Cannabis Harvest

The harvest is underway. 

People can and do grow cannabis legally here in Southern Oregon. 

The plants needed to get out of the weather. It has frozen three times and the cool rains have begun. 

Cannabis grown for its medicinal non-psychoactive CBD is regulated as an agricultural crop and is grown like corn or other annual field crops. Current practice is to control weeds and water use by growing it poking through plastic ground cover strips. One or more drip lines are laid down under the plastic. Young plants are transplanted in small holes poked into the plastic. The plastic is pulled up, compacted, and discarded at season end. The crop is not a particularly high value crop, so farming practice tends to be low-input to control costs. This is a weedy field.  Below, a crew of workers start a CBD harvest about October 9:

Cannabis grown for the psychoactive "get you high" THC is grown differently. THC-bearing plants have complicated government rules that limit the size of fields and the number of plants. THC plants tend to be coddled, with careful attention to soil amendments, fertilizer schedules, pest control, and trellising to support the branch. They get the "Ritz Carlton" treatment, so they will grow huge buds. 

Here is what a THC plant looks like in early August. The plant grew from an 18-in high transplant in late May to this, in about 70 days.

Look closely.  Notice there are no buds or flowers on the plant above, but by October 10 it looks like this: 

The plants grew buds like these:

A close up photograph of a bud can be expanded on a smart phone to give a good look at the trichomes on the flower. These little white dots change from transparent to milky-white to amber-colored as the plant matures. This photo was taken on October 10, and it indicated the plants were not quite ready. The trichomes were not yet turning amber.

We mostly avoided a bug-pest problem this year but we had three other problems. The first was a tiny problem of seeds on one plant. Seeds happen when the female plants get fertilized by some errant male plant upwind, probably on a neighbor's property about 600 feet away. The immature seed is that light green football-shaped object about midway between the fingers in this photo. Fortunately, there were few of these.

The second problem was threat of theft. The price has collapsed on THC-bearing cannabis buds, but objects acquired for free  are worth stealing. I was one of several people guarding my crop, armed with headlights, high-beam flashlights, a car horn, and a cell phone to call 911. Plus, I located and installed multiple tiny GPS trackers and paid for a service to track their location and alert me if they moved and show me where they go. Perhaps more important, i invested in two signs warning people I had done this.  My goal was to be an un-attractive target for the people flying drones that were surveilling my farm.

The third problem was frost. The coldest part of the night is right at dawn. The temperature dropped from 29 degrees at 4:00 a.m. down to 25 degrees briefly just after daylight on October 12, ten days ago. This photo is taken with natural light at 7:20 a.m. Notice a light dusting of frost on the buds and leaves.

Had it been only that single frost, I might have been able to ignore it, but it was followed by two more nights of frost and now cool rains. The golf-ball and tennis-ball sized buds retain water and risk rotting from the middle. We began harvesting to get them harvested before rot began. Better a couple of days immature than rotten. The photo below is a plant 99% harvested.

Here is a final harvest photo, taken Wednesday. I am all done but the clean-up. Notice the remains of the trellising, done with plastic netting.The buds get heavy and the branches will sag and break if they are not supported. 

 

The crop is harvested and safe, I think, from thieves, insects, and mold. The buds are hanging in a room with a de-humidifier and fans. I treat the cannabis crop the way I treat my melons. I grow cannabis because it is fun to grow things. I mostly give the crop away in small amounts to people who find "farm tourism" interesting. I like showing off the farm, especially during melon harvest season in August. People like my cousin, photographed below, had the unexpected fun of dropping a melon on purpose:

Democrats don't have the votes to "think big."

Democrats don't have a mandate for change. 

They don't even have a majority.

50-50

Joe Manchin said the simple truth. If you want to advance liberal causes, he told Democrats, "elect more liberals."  

Democrats had a good chance to elect a liberal senator in North Carolina in 2020. It is a swing state.  North Carolina voters elected Tom Tillis, a Republican.

In Maine Susan Collins won 51-42. Collins is a moderate. She sometimes votes with Democrats when her vote is irrelevant, but she is a reliable Republican when McConnell needs her to be one.

In Iowa incumbent Republican senator Joni Ernst had the burden of Iowa soybean farmers having their crop rejected by the Chinese, in retaliation to Trump tariffs. She won anyway, with 52% of the vote.

Democrats had opportunities. Trump was uniquely controversial at a time when COVID cases and deaths were at their highest. Voters rejected Trump himself, but kept Republican senators who backed Trump.

Joe Manchin is a Democrat in a state that loves Trump. West Virginia is rural, White, blue collar, and church-going. Its population is the archetypal Trump voting base. Democratic messaging is clear and consistent that fossil fuels are bad and that coal is the worst of the worst. West Virginia's biggest industry is coal. Green New Deal messaging declared war on coal, and therefore on West Virginians and their way of life, in a state John Denver called "almost heaven." 

Democrats need to stop and look around. If a deal is going to get done, it won't have a big Green New Deal component because it needs at least 50 votes. The problem isn't Manchin. He is being who he always was, a Democrat who got elected in West Virginia. 

Kristin Sinema represents Arizona. Her issues seem to be taxes and drug pricing. There are a lot of conservative retirees in Arizona, and they are notoriously anti-tax. Her tax position is not surprising. She is also sympathetic to drug companies. Democrats can stop the faux dismay that she gets campaign help from those companies. Every U.S. senator gets financial support from some industry, or two, or three, plus for Democrats, some union, or two, or three. Democrats are unhappy that she is standing in the way of using Medicare's market power to negotiate lower prices on prescription drugs.  

Democrats have a mixed message. Democrats say that drug companies were a lifesaver when it came to COVID. They employ cutting edge research, and they are trustworthy, very trustworthy, and care about us. Get vaccinated. Meanwhile, drug companies are money-grabbing extortionists who put their own interests first. 

The reality is that the American taxpayer overpays the drug companies. In exchange, we fatten up their R&D budgets--and stockholders--and we get more and faster new drugs than we otherwise would.  Americans are getting their third COVID vaccine doses, while much of the rest of the world has none. We are paying for that. Kristin Sinema is on the side of continuing that extraordinary subsidy, 

Whatever bill gets through will not have a significant change in either coal or drug pricing. Democrats look confused and lost, but they are not lost. They just don't like where they are: One vote short.

Democrats need to face the real problem. Democrats lose by attempting to please their most liberal, woke, point-of-the-spear supporters on cultural issues, and they project a kind of moral superiority over culturally conservative people. It is why Black and Hispanic voters are drifting away, and would do so faster if GOP messaging were not so hostile to them. How do I know that?  It is because that is what Trump, Fox, GOP officeholders and GOP candidates all hammer on. They don't defend high drug prices or tax cuts for billionaires. They talk about transgender bathrooms and the left's accusation that all Whites are racially prejudiced, whether they know it or not. 

Democrats can console themselves by knowing they are morally right and working to move to a more just America. An emotionally satisfying way to display a superior moral position is to condemn and sneer at the people who "don't get it." Not everyone does that, but there is enough of that coming out of liberal cities and academic environments that this message becomes the caricature of Democratic thinking. Prudent Democrats who want to have majority power in the chambers of Congress could inoculate themselves if they called it out, clearly and forcefully condemning that attitude, but so far I don't see it happening. They don't want to lose their progressive woke base. Social change is happening, but it is happening faster than a majority of people are comfortable with and people don't like to feel scolded. That is how culturally conservative people feel, and they feel it so strongly they will support GOP senators and a narcissistic, autocratic, election-overthrowing, race-baiter for president, rather than trust people who they think sneer at them.

Damned lies and statistics

The message on conservative media is that COVID vaccines are risky and of questionable value.

Moreover, tyrants are forcing it on you. Of course you are angry.

The Fox and Friends hosts were on-message this morning. There was a lot of head shaking and smirking. "Who knows how effective the vaccines are?" "I've heard of three people who died, and they were fully vaccinated." 

Will Cain, a Fox commentator, responded to Colin Powell's death:

[H]ow effective overall are these vaccines? The headlines have shifted over the past 18 months. And look at these numbers. We have gone from implications that the vaccine was 100 percent effective to 90 percent, to 70 percent, to 60 percent, to 50 percent. … This does not inspire much confidence.

One vivid anecdote like the death of fully-vaccinated Colin Powell, is easier to grasp than are the statistics of COVID deaths, especially when the statistics are presented misleadingly. College classmate Eliot Nierman, M.D. is a physician and Professor of Clinical Medicine at a University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine. He read this blog and Tucker Carlson's words yesterday and sent a comment that helps explain how it is Carlson might be so misleading about vaccine effectiveness. 

Eliot sent me this note:

Interesting idea to talk of [medical people] as fiduciaries. You might also have talked about religious leaders. One could make the argument that media leaders should be as well.

As for what Carlson said, the issue is misuse of statistics and using a singles case an anecdote to prove something. He is of course the liar and manipulator The chances of dying unvaccinated are at least 10 times higher than vaccinated. Yes that means that some vaccinated people die. And yes that means that if most people are vaccinated, as many who die of covid may in fact be vaccinated. 

Assume for example, that 90% of elderly are vaccinated (true in some locations) and the chances of dying unvaccinated  and elderly are 1/10 that of dying vaccinated. Assume your chances of dying from covid if you are unvaccinated are 0.1 % (1/1,000). The chance of dying vaccinated are 0.01% (1/10,000). Take 1 million elderly people. 900,000 are vaccinated, 100,000 are not. Of the unvaccinated 100 die. Of the vaccinated 90 die. Hmmm, close to the figure in Maryland of 40%. (actually higher at 47%)

Anyone who wants to bet with me and give me 10x odds when the odds should be even count me in!

Eliot graduated from college summa cum laude in physics, and the college is very stingy giving out summas. It is possible that his comment needs a moment's translation and repetition. As is predictable, the pool of people who are most vaccinated are the people who understood themselves to be most at risk, the elderly and ill. They are the people most likely to die of something, especially if there is a complication from COVID, as in the case of Colin Powell. There is also a pool of people who have, so far, not gotten vaccinated--a pool that includes a large number of people who are young and healthy, and who consider themselves invulnerable. A small percentage of people in both groups get COVID and get very sick. 

As the pool of highly vulnerable people get vaccinated and grows to approach 90% of the population, and the pool of unvaccinated shrinks, then even the rare instances of hospitalization and death from the huge pool of the vaccinated turns out to be a bigger number than much-greater percentage of illnesses from the smaller pool. Moreover, not only are the sizes of the pool different, but the age and risk profile of people in the pools are different; the vaccinated group was older and less healthy to begin with. So the absolute number of deaths from the large and small pools might be equal.

Properly understood, this is strong evidence for vaccination. Being vaccinated is as good or better than being young and healthy!  

When reported misleadingly, as Tucker Carlson did, that near equal numbers of people die--vaccinated or un-vaccinated--it implies that vaccinations are of little value. It leaves out the most important thing: The size and makeup of the pool of people in each group.

Possibly Eliot's explanation was as clear or clearer than my repeat, but we may hear the Fox message more often as the U.S. makes progress on getting people vaccinated. Head's up: if and when everyone is vaccinated, there will still be a very few people who get sick and die with COVID as a complication, and at that point everyone who dies will have been vaccinated. Don't be surprised when that gets reported. Vaccinations don't make people immortal. They do make people much less likely to get sick and die.

Fiduciary. Some jobs include a duty of care.

Not everyone has a well-functioning immune system. Colin Powell didn't. COVID tipped him over the edge.

I consider health care workers and police officers to be fiduciaries.

Readers of this blog skew older. We have a right to live. We have a right to be protected from people who would assault us by carelessly shoving us and knocking us down onto a sidewalk or store aisle.

There are some places where an old or ill person is likely to be by necessity--hospitals, for one. Much of the work of a doctor, nurse, or other attendant is done up close. A police officer, too, is likely to get close to a senior who is being helped or detained. In either case, people are in the control and care of the worker. 

Everyone exhales. That is how COVID spreads.

A word has become a familiar part of public discourse, "immunocompromised." Getting older in itself is a cause of reduced immunity. Other causes are chemotherapy for cancer, drugs to suppress rejection of transplants, and treatment of diseases including lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease, celiac disease, multiple sclerosis, multiple myeloma, and more. 

Powell died from a combination of COVID and multiple myeloma. Tucker Carlson's monologue made the point that Colin Powell had been fully vaccinated, but got COVID and died. Readers who have difficulty understanding neighbors who refuse vaccination might take a moment to read closely and watch this talk, even if watching Carlson is not something one normally does. He said,

Like almost everyone his age Colin Powell was vaccinated against Covid, yet according to his family and doctors Colin Powell died of COVID. Of course that fact does not make his death any less sad, nor is it unusual. Many thousands of vaccinated people have died of COVID. Former CDC director Robert Redfield just today announced that about 40% of all recent COVID deaths in the state of Maryland, for example, are among those who have had both shots. So what does this tell you exactly? It tells you you have been lied to. 

Vaccines may be highly useful for some people, but across the population they do not solve COVID. That’s not speculation. It is an observable fact. People who have been vaccinated can still get the virus, they can still transmit the virus to others, and they can still die from COVID. Colin Powell is hardly the only example of that. So the question is, why are they telling us otherwise? And the answer is simple. They are telling us that to divide us from each other. To set the country against itself. It’s been going on a long time but it’s never needed to happen. There is no inherent reason that a virus should rip apart the United States. COVID easily could have brought us together. Shared suffering often does that. 9-11 did that. Yet from the very beginning demagogues like Joe Biden and many others have used this virus as a hammer, to smash the bonds that connect Americans to one another.

 https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3976741/embed/embed 

Carlson employs an adept switch in the vaccination frame. He left out the fact of Colin Powell's multiple myeloma, and he offered a misleading statistic about the effectiveness of vaccines. Readers should not let his cynicism and dishonesty distract from the skill of his message and presentation. He is indignant and confident. He is bold and shameless. He blames Democrats for what he himself is doing right there on screen. "Vaccines may be highly useful for some people" is a subordinate clause, a throwaway to the real point of the sentence, that vaccinations "do not solve COVID," as if anyone claimed vaccinations "solved" it. Carlson employs Powell's death to show vaccines don't work. People inclined to think Joe Biden is a demagogue now know the score. You are a victim of lies. Don't be a sap. There is a lying demagogue in America who inflames and divides, and it is Biden.

There are lots of old and immunocompromised people who do well--if they avoid a mistake. An older person who falls, or is shoved, sometimes breaks a hip and dies. A person who carries COVID endangers others with exhalations. Some of the people they endanger are immunocompromised. They have a right not to be shoved. They have a right to know the institution that person works for has taken every precaution.

Many people like what they hear from Carlson, and it helps explain why people quit jobs this week rather than be vaccinated. They don't want to feel pushed around by a "demagogue." Meanwhile, vulnerable people don't want to be pushed around, either, or be at higher risk of a breakthrough case of COVID transmitted by an unvaccinated person. Colin Powell died because he caught COVID from someone and that, when added to the existing disease, was enough to kill him.

How does one resolve the conflict between the two views of shoving? There is law and custom regarding fiduciaries. They have a duty of care. 

The news is full of people resigning their jobs this week. I am OK with them quitting. Go. If they don't want the duty of putting the vulnerable person's interest first, they should do something else.

City councils and hospital boards of directors are fiduciaries, too. People in control of police forces and health care workers have a responsibility to the people they serve and to their institutions. A vulnerable immunocompromised patient or police detainee who gets COVID after close exposure to an unvaccinated COVID-infected health care worker or police officer has a gripe, and maybe a lawsuit. 

A multi-million dollar lawsuit might give fiduciaries of institutions courage better to protect the people they serve.

Billionaires and their billions

"Ask what you can do for your country."

        JFK inaugural speech

Today's Guest Post tells billionaires what they can do.

For the first 35 years of the postwar era, the income of working Americans tracked the overall productivity of the nation. Everyone was getting richer. Then, in 1980, things changed. Productivity kept going up, but the workers' share of that pie flattened. What happened to the "excess value" produced by the rising productivity? It went to capital, not labor. It created people of unimaginable wealth.

Perhaps it all goes back to Ronald Reagan's breaking the air traffic controllers' demand for higher wages and better working conditions by firing the ones on strike. Or maybe it was the mass of Boomers like me entering the workforce faster than we could be absorbed. Or maybe it was increase in immigration numbers with President Reagan's blessing. Or maybe it was something as simple but profoundly important as shipping containers, which put low-wage labor in China into direct competition with American workers. Or maybe it was something else.

Michael Wallace

One thing is clear: The middle class got poorer and America began creating a class of fabulously wealthy people who owned the businesses that participated in the rising productivity. 

Michael Wallace is a college classmate who became a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nepal, then an international career worker in social and economic development in Pakistan, Nepal, Philippines, Russia, and Macedonia. He is coiner of "numbulary" (number-vocabulary), and shares his insights at a Twitter account, @numbulary, where he posts interesting and useful observations about numbers.

Guest Post by Michael Wallace         

                  How much is enough?

 

During a recent visit with college classmate Peter Sage, I commented: "America has done a great job with the production side of things. “We can create lots of stuff for Americans. But we haven’t figured out the distribution side of a prosperous economy. Amid all this plenty, so many people are destitute.” I promised to provide my perspective on distribution for Up Close.

 

The distribution of stuff reflects the distribution of income and wealth, and income and wealth are easier to measure and analyze than stuff such as land and houses and cars and clothes, so let's look at income and wealth:

• In 2019, the world’s billionaires (2,153 people) had more wealth than the poorest 4.6 billion people (3/5 of humanity). The richest 22 men in the world own more wealth than all the 700 million women in Africa. The world's billionaires have $9 trillion of wealth, while the poorest 60% of humanity has barely $6 trillion--less than $2,000 per person. The billionaires could double the wealth of each member of the poorest 60% and still be billionaires.
• The 400 richest US citizens have more wealth than the 150 million adults in the bottom 60% of the country's wealth distribution. The top 0.1% of the population (333,000 people) has nearly 20% of the nation’s wealth, giving them a greater slice of the American pie than the bottom 80% of the population (266 million people) combined.

These descriptions illustrate the same point: There is too much money concentrated in the hands of too few people, both globally and in the US.

Countries move extremely slowly in solving global problems, and we cannot expect individual countries or groups of countries such as the European Union or the African Union or the United Nations to solve our global wealth and income inequality problems. We must pursue other avenues to address the global wealth and income inequality problem: we must define and present this as a global philosophical and ethical problem and address it from that perspective.

If the world’s 2,000+ billionaires gave $6 trillion of their wealth to the poorest 60% (the poorest 4 billion people), doubling the wealth of the poor, would the world be a happier place? The 4 billion would certainly be happier, and the 2,000+ billionaires would still be billionaires.

The key to solving problems is to define them in ways that allow for solutions. We must define this as a problem that individuals can help solve. We must define this problem in a way that the rich themselves must see as a problem and see themselves as the problem-solvers.

Peace Corps Training Group. Wallace is front row, second from left

 

We must convince the rich that the distribution of global wealth is a global problem and enlist their help in solving it. We must convince the rich that they can help solve this problem in their own best interests. Let's take a clue from Bloomberg, which publishes lists of the world's richest people.  (https://bloomberg.com/billionaires/)

The Chronicle of Philanthropy publishes lists of the largest charitable donations each year. This should be expanded to highlight the people who are the largest overall donors each year, and this list should be published as front page headline news.  (https://www.philanthropy.com/article/jeff-bezoss-10-billion-environmental-gift-tops-chronicle-list-of-the-biggest-charitable-donations-of-2020)

"Oregon, don't be a sucker."

     "If you are sitting at a poker table, and you cannot figure out who the sucker is, then it's you."

     Attributed to Paul Newman, Amarillo Slim, Warren Buffet, and many others.

If Texas gerrymanders--and it does--shouldn't Oregon do so as well?

A category error is a misunderstanding of the essential nature of a thing. The classic example is the sentence "Green ideas sleep." The sentence is grammatical, but nonsense. Greenness describes things, not ideas, and green doesn't sleep. Another category error would be to think you are having a debate when the other side thinks it is a gunfight.

The Supreme Court backed away from "calling balls and strikes" on gerrymandering. Chief Justice Roberts said that even when district boundaries "reasonably seem unjust"  district boundaries are a political matter to be decided in the two political branches of government, not the courts.

There is a "good government," idea of districting, built around the idea that voters should pick their representatives, not representatives picking their voters. The will of the people is expressed by the people they elect. Presumably, if the overall population of a polity with ten representatives is 55% Democratic in orientation and 45% Republican, and if the districts were "fair," then one would expect about six Democrats to get elected.

Some states have laws in place to establish independent non-partisan, non-political commissions to make districting decisions. Some states do not. Texas and Oregon allow the political branches of government to make the district lines.

Oregon had a tradition of bipartisanship. We have elected Democratic and Republican governors and senators. We have had four out of five Democratic U.S. Representatives in a state with two Republican senators, Mark Hatfield and Bob Packwood. Oregon voted for Republican Gerald Ford in 1976 instead of Jimmy Carter, but also for Democrat Mike Dukakis in 1988 instead of George H.W. Bush. Oregon has become more Democratic in recent years. The Oregon vote in the presidential election of 2020 was 56.5% for Biden to 40.1% for Trump, a 16.4% margin.

Texas voted Democratic back in 1968 and 1976 but it is southern, rural, White, and religious--therefore, now Republican. Those demographics are changing. Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth are now the fifth and sixth most populous metropolises in the country. Austin has become hip--the new Brooklyn. They gained two congressional seats because they gained four million people in the past decade. Ninety percent of those new residents are "people of color," i.e. Hispanic, Black, Asian.

Texas has a tradition of aggressive gerrymandering to protect Republican majorities. Texas is still a red state, turning purple, with a Trump-Biden split of 52.2% to 46.4%, a 5.8% margin. The current division of U.S. Representatives from Texas is 25 Republicans to 13 Democrats. 

The Texas Tribune wrote:

https:/texastribune

Republicans constructed the map with incumbent protection in mind — a strategy that focused on bolstering vulnerable GOP seats rather than aggressively adding new seats that could flip from blue to red. However, the map does in fact strengthen Republican positioning overall in Texas, going from 22 to 25 districts that would have voted for Donald Trump in 2020. The number of congressional districts that voted for Joe Biden would have shrunk by one, from 14 to 13.

If Texas Congressional districts were drawn to match the partisan split in the state, Texas would have about two more Republican representatives than Democratic ones, not the ten they have currently. With the two new seats drawn for partisan advantage, the split is intended to go to 25 to 13, a twelve seat advantage.

How can they squeeze out ten "extra" GOP seats?  They have the votes in the Texas legislature and a Republican governor, and they can draw lines where they want. They can, so they will, proudly and openly. 

It would be a category error for Democrats in Oregon to think this is a televised PGA golf tournament in which technical rules of the game are observed closely and applied punctiliously. This isn't a "fair fight" in a civics class. It is a process in which states that have Republican majorities in the legislature and a Republican governor draw districts to maximize their partisan advantage. This isn't theoretical or proscriptive; it is practical and in place now. Texas is doing it and adding to it.

What should Oregon Democrats do? Understand the category. If it better meets their values, then change the future game nationwide with legislation requiring non-partisan district-making everywhere. In the meantime recognize the game they are in. You are at the table. People around you are playing their hands to win. 

Don't be the sucker at the table.

 

Ashli Babbitt, martyr.

Re-writing history:

The Capital invaders were patriots. Ashli Babbitt was a victim. The real insurrection was the election on November 3, not January 6.

Introducing Ashli Babbitt.

While people were crashing through barricades and moving about the Capitol on January 6, Donald Trump was serene. Plan B was working. They were going to convince the Vice President and Congress that "the people" wanted to keep Trump in office. The Capitol rioters were peaceful protesters, and he loved them. He tweeted:

These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!

Then, the next day, a moment of remorse. It played badly on TV. Their actions, he said, were a "heinous attack":

The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy. To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay.

That was then. 

Trump now describes the Capitol rioters as patriots. It was a modern Boston Tea Party, a disorderly event undertaken to bring political justice. This week Trump sent a video to a birthday party memorial done by Ashli Babbitt's family. Ashli Babbitt is the woman shot and killed as she attempted to climb through the broken glass window to enter the House Chamber. Trump said she is a "truly incredible person" and he offers his "unwavering support to her family."

Movements gain energy from martyrs. Ashli Babbitt is offered up to play that role. Fox News hosts treat her as an innocent victim. Demonstrators rally in her defense.

Ashli Babbitt is an Air Force veteran who became deeply involved with pro-Trump activities. As with George Floyd, there are problems with making her a hero. Floyd had a history of domestic violence. Protesters overlooked that; it was irrelevant to the real point of the protests, the way he was killed. 

Ashli Babbitt was part of a crowd that was shoving and hammering on the broken window on a door barricaded with stacked up furniture. Beyond the door was the House Chamber, where House Members were huddled. The scene was loud and disorderly, people shouting "Fuck the Blue." Might she have "listened to reason" if she had better understood that her death was imminent if she did not retreat? Here is the scene:

The video below was new to me. Here is Ashli Babbitt, in a self-filmed video, done while she drove her car. Possibly some Americans will be thrilled by her passion. I consider her dangerously manic. I think efforts to portray Babbitt as a victim will be difficult.

https://youtu.be/XGthb6ZKpjg