Sit on It

Yay for Tom Saunders, and the people supporting him, as he builds benches to place on the streets of downtown Minneapolis. Today's Star Tribune story (gift link) wasn't the first story about the benches. The Downtown Voices website covered it on April 1, and KARE-11 covered it a few days ago.

Each bench is made from salvaged wood, and has a unique phrase burned into the surface. 

This bench says "Everyone deserves a place to rest." (Photo by Tom Saunders.)

The benches also carry a QR code that helps visitors contact the mayor and city council members, asking for more seating in downtown.

Fund the IRS

The latest episode of The Stakes series on the Why Is This Happening? podcast is about tax policy. The guest is  Kimberly Clausing, a UCLA Law School endowed chair in tax law and policy.

(As a reminder, guests on The Stakes compare what Trump and Biden did as presidents in particular policy areas. The 2024 election is the first one since 1892 when both major candidates have previously been president, so each has an obvious record to compare. The first episode was about immigration policy.)

The tax policy conversation looked at rates and enforcement under each president, which connected to climate policy as well, since that's part of Biden's tax policy. Of course, a lot of discussion about Trump was about the big tax cut bill that passed in 2017. But Clausing and Hayes also talked about the undermining of the IRS as it relates to enforcement, which started before but continued under Trump. (Here's an earlier post on that subject.)

For me, this is the literal money quote from Clausing:

The people who have opaque sources of income are well off, and so underfunding the IRS really serves the interests of dishonest people at the top, rather than your typical worker who would benefit from being able to get their questions answered and get their returns prioritized in quick ways.

Dishonest people at the top who have opaque source of income... gee, who does that sound like?

Maybe it's not the best idea to have people like that making decisions about our public policy!

What's What with Americans and Religion

As much as polls can tell us anything, this one from PRRI* is interesting. 

As of late 2023, the religiously unaffiliated made up more than a quarter of the U.S. adult population, while white evangelicals were only 14% and white Catholics were 12%. Essentially, the combined number of those two religious groups equaled the unaffiliated.

The share of white Catholics and mainline Protestants has declined most rapidly, when comparing 2013 and 2023, while the unaffiliated is the one group that has grown rapidly. 

In a 2020 report, PRRI cited a Pew survey that tracked part of this trend:

During that earlier time frame, the unaffiliated and white evangelical shares essentially switched places. Since then, as the 2023 PRRI report shows, white evangelical numbers have stabilized, while the unaffiliated have continued to increase. 

Maybe some day the unaffiliated will get some political representation in this country.

__

*PRRI is the Public Religion Research Institute, though their website doesn't appear to say that anywhere. I guess they're like the AARP or other organizations who think they can get by using only initials. 

The Happy Card Reader

I see card readers all the time lately when out and about, but recently I realized that one of the common designs has a discernible face...

...and a happy face at that.

__

Previous posts about pareidolia.

Greenwashing in Stainless Steel

Tesla has recalled all 3,878 cybertrucks sold, because the accelerator pedal cover can slide off so the pedal sticks under the floor mat. Which means, of course, the truck is literally going pedal to the metal, unintentionally.

I saw a video of a cybertruck owner describing how this happened to him. He had the presence of mind to realize he could stop by jamming his foot on the brake, and then putting the thing into park. 

(I've also read that you can't take cybertruck through a car wash without voiding the warranty, but I'm not sure if that's true.)

Anyway, 3,878 is not very many units sold in a country this large, especially when a lot of them are probably around Silicon Valley, so I was surprised when my other half reported he had seen one on the streets of Saint Paul the other day:

I don't know about you, but I don't see an upside to paying more for a new roof in order to subsidize someone's Elon obsession. (And the only "eco" in this company's roofing appears to be carbon offsets through donations to a tree-planting organization.)

Better get that hunk of stainless steel turned in for the recall, people.

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.

__

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."