In the last 6 days the NY Times has run 4 articles about e-bikes -- all of them negative.
A few other stories the paper might consider:
🔹 E-bikes pollute far less than even electric cars
🔹 Compared to autos, e-bikes pose minimal risk to other people
🔹 Unlike cars, e-bikes provide exercise
@davidzipper An e-bike can be as fast as a car in city traffic, while using less gas and being far easier to park. And allowing for more vehicles in traffic. Cities would be nuts to not consider them.
Joe Scarborough to Republicans defending Trump: "You're better than that."
No, they're not, Joe. They show us that every single day. They are not better than that.
Fascism is notoriously difficult to define, at least when you haven't already read Umberto Eco's essay "Ur-Fascism" (German: "Der Ewige Faschismus"). Read it, it's not too long and it really helps.
But I think a common and critical mistake is to only recognise it when it's in power, when it's too late.
But the small group of fascists who meet secretly in a shitty bar, before they have a political party or any meaningful influence at all, that's also fascism. And that's the best time to fight them, it only gets harder from there. But in order to fight them, we need to recognise them.
I am absolutely floored that I have 25,000 followers after less than a year of being on Mastodon. I would donate a kidney to each and every one of you. Not one of my kidneys obviously, but the sentiment is still just as meaningful.
It is impossible to earn a billion dollars. Take any exorbitant salary you like — let’s say $500,000 per year — and calculate how many years you would have to work, spending nothing, to earn your first billion. At $500k/year, it would take 2,000 years. Or, if you simply steal $3 from every single American, you can make a billion in a single year.
Billionaires’ wealth comes only from wage theft from workers. It is never earned. It is estimated that ~5% of deaths in the US are attributable to poverty, making every billionaire a de-facto mass murderer. No one becomes a billionaire because they are intelligent or talented; people become billionaires because they are able to rob millions of other people into poverty, destitution, and early death — and still sleep soundly at night.
These are the people determining our future. They are brain-damaged by power. [See https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711/] Billionaires are, by definition, psychopaths. They believe they are chosen by the universe to live as gods. If you are counting on billionaires to save the planet because “it’s in their best interest,” you misunderstand their interests.
That's an excerpt from a long and very informative piece by Sam Hall (@SamYourEyes).
If the Republican Party responds to the Trump indictment solely by attacking courts and judges, and if its leaders continue to work to de-legitimize the legal system, I am not sure how we recover.
For a precedent, Americans don't even have to look beyond our hemisphere: Venezuela is an excellent example of state that slid into autocracy while an elected president repeatedly assaulted judges.