Organizing and Power

I'm a few days away from the half-month BlueSky post, and there's one whole thread that's too long to include anyway, so here it is in its entirety.

It's from David Roberts @volts.wtf, not too surprisingly:

I just got an email pushing a new book, and ... I'm not going to call out the book itself, cause I don't wanna ruin anyone's day, but ... I am going to subtweet it. 

It's yet another book on how the problem with climate change is the way we talk about it! "Framing"! "Messaging"!

It is genuinely amazing to me — has been amazing for many years — how obsessively the broad left-of-center focuses on language. I can't tell you how many books and articles and studies and surveys I've seen on "framing" climate change. Endless. They never stop!

Not just that people focus on this, but they focus on it to the exclusion of almost everything else. Like the amount of f'ing language analysis from the left and academia *dwarfs* the amount of, say, *power* analysis. Y'know ... power? Anyone? Power?

I don't want to do a whole long rant on this, so I'll just say: the reason fossil fuels and other aligned incumbents don't want to transition to clean energy is that it will *damage their material interests*. And folks, they understand their own material interests. Really well!

They are not going to be fooled into forgetting about those interests by the right combination of words. There is no magical messaging or phrasing, no "framing," that is going to distract them from their material interests. They are not open to persuasion on this matter!

If you want to beat them, figure out how to organize a bloc of economic actors whose material interests are served by the transition. Organize a bloc with *more power* and then *defeat* them. That's how this works. You're not going to fucking seduce them with your clever verbiage!

Quick addendum on this: the one part of the left that truly understood power was unions. Union organizers were never under the illusion that they could sweet-talk concessions from bosses with the right framing. They dealt in power.

That's why the right killed them. 

 

Punches from Half a Millennium Ago

I found out from kottke.org that the Cambridge University library has digitized the Baskerville punches, sizes 16 and 60. 

Check that link out for an explanation of how punches were (and still can be) used to create metal type, and a little bit about who John Baskerville was. 

Here's a basic diagram to give you an idea of how the process works:


What Kottke's post made me think of was the time I visited the Plantin Moretus Museum in Antwerp, where I saw some of Claude Garamond's punches. That's Garamond as in Garamond…the typeface. But more importantly, his eponymous typeface was one of the earliest examples of what came to be called old style type, which dominated the printed word in the West for about 250 years, and continues in popularity to this day.

Plantin Moretus itself is a piece of history, since it was a working print shop for about 450 years. This is the hall on the second floor where the punches are housed in the wooden and glass cases along the walls:

 

The museum has two sizes of Garamond punches, a large set in the Greek alphabet and a text size in the Roman alphabet. 

 
My close-up photo of the small punches is not great, but imagine these letters are not much larger than if you broke off the end of a pencil tip. (If you want to see good photos of small punches, check out Cambridge's 16 point Baskerville photos. I think this Garamond type is several points smaller than that.) 

These are matrices that were stamped into copper from the larger Greek punches.

  
Each matrix would be placed into one half of a two-piece mold like one of these, the parts of which could slide to create different widths. Hot metal would be poured into the hole at the end of the mold to make the body of each piece of type.

If you click to zoom in on this picture, you can see that the Greek at left was printed from the composed type shown in the center. And that the accompanying Roman type below is in Dutch (or probably Flemish, my apologies). 

I remember at the time I took these photos, seven and a half years ago, I had that weird reaction I get to seeing talismanic historical objects. Today's Kottke post brought that feeling back, and I can't believe I never posted about this at the time.

See the U.S.A. Through 1960s White American Eyes

I recently got a copy of this kids' coloring book at a used bookstore or garage sale (I can't remember where):



The back cover says it was recommended as a supplementary aid to grade school pupils. It's from the Bonnie Books Child Craft Series, and the copyright is 1960 by James & Jonathan, Inc. 

As the cover says, it depicts:

• PEOPLE from the pages of history
• PLACES important landmarks of our destiny and 
• EVENTS past and present. 

It was published a year after I was born. Material like this was what filled my childhood, in and out of school. It's what were we taught, what we were shown as reality about our country.

First, meet our main characters, Johnnie and Janie:

The setup is that these two are going on an unattended trip around the country, visiting various uncles and aunts who will show them historic places. They'll travel on trains and planes, alone, even though they appear to be about 6 and 8 years old. 

Mom and Dad send them off without a moment's hesitation. As you did back then, I guess. (No one in my family did anything like this.)

Their time riding on trains is the only point when Black people (who are all men) are shown in the coloring book, and they are, of course, all in serving roles:

There were four Black men in various roles on the trains.

The kids take a train from the West to Chicago, and later from Philadelphia to New York. They also fly an awful lot for people in 1960, and flying is shown to be very luxurious:







Here's a list of the historic indoctrination they are subjected to by their relatives:

• Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean.
• Gold was found in California (nothing about what effect that had on the people who lived there before that).
• The Alamo was defended by heroic [freedom-loving implied] Texans who perished. (Not.)
• The giant oil derricks in Oklahoma... are great.
• Ferdinand de Soto discovered the Mississippi River.
• The founding fathers are to be revered, with several of them getting full-page portraits and pictures of their slave labor camp homes.
• Ponce de Leon discovered Florida.
• Peter Minuet bought Manhattan "from the Indians" for $24 in trinkets and cloth.
• The Boston Tea Party was carried out by Indians, as far as a kid could tell from the image shown, and was about paying taxes on tea. Rather than because the tea on the ship was priced to undercut tea smuggled by colonists.
• Four full pages about the Pilgrims: Plymouth Rock, religious freedom, the Mayflower, how the Pilgrims "tilled the soil," and the establishment of Thanksgiving (with no help from anyone). 
• And of course, Columbus discovered America.

I was taught every one of those things in school. Except we did hear about Squanto helping the Pilgrims.  

Given the simplistic drawing style in this book, a child seeing this illustration would assume these men are supposed to be Native Americans, rather than people pretending to be. The Tea Party is generally a complicated topic to put into a coloring book. 


There isn't a lot of finished coloring in the book, and what there is was clearly done by a fairly young kid. The exception is this page showing Columbus, which was done by an adult or at least a teen or preteen. Columbus, in this person's imagination, was blond and had very light skin. It's not hard to imagine where they would have gotten that idea.

I did appreciate that Johnnie and Janie's New Yorker uncle Bill took them to Coney Island (for a whole day) by subway and bus while wearing a business suit and hat:

If this book were done now, Bill probably would have driven them there in a Cadillac Escalade.

What About Those Car Carriers?

As we live through the current "drawdown" of DHS paramilitaries here in Minnesota, no one quite knows what's going on. There do appear to be significantly fewer overt grabs happening in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, but reports are that they continue in greater Minnesota and farther suburban areas. The feds keep lying about how many personnel they have here currently, and how many they intend to keep here, including telling bald-faced lies to members of Congress. 

So no one is resting easy and people have not returned to "normal," whatever that is these days.

And then there are the multiple car-carriers full of brand-new black Suburbans and Chevy Tahoes that have been seen driving into the Whipple Building in the past week or so. Why would DHS need dozens and dozens of new urban assault vehicles if they're withdrawing from the area?

Today there was a short conversation on BlueSky with a hypothesis:  

My husband’s theory about all the truckloads of fleet vehicles going INTO Whipple when there’s allegedly a drawdown is government inefficiency.  They ordered tons in December and just now getting delivered. Thoughts?   Would be cool if four federal electeds could get information on this!
@mauratwit.bsky.social

I was thinking this awhile ago. I think it’s also possible that the equipment procurement people don’t talk to the personnel people.
Norm Charlatan

Seems about right for this administration.
Bart @mud2minnehaha.bsky.social

I've suspected/hoped it was a logistical problem, but then again we don't ever hear "flatbeds of vehicles LEAVING," which would help confirm that. 
Professionally Certified Woolgatherer @earational.bsky.social

It does seem that the same vehicles would be seen leaving at some point soon if the deliveries were a mistimed mistake, right? And the Whipple Building in general would be returned to its previous federal uses, none of which were as an illegal detention center or base for DHS goons.  

5th Tahoe shipment of the day at the Whipple Building (today, March 9). More last week as well. Source.

Video from a car carrier driving in six days ago.  

Where Could She Be?

Happy International Women's Day to an international woman of mystery!

As Rockapella told us,

Well she sneaks around the world from Kiev to Carolina,
She's a sticky-fingered filcher from Berlin down to Belize,
She'll take you for a ride on a slow boat to China,
Tell me where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?

Steal their Seoul in South Korea, make Antarctica cry Uncle,
From the Red Sea to Greenland they'll be singing the blues,
Well they never Arkansas her steal the Mekong from the jungle,
Tell me where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?

She go from Nashville to Norway, Bonaire to Zimbabwe,
Chicago to Czechoslovakia and back!
Well she'll ransack Pakistan and run a scam in Scandinavia,
Then she'll stick 'em up Down Under and go pick-pocket Perth,
She put the Miss in misdemeanor when she stole the beans from Lima,
Tell me where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?
Oh tell me where in the world is... Oh tell me where can she be?

Ooh, Botswana to Thailand, Milan via Amsterdam,
Mali to Bali, Ohio, Oahu...!
Well she glides around the globe and she'll flimflam every nation,
She's a double-dealing diva with a taste for thievery,
Her itinerary's loaded up with moving violations,
Tell me where in the world is Carmen Sandiego? 

Mike Meyers, Newspaperman

My home office finally reached that negative tipping point where I absolutely had to deal with it. This always happens when I can't find some critical piece of paper, and the only way past it is to winnow through all the piles that have accumulated in the years (yes, it is years) that I've been letting it go since the last time someone visited and used the office as a guest room.

Part of my excuse is that I was being treated for cancer during a year or more of that time, and the other part is that during treatment I moved my base of home operation to the living room, so the office became a repository. That meant the office didn't need to function as a workable space, and my normally bad habit of piling things led to worse-than-normally bad piles on the floor. You begin to get the picture.

Anyway, today was the day that I went through it all and mostly got it under control. 

While I was doing that, I found a page from the Star Tribune I had saved because I wanted to write about it here. It's from October 13, 2024. But other than the fact that it's an obituary, the article is relatively timeless.

Because I still want to say that I appreciated its subject, Mike Meyers, who was a long-time reporter and writer at the Star Tribune (gift link).

I knew when I saw his byline, whether it was during his lengthy career covering economics or in a commentary after he retired in 2009, it would be worth reading. I didn't know until I read his obit that he had started working as a journalist near where I grew up and went to college, or that he was a single guy his whole life, or that he had been active in the Newspaper Guild.

He was only 75 when he died, it appears from some kind of complications after a fall and a broken ankle. 

No funeral was held, the obituary reported, "but friends will gather privately to share memories." For the record, this reader also remembers him and his work fondly.

__

The obituary was written by Randy Furst, Meyers's long-time colleague who retired in February 2025 from the Strib at age 78, after more than 50 years at the newspaper. 

Photo of Mike Meyers by Star Tribune photographer David Joles
 

Flips of the Tongue, 2026

I think it's time for a funny usage post. These are things I've heard or seen written, usually in social media comments. These days, sometimes it can be hard to tell if the person who wrote them made a mistake (whether a typo or a complete mistake) or if it was an intentional joke.  

But here goes anyway:

• Sent by a friend last summer, regarding Iran's attack on Israel: "The world has shifted on its access."  . 
• "A broken record is right twice a day" (extemporaneous spoken words).
• "Right on queue." I'm not sure where I saw this.
• "Making their ends meet" (said by the owner of a child care center, speaking as a source on child care expenses on a Minnesota Public Radio story)
• "Cars-carrying white MAGAts." I'm not sure where I saw this. It's clearly just a typo, but the image of white MAGA devotees carrying cars is pretty sweet.
• "The supper rich." Reported by Anne Billson on BlueSky, as seen on Twitter.

There were two from Facebook:

• "One fowl swoop" (a comment made by someone in my hometown group)
• "Run rock shod" 

And a lot from BlueSky, where I spend so much time:

• "The cutely is the point." (This was someone trying to cite Adam Serwer.)
• Someone made reference to a "Venmo diagram." Some users of Venmo could use a diagram, I'm sure.
• "Sending all the smaller law firms under the boss" 
• There should have been "full throttled condemnation." 
• "The cannery in the coal mines" (okay, that one is really funny)
• "When it came down to brass tax" 
• "He’s no rocket surgeon" 

 Brass tax, rocket surgeons, Venmo diagrams. Maybe the Minnesota laser loon does fowl swoops?

Rating Morality

I have a couple of thoughts on this chart from Pew Research:

(Click to enlarge.)

As it shows, the U.S. is the only country among the 25 they surveyed where the majority rated their fellow citizens as not having good morals and ethics.

First, it's too bad Pew has never asked this question in its surveys before, because I really want to know how the answer for the U.S. has changed over time. As they noted in the write-up, 

Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democratic Party are much more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to rate fellow Americans as morally and ethically bad (60% vs. 46%).

I wonder if that would have been true in 2015 or earlier. I would be willing to bet money it was not. (It seems fair to think that if 30–40% of your fellow citizens are willing to vote for Donald Trump once or twice, despite everything he's done, you might feel as though there's a problem with their morals and ethics.)

Second, I wish the survey had included Russia, because I really want to see how Russians would score their fellow country members. My thought is their ratings would be even lower than the American percentages.   

Third, what is it like to live in a country where 80% or more of people think their fellow citizens are morally and ethically good? Wow. Envious.

How would you answer Pew's question, if you were surveyed? Despite all that has happened in the last 10 years, I think I would have said "somewhat good."
__

I note that Turkey and South Africa appear to be about tied for the highest percentage of people who replied "Very bad," while India has the highest percentage who replied "Very good."

Plants…on the Colosseum?

Today I learned, via Public Domain Review on BlueSky, that the Roman Colosseum used to be covered in plants before archaeologists and the tourism industry removed them all in the 1850s. There were some 420 species. 

They were recorded by an amateur botanist named Richard Deakin in his Flora of the Colosseum of Rome (1855), which can be seen here. 

This is the caper bush, Capparis spinosa:

The Real Infiltrators

As if it isn't bad enough to start an illegal war with no plans, we're also being led by people at the top and by far too many members of our military leadership who believe in the Armageddon story or at least that we are involved in a holy war. 

Independent journalist Jonathan Larsen reports on the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which has been contacted by U.S. troops across the Middle East. They say their commanders claim the U.S. war on Iran is a Christian War. "One NCO said they were told the U.S. war is to bring about Armageddon and the return of Jesus."

Larsen's full article gives the details, and is worth reading in full. 

MRRF was founded by the former Air Force attorney who brought to light the fundamentalist Christian indoctrination that was happening at the Air Force Academy more than 20 years ago. Despite his work and that of his organization, fundamentalist indoctrination continues there. 

Carmen Celestini (@philofwrite.bsky.social on BlueSky) is a researcher in conspiracy theories, religion, gender, extremism, end times, and hate. She is a lecturer at the University of Waterloo.

Prompted by Larsen's story about Iran, she posted a thread recounting what she called a "short history of the end times/rapture in the American military":

Cold war: Forces were seen as the defense against godless communism, but also as a rich environment for missionary outreach.

1959 – National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) estimated 50% of those in service were not affiliated with a church or had a religious background.

1952 – Mainline Protestant denominations aggressively promoted annual preaching missions on US military bases. Battle was fierce between Mainline and Evangelicals for influence in the military Chaplaincy. NAE created a chaplain-endorsing agency – called the Commission on Chaplains – as liaison between Evangelical and Fundamentalist denominations in the military Chaplaincy 

The US military recruited chaplains through endorsing agents in a system created to avoid Constitutional problems with the government endorsing religion within the military.

This was the beginning of Evangelicals' attempt to take over. Creation of the officers' Christian fellowship during WWII. Officers were placed in the military to meet and share their faith. This fellowship changed in the Cold War from a prayer group to a missionary movement. 

The Vietnam War composition of the military chaplaincy changed. Up to then it was primarily Protestant denominations and Catholics. These religious leaders spoke out against the war. Evangelical leaders did not: they saw the Vietnam War as God's work. And Evangelicals soon filled the gap of Catholics/Protestants leaving the military.

1967 – The Assemblies of God retracted its commitment to pacifism and proclaimed worldly war as a counterpart to the spiritual struggle. 

Other Fundamentalists applied the tactics of guerrilla combat to the spiritual fight. Developed "Infiltration," filling the ranks of secular institutions they deem as "American" with undercover missionaries. They saw the military as a way to send their missionaries into the world.

Reagan cemented the Evangelical hold on the military when he changed regulations governing the denominational breakdown of the Chaplaincy based on religious demographics of the whole military. 

In 1987 Protestant labeling in the military was an umbrella term  for all denominations, so numbers increased dramatically. The Pentagon allowed Fundamentalist Bible college grads to fill the required Protestant placements in the Chaplaincy. More than 2/3 of the military's active duty Chaplains were associated with Evangelical or Pentecostal denominations. 

Between 1994 and 2005 the number of Chaplains from evangelical and Pentecostal churches rose and in some cases more than doubled. DOD stats show 40% of active duty personnel were Evangelical while in civilian population it was 14%. In the early 2000s, Evangelical Chaplains represented 60% of the military chaplains.

Fundamentalists were the most represented faith among military officers. The Officers' Christian Fellowship (OCF) was active at 80% of the US military bases worldwide. After 9/11 membership in OFC grew 3% each year. They saw the war on terror as a spiritual battle. The OFC website's stated goal is "to create a spiritually transformed US military, with Ambassadors for Christ in uniform, empowered with the Holy Spirit."

Church support groups such as Navigators, the OCF, Overseas Christian Servicemen's Centres and the Full Gospel Businessmen were operating active chapters globally in and around US military bases. Note the Chaplain Corps is the second oldest branch in the Army, second only to infantry.

The most prominent group is the Military Ministry – an affiliate of Campus Crusade for Christ.

Basic training broke people and their missionary was there to spread the good news, when they were broken and more open to the word. They claimed bases are excellent locations to pursue their strategic goals.

They created books, events, strategic plans to share Christ and convert. Military personnel were "chosen people" to spread the gospel.

A Christian Embassy – ministered at the Pentagon, with more than 350 Bible study classes, using their curriculum – is held regularly among the 25 to 30k members. Curriculum is spiritual warfare, warfare for Christ, as a force multiplier.

Pete Hegseth clearly comes out of this tradition. 

I had no idea the chaplaincy was so tainted and infiltrated by these people. Where is Father Mulcahy when you need him?

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Update: Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist, raises good questions about the sourcing of the MRRF claim about the Armaggedon story specifically, and about MRRF's history of posting very similar-sounding letters it claims were written by service members. 

As Mehta says in his conclusion,

There are so many problems with our military right now, and a hell of a lot of those problems involve Christian Nationalism. If a seemingly damning story ever took off, only to be debunked, it would upend a lot of crucial work done by people who take these concerns seriously. 

On Nicollet Avenue

Yesterday was Alex Pretti's 38th birthday, which makes him just a bit younger than my oldest nibling (on my side of the family). 

I hadn't been over to Minneapolis to the memorial site on Nicollet Avenue until Saturday. I wasn't sure if I would take photos, but I did.

The snow is all melted from the area where he was shot and killed:

There are Sharpie markers left on top of some of the structures, and people keep leaving messages on the wood and on notes that are already posted in various places. I saw someone writing while I was there.

The lane in front of this part of the sidewalk is closed to cars, but the street is open. The close-by businesses — Lu's Sandwiches, Christo's Greek restaurant, Glam Donuts, the Black Forest Inn — are all open and need customers, as do all the businesses of the Twin Cities.

Forty Years Ago

Someone on BlueSky posted yesterday that the film Pretty in Pink was released 40 years ago.

I wouldn't have noticed this, except that it has a particular significance in my life. 

I decided to go to graduate school a bit over 40 years ago, and right around the time that movie came out, I was planning my trip to Madison and Minneapolis to check out the universities in those two cities. 

When I visited Minneapolis, probably just a few weeks later than this date in 1986, I had driven from the airport in Milwaukee in a rental car. (That meant I could also check out Madison on the way.) 

I stayed at a bed and breakfast in Minneapolis's Lowry Hill neighborhood, somewhere not too far from the Walker Art Center: I remember it was the cheapest room, and probably had been a maid's room in the house originally. The owners were very nice.

I think it was a Friday that I was there, and it was still wintery, although it was March. I decided to go to a movie after having spent the day on the University campus talking to faculty and staff. I looked at the ads and found that Pretty in Pink was playing at a theater called the Excelsior Dock Cinema. I had a map book of some kind, and I don't remember how I figured it out, but I drove there.

I remember going down Hennepin Avenue, then turning right in the Uptown area and going... and going and going and going. Because, unknown to me at the time, the Excelsior Dock is in Excelsior. On Lake Minnetonka. Which is pretty far west of Minneapolis:

Google Maps tells me the distance between the two locations is currently about 15 miles and a half-hour trip. I'm not sure if the roads between were as easily connected back then. And this was me, alone, in a completely unfamiliar place, at night, on somewhat icy roads. The return trip was even more fun than the trip out.

Not the best idea I ever had.

So that's what I think of when I think of Pretty in Pink. It was the beginning of what was supposed to be two years in graduate school and in the Twin Cities.

Instead, I spent about nine years in grad school (sort of), and I've now lived here for well over half my life. Things don't always turn out as we think they will.