"Nicaragua, Nicaraguita"

Another pretty picture of tropical paradise, in no way representative of our strenuous trips to El Porvenir water projects, but a nice memory to share while stuck in Houston waiting to see whether/when we can fly into San Francisco despite smoke delays. 

More normal blogging soon enough. 

On the road again

Watershed improvements in progress.

For the next week, I'll be in Nicaragua attending the board meeting of El Porvenir. This non-profit project

partners 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.

We'll be visiting sites where work in ongoing and helping staff evaluate how we're doing on our tiny piece of meeting the United Nations' Water and Sanitation Sustainability Goal. (Yes, there is such a thing. North Americans blithely ignore the UN, but in much of the world UN standards are assisting development for better lives.)

I don't know how much connectivity I'll have in Nicaragua, so for the next week blogging will be sporadic or perhaps just photos.

Lake at the coffee plantation at Selva Negra

In fact most of this trip has involved swollen rivers and mud flows that knocked out bridges. Hurricane Nate didn't hit Nicaragua directly, but the storm and torrential rains have caused deaths and left major damage. And meanwhile the staff and board of El Porvenir conferred usefully. 

But for a minute late this afternoon the sun came out. 

Friday cat blogging

 

Never fear. Morty is not alone with America to keep him company. 

Some Spanish windmills

As we walked the Camino de Santiago in Asturias and Galicia, we often found ourselves repeating a line we'd read in somebody's blog: "More windmills? Guess that means we have to climb another big hill ..."

Indeed there are a lot of windmills in Spain, especially in this part of Spain. In 2015, Spain was the fifth largest generator of wind power in the world. On a few blustery days, wind power makes up more than 50 percent of the power the country uses. Wind power even enables the province of Galicia to produce more renewable energy than its own power needs demand. Spain has promised the European Union to achieve 20 percent of all its energy needs by 2020.

The country seemed well on the way to this target a decade ago, through a combination of wind, solar and hydroelectric production. However, since the conservative government of Mariano Rajoy’s Popular Party took power in 2011, green power production has plateaued. Subsidies for clean energy were cut; the government introduced a "sun tax" which penalizes individual private installations of solar panels which might reduce demand for the output sold by commercial power companies.

Under the new rules, these self-reliant consumers will not be able to use products such as the Powerwall battery recently launched by American automotive and energy-storage company Tesla, and will additionally be penalized for the storage systems that come included with the latest generation of solar panels.

... The Spanish government’s attitude is in contrast to other countries, such as Germany, which is encouraging the use of solar panels with batteries.

Government solicitude for the stranded costs of legacy power companies acts as an impediment to clean energy all over the world. David Roberts has recently explored why cheaper batteries are going to blow away the old monopoly electric company profit model despite their political power in the U.S. -- and as soon as 2020.

Rooftop solar can be staved off temporarily with fees and rate tweaks, but as batteries get cheaper, those strategies will stop working. More and customers are going to generate, store, and manage more and more of their own power.

Utilities have got to find other ways to make money, other services to provide, other roles to play in the power system of the future. They have no other choice.

Yet another hill to climb ...

A modest proposal

Even here in anti-gun San Francisco, you don't encounter many signs like this one in a fixture display window. Why not, I wonder? Yes, I know, unchecked gun-toting is legally and socially discouraged around here. Maybe such a sign doesn't seem necessary, unlike, for example, in Nevada, where casinos DO post signs to exclude guns. But, since we can't seem to win the legislative battle for sensible gun regulation, private businesses should be encouraged to take this step and complimented when they do ... Just a thought.

Spain's mad knight may still have a message for our times

Plaza de España

The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) responded to the last crumbling of Spain's colonial empire (that would the seizure by the United States in 1898 of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines) with the

realization that, in hopeless times, quixotic lunacy could save people from the paralysis that often accompanies defeatism.

According to Mariana Alessandri, embracing the "madness" of the fictional Don Quixote de la Mancha who tilted at windmills and "dreamed impossible dreams," undergirded Unamuno's principled denunciation of Spanish fascism at the end of his life, a story I've recounted previously. The philosopher's thinking seems highly relevant amidst political inertia, lies, corruption, and folly.

... Unamuno urged his fellow Spaniards to practice quixotism, which meant adopting the moral courage necessary to fight for lost causes without caring what the world thinks. ...

Quixote didn’t charge the windmill because he thought he would defeat it, but because he concluded it was the right thing to do. Likewise, if we want to be legitimate actors in the world, Unamuno would say that we must be willing to lose the fight. If we abandon the common-sense belief that deems only winnable fights worth fighting, we can adopt Unamuno’s “moral courage” and become quixotic pessimists: pessimists because we recognize our odds of losing are quite high, and quixotic because we fight anyway. Quixotic pessimism is thus marked by a refusal to let the odds of my success determine the value of my fight.

... Warning: quixotic pessimism will not go over well in public. If you choose this life, Unamuno says you will face disbelief, judgment and ridicule. He writes that moral courage “confronts, not bodily injury, or loss of fortune, or the discredit of one’s honor but rather ridicule: one’s being taken for a madman or a fool.” In a real-life context, quixotic pessimism will look like constantly face-planting in public, and we will need moral courage to accept it. People will laugh at us as they do at Quixote. ...

In our time, some windmill tilting seems to have its moments. Who thought that the horror of unified Republican control of government would end up exposing that a substantial majority of us actually believe that it is the government's job to ensure access to medical care for all? Apparently we collectively are not afraid of "socialized medicine" any more. Let's see what other longstanding truisms a determined resistance can knock over ...

Bilbao

The Catalan independence vote

Banners supporting Catalan and Basque separatism on a political party building in Bilbao

During the entire month we were walking in Spain, the impending October 1 regional referendum on Catalan secession dominated news media. Whenever we caught a glimpse of a newspaper or a few minutes of TV news in a bar, the separatist effort in the Barcelona region overwhelmed all other topics. (Even Trump. That was sort of restful.)

The situation is very complex, arising from centuries of historic grievances complicated by contemporary differences between a conservative federal government in Madrid and a pro-independence regional government. The national government has outlawed the referendum; it is not at all clear whether any of this is going to reveal the desires of a majority of Catalans.

Some of the apparently most complex coverage, sympathetic but honest, I've seen of the Catalan situation in English has been in the Guardian. Perhaps a British newspaper, with experience with Scottish and other regional independence movements, is better at this than U.S. media. In any case, for more substantive information, read them, not me. I know little.

But I can share an observation from our walk on the Camino that may cast a weak light. In the north of Spain, the home language of many or even most people is not what we think of as "Spanish." In Spain, "Spanish" means Castilian and that is what people call it. Catalan is the co-official language the Mediterranean coast, of Catalonia. In the Basque country, people and their street signs, use Euskara. As we walked west, signs changed languages. In Asturias, though the language is not officially co-equal, Asturian is the mother tongue. And in Galicia, the province's official language is Galician, which speakers of the majority Castilian Spanish think of as akin to Portuguese. This map shows the language distribution; like so much in Spain's rich diverse fabric, it's complicated.

Saturday scenery: Toledo, city of concurrent and successive faiths

The Spanish city of medieval Toledo is a well preserved treasury of multi-faith historical religious edifices. A schematic history of the city: the Jews came along with the Roman Empire's legions; most Ibero-Romans eventually adopted Christianity as did the northern European "barbarians" who conquered this rich land; these kingdoms were pushed to the peninsula's margins by Muslim invaders bringing a rich pan-Mediterranean civilization; and the Muslims in turn were eventually expelled by Spanish Christian monarchs in the Reconquista ending in 1492, along with the remaining Jews who became the Sephardim of the Diaspora. It's a bloody, tangled story and Toledo proudly displays the cross-fertilized remnants.

Today the Sephardic Museum occupies the Synagogue of El Transito, a worship space built by the merchant Samuel ha-Levi in 1356 by permission of the Christian king Peter of Castille.

The synagogue's intricate artistry suggests comparison with the contemporary Moorish palace of the Alhambra in Granada.

Incongruously the Jewish worship space thought to be the oldest synagogue building in Europe is now maintained by the Roman Catholic Church as "Saint Mary the White." (Yes, Catholic Spain also boasts black madonnas, black representations of the mother of Jesus, but not that we saw in Toledo.)

Far more than El Transito, despite the cross belatedly hung over the main open space, this building is infused with a feeling of its historic sacred use. The only religious edifice I've ever experienced to equal this holy feeling is the Ummayad Mosque in Damascus.

Far more incongruous is this interior from what is called the Mosque of Cristo de la Luz. The small square Islamic structure surrounded by fountains and a garden was built in 999. The Muslim city of old Toledo was conquered by King Alfonso VI in 1085 and the mosque converted into a Christian chapel in 1186.

Today Toledo throngs with gawking tourists staring at this religious melange. Do we hunger for a glimpse of religions co-existing? I certainly do.

North Korea, Washington, and the end of US empire

While we were walking the Camino, I got persistent questions from friends watching President Blunderbuss heating up tensions with North Korea (and Iran, and everyone else with half a glimmer in the wide world), "why aren't we in the streets screaming against this madness?"

Returning to the unhappy USofA seems to mean I can no longer dodge thinking about this.

Serious people, including that wise historian of things vital and military Thomas Ricks, pictured here on tour promoting his book Churchill and Orwell, opine that there is a 50/50 chance of war with North Korea, a war that would almost certainly be nuclear. Oh shit, another generation has to live under the threat of fiery annihilation as mine did in the Fifties.

The usual campaigners for peace are making the usual appeals to Congress, but this does not seem equal to the horror of the prospect. The Orange Cheeto gives us unending white supremacist distractions; Congressional GOPers continue their crusade to transfer the nation's wealth to plutocratic sponsors; and most of us just try to get along.

But also, I don't think either the peace movement, or the left, or the Democratic politicians who dissidents are stuck with as a vehicle for influence in Washington, are ready to articulate the central reality that makes war so likely at present: US empire, US hegemony, is over. Cemented in place in 1945 when World War II had flattened the rest of the world, US pre-eminence has been eroding for decades. (Many of us knew this during the Vietnam war.) But mainstream US politics has never quite found a way to deal up front and honestly with this reality. So for all the handwringing over Trump and Korea, there's hardly any mainstream debate about how this powerful country should act as a force among many in a plural world.

Obama certainly had a glimmer about this, though like all of them, he couldn't allow himself to articulate clearly that the current object of US foreign policy has to be to manage the decline of empire. He was willing to suggest some US adventures were "dumb wars"; he knew his efforts at power projection would be undercut by too many dead US soldiers, so he favored drones and spooks over troop commitments; he generally eschewed loud displays of imperial dominance.

Since we mostly lack even language to talk about this, I was heartened to read a smart article by Jeet Heer that lays out Democratic pols' tongue-tied inertia over the country's stance in the world. The entirety is a good survey of the situation and highlights Bernie Sanders' attempt to find ground that mainstream Democrats might join him in.

Sanders’s recent foreign policy speech, notably in its strong defense of the Iran nuclear deal, was a careful attempt to claim Obama’s legacy by arguing for a liberal internationalist approach of alliance-building to solving the world’s problems. The central theme of the speech was the need to re-conceptualize foreign policy not just as a matter of military policy. “Here is the bottom line: In my view, the United States must seek partnerships not just between governments, but between peoples,” Sanders argued. “A sensible and effective foreign policy recognizes that our safety and welfare is bound up with the safety and welfare of others around the world.”

I'm no across-the-board Sanders fan (too often he reminds me of thousands of old white lefty men who never understood why women and people of color and queers might have different priorities) but if he can drive Democrats in this direction, he is serving the country well.

Friday cat blogging

Morty gave the returning pilgrims a bit of the evil eye, but soon enough reverted to his affectionate self. Before meeting this fellow, I never had known an affectionate cat. Previous cats were aloof, but not Mr. Mort, most of the time.

We get by with a little help from our friends ...

as the Beatles once reminded us.

How to help recovery from the Mexican earthquakes:
My good friend who teaches teaching at the Autonomous University of Mexico suggests this group which has a long history of working with poor families in the most harmed communities:

The information included in the graphic is how to make a bank wire transfer. You can learn more about the Grupo de Educación Popular con Mujeres here.

How to help recovery in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria:
My friend Norma has been trying to figure out how to do the most good for her island territory and writes this:

... as you have heard and seen in the news, a week after the catastrophic disaster that Hurricane Maria caused in my country and the Caribbean, about 97% of the island's 3.4 million residents are still without electricity today, more than half of the residents do not have running water and fuel, and food is being rationed in some parts of the country. With supplies running out and no water, people in isolated areas (the countryside) are starting to drink from mountain streams. Out of the island's 69 hospitals, only 11 are open and depending on generators fueled by diesel. Two people who were on life support died in the past days in a hospital in San Juan because the generator run out of diesel.

Residents are relying on generators to keep appliances, medical devices and refrigerators running. Soon they will run out of gasoline and diesel. The biggest problem is getting supplies from Point A to Point B as the country is still battling destroyed and flooded roads. Frustration and fear is mounting because aid is not getting to the residents and people are starting to get desperate. Looting is growing and people are violating the curfew. The situation now, according to the San Juan mayor, has reached humanitarian crisis proportions.

[President Trump has bowed to pressure and belatedly waived the Jones Act which was enabling shippers to extract gross profits from Puerto Rico's pain.]

For many of us here so far from our loved ones, this situation brings up a lot of anxiety and feelings of impotency and deep sadness. That is why I'm turning to you. Many of you are wondering what you can do.

I’ve looked into the places to donate money or supplies. The situation is still so chaotic that I don’t yet feel 100% sure about the options and with time, this all will become much clearer. But for now, I have three places to suggest if you want to donate funds. I think they are trustworthy, supported by some key people and organizations, and will get the funds there.

 I’ve also included a link to an organization that can coordinate volunteers. They are not ready for that yet but you can sign up and when they know how to best use volunteers, they can get back to you. ...

These are the organizations to donate:

Hurricane Maria Community Recovery Fund
This fund is managed by the Center for Popular Democracy which many of us know. They seem to be connecting with some of the most grassroots orgs in PR, some of whom we know and surely want to support.

UNICEF
During a time like this it may be that large NGOs like UNICEF are in the best position to deliver and distribute mass aid. This fund specifically supports children and families.

UNIDOS: Program of Hispanic Federation
This fund was started by Mayor Di Blasio and some of the Nuyorican electeds who we trust (and supported by Hamilton’s Lin Manuel). From my research the Hispanic Federation seems to have a good record of financial management and integrity.

The volunteer organization where you can sign up if you want to consider on site work is called Puerto Rico Voluntary Organizations in Disaster.
We don’t know much about them. As many of you might recall from Katrina days, it took a long time for all of this to settle -who was doing what, what level of infrastructure did orgs have to manage money, volunteers, who was supporting what areas and what kinds of people, who could be trusted. I’m sure we will see that work itself out.

Fortunately we have many good friends and activists on the ground in PR, who are in the center of all of this, and are keeping us updated and informed. ...

It is time (as always) to stand with friends around the world.

Goodbye Spain

Hello ordinary responsibilities. Ready to go, whether ready or not. Such is life.

On pilgirmage

Any blog posts are likely to be single photos for the next month; I don't know how much connectivity or communicative energy I'll have, but walking 321 km is sure to teach me much as well as take a lot out of me.

Tend your souls; resist and protect much.

Just when I was weaning myself off football . . .

This was last year. Now the Cheeto seems to have declared a culture war on the brave athletes of the NFL standing up for themselves, free speech, and Black lives. Guess I'll have to pay attention to the national game again. Thanks Colin!

Basque Country welcomes refugees

In keeping with the generally sophisticated design consciousness in Bilbao and environs, Euskara-speaking activists have redesigned the familiar fleeing family on these banners. The image hangs on private houses and some public buildings. The ongoing tragedy of refugee drownings in the Mediterranean feels very close here. 

Stubborn for earth and sustainability

The mountainous hills and valleys north of Burgos where Spain's long river Ebros arises are breathtakingly lovely.  

The people who live there want to keep it that way.  

The bear and the madrone

The heraldic emblem of the city of Madrid as it appears on manhole covers throughout the city. 

The city's bear as created out of aluminum foil by a cheerful Metro artist. He gave it to EP in response to her interest.

Hints of civilization

The Palacio de Cibeles is the seat of the City Council of Madrid.

Within, the better part of one floor was devoted to an exhibit about the history of LGBT struggle in Spain. That struggle has been part of the wider movement to restore democracy after the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975 and has achieved a remarkable turnaround in social attitudes in a conservative country. 

All very heartening on a day when a U.S. president blustered before the world, threatening to annihilate a country of 25 million people ...

The iconography of the pilgrim: part 2 -- Saint James

In Santiago, we visited the Museum of Pilgrimage. This excellent institution grapples with the different representations of St. James -- as Apostle, Crushing Caballero of Christian Spain or Matamoros, and Pilgrim. In the early iteration above, he carries the book and is shoeless as is proper for an apostle, but also wears the hat and carries the shell for scooping water and the pack (or sporran) of a humble pilgrim. 

By the Renaissance, St. James the Pilgrim had acquired an intercessory cult, attached to the Camino, the Way

  .

The very different features of these two representations of the saint provide a glimpse into the history of the peoples of the Iberian peninsula and particularly of Spain itself. In Roman times and through the period of Islamic rule, the region was as much tied to North Africa and beyond as to Northern Europe. There is no reason to believe that Spainards were monochromatically "white" or as we might say today "European" in appearance. That changed as the militant Christian Reconquista seized the whole land and expelled Others, Jews and Muslims.

In some eras the saint, though still bearing the staff of a pilgrim, became quite regal.

In this contemporary mural in a remote hostel in Galicia, St. James has become a welcoming almost Santa-like friend.