The wisdom of Seuss

I have to wonder if this guy would have been fired if he'd done this under Prez George W.? The ranger is reading Dr. Seuss's anti-corporate fable, The Lorax, to a small group of attentive kids and their parents, after pointing out the peaks.

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It is not.

Here's the setting, a large granite lump called Lembert Dome in Yosemite National Park. It's both dramatic and easily scaled.


That's Tuolumne Meadows down below.

I'm back from a week in the mountains, recharged.

It hurts to care a whole awful lot, but caring and acting is the only hope of making it better. Dr. Seuss knew.

When science trusted in its own virtue ... and subjects could not

Writer Rebecca Skloot describes her narrative, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, as "a logistical and organizational nightmare." It certainly is expansive, episodic, complicated, nuanced, informative, intelligent, easy to read, and morally sensitive. I'm not going to pretend to summarize beyond passing on this description, from Skloot's website:

Henrietta was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells [labeled as HeLa], taken without her knowledge, became one of the most important tools in medicine, with disastrous consequences for her family. Today, her family can’t afford the health care advances their mother’s cells helped make possible.

That is, this is about what happens when poor black people meet modern science and scientists; we know who starts off one up and who stays one down. The book chronicles that relationship as first observed and then felt intimately by a white, well-educated, science journalist -- and it works in the sense that readers of similar background to the author's can journey through that turf with Skloot. Readers will get a glimpse of the chasm of race, class and educational privilege that separates their world from that of generations of Black people in this country. Along the way, we can also learn a lot about our high-end science and its ethics.

One of the episodes that made the strongest impression on me concerned cancer research in the mid-1950s. Perhaps because my partner is an ethicist who serves on an Institutional Review Board assessing scientific experiments, I found this tale shocking:

In February 1954, [Dr. Chester] Southam loaded a syringe with saline solution mixed with HeLa. He slid the needle into the forearm of a woman who'd recently been hospitalized for leukemia, then pushed the plunger, injecting about five million of Henrietta's cells into her arm. Using a second needle, Southam tattooed a tiny speck of India ink next to the small bump that formed at the HeLa injection site. That way, he'd know where to look when he reexamined the woman days, weeks, and months later, to see if Henrietta's cancer was growing on her arm. He repeated this process with about a dozen other cancer atients. He told them he was testing their immune systems; he said nothing about injecting them with someone else's malignant cells. ...

All those who were injected grew tumors at the pinprick sites. Most, but not all, of these resolved on their own. Some Southam removed surgically. Having collected his results from cancer patients, Southam went looking for healthy subjects into whom to inject Henrietta's cancer cells.

So, in May 1956, he placed an ad in the Ohio State Penitentiary newsletter: Physician seeks 25 volunteers for cancer research. A few days later he had ninety-six volunteers, which quickly increased to 150. ... Research on inmates would come under scrutiny and start being heavily regulated about fifteen years later, because they'd be considered a vulnerable population unable to give informed consent. But at the time, prisoners nationwide were being used for research of all kinds-from testing chemical warfare agents to determining how X-raying testicles affected sperm count. ... Southam gave multiple cancer cell injections to each prisoner, and unlike the terminally ill patients, those men fought off the cancer completely....

In the coming years, Southam injected HeLa and other living cancer cells into more than six hundred people for his research, about half of them cancer patients. He also began injecting them into every gynecologic surgery patient who came to Sloan- Kettering's Memorial Hospital or its James Ewing Hospital. If he explained anything, he simply said he was testing them for cancer. ...

No patients died from these experiments, so the doctor didn't feel he was doing anything wrong. He was advancing science; if patients had been told they were being shot up with live malignancies, he feared they would not have let him do it.

Fortunately, three young Jewish doctors, grimly aware of the Nuremberg trials' verdicts condemning Nazi doctors for experimenting on captive human subjects, blew the whistle on Southam and the medical establishment that saw nothing wrong with his activities. The experimenting doctor received no more than a slap on the wrist, suffering no professional penalty for his conduct.

But the episode led the National Institute of Health to require that proposals for government funding of scientific research should be approved by review boards that included laypeople from diverse races, classes and backgrounds as well as doctors and scientists. Out of this ferment, the modern concept of "informed consent" in medical research was born.

Scientists howled that progress would cease if there were such restraints on their work; but the curbs were enacted and research chugged along. Many people are at least somewhat willing to give consent, though questions always remain about how well most of us understand what we consent to.

However, as Skloot explains, even harder issues lurked in questions about individual privacy and commercial exploitation of bits of our bodies when they are handed over to the medical profession. Henrietta Lacks concludes with a careful afterward about the contemporary shape of these issues that should be required reading for scientists and concerned citizens. As research progresses deeper into unraveling the human genome, these questions will become ever more urgent.

Again, Skloot explicates the problem succinctly on her website:

The thinking in science has always been that everyone should participate freely in tissue research -- giving freely of their cells and tissues -- because it helps medical progress. When you go and have a biopsy taken at a hospital, you sign a form that says my doctor can dispose of my tissues any way he sees fit or use them in research, those tissues are stripped of your identity and used in research.

The attitude has long been that everyone should allow their tissues to be used for the good of science because everyone benefits, since the research leads to important drugs, vaccines, etc.

But the thing is, not everyone does benefit in the United States, because we don’t have universal access to health care. There is an imbalance in this country, which means many of the medical advances coming from tissue research aren’t available to everyone, sometimes including those who provided raw materials for the research.

My emphasis. That's the fulcrum of Henrietta Lacks' story. Rebecca Skloot has told it with balance and complexity.

Saturday scenes and scenery: Street food in the Mission

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on healthy food in the 'hood. The food available in San Francisco's Mission from diligent vendors may not be quite so healthy, but it's tasty!


The corn on the cob probably isn't bad for you.


Neither are the tamales this woman patiently hawks from her cart at the 24th Street BART [subway] station.


But these bacon wrapped hot dogs are heart attack specials.


And popular all around the street.


Follow that hot dog with an ice cream bar.


The ice cream guys work this stuff off, pushing their carts around the neighborhood.

Friday critter blogging: Coraline came to visit

With her friend.

She is a Silken Windhound puppy and an enthusiastic lap sitter.

My Congresswoman shows a glimmer

Because Nancy Pelosi's real constituency is the Democratic caucus in Congress, those of us she nominally represents -- because we can and do (mostly) vote for her -- often feel under-represented. I certainly have.

But sometimes even if inelegantly, the Congresswoman lets us know she understands which end is up:

"It just can't be that we have a domestic agenda that is half the size of the defense budget," [Pelosi] said. "If you take away entitlements, the domestic discretionary non-defense budget is about half the defense budget, and maybe that's what we need to protect the American people. But in terms of the war now in Afghanistan, which is a growing part of it, that we have to say how can we carry this and can we carry this on the backs of children's nutrition. I'm not even talking about unemployment, there's so much else that is at stake."

Huffington Post

Wars and more wars and military bases everywhere are luxuries we simply can't afford if we want to feed kids.

Okay -- so now do something about it Congresswoman!

Diane Ravitch has changed her mind

When I was employed during the 1990s working for racial equity in public education, Diane Ravitch was one of the leaders of what we saw as the enemy camp. A veteran of George H.W. Bush's Education Department, we saw her as part of a cabal of "reformers" who wanted to impose homogenous high-stakes testing, privatization by way of vouchers and charter schools, and authoritarian management practices on messy, but democratic, institutions that we too thought needed changes. There were people with good ideas out there like testing skeptics at FairTest, the progressive practitioners at Radical Teacher, and the academic advocates like Linda Darling-Hammond then at Columbia and Christopher Edley, then at the Harvard Civil Rights Project. Ravitch was then a heavy hitter against their ideas.

So when I heard she'd changed her mind on most of that I figured I should read her new book: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Her rejection of past enthusiasms is thorough. Some specimens:

• On the "No Child Left Behind" federal law that sets the framework for education reform: "

  ...To date, there is no substantial body of evidence that demonstrates that low-performing schools can be turned around by any of the remedies prescribed in the law. ...
  
  Its remedies did not work. Its sanctions were ineffective. It did not bring about high standards or high accomplishment. The gains in test scores at the state level were typically the result of teaching students test-taking skills and strategies, rather than broadening and deepening their knowledge of the world and their ability to understand what they have learned. NCLB was a punitive law based on erroneous assumptions about how to improve schools.

• On charter schools:

  Charter schools in urban centers will enroll the motivated children of the poor, while the regular public schools will become schools of last resort for those who never applied or were rejected. The regular public schools will enroll a disproportionate share of students with learning disabilities and students who are classified as English-language learners; they will enroll the kids from the most troubled home circumstances, the ones with the worst attendance records and the lowest grades and test scores.

• On the mania for standardized tests:

  The problem with using tests to make important decisions about people's lives is that standardized tests are not precise instruments. Unfortunately, most elected officials do not realize this, nor does the general public. ...
  
  The consequence of all this practice is that students may be able to pass the state test, yet unable to pass a test of precisely the same subject for which they did not practice. They master test-taking methods, but not the subject itself. In the new world of accountability, students' acquisition of the skills and knowledge they need for further education and for the workplace is secondary. What matters most is for the school, the district, and the state to be able to say that more students have reached "proficiency."

Most of Ravitch's new views are conventional among progressive reformers, but novel coming from her.

The part of the book from which I learned the most concerned the big foundations that have moved into educational policy in the last 15 years. Ravitch calls Gates, Walton and Broad "the Billionaire Boys' Club" and her attitude toward their interventions is scathing.

Each of the venture philanthropies began with different emphases, but over time they converged in support of reform strategies that mirrored their own experience in acquiring huge fortunes, such as competition, choice, deregulation, incentives, and other market-based approaches. These were not familiar concepts in the world of education, where high value is placed on collaboration. The venture philanthropies used their funds assertively to promote their goals. Not many school districts could resist their offers. ...

And so it happened that the Gates, Walton, and Broad foundations came to exercise vast influence over American education because of their strategic investments in school reform. As their policy goals converged in the first decade of the twenty-first century, these foundations set the policy agenda not only for school districts, but also for states and even the U.S. Department of Education.

There is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society's wealthiest people; when the wealthiest of these foundations are joined in common purpose, they represent an unusually powerful force that is beyond the reach of democratic institutions. These foundations, no matter how worthy and high-minded, are after all, not public agencies. They are not subject to public oversight or review, as a public agency would be. They have taken it upon themselves to reform public education, perhaps in ways that would never survive the scrutiny of voters in any district or state. If voters don't like the foundations' reform agenda, they can't vote them out of office. The foundations demand that public schools and teachers be held accountable for performance, but they themselves are accountable to no one. If their plans fail, no sanctions are levied against them. They are bastions of unaccountable power.

I have to wonder whether these epiphenomena of our present age of growing inequality will ever mellow in their philanthropic enthusiasms? The residue of the previous Gilded Age (such as the Ford, Mott, and Carnegie foundations) have moderated their arrogance to some degree, noticed a few failures, incorporated some diverse influences. But the new outfits are still feeling their oats, ricocheting around in the enormously complex arena of our kids' education with lots of money and without any need of exercise any of the less dramatic virtues such as prudence or doubt. I pity the kids (and teachers) who are the butt such well-intentioned experiments.

Calling out foundations' autocratic interventions is not something that most policy analysts can afford to do -- literally. Ravitch has the standing to speak truths that would cost less prestigious advocates their jobs. She does the vision of a public education system a great service with this denunciation of destruction passing as reform. Unfortunately, in public education the Obama administration is augmenting the failed policies of its predecessor so such voices are needed as much today as ever. ***For all my gratitude for the stance Ravitch has chosen to adopt in this book, I should add that, as in the 1990s, Ravitch subsumes any attention to the lack of racial equity in all phases of the school experience under the category "achievement gap." When many children of color are still (within the law) relegated to schools without textbooks, enough chairs, or even heat in winter, while white students attend gorgeous modern facilities and meet less harried, better paid teachers, race still matters in public education. She must know this, but it still doesn't seem to have penetrated to the center of her educational concerns.

The crises of capitalism

You wouldn't think an exposition of the world's current economic (and governance) crisis could be fun, but this is. If you've got a platform, REPOST IT! as I did from Cogitamus.

A movie not to be missed

The film Stonewall Uprising is currently showing as many places as it ever will. Catch it before it disappears.

Why this documentary? Because filmmakers Kate Davis and David Heilbroner have framed the story of the famous riot in 1969 in Greenwich Village where gays fought police repression just as we need to have it framed today if we're not to buy into historical distortions.

Stonewall was about the crazy-making dissonance between a youth culture that was exploding with exuberant sexual liberation (and a nod to peace and racial justice as well) but that did not yet include LGBT people. If everyone else got to glory in loving and fucking freely, why not the queers? The moment was ripe for rebellion and the fags, drag queens, trannies and other rifraff at Stonewall brought it.

All of this not the message of contemporary, and necessary, LGBT civil rights agitation. We do need to be able to join the military and get married if we wish. But first we had to just BE in all our raunchy perfection! Stonewall Uprising tells that tale.

Full disclosure: Kate and David (straight folks by the way) are friends and we've been hearing about the making of the film for a couple of years.***
Tuli Kupferberg, best known as the founder with Ed Sanders of the 60s rock band the Fugs, died today at age 86. The Fugs were a classic of the era that made Stonewall possible. As Kupferberg explained to an interviewer:

our message: love, sex, dope.

Is this what U.S. troops are dying for?

An Afghan actor and film maker wanted to expose the corruption of the Afghan police. So he bought a police uniform in the market, set up a fake checkpoint in Kabul -- and offered the drivers he pulled over an apology for police corruption and a $2 tip. He made a lot of unsuspecting men happy with this daring caper. You can watch the performance in the short clip from CNN.



According to Dion Nissenbaum's McClatchy news blog from Kabul where I saw this:

When asked again this weekend about the open -- and illegal -- sale of police uniforms in Kabul markets, Afghan Interior Ministry spokesman Zemeri Bashary said the problem was one for the Kabul police to tackle...

Deficit hawkery: It's just a political game

I don't usually do this; I usually try for, if not originality, at least added value on this blog. But here I'm just going to reproduce a cogent statement from the wise Meteor Blades that lays out why Republicans (and dumb Democratic elites) are blocking all efforts to mitigate economic pain these days.

Foes of extending unemployment benefits keep spouting two excuses. First, benefits create hobos, layabouts who enjoy spending every day watching cable, drinking six-packs of brew and luxuriating on an average $315 a week instead of looking for a job. For a three-person family, that comes in at $16,380 a year, a couple of grand below the poverty line. Cushy, eh? The second excuse, which we've been barraged with for weeks, is that America cannot afford another extension because of the federal deficit. Between now and November, the extension would cost $33 billion.

These excuses are mere cover for what Republicans who have blocked the extension really want – to make life hard as possible until November. This, they believe, despite their disgraceful record at holding out-of-work Americans hostage to their ideology, will somehow give them cachet to trash the Democrats. And for what? For failing to achieve economically what Republicans have done everything in their power to keep them from achieving. They take their leader Rush Limbaugh seriously.

Paul Krugman describes them as "the coalition of the heartless, the clueless and the confused." Right on the first count. But unconvincing on the second two. The heartless are neither clueless nor confused. They have a clear-headed agenda: economic terrorism. They're the real-life version of Saw. And their shameless goal is straightforward: worsen the economic situation for millions of Americans' in hopes of scoring more seats in Congress so they can cause even more damage to people's lives.

Thinking about the U.S. deficit

Actually, as economists more devoted to reality than to apologetics for greed have been insisting loudly, we shouldn't be thinking about the U.S. deficit right now. The Administration should be moving heaven and earth to spend more, to bailout the states, to save and create jobs, and to push the Federal Reserve to do the same if they don't want us mired in recession for the foreseeable future.

But if you remain curious about ways to bring down the national debt sometime in the future when we are more prosperous, I recommend exploring the Deficit Calculator created by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. This outfit describes itself as aiming

to promote democratic debate on the most important economic and social issues that affect people's lives.

The calculator shows what percentage of annual Gross Domestic Product-GDP (a standard measure of economic activity) the debt would be in 2020 under various policy options. At present, projections are that the debt to GDP ratio will hit 85 percent in 2020. The U.S. debt to GDP ratio is currently about 53 percent. By comparison, Japan currently sits at 185 percent of GDP, Greece (considered a basket case) is at 113 percent, and Argentina and Poland check in the 40s.

For the European Union, the standard countries must aim for has long been set by the Mastricht Treaty at 60 percent -- and any number of economists will tell you that this has been inflexibly low, privileging Germany at the expense of other member states.

So here's what happened when I played with the deficit calculator. Your mileage may vary ...

1) How about applying a small tax on financial speculation? Hey, that gets us down to 75 percent of GDP right there! Here's what that would work according to CEPR:

This is a modest tax on financial transactions like trades of stocks, options, futures and credit default swaps. A modest tax on these trades (e.g. 0.25 percent on the sale or purchase of a share of stock) would be barely noticeable to long-term investors. However, this sort of tax would be very costly to people who buy and sell stock by the hour or even the minute.

2) Let the Bush tax cuts die at the end of 2010. If Congress does nothing, federal income taxes will revert to the levels that existed the 1990s -- not a bad decade for business or people. Add this to the previous action and we'd be down to 69 percent.

President Bush's tax cuts lowered tax rates across the board by 15 percent. These cuts expire at the end of 2010. President Obama has proposed leaving the cuts in place for low and middle income families, but allowing the cuts to expire for families with incomes of more than $250,000 a year. This proposal would leave the cuts in place for high-income families as well.

3) Bring back the inheritance tax. Rich people in the U.S. benefited all their lives from the stability their society provided. They wouldn't have got rich if they had to live in Somalia or Kazakhstan. After the first few million dollars are exempted, their heirs can afford to share some of the loot with the society that made their lives possible. That would get us down to 67 percent. Again, Congress could do this by doing nothing!

The estate and gift taxes were phased out under President Bush's tax cut. However, the taxes are to return to their original levels after 2010.

4) End our unnecessary, purposeless wars. A quick end to Iraq and Afghanistan would get us down to 62 percent.

This proposal would reduce combined troop strength in the region to 30,000 by 2013.

5) Missiles and missile defense are awfully expensive, especially since we outspend the whole rest of the world on weapons. Cuts would get us to 62 percent.

This proposal would reduce strategic nuclear force to 1000 deployed weapons on 160 land-based missiles and 7 ballistic missile submarines; limit planned upgrades to weapons industry infrastructure and research.

6) The really big potential savings are in health care and it doesn't have to complicated. Simply using the bargaining power of the Medicare to bring down drug costs (plus all the measures above) would get us down to 52 percent -- exactly where the debt to GDP ratio sits today!

This option would have Medicare negotiate lower prescription drug prices for drugs purchased under the Medicare prescription drug plan. Currently people in the United States, including those taking part in the Medicare drug plan, pay close to twice as much for the same drugs as in countries like Canada or Australia that negotiate prices with the drug companies.

If deficit reduction is the right policy goal, this exercise shows it is possible without destroying general well-being and/or gutting Social Security and Medicare.

There are two simple principles that should underlie any deficit reduction:

• the rich have the money and the purpose of civilized government is ensure that they share;
• the U.S. should get out of the business of world domination by military power projection.

Do those things, and we can stop worrying about excessive national debt.

No freedom to travel for Muslims

Are we really willing to be the sort of country that exiles people from their homes and won't tell them why? Apparently we are, if those people are Muslims. (More here.)

This video clip [3:22] introduces us to two U.S. Muslims recently marooned. Ayman Latiff, a disabled military veteran, is stuck in Egypt, told he is on a "no fly list." Back home, Adama Bah explains no one will tell folks unlucky enough to be banned what they did to get listed or how to get off. She wistfully tries to convey what is like to be unable to board an airplane for work or leisure.



In response to a developing pattern of such strandings, the Muslim civil rights group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, has issued a "travel advisory."

In the past few months, CAIR has received a number of reports of American Muslims stranded overseas when they are placed on the government's no-fly list. Those barred from returning to the United States report being denied proper legal representation, being subjected to FBI pressure tactics to give up the constitutionally-guaranteed right to remain silent, having their passports confiscated without due process, and being pressured to become informants for the FBI.

These individuals tell CAIR they have not been told why they were placed on the no-fly list or informed how to remove their names from the list. ...

FBI agents have reportedly told a number of individuals that they face being stranded outside the United States longer, or forever, unless they give up their rights to legal representation or to refuse interrogations and polygraph tests. But even those who submitted to interrogations without an attorney or to the "lie detector" tests remain stranded.

The ACLU is representing 10 plaintiffs who have had this experience -- and all of us who might somehow run afoul of arbitrary government decisions.

A quiz for beer lovers

Can you identify what country this imported beer comes from? Light, but tasty and available in the San Francisco Mission district. Leave answers in the comments. (If you were with me, answering is cheating!)

Light blogging today. I'm busy.

UPDATE: Congrats to LarryE who figured this one out. His answer is in comments.

Two ideas to help the California budget impasse

The annual failure of the California state government to pass a budget on time is underway in Sacramento. The Governator is posturing futilely. The Republican minority is refusing to pass anything, refusing to tax people who have money to pay their fair share for the good of the community.

Since all this happens every year, only those persons whose lives are immediately being destroyed by state government dysfunction are paying any attention. A partial fix is in the works if we want it: Prop. 25, which will be on the November ballot. It would allow a budget to be passed by a majority, though still not allow taxes to be increased by majority vote. It's a start.

Here's an idea the State could implement right now to help bring the budget into balance from James Clark, field organizer for the ACLU of Southern California:

California spends vast amounts of money prosecuting death penalty cases and supporting death row. To avoid executing an innocent person, the death penalty process is long, complicated, and expensive. Each prosecution seeking death costs approximately $1.1 million more than a trial seeking permanent imprisonment, and with more than 700 inmates, California's death row is by far the largest and most costly in the nation. In total, California's death penalty system costs taxpayers $137 million per year.

Contrast that with just $11 million per year if we replace the death penalty with permanent imprisonment. Top that off with $400 million saved if we don't build a new death row, needed because the existing one is so old and overcrowded.

Today, if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger were to convert the sentences of all those on death row to permanent imprisonment, the state would save $1 billion over the next five years without releasing a single prisoner.

My emphasis.



Besides the savings ... ending the death penalty is simply the right thing to do.

Friday critter blogging: Only some of them sheep-faced

At the annual Estes Park Wool Market, there are several animal barns where the critters who supply all that lovely spin-able fiber are displayed for a few days.


Freshly shorn paco-vicunas, a breed of alpaca that grows super-fine fiber more like the wild Andean vicuna, look pretty silly.


Their eyes seem mournful.


"Ambrosia" here in her full size glory.


Next door there were sheep pens -- note the fleece is still on the sheep.


In addition to very blue eyes, the Jacobs sheep has four horns ...


... while this meditative ram got by with just two. It looks like plenty.

I suspect I had a better time checking out the animals than they did being exhibited.

Now I know why I run

I'm making more Noggin! No, really.

Your brain, you will be pleased to learn, is packed with adult stem cells, which, given the right impetus, divide and differentiate into either additional stem cells or baby neurons. As we age, these stem cells tend to become less responsive. They don’t divide as readily and can slump into a kind of cellular sleep. It's BMP [bone-morphogenetic protein] that acts as the soporific, says Dr. Jack Kessler, the chairman of neurology at Northwestern and senior author of many of the recent studies. ...

But exercise countermands some of the numbing effects of BMP, Dr. Kessler says. In work at his lab, mice given access to running wheels had about 50 percent less BMP-related brain activity within a week. They also showed a notable increase in Noggin, a beautifully named brain protein that acts as a BMP antagonist.

The more Noggin in your brain, the less BMP activity exists and the more stem cell divisions and neurogenesis you experience. Mice at Northwestern whose brains were infused directly with large doses of Noggin became, Dr. Kessler says, “little mouse geniuses, if there is such a thing.” They aced the mazes and other tests.

New York Times "Well" blog

And here I thought my running was for vanity and a striving after wind.

Yes, those beautiful young things running above were photographed (by me) in New York's Central Park. I don't look nearly that efficient as I plod along. But I get there.

This goes for racism too ...

Here’s an easy rule for any manager to live by: If you haven’t considered the societal forces and ingrained prejudices that may contribute to gender disparities in your hiring practices, your hiring practices are probably sexist.

And if you respond to suggestions that your hiring practices may be sexist with a letter signed by all the women on your staff dismissing these claims out of hand, then your hiring practices are almost certainly sexist. That, or men are just better than women.

Substitute "race" for "gender," "racist" for "sexist" and "blacks" for "women" -- and you can notice you are asserting that white (men) are just better than black and brown people. It happens -- a lot.

The quote is from an Amanda Hess column in the Washington City Paper explicating the flap over whether Jon Stewart's employment practices at The Daily Show are sexist.

Budget short takes: Choosing disability over fruitless job seeking

At a Wall Street Journal economics blog, Sara Murray points out

...for each percentage point increase in the unemployment rate, disability rolls increase anywhere from 2% to 7%. Some studies show that effect grows larger in the following two years. Those increases, if they prove true again in this recession, could increase the strain on an already stressed disability system.

I know two people who would be classified as simply "unemployed" in the current recession if they hadn't decided that it was worth the extreme hassles involved in winning a long term disability status that pays them something out of Social Security.

I'm not implying that they aren't disabled; working a full time job would be a very difficult stretch for either of them. But if job prospects had seemed more promising, they might have kept looking. Knowing that we are in such deep recession, they opted to use what energy they had to get through the process to collect disability benefits (we do after all pay for them via Social Security taxes.)

H/t Ezra Klein.

How far has the oil spread in the Gulf now?

This latest map is available from the government here. It's extremely inclusive of a variety of data. Despite its detailed character I find the New York Times map tell me more about where the oil is and how it has spread over time.

Today's oil atrocity story was a Washington Post report that chronicled the extent of BP's inability to deliver what it promised regulators when they approved the well:

In the 77 days since oil from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon began to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, BP has skimmed or burned about 60 percent of the amount it promised regulators it could remove in a single day. ...

In a March report that was not questioned by federal officials, BP said it had the capacity to skim and remove 491,721 barrels of oil each day in the event of a major spill.

As of Monday, with about 2 million barrels released into the gulf, the skimming operations that were touted as key to preventing environmental disaster have averaged less than 900 barrels a day.

My emphasis.

Meanwhile, at Jeff Master's hurricane blog, that seasoned observer of Gulf weather patterns has pointed out what we're in for this summer.

I hope [Hurricane] Alex will give the officials in charge of the BP oil disaster a bit of a wake up call. We've been told that five days are required to shut down operations in the event of tropical storm force winds are forecast for the clean-up region.

It is very unrealistic to expect a five day warning, since the average track error in a 5-day forecast is about 300 miles. Furthermore, we have little skill forecasting the formation of tropical storms, and it is often the case that a tropical storm forms just a 1-day journey from the Deepwater Horizon blowout location.

If we examine the incidence of tropical storm force winds in that region over the past five years, I suspect that they were successfully predicted five days in advance perhaps 30 percent of the time.

It's going to be a tough season until/unless BP gets this thing plugged.

Wars stoke summer of discontent

Over the weekend, one of our Establishment pundits, Fareed Zararia, the editor of Newsweek's international editions and CNN host, asked a sensible question about the Afghanistan war:

"If Al Qaeda is down to a hundred men there at the most," Zakaria asked, "why are we fighting a major war?"

Noting that there were more than a hundred deaths among NATO soldiers last month and that the war is estimated to cost the US more than $100 billion this year alone, Zararia wondered again,"Why are we fighting this major war against the Taliban? ... If al-Qaeda itself is so weak, why are we fighting against its allies so ferociously?"

"The whole enterprise in Afghanistan feels disproportionate," Zakaria remarked, "a very expensive solution to what is turning out to be a small but real problem. "

Raw Story

The comments are almost more interesting than the question:

We let America get attacked and we let the Attackers get away. That's why we're fighting in Afghanistan. Waving our meaningless gestures of anger and retaliation. Because you don't attack America and get away with it. ...

It's all about the money . War is a racket . A hand-full of Cheney types are making tons of money. ...

...Because some people are getting rich from it, you dumb fuck.

One commenter thinks Obama is a "murderous psychopath," to which someone responds: "And Bush before him."

Though I almost certainly differ on a lot of details with Zakaria and all these commenters, the matter is clear: this country has no idea, and certainly no agreement, on why we are getting people -- Afghans, NATO allies, and U.S. troops -- killed in Afghanistan. That fact ought to be enough for a democratic leader (small "d") to draw the conclusion that it is time to end the losses.

James Carroll at the Boston Globe recently asked questions that points to one factor in our current, incoherent, angry moment:

A psycho-medical diagnosis -- post-traumatic stress syndrome -- has gained legitimacy for individuals, but what about whole societies? Can war’s dire and lingering effects on war-waging nations be measured? Can the stories of war be told, that is, to include aftermath wounds to society that, while undiagnosed, are as related to civic responsibility for state violence as one veteran’s recurring nightmare is to a morally ambiguous firefight? The battle zones of Fallujah and Kandahar are far away, but how do their traumas stamp Philadelphia and Kansas City -- this year and a decade from now?

The existence of a professional ("all volunteer") army that has carried pretty much all the burden fighting the empire's continuous faraway wars makes it easy to imagine that their horrors have not imprinted all of us. But is that true?

Yes, the Great Recession is making us (appropriately) cranky. Jobs, jobs, jobs would help. And BP's oil poisoning the Gulf of Mexico is (appropriately) revealing frightening limits to what our technology can do for us.

But a constant background of meaningless wars, of atrocious deaths and unanswered questions, is certainly stoking this summer of discontent.

About the photo: An American medic in the 82nd Airborne Combat Aviation Brigade gives CPR to a grievously wounded unidentified Afghan National Army soldier (ANA) in a Medivac helicopter November 1, 2009 in Kandahar province, Afghanistan. The soldier, who later died of his injuries, had stepped on a land mine planted by insurgents severely wounding his legs. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images) We don't usually look at these scenes.

Designing for generosity

[13:05] I hate talking heads and PowerPoint as much as the next person, but this is worth thinking about.

Generosity and social cohesion can drive outcomes instead of fear and sanctions. But how to get there at a large scale? There are an awful lot of us trying to share an overburdened planet. This will demand imagination. Take a look.

H/t Andrew Sullivan.

A reminder

Some things are more important than our national holiday (lots of things actually). You can see one of them in this BBC video that features Dr. Maggie Aderin-Pocock demonstrating how excess greenhouse gases let loose by human activity -- like CO2 from our burning of oil and other fossil fuels -- are turning up the temperatures on the planet. Only 2:20 minutes.

We humans and the rest of contemporary creatures didn't evolve to live in a much hotter world. Trouble ahead of we can't kick the habit.

H/t Climate Progress.

A few more Independence Day thoughts

Ask stupid questions, you can guarantee you'll get stupid answers. The Pew Research Center polled this question:

How proud are you to be an American?

WTF? What does that mean? One can take pride in something one achieves through hard work and discipline. Being "an American" is, for almost all of us, a happy accident. (A few people went through hell and immigration snafus to get here; they might be proud of their ingenuity in circumventing obstacles.) We won the human lottery and find ourselves in the richest, if not the sanest or safest, country on earth.

Eighty-three percent of us are "proud" of this. The holdouts, not surprisingly, are younger and browner than the enthusiastic majority.

I could not possibly have answered anything but "Don't Know." The inquiry is meaningless on its face. ***Meanwhile a friend has sent along some thoughts she is going to use in an Independence Day sermon. I like them:

On this day, I wish independence for all -- that no one would have to stay in an abusive relationship because they cannot afford to be out of it; that all people around the world would be free of oppression-- political, economic, social; that every person could break free from addiction or other stumbling blocks that keep us from being whole and creative; that every child would have the circumstances that allow her or him to grow up with a strong will, a kind heart, and an indomitable spirit.

Church, State, Episcopalians and liberty for all

When I first reestablished a membership in a church about 10 years ago, one of the obstacles to my whole-hearted commitment to the community was its custom of hanging a monster American flag in the side aisle at this season. When I had gotten to know the gentleman (a volunteer, not a clergy person) who appeared to have been in charge of everything that had to do with appearances for the last 50 years, I ribbed him about it: "Hey -- I usually want to burn those things ..."

He replied a little huffily: "Well, a lot of us are veterans!"

I should add that he didn't seem to hold our differences against me. Like most people in our little parish, he'd seen too much to hold a grudge about a difference like this.

Later the parish briefly had a new priest who I mostly thought was entirely wrong for the place, but he did one good thing: he got rid of the flag display custom. Endless, senseless wars have, I think, dampened any enthusiasm for bringing it back.

The little branch of Christendom I'm affiliated with, the Episcopal Church, can easily get a little muddled about its relation to the state. After all, it is the descendant of the official, established, Church of England and came into being after the U.S. Revolution as the local replacement. In much of the country for the first hundred years or so of U.S. history, it was the church of the ruling class despite the Constitutional wall of separation between church and state. More U.S. Presidents (11) have been Episcopalians than anything else (Presbyterians come in next with 10). We produced some good ones like Washington and FDR and also our share of duds like Chester Arthur and Gerald Ford. Nowadays we're only around 2 percent of the population, but this church used to be at the center of political life.

Given this history, it is not surprising that week in and week out, in various words, we pray for the President (I love pronouncing the name "Barack" [Mr. Blessed] in this context) and "all in authority." Can't hurt. Might help. We also pray for justice and peace, which I like to think improves the odds.

Another peculiarity that comes from the history of close identification with the U.S. state is that we have a prescribed prayer for Independence Day, for July 4. Since this only occasionally falls on a Sunday, it doesn't come up for use very often. In fact I wouldn't have thought of it if I hadn't read that the Honorable Byron Rushing, a Massachusetts State Representative and also a highly respected Episcopal layman has reminded us that

... many of us do not consider the words -- "the founders of this country won liberty for themselves and for us" -- in the Independence Day collect [prayer] ... to be accurate. Look around your congregations and reflect if all the ancestors of the "us" got their liberty then.

There was a lot of liberating left to do when this Church set down its roots. It took almost 100 years to end slavery. And actually there's a lot of liberating still do, in the nation and the world. Rushing suggests another prayer for the day which asks

... Give to the people of our country a zeal for justice and the strength of forbearance ...

Yup -- when you are a nuclear armed super power, forbearance seems like a good idea.

We're not likely to get into any of this heavy stuff at church today. We're having a barbecue and hoping the San Francisco fog will clear, partying as we send a loved clerical leader on to whatever comes next for him. Independence Day celebrates summer this year. I'll take it.

Photo of Byron Rushing at General Convention, 2009.

Saturday scenes and scenery: Don't drain Nevada's Snake Valley!

As we drove across the border from Utah into Nevada on Route 50 a couple of weeks ago, we were confronted by this:


Because friends and co-workers wrote a report on Nevada water issues back in 2006, I recognized what this might be about.

During the housing boom, Las Vegas (and Reno to some extent) were epicenters of rapid construction and sprawl. All those new people needed water.

That was not an easy problem to solve: Nevada and neighboring Utah are mostly desert. Developers sought to extract as much water as they could from the public and private lands of the Great Basin, the broad expanse of land between the Sierras and the Great Salt Lake. Water agencies had an interest in satisfying the developers. The people who live where the water was supposed to come from were resolutely opposed to letting it go, contending that any lowering of the water table would destroy their way of life. Hence the bucket.


That's a view of the arid Great Basin from a shoulder of adjacent Wheeler Peak.

Water laws in the West are complex and a perennial source of conflict. Without going into the ins and outs of all this, suffice to say that the local people went to court. So far (with an assist from the recession), they have fought off the water grab, winning at least a delay.


In the tiny town of Baker, there was an information display, explaining residents' campaign to keep their town viable.


Folks want to make sure that everyone who goes by knows what the fuss is about.


The store in Baker can supply your "water grab" bumper stickers for all occasions. These folks aren't about to let the Snake Valley be sucked dry. They explain their point of view:

Encompassing more than 500 square miles in the Great Basin desert, Snake Valley is over 100 miles long and contains huge mountains, deep canyons, rolling foothills, flat playas, spectacular caves, and even marshes in the middle of the Great Basin desert. Snake Valley straddles the Utah-Nevada border, with US Highways 6 & 50 bisecting it.

Located five hours from Las Vegas, four hours from Salt Lake City, and seven hours from Reno, it would seem that Snake Valley is far enough away from the beaten path that it can continue as a secluded, peaceful place. ...

The people who live in Snake Valley live modest lives, balancing modern amenities with limited natural resources. The pipeline proposal would greatly upset the natural ecosystems, which rely heavily on the scarce water bodies found in the valley. Even a small drop in the water table can stop springs from flowing, kill off plants, and harm wildlife. ...

We loved Snake Valley too and hope to go back to hike in Great Basin National Park.

No immigration reform any time soon

President Obama spoke on immigration reform Thursday. I actually watched the speech. I'm sure that despite promotional emails from -- take your choice: Organizing for America/the DNC/some organ of the fall Democratic campaign -- very few people paid any attention.

As usual, the President demonstrated that he actually understood the complex of issues. That's one of the reasons I find him so disappointing: since he does know what is going on, why does he show so little urgency about fixing it? The peroration was borrowed from Emma Lazarus' poem inscribed on the Statute of Liberty. (I kid you not.) Hard to believe his speechwriters couldn't come up with something slightly more novel.

He blamed Republicans for walking out on reform. This is true.

So why should any Republicans help fix a system that Obama called "broken," a mess of "patchwork fixes and ill-conceived revisions"? The previously camouflaged horde of racist toads that have crawled out of hiding as Tea Partiers, Minute Men, and their Arizona friends make it doubtful that hardly any Latino will vote Republican for many decades. So why would the GOP enfranchise more such hostile voters?

Of course Latinos may not vote for foot dragging Dems either, but historically they have come around, despite the Donkey Party's lukewarm overtures.

According to population estimates from the Census, by the year 2050,

...less than 53 percent [of U.S. residents will] be non-Hispanic White; 16 percent would be Black; 23 percent would be Hispanic origin; 10 percent would be Asian and Pacific Islander; and about 1 percent would be American Indian, Eskimo, and Aleut.

More from the Census:

Almost one-third of the current population growth is caused by net immigration. By 2000, the Nation's population is projected to be 8 million larger than it would have been if there were no net immigration after July 1, 1992. By 2050, this difference would increase to 82 million. In fact, about 86 percent of the population growth during the year 2050 may be due to the effects of post-1992 net immigration.

That's both legal and undocumented immigration, I think. Those people are mostly simply not going to vote for Republicans.

In fact, the Republicans' only hope is probably repealing the 14th Amendment -- the one that says that people born in the United States are US citizens. Their Senate candidate in Kentucky, Rand Paul, is on the case.

"Many argue that these children that are born to illegal aliens are really still under the jurisdiction of the Mexican government," Paul said in an interview earlier this week with Right Wing News. "I think we need to fight that out in the courts. If we lose, then I think we should amend the Constitution because I don't think the 14th amendment was meant to apply to illegal aliens. It was meant to apply to the children of slaves."

I know people who would argue that low wage workers without papers are modern slaves. Not quite, I think, but way too close.

I don't think that Republicans will succeed in repeal, but we can never say never. Look for some of them to take a serious run at this.

What can break the immigration impasse? Hard to see. Economic prosperity would help; people who are already here could be less anxious about holding on to what we have. The signs aren't good for that anytime soon.

Eventually, the children of recent immigrants will be a far greater portion of the electorate -- but will divisions among them keep them from acting as a bloc, keep all pushing in the same direction? Possibly they'll manage that on immigration reform, but there is nothing automatic about progress that requires a coalition.

As in California in the 1990s, working for national immigration reform needs to involve 1) arousing the sleeping giant and getting new citizens voting as rapidly as possible and 2) building broad coalitions because there is no demographic segment that can do this alone, even though the proportion of people much closer to the immigrant experience will rise rapidly.

Full disclosure: I worked most of the decade of the 1990s in California politics and organizing on projects to help Californians of color overcome the nativism and racism that dominated the state's elections in that time. The national picture looks a lot like what we confronted in 1994 here.

Friday Critter Blogging: Dogs don't like oil much either

It wasn't only the humans who lay on the beach to say Hands across the Sands/NO OIL! last Saturday. About 10 percent of the humans gathered on Ocean Beach seemed to have brought along their canine friends.


Some consultation happened between friends deciding whether to take part.


It was cold -- furry friends can help.


The sand itself was pretty warm though, if you were close to the ground.


Still it wasn't good manners to try to burrow into it.


After the first fly-over, we all moved to line up along the water's edge.


This being linked together stuff was more intuitive for some than for others.


You can see the rest of Montgomery's pictures here.

Health care reform: Read all about it!

The Health Care.gov website mandated by the new "Affordable Care Act" is up -- and it is worth poking around, even though it will be several years before much of the reform becomes operational. It's a clean, clear, understandable site.

Just for the heck of it, I decided to see what it would recommend that I could do if it were not for the happy reality that I get health insurance through my partner's employer's group (she has a good union!)

As a healthy individual, 25-64, living in San Francisco, the site provided a long list of possible policies -- but it prefaced the list with the following, very telling, warnings:




I hate to think what happens to people who don't have the option I have.

Kagan owns the Senators

The Senate confirmation hearings on Solicitor General Elana Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court apparently aren't all that interesting, as many had predicted. TPM reported the press seats were "near deserted" on Day Three. She's qualified; she has no written record to pick apart; and nobody knows what sort of Justice she'll make, even her old friends.

But I learned something: she's charming in a delightful New York, Jewish, butchy femme sort of way. This clip has some highlights that will make you laugh (sorry about the ad that introduces it, but wait it out for the good stuff.)



Somewhere along the line this not-conventionally-attractive woman figured out how to adopt this persona to jump around the obstacles that would have been so much lower if she'd been blonde, or Christian, or even just a thin white guy. It's impressive -- and a little scary. Women who are "qualified" still have to be just a little more extraordinary, I think.

I sure hope I don't spend the next 20 years hating this woman.