I Could Tell Stories, But that Doesn't Make the Subject Storied

When the country is run by the worst people in the world, it's almost fun to let yourself get bent out of shape by minor things like misuse of a word in a newspaper column.

That happened today in the syndicated "Asking Eric" advice column, which had a letter that the Star Tribune headlined "When to share family secrets." The first sentence was this:

I have two brothers with storied pasts from 60 years ago.

I read that and expected to hear about the brothers' great accomplishments, so I was surprised to immediately be told that one of them had a child when he was a teen (okay, that's not so bad but is also not usually considered an accomplishment) and the other one had molested a niece for eight years.

Eric, this is not what "storied" means. 

This misuse of the word means the letter writer, columnist, and at least one copy editor at the Star Tribune all do not know that "storied" means something much more like "legendary" or "distinguished." 

It does not mean "infamous."

Harumph. 

Yes, I feel a tiny bit better. I await your fulsome praise (not).

The Sudden Appearance of Liam

I've mentioned the cartoon "Crankshaft" a few times recently. 

One recurring character is a cartoonist, who's being interviewed about his life by the local newspaper guy. It's not my favorite part of the strip, but today I was startled to find his reminiscence about a high school essay interrupted by something much more topical:

Apologies for the bad reproduction: the Star Tribune's printing took a double hit on that page. Clicking to enlarge will definitely help.

Rain, a Week Before

Today was a day when I was happy to have a chocolate chip cookie for dessert at lunch and a chocolate muffin after dinner (during a meeting). 

It was raining all day, which is a good thing in a year of drought, but still kind of dreary. 

Walking in the rain and avoiding the resulting mud seemed like a metaphor for getting through the next week before the election. We'll see if there are any landslides or floods.

How About a Heat Ray?

Today I learned, via a Facebook post, that there is such a thing as the euphemistically titled Active Denial System. It's a heat ray developed for the U.S. military that sends an energy wave up to 700 yards to heat the water molecules in the surface skin cells of anyone and anything in its path. The intent, on paper, is to make anyone who feels it run away from the area where it is beamed.

700 yards. I like to think of those in terms a lot of Americans can understand. That's seven football fields. Sounds really focused to me.

Since it essentially feels as though you are being microwaved, that's likely to be the reaction — if a person has the physical ability to flee. Which is a big if. The ifs also include that people won't trip or get trampled, have more fragile skin that burns more easily, or experience some interaction with metal on their body. That last item hasn't been thoroughly test yet because, you know... human subject research with a dangerous weapon.

The post I saw on Facebook said that the Department of Homeland Security has been authorized to test ADS for the U.S. southern border. 

I didn't know if any of this was true, so I found the trusty Wikipedia article on the topic, which confirmed the basics of all that, with sources. It did not say that DHS has currently been authorized to test at the border. 

It did, however, say this about concerns with the technology:

Critics cite that despite the stated intent of the ADS to be a non-lethal device designed to temporarily incapacitate, and despite that ADS had undergone legal and treaty compliance reviews ... and determined to be in compliance with the applicable laws and treaties, that modifications or misuse by an operator could nevertheless turn the ADS into a more damaging weapon which could potentially violate international conventions on warfare.

Some have focused on the lower threshold of use which may lead those who use them to become "trigger-happy," especially in dealing with peaceful protesters. Others have focused on concerns that weapons whose operative principle is that of inflicting pain (though "non-lethal") might be useful for such purposes as torture, as they may leave little or no evidence of use, but undoubtedly have the capacity to inflict horrific pain on a restrained subject. According to Wired, the ADS has been rejected for fielding in Iraq due to Pentagon fears that it would be regarded as an instrument of torture.

The article also included:

In September 2020 it was revealed that federal officials had explored the use of the device and the Long Range Acoustic Device to disperse civilians protesting outside the White House in June of that year, but had been advised that the National Guard was not currently in possession of either device.

In August 2020, it was revealed that the use of the device had allegedly been considered in 2018 on the Mexico-United States border to prevent further illegal immigration.

Those sentences cited stories from the BBC, Guardian, New York Times and Forbes. 

This recent story from Scripps News does say the Pentagon has given DHS permission to test the device at the border:

The memo authorizes the “temporary loan” of one ADS system for seven months, starting in September, and states that it “shall not be operated by DoW (Department of War) personnel,” appearing to absolve the Pentagon of any responsibility for how the directed-energy system may ultimately be deployed.

The DHS permission was also reported in the Guardian. I assume that means September 2026, as in last month: so DHS already has the weapon. 

Downsizing

I'm thinking about moving and downsizing, and with it, getting rid of the accumulation of 60+ years. As I've mentioned, I was treated for cancer in the past couple of years. It has a chance of recurring, so it seems like a good time to downsize and go through that accumulation so no one else has to — just in case.

A notable portion of the potentially downsized stuff came from my parents, some from my grandparents, and a bit from earlier generations. Daughter Number Three-Point-One, now getting to the low end of what is considered middle-aged, has her own dishes and furniture at this point, and — like many younger Millennials — is less inclined toward clutter in the first place. Some of her cousins are absolute minimalists. 

Does she need or want teapots I remember from one grandmother's house, or a wooden clown doll from the other grandmother's childhood? What about photo albums full of pictures my dad compiled but never labeled well, depicting his and my mother's progenitors? If I don't know who the people shown are, how is she supposed to?

What are we to do with these objects that store memories? Whose memories are they, or will they become in the future? 

How many generations can one person preserve, if any single person can only personally remember two generations-worth of people? 

My grandparents are significant to me, but my daughter doesn't remember meeting any of them. My own great-grandparents have come to feel significant to me through research, but compared to the people I personally knew, it's not the same. It's like reading a history book instead of living through an event.

I've never understood the idea of ancestor worship*, but I'm beginning to think ancestor veneration is something we could use in this country as a way to better sustain the memories of previous generations. Maybe I can preserve a few items, one or two items per person, to pass to her within a modern-day altar of the ancestors. 

I'll think about that while I'm winnowing the stuff of years that's stored in my home.

__

* I'm not sure "worship" of ancestors is what is actually practiced in cultures the West represents as doing that. Ancestor veneration may be a better term for it, which seems to me a meaningful difference from worship. 

Worship is inherently religious and implies devotion, as in bowing down to, lowering oneself, and even obedience in some sense. Veneration means regarding with reverence, to regard as worthy of great honor. It's a version of respect. 

More Hats to Cheer You Up

I knew I had posted about these before. My local co-op once again has fair trade hats that will make you happy as you pass by:

This time, instead of a purple grimace and a red panda, I see a llama, a pony, a brown bear, and a goofily friendly green monster of some kind or other. And that may be something resembling a poisonous but attractive red and white mushroom, if I'm not mistaken.

They're made by Andes Gifts.

They Make the Debt

I am not one who spends time caring about the federal deficit or the U.S. debt. Compared to the climate change bomb that awaits us, the debt is imaginary. 

However, I know the debt is politically real, especially the way it suddenly becomes important as soon as Democrats are in the White House, and especially if they are also in control of Congress. So watch for that if things go well in November, and especially if they also continue to go well in 2028.

On that note, here's some of what Heather Cox Richardson posted yesterday:

...the deficit for the fiscal year that ended on September 30 clocked in at about $2 trillion, about $160 billion more than it was during former president Biden's last year as president. Next year's deficit will likely be even greater.

How we got to this point...is that the Republicans' 2025 extension of their 2017 tax cuts will reduce government revenues by $4.5 trillion over the next ten years. Their cuts to Medicaid and SNAP reduced spending by $1.1 trillion. That leaves a growing deficit that climbs to more than $4 trillion as the cost of servicing the debt grows.

Economist Justin Wolfers explained: "Washington has discovered a brilliant financial strategy. Cut benefits for people who need them, cut taxes for people who don't, and borrow the difference from people who aren't old enough to vote."

Those numbers...don't include the cost of Trump's war on Iran. The administration acknowledges that fuel and munitions for that war have cost about $45 billion, but the real costs run far higher with the destruction...of U.S. bases in the Middle East. The Department of Defense has asked for an additional $200 billion for the war, and Trump has asked for $1.5 trillion to fund the military in 2027, which...is up 44% from before the war on Iran.

The whole thing is hideous, but it was that last sentence that made me quote it. They want to fund the Department of Defense, which is unauditable, with almost 50% more money next year than before Trump's illegal war started. 

And as I said at the top, we know that as soon as anyone with a D next to their name is in charge, suddenly it will be time to care about debt and deficits again, and anything but the Pentagon will be what gets cut.
 

America Is a Gun

In February 2016, a British man writing under the pseudonym Brian Bilston, the “poet laureate of Twitter,” published this poem:

America is a Gun

England is a cup of tea.
France, a wheel of ripened brie.
Greece, a short, squat olive tree.
America is a gun.

Brazil is a football on the sand.
Argentina, Maradona’s hand.
Germany, a oompah band.
America is a gun.

Holland is a wooden shoe.
Hungary, a goulash stew.
Australia, a kangaroo.
America is a gun.

Japan is a thermal spring.
Scotland is a highland fling.
oh, better to be anything
than America as a gun.

I heard about the poem at some point after that. It gets reposted or quoted when there's a particularly prominent mass shooting: Uvalde, Annunciation school in Minneapolis last year, last week in Bend. Too many to remember. 

But I've been thinking about the poem's words as more than the tragedy of mass shootings, as if that isn't enough. About how our country has more guns within its borders than people; how way too many young men have guns with them so that when they have the normal disagreements young men often have, someone gets shot instead of punched; and how those shootings then get spun into media panic stories of "gangs" operating. Then, even when violent crime is actually declining as it is now, the message of fear is used to flog the message of retribution and more prisons. 

How police in the U.S. now routinely walk around in bullet-proof vests, and you can't have a community festival without paying for armed police to parade through, watching for possible shooters everywhere. That means there are more guns in front of us, routintely — supposedly making us safer. 

America is a gun, and it makes the National Rifle Association and the gun manufacturers very, very happy. 

A Survey on Empathy

I started following Jack Jenkins, a prolific reporter/writer for Religion News, some time in the past year or so on BlueSKy.

For an atheist, that may seem a bit of a weird thing, but he keeps me on top of things like this: An ‘empathy gap' divides Americans ahead of the midterms, says PRRI report. 

He posted this summary:

A survey released Tuesday (Oct. 20) found that Republicans and evangelicals increasingly see empathy as a danger that can lead society away from God.

The survey of 5,200 American adults was done by the Public Religion Research Institute.


(Click to enlarge for better readability.)

Combining the stronglies and not stronglies at either end of the graph's spectrum, 83% of religiously unaffiliated people and 80% of people from non-Christian religions think empathy is at least somewhat foundational, while 54% of evangelicals think it can literally become dangerous to God's truth. 

Conversely, only 42% of evangelicals think empathy is foundational, the lowest by far of any of the sub-groups identified. The New Testament, I think it is clear, is in agreement that empathy is foundational. 

A few comments on the survey's results:

What we’re seeing here is fascism: the religious devotion of the lynch mob, the “old time religion” of enslavers, and the white piety of the Jim Crow state. It won’t go away on its own, but at minimum we can stop subsidizing this extremist ideology and begin to build bonds of genuine community.
Dr. William Horne @wihorne.bsky.social

the idea that empathy is dangerous has been permeating right-wing spaces for a while, but it's not an actual element of their ideology as much as it's a defense mechanism against confronting the reality of their cruelty. the right doesn't reject empathy entirely, they selectively deploy it. when a white person is murdered by an immigrant, for example, they will call upon your empathy. but empathy directed at their enemies is cast aside as toxic.
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

I tell my kids that empathy is bad, then wonder why they don’t call anymore.
Norm Charlatan

When You’re President, They Let You Do It

Thanks to kottke.org for pointing me to a recent Ta-Nehisi Coates essay called "Donald the Great" (archive link of the whole thing here). 

Kottke's excerpts are here, under the headline "Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Consequence of Donald Trump." 

Coates, of course, does not think Donald is great, but rather that he is consequential for all the wrong reasons:

The example that Trump has set, the scope of what is possible should one embrace the dark powers of the White House, will not dissipate. It turns out that you can deploy secret police onto American streets. You can deport immigrants in defiance of the courts. You can have the Justice Department badger your enemies. And you can become very rich while doing it. And some of the most powerful sectors in America, those who most loudly extol their own love of country, will stand around and watch you do it. Asked why he was making deals during his second term, Trump gave a succinct and chillingly accurate summation: “I found out that nobody cared.” And to the extent that there is a genius to Trump, it is in his apprehension of this reality — so very few people who matter care. When you’re president, they let you do it.

In his post, Kottke also included a half-hour video from the Vanity Fair podcast of Coates talking about the essay, which is worth watching or listening to.

I saw Kottke's post after reading my morning newspaper, which included yet another example of the way Trump's regime does exactly what Coates says. It was so outrageous I bitterly laughed out loud.

It was a New York Times story, reprinted in the Star Tribune, so I can't link to it. The headline is "DOJ seeks to disqualify judge overseeing golf course suit." 

Not only is the regime wanting to destroy a Washington, D.C. public park. Oh, no. His Department of Just-Us is also now attempting to get the judge who wants to stop them to recuse herself. 

Why? Because her righteous indignation at their courtroom behavior "continues a pattern of animus against the Trump administration." 

The judge, Ana C. Reyes, had ordered the government not to do surprise work. You know, like they did with the East Wing of the White House. So what did they do after she gave that order? They went ahead and cut down more than 400 trees (including many large ones) with no notice over the weekend of Indigenous Peoples' Day. 

As anyone might imagine, that did not please the judge. On October 12, she ordered various people from the Interior Department and National Park Service to appear in her courtroom on October 19. 

Last Friday, October 16, the associate attorney general filed for Reyes' recusal, citing her very anger at how she was disobeyed as reason for her recusal. It's another example of the regime's upside-downism, when the DOJ is headed by an attorney who should be disbarred, and the president is a convicted felon who tried to overthrow the government. 

A college friend of mine, who lives in the D.C. area, posted this to Facebook today:

Never hated anyone in my life as much as this man [Trump]. Hains Point (East Potomac Park) was never about being a “world class” golf course. It was a tiny course for beginners and for folks sneaking away on their lunch hour. What it HAS been about — for decades — is cyclists riding the 3.1 mile loop; picnickers enjoying a lunch by the water; fisherman angling off the railings; and walkers out for a stroll. It has never been a place many tourists went. Rather, it was a secret park for DC locals.

Today, the orange loser announced he was annexing the park for a golf course for himself. 

Like the Kennedy Center, the East Wing soon-to-be-ballroom, the non-Reflecting Pool, the gold-swizzled walls of the Oval Office and White House portico, and who knows what else we haven't even heard of, he stamps his ugliness on everything, mirroring the vileness of his inner life. Someone, please, stop letting him do it.

Annalee Newitz

Scholars of science fiction agree that one of the two major questions that run through the writer Philip K. Dick's large body of work is this: What is human? The most obvious example of this is in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which became the movie Blade Runner.

Having read all but one of the fiction works by current SF writer Annalee Newitz, I would say that a version of that question is also what underlies their work. The difference is the question for Newitz has become: What is a person? 

And there is an extension: Who has the power to decide the answer?

I previously read Newitz's 2023 novel The Terraformers, which was about corporate power in making that decision on a planet over several millennia. Are sentient trains people? What about cat journalists? 

Then there was their much more recent novella Automatic Noodle, which is about social and state power as it affects self-aware bots in San Francisco. 

Now there's the new novel A Wall Is Also a Road, which I just finished. This book is about power within academia, but this is the academy as none of us have ever imagined it. No spoilers from me on that, but it's not news to say the book combines that story line with visits to Pompeii before the eruption of Vesuvius.

I really enjoyed the book, even though originally I found the title completely confounding. I have now learned to trust Newitz, and have to go back and find their first novel, Autonomous. 

That's Why Some Call It a Second Reconstruction

It was 155 years ago today — October 17, 1871 — that President Ulysses S. Grant declared martial law in South Carolina.

What?!

That's what I learned today from the Equal Justice Institute's calendar. 

The feds had investigated the Ku Klux Klan's violence in the state. In keeping with the Ku Klux Klan Act, which Congress had passed and Grant signed earlier in 1871, nine counties in South Carolina were warned that they were depriving citizens of their civil rights through terrorism, and that martial law would be declared if the Klan did not stop its actions. 

They didn't stop, so Grant followed through: 

Many affluent Klan members fled the jurisdiction to avoid arrest, but by December 1871 approximately 600 Klansmen were in jail. More than 200 arrestees were indicted, 53 pleaded guilty, and five were convicted at trial. Klan terrorism in South Carolina decreased significantly after the arrests and trials...

But as anyone familiar with U.S. history knows, Reconstruction did not last, and racial violence against Black people increased across the South over the next decades.

I think there needs to be a willingness to approach the Right in the U.S. today from that perspective if anything is ever going to change for the better in this country. 

Here are two essays I saw recently that touch on the core underlying what we now think of as Trumpism, but is really the Right's fight against a pluralistic democracy, going back to the same beliefs that led to the Civil War:

Demonizing Democracy by Thomas Zimmer, Georgetown University historian. Subtitle: The Right has long derided any attempt at leveling racial and social hierarchies as anti-American “socialism” or “communism.” What they are actually fighting is equality. 

Polarization Is Not the Problem by Lilliana Mason, Johns Hopkins University political scientist. Abstract: Partisan polarization is not the greatest threat to U.S. democracy, but a symptom of a deeper struggle over who belongs and deserves equal rights. Rapid gains by racial minorities, women, and LGBTQ citizens have produced an ethnonationalist backlash whose adherents now wield disproportionate power through the Republican Party. This conflict has intensified partisan animosity and moral disengagement, but a “both sides” diagnosis obscures the asymmetry between a faction seeking to reverse social progress and those resisting it. Polarization is therefore less the disease than democracy’s immune response to an unpopular, antidemocratic movement.* 

As Minnesota approaches an election where it's likely to elect a new governor famous for promoting herself for being great at "reaching across the aisle," I remember these words of Son of Baldwin, Robert Jones Jr.:

We can disagree and still love each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.

We don't need civility with people who want to control our lives, or who want us to die or disappear.

__

* Here's a quote from Mason's essay that I find oddly hopeful: 

The current ethnonationalist movement in the United States can only succeed with an extraordinary amount of violence; there is no other way to re-oppress the 70 percent of the population that is not white and male. This revanchist project is already being met with resistance.