We have no choice; this is the job

Anand Gopal's New Yorker article about how Syrians overthrew their long time dictator Bashir Assad in 2012 and how the new democracy degenerated over time into despair has haunted me. Here's Gopal and what I find myself thinking about (emphasis added): 

Eight months of painstaking political work—building coalitions, establishing civic front organizations, circulating propaganda, well-timed theatre—had won ISIS a decisive following. Revolutionaries had braved bullets and prison to overthrow the dictatorship and build a fledgling democracy. In the beginning, they had the allegiance of the masses, who marched through the alleyways and plazas chanting in praise of freedom. But now people spoke only of the prices at the grocer, the cost of rent. The city had exhausted itself, and people hoped not for liberation but deliverance.

Syria is hardly the only example of this phenomenon. Persistent economic inequality has long sounded democracy’s death knell. In the latter years of the Roman Republic, landowners amassed unprecedented riches while plebeians floundered, spawning resentment that infected many corners of society. In the context of this soaring inequality—that is, of ordinary people’s loss of power—there appeared, for the first time, populist politicians like Julius Caesar, who promised reforms while accruing dangerous degrees of power themselves. Other élites fiercely resisted the populist surge but refused to make meaningful concessions to address the citizenry’s core grievances. Ultimately, civil war led to the fall of the Republic and the rise of dictatorship.

In 1848, a popular uprising in France overthrew the monarchy, demanding universal manhood suffrage and wealth redistribution. The revolution established government-owned workshops that employed the poor, but were bitterly opposed by the wealthy. A conservative government shut them down, prompting bloody riots. Eventually, the masses voted for Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, a nephew of the famed emperor, in a landslide. He styled himself as all things to all people—a paragon of order to the right, a champion of the poor to the left. As soon as he was elected, he cracked down on the freedoms of press and assembly, and later dissolved parliament. Before long, he declared himself emperor. ...

... the tyrannical impulse of authoritarian populists is the same across the world. In one context, the authoritarian is railing against non-Muslims; in another it is immigrants. No matter the trope, the forms of mobilization are identical: those who feel powerless and hopeless, who are embittered by the rapacious greed of élites controlling their democracy, will begin to question the idea of democracy. If tyranny is where democracies go to die, inequality is the cause of death. 

The current regime in Washington is flaunting its oligarchic nature and tyrannical pretensions. What else to make of Trump's gilded ballroom and his proposed triumphal arch? Should the people ever take our government back, his edifices should be torn down and ground to landfill to be used to fight waters rising due to climate warming. 

What to do about the physical markers of Trumpism is easy to envision. How to rebuild a responsible, responsive democracy is harder, but that's the project.

Waiting game

Our ballots for the California June primary have arrived -- and I'm not going to do a damn thing with mine for the next few weeks. 

It's not my usual practice to delay voting. Usually I deposit the ballot in our nearby drop box right away and sigh with relief, or at least resignation.

But given the chance that our stupid "top two" primary voting system means we could get stuck with two Republicans as the only choices for governor if they come out ahead of the gaggle of Dems running, I have to wait and probably go with the Dem who seems most likely to make the November ballot. Even if that individual is not my top choice of governor. 

The combination of the state's electorate having done away with party primaries for this dumb system and the indiscipline of the Democratic Party in throwing up so many candidates leaves me in this absurd position. Let me offer applause to Betty Yee who had the decency to pull out when her campaign didn't catch fire. Let me denounce Mat Mahan who jumped in at the last minute with a ton of billionaire money, making this mess worse. Forget that guy!

If this were a time when I could vote my true choice, I'd vote for Katie Porter. That woman is enough a policy wonk to be able to be a good governor, after a learning curve. I don't care if she is sometimes abrasive; that's often the rap on very sharp women.

But responsible citizenship may force me to vote for whichever Dem looks able to be one of the top two when we get to June. This silly election system robs me and many Californians of their chance to support their first choice of candidate for governor. That's an improvement?

May Day 2026 -- International Workers Day

May Day here in San Francisco was marked around the Bay by what seemed a lot of protest events.

In the morning, my candidate to fill the Congressional seat that the ageless Nancy Pelosi is finally leaving joined airport workers from the Service Employees International Union in blocking an airport  road way and was arrested. Connie Chan stands up for workers. The San Francisco Chronicle was there and reported:

“San Francisco airport is the people’s airport,” Chan told supporters before her arrest. “We know our workers deserve fair pay, a fair contract, health care and benefits. We’re demanding that the workers get that benefits and fair pay right now.”

Later in the day, protesters from among unionized workers and activist groups gathered in Civic Center plaza.

 

He wanted to let folks know what it is all about ...

Workers know what we are up against.

The tech sector is not unionized and their bosses sure don't want them getting ides. But brave workers turned out anyway.

Friends from UniteHERE, the hotel and restaurant workers union, were in the house.

There are an awful lot of ways to say to the bosses ENOUGH!

 

Eventually the Civic Center crowd marched off to join the next rally to be held in Embarcadero Plaza at the end of the day. 

 

I admit it -- I'd had enough for one day and skipped this one. Would May Day have felt more powerful if the various participants had not spread themselves all around the Bay? I don't know. We're learning ... the movement is learning ...

On enforced ignorance of history

It should probably not come as a surprise that this very cogent denunciation of the Republican Supreme Court's murder of a pillar of racial justice under law should come from a writer whose experience is in studying and teaching the American Civil War to school groups and other ordinary citizens.

Kevin M. Levin pulls no punches about the Callais decision: 

Jim Crow Didn't Die. It Went to Law School. 

... The Voting Rights Act was written in blood following years of sacrifice and bloodshed. It came directly after Selma. After the clubs and the fire hoses were unleashed on African Americans trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965.

Alabama police assault John Lewis, Selma, Alabama, 1965

It came after centuries during which Black Americans were systematically oppressed and for decades following the end of Reconstruction, when they were legally stripped of the franchise. The Act was the hard-won answer to a hard, ugly question: will this country actually mean what it says?

For sixty years, imperfectly but meaningfully, it tried to. Today, that answer is being rolled back. 

But this ruling does not exist in isolation. It sits inside a broader campaign of manipulation and erasure.

Look at the push to return Confederate monuments to public property—statues of men who took up arms against the United States to preserve the institution of slavery and white supremacy. The argument made for these monuments is almost always framed as “heritage” or “history.” But heritage is a choice. 

We choose what to honor. Returning these statues to pedestals of prominence is not a neutral act of preservation. It is a statement about whose history matters, and whose suffering can be brushed aside in the name of regional pride.

Look at the Trump administration’s assault on how Black history is taught and remembered. Federal pressure on universities and schools, the gutting of diversity programs, the reframing of civil rights history as divisive “ideology” rather than documented fact. These are not random culture-war skirmishes. They are part of a systematic effort to make the full truth of American history inaccessible, uncomfortable, or simply illegal to teach.

It’s a cliche, but true. You cannot understand where you are going if you are not allowed to honestly reckon with where you have been.

Self serving, exploitative lies about the full humanity of all people, and enshrining those lies in an economic system and laws, got us a Civil War once. It seems all too likely that the philosopher George Santayana's aphorism will be proved out again: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Little as the MAGAs might understand this, an important way to avert more civil conflict is to fight back against their attempt to erase accurate history. Oddly enough, truthful history can make possible a path forward.

Rural sacrifice zones courtesy of MAGA

It seems to be accurate to point out that much of the rural United States is being transformed into "Sacrifice Zones." The term is usually associated with devastating environmental exploitation which renders a place uninhabitable -- but can also include economic development which the local population doesn't support. A definition:

A sacrifice zone or sacrifice area is a geographic area that has been permanently changed by heavy environmental alterations (usually to a negative degree) or economic disinvestment, often through locally unwanted land use (LULU). 

Following the news of Trump's America, I find myself coming across two stories that are seldom told in the same frame, but which seem to me closely analogous. .

• All over the country, rural people a learning that some tech behemoth wants to transform or build what looks like a warehouse, but is actually an energy and water sucking data center. The locals might welcome more opportunity for economic activity, but they smell a rat. Jess Piper tells one story from rural Missouri: 

... I opened my local paper, The Maryville Forum, a few days back, and saw an article on a new AI data center that looks like it has been in the works for a while. I am sure you know that if anyone stays on top of the news, it’s me. If anyone regularly reads and subscribes and pays for news, it’s me.

And I didn’t know anything about a data center coming to my own county.

I had no idea, and by the time I did have an idea, it looked as if the “planning” part of the AI data center deal is well past the planning stage. It looks like some developers came in and met with county officials without making noise. It also looks like there may already have been at least one NDA signed with the data center developers, and that just doesn’t sit right with me. Why would anyone need to sign a non-disclosure agreement with a developer?

... What a ripoff, and for what? The data center is only projecting 100-130 jobs, and I am not sure I believe that number. There has been no transparency on what kind of jobs or how long they would last.

My god…I feel like we are being sold a pile of shit, and they aren’t even bothering to wrap it with a bow... 

Read the whole story, told in Jess's inimitable voice. 

• Meanwhile, wherever they see a likely target, ICE/DHS is scooping up rural warehouse spaces in which to lock up immigrants they want to deport, all to meet Trump and Stephen Miller's quest to Make America White Again. 

Neighbors don't much like the idea of having a warehouse/concentration camp nearby. Even Republicans don't want these uses in their town. Bolt reports from Roxbury, New Jersey:

On Christmas Eve, residents of Roxbury, New Jersey, a township 50 miles west of Manhattan, learned from a Washington Post article that the Department of Homeland Security had plans to purchase a vacant warehouse on the outskirts of town and convert it into an ICE detention facility. The news was part of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s larger plan to buy up warehouses across the country to house 92,600 new detention beds for expediting deportations, a scheme acting ICE director Todd Lyons likened to “[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.” 

By mid-January, Roxbury’s Township Council, an elected body of seven people, all Republicans, passed a resolution affirming that it “unequivocally opposes” modifying town warehouses for ICE use. Roxbury Mayor Shawn Potillo, who forms part of the council, stated during the vote that his approval of the resolution did not mean that he opposes the country’s immigration laws. 

The resolution was merely symbolic; it wouldn’t actually stop ICE from buying the warehouse in town and turning it into a detention center....

... The fight against the facility has brought together an unlikely coalition of immigrant rights advocates and town leadership who have said they support the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda but do not want to host an ICE facility. Small towns across the U.S. caught in clashes with DHS over warehouse conversions have turned to similar arguments in a bid to stop the projects. 

“The town council is unsurprisingly caught in a very difficult position, because they are having to fight efforts from the Trump administration, despite them being very supportive in general, of Donald Trump and the Republicans in power,” William Angus, the co-founder of immigrant advocacy organization Project No Ice North Jersey Alliance, or Project NINJA, told Bolts. ...

 The story goes on to explain the projected effect of turning the warehouse into a camp:

... The facility has just four toilets and is approved to supply 12,000 gallons of water each day. But increasing the capacity for 1,500 people would require roughly 187,500 gallons each day and add more than fifteen times the amount of sewage currently processed by the facility, according to the lawsuit. 

Despite DHS needing approval from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the Highlands Council to complete the project, Spinelli said that the agency has not filed plans for changing the water system. The review of the site could happen quickly, he explained, but there would likely be new legal challenges to the final decision filed by the losing side that would stretch on for years.  ...

The Roxbury facility is not alone in facing challenges from neighbors. All over the country, ICE concentration camps are meeting resistance from rural people. The New York Times [gift article] reports on an array of challenges as rural communities resist the unexpected role the Trump administration has assigned to them: "Sacrifice Zone for MAGA bigotry."

Now they want to test the water to control women

If you live in a blue state -- and especially in a blue city -- it's easy to forget that a part of the MAGA authoritarian project is to rob women of our bodily autonomy.

If you live somewhere where the Supreme Court's 2022 Dobbs decision empowered state governments to outlaw abortion and the people have not been able to stop anti-abortion pols from implementing the ban, this will probably not surprise you.

Jessica Valenti who keeps track of the anti-abortion fanatics at Abortion, Every Day reports a new assault on women's freedoms. The Trumped-up EPA Tells States to Test the Water for Birth Control and Abortion Pills.

... After years of anti-abortion pressure, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recommended that states test their drinking water for abortion medication and birth control, putting the drugs on a federal list of potential “contaminants.”

The move clears the way for Republicans to restrict abortion and contraception under the guise of protecting the environment—including humiliating regulations that could force women to bag up their pregnancy tissue as medical waste. And at a moment when pregnancy-related arrests are rising and states are moving to punish abortion patients, it marks a dangerous acceleration toward a full-blown reproductive surveillance state.

 ... Anti-abortion activists claim that when women use medication to end their pregnancies, remnants of the drug poison the environment and water supply. They also say that pregnancy tissue is getting into the drinking water, and that Americans are all “drinking abortions.”

As you can probably guess, there is no truth to any of this. ...

She explains that, yes, the scientific studies have been done.

We metabolize abortion and birth control pills like any other medication, and only trace amounts leave our bodies at all. Using anti-abortion logic, every single drug people take—from antidepressants to Viagra—would be a “pollutant.”  

This, like all the right's anti-abortion and anti-contraception hysteria, is about controlling women. We've had enough of this BS!

AI for the love of lucre

Yesterday I ran across a polling finding that stopped me cold. According to the Pew Research Center: 

About four-in-ten U.S. adults believe humanity is ‘living in the end times’.

Apparently the sense that some kind of radical break is imminent is very powerful among us. (For the record, for myself, I doubt this. History records societies and the species evolving over time, not through genuine disjunctions. We're stuck in time, and not going to escape.)

But the notion of a coming apocalypse does seem to have become the norm among our tech overlords. And their vision seems a combination of vicious and silly. But what would you expect from a bunch of emotionally crippled white men unleashed by their wealth?

Timothy Noah is a New Republic staff writer who investigates one of the core questions of this time:

How the Tech World Turned Evil 

... The talk may be of a literal or figurative God, but what’s really at stake—as usual—is Mammon. Tech lords’ ferocious opposition to government interference reflects a collective financial investment in AI that’s quite literally unprecedented within the private sector. In February, The Wall Street Journal reported that the $670 billion to be spent this year developing AI by Meta (Facebook), Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet (Google) represents 2.1 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. 

That’s slightly more than what the United States spent to build the railroads in the 1850s (2 percent of GDP), and considerably more than the amount spent to build the Interstate highway system (0.4 percent) or to put a man on the moon (0.2 percent). The only national investment the Journal could identify that represented a larger slice of GDP was the Louisiana Purchase (3 percent), which nearly doubled the size of the United States. That was in 1803, when GDP was a puny $488 million, not today’s $31 trillion. And unlike these earlier infrastructure projects, this year’s $670 billion investment in AI draws entirely on private-sector funds.

There's a good deal of Greek mythology about what happens when humans think we are as gods. If their educations were a little wider, the bros might have heard of Icarus. 

Peter Theil of Palantir has made himself the spokesman for tech hubris. Noah goes on: 

... Palantir, of which Thiel is co-founder and board chair, is the most obviously sinister of these firms, because, among other things, it supplies surveillance technology to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which, according to one contract award, provides “increased efficiency in deportation logistics, minimizing time and resource expenditure.” A 2020 Amnesty International report concluded that “there is a high risk that Palantir is contributing to serious human rights violations of migrants and asylum-seekers by the U.S. government.” To this a Palantir representative replied, “We will not allow our software to be used for immoral or illegal purposes.” 

But at a February videoconference with shareholders, Palantir’s T-shirted, wild-haired chief executive Alex Karp could scarcely contain his glee as he said, “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world, and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them” (italics mine). By early March, Palantir was doing just that, picking bombing targets in the Iran war and seeing its stock climb 15 percent.

... Tech’s final descent into unambiguous villainy was the result of three events during Joe Biden’s presidency: Lina Khan’s appointment as Federal Trade Commission chair in 2021; the advent of ChatGPT in 2022; and the election of President Donald Trump in 2024. Amazon and Meta lobbied against Khan’s nomination because she sought to reinvigorate antitrust enforcement, and after she was confirmed, both companies sought unsuccessfully for Khan to be recused from cases concerning them. 

ChatGPT’s introduction in November 2022 set off the arms race among Google, Meta, Microsoft, and other tech companies that resulted in tech throwing $670 billion this year at AI. And Trump, three days after his second inauguration, issued an executive order reversing what he later called “my predecessor’s attempt to paralyze this industry.” 

Trump also eased up on antitrust enforcement and within a year drove away the Justice Department’s antitrust chief, Gail Slater, not long after Hewlett-Packard and Juniper Networks hired two Trump allies to go over her head and settle an antitrust lawsuit on favorable terms.

Seems pretty evil to me, though evil rich guys are a dime a dozen in history. There's not as much novelty here as they like to think. Noah insists that human beings need to do an intervention to stop these boys and their toys.

... to succeed, regulating AI will require standing up to a class of plutocrats more fanatically opposed to public accountability than any in history. The robber barons of the Gilded Age have gone down in history as the epitome of private avarice, but at least they believed in democracy (albeit as something to buy or sell). 

The tech lords, who match the robber barons’ greed, are weakly committed to democracy at best—and at worst, they’re millenarian nutcases who would dispense with government altogether. Suggest we slow the march to Singularity, and they’ll peg you as a literal or figurative devil. They’ve invested too much cash in their digital Second Coming to think otherwise.

Taming the tech lords won’t be a battle on the scale of Armageddon. But the stakes will surely be higher than we’re able right now to know. Democrats, and indeed all humankind, should prepare for a long and bitter fight, because this enemy is at least as crazy as it is rich—and it’s really, really rich. 

If our societies can't figure out how to intervene, I suspect material reality will. Climate apocalypse seems more likely than the bros' Singularity. 

On lockdown ... behind the plastic gates

Suppose you need a bottle of dish soap. You can buy one at the Walgreens around the corner ... if you can find a clerk to unlock the plastic case where the item is confined. Good luck with that. You push the call button and sometimes a harried employee appears to unlock the soap. And sometimes no one responds. Usually you give up.

Walgreens has taught you to take your business elsewhere. (I get such items at Costco where the quantities are excessive, but you can put what you need in your cart without plastic hindrance.)

The plastic barriers are supposed to deter shop lifters. Makes you envision an old person who who slips a bar of soap into a purse or a kid who pockets a candy bar. I'm sure that happens all the time, but that's not the significant shoplifting problem. That's not what inspired retailers to adopt the plastic lockdown.

Where I live, organized retail theft at scale was happening. I've seen swarms of young males sweep products into laundry bags and run out the door. Those commodities will soon appear on blankets in front of street sellers around the corner. I doubt either the thieves or the street sellers are making much, but it's an economy of sorts. 

I sympathize with Walgreens needing to break the cycle to thrive. I sympathize also with people who get by in the informal economy, much of it extra-legal.

But plastic land isn't working. The only part of the Walgreens store that is crowded is the line for the pharmacy. 

Shopping without plastic barriers is becoming a luxury experience here in the inner city.

• • •

Another kind of plastic gate now collects fares and allows entrance and exit to the regional underground rail system, BART. We used to see groups of young people who jumped the waist high barriers at the fare stations. But no more. In my experience, the gates work reasonably smoothly and are not particularly daunting even to San Francisco's many tourists. 

I hope the gates have improved the BART experience; riders are way down since folks started working from home during the pandemic. This thing was designed to carry the region into downtown San Francisco. Now the system is gaining riders for Saturday events, though business traffic is still sluggish -- as is revenue.

Transit activists in San Francisco and also the five other BART counties are collecting signatures for November 2026 ballot measures to put the public systems on a firmer footing. This is something I can support.  Please do sign on!

Friday cat blogging

 

Today, let's give Mio pride of place. Here he is, being magnificent, while over looking the room.

Here he is, bathing actively. Perhaps he'd prefer not to be observed. But when you are Mio-sized, you don't worry about being interrupted. Always those eyes!

Popularity discontents

This morning while dipping into the endless stream of punditry, this from Obama's communications guy Dan Pfeiffer caught my eye: 

The best way to protect democracy is to punch fascism in the mouth. ... If there’s one lesson of the Trump era, it’s that moral victories aren’t really victories at all.

This definitely makes me sad. Pfeiffer's boss, Barack Obama, the very election of a Black president (who was rather good at the job), was a moral victory. We need more of those, more demonstrations of the positive potential of the American story.

But Pfeiffer is also certainly correct. Trumpism needs a punch in the kisser. 

Polling guru G. Elliot Morris has been investigating Democratic discontent. His national findings: 

Democrats are not unpopular. They’re unsatisfying.

What all of this suggests is that Democrats do not have the problem many political narratives say they do. The party’s core weakness is not that voters see it as elitist or too extreme; it is that too many voters, including their own, see Democratic politicians as unmoored, passive, and ineffective. Republicans, by contrast, still project the kind of strength and clarity that voters often reward — though their extremism is a huge drag on votes.

More Americans see the GOP as extreme, out of touch, and worthy of intense dislike. That is why Democrats can be underwater on their favorability and still in a stronger electoral position overall.

His research leads him to conclude that Dems currently really do have strong chances going into the 2026 election, despite how little most of us thrill to their candidates.

The California gubernatorial race seems to have all the worst features of this moment.