I Agree with Rob About "on Accident"

Despite my interest in grammar and usage, I don't spend a lot of time listening to podcasts about the topic, or know much about who the best voices are on the topic.

I enjoyed this podcast called Words Unravelled, where the two hosts interviewed Grammar Girl, Mignon Fogarty, who has had her own podcast on the topic for 20 years. That's called Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing:

The teaser below the YouTube frame says,

Is it "on accident" or "by accident"? Should "red, white, and blue" have that second comma? Is "10 items or less" okay? Jess and Rob are joined by the internet's Grammar Girl, Mignon Fogarty, to examine some common grammatical myths and mistakes.

Is it wrong to use "fun" as an adjective?
Is "drive slow" bad grammar? (or just a flat adverb?)
Why does "tonic and gin" sound weird?

Dead Children of the Past

I discovered today that the tiny rural cemetery next to the house I grew up in is listed on a county historical site, its 27 graves recorded by the now-deceased volunteer town historian, who was married to my high school math teacher.

Of those 27 graves (some of which have shared markers), 12 identify the resting places of children under the age of 12, plus one 16-year-old. So that's just about half of the people buried.*

One of the gravestones, for a child who died at 11 months old, has a picture of a lamb at the top, and at the bottom the words "Our little pet."

One family had four children born between 1857 and 1865 buried there. The oldest lived to be 6. As I remember it, their graves share a single, small marble obelisk.

There is also one 19-year-old man who died in 1864 — possibly in the Civil War. There are definitely some Civil War veterans' graves in the cemetery, since those used to be marked with flags by someone on Memorial Day.

There are other graves in an older part of the cemetery that had big pieces of slate for markers, which bear no engraving. No one knows who is buried there. Large stands of common lilacs had grown up around them by the time I was a child. The shrubs were cut down at some point, but they later regrew. I think they are still there now.

The newest grave in the cemetery is from 1907, a widow of one of the men buried earlier. The cemetery was closed to new graves after that.

__

* There is a typo in the death year recorded for one of the graves: it says 1951 but I believe it should be 1851, since no one can live to be 116 and I don't remember there being a grave with a date that late. 

An 1851 death year for this person would add one more 16-year-old to the list of teenagers in the cemetery, and make it 14 minors out of 27 graves. Welcome to Robert F. Kennedy's preferred future.

Andrea Gibson, Goodbye

It was announced yesterday that the performance poet Andrea Gibson had died from the cancer they were being treated for over the past several years.

Gibson was only 49 years old.

As I wrote back in 2023, both performance poetry and Gibson were new to me. The poem I shared was about chemotherapy, something I had not experienced at the time. 

Now that I have, I see the poem a bit differently — but it's still great. 

I'm happy to live in a country that is home to people like Andrea Gibson. I keep thinking we need more like them, and less like Stephen Miller or a lot of other people with too much power these days.

Air Conditioning Is Fine

Over the weekend, The Guardian ran an article about how air conditioning is "destroying the planet." Joshua Foust, assistant professor at Syracuse University, took it to task on BlueSky and started a bunch of other discussion:

This [article] is satisfying an obvious fetish for sneering at vulnerable poor people, but also it is a classic example of the weird Euro-Puritanism about air conditioning, which is a minuscule carbon emitter compared to gas heating, data centers, cheap air travel, or cars. It’s such a weird, elitist thing to focus on.

Another way of looking at this: the US has larger areas experiencing consistent, extreme heat in the summer, but because of widespread AC adoption, annual heat deaths rarely rise above 2,000, or a hair over 1% as many as Europe. Their sneering contempt for AC is just mass death for poor people.

Europeans like to lecture Americans about how 20,000 people die per year from guns here, but that’s 10% of how many Europeans die of heat neglect each year. It’s crazy to me that this is such a sticking point for them.

That comparison with gun deaths was startling. Obviously, 20,000 gun deaths is terrible and unacceptable. But in comparison, the number of people who die from heat in the U.S. is around 2,000. Europe's somewhat larger population comes nowhere near making up for the discrepancy: 175,000 per year there vs. 2,000 in the U.S.

Some of the best related comments:

People didn’t “used to be fine” without air conditioning during heat waves in the U.S. - a lot more people *just died*. According to this study, air conditioning has cut heat deaths in the U.S. by around 80% since 1960.
Faine Greenwood

One of those hills I’m willing to die on is that especially with the ongoing revolution in renewable energy technologies, of all the problems in the world, electricity consumption and *especially* daytime consumption is really not among the major ones.... Electricity is among the very few things we actually know how to make in massive quantities with small enough environmental and social costs. Especially now, when renewable energy techs - and in particular solar PV and batteries - are advancing *MUCH* faster than even *optimists* dared to *hope*!!!
Janne M. Korhonen

Also, on this specific front: Japan has been using air-source heat pumps for both heating and cooling for 40+ years. This is quite literally a solved problem, and the parts of it that aren't, can be quite soon and are under active research. The Continent needs to get its head out of its ass.
Jordan Carlson

Every time air conditioning shaming comes up, I think about the fact that the energy demand (and carbon impact) of heating my home is about 4x higher than the carbon impact of cooling it, but I've never once seen anyone recommend that people move out of cold areas to areas that need A/C instead.
Christopher Schmidt

I used to be an air-conditioning snob, and still regret the effect it has had on our politics (allowing for the increasing number Congressional districts in the South and Southwest, and basically creating Florida as we know it). 

But that final point, about the energy efficiency of cooling vs. heating, is what originally convinced me it was stupid to be biased against air conditioning, if you think heating is fine.

Cabaret, Yet Another Warning

I don't know how long ago the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis decided to stage Cabaret this season, but given what is happening in our country, it's almost too much to watch it, which I finally was able to do this afternoon.

I've only seen the 1972 movie before, never a stage production, and definitely not the updated post-Alan Cummings version. As I expected, it was more visceral, both in terms of the script and the theater experience. 

The reviews in the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press, plus some things I had seen mentioned by people I know on social media, had prepared me a bit. But I not only cried a little, unexpectedly, as Sally Bowles sang the closing title song, I wept even more because of the sound effects that followed just after that, accompanying telegraphed visuals of people being stolen away by train.

This essay, by another local resident who just saw the performance, echoes my experience. As she says, "This musical is full of 'what not to do' in the face of a growing totalitarian dictatorship – do not deny, do not think that being an American makes you safe, do not go along to make a profit (and survive, yes) or to maintain your business, and do not run away."

If you're here, go and see Cabaret.

A Real Counterfactual

All too often, when we talk about government investment in things that keep people safe — public health measures, fire safety, what-have-you — there's no counterfactual to show what would have happened if the investment hadn't been made.

There's no way to count the people who didn't die or get seriously injured or sick. So the (too many) people in this country with no imagination or no empathy are unwilling to spend money to prevent disasters. The covid pandemic made it worse, as the MAGA crowd grabbed it as a political issue. (See the recent If Books Could Kill episode on the book In COVID's Wake, part 2, for discussion of this.)

Anyway — the recent flooding and mass death event in Kerr County, Texas, has provided an inadvertent counterfactual. Its county leaders went out of their way to not spend money they had immediately available to create a warning system for a river they knew had a history of flash floods that had killed people in the past.

Check out this post from emptywheel's blog that provides transcripts from their meetings, where they discussed it at various points since the mind 20-teens. While some members try to argue for a warning system, what became the majority doesn't want to have sirens that interrupt their sleep or that could help undeserving tourists in their area (since the "real" residents would know how to get out and don't need help, of course). And then post-covid, they don't want to accept tainted federal money from the communist Biden administration. Really.

In response to all this, Buffalo News editorial cartoonist Adam Zyglis created this cartoon:



And wouldn't you know it, folks in Buffalo just had to cancel an event where Zyglis was to appear because there were death threats against him. You know, since he dared to make a cartoon that named the problem.

Since the mass deaths and overall destruction from the flooding, there has been news that Kristi Noem defunded FEMA's response phone lines on the second day after the flooding.

Cara Jackson posted this to BlueSky:

Two days after deadly Texas floods, the agency struggled to answer calls from survivors because of call center contracts that weren’t extended. This is so horrifying I made a bar graph:

Laura Kowalski Linden @samoart.bsky.social said this:

Further context: If you’ve never dealt with FEMA after a disaster I can tell you they answer within 30 seconds. No hold times. Real live wonderful people who help while you cry and can’t even figure out what questions to ask. They walk you through it all. Every call. NOEM STOLE THAT $ FOR ICE.

Which is an interesting point. Before the budget reconciliation bill was passed in Congress, ICE was exceeding its already large budget, so Noem has been moving money around within DHS funds to give more of it to ICE. Kowalski Linden's claim could well be correct.

Fascist Takeover Attempt of California

I haven't written a concerted post about the actions of ICE and the Department of "Homeland Security" — primarily in California — which become more fascist by the day.

Yesterday they laid seige to an agricultural facility in Ventura County. One worker was killed after trying to flee and falling from a height. Others were critically injured. A number of others were held for eight hours or longer, and only let go after they agreed to wipe their phones of photos and videos they had taken showing what had happened in the raid — being forced to destroy evidence. (This info is based on a statement from the United Farm Workers.)

Tonight, the Service Workers International Union California released a statement saying a California State University faculty member (a U.S. citizen, if that matters) was assaulted and is still detained in the raid. The faculty member, Jonathon Caravello, was there as an observer, and one statement I saw said he had tried to aid a woman in a wheelchair who had been teargassed by ICE.

On the same day as the Ventura raid, other masked, purported ICE henchmen went to a clinic in Ontario, California, to grab a man at a medical clinic. The staff asked for a warrant and tried to use their bodies to prevent ICE from taking him. They were unsuccessful.

ICE acting director and human thumb Tom Homan went on Fox News today to say, "People need to understand ICE officers and Border Patrol don't need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them ... based on their physical appearance."

Which is the very definition of racial profiling. 

Tonight, however, a federal judge ordered DHS to limit these “roving patrols” in LA because officers are racially profiling people by demanding their papers based on race (including speaking Spanish, having an accent, being at a specific place — like hanging outside Home Depot where day laborers congregate, or doing a specific type of work. 

We'll see how long that stands up as the case moves up the federal court system to the Trump-patsy Supreme Court.

A Snowplow Logo

It's July, so of course I got a brochure from the City of Saint Paul about snow emergencies in a mailing about a sewer assessment. It's good that they took advantage of the postage they were already paying! 

And it gave me a chance to appreciate the logo they've created for snow-plowing here in my fair city:

Just a little bit of pleasantness in an unpleasant era.

It's Not the Windmills

If you have MAGA relatives like I do, who like to assail clean energy for gobbling up farmland for solar farms or who echo Trump's hatred for wind turbines, here's a good chart to keep handy in your filing cabinet when they make the fake claim that the turbines kill a significant number of birds:

Note the source on that chart: the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The total number of bird deaths shown on the chart is 3,316,834,012 — a number that, I note, does not include deaths resulting from habitat loss and/or climate change. 

A bit of arithmetic gives us these percentages for the cited sources:

• Cats: 72.4%
• Collision – building glass: 18.1%
• Collision – vehicles: 6.5%
• Poison: 2.2%
• Collision – electrical lines: .8%
• Electrocution: .2%
• Collision – land-based wind turbines: .007%

So that's... four? orders of magnitude difference between killer cats and wind turbines. If MAGA folks were really worried about infrastructure, they'd advocate removing windows, cars, and electrical lines. 

Seems like a misplaced bit of worrying, or more properly, an intentionally malicious and motivated accusation. Gee whiz, they never do that.

Confounding Bumper Stickers

This is an amusing but confounding set of bumper stickers:

Maybe I can assume the cat one is about how felines are selfish (like Republicans), given the context of the protect trans kids sticker? 

And what about the frogs? 

Just a bit of random word and visual vaguerness out in the world.

What a Bunch of Know-Nothings

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins held a press conference today to talk about how all those "lazy" people getting Medicaid should become farm laborers to make up for all the people being deported. She said,

There will be no amnesty. The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way. And we move the workforce toward automation and 100% American participation, which with 34 million able-bodied on Medicaid we should be able to do fairly quickly.

Author Charles C. Mann had this to say about it:

All I can get out of this is that the US Secretary of Agriculture has no idea that ag has been furiously automating everything it can for 30-40 years and all the human jobs left now are ones we have no idea how to automate. I know it is probably a violation of Godwin's Law to mention this, but as far as I know the last program that tried to get millions of people to leave their homes to work on farms was the Cultural Revolution.

Sarah Taber, agricultural consultant and recent candidate for North Carolina commissioner of agriculture, went into a lot more detail. As always, she was enlightening:

So. I've been on field manual labor crews where most of my coworkers were convicts. I've also worked with a lot of tech companies on automating farms. And [Rollins'] press conference is incredible. Rollins hasn't the foggiest clue what she's on about.

Every farm job that CAN be automated, already is. Let's start there. She thinks... nobody's ever tried to automate picking fruit? Really? And then we'll talk about the "tehe we'll just make the Medicaid people work the farms" part.

Produce that's hard, OR destined for processing, can be picked by machine. So carrots, nuts, sour cherries for pie filling, berries and grapes that will be dried, tomatoes for sauce - those are picked by machine already. But berries, fruit, tomatoes, etc that are eaten fresh can't be automated w current technology.

I know because I worked for a lot of the startups that tried!

There's no way to pick fast enough by machine to be commercially viable, without bruising so they rot before they get to the store. Having a USDA Secretary who doesn't know any of this is wild!

Now let's talk this whole "We'll just have the Medicaid people pick the crops!" thing. And let's just ignore the whole "forced labor is morally bad" issue. Let's focus strictly on logistics.

A thing that kept happening to me, as a white American who worked manual labor field jobs (we are in fact out here, sorry) is finding out I was the only fool on the crew who was there voluntarily and getting paid. Everyone else was convicts with a sentence.

So they were completely new to farm labor and didn't really want to be there. Part of the job is I was supposed to "mentor" them. News flash: inexperienced people who don't want to be there DON'T DO GOOD WORK. Even if they want to, they don't know how.

Farmers would hire these crews because they "didn't want to hire migrants" but also "didn't want to pay real wages." And they were ALWAYS disappointed with the results. Slow. Sloppy. Kept breaking stuff because they were clumsy. No real cost savings compared to just hiring real workers.

This one Florida crew I was on had a rotating cast of 19-year-old weed and Xbox kids who'd been caught on minor drug charges. They were harmless. And also, clumsy AF. Big kids who had no idea where their feet were. They kept stepping on the blueberry transplants we'd just planted.

Another crew was a bunch of minors who were working as "community service" for juvie. They all smoked... Tobacco is packed with plant viruses that are super contagious; can be spread just by touch. So "don't smoke in the fields" is a key farm rule.

Not only did the juvie crew not know or care. The FOREMEN didn't know or care. That's how janky this outfit was. Hope those fields turned out ok

Ag is a real job. It takes real skills, knowledge, and people who GAF about what they're doing. Stop treating agriculture like society's dumping ground.

Jamelle Bouie also had a thread that was about a slightly different topic – pundits pontificating that "other people" should go work in factories — but it ended up in an allied place:

i think that if you are an upper income writer living in a major urban area complaining about “the laptop class” — really, if you are a knowledge worker of any kind complaining about the “laptop class" — you have an obligation to quit your job and go work in a factory for a year

you’ll never hear me complaining about that shit. my grandparents did factory work and labored as domestics — and my parents joined the military — so that my brother and i could provide for our families without destroying our bodies

the other thing is that no one who fetishizes manual labor actually cares to improve life for people who are in those circumstances! no support for unionization or a generous welfare state! no interest in policies that make life easier for people who work their hands or afford them more autonomy!

Brooke Rollins is another fine example of the incompetence of the Trump regime. Jesus. On the same day Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy once again defamed the New York subway system as dangerous, when cars kill more than 40,000 people a year. And more than 100 people died in flooding in Texas after DOGE has decimated FEMA and NOAA and the National Weather Service...

Here's what Tom Tomorrow had for this week. You can't top it:


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Cars! Cars! Cars!

Another negative effect of the Republican Murder Bill that got no attention:

Car buyers will now be allowed write off up to $10,000 per year in interest they've paid on auto loans. Because subsidizing car- (or SUV-, or light truck-) driving is what we really need to be doing, right now! Right!

Bike commuters, on the other hand, had their $240-per-year benefit cut.

The new deduction for car loans is estimated to cost $57 billion over 10 years (2025–2034), which is about three times as much spent on bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure by the federal government in the last 35 years.

This, of course, is heaped on top of the cuts to clean energy and increased subsidies to oil and coal. COAL!