Maybe someday

By way of Come and Make It, I have been reading about micarta, which is paper or fabric laminated in a resin. It is often used for knife handles.

Those links above mention fiberglass resin; these guys used a much more expensive epoxy, and their micarta did quite well under stress testing.

How the Democrats will lose in 2020

Or at least, how they richly deserve to lose:  through the continuing slow-motion failure of the Affordable Care Act.  Democrats keep talking about health care and how it needs to be reformed, hoping that no one will remember that they were the ones who shoved that 1000+ page law through in 2009.  People who especially are being screwed by it:  young adults (subsidizing costs of older adults), parents of younger adults (having children staying on their plans until age 26), people getting health insurance through their employers (being ineligible for subsidies), single-income families (paying way more than Obama’s “affordable” 9.5% of income), and lower-income people nearing retirement age (paying far more than they can afford).

Out of curiosity, I looked into health insurance options in the high-unemployment coronavirus economy.  COBRA still exists, and now sucks worse than ever, because the ACA requirements generally raised premiums.  Thanks to Trump, there are now short-term plans available, but they may not count as having had “minimum essential coverage” when you try to get on a better plan later. Christian cost-sharing plans have not yet developed adequate fraud protections, I believe—without any evidence, just based on intuition. Going on Medicaid leaves the possibility open that the program could seek to recover the money it spent on you from your estate after you die, although at present they usually don’t bother to.

That leaves buying insurance yourself, either on or off the exchanges, or self-insuring.  My question was how a change in income would be reflected in a change in premium subsidy, for an exchange plan. It appears from this article that most of the time, an income change earns you a 60-day Special Enrollment Period, with subsidy re-calculation, aside from perhaps being required to report changes in income anyway. But with exceptions and changing rules and state-to-state variations, it just looks like a giant headache...one that could continue into next year with tax return preparation for tax year 2020, since the amounts of subsidies received versus subsidies qualified for have to be reconciled and squared up.

I’m tempted to think that the options presented there would be more understandable if they were presented in flowchart form, but there are too many unknowns. As I have said before, this system was designed to fail. It is simply too complex.

One minor point from near the end of the piece:  changing insurance plans will usually reset your out-of-pocket costs counter to zero. That’s a cost to factor in.

A surprise, yet not entirely a surprise

Christian History magazine* has a new issue out on the role of the Church in the development of science and technology.  One of the articles interviews several scientists on how their faith and research connect...and one of them is physicist and 1997 Nobel Prize winner William Phillips!

He was the keynote speaker at a physics conference that I went to as a graduate student.  Apparently, once you have won a Nobel Prize in physics, you can have conversations like the following:

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS:  We would like you to speak at our conference.

PHILLIPS:  Okay, I'd be happy to...but I'm going to need some liquid nitrogen.

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS:  No problem, how much do you want?

Phillips spent most of his speech (in front of an audience of hundreds of physicists) playing with liquid nitrogen and having a great time.  The joy he showed then makes it less of a surprise for me to see him interviewed in Christian History now.

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*Christian History has subscriptions, but financially it runs on the basis of donations:  they print and mail out the next issue when they have the money to do so.  They also sell back issues and reprints, which can be helpful for research, as each issue is centered on a historical person or topic.

Pondering

Remembering all the sewing machine needles that have broken while in use, right in front of my face, I am thinking that I should be wearing better eye protection while I’m running it.

Usually a needle will break into two pieces:  one end still held in the clamp, and the other still held by the thread running through the eye, but there have been times when pieces went flying.

I made something

I’m not the first woman to have felt a lower level of creative energy during gestation. I am starting to remember now some of the things that I wanted to make.

One of those things was a toddler dress, using fabric from an old skirt that was among the fabrics that my mother-in-law gave us.

I had a little time, and sat down to figure it out. I decided to use the waistband of the skirt as the neckline, and keep the lower edge with its hem the same. That left the sides and armholes, which I marked with chalk and then sewed, along with joining the necklines at each shoulder.

To finish it, I added a long piece of bias tape around the front waist, leaving the ends loose to be tied at the back. There was a setback at this point, as I was distracted by people running in and out, and caught some of the back of the dress in the seam I was sewing. It took a minute to pick out those stitches and get going again.

The finished dress is loosely draped, and very similar to a “pillowcase dress”, which is traditionally made from a pillowcase.

Joel Rosenberg and the MPD

This was almost a decade ago:  the story of his arrest, and the sad ending before he got his day in court. 

A signal for the sickroom

Sickroom isn’t quite the right word for the bedroom where the newest Baby of Unusual Size and I have been hanging out since his home birth last week. It is at the far end of the house, and can go without attention from the rest of the family for hours at a time...which is sometimes too long.

A couple of weeks ago, my husband looked into why the doorbell, an older wireless model with a button and a chime that communicate by radio, wasn’t working. We had a similar one, new in the box, that had been handed down to us at some point. I’m not sure exactly what he ended up doing, something like replacing the original button with the new one we had, I think. They can work on the same frequency.

Later on, I got the idea of taking one of the buttons and using it to ring the doorbell and summon assistance when needed. He must have given me the only one that worked. Anyway, it works fine from the bedroom, and it has been very helpful more than once.

In other topics, I am finding this pantry/craft space inspiring; it has been a while since I have been able to have a little crafting space of my own.

Kevin Roche looks at Minnesota coronavirus trends. The case numbers have remained fairly flat to slightly declining. The number of long-term care facilities with cases is over 200 now, I read somewhere last week, out of something like 1700 total in the state. While the state has been working to contain this epidemic-within-a-pandemic, I still see a high potential for these facilities to be infected. It will just be spread out over several years, and considering the turnover of residents that can happen over such a time period, it is likely that places that had been cleared before will see fresh outbreaks later on.

So I still expect to see cumulative Minnesota deaths run up into five digits, eventually. They are at about 1300 now. At the same time, I think it is time for Governor Walz to stop twiddling the dials. There is an effort being made now to recall him, but apparently the law requires trying him in the state Supreme Court, and only if that is successful can there be a special election held to try to vote him out.

Left as an exercise to the reader

In the early days of the pandemic, there were videos coming out of China showing people collapsing in the streets. Why hasn’t that happened here?

Waiting

The weather has been very hot and humid the past few days; we are ready for a break from the heat. There were several protests over the weekend.  The Minneapolis City Council promising to eliminate the Minneapolis Police Department probably is going to do more damage to the city’s tax base than the rioting and looting did. It was surreal to see them saying this with violent protests still going on all over the country, but for what’s going on here at this point, it is getting near the end of the psychological opportunity to shove through such a radical change. It bears repeating that relations between the MPD and various city factions have long been strained and hostile.  Also, the characters of the different neighborhoods can vary quite widely, and having “community policing” that presumably would include more neighborhood-level input and oversight seems appealing to many.  I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if some neighborhoods have begun to look into the feasibility of legally separating themselves from the city.

The 3rd Precinct building that was abandoned, looted, and burned had been designed and built as an imposing fortress, overlooking a commercial area that is more on the scale of a village crossroads.  That exaggerates the difference in physical scale, but not the emotional impressions. I always felt unsettled when we drove past it. It seemed to belong to an occupying force. The rioters, most of them from outside the neighborhood, certainly treated it that way. Not many people are going to miss it.

Agenda revealed

Some on the left have been using the law enforcement responses to the protesting and rioting to propel calls to Abolish the Police, saying that the cops are violent thugs, and that the social problems like mental illness and homelessness and drug addictions that we have been leaving for the police to handle should be addressed through nonviolent social interventions. Minneapolis City Council members have been talking about this, and about the new programs that they want to create.

But addressing social problems top-down through government intervention maximizes the resources needed, while minimizing the effectiveness of their utilization. The Bible very strongly says that this should happen from the bottom up:  personal responsibility, then family members caring for each other, on up through neighbors, extended family, local worshiping community, city, clan, tribe, nation. The main job at the higher levels is to protect the lower levels from predation and to strongly discourage behavior that is obviously dysfunctional. At the lower levels, close connections between people motivate them to cooperate and help each other, which minimizes the need to draw from the resources of the broader community, and so maintains overall stability and sustainability.

That’s not what the Abolish the Police people are proposing to do. Instead of a police state, they want to create a Nanny State on Steroids. Neglecting to mention that there would still be a big helping of Police State on the side.

It makes more sense if you realize that the primary goal of the people in back of it all is to gain power, not to have a healthy society. Instead of restricting freedom only through the use of physical force, they want to also use therapeutic force...”It’s for your own good, you know.”  Which is terrifying, because while a police beating will end at some point, therapy can go on indefinitely.  It’s basically the same thing as in that famous C. S. Lewis quote about do-gooders, and as he portrayed it all playing out in That Hideous Strength. It has already been partially accomplished.

One of their steps that preceded Abolish the Police was to Abolish the Family. That’s not yet complete, but they have been working hard at it for generations. It was probably Abolish the Faith before that. They work to create social problems, and then “solve” them, and when the solutions don’t work, they take it up a notch and “solve” them some more.

So when I look at the videos of police brutality that they have harvested from the protests and riots, I am getting quite angry about how callous they are about using peaceful protestors as pawns in this campaign to seize and extend power. The protestors serve both as cover for rioters to escalate the level of violence, and as photogenic victims of the police retaliation...the more blood, the better for the Cause.

Looking back at coronavirus, and how it ties in

It’s now long enough since the state started opening back up that the predicted eruption of cases toward a late June or early July peak should have begun. I’m not seeing it yet in the graphs; new positive tests per day, hospital beds, and ICU beds are all basically flat.

I think that the protests may not have much of a net effect on the spread of the virus locally.  Thousands of people were out protesting and rioting, but hundreds of thousands were sitting at home under curfew. Less shopping went on overall because of stores being closed or destroyed, but there was possibly a higher concentration of people in the fewer open grocery stores; some stores were having whole shelves emptied out as people bought food to donate.

Floyd’s April 3 positive test was interesting, because at that time tests were scarce, and commoners were only tested if symptoms were present. From my post from just before Minnesota shut down, I’m reminded that he may have needed to have been exhibiting “severe symptoms“ to have been tested.

I was also sick around that time, but not tested, and my breathing isn’t great even now, although in my case mild seasonal allergies and extreme pregnancy are factors.

I just watched the New York Times’ compilation of videos around the arrest and restraint, until it froze up on me. What the video shows well is the sequence of main events from multiple perspectives. What it shows poorly are the real-time length of each event, and the flow from one thing to the next. The video is about half as long as the whole thing actually took to play out.

Steps further

The county released the autopsy report.   Points of interest: no physical injuries to neck; COVID-19 test positive, but not necessarily from an active case because he had also tested positive in early April (when the number of positive tests per day in Minnesota was approaching but not quite at 100); numerous bruises, none on neck; traces of multiple drugs found, and some of the results seem to indicate use on the day of his death, if I am reading right.

More locally, police said there were reports of threatening letters being left in some people’s yards, in reaction to the politics expressed on their yard signs.

Haven’t heard of anything else around here, besides Chauvin being charged with second-degree murder, and the other officers being given lesser charges. Charges for all of the officers was one of the loudest demands of the protestors. Tomorrow is the funeral, or at least the first funeral, closed to the public, which is likely to be a focus of further protests.

The beginning of the end?

Last night the biggest happenings as far as I know were a group of protestors who lingered at the Capitol after curfew to be arrested, and a beat-up old van with red tape crosses on the windows that a reporter had previously pointed out as a makeshift ambulance turned out to be a supply vehicle for organized rioters. They seem to be using them in other cities, too.

Police allowed a peaceful protest at the site of Floyd’s death to continue well past curfew.

People have been donating enormous quantities of food to the area worst hit by the rioting.

The gas tanker driver was released with no charges; investigation ongoing. The story is that he was the only driver at his company willing to deliver to a black-owned gas station in Minneapolis during the unrest, and that the owner stood up in support for him after the arrest.

Today, we had afternoon thunderstorms, and the news is more focused on the charges that are beginning to be filed on the rioters. And also returning to doling out scoldings about coronavirus risks. The governor is having the state Department of Human Rights do a civil rights investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department, going back ten years.

This post by a Ferguson resident has riot preparation tips, but the one I want to highlight is #9.  The media coverage of the violence in Ferguson died down long before the actual violence did. Most everyone who was doing the rioting is probably still in town. There are reports that a number of vehicles have been fleeing police tonight. Other than that, the crime watch/scanner monitoring Twitter accounts are reporting only a few normal-sounding incidents. Curfews continue.

Not over

Only the gas tanker driver was arrested on the bridge last night; today it is reported that somehow the highway shutdown missed him, and he came right into the bridge area full of protestors at speed, and panicked. The protestors had been peaceful up until then, but they perceived it as an attack, some responding by swarming the truck. He was pulled out of it, and received minor injuries only, thanks to intervention by more peaceful protesters.

A couple of hours later, after curfew began, police surrounded and arrested a group of 100+ protesters, peacefully.  Altogether 276 arrests in Minneapolis.  Evidence found of pre-placed incendiary supplies, and use of stolen cars and stolen or missing license plates. Federal charges for an  Illinois man who helpfully posted evidence of his various crimes on Facebook. No evidence that confirms reports made of guys in KKK robes, however.

Tonight there are two large protests going on—one at the governor’s mansion in St. Paul—some other groups beginning to gather, and a number of isolated instances of lawlessness. I don’t know how the last compares to “normal” crime levels, probably still on the high side, even with the increased police and National Guard presence and level of resident vigilance. Curfew starts later, at 10 pm, and ends earlier, and highways are open for now, but will be closed if needed.

A couple of other takes on the past few days:  by Mitch Berg, acquaintance and former neighbor, and by James Lileks, Star Tribune columnist we’ve spoken to in person a couple of times.