On New Year's Eve, Parts of the Solution

I was going to post something true-but-depressing (an easy thing to do these days!), but I'll save that for Saturday and instead post a round-up of my Part of the Solution posts from 2020.

Advice for Today and Every Day (January) — nine evidence-based guidelines for a "good life" from the Skeptical Inquirer.

One Less Shooting in Saint Paul (January) — well, that was short-lived, now that we've tied the city's all-time record for homicides. But the organization the story is about is still in existence and doing good work.

Eville Gorham, Hero (January)— about the "father" of acid rain research.

Finding Arash Kolahi, Remembering Parecon (February)

No More Runways (February) — about the fight against an additional runway at Heathrow Airport.

Rebirth (April) — thoughts from early in the pandemic. 

Straw-Bale Houses (April) — just what it sounds like.

One Piece of Good News (May) — Minneapolis tenants organize and win the right to buy their homes from their slumlord.

The Equal Justice Initiative (June) — a great logo and identity program for a great organization.

It Can Be Done (July) — looking at the same street, 40 years apart.

Thank You, Andrew Benjamin (July) — a volunteer makes a difference.

Land Back (October) — thinking about ways to return land in the U.S. to indigenous peoples.

Bottles Up (October) — why can't we reuse bottles?

It's Not as Simple as I Thought, But There Is a Solution (November) — thinking about the idea of an Honor Tax and more on returning land to indigenous peoples, especially in light of the Line 3 pipeline approval.

Let's Go! Here's One Way (November) — a look at how little it would cost — relative to the Pentagon budget — to vastly improve transit in all of our major cities.

That's only 15 posts out of 365 days. Looking back over the most recent years, though, it's not much lower than average. I'm sorry I don't find more optimistic things to write about. If I were the type of person who made New Year's resolutions, I might consider that as one.

Enough

I wore myself out with my long post yesterday and I want to watch two episodes of The Expanse tonight, so I'm just going to quote one person from Twitter. He's just a local Minnesota guy I follow and this tweet wasn't even going to be in my end-of-the-month round-up, but looking around for something to post, it hit me that this is where I'm at tonight and for the end of this year. 

So thanks, Bob Moffitt:

I don't want to see any specials or stories recapping 2020, thank you very much. Let's just move forward, shall we?

Grading the U.S. Presidents

I mentioned a few days ago that in 8th grade, my classmates and I organized a protest when the school district decided to change our middle school's grading system from numbers to letters. There would be no more 92s or 85s, but As, B-minuses, Ds, and so on. We were outraged, wrote a petition, and gathered signatures from many of the kids.

I'm sure the logic of our arguments was a mix of youthful enthusiasm and Stockholm Syndrome (says the old lady who hasn't believed in grades as an academic method for many decades). We took the petition to a School Board meeting, which I just realized was probably the first civic meeting I ever attended.

We failed to persuade the board members and the grading system was changed to letters the next year. Note that we were trying to preserve what we perceived as a better way for the younger students, not for ourselves, since we moved on to high school, which still used the number system.

I remember one of our arguments for keeping the number system was based on its granularity, though I'm sure we didn't use that word, since I only learned it in the past 20 years. A student who gets a 99 knows they did better than a student who got a 97, but in the letter system, both would get an A, or maybe even an A+, depending on how that line is drawn. Distinction.

Almost 50-years-older-me thinks that level of granularity is not particularly healthy for students, and also knows that number grades go with tests that have a quantitative aspect to them, while letter grades go more easily with papers, essays, and even labs, which get sorted into qualitative piles.

Since remembering my 8th grade organizing movement for the number grading system, I saw a couple of Twitter posts where the writers were rating all of the U.S. presidents since World War II, using letter grades. Both of the posts were written by Democrats, but their grades for our leaders varied a bit (you can see them here and here).

I have so many thoughts about this idea in general.

First, that no president can get a pure A grade because it's an impossible job to ace. You will do something horribly wrong for some large number of people or the planet. I don't know how to grade that on a curve. For instance:

• It's not my right to decide that Eisenhower was great except what about "Operation Wetback"? 
• Or like, how could the two linked Twitter guys have given G.H.W. Bush a B+, after he pardoned the Iran Contra crooks and took us into the first Iraq war? 
• And they both gave Carter a C, in comparison to what? Because they're Gen Xers who remember Ted Koppel every night? 
• And how do you even put all these decades of failure that have led to catastrophic climate change into their grades? The interstate highway system is an achievement, sure, but it also destroyed city neighborhoods (which were home, in large part, to Black people) and directly caused car-centered land use to increase.
  

Second, that this assessment needs a rubric. Even a basic one with three topics: domestic policy, foreign policy, and a catch-all I'll call "upholding norms / respect for democracy / non-sociopathy." I shouldn't have to have that last one, but everyone who's lived through the last four years knows why we need it. I don't know how to weight the three areas, but let's just make them even.

Third, I can't help but wish for a numbered grading system. I don't mind using letters for most of these presidents. There's enough granularity for the ones who pass, but for the ones who fail, giving them all an F doesn't begin to grade them. In the old number system of my high school days, 65 was passing, so 64 was an F. And so was 60, and 50 and 40 and so on. All the way down to zero.

I think three of our post-World War II presidents deserve Fs, but if they were assigned numbers, they would instead be something like this:

• G.W. Bush: 40
• Reagan: 30
• Trump: 0

In writing those, I realize the scale I'm working with is based on "how much damage did he do to the country?" (and the world)...and "did he accomplish anything redeeming during his time?"

That's why Reagan gets a lower number grade from me than G.W. Bush, because while Reagan's damage was less obvious at the time than W's, I think Reagan's is deeper and will have longer term effects.

As far as redeeming moments in the presidencies of these three losers, George W. Bush had one semi-redeeming policy moment (Medicare Part D, as imperfect as it is). Reagan is said to have helped end the Cold War, of course, which is a pretty big achievement. But many historians are reassessing how key he was in that, versus his reputation benefitting from larger shifts that were happening independently in the Soviet Union. And we and the Russians still had a whole lot of nuclear weapons left to destroy us all by the time Reagan left office.

I have to admit, though: Trump has given us a new low bar in assessing presidential failure, because in the past I would have thought Reagan and G.W. Bush were as low as you could go on policy and Nixon was as low as possible on behavior.

But here we have been with the worst of both worlds for the past four years. I admit these years were beyond my imagination before him, because it seemed impossible for someone like him to be elected in the first place.

My only fear in writing this and assigning him a zero grade is that there's nowhere lower for anyone else —who could be elected — to go. (Or him in the next few weeks.)

I hope that's true. 

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This is my attempt at a three-part graded rubric (Foreign Policy, Domestic Policy, Norms) for the last 13 U.S. presidents.

President	For. Policy	Dom. Policy	Norms	Over all	Comments
Truman	D-	A	A–	B-	The Marshall Plan, the UN, but Hiroshima/Nagasaki and Korean War
Eisenhower	B–	A–	A	A–	Warren and Brennan to SCOTUS
Kennedy	C	B+	B	B–	The space program, missile crisis, but Vietnam, Bay of Pigs
Johnson	C	A+	B	B	Marshall to SCOTUS, civil rights legislation, Great Society but Vietnam
Nixon	A–	B+	F	C+	SALT talks and China but Vietnam; EPA and school desegregation but Rehnquist to SCOTUS
Ford	C	C+	B	C+	Stevens to SCOTUS
Carter	B+	A	A+	A–	So maligned. Iran balanced by Sadat-Begin, environmental work
Reagan	D	F	D	F	Too much to list
GHW Bush	C–	C	B	C+	Republican domestic BS [including the beginning of ed deform!] balanced by the ADA, but Thomas to SCOTUS, Iraq war, pardoned Iran-Contra felons
Clinton	A–	C+	B–	B	The crime bill, welfare "reform," don't ask don't tell, but CHIP, budget surpluses, RBG and Breyer to SCOTUS
GW Bush	F	F	B–	F	Too much to list
Obama	B	B+	A+	B+/A-	Drone strikes, but health care, but not more done domestically
Trump	F	F	F	F	Too much to list

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Late addition: Unlike many of my Facebook friends, I have not been following and sharing the daily posts of historian Heather Cox Richardson. But I did see her post from December 30, and it seemed a good accompaniment to this assessment of the recent presidents. As an overview, she writes that "the twenty years since 2000 have seen the end game of the Reagan Revolution, begun in 1980." 

Minneapolis Hates (or Hated) Its Past

When you live in the Twin Cities, you get used to the fact that you're constantly learning how we've always destroyed buildings we should have saved, and usually destroyed them for the dumbest possible reasons. Architecture writer Larry Millett had a piece in the Star Tribune a few days ago about one such example, the 1904 Cream of Wheat factory in downtown Minneapolis, which I had never heard of until then.

It was five stories, and while its purpose was food production and I'm sure the inside was functionally oriented, its exterior was designed during the City Beautiful movement, and it shows:

In addition to stained glass windows, yellow brick, and terracotta embellishments, it was designed to have an Italian garden on one side for the employees' use. 

Inside, as Millett describes it,

...the actual manufacturing of the company's product — a hot breakfast cereal made from a milling byproduct known as wheat middlings — was accomplished on just one floor of the building, the third. The two floors above, despite their architectural elaboration, were essentially nothing more than bins for storing wheat.

The two lower floors offered an interesting mix of uses. The ground floor contained a large shipping room as well as the company's offices and a richly paneled directors' boardroom. At the rear was a thoughtful touch ahead of its time: a small room for storing bicycles. The second floor included a small cafe that served the company's largely female workforce. A "rest room" next to it provided a place for employees to take breaks.

All of that says the company's owners were ahead of their time in a number of ways. Or maybe that too many companies since then have been behind their times. 

The product was popular and the company outgrew that modest third-floor production facility in about 20 years. They built a new, much larger factory in Northeast Minneapolis, which opened in 1928. 

The glorious downtown factory stood empty for a few years until it was turned into a parking garage in 1931 — Minneapolis already felt a need for parking garages in 1931! — and then was torn down in 1939 to become a parking lot, which is what remains in that spot to this day. It's just one of downtown Minneapolis's many under-utilized surface parking lots.

The "new" Cream of Wheat factory was also nothing to sneeze at when it came to looks, though its location on Stinson Boulevard was far-removed from the dense, walkable parts of the city, as Minneapolis began its post-automobile process of sprawling outward:

The Cream of Wheat Company was bought out in the late 1940s by National Biscuit Company (now Nabisco), but its Northeast factory building still stands today. It was turned into apartments — mostly surrounded by a big parking lot, of course, since it's not near much of anything else, including transit — in 2006. 

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While looking around for information on the buildings, I came across this wonderful lettering on a shipping crate:

 

I also wanted to comment on the nature of wheat middlings. When I first heard the term in Millett's story, it sounded like it was almost a waste product of milling ("byproduct"), but clearly this part of the wheat plant has been used to create food for a long time, since it's also what pasta and couscous are made from.

But given all the white flour that was being churned out of the mills in Minneapolis, driven by the Mississippi River's waterfalls, it was a good place to make a complementary product from the rest of the whole grain.

Thirteen Years of Daughter Number Three

Wow, I blew my blog anniversary once before, but not by this many days. Thirteen years and 11 days ago (on December 16, 2007 to be exact), I started this blog.

At age 13, Daughter Number Three (the person) was in 8th grade and had what was probably the most unfortunate school photo ever taken of her. I remember distinctly after the brief photo session that I thought it was going to be a great picture, so the result was all the more disappointing.

This was a time — 1972 — when all of the (white) girls had long, straight hair parted down the middle with no bangs, so I was in the midst of growing out my hair from always having had bangs. As you can see, I also have a widow's peak, so that center part is not something I can pull off, but I didn't know it then. And that's all without mentioning the ’70s fashion touches in my glasses and pointy collar, my manic expression, or the incipient pimples on my chin and forehead.

Ah, puberty. What a time. This was the year my school wouldn't let me take shop class because I was a girl but I also refused to take home economics, my first year taking a foreign language (French), and the time they marched us to Religious Ed classes during the school day, sending us to community volunteers based on our parents' religion (!). But it was also the year my classmates and I organized to protest the school changing middle school grades from numbers to letters. And when we held our mock 1972 presidential election, which resulted in 30 votes for Nixon, two for McGovern (me and one of my friends), and two for Gus Hall of the Communist Party.

For some reason, I don't have a report card saved for this year, so I can't give the usual information on my grades or number of absences, but I think I was relatively healthy and I did okay but not tremendously. I do remember I got less than an 80 in math the last quarter, because my mother made a deal with me that she wouldn't hassle me in the future as long as things stayed at 80 or above. 

I remember by the end of 8th grade I wished I could move to a new town and start over in high school, but that was not to be. I had to continue for four more years with mostly the same people in my small town, and I will continue here at Daughter Number Three into year 14 as well.

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My past anniversary posts, each with age-appropriate photographic evidence:

• First
• Second
• Third
• Fourth 
• Fifth 
• Sixth 
• Seventh
• Eighth 
• Ninth
• Tenth
• Eleventh
• Twelfth

Keep Seeking, You're Looking at It All Wrong

This ad appeared in one of my local newspapers on Christmas day:

It was a full-page tall, on a right-hand page. I've cut it in half and put the two halves side by side to show it better here, but you can imagine that a tall skinny shape like this would have almost as much presence in the paper as a full-page ad.

Tying Jesus and Reagan together is what got my attention first, but then I focused on what Reagan said specifically. A quick search tells me the words are from his 1982 Christmas address:

In spite of everything, we Americans are still uniquely blessed, not only with the rich bounty of our land but by a bounty of the spirit — a kind of year-round Christmas spirit that still makes our country a beacon of hope in a troubled world and that makes this Christmas and every Christmas even more special for all of us who number among our gifts the birthright of being an American.

It hit me in at least three ways that I disagree with it (predictable, I know, for those of you who read this blog regularly).

First that "we" are uniquely blessed. This is the typical Reagan and conservative/Republican message of unexamined American exceptionalism. It may be human, on some level, to think you're special, and children particularly go through developmental stages of thinking they are the center of the world. But it's healthy to outgrow it, and if you don't, you're probably an asshole, as Robert Jensen put it in Citizens of the Empire, way before we had to suffer through Mafia Mulligan's presidency. 

Second, that this blessing included the rich bounty of our land. Whose land? "Our" land, again. Whose land? All that empty land no one else was using, of course! We didn't kill anyone to get use of that land, and we didn't murder, rape, sell parents/children, or generally exploit anyone to use that land. We didn't damage the land itself, either, of course. Remember, today is the anniversary of the largest mass execution in U.S. history. It was in 1862 at Mankato, Minnesota, when 38 Dakota men were hanged, with permission from Abraham Lincoln, the "Great Emancipator." Four thousand white spectators looked on. Afterward, the bodies of the men were dug up and used in medical training (including what became the Mayo Clinic) and hundreds of Dakota women, children, and elderly died of disease and cold while they were being held in camps before they were forced westward to reservations.

Third, that the Christmas spirit (generosity, right?) that makes "our" country a beacon of hope is only to be shared with those who are part of "we," the ones who "number among our gifts the birthright of being an American." It implies (or says, let's be clear) immigrants don't get to share in that gift—it's only a beacon seen from afar to inspire. The U.S. is not a place someone should actually go to to share in its promise, nope. We took all that bounty (whether from "our" own land or others' land through imperialism—not mentioned in the quote) and we're keeping it for ourselves.

The idea that the luck of where you happened to be born determines your life outcome is so at odds with my worldview. It doesn't fit very well with what 90% of Americans think, either (at least before 2010). So talking about birthrights based on national boundaries makes zero sense to me, especially in a country created from stolen land. And being righteous about exceptionalism on top of all that... whew.

Merry Christmas, Christians. I think your god would have a few things to say about this.

A Union Card Christmas

I just saw this cartoon on Twitter, thanks to Steve Greenhouse, former labor reporter for the New York Times:

It was created by John Miller Baer, a North Dakota civil engineer and agriculturalist who was also a labor cartoonist. He was a member of Congress from 1917 to 1921 and part of an organization called the Nonpartisan League, back when there were populist organizations that realized corporations were the problem, rather than other working people.

Happy Christmas to those who keep it.

Visualizing the Discourses of Climate Delay

Ten international researchers and writers on climate topics recently published a paper called Discourses of Climate Delay, identifying the lines of thought they hear repeated in their work and particularly when making the case for immediate action on the climate crisis.

This is the nontechnical summary from the Cambridge University site where it's published and free for reading in full:

‘Discourses of climate delay’ pervade current debates on climate action. These discourses accept the existence of climate change, but justify inaction or inadequate efforts. In contemporary discussions on what actions should be taken, by whom and how fast, proponents of climate delay would argue for minimal action or action taken by others. They focus attention on the negative social effects of climate policies and raise doubt that mitigation is possible. Here, we outline the common features of climate delay discourses and provide a guide to identifying them.

That's great, but perhaps better for many of us is this illustration by French artist Léonard Chemineau, which brings the article's findings to life:

As always, click to enlarge for better viewing. 

Or for even better viewing or reuse and reprinting, visit Chemineu's site, where he has shared each of the images and the full poster in high resolution. 

 

A Plush Flashback

One of the pleasures of being a parent, if you're lucky enough to see your child become an adult, is seeing their progression to adult skills and abilities. And the steps along the way. 

I was reminded of this yesterday when Daughter Number Three-Point-One found this stuffed... nonanimal she hand-sewed some time early in high school:

What is it, you ask? Well, some hints:

• That orange thread is meant to stand out from the black fabric, including the way it wraps the horns (yes, those are horns, not ears).
• The orange fabric that creates the mouth, eyes, and nose and hangs from the wings (yes, those are wings) is meant to represent flames.
• It's a bit cute and cuddly because she wanted to create a baby version of a famous monster from a certain fantasy trilogy, one which shall not pass.

The answer is below in case that's not obvious enough or you haven't read the books it comes from.

*

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*

It's a baby balrog from the Lord of the Rings, inspired, more or less, by this creature:

Since then, DN3.1's sewing skills have improved but the creativity continues.

Uncle Hugo's

Because the end of the year is approaching, I recently went through all my checking account transactions to find donations. This is a bad year for looking backward because you suddenly find yourself looking at the before times. The last time I had lunch at a couple of places I used to visit regularly until March, for instance. Before.

But it was a check card transaction recorded on April 17 that really got me. Yes, that date is pretty late in our covid saga, because it wasn't to pay a restaurant: it was for a bookstore, and it was the last store I went into before Minnesota locked just about everything down. 

Uncle Hugo's, which was the longest operating science fiction and fantasy bookstore in the U.S. Located on Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis. 

I've been going there since I moved to Minnesota in 1986 (or maybe I started going the year after). I've mentioned it in passing or in more depth seven times on this blog.

That day, knowing the lockdown was coming, I made a special trip over to finally buy all of The Expanse books because I trusted that Uncle Hugo's would have every one of them in stock. And they did:

I suppose I should have arranged the books differently for this photo, but they're in order from lower left in rows (book 1 is at bottom left, book 8 at top right). 

A bit more than a month after that visit, on the night of May 29, Uncle Hugo's was burned to the ground, along with a number of other buildings in its neighborhood in Minneapolis during the days and nights that people around here have taken to calling "The Uprising." 

At the time I couldn't write about it. It was in the midst of so much other devastation, especially the loss of human lives, starting with George Floyd's, but also Breonna Taylor and so many others. Looking back at my posts from those days, I see that I could barely write anything.

But after seeing that April purchase in my records and having just watched the first three episodes of season 5 of The Expanse that were recently been released, it now seems like the time to write something here about this particular loss of a community institution. 

The store's owner, Don Blyly, is cooperating with a Go Fund Me that was set up. He hopes to start the store again in a new location. Info on his progress (written in his typical fashion, if you've ever read an Uncle Hugo's business update) is also on that page. Though all of the store's books — including its incredible stash of used titles — were destroyed in the fire, he's also selling through Abebooks online from his personal collection and signed copies that were donated by authors, and that link is included in the progress update.

I hope the store can come back. I'm sad that I never wrote a post about it specifically before now. I took it for granted.

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Past posts that mentioned Uncle Hugo's:

A History of Book Distribution Channels, October 2017

Two Covers, Separated at Birth, August 2016

Go with the Flowchart, August 2015

Recommendations from Jo Walton, April 2014

The Forever War's Many Covers, March 2013

No Coast Craft-o-Rama, December 2008

Lois McMaster Bujold, April 2008

My Helium 101

You may have heard there's a global shortage of helium, but this recent story from the New York Times story is full of other facts I never knew about the second lightest element. 

I had heard about the shortage and the fact that it was getting to be hard to find helium-inflated balloons, which make up 10% of the gas's use currently. I've thought, myself, that they should be taken off the market somehow, since they're often made of Mylar, which is not recyclable because it's made of multiple materials, and even when they're made from just one material, they generally end up in landfills or floating off into the oceans or wherever. Kind of a symbol of our waste-strewn modern world.

So a shortage of helium, in that sense, might not be such a bad thing if it drove all the cheap balloon marketers out of business, I thought.

What I learned from the Times story was eye-opening:

• The U.S. and Qatar are currently the biggest producers of helium, and that's because the gas is a byproduct of natural gas drilling. I had no idea about that. So essentially, it's a fossil fuel, at least in terms of production. 
• Russia is about to become a key player in the market as it brings huge natural gas reserves online along the Arctic coast in 2021, shipped out of Vladivostok, which has good proximity to both China and the U.S. West Coast. By the mid-2020s, Russia is expected to control up to 30% of the market, even though other countries are also increasing production.
• All of that seems bad, since it's part of natural gas production and natural gas should be projected to phase out, not ramp up, in a world facing a climate crisis caused by greenhouse gases.
  
• Helium in its liquid form, which is the coldest thing on the planet, is essential to MRI machines, where it cools the superconducting magnets. 
• It's also used in rockets and welding because it's completely not flammable. And it's also used in printing computer chips. So the fact that it's extracted at the same time as natural gas, but is essential in things like MRIs, is... not good.
• The history of helium in the U.S. sounds like it requires its own deep dive. The Times story, as it ran in the Star Tribune, ended with two paragraphs that give a brief glimpse of that depth:

The U.S. government began stockpiling the gas in the 1920s, when zeppelins seemed to have a future in military air power, a role that never came. Still, the Federal Helium Reserve holds in the porous rock of an abandoned gas field outside Amarillo, Texas, about 2.8 billion cubic feet of helium owned by the American people — enough for an armada of blimps, or about three billion balloons if Congress decided to throw a big party instead.

The 1996 Helium Privatization Act required the Bureau of Land Management, which runs the site, to sell the entire reserve to privatize the helium market. Periodic auctions became a major source of helium for industry and created a benchmark for global prices, affecting the cost of everything from balloons to M.R.I. scans. Private American companies will still produce helium. But the government reserve is expected to hold its last auction in 2023.

Zeppelins (which I assume are helium-filled) feature prominently in the sustainable transportation visions of Kim Stanley Robinson and others, so realizing that the gas is tied to fossil-fuel extraction is basically a big bummer. And learning that we, the people, used to own enough for "an armada of blimps" but Congress decided to privatize it during the Clinton era... well that's an extra insult. 

That we've created a huge market for unnecessary goods (party balloons) using something that's needed to run important machines (MRIs, and maybe transportation some day) is pretty typical of how we do things.

I don't know what other ways could be used to extract helium than this existing fossil fuel-based method. It's the second most abundant element, though, so it doesn't seem impossible that there is one. But right now, of course, the cheapest way is the fossil fuel way, since its externalities are not included in the cost. I wonder if, like concrete production, it's being worked on by multiple scientists and engineers and I don't even know it. I hope so.

Poverty, More on Top of More

I recently saw a stat that 8 million Americans have "fallen" into poverty in recent months, and that it was the the biggest increase in 60 years. 

When I read that, I thought to myself, What was going on in 1960 that would have been worse than now? 

I couldn't think of anything, and in fact have always thought that 1960 was an era of relative prosperity. But I soon forgot to look into it in the midst of the rest of our hell-in-a-handbasket moment in time.

Then today another friend shared a Washington Post story that gave that same 8 million number. This time my friend was more helpful in her summary. She put it this way:

That is the biggest single-year increase since the government began tracking poverty 60 years ago.

Ohhh, so that's why 1960 was the year: it wasn't that there was such a dramatic increase in poverty that year, it's that it was the year when the federal government came up with a definition of poverty in the first place and began tracking it. 

Which then led directly to the War on Poverty during the Johnson administration. (And then, one could argue, to the backlash against it.)

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The federal poverty line, by the way, is set at three times the cost of a defined subsistence food basket. That multiplier was set in 1955 and has not been changed, even though the percent of household costs has changed greatly since then (for instance, housing and child care as a percent of household costs have both increased, while food has become cheaper). As the linked Brookings Institute testimony from 2008 put it, the multiplier by that time should have been 7.8. The resulting undercount of people in poverty is one of those widely known "secrets" in this, the wealthiest country in the world.

Posters, but Not of People

The most recent Twitter where someone asks about something from your childhood as a way of dating cultural trends was this: Did you have posters in your room when you were in middle school? If so, what were they?

The person who posted this to Twitter answered with names like Corey Haim, Motley Crue, Rob Low, and Debbie Gibson.

This sent me down a path of both memory and cultural history. 

First, middle schools were just becoming a thing when I was the appropriate age (1969–1973).

Second, I don't think posters were much of a mass-market item when I was in middle school, at least not in the part of the country where I lived. They were just starting to become that by the time I was in high school in the mid-1970s.

Third, the posters I had in high school didn't have images of real people (celebrities) on them. They were a map of Middle Earth from the Lord of the Rings:

Or they had sayings I liked on them, like this one by theologian Harvey Cox:

I also had a smallish poster with a night image of a neon-lit street accompanied by Paul Simon's lyric, "And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made."

Oh, and I had this big poster under the window in my basement bedroom:

(I remember being unsure if the middle figure was supposed to be a woman or not.)

Remembering these posters reminded me of where I got them: from bookstores in the very first shopping malls I ever experienced, also in the mid-1970s. These were fairly small, independently owned stores that later were absorbed by Walden Books. So the existence of these types of stores (plus Spencer Gifts!) provided more of an outlet for them.

I think I got at least the two "quote" posters and maybe the Middle Earth map in a shop called Friar Tuck Books in Oneonta, New York. I have no idea where I got the urinal poster.

I think the turn toward celebrities dominating posters started soon after this, copycatting the Farrah Fawcett swimsuit poster, which came out in 1976. 

There's probably an American Studies dissertation or two about the history of mass-market posters in late 20th century popular culture. The decreasing cost of offset printing, the increase of U.S. affluence that put money in the hands of late Baby Boomer purchasers, the building of shopping malls across the country... I can begin to imagine the factors that went into the rise of the poster. 

I was there for the beginning of it, but I think I missed the main wave.

Allegories of Good and Bad Government

I've spent very little time in Italy, and I didn't get a chance to go to the city of Siena, even though I had heard there were incredible frescoes there. My mistake.

I only recently learned from a friend about a few of them, and I confess this post is still not entirely a case of art for art's sake. I'm writing it partly because their content could have been created today.

Almost 700 years ago, in 1338–39, Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted three large frescoes on the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico, the council hall of the city. (They're the equivalent of the Saint Paul city council WPA paintings, only better.)

I don't have a sense of the scale, but it's a large room where the nine councilors met, I assume with an audience, so it's not small.

The left wall contains the Allegory of Bad Government and the Effects of Bad Government in the City:

The center wall shows The Allegory of Good Government...

...and the right wall displays the Effects of Good Government in the City and in the Country:

The citizens and city officers in the Allegory of Good Government, in the foreground of that fresco, are holding two woven ropes, symbolizing the way they are connected.

The virtues of Peace, Fortitude, Prudence, Magnanimity, Temperance, and Justice are arrayed on either side of Wisdom, who is dressed in the black and white colors of Siena. 

 

Peace, on the far left of the virtues, is posed resting on unneeded armor and holding an olive branch. 

The fresco that depicts the effects of good government was, according to the Wikipedia entry, "the first accurate panoramic view of city and country (landscape) since antiquity."

 

It is clearly identifiable as Siena and is full of thriving people and businesses, coexisting in peace.

The surrounding countryside is likewise tranquil and fruitful.

The Allegory of Bad Government, very much on the other hand, shows Tyranny enthroned and holding a dagger, with his feet on Luxury (a goat). Justice, bound, lies below him. Figures representing "Cruelty, Deceit, Fraud, Fury, Division, and War flank him, and above him float the figures of Avarice, Pride, and Vainglory."

This is the part that seemed particularly apt for our present situation. Those words sound so familiar: Division, Cruelty, Avarice, Deceit, Fraud. There's hardly a one that can't be used to describe some aspect of our current administration's acts in government. 

And what do we see as a result?

The Effects of Bad Government [fresco] shows the city is in ruin, windows are wide open, houses are being demolished, and businesses are nonexistent, except that of the armourer. The streets are deserted, and the country side shows two armies advancing towards each other

I don't intend to go back and study 14th century Italian history to understand exactly what the city councilors of Siena were speaking to when they commissioned these frescoes, but I may do a little bit of CliffsNotes reading on the subject. 

The fact that these murals exist in the very country that later gave rise to Mussolini doesn't lend a lot of reinforcement to the idea that one era can pass its hard-won wisdom to later generations.

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The first six photos are from the Wikimedia Commons. The last five were taken by my unnamed friend during her visit to Siena.

Tiny Killers

Tiny particulates are increasing in the air, and at the same time are being recognized more and more as dangerous to human health. The January/February issue of Discover magazine contains a story called Killer Pollution, which says, "recent studies show that long-term exposure to this fine-particle pollution at levels far below what current EPA standards allow is associated with premature death."

For example, we've just had stories in the past few days about children dying in part because of particulate exposure (here and here). And a large-scale analysis by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health found people with matched demographics had different mortality outcomes depending on their proximity to worse or better air quality. As the Discover writer put it:

Their work showed that tightening annual EPA air quality standards for fine-particulate matter by about 17 percent — from 12 micrograms to 10 micrograms per cubic meter of air — would save 143,257 lives in one decade. The data overwhelmingly confirm that [EPA] standards of this pollutant are too loose...

As for the increase in recent years, check out this data-mapping from the Discover article. This is the change between the 2000 and 2016, just 16 years:

Huge swaths of the country saw their level double and in some areas (like the part of New York I'm from) it looks like the level has tripled. It may not be readable even if you click to enlarge the image, but the difference between 12 and 10 micrograms (the line that the Harvard researchers identified as significant for decreasing mortality) is located just about where the map starts to turn orange on the color scale. It was in a sprinkling of places on the 2000 map. In the 2016 map, at least two-fifths of the lower 48 states' geography and probably 60 percent or more of our population is at or above that unhealthy level.

What's going on? 

I'm sure it's many things, but for much of the increase, I think some of it's from forest fires, some from people burning wood on purpose for heat or outdoor fun fires, while some is from bigger, heavier vehicles. As this article says, electric vehicles won't save us from pollution because the "emissions from tire, brake, clutch, and road wear" combine with stirred up particulates that are already on the road surface. EVs, remember, tend to be heavier because of their batteries, plus we have the whole SUV-tank obsession gripping American car buyers. Heavier vehicles wear out their tires and the road faster and that wear goes into the air.

An OECD study found that "emissions from road traffic might even be worse for health than those from other sources, like burning coal, because they are concentrated in areas with the greatest population density and the most traffic... causing an estimated 4.2 million premature deaths in 2015."

For me, the upshot of all that is that EVs should be condiments, not the main course, of a transportation system transformation to a low-carbon future. If they are passenger vehicles, especially, they should be small and light, not Teslas or Hummers or F150s. And there's a lot you can do with an ebike, especially an cargo ebike, especially if there were fewer dangerous heavy motorized vehicles on the roads.

Decreasing vehicle miles traveled through land use and localism is the way to go.

A Double Standard, No Surprise

It's all so hard to remember, but Van Jones used to be someone you'd think was part of the solution instead of an apologist for the problem. In those days, he was bounced out of the White House because at an earlier point he had called Republicans "assholes." I mentioned this about a year ago, when Stephen Miller wasn't bounced out of the White House for writing a number of white supremacist emails. 

Today I saw this juxtaposition on Twitter, which reminded me of the same scenario:

Basically, the image shows a tweet reporting that the woman Biden wants to have as deputy chief of staff was quoted somewhere referring to Capitol Hill Republicans as f*ckers (a term they have never heard before, I'm sure!). Not even all Republicans — just the ones on Capitol Hill. Which seems amply demonstrated at this point.

The next tweet has a quote from Georgia Senator David Perdue explaining how he's trying to segregate (his word) any absentee ballots in the January run-off election that are voted by people who registered after the presidential election, treating them as provisional ballots.

Which of those does any actual harm? Perdue's actions.

But which one will cause outrage? The one by a woman (and Democrat) who swore, not a Republican man who actually wants to do harm to other people and their rights.

Time to start ignoring these kerfuffles and forge ahead, Democrats.

A House, a Rabbit Hole

It has been a long day and I don't have a lot of brain power, so once again I'm going to share a couple of images that come from the Twitter feed of Cory Doctorow. These are plans and renderings of a 1932 house built in Scarsdale, N.Y., designed by Electus D. Lichtfield for an investment banker named Randolph P. Compton. It was built at the height of the Great Depression.

Scarsdale, in case you don't know, is a hoity-toity early bedroom community north of New York City, connected by commuter rail before cars were common. This house has three servants' bedrooms and that was what got my attention. 

To someone of the present day, at first the outside images don't look abnormal for an American house, but it was large for the time it was built. It actually had more in common with an English stately home than a typical American house of that period (such as the one I live in, which was built not long before). 

My house is not small for its era, with four bedrooms, two up and two down, but it wasn't built with servants' quarters. Or a basement under the kitchen that I suspect was for the wine. Or a three-car garage. Or four-and-a-half bathrooms.

 

According to the plans, that's the kitchen in the stone portion with the chimney, so below it is probably a food and drink-related cellar. There doesn't appear to be an internal stairway from that cellar to the house interior.

(Click to enlarge.)

The three servants' bedrooms are in the wing above the garage, along with a "servants hall" that is shared with the laundry. I think this means they ate their meals in the same room where they did the laundry for the family. 

There are two stairways to the second floor, a main one from the center hallway and one tucked behind the dining room leading out of the pantry. On the second floor, the main one comes into an area adjacent to the master suite. The secondary stairway rises into an area between the guest room, a second bedroom, and the children's suite (shared with a governess's room), which is above the servants' quarters.

The second floor and attic (with playroom, above the master suite):

  

The main hall, looking inward from the front door.

The children's sleeping porch, above the end of the servants' wing.

A little research on the Comptons turned up a few facts. Randolph's father was also an investment banker, and Randolph began his career working for his father's company. Randolph lived until the age of 95, dying in 1987. He was on Nixon's enemies list (good company). Mrs. Compton — Dorothy (née Danforth, of the Ralston Purina Danforths) — went to Vassar College, as did their daughter, while it appears the men generally went to Princeton. 

Randolph and Dorothy started a family foundation in 1946 that "supports work in climate change, progressive foreign policy, and reproductive rights and justice," especially as those three areas overlap. They recently announced the foundation would begin spending down its assets and close out operations by 2027 "in response to the severity, urgency, and scale of the threats facing our grant partners and all advocates working for a more peaceful, climate resilient, just, and democratic world." They granted $9 million in 2020 vs. $1.9 in 2019.

The architect, Electus Litchfield, worked until 1950. He designed many houses and planned some towns. It sounds like he saved New York's Central Park from being turned into a bunch of baseball diamonds. He also designed the main library in downtown Saint Paul (!) and the Lewis and Clark monument in Astoria, Oregon. I don't remember ever hearing of him before today.

Keep on the Sunny Side

I've occasionally mentioned one of my side obsessions with associations. In this country, there's an association for everything, including an association of associations. And with associations, there's also often a trade press, where people in an industry talk to each other about the things that matter to them in their specialized language. 

In the age of the interweb, the trade press is not as much of a thing as it used to be, so it can be a little startling to glimpse a real insider magazine from back in the day like Casket and Sunnyside:

Yes, this is the trade magazine of the funeral home industry. 

It didn't come by its odd name naturally. That was my biggest worry, honestly, and I feel a bit better knowing that it resulted from the 1932 merger of one publication called The Sunnyside and another called The Casket. 

Cory Doctorow recently shared several covers from the magazine on Twitter. Unfortunately, most of the graphics were pretty low resolution, so the type is hard to read. But these two are not bad, so I could read them enough to wonder a few things about them:

This Christmas 1934 issue asks the question, "Shall We Have a Daniel Webster or a Czar?" I don't know what that means for sure, but I bet it has something to do with FDR. This would have been written about a year or 15 months into his first administration, in the depths of the Depression and the early years of the New Deal, and I can just bet the probably well-off owners of funeral homes were not fans of FDR. Daniel Webster was a great compromiser throughout his career, selling out on slavery, among many other issues of the day. To get ahead of myself by a few years, it sounds as though Casket and Sunnyside may have been a bit more with Nevil Chamberlain than Winston Churchill.

A few years later, during the 1939 World's Fair, the cover was used to juxtapose the Fair's iconic, modernist trylon and perisphere with an interesting graph:

It's a bit hard to make out even if you click to enlarge, but it reads "the retreat of death," and the years start at 1800 and increase in 30-year increments to 1920, then feature 1938 in between near the right. Notice how the curve flattens out to the right instead of continuing downward.

The deaths per 1,000 (per year, I assume) peak in 1830 at 36 (I think, it's a bit blurry) then drop through 1920 to 12, then further to 11 in 1938. As we know, this was largely due to public health work, but I'm sure it was all bad news for the funeral industry!

The cover headline below reads "Public Health Exhibit: New York World's Fair 1939 Captures Professional Interest." So that graph is a large, three-dimensional infographic from the public health exhibit. That spurred me to look around and find a better version of the exhibit photo:

For comparison, the 1950 U.S. death rate per year per 1,000 was a bit over 9.5. In 2019, it was a bit under 8.8 (though it reached its lowest level around 8.1 in 2008). Many other countries, I should note, have much lower death rates than the U.S., so that should make our funeral home industry happy.

Casket and Sunnyside ceased publication in 1988.

Housing, Hatred, and Indomitable Women

A friend recently gave me a copy of the 1955 book Forbidden Neighbors: A Study of Prejudice in Housing by Charles Abrams. I gather that it was one of the early academic works that began to form the field that has now led to works like Keeanga-Hamahtta Taylor's Race for Profit and Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law.

I haven't spent much time with the book, but the one thing I did was check the index to see if it had anything to say about Minneapolis and Saint Paul, which we now know were hotbeds of segregation and redlining. Despite the fact that this is literally the exact time when the interstate highways were being planned through the heart of our Black communities, Saint Paul is not mentioned at all, and Minneapolis is noted on just one page, where Abrams is listing his program for action. The 12th aim is to integrate "minorities" into neighborhoods, and Minneapolis is given as an good example of a city with a minority population under 2 percent that is widely "distributed throughout the city." And he continues:

This is a healthy pattern and should stay that way. FHA and VA should not encourage housing projects which disrupt it. Suburban development should follow a similar pattern; urban redevelopment or slum-clearance projects should not aim to oust the minority or force it into ghettos elsewhere (page 382).

I don't know where Abrams got his information on Minneapolis having a healthy pattern, since the city was redlined and covenanted well before 1955, and segregated public housing like the Sumner Field project in North Minneapolis was built in the 1930s. White flight from Minneapolis to the segregated suburbs was well underway at this time as well.

A much better look at these practices comes from the Mapping Prejudice project, which has completed work on racist covenants in Minneapolis and is described in this one-hour documentary called Jim Crow of the North. Because of the nature of record-keeping and digitization, it doesn't cover Saint Paul, unfortunately, but we know there is more to come from oral histories already on record.

A few things I learned from this documentary that I didn't know.

Franklin Avenue in the Prospect Park neighborhood was where white racist terrorism around housing started in Minneapolis. In 1907, the Jackson family built a house in the up-and-coming neighborhood. 

The Jackson house today, at 2003 Franklin Ave. SE. (It was originally built with a covered porch.)

When they moved in and the neighbors realized they were Black, the reaction was not great (in fact, the white woman across the street screamed at them.) But when a second Black family, the Simpsons, who were friends of theirs, started to build in 1909, things got really bad. 150 people, "some of the most power people in Minneapolis" marched on the house to present a threatening message.

 The newspaper clippings shown in Jim Crow of the North are hair-raising. Imagine living through this:

 

This was during an era when lynchings were common in the U.S., so referring to rumors of "parties in this vicinity" being willing to "take any steps necessary" is obviously a threatening, terroristic message.

The Simpsons' house today. 

It's not a not a coincidence that the next year, 1910, the first racial (racist) covenant was incorporated into a Minneapolis housing deed. 

Mapping Prejudice has identified covenants all over South Minneapolis, and acknowledges that their effects extended beyond the houses they specifically applied to. One example is the Lee family, who bought an uncovenanted house in 1931 (located in the blue area) between covenanted houses, marked in red on this map from Jim Crow of the North.

Arthur Lee was a World War I veteran and a postal worker. He, his wife, Edith, and daughter, Mary stuck it out for three years, enduring crowds of thousands outside their home, having their dog poisoned and paint thrown at the house, and being forced to sleep in their basement. 

 

That's terrorism, by any description. They were protected by Arthur's fellow postal worker and veterans. But they finally sold the house and moved.


A monument at the street corner of 4600 Columbus Ave. S. marks this ignoble history today. (Here's a recent Star Tribune story that reprints a contemporaneous version of one of the white race riots.)

From the Jim Crow of the North documentary I learned about two women I had never heard of before.

The first is Lena Olive Smith, attorney for the Lee family in their struggle. Smith was the first Black woman lawyer in Minnesota and the first black lawyer of either sex to practice in Minneapolis. She moved here in 1906 at age 21, working at first as a real estate agent, where she saw discrimination in action (big surprise). She started attending law school part-time at age 31, finishing her degree and passing the bar when she was 36. She cofounded the local Urban League in 1925 and was president of the Minneapolis NAACP from 1930 to 1939.

Smith would have been working in real estate, I think, while the Jackson and Simpson families were being harassed and threatened in Prospect Park. She practiced law until she died in her 80s.

The second woman I learned of is Marvel Jackson Cooke. Cooke was one of four daughters in the Jackson household in that house on Franklin Avenue, along with her parents Madison and Amy. (Madison had a law degree, but worked as a Pullman porter, which tells you something about opportunities for Black men in the early 20th century in Minnesota.) 

Despite the harassment during their early years, her family stayed in the house on Franklin Ave. and she attended Pratt School in Prospect Park, then the nearby University of Minnesota. But she left Minnesota immediately after graduating. 

Her Wikipedia page is one amazing thing after another, since it appears she knew and worked with most of the prominent Black figures of the Harlem Renaissance and many in the Civil Rights movement. Her first job in Harlem was working for W.E.B. Du Bois on The Crisis, followed by a career in journalism at the Amsterdam News and other publications, including being one of the first Black journalists hired at a white-owned publication, the Daily Compass. She also was a labor organizer for the Newspaper Guild.

This 1950 article from the Daily Compass, co-bylined with Ella Baker!, was an investigative story about wage theft from Black domestic workers by white women in the Bronx:

As Kirsten Delegard, one of the Mapping Prejudice researchers featured in the documentary said,

I just wonder what it would have been like if they had been welcomed. If Prospect Park had become an enclave for Black intellectuals and Black Civil Rights activists. What would that have been like? How would this city be different?"

In combination with this earlier post about our local history, these stories of our own Jim Crow of the North clearly give the lie to the idea that the South has a corner on American racism and segregation, if that needed any proving.

Stop Line 3

The contradiction of a governor who pledges to protect Minnesota's climate and future generations—but then doesn't do everything he can to stop a new pipeline from being built across his state—is really getting to me. It's a story that's echoed by Democrats again and again: they use what I consider the excuse of constraint from existing legalisms when we are in a crisis that transcends those. What will those legalisms matter when we've passed 2°C of warming? Because that's what's going to happen. 

Governor Tim Walz supposedly believes that's where we're headed if we don't act, and understands what it will take to decrease our greenhouse gas emissions, but he is not stopping the Line 3 pipeline.

In this case, the state's Department of Commerce has given the opinion that the pipeline is not needed to replace the capacity of the pipeline that's already in operation, so he could follow that finding, but the Pollution Control Agency has said it is "safe" to build the new pipeline (though of course others disagree). The new route crosses dozens of new wetlands that the old pipeline doesn't touch and it also crosses the Mississippi River in a new location. It also violates the treaty rights of three tribes who object to it. 

Perhaps you heard that the stuff humans have made now outweighs all the natural biomass on earth, which is astounding, given how much biomass there is in plants alone, let alone animals (including all the fish in the sea). Our human stuff is mostly nonbiodegradable. It's trash, permanently. We are trash-making machines.

The Biden administration has the slogan "Build Back Better," referring both to a post-Trump and a post-pandemic America. Stopping this pipeline should be part of that. "Better" means keeping carbon in the ground, not drilling it or mining it, pumping or piping it, trucking or training it. "Better" means finally abiding by treaties instead of violating them. Governor Walz, be part of Better.

Creating a few thousand jobs for a couple of months make no sense just to satisfy a big corporation that has spent a lot of money lobbying to destroy pristine parts of our state and watershed. All so they can sell tar-sands oil to burn into our atmosphere and cook our habitat.