The Israeli Government

Thanks to a gift link shared on Twitter, I got to read the New York Times expose from two days ago on how extremists have taken over the government of Israel (that's the gift link).

One of the authors was in Israeli IDF intelligence himself and has been covering Israeli defense, intelligence and terrorism for more than two decade.

I admit I have not paid enough attention to who the various players in the Netanyahu government are as their shockingly genocidal statements have shown up in various social media posts. This article gives their background.

For instance,

In October of [1995], [Itamar] Ben-Gvir spoke to Israeli television cameras holding up a Cadillac hood ornament, which he boasted he had broken off ... prime minister [Yitzhak Rabin]’s official car during chaotic anti-Oslo demonstrations in front of the Knesset. “We got to his car,” he said, “and we’ll get to him, too.” The following month, Rabin was dead. 

Ben-Gvir, now Israel’s minister of national security, during a protest in 2009. Photo by Moti Milrod/Associated Press.

It's hard not to read this article without thinking of American settlers wiping out settlements of Native people on this continent in the name of "security," resulting in the militaristic culture we still face as a major factor in this country. Multiple U.S. presidents made their name as "Indian-fighters" committed to genocide and this is similar, except we live in a post-Geneva Convention world, and Israel is a signatory of that document.

One More Thought on Originalism

It's not like this is news, but when Elie Mystal wrote that he had no patience for originalism because of who the originalists were, I didn't relay the details. It goes without saying that they were all men, of course. 

But like Mystal, Ari Melber brings the information. He recently appeared on Why Is This Happening, and among other things pointed out that

10 of the first 12 US presidents were slaveholders, 18 of first 31 Supreme Court justices and most House speakers for the country’s first four decades. Minority rule and reactionary white power were built into our political system...

I just picked up a copy of Melber's new book, Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It. Now I have to find time to read it.

The originalist-in-chief made it clear where he stands on January 17, 2021.

Do More with the Same

The more I learn about renewable energy and the U.S. electric grid, the more I realize how inefficient our current way of producing power is. One stat I learned from a recent Volts podcast is that when you power an electric light with burned coal that was transmitted through the grid, 95% of the energy is wasted before the light is emitted. 

So part of what renewable energy does is waste less energy, so there doesn't have to be as much energy produced in the first place.

On Tuesday the Star Tribune carried a story in that vein (gift link). One of our local electric co-ops is installing a series of basketball-sized spheres onto its transmission lines. They're called neurons, and they can allow more than 40% more electricity to go through the existing high-power lines. 

That's because the lines, as is, run under-capacity for fear that they will overheat. The neurons monitor cable temperatures, as well as sagging lines and weather conditions, which makes them more efficient.

The president of the company that makes the neurons is quoted:

"Without software and sensors like this showing the actual temperature on the line, it's like driving without a speedometer. And when you're driving critical infrastructure, you do not want to speed, you want to be on the safe side."

The neurons make it safe to go faster, in effect, and make better use of the infrastructure we already have.

Times Have Changed

When I was working on yesterday's post about the Supreme Court and originalism, I came across a fact I never knew that seems particularly relevant these days. It's also a mark of how things have changed in the age of Clarence Thomas and today's Republican Party.

In the article I cited about Roberts v. United States Jaycees, I learned the origins of the case. Two chapters of Minnesota Jaycees had tried to admit women as full members. Because of that, the national organization threatened to revoke their charters, which only allowed women as auxiliaries. The Minnesota chapters sued under Minnesota state law, which prohibited sex discrimination in membership organizations. 

When the case reached the Supreme Court, two members of the court were from Minnesota: Harry Blackmun and Warren Burger. Both of them recused themselves.

They recused themselves because they were from Minnesota. 

And today we have Clarence Thomas, who will not recuse himself from cases where his own wife is directly involved in the topic in question.

In case anyone wondered how much things have changed.

On Originalism

Regular readers know I've had a long-time interest in the Supreme Court and its dance with the U.S. Constitution.

I'm not sure when my interest became more than casual, but I suspect it was the mid-1980s while I lived in Washington, D.C., and probably because of the Bowers v. Hardwick decision. I don't have a lot of clear memories of reading newspaper stories, but I remember reading the Washington Post coverage of that, understanding the basics of the case, and seething at what it meant for LGB (no T or other letters at the time) people and civil liberties generally.

It's a constitutional question, as are many before the Supreme Court. Not long after, I was involved with an organization that cared a great deal about Roberts. v United States Jaycees, in which the court had ruled the all-male Jaycees organization must admit women, and in which Sandra Day O'Connor established a test to determine when membership exclusion was allowed as part of expressive speech. 

Since then I've kept up pretty well as Supreme Court members have changed, and followed cases. My interest has been strongest over the past 25 or so years, though. I was barely paying attention when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was placed on the court, since it coincided with the birth of Daughter Number Three-Point-One.

I've disliked the concept of originalism since I first heard of it, which was probably in a newspaper commentary in the 1980s, probably associated with Antonin Scalia. My natural intellectual response was that times have changed and we can't be bound in every way by what "the Founders" thought. I didn't do as good a job of critiquing the concept as Elie Mystal does in his book (see link below).

I've written a few posts about constitutional law specifically, but I don't have the background or bandwidth to write about legal philosophy. So when I came across a Twitter thread by a philosophy professor named John Holbo, I read the whole thing and was grateful to him.

First, he points out that originalism (also called textualism) only arose as a common approach to constitutional law after 1980, and didn't become the big thing it now is until after 2000. It has become a partisan issue as well. It's not the only way to go about things: There are a number of other approaches to constitutional questions (which are summarized in this lecture by Cass Sunstein).

One quote from Holbo:

Republicans like to mock libs as perennial fashion victims of academic nonsense. Imagine if the only thing that Dems could all agree on was that they wanted to make public policy according to Derrida's "Of Grammatology". What a world!

But of course it's Republican-appointed justices who have followed the fashion, if you can call it that, of originalism. Holbo thinks Republicans don't care about the original meaning; they're after the results it gives. Another quote:

Originalism is wonderfully serviceable not just as a likely vehicle for securing steady, on-balance policy wins for conservatives  – it's a lever for 'legislating from the bench'. It is also a key piece of apparatus for coalition-building. Fusionism – traditionalism + libertarianism – was, for decades, glue that held together the conservative movement. Originalism is fusionist glue, in hermeneutic form. It is attractive because it promises, potentially, big wins BOTH for traditionalists AND libertarians.

Of late we have seen Republican-appointed justices abandon originalism when it suits their purpose, which makes it clear that it's a prop they bring out when it suits them — which is most of the time, given that that 90% or more of the population was excluded from having a say in writing the Constitution. The Reconstruction amendments, however, don't, and so they've managed to twist those out of their "original" meaning.  


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One of my most recent posts on related topics was a review of Elie Mystal's book Allow Me to Retort.

In another past post, I speculated on what ages my ideal society would use to begin various adult rights and responsibilities

A few of the other past posts:

It wasn't reasonable to beat Dethorne Graham

Big states, little states 

Amar loses his way on Mapp

Do What the Clock Tells You

After several visits, I realized that a restaurant I go to has a special frame around its clock:

It's a fun restaurant, and increasingly popular these days. 

Time to eat!

What We Learn on the Job

My first jobs were at IBM: four summers during college.

Back in those days, at a time when IBM was flush with cash — before desktop and laptop computers became a thing — any child of an IBM employee who was a National Merit semifinalist automatically was awarded a Thomas J. Watson scholarship. And on top of that, IBM also gave its scholarship winners a summer job paying about twice minimum wage for all four years of school.

As I said in an earlier post, this is how I paid for the majority of my college expenses.

I was thinking recently about two of those summers, which I spent in the same department. (Names of people are changed, though many of them are probably deceased now.)

In my second summer, I was assigned to a department that managed the parts supply to the manufacturing floor. It had two kinds of employees: expediters and analyzers. I don't know why the work was divided this way, but there was a clear class division between the two. Expediters had only high school educations and had worked their way up to their position from something lowlier, while almost all analyzers had college educations and may have come to their jobs right out of college.

Expediters were much more physically active, walking all over the plant to check on things and talk to people. Analyzers stayed in the department looking at data on "the tube" — the dumb terminals attached to the mainframe or mini computer that managed the parts inventory tracking system — and printing out long runs of green-and-white listings to look for problems.

My first summer in that department, I was assigned to work with two men about my dad's age or maybe older, named Bernie and Chucky. We walked all over the plant to check in with the managers of various manufacturing departments and with the parts warehouse.

Bernie and Chucky were kind to me, though I think they were generally annoyed that women had been introduced into the department. They told me there had been either an actual or threatened lawsuit against IBM about gendered division of labor, and after that the company began integrating women into more roles in the company.

There was one woman expediter named Doreen, who was a former secretary. She walked all over the plant the same way Bernie and Chucky did, though she didn't have a partner or a summer sidekick. Doreen was about their age, and she wore polyester pantsuits and sensible shoes. She had glasses. They thought she was all right.

On the other hand, they couldn't stand Georgia, the other woman expediter. She was also a former secretary, though much younger — at most 30, and pretty. She dressed nicely and wore heels. I don't think she did anything to offend them except be herself. To this day I remember Bernie saying about her, "I wish my shit didn't smell." I was still 18 at the time and a bit sheltered. Those words really stuck with me.

Today, I think Georgia couldn't have won with them no matter what she did.

In my second summer in the department, the IBM HR assigned me to work with the analyzers instead of the expediters, which seemed like a stupid decision to me, since I knew how to do the expediter job. The analyzers sat around a lot more, and I was their gopher, which was fine.

There was one analyzer, Joan, who I think came from a non-college background. She provided a bridge with the expediter side of the department. I don't know how she came to be an analyzer, but she was liked by all.

There was a new analyzer, a young woman named Roxie, who came to it right out of college, and I know Bernie and Chucky thought she was a waste of a salary. That did appear to be the case, though I don't remember how recently she had started the job. The other youngish male analyzer, Ward, owned a harness-racing horse, if that tells us anything about his class difference with the expediters. It appeared he and Roxie were dating.

I don't remember what the work was during my time as an analyzer the way I do from my summer as an expediter. I marked up a lot of printouts, I think.

The things I remember the most were the class and gender divisions and tensions, even though at the time they seemed just the way things were.

Not the Dry Cleaner

Everyone used to know of the Fuller Brush Man... and when I was growing up, we had some family friends whose last name was Fuller. At some point I realized that Fuller must be one of those last names that was an occupation, like Miller or Smith, so I looked it up.

I remember finding out that fulling was part of the process to create wool fabrics, after they were woven. The new fabric would be washed in the fullery to eliminate the lanolin, which would tighten and shrink it, making a heavier, more solid cloth. Urine was used in the earliest times, then fuller's earth (a type of clay). There's more to it, which you can see on the Wikipedia page.

I was reminded of this recently when I saw a photo of a Roman fullery in Vienna on Twitter:

What I didn't know was that in Roman times, fulleries also did laundry more generally, as well as finishing fabric. Servants (or enslaved people) would walk upon the clothes in baths of water and additives to agitate and beat the clothes, and then the items would be rinsed and squeezed before drying and bleaching, using various techniques.

Though it was an essential business, that article about Roman fulleries says their owners were looked down upon because of their interest in acquiring urine for cleaning — despite their financial success and the obvious necessity of the work.

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As I was finishing this post, it occurred to me that the somewhat archaic word "scullery" is similar to "fullery," except that the two start with different letters and don't rhyme. Since they're both places where someone of lower station cleans things for other people, it seemed as though they could be related. 

Checking their etymologies, though, it's clear they have no common roots. 

 

Richard Drew, Mystery Man of Innovation

For some reason, I recently stumbled across an article about the man who invented Scotch tape, Richard Gurley Drew. He worked for 3M, of course, which is synonymous with the brand.

But the story went in directions I didn't expect. Drew invented masking tape before he invented Scotch tape. And the invention of masking tape is core to how 3M came to be the company known for innovation by allowing its engineers and inventors the freedom to think outside the box before "think outside the box" had even become a cliché. Without trying too hard to read between the lines in the company's history, it seems as though 3M might never have broken out of the sandpaper business if it weren't for Drew.

Drew's biography before he was at 3M is sketchy, though, which seems odd to me. All I could find is that he was born in 1899 in Saint Paul, he went to city schools, and he dropped out of the University of Minnesota. The various bios and obituaries never say which high school he went to, or what part of town he lived in. I assume it was Saint Paul Central, which was one of few high schools in the city at the time, but the Wikipedia page for Central doesn't claim him as an illustrious alum, which you'd think it would. 

Everyone knows exactly where Charles Schultz grew up, for instance. Or all the houses F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in when he was a child. Why doesn't anyone seem to know where Richard Drew's family lived?

Maybe he's not quite famous enough, but I think he is. Saint Paul needs to do more to claim its innovators.

International and Forever

I've known about the U.S. Postal Services Forever stamps since they were issued in 2007, but I don't remember ever hearing about their Global Forever stamps until recently, when I was looking through the People's Graphic Design Archive and came across this post.

They date back to 2013 and are valid in 180 countries. Their round shape helps to differentiate them from domestic stamps.

I guess I don't send a lot of international mail!

One Word: Plastics

In the midst of all the climate crisis topics, I try not to let myself think about the problem of plastic too often. But recently several stories converged to the point where I have to put them here in my virtual filing cabinet:

A report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that:

The [plastics] industry releases about four times as many planet-warming chemicals as the airline industry....

Its emissions are equivalent to those of about 600 coal plants — about three times the number that exist across the U.S.

And if plastic production remains constant, by 2050 it could burn through nearly a fifth of the Earth’s remaining carbon budget....

And that's only about producing the plastics — not about what they leave behind. A story in the May/June issue of Discover magazine discussed inhaled microplastics. Recent research had already found people in the U.S are eating and drinking 40,000–50,000 microparticles per year on average. Additional work has found that breathing takes in about 100,000 per year, and that when sleeping, the particles probably lodge most deeply, since we breathe more deeply when asleep.

A sample issue of the British New Scientist magazine from the same time told me about another aspect of plastics I'd never heard of. The headline on that story is "Fertilisers add microplastics into agricultural soil." I couldn't figure out how that would be the case, but this is the nugget: inorganic fertilizers are coated with polymers to slow their nutrient release. Essentially, thin coats of plastic cover the pellets. They have been designed to release microplastics into the soil. It's on purpose.

It makes me wonder about all the other slow-release products that exist, including pharmaceuticals. Do they work the same way?

And of course, washing clothes that have any non-natural fibers puts microplastics into the water system. Can you even buy women's jeans without Lycra in them anymore? I'm not sure. The intentionally innocuously named fabric we all know as "fleece" is made from polyester (100% plastic). 

No one even knows the extent of damage that microplastics do to our bodies, or at what levels. But it's obvious there are many ways plastics are being used that are unnecessary, which the plastics and fossil fuel industries have devised over recent decades to sell more oil and methane as a hedge against declining demand for fossil fuels.

This commentary in the Washington Post (gift link) argues that recycling plastic is actively worse than landfilling it. From it I learned that up to 70% new plastic is needed in the mix to bind the "recycled" plastic into those picnic benches and other products, and also that each plastics recycling factory can send millions of pounds of microplastics into the environment in its wastewater. 

The solution is to require new laws and regulations, as the guest on this Science Friday episode says.  A plastics treaty negotiation was just held under the auspices of the UN in the past few weeks. I followed the talks in the Star Tribune, which ran AP coverage on page 2 pretty consistently. The final story makes it sound as though it was better than past convenings, and better than many expected. But it also sounds as though it was not enough: it's focused on plastic litter to the exclusion of plastic production, which is what the plastic-producing companies wanted. 

It's good that they made progress, and have agreed to continue talks. But this sentence sounds like the key outcome: "Environmental groups were frustrated that production cuts won't be part of the work between now and the fall meeting." But at least there is a fall meeting.

For yourself in the meantime, start by reducing your biggest use first. And props to the AP for covering the convening, and the Star Tribune for running the stories consistently.

I'm going to be looking into the organization Beyond Plastics.

Agrivoltaics—Not Romanticized AI Art

On Earth Day, a relative who diverges from me on many political topics posted this to Facebook:

I didn't respond there because I know better than to get into it on Facebook because… who has the time?

But I do have thoughts.

1. This is one of the many pieces of AI-generated "art" that have been showing up on Facebook. So thanks for putting more visual pollution into my feed.
2. This is not at all what it looks like when a farm family decides to put a solar array onto their land. The image makes it look like a return to the Dust Bowl in which we're all going to starve. 
3. Solar panels are not located inches above the ground, and the plants below are not dead and brown. The combination of solar and farming is called agrivoltaics, which I figured out pretty easily by searching for just a few minutes, and there's lots of information and photos of people growing plants and managing livestock under and adjacent to solar panels (see below for a few).
   
4. The idea that farmers would replace a field of sunflowers (and mixed produce, implied by the tomatoes and other vegetables in the foreground) is pretty strange. If anything, it would be fields where they alternate commodity soybeans and corn, since those cover most of the Midwest. The fertilizers used to grow those crops are poisoning the water supplies of farm families, nearby towns, and the downstream lakes and rivers, including the Mississippi. But corn and soybeans are not picturesque enough, so that's not what is shown. 
5. The hay bale the Hee Haw-era farmer is sitting on basically doesn't exist on farms anymore. Farmers now bale hay into broad cylinder shapes as big as a car, much too large for humans to lift. Sometimes the hay is instead piled into long mounds that are covered in plastic. Silos are becoming a thing of the past, I've been told, since each farm building is taxed; covering the hay with plastic gets around the taxation.

All in all, the AI image is a romanticized version of farming, juxtaposed with an imaginary evil version of solar energy.

Here are a few photos of what solar on farms/agrivoltaics actually looks like: