Author Archive
Efficiency Be Damned
from the series Peace House Community Journal Marti Maltby By Marti Maltby Like many people, I have watched Elon Musk’s dismantling of the federal government with everything from bemusement to unspeakable foreboding. The bemusement comes from Musk’s own claims that he is making the government more efficient. If that was the real intent of the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk would be the equivalent of the kid whose dad throws him into a deep lake to teach him to swim. He flails around a lot but doesn’t accomplish much, and eventually he sinks out of sight. Musk has made many claims about how much he is saving the government, but the claims are not believable in the slightest. Compare Musk’s approach to the investigation into Feeding Our Future, an organization that fraudulently billed the government for $250 million. The investigation required numerous investigators, working for years, to bring charges against hundreds of individuals. By contrast, Musk [...]
August and Charlotte Swedenborg Lose Three Children to Contagious Diseases
233rd in the series Tales from Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery By SUE HUNTER WEIR “Our need will be the real creator.”*Plato, 380 BC August William Swedenborg was 16 years old when he arrived in America. He was born in Sweden on October 20, 1855. Before moving to Minneapolis, he briefly lived in Chautauqua, New York and Titusville, Pennsylvania. On June 3, 1877, he married Charlotte Scruf. Over the course of the next 17 years, Charlotte gave birth to eleven children. Three of those children died young from highly contagious diseases.Mina Anna Swedenborg (A. M. Swedenborg in the Cemetery’s records) died on March 13, 1881, from diphtheria. She is one of 923 people buried in the Cemetery, most of them children, who died from that disease. And that number includes only those buried in our Cemetery. In the 1800s, one out of every seven deaths was caused by diphtheria. That began to change in 1926 when a vaccine first became available. Annie Elizabeth Swedenborg [...]
