The damned thing isn't even online yet ...

From the Guardian:

The Dakota Access pipeline has suffered its first leak, outraging indigenous groups who have long warned that the project poses a threat to the environment.

The $3.8bn oil pipeline, which sparked international protests last year and is not yet fully operational, spilled 84 gallons of crude oil at a South Dakota pump station, according to government regulators.

Although state officials said the 6 April leak was contained and quickly cleaned, critics of the project said the spill, which occurred as the pipeline is in the final stages of preparing to transport oil, raises fresh concerns about the potential hazards to waterways and Native American sites.

The pipeline runs under the water supply used by the Standing Rock Sioux.

As I've aged, I've come to appreciate that engineers sometimes can build marvelously functioning wonders that achieve extraordinary capacities. There's the tiny computer on which I'm writing, for example. Or my friend's hearing aids which actually work, unlike the horrid appliances my grandmother futilely adjusted for 20 years.

But sometimes engineers simply make mistakes -- I think of the design flaws that mean that the steel reinforcement in the new Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge is most likely rusting out after only a few years of use.

Most especially on grand projects from which some entity expects grand profits, engineers have perverse incentives to over-estimate how perfectly their creations will function. Think Fukushima and the engulfing, "impossible" tsunami that made for the meltdown of its nuclear core. Or the Hanford nuclear waste depository where a tunnel containing deadly radioactive material collapsed this week.

DAPL seems all too likely to be one of the latter kind: grand, ambitious, but sloppy in execution and under-regulated by compliant state and federal officials.

When the land and water are despoiled, the life on it dies. That ought to count for something.

Friday cat blogging

What blue eyes you have!

Encountered while Walking San Francisco.

About the FBI, but not about James Comey

Easy to miss amidst the furor over the FBI director getting canned for investigating Trump's still unproved, but likely, Russian ties, was the release this week of the Council on American-Islamic Relations new report: The Empowerment of Hate: The Civil Rights Implications of Islamophobic Bias in the U.S. 2014-2016. The general picture is depressing, and reveals the country's underside:

Islamophobic bias continues its trend toward increasing violence. In 2016, CAIR recorded a 57 percent increase in anti-Muslim bias incidents over 2015. This was accompanied by a 44 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes in the same period.

From 2014 to 2016, anti-Muslim bias incidents jumped 65 percent. In that two-year period, CAIR finds that hate crimes targeting Muslims surged 584 percent.

The authors discuss many forms of bias, including in employment, in school, and harassment on the street. I found this chart particularly disturbing:

Of all federal agencies, the FBI -- our supposedly most professional national police -- was far and away the subject of the most bias concerns. The relative magnitude of these complaints seems off the scale.

Digging into the report, CAIR offers a carefully worded description of the community's relationship with the FBI.

Visits from the Federal Bureau of Investigation have become a regular feature of life for many American Muslims. The FBI regularly contacts individuals in order to question and interrogate them about their religious views and to surveil the Muslim community to gather general intelligence, rather than to acquire specific information regarding a credible crime or threat. However, the agency also investigates hate crimes and other criminal activity targeting Muslims and their places of worship, positive work for which many members of the community are grateful.

But last October and November, something seemed to escalate. Note, this was before Trump was elected, under Obama. Agents descended on Muslim enclaves, asking ten scripted questions. Some of these seem plausibly related to security concerns, though accusatory, such as "Do you know of anyone in the U.S. who raises money or provides support to Al-Qaeda or other extremist groups in Afghanistan or Pakistan?" But other seem just crackpot: "Are you aware of anyone with family or other connections to Afghanistan or Pakistan?" What do they think, that Muslims spring fully formed from the ground without parents or relatives?

CAIR's offers a very polite, measured pushback against this dragnet questioning.

CAIR’s concern is that headquarters instructed agents not to follow legitimate leads regarding any particular individual. Instead, it systematized an ineffective general sweep generated by the mindset that Muslims are a monolith and, in general, a threat to the nation. ... This mindset is in conflict with statements from two FBI Directors praising the Muslim community’s actions to report criminal activity. The questions themselves reflect an internal indecision on the part of FBI headquarters because they presume that Muslims would not come forward with information regarding criminal activity.

Concerned U.S. Muslim parents have in fact called in the authorities to report their own children who were "radicalizing."

Back in the early '00's, when the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were young and people in the United States were just as ignorant as we are today, we'd hear stories of GI's roughing up unlucky Afghan peasants while demanding to know whether the captives knew Osama bin Laden. One guy with a headdress is just like another guy with a head covering, right? That didn't get them very far. You'd think that we would have learned.

U.S. Muslims are understandably afraid with the Orange Tweeter unleashing the least professional, most bigoted elements in border control and law enforcement agencies. They long had to live with the unfounded suspicions of those among their neighbors for whom they are the Other.

Resist and protect much.

Why did Trump fire Comey?

Alright leakers, spill the beans. You've been good at your job so far ...

The official story doesn't pass the laugh test. Trump has something to hide. Out with it!

Not my bruhaha, but I can feel this

While walking San Francisco, I encountered this church sign today. By choosing to center the message "Pray for Bishop Karen Oliveto" on a billboard on a busy boulevard, this church is proclaiming its stance within a fraught process in its denomination of coming to terms with the varieties of human sexuality. I have lots of empathy. I am lucky enough to have wandered into a Christian community that has prayed and blundered its way to relative peace with the full humanity of LBGT people. These United Methodists are currently stuck in the harrowing stage.

The controversy about Bishop Karen Oliveto is one of those things which are largely invisible to people outside a particular community, but which can feel agonizing for those inside. Since Temple United Methodist has put its concern literally out on the street, I feel okay about writing something about what is going on here.

When gay people began to make ourselves more visible in the 1970s, most U.S. Protestant churches reflexively recoiled. We're not talking about prayerful, thoughtful discernment here; we're talking about panicky reassertion of poorly considered sexual pieties. But gay Christians didn't shut up and go away. The very bravest among us insisted they had as much right to, and as much need of, the promises of their traditions as any other believers. And because these impossible people didn't disappear, many religious communities have found themselves rethinking much.

Bishop Oliveto is a married lesbian and an experienced pastor whose denomination raised her up to lead 400 congregations in a region centered in Denver. There is nothing secret about her life. Here's how she explained "coming out" to NPR:

... when I got to seminary, I realized that I was seeing the lives of faithful LGBTQ people really for the first time. And their stories sounded a lot like my story. ...

By the end of my first year of seminary, I couldn't take it any longer. I ran away. I hopped on a bus in Oakland, Calif., and ran as far away as I could, all the way to Nova Scotia, Canada, where my grandparents lived. And I cried for mile after mile after mile. The Bible that was sitting on my lap just became tear stained. And for the first time in my life, God felt distant. And that I didn't understand because the rest of my life, God had always been a very present figure in my life.

But when my tears were finally spent and I took a deep breath and I was able to say, I'm a lesbian, I had the peace which passes all understanding descend upon me. And I realized God was back. But God had never left me. We leave God when we don't live into who God created us to be. So I returned to seminary and so was able to live - you know, live into my identity fully and without shame, without fear. And that was a great gift.

U.S. United Methodism's Western Region chose Oliveto to serve as a Bishop. But more conservative regions effectively said "hey -- don't we have rules about this?" And the church does have rules -- rules which create internal church disciplinary processes that will work themselves out and may, or may not, lead to censure of Oliveto and/or splits in the community.

This stuff hurts. It's not my business to opine how Methodists will emerge from this round, though I would not bet against this faithful woman and the loving Spirit she evokes.

Kudos to Temple United Methodists for putting what some might call "dirty linen" on the street. Sure, they are in San Francisco and not likely to encounter fierce local push-back. It would be easy to think something like "aren't you a little behind the times?" But when you are inside a convulsion, stepping out takes some bravery and some faith. Prayers for Bishop Karen and community seem right on time.

The GOPers and the undeserving sick people

A friend fighting cancer responded to House passage of the GOPer Trumpcare bill with this:

The best I can read it, the Republicans in the house just told me that I'm a bad human being for having a pre-existing condition and that I should simply go away and die. It's God's will and they want to help speed the process along.

It all feels so familiar. This is exactly what the early days of the AIDS epidemic felt like to gay men, other queers, and their friends.

Doctors noticed that something was killing a few gay men in Los Angeles in 1981. By the end of that decade, 160,969 cases of AIDS were reported, leading to 120,453 deaths. And this wasn't just an epidemic among relatively affluent white gay men. In 1990 there had been 45,446 cumulative AIDS diagnoses among Blacks and 28,576 cumulative AIDS deaths among Blacks. The disease was becoming a major danger to the female partners of infected men of all races and was known to be passed on to their babies.

At first, nothing was known about this new plague except that more people died each year. Would everyone eventually catch it? Early on, AIDS -- the conditions arising from infection by the HIV virus -- was identified as a sexually transmitted illness. Or, for many, as something those people contracted because of having sex. SEX! And so, there must be something bad about those people; they were intrinsic wrongdoers; they probably deserved it. It took his buddy Rock Hudson dying to move President Ronald Reagan to as much as mention the exponentially increasing plague. Infected kids (in those days usually hemophiliacs victimized by an untested blood transfusion) were barred from public schools; dentists refused to treat HIV-infected patients; so did some medical doctors and nurses. Basketball phenom Magic Johnson lost his career when he tested positive; other athletes feared being in a locker room with him. And, too often, HIV carriers were condemned as sinners from conservative pulpits.

And concurrently, brave activists, many fighting the virus themselves, demanded that their neighbors grow up and recognize the difference between illness and moral depravity. It was a tough lift, facing both a panic about an unknown threat and concurrent homophobia. Yes, people who had sex, even unfamiliar sex, could be innocent people. Innocent people who revealed the story of their disease in order to raise awareness like Bobby Campbell (pictured on an early Newsweek cover). Innocent people like filmmaker Marlon Riggs who struggled with his own community's distress at admitting that Black homosexuals were part of the family as well as with rejection by a wider society that condemned carriers of a virus.

And these struggles, along with the work of doctors and scientists who found treatments, taught far more of us that disease is unmerited affliction, not a sign of moral turpitude. The nightmare of AIDS-HIV served as a wake up for many. Not for everyone. Stigmatization of disease remains strong, especially among people who call themselves evangelical Christians and in red states which did not expand Medicaid under Obamacare to cover their neediest citizens. That is, Trump voters. But the fight for care for the victims of the "gay plague" helped weaken notions such as what Alabama Republican Mo Brooks blurted out after voting for Trumpcare:

“My understanding is that it will allow insurance companies to require people who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurance pool that helps offset all these costs, thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives, they’re healthy, you know, they are doing the things to keep their bodies healthy,” he said. “And right now, those are the people who have done things the right way that are seeing their costs skyrocketing.”

TPM

Mark Joseph Stern and Perry Grossman argue that Americans Now View Health Care as a Right. Republicans Can’t Change That. A new Pew poll finds that 60 percent of us agree. These writers' argument is that exposure to Obamacare has deeply planted the idea that healthcare is for all, not about who is deserving and who is not. They make an analogy of our gradual progress toward accepting that marriage is a private right, first between individuals of different "races," and later of individuals, even of the same sex.

But I think the teaching experience of the AIDS crisis may have weighed even more in creating the consensus Republicans are seeking to overthrow. GOPers aim to grab back 800 billion dollars from health care to give to rich people in tax cuts. AIDS taught a lot of people who didn't want to learn it that we're all in this together and that illness doesn't make moral distinctions between victims.

Some Republicans are behind the curve on this, but they would be wise to catch up. Any of them, and people they love, can get cancer or some other "pre-existing condition."

No, it is probably not advancing senility

Have you ever forgotten why you walked into a room? Turns out it's just your brain doing its job.

Our brains are usually pretty good at dividing up what we encounter and ordering it so we can take it in. But they are also good at dropping non-essential input and sometimes we confuse them.

Or so this video suggests.

H/t Time Goes By.

Saturday scenery: on the run

On a surprisingly hot day, the shoreline of the bay is lovely.

That's the San Mateo-Hayward bridge in the distance. Yes, it is a good five+ miles long.

The trail on top of Pulgas Ridge has dried out. I have seen a coyote here once, but the other day only a large rabbit.

California is seldom this green.

The road goes on and on ...

Republicans tell sick people: "just go die"

Two hundred seventeen Republican Congresscritters voted for Trumpcare yesterday. That total included every wavering California Republican, seven of them from districts carried by Hillary Clinton last November.

Here's that roll of dishonor:
Rep. Jeff Denham (Turlock)
Rep. Darrell Issa (Vista)
Rep. Steve Knight (Palmdale)
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (Costa Mesa)
Rep. Ed Royce (Fullerton)
Rep. David Valadao (Hanford)
Rep. Mimi Walters (Irvine)None of them should survive re-election in 2018. Let's see how many we can push into early retirement before that.

And lest anyone forget what sort of cruel monstrosity they voted for, here's Paul Waldman's summary of what is in the bill.

• Takes health insurance away from at least 24 million Americans; that was the number the CBO estimated for a previous version of the bill, and the number for this one is probably higher.

• Revokes the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid, which provided no-cost health coverage to millions of low-income Americans.

• Turns Medicaid into a block grant, enabling states to kick otherwise-eligible people off their coverage and cut benefits if they so choose.

• Slashes Medicaid overall by $880 billion over 10 years.

• Removes the subsidies that the ACA provided to help middle-income people afford health insurance, replacing them with far more meager tax credits pegged not to people’s income but to their age. Poorer people would get less than they do now, while richer people would get more; even Bill Gates would get a tax credit.

• Allows insurers to charge dramatically higher premiums to older patients.

• Allows insurers to impose yearly and lifetime caps on coverage, which were outlawed by the ACA. This also, it was revealed today, may threaten the coverage of the majority of non-elderly Americans who get insurance through their employers.

• Allows states to seek waivers from the ACA’s requirement that insurance plans include essential benefits for things such as emergency services, hospitalization, mental health care, preventive care, maternity care, and substance abuse treatment.

• Provides hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts for families making over $250,000 a year.

• Produces higher deductibles for patients.

• Allows states to try to waive the ACA’s requirement that insurers must charge people the same rates regardless of their medical history. This effectively eviscerates the ban on denials for preexisting conditions, since insurers could charge you exorbitant premiums if you have a preexisting condition, effectively denying you coverage.

• Shunts those with preexisting conditions into high-risk pools, which are absolutely the worst way to cover those patients; experience with them on the state level proves that they wind up underfunded, charge enormous premiums, provide inadequate benefits and can’t cover the population they’re meant for. Multiple analyses have shown that the money the bill provides for high-risk pools is laughably inadequate, which will inevitably leave huge numbers of the most vulnerable Americans without the ability to get insurance.

• Brings back medical underwriting, meaning that just like in the bad old days, when you apply for insurance you’ll have to document every condition or ailment you’ve ever had.

All that, so the Orange Cheato can throw himself a party.

Friday cat blogging

Something unexpected happened in San Francisco this past week: it turned hot, record breaking hot, for a couple of days. Instead of basking in the sun, this animal watched the world go by from a shaded perch.

Not heros, but citizens: keep on calling!

With MayDay passed, the spring marching and protest season is coming to a close. Oh, there are various gay pride events in June. But barring unusual emergencies, marches and protests in this country take place in September and October (except in presidential elections years) and in March, April, and May -- with occasional eruptions around the MLK holiday in January. That's in usual times.

But as we know, these are not usual times. Here some reflections from Josh Marshall in his historian mode on how the Orange Cheato continues to show himself a danger to democracy:

The President’s fondness for foreign dictators is no secret. ... many of us console ourselves with the notion that Trump is just demonstrably too inept and incompetent to be a strongman or push towards some kind of Americanized authoritarian rule.

This is a misunderstanding.

Incompetence and authoritarianism aren’t incompatible or even in tension. Historically they tend to go together. Incompetence and failure borne of ineptitude tend to show up both as a cause and outcome of democratic breakdown and collapse. Small-d democratic government is hard, by design. It’s meant to be. It should be. ...

... What’s held Trump back are the invisible hands of public opinion. He [hasn't yet got] his bill or Ryan’s bill or whomever is claiming it at this point out of the House because Republicans are afraid of the electoral consequences of voting for it. They are afraid they will lose their seats if they vote for it. That’s democracy in its most immediate form. ...

Because Democratic politicians are in the minority in Congress, they can't lead the opposition to Trump's anti-democratic aspirations, even if they were clearer that is their job. It's up to us. We lead them.

So, though, the marching season is on break for a bit, it remains vital that ordinary people keep the heat on the political system. And that means keeping on deluging Congress in phone calls opposing Republican and Trumpian outrages.

There are several internet-based pages designed to make this as easy as possible. I've tried all these and they all help making these calls simpler and better targeted to influence the outrage of the moment.


Daily Action: Just follow that link, enter your smart phone number, and you'll get a text each day at 9am alerting you to the day's target and linking you through to your Congressperson or Senator's office. I've been positively impressed by the selection of targets; alerts have urged calls for investigation of Trump's personal corruption, demands that Congress oppose his bellicose gestures, as well as pushing representatives on the Republican attack on our access to health insurance. Daily Action also provides alerts to call about California specific legislation.


The 65: The name refers to all of us who voted for someone other than Trump in the 2016 election. It provides a weekly action (currently the health insurance bill), a menu other issues, scripts, and the phone numbers for your elected officials who need calls. It is a good one to use while sitting in front of a monitor or laptop.


5 Calls: Based on the zip code you enter, this link offers you a list of issues, scripts and phone numbers for your representatives. The screen asks you to enter whether you got through and tallies calls. In addition to the web portal, there are apps available for both Android and iPhone.

Does all this calling seem fruitless? It's worth recalling, as Mr. Trump does not, that this sort of citizen engagement is what it has always required to make this country the best democracy it can be. Jane Coaston responded to the Cheato's ill-informed enthusiasm for Andrew Jackson with a history lesson:

Fortunately, history does not move on the machinations of a select group of great people. It moves on the small movements of a great many individuals. For example, think of the thousands of abolitionists, the millions who voted for President Abraham Lincoln, and those who moved West and changed the calculus of slave versus free states.

We are among those individuals; our politics, our decisions, our very words will set us on a course of history we cannot possibly begin to predict. History happens while we’re not paying attention, even while we’re rehashing the history of something else.

We do not need to be Andrew Jackson (or, ideally, someone far less likely to commit crimes against humanity). We do not need to wait for a hero of our own making, either. We are what we’ve long awaited, the mover and shaper of history, the decider of our fate. If the arc of history bends toward justice, it is not bent by the greatest of us — but by the rest.

Caption contest

I encountered her while Walking San Francisco.

Reflecting on MayDay

About ten paragraphs into the Washington Post summary story on International Workers Day marches around the country, the reporters mention that the protests were "overwhelmingly peaceful." Wouldn't want to give too much attention to the serious, yet happy outpouring of people who do so much of what makes this a good country to live in, would we?

Certainly the thousands walking down San Francisco's Market Street in bright sun were mostly a happy bunch.

The day's theme was unity -- unity between unions and community organizations, unity among people of different races and ethnicities, unity between workers regardless of immigration status.

“Today is a labor day and an immigration day,” said Yemeni expatriate Ahmed Abosayd, a vice president of the Service Employees International Union local chapter.

Abosayd, whose son, Mustafa, was detained at San Francisco International Airport in the opening hours of the first version of Trump’s travel ban in February, urged the crowd to “give a message to Donald Trump: No ban, no wall.”

SF Chronicle

Labor's great solidarity axiom -- "an injury to one is an injury to all" -- has, of necessity, been extended far more broadly, even globally, in the contemporary labor environment. Events like this enact that spreading realization.

No, Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon, not all of us are willing to be divided into grasping, warring tribes. We have begun to explore our wider humanity. That is the way forward.

MayDay 2017: all together now!

Can we learn to chant in a mix of Cantonese, Spanish and English ... well, we can practice.

Unions, community organizations, and friends turned out before 8am outside the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement--the deportation arm of Heimat Security) in downtown San Francisco.

The street needed redecoration.

Yazmin Elias's sister shared the story of this domestic violence survivor's year long incarceration and threatened deportation.

Volunteers placed themselves in front of the bus exits, risking arrest.

No fooling.

Mujeres Unidas y Activas think the street looks a lot better now.

May Day 2017

The urgency of this moment calls us to stand, together.
Will you join the fight for freedom, justice and equality?

For more information about broad national May Day demonstrations, enter a zip code here. For national general strike information, use this link. And in the Bay Area, ABC7news has a good list of local activities.

Why the May Day strikes and marches?

In the rest of the world, May Day is International Workers Day, a holiday celebrating the contributions we all make through our labor that keep society going. Though first proposed by organized U.S. workers in the late 19th century, the day has been little noted in the United States; we are not accustomed to honoring labor.

One of the gifts of our large immigrant population has been the return of May Day to prominence. Some of the largest demonstrations in recent years were the 2006 May Day marches led by thousands of Latinx workers who came out of the shadows to demand immigration reform and a path to citizenship for undocumented persons. Half a million marched in Los Angeles and hundreds of thousands in aggregate all over the country.

And now we have a president who spouts hate against Latinx, Black, and Asian-origin people, and against vulnerable women. That is, the Cheato trashes the true U.S. working class, the people whose toil keeps our post-industrial society going. So May Day again has risen in prominence. I saw six of these signs on one block of businesses on San Francisco's Mission Street today. There is not quite the atmosphere of excited anticipation there was in the air before the 2006 marches. What with Trump's turning the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) into a thuggish deportation force, no wonder.

But there's a tough determination in the community this year, making May Day the occasion of a call to "shit it down," not just for a parade.

And, at least some of organized labor gets where the action among workers is. This graphic is from the California Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, some of the traditional gorillas of the union movement.

For more information about broad national May Day demonstrations, enter a zip code here. For national general strike information, use this link. And in the Bay Area, ABC7news has a good list of local activities.

Bonhoeffer on folly and the making of fools

One of the stock features of the 100-day presidential frenzy in the media is the report from some rust belt town where an urban-based reporter interviews voters. "Do you regret that you voted for Trump?" they ask. "No, he's doing great," says the interviewee. Oh for goodness sakes, even if this voter does have a sneaking suspicion that Trump might disappoint, s/he is not going to trot it out for this interloper to smirk at. I am not impressed.

But I remain horrified that so many people thought an Orange Cheato who lies, steals, and corrupts all he touches was a suitable leader for the country. Since the election, I keep returning to the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer's thoughts on human folly, arrived at while awaiting execution for plotting to kill Hitler.

Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than evil. One can protest against evil; it can be unmasked and, if need be, prevented by force. Evil always carries the seeds of its own destruction, as it makes people, at the least, uncomfortable. Against folly we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it; reasoning is no use; facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. ...

... If we are to deal adequately with folly, we must understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is a moral rather than an intellectual defect. There are people who are mentally agile but foolish, and people who are mentally slow but very far from foolish — a discovery that we make to our surprise as a result of particular situations. We thus get the impression that folly is likely to be, not a congenital defect, but one that is acquired in certain circumstances where people make fools of themselves or allow others to make fools of them. ...

... The fact that the fool is often stubborn must not mislead us into thinking that they are independent. One feels in fact, when talking to them, that one is dealing, not with the person themselves, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like, which have taken hold of them. They are under a spell, they are blinded, their very nature is being misused and exploited. Having thus become a passive instrument, the fool will be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. Here lies the danger of diabolical exploitation that can do irreparable damage to human beings. ... we have to realize why it is no use our trying to find out what “the people” really think, and why the question is so superfluous for the person who thinks and acts responsibly ...

But there is some consolation in these thoughts on folly: they in no way justify us in thinking that most people are fools in all circumstances. What will really matter is whether those in power expect more from people’s folly than from their wisdom and independence of mind.

Bonhoeffer concluded that we only turn away from our human tendency toward individual and collective folly through an inward liberation that is found through the practice of a responsible life seeking Good. In our diverse ways, an awful lot of us lately have been forced to take up this challenge more seriously than has been our comfortable custom. We reject the onslaught of fakery, of folly.

Resistance isn't fun, but it feels life-giving. When the horror gets you down, do something! And be gentle with others also struggling for hope, understanding, and effectual action.

H/t Slacktivist.

Saturday scenery: for the Orange Cheato's 100th day ...

a few more signs of San Franciscans' discontent:

Just a couple of random windows ...

in a boutique storefront ... very tastefully displayed ...

looks like this person is keeping a sign at the ready for persistent protest ...

This one is graceful.

Hope is a theme ...

Hortatory hope.

Short, to the point, easily disseminated.

Many from Walking San Francisco. Don't worry, I'll go back to less political Saturday images soon enough, now that it is not quite so muddy on the trails.

Why the Climate March?

Actually, that's a silly question on this site. The Climate March is a heart cry from all of us who can feel the planet we inhabit being smothered by our species' excesses. So we march. National Peoples Climate March information is here. People's Climate Movement Bay Area information is here.

Any seasoned political observer can't help asking: why did we have a Science March last week and the Climate March this week? That both arise from congruent if not quite identical impulses seems obvious. Oh, I know, some of the scientists continue to hope that their discipline can exist above the political hurley-burley, but that's both faux-innocent nonsense and damn poor anthropology. So I did some cursory internet research and here's what I learned:

The Peoples Climate March aims to promote the broad truth that:

... climate change is as much a social issue as a scientific one. “We are a broad-based coalition that represents immigrants and workers and women and people of color and multi-issue community organizations,” [coordinator Paul Getsos] said.

Washington Post, April 21

Moreover, the Climate March was initiated without regard to who might be elected President. The call would have gone out just as certainly under Hillary Clinton as under Donald Trump. The struggle against soiling our own (and only) nest really is universal, as well as particular in every community and political context.

For those of us who have been trying to make our rulers do the right thing for decades, it is probably correct to think of the Peoples Climate March as the worthy successor to what felt like an endless parade of "Spring Mobes" -- fraught coalitions which demonstrated successively, spring after spring, against the Vietnam war, nuclear power and nuclear bombs, Reagan's wars in Central America, South African apartheid, Iraq War One, Iraq War Two,... In the spring when green shoots flourish, it's always time to push for justice and peace.

Friday cat blogging

Morty is so decorative ... though you can't tell from this picture that he is taking up most of my desk and no intention of ceding space to something so mundane as a computer.