Dishonoring All of Us

Among all the bad (disgusting? immoral? illegal?) news that comes out of the Trump regime's Department of Defense, you may have heard about the U.S. removing a display honoring Black soldiers in the Netherlands American Cemetery... at least that has gotten some coverage. 

Less has been said about the renaming of U.S. military bases to once again name Confederate military leaders, usually with a sneering wink that the renaming is in honor of someone else who happens to have the same last name.

Today's post by the Equal Justice Initiative is such an example, and most likely one you won't read about, unless you happen to be in Louisiana. 

Near the western border of the state, about halfway between the Gulf Coast and Shreveport, is a fort that was called Fort Polk until 2023, when it was renamed Fort Johnson, after Congress outlawed naming military installations for Confederates. 

Johnson was "a Black World War I soldier who was wounded 21 times, suffering a permanent foot injury that would leave him with limited mobility, as he single-handedly drove back a German raiding party in France in 1918."

Leonidas Polk, on the other hand, was not only completely incompetent as a military leader: he should have had R for a middle initial because he was a reprehensible racist through and through. And he was an Episcopal bishop, to boot. (I've read a lot of EJI's daily write-ups, and this may be the longest one.)

The fort has now been named back to Fort Polk, supposedly to honor a different General Polk, who served in World War II, but everyone knows why it was renamed. 

Johnson's name, to add insult to injury, "has been relegated to Fort Polk’s exchange, where service members go for haircuts and fast food."

The title of the EJI post is "The U.S. Project to Dishonor Black Americans in 2025."

Causes vs. Coverage

No one expects news coverage to reflect reality 100%, but it's eye-opening just how distorted it is. And I'm not talking about Fox News, either. 

The book Copaganda gave one perspective on this, but here's a simpler one. Data from Our World in Data:

I imagine most of the coverage of cancer, heart disease, and other medical causes occurs in either science/health stories (usually not in the main news section) or the obituaries.

The Dittmans of Saint Paul

Some time not too long ago I started following a person named S.J. Hurley on BlueSky who writs an occasional blog about 19th century Saint Paul, based on the death records of our city. It's called Syndicate & Hague, which is an intersection significant in their life and the life of their family. 

I was going to write about the most recent post (about 50 children who died from cholera infantum), but then I got distracted by the previous post about the many tragedies of the Dittman family.

Hurley describes what can be known from their immigration, census, and death records, and I recommend it to you.

Near the end, she sums up with this:

All of the deaths make me angry—not about the past, but about the present and how vulnerable our perception of the past is to people who want to make money off an image of a perfect, healthy, better life that only existed before modern medicine and public health. It was not better. Emilie’s life is such an example—she married a physician and seems to have had access to anything money could buy. However, it couldn’t buy a life free of illness....

So much of what this family suffered would have been prevented or treated now: water sanitation to prevent typhoid, vaccines to prevent diphtheria, antibiotics to treat tuberculosis, medication and therapy to support people who are struggling with mental health, and so on. We don't have to imagine the past—the records are right there, showing us what things were really like.

MAHA like the Dittmans, RFK. 

Baldwin on Images

When I took the preliminary exams for my Ph.D. in mass communication (visual communication emphasis), one of the questions was something like, "What is the ontogeny of the photograph?" It may have been phrased a bit more formally, something like, "Describe your perspective on the ontogeny of the photograph, grounded in the literature of visual communication." But I remember it worded in the simpler way.

As I recall, I wrote about Susan Sontag, and about framing (as chosen by the photographer) and cropping of photos, and that photographic images are not natural representations of reality. They are selected, one way or another. I don't remember what else I wrote. I don't know if I talked about the physical ontogeny of photos, how the process was developed over time, and how that has shaped what they became. (This was 1991, so digital photography was not yet part of the picture.)

All of this came to mind when I was reading Copaganda recently, because at the opening of one of the early chapters, Alec Karakatsanis quotes James Baldwin:

It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see. The language of the camera is the language of our dreams.

I wish I had known that quote, or read the piece it came from (The Devil Finds Work: Essays, 1976), but I never heard of it until now. A failing of my education, or my curiosity. No one assigned Baldwin, fiction or nonfiction, at any point in my education.

Big Boats Gotta Spew, See?

There's so much bad news, I was ignoring this story I kept seeing in my BlueSky feed: "Did U.S. bully tactics kill climate measure?" It was a gift-linked story, which sometimes are wonky when viewed on my phone, and I thought, What's one more climate bad news story from the Trump regime? They're all bad, I know enough, so I didn't click on it.

But then it showed up as a reprint in today's Star Tribune so I read it. (Here's a gift link to the New York Times.)

The climate measure in question was, in effect, the first global carbon tax, and it was all agreed upon except the final vote. It would have fined the worst-polluting cargo ships, heading off the increases anticipated in their output by 2050.

The Trump regime, of course, wants more pollution. None of us are surprised by that at this point, but it's the tactics they used in this case that are notable. 

They threatened primarily poorer and smaller countries — all of which had previously planned to vote for the fines — with revocation of port access for their ships and sailors, financial penalties, blacklisting of diplomats, and revocation of personal visas. Marco Rubio personally called people in several of the countries.

And now, of course, the regime denies the strong-arm tactics they used. Lying cat says...



Here are a couple of choice quotes from the article:

• The regime opposed the fines because "activist-driven climate policies ... would burden American consumers." Unlike, of course, Trump's tariffs. Those don't burden American consumers at all.
• "Chris Wright, the energy secretary, said he and other Trump administration officials were told the approval of the maritime fee was a foregone conclusion, and took it as a challenge. Early on, State Department officials recognized the shipping fee as a winnable battle that would excite Mr. Trump." Exciting Trump — that's the goal of people in our government. Since he is a toddler, as we know.
• The regime dared to release a statement calling the fines a "European-led neocolonial export of global climate regulations." When everyone knows, many of the most important leaders of global climate efforts have been people from previously colonized countries — the ones most in peril from global warming. And the neocolonial United States calling anyone else neocolonial is rich, indeed.
• The Energy Department spat out the phrase "climate alarmists" in one of its victory statements, made after the fine was voted down. I try to wrap my head around those words. How does the word "alarm" which is neutral or maybe even a good word for it get turned into a negative when you put the suffix "ist" onto it?

Separately... but possibly of use in this fight, a group called Oilfield Witness has developed cameras that can see emissions that are invisible to the human eye. Their optical gas imaging (OGI) camera is calibrated to detect hydrocarbons:

I wonder if such a camera, trained on these cargo ships, would help in the future fight to reinvigorate this carbon tax. As well as in fighting the natural gas fracking fields Oilfield Witness intends them for.

Copaganda

Not too long ago, I finished reading Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our Media by Alec Karakatsanis. I saw Alec discuss the book at Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis, and got a signed copy.

It's a short, intense read. I've followed him on social media for a while, so there was a lot that was familiar. Here are some of the things I knew somewhat, or maybe not enough:

• The U.S. confines people at six times "its own historical averages" and five to 10 times the rate of comparable countries. We confine Black people six times as much as South Africa did during Apartheid (p. 6).
• Our incarceration rate decreases U.S. life expectancy rates by two years.
• Copaganda, he says, operates by narrowing the threat and manufacturing a vague state of fear of the other. Narrowing the threat includes this: Police commit 1/3 of stranger homicides, but you don't hear that. Another example: "...federal prosecutors charged 23 people with environmental offenses in 2020, and they charged more than than 23,000 people with drug offenses" p. 20. Wage theft: The total estimated is more "than all other police-reported property crime combined." Tax evasion: 1,672 times the "value of all U.S. robberies combined." The threat of "crime" as reported is small compared to these other things, but we almost never hear about them.
• Daily street crime is always seen as "new" news, but information about prison conditions or bail reform are seen as occasional "reform" stories.
• Selective crime coverage is ramped up before elections (with charts to demonstrate the rate of coverage increasing, while the number of crimes stayed flat) (pp. 27, 28). Or after Eric Adams was elected mayor in New York City, when he wanted coverage of crime. "Public safety 'news' surges when someone wants police-reported crime to be news" (p. 30). 
• He quotes Jacques Ellul on the nature of propaganda: "the curation of true anecdotes leads to false impressions" (p. 53). That phrase, "curation of true anecdotes" will come up again.
  
• The use of moral panics... terms like mugging (which is just a form of robbery) and car jacking were created as part of moral panics. "Professional-class news consumers regularly accuse any skeptic of the moral panic du jour of being an 'elitist' who is 'out of touch' with the most marginalized communities" (p. 56).
• I was shocked, I admit, at the size and growth of the big-city public relations staffs he cites. Chicago PD's PR staff in 2014 was just six (at the time when a cop killed Laquan McDonald). During the time CPD fought to keep the video of his killing out of court, etc., the number increased to 25. By 2023: 48. 2024: 55. In 2020, the LA County Sheriffs had 42 and LAPD had 25, "Some of them made more than $200,000 a year." In 2024, NYPD had 86, twice what it had in 2022. None of these staff numbers include additional consultants, let alone money spent on police swag or events. They use all these resources to create ready-for-TV content that is used to fill air time. It made me wonder how large the PR staffs are for Minneapolis and Saint Paul's departments.

Cash bail
The short section of the book on cash bail and bail reform was a particularly concentrated bit of outrage, and the main reason I wanted to write the book up here.

When you live in the U.S., it just seems normal that people have to "make bail" and that there are bail bondsmen. But this is not normal just about anywhere else in the world, and it wasn't normal in the U.S. until the past 40 years. People are innocent until proven guilty and the fact that those charged with minor crimes, especially, are held because they can't post bail is highly unusual.

In his career, Karakatsanis has been working to change this. Keeping people in jail, pre-trial, is bad for overall safety, but judges are afraid to be the ones to let people out, in case one of theirs is a defendant who does something bad and they (the judge) gets blamed. No one blames them for the people who die or are injured or raped in jail while being detained without bail, though: which is a much more likely outcome.

... if a judge releases a thousand people and they keep their jobs such that their children don't become homeless, no one will tell the public about it on the nightly news. Bad curation of anecdote leads to bad policy (p. 177).

As there was increasing clamor to end cash bail, especially for misdemeanors — after the death of Kalief Browder — Karakatsanis says there was strong pushback from police, prosecutors, and the bail industry. Why? Because prosecutors need detention to coerce guilt please quickly, and the bail industry makes money (obviously).

In Harris County, Texas (Houston), Karakatsanis's organization won a 2017 case that ended cash bail for minor offenses. Convictions (almost all from guilty pleas) dropped by 24,000 per year because "if forced to prove them, police and prosecutors can't" (p. 177). He cites a study on the years of Harris County's experience that found "the decreased number of people jailed resulted in more public safety and huge economic benefits" (p. 177), and that the same was found after similar changes in Los Angeles.

I just have to quote most of the next page:

These are among the most important facts you will ever need if you want to understand the punishment bureaucracy: the U.S. arrests so many people for so many low-level things that it could never provide adequate defense lawyers, investigation services, prosecutors, judges, or jury trials for them all even though the Constitution requires it. The Constitution wasn't designed for mass incarceration. If all people could exercise their constitutional right to a fair trial and a zealous lawyer, the assembly line would grind to a halt....

The crushing volume of cases is what the for-profit bail industry exploits. The industry didn't exist when the Constitution was drafted or in the century that followed it, and before the 1990s, release without requiring cash was more common than release requiring cash. But as court dockets became overwhelming, cash became an efficient point of leverage for bureaucrats to coerce more people to plead guilty quickly. Most of people are released with time served if they plead guilty, and are almost always charged fines and fees that police, prosecutors, and courts then collect as revenue. Thus, the system profits from its own injustice, and tens of millions of poor people are trapped in a cycle of debt collection and jailing for years.

Even on its own terms, this system has nothing to do with "safety" because most people are released immediately if they either pay money, which they don't lose even if they commit a crime, or if they agree to plead guilty and accrue debt. They are typically put on probation for additional fees, and many have their driver's license suspended for unpaid fees, incurring yet more fees. As of this writing, the licenses of 11 million people are suspended solely because of these coerced debts....

Every court to look at the evidence has made an additional empirical finding: ...cash bail does nothing to protect the community or encourage court appearance. In fact, it makes people more likely to commit crime in the future because short periods of detention destabilize people's lives—they lose shelter, jobs, and kids (p. 178–179).

He lists more things that people lose because of jailing without bail, but those three are enough to give you an idea.

When bail reform has been attempted in some places, that "curation of anecdotes" in media he describes has been furious. In New York, for instance, a 2019 reform to release people with misdemeanors was followed by waves of media cherry-picking, which led to the reform being rolled back within a few months in spring 2020.

Another example of media cherry-picking involves the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a bail fund created in Minneapolis in 2016 that saw its profile go national after the murder of George Floyd, when the Fund bailed out people arrested during protests. The Fund was heavily assailed because two of the many people they assisted went on to commit a violent crime (which the offenders had no record of when the Fund bailed them out). The Fund has since stopped providing cash bail and switched its focus to policy work to end cash bail entirely.

As Karakatsanis says, there is no consideration of the counterfactual: what about all of the people who were bailed out, or who were released without bail in New York City (or Houston, Los Angeles) and didn't lose their job, or whose families didn't end up homeless. They don't matter.

Only the few examples where a "newsworthy" crime was committed got notice.

Alec Karakatsanis signing books at Moon Palace in Minneapolis.

Two Visions of the U.S.

I wrote about Colin Woodard's book American Nations a long time ago, which described the 11 different nations he saw as making up the U.S., based on the initiating cultures in each area, or that spread from the initiating area.

A few days ago he had an op-ed in the New York Times, reprinted in today's Star Tribune (also in the Salt Lake Tribune, which posts it online with no paywall) called "There’s still a shared American story, and JD Vance’s blood-and-soil vision isn’t it."

It outlines the long-time dichotomous visions that exist in this country between a U.S. based on ideas — a place dedicated to creating a society of equals — vs. a U.S. as a place of "privileged heritage and bloodlines." In my words, that's an idea of "we made this and it's ours, you can't have it." (Despite it being on stolen land, made largely by stolen labor.)

J.D. Vance, as you may have heard, made a speech not too long ago declaring himself and MAGA for the latter vision of America, which excludes well over half the country's population. And that's even assuming he thinks any women would be included.

Woodard, of course, disagrees with Vance and MAGA, but his main point in writing the op-ed was to report that his institute's research finds about two-thirds of Americans also don't agree:

...when offered rival statements... Sixty-three percent of Americans preferred the statement that we are united “by our shared commitment to a set of American founding ideals: that we all have inherent and equal rights to live, to not be tyrannized, and to pursue happiness as we each understand it” over one embraced by just 33 percent of respondents that said we are united “by shared history, traditions and values and by our fortitude and character as Americans, a people who value hard work, individual responsibility and national loyalty.” That 63 percent included just shy of half of Republicans, nearly two-thirds of independents, and eight in 10 Democrats.

So that's good news. 

But it's that same blasted 33%.

I'm willing to bet that a very high proportion of the 33% minority would also come out in a particular way on those authoritarian screening questions I wrote about back in 2016.

Recycling, and Pulled from the Recycling

Today I visited the new Ramsey County Environmental Center, which brings all of my county's disparate recycling and related services into one building. It has a large meeting room that can be used for Fixit Clinics, which are very popular, and a Reuse Center, where people can pick up free paint and household chemicals that have been dropped off in the hazardous waste area:

The paint is tested to make sure it's still in usable condition, and sometimes remixed to usable amounts. They also have 5-gallon sizes.

These are perfectly good materials that would otherwise have to go into a landfill or toxic waste dump. On the Miscellaneous shelves I saw Goo Gone, ammonia, and wallpaper remover... and I wasn't looking closely.

The Environmental Center also takes rechargeable batteries to get them where they need to go, as well as all the parts of the recycling stream that are hard to figure out (weird kinds of metal that can't go out in the weekly bin, plastic bags, and electronic waste like TVs and computers). They also accept the regular recycling you can get collected at home. And the compostables that are collected at a number of other sites around the city and county.

I dropped off a bunch of paint, some metal (including a couple of old pans whose nonstick coating was eroded and a steel lamp that no longer works), and a collection of defunct rechargeable batteries.

While we were there, we were shown the staff office area, where they keep a collection of fun things pulled out of the recycling. Believe it or not, here are a few items they've got in their credenza-top display:

Probably my favorite, from personal nostalgia, was this GE Show ’N Tell Phono Viewer. We had one just like it in the late 1960s, except ours was orange instead of red. I think my mom bought it for us when she had a job as the school librarian for two years when I was in first and second grade, so about 1965.

There's a slot on the top right where you put a film strip in, which advanced synchronously with the record. The film strip we had that I remember most clearly was about Persephone and Hades, and it set my interest in Greek mythology from then on.

According to this gizmo's Wikipedia page, they were made in Utica, N.Y. (buy local, mom!) and were in production from 1964 through the 1970s. The original cost was $29.95, which is a bit over $300 now (!), with each film strip/record going for $.99, about $10 now. 

It's funny that whoever turned the Show ’N Tell in to the Environmental Center included the record with it, since the machine does not work, according to the staff.

 

This bundle of letters was leaning up against the Show ’N Tell. It was found in the paper recycling.

I didn't get to examine the letters, so I'm not sure exactly when they're from, but I would say roughly turn of the 19th century. (Stamps were $.02 from 1885 to 1932, except for a brief period during World War I.) But the lack of street address and a year in the postmark argues for earlier than later in that time period, I would think. 

The young woman who was showing us the display told us she is not able to read the cursive handwriting on the letters.

This Ampro speaker may be from the late 1950s. Here's one from 1958 for sale for about $200.

They also had this tin of mints with a name that seems not quite ready for prime-time. U All No? You All Know? I guess that's what it means. 

They were made in Philadelphia, and the trademark was registered in 1906. There's a smokestack there with the name in bricks! According to that site, during World War I, production of the air-tight tins was repurposed to make boxes to hold fuses and detonators on their way to Europe.

As I suspected, this box has some resale value, like $10–15. (I must really like vintage tins, because here are some of my past posts on tins: here and here and here and here).

Disapproval, and It Shows

As with all elections, I was holding my breath. Locally, I didn't get what I wanted in either of our mayoral outcomes. But otherwise, I am generally very happy — even about races I didn't know were happening around the country.

Now I feel confident enough to share some screen shots of poll results, which I took during the Rachel Maddow Show on Monday evening. They clearly underpin last night's election results.

First, Trump's overall approval rating, comparing January 2021 (taken just after the January 6 riot at the Capitol) and October 2025:

His disapproval rating is higher now than it was then. And then there's this:

More than twice as many people strongly disapprove of Trump as strongly approve of him.

On particular topics, here are a couple:

That's 44 points "underwater," as they like to say.

And you know that thing about how 3.5% of people in a country protesting is what it takes to stop something bad from happening? Well, that's about being out in the streets. 

But still, check this out:

The survey data were collected six to 10 days after the No Kings protest date. But that sense seems to have held up through Tuesday night.

HVAC Companies Work Together

Today I learned there's an organization called Nexstar Network. It's a shared services group for independent HVAC companies in the U.S, Canada, and Australia, training people in the businesses in everything from customer service and marketing to technical aspects of the work. It's been around since 2000, and is funded by its members' dues. 

A Star Tribune story (gift link) led me to this because the Network has faced the challenge of whether to include HVAC companies that are being bought up by private equity companies: a trend that affects many different kinds of companies these days. (I remember hearing that funeral homes, which have traditionally been "mom and pop" operations are now mostly owned by private equity, for instance.) 

The lead in to the Strib story is about a 55-year-old local contracting company that just suddenly declared bankruptcy, driven to it by its private equity owners, who purchased it in 2022. 

Up until this year, Nexstar Network had been including private equity-owned HVAC companies, likely because they were already members whose companies sold out to private equity. Those companies made up about a third of the Network's members, so considering whether to bar them from membership was a serious decision. But the decision was made.

As the Strib article says, dumping private equity members seems like the obvious choice:

...a breakup with private-equity backed contractors was inevitable because Nexstar is designed to help create the innovations and training the well-heeled investors claim to bring.

"Nexstar gathers information from the whole membership... They figure out what's working across the country, then help consolidate those ideas and teach us about them and help us solve problems."

All without imposing a debt burden.

It's almost a co-op model, without that legal structure. (Not unlike the hardware store model, without the "virtual chain" branding.) Self-help and mutual aid, on a small business level. No private equity millionaires and billionaires welcome.

Economically Policing Poor People for Pleasure

Social media, my which I particularly mean BlueSky at the moment, is such an odd thing. There are people on there whose posts I see fairly regularly, but who I do not follow... even though I generally like what they post. And I get the sense they are well-respected by people I do follow, so there's a second-hand positive impression. Yet I hold off on adding yet another "big account" to the list of people I follow, probably because I'm trying to resist the inundation.

Which is kind of a joke, right, since anyone who tries to read my semi-monthly BlueSky round-ups knows I've given in to the doom-scrolling.

Anyway. One of those people whose posts I see, but who I don't follow is Noah Berlatsky. I had no information about who he is until today, but it looks like he's a poet and maybe a pop culture writer? Who also has about 25,000 followers on BlueSky (and somehow follows about 5,000 people as well... for comparison, I follow about 350). 

Yesterday, Berlatsky posted this thread, clearly in the context of the current SNAP upheaval. I agree with it, and I want to save most it here:

study after study after study shows that literally just handing people money and telling them "do what you want with this" reduces homelessness, increases food security for children, makes it more likely people will find and retain jobs.

but there's always a moral panic that some poor person somewhere is spending their snap benefits in ways that allow them to get too much enjoyment out of life.

wealthy people spend money on all sorts of useless shit. Jeff Bezos paid for a monstrously expensive gaudy and ugly wedding. Trump gold plates his toilets.

people don't feel they need to police that stuff because the wealthy are supposed to be entitled to grotesque expenditure, while the poor (and especially non-white poor people) are entitled to nothing.

more, rich people feel like they're entitled to the sadistic pleasure of policing poor people. like, it's not just that they don't want poor people to buy steak.

it's that they positively enjoy the sense of power it gives them to police what people are allowed to have; to judge others; to put in place harmful policies as punishment.

hating poor people is fun. it's leisure entertainment. they love it.

This does seem to be the case, given the evidence all around us.

Remember Again Who Built this Economy

Just about 10 years ago, I wrote about the book The American Slave Coast, which laid out the economic reality of slave-breeding, showing that ending the importation of enslaved people to the U.S. in 1808 wasn't humanitarianism: it was protectionism, particularly for Virginia plantation owners, upping the value of their investment in human beings against cheaper imports.

A new commentary, recently published in the Wall Street Journal (gift link) touches on similar topics, but also describes the economic scale of cotton-growing in the U.S., which relied on those enslaved people, and their 10-fold increase in population between 1808 and 1861.

Before Eli Whitney's cotton gin (invented 1794), and while people were still being imported from Africa, the U.S. produced just 1.5 million pounds of cotton. The number went up incredibly from there:

• 1790: 1.5 million pounds
• 1800: 36.5 million pounds
• 1820: 167.5 million pounds
• 1860: Nearly 2 billion pounds

By the Civil War, cotton was more than 60% of U.S. exports, and the material was going to English cotton mills. Shipping, handling, and middleman industries all were built upon the backs of the enslaved as well. 

At its peak, the enslaved population’s market value exceeded the worth of all the other industrial capital in the country, which would include railroads and factories, estimates economist Thomas Piketty.

Enslaved people were, essentially, currency — as the author of The American Slave Coast explained. They were "sold down the river" to the newly stolen lands nearer to the Mississippi any time an owner needed cash, or used as collateral against loans. 

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A related post from 2021: You Can't Found Legitimacy on Illegitimacy.