Air travel hell again ...

... this time to Nicaragua to visit some projects of El Porvenir. Here's the organizational mission statement:

We partner with the people of Nicaragua so that they can build a future for themselves. Clean drinking water is at the core of El Porvenir; sanitation is necessary to ensure that the water is clean. In addition to sustainable water and sanitation projects, we work with communities on health and hygiene education and reforestation.

I last traveled this route in 2007; here's a story from that trip.

Meanwhile this is another surreal experience of airports, planes, security (yeah for Pre-Check!), no healthy food, hurrying up and waiting, anxious boarding lines, luggage wrangling ... Air travel is so convenient, miraculous if you think about it -- and so unpleasant.***I don't know how much connectivity I'll have over the next few days. I haven't pre-posted much (besides Morty for Friday.). Hopefully I'll have pictures and thoughts early on. Otherwise, whenever I can. Last time I was in Nicaragua, the internet was rare. But I suspect that has changed for visitors, if not for most residents.

San Francisco election 2015

Completing San Francisco's ballot for November 3 (two-thirds of us will have voted by mail by that date) is a dutiful chore. But I did my homework and cast my votes. Here's what I learned:

Nobody plausible was willing to take a beating against our corporate overlords' bought-and-paid-for incumbent mayor. So we have good people (Francisco Herrera, Stuart Schulman, and Amy Weiss asking us to vote for each of them on the "ranked choice" ballot -- sure, I voted for "1-2-3 "Anybody but Lee!" I'm sympathetic to all the more plausible politicians who took a dive; exposing themselves to a million dollar whooping with little chance of prevailing is something reasonable people might dodge. The current charade reminds me of the 1979 campaign when we had the chance to vote for Jello Biafra as an alternative to a couple of right-centrists (the winner is now in the U.S Senate). Those were the days ...

Then there are the propositions, A through K this year. Four of them (A, F, I, and K -- YES on all ) amount to cries from the heart against the gentrification and displacement created by the tech boom. The effort to pass the lot of them is vital to the future of the city. As of August, renters looking for a one bedroom saw charges of about $3000 monthly; I hope new apartment hunters are making over $100,000 annually, because otherwise they are shit out of luck.

There are a few tricky propositions that deserve a little explication.

• Prop. D is a carefully negotiated compromise with the SF Giants that allows them to build on open port land, including 40 percent affordable rental housing and some spaces that might be within the means of artists. Yes on D just to show that these things can be accomplished.

• Prop. E pretends to extend openness in government. It's a con. I like the League of Pissed Off Voters description:

  it could create a bureaucratic clusterfuck and allow corporations and Fox News types to carpetbomb meetings with pre-recorded public comment.

  NO on E.

• No on G; Yes on H Another con job with a counter measure. G would undermine San Francisco's CleanPower initiative in the interests of PG&E; H protects our local sustainability project. Supporters of G count on confusion to pass it. We are not confused and we don't like PG&E.

• Prop. J aims to help longtime businesses getting slammed by rent increases. Yes. (There can be no commercial rent control in California; the corporations persuaded the legislature to outlaw such provisions back in 1988.)

There is one important candidate election, though not in my district. Aaron Peskin would help restore some concern for tenants and lower income residents on the Board of Supervisors in a special District Three election.

And we need people who give a damn about City College to bolster that board. Tom Temprano has earned progressive support.

A death grip on criminal failure

Yes dude, many people do blame George W -- for being asleep at the switch and giving away direction of policy to his bellicose, authoritarian Vice-President.

The career security spooks tried to warn your brother; "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US" they told him in August 2001. He whiffed.

Of course many of us blame George W even more for continuing to abdicate his role, giving the security hustlers and crackpot tyrants in the Republican Party a chance to run the country off a cliff: domestic surveillance, torture, an indefensible and unprovoked aggressive war against Iraq; the list is long. Prosecution would be appropriate.

Running as the loyal brother of a criminal failure is no advertisement.

Graphic cribbed from TPM.

Schooling economists

Kevin Drum and Charles Gaba look at a lot of confusing numbers and conclude that Obamacare is chugging along satisfactorily, enrolling more and more people who might otherwise be uninsured.

Meanwhile, Sarah Kliff reports that developments in one of the program's many byways are not having the expected results.

Kliff explains: health economists

have long theorized that higher deductibles would force down health-care costs.

The idea was that higher deductibles would make patients become smarter shoppers: If they had to pay more of the cost, they'd likely choose something closer to the $1,529 appendectomy than the $186,955 appendectomy (yes, some hospitals really do charge that much). This would push the really expensive doctors to lower their prices so cheaper physicians didn't steal their business.

But it turns out, people don't treat getting sick as an occasion for comparison shopping. They want access to a medical system that will heal them and they go where they know. If high deductibles make access expensive, they delay and go later -- probably sicker and probably eventually needing more expensive care. Under high deductible insurance plans

workers just went to the doctor way less.

Illness simply isn't an occasion for consumer diligence. We don't work that way.

I find it hard to imagine anyone who was not an ivory tower economist would ever have thought otherwise.

Department of things I didn't know, but probably should have

Is this also news to you?

Through much of July and August the Middle East suffered through an unprecedented heat wave that settled over the entire region for weeks, with temperatures reaching above 120 degrees for days at a time. Factoring in the heat index — the combination of surface temperature and humidity that tells you what the human body is actually experiencing — the feel-like temperature on July 30 in the Iranian city of Bandar Mahshahr reached 164 degrees, the second-highest ever recorded on earth. The heat index reached 156 degrees that day in parts of southern Iraq. You can set your oven to that temperature and cook a chicken.

Israel caught the worst of the heat wave in August, which was the country’s hottest month on record. The hottest single day in most parts of the country was August 16, with a heat index topping 150 degrees in some of the inland valleys. Arguably worse, though, was the freak dust storm, the worst in the country’s history, that blanketed Israel along with Lebanon and Syria as well as parts of Egypt and Cyprus for a week in early September. Dust storms in the region rarely last more than a day, and a storm at the end of the summer is unprecedented. Three people died from weather conditions in Israel this summer and hundreds were hospitalized. Once again, scientists were stumped.

If there’s a common denominator in these natural disasters, it’s that each one sets a new record for the worst ever, except when it’s an unprecedented first-ever. The days of predicting that carbon emissions will eventually warm the globe with likely calamitous impact are finished. We have arrived. The calamitous impacts are here.

The source is J.J. Goldberg writing in the Forward, the New York City-based Jewish newspaper. Goldberg is an editor-at-large of the publication where he previously served as editor from 2000-2007. Before that he worked in education and journalism in both Israel and the United States.

So why is Goldberg writing about climate crisis in the Middle East? Because he wants his fellow sympathizers with Zionism to think about what it means to hitch their fortunes to a U.S. Republican Party mired in climate change denial. He's thoughtful.

At some point, denial of reality, of whatever sort, becomes unsustainable.

Signs of the season

Football, football, and more football ... and this.

From California's drought

Sometimes a sign can have multiple meanings ... noted in San Francisco, near Lake Merced.

Afghanistan forever war

So the Prez has given up. He thought he needed a "good" war and he's lured himself and us all into a tar pit. We can expect U.S. troops to be in Afghanistan for many years, even decades, until the Afghans finally chase us out.

Spencer Ackerman has been chronicling our imperial flailing for the last decade and a half:

Barack Obama was elected to end the grueling ground wars of his predecessor, but he will leave office entrenching a military era defined by an inability to achieve either victory or extrication.

Obama’s decision to scrap his long-deferred ambition to end the US military commitment to Afghanistan reflects a twilight period in US warfare: after more than a decade, military commanders are unable to defeat an insurgency or field an indigenous proxy force and political leaders are unwilling to accept the blame of losing a war or openly committing the US to indefinite combat.

The result is a fudge that favors a rump force based on dubious military necessity and a hope that, at some point, the local force – whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere – will be able to shoulder the burden.

Nothing good can come of this because the "government" of Afghanistan has earned no legitimacy from its population. Those Afghans who can flee; those who can't suffer.

One of our pundit cheerleaders for empire, Roger Cohen, states the domestic reality baldly:

American power in 2015 is not American power in 1990. Hyper-connectivity and the rise of the rest will constrain any president even if the United States, as Hillary Clinton put it, is not Denmark.

Suppose — that word — Obama had been frank and said: “My job is to reduce the footprint of America in a changed world and empower other countries to do more.” That’s a total sinker in American politics.

It’s unthinkable because most Americans are still hard-wired to American exceptionalism, the notion that America is not America if it gives up on spreading liberty. So it becomes hard to find a foreign-policy language that’s aligned to reality but does not smack of “declinism” — fatal for any politician.

I'm not about to concede that what we are so committed to spreading is "liberty" -- substituting "ignorant faith in our superiority" strikes me as accurate. But Cohen has it: this President flounders because the mass of us want him to.

We're going to have to crash a lot further, before we stop behaving like dumb brats with nukes. Any of the plausible successors to the present President will almost certainly be worse. And this one has been pretty bad.

Friday cat blogging

Morty and I feel similarly about having the house turned upside down by remodeling. He expresses his unease by climbing over us while we sleep and grooming our heads. I express mine by complaining here. I'm sure we'll both be happier when it is over. Also warmer: we are adding considerable insulation.

Political insurrection springs eternal in the 'hood

People with a cause and some less than attractive signs are out at 24th and Mission.

Improbably, they seem to hope that you can convert people if you give them enough pieces of paper.

I did not engage.

Like Jim Webb said to Bernie on Tuesday night, I "don't think the revolution is going to come." But then, I don't think Bernie thinks so either; he just can envision ways in the economic realm to make what we have better.

Down the street, a film crew was shooting at the entrance to a building which has recently been turned into condos.

Gender conundrums

Why do women who work full-time usually earn so much less than men? A study described at the Pacific Standard suggests an explanation where other variables won't cut it.

An analysis by three University of Warsaw scholars finds that nations using relatively gender-neutral languages have a smaller gender wage gap.

...The researchers note that some languages, such as French, link specific nouns to genders. Others, including English, use different pronouns for men and women ("his" and "hers"). In contrast, they write, "Mandarin or Finnish have no system of gender identification in the language."

...The result: "We find that nations with more gender-neutral languages tend to be characterized by lower estimates of a gender wage gap."

They admit that gendered languages may reflect societal norms about gender rather than create them. But they nonetheless find a strong correlation between large wage gaps and a strongly gendered language.

This is interesting in light of the efforts of many persons to evolve less gender specific ways to use pronouns in English which we discussed on this blog a couple of weeks ago. This is a tough project. We learn very early that it is essential to identify immediately the gender of each new person we encounter. But what if it is not?

Or am I just reacting to being called "Sir" by an older male clerk in Walgreens tonight? I know he is bored, but hey ... look at the damn customer!

Advantage Bernie

I try not to allow made-for-TV movies to shape my thinking. The 9/11 attacks were a made-for-TV movie for most of us, except the unfortunate 3000 who served as involuntary extras and lost their lives. The rest of us have let that one deform our country to this day.

In the same vein, I don't watch early season Presidential primary debates. I understand the TV news networks need the ratings boost, but the Republicans are just a pack of clowns. The Dems tonight included at least two "candidates" who are barely running campaigns. It all seems a little crazy.

While doing other things, I did check in with one of my favorite bloggers who reported this:

Down the line question: Who or what is greatest threat?

Chafee: Chaos in middle east.

O’Malley: Nuclear Iran.

Clinton: ISIS.

Sanders: Climate change.

Webb: China.

I think I can fairly conclude that all the responses but one are just silly. Chaffee's answer is so vague as to be meaningless. Iran is a third rate military power half a world away that spends annually about $6 billion compared to the $577 billion the U.S. pours into our war machine. We're letting ourselves be spooked by ghosts when we fear Iran. China is a huge country with only a little over half the GDP of the United States and a lot of domestic problems, including unbreathable air. It's too busy to be a threat. And ISIS is a TV movie, only a threat to the United States if we mirror its spectacular atrocities with our own.

The warming climate is the only serious threat to the people of the United States in the lot.

Struggle against U.S. bases continues in Okinawa

U.S. bases on Okinawa, via Wikipedia. "As of 2006, 75% of all US [Forces in Japan] bases were located on Okinawa, and U.S. military bases occupied 18% of the main island."

The elected governor of the Japanese-controlled island of Okinawa has said no, again, to further construction of a new U.S. base. Okinawans have been trying to reclaim their territory for decades. The island is part of the Ryukyu archipelago which the U.S. conquered at the end of World War II. Japan recovered sovereignty, but although since 1945 Japan has been ostensibly a nuke-free zone, the U.S. has been allowed to bring nuclear armed vessels to Okinawa if not the Japanese mainland.

The 1.3 million Okinawans have repeatedly elected officials who promise to oust the U.S. military. These local officials have then been overruled from Tokoyo repeatedly.

The U.S. Marines are not considered good neighbors on the island: they are seen as the source of drunken louts and rapists who usually enjoy impunity from the local justice system.

Between 1972 and 2009, U.S. servicemen committed 5,634 criminal offenses, including 25 murders, 385 burglaries, 25 arsons, 127 rapes, 306 assaults and 2,827 thefts.

The government of Japan, currently in a phase of newly assertive nationalism, appreciates living under the US. security umbrella, especially since they have offshored the basing tensions.

Okinawans are Japan's largest minority group.

I have written previously about Okinawa's special place and its irritants to the U.S. empire here and here.

Construction hiatus

Montenegro couldn't derail regular posting, but domestic remodeling probably will. Or at least it will unsettle the regular morning schedule of posting until the dust clears.

The interruption gives me an excuse to post this remarkable 1931 art-deco celebration of urban construction from a hallway in Buffalo's City Hall. Industrial capitalism sure was brimming with confidence that year, wasn't it?

Why you'd think California's leaders wanted the people to vote!

Might this plea become obsolete?

A law signed on Saturday should increase voter turnout, not instantly, but gradually.

Governor Jerry Brown approved a measure to make voter registration an "opt-out" part of the Department of Motor Vehicles process of issuing or renewing drivers licenses. Unless you say you don't want to be able to vote, when you come away from the DMV, you'll be on the voter rolls.

Oregon uses such a system. Several other states allow people to register on election day. But California is more than 10 times larger and more heterogenous than any of the states that currently make voter registration easy and automatic.

But come on: we live in a society where privacy is on its death bed and big corporations know everything about us. Surely the government can keep a good enough database to allow citizens to participate without having to file additional, antiquated paper work. And now California is saying, let's give this a try! A big try.

The measure won't go into full effect until the state further cleans up its records. Historically, that's not been an easy task, but completion is now promised in time for the 2016 June primary.

Brown also signed other measures to allow more early voting and to ease drop off procedures for mail-in ballots.

People will still need to be convinced that there is a reason to vote -- but we're moving toward the day when, if a citizen decides to participate, doing so will be easy.

They work on the streets of Oakland

Commenting on yesterday's post about recycling, Terry Moon wrote (at Facebook):

It is capitalism, after all, whose motto is production for productions sake.

I can hardly suggest a better way to appreciate how capitalist production of commodities without thought or limit bulldozes human beings and our relationships than to watch the film Dogtown Redemption which we saw yesterday afternoon in San Rafael.

Amir Soltani and Chihiro Wimbush's documentary shares the lives -- the pains, the joys, the endurance, the hopes -- of some of a hardy crew of homeless recyclers (trashpickers) who survive in Oakland CA by selling scrap metal, glass and plastic. The product of 7 years of following these individuals (one of them, speaking from the stage yesterday, said the process felt like being "stalked") the viewer is given a unique peek into snippets of some unfamiliar lives.

Unfortunately, this special film is not likely to get much distribution but consult the website. The trailer provides a taste.

Dogtown Redemption (Official Trailer) from Dogtown Redemption on Vimeo.

Preserving the earth: not just for rich people

Some guy named John Tierney writes an article denouncing recycling every 10 years or so in the New York Times. The last one is here. Now I admit, I've sometimes wondered whether the garbage powers-that-be every really do anything with the mess we give them in the blue bins. But that's not what offended me in Tierney's latest offering.

What offended me was this:

... it’s popular in affluent neighborhoods like Park Slope in Brooklyn and in cities like San Francisco, but residents of the Bronx and Houston don’t have the same fervor for sorting garbage in their spare time.

Actually, just about everywhere I've ever traveled, the locals were eager to reduce and avoid spreading garbage across the landscape. Now maybe they are just catering to tourists, but I think everyone prefers to live in a clean environment if they can.

Some examples:

On the Hawaiian island of Kauai, there's a gentle admonition.

In a Chilean national park in Patagonia, the order is more formal.

It didn't seem likely that anyone ever emptied these bins in the Argentine town of El Chaltain, but someone thought it worthwhile to put them there.

On the trail toward Mount Everest base camp, Nepal posts formal rules and procedures.

In the town of Trevelez in the foothills of Spain's Sierra Nevada Mountains, there's a public collection point for cooking oil as well as municipal recycling!

Bhutan is a didactic sort of country. At Tango Monastery, there's no hesitation about instruction ...

That's also true on the trail to the Tiger's Nest monastery, just in case you didn't know how to behave ...

No, Mr. Tierney, concern for preserving the environment is not just a hobby for a few rich people. We -- none of us -- either always know how nor always can be as careful of our surroundings as we might want to be. But given a chance, we'll try, and eagerly at that.

Guns are the definition of uncool

Michael Maiello thinks he knows how to undermine gun culture:

It’s surprisingly easy to imagine a society where gun ownership is looked down upon, if not scorned outright. This already happened with smoking, at least partly as a result of a public education campaign aimed at young people, and it happened when polite society finally came down against people flying the Confederate flag after the Charleston church shootings this year. Sometimes, when legislative action is difficult or downright impossible, a cultural approach works to curtail dangerous behaviors.

In short, we can make gun ownership uncool.

This was once unthinkable when it came to cigarettes. In post-World War II America, you might have kept an ashtray in your house even if you were a non-smoker, just to accommodate guests. It's hard to imagine anyone doing that today, or even to imagine a smoker with the audacity to ask if they can light up inside. ...

It's been hard for me to imagine that young people might think that equal rights for gay people would ever be the definition of a just society -- but that's how it is for Erudite Partner's undergrads. Sometimes extreme cultural change can precede legal change, and even obviate the need for legal change to some extent. We've all seen it.

Maiello has some practical suggestions re guns:

• Let other parents know you don't want your kids staying over if they have unlocked guns.

• Shun adults who take kids to gun ranges, as apparently the mothers of both the Sandy Hook and Oregon shooter did.

• Remind them of the child who was taken to play with an Uzi and shot her instructor.

• Point out that mature gun owners know when not to wave heat in the middle of a confusing melee -- including one young man at the recent Oregon massacre and another who witnessed the Gabby Giffords shooting. Owning a gun requires that kind of self-restraint.

• Push for trigger locks that prevent unauthorized people from firing and for required liability insurance. Guns are dangerous business, not toys for fantasists. The only people who benefit from resisting safety features are owners of stock in gun manufacturers.

These sorts of measures can reduce the cool factor, if not for current gun owners, for the next generation of potential buyers.***Listening to D. Watkins, author of The Beast Side: Living (and Dying) While Black in America, interviewed on Fresh Air, I was reminded that, in addition to alienated rural white men, there is another set of people among us for whom the gun is a very present reality. For young men, usually of color, in neighborhoods where the drug trade thrives, guns just part of a precarious life. Here's Watkins describing how he came up:

... I had a friend - a really, really close friend - he's passed away now - but he was being bullied. He was being, you know, he was being picked on. He got beat down like three times by these same - by the same group of guys.

And these guys, they were notorious in East Baltimore. They used to roll around in packs of, like, 35 or 40. And they used to come through neighborhoods and, you know, I got beat up by them before. They used to beat us down. But, you know, my one particular friend, they beat him up, like, a couple of times - three or four times.

And the last time, he was just - you know, he couldn't take it anymore. He was frustrated. And we're, like, 12 and 13 years old around this time so one day - you know, we used to hang on this corner called Robinson Street - the corner of Robinson and Orleans Street - and we was outside, there was some girls outside, there was some people outside. And, you know, it was a regular summer night. We were having a good time. These guys bend the corner, you know, and they - so many of them. And they walking down the block, and, you know, they spot him, and they see him, and they walk up on him. And, you know, there was about 10 of us so, you know, we swelled up and just stood up. And it was like, you know, like, you know - you know, it's more of them than us but whatever, let's do this.

And, out of nowhere, you know, I - none of us expected this. We didn't even know he pulled a gun out. And he just started busting shots at the crowd. I, you know, well, he was behind me when he did it, so I felt, like, bullets pass right past my head. And, you know, I hit the deck. And he ended up shooting his cousin in the hand by mistake.

And those guys - those same guys - they didn't pick on him anymore. But that was our most, like, one of the worst situations for him because after he did that, you know, it was no looking back. He carried that gun like, you know, like that was his best friend. And it ended up being the way he died.

The gentrifying San Francisco Mission District is not immune to this sort of gun problem. We had a young man around our little church last year who was trying to leave the gang life, who was trying to make it by working a job ... and his former mates shot his girl friend dead next to him. It happens.

This kind of gun violence is not what organized gun owners and manufacturers are defending. But we have relatively good gun laws around here. Yet the thugs get the guns because there are all those other jurisdictions where rabid gun absolutists fight to make availability easy. Guns leak to where people want them.

Caging Black and brown people into neighborhoods where kids have to learn to avoid the guns -- that strikes me as the height of uncool.

Friday cat blogging

Morty performs his best (and only) trick: being a handsome fellow.

Fifteen years of U.S. war in Afghanistan

We can call it fifteen years as of today, if we don't count arming Afghans and various foreign mujahadin against the Russians starting in 1979. Perhaps we do need to include that phase, since it produced Bin Laden and 9/11 ...


So this week we marked the war's anniversary with an apparent war crime. The medical aid folks, Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres), who saw their staff and patients incinerated have been wonderfully clear:

"Today the US government has admitted that it was their airstrike that hit our hospital in Kunduz and killed 22 patients and MSF staff. Their description of the attack keeps changing—from collateral damage, to a tragic incident, to now attempting to pass responsibility to the Afghanistan government.

The reality is the US dropped those bombs. The US hit a huge hospital full of wounded patients and MSF staff. The US military remains responsible for the targets it hits, even though it is part of a coalition. There can be no justification for this horrible attack. With such constant discrepancies in the US and Afghan accounts of what happened, the need for a full transparent independent investigation is ever more critical."

C. Stokes, MSF, October 5, 2015

Accounts in U.S. media have been weaselly. Maybe there were Taliban in the building (though U.S. forces had every reason to know there were not.) Maybe this atrocity was a mistake ... The New York Times even tried to suggest that maybe the hospital bombing wasn't so bad because Russia commits similar crimes. What's this irrelevant snippet doing in a story on President Obama's apology to MSF?

On Wednesday, Physicians for Human Rights, an advocacy group, said it had confirmed that Russian airstrikes had damaged three medical facilities in Syria.
“With these actions, Russia is damaging hospitals, putting patients and medical staff at risk, and depriving civilians of lifesaving access to health care,” the group said in a statement.

Pathetic special pleading that tack: so American exceptionalism means someone else is always worse? Apparently.

The Afghanistan adventure has long shown the brutality and futility of our imperial project. Amy Davidson got to the crux:

Do we understand our own motives and priorities in Afghanistan? If not, fourteen years after invading, when will we?

No hope for that, that I can see. Bring 'em home, Obama!

Guns begone

Our one and only local gun store is closing for good. It's a few blocks from our house; it's been there longer than I've lived in the city, a long time.

The owners want us to believe that creeping over-regulation of firearms is killing the store. I doubt it.

More likely the business is in decline because, despite the awful gun massacres this country goes in for, gun ownership is in decline.

The [General Social Survey (GSS), which is conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago] finds that the percentage of Americans who reported personally owning a gun dropped more than 26 percent from 1985 to 2014. In 1985, 30.5 percent of Americans said they personally owned a gun. The percentage is now down to 22.4 percent, or a little more than one in five.

Not surprisingly, most gun owners tend to be white men who live outside cities.

Drawing from data from 2010 to 2014, NORC found that 39 percent of white respondents said they lived in a household with a gun. During the same period, 18.1 percent of black respondents and 15.2 percent of Hispanic respondents said there was a gun in their household. NORC found that "households with firearms are concentrated in rural areas and in regions with more residents living in rural areas."

San Francisco is simply unpromising turf for a gun business.

The sort of people who insist that they must be allowed to threaten their neighbors anywhere and everywhere with their hardware are a dwindling minority. The tyranny of gun culture will be ended when the rest of us simply bring our numbers to bear on the problem. We are letting a small number of gun nuts wave their uninsured, over-powered, fetishized guns in our faces.

Through our sheer numbers, we can make these men earn their safety credentials, lock up their killing gear except when in use for sport or on a licensed range, carry insurance commensurate with the harm their killing tools can do, and, if necessary, replace a Supreme Court that misinterprets the Second Amendment as a personal entitlement to instruments of death.

But we do have to be a little bit brave, because we are dealing with scared bullies -- and we have to care enough to organize over time.

California history: when we packed those people in trains

Last week, in a post surveying immigration history, I made a glancing reference to the practice in the U.S. southwest of "packing Mexican workers in trains and sending them home." I've since realized that this is not universally remembered history.

One of the many California bills Governor Jerry Brown has signed this year aims to change that. Here's how the law's legislative sponsor Assemblymember Christina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens) explains her measure:

... Assembly Bill 146 encourages that the “Mexican Repatriation,” the unconstitutional deportation that occurred in California 1930’s, of over 1 million U.S. citizens and lawful residents of Mexican descent, be included in student history textbooks and courses of study. ...

“I firmly believe that this is a lesson worth teaching. In fact, a certain Republican Presidential frontrunner, should now see that his unworkable and reckless plan for mass deportation, will be a human disaster, just as it was so many years ago. He could learn a lesson from the minds and the hearts of our young school children,” Assemblymember Garcia commented.

Take that, Donald Trump.

Here's a video that tells the story of the Mexican expulsions. The picture is from the video.
***'Tis the season when Gov. Jerry closets himself with all the bills (640 or so!) the two house of the California Legislature have laboriously passed through committees, procedural hurdles and final votes -- and decides which he'll sign. He has until October 11 to complete the process.

Brown can be infuriating. After all that, he's been known to kill off, without much warning, the carefully crafted products of years of agitation. And these rejected measures were usually brought by his own party. So it was with the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2012 -- Democratic legislators brought the requirement that employers pay overtime to these workers back in 2013 and Brown signed that bill into law.

With that history, waiting for the Governor to act is an annual pins-and-needles ritual for advocates.

He's signed a lot of what I consider good stuff this year: a bill requiring police departments to collect and report information, including race, on who they stop and who they shoot; a new requirement that schools teach an accurate sex education curriculum in middle and high school; and permission for physician-assisted suicide, explaining his affirmation in a thoughtful message.

Measures encouraging divestment by state pension funds from fossil fuels and suspending the high school exit exam await his consideration.

Brown can be thorough and thoughtful -- you'd think a bill prohibiting flying drones in such a way as to impede firefighters would be a no-brainer. But he has just vetoed such a measure. He held it would have just added to an already over-long criminal code. If people flying drones push their luck, this one might come back ...

Serendipity in the 'hood

This amazing plant grows in our front yard. It blooms something like four times a year. Someone gave us a little bush -- and now it is 12 feet tall, at least.

I took the picture in order to test Google's tool for identifying the subject of photos. The tool flunked, unable to connect the picture, which looks pretty clear to me, with the name of the plant. Fortunately Erudite Partner got interested in the experiment and used her excellent Google-fu to figure out this was an Angel's Trumpet, scientifically, Brugmansia.

And from that Wikipedia entry, we learned:

All parts of Brugmansia are poisonous, with the seeds and leaves being especially dangerous.[19][23] Brugmansia are rich in Scopolamine (hyoscine), hyoscyamine, and several other tropane alkaloids.[24] Effects of ingestion can include paralysis of smooth muscles, confusion, tachycardia, dry mouth, diarrhea, migraine headaches, visual and auditory hallucinations, mydriasis, rapid onset cycloplegia, and death.[25][26][27]

The hallucinogenic effects of Brugmansia were described in the journal Pathology as "terrifying rather than pleasurable". ...

The next morning as we were coming out of the house, as often happens, passersby were looking into the yard.

A regular Mission homey asked: "What's that plant? I feel like it wants me to sniff it or something."

E.P.: "Probably shouldn't do that. It's called Angel's Trumpet and it's poisonous."

"Even to smell it?"

"They say 'yes.'"

"Okay, now I know ..."

I can't decide whether I feel I should be responsible for knowing the toxicity of what's in my yard or not. These plants are quite common around here.

Stop! Are you going to run me over?

My ten-day duration head cold just won't quit, so today I offer only this intriguing video of an effort to increase compliance with disabled parking regulations.
I think this would scare the bejesus out of a driver who tried to occupy the wrong space unaware. Nice to run across something in which Russians are, benignly, leap-frogging us in their use of technology.

What would you do, if this turned up in a mall near you?

H/t Time Goes By for this one.

Peace is too important to be left to politicians

Professor Stephen Walt, makes a prediction about the presidential horserace.

... there’s one important concept about which we won’t hear very much: peace.

He's right of course. As far as the GOP clowns are concerned, peace is about as popular as venereal disease; they seem to be competing over who can boast of the stiffest dick. (Yes, that includes Carly -- she's doing pretty well at it, actually.)

Among the Dems, there is something beyond silence. Bernie says the right things:

Senator Sanders believes that the test of a great and powerful nation is not how many wars it can engage in, but how it can resolve international conflicts in a peaceful manner.

He's proud of his vote against the Iraq war. He's got a good grip on the fact that wars starve and strangle domestic progress.

But the Dem frontrunner is another story. Hillary is an aggressive strength projection kind of woman. As Walt remarks,

... Has Hillary Clinton ever opposed a military operation or led a successful peace campaign?

She seems eager to plunge more deeply into Syria. I've always been afraid that the first woman to have a shot at occupying the Oval Office would have so honed her reputation for bellicosity that she made herself immune to attacks based in the sexist notion that "girls don't know how to fight." As a member of my generation of early contemporary feminists, Hillary seems to have done just that; perhaps a younger woman would have felt less need to prove herself in this particular fashion. (Or maybe not.)

And Hillary seems to have learned none of the lesson of last 75 years: no shooting war the U.S. has engaged in since World War II has left either the people directly in its path or the U.S. itself better off than before hostilities commenced. When all-out war came to mean annihilation in 1945, war ceased to be a viable instrument of even superpower policy. Sure, this turns historic human experience on its head, but it is true.***Once upon a time, aspiring presidents thought there were votes to be won by promising peace. Dwight Eisenhower's 1956 slogan was "Peace and Prosperity." I'd get behind a candidate who dared such an unfashionable suggestion for our national aims. Right now that means Bernie -- but I want such a candidate in November 2016. So if Bernie falters, we're shit out of luck.***The desire for peace is a baseline human trait. Even most citizens of this empire share it, except when riled up. So why is there no permanent constituency injecting peace into presidential campaigns?

• In the last two administrations, our rulers have perfected the evil art of waging faraway wars without troubling most of us. When you are as rich and as safe as citizens of this country, so long as no one you know is doing the fighting, you don't worry much about the foreign millions whose lives are shattered by our imperial adventures. For ourselves, we have peace. It asks a level of imagination most people lack to get across that in so much of the world, we're the problem.

• Because we are so safe from foreign threats (though perhaps not from homegrown gun cultists), we scare easy. This is particularly true when our pols hype the supposed threat. And, in turn, our politicians are afraid that if a critical mass of us get in a panic, they'll take the blame. We need a peace movement to have the back of any politician who offers us a realistic assessment of actual threats.

• Collectively, this society has lost any awareness that peace is a positive good. We think of peace as absence of war, not the presence of security, justice, community, possibility, and love. Peace is the precondition of all those goods; we are unrealistic insofar as we struggle for any of them without the awareness that peace is needed for all of them.

This country still needs a permanent peace movement.

Saturday scenes and scenery: Dubrovnik, Croatia

This medieval city is a UNESCO World Heritage site. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Dubrovnik was the capital of the Republic of Ragusa, an eastern Mediterranean trading power of the day.

A small boat harbor still thrives.

This magnificent main street fills to overflowing as buses arrive during the day. Cars cannot enter the old city. I stayed within the walls, so got a chance to wander before the throngs arrived.

Residents and tourists alike need their hiking shoes to get around the old streets.

These are worth exploring, revealing curiosities. I think she long pre-dates the restaurant; and you sure wouldn't want to traverse these high streets in a storm! Click to enlarge.

From the city walls, it is possible to glimpse kitchen gardens between the stone buildings.

Today Dubrovnik is perfectly organized to intrigue, thrill, and milk stray dollars from tourists. Good for the Croatians for getting value from their asset.

But just 24 years ago, as the city guides who lead tours explain to all who will listen, this wonderfully preserved historic site was under siege during the wars that broke up the former Yugoslavia. This map is displayed at every entrance:
Fortunately, the Serb and Montenegrin attackers wanted to own it as much as to destroy it, but for six months they cut off water, power and supplies while lobbing shells at a population swollen with 30,000 refugees. UNESCO has invested millions of dollars in restoration and repair.

Even Elizabeth Blackwell's sympathetic volume, Realm of the Black Mountain: A History of Montenegro, describes siege with horror:

[In the fall of 1991,] the Yugoslav Army attacked Dubrovnik from Montenegro. JNA soldiers, supported by Montenegrin irregulars, earned a name for lawlessness and rapacity, which prompted a torrent of international outrage and disapproval. Dubrovnik had no military strategic value and was barely defended by the Croats. Nor were there more than a few Serbs living there. Rather, the attack seemed to stem from pure vindictiveness or, according to some, from the Montenegrins' traditional appetite for plunder, and led to headlines in the Western press likening the Yugoslav army to barbarian hordes. Although Montenegro was officially detached from the war in Croatia and withdrew its reservists there in October 1991, Montenegrin soldiers from their positions on the hills about Dubrovnik destroyed hotels, yachts, and other signs of sophistication or civilization with a wantonness that caused more damage to Milosevic's interest and game plan than he could possibly anticipated.

... In the year 2000 [Montenegrin] President Djukanovic made an official apology to Croatia for Montenegro's part in the 1991 attack on the coastal area around Dubrovnik. Since then, two prominent Montenegrins have been sentenced by The Hague Tribunal for their part in the shelling of Dubrovnik -- Admiral Miodrag Jokic, who was sentenced to seven years imprisonment in March 2004 and Lieutenant General Pavle Strugar, who was sentenced to eight years in January 2005.

There is plenty of residual bitterness here, just under the sunny surface. Dubrovnik plays host to a revolving museum of international war photography which felt very appropriately located.

Friday cat blogging: Kotor and Budva

The Montenegrin town of Kotor sits on the Adriatic coast in a corner of what locals call Europe's southernmost fjord. The old town is a small, fully walled, medieval city, overshadowed by extensive, crumbling fortifications on the heights. From sea and land, invaders have coveted this secluded port. I was not surprised to note a handsome cat sitting sentry on the city wall.

At ground level, cats go about their business on the stone streets, apparently unconcerned by co-existing among hordes of tourists.

These kittens seemed to feel that the tables and chairs at a sidewalk cafe had been provided for their amusement.

The local dogs showed no interest.

Down the road in the even smaller walled town of Budva, the cats seemed a little more wary. They kept themselves out of reach of the tourists.

The tourists had their own delights.

Unthinkable thinking

Back in the day, 1969 in fact, I remember sitting up late one East Coast evening watching astronaut Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. As he set down a U.S. flag, I remember remarking to a friend: "Damn, the first thing we do when get there is litter!"

These days, humans have put up thousands of satellites orbiting the earth. These provide the backbone for our everyday communications, for our scientific understanding of the planet including tomorrow's weather, and even the GPS in our cellphones and my Garmin watch. Soon we'll need that mapping capacity to direct our self-driving cars. We count on all that stuff floating around up there without even thinking about it.

But apparently all that orbital clutter makes for an new threat, a consequence of our profligate habit of thinking that the universe is so big we can just leave stuff lying around. According to Charlie Stross,

Kessler Syndrome, or collisional cascading, is a nightmare scenario for space activity. Proposed by NASA scientist Donald Kessler in 1978, it proposes that at a certain critical density, orbiting debris shed by satellites and launch vehicles will begin to impact on and shatter other satellites, producing a cascade of more debris, so that the probability of any given satellite being hit rises, leading to a chain reaction that effectively renders access to low earth orbit unacceptably hazardous.

This isn't just fantasy. There are an estimated 300,000 pieces of debris already in orbit; a satellite is destroyed every year by an impact event. Even a fleck of shed paint a tenth of a millimeter across carries as much kinetic energy as a rifle bullet when it's traveling at orbital velocity, and the majority of this crud is clustered in low orbit, with a secondary belt of bits in geosychronous orbit as well. The [International Space Station] carries patch kits in case of a micro-particle impact and periodically has to expend fuel to dodge dead satellites drifting into its orbit; on occasion the US space shuttles suffered windscreen impacts that necessitated ground repairs.

If a Kessler cascade erupts in low earth orbit, launching new satellites or manned spacecraft will become very hazardous, equivalent to running across a field under beaten fire from a machine gun with an infinite ammunition supply. Sooner or later you'll be hit. And the debris stays in orbit for a very long time, typically years to decades (centuries or millennia for the particles in higher orbits). ... And then there's the nightmare scenario: a Kessler cascade in geosynchronous orbit. The crud up there will take centuries to disperse, mostly due to radiation degradation and the solar wind gradually blowing it into higher orbits.

There's an interesting discussion at the blog where I found this about how immanent and how destructive this might be. Evaluating it goes way beyond my expertise though I found the conversation interesting.

Humans evolved to make more and more and more -- because more was good for survival. Having managed to make so much more we're screwing up the planet, apparently we've also spread the malady into near-space.

Maybe it's just my apparently endless head cold doing my thinking, but looking at us through this lens, it's hard not to conclude there's simply too much of us.