Posts in: Links

USAID shutdown reportedly styming anti-human trafficking direct service efforts

I worked for nearly a decade with the organization that currently runs the National Human Trafficking Hotline. I do not know the current specific details, but I believe it and am saddened by this news. I and my team supported some efforts to engage with some of the international partners alluded to if not mentioned in this reporting. I have all kinds of feelings about the space (and Polaris's unfortunate support for some very flawed legislation in the US), and I do not have an uncritical view of USAID, but it pains me to understand the many ways people just trying to help people are being crippled, seized-up and disrupted.

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Thank you, Noah.

I watch us
in our last, most honest minutes
putting bread on credit, double-
bagging bleach and ketchup, trying
to keep what we love alive.

What good comes out of increasing the void of help for the innocent?

I’m not really making an effort at being a news blogger. I have little to add of any unique value. I do not want to sound self-important. If there’s anything to when I do comment on the larger world I do not control or have particular expertise in, it is to assert as much agency as I think we all might have due to any way we might relate to the world, to care about things and to ask for justice.

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The Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts can suck it. The vertical playground at Swampoodle is one of The Childe’s favorite places to play.

It is near several places we make regular errand runs to and, in addition to climbing fun, it provides him a vantage point to observe the train traffic coming in and out of Union Station (The Childe is a trainspotter, although he does not yet know this term).

Like many park areas with something interesting for different groups, it is a small oasis in the city. We need more such things for all of us. (We also need the city to keep the drinking fountains in clean, working order in all the parks. I did just put in a 3-1-1 request with regards to Swampoodle’s drinking fountain.)

This says nothing about me (except to significantly explain my stint of SAHD duty in the latter case), but I am proud to know people directly involved in each of these efforts:

I don’t have to let go of my broader and deeper political critiques to appreciate some of this progress.

Design to survive the sacrifice

This feels like design for sacrifice zones… I’m not sure I believe that, but I hate the ideas that both people may need things like this and that whatever capital went into this has been dwarfed just by the fight to keep burning fossil fuels, never mind the wealth extracted and costs externalized on our lives by the continued burning.

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War Culture Hates the Ethical Passion of the Young

We (the United States) have a war culture. We’ve been at war, one way or another, at substantial expense, my entire life, and longer, and most of the time, really. That, and my being politically aware and anti-war on most fronts (with a couple of exceptions that have their own equivocation) for 25 years (ugh), means this resonates with me: “War Culture Hates the Ethical Passion of the Young." Also, I used to work for IPA.

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The clock ran out on "if" a long time ago.

This still feels like equivocation. In other words: too little. Certainly far too late for tens of thousands of dead innocent civilians, and what infrastructure there was to support the social and physical fabric of a society. (Israel is attacking clean water!) Not sure this stops, or rights, a genocide. Those are the table stakes now. Not enough, Joe.

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