Socialism for the Rich, Capitalism for the Poor

Matt Bruenig usually writes statistical analyses of poverty and income, but today he's posted an old-fashioned piece of reporting about a guy named Eric Harwood.

Harwood has applied for Social Security Disability twice (still pending on the second one) because of chronic pain from degenerative discs and nerve damage in his legs. He lost his house after the 2008 mortgage meltdown and is about to be homeless. He hasn't been able to work since August of this year. When he loses his apartment and moves to Arizona to live with family in February, he worries he won't be able to get Medicaid.

As Bruenig notes, Harwood is an example of the hard-pressed working-class white Americans whose death rates have been increasing. And who turn to Donald Trump (and Ted Cruz) as a political option, because somehow they think foreign aid and assistance to refugees is what's preventing the government from helping those who really deserve it: children, veterans, the disabled and elderly.

Harwood has part of the analysis right:

In his view, the [bank] bailout was an incredible mistake. The money that went to the banks should have been given out to the people more generally, who then could have used it to pay off their loans (and thus save the banks) and to pump up demand more generally. 

But he doesn't follow that with recognition of the many subsidies that have been carved out by Congress for corporations, sometimes called "socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor." Instead he picks out other needy people as the problem. Bruenig doesn't ask whether there is a racial angle to Harwood's perspective on this, but there often is. He does mention that Harwood is pro-life, so we can imagine that's been used effectively to keep him in the Republican camp.

If all of the people being screwed by the way things are could see their common cause and not let racism and culture-war issues like abortion drive a wedge between us to the benefit of the oppressor, think of what we could accomplish.

Meanwhile, here are some memes that I wish Eric Harwood could see:

2015, a Turning Point on Energy

Here are some good-news links for the end of the year.

First, from the Washington Post: why 2015 may be remembered as a transformative year for how we get energy. We've been turning away from coal, wind and solar have matured, and more options are available for energy storage. Even the lower natural gas price is good (though lower petroleum prices are not).

Better battery storage is leading to the coming electrification of everything. The writer is a bit of a booster and a cornucopianist, but still.

And finally, the break-up between carbon emissions and economic growth may have begun. That's a necessary step, since we can't get to zero carbon (or just a 2°C rise in global temperature) without getting to zero carbon as soon as possible.

Talk About Domestic Violence, Not Terrorism

The way Republican candidates (and to some extent, government) constantly whip up fear seems obviously stupid (yet insidiously effective) to me. Today's Star Tribune carried a commentary that compares them to a therapist who tells a patient his fear of spiders is accurate and that spiders represent a real threat to him.

This is clearly not the way to live a reality-based, let alone happy, life.

My favorite part of the commentary was this:

If terror attacks were to receive the same amount of media coverage as, say, domestic violence — a far more lethal threat — they would probably soon be a relic of history. They would cease to exist because the cost of conducting attacks would outweigh their benefit to the perpetrators. This is precisely what happened in the 1980s to terrorist groups such as the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigades when the European media started losing interest in them.

The media are also part of this problem, of course, because fear drives audiences and sells ads.

The Recidivism Rate Is Not What You Think It Is

I could have sworn I already posted about this, but I went looking for this topic on my blog and can't find it... so I guess not. Wow. This was one of the most shocking facts I learned in 2015, and I can't believe I haven't already talked about it.

One of the things we all "know is true" about prison is that the majority of inmates end up back inside pretty soon after they're released. The recidivism rate is actually only 50 to 55 percent within five years, so that's barely a majority. (The numbers are based on the 400,000 people released from state prisons in 2005 as reported by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.)

That 50 percent number may be lower than you thought already, but the research described in this incredible article from Slate shows that even 50 percent is misleadingly high. Yes, it's accurate for the 400,000 people released from prison that year, but that isn't what people think it means.

2 out of 3 people who serve time in prison never come back, and only 11 percent come back multiple times.

The reason for the shocking discrepancy between these new findings and those of the BJS, according to [Massachusetts–based public policy firm] Abt’s William Rhodes, is that the BJS used a sample population in which repeat offenders were vastly overrepresented.

What's wrong with the way the BJS does its sample?

It is difficult to explain to a nonstatistician. I try to use an analogy: Suppose that I were asked to describe a population of people who go to shopping malls. What I might do is go to the mall and perform an “intercept survey”—that is, I’d randomly select people who are entering the mall and ask them about themselves—record their age, sex, race, and frequency of visiting the mall. The problem is, I’d probably do that over a pretty short period of time, like a week. So I’d get a lot of people who are frequent mall visitors and fewer people who aren’t. You know, if you go to a mall you’ll see an elderly population who go daily, to exercise by walking through the mall. You’ll also see a number of people who simply like malls, and maybe they go weekly. Or you’ll find, occasionally, people like me, who go about once a year when they need to buy a washing machine or something. If you did a simple tabulation of all the people you intercepted during a week you’d get a large proportion of frequent mall visitors. And they wouldn’t be representative of people who visit malls—they’d be representative of frequent mall visitors....

[The BJS is] not attempting to be misleading. What they’re reporting is true: If you take people who are released from prison during a given year, here’s the rate at which they’ll return. But it gets translated in people’s heads as, “Here’s what happens to offenders in general.”

In truth what you have is two groups of offenders: those who repeatedly do crimes and accumulate in prisons because they get recaptured, reconvicted, and resentenced; and those who are much lower risk, and most of them will go to prison once and not come back. [emphasis added]

Acknowledging this reality has policy implications:

...there are very low-level offenders who manage to readjust, and you ought to focus the rehabilitation resources you have on those individuals who are high-risk offenders. They’re the ones who are going to benefit most from treatment—or, I should say, society’s going to benefit most from treating them. The problem, of course, is identifying them. That’s why criminologists have attempted to develop risk assessment tools, to identify the high-risk offenders and treat them, while almost letting the others recover by themselves.

Yes!

Glowing Praise for Alcohol

Okay, here's one for you: Did you know that all the liquor and wine sold in the U.S. is radioactive?

Why? Because it's required by law.

This comes from Quora, the question-asking site, where someone asked "What are some mind-blowing facts that sound like B.S. but are actually true?"

Richard Muller, a physics professor at Berkeley, replied with the hard-to-believe answer:

Liquor and wine is illegal in the U.S. unless it is radioactive. When tested, drinking alcohol is required to have at least 400 radioactive decays per minute for each 750 ml.

Explanation: The United States government has decided that alcohol for consumption must be made from “natural” materials, such as grains, grapes, or fruit. That rules out alcohol made from petroleum. Such alcohol is chemically identical to natural alcohol and just as safe – there’s no difference in taste -- so why this rule? The reasons have to do with history (keeping alcohol more expensive, a goal of the anti-alcohol lobby) and minimizing competition (a goal of the liquor lobby).

How can you tell the difference between natural alcohol and alcohol made from petroleum? There’s no chemical difference. The United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, charged with enforcing the natural alcohol rule, has only one reliable test: check for radioactivity. Natural alcohol gets its carbon from plants; the plants got the carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide. ...atmospheric carbon dioxide is radioactive because of the continued bombardment of cosmic rays – particles coming from space that collide with nitrogen molecules and turn it into C-14, radiocarbon. Only one atom in a trillion carbons in the atmosphere is radiocarbon, but that’s enough to be detectable....

Petroleum was also made from atmospheric carbon, but it was buried hundreds of millions of years ago, isolated from the radioactive atmosphere. Radiocarbon has a half-life of about 5700 years, and after a hundred million years, there is nary an atom of C-14 left.

True, bootleggers could get some C-14 and add it to illegal liquor. But that’s beyond the skill set of most of them.

I also learned from this answer that it's possible to make alcohol from petroleum that's chemically identical to that made from plants.

Artifacts of Racist History

The Minnesota State Capitol is being renovated, and while the work is going on all of the artwork has been removed from the walls and put into storage. As the building changes near completion, the question becomes, Which art do we put back?

See, the historical paintings on our walls mostly showed Minnesota's troops in the Civil War, Native Americans signing over their land, or battle between natives and European settlers. I've pretty much been in the camp of people who think it's time for a bit more range in our civic artwork, and that the paintings, including some of the Civil Wars ones, can go to museums instead.

A letter from the Sunday paper makes the argument better than I can:

STATE CAPITOL ART
Paintings don’t fully reflect our history and need to come down

Although the Brown County Historical Society’s president and director (Anne Earl and Bob Burgess) acknowledge in their Dec. 20 commentary that the paintings “The First Battle of New Ulm” and “Treaty of Traverse des Sioux” are “disturbing to some viewers,” they advocate for these works to remain on public display in the Minnesota State Capitol (“In Brown County, we prefer to keep our history in view”). To bolster their case, Earl and Burgess point to their 497 museum members, 7,000 visitors and the “careful research” that “has proven that these pieces were created with great care to detail and accurately depict the events portrayed.”

What Earl and Burgess fail to acknowledge is that the specific events selected and the way they are represented reflect white settler experience, privilege and understanding; they never address the specific arguments against the images, the very reason why “some” find the paintings disturbing. Their logic is much like that of confederate flag supporters — the whole it’s-part-of-‘our’-history-and-therefore-should-remain line of persuasion. This is particularly critical, as the State Capitol should be a welcoming place for all, not just the European-ancestry demographic. While walls of the Minnesota Capitol feature art, the building is not a standalone museum, a place where people go and expect to encounter controversial images. Add to this the facts that racial inequality remains very much a part of Minnesota culture and that the vast majority of state lawmakers remain white men.

Here’s hoping in 2016 Minnesota welcomes more perspectives to our State Capitol. It’s time to be more inclusive; it’s time for these paintings to come down. Besides, the works have had quite a bit of display time — few perspectives get that much play in our nation’s Capitol. Think of all the other viewpoints that have yet to be presented through visual imagery.

Julie Risser, Edina

Coincidentally, another story in the same edition of the paper told of South Carolina's recent discussions about how to display the Confederate battle flag they removed from their state capitol. The chosen museum thinks it needs $5.3 million to do the flag justice. What's it worth to a state to display these artifacts of racist history?


The painting Treaty of Traverse des Sioux, commemorating the treaty signing that handed over half of Minnesota and almost all of what became North and South Dakota to the U.S. This was the context, according to an article from MinnPost: "The Dakota were in a very weak bargaining position because they believed that if they did not sell their land, the United States would take it. Negotiations took several days, and some Dakota chiefs initially resisted the demands made by the commissioners because they asked for so much. Ultimately however, the chiefs gave in." A true moment of glory in the history of our state.

Your Christmas Weather Report

It's Christmas day, so that means Tim Minchin is home in Australia Drinking White Wine in the Sun. Given the weather, it looks like a lot of folks on the east coast of the U.S. may be joining him in that activity with their 70° weather.

Here in Saint Paul, we have a slightly white Christmas. There's about a half-inch of snowish stuff that fell yesterday and has managed to hang on overnight. We're supposed to reach 34 ° today, though, so it probably won't last.

There's more snow coming overnight, so it will soon be replaced. The odd winter of 2015-16 continues.

Two Graphs, Ups and Downs

I've got two graphs for today. First, from the Washington Post, the population-adjusted number of police deaths per year since the 1870s:


Prohibition, not surprisingly, was an outlier when it comes to police deaths, but note that the number of deaths was heading up significantly even before Prohibition. And also that the valley of the oh-so-safe 1950s is actually slightly higher than the one in the past few years. The peak around 1975, while notably high compared to the trends before and after it, would have been good years at any time before 1935 or so.

Then the number of drinks per week consumed by each American over 18:


Yes, that graph shows the top 10 percent consuming almost 74 drinks a week, more than 10 a day. (Now that's what I call a power law distribution.) The ninth decile, people who consume in the 80- to 90-percent range, average about two drinks a day, which seems an acceptable amount.

I wonder what that top 10 percent looks like when it's broken down by percents: How high can the top 1 percent go without dying of alcohol poisoning?

That chart is from Boing Boing. The Washington Post recently ran an article about the recent trend toward more alcohol-related deaths (over 30,000 per year, a number that's up 37 percent since 2002). Those deaths do not include car crashes or other physical mishaps caused by drunkenness — just deaths from things like cirrhosis and alcohol poisoning. If you add in "accidents" and homicides, the number triples to 90,000 a year.

A Landline at Christmastime

I've mentioned before that I used to read Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising each Christmas. This year I thought I would start a new tradition by rereading Rainbow Rowell's Landline.


It takes place at Christmas, when the main character, Georgie, stays in L.A. to work through the holiday to get her big break in television writing while her husband and two young daughters leave to visit his mom back in Omaha. I don't want to say much about it but here are a few things:

• Rowell does a great job of capturing the reality of a long-running relationship — the part that comes after the usual happily-ever-after of romantic novels.
• She's an unabashed romantic (read more about her thoughts on the gendered criticism of romance), which is key to the book's success.
• The reversal of the usual gender roles in Georgie's family creates a quiet tension that runs throughout the book, but it's never labelled as such; it's just the way they are.
• The plot involves a telephone in a way you wouldn't expect.

Anyway, I think it's time to go off and do some reading.

Anand Giridharadas

Last night while watching All In I discovered a new journalist to watch: Anand Giridharadas, a columnist for the New York Times. Aside from a crazy hairstyle, Giridharadas offered multiple thought-provoking points about Donald Trump and our current climate of fear. The two best moments: His reaction to Trump joking about killing journalists before a fawning crowd, and his discussion of the normalizing effect of media coverage, as what's sayable moves further and further in one direction.

You watch the Democratic debate [Saturday, December 19] the number of questions that were essentially versions of "which freedoms do we need to give up" — Trump set that agenda. And the Democratic debate moderators are saying, Okay, we accept the premise that freedom must be curtailed. Well, when did we accept that premise? Now, it's just a question of which freedoms must be curtailed.

At another point he asks, "What is it about our system that provides no checks on this?"

Here's the video on MSNBC's annoying website. After the 15-second ad you have to sit through, there's a bunch of footage of Obama's recent interview with NPR's Steve Inskeep. Giridharadas comes on at about 2:25.

Police Killing Citizens, 2015

This email from Campaign Zero is the thing that's getting my attention today. Assuming you, my reader, are not on their email list, I thought I would share it in its entirety.


Today, we released The 2015 Year-End Police Violence Report, focused on police killings in America's 60 largest cities. The data, part of the Mapping Police Violence project which is the foundation for our work with Campaign Zero, shows which of these cities' police departments kill people at higher or lower rates than others. Three charts presenting the data and the source dataset are attached. Key findings include:

Police killed at least 1,152 people in America from January 1st through December 15, 2015. Nearly a quarter of these killings, 249 in total, were committed by the police departments of America's 60 largest cities, which police 17% of the U.S. population.

59 of the nation's largest 60 city police departments killed people in 2015, and some killed people much more than others:

• Bakersfield, Oklahoma City, Oakland, Indianapolis Metropolitan, Long Beach, New Orleans, St. Louis Metropolitan, and San Francisco Police Departments killed people at the highest rates in 2015.
• St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department killed over 7x more people per capita in 2015 than did Philadelphia Police Department, meaning your risk of being killed by your city's police department were 7x higher if you lived in St. Louis compared to Philadelphia this year.
• Of the 60 police departments reviewed, only Riverside Police Department did not kill anyone in 2015.
• The 60 largest city police departments disproportionately killed black people, who are 41% of the victims despite being only 20% of the population living in these jurisdictions.
• 14 of the 60 largest police city departments killed black people exclusively in 2015, 100% of the people they killed were black; for only 5 police departments were 100% of those killed white.

Data shows that police violence and community violence are completely separate issues. While some have blamed "black on black" crime for being responsible for police violence in our communities, data shows that high levels of violent crime in cities did not make it any more or less likely for police departments to kill people. Rather, as investigations into some of the most violent police departments in America show, police violence reflects a lack of accountability in the culture, policies, and practices of the institutions of policing. Campaign Zero, among other initiatives, seeks to directly address the policies and practices that contribute to police violence.
We hope these facts and statistics will help you make the case to end police violence in your community. More analysis of police violence will be released in the coming weeks.

In solidarity,

DeRay, Netta, Brittany and Sam

Love Is a Combination of Commodities

Remember, in this season of holiday baking:


Yes, butter + sugar = love, at least at the cash register of a nearby cafe.

Though I can never forget that homemade stuffed animals and crocheted afghans are where the real love is at.

Celestial Seasonings' New Boxes: Cold Tea

Celestial Seasonings tea had the same iconic packaging for decades. After the company was bought by Hain Food Group in 2000, it finally rebranded in 2010. I respect that Hain kept the packaging the same for a decade as the two companies got used to each other. The 2010 transformation definitely updated the look, but generally held to a similar approach in illustration. (I wrote about that rebranding here.)

Well, not anymore:


Clearly, Hain is in the middle of a new box rollout just five years later, as seen in this display at a local store, which still has a few boxes with the old designs mixed in.

I'd say the new design is a mistake this time. It takes something that was distinctive on the shelf and makes it almost generic looking. The differentiation between varieties is especially weak. Compare the two different chamomile packages at top left:


The new package feels dry, yet still cluttered, despite the white space.

I don't mind the new logo, but I think the idea that the names of the varieties — now located at a relatively low spot within the box layout and in harder-to-read, smaller, condensed, and all-caps type — will be more identifiable than the colorful, iconic illustrations is a mistake. Also, notice how, in the cardboard display shown, the names of the varieties are often cut off by the display edge.

Oh, and it's interesting that the Sleepy Time box doesn't use the new Celestial Seasonings logo — instead it uses a similarly styled version of the Sleepy Time name. I'm not sure if I've ever seen a major brand do that with its logo. The box actually says Sleepy Time twice on the package front, since the design requires the variety name be shown at bottom left just above the color bar.

As one commenter said on the design site, Under Consideration,

If this was a new product, I think people would applaud it for ticking all the current design boxes when it comes to teas. But it had such a distinctive/quirky look and feel that made you want to believe this was not just some large multi-national corporation. I bought one of these new teas not even realizing that it was "that" Celestial Seasonings.... I like the new look, but loved the old look. 

Another commenter called out the type choice used for the variety names:

That all-caps, condensed sans-serif support font in solid color against the white background makes the overall packaging look too sterile and medicinal for a warm, cozy tea brand.

"Colder" appears to be the consensus among the commenters on Under Consideration. Not a fitting adjective for a brand of hot teas.

A Few Tabs, Late in the Day

I'm not sure if you've ever noticed, but the later in the day I post something, the less coherent it is. I'm clearly a person who functions best before noon. That said, let me see if I can pull it together to post some of the open tabs in my browser windows.

Before there was Citizens United, there was Buckley v. Valejo, which gave us the abhorrent Supreme Court decision that money equals speech. Demos gives a succinct summary of that case and why it matters in the morass of corruption we call the American election system.

A thoughtful essay that appeals to and assails both the activist and historian parts of my self: Historian Tim Tyson, writing for the Atlantic, asks can honest history coexist with hope? Not surprisingly, he finds the obligations of scholarship diverge from the needs of activists. He writes, "When I march in a demonstration and begin to chant, 'The people, united, can never be defeated,' it makes me want to lie down in a puddle of tears." Tyson ends with some version of hope, despite his historical approach; I pair his thoughts with those of Bob Jensen (hope is for the lazy) and Ta-nehisi Coates (a writer wedded to “hope” is ultimately divorced from “truth”).

If Matt Bruenig of Demos was in charge, this is what he would do to revise the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Should only wealthy people be able to have children in the U.S.? That's the way we're heading, given the cost of child care (not to mention housing and other essentials). "Having children isn’t like buying a whirlpool bathtub or a fancy car, and it certainly should not be reserved for the wealthy. Childcare and other supports for working families are an investment in our future and the country we want to be."

How family doctors contributed to America's opioid problem (you know, the one that's so bad it's led to ads during the World Series for drugs to counter the constipation caused by opioids). From Pacific Standard.

This map of KKK "klaverns" between the World Wars may explain why I saw so many rebel battle flags during my trip across part of Upstate New York. Zoom in for detail in any part of the country. There was even one in my tiny home town.

Matt Bruenig (yes, him again) wrote a three-part take-down of the recent Brookings Center/American Enterprise Institute report, which its authors touted as a bipartisan solution to poverty based on education, marriage and delayed child-bearing, and having a job. While those things clearly correlate with being better off in our society, Bruenig assails the causality. This post provides a wrap up of his arguments and links to all of his more detailed points.

The world sees Americans as disorder-level narcissists. From CityLab. Who can blame them? Many of us agree, according to the research. Some of the markers of narcissism: immodesty, self-absorption, entitlement, exploitativeness, and callousness.

For your right-to-bear-arms reading pleasure, this from The Nation:  The Second Amendment was never meant to protect an individual’s right to a gun. The crux of the article rests on John Paul Steven's dissent from the court's 2008 Heller ruling. He wrote, "The Second Amendment was a response to concerns raised during the ratification of the Constitution that the power of Congress to disarm the state militias and create a national standing army posed an intolerable threat to the sovereignty of the several states. Neither the text of the Amendment nor the arguments advanced by its proponents evidenced the slightest interest in limiting any legislature’s authority to regulate private civilian uses of firearms."

Combine that with this piece from the Atlantic, The slave-state origins of modern gun rights. "The idea that citizens have an unfettered constitutional right to carry weapons in public originates in the antebellum South, and its culture of violence and honor." Concealed carry, open carry, dueling, keeping those slaves (er, blacks) under control... it's all coming back.

So maybe it's time to ban guns. Yes, all of them.

Once and for all, there's no such thing as a male brain and a female brain.

Dave Roberts of Vox, who usually writes on environmental topics, is going further afield these days. This time it's rumination and research why gun rights advocates dig in deeper each time there's a mass shooting. It's similar to The Weekly's Sift's analogy of the security blanket. But Roberts broadens it beyond a direct response to a "scary world" to an attempt by gun advocates to hold onto an entire way of life that's slipping away ("men working in honorable trade or manufacturing jobs, women tending home and children, Sundays at church, hard work yielding a steady rise up the ladder to a well-earned house, yard, and car...").

I may have been sucked in by the musical Hamilton into the Alexander Hamilton fan club, but not so much that I can't appreciate facts that run counter to Lin-Manuel Miranda's lionizing narrative, such as this from Boston Review and this from Vox.

How single poor moms survive. It makes me angry to read the words, "Syracuse resident Brandi Davis, a 35-year-old mother of five, has been on public assistance since she was 18 years old. She asks her parents and grandmother to watch her kids when she’s working her minimum-wage job at the grocery store..." When I read "on public assistance" I automatically assumed the writer meant "welfare" in the meaning of the word -- that the person who gets that money is not working. But that is clearly not the case. She's working. It's just not nearly enough to support a family, and the systems we have in place don't make it possible to get more education so that she can improve that, since our economy is intent on keeping wages low for the kinds of jobs she currently qualifies for.

How American businesses (most, but not all, in agriculture) manipulate the H-2 visa program so they don't have to hire American workers. It's a seven-step process that the employers have perfected.

Barbara Ehrenreich's thoughts on the growing death gap among poor and working-class whites. And how it relates to the rise of Donald Trump and our current wave of know-nothingism.

Why today’s college students don’t want to be teachers. "Today’s top college graduates are savvy enough to understand [the loss of status and autonomy in teaching]. They intuit what pollsters already know is happening in schools. In a comparison across 14 professions, teaching ranked last among respondents who felt that their 'opinions seem to count,' or included workplaces with 'an environment that is trusting and open.'"

Three Letters that Speak for Me

Three letters to the Star Tribune editor in the past two days. Words I could have written, so thanks to these letter writers for representing me.

From today's paper, on the presidential campaign:

Is anybody interested in truly leading the nation?

Just listened to the final Republican presidential debate of 2015. I do not understand our politics today. We are surrounded by a blast furnace of hate and fear, coming almost entirely from the Republican side. Congress is locked in the politics of "no." Republicans will kill anything Obama endorses and even try to kill his already-booked accomplishments, but lack an agenda of "yes." Where are the alternatives? Or is the goal simply to emasculate the effectiveness of our government?

The Democrats don't fare a whole lot better. When you are under attack, you fight back, but while what we have is not silence, it is something close to it. Obama's presidency, in my view, has been quite consequential and will be recorded as such by posterity despite the powerful roadblocks he faced. Start with completely turning around the economic train wreck he inherited and move on to an admittedly limited reform of the health care system, one limited primarily by the perverse medical insurance system with which we are burdened and move on to the ownership of our politics by the health insurance industry.

What I understand even less than our politics is the willingness of Americans to buy into the politics of fear and hate. Why? What do they think they'll gain? Do people think we'll be more secure by beefing up an already-bloated military and putting "boots on the ground" in places where we're already hated? Do they think we'll be safer by blocking entry into our country for Muslims? The 9/11 attackers had legal visas. One of the attackers in San Bernardino, Calif., was born here.

The bottom line? Hate and fear breed hate and fear, exponentially. Our politics and the public forum are diseased. Our government is no longer a democracy. It's an oligarchy, ruled by money. Our media are owned by the oligarchs, and they govern what the public hears and sees. If this doesn't change dramatically, we may well find ourselves as victims of crypto-Nazis like Trump. Make no mistake. We are in extremely dangerous territory.

John F. Hetterick, Plymouth

From yesterday's paper on the Paris climate agreement:

Fossil fuels

I have two beautiful, smart grandchildren, and I worry that the planet we’re leaving them is going to be in crisis, with species extinction, massive storms, rising seas, unprecedented human migration and ice-cap disappearance, among other huge changes. There isn’t much I can do about this, as one person, but I can do something.

As one of my grandchildren’s presents, they are receiving three promises from me, and I hope they hold me to them: I will use 15 percent less household energy, drive 15 percent fewer miles and eat less red meat. (The last one is hard to quantify, so they will have to take my word for it.) These are not only “math word problems” for them, they are also a challenge for me, because I already try to conserve. But I can do better, and I shall. If not, there will be consequences, but that’s between me and the kids. And if many others joined me, we would make a real difference.

Mary McLeod, St. Paul

On health care costs:

Enrollment experience confirms that system is not sustainable

After just completing the health insurance enrollment process for 2016, I feel compelled to comment on just how crazy our system of health care has become. During the enrollment period, there have been several newspaper and TV news reports about how the insurance providers can’t make money in the individual market or how there is a concern over the migration of policyholders from platinum, gold and silver policies toward bronze-level policies.

There has been very little reported, however, on the plight of the unfortunate souls who find themselves in the individual private insurance group. Yes, if your income falls below the designated level for your age group and size of family, you may qualify for some level of government assistance or tax breaks. However, for those who make just a little too much — in our case $62,900 — then you are on your own.

So what does that mean? It means that you are required by law to purchase a product that will cost you somewhere between 25 and 40 percent of your gross income before you start enjoying the features and benefits of the product.

In what world is this considered affordable?

Yes, it is easy to not think too much about this when you are not faced with having to shop in this market. But beware — about 50 percent of the policies sold to date are to people between 55 and 64 years old. So if you plan to retire early or are forced into early retirement, you will need to beef up your savings to get you to the promised land (Medicare).

We all know that the only way to gain control over this runaway train is to do what nearly every other industrialized country has already done.

We need universal health care in this country.

Gary Staples, Plymouth

Eight Years as DN3

Eight years ago today I decided to share this messy file cabinet full of stuff I'd accumulated or seen in the world. I've added 3,072 posts since then. If you'd told me that eight years ago, I probably wouldn't have believed it was possible.

Here's what DN3 looked like at age 8:


That was third grade, mostly in the year 1968. It amazes me how little of that year's important events I remember with any clarity. Assassinations, riots, police brutality. I was a happy, sheltered kid, working on the 1–5 times tables, memorizing the continents, making papier mache Easter eggs using a balloon as a form. And I was in Brownies, as my school photo shows.

I missed 26 days of school, which is rather a lot -- 13 in the second quarter and 10 in the fourth. I know I was out with gastroenteritis and a long bout of bronchitis. Lots of Bs on my report card, with a few Ss in Citizenship Education (see, I got an early start!) and Science, Health and Safety. Occasional general minus marks for arithmetic, being a good listener, and obeying cheerfully.

Oh, and during one of the quarters when I was absent a lot I got a minus for reading because I wasn't doing enough independent reading. Must have been watching a lot of television instead. I didn't start reading for pleasure until fifth grade, as I recall, even though I always read at grade level. I think I resisted because DN1 and DN2 were big readers, and I was trying to find my niche.

Past anniversary posts, each with age-appropriate photographic evidence:

• First
• Second
• Third
• Fourth 
• Fifth 
• Sixth 
• Seventh

Taking a Stand at the Birchwood

A few weeks back, during the occupation of Minneapolis's Fourth Precinct police station, the Birchwood restaurant in South Minneapolis was taking donations for Black Lives Matter Minneapolis. I wonder if that bit of solidarity cost them any business from their liberal and mostly white customers? It made sense to do it, though, given that they had a Black Lives Matter sign out front well before the shooting of Jamar Clark.

Now they have this sign in the window to the right of the door:


The languages at the bottom are Somali, Arabic, Spanish, and Hmong.

Reconsidering the Transcontinental Railroad

I love, love, love historians who make you reconsider things you thought were unquestionably true.

Today on MPR, Richard White of Stanford University told me why the transcontinental railroad wasn't such a good idea, at least at the time it happened in the U.S. and in the way it was paid for. The talk is based on his book, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. Sounds like it's definitely worth a read.


White points out that the way we all learned about the accomplishment of building the railroad emphasizes the technical achievement, such as this moment in Promontory Point, Utah, where the "golden spike" was driven to join the two railroads together. This story omits the fact that the railroad wasn't needed at the time and therefore never had enough business to sustain it, was heavily subsidized, and went bankrupt multiple times.

Who Are the Students?

Quoting a recent article from the Atlantic:

If a hypothetical classroom of 30 children were based on current demographics in the United States, this is how the students in that classroom would live: Seven would live in poverty, 11 would be non-white, six wouldn’t speak English as a first language, six wouldn’t be reared by their biological parents, one would be homeless, and six would be victims of abuse.

These are good numbers to remember when thinking about education. 

I wonder how much that differs from classrooms 50 or 100 years ago (especially in terms of poverty, home language, and abuse). Maybe "those kids" were driven out of school at younger ages 100 years ago than today, so that a primary school would have looked more like this while a high school would not have; maybe tightening of immigration, strong unions, and something closer to income equality at mid-century meant students were financially better off on average and were more likely to speak English at home.

I wonder if the need to pathologize students was as strong in those other eras.

If Facts Matter in Elections

I could look at this graph from the New York Times all day:

• O'Malley never says anything completely true or pants-on-fire false, but more than half of his statements are half of each. What's up with that?
• Sanders has no pants-on-fire ratings and the highest total true or mostly true. He's the only one who gets noticeably above the 50% line for at least mostly true. (Hillary is just at the line.)
• Jeb! does best among the Republicans, with Rand Paul not far off. And look where that's gotten them.
• Ben Carson and Donald Trump have never said anything that's completely true, though Trump is slightly better on the mostly true front. But Trump also has the most flaming pants of any candiate.
• Lindsey Graham may have the most even distribution among the varying amounts of truth (omitting pants on fire, which he has managed to avoid). In this case, balance is not a good thing, though.

I suppose a conservative might look at this and say the ratings are biased. But I bet if you dig into the stories behind each data point, you'll find that it's very middle-of-the-road. I know when I've read the PolitiFact ratings on the (liberal or progressive) candidates I like when they're rated badly, I often disagree with the writer's premise. So I don't believe they're in the bag for the Democrats. Reality, as some say, just has a liberal bias.

From a Basement Workshop

More from the basement... in this case, these items are from a workshop that's not in my basement, but close enough.

Love this Wissota logo from a vise:


And all the great staple boxes:






A midcentury sealing-wax box:


A steel Faber Castell pencil box:


I don't know why I find this Gold Seal scriber box appealing. Maybe the colors?


Then there's this die-cut postcard from Yellowstone. On the back, there's a small piece of petrified wood attached. I don't know if the colors were always in these muted hue or if they've faded:


These containers are from a silver-boxed mineralogy set from ScienceCraft. The whole thing is picture worthy, but here's just a sample:


This bit of ephemera, from some type of sander disc, isn't that old, but I love the name and logo:


Watch out for the disintegrator!

I've never heard of Par coffee, but this can is beautiful, even though it's full of hunks of lead:


A beautiful mid-century Black & Decker logo:


I admire the plain beauty and utility of this nail sizing chart:


And finally, a mysterious tool. I think it may be a kitchen whisk, but it was a promotional item for TIK wheat paste. The bulbous lettering on the handle warms my heart:

The Alternate Universe at Aldi

Aldi, the supermarket chain owned by the same reclusive German billionaires who own Trader Joe's, has been in the Twin Cities market for over a decade, but I've never visited one until recently. I knew that they keep their prices low by carrying only store brands, rather than name brands, but I didn't know what that looks like when you're in the store.

Now I do, and I have to say it's a disorienting trip through an alternate universe where things look familiar but they're not what you think they are. Sometimes the designs are very close to the reference brands, and other times they just have a sense of similarity.

The spaghetti packaging mimics Barilla in its overall color use without specifically copying the exact hues or shapes:





The paper towel brand, Boulder, uses the same first three letters as Bounty, but the packaging is pretty generic-looking compared to actual Bounty:




Willow, the Aldi tissue knockoff, comes the closest to copying its inspiration brand, Kleenex.





The sparkling water brand, LaVie, is clearly a reference to LaCroix, but I actually like the LaVie package better in this case:




The Campbell's soup knockoff is the one that really caught my attention at first. It's not that it looks exactly like the real thing, but in the store without the brand-name cans to compare it to, I was convinced the Aldi designers had captured the gestalt of the Campbell's design:




 I was fooled by these bottles of canola oil:


I thought they were olive oil because of the green and red and the "Italian" name, but I guess green is also used for canola.

Maybe the most interesting thing I noticed was the types of products for which Aldi does sell the name-brand item:


Aside from these Always pads and Tampax tampons, I saw a small selection of real Coke and Diet Coke among the generic soda boxes, plus M&Ms and some other bagged candy. Oh, and Barbie dolls.

Two Absurdities

Here are two amusing or painful or painfully amusing things I saw this week.


The art isn't beautiful, like the old fruit and vegetables crates of the mid-20th century, but at least this anthropomorphized sweet potato is good for a laugh in the grocery store. Just a tad obscene, maybe. But that's probably just me.


This combination of Santa, a Christmas angel, and the Gadsden Flag is more laughable than laugh-inducing. Don't tread on me, Santa! Watch out when you come down this chimney.

What Those Guns Are Actually Good for

Doug Muder posted an addendum to his post on guns as security blankets. He separated it because he didn't want to distract from the main point he was making in that post, but this argument stands on its own and deserves notice:

Guns don’t protect freedom, they threaten it. One of the what-if fantasies that justifies a well-armed civilian population is: What if the government becomes tyrannical? Won’t we want to have the ability to launch a Red-Dawn-like insurgency?

A bunch of things are wrong with this fantasy, the biggest being that my handgun or hunting rifle wouldn’t be much use against the U.S. Army, if it ever came to that. The historical references people back this point with are also usually dead wrong. (No, Hitler didn’t confiscate the German people’s guns.) The actual examples of tyrants being overthrown in recent history aren’t stories of civilian militias shooting it out with the army. Instead, they involve mass demonstrations by unarmed people, raising the prospect either of the army or powerful foreign protectors turning against the government. (See: Arab Spring, or the overthrow of the Shah of Iran.)

There is, however, one example from American history that fits the civilian-militia scenario perfectly: the Ku Klux Klan’s resistance to the occupation of the South after the Civil War. (I have written about this before; for a more detailed discussion, read the recent book After Appomattox by Gregory Downs or Eric Foner’s Reconstruction.) At the end of the Civil War, the U.S. government recognized that simply freeing the slaves on paper wasn’t enough, because the white-supremacist power structure of the Southern states would quickly re-assert itself and deny any real rights to black citizens. Tens of thousands of Northern troops occupied the South for several years, attempting to establish a social order in which blacks and whites were equal under the law.

To the former rebels, this was tyranny imposed by a distant government in Washington DC. They wanted to restore the pre-war whites-only power structure, in which blacks were subject to separate, harsher laws that they had no voice in either making or enforcing. To that end, the KKK unleashed a campaign of political terror, attacking not Army units, but political gatherings of blacks and pro-government loyalists, and assassinating numerous public officials who attempted to enforce the federally-mandated laws.

Ultimately, the KKK succeeded in throwing off the “tyranny” of Washington, resulting in the Jim Crow era.

In other words, in the historical example that best fits the pro-gun rhetoric, it was the federal government that was fighting for real democracy and freedom, while the armed civilian militias were fighting to take rights away from the new citizens (who we think of as minorities, but who actually constituted a majority in Mississippi and South Carolina).

Something similar is happening today in the recent abortion-clinic violence: The federal government protects the right of women to make their own decisions about their pregnancies, while an armed minority wants to make those decisions as dangerous as possible, and ultimately to intimidate citizens into not using their rights. The point isn’t to fight the Army, it’s to assassinate doctors and terrorize pregnant women.

This fits well with the historical analysis that finds the Second Amendment was intended to legalize armed slave-control patrols in the South.

Monsters in the Closet

Doug Muder at The Weekly Sift once again says it for me, this time on the topic of guns and why some folks are so attached to them. While people like me cite statistics about the likelihood of suicide or killing someone you love, gun advocates instead tell stories:

...and often those stories are dark what-if fantasies: What if home invaders came to kill you, kidnap your baby, or rape your teen-age daughter? What if you were a hostage in a bank robbery? What if you were at a restaurant or grocery store when terrorists broke in and started killing people? Wouldn’t you wish you had a gun then?

Such stories are easily stretched to indict even the mildest forms of gun control, like limiting magazines to ten shots: Picture your wife hiding in a closet with a handgun. Before she hid, she already gotten off a few shots at the invaders, and now she’s not sure how many shots she has left. Don’t you wish now you’d been able to buy her a gun with a larger magazine?

And we all know how effective stories are with humans. Guns are lethal teddy bears or security blankets for adults who live in a self-reinforcing "scary world" where they feel unmoored from security. For a child who fears monsters in the closet,

the problem isn’t the real-life probability of danger, it’s that a dark fantasy has gotten into your head and you can’t get it out. If you’ve ever dealt with a frightened child or remember being one, you know that you can’t solve a closet-monster problem by finding statistics to demonstrate how low being-eaten-by-a-closet-monster ranks among childhood death risks. Instead, you need to come up with some talisman or ritual that creates an aura of safety. The child needs a security blanket or a teddy bear, not more accurate information about relative risks.

That’s the need that guns fulfill for most of their owners. They’re security blankets, not insurance policies. The point isn’t that home invasion is a major risk in your life, that you are well-trained enough to win a middle-of-the-night shoot-out if home invaders show up, or even that you have a practical way to get the gun out of its safe-storage location in time to use it at all; it’s that when the home-invasion fantasy plagues you, you can tell yourself, “It’s OK. I have a gun.”

Having been asleep in my bed when my house was broken into, having heard the voice of the intruder telling us not to come downstairs unless we wanted to get shot, having the recurring nightmares to go with that experience -- I really do sympathize with the wish for some talisman that could make me safe no matter what or when.

But that's not realistic, and in grasping for it, gun owners make themselves and everyone around them less safe.

Hamilton Sights and Sounds from New York

It's time for a bit more about the recent trip to New York City.

A major highlight was seeing the Broadway musical Hamilton. If you don't already know, it's a hip-hop retelling of the life of Alexander Hamilton, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda (creator of In the Heights, which won Tony awards in 2008).


Miranda wrote Hamilton's book, lyrics, and music, and also performs as Hamilton. He's an amazing guy and the show is spectacular; listening to the cast album is a somewhat close second, though, so I recommend that too.


This is the set... the only photo I have from inside the theater, since, of course, you are not allowed to take photos during the performance.

Anyway... I had listened to the album about five times before seeing the show,  and so was pretty familiar with the music and the story as Miranda has framed it. One of the things I learned from the show was that Hamilton was married to a woman named Elizabeth (Eliza), who had a sister named Angelica. They were the daughters of a prominent and wealthy Dutch-descended couple from the Albany area (father: Philip Schuyler and mother: Catherine van Rensselaer). Both sisters play major roles in the show, so that makes a nice contrast with the usual Founding Fathers narrative.

As part of the Hamilton theme of the week, I visited several Alexander Hamilton-related sites in Manhattan. There are quite a number of others that I didn't know about. Maybe some other trip.


This is the marker on Hamilton's grave in Trinity churchyard, visible through a fence along the side street.


If you go into the church yard, you see this inscription on the other side of the base.


Eliza is buried there as well, with her own stone lying at the foot of the larger marker. She lived 50 years after Alexander's death (which features prominently in the final song of the show). Angelica is buried elsewhere in the church yard; her marker, like many other of the marble stones, has worn away to the point of being unreadable. (But she has a town named for her in western New York. It was designed by her son, based on the layout of Paris.)

Other than the church yard, the Hamiltonia I saw was all gathered together at the New York State Historical Society museum.


First are two original documents that carry Hamilton's signature. These are both from payroll documents he managed as George Washington's aide-de-camp.


And a fine calligrapher he was, too.


The portrait at left is Aaron Burr; the one at right is his daughter, Theodosia (subject of another song in the show). The bust in the middle is Alexander Hamilton, done several decades after his death.


These are the pistols used in the duel with Burr; they both belonged to Hamilton, and had been used earlier in a duel that killed Hamilton's young-adult son Philip.


This marble marker was once on the site of the duel in Weehawken, New Jersey. Duels generally took place across the river from Manhattan because dueling was a capital crime in New York, but not in New Jersey.


The blue platter is a rendering of the dueling site in Weehawken; the white head is a death mask of Aaron Burr from 1836.


This letter from Angelica Schuyler Church, writing to her brother Philip Schuyler, describes Hamilton's condition after the duel. Her handwriting is dreadful, revealing her distress, but this is what it says:

at Mr. Bayards Grenwich
Wednesday Morn

My dear Brother

I have the painful task to inform you that General Hamilton was this morning wounded by that wretch Burr but we have every reason to hope that he will recover. May I advice that you repair immediately to my father, as perhaps he may wish to come down – My dear Sister bears with saintlike fortitude this affliction.

The Town is in consternation, and there exists only the expression of Grief & Indignation.

Adieu my dear Brother remember me to Sally, ever yours

A Church

Despite her attempt at a hopeful tone here, Hamilton died the day after the duel.