I keep meaning to get them posted, then I don’t get it done. Here they are; readers can pick and choose, or read each one in your own time. Enjoy!
This one has 2: 120, and 120a! -A
Queer History 120: Sappho by Wendy🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈🌈
How a woman from ancient Lesbos changed literature and sexuality forever Read on Substack
Queer History 119: Dr Alan Hart, Trans Guy Super Power by Wendy🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈🌈
“What does it feel like to save countless lives while being forced to hide who you really are? To revolutionize medicine while living in constant fear of being “discovered”? To fight a deadly disease that ravaged millions while battling a society that treated your very existence as a fucking scandal?” Read on Substack
Queer History 118: The Tragedy of Carmen Carrasco (1932) by Wendy🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈🌈
“In a Spain teetering between progress and persecution, one woman’s death exposed the brutal reality faced by those who dared to love differently.
The day they found Carmen Carrasco’s body, Madrid whispered.” Read on Substack
Queer History 117: The Boys of Boise Scandal by Wendy🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈🌈
“In 1955, the sleepy city of Boise, Idaho became ground zero for one of the most fucked-up anti-gay witch hunts in American history. What began as arrests of three men exploded into a moral panic that would rip families apart like wet paper, crush reputations under its boot, and drive some to blow their brains out—all under the bullshit guise of ‘protecting the children.'” Read on Substack
Queer History 116: Natalie Clifford Barney by Wendy🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈🌈
How an American heiress built a lesbian literary empire in the heart of French culture while telling society to go fuck itself Read on Substack
Queer History 115: The Radical Queer Brotherhood in Walt Whitman’s Revolutionary Circle by Wendy🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈🌈
How America’s “Good Gray Poet” built a secret society of gay intellectuals that changed literature forever Read on Substack
“Straight up through the sky above this road right now, The galaxies of the Cygnus A cluster Are colliding with each other in a massive swarm Of interpenetrating and exploding catastrophes.” by Worriedman
Pattiann Rogers is one of the great modern poets. She writes about nature in a completely relatable way that you can learn from and admire.
Cardinal! State bird of seven different states – the most of any bird. Meadowlarks come in second with six different states. (This feels like the kind of information old people share….)
Lilac! The good old fashioned kind.
The fragrance is amazing. In a day or two they’ll be fully open. A week after that they’ll be gone.
I went out to the barn to visit some friends
Never gets old!
(snip-little vid of Barncat greeting Worriedman. Just click through above to see it; I couldn’t embed it.)
She’s so pretty!
She’s been working on this for years-
Juice! You can’t hide, Juice…
I am frequently found taking pictures of flowers in the rain.
Ninebark – Two different varieties
A goose among the ragwort –
That’s all I’ve got room for – Thanks for dropping by!
Mary Robinson (center), former president of Ireland, shares her views on human rights at a Carter Center event in March. From the Center, CEO Paige Alexander (right) participated in the discussion, and Nicole Kruse, VP, Development, moderated.
Human rights pioneer Mary Robinson shares life lessons at Carter Center event
When Mary Robinson began her term in 1990 as the first female president of Ireland, she didn’t let her gender take a back seat to the office. She wanted to convince people that “I would actually do a better job because I was a woman,” she told an audience at The Carter Center in March.
Robinson went on to blaze trails not only in politics but human rights, women’s rights, and climate advocacy. She offered insight on her remarkable life during a public conversation and Q&A with the Carter Center’s Paige Alexander, CEO, and Nicole Kruse, vice president of development, following a screening at the Center of “Mrs. Robinson,” a new biographical documentary.
Robinson has several ties with the Center, including a long friendship with co-founders President Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter. She also helped lead the Carter Center’s election observation mission to Myanmar in 2015.
But perhaps her strongest connection to the Center is a shared commitment to bolstering human rights around the world. “The universal values of human rights are indispensable,” Robinson said. “They are as valid today as they ever were, and they are more relevant today than they ever were.”
During her tenure as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997 to 2002, she traveled to many dangerous places — Chechnya, Kosovo, and Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “I always came back energized because I was meeting people on the ground,” Robinson said.
The world celebrated the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights last year and its 50th anniversary while Robinson was high commissioner. The document is as “relevant today as it was in 1948,” she said. “We have learned so much about how, hopefully, to do better in creating more understanding but also embedding it in the cultures of people.”
Despite her belief that “countries go up and countries slide” in their commitment to human rights, she remains optimistic about the future and the young people who will be inheriting the world older generations created.
As a member of the Elders, a group of former world leaders to which President Carter also belonged, Robinson said she has been involved in conversations about climate and energy that span several age groups. “Younger people are insisting at being at the table,” she said. “I’ve had incredible conversations with 13-, 14-, and 15-year-old climate activists.”
The motivation of younger generations will lead to sea change soon, Robinson believes, because they want the world to move faster. “We’re on the cusp of this much healthier clean energy, renewable energy, no-waste circular economy,” she said. Robinson marveled at the difference such innovations will make for people in Africa who have never had electricity.
Although Robinson has spent her career addressing societal ills across the globe, she believes joy and hope can be found anywhere and are essential components for a well-lived life. She once heard her mentor, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, describe himself as a “prisoner of hope.” It made an impression on Robinson. She thought, “what he’s saying is the glass may not be half full. There may be only a tiny bit in the glass. But hope is action. You work with that.”
Forum Participants Provide Perspectives on Human Rights
As a former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and member of the Elders, Mary Robinson has fought for human rights around the world. Similarly, the Carter Center’s Human Rights Program works to advance the rights of protected groups. Last year, the Center hosted the Human Rights Defenders Forum, where activists and scholars came together to learn from and support one another. Below are perspectives from four participants, working on different aspects of a broad human rights agenda.
Colette Pichon Battle Vision and Initiatives Partner, Taproot Earth “One way for us to understand the climate crisis is to understand everybody’s going to be impacted.… The worst part of climate change is not the big hurricanes. It’s not the big storms that you can predict. It’s global temperatures that are going to take out more people than any storm ever could.”
Vincent Warren Executive Director, Center for Constitutional Rights “States talk a lot about their rights, but states don’t have rights. What states have are power. And who has the rights? People have the rights.… What we have to do as human rights defenders is shift power to the people from the state.”
Hossam Bahgat Founder, Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights “Our work can only succeed if we think of ourselves and execute our activities as a movement, not as a group of individual organizations working in individual countries, and not as a group of visionary individuals exercising leadership. To really make change, you need to build.”
Hina Jilani Pakistani Lawyer and Women’s Activist, Member of the Elders “I cannot afford the luxury of either pessimism or cynicism or frustration, so I always have hope. I respect my struggle more than I expect achievement. I believe in my struggle. And because I have that belief, I have hope.”
May 18, 1872 Bertrand Russell Birthday of Sir Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, logician, essayist, and social critic, a leading figure in his country’s anti-nuclear movement. In 1954 he delivered his “Man’s Peril [from the Hydrogen Bomb]” broadcast on the BBC, condemning the Bikini H-bomb tests, and warning of the threat to humanity from the development of nuclear weapons: “. . . as a human being to other human beings: remember your humanity, and forget the rest.” A year later, together with Albert Einstein nine other scientists, he released the Russell-Einstein Manifesto calling for the curtailment of nuclear weapons. Text of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto He became the founding president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958. He resigned in 1960, however, and formed the more militant Committee of 100 with the overt aim of inciting mass civil disobedience, and he himself with Lady Russell led mass sit-ins in 1961 that brought them a two-month prison sentence, at the age of 89. Bertrand Russell in front of the British Ministry of Defence, Whitehall, London
May 18, 1896 Supreme Court endorsed “separate but equal” facilities for those of different races with its Plessy v. Ferguson decision, a ruling that was overturned 58 years later.
May 18, 1972 Margaret (Maggie) Kuhn founded the Gray Panthers (originally called the Consultation of Older and Younger Adults for Social Change) to consider the common problems faced by retirees — loss of income, loss of contact with associates, and loss of one of society’s most distinguishing social roles, one’s job. The members discovered a new kind of freedom in their retirement — the freedom to speak personally and passionately about what they believed in, such as their collective opposition to the Vietnam War.
May 18, 1974 In the Rajasthan Desert in the state of Pokhran, India successfully detonated its first nuclear weapon, a fission bomb similar in explosive power to the U.S. atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. The test fell on the traditional anniversary of the Buddha’s enlightenment, and Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi received the message “Buddha has smiled” from the exuberant test-site scientists after the detonation. The test, which made India the world’s sixth nuclear power, broke the nuclear monopoly of the five members of the U.N. Security Council—the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, China, and France. Detailed background on India’s nuclear weapons program and its first test
May 18, 1979 A jury in a federal court in Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee established a company’s responsibility for damage to the health of a worker in the nuclear industry. Karen Silkwood worked for the Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation at their Cimmaron, Texas, plant where plutonium was manufactured. Silkwood had become the first female member of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers bargaining committee, focusing on worker safety issues, but had suffered radiation exposure in a series of unexplained incidents. The jury in Judge Frank G. Theis’s court awarded her estate $505,000 in actual damages, and $10 million punitive damages. Karen Silkwood’s sisters and parents She had died in a car accident on her way to a meeting with a The New York Times reporter five years earlier. Karen Silkwood remembered The Supreme Court upheld the decision and the award
When books burn, humans follow – a warning we cannot afford to ignore Read on Substack
When I tell you that fascists don’t start with violence—they start with books—I’m not speaking in fucking hypotheticals. On May 6th, 1933, while the ink was barely dry on Hitler’s chancellorship, young Nazis stormed the Institute of Sexual Research. They ransacked the place that night, and then four days later, they took more than 20,000 books from the Institute’s library to Berlin’s Bebelplatz Square and burned them.
They didn’t just burn paper. They burned hope. They burned sanctuary. They burned the world’s first transgender clinic and decades of groundbreaking research that might have spared generations of queer people unimaginable suffering.
I’m not being dramatic when I say this is one of the most gut-wrenching episodes in queer history. The visceral image of Magnus Hirschfeld—a gay Jewish doctor and pioneering advocate for gay and transgender rights—watching on television as his life’s work went up in flames should haunt us all. Because make no mistake: these weren’t military operations. These were everyday people, your neighbors, your classmates, who decided certain knowledge was too dangerous to exist.
A Haven of Revolutionary Care
The Institute for Sexual Research wasn’t just ahead of its time—it was blazing the trail for a future we’re still fighting to reach nearly a century later. Opened in 1919 by Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin, this non-profit institution provided care that modern transphobes claim is “experimental” today, despite the fact that Hirschfeld was performing these procedures over a hundred years ago.
Initially hesitant about gender-affirming surgeries, Hirschfeld changed his mind when he recognized a simple truth: this was life-saving care that prevented suicide. Think about that—while most of the world was still living in willful ignorance, this man understood that people would rather die than live in bodies that betrayed them. The Institute provided facial feminization and masculinization surgeries, hair removal, and complex gender reassignment procedures when most doctors wouldn’t even recognize trans people as human.
It’s hard to wrap your mind around just how revolutionary this place was. Hirschfeld recognized that gender identity and sexual orientation were entirely separate entities—a concept some people still struggle with a century later. He coined the terms “transsexual” and “transvestite,” creating language for experiences that had been silenced for millennia. The Institute was staffed with every specialist imaginable—psychologists, gynecologists, radiologists, lawyers, general practitioners—providing low-cost or free care to those whom society had abandoned.
History Doesn’t Repeat, But It Does Rhyme
My friend (and my Editor-in-Chief) thepoetmiranda saw the dark echoes of history when one of Trump’s first orders was for the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control to start scrubbing medical literature related to healthcare for transgender Americans from government databases (an erasure policy that has spread beyond healthcare to all historical references of transgender people—even on the Stonewall National Memorial website). She wrote the poem linked below, which is a fucking must read:
Hirschfeld’s clinic wasn’t just a clinic. It was a fucking sanctuary. Hirschfeld and his partner Karl Giese lived in the building, creating a warm, plush space filled with life. They hosted costume parties where queer people could express themselves freely. They recommended local bars and venues where LGBTQ+ folks could find community instead of isolation.
When trans women struggled to find employment after transitioning, Hirschfeld hired five of his own patients to work at the clinic. He fought for the repeal of Paragraph 175, which criminalized homosexuality, and even secured legal identification passes for his trans female patients with a “transvestite” gender marker to prevent them from being arrested for crossdressing.
Instead of the torturous conversion therapy that was common practice, the Institute taught “adaptation therapy,” instructing queer people how to navigate a hostile world while staying true to themselves. Their motto was “Through science to justice”—a radical notion that education and understanding were the path to equality.
The Day Knowledge Became Dangerous
When the Nazi youth and the German Student Union piled the contents of the Institute in the square on May 10th, 1933, they topped it with Hirschfeld’s bust before setting it ablaze. This wasn’t random destruction—it was a deliberate erasure of knowledge they deemed threatening. This happened just three months after Hitler was named Chancellor. It wasn’t soldiers who did this; it was civilians, ordinary Germans who had been convinced that minorities were the root cause of inflation and social problems.
Anyone who wasn’t white, cisgender, and Christian was deemed immoral and dangerous to German youth and the “traditional family.” Sound familiar? It should, because we’re hearing the same bullshit rhetoric recycled today by people who would burn books all over again if given half a chance.
Hirschfeld, who was out of the country, watched the destruction on television. He never returned to Germany and died of a stroke in 1935, his life’s work reduced to ashes. The loss was immeasurable—not just papers and books, but decades of research that could have advanced trans healthcare by generations.
The Brutal Reality of Lost Knowledge
We lost so much ancestral knowledge about our community in this one raid. The world’s first transgender clinic—gone. Groundbreaking research on gender identity—gone. Records of successful gender-affirming surgeries—gone. Resources for queer people to find community—gone. All of it, up in smoke because knowledge in the wrong hands threatened the status quo.
The memorial for this event bears the quote, “Where they burn books, in the end, they will burn humans, too”—a line from Hirschfeld’s own library that would prove prophetic. The Nazis began with books but ended with concentration camps where thousands of queer people wore pink triangles to their deaths.
Practical Tools for Preserving Our History
Document and digitize queer history in multiple locations and formats
Support LGBTQ+ archives financially and through volunteer work
Learn and share the stories of pioneers like Magnus Hirschfeld
Recognize warning signs when marginalized communities are blamed for societal problems
Protect trans healthcare by understanding its long history and scientific basis
Community Connection
The story of the Institute’s destruction isn’t ancient history—it’s a warning. When you hear politicians targeting trans healthcare, when you see books about queer experiences being banned from libraries, when you witness the demonization of drag performances, remember the Institute. Remember what happens when fear and ignorance are weaponized against knowledge.
Today, organizations like the Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation continue his legacy, but the threat remains. Every time a state bans gender-affirming care, every time a library removes LGBTQ+ books, every time a transgender person is denied basic dignity, we’re watching echoes of that burning pile in Berlin.
Conclusion
Knowledge is a form of rebellion, and the facts and history you carry in your mind can never be taken away from you. Education and queer joy are our greatest protections right now, just as they were in Hirschfeld’s time.
When we learn about the Institute for Sexual Research, we’re not just studying history—we’re resurrecting knowledge that fascists tried to erase. When we speak the names of Magnus Hirschfeld and his patients, we’re undoing their work of erasure. Every time we share these stories, we’re rebuilding what they tried to destroy.
The memorial’s warning echoes across time: “Where they burn books, in the end, they will burn humans, too.” We must never forget this. We must never allow it to happen again.
Because our history isn’t just about the past—it’s about fucking surviving the present and building a future where institutes like Hirschfeld’s aren’t revolutionary; they’re just how we treat each other.
References:
Hirschfield, M. 1912 “Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den Erotischen Verkleidungstrieb”
Hirschfield, M. 1920 “Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes”
Hirschfield, M. 2017 (Reprint) “Berlin’s Third Sex”
May 2, 1963 Hundreds of children ranging in age from six to eighteen were arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, as they marched from Kelly Ingram Park, across from 16th Street Baptist Church, to downtown singing, “We Shall Overcome.”Part of an ongoing effort to end segregation in that city, and following the arrests of many adults including Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the children had volunteered to minimize the threat to families if a breadwinner were jailed. A judge had issued an order preventing any of 133 civil rights leaders from organizing a demonstration. Birmingham, the capital of Alabama, had been the site of 18 unsolved bombings in black neighborhoods over recent years, and the place where mobs had attacked Freedom Riders on Mother’s Day in 1961. Leaving the park in groups of fifty, the kids were put in vans by police, led by Eugene “Bull” Connor, until there were 959 filling the city jails.
May 2, 1968 The Poor People’s Campaign began with groups from several locations around the U.S. setting out for Washington, D.C., to draw attention to the living conditions of the poorest Americans. It was conceived and organized by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and, following his assassination the previous month, led by his successor at the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Reverend Ralph David Abernathy. The first wave of demonstrators arrived in Washington on May 11. One week later, Resurrection City was built on the Washington Mall, a settlement of tents and shacks to house the protesters. Resurrection CityA Read more
Note From Ali in 2025: Not a dream, and while not yet fulfilled, the goal is not unfulfilled (“A Dream Unfulfilled” from the link above,) as The Poor People’s Campaign is still very active, operating in many US states. See if there’s a committee near you!
Exclusion Order No. 20 affected 660 people living in the area bounded by Sutter and California streets and Presidio and Van Ness Avenues in San Francisco. The Japanese Americans living in those neighborhoods were ordered to report to 2031 Bush St. for registration, and then, on this day, for removal to internment camps for the duration of the Second World War, and faced loss of their homes and businesses. Presentation on what happened (Check it out! Some of Dorothea Lange’s work.)
April 29, 1962 Nobel Prize-winner (for chemistry in 1954) Linus Pauling picketed the White House with others protesting the resumption of nuclear weapons testing. He had been invited there by President John Kennedy, to be honored at a dinner along with other Nobelists.
April 29, 1968 Peace message, Vanessa Redgrave, 1968 photo: Frank Habicht Actress Vanessa Redgrave was among 826 British anti-nuclear protesters arrested during a London demonstration protesting the Vietnam War. Film from the BBC and their take on the demonstration that day
April 29, 1970 U.S. and South Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia and began a bombing campaign, known as Arclight, that widened the Vietnam War. They were after North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops and supplies that had been moved into Cambodia. By the time the bombing ceased in 1973, the U.S. had dropped more than half a million tons of ordnance on Cambodia, three and a half times that dropped on Japan in World War II. Background on the Cambodia “incursion”
April 29, 1992 Deadly rioting erupted in Los Angeles after an all-white jury in Simi Valley acquitted four Los Angeles police officers of almost all state charges in the beating of Rodney King, an African-American motorist who had been stopped for a traffic offense.Videotape of the abuse had been seen around the world. 17 other officers, who had been present and had not intervened, were never charged. The National Guard was called out to help restore civil order. By the time schools were able to re-open on May 4, more than 50 had been killed, over 4000 injured, 12,000 people arrested, and $1 billion in property damage. The Riot The trial (The original link to the trial news on History.com is no longer present. This link will take you to more about the rioting. Again, noting the loss of the info, this time, also again, that an all white jury acquitted police of battery of a Black man.)
April 29, 2016 Gary Tyler was released from Angola penitentiary in Louisiana. He was just 16 years old when charged with shooting a white student in 1974. Gary was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death by an all-white jury and became the youngest person on death row. His case sparked a movement to gain his release which persisted for 40 years. FreeGaryTyler.com Read more about the case and the movement to free him Listen/watch more about the case Democracy Now
I enjoy this man’s commentary. He’s always seemed to know whereof he speaks. Every weekend I intend to post this newsletter, and every weekend gets by me without me getting it done. This is a copy-paste of my newsletter; I receive it in email from “The Nation” magazine. All links within are live.
A retirement for the ages Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, who has been in Congress or the Senate for nearly my entire life, has announced that he will not seek reelection in 2026. The 80-year-old’s retirement will touch off a firestorm of a Democratic primary in Illinois, and I’m already dreading the prospect of a heap of progressives jumping into the race, cannibalizing each other, and clearing the path for the wealthiest available moderate white man to buy the nomination. If progressives could just coalesce around one candidate and stick together, they’d win this thing. Then again, if I had wheels, I’d be a wagon. In any event, Durbin’s long overdue retirement is more important to what I cover than the primary, because Durbin is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which controls the judicial nomination process. He was the head of the committee during Joe Biden’s presidency—a job he got by literally pulling rank over the guy who was best suited for the post (according to me), Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. The last four Democratic leaders on Judiciary have been, pretty much, a disaster. Durbin was preceded by Diane Feinstein, who was preceded by Patrick Leahy, who was preceded by Joe Biden. All four of these people were establishment moderates who were more concerned with formalities and courtesies than fighting for control of the courts. It was during their watch that the Federalist Society was able to overrun the judiciary with Republican judges who have literally taken away constitutional rights and redefined the law as a tool of the Republican political agenda. The Judiciary Committee desperately needs new, energetic leadership, to say nothing of a fighting spirit. I can only hope that Durbin’s retirement marks the end of the era of Democrats’ getting punked on judicial nominations.
The Bad and The Ugly SCOTUSblog, a popular website that reports on the Supreme Court, has been acquired by the right-wing media outlet The Dispatch. The acquisition likely marks the end of one of the few nonpartisan sources of information about the Supreme Court and plunges yet another independent outlet into the dark morass of the white-wing media ecosystem. I have a ton of respect for the website’s senior editor, Amy Howe, and I know she will fight like hell to retain the site’s nonpartisan independence. But this ain’t no fairy tale. When you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.The number of young people who are incarcerated is going down, but the racial disparities among the children we put behind bars are “the highest in decades.” Black and Native American children are getting the worst of it, according to NPR. Pope Francis died. Francis was from Argentina. He was the first pope from Latin America, the first pope from the Southern Hemisphere, the first Jesuit pope, and the first pope born and raised outside of Europe since the 8th century. He was also one of the most progressive popes in the history of that office, though admittedly that’s a bit like saying he was the least fungal fungus. For my lapsed-Catholic part, I liked him. I hope the next pope is the second pope who can claim to be most of these things. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been caught up in yet more Signal-inspired controversy. I know I’m supposed to care, but I don’t. They put a Fox News host in charge of the American military; what the hell did people think was going to happen? Decency? Competence? A group of bigoted parents went before the Supreme Court this week and asked the justices to allow them to object to books in school that mention gay people. The Republican justices on the court fell all over themselves to agree with the parents. I am once again asking bigoted religious wing nuts to homeschool their children and leave the rest of us who want to live in a society alone.
Inspired Takes In The Nation, my colleague Joan Walsh took on the Trump administration’s ridiculous and sexist obsession with white birth rates. For my part, I am willing to help the administration accomplish its goals: If it really wants white birth rates to go up, all it has to do is make most white people poor again. The lesson from literally all today’s high-income societies is that birth rates go down as economic prosperity goes up, so the solution is actually pretty simple. Maybe that’s the real reason behind Trump’s tariffs? Contraband Camp has put out a “Trump Administration Discrimination Database.” So now, whenever your MAGA uncle says, “Point to one thing Trump has done that is racist,” you have a reference source. I used to feed my dog a “raw food” diet. It made sense to me, in an unthinking way (dog = wolf = murderous carnivore = “Aww… who’s the good girl who wants to feast on the raw viscera of your slain enemies?”). The fru-fru suburban veterinarian I go to didn’t immediately tell me it was a bad idea. But then, I happened to run into my old, hardscrabble city veterinarian and she basically said, “What the fuck? Don’t do that. I thought you were a smart person?” She then gave me some research. Now, we’re back to kibble. For people who don’t have the benefit of knowing a frank-talking vet, Emmet Frazier explains in The Nation why your fully domesticated dog doesn’t need to be eating rabbit liver.
Worst Argument of the Week This isn’t really an argument, but I read a story in Gothamist that almost made me cry. The Trump administration has largely cut off funding for legal aid programs that would provide lawyers to immigrant children sent here without their parents or legal guardians. That has forced thousands of children in New York City to go through the court process—which can lead to their deportation (among other things)—with no legal representation. We’re talking about children as young as 4 being hauled into a courtroom without a lawyer. I do not know what kind of sick fucks think this is OK. I cannot fathom the base, racist, cruelty and inhumanity you have to be comfortable with to think that Trump is right to cut this funding. I cannot conceive of the argument one might make to support this. All I know is that whatever argument one has for making this OK is wrong.
What I Wrote I was not prepared to engage with a Supreme Court decision at 1 o’clock on Saturday morning, but I’m very glad the court was still working. It issued a ruling that prevented Trump from deporting another group of immigrants, and in so doing, probably saved some of their lives. The Harvard lawsuit against the Trump administration over his illegal and unconstitutional freeze of the university’s research funding is very strong. Harvard should win, if winning in court still matters.
In News Unrelated to the Ongoing Chaos You should watch Andor. The first episode of its second season just came out and, trust me, you should just watch it. Forget that it’s part of the Star Wars franchise. Forget that it’s another Disney-owned media property looking to milk that franchise for all its worth. This show is about fighting fascism. It is the most relevant piece of dramatic fiction of this era.
Mary Robinson (center), former president of Ireland, shares her views on human rights at a Carter Center event in March. From the Center, CEO Paige Alexander (right) participated in the discussion, and Nicole Kruse, VP, Development, moderated.
Scottie's Playtime 