A casual fan's take on college football anarchy

Tis the season of what I call the "East Armpit Bowls." These are the contests between (mostly) unheralded college football teams which have winning, but undistinguished, regular season records (think 6-6 or 7-6) often played before Christmas or immediately after in warm tourist spots. This is college football for the unserious and I revel in it. The high class serious Bowls come later. I consider having the space and time to watch the East Armpit batch a great seasonal pleasure; this doesn't prove convenient every year but it sure is a good way to unwind after a election campaign season.

It used to be the distinguishing characteristic of the best of these seasonal bowl games that, in one their one chance of wide TV exposure, both the college in question and its gladiators took the opportunity show their stuff, to strive violently, and sometimes skillfully, to demonstrate their passion for the game. 

(And they still do. Yesterday I saw a contest between Pitt and Toledo in the "GameAbove Sports Bowl" that went to 6 OverTimes and ended with scores in the mid-forties.)

The changing structure of college athletics, the demise of enforced amateurism, and of enforced penury for the "student" athletes, is changing all that, even at the lower levels.

A series of legal rulings have released college football players from what was a sort of indentured servitude. Once recruited and signed by a college's football program, and often its domineering coach, young men were awarded a scholarship and perhaps a small stipend, while losing their freedom. Including the freedom to decide they should play somewhere else. No more. Now college football is shaped by the "transfer portal." Moving between school and football programs is constant, though regulated.

ESPN explains:

At the FBS level [the Bowl stratum of college teams], more than 25% of scholarship players transferred after the 2023 season. Thousands of players becoming available each offseason is forcing programs to adapt and rethink how they construct their rosters to stay competitive.

The NCAA transfer portal is an online database that lists student-athletes who are interested in changing schools. In major college football, players can enter their name in the portal during transfer windows in the winter and spring. For this 2024-25 school year, the winter window is Dec. 9-28 and the spring window is April 16-25.

When a player puts their name in the portal, schools can immediately begin contacting and recruiting them. ... once a player enters the portal, their school can decide to cancel their athletics aid and remove them from the roster. ...When programs go through head-coaching changes, their players are granted an immediate 30-day window during which they can enter the portal. However, players are not allowed to play for multiple teams in one season.

There's no more penalty to the athlete of having to sit out of football for a year when jumping to another college. An increasing number of players jump every year. And football programs can accumulate as many transfer players as they can recruit with no limiting rules. Concurrently, when popular and successful coaches jump to new jobs, the players they've accumulated can jump along with them!

The disruption has been huge -- and it is complicated by court rulings that the college athletic association (NCAA) cannot enforce amateurism (and poverty) on the athletes. A scholarship that comes with an obligation to the football program is not fair compensation for many athletes. Collectives of rich boosters and the colleges themselves can contract with the athletes for the use of their  "names, image, and likeness" (NIL). The best players, usually quarterbacks, can earn serous money.

Many coaches feel they are having to navigate a new world:

"You're not building a program anymore," Coastal Carolina coach Tim Beck told reporters Thursday. "This isn't a program. Each year, you just build a team. You try to find the best team that you can put out there every year, and you know the team is going to get hit by free agency."

Some make the case that the new wild world of unfettered college sports will teach athletes new skills:

The portal process has evolved into a sophisticated professional development opportunity. Athletes gain real-world experience in personal branding, contract negotiation, and business relationships.

Well, maybe. But for many of these young men, this may be a dangerous opportunity. There are a lot of sharks out there, wanting a piece of the new money that comes with the new freedom.

Naturally, with all that money floating about, there are moves to try to organize college football players into something like the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) at the professional level. Some coaches have even encouraged this effort -- a union would simplify and clarify a very murky and potentially exploitative situation.

[Last May University of Alabama Birmingham] football players say their entire roster ... signed up for Athletes.org, making them the first Division I football team to publicly join the players' association. They were introduced to the group by an unexpected source: their head coach.

[Former NFL quarterback] Trent Dilfer gathered his team for a voluntary meeting in mid-April to encourage them to prepare for a future when college athletes might be able to negotiate for a larger share of their sport's revenue.

"They're going to have a seat at the table," Dilfer told ESPN. "I wanted to make sure I helped pour gasoline on something that is going to happen no matter what. I might as well use my influence to help it happen faster on behalf of our players."

A union to protect the majority of players seems like a necessity. 

All this is unsettled, changing every year as colleges struggle to organize themselves to grab the largest possible TV broadcast contracts, winning coaches command ever higher salaries, and players demand their piece of the pie. Football truly is the all-American game.

A cheer for sand in the gears

Especially on the left, it's popular this year to dump on the response to Donald Trump's first ascension to the presidency in 2016.

In the Guardian, someone named Dustin Guastella condemns that "resistance" was "big on spectacle and short on substance." Watch out -- when someone says something lacked substance, you can be pretty sure they wanted that something to mean what they preferred, rather than being content to observe what it meant on its own terms. I kinda think getting millions marching for women, for science, against corruption was inherently a good thing, even if the on-the-ground consequences are not immediately apparent. 

And by the way, ignorance of the magnitude of the obstacles ahead sometimes enables progress in overcoming them.

Or take Michael Schaffer in Politico. He regrets that...

The bulk of those great public protest moments, for instance, were organized around issues of identity: The Women’s March, the mobilization against the Muslim ban, the fury about the Charlottesville protests, the 2020 racial-justice protests. ...

True -- but should insults from Trump and the MAGAs to civilized decency have been unmarked? 

Note also, he misses the vital category of efforts to protect immigrants.

Schaffer goes on to complain that "the resistance" launched mainstream press on a kind of sugar high but failed to save the legacy media, which seems to be true. Aside from the New York Times, legacy media is not longer where information is widely found. And even the Times kowtows to power often.

All this seems ridiculously short sighted to me. Present circumstances are different than 2016. Trump and the GOP actually won a tiny, but real, presidential victory; lots of Americans demonstrated their discontent with what Joe Biden had on offer. That matters.

Lawyers and other professionals will carry on a fight for rule of law. Democrats with any power (and guts) will stick up for a more benign version of both federal and state action on behalf of a better society. But for sure it is going to be a shit show.

But at some point, large groups of people are going to be moved to collective action on behalf of better values. That's what we do. 

Opinion columnist Charles Blow (gift article) who was very vocal during the last round makes some interesting observations:

It may not be clear what issue or person or group will galvanize opposition to Trump’s second term. But any assumption that an opposition won’t rise or any revisionist history that casts resistance as something unique to Democrats would be a misreading of contemporary movements...

... As Democrats look for a way forward, it should not be a surprise if what emerges as Trump’s opposition is ... hostile to the Democratic Party as presently constituted.

... when Trump takes office again, the response of the public to his policies will have sway, and if that response is disapproval, and if it becomes organized and focused, it could be a formidable obstacle to Trump fully realizing his aims.

Note that Tolkien opined this while looking at fascist Europe.

Meanwhile, millions of us are not going to take the repeat of the sociopath's ascendancy lying down. We're going to do the little things that make society more humane. We already are; see #strikeseason.

As events develop, we'll be looking for stress points, for where ordinary people can throw sand in the gears of theft, hatred, and cruelty. We won't know where we'll find them; but these MAGA frauds and blowhards are not some coherent, unstoppable force.

Merry Christmas to all

A confession: Christmas is not my favorite holiday. Yes, I know, I'm not alone in that.

As a secular holiday, the great American consumption fest is, well, sort of gross. Do we really need all this stuff? I know, I'm lucky to have been able to embrace the gospel of "Enough." I buy things to delight myself, so my feelings are a little hypocritical. But there it is.

The 90% celebrating Christmas contrasts with the 68% of Americans who report identifying with a Christian faith, indicating other faiths partake in the holiday. Gallup

As a religious holiday, I get Christmas, sort of. Embracing the holiday as the birth of the Christ child, the eruption of Godself into the humanity, requires the ability to swim comfortably within myth. Myth is important to humans, but not my best mode. I do better floating within consciousness of horrible, terrible, grace-filled, good, and all-too-human realities. Yes, that's Holy Week and Easter.

The Rev. Elizabeth Kaeton offers this for Christmas which captures a bit of how I apprehend the holiday:

Emmanuel means God with us. Think about that for a minute. It really does help to put things into better perspective.

Christmas is about being in the consciousness of where Christ is in life and where he is not.

The question of Christmas is not what to buy for whom or what you might get for Christmas. The question of Christmas is where Christ is and where Christ is not in your life.

And note, please, that now, we are talking about Christ, not Jesus, per se. We are talking about the spirit of the Resurrected Jesus, which is The Messiah, the Christ.

Let's all enjoy this time in our own ways.

It's cold in Ukraine this winter

Here I pass along observations from Kateryna Kibarova, a Ukrainian economist and resident of Bucha, writing in Persuasion. 

If you live in Ukraine today, checking the news is your morning routine. You have to understand what is going on—how can you not?

You have to understand which direction the drones are flying from, whether it is dangerous to go outside. If you want to protect yourself, you have to constantly monitor the situation. When the air raid alarm goes off, immediately everyone’s phones in the office start howling. Everyone has the alerts set up.

The Russians have gotten more sophisticated with the air raids. Now they fly lower, at altitudes that make our air defense system operators fear that interceptions will hit houses or schools or kindergartens. They launch drones along the highways so low that they are almost level with cars, or along riverbeds so that they cannot be tracked and shot down. On the one hand, in Kyiv, the sheer number of drones—sometimes 150 per attack—makes it impossible to intercept them all. On the other hand, the cities closer to the front, like Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv, are simply defenseless. They are in a constant state of fear—without air defenses, facing more complex attacks, tougher and more precise than ours in Kyiv. It’s an impossible situation.

The scariest thing is how cold-blooded you become. You're out there driving to work, and you’re turning up the radio, listening to YAKTAK and Svyatoslav Vakarchuk,1 in the car so you don't hear the suicide drones fly overhead. They’re launching the Shaheds2 in just incredible numbers to deplete our missile defense systems, so that we have no protection. And the Russians are constantly threatening to blow up the nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia. In my bag, next to my documents, I keep a special pill. In case of a nuclear explosion or meltdown, it has to be taken to neutralize the first of the waves of radiation. I carry it everywhere I go.

 ...  Many of my friends have gone abroad with their children. I think it’s the right decision because it’s so dangerous for kids to be here right now. This summer, 200,000 more Ukrainians left the country. Now that the winter blackouts are coming, more will leave.

But probably the strangest and scariest part of this situation is that there is already an abyss between us, between those who live in Ukraine and those who have left. Those who have left—even my friends who come here to see their parents or just to see their friends—aren’t embedded in the context of what is happening here anymore. I’m about ninety percent sure they’re not coming back. They have learned the languages of the countries where they live now; their children are going to school; they themselves have got jobs or are receiving welfare support.

Those of us who remain have become very wounded internally, in our spirit. For example: I feel strange when my girlfriend, who emigrated, comes to visit. She’ll make some ordinary comment and laugh, and I’ll get scared that I no longer have these simple, unburdened feelings. ...

Go read it all. Many Ukrainians seem to think something good could come for them from Donald Trump; I doubt this, but I hope they are right and I am wrong.

For the fourth Sunday in Advent: we work in joyful hope

Bill McKibben is one of the best of us. Diana Butler Bass asked the Methodist environmental activist for his 2024 Advent reflection.

... Even in 2024, there are some things to be looking forward to. For me, the most important is the real possibility that in the next few years, we could be seeing quick end to human beings making their living by setting things on fire, coal, gas, oil, anything else.

Because all of a sudden, we've really figured out how to capture the power of the sun that the good Lord hung 93 million miles up in the sky. That star that we need to make our North Star in the climate fight.

This year, just to give you one example, so many people just went out in the country of Pakistan and installed solar panels on their roofs, on their farms, everywhere else, that the use of diesel fuel dropped 30% in a year. Those are the kind of numbers that help us deal with climate change

And they're because we're using our God-given wits to make the most of the world around us. It won't be easy. It'll require lots of activism and pushing to make it happen. We'll have lots of opportunities to do that. But there are powerful forces afoot in God's world that give us some real chance.

He's not blowing hot air. Quite separately in his own substack, McKibben has described the progress humankind is making on ending our dependence on fossil fuels which pollute the atmosphere and alter the climate. 

Here’s a contestant for the dumbest headline of all time (and no shade on the writer, because They Do Not Write The Headlines). The normally insightful team at Bloomberg produced an article about the remarkable fact that as the Chinese market breaks decisively for EVs, this is driving down demand for gasoline. Instead of heralding this as a potentially mammoth breakthrough in the climate fight, here’s how they titled it: “China’s EV Boom Threatens to Push Gasoline Demand Off a Cliff.”

The more rapid-than-expected uptake of EVs has shifted views among oil forecasters at energy majors, banks and academics in recent months. Unlike in the US and Europe - where peaks in consumption were followed by long plateaus — the drop in demand in the world’s top crude importer is expected to be more pronounced. Brokerage CITIC Futures Co. sees Chinese gasoline consumption dropping by 4% to 5% a year through 2030.

“The future is coming faster in China,” said Ciaran Healy, an oil analyst at the International Energy Agency in Paris. “What we’re seeing now is the medium-term expectations coming ahead of schedule, and that has implications for the shape of Chinese and global demand growth through the rest of the decade.”

For a global oil market, which has come to rely on China as its main growth driver for most of this century, that will erode a major pillar of consumption. The country accounts for almost a fifth of worldwide oil demand, and gasoline makes up about a quarter of that. The prospect of a sharp drop from transport is also coming on top of tepid industrial consumption due to slowing economic growth.  ...

The U.S. may not be at its best. But though we're often a shortsighted, self-centered species, we humans collectively do have an instinct leaning toward trying to leave something for future generations.

It's winter on the Vineyard

What was coming was clear late last night.

And indeed, by morning the white stuff was everywhere.

Ganesh looks almost comfy under a light covering of the white stuff.

I think this day is for staying inside and watching football.

#MerryStrikemas #strikeseason

Just a random sample of the worker activism bursting out all over this Friday before Christmas:

From the Starbucks baristas: 

 

 

From Amazon Teamsters workers who know better than their Trumpist leader ...

The UFW leads mushroom workers in Washington State; I remember a UFW mushroom strike in Gilroy.

Hospitality workers from UniteHERE march outside the Grand Hyatt Hotel in San Francisco:

A message for the season:

An introductory penalty for mass folly

Josh Marshall's observation on the national shit show tickled my curiosity. Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Mike Johnson, and the Republican Congressional majority are giving the American people an early taste for this Christmas of what it is like to flunk governing. Marshall, grounded in history as usual, observes:

Trump has sewn himself into a sack with Elon Musk, a few billion dollars, a cat and a snake, and had the sack tossed into the Tiber [river]. That’s the story here. And it will go on for a while.

I had a dim notion of the ancient execution practice Marshall is referencing here, but it seemed worth a little superficial research. Fortunately, Wikipedia is strong on this one; it's the sort of topic on which some devoted volunteer editor produces extensive, probably reasonably accurate, history.

Apparently the Poena cullei  (Latin, 'penalty of the sack') was a punishment  for parricide, murder of the father, in the Roman-influenced world. A variant was still practiced all the way up until the mid-18th in a few German city states

The punishment consisted of being sewn up in a leather sack, with an assortment of live animals including a dog, snake, monkey, and a chicken or rooster, and then being thrown into water. 

The variation that included a cat seems a late addition; the viper and a chicken seems to have been a more prominent early version. 

Hell of a way to go and possessed of a dramatic cruelty that suits the cruelty of these men who are playing at being a government. 

Meanwhile, somehow, funding for children needing cancer treatment got stripped from the pending legislation. Thanks Elon.

Queers for the win

I have a counterintuitive opinion to share today.

All the visibility currently wreaking suffering on many trans people is going to be the prelude to eventual normalization of the underlying reality that a rigid gender binary simply isn't true of the human species. (Or, actually, many species.)

We're going to get there. Radical as this seems, we know how this works: first they try to kill you, then they kick you, then they meet you, then they let you live off in a corner, eventually you are just you. 

There are heroes along the way whose lives are teaching our society that trans folk exist and thrive. In the last month, I think of Delaware Congresswoman Sarah McBride who, for pure grandstanding spite, has been denied access by Republicans to the Congressional bathroom that agrees with her gender presentation. There is lawyer and advocate Chase Strangio who argued a doomed case for transgender adolescents and their parents before our regressive Supremes this month. 

But perhaps even more important in this process of trans and gender fluidity are the little local victories all over the country, when nonstandard people meet their neighbors and prevail. 

Here's a recent instance by way of The Advocate: 

It didn't pay off to neglect garbage pickup while campaigning on fear.

Craig Stoker, the executive director for Meals on Wheels in Odessa, won his November election for at-large City Council member with 56 percent of the vote — in the same county President-elect Donald Trump won 76 percent of the vote.

Stoker beat Denise Swanner by campaigning on infrastructure — specifically roads and garbage pickup — in contrast to the incumbent, whose campaign sent out mailers comparing the two's opposite positions by listing their only similarity as the fact that they are both in relationships with men.

... The Odessa City Council banned transgender individuals from using bathrooms, locker rooms, changing areas, showers, and similar public facilities that align with their gender identity after a contentious open meeting in October. Those who violate the ban could be convicted of a class C misdemeanor and receive a fine of up to $500, also giving legal standing to alleged victims to sue for damages up to $10,000 in civil court.

... “None of it was truly about me. It was their fear of losing a seat, losing an election, losing the title," Stoker continued. "I came into this campaign with the mindset that I'm going to have to rely on the work I've done in the community and the reputation I've built preceding me. That's all I got.”

When we fight, we win. Even in Texas.

We cannot cower; Mangi does not

Too often, the best Americans -- the people who best embody the aspirations of this terrible, conflicted country -- are the relative newcomers rather than the old timers like me (a Mayflower descendant through and through.)

Adeel Mangi is a distinguished Pakistani-American New Jersey litigator, both in private practice and in pro bono civil rights cases. Joe Biden nominated him to an appellate court judgeship. At confirmation hearings, Mangi endured repeated, ignorant, and abusive interrogations from Republican senators. LawDork explains:

Mangi would have been the nation’s first Muslim American federal appeals court judge, and the attacks against him never stopped. After Republicans questioned him at his confirmation hearing largely with anti-Muslim guilt-by-association attacks, the opposition later expanded to include baseless claims of terrorism and anti-law enforcement connections. ...

Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer cut a deal with the Republican senators to give up on confirming Mangi and other appellate nominees in order to advance lower federal court Biden appointees. This may have been a necessary deal -- it's hard for outsiders to know. I'm not surprised by betrayal of Mangi by Joe Manchin; he's a preening popinjay masquerading for decades as a man of the people.

But it is hard to learn that two Democratic Senators who I worked in Nevada to elect dissented from Mangi's nomination. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen choosing to torpedo Mangi is really bad. 

What follows is my speculation; it is neither kind nor generous. 

Presumably Rosen was running scared in last fall's re-election bid; her status as a visibly Jewish leader in national politics presumably made it seem simple to sign on with the reactionary strain in Jewish politics in a state with few Jews, but some loud and well-funded right wing Jewish advocates. It looked an easy cave to the MAGAs. (As it turned out, she delegitimated her opponent early on and won easily.) Cortez Masto is gunning to rise in the Dem Senate leadership; sticking with and covering for her sister Nevada Senator made for a cheap date. So Mangi becomes a scalp claimed by Republican Islamophobes. The two Senators' choices sicken me.

Mangi has written a heartfelt public letter denouncing the process he, and by extension his faith, were put through. 

In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, spoke at the inauguration of a mosque in Washington, D.C. He said: “And I should like to assure you, my Islamic friends, that under the American Constitution, under American tradition, and in American hearts, this Center, this place of worship, is just as welcome as could be a similar edifice of any other religion. Indeed, America would fight with her whole strength for your right to have here your own church and worship according to your own conscience. This concept is indeed a part of America, and without that concept we would be something else than what we are.”... 

It was that vision of America that led me, 25 years ago, to make it my home. ... 

When my nomination then came before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I was prepared to answer any questions about my qualifications, philosophy, or legal issues. I received none.

Instead, I was asked questions about Israel, whether I supported Hamas, and whether I celebrated the anniversary of 9-11. Even more revealing, however, was the tone. The underlying premise appeared to be that because I am Muslim, surely I support terrorism and celebrate 9-11. When I made clear that all these claims are false — that I condemn the Hamas attacks and all forms of terrorism, and indeed that it was my city that was attacked on 9-11 — the next Republican Senators up just repeated their performative outrage. There were children in the audience. ...

... advertisements were run deeming me an antisemite, a radical, and a terrorist sympathizer. Horrifying images were published with the Hamas flag substituted for my eyes or interspersing my face with footage of the twin towers on fire. And all of this, even while major Jewish organizations across the country condemned these attacks, ranging from the National Council of Jewish Women to the Anti-Defamation League, and over a dozen more. One of the largest Jewish groups put it this way: “Adeel Mangi, was questioned aggressively on thin pretext about his views on Israel, terrorism, and antisemitism, turning these serious issues into a tool of partisan attack. … American Jewish Committee (AJC) has joined several U.S. Supreme Court briefs led by Mangi and find him to be an able jurist, a person of integrity, champion of pluralism, and adversary of discrimination against any group.”

...What can explain all of this? One commentator recounted my professional accomplishments and then observed: “But he also successfully fought efforts by two New Jersey communities to prevent the construction of mosques. He has served on the board of directors of the Muslim Bar Association and Muslims for Progressive Values. Clearly, he’s both an accomplished attorney and a proud representative of his religion. That’s what his Republican critics can’t tolerate. They will never accept someone who is so prominently associated with Islam.” 

Mangi is even less sparing of Rosen and Cortez Masto then I am. (And that's not very.)

Two allied Senators from a state far from the Third Circuit announced their opposition ostensibly based on the attacks claiming I am against law enforcement. I will not assume the worst possible motivation for their embrace of this attack. But to me that leaves two possibilities: that these Senators lack the wisdom to discern the truth, which exposes a catastrophic lack of judgment; or they used my nomination to court conservative voters in an election year, which exposes a catastrophic lack of principle. One reportedly made the decision based on fear of an attack ad—and apparently not for the first time.

He concludes:

Our country faces an incoming tsunami of bigotry, hatred, and discrimination. It targets Muslims, Arabs, Jews, Black people, the LGBTQ+ community, and many others. And it always pretends to be something other than what it is. These forces are fueled not only by their proponents, but equally by the collaboration and silence of the spineless. They can be defeated only by those who lead voters with courage, not those who sacrifice principles for votes. But courage can be found outside of politics. 

American Muslims are part of this nation’s fabric and will not cower. This campaign was intended to make it intolerable for Muslims proud of their identity to serve this nation. It will fail. Our Constitution forbids religious tests for any Office of the United States and American Muslims will cherish that fundamental American value, even if others apply it only selectively. And let me be clear: I will always be immensely proud of my faith as well as my pro bono legal work to challenge both denials of freedom of worship and the alleged killing of an incarcerated Black man. I have battled for justice, even if it meant there would be none for me.

... To return to President Eisenhower’s words, Americans must now look at the story of this nomination, and ask themselves: is this who we are now? For my children, I hope America one day lives up to President Eisenhower’s promise, even if not today. For my part, I entered this nomination process as a proud American and a proud Muslim. I exit it the same way, unbowed.

This is the spirit the country will need in the difficult times ahead.

Media consumption diet 2024

Long time Senior Legal Columnist for the LA Times' Op-Ed section Harry Litman quit in disgust when the newspaper's owner, healthcare entrepreneur billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, vetoed an endorsement of Kamala Harris. Litman now has some cogent thoughts on ABC's $15 million capitulation to Donald Trump on the matter of whether the incoming president is a rapist. 

I talked to several high-powered defamation defense lawyers about this point. They all affirmed that under the longstanding practice in the NY Times v. Sullivan era, it would have been near inconceivable for ABC to settle but for the prospect of Trump’s return to power. A prominent news organization would sooner have switched to all-cartoon programming than agree to a settlement on such favorable terms. 

This is clearly where we are going in Trump 2.0 -- so-called "mainstream media" can be expected to bend the knee to the Donald. Sometimes this will be glaringly obvious. More often we'll be treated to omissions and sane-washing. The President-elect is a misogynist, a con man, a sociopath, an emotional toddler, and utterly unserious in Ms Harris's memorable formulation. But the big guns aren't going to say any of that; it might hurt their owner's bottom line.

So what's a consumer of news to do? I consume neither TikTok nor TV; I'm a unicorn. I read and I listen and sometimes I debate. That seems enough.

Actually, I had already adjusted my consumption before we came into the second Trump era. Yes, I've quit the Washington Post and the LA Times (or will have when my subs runs out.)

I still pay for the New York Times. It's frequently infuriating and will almost certainly get much worse, but it currently is reputed to employ somewhere around 7 percent of all working journalists in the country. Some great stuff slips through the commercial sieve. 

For balance, I read the US edition of The Guardian from Britain. This is particularly important for anything outside the USofA. They don't always get us Yanks -- but then we don't always get them.

When something has happened and trusted sources seem weak, I start with AP News.

I subscribe to the San Francisco Chronicle which is mighty thin, but has had moments under the current editorial regime.

ProPublica does real reporting on under-covered news unearthed by real reporters.

Sources I trust to be what they say they are -- not that I'm always in agreement -- include Talking Points Memo, The Bulwark, The Atlantic, The New Republic, the New Yorker, Mother Jones ...

And then there are the substacks. Just as blogs once did, these appeal to the actual way I consume news -- by prioritizing known authors. I read the NY Times by byline; why shouldn't I get the benefit of individual thoughts from individual people I find interesting, provocative, or informative? So I do, voluminously.

Like most people on the liberal side of things, I've quit Xitter. Yes, I'm on BlueSky (@janinsanfran.bsky.social) Kind of fun. Not sure it will stay that way or continue useful.

• • •

Looking over this collection, it seems kind of boring. And there are days when it is.

For all the breadth of sources here, I'm determined not to follow every twist and feint thrown out by our fascist-in-chief. 

As of now I know I'll be following as many developments as I can stomach from the war on immigrants and also the attempt to shove the gender-genie (trans, LGBQ+, and other noncomforming folks) back under wraps. And then there will be the times I go chasing off after new news ...

A great excuse for how I while away Sunday afternoons

Unionized professional football players supporting hospitality workers. Maybe they actually do realize that stadium workers and concessionaires deserve some cut of the money that slooshes around their sport. Also hotel workers. Most of these football guys know that, however well they are doing today, they aren't on the side of the bosses. Great to see.

When workers fight, we all win.

Wisdom for our moment

 

“We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist” James Baldwin

[image or embed]

— Literary Pearls (@literarypearls.bsky.social) December 14, 2024 at 8:14 AM

Half the country lost a very close election to a grifting sociopath who aims to overthrow the Constitution for his own gain. The natural response from the losing half is to throw blame around widely. In particular, some Democrats do what Democrats always do, which is insist if only we could downplay the needs of the non-white, non-male, non-gender standard fraction of our coalition, every thing would have been fine. It's always the same bullshit.

When we remember we need each other, we have laid the basis for coming back and winning.

Getting better all the time

I really didn't know this. I thought Republican anti-immigrant agitation was just racist bigotry.

I still think that is what's going on, but I didn't know how large an influx the country has enjoyed in the last decade.

All these willing workers and entrepreneurial strivers are making us a smarter, better country.

As throughout our history, it will take awhile for American society to digest the newcomers. But, even in the age of Republican stupidity, we're still big and rich and spacious and adaptable and we'll be fine.

Source: NYT gift article. It might be possible to have some quibbles about the numbers, because a lot of the people in these figures are keeping their heads down. David Kurtz has summarized:

    The pace of immigration from 2021-23 was faster than at any previous period in U.S. history, including the peak of Ellis Island.

    As a share of total U.S. population, the average annual change in the foreign-born population went up faster than any period since at least the 1850s.

    The percentage of the U.S. population born in another country reached a new high of 15.2 percent in 2023. The previous high was 14.8 percent in 1890.

For Californians, there's a local angle to stay aware of: according to CalMatters: 

Roughly 3.3 million Californians live in mixed-status households, including 1 in 5 children under 18.

Rage, even if defensible, is not enough

Thinking about the shooting of United Healthcare exec Brian Thompson has sent me off down an intellectual rabbit hole which might (or might not) be interesting to someone besides me.

Let me start by admitting that my instinctive response to the murder was "Dude had it coming." For-profit health insurance is an abomination. No matter how nice these individuals may be to dogs and children, the people who run it have chosen cash over human decency. "Serious" opinionaters like Zeynep Tufekci or the Washington Post editorial board tried to cool such passions.

A good Facebook friend put my more considered sentiments well:

If you shoot a business executive because you don't like the way capitalism operates, that's an act of terrorism.

I totally understand the current schadenfreude. I have to talk myself out of it.

I understand that pacifism is unnatural and a truly depressing number of people scorn it.

Still, just because I say, "Every day without guillotines surprises me," doesn't mean I'm honing a blade.

Okay, my better angels know better and I inconsistently aspire to envision and build a nonviolent society and life. I have not personally been much victimized by the health insurance racket. But the sheer obscenity of killing sick people to make a buck while bloviating about mission and purpose hits me deep.

That said, I'm thrown back into thinking about another era when robber barons needed a lot of security to survive contact with the people they were grinding down and throwing away for their profits. In particular, this apparently ideologically-muddled Thompson murder made me think about Alexander Berkman, the anarchist who attempted to shoot and then knife the Carnegie Steel baron Henry Clay Frick in 1892. Labor historian Erik Loomis reminds about what Berkman had against Frick.

Let’s start with a basic fact: Henry Clay Frick deserved to be murdered.

This was a truly awful human being responsible for the deaths of a whole lot of people. First, there was his culpability in the Johnstown Flood, where the negligence of he and his friends led to over 2200 dead people.

Admittedly, he didn’t order their killings, but he also just didn’t care whether they lived or died.

Second, there was his actions at Homestead. To review this famous incident, Frick was the second in command to Andrew Carnegie at Carnegie Steel. Frick hated unions. I mean, all Gilded Age capitalists hated unions but Frick truly despised them.

He once personally evicted a worker from company housing by picking him up and throwing him in a creek. The world would have been better off without Henry Clay Frick in it. But that doesn’t excuse Berkman’s actions.

... [Berkman] didn’t know any Homestead workers and ... didn’t consult with any Homestead workers.

Berkman was an ideological anarchist of a late 19th century type, acting on a pseudo-political creed that celebrated violence as a prelude to revolution and a sort of eschaton. That creed, in its incoherence, was not so different from the manifestos of the Unabomber and apparently suspect Luigi Mangione.

Because Frick survived, Berkman also survived, convicted of the assault and imprisoned for 14 years in Western Penitentiary of Pennsylvania, in Pittsburgh. After his release, he published  Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist.  

This book is a sort of coming of age story, the record of Berkman's overcoming his highly theoretical idealism, yet finding a more mature identity and stance toward the injustice of Gilded Age capitalism.

He recounts the sheer dreariness and hardship of prison which almost drove him to suicide. 

He felt distain and disgust toward the other poor and broken men who were his fellow prisoners. They weren't the class heroes of his imagination. They too were victims of the system, but he couldn't identify with them.

"They are not of my world," he writes. "I would aid them", he says, being "duty bound to the victims of social injustice. But I cannot be friends with them ... they touch no chord in my heart." Quoted in Wikipedia

Growing up meant becoming able to appreciate and interact with these fellow flawed humans as something more than abstract victims of the class struggle. He had plenty of time to accomplish this before winning early release. He got out in time to be caught up in America's World War I panic about homefront immigrant subversives and being deported to the new Soviet Russia. He and his partner Emma Goldman didn't find anything liberatory about that experience either.

Berkman's memoir is a classic of political evolution. I highly recommend it.

Movie recommendation

Not my usual terrain, but a splendid antidote to the pain in this odd interregnum we're living, between electoral rejection of the good and righteous and anticipated cruelties. This, available for rental if not in theaters, might cheer you up as it did me.

I suppose the Roman Catholic Church may not like it. Nor will the MAGAs. But it's proof of my strong belief that, even when the winds seem to be blowing a different way, that our strange, divided culture continues to evolve toward broader understanding and greater compassion.

Over Thanksgiving, we watched this with family for whom many of its themes were wildly foreign, yet all of whom were pulled in and moved. Give it a chance if intrigued.

Blog on break for a few days

Some combination of system updates and overloads are giving the old laptop fits. Think I'll take a break here for a couple of days and try to restore order.

How long will they ride hide?

Welcome to our latest Gilded Age. The Trump regime implants its oligarchs. 

 

As of December 6, the plutocrats are being put in place. Does the wider society have the imagination and boldness to unseat them? 

The next installment of the American adventure ... A corrupt oligarchy is not stable; things could get worse or better. Here we go.

Saturday scenes

So the human went out for a walk. It's shotgun deer hunting season, so I'm wearing my bright colors and sticking to the road sides. So what do I see?

 

A little further down the road ...

 

Yet further ...

 

Here's the last ...

 

Burma Shave! for anyone old enough to remember that sort of highway advertising. I remember squealing with delight on car trips with my parents on encountering those ads. 

 

I have no idea what someone on the Vineyard has against chickens. Did someone attempt to make a chicken an indoor pet?

Friday cat blogging

Mio's a happy fellow -- and so is Allan!

Janeway watches from a table. Note the instrument of torture next to her. She needs frequent attention with those claw clippers. She is not entirely cooperative, but keeping claws trimmed is self-protection for her humans.

From South Korea to the home front

The Verge Editor Sarah Jeong just happened to be in Seoul, out drinking, when the president declared martial law in a coup attempt this week. This wasn't a reporting assignment, but how could a journalist miss the history that was unfolding?

She rushed to the protests, catching the flavor of an instinctive, momentarily successful, popular uprising, combining high tech youth in this super-modern country with old time progressive campaigners who remembered overthrowing a dictator to install democracy. It's fascinating ... here are some excerpts:

... the presence of political protests is not unusual in South Korea: this is a nation that lionizes the protesters who opposed the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and teaches young schoolchildren to revere the 1919 protests against the Japanese colonial occupation. But it’s not just rote opposition politics — even relatively conservative newspapers are criticizing Yoon, and his popularity is in the toilet. It’s against this backdrop that Yoon Suk Yeol made the late-night surprise announcement that the country was now under martial law, in order to stop “shameless pro-North anti-state forces that plunder the freedom and happiness of our people.” All political activities — including those of the National Assembly, the parliamentary body that can legally block his martial law order — were suspended.

[So she took a train to where the action was, outside the National Assembly.] ... The sudden vibe shift starts with a middle-aged auntie sitting on a platform bench waiting for the other train who shouts “Fighting!” at the crowd that packs the escalator and the stairs. Another woman in a motorized wheelchair yells political slogans as she zips ahead to the exit, fist in the air.

When I emerge into the freezing night air, the first thing I see is military uniforms. My heart races and I take out my phone, before realizing that the two young men in full-body tactical camo look frightened. The soldiers are surrounded by furious ahjussis pushing and shoving and cursing at them. [Ahjussis are older working and middle class men who may well remember their student protests that won Korean democracy, however stodgy they may now appear.]

... Before I can even really process it, I can no longer see soldiers on the street. There is still camouflage here and there, but these are a smattering of protesters wearing it head-to-toe, possibly vestiges of their own time doing mandatory military service. Hordes of riot police with shields and neon green vests are marching through the streets. The protesters are ignoring them.

An unidentified man gets on a microphone and begins narrating updates; he starts by asking the crowd to surround him and protect him from having the mic taken by the police. The protesters oblige in an orderly fashion. 

It’s freezing out, and people are mostly bundled up in puffer coats. I wonder if anyone else can tell how drunk I am; I wonder, also, how drunk other people are. On television, politicians who sprinted to the National Assembly to stop the fall of democracy are blinking slowly and slurring their words. They appear to have been enjoying their Tuesday night in very much the same fashion I had been. 

At 1:02AM, the man on the microphone announces that the Assembly has voted to block the declaration of martial law; a heartfelt cheer goes through the crowd. The loudspeakers begin to play some truly awful music, a tinny version of a cheesy protest song that sounds like it was recorded by literal children. The crowd sings along; the ahjussis seem to know all the words by heart. I look up the lyrics later; they roughly translate to: The Republic of Korea is a democratic republic. The power of the Republic of Korea stems from its people.

The chants switch to “Arrest Yoon Suk Yeol!” and “The people are victorious!” The crowd presses against the fences that barricade them from the National Assembly building. Most of them are on their phones, following the events happening inside; some of the older men have their phones pressed against their ears, listening to news broadcasts. 

One kid with an open beer slurs, “Death to Yoon Suk Yeol!” and is ignored. People are standing on top of tall decorative planters, on top of walls, on top of piles of unassembled police barricades that have been abandoned. The people standing on the walls are a mix of young men and ahjussis; I am starting to see selfie sticks and GoPros and livestreamers enter the crowd. An ahjussi yells at great length about how much he loves his friends for coming out with him to protest.

... When I finally catch a cab, the gray-haired driver asks me if I was at the protests. When I answer in the affirmative, he thanks me. I am embarrassed; my Korean is not good enough to explain to him that I am a journalist, that I am an American, that I am supposed to be an impartial observer of history. The ahjussi goes on to tell me he’s always hated Yoon and complains about being called a commie for saying that Yoon was going to ruin the country. ...

I think about the GoPros and livestreamers; I think about the kids asking to have their picture taken, so they can tell their families that they were there on that important day. Politics is being intermediated so smoothly through technology that it has become almost unnoticeable, embedded into the fabric of life for the young and the old alike. ... 

Yoon tried to take power with soldiers, police, and helicopters — to take the country back to the 1980s. But these aren’t the 1980s. He should have seized cell service first.

Go read it all.

My friend  Christine Ahn is mobilizing for Korean democracy still. This event is in Honolulu.

Like many in my age cohort, young and active between 1965 and 1975, I can identify with those people in those crowds. I know what it is to surround a building while facing police, to make loud demands. We did that sort of thing a lot back in the day. (I kept doing it many years longer, but that's another story.) Looking forward to the Trump regime, I think many of my age group wonder whether we could do it again. 

The outpouring of young people to work and canvass for the election just past is reassuring. We didn't win, but it wasn't for lack of volunteers who cared. I don't think Trump's narrow victory will keep them from continuing to care and to turn out for their hopeful vision of the country if they have to.

•  •  •

Jay Kuo, multi-talented human rights lawyer and digital whiz, has some takes on what South Korean events might mean in our context.

Presidents like Yoon or Trump do not feel constrained by laws or even common sense or decency. To stop them from seizing complete power, it takes people willing to mobilize in the streets, press willing to defy censorship orders, unions willing to call for general strikes, legislators ready to risk their safety, and a military prepared to stand down in order to stop a determined takeover of the government by a dictator.

The chances are not negligible that Trump will attempt such a decree at some point during his tenure. After all, he has already said he wants to be a Day One dictator, and he has toyed in the past with invoking the Insurrection Act, thwarted only by cooler heads who will not be present this second time around.

... Nor does the U.S. Constitution or any federal law provide a clear mechanism for undoing martial law once decreed, other than to seek a court order to overturn it. But based on recent rulings, if the final decision rests with this Supreme Court, the fate of the Republic is shaky at best.

That means there likely is no quick way out of an unlawful or pretextual decree by Trump under the Insurrection Act, or some other kind of emergency powers declaration, under which he assumes full control of the government and can silence all dissent. In light of the South Korean example, civic leaders, union officials, legislators and ordinary citizens must begin to ask an important question: What will they actually do if Trump seeks to end our democracy by decree? How far would they go and how would they try to stop him?

This is no longer some abstract thought experiment. Through these events in South Korea, we have now been duly warned of the risks of autocratic takeover. The future of our democracy may very well depend on whether we can match the kind of response we just witnessed. We must take the South Koreans’ complete rejection of military dictatorship as an inspiring example and pledge to defend democracy with equal passion, resolve and action.

I'm inspired again and I'm with Kuo.

News to celebrate

The state of Wisconsin continues to demonstrate how organized Americans struggle to get their country back when the popular will is derailed by an authoritarian faction in power. Former Republican Governor Scott Walker thought he'd killed off the state's public service unions way back in 2011, a vital element of a gerrymandering and broadly repressive project that sought to move the closely divided state permanently into GOP control. And for some years, it looked as if he'd succeeded. 

But Wisconsin unions and Wisconsin Democrats never gave up.

From the Associated Press: 

Unions score major win in Wisconsin with court ruling restoring collective bargaining rights

MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin public worker and teachers unions scored a major legal victory Monday with a ruling that restores collective bargaining rights they lost under a 2011 state law that sparked weeks of protests and made the state the center of the national battle over union rights.

That law, known as Act 10, effectively ended the ability of most public employees to bargain for wage increases and other issues, and forced them to pay more for health insurance and retirement benefits.

Under the ruling by Dane County Circuit Judge Jacob Frost, all public sector workers who lost their collective bargaining power would have it restored to what was in place prior to 2011. They would be treated the same as the police, firefighter and other public safety unions that were exempted under the law.

Of course one court ruling doesn't mean the struggle is over. There will be an appeal to the Wisconsin state Supreme Court. But diligent grass roots organizing has won, at the ballot box, a court less friendly to Republican arguments. The justices have overturned the Republican gerrymander of the state legislature; over several electoral cycles, Democrats finally have a chance to make their policy preferences heard at the state house. 

Last year, Democrats elected a pro-choice justice to the state's highest court, changing the balance there. Another judicial election comes along on April 1. If the Dems can win that one, the unions will once again be able to work in a state that was synonymous with enlightened liberal government before the Koch brothers-funded Walker seized the reins. 

When we fight, we win. See WisDems for more. 

Photo is from a Bay Area solidarity rally in 2011.

Big trouble ahead

The presidential election just past was a very close contest. Oh sure, Trump wants to overwhelm us with his claim that he won by a landslide. That's just authoritarian bombast. Because he won all the projected swing states, his win looks huge, especially on a map. And across the country, he did actually dig out a one percent plus actual majority. But if only 115,000 voters distributed across Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin had gone the other way, we'd have a President Harris.

Since the election was so close, everyone gets to have their own plausible theory of what happened. I'm sticking with mine: COVID put us in a nasty mood and Trump was able to capitalize on this. (That's the only thing he knows how to do: turn venomous emotions into profit for himself.) I read the deluge of explanations for Harris' loss, but remain conscious that even vast quantities of data -- and there is more every day -- can't definitively account for the narrow outcome. Eventually many pundits and commentators will settle on some theory -- and then historians and political scientists will come up with their alternative takes. The 2024 election lends itself to interpretation and reinterpretation.

All that is introduction to sharing excerpts from the leftish economic historian Adam Tooze's take on our American predicament. Although I am not sure I buy it completely, I find his Olympian draft of contemporary history quite intriguing. 

... The essential fact about US politics in the current moment remains that the two party system anchored in the ancient constitution divides the country almost half and half. Those cleavages run through society including through the working-class and the business interest. ...

... If the class analytic of workers v. owners is not helpful in making sense of Trump’s victory, the idea of a revolt against the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) may be more so.

The PMC was a term coined in 1977 by Barbara and John Ehrenreich. The term designated the rising mass of college-educated white collar professional and managerial workers whose ambiguous role in modern Western politics the Ehrenreich’s were trying to explain.

In the 1960s and 1970s many professional and managerial people contributed to social movements that were clearly progressive. Furthermore, for the vast majority of folks who count themselves as progressive this alignment has a deep logic all the way down to the present day. 

As Gabe Winant, one of the sharpest observers of the contemporary scene, noted back in 2019 in N+1:

For all the cynicism and compromises that professional pretensions engender, professional labor  [i.e. the labor of the PMC, per Adam Tooze] does carry a utopian seed—in the impulse to create and disseminate knowledge, to care for the sick, or to defend the rights and dignity of the democratic subject.

And yet what is also undeniable is that in the late 1970s and 1980s large and powerful parts of the PMC broke with any association with classic, working-class. left-wing politics, rooted in the trade union movement. Instead, they provided their support to the agenda of neoliberalism. Despite its endless critiques of the state and its rhetoric about markets, actually existing neoliberalism was the latest iteration of PMC politics. Neoliberalism was a managerialism.

.. The outcome in electoral terms in the US from the 1990s onwards was an increasing alignment of the Democrats with College-educated voters, an alignment that was particularly strong for women and minorities. Figures like the Clintons and the Obamas personify this coalition.

By 2008 this corporate-PMC synthesis made a large and tempting target for populisms of the left and the right. These populisms pitted “the people” against an elite bloc that was more often than not personified, not by oligarchs or the owners of the means of production, but by members of the PMC. Perversely, the much remarked upon resentment of working-class voters, particularly men, triggered by new patterns of inequality and disadvantage, vented itself in the first instance on elementary school teachers and social workers, often women, who found themselves grouped with “beltway liberals” in the crosshairs of right-wing populist vitriol.

... Trump and Brexit in 2016 were early breakthroughs for the new anti-PMC politics.

The Trump shock of 2016 caused soul-searching in the Democratic party elite. The principal wager of the Biden administration was an effort to react to the first wave of anti-PMC revolt by widening the Democratic electoral coalition so as to attract trade unionists and working-class Americans back into the fold. In many ways this was ironic. The fact that the American working-class is increasingly feminized and diverse is no conceit of woke PMC ideology. Under Biden the party chased the image of the blue-collar production worker, almost as hard as they would eventually chase the respectable centrist Republican.

In 2020 when COVID demonstrated the harsh and dysfunctional reality of governance under Trump, the Democrats won back a majority. Though not for the anti-vaxxers, but for a majority of the population, COVID was a “PMC moment”. Nurses, doctors and lab scientists mattered, along with logistics experts and people who could get things moving again. It was not merely coincidental that COVID handed a PMC-dominated Democratic party a surprise victory. It was not for nothing that it was the Democratic majority in Congress that carried the US under Republican Presidents, both through the crisis of 2008 and that of 2020.

In 2024 with the electorate wanting a faster return to normality - resentments concentrated in the superheated discussion of “inflation” - what came back to the fore was the anti-PMC coalition that Trump rallies like no politician before him....

... What has become obvious with the Clinton-Trump-Biden-Harris-Trump sequence is that the Democratic formula is itself increasingly a driver of crisis. It is not capable of providing reliable electoral wins. And when it does have power, nostalgia for the bygone era of hegemony and the reflexes of US globalism - a quintessential product of the 20th-century PMC - tend to accelerate crisis in the form of aggressive claims to US leadership and a resurgent neoconservative revisionism. ...

In the first Trump administration, expressive gestures of rupture with the status quo were tempered by vested interests and the functional imperatives of the moment. The administration then inherited an economy with plenty of slack and a relatively calm geopolitical environment. Until 2020 few complex trade-offs were called for. When COVID hit, the Trump administration and the Republicans in Congress rapidly decomposed. How the Trump administration will actually look remains to be seen, but the environment today is far more complex and will test the anti-PMC politics of the Trump administration far more seriously.

Looks like big trouble ahead, and that's aside from the Christian nationalist and cult-of-Trump fascist aspirations of the Orange Man's coalition.