Seen on a Street

I've been seeing this truck repeatedly on a block not too far from my house:

It's parked outside a couple of small apartment buildings every day (during the day), so I'm not sure if that means its owner is working at one of the homes nearby or if he works at night. Or maybe isn't working. 

As always, click to see it larger, but if you do, you'll see it combines the Punisher symbol that I wrote about recently with the Three Percenter's slogan about tyranny (apocryphally attributed to Thomas Jefferson), plus the year 1776 and We the People lettering from the preamble to the U.S. Constitution. 

It's quite an amalgam of current right-wing references.

Then on the other side of the window, there's a cross made of nails, which I gather from searching is currently popular among some Christians. I don't remember that being a thing back when I was part of Christianity, but whatever. In the context of the other sticker, I have to say it feels kind of threatening. Which is sad.

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Here's a post from last summer about another pickup truck I saw in the neighborhood. This earlier one definitely belonged to a person who was working on a construction contract, rebuilding a street. 

A Decadal Life

I realized recently I've lived a decadal life.

I was born at the very end of 1959, so my childhood years were the 1960s, while my pre-teens and teens were the 1970s. I was a young adult in the 1980s, finishing college, changing jobs several times, moving from one place to another to another, starting grad school, and entering my life-long relationship. The 1990s were real adulthood (my 30s), including parenthood.

My decades correspond to the decades Western humans have mapped onto time. This is not unique: anyone born in the last few months of the year at the end of a decade can say the same thing.

Still, it was a small revelation to me that I have experienced the change of the decades in a personal way that most other people have not. People with birthdays even later in the last year of the decade can say it more closely than I can.

Progressive Taxation

There's so much bad news online today, I'm feeling overwhelmed. (And I realize as I write those words that when I look back at this post, I won't know what particular things I was referring to. Oh well.)

Here's one thing that's kind of good:

I saw that shared on Twitter by Lars Negstad, policy director at ISAIAH in Minnesota. He said, "Taxes are how we take care of one another, but those with the most should pay the most." I'm from New York and live in Minnesota, so I've experienced progressive taxation my entire life. Even the three years I spent in Washington, D.C. was in a blue area on this map.

The depressing way to look at it, of course, is that the vast majority of states have tax rates that are the inverse, rather than falling in between: their richest people pay the lowest share.

It's common for Minnesota's Republicans to claim that people, especially rich retirees, flee the state because we're a high-tax state. Star Tribune business columnist Evan Ramstad — who isn't exactly a bleeding heart lefty — recently demonstrated that this is not the case. Older people are moving into Minnesota, in fact. And our highest tax brackets were higher in the 1970s and ’80s. 

Stand up to the race to the bottom. Those with the most should pay the most.

Westmark on Dragonbabies

I found out about the Dragonbabies podcast a few years ago. In it, two sisters review young adult fantasy and science fiction books they read as kids or teens after rereading them. 

It's fun to listen to, even though their childhood books and mine don't overlap all that much, since they're about the age of Daughter Number Three-Point-One. They started recording quite a number of years ago, so there's a big backlog that lets me skip books I haven't read and still have plenty of podcasts. As kids they weren't snobby about what they must have considered "old" books. They've covered a lot of works by Ursula K. LeGuin, Robin McKinley, Zilpha Keatley Snyder, and Tamora Pierce. They also have reviewed most of Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles.

Their new episodes for a while have been books I haven't read, but today I woke up to find that they finally posted a review of Alexander's Westmark, the first book of his Westmark trilogy. I had sent them an email suggesting those books not long after I discovered the podcast. I gather, from what they said at the end of today's episode, that I'm far from the only person to suggest the books.

Now I want them to do the other two books in the series because I've always wanted someone to put Westmark overall in conversation with Prydain, and they're the ones to do it! There's probably an article or a dissertation chapter in the children's literature field somewhere that I could find on this topic.

I didn't read the Westmark books as a kid, since the first book came out in 1981, late in my college years. I discovered them in the Washington, D.C., public library after the whole trilogy had been published, probably in 1985 or so. I was so psyched to see them because I loved Prydain so much. 

It's hard to remember, but I think I was a bit taken aback by the direction the books take, relative to classic fantasy, the first time I read them. But I got used to it and at some point began to realize it was a better take than the usual "great man pulls the sword from wherever and is crowned the one and only" (oops, spoiler alert).

I'm very happy the Dragonbabies women love them too.

Goose Eggs

While I was helping with a cleanup at a wetland on Saturday, I didn't take much notice of the pair of Canada geese in the remnant pond where I was working to pick up trash.

I heard but didn't really pay attention when the geese honked at some of the other cleanup volunteers.

A little while later, one of those volunteers told me why they had honked: the geese had a nest at the end of the pond, and the nest had five eggs in it. 

I've never seen a Canada goose nest before, so I waited until the parent geese had paddled a bit farther into the pond and went as close as I thought wise to figure out where the nest was. I thought it might be right down by the shore line, but after looking around, I finally realized it was the giant pile of dried grass built up above the shore, and the eggs were up at the top:

I guess the geese don't want the eggs to have the possibility of getting wet, and when a parent is sitting on the eggs, it's probably a good idea to have a good view of possible predators, too. 

Here's a somewhat higher resolution version of the egg part of the photo:

This pond is one of the last parts of the original wetland complex destroyed by what is now the northwestern corner of Saint Paul and the eastern edge of Minneapolis. 

I know many people consider Canada geese to be pests, but like I say about native plants that grow a bit too rambunctiously for gardeners' comfort, they were here before you were.

No Luck with the Eclipse

Unlike just about everyone else, I didn't mention the eclipse the other day, which probably implies that it was a nonevent.

Aside from the fact that coverage of the sun, when viewed from the Twin Cities, was about 75%, it was also fully overcast here. I went outside at the height of it and I couldn't tell the difference between that time and 10 minutes earlier and 10 minutes later, or a half hour earlier or later. 

This lack of change does not make me a skeptic of others' experiences, who were in the path of totality where the skies were clear. I saw the photos, and heard their reports.

But it does make me think of my experiences with door-prize drawings where there are decent odds of winning (compared to lotteries, for example), and how I never win.

It also made this cartoon from The Oatmeal my new favorite thing.

A Broad Look at Immigration

Over the next months, the Why Is This Happening? podcast will include episodes called The Stakes that look at a particular policy topic, and compare and contrast what Trump did during his term as president with what Biden has done since 2021. 

As the podcast description says, for the "first time since 1892, we have an election in which both candidates have presidential records, which provides a unique opportunity to cut through messaging and rhetoric and culture war flotsam and actually take a hard look at what each man has actually done as president."

The first episode aired recently on the topic of immigration, with guest Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council. I've never heard of him before, which tells me he's a wonk on the topic. 

It's a informative on many levels, but here are some specific facts I learned:

• As part of undermining legal immigration, the Trump administration imposed a hiring freeze within the refugee resettlement program. By the time Biden took office, there were 1,000 fewer adjudicators on staff.
• When Obama left office, the U.S. was accepting 100,000 refugees per year. By the time Trump left, it was 15,000. No matter what Biden wanted to do, it wasn't possible to increase the number immediately because there weren't enough adjudicators, and the network of nonprofit resettlement organizations across the country had been decimated during the Trump years as well, with their staffs cut back because of lack of work. The number of refugees admitted is just now reaching the level it was at the end of the Obama years. (And note that it's not as if 100,000 is a great number relative to many other countries!)
• The Trump administration used every petty means it could to keep people from coming here who had a right to come under international law. One example Reichlin-Melnick gave was this: forms with fields an applicant didn't need (like apartment number when you live in a house) were rejected if the person didn't put NA into the field. 
• The number of people "at the border" is not more than some other times in the last 25 years, but the nature of the situation and who they are has changed. And, of course, our systems have not kept up because Republicans in Congress have made sure nothing can get fixed.
  

The details of what happened with family separation, "zero tolerance," and the failure of deterrence are all laid out, including what happened in 2020 during the covid shutdowns, when none of us were paying attention to immigration.

At the end, Reichlin-Melnick says that a slight bit of progress is being made now against the asylum backlog, but the structural issues persist, which only Congress can address . 

Finally, he says, "As legal immigration becomes more inaccessible, people are driven to the border... You need a broader perspective that looks at the systemic issues that are causing people to do this."

Another Kind of Bodily Autonomy

Back in late February, I forgot to post this graphic essay by Aubrey Hirsch, called The Consequences of (Not So) Casual Sexual Assault.

She starts by pointing out some of the more recognized disproportionate burdens women bear (lower wages, more of the work at home, financial and health burdens of reproduction), and then moves on to her main topic: the burden of unwanted touching. 

When you've been taught you are unsafe in public space, it's hard to say what effect that has on you. Depending on how young you are when it first happens to you, and of course how bad it is, that compounds it further. 

The vast majority of men have no idea what this is like to have as your reality. Assuming they are not men who perpetrate it, most of them have little or no idea that it happens.

In Name Only

How many times does research have to prove something for it to become acknowledged as fact? 

I have no idea how many times I've read about studies where researchers sent resumes that differed merely in the person's name, only to find that applicants with Black-sounding names were less likely to be contacted about job openings. 

Here's another one.

These researchers sent resumes to about 100 large companies (80,000 of them for 10,000 job openings over three years), and found that white-named applicants were contacted an average of 9.5% more often. That average is a bit misleading, though, because 20% of the companies were responsible for half of the discrepancy, and just two companies were the worst of all. 

One was a used car dealer I've never heard of (AutoNation), which contacted white applicants 43% more often, and the other was an auto parts company whose group of brands includes NAPA. They called white people 33% more often.

Companies requiring lots of interaction with customers, like sales and retail, particularly in the auto sector, were most likely to show a preference for applicants presumed to be white. This was true even when applying for positions at those firms that didn’t involve customer interaction, suggesting that discriminatory practices were baked in to corporate culture or human resources practices, the researchers said.

The researchers pointed out that large companies are probably less likely to discriminate than smaller companies, so this study is more likely to underestimate the rate, if anything.

The industries that were the least likely to discriminate on race were food stores, food products, wholesale businesses, and freight/transportation.

Appomattox Day

April 9 was the day Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House.

It's not a day that's particularly marked in our country. If you had asked me to name the date before this morning, I couldn't have. I knew it was in April because I read Irene Hunt's book Across Five Aprils so many times, but that's the only reason. 

Jamelle Bouie shared this image on BlueSky today...

...with these words:

on this appomattox day let me share my favorite union army flag. they should have made this the american flag.... a soldier for freedom bayoneting a soldier for repression and supremacism

In case it's not clear, the 22nd was a regiment of Black troops, and that's a Black soldier with the bayonet. The regiment was organized in New Jersey, though it was a federal unit with soldiers from all over. They had fought in the battles of Richmond and Petersburg, which immediately preceded the surrender at Appomattox.

The flag was designed by David Bustill Bowser, an African American artist.

Personally, I think it's a bit unclear what's going on going on in the image, despite Bouie's summary. The white officer (I assume he's an officer, since he has a saber) also has a flag of surrender. The Black soldier is not bayoneting him, but rather holding him at bay, forcing him to drop his weapon — which the officer shouldn't have in the first place if he was supposed to be holding up the flag of truce. 

In my opinion, the image is intended to symbolize Black troops' role in forcing the South to surrender in the war, to drop the saber and pick up the white flag. Thus always to tyrants.

Takeout, Takeaway

I learned that the British use the term "takeaway" instead of "takeout" in 1985 when I first visited the U.K. I remember being confused, briefly, about what it meant. But obviously, there's no particular reason "out" makes any more sense than "away."

Yesterday I found myself wondering which term was older, and how old they are. 

It turns out, takeout predates takeaway by more than 20 years: the former is first noted in 1941, the latter in 1964. 

I couldn't find details on where those first uses occurred. I tell myself that takeout would have first been used in New York City, but who knows. 

More interesting, takeout has an older meaning, which is documented in the 1908 Sears Roebuck catalog. It was an adjective used with a kind of table "designed to be removed or folded away." So by the 1940s, if you were old enough to remember that name, you could have served your takeout food on your takeout table.

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Carryout is older than either takeout or takeaway, dating from 1935.

The Last Dinner Party

I feel badly for cartoonists, though their situation is only an extreme distillation of what anyone who's paying attention experiences. Tom Tomorrow writes about this in his weekly enews missive. How do create work that points out the absurdities that politics has become, when that politics is already so absurd that it shouldn't need to be pointed out?

I thought of him when I saw today's Doonesbury:

Garry Trudeau is clearly feeling the same way.

Trump supposedly raised more than $50 million from the ultra-rich last night at a dinner party at a billionaire's home in Florida. They shovel money at him through obvious and less obvious means, while he also grifts smaller amounts from people who somehow believe he's god's chosen one and will bring the end of days. 

The rich people, I believe, know he's a buffoon, but he's their buffoon — or so they think. They've revealed they don't care about anything except being rich and keeping their children rich.