Checking out the IBM 7532 Industrial Computer, introduced in May of 1985 at $6149. Prices only went up from there, easily surpassing $10000 for a decent setup with EGA and a hard drive! It's one monster of a rackmount 286, built for use in professional environments like factories, power plants, and alongside mainframes.
And yep, this is the source of the legendary gray Industrial Model M keyboard!
There’s a good chance that Richard Linklater wouldn’t be Richard Linklater without the River Oaks Theatre. In the early eighties, he was a college dropout who wasn’t sure how he wanted to spend his life. Linklater had dreamed of playing professional baseball and earned an athletics scholarship to Sam Houston State University, but a heart problem put an end to that. He left school and got a job as an oil worker. When he wasn’t on an offshore rig in the Gulf of Mexico, he spent his time watching movies — especially cheap weeknight screenings at the River Oaks. “I would sit really near the screen in those days, in the middle, a few rows from the front,” Linklater later recalled. “I remember watching Taxi…View Original Post
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It might seem like common knowledge that the finest graphics cards can help boost fps, increase your resolution, and bump up the settings of your favourite games, but the promise of cryptocurrency-shaped riches has the winner of an RTX 3080 raffle oblivious to his GPU's original purpose.
After praising the RNG gods that he beat the current stock issues and now has his hands on one of the most coveted components in the world, prizewinner Barry Tender's celebrations are cut short when we ask what's the first game he's going to play. "It plays games, too? I thought I just needed to plug it in to get rich," Barry exclaims.
When we question if he'll end up on Steam now that he knows what his system will be capable of with ray tracing, DLSS, and Resizable BAR support, Barry tells us that our suggestion "sounds painful" and that he's just going to stick with mining for now. His hope is to eventually save up enough cryptocurrency to buy an RTX 3090, which will then be used to grab a 40 series card when it comes out.
Back in 2017, Adult Swim pulled off the rare satisfying April Fools’ Day prank by giving fans the surprise debut of the third season premiere of Rick and Morty. Though they didn’t follow suit with the fifth season premiere – though the first trailer for new episodes arrived earlier this week – they still delivered something fun for longtime fans to enjoy.
Under the guise of the new Adult Swim Junior banner, the late night Cartoon Network animation block introduced us to Rick and Morty Babies, a Muppet Babies-inspired version of the series geared towards younger viewers. You can see the all-new opening credits sequence for Rick and Morty Babies below.
Rick and Morty Babies
The above opening credits sequence for Rick and Morty Babies isn’t the only part of this April Fools’ Day prank. Last night at midnight, Adult Swim turned into Adult Swim Junior and released a full episode of Rick and Morty Babies online. It wasn’t an entirely new episode though. Instead, it was the fan-favorite “Total Rickall,” and all the voices had either been dubbed or modified to sound like kids were voicing the characters instead. The episode even changed Mr. Poopy Butthole to Mr. Poopy Butt Butt, though I’m not sure how much less inappropriate that is for children.
Unfortunately, the YouTube link that hosted the Rick and Morty Babies episode has been made private, so there’s no way to watch the entire episode online (at least not legally). But if you want to get a taste of what this prank was like, you can see some clips from the episode over on Reddit. It’s pretty hilarious to hear all of Rick’s nonsense catchphrases in such a high-pitched voice. Hopefully Adult Swim officially releases this episode at some point, even if it’s just as a special feature on a future home video release of Rick and Morty season 5.
A long bank holiday weekend is a good time to tackle a project. Maybe think about putting up some shelves, organising your drawers, cleaning the tent you'd left festering since summer, or building networks of road, rail, water, and air transport to shunt people and products around the world for fun and profit. Friend, if the last idea tickles your fancy, you're in luck. OpenTTD, the excellent open-source remake of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, is now available free on Steam too.
I manage a staff of about 50 in a publicly funded, public-facing organization. We have been both open and closed during different phases of the pandemic but have been able to offer some level of service to the public except during the early shelter-in-place part of 2020. Obviously, this has been a stressful time for everyone on staff.
We closed our doors and went to virtual and curbside service when cases spiked in our area in the late fall. But now things are reallylooking up! Cases have been steadily falling since January and are very low in our area now, vaccination rollout is ramped up and 40% of people in our county already have their first dose, and vaccine eligibility is wide open now. All of my staff have had the opportunity to get their first dose of the vaccine and will get the second in two weeks.
We are going to reopen our facility to the public soon and it is causing a lot of anxiety among the staff. We have all the protectionsin place, plexiglass everywhere, masks required, social distancing, and a new high-quality air filtration system — but none of it, theprotections, the vaccines, the plummeting case counts, low hospitalizations, even the warm spring weather — seems to have much ofa positive impact on morale. There is a lot of misinformation and mistrust going around and when I try to share info from qualitysources, like the positive trends state and local health departments or vaccine efficacy studies from the CDC, it doesn’t get through the gloom.
I personally feel very optimistic — while still remaining vigilant and cautious — about how things are going here. We live in a county where elected officials took the pandemic seriously. We did all the right things and kept each other safe at work during the darkest days of the pandemic. How can I help my staff let in a little ray of sunshine? Is there a way to make the transition into reopening to the public easier or do we all just need to work through the negative emotions in our own time?
Give people time. A lot of time.
The country has been through — and is still going through — a trauma.
We’ve watched the world as we thought we knew it upended overnight. The government misled and failed us on a massive scale. Hundreds of thousands of people died because of those failures. Many, many people lost loved ones. All of us feared that. We have been told time and time again that an end is in sight, only to have more mass-scale, avoidable death.
And that’s just the pandemic. We also came very close to having a free election overthown; we watched a slow-motion coup attempt being carried out in plain sight, and then suddenly in faster motion one horrible day. We saw people killed in our national seat of government, with more bloodshed only narrowly avoided. We saw swastikas and racist flags hung in our capitol.
We saw unarmed civilians murdered by police kneeling on their necks until they died, and shot while they were sleeping in their own homes. We saw the chilling way some of our fellow citizens responded to those murders, in some cases even our own family members.
Trauma.
Plexiglass barriers and warm spring weather aren’t going to heal that.
You’re right that lots of indicators are looking up, especially the ahead-of-schedule vaccination rates and the rapidly increasing vaccine supply. The news is getting better and better. But people are going to be anxious and suspicious for a long time.
So many institutions have lost people’s trust over the last year, and that doesn’t come back overnight. Even if your organization has done everything right, at this point people have grown used to not being protected by the people and institutions that were supposed to protect them — and instead have had to protect themselves, often at great cost. So yes, when your employees hear you want to reopen, some of them will be anxious. There have been too many businesses reopening before it was safe, and too many government bodies giving that their blessing. To people still reeling from that, this may feel like the latest in that pattern.
And you’re right that to a large extent, it’s not terribly rational now. If everyone on your staff is vaccinated, it makes sense to bring them back. That was always the plan, after all — not for businesses to stay remote forever.
But it’s too soon to expect the anxiety to lift. People are traumatized and grieving. Trust has been broken. It’s going to take time.
“April Fools’ Day… dates back several centuries to the Middle Ages.” — WorldHistory.us
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April 1, 1424: A woman in Edinburgh serves her no-good husband a delicacy she invented called “haggis.”
April 1, 1589: Armed with quill pens, a rhyming dictionary, and dozens of confusing plots, Francis Bacon and Kit Marlowe launch a prank they expect will be unmasked by theatre critics in a year or two, tops.
April 1, 1603: “Check out these little brown tulip bulbs," one Dutchman tells another. “You should definitely spend lots of money on them.”
April 1, 1684: King Charles II announces that, henceforth, judges must wear wigs that make them look like monstrous sheep.
April 1, 1691: A couple of tweens in Salem, Mass., agree everyone will find it hilarious if “we behave as if a strange fit is upon us, tee hee.”
April 1, 1702: The jumbo “beauty mark” is introduced.
April 1, 1761: Catherine the Great punks her lover — who has a fear of horses — by decorating their bed with fake hoof prints. “What harm could come of it?” she writes in her diary.
April 1, 1787: Martha Washington swaps her husband’s dentures for a set she fashioned from horehound candy and fish glue. George unwittingly wears them for months, making his jaws so sticky that at the Constitutional Convention he can’t share his “plan for ensuring that our nation shall become a non-sexist, non-racist, non-heteronormative utopia.”
April 1, 1805: Sick of hearing Lewis and Clark prank her with bear noises while she lugs a baby around, Sacajawea quietly rips up her directions to the Northwest Passage.
April 1, 1807: In a move he will soon regret, Tsar Alexander I sends Napoleon Bonaparte a painting of a Borzoi puppy in a bicorne hat, with a note asking, “This you?”
March 3, 1841: William Henry Harrison’s grandson Benjamin gets a jump on April Fools by hiding Grampa’s coat. “Oh well,” Harrison says the next day, heading to his inauguration in a light sweater. “A little fresh air will do me good.”
April 1, 1844: Fun-loving 13-year-old Emily Dickinson runs about, pinning notes (“Kick me! — / Lick me! —”) on schoolmates’ backs. When a cousin dies of typhus soon afterward, Dickinson renounces her boisterous ways: “I might have cured — my cuz who died — / Had I not horsed — around — outside.”
April 1, 1861: “You know what we should do this month?” South Carolina’s governor asks his militia. “Bombard Fort Sumter!” He then enjoys a tall glass of corn whiskey, thinking what fun it is to have a day when everyone knows you can’t suggest anything serious.
April 1, 1871: The “handlebar mustache.”
April 1, 1909: “Cubism.”
April 1, 1910: Grinning with mischief, 10-year-old Hans K. trails his sweet, peace-loving chum Adolf H. with a pair of scissors, planning to snip a lock of his hair — then trips and lops off one of Adolf’s testicles instead.
April 1, 1912: As the RMS Titanic is readied for her maiden voyage, an impish cabin boy tapes drawings of icebergs to windows on the bridge — causing his superiors to laugh appreciatively before whipping him. Upon first hearing warnings of “Ice!” thirteen days later, Captain Smith murmurs, “That cabin boy,” and resumes eating oysters with the Astors.
April 1, 1937: After a night of drinking, navigator Fred Noonan reverses North and South on Amelia Earhart’s gyroscope. “What a chuckle she’ll have when she notices, months ahead of our big trip,” he thinks before passing out and waking with no memory of the caper.
April 1, 1941: In a move he will soon regret, Franklin Roosevelt sends Emperor Hirohito a picture of a samurai in spectacles: “This you?”
April 1, 1957: “Pantyhose.”
April 1, 1962: The “cockapoo.”
April 1, 1966: A roadie gleefully cranks up Jimi Hendrix’s amp, then waits for the feedback to drive him crazy. Instead, Hendrix purrs, “Eureka, man”… and cranks it higher.
April 1, 1969: Buzz Aldrin, a fan of the long game, gives Neil Armstrong “special Tang” to drink before the moon landing, so he’ll sound perfect and not mess up his only line.
April 1, 1972: “You know what you should do in a couple months?” Richard Nixon tells G. Gordon Liddy. “Get some guys to break into the DNC office!” He then enjoys a tall glass of Château Lafite Rothschild.
April 1, 1983: Hooters, Inc. is incorporated. (Truly.)
April 1, 1987:Howard Schultz playfully hands a customer two Starbucks lattes and says, “That’ll be $16.95.” Instead of guffawing as expected, the customer pays — and Schultz rushes off to revise his business plan.
April 1, 1989: “Botox.”
April 1, 1990: “Fanny packs.”
April 1, 1996: “Speed dating.”
March 31, 1997: Even though Teletubbies’ release date has been pushed up a day, every adult in the audience knows it’s an April Fools joke.
April 1, 1998: Helpless with mirth, the International Olympic Committee adds curling to the list of winter games.
April 1, 2006: “Check out these intangible derivatives full of subprime loans,” one hedge-fund manager tells another. “You should definitely spend lots of money on them.”
April 1, 2015: Donald J. Trump decides to run for president — and to wait until June to announce it.
April 1, 2020: April Fools’ Day is unofficially suspended due to a worldwide humor shortage. America’s village idiots agree to plan “extra awesome pranks” for January 6 instead.
In celebration of vintage Macintosh month, #MARCHintosh, I make the most obvious video possible. The original 1984 Macintosh! I'll discuss the events that surrounded it's release, it's reception and how I made-out repairing Joseph Samuels' January 1984 Macintosh.
Thanks to: The Computer Chronicles Infoworld Magazine Apple Computer Inc. Anonymous donor of the 2007 iMac that appears in the video and Ron McAdams for the invite to participate.
Mr. Voorhees has long been a proponent of masking and is considered a public health folk hero. When not taking long, contemplative walks in the woods, he can be found at nearby summer camps, rigorously enforcing social distancing among the teens.
Norman Bates
Norman is still running the Bates Motel, which he deep-cleans regularly. While it’s been a tough year for the hospitality industry, his #1 priority is keeping guests away from his elderly mother.
Leatherface
While the family’s famous BBQ joint has been shuttered, the Sawyer family has kept afloat by selling artisanal leather goods, bone furniture, and other handicrafts on Leatherface’s Etsy store. With Governor Abbott’s recent announcement that Texas is reopening “100 percent,” however, they’re excited to get back to serving ribs and chili.
Freddy Krueger
Mr. Krueger has been doing some of his finest work in years crafting COVID anxiety dreams. His kill count, however, has been uncharacteristically low because constant handwashing has rusted his fingers together.
Michael Myers
Michael’s lifestyle has remained unchanged since quarantine began. He spends most of his time strolling through suburban neighborhoods, following his victims from a safe distance of six feet.
Hannibal Lecter
As an individual with high regard for medical science and rules of decorum, Dr. Lecter has been eating anti-maskers on a regular basis. He currently divides his time between providing mental health support to his clients over Zoom and strolling the scenic beaches of the Plum Island Animal Disease Research Center. When indoors, he insists on a room with a view.
Dracula
Quarantine has been hard on the Count because he can no longer entertain, and no one is inviting him into their homes. For sustenance, he now resorts to ordering GrubHub and draining the delivery driver.
Annie Wilkes
Annie is thriving in quarantine! While initially depressed to have exhausted the Misery Chastain series, she reports that she is now working on a collaborative writing project with an undisclosed partner, which is going “very well.” As an RN, she feels affirmed to have been finally recognized as “essential.”
Jack Torrance
While he refers to his quarantine as a “writer’s retreat,” Jack has spent most of the past year drinking, snapping at his family, and pretending to finish his book.
Damian Thorn
Little Damian has been raising hell in his online kindergarten classes by putting up silly backgrounds, Zoom-bombing other lessons, and causing the students to see shadowy projections of their own deaths on the screen. He has not been punished since none of his teachers dare to contact his father.
Patrick Bateman
Mr. Bateman lost a billion dollars this year shorting GameStop. As a result of the stress, he gained half a pound and developed two fine lines in his forehead. With his body image at an all-time low, he has doubled the length of his exercise regimen and added a high potency Vitamin C serum to his skincare routine.
The Tethered
The Tethered are well-adapted for quarantine, being accustomed to staying indoors, stumbling through their daily routines, and never experiencing pleasure. Without contacts in the surface world, however, they are wondering why some of them are wearing burlap over their faces and scrubbing their raw rabbit rations, but the rest of them are not.
The Witch
In the relative seclusion of rural New England, the Witch and her coven/pod have continued to meet, despite many of the members being in high-risk age groups. When not trying out new concoctions, they have been providing affordable childcare to local working families.
Pinhead
In pursuit of the ecstasy of ultimate agony, Pinhead has electively contracted Long COVID and reports the experience to be very satisfying. If he gets bored, he plans to inject the Moderna vaccine into every pore at once.
John “Jigsaw” Kramer
As a cancer patient in his fifties, Mr. Kramer has spent the entire year indoors for his own safety. Nevertheless, he has kept himself occupied by organizing the vaccine rollout in your state — an undertaking that calls upon his experience as both a civil engineer and a sadist.
R.J. MacReady
Following an infection scare in his isolated pod, MacReady describes the atmosphere of their Antarctic research station as “anything but chill.” While the entire team is currently undergoing blood tests, nobody trusts anybody now, and they’re all very tired.
Ellen Ripley
Quarantine was her idea. One year in, she feels vindicated in her leadership instincts, but it grieves her that the slow response allowed things to get so out of hand. She has since decided to devote her life to union organizing and protecting essential workers. When not fighting for 15, she enjoys an occasional hypersleep staycation and the company of her beloved cat, Jonesy.
When Modesti Cooper returned home to Houston in July 2019 after more than a decade overseas with the United States military, she moved into her dream house on the corner of Nance and Grove streets in Houston’s Fifth Ward. She’d bought a parcel of land and designed the home from scratch in her downtime while touring from Kuwait to Afghanistan to Iraq. It was a relief to finally move in. “It’s a calm, cool, nice area,” Cooper says. “Besides the traffic, there’s no violence, no noise. It’s so quiet, it’s unbelievable. I had rockets and mortars and missiles blown over my head. To come home to peace of mind and say, OK, this is my forever home.”
Cooper, 35, had barely unpacked when she started receiving letters from the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT). The agency was planning to expand Interstate 10 as part of the North Houston Highway Improvement Project: a $7.5 billion initiative to expand I-45 from downtown Houston north to Beltway 8 and rebuild and reroute parts of the downtown loop.
When Cooper started getting letters, the project was working its way through the years-long environmental review process required by the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA). The agency couldn’t yet compel Cooper to sell her forever home through eminent domain to make way for a new overpass. “At first, it seemed like they were going to work with me,” she says. “But once I actually got to the TxDOT office and met with everyone, it was more like: you’re going to lose your house. You might as well just give it up to us.”
Cooper refused, and in late February of this year, she filed a complaint with the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), a division of the U.S. Department of Transportation that oversees highways. In the complaint, she alleged that the expansion project violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination “on the basis of race, color, or national origin” in any project that receives federal funding.
Cooper, who is Black, lives in one of the only new homes on her block. Many of her neighbors are Hispanic and have been in their homes, built in the 1930s and ’40s, for generations. They know each other, have cookouts and holler across fences: “Where you going neighbor? What’s going on?” she says. TxDOT, she believes, could only see the old and rickety homes, not the lives and history inside them. “I just feel like, yeah, there is some sort of discrimination because you wouldn’t go to any other neighborhood like River Oaks and kick those people out of their homes.”
A community group called Stop TxDOT I-45 has organized protests and letter-writing campaigns in opposition to the planned expansion. Megan Kimble
According to the final environmental impact statement published by TxDOT in August, the last step in the NEPA process, the project would displace 160 single-family residences, 433 multi-family residential units, 486 public and low-income housing units, 344 businesses, five churches, and two schools. TxDOT’s own analysis concluded that “the effects of the project would be predominantly borne by minority and low-income populations.” However, the agency continues to stress the benefits of the project—increasing capacity to reduce congestion and improving design to make the corridor safer, along with other improvements—and maintains that it would sufficiently mitigate any adverse impacts.
Community groups in Houston have been organizing for years to stop the expansion project. They’ve held protests and marches, called into city council meetings, and sent comments to TxDOT and the Houston-Galveston Area Council (H-GAC), which oversees transportation planning in Harris County. Gradually, Houston’s elected officials have started to sour on the project. In December, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner sent a letter to TxDOT’s district engineer stressing that the highway shouldn’t be widened and threatened to pull the city’s support if the project’s “shortcomings” were not addressed. H-GAC requested a memorandum of understanding that would hold TxDOT accountable for mitigating adverse impacts of the expansion. TxDOT refused to sign it and instead insinuated that if Houston didn’t like the project, the agency would go ahead and take its $7 billion elsewhere.
In early February, TxDOT issued a record of decision, the end of the NEPA process which allows the project to move forward into construction. But by then, the tides had turned—and not just in Houston.
According to TxDOT, the highway project would displace 160 single-family residences, including these homes in the Fifth Ward. Modesti Cooper
On March 8, the Federal Highway Administration sent a letter to TxDOT requesting that the agency pause activity on the project until the federal agency could investigate “serious” civil rights concerns. Days later, Harris County filed a lawsuit against TxDOT in federal court, alleging the agency had “ignored serious harms” and disregarded community concerns during a “flawed” environmental review process. A TxDOT spokesperson declined a request for an interview, but said in an email that the agency was in contact with FHWA and seeking clarity around what the pause meant for future contract solicitation efforts.
FHWA’s intervention in Houston is perhaps the first sign of a significant sea change in the U.S. Department of Transportation under Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Shortly after the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor was nominated to the cabinet position, he told CNN, “It’s disproportionately Black and brown neighborhoods that were divided by highway projects plowing through them because they didn’t have the political capital to resist. We have a chance to get that right.”
Houston is a test case for that commitment. Over the coming months, FHWA investigators plan to talk to community members, local officials, and advocates to determine, among other things, whether the highway expansion project “creates potential disparate, adverse impacts to the predominantly African American and Hispanic communities within the project area.” If the agency finds that discrimination occurred, it can refer the project to the U.S. Department of Justice to litigate or withhold some categories of funding allocated to Texas. More likely, the FHWA will try to mediate some kind of voluntary resolution with TxDOT.
“I think the really important thing is that it’s about whether there’s a disparate impact,” says Erin Gaines, an attorney at Earthjustice who has worked on Title VI complaints. “They may also be talking about intentional discrimination, but you don’t need intentional discrimination to violate Title VI in an administrative complaint. You need a disparate impact.” In other words, it doesn’t matter if TxDOT intentionally chose to expand a highway that runs through a predominately Black and Hispanic neighborhood; it only matters if Black and Hispanic people are unequally impacted by the highway being expanded.
“Many of these neighborhoods literally had no voice in the construction of this highway,” says Christof Spieler, the director of planning at the design firm Huitt-Zollars. When I-45 was completed in 1958, many “residents were not even able to vote for the government that was putting these projects in place.”
By the time the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, most urban highways across the United States had already been planned and built.
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The last time the FHWA came to Texas to investigate a highway project was in 2015, after residents of Hillcrest and Washington-Coles, two predominantly Black neighborhoods in Corpus Christi, alleged that a proposed rerouting of the Harbor Bridge violated the Civil Rights Act. In 2003, TxDOT proposed rebuilding the aging Harbor Bridge to address safety concerns and suggested moving it from the eastern edge of the harbor to an alternate route that would bisect the two neighborhoods. At the time, Hillcrest and Washington-Coles had significantly higher Black populations than the city as a whole—35 and 30 percent, respectively, compared to 4 percent of Corpus Christi as a whole. In 2014, TxDOT’s final environmental impact statement concluded that their proposed route for the Harbor Bridge would result in “disproportionately high and adverse effects to minority populations and low-income populations.”
The North Houston Highway Improvement Project would expand and and reroute I-45 through downtown Houston. Megan Kimble
In 1958, the construction of Interstate 37 south of the neighborhoods had isolated Hillcrest and Washington-Coles from the rest of the city, hemming them in with the industrial plants and refineries that had sprouted to the west. As the area became more and more polluted, besieged by explosions and chemical spills, people and businesses started moving out. In the early 2000s, about 1,500 families remained. Many felt fiercely connected to the community where they’d grown up and raised their families. “I think most of the folks knew that change was coming,” says Adam Carrington, the pastor at Brooks AME Worship Center in Hillcrest. “They just didn’t know it was a bridge that was going to be coming.”
In March 2014, residents filed a complaint with the FHWA alleging that the bridge project violated their civil rights. Nine months later, TxDOT agreed to a voluntary relocation program for residents. Those who qualified could get reimbursed significantly more than the market value of their homes, which had been devalued over decades because of the environmental degradation around them.
In some ways, the agreement was a success. As TxDOT moved forward with construction on its preferred route through Washington-Coles, more than 300 families left the neighborhood and bought homes of much higher value in Corpus Christi or elsewhere in Texas. But many residents didn’t want to leave their community behind, and had instead advocated for the creation of what they called “Hillcrest 2,” an entirely new neighborhood away from the refineries and bridge where they could remain together as a community. “We had grown up together, we had been together all our lives. I wish that we could have as a group stuck together. I think we would have come along a lot better,” said Rosie Ann Porter, one of the plaintiffs in the civil rights complaint, in a documentary project about Hillcrest.
Residents’ requests to relocate together as a community were deemed untenable.
“This is a key thing: FHWA will negotiate any resolution agreement with TxDOT,” Gaines says. “The resolution agreement for the Harbor Bridge was not signed by community members.” So although community members were at the table during negotiations and voiced their preferences, it was on FHWA to take those preferences into account.
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Isis Berruete grew up with her mom and six siblings in Kennedy Place, a 60-unit public housing complex on Gillespie Street, two blocks south of I-10 in the Fifth Ward in Houston. Their two-story brick home had two bathrooms—a luxury that made Berruete feel like she was rich. She walked to school at Bruce Elementary, a red-brick building in the shadow of the tangled spaghetti junction of I-10 and I-69.
In 2009, after Kennedy Place was demolished to be redeveloped into a 108-unit apartment complex, Berruete says her mom was given a Section 8 voucher valued at $500 a month and told she could come back when the new development was completed two years later. Unable to find a place big enough for the whole family, Berruete, who was 19 at the time, and her older siblings moved out on their own. “The same thing that is happening to Clayton Homes and Kelly Courts happened to me,” she says.
If it goes forward, the highway project would subsume all 296 units of Clayton Homes, a public housing complex built in 1952 and tucked in the armpit between Buffalo Bayou and I-69. It would also run through at least part of the 270-unit Kelly Village, formerly Kelly Courts, located across the highway. Last year, in anticipation of the highway expansion, the Houston Housing Authority (HAA) sold Clayton Homes to TxDOT for $90 million and said it would use the money to build two mixed-income communities which will “include replacement units specifically reserved for the displaced Clayton Homes residents, who will have the first right to return after construction is complete,” said Mark Thiele, the agency’s interim president and CEO, in a statement.
Susan Graham, the founder of Stop TxDOT I-45, solicits signatures at a protest against the highway expansion in December 2020. Megan Kimble
In the meantime, residents say they’ve been told they can either accept a Section 8 voucher, essentially a rent subsidy, or move to another property in the neighborhood. “We still don’t know where we’re going or how they’re going to handle it,” says a resident named Mike, who declined to provide his last name because he was worried that HHA wouldn’t give him a voucher if he spoke out—a concern shared by residents at both complexes. But a voucher doesn’t guarantee housing. In Texas, it is legal for landlords to decline to rent to voucher-holders, who are overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic. As a result, many families struggle to find adequate housing and end up moving to poor, predominantly minority areas, according to a lawsuit filed by the Dallas-based Inclusive Communities Project in 2017.
In addition to displacement, FHWA investigators can consider environmental justice issues like pollution. As a kid, Isis Berruete says she frequently got headaches, which she attributes to the air quality at her school, Bruce Elementary. “It was like a cloud everyday. My mind felt cloudy,” she says. “Now, I have issues with my throat, my esophagus, my glands, because of that air quality.” In 2019, a report by Air Alliance Houston found that students at Bruce Elementary—99 percent of whom are Black or Latinx and qualify for free or reduced lunches—suffered from asthma at twice the rate as other students in Houston Independent School District. Expanding I-69 could make the problem worse, the nonprofit found. Air Alliance Houston modeled air emissions at the school and found that bringing the highway even closer could cause substantial increases in traffic-related air pollutants like benzene, a chemical compound known to cause cancer.
The FHWA is beginning the process of interviewing impacted residents and may conduct site visits this summer, but it’s still unclear what residents will be able to demand and what outcomes TxDOT will entertain.
The investigation could prompt TxDOT to reconsider how it approaches highway projects in cities across the state—the agency has just begun the NEPA process for a $7.5 billion expansion of I-35 through Austin. But ultimately, change will have to come from the state legislature, which has required that 97 percent of TxDOT’s funding be spent on roads.
In the Fifth Ward, Modesti Cooper says surveyors have started marking lots on her street, wood sticks appearing in front yards fluttering with bright pink flagging tape. Two of her neighbors have moved out. She’s not going anywhere until she has to. “I can see downtown, I can walk to Discovery Green, to the bike trails and park that we paid our tax dollars for,” she says. “I won’t even get to use that if I have to leave this year. Now that we’re actually getting the things we want, it’s being taken away.”
A group of documentarians have signed a letter to PBS expressing concerns that white stars like Ken Burns get too much airtime and resources, while filmmakers of color struggle to build careers.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson discusses “Populism and the Right” during the National Review Institute’s Ideas Summit at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel March 29, 2019, in Washington, DC. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Fox spread a dangerous lie about the 2020 election. Now the network could face expensive consequences.
Not long after last November’s election, and before all the votes were even counted, a bizarre conspiracy theory started spreading in the Trumpiest regions of social media. This false conspiracy theory spread throughout conservative media, stoked by close Trump allies and even by the former president himself. And it was repeatedly touted on Fox News.
The theory alleged that Dominion Voting Services, a company that supplies hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of voting machines and related services to more than two dozen states, was actually owned by a different company, Smartmatic, and that Smartmatic was formed in order to “fix elections” in Venezuela. As Trump’s early leads in several key states disappeared after more ballots were counted, the conspiracy theorists blamed Dominion, claiming that the company’s machines were somehow stealing votes from Trump and giving them to now-President Joe Biden.
None of this is true. Smartmatic does not own Dominion and, in fact, competes with Dominion for business. Neither company was formed to rig elections (although Smartmatic did supply voting machines for Venezuela’s 2004 election, independent audits determined that those machines were “very accurate”). And there’s no credible evidence that Dominion’s voting machines did anything other than accurately tally up the votes cast on those machines.
Indeed, after Dominion sued Sidney Powell, a lawyer close to Trump and a major popularizer of the conspiracy theory against Dominion, Powell’s lawyers argued that she should not be liable for defamation because the allegations against the voting machines company are so implausible that “reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact.”
But the outlandishness of the lies against Dominion did not stop Fox News from hosting guests that touted those lies — including Powell herself. It didn’t stop many of Fox’s hosts from spreading lies, either.
Read all about Dominion and Smartmatic voting companies and you’ll soon understand how pervasive this Democrat electoral fraud is, and why there’s no way in the world the 2020 Presidential election was either free or fair. #MAGA@realDonaldTrump#AmericaFirst#Dobbshttps://t.co/H38VvuvSUQ
Even if Fox loses these cases, it’s far from clear that it will be ordered to pay billions of dollars. But the recently filed complaint in US Dominion v. Fox News Network lays out an unusually strong defamation claim.
As the Supreme Court held in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), when a defendant is accused of making false claims about a public figure regarding a matter of public concern, that defendant cannot be held liable unless they made that false statement “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
But Dominion’s lawyers lay out considerable evidence that some of Fox’s top executives, editors, and hosts knew that they were doing so but did it anyway. That’s the kind of behavior that can get a media company in deep trouble, even under the very strong First Amendment protections laid out in New York Times v. Sullivan.
Responding to the Dominion suit, Fox News Media issued this statement: “FOX News Media is proud of our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of American journalism, and will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court.” Fox has not had enough time to formally respond to Dominion’s legal complaint, so we don’t yet know for sure how it will defend itself against the evidence presented in the Dominion complaint. But in the lawsuit filed by Smartmatic, Fox made the bold argument that it should be permitted to broadcast allegations against that company because those allegations were “objectively newsworthy.”
The Smartmatic case, however, was filed in New York state courts, and Fox’s lawyers rely heavily on decisions by New York courts in laying out their argument. The Dominion case was filed in Delaware.
This case against Fox is only one part of a larger litigation strategy seeking to clear Dominion’s name — or, at the very least, secure compensation for the damage many Trump supporters have done to Dominion’s reputation. The company has also sued Powell, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, another popularizer of the conspiracy theory. And it’s warned other conservative news outlets, including Newsmax and One America News, that additional suits may be coming.
The allegations against Fox
The complaint in the Dominion lawsuit is 137 pages long, and a significant portion is devoted to quotes from Fox personalities and regular guests who touted the conspiracy theory against Dominion.
On November 8, for example, shortly after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, Fox host Maria Bartiromo interviewed Sidney Powell.
“Sidney, we talked about the Dominion software. I know that there were voting irregularities,” Bartiromo said to Powell. Powell then claimed that Dominion’s software was “flipping votes in the computer system, or adding votes that did not exist.”
Similarly, in a November 16 appearance with then-Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel falsely claimed that “we had a situation in Michigan where one county had a 6,000-vote flip from Biden to Trump because of this Dominion voting machine.”
In a third segment — and, again, Fox featured many segments that promoted false or unproven statements about Dominion; I’m just going to describe three of them here for the sake of brevity — Fox host Jeanine Pirro touted a claim, which she attributed to “the president’s lawyers,” that Dominion is an “organized criminal enterprise” that was “started in Venezuela with Cuban money” and that it uses software that “is capable of flipping votes.”
Under New York Times v. Sullivan, the mere fact that Fox hosts and guests made these and similar statements is not enough for Dominion to prevail in its suit. Again, to overcome the bar to defamation suits laid out in that case, Dominion needs to show that Fox made a false claim “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
But that brings us to the other half of Dominion’s case against Fox.
Dominion’s complaint lays out numerous times when it contacted Fox News to inform them that the network was not telling the truth. Dominion claims that it “had a direct conversation with Fox News President and Executive Editor Jay Wallace during which Dominion detailed Fox’s defamatory falsehoods about Dominion and explained how and why they are false.” It also points to several “SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT” emails that it sent to Fox employees, and to two letters to Fox that formally demanded the network retract its statements.
Fox, moreover, did not simply need to take Dominion’s word. High-ranking government officials, including then-Attorney General Bill Barr and then-Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Chris Krebs, made public statements that, in Barr’s words, there’s no evidence of “fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election” —though these statements spoke generally about the absence of fraud in the 2020 election and not specifically about Dominion.
And key figures within Fox appeared to be perfectly aware that there was no significant fraud in the election. One reason the claims against Dominion took hold is that many Trump voters saw Trump’s early leads in several states evaporate as additional ballots were counted. But Arnon Mishkin, director of Fox’s decision desk, warned months before the election that “on election night, we may be looking at states where it seems that President Trump is in the lead, but there’s still 20 or 30 percent of the vote outstanding.”
Mishkin (along with many election observers) understood that Biden voters were more likely to vote by mail than Trump voters, and, in many states, mailed ballots would be counted after in-person ballots.
Similarly, the Dominion complaint points to several instances where Fox hosts correctly stated that allegations of voter fraud in 2020 are false or overblown. In a November 19 column adapted from one of his show’s opening monologues, for example, Fox host Tucker Carlson wrote that Powell has “never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another. Not one.”
In fairness, the fact that at least some Fox personalities contradicted the lies about Dominion could potentially reduce the amount of damages that Dominion is able to collect from Fox, because true statements will tend to reduce the impact of the lies. But true statements such as Carlson’s also suggest that Fox knew the allegations against Dominion are false.
It appears, in other words, that Fox didn’t simply behave recklessly when it spread lies about voting machines rigging the election for Biden. Rather, key figures within Fox were perfectly aware that these claims are lies. And yet the network touted them anyway.
How much could this wind up costing Fox?
The general rule is that a defendant who commits defamation is liable for any financial damages caused by a defamatory statement. If your uncle is about to give you a $5,000 gift, but then your brother tells him a lie that so enrages the uncle that he cancels the gift, then your brother would owe you $5,000 in a defamation suit.
Dominion points to some relatively small expenses that it’s incurred due to the conspiracy theories against it. It says that it “spent more than $600,000 on private security for the protection of its people” after its employees started receiving death threats. It also claims that it’s spent about $700,000 on a PR campaign “to mitigate the harm to its business.”
The biggest issue, however, is that Dominion could lose valuable contracts — either because Republican state officials will believe the lies about the company and refuse to do business with them, or because state officials who do not believe the lies will nonetheless choose not to do business with Dominion for fear of triggering a backlash among voters who do believe the conspiracy theories.
Dominion says that its contracts with state and local governments “are typically multi-year contracts and range from tens of thousands of dollars to over a hundred million dollars,” and it claims that it’s already losing business because of the smear campaign against it. An Ohio county commission, for example, voted to reject a $6.45 million contract with Dominion.
Overall, Dominion’s “current projections show lost profits of over $600 million over the next eight years”; the company also claims that “the viral disinformation campaign has irreparably damaged Dominion and destroyed the enterprise value of a business that was worth potentially more than $1 billion.”
It remains to be seen whether these catastrophic losses actually play out, but Dominion’s suggestion that the smear campaign against it could have ruined the company is, at the very least, plausible. Even fully rational election officials, who are completely aware that the lies about Dominion are in fact lies, may be reluctant to deal with the legions of Republican voters who could rise up in anger if a state or local government signs a contract with Dominion.
So Fox, in other words, could be in for a world of hurt.
The Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal. It was refloated. So now you can use this “ridiculous thing” by Garrett Dash Nelson to get the Ever Given stuck anywhere in the world. Show the ship to scale and click-and-drag the satellite imagery, and you get a pretty good idea of how big the thing is.
To better understand the challenge of steering a giant container ship through the Suez Canal, CNN made an interactive that lets you do just that. Control the power and point a silhouette of the Ever Given in the right direction without crashing.
It is of course a simplification that doesn’t account for things like water depth and passing boats, but it does leave you wondering how giant ships don’t get stuck more often.
There’s a good chance that Richard Linklater wouldn’t be Richard Linklater without the River Oaks Theatre. In the early eighties, he was a college dropout who wasn’t sure how he wanted to spend his life. Linklater had dreamed of playing professional baseball and earned an athletics scholarship to Sam Houston State University, but a heart problem put an end to that. He left school and got a job as an oil worker. When he wasn’t on an offshore rig in the Gulf of Mexico, he spent his time watching movies — especially cheap weeknight screenings at the River Oaks. “I would sit really near the screen in those days, in the middle, a few rows from the front,” Linklater later recalled. “I remember watching Taxi…View Original Post
![Calvin: "I hate homework, why do we have to do it anyway?"
Hobbes: "Because we must all submit to higher authority if we want to avoid a chaotic, brutal war of all against all. "
Calvin: "Oh...uh, i guess."
[next comic strip]
Bully: "Hey kid, give me your lunch money, or I'll pound you!"
Calvin: "This is an affront! An unjust coercion to my person!"
Hobbes: "Wrong! There is only physical coercion and he is giving you a free choice between robbery and pain. He is well within his moral rights to do so in the state of nature."
Bully: "Yeah! What he said."
[next comic strip]
Calvin: "Hobbes, do you ever dream of your spirit flying far away?"
Hobbes: "No, because spirits don't exist and neither do dreams, all that exists are material bodies, Now get back to obeying the monarch!"
Calvin: "I really don't care for you, Hobbes, let's not hang out anymore."](https://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/CalvinandThomasHobbes.png "Of course Hobbes was named after Thomas Hobbes, but Bill Watterson was too much of an intellectual coward to have the majority of the comics be based around the Leviathan.")
