This is possibly one of the best Substack blogs around. Father & Son - Prof Lawrence Freedman (War, Foreign Policy) & Sam (detailed UK policy analysis). It rises above the click-bait & quick takes - they write lengthy, thought out, detailed stuff.
This particular piece by Sam I almost filed away for later. But glad I made the time for it.
Air and light pollution are both scourges of modern life in many world cities. #AirPollution affects the brightness of the night sky, and #LightPollution at night may make daytime #AirQuality worse. Find out why addressing both issues makes good #PublicPolicy sense.
"Jennifer Pinsof, staff attorney at Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the technology has been used in too many nefarious circumstances to be trusted... There are several local and state-level regulations in place... to mitigate inappropriate data sharing. Police departments, for instance, are not supposed to share the license plate data with other states, nor with federal law enforcement agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That, however, hasn’t stopped at least 73 departments throughout California from violating those rules...
"We found that many California law enforcement agencies share this data not just out of state but specifically with agencies in states that ban abortions, and those law enforcement agencies who now have access to this highly sensitive location data can use it to prosecute things that are crimes within their state but not within the state of California,” she said."
For one of the most devastating #PublicPolicy#crises of this century, half of the governments in this country have published no internal reflection.
Why the lack of reports? It could be that governments simply haven’t gotten around to it yet. The federal government recently tasked a panel of experts with a report reviewing the federal approach to #pandemic#science advice and #research coordination. It is set to be published in March.
"Collapsing councils are a microcosm of the British state’s failings: austerity, short-termism, Treasury myopia and decades of failure to solve the so-called wicked problems of policymaking, such as council tax, planning and our broken social care model. Every block in the Jenga tower appears to be wobbling"
Anoosh Chakelian writes about the dire straits local government is in.
Reporter Jenny Gold analyzed state Medi-Cal data for 2021. Her findings on health care access for kids in the California public insurance program are sobering:
🟡 60% of babies—and 75% of Black babies—did not get their recommended well-child visits in their first 15 months of life.
🟡 65% of 2-year-olds were not fully vaccinated, leaving them vulnerable to vaccine-preventable diseases like measles.
🟡 Half of children did not receive a lead screening by their second birthday.
Our colleagues at PRB have been publishing on this for awhile. In 2022 we published a bulletin, Dying Young, that looks at why our early-life mortality rates are so much higher than other wealthy nations. If you're interested, you can read it here: https://www.prb.org/resources/dying-young-in-the-united-states/
Brazilian #museums join the #Fediverse: "From a [#digitalmemory] #publicpolicy standpoint, creating an online social environment for disseminating information that is independent of centralized platforms is crucial for the sustainable functioning of information and knowledge networks of public interest."
"America’s quest for global dominance primarily serves the interests of giant corporations that suppress labor movements worldwide.
While US politicians from both parties cover it in euphemism, the proper role they see for the working class in foreign policy is as fodder for factories and battlefields, valorized in rhetoric to obscure their exploitation.
“We’re gonna get yelled at to stay in our lane, and focus on our jobs or whatever, but we’ve waited for the Democrats forever to become this great institution of working people and peace throughout the world, and they suck. We no longer can trust the Democrats,” Vicente said."