Loose Ends (107)

So, how’s that whole impeachment thing working out for Democrats?

Chaser:

Trumpsters, 2016: Burn it all down!

Trumpsters, 2020: Bern it all down!

I wish we had more college administrators like this one, as reported in The Times of London today:

How do you respond when placard-waving students occupy your 15th-century quadrangle and refuse to leave until you sell the college’s shares in oil companies? As this is Oxford, naturally you present them with a philosophical dilemma.

Two students at St John’s College wrote to Andrew Parker, the principal bursar, this week requesting a meeting to discuss the protesters’ demands, which are that the college “declares a climate emergency and immediately divests from fossil fuels”. They say that the college, the richest in Oxford, has £8 million of its £551 million endowment fund invested in BP and Shell.

Professor Parker responded with a provocative offer. “I am not able to arrange any divestment at short notice,” he wrote. “But I can arrange for the gas central heating in college to be switched off.”

Do it!

So we’ve been building bike lanes like crazy to “save the planet,” blah blah. But who could have seen this coming?

Bike Fatalities Are on the Rise

Alongside the surging popularity of bike shares and fitness cycling in California comes a sobering statistic: From 2016 through 2018, more cyclists died in traffic accidents across the state than during any three-year period in the past 25 years.

Finally, important historical news from The Nation:

The First Drag Queen Was a Former Slave

His name was William Dorsey Swann, but to his friends he was known as “the Queen.” Both of those names had been forgotten for nearly a century before I rediscovered them while researching at Columbia University. Born in Maryland around 1858, Swann endured slavery, the Civil War, racism, police surveillance, torture behind bars, and many other injustices. But beginning in the 1880s, he not only became the first American activist to lead a queer resistance group; he also became, in the same decade, the first known person to dub himself a “queen of drag”—or, more familiarly, a drag queen.

The first ever drag queen? Seems altogether America-centric to me. I have a hunch this will run afoul of the intersectional/de-colonial matrix somewhere.

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