LibertyLizard

Not sure how many people follow Miser but he's been a big influence on pushing for change in the NYC area. Apparently Mamdani asked him to come up with a plan to make the city's streets better and this is what he came up with. Pretty incredible work and I hope it can be implemented!

But I'd like to see people pushing for this in every city, not just NYC. If you haven't already connected with local urbanist activists, I highly encourage it. I've been surprised how few people it takes to make an impact. If you're not sure where to start, check to see if your area has a local strong towns chapter.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.myserv.one/post/21841057

The Trump administration has said it will rescind Bill Clinton’s roadless rule, more than two decades after its introduction appeared to mark the end of the bitter battle between environmentalists and loggers over the future of America’s best remaining woodland.

The rule is “overly restrictive” and an “absurd obstacle” to development, according to Brooke Rollins, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, as she outlined its demise in June. The administration is in a hurry – an unusually short public comment period of 21 days for this rescission has just ended, following a Trump “emergency” order to swiftly fell trees across the US’s network of national forests, spanning 280 million acres.

“We are freeing up our forests so we are allowed to take down trees and make a lot of money,” Trump has said. “We have massive forests. We just aren’t allowed to use them because of the environmental lunatics who stopped us.”

Please don’t do this to your trees. It hurts my soul.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/39080622

It’s been a good year. It’s probably past time to pull out some of the summer stuff and plant some fall crops but I always have a hard time pulling out healthy plants. The tomatoes in particular look good but have very little fruit.

An interesting historical analysis that examines what constitutes effective resistance and what doesn’t.

This is a discussion about violence in resistance, and the stupidest form of resistance violence: assassination.

Right now, people are screaming about political violence having no place in our democracy, as if this democracy wasn't built on calculated bloodshed. The Boston Massacre wasn't spontaneous - Samuel Adams orchestrated it after studying how British troops firing on protesters in London created martyrs that transformed public opinion. Dead colonials would turn British authority from irritating to tyrannical. That's strategic violence.

But assassination? That's different. When resistance movements try to kill leaders, they consistently make things worse. The socialists who killed Czar Alexander II in 1881 got worse oppression under Alexander III. The Black Hand thought killing Franz Ferdinand would unite Serbia - instead they triggered World War I and lost a quarter of their population. Even killing Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Holocaust, accelerated the genocide. The Nazis named Operation Reinhard after him and murdered 1.5 million Jews in his memory.

The resistance movements that actually worked during World War II learned to target the machinery, not the symbols. The Polish Home Army killed 945 prison guards and deportation clerks. The Danish resistance eliminated 400 informers. The French assassinated local collaborators who knew faces and names. No glory in shooting a clerk outside a café, but the trains ran late, the deportations slowed, the resistance networks survived. They understood that occupation runs on middle management - people who are irreplaceable in ways generals aren't.

This matters now because claims about "radical left violence" in America make no sense. That radical left doesn't exist here. The American left has been domesticated - they file permits for protests in designated free speech zones while begging to be heard. When someone screams about radical left violence while the actual left is filling out paperwork for candlelight vigils, they're not describing reality.

The historical lesson isn't that violence doesn't work - it's that symbolic violence is a waste. Assassination is what you do when you want to lose heroically. Real resistance understands how power actually works, not how it looks. Most people who reach for violence are committing elaborate suicide. The ones who succeed map the machine first.

Supervisor Joel Engardio was ousted by voters who were angry that he helped turn a thoroughfare into a park.

Mirror: https://archive.ph/WbeZm

What could be more important than traffic throughput?

CW: Animated traffic violence

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/27309251

Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20250824220020/https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/08/dsa-mamdani-losing-elections/683970/

An overview of this very unique and beautiful tree of the US Pacific coast, as well as a peek into the world of an arborist who works on them.

A Meadowview, Virginia, research center spearheads the effort, and more than a dozen experimental, large-plot plantings on state public lands have not only survived but reached maturity. Lesesne State Forest in Nelson County, for instance, holds about thirty acres of natural, second-growth woods anchored by seventy-foot-tall American chestnut trees that are more than sixty years old—and produce delicious wild nuts that few living people beyond foresters and researchers have ever tasted.

“We don’t go out of our way to advertise this fact,” says Scrivani, “but the public can now hike in and walk through natural groves of healthy [American chestnut trees] and forage for nuts for the first time in nearly a century.”