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The Hidden Politics of Disorder

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🗓️ 10/18/24 • 🕑 01:35:25 • 📁 89 MB Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show Author: New York Times Opinion

Web player: https://podcastaddict.com/the-ezra-klein-show/episode/184468294

Episode:  

https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/chrt.fm/track/8DB4DB/pdst.fm/e/pfx.vpixl.com/6qj4J/nyt.simplecastaudio.com/3026b665-46df-4d18-98e9-d1ce16bbb1df/episodes/8220a21d-6d9b-407c-b8b2-652afcb627dc/audio/128/default.mp3

Crime data has been a flashpoint in this election. Kamala Harris has claimed that violent crime is at a “near 50-year low,” while Donald Trump has insisted that crime is going up. According to the numbers reported to the F.B.I., Harris is right: Crime, especially violent crime, has been falling. But if you look at survey data, Trump is tapping into something people feel. Last year, 77 percent of Americans told Gallup that they believe crime is on the rise. So what’s going on here? Why, if crime is falling, do people feel less safe? Charles Fain Lehman, a crime and drug policy researcher at the Manhattan Institute, wrote a piece on his Substack, The Causal Fallacy, on exactly this question. In this conversation, we discuss why he thinks Americans are feeling less safe, despite what the data says, as well as the ideological shifts taking place around drugs and crime, on both the left and the right. 

One more day working in the office this week 🏢

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Enjoying a grapefruit on this first morning with the mercury below freezing outdoors, though it’s plenty warm inside as I have the oven full of butternut and acorn squash and cornbread and stove top cooking down onions, corn, mushrooms and eggs and a pot of coffee bubbling up. Gotta eat!

It’s a Thursday. 😀 Off to work in a bit – that is once the sun rises and there is enough daylight to ride in. Getting harder, especially in the evening, next week is the last one for riding home after work. It will be nice having more daylight in the morning for heading into work. It’s nice having the grapefruit in the morning. 🍊 The grapefruit are nice, I really appreciate them knowing the elderly can’t eat them because it interferes with their statins. See when you know something could go away, you like it even more. Terrible but true.

Tomorrow at this time I’ll be finishing up packing and showering 🚿 and then it’s off to Madison County for the weekend. 🏕️ I was on my bestest behavior and stayed in town as a coughed out my brains last weekend. So now it’s off to hills and hollows of Mad County to ride trail and kayak the Nine Mile Swamp. 🐸 Need to get propane tonight.

As the Tuesday lunch meeting was canceled, ☹️ today they’ll be providing lunch for our meeting in the office, 🏢 so I won’t have to pack a  lunch, though I’ll have to be prepared mid-day to ride up the State Street Hill. 🚲 Probably work downtown for the balance of the day, then come home and get packed, fuel up the car, get the propane and a few random supplies and it looks to be a beautiful weekend coming up. ☀️

That cornbread is so good. 🌽 I used two eggs 🥚 in the mix, which made it extra cake-like, along with a bit of stevia and lots of turmeric. It’s very yellow and spicy but so good. 🍞 Lots of protein and some saturated fat, but it will be good to enjoy when I’m out in Mad County over the weekend. 🗺️ I’m sure it will be a busy weekend for remote work 💻 but I’ll keep things moving on as the weekend progresses. That oven stinks a bit from spilled food on the outside, and it hasn’t been run in a while, but that will get better as the winter progresses.

All that squash is going to be good. 🥭 I like my butternut squash and my acorn squash, and I also have spaghetti squash created from last year’s compost seeds which is pretty darn good stuff. It’s important ot have a lot of fiber in your diet, as not only does it help food move through your system, it comes along with a lot of good vitamins and fills you up quickly, displacing less healthy fats and carbs. Good stuff. 😋

I “discovered” the new US Forest Service Vector TIle base maps yesterday, 🗺️ and I realized they would be perfect for maps both on federal and state land, with some additional layers. They are a much more standardized design, and quite attractive. I am going to explore them further with the blog in the coming weeks. Of course, with all the craziness of work going on and everything else going on it’s hard to find time to make maps, but November will come… And I’ll be busy updating the state data systems, though at least I probably won’t bringing that work home or working extra hours to do that.

Virginia Accents

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It’s kind of interesting how local people I have talked into in Maryland and Virginia – especially women – have Southern accents. In West Virginia, at least in the northern part, don’t have much of an accent or if they do its mostly a rural Midwestern accent as is common in much of Rural Upstate NY, especially the western part of the state.

I do wish I had a woodstove 🪵

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One of the first things I look at when I’ve been looking at property and houses, does the house contain a woodstove and is there wood on the land. I really do not like being dependent on natural gas or oil plus electricity for heat, getting metered and billed through direct withdrawal for every calorie produced as fuel is piped in and the planet warming emissions go out.

It would sure be nice to be able to chop my own wood, have control over how warm I am without thinking of the monetary costs. Where the only real cost would be my sweat equity, where I wouldn’t have to worry about the power going out. Plus, there is something so warm about a wood stove – the dry heat it produces – radiating out into the room. The smell of the smoke, the look of the flame in it’s rawest form producing heat.

Not as cold as I expected to start out the day ❄️

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Sometimes I think the weathermen are over dramatic about the cold. If you have frost sensetive plants or crops, your going to want to harvest them or bring them in but for the rest of us I think if anything today is warmer out then yesterday.

It’s mid-October so one would expect it to be colder out, 🍁 indeed I have my heated blanket out and the windows closed. But when I ran to Stewart’s this morning to get milk 🐮 it really didn’t feel that cold on my face. There is no wind this morning, which helps a lot. I was surprised 🤨 how actually cold it felt at the end of day yesterday for the ride home from Menands.  Still a fair bit of daylight left for the evening commute home, indeed I took a slightly longer route home, 🚴 but certainly by the time dinner was done it was dark.

After dinner, I crawled into bed 🛏️ and watched a Youtube video and put on a podcast and was asleep by around 8 PM. Cool enough I didn’t feel like staying up plus the heat isn’t on but that heated blanket fell so wonderful though it was quickly too hot and had to be turned off.♨️ It’s not really the cold part of winter yet. Now if I only had a house with a woodstove 🪵I probably would be willing to be up much later. But I also was tired after my first day of in-person work after being sick last week. I tell myself I am fully recovered, but my nose 👃 still runs a lot with the cold outside riding to and from work, and I still have an occasional hoarse voice 🐴 and a crackling cough. It’s not like it was but it’s not perfect either.

After getting to Stewart’s for milk, had my coffee ☕ and oatmeal-whole wheat flour pancakes. 🥞 Topped with lots of frozen strawberries and seasoned with pumpkin spice mix. 🎃 Definitely feels like mid-October this morning, very dark and gray to start out the day, but it’s supposed to clear out as the day is going. That caffine jolt is helping a lot, 😀 I am going to shower and get on my way. 🚴 I see that they are constructing the Dark Horse Cannabis dispensary on the way into the office, though I dout they’ll be open for the ride in, it’s nice to have additional options not that I buy that much cannabis but I do like to have an occassional smoke up at a camp.  🚲️ All week with the chain greased up and everything adjusted, things have been working great on the bike front. Laptop also is working pretty good now that I reset the BIOS with the new charger.  🔌 Holding off replacing the battery in the laptop for now. 🪫

Weekend still looks most excellent, ☀️ Thursday after work and meetings I’ll need to go to store and get propane and whatever other supplies I’m missing for the long weekend. 💼 Maybe I should start packing this evening so there is less to do on Thursday. Abuse some of those Caffine Pills 💊 and be off before sunrise on Friday. 🌄 Then it’s off to the land of chopped corn silage and cow shit now that autumn is underway. 🌽🐮💩 Work all day, then have that rip-roaring Friday campfire 🔥 with the Dire Wolf. 🐺 Fun times. I promise I won’t burn too much plastic or smoke too much pot, or do anything that involves 600 lb of sin. Then ride and kayak on Saturday int Sunday. At least one good adventure in colors of autumn before it’s dun. 📸 Maybe on Monday, I can remote work from Glimmerglass State Park 🏞️. It would likely be a beautiful day before heading home.

Still very troubled about voting for Trump

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You know, back in 2016 I thought a lot about potentially voting for Trump. Not as a Republican but on the conservative line. Not because I love or embraced his ideas, but I like how he’s different, he gives the system a much needed kick in balls, he gives knocks liberals down a peg with a dose of reality. You can want to do something, dream about something, but ultimately if you want to do something, you just got to do it.

I think history proves that outside of the acts done by political mastermind Mitch McConnell, President Trump was an abysmal failure. Like a bullied weak child who punches the bully in the knee, Trump ended up with a black eye and a broken nose when the bully responded. As a convicted criminal myself, I like the idea of a convicted felon as President. It really knocks the whole system and it’s fake moral superiority down a notch. It exposes the raw nature of power.

I do cringe a bit thinking about the public policy proposals put forward by Trump, many are not to my liking. I mean, he’s the man who appointed Jeff Sessions, whose most famous remarks are “Good people don’t smoke pot.” I like smoking pot.  I think his ideas and publicly proclaimed positions on trade are disasterous and should not be implemented. His ideas on criminal justice, immigration, renewable energy and the cities are equally bad. But he’ll be good on guns and keeping all our public lands from getting locked up as wilderness with roads and campsites closed. A lot of people I respect and admire are embracing the Trumpster.

I don’t think the world is coming to an end regardless of who becomes President. And it’s not like with the Electoral College my vote in New York counts for much at all. It will be discarded. If Trump’s elected, maybe there will be somewhat slower progress on adoption of renewable energy, some tweaks to public policy,. On the ordinary level, I doubt there will be much change to every day life whoever becomes President. He might cause a few years of indigestion to evening TV watchers, but that’s a bout it. It’s only four years, time goes by quickly, before long we will be talking about Election 2026 and 2028.