Notices by Chuck Darwin (cdarwin@c.im), page 7

Historians already knew that the cathedrals had been erected over decades, one bay at a time, from east to west.

Mark’s models showed how adjustments in design made by the builders
— the slight differences from one bay to the next
— were probably responses to problems they had observed along the way.

A crack in an early pillar led to a different approach for a subsequent pillar.

This is how people unable to multiply or divide had erected these miraculous structures:
by trial and error.

This enterprise was the SpaceX of its day.

By the time Chris was aware of what his father did for a living,
his father had become a tiny bit famous.

He’d been featured in Life magazine and Scientific American and was soon to be the subject of a PBS documentary.

Chris was the eldest of three sons and the one whose mind most resembled his father’s:

Their thoughts rhymed in all sorts of interesting ways.

He was usually the smartest kid in the class.

Technically gifted, he, too, crossed the usual academic boundaries.

He, too, loved art and history.

“In kindergarten, I’d ride a tricycle and pull my socks over my pants because it looked like Napoleon in garters.”

He was naturally self-contained and inclined to see the world for himself rather than how others wished him to see it.

His parents encouraged the quality.

When he was 5, he asked his mother, how come the rest of the world goes to church and we don’t?

“She said, ‘Well, they’re wrong and we’re right.’

And what I took away from that was that I should be able to make my own decisions about right and wrong,
and whatever anyone else thinks doesn’t matter.”

He had a feeling in him that his father lacked, however,
or perhaps he could afford to develop a side of himself that his father couldn’t:

the side that questioned the structure not just of churches but of society.

“I have a very fine nose for elitism,” said Chris.

“And it bothers me.

And I was in Princeton.

There’s a kind of idea at a place like that:
‘We’re the smartest and you should just shut up and let us run the world.’

And this just really bugs me.”

The younger Mark was coming of age in what seemed to him a revolution.

His weeping mother had awakened him in the middle of the night, when he was 12 years old,
to inform him that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had just been killed.

The Vietnam War was roiling the Princeton campus
— and it wasn’t Ivy League kids being sent to fight and die.

One day, flipping through one of his mother’s magazines,
Chris came across photographs from Vietnam.

They showed children killed and wounded by American napalm and shrapnel.

Next to them was a piece about an American company that had figured out how to make plastic shrapnel,
so that it couldn’t be detected by an X-ray.

“This sent me off the deep end,” said Chris.

“Everyone knew what napalm did to kids in villages.

This was the same mentality used in a different way.”

By the time he reached high school, he was joining campus war protests
and entering a running one-way argument with his father.

“Chris was very political,” recalled his brother Peter Mark.

“Very antiestablishment.

He used words like ‘bourgeois.’”

His father, still working for the Defense Department, didn’t share his son’s taste for politics.

“My father didn’t like to argue,” said Peter Mark.

“He’d just listen to Chris and say, ‘you got funny ideas.’”

The roof of their family home had yet to collapse, but the structure exhibited obvious cracks.

One was that Chris identified less with the class his father had ascended to than the class he’d come from.

“He always wondered why the police didn’t use horses more often to scare demonstrators,” said Chris.

Christopher Mark was born in 1956, the eldest of three sons of a civil engineer named Robert Mark.

His mother was a classical pianist, but his mother, for reasons that later became clear, wasn’t present in Chris’s initial, and somewhat halting, telling of his own story.

His father, however, was impossible to hide.

His father had moved the family to Princeton the year Chris was born.

Robert Mark had grown up in the Bronx and studied engineering at City College of New York.

A few years out of college, he’d made a name for himself with his deft use of photoelastic models to test the effects of physical stress on virtually any object.

He was testing fighter jets and nuclear subs for the Defense Department when Princeton hired him to test parts of small but expensive nuclear reactors it was about to build.

His work saved Princeton so much money that the university ignored his lack of graduate education and invited him to be a professor in the engineering department.

He accepted.

There, his life was biffed onto a radically different course.

“A kid asked a question,” recalled Chris.

“He’d just come from some art history class, where they had these running arguments about Gothic cathedrals
— if certain elements in the buildings are there for aesthetic reasons or structural reasons.

The kid asks my dad:
Can you answer the questions using these models you have?”

The answer was yes.

It would be a bit like reopening a cold case using new DNA technology.

A 12th-century builder had no concept of gravity and only Roman numerals to work with:
He couldn’t multiply or divide.

And yet an engineering movement that started in roughly 1135 A.D. proceeded to generate structures more improbable and accomplished than anything built anywhere in the world over the next 700 years.

As if to further bewilder historians, their architects had left next to no written records.

Any tourist who has stumbled into Chartres soon asks the obvious question:
What’s holding this roof up?

By the time the question was put to Robert Mark, scholars had pretty much given up looking for an answer.

“An insuperable barrier separates their approach to building from ours,” wrote one of the leading historians of Gothic art, before dismissing any hope of figuring it out.

But then Mark deployed his stress-testing gizmos to investigate Gothic cathedrals.

“Robert’s big thing was showing that this technique that came from aerospace could be used for concrete,” says Rob Bork,
a former student and current professor of medieval architecture at the University of Iowa.

“The work was not only original but essentially unique.”

Mark began by taking a vertical slice of, say, Chartres and replicating it in a special kind of plastic.

He’d then hang fishing weights from various points on the plastic replica,
like ornaments on a Christmas tree,
to simulate the actual external forces acting upon various parts of the cathedral.

There was the direct load of the overhead stone, of course,
but also the winds.

(To estimate the winds in the 12th century, he found anemometer readings in rural France going back a century. Not perfect, but good enough.)

He placed his fully loaded plastic model in an oven, where it was subjected not just to heat but also light.

Warmed, the plastic model revealed its stresses, sort of like the way an MRI reveals damage to soft human tissue.

The models had their own haunting beauty.

They turned art history into science.

They generated testable hypotheses.

They predicted exactly which stones inside Chartres or any other cathedral might be overstressed by their loads.

But the power of Mark’s methods became clearest when he traveled to France to visit cathedrals.

The buildings behaved exactly the way his models suggested they should.

“There should be cracking in the mortar here,” he would say to some French stonemason at Chartres,
and the stonemason would invariably reply,

“We repointed that only last year!”

For centuries, the damage inside Chartres had been repaired by workers who never understood why certain stones always needed replacing.

Now this guy from Princeton could not only tell you why
— he could explain the buildings in ways that not even their builders could have done.

Mark founded a program at Princeton that combined architecture and engineering.

His plastic models yielded insights beyond the cathedrals’ weak spots.

They proved that certain Gothic features that art historians assumed essential were mostly decorative
and other Gothic features that seemed decorative were structural,
preventing the roof from collapsing.

An example:
The pinnacles on top of the outer piers had been thought to be mainly for show,
but they actually pre-stressed the mortar beneath them and thus prevented it from cracking and weakening the entire structure.

The premise of his radical youth was that people without power needed to be protected from the people with it.

But these coal miners weren’t asking for protection.

Their jobs were insanely risky,
but they seldom complained and at times even courted risk.

They routinely ventured beyond the pillars that prevented the mountain from falling in on them,
and into areas where the mountain floated over their heads without support.

They upped the odds of a methane explosion by smoking inside the mine.

“The way they judged a new boss was to whip out a cigarette and see if he said anything,” said Chris.

“If he said something, he was done.

He’d never be able to mine any coal.”

All of them knew people who had been killed mining coal.

Married couples learned to settle their arguments before the husband returned to the mine,
because they might never see each other again.

“Everyone had a tragedy,” said Chris.

Chris himself was twice nearly killed, and yet he never adjusted his behavior, either.

For reasons he could never fully explain, even to himself,
he loved being inside a coal mine.

“It was just so cool,” he said.

“You go down into a place most people think you are crazy to be.
And you like it.”

But a year into the job, his enthusiasm for the actual work flagged.

He didn’t really belong in West Virginia.

Everyone knew everyone else,
and he knew no one.

“It was like being an immigrant,” he said.

“You could be there your entire life and never fit in.”

Partly out of stubborn pride, he refused to even consider heading home.

He enrolled in Penn State instead, to study mining engineering.

His mother had left him some money.

His father, mollified that his son had returned to college, chipped in a bit more.

And Chris would help pay for his education
— by moonlighting inside coal mines as he studied.

His political interest in workers’ rights was morphing into a technical interest in their safety.

Coal mining had long been the most dangerous job in the United States.

At the height of the Vietnam War, a coal miner was nearly as likely to be killed on the job as an American soldier in uniform was to die in combat,
and far more likely to be injured.

(And that didn’t include some massive number of deaths that would one day follow from black lung disease.)

Up to that point in the 20th century, half of the coal miners who had died on the job
— roughly 50,000 people
— had been killed by falling roofs.

In his classes at Penn State, Chris saw at least one reason for that:

The coal mining industry had learned to see the problem as the cost of doing business.

After his junior year, his parents divorced
— Chris was surprised;
they never argued
— and any overt power his father held over him vanished.

“I said, ‘You no longer have the right to tell me what to do with my life,’” said Chris.

“You’ve been giving me a hard time for not doing what I’m supposed to do,
and now you’re not doing what you’re supposed to do.”

He’d finished high school a year early and a decision presented itself.

“The big question for my father was, would I go to Harvard or would I settle for Princeton,” said Chris.

“And I told him that I wanted to work in a factory.

And he said, ‘I’m not paying for you to go to college so you can get a job at an auto plant.’

So, I thought about it and decided, ‘What do I need college for?’”

He joined a group whose goal, quaint as it sounds today, was to train smart young people to organize workers.

“The idea was to make the unions more responsive,” he said.

Along with a small crowd of like-minded young people,
he bounced from an oil refinery outside Los Angeles to a UPS warehouse inside Los Angeles to an auto factory in Detroit
and, finally, to a coal mine in West Virginia.

“It wasn’t that I was going to be the leader or anything,” he said.

“It was helping working people make use of their own power.”

The more time he spent with actual working people, the less plausible his self-assigned role seemed
— and not just to him.

By the time he arrived in West Virginia, he had only two other young revolutionaries by his side
— and they both took one look at their new jobs and fled.

Neither of them had had any idea of what a coal mine looked like, either.

His arrival in West Virginia coincided with something else:

a call from home to tell him that his mother had died by suicide.

(He never mentioned this to me. I learned it from a former colleague of his father’s.)

Chris went home for two days … and then returned to the coal mine in West Virginia.

He was now 19 and nearing the end of a romantic mission to revolutionize the life of the American worker.

The main effect of the previous three years had been to alienate his father.

(When his father told a friend of the curious path that Chris had put himself on,
the friend had said,
“You must be so proud of him.”

To which Robert replied, “I’d be proud of him if he was your kid.”)

He wasn’t organizing anything or even trying to.

He was sleeping in a trailer and working the graveyard shift at the Lightfoot No. 1 mine in Boone County, W.Va.,
alongside a bunch of guys who had grown up together.

It was as if he had flown halfway across the country to crash some random high school prom.

“I was never unaware of my outsider status for a moment,” he said.

“There was not a moment when I thought I fit in.”

Real-life American workers were different from his mental model of them.

“I had thought if they only knew what I thought, they’d see things how I do,” he said.

That idea now struck him as so obviously nuts that he didn’t bother to let them know what he thought.

His fellow coal miners were less concerned with his ideas about the economy and their rightful place in it than in simply making a living.

Their morale, at that moment, was actually sky-high.

“Coal was booming,” said Chris.

“We were going to save the world.

Thank god we have all this coal so we’re not reliant on Arab oil.

People felt good about themselves.”

Inside a West Virginia coal mine that politics had brought him to,
politics seeped out of him.

He was aware that his fellow miners must wonder why this stranger had turned up wanting to be a miner,
but they never asked him about it.

He returned the favor and didn’t pester them about their opinions.

“I’ve always thought that everyone has a right to think what they think,” he said.

But there were moments when he was reminded how different their world was from the one he’d grown up in.

The one time in the mine that someone brought up religion, for example.

“I broke my rule,” said Chris. “I said, ‘I’m, uh, actually an atheist.’

This other guy got this stricken look on his face, then looked up at the roof and said, ‘don’t say that in here!’”

Another time, Chris woke up for his night shift to hear on the radio that Mao Zedong had died.

“No one had the slightest interest in global affairs, but I thought, ‘I’ll try it.’”

He told a fellow miner the news.

“Who’s that?” asked the miner.

“He’s the head of China,” said Chris.

“Well, they won’t miss him, then,” said the miner.

“It’s standing room only over there!”

His rock mechanics professor was a Polish aristocrat named Z.T. Bieniawski.

Bieniawski was a big personality and maybe a tad out of place in State College, Pa.

“He liked five-star hotels and flying first class,
and in a lot of ways we didn’t have that much in common,” said Chris.

“Whatever the highest level of Toastmaster was, he was it.”

There was the story, which Chris loved, of the time Bieniawski staged a formal dinner at the restaurant of the Nittany Lion Inn.

Bieniawski (summoning the waitress): Madam, can you recommend your finest bottle of red wine?

Waitress (after studying Bieniawski a beat): Sir, if you want my opinion, you shouldn’t be drinking at all.

But he was a fabulous professor
— the sort of teacher who got you thinking even when he didn’t mean to.

One day he lectured his students on the formulas used to design the pillars that supported the roofs of coal mines
— which of course sounds like a topic to light a fire under no one.

But it lit a fire under Chris.

He’d experienced roof collapse.

He knew that poorly designed pillars killed people.

Now he learned that the formulas used to create them were all over the map.

“A kid in class raised his hand,” said Chris.

“He asked, ‘which of these formulas is the right one?’”

As Bieniawski had created one of the formulas, the professor’s answer seemed almost modest.

“You need to use your engineering judgment,” he replied.

But that can’t be right, thought Chris.

Each formula implied a different pillar design than the others.

At most only one could be right.

When wrong, coal miners died.

Yet no one had figured out which formula was best or really even saw the problem.

“I said, this is the place for me!” said Chris.

He graduated in 1981 without a clear idea of where to go next.

He had a serious interest (mine safety)
but no obvious place to express it.

He worked for a spell with an engineering consulting firm in Chicago
but found it dull and beside the point.

He toyed with going to work as a field engineer for a coal mining company and even spent a summer in mines in Wyoming.

There he was reminded of the realities of a coal miner’s life.

“A guy says, ‘Let’s go to a bar.’

It’s 50 guys and one woman stripper.

He says, ‘Let’s go somewhere else.’

It was the exact same scene:
50 guys and one woman stripper.

It made me so depressed
— that’s all I need is to be one of those 50 fucking guys.”

Then Bieniawski called to say that he’d just received new funding for a PhD student.

He wanted Chris to be that student.

All Chris needed was a thesis topic.

The coal mining industry soon supplied it.

On Dec. 19, 1984, a roof collapsed inside the Wilberg Mine,
just outside of Salt Lake City.

The miners at Wilberg had been trying to break the world record for the most coal mined in a single day.

Nine senior officials from the mine’s owner, Utah Power and Light,
had entered the mine to witness history.

Suddenly, a fire broke out in one of the two main tunnels.

Before the executives or 18 working coal miners could escape,
the roof in the second tunnel collapsed and blocked their exit.

All 27 people wound up trapped inside an inferno.

It would take a year to recover their bodies.

And Christopher Mark thought:

If they’d figured out the right formula for their pillars, they’d all still be alive.

Imagine a cake in the shape of a giant rectangle.

It consists entirely of vanilla quick bread except for a single six-foot-thick layer of chocolate fudge in the middle.

Your assignment is to burrow into that layer of chocolate fudge and extract as much of it as you can without triggering a collapse of the cake over your head.

If you were a coal miner in possession of a longwall mining machine,
you would drill several narrow tunnels into either end of the exposed side of the cake,
directly through the chocolate fudge,
all the way to the other side.

To prevent the cake from caving in, you wouldn’t carve out all the chocolate;

you’d leave pillars of it inside the tunnels.

As these pillars are made from chocolate, and your goal is to extract as much chocolate as possible,
you face constant pressure to take more of them than is safe.

Then, facing the direction you came from, you’d use the longwall mining machine to cut your way through the chocolate and back to where you started.

That’s when the job becomes especially treacherous.

You are now moving back and forth across the entire cake,
removing essentially the entire layer of chocolate fudge
— which also happens to be the sturdiest layer of the cake.

The machine starts on one end of the wall and slices all the way across to the other
and feeds the chocolate it removes onto a conveyor belt that carries it out through the original entry tunnels.

The more chocolate fudge you remove, the more vanilla cake you’ve left over your head without anything to support it.

You’re now effectively carving out a roof over your head.

Lacking support, that roof will eventually collapse.

Happily, the mining machine has a makeshift roof on it
— a giant metal plate capable of supporting a lot of cake
— and so you are protected from any cake that falls from immediately overhead.

But if that happens, you’ll probably need to stop mining and flee.

Meanwhile, behind you, the cake is collapsing in on itself.

That’s expected.

If anything unexpected happens, you can scurry into your original entry tunnels and out of the mine

This is the first sort of disaster that Chris set out to prevent.

“Pillar Design For Longwall Mining”
would be the subject of his PhD thesis
and the title of his first paper.

Bad pillar design was killing longwall coal miners.

It’s what killed 27 people in the Wilberg Mine.

It had killed miners since longwall mining had been invented in the 1940s.

It had also cost the coal industry money.

By the time Chris turned his attention to its roofs,
the longwall coal mining industry was out of pocket $200 for every minute its mines were shut down by some roof collapse
— and a single roof fall could shut a mine for days.

“The same roof fall that can kill miners can also cost a lot of money,” Chris said.

And yet even though the coal mine industry had a huge financial incentive to figure out how to solve the problem, it hadn’t solved it.

But the problem was complicated.

It didn’t frame itself as a single problem but thousands of smaller ones.

Each mine was sufficiently different from every other mine that regulators felt compelled to devise rules specific to it,
almost as if each mine were its own little industry.

The deeper the mine, for example, the heavier the weight over its roof,
and the more support it would require.

Rock itself differed from mine to mine in diabolical ways, so there was no reliable way to measure the load the pillars needed to support.

“A mine is unlike any man-made structure,” said Chris.

“It’s not a designed environment.

Most of the material the structure is made from is kind of unknown.

With rock you don’t know what the engineering properties are
— what the loads are.

You have a problem that is really not an engineering problem,
but people were insisting on using an engineering mindset to solve it.”

There was a reason no one could agree on coal pillar formulas:

No one could agree how to measure the rock the pillars needed to support.

Preventing the roof from collapsing inside a coal mine was less like analyzing the stresses inside a Gothic cathedral than building one from scratch.

There was only one way to do it: trial and error.

“The science wasn’t there,” said Chris.

“It didn’t have a clear mathematical solution or a way to get one.”

Democratic government isn’t really designed to highlight the individual achievement of unelected officials.

Even the people who win an award will receive it and hustle back to their jobs before anyone has a chance to get to know them
— and before elected officials ask for their spotlight back.

Even their nominations feel modest.

Never I did this, but we did this.

Never look at me, but look at this work!

Never a word about who these people are or where they come from or why it ever occurred to them to bother.

Nothing to change the picture in your head when you hear the word “bureaucrat.”

Nothing to arouse curiosity about them, or lead you to ask what they do, or why they do it.

Our elected officials
— the kids who bludgeon the teachers for attention and wind up cast as the play’s lead
— use them for their own narrow purposes.

They take credit for the good they do.

They blame them when things go wrong.

The rest of us encourage this dubious behavior.

We never ask: Why am I spending another minute of my life reading about and yapping about Donald Trump or Kamala Harris when I know nothing about the 2 million or so federal employees and their possibly lifesaving work that whoever is president will be expected to nurture, or at least not screw up?

Even the Partnership seems to sense the futility in trying to present civil servants as characters with voices needing to be heard.

But this year, someone inside the Partnership messed up.

Spotting the error, I thought: Some intern must have written this one.

It felt like a rookie mistake
— to allow a reader of this dutiful list a glimpse of an actual human being.

Four little words, at the end of one of the paragraphs.

"Christopher Mark: Led the development of industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first year (2016) of no roof fall fatalities in the United States."

A former coal miner.

A former coal miner.

Those words raised questions.

Not about the work but about the man.

They caused a picture to pop into my head.

Of a person.

Who must have grown up in a coal mining family.

In West Virginia, I assumed, because, really, where else?

Christopher Mark, I decided, just had to have some deeply personal stake in the problem he solved.

His father, or maybe his brother, had been killed by a falling coal mine roof.

Grief had spurred him to action, to spare others the same grief.

A voice was crying to be heard.

The movie wrote itself.

But then I found Christopher Mark’s number and called him.

Even after I’d explained how I’d plucked his name off a list of 525 nominees, he was genuinely bewildered by my interest.

He’d never heard of the Sammies award.

But he was polite.

And he answered my first question.

“I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey,” he said.

“My dad was a professor at the university.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/michael-lewis-chris-marks-the-canary-who-is-government/

Think Donald Trump isn’t really serious about being a dictator? Think again

Trump has always flirted with the idea of autocracy.

But now that flirtation has become a full-on embrace.

He has threatened to weaponize the Justice Department against his political opponents,

gut the civil service system to replace professional federal employees with loyalists,

invoke the Insurrection Act to put down protests,

reinstitute his ban on Muslim immigration

and incarcerate millions of immigrants in detention camps.

If you don’t think he’s serious, you’re in denial.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-09-15/donald-trump-kamala-harris-election-2024-viktor-orban-dictator-robin-abcarian

Bomb threats have come to Springfield, Ohio.

So why don’t Trump and J.D. Vance back off the demagoguery?

Because supercharging all these toxic social tensions is precisely what they want.

https://newrepublic.com/article/185953/trump-vance-haitians-springfield-ohio

For years, the identity of the world-renowned street artist #Banksy has been shrouded in mystery,
sparking countless documentaries and investigations.

However, a BBC Radio 4’s special, “The Banksy Story,” sheds light on this enigma.

The program features a rare in-person interview from 2003, offering insights into Banksy’s world and, surprisingly, his real name.

https://streetartutopia.com/2024/09/12/street-art-legend-banksy-reveals-his-name-in-a-rare-bbc-interview/

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump

After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close,
I was able to kill Roe v. Wade

Older people who were infected with #COVID-19 show a substantially #higher #risk

—as much as 50% to 80% higher than a control group

—of developing #Alzheimer’s disease within a year,

according to a study of more than 6 million patients 65 and older.

https://thedaily.case.edu/new-study-risk-factor-for-developing-alzheimers-disease-increases-by-50-80-in-older-adults-who-caught-covid-19/

California reports a total of eight H5N1 bird flu outbreaks among dairy herds

Officials have refused to disclose the locations of the infected herds,
but have said they are in close proximity somewhere in California’s Central Valley
— an 18,000-square-mile expanse that is roughly the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined.

They say they are still investigating the source of the virus, but at a news conference Thursday, federal officials said genetic sequencing from the first three outbreaks suggests the strain is similar to that seen in other states.

They say it does not appear to have been caused by wild birds or animals.

“This is the same virus that we’ve detected in herds since the beginning of the emergence of H5N1 in dairy cows,” said Eric Deeble, deputy under secretary for marketing and regulatory programs at the United States Department of Agriculture.

“Sequencing of the samples from the additional five premises will likely be completed later this week or over the weekend.”

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-09-13/bird-flu-outbreaks-are-rising-among-california-dairy-herds

Florida officials investigate voters who signed abortion ballot initiative

Florida law enforcement officials are ❌ investigating voters who signed a petition to get a closely watched abortion rights measure on the ballot this fall,
🆘showing up at the homes of some residents unannounced in what activists say is an effort to intimidate voters.

Organizers turned in more than 900,000 signatures in January to get a measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution.
The deadline to challenge signatures has passed, but a state agency created by #DeSantis to investigate voter fraud recently began investigating whether there was fraud in the gathering process.

Isaac Menasche, a Fort Myers voter, said he signed a petition months ago when he was approached at a local farmer’s market.
He wrote down his name, birthday, address, and scribbled a quick version of his signature.
He didn’t think much of it until last week when 💥a law enforcement officer showed up at his door and pulled out a copy of his signature on the petition, asking him to confirm that it was his – which it was.

“The experience left me shaken.
What troubled me was he had a folder on me containing my personal information
– about 10 pages.
I saw a copy of my driver’s license and copy of the petition I signed,” Menasche wrote in a Facebook post last week.
“It was obvious to me that a significant effort was exerted to determine if indeed I had signed the petition.
Troubling that so much resources were devoted to this.
❓I wonder if the same could be said if the petition were for some innocuous issue.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/13/florida-abortion-petition-investigation?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

The "misery index" under Biden-Harris is
✅ near a six decade low!

In 1980 Ronald Reagan brought the term “#misery #index” into political debates.

The concept is simple, it’s the sum of the unemployment rate and inflation rate over the last year.

It’s not obvious that these two numbers should have the same importance, and they certainly are not the only measures that matter in evaluating the economy,
but they do provide an interesting snapshot.

Anyhow, Reagan could point to a misery index that was over 20 percent as the election approached.

The high level for the misery index was a theme Reagan hit on repeatedly in the campaign.

https://cepr.net/the-biden-harris-misery-index-in-historical-context/

No pets were harmed in the making of this video.

Disclaimer: as a South African, I am non-partisan in my support for either
Kamala Harris or
DonOLD Trump in the US elections.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=3VXVfcWI5EAEk_M1&v=3BrCvZmSnKA&feature=youtu.be

Taylor Swift Drove Nearly 338K People to Vote.gov With Kamala Harris Endorsement Post

According to data from the GSA, Swift's post directed 337,826 people to the site, which refers people to their local state election websites.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/politics-news/taylor-swift-kamala-harris-endorsement-impact-vote-gov-1235998634/

Trump Admits He Has No Answer To Obamacare, But ‘Concepts Of A Plan’

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2024/09/10/trump-admits-he-has-no-answer-to-obamacare-but-concepts-of-a-plan/

𝕐 Are you still on 𝕏?

Staying on a social network and sharing your writing, photos, and other work with its users and owners is a choice.

Asking yourself 𝕐 you're still there is always a good idea, no matter what the network is or who owns it.

https://y-after.social/