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March 25th, 2023:

There will still be HISD Trustee elections this fall

Mar 25th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
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Just a reminder, in case you needed it.

Although the state is preparing to appoint a board of managers this summer, local elections for Houston ISD trustees will still be held as scheduled in November.

The Texas Education Agency announced plans to replace the district’s top leadership following chronic low academic achievement at a Fifth Ward high school and prior school board mismanagement.

It’s unclear what the elected-trustees’ roles will look like once the board of managers is appointed, but they will likely serve in an advisory position, although they will have not voting power.

After about two years of the board of managers running the district, a transition timeline may be announced if HISD reaches certain goals, and elected-trustees will be phased back into the board over the course of at least two years.

Four of the nine Houston ISD school board trustees are up for re-election in November and confirmed the plan to run again.

Trustees must file their candidate application by Aug. 21.

The rest of the story is about those four incumbents – Kathy Blueford-Daniels in II, Dani Hernandez in III, Patricia Allen in IV, and Judith Cruz in VIII – and their reasons for running again in spite of it all, which mostly amount to “someone needs to represent our district” and “I know what’s going on”. I will remind everyone that Hernandez and Cruz ousted two of the former Trustees who had been involved in that Open Meetings Act issue.

What I wonder about at this point is whether anyone will file to run against any of them. Anyone can make a case for themselves as being the better alternative, but who would want the job? It’s just going to be a placeholder for some number of years, and there’s an excellent chance that future voters will hold you responsible for anything unpopular that the Board of Managers does. It’s easy enough to see why the incumbents want to stay. It’s not at all clear to me why someone else would want in right now. We’ll see.

New frontiers in propaganda

Mar 25th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
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We are at the forefront, because of course we are.

Readers of the daily email newsletter of one of the country’s leading right-wing, fossil fuel-funded think tanks were treated to a bizarre sight [last] week: an AI-generated image of a dead whale washed ashore on a beach in front of wind turbines, above a fearmongering story about offshore wind. Unfortunately, what is isolated to one newsletter today could spread around the right-wing ecosystem tomorrow.

I cover climate and read breaking news about renewable energy every day; if there were a real photo of a dead whale in front of a wind farm like this, chances are I would have seen it. Still, the image gave me a jump when I opened the email from the Texas Public Policy Foundation. For a moment, I wondered if I’d somehow missed a huge story about a dead humpback that had washed ashore in front of a wind farm.

The story under the image is old hat for this particular newsletter. The Texas Public Policy Foundation, or TPPF, is one of the leaders in the national right-wing push against renewable energy—specifically against offshore wind. Despite its location in Texas, the group has lent its sizable financial muscle to anti-offshore wind efforts on the East Coast, joining a lawsuit against a project filed by local fishermen and creating an entire movie about the evils of wind energy.

The image is at least recognizably an AI generation: there’s the tell-tale uncanny valley nature of the pattern of the debris of the beach, and the blades of the wind turbines are, well, bendy, in a way that you certainly don’t see in real life. The biggest giveaway is the DALL-E generator watermark at the lower right hand corner of the image. When I plugged in various search terms, like “beached dead humpback whale in front of offshore wind turbines” into the DALL-E generator, I got images that looked a lot like what was at the top of my newsletter. (Some of mine were much better, not gonna lie.)

Still, the image is, at first glance, realistic enough to make me do a double-take, and there’s no label on the image marking it as not a real photograph. Readers of the newsletter who aren’t familiar with how AI images look or who are just skimming could certainly be forgiven for thinking that this is real evidence of dead wildlife near a wind farm.

The story shows the original image, and especially with the foreknowledge that it’s sketchy it’s easy to see the fakery in the photo. There’s also a much less janky image of the same scene, created by the story author, which shows how much better and more insidious this sort of thing can and surely will be in the hands of liars and lowlifes. For now, if someone has passed along this bit of bullshit to you, you can show them this story and hope to at least spark a bit of skepticism in them. The next time, when it’s much more convincing? I have no idea. God help us all.

Whole Woman’s Health opens its New Mexico clinic

Mar 25th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
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A little bittersweet, I have to say.

One of the largest independent abortion providers in the nation opened a new clinic in New Mexico on Thursday, nearly nine months after it shuttered its clinics in Texas after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Whole Woman’s Health of New Mexico opened its Albuquerque clinic on Thursday. The clinic is expected to see 19 patients over the next few days, with 18 of them coming from Texas.

The clinic currently offers first- and second-trimester abortion procedures to people who are up to 18 weeks pregnant, with plans to expand to up to 24 weeks in the near future.

Whole Woman’s Health opened its first Texas clinic in Austin in 2003 and later expanded throughout the state. The organization had four clinics in Austin, McAllen, Forth Worth and McKinney before it announced plans to leave the state and reopen in New Mexico.

“As we open our doors to both local communities and those forced to migrate from other states for care, we remain unbelievably grateful for the thousands of supporters from around the world that came together to make this clinic a reality,” Amy Hagstrom Miller, the president and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, said in a news release.

The New Mexico clinic is located minutes from the Albuquerque International Sunport Airport and all of its staff members are bilingual, the news release says.

[…]

Whole Woman’s Health said New Mexico has become a “refuge” for patients seeking abortion care, including from Texas and Oklahoma, which is also among the 13 states that banned nearly all abortions after Roe v. Wade was overturned.

“Today marks the next chapter of our organization,” Marva Sadler, senior director of clinical services for Whole Woman’s Health, said in the news release. “In these times when abortion rights, health, and justice are under attack, our Albuquerque clinic will serve as a safe haven for abortion care,”

In June 2022, Whole Woman’s Health launched a GoFundMe campaign to relocate its Texas clinics to New Mexico, with more than 3,500 donors giving more than $300,000 toward the effort.

See here for the background, and here for a copy of the press release. I’m glad they are able to get back to the important business of caring for women and their reproductive needs. Lord knows, we need them. I just hope that someday they’ll be able to open back up here in Texas.