Warming Wednesdays: highlighting the new normal

Just for the fun of it, I'm reading Consider the Fork, a thoughtful, informed and playful tour through the history of cooking technologies and kitchen labor. It's fun. The author, Bee Wilson, is a British historian and food writer.

I was brought up short by this very ordinary passage from Wilson's introduction:

Most days, my breakfast consists of coffee; toast, butter, marmalade; and orange juice, if the children haven't drunk it all. … I grind my beans (fair trade) superfine in a burr grinder and make myself a "flat white" (an espresso, steamed milk poured over the top), using an espresso machine and a range of utensils (coffee scoop, tamper, steel milk pitcher). …Toast, butter, and marmalade were known and loved by the Elizabethans. But Shakespeare never ate toast such as mine, cut from a whole-grain loaf baked in an automatic bread maker, toasted in a four-slot electric toaster, and eaten off a white dishwasher-safe china plate. …

… who can say if comfortable breakfasts like mine will exist a few years from now? Oranges from Florida may become unaffordable as wind farms replace citrus farms to meet rising energy needs. Butter may go the same way (I pray this never happens) as dairy land is diverted to more efficient use growing plant foods. Or perhaps in the techno-kitchen of the future, we will all be breakfasting off "baconated grapefruit" and "caffeinated bacon," as Matt Groening imagines in an episode of Futurama.

Welcome to what I think we need to recognize as "the new normal." Wilson goes on to describe past and contemporary cooking quite cheerfully -- but she has prefaced the story with this. It is becoming impossible to write thoughtfully about much of anything and project into the future without recognizing that the future will be shaped by global warming.

This recognition isn't a political statement -- it is simply realistic. Narratives like this that nod casually to "the new normal" will do a lot to help break the current political impasse over responding to climate change. If everything takes place in a world where humans are conscious that we are reshaping the climate, we will grope our way to changing how we organize our societies. Our adaptation probably won't be comfortable, efficient or elegant -- and it is certainly not timely -- but we'll move.

This is not pie-in-the-sky thinking. I know. I'm a proud lesbian leading a good life in the United States. In my lifetime this society has adopted a another sort of "new normal" which is on the way to treating me as a full, responsible member of the human family. From unthinkable and perverse, we queers are on the way to normal. Adapting to reality can happen -- but first the "new normal" gradually becomes integrated into all our thinking. And that is imperceptibly happening with awareness of climate crisis.
***On the topic of how we talk about the new normal, I want to quote a response to the recent Earth Day from the Washington Monthly's Ryan Cooper that I find wise:

… this is qualitatively different from something like, say, rescuing the California Condor. Climate change is not just a case of some corporations profiting from raping the collective commons, it’s our society slowly destroying itself.

This is why I get somewhat frustrated when I hear climate hawks reflexively invoke “the planet” as a reason for strong action on climate. The planet is nigh invincible. We literally couldn’t destroy it if we wanted to. It’s just a big chunk of rock. The Earth’s biosphere, however, upon which our society is totally dependent, is little more than a thin layer of grease between that rock and the void of space. ..

I've used that language about our destroying "the planet," but Cooper is right: the new normal is that our society and our species are behaving suicidally. The planet will be fine; we humans, or our offspring, will not unless we change.

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.

Armament

If you have an arsenal to protect ...

you can get one of these from your local Costco. It even comes with a free subscription to Sports Afield. Only $3000. I guess if we're going to be a society of the heavily armed, it better that people have these than not have them.

A Cambridge, Mass. police commissioner says the Tsarnaev brothers didn't have permits for their guns. Big surprise. They have gun laws in that state. All legal purchasers go through a background check via local police departments and a state Criminal History Board. Very few automatic weapons are legal and no magazines in excess of 10 rounds. The surviving brother couldn't have got a permit anyway; Massachusetts doesn't issue permits to individuals under 21.

But we live in a country in which aspiring criminals can almost always acquire guns if they want. Maybe they bought them from local criminals or from another state with less laws. Maybe they stole them or someone else did?

The only people charged legally after Columbine were the men who helped the students get their weapons.

Will the Feds be able to find out the source of these guns? From a law enforcement point of view, it certainly seems it would be a good thing to be able to so. Maybe someone should keep a list of the weaponry floating around? Oh no, that wouldn't do.

Thinking about cities and gentrification

Just to be sure I was on the right track, I looked for a definition. Here's the Merriam Webster dictionary:

Gentrification:… the process of renewal and rebuilding accompanying the influx of middle-class or affluent people into deteriorating areas that often displaces poorer residents

I think there's a predicate missing there. Gentrification is peculiarly something that happens in cities. It is urban.

Here are a couple of stories that have me thinking about gentrification.

A Catholic Worker House (CWH) in San Antonio, Texas, has been barred from providing meals to homeless people. They had been doing this work since 1985, currently handing out about 400 meals a day. Local columnist Gibert Garcia explains:

There are two issues at play here: the official one that's driving the city's effort and the real one that's motivating neighbors to get the city involved.

The city argues that CWH is defying a local ordinance that prevents an establishment from preparing food without a licensed kitchen. That issue first flared up in August 2009, when the city shut down CWH's kitchen.

Shortly after that, the charity seemed to render the issue moot by moving next door to a new home that did not have a kitchen. From that point on, CWH simply handed out meals prepared for it by local restaurants ...

Truth be told, the people who are instigating these investigations -- the community members who've made four complaints to the city in the past 20 months about CWH -- are not worried about the quality of the food being served or the possibility that CWH's clients could get sick from eating it.

They're angry about what's happened in Dignowity Hill since CWH's clientele exploded about three years ago [thanks to changes in city policies.] ...“We have people laying on the porch, sleeping on the porch, sleeping in the back, going to the neighbors' homes begging for money, peeing in their yards, and hanging out in the alleys and drinking,” said Dee Smith, president-elect of the Dignowity Hill Neighborhood Association. …

If there's a “compelling public reason” for this city to tamper with CWH, it has little to do with food safety (the ostensible justification) and everything to do with the popular will of a frustrated neighborhood.

This sounds like a classic conflict -- a neighborhood feels it is on the way up and wants to be able to be part of its city without having to see the city's underside. These people may have some legitimate complaints -- in fact, I am sure they do. Homeless people with no facilities don't mix well with others. But there's an escalation reported here and that's where the label gentrification comes in. What used to be tolerable, even if unwelcome, somehow became intolerable to this neighborhood, apparently an upward trending place.

Wonder how they'll work it out? People who have been serving the poor since 1985 aren't likely to just stop …***The second situation I'm pondering is much closer to home. Last week I went down to City Hall to support Planned Parenthood at a hearing on a proposed 25 foot buffer zone meant to keep anti-abortion activists away from patients and clinic doors. PP says, and I certainly believe them, that women seeking medical services are being harassed and given inaccurate information as they approach the clinic.

San Francisco has a rule that protesters must stay 8 feet away from their targets, but it isn't working. Some cities have much stricter limits -- up to 300 feet -- but we're into free speech here.

There was cogent testimony from medical providers and from the anti-abortion folks. Here's a news report, prefaced by a 15 second ad.
Don't miss my friend Renee at 1:37. What they didn't include from her that goes to the heart of this conflict is her indignation with the very idea that young women like her hadn't thought through their decision to abort and need half-baked "sidewalk counseling."

So all well and good. Supervisor Campos has done a careful, lawful, balanced job of framing it. This proposal will pass overwhelmingly -- this is San Francisco after all.

But during the long public comment period, there was another strain besides that represented by Planned Parenthood, its clients and medical providers. Resident after resident from the neighborhood got up to talk about how they shouldn't have to see the anti-abortion people's gory signs -- their children should not be exposed to such things. Hmm …

I wonder if that's what Representative Nancy Pelosi's neighbors and Senator Diane Feinstein's neighbors say about my kind -- antiwar and eco-liberals periodically invade their neighborhoods to make our voices heard. I think I know the answer to that question.

The neighborhood of the Planned Parenthood clinic is not considered a "good" location. Not exactly a slum, working class in an insanely expensive city. But I was hearing the hope that the area could be on the way up. Right now, that rouses residents to want to get the anti-abortion protesters out of sight. But will this same impulse someday move the neighborhood to want to push Planned Parenthood out as well? "Too controversial .." Could happen I think. That too is gentrification.

Two more thoughts on Boston

Okay, I can't seem to let this go.

Last Thursday while lunching with a friend, I confessed I was hoping desperately that whoever set off the marathon bombs would turn out to be what people in this country call "white." The bombing itself had done enough damage to the social fabric; we didn't need an explosion of race hatred on top of that damage. We agreed.

So Thursday night when the authorities put out pictures of the men they thought were the bombers, I was pleased to see they appeared "white."

Like Joshua Marshall, I thought of frat boys -- perhaps college students like those my partner teaches. Boston has lots of those.

So it turns out, I wasn't altogether wrong. They had, at least recently, been college students. And they were as Caucasian as any of us can get -- actual immigrants from Central Asia. But they were also from Muslim backgrounds. So the usual suspects now are howling.

I have to wonder: does the historic practice in the United States of branding people who a majority fears mean that we must now believe that Muslims from the Caucasus region are non-white? It wouldn't be the first time we incongruously applied a racial label for an ethnic origin. It would however be flat out absurd -- and instructive about our notions of race.
*** Up until the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, I was prepared to give Massachusetts authorities and the Administration pretty high marks for not engaging in bellicose posturing in response to the crime. And they still deserve credit for largely tamping down unrealistic fears; a "Westerner's" chance of being killed in a terrorist attack in modern times is "one in three million each year, or the same chance an American will be killed by a tornado" according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal.

But then the feds had to blow it by announcing they were going delay giving the surviving Tsarnaev his Miranda warning -- put off telling him he had a Constitutional right to shut up and ask for a lawyer. Withholding the warning is just Administration posturing, demonstrating they are "tough." This guy is a kid who grew up with cop shows and, having completed naturalization, probably studied the Constitution; in theory he knows he has such rights.

I'll outsource legal comment on what is wrong with failing to expeditiously warn the prisoner:

Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said it would be acceptable for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to ask Mr. Tsarnaev about “imminent” threats, like whether other bombs are hidden around Boston. But he said that for broader questioning, the F.B.I. must not “cut corners.”

“The public safety exception to Miranda should be a narrow and limited one, and it would be wholly inappropriate and unconstitutional to use it to create the case against the suspect,” Mr. Romero said. “The public safety exception would be meaningless if interrogations are given an open-ended time horizon.”

Sure, there are lots of things our security spooks want to know from this guy. And they are going to find out; they've got an airtight case with a death penalty option.

Choosing to use exceptional procedures because this concerns a crime of terror signals weakness, not strength. The Administration has turned down Republican calls to hand the guy over to the inept, law-free military commissions, but apparently it couldn't resist making a gesture to our homegrown authoritarians. Too bad; they'd been doing a good job.

Haunted by Boston

I could post intriguing photos today as I usually do on a Saturday, but I want to meditate on the last couple of days and my reactions.

Yesterday I let myself get locked into the awful drama going on in the Boston suburbs. I picked up the WBUR (local public radio) live stream on my smartphone and listened as I went about my life.

Why? What possible purpose would it serve to listen to hours of broadcasters fumbling, filling empty moments with quasi-information, with fear, with "expert commentators" trying to fit the the incomprehensible into whatever frames they carry about with them? But I listened. When life has turned into a TV movie -- and you are at a safe distance -- it is not hard to get sucked in. I am not proud of my fascination; there was never going to be a good end to this.

I need to applaud the local radio station. It turned out one of their regular hosts, Robin Young of "Here and Now" had met Dzhokhar Tsarnaev at a high school prom party she hosted for a nephew. The station took serious flack for her journalistic enterprise in putting on the nephew to report what a regular guy the fugitive young man had seemed so recently. Broadcasting this took some courage: Boston had good reason to believe this young man had killed a cop -- killed a cop in a city where, more than in many of our cities, police seem less an occupying army and more like good fathers from down the block.

Repeatedly, reporters put on various academics and "terrorism experts" to opine about Russian Chechnya. I don't know anything about Chechnya but the incoherent drivel coming from these people was enough to make me agree with the thuggish Chechen president "You must look for the roots of their evil in America." These Boston men had grown up in the US; they seemed to have made lives in New England. Moreover, it quickly came out that they've essentially never lived in the terrorist-filled Chechnya the "experts" referenced.

The day's standard photo of Dzhokhar should be enough to derail the push for marijuana legalization for a decade, though I don't imagine it will (nor should it). But how much more can a person brand himself as a stoner than Dzhokhar does in this high school picture?

It was noticeable to me that these guys were described as living in a world unusually devoid of women, as two young men alone. Listeners were told nothing about a mother. The older man had apparently had a wife and a child -- and a domestic violence arrest -- but these people seemed dim appendages. Just maybe that means they'll be able to make an unstigmatized life?

Nobody was asking one obvious question: "Where did these guys get their guns?" Now that the NRA has triumphed in the Senate, I guess we're not supposed to think about that, though if I'd been a time-filling reporter, I'd have wondered. Will we be told? My partner teaches college students -- she has at least one who doodles gun sites in class. Should that worry her? Nobody thought this Dzhokhar was dangerous until he apparently was.

I sure hope we don't get more of this reaction, but we probably will:

Every day, Heba Abolaban of Malden checks on her family in war-strafed Syria, where water, bread and electricity are in short supply. She was far more worried about them than about herself on Wednesday morning when she put her baby daughter in a stroller and headed into the sunshine to a play group with a friend.

But as they strolled down Commercial Street, an angry-faced man charged toward the petite woman, his hand balled into a fist. He punched her hard in the shoulder and screamed curses inches from her face. Then he pointed at her and walked away shouting.

“He said, ‘(Expletive) you. (Expletive) you Muslims, You are terrorists, you are the ones who made the Boston explosion,’” said Abolaban, recalling the episode in a phone interview Thursday. “I was really, really completely shocked. I didn’t know what to do. Then I realized what happened. I was crying and crying.”

Boston.com

Enough for now. I remain haunted. Catching one of the perps does not dispel the mysteries.

Friday cat blogging

Morty's "you caught me in the act" pose. If you weren't such a pretty boy, maybe we wouldn't keep invading your space, Mr. Cat.

They know how it feels

H/t Beth Murphy at the Atlantic. Many more pics at the link.

Too much grief and shame to post today ...

But go read this -- Boston and Beyond: For Whom the Bell Tolls -- from my marathon-running, peace agitating friend, Max Elbaum.

To My Dear Peace Movement Comrades,

Though using the gender-biased terminology of 1624, John Donne's Meditation 17 seems to me as if it could have been written in the first hour after Monday's carnage in Boston:

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

For those of us who have crossed the Boston Marathon finish line, those last few blocks on Boylston Street are unforgettable, emotionally as well as physically. To see the pictures and videos of maimed instead of merely exhausted bodies there is an especially searing experience. Saying that the bombing instantaneously turned a moment of large-scale human triumph into horror has already become a cliché. But it is true nonetheless. Reading about the lives of the dead and wounded is heartbreaking. Seeing the heroism of so many people who immediately ran toward instead of away from the explosions – including Boston Athletic Association volunteers and peace activists – is an inspiring reminder of human beings' capacity to put the needs of others before their own. But also a reminder that almost all of the killed and wounded were present on Boylston Street for that very reason: to support a loved one who would need all the encouragement she or he could get over those last body-punishing yards. That's the spirit of "the people who watch marathons" – and after Monday I will never look at another person who turns out to cheer us runners in the same way. ... [More]

Warming Wednesdays: something to do about it

Part of my difficulty in envisioning climate change comes from an overwhelming terror that the amount of destruction we nonchalant humans are wreaking on planetary systems is so great that nothing can be done about it. This is particularly distressing to inveterate campaigners like me: we're used to seeing a wrong and figuring out what combination of agitation and policy could make it right, then fighting for our solution. This climate change stuff is just too damn big and too damn complicated to look at.

The good folks at 350.org are offering people in the United States a practical way to get involved in preventing yet greater fossil fuel emissions. Their campaign may not be perfect, but at least they have one. They are working to stop the Canadian tar sands pipeline (Keystone XL) running from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico. James Hansen, the retired NASA climate scientist who has been warning about global warming for over 20 years, has said that if all those tons of carbon pollution are let loose in the atmosphere, it is "essentially game over" for the climate.

The Obama administration will decide soon whether to permit construction of the pipeline. The administration seems so in the pocket of fossil fuel companies -- and so pleased to get energy from somewhere beside the Middle East -- that they are likely to approve construction.

But there is still time to enter public comments urging restraint. 350.org has set up an easy tool from which to enter your comment. Do it now. The object is to collect one million protests in the next week.

Go ahead. It is not hard. This is something you can do.

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.

Choice in the presence of horror

On Monday night in California, we know that Boston headline should read (at least) "3 killed". Who knows what more we'll know tomorrow?

We happened to have the 12 noon radio news on in California, so we heard about the bombing in close to real time. We've run a few marathons.  Boston is the ur-marathon for long time runners, even if neither of us ever dreamed of meeting its qualifying standard.  Both of us have lived in Boston. We could imagine the scene too well.

We consoled ourselves there couldn't still have been too many people on the course -- Boston Marathoners don't take 5 hours and more to finish -- this isn't like New York's 12 hour marathon cum folk parade. I was wrong in that assumption; a Wave 3 had started at 10:40, so there were still plenty of runners out there at 3 pm Boston time.

Media and even Presidents have learned to discourage jumping ahead of what we know when horrors occur. I keep remembering the false leads thrown up at the Atlanta Olympics and at Oklahoma City. We're not a restrained society, so I imagine some of us are jumping ... I'm staying away from Twitter.

We've become accustomed to knowing that such atrocities take place in Iraq (42 killed there Monday), in Syria, in Pakistan, in many other countries, frequently, even daily. Our country is not innocent in those places -- but neither were the Boston runners and spectators guilty. And we have no substantive reason to connect this event to those horrors. There may be a reason, but we certainly cannot presume one tonight. That's what I mean by refusing to jump ahead of what we know.

People who commit acts of terrorism want us to respond out of the inner well of hate that most of us have lurking somewhere inside us. If we cleave to our best selves -- to grieving appropriately, uniting with our neighbors, acting judiciously -- we foil them. That won't heal the injured and bring back the dead, but it preserves the lives of the living.  That's a choice we can make when confronted by atrocity.

Surprise: California is a good example

TPM's Josh Marshall makes a significant observation:

… over recent months we’ve seen more and more polling which shows that Hispanics aren’t voting for Democrats because of the immigration issue. They’re voting for Democrats because they turn out disproportionately to be Democrats. …Quite apart from the immigration issue itself and whatever disconnect and tensions are created by anti-immigrant and anti-Hispanic elements within the GOP, most Hispanics align with the issues supported by the Democratic party.

... different ethnic groups in the US simply have different politics. It all points toward doing something I think most people across the racial spectrum have a hard time doing, even as it becomes more and more of a demographic fact: seeing whites as another ethnic group in the US, still a huge but no longer an overwhelming majority of the country.

Quite apart from racial or cultural hostility or opposition to immigration for whatever reasons, it may be hard for the GOP to make significant inroads into the Hispanic or African-American or Asian-American votes, while remaining the party that so wildly over-performs among whites.

I read this -- and there's a good deal more in the original that deserves a more nuanced consideration than what I quote here -- and I wanted to scream: haven't these people who write about politics from the East Coast paid ANY attention to political developments in California over the last two decades?

If they had, none of this would have seemed so foreign. Politics in this state have been about working out a transition from white supremacy to pluralism for a long time and there's a good chance that the national trajectory can be envisioned by attending to what we've experienced here.

• When older whites began to sense that their unquestioned numerical and electoral majority might not last forever, they used the Republican Party as an instrument to inflict policies that amounted to "Rule or Ruin" on the state. Specifically, they passed measures that broke state government's power to tax and hence to govern, beginning with Prop. 13 in 1978. The impulse to impede the progress of the rising tide of black, brown and various Asian Californians led to anti-immigrant measures (Prop. 187 in 1994), destruction of state affirmative action efforts (Prop. 209 in 1996) and outlawing bilingual education (Prop. 227 in 1998.)

• Action leads to re-action. People of color and progressive whites -- including especially younger whites who had grown up in a plural society -- saw Republican racial bigotry and obstruction and mobilized electorally as Democrats. Since 1998 Democrats have monopolized almost all the positions elected statewide. Only the cartoonish Arnold Schwarzenegger could break the Democratic monopoly, though he couldn't bring other Republicans along on his coattails. Republicans could still stymie the legislature however, because a two-thirds vote is required to make a budget and they consistently had one vote in excess of one third.

• Last year Democrats finally managed, with the growing black, brown, Asian and progressive white electorate, to pass new taxes by initiative and to win two thirds of both houses of the legislature. We can have government again -- Republican Rule or Ruin no longer prevails. The new balance is by no means certain, but any Republican gains in 2014 will almost certainly be swept away again by a California Democratic electorate in 2016.

• Democratic pluralities of this size do not mean political nirvana. Ideological and interest struggles -- such as choices between spending on education or high speed rail; who is going to have lose as the state deals with its growing water shortage; should we allow fracking -- now have to get worked out within the Democratic Party. The minority Republicans are largely irrelevant; they've been dismissed by the voters. But the conflicts that are democratic politics remain.

It was possible to see that this was how the politics of California were likely to develop as early as the early 1990s -- the surprise is how rapidly California passed a democratic (small "d") tipping point. In two decades, we've moved from ground zero for a politics of racial polarization to a moment in which we're collectively trying to set the terms of the next period's challenges. We haven't achieved harmony -- far from it -- but the terrain has shifted, irrevocably.

I see no reason not to expect a similar national transition from the Republican Rule or Ruin era that we're currently living through to a more plural society. Yes, there are obvious obstacles: uneven geographical demographic change, the Senate, federalism, the South. But the most amazing feature of the last two decades of politics in California is simply that we did work our way through it. In 1994, the level of racial animosity in California and its accompanying political strains were bad enough that some of us found ourselves trying to explain that "California is the new Alabama."

California is not that state anymore. We still have many, many challenges, but at least we can say that it is possible to move through old problems and on to new ones. That's a lot when the alternative is fixating on the current gridlock in Washington and the constrained Obama presidency.

I'm getting on, but I can imagine living to the other side of this national impasse; California has demonstrated that it need not take as long as we might expect on our bad days.

The times they are a changin': Religious institutions and their queers

As the Supreme Court deliberates gay marriage, there's a lot going on among the faithful and leaders are beginning to adjust.

Item: Long Island Roman Catholic Nicholas Coppola was one of those devoted parishioners upon whom churches depend: a lay eucharistic minister, catechist, altar server. That is, he filled all those roles until he married his husband. He'd never made any secret of being gay, but now his diocesan bishop made his pastor fire him from his parish work. For many years, that would have been that … but not these days. He rapidly discovered:

"The best part about telling my story is that it has reminded me that I'm not alone," Coppola told the press Thursday. "I have been given so many words and signs of support and love by my fellow parishioners at St. Anthony's Parish. … "There is a tremendous disconnect between the hierarchy and the people in the pews" on the issue of the inclusion of gays and lesbians, he said.

…Coppola remains deeply committed to maintaining his own place in his parish. Given the love he has been shown by his parishioners and pastor, he believes leaving would only exacerbate the pain already being felt by the community.

"St. Anthony's was, is, and will continue to be a welcoming parish," he said.

National Catholic Reporter

More on Coppola's story in his own words here.

Item: The headline says it all: Mormon Church Abandons Its Crusade Against Gay Marriage. After having provided the resources and foot soldiers to the 2008 campaign that passed Prop. 8 in California outlawing same sex marriage, the Mormon Church has recoiled from the backlash that followed.

Although the LDS's prophet hasn't described a holy revelation directing a revision in church doctrine on same-sex marriage or gay rights in general, the church has shown a rare capacity for introspection and humane cultural change unusual for a large conservative religious organization.

"It seems like the [Mormon] hierarchy has pulled the plug and is no longer taking the lead in the fight to stop same-sex marriage," says Fred Karger, the LGBT activist who first exposed the church's major role in the passage of Prop. 8. "The Mormon Church has lost so many members and suffered such a black eye because of all its anti-gay activities that they really had no choice. …"

The whole article is worth reading; it is interesting to observe such relatively supple behavior in so hierarchical an institution.

Item: Reverend Jim Wallis of Sojourners has made a career of being Mr. Liberal Evangelical, always ready with a quote for the media. But he and his institution have long been out of step with more inclusionary mainline Protestants when it came to recognizing the full humanity of gay and lesbian people. Now, less so … Sarah Posner has the story at Religion Dispatches.

Item: Retired Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Gumbleton has been a insistent voice for peace, justice and reconciliation for years -- and there's seldom been much indication that anyone of any importance in his institution (except possibly God?) paid any heed to his pleadings.

Recently the current archbishop of Detroit told Roman Catholics that people who differed from the denomination by supporting gay marriage should stay away from holy communion. Bishop Gumbleton doesn't agree and we tells a TV reporter why (the ad is only 15 seconds):
Fox 2 News Headlines
***H/t the National Catholic Reporter, the Reverend Susan Russell, and The Lead for these stories.

Saturday scenes and scenery: a bevy of Buddhas

All these grace the side streets of San Franicisco.


This fellow exudes a lovely calm.


On the other hand, this once is awfully energetic. He has an incongruous companion, too.


That's a welcoming smile!


This one is never going to have suffer a stable existence.


These photos are by-products from my photoblog project: 596 Precincts -- Walking San Francisco. If intrigued, take a look and sign up for sporadic email updates.

Immigration "reform" won't help with this

Center for American Progrees
U.S. immigration law is a maze of preferences, exceptions, bureaucratic interpretations of regulations, but one principle (usually) underlies it: families should be able to live together, should be reunited if necessary.

For most Republican officeholders, conservatives and the particularly the Roman Catholic Church (otherwise a reforming institution), gay people's relationships can't form families. Consequently, family reunification policies don't apply to us.

There are an estimated 32000 binational LGBT couples (one born in the U.S., one a noncitizen) in the country today. Colorlines reports that nothing in the current proposal helps these couples.

Yet. One more hurdle to jump ...

A perennial outrage recurs: hospital bars gay partner

We like to think stuff like this doesn't happen any longer, but unhappily it can. According to Roger Gorley, a Kansas City Hospital refused to let him stay with his domestic partner for whom he has a power of attorney. They had him arrested and removed and got a restraining order to keep him away.

There's the inevitable Change.org petition asking for an apology from the hospital.

The right to visit was the chief selling point for San Francisco's ground breaking domestic partner initiative in 1990. Apparently we still have to keep having these fights.

Toward immigration reform

The ALF-CIO and community immigration activists held rallies calling for comprehensive reform yesterday. News media report the Washington rally drew 10,000 campaigners; the San Francisco iteration of this mobilization drew a small but noisy crowd for a march from Senator Diane Feinstein's office to the old Burton Federal building on Golden Gate.

For those of us who've been watching immigration issues for a long time, it is heartening to see organized labor taking a lead in demanding a more equitable system. Undocumented workers fill many of the low wage jobs that most need the protection of a union; these marginalized workers are more likely to engage in militant action than folks a little further up the economic ladder. It is going to take militance to breath life into the labor movement these days.



Meanwhile, a posse of Senators apparently are on the verge of making an immigration proposal, according to the New York Times. Their law sounds pretty awful. Apparently we'll be required to waste $3.5 billion taxpayer dollars on "homeland security" measures (that's a fence to keep out scary Mexicans) before we'll be allowed to let people who are already here move toward citizenship. This is ridiculous. I feel damn sure that very few of the ancestors of these legislators had to jump through hoops like those planned for the current generation.

But there we are: a fearful, tired, though still rich, hulking husk of a declining empire.

Warming Wednesdays: will rising temperatures bring down the Pakistan state?

These days I'm reading Anatol Lieven's Pakistan: A Hard Country. It's a big, smart, wide ranging book about a country where the U.S. is both deeply involved and often deeply ignorant.

There are lots of U.S. pundits who dismiss Pakistan as an irrational, Muslim-fundamentalist, ungovernable "failed state." Lieven is offering an alternative narrative: his Pakistan is a wildly diverse, complicated but essentially resilient society where competing ethnicities, religious traditions, and economic classes somehow co-exist and are likely to continue to succeed in doing so. He labels it a "negotiated state" -- two big political parties (that are both actually ethnic and feudal assemblages) alternate ostensible control of government, occasionally interrupted by military takeovers, but underneath all the fuss, life for most Pakistanis goes on with little change.

The book is full of interesting anecdotes and arresting facts. Who would have thought that in 2002, according to economists' system for measuring such things (the Gini co-efficient), Pakistan is actually a less economically unequal society than the United States? Though millions live in absolutely destitute poverty, their plight is mitigated by family, clan and tribal ties. That is, they enjoy a safety net; it is just organized differently than ours.

I should however point out that Lieven's somewhat attractive Pakistan works not nearly so well for its women.

Lieven sees only one threat that might turn Pakistan into the violent, dangerous "failed state" of so many Western imaginings. That threat is the loss of water resources exacerbated by climate change.

The huge youth bulge making its way through the Pakistani population means that this population will continue to grow steeply for a long time to come (in 2008, 42 per cent of the population was estimated as under the age of fourteen). If present trends continue, then by the middle of the twenty-first century, according to World Bank projections, Pakistan may have as many as 335 million people.

This is far too many people for Pakistan's available water resources to support, unless the efficiency of water use can be radically improved. If the old Indian economy used to be described as 'a gamble on the monsoon', then the entire Pakistani state can be described as 'a gamble on the Indus [river]' -- and climate change means that over the next century this may be a gamble against increasingly long odds. The capricious power of water in this area is demonstrated by the remains of numerous cities -- starting with those of the Indus Valley civilization 4,000 years ago -- that have been either abandoned because rivers have changed their course, or been washed away by floods, as so many towns and villages were by the great floods of 2010.

At an average of 240 mm of rainfall per year, Pakistan is one of the most naturally arid of the world's heavily populated states. … Only 24 per cent of Pakistan's land area is cultivated -- the great majority through man-made irrigation systems. The rest is pastoral land, or uninhabited: desert, semi-desert, and mountain. Chronic over-use, however, means that many of the natural springs have dried up, and the water table is dropping so rapidly in many areas that the tube-wells will also eventually follow them into extinction. That will leave the Indus once again; and in the furor surrounding the debunking of the exaggerated claim that the glaciers feeding the Indus will disappear by 2035, it has been forgotten that they are nonetheless melting; and if they disappear a century or two later, the effects on Pakistan will be equally dire, if no serious action is taken in the meantime radically to improve Pakistan's conservation and efficient use of water.

If the floods of 2010 are a harbinger of a long-term pattern of increased monsoon rains, this on the other hand would potentially be of great benefit to Pakistan -- but only potentially, because to harness them for agriculture requires both a vastly improved storage and distribution infrastructure, and radical measures to stop deforestation in the mountains and to replant deforested areas. Otherwise, increased rainfall will risk more catastrophes like that of 2010 …

…dependence on the Indus is the greatest source of long-term danger to Pakistan. Over the next century, the possible long-term combination of climate change, acute water shortages, poor water infrastructure and steep population growth has the potential to wreck Pakistan as an organized state and society. Long-term international aid projects in Pakistan should be devoted above all to reducing this mortal threat, by promoting reforestation, repairing irrigation systems and even more importantly improving the efficiency of water use. Human beings can survive for centuries without democracy, and even without much security. They cannot live for more than three days without water.

… If anyone thinks that the condition of Pakistan will be of little consequence to the rest of the world in the long run, they should remember that a hundred years from now, if it survives that long, Pakistan will still possess nuclear weapons, one of the biggest armies in the world, one of the biggest populations in the world and one of the biggest diasporas in the world, especially in Britain. lslamist radicalism, which has already existed for hundreds of years, will also still be present, even if it has been considerably reduced by the West's withdrawal from Afghanistan. All of this will still mean that of all the countries in the world that are acutely threatened by climate change, Pakistan will be one of the most important.

That's what global warming may mean in one country. Some of the earth's oldest known civilizations arose in the Indus River valley; the collapse of the present order there could unleash hideous consequences for Pakistan's people and even for those of us half way round the globe.

Obama in idiot mode again

I suppose I should write something about the Prez plumping down for unnecessary Social Security cuts by way of changing how inflation is measured.

My thoughts are simple: the man is a political idiot. He wanted to be a transformative figure and being the first Black man elected President gave him a huge leg up on the project. But he has never apparently understood that policy options that satisfy "experts" and mollify centrist opinion mongers merely make a President mediocre. Transformative Presidents build the political force to sustain their achievements.

Abraham Lincoln is generally thought the country's greatest President. His policy choices saved the integrity of the country and ended slavery -- that's greatness alright. But we forget that he accomplished this while somehow building a new political party out of northern businessmen, urban workers, small farmers on the frontier -- and the unruly, noisy chorus of moralist abolitionists. He knew he needed the absolutists, even if they were the most fractious bit of the potential ruling coalition. And somehow he held all these tendencies together, won the war, and won the future by launching the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution. Now that's transformative. (See here and here.)

Obama simply doesn't seem to understand that nothing he does -- Obamacare, any "grand fiscal bargain" -- will survive if he doesn't leave behind an organized constituency (a Party) to defend his policies. Maybe if Obamacare ever gets off the ground it will develop a constituency, but a Rube Goldberg machine like this seems more likely to be picked apart before people form any attachment too it. The "there that is there" is too opaque. And by abetting Republicans at picking away at the structure of Social Security -- that's what chained CPI does -- he's throwing away whatever allegiance his Party commands as the defender of middle class citizens. (Another Democrat, Bill Clinton, kicked poor women under the bus a couple of decades ago.) Sure, he might even achieve some slight of hand that means that the cuts aren't as harmful as they seem on first glance -- the former Obama budget director is peddling this line today. But he's putting himself and his party on record against the fundamental wish most citizens have of government -- that it provide some basic security. This is a prescription for seeing even the good he's done washed away in his wake. The spectacle is sad and infuriating because the people need to the government to do its job. That's why we have it. And watching Obama fumble the politics is getting boring; we saw all this in the 2011 debt ceiling debacle. Nothing much has changed.
***Interestingly, the often irritating Ezra Klein at the Washington Post pointed out on Friday what a President building a legacy would be fighting for.

Today, Social Security provides 37 percent of the income for all Americans over 65, and about 80 percent of the income for seniors in the bottom half of the income distribution. …

In a report for the New American Foundation, Michael Lind, Steven Hill, Robert Hiltonsmith and Joshua Freedman survey [the] data and conclude that the ongoing debate over how to cut Social Security is all wrong: We need to make Social Security much more generous.

…It has become common in Washington for wonks and politicians alike to lament the public’s resistance to cutting Medicare and Social Security. But that resistance is there for a reason: These programs work extraordinarily well. Social Security has been wildly successful at raising living standards for the elderly, even as other forms of retirement savings have grown shakier. Medicare is cheaper than private health insurance, and has seen its costs grow more slowly, to boot. We’ve gotten so used to thinking of our entitlement programs as problems to be solved, we’re missing all the problems they can solve.

We're thrown back to the truism: if (organized) people lead, maybe the leaders will follow.

Something wicked passed this way ...

It seemed appropriate this morning to awake to BBC radio calling on Henry Kissinger to eulogize Margaret Thatcher -- one foul monster offering an encomium to another. Neither will be missed by ordinary -- that is human -- humans.

Airbags for the urban cyclist

The Invisible Bicycle Helmet | Fredrik Gertten from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

It's chicken to be a realist ... Cars are so yesterday. Bikes are the future.

If these were available, they would significantly raise the possibility that I'd brave riding a bike around town. I have always hated helmets. When I charged off on my bike as a child, the experience was about freedom. Now "they" say, rightly, that I need to protect my head. "They" are right, but there goes much of the freedom I would be seeking by getting on the bike.

Sorry about the sponsorship from GE for this video, but it's fun and I hope the idea works out.

Wars' residues

U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Sal Somoza, Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) Farah, pulls security outside the Farah provincial governor's compound in Farah City, Feb. 5. U.S. Navy photo by HMC Josh Ives

The people in power who start wars don't seem to much attend to this, but for people caught up in the violence they initiate, wars are never "over." If they are still around when the fighting dies down, nonetheless, their lives and their world are changed forever. Here are a few items I've noticed recently that highlight this:

• PTSD symptoms may NEVER subside.

  Mr. Perna was 80 when he finally made his way to the Philadelphia VA Medical Center, where he began therapy with Dr. Cook and joined other World War II and Korean War veterans in a Thursday afternoon support group. “We began to understand what was happening to us,” he told me. “In your home by yourself, you figure this is just you. You don’t know other guys are going through the same thing.”

  New Old Age, March 15, 2013

• Invaders may depart, but enmities linger.The U.S. will (more or less?) get itself out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014. But there remain the Afghans …

  Mr. Balegh dismissed American concerns that released prisoners would return to the war. “We Afghans are the ones who face the most danger from these people who are released, not the Americans,” he said.

  New York Times, March 26, 2013

  Novel notion that, attending to the people who live there.

• The majority of the men still held at the United States prison at Guantanamo have been "cleared for release" -- 86 out of 166. More detainees have died without charges in the camp (9) than have been convicted of a crime (7). Now, according to lawyers who represent some of them, some 130 are on a hunger strike against mistreatment by Army guards and their indefinite, endless detention. On Friday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay spoke about the camp:

  “… this systemic abuse of individuals’ human rights continues year after year,” she said. “We must be clear about this: the United States is in clear breach not just of its own commitments but also of international laws and standards that it is obliged to uphold. When other countries breach these standards, the US – quite rightly – strongly criticizes them for it.”
  
  “As a first step,” Pillay said, “those who have been cleared for release must be released. This is the most flagrant breach of individual rights, contravening the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. …

  Office of the High Commissioner, April 5, 2013

  Guess the Guantanamo prisoners are just the unwanted residue of the misbegotten "War on Terror" indulged in by a terrified nation.

Saturday scenes and scenery: a few automotive hood ornaments

Once upon a time, in my youth, it was easy to pick out different car models. In those days, car companies competed to distinguish their wares one from another. The result was some truly baroque designs -- tail fins, huge front grills, bodies sleek, and other bodies boxy.

These days, pretty much all modern cars look alike. I long ago stopped being able to discern the differences. And consequently, some tiny fraction of us, striving for individuality, are adding after market hood ornaments -- or treasuring old ones -- that help our vehicles stand out from the crowd. Here are a few I've seen recently.


This add-on lady strikes a pose.


Dodge has been using variants of ram figures for a long time. This one is surprisingly finely detailed.


This one was on an old Pontiac.


I don't know quite what inspires someone to add this to their car, but there it was.

These photos are by-products from my photoblog project: 596 Precincts -- Walking San Francisco. If intrigued, take a look and sign up for sporadic email updates.

Why can't Medicare "go paperless"?

This will come as no surprise to anyone who reads this who is on Medicare, but it sure isn't hard to suggest some obvious measures that would help the program save money.

Every month I receive an envelope that displays, on the exterior, this phrase:

Inside, the enclosure is headed with this:

 The government takes my payment directly out of my bank account. The monthly mailing is just a receipt.

Unlike any other big institution I deal with, there is no option to "go paperless." My bank statement is paperless; my electric bills are paperless; the water bill is paperless. The IRS even takes my taxes out of my bank account by way of online filing. But for some reason Medicare is still sending me mailings, mailings I might easily find confusing or frightening. This doesn't make sense.

*** And that doesn't even go into the difficulties I had setting up automatic payment from my bank. Now I know most people get their premiums deducted directly from their Social Security -- but I haven't taken Social Security yet. But I certainly didn't want to have to write the government a check every month, so I figured they ought to be able to do direct withdrawal (everyone else does.) Not so easy. It's not as if there's an online way to request bank withdrawals. I had to call up and talk to a nice man who answers inquiries; he had to mail me the correct form; I had to fill it out and mail it back; and then I had wait six weeks while they processed it.

This is nuts. The municipal garbage authority can do this immediately, online. Why not Medicare?

*** Don't get me wrong -- I'll fight to the death any politician who wants to cut or privatize the system. But I look forward to the day when Medicare lumbers into the current century.

Friday cat blogging: yearning

Morty wants something ... something OUT THERE. His back speaks desire.

As it happens, we know what he wants. He wants to eat grass. Sometimes he gets a few mouth fulls if we are unwary and he slips by someone going out. He's not supposed to go out. There are dogs and cars out there. He's never gotten further than the clump of grass and he's not going to. But he wants ...

Good news for the day, no. 2

Brian Banks, a 27 year old rookie linebacker, signed with the Atlanta Falcons. This time of year, aspiring football players with little experience sign contracts all the time; most of them don't last past training camp -- so what's the big deal about Banks?

Ten years ago Banks was a prime high school football prospect on his way to play at USC when a woman accused him of kidnapping and rape. According to CNN, he was confronted with the choice of trying to convince a jury of his innocence and risking a 41 year sentence -- or pleading "no contest," serving a five year sentence and a long stretch on probation, and being permanently stigmatized as a sex offender. He took the plea, even though he always claimed to be innocent.

Ninety-five percent of criminal cases are resolved through such plea bargains. A friend explained his job as a deputy DA:

If defendants play along and agree to spare the state the effort and cost of a trial, we repay them in time. If they insist on their rights, we get tough.

The courts wouldn't work if most cases didn't end before trial. But when prosecutors threaten to "get tough," defendants have to calculate their odds, even innocent defendants.

In fact, Banks didn't rape the woman. Ten years later, she recanted her claim. There had been no crime.

So Banks has spent the past year beating his body into football shape and has won a chance from the Georgia team. No wondering he's beaming in his XONR8 sweatshirt:

Good news for the day, no. 1

No human being is illegal, says the Associated Press, even though some people do take up residence in this country without legal permission.

Count this as a victory. Colorlines, Presente, and the journalist Jose Antonio Vargas have worked long and hard for this day.

Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll of the Associated Press explains:

The Stylebook no longer sanctions the term “illegal immigrant” or the use of “illegal” to describe a person. Instead, it tells users that “illegal” should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally.

… we had in other areas been ridding the Stylebook of labels. The new section on mental health issues argues for using credibly sourced diagnoses instead of labels. Saying someone was “diagnosed with schizophrenia” instead of schizophrenic, for example.

And that discussion about labeling people, instead of behavior, led us back to “illegal immigrant” again.

We concluded that to be consistent, we needed to change our guidance.

So we have.

Good for the AP; this suggested change in reporters' usage will percolate through the society gradually. It will help move discussions of comprehensive immigration reform in a more humane direction. After all, no human is "illegal."

Warming Wednesdays: what I learned about climate from Nate Silver

The New York Times' resident statistical whiz kept me on an even keel during the run up to the Presidential election: his calculations always gave some advantage to Barack Obama even at the candidate's lowest ebb after the first debate. I wasn't really paying much attention, having my own campaign to work on, but Nate Silver's predictions confirmed the little I could glean from my other observations.

Nate Silver has published a book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail -- but Some Don't, that I can heartily recommend to anyone who wants to evaluate the many predictions we encounter around us and that we make ourselves. It's an argument for utilizing Bayesian probability, an application of mathematical logic, in how we think about the world; if that sounds forbidding, just let me say that Silver's book is not difficult at all. He's a sharp observer of multiple subcultures, including sports, gambling, weather forecasting, economics, and earthquake science. In short, this book is fun and I thought a convincing argument in favor of a mode of prediction that might improve our understandings.

In particular Silver puts the arguments about the reality of climate change in a context I found slightly different than I'd understood. There are people for whom not believing in the climate conclusions of mainstream science is a good gig (sponsored usually by the fossil fuel industry) or who thrive on pure contrarianism, so it possible to say that "not all scientists" agree that global warming is real. But it is possible to discern which climate assertions win wide agreement and which are open to appropriate scientific questions.

… climate scientists are in much broader agreement about some parts of the debate than others. A survey of climate scientists conducted in 2008 found that almost all (94 percent) were agreed that climate change is occurring now, and 84 percent were persuaded that it was the result of human activity. But there was much less agreement about the accuracy of climate computer models. The scientists held mixed views about the ability of these models to predict global temperatures, and generally skeptical ones about their capacity to model other potential effects of climate change. Just 19 percent, for instance, thought they did a good job of modeling what sea-rise levels will look like fifty years hence. …

It is useful to the mere interested observer of scientific argument to have to parameters of consensus laid out so clearly.

The fact that some issues still need more data points and more sophisticated models in order to generate predictions that command overwhelming assent would not be a problem if climate change were merely a puzzle for scientists. But the scientific mode of knowledge has wandered into a political minefield where its conventions don't fit social needs.

The fundamental dilemma faced by climatologists is that global warming is a long term problem that might require a near-term solution. Because carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for so long, decisions that we make about it today will affect the lives of future generations. In a perfectly rational and benevolent world, this might not be so worrying. But our political and cultural institutions are not so well-devised to handle these problems …

Michael Mann, who is director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University,
"We're in a street fight with these people," he told me, referring to [one characterization of climate change skeptics]. The long-term goal of the street fight is to persuade the public and policy makers about the urgency (or lack thereof) of action to combat climate change. In a society accustomed to overconfident forecasters who mistake the confidence they express in a forecast for its veracity, expressions of uncertainty are not seen as a winning strategy by either side.

"Where you have to draw the line is to be very clear about where the uncertainties are, but to not have our statements be so laden in uncertainty that no one even listens to what we're saying," Mann told me. "It would be irresponsible for us as a community to not be speaking out. There are others who are happy to fill the void. And they're going to fill the void with disinformation."

Responsible prediction is hard; Nate Silver at least makes its contours more accessible in this book.

Drug patents are not a fact of nature

Yesterday, the New York Times headlined a business article about that perennial point of contention: drug company patents.

NEW DELHI — People in developing countries in Africa and Asia will continue to have access to low-cost copycat versions of drugs for diseases like H.I.V. and cancer, at least for a while. … The debate over global drug pricing is one of the most contentious issues between developed countries and the developing world. While poorer nations maintain they have a moral obligation to make cheaper, generic drugs available to their populations — by limiting patents in some cases — the brand name pharmaceutical companies contend the profits they reap are essential to their ability to develop and manufacture innovative medicines.

… In the United States, companies can get a new patent for a drug by altering its formula or changing its dosage. The companies contend that even minor improvements in medicines — changing a pill dosage to once a day instead of twice a day — can have a significant impact on patient wellness. But critics say the majority of drug patents given in the United States are for tiny changes that often provide patients few meaningful benefits but allow drug companies to continue charging high prices for years beyond the original patent life.

… While advocates for the pharmaceutical industry argue that fairly liberal rules on patents spur innovation, a growing number of countries are questioning why they should pay high prices for new drugs. Argentina and the Philippines have passed laws similar to the one enacted in India, placing strict limits on patents.

This article is a fine example of journalists accepting framing that constrains possible understandings of the issues involved. The writers could have improved their grasp of the competing interests here by considering the viewpoint in a free e-book by economist Dean Baker, The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer. Consider this:

In policy discussions, patents and copyrights are usually treated as part of the natural order, their enforcement is viewed as being as basic as the right to free speech or the free exercise of religion. In fact, there is nothing natural about patents and copyrights, they are relics of the Medieval guild system. They are state-granted monopolies, the exact opposite of a freely competitive market. The nanny state will arrest an entrepreneur who sells a patent-protected product in competition with the person to whom it has granted a patent monopoly.

Patents and copyrights do serve an economic purpose — they are a way to promote research and innovation in the case of patents, and a means of supporting creative and artistic work in the case of copyrights. However, just because patents and copyrights can be used for these purposes, it does not follow that they are the only mechanisms or the most efficient mechanisms to accomplish these purposes.

… It is necessary to have mechanisms for supporting innovation, and many alternatives to patents and copyrights already exist. The government directly funds $30 billion a year in biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health, a sum that is almost as large as the amount that the pharmaceutical industry claims to spend. A vast amount of creative work is supported by universities and private foundations. While these alternative mechanisms would have to be expanded, or new ones created, in the absence of patent and copyright protection, they demonstrate that patents and copyrights are not essential for supporting innovation and creative work. The appropriate policy debate is whether they are the best mechanisms.

My emphasis. Just because enterprises have long been organized in a familiar fashion doesn't mean that this is the only way. The patent system is a social invention; if we chose, we could try other incentives. In the book, Baker suggests alternative spurs to innovation that don't involve monopoly profits for a few companies or exclude the world's poor from access to drugs.

Not only can Baker's book be freely downloaded at the link above, you can even get it as a free audiobook here.

Easter Monday

Karen Armstrong understands why I spent so much of last week at church services:

Religion ... is a practical discipline in which we learn new capacities of mind and heart. Like premodern philosophy, it was not the quest for an abstract truth but a practical way of life. Usually religion is about doing things and it is hard work. …

If you don’t do religion, you don’t get it. In the modern period, however, we have turned faith into a head-trip. Originally, the English word “belief”, like the Greek pistis and the Latin credo, meant “commitment”. When Jesus asked his followers to have “faith”, he was not asking them to accept him blindly as the Second Person of the Trinity (an idea he would have found puzzling). Instead, he was asking his disciples to give all they had to the poor, live rough and work selflessly for the coming of a kingdom in which rich and poor would sit together at the same table.

New Statesman, March 2013

And so -- now that Christ is once again risen from the grave "trampling down death by death" -- I think I'll take a day off from blogging.