Why Believe Them?

Late last week I heard news the Trump administration was reversing course on two high-profile bad decisions: revocation of thousands of student visas and defunding of the long-term Women’s Health Initiative study.

This would be good news, obviously. If it's actually true.

At this point I don't know why any of us should believe the leaders of our federal government when they claim anything. They've declared other canceled programs uncanceled in the past, and it wasn't true. PEPFARS funding, anyone?

So why should these examples be any more true?

Don't believe it until the money is in a bank (and preferably transferred to a different bank the feds don't have access to... if that's even possible) and every student has their visa back.

Trump's people are arresting and jailing judges. They lie with impunity. They know they can make a story go away for at least a while and muddy the waters by saying they've reversed on an unpopular issue.

Don't believe them.

Independent Bookstore Day

 I didn't set out to go to Independent Bookstore Day, and I wasn't thorough. 

But I happened to be near Against the Current on Grand Avenue in Saint Paul last night and stopped in. I found a first edition of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried for $20, so that was cool.

Then today, after my usual Tesla Takedown morning, I thought I would make my way over to Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction bookstore (still in its "new" location) in Minneapolis.

It was very busy in there. I finally picked up copies of Nnedi Okorafor's new book Death of the Author and Ted Chiang's short story collection Stories of Your Life and Others. I've been meaning to get the Chiang book for years: it contains the story that the movie Arrival is based on. I hate to admit I'm not the biggest fan of short stories generally, but his are indescribably good.

Just around the corner from Uncle Hugo's is the general interest bookstore Moon Palace. They were swamped with customers and had worked with several other booksellers to set up popups outside their store: a book mobile, a comics seller, and a place called The Paperback Exchange. 

The area outside the store was a nice example of an urban shared space, with artwork on the ground in chalk...

And temporary paint...

Lots of people had biked and there were enough places to lock up bikes, too!

That only shows some of the bike parking.

It was a good book diversion from the usual drumbeat of doom.

It Goes Without Saying

It's hard to believe, but I had largely forgotten about the 2022 mass shooting at the Highland Park, Illinois, July 4 parade, in which seven people were killed and 48 wounded. There are just so many mass killings in this country.

The killer, Robert E. Crimo III, pled guilty yesterday and received seven life sentences. I don't remember hearing his name before, which may be okay since in one way, it's not a bad thing to deprive these guys of publicity. But Crimo? For real? That's his name?

The other thing about the coverage of the sentencing is that it generally didn't mention his motivations for the crime, which seem as though they should have been noted. The AP story that ran in my local newspapers, for instance, did not say anthing about them. 

Crimo signed the name Donald Trump to his trial waiver. He has the number 47 tattooed on his right temple. Highland Park is, prominently, one of Chicago's best known Jewish areas.

As one BlueSky user put it,

Kinda insane and shows how afraid the networks are of upsetting this administration that a guy who killed 7 people and wounded 48 with “47” literally tattooed on his face has all but been forgotten like there’s still not a very serious threat emanating from every pore of this pathetic cult.

Possibly the Funniest Misspelling

I won't quote the exact way it was used, but on a social media post today I saw a person spell the word dementia as dimensia.

It almost qualifies as an eggcorn, as if a person with dementia is in another dimension. That's a pleasant way to think of it, compared to the connotation of demented.

I never thought about the etymology of demented or dementia before now, but of course de- is from Latin, "away from" and -ment comes from mens, "mind."

It's Actually Losing Money

It was hard to miss yesterday's news that Tesla's first-quarter 2025 earnings were 71% lower than the same quarter in 2024, which — good. In addition to the utter damage Elon Musk is doing to our country (and the world, by extension), the company is a bad investment, the products it has are not worth buying, and the products it claims it will have will never be for sale.

The thing I didn't know about the remaining profit, though, is that none of it comes from the sales of products. The company's overall operating profit was $400 million, which came from $595 million in automotive regulatory credits. Forbes described those as "all essentially free profit Tesla receives from its gas car rivals looking to comply with emission requirements." Those credits, of course, come from the federal government and U.S. tax payers.

The company had several additional million dollars in revenue from interest on investments, which made its bottom line look better, but that money also is not from sales.  

Tesla cars are money-losers, and this was its first year-to-year decrease in sales, according to Tech Crunch (linked above). Musk and the company are covering up reality. When none of the promises he made yesterday pan out — once again — maybe it will have some effect this time, given the hole he's sinking in already.

Early to Rise

On Monday, I started a new regimen of getting up an hour or more earlier than I'm accustomed to. This seems worse to me than the annual Daylight Saving Time/Standard Time changes because I still want to go to bed at the same time: I just have to get up earlier. 

I guess that does make it worse, until I finally get so tired I give up and start going to bed earlier. 

Who knows when that will happen, though. Until then, I'll just be bleary eyed.

Meet Alexander Stephens

Standards of attractiveness change, of course, and politics since the age of television has been dominated too much by the visual aspect of what candidates look like. In the 19th century, it was even considered in bad taste for U.S. presidential candidates to do their own campaigning, so their appearance must have been very much a secondary (or tertiary, or even lower level) consideration. 

However.

Have you seen a photograph of what Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States of America, looked like?

Stephens was in his 50s in this picture, and he lived for about another 20 years, so the fact that he looks like death warmed over is not literally true.  

Reading his Wikipedia page, I can see that his looks had no bearing on his election within the Confederacy. But still, I can't think of a contemporary politician who rose so high while being so unattractive. There have been some members of Congress, I admit (and more power to them!), but nothing higher than that. 

He got there on his own merits.... Helping to run a slaveocracy.

Stay Gold, Donny Boy

Art historian and art dealer Bendor Grosvenor posted a thread to BlueSky analyzing Trump's recent redecorating of the Oval Office. I had noticed the gilding of the fireplace directly behind the two chairs that are often used for meetings, but that's not the only change.

He provided photos from multiple times for comparison, and I've added one.

First, the Reagan era:


Note the green plant — a Swedish ivy given to JFK by the Irish ambassador — on the fireplace mantle.

The last days of the Biden presidency. The Swedish ivy, much grown, is still present. The carpet is now blue. Different sofas and chairs, a few more paintings. Probably different wallpaper but similar in effect:



February 2025, not long after Trump's inauguration:


More paintings and mirror added with fancier gold frames, flags with gold eagles finials, and the Swedish ivy is gone, replaced by seven gold vases or trophies. And the fireplace is flanked by gold side tables, and the carpet is lighter… basically also gold.

March 13:


Fake gold decorative flourishes have been added to the front of the fireplace…though the flags are gone. The paintings have been rearranged, though there are still a lot of them.

Last week with the dictator of El Salvador:



Two more fake gold decorative flourishes have been added to the wall on either side above the fireplace, as if there wasn't enough gold up there already, and gold flourishes have been added near the ceiling below the crown molding. 

All of this is in line with Trump's general taste in decorating, but it also fits with the way monarchs "have long used excessive decoration to signal status," as Grosvenor puts it. "Crowns are an obvious example; blingy, lavish items only the richest – and most powerful – person could wear." 

Of course, it's in bad taste in a democracy (or even a republic!) to decorate your place of work as if you were a king, but in the case of Donald Trump it signals his intentions. The fact that most of it is fake, and likely purchased from China, adds to the crassness and makes it more appropriate in an odd sort of way.

April 19, 2025

Busy day. A litter pickup, two protests, and a meetup to foster involvement in a community event I'm organizing this summer.

You have to stay busy or you sink into despair. 

And it's the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord, and a day after they lit the lights in the steeple of the Old North Church in Boston. Yesterday, this was that church:

A few years ago, as they planned for commemorations in Boston, I don't imagine anyone thought they would be doing that as part of the 250th anniversary.

A Plurality for "Did Not Vote"

I stared at this chart of U.S. presidential election results from 1976 to present for a long while today when I saw it on BlueSky:

Each year has the colors — and therefore what they represent — arranged from highest percentage to lowest, left to right. As you can see, "Did Not Vote" has consistently been the highest percentage, except in 2020 when Joe Biden just barely exceeded it. 

Political scientists, I'm sure, have many hypotheses about why 2020 — and to a lesser extent 2024 — had historically low percentages of non-voters. The increasing ease of vote-by-mail and extreme political polarization are two that come to mind. 

One interesting fluctuation in the usual rate of "Did Not Vote" was in 1992, which had the best turnout. That was when Ross Perot was running as a credible third-party candidate. Other than that, "Did Not Vote" was pretty stable between 1976 and 2000, running between 47 and 49% each year. (I don't know if the pre-1976 non-voting percentage was higher or lower, or if it fluctuated greatly.)

Then in 2004, after 9/11 and during the Iraq War, it suddenly dropped 8 points and has stayed relatively lower than the earlier consistent trend line. The question must be, why was that?

Some of it could be from relaxation of the rules restricting vote-by-mail, and the institution of voting completely by mail in some states (Oregon 1998, Washington 2009, Colorado 2013). If it's easier to vote, more people vote: It makes sense. 

The other thing that surprised me about the chart was how small the margins of popular vote victory were in some of the races, especially compared to "Did Not Vote." Obama got 33% of the vote in 2008, compared to McCain's 28%, while "Did Not Vote" got 39%. In the year of Hope and Change, 39% did not feel inspired to vote at all.

After Watergate, 47% did not feel inspired to vote and throw the rascal out who had pardoned Nixon. That's 20% more than who voted for Carter. The supposedly disastrous Dukakis only lost by 4 points, which I guess is a lot, but also sort of... not?

Lots of interesting things in this chart.

You're Wrong About Gangs

As anyone knows who has paid any attention to the illegal renditioning of Venezuelan men to El Salvador, the Trump administration's ostensible reason for this action is that the men are supposedly members of a dangerous gang. Whether they really are members of the gang or not has been mentioned somewhat in discussions I've seen, but there has been less attention paid to the general idea that "gang" is used as a scare word in this culture.

An August 2019 podcast by You're Wrong About looked at gangs as yet another instance of moral panic.

I have not been a listener of that podcast, being a late arriver to the Michael Hobbes phenomenon, so I just listened to it. I recommend this episode particularly. It fits squarely within other media that looks at the "war on crime" over-reaction, such as the Vera Institute's 2024 look-back at the 1994 Crime Bill.

In this You're Wrong About podcast, Hobbes identifies four attributes of moral panics generally, and discusses how they apply to the gang moral panic particularly. It's easy to see how moral panic applies to the present situation. The four attributes are:

• A real phenomenon (though not the one that's named). So in the case of gangs in the 1980s, the phenomenon was increased violent crime in cities.
• An exaggerated narrative, often with internal inconsistencies. For example, gangs of wilding teenagers — the equivalent of animals — were also devious, hierarchically organized drug lords. Thousands of them sprang up everywhere, almost overnight. 
• A disproportionate response. Gang task forces were created across the country, police militarized their equipment, and finally there was the 1994 crime bill. The task forces created lengthy lists of gang members and "known associates," including, at one point in Los Angeles, a list that encompassed half the Black men between the ages of 21 and 24.
• Failure to ever return to debunk it later. This left us with the continuing belief in gangs as a real thing, the idea of known associates, and therefore vulnerable to exploitation of those beliefs by the Trump administration currently.

Hobbes's cohost, Sarah Marshall proposed a fifth attribute that might apply:

• Identifying a problem in the dominant culture and projecting it onto an outsider group in order to eradicate it.

In our present situation, I would say the underlying real phenomenon is not crime (which has been trending downward for years, aside from the covid bump) or immigration, but many white people's unease with an increasingly diverse U.S. population. That has led to decreased support for the idea of immigration, which is relentlessly exploited by the right and pushed by right-wing media to the point where Great Replacement Theory has become almost mainstream.

In that context, labeling Latino men as gang members because they have tattoos, kidnapping them to another country, and dehumanizing them by shaving their heads and putting them on display is literally what Marshall said about projecting the problem onto a set of outsiders to try to eradicate it.

My Favorite Spring Tree

I was going to call this my favorite tree, but I decided it's not possible to make such a statement. But I think I can say it's my favorite spring tree:

It's a youngish pussy willow, planted on a boulevard a few blocks from my house. It's about 10 feet tall now, and at this point in April it's covered in catkins that have just been turning from fuzzy gray to their yellow pollen-covered state, which is a great source of nutrition for early-emerging pollinators.

I didn't catch any of the pollinators in my photos because they were generally on the higher catkins.

This photo shows how some of the catkins are still in the gray state while others have bloomed into pollen.

Soon the tree will leaf out and become an unremarkable part of the street. But in the early spring, it's a balm for the soul.