The Squeeze

I've dived back into The Power Broker again, and I finally reached the section about the devastation wrought by Robert Moses' creation of the Cross Bronx Expressway in the 1950s.

Robert Caro describes one mile of a vibrant Jewish neighborhood just north of Crotona Park, where block after block of six-story apartment buildings housed tens of thousands of people, families who had earlier lived in tenements on the Lower East Side.

Their apartments in the East Tremont neighborhood had great transportation access to jobs and nearby shopping for everything they needed. The park was just a few blocks away, too. And the apartments themselves were spacious and airy, and most of all affordable.

The whole chapter is heart-breaking and enraging, of course, as the neighborhood women try to get the highway rerouted (which would have saved millions of dollars and been more direct too!), but the fact I never knew in all of it, the thing that stuck out to me the most, was the definition of housing affordability Caro presents:

Weekly take-home pay in the garment industry — the pay on which most of these people lived — averaged well under a hundred dollars. And while the generally accepted rule of thumb held that a family could afford to pay a monthly rent equal to about a week's income, this was not a rule accepted by the families of East Tremont, who had their own rule of thumb... (page 855).

So the families were used to paying less than a quarter of their income in rent because they were saving for their kids' college or medical expenses, Caro says.

But reread that quote: the rule of thumb for affordability was a quarter of income to housing.

These days, the rule of thumb is one-third of income is considered affordable housing.

When did that change? How did the government decide people's ability to afford housing magically become more robust at some point, or their need for things other than housing decrease? Housing got more expensive over time, yes, that was a reality — but did our need for other aspects of life become less?

Or was it just the squeeze of Reagan's America once again?

That seems the most likely answer.

A Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma

This video is from TikTok, shared on Twitter, so I can't place it within this post. 

But here it is and I promise it's worth the 1.5 minutes.

The person who put it on Twitter said, "If this guy's house is ever raided, I love the mental image of the cops just slowly losing their minds and getting angrier and angrier."

I had no idea what that meant, and it made me a little afraid. But I watched it anyway, and I can promise you it's not scary. 

We all need a break and this is a good one.

Driving to Victory

Sometimes you can't believe what comes out of that guy's mouth.

At a rally today in Charlotte, North Carolina, Trump just said we should replace military generals with NASCAR drivers or football coaches. Really; he said that.*

And I noted that in the video where he says that, there's a built-in ad that tells viewers to VOTE TRUMP AND BUY GOLD!

Maybe I'm dreaming all of this. If I wake up tomorrow and this is posted on the blog, I'll know it was true.

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* If this astounding suggestion gets any attention, he'll probably say he was joking, but of course he wasn't… any more than he was when he ruminated on using bleach or UV light in the human body to kill the coronavirus. 

My Harris Poll

John Scalzi posted his thoughts on the presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris yesterday. Most importantly, he's up for it: she was his #1 pick in 2020.

At point four in his post, he lists what he calls her "disadvantages," but which we all recognize as the disadvantage of her existing in our country:

Bluntly, she’s a black woman running for president in a racist and sexist country where straight white men freaked out so hard at the Obama presidency, and the possibility of Hilary Clinton back in the White House, that the majority of them voted en masse for a felonious grifter in 2016, and then did it again in 2020. Do not kid yourself that the majority of them will do anything but in 2024, either. The question is how many of the straight white women they will take with them when they do.

(You may or may not think this is a reductive observation, but if you do, I suspect you may be a straight white person who decided not to vote for Clinton “because of her emails,” or because she was “unlikeable,” or whatever, i.e., you were looking for any reason not to vote for the candidate who was actually qualified for the job, in order to vote for the unfathomably shitty person the other side hauled up out of the incompetent depths, who had no platform besides his own cretinous id and still does not. It’s 2024, I’m done pretending that sexism and racism, implicit or explicit, aren’t huge fucking motivators for the white-people vote here in the US. You can rationalize it however you like; I understand it’s important for one’s self-image to do that. I’m not inclined to buy into the rationalizations any more.)

The current iteration of the GOP has been mask-off racist and sexist for some time, and Donald Trump sets the tone for the party on this score. Be expecting the whole array of nonsense from them, from dog whistles to flat out racist and sexist shit, said out loud, and also all over the former Twitter by Trump’s pet fascists and/or Russian bots. I guarantee you it will be nothing Kamala Harris has not heard before, but you might see a couple of new ones. The GOP outsourced their policy making to The Heritage Foundation with its Project 2025, which is already deeply unpopular, probably because it’s terrible for anyone who is not already a billionaire cryptofascist with a cross fetish. The GOP can’t go after Harris on policy grounds, and Trump doesn’t do policy anyway. So expect endless variations of she’s an uppity black woman for the next several months.

Laugh at the people who say Harris is unqualified, or who try to slut-shame her, or who posit that she can't run because her parents were immigrants. Their candidates are far less qualified (one proven as such while in office for one term!), their presidential candidate is a rapist, and their hatred of the 14th Amendment is grounded in racism.

They deserve nothing more than our derision.

As Mehdi Hasan said on Twitter,

Multiple European and South American democracies have elected female leaders. The idea that America ‘isn’t ready for a woman president’ is dumb and is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The MAGA Martyr

L.K. Hanson, retired Star Tribune illustrator, continues to have a political cartoon on the op-ed page on Mondays. I've posted several before: he selects a quote, usually from a prominent intellectual or politician in history, and then illustrates it in some ironic way, or sometimes with just a portrait of the speaker.

His usual piece did not appear in today's paper, however. On Facebook, he posted this:

For reasons with which I don't agree, a decision was made to kill this piece for today's Strib Opinion Page. The argument was that it's 'too soon' to present the martyrdom issue, despite the fact that the GOP was touting it hours after the shooting.

Such are the vagaries of journalism and editorial decisions.

I don't usually prevail upon people to spread my efforts around, but in this case I ask that you send the piece hither and yon, to your friends and followers, wherever they might be. 

So here's the piece:

Feel free to share it with his thoughts, if you want to, since we have his permission.

What Can Happen in One Day

Yesterday was July 20, 2024. It seemed as though I kept seeing different posts about the anniversary of this or that, starting with the 55th anniversary of the moon landing.

It also was the day that the dystopian events of Octavia Butler's novel The Parable of Sower begin. Her book was published in 1993 and when I read it, just after it came out, 2024 seemed a long way away. I remember trying to imagine how wrong things would have to go to be that way.

Yet here we are, well on our way.

Another anniversary on July 20 was from 1934: Minneapolis's Bloody Friday, when cops killed two and injured 67 as truckers struck for better wages and working conditions during the Depression. Later that decade, the city's business leaders created the Minneapolis Aquatennial celebration, held the same week of the month each summer, to defuse angry remembrances of the bloody day in 1934. Now, awareness of its roots is all but lost.

The Equal Justice Initiative also told me that on this day in 2015:

...the North Carolina legislature passed a law requiring legislative approval to change or remove monuments erected to honor “an event, person, or military service that is part of North Carolina’s history." ....written as a response to efforts to remove Confederate flags and memorials in other states after a white supremacist shot and killed nine Black men and women in a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina...

Some other notable occurrences on July 20:

• The 1848 Women's Right Convention concluded in Seneca Falls, N.Y.
• Ford Motor Company shipped its first car (1903)... setting Henry Ford up to spew antisemitism.
• Hitler survived the 1944 assassination attempt by some of his officers.
• People in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater died and were injured in a mass shooting (2012).

It's always worthwhile to read the Wikipedia page for a particular date to see how many events happened in history that you do or don't remember — even from your own lifetime — and which ones seem significant enough to mention.  

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Bloody Friday photo from the Minnesota Historical Society.

 

Seen in an Alley

You never know what you'll see in an alley. I was looking for plants, and I did see plants, but I also saw this:

Good way to repurpose an illegally placed "snipe" sign, people!

Bernice Johnson Reagon

Bernice Johnson Reagan, singing civil rights activist, Smithsonian music archivist, and Black feminist writer. died at age 81 on Tuesday this week. I appreciate this thorough write-up of her life on womenhistory.org, which told me many things about her that I didn't know.

I discovered her (and Sweet Honey in the Rock) in 1982 when a college friend made me go to a campus concert at a time when I was working 80 hours a week. It's hard to sort out everything in my life, of course, but I think their songs were one of the biggest influences on my politics from then on.

At the end of the womenshistory.org article, there's a 2010 video of Johnson Reagon performing for a Washington, D.C. audience that includes the Obama family. Here in the summer of 2024, it's startling and a bit painful to suddenly be reimmersed in that more rational time (remember when Michelle Obama invited Sweet Honey in the Rock to the White House?).

Johnson Reagon sings the song "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around," accompanied by her daughter Toshi on guitar, with two other vocalists. They start out for the first few bars, and then she stops the song, saying, "Wait wait wait":

I know this is a show, but, uh...
You have to actually sing the song.
You can never tell when you might need it!

The audience laughs, and the song is started over with the audience singing along.

You can never tell when you might need to know the songs of struggle. We need them now. And as the song says, you should never let anybody turn you around on the way to freedom and justice.

LLM Echo Chamber

I'm not sure when I started to dislike what I call puffy writing. It was some time after college, probably. I think it rubbed off on me from working at publications and having friends who were editors. I was a typesetter, and then a graphic designer. Often we needed to shorten things to get them to fit.

Puffiness is about pretension — beyond the mere unnecessary.

A recent study by researchers in Germany and the U.S. analyzed vocabulary usage in 14 million PubMed abstracts between 2010–2024, looking at how usage changed after the introduction of "AI" (LLMs) as a tool, particularly in the wording of abstracts.

They found that there has been an obvious increase in the frequency of what the researchers call "style words," such as:

• delves
• showcasing
• underscores
• crucial
• intricate / intricacies
• surpassing
• comprehensive

They write:

The following examples from three real 2023 abstracts illustrate this ChatGPT-style flowery language:

• By meticulously delving into the intricate web connecting [...] and [...], this comprehensive chapter takes a deep dive into their involvement as significant risk factors for [...].
• A comprehensive grasp of the intricate interplay between [...] and [...] is pivotal for effective therapeutic strategies.
• Initially, we delve into the intricacies of [...], accentuating its indispensability in cellular physiology, the enzymatic labyrinth governing its flux, and the pivotal [...] mechanisms.

From their discussion:

We found that the effect was unprecedented in quality and quantity: hundreds of words have abruptly increased their frequency after ChatGPT became available. In contrast to previous shifts in word popularity, the 2023–24 excess words were not content-related nouns, but rather style-affecting verbs and adjectives that ChatGPT-like LLMs prefer.

Our analysis of the excess frequency of such LLM-preferred style words suggests that at least 10% of 2024 PubMed abstracts were processed with LLMs. With ∼1.5 million papers being currently indexed in PubMed per year, this means that LLMs assist in writing at least 150 thousand papers per year.

What are the implications of this ongoing revolution in scientific writing? ...LLMs are infamous for making up references, providing inaccurate summaries, and making false claims that sound authoritative and convincing... [citations omitted from this paragraph]

And what is the title of this paper? "Delving into ChatGPT Usage in Academic Writing Through Excess Vocabulary." Ha, very ha.

Under Every Rock

Someone was recently telling me that their grandparents came from Granite City, Illinois. I hadn't heard of that place, so they told me it was just across from St. Louis. I said, Oh, is it by East St. Louis?

You may or may not know that East St. Louis is the Black ghetto — there is no other word for it — just across the Mississippi River from downtown St. Louis in Illinois, created by racism, segregation, deindustrialization, disinvestment, and a history of white race riots.

Granite City, it turns out, is not far north of East St. Louis, and it's a white working class to middle class industrial city of moderate size. Its Wikipedia page describes the industries based that have been based there (steel and, yes, granite), and the various European immigrant groups who populated it.

I was not terribly surprised to find this information on the page:

Around 1903, Granite City expelled its African American residents. In 1967, the Congress of Racial Equality alleged that Granite City was a sundown town. Mayor Donald Partney acknowledged that the city was commonly understood to have a sundown ordinance but denied that it was official.

As of the 2020 Census, Granite City's population is still 91.5% white.

Appalachia — and Food — for Me, Not Thee

When Bobby Kennedy was a senator from New York State in the mid-1960s, he got the south/western-most rows of counties in New York, contiguous with central Pennsylvania, included as part of Appalachia in a particular federal program. One of those was the county I grew up in. This entitled us to certain monies, which — given the rates of rural poverty where I lived — I'm sure we needed.

I don't think it was wrong to call my home county part of Appalachia. There is literally a town in my county named Appalachin, and there are multiple roads whose names end in "Hollow." People were living in school buses.

Here's a map of the various boundaries of Appalachia. As you can see, that particular federal designation, marked in yellow, is the most wide-ranging:

None of them, however, reach the place where J.D. Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio. Which is why I was thinking about definitions of Appalachia today, as were a bunch of other people.

Attorney Lyra, Esq. posted on Twitter with her thoughts on Vance and rural white people:

JD Vance and that Hillbilly Elegy bullshit always reminds me of when I had an internship at a rural  food bank and I constantly had to deal with impoverished white people complaining to staff anytime they perceived a non-white food bank client as undeserving.

It was bizarre, really pretty sad, because all our clients were in dire straits. The white clients relied on us just as much. Also 90+ percent of our donations were grocery store foods a day or two away from expiring so there was never any shortage.

So we were usually like begging people to take more because we had so many of most of our items and only a day or two to give them out, but we’d still have white clients coming up to us complaining about how much a non-white person was taking.

And they’d like keep track of how long non-white people had been coming, even when *they’d* been using the food bank just as long. I had the following conversation like three times a week:

White client: “that guy over there has been coming here for two months now.”

Me: “Okay, well you’ve been coming for six months.”

White client: “Yes but I have a disability.”

Me: “How do you know he doesn’t have one?”

White client: “Well he doesn’t look like he has one.”

Me: “Neither do you, man.”

Or I had to explain all that shit was just not our problem. “We have more food than we can give out, we wouldn’t turn a millionaire away, why do you even care?”

They literally couldn’t imagine just unconditionally helping people, it was so exhausting. A whole lot of people would rather food go in the garbage than go to a “lazy” person, and by lazy they always mean non-white.

And these white people were otherwise very sweet and kind, which made it all the more taxing. I am certain none of them thought of themselves as racist. The math to them was “white person who needs help equals unfortunate victim, non-white person who needs help equals lazy.”

This is what Heather McGhee calls drained-pool politics in her book The Sum of Us, and with every day that goes by in Donald Trump's America, they try to prove her right.

Bigots and Billionaires

The idea that anyone should stop talking about Trump and his incipient fascist regime because a 20-year-old Republican with a gun in an open-carry state took a shot at him is just... ridiculous.

Tom Tomorrow is having none of it:

We have to keep talking about Project 2025, as Cory Doctorow did recently. Many subject-matter experts are focusing on particular parts of the plan, which is necessary. Doctorow was one of the people who looked at the crux of it:

The American right has, since the founding of the Republic, been bent on creating a system of hereditary aristocrats, who govern without "interference" from democratic institutions.

He goes on to point out the weakness in the Right:

But for all that the right has bombed so many of the roads to a prosperous, humane future, it's a huge mistake to think of the right as a stable, unified force, marching to victory after inevitable victory.

The American right is a brittle coalition led by a handful of plutocrats who have convinced a large number of turkeys to vote for Christmas.

The right wing coalition needs to pander to forced-birth extremists, racist extremist, Christian Dominionist extremists (of several types), frothing anti-Communist cranks, vicious homophobes and transphobes, etc, etc.

Pandering to all these groups isn't easy: for one thing, they often want opposite things...

Another person I read used the phrase "bigots and billionaires," and I think that's wording we should adopt to describe the Right to point out who they really are, and make the choice clear to anyone considering voting for Trump and other Republicans.

Do you want to work with the bigots and billionaires? Be part of the party of bigots and billionaires?