All posts by Greg Laden

Terrorists Poised To Take Over United States

2022 Election, 2024 Election, Violence and Guns, , , ,

In American Jews start to think the unthinkable Dana Milbank talks about a recent service in Temple in which about half the congregants admitted to giving serious consideration to developing an exit plan for when the MAGA Republicans come for the Jews, as Nazi-types tend to do. The recent attack on the Pelozi household (see Assailant shouted ‘Where is Nancy?’ in break-in at speaker’s home, attack on Paul Pelosi) was a reprise of the treasonous “Where’s Pelosi/kill Pelosi/Where’s Pence/Kill Pence” January 6th insurrection. It reminds us of other ongoing threats, such as the incessant so far mostly verbal attacks and threats against Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (see In wake of Pelosi home invasion, Omar attacked online for hiring security.)

The MAGA Republican Party is a terrorist organization, but one that has infiltrated enough of the Justice Department, State Department, and Congress to not allow our country to classify it correctly as such. Hopefully in a few days, enough voters will realize this that they won’t be allowed to take over our country.

It will be a very sad day if we wake up on November 9th and realize that Americans have chosen to end democracy.

From Scrivener’s Mouth to OpenSource Ears?

Technology,

I am a Scrivener user. I like Scrivener so much that I maintain a Windows computer to run it on, because, sadly, it does not have a Linux version. There are two things that Scrivener does that I don’t think are widely adopted, and I am writing this post in the hopes that OpenSource software developers will notice and adopt.

Help: Search Menus

The first one is totally unique to Scrivener in my experience. This is an item under “help” that simply searches all the menus for what you are searching for. Never mind counter arguments to deploying this idea, that any help system will produce the same results mixed up with other results, etc. Especially never mind those arguments from OpenSource world, where the help item on the menu is, traditionally, so useless that I for one don’t even bother using it. It is vestigial. One way to resurrect the idea of OpenSource software even having a useful help option is to simply deploy a search for a term among the menu items in the software itself as a routine feature. This is incredibly useful in complex software where there are perhaps a hundred or so items across all the menu choices. This should be easy to implement. The list of menu items is certainly a set of objects in the software, and probably comes with links to information that could be added to the results. Play around with it, people!

File: Favorite Projects

The second item exists in some form or another here and there,. Qgiss might have something like this (I’ve not paid attention). This is the “favorite project” or “favorite file” menu item. For Scrivener, I have something like 30 projects on my computer, but some are old and done(ish), some are false starts or experiments, some are long term and at any given moment not of interest. So, I put the four or five that I’m currently working on in the Favorite Projects menu.

I want that for all my software.

Greg Laden's BlogThere are four of five files that I use in Libre Office often enough to want them handy as shortcuts or favorites, but not often enough that they remain near the top of the “Recent Files” list in LibreOffice. A few years ago I tried to convince the LibreOffice community to make the Recent Files item include (as an option?) only files opened in a particular program. The way it works now, recent files opened in Calc (the spreadsheet) are on the list when you are working in the word processor (Writer). Sometimes, when I’m using Calc for a particular project, I may have 10 or 15 files (imported CSV files, various spreadsheets, etc) open over a work session, almost none of which I ever want to see again, but all of which populate the Recent Files menu list. This makes that list less useful, and if the list was separate for each different program (Cals, Writer, Draw, etc.) at least the problem would be partly contained. I don’t remember the reason they gave that this could not be done, but I didn’t buy it at the time. A technical glitch that seemed very solvable.

A “Favorite File” menu item in that software suit would solve this problem.

Microsoft’s office suit actually does this, I discovered while lamenting this problem. They are “pinned” items you can have in the otherwise very clumsy opening screen on the “Home” ribbon item. That good, but I’m not sure if I count that as a solution, since it involves using Microsoft Office and who wants to do that?

James Webb Cancelled

James Webb, LGBTQA, Science

Above: The telescope formerly known as James Webb.

The Royal Astronomical Society has implemented a policy that papers published in its journals that make reference to the telescope formerly known as James Web use only the acronym JWST to signify this particular machine. This is because James Webb, who died in 1992, has a history.

James E. Webb was not a scientist. He was a government administrator with a law degree, some military experience, and a BA in Education. In 1961, JFK put him in charge of NASA where he worked until 1968.

Prior to any of this, there occurred what is known as the “Lavender Scare,” a nationwide panic that Teh Gay was poised to take over key positions in the American societal landscape. Gays and Commies were conflated, and suspected socialists or communists and gay people were hunted down and persecuted, and if working for the government, fired.

In March 2021, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Sarah Tuttle, Lucianne Walkowicz, and Brian Nord, all scientists in the astronomy field, wrote a piece for Scientific American, in which certain aspects of Webb’s history were pointed out.

When Webb joined the recently created NASA, it was government policy to purge LGBT individuals from the federal workforce. That was happening earlier as well, and in those earlier times, Webb was with the US Department of State. The authors point to a book, The Lavender Scare*, by Javid Johnson, which includes evidence that Webb (and others) were involved in the deployment of these anti LGBT policies. Webb, apparently, remained silent as the LBTG purge happened at the Department of State, and actively participated in it at NASA.

To some extent, this is a case of someone “going along” with the culture of his time. For example, in 1950, a senior Stater Department administrator sent Webb a set of memoranda including a roadmap for this purge, and Webb passed the memos on to those he was overseeing. So, he didn’t start it, but also, he didn’t stop it, and who knows what he was thinking at the time.

Astronomers and others in cognate fields have defended Webb, in some cases by pointing out that some of the evidence against him was false or misattributed, or by pointing out that he did, after all, oversee the greatest successes ever during the period of the greatest expansion of space science ever.

The authors of the Scientific American piece make an important point, that I agree with. Had this been an historical wrong, a wrong yes but an old wrong, a part of a period in history where the wrong was normal (and this is clearly true in this case) but not part of the present, than we might view this differently. We don’t forgive Founders who enslaved Africans and African descendants in our early nation, but we also don’t see those wrongs as pertaining directly to current events in their historical form, because there is no widespread enslavement of African Americans by plantation owners today. But anti-LGBT sentiment and action in the living scientific community is not erased by recent wokeness. Indeed, the whole idea that gayness is a security risk was until very recently part of national self-policing in both the US and the UK. Still might be, for all I know. So, we don’t worry about the energy unit “Newtons” even though Newton certainly had some ideas we would not accept today (beyond his really poor grasp of elemental chemistry) but we do regard certain older or recently deceased old timey scientists as having been legit jerks in on way or another, having to do with LGBT rights, sexism, or racism. Don’t make me start a list here, not time or space.

So, in Great Britain, no more James Webb. We will see how this plays out in the US. See Society bans James Webb Name in the current Science.

#Chalk The Vote

2022 Election

This weekend, the weekend of Sat October 29th and Sunday October 30th, is #ChalkTheVote weekend. Note that participatns are welcome to chalk early, on that Friday, or later, on that Monday, but don’t get stepped on by monsters and ghosts if you are down on the sidewalk chalking too late in the day Monday.

This is a GOTV effort. Here’s how you do it:

  1. Create chalk messages to inspire your community to vote.
  2. Take a picture or video of your artwork.
  3. Post it to Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok with the hashtag #ChalkTheVote. Tag @parentstogether so we can feature your art!

Make sure your post is public so we can see it! The folks at Parents Together, Chalk The Vote HQ, will repost some of their favorites.

Check out some ideas to get started!

Local Liberal Press Produces Mild October Surprise

2022 Election, 2024 Election, Politics

An unusually upbeat (in a sense) day in our local paper, just before the election.

Star Tribune headline tells us that the MAGA extremist running for Governor has a tax plan that would ruin the economy. Tope headline of the paper.

Lower down on the same page: Jan 6 panel subpoenas Trump, with a pic of Bannon being shuffled off after sentencing. Trump has a November deadline.

Still on front cover:

Iran, China intelligence among seized documents

Calls for (MAGA Extremist) Sviggum to resign (from UMN regents) intensify (after he says that what may be the whitest of our campuses in Minnesota is too diverse! He refuses to resign, by the way, so this is going to be an interesting fight.)
Biden Touts Falling Deficits

Inside the paper:

  • Emmett Till statue unveiled
  • Good news for Ethiopian refugees
  • First woman (Eve?) PM of Italy
  • Page A5: Bannnon gets 4 months
  • PA Man gets 34 months for attacks on press, cops, on Jan 6
  • Seized (Trump) document describes Iran nuke program

Today’s Strib editorial excoriates MAGA republicans for being insane, mentions litter boxes and bat-boy myths.

Piles of amazing infrastructure news.

DFL AG Ellison’s big GOTV push at UMN

GOP donor in sex trafficking case tapdancing

Weekend weather in the 70s.

The End Of Democracy As We Know It. Coming soon to a polling place near you.

2022 Election, 2024 Election, Politics

As if you care.

There is new polling, extensive and high quality polling, that seems to make clear one small problem we have in the United States.

Nobody really gives a hoot about key issues such as abortion rights or democracy. People will get mad, there will be demonstrations, but when large percentages of Democrats (yes, I said Democrats) tell us that they prioritize gas prices over democracy, and polls show, as they do, that if the election were held today, Republicans would take over the US House and possibly the Senate, then we have to admit that we are a Republican nation, a nation not in favor of freedoms or democracy. We are an anti-abortion nation, a back ally nation, a nation where we are ready and seemingly even happy to let a right wing fascist government control our lives.

I see it day to day. I see people who in the past helped Democratic candidates not showing up, not donating money, letting someone else do it. But there is no “someone else.” When Democrats lose this rare two-year trifecta on November 8th, and a Republican House is sworn in come January, we will begin a two or four year long deconstruction of this country. Enough election deniers will be in the power positions in key states that the republican party will be able to “elect” (but not really elect) whomever their party puts up for 2024, probably Donald Trump. There is a good chance that at the same time Trump is sworn in, a Democratic house will be sworn in, but with only the slimmest majority. Then two years after that, Democrats will stay home again, and there will be a Republican (Trump) in the White House, a Republican Senate (with McConnell in charge), and a Republican House with who knows which monster in charge.

The only pertinent details will be which of the old men who are bent on turning us in to a fascist country die of natural causes earlier than their plans ideally require. But that is just a detail. Others are eager to step in.

I partly blame the left. We removed the possibility of empathy as part of our way of being when we shouted down anyone who claimed it, in our rush to blame our allies for everything that our enemies are actually doing. We threw out half our good messaging when it failed to come from a repressed group, even if it was about repression. We developed and deployed abysmally bad messaging and wore it as a chip on our shoulder, a guaranteed recipe for losing any argument. We let our identity politics undermine our pro equity efforts. Then, after doing that for about a decade, we stopped showing up. We explicitly put “self care” as our number one priority, then forgot to move to number two after a suitable recovery peirod.

I thought 2016’s election was depressing, but that was just the beginning of the end. The elections of 2022 and 2024 will be the actual end, and we are letting it happen. Making it happen. Choosing for it to happen. When the Republicans take the majority, we will simply have to admit that this is a MAGA Republican country. We are a democracy that is about to vote out democracy, democratically.

This is my third or fourth missive declaring our failures, but in the previous ones, I also asked for help, asked for people to step up. I now see that as too unlikely. Nobody stepped up, and the polls show that nobody will.

The “Big Man”: Male linguistic deficit and female linguistic superiority

Anthropology, Biology, Evolutionary Biology, , ,

It is hard for a person who thinks about, knows a little about, evolution to reconcile the seeming contradiction that females should be smarter than males, particularly in the language arts, knowing what we know about brain development in mammals. This is because, while there are great writers and speech makers among women, there are more men famous in these area. We can reasonably assume that the greater number of famous male authors and famous male speeches through Western history is due to bias imposed by the patriarchy. We know this because the numbers have shifted to something much more like equality in recent decades. But it is still hard to see how, if women are expected to be better than men on average in using words, that this supposed biological fact does not show itself somewhere, or somehow.

It is easier for a person who studies behavioral biology to get this. Colnsider Big Men in cultures that have formal Big Men. There are of course big men (small b, small m) in all soceities, in some way, but the role of a man as a Big Man is especially clear in societes that have a word for it, and a social and political position so defined. One of the great and classic ethnographic examples Ongka, a New Guinea big man from a tradition region, the star of a documentary called Ongka’s Big Moka. Ongka is a Big Man, a leader among men, seen as the Big Man for a large community which is in bellicose relationship with neighboring groups. In the documentary, Ongka devises an attack on his neighbors, in which he will attempt to defeat their Big Man. The attack requires the accumulation of a huge store of valuable goods, which includes Australian cash, a Land Rover, many bushels of Yams, and large numbers of rare forest bird feathers and domestic pigs. During the course of accumulating this wealth, Oka talks, and talks, talks. Ongka incessantly shows up ina aprt of the villafge, and talks about how he is the Big Man, and how he with the help of the villagers will defeat the neighboring Big Man1. Ongka shows up, gives his speech, and leaves with some pigs to add to his larder, and some yams, which will be used to feed the pigs. He may get a feather or two. And, over the months of time during which this happening, the polygenous Ongka adds a wife or two a well.

Eventually Ongka is ready to defeat his neighbor, and a ceremony is arranged. The two men face off. This is not a symmetrical battle, this is Ongka on the offense, and the man he is going after absorbs the attack, survives or loses, but has the option of attcking back at a later time. Ongka gives the biggest and baddest speech of them all, but the speech is not to ask for help, but to accompany what has been laid out. The feathers, pigs, yams, money, and Land Rover have all been arranged to look quite impressive. No marketing rep at Target could do a better job at making the goods look so good. This is the a largest Moka (that is what the ceremony is called) anyone can remember. Ongka’s Bit Moka has defeated his enemy, and Ongka tells him so in the last chapter of this round of his Big Man narrative.

This may look like a man being great at what men are great at, giving speeches that get him goods, mates, fame, and power. That would be the more naive or amateur evolutionary view of the thing. But if we add one level of theoretical sophistication to the model, we might see that this is actualy a man being good at what men are handicapped at. Linguistic skill is more easily come by in women than in men. Traditionally, remedial reading programs are frequented by boys, not girls. Typically, UN simultaneous translators are more often women than men. In many societies, women move at marriage between groups, and in places where language areas are small and heterogeneously mixed up, many young girls are expected to quickly learn, if not already have, high proficiency with a language that was not her birth language.2 In mammals, all males are females that have become masculinized to varying degrees in development, and in the brain, this masculinization can not be done by adding structure, function, or features, but only by literally wiping out brain tissue. It is thought that this process goes a bit farther in some boys, ultimately causing modest language related deficits. The details and degree to which this happens is not well understood, but it is generally agreed that it happens. Baby girls have better hearing discrimination of language phonemes than do boys. Average starting age for linguistic (verbal and reading) milestones are earlier for girls than boys. And so on.

So from a behavioral biological point of view, Ongka is handicapped, and is overcoming his handicap by being very very good at a behavior in which men tend to be limited relative to women. There is a great deal of theory and study surrounding the “handicap principle” (look up Zahavi’s Handicap Principle). If he can do that mentally, he must be an exceptional male, at the high end of the bell curve for the men in his society. No wonder he gets the extra yams.

I know I’ve been a little disdainful in this essay of amateur evolutionary thinkers. Let me be clear: I love amateur evolutionary thinkers. The non-specialists who take on evolutionary biology as an interest are in many areas more important, and their activities more impactful, than actual evolutionary biologists when it comes to preserving and sometimes even saving science from religiously or politically driven attacks. That is very much appreciated. The average actual biologist is a lab rat or a field drone, collecting data, running it through the peer review process, usually ignoring and maybe being unaware of the “war on science” carried out by the right win in congress, right wing parents in vulnerable school districts, and all those yahoos on the Internet. If it weren’t for the non-scientists who happen to love science, we would be doomed. But at the same time, people want to know the details, understand the nuances, and enjoy learning more things about the thing you know about already. So that’s what this is.

Here’s Ongka’s Big Moka:

  1. To be accurate and clear, I don’t actually know what Ongka is saying in these speeches, it is not clear in the documentary, but I’d like to find out.  ↩︎
  2. She and most others in her society probably already had familiarly with most or all of the languages spoken in the region, but it is only women that have to rely for their own social comfort or even safety to become proficient at their new family’s primary language and dialect.  ↩︎

Is Blood Ever Blue? Science Teachers Want to Know!

Anatomy and physiology, Education, Falsehoods and Skepticism, , ,

According to one of the leading experts on the human circulatory system, blood flowing through veins is blue.

I’m not going to mention any names. All I’ll say is this: A person I know visited a major research center last year and saw a demonstration of organ removal and some other experimental stuff. A person also visiting asked the famous high-level researcher doing this work if blood was ever blue. What he said was not recorded in detail, but it was very much like this statement I found on the Internet:

… human blood is red as soon as it is oxygenated. Blue blood flows through veins back to the heart and lungs…..
[source: Some Guy on Yahoo Answers]

My friend was disturbed by this, as s/he had been teaching high school students for years that blood is not blue. Her understanding of the situation was that people thought blood was blue because standard anatomical drawings and models depict arteries as red and veins as blue, and because if you look at your veins they are blue. Obviously veins are not clear, but if you don’t think that out you might assume that you were seeing blue blood.

Continue reading Is Blood Ever Blue? Science Teachers Want to Know! →

Christian Conservatives: Just don’t vote.

2022 Election, Politics

Being a conservative means that if you vote, you must vote for a rapist, a liar, a violent offender, a person with anti-Christian values seeping out of their pores. Being a Christian means that you know you will go to hell if you support the smashing of half or more of the Ten Commandments. Being a conservative means you can’t vote for the empathetic, intelligent, humanistic Democrat. Being a Christian means you should vote for the progressive, liberal, or centrist candidate. But you are a conservative so you can’t.

So, there is only one thing you can do and save your soul: Sit out this election.

The extremist MAGA Trump Base has spoken. It is the tail that wags the Republican dog. The base has picked the candidate you get to support, or not, and the base has decided that power is more important than democracy, winning is more important than truth, hate is more fun than love, aggression and bullying is better than empathy and thoughtfulness.

And that is what you’ve got, that is all you’ve got. That is what you are voting for (or not).

Is this you? Are you that bad of a person? Or not????

Cheap books: Ohio fossils, Le Guin, Heinlein, Midwife

Other

A Sea Without Fish: Life in the Ordovician Sea of the Cincinnati Region (Life of the Past) Kindle Edition* is an interesting looking book I’ve not read, but I’ve looked for. It is a case study of a particular (long) time period represented in a particular (large and rich) location, including the history of research, the relevant history of life in the region, and the fossils. Ohio is one of those states where people really love their state, and Cincinnati is one of those cities where people are all over the place with their love of city. If you are Ohio or if you are Cincinnati, you will need this book in order to document that you have the BEST FOSSILS.

The classic Starship Troopers* by Heinlein is two bucks now.

The book on which Call The Midwife is based (“The Midwife”), or more exactly, the first in the trilogy, is cheap in Kindle format. This is another book I’ve not read but I’m advised that a lot of people want it so here it is for two bucks.

Another classic: The Wind’s Twelve Quarters by Ursula Le Guin.

Fascism coming to America? Already there in the judicial branch.

2022 Election, 2024 Election, MAGA terrorism, Politics

When I was a kid, I got in trouble (a couple of times, but there was this one time…) In truth, I had done nothing wrong, but I got caught up in a drug deal I had nothing to do with. The damaging evidence was planted by the police (I witnessed that and reported it to my public defense lawyer, who told me that’s how it works). In public, the judge was judgmental and stern, but reasonably well behaved. But there was a moment where I was sentenced, unofficially, to get a stern talking to by him in his chambers, instead of a severe actual sentence. In his chambers, he was a pompous ass. He stood to pace in his opulent office while lecturing me, and decided to re-tie his perfectly tied shoe. When he lifted his foot up to the seat of a chair, his robe fell open, and exposed … the handgun strapped to his leg. What an ass.

A couple of other times, such as in an unemployment dispute for example, the judge was an ass. In my life I learned that low level judges tend to be assholes. Perhaps that is my bad luck and not truly representative, but my experience shapes my opinion. I’ve never had the pleasure of standing in court, or in chambers, before a higher level judge. Maybe the higher level judges are not assholes, who knows.

When the right wing Trump/McConnell stacked supreme court ruined the Constitution and started America on its retraction of human rights long held and hard fought for, a lot of people were surprised. I think everyone expected the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, but I’m not sure most people expected them to lay out a road map for the retraction of most personal rights, which would be a necessary condition for the deployment of a full-on fascist government led in two years from now by Donald Trump, the real estate robber baron. (With the Proud Boys as his palace guard and Q-Anon as his brown shirts.) But I wasn’t that surprised, because I already knew that the judicial branch at the lowest levels had more assholes than the Russian Army.

Why do we revere our judicial branch? Our criminal justice system is unjust and has been for the entire history of this country. The judicial branch has been run by judges this entire time. Seems to me like this makes judges, by and large, even those with nice personalities, essentially assholes.

The most widely disseminated and widely listened to opinions about how judges are worthy of praise, trustworthy, important centers of civilization, etc, come from lawyers. Lawyers are self selected, then further culled by law school, many if not most spend almost no time in the presence of judges, so there is a great deal of further selection among them that do. Those litigators are a subset of people further subsetted, further subsetted, further subsetted, to work with, appreciate, and live by virtue of the existence of … judges. So of course lawyers say of judges what fish mongers may say of fish. Meanwhile there are fish that are complete assholes, and there are judges that are complete assholes. More, percentage-wise, judges than fish, I would judge.

The Republican Revolution is the takeover of our legislative branches by assholes. Started with Gingrich, continuing today, and with Trump, likely joined soon enough by the Executive branch. If and when Trump wins the presidency in a couple of years, and the Senate and House go Extremist Asshat, like is about to happen according to some polling, the executive branch and the legislative branch will join the judicial branch to become a trifecta of imperfection, a triumvirate of terror, a trinity of self-centered fascist demagogues.

One could argue that the judicial branch has been most of the way there all along, and this has been one of America’s best kept secrets. The transition of judges to moderators of a Gestapo-state will require the removal of those remaining judges who still believe in democracy, but judges take care of their own, and they will figure out a way to do that.

Keep this in mind: The courtroom is the opposite of a democracy. A courtroom is ruled with an iron fist. In their own courtroom, each judge has the final word, and can choose whom to give voice, and can choose what they may say and not say. Find a definition of fascism and apply it to a courtroom. It will fit nicely. The lawyers, observers, others, who work in that context and extoll the virtues of judges as fair, thoughtful, whatever, are to this fascism what the fish is to the water: they don’t realize that part of their world exists, so they don’t point it out, they don’t criticize it.

The judicial branch will be the first of three, not the third of three, branches of our government to turn full on Mussolini.

Mussolini was an asshole.

Republicans Eschew Voters, Democracy

2022 Election, Politics

Last night I attended a local League of Women Voters campaign forum to which candidates running for the Minnesota Senate and House from my local district (SD 42) were invited. Full disclosure: all three DFL1 candidates are my friends, and I support them politically. They are, Senate candidate Bonnie Westlin, House Candidate Ned Carroll, and House Candidate (and my own house rep) Representative Ginny Klevorn.

The forum was held in the well-appointed digs of the City Council, up the hill at City Hall. I note that my friend Ned, running for House but currently a city council member (at large) got to sit in the Mayor’s seat. All three candidates were asked questions collected from the public over the last several days, and at the venue just prior to the start of the forum. All of the candidates gave straight forward, excellent, well thought out answers to all but one of the questions2

DFL Candidates Westlin, Carroll, Klevorn. They showed up.

Sixty people attended, about eight or so questions were asked and answered, by all three candidates. Which, if you think about it, does not add up. Three positions, three candidates, means only one candidate per position!

That’s right, folks, the Republicans did not show up. The campaigns were informed on the night before the debate that two of the candidates would not would not attend, and rumors that the third candidate would also fail to show came along as the day progressed.

The point of these forums is to provide a non partisan setting for members of the electorate to have direct access to candidates, and for candidates to stand or stumble on their positions on the issues defined by the voting public, and moderated by a fair third party (the LWV). This is something, apparently, that Republicans don’t want, or perhaps, can’t handle.

This is part of a trend3. Across the country, “Candidates, mostly Republican, skip debates, bar press during midterm campaigns.” Not only debates, but press conferences are being shunned by Republicans. This is happening by routine when races are close. Republcian campaiging is a game of duck, duck, grey duck, but instead of actual ducks, ducking debates.

Empty Chair
Empty chair. AKA Republican candidate not appearing at a fair and open forum.
The controversial pullouts from presidential debates are well known and well documented. There are way way too many examples to cite here without running out of links. I only have so many links to give. And yes, skipping LWV forums is very much part of this anti-democracy trend. This has been going on since at least 2018, but is much more widespread this year.

I am fortunate to live in a district that has shifted, since I’ve lived here, from red to blue. Indeed, the very first local person I met when moving here4 was then-candidate Ginny Klevorn. I was in my newly purchased driveway moving stuff into my newly purchased house, and this lady I did not know came along and gave her pitch for her candidacy. Naturally, my internal dialog was “is this person a Democrat or a Republican, hard to assume in this red town.” I was eventually to learn that Ginny is a DFLer, and an excellent one, and over time we became good friends, but equally important, she became an excellent representative. I’ve always been able to talk to her about issues, make suggestions, or more often, learn the nuances of current policy debates. Ginny would go on to lose that first year to the incumbent Republican, as was normal and common in this district, but the next year she took the seat, and every cycle after that, she has won more and more decisively. These days, when a person tells me they would like to run for office (I’m on committees that seek out candidates, so this is a frequent conversation for me), one of the first things I tell them is, “Look at everything Ginny Klevorn does, copy her, and you’ll have the best possible campaign.”

I admit the Republicans in this district are justifiably fearful of their DFL rivals. They should be scared out of their socks. Last weekend’s Plymouth Parade demonstrated why. Each of our candidates had very large crowds of supporters marching with them, each in a different part of the parade. Meanwhile, the Republicans, MAGA extremists every one, had to gather together into one group just to look like they had any support at all. There were more lawn signs attached to the hokey trailer they were dragging than there were supporters.

My community is one of those places where for years, many citizens went along in life avoiding politics, just voting for the incumbent, until one day he who shall not be named (to avoid sullying this post) got elected and there was a great awakening. There are still Republicans in Plymouth, Minnesota, but they seem to know their worth5, and have retained a modest sense of shame. So they don’t show up for debates. I’ll be they won’t show up to vote either.

Please, vote. Also, here are the links you need to donate to my three candidates, which you should also do.

Klevorn – Carroll – Westlin

By the way, they are all strongly pro-choice, and we need more pro-choice legislators in Minnesota, in both houses. We lack a clear majority, so your donation will be extra meaningful.

Footnotes:

1The Democratic Farmer Labor Party is the Minnesota version of the Democratic Party, founded in 1944 by a committee with Elmer Kelm, Elmer Benson, and led by the up and coming Hubert Humphrey. So it is mostly the Elmer Party and it glues together farmers, union folk, mostly urban progressives, Native folk, LGBTA and kin, poc, the Woke, a diversity of faith-based communities, non-libertarian suburban Conservatives, traditional Democrats, and so on and so forth.

2No one I spoke to after the forum considered it a valid question. It might have been the headline and sub-head of a Star Tribune editorial followed by a phrase amounting to: “yeah, so what about this, huh?” An unfortunate choice especially for the closing question of the evening.

3I thank my friend Audrey Britton, for sending me this Google search.

4I knew many people in Plymouth MN before living here, having married into a family of Plymouth folk, and having worked on several Congressional campaigns centered here, but this is the first local person I met AFTER moving in, a fine but important distinction.

5A small value.

And in today’s news …

2022 Election, 2024 Election, Politics

Rethink The Police

Attempts at police reform, or more accurately, policing reform, are stalled by right wing tactics that paint any sort of critical examination as pro-crime, and centrists and “persuadable” tend to buy what the right wingers are selling. This pattern is common in many areas of progressive change. Then, along comes some other aspect of reality and bam, upside the head, anti reformers! Change happens anyway.

One area of reform is to curb the cowboy in the cop and limit high speed, high risk chases, which often have negative side effects. Like the one in St Ann MO, where a chase of a car with expired tags led to the permeant disablement of Brent Cox, who happened to be in a nearby car that was slammed into by the errant driver. When asked to limit dangerous overdone car chases, the chief told the press they would drag his car chases out of his cold dead hands. Well, not really. He said “St. Ann will chase you until the wheels fall off.”

Then the insurance agency stepped in and put him down. From reporting in the Washington Post (this is Washington Post Day on Greg Laden’s Blog, by the way): “….an otherwise silent stakeholder stepped in. The St. Louis Area Insurance Trust risk pool — which provided liability coverage to the city of St. Ann and the police department — threatened to cancel coverage if the department didn’t impose restrictions on its use of police chases. City officials shopped around for alternative coverage but soon learned that costs would nearly double if they did not agree to their insurer’s demands.”

Sometimes reform is just the natural organic thing that happens in a free market. Rarely, but savor the moment when it does.

The New York Time Is Biased

I had two headlines in my morning email:

“White House reaches tentative agreement to avert national rail strike”

and

“Railroad unions and companies reach a tentative deal to avoid a strike”

The former from Wapo, the latter from the NYT. Leave it to the NYT to understate Biden. They have a reason. Everybody loves a close horse race, so keep the horse race close and the value of your add space rises. I only subscribe to the NYT because when I told them to bugger off a few months ago they bribed me by offering a super cheap subscription (like a dollar a month or something crazy) so I kept it. You should try that! Just call to cancel and they’ll give you a great deal.

The Wisdom of Linsey Graham …

At first I was only getting snippets and I was confused. Lindsay Graham will ban abortion in 15 weeks. So hurry up and get yours. No, no, Lindsay Graham will ban abortion FOR 15 weeks. Like a moratorium? No, no, Lindsay Graham will ban abortions AT 15 weeks. For reference, that is 15 out of 40.

The truth is more like this: Lindsay Graham got drunk again.

One of the most common terms that comes to my mind when I think of Lindsay Graham, other than “lush”, is “bone-headed.” This morning, I was pleased and amused to wake up and find Ruth Marcus saying (in Wapo, not in my apartment), “Graham’s move might be politically bone-headed, coming less than two months before a midterm election in which voters already appear angered and energized by the court’s action. But it is just the opening salvo.” Nice.

Ruth’s main point: “… it is not hard to imagine a moment when Republicans have the power to proceed [with such a ban], and use it.” But on the ground, in this year and at this time, the MAGA-trumps “…rattled by midterm polling, scurried to distance themselves from Graham’s proposal and talk up states’ rights.”

So to complete the sentence at the head of this comment: “The Wisdom of Linsey Graham … is drunk”

Ken Star Is Dead

I will not here speak poorly of the dead. I did that on Facebook and it was pretty satisfying. That is all, have a nice day.

No, but seriously, Eugene Robinson has some things to say about Ken Star.

Sports sucks

I love this paragraph, that I found here:

The greatest threat to the integrity of pro sports is the unchecked, immoral owner. He slithers across all of these leagues, rich and toxic and indestructible, profiting from sports’ charm without upholding their virtue. You can expose his misdeeds, shame him and force him to answer to people who are supposed to have real power. He will escape, though. And those like him will multiply.

A few interesting things about the Queen’s death (long live the King)

They made the coffin 30 years ago.

In 1901, the horses carting Queen Victoria’s gun carriage (that’s what they use to parade the coffin around) broke free, so some British Sailors pulled Victoria’s cart for a while. Therefore, at some point during the ceremony, Royal Navy sailors will likely drag the carriage by foot for a while. This is how ancient traditions start.

You know what a plinth is. Well, a catafalque is a wooden plinth for a royal coffin. Now you know that too.

The queen’s Royal Sovereign’s Scepter is three feet long, bears one of the world’s most famous diamonds, and has a core of Unicorn tail hair taken from the same Unicorn as the Scepter wielded by the royal house of Freedonia.*

The Royal Orb … well, there is a royal orb. What the heck? It’s actual name is Globus cruciger, and it is really old, from back in the Age of Orbs I suppose.

The state hearse is a Land Rover. Therefore it will break down during the ceremony and the cost of repair will exceed the Royal Funerary Budget so the Queen’s coffin (did I mention the coffin was made 30 years ago) will have to be dragged the last few blocks.

source

*That part is mostly but not entirely made up