Parks should belong to the people

We took a day off on Monday and went hiking. We didn't go to the trails shown on this video because, for no plausible reason they've ever offered, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission bars recreational use of its Peninsula watershed. On the San Mateo County side to the east, along the Sawyer Camp Trail, you can amble beside the Crystal Springs Reservoir for miles. But not on San Francisco's property to the west.

I actually have joined one of the limited outings the PUC permits to authorized groups. Our entrance was monitored by a ranger; another drove the back roads to check on us twice over the eleven mile hike. It felt very police-statish -- what are they hiding up there?

Brian Coyne told the history.

... until the PUC bought the land in the 1930s from the private Spring Valley Water Company and closed the land to the public, the roads through it were among the most popular scenic routes—for motorists, bicyclists, and hikers—in the whole Bay Area. A popular guidebook of the era recommends routes that start in Millbrae, wind along the shores of the reservoirs, and connect eventually to what’s now Highway 92 leading to Half Moon Bay.

Tom Stienstra, longtime outdoor guru for the Chronicle, calls the PUC's excuses for not opening the area "just a bunch of puckey."

Open the SF Watershed has been pushing the PUC to change its policies. Politicians in both San Francisco and San Mateo are taking up the cause. Just last week, the agency indicated openness to allowing more access to the Fifield-Cahill road along the ridge. Let's hope they follow through with this. In San Francisco, Supervisor John Avalos is on the case. In San Mateo County, it's been Dave Pine and Dan Horsley.

How did the U.S. lose in Afghanstan?

Aiming for the light at the end of the tunnel? Baz Ratner photo

This post is an afterword to the discussion of Carlotta Gall's The Wrong Enemy that I wrote here last week.

One aspect of that very interesting book about the U.S. war in Afghanistan that I did not emphasize is that she is unwilling to say that the U.S. "lost the war." I find this odd, as she describes cascading failure and folly, but that is her position.

Meanwhile, U.S. soldiers who fought there have been having a discussion at reporter Thomas Ricks' The Best Defense blog asking what the hell happened? Many of their judgments lack empathy for the Afghans upon whom their forces were launched -- but they were there and people at home need to listen to what they are thinking. The conversation started with a query from a regular, Jim Gourley, a former military intelligence officer. He seems to have no doubt the U.S. "lost."

Why did we lose in Afghanistan? ... I’ve heard the “because we lost civilian support” argument dozens of times, but I’ve yet to see how that materially affected the effort. It certainly didn’t stop funds and recruits from reaching the combat zone. I recently got into a discussion with someone about how our primary method of destroying armed resistance was through direct fire engagements, and by various means we made that task extremely difficult on soldiers. He responded “you can’t say we lost because we couldn’t chase them over mountains when most of our guys died in IED attacks.”

It reminded me of Patton’s saying that no one ever won a war by dying for their country. The point is to kill the other guy. I think our fundamental failure can be identified right on page one, chapter one of On War. “Force… is thus the means of war; to impose our will on the enemy is its object. To secure that object we must render the enemy powerless.” We never rendered the enemy powerless. ...

Someone who calls him(?)self JPWREL responded:

The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and the subsequent war against the Pashtun people was reckless foolhardiness of the most profound kind considering the evidence from the most recent Soviet experience. ...

... we lacked an essential political harmony, a feature common in limited wars that people sense are unimportant to the existence or prosperity of the nation.
In order to succeed in limited wars one needs to discipline oneself to reach for very limited objectives, and for a prideful people conscious of their power this is extremely difficult to do.

The question is no longer why we lost but have we learned anything?

A commenter who calls him(?)self Kriegsakademie (who Ricks knows and trusts) replied:

Had we not moved on from our six month triumph (chasing out Al Quaeda) to the role of an occupying power trying to build a state that almost no Afghan wanted, we would not have needed to fight a protracted war against the Taliban.

Unless we start from a clear statement of American national interests, and American war aims, and a defined "enemy" that flows from those two, then we cannot have a sensible discussion of whether or not we might have "won" this war.

Another, Kieselguhr Kid, was quite emphatic about how the wars of the '00s felt to him.

Quite a number of our leadership thinks we won.  Shortly after dropping my own papers [resigning from the military] I saw an article by GEN Petraeus in these pages titled, "How we won in Iraq."

Hell, maybe we did win in Iraq and Afghanistan; what do I know?  It didn't feel like winning, it doesn't smell like winning, but what do I know from winning say a tennis match or a chess game?  So far as I understood the objectives, we didn't achieve them, but I'm not one of the flags who ran the thing.  Shoot, maybe we won.  Although if we did, man, I don't want to win a lot more of these things.

Here's a last word from someone (waris-safi123) who might be an Afghan.

the reason why all the invaders failed in Afghanistan and Will fail is simple Afghans dont like foreigners in thier country! how would you feel if Afghans holding guns in the streets of London or Washington tells you what to do? you wouldn't like it! similarly Afghans dont want that eithrr WE WERE BORN FREE!WE WILL BE FREE FOREVER! even if we have to sacrifice millions more afghans

I hope people in the military are discussing these questions somewhere besides Ricks' blog. Even more, I hope our politicians understand that, if they are going to authorize more wars, they better be prepared to listen to the folks who elect them and figure out why they are sending soldiers to kill and die!

Why insist the North Carolina murders are a hate crime?

After all, it won't make these nice young people any less dead.

The murders of Muslim students in North Carolina seem likely to precipitate bad feeling between local law enforcement and mourning relatives and communities over whether this was a "hate crime." After all, the crime is "solved." The shooter, who seems to have been the kind of dangerous angry crank who likes to act as the policeman of his neighbors' activities, turned himself in. In a state where such crackpots have an absolute "right" to hoard and strut around with guns, bad things happen too easily.

So why call the North Carolina killings a "hate crime"?

The question seems worth unpacking. First and foremost, there was a "crime," a murder, three murders. Nobody is arguing that Craig Stephen Hicks had a right to kill these young people. His crime is murder.

Labelling it also a "hate" crime is an "enhancement:" for the killer, it might mean a longer sentence. But the effect of the hate crime label is really elsewhere, in the community.

For bereaved relatives and the Muslim community in general, labelling the murders a "hate crime" affirms that we understand that to be Muslim in the United States is to be afflicted by ignorance and prejudice. We have all too much evidence; twit-wits like Republican Presidential aspirant Mike Huckabee spread insults such as "Muslims will go to the mosque, and they will have their day of prayer, and they come out of there like uncorked animals -- throwing rocks and burning cars."

Additionally, labelling the killing a "hate crime" serves as a spur for law enforcement to take minor bias crimes seriously -- before they turn into ghastly multiple murders. Cops and prosecutors need to be trained to recognize that "hate" leads to "crime." If they take their job to be preventing crime, they can make that job easier by recognizing "hate" as the precursor to crime. People have a right to say what they want, but they can't assault their neighbors. Law enforcement needs to understand that hate is dangerous to a law abiding society. In particular, training about the dangers of terrorism must not be allowed to slide over into reinforcing prejudices; sometimes it has.

In fact, hate is what leads to religious, racial and gender terrorism. David Neiwert explored the issues raised by "hate crime" laws lucidly in Born on the Fourth of July, a book that remains as relevant today as it was a decade ago.
***
This flyer turned up under the wiper blade of my car yesterday. Click to enlarge.
The flyer is from a proselytizing offshoot of orthodox Islam; the Christian analogy would be something like getting a tract from Seventh Day Adventists or Mormons. Obviously they think they have a hurdle to surmount. Believers in this sect are objects of persecution in Pakistan and other Muslim countries.

Their leaflet is a good illustration of the protestations that even the most innocuous of Muslims are forced to express as they carry out what they consider their religious obligations, in this case to try to convert the ignorant.

March for Renter's Rights

Over two hundred people marched through suburban Redwood City on Valentine's Day to demand that the town, neighboring jurisdictions and the whole of San Mateo County take action to ensure that the people who do the work can afford to live nearby. Just as in San Francisco, middle and working class people are experiencing a deluge of displacement.

The march followed a rally at the Redwood City City Hall on Thursday at which residents told their stories according to The Daily Journal.

Led by the nonprofit San Francisco Organizing Project/Peninsula Interfaith Action, the group held the rally to highlight the need for tenant protections as rents in the area continue to climb.

“In the past, residents of all incomes were able to live in Redwood City,” said Diana Reddy, with Redwood City Residents for Housing Security. “People lived in their apartments for decades because those apartments were affordable.”

But skyrocketing rents have priced out seniors, individuals with disabilities who live on fixed incomes and young families who earn low wages, Reddy said.

Marchers were greeted by enthusiastic honking. Apparently they are not the only ones feeling squeezed.

The short procession on concluded on the steps of the old courthouse, now the San Mateo County History Museum.

Saturday scenes and scenery: heron nests in Golden Gate Park

We haven't exactly had winter this year, but I take the sight of this sitting bird as sign of spring.

They are shy, not especially willing to be seen. That's not hard to accomplish if you locate your nest at the top of a tree on an island. In the past they've been visible from the west side of Stowe Lake. Right now, I only glimpse them from the east side, especially from larger island in the center of the lake.

Democratic convention to be held in Philly

Good to know the prime criterion for selecting a site for ritual enactment of democratic politics is the ability to keep the people out.

The prospect of setting up a security zone in the largely residential area around the Barclays Center [in Brooklyn] put off party officials.

NYT

I have no dog in the convention siting fight and I trust the people of the east coast will respond to any siting, but the terms of discussion seem worth noting.

The good news is that we'll likely get commentary from Philly during the event from Field Negro.

Friday cat blogging

No, I will not be your Valentine.

Maybe you'll be less funny looking if I scrunch over like this.

What are you doing here?

All encountered while Walking San Francisco.

Here we go again ...

The Prez has asked Congress for a new Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). The good news is that he concedes that it might exceed his powers to go on shooting people up around the world based on the panicked resolution that Congress passed in 2001. The bad news is that he wants to go on shooting people up around the world. (And he is not ready to repeal the old AUMF, just in case it might come in handy.)

If we have learned anything since that old AUMF, it would be that if we decide to go shooting people up, we ought to know what we are trying to accomplish by doing so. Also whether shooting people up is a plausible route to whatever that goal is -- but that's an advanced question. A couple of days ago, my friend Sarah Lazare asked some of right questions at Foreign Policy in Focus.

Do we really think that the U.S. military operation against ISIS will bring about a good outcome for the people of Iraq and Syria, or for U.S. society? Is there any evidence from the more than 13 years of the so-called “War on Terror” that U.S. military intervention in the Middle East brings anything but death, displacement, destabilization, and poverty to the people whose homes have been transformed into battlefields?

The answer to these questions must be a resounding “No.”

... More than 13 years on, there is no evidence that the “War on Terror” has accomplished its stated, if amorphous, goal: to weed out terrorism (defined to exclude atrocities committed by the U.S. and allied states, of course). According to the Global Terrorism Index released by the Institute for Economics and Peace, global terrorist incidents have climbed dramatically since the onset of the War on Terror. In 2000, there were 1,500 terrorist incidents. By 2013, this number had climbed to 10,000. People in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Syria suffer the most, the index notes. ...

Go read the whole article -- it is to the point.

So what to do? I've just learned about a new book that might have some promising suggestions: Against All Odds: Voices of Popular Struggle In Iraq. If Iraqis can keep trying to make peace and justice amidst the carnage we've left them with, we can at least try.

And at this moment, sign those petitions to Congress. It would be healthy to demand debate on whether we want to be tromping around in other peoples' countries for once. Here at two:

Peace Action

Win Without War

Yes, they'll probably send you email for the rest of your life (or your email's life) but that's a small price to pay. You might not even mind if they pass you on to more activist groups ... This isn't going to stop until we stop it.

Somebody asked some Afghans ...

I first became conscious of Carlotta Gall's reporting from Afghanistan for the New York Times in 2003 when she broke the story that U.S. military medical authorities had labeled the death while in custody of a detainee named Dilwar a "homicide." She was the rare foreign reporter who seemed to assume that the journalist's job was to find out what it meant to Afghans to be invaded and then occupied by U.S. and NATO forces.

Here's that story again in The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014. On hearing that a prisoner had died in U.S. custody, Gall went looking to understand more.

When I visited his family in Yakubi in February, Dilwar's brother, Shahpoor, showed me a death certificate they had been given along with the body. The certificate was in English, and the family did not understand fully what it said. It was dated December 13, 2002, and was signed at the bottom by Major Elizabeth A. Rouse, a pathologist from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology based in Washington, D.C., and medical examiner Lieutenant Colonel Kathleen M. Ingwersen from the Army Medical Corps based in Landstuhl, Germany.

It gave the circumstances of death: "Decedent was found unresponsive in his cell while in custody." Under "Cause of death" was typed, "Blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease." Mode of death, it stated, was "homicide."

Dilwar was a young taxi driver picked up by mistake; he had no part in resisting U.S. forces. His story is told in the documentary Taxi to the Dark Side.

Gall lived in Afghanistan from 2001 through last year. She's a Brit whose father had reported from Afghanistan and who had worked herself in Chechnya and Bosnia. She likes Afghans. Her explanation of why she wrote this book:

[The conflict/occupation] would become America's longest overt war. Thirteen years later, there is no swift resolution in sight, and support at home has waned. Few Americans seem to care anymore about Afghanistan, and I decided owed it to all those caught up in the maelstrom of Afghanistan to put down a record of events as I had seen them from the ground.

In Gall's view, the arc of the U.S. Afghanistan war begins with most Afghans welcoming help in throwing off Taliban rule; through neglect, failure and corruption as the U.S. turned its attention to Iraq; the Petraeus/McChrystal "surge" under Obama which Gall portrays as succeeding in the Pashtun heartland from whence the Taliban originated; through U.S. disengagement and the Kabul government's weakness, pointing to an uncertain future. Looming over this entire bloody trajectory, in Gall's view is the unceasing determination of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to manipulate Afghanistan by funding, training and inciting Afghan Islamists. Pakistan was the true enemy of Afghan peace and security; only in those sporadic episodes when U.S. administrations pressured Pakistan's governments to curb the militants did Afghanistan enjoy relative peace and development.

There are many other schools of thought about the NATO/US Afghanistan adventure; perhaps the one most familiar to readers of this blog is that the U.S. never decided what its objective was in mucking about in this strange, distant, peripheral hornet's nest of a place and consequently accomplished little except death and destruction. Gall has another view, one informed by extensive discussion with many sorts of Afghans. The book is fascinating on that level.

A Western reader naturally wonders how a woman reporter managed to function so broadly in such a conservative religious environment. Gall explains:

Most Afghan and Pakistani houses have separate rooms for entertaining guests and holding meetings. The guest room often has its own entrance and is designed to allow visitors to be entertained without disturbing the sanctity of the women's quarters. Many Afghan and Pakistani families, especially the conservative tribal and religious ones, still continue the practice of purdah. Women only mix with their extended family and do not meet unrelated men. ...

As a foreigner I was exempt from such rules. I had little difficulty working as a woman in Afghanistan and Pakistan where hospitality is a much-honored custom, and I often had the bonus of being invited into the inner sanctum to visit the women of the family.

... It is a strictly honored custom that no one enters an Afghan's home without being invited, and no man unrelated to the family enters the women's quarters. This becomes second nature to anyone living in Pakistan and Afghanistan, yet the readiness of foreign soldiers to violate this cherished custom in their search for militants, kicking down doors in house-to-house raids and searching women's quarters, became one of the most upsetting issues for Afghans across the country.

The American and NATO forces violated a code that could have worked in their favor: when you are invited into someone's home, you are under the protection of your host. I felt no fear going to interview a Taliban commander in the warren of Quetta's [Pakistan] back streets. I knew and trusted my host, who had organized the meeting. He would make sure I came to no harm.

In Gall's view, U.S. forces sacrificed their chance at a cooperative relationship with Afghans by killing too many ordinary civilians, whether through mistaken application of their overwhelming firepower or out of blatant (racist?) indifference to Afghan life. She reports a chilling story:

One day an Afghan I knew and trusted told me a story he had never dared tell anyone, even his closest family. He had worked as an interpreter for the U.S. military for several years.

One night he had accompanied U.S. special operations commandos on a raid. Helicopters dropped off the team a mile or so from their target village, and they hiked in silence to its edge. The unit split up, and the interpreter went with a group of four men to a house in the center of the village. Two men were in front of him and two behind, armed with American assault weapons with silencers attached. They moved without noise, communicating with hand signals. They kicked in the door of the house and entered a room.

A gas lamp was burning very low but enough for the interpreter to see the astonished faces of a young couple in their twenties as they leapt up from their bed on the floor. "Why? Why are you shooting?" the man asked. The Americans did not answer. They crouched and shot them both. They fired four or five rounds, the silencers making a dull "tick, tick" sound. As the woman fell, she let out a dying gasp. A child sleeping beside them began to cry.

The Americans moved straight on to the next room. The translator began to shake. This time he did not enter the room but stopped at the door. He saw four people by the lamplight. A grandmother stood, her head uncovered, and asked, "What's happening? Why?" Three teenagers, a boy and two girls, were cowering on the floor, wordless, trying to hide among their bedclothes. The Americans did not speak. They fired two or three rounds. The translator did not see who was shot. He was never asked to translate anything. "You have to wait until they ask. If you say anything, or translate anything, they say 'Shut up, motherfucker, or I'll shoot you.'"

Gall also describes the atrocities U.S. soldiers experienced from Taliban ambushes.

One Humvee had made it out with survivors, but three men were dead at the scene and two more were missing. Search parties scoured the area for the rest of the day. Just before dark they came across the remains of one of the men. He had been dragged nearly a mile from the ambush site, and his body had been mutilated. His arms had been cut off, and someone had tried to carve out his heart. The search went on through the next day, but the units only ever found parts of the other soldier.

... The mutilation of victims, which was not often revealed to the public, was a particular horror for the men serving in Afghanistan, a sign of the brutalizing effects of the war. It was a grim burden for those who encountered it and led to acts of retaliation on both sides.

Gall is not hopeful about Afghanistan's future.

... after thirteen years, a trillion dollars spent, 120,000 foreign troops deployed at the height, and tens of thousands of lives lost, the fundamentals of Afghanistan's predicament remain the same: a weak state, prey to the ambitions of its neighbors and extremist Islamists. ...

... The cost in lives to reach this unfinished state had been painfully high. There is no complete count of how many Afghans have died since the American intervention began in October 2001. My own rough estimate places it between 50,000 and 70,000 Afghans. By the end of 2013, over 3,400 foreign soldiers have died in the campaign, 2,301 of them American.

Civilian deaths in the war had been running between two and three thousand a year since 2006. Casualties among Afghan security forces have been between one and two thousand a year, and rising, as their forces have grown and they have taken up the frontline fighting.

Thousands of young Afghan and Pakistani men have died in the ranks of the Taliban, too, many of them villagers and madrassa students, used as so much cheap cannon fodder. They are referred to as "potato soldiers" by their Pakistani recruiters.

This is not a hopeful book. Whether or we agree with Gall's take on the geopolitical situation, we can be glad that someone from the Western media bothered to listen so closely to so many Afghans.

Terror enforcing racial and gender hierachies

Today the New York Times featured a map showing where lynchings took place in the South between 1877 and 1950. The accompanying article explains that the map is a product of a report and project from the Montgomery AL based Equal Justice Initiative. EJI aims to erect markers reminding us of these "racial terror lynchings," just as they have previously marked locations of pre-emancipation slave markets.

EJI director Bryan Stevenson made what he considers a crucial point:

... these brutal deaths were not about administering popular justice, but terrorizing a community.

“Many of these lynchings were not executing people for crimes but executing people for violating the racial hierarchy,” he said, meaning offenses such as bumping up against a white woman or wearing an Army uniform.

But, he continued, even when a major crime was alleged, the refusal to grant a black man a trial — despite the justice system’s near certain outcome — and the public extravagance of a lynching were clearly intended as a message to other African-Americans.

*** We're fooling ourselves if we assume that killings meant to enforce hierarchies happen only in the South or only in the distant past. Now as then, the victims are almost always of people of color, overwhelmingly Blacks -- but these days they are also usually persons who are considered to break the gender rules. As recently as 1985 here in liberal northern California, Timothy Charles Lee , a Black gay man was hung by a strap near the Concord BART station. Local police ruled his death a suicide, though two men were arrested for a stabbing while wearing Ku Klux Klan robes in the town the same night. I wonder if Concord's gay community has put up a marker?

Today in San Francisco, 48 Hills reports, the LGBT Center issued a report documenting ongoing public violence experienced especially by transgendered people of color. The housing crunch leads to more homelessness and more people stuck in living situations that are not safe.

**68% of the community has experienced physical violence, 48% sexual violence, 81% harassment — and a full one-third all three. (For transgender people, those numbers jump 17%.)

**Transgender community members are seven times more likely than non-transgender people to feel unsafe in everyday settings: 60% of transgender Latinas feel unsafe walking around during the day.

The truth of these fears is demonstrated by last week's murder of transgender woman Taja de Jesus in the Bayview district.

Transwomen of color staged a die-in on the steps of San Francisco City Hall before going into raise issues of violence and safety before the Board of Supervisors.

Several hundred allies gathered round.

This remains a society that defaults to terror to enforce social conformity, to keep those who have "always" made the rules on top.

Too true ...

All this technology is making us antisocial pic.twitter.com/ajY1zvZdP7

— History In Pictures (@historyepics) February 10, 2015

Drifting into the next war in Ukraine?

View image | gettyimages.com

The U.S. is currently party to several wars in the greater Middle East -- against ISIS, against (someone) in Yemen, against (someone) in Somalia -- and probably some more in that area. We've indicated we'd like to stick a toe in against Boko Haram, but so far the Nigerian government is resistant. We aren't really out of Afghanistan, though the remaining U.S. sacrificial targets are ordered to keep their heads down.

We make war on the cheap these days: we infiltrate our spooks and/or mercenary contract killers; we blast the unlucky (and occasionally guilty) with drones; we only show the country's colors when these little wars pull in the full panoply of bombers and cruise missiles.

And now the usual suspects -- John McCain, various other neocons and apparently Obama's nominee to be War (Defense) Secretary Ashton Carter -- think throwing advanced U.S. arms to the Ukrainian government in Kiev would be a great idea.

Sensible people keep trying to explain to our more foolish rulers why this is stupid (in addition to pointing toward a criminal escalation of human misery). Here's University of Chicago international relations professor John J. Mearsheimer in the New York Times:

... the United States cannot win an arms race with Russia over Ukraine and thereby ensure Russia’s defeat on the battlefield.

Proponents of arming Ukraine have a second line of argument. The key to success, they maintain, is not to defeat Russia militarily, but to raise the costs of fighting to the point where Mr. Putin will cave. The pain will supposedly compel Moscow to withdraw its troops from Ukraine and allow it to join the European Union and NATO and become an ally of the West.

This coercive strategy is also unlikely to work, no matter how much punishment the West inflicts. What advocates of arming Ukraine fail to understand is that Russian leaders believe their country’s core strategic interests are at stake in Ukraine; they are unlikely to give ground, even if it means absorbing huge costs.

Great powers react harshly when distant rivals project military power into their neighborhood, much less attempt to make a country on their border an ally. ...

Yeah. Think how we'd react if some European power tried to arm Cuba against us ... how long has getting over that one taken?

And here's Stephen M. Walt from Harvard pointing out that jumping further into this conflict, in addition to amounting to poking a hornet's nest with nukes, is a recipe for failure and humiliation:

Ukraine’s fate is much more important to Moscow than it is to us, which means that Putin and Russia will be willing to pay a bigger price to achieve their aims than we will. The balance of resolve as well as the local balance of power strongly favors Moscow in this conflict. Before starting down an escalatory path, therefore, Americans should ask themselves just how far they are willing to go. If Moscow has more options, is willing to endure more pain, and run more risks than we are, then it makes no sense to begin a competition in resolve we are unlikely to win. And no, that doesn’t show the West is irresolute, craven, or spineless; it simply means Ukraine is a vital strategic interest for Russia but not for us

Among others who know better can be included the Germans.

The German foreign minister [Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier] recalled that a Canadian colleague at a NATO meeting last summer had asked whether Russia should be seen as “a friend, partner, enemy or opponent to us.”

“Perhaps,” Mr. Steinmeier said, “this is easier to answer when you are further away from the conflict region. Our experience in Europe — in good times or bad — is that Russia remains our neighbor.”

This would be a great moment for President Obama to apply his most sophisticated policy principle: "Don't do stupid stuff!"

Torture opponents encroaching on John Yoo's home turf

Erudite Partner and distinguished others will be discussing torture and accountability at the Law School at U.C. Berkeley on Thursday afternoon.

There's no reason to expect the Boalt Hall professor who wrote the legal cover rationale for the Bush administration's torture program will be there, but you can be.

No frackin' way ...

Several thousand Californians joined a March for Real Climate Leadership in Oakland on Saturday, calling on the Governor Brown to ban fracking for oil extraction. In times of historic drought, fracking not only pollutes and wastes the state's dwindling water supplies, but also sustains carbon pollution. (Click on any photo to enlarge/see as a slide show.)

Though Oakland is ground zero for protest in California these days, this didn't seem a home grown crowd.

From north ...

and south ...

and further south yet, they came.

There was a good sprinkling of students ...

as well as a plentiful supply of classic northern Californians.

It's not just the fracking that presents a danger to our lives. Once they get the oil out, they have to transport it through our communities.

People get understandably pissed off about having their water polluted.

Some people aren't going to take it.

Keeping hope alive ...

In the measles zone in the 'hood

By way of the New York Times. Note, the low rate of vaccination is not the consequence of parents opting out via the idiosyncratic "personal belief exemption." The low vaccination rate in the neighborhood school seems a result of new immigration status and poverty.

I would not be surprised to hear that the San Francisco Unified School District contests these numbers; nor would I be surprised if the true percentage is still very high.

Saturday scenes and scenery: for the birds

If you were a bird, would you risk settling on something with that head decorating it?

Come to think of it, I seldom see birds alighting on bird baths. In this instance, that's been rectified.

Often the bird's place has been usurped by someone else ...

Somehow I don't think those wings would fly.

Then there's the situation in which the birdbath itself is missing.

All photos are out takes from 596 Precincts - Walking San Francisco.

Wild times -- and we thought we were just normal

Bear with me on this one; I really don't know quite what I think of David Talbot's Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love, a narrative of San Francisco's tumultuous passages from the 1960s through the early 1980s.

His story was, after all, much of my life. I was a Berkeley student exploring the other side of the Bay at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in 1967; I remember staying clear of the throngs to listen to a solitary woman playing a guitar and wailing keening songs while sitting under a tree; that was Buffy Sainte-Marie. (She's still powerful; check the link.)

I remember mass stops of young Black men during the hunt for the Zebra killer. I learned to hang sheetrock while renovating the International Hotel and welcomed busloads of older Black women from the People's Temple who marched alongside white hippies defending that residence for retired single Filipino men.

At the free restaurant, Martin de Porres House, where I lived, we refused the bulk food extorted from Randall Hearst by his daughter Patty's kidnappers -- but we gladly accepted the bags of provisions that our homeless friends brought us from that misbegotten boondoggle. Mayor George Moscone rallied to our defense when the Health Department sanctioned us for feeding the hungry without a permit (so did Fr. Quinn, the Catholic Archbishop.)

When Diane Feinstein was choosing a supervisor to succeed Harvey Milk, I joined many who lobbied for a lesbian woman. (We lost, getting Harry Britt instead; he turned out pretty well.) When Milk and Moscone's murderer, Dan White, got off with a slap on the wrist, I wrote up the ensuing satisfying orgy of burning police cars for a lesbian newspaper. And I celebrated with everyone else when Bill Walsh's 49ers became a dynasty of football winners who the rest of the country could never quite erase with the label "effete."

So I lived Talbot's story, perhaps a little closer to the ground than his sources and so, though I'm glad that he told it, I often also had a different view. Not a contrary view, but a different view.

Some things he got terribly right. One of these was the descent of the scene in the Haight into anguished violence.

But as San Francisco's revolution spread -- carried by the music, the drugs, the underground railroad of wandering youth -- the poison in America's soul was also billowing. You could feel it more and more on the streets of the Haight. San Francisco was no longer only a haven for the country's restless dreamers but also for its wrecked and ruined.

The 1960s turned sour in large part because of the endless bloodletting in Vietnam. The soul sickness leached everywhere as the war came home, but nowhere more than the Haight. where many ravaged veterans sought solace. The music that GIs listened to in Vietnam, and the magazine spreads of hippie revelry, promised a halcyon world far him the blood and mud. But many of them found it was not easy to leave the war behind; they brought it home with them. Life in the Haight grew more violent and disturbing. The drugs got harder.

The Haight was nowhere I wanted to be by as early as 1969.

Talbot clearly has great sources in the old labor-Communist (Hallinans et al.) San Francisco that battled the old Irish-Italian Catholic San Francisco. And he's worked to have some sense of the Black and Asian forces that struggled to be heard underneath of those conflicts and around the various newcomers.

But I don't think he has much grasp of the struggles of gays and of Mission and Excelsior Latinos to find their place in this melange. Diane Feinstein's long ascendancy was not some peaceful afterward to the terrifying years about which he writes for those groups. Her "Mommy knows best," patronizing style disgusted grassroots activists. Her prissy prudery was no help to the gay community struggling to change sexual practices with the appearance of HIV infection. She offered nothing to tenants nor to the movement to curb downtown oriented Manhattanization.

And these civic skirmishes never stopped. As late as 1989, the San Francisco Police Department rioted in the Castro, attacking gay individuals and bars. Struggles over retaining a place for middle and working class people in this spatially constrained peninsula continue to this day. They get heated in ways that are not so different from the 1930s labor battles on the waterfront that preceded Talbot's era.

Perhaps our forms of political expression became slightly less wacky in the years after Talbot's period, but as late as the first Gulf War San Franciscans were still opposing the national imperial eruption by seizing the Bay Bridge; within a week of the 9/11 attacks, we enjoyed a "Power to Peaceful" concert in Precita Park.

The current explosion of property values and consequent expulsion of the less affluent may, finally, render San Francisco an ordinary city. (As of 2014, after this book, Talbot seems to have concluded that the class war in the city is lost.)

But maybe not. This place has a potent history of absorbing disruptive changes. Maybe we'll weather a few more and remain an interesting place. In any case, Season of the Witch is a significant contribution to what must always be incomplete and tendentious slices of that history.

Friday cat blogging

This one seemed to suspect I was too close for comfort.

Old Mission relic consumed by fire

Demolition contractors are gathering.

Not far from where I live, eight days ago a fire gutted an old three story building on Mission Street. One resident died and 64 people are homeless, as are nearly two dozen small businesses which occupied offices on the second floor and the store fronts at ground level. The neighborhood feels as if a hole had been gouged in its heart.

A passerby on his bike knew what he could do: launch a GoFundMe appeal for the residents. Zack Crockett thought he might raise about S2000. So far, the fund has collected over $110,000 which will be distributed through Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA).

Crockett is also sharing what he has learned of the lives of our displaced neighbors via the web site where he works, Priceonomics. At the link, he shares the interrupted story of Salvadoran immigrant construction worker Toni Segovia and of two young women whose families now wonder where they will end up.

The girls, who had just applied to college less than a month prior to the fire, each have a distinctive dream. Mayra, who has “always been interested in helping people,” wishes to attend the nursing program at Dominican University in San Rafael, about 30 minutes north of San Francisco. Perla would like to attend Syracuse University in New York and work toward becoming an early childhood education teacher -- though, the disaster has impacted her desire to leave home, and her family.

“Now that everything happened, I don’t want to go as far away,” says Perla, softly. “I can’t leave everything the way is it, now that this happened. It would make it more difficult to move on.”

“I’ve worked so hard to have a better future,” adds Mayra, “and now I feel, like, guilty for leaving to college.”

The hard truth is that the Mission is no longer hospitable to the sort of naturally occurring community of low income renters which occupied that building. There are legal protections for the displaced people, but they are weak. And there are no protections for the small businesses that have scratched out a living in the odd corners of our streets.

... When incidents like this happen, tenants are legally entitled to return to their units, once the units have been repaired, at their former rent prices. There are, however, many loopholes to this. If a tenant accepts his security deposit back or takes any other financial offer from the building owner, for instance, he could lose this right. What’s more, if 75% of the building is deemed “a new development” upon restoration, this right is terminated, essentially punishing the tenants for the severity of the fire. With damages on Toni’s building estimated at over $8 million, this is a likely scenario.

Staying in the Mission -- the only place Toni, Perla, and Mayra have ever called home in America -- is a major concern.

“Our rent didn’t raise too much -- only, like $60 every two years,” says Toni. “Our unit was the biggest one in the building, and we paid less than $1,100 [per month].” Finding something comparable in San Francisco’s increasingly-heated and crowded real estate market will be a daunting task.

The hyperlocal news site Mission Local, itself one of the displaced small businesses, has provided extensive coverage of this neighborhood trauma.

More collateral damage amid creative destruction

Due to various domestic interruptions, I am posting this from a bookstore cafe this morning.

And the subject of this post is that the place where I am sitting is about to shut down. Borderlands is a wonderful sci fi, fantasy, and mystery bookstore that has been in my Mission neighborhood, if not forever, at least for more than a decade.

Borderlands is not -- entirely -- a casualty of the tech economy. Sure, it suffers from the usual vicissitudes of book selling these day: competition from giant online retailers that can always undersell brick and mortar establishments and from rising rents as our little corner of the world morphs into a playground for comparatively affluent tech worker newcomers. But squeezed by these realities, it was the voter mandate to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour by 2018 that did this place in. I'll let Borderlands owner tell his story:

Borderlands supports the concept of a living wage in principal and we believe that it's possible that the new law will be good for San Francisco -- Borderlands Books as it exists is not a financially viable business if subject to that minimum wage.  Consequently we will be closing our doors no later than March 31st.

Many businesses can make adjustments to allow for increased wages.  The cafe side of Borderlands, for example, should have no difficulty at all.  Viability is simply a matter of increasing prices.  And, since all the other cafes in the city will be under the same pressure, all the prices will float upwards.  But books are a special case because the price is set by the publisher and printed on the book.  Furthermore, for years part of the challenge for brick-and-mortar bookstores is that companies like Amazon.com have made it difficult to get people to pay retail prices.  So it is inconceivable to adjust our prices upwards to cover increased wages.

The change in minimum wage will mean our payroll will increase roughly 39%.  That increase will in turn bring up our total operating expenses by 18%.  To make up for that expense, we would need to increase our sales by a minimum of 20%.  We do not believe that is a realistic possibility for a bookstore in San Francisco at this time.

What I take from this is that the business has always been extremely precarious. If bumping several part timers up to $15/hour will raise the payroll 39 percent, the payroll wasn't much to begin with. This is confirmed by Alan Beatts's explanation that he only made $28K last year, in a year when the bookstore was marginally profitable. Borderlands has simply been hanging by a thread all along. The entire essay is worth reading at the link.

Though I'm not an aficionado of the sort of fiction they sell, I've always loved Borderlands as the place where I first learned that there was a breed of cat known as the Sphinx. Meet Ripley, long in residence here, and now sadly deceased.

Just a bit more football ... while thinking about journalism

During the season, I not only waste my time watching the big men beat each other up, I waste even more time reading football commentary. So, now that it's over, I turned to my sources for one last dose of the drug for the year and ended up thinking how the varieties of football journalism mirror many other tensions among which we all live.

Football coverage seems to go in two quite different directions these days. There's the classic style: inclined to highlight the "heroic," gently opinionated, a little gossipy, yes, even a bit jock-sniffing. The work of Peter King at Monday Morning Quarterback is a delightful example of that genre. He knows everyone, forgives much, and shares his pleasure in the sport.

The other contemporary genre aims to turn football analysis into objective numerical measurements. Modeled on what Sabermetrics has done for baseball, these writers seek to understand football games and plays quantitatively. Bill Barnwell at Grantland churns out reams of this exhaustively and charmingly. Here's a sample from his rumination on the Seahawks seemingly inexplicable decision to pass on the one yard line at the end of the Superbowl -- the pass that a Patriot intercepted, deciding the game.

In fact, this season it was more dangerous to run the football from the 1-yard line than it was to throw it. Before Sunday, NFL teams had thrown the ball 108 times on the opposing team’s 1-yard line this season. Those passes had produced 66 touchdowns (a success rate of 61.1 percent, down to 59.5 percent when you throw in three sacks) and zero interceptions. The 223 running plays had generated 129 touchdowns (a 57.8 percent success rate) and two turnovers on fumbles.

Stretch that out to five years and the numbers make runs slightly superior; they scored 54.1 percent of the time and resulted in turnovers 1.5 percent of the time, while passes got the ball into the end zone 50.1 percent of the time and resulted in turnovers 1.9 percent of the time. In a vacuum, the decision between running and passing on the 1-yard line is hardly indefensible, because both the risk and the reward are roughly similar.

The key phrase there, of course, is “in a vacuum.” This wasn’t a vacuum. This was the Seahawks and the Patriots ...

This stuff is fan-candy, making the reader feel knowledgeable and a participant in the game's sacred mysteries. It may also be great analysis -- or not. Most of us are not equipped to know.

What strikes me is how similar these two sorts of journalism are to various sorts of media engagement with U.S. politics. On the one hand there's political campaign coverage that tries to discern the character and principles (if any) of political figures. That's the classic genre, pioneered by Theodore White in 1960, practiced subsequently by Walter Shapiro and Bob Woodward, and brought up recent times by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman on Mitt Romney and David Remnick on Barack Obama.

Then there's the scientific (or sometimes pseudo-scientific) genre pioneered by Nate Silver in a number of venues and now living at FiveThirtyEight where campaign politics and sports co-exist on an ESPN site. The New York Times has its own version of a data driven journalism site at the Upshot. I think Justin Wolfers writing there gets the award for the most charming "scientific" explanation of why the choice by the Seahawks to pass at the one yard line was likely "right" (though disastrous.)

A key reason that [running back Marshawn] Lynch has been so successful is that his coach has been playing a mixed [random pass or run] strategy all season. Lynch has accumulated impressive numbers in part because opposing defenses have had to be concerned about [quarterback] Russell Wilson’s passing. And so Lynch’s history of success when playing as part of a mixed strategy says nothing about how successful he would be if his opponents knew for sure his coach would call a running play.

Game theory points to the possibility that [Seahawks coach Pete] Carroll’s decisive call was actually the result of following the best possible strategy, and that this is a strategy that involves an element of randomness in play-calling. This leads to the intriguing possibility that if that fateful final play were to be run in a dozen parallel universes, with each coach continuing to play the same mixed strategy, the actual plays called would differ, as would their outcomes.

Delightful whimsy there, and possibly true.

This approach is not so happy when what is at issue are public policy choices. What government does and doesn't do needs to be undergirded by smart quantitative analysis which is what both sports and campaign journalism offer ever more smoothly. It should be the business of policy journalism also to explain what is at issue -- say for example, how the ACA/Obamacare is expected to increase the number of insured individuals and cut the growth of medical costs. Most journalism is not so good at this sort of thing. (There are exceptions; I'm thinking of Sarah Kliff at Vox for one.) It frequently wades so deeply into the weeds so quickly that most of us throw up our hands in hopeless confusion. Or, alternatively, it just defaults to quoting uninformative on-the-one-hand-on-the-other hand sound bites that do not elucidate.

Good policy journalism in a democracy should uncover and draw out what values underlie policy choices. Taking, for example, the ACA/Obamacare: citizens need to be able to think about and discuss why (or why not) we might choose to shoulder the cost and complexities of making sure that more individuals have access to health care. Why do we want to undertake this difficult project? Why is it important to curb costs? Who gains and who might be hurt and do we have criteria for making choices between winners and losers? Policy journalism isn't usually very good at going to first principles; it simply assumes we know the answers to such questions. But do we?

Most of us, most of the time, have to default to trusting that somebody somewhere does know. If we're Democrats, we look to leaders who carry the D label; Republicans look to the other guys. That's not wrong, but we need a better bridge between policies and more personal allegiances. Oddly enough, old fashioned classic sports writing does that rather well for sports. Though the quants provide us with intellectually fascinating new metrics in policy as well as in sports, the best of our human interest journalists still have a lot to show us as well.

Super Bowl finally over

You either saw it or you didn't. That was exhausting and I don't know whether I'll have the strength to post tonight for Monday morning.

Bye-bye football for another season. Can't say I'll miss you. That's the nice thing about entering the offseason: by the time it arrives, I'm ready to reclaim the ridiculous number of hours I spend watching big men beat each other up. This year has been unsavory. Might I perhaps be ready to forgo the NFL come next September? Not ready to say right now.

The public and the scientists

There's a graphic floating around the web that comes from a Pew study about science and society. The general public thinks differently than the scientists:

Mostly I'm on board with the scientists, not too surprisingly. But I find it interesting to think a little about the items on which I part company with them.

• I have qualms about using animals for research. Sure, all life is pretty brutal, though we don't like to think about it. And I eat animals. Yet I believe we should only do research on animals when our big brains and ingenuity can't come up with any alternative. And I don't trust that scientists think searching diligently for alternatives is important. I may be wrong.

• I'm glad to see that scientists aren't close to unanimous in endorsing the safety of foods on which pesticides have been used (most all commercial foods.) It seems to me that we may not entirely know what we doing to ourselves with these poisons. Can science really promise that all or even most of the possible dangers have been thoroughly studied? Not if studying them would cost the companies whose costs are lowered by pesticide use.

• On the item on nuclear power plants, I think the scientists are being bamboozled by their own cleverness. Yes, science has learned how to release energy from atoms. That's remarkable all right. And we may even know what it would take to shield ourselves and posterity from the toxic byproducts of our ingenuity, though I don't think we've yet demonstrated that capacity. (The U.S. has thousands of tons of "legacy" nuclear waste sitting around waiting for safe disposal.) Though the engineering know-how to manage nuclear energy production may exist, I don't trust that we have to social capacity to build and manage this energy safely. And this question is not within the domain of science; the general public may very well have a clearer experiential idea of what social systems can do than the men and women in the labs.

• The more extreme forms of offshore drilling evoke the same reaction that I have to nuclear power: the technology for doing it may exist, but what makes us think we can use it safely and without major damage to oceans and shorelines? Nothing, if the experience with BP in the Gulf of Mexico is taken seriously.

• And then there is fracking. Here I think there is mammoth evidence that oil extractors don't give a damn about the environmental effects of their process. And it looks as if the scientists too have their doubts. That's what you get when your process causes earthquakes and the companies doing it refuse to release data on what chemicals they are injecting into the earth.

• I skipped over the item on GMO foods. On this, I'm with the scientists; farmers have been modifying plants as long as humans have been growing them. But even though I'm somewhat convinced this is safe, I've voted to require that the producers label their GMO products. The public may be untutored, but we have a right to know.

Do you find that you agree with the scientists? If not, do you know why? This seems a worthwhile exercise.