Time to build some arks?

When scientists can investigate properly, sometimes what they find exceeds their expectations.

H/t Climate Denial Crock of the Week.

Dumb cop tricks

The video shows what New York cops have time to do while refusing to do their jobs. Over the last two weeks, they've made 90 percent less arrests than in the same time frame last year. They are protesting that the Mayor the citizens of their city elected told his Black son the truth: cops are dangerous.

The officer horsing around in this clip was injured according to reports. I suppose he gets work-related disability?

Today is all about windows

Regular blogging will resume when the installer gets finished. More insulation ahead!

This 2006 sculpture by Leandro Erlich is on display in the outdoor garden at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Found item: Seeing ourselves as others see us

Yes.

On Wikipedia

I use Wikipedia almost every day. Mostly, as far as I can discern, it gives me good information or steers me toward good sources for further exploration. I've even made small contribution during the annual fundraiser. My Erudite Partner, the academic, wishes her students would go beyond it to deeper sources, but, like many of her colleagues, she has come around to appreciating the online encyclopedia.

I was intrigued by Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia by Dariusz Jemielniak. How does this all volunteer project do it?

Wikipedia's process-oriented systems enable Wikipedians to achieve enormous scale: Jemielniak reports that Wikipedia exceeds 20 million articles in 270 languages. All this is community-written and -edited. It is also all free and mostly accurate.

Having worked my way through this small volume, I mostly learned that the last thing I'd like to do is engage with the Wikipedia community of dedicated volunteer editors. Why would I want to enter into a large group of quarrelsome, nit-picking (mostly) male intellectual combatants who achieve consensus by exhausting their opponents? This doesn't sound fun; will there always be an adequate supply of the sort of individuals who want to venture into an environment of this cast? Or will Wikipedia have to change its culture to continue to attract enough variety of volunteers to keep the project going? For all its success, Jemielniak's account makes me wonder.

This well-documented ethnography is not light reading but I found it worth grinding through: Wikipedia is one of the largest and most successful cooperative endeavors the world has ever seen. How it works should matter in this combative world.

A seasonal reflection

Not for the first time, yesterday I was grateful that I worship in a Christian church (Episcopal) that observes its own seasons. Most of our society is done with Christmas. Retailers report we spent and consumed appropriately (presumably in the interest of "the economy".) Dead evergreens are lying on street corners, waiting for the garbage company to chew them up. We've weathered the grand drinking bash that is New Years. Christmas is SO over.

And that's just fine with me. I have a very hard time getting into the boisterously cheerful and ostentatiously prosperous secular Christmas. And the religious celebrations mostly evokes in me anxiety about candles that might ignite the decorations and recoil from ornate, maudlin representations of story.

I do rather like the sheep.

Couldn't we all just quietly give thanks for the solstice -- the planet's enduring round that returns light to the Northern hemisphere -- and let it go?

But, since my worship community is still celebrating the Christmas season, I found myself yesterday singing a familiar hymn (102 in the 1982 if that means anything to you) and suddenly found myself able to feel the spirit of the season I'd just endured.

... with the poor, the scorned, the lowly, lived on earth, our Savior holy ...

... this child, our Lord and brother, brought us love for one another.

Ah yes, that's Christmas. Thank goodness it finally got through at the end of the season.

Sleazy ads promise easy loans

In addition to those annoying Buick and Lexus pitches, the pizza deals, and the movie promos, my annual football bowl watching binge exposed me to what seemed like dozens of ads for suspicious outfits offering quick and easy loans. While the former category of commercials were clearly national, I suspect the latter category were fill-ins sold by the local station in California.

A company called LoanMe (I'm not going to link but they are easy to find) showed a borrower waiting for a bank to approve a car loan and a real estate agent anticipating a sale -- they brimmed with delight when they learned they could get cash right away from this lender. The pitch didn't pass the smell test. What's the interest rate? What are the fees? What's the business model that makes offering unsecured personal loans profitable?

A review site for borrowers explains how LoanMe does it:

LoanMe.com offers personal loans ranging from $2,600 to $25,000 and interest rates from 35.87% APR to 204.94% APR. All loans have a $75 loan fee. The lower APR is only available for loans of $25,000. A $2,600 loan has a rate of 204.94% to be repaid in 47 months. The monthly payments would be $431.49, which means you would end up paying $20,280 for a $2,600 loan!

Although LoanMe.com's website doesn't specifically say that $2,600 is the smallest loan available, it's the lowest amount for which they offer an interest rate. There is a reason for this. ...loans for $2,500 or less are limited by law to a maximum interest rate of 30%. Loans for more than $2,500 have no APR limitation. This means that even if you repay a big chunk of the loan on the same day, they will still be able to charge you an interest rate of 204.94% on a loan that would otherwise be limited to a 30% APR.

Apparently LoanMe is a new name for a lender named CashCall which the California Department of Business Oversight is trying to put out of business. Their web sites have the same Orange County address. And in December, Senator Elizabeth Warren's contribution to the federal regulatory bureaucracy, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)

took its first action against an online loan servicer, CashCall Inc., its owner, its subsidiary, and its affiliate, for collecting money consumers did not owe. The CFPB alleges that the defendants engaged in unfair, deceptive, and abusive practices, including illegally debiting consumer checking accounts for loans that were void.

“Today we are taking action against CashCall for collecting money it had no right to take from consumers,” said CFPB Director Richard Cordray.

It didn't take particular genius to guess that LoanMe was somehow trying to prey on needy people by making implausible claims. But as Erudite Partner, the former accountant, wondered while we watched the tube: "can it be legal?" Apparently there are limits to what the fraudsters can get away with. That strikes me as good work by several levels of government. And hard work, since the swindlers seem to recur under new names.

I would never question the right of TV stations to sell ad space to anyone, but does ESPN, which presents almost all football bowls, really want to be associated with crooks?

Saturday scenery: Knights Templar in San Francisco

Before the Baptists acquired this building in 1950, it was the home of the Golden Gate Commandery #16 of the Knights Templar. I knew of the Knights Templar as a medieval Christian military order, associated with the short Crusader occupation of Jerusalem and development of trade and banking; I hadn't realized there was a modern iteration of the Knights, a branch of Freemasonry.

In 1907, the San Francisco chapter of these Masonic Knights erected their multi-story fortress in the Western Addition. Its architectural style is known as the Jacobean Phase of Medieval Revival.

The decorative sculptural details are quite extraordinary. Click on them to enlarge.

It's intriguing to realize that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached here in the 1950s and 60s, presumably rallying local support for the civil rights struggle in the South.

Discovered while Walking San Francisco.

A straw in a howling wind of horror

If there's one thing I learned from tagging along on Erudite Partner's book tour about torture all summer, it was that it takes courage to learn and internalize the terrible knowledge of what our government does to human beings it considers proper subjects of inhuman treatment. People who came out to her events displayed an unusual willingness to tolerate learning awful truths. Most of the time, most of us would rather not know.

Hence it is welcome news that the print edition of the Senate Torture Report, the semi-official, much redacted record of what the C.I.A. did (does?) in our name, seems to moving well in the market. A small publisher decided it was worth turning the government's unwieldy PDF into a book.

... indie publisher Melville House said that they have shipped out nearly all 50,000 copies in their initial print run.

Bookstores large and small from Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble to independent stores ... put in orders with the publisher for print copies of the books, Melville said.

Washington Post

Can't hurt worse; might help. The book is also available direct from the publisher.

Friday cat blogging

Morty welcomes the new year by sleeping on my lap while I watch football. He's got some reason to be tired. He left us a mouse corpse the other day. Who knew this sedentary creature was really a predator?

A new year in the City

I encountered this on a sidewalk while on my 10-year project, chronicled at 596 Precincts -- Walking San Francisco. Over the last two years, I've trekked with camera around 120 of these small electoral subdivisions, 20 percent of the total. For each, I post one, two or three photos. I've now ventured into all 11 supervisorial districts; by some time in 2022, I intend to have walked all 596.

The posted images are not meant to be documentary or representative. They are just the shots I found most interesting among what is sometimes a haul of more than 100 images.

Inevitably I am learning about the city where I've lived and worked for over 40 years.

I am continually amazed by the force of many residents' impulse to put an individual stamp on their surroundings. That can mean anything from painting their houses in exotic color schemes, to wild garden plantings, to creative signage. San Franciscans are inclined to shout their opinions in all venues, from bumper stickers to the sidewalks.

I am also amazed by how often birds, butterflies, humans and other critters allow themselves to be photographed.

But mostly I am overwhelmed by the visual evidence that the city is changing very rapidly. In every area including squalid and affluent pockets as well as everything in between, there's construction underway. Old buildings are being spruced up; new buildings are going in. There's an awful lot of money being spent on physical plant. There's also an awful lot of money being put into what were recently vacant commercial spaces, now occupied by what to me seem strangely minimalist emporiums selling hip clothes, or furniture, or designer chachkas. And the restaurants -- how can so many expect to survive and thrive? They don't, naturally. I've seen some turn over just in the year or so after I first noticed them.

This new money, and the new people who bring it, are unsettling. I've been here long enough to see San Francisco's ethos overturned successively and concurrently by hippies, and gays, and AIDS, and wave after wave of Latin American immigrants, political and economic. I've watched the Chinese-American community grow and spread out. I've seen too many bastions of the African American community driven out. It is the nature of living cities to change -- that's part of why many of us choose to live in them. But a change driven by the out of scale affluence of a relatively small number of newcomers rather than some cultural, political or even survival imperative seems different.

Over the new year, the city will continue to fight out the implications of current changes. I've long opted for the remaining people and institutions that work to keep San Francisco available to the immigrants, the renters, and the middle class. Nothing about this is going to be easy.

Sometimes it is good to be sick and tired

... the American public won’t support a lasting U.S. commitment to solve what are perceived to be other people’s problems. A Pew Research poll conducted in late 2013 found that for the first time in the half-century that Americans have been asked this question, a majority of respondents said the U.S. “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.” Just 38% disagreed. More recent polls tell the same story. In a democracy, no President can sustain an expensive, ambitious foreign policy without reliable public support. In the U.S., this support is no longer there, and the world knows it. Short of another large-scale terrorist attack on U.S. soil, it’s hard to imagine anything that can restore public appetite for a more assertive foreign policy anytime soon.

... the U.S. will exercise less power in the coming years in nearly every region of the world, and we can expect a de-Americanization of the international system.

Ian Bremmer, TIME

My emphasis. Mr. Bremmer is distresed. I'm not.

Sure, this doesn't do much for people trapped under buzzing U.S. drones while Washington continues to prosecute global dominance on the cheap (at least if the measure of cost is U.S. lives).

But whatever it takes -- harm reduction, even through exhaustion, is to be applauded.

What goes down might be raised up

That was the price at which I filled the car in Mill Valley, California yesterday. Having spent the summer driving 14000 miles around the country with gas prices sometimes higher than $4 and almost never lower than $3, this was an opportunity not to be skipped.

The lower gas prices are good news for those of us who depend on cars. If lower prices allow us to drive more, it will be bad news for the planet as we increase our carbon emissions.

Paul Krugman points to collateral damage from the apparent oil glut:

We could ... be looking at a situation in which Texas is sliding into recession even as the rest of the country is doing fairly well.

So sorry, all you Texas politicians who want to run for President. Will Mr. Cruz and Mr. Perry start calling for restricting oil production in order to claim their state represents a permanent economic paradise? Could happen -- that's what Saudi rulers do. Extraction industry plutocrats seem to display similar family traits.

In favor of requiring body cameras on cops

Many of my friends may disagree, but I think demanding that cops be equipped with body cameras -- and that cops keep the things turned on! -- could, over time, significantly reduce the level of police violence against citizens.

Lots of good folks are skeptical. One variety of skepticism comes with lots of evidence: we have all learned, bitterly, that most of us see what our biases condition us to see, and therefore that body camera evidence might not break through. After all, we all saw Eric Garner choked -- but somehow a grand jury didn't see homicide. Or, two decades ago, we saw Rodney King beat within an inch of his life -- but a jury in Simi Valley didn't see any police officers doing wrong.

Kevin Drum writes a good discussion of how cognitive science shows that "motivated reasoning" determines what we see. There are plenty of experiments to confirm this. (This article is the source for the picture which probably derived from a sales brochure?)

But I wonder whether our biases can be at least partially unlearned. Sure, we see what we expect (and desire) to see. But all my hours watching football on TV -- watching replays of close plays -- have convinced me that we can learn to be more unbiased observers. When the officials review a dubious catch, as a fan I want my guy to have corralled the ball. And I'll tend to think I saw him catch it. But after years of seeing these films, I have learned to focus narrowly on the specifics that determine whether there was really a catch -- did the ball hit the ground, if so did the player control it, etc. Watching the replays has carried over into watching in real time; I am more and more likely to have seen what replay officials rule when they view the film. This is not natural. It is a result of having learned to focus on the critical variables and to screen out my natural biases.

These days, everyone videos everything. One of the frustrations of photographing protests is avoiding shots cluttered with hands waving phone cameras at the action. Most of the resulting clips are so jumbled as to be incomprehensible. But we did see video of Oscar Grant shot by a BART cop; we did see Eric Garner jumped and choked. And we all learn.

This is becoming a more visually sophisticated society. I think, as with football replays, exposure is teaching us to focus on what matters. And a society that focuses on what matters can stop police violence.

Cops brutalize and kill Black, brown and crazy people because they believe they are charged with protecting "society "-- the good, the white, the conventional people -- from "those people." A requirement that shows what this means, death and mayhem, is all to the good. A reform that creates a presumption that "the camera didn't work" means probable misconduct is all to the good. (I'm old enough to remember cops taping over their name badges when they set out to beat queers.) Only justice for everyone will stop police violence, but more required cameras can help; this seems a worthwhile incremental reform for some people to fight for.

Only one boat, sinking or floating, on only one planet

In a lot of ways, 2014 was an awful year. I'll skip the catalog; every reader here lived it.

But I want to call out what strikes me as an important straw in the wind pointing to better times: lately the hip environmental/climate-hawk magazine Grist has been on a tear, trying communicate to its presumably nerdy, almost certainly white, and likely male, audience that the only way forward involves getting behind the justice demands of people of color, especially Black people.

Brendan Mock, a Black man who carries the title "Justice Editor," has been churning out article after about the differential effect of planetary warming on communities of color. But when a grand jury failed to indict the police officer who choked Eric Garner to death, it all came together for Mock. He learned the news while lying in an emergency room bed, having just been diagnosed with a tumor in this chest.

Many will continue to refuse to connect green issues to black bodies and red blood spilled in the street. Many others will continue to ignore the festering sores of racism, police brutality, and the ongoing vestiges of white supremacy. Ignorant or not, those issues will still grow, and when they do, they’ll touch nerves and cause deeper pains for everyone. Metastasis sets in irrespective of its acknowledgment. ...

Please allow my own life as the analogy: I can’t feel this tumor, or whatever it is, in my chest, but I do still feel the throbbing ache in my back. The two problems may be unconnected. But resolving my spinal pain won’t matter much if I let this thing in my chest take hold of my heart.

Brendan Mock

If Mock were just an isolated token in the Grist world, his epiphany wouldn't matter much. Adopting tokens is one way white supremacy maintains itself. But he's not alone.

Here's editor Ben Adler describing sustainable cities.

Cops must treat the people they encounter — the man standing on the corner, maybe hustling loosies, the kid walking home from school with the sagging pants, the people hanging out in the playground — with respect. Otherwise, the police threaten to chase away the pedestrian vitality that gives cities their spirit.

And here's Greg Hanscom on the lessons of the year:

... if 2014 taught us one thing, it’s that, while cities hold tremendous promise as the source and drivers of climate solutions, unless and until we deal with underlying injustice and inequity, they will never realize that potential. The good news is, thanks to some brutal news in 2014, we are now poised to address those issues in a real and concerted way.

I have pointed before to Grist's female token's Heather Smith explaining the BlackLivesMatter movement to their readers.

I have to ask myself, how much of this newly emphatic positioning from a climate magazine derives from its intellectual heart, editor David Roberts, affirming that climate hawks are on the Left, like it or not.

Climate hawks see a problem that markets will not solve on their own, one that requires long-term planning and some measure of international governance. They see a need for new taxes, regulations, and public investments.

They see an enormous injustice underway, as countries that have grown wealthy burning fossil fuels now stand to visit unthinkable suffering on countries that remain poor and have produced very little climate pollution. Indeed, a hyper-rich global elite is producing a wildly outsized share of the carbon.

Since everyone can’t produce as much carbon as the 1 percent and preserve a liveable climate, either grotesque inequality must stay in place or, as the global poor rise, the global rich must reduce their share. So the climate struggle is inevitably about redistribution, about the spoils of the few vs. the interests of the many. Nothing is more anathema to the current right.

Conservatism seeks to preserve the status quo, which in the U.S. means oil, coal, suburbs, consumerism, and inequality. ...

From there it is not far to recognizing the centrality of the movement for justice for people of color being oppressed by police. Not far at all. We only survive what we have made together; the rest is illusion.

Entertainment values

Over this strange interregnum between holidays, I'm indulging one of my favorite seasonal pastimes: catching parts of almost all the Armpit Bowls. Every year these TV spectacles pit East Armpit against West Instep (colleges, mostly in the South, that seem to exist to play enthusiastic, but seldom great American football) in half empty stadiums before what I suspect are very small TV audiences. These are one of my quirkier passions.

Along with the Bowls, the viewer also endures the seasonal commercials. This year, the two worst to my way of thinking come from Buick and Lexus. I'll share one -- see if you can stomach this:

Fortunately, I don't have to try to deconstruct this for you. Pointless Planet: Inane advertising in an irrelevant world does a terrific job one it.

The same site is also magnificent on those cloying Lexus Christmas Stories. Enjoy.

Journalism and election campaigns display similar hangups

Media professor and gadfly Jay Rosen has put up an interesting post at PressThink about the understanding that anyone going into journalism had better be prepared to cultivate about the business models that technological and social changes are forcing on their profession.

Journalistic enterprises are all struggling to replace the system in which advertisers with few choices for reaching their target customers paid for content -- both "popular" and "serious" -- that would attract the readers and viewers they wanted to reach. The creators of the content, the journalists, proudly disdained the activity of the "business side" of a metaphorical wall where the money grubbers scrambled to fund the journalists' noble undertaking. (Very likely nothing truly this smoothly functioning ever quite existed, but the myth commanded allegiance nonetheless.)

This model no longer pays the bills because advertisers don't have to buy "content" that is more or less irrelevant to their market needs, such as, for example, local election news or investigative reporting that rattles any cages. They might be happier with nothing but weather and sports. And, indeed, as online media proliferate, advertising revenue will no longer be enough to pay for journalism as we have thought of it. Rosen insists that journalists can, and must, think differently in this difficult environment while retaining their professional integrity:

• If you work in any kind of editorial organization, it is your job to understand the business model. If you feel you can’t do that, you should quit. By “understand the business model,” I mean you can (confidently) answer this question: What is the plan to bring in enough money to sustain the enterprise and permit it to grow? Can’t answer? You have the wrong job.

• The business model is not the business only of the business “side” (a wretched metaphor) because a vital part of any such model is the way in which the editorial staff creates value, earns audience, wins mind share, generates influence, builds brand. These are the sorts of goods a good sales staff sells. It’s your job to understand the business model, because you have to know what kind of good you’re being asked to create, or you won’t be any good at creating it.

• The Editor has to come to a clear agreement with the publisher and commercial staff on: a.) what the business model is, meaning: how are we going to sustain ourselves and grow? b.) exactly how -- in that model -- the editorial team creates value for the business, and c.) the zone of independence the editorial team will need to meet those expectations. ... Every successful publication that does journalism operates with a kind of contract between The Editor and the people who own the joint. (Unless they’re the same people.) If the contract is unclear, if different people have different ideas about what it says, if the staff doesn’t understand it, then neuroses will set in. The result will be an unhappy place to work.

• If you work on the commercial “side” (misleading image) of an editorial company and you cannot explain the kind of value the journalists have to add for the business model to click on all cylinders, or if you see them as merely an expense item -- and a whiny, entitled one at that — then you too are in the wrong job. Please leave as soon as possible

Rosen enumerates some ideas for how such a media organization might work in another post.

I was struck by these points because they seemed so familiar. In my work on political campaigns, the same willful misunderstandings that Rosen calls out in journalism play out far too often. This is counter-intuitive. Campaigns are almost always topdown, disciplined structures with little pretense of collegiality. Anything legal goes; the ethical standard is a bald utilitarianism, with little pretense of any higher values. But nonetheless, something like what Rosen describes in journalism goes on in too many campaigns:

• Message mavens, ad creators and organizers like to assume it's up to the fundraisers to find the cash to pay for their plans. Campaigns even contract out the fundraising function to separate operatives. Separation here is nuts. Your campaign plan, how you aim to win, is your pitch, at least in part.

• Everybody in the campaign needs to be able to explain both message (why people should vote for your candidate or initiative) and why as many people as possible should contribute money so the campaign can execute its (excellent) plan. If fundraising is thought of as an esoteric (and slightly dirty) afterthought, this won't happen.

• Strong campaign managers model the unity between voter contact initiatives (online media, ads, and knock-on-door field programs) and raising cash to pay for all of it.

• Fundraisers shouldn't squirrel away their contacts from those scruffy field operatives. People with money aren't just pots of cash; they have friends and social networks too that need to be touched by the campaign. They should be drawn as much as possible into campaign activities. Even if they are unwilling, asking their participation for more than their cash reassures them that the campaign is working toward its goal.

Friday cat blogging

Issac wonders who the strangers are who have come to feed him and to clean the box.

The work of Christmas

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart
Howard Thurman (1899 - 1981)

May whatever seasonal holiday you observe, if any, be bright and blessed. And if you can, just for a little while, heed this sidewalk stencil:

Queers rally for #BlackLivesMatter on Christmas Eve

The intersection of Market street and Octavia Boulevard was blocked to traffic briefly this morning while LGBT protesters reminded passersby that the struggle for justice cannot take a holiday.

Both the SFPD and motorists were largely tolerant of the disruption. Some drivers honked approval. I have no idea what cars backed up on the freeway out of sight of the protest may have thought was going on.

While we occupied the intersection we chanted a litany of names of victims of police violence.

We observed 4 minutes and 28 seconds of silence recalling the 4 and one half hours Mike Brown's body lay on the street in Ferguson after he was shot by an officer last August.

From mid-Market we marched up the intersection of Castro and Market.

Again we formed a circle around a large pink triangle ...

... and again sat silent for 4 minutes, 28 seconds.

No assemblage is complete without some preaching; her message was Queer Black lives matter!