And A Guest Post From Barry: Brain Drain In Florida

Barry Opines -- See here:

https://www.tampabay.com/news/education/2023/07/06/are-florida-laws-chasing-university-faculty-away-some-see-brain-drain/

I've been wondering when the DeSantis/Rufo war on higher education in Florida would begin showing ill effects on Florida's universities and colleges. I'd thought it would take a few years at least, possibly more, but it looks like we're starting to see it now. I have two nephews going to school in Florida now, one in college now and one who just graduated high school and will be entering USF in the fall, sadly he really wanted to go to Boston College or Boston University but didn't get in so this has been on my mind a lot lately.

Excerpts below:
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The Tampa Bay Times reviewed records showing an upward tick in staff departures at some of Florida's largest universities. And, as the Board of Governors discovered this spring, doubts about the state's academic workplace are spreading fast.

Matthew Lata, a music professor at Florida State University, told board members that candidates were turning down positions in his college "because of the perceived anti-higher education atmosphere in the state."

Talk of the phenomenon is everywhere, he said. "More and more often we are hearing 'Florida? Not Florida. Not now. Not yet.'"

Across the State University System, the murmurs are getting louder: Some Florida schools are having trouble filling positions.

A candidate who applied to join the University of South Florida's philosophy department instead took a job at a lower-ranked school in another state, pointing to Florida's political climate.

Among the hundreds of messages sent to the Board of Governors in recent months was an email from a finance professor at the University of Central Florida who wrote to say his department lost a candidate over concerns about tenure.

A University of Florida employee reported giving tours to a half dozen prospective hires, all of whom "expressed mixed feelings about moving to Florida in the current political climate."

The African American studies department at UF made nine offers while trying to fill three positions. None accepted.

A report from the American Association of University Professors pointed to a law school position that couldn't be filled and said some candidates were turning down Florida offers with nothing else lined up.

Wyn Everham, a professor of ecology at Florida Gulf Coast University, said it's becoming more difficult to attract faculty to the Fort Myers school. Open positions that once drew over 200 applicants now see fewer than 20, he said.
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I wonder what a deep dive into the situation in Texas would reveal.

Daryl Davies

We've definitely talked about this kind of thing before, but I don't know if we've specifically talked about Daryl Davies, a goddamn living saint if there ever was one. Daryl Davies is a pianist:

He has jammed with the likes of Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, BB King and even Bill Clinton. Loyal to music but not to genre, he plays jazz, blues, rock'n'roll, country, boogie-woogie, swing, big band and beyond.

It is extremely relevant that he is black.

As his music career continued to flourish, Davis also became enmeshed in quite arguably the world's strangest side hustle - meeting with KKK members of various ranks and attending so-called cross lighting rallies. Some of these Klansmen became close friends of Davis's - the aforementioned Silver Dollar patron included - their long conversations untangling a knot of hate that had coiled for decades. In many cases, these civil dialogues led them to quitting the organization because they no longer believed in its tenets.

Like, this guy converts KKK members one at a time, doing it the right way, which is the extremely time-consuming, individualized way involving many conversations, building friendships, approaching them from a place of curiosity and non-judgement, and JFC how can he stand it?!

My mom likes to ruefully say something along the lines of, "Of course monks are serene. They live in a monastery. Let's see if they can keep that up if they're watching toddlers all day for a week." This guy is living the true test of self-actualization and serenity, I think. Can you engage with someone in an ongoing conversation about why they want to exterminate you, and sustain a mindset of curiosity and non-judgement? (I could not. Give me the toddlers any day.)

And he doesn't do it because he gets his kicks that way:

"I still perform sometimes and though I would much rather be on stage playing happy music all the time and seeing people dance than be talking about the KKK and neo-Nazis," Davis says with a laugh, "I have found that lecturing and talking and educating people is far more important and necessary today."

via

The Viral Underclass

This book came recommended, and while I'm never going to actually sit down and read it, it looks like a really nice framing of a problem we're all aware of, but that gets under-discussed:

[M]embers of the viral underclass are not only most likely to contract diseases such as HIV and covid-19, they are also disproportionately punished for it, a process that largely absolves the country's classist and racist policies and institutions.

Thrasher borrows the term "viral underclass" from a 2011 statement by Sean Strub, a longtime activist for LGBTQ equality, who coined it as a way of acknowledging the discriminatory effects of legal sanctions and other policies around HIV... In broadening the scope of this concept, Thrasher shows that such logic can be self-reinforcing. Instead of fighting for a more affordable and equitable health-care system that would expand access to HIV drugs and dramatically lower the risk of transmission, for instance, we lock up lone men like Johnson who have faced various challenges, including, in his case, dyslexia and economic hardship. In Thrasher's telling, Johnson serves as a convenient scapegoat for society's sins.

It's really important for journalists and writers to spend time on systemic problems that aren't novel. As a blogger, it's really important that I don't actually read what they wrote and just vaguely gesture at it.

Guest Post: Alison Bechdel

Chris Y writes: Shit! She's 62! Who's coming up behind her?

Heebie's take: When did 62 year olds start to seem so young?!

It's a very nice interview. Apparently they're making Dykes to Watch Out For into an audio series, starring Jane Lynch, Carrie Brownstein, and Roxane Gay. That's quite a cast! (And someone named Roberta Colindrez who isn't mentioned at the link, but seems to also be a main character.)

Happy 4th of July!

From E. Messily: West Virginia state police face damning claims: 'The more we dug, the worse it stunk'. It's really brutal and gross.

It reminds me of the recent Minneapolis report, and surely most police departments need a thorough investigation to uncover whatever's there.

On the topic of the Minneapolis report, there's this Radley Balko column in the NYT (gifted link) which mostly says, "There's some anecdotal evidence to push back on the idea that cops quitting is automatically going to mean that crime goes up."

I just want to excerpt this one bit:

Golden Valley is a suburb of about 22,000 that in many ways is as idyllic as its name suggests. The median annual household income tops $100,000, there's very little crime, and 15 percent of the town is devoted to parks and green spaces, including Theodore Wirth Park on its eastern border, a lush space that hosts a bike path and a parkway.

But the town's Elysian charm comes with a dark past. Just on the other side of the park lies the neighborhood of Willard-Hay. There, the median household income drops to about $55,000 per year, and there's quite a bit more crime. Willard-Hay is 26 percent white and 40 percent Black. Golden Valley is 85 percent white and 5 percent Black -- the result of pervasive racial covenants.

"We enjoy prosperity and security in this community," said Shep Harris, the mayor since 2012. "But that has come at a cost. I think it took incidents like the murder of George Floyd to help us see that more clearly." The residents of the strongly left-leaning town decided change was necessary. One step was eliminating those racial covenants. Another was changing the Police Department, which had a reputation for mistreating people of color.

WAIT. There are still racial covenants?!? This century?

Guest Post: In the brighter timelines this owned the news cycle for months

Mossy Character writes: Wiki:

The San Rafael Falls (Spanish: La Cascada San Rafael) were, until 2 February 2020, the tallest falls in Ecuador. The 130-metre (430 ft) falls were located on the Coca River in Cayambe Coca Ecological Reserve until a collapse of the river bed upstream of the falls diverted the river underneath the band of hard rock that had originally formed the lip of the waterfall,[2] connecting to a cave below and creating a new natural bridge, possibly surpassing Xianren Bridge as the longest in the world.[3] The natural bridge subsequently collapsed in February 2021.[4] The falls were a significant tourist attraction with a recorded 30,000 visitors during 2019.[5] There has been discussion as to whether the riverbed collapse and subsequent disappearance of the falls is connected with the operation of the Coca Codo Sinclair Dam some 20 km upstream.

Before and after video.
Real time erosion video.
Oil!
Geology.
Consequences:

The waterfall collapsed in February 2020, initiating a process of regressive erosion that has increased along the path of the river constantly. The resultant slope failures, due to the adjustment of the valley to river deepening has caused the collapse of one of the main pipelines that carries oil from the main oil fields (Amazon basin) to the coast, and of highway E35, one of the main north-south roads. Additionally, the largest hydroelectric plant in Ecuador, the Coca-Codo Sinclair dam, is located upstream of the waterfall collapse in the path of the regressive erosion. These impacts have directly affected around 25000 people. The estimated economic losses are 4 million dollars/day, and if the Coca-Codo Sinclair dam is affected, this would represent a loss of 1.6 billion dollars (1.62% of Ecuador's GDP).

(Actually probably even more, seeing how it was financed.)
Your tax dollars to the rescue! (The Corps thinks it's fixable, but not the way the Ecuadorians wanted to do it.)

Heebie's take: wow.