Lots to do to end police violence

Activists who are part of the movement against violence inflicted on Black individuals and communities have offered a list of remedies they call Campaign Zero. This effort is wider, more of a coalition effort than Black Lives Matter, which leads a vibrant cri de coeur that inspires Black people to come together and assert their simple right to be. Campaign Zero gives everyone who will listen lots of specific campaign objectives that might help.

An easy deflecting response to demands for change is always "what do you people want, anyway?" We've been given an extremely comprehensive list. I'll crib a summary from Molly Weasley at Daily Kos as she's done a good job of catching some details of a program that has multiple local, state and federal components.

End broken windows policing. This calls for an end to the decades-long focus on policing minor crimes and activities, especially in neighborhoods with people of color. Also addressed are the need for different approaches to those with mental health issues and an end to racial profiling.

Community oversight. This calls for an all-civilian oversight structure with discipline power that includes a Police Commission and Civilian Complaints Office. Both offices would have specific responsibilities and across-the-board power.

Limit use of force. This solution seeks to establish standards monitor how force is used.

Independently investigate and prosecute. Among other recommendations, this point seeks a permanent Special Prosecutor’s Office at the state level to investigate any police shooting.

Community representation. This calls for officers to be a more accurate representation of the communities they serve.

Body cams/film the police. This would require and fund body cameras as well as dashboard cameras. All citizens would have the right to record police interactions on a cell phone, and police would not have the right to confiscate that phone, as is the case in some states.

Training. This calls for rigorous and sustained training, especially about racial bias.

End for-profit policing. This calls for an end to quota systems and limits fines for low-income people.

Demilitarization. This seeks the end of the sale of military weapons to the nation’s police forces.

Fair police union contracts. This seeks to rewrite police union contracts that create a different set of rules for police, and asks that disciplinary records be open and accessible.

Different pieces of this will take center stage in different localities, depending in part on who lives where and what the power relations are between various communities. Where Black people and other people of color are numerous and are able to exercise political influence (usually but not always by voting), it might be realistic to focus on police recruitment, training and community oversight issues. Where Black people have little power (almost all state level decisions), the core issues are likely to be for-profit policing, demilitarization (police don't have to acquire all that armament) and "police rights" deals that negate their duty to serve the people by protecting individual officers rights as employees.

Getting and keeping the Justice Department on the side of widespread oversight is unequivocally a political issue. Minimally, we can't afford a Republican president or an indifferent Democratic one.

Police have been substituted for a mental health system in most of our urban areas. A huge fraction of police violence happens when a mentally disturbed person confronts insecure officers with a military mindset equipped with badges, tasers and guns. Police also kill disabled personsdisproportionately. This is worst in communities of color, but our failure to fund services to the mentally ill happens everywhere.

As a fix, body cams are tricky. As police have usually done with requirements they display their badges at all times so we at least can know who did the bad deed, officers will figure out how to avoid the scrutiny they create. They will also fight to ensure that review of film is limited to their peers and it is never released to the public. Yet having the political fights over these issues seems a good way to build the struggle. It matters when majorities say "Hey -- that's not right!"

There's so much more. None of us lack for something to do.

Indicted murderer to visit

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court from 2003 to 2012, says the U.S. should arrest Omar Hassan al-Bashir, president of Sudan, when he comes to New York to the United Nations in September. After all, there's a warrant out from the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the guy for mass killings in Darfur.

Yeah, and pigs should fly.

Under Clinton, the U.S. signed the treaty creating the ICC -- but that treaty never went to Senate for ratification. George W. Bush said no way we were going to submit to the jurisdiction of a court currently recognized by 123 nations. We're exceptional ... then he proved it.

We have company in our stance. When we withdrew our ratification, we joined two other countries that had signed the treaty but then pulled out: Sudan and Israel.

George W., Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and their underlings should watch where they travel, as I am sure that they do.

Divided Democrats but good news for anti-nuke deal with Iran

Democratic Senate Minority leader Harry Reid (NV) has come out for the agreement. This certainly increases the likelihood that enough Democrats will stick with the President's initiative to ensure that it survives, even though Obama will have to veto a Republican vote to disapprove it. There was never any great reason to think Reid would not go along, but still the signal is a good one.


This picture of the members of the Democratic Senate leadership points to the back story. Reid is wearing his sunglasses subsequent to an eye injury. At Reid's left is Illinois Senator Dick Durbin. Durbin is the Senate point man rounding up votes for the Iran deal. He is also Reid's Assistant Leader, number two in the Democratic Caucus. On the left looking over his glasses is Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, number three in the present leadership. He is one of only two Democratic Senators so far who has come out against the Iran deal.

Reid is retiring after this term. He has endorsed Schumer over Durbin to succeed him in leading the caucus. Why should a guy who won't play with the team get to leap frog over the guy who is organizing for one of the greater accomplishments of a Democrat in power?

These guys, and Washington State Senator Patti Murray who is number four, will be jockeying for position through the 2016 election. Whoever the Democratic Senators are in 2017 will vote for which leadership they want. I'm sure constituents will remind them who was there when it counted.

Towards a new religious past

Though I'd argue that the dominant culture of the United States still derives from Protestant Christianity, an honest look around reveals that a bewildering variety of religious structures, practices, and experiences finding adherents. A May 2015 survey from the Pew Research Council of our "religious landscape" summarized these changes with the sub-head Christians Decline Sharply as Share of Population; Unaffiliated and Other Faiths Continue to Grow.

We're coming a new context; when hasn't that been true of this youthful nation? And any emerging identity requires a new history. Over the last fifty years, women's histories, African-American histories, native histories and gay histories have intruded into our stories and reshaped our understanding of the past. Peter Manseau in One Nation, Under Gods: A New American History is offering us the raw material for a new religious history just as unsettling of old verities.

The book is episodic, eighteen loosely connected chapters about various religious eruptions in what for Europeans was a "New World."

Some are delightful such as the saga of Mustafa Zemmouri. Born a Muslim in North African Morocco where some religious interaction was traditional, he was enslaved by Christian Portuguese and Spanish adventurers and carried as a servant along on the doomed trek of the Spanish Narváez Expedition across what became Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, through modern Texas, and the desert Southwest, finally meeting up with other Spaniards in California. Only four of the original members survived; Zemmouri had become the indispensable intermediary with native peoples along the way acting as translator (language skills were good for slave survival?) and religious healer. Sent back north to guide some Franciscans, he seems to have taken off to join the Zunis. The Spanish telling of what followed has the natives killing him. But Manseau reports other possible endings:

Another story recounts an event that was ambiguously remembered as either his expulsion or his forced return to the spirit world. It was said that the wise men of the village in which he sought refuge took him to the edge of their pueblo at night and then "gave him a powerful kick, which sped him through the air to the south whence he came." Still another story suggests that among the Zuni he found neither death nor exile but apotheosis. His image has been linked to one of the many divine spirits of the kachina religion of the Pueblo people, of which the Zuni were a part. In legends from native mythology enacted in elaborate dance ceremonies, the figure possibly inspired by Zemmouri, a kachina called Chakwaina, is depicted with black skin and carrying a sacred rattle -- an indication , perhaps, that his career as a god lasted longer than the time he spent as a slave.

Other chapters I'd characterize as entertaining include a depiction of 19th century women's rights activists participating in an infatuation with what they understood of Hinduism and an exploration how psychedelic enthusiasms intertwined with the anti-Vietnam war movement of the 1960s.

Of course much of the history of religion on this continent is not at all benign. Manseau characterizes the expansion of the Franciscan missions into California, the Christianizing of the "heathen," as "an American jihad" and he means to evoke something more like ISIS than interior struggle for right relationship to God. He recounts the early colonies' "Jew bills" restricting full rights to Christians, riots against Sikh laborers in Washington State, and the mixed story of Chinese exclusion and assimilation through which these workers preserved loyalty to ancestors and ancient places.

A book as ambitious as this one can be impressive; Manseau has obviously been researching for years and this does impress. But such a book leaves the reader wanting a narrative with less loose ends. That's normal when a new identity is coming into being. America the multi-religious is both old and effectually very new. We need a new past; this is a solid, necessary contribution to finding one.

Saturday scenes and scenery: sleepers in the city

Good news this week: the Department of Justice told towns and cities the obvious:

When adequate shelter space exists, individuals have a choice about whether or not to sleep in public. However, when adequate shelter space does not exist, there is no meaningful distinction between the status of being homeless and the conduct of sleeping in public. Sleeping is a life-sustaining activity — i.e., it must occur at some time in some place. If a person literally has nowhere else to go, then enforcement of the anti-camping ordinance against that person criminalizes her for being homeless.

Washington Post

This should block San Francisco's recurrent ballot measures to criminalize being poor and homeless. But it probably won't.

San Francisco does have far too many folks who get their rest where they can. This gentleman seems to have just put down his book before nodding off.

It's hard to tell whether this fellow is passed out or just feeling the sun. We take what sun we can get here in Fog City.

Some sleeping choices seem to make a statement.

Others just seem counterintuitive.

Not all who recline are animate.

Some sleepers might bark if disturbed.

Come to think of it, this one almost certainly would bark.

This harmonious figure smiles as the world goes by ...

... while this one embodies harmony itself.

Most photos are out-takes from 596 Precincts.

After torture, facing awful realities

Here's a heartening note: the Chilean ship Esmeralda can't take part in an Amsterdam naval festival this month without provoking protest.

The presence of Chilean school ship Esmeralda, used for the torture of political opponents under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), has brought controversy to the family event.

An association of Chilean exiles has said it would hold a vigil next to the four-master on Wednesday.

"At least 100 people were tortured or raped on board," the association said in a statement, expressing disappointment that "the boat's dark past is still taboo."

In addition to serving as a training vessel for the Chilean Navy, the Esmeralda roams the oceans acting as a kind of floating embassy for the South American nation.

I remember protesting the Esmeralda on one of its visits to San Francisco in the 1970s when its reputation for horrors was more fresh. In trying to confirm my recollection, I came across this letter published in the Baltimore Sun from a William A. Yankes:

While I was a cadet in the Chilean Naval Academy, I and everyone I knew viewed the Esmeralda as the symbol of all that was bright and good about my country. I was eagerly looking forward to sailing with my graduating class as a midshipman in 1973.

But before that happened, my family fled to the United States to avoid President Salvador Allende's Marxist regime. At 17, I was forced to leave with them.

I first heard about torture on the Esmeralda from protesters while visiting the ship in San Diego, Calif., in 1997. I dismissed the charges as absurd. I was sure it was just another attack by extremists determined to besmirch her unimpeachable reputation.

When I asked a Chilean naval officer, a former classmate of mine at the naval academy, whether civilians had been tortured on the Esmeralda, he looked straight at me and said, "We were at war." My heart sank, but even then I couldn't bring myself to believe it.

But while traveling in Chile in March [2000], I interviewed several Chilean writers, some of whom told me they had been tortured. They said that it was well known that people had been tortured on several ships, including the Esmeralda, during the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Finally, I had to accept that it was true.

After speaking with some who were tortured, I now understand why protesters have expressed outrage against the presence of the Esmeralda at various foreign ports and why she was turned away from San Francisco in 1974. ...

Mr. Yankes chose to face unwelcome truths. As I always say about the probable course of any effort to repudiate torture, this takes time. We don't want to look, to know. But looking is how a turn away from wrong begins. Looking is hard, but necessary.

Do you feel the Bern?

Here's a strong Bernie Sanders clip (5:38). It is worth watching the candidate being articulate and passionate about what he cares about. He's good!

It also points up why many of us no matter how liberal or progressive we are on vital economic issues don't instinctively trust him. I'm old enough to remember when old white guys who talked about doing right by the working class didn't really include women in their picture of that class -- and certainly they weren't thinking of queers or single women. It doesn't take a lot of imagination for me to wonder whether Bernie's mental image of the working class really includes people of color. I suspect Bernie's pretty good on my issues and even on communities of color's issues.

But for an awful lot of the people, people who are the contemporary working class, old white guys have to prove they mean it. They have to work for an awful lot of people's trust.

For what it is worth, if he's still in the game, I'll vote for Bernie in the California primary. I've even sent him a few bucks. I don't expect him to be the Democratic nominee, but he's playing a good and honorable role, demanding national policies to fight economic inequality.

Prescribed and proscribed values

Governments seem drawn like moths to flame by the fantasy that they can dictate to teachers what opinions they should hold and what ideas of the world they can teach. The controversies that ensue can be clarifying. It may seem that in the era of 24/7 internet-facilitated information glut such efforts would be inherently laughable. But they recur.

When I arrived at the University of California at Berkeley in 1965, the saga of faculty resistance to a McCarthy-era anti-Communist loyalty oath was still an iconic part of campus history. Many of the participants were senior faculty in the 1960s. When the oath had been introduced, some professors and more non-academic employees were fired for failing to sign; the faculty quite rapidly won a free speech judgment against the oath. The university governing board rescinded the rule. Ordinary employees were not so absolved however; to this day the California state constitution requires state workers who are US citizens to sign a loyalty oath as a condition of employment. In 2008 this was challenged by a Quaker who could not promise to use violence to support the state. The state cobbled a compromise. The most recent national litigation about a loyalty oath seems to have reached the Supreme Court in 1972; the Court agreed that Massachusetts could require an oath to "oppose the overthrow of the [government] by force, violence, or by any illegal or unconstitutional method." So existing precedent makes this sort of thing legal.

Apparently another round may be currently playing itself out in Nebraska. According to reporting by Sarah Lazare:

Dating back to 1951, the law requires "all persons engaged in teaching in the public schools of the State of Nebraska and all other employees paid from public school funds" to sign the pledge of loyalty. The oath includes the following language (emphasis added):

"I acknowledge it to be my duty to inculcate in the hearts and minds of all pupils in my care, so far as it is in my power to do, (1) an understanding of the United States Constitution and of the Constitution of Nebraska, (2) a knowledge of the history of the nation and of the sacrifices that have been made in order that it might achieve its present greatness, (3) a love and devotion to the policies and institutions that have made America the finest country in the world in which to live, and (4) opposition to all organizations and activities that would destroy our present form of government."

The local affiliate of the ACLU threatens a civil rights lawsuit if a school district enforcing a requirement that its employees sign this pledge doesn't back off. This will be worth watching. Do we currently have a civil liberties consensus in which courts would invalid such an oath? I'm not sure.

Interestingly, something like this is going on Great Britain as the acerbic Cambridge don Mary Beard discovered:

For various reasons, I was having a careful look yesterday at a secondary school's website and was surprised to discover that they had a whole section of their website devoted to the question of how they promoted British values. For those readers abroad, this clearly related to a government directive last year that all schools should do precisely that: promote Britishness. This apparently means the values of "democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance for those with different faiths and beliefs".

Now there are all kinds of obvious problems with this. For a start, it is hard to know what the government thought any teacher was supposed to do when confronted by the clever 13 year old who asked if the law-breaking suffragettes were promoting British values or not. And the idea that these values are peculiarly British causes one to gag a bit (one section of the government guidelines actually suggests that teachers should  get across "the strengths, advantages and disadvantages of democracy, and how democracy and the law works in Britain, in contrast to other forms of government in other countries". Like what "other countries"? France?

She goes on to report that a quick examination of other schools' websites shows that they've all sought compliance by posting the same verbiage. She doubts there is much real world effect of these boilerplate affirmations, except perhaps to burden police and fire departments with school visits.

I enjoyed Ms. Beard's response to her government's mandatory "values" boosterism. If we can't get rid of such initiatives legally (and I don't think either here or in Britain we can look to courts to do that job) we can perhaps mock them into the moth zapper. That seems worth the attempt.

The torture regime endures

If Jeb Bush's flirtation with torture upsets you, blame Barack Obama. The Prez is a very careful guy; he picks his fights. Sometimes that serves him and the rest of us well: Obamacare and the Iran nuke development moratorium are big wins.

But very obviously, from his first days in office, Obama discovered that restoring the rule of law in relation to a national security agenda would cost him big time. If the CIA's backing, filling, stalling and obstructing of Congressional oversight means anything, it means that the agency knew full well that John Yoo's phony-baloney torture memos wouldn't protect its agents. Torture is a crime under both U.S. and international law. So they've fought disclosure every step of the way. So have all the other spook agencies, even larger institutions than the CIA, operating out of the War (Defense) Department and other secret hideaways.

These agencies not only want to conceal what they did (do? -- how can we know if they are allowed to hide behind "security"?). They want to keep us focused on whether torture "worked." That's a non-question. Torture is a crime and crimes should be prosecuted. Period.

But Obama ducked that fight. He needed the spooks to try to prevent a terror attack that could undermine his tenure. So he caved. If Jeb were elected President, all he'd have to do is give a nod to the spooks -- Barack Obama's administration has made the laws in this area meaningless.

And having ducked the fight, Guantanamo remains still open. Obama's Justice Department recently has gone to court to prevent compassionate release of an inmate on hunger strike who is down to 75 pounds and has been cleared for over half a decade. The National Religious Coalition against Torture has a letter writing campaign. If we don't like being a torture state, we have to keep protesting these things.

Yes, Erudite Partner has just written a book about these issues. She expects a spring release.

Not everyone's idea of a breakthrough for women ...

... but I find this is uplifting: Jen Welter (l) is coaching inside linebackers for the Arizona Cardinals this preseason. Sarah Thomas (r) is the first full-time female NFL official. They greeted each other before the pre-season game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Cards last weekend.

I assume they are both very good at what they do.

I don't find it hard to believe in Thomas' professionalism. My ex was a national-class women's rugby player back in the day and she went on to referee men's games. From what I've seen, male ruggers may be even more unruly than American football players.

But how do you coach linebackers in a sport in which you can't have played at a high level? Not surprisingly, Welter played women's rugby in college; then she developed her skills in the low profile world of women's American football. I sure hope Welter is a success. Women on the sidelines have been athletic trainers, if they weren't cheerleaders. But these roles are new.

Info and photo from the Guardian.

That damned flag still ignites rage

Historian/journalist Rick Perlstein kicked off an unexpectedly violent storm when he piggybacked on removals of Confederate battle flags from public buildings in the wake of the racist Emmanuel AME massacre in Charleston to tell the true story of the POW/MIA flag that hangs on many government buildings. He contends, with plentiful backup, that that the Nixon administration cruelly cultivated the ambiguity in the designation "Missing in Action" to rally families and war supporters behind the myth that the Vietnamese enemy was holding thousands of hidden prisoners. The U.S. military knew perfectly well that downed flyers had crashed in the jungles and were almost certainly dead. But Nixon thrived politically on exaggerating the number of U.S. troops in Hanoi's custody and backed the "National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia" as a counter to antiwar passions. The black and white banner was made into a symbol of aggressive patriotism.

[That flag] memorializes Americans as the preeminent victims of the Vietnam War ...

In other words, that flag is a tool of psychological projection: we bombed, defoliated, poisoned and burned Vietnam, but they're the guilty ones. ***
When I read Perlstein's account of Nixon's exploitation of the families of the MIAs in The Invisible Bridge, I reacted strongly. This seemed to me one of Nixon's more grotesque offenses. Yet on reflection, I think that reaction is something of an anachronism. Now that we use a small professional army which we expect to fight our wars without bothering the "Homeland," we compensate for our guilty awareness that we're passing off the pain to others by exaggerated solicitude for the irreproachable troops. In the era of mass citizen armies, I suspect there was a chronic realistic awareness that the military machine often wasted the lives of men who thought of themselves more as grunts, than heroes. Every history of broad-scale war is one of wasted lives.***
When Perlstein's article was first published in The Washington Spectator it appeared under the headline "The Forgotten Story of America's Other Racist Flag". No longer. If you follow the link above, both author and editor have appended apologies for using the term "racist." I see in the comment section that the old passions, especially from those who had lost relatives and friends in the jungles, have broken out from the flag's defenders. It was not pretty.

But I am sorry that Perlstein and his editor felt they had to retract the adjective "racist." That they reacted as they did makes me think that in addition to an N-word, U.S. usage now nearly has an R-word.

I'm not prepared to accept that linguistic prohibition. Of course the U.S. war in Vietnam was racist. The enemy (and the set we called "allies") were incomprehensible little brown people, "gooks." The notion that the U.S. had the right to take the place of the French imperialists and dictate the evolution of this complex, ancient land was a product of racist ignorance.

What I might have retracted was the article's lede, the equation of the POW/MIA flag's racism to the struggle against our country's deepest white supremacy. The Confederate flag stands for the particular racism that defended the slave status of persons of African origin. Its widespread prominence in southern U.S. state capitals some fifty years ago signaled defiance of the African American civil rights struggle. That's our domestic racism; Vietnam was more in our imperialist vein, still morally indefensible, but a differently contested territory.

Letter from Lebanon: August 13, 14, 15

Reproduced with permission from the writer: Tina from Beirut.

Dear Friends,

On August 13, it was the first anniversary of the killing of Yazidis in Iraq, I went at the screening of a documentary on this massacre, done by a Lebanese journalist who was the first Lebanese to make it there. I cried.

On August 14, it was the 9th anniversary of the defeat of the Zionists in Lebanon. I am sure you remember what happened then and how the Zionists destroyed large parts of the infrastructure of our country from North to South. And during those 33 days, what happened was a total support [by] the majority of Maronites for the million Shiaa who left their homes in the South and moved North. Many, many homes were destroyed and when leaving, the Israelis left behind more than 100,000 cluster bombs. And of course you recall that without the support of the [U.S.] Empire, all this would not have happened.

Yesterday, there was a very moving ceremony organized by Hezballah in a valley in the South, the place were the Mirkava tanks were attacked and destroyed, after which the Zionist soldiers just ran away, it was on August 14.

Today, we, in my part of the world, we are still in a war zone created by the Empire and its allies, be it the Zionists or the Saudis or the Qataris or the Europeans. This war zone includes Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

I am well aware that you are not anymore the activists who can move things in the US, like I am not in my country either; but you are still people involved in politics and you will be voting or maybe even working on campaigns for presidential candidates. Please, please, look at what is a candidate's stand on my part of the world before getting excited for her/him. Really, really, until now who ever was your president, he took part in the destruction of my part of the world and in the destruction of my country in particular.

Do you know that it is your government who is stopping the election of the strongest Christian/Maronite in Lebanon, Michel Aoun, because he is not under the control of anyone and because he is an ally of Hezballah? Do you know that your ambassador gets involved even in stopping a specific general to head the Lebanese Army? This to give you just small details.

August 15, it is the "our lady's holy day" Mary is considered the protector of Lebanon, she is the replacement of Ashtarut (Ashtar) the goddess who was the goddess of our mountains.

I am not a believer, but Mariam is our goddess. I love it, especially that she is loved by both Muslim and Christians. Yes yes I am a non-believer, but my name on my ID is Christiane Maria and any Takfirist will recognize me as a Christian and would kill me ...

One day, the Empire will disappear. I doubt this will happen in our lifetime. Hopefully it will disappear before destroying totally my part of the world.

With my love ...

If you've forgotten the Israeli assault on Lebanon in 2006, this Seymour Hersh article from the New Yorker tells the sordid story.

Today it begins ...

... the San Francisco (San Carlos) 49ers take the field for their first preseason game.

It is hard to anticipate the arrival of the season with hope. Horror seems more appropriate.Fans have seen

• ... the precipitate departure of a winning coach

• retirements and leave-takings, perhaps departures from a sinking ship?

• releases of guys who couldn't control themselves

• yet another roster of cast offs and newbies

• an exciting but undeveloped quarterback, perhaps surrounded by a cast among whom he'll never be able to prove himself ...

Meanwhile football itself becomes more and more suspect, arbitrarily governed, leaching the life from vibrant young men who mistake brawn and bluster for accomplishment. All for the profit of 32 billionaires.

Perhaps this year I'll finally lose interest. Or perhaps not.

Saturday scenery: Martha's Vineyard, summer 2015

Actually I'm cheating a little on the geography here. This fine patriot was on the concourse at Logan Airport in Boston. He's a perky creature, isn't he?

Oh, and by the way, I believe Tom Brady is innocent, so I was right at home in New England last week.

The island was lovely, as always.

In the first week of August, there was already a hint of autumn in the air.

As usual, I wandered the trails.

The sound was quite still on this morning.

A lesson in sharing the road.

These cows seem intent on getting somewhere.

These bucolic scenes convey a false impression. In truth, the Vineyard is jammed in August, full of tourists, extra vehicles, and the Prez with family. After so many presidential visits, the security seems to have it down about being unobtrusive. The island welcomes its illustrious visitor.

A perennial question: Who's next?

1994

When the people you live among are enthusiastically voting to take away what little hope you have -- education for the children, emergency health care, stable work -- and deliver you to be deported, you ask the question.

2015

How can I be safe in America if I can’t be safe in my body? It is a confrontation with a most discomforting concept: that there is no amount of righteous behavior, no neighborhood right enough, to produce sufficient security.

It produces a particular kind of terror, a feeling of nakedness and vulnerability, a fear that makes people furious at the very idea of having to be afraid.

Charles Blow

What can people who are on the butt end of injustice do but A) come together, B) draw strength from those beside them and anyone else who will respectfully accompany them, and C) demand the injustice stop NOW! Organize!

Friday cat blogging

I think he's glad we're home, but he's watching us closely.

A reminder: the Iran nuke deal matters

It would be possible to think all these gabbing candidates (of both parties) are what's important. That would be a mistake.

What's more important is the push by the incumbent president is to do all he can to lower the danger of civilization-destroying war and increase the chances of peace. This species can kill ourselves (and most everything else) off much more quickly with our weapons than we can by allowing carbon pollution to increase.

(There may come a moment when that balance of danger tips. Certainly moving now to mitigate climate change is the stuff of survival. But if we allow unchecked warming to continue, we're not likely to be able to do much about a climate that won't support our kind of life.)

That venerable interpreter of political doings, reporter Elizabeth Drew, tries to fix our attention on what's vital:

We’re now so close to the fray and the din that it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that this is a historical moment. It’s on a scale of a decision to enter a war or make peace.

It’s about the efficacy of negotiations versus military action. If the deal’s opponents succeed in canceling it, they will have to answer to history. At a minimum, if the deal works, it postpones the day that Iran might have a nuclear weapon.

Those who insist that the deal should have been more punitive toward Iran overlook the fact that it’s the result of a negotiation. Simple logic suggests that a man as obsessed with his place in history as Barack Obama wouldn’t consciously allow his negotiators to reach a deal that’s easily breached. He has said that he expects to be around when the deal has expired and he wants to be able to hold his head up. ...

The signing of this agreement is a concrete step toward choosing life over death. The chances seem good that the naysayers will not be able to block it. Now that's "one small step ..."

Police procedures ...

When they don't come out with guns blazing, they use the authority society gives them to sexually assault their captives.

From ABC 13 KTRK in Houston, Charnesia Corley, 21, says she was pulled over for allegedly running a stop sign. Deputies told her they smelled marijuana and ordered her to get out of the car.

As she told her story to the Houston Chronicle:

... a male deputy pulled her over for allegedly running a stop sign. He said he smelled marijuana, handcuffed Corley, put her in his vehicle and searched her car for almost an hour. He didn't find any pot, according to her attorney, Sam Cammack.

Returning to his car where Corley was held, the deputy again said he smelled marijuana and called in a female deputy to conduct a cavity search. When the female deputy arrived, she told Corley to pull her pants down, but Corley protested because she was cuffed and had no underwear on. The deputy ordered Corley to bend over, pulled down her pants and began to search her.

I think any woman would call this a public rape ... whatever else there is to this story, this woman is brave.

That's so much of what BlackLivesMatter is accomplishing: unleashing and throwing a spotlight on the bravery of Black people who've been kept down.

H/t TPM.

The fighting mannikins put their dukes up, pummel women

Marco Rubio, one of the 17 Republican dwarfs running for president, says

“I’ll support any legislation that reduces the number of abortions ...”

But we know he doesn't. As Paul Waldman points out, Republican platforms have for years called for an end to any exceptions to an abortion ban -- even for women who are raped, molested by a male relative, or might die if made to give birth.

Nor do these pitiful creatures have any interest in a proven measure to prevent abortions: if we ensure easy, free access to long acting contraception, young women don't have so many unwanted pregnancies. Colorado made the experiment.

The initiative provided women with free IUDs (intrauterine devices) or hormonal implants that can prevent pregnancy for up to 10 years, resulting in a 40 percent decline in birthrates among teen moms and a 42 percent decline in teen abortions from 2009 to 2013 ...

Not for the first time, I wonder how the dwarves would react to a fool proof mechanical means to prevent irresponsible fatherhood ...

An overdue break in a wall of denial

Don't expect me to be upset about this.

That the debate over the Iran nuclear deal is clarifying that the sycophants of Israel's right-wing government want the U.S. to be embroiled in permanent war on the Middle East strikes me as a good tangential benefit of a sound diplomatic process.

Let's get real here. It is not in the U.S. interest to carry water for Benjamin Netanyahu.

Don't take my word for this. Listen to M.J. Rosenberg who used to work for AIPAC (the coordinating force in the Israel Lobby).

Obama is fighting a lobby that has been the bane of every president since Eisenhower ... Will Obama succeed in getting the lobby to back off? Will he do it serious damage? One can only hope so. The lobby is a malignant force in this country.

But it is only a powerful force because politicians allow it to be. ... The lobby is really the Wizard Of Oz. It is back there madly manipulating and issuing pronouncements in a loud voice. ... all it will take is a president willing to take them on. And then beating them badly as must happen with the Iran agreement.

President Obama is doing a great thing, not only for himself and the country, but for everyone of his successors. ... As for 90% of American Jews, if not more, we want and need to be rid of this curse. It doesn’t speak for us and never has. It speaks for the Israeli Right. And it jeopardizes our standing as Americans by making us all look like expatriate Israelis when all we are is Americans. And good ones.

AIPAC is not us. Not even close. Obama, who received 70-80% of our votes in two elections, is. Beat them, Mr. President.

More on this from James Fallows at the Atlantic.

"A deep-seated, erroneous conceit"

It's been a year since an unarmed 18-year-old Black young man, Michael Brown, was shot by a police office in Ferguson, Missouri. A brief check-in at Twitter turned up the news that yesterday a Dallas cop had killed another young Black man, Christian Taylor, also unarmed.

The Guardian database of police killings in 2015 currently reads 695 for this year. If you click the link, it could be greater yet. U.S. police are on pace to kill 2+ a day. One hundred seventy-eight of those killed are listed as Black. One hundred forty-eight of the dead are described as "unarmed." I don't much trust that second figure as the database seems to be crediting police claims that Amilcar Perez-Lopez, killed just blocks from my house, was waving a knife at them. Nobody in the neighborhood believes that one. He was felled by 6 bullets in the back.

Last spring Professor of Religion Jan Willis offered a Buddhist meditation at Lion's Roar on how these killings can go on and on.

What does it mean when we need protection from the people whose job it is to protect us?

We cry out for what seems so simple: fair and equal treatment under the law. But to view each other as “equals” is precisely the problem here. The root of this problem is the very root cause of samsara itself, namely, the over-exaggerated investment we each make in our respective “I”s.

The conceit of “I” prevents us from seeing others—any others!—as “equal” to us. So some human beings actually harbor the thought that some lives matter less than others. And so we witness again—almost unimaginably in this 21st-century so-called “post-racial” society—the placards that must state the obvious: “Black Lives Matter.” I am reminded that 50 years ago the placards read poignantly, “I am somebody.” Why is this so hard for us to see and accept, and even cherish?

It seems to me that only if we harbor the deep-seated, erroneous conceit that “I am better than others” can we harbor the view that black lives—or any lives—don’t matter. This conceit is our downfall.

Embedded in our institutions, the conceit of white supremacy is what makes it so hard to end these killings. White supremacy, the national original sin, expresses itself in individuals as a stubborn confidence that I and my kind are better than -- and matter more than -- those others and and their kind. We aren't and we don't.

Saturday scenes and scenery: critters of urban imagination

We construct environments where they can survive only furtively, then bring them back as porch decorations.

Some we invest with anthropomorphic charm.

I can't tell whether this critter is portrayed as alive and sleeping peacefully or as dead, serving warning to its siblings.

All out-takes from my photoblog: 596 Precincts.

Friday cat blogging

Morty had to stay home this week while we went gallivanting ... I don't imagine he minds since he has Anna to attend to him.

Seeing ourselves as others see us

The vision is scary.

Item One: Our Congress thinks it is debating whether the international agreement to curtail Iran's nuclear program will happen.

The UN Security Council has already approved the deal, and by a 15-0 unanimous vote—hardly its norm on controversial issues. So has the European Union. Sample report, from Reuters: “‘It is a balanced deal that means Iran won’t get an atomic bomb,’ said French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius. ‘It is a major political deal.’” The Russians and Chinese are moving ahead as if the deal is done, because from the world’s perspective it is.

James Fallows, The Atlantic

Item Two: These scrabbling fools are competing to demonstrate who can be most ignorant and irresponsible in order to have a chance to become President of the United States. Sticking a podium in front of each of them does not confer gravitas or sanity.

It's the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima

At sunrise members of the Martha's Vineyard Peace Council and friends gathered near Gay Head Lighthouse to reflect, mourn, pray and stoke their collective determination to work to ensure that nuclear weapons are never again used.

This country does have a chance at this time to affirm a diplomatic deal to keep Iran out of the nuclear bomb business for at least 10 years. There may be enough Republican Congresscritters and Senators who want to kick President Obama one more time to field a majority against this sensible measure. But if marginally more civilized members stick together, they can uphold a veto. That's what keeping the deal will probably take. It's time again to batter your Congresscritters for peace!

My Senators, Feinstein and Boxer, have lined up for the deal. Have yours? Here's a current tally of Senators.

Blog hiatus

This is what can happen while trying to wrestle luggage after an overnight cross-country flight. Just bruised rather than broken, I think. But disabling. Typing is painful. Blogging will be on hold until the pain passes..

The Donald grabs eyeballs ...

... even here in the 'hood.

I doubt if the attention he gets around here translates to support. But he's a phenom.

With a mix of aggression, boffo self-assertion and nonsense, Trump has managed to boil modern Republicanism down to a hard precipitate form, shorn of the final vestiges of interest in actual governing.

In the economics of Crazy, there is purity and volume. Trump has brought to market a purer and more widely deployable product. He has also radically increased volume. Like a high-flying tech start-up or new drug syndicate, he has radically devalued the product, while dominating the transformed market in a way that allows him to make a killing even against reduced prices and margins. ... In both purity and volume, his competitors simply cannot compete.

Joshua Marshall, TPM

A non-judgmental call to action

When Robert D. Putnam talks, policy makers listen (or at least pretend to). In his new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, the eminent Harvard social scientist is sounding a gentle, reasoned alarm: he doesn't want to point out any upper middle class villains (who tend to read books), but he argues that economic inequality is destroying equality of opportunity and hence the life-chances of too many, perhaps most, of today's young people.

... most Americans have not been greatly worried about [inequality of income and wealth] ... we tend not to begrudge others their success or care how high the socioeconomic ladder is, assuming that everyone has an equal chance to climb it. ... The prospects for the next generation -- that is, whether young people from different backgrounds are, in fact getting onto the ladder at the same place and, given equal merit and energy, are equally likely to scale it -- pose an altogether more momentous problem in our national culture.

The book looks at Putnam's own middle-class upbringing in a white, Rust Belt, Ohio community where most all the adults treated all the town's young people as "our kids." No longer does this impulse prevail. Both class and racial segregation mean that the affluent (still white) stratum of the town has no idea of how poor kids live and no intention of finding out.

Subsequent chapters explore how today's affluent and poor kids inhabit separate and unequal worlds in the kind of families they experience, the sort of parenting they receive, the schooling to which they are exposed, and the communities which create their sense of the adult world. The book is a fluid mix of story and hard data, easy to read, unlikely to be broadly refuted -- and scary as hell. Highly recommended.
***Perhaps one third of this small volume is devoted to stories of real kids and their families based on several years of interviews. Putnam gives gracious credit to his doctoral fellow, Jennifer M. Silva, who carried out most of these and helped him sort them into narratives. These stories are central to his project:

... class segregation means that members of the upper middle class are less likely to have firsthand knowledge of the lives of poor kids and thus are unable even to recognize the growing opportunity gap. One reason, in fact, for including the life stories of the young people in this book is to help reduce that perception gap -- to help us all to see, in the words of Jacob Riis, a social reformer of the previous Gilded Age, "how the other half lives."

The inclusion of these narratives also provides Putnam's means of approaching the racial divides that are so central to how our society is structured. In addition to white children and families, there are Black and Latino vignettes. The stories show that the class divides in white society also play out in the families of color that the white people most likely never meet. Those who own and earn more live and raise families more comfortably, regardless of race.

I felt this approach, though presenting some truths that dominant white narratives tend to erase -- yes, upper income Black parents also want their kids to go to good colleges; who knew? -- also left gaps, things unsaid. I'm just a comparatively well-off white lady, but I have been fortunate enough to live and work for a lifetime in a far more economically and racially integrated context than many white U.S. residents. Yet as I read this book, I was haunted by a snippet of a quotation from one of the two Black students Putnam went to high school with back in the 1950s. "Cheryl" went on to college, became a teacher, and, though she agrees their shared town gave her opportunities, does not remember it fondly. As she puts it:

"Your then was not my then, and your now isn't even my now."

I have to wonder whether interviewers of color could have crossed a divide that is not as visible in this book as it in our lives.

Wayback machine: was the Afghanistan war ever avoidable?

Jon Lee Anderson reacted to the news that dribbled out last week of the death of Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

The international conflict that Mullah Omar helped to start in 2001 is still going on, having cost, thus far, the lives of an estimated ninety-one thousand Afghans, twenty-six thousand of them civilians. Three thousand three hundred and ninety-three soldiers from twenty-nine different countries died, too, the majority of them—two thousand three hundred and sixteen—Americans. The financial cost to U.S. taxpayers alone has been around a trillion dollars, with billions more to come, in the years ahead, in medical bills and other long-term costs for Afghan-war veterans. Although the American combat role in the Afghan war officially ended last December, about ten thousand troops have stayed on as advisers and as a counterterrorism quick-reaction force within a reconstituted NATO mission, and will remain at least through the end of 2016.

Afghanistan is still at war. The same article reports that one of its many warlords seems to have signed on to operate as a branch of the Islamic State; meanwhile the U.S.-backed Afghan government is in talks with the resurgent Taliban that Omar once headed.

In October 2001, ten percent of us in this country didn't think we should be bombing and invading Afghanistan, despite our grief about the 9/11 attacks. In the most recent poll I can find, from December 2013, 66 percent of us say the Afghanistan war was "not worth it."

Looking back on 2001, we should remember how ill-served we were in the men who exercised executive power in Washington that unhappy autumn. After the 9/11 attacks, there was some back and forth with elements of the Taliban about handing over bin Laden for trial. Mullah Omar was adamant about safeguarding bin Laden:

Ten days after 9/11, the Voice of America radio service interviewed Mullah Omar, asking him: "So you won't give Osama bin Laden up?" Omar replied, "No. We cannot do that. If we did, it means we are not Muslims, that Islam is finished. ..."

On the other hand, Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, Taliban’s last foreign minister, told Al Jazeera there had been some communication:

Even before the [9/11] attacks, our Islamic Emirate had tried through various proposals to resolve the Osama issue. One such proposal was to set up a three-nation court, or something under the supervision of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference [OIC] ...

According to the Guardian on October 14, 2001, President George W. Bush wasn't having any of it:

"There's no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he's guilty ..."

Bush and his men would be judge and jury, overriding any procedures or protocols. Not for them, cultivating international legitimacy. We and the Afghans are still paying for this arrogant hubris.

It's obvious, but still worth mentioning, that the opponents of the P5+1 agreement to restrict an Iranian nuclear bomb program are the same cowboys who couldn't take a few weeks to negotiate for a handover of bin Laden for trial, somewhere, in some court. Maybe it would never have happened, but they sure weren't about to find out. They thought they could impose their fantasies on the whole world. They have failed miserably and will continue to fail. Their greatest fear is that there might be another way.

A Wayback machine post is about something I've dug into that is tangential to E.P.'s new book project.

Home truths

Thom Hartmann talks with former President Jimmy Carter(served 1977 to 1981)

[The U.S.political system] now it is just an oligarchy. It's just political bribery ... we've seen a complete subversion of our system by political contributors who want and sometimes get a political payoff when the election is over.... At the present time the incumbents, Republicans and Democrats, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody who is in Congress has a lot more to sell ...

Carter is on a book tour for A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety.

The guy is having a pretty damn good post-Presidency.