A righteous rant ...

I reproduce here a righteous rant from Simon Rosenberg. His Hopium Chronicles project may be a little too Democratic Party-oriented for the taste of most of my friends. But you got to love that he activates people, in the style of, and in homage to, FDR and Harry Truman.

I've made this a little easier to read:

In these first six terrible months of Trump they have told us who they are and what they want - they want our country to be poorer, weaker, less safe, less healthy and less free. 

The agenda is clear. There is no American greatness or a better tomorrow. Their way is a diminished country, with fewer opportunities for our people, an end to our democracy, and a nation less able to chart our course in a competitive world. They want for more them and less for all of us. They cannot run away from who they are and what they are doing. There isn’t any way to put lipstick on this Trumpian pig. 

And unlike 2024 we cannot shirk from our responsibility to tell this part of the story. 

For the first step in defeating Trumpism is to make sure every voter available to us understands exactly who they are and what they mean for our nation’s future. 

The passage of the Big Ugly [Budget Bill] gives us an opportunity to go tell this bigger story about this rancid agenda of sabotage, plunder and betrayal. We are no longer limited in our comms and story telling to the elements of the big ugly. We must now in fact integrate the elements of the big ugly into their broader agenda and attack it on all fronts. They have betrayed us and we can and must find a better way, together. 

• The tragedy in Texas has started a national debate about their “more for me, less for all of you” agenda. 

• The return of measles has given us an opportunity to talk about their assault on our health care. 

•Trump’s ongoing tariff fiasco allows us to talk about his core betrayal of working people by raising prices not lowering them. 

• His attempt to create a secret police gives us an opportunity to talk about his authoritarian fantasies and abandonment of the Constitutional order here in American. 

The upcoming debate over Congress’ Fiscal Year 2026 budget gives us an extended opportunity to explain the harms of their agenda to the American people. 

Democrats in state and localities across the country can start to immediately organize town halls, hearings and other community conversations to talk to their constituents about what the Big Ugly and the broader GOP agenda means for them (and we need to help them do this). 

For it is no longer notional or a promise. It is here. 

And people are dying. The economy is slowing. Prices are rising. Our debt is exploding. 

Masked men are disappearing people into foreign and domestic gulags. Measles has returned. 

The world is laughing at us. 

They’ve given themselves huge tax cuts while levying one of the largest tax increases in history on working people. 

Our leader is a fucking painted clown, a joke, an impulsive and out of control fool, being enabled by unprecedented cowardice in what was once the Party of Lincoln and Reagan. ...

What else, Simon? Unfortunately, there's always more when a conman is dependent on hyping up a base of the vengeful and deluded.

We should not have to participate in a national suicide pact

Click to enlarge

Once upon time, not so long ago, mass shootings were relatively rare. Sure, the United States had a gun culture, but the carnage was much less. The red line that in the chart marks the year when a Republican-controlled Congress allowed the ban on civilian ownership of assault (military) weapons to expire. Whoopee -- now any nut with a bug in the ass can inflict carnage on a crowd. 

If the Supreme Court won't allow the vast majority of Americans to rein in the gun plague, we have to replace the Supreme Court. Their current reading of the Second Amendment is a nonsensical invitation to gun violence. Perhaps they should be required to wash the remains of shooting victims for burial in order to get paid?

The same goes for Republican gun fetishists. They are getting what they want.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I've lost track of the source for this excellent graphic. Looks like the Financial Times by way of someone I read. ?

Racist rats recur

Writing in Slate, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern denounces the cesspool of pseudo-intellectual racism from which the latest birther lies about Senator Kamala Harris' citizenship derive.

Why, then, do outlets like Newsweek and the Washington Post keep publishing articles that promote this lie? A coterie of racists based at the Claremont Institute hope that if they repeat it enough, they can leave the door open for a mass expatriation of second-generation Americans, most of them minorities. Indeed, there are few if any supporters of this falsehood who lack connections to the Claremont Institute. [John] Eastman is a senior fellow at Claremont and the founding director of its Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence. Josh Hammer, the Newsweek editor who commissioned the piece, is a former fellow at the institute. Michael Anton, who manipulated the text of a quote from the Senate debate over the 14th Amendment in a Washington Post op-ed to make this lie seem more credible, is a senior fellow there. (Anton may be best known as the author of “The Flight 93 Election,” published in the Claremont Review of Books, which condemned “ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners.”) Claremont “scholar” Edward J. Erler wrote a book arguing that the American-born children of Mexican immigrants have no right to U.S. citizenship, giving the idea greater exposure.

The Claremont Institute masquerades as an intellectual salon of the right, but it is really just a racist fever swamp with deep connections to the conspiratorial alt-right. It even granted a fellowship to Jack Posobiec, who helped promote the notorious Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Claremont’s resident bigots offer deranged fantasies of violently expelling Americans from their home country because of their ethnic backgrounds. Their work deserves the intellectual weight given to that of David Duke and his Nazi-loving fellow travelers.

The Claremont Institute has been at its dirty work for a long time. According to the L.A. Times, it was the breeding ground in 1996 for Prop. 209, California's ban on considering race in state college admissions and state contracting.

The measure began as an exercise by two academics, Glynn Custred and Tom Wood, encouraged by the conservative Claremont Institute think tank.

As a consequence of their ballot measure, the state has been unable to assure that Californians of all races and genders have equal opportunity. 

Presumably these con men will be active again, making up lies, during the fall campaign to pass Prop. 16 which repeal their handiwork. 

 

Thanks Donald!

Your incompetent response to the coronavirus has turned 60 percent of us into anti-vaxxers. That took some doing. Most of us knew at least vaguely we were glad to be living in a world without polio or smallpox thanks to vaccines until you came along and raised up the stupid.

Your handling of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic has been nothing but ignorant and venal. It's clear that you are either incapable or unwilling to understand the toll of COVID. Your interest in a preventative vaccine seems almost entirely about enhancing your own glory.

I don't know whether something you've labeled "Operation Warp Speed" can rapidly produce a safe and effective vaccine that I'd trust. "Warp Speed" is great in fiction, but careful science gets it done and you are devoid of acquaintance with either care or science.

This injury to our trust in science will have lasting consequences beyond the coronavirus -- even if we somehow don't see 300,000 U.S. deaths by the end of this year. Responding to human-induced climate change will require the best of our human analytical faculties -- which are organized and empowered as science.

This was preventable.

Historical farce

Once upon a time, there was a Kennedy who "advised American families to build bomb shelters to protect them from atomic fallout in the event of a nuclear exchange ..." That dangerous farce was 60 years ago.

Now we have a Republican Kennedy who argues again for bomb shelters.

“Well, the [former] vice president says he will transform America. He will. And the American people will pay a fearsome price. [Biden's] foreign policy is hugs and hot cocoa for America’s enemies. If he’s elected, my advice to you is to build a fallout shelter,” the Louisiana senator exclaimed, prompting [Sean] Hannity to do a double take.

“Build a fallout shelter,” Kennedy reiterated. “You’ll need it. ...”

Daily Beast

Pretty stupid argument for his party's President who has abrogated, ended, or broken every agreement restraining nuclear danger that he could get his mitts on: the multilateral agreement with Iran to halt their nuclear bomb development; the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) first signed by Ronald Reagan; and the Open Skies Treaty which allows the U.S. and Russia to fly over each other's territory to verify arms control agreements. And this Kennedy's current president seemingly aims to kill off the New START treaty with Russia which limits how many nuclear missiles each country can deploy.

Fallout shelters never were going to save anyone; the very real Cuban Missile crisis which nearly led to mass annihilation taught that first Kennedy that nukes were nothing to play games with. Of this, as of most everything but gilded gewgaws, this President knows nothing. Arms control treaties bring adversaries together to, at minimum, keep the talk going instead of the shooting. We need more, not less of them. This is something I do trust that Joe Biden knows.

Bull-bleep on behalf of cops and other stirrings

Dan Walters is what I think of as a classic curmudgeonly columnist. He's been writing in newspapers about California politics nearly forever -- since 1960 in fact. He's a smart old white guy who knows where a lot of bodies are buried, and he has a sharp eye for how power has worked. At this point he's also deeply cynical and out of tune with the hopeful, multi-racial, loosely left, California that is emerging. So, naturally, he gives voice to police unions' propaganda about why it would be terrible if racial justice reform chipped away at the cops' power.

It's not that Walters doesn't see a problem with policing: he calls out

... the cozy relationship between police unions and politicians and the laws and policies that protect violence-prone officers from consequences for their acts.

The unions get what they want from local and state officials, not only legal protections but generous salaries and pension benefits. The politicians also get what they want, campaign funds and union endorsements testifying to their crime-fighting credentials.

But right on cue, he insists that police unions are just like other public employee unions.

... the political clout that police unions have wielded in California for decades is no different from what other public employee unions have done. Universally, they seek more job security and increases in pay and fringe benefits for their members, and do so by supporting politicians who will deliver the goods, regardless of how it impacts the larger public.

If, therefore, we condemn the unhealthy relationship between police unions and politicians, we should subject other public employee unions to the same critical scrutiny.

Police unions have often blocked accountability for violent acts. Education unions flex their muscle to stifle competition and avoid accountability for how schools treat their neediest pupils. The outcomes of both damage the larger society.

Why, in Walters' view, cops are just like teachers!

Here he's equating organized teachers' fight to prevent private charter schools from sucking up public school funding with cops' demand for a protected right to beat, gas, and shoot persons they consider scary or uppity. Usually Black or Latinx persons. And to get paid well for this.

Walter's sleight of hand makes a false equivalence between a policy difference over how to achieve a socially agreed common good -- educating kids -- with perpetuating a license to harm without effective legal limits.

That is, he's spewing bull shit for the cops.

Many of us have long called out corrupt police unions defending indefensible behavior by some of their members. I certainly have. Too often these unions serve as toxic reservoirs of white (and usually male) resentment in a changing society. The labor movement at large is going to have to decide whether it can advance the interests of a multi-ethnic working class while treating police work as just another type of work for wages.

This is not a new dilemma. Because throughout the 19th century, police in the U.S. north had served as violent strikebreakers for bosses, the 1886 American Federation of Labor wanted nothing to do with organizing cops. (In the Jim Crow South, policing in that era meant local white sheriffs whose job was to maintain the racial hierarchy by force.) Labor journalist Steven Greenhouse explains that police officers only won the right to collective bargaining in the 1960s as part of a general expansion of labor organization among public employees. Once governments agreed to bargain with their police, a poisonous dynamic played out.

Initially, newly established unions focused on winning better wages and benefits. A major recession in the early eighties and the anti-tax fervor of the Reagan era caused budget crunches in many cities. Local leaders told police unions and other public-sector unions that they had little money for raises. In turn, the police demanded increased protections for officers facing disciplinary proceedings.

Since the eighties, police contracts in New York and many other cities have added one protection after another that have made it harder to hold officers accountable for improper use of force or other misconduct. Such protections included keeping an officer’s disciplinary record secret, erasing an officer’s disciplinary record after a few years, or delaying any questioning of officers for twenty-four or forty-eight hours after an incident such as a police shooting.

This is how you get a killer officer like Derek Chauvin still on the Minneapolis police force and training newcomers after 17 previous complaints.

Progressive unions within the laboring movement are edging up to the problem of how to deal with affiliates which act as bullies for white supremacy. SEIU President Mary Kay Haney has been willing to talk about expelling police groups. Though national union leadership, including AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, are flinching from a fight over police, plenty of progressive parts of the labor movement such as United Teachers Los Angeles, the second largest teachers organization in the country, want the police out.

One of the accomplishments of the Black Lives Matter movement has been to force organized labor to re-examine its allegiances -- to decide whose side it is on.

Mini-rant on ageism

I found myself driving along behind this today. Who's that? Big Brother? It struck me as creepy.

Apparently it is part of a campaign to End Ageism. The gent is identified as "Mario," a 65-year old Family Therapist. He doesn't strike me as particularly likely to have experienced age discrimination. Quite the contrary. White professional men frequently gain social stature in early old age.

In fact, they are just about the only people who, as a society, we think belong in leadership positions. At least, so the current political moment is showing us.

To be fair, the campaign promotes other people and other images, but why make this young-looking man the image of "leadership"? Some designer was being utterly banal.

And Mario staring from the back of a bus is just weird.

And then there were two more ...

Just when we were beginning to get down to a more reasonable number of Democratic presidential hopefuls, we get two more.

I'm offended. If they wanted to run, they should have joined the circus back in the spring and made themselves available to Democratic Party voters to assess in action.

I watched a version of Deval Patrick's announcement video. He might have made a strong candidate; he conveys a calm confidence that he can restore decency to the White House. I was reminded that when Doug Jones unexpectedly won his Alabama Senate seat in 2017, his campaign manager reported his greatest asset was giving voters a sense that he would reduce the crazy emanated by Trump. Patrick has some of that. But when he completed his terms as Governor of Massachusetts, Patrick disqualified himself by getting a job with the private equity vulture financial firm, BainCapital. Mitt Romney's old venue is not a recommendation to Democrats, even desperate "moderate" ones.

As for Michael Bloomberg -- sure, he's funded a lot of good gun control and some climate sustainability work. But hey -- we don't need a billionaire whose idea of good police work is "stop and frisk" treatment for thousands of Black and Latin men.

Go away guys. You missed your chance and you are not what we are looking for anyway. Oh -- and use your money to elect whoever is the legitimate Dem nominee.

Talk about burying the lede: success in life depends on where people settle

Why do journalists do this sort of thing? Emily Badger at The Upshot reports on a working paper from a team of economic historians at Princeton, Stanford and the University of California, Davis. They found that in every generation since the 1880s, children of poor immigrants (actually they say "sons") have been more economically successful than children of "similarly poor fathers born in the United States." That is, once immigrant families become established, many prove adept at getting ahead.

The adult children of poor Mexican and Dominican immigrants in the country legally today achieve about the same relative economic success as children of poor immigrants from Finland or Scotland did a century ago. All of them, in their respective eras, have fared better than the children of poor native-born Americans. If the American dream is to give the next generation a better life, it appears that poor immigrants have more reliably achieved that dream than native-born Americans have.

It would seem to me that the phenomenon that needs more study here is what's keeping poor native-born families from doing as well -- but that's not what this study is about.

The researchers examined whether their findings merely showed that first generation immigrants, learning a new language and culture, simply could not make much money, so the successes of their children stood out in contrast to the fathers. And they looked at whether second generation immigrants looked successful because the U.S.-born poor cohort to which they were compared included a lot of African Americans who suffer from the historic wealth gap arising from their family history of being enslaved and subjected to discrimination. But the apparent advantages of immigrant children still appear in the data when Black peers are left out of the comparisons.

So what's going on? Way at the end of Badger's article she explains: new immigrants tend to settle or move to places in the United States where the economy is strong and opportunity is greater.

So what else might explain this pattern that is so consistent through history and across diverse immigrant groups? The researchers point to one other factor that we know influences a child’s economic mobility — where he lives. Both documented and undocumented immigrants have tended to cluster in common international ports of entry, in major cities, in communities where jobs are easier to find. The places they have moved to have frequently been the same places that have offered better economic mobility to everyone.

In their data, when the researchers compare the sons of immigrants with the sons of native-born fathers who grew up in the same county, the difference in their mobility rates largely vanishes. This suggests that what separates these immigrant and native-born groups isn’t necessarily some quality inherent in their culture or work ethic, but rather their decisions on where to live.

Looked at another way, immigrants embody the upward mobility more native-born families in poverty might experience if they were more able or willing to move. In this way, immigrants have one significant advantage U.S.-born families don’t. They’re not bound by generations of family ties or by the feeling they can’t leave a particular place, whether things are going well there or not.

My emphasis. Immigrants do what residents of this rich land have always done if they could. They go where the getting is good; they "head out for the territory." Movement of people for a better life has always been how this country worked.

Like a lot of privileged white people, I can say I did this myself, trading in declining Buffalo, New York roots for mid-20th century California.

What needs sympathetic study is why some people can't, don't, or won't participate in the great national ebb and flow for better lives....
Meet a second generation immigrant who has found her niche -- and should be able to keep it, despite Trump's ugly attempt to expel her.

Where do names for wildfires come from?

Watching California burn from afar, I realized I didn't know the answer. Dr. Google came to my rescue:

Unlike hurricanes, wildfires are not named from a predetermined list. They are named by officials, who choose names based on “a geographical location, local landmark, street, lake, mountain, peak, etc.,” the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said.

Why name a fire? Officials said that quickly coming up with a label provides firefighters another way to locate the blaze and allows officials to track and prioritize incidents by name. ...

In most cases, the dispatch center sending the initial resources to a wildfire gets to name it, but sometimes that task falls to the first fire personnel on the scene, officials said. What they name it — well, that is up to them.

“You could have a fire by a landfill — and they might call it the Dump Fire,” Heather Williams, a Cal Fire spokeswoman said. “Sometimes the names come through and it’s like, ‘Really guys?’”

... Ms. Williams conceded that the more remote the area, the harder it is to come up with a good name. Fires sparked by lightning, in particular, can pose a challenge, she said. In those cases, officials may simply use the coordinates on a map grid to name a fire something like “R-15.” Most of those peculiar names, though, go under the radar.

“Twenty to 30 fires start on a given day,” Ms. Williams said, speaking about Cal Fire’s jurisdiction. “Only a handful reach the point that the public knows about them.”

Matt Stevens, New York Times

That's clear enough. But the way the media sometimes seize on the names and then repeat them endlessly without very precise geographical explanation may confuse as much as it helps.

For example, the San Francisco Chronicle touts its California Fire Tracker as the go-to source on wildfires. But getting information out of it requires already knowing the name and general area of the fire you want to track. They could do better.

Lobbying at work

You have to ask? I don't know what "too powerful" is, but it is dead obvious that AIPAC is plenty powerful enough to get a bunch of Congresscritters baying "anti-Semitism" every time anyone makes a modest criticism of Israel.

A new generation of people in the United States aren't going to put up with that. They treat Israel as a normal country, self-interested and too often willing to sacrifice human rights for (probably false) security. (You know, like the USA.) Legitimate friends of Jewish safety lose out -- as Palestinians have been losing for two generations now.

Headline ganked from the NYT. The article is very substantially better -- less biased and more informative -- than the headline.

Pet peeve post about water

Several of the aggressively hip progressive podcasts I listen to have an irritating new sponsor. You've probably encountered this company -- I won't give them a link, but for as long as I can remember, they've been pitching pitchers to filter your tap water if, for some reason, you think you need to do that.

But now they've got a new shtick: actually they are earnest environmental warriors seeking to save us all by reducing use of plastic bottles. You are promised a warm glow of social responsible when you buy their gadget.

Bullshit. They are selling a product we can and should be working not to need in the first place.

It's true that climate change threatens global water and that plastic bottles are filling landfills and polluting the oceans.

But what people need is access to healthy, adequate water which usually requires government organization and/or regulation. Way out in the countryside -- whether in the US or in the campo where I support El Porvenir helping local Nicaraguans -- local wells can still matter. But most humans live in developed urban areas and need developed water systems. And developed countries usually have such systems.

US tap water is far from perfect, though most of it is just fine to drink. In 2017 the Natural Resources Defense Council issued a report which found that about of fourth of us live in jurisdictions where water should be safer. But they don't tell us to go buy a filter pitcher. The title of the paper tells what we need to do: Threats on Tap: Widespread Violations Highlight Need for Investment in Water Infrastructure and Protections.

Bottled water may be a temporary last resort solution to bad supply. But if we want better water, we don't need either plastic bottles or fancy filter pitchers. We need collective public action to demand that public authorities do their jobs. At the water system level, city, state, and country governments are failing if the water is contaminated. Sometimes old residential plumbing systems are the source of dangerous pollutants: landlords should be held liable for pipes that contaminate; governments should be forced to assist building owners and householders to clean up their acts.

Individual filters -- however slick and hip -- treat a social problem as a consumer fashion accessory. Want cleaner water and less bottles? Jack up your politicians!

They depend on keeping our eyes off the prize

The media is agog about the "revelation" that Russia (and other intrusive actors?) successfully passed around all sorts of disinformation in various social media channels.

It's good to see some specifics nailed down I guess. I remember seeing fragments of the propaganda aimed at African Americans because I try to track Black friends on Twitter a little and visit that world, quietly. There were plenty of pitches to Blacks to just sit out the 2016 (and 2018!) election, building on the sad truth that very little freedom or dignity is won through the ballot box. But there were also plenty of pitches from Black leaders like @aliciagarza, @BreeNewsome, and @staceyabrams for folks to hold their noses and do the voting thing one more time -- because you can't throw away any tool, however weak and compromised, in the forever struggle for liberation.

If I'd been following folks in rural white communities, I'm sure I'd have seen the reverse campaign, touting Trump and the GOPers as the revenge of innocents who feel despoiled and desperate.

The Russian propaganda offensive works because it is aimed like a knife at exacerbating our existing injustices. We can be manipulated to do dumb stuff because we hurt and we feel powerless. Too much right wing consumer media and their funders -- and too many of our pols especially GOPers -- like to keep us that way: dumb and divided.

The remedy for this junk is broad collective action for liberation; when movements are true, they are hard for propaganda to throw off course, as the black sisters cited above are demonstrating.

Mean tweeter bird courtesy of Dabbled

It's about disreputable and respectable meaness

Paul Krugman offers his explanation of our Preznit's policy atrocities this morning under the headline Manhood, Moola, McConnell and Trumpism. One of the more endearing features of liberal US political discussion is that we think bad acts require explanation. It's one of our nicer attributes.

On a day when we read the story of a Guatemalan child who died after being left without food or water for hours by the Border Patrol and US envoys try to sell the joys of fossil fuel exploitation to an international climate conference, I think it is important to add a couple of additional Ms to Krugman's diagnosis: Trumpism is enabled and empowered by a Mob enjoying its own Meaness.

Lance Mannion writes a grand rant describing a large fraction of us.

It’s not just Trump. He is what he is, and that’s infuriating, but as I’ve said and has been said by wiser men and women, he’s the embodied expression of a general, and all-purpose hostility to having to be kind.

To having to care.

Trump’s cohorts of hideous men and women are a vindictive mob. They want to get even. They want to punish. But what they want to get even with is the world, which they have, quite rightly, recognized doesn’t care they exist. Who they want punished for this existential affront, however, is anybody and everybody they think is getting in the way of the world taking proper note of their existence and that turns out to be most of the rest of their fellow Americans and, although they’re apparently not aware of the irony, themselves as well, since the politicians they vote for to inflict the punishment don’t care about them and their existence except to the extent they are useful.

But Mannion insists that the active haters on the Trump train are not the whole of the moral catastrophe this small, damaged man spreads from his accidental perch. He is mining a familiar vein:

Trump assures his mobs that is ok to want revenge, it’s ok to hate. But he assures Republicans in general that they don’t have to care. As long as things are working out for them, whatever is happening to someone else somewhere else, everything’s fine, life is terrific, and America is great again. This is part of the essential message of almost every Republican politician since Coolidge. It will all work out if people mind their own business and others just mind theirs.

Meaness, both disreputable and respectable, is at the heart of our political sickness. As always, it is worth asking: who benefits?

Facebook rant

I'm feeling a little rant about Facebook. Why should I have to look at bullshit like what I've posted next to this?

Both these ads are obvious fakes. Both gents are alive and more or less kicking. But somebody pays Mark Zuckerberg to show them to me in the vain hope that I'll click on them.

And this crap is inescapable. I have no control over what turns up next to my feed -- and no control over what turns up in my feed. Twenty percent or so of that seems to consist of planted garbage from institutions that some friend incautiously "liked" at some point. I mean, I don't hate the National Geographic or Amnesty International, but if want to relate to them I can visit their digital premises. In no sense have I asked for them just because someone I know "liked" them once.

I didn't like AOL back in the day -- that ancient (1983-2009) connectivity service tried to give us a diminished internet selected to meet AOL's commercial needs. AOL mailed half the population floppy disks in the hope we'd sign on. Many did, for awhile, till they discovered they didn't need it to venture online. AOL merged with/purchased Time-Warner as the temporarily more valuable partner in 2000. But most of us wanted an unfiltered web and that old AOL died of disuse.

But the unconstrained potential of the web apparently was too much for us. These days most all of us have allowed ourselves to be corralled in Zuckerberg's stable. I'd never look at Facebook except that too many of my friends and acquaintances who want to comment on my blog seem to live there. I try to be polite and friendly. I show courteous interest in others. I respond if contacted. But dammit, the space is a commercial playpen! I'd be quite happy if I never had to look at it again.

Anyone want to tell me what is good about Facebook?

An expectations game: right, center, and left

Sometimes economists are just dopey. Apparently they've long been arguing about why cab drivers (and other contingent workers who can set their own hours and thereby earn variable pay) sometimes decide to "call it a day" when they might maximize their earnings by choosing a longer work day.

In one camp is a group of so-called behavioral economists who have found evidence that many taxi drivers work longer hours on days when business is slow and shorter hours when business is brisk — the opposite of what economic rationality, to say nothing of common sense, would seem to dictate.

In another camp is a group of more orthodox economists who argue that this perverse habit is largely an illusion in the eyes of certain researchers. Once you consult more precise numbers, they argue, you find that drivers typically work longer hours when it is in their financial interest to do so.

Academics who find it "perverse" or contrary to "common sense" that workers might choose how much to work based on how much they feel is enough for a day's work, apparently have never depended on an alienating job to put food on the table. Most people work most jobs in order not to have to work any more than they must. They have better things to do, above a certain minimum, than to increase the profits of the owners. This characteristic of life in a capitalist society is apparently invisible to economists, especially to those whose notion of human society begins and ends with fealty to rational maximization of economic life. What a sad and empty universe they inhabit!

It was interesting to read this article in juxtaposition with a big New York Times piece that discusses why younger African Americans (so-called "Obama surge voters") are failing to warm to Hillary Clinton or even see her as much preferable to the Donald, based on some leaked campaign focus group research.

The research is mildly interesting and well presented, intended to convince the Clinton campaign to approach these voters with a more positive argument. What it comes down to is that young African Americans, like many (even most?) younger voters, want someone to vote for, not to be told there is someone they must vote against. They want inspiring plans and aspirations, not another tired lesser evil.

Many of the 18-35 set are at their core more hopeful than their elders. Since they are also the generation whose outrage is driving the Movement for Black Lives, that underlying hopefulness is probably not the first characteristic that comes to mind in observing their culture of demand and protests. But at least for now, these are optimistic young people. Pollsters and sharp observers know this. Politicians will need to learn. They won't make any headway among them by preaching pragmatism, incrementalism, and "mature" choices. This is the same false picture of the human person that grips the rational choice economists. We are bigger than their cramped visions.

My friend Steve Williams wrestles with the implications for aspiring revolutionaries of holding fast to a broad hope for people and society:

... with the defeat of the socialist experiments of the 20th century, two generations of organizers and activists have now come of age politically with few visible and viable alternatives to imperialism and neoliberalism. The fight against the enemy, as trying as it has been, has been no more difficult than our internal struggle with the troubling idea that noble, doomed resistance may be all that is left to us. I’ve spent too many sleepless hours haunted by the fear that victory may be nothing more than an unattainable dream.

The danger in this insidious notion is profound. Without a clear conviction that another world is indeed possible, we resign ourselves all too easily to the idea that simply “putting up a good fight” is enough. We absolve ourselves of the responsibility of finding ways forward. We forgive our own shoddy, sloppy practice, just as we forgive our comrades’. We quickly lose all incentive for rigorous reflection on and evaluation of our work. We stop striving for improvement and excellence. The doubt takes control: what’s the point, anyway?

Black Lives Matter activists directly address the need to preserve an informed hope in the face of violence and oppression when they teach Assata Shakur's declaration of Black revolutionary faith:

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

The right is never likely to "get it", but both center and left (no, not together but in parallel) can hope to ride rising expectations, if they will dare.

Upgrade hell

If, like me, you cringe every time you get an upgrade nudge from your laptop or your phone, you are not alone. Yes, often, upgrading software and operating systems seems to break as much as it improves.

But we have the federal government's predicament as a horrible example of what happens when cost, inertia, and complex systems leave our technological infrastructure unimproved over time.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The government is spending about three-fourths of its technology budget maintaining aging computer systems, including platforms more than 50 years old in vital areas from nuclear weapons to Social Security. One still uses floppy disks.

... The Defense Department's Strategic Automated Command and Control System, which is used to send and receive emergency action messages to U.S. nuclear forces. The system is running on a 1970s IBM computing platform, and still uses 8-inch floppy disks to store data. "Replacement parts for the system are difficult to find because they are now obsolete," GAO said. The Pentagon is initiating a full replacement and says the floppy disks should be gone by the end of next year. The entire upgrade will take longer.

... Social Security systems that are used to determine eligibility and estimate benefits, about 31 years old. Some use a programming language called COBOL, dating to the late 1950s and early 1960s. "Most of the employees who developed these systems are ready to retire and the agency will lose their collective knowledge," the report said. "Training new employees to maintain the older systems takes a lot of time." Social Security has no plans to replace the entire system, but is eliminating and upgrading older and costlier components. It is also rehiring retirees who know the technology.

There's much more at the link.

I'll try to remember this every time I resist a prompt to upgrade. I can learn to do things technological a new way -- yes, I can -- yes, I can... But don't ask me to be happy about it. My tech is a tool, not a life.

Ease up, sister ... look before you shriek!

It happened to me again yesterday. While running the trails in Golden Gate Park, I stopped in at the public restroom at the Beach Chalet. Whew! -- no line out the door. On weekend afternoons sometimes these facilities are overwhelmed by restaurant and brew pub customers. But not this time ...

I step inside and a small blonde woman pipes up: "You're in the wrong restroom."

"No, I am not!" Fortunately a stall opened up just then and that's the end of it.

Often I'm a little more communicative when I encounter this gender anxiety. But hey, I was running. I was wearing nondescript, non-gendered running clothes. I look like a tall, old lesbian who doesn't give a damn what the world thinks about her appearance when she is trotting about outside. I look that way, because that's who I am, which I think is quite good enough, thank you very much.

All this to say, these stupid, vicious bathroom bills like the one in North Carolina are not only an attack on transpeople, although they are certainly a direct attack on the humanity of transpeople.

These measures are an attempt to shore up crumbling rules about gender presentation which seek to constrain many of us. But human beings are almost infinitely variable. If we were free to notice, most of us would not exactly fit conventional social definitions or what is a "man" or what is a "woman." Gender is a spectrum -- and some people aren't even on it, experiencing themselves as "non-binary." We can get over enforcing gender rules on other people ... or on ourselves.

A donation

The makers of Budweiser are donating 51,000 cans of water to Flint. The people of Flint certainly need all the help they can get.

This seems a better use of perfectly good water than using it to formulate the swill Anheuser-Busch passes off as beer.

It would also be nice to see some corporate political muscle behind sending the Michigan governor and his cronies to jail for poisoning children.

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.