Friday cat blogging

They seem to think somebody turned up the heat here in San Francisco. I think so too.

Cesar Chavez revisited

In Dolores Huerta's interview about the rapes she endured by her United Farm Workers co-founder Cesar Chavez, she explains:

"I just didn’t want to hurt the movement.”

She goes on:

“Cesar believed in promoting women as leadership, not at the policy level, but at the work level,” she said. It was, she suggested, a reflection of something deeper. “Women are not seen as human beings. We’re just seen as sex objects. I think it’s an illness.” 

And there it is. The New York Times expose [gift link] of Chavez's pedophilia, as well of his many infidelities to his long suffering wife Helen is a period piece. Read it; it captures a great deal about what one of the significant progressive heroes and movements of the 1960s and '70s was really like. 

But Chavez makes such an arresting villain that the Times piece obscures a truth of those times: pretty much all the men who saw themselves as heroes of history-defining movements -- for poor people, for peace, for justice -- blithely saw women as subordinate workers and sex objects, just as Dolores Huerta describes. 

There's a reason that Second Wave feminism was born among women inside the movements of the 1960s. Long days working in struggles for justice alongside men who could not be trusted to see and value our brains and humanity was bound to spark resistance.

And, moreover, it should be no surprise that a vibrant lesbian feminism also sprung up and came to include many movement women who might not have organized their sex lives around women if they hadn't gotten tired of being seen as conquests for movement men. Some, like me, found a natural home as lesbians; for others, bi-sexuality was a protest and an experiment, a liberating option.

Chavez was not unique in his time in his root-and-branch sexism and in being a sexual predator when opportunity came his way. 

• • •

Chavez was however unique in being a larger-than-life movement visionary who both moved mountains, metaphorically, and, very materially, stumbled over stones along the wayside. 

I worked for the United Farm Workers twice, briefly, first on the grape boycott in Boston in 1970-1971 and again in New York City in 1972. Later, when located in California, I reported on the UFW for the national Catholic Worker newspaper  and various alternative media through much of the 1970s and volunteered on the San Mateo County boycott. I was never anywhere near the center of the union/movement, just a peripheral staffer, supporter and observer.  

But that background gave me credibility on reporting trips to California's fields, talking with dozens of staffers and workers about their experiences with the union. When I visited strike sites or attended a mass rally, I could usually find a slightly disappointed staffer who was about to leave the union and could share the joys and contradictions that were life in "La Causa." Very little of those conversations found its way directly into my reporting, but I hope they informed a fairly honest picture of the struggle of the workers.

Years later, on this blog, when the LA Times was publishing one of its periodic exposés about the UFW, I wrote this:  

... in the 1960s and 70s, Cesar Chavez' United Farm Workers Union was a stirring, seething locus of social creativity, bound together by its founder's charisma. It was a multi-headed beast, providing structure and meaning to very different tendencies and constituencies.

• Most obviously, it was a labor union, organizing to win better wages and working conditions for agricultural workers.

• True to Chavez's roots in community organizing, it engaged whole communities with the struggle of the farmworkers for justice, especially settled Latinos who had escaped the migrant labor stream and put down roots in rural California.

• It ran a network of social services, clinics, a credit union, a gas station and more.

• It pioneered a creative tactic, the grape boycott, that carried what could have been a local California struggle to cities across the country and world, engaging literally millions with the well-being of farmworkers.

• The farmworkers' movement served as a catalyst and rallying point for the struggle for Brown people's civil rights in whole Southwest.

• It was also a beacon for Latino and Chicano cultural nationalism as a formerly muzzled segment of the population articulated its identity.

• The UFW attracted a stream of earnest, mostly white, mostly middle class, progressive people who learned class consciousness and organizing skills from the farmworkers and went on to work in labor, politics and communities all over the country.

• The movement incorporated the workers' Roman Catholic spirituality, marching to victory behind the Virgin of Guadalupe.

• Chavez also urged a philosophy of self-sacrificial non-violence, drawing on many traditions including those of Gandhi and Jesus.

• And I'm sure that other veterans of the movement could and would suggest more things the UFW was to its many adherents.

Nobody straddled all these tendencies but Cesar Chavez himself. Not surprisingly, as the movement grew, tensions between devoted workers who emphasized different parts of this complex package within the movement only increased. 

I still think that was a pretty accurate catalogue of characteristics of the classic period of the UFW, though looking back now, I'm very aware that once agricultural organizing stalled in the 1970s, Cesar led the union's leaders into his idiosyncratic explorations, in particular the "attack therapy" which was the Synanon Game. 

• • •

Contra what the Times article implies, in its peak years, the UFW was not in support of broad immigration reform or migrant laborers. The backbone of Chavez's union and movement was the class of settled Spanish-speaking Californians in the Central Valley who had long moved beyond their migrant roots. Their children were upwardly mobile and now constitute much of the political leadership of the state.

• • •

I chose the photo of Cesar here because it places him beside his admired role model, the Indian visionary and anti-colonial campaigner Mohandas Gandhi. Late in life, the Indian who had famously taken a vow of celibacy slept alongside young girls "to test, or further test, his conquest of sexual desire". As Dolores says, "I think it is an illness."

Say it loud: Trump is failing

I'm going to outsource this to that stalwart Democratic agitator Simon Rosenberg:

That Trump is no longer mentally competent isn’t really a question. For to understand how we got to where we are as a country you have to start by accepting that he is mad, and that he believes that he has the power to bend reality to his match his own imagined and fantastical world. 

... In many ways the central project of Trumpism is this daily construction and defense of this imagined world so dear to him; of maintaining the fiction of Oz; of the pretending that indeed the orange Emperor has no clothes. The “play’s the thing” Shakespeare once wrote. And so it is with the Trump regime. Every day.

The problem with all of this for Dear Leader, of course, is there is an objective world out there that he cannot bend to his malevolent will. People and nations have agency. Facts are stubborn things. ...

Trumpism has failed as a project because at its core it is mad, dismissive of truth and fact and reason, an imagined world at war with the real one. And the real one keeps winning, and Trump - and all of us - keep losing.

And now Trump has started a war he cannot escape that is alienating every possible friend and partner on the globe. And he wants $200 billion of taxpayer money for his murderous folly. Rosenberg outlines what Congress should demand before considering authorizing a penny:

Trump has becoming increasingly unstable, as has his regime. His utterances each day about the war are outrageously incoherent. ... we must make very clear what it will take to get our vote for this funding. Here’s my working list:

• End This New Gulf War, And Trump’s Global Imperial Ambitions

• Make Clear We Support Ukraine and Europe, Not Russia

• Roll Back The New, Illegal Tariffs

• Rescind The Trump Tax Cuts, Claw Back The Extra ICE Funding

• Make The US A Clean Energy Superpower, Fight For True Energy Independence, And Lower Energy Prices For The American People

• Keep Fighting To Rein In ICE, End Mass Deportation

• End the War on Science, Health and Public Health

• Demand the Resignations of Hegseth, Bondi, Kennedy

 Yes, I know, Simon, this is too much. We can’t ask for all that. My point is that something like this should be our agenda now; we have to stop playing defense, being tactical, and start going on offense, being far more strategic. Trump and his regime have failed, and it has begun to crack up. ...

That's a good list of demands; we need to begin to have one. I think Rosenberg is right; the time has come to leave tactical asks behind and demand it all. Dems will be bashed for "not supporting the troops .." if they balk on the $200 billion down posit for war, but we've been down that road before. No money for this illegal war!

Let's all see each other on Saturday, March 28 at NO KINGS.  And beyond.

The people are saying NO to Trump's concentration camps

Yesterday's post chronicled the brutal history of concentration camps. But it made scarcely a mention of resistance to these facilities in societies where authoritarians have used them to crush designated enemies and those who resist.

We're not all the way there yet. For the time being, the broad resistance to Trump's detention camps should inspire us all. In jurisdictions across the country, people reject having these facilities as part of their landscape. As of today, the ICE warehouse purchase tracker, Project Salt Box, shows that DHS has bought 11 properties intended to become detention camps -- and seen 11 other acquisitions canceled because of citizen agitation.

In early February, NBC News via AP reported:

The fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti during immigration enforcement actions in Minnesota have amplified an already intense spotlight on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, increasing scrutiny of its plans for new detention sites.

A proposed ICE facility just north of Richmond, Virginia, drew hundreds of people last week to a tense public hearing of the Hanover County Board of Supervisors.

"You want what's happening in Minnesota to go down in our own backyard? Build that detention center here, and that's exactly what will happen," resident Kimberly Matthews told county officials.

As a prospective ICE detention site became public, elected officials in Kansas City, Missouri, scrambled to pass an ordinance aimed at blocking it. And mayors in Oklahoma City and Salt Lake City — after raising concerns about building permits — announced last week that property owners won't be selling or leasing their facilities for immigration detention.

Meanwhile, legislatures in several Democratic-led states pressed forward with bills aimed at blocking or discouraging ICE facilities. A New Mexico measure targets local government agreements to detain immigrants for ICE. A novel California proposal seeks to nudge companies running ICE facilities out of the state by imposing a 50% tax on their proceeds.

Journalist Scott Dworkin passes along what happened in one town in rural George when ICE tried to set up a camp:

GEORGIA TOWN SLAMS THE DOOR ON ICE PRISONS

In the nearby towns of Social Circle and Oakwood, ICE prisons landed with no warning. DHS quietly bought the buildings, signed the deeds, and told local leaders only after the fact. Mayor Michael Owens saw the “calamity and unrest” that followed—and vowed Mableton wouldn’t be next.

Mayor Michael Owens

“They are stood up much faster and a lot of times without taking into account the burden that’s going to be placed on a local community,” he said.

The Mableton City Council unanimously approved a moratorium on detention centers within city limits—effective through December 31, 2028.

State Rep. Terry Alexis Cummings backed the vote. Her statement was read into the record at the council meeting: “Our community should not be a site for expanding a system that too often operates with limited transparency and accountability. Every person deserves to be treated with dignity and our community should stand on the side of justice and human rights.”

Trump's camps are largely being built in rural areas where people voted for Trump. But lots of locals don't want to be known as where ICE put its immigrant concentration camp. The objectors won't win all these skirmishes. But every eruption of resistance makes it slower and more difficult for the Trump regime's fascist project to succeed. 

Sand in the gears, folks! Detention Watch Network has a great guide to taking action against detention camps.

Concentration camp nation?

Is Donald Trump's gift to these disUnited States to build a national system of concentration camps? Is that what the massive new system of DHS detention warehouses ostensibly to hold victims of his immigrant cleansing policies portends? We're not used to thinking of ourselves as a concentration camp country, but perhaps we should. 

Journalist Andrea Pitzer wrote a massive book that came out in 2017 that surveys the spread of these camps around the world through the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps argues that internment camps are a novel feature of modernity, peculiar to our time. Should we be surprised that the backward looking Trump regime is recreating one of the recent pasts' worst features? 

Pitzer defines her subject:

... The history of concentration camps circles from Cuba [under Spanish rule in 1896] around the world and back [to the USofA's Guantanamo], visiting six continents and nearly every country along the way. Camps have been in existence continuously somewhere on the globe for more than a hundred years. Barracks and barbed wire remain their most familiar symbols, but a camp is defined more by its detainees than by any physical feature. A concentration camp exists wherever a government holds groups of civilians outside the normal legal process -- sometimes to segregate people considered foreigners or outsiders, sometimes to punish.

If prisons are meant for suspects convicted of crimes after a trial, a concentration camp holds those who, most often, had no real trial at all. ... Concentration camps house civilians rather than that combatants -- though at many points, from World War I to Guantanamo, camp administrators have not always made an effort to distinguish between the two. Detainees are typically held because of their racial, cultural, religious, or political identity, not because of any prosecutable offense -- though some states have remedied this flaw by making legal existence next to impossible. Which is not to say that all detainees are innocent of criminal actions against the government in any given system; rather, the innocent and the guilty alike may be swept up without distinction or recourse.

... detention is announced as preventative, to keep a suspect group from committing potential future crimes. If mass civilian detention without trial is the defining feature of a camp, then it becomes possible to look at a whole host of categories of camps, many of which have interrelated histories over time. ... Political philosopher Hannah Arendt described concentration camps as divided into Purgatory, Hades, and Hell, moving from the netherland of internment to the labor camps of the [Soviet] Gulag and [to] Nazi death factories. But nearly all concentration camps share one feature: they extract people from one area to house them somewhere else.

It sounds like a simple concept, but both elements are distinct and important. Camps require the removal of a population from a society with all its accompanying rights, relationships, connections to humanity. This exclusion is followed by an involuntary assignment to some lesser condition or place, generally detention with other undesirables under armed guard. ...

... Concentration camps are at heart a modern phenomenon and belong in the company of the atomic bomb as one of the few advanced innovations in violence. Just as other kinds of bombs existed before nuclear devices were developed, concentration camps also had precursors, but nonetheless represented a deliberate escalation and transformation of previous tactics. In both cases, observers realized that some dangerous genie was being released from a bottle, but in neither instance would it have been possible to imagine everything that would follow. 

The book, as befits its subtitle, is a historical-geographical tour of horrors, each with its peculiar national characteristics. Pitzer credits Spanish generals' doomed effort to hold on to their Cuban colony with inventing the modern form; within a few short years, the Americans who had thrown the Spaniards out of Cuba were using a similar system of civil internment to attempt to subjugate our newly acquired Philippine colony. Soon the British were replicating such camps during their imperial war against Boer Afrikaners in South Africa; nearby, German imperial authorities in Southwest Africa came close to exterminating the Herero people by forcing them into detention.

World War I saw internment of foreigners implemented widely by belligerent countries across Europe. And after that war and through the troubled decades that followed came the most widely known detention facilities -- Nazi extermination factories and the Soviet Gulag -- which usually we think of when we hear "concentration camps."

Across the globe, the long series of post-1945 decolonization struggles and internal wars across Asia in China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and the Malay peninsula led to further camps run by several authorities. Concentration camps of a sort went alongside wars of liberation.

Africa was not spared. Both Algeria and Kenya were the sites of murderous concentration camps during their independence battles.

And so, Pitzer comes back the Americas, focusing on "dirty wars" on citizens who opposed right wing dictatorships in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s. She highlights the United States' experiment with internment of Japanese-origin residents and citizens during WWII and goes on to our Guantanamo camp created after 9/11.

Pitzer is a journalist, not an historian. She recounts these horrors through individual personal stories. The result is both horrifying and very partial. But just maybe, this mode is the only way we can begin to imagine the cruelties (and infrequent eruptions of kindness) that some people are willing to inflict on others under enabling circumstances. 

She is well aware what her method adds and erases.  

It is tempting to see the prisoners' stories braided through this book as somehow representative. In many ways, they are not. Most crucially, these are by and large stories of those who survived. In addition, the prisoners mentioned here are, on the whole, more educated, more politically active, and more likely to have been tied to networks of people inclined to help them. They often got administrative jobs, medicine from friends, or special favors.

While many concentration camps did hold intellectuals, political figures, writers, and business owners, the majority of those sent to camps across the century were poor, illiterate, or apolitical. They are the least likely people to have a chance to tell their stories, and perhaps also the least likely to end up having their stories told by someone else.The loss of their accounts necessarily makes any panoramic picture of the camps incomplete. 

This book is literally weighty -- 400 plus pages. Fortunately, Pitzer offered a solid summary of her research in this six minute video interview which some may find more approachable. The interviewers are weird -- one ignorant, one pretentious -- but Pitzer knows her stuff and applies her knowledge to our present circumstances. 

 • • •

In case you wondered as I did, the title phrase "One Long Night" comes from an epigraph she takes from Holocaust survivor and memoirist Elie Wiesel in Night:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.

There are still a few good guys.

When the Supremes decided that the Orange Toddler's tariffs from last spring were illegal, the question arose whether what or who might get a refund. Many companies had raised prices hoping to make up for the hit to their bottom line from paying the duties on imported goods. Many others held tight on prices, hoping a court would free them from the levies, as it did, while nonetheless paying up in the interim. That is, as usual, Trump had left American businesses with a mess.

So now what happens to the money the Trump regime has been ordered to pay to the importers?

Popular Information looked into this:  

The federal government could now be responsible for issuing “refunds worth $175 billion,” according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model.

... While it seems likely that companies will eventually get refunds from Trump’s tariffs, much of the cost was borne by consumers. Many companies publicly stated that they were raising prices due to the tariffs. But now that the tariffs are being refunded, only a few companies have pledged to refund customers or offer discounts.

Costco is one of the few companies that has promised to pass some of the refunded tariff money back to customers.

“As we’ve done in the past, when legal challenges have recovered charges passed on in some form to our members, our commitment will be to find the best way to return this value to our members,” Costco CEO Ron Vachris said during an earnings call last week. Vachris said that the company would return recovered tariff money to customers “through lower prices and better values,” but noted that “it is not yet clear what the process will be, what refunds, if any, will be received, and when this will happen.” Costco executives also said during the call that the company took steps to absorb some of the increased cost caused by tariffs instead of passing it on to customers.

In November, Costco sued the Trump administration over its tariff policies and sought refunds.

FedEx has also pledged to refund a portion of any tariff money it receives to customers. “Our intent is straightforward: if refunds are issued to FedEx, we will issue refunds to the shippers and consumers who originally bore those charges,” FedEx said in a statement on its website. “When that will happen and the exact process for requesting and issuing refunds will depend in part on future guidance from the government and the court.”

It seems worth remembering who treated their customers right ...

Listen to the old timers ...

According the Johns Hopkins Measles Tracker the US has seen 1513 measles cases this year as of March 13. (Yes, I looked on a university site; dare I trust whatever stats the federal government is offering any longer? Don't know.)

I am old enough to have vivid memories of a time when measles and chickenpox were simply considered hazards of childhood. In the 1950s, most of us got the diseases; most of us came through fine. But not everyone. 

There was a little kid who lived down the street. She was several years younger, had a sister my age who was someone I played with. The family was not exactly close to mine, but a pack of us kids rioted around in each other's houses. I can still remember that family's entrance hall and front room. And then, the younger sister got sick and we were kept out of that house. Several weeks went by and we were told that the little one had died. Her illness had begun with measles; she suffered complications which I now think probably included encephalitis. And then she was gone.

The kid pack never went back to that house and I don't remember the older sister ever playing with us again.

Naturally I have no trouble believing that vaccines which prevent measles, mumps and rubella (chickenpox) and later polio (that scourge too crippled several girls in my school) are among 20th century America's best inventions.

So I was heartened to read Jonathan Cohn's shout-out to a creative intervention. 

Grandparents for Vaccines recruits elders who lived the pre-vaccine era to tell their stories.

The goal of Grandparents for Vaccines is to push back against [the anti-vaccine] movement, while getting Americans thinking about what’s at stake if the trends continue. And while that’s an awful lot to ask from a group of seniors, most of them political novices still learning the finer points of social media, they have two powerful weapons for making their case: the unique moral authority of grandparents, and insights that can come only from people who have seen these scourges up close. ...

[Founder Arthur] Lavin likens the effort to what Mothers Against Drunk Driving did in the 1980s and ’90s. ...

Judging by the offerings on YouTube, the project needs more new immigrants and people of color. But if we have to do public health for ourselves without federal authorities we can trust, who better to testify than grandparents?

A psychotic war made by two psychopaths

Uri Misgav is an Israeli journalist, publicist, lecturer, teacher and director, formerly with Haaretz, the closest thing Israel has to a mainstream opposition newspaper. 

Haaretz gave him oped ed space to denounce Prime Minister Netanyahu's current war. 

I wish to write my opinion about the war. No filters. It's important to do this because, heaven forbid, a missile will hit our rented apartment in Jaffa or the shelter in the assisted living facility next door where we run to during the incessant sirens. I'm using the free platform provided me by Haaretz, which has been under frontal assault by the government in recent years. It is also my right to make my civic voice heard in a democratic country (still, ostensibly).

I think that this is a psychotic war. One that Israel and the United States entered led by two psychopaths. Vainglorious, narcissistic, disconnected. They're up to their necks in political and legal trouble. They head the two most fundamentalist and anti-democratic governments in the history of their countries. And they have the chutzpah to preach democracy elsewhere.

It gets worse.

At the moment, it's a deluxe war, based on bombing from an open air corridor high above, with almost no enemy antiaircraft or jets. Or bombing by American cruise missiles, which sometimes hit desalination plants or a girls school. The cannon fodder are Israelis and people in the Gulf states. 

Also the Iranian people, whom U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are encouraging to replace the ayatollahs' regime even as they are being savagely bombed and hit by black rain after oil depots were attacked. 

And one million Lebanese who were again ordered to evacuate their homes, or were simply unfortunate enough to live in Beirut. Everything is supposed to give rise to "changing the face of the Middle East for generations."

... I have a name for this war: the roaring psychos.

 

Mishav, for all his desperation at finding himself huddling in shelters as a consequence of the vicious stupidity of a government he despises, writes obliviously, ignoring the two million Israeli Arab citizens and the additional two and a half million residents of the occupied Palestinian West Bank. These people largely do not enjoy the same high class bomb shelters.

In the Israeli/Palestinian +972 Magazine the journalist Meron Rappaport puts the psychopaths' war in a  perspective that is both closer to home and wider at the same moment. 

Questioner: ... Where do you see the Palestinians in Israel, in the West Bank, in Gaza, and the Palestinian refugees fitting in Israel’s or Netanyahu’s plan for the region and for Iran? 

Rappaport: In two words: not here. I think the genocide and the partial ethnic cleansing in Gaza set a model that this is possible. Or at least I think Netanyahu and his allies think it’s possible, even if we, Israel, failed to do the total ethnic cleansing. 

There are still two million Palestinians in Gaza. Yes, they live in tents and in broken houses, but they are there. But I think it opened up the appetite to do this, that this is possible, that the world will not oppose, that there will be no internal opposition to that. 

Of course we see that in the West Bank, it’s still the semi-official policy in the West Bank. It’s not the official policy — the ethnic cleansing. In Italian there is ufficiale and there is ufficioso. Ufficiale is official and ufficioso is half-official. There is this policy in the West Bank of half-official policy of ethnic cleansing. Still, you have to see the big picture, it does not still succeed fully or even partially. You know, for the communities hit in the Jordan Valley or Masafer Yatta, it’s terrible for every community, but there are still two and a half million Palestinians in the West Bank.

But I think this is the idea. The idea is put on the table. It was more or less agreed upon by the army, which was previously a little bit opposed to this kind of move. So I think that there is a semi-official policy of ethnic cleansing and really wiping out any opponent like Israel did in Gaza. We see it in Lebanon now really leveling out. 

The opposition leader, Yair Lapid, said yesterday that Israel should have no alternative but to go into South Lebanon and bring down a few villages, level down a few villages. This really went into the bloodstream of Israeli society, not only Netanyahu and his allies, the army, the institutions. 

Of course, it will be hard to do the same thing in Iran, 2,000 miles away and with 80 million people but what we are seeing, the bombing, the pressing now in Tehran, other cities are leveling down. The idea is the same. 

This is, I think, really here Israel’s biggest contradiction maybe or problem. Because if this is the thinking — that taking down the Iranian regime — if someone really believes, and of course we put a lot of question marks on this, but let’s say that people do believe that taking down the Iranian regime will make it possible for Israel to live in peace in the Middle East without giving Palestinians their rights. 

If someone really believes in this I think quite soon he will realize this is not the case. I think Israel will learn quite quickly that it did not solve anything, that the Palestinians are here. ...

The vocation of a genuine objector within Israeli society is lonely. +972 Magazine and Standing Together attempt the near impossible: a joint Israeli/Palestinian peace movement from within.

Much as the two psychopaths wish, Palestinians cannot be just erased from the reality of the lands of their ancestors.

So far, they haven't figured out how to turn off the sun

NPR reports:

Easy-to-install solar panels that plug into a regular outlet are getting attention just as Americans are worried about rising energy costs. That's because these plug-in or balcony solar panels start shaving off part of a homeowner's or renter's utility bill right away.

"A year ago, nobody was talking about this," says Cora Stryker, co-founder of Bright Saver, a California nonprofit group that advocates for plug-in solar. The panels are already popular in Germany, where more than 1.2 million of the small plug-in systems are registered with the German government.

For the panels to become more widely available in the U.S., state lawmakers are proposing bills that eliminate complicated utility connection agreements, which are required for larger rooftop solar installations and, most utilities say, should apply to plug-in solar too. Those agreements, along with permitting and other installation costs, can double the price of solar panels. ...

The utility companies which make a business of selling electricity don't like the promise of plug-in panels ...

"They don't want anyone messing with their business model," Stryker says. "Kicking up dust regarding safety concerns is definitely a strategy that is being used by people who don't want this for their own self-interested reasons." 

Utilities also raise potential safety issues. But they ignore that Germans have been conducting the experiment for a decade.

... with more than a million systems installed, no safety incidents have been reported for customers who used the panels as instructed, according to a research paper funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. 

... Stryker says plug-in solar took off in Germany once renters were allowed to install the systems, and she sees the potential for a similar trajectory in the United States. 

State legislation which would overcome utility company opposition is under consideration in Utah and Virginia.

Where's California in this? 

Friday cat blogging

Actually this should probably be titled something like "domesticity at a quiet moment."  The beasts are often not so settled. Erudite Partner can even read without interruption, not always the case.

We knew he was a crook. The latest Trump heist comes for us all.

The United States is not only failing to "win" but also actively losing Donald Trump's glorious new iteration of a Middle East war. 

Journalist and historian Garrett Graff explains:

... The Pentagon is telling Congress today an initial, partial tally of the monetary cost of the war (the cost in human lives, instability, and reputation is of course much higher): The first week of the war cost about $11.3 billion — an enormous number that is hard to even tally. To put that in context: It’s a number larger than the annual state budget of some 16 states, including Iowa or New Mexico and represents roughly the entire annual state budget of Nebraska, Oklahoma, or Alabama.

More than that, though, is how we as a nation spend money on war and “immigration enforcement” as if it’s endless, while skimping on all the expenses that actually help our fellow humans. We have already added this past year $150 billion to the defense budget — while destroying and dismantling the $35 billion we spent on the US Agency for International Development. 

As I wrote and investigated a couple weeks ago, the $52 billion construction and procurement budget for Customs and Border Protection is so large that it represents more than the defense budgets of Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Finland, Greece, Belgium, Romania, Denmark, and Norway combined.

The remaining money to spend this year that CBP has to spend equals the entire GDP of Estonia. 

I think a lot in moments like this of the 1953 speech by Dwight Eisenhower about the cost of war versus peace. 

 “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” [President Dwight] Eisenhower told a group of newspaper editors. “This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.” 

What could $11.3 billion have bought us if we spent it here at home? A few data points: We spent in the 2020-2021 school year a total of about $21 billion to feed near universal school lunches and breakfast across the country during the pandemic — a life-changing educational investment for children. Or today: $11.3 billion would cover putting 1.4 million on Medicaid or into affordable housing — that’s the entire population of New Hampshire or Maine. 

Remember all of this the next time you hear a politician tell you there’s not enough money for this social safety program or that one. ...

I am confident we the people didn't make this grifting moron the president in the hope he'd crash our economic well-being. But here we are.

What does it know? What do we know?

Somebody asked the AI chatbot Claude Opus 4.6 what it is like to be a Large Language Model. 

 Seems to be busy -- and importantly, is emphatically not a human. 

Via Micah Sifry.