Saturday scenes and scenery: Clarion Alley

In the 1980s and 90s, if a visitor to San Francisco seemed the sort who should be shown street art, I'd take her to Balmy Alley. The predominately Central American struggle themes pictured there still resonate for me. But nowadays, I'd probably start with Clarion, a little street between Valencia and Mission just south of 18th Street.


The fences and garage doors here offer a wild mix of subjects and styles, just like our city these days.


Some are bucolic, though foreign to most of us.


Others celebrate courageous struggle.


Others are not easy to interpret, even subtle. That's an accomplishment on an old wood fence.


A comment on our enthusiasm for threat inflation perhaps?


Haunting.


Frightening and all too recognizable, these dogs of war.


Tamara Ching is celebrated as godmother to transgendered and otherwise gender fluid people in Polk Gulch.


Then there's a musical Eden for a respite.

I trust my next tourist will enjoy this show.

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.

Once upon a time, the U.S. fought a war at home

Thoughtful Ta-Nehisi Coates suggested that if a person wanted to learn more about the U.S. Civil War era, one had to read the historian James McPherson. I have been doing this and will do more. I began with an anthology of his short articles: This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War. I was bowled over by my emotional reaction to this book.

McPherson's lead essay -- it gives the book its title -- is devoted to the historiography of the conflict -- essentially to dismissing various, sometimes quite influential, historical theories that the Civil War was about anything but whether this would be a country that continued to endorse racially demarcated human slavery. Contemporaries were clear about this:

… the new vice president of the Confederate States of America, Alexander H. Stephens, said in a speech at Savannah on March 21, 1861, that slavery was "the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution" of Southern independence.

...The old confederation known as the United States, said Stephens, had been founded on the false idea that all men are created equal. The Confederacy, in contrast, "is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth…"

Yet after the Union victory, many historians worked hard to promote alternative explanations for a conflict that killed over 600,000 soldiers. Former Confederate rebels wanted back into the U.S. national narrative without the moral stigma of having fought for what was now considered an immoral social system; over time, the victors too wanted to forget the bitterness. By the early 20th century, many Progressive Era historians promoted the idea that the fight was really over incompatible economic systems.

"Merely by the accidents of climate, soil, and geography," wrote Charles A. Beard, doyen of the Progressive school, "was it a sectional struggle" -- the accidental fact that plantation agriculture was located in the South and industry mainly in the North. … For some Progressive historians, neither system was significantly worse or better than the other -- "wage slavery" was as exploitative as chattel bondage.

Southern historians claimed, influentially, that it had all been about their ancestors attachment to "state's rights." McPherson demolishes this:

Of all these interpretations, the states-rights argument is perhaps the weakest. It fails to ask the question, state's rights for what purpose? State's rights, or sovereignty, was always more a means than an end, an instrument to achieve a certain goal more than a principle. … In the antebellum South, the purpose of asserting state sovereignty was to protect slavery from the potential hostility of a national majority against Southern interests -- mainly slavery.

In fact, McPherson works to clarify that Southern politicians only gave primacy to "states' rights" arguments when they were losing what had been a vise-like grip on the federal government.

… state sovereignty was a fallback position. A more powerful instrument to protect slavery was control of the national government. Until 1861 Southern politicians did this remarkably well. They used that control to defend slavery from all kinds of threats and perceived threats. They overrode the rights of Northern states that passed personal liberty laws to protect black people from kidnapping by agents who claimed them as fugitive slaves. During forty-nine of the seventy-two years from 1789 to 1861, the presidents of the United States were Southerners -- all of them slaveholders. … Two-thirds of the Speakers of the House, chairmen of the House Ways and Means Committee, and presidents pro tern of the Senate were Southerners. At all times before 1861, a majority of Supreme Court justices were Southerners.

This domination constituted what antislavery Republicans called the Slave Power and sometimes, more darkly, the Slave Power Conspiracy. … By 1850, when the number of free and slave states was equal at fifteen each, the free states contained 60 percent of the population and 70 percent of the voters but sent only 50 percent of the senators to Washington. [The three fifths compromise, counting Negro slaves as 3/5 of a person, embedded in the Constitution,] gave slave states an average of twenty more congressmen after each census than they would have had on the basis of the free population alone. The combined effect of these two constitutional provisions also gave slave states about thirty more electoral votes than their share of the voting population would have entitled them to have.

Southern politicians did not use this national power to buttress state's rights; quite the contrary. In the 1830s Congress imposed a gag rule to stifle antislavery petitions from Northern states. The Post Office banned antislavery literature from the mail if it was sent to Southern states. …

Because we read history with hindsight generated by outcomes, what's not easy to recapture is that when the Civil War began, the North as well as the South was gripped by a strong feeling of having been unjustly treated by the other side. If Southerners felt insulted because Northerners labeled their slavery "immoral and unworthy," Northerners felt Southern willingness to break up the country would be a repudiation of what their ancestors have won in the Revolution, a democratic republic of (white, male) equality.

Lincoln and most of the Northern people were not willing to accept the nation's dismemberment. They feared that toleration of disunion in 1861 would create a fatal precedent to be invoked by disaffected minorities in the future, perhaps by the losing side in another presidential election, until the United States dissolved into a dozen petty, squabbling, hostile autocracies. The great experiment in republican government launched in 1776 would collapse, proving the contention of European monarchists and aristocrats that this upstart republic across the Atlantic could not last.

*** I've been thinking for several weeks about why this book touched off strong emotional reactions in me. I read widely on a good many pretty disturbing subjects, but this evoked real feeling. Some thoughts:

• My ancestors were Union partisans. Though they mostly avoided actually fighting, they were active Republicans, political supporters of Lincoln. One was a U.S. diplomat in France, working to discourage Napoleon III from jumping in on the Confederate side.They believed their ancestors had fought against injustice and won -- and I was raised to think they had carried on that heritage in the Civil War.

• As a young student of history, I recall being alternatively confused and attracted by the various strains of Civil War historiography. Growing up during the African-American freedom struggle in the South, I never put much stock in the states-rights/War Between the States version of the story. That seemed sectional sleight of hand. But I do remember being much attracted by the Beard clash of economic systems paradigm, if only because it seemed to treat Northern workers as if they mattered. But, really, I have no attachment to any of the historical explanations that erase slavery. Come on -- four million black people in bondage unequivocally mattered!

• But what really sets me off is that contemporary Republicans seem bent on recreating the "Slave Power Conspiracy" in modern dress. The Senate is even more unrepresentative now than then: 38 million Californians get the same two votes in the 100 member body as 564,000 residents of Wyoming? And then there's the filibuster; with the current party breakdown, states with just a third of the country's population can block legislation or Presidential nominations. States are again attempting nullification of federal laws they don't like, such as any gun control measures. Our unrepresentative institutions can't do what majorities understand needs to be done, so our politics are consumed with insignificant media-driven kerfuffles. We can't even take up the real challenge to our system and the world -- abrupt climate change. Before the Civil War, our ancestors put off dealing with slavery and its implications for the nation for two generations; we still have too many of their busted governmental institutions and we don't have 70 years to waste before taking measures to limit the havoc unconstrained carbon emissions are wreaking.

No wonder pondering the last great rift in U.S. history renders me anxious and angry.

McPherson's essays are so rich I think I'll be writing at least a couple more posts jumping off from them.

Friday cat blogging

Readers will be reassured to know that I compose these posts while under watchful supervision.

Gender fluidity

Uh-oh. As noted in the previous post, some people wouldn't like this:

These choices were included in a survey sent out by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. They are clearly gathering information to improve their public image and fund pitches. And they get props for noticing some people do not experience gender as binary.

Why don't they just come out and say what they really mean?

They want uppity women to remember their place -- mutely following the guys in the dresses and purple hats. The purpose of the Catholic Church's opposition to gay rights and marriage equality is to shore up the crumbling pillars of male domination over women. Here's San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone bemoaning the Minnesota state decision to legalize same sex marriages.

"It is the height of irony that the Minnesota legislature decided, and the governor signed into law, the redefinition of marriage just after we celebrated the unique gifts of mothers and women on Mother's Day," he said in a statement the bishops' conference released Wednesday.

National Catholic Reporter

The further we go toward recognizing that human societies make choices about how we organize ourselves, and that we can expand those choices to allow greater human possibility and dignity for more of us, the harder it becomes to insist on traditional patriarchy. Too bad, guys.

Prescriptions for overcoming "well-informed futility syndrome"

Sandra Steingraber has an unusual ability to make toxicology and environmental science understandable to an uninformed lay reader -- and Raising Elijah: Protecting Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis is consequently an impressive book. Here's her summary:

In the absence of federal policies that are protective of child development and the ecology of the planet on which our children's lives depend, we serve as our own regulatory agencies and departments of interior....

Thoughtful but overwhelmed parents correctly perceive a disconnect between the enormity of the problem and the ability of individual acts of vigilance and self-sacrifice to fix it. Environmental awareness without corresponding political changes leads to paralyzing despair....

We feel helpless in our knowledge, and we're not sure we want any more knowledge. You could call this well-informed futility syndrome. And soon enough, we are retreating into silent resignation rather than standing up for abolition.

Her son is named "Elijah" in memory of the Illinois abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy who was murdered by a pro-slavery mob in 1837. This woman is serious about standing up for the truths she discovers in her work and parental experience.

And she's not into sitting around feeling helpless. In fact, on April 30, she completed a 10 day jail term for blocking the entrance to a natural gas facility that has invaded her 'hood, the Finger Lakes region of New York State.

“I would do it again in a minute. …Being new to civil disobedience, I’m still learning about its power and its limitations…

But I know this: all I had to do is sit in a six-by-seven-foot steel box in an orange jumpsuit and be mildly miserable, but the real power of it is to be able to shine a spotlight on the problem.”

Steingraber reminds us that we will have the quality of life and democracy that we can win from elites who want to exploit for profit both all of us and the natural world. The book is an accessible introduction to toxics in our daily lives, especially addressed to parents.

Warming Wednesdays: where are your local temps are headed as carbon emissions continue?

The Wunderground weather site has a section which uses your location to draw a graph of scientists' projections of expected temperature change in your locality. You may have to enter your location under the "Climate Change tab/Local" tab; I can't confidently predict what your path might be because Wunderground knows my location already.

Here's what they show for San Francisco:

It does precipitation as well. Again, here's our city by the bay. Looks like rain.

The projections are based on the models used by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) studies. There's lots to explore here.

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.

Defenders of Israel throw a hissy fit

American Muslims for Palestine board chair Dr. Hatem Bazian announces a campaign that will put this sign on San Francisco buses for the next month.

This bus sign campaign is yet another free speech effort -- we see a lot of them around here, what's the big deal?

Unless I'd happened on one of the buses, I probably wouldn't have noticed this effort. Nor would I have thought much about it. I have no trouble believing retired South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu when he calls Israel an apartheid state. He's got no axe to grind; in fact, as far as I know he labors in retirement for peace and justice. And he knows plenty about systemic discrimination and exclusion. I'll take his word for it. And the ad itself, highlighting the fact that U.S. taxpayers are paying for systemic discrimination and exclusion, seems simply true to me.

But the campaign got a higher profile on my mental horizon when emails started flying by about a clutch of organizations -- the Jewish Community Relations Council, the Anti-Defamation League, and the American Jewish Committee -- branding the ads as "inflammatory rhetoric designed to delegitimize Israel's very existence," "extremist language," and "bigoted lies and demonization." It seemed as if the triggering word was apartheid. Jewish Voice for Peace jumped into the fray with a collection of other people in addition to the Archbishop who have uttered the dread word:

• Archbishop Desmond Tutu: "I am aware that many of our Jewish brothers and sisters who were so instrumental in the fight against South African apartheid are not yet ready to reckon with the apartheid nature of Israel and its current government...But I cannot ignore the Palestinian suffering I have witnessed, nor the voices of those courageous Jews troubled by Israel's discriminatory course." Tampa Bay Times, April 30, 2012

• Israeli Defense Minister (and former Prime Minister) Ehud Barak:"As long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state." (2010)

• Israeli newspaper Haaretz editorial:"The de facto separation is today more similar to political apartheid than an occupation regime because of its constancy. One side - determined by national, not geographic association - includes people who have the right to choose and the freedom to move, and a growing economy. On the other side are people closed behind the walls surrounding their community, who have no right to vote, lack freedom of movement, and have no chance to plan their future. " (2007)

• Former Israeli Minister of Education Shulamit Aloni:"Jewish self-righteousness is taken for granted among ourselves to such an extent that we fail to see what’s right in front of our eyes. It’s simply inconceivable that the ultimate victims, the Jews, can carry out evil deeds. Nevertheless, the state of Israel practices its own, quite violent, form of Apartheid with the native Palestinian population." (2007)

• B’Tselem,The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories:This report deals with one of the primary, albeit lesser known, components of Israel’s policy of restricting Palestinian movement in the Occupied Territories: restrictions and prohibitions on Palestinian travel along certain roads in the West Bank. This phenomenon is referred to in the report as the “Forbidden Roads Regime.” The regime, based on the principle of separation through discrimination, bears striking similarities to the racist apartheid regime that existed in South Africa until 1994. In the roads regime operated by Israel, the right of every person to travel in the West Bank is based on his or her national origin. Forbidden Roads: Israel’s Discriminatory Road Regime in the West Bank, Btselem, 2004

• On 21 April 2010, the South African government expressed "the greatest concern" over: Israeli Infiltration Order 1650, saying that the order has a broad definition of "infiltrator" and unclear terms as to which permits would allow a person to reside in the West Bank, as well as how valid residency might be proven. The South African government said the terms of the order are "reminiscent of pass laws under apartheid South Africa."

Two comments on this controversy:

The ADL has zero credibility with me on anything about apartheid. My friend Jeffrey Blankfort has described the ADL's program in the 1980s and 90s in San Francisco which included funneling "intelligence" from San Francisco police files about US activists to the South African apartheid secret service. I've always assumed that this was the reason that the day after my working group arrived in Cape Town in 1990 to help anti-apartheid newspapers upgrade their technology, we received what seemed a clumsy visit from state security. The men at the door said they were roofers and must look over the house; there was nothing wrong with the roof.

Secondly, it raises my hackles when anyone tries to stifle discussion by outlawing particular language. Israel's existence is not at stake -- unless it manages to commit suicide by fatally alienating all its neighbors and its friends. The charge of legal, forceful systemic discrimination and exclusion of Palestinians by Israelis in the Occupied Territories and even within the 1948 borders is simply true. You can't expect people not to point this out. And pitching a hissy fit when people do won't stop anyone.

What are they hiding this time?

Nothing new about government secrecy …

except the extreme enthusiasm with which the Obama administration seeks to protect it.

The A.P. said that the Justice Department informed it on Friday that law enforcement officials had obtained the records for more than 20 telephone lines of its offices and journalists, including their home phones and cellphones. It said the records were seized without notice sometime this year.

… In an angry letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Monday, Gary Pruitt, the president and chief executive of The A.P., called the seizure, a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into its news gathering activities.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” he wrote. “These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the news gathering activities undertaken by The A.P. during a two-month period, provide a road map to A.P.’s news gathering operations, and disclose information about A.P.’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”

The various phone companies involved are set up technically to grab such information whenever the government asks for it. In investigations of leaks of "national security secrets," the Obama administration has sought twice the number of indictments issued under all previous administrations combined.

The investigation, thought to involve publication of news of a Yemen-based terrorist plot to bomb an airliner, is one of two announced by the Justice Department last June. The other involves leaks to the New York Times about US-initiated cyberattacks on Iranian nuclear facilities. The Times has no knowledge of seized phone records in that case.

What this is really all about is whether the government can intimidate the press. The government wants to be free to decide which of its war-on-the-cheap projects the citizens get to know about. For the moment, we're a nation tired of declared wars and occupations. But our leaders (and particularly our spooks) have lots of places they want to project U.S. power. Maybe some of these efforts actually do protect us. Maybe some of them are monumental screw ups or even crimes that will ultimately make us less safe. None of them can be debated democratically if the government can succeed in hiding them in the name of "national security."

Want to keep on top of these machinations? I suggest reading Marcy Wheeler. She often has the story months before the "news" media.

A little family history

My parents were married 80 years ago this month. They didn't have a big wedding; the time was the nadir of the Depression. Though they came from families that remained more than comfortably well off, the times were too uncertain for grand celebrations.

 

Roger was 27 years old, possessed of an engineering degree that he had never used. He had gone to work for his father in "the brokerage business" in 1927. Pretty soon they were both out of work. My grandfather retired and my father went on to do accounting for a series of employers, mostly relatively small businesses. 

Martha was three years younger. She too had a college degree, in history. In better economic times, she might have become an academic. Her degree served her well when she held a job writing abstracts of esoteric literature for a local soap magnate.

The fashions of the time didn't flatter them in this newspaper picture announcing the event. Look at those shoes!

I didn't come along for another 15 years; I think they didn't believe in adding a child to the uncertain world of the Depression and then World War II. I was the only offspring.

Their loving marriage endured 58 years until Roger's death in 1991.

I'm scanning bushels of family photos these days. Occasionally I'll share here.

Mass effort

Getting the Obamacare program off the ground by the beginning of next year is going to require lots of people to get into the act. Here's an early offering:

Enjoy.

Agreements and qualifications

Will these young people grow up to adopt the current consensus?

A Pew poll aimed to find out what people in the United States all agree on. They got 90 percent assent, or close to that number, to a list of assertions.

Some of us are not like others of us, I realized reading through the list. On the other hand, maybe I'm not so far removed from opinions of the crowd as I might like sometimes to image myself. What follows is a snapshot of my reactions to the study.

Pew's areas of near universal agreement are in bold face; some of my responses to these items are in italics.

—believe in God.
Well, I do that -- but I worry that a lot of my sister and brother citizens seem attached to a rather demonic conception of the Deity. On the other hand, I sure don't want any more Wars of Religion, so mostly I remember to be polite about this.

—are very patriotic.
Not my best subject. I love this country, the land and our recurrent outbreaks of struggle toward greater equity and justice. I feel inexpressibly lucky to live with the wealth and security that we enjoy. But ultimately I sign on with the common English lyrics sung to the tune "Finlandia":
"This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine.
But other hearts in other lands are beating,
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine."

—consider preventing terrorism a very important foreign policy goal.
Huh? Preventing terrorism is much to be desired, but this only occasionally relates to "foreign policy." When you are the leading world empire -- or trying to be -- "foreign policy" is a very inadequate label for your international behavior.

—admire those who get rich by working hard.
No. Nor do I usually think those who get rich got there by working hard. Mostly they stole their wealth fair and square.

—think society should ensure everyone has equal opportunity to succeed.
There's something I can agree with. There are some crooks who get in the way. See the previous response.

—think it’s important to get more than a high school education.
Yes. Not certain this requires going to more school, though that probably helps provide a context for learning.

—favor teaching sex education in public schools.
Of course.

—find birth control morally acceptable.
Of course-- and essential for women's autonomy and dignity.

—believe cloning humans would be morally wrong.
I haven't thought this through really, but I instinctively recoil, along with the rest of the 90 percent.

—believe it’s wrong for married people to have affairs.
Probably, unless people can agree on some other arrangement and handle any emotional fallout. We've made marriage into a contract between two people -- not society or our families -- and we need to keep our promises to each other, whatever those promises are. Fidelity is usually one of them. And children should probably have some claim on their parents' behavior.

—are interested in keeping up with national affairs.
Yes. Also interested in influencing the national direction; that takes work.

—believe it’s their duty to always vote.
Gee, an awful lot of people who believe this must be disappointed in themselves. I do it, but I can imagine feeling it was less than meaningful. On the other hand, I think campaigns and citizen activity are good for us, building our capacity for collective action.

How do you respond to this list? Are you in agreement with the 90 percent? Or perhaps, like me, you have some reservations?

Saturday scenes and scenery: Coastal Trail in Mount Tamalpais State Park

Sometimes, you just have to get out there.


I jogged a 12 mile out and back on this trail on Friday.


There are a few wooded sections ...


but most of the route runs across open hill sides.


Eventually the fog began to burn off and the ocean came into view.


I spent the day carefully jumping over lizards ...


and an occasional snake.


Next time, I'll have to go down to Stinson Beach. After days like this, I really do think northern California is akin to paradise.

Straight arrow prosecutor in Washington-land

In his book on the experience, former Special Inspector General for Oversight of TARP Neil Barofsky sometimes comes off as a cross between the Jimmy Stewart character (Tony Kirby) in the film You Can't Take It With You and Eliot Ness. That is especially the case in the sections on the abysmal deficiencies of the federal program -- HAMP -- advertised to help homeowners suffering foreclosure in the wake of the mortgage bubble juiced by Wall Street financial cowboys.

Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street begins and ends with Barofsky bemused at how an investigating, Democratic-voting, criminal practice attorney like him ever was nominated for the job of seeing what the Treasury Department did with the $700 billion taxpayer funds extracted from a reluctant Congress in the fall of 2008 when the whole global financial system came unglued.

Suffice to say, he wasn't a welcome addition in Republican Hank Paulson's Treasury Department under Bush and he was probably even less welcome under Tim Geithner when President Obama came into office. He kept asking questions. He expected if they were going to throw all that money around there would be prudent controls. They tried to brush him off -- after all, Wall Street financiers were their kind of people and they trusted them. Besides, nothing was ever really the fault of the money men; it was all some kind of fault-free accident. They were certain some outsider lawyer couldn't possibly understand the entrails of high finance.

In fact, Barofsky understands the financial implosion very well indeed -- this is a great book for anyone who wants to get a basic picture of what the hell the financial plutocrats did (and are doing again) with their clever inventions for betting on our dingy remnants of a real economy. (The only equal in clarity I've read is Gillian Tett's Fool's Gold.) He spent three years trying to get government officials to use the bailout bonanza they'd come into to restore the economy for ordinary citizens as well as for their peers in high finance. Or at least not to allow crooks to run off with too much of the cash. Though he had some influence, he doesn't feel he succeeded. As he wrote in his last report:

… even if TARP saved our financial system back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car [with faulty brakes…]

[Barofsky's addition.] He hoped the Dodd-Frank law would force some changes, especially by breaking up the "too big to fail" banks. Because the recovery as organized under both Bush and Obama has just made these few banks bigger and more politically powerful, he believes we are heading for yet another nasty crash sometime down the line.

Barofsky describes himself as, at times, remarkably politically insensitive. I found it amazing that he didn't understand why efforts to undercut his oversight reached a crescendo right before the 2010 midterm elections. Of course the Obama administration got huffy with this jerk who was messing with their message. Not that he should have shut up, but he could have anticipated some of the grief.

On the other hand, he rapidly figured out that Congresscritters are subject to slightly different pressures than the executive branch and that he could leverage his Congressional supporters on both sides of the aisle to get more influence. Several Congressional figures who seldom get a positive mention from any progressive get high marks for supporting his efforts to avoid fraud: would you believe Darrell Issa and Max Baucus come off as caring about the taxpayers' money? I find it hard. Barney Frank was also a good ally to the oversight function.

Given the mountains of fraud, recklessness, and unethical behavior Barofsky describes here, you might expect that Bailout is depressing. It is not. It is even sort of fun in a police procedural sort of way. Washington may be a rat's nest of greed, ambition and obliviousness to ordinary citizens, but book is still a testament to how persons with decent values plugging away in our various spheres can make some difference. It's not nirvana, but it can be an improvement.

Racism and "Redoubt Republicanism"

New York Times commentator Charles Blow took aim at that Heritage Foundation immigration "study" that has turned out to be written by some right-wing hack whose Harvard Ph.D. work consisted of asserting that Latinos have low IQ scores, probably because Latinos are genetically dumb. Blow has a name for the weasel words -- "skill-based" differences -- this author suggests when trying to "blunt negative reaction."

Skill-based. Clever. Or Machiavellian.

In reality, it’s just another conservative euphemism meant to cast class aspersions and raise racial ire without ever forthrightly addressing the issues of class and race. This form of Roundabout Republicanism has entirely replaced honest conservative discussion, to the point that anyone who now raises class-based inequality is labeled divisive and anyone who raises race is labeled a racist.

It’s a way of wriggling out of unpleasant debates on which they have stopped trying to engage altogether. The new strategy is avoidance, obfuscation and boomerang blaming.

This “skill-based” phraseology is simply the latest in a long line of recent right-wing terms of art.

I don't quite agree with Blow that this is "Roundabout Republicanism."

I think better term for what is practiced here is "Redoubt Republicanism." This is a political movement that has chosen to lock itself away, against the United States that is, and even more against the United States that will be. They seem to think they are re-enacting the battle of the Alamo, heroes standing pat against a foreign horde. Clinging to white supremacy, Republicans are immured in a prison of their own making.

Also, since when did anyone, left or right, believe that IQ tests measured anything except the ability to take IQ tests? I thought scientists like Stephen Jay Gould had killed that notion off a generation ago. But the ghoulish myth recurs ... Harvard must have gone downhill.

"We are not barbarians. We bury the dead." Eventually.

We are not covering ourselves with glory on this.

A funeral director (that's an undertaker if you are old fashioned or plain speaking) in Worcester, Mass., took responsibility for Boston bomber Tamerlan Tzarnaev's corpse on May 1 when the police were through with it. He has prepared it according to Muslim custom (no cremation allowed) -- but no burial site has been found and he's got protestors at his doors.
Peter Stefan is not a stranger to controversy. Apparently he's been through some of this before.

“[Peter Stefan]’s bent over backwards to serve the least in the community for decades,” said Josh Slocum, executive director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance.

"He's probably one of the few people with the guts to do the right thing," said Lisa Carlson of the Funeral Ethics Organization. …

"He was the only one who would bury gay men dead of AIDS back in the 80s. He did funerals for slain prostitutes that everyone else treated like some sort of subhuman trash,” Slocum said in an email, calling him “a good man of rare character.”

A 2002 profile in the Worcester Telegram and Gazette highlighted Stefan’s soft heart and the free funerals he had given to the downtrodden – from new immigrants to homeless veterans.

“God must have loved the poor, ‘cause he made so many of them. That’s one of my favorite sayings,’” he told the paper. “Nobody seems to give a crap. That’s why I’m involved, to take care of poor people.”

Worcester's police chief is begging for authorities to clear the way for a burial. "We are not barbarians. We bury the dead."

According to an Associated Press story today,

… none of the 120 offers of graves from the U.S. and Canada has worked out because officials in those cities and towns don’t want the body.

I'm glad to hear there were 120 offers of burial sites, even if local authorities seem to have blocked using any of them so far.

For some reason I find this episode extremely upsetting. Boston is being "strong;" this isn't strong.

UPDATE: Apparently they've accomplished a burial. According to the NY Times:

“A courageous and compassionate individual came forward to provide the assistance needed to properly bury the deceased,” read a statement published on the department’s Web site and read on Thursday morning in front of the funeral home that handled Mr. Tsarnaev’s body.

But in the same article, this episode is still inspiring thoughtless nonsense.

The body presented something of a legal quandary, as the interment of a terrorism suspect is rare on American soil ...

Rare? Really? What did they do with John Brown? Or John Wilkes Booth? Or Lee Harvey Oswald? Or David Koresh? Come on. When people are dead, you bury the bodies, unless you are barbarians.

Warming Wednesdays: sitting up and taking notice

Who'd have thought it? GM -- the carmaker -- has some news:

General Motors officially acknowledged today that implementing policies to prevent climate change is “good business.”

GM became the first automaker to sign the “Climate Declaration” pledge, which is promoted by nonprofit Ceres’ Business for Innovative Climate & Energy Policy (BICEP) coalition.

The decision to sign the pledge comes as GM has been pressuring the U.S. government to establish a national energy policy focused on promoting energy security with a diverse range of sources, including natural gas and renewables. The automaker sends no waste to landfills from 105 of plants, and is trying to boost that figure.

GM CEO Dan Akerson told the Fortune Green conference on Tuesday that “sustainability is woven into our global strategies.”

Detroit Free Press, May 1, 2013

Action on galloping climate change will come when the power players finally realize that their survival is at stake. Apparently GM has noticed.

So has the U.S. military, for quite awhile. Warming-enhanced disasters are going to define their operational environment and they know it.

In this context, listen to President Obama at the National Academy of Sciences:
Smart guy, great comedic timing, terrific researchers.

H/t to Climate Crocks for today's topics.

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.

New York Times and the drumbeat for yet another war …

Looks like the New York Times is onboard to try to talk a reluctant U.S. citizenry into another Middle East war. Whoopee! This could be a terrible ride for all concerned.

I got my first inkling of the seriousness of this over the weekend from the "public editor" column. That's the in-house critic who is supposed to call the paper out when it violates journalistic rules, such as by lying in its stories. The current incumbent, Margaret Sullivan, has shown somewhat more signs of life than past occupants of the position. Her column rehashed the paper's response to a long forgotten miscreant, Jason Blair, who was making up his copy out of thin air about a decade ago. However, she went on to point out, individual fabulists are not what dominates the reader complaints she sees:

Have The Times and its reputation recovered fully? My sense is that they have recovered better from the Blair scandal than from the paper’s flawed reporting about the existence of weapons of mass destruction that led up to the Iraq war. I hear about this, disparagingly, from readers far more often. Because much of that reporting, especially from the disgraced reporter Judith Miller, took place at the same time and under the same leadership, I asked Mr. [Howell] Raines, [the Executive Editor in that period] about that as well.

“I regret any error that ever got into the paper, but from where I sat, there was a total congruence — everything was coalescing around one message,” he said, noting that The Times was far from alone in its reporting. “I was suspicious, and perhaps I should have been more aggressive in pursuing that suspicion.”

"Everything was coalescing around one message …" Here we go again … the mere suggestion that "everything" is pointing one way should be suspicious where hard information is obscured by conflicting, warring parties. All the more so in a region in which the U.S. has very little track record of knowing what is up and what is down. In fact, the record shows the U.S. being led around by the nose by ambitious politicians and mendacious pseudo-allies. Whose "everything" is this?

Then today we get a column by Bill Keller, another past editor who has more or less admitted he was suckered about Iraq. He is urging us to forget about that war crime and leap into Syria. He sure does his best to ensure that "everything is coalescing around one message."

[Iraq] turned out to be a humbling error of judgment, and it left me gun-shy.

Of course, there are important lessons to be drawn from our sad experience in Iraq: Be clear about America’s national interest. Be skeptical of the intelligence. Be careful whom you trust. Consider the limits of military power. Never go into a crisis, especially one in the Middle East, expecting a cakewalk.

Having said that, he goes on for a full column urging us to ignore exactly those prescriptions.

He faults Obama for doubting that the U.S. has a vital national interest in the Syrian civil war. So he makes up with some wobbly legs to stand on while arguing for more intervention: a mix of fear of allowing a haven for terrorists adjacent to a mixed bag of "allies" -- Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey. He tops this off with a dose of the foreign policy analogue of the appeal to the "confidence fairy" in economic policy -- we must protect our imperial "credibility."

Let's hope the Obama administration knows that no good will come of another "dumb war" in the Prez' dismissive description the Iraq adventure.

For a balanced discussion of what stance the U.S. might take to try to avert even greater bloodshed, here's an article from analyst Phyllis Bennis.

So what should the US do?

The first thing is to de-escalate the fighting – initially, stopping the arms shipments to all sides. And that means negotiating directly with Russia, on a quid pro quo to stop US and allied training and arms shipments to the rebels, in return for an end to Russian and allied shipments to the Syrian government. And it means supporting a broad UN mandate for a truly internationally credible inspection team authorized and empowered to investigate all claims of chemical weapons use, by any side in the conflict. (Accountability for any violations of the chemical weapons prohibition must be imposed, but the timing of achieving such justice may have to wait for an end to the fighting.) …

Read it all to get a sense that everyone is NOT coalescing around one message ...

"Foreign policy is not a game of Risk."

There are some policy points that are worth repeating, even by a no-count blogger, even at the risk of being a bore.

To the U.S. government:

• Don't torture.

• Close Guantanamo.

• Don't attack Iran.

• Don't jump into the war in Syria.

And perhaps more effectually, to the peace and anti-militarism movement in the United States:

• Don't fixate on the drones.

It's not the drones that embody the evil of the moment issuing from our imperial security state: it's the resort to a policy of assassination, "targeted killings" that often turn out not to be so targeted. Not to mention that these actions flunk any plausible role for the international rule of law. On this topic, Steve Coll has written an important article in the form of a book review that is accessible at the link. Here's an excerpt:

For Eisenhower [in the 1950s], who had witnessed the carnage of the Normandy landings and the Battle of the Bulge, and later claimed to “hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can,” political assassinations represented an alluring alternative to conventional military action. Through the execution or overthrow of undesirable foreign leaders, the thinking went, it might be possible to orchestrate the global struggle against Communism from a distance, and avoid the misery -- and the risks of nuclear war -- that out-and-out combat would bring. Assassination was seen not only as precise and efficient but also as ultimately humane. Putting such theory into practice was the role of the C.I.A. …

Aside from the moral ugliness of violent covert action, its record as a national-security strategy isn’t encouraging. On occasion, interventions have delivered short-term advantages to Washington, but in the long run they have usually sown deeper troubles. … Memory of the C.I.A.’s hand in Mosadegh’s overthrow stoked the anti-American fury of the Iranian Revolution, which confounds the United States to this day. Foreign policy is not a game of Risk. Great nations achieve lasting influence and security not by bloody gambits but through economic growth, scientific innovation, military deterrence, and the power of ideas.

… after September 11, 2001, as lower Manhattan and the Pentagon smoldered, C.I.A. leaders advocated for the right to kill members of Al Qaeda anywhere in the world. George W. Bush eagerly assented. …

[Emphasis is mine.] The drones are just the latest shiny toy that seems to promise a means to maintain U.S. hegemony on the cheap. Our administration's evident delight in its technological killing instruments is actually a sign of weakness. Coll points out that the U.S. does a path have global leadership; politicians are deterred from following the path of "economic growth, scientific innovation, military deterrence, and the power of ideas" because it would entail investing in the quality of life here at home.

This points me to another of those policy points that even a no-count blogger can't repeat too often:

• If the government needs money for the common good, tax those who have it -- that would be the banks and rich people.

A meditation on "religion" and "the rules"

A friend, a Chinese American whose family has been in the United States for many generations, once proposed to me that the Chinese just don't have any religion. This seemed like a very broad generalization from a less than unimpeachable source -- there are an awful lot of Chinese and he'd barely visited the place.

Still I think he meant something like what Brent Nongbri writes about in Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept.

My father grew up in the Khasi Hills of northeastern India. The Khasi language is today spoken by roughly one million people, mostly in the state of Meghalaya. When I was in college and just becoming aware of the complexity of studying religion, it occurred to me one day that I had no idea what the Khasi word for "religion" was. I owned a small Khasi-English dictionary, but it did not provide English-to-Khasi definitions. … a few years later, the topic came up in a conversation with my father, and I asked him about the Khasi term for "religion." He replied that it was ka niam. By this time I was a graduate student in religious studies, and I was curious to learn more about this word. I dug out my little dictionary and looked it up. I found it could also simply mean "customs," that is to say, not necessarily anything particularly or especially religious. More intriguing, though, was the asterisk beside the word that directed me to a short note at the bottom of the page. It turned out that niam was in fact not an indigenous Khasi term at all but a loan-word from the Bengali niyama, meaning "rules" or "duties." My father's language, it seems, had no native word for "religion."

Nongbri sets out to show that the way we commonly use "religion" is an artifact of European adjustments to the splintering of medieval Christendom into a multiplicity of warring nation-state Christianities; the most effective way to stop the bloodshed between rival sects was to confine "religion" to a personal, private sphere. What mattered was not what individuals thought was "true," but what made for law-abiding citizens in the public realm under a regime of law. That is, "religion" ceased to be synonymous with society's core operating principles, "the rules." Because this occurred concurrent with European discovery of and colonial domination around the world, we overlaid our concept of "religion" on peoples and their social structures where it is not necessarily a good fit.

…This projection provided the basis for the framework of World Religions that currently dominates both academic and popular discussions of religion: the world is divided among people of different and often competing beliefs about how to obtain salvation, and these beliefs should ideally, according to influential figures like Locke, be privately held, spiritual, and nonpolitical. It was only with this particular set of circumstances in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the concept of religion as we know it began to coalesce.

… Because of the pervasive use of the word "religion" in the cultures of the modern Western world (the "we" here), we already intuitively know what "religion" is before we even try to define it: religion is anything that sufficiently resembles modern Protestant Christianity. Such a definition might be seen as crass, simplistic, ethnocentric, Christianocentric, and even a bit flippant; it is all these things, but it is also highly accurate in reflecting the uses of the term in modern languages. Every attempted definition of "religion" that I have seen has implicitly had this criterion at its base. Most of the debates about whether this or that "-ism" (Confucianism, Marxism, etc.) is "really a religion" boil down to the question of whether or not they are sufficiently similar to modern Protestant Christianity. This situation should not be surprising given the history of the category of religion.

*** These acute observations came to mind as I listened to a devastating account by Mobeen Azhar on the BBC of the religious "cleansing" being suffered by the half million Pakistani Hazara Shias Muslims at the hands of some Pakistani Sunni Muslims. A series of a devastating bombings have killed hundreds , robbing this long established Central Asian segment of the population of Pakistan's Balochistan state of any security. Children ask their parents "will we be martyrs?" Young people attempt to emigrate and often die in the process.

Azhar interviewed Sunni politicians campaigning in the May 11 elections about what should be done about the atrocities against the Hazara.

Salafi-inspired groups such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and its sister organisation Sipah-e-Sahaba have terrorised Pakistan's Shia community for years.These groups have been banned by the Pakistani government but the organisation has re-branded itself as Ahle Sunnah Wal Jamaat. The party is now fielding candidates in general elections due this month on a specifically anti-Shia platform.

Senior party member and National Assembly candidate Mohamed Fayyaz denies that the organisation is involved in attacks on Hazara Shias. "Just because someone said they are from Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, what proof is there that it was someone from our group? We don't want to murder Shias. We want them to be declared non-Muslim in the National Assembly. That is what we're working towards."

Clearly for Mr. Fayyaz, the Hazara's "religion" is a vital threat to "the rules." And Mr. Fayyaz' attitude is a threat to the life and limb of the Hazaras. This sort of "religion" is a threat to the peace of communities. It will require leadership from within the affected communities to come to some sort of agreement to co-exist to end the bloodshed; this may, or may not, come from the same sort of accommodation that led to the invention of the European idea of "religion."

Saturday scenes and scenery: birds under foot?

This brown dove was huddled on our front stairs one morning. I wondered if she was injured.


Having encountered one grounded bird, I started noticing that the situation is fairly common. This pigeon let me within two feet of her.


This bedraggled creature was a little more shy, but not much.


This pair, encountered in the bowels of an underground parking lot, left me wondering whether we're really causing pigeons to find it adaptive to nest on concrete?


The Mission District's ubiquitous sidewalk stenciling artists have added this bird. A stomping duck?

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.

All mixed up

This played during an NCIS episode last week. While I'm skeptical that CBS Cares, I laughed out loud with delight. Maybe you've seen it, but I hadn't. Go ahead and watch -- it's only 11 seconds.
When I checked out the clip on YouTube, the comments brought me up short. A sampling …

… this is [sic] extemely racist. i don't squint my eyes and talk in broken english when i order [sic] oriental food.

… I believe, if "Race and Gender" were taken out of College and Job Applications, we would no longer have the problem of being "Denied a Job Due to Race and/or Gender". And "Diversity" would no longer be an excuse because if they were hired strictly for "Experience", there should be no problems. Am I right?

Yes, I agree. Thats why Affirmative Action should be ended....too bad we can't go back to [sic] juding people based on their content of character instead of giving minorities preferences through government mandated racial and gender quotas...what good is it to give someone a job that they aren't qualified to do just [sic] beause they bring 'diversity' to the workplace?

Evidently this innocuous, slightly silly, little video pushes somebody's buttons.

Let's see -- is the trigger anti-Semitism? Misogyny? Bias against Asians? All of the above? Probably the last. If you are like me, you don't run across the raw form of this stuff very often. We're going to have to get over this stuff; we live in a scrambled world where delight is more adaptive than resistance.

May Day 2013, San Francisco

I feel incredibly fortunate to live in a city where immigrant workers have combined with the best elements of the labor movement to invigorate what much of the world celebrates as International Workers' Day -- May Day.


A crowd of at least 1000 marched down Mission Street to Civic Center on Wednesday afternoon.


The glorious sunny weather helped evoke broad smiles to go with political demands


Comprehensive mmigration reform was the agenda.


Around here, borders seem just impediments to our humanity. Marchers want a real reform based on stopping deportations, a path to citizenship for all the 11 million undocumented, and full workers' rights for the immigrant, mostly low wage, work force.


Folks knew there was one vulnerable population whose immigration needs aren't even recognized in the legislation that may be considered in the Senate.


What anti-immigrant agitators never understand is that there is no meaningful difference between folks who happened to successfully navigate the legal immigration maze and their relatives and friends who cross borders without permission. They all come for work and a better chance for their children, just like those of us whose ancestors have been here for a long time.


Like everyone else, they need legal rights in the workplace.

Warming Wednesdays: suicide watch on May Day?

Last Wednesday, I quoted Ryan Cooper explaining that climate change means "our society [is] slowly destroying itself." He's explained in a video if that's your medium:
***Grist writer David Roberts breaks down what stands in the way of our making the changes we need for species survival.

Presidential science advisor John Holdren is fond of saying that there are only three possible responses to climate change: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering. We’ll prevent what we can, adjust to what we can’t prevent, and suffer through what we can’t adjust to. All that remains is to determine the proportions…. Different individuals assess risk differently. And crucially, debates over what is acceptable vs. tolerable vs. intolerable risk can slow collective responses.

There’s also a rather obvious point to make here about equity, though the [writers of a paywalled article Roberts is discussing] do not make it. The members of a society with the most economic or political power will also be the ones most buffered against risk. As the last to be adversely affected by risks, they will be the least inclined to take adaptive action, especially if it’s expensive. And because they are also the ones with the most political influence, they will be able to delay collective action even as risks are ravaging the more vulnerable.

To put the point more bluntly: The 1 percent can delay adaptive action even when the 99 percent are suffering. By the time the 1 percent are swayed to action, the risks to the broader collective may already have become intolerable. Thus do the social limits of adaptation bite harder, and faster, than any physical or economic limits.

As is usual in human societies, it's all about who's got the power to get their way -- and this time the implication is murder. Are we willing to let that come to pass? The planet will be fine after all -- as Cooper says, this is just a rock. The rock's current inhabitants, not so much -- so if we leave things to the 1 percent.

On International Workers Day -- that's today, May 1, in much of the world -- we're reminded that human civilization is still made, nurtured and preserved by millions of human hands.

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.