Hasta La Gadget!

There was something missing in United Airlines’ response when police officers dragged a passenger from one of its planes.

Normally, when a company is the target of customers’ fury, it rolls out an explanation of how and why the awful things it does are simply capitalism’s natural course ― so normal, in other words, that to do things any other way would be wrong.

Yet amid United’s responsibility-skirting euphemisms (“I apologize for having to re-accommodate these customers,” is a newly minted addition to the PR-speak hall of infamy), the airline never turned to that last refuge of corporate scoundrels ― the free market ― to excuse its own police-assisted brutality.  

This omission is all the more odd because there seems to be an easy free market solution within grasp: Just pay people enough money to get off the plane and take the next flight. Indeed, this is what airlines do all the time to get themselves out of a bind when the self-imposed (and profitable) practice of overbooking backfires.

While United did offer to pay, it reportedly stopped at $1000 before calling the cops. All the airline had to do, says the ghost of Milton Friedman, is offer a market clearing price!

But that assumes the airline industry broadly represents free-market principles. It doesn’t. It’s hurtling toward monopoly with regulatory blessing, foisting higher prices, fewer flights and crappier service on choice-bereft customers.

The airlines themselves don’t make much, if any, profit, and squeeze their employees just as hard as their customers. Everyone involved is miserable and bound together by the threat of violence.

Rather than functioning as a tool to advance United Airlines’ “sadistic commitment to cost control,” as the Financial Times’ Matt Klein described it, the government should actually enforce antitrust laws. Instead, after rejecting American Airlines’ proposed merger with US Airways, it approved the deal just three months later, after intense lobbying and revolving-door hiring.

The first step toward making things better is one the airline industry has already taken: Dispense with the corporate theology of idolized, naturally free markets.  

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A nurse at a children’s hospital in Forth Worth, Texas, is cheering up kids and normalizing their environment through his dry-erase art.

Edgar Palomo, a nurse on the hematology/oncology floor at Cook Children’s Medical Center, leaves works of art on the floor’s dry-erase board. He’s drawn scenes from movies like “Beauty and the Beast,” “Star Wars,” “Inside Out” and more. Palomo told The Huffington Post that each drawing takes a week or two.

”I work at night, and sometimes there’s a little bit of downtime, so I’ll work on it a little at a time, maybe like 15 minutes at a time,” he said. “I definitely don’t finish them all in one night. It takes like a week or two weeks to finally get it all done, but definitely work comes first.”

Palomo started sharing his art around the hospital about three years ago. He said he wants to “liven it up” in the unit with his drawings. 

“From what I’ve seen, it tends to make the kids and even the parents really happy,” he said. “Anything to normalize the environment and cheer them up.”

The creative nurse takes requests from kids, parents and his fellow employees. The most difficult request he’s received? The Mona Lisa. 

“I tried my best,” he joked.

Palomo also sometimes uses colored pencils or pens to do personalized drawings for patients. On April 5, Cook Children’s Medical Center shared photos of his work on its Facebook page, prompting people to share comments about their experience with Palomo and include photos of the drawings he gave to their kids. 

Kim Griffith, media relations specialist at the hospital, told HuffPost that the kids who get to interact with Palomo adore him and enjoy seeing his drawings as well as playing Xbox with him.

“He’s just a really crucial part of our H/O department,” she said.

See more of Palomo’s work below. 

The HuffPost Parents newsletter, So You Want To Raise A Feminist, offers the latest stories and news in progressive parenting.

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When discussing black women’s history, activists like Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks are often quick to come to mind for many. 

Yet while their resilience and advocacy is noteworthy, they’re certainly not the only famous black activists we should know. 

Now, a recently digitized collection of rare photos at the Library of Congress shows similarly socially active but lesser-known black women throughout the 19th century. The images, which are mostly striking black-and-white portraits, once belonged to William Henry Richards, a professor who taught at Howard University Law School for nearly four decades before his death in 1951. Richards was “active in several organizations that promoted civil rights and civil liberties for African Americans at the end of the nineteenth century,” Beverly Brannan, the curator of Photography, Prints & Photographs Division at the Library of Congress wrote in a post published last week. 

The library acquired the collection in 2013 and recently digitized the images to bring visibility to more obscure black women who were active in civil rights, education and journalism in the decades following the Civil War. They include pictures of women like writer Hallie Quinn Brown, who helped to launch the Colored Women’s League of Washington, DC and educator Josephine A. Silone Yates, who was trained in chemistry and was one of the first black teachers at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. 

Below you’ll find the entire collection of images. 

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