Rad Geek People's Daily

This crisis is worsened by the massive, ugly bureaucratized medical negligence and political cruelty of the U.S.’s jails in general and its immigration detention system specifically. It is also only a crisis in the first place because the U.S. government continues to insist on building institutions to hold migrants captive and keep them around in case the state might decide to deport them. Even if they were better at passing around covid vaccines, and even if all the guards wore masks as they prowled around the jail, and even if they more assiduously handed out conditional releases to people with serious pre-existing health conditions, there is no humane way to jail immigrants or hold people for possible deportation. The crisis is not something that’s happening at the jail; the jail is the crisis, and there is one easy, obvious solution: stand down, let people go, and leave them alone. All of them, immediately, completely, and forever.

Needless to say, Alexander Lukashenko is a despot and a contemptible thug, and he, and the rest of the Belarussian government beneath him, both richly deserves the criticism they get from European Union officials.

Be that as it may, there is no question who the villain is in this ghastly diplomatic game. And the villain is not in Minsk, however villainous they may be in other respects. There is nothing wrong with encouraging Iraqis or Syrians or Afghans to pass through and travel towards Poland. There is something wrong with using brutal, coordinated force to stop them crossing. Of course Iraqis and Syrians and Afghans ought to be able to cross freely and peacefully into Poland, and indeed into anywhere else in Europe that they care to freely travel. They have a human right to move freely without being hassled, without being threatened, without being rounded up and held captive or expelled by the Polish government’s border guards, the Polish government’s police, or any other paramilitary or military force patrolling the unconscionable razor-wired walls of Fortress Europe. Every migrant assaulted or beaten, every migrant suffering from hunger or freezing cold, every migrant left at risk of exposure and disease, is entirely the fault of the European authorities trying to seal the borders. There is an easy, and obvious solution to this horrible border crisis: the only crisis is the border. All you need to do to solve it is to stand down, let people come in and leave them alone.

So just the other day, I found out (1) that this exists; and (2) that four (4) archival institutions in the United States have copies of it in their collections:

Shadows from the Walls of Death: Facts and Inferences Prefacing a Book of Specimens of Arsenical Wall Papers is an 1874 book by Dr. Robert C. Kedzie (1823-1902) of Michigan.^[1]

The book warns of the dangers then commonly used arsenic-pigmented wallpaper. The book contains 86 samples of said wallpaper. Due to the dangerous amount of arsenic in the work, of the original 100 copies, only four have survived. Most copies were destroyed by the recipient libraries. These are only handled using special precautions for safety.^[2] As of 2021, the remaining copies were held at Harvard University Medical School, the U.S. National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, MD, and the university libraries of Michigan State University and the University of Michigan.^[3] The copy in the National Library of Medicine has been digitized and is freely available.^[4]

— Wikipedia: Shadows from the Walls of Death
Retrieved 4 November 2021

Because of the samples of poisonous wallpaper in the book, archivists have to make decisions about how to make the booklet available to researchers. If you handle the pages the arsenic gets on your fingers. If you lick your fingers or otherwise ingest the residue, it can make you sick or it can kill you. Some institutions require anyone handling the document to do so with gloves and a mask; one has encapsulated every page so that they can be handled without inadvertently poisoning the researcher. This is simultaneously the most metal fact I have learned all week, and also the most Umberto Eco fact that I have learned all week.

You can now read and see the full book online, in full color, without taking extreme measures to make sure that you do not die from exposure to the pages, because technological civilization is awesome.

1. ^[1]“Shadows from the walls of death”. search.lib.umich.edu. Retrieved 2021-06-02.↩
2. ^[2]Zawacki, Alexander J. (2018-01-23). “How a Library Handles a Rare and Deadly Book of Wallpaper Samples”. Atlas Obscura. Retrieved 2018-06-16.↩
3. ^[3]Kedzie, R. C; Baker, Henry B; Michigan; State Board of Health; W.S. George & Co (1874). “Shadows from the walls of death”: facts and inferences prefacing a book of specimens of arsenical wall papers. OCLC 1194639611.↩
4. ^[4]Zawacki, Alexander J. (2018-01-23). “How a Library Handles a Rare and Deadly Book of Wallpaper Samples”. Atlas Obscura. Retrieved 2018-06-16.↩

Here’s 2019 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia who has just assumed extraordinary powers under a six-month state of emergency in his government’s ongoing war on Tigray.

The pit which is dug will be very deep, it will be where the enemy is buried, not where Ethiopia disintegrates, he said in a speech at an event at the military’s headquarters in Addis Ababa.

We will bury this enemy with our blood and bones and make the glory of Ethiopia high again, said Abiy, who won the Nobel prize for settling Ethiopia’s longtime conflict with Eritrea.^[1]

— Ethiopian leader, marking year of war, says he will bury foes with our blood
Reuters, 3 November 2021

The Norwegian Nobel Committee now gives away about 10,000,000 Swedish kronor a year for this prize.^[2], or about $1,000,000. It would probably be better if they retired the prize out of a decent sense of shame, and just donated the money through GiveDirectly.org or Doctors Without Borders / MSF instead; or maybe they could donate $999,980 a year to an organization like Doctors Without Borders / MSF that provides urgent relief in conflict zones, and set aside a $20 a year donation to the Fund for the Revival of Satire in Honor of Tom Lehrer.

1. ^[1]It turns out that Abiy’s 2019 peace deal with Eritrea’s government has provided him with some advantages. Among them, the assistance of Eritrean soldiers to invade and ravage Tigray. All sides in the conflict have committed heinous human rights abuses throughout the civil war; the Eritrean soldiers have been accused of huge responsibility for the blockade and pillaging of Tigrayan villages, and the torture and massacre of thousands of civilians. The ongoing civil war has driven about 2.5 million people across northern Ethiopia out of their homes. —RG.↩
2. ^[2]This increases a bit year over year. and in theory it could depend on the market performance of the securities in the Nobel endowment. Abiy’s cash prize in 2019 was 9,000,000 SEK.↩

Curtis Sliwa brought a special guest with him to vote on Tuesday: Gizmo, one of the 17 cats he lives with in a studio apartment.

But Gizmo was denied entry to the polling site, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and Mr. Sliwa, the Republican nominee for mayor, was irate.

More problems soon followed, and Mr. Sliwa openly quarreled with election officials, shouting: Arrest me! when they asked him to take off a red jacket with his name on it — an apparent violation of electioneering rules.

In a general election match-up against Eric Adams that has provided relatively little drama, Mr. Sliwa’s visit to the polls created quite a stir.

His ballot jammed in the scanning machine, and the machine had to be repaired. An election worker hurled an expletive at Mr. Sliwa while asking him to leave.

They couldn’t have been more hostile, Mr. Sliwa said as he left the polling site, at Frank McCourt High School, more than an hour later and was reunited with Gizmo, who was being watched by a staffer.

— Emma G. Fitzsimmons, Curtis Sliwa tried to bring his cat to vote. It got weirder from there.
New York Times, 2 November 2021.