Even that's Odd @eventhatsodd - Tumblr Blog

We Made It Illegal, Then Called Them Illegal

I was listening to BBC Newshour the other day. A Democratic senator was trying to talk about immigration, and the reporter kept pushing the same question: these people broke the law to get here, so why should they be allowed to stay? You could hear the senator stumble. He couldn’t find the answer. And the longer I listened, the more I realized: that stumble is the whole problem. That’s where…

s is a new thing I'm trying. I say my piece first — all my bias, all my gut, no notes, no Googling, no homework. Then I run the whole thing past Claude to check me. What I got right, what I got wrong, where I was loud and confidently incorrect. The point isn't to be right on the first pass. The point is to show the seams. So the Supreme Court just gutted the Voting Rights Act. The way I understand it, they said you can't draw districts based on race. And on its face — fine. If you're using race to limit a minority's voting power, that's exactly the thing the Voting Rights Act was built to stop. But that's not what this was. This was the opposite. They took a tool built to undo Jim Crow and used it to dismantle the remedy. And then — this is the part that broke my brain — they basically said it's still fine to carve up districts by party.

#Check My Work

My shoe philosophy has done a full lap. It started where everyone's starts — slip-ons and Velcro, because I couldn't tie laces yet — and it has now, decades later, returned to that exact spot. Different shoes. Same logic. The toddler was right. For most of my adult life I was a laces guy. Tying your shoes was just what you did. Living in the city helped — you put your shoes on in the morning, you left for the day, and you didn't think about them again until you got home. Maybe you went back out once for food (I was a Seamless-pickup person, not a delivery person — I needed the walk anyway). Either way, it was two shoe events a day, tops. Not enough friction to rethink anything. I was firm about it indoors, too. Shoes off in the house, no exceptions. I won't argue with people who do otherwise, but I will quietly judge them. You don't know where your feet have been. You step in dog crap, you step in worse, and then you walk it onto your rug. I'm not interested. cont eventhatsodd.com

The White Sole Argument I Lost to Myself

For most of my adult life, white soles felt like a costume. Like I was dressing as a younger version of myself. The white-soled sneaker had a specific era for me — Air Force 1s, old Puma Clydes, that whole lineage of clean white rubber under suede or leather — and at some point I aged out of it. Not aged out in the bitter sense. Just clocked that I didn’t need to be in those anymore. The other…

Our kit house came with about a dozen front-entry options. Most of them weren't really porches at all — they were flush to the house, or very slightly recessed with some nice trim work. A couple had actual covered entryways, but those weren't the style we chose. So we ended up with a flush entry on the side of the house. Nice trim. Not a porch. For the back, I wanted a big porch. Wrap-around if I could swing it. I had this idea — based on no actual experience, because my parents didn't have one and Jennifer and I had just come from city apartments — that I would love sitting outside in the rain when you want to be outside but don't want to be outside. And on nice days. Basically all the time. cont eventhatsodd.com

Spider Eyes

We went to Belize a couple springs back — Spring Break 2024, jungle half of the trip at Sleeping Giant Rainforest Lodge — and I learned something there that I cannot unlearn. It doesn’t bother me, exactly. But it has rewired how I look at my own yard at night, and I don’t think there’s any putting that back. One of the things on offer was a night hike. You go out with a guide, headlamps on, and…

#nature #photography #Travel #wildlife #writing

A federal appeals court just ordered the FDA to require in-person dispensing of mifepristone — the pill used in roughly 60% of abortions in this country — and it applied that ruling nationwide at the request of one state. Louisiana sued, the Fifth Circuit said sure, and now everybody from California to Vermont is supposed to live under Louisiana's preferences. Justice Alito put the order on hold for a week while the Supreme Court figures out what it wants to do, but the message is clear enough: states' rights are sacred until they aren't. So one state rules them all? Or is it states' rights only when it's what you believe or in your favor? That alone is worth a post. But let me set the hypocrisy down for a minute, because it's only part of what's bothering me. The deeper thing I want to think through is what actually happens — to actual people — when you make abortion harder to get. Not the slogan version. The downstream version. A couple of things I'm taking off the table first, because I refuse to have these arguments. If the mother's life is in danger, or if the pregnancy isn't viable, this isn't a debate. We put horses down to end their suffering and somehow we've decided humans don't get the same dignity. Same with rape and incest — the fact that grown adults have to defend exceptions for those is its own kind of madness. And before I get into consequences, the other piece of hypocrisy I can't quite let go of: the same political faction that wants to ban abortion to make sure every baby has the right to be born is the one that won't move an inch on guns to make sure those same babies don't get shot at school ....

A new US party structure, by way of Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the Nordics. Three things need to change if we want a country that actually moves instead of just performing motion for the cameras: Kill the Electoral College. Reweight the Senate so a Wyoming voter isn't carrying about sixty-seven times the weight of a Californian. Break up the two-party stranglehold. The first two are arguments for another day. This one is about the third — because the two-party system isn't some sacred American invention. It's a side effect of how we vote. Winner-take-all districts plus a presidential system that crushes any third option before it gets a heartbeat. Almost no other functioning democracy does it this way, and most of them aren't this paralyzed. Quick caveat before we go any further. Even inside that third question, there are two huge mechanical roadblocks I'm setting aside for separate posts. Citizens United turned campaign finance into a market where whoever spends the most buys the most speech, and fifteen years of compounding damage means you can't run a competitive race without selling pieces of yourself to people who already have all the money and want more. The Republican rolling ban on ranked-choice voting — nineteen states as of March 2026, every single one out of a Republican-controlled legislature, plus a bill sitting in Congress right now trying to kill it in federal elections too — is the active legal effort to make sure no third option ever gets traction. Both are real and both are doing serious damage. Each deserves its own post. This one is a thought experiment about what the field could look like if those weren't in the way. So before we talk about what an American multi-party landscape might look like, let's see how the rest of the grown-ups handle it. First, Why Is It Even Called "Right" And "Left"? Because of a seating chart. Seriously. In the summer of 1789, the French Estates-General turned itself into the National Assembly and started arguing about what to do with King Louis XVI. The deputies who wanted to keep the king, the church, the aristocracy, and the whole pre-revolution machinery intact....

#democracy #elections #history #news #politics

US Against Them : Enough is Enough

Here’s the thing they don’t want you to figure out. If you’re working two jobs and still can’t cover rent — the problem is not your neighbor. The problem is not the immigrant down the street. The problem is not the family across the political aisle. The problem is the system that pits you against all of them so you stay too busy fighting sideways to look up. That’s what this song is about. US…

#BrokeCon by Design

Broken By Design: The Complete 25-Part Series

A 25-part series on how American life got rigged against the bottom 90% — system by system, with receipts. Healthcare, housing, education, retirement, taxes, the courts, the media: none of the dysfunction is accidental. It’s working exactly as designed, just not for you. Two topics got too big for a single post, so 27 posts cover 25 parts. Read in order, or jump to whatever’s eating you most this…

#economics #health #health-insurance #healthcare #politics

Crashed My Bike Trying to Avoid a Garter Snake, And Then My Dog Wanted In On The Action

Body (paste into WP): We live right next to the rail trail — our property literally borders it — so we end up using it a lot. I walk the dog there. I ride my bike. The section closest to us is the rough version, just packed dirt that gets muddy after rain and stays covered in sticks and leaves. Other stretches have stone dust laid down, which is much nicer to ride on, but you have to get a ways…

Do Unto Others: The Complete 5-Part Series

When empathy becomes transactional, democracy stops working Most of the political writing on this site is about systems — who built them, who profits from them, what it would take to change them. This series is different. It’s about something more fundamental: the moral framework underneath a functioning democracy, and what happens when that framework collapses. The argument across these five…

Divided We Fall: The Complete 10-Part Series

The culture war as a business model — and what’s actually true on the issues it sells you Every morning, millions of Americans wake up angry about something they saw on a screen. The outrage is real. The threat feels immediate. But the machinery that creates and amplifies that outrage is a business — one that profits whether or not the things it sells you to be afraid of are actually…

Passing the Buck: The Complete 15-Part Series

Why we make less but pay more — and how it got that way If you’re working hard and still falling behind, you’re not imagining it. The math really doesn’t add up anymore. A median American income in 2026 doesn’t cover a median American life — and that gap isn’t an accident, a personal failing, or the inevitable cost of progress. It was built. Deliberately. Over the last 50 years. This series is…

Vehicle Roof Philosophy

Just Give Me a Solid Roof Already I used to be a moon roof guy. Always checked the box. Paid the upcharge. Felt good about letting a little extra sky into my life. That was me. Past tense. Now? I’m not so sure I’d bother. I’ve owned most flavors of car roof at this point — hardtop, convertible, moon roof, glass roof. The only one I’ve really skipped is a plain old sunroof, but a sunroof is just…

Union Strong: The Only Thing Standing Between Us and the Bottom

I’m not a union guy in the way you might picture a union guy. I’ve complained about unions. I’ve worked around them because the budget demanded it. I’ve watched strong-arm tactics that embarrassed everyone involved. I’ve sat in a production office calculating how much cheaper everything would be if we just went non-union. And I still think unions are probably the most important thing that ever…

My Wheel Philosophy That Became a Tire (Tyre) Philosophy

I am a firm believer in snow tires and I think the fact that I have to say that out loud in 2025 is genuinely one of the more baffling things about living in the Northeast — like, we all agree the earth is round, right, so can we also agree that all-season tires in February on a hill that gets black ice are not a plan, they’re a prayer The thing is it didn’t start as a tire philosophy it started…

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