The Very Model of Extractive Bad Economy

Star Tribune letter writer Philip Kerler of Eagan put it perfectly in Sunday's paper:

COMMUNITY CONCERNS
We, too, often lose sight of our key priorities

The Dec. 18 newspaper featured two articles that were revealing about the times in which we live. One story detailed how the city of Wabasha, Minn., denied a petition request for an environmental review for a frac-sand rail hub, despite the very real risks posed to both health and the environment by this type of mining (Wabasha boosts frac-sand rail hub). The other story dealt with the denial of a Minnetonka senior home's request to add an 11th resident -- which wouldn't have increased staff or physical space -- just because people didn't want to see an additional car or elderly person being walked around the block by a home health care aide (Minnetonka senior home not allowed to expand, council says).

Apparently, it is OK to push through a potentially dangerous mining operation that will affect thousands with both noise and pollution in order to increase a company's profits, but God forbid we should show compassion to an elderly resident because it might lower property values. I wonder how the good citizens of Minnetonka would like it if they had to put up with the noise and pollution of frac-sand mining instead of a minor disturbance from just one additional elderly patient?

Great point, Philip. I didn't notice the juxtaposition of those two stories.

I did mean to write about the Wabasha frac sand decision. It sounds as though the city council didn't have a lot of choice, from a legal standpoint: if they denied the rail hub's request, it would have guaranteed a lawsuit against the city.

But I can't think of a better example of extractive economy than the frac sand rail hub, and frac sand mining in general. The hub will bring 400 to 600 semi-trailers a day into historic, quaint Wabasha, which markets itself as a tourist destination. Over a 10-hour day, that's one semi every minute or 90 seconds. Many of those trucks will be coming over the bridge between Wabash and Nelson, Wis., from another scenic, small-town area, pounding the hell out of the bridge, I assume.

The trucks will be full of sand mined from the landscape, destroying the unusual geography of the area, including the bluffs above the Mississippi River, which are home to eagles and other raptors that soar on the thermals.

And for all of this, what does Wabasha get? No increase in their tax base, and just a tiny increase in employment -- an additional 18 jobs. These aren't local companies. They contribute almost nothing to the local economy, after extracting what they came for.

But because some robber-baron companies bought a piece of land with intent to mine it or to put a rail hub on it, and the small towns didn't have the foresight to create zoning laws that could prevent the unpredictably insane destruction of their towns and the land around them, there's nothing they can do about it.

I wanted to write a take off of Gilbert & Sullivan's "Modern Major General" song about this, but I don't have the heart. I only have one line: It is the very model of extractive bad economy.

You're Getting Warmer

Minnesota will tie the all-time high average temperature this year, at 50.8°F. Today's Star Tribune included this excellent graph of our average temperatures since 1873, when record-keeping began:


(Click to enlarge.) As the lead-in to the graph says,

The current average annual temperature for the Twin Cities is 45.1 degrees. All but one of the past 15 years have been warmer than that. The year 2012 will be one of only two in 140 years of record-keeping with an annual average temperature above 50 degrees.

The gray shaded area on the right end of the graph represents the last 15 years, and at a glance you can tell that those bars are almost all higher than the vast number of others shown.

I did a close guesstimate on the average temperature over the past 15 years, based on those bars, and came up with 47.5°, compared to the almost 140-year average of 45.1° (which includes those last, warmer 15 years, of course).

In case you were wondering, 1987 (the third highest year on record) was what I used to call the year without winter. It was my first in Minnesota, and it never got very cold. Winter ended in February and the flowering trees bloomed just before the end of April, compared to their usually bloom-time in mid-to-late May. At the time, I joked that I had brought Washington, D.C.'s winter with me, but the next year, winter returned to Minnesota normal.

In 2012, the flowering trees bloomed in mid-April, for the most part. There were magnolias even before that. Anyone who denies the planet is warming should talk to a gardener.

Sharing Farms

Iowa farmer Dick Thompson, 81, has farmed 300 acres for decades using sustainable (but not organic) methods. As described in today's Star Tribune, Thompson rotates corn, soybeans, alfalfa, and oats over five years, and fertilizes with manure from animals he raises, plus biowaste from a nearby town.

The results: the same or better profitability as high-input, much-larger neighbor farms; better soil health; and almost no water pollution.

Thompson's methods, worked out over years by trial and error, are being studied and documented so  they can be replicated by more farmers, and rightly so. But there was one part of the story that particularly caught my attention:

[Thompson's methods] also requires a lot more time and daily management, plus livestock to eat the oats and alfalfa, for which there isn't much of a market anymore.

Which makes some question how many farmers would adopt Thompson's methods.

"That's the way my dad farmed in the 1950s and '60s," said Robert Plathe, a corn and soybean farmer west of Mason City. "If I have a market, that makes sense," he said. It would also help revive agricultural communities because farms would be smaller and more families could live off the land.

But, he pointed out, it's a lot harder, and few people want to farm like that anymore. Animals require daily care, winter and summer.

"Farmers like their free time in the winter," he said.

My solution: Why is it a single family on each farm? Why not have two families per farm (perhaps with more acres, shared) so that they can take turns taking care of the animals during the winter months? This especially makes sense as part of the process of apprenticing farmers to learn the methods.

The idea of the individualistic farmer is one of the things that has to go as we find sustainable solutions to feeding this warming world.

Goodbye, Noon and Midnight

Have you seen something like this in your travels around the interweb?



What time is that in the yellow highlighted area, you say? 12 p.m.? As in, 12 post meridian? How can 12 be post meridian when 12 is the meridian?

I understand that computers can't deal with the reality that noon and midnight are not part of a mechanistic construction of time, and using the 24-hour clock that underlies how time is managed by computers makes it all obsolete. 24-hour time is much more logical, after all.

But this example was written by a person who thinks that 12:00 p.m. is the same as 12:00 noon. My sense is that noon as p.m. is the more common way to assign the meridians, rather than having 12:00 p.m. signifying midnight.

Who decided that 12:00 p.m. was noon instead of midnight? It doesn't make any sense to me. Maybe it's a glass half-full/empty, optimist/pessimist test.

Not the Sharpest Scissors in the Drawer

I love it when one of those things I've always heard (but wondered if it was true) turns out to be true, rather than made up. Seems like it doesn't happen very often.

Marilyn vos Savant's Parade column from last Sunday included a question on whether scissors meant for cutting fabric will really become dull faster if used to cut paper, particularly wrapping paper. Her answer:

Paper typically contains hard ­minerals that aren’t found in fabric, so cutting even ordinary paper will dull blades more than cutting fabric. Wrapping paper is worse, and holiday wrap with all its foil and sparkly accents may be the most damaging of all. Fabric shears are quickly dulled by using them for household purposes, so hide those shears from the rest of the family! ­Cutting fabric (and hair, etc.) ­requires very sharp scissors because the fibers bend and slip away from the blades so easily. (Ever tried cutting a lock of hair?) But scissors used ­mainly for cutting paper don’t need to be sharp. Even ­kiddie scissors work on just about everything. 

How's that for a bunch of related facts I wouldn't have ever come up with -- paper contains more hard minerals than fabric, fabric and hair are harder to cut in the first place because they bend so much, and paper doesn't even require something sharp to cut it.

Local Ownership in Bemidji

I love co-ops, but there are more parts of the generative economy model, such as employee ownership. MPR this morning featured a story about Bemidji, Minn., grocer Joe Lueken, who is selling his small chain of stores to his employees through a multi-year stock sale.

Store managers say the stores could have fetched at least $30 million from outside owners. Instead, 400 employees will take over ownership on Sunday and pay Lueken out of store profits over the next five to seven years.

Maria Svare, front-end manager at one of the stores,

worried that if Lueken had sold the stores to someone else, new management might have come in and fired or replaced existing workers. She said keeping the grocery stores locally owned instead of chain-owned means the profits will stay in the community. 

That's it exactly. Thanks, MPR for giving us this bit of good news, and thanks to Joe Lueken for thinking of his employees and his community.

__

More info for business owners who are interested in selling to their employees is available through the Ohio Center for Employee Ownership.

Merry Christmas! from Natasha Simkhovitch

For Christmas, I was looking through my small pile of holiday picture books and came across this one.


I believe I bought it for a dollar in the used book store at the downtown Milwaukee Public Library several years ago (during one of my Ellen Raskin visits). As you can see, the cover and binding are in rough shape.

But the art inside is still good. It's by Natasha Simkhovitch, despite the fact that her name is nowhere on the outside of the book. (Google tells me that may be a pseudonym for someone named Marie Stern, about whom very little appears to be available online, though there's a mention of "Marie Stern Papers" in the University of Southern Mississippi's collection.) I wonder what moved her, or Knopf, to use a Russian name in the middle of World War II?


The text is a mix of stories, music, and poems. The art is usually made up of three horizontal illustrations per page, with a decorative border, like these three:

It's a neat book that I don't remember seeing as a child, but I'm happy to enjoy it as an adult.

One Thing That's Hard to Find

Once in a while, I need to search something that's hard to search. Usually it's something with a generic name, so too many results come up. I keep meaning to start of list of examples when this occurs, but I haven't managed to yet.

But one thing I know is hard to find are books based on their illustrators, rather than authors, especially if you don't know the illustrator's name. I first noticed this because there's a copy of The Night Before Christmas that we had when I was a kid (probably published around 1960) that I've never been able to track down using the usual modern methods.


Books like this, where there are numerous illustrated copies of a public-domain text, are one of the worst things to look for. There's probably a rare book dealer somewhere who knows what book I'm talking about, but there's no IMDB for illustrators, especially not one cross referenced by title.

If anyone has a suggestion of a way to go about finding this book, let me know.

The Ooo, Shiny List of 2012

Today's Star Tribune includes an AP story on the 10 biggest news stories of the year. Here are the topics as printed:

1. Mass shootings
2. U.S. election
3. Superstorm
4. Obamacare
5. Libya
6. Penn State
7. U.S. economy
8. Fiscal cliff
9. Gay marriage
10. Syria

The accompanying text explained that the election had been number one -- based on a survey of U.S. editors and news directors completed on December 13 -- until the shooting on December 14 in Newtown, Connecticut. AP then reopened the survey and suddenly mass shootings jumped from sixth place to first.

This kind of "ooo, shiny" response by editors is part of the problem with media coverage. I understand the election being number one, since it dominated the entire year, but the Newtown/gun story really has nothing on the superstorm story, both in terms of first-hand effects on individuals and long-term impact (since the storm is the only hint of climate change in any of the stories).

I love little children and hate the proliferation of guns as much as the next progressive, but the destruction of hundreds of thousands of people's homes and lives (and over a 125 killed in the U.S., plus 70 in the Caribbean) seems like a bigger deal to me. Let alone the aftermath of Sandy and what it means for people and the whole country's (let alone the world's) economy as ocean levels rise and the incidence of severe weather increases.

And really, the Penn State story is more important than the U.S. economy or Syria?

The only good thing about this list is that the Petraeus scandal came in at 11 and missed the list. That's the biggest nonstory of all, aside from the usually unmentioned violation of civil liberties inherent in the government snooping in his private emails.

Too Much Information for a Saturday

I just opened a bunch of tabs I found from Twitter links, and I'm feeling overwhelmed by them all, plus some others that have been sitting open for a bit longer. So many interesting thoughts that my brain feels like it's on fire. The solution: put them here with just the titles and the links.

More cars on the road make you late, but some cars make you much later than others (The Atlantic Cities project)

The simple truth about gun control (Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker)

The NRA and the 'positive good' of maximum guns (Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic)

Free trade in Medicare benefits: the best idea you won't hear in Washington: An international free market in healthcare would solve America's Medicare funding problem, but deficit hawks just want cuts (by economist Dean Baker)

Mental health checks for gun buyers: weak, chaotic, full of loopholes (Mother Jones)

You can't say that -- "the real choice we face, is not between climate protection on one hand and economic growth on the other. It’s between planned economic contraction (with government managing the post-carbon transition through infrastructure investment and useful make-work programs) as a possible but unlikely strategy, and unplanned, unmanaged economic and environmental collapse as our default scenario." (Post Carbon Institute)

Thorium (the future of nuclear energy?)

Wal-Mart nixed paying Bangladesh suppliers to fight fire (Bloomberg News)

Cornstalks everywhere but nothing else, not even a bee (Robert Krulwich via NPR)

Expert on mental illness reveals her own fight (New York Times)

Magoo's Christmas Carol -- Tonight

Mr. Magoo is back on primetime television tonight for the first time in decades.


If you're not lucky enough to own your own copy, this may be your first chance to see it. Fans of the nephew Fred subplot may not like it, since Fred is nowhere to be seen, but the music and backgrounds more than make up for it.

It's on at 8:00 p.m. Eastern, 7:00 p.m. Central on NBC.

A Religious Sign I Agree with

I recently made a foray into British Columbia. It's startling, and a bit disconcerting, how much is different about the Canadian way of doing things. (A parochial way of putting it, I know.)

I'm not sure what the Religious Right is like in Canada, or if they even exist exactly, but this sign made me think that at least some of them have more of a sense of humor than their American cousins:


Seen in White Rock, British Columbia.

A Bus for the Season

It's been close to ten years since we went to Minneapolis's Holidazzle parade, but Daughter Number Three-Point-One wanted to go, so we braved the wind chill and all I got was this picture:


That's a Metro Transit bus wrapped in LED lights.

Red Balloon's New Logo

I'm known to grouse from time to time about bad designs, particularly logos. So it's nice to have something nice to say for once.

My favorite children's bookstore, Red Balloon book shop on St. Paul's Grand Avenue, recently changed hands and the new owners must have thought it was time to update the logo, which was designed by illustrator Warren Hansen around 1980.

It's a classic logo, referring to a style made popular by early 20th century publishers, but the type, particularly, wasn't aging well.


The new logo is definitely fresh and, particularly in the application of the shop's new bookmark where I first saw it, I was wowed.


I love the simplicity of the front, with the address info set sideways to serve as a string, and I just as much love the repeating pattern on the back. It's probably the best free bookmark I've ever gotten from a bookstore. Fun, clean, zippy -- it makes me want to go buy some books!

But I can't be 100 percent positive, can I?

The longer I looked at it, the more I wished that the Red Balloon name, reversed out of the large balloon on the front, had been set in a somewhat heavier weight of type, so that it wouldn't disappear into the red. It's even more obvious on the back, where the balloons have been scaled down substantially and the type is tiny.


And when I went to check out the store's website to see how they're using the logo there, I found this:


Which is okay, but not as elegant as the single balloon with the type on it. I understand the need to get the name larger, of course, but I'm not sure this solution was the best way around that. The clouds feel tacked on, and using the "l" as a string seems a bit forced. Having the two "l"s at different heights makes them hard to read at a glance.

And then there's the version they're using as a Twitter icon:


This is clearly misbegotten. The clouds don't belong on the balloon, and the balloon doesn't need a balloon on it, either -- why can't the icon be the same as the usage on the bookmark (with slightly heavier type)?

So, I guess that's a B+ for the Red Balloon redesign. But I do love that bookmark.

Tuesday Is for Tired

I'm tired tonight, still overwhelmed by the dissonance of holiday expectations combined with Newtown and its aftermath. So just a couple of things related to the latter, and nothing about the holidays.

____

The best big-picture piece of writing I've seen on the incompatible worldviews of pro-gun and anti-gun Americans. By philosopher Firmin Debrabander of the Maryland Institute College of Art.

____

A few facts. From a University of Pennsylvania study: If you're present during an armed assault, you're 4.5 times as likely to be injured if you're armed than if you're not. And from MinnPost's health writer Susan Perry, the health risks of having a gun at home.

___

The most deadly mass murder at a school in the U.S. didn't occur this week, or at Virginia Tech in 2007. It was in Michigan in 1927, and the fact that none of us has ever heard of it tells you something about the difference of the media landscape then vs. now.
___

And this question, via Twitter user Chris Sacca:

Can you guess which of these is illegal to sell anywhere in the US because of the risk to human lives?

What's in a Name?

Regular readers may remember my obsession with names. Whether it's people with common names being hounded by debt collectors for money they don't owe or people with unusual names being unable to hide in the age of the interweb, what you name your child these days is a dicey business.

So I was, of course, fascinated by a recent article listing the most unusual baby names of recent times. Each of these names was given to at least two children. Really.

These are the ones I found to be the biggest head-shakers:

Girls

Admire
Couture
Excel
Fedora
Inny (not a twin with Outie, I hope)
Jury
Rogue (but it will always be misspelled, a la Sarah Palin)
Sanity
Sesame
Thinn
Yoga

Boys

Alpha
Ball
Donathan
Drifter
Elite
Exodus
Google (try looking that one up!)
Hippo
Mango (probably wouldn't have made me blink if it was a girl's name, I admit)
Rogue (see Sarah Palin note above)
Savior
Vice (may become best friends with Savior)

One of the most notable changes that's happened with baby names, from a sociological perspective, is the way the list of most popular names for boys has changed. It seems like girls' names have always been subject to fashion -- and I know whereof I speak, as a baby boomer member of the vast Nancy/Linda/Carol/Patricia/Janet/Lori/Susan/Brenda confederation -- while boys' names were almost immune. Biblical names like Michael, William, and Thomas seemed unshakeable in their positions atop the list.

Now the 10 most popular boys names are:

Aiden
Jackson
Ethan
Liam
Mason
Noah
Lucas
Jacob
Jayden
Jack

A couple of those are from the Bible, but they were names that were unusual for most of the 20th century (Noah and Lucas as a variant of Luke were particularly absent, and even Jacob wasn't that common until the last 20 years).

Scanning the lists of popular names shows a lot of clearly trendy girls' name like Aubrey and Peyton, but the boys' list is littered with just about as many Braydens and Graysons.

I did a rough count of the names, loosely grouping them into one of three types:

1. Old-fashioned: A name you wouldn't think was unusual if you found it in records from 50-100 years ago, or older. Examples: Emma, Hannah, Isaac, Charlie.
2. Old but reanimated: Not new, but uncommon in the 20th century. Examples: Zoe, Chloe, Owen, Ethan.
3. Trendy: Neologisms, pop-culture references, and former last names. Examples: Addison, Nevaeh (now number 96!), Brayden, Chase, Colton, Bentley.

The gender split is like this:

1. Old-fashioned: Surprisingly, there was an even count with 35 names for each sex. But the boys' names are much more likely to be biblical, 30 vs. 5 (disclaimer: I used my imperfect recollection of saint names and didn't spend a bunch of time looking up obscure women in the Bible).
2. Old but reanimated: More popular with boy names than girl names, 25 to 15.
3. Trendy: More popular with girls than with boys, 50 to 40. But closer than I would have thought.

The takeaway, for me, is that the combination of trendy and reanimated names is the same for both sexes, with the parents of boys genuflecting just a bit more the the direction of tradition.

The most popular sound to use at the end of a girl's name was the venerable schwa (uh) with 39, followed by the long "e" (21). It's no surprise that vowels for the girls are the order of the day.

Boys' names are most likely to end in "n" (39), but I didn't see much of a pattern for other sounds. It's interesting that the girls also had 14 names ending in "n" -- Jasmine, Caroline, Morgan, Lauren, Madison, Addison, Madelyn, Kaitlyn, Peyton, Lillian, Brooklyn, Evelyn, Reagan, Allison. Half of those are last name switchers, formerly male names, or place names, and all of those have a decidedly masculine feel. The old names (Madelyn, Lauren, Caroline, Allison) sound less masculine to my ear.

The upshot of the ending sound analysis, it seems to me, is that girls' names have a much more circumscribed set of options, since 60 percent end with one of two vowels, and another almost 15 percent end in "n." So as with gendered colors, girls get a couple of options, while boys get all the rest.

Finally, I only spotted one name that appeared on both lists -- Riley -- though there are others that I've seen fairly often in use for the other gender: Dylan, Jackson, Tyler, Charlie, Adrian from the boy list and Morgan and Evelyn from the girls' list.

Five Years Old

Today is the fifth birthday of Daughter Number Three. Since December 16, 2007, I've posted here 1,940 times (plus another 29 drafts that never made it).

Here's my school picture from kindergarten, taken when I was just a bit over 5 years old:


I was in the class of kids who hadn't turned 5 yet when school started in September. I guess it was sort of a pre-kindergarten. They evaluated us at the end of the year to see who was ready for first grade and who should do another year in kindergarten.

I remember lots of playing in the kitchen or with big blocks and trucks, spending time on the playground that was right outside our door, and being read to by our blue-haired teacher, who sat among us in a rocking chair. And naps, during which I never slept, but instead told myself stories about princesses having adventures in caves. (I was inspired by the quilting on the inside of my blanket, which had holes worn into it.)

It all seems so idyllic, compared with the increasingly academic frame that's being placed not just on kindergarten but preschool. And so innocent, as the lives of young children should be.
____

Here are my past anniversary posts, in case you want to see me age before your eyes:

• First
• Second
• Third
• Fourth

After Newtown, a New Approach

I'm in agreement with a Facebook friend who wrote, "Everyone predictably talks about their hearts going out to the people in Connecticut. My heart is spent."

The best of what I've seen related to the Newtown shooting and what we should do about it:

• Pete Hautman explaining why he got rid of his handgun.
• Constitutional scholar Akhil Amar's take on the Second Amendment, as seen in two paintings.
• Cartoonist Tom Toles gets it right:
  
  
• Ezra Klein's list of facts about mass shootings, especially the charts about the decline in these types of shootings (believe it or not) and the decrease in the number of people who own guns in the U.S. Yes, a decrease, which means the number of guns per gun-owner has gone up. And the contradictory graphs that show fewer people favor stricter gun laws, when described generically, while large majorities support specific restrictions, such as background checks, banning high-capacity clips, banning semi-automatics assault rifles, and requiring gun registration. No mention was made of the loopholes that exist for sales at gun shows and internet sales.

To anyone who thinks we'd all be safer if more of us were armed, remember the Rochester, Minn., teenager who was just shot by her grandfather because he thought she was an intruder, or the two young boys shot by accident by their brothers in the past few months here in the Twin Cities, let alone Jordan Davis or Trayvon Martin. People with a gun in their hand think other people have guns in their hands, and gun owners all too often leave their weapons where children can get at them.

But I don't know how I can say prohibition works, if I believe it doesn't work for drugs. Regulating guns more heavily, though -- including getting rid of semi-autos and large clips, and increasing requirements for licensing -- I can see those as possibilities.

And a media agreement to ban coverage wouldn't hurt, either. There's definitely an element of contagion in all this.

Good News for the World's People

Hey, doomsayers, next time you think everything is getting worse in our world, remember these facts about the worldwide population:

• Infant mortality decreased by more than half between 1990 and 2010.
• 43 percent of people lived to at least the age of 70 in 2010, up from 33 percent in 1990. That's a 30 percent increase.
• The average age of death in Brazil and Paraguay increased from just 30 to 63 between 1970 and 2010.

Everyone has to die of something, of course, but I think it's an excellent goal to get to a point where premature death from disease is a thing of the past. Having a population where almost everyone reaches an advanced age has its own problems, of course, but it's preferable to the loss of people long before their time.

Lori Swanson Gets It Right on Debt Collectors

Hurray for Minnesota's attorney general, Lori Swanson. She went after one of the debt collection companies that victimize people and just settled with one of them for $500,000.

That's not much, maybe, but more importantly, Midland Funding LLC agreed to what sound like reasonable rules for how they will operate. According to the Star Tribune, Midland will:

• Ensure it's not trying to collect "zombie debt," (beyond the statute of limitations)
• Change the way it serves lawsuits to ensure people know they are being sued
• Verify both the amount of debt and the identity of who owes it, and "show that information to people before the company sues them to collect."

That last point appears to be particularly difficult for Midland to get right. Swanson's press conference included personal statements from three people who were pursued despite the fact that they were not the person who owed the money. All of them have common names (William Harris, Andrew Martin, and Ka Yang, which is a very common name among Hmong-Americans). Midland took $9,000 from Yang's account, and she only got it back by hiring a lawyer, which cost her $2,000. Martin was thought to owe money to Citibank, and Harris was listed as owing money to Capital One, despite the fact that he's never had a credit card.

How can a company prove they have the right William Harris out of all the William Harrises? With the information companies like Midland receive from the credit card companies, how can they even prove the amount is owed by anyone?

And here's the kicker: Midland's parent company is called Encore Capital Group. (The name is clever but also sick, since it's basically a brand promise to be the debt collector who keeps coming back no matter what.) It's a publicly traded company with profits last year of $61 million, and it has been on Fortune's 100 Fastest Growing Companies list for the last two years. This is how people make money these days, and what your 401(k) might be invested in.

More prosecutions of other vulture companies are in the works. Go, Lori Swanson -- make them all behave like halfway civilized human beings.

Reconsidering the Home Mortgage Deduction

From the Atlantic:

The home mortgage interest deduction...costs the federal government (in lost tax revenue) more than Washington spends on the entire Department of Housing and Urban Development, more than it spends on veterans benefits and education....

That's a lot of money.

And while I, like most people, imagined it was a sacred cow for the middle class, it turns out it's not: the greatest benefits go heavily to high-income households. Families with incomes under $100,000 top out at an average of $360 in savings per year, while higher bracket folks get a lot more -- $746 for families making $100 - 200K and $2,221 for families making over $200,000. (Especially when those second homes start being bought, I imagine.)


The Atlantic story focuses on the geographic inequality in how the money is distributed. It's no big shock that the people with expensive houses in pricey markets like California, Washington, D.C., the New York metro area, and Boston get the most. But the thing that surprised me the most was that truly middle class families, making under $100,000 a year, get so little.

Seems like we should get rid of the mortgage deduction and come up with a new way to extend that bit of money to the people who need it, while not giving it to people who don't. Whether that's expanding the earned income credit or lowering the rates for the bottom percentiles, I don't know, but it doesn't seem like it would be that hard to make up $100 to $300 per family for those making under $100,000.

Possibly the Worst Bumper Sticker Design of All Time

It's a high bar, I know, but this one is about as unreadable as they get:


In addition to being stupid (once you figure out what it says) and badly designed. Squinting at it in the fading light, all I could make out at first was Rat Terrier Honor Student. I couldn't even see the wee doggy with his light outline, and didn't notice the oddly placed MY.

And yes, I did shoot a picture of this while driving on a snow-packed, slippery street after twilight. That's snow decorating the edges of the sticker.

A Message for the Michigan Legislature

I saw this on a bullet board at Take Action Minnesota, back when I was there to make calls against the voter ID amendment.

Who knew that it would come in handy for the recent Michigan vote on "right to work"?

Eugene Jarecki and the Case for Legalization

Filmmaker Eugene Jarecki is my newest hero. His recent documentary, The House I Live in, is about the U.S. drug war and its effects. Sounds dry, maybe, but it's not. Here's the trailer:


And here's Jarecki synthesizing in about two minutes everything that's wrong with criminalizing drugs, and what can be done about it (he starts speaking at 2:00):

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Here's  my transcript of what Jarecki had to say:

I think the word legalization is scary for most people. I think it's smarter to talk about it as tax and regulate, which is what you saw happen in Washington State, and it's also how the British look at it.

Portugal decriminalized drugs -- all drugs -- possession 10 years ago. Every single result in Portuguese society has been a huge success. Drug use among the young is down, HIV rates are down, violence is down, and the work load of the criminal justice system has dropped precipitously. The huge savings that they have from that, they've taken just a small part of that and made one of the most robust treatment systems in the world.

And Portugal's success is a symbol to the world right now, where America is looked at as having a very primitive policy. Our policy is "tough on crime." We took drug addiction, broadly, 40 years ago, and instead of dealing with it as a health matter, we dealt with it as a criminal matter.

Our results -- look at them by contrast. 40 years, a trillion dollars spent, 45 million drug arrests, and today drugs are cheaper, purer, more available, and more in use by younger and younger people than ever before.

So we have a record of abject failure and the only thing it has produced, is made us the world's largest jailer with 2.3 million people behind bars. And we know about the disproportion of African Americans and minorities within that.

So the real question for me is, this is a giant human rights crisis within America, decimating poor communities across the country, now increasingly white communities are being targeted for methamphetamines and prescription drugs…

The small marijuana victories show that the public taste, the public opinion on this has shifted. The public doesn't want to see us waste billions criminalizing nonviolent people as if they were violent. That's the key.

(I love a person who can produce so much coherent thought on demand without notes or hesitation. A skill I lack in big way.)

As another guest on the show said, we should take away 90 percent of the money from drug enforcement and prisons and put it into treatment, and see what happens. Given the Portugal experiment, it sounds like that's a good idea.

Meanwhile, I have to figure out a way to see The House I Live in. It's not playing anywhere closer than Chicago or Iowa City currently.

Twat Watchers

I'm no fan of the old Weight Watchers logo.



It's boring, the type is getting dated, and the use of a swoosh is as meaningless as it is overly common.

But I have nothing good to say about the recently launched new logo, either:


Created by Paula Scher of Pentagram (probably the best-known woman designer alive today), it seems misbegotten to me in a number of ways.

First, as was pointed out by Twitter user Alex Griendling, it includes the word "twat" in the middle of it, and once you've seen that, you can't forget it. Lower-casing the two words, which was probably done to to make it friendly and young, has the unfortunate effect of making an in-between word where there wasn't one before.

Second, the description of the logo on Pentagram's site is full of the hyperbole I despise in graphic design presentations. "Modern, open and energetic, the identity brings to life the transformation that members experience when they adopt a new lifestyle that can lead to significant weight loss."

Transformation, huh? So you go from dark to light when you lose weight? You fade away, in effect? How does this read to women of color, particularly? Is light right?

Third, I can't get over the idea that a gradation is being presented as a concept in the first place. Really. A gradation?

Fourth, I predict the super-horizontal shape will be a problem when it comes to using the logo in layouts. Extremes in either direction always are. I see that there's a secondary mark, which is more useably compact, in a slightly vertical square shape, but that's not a fully readable logo. (After all, WW could stand for lots of things... Willy Wonka...Walt Whitman... Walter White... Okay, that's enough of a Breaking Bad reference.)


I'm a fan of Paula Scher's work. I love her book Make It Bigger. She's right about so many things.

But this logo is a miss.

Faces of Jesus

I've always found the Minneapolis Institute of Art to be overwhelming, and if you asked me, I would say I greatly prefer smaller museums, such as the Museum of Russian Art.

But now that I'm an empty-nester, I've taken to visiting a museum each weekend for a more limited viewing, and so have spent just an hour or two at the MIA on a couple of different occasions. This is an amount of time I can do without becoming overwhelmed and exhausted by all of the visual stimulation.

Last weekend I checked out the European 12th–16th-century paintings, many of which have religious themes. I couldn't help noticing the various ways the Christ child was depicted.

First was this small statue. I didn't get the sculptor's name or its provenance, but I was amused by the fact that the baby Jesus is standing on the heads of children.


Okay, I know they're supposed to be cherubim, and that I'm blissfully unaware of how that's symbolically appropriate. But it's still funny.

Next was a madonna and child where Jesus appears to be a middle-aged, blond Jackie Mason.


Lucas Cranach the Elder, Madonna and Child with Grapes, 1537

Get ready for the next one, because Jackie Mason is good-looking compared to this rendition of Jesus:


Nicola di Maestro Antonio (di Ancona), Madonna and Child Enthroned, c. 1490

They're either aliens or the painter is one of the 20th century illustrators who intentionally imbue distortion and disturbance into every image. Check out Mary's hand!

This earlier work, from Florence, is closer to the look of Eastern religious icons. The flatter style is more harmonious with the overall lack of realism. But it's still amusing that Jesus is rendered with adult proportions, in miniature:


Nardo di Cione, Standing Madonna with Child, 1350-1360

It made me think of this ad.

Finally, there was this nightmare composition. Okay, this one isn't a madonna and child, it's Venus and Cupid. Hence the bow in his hand.


Monogrammist HB with the Griffin's Head, Venus and Cupid, 1529

But what's the deal with the way the end of Cupid's red bow appears to be coming out of Venus's backside? And why are they so darn creepy looking? Had this painter ever seen an unclothed human woman before?

Probably not, I guess.

On the Philosophy Shelf

I'm assuming this juxtaposition was intentional:


Ezra Jack Keats's The Snowy Day is among my most beloved picture books. And if anything, this makes it more so.

Seen at Common Good Books, Snelling Avenue at Grand.

Say No to DNA Screening

Two NPR stories on the question DNA testing from today's news:

British scientists analyzed the DNA of 179 healthy adults and found a much higher rate of mutation than they expected, including 10 percent with mutations that should cause serious disease. Yet, these people are healthy. So that means that our DNA, in this sense at least, is not our destiny.

There's increasing pressure, however, to test babies at birth (or even in utero) to analyze their DNA. Of course, decisions -- including abortions -- will be made based on that information, as new parents seek perfection and avoid risk. The idea of selecting your children like you would a house or a car is pretty disturbing. It reminds me of people who seem to be breeding their children to be sports stars, as if unconditional love is not the basis of parenting.

And even if the children are born after testing, or were already born when tested, knowing too much has risks.

Bioethicist Mark Rothstein of the University of Louisville says the tests can lead to so-called vulnerable child syndrome.

These children "are viewed as medically vulnerable and medically frail," Rothstein says. "And so while all the other kids are riding bikes and climbing trees, these kids are sort of sitting in a corner. So they can't even enjoy a normal childhood."

And what if the sequencing reveals that a child has genes that may make them prone to diseases that may not show up for decades — and that they can't do anything about anyway?

Would you want to know what your genome says? Isn't that the ultimate in screening health people, which we already know leads to over treatment?

How can we even be talking about this?

The Gender-Neutral 1970s

Coming of age in the 1970s had its pluses and minuses, but one attribute of the decade that benefited me was its relative gender neutrality.

If I look back on what I wore in high school, 1973–1977, I can't imagine a girl getting away with dressing that way these days without being called (or at least thought of) as a dyke: flannel shirts and jeans, no makeup, next to no attention to hair or shoes. But I would say that even the "best-dressed" girls at school wore clothes that were minimally feminine.

In the years before that, girls in my school weren't allowed to dress that way because during elementary school, we had to wear skirts at all times. Though in the harsh upstate New York winters, we were allowed to wear pants under our skirts. Thanks a lot, gender police.

My high school years were the beginning of an era that included this Lego ad (from 1981):


Contrast that with the recent products Lego has created for girls, and with examples of currently enforced gender stereotyping like this.

I've lived most of my life in this gender-role-refusing way, but if anything, I'm more aware now that I don't conform than I was during my self-conscious teenage years. The pressure to use makeup and wear heels, particularly, is pretty strong.

It's easy to think that, over time, everyone becomes freer to behave as fits them, wear what they like, and be who they are. But it's wise to remember there have been times in the past when some of the social rules were more relaxed than they are now, and gender performance now vs. the 1970s is one example.

Seeing It Again

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts has a show up of photos from its collection, called Strangers in a Strange Land: Photographers’ First Impressions. It includes Dorothea Lange's famous Migrant Mother image:


I've seen this photograph many times, but I don't believe I've ever read much about the woman in the photo. At the MIA, it's accompanied by this quote from Lange:

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).

Just thirty-two years old. So much worry and stress in so few years.

Wondering about the woman, who was identified on the MIA card as Florence Owens Thompson, led me to her Wikipedia entry. It sounds as though Lange got some of her facts wrong, and that the context of the photo shoot wasn't as nonexploitative as she remembered it. Quoted in 1978, Thompson said, "She didn't ask my name. She said she wouldn't sell the pictures. She said she'd send me a copy. She never did."

It's a bit reminiscent of the Henrietta Lacks story.

This is a photo of Florence and her daughters taken in 1979, 43 years after the iconic photo:


It's good to see that they all came out okay, and appear to have lived their lives in relative comfort in this, the most comfortable of all countries in history.

Big States, Little States

MinnPost's Eric Black today rounded out his series on the U.S. Constitution with an article on the only part of the Constitution that can't be amended: The requirement that the Senate be made up of equal representation by state.

I didn't know that was the only requirement that was unchangeable, and I also had never thought hard enough about how disparate the populations of the least populous states are vs. the most populous:

The combined population of the 21 least populous states is a little less than the 37 million population of California alone.

So the 37 million residents of those 21 states are represented by 42 U.S. senators – enough to sustain a filibuster in the Senate and prevent a bill from coming to a vote. Meanwhile, the 37 million Californians (12 percent of the U.S. total) are represented by two senators (2 percent of the Senate total).

Black points out how that contradicts the idea of one person, one vote, let alone equal protection under the law.

To clarify, if Minnesota wanted to create a state Senate based on the federal Senate model, by granting, let’s say, one Senate seat to each of Minnesota’s 87 counties, notwithstanding the huge disparity  between Traverse County (population 3,552) and Hennepin County (1.15 million), the U.S. Supreme Court would deem that it violates the one-person one-vote principle.

He continues with the historical context where this rule arose, and we all can understand that there were trade-offs in the Constitutional Convention. There's really nothing that can be done about it, so, as commenter Ray Schoch put it, it does no good to worry about it. A Constitutional Convention is out of the question for any sane person, and that would be the only way to get rid of it.

It does, however, reinforce the need to get rid of the Electoral College and reform the filibuster, which would both help to lessen the effects of this disparate representation.

On the latter topic, the Up with Chris Hayes show from last Saturday is must-viewing (the first segment is here, another here, and the next is here -- and another here -- apologies for the ads and any possible misordering. I hate MSNBC's chopped-up segments that give no clue about the order to watch them in).

The panel included my new favorite person, Constitutional scholar Akhil Amar, along with the past parliamentarian of the Senate and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who used to be the lone voice calling for filibuster reform, but who now has some interesting company.

The War on Christmas Is Very Old

I went on a tour of the Purcell-Cutts house in Minneapolis yesterday. It was fun, and I may get around to sharing some photos, but I came away with one piece of knowledge above all others: There used to be an organization called the Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving (or Gifts in some instances), better known as SPUG.

Our tour docent speculated that the Purcells were members of SPUG, or that they were influenced by that type of thinking. It did seem a good fit for an aesthetically oriented couple in the Arts & Crafts era.

SPUG was founded in 1912 by a group of Manhattan socialites who thought it was deplorable that working-class women were being forced by convention to contribute to Christmas gifts for their bosses. As this 1913 New York Times article makes clear, the group were militant enough to organize a large rally against the practice.

Not wanting to be perceived as negative or anti-Christmas, though, they later changed the organization's name to the Society for Promotion of Useful Giving.

Googling the acronym turns up everything except references to the 1912 group. Who knew there were so many SPUGs in this world?

• Skyline Propane Users Group
• Seattle Perl Users Group
• Small Power Utilities Group
• SharePoint Users Group
• Sewer Pipe Users Group
• Swiss Puppet Users Group
• Shoe Press Users Group
• Silesian PHP Users Group
• Stanford PalmPilot Users Group
• Society for the Protection of Ugly Goblins

I like the original group's name the best. Although that one about the goblins is pretty good, too.

Guns Do Kill People

Christopher W. Howard of Bloomington, Minnesota, had a letter in today's Star Tribune that set me off. The only good thing about it was that it was short.

LITTLE FALLS
Double standard when it comes to shootings

If a police officer says that he or she was afraid at the time that an unarmed individual on the street is shot numerous times, that's often considered justifiable homicide. But a Little Falls retiree alone on Thanksgiving who blasts away at two burglars rushing through his home now sits in jail charged with second-degree murder in their deaths. This is wrong, even though it's unfortunate that the would-be burglars are dead.

You'd better believe I have a double standard for the behavior of police and citizens, Mr. Howard. I don't want citizens trying to behave like police the rest of the time, either. That's what we call vigilantism.

That said, if a cop shot an unarmed person the way the Little Falls shooter Byron Smith did, and confessed to it the way Smith did, that cop would be prosecuted also. According to his own words, Smith had wounded both burglars enough to completely disable them. He then purposely shot to kill them, in one case multiple times, including what he called a "clean kill shot" into the young woman's brain. He also said he shot her the second time because she laughed at him.

If a cop confessed like that, he would be charged with murder just as Smith has been. But cops don't confess in this way -- they claim they saw a gun, if nothing else.

But the larger issue is whether citizens who are not in their homes have the right to "stand their ground" without question. As in the Trayvon Martin case, and the more recent Jordan Davis killing (where some black boys in a parked car didn't turn down their loud music when a white man asked them to), the presence of armed people leads to more deaths than would have happened if they weren't armed.

Research shows that those with a gun are more likely to think others are armed, too, so they will always feel threatened. And obviously, assumptions about the dangers of black young men play into this paranoia. Melissa Harris-Perry has more to say about that.

Will the shooter in the case of a murdered North Carolina couple claim he felt threatened by them?  Where does it stop?

Prosecutors have discretion in whether to charge shooters or not, depending on the circumstances. As former Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner said the other day on MPR, they also have the option of taking a case to Grand Jury, which doesn't require the defendant to pay for a lawyer, to see if a panel of fellow citizens thought a shooting was reasonable.

Allowing lethal gun use at any time and in any place a person says, post hoc, that he felt threatened is bad policy. Worst of all, it gives shooters a strong incentive to make sure their victims are dead so that they can't talk back.