Monday, March 18, 2024

Not the Place to Move

U.S. population shifts over the past several decades have been recorded by the Census. Here are a couple of maps that show two versions, one a snapshot between the two most recent censuses, and one combining most of two census time periods:

2010–2019

2000–2018

I had just seen a map like this and was thinking about the growth of population in Idaho, with its 14% growth in the 2010s and 36% growth from 2000–2018, when I saw this story about the loss of obstetric care-givers in the state

The gist is that 22% of practicing OB-GYNs have left Idaho since the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, including 55% of the high-risk practitioners. There are only five high-risk practitioners left in the state. Five.

After all that population growth, Idaho had just shy of 2 million people in 2023. According to the Census, about half of those people are female, and they don't all appear to be beyond child-bearing years.

This seems very bad.


Sunday, March 17, 2024

People's Graphic Design Archive

Have I shared before about the People's Graphic Design Archive?

No? Well, now I have.

It's a place to constantly check because it's always changing as people upload work from all time periods and places.

Here's one sample:


Saturday, March 16, 2024

Charles Hamilton

Back in late February I missed posting about the announced death of Charles V. Hamilton, a Columbia University professor who died in November 2023. His obituary from the New York Times ran in the Star Tribune, but this Washington Post article is more complete than what I saw (gift link).

I had never heard of Hamilton until I saw the obituary in the Star Tribune, but it's clear he and his work were everywhere at key points. He popularized the phrases Black Power and institutional racism and provided intellectual gravitas to the movement associated with Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael).

I know it's naive, but it always amazes me to find out about a person who played a major role in spreading ideas I've known about for a long time, but I've never heard of him. Where was the short-coming — in me, my education, or in active suppression? I know I'm a bit too young to have read the material he wrote on these subjects as it was coming out, but it surprises me that I never came across his name and bio before now.


Friday, March 15, 2024

Heading Off Theocracy

I have a sick obsession with Christian Nationalists and the theocracy they want to enact in this country. They're the opposite of everything we need, and at a deep level I don't understand them and how they can think what they want makes sense in general, let alone in this country.

A recent Why Is This Happening podcast was helpful, while still a bit frightening. The guest was Doug Pagitt, an evangelical pastor who heads a group called Vote Common Good. As the description on the podcast says, the group "has been on a nationwide tour focused on directly engaging evangelicals in key swing states with the hope of swaying a critical percentage of them against former President Donald Trump."

One of the most memorable moments in the podcast was Pagitt describing a person he talked to near the Texas border who didn't believe Trump had said immigrants are polluting the blood of America. Pagitt showed him a quote; the guy didn't believe it was real. Someone just says Trump said that, he claimed. So Pagitt showed him video of Trump saying it. And the guy said, "Well he only said that once. It might not have been what he meant."

Jaw-dropping.

But Pagitt interprets that to mean the guy himself doesn't agree with what Trump was saying, and since he can't reconcile that fact, he pretends to himself that it's not what Trump means.

Which of course is b.s., but it's very charitable and gives some basis for Pagitt to be able to talk to a person like this and maybe make some headway in changing his mind about Trump.

It's work that's beyond me, but it takes people like Pagitt to do it, as well as ex-evangelicals who are there for all the people who are leaving churches these days.


Thursday, March 14, 2024

A Brief History of Eugenics

This image comes from a long but readable tweet thread by Craig Spencer, physician and public health history professor at Brown University:

As you can probably guess, the subject of the thread is the history of eugenics. The term isn't as old as one might think: it was coined only in the late 19th century.

Reading Spencer's thread, I found mention of names I've posted about before (here and here): Charles Davenport, H.H. Laughlin, Alexander Graham Bell, and the Eugenics Record Office, which was located in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.

The eugenicists' deep well of belief in protecting some form of purity, or their fear of contamination, is alien to me. Much as I dislike invoking Jonathan Haidt these days, it brings to mind his finding from The Righteous Mind that conservatives feel much more strongly about sanctity than liberals

 

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

More on Immigration

I'm not a big fan of Jen Psaki, the former White House press secretary who anchors a show on MSNBC these days. But I usually catch at least part of her Monday evenings when she's "in the seat" instead of Chris Hayes, and this week she ended that show with Jonathan Katz as her guest. 

He's the independent journalist who caught Alabama Sen. Katie Britt's big ol' lie in the Republican response to the State of the Union Address. They spent most of the interview talking about that, but at the end, right around the 3:30 mark in this video, Psaki asked Katz to name one thing people say about immigration that drives him the most crazy. 

I love his answer. 

My partial transcription (some of this is quoted, some paraphrased) is that the victims of the dysfunction at the border, the backlog are the immigrants. But in the U.S., almost everyone, including Democrats, talks about it as the opposite—as if "Americans," or "your children," are the victims. 

People coming to the U.S. are fleeing terrible things, he said, and they're being demonized and weaponized in our politics and it hurts everybody.

It reminded me of a book that I read several years ago but never got around to posting about: "They take our jobs!" and 20 other myths about immigration by Aviva Chomsky (Beacon Press, 2007). It came out 17 years ago, but looking through the chapter titles, you would have no idea that it wasn't written last week. Except the myths have gained strength, if anything.

Which reminds me — the St. Croix County board of supervisors voted 15–4 yesterday to pause refugee resettlements, as I previewed on Monday. Even though no one has proposed settling anyone in their county and the supervisors don't legally have jurisdiction over the decision. 

At the meeting where the vote was taken, this happened, according to Star Tribune reporter Maya Rao:

Residents filled the main chambers and overflow rooms, as they have in recent meetings featuring hours of public comment. Some shook their heads and snickered when one supervisor recited the famous quote on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." Supervisors repeatedly noted that refugees are approved to come here legally and unrelated to the crisis at the border.

Sounds like a very welcoming meeting to attend. I wonder how reporter Rao felt being there. 

I also wonder if the folks who snickered can be banned from visiting the Statue of Liberty.


Tuesday, March 12, 2024

We Are Better Off Now than We Were Four Years Ago

Lots of other people have been writing over the past few days about what was happening four years ago when the covid pandemic became real to us all. I'm not sure why four years seems like the interval to write about; maybe it's because 2020 was an election year and this echo of an election year is bringing it back. Will this happen next year, too, when it's the more usual "anniversary" year?

Anyway, it made me look back at my posts from four years ago. First, I realized I had to search the word "corona" instead of "covid" in order to find the first mention, so that was itself a minor reminder of how things have changed. 

One brief post to point to is from March 9. I called it Before and After:

“Everything we do before a pandemic will seem alarmist. Everything we do after a pandemic will seem inadequate.”
—Michael O. Leavitt,  former secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (under George W. Bush... he started early in 2005, before Hurricane Katrina)

The virus featured heavily in my February 2020 Twitter round-up (which I light-heartedly titled "Going Viral"). It looks as though my first mentions of coronavirus were in back-to-back posts about Mafia Mulligan's ineffective actions in response to the outbreak on February 25 and 26

Of course, we now know all this was well after U.S. Senators had been briefed and some had sold their sensitive stocks, and Trump had given interviews to Bob Woodward explaining that he knew just how bad it was.

Meanwhile, I was about to enter a hellacious multi-month period of upheaval here in the Twin Cities that (personally) could have been much worse. No one died in my immediate circle, after all. Many others lost so much, and so many.

It's hard to remember just how bad it was except in the times when a memory sneaks through.


Monday, March 11, 2024

What, Me Racist?

Yesterday, the Sunday Star Tribune had an interesting juxtaposition on its front page, plus a business section front page column added to the mix:

The story at left tells about how seniors and people with disabilities in rural communities and smaller cities are struggling to maintain access to transportation services for medical appointments because of staffing problems (as well as insufficient reimbursements). The older white man pictured in a wheelchair is being helped by a Black man named Chris Isaya. I don't know that Isaya is an immigrant, but I'd be willing to bet money that he is, like many workers in nursing homes and other caring roles. There have also been numerous stories in recent years about the Greater Minnesota downtowns revived by immigrant-owned business — sometimes African or Asian refugee-owned, sometimes Latino-owned.

The column on the right side of the front page is headlined "Refugee backlash emerges in Wis." (gift link). It tells of how people in St. Croix County, Wisconsin, home to the Twin Cities exurb Hudson, just across the border, are riled up about too many dang refugees from Myanmar and two Congolese countries being brought to their almost all-white, population-losing part of America. 

Half of Wisconsin's towns lost population in the 2020 census but the people in St. Croix County want to be stranded in their houses with no one to take care of them in their dotage, I guess. 

But they're not racist or xenophobic, no sir! The story quotes a member of the Republican party telling us so. It's about taxation without representation. Those refugees will be sucking on the teat of all those taxpaying Wisconsins, see? Those people just don't want to work.

The misinformed people who support the Right in its immigrant fear-mongering are backing a Republican bill that would require any local official who "is contacted by a nonprofit or federal agency about proposed placements of refugees" to report it "to every municipality, county and school district within a 100-mile radius." And each one of those entities would have to have a public meeting and hear public comments about the request.

A 100-mile radius would cover half the state of Wisconsin, generally, so that basically precludes any resettlement, which is the intent.

All those non-racists who came out to comment at the St. Croix County hearing were clear about what they thought. "I don't want to live in a third-world hell-hole," said one, according to the Star Tribune. People in the audience clapped. 

Other speakers told the usual lies about failure to screen refugees, refugees' failure to assimilate, why don't "they have to wait in line like I did" to come to the U.S. (there is no line), and that refugees would be a fiscal drain. 

In Minnesota, most of us know — as the headline on the business section column by Evan Ramstad at the right side of my photo above says — migrant influxes benefit us. Documented or undocumented migrants, and also refugees, despite their traumatic reasons. We could make it easier for them than we do, I know, and that would bring the benefits of their presence faster. But there are studies that demonstrate that immigrants of all types bring innovation, new businesses, and economic growth. And also less crime.

But that's not the story of fear and paranoia the Right wants to tell.

Gillian Branstetter's recent post, which linked the Right's joined obsession with divorce, fascism, and transgender children, had a quote that is relevant to this topic, and made me think of my own sister who could be the most empathetic person for anyone she knew but was poisonously anti-immigrant:

Particularly in the U.S. (with its near-zero social safety net), mothers are trapped in a permanent state of precarity and judgment that incentivizes paranoia and distrust of all forces outside the home—be it “gender ideology” and vaccines or, for white mothers, racist fears of migrants and urban crime.

They're sad people, cutting themselves off so they can suck on their Fox News anti-pacifier. I hope there's a fight for the soul of Western Wisconsin, from Eau Claire to River Falls to Hudson. That's one place close enough to campaign.


Sunday, March 10, 2024

Time for a RECAP

Just about every Cory Doctorow novel contains at least one mini-lecture on a topic he thinks is needed for to understand an aspect of the story. In Little Brother, it was about the way two-way encryption works, and every time I reached that part of the book, my eyes glazed over.

In his latest book, The Bezzle, my eyes didn't glaze over. One of the topics is the privatization of law, which I knew almost nothing about.

Since 1998, case law has been paywalled in an online system called PACER. Access is by the PDF page, and the search tools are bad, so it's easy to rack up bills fast. Which is not that big a problem for law firms who bill their clients, but is a big impediment to anyone else.

Starting in 2009, open-access activists created a browser plug-in called RECAP (PACER backwards, get it?) that downloads every page as its accessed from PACER and puts it into an open archive where anyone can reach it. Then when someone searches PACER, if the page exists in RECAP, it sends the free copy to the searcher before they're charged by PACER.

"RECAP," Doctorow's first-person character narrates, "exists because the law belongs to all of us. U.S. law — like all works created by the U.S. government — is in the public domain."

In 2007, 17 public libraries were given free access to PACER (I imagine that was after an earlier round of complaints). With that access, open-access activists brought thumb drives to those libraries and copied as much PACER content as they could to upload to RECAP.

21-year-old Aaron Swartz was one of those activists. He downloaded and freed up to $2 million worth of documents at the libraries to upload to RECAP. 

It has been 11 years now since Swartz's death. If you don't know about Swartz, this Rolling Stone article from early 2013 gives a good overview of his life and what led to his death at age 26.

In addition to finding out about the existence of PACER and RECAP, I learned today that as a pre-teen and then a teen, Aaron Swartz was involved in the development of RSS, the Creative Commons, and Reddit. I also learned that in the time just before his death, he had become good friends with Ben Wikler, a name I now know because Wikler is head of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, and he's in the national news periodically when it comes to that state's Republican gerrymandering and election denialism.

It's always strange when you start from one fact you never knew and end up with a bunch of others.


Saturday, March 9, 2024

Alabama's Best?

I didn't watch the Republican response to the State of the Union address, though I've seen some clips from it now that Alabama Sen. Katie Britt's odd performance has become at least a social media news story.

I'm not sure how widely the second part of the story has gotten out beyond social media circles, but a guy named Jonathan Katz deconstructed Britt's claim that a woman at the Texas border told her about being sex trafficked as a child. Britt's delivery implied that it happened in the U.S., and — less clearly but one would have assumed because of her rhetorical omission — that it was under a Democratic president.

With minimal sleuthing and using only publicly available information (yet undiscovered by "real" journalists, who clearly didn't look), Katz put the truth together. The now clearly adult woman Britt referred to was 12 at the time, but her trauma happened back during the George W. Bush administration in Mexico — and nowhere near the border. 

Britt heard about it during a 2023 trip to Texas, but it wasn't a confidential heart-to-heart moment — again, something that she implied in her speech. The information came from a statement made by the survivor-activist at a press conference. She has told her story many times, including in front of Congress.

Yes, women and girls are sexually assaulted while trying to come to the U.S. for asylum or otherwise without documentation. They're victims, and for the Right to use that experience against immigration reform is bad enough, but to lie about it just shows the depths of their moral vacancy.

As historian Will Jones said about the lie on BlueSky,

That Katie Britt lied about rape to mobilize violence against migrants makes it even more similar to the way racists used rape scares to encourage lynching of Black men in the 20th century. We can't just laugh this off as a lie — it's a very deliberate strategy.

That's clearly what they're up to, and have been up to since at least 2015 when Trump came down the gold escalator and declaimed that Mexico was sending its rapists—even though all the statistics are clear that immigrants (including undocumented immigrants) commit far less crime than people born in the U.S.

The lies continue. While the liars wear crosses around their necks, of course.

 

Friday, March 8, 2024

The Gnadenhutten Massacre

Somehow, even "genocide" seems an inadequate description for what happened, yet rather than viewing it with horror, most Americans have conceived of it as their country's manifest destiny.
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, p. 79. 

Today is the anniversary of such a horror, and until today it was one I had never heard of, not even in reading books like Dunbar-Ortiz's. I guess that's because there are just too many like it for a casual learner to know of them all without a source like the Equal Justice Institute, which shares facts on the day they happened. 

Today is the anniversary of the Gnadenhutten Massacre in 1782, in what became Ohio, about 20 miles south of Canton.

Christianized pacifist members of the Delaware tribe staying at Gnadenhutten were blamed for raids by other Indigenous people. A troop of Pennsylvania militiamen actually voted on whether to execute them or not, which is worse than if it had been done in the heat of the moment. They then waited until the next morning to carry it out, and listened to their victims singing hymns and praying through the night, before bludgeoning them to death.

There were more children among the murdered than either men or women. The Wikipedia page has more gruesome details.

According to EJI,

The Gnadenhutten Massacre has been called the greatest atrocity of the Revolutionary War. When the U.S. Congress learned of the incident, it ordered an investigation. However, the investigation was soon called off due to concerns an inquiry would "produce a confusion and ill will amongst the people."

I wonder if that would have been true at the time, given attitudes among European American settlers toward Native people.

In 1889, Theodore Roosevelt called the killings "a stain on frontier character that the lapse of time cannot wash away." He was right that it cannot be washed away, but his idea that it is a stain on frontier character is all too typical of his and others' mentality. 

It is the very nature of frontier mentality, rather than its antithesis.


Thursday, March 7, 2024

Cherry Blossoms 2.0

Much as I like the artistic graph showing the Japanese cherry blossom times recorded since the year 812 that I posted last year, this graph is clearer as a representation of the data:

I've added a few more year calibrations at the right end to make it extra clear that the trend line was moving within a set 10-day range up until 1950. Though it had started its downward trend around 1900, that still fit within the normal trend. But 1950 is the approximate year when it began to dive below any point that had existed at least since 812. 

Since 1950 it has continued on just as steep a line downward, after a few years of flattening out. The actual bloom dates sometimes reach well into March, with the trend line, of course, lagging. Given the recent bloom dates on the chart, the trend line will continue to fall unless there is quite a run of much later bloom dates soon.