Huckster alert

Last night I heard something odd coming from the TV in another room. Some guy was animatedly lecturing on KQED (local public television) about brain scans and weight loss and it all sounded like a sales pitch for a fad diet scam, the sort of thing that you expect on the The Shopping Channel, not on highbrow TV.

A quick look at KQED's listings produced this:

Amen Solution - Thinner, Smarter, Happier with Dr. Daniel Amen
Award winning psychiatrist and bestselling author Dr. Daniel Amen gives you 10 very simple steps that will help you lose weight, boost your memory, and improve your mood. Based on his brain-imaging work with tens of thousands of patients over the last 20 years he has discovered two of the major secrets why most diets don't work. Contrary to what you might think, they have nothing to do with your lack of desire to lose weight or your willpower. In fact, he shows you that for some people the harder they try to lose weight the worse it gets. ...

So who is this Amen guy?

It didn't take much work to find this:


Apparently Dr. Amen -- he does seem to be a legitimate MD, though his claims of university affiliation have been questioned -- peddles his stuff as an adjunct in homophobic mega-chuch Pastor Rick Warren's empire.

Reputable doctors have been trying for years to out this conman. Robert Burton, M.D., former chief of neurology at Mount Zion-UCSF Hospital, describes his exhaustive inquiry into Amen's claims in a May 2008 Salon article. He's almost as disgusted with PBS for hawking this tripe as he is with Amen. The article concludes:

According to the PBS mission statement, "as a non-commercial enterprise, we can maintain our commitment to delivering quality, innovative and distinctive media content as our utmost priority. By guaranteeing our programs treat complex social issues with journalistic integrity and compassion, our audiences know they can rely on us to provide accurate, impartial information."

In the case of Amen, that is simply not true.

Oh, and this Amen character is trying to get in on the cause celebre of the moment, the growing proof, via autopsy not brain scans, that many NFL football players suffer permanent damage from the many hard hits they experience. The legitimate researchers breaking this story seem to be Dr. Bennet Omalu, Dr. Ann McKee and former pro-wrestler Christopher Nowinski. Dr. Amen appears to hope to ride the stardom that has rubbed off on them from what they've learned of the damage to our gridiron heros.

Kind of a sickening play to catch the spotlight, don't you think? And what was KQED thinking to broadcast this junk?

On leadership in another time when the system reached impasse ...

... [Obama's has] been a pretty tepid and unimaginative presidency and at a moment in history where bigger and harder decisions were needed.

Professor Stephen Walt

I agree with Walt -- we desperately need more imaginative leadership and bolder decisions. We are mired in multifaceted intractable problems that, despite the United States' fading status as the world's lead empire, have planet-wide implications. Yet our politicians and institutions seem unable to take up the work of dealing with these realities at home or abroad.***
Meanwhile, I just finished reading with fascination Eric Foner's The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. In fact, I read it through twice. It's that gripping -- and it gave me a lot of think about. Much of that thinking arises from appreciating that Foner is drawing a picture of another era when the U.S. system of government proved constitutionally unable to solve its vital presenting problems. Lincoln's trial, and the nation's, was the result.

Foner's picture of Lincoln, as the subtitle indicates, makes the struggle over whether slavery would continue the center of the Civil War era impasse. That may seem obvious, but it was not always so. I grew up in a time when historians had acceded to Southern insistence that we'd had a "War between the States," an argument about states' rights that somehow turned violent. As a young person haunted by visiting Civil War battlefields where tens of thousands died, I doubted that this conflict was about anything so abstract and bloodless. As a young liberal, I leaned toward the historiography of Charles A. Beard, now largely forgotten, that placed the war in a context of class conflict leading to capitalist development. Nonetheless, coming up in the civil rights era of the 50s and 60s, I could hardly forget that the Civil War was somehow about the full humanity of "the Negroes" as we would have called African Americans at the time.

Slavery and how to end the institution that held 4 million Black people in bondage frames Foner's history. Here's how he introduces his project:

... My aim is to situate Lincoln within what Charles Sumner, the most outspoken foe of slavery in the U.S. Senate, called the "antislavery enterprise." This social and·political movement encompassed a wide variety of outlooks and practices. At one extreme, it included abolitionists who worked outside the party system and advocated an immediate end to slavery and the incorporation of the freed slaves as equal members of society. It also included those who adhered to what Sumner called "strictly constitutional endeavors," including steps to prevent the westward expansion of slavery and, in some cases, plans for gradual emancipation with monetary compensation to slaveowners and the "colonization" of the freed people outside the United States. At various times, Lincoln occupied different places on this spectrum.

... Much of Lincoln's career can fruitfully be seen as a search for a reconciliation of means and ends, an attempt to identify a viable mode of antislavery action in a political and constitutional system that erected seemingly impregnable barriers to effective steps toward abolition. For most of his career, Lincoln had no real idea how to rid the United States of slavery, although he announced many times his desire to see it end. But in this he was no different from virtually every other antislavery American of his era. ... If Lincoln achieved greatness, he grew into it. Not every individual possesses the capacity for growth; some, like Lincoln's successor as president, Andrew Johnson, seem to shrink, not grow, in the face of crisis. But to rise to the occasion requires not only an inner compass but also a willingness to listen to criticism, to seek out new ideas. Lincoln's career was a process of moral and political education and deepening antislavery conviction.

Rather than try to summarize Foner's dense volume, I'm just going to throw out some highlights from what I learned, hoping they intrigue readers as they did me.

• It struck me that the names of most of the actors in the Civil War era were the same ones that I learned in childhood were normal for men of the political class. This is no longer quite so true (and now they are not all men); note the President's name. But nonetheless, we still have lot of Clintons and Browns and Bushes, just like the old days.

• Lincoln was a party building politician, a guy who saw his role as holding the fragile, newly formed, Republican Party together in the 1850s. The glue that worked for that purpose was opposition to the extension of slavery into new territories. Maintaining party cohesion seems to have been the impetus that moved slavery to the center of Lincoln's concerns. (Yes, it's hard to think of Republicans as the party of liberation and progress -- how times have changed.)
  
  In trying to forge a winning Republican coalition, Lincoln understood he needed to not only keep as many conservatives in the fold as possible, but also to show respect for those who pushed him in more radical directions.

  In July 1856, the Chicago Tribune observed that the "charge of abolitionism" constituted one of the greatest obstacles to Republican success. Fear of being "caught in cooperation with some abolitionist" had led "timid souls" to remain "aloof from the Republican movement." Yet Lincoln was not afraid to work with abolitionists. He understood that without the public sentiment generated by abolitionist agitation outside the political system and by Radical Republicans within it, his new party could never succeed and that it needed to harness the intense commitment that [abolitionist Owen] Lovejoy's supporters would bring to the campaign.

  Would that the current Democratic leadership understood as well the need to keep the core of moral liberal activists within the broad "enterprise." This history also gave me a useful adjective to describe our current incumbent president; as Lincoln was to his critics, for contemporary progressives Obama is often "provoking."

• I feel a little embarrassed to admit this: this book, for the first time, enabled me to internalize why the common Northern description of the Civil War was as "a fight for the Union." My own ancestors who fought for the North labelled the war that way, but I didn't get it. To take this in (and even comprehend the Gettysburg address!) you have to be able to enter a mindset in which it was still an open question whether democratic government under a constitution written by known human actors could ever work. In the 1860s, this was still debatable all around the world; maybe the idea was just a momentary madness and humans needed kings and priests to govern them? Today we treat legal democratic governance as so normative that we try to impose it on other, unwilling peoples. But in the 1860s, the question of whether humans could intentionally govern themselves under a broadly enfranchised, secular democracy really was up for grabs. Perhaps it is still.

• Foner puts abolitionist agitation at the center of the national crisis Lincoln confronted. In doing so, he resuscitates a picture of the power of a morally grounded social movement that we've sometimes lost touch in these cynical times. The Constitution as written in 1789 protected slavery; figuring out how to end it required thinking outside established norms -- and led the abolitionist movement to altogether new ideas. Abolitionists were not popular; they were the shit-disturbers of their day.
  

  In 1795, the Virginia critic of slavery St. George Tucker inquired of the Massachusetts clergyman and historian Jeremy Belknap how his state had abolished slavery. Belknap replied, "Slavery hath been abolished here by public opinion." Understanding the importance of public sentiment, abolitionists pioneered the practice of radical agitation in a democracy. They did not put forward a detailed plan of emancipation. Rather, their aim, explained Wendell Phillips, perhaps the movement's greatest orator, was "to alter public opinion," to bring about a moral transformation whereby white Americans recognized the humanity and equal rights of blacks. By changing public discourse, by redefining the politically "possible," the abolitionist movement affected far more Americans than actually joined its ranks.
  
  ... The first racially integrated social movement in American history, abolitionism was also the first to insist on the inextricable connection between the struggles against slavery and racism. "While the word 'white' is on the statute-book of Massachusetts," declared the abolitionist editor Edmund Quincy, "Massachusetts is a slave state." Abolitionists challenged both southern slavery and the racial proscription that confined free blacks to second-class status throughout the nation. In the ideas of a national citizenship and of equal rights for all Americans, abolitionists glimpsed the possibility, which came to fruition during the Civil War, that the national state might become the guarantor of freedom and equality rather than its enemy

• Foner's account of Lincoln's drift toward emancipating the slaves makes clear the extent to which slave and free Black people liberated themselves. Black abolitionists forced the movement to go beyond condemning slavery's bad effects on "free" (white) labor and imagine legal equality. During the Civil War, slaves flocked to Union outposts seeking freedom long before the North had yet considered emancipation -- and by doing so, showed their value to the Union war effort by undermining the Confederate economy. The Emancipation Proclamation was in part a recruiting device: Lincoln needed every Black soldier he could attract to fill the ranks of the army. By war's end, some 100,000 had served. It became unimaginable to Lincoln to treat these men and their families as anything less than full citizens.

At one point in The Fiery Trial, Foner remarks

History, it has been said, is what the present chooses to remember about the past.

This volume indeed gives those of us obsessed with the current impasse in government many insights, "a usable past." That's what I want from the study of history. Foner delivers. Some may criticize such a history; I applaud.

No groping bill for good reasons

I hate it when things like this mess up my neat categories. Here's a guy who I am pretty sure is right wing nut, a Texas Republican state representative named David Simpson. I disagree with him about just about everything. But he's introduced a bill to curb intrusive TSA security theater at airports and on this, I think he's right. Here's what he told the New York Times:

Q. You call this an antigroping bill. Why is it necessary?

A. The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches and seizure of our person, not just our houses, and effects and papers. Right now, searches are proceeding under the object of preventing terrorist activities. But we’ve got to draw a line. You’ve got to have reasonable cause to touch people’s private parts. There was a parallel bill banning these full body scanners that allow people to see you naked. Both are violations of our dignity and impede law-abiding citizens’ access to travel.

Q. Without body scanners and pat-downs would travelers be less safe?

A. If you have reason to believe that someone is guilty of trying to commit a terrorist attack, then by all means investigate them and arrest them. But right now, everybody is having to undergo these searches. Use dogs, metal detectors, ask people questions. What’s wrong with using metal detectors? This is an issue not so much about security but about control. We’ve gone from prudent caution to ridiculous excess.

His idea is popular, though presumably the federal government can block it. But if we are ever going to get back any of the civil liberties flushed away in our post-9/11 panic, it will take a multitude of these eruptions.

Equal treatment under law

Yesterday a federal judge ruled, in vigorous language that Judge Vaughn Walker's holding that Prop. 8, California's gay marriage ban, is unconstitutional should not be overturned because Walker is gay. This seems pretty clear and simple:

In a case that could affect the general public based on the circumstances or characteristics of various members of that public, the fact that a federal judge happens to share the same circumstances or characteristic and will only be affected in a similar manner because the judge is a member of the public, is not a basis for disqualifying the judge.

...[I]t is inconsistent with the general principles of constitutional adjudication to presume that a member of a minority group reaps a greater benefit from application of the substantive protections of our Constitution than would a member of the majority. The fact that this is a case challenging a law on equal protection and due process grounds being prosecuted by members of a minority group does not mean that members of the minority group have a greater interest in equal protection and due process than the rest of society. In our society, a variety of citizens of different backgrounds coexist because we have constitutionally bound ourselves to protect the fundamental rights of one another from being violated by unlawful treatment. Thus, we all have an equal stake in a case that challenges the constitutionality of a restriction on a fundamental right.

...Requiring recusal because a court issued an injunction that could provide some speculative future benefit to the presiding judge solely on the basis of the fact that the judge belongs to the class against whom the unconstitutional law was directed would lead to a [] standard that required recusal of minority judges in most, if not all, civil rights cases.

Obviously the Examiner wasn't paying attention to the content of the ruling because the throwaway paper's cover this morning looked like this:

This ruling is not a victory for Judge Walker. It is a victory for any citizen, of any race, gender, or sexual orientation, who needs equal treatment under the law.

Somehow I don't think the plaintiffs would have dared try this attack on the judge's legitimacy if the issue had been one of women's or racial minoritys' civil rights. But they apparently hope they can still get away with such a discriminatory claim against a gay judge -- in their minds, though not in law, he is disqualified simply because he is gay. The Examiner seems to want to flog the same idea. Homophobes are working hard to keep the gays down -- and they are failing.

Washington responds to warming

Sometimes all you can do is laugh.

Warming Wednesday: hot times ahead

We had a warm, sunny day today, the first in weeks. It's been a brutally foggy, windy, cold spring in San Francisco. To check my impressions, I just looked at the National Weather Service data for the last month. It's true: since May 5, every day the temperature has registered at or (mostly) below normal for the date. Not by a huge amount, but the pattern is strong.

But Stanford University scientists insist this is not what's ahead for the area.

... the Stanford team concluded that many tropical regions in Africa, Asia and South America could see "the permanent emergence of unprecedented summer heat" in the next two decades. Middle latitudes of Europe, China and North America – including the United States – are likely to undergo extreme summer temperature shifts within 60 years, the researchers found.

"According to our projections, large areas of the globe are likely to warm up so quickly that, by the middle of this century, even the coolest summers will be hotter than the hottest summers of the past 50 years."

My emphasis. The Stanford researchers didn't home in on California, but a recent Newsweek cover story did.

Picture California a few decades from now, a place so hot and arid the state’s trademark orange and lemon trees have been replaced with olive trees that can handle the new climate. Alternating floods and droughts have made it impossible for the reservoirs to capture enough drinking water. The picturesque Highway 1, sections of which are already periodically being washed out by storm surges and mudslides, will have to be rerouted inland, possibly through a mountain.

These aren’t scenes from another deadly-weather thriller like The Day After Tomorrow. They’re all changes that California officials believe they need to brace for within the next decade or two.

All these scientific projections raise the political question: can our institutions deal with threats of this unprecedented sort or are we doomed to suffer them with minimal mitigation and adaptation because our political arrangements fail us?

On the political front, the news inspires more chills than our recent weather. Writing in the The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert makes as unequivocal a condemnation of the administration as I can imagine.

When Obama took office, he appointed some of the country’s most knowledgeable climate scientists to his Administration, and it seemed for a time as if he might take his responsibility to lead on this issue seriously. That hope has faded. The President sat on the sidelines in 2009 and 2010 while congressional leaders tried to put together majorities in favor of climate legislation. Since the midterm elections, Obama has barely mentioned climate change, and just about every decision that his Administration has made on energy and the environment has been wrong.

Again my emphasis. And the other guys are worse, most of the Republican presidential hopefuls claiming to question the science of climate change.

This is the great challenge to our democracy in this time.

Selfish infants grab; real adults share

Busy today; this will have to suffice for a post.

Thanks to Ronni for the clip.

What kind of country is this becoming?

According to the New York Times, the F.B.I. has a new manual for its agents telling them when and what they are allowed to do about checking up on citizens. Essentially, they can do pretty much anything they want without the approval of any court or even, usually, any supervision from within the agency. They scarcely even need a plausible suspicion to open what they call "an assessment"; an individual agent's hunch will do.

[Valerie E. Caproni, the F.B.I. general counsel] said the new manual would adjust the definition of assessments to make clear that they must be based on leads. But she rejected arguments that the F.B.I. should focus only on investigations that begin with a firm reason for suspecting wrongdoing.

A fine secret police we've got these days!

I'm sure Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and author David K. Shipler is not surprised. His new book, The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties, chronicles the choices U.S. rulers have made since 9/11, largely with our whole-hearted cooperation, to eviscerate individual privacy and guaranties of liberty. He does a masterful job, cataloging the sorry story of wholesale electronic spying, sneak and peak searches, gag orders, preventive detention under "material witness" cover, "state secrets" claims that conceal government lawlessness, infiltration of political and religious groups, and racial profiling that is the work of the abominably named Department of Homeland Security (love that totalitarian designation).

And this is only the first of two volumes. This one focuses on the demise of Fourth Amendment protections against government snooping on individuals; a further volume will take up how our government is constraining First Amendment rights -- free speech and religious liberty -- and the decline of the legal protections that create the context for such freedoms.

What I liked best about this book was that Shipler put the post-9/11 erosion of civil liberties in the context of their longstanding destruction in poor and, usually, black or brown communities under the rubric of the "War on Drugs." He follows well-meaning, mostly white, cops on the hunt for drugs and street violence in D.C. for whom any right that citizens might have to be secure from random search seems an anachronism from a fantasy world that must be swept aside in the interest of police efficiency.

There is no Fourth Amendment for most of our clients. --Tony Axam, assistant federal public defender, Washington, D.C.

The rest of us, outside those inner cities, have been quite willing to turn away from the lawless void we have encouraged our armed cowboys to enforce in those frightening dark fastnesses.

The post-9/11 destruction of our traditional legal freedoms simply extends this regime to more prosperous citizens with a bit more legal gooble-de-gook. At its core is the confidence of most government agents that they are doing the right thing in a good cause. (We owe a great deal of what we know about this lawless exercise of power to a few individuals within the system who experience scruples.) Government admits few limits on what its agents can do, ostensibly to make us safer. Looking at the power differential, I am far more afraid of the U.S. government at work killing the ennobling idea of a "land of liberty" than of a few terrorists who seek to kill some of us.

Shipler brings an ominous perspective to his gracefully narrated survey:

The best view of American freedoms may be from a country without them, as I learned in Moscow, where I lived for four years as a New York Times correspondent in the Soviet era of the 1970s. Devoid of the intricate balances and protections that preserve individual rights, the Soviet system sent many of my friends to prison camps and Siberian exile after sham trials for the mildest political dissent. ...I wish those who made policy in post-9/11 Washington had spent time in Moscow.

I wish those in power in Washington had identified with the Soviet people, instead of envying their unfettered rulers. The Obama regime is not discernibly better in this respect than the Bush set, though they sometimes talk a better game. We are living the corruptions of power.
***Full disclosure: My partner and I were interviewed by David Shipler about our brush with the no-fly list in the course of his research for this book. Among the dozens of reporters we interacted with over this minor episode, Shipler was one of the most reflective and measured in his approach to the subject. I have been looking forward to this volume for about five years, because I shared with Shipler completely the insight he says led writing this:

I decided to do this book on the morning of September 11, 2001. Some time around 11 a.m. I finally loosened myself from the grip of the awful images on television, stepped outside into the dappled sunshine of a brilliant day, and in a moment of extreme clarity had an extreme thought: There go our civil liberties.

That's exactly what we said to each other in this household. Little did we know we'd get a bit part in the demise.

If you care at all about what kind of country this is becoming -- about our enjoying a future as a society where freedom is explored and enhanced -- The Rights of the People is a necessary read.

Family burial plots

You know folks are really settling in when they establish a cemetery for their dead.

The Washington Post ran a rather nice article yesterday about the lives of Muslim-Americans in the DC area. An accompanying photo essay ended with this lonely image from a community's new cemetery.


Al-Firdaus Memorial Gardens in Frederick County is the first all-Muslim cemetery in the Washington area. More American Muslims are opting to be buried in the United States rather than being sent back to the countries of their ancestors. Jahi Chikwendiu photo

In forty years, will this site look more like this? If the country's ability to absorb and change survives it's periodic xenophobic spasms, probably yes.

A section of the family plot established by my ancestors in Buffalo, New York in their heyday, roughly 1814-1900.

Warning

I wouldn't think of it. You don't exactly look appetizing.

Three short items on the same-sex marriage front

The federal Department of Health and Human Services deserves credit for issuing a letter telling state Medicaid authorities they can apply the same rules to gay couples that they do to heterosexuals. They can allow a healthy partner to retain their home when a disabled partner needs Medicaid to pay for nursing home care. It used to be that the "unrelated" partner would have to sell the house before Medicaid would pay for the sick partner. This is only advisory. It won't help in aggressively anti-gay states like Texas, but it could lead to great relief of suffering for couples in more enlightened jurisdictions.***DOMA (the federal Defense of Marriage Act) still causes material discrimination. I encountered a small example this week. My partner is an adjunct faculty member at a private university where these quasi-temporary employees enjoy a good union contract. One of her benefits is that a spouse may enroll for free in one course per semester. This being San Francisco, as far as her employer goes, I'm her legitimate spouse. So we looked into this and discovered a Catch-22: the cost attributed to my course would be credited to her as salary for federal tax purposes (not state, as California treats us as if married) because DOMA prevents the IRS from recognizing our partnership. So, for gay couples, this benefit is absolutely not "free," though it is for straight couples. No course for me this year. ***

Equality California has been holding a series of meetings and online sessions to involve LGBT people and their friends in the question of whether to try to repeal the gay marriage ban, Prop. 8, by a ballot measure in 2012. (Unless it gets thrown out in the courts, it has to be repealed by a popular vote because it was put in by vote in 2008.) They shared polling which shows some, but not much, movement. Older people still don't approve -- but more of them are less sure about that. Opposition to our rights still correlates with frequency of church attendance. Young people still overwhelmingly support marriage equality. There's some hope that adding an explicit element to the measure reiterating that religious organizations would not be required to perform gay marriages would help. But there's still no overwhelmingly clarity about the path forward.

For 2010, I was vehemently opposed to going back to the ballot; the issue had not ripened and we weren't ready. This time around, I'm less sure. California is unlikely to be an electoral battleground -- we'll vote for Obama even if most of the country won't, as I think likely. That means we won't necessarily have an enlarged or aroused electorate. Winning the campaign would be hard and costly. Can the community afford it? And winning looks like no sure thing, though possible. I remain agnostic. Organizationally, a ballot campaign should decide by this fall whether it's a go.

If you have views, follow the link to Equality California and take their "Back to the Ballot" survey.

Two women and some big hills

On Sunday the 101st running of the Dipsea Race will take place over on the hills of Marin County. I'll be staying well away -- my idea of a good time to wander those trails is a quiet weekday, not when hundreds are blasting through as fast as they can.

Still, the race is a wonder. Here's the story of last year's edition -- a race won fair and square by an 8 year old girl.



Melody-Ann Schultz, 68, narrates the tale of her struggle to catch Reilly Johnson. Both women beat everyone else in the field, benefiting from an age- and gender-adjusted head start. None of the young or mature, male or female, could catch either of them.

You can read more about the Dipsea handicap system here. As a past winner, Reilly Johnson will have a one minute penalty added to her age-graded start if she is running on Sunday. It's just the way the rules work. The race directors want competition.

The race is a grand local institution!

Here comes war in Yemen ...

Did you notice we seem to be at war in yet another Middle Eastern/Muslim country? The New York Times reported Wednesday that

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has intensified the American covert war in Yemen, exploiting a growing power vacuum in the country to strike at militant suspects with armed drones and fighter jets, according to American officials.

Evidently we're doing this because the Yemeni government is on the verge of collapse -- certainly in no condition to protest U.S. jets shooting up the countryside. This activity is actually a resumption of attacks that had been curtailed for the last year because of "bungled missions and civilian deaths."

We no longer bat an eye when a President orders our forces to shoot up another country. Iraq, Afghanistan, parts of Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Yemen ...

I guess I'm old fashioned: I think war is too important to be left entirely to the judgment of presidents and spooks without discussion at home.

Photo is the Yemeni capitol of Sana'a.

Something is broken

Pew Research Center poll.

Most of us want to do sensible things with our national money. The horror is that these sensible preferences have next to no influence on our rulers of either political party.

Rays of effing sunshine: San Bruno Mountain

Last night I learned why there's a windswept, sometimes harsh, always lovely, mountain surviving in the midst of urban sprawl just fifteen minutes drive from my house. San Bruno Mountain survives as open space because of San Francisco's garbage.


So explained David Schooley of Mountain Watch who has been fighting to keep the mountain open and as much in its native state as possible for 42 years. Schooley (the gent who looks like Father Time) spoke an event at based on the anthology Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-1978. I've barely glanced at this book yet; I suspect it may inspire quite a few posts.

But back to the Mountain, a place I usually frequent weekly, running over the peak and sometimes much further. According to Schooley's essay:

The miracle is that San Bruno Mountain has survived so long. The tide of San Francisco suburbs parted at its base and moved on to leave the Mountain the last island of true Franciscan country left on earth, its plant and animal communities little altered, its Ohlone village sites surprisingly undisturbed by the bay, rare and endangered species visibly intact.

... from 1920 to 1960, the City of San Francisco inadvertently saved the Mountain; marshes, lagoons, and creeks at the base of San Bruno Mountain slowly filled with the shining City's garbage, acre after acre of up-to-date stench floating beside its ridges and canyons.

The only people who lived hard by this stinking mound were Blacks clustered in Hunters Point. In the '60s, the conservationist movement to "Save the Bay" cleaned up the shoreline, but by then a constituency had come into being to fight to save the Mountain from developers. Ever since, community groups and developers have duked it out, winning much of the area for parkland, but also losing habitat to encroaching development.


This Mountain Watch aerial photo shows how much of an island the peak and ridge remain. That's the Bayshore (101) Freeway in the right foreground, the town of Brisbane nestled on the adjacent slopes and San Francisco spreading out at the top of the picture. You can just make out the "South San Francisco The Industrial City" sign at the left bottom of this aerial shot. I run in the (seasonally) green upper left west quadrant of the park, though once in a while I'll come down the ridge toward the bay.

Schooley, who has spent a lifetime saving the Mountain, writes of its healing mysteries.

While some battles were lost and others won, a different kind of potency has always been in the background, a vision of San Bruno Mountain as a native place rather than issue or image. Perhaps, some thought, the concept of Park or Preserve can be turned inside out here on San Bruno Mountain-- no longer an enclosure under siege, a senescent remnant under glass, but a seed ground; not a place to get away from it all, but a place to get into; not a place to look at, but a place to see from.

I like that thought. Usually the Mountain is a hard place, but not always. Occasionally it is lush. Here's a picture I snapped just days ago on a little used trail.


I am grateful for the many who have worked to save the Mountain.

I don't want to just gripe here all the time. I do after all, quite frequently, encounter things and people that delight me. Hence this feature: occasional posts labeled "rays of effing sunshine."

Political and economic immaturity warning

Great -- by holding the debt ceiling hostage, Republicans now have investors trading in what amounts to insurance policies on whether the U.S. will pay its debts. From Stan Collender at Roll Call, one of DC's insider publications:

The best indication of all that the market has already started reacting negatively is the current trading of credit default swaps on U.S. debt. As of late May, the number of CDS contracts — essentially insurance policies on the possibility of a default — had risen by 82 percent. Equally as important, the cost of a CDS — the best indication of how much riskier U.S. debt has become — rose by more than 35 percent from April to May. Last week I spoke to a number of people who calculate such things for a living, and they said this change means that the interest rate the U.S. government has to pay has already increased by as much as 40 basis points compared with what it otherwise would be. This means higher federal borrowing costs and deficits, and overall higher interest rates on everything from car loans to mortgages to credit cards.

Except when something unexpected occurs, the initial changes in market psychology and behavior start with just a few investors who act either because they are more or less risk averse, have better information, or are smarter. That means there are usually small signs of change before a market tsunami hits. In this case, there is now clear evidence that the uncertainty over the federal debt ceiling is already having the negative impact on financial markets that the Republican leadership has said will not occur. Just because it may not yet be obvious to everyone doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

Of course Republicans don't care. They just want bash President Obama and cut taxes for their rich sponsors.

Warming Wednesdays: Welcome to the Anthropocene

When I was growing up, the idea that human activity could have enough of an impact on the planet to require the declaration of a new geological epoch would have seemed mad. It still seems slightly nuts; the globe and its processes remain huge and unfathomable. But some earth scientists have taken their case that we've entered a new epoch to an Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the academic body that decides such things. According to the U.K. Guardian:

There is now "compelling evidence", according to an influential group of geologists, that humans have had such an impact on the planet that we are entering a new phase of geological time: the Anthropocene.

Millions of years from now, they say, alien geologists would be able to make out a human-influenced stripe in the accumulated layers of rock, in the same way that we can see the imprint of dinosaurs in the Jurassic, or the explosion of life that marks the Cambrian. Now the scientists are pushing for the new epoch to be officially recognised.

...There have been seven epochs since the dinosaurs died out around 65m years ago. The last time we passed a geological boundary, entering the Holocene around 12,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, we were an insignificant species, just one of a couple of hominids struggling to survive in a world where so many of our cousins, like Homo erectus, had failed to make it.

Now our effect on the climate and our fellow species is having a global impact. "The fossil record will reveal a massive loss of plant and animal species, and also the scale of invasive species – how we've distributed animals and plants across the globe," [Dr. Jan] Zalasiewicz [of Leicester University] says.

... the new epoch is upon us and we should come to terms with its implications for the planet. "We broke it, we bought it, we own it," [Professor Erle] Ellis [of the University of Maryland] says. "Now we've got to take responsibility for it."

The same geologists are suggesting that we need to learn to manage the environment so as not to transgress "planetary boundaries" -- a set of conditions that existed in the Holocene that made possible the development of our ever-so-powerful, yet fragile, civilization.

The Economist describes the project these scientists have in mind succinctly:

... the Anthropocene marks the emergence of a form of intelligence that allows new ways of being to be imagined and, through co-operation and innovation, to be achieved. The lessons of science, from Copernicus to Darwin, encourage people to dismiss such special pleading. So do all manner of cultural warnings, from the hubris around which Greek tragedies are built to the lamentation of King David’s preacher: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity…the Earth abideth for ever…and there is no new thing under the sun.”

But the lamentation of vanity can be false modesty. On a planetary scale, intelligence is something genuinely new and powerful. Through the domestication of plants and animals intelligence has remade the living environment. Through industry it has disrupted the key biogeochemical cycles. For good or ill, it will do yet more.

It may seem nonsense to think of the (probably sceptical) intelligence with which you interpret these words as something on a par with plate tectonics or photosynthesis. But dam by dam, mine by mine, farm by farm and city by city it is remaking the Earth before your eyes.

You don't have to rely on my feeble word for this insight. Here's the Executive Director of the Australian National University's Climate Change Institute, Professor Will Steffen, explaining these matters in 18 highly intelligible minutes. This one is well worth your time.


Despite every other legitimate concern, we cannot ignore that our economic and social system is rapidly making the planet less habitable. So I will be posting "Warming Wednesdays" -- reminders of that inconvenient truth.

Let's hear it for General Displays of Ignorance and Prejudice!

After a week of trying to ignore Sarah Palin and Anthony Weiner prancing around making fools of themselves, I need this reminder that other peoples' political cultures are equally inane.

H/t Balloon Juice.

Good news for young migrants in California

Now if we can just persuade the Feds not to deport them when they graduate ...

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge Monday to a California law granting college tuition discounts to high school graduates in the state, regardless of immigration status - a law that saves illegal immigrants, among others, nearly $23,000 a year at UC campuses.

The 2002 law, intended to encourage youths to attend college, enables illegal immigrants and out-of-state residents to pay the same lower fees as California residents if they attended high school for three years in the state and graduated.

At the University of California, in-state fees total $11,300 a year, while non-Californians pay $34,000. The savings are $11,160 a year at California State University and $4,400 a year at the community colleges.

San Francisco Chronicle, June 6, 2011

Throwing away young people who've succeeded in our schools and whose undocumented status is simply an accident of their parents' history is stupid. Glad to see that California -- and apparently eleven other states -- are not so poisoned by fear of immigrants that we refuse to give kids who grow up within our boundaries a chance.

Actually even California's current hamstrung state legislature is doing what it can for these young people. Last week,

the California State Assembly approved the DREAM Act ... by a landslide 46-25 vote -- legislation that would allow illegal immigrants who have, against all odds, earned their way into state universities, a chance to receive financial aid.

LA Weekly, June 1, 2011

Now the bill needs to pass the state Senate and move on to Governor Jerry Brown's desk. A similar law passed twice before, but our former Governator vetoed it. Brown promised to sign the bill during last fall's campaign. We'll see if he comes through; he owes his election to a huge Latino vote margin.

For more information on efforts nationally to enable young people who've grown up in the United States without papers and graduated from high school to earn citizenship by serving in the military or going to college, check out the DREAM Act.

Heterosexual homophobia can endanger children

The Boston Globe is digging into the backstory of child molestation at a Christian summer camp on Cape Cod brought to light by Senator Scott Brown's account of his own abuse.

Since Brown went public over a dozen men have come forward with reports of abuse and forced sexual contact over several decades by a counselor and maintenance staffer at Camp Good News. In April, the accused man, Chuck DeVita, committed suicide.

As is common in such cases, quite a few other people in the situation tried to rouse the camp administration to intervene. The director, Faith Willard, seemed to want avoid thinking about the problem in her domain. A whistleblower, a "Chip" Lewis, told the Globe of one interaction, when he reported child pornography on DeVita's computer:

...Willard asked Devita only one question: Are you a homosexual? Devita, then 29, said he was not and explained that he had stumbled upon the images by accident.

Apparently satisfied, Willard suggested that they pray.

“We all three put our heads down, and Faith led us in prayer,’’ recalled Lewis. “And that was more or less that. Faith wanted to believe it was an accident, and so that is what it was. To think otherwise would have been far too painful.’’

It's just so clear -- all Willard seems have thought of was whether the "sin" of homosexuality might have infected a valued staff member. She had no way of separating pedophilia (rare and dangerous to others) from homosexuality (infrequent in hostile contexts, but socially harmless). The danger to children meeting an empowered pedophile just wasn't there in her consciousness, driven out by the horror of finding possible homosexuality in someone she knew and trusted.

Years of refusal to investigate reports of abuse of children in this situation is the sort of thing that requires explanation (besides implying possible legal liability). If the Globe's account is true, it is all too clear how this could go on and on. There was magical thinking at work. Camp leaders acted as if, if they just held on tight to their sexual ignorance, the awful gays would be held at bay and the children protected. Maybe in the 1950s this might have been excusable, though I saw more sophisticated understanding at a camp as early as the mid-1960s. Too bad for the kids ....

When the Taliban came ...

In the awful days when the Bush regime was ensuring that the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks would be violent, ignorant and vile, San Francisco never felt as if it were quite as given over to jingoism as much of the country. We like our country a lot, but we usually retain some skepticism about its use of force in other peoples' lands.

One good reason why that skepticism held up in the early years of the last decade was that the fading San Francisco Chronicle was publishing stories from Afghanistan and later Iraq written by reporter Anna Badkhen. As one of her bios says,

Anna Badkhen writes about people in extremis.

Unlike many war reporters, by "people," she means civilians.

Currently on the Foreign Policy website, she writes about the "The Lost Villages" of northern Afghanistan.

BALKH PROVINCE, Afghanistan — The villages fell without a battle.

Armed men on motorcycles simply showed up at orangeade dusk, summoned the elders, and announced the new laws. A 10 percent tax on all earnings to feed the Taliban coffers. A lifestyle guided by the strictest interpretation of Shariah. All government collaborators will be punished as traitors.

There was no one at hand to fend off the offensive. There were no policemen in the villages, no Afghan or NATO soldiers nearby. The villagers themselves, sapped by two consecutive years of drought and a lifetime of recurring bloodshed, put up no resistance.

Some of these villages I know quite well. I have swapped jewelry and cooked rice in too much oil with their women. I have walked to town across the predawn desert on bazaar days with their men. I have drawn ballpoint flower tattoos on the grimy palms of their children. I have fallen asleep on their rooftops, watching the Big Dipper scoop out the mountains I could just skylight against the star-bejeweled sky. ...

Go read it all.

Then, as the Secretary of War Gates lobbies for endless troop deployments in Afghanistan and Obama weighs the policy and political consequences of that endless war, ponder whether we have any idea at all why we are still fighting in Afghanistan.

Just perhaps, if we have no idea why we conquer and kill, might we not just go home now?

Viva los Gigantes! It does get better

The local team speaks to gay teens. Who could have imagined this much change in 40 years?

Just say no to phony generational fights

The New York Times needs editorial help. Only a complete absence of editorial competence or integrity could have allowed a completely false headline --- Between Young and Old, a Political Collision -- to see light on Friday.

The heart of Kirk Johnson's article is an exploration of the suggestion made by one of the experts he quotes:

“Age is up for grabs,” said Fernando Torres-Gil, the director of the Center for Policy Research on Aging at the University of California, Los Angeles. “In the last election it was about the young vote, and Hispanic vote — this time the issue is age.”

If you only skimmed the headline, you'd assume that the writer was about to quote young and old people in political conflict -- but that's not what he does here at all. There is not one quote from a young person anywhere in the article. Instead, there's a pretty substantial exploration of anxieties among elders in Jefferson County, Colorado and some discussion of polling data and political consultant opinions about older voters' likely behavior in the 2012 election.

Some of what Johnson highlights is actually interesting, despite a thoroughly muddled presentation.

• The recent New York CD-26 special election, improbably won by a Democrat in a very Republican area, does show there is a "Medicare voting bloc." Older voters want to keep Medicare. Notwithstanding obstacles such as the Time's style for describing Representative Ryan's budget plan which apparently requires obfuscation and circumlocution, elders evidently believe that this plan means a vote for a Republican is a vote to end Medicare.

• When AARP urged elders to tell their reps to let Medicare alone, "200,000 e-mails filled inboxes in Washington."

• Besides, elders face real problems for which they expect government support.

  At least 29 states have already cut financing for programs that serve the elderly and disabled, according to a report this year by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a research and advocacy group for low and moderate income people.
  
  People over 65 had the fastest rate of growth in bankruptcy filings of any demographic group even before the recession, according to a study last year by the University of Michigan Law School.
  
  And the National Council on Aging, a nonprofit advocacy group, estimates that 13 million older Americans are economically insecure, living on $22,000 or less, and that age discrimination in the aftermath of the recession is rampant.

  It shouldn't be surprising that older people are trying to use our votes and political activity to defend ourselves. We might even be ready to stop allowing ourselves to be distracted by "social issues" from pursuing our economic interests.

This confused article particularly disturbed me because it draws on interviews with folks from a Denver exurb a lot like the near-by one where I had the pleasure of working on the Obama campaign in 2008. In a very short time, I met hundreds of local people and was impressed by their thoughtfulness and their values.

These were people whose devotion to family simply would never have allowed them to be drawn into a competition between young and old for scarce resources. The older folks worked on the campaign so that their young relatives could get a good start in life; the young ones weren't about to throw away grandma. I can't imagine any of them being willing to be drawn into a sham generational fight -- I can imagine them demanding vocally that politicians solve our economic problems in some way that seems fair and offers the greatest good to the greatest number. This may look impossible in Washington, but it seems dead obvious out in the country at large. And it's safe to assume that neither young nor old think the highest good ought to be saving rich people from paying taxes.

If 2012 really is the year of the old, Republicans are likely to be in trouble. I don't see either young or old giving up on each other. Those who want to set up the fight forget at their peril that we all start out young and become old and in between we are in the same families, even if there is friction. Plutocrats don't need social solidarity; most people have little else to fall back on and will fight for it.

Saturday scenes and scenery: a hike from mountain to sea

The arrival of out-of-town visitors meant a chance to show off my playgrounds in Marin County.


First stop, this ghostly forest on the Dipsea Trail, downhill from Pantoll in Mt. Tam State Park, walking towards the ocean. Mount Tam is not one of the 70 state parks that will be closed in September because rich Californians refuse to pay taxes.


There's a stand of young redwood trees just below that really does look like this.


Close up, the trees are sprouting.


Suddenly we break out into light as clouds part and the panorama of Stinson Beach comes in sight.


After lunch, we make the hike up the Matt Davis Trail out into a meadow along the Coastal Trail and back to Pantoll.

What to do in 2012?

Talking Points Memo seems to dismiss this as goofy and cute. I can't.

America, Mitt Romney understands why you did what you did in 2008. And he's not here to judge -- just help you clean up the mess.

In his campaign kickoff speech in New Hampshire today, Romney sounded like a passive-aggressive ex-boyfriend ready to take the country back after it briefly ran off with the hot new guy in school.

"A few years ago, Americans did something that was, actually, very much the sort of thing Americans like to do," Romney said. "We gave someone new a chance to lead; someone we hadn't known for very long, who didn't have much of a record but promised to lead us to a better place."

..."At the time, we didn't know what sort of a President he would make," Romney said. "It was a moment of crisis for our economy, and when Barack Obama came to office, we wished him well and hoped for the best."

Three years later, Romney said it's time to accept the truth about the country's new boyfriend: "Barack Obama has failed America," Romney said.

Unfortunately, I've long thought this was the message that could unseat the Prez. It's not a message for rabid birthers, flat earthers and Muslim haters. Whoever gets the Republican nod will get those votes. It's a message that speaks all too well to people who hoped for change in 2008 and got -- instead -- national depression and stasis, with occasional eruptions of loud political conflict.

Unfortunately, there are too many of us in that category.

Republicans have been willing to let the country sink into further public squalor and kleptocracy in order to retake power. They really don't seem to care about anything except having "people like them" at the helm, a little militaristic cheering, and paying no taxes.

But everyone else wanted more, several different kinds of more. And most of us don't feel that we've gotten much of the change we worked for.

The Obama administration has picked off a few low-hanging fruit; numerous government agencies are actually trying to do their jobs, insofar as Congress will fund them. That's a plus. A few LGBT equality measures have lurched forward; since they have majority support, that too seems little and late. We'll probably get out of Iraq in December, but that hardly feels like a great accomplishment, since we never should have been there in the first place. A health insurance bill passed, but most of it doesn't kick in until years from now and Republicans may yet manage to fatally mangle its very tentative reforms before they are even tried. Probably the Administration's greatest accomplishment was helping the auto industry get back on its feet -- a very good thing, but under any sensible regime something that would have been a no-brainer, not a "big deal."

Meanwhile, the labor movement got nothing for pouring its love and treasure into Democratic campaigns. Though people who believe in science are in charge, the country still isn't tackling the implications of human-induced climate change. The Obama administration has continued and relished all the law-free executive powers so beloved of Dick Cheney. And the economy is no better for most people, though Wall Street chugs along vibrantly.

So Romney's "buyer's remorse" message is likely to strike a chord. President Obama looks strong now and his actual existing competitors look weak, even farcical. Most Democrats are never going to vote for any of them. But we're a very unhappy people about to be assaulted with a further barrage of emotionally tinged misinformation and resentment. Who knows what we'll do?

Many people like me, disappointed progressives, aren't going to work for Obama this time around. I can't. When he caved on Guantanamo, refused to sanction anyone for shaming the country by making world-wide kidnapping and torture our national policies, and embraced assassinations of enemies as a routine option, he lost my active support. A person must have some limits of conscience, though I'll probably cast a meaningless vote for him here in California.

But I won't give up on electoral strategies in the face of the Know-Nothing tide. Obama would be a better President with a Democratic House of Representatives -- and Republicans have made themselves unpopular enough that this may be possible. I urge everyone to adopt a plausible House race for a Democratic pick up, get in there and work. There are 75-80 districts where Dems might pull out a victory with the right candidate and some luck. I pointed to one yesterday. Those of us in California will probably have to go a bit afield, though who knows what the new Congressional districts will look like.

I think I've got my mantra for 2012: The House matters. What do you think?

Friday cat blogging: approaching an end

Frisker looks out from her carrier on the way home from a visit to the vet.

The vet informed us this week that the moment we've feared for several years has come. Frisker has reached the end of any plausible medical intervention's capacity to keep her going with a good quality of life. She is about 19 years old, arthritic, and is developing stomach tumors. We are forced to face the responsibility that people who choose to live with a domestic animal assume.

Frisker is the third cat we've lived with, but we've not really faced this before.

The first one, a sad ditz of a feline, met her end under the wheels of a passing car. It was not really possible to be surprised; she had no sense.

The second one just dragged herself along well into old age, until one day she died on my lap. We were too busy (and perhaps too immature) to take her to the vet; besides, we literally couldn't afford veterinary medicine.

This time, we intend within a few days to take Frisker to the vet to receive the sedative that will kill her. I cry as I write this.

She's not really my cat; she bonded with my partner and mostly tolerated me. But we have a relationship. She wakes me up to demand food. She gives me stern looks if I might be about to intrude on her space or dignity. If I sit in the right place, she has chosen late in life to sit on my lap and receive respectful patting.

I've gotten closer than most. There are people who've called her "psycho-kitty" -- she's been known to bite the unwary. Even at death's door, she has never allowed a vet tech to take a rectal temperature. She emits a terrible low leonine growl at very approach of a doctor. No one messes with her without protest.

I will miss her horribly.

A practical action to save Medicare -- and restore sanity in DC

One of my favorite Democratic candidates who didn't make it in 2010 was Anne McLane Kuster, an attorney from Concord, NH. She hasn't gone away since losing narrowly to Charlie Bass and will challenge again in 2012.



The Progressive Campaign Committee is running this devastating ad in the district. I've contributed to PCCC to keep it on the air. You can too.

If we are to have any hope of not being perpetually screwed by Washington, we need to get the House of Representatives back under Democratic leadership.

UPDATE -- 6/4/2011: Have doubts this is the right ad to bring down Republicans? Republicans are pressuring TV stations to refuse to run it. Truth hurts. They can try to name any crackpot scheme "Medicare," but if it doesn't provide care, it's a turd, not the program we know.

Two scholarly and feisty ladies recalled

This is a very San Francisco story. Ever noticed this bench in an obscure corner of Golden Gate Park? Probably not. Either had I when I stumbled on it.

It memorializes Miss Fidelia Jewett and Miss Lillien J. Martin, respectable lady friends in San Francisco in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who, without the bench, we'd have forgotten.

They were quite a pair: one a public school teacher, the other a professor of psychology at Stanford when such posts were seldom available to women. In old age, they studied aging and proposed how we might live full lives to the end.

If I've piqued your interest, head on over to the elderblog and community at Time Goes By to read the stories I found about them there.

Warming Wednesdays: Science Communication

Here's something I never thought I'd be saying: I can empathize with Justice Scalia.

James Milkey, assistant attorney general of Massachusetts, corrected Justice Antonin Scalia, saying: “Respectfully, Your Honor, it is not the stratosphere. It’s the troposphere.”

“Troposphere, whatever,” Justice Scalia replied. “I told you before I’m not a scientist.” Over a brief flutter of laughter from observers, he added: “That’s why I don’t want to have to deal with global warming, to tell you the truth.”

from Supreme Court arguments in 2006 via Dot Earth

I share with the Justice a wish not to have to understand more than the barest outlines of the science that goes into the climate data and future modeling that tells us that we're well into a process of human-caused global warming. I am confident the scientists understand the trends if not the details. Why shouldn't I be confident? After all, we (mostly) enjoy the benefits of antibiotics and the world wide web, as well as sending Mars rovers to explore the red planet. I'd be just dopey not to have a lot of confidence in scientific knowledge; such a view would contradict my experience. But I don't expect to have to understand all the nuances.

Still, living on a planet that our species is in the process of frying means that more of us do need to understand more, unless we're willing to cede all democratic control of decision making to some body of experts. And that's probably not about to happen. We need to know more because knowing more will enable better collective decisions. And we need to know more to fend off crackpots and people whose salaries depend on not understanding the problem. (H/t Upton Sinclair.)

Learning enough to make informed decisions doesn't require all of us to understand climate science in depth, but it does mean we need to integrate an assumption that human actions are driving changes in the natural world and that these changes derive from our choices. We can learn to understand that; most of us have internalized the counter-intuitive perception that the planet is round and the universe does not revolve around the sun. One day, awareness that to a considerable extent the planet is what we make it will seem equally obvious.

I was extremely pleased the other day at a class put on by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy to meet two new employees who explained that they'd just graduated from college with degrees in "Science Communication." Now there's something we need: more people trained to speak across the gap between the scientists and the educated masses. And the scientists seem to be getting this; there's even a Science Communication academic journal.

At the New York Times' Dot Earth blog, Andrew Revkin argues that better communications need to move into new avenues. He suggested the video below. I'm not so sure -- but we need every medium we can find.



Despite every other legitimate concern, we cannot ignore that our economic and social system is rapidly making the planet less habitable. So I will be posting "Warming Wednesdays" -- reminders of an inconvenient truth.