bisexualbaker:

regicide1997:

So when I was getting dressed today, I very quickly put on a lab coat and some cat ears, not even trying to have something coherent, just wanting to have some kind of costume, and then I used some eyeliner to draw some whiskers on my face, so, yeah, that’s my costume, cat in a lab coat, does it make sense? no. who cares. Still wearing the same skirt and striped knee-high socks from yesterday, but that’s just my work clothes.

But then when I got to my office in the physics department, one of my colleagues was immediately like, “Oh! Schrödinger’s catgirl!”

It both was and was not a coherent costume until someone observed you and collapsed the wave form.

Have you made a lot of terrible life decisions?

Then our product is specifically for you!

Wow, this sounds like it’s designed specifically to prey on people who make bad financial decisions, by encouraging them to make more such decisions in the wake of their previous mistakes. Let’s ask the CEO about that:

We didn’t build Coverd to help people inhibit their spending; we built it to make spending exciting. We let spenders win twice – the second time is when they play it back and win. Our users want immediacy and upside. Coverd gamifies transactions with real financial leverage, meeting users where they are and turning spending into a moment they look forward to. 

That this is (probably) legal tells you a lot about how degenerate the financialization of everything has become.

The post Stage 4 capitalism appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

This is the grave of James Mann.

Born near Bloomington, Illinois in 1856, Mann grew up in a prominent agricultural family interested in reform of the topic. He went to the University of Illinois but rather than follow his older brother into the farm world, he wanted to be a lawyer. He got his law degree from Union College of Law in 1881 and then passed the bar and began practicing in Chicago. Like a lot of people we cover in this series, the law was a pathway to politics. Mann didn’t care so much about agricultural issues, but for a Gilded Age Republican, he was definitely on the reformer side of things and became identified with the growing Progressive movement.

Mann began running for local office in 1887 when he won a seat on a local board of education. That led to additional local runs. He made it to the City Council in 1892 and then in 1896, to Congress. Mann remained in Congress for the rest of his life. He was in a very Republican district and so never faced a serious challenge again. By and large, he was a big reformer.

But you know, when you are talking about Progressives, the reformers play as good or really bad depending on the issue, but they often come out of the same person. Mann is a great example of this. His name is on two enormously important bills. The first is the Mann-Elkins Act. This was passed in 1910 and is one of the key railroad regulation bills. It’s difficult to comprehend just how powerful the railroads were at this time and how loathed they were as corporations. It’s a bit like tech today, except that most Americans love tech so there’s no meaningful opposition to the horror show of the CEOs who want to dominate our lives. After all, who can say no to a world of terrible Netflix shows and Tik-Tok videos and fascist influencers? What a country! Well, back in the days when people actually had a critique of contemporary capitalism, the railroads were the top target.

So what Mann-Elkins did was to empower the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate railroad rates, also expanding the ICC’s mandate to include the telegraph and growing telephone industries. When western railroads decided to jack up their rates in 1910, Mann and Stephen Elkins, who had lived in New Mexico for quite awhile but was then a senator from West Virginia, decided to act. It’s an important bill that really did reduce the power of corporate America a little bit. He also had introduced the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.

But then there’s the other side of the Progressives. That’s the side that liked to police bodies and behavior. The second thing Mann is known for is the infamous Mann Act, also from 1910, that made it a felony to bring women across state lines for sex work. Basically, this was the white slavery scare placed into law. Progressives were all whipped up over the idea that our good little white girls were entering the city and being taken in by evil Italians or Chinese or Blacks and given drugs and then forced into sex and a permanent sense of white slavery. In short, this is the early version of Nic Kristof’s bullshit about sex workers in Cambodia (and never forget that he was completely scammed in his “investigations” in Cambodia and his endless lies did not lead to even the slightest blink by the New York Times over continuing to run his white savior bullshit columns). Sex work was common. And there was some sex trafficking, sure. But was there even the slightest thought given to why this was happening and the economic conditions behind it? Not by too many people. Would they admit that for some women, sex work was a reasonable economic option? Absolutely not. No, it must be those foreigners and darkies.

So when the Mann Act passed in 1910, it was part of a larger freak out (see the 1911 film Traffic in Souls, which still exists, as the best cultural manifestation of this) over white slavery. Incidentally, it was Charles Sumner who actually coined the term “white slavery” back in 1847 to discuss the Barbary pirates’ engagement in the slave trade. Anyway, the first major prosecution of the law was of the boxer Jack Johnson, as whites were desperate to take him off of the throne as heavyweight champion. Johnson loved to date white women and flaunt them in the face of the crackers. And that a boxer would date prostitutes hardly shocked anyone. So Johnson was prosecuted under the Mann Act in 1912. Oddly, Mann opposed the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1912, so that was one area where he did not play the moral scold.

So that pretty much sums up the Progressives. We need to square these two sides. I recently reviewed a book about the horrors of Oregon progressives policing the bodies of women, gender non-binary people, and immigrants for a professional journal. It’s a good book, but I also stated that the overwhelming discussion of Progressives today are as horrible people and the social libertarianism of the left actually plays very well with the economic libertarianism of the right. In short, if all we do is condemn these people for engaging in state interventions with people (and in these cases, yeah, condemn anyway), then aren’t we also playing into the idea across the political spectrum that the state has no role to play in society period. In short, we have to be able to take the good parts of state intervention and also the bad parts and come up with a more sophisticated analysis of when the state should intervene in society. What is freedom anyway? I don’t think it is a libertarian paradise. In fact, that sounds terrible. But this seems to be where critics, both left and right, lean these days.

Anyway, Mann was still in Congress when he got pneumonia and died in 1922. He was 66 years old.

James Mann is buried in Oak Woods Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois.

If you would like this series to visit some of the people Mann worked on with his legislature, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Stephen Elkins is in Elkins, West Virginia (appropriately enough) and Weldon Heyburn is in Birmingham, Pennsylvania (despite being a senator from Idaho). Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

The post Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,005 appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

As the U.S. tariff act of June 6, 1872, was being drafted, planners intended to exempt “Fruit plants, tropical and semi-tropical for the purpose of propagation or cultivation.”

Unfortunately, as the language was being copied, a comma was inadvertently moved one word to the left, producing the phrase “Fruit, plants tropical and semi-tropical for the purpose of propagation or cultivation.”

Importers pounced, claiming that the new phrase exempted all tropical and semi-tropical fruit, not just the plants on which it grew.

The Treasury eventually had to agree that this was indeed what the language now said, opening a loophole for fruit importers that deprived the U.S. government of an estimated $1 million in revenue. Subsequent tariffs restored the comma to its intended position.

This article was originally published by Block Club Chicago, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering Chicago’s neighborhoods. Sign up for their newsletters here.

As ICE patrols swarm Chicago, the tamale vendors who serve up steaming hot corn husks from the sidewalks or sell them to hungry bar patrons from coolers have retreated from their regular spots for fear of being snatched.

That has prompted a brigade of bicyclists to take to the streets in a show of support, buying out the vendors so they can go home to safety while making the money they need to survive.

At least three street vendors have been detained by federal agents since the Trump administration started operations Midway Blitz and At Large last month. The controversial immigration enforcement operations are supposed to target undocumented people with serious criminal histories — but many Chicagoans have reported loved ones being taken even if they do not have a history.

Cycling x Solidarity, a collective of Chicago cyclists who organize group rides and mutual aid efforts, will host a Street Vendor Bike Tour Saturday (November 1) with the Street Vendors Association of Chicago. The ride will begin 10 a.m. local time at Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park and wind through Pilsen and Little Village, where the group will buy food from street vendors.

All purchases are considered funds for vendors and not donations since Cycling x Solidarity’s work is not tax-deductible, said Rick Rosales, a community organizer with Cycling x Solidarity.

The Saturday ride is an extension of an initiative that started last month when the group decided to collect funds to buy out vendors in Pilsen and Little Village so vulnerable residents could pack up early and avoid federal agents. Riders paid the vendors in cash and then passed out the food to people in need throughout Chicago, Rosales said.

Cycling x Solidarity’s rides benefit vendors of all types, including those who sell tamales, elotes and tortas throughout Pilsen, Hermosa and Little Village.

The group has organized similar events like Burrito Brigade, where cyclists deliver burritos to Chicagoans living in encampments and shelters, and an unemployment support group that provides resume help, networking and a place to air out job search frustrations.

Rosales hopes to make the Saturday vendor tour part of a series, he said.

“We’re providing an opportunity to support vendors and hearing their stories, to make this so it’s not just transactional,” he said, adding that the group is always looking for translators who can help. “They’re gonna introduce themselves so we can support them in that way.”

Rosales lived in Indianapolis for 12 years, and he saw virtually no street vendors, he said. But in Chicago, where street vendors are a common sight, they stir “literally warm and figuratively warm” feelings in him.

“To me, it embodies what it means to be an American,” he said. “My fondest memories are them handing these warm tamales for a reasonable price and being able to support them and their hustle. I think a lot of Chicagoans have a similar feeling toward them. They cherish the vendors in their neighborhood.”

The tense political climate has pushed many vendors into the shadows, said Maria Orozco, development manager and outreach coordinator with the nonprofit Street Vendors Association of Chicago. The organization helps street vendors obtain insurance, licenses and Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers.

“It’s been really tough on them. And then the people that have the opportunity to go out and sell or just risk it, they’re not getting as much sales as they used to,” Orozco said. “So it’s something very traumatizing for people to see … It’s very unexpected. I think Covid wasn’t even this bad.”

For Orozco, the impact on street vendors is personal. Her family of four, including Orozco’s sister, began selling tamales, elotes and chicharrones about a decade ago on the corner of 79th Street and Pulaski Road in Ashburn. Both her parents still work as vendors, but her mother hasn’t ventured out for fear of ICE, nor have they gone to the church where they once set up shop, Orozco said.

“We always used to complain that we can’t have family Funday Sunday, and now we haven’t worked in weeks,” Orozco said, adding that her sister does the grocery shopping so her mother can stay home. “It doesn’t feel real, what’s going on.”

In spite of the bleak mood weighing over many Chicagoans since the Trump administration launched Operation Midway Blitz, Cycling x Solidarity’s initiative has inspired other cyclists to embark on their own vendor buyouts. Humboldt Park resident Stephanie Reid wasn’t able to attend one of Rosales’ recent rides but still wanted to help.

“I stole Rick’s idea,” Reid joked. “When all the ICE activity increased, I said, ‘I have a pretty generous network of friends. Let me go buy out some vendors on my own.’”

Reid posted on Facebook that she wanted to raise a few hundred bucks to buy out local street vendors. She received donations from all around the United States via Zelle and Venmo, she said. She drove around West Town, Logan Square and Humboldt Park with her husband and 14-year-old, buying out $200 worth of tacos from one vendor and $120 worth of tamales from another vendor so they could return to their homes.

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The outing turned into a teachable moment for Reid, showing her teen the importance of helping her neighbors, she said. She was also surprised to learn that not only could her teen use the Spanish they learned in school to translate conversations with vendors, but her husband knew Spanish too.

“They’re just a fixture on our streets, and it’s awesome what they’re doing,” Reid said of the vendors. “Personally, I’m a huge fan of Claudio, who goes around and sells his tamales at all the bars. They’re just hardworking people trying to make a living and supporting their families.”

The post Chicago Cyclists Buy Out Tamale Vendors to Keep Them Safe from ICE appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

Almost a decade ago we discussed “why complex mythical stories that surface in cultures widely separated in space and time are strikingly similar” (1, 2); now Manvir Singh has a thoroughgoing and amazingly sensible New Yorker article on the subject (archived). It begins:

I read George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” sometimes hailed as the greatest British novel, in a rain forest in western Indonesia. I was there as a graduate student, spending my days slogging through mud and interviewing locals about gods and pig thieves for my dissertation. Each evening, after darkness fell, my research assistant and I would call it a night, switch off the veranda’s lone bulb, and retreat to our separate rooms. Alone at last, I snapped on my headlamp, rigged up my mosquito net like a kid building a pillow fort, and read.

Those were good hours, although, honestly, little of the novel has stuck with me—except for Casaubon. The Reverend Edward Casaubon is Eliot’s grand study in futility: an aging, self-important, faintly ridiculous clergyman who has dedicated his life to an audacious quest. Casaubon is convinced that every mythic system is a decayed remnant of a single original revelation—a claim he plans to substantiate in his magnum opus, “The Key to All Mythologies.” He means to chart the world’s myths, trace their similarities, and produce a codex that, as Eliot puts it, would make “the vast field of mythical constructions . . . intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light of correspondences.”

The ill-fated project founders between the unruly diversity of cultural traditions and the fantasy of a single source, between the expanse of his material and the impossibility of ever mastering it, between the need for theory and the distortions it introduces. These failures are deepened by Casaubon’s limitations—his pedantic love of minutiae (he “dreams footnotes”) and his refusal to engage with scholarship in languages he doesn’t know (if only he’d learned German). […]

Casaubon’s “Key to All Mythologies” lingered with me less as a cautionary tale than as a temptation. Like Dorothea Brooke—Casaubon’s much younger, idealistic wife and the novel’s protagonist—I found his vision thrilling. As an aspiring anthropologist, I understood the seduction: the promise that somewhere, beneath the confusion of gods, ghosts, and rituals, there might be a hidden order. Of course, my method was different. I was mud-caked and by myself on a remote island, chasing a crocodile spirit; Casaubon was at his desk, trying to map out myths he barely knew. But, amid all the pedantry, I recognized a kind of kinship.

Singh namechecks Max Müller, James Frazer, Robert Graves, Joseph Campbell, and Robert McKee before continuing:

The key that Casaubon craved is particularly alluring. He wasn’t just tracing similarities; he was hunting for a primordial mythology, a long-lost ancestor dimly visible in its descendants. He happened to believe this original tradition was Christian truth, but set aside the apologetics and there’s still something intoxicating about the quest for a key: the notion that, by sifting through myth, we might retrieve the imaginative worlds of the earliest storytellers. Nor is the quest just a scholarly game; it’s an attempt to prove, against all odds, that our wild, warring species shares something irreducible at its core.

Nowadays, we can unearth bones, extract DNA, even map ancient migrations, but only in myths can we glimpse the inner lives of our forebears—their fears and longings, their sense of wonder and dread. Linguists have reconstructed dead languages. Why not try to do the same for lost stories? And, if we can, how far back can we go? Could we finally recover the legends of our earliest common ancestors—the ur-myths that Casaubon so desperately pursued?

If any field lends credibility to the dream of a Casaubonian key, it’s Indo-European studies. Where Frazer’s method was freewheeling, Indo-Europeanists are exacting. […] Today, it’s broadly accepted that languages as different as English, Welsh, Spanish, Armenian, Greek, Russian, Hindi, and Bengali descend from a single ancestor: Proto-Indo-European. Linguists have mapped how words spoken five thousand years ago have branched into the webs of vocabulary we know now. My first name, Manvir, for example, fuses two Sanskrit roots with clear European cousins: “man,” meaning “thought” or “soul”—related to “mental” and “mind”—and “vir,” meaning “heroic” or “brave,” as in “virtue” and “virile.”

But reconstruction didn’t end with nouns and verbs. Gods dance on our tongues, and, as scholars compared Indo-European languages, they found striking mythological congruences, too.

He then discusses Laura Spinney (see this LH post) and Calvert Watkins, whose How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics “set the standard for the field”:

Watkins himself was something of a mythic figure. Casaubonian in his learning and drive but without the tragic vanity, he was born in Pittsburgh in 1933 and raised in New York, inheriting from his Texan parents a pride in the Lone Star State, along with a lingering twang. He arrived at Harvard with the class of 1954, and then stayed, first for his Ph.D., and then as a faculty member in linguistics and classics until his retirement, in 2003. His intellectual range was prodigious. By fifteen, he was immersed in Indo-European studies; his knack for languages was so uncanny that people joked he could board a train at one end of a country and disembark at the other fluent in its national tongue. He forgot nothing, and his eye for hidden connections bordered on supernatural. In 1984, reading a fragmentary Luwian text—a cousin to Hittite—he picked out the phrase “steep Wilusa,” a twin to the Greek “lofty Troy [Ilios],” and speculated that it pointed to an epic tradition about Troy that predated Homer. The discovery landed on the front page of the Times.

“How to Kill a Dragon” showed that ancient mythology could be reconstructed not just from scattered names or motifs but from shared poetic formulas—bits of old myth embedded in texts like slabs of pagan altars lodged in the foundations of later temples. Watkins’s prime example was the phrase “he/you slew the serpent,” a formula that crops up everywhere: in Vedic hymns, Greek poetry, Hittite myth, Iranian scriptures, Celtic and Germanic saga, Armenian epics, even spells for healing or harm. “There can be no doubt that the formula is the vehicle of the central theme of a proto-text,” he wrote—a core symbol in Proto-Indo-European culture. His approach made the reconstruction of myth seem less like a guessing game and more like real historical work. […]

The richness of this reconstructed realm raises a bigger question: If we can piece together such a detailed mythoscape from five or six thousand years ago, why not go back further? The Proto-Indo-Europeans are recent arrivals in our species’ story; the Ice Age ended twelve thousand years ago, the out-of-Africa migration took place around sixty thousand years ago, and Homo sapiens emerged about three hundred thousand years ago. Do we still carry stories from those far earlier times?

Some scholars say yes. They’re Casaubon’s heirs, but with better tools, better German, and, sometimes, better judgment. The earliest myth is their holy grail. One of the boldest attempts was undertaken by Michael Witzel, a comparative mythologist at Harvard. In “The Origins of the World’s Mythologies” (2012), Witzel proposed that the world’s myths fall into two superfamilies. One, Laurasian, stretches from Europe and much of Asia to Polynesia and the Americas; it supposedly preserves a story line, at least twenty thousand years old, that runs from creation to apocalypse. The other, Gondwanan, found mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, New Guinea, and Australia, is older still, but less coherent; it has a heavenly High God, trickster low gods, and the creation of humans from trees or clay, but lacks a unifying plot.

Witzel, a celebrated Indologist and the founder of the International Association for Comparative Mythology, seemed poised to deliver the key to all mythologies. Yet his theory leans on outdated models of deep history. He believed, wrongly, that New Guineans and Aboriginal Australians split off in a separate early exodus from Africa; genetic evidence shows otherwise. The framework also carries uncomfortable racial overtones: darker-skinned peoples are said to have more archaic, less structured mythologies. The ambition is tremendous, but the result feels mostly like a dead end.

A rival approach puts its faith in data. Yuri Berezkin, a professor at European University at St. Petersburg, has spent nearly sixty years reading some eighty thousand myths and folktales, coding each one for motifs—anything from a crocodile without a tongue to a butterfly stealing fire. The result is a database of unprecedented reach; no earlier folklorist has worked with so many texts from such a range of societies. For Berezkin, patience is everything. When I e-mailed him in 2018 to ask if his summaries could be mined for patterns in heroic tales, he replied, “I think, No. Everything that is easy and quick can hardly be good.” […]

But these motifs—doglike tricksters, a figure visible on the moon, a man who performs difficult tasks to win a bride—are all frustratingly generic. Do they really descend from tales told by our distant ancestors, or are they merely the sort of stories any species with minds and bodies like ours would keep inventing? The question remains open.

This is the core problem for seekers of ur-myths: they lack the names, formulas, and fossilized phrases that make Indo-European studies persuasive. People across continents might link rainbows with snakes, or see rabbits on the moon, or cast foxes, jackals, and coyotes as tricksters. But without recurring lines of verse, without epithets worn smooth by generations, the search for a universal key risks a Casaubonian fate: grand in vision, romantic in intent, and ultimately thwarted by the bounds of what can be known. […]

Spurred by Casaubon’s failed ambition, I set out on my own hunt for patterns after returning from Indonesia. With a colleague, I began building a new database and delved into a century’s worth of comparative analyses. […]

Today’s mythographers have access to sources and tools that Casaubon could never have imagined—vast digital archives, instant machine translation, pattern-finding algorithms that would have sounded like science fiction a decade ago. Yet what they keep unearthing is not so much some hidden code or lost ur-myth as the ubiquitous contours of human experience. If there’s a key to all mythologies, it isn’t buried in vanished languages or ancient ruins; it lies in the basic patterns of how we think, feel, and tell stories.

We are living proof of narrative’s power to reach across time and space. We hear stories from distant lands and discover that they’re not altogether unfamiliar. We read about snake killers and thunder gods and find ourselves enthralled. That is the mythographer’s true accomplishment: tracing the social, cognitive, and emotional lines of force that continue to bind us to one another—and to our most ancient tales. It’s what makes the mythographer’s job both daunting and vital. Forget Casaubon’s footnotes or his ignorance of German. His real mistake was to treat myths as dead fossils rather than as living instruments—still moving minds, still shaping worlds.

I wish more popularizers had that ability to retain skepticism even while being tempted by the sirens’ song of endless reconstruction. (As lagniappe, if you like long [1:19] videos, here’s The Most Popular Bad History Theory I’ve Encountered: Proto-Indo-European Religious Reconstruction.)