Inverted Priorities

I had one of those moments of juxtaposition today. 

A local person commented on BlueSky about how U.S. policy encourages drunk driving by requiring parking near bars, while in contrast Canada has a mandatory minimum sentence of 30 days for a second impaired driving offense, and a 120-day minimum for the third. 

The post right after that told of a toddler who nearly died at the Dilley concentration camp near El Paso. After treatment in intensive care, she was sent back to Dilley where she grew sick again and wasn't given the care she needed. Her parents, asylum seekers from Venezuela, were also locked up there. 

The parents had been going through the proper asylum process since 2024, but — of course — had the rug pulled out from under them under the Mass Deportation Now policies of Stephen Miller and Donald Trump.

These two posts created a perfect moment of clarity about the priorities of our country. One priority existed long before the current regime, and the other is of the current moment. "We" want drunk drivers and we don't want immigrants. 

About 12, 000 people died from drunk-driving-related crashes in the U.S. in 2024, according to NHTSA stats (and that does not include the much higher number of severe and life-altering injuries that always accompanies any fatality number). 

While immigrant workers provide a huge percentage of this country's health care workforce: who knows how many lives immigrants have saved and improved by being here just through that work, let alone all the other ways they contribute to society. 

What a country.

Hungarian Bike Posters

I'm trying to ignore the demented man in the White House today. Here are several vintage posters (most? all? appropriately Hungarian) from an account called Cool Bike Art:

"In work, in rest: your loyal friend is the Csepel bicycle. Available in Keravill stores and in state department stores." ca. 1940

Styria bicycles. "Puch János and his partner Grácz." Budapest. Art by Joseph Mária Auchentaller

"Yes! Motorcycles and Bicycles at the Cooperative Stores!" 1966. Photo by Sándor Lengyel.

This is a Hungarian poster for the Estonian (then part of USSR) film Jalgratta-taltsutajad: The Bicycle Tamers. "The Orszaguti Adventure (also translated as "The Roadside Kalano"). The smaller type reads: Humor, music, love. Color Widescreen Soviet film satire. ca. 1965

Rebecca Solnit, Crystallizing

I have a number of friends who practice daily gratitude. I am not one of them. 

I think it's a good idea, but I can't seem to make a habit of it. When I visit with one of these friends, we often trade gratitudes, and I make an effort, but it feels like work. 

Here's one for today that came to me without effort: I am grateful for Rebecca Solnit.

Every word of this essay in the Guardian is worth quoting, but here are two sentences:

Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled. All this is common knowledge, but because it dribbles out in news stories about this specific incident or department, the reports never adequately describe an administration sabotaging the functioning of the federal government and also trashing the global economy, international alliances and relationships, and the national and global environment in ways that will have downstream consequences for decades and perhaps, especially when it comes to climate, centuries.

Thank you, Rebecca. I treasure you.

Our Country Is Being Run by an Evil Vesion of the Franklin Mint

Talking Points Memo has gotten word that DHS is distributing one of those puerile challenge coins to agents in Minnesota for Operation Metro Surge. Here are the two sides of it:

Photos of the coin were given to TPM by someone at Whipple, the federal building on the edge of Minneapolis that is the DHS base of operations, and where detained people are taken and housed in inhumane conditions. It's also where immigration judges like Nathan Hansen do Stephen Miller's work for him.

Not surprisingly, the person who gave TPM the photos "requested anonymity to avoid retaliation." When asked for comment, the DHS spokesperson only seemed concerned about whether the coins were authorized in terms of branding, not about what they depict.

As a person who lives in the Twin Cities, let me say: we do not live in the war zone depicted here and did not, even at the height of Operation Metro Surge. There were no buildings on fire, let alone dramatically blown up as shown on the coin reverse, with roiling clouds of smoke along the horizon. 

There were way too many helicopters flying at night: that's probably the most true part of the imagery.

The masked goons we had here were generally wearing khakis or jeans and regular coats, with some random-looking camouflage they got at Fleet Farm, usually with a flak jacket thrown over that said POLICE. Their clothing didn't look at all like uniforms, and they seldom had giant guns like these. 

The deaths' heads with glowing eyes and matching guns behind are generally reprehensible, and especially in the context of a domestic operation. 

Donald Trump, of course, is shown as a chiseled version of himself that was true even 20 years ago, and the guy on the right doesn't even resemble Mr. Potato Head, Tom Homan. That's who I assume it is supposed to be, since it can't be Greg Bovino.

The whole idea of challenge coins for domestic law enforcement should not exist. Maybe they make sense for military units (I never knew these things existed until the Trump regime, which makes me think they and their designs were innocuous), but law enforcement members working among their fellow residents should not see their jobs as a game with the goal of winning a coin. No matter how good or bad its design is.

A Judge in His Own Image

The Trump regime has made a practice of firing qualified immigration judges and replacing them with loyalists who will follow Trump (and Stephen Miller's) ideological dictates. These types of judges are directly appointed and go through none of the usual vetting processes. 

The most recent example, here in Minnesota, is a man named Nathan Hansen. Minnesota Reformer tells us about Hansen's extreme history and, essentially, anti-qualifications for the job:

Hansen’s extensive social media history contains posts endorsing popular but widely debunked right-wing conspiracies including Pizzagate and Obama birtherism, to which President Donald Trump also subscribes. In 2024, he amplified posts about the “Haitian invasion of Ohio,” a racist conspiracy pushed by Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance that accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating family pets.  

More recently, Hansen called for Minnesota State Rep. Brad Tabke (D-Shakopee) to be jailed for filming ICE agents within his districts and posting about their actions online. 

It appears that Hansen has no experience in immigration law. 

The only semi-good news about any of this is that because immigration judges can be appointed so easily, they can also be fired just easily when/if Trump is out of office. That's if Trump doesn't manage to appoint Hansen to a real judgeship in the meantime.
 

An Important Day, Unmarked

This morning, multiple BlueSky accounts informed me that today is Confederate Surrender Day.

@andrewpaul.bsky.social pointed out that the fact that it isn't a federal holiday tells us "pretty much all you need to know about the U.S."

Jonathan Ladd shared this historic ad:


And Peggy Flanagan, my preferred candidate for U.S. Senate here in Minnesota, shared a post by John Moe, who wrote:

Happy Confederate Surrender Day from Minnesota where we still have your goddamn flag and we’re not giving it up:

That's the Confederate battle flag that belonged to the 28th Virginia Infantry Regiment. It was captured by the 1st Minnesota Infantry Regiment at Gettysburg. Virginians periodically ask Minnesota to return the flag, and Minnesota always says...

No.

Were you taught to celebrate April 9? I was not. It seems as important as July 4 to me. But we don't notice it at all.

Bursting

Shared by the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Bird Sanctuary today:

Though they look like the horns of twin animals, they are instead the "bursting buds of the red elderberry shrub" (Sambucus racemosa).

The gardeners remind us all that it's one week until opening day. Spring is probably the best time to visit, because it's largely a woodland area with many spring ephemerals.

Even more than most, this is a good year to go outside and appreciate the beauty of our world.

When You're Making Calls

From Garrett Graff, a journalist and historical writer:

In all seriousness, one thing that might be worth doing today:

Tell your Reps and Senators to call Adm. Richard Correll, the Commander of U.S. Strategic Command, which controls the nation's nukes, and remind him of his unique responsibility to refuse an illegal order.

For extra measure, contact info at StratComm:

Still Working

Johnny Gilbert, the announcer on Jeopardy! (This – is – Jeopardy!), is 97 years old, going on 98.

I sort of can't believe it. 

He has been doing voice recordings for the daily shows from a studio in his home for several years. According to his Wikipedia page, they're swapped in after the shows are taped, with another announcer doing the live voice within the studio. 

Gilbert has been with the show since 1984 when it was relaunched with Alex Trebek as host. 

Threats of War Crimes Drown Out War Crimes

This morning, before news of Trump's vile Easter morning tweet broke, the big story was recovery of the second U.S. pilot in Iran. Between Trump's war-crime blast and the general news of the rescue, I think this part will be lost:

Basically, anyone within a little under two miles of the pilot was killed by a drone. 

The report says "military-aged males," but that means 12-year-old boys and up. And that's if we can believe them about only seeing males as threats. I doubt they will tell us how many people that was.

Within two miles of the pilot. 
 

Grandma D's Teeth

My father's mother had no teeth. It was just one of the things I knew about her — no big deal. We joked that she gummed her food to death.

But we also knew that she had no teeth by the time she was 25 years old. Of course, as children, we thought that was plenty old to lose your teeth.

D was born in 1910, which means she had no teeth left by around 1935, when my father was about 4 years old. That was mid-Great Depression. I think this was about the same time my grandfather was off working in the Civilian Conservation Corps, so that tells you something about how they were doing financially.

Her 29-year-old mother had died when D was only 10, in 1921, of quinsy. I believe D had a stepmother during most of her preteen and teen years. Maybe she had no dental care, and had cavities, so her teeth literally rotted out of her head and had to be pulled, one by one, because it was cheaper than dealing with the underlying cause.

Her father was a cantankerous man who was an engineer on the local railroad. He was a World War I veteran. He married, divorced, married, and even remarried several times. I don't know that he didn't provide, but I can imagine that he wasn't attentive to his child's needs, either. He later took his own life. 

Conversely, I know my mom's family went to a dentist because her mother mentioned it a lot in the journal she kept. That family was not well off either, but had a bit more money, especially earlier on in the Depression years.  

I just realized I wrote about some of this eight and a half years ago, but I wasn't thinking quite as much about the financial circumstances of my family members. I wish I knew more about how Grandma D came to have no teeth.

U.S. Forest Disservice

I have mixed feelings about whether now is the time to be spending hundreds of billions of dollars to return to the moon. Like many (most?) people of my generation, I have that remnant childhood thrill left from the Apollo program. And my dad worked on the space program, to boot. 

But we have more existential problems to solve these days; whether we would spend that kind of money to solve them or not is the question.

That said, it's hard not to feel awe at this new photo sent back by the Artemis crew:



This is the dark side of Earth, lit only by moonlight. Dawn is just peeking over the lower left of the planet. 

We share a beautiful world, despite the work of humans and particularly capitalism to extract everything it can and leave behind negative externalities. 

Some of this week's bad news in the U.S. is from a Trump regime press release, which decreed the dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service. Really, it's just from a press release, as if it's not a major catastrophe worthy of front-page news all by itself. Read the whole story here.  

At first it sounds semi-innocuous — they plan to move the Forest Service headquarters from Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City, Utah. 

But it also means closing its 10 regional offices and 50 research facilities across more than 30 states. Those labs do work that can't be restarted once it's stopped:

You cannot move a thirty-year watershed study. You cannot relocate a decades-long old-growth monitoring program. You cannot box up a forest and ship it to Colorado. When these facilities close, the experiments die. The datasets end. The partnerships with universities that took generations to build collapse. And the institutional knowledge of the scientists who ran those programs walks out the door, because the administration damn well knows most of them won’t follow a forced relocation to a single consolidated office that has nothing to do with the ecosystems they’ve spent their careers studying.

As seems to always be the case with the regime, the idea is to replace it all — thousands of people — with political appointees, in this case 15 of them. Located in state capitals where they can be lobbied to log the forests more, more, more.

And the HQ will be in Utah — a state whose government itself wants to gut federally owned forests. What a place to house the Forest Service! 

This is what temporary restraining orders and injunctions are made for. It has to be stopped before it can start. It cannot be allowed to happen. 

Once it is done, it's done.