Two from Volts: Hard Truth, Easier Truth

I haven't been listening to podcasts as much lately, but during and just before my recent trip I took in two from David Roberts' Volts.

I meant to write about the first one, The cure for misinformation is not more information or smarter news consumers. 

The guest is Samuel Bagg, University of South Carolina political scientist. Bagg argues that if you want to change minds, it's not about fact-checking and putting out better messaging: You have to change identities. “More than any particular institutional, technological, or educational reform, promoting a healthier democracy requires reshaping the social identity landscape that ultimately anchors other democratic pathologies.”

Now it's been too long since I listened to it, so I will just recommend it. I'm afraid he's correct.

I heard the other one yesterday on the train back from Chicago, and managed to take a few notes. It featured Saul Griffith, MacArthur fellow, engineer, and inventor. Founder and CEO of OtherLab. Part of Rewiring America. 

The podcast's title is not as provoking as the other one: What's the real story with Australian rooftop solar? 

But as with Bill McKibben's recent book Here Comes the Sun, it's full of good news about the future of solar, and in this case, specificaly roof-top solar. 

"In every single possible future of this planet, the cheapest electricity will always be your rooftop solar. I can't say it more clearly than that." Because there's not distribution involved. 

Despite the current partisanship associated with solar energy, "Eventually the economics will catch up with you people" [Americans]. He gave the example of just one family he knows saving $9,000 a year.

Solar as a primary source will just make sense, he said, for any country that's an importer of fossil fuels — which is 80% of countries. It already works at up to 36° latitude, and is getting more efficient and cheaper, the batteries are better, so 1 or 2° more are added to that efficiency line every year. (Sydney is at 36°). 45° south/north is likely the boundary. (Chicago and New York are 40–41°, Minneapolis is 45°.)

Maximize rooftop solar, he says, and back fill with other forms of noncarbon energy. That makes for the lowest cost system, with the highest use of wires.

At some point countries that export fossil fuels will have a problem because FFs are more expensive than solar. Exporters will have to force countries to take them.

Roberts asked about making initial solar installation cheaper for middle-income to poorer people. Isn't it a problem that as more (better-off) people move to rooftop solar, won't that make conventional electricity more expensive for the poorer people who remain to share the cost burden? Griffith's answer is an emphatic No:

The highest component of anyone's electricity bill is the cost of the distribution, which is the local poles and wires that move the electricity around. Those things don't have very high utilization, typically between 25 and 40%. Meaning, they're rated very high, as though every house has every light turned on at all times... If you do a whole lot more solar and a whole lot more batteries under the local substation, under the local distribution grid, you can probably double that utilization. If you double the utilization, the per-kilowatt-hour delivered cost of electricity will go DOWN. 

They ended by talking about what we need to do in our individual states within the U.S. to make this happen:

• Find your local AHJ (authority having jurisdiction). Changing state law to make permitting faster is the quickest method, but it may be a Public Utilities Commission, or something else. 
• Advocate for better permitting and interconnection. Making solar installation fast and connection automatic is the key. Rewiring America found that you only need 12 people at a Public Utilities Commission meeting to make a difference.
• Lower the cost of customer acquisition, so word of mouth takes over. In Australia that cost is $0 because people recommend it to their friends. In the U.S. it's a huge percent of the cost of solar installations. 

 

No ICE in New Orleans

I'm just back from almost nine days away, three or so spent on trains, two and a half spent in Chicago, and the rest in New Orleans. I've never been there before, and there was a lot to see, so I missed a lot. 

One thing I didn't see while there was Customs and Border Patrol or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, though I wasn't near a Home Depot, so maybe that accounts for it. Though I wasn't looking for it, I saw some evidence of New Orleans talking back to ICE and Homeland Security:

Possibly dating from the No Kings march date? 

On a bougie porch in the Garden District.

I don't remember where I saw this.

This artistic rendering is a bit difficult to make make out, but easier if you click to enlarge the photo.

I shot this from the street car going up Canal Street on the way toward City Park, so it was far away and is a little fuzzy — but you get the idea.

Now I'm back in the Twin Cities, where we're facing a full-blown right-wing-induced panic that's likely to get people hurt, if not killed. So things are not great.  

A Voice from 1981

A friend who used to work for Ambassador (TWA's in-flight magazine) shared this with me recently. It seems the magazine's editor, William Reynolds, wrote to a number of well-known writers and asked them for a list of books that we all should read. 

He got responses from Studs Terkel, Isaac Asimov, Jerzey Kosinski, and David Brinkley. Some had interesting lists, and others less so. 

The best response was from Ursula K. LeGuin, and I'm not saying that just because I love her writing. Here's the note, which was typed on monarch-sized paper:

And as text:

March 23, 1981

Mr. William J. Reynolds
Senior Editor
AMBASSADOR
1999 Shepard Road
Saint Paul, Minnesota 55116

Dear Mr. Reynolds:

I drew a blank trying to think of books that "we should all read." The "should" really scares me. The kind of books I read were written to give pleasure and delight. I am now trying to think of books that we should not read, and even this is very difficult. Perhaps MEIN KAMPF, perhaps the instruction manuals of the KU KLUX KLAN, perhaps THE ODYSSEY in Greek, unless we understand Greek. I guess I am stumped. Maybe I will now go read the latest Harlequin Romance, although I know I shouldn't. 

Yours very truly,

Ursula K. LeGuin 

UKL/d

Note the initials at the end: I wonder who "d" is? I assume her assistant. The letter was typed on an IBM Selectric with the Letter Gothic type element. From the looks of the Xerox copy, her letterhead is either engraved or thermography, given the way the thin parts of the letters didn't make full contact with the paper when copied.

At this point in 1981, LeGuin was 51 years old.
 

A Little Birdy Told Me

You never know what you'll see when you look in a bowl of stickers:

As seen at Next Chapter Books, Saint Paul.
 

The Star Apartments in Miniature

On a recent visit to the Art Institute of Chicago, I saw a number of things worth writing about, and maybe I will do that soon, but the one I wanted to mention first was a set of models of the Star Apartments. They're located in the small Architecture and Design area on the second level. 

Unlike most architectural models, which show the way a building might look after it's built, these five depict some of the Star Apartments the way they have actually been furnished by the people who live in them. The Star Apartments, as the accompanying information card says, are permanent supportive housing in Los Angeles, built for formerly homeless people.

The apartments, according to the complex's Wikipedia page, are each 350 square feet. The building has 102 units in six stories. It was created as a collaborative between the architect (and model-maker) Mike Maltzan and Skid Row Housing Trust. The building has a health clinic, community garden, running track, fitness center, art space, and library. More than 15% of the building's 95,000 square feet is community space. 

Each resident is required to pay 30 percent of income or government assistance toward rent. Residency is non-conditional, meaning residents are not required to enroll in assistance programs offered on-site, including addiction counseling, medical assistance, or psychiatric counseling.

This is an example of the "housing first" strategy the Trump regime is currently attempting to destroy.

The models in the Art Institute display show how real people personalize even small spaces. Imagine that you are looking into these apartments through a solid wall, since that's what's missing from each of the models:

There's one window, which is at the far right end in the bedroom area, and one door at the left.

 

The bathroom is in the center, in the area enclosed with the sliding colored door.

Each person has a small kitchen, a desk, a bed, and a wardrobe.

The other furnishings, arrangements, and decorating are individual. 

I had just spent a bunch of time on the same visit looking at the Institute's collection of Thorne Miniature Rooms, which recreate imaginary historic period settings, so seeing these models of places where real people live was startling in contrast. 

Scarry's Animals Say Merry Christmas

I'm fairly sure I never heard of Richard Scarry when I was growing up. I'm not sure why, but I never came across his books (which began appearing before I was born) until well after I was an adult and they became the subject of pop culture references. It looks like Busy Town came out in 1976, when I was almost finished with high school, so maybe his books just weren't circulating that much in libraries before that. 

Anyway, I had still never heard of The Animals' Merry Christmas (by Kathryn Jackson, art by Scarry) until yesterday, when one of my relatives shared this on Facebook:

It would be cool to get a copy of this book — from the second year of his book-illustration career — to see how all of the images presage the later appearance of Scarry's work. There are quite a number of versions of it, including at least two different ones from the publication year 1950 that claim to be first editions. It looks like one is a Big Golden Book and one was not, and there might be a Little Golden Book from the same year... it's pretty hard to sort out. 

As you can see in this single example, Scarry's animals already had a lot of personality, while the illustration style was much more complicated than it became.

Suspension of Disbelief About Age

I was watching It's a Wonderful Life last night, as one does, and a couple of things occurred to me about the actors' ages.

Of course, Jimmy Stewart is too old to be playing 21-year-old George Bailey, but I can forgive that, since he has to also play fully adult George. That's not the problem. 

In 1928, when Harry graduates from high school and their father has a stroke and dies... how old is Pop supposed to be? As a parent of high school- and college-age young men in the early 20th century, you'd think he could be as young as maybe 42, more likely something like mid-50s, maybe... 

But Samuel Hinds (right), the actor who played Peter Bailey, was born in 1875 and was at least 70 years old when the movie was shot. Okay, sure, that's still possible. He would have been almost 50 when George was born. 

Meanwhile, Thomas Mitchell, the actor who played Peter's brother, Uncle Billy (left), is said to be 55 years old when the movie takes place in 1946 (18 years later) — which means Billy would have been only 37 in 1928:

But brother Peter looked like he was (and actually was) 70 years old at the time.

Of course, this is possible if they were real people and were half-brothers, but it's more likely just a weird artifact of casting the actors Frank Capra wanted to cast. 

In reality, Thomas Mitchell/Uncle Billy was 54 when the movie was shot. He was made to look a bit older in the film (since he was only 16 years older than Jimmy Stewart). 

Fun facts about Mitchell: 

• he played Scarlett O'Hara's father in Gone with the Wind (a movie I've never seen), 
• his nephew was Secretary of Labor under Dwight Eisenhower, and
• he was the first male actor to win an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony Award

You never know what you'll find when you start reading Wikipedia pages.

So Much Soda

If you're in the Twin Cities and you want a wide selection of oddball-brand sodas, Nelson's Cheese & Deli on Como is the place for you.

I only photographed the ones with the relatively retro labels. There are others with jankier looks, and a lot more varieties than this.
 

Know Your Rights

As seen at the counter of an immigrant-owned coffee shop in Saint Paul:

These days... 

Pyramid Schemes

I've been reading and rereading Cory Doctorow's now-three-book Marty Hench series. The newest book is called Picks and Shovels, and it's Marty's origin story in the 1980s, at the dawn of the modern computer era. He's a forensic accountant who uncovers financial malfeasance in the tech world. I know, sounds fascinating, but it is!

As in most Doctorow books, there are passages of the book that I can only describe as short lectures on some topic he thought was needed to understand what the book is about. (In his Little Brother books, one topic I remember is public and private keys used in creating secure communications. I confess I skimmed that part.)

In Picks and Shovels, a topic that comes up is pyramid schemes, which is relevant to a character who's a forensic accountant. The book is in first person, so this is Marty narrating:

One of my accounting profs had worked for the FTC when they'd gone after Amway, and he was still bitter that Amway's founder, Rich DeVos, had gotten Gerry Ford to lean on the FTC to shut down their prosecution of his company. Ford had been DeVos's congressman before Nixon's resignation catapulted him into the White House, and DeVos's partner, Jay Van Andel, was the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the most powerful lobbyist in America, so the FTC buckled. 

There was only one problem: Amway was guilty as hell. 

Checking into this, I see that the Amway case was filed in 1975...heard in 1978...and decided in 1979. In the context of the novel, that decision date would not have been long before Marty had his class with the professor. 

From the Wikipedia page about the case:

In the Final Order, issued on May 8, 1979, Amway and its representatives were ordered to:

• cease allocating customers among their distributors;
• cease retail price fixing;
• print a specific disclaimer on any suggested retail price list; and
• cease misrepresenting profits, earnings, or sales; and stop implying other than average results, unless the average results or the percentage of distributors actually reaching those figures is also conspicuously disclosed.

In 1986, Amway agreed to pay a $100,000 penalty in a consent decree for violating the 1979 ruling, after Amway placed ads that represented higher-than-average distributor earnings without stating the actual average results or percentage of distributors who actually met the represented claims.

But, as Doctorow's book says, the Final Order somehow — in the midst of all that — also explicitly said that Amway is not a pyramid scheme. 

In the middle book of the Marty Hench series, The Bezzle, the Amway pyramid scheme and FTC are also mentioned, this time in less detail. But in some ways it answers my question about how the case was found to not be a pyramid scheme. In this book, Marty says in narration, that through the intervention of Gerald Ford,

...they crafted anti-pyramid-scheme rules that were so loose that almost any scam could fit comfortably inside of. 

Essentially, they wrote the rules to exclude the things Amway was doing, then declared that Amway was not doing those things. So therefore it was not a pyramid scheme. Neat!

The name DeVos is probably familiar. Rich DeVos's son is still the head of Amway. His wife is Betsy DeVos, was head of the Department of Education in the first Trump administration, and head of the Michigan Republican Party before that. Her brother is Erik Prince, head of Blackwater, the shadowy mercenary company.

Amway is still in business, making the people at the top very rich so they can fund right-wing (and evangelical Christian) causes. Meanwhile, "the Federal Trade Commission requires Amway to label its products with the message that 54% of Amway recruits make nothing and the rest earn on average $65 a month" (source). 

Denaturalization

My most recent BlueSky round-up included this:

Immigrants ‘plucked out of line’ at citizenship ceremony at Faneuil Hall “the cradle of liberty.” If you ever claimed you want immigrants to do it the right way, this should outrage you. On the other hand, If you think this was okay, you need to come to terms with your white nationalist views.
Christopher Webb 

It's one of those things that belongs on a list of moments I wouldn't have thought was possible 10 years ago.

That happened at the same time DHS has announced it plans to "denaturalize" citizens at a rate of 100–200 per month. The only cause that exists under law is fraud in the application process, so those numbers are extremely unlikely, if they operate legally.

The low end of that range is 10 times higher than the total number of annual denaturalizations in recent years (since the 1990s). The process is difficult in court for the government — as it should be! The highest annual number filed since the 1990s was 90 in 2018, and that doesn't mean they were all successful.

The Trump regime — of course — says it will pursue people beyond application fraud:

Categories of eligible people include gang members, those who committed financial fraud, individuals connected to drug cartels and violent criminals.

Since they pretend to think anyone with a tattoo is a gang member, and they call all sorts of things violence that are not, this could get bad quickly. I wonder if they will denaturalize Elon Musk for financial fraud? Hmm. 
 

The Jews in Rome

I've heard many times that the Nazis got their ideas for suppressing the Jews from Jim Crow and white supremacists in the U.S. South. In recent decades, this has become something of the going way of thinking of such things, I would say.

Recently, there has been some historian push-back against this: that Europe had its own examples of Jewish suppression to draw upon. There was an example given on BlueSky by Isaac Gantwerk Mayer, about a week ago, that's worth quoting substantially:

There were a lot of Jews in Rome, and they all had to live there. The per capita population density was approximately equivalent to Kowloon Walled City. Every building was a rickety five-story nightmare, because there was simply not enough space otherwise.

The walls of the ghetto were under guard. The guard was paid by a tax on the Jews and stationed outside the walls, for their own protection, of course. No Jew was allowed to be caught outside of the ghetto walls after sunset, or before sunset unless they were wearing their yellow cloth.

Every Saturday, all of the Jews were forced to listen to sermons about how the Jews are evil Christ-killers, given at the San Gregorietto church just outside the ghetto walls. This church, which is still there, has a plaque outside of it with Isaiah 65:2...: “I spread my hands all day to a disloyal nation, walking a way that is not good, after their own designs; a people provoking My anger always.”...

The Jews, who were forced to listen to these sermons would melt wax in their ears as a sign of silent protest, refusing to listen to the hate. But they didn’t have a choice, but to be there and hear a priest tell them that they were Satan worshipers every Shabbat.

Carnival season is upon us! How exciting, if you’re a Christian. If you’re a Jew then get ready for the Jew race. All of the Jews in town would have to race around in  little games for the amusement of the gnarelim. Sometimes soldiers would sit on them, and they would have to be the horsies. Sometimes they would have nooses around their neck. Sometimes they would be stripped naked.

Every year, the chief rabbi of the entire community would have to go before the Capitoline Hill and pay obeisance - and a hefty fine for the privilege of living in such a place – to the caporione. In return, the caporione would kick the rabbi in the ass.

The Jews were also required to swear a yearly oath of loyalty to the pope. Do you know where that the oath of loyalty had to be sworn? At the fucking arch of Titus.

That’s right, the yearly oath of obedience to the fucker who put them there was at the monument to mass genocide that the Roman empire built to celebrate the single most traumatic thing that happened to the Jewish people in the four-thousand-year span between Abraham and 1938. That was the spot.

Very little of the Roman ghetto remains today. And there’s a reason for that: when Napoleon conquered Rome and liberated the ghettoes, the Jews were the first to take it apart brick by brick, celebrating as they did so. A substantial chunk of the entire ghetto area is currently the great synagogue.

The Catholics in Rome were furious, and rumors spread that a secret Jew traitor let Napoleon into the city gates. The fact that the papal states were an absolute mess of a backwards country couldn’t be the problem. There must’ve been a Jew to blame.

According to legend, the Jews of Italy were so thankful to Napoleon for getting rid of the ghetto system that for a whole year after the conquest, every single Jewish boy in some towns were named Napoleon in his honor.

Mark Twain, whom you might notice was an American and well aware of American racism and how it worked, visited Rome in 1867. In chapter 26 of his memoir “The Innocents Abroad” he imagines what your average Roman would say upon visiting America.

So don’t make me laugh by saying that the Nazis learned how to be bigots from the US. They perfected a science that the European Christian mind had been working on for two goddamn millennia prior. 

I saw one of the Venice ghettos when I visited in 2013. 

One of the photos I took while I was there. 

The word "ghetto" comes from Venetian: a fact I learned back in 2013. 

Both the Roman and Venetian ghettos were instituted in the 16th century. I don't know why Italians in the 1500s suddenly felt compelled to segregate the Jews of their cities. The Venetian ghetto preceded the Papal bull of 1555 by decades, so that wasn't it, or at least not the only thing.