Neon Signs

Neon signs are one of those things that clearly don't need to exist, and they wouldn't exist if this were a sustainable world. They can't be part of an earth where billions of people live within their carbon means.

But I love them. Here's one I noticed for the first time yesterday:


As seen in the window of Cafe Biaggio, University and Raymond Avenues in St. Paul.

Oh, Yeah, Deranged Is So Much Better than Deplorable

I expect junk thinking from Center of the American Experiment writers, but I used to think Stephen B. Young was worth reading. Young is executive director of the Caux Round Table, “an international network of business leaders working to promote a moral capitalism.” Specious as that mission may be, I have read some of his thoughts over the years and found them to be part of a reasonable conversation.

I’m not sure what’s going on with him in the past year, however. First there was a Star Tribune commentary from September 2016 titled The Case for Trump, then one from January 2017 called The Gospel of Winning: Trump’s Philosophy, and Its Policy Implications. Both show that Young is deeply misguided about Donald Trump’s abilities and appointments.

I confess I didn’t read them closely at the time, though, and mumbled to myself, Well, that guy is clearly not aging well.

But then there was his most recent piece, Our Half-Century of Derangement. In it, he says one thing I agree with: Pope Francis is seeking to “cure—as best he can—the ills of our world.” I have my disagreements with Francis, of course, but I believe he’s well-intended and tries to live his values.

Young, on the other hand, seems confused and hostile. He uses the right-wing term “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as a given and it goes downhill from there. I can’t get over how he sees no problem calling anti-Trump citizens “deranged,” but goes on and on about how Hillary Clinton’s use of “deplorables” was unacceptable. She, at least, qualified her statement to say she was referring to strident racists, sexists, Islamophobes, and so on.

Racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression do not exist in Young’s world, however. In his view, they are part of an academic scheme that started with misguided opposition to the war in Vietnam War, leading to distrust in government and worse. The Vietnam War, he tells us, was a good fight. Veterans’ PTSD is not caused by the effects of battle, but by internalizing the rejection veterans felt upon returning from the war. Some of those vets were even deranged enough to think Agent Orange made them sick. Imagine!

Young then leaps from his Vietnam alternate history to blaming the Left for the invention of white racism. Whiteness, he says, only existed in the South before the 1960s, and it was the Left that caused it to become part of American culture elsewhere. Young doesn’t see color, as Stephen Colbert used to say. Of course not. It’s the bad old Left that makes everyone white.

Oh, and while he’s at it, Young throws in the that feminist fantasy, “patriarchy.” You know, that’s just a myth.

Working against white privilege, white supremacy, patriarchy, and other oppressive social structures: those efforts are “cultural counternarratives [that] have acted as social cancers, filling our souls with unhappiness and resentment.”

We all know who the “our” is in “our souls,” right? The souls that really matter? They belong to people like Stephen B. Young: white, male, straight, wealthy enough to have gone to Harvard in the 1960s…

Yes, I certainly hope my favored cultural counternarratives have filled his soul with unhappiness.

—

I was hoping the Star Tribune would publish a substantial commentary in response to Young the following Sunday, but instead there were a few letters, one supporting him and three opposed. Here are the three critiques.

From Grace Heitkamp, Lonsdale:

The June 18 lead commentary — “Our half-century of derangement,” penned by Stephen B. Young — was shockingly provocative. To claim, as Young does, that the Vietnam War was winnable and only lost because of antiwar hippies; to claim that Agent Orange and the post-traumatic stress disorder of our soldiers was a result of “Vietnam Derangement Syndrome” is outrageous. To claim that the present citizen “fed-up” mentality against policies, domestic and foreign, is a result of citizens of the 1960s and the ’70s protesting an insane war is obscene.

According to Robert Caro in his LBJ biography: Fifty-eight thousand dead. Three hundred thousand wounded. More than 2 million Vietnamese killed and wounded. It’s hard to grasp numbers like that, knowing now that it was a war based on lies.

Mr. Young is attempting to rewrite history — it’s the lefties’ fault! — and if history is any guide, he will likely succeed.

From William R. Page, Eden Prairie:

Young has persuaded me of one thing. I do not doubt that his soul is filled “with unhappiness and resentment.” If I were as sensitive as he seems, I would be unhappy if he had persuaded me that my belief that racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, etc., should be stigmatized as such is a “social cancer.” I would be doubly unhappy and remorseful (not resentful) if I was persuaded by his assertion that “contemporary racists” (as opposed to the old-fashioned kind who were evidently eradicated by passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts) are those who deplore the continued endemic racism in our society. However, I do not find his arguments persuasive. On the contrary, I find his condemnation of those who support equal rights for all deplorable.

From Deborah Svanoe, Mounds View:

I gagged on the white, pasty pablum served up on the front page of Opinion Exchange last Sunday. Young just can’t understand why we can’t all just be as peaceful as the pope! Why can’t we all get along as well as he did with two fellow classmates who represented their minority race on the manicured grounds and in the rarefied air of Harvard? “Just two more guys”! “I don’t see white,” as Stephen Colbert might say. Young opines that Southern racism is just a manufactured concept, conjured up by those who wanted to make us whites feel guilty, for the purpose of trashing traditional values. Why, don’t they know racism was abolished “for good and forever” by the civil rights law? He uses the word “derangement” like Hillary Clinton used “deplorables.”

Piling on, D.J. Tice (“Jury has done its duty; now we must do ours”) urges “kindness, caution, acceptance and peaceful respect” for the Jeronimo Yanez verdict. He equivocates Philando Castile’s death with “whenever innocents die … citizens or police.”

These two authors are the type who reply to Black Lives Matter with “all lives matter.” They just don’t get it. Star Tribune, you need more black writers!

These writers all get at pieces of Young's wrongness, but I still hope someone will thoroughly critique his incredibly mistaken description of the Vietnam War.

A Thin Blue Line for One, Assumed Criminality for the Other

No Minnesota cop would say publicly that Jeronimo Yanez was unreasonable to shoot Philando Castile. That's part of the reason the jury could do what seems unthinkable to me, and find Yanez not guilty. The prosecution had a California-based expert witness, an ex-cop, but that wasn't good enough.

Today the Pioneer Press published a letter to the editor from a Madison, Wis., police detective saying exactly what all cops need to say. Angela Kamoske wrote:

I have been a police officer for 19 years. I love my job and serving my community. I have learned over the course of my career to never assume anything. As I watched the events unfold on July 6, 2016, on a Facebook Live feed, I thought that there must be more that happened. There must have been such a threat that wasn’t captured on this video, that forced Officer Yanez to feel his only option was to shoot into a vehicle with a child in the back seat.

Over the past two days, I have listened to the audio interviews. I have read the documents. And then I watched the dash cam video. And it broke me. Officer Yanez was in a position that if he perceived a threat, he could have disengaged. He could have taken other steps to ensure everyone’s safety, and not have forced this outcome.

Shooting a seat-belted man, with a child in the back seat, was not the only option. Until those of us who wear the badge are willing to stand up and speak out when we see things that are wrong, and lead hard conversations, how can we ever expect change?

Thanks to Detective Kamoske for that. I hope she manages to keep her job and serve the people of Madison.

And in case you didn't hear, in the days following the Castile killing, our state Bureau of Criminal Affairs — which investigates police killings because they can supposedly be impartial! — spent a bunch of time investigating Castile and Diamond Reynolds, especially their cell phones, email, and social media accounts. They didn't look into the killer's accounts at all.

Judges signed seven warrants for Castile's and Reynolds's accounts:

The day after Castile was killed, the BCA got a warrant to go through his car and phone, and a day later for Reynolds’ phone, examining the device as well as all of her incoming and outgoing calls for several days before the shooting.

On July 8, they sent a warrant to Facebook to view the couple’s Facebook accounts, and to make sure it was done without Reynolds’ knowledge.

“[The applicant for the search warrant] is aware through training and experience that individuals frequently call and/or text messages to each other regarding criminal activity during and/or after and event has occurred,” a BCA investigator wrote in his request. “Analysis of text messages and chats regarding the individuals involved in this incident may in fact assist in corroborating or refuting statements made by the individual involved in this investigation.” (emphasis added)

So clearly, 24 hours into the investigation, the BCA was thinking of Castile as a perp, not a victim. He and Reynolds are described in that quote as people who are involved in criminal activity.

Facebook complied with the warrant, "but would not allow the search to be done in secret." Other companies complied, though, and did it in secret, including Apple, which gave access to Reynolds’ iCloud account.

Those searches turned up nothing.

More evidence that the BCA was trying to justify Yanez's initial traffic stop, based on Castile's supposed resemblance to a robbery suspect:

On Aug. 1, the BCA got records from Castile’s cellphone provider to determine his whereabouts before the shooting. They wanted to see if he was potentially a suspect from a May 22 traffic stop, then if he was near a gas station robbed July 2.

Meanwhile, they were interviewing Yanez and telling him he had done a good job.

A month after the shooting, the BCA finally looked into Yanez's phone records, but only after Ramsey County Attorney John Choi insisted that they do so.

Even after that, the BCA wasn't done with their attempts to find justification for the shooting in an imagined criminal past for Castile, though. In early April of this year, as the trial approached, they were searching the state gang database to seek if Castile was included in any way. But of course, found nothing. He was just a regular citizen going about his business. A gun owner who followed the rules and had a permit.

But his skin was the wrong color and he had his hair in locks. Oops.

Darth in the Daylilies

Somewhere in my neighborhood, there's a house with a funky yard. I came across it once before, but had forgotten about it. Doll heads and empty bowls are used to interesting effect among their plants, for instance.

Along a low stone wall, full of daylilies, there's a row of rounded objects, and among them, lost in the leaves, I saw this:


He lost his head, and this is clearly what happened to it. He's resting in peace.

A Logo that *Does* Read

Using a picture to stand in for a letter is a common way to make a logo. An apple becomes an O in an education-related logo, a mountain becomes a capital A or M. Or the outline of Minnesota becomes one of way too many letters that it does not resemble. Yada yada, you've seen these logos. They're not clever, and usually they're not very readable (like this one and this one).

But hey, here's a logo that uses a picture to replace a letter and it totally works, with charm and clarity:


It's possible, people. Just do a better job.

Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Cars

I have a new weather app on my phone. Recently, when I checked its hourly forecast overnight to see if it was going to rain, I saw this:


At first, I couldn't figure out what those little blue cars were doing behind the clouds in the sky. But it slowly dawned on me they probably meant to indicate it was going to be foggy.

I can't be the only one who finds this visual shift from "things located in the sky" to "things on the ground" disorienting. But the idea of little blue cars banging around up in the heavens is kind of appealing in a cartoonish way.

One Word in a Headline

It's easy to forget about the casual use of the epithet "Japs" if you didn't live through World War II. I recently ran across this ad celebrating VE day:


Click the image to zoom in and read the smaller type, but the headline is readable at this size: "You won the war in Europe, now let's whip the Japs."

The ad is meant to be a commemoration of the people from a company (Spaulding Bakeries) who were fighting in the war, and those who worked at home to supply food to the nation, and by extension, the war effort. But from my perspective, the thing I notice the most is that use of "Japs" in the headline.

The Non-Spanish Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918

Over at Science-Based Medicine, Harriet Hall has been having fun with Spanish Flu myths. But I found some of the true things about the 1918-19 influenza pandemic even more interesting.

One-third of the world's population was infected by the flu, and 20 to 50 million people died. Extrapolating our current population, the equivalent impact today would be 2.3 billion people infected and 93 to 233 million deaths.

The flu was not Spanish, which I already knew, but I'm not sure I ever had heard why it was called that. Hall explains,

Spain got the blame because it was a neutral country in WWI and had no wartime press censorship. The countries involved in the war censored news about flu cases in their own countries. When Spain reported its cases, that news was reprinted and everyone got the idea that that’s where the epidemic started.

On the myth front, Hall explains that the flu has been attributed to vaccines, aspirin overdoses, and government/pharma conspiracies. None of which is true, of course. It's H1N1 influenza, and has been sequenced from the body of an Inuit woman buried in the Alaskan permafrost. Scientists now hypothesize that it originated in birds and mutated to allow spread to humans.

German or English?

The overlap set of English words and German proper names could make a cool Venn diagram (for instance, I wonder how many people named Dieter are dieters?). But this is a great one that I saw recently:


Do you think the person who started the Diedrich company, probably based on some newly efficient or improved way of roasting coffee, died rich? I bet he did.

(As seen at the Dunn Brothers coffee shop in Hastings, Minnesota.)

The Skirt Is Not the Problem

For today, a tweet storm from Josh Weed‏ (@The_Weed), unrelated to obvious current topics, but addressing a contradiction that haunts many human societies:

I am a gay man who was raised in a heteronormative world. A part of this world I have always been baffled by is "modesty" culture.

The main premise of "modesty" culture is that women need to dress in a way that doesn't provoke sexual response in men. Which is insane. I think it is absolutely crazy that a man can look at a woman and say "I think you should wear something else, because seeing your skin makes me feel aroused. And that arousal is strong and I haven't learned how to appropriately manage it. So please change your clothes.

This is BONKERS. Especially when men then start to claim that a woman is *worth* more if they dress a certain way. As if covering flesh somehow earns a woman value, all because it doesn't evoke a sexual response in men. And then, if a woman DOESN'T do this? Well now a man has the right to chastise a woman, call her names, say she is slutty and wicked. All because *he* is having a sexual response!

Newsflash: women's worth is STATIC. It is inviolable. It doesn't change with what she does or doesn't wear. It doesn't change with sex. And a man's sexuality is HIS OWN RESPONSIBILITY.

Wanna known I know this? It's because in my whole life I have never told another man how to dress even though a man's body arouses me. I have never told a man he should put his shirt on on a hot day when he is on a summer run. I have never demanded modesty from a guy. I have never expected men to stop wearing loose basketball shorts just because they might be revealing to me and turn me on. In fact, I have had, my entire life, been in situations where men take ALL THEIR CLOTHES OFF RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME (locker rooms, etc.).

And guess what? Even though I have felt aroused, I have never EVER blamed another man for that arousal. My arousal is about ME. Not him. I have never assaulted another man for this. I have never raped another man for this. I have never claimed a man was "asking for it."

A person's worth is static, inviolable, and begins the day they are born as a baby until the day they die. Clothes do not change this. And a man's arousal is HIS OWN DAMN RESPONSIBILITY. It is NOT the responsibility of the body that evokes that arousal. Ever.

Straight men blaming women for their own sexual responses degrades women. And it disempowers men. It excuses them from taking ownership of their own bodies. And it allows them to build fury towards what they covet. It's dangerous. It leads to assault. It IS rape culture.

My four daughters deserve better than this. They deserve to be safe. They deserve to wear what feels good to them on a summer day. And they deserve to relish knowing that they are valuable no matter WHAT they wear. (You know, the same message men get from birth on!)

To which one person responded,

There's a great quote about how if lesbian/bi women don't misbehave upon seeing a woman in a short skirt, the problem isn't the skirt.

Turning Away from Turnip

A regular reader asked me to stop referring to Donald Trump as Turnip or the Turnip. What did turnips do to deserve this defamation? she asked. They are delicious. You can even pickle them.

Nothing, I say. The turnip is faultless. You are right.

I have affronted this noble vegetable and will henceforth use only Turmp (or Trump, I suppose) to refer to him. He is not good enough to share their humble name.


Rest well, turnip friends.

Yanez "Not Guilty" of Killing Philando Castile

Jeronimo Yanez has been found not guilty on all charges for killing Philando Castile and endangering the lives of Diamond Reynolds and her 4-year-old daughter. I was allowing myself to hope that the jury would find him guilty of at least the endangering charges, especially after they deliberated for almost five days.

I am imagining that one or two of the jurors were refusing to acquit (let's see... there were two African-descended people on the jury, I wonder who it could have been?), but they were worn down by the others to vote for acquittal. No way to know at this point, of course, but otherwise why would it have taken so long?

Here's the state of Twitter so far on the case, in reverse chronological order. I'll be at the protest tonight, 7:00 p.m., at the State Capitol.

Even as this has become so expected, we should never, ever lose a sense of outrage about it.
Ida Bae Wells‏ @nhannahjones

He did nothing wrong. He had a gun license. He did what the officer asked. The officer screwed up and gets NOTHING.
N. K. Jemisin

A system that perpetually condones the killing of people, without consequence, doesn't need to be revised, it needs to be dismantled!
Colin Kaepernick

When black men routinely get away w/killing cops we can talk abt need 2say Blue Lives Matter. Today that's like callin 4 white history month
Tim Wise‏

What happens to our souls when no hope is there for justice and no room is left for surprise? How any times can we do this, and not break? This system either kills us outright or it grinds us down day by day. Either way we land here. Again and again. What happens to our souls when no hope is there for justice and no room is left for surprise? How any times can we do this, and not break? We already know we need to love each other because this world doesn't love us. We don't need to be reminded, we don't need that lesson. But how do we keep believing that is enough?
jay smooth‏

On Wednesday, we were asked to come together after the congressional shooting. What do we do now that this brotha is dead and his murderer is free?
@drcarlhart

Philando Castile was murdered and apparently nobody did it.
Ashley C. Ford‏ @iSmashFizzle

How can Black people feel safe in this police state we live in?
Judith Browne Dianis‏

Let’s drop the pretenses and stop bothering to put police on trial for needlessly shooting black people. It would be more honest that way.
jelani cobb‏

serious question: what's the vetting process for cops? how are so many guys who get so scared in this difficult job?
@bomani_jones

The verdict in the Castile murder isn't proof the system is broken. It is proof that the system was built to oppress and it is working.
Mikki Kendall @Karnythia

They stopped him dozens more times for the next decade or so, until they shot him.
Gene Demby‏ @GeeDee215

Don't be fooled into believing a camera will bring justice. They turned lynchings into photo ops and postcards.
Melissa Harris-Perry‏

It is easier to blame jurors for really jacked up trial outcomes than it is to admit that injustice lives within our laws & legal processes.
T.L.‏ @talilalewis

[Philando Castile's] first [traffic] stop was for a learner's permit violation. "Three months after that first stop...his license was suspended and he went into his first spiral.... Of all of the stops, only six of them were things a police officer would notice from outside a car, things like speeding or having a broken muffler. Police stopped him on Jan. 8, 2003. They stopped him on Feb. 3 and on Feb. 12 and Feb. 26 and on March 4."
Gene Demby‏ @GeeDee215

The only thing worse than the verdict is the local news coverage of the verdict.
William Lindeke‏ @BillLindeke

Philando Castile had a permit to legally carry a gun. Philando Castile had a permit to legally carry a gun. Philando Castile had a permi-
Philip Lewis‏

Philando Castile "memorized the names of the 500 children he served every day—along with their food allergies."
Gabe Ortíz @TUSK81

"But why are so many Black people afraid of police?" Because society says they can kill us at will and not be punished.
Mikki Kendall @Karnythia

I've concluded white people are not rationally or morally capable of sitting on a jury where a police officer is the defendant.
TC‏ @tchopstl_

Yanez wasn't even found guilty of recklessly discharging a firearm - after shooting into a car with a four year old in the back seat.
The Advancement Project

there’s almost literally nothing a police officer can do to a black person that they can’t find legal justification for/get away with.
Joel D. Anderson @byjoelanderson

The criminal justice system - for a million different reasons - is not going to transform policing or hold it accountable. Ever.
Christopher Hayes

unreasonable fear cannot justify use of deadly force. unreasonable fear cannot justify use of deadly force. unreasonable fear cannot justify
andrea‏ @whtegrlinacrowd

Remember: in stand-your-ground states, everyone gets the immunity given to cops generally. (Except Black women like Marissa Alexander.)
Pat Thompson‏ @pattho

When police officers are allowed to kill (black) citizens for legally carrying a gun, what is the point of everyone carrying guns?
TC‏ @tchopstl_

Once Yanez said "I saw a gun" it was probably over. Despite all of the reason to be skeptical of that claim
Adam Miller‏ @ajm6792

We cannot claim to live in anything close to a just society if the police can kill someone for 6 seconds of alleged non-compliance
Adam Miller‏ @ajm6792

I should have known the jury wouldn't be able to convict based on the judge not allowing the prosecution to play the audio tape of Yanez's interview with the Bureau of Criminal Affairs. He allowed the transcript only, which masks Yanez's "unreasonableness." And then the judge would not let the jury have that transcript or court transcript of Yanez's testimony. The jury was clearly trying to decide if Yanez had been reasonable, and the judge deprived them of those tools.

Remember: this judge was the second one in the case. The first one was removed because of defense objections. They didn't have to give a reason, but the fact that the first judge was black (and also the second most senior judge on the county bench) is a pretty good guess for a reason.

The Yanez decision makes it clear that cops can shoot you if they think you've been smoking pot, as made clear in this Facebook post a few days ago by Robin Garwood, a legislative aide to Minneapolis City Councilmember Cam Gordon:

I obviously don't know what's going to happen, and whether there will be #justice4philando, but it's not looking good. And there's so much to write about this that I feel overwhelmed, but I want to second Carin's spot-on focus on the defense's marijuana excuse.

My dad smoked a lot of pot. For a long time he did it daily, or nearly daily. I have had a lot of friends in my life who smoke marijuana very regularly. Most of them are white. Most have faced no negative legal repercussions for their marijuana use. I have used marijuana quite a few times, though definitely not regularly anymore (mostly just because I don't actually like it very much).

The focus on whether or not Philando was high at the time of the incident is appalling. It's unreasonable, an excuse, a fig leaf, bullshit. The fact that Philando may have smoked marijuana at some point before he was killed has NOTHING TO DO with Yanez shooting seven rounds into his car within 74 seconds of the start of the traffic stop. It has nothing to do with why he was pulled over, nothing to do with Yanez's failure to deescalate the situation, nothing to do with Yanez's dangerous 'bulletproof warrior' mental state, nothing to do with Yanez's decision to kill him.

When I read the things Yanez's defense attorney has said about this bullshit "marijuana defense," it reads like Reefer Madness:

“That was a big issue of us,” Gray said. “It’s our position that the evidence will be overwhelming that (Castile and his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds) had been smoking marijuana that day. … And that explains why when … officer Yanez said, ‘Don’t reach for (your gun). Don’t do it.’ … Castile reached for his gun anyway.”

Anyone who knows anything about marijuana knows how totally, appallingly, laughably full of shit this is. It's not a legal defense, it's character assassination of the victim. It's not actually about making a credible argument that having smoked marijuana at some point made Philando more likely to reach for his gun (which, by everyone's account but Yanez's, he didn't even do); it's about painting him as a criminal, a bad guy, violent, scary. It's trying to make Yanez's *totally unreasonable* fear of Philando seem defensible. It's trying to make Philando seem dangerous - when it's obvious that the only dangerous person in this situation was Jeronimo Yanez.

It's not okay.

If you're black and have been smoking pot, or if the cop thinks you've been smoking pot. And that's not even getting into being a black person with a legally registered gun. The Second Amendment was written to make slave patrols legal; it's baked in that black folks aren't supposed to have guns.

Jeronimo Yanez was clearly a good public relations officer for the city of St. Anthony. He was (is) terrible at the most important duties of a police officer, as demonstrated not just by his killing of Philando but by an earlier incident described in the May 23 podcast of 74 Seconds, created by Minnesota Public Radio. He had no business patrolling our streets with a gun in his hands.