Lettuce growing at St. John’s University, January 16, 2016
Local lettuce all winter? At St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict, passive solar greenhouses grow lettuce for college food service, with farming and management by enthusiastic student volunteers. With a few dozen other folks, I visited both greenhouses on a subzero January Saturday, on the first of the Deep Winter Greenhouse Tours sponsored by the Sustainable Farming Association of Minnesota. Continue reading
Filed under agriculture, environment, food and farming
El Salvador is dangerous. The murder rate last year was just over 100 per 100,000 residents — one per thousand. That’s even worse than Honduras, where the murder rate is 61 per 100,000. The Peace Corps suspended its program in Honduras in 2012 because of the violence there. On Monday, January 11, the Peace Corps suspended its program in El Salvador “due to the ongoing security environment.” Continue reading
Filed under immigration
Photo by James G Miller, used under Creative Commons license
Want to rent in downtown Minneapolis? Latitude 45, a 13-story building with 318 apartments, is conveniently located at 313 S Washington. The Strib reported (back in October) that the building was a product of a public/private partnership , with the state of Minnesota contributing $472,000 for site clean up. Monthly rents run $1300 to $1600 for a studio apartment, with two-bedroom units going for $2500 to $3000. Amenities include a direct skyway connection and a heated rooftop dog oasis. Continue reading
Photo by Fabrice Florin, used under Creative Commons license.
(CORRECTION 1/13/2016 – see below) Back in December, I talked to M.L. Kenney on her Consuming Media radio program on Macalester college radio. We started off with her question about whether the media is trustworthy. My take: The right response is not trust but a critical, skeptical stance toward both media and official/semi-official sources of information. A critical response goes beyond the automatic “I don’t believe you” to a more difficult attitude of thinking about who has furnished information, how reliable the source is, and what other sources say. Continue reading
Filed under media
On this cold Minnesota night, about 25 Glendale Public Housing residents gather at Luxton Park for a Defend Glendale meeting. Discussion shifts back and forth, English to Somali, with translations and side conversations swirling about the room. Continue reading
The finished product from the Materials Recycling Facility (MRF): bales of paper, plastic, cans.
It’s noisy in here. Crashing, clashing, grinding, headache-inducing noisy — and that’s with earplugs in. Not only earplugs: for this visit to Eureka’s Materials Recycling Facility (MRF), I’m also outfitted with a safety vest, plastic goggles, and protective hard hat. Watching a big, yellow front-end loader move across the floor toward us, I’m glad that I also have an earpiece and transmitter so I can follow the directions given by my guide, Lynn Hoffman, Eureka’s chief of community engagement. Continue reading
Filed under environment, St. Paul Notes
Outside the glass windows of the office, the incessant clatter and clashing of the Eureka Recycling‘s Materials Recycling Facility (MRF) continues nonstop. Inside, I extract the protective plugs from my ears, and sit down to talk to José Hernandez about his work at Eureka Recycling. Continue reading
Filed under environment, St. Paul Notes
While I can’t claim that I see every story, I do read a lot of news, and I’m struck by how often really important stories get less reporting and fewer readers than more sensational stuff. Three of this week’s biggest underreported stories: the Obama administration staged raids to capture and deport mothers and children back to the deadly violent Central American countries they fled ; Flint, Michigan’s cheaper water poisoned thousands of children; an on-going methane leak in California may have a bigger impact than the BP oil spill. Continue reading
Filed under environment, immigration, race, Uncategorized
Look at the photo above. This is a bus stop. In St. Paul, a city committed to “creating safe, pleasant, lively streets and public spaces that work for everyone from eight to eighty.” If you are eight years old, will you be secure climbing over the snow to the bus? If you are eighty, will you be secure walking a block over the unplowed, unshoveled side of the street to get to the bus? Continue reading
Filed under St. Paul Notes
Downton Abbey is new. NCIS is new. Sherlock is new (not very good, IMHO, but new.) So why is the news in reruns? We have, once again, a stupid, mean-spirited deportation move against Central American families and children. Ultra-right-wing, anti-government, white supremacist grandstanding — take over a bird sanctuary? Really? And a re-run of old gun control rhetoric, with minimalist but highly choreographed executive action substituting for actual gun control. Continue reading
Filed under immigration, news
Seems like every week brings more news of government surveillance. You’d think the right wing would be up in arms about this government overreach and invasion of privacy—but it’s their folks who are taking the photos and setting up the databases of protesters and immigrants and anyone else who happens to get captured on some […]
On June 16, Kash Patel announced on social media that an alleged plot to mount a drone attack on Trump’s UFC fight had been “stopped cold.” And then the story went away. Why? This attack was not international terrorism. Even Patel could not spin it as a left-wing plot. Those arrested came from home-grown, right-wing […]
Bombing schools and hospitals is a war crime. Deliberately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure is a war crime. Yesterday’s fulminations from the Führer in the White House go beyond war crimes to announce that he intends genocide: the wiping out of an entire people and civilization.
ICE is only one of the federal agencies surveilling people. Federal surveillance reaches far beyond immigrants. Federal agents use massive databases, facial recognition, cell phone photos, and license plate records. Beyond surveillance, they target and threaten people involved in protests, bringing the full weight of federal power to bear on individuals. Their actions often remain […]
Five years after the violent attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters, the attacks on democracy and on elected officials continue. Yesterday, two politicians currently under attack by the Trump administration spoke out with anger and eloquence.
Mary Turck