A Real Counterfactual

All too often, when we talk about government investment in things that keep people safe — public health measures, fire safety, what-have-you — there's no counterfactual to show what would have happened if the investment hadn't been made.

There's no way to count the people who didn't die or get seriously injured or sick. So the (too many) people in this country with no imagination or no empathy are unwilling to spend money to prevent disasters. The covid pandemic made it worse, as the MAGA crowd grabbed it as a political issue. (See the recent If Books Could Kill episode on the book In COVID's Wake, part 2, for discussion of this.)

Anyway — the recent flooding and mass death event in Kerr County, Texas, has provided an inadvertent counterfactual. Its county leaders went out of their way to not spend money they had immediately available to create a warning system for a river they knew had a history of flash floods that had killed people in the past.

Check out this post from emptywheel's blog that provides transcripts from their meetings, where they discussed it at various points since the mind 20-teens. While some members try to argue for a warning system, what became the majority doesn't want to have sirens that interrupt their sleep or that could help undeserving tourists in their area (since the "real" residents would know how to get out and don't need help, of course). And then post-covid, they don't want to accept tainted federal money from the communist Biden administration. Really.

In response to all this, Buffalo News editorial cartoonist Adam Zyglis created this cartoon:



And wouldn't you know it, folks in Buffalo just had to cancel an event where Zyglis was to appear because there were death threats against him. You know, since he dared to make a cartoon that named the problem.

Since the mass deaths and overall destruction from the flooding, there has been news that Kristi Noem defunded FEMA's response phone lines on the second day after the flooding.

Cara Jackson posted this to BlueSky:

Two days after deadly Texas floods, the agency struggled to answer calls from survivors because of call center contracts that weren’t extended. This is so horrifying I made a bar graph:

Laura Kowalski Linden @samoart.bsky.social said this:

Further context: If you’ve never dealt with FEMA after a disaster I can tell you they answer within 30 seconds. No hold times. Real live wonderful people who help while you cry and can’t even figure out what questions to ask. They walk you through it all. Every call. NOEM STOLE THAT $ FOR ICE.

Which is an interesting point. Before the budget reconciliation bill was passed in Congress, ICE was exceeding its already large budget, so Noem has been moving money around within DHS funds to give more of it to ICE. Kowalski Linden's claim could well be correct.

Fascist Takeover Attempt of California

I haven't written a concerted post about the actions of ICE and the Department of "Homeland Security" — primarily in California — which become more fascist by the day.

Yesterday they laid seige to an agricultural facility in Ventura County. One worker was killed after trying to flee and falling from a height. Others were critically injured. A number of others were held for eight hours or longer, and only let go after they agreed to wipe their phones of photos and videos they had taken showing what had happened in the raid — being forced to destroy evidence. (This info is based on a statement from the United Farm Workers.)

Tonight, the Service Workers International Union California released a statement saying a California State University faculty member (a U.S. citizen, if that matters) was assaulted and is still detained in the raid. The faculty member, Jonathon Caravello, was there as an observer, and one statement I saw said he had tried to aid a woman in a wheelchair who had been teargassed by ICE.

On the same day as the Ventura raid, other masked, purported ICE henchmen went to a clinic in Ontario, California, to grab a man at a medical clinic. The staff asked for a warrant and tried to use their bodies to prevent ICE from taking him. They were unsuccessful.

ICE acting director and human thumb Tom Homan went on Fox News today to say, "People need to understand ICE officers and Border Patrol don't need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them ... based on their physical appearance."

Which is the very definition of racial profiling. 

Tonight, however, a federal judge ordered DHS to limit these “roving patrols” in LA because officers are racially profiling people by demanding their papers based on race (including speaking Spanish, having an accent, being at a specific place — like hanging outside Home Depot where day laborers congregate, or doing a specific type of work. 

We'll see how long that stands up as the case moves up the federal court system to the Trump-patsy Supreme Court.

A Snowplow Logo

It's July, so of course I got a brochure from the City of Saint Paul about snow emergencies in a mailing about a sewer assessment. It's good that they took advantage of the postage they were already paying! 

And it gave me a chance to appreciate the logo they've created for snow-plowing here in my fair city:

Just a little bit of pleasantness in an unpleasant era.

It's Not the Windmills

If you have MAGA relatives like I do, who like to assail clean energy for gobbling up farmland for solar farms or who echo Trump's hatred for wind turbines, here's a good chart to keep handy in your filing cabinet when they make the fake claim that the turbines kill a significant number of birds:

Note the source on that chart: the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The total number of bird deaths shown on the chart is 3,316,834,012 — a number that, I note, does not include deaths resulting from habitat loss and/or climate change. 

A bit of arithmetic gives us these percentages for the cited sources:

• Cats: 72.4%
• Collision – building glass: 18.1%
• Collision – vehicles: 6.5%
• Poison: 2.2%
• Collision – electrical lines: .8%
• Electrocution: .2%
• Collision – land-based wind turbines: .007%

So that's... four? orders of magnitude difference between killer cats and wind turbines. If MAGA folks were really worried about infrastructure, they'd advocate removing windows, cars, and electrical lines. 

Seems like a misplaced bit of worrying, or more properly, an intentionally malicious and motivated accusation. Gee whiz, they never do that.

Confounding Bumper Stickers

This is an amusing but confounding set of bumper stickers:

Maybe I can assume the cat one is about how felines are selfish (like Republicans), given the context of the protect trans kids sticker? 

And what about the frogs? 

Just a bit of random word and visual vaguerness out in the world.

What a Bunch of Know-Nothings

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins held a press conference today to talk about how all those "lazy" people getting Medicaid should become farm laborers to make up for all the people being deported. She said,

There will be no amnesty. The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way. And we move the workforce toward automation and 100% American participation, which with 34 million able-bodied on Medicaid we should be able to do fairly quickly.

Author Charles C. Mann had this to say about it:

All I can get out of this is that the US Secretary of Agriculture has no idea that ag has been furiously automating everything it can for 30-40 years and all the human jobs left now are ones we have no idea how to automate. I know it is probably a violation of Godwin's Law to mention this, but as far as I know the last program that tried to get millions of people to leave their homes to work on farms was the Cultural Revolution.

Sarah Taber, agricultural consultant and recent candidate for North Carolina commissioner of agriculture, went into a lot more detail. As always, she was enlightening:

So. I've been on field manual labor crews where most of my coworkers were convicts. I've also worked with a lot of tech companies on automating farms. And [Rollins'] press conference is incredible. Rollins hasn't the foggiest clue what she's on about.

Every farm job that CAN be automated, already is. Let's start there. She thinks... nobody's ever tried to automate picking fruit? Really? And then we'll talk about the "tehe we'll just make the Medicaid people work the farms" part.

Produce that's hard, OR destined for processing, can be picked by machine. So carrots, nuts, sour cherries for pie filling, berries and grapes that will be dried, tomatoes for sauce - those are picked by machine already. But berries, fruit, tomatoes, etc that are eaten fresh can't be automated w current technology.

I know because I worked for a lot of the startups that tried!

There's no way to pick fast enough by machine to be commercially viable, without bruising so they rot before they get to the store. Having a USDA Secretary who doesn't know any of this is wild!

Now let's talk this whole "We'll just have the Medicaid people pick the crops!" thing. And let's just ignore the whole "forced labor is morally bad" issue. Let's focus strictly on logistics.

A thing that kept happening to me, as a white American who worked manual labor field jobs (we are in fact out here, sorry) is finding out I was the only fool on the crew who was there voluntarily and getting paid. Everyone else was convicts with a sentence.

So they were completely new to farm labor and didn't really want to be there. Part of the job is I was supposed to "mentor" them. News flash: inexperienced people who don't want to be there DON'T DO GOOD WORK. Even if they want to, they don't know how.

Farmers would hire these crews because they "didn't want to hire migrants" but also "didn't want to pay real wages." And they were ALWAYS disappointed with the results. Slow. Sloppy. Kept breaking stuff because they were clumsy. No real cost savings compared to just hiring real workers.

This one Florida crew I was on had a rotating cast of 19-year-old weed and Xbox kids who'd been caught on minor drug charges. They were harmless. And also, clumsy AF. Big kids who had no idea where their feet were. They kept stepping on the blueberry transplants we'd just planted.

Another crew was a bunch of minors who were working as "community service" for juvie. They all smoked... Tobacco is packed with plant viruses that are super contagious; can be spread just by touch. So "don't smoke in the fields" is a key farm rule.

Not only did the juvie crew not know or care. The FOREMEN didn't know or care. That's how janky this outfit was. Hope those fields turned out ok

Ag is a real job. It takes real skills, knowledge, and people who GAF about what they're doing. Stop treating agriculture like society's dumping ground.

Jamelle Bouie also had a thread that was about a slightly different topic – pundits pontificating that "other people" should go work in factories — but it ended up in an allied place:

i think that if you are an upper income writer living in a major urban area complaining about “the laptop class” — really, if you are a knowledge worker of any kind complaining about the “laptop class" — you have an obligation to quit your job and go work in a factory for a year

you’ll never hear me complaining about that shit. my grandparents did factory work and labored as domestics — and my parents joined the military — so that my brother and i could provide for our families without destroying our bodies

the other thing is that no one who fetishizes manual labor actually cares to improve life for people who are in those circumstances! no support for unionization or a generous welfare state! no interest in policies that make life easier for people who work their hands or afford them more autonomy!

Brooke Rollins is another fine example of the incompetence of the Trump regime. Jesus. On the same day Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy once again defamed the New York subway system as dangerous, when cars kill more than 40,000 people a year. And more than 100 people died in flooding in Texas after DOGE has decimated FEMA and NOAA and the National Weather Service...

Here's what Tom Tomorrow had for this week. You can't top it:


See him weekly on the Daily Kos and/or subscribe to Sparky's List to get his cartoon a day early (with additional commentary) by email.

Cars! Cars! Cars!

Another negative effect of the Republican Murder Bill that got no attention:

Car buyers will now be allowed write off up to $10,000 per year in interest they've paid on auto loans. Because subsidizing car- (or SUV-, or light truck-) driving is what we really need to be doing, right now! Right!

Bike commuters, on the other hand, had their $240-per-year benefit cut.

The new deduction for car loans is estimated to cost $57 billion over 10 years (2025–2034), which is about three times as much spent on bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure by the federal government in the last 35 years.

This, of course, is heaped on top of the cuts to clean energy and increased subsidies to oil and coal. COAL!

Alebrijes at Raspberry Island

I finally got down to Raspberry Island in downtown Saint Paul to see Alebrijes: Keepers of the Island. It's an installation of 16 large-scale papier-mâché sculptures by artists working in partnership with the Minnesota Latino Museum and Mexican Cultural Center DuPage.

Alebrijes are a nearly 100-year-old folk art tradition from Mexico. The fantastic creatures sprang from an artist's near-death experience and vision before recovering.

Baron, a standing bird

Gigi, a blue bear

Bicéfalo, a two-headed dragon

Chamak, a fox

Jonas, a whale

Patapez, a fish with feet

Osita Emilia, a little bear

Blue, a racoon

Mykel, a toad with wings

Some of the artists' names that I saw repeated on the various sculptures were Perla Miriam Salgado Zamorano, Alberto Moreno Fernandez, Edgar Israel Camargo Reyes, and Alejandro Camacho Barrera.

The exhibit on Raspberry Island is completely open air and accessible when the park is open, and will be on display until October 26. You can reach it on foot by going down the staircase in the middle of the Wabasha Bridge, or from the west side of the bridge on foot where it is level for the most part. There is one short stairway, but I'm sure there is a way around that for those on wheels. 

The parking on Raspberry Island is reserved and not available, it appears, but probably could be used for a short time. The Saint Paul Parks site (linked above) recommends transit access and parking locations.

At Least the Lettering Is Nice

I had to hang around the Snelling-Selby intersection in Saint Paul today for a little while, waiting for a business to open. While there, I appreciated some of the commercial buildings along the north side of Selby, east of Snelling:

Up close in the lobby window of the one in the center, the streamline moderne Park Building, I admired the look of the interior that I could see, particularly the mailboxes, and the way they have hired a professional sign painter for the glass, who provided lettering in styles appropriate to the age of the building:

The message, however, is less inspiring.

And today I learned the same company owns (or maybe just manages?) the Park Building and the building to the left, as well as the apartments above the building to the right. As well as a number of other historic buildings in Saint Paul.

Thoughts on "Independence" Day

Writer and musician Margaret Killjoy (who I never heard of until today) posted a thread on BlueSky about the American Revolution that rings true to me. It's not what I was taught in school, but I've since learned these essential facts, probably after reading M.T. Anderson's Octavian Nothing. Here's what Killjoy had to say:

the US revolution was not a revolt against colonization but instead the (seemingly) permanent cementing of the colonial project. It's not like India or Ireland breaking free from the UK, it's like if the British colonists in India broke free from the UK's control.

In essence, the king was like "okay but you can't go any further west" and the slavers in the US were like "yeah, we're going to though" and threw a war over it. That's what's being celebrated today. It can be dressed up in fancy language around freedom and democracy but it was a slave empire.

There were other causes, but at the core of it, the revolution was so that genocidal slavers could expand the scale of their genocide and slavery.

Many of the early revolts against monarchy, ostensibly in the name of democracy, were actually and explicitly just about empowering the capitalist rich rather than the aristocratic rich. This is a lateral move. (See: the English civil war that displaced a king and led to the genocide of Ireland)....

More than twice as many Black soldiers fought for the UK in the revolution as fought for the US, because the UK promised them their freedom (and largely delivered on that promise). The UK was absolutely more moderate on both slavery and anti-indigenous warfare than the US was.

None of this makes the UK good, or monarchy good. But the US revolution was somewhere between a lateral move and a counterrevolution and it has NOTHING to do with anti-colonialism.

The fancy language of freedom the US wrote was adopted over the years by other revolutions that actually sought freedom, that is the one thing I can think of to grant the US revolution.

This "independence day," the thing I remember is that the first colony of the UK, Ireland, took 800 years to gain partial independence from the UK and is still fighting for full independence. North America is coming on 500 years. There is still time.

So go shoot off some fireworks and scare all the dogs and wildlife to celebrate a country that has never once in its history come anywhere close to deserving your respect.

Vox, back in 2019, had an article on three ways the American Revolution was a mistake. It seems pretty right on, the difficulties of counterfactuals aside.

For an alternate idea of what to celebrate today, look to Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com:

Today I’m celebrating the fall of Vicksburg and the Confederate retreat at Gettysburg, which is why we set off fireworks and grill, yes?

And despite all of this country's faults, from its founding onward, this post by Ken White (known as popehat on social media) reminded me of what it could and should be, and why the current assault on actual freedom is so hideous.

The Big Bribe Bill

Republicans managed to pass the Big Bribe Bill today, after Trump brought the hold-outs to the White House and gave them some signed swag and told them he saw them on TV. That's all it took for them to sell out their supposed principles. (New York Times gift link)

Seriously. This is the level of puerile vapidity that passes for Republican leadership.

The Freedom Caucus = "free stuff for me," police state for you.

As one person said on BlueSky in response to this story, "i'd have more respect for this guy if Trump threatened him with violence and he buckled..."

I still don't know if the list of legal changes that would give Trump control of judges and elections, which I included in a post a couple days ago, are in the bill or not.

One aspect of the bill that has gotten no mainstream attention is its effect on Medicare (not Medicaid). David Dayen at The American Prospect has been following this, and wrote a brief explainer of how it will happen.

Here are another couple of political cartoons I've seen that are relevant:

This post by Senator Senator Scott Wiener sums it up:

In one fell swoop, they destroyed access to health care, shut down hospitals, upended clean energy, massively expanded their secret police force and took food away from kids. All to cut taxes for the rich and corporations. It’s one of the biggest betrayals of Americans in the history of our country.

Making the Debt More Understandable

Ivo Welch, a professor of economics and finance at UCLA, wrote an op-ed for the LA Times that appeared in the Pioneer Press today, giving a good way to understand what a trillion dollars means to normal people, in the context of the deficit Republicans plan run up further in their Big Murder Bill:

• The current debt equals $240,000 on average per taxpayer. That equals six years of median income. As he says, "For most people, learning that you owe $240,000 is a lot more concerning than hearing that the national debt is $37 trillion."
• Every year (now — before the Murder Bill), U.S. spending is adding another $10,000 per taxpayer to that amount because expenses exceed income. That's $10,000 every year.
• And the interest rate paid on the debt is about to go up, from 2.3% to about 4%, which will increase the per-taxpayer amount by another $4,000 per year.
• Then there's the Republicans' Murder Bill. That will add another $18,000 per taxpayer.

As I've probably said before, to me the debt is imaginary compared to the physical reality of the climate crisis, yet Republicans don't care about climate and are now actively working to undermine the climate action recently undertaken.

But I still appreciate Welch's ability to make the debt more tangible, and those interest payments are real in the sense that they are paid out currently to the debt-holders.