The 2025 law forbade any flags on public property other than the flags for US America, Idaho, cities and tribes, military services, and a few other official flags of “a governmental entity.” The bill’s Republican sponsor insisted that this wasn’t culture war, heavens no, it was about promoting unity, and America, and “stuff that we can all agree on.”
The Boise City Council promptly turned right around and passed a resolution adopting the Pride flag as one of three official City of Boise flags, and ran the rainbow colors up the flagpole again. Hooray!
Unwilling to accept such rampant disrespect to their edict, Republicans in the Lege this year passed a whole new flag law, this one adding a new rule saying that only official city or county flags “designated prior to 2023” will be allowed. The new law also added a $2000 per day / per flag fine, to show Boise what serious business this flag war is. The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Ted Hill (R), explained the fine was absolutely necessary to force compliance from “insubordinate government officials. […] It sets a tone of anarchy.” He too said that we must have “unity” under the stars and stripes, orelse.
Pride flags along Harrison Blvd. in Boise, 2023. Since Trump’s first term, assholes have stolen and even burned multiple flags each year. They’re then replaced by the volunteers who put ‘em up in the first place. Screenshot, KTVB-TV on YouTube.
In an extra little kick at Boise, where light poles on the median of one major residential street have long displayed Pride flags throughout June, the bill specifically applies to land along “parks, roads, and boulevards.” No nice things for you, Boise.
Just to be a real prick about it, Gov. Brad Little signed the bill on March 31, the Trans Day of Visibility. Little also signed another far worse bill criminalizing trans people who use bathrooms or locker rooms that match their gender identity, not only in schools and public buildings, but also in “public accommodations,” like private businesses. First offense is a misdemeanor, with up to a year in prison, and a second offense would be a felony, with up to five years in prison. The Idaho affiliate of Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates called it “the most extreme anti-transgender bathroom ban in the nation.”
In response to the two new laws, Boise Mayor Lauren McLean ordered the Pride flag lowered outside City Hall, but also presided over a special session of the City Council to honor the Trans Day of Visibility. Choking back tears, McLean said to the Council and an audience of about 60 Boiseans, “Many people in this state and around this country are seeking to divide us. They’re seeking to divide us by targeting the most vulnerable among us. I want the people in this room to know that I see you. We see you. You are wanted, important, and unique members of our community.”
That night, City Hall was lit in the colors of the transgender flag.
Then, a week after the Pride flag came down, the three flagpoles in front of City Hall sported new vinyl wraps in the colors of the Pride/Progress flag, and a big new banner was visible in the building’s windows, with the rainbow and the slogan, “Creating a city for everyone.” Yr Dok Zoom went downtown to take some photos, and damn right he plugged in his EV at one of the two free EV chargers at City Hall (still hadda feed the meter, though, so that explains the $1.50 on my company card, Rebecca).
You can see the poles up top, and here’s that nice new sign:
And now at nighttime, City Hall is lit up in rainbow colors as well. Gosh I like my city a lot!
City Council President Meredith Stead told local TV station CBS2 that the city is observing the new state law to the letter, and joyfully at that. “The law was based on the flag and we are using rainbows, and it’s not at all a flag,” Stead explained, and I hope she was grinning. “So I would say we are in full compliance of the law, that’s certainly the most important thing to us. So we’re going to be sure that we always are, and this was just a different way to celebrate our diversity and values.”
The cost of the flagpole wraps and new banners was $5,931.87, from the city’s operating budget. We think that may also have included the printing costs for these spiffy new stickers you can pick up at City Hall; I got a nice big one that looks great in the rear window of my EV:
We like this “everyone” thing the mayor is going on about! Photo: Dok Zoom.
Needless to say, while all the folks you’d like to hang out with in Boise are delighted by the city’s latest reply to the Lege, the Usual Suspects are big mad about this latest besmirch statement by the city, and we can only imagine what sort of stupid crap law the Idaho Lege will pass next year in another futile attempt to control the wayward capital city. We’ll close with this line from the very timely second season of Andor, which Dallas ally, former Obama official, and teamonger Brandon Friedman says nicely sums up Boise’s Rainbow Battle: “Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle.”
At a New York party, attendees spent Trans Day of Visibility dancing, DJing, and learning how to become less visible online.
Imani Thompson, digital security trainer and organizer of the event / Photo by Janus Rose
It’s Trans Day of Visibility, and I’m at an event space in the heart of New York City’s Commie Corridor to learn how to become less visible online.
The crowd gathered at the aptly-named Trans Pecos in Ridgewood, Queens is here for “404: Deadname Not Found,” a digital self-defense workshop which promises to teach trans people how to find and remove their sensitive personal information from the internet (and which also has no relation to this website). The vibe is giving OpSec rave happy hour—attendees sip colorful drinks, groove to DJ sets, and huddle around laptops using online tools to track down their own digital footprints.
The goal of the exercise is to find holes in your digital defenses, a practice cybersecurity folks call “red-teaming.” A slide deck guides participants through this “self-doxing” ritual, instructing them to use websites like IntelBase, PimEyes, and haveibeenpwned to find addresses, selfies, passwords, old names and aliases, and other personal info that might have been left sitting around on the open internet.
It makes for great cocktail party banter. One participant raises their arms in triumph upon receiving a clean bill of health while checking if their information was leaked in a data breach. Others swivel laptop screens and compare notes on the various places their digital detritus had cropped up. In my case, I was lucky: I mostly found data brokers with incorrect information, a long-forgotten MySpace page, and a woman whose spam calls I’ve been receiving for the past 10 years. Finally, participants are directed to various pages where they can request data to be removed, or sign up for discounted services like Kanary and DeleteMe that do the removals on your behalf.
Behind the fun and light atmosphere, everyone here knows the unspoken reality that drives tonight’s activities: an unrelenting wave of discriminatory bills and executive orders that are rapidly demolishing trans rights across the US. “Trans Visibility” is a nice idea, but it turns out it really sucks to be visible in a fascist surveillance state where the highest levels of government are obsessively trying to destroy your ability to live.
“In this world of hyper-surveillance, I want to make sure all my stuff is safe and that no one is trying to harvest my data for anything,” Anna, a workshop participant, told 404 Media. Anna asked to use a pseudonym to protect her identity, which is not surprising given that the goal of the workshop is to make it harder to be doxed. “Especially now that there’s lots of incentives for the federal government to get into that business, I just wanna make sure all of that is under wraps.”
Like the event’s name suggests, many attendees are looking for traces of their “deadnames,” which is how some trans folks refer to the names they were given pre-transition. Trans people face a disproportionatelyhigh risk of being doxed online, and deadnames and other sensitive info are frequently dug up on right-wing hate forums like KiwiFarms and social media sites like Elon Musk’s X, where harassment campaigns and hate speech are allowed and even encouraged.
“We have to protect ourselves,” said Ryan, who also used a pseudonym. “It’s great to know how to find stuff like this, because you never know what’s still out there.”
Imani Thompson, a digital security trainer who organized the event as part of her series Cache Me Outside, says she started hosting the free workshops at queer bars in Brooklyn a year ago, after noticing trans and intersex friends who were noticeably shaken by the opening salvos of the second Trump administration.
“I hadn’t seen cybersecurity events that looked like they would attract or resonate with the crowds I felt needed this information the most,” she told 404 Media. “I wanted to make this fun and un-intimidating and doing digital security training at the bar is kind of silly and fun and gives us a built-in VPN and protection from sensitive convos being recorded.”
There are specific reasons many trans people are anxious about their personal data and online presence these days. For one, trans identities often don’t fit neatly into government boxes, and the name and gender they are assigned at birth may or may not match their government-issued IDs. Recently, a new law in Kansas resulted in hundreds of trans people being told that theirdrivers licenses and IDs had been invalidated overnight, forcing them to obtain new documents that revert to the sex marker assigned at birth. JournalistMarissa Kabas later reported that the 300 trans IDs in question had been flagged and not immediately invalidated, but the goal of the law and its ensuing chaos was clear: requiring trans people to have IDs that don’t match their appearance or lived reality, forcing them to out themselves and introducing friction and discrimination into their everyday lives.
The same Kansas law also implemented the first state-level “bathroom bounty,” making it a crime for trans people to use appropriate bathrooms and changing rooms and promising rewards to random passersby who feel “aggrieved” by someone they think might be trans. Lawmakers in Idaho have passed an even harsher bill, which would charge repeat trans bathroom-users with a felony and up to 5 years of jail time. These bills threaten not only trans people, but anyone whose appearance might fall outside of someone’s normative expectations of “male” and “female.” And they are especially dangerous at a time when facial recognition can near-instantly identify someone with a quick search.
Thompson also worries about the information that queer folks can reveal while asking for help online. Trans people experienceunemployment,housing insecurity, andviolence at exponentially higher rates than cis people, and it’s not uncommon to see Gofundme pages and Venmo accounts flooding social media feeds. These posts will sometimes include personal details like a person’s name, face, transition status, location, immigration status, and even how much they have in their bank account—great for getting donations, but not so great for the doxable breadcrumbs they leave behind.
“I think the risk is tenfold for the dolls and Black trans siblings because of disproportionate scrutiny in light of these bathroom bills and also how we do mutual aid,” said Thompson. “Whenever I see a mutual aid request being reposted or processed it makes me nervous, because we’re basically doxing our most vulnerable friends.” To reduce risk, she recommends people take down mutual aid posts as soon as needs are met and set their Venmo activity to private. “I feel like the intention in listing off how all these systems of oppression impact our friends are meant to create a sense of urgency and care, but then months later it’s still floating around and is a goldmine for someone who wants to claim they were made to feel unsafe in a bathroom so they can claim $3k or further an agenda.”
The privacy attitudes on display at the event contrast with the dominant media narratives about trans communities a decade ago. Fresh off the Supreme Court victory in Obergefell vs. Hodges that legalized same-sex marriage, many at that time were convinced that trans visibility would pave the way to equality, as glossy magazine covers featuring stars like Laverne Cox declared a “Trans Tipping Point.” But while conditions for some trans people marginally improved, we all know what happened next: a wave of reactionary anti-trans state laws, culminating in the re-election of Donald Trump and a series of executive orders aimed at destroying trans peoples’ access to healthcare, sports, bathrooms—essentially the ability to live a normal life.
At the same time, protection can’t be a retreat back into the closet. “It’s still important for trans voices to be heard in online spaces,” said Anna. “It’s not like I wanna go into the shadows or anything. I just don’t want people to know my personal data, my personal records, any of that.”
“Being Black, I also understand the distinction between visibility and hypervisibility and the precarity and lack of agency that hypervisibility creates,” said Thompson. “It’s tricky to find language around digital security that doesn’t imply queerness is something to hide or a shameful thing, because of course it’s not. I think having agency and purpose in how we can show up online and interact with tech as well as literacy around how technology and surveillance operates makes us better equipped.”
Janus Rose is New York City-based journalist, educator and artist whose work explores the impacts of A.I. and technology on activists and marginalized communities. Previously a senior editor at VICE, she has been published in digital and print outlets including e-Flux Journal, DAZED Magazine, The New Yorker, and Al Jazeera.
Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.
In the latest episode of their podcast A Touch More, all-star athletes Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird denounced the International Olympic Committee’s new rule requiring sex testing for athletes competing in the women’s category.
The anti-trans policy will subject athletes competing in the women’s division—and only women’s, not men’s—to invasive sex testing to determine whether they have an SRY gene. Why this is where the International Olympic Committee chose to draw the gender line is arguably arbitrary.
No major medical organization endorses this litmus test as a reliable marker of athletic skill or “biological sex.” Even the scientist who discovered the SRY gene has slammed this practice in sports, saying “science does not support” this “overly simplistic” approach. Rather, it’s an arbitrary line in the sand used to cram unscientific ideas about gender and sex into manmade, binary boundaries.
Nonetheless, if a woman tests positive for the gene, she could be forced to compete in the “male” category. This has had dire consequences the last few times it was deployed against women’s athletes. From 1992 to 1999, cisgender women were forced into testing and found out, on the world stage, that they had intersex conditions they never knew about. The spectacle led to ostracization, disqualification, and at least one suicide before such testing was abolished.
“What we’re doing is subjecting everybody, all women and all people who are identifying as women, to this really invasive testing that only to me just says like, oh, so we’re just trying to whittle it down to a certain type of woman,” Rapinoe said.
Rapinoe is one of the most high-profile athletes in the country, a soccer player with three Olympic competitions under her belt and a decorated career in the U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT). Bird, meanwhile, is among the most successful athletes in history—the retired WNBA legend spent her 20-season professional career as a point guard for the Seattle Storm, and is a record-breaking Olympian in her own right. The athletic power couple has been engaged since 2020. Together, they’ve long been outspoken advocates for the LGBTQ community.
Rapinoe connected the anti-trans vitriol in sports to the right wing’s broader attacks on queer and trans people, calling the push for sex testing “hateful.”
“They sort of like, lost the battle on gay marriage,” Rapinoe said. “So, it’s just like, we’re going to have this whole campaign for all these years to just hate trans people, which is such a small percentage of the population.”
Countless women, cisgender and transgender alike, have faced harassment and persecution because of the anti-trans athlete witch hunt.
“It’s just a total acquiescence to the Trump Administration,” Rapinoe said. “It’s just horrible, and I’m just sickened by it.”
The IOC rule is part of a broader pattern. In the United States, sports bans have served as a Trojan Horse for more sweeping anti-trans policies. The DOJ’s recent lawsuit over “women’s sports,” for example, also demands that transgender students be banned from bathrooms and locker rooms.
“Can we please stop obsessing over trans people and, I don’t know, maybe focus our time, energy, and resources into real problems women’s sports face?” Bird chimed in. She rejected the idea that sex testing, as the IOC claims, “protects women,” instead calling it a “fear-mongering” political ploy meant to generate support from conservative voters.
“That’s all this is,” Bird said. “If you crack this door open, it gets blown open. You’re now policing women’s bodies across the board.”
Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.
I remember seeing a headline or a hyperlink somewhere, maybe yesterday or the day before, but I didn’t get to the story. Lucky for me, it’s linked again in an email today, so here it is!
Paris (France) (AFP) – Scientists have managed to film a spectacular event rarely witnessed by humans: a sperm whale giving birth while other females worked together to support the mother and her newborn.
A team from Project CETI, an international effort seeking to understand how whales communicate, were in a boat near a pod of 11 whales off the coast of the Caribbean island of Dominica on July 8, 2023.
A 19-year-old female named Rounder was surrounded by family members and others as she was about to give birth to her second calf.
Over nearly five and a half hours, the scientists documented the group’s behaviour, watching them from the boat, filming them with drones and recording the sounds underneath the waves.
The data they collected, which was published in the journals Scientific Reports and Science on Thursday, represent an exceptional rarity in the history of science.
Out of 93 species of cetaceans — a group that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises — only nine have ever been observed giving birth in the wild.
Rarer still was that whales not related to the mother were helping out.
“This is the first evidence of birth assistance in non-primates,” Project CETI team member Shane Gero told the New Scientist.
“It is fascinating to see the intergenerational support from the grandmother to her labouring daughter, and the support from the other, unrelated females.”
Lifting up the newborn
The birth lasted 34 minutes, from their tails emerging from the water to the calf being born.
During labour, other adult females dove under Rounder’s dorsal fin, often on their backs with the heads facing her genital slit.
Immediately after the birth, the pod’s behaviour “rapidly changed” as every member became active, according to the study in Scientific Reports.
All the adults were “squeezing the newborn’s body between theirs, touching it with their heads”, the researchers wrote.
The whales pointed their noses towards the newborn, “pushing it around, under the water, and onto and across their bodies above the surface”.
The remarkable behaviour dates back more than 36 million years and is believed to be due to the unique history of cetaceans.
After their distant ancestors left the water and adapted to life on land, cetaceans are the only mammals that returned to the ocean.
This dive back into the water required some evolutionary tricks to prevent newborns from drowning.
For example, whale calves are born tail-first, rather than head-first like other mammals.
However, while newborn sperm whales become talented swimmers within a few hours, they still sink right after birth.
So other whales have to lift the calf up “to prevent the newborn from sinking while also facilitating its first breaths”, the researchers suggested.
Primates — including humans — are the only other mammals known to help assist each other out during birth.
Excited vocal sounds
The scientists also recorded the whales making many sounds, including significant changes in “vocal style” during key events, the study said.
This included when a group of pilot whales approached the pod after the birth.
The changes in vocalisation suggest that the group was coordinating to support the birth — or protect the newborn, the researchers said.
Sperm whales have one of the longest pregnancies in the animal kingdom, with a gestation period that lasts up to 16 months.
When calves are born they are already four metres (13 feet) long. They will rely on their mother’s milk for at least two years.
As they grow, the young become the centre of their pod’s social unit, with others helping out with babysitting while the mother searches for food.
After the birth was filmed in 2023, the pod was not spotted again for over a year. Then the newborn was spotted with Accra and Aurora — the other young members of the pod — on July 25 last year.
Surviving its first year is a good sign that the sperm whale will reach adulthood, the Project CETI team said.
The idea behind these laws seems to be if they can hide that LGBTQ+ people / kids exist they can prevent the acceptance and tolerance of LGBTQ+ kids / people. In the minds of the haters who write these bills hopefully that will force people who are not straight or cis to stay hidden from society. They are desperate to return to the 1950s when LGBTQ+ people had to stay hidden or risk losing everything they had, their job, housing, and friends. They are pathetic in their need for everyone to be the same as they are, feel the same as they do, and to live as they do. Why I did not know or understand. The irrational hate for LGBTQ+ kids is really weird. That they would rather have kids hurt, harmed, assaulted, ostracized, and possibly driven to suicide rather than give them acceptance or simply tolerance. I don’t undestand what their gain is in this? Hugs
The appeals court vacated two separate injunctions against the law, but advocates promise to keep fighting.
John Russell (He/Him)April 7, 2026, 1:00 pm EDT· Updated on April 8, 2026
Shutterstock
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has ruled that Iowa can enforce a 2023 law restricting classroom instruction on LGBTQ+ topics and access to certain books while legal challenges against the law proceed.
On Monday, the three-judge panel overturned injunctions previously issued by lower courts in two separate lawsuits challenging aspects of the Senate File 496, according to the Associated Press and The Des Moines Register.
Passed by the Iowa state legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds in 2023, the law prohibits “any program, curriculum, test, survey, questionnaire, promotion, or instruction relating to gender identity or sexual orientation” in kindergarten through sixth grade. It also bans materials featuring “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act” from school libraries and classrooms — a provision which critics say is intended to ban books featuring LGBTQ+ characters and themes.
The law went into effect on July 1, 2023. The following November, the ACLU of Iowa and Lambda Legal sued the state on behalf of LGBTQ+ advocacy organization Iowa Safe Schools and seven students and their families, challenging SF 496’s classroom instruction ban.
Last May, a federal judge issued a split decision, upholding the law’s ban on discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in K–6 classrooms, but blocking its ban on school “promotions” and “programs” that acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ+ people. U.S. District Judge Stephen Locher also blocked a provision of the law banning schools from providing “accommodation that is intended to affirm the student’s gender identity” without notifying their parents, writing that S.F. 496 was impermissibly vague about what constitutes an “accommodation.”
Writing for the Eighth Circuit on Monday, Judge Ralph Erickson held that the state’s interpretation of the law as requiring school “programs” and “promotions” to only encompass curricular activities does not violate the U.S. Constitution. However, the court did not address whether it is constitutionally permissible for the state to ban specific groups and extracurricular programs, such as Gender & Sexuality Alliance groups, because the Iowa Safe Schools lawsuit did not challenge specific applications of the law, according to the Register.
The court also disagreed with Judge Locher’s ruling that the law’s language around “accommodations” was too vague, restoring S.F. 496’s ban on schools accommodating students’ gender identities without outing them to their parents.
In a separate November 2023 lawsuit, the Iowa State Education Association was joined by publisher Penguin Random House and several prominent authors of banned books in a challenge to S.F. 496’s book-banning provision. Last March, Judge Locher sided with the plaintiffs, issuing a preliminary injunction preventing schools from removing books it considers “obscene” from classrooms and libraries.
Again, writing for the Eighth Circuit in a separate decision Monday, Judge Erickson disagreed w ith Locher’s ruling that school library books are not part a school’s curriculum. Erickson wrote that a school’s library catalogue constitutes government speech and can be restricted by state law, according to the Register.
The decisions on both cases send them back to the district court. But as the Register notes, the Eighth Circuit indicated in both rulings that the plaintiffs could not show a “likelihood of success on the merits” in their challenges to S.F. 496.
At the same time, in a joint press release the ACLU of Iowa and Lambda Legal noted that the rulings narrow “where and how the law may be applied.”
“The prohibition regarding sexual orientation and so-called gender theory applies only to specific, mandatory instruction on these topics during class time. The law, as currently interpreted, does not require schools to prohibit student expression of LGBTQ+ identity nor does it limit the sponsorship or promotion of GSAs,” ACLU of Iowa Senior Staff Attorney Thomas Story said.
“The court’s interpretation of the provision on banning books is that it applies only to those that specifically describe or depict one of those sex acts defined in Iowa’s criminal law. And with the forced outing provision, a report would be made to parents or guardians only if a student specifically requests a school accommodation for the stated purpose of affirming a gender identity different from their registration forms,” Story added.
In a statement responding to the court’s decision, Iowa State Education Association president Joshua Brown told the Register that the case was “about much more than legal technicalities.”
“It is about protecting the freedom of speech and the right to share ideas — values guaranteed by the First Amendment,” Brown said. “Our schools should be safe spaces where students are free to learn, teachers can use their professional expertise without fear, and families can trust that education is based on open inquiry rather than government censorship.”
A spokesperson for Penguin Random House indicated in a statement to the Register that the company intends to keep fighting against S.F. 496. Similarly, Lambda Legal Senior Attorney Nathan Maxwell called the ruling “a setback,” but noted that “it is not the end of this fight.”
“Iowa’s SF 496 is a cruel and unconstitutional law that silences LGBTQ+ children, erases their existence from classrooms, and forces educators to expose vulnerable students to potential harm at home,” Maxwell said in a statement. “We will continue to use every legal tool available to protect these young people. They deserve nothing less.”
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I wish! 😄 Leading Kansas writes this time in regard to data centers, and about addressing our local governments in our own behalf.It works the same in every state.
This cartoon was drawn for the Fredericksburg Advance. But don’t yell at them for it; you can yell at me.
If you live in Virginia, you have been bombarded with flyers about the special election on redistricting. And it’s not just flyers but also TV commercials, which are also popping up online. We are getting these things from both sides.
There is a special election in November on a state constitutional amendment that would give Democrats as many as four seats in Congress. The measure would also temporarily bypass the state’s redistricting commission to redraw maps in the middle of the decade.
The state’s Supreme Court approved the measure to be on the ballot less than a week before early voting began. State Republicans repeatedly tried to stop Democrats from moving forward with the referendum. The irony here is that Republicans claim that voting yes will disenfranchise voters, while they literally tried to keep this off the ballot so people couldn’t vote on it.
This is a direct response to Donald Trump and Republicans redistricting mid-decade to give themselves more seats. Donald Trump even said he was entitled to have more congressional seats. This is one reason why we need to No Kings protest. Donald Trump already believes he’s entitled to win elections he’s lost. (snip-MORE, and it’s on point)
Energy company Deep Fission is in the process of building a new and untested type of underground nuclear reactor in Parsons, KS
The Trump administration has reduced regulations to encourage nuclear power production
The reactor will likely power data centers for artificial intelligence
Large data centers consume huge amounts of water and energy and produce different types of pollution, leading to health risks for nearby residents
In November 2025 a two-year-old energy company called Deep Fission broke ground in Parsons, Kansas. They hope this project will enable them to install the second ever energy producing nuclear reactor in the state, after Wolf Creek, potentially with more reactors on the way in the future. If the early “characterization” drilling goes to plan, they claim the reactor could begin pumping electricity into the grid in the near future.
Parsons is a city of 10,000 in southeastern Kansas, near the Oklahoma border. I’ve lived in Kansas for most of my life and I had not heard of Parsons until last week. So, why is Deep Fission in Parsons, Kansas, and why now? Not coincidentally, the Great Plains Industrial Park, also located in Parsons, has lately been advertised as a prime location for new data centers to power the trillion-dollar (yes, trillion with a T) artificial intelligence boom forced upon us by large technology corporations and their venture capitalist backers. Which means the Parsons nuclear reactor project would likely come as a package with one or more new data centers, along with potential economic prosperity and a host of legitimate concerns that community members have already raised.
Part 2: The New Nuclear Power
While the Department of Energy set a goal for the Parsons reactor to go online in July of this year, Deep Fission themselves are aiming to connect to the grid by 2027 or 2028. Two years is still an unusually rapid rollout for a nuclear power plant, which usually takes 6-10 years from groundbreaking to full operation.
Nuclear energy is typically labeled as “clean” energy compared to coal, oil, and natural gas, meaning that it releases fewer pollutants into the air and water than fossil fuel consumption. Still, there are two main concerns. First is the disposal of nuclear waste, which ranges from the lightly contaminated clothing of plant workers to the lethally radioactive spent fuel a plant produces over time. This latter “accounts for just 3% of the total volume of waste, but contains 95% of the total radioactivity.”
A relatively new method in the US and Europe for disposing of our most dangerous nuclear waste is to bury it very deep underground, so that it can be surrounded by solid rock to provide the same level of pressure containment as required at structure at a surface nuclear reactor facility. The father-daughter team that eventually founded Deep Fission originally created Deep Isolation to dispose of nuclear waste. Deep Fission takes their concept a step further by placing the entire reactor, and therefore its most dangerously radioactive elements, into a borehole drilled one mile underground.
The second main concern related to nuclear energy production is, of course, accidents or attacks. It is true that large-scale nuclear accidents are very rare, but when they happen, they become instant, globally recognized disasters whose names we all know: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima. The effects are so widespread as to be practically impossible to quantify. The reactor explosion and meltdown in Chernobyl, for example, caused several dozen deaths directly related to radiation exposure, but various studies have predicted anywhere from thousands up to a million eventual additional cancer deaths. Not to mention the environmental and economic cost to the entire region around Chernobyl. And radioactive boars still terrorize people and farmland in the region around the Fukushima plant in Japan.
But those issues are known, and regulations have historically attempted to shore up potential dangers posed by new plants. In contrast, nothing like the underground nuclear reactor in Parsons, Kansas has ever been attempted before, and thanks to Executive Order 14301, will not need to go through long established design and testing phases that other types of nuclear reactors have been subject to in the past. John Young, a mining environmental regulatory specialist who lives in Sedgwick County, asks, “Why abandon the current regulatory process for something created out of whole cloth with no public input? And no one can define the current regulatory pathways for Federal and State authorizations.
“What,” Young asks in frustration, “could possibly go wrong?”
Part 3: Data Centers and Artificial Intelligence
So that is a glimpse into the nuclear energy side of things. Next we must address concerns around data centers and artificial intelligence. Data centers come in different sizes, like the smaller center being proposed in Wellington, KS, which would reportedly “use roughly 30% of the city’s electrical capacity while generating an estimated $1.3 million in annual electric utility revenue” while consuming only two gallons of water per day. Larger data centers consume resources less modestly. “Around the country, and the world, there is a land race among the big tech companies for sites for their data centers,” claims a November 2024 investigative report by Rolling Stone. Data centers are much newer than nuclear energy technology, yet the ways in which they harm communities near them have already become apparent.
Water: “Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people,” according to a June 2025 study by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI). And data centers built explicitly to power AI represent the fastest growing portion of the market.
Last year, researchers at the University of California, Riverside calculated that ChatGPT—one of several popular Large Language Models (LLMs) vying for marketplace dominance—answered about 10,000 queries per second. The processing load to do so guzzled about 6,000 liters (or about 1,000 toilet flushes) of fresh water per second, all day, every day. That is only generating written text. AI photos require more water, and still more for AI video. “The extraction process is permanent,” explains the University of Alabama at Birmingham Institute for Human Rights. Water used to cool data centers evaporates as it cools hot components, meaning it can no longer be used by people in the region who need water for drinking, cooking, bathing, laundry, and general survival.
Pollution: Unfortunately, it is not only consumption of water to worry about. The evaporation of water cooling data centers leaves behind higher concentrations of nitrates and other contaminants leaked through agricultural fertilizers and pesticides into local water supplies, drastically increasing incidents of “rare cancers, muscle disorders, and miscarriages” among people who live nearby. Geographically, Parsons, Kansas sits atop the Alluvial and Ozark Aquifers.
Reports of noise pollution have increased near data centers as well. Residents in different Virginia towns experienced disturbing high and low frequency humming in a wide radius around two new data centers.
These same experts predict that the disempowerment will not only come at the individual level, but also at the societal level, as lawmakers turn their attention and favor even more toward tech companies and AI services that increasingly take over tasks that used to be performed by human beings.
The purpose of this article is not to overwhelm with doomsaying or inevitability. If the Deep Fission underground reactor works as advertised, it could genuinely provide cleaner energy than fossil fuel and mitigate some of the effects of climate change. But to get there safely, we need to demand transparency and regulatory protections from political and corporate leaders. If enough of us speak up in place like Parsons, Topeka, Sedgwick County, and every corner of our town, state, country, and world, we embolden those watching, each other, and ourselves to continue building the world we want and deserve.
tRump couldn’thelp himself but he had to attack Obama making claims of how bad Obama’s library is. Then Sam describes tRump’s grift / scam on his library, using tax free dollars to build a hotel that he will make money from. Then Sam talks about the citizenship birthright case. Hugs
Abraham Lincoln’s faith in the Declaration of Independence ultimately influenced Walt Whitman’s harsh but optimistic appraisal of the American experiment.
Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln (Library of Congress)
“The United States are destined either to surmount the gorgeous history of Feudalism, or else prove the most tremendous failure of time,” wrote American poet Walt Whitman in his 1871 work, Democratic Vistas. Despite writing in the wake of a brutal civil war and a failing Reconstruction Era, Whitman remained optimistic. “Not the least doubtful am I on any prospects of their material success.”
Known more for his poetry, exemplified by Leaves of Grass (1855), Whitman’s dark 1871 treatise on the nation remains a harsh but ultimately optimistic appraisal of the American experiment. It serves as a useful tool for thinking about the nation’s current state on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Whitman’s revolutionary patriotism had long been part of his worldview. He celebrated the Declaration of Independence and the Revolution in the preface to Leaves of Grass, noting that a poet must “enter the essences of the real things and past and present events,” among them “the haughty defiance of ’76, and the war and peace and formation of the constitution.”
But for all his celebration of the Declaration and the nation’s founding, he did not mince words regarding the nation’s failings. He wrote of a “hollowness” at the center of American life at the time, calling the business classes depraved and the government saturated in corruption. (snip-go see the rest!)
Donald Trump is threatening to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age, which, if he does, would be a war crime.
Trump’s chosen war is with the government of Iran, not the people, yet he continues to threaten to destroy its infrastructure. The more Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth brag about their success in the war, the more it seems that Iran fights back.
Trump tells us that the war is won and that Iran’s ability to wage war is nearly depleted if not already destroyed, yet missiles still rain on Israel and our other allies in the Gulf. And if Iran doesn’t have any weaponry left, then how did they shoot down two American jets? If the war is already won, then why are we still fighting? (snip-click on the title to get the rest!)
There’s a theory that most men, and people in general, intuitively understand “urinal etiquette.” It’s the art and science of where to stand in relation to other men when using a public restroom. Stand too far away, and you risk coming across as standoffish or rude. Stand too close, and you’ll make the other person uncomfortable.
Most people prefer to have a “buffer” between themselves and strangers, and it’s not limited to urinals or public restroom stalls. When given the option, most of us will sit at least one seat away from the nearest stranger in a movie theater or auditorium. We’ll leave a bench or treadmill between ourselves and a fellow gym-goer.
The buffer may seem like common decency and consideration for the people around us, but there could be more to it than that, according to a decades-old research study.
Scientists put theory to the test
In 1976, a team of researchers actually got the idea to test whether the proximity of a stranger had an effect on the way men urinated. Yes, really.
More specifically, they wanted to test what happens when someone invades your personal space. Do you just feel awkward or uncomfortable, or are there more measurable things happening in the body.
For the experiment, researchers began with a pilot study in a men’s public restroom. An observer stood by the sink, appearing to busy himself with washing and grooming, all while secretly keeping tabs on the men who entered. The published study takes it from there:
“When a potential subject entered the room and walked to a urinal, the observer recorded the selected urinal and the placement of the next nearest user. He also noted (with a chronographic wristwatch) and recorded the micturation delay (the time between when a subject unzipped his fly and when urination began) and the micturation persistence (the time between the onset and completion of urination). The onset an cessation of micturation were signaled by the sound of the stream of urine striking the water in the urinal.”
Ethical concerns about observing unsuspecting men in a restroom aside, the study found that none of the 48 subjects chose to stand directly next to another “user” at the urinal banks. The data also showed that men urinated longer the farther they were from the nearest person.
The study was repeated, but this time, confederates were involved. Volunteers were stationed at specific distances from unsuspecting bathroom users, while another observer hid in a nearby stall and used a “periscope” to get a clear sightline of the urine stream.
The surprising findings
Once again, the data was extremely conclusive: men who stood directly next to a confederate while urinating took longer to begin and also urinated for longer overall.
“These findings provide objective evidence that personal space invasions produce physiological changes associated with arousal,” the authors noted in their abstract.
It was an important, if controversial, study in advancing the field of proxemics—the study of physical space in human nonverbal communication. Research like this unusual bathroom study has helped us understand “intimate distance,” a space very close to our bodies that we reserve for romantic partners, children, and close friends.
Research in the field has also mapped the “personal bubble,” or “personal distance,” typically reserved for family members and friends. However, when strangers invade this space—in a crowded elevator, a packed subway car, or by standing next to us at the urinal—that’s when things get really interesting.
Our bodies respond, and MIT Press notes that people often deal with an invasion of personal space by “psychologically removing themselves from the situation” by listening to music or staring blankly at a wall.
Now we know a little more about the physiological response behind this aversion, and it makes urinal etiquette make much more sense. It’s not just “machismo” or homophobia—it’s a way of avoiding a serious stress and anxiety trigger. Or, at the very least, a way to have a much more satisfying pee.
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