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why for the love of god, do people think picking their own trash collector is such a vital freedom?
Arvada wants to boost its sluggish recycling rate and reduce heavy truck traffic, while giving residents a break on their trash bill with a municipally run curbside garbage collection program.
Starting March 8, homeowners in Arvada will be asked to choose from three sizes of trash cans, with the price of service going up with the volume of the receptacle. It’s an incentive-based approach — already in use in several Colorado communities — designed to get people to throw away less and help cities better meet sustainability goals.
It sounds good on paper, but there’s a catch: For people who decline to transition, Arvada will impose a mandatory $5.13 monthly “minimum service” fee. Non-payment could result in a lien being placed on a homeowner’s property.
There’s a growing contingent of Arvadans who think the city is sticking its nose where it shouldn’t. One person on a city message board likened the service fee to extortion.
“We are opposed to a city-mandated monopoly for trash service in Arvada and we’re asking people to exercise their right of choice and opt out,” said Jonah Hearne, a 20-year resident who next month plans to go door to door with dozens of like-minded citizens urging neighbors to reject the new program.
For Tom D’Agostino, a three-year Arvada resident who is happy with the service he gets from his contracted hauler Waste Connections, the city’s levy is a no-go.
“I’m not going to pay for something that I’m not going to use,” he said.
City officials say the opt-out fee, which is less than what other communities with similar programs charge, is necessary to make the program feasible on a citywide basis. And residents will still get waste services — bulky item and leaf and yard waste drop-off events — even if they stay with their current hauler.
Colorado’s seen this fight play out in several Denver suburbs. Next door to Arvada, Westminster residents crowded council chambers in 2017 to denounce the city’s plan to implement a centralized trash collection system.
Two years later, voters in Lakewood shot down a ballot measure that would have authorized the city to manage garbage pickup there. Arvada itself looked at consolidating trash service a decade ago before tabling the idea in the face of opposition.
The Arvada City Council passed the current plan in June and it is scheduled to start July 5.
Kate Bailey, a policy and research director for Boulder-based Eco-Cycle, Inc., consulted with Arvada on its new trash collection plan. She said the hubbub over the issue might seem puzzling to much of the rest of the U.S., where municipal trash service is more common.
“People from the rest of the country look at us like we’re nuts,” she said. “This makes a lot of sense and yet it’s oddly political.”
Andy Cross, The Denver Post
Waste Connections sanitation worker Marice Flippin rides on the back of his truck while making pickups in a neighborhood near W. 70th Pl. and Welch Ct. in Arvada Feb. 19, 2021.
Incentive to recycle
Arvada will be taking a single-hauler approach to garbage collection, contracting with Republic Services for citywide service in contrast to the nine different haulers that currently provide residential pickup service in the city.
The city will also use the pay-as-you-throw model, which is already in place in several Front Range communities, including Lafayette, Louisville, Golden and Sheridan. Arvada would be the state’s largest city to embrace it.
The principle is straightforward: The more you toss, the more you pay. In Arvada, a 95-gallon trash cart will cost $19.76 a month, a 65-gallon cart $15.63 a month and a 35-gallon cart — which can hold three to four kitchen-sized bags — will cost $11.50 a month.
Every household in the program gets a 95-gallon recycling bin at no charge, which Bailey says will goose recycling levels. The proof is in the data, she added.
According to Eco-Cycle, the top recycling communities on the Front Range have citywide programs that automatically provide bins — and communities using a pay-as-you-throw approach stand out, Bailey said.
Loveland, which charges as little as $3.25 a month for a 17-gallon trash bin, is at the top of the list with a 60% recycling rate. Louisville and Lafayette are at 44% and 36%, respectively. Arvada’s recycling rate is below 15%, according to past surveys of haulers, Bailey said.
“Pay-as-you-throw does have a behavior modification element to it, much like tiered pricing for water use helps to incentivize water conservation,” Bailey said.
A 2018 study by the University of New Hampshire found among 34 towns that used the pay-as-you-throw model, waste disposal rates dropped between 42% and 54%, according to reporting from The Associated Press. Another study in neighboring Maine found that cities with the incentive-based system generated approximately 44% less trash per capita than communities without the program.
In Sheridan, a working-class suburb south of Denver, City Manager Devin Granbery said the city’s pay-as-you-throw program has brought noticeable benefits since it launched in 2014.
“Recycling has gone from virtually zero to 75% of our residents participating in curbside recycling, with a diversion rate of 15%,” he said.
“Trucks have a huge impact when turning and areas such as cul-de-sacs get torn up over time,” Kowar said. “In general, a trash truck equals 1,000 cars per day on the road.”
That’s important to Rachael Smallwood, who moved to Arvada from North Dakota five years ago. She’s one of dozens of city residents who have praised the program online.
“It was a shock that there were so many ginormous trucks putting out all that pollution,” she said. “That’s important to me as our climate crisis gets worse.”
Smallwood said she barely fills a third of her trash can per week and will be opting for the smallest container Arvada offers, giving her a huge discount off of the $30 she pays monthly now.
“Put it on a ballot”
But for opponents of Arvada’s single-hauler trash system, they’re not just bothered by what they perceive as a heavy-handed approach to garbage collection. They say the means by which the new program was approved — a slender 4-3 margin by the City Council in the middle of a pandemic rather than a vote of the people — is problematic.
“If you all of a sudden change the relationship between the city and the citizens — then put it on a ballot,” Hearne said. “The city is collecting money that a lot of people consider a tax and giving it to a private company.”
Last year’s vote so incensed some Arvada residents that they launched an effort to recall the four council members who voted for it. The recall never made it to the ballot.
Mayor Marc Williams, who opposed the single-hauler contract, also felt the issue should have gone to the voters. But, he said, “the council has spoken.”
“I knew this would be as contentious as it was 10 years ago,” Williams said.
In 1864, when U.S. cavalry troops slaughtered more than 100 Cheyenne and Arapaho in what became known as the Sand Creek Massacre, The Rocky Mountain News didn’t report it as a mass murder on behalf of white settlers. Instead, the newspaper heralded the soldiers for what it called a “needed whipping” — and it slurred the tribes.
So tells the 2011 book “News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media.” In it, authors Juan Gonzales and Joseph Torres point to the Rocky’s coverage of the massacre — and its portrayal of American Indians leading up to it — as an example of how stories that ran across the early Associated Press wire “influenced national perceptions of race.”
A couple weeks ago, Torres spoke on a webinar with dozens of Colorado journalists about a legacy of media harm — and also current efforts to acknowledge and repair it.
Corey Hutchins
This past fall, theLos Angeles Times examined its failures on race and explained its “path forward.” Closer to home, in late December,The Kansas City Star published a six-part package revealing how in its early history “through sins of both commission and omission — it disenfranchised, ignored and scorned generations of Black Kansas Citians.”
During the local webinar, led by News Voices: Colorado and supported by COLab and the Colorado Media Project, some participants wondered what similar acknowledgments might look like here — if and should they emerge.
The Rocky, which folded in 2009, isn’t around to examine its archives for past harm, but its former rival, the 150-year-oldThe Denver Post, is. I asked Editor Lee Ann Colacioppo if such a thing was on her paper’s radar. She said she found the Star’s project compelling, and while the newsroom hasn’t discussed exploring the Post’s past coverage, journalists are working to ensure current practices don’t reinforce racism. The Post doesn’t publish mugshot slide shows and is pursuing a “coherent policy” around mug shots in general, for instance, and it is working on a system to help people who want a story updated or changed — a policy that is already in force, in a way, at some other papers like The Aspen Times.
“Both of these last two items are meant to address the disproportionate impact of the criminal justice system on people of color, which over the years has been reflected in our paper and our website,” Colacioppo says.
About 150 miles west, The Steamboat Pilot & Today newspaper, whose work predated that of the California and Kansas papers, in September embarked on a six-part series called “Indivisible” about diversity, equity and inclusivity in Routt County, which is more than 90% white.
In a first-person column, Editor Lisa Schlichtman wrote, “at the age of 55, I looked in the mirror and acknowledged my white privilege … I came to the conclusion that I can best contribute to the cause of anti-racism through my work as a journalist and editor.”
Schlichtman, who has been at the paper for seven years, says readers told her they appreciated seeing diversity in photos and interviews in a way they weren’t used to. The Pilot, she told me, would have covered, say, a local World Fiesta event as part of the paper’s arts and culture coverage, but “when it came to covering issues that were important to our readers we didn’t make a huge effort to consider who we were interviewing.
“And if you look back at our coverage and at our photo archive over the years it’s just almost all white people,” she says. “And so I think that was something that has forever changed in our newsroom and how we are going to — how we have been — covering things.”
Meanwhile, the Pilot and others in the Swift Communications chain are also re-thinking the way they cover criminal justice, reflecting a broader national movement among forward-thinking editors who understand the damage much traditional crime coverage can inflict. (I’m ashamed of my own early-career dehumanizing coverage, and wish I had been thinking about these things back then.)
Aspen Times editor David Krause says his policy — and that of other Swift editors — of allowing subjects of past new coverage the ability to request a story update or even to have their names removed is part of the “Right to be Forgotten” movement championed by Advance Ohio President Chris Quinn at Cleveland.com.
“We’re joining the movement,” Krause told me this week, adding not all Swift editors in Colorado will handle it the same, but they’re talking about it.
In Aspen, Krause already has amended a handful of stories, typically after hearing from someone trying to get a job who knows what’s popping up when prospective employers search a name.
The program has also informed how the newspaper covers criminal justice in real time. Journalists are more selective about stories and follow each case throughout the full adjudication process. “If we’re going to put it out there, we’ve got to clean it up at the end,” Krause says. “And that takes a little effort.”
A little effort I wonder if more Colorado newsrooms might consider.
Corey Hutchins is a journalism instructor at Colorado College and a contributor to Columbia Journalism Review, The Washington Post, and other news outlets. This column is produced with support from the Colorado Media Project, and is distributed statewide via the Colorado News Collaborative. Interested in an insider’s look at the news behind the news in Colorado? Sign up here for Corey’s weekly email newsletter.
The Colorado Sun is a nonpartisan news organization, and the opinions of columnists and editorial writers do not reflect the opinions of the newsroom. Read our ethics policy for more on The Sun’s opinion policy and submit columns, suggested writers and more to opinion@coloradosun.com.
Why are democracies around the world failing to curb rising inequality? What explains the ascent of populist parties and politicians? In a recent paper, French economist Thomas Piketty argues not only that inequality and populism are linked – but that both can be explained by dramatic shifts in the traditional two-party system that favour different elites.
Citing historical data from France, Britain and the US, Piketty suggests that left-wing parties, which used to attract and represent less educated voters, are now more associated with highly educated voters. Right-wing parties, on the other hand, have consistently attracted and represented wealthy voters. As a consequence, “low education, low income voters might feel abandoned.” In short, the rise of populism is related to what Piketty calls “the rise of elitism”.
The author of the bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century analysed post-electoral surveys from 1948-2017 from the three countries, which have very different political systems. Strikingly, he found the same major trends affecting all three. The increased influence of educational and economic elites over the party system, he argues, “can contribute to explain rising inequality and the lack of democratic response to it, as well as the rise of ‘populism’”.
His argument sheds light one of the most puzzling phenomena in modern politics and economics, namely, that economic growth does not seem to be translating into better living standards for everyone. In fact, as an analysis by the World Economic Forum has shown, stronger growth has not relieved widespread social frustration over inequality and economic insecurity. Piketty's research raises the question of who is representing those at the bottom of the social pyramid.
Here the top three findings from Piketty’s paper, “Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict”:
Highly educated voters tended to vote for the right, but now tend to vote for the left.
Image: Thomas Piketty
1. The rise of the “Brahmin Left”
Piketty notes that the 1950s-60s were characterised by a class-based system split by wealth and education. Left-wing parties in France, the UK and the US tended to attract voters with lower education and lower income. Right-wing parties tended to attract more educated and wealthier voters. The left therefore promoted the interests of the poor and less educated, for example by calling for redistribution and other measures to improve equality.
But since the 1970s-80s, the left has gradually attracted more educated voters, to the point where what Piketty calls the “intellectual elite” – the “Brahmins”, after the traditionally highly educated category in the Indian caste system – now votes for the left.
In fact, “the higher the education level, the higher the left-wing vote.” In the US, for example, university graduates in the 1950s-60s voted a lot more for Republican candidates; now they vote more for Democratic candidates. This effect intensifies the more educated a voter is. In 2016, 76% of US voters with PhD degrees voted for the Democratic candidate, compared with 44% of high-school graduates.
In Britain, the educational cleavage has been more marked and rigid. It was very rare for educated voters to choose Labour in the 1950s-60s, and it took a very long time for them to shift towards the left. Piketty attributes this to Britain’s more entrenched class divisions.
Why did educated voters change their minds? Piketty says that further research is needed, but one reason may be globalization and migration. Highly educated voters may benefit more from economic and cultural openness, and may vote for the left because of its generally more internationalist outlook.
Highly educated voters tend to choose left-wing parties.
Image: Thomas Piketty
2. The persistence of the “Merchant Right”
While the educational left-right split has been reversed, the split along wealth lines has persisted. In all three countries, voters with higher wealth and/or income – the “Merchants”, or business elite - tended to vote for the right in the past, and still do so now. Right-wing parties have generally promoted policies that benefit high earners, such as low taxation. This means that both sides of the political spectrum now represent groups that are already influential, be it in intellectual or economic terms.
In the US, for example, Piketty observes that the educational elite votes for Democrats, while the high earners vote for the Republicans. In Britain, “high education voters now strongly support Labour, while high-income voters strongly support Conservative.” In France, too, high education veers left, while high income veers right.
It is striking that this overall trend holds true for all three countries, despite their profoundly different systems and histories.
High-income voters in the US have tended to vote Republican, until the last election.
Image: Thomas Piketty
3. Where does this leave poor and less educated voters?
Piketty believes that the current, elite-dominated system may continue to evolve. One possibility may the emergence of a new split between educated, high-earning, pro-migration “globalists” and less educated, poorer, anti-migration “nativists”. As Piketty says: “Globalization and educational expansion have created new dimensions of inequality and conflict.”
In recent elections in France and the US, for example, high-earning voters were shifting towards the more left-wing Emmanuel Macron and Hillary Clinton respectively, perhaps signalling a globalist-nativist realignment. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn’s pro-redistribution stance makes this high-income shift to the left less likely, according to Piketty.
Piketty’s analysis may partly explain the rise of the populists. It also shows why economic growth alone has failed to quell social dissatisfaction around the world. In a system of multiple elites, no major party has a strong incentive for ensuring that growth is inclusive. And without political action, inequality is likely to persist or even worsen. Those left behind may find themselves underrepresented by mainstream parties, and are more likely to seek out alternatives.
This chimes with some of the findings of the World Economic Forum’s Inclusive Development Index, which provides evidence that growth alone does not foster socioeconomic progress. According to the Index, growth is in fact rather weakly correlated with indicators of broader social inclusion, such as employment and inequality. Taken together, Piketty’s historical analysis and the Forum’s data highlight inequality as one of the most pressing issues of our time – with the power to dramatically reshape our democracies.
i guess this is just overton window shifting, which is cool but since it’s easily attackable as unconstitutional i think it gets relegated to fringe, sadly
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) will propose a new annual “wealth tax” on Americans with more than $50 million in assets, according to an economist advising her on the plan, as Democratic leaders vie for increasingly aggressive solutions to the nation’s soaring wealth inequality.
Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, two left-leaning economists at the University of California, Berkeley, have been advising Warren on a proposal to levy a 2 percent wealth tax on Americans with assets above $50 million, as well as a 3 percent wealth tax on those who have more than $1 billion, according to Saez.
On a substantive basis, I don’t know if I favor this or not. But before I spend any time thinking about it, can someone tell me if it’s even constitutional? The 16th Amendment allows the federal government to levy direct income taxes, even if the income is derived from real or personal property, but a direct federal tax on property itself is still forbidden by the Constitution unless it’s proportional to the population of each state—which I’m sure is something Warren doesn’t have in mind.
But nobody seems to be mentioning this. Am I missing something?
fuck this stuff is terrifying. conrad is almost 10.
In the span of two weeks, four students at Chad Hawthorne’s high school in Colorado Springs killed themselves. The deaths came every few days near the end of his freshman year, even as school officials scrambled to make them stop.
Across town at Alexis McCowan’s high school, a friend’s little brother took his own life last year. It was the first suicide to touch the young El Paso County charter school where students felt so protected from drugs and death that they called themselves the “bubble kids.”
The voices of Hawthorne and McCowan, along with a handful of other teens, are behind a new statewide suicide prevention campaign. Expect to see their messages soon on a social media post, chapstick tube or school wall near you.
The campaign, created by the teens and coordinated by the Colorado Springs affiliate of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, or NAMI, was so successful in El Paso County, the state is copying it.
It’s called “Below the Surface” — as in a teen might look put together on the outside, but inside is feeling depressed, anxious or suicidal — and the posters are in-your-face honest. The whole point is to urge young people who need help to send a text message to an anonymous helpline that will start a live text conversation with a counselor.
Chad Hawthorne, 18, is reflected in a poster that is part of a National Alliance on Mental Illness awareness campaign to prevent youth suicide. Hawthorne, a senior at Discovery Canyon Campus High School in Colorado Springs, was one of a group of teens who helped work on the campaign. This poster is his favorite. (Mark Reis, Special to The Colorado Sun)
The text line has existed in Colorado for almost three years, but the state had yet to market it to its target audience: teenagers.
Until now. After seeing texts to the hotline more than triple in El Paso County, the state Office of Behavioral Health has spent $70,000 since October to expand “Below the Surface” statewide, creating a new website, short videos and a youth leadership program.
Texts from El Paso County reached 1,648 in 2018, including 687 from teens ages 13 to 17. That was up from 968 a year earlier, when the local campaign began. The line received 492 El Paso County texts from March 2016, when it went live, through the end of that year.
Putting forth a good face but “struggling underneath”
Hawthorne and McCowan were among a group of young people invited by NAMI two years ago to brainstorm ways to tackle the teen suicide rate in El Paso County, one of four counties with the highest rates in Colorado. The county had 117 youth suicides from 2003-2017.
The ideas went straight from the teens’ heads to a creative design team that developed posters, notecards and stickers advertising the little-known text line.
Each of the posters, which debuted in two El Paso County schools that agreed to pilot the project, starts with an attention-grabbing, positive message on the top half. And then on the bottom half, “below the surface,” is the truth that’s harder to see.
“I’m in love,” states one on a bright purple background. “But I’m scared to come out.”
“I’m happy. That people think I’m doing OK.”
“My good grades,” says the top of an orange poster, which continues, “Are never quite good enough.”
Kirk Woundy, communications and grants manager for the National Alliance on Mental Illness said there sometimes is a disconnect between what people “present to other people and what you are dealing with internally.”(Mark Reis, Special to The Colorado Sun)
By tracking texts to the crisis line in the 16 ZIP codes surrounding the two schools where the first posters appeared, researchers were able to show the extent of the campaign’s impact. Contact with the crisis line went from just 35 texts in the five months before the posters were up, to 103 text conversations in a five-month period afterward.
The posters first appeared in Manitou Springs High School and Atlas Preparatory School in Colorado Springs at the start of the 2017-18 school year. As word spread, more schools asked to display the materials.
By the end of that year, 16 schools in and around Colorado Springs were participating in “Below the Surface.” Now there are 40 middle and high schools — all in El Paso County, and the state’s campaign will expand the efforts to schools statewide.
NAMI had $75,000, mostly from the Colorado Springs Health Foundation, to create the project, including hiring a design firm and data tracking to measure the campaign’s impact. From the start, the organization realized the message had to come directly from teenagers, said Kirk Woundy, NAMI communications and grants manager. They pulled together a focus group of teens, asking them to comment on other suicide prevention pamphlets and marketing, and what they thought were the biggest stressors in teens’ lives.
“What came out of those conversations was an acknowledgement that for a lot of people, not just teens, the line between ‘you’ve got everything in control’ and ‘you don’t know what’s going on and where to take the next step’ is a really fine line,” Woundy said. “You can be putting forth a really good face but really be struggling underneath.
“There can be a disconnect between what you present to other people and what you are dealing with internally.”
Every poster came from a true story
Hawthorne, a senior at Discovery Canyon Campus High School, asked to join the advisory group because he was shaken by the four student suicides his freshman year, including the death of a classmate he had known since elementary school.
In the midst of the deaths, Discovery Canyon made final exams optional, the 18-year-old recalled. “They gave us a week where we went to school but we didn’t really do anything,” he said. “They were trying to figure out why it had happened.”
The fourth student took his life at the start of summer break, Hawthorne said. Since then, the school has adopted a program called Sources of Strength, which teaches students to recognize the signs of suicide or depression in online posts and how to help each other connect to trusted adults.
Helping create the “Below the Surface” campaign, Hawthorne said, is one of the best things he’s done in his life so far. The discussions were open and honest, and without adult interjection. “It wasn’t something that was manufactured by adults for kids,” he said. “It wasn’t trying to be hip. It was coming from us and it was based on things that we felt or we knew that other people felt.”
Each poster, Hawthorne said, “had a face with it.” Hawthorne, who identifies as gay, is particularly proud of the poster that speaks directly to LGBTQ kids who are scared to come out. “Sometimes fear lies just below the surface,” it says.
Another poster is aimed at immigrants: “My family loves a country that doesn’t want us. Sometimes rejection lies just below the surface.”
McCowan, who is 19 and now a sophomore at the University of Northern Colorado, was invited to the panel because she had spoken out at a youth leadership summit about busting the stigma of mental illness. The first suicide of a student at James Irwin Charter High School, the younger brother of her friend, happened the year after McCowan graduated.
“In my own high school, there was very little talk of mental illness and what that meant,” she said. “Any sort of interaction with someone who may be a little ‘strange’ was not happening. But I had friends in other schools and districts where they were dropping like flies, for lack of a better term. It’s an epidemic.”
For McCowan, the most crucial point of the text line is that it is a window to mental health care. “A lot of young adults don’t have access to counselors or they can’t afford therapy,” she said. “We really wanted to have a system that was noninvasive and open to all.”
Teen ambassadors will spread the campaign
Text TALK to 38255 and a counselor will text back, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The line is answered by Colorado Crisis Services, a statewide network of walk-in mental health clinics and stabilization centers created in response to the 2012 mass murder at an Aurora movie theater by a college student who was experiencing a psychotic break.
The conversation is confidential, though by law, the counselor must report to authorities if someone commits child abuse or neglect, or says they plan to harm others. Counselors who answer the texts can connect those who need it to follow-up, in-person mental health care.
Stickers promoting a text line are part of a statewide awareness campaign to prevent youth suicide. The stickers were created by the Colorado Springs affiliate of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, or NAMI. (Mark Reis, Special to The Colorado Sun)
The state’s new youth leadership program deploys teens to market the campaign in their schools, with an emphasis on counties where the youth suicide rates are the highest. The effort also includes videos posted on Instagram and other social media featuring teens talking about the pressures of academics, getting into college or the death of loved one. “This campaign is going to make the text line much more widely known,” said Dr. Robert Werthwein, director of the state Office of Behavioral Health.
Before the state adopted the campaign, the state and NAMI signed an intellectual property agreement, aiming to protect what NAMI saw as the key ingredient of the campaign: teen voices.
“The biggest concern for us is that there wouldn’t be any new messaging created that wouldn’t come from teenagers,” Woundy said. “You don’t want to feel like you are trying to get into the head of a 17-year-old boy or girl as a 40-year-old-something person. It’s just not going to work.”
frustrating all the complicated legal hoops that need to be navigated to make this happen when they could just decriminalize simple possession and they'd be most of the way there.
Tony Fairchild died leaning against a tree along the Cherry Creek Trail, overlooking the water as autumn leaves fell.
It could have happened anywhere — a restaurant bathroom or a shadowy alley. Not long before, Tony had overdosed in the restroom of a Sonic Drive-In, and police had to break down the door to get him to a hospital.
Joelle Fairchild didn’t learn that her 27-year-old son had been shooting heroin until after Tony’s death on Oct. 22, 2014. He hid it from her because he was ashamed, she said.
This is why she now tells anyone who will hear it about how her sensitive, artistic boy died outdoors, alone. And it’s the reason Fairchild is an outspoken supporter of a Denver proposal to open a safe injection site, a clinical place where IV drug users could inject heroin or methamphetamine in private booths near trained professionals standing by with the life-saving antidote to an opioid overdose.
A cross left by a cousin marks the spot where Tony Fairchild died of a heroin overdose along the Cherry Creek Trail in Denver in 2014. (Photo provided by Joelle Fairchild)
“I feel like I’m his voice on Earth. I’m still his mother,” said Fairchild, a portfolio administrator at a downtown financial investment firm who recently testified in favor of the proposal at a Denver City Council committee hearing.
Fairchild was at work when her ex-husband called to tell her the thing they had feared most had happened.
A transient man saw Tony leaned against the tree during the day, then saw him in the same spot late that night. He called 911. It took until the next morning to identify Tony and call his family. Fairchild wonders how many people walked past him before the homeless man called for help.
“We knew something was going to happen to Tony,” she said. “We tried to be tough love — ‘if he’s high he can’t be around us.’ That doesn’t work.”
Fairchild knew her son, who had attention-deficit disorder, had struggled with addiction since high school, starting with alcohol and marijuana. She also knew Tony used opioid pills in the years before he died.
After he died, Fairchild found out Tony had been getting clean needles at a Denver needle-exchange program run by the Harm Reduction Action Center. She is convinced he would have used a safe injection site if one had existed.
The Harm Reduction Action Center displays a safe-neighborhood award. The center is a needle-exchange and offers training in naloxone, an antidote to heroin overdose. It has made more than 52,000 referrals for drug treatment, mental health therapy and testing since 2012. (Marvin Anani, Special to The Colorado Sun)
There are more than 60 safe injection sites worldwide, mainly in Canada and Europe, but no American city has managed to open one. It’s possible Denver could become the first, but other cities, including San Francisco, Philadelphia, Seattle and New York, are in the running.
Opening a site would require not just a city ordinance, but state legislation to provide criminal immunity for drug-users at the safe injection site. City and state officials tried to pass similar measures last year, but despite bipartisan support, the proposal fizzled out of concern that it would condone illegal activity, create an area of heavy drug sales and defy federal law. It was seen by many as too radical for Denver.
The legislation was killed by a Republican-controlled Senate committee in February. One Republican who voted against it, Sen. Vicki Marble of Fort Collins, said at the time that the proposal wasn’t fully vetted. She urged Colorado to do more research “before we jump into a pilot program that you know as well as I will become part of Colorado’s culture.”
Tony Fairchild struggled with addiction beginning in high school. He died of an overdose at age 27. (Photo provided by Joelle Fairchild)
This time around, Democrats will control both the House and Senate, and the proposal — along with a list of other ideas to mitigate the opioid epidemic — is more likely to pass than it was last session. The Denver measure, which would create a two-year pilot program, was passed unanimously Nov. 7 by the council’s safety and homelessness committee.
“Obviously we are here because we are in a public-health crisis,” said Councilman Albus Brooks, who is scheduled to present his bill to the full City Council on Monday night. “Our No. 1 goal is to save lives in the city of Denver.
“The support for this has been overwhelming,” he said. “We’re not pushing this, we’re responding to the community.”
Drug overdoses are now the No. 2 cause of death in Denver, behind blunt-force trauma and ahead of firearm deaths. In 2017, 201 people died of drug overdoses, the most ever for the city, according to the Denver medical examiner. In recent years, two people have died inside grocery stores, one in a grocery store parking lot stairwell, another in a coffee shop, one in a field next to an Interstate 25 exit ramp and one near a hospital ambulance bay.
The city measure would create an exception to Denver nuisance laws and and a law that prohibits possession of a injecting device. The safe injection site would close after two years unless it is determined the program “promotes the protection of the health of Denver residents.”
The whole thing is contingent on state legislation.
Sen.-elect Brittany Pettersen, whose mother nearly died because of heroin addiction, has already pulled a bill title and plans to sponsor the legislation, along with a package of measures intended to increase access to treatment and crack down on opioid-prescribing doctors who accept gifts from pharmaceutical companies pushing the drugs.
Supplies are available to heroin users at the Harm Reduction Action Center, which offers clean needles, training in the use of the overdose antidote naloxone, and assistance getting into treatment. (Marvin Anani, Special to The Colorado Sun
“This is about keeping people alive, bringing them out of the shadows,” she said. “This isn’t about whether or not you think people should be doing heroin. This is about whether you care about keeping them alive.”
For those who use IV drugs, a first step to recovery is visiting a needle-exchange program or safe injection site, Pettersen said. They develop relationships with the staff, and may someday accept a referral for a treatment program, she said. “We’re keeping them alive today,” she said, calling the nation’s opioid epidemic “the greatest public health crisis of our time.”
The sites aren’t “shooting galleries,” said Pettersen, a state representative from Lakewood who was politically attacked during her Senate campaign because of her support for safe injection sites.
A pamphlet at the Harm Reduction Action Center depicts a diorama of a booth at a safe injection site where IV drug users would inject heroin or methamphetamine. (Marvin Anani, Special to The Colorado Sun)
The sites in other countries are clinical spaces where each person has a booth stocked with alcohol swabs to clean their skin, sterile water to cook their drugs and a clean syringe. Some have strips to test the drugs for fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is more potent than heroin. Users must bring their own drugs.
Drug users wait about 20 minutes after injecting to make sure they are OK, then walk out.
Data from some of the 60 international sites shows no deaths at a safe site, as well as decreased overdose deaths overall in those cities.
Supporters of a safe site for Denver point toward numbers from the Harm Reduction Action Center, a needle-exchange program across East Colfax Avenue from the state Capitol. The center has made more than 52,000 referrals to treatment centers, mental health therapy and testing since 2012.
Lisa Raville is executive director of the Harm Reduction Action Center, a needle-exchange program that also offers training in naloxone, the heroin overdose antidote. (Marvin Anani, Special to The Colorado Sun)
It also has trained 2,608 people to use naloxone, the antidote to a heroin overdose. It counts more than 919 lives saved through naloxone, which it encourages users to carry with them.
The center’s executive director, Lisa Raville, has offered to host the safe injection site. She sees 120 to 150 people every morning who come to exchange used syringes for clean ones.
“I can’t get them into treatment if they are not alive,” Raville said. “Every bathroom, alley and park will continue to be an injection site without this.”
Whether Denver — or any other American city — follows through with plans to open a safe injection site, there is still the matter of federal law.
The U.S. Department of Justice signaled in August that cities who approve such sites could face federal prosecution. In an opinion piece for The New York Times, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein called out Colorado and other states for exploring options to “help their residents use hard-core drugs.”
Rosenstein said safe injection sites would make the opioid crisis worse and pointed to a Redmond, Washington, city councilman’s description of a safe-injection site in Vancouver, British Columbia, as a “war zone” with “drug-addled, glassy-eyed people strewn about.”
In Denver, newly appointed U.S. Attorney Jason Dunn has not commented on whether as the state’s top federal prosecutor he would challenge a Colorado safe injection site.
San Francisco has plans to open a three-year safe injection site as a pilot project. California lawmakers passed legislation in August that paved the way, but the measure was vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown. The Democratic governor criticized the bill for not requiring drug treatment and because it was contrary to federal law.
And in Philadelphia, officials are moving ahead with plans to open a site, which has the support of former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat. Rendell told NPR last month, “I have a message for Mr. Rosenstein: I’m the incorporator of the safe injection site nonprofit and they can come and arrest me first.”
The Harm Reduction Action Center is across East Colfax Avenue from the Capitol. It offers clean needles, training in the use of the overdose antidote naloxone, and assistance getting into treatment. (Marvin Anani, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Not too long ago, Cuica Montoya was among those who regularly picked up clean needles at the Harm Reduction Action Center. Montoya, 39, was rushed to a hospital by ambulance at least five times during the years she was homeless and shooting heroin.
Once a friend drove her in his car as she slumped over and stopped breathing. She woke up in a hospital bed with a tube in her nose and no recollection of why she was there.
Now on the other side of treatment, Montoya said she speaks for her friends who are dead.
“I don’t know anybody that is outside injecting drugs that that’s what they want to do in life,” she said. “There is that window of opportunity when somebody doesn’t want to continue to do the same thing over and over.”
Recovery, she said, only works if people who want to help are not judgmental. The shame of using drugs, especially in a public bathroom where someone might knock on the door, is so thick, Montoya said, it “keeps some of us swirling in this deep, dark hole.
“When people are looking at you and they are judging you, that feeling, it sucks,” she said. “It’s almost like reliving every mistake you’ve ever made in your whole life in that one judgmental look.”
Cuica Montoya, 39, spent years homeless and using heroin before getting into treatment in 2014. She is now sober and speaking out in favor of a safe injection site for Denver. (Marvin Anani, Special to The Colorado Sun)
After years of drug use that led to the breakup of her marriage, multiple arrests and homelessness, Montoya got clean in 2014 because she was locked in jail for three months. She had burned all her bridges. Even her mother wouldn’t let her move in with her when Montoya was released from jail.
She went to the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless and signed up for a program that included housing, mental health therapy and substance abuse treatment. Months later, as she was rolling burritos at Illegal Pete’s, she realized her calling was to become a peer navigator. Now she is a library employee, doing outreach to people who are homeless and have drug problems.
Montoya often runs into people she knows from her days on the streets, when she traveled with a pack and slept outside or in cheap motels. “I’m not the same person in my heart anymore,” she said.
If you take a look at The Centennial State on any map, you see a perfect rectangle in most cases. But the truth is quite far from that.
Colorado is not a rectangle, it’s not even a quadrilateral (or quadrangle). The reason for this surprising fact is that it has many minor deviations along its borders. In this article, we’ll take a look at these deviations and we’ll also dig deeper and find out why they exist.
Below you can see a map which we made to highlight the most noticeable of the state’s border deviations. (Click on the map to view in full size!)
Map legend:
The cause: Surveying errors
On paper, Colorado is one of the only three U.S. states (along with Wyoming and Utah) which use latitude and longitude lines as borders. The state was originally defined by an act of Congress as a geospherical rectangle. The act specified it to stretch from 37°N to 41°N latitude and from 102°2’48″W to 109°02’48″W longitude (25°W to 32°W from the Washington Meridian).
However, the borders didn’t really end up that way. When surveyors set out to define the actual border with boundary markers, they made several mistakes. This happened in the late 19th century when there were no GPS devices or any other precise tools. Also, the terrain that they had to hike through was quite mountainous so these inaccuracies are really not that surprising.
The map above magnifies the four border sections where the legal border is most noticeably different from the latitudes/longitudes defined by Congress.
The most interesting one perhaps is the famous Four Corners Monument. It’s the only location in the United States where four states meet. Its coordinates are 36°59’56″N, 109°02’43″W. We found it to be about 560 feet (170 m) southeast of the congressionally defined location of 37°N, 109°02’48″W. Some news outlets report that it is misplaced by as much as 2000 feet, which we found to be incorrect.
In the early 20th century, when it became clear that the borders are way off at some points, the Supreme Court had to get involved as well. In 1925 the Court ruled that the legal borders are to remain the ones that were defined by the early surveyors. This put an end to the issue and the borders are still the ‘inaccurate’ ones today.
So how many sides does Colorado have?
Due to the surveying errors and their corrections, Colorado is technically a concave polygon which has hundreds of sides and edges. The below map shows all of the vertices on its border:
According to our calculations performed in QGIS based on the outline of the state from OpenStreetMap, Colorado actually has 697 sides (edges). This means it is not a rectangle, it’s a hexahectaenneacontakaiheptagon based on the naming system of polygons by Kutztown University.
Sources:
1: Map of U.S. with Colorado highlighted is from Wikipedia user TUBS.
The large demographic shifts reshaping America are playing out differently across urban, suburban and rural communities. See how your county compares with others in the U.S., and read the Center's full report on this subject for more details.
Years before he got into podcasting, Hrishikesh Hirway heard a strange sound on his street late at night.
It was a passing truck, dragging glass bottles behind it that clinked against the pavement. He grabbed a recorder and ran outside to capture the sound, then looped it to create a “little texture” in a song by his synth-pop project, the One AM Radio.
“No one is ever gonna know that happened, but that’s such a strong memory for me,” he says now, sitting in the home studio in Eagle Rock where he creates his biweekly music podcast, “Song Exploder.” “It’s an important part of the song’s DNA. And I thought about how so many songs have those kinds of secrets in them.”
On “Song Exploder,” Hirway and his guests — who have included the likes of “Royals” pop singer Lorde, “Game of Thrones” composer Ramin Djawadi, hip-hop group the Roots and indie rock pioneers R.E.M. — excavate those secrets, using a tune’s isolated tracks, or “stems,” to explore the songwriting and recording process. With the musicians themselves serving as narrators, listeners get to hear songs stripped to their component parts and learn how — and why — those parts were created.
On Saturday, Hirway will brings his skills to the Theatre at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles as part of the latest edition of the multimedia event series Pop-Up Magazine.
Hirway, who grew up in Massachusetts and moved to Los Angeles in 2002 to pursue film composing, became fascinated with stems about a decade ago when he began doing remix work. Going through each part of the tune to decide what to include in the remix, “I’d hear the song in a totally new way,” he says.
“I’d realize: Of course, there’s all this beautiful detail in here … that you miss when you hear the final song,” he adds.
He launched “Song Exploder” in January 2014 with a friend as his first guest: electronic musician Jimmy Tamborello, who discussed a track from the Postal Service, the 2003 one-off project he did with Death Cab for Cutie singer Ben Gibbard. From there, Hirway quickly accumulated an impressive list of guests through a combination of industry connections and word-of-mouth. Garbage’s Shirley Manson — whom he met through his work with the Pablove Foundation, a childhood cancer charity — was an early participant; so was Austin, Texas, rock band Spoon, which signed on after someone at its label, Loma Vista, became a fan.
A breakthrough moment for the show came in June 2015, when Bono and the Edge of U2 did an episode.
“Once that came out, it really showed there was no limit to who could be on the podcast,” says Hirway.
Hrishikesh Hirway, left, founder of the "Song Exploder" podcast, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma pause in Hirway's home studio in Los Angeles. (Patrick T. Fallon / For The Times)
Song stems have long been a source of fascination among music fans; search YouTube for “isolated vocals” or “isolated drum track” and thousands of results come up. What makes “Song Exploder” stand out is the unique way in which Hirway presents them. Instead of playing each track straight through, he uses snippets of them as narrative devices, weaving them in and out of his guests’ commentary to illustrate how they serve as the song’s building blocks.
To do this, Hirway spends far more time on editing than most podcast producers — 20 to 25 hours per episode, he estimates, for a show that rarely runs longer than 20 minutes. In the process, he edits himself out of the conversation almost entirely. “I wanted it to feel like this intimate, first-person conversation that the listener is having with the artist,” he says. “I didn’t want them to feel like I was getting in the way somehow.”
Hrishikesh Hirway relaxes in his home studio. (Patrick T. Fallon / For The Times)
Hirway’s tiny home studio, occupying half of a converted garage, is as meticulously well organized as an episode of his podcast. Guitars hang neatly along one wall; framed gray-scale posters adorn another, advertising a joint tour of the One AM Radio and Tamborello’s solo project, Dntel. Hirway, dressed in black from head to toe, notes that Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast was an early inspiration, for the “insider’s view” quality of its interviews. But a bigger influence was Nate DiMeo’s short, carefully scripted history podcast, “The Memory Palace.” “They’re really meditative and beautiful,” Hirway says of DiMeo’s shows. “They share a lot of the feeling I want from art.”
Thao Nguyen, who has appeared on “Song Exploder” as both a guest host (interviewing singer-songwriter Neko Case) and artist (discussing a song from her band, Thao & the Get Down Stay Down), thinks Hirway’s specificity is what makes his podcast so special. “As songwriters, there are few avenues in which we can talk in detail about the elements over which we intensely labor, elements that could forever go unnoticed,” she writes via email. “It’s so gratifying to remember how excited you were when you came up with those things.” Listening to other artists’ episodes, she says, “you become a student of songwriting again.”
Hrishikesh Hirway, left, prepares to interview cellist Yo-Yo Ma in Hirway's home studio. (Patrick T. Fallon / For The Times)
Despite his podcast’s seemingly technical subject matter — guests often discuss what synthesizer was used to produce a certain sound or how close the mikes were to the drums — Hirway excels at getting his guests to open up about some of the most personal and emotional parts of their craft. On Nguyen’s episode, she discussed a song written about her estranged father; more recently, French electro-pop artist Christine and the Queens played a vocal demo she recorded while crying.
“One of the things that I try and push for is for a song that the artist has a very strong emotional connection to,” Hirway says. “The sonic part of ‘Song Exploder,’ the part where you get to hear the stems isolated, [is] like candy. … But the thing that makes an episode memorable or maybe meaningful for someone is when it also has heart in there as well.”
Hrishikesh Hirway interviews Yo-Yo Ma. (Patrick T. Fallon / For The Times)
Inspired by the success of “Song Exploder,” Hirway launched a second podcast, “The West Wing Weekly,” in March 2016. Each week, he and actor Joshua Malina discuss an episode of “The West Wing,” the early 2000s television drama set in a fictional White House that, then and now, appealed to audiences starved for more progressive ideas and civil discourse in their politics.
“He’s just a great conversationalist,” says Malina, who was a regular on “The West Wing” for four seasons. “Thirty seconds into my discussion with Hrishikesh, I find myself laughing as he guides us into a provocative, entertaining dialogue. He’s just good company.”
He also possesses, according to Malina, a “great combination of charm and tenacity” — which came in handy when he cajoled “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda into writing and performing a “West Wing”-themed rap for the podcast’s intro music. “Josh was, like, ‘I can’t believe that this actually happened,’ ” Hirway recalls, laughing.
Miranda has also been a guest on “Song Exploder,” joining a list that, as the show approaches its 150th episode, is further testament to Hirway’s charm and tenacity: Arcade Fire, “Black Panther” composer Ludwig Göransson, Nine Inch Nails, St. Vincent, Metallica, Solange, Iggy Pop, Björk, Ghostface Killah. The show reflects both Hirway’s diverse tastes and his conviction that all good songs, regardless of how or in what genre they were created, have stories to tell.
“I don’t think there’s [any] part of a song that I immediately think is not interesting,” he says. “I think that’s sort of the underlying principle of the show — all of it is potentially interesting.”
Hrishikesh Hirway relaxes in his home studio. (Patrick T. Fallon / For The Times)
Where: The Theatre at Ace Hotel, 929 S. Broadway, downtown L.A.
“Some of the rats have learned that they can eat through the bottom of the trash cans. They’re plastic,” said Deputy Parks Director Scott Gilmore. City crews even found burrows leading directly beneath the cans."
And the rodents seem to be adapting, too.
“Some of the rats have learned that they can eat through the bottom of the trash cans. They’re plastic,” said Deputy Parks Director Scott Gilmore. City crews even found burrows leading directly beneath the cans.
interesting. i'm so wedded to the housing market now. i get that the skyrocketing prices of the front range isn't good generally but it sure does pad the ol' balance sheet.
The number of homes on the market surged, the number of sales dropped, and price reductions were abundant last month, all signs that buyers are pulling back in metro Denver, according to the latest market trends report from the Denver Metro Association of Realtors.
The inventory of single-family homes and condos available for sale at the end of August rose to 8,228, an increase of 7.65 percent from July and 11.8 percent higher than August 2017. Normally, the inventory barely drops between the two months and the change set a record.
“Over the past four years, we’ve experienced the strongest sellers’ market in recorded history,” Steve Danyliw, chairman of the DMAR Market Trends Committee and local Realtor, said in the report. “This past month, we saw available homes for sale increase to the highest level in four years, giving buyers more homes to choose from.”
Single-family home sales in August dropped 7.46 percent from July, and are down 9.75 percent from the same month a year ago. Condo sales dropped 5 percent for the month and are down 15.6 percent from August 2017.
About 30 percent of sellers lowered their listing price in August to entice buyers, Danyliw said. That has created downward pressure in the market.
The median price of a single-family home sold in August was $445,000, down 1.1 percent from July and up 8.54 percent from a year ago. The median condo price was $299,000, up 0.89 percent from July and 9.05 percent from August 2017.
The number of days it took to sell a condo rose to 20 in August, up from 18 in July, while the number of days a single-family home took to sell rose to 23 from 21. While higher, both still reflect a fast pace of sales.
Danyliw pointed to several signs that buyers are pushing back more — fewer multiple offers on properties, fewer inspection allowances and fewer appraisal guarantees. That said, homes that are priced correctly and move-in ready still sell quickly.
i just read this book and i thought this essay was an insightful follow-up. also, we should have read this in high school.
Eliot Elifoson/National Museum of African Art/Smithsonian Institution Chinua Achebe at his house in Enugu, Nigeria, 1959 The genius of Chinua Achebe, like all…
Foundry Distilling Co. opening in West Des Moines Rodney White, rodwhite@dmreg.com
Have you ever wanted to try making your own whiskey, but didn't know where to start? (Besides, it's also illegal.)
Now you can make your very own customized aged whiskey — you even get to design your own logo.
Foundry Distilling Co. at 111 South 11th Street in Historic Valley Junction is officially open to the public. The Foundry Alchemy Lounge opened on Saturday, August 25. The spacious, comfortable bar features a modern, industrial vibe with wood accents and cocktails made from Foundry products.
Interested in Iowa food news? Follow @briantaylorcarlson on Facebook, @BriinDSM on Twitter and @briindsm on Instagram.
One-hour tours of the facility are open to the public and will begin on Wednesday, August 29th and can be arranged through its website for groups and individuals. Tours are $15 and include a complimentary tasting and a $5 coupon for use in the distillery.
The Foundry is currently distilling whiskey, vodka, gin and rum. Foundry Vodka is available for sale at stores in Iowa like Hy-Vee and Fareway. Foundry gin and rum are available for sale at the distillery for $20 per .375-liter bottle. The Foundry currently has about 120 barrels of whiskey already aging.
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Scott Bush, Founder, Foundry Distilling Co., gives a tour of their new facility and distillery Friday, Aug. 24, 2018, in West Des Moines. (Photo: Rodney White/The Register)
MORE: Take advantage of these frequently-updated metro dining guides:
The centerpiece of the distillery is a color-changing, LED-lit 30-foot-tall custom-built column still with 21 plates, making it one of the largest in the craft spirits industry. The still is accompanied by an 8,000-gallon fermentation tank, a 500-gallon copper pot still and a 500-gallon open-top cypress wood still.
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Woody, a 550-gallon open-top cypress fermentation tank ay Foundry Distilling Co., at their new facility and distillery Friday, Aug. 24, 2018, in West Des Moines. (Photo: Rodney White/The Register)
"This is one of the tallest, if not the tallest, in the craft spirits industry,” said Scott Bush, founder and owner of The Foundry Distilling Co. "We distill everything ourselves and had our two stills designed and built right here in Iowa."
Scott Bush is the Founder and Owner of Foundry Distilling Co. He is also the founder of Templeton Rye Whiskey, which was one of the first brands to release a rye spirit in 2006. He sold controlling interest in Templeton Rye in 2016 after deciding he wanted to get back into entrepreneurship.
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Alchemy Lounge at Foundry Distilling Co. during tour of their new facility and distillery Friday, Aug. 24, 2018, in West Des Moines . The bar will feature Foundry products and serve cocktails designed by a rotating group of some of the best bartenders in the world. (Photo: Rodney White/The Register)
Foundry Distilling Co. has developed two unique offerings: the Private Barrel Program and the Brewer/Distiller Alliance.
Private Barrel Program
The Private Barrel Program allows individuals and groups to work with the Foundry team to make two barrels of their own custom whiskey.
“It is really fun to work with these groups and see their plans come to life. They get to learn a ton about whiskey and we work hard to make sure they have a good time,” said Bush.
The Foundry team, including master distillers Greg Biagi and Cory O'Neel, works with you all the way through the process — from mashing to fermentation to distilling and barreling.
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Scott Bush, Founder, Foundry Distilling Co., gives a tour of their new facility and distillery Friday, Aug. 24, 2018, in West Des Moines. (Photo: Rodney White/The Register)
Whiskey is typically made from the same mash as beer, called wort, so you can choose which beer wort you want to use, including wort from local breweries.
Barrels are personalized and aged in 30-gallon and 5-gallon, or pilot, sizes.
The 5-gallon pilot barrel contains about 30 bottles of whiskey and ages for about six months, while the 30-gallon barrel is enough for 160 bottles and takes about 2.5 years to age. During that time, you can come in and check on the aging process of your whiskey, which will be on display in the "aging museum." And there's a private tasting room where you can sip your own product, and you can even design your own logo for the whiskey.
The Foundry's own whiskeys are aged both in-house and at an off-site storage facility.
After the aging process, your custom whiskey is ready for bottling using your custom label. Bush said the exact number of bottles depends on the proof level and in-barrel evaporation called the "angel's share."
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Scott Bush, Founder, Foundry Distilling Co., left, with distillers Cory O'Neel, center, and Greg Biagi, right, during a tour of their new facility and distillery Friday, Aug. 24, 2018, in West Des Moines. (Photo: Rodney White/The Register)
The Brewer/Distiller Alliance
The Brewer/Distiller Alliance is a collaboration with several breweries to make whiskey from the recipes of their well-known beers.
“People are really excited that they will have a chance to buy some of the most unique whiskey in the world, right here in Iowa,” said Andrew Tomes, director of sales at The Foundry.
The Foundry is currently working with Boulevard Brewery, Stone Brewing, Surly Brewing and Left Hand Brewing as well as several Iowa breweries.
"Whiskey connoisseurs and whiskey collectors are going to love this stuff because it's incredibly unique," Bush said. "It's a low supply and it's just a great product."
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Foundry Distilling Co., brewer/distillers alliance barrels in their new facility and distillery Friday, Aug. 24, 2018, in West Des Moines. (Photo: Rodney White/The Register)
Alchemy Lounge
Alchemy Lounge features cocktails made from Foundry products made by a rotating assortment of talented bartenders, including summer marketing interns and Mike Crownover of Fleming's Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar. Cocktails can be ordered individually or in carafes.
Here is a sampling of the cocktail list:
Iowa Mule - Foundry vodka, fresh strawberries and local Wertzberger ginger beer
Bee's Knees - Foundry gin and Iowa honey
Bush said The Foundry's products will be available in cocktails next door at The Hall as well.
"It's simple, sophisticated and cool, and I think people will really enjoy it," Bush said. "We want to be one of the most innovative distilleries in the world."
Foundry Distilling Company
Location: 111 S. 11th St., West Des Moines
Bar hours: Thursday through Saturday, 4 to 10 p.m.
First barrel at Foundry Distilling Co. at their new facility and distillery Friday, Aug. 24, 2018, in West Des Moines. (Photo: Rodney White/The Register)
this "We’re taking a look at it." innovation is pretty genius. his followers are immediately convinced that the thing was done, and normal people tear their hair at the absurdity of it, much to the delight of the trumpists. and the overton window shifts.
Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!
The Trump administration is “taking a look” at whether Google and its search engine should be regulated by the government, Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s economic adviser, said Tuesday outside the White House. “We’ll let you know,” said Kudlow. “We’re taking a look at it.”
Well, let’s take a look at what I get when I open a Google window and search for Trump:
CNN
Fox News
Vice News
Politico
Trump’s Twitter feed
Guardian
Politico
NBC News
News about #trump on Twitter
Donald J. Trump for President
Washington Post
Fox News
CNN
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
ABC6OnYourSide
Washington Times
CNBC
Vanity Fair
The Atlantic
New York
Wikipedia
ABC News
Trump Hotels.com
Vanity Fair
The Atlantic
Trump National Golf Club
White House.gov
New York Times
YouTube
Bloomberg
Trump Tower New York
Twitch.tv/trumpsc
USA Today
New Republic
RealClear Politics
I got bored of transcribing sites after that, But it looks to me like about a third of them are sympathetic to Trump. The other two-thirds are standard news sites, and sure enough, their coverage is mostly about whatever dumb thing Trump has done lately. But what do you expect? It’s not like Trump gives them much to work with.
Anyway, it’s obvious that Trump can’t “do anything” about this. It’s just another effort to bully someone into tweaking their algorithms to give him more positive coverage. First it was Facebook, then Twitter, and now Google. They’re all “shadow banning” the sources who are sympathetic to Trump, you see, and that’s an outrage. The White House demands that everyone give him more positive coverage!
i guess it's progress but it's depressing to see that the vanguard of conservative thought on race is debating whether past racism has present effects.
I have a question. If you’re a young person of good will who is concerned about racial division in this nation, longs to understand how race has played a role in American history, and seeks racial reconciliation — which is to say, one of millions of politically and culturally engaged young people in America — how many thoughtful conservative voices will you encounter compared to thoughtful progressive voices?
….It strikes me that an enormous amount of conservative or right-leaning commentary on race is dedicated mainly to debunking the excesses and hypocrisy of the identity-politics Left….Less is dedicated to seriously grappling with the consequences of racism in American life and culture….In fact, at least in my experience, showing particular concern for issues of race is often seen as evidence by itself that you’re thinking like a progressive or that you’re somehow not sufficiently conservative.
Time and again I see concerned young people ask probing questions about stubborn racial gaps in a host of areas of American life, their elders ask them not to follow the siren song of the so-called social gospel, and then drop the ball on providing any meaningful alternative answer….Honestly, it’s amazing how much Sharpton or Louis Farrakhan come up, as if they represent the sum total of progressive thinking on race.
So the question hangs out there. If I care about bridging racial divides, what should I do? The identity-politics Left has an answer, one that provides millions of people with religious-level meaning and purpose. The conservative response is far harder to find.
French doesn’t mention Donald Trump, but it’s obvious that Trump has made this an existential issue for the right. Trump’s campaign and his presidency have been predicated almost entirely on appealing to white racial animus, and it’s this—not his populism or his ignorance or his braggadocio—that sets him apart from Republicans past. If conservatives are afraid to forthrightly address this—and so far they are—the Republican Party will be tied to a political legacy of wholesale racism forever. Regrettably, the first response to French’s piece came from Roger Clegg:
Thanks for your post, David. I’d offer a few thoughts.
First, the principal reason for the stubbornness of racial disparities in this country is family structure — i.e., out-of-wedlock birthrates….Second, I would note that the problem of race relations in this country is really a problem about African-American racial disparities, and again it is no coincidence that they have the highest out-of-wedlock birthrates….Third, this is not to deny that racism still exists and that the effects of past racism are still with us. But the persistence of the racial disparities cannot, I do not think, be blamed on present or past racism.
….Here’s my answer to what I think is your core question, David, and which as a fellow Christian I also think you may welcome: This is basically a moral problem, and moral problems are religious problems. More people need to believe in God and follow His rules….Our laws, after all, prohibit racial discrimination in just about any public transaction (except, by the way, politically correct racial discrimination, namely affirmative action) and are widely supported. Racism is socially unacceptable except on the fringes. Americans are increasingly multiracial, which ought to tell us something; indeed, as I recall, we just had a multiracial president. What’s really needed is a period of benign neglect, but alas that’s unlikely because, to echo the end of your post, the grievance industry is too large and too entrenched in the intelligentsia and in one of our political parties.
This, unfortunately, is what French’s young person of good will is all too likely to hear from fellow conservatives: African-Americans live immoral lives and are too stupid to do well in school—and there’s nothing much we can do about it. So we should just ignore it except for fighting back against the liberal racial grievance industry. How inspiring. But then we get Reihan Salam:
I disagree with Roger. Before turning to racism in the present, consider the role of past racism….Past discrimination created significant obstacles to labor-market success and wealth accumulation, which in turn have made life more difficult for those in subsequent generations. It contributed to the rise to ghetto communities defined by high levels of concentrated poverty, which in turn have had lingering negative effects on those residing in them — I found Patrick Sharkey’s Stuck in Place particularly convincing on this point. That growing up in a high-poverty neighborhood has a negative impact on a child’s ability to learn is not especially controversial….One can argue that dwelling on the present-day effects of cumulative disadvantage is counterproductive, and that self-help is always the best and most reliable way for those burdened by it to better their lives and those of their loved ones. Fair enough. But that’s different from the claim that the persistence of racial disparities (in marriage rates, rates of nonmarital childbearing, and much else) is not rooted, at least in part, in past racism.
….And while racism has greatly diminished in recent decades, there is evidence that anti-black discrimination in hiring persists….If I can’t secure entry-level employment, how will I gain the experience and training I need to succeed? Roger believes that while statistical discrimination exists, “we should not pretend that this is a bigger problem than it is.” Again, I’m inclined to disagree. I believe that statistical discrimination isn’t just a problem for its victims — it’s a problem for society as a whole, as Tyler Cowen recently suggested: It deprives us of talent that we can’t afford to waste.
….More broadly, there is the question of social networks….These networks tend to be highly segregated by race and class….Does this pattern reflect racial animus on the part of whites toward blacks? I don’t believe so. But is it the case that blacks and whites are less likely to cross paths and form friendships due to the legacy of past discrimination and (perhaps to a lesser extent) the interaction of subtler forms of color and class prejudice in the present, and does this kind of social segregation contribute to persistent racial disparities? Yes, I believe that’s a big part of the story. And that’s why I greatly appreciated David’s call for a more constructive conversation about race on the right. Like David, I believe that conservatives can make an important contribution to racial reconciliation. To do that, however, it is important to acknowledge that past discrimination has ongoing ill effects.
When it comes to race, liberals and conservatives have a similar problem: it’s a lot easier—and frankly, a lot more fun—to slam the obvious idiocies of the other side than it is to seriously engage with their best arguments. This is especially true when there’s usually a political and social price to be paid for being perceived as “soft” on racial issues. Unfortunately, this is almost inevitable when declining to adopt the most extreme views of your own side is all it takes to be dismissed as “not getting it.”
If there’s any silver lining to Donald Trump’s presidency, this could be it. Perhaps more conservatives will wake up to the fact that plain old racism is far more pervasive in their party than they believed, and they’d better take it seriously if they don’t want to end up with yet another Trump in the next election. On the flip side, liberals might realize that there’s a price to be paid for playing endless rounds of woker-than-thou that accomplish little except to trigger fragile whites into voting for guys like Trump.
The truth is that real, steady progress on race probably requires both sides to take political risks: liberals might occasionally lose black support on certain issues while conservatives run the risk of losing older white votes. Nothing comes easy. But thoroughly rejecting Trump and Trumpism is a good start, and with even a little bit of goodwill it’s possible that we can go further.
That’s where my bill comes in. The Accountable Capitalism Act restores the idea that giant American corporations should look out for American interests. Corporations with more than $1 billion in annual revenue would be required to get a federal corporate charter. The new charter requires corporate directors to consider the interests of all major corporate stakeholders—not only shareholders—in company decisions. Shareholders could sue if they believed directors weren’t fulfilling those obligations.
This approach follows the “benefit corporation” model, which gives businesses fiduciary responsibilities beyond their shareholders….My bill also would give workers a stronger voice in corporate decision-making at large companies. Employees would elect at least 40% of directors.
Warren’s basic idea is that workers have lost power over the past few decades and therefore have seen sluggish wage growth. At the same time, this has allowed management and shareholders to pocket the rising profits of corporations since they don’t have to fight workers for a bigger share. She’s certainly right about that. Labor and management shares of income vary a bit during booms and recesssions, but the overall trend since the Reagan era is crystal clear:
But here’s the thing I don’t get. Warren’s theory is that this has happened largely because workers have lost negotiating power over the past four decades. Even conservatives, I think, wouldn’t argue too strongly against this notion. It’s pretty plain that the demise of unions has stripped workers of wage bargaining power and this has reduced their ability to claim the same share of overall corporate income that they used to.
But if that’s the case, why introduce a bill that primarily changes the composition of corporate boards? My objection isn’t that it won’t work. It might. But we know that making it easier for workers to unionize would work, and Republicans will fight just as hard against one as the other. So why choose an oddball proposal that sounds European and vaguely socialist even to the American working class?
Why not instead propose a truly simple and powerful proposal to boost unionization throughout the American economy? If your goal is to increase the power of the working class, this is the way to do it. It’s been done in America before, notably during the “Golden Age” of the 40s and 50s when America was supposedly greater than it is now. It produced a strong economy. It didn’t pauperize the rich. It’s easy for workers to understand. And you’re going to need a Democratic president and 60 Democratic senators to pass it, just like Warren’s bill. If the Democratic Party is ready for Warren’s new idea, it’s ready for my old idea. What’s not to like?
This two-bedroom townhouse in Arvada, listed earlier this summer, is believed to be the first property along the Front Range to be marketed on a major multiple listing service as accepting cryptocurrency.
When you’re in the market for a new home, you probably have a lot of things on your mind: square footage, school districts, mortgages rates.
One thing you’re probably not spending much time thinking about: Bitcoin.
But perhaps cryptocurrency and blockchain technology will soon be a major consideration for property purchasers and sellers.
At least that’s what some Boulder County real estate professionals are gearing up for.
“Blockchain and cryptocurrency really has the ability to change every aspect of real estate, from titles, to lending, to the brokerage itself,” said Jim Merrion, a Boulder real estate agent with Coldwell Banker.
"Jeffco GOP Men’s Club” I shudder to think who I knew at that meeting.
(Promoted by Colorado Pols)
Tom Tancredo is always comfortable in front of a microphone, even when his words are making his audience uncomfortable. That’s exactly what the most prominent Republican to endorse Walker Stapleton did July 30 at the Jefferson County Republican Men’s club, when he delivered racist comments about black student athletes at his alma mater, Northeastern Junior College.
Musing about the racial and religious quotas imposed on his college’s dormitories by the Klan-influenced local government, Tancredo, a former Congressman, wondered why the restrictions didn’t apply to the whole school rather than just the students at the residences:
Tancredo: “I always wondered, why just the dorms? If you’re gonna have a quota, why not on everything. I dunno, they needed black players, I guess, on the team.”
The anti-immigrant firebrand’s influence with the GOP base is exactly why Stapleton asked the conservative icon to introduce and nominate him at the Republican state assembly. That said, Tancredo’s remark about the Klan’s relaxed racial quota when it came to black athletes fell flat on the conservative audience, which appeared to be shocked by the comment.
Undeterred, he stuck with his racist theme by promoting “a great book,” Losing Ground by Charles Murray, which argues for abolishing welfare. The sociologist has also argued that African-Americans tend to be less intelligent than white Americans and that genetic differences between the races are partially responsible. Current Affairs magazine wrote an extensive profile of Murray’s racist writings in a feature piece, “Why Is Charles Murray Odious?” Tancredo acknowledged the author’s controversial status, noting, “Of course, everyone gets scared the minute you say his name.”
Yet he proceeded to rattle off statistics from the book, showing a decline in numbers of traditional nuclear African-American families and an increase in “black-on-black murders” since the 1950s and ascribing that decline to “the war on poverty.” “[The government] started paying people not to have a male in the household.”
He went on to claim that African-Americans “used to have a higher commitment to Christianity than whites,” but “that’s all changed and it was because of the destruction of the family structure.”
In Tancredo’s other roles, including frontman for an anti-immigrant 501c4 nonprofit, occasional radio host, and social media personality, his continual race-baiting and sometimes flat-out racist statements fall on generally friendly ears.
Ever since Walker Stapleton used Tancredo’s name and brand to secure the Republican nomination however, pundits have noted that ultra-conservative firepower that proved so useful before the primary will likely become a liability in November.
Mike Littwin made this exact point in his July 25 column in the Colorado Independent, writing “Enter Tancredo, who was brought in to help Stapleton appeal to the assembly’s right-wing fringe. It worked then. But how about in November?”
“I think Walker Stapleton is making a number of strategic errors here… To have Tom Tancredo give his nominating speech at the convention in Boulder…you don’t think that one will come back to bite him come September, October, etc.? In tennis, it’s called ‘unforced errors.’”
In his speech nominating Walker Stapleton to Colorado Republicans at the state assembly in April, Tancredo gave two reasons for his presence.
First he said it was because “the day after the election, I want to see all those liberal looneys running with their heads in their hands, looking for a safe space because they can’t handle what just happened to them.”
He concluded by saying, “the only reason I am here and I am proud as I can be to do it, is to place into the nomination for the Republican governor of Colorado, Walker Stapleton.”
If Tancredo continues to make blatantly racist statements in public and the pundits are correct, then some people will indeed have their heads in their hands November 7, just not the ones Tancredo is thinking of.
This is fun to play with: Dinosaur Pictures has a Google Earth-style globe that shows the state of the planet at various intervals 20 million, 200 million, or 750 million years ago, with plenty of stops in between. You can watch India collide into the rest of Asia, or jump to the birth (and death) of dinosaurs, the first flowers, the first hominids, etc. And you can watch the whole planet or zero in on an individual contemporary address.
One point of view that I found oddly soothing: the middle of the Pacific Ocean. All over the planet, millions of years are passing by, transforming the land-bound flora and fauna through tectonic and climatic upheavals, and the ocean just… stays the ocean. Big things are happening below the surface, but the biggest part of the planet just continues to be this deep blue, undisturbed marble.
Less than a year after launching the brand, MillerCoors is ending production of Two Hats, the fruit-flavored lagers aimed at younger drinkers who increasingly are being lured away by wine and spirits.
MillerCoors
MillerCoors has pulled the plug on its Two Hats beer brand.
The beer will no longer be sold by early next year.
The decision reflects the challenges facing macro-breweries beset by rising costs and flagging sales. MillerCoors announced its decision to “pull the plug” on its company blog Monday, less than a week after parent company Molson Coors reported disappointing revenue and profit results for MillerCoors for the fiscal quarter.
Under CEO Gavin Hattersley, who was named CEO in September 2015, the proclaimed mission at MillerCoors has been to stop the volume sales decline by 2018 and return to growth by 2019.
That appears unlikely at this point and impossible without turning around Coors Light, its top-selling beer that is in steeper decline than Miller Lite, the company’s other flagship beer. In the company’s Behind the Beer blog on Monday, MillerCoors executives said they planned to focus spending behind Coors Light and Miller Lite, while also increasing investment in “above-premium” brands like Sol and Arnold Palmer Spiked.
Two Hats, a 4.2 percent alcohol beer lightly flavored by lime or pineapple, was targeted at 21- to 24-year-old drinkers but didn’t stand out in its brief run in a crowded marketplace. Both flavors brought in less than $1 million in revenue in year-to-date data ending July 15, according to retail sales figures from Chicago-based market research firm IRI, which do not include sales at Costco or liquor stores.
By comparison, Coors Light made more than $1.2 billion in sales in the same time period, according to IRI data, which represented a decline of about 4.2 percent from the same period a year ago.
Beer sales, in general, are having a tough summer. Domestic beer shipments are down 3.7 percent through June compared to last year, according to the most recent data available from the Beer Institute, the trade group that represents the largest beer companies in the U.S.
The City Council on Tuesday will consider adding 442 acres of open space to Boulder, jointly purchased, owned and managed with Jefferson County. The property, Lippincott Ranch, abuts four existing city open space parcels and could provide access to 80,000 acres of state, federal and locally protected public lands.
“It’s one of the last remaining large acreage properties connected to city open space,” said Bethany Collins, a property agent in the city’s Open Space and Mountain Parks department. “It’s an exciting property and a great opportunity.”
Boulder and Jefferson County will each pitch in half of the $7.75 million purchase price, either in cash or through a 20-year financing deal. The city is seeking approval for all possibly buying scenarios, including the use of Boulder Municipal Property Authority funds.
The property will be closed to the public while Jefferson County and Boulder decide what it’s eventual use will be. For the time being, an agricultural leaseback to the Lippincott family is likely to allow for continued cattle grazing.
The land, south of Eldorado Springs, has long been used by trespassing climbers to access a secret crag. Government management could improve access to that site, Collins said. There is also potential for a trail to be connected to Jefferson County’s Coal Creek Canyon Park.
this is something that bugs me a lot. an originalist constitution _should_ be longer, but amending the constitution is hard and it is ESPECIALLY hard to create/protect minority rights by a supermajoritarian process, quite obviously. but somehow that contradiction doesn't get discussed nearly enough. originalism is bankrupt given the structure of our constitution, but somehow because it's easy to understand in bumper sticker-sized sentences it's treated as a serious (indeed controlling) jurisprudential theory.
i know you all know this, just venting.
The nomination of Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court will raise the profile of originalism in public life, though his confirmation hearings and some of his subsequent opinions. Many people are understandably focused on how a more originalist approach would influence doctrine (say on Roe v. Wade). I want to discuss briefly a different effect that originalism may have on the wider culture.
In May, Illinois ratified the ERA. The lead sponsor of that effort in the state House of Representatives explained on the floor that the amendment was necessary because the Constitution as written does not protect equal rights for women. His authority for that proposition was Justice Scalia. In 2011, Justice Scalia gave an interview in which he said: "Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the bass of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't. Nobody ever thought that's what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that." The Illinois Representative offered this as support for the argument that the ERA is necessary to protect sex equality. (In what we in the trade call "ironic," this same representative was accused of sexual harassment the next day and resigned his party leadership post in the Legislature.)
One way of describing this argument is fear-mongering. The doctrine is there for sex equality. And a Supreme Court full of originalists is unlikely to repudiate those precedents. Nevertheless, it would be hard to deny that many people might worry (rightly or wrongly) about a constitutional rollback of gender equality. There are two plausible responses. One is to oppose the confirmation of certain types of Justices. The other is to ratify the ERA and make Justice Scalia's comment obsolete. Thus, an unintended consequence of changing the balance of the Court may be a new Article Five amendment.
Broadly speaking, this development is consistent with the originalist vision. The Constitution should be formally amended rather than changed significantly through interpretation. Taken seriously, an originalist Constitution ought to be much longer than the one we have. The ERA would be a start.
I'm no expert when it comes to matters of Senate procedure, but one thought suggested to me by a learned friend after we heard yesterday that Justice Kennedy was retiring is that Democrats do have a "Trump" card, so to speak, that they could play to prevent Trump from filling Justice Kennedy's seat before the midterms. I speak of U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 5, Clause 1, which provides:
Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members, and a Majority of each shall constitute a Quorum to do Business; but a smaller Number may adjourn from day to day, and may be authorized to compel the Attendance of absent Members, in such Manner, and under such Penalties as each House may provide.
Given the current narrow balance of the Senate, if Senate Democrats orchestrated a walkout (our suggestion would be they all go to Mexico City though Canada might be nicer in the summer months), the Senate would only be able to reach 50 members (because Senator McCain is ill) which is less than “a majority,” and therefore would be unable to “do business” (e.g., act on nominations). My friend calls this constitutional “super hardball." I think it's time to play.
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In his speech nominating Walker Stapleton to Colorado Republicans at the state assembly in April, Tancredo gave two reasons for his presence.
