Six Reasons: the View from an Expat

I've never heard of Evan Edinger, but I now understand he's a New Jersey native who moved to the UK 13 years ago at age 22 (for grad school, I think), assuming he'd be there for a couple of years, and then decided to stay.

He's had a YouTube channel for 15 years (with over a million subscribers). In some of his videos, he explains what he likes better about the UK than the U.S. 

I didn't know about this until the last couple of days when I kept seeing his summary video shared repeatedly, and finally watched it this morning. It's called "How I View the US After 13 Years Living in Europe." He gives six reasons he would not return to the U.S.

Which sounds harsh, but when I watched it, I have to say, it made me doubt my commitment to staying here:



These are the six reasons:

• Much less need to fear being killed by guns.
• A more rational form of government (parliamentary democracy) that doesn't prevent change from happening.
• Places are made for people, not for cars. From cities to small towns, they give people better access to shopping, friends, and things to do — all close by. And they're healthier to live in because walking is inherent when using transit.
• A health care system that doesn't cause bankruptcy and or death through lack of access.
• Effective consumer protections, which save you money.
• Workers' rights (paid vacation and parenting leave, sick leave, better termination protections).

He followed up with another video about the comments he received from some Americans, who can't accept that the U.S. is not preferable, or even perfect. Some label everything he says as communism (of course). But all of the negative ones he cites suffer from the same lack of perspective and America-only knowledge base.

I still don't think I'll seriously consider leaving this country, but Edinger's videos certainly set out a clear list of things we need to change if we want this country to be a decent place to live.

Still Not Columbus Day

It's Indigenous Peoples' Day under the Trump regime. 

That means anti-Indigenous Peoples' Day, and glorification of Columbus once again, because everything is backward in Trumplandia. After Pete Hegseth reinstated the Medal of Honor to U.S. troops who massacred unarmed people at Wounded Knee in 1890, this comes as no surprise. 

Trump's October 9 proclamation, in which he redeclared today as Columbus Day, included these words:

Upon his arrival, [Columbus] planted a majestic cross in a mighty act of devotion, dedicating the land to God and setting in motion America’s proud birthright of faith. … Guided by steadfast prayer and unwavering fortitude and resolve, Columbus’s journey carried thousands of years of wisdom, philosophy, reason, and culture across the Atlantic into the Americas — paving the way for the ultimate triumph of Western civilization less than three centuries later on July 4, 1776. 

As anyone knows who reads about Columbus, he was reviled by Europeans in his own time for his actions against the people of the Western Hemisphere. In a way not dissimilar to today's MAGA faithful, he couldn't seem to follow the teachings of his own religion when it came to anyone who wasn't within a small circle of people he recognized as being like him.

Maybe that is, indeed, "America's proud birthright of faith." Some Christians disagree, but they are not in ascendancy currently.

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Some past posts on Indigenous Peoples' Day:

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

The Goose Chase Meme

This modern world is a strange place of siloed information. Memes are an example of this. There are many that some people assume everyone knows, which I've never heard of or seen. I've known this for quite a while, and accepted it as part of getting older.

So I come to the subject of the goose chase meme humbly. 

It seems to me as if everyone must know what it is, because on BlueSky, "everyone" appears to reference it.

Do you know it? In its bare form, it's like this:


The memes can be generated here.

The idea is, the goose asks some question in the first panel, and then the person who was asked the question runs away in the second, while the goose pursues them with a more stringent version of the question.

This is the original cartoon it was derived from:

This is the version that everyone on BlueSky appears to know:

The context of that — the "which views?" — is this: A conservative person, maybe a student on a college campus, says they were scared to share their views in class or with friends. But they aren't conservative views like lower taxes or small government. Instead, they're, "Black people have lower IQs" or "women shouldn't be allowed to vote" or "being gay is unnatural."

As Son of Baldwin (novelist Robert Jones, Jr.) said, "We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist."

Here's another one, generally in the same vein:



These two memes point out denialism, which is popular on the Right, and that's what I associate the goose chase meme with. 

So I was surprised when I searched it and saw versions that weren't about a version of denialism, and even just that there aren't that many versions of it that turn up at all. If BlueSky was your only source, you would think there would be hundreds of versions, or at least that the same few would turn up many times.

A week or so ago I happened to hear David Remnick on the New Yorker Radio Hour, interviewing Robert P. George, a conservative professor at Princeton. George is a good example of a talking version of the goose meme, as so many of the people who decry the left-wing dominance of higher ed are.

Oh, you've had your feelings hurt by not being the dominant thought leader of your generation? Well we're in the middle of a fascist takeover right now. Maybe you could stop talking about those mean students from 10 years ago and figure out what matters now.

If we don't do everything we can, we'll be goose-stepping instead of goose-meming.

Three Headlines from the Handbasket

Sometimes you just have to stop and recognize what's happening.

These are three headlines from Thursday's paper (two days ago). They were all fairly near each other from the front page to the third page or so of the Star Tribune:

And I believe those canceled energy projects don't include the one that was announced the next day, the Esmeralda 7 solar farm in Nevada, which would have provided as much power as three Hoover dams, enough to power two-thirds of Las Vegas.

Exception Proves the Rule

As seen on Franklin Avenue in Saint Paul, just east of the Minneapolis border:

This proves that not every owner of a black Ford F-150 with a vanity blackout plate is a jerk... I guess.

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If you notice the weird semi-parallelogram and the 0 mph to the left of the license plate, that's the heads up display on my windshield, which indicates we were both stopped at a light when I took this photo.

Termites!

Daughter Number 3.1's partner is studying entomology this term, and has been learning about termites. They make up 10% of the Earth's biomass. (Not to worry, they are not #1: ants make up 20%.)

Termites are the most social of insects, she told me, with more roles among members of the hive than any other kind of insect. The various types of termites look very different from each other, so in order to identify a termite species, entomologists have to have a sample of each role within the hive to be sure.

Though we tend to think of termites as causing damage to houses, that's not their main target. They are responsible for eliminating much of the dead wood on our planet.

The thing that got my attention the most about what DN3 told me was the fact that termite queens live for 10 years and lay 2,000 eggs a day during that time. (That's more than 7 million eggs for those without a calculator handy.)

The queens are larger than the other members of the hive, which is not unusual among insects, but in this case... their abdomens are MUCH larger:


The little brown part at left is the head; the giant whitish part is the abdomen. 

 While we were talking, DN3.1 mused that a curse on your enemies would be to wish they were reborn as a termite queen, since the queen's 10 years of egg-laying duties do not sound like much fun. 

And it occurred to me that such a rebirtgh would be perfect for Elon Musk: he could have 7 million + children, and eliminate a lot of dead wood — without a chainsaw.

Every Day in Trump's USA

Welcome to America, 2025.

ICE detains, threatens Oregon man despite U.S. citizenship

According to this report from a television station in Portland, a U.S. citizen (last name Miranda, ironically!) was taken by ICE, despite showing his drivers license. 

They threatened to sic a dog on him and struck him from behind.

Then they confined him at a federal facility for several hours, before driving him back to his place of work with no explanation for anything. 

Of course. 

A List to Keep in Mind

I keep checking kottke.org every day. This post brought me up short today.

It's called What Makes for a Healthy Society?, and it's excerpted from a book about how the indigenous peoples of the Bay Area in what is now California lived before Europeans arrived.

The part Kottke excerpted was this list, describing what the author thought was a healthy society:

• Sustainable relationship with the environment. In a healthy society, the present generation doesn’t strip-mine the soil, water, forest, minerals, etc., leaving the future impoverished and the beauty of the world degraded.
• Few outcasts. A healthy society will have relatively few outcasts — prisoners, homeless, unemployed, insane.
• Relative egalitarianism. The gap between those with the most wealth and power and those with the least should be moderate, and those with the least should feel protected, cared for, or rewarded in some other way.
• Widespread participation in the arts.
• Moderation or control of individual power.
• Economic security attained through networks of family, friendship, and social reciprocity rather than through the individual hoarding of goods.
• Love of place. The feeling that one lives with emotional attachment to an area that is uniquely beautiful, abundant in natural resources, and rich in personal meaning.
• Knowing one’s place in the world. A sense, perhaps embodied in spiritual practice, that the individual is an insignificant part of a larger, more abiding universe.
• Work is done willingly, or at least with a minimum of resentment.
• Lots of laughter. 

This is the inverse of what our government is trying to create in our country now. The rest of us need to keep a list like this in mind as what we are working for, rather than just "not what they are doing" as we go forward. I try.

Tulip Trees

Once in a while, I see something worth sharing on Facebook. This is from an account called Ancient Forests & Champion Trees:

The national champion Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) in Bedford, Virginia. 



It boasts an amazing trunk circumference of 362 inches and stands at 139 feet tall, making this the overall largest of its kind in the United States.

Another giant known as the Fork Ridge Tulip Tree, located in the Great Smoky Mountains, North Carolina, measures an astonishing 191 feet 10 inches (58.47 m) tall, making it the tallest tulip tree ever recorded.

Tulip trees are among the tallest broadleaf trees in the eastern US. They have a long lifespan and can live for up to 450 years. Valued for their strong, straight-grained wood. They have unique tulip-like yellow-green flowers that give the tree its name. Its native range is from Ontario to Florida, from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean. 

Photo by: Eric Wiseman and The Virginia Big Tree Program.

450 years! For comparison, red oaks live up to 200–250 years.

When they say the native range edges are the Mississippi River and Ontario... they don't really mean to include Minnesota. Ontario is a big province with parts that are south of Minnesota, and the north part of the Mississippi — which has its headwaters in northern Minnesota — is usually excluded from these kinds of descriptions. They really mean the state border created by the river, which starts south of here. 

The University of Minnesota says tulip trees "can be successful" here, probably especially in our warming climate, and particularly in the southern part of the state.

They are cool trees, though. I haven't seen many in person, and definitely never one anywhere close to this size.

Strict Scrutiny of SCOTUS and the Civil War Amendments

Despite my admiration for Melissa Murray (a frequent guest on Chris Hayes's show), and knowledge of her sister law professors Kate Shaw and Leah Litman, I've never listened to their shared podcast, "Strict Scrutiny," until now. As I've said before, my life is not well-suited to listening to podcasts, and even the ones I subscribe to, I don't listen to most of the downloads.

However, I heard that their September 29 episode included two of my favorites as guests, Sherrilyn Ifill and Jamelle Bouie, discussing the post-Civil War Supreme Court, essentially in comparison with the current court majority. The Reconstruction-era court was a roadblock to implementing the post-Civil War amendments and making Black people full citizens, just as the current Supreme Court is trying to dismantle the achievements of the Civil Rights movement.

The part of the two-hour podcast where Ifill and Bouie come in is around the 1-hour mark (after a bunch of judicial news of the week).

Just after 1:10 or so, Ifill sets out a truth about the post-war amendments that I don't know if I ever fully realized:

Melissa Murray: [The ethos of the Lost Cause and the idea of restoring the honor of the South] is very much underpinning John Roberts's 2013 majority decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which dismantles the preclearance regime on the view that subjecting formerly discriminatory states to preclearance degrades them in some way in the eyes of their sister states.

Sherrilyn Ifill: See, this makes me crazy. Because it is a denial of the very project of the Civil War amendments. The Civil War amendments start from the premise that what we have learned is that, if we are going to integrate — and we are — going to integrate Black people, both formerly enslaved and free, into the body politic and into full-class citizenship, the states cannot be trusted to protect their rights. That's basically it, if we just kind of put it in a nutshell. The great reordering of the Civil War amendments is the expansion of federal power to the detriment of the states. The words NO STATE SHALL — right? — that is kind of the core of the thing.

And there's no better example of Congress doing that job than when the Congress passes those Enforcement Acts that you were talking about, and they hold a series of hearings, the Ku Klux Klan hearings. President Grant is getting letters, he's going nuts, he's gotta do something about this violence in the South. Congress doesn't just write up an Enforcement Act! They hold hearings, and brave Black people come forward to say, This is what has happened to us. We live in the woods because we're afraid to be in our house. They broke something in me when they violently raped me. They tied me to a tree and they whipped me.

All of this information, which then leads Congress to pass the Ku Klux Klan Act or the Enforcement Acts, as we call them. This is like Congress spending a year investigating whether Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and the coverage formula is still needed, by having 90 witnesses, by having thousands of pages of material. And ultimately concluding, we thought it would be better — and it's actually worse! And therefore, we're going to extend the Voting Rights Act again in 2006.

And [then] the Supreme Court coming forward and saying, But that is a dishonor to the reputation of the South. YES, the whole point of the Civil War amendments was — the South is dishonored. They have dishonored themselves and we don't trust them to protect the rights of THESE particular people.

I don't think I'm exaggerating! All of the signs, all of the legislative history point to that.

Near the very end, one of the hosts asks, What can we do about this? Their primary answer is education of the public, of course, whether through writing, like Bouie, or literal higher education, like Ifill. Both also make media appearances and do social media. 

Ifill started the 14th Amendment Center at Howard University to call attention to the importance of that amendment, and she offered this as her ending comments:

I've said it all the time: People have no problem talking about their 2nd Amendment Rights, people talk about their 1st Amendment rights all the time — ordinary people...they feel like they know what their 1st Amendment rights are. You can be in a conversation, joking with somebody, and they'll say, I plead the 5th. It's not that we don't ever talk about the Constitution in normal language. But even those of us who are Civil Rights lawyers or activists — if someone is the subject of bias, we don't say "They violated their 14th Amendment rights." We say they were discriminated against or there was prejudice or there was bias. But we don't ground it in the Constitution.

And that's on us — that people in this country think that when we talk about race, we're talking about feelings and we're talking about morality, and we're not talking about the Constitution.

And so my hope, and part of what I want to do with the Center, is to have an opportunity to embed, to inculcate, the ordinary American public with the ideas, the values, the principles, of the 14th Amendment.

It's this incredibly powerful democratic moment. I use it as inspiration for what I hope will be a moment for — if we manage to make it past this period, no guarantees that we do, but if we do — that's the spirit that we should have towards thinking about refreshing democracy in America. It's allowed. You can do it. We've done it before. You can make a new country.

I think we need to learn about Reconstruction and the Civil War amendments and this period also as a sense of empowerment. To empower ourselves like we can be constitutional actors, that we can be founders and framers of a new republic.

The whole thing is worth a listen.

Fuzziness on National Poetry Day

I didn't know it was National Poetry Day today, but I saw this on BlueSky.

The poster put up a screenshot of a parody poem by a person named Robin Johnson. On the theory that we can all use a break, I've retyped it here:

Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
(Not sure if I spelled that right)
What immortal hand or eye
Could fashion such a stripy guy?

What the hammer that hath hewn it
Into such a chunky unit?
Did who made the lamb make thee,
Or an external franchisee?

What the hammer? What the nail
That attached thy swishy tail?
What the forge and what the bellows
Where were wrought you floofy fellows?

Where was bought the tube of glue
By which your fur was stuck to you?
In what distant deeps or skies
Are sold such art and craft supplies?

On what anvil wert though wrought?
In what smithy? Who'd have thought
A beast so fearsome, fierce and hungry
Could be made by ironmongery?

The poet is here on BlueSky. 

The War in Our Cities Is ICE Terrorizing Everyone

October 18 (the next No Kings event) is 15 days away.

The Trump regime killed four more people in a boat in the Caribbean today.

They enacted multiple outrages in Chicagoland — teargassing on a street outside a school, helicopters over a school, an aldermember arrested asking for a judicial warrant at an emergency room, many people arrested while peacefully protesting at the Broadview "holding" facility.

I learned a lot from this short speech by Kat Abughazaleh, candidate for Congress, outside Broadview:

 

"Trump, ICE, and Kristi Noem won't even follow the Geneva Convention when it comes to their fellow Americans," is one notable thing she said.

Today, Illinois state patrol helped DHS/ICE enforce the space outside Broadview. What's up with that, J.D. Pritzker?

Yesterday, ICE (or DHS, whatever, who can tell with these masked guys who don't wear uniforms) raided a roofing job site (at a single-family home!) on the North End of Saint Paul and detained four men who they say are not here legally, and further, have some kind of criminal record. I do not believe anything this government says. I see what they do, which is illegal.  

As Lyz Lenz said in her Men Yell at Me newsletter today, “Trump’s second administration is run wholly by crooks, dorks, brainworms, and sentient lip filler.” 

Following up from my post yesterday about the lack of national coverage of the illegal Chicago apartment building raid, here's Chris Hayes' take on it from last night, after I posted:

Meanwhile, Trump is preparing to mint dollar coins in his likeness (which is illegal, of course), the White House has posted a video stealing the song "(Don't Fear) the Reaper" in a video that violently glorifies their federal shutdown, and Bloomberg reported that Trump has doubled his net worth — to about $5.4 billion — since the early days of the election.

October 18 (the next No Kings event) is 15 days away. What will have happened by then?