And Something About People Who Are Not Refugees

From Minnesota Governor Tim Walz: 

On Indigenous Peoples Day, we honor and celebrate the 11 sovereign Tribal Nations and robust urban Native communities that enrich and strengthen our state’s cultural landscape, economy, and heritage:

A Few Thoughts on Refugees

Last Friday, the Star Tribune ran a helpful article (gift link) by reporter Maya Rao that defined the terms refugee, asylum seeker, and humanitarian parole and gave examples of people who have come to Minnesota in each circumstance.

Minnesota has long prided itself as the recipient of refugees, most numerously Hmong and Somali people, but more recently the Karen people from Myanmar.

I knew that Donald Trump had derailed refugee resettlement during his administration, and that it had taken a while for it to get back on track after Biden took office, due to staff capacity cutbacks. Here's what those numbers looked like over recent years, from a chart in the Strib article:

It's important to note that even the highest annual numbers on that chart are not very high for a country the size of the U.S. There are much smaller countries in the world that take in much larger numbers of refugees. At our best, we are doing the minimum. 

Some people have pointed out that Trump's claims that other countries are sending people from asylums to cross into the U.S. is because he misunderstands (or is trying to mislead about) what political asylum is. I've also recently heard it said that, similarly, his decree that people who are here under humanitarian parole are criminals comes from the same lack of understanding of this use of the term parole, confusing it with parole from prison, as if they were released and sent across the border.

It's notable that the years with the lowest number of refugees were the years when crime in the U.S. surged — during the peak years of the pandemic. Correlation, or causation? Or is Trump too addled to understand the question?

Thoughts Inspired by Eating Worms

I've read a lot of books that used to be called "juvenile" novels, and these days are called middle grade novels. But I never read How to Eat Fried Worms.

I think that omission is because the book came out in 1973, just as I was starting high school. That may have been a low point in the time when I was reading juveniles. Or maybe the title put me off, not being a big fan of worms. 

I know I saw it in the library because I remember the cover, with its illustration by Emily McCully, and the big fat Cooper Black type (though I didn't know that name at the time). 

Yesterday I learned that its author, Thomas Rockwell, was the son of illustrator Norman Rockwell. He co-wrote his father's autobiography. Thomas died in late September this year at age 91.

I also just learned that Fried Worms is one of the most frequently challenged books, which feels pretty quaint these days as far as challenged book topics goes. I guess it belongs in the Captain Underpants set of challenged books, rather than the Bluest Eye set. 

Cover illustrator Emily McCully has had quite a career, much of which I was unaware of. She's been working since the 1960s and is best known for winning the Caldecott Medal in 1993 for the memorable Mirette on the Hire Wire, which she also wrote.

I wonder if McCully knew Ellen Raskin, since the two of them were frequent children's book illustrators at the same time, working in the New York City market, who also wrote books.

Berol Giant

A friend who's a Realtor® posted a photo of some mounted pencil sharpeners she saw inside houses she recently viewed. This was one of them:

I had an instantaneous reaction. I'm not sure which school rooms we had these in — maybe all of the ones in my home district, or maybe it was college. But I saw them a lot at some point in my life. 

Ah. Pencil sharpeners.

Pick Me, I'm White

Every time Donald Trump says Kamala Harris is dumb, stupid, or some other version of that, it's obvious racism and sexism. Anyone who can't tell that is open to his racism and sexism, because it takes no effort to find multiple examples that demonstrate it's not true, and if anything, the opposite is true: that he is in cognitive decline, at a minimum.

Tonight, after Obama's speech in Pittsburgh and Trump's in Detroit, All In With Chris Hayes had political journalist Alexi McCammond on. She said,

His pitch is literally at this point, Pick the white guy over the Black girl. And he's asking people who are the most racist of this country to support him and to actually come out and vote. Because that's who he knows he needs to get out to vote in order to win this election.

It's a fairly succinct version of this year's election reality. I'm glad it has been a short campaign so there is less of it to see, and less time for the message and its reach to get consolidated. Imagine if she had been the candidate for 18 months.

It's an utter head-shaker, because as Trump is fond of saying in many other cases, Harris is "right of central casting" for the role of modern-day president. Sure, she could be a bit taller, but other than that, she hits every note of what a U.S. president (who's a woman) would look like in a movie.

And the idea that she's stupid is just...so clearly not true. He has mentally blocked out the debate, of course.

Everything Trump says is his insecurity speaking, when the opposite is true. Usually he makes accusations of actions and therefore is confessing to acts (they're stealing the election!), but in this case it's an admission of his own intellectual inferiority.

Billion Dollar Disasters

I learned two important facts last night about climate-change-induced weather damage on All In with Chris Hayes.

One was that Hurricane Helene damaged pipes that had been buried 24 feet deep in anticipation of future severe weather. So "future-proofing" didn't work against Helene.

The other was how much inflation-adjusted billion-dollar weather events have increased since 1980:

Those unlabeled lines closer to the bottom are generally the years before 2017, if they had billion-dollar events. Even 2005, the year of Katrina, doesn't rate compared with the disasters of recent years, as the climate has warmed further. 2011 is the only year from those before 2017.

And 2023 is clearly an outlier, with 28 events. It will be notable to see how 2024 rates compared to 2023. 

Hurricanes

As Hurricane Milton approaches Florida, I'm remembering reading in the newspaper about Katrina several days before it was to arrive in New Orleans. The story said it could (likely would) leave southern Louisiana and the city uninhabitable, that the levees would be overwhelmed. 

And I'm wondering what happened in the Yucatan already this morning as Milton passed at an even more powerful level, and what's happening right now as it passes the western end of Cuba. No word on either of those places in our media, as far as I've heard.

And North Carolina (and Georgia, and other places in the Southeast) are still in the midst of search and rescue and major recovery from Hurricane Helene, while Republicans thwart those efforts with lies. 

It was bad enough during the Katrina debacle to have the usual incompetence, racism, and financial greed making things worse: now we have overt manipulation of vulnerable people, carried out in an attempt to seize national political power.

It's another one of those moments where I can't believe what these supposed leaders have sunk to.

Tell NHTSA Yes

You and I have until November 18, 2024, to send comments to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (here's the link) on its proposed new vehicle safety standards. They would require passenger vehicles under 10,000 pounds — finally — to be less dangerous to people outside the vehicle.

That means pedestrians, and likely people on bikes, too. 

The standards would set up test procedures and performance requirements related to hood heights, which have been getting higher and higher in recent years. Increased hood heights are documented as particularly dangerous in two important ways: they decrease drivers' ability to see in front of them, and when a person does get hit, they make the injury worse because the pedestrian's head is hit instead of their torso. (The hood designs are also often blunt, rather than curved, which is another danger.)

David Zipper, Senior Fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative, wrote about the rules in Fast Company in late September. 

It's time to say yes to what Europe has been doing for quite a while, and bring the SUV/truck bloat and and blunt under control.

 

Waste Not, Want Not: Fences

Today I learned from Alice Loxton, who writes on Twitter as History Alice, that there are metal street fence rails in London that were once stretchers used during the World War II Blitz:

The original fences had been removed to harvest the metal for the war effort:

During the Blitz, utilitarian stretchers were created that were made up of a metal frame overlaid with a wire grid...

...which made them easy to clean.

After the war, in rebuilding London, someone had the idea to use the stretchers, unmodified, as fence panels in at least some parts of the city.

They're still there today.

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(The images are all screen grabs from the 1-minute, 20-second video Alice posted.)

A Day Off

I've been laid low by the covid and flu vaccines I got yesterday, so I don't feel up to writing tonight. Low-grade fever most of the day, and still kind of an oogy feeling now that the fever is gone. 

I'm hoping for a normal morning tomorrow!

The Roches

I came across this blog post about The Roches, in which the writer listed his 12 favorite songs by the sisters. He says he's particularly interested in their ability to "court unpleasantness" and depict "infidelity and tensions in the nuclear family," which makes sense... but then I don't understand his ranking of their version of the "Hallelujah Chorus" at number 2.

Reading his list made me realize I truncated my Roches' album accumulation prematurely, however. I have their "regular" albums through 1982, and then after that I have just their 1990 Christmas album and their 1994 kids' album, "Will You Be My Friend?" 

I missed albums in 1985, ’86, ’89, ’92, and ’95... and a final album in 2007. What happened? I must have run out of money in the mid-1980s and then forgotten to keep up because I was busy.

Blogger Alfred Soto's list of 12 songs includes six I know well, and one from an album I have but don't know (and having just listened to it, I don't understand why it's included).

I can't comment on the songs he includes that I don't know, but here are my top 10 from the albums I know — the ones I think of most frequently:

1. The Hammond Song
2. Mr. Sellack
3. Runs in the Family
4. It's Bad for Me
5. This Feminine Position
6. The Train
7. Married Men
8. My Sick Mind
9. The Laundry (from "Won't You Be My Friend?")
10. Good King Wenceslas (yes, from the Christmas album "We Three Kings")

 My ordering is not very precise.

Now I have to go listen to the songs Soto listed that I don't have in my collection and see if they're as great as he seems to think.

 

Actual Facts About Immigrants

Yes, I know Vance's lies during the vice presidential debate were many, and countering them with facts does little to no good with people who will vote for the Trump/Vance ticket anyway.

But the ones about how many undocumented ("illegal") immigrants there are in the U.S and how the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, particularly were admitted by use of a phone app that Kamala Harris was responsible for need to be addressed.

I've seen many various tweets and BlueSky posts on these topics, but a Star Tribune article gave the essentials.

The vice president (big shock!) does not decide who can enter the country. And as Tim Walz said in the debate, the laws that govern the Temporary Protected Status used for the Haitian people began a long time ago, first in 1952, updated in 1996. The specific "One Phone App" that Vance seems to hate lets people who are still outside the U.S. schedule an appointment before they arrive at a point of entry. It was initiated in 2020... when Trump was president, and is administered by Customs and Border Protection (under Homeland Security). The Strib says, "it was expanded" under Biden, but it's not clear in what way.

As far as the total number of undocumented people goes, we know the Right and Trump in particular make up numbers about everything to please themselves. In this case, their current favorite number is 20–25 million "illegals." The Strib says the best estimate is 11 million unauthorized immigrants, and of those 79% arrived before 2010. That estimate is from a Homeland Security report.

Multiplying 79% by 11 million means only 2.3 million people are still here who arrived since 2010. And of that smaller group... as with undocumented people generally, I'd be willing to bet a large percent overstayed their visa or other way of entering legally as a student or tourist, rather than crossing at the southern border in the way Republican fever dreams imagine.

The other 79% who've been here longer likely have built lives in their U.S. communities, have jobs and families, may be married to citizens or permanent residents, and like anyone undocumented who is working under a name other than their own, they are paying Social Security contributions they will definitely never get back and helping to keep that system funded for today's retirees. It's a great "system" we've got here.

Of course Vance and Trump's claim that undocumented immigrants cause our country's housing shortage and drive up prices is absurd, and no one should have to answer it at face value. It has been shown that their plan to deport undocumented people will drive up housing prices because a large percentage of the workers who build housing are undocumented, so deportation will likely increase the cost of labor for new building (at least, according to the usual laws of economics). 

And it is also projected that mass deportation will drive down GDP generally (as well as put us into a police state...but la la la, who seems to care about that, right?).

And all of this because these cravens want to use immigration as a fear issue to get elected. Whether it's the general issue of "open borders," supposed caravans at the border, thugs with imaginary guns and fentanyl, or vulnerable Haitians in Springfield*, they'll say anything if they think it helps their chances.
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* None of this even touches on the question of whether there really even is the huge number of Haitian temporary residents in Springfield that many have said, including the authorities in Springfield. 

This BlueSky thread by a user called Ellie Likes Data from mid-September questioned that reality thoroughly. She says the most recent Census Bureau's American Community Survey (July 2023) reports there are 5,264. The school district says there were 7,415 at the start of school this year... and that they had 7,716 in 2019 — so that's a decrease. The ACS number only includes people born in Haiti, so it makes sense the school system's numbers might be higher, since they could be including young children of Haitian parents. (Springfield began recruiting Haitians to its workforce about 10 years ago.)

The city of Springfield says on its website that there are 12,000–15,000 total immigrants in Clark County — from all possible countries, in the entire county of 136,000 people. That gives the county a 9–11% foreign-born population, vs. the U.S. average of 14.3%.

Ellie called on a number of investigative journalists in the thread to do a FOIA request on Clark County government for records because things are being reported that don't seem to jibe with reality. I don't know the answer to this, but I sure wish someone would figure out whether this racist, xenophobic nothing-burger is a nothing-burger squared.