In The Resistance We Drive Minivans

The left is resilient. We have strong communities. We care for our neighbors. We are the grown ups in the room and we prove it with our actions. Trump and the Republicans are doing immense damage to our nation, but at the grass roots, we are doing what we can to mitigate the harm.

In the resistance we drive minivans, we take ’em low and slow down Nicollet Avenue, our trunks stuffed with hockey skates and scuffed Frisbees and cardboard Costco flats. We drive Odysseys and Siennas, we drive Voyagers and Pacificas, we like it when the back end goes ka-thunk over speed bumps, shaking loose the Goldfish dust. One of our kids wrote “wash me” on the van’s exterior, etched it into the gray scurf of frozen Minneapolis slush. Our floor mats smell like mildew from the snowmelt.

In the resistance we play Idles loud, we prefer British punk, turn the volume up, “Danny Nedelko,” please and thank you — we cast that song like a protective spell across our minivans: Let us be bulletproof, let us be invisible. . . .

Everyone is doing his part here, each to his ability. This is easier to accomplish, it seems, when joy and love are the engines. Outside the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, where detainees, some of them American citizens and legal residents, are being held without beds or real blankets, the grannies of the Twin Cities are serving hot chocolate to college kids in active confrontation with ICE. I know of an off-grid network of doctors offering care to immigrants, a sub rosa collective of restaurateurs organizing miniature food banks in their basements. A friend of mine is a pastor who went with around 100 local clergy members to the airport in protest. Another friend is an immigration lawyer who spends his days endlessly filing habeas petitions, has gotten 30 people released from detention over the last few weeks. He recently offered a training session on how to file habeas petitions and 300 lawyers showed up, eager to do the work pro bono. . . .

Here’s what you need to remember: There is no reward that comes later. No righteous justice will be dispensed, not soon and not ever. Renee Good and Alex Pretti don’t come back to life. The lives of their loved ones are not made whole again. Thousands of people will remain disappeared, relatives scattered, families broken. This story does not have a happy ending, and I can assure you the villains do not get punished in the end. If that is your motivation, try again, start over.

But you also need to understand — and this is equally important — that we’ve already won. The reward is right now, this minute, this moment. The reward is watching your city — whether it’s Chicago or Los Angeles or Charlotte or the cities still to come — organize in hyperlocal networks of compassion, in acephalous fashion, not because someone told you to, but because tens of thousands of people across a metro region simultaneously and instinctively felt the urge to help their neighbors get by." . . .

you slow down to the speed limit, you turn Idles a little louder, you play “Danny Nedelko” again. That song comes from an album called “Joy as an Act of Resistance.”

Today I’m driving a girl who never speaks other than to say thank you. She’s out of the car now and trying to clamber ungracefully over a dirty ice bank that walls off the roadway from her house. There is no entry point — she’d have to walk down to the corner to gain access — and I’m cursing myself for where I’ve dropped her off. The skies are an unsympathetic oatmeal. It is very cold, the dark dead of winter.

Out on the stoop of her building, the girl’s mom and little sister are waiting. The mother looks on nervously, wishing to minimize this vulnerable transition point between car and home. The little sister is probably 3 years old. She is in pigtails and wearing footie pajamas and she is radiant, leaping up and down, clapping, ecstatic to see her big sister come home. The quiet girl is stone-faced and stumbling, and eventually she makes it across the wall of gray ice to her stoop, where her little sister grabs her by the leg. 

I’ll admit: This was the only time I cried, throughout this whole disgusting affair, as I sat in my car watching the girl in the footie pajamas clapping for big sister’s safe return[.]

An excerpt from this New York Times Op-Ed essay.

Against Municipal Courts In Colorado

The Denver Post has an article highlighting the problems of having municipal courts not of record incarcerate people who aren't represented by lawyers with no record of the proceedings, and notes that a bill this session seeks to change that. The bill is HB26-1134:

Fairness & Transparency in Municipal Court: Concerning measures to ensure that municipal court defendants are subject to conditions similar to state court defendants.

The bill clarifies that municipal court defendants have a right to counsel and that municipal defense counsel have the same notice, case information, and opportunity to meet with their clients as do state-level defense counsel. Current law prohibits paying indigent municipal defense counsel on a fixed or flat-fee payment structure if the municipality prosecutes domestic violence cases. The bill applies the prohibition to all municipalities.

All municipal court proceedings are required to be open to public observation. Virtual observation is required for all in-custody proceedings, and prompt resolution of municipal cases is required.

Last year, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that municipalities with ordinances that parallel state crimes can't have higher penalties than the state crimes, in the wake of the state legislature reducing penalties for misdemeanors, and in the wake of Governor Polis vetoing a bill that would have mandated the same result.

A different bill last legislative session addressed the problem with municipal court judges abusing failure to appear warrants in a way that led to disproportionately harsh punishments.

None of these bills address yet another problem with the municipal court system, which is that municipal court judges are not nearly as independent of the municipal legislative bodies as state court judges are because they are appointed by the Governor in a merit based system that makes state court's independent of local governments (except for Denver County Court which is quasi-municipal).

Municipal courts also leave people arrested languishing in jail for longer than the U.S. Constitution allows because they hold court less frequently than state courts.

The simple and best solution would be to abolish municipal courts entirely and to give county court's jurisdiction over ordinance violations (which could still be prosecuted by City attorneys). 

Perhaps parking violations could be made administrative proceedings of municipalities limited to fines, boot, and tow orders instead of municipal violations.

Typos In Blog Posts

A rare essay about typos in blog posts, expressing views that largely mirror my own views on the topic, can be found here.

The MAGA-GOP Coalition Is Falling Apart

 

Trump's decade plus old hold on the GOP is slipping, because Republican political leaders they know that their prospects in the midterms look apocalyptically bad as a result of his actions over the last year.

Military Updates

Initially without links:

* 70%-80% of the casualties in the Ukraine War have been from drones. Heavy armored units en masse have almost vanished as a tactic and a very large share of all artillery batteries have been destroyed. Russia has had 1.2 million military casualties, Ukraine has had 0.6 million military casualties. The fourth anniversary of the start of the latest phase of the war is coming up later this month. Russia's rate of territorial advance has been the slowest in the last century. Europe is stepping up support for Ukraine and considering deploying troops as U.S. support under Trump continues to be fickle. Ukraine's campaign against oil and gas infrastructure in Russia seems to have subsided somewhat although it has hit some relatively low value targets near Moscow. Russia has stepped up strikes against civilian targets in Ukraine (more or less indiscriminately). Russia is nearing a breaking point economically, although it has finally started to ramp up its military-industrial capacity someewhat. U.S. and European forces are being more pro-active in interrupting "ghost fleet" trade in sanctioned Russian oil.

* Germany has invented anti-torpedo torpedos.

* Japan has invented a 40mm railgun for one of its ship classes. It overcame the hurdles faced by the U.S. program with a 40mm round instead of a 155mm round, different materials in the barrel that have different electrical properties, and gallium capacitors that reduce the power supply footprint. It can fire 120 rounds in shot succession and doesn't suffer the barrel burn out problem of the U.S. attempt. It can fit in a shipping contain plus a small turret. This would be mostly useful in anti-small craft, anti-drone, anti-helicopter, and missile interception roles. It is quite accurate although range and accuracy details are not publicly available. The same ship would have lasers, something that China is also investing it. But lasers are only effective for 3-5 km, and can be disrupted by heavy sea spray, fog, low lying clouds, storms, and fog, so the lasers would be mostly for close in missile and drone defense together with something like a Phalanx Close In Weapons System. Railgun rounds are basically immune to lasers.

* The U.S. has developed a large area anti-drone system that uses microwaves to generate an electromagnetic pulse that can take down hundreds of drones at once, deployed on military truck.

* The U.S. is stepping up B-21 Raider production, a stealth bomber similar to the B-2 but a bit smaller and more modern.

* A prototype of a next generation Abrams tank was shown off at the Detroit auto show.

* China claims to have ready for prime time sensors that can see U.S. stealth aircraft.

* Progress is being made in ground drones, generally, either on a small unmanned ATV scale or a robot dog with a rifle sized weapon approach.

* Progress is being made on surface and submarine drones.

* Progress is being made on optical gun sight attachments that make it much easier to identify sniper sights that would otherwise be almost invisible at ranges up to a mile.

* China continues to be active in deploying its navy, coast guard, are paramilitary maritime forces around the Philippines and the South China sea.

Siblings, Conflict, and Personalities

This is a question and answer from Facebook (I won't identify the person asking the question, and if you are anyone other than the person asking the question and know what I am referencing, please don't identify them or link to the conversation in the comments). I have added paragraph breaks that the Facebook user interface makes more difficult and less natural to do, for easier reading.

Question: 

I was raised as an only child. Half and step sibs came later in life, but from birth til leaving home, it was just me. I have felt lucky about this. 

Almost everyone I know with brothers and sisters have had fraught, difficult relationships with them. Is this as common as it seems to me? If you have siblings, has it been an easy relationship or not so much?

My Answer:

Being an only definitely influences your personality, not always for the better (stereotypically, more selfish, better at interacting with adults but less good at interacting with peers, less likely to understand give and take in relationships). 

My relationship with my brother (who is three years younger) is fine, but not super close. Siblings who are one or two years apart tend to have more intense relationships, sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse. Twins, of course, are their own thing (and are almost always on pretty good terms with each other). Big age difference siblings start to be more similar to only children as the age gap gets greater. My two children, who are two years apart, and my wife and her sister, who were two years apart, are probably closer than my brother and I were at three years apart. 

Birth order (oldest, youngest, middle, etc.) also significantly impacts your personality and outlook on lots of thing - it even significantly predicts the side that a scientist is likely to take between two competing scientific theories. 

Both of my children benefitted in their relationships in life from having an opposite sex sibling. People who don't have an opposite sex sibling tend to be more wary of the opposite sex in early puberty. 

As an estate planner and probate lawyer for three decades (I no longer do that work), each additional sibling increases the likelihood of will contests and disputes (even in non-blended families). Families with two full siblings are usually low conflict when the last parent dies. At four full siblings it is 50-50 between high conflict and low conflict. At five or six, there are usually two or three factions among full blooded siblings, at seven or more there are almost always factions. 

Families that have half-siblings and step siblings have much more conflict than families with full siblings, although timing matters a lot. Non-full blood siblings who were pre-teens together living in the same household (or if some were pre-teens and the oldest was a young teen) interact much more like full siblings with each other and also almost never have romantic feelings for each other, unlike those who were never in the same household or started living together as teens or later who are more like roommates with each other and sometimes do have romantic feelings for each other. So sometimes in a blended family, some of the non-full blooded siblings act like full siblings to each other, while others do not.

Post-Script

On balance I think our society as a whole probably loses something of value by having more only children, and by having far fewer middle children, than it did historically, in terms of adult social interactions and in terms of having less variety in personality types when a mix of birth order related personality types is valuable.

Also, while outside my realm of personal experience, it is pretty clear that children raised in polygamous families (usually with many children with each of the sister wives), that at least in Mormon history, those children had less desirable life outcomes than children raised in large monogamous families (with a far small total number of children in the household from their shared father).