Linkage

Anelise Feldman, a freshman at Yarmouth High School in southern Maine, finished second to Soren Stark-Chessa, a multisport standout at rival North Yarmouth Academy, at a May 2 intramural meet. 

“I ran the fastest 1,600-meter race I have ever run in middle school or high school track and earned varsity status by my school’s standards,” Feldman wrote in a letter to The Portland Press Herald published Wednesday. “I am extremely proud of the effort I put into the race and the time that I achieved. The fact that someone else finished in front of me didn’t diminish the happiness I felt after finishing that race.” 

Feldman’s letter was prompted by State Rep. Laurel Libby’s (R-90) comments during a Fox News interview earlier this month in which the lawmaker, while not naming Stark-Chessa, referred to her accomplishments and accused transgender athletes of “pushing many, many of our young women out of the way in their ascent to the podium.” 

 Feldman stressed: “I don’t feel like first place was taken from me. Instead, I feel like a happy day was turned ugly by a bully who is using children to make political points.”

“We are all just kids trying to make our way through high school,” she added. “Participating in sports is the highlight of high school for some kids. No one was harmed by Soren’s participation in the girls’ track meet, but we are all harmed by the hateful rhetoric of bullies, like Rep. Libby, who want to take sports away from some kids just because of who they are.” 

Not only is it scary to have all your data available to US spying, it is also a huge risk for your business/government continuity. From now on, all our business processes can be brought to a halt with the push of a button in the US. And not only will everything then stop, will we ever get our data back? Or are we being held hostage? This is not a theoretical scenario, something like this has already happened.

Here and there, some parts of at least the Dutch government are deciding not to migrate EVERYTHING to the US (kudos to the government workers who are fighting for this!).

But even here, the details of Dutch policy are that our data will only ‘for now’ stay on our own servers. Experts are also doubtful whether it’s actually possible with the current “partial cloud” plan to keep the data here exclusively.

And then we come to the apparent reason why we are putting our head on Trump’s chopping block: “American software is just so easy to use”.

Personally, I don’t know many fans of MS Teams, Office, and Outlook. We are, however, very used to these software products. We’ve become quite good at using them.

But this brings us to the unbearable conclusion that we are entrusting all our data and business processes to the new King of America… because we can’t be bothered to get used to a different word processor, or make an effort to support other software.

Do I hear dominoes falling with grim predictability? Plus: there's a Northern Territory Government? You learn something new every day.

In short:

Health Minister Steve Edgington has announced the Northern Territory government will no longer fund puberty blockers or gender-affirming hormone treatments for children.

He said the government's public health focus would instead "remain on adolescent mental health services".

What's next?

Mr Edgington says the policy will affect "a handful of young teenagers" who had been accessing the treatments through the NT's public health system.

[…]

Children in the Northern Territory will no longer have access to publicly funded puberty blockers or gender-affirming hormones after Health Minister Steve Edgington announced the government would follow Queensland's lead in suspending the treatments. […]

"Territory kids deserve to grow up free from these dangerous, ideologically driven practices with irreversible consequences," he said.

"The Territory's public health focus will remain on adolescent mental health services."

The move follows pressure from the Australian Christian Lobby, which presented a petition to the government in October 2024, calling on it to "suspend all medical and surgical transitioning for children in the NT".

Key findings

• The housing sub-function of the Federal Budget was $3.5 billion in 2021/22, but this did not include key housing support measures such as Commonwealth Rent Assistance and property tax concessions. With these included, actual 2021-2022 federal expenditure on housing is estimated at $27 billion.
• The share of federal housing spending going to the lowest 20% of income earners declined from 44% in 1993 to 23% in 2023, while the share going to the top 20% increased from 9% to 43%.
• In the last decade alone, the share going to the top 20% of earners has increased by over a third.
• The share of total federal housing expenditure going to property investors rose from 16.5% in 1993-94 to 61.4% in 2021-22.
• Investor tax concessions have grown from $1.5 billion in 2000 to an estimated $17 billion in 2024, effectively operating as a shadow housing policy with a significant impact on the market.
• In 2023-2024, federal investor tax breaks will be worth almost five times the amount spent by the Federal Government on social housing and homelessness services through the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement and the $2billion Social Housing Accelerator Fund, announced in 2023.
• Strategic expenditure on social housing and homelessness services, which are negotiated between the Federal and State/Territory Governments, once made up well over half of total federal housing spending. Now just 7% of total federal housing expenditure goes toward these programs.

I'm reading the book at the moment, and it's brilliant. I'd already been struck by the Utopian parallels between fascism and neoliberalism, but I confess I've only just started to get a grasp on contemporary Marxist economics this year, know little about Soviet history, and have never read any Marx. [Gasp!]

The book is also a very useful history of neoclassical economics, which I assumed was born more-or-less fully-formed in the late 19th century, but apparently many key components were still falling into place until well into the 20th century.

Also this:

Platform decay is the phenomenon of major internet platforms, such as Google search, Facebook, and Amazon, systematically declining in quality in recent years. This decline in quality is attributed to the particular business model of these platforms and its harms are usually understood to be violations of principles of economic fairness and of inconveniencing users. In this article, we argue that the scope and nature of these harms are underappreciated. In particular, we establish that platform decay constitutes both a cognitive and moral harm to its users. We make this case by arguing that platforms function as cognitive scaffolds or extensions, as understood by the extended mind approach to cognition. It is then a straightforward implication that platform decay constitutes cognitive damage to a platform’s users. This cognitive damage is a harm on its own; however, it can also undermine cognitive capacities that virtue ethicists argue are necessary for developing a virtuous character. We will focus on this claim in regards to the capacity to pay attention, a capacity that platform decay targets specifically. Platform decay therefore also constitutes both cognitive and moral harm, which simultaneously affects billions of people.

This is interesting. A considerably less bleak conclusion than I would have expected.

I interviewed 30 chiefs of staff, legislative directors, and legislative assistants—the key players who shape nearly every policy decision that moves through Congress. What I learned challenges conventional wisdom about how scientific information flows on Capitol Hill and reveals why many well-intentioned efforts by academics fall short.

It’s widely understood that data alone rarely drive decisionmaking. But nearly all the staffers I spoke with described relying on a hierarchy of information sources in which guidance from party leadership, committee staff, and lobbyists takes precedence over expertise from universities, think tanks, and nonprofit organizations. After working in Congress, I was not surprised by the significance of party positions—but I did not expect academic and NGO scientists to have such a low priority.

The hierarchy I observed upends two common notions among scientists: that peer-reviewed findings speak for themselves, and that more information about science leads to more favorable policy outcomes for the science community. […]

“My whole day is people coming in telling me that they have a crisis that I need to address,” one legislative assistant shared. “Ninety-five percent of the time they’re not telling the truth, and I have to figure out the 5% of the time that they are.”

As a result, experienced staffers rely heavily on established networks, both inside and outside Congress. “A lot of the time, it’s individuals you know, or know indirectly … just a friends-of-friends sort of situation,” explained one legislative director. By developing sophisticated networks of trusted people on and off the Hill, staffers can quickly separate signal from noise.

[…]

This relationship-based approach often puts academic scientists at a disadvantage, as they typically lack the sustained presence and personal connections that successful industry lobbyists cultivate over years. Not a single person I interviewed said they would call a member of the scientific community first when they needed to learn more about a science-related issue. The first people they turn to are those closest at hand, including party leaders, staff colleagues in other offices, and industry lobbyists.

Almost two dozen researchers at a top medical journal have published a scathing scientific takedown of the Cass Review. Experts found that the NHS-issued report—a non-peer reviewed publication authored by Dr. Hillary Cass, a pediatrician without clinical or research experience with trans patients—was marred by “unexplained protocol deviations,” “methodological flaws,” and “unsubstantiated claims.”

Published on May 10 in BMC Medical Research Methodology, the report identified critical flaws in the study. The Cass Review led to a ban on puberty blockers targeting trans children in the UK. However, puberty blockers remain readily available to cisgender children, who may need them for conditions like precocious puberty.

“These issues significantly undermine the validity of the Cass Review’s recommendations, such that the Review fails to fulfil its aims as commissioned and should not be used as the basis for policy making,” the researchers said in a statement to Erin in the Morning.

The Cass Review has been rejected by countless medical organizations across the globe which oversee aspects of trans health care—including the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the Endocrine Society, The American Academy of Pediatrics, the Association of the Scientific Medical Societies in Germany, and the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, to name just a few.

Nonetheless, it continues to act as the vanguard for anti-trans lawmakers and leaders grasping at straws for a scientific basis to further an extremist political agenda.

You can't make this stuff up:

Insiders at Australia’s biggest private company – Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting – have lifted the veil on what they describe as a “bizarre” culture within the organisation that includes annual requests to thank Australia’s richest person.

While not compulsory, the thank you messages are encouraged by senior executives and are requested across the company, including from workers at its mine sites.

[…]

One former employee describes the thank you messages as a “wild concept”, particularly given that Rinehart has become the country’s richest person in part off the back of her staff’s work.

“We are encouraged to email her thanks for literally making her the richest person around,” he says. “Because the transaction where I work my guts out and she becomes even more rich is not enough – we should thank her yearly, apparently.”

[…]

Insiders have told Guardian Australia that staff are frequently exposed to political material, with an email seen by the Guardian encouraging workers to listen to Trump’s inaugural address.

The email, sent as an Australia Day message by Veldsman, talks about Rinehart’s visit to the US and Trump’s “strong commitment to creating a field that attracts investment into the US, something our government here in Australia could learn a thing or two about! While Australia has punched above its weight on the global stage, we are faced with increasing headwinds brought about by ill-conceived tape and tax that is stifling business.”

Guardian Australia understands that Hancock Prospecting distributes the conservative magazine the Spectator in the company’s office buildings and mining sites.

The central goal of much anti-transgender rhetoric is to make cisgender people believe that their interests and trans people’s interests cannot be met at the same time. It’s not just the accusation that trans people are different or weird or creepy; it’s that our rights, our healthcare, and our well-being must come at the expense of your well-being. As the infamous ad from Trump’s reelection campaign put it, transphobes want cis people to think that someone who cares about “they/them” could never be for “us.” It fits neatly into the central thesis of Trumpism—that someone else’s suffering will be your gain. It also feeds into the portrayal of the Democratic Party as feckless, effete, and obsessed with the abstractions of identity.

For any politician facing them, there are two ways of handling these attacks: by promising to care less about trans people or by promising to care more about everyone. If you are not responsive to the needs and interests of a broad coalition of working people, you can be more easily caricatured as dedicated to the interests of some nefarious (and often racialized) other. But if you do have a compelling vision for how to improve all people’s lives, the fact that not all of those people are the same carries less weight. It is true that many Americans would rather starve than share a table with someone they view as less deserving or too deviant from their own experience. But it’s especially true if all that’s on the menu is scraps.

[…]

I am exhausted with begging for help and pleading for others to recognize transgender people’s humanity. I’m also exhausted with the shallow brand of identity politics removed from the material concerns of most people–including trans people–adopted by the mainstream of the Democratic Party in the 2010s when it seemed a useful wedge against progressives like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As Judith Butler told El País earlier this year, “Identity is a great start for making connections and becoming part of larger communities. But you can’t have a politics of identity that is only about identity. If you do that, you draw sectarian lines, and you abandon our interdependent ties.”

It is exactly those interdependent ties that Mamdani won on and that our political future depends on. The politics of forced scarcity being sold by Trump and seemingly bought into by many Democrats is a myth deeply ingrained in our politics, our communities, and our culture. Rewriting it is not simply the work of rhetoric, talking points, and being open to disagreement. It’s also the work of changing how people experience politics to begin with, and showing them their freedom and dignity need not come at the expense of someone else’s. And what I see in Mamdani’s campaign is not only a promise of solidarity with a marginalized group I happen to be a member of. What I see is a promise that nobody will have to do that work alone.