😵‍💫 Good morning, RVA: A black hole, gun violence prevention, and birds of prey

Good morning, RVA! It’s 62 °F. What the heck! Despite this morning’s late-spring temperatures, you can expect a cold front to move in this afternoon and for the day to end somewhere in the 30s. Boringly, the rain will let up just as temperatures start to drop. Expect cold—but clear—weather for the rest of the weekend.
 

Water cooler

Kate Masters at the Virginia Mercury has some good reporting on the Youngkin Administration’s refusal to turn over communications and documents pertaining to the governor’s education-related executive orders. I’m sure y’all have read about the Governor’s tip line for parents to report educators who dare to teach their students about the existence of systemic racism. He casually rolled it out a couple weeks ago on a right-wing radio show, and then it got picked up by national news and spread around on social media—mostly by liberals hoping to encourage other liberals to flood the email address with sickburns. While this seems like another misstep for the new, inexperienced governor, I think things are pretty much going according to plan! Remember, the goal here, as always, was not to collect actual feedback from parents concerned over the teaching of “divisive” subjects, but to make liberals angry. Not only did the tip line succeed at that primary objective, its also convinced thousands of folks to spend what little civic time and energy they have shooting off angry emails into a black hole rather than emailing their legislators, submitting public comments, or attending a public meeting. Honestly, I would not be surprised if the tip line inbox literally did not exist (which would explain why subsequent FOIA requests for tips submitted have been denied by the Administration). I appreciate Kate Masters reporting, though, because she points to a larger trend within the Governor’s team to improperly use FOIA exemptions to shield their work from the public. This lack of transparency is Not Good—especially around topics like the enforcement of Executive Order #1 which, theoretically, bans the teaching of systemic racism in classrooms. Have they denied these FOIA requests because what they’d turn up would be embarrassing or damning (or both)? I think that’s an important question.
 

You should read this piece by Mel Leonor in the Richmond Times-Dispatch about how the Virginia Senate has slowly started to dismantle the Governor’s agenda piece by piece. That was a smug sentence! I thought two things while reading through this good reporting: 1) Bills in the General Assembly die and resurrect with alarming, unpredictable frequency, so don’t consider Governor’s push for all charter schools all the time dead until the end of the session, and 2) Folks really need to vote! Can you imagine how different things would look without that slimmest of majorities in the Senate? Big yikes.
 

Also in the RTD, Chris Suarez reports on some local progress on gun violence prevention. The City is “working alongside a local nonprofit to distribute $1 million in grants for the first phase of a new gun violence prevention effort” and will also hire a new community safety coordinator who will serve as the City’s point for all gun violence issues. Suarez says the new coordinator position was recommended by the Mayor’s Task Force to Reimagining Public Safety from a thousand years back (aka November 2020), but, looking through the report, I see a couple recommendations to create an entire Office of Restorative Justice and Community Safety, not just a coordinator position. Perhaps this is step one, though. Actually, it’d be really interesting for someone to take the Taskforce’s report from a year and a half a go and see which of its recommendations the City has implemented. Some of them are big, expensive, and will take a lot of work (like creating an entire Office of Restorative Justice and Community Safety), but some are small and practical (like changing the languages used by police officers). Anyway, I’m stoked to see the impact of this $1 million and the new community safety coordinator. We’ve got to do whatever we can locally, while the state and federal governments actively prevent us from getting the guns out of our communities.
 

I’m trying to remove beef from my diet, because, while delicious, meat farming certainly doesn’t help our burning planet. ZZQ, makers of the finest beef brisket in the region? the state? have not made things any easier by announcing a new burger joint in Scott’s Addition. Eileen Mellon at Richmond Magazine has the greasy details…which literally acknowledge my burning-planet concerns! “A huge part of Eazzy Burger is going to be our mission to be good stewards of the environment and advocates for fighting climate change, particularly how the beef industry factors into that…We want to make it so our guests aren’t having to make decisions to make good decisions.” I’m skeptical, interested, and hungry.
 

Via /r/rva, here’s a picture of a hawk sitting on top of a stop sign. Also via /r/rva, here’s a picture of an owl sitting on top of stop sign. What…is happening?
 

This morning’s longread

Why Is Everyone Smoking Toad Venom?

People will literally smoke anything! How does humanity even learn to smoke toad venom unless there’s a dedicated group of people smoking every single thing, living or dead, that crosses their path?
 

For nine months of the year the Sonoran desert toad lives under the sands of the Mexican desert to survive the scorching heat, but when the winter rains arrive, it emerges for a Caligula-like orgy of eating and fornicating. Glands on the sides of its neck and legs emit a venom so toxic it can cause death in a predator within seconds. Bufo hunters catch the toads at night using flashlights—the toads freeze when confronted by a bright light—then milk the venom from the toad’s parotid glands, typically holding a mirror up to catch the spray. Overnight, the milky venom dries on the glass, turning into flaky crystals, leaving behind only the 5-MeO-DMT and none of the lethal toxin. (The toads are allegedly unharmed.)
 

If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
 

Picture of the Day

I don’t know what this is, but I wanted to take it with me.