Mime Troupe in Dolores Park

Summer is truly here -- the San Francisco Mime Troupe performed today in Dolores Park. Mirabile dictu, it was warm and sunny. (Too often the fog sweeps in.) The show drew a terrific crowd.

I'll let the Mime Troupe describe this summer's offering:

For the Greater Good, or The Last Election
Pity the poor 1 per cent. Abused in that sliver of press they don't own, condemned in the streets by a rabble who don't appreciate the benefits of being trickled down upon, and raked over the coals by the few politicians who aren't lined up to kiss their wealth and power. Talk about an oppressed minority! Finally, someone is stepping up to tell the story of these steaming sacks of benevolence as the San Francisco Mime Troupe presents For the Greater Good, or The Last Election, a tale that will warm the heart of every billionaire. Based on the classic 19th century melodrama The Poor of New York, the Troupe turns the story on its head, telling it from the point of view of the misunderstood Godzillionaires who have made this country what it is today: broke.

This show was not the best effort I've seen. The sound system was grossly inadequate to reaching an audience of this size; too often, the play narrated its themes rather than showing them.

But seeing the Mime Troupe means summer has arrived to thousands of San Franciscans ... when the weather cooperates, it's a satisfying ritual.

Holiday!

Enjoy however you celebrate!

Warming Wednesdays: U.S. summer is "what global warming looks like"

Not doing much good.

This post is for my friends sweltering on the Atlantic seaboard, frying in Chicago, or breathing smoke in the Rockies.

From Time magazine:

If you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, scientists suggest taking a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks.

Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts. Flooding from giant deluges. And a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho. ...

So far this year, more than 2.1 million acres have burned in wildfires, more than 113 million people in the U.S. were in areas under extreme heat advisories last Friday, two-thirds of the country is experiencing drought, and earlier in June, deluges flooded Minnesota and Florida.

"This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level," said Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona. "The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about."

Go read the rest.

Despite every other legitimate concern, we cannot ignore that our economic and social system is rapidly making the planet less habitable. So I will be posting "Warming Wednesdays" -- unpleasant reminders of an inconvenient truth.

Trading places: cities and exurbs

It's not hard for me to believe the headline story in Alan Ehrenhalt's The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City -- I'm living in the middle of it. Ehrenhalt documents the choice by many contemporary younger people to move into central cities instead of fleeing to the suburbs as their parents largely did.

Increasingly over the past decade, both before and during the recession, people with the resources to live wherever they wished began choosing to live near the urban center --- just as Viennese, Parisians, and Londoners at the turn of the previous century elected to do. This will have significant social consequences, especially when it comes to daily communication and casual social life. Central-city dwellers who have the option of communicating with friends almost entirely by electronic device will also have the option of socializing on the street or in neighborhood cafes in ways that suburbanites do not get the opportunity to do. Many of them will be drawn to the urban center by precisely that opportunity.

So true -- explore San Francisco's Mission District these days and you can wander from breakfast spot, to hip cafe, to upscale ethnic restaurant, to neighborhood bar. The 'hood is full of new energy (and money). As a long time resident, I try to appreciate the newcomers rather than resent them. They are adding delight to the place, yet I have to wonder where my less affluent neighbors are going.

But, despite its title, Ehrenhalt's survey of cities is actually more wide-ranging and, to me, interesting than just a nod to contemporary hipster-villes. Who knew that Manhattan's Wall Street has become a bedroom community where office space has been converted to condos?

… In some ways, lower Manhattan in the early twenty-first century has come to resemble lower Manhattan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth: brokers, investors, and insurance agents who live in the neighborhood and walk to work; a social life that does not disappear at quitting time, the way it did twenty years ago; a modest but growing number of families with young children. …It would be foolish to extend the analogy too far, but it's perfectly true to say that conviviality has returned to the Financial District. … this is a neighborhood, then, but is it a community? …it genuine -- or is there something artificial about it?

That is a question on which reasonable people may disagree. One can argue that the astronomically high average income of the people who bought residences in the Financial District mandates an inequality that will prevent it from becoming a true neighborhood in the sense in which most of us understand that term. The public school population in lower Manhattan does not mirror the public school population in other parts of the city. Or one can look at the growing vibrancy of the streets and decide that the rudiments of genuine neighborhood life are present, regardless of the economic imbalance of those living in the buildings. Street life is perhaps the most crucial aspect of the urban revival of the twenty-first century, and street life is not dependent on demographic equality. …

I have long noticed that people of color are settling in suburbs (I'm a Californian, ahead of the game, after all). That's where many of my former neighbors have gone. That is also where new immigrants go today.

In 1970, a majority of foreign-born newcomers to this country were settling in cities. By 1980, more were settling in the suburbs, although relatively few demographers were paying much attention. Today, the numbers aren't even close. In 2005, it is estimated, 4.4 million immigrants went to suburbs and 2.8 million to cities. …

Gwinnett County outside Atlanta is one such destination, a county of strip malls and striving Asian Americans.

One of Ehrenhalt's most interesting conclusions is that cities that have been hospitable to immigrants have been the most successful. Philadelphia serves as an example of a city where immigration didn't happen, in his telling due to tax policies that constrained property transfers.

Philadelphia was once a city of immigrants, attracting Irish and Germans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and Italians in the early twentieth -- in 1910, a quarter of its population was foreign-born. But it did not become a magnet for immigrants in the years after immigration restrictions were lifted in 1965. While Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago were being remade during those years as multiethnic communities, Philadelphia remained through the 1990s a place where demography and politics were almost entirely a matter of black and white. …

And even though the numbers have picked up, what matters most is that during the years when the row-house neighborhoods were losing their original home owners, there was no significant immigrant cohort available to revive them.

All of this is fine -- but what happens to poor people? After all, the last decade seen a significant rise in the number of poor people? In the country of the Great Inversion, they may find themselves stuck without transportation or decent jobs in exurbs with little tax base, adjacent to the longstanding rural poor.

Reviews of this book tell me that Ehrenhalt developed his theories at least in part by spending ten years walking U.S. cities. It shows -- his story is vivid. Like watching the changes in my own neighborhood, it made me both happy and uneasy. Should I ever get a chance, I want to walk many of these places and feel for myself how cities are changing.

Mexico is close by ...

Not everyone is happy about the results of the presidential election in Mexico. Opponents of the victorious candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) -- Enrique Peña Nieto -- demonstrated at 24th and Mission Streets in San Francisco Monday afternoon. The PRI ruled Mexico for 71 successive years in the last century, becoming a spent force for progress, finally synonymous with corruption and electoral fraud.

The Mission District protestors carried signs from the movement YoSoy132. According to Julian Aguilar of the Texas Tribune:

Doubts that a new PRI means anything significant for Mexico have been brewing, particularly among the country's youth and a movement called YoSoy132 (I Am the 132). Though the group, which largely supports [unsuccessful leftist candidate] Lopéz Obrador, was founded by college students, it has now grown to include anyone who opposes the PRI, and Peña Nieto specifically. On Saturday, thousands in the movement descended upon Mexico City’s Plaza de Las Tres Culturas, the site of the country’s massacre in 1968 when student protesters were gunned down by military and police.

Victor Leon, 33, vowed to put the pressure on the PRI despite early reports that Peña Nieto would ascend to Los Pinos, the country’s presidential palace.

“We are committed to staying unified and moving forward with a pacifist movement,” he said.

Homo ludens: the playful creatures that we are

A friend smiles in delight atop a small mountain.

Last night I sat with the dozen or so women members of my long standing women's group, discussing our lives. These days, the topic is often retirement -- when, if ever, this life change will arrive and what we'll do when it does. Those who have already retired (not me!) run the gamut from hyper-involved in the life of their communities to busily exploring inner depths they'd never had time for when employment ruled their schedules.

Maybe we should all be pondering the wisdom of cartoonist and satirist Tim Krieder writing in the New York Times Opinionator series:

“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write “Childhood’s End” and think up communications satellites.

My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment....

This is definitely a "go read it all" essay. The guy has a vision I can get behind.

A former warden speaks against the death penalty

Jeanne Woodford was the responsible official who carried out four of the 13 executions that have taken place under California's 1978 death penalty law. She knows the law isn't delivering. Now she is the lead proponent of the SAFE California Act, a November ballot measure that will replace the death penalty with sentences of life without possibility of parole.

Full disclosure: I am working for the campaign. If posts become erratic here, blame the hard work of an election season.

Michelle gets into God and democracy

You want more God with your politics -- how about this?

First lady Michelle Obama Thursday offered a rare public reflection on her religious faith, telling a conference of the African Methodist Episcopal church that the life of Jesus Christ is a model for democratic organizing.

"It's kind of like church," Obama said. "Our faith journey isn't just about showing up on Sunday for a good sermon and good music and a good meal. It's about what we do Monday through Saturday as well, especially in those quiet moments, when the spotlight's not on us, and we're making those daily choices about how to live our lives.

"We see that in the life of Jesus Christ. Jesus didn't limit his ministry to the four walls of the church," she said. "He was out there fighting injustice and speaking truth to power every single day. He was out there spreading a message of grace and redemption to the least, the last, and the lost. And our charge is to find Him everywhere, every day by how we live our lives."

Obama, who is not a regular churchgoer, said citizenship like the practice of faith is "not a once-a-week kind of deal."

"Democracy is also an everyday activity," she said. "And being an engaged citizen should once again be a daily part of our lives."

ABC News, June 29

There are a lot of good reasons to not want politicians waving God around. I have heard young evangelical Christians sing happily that "my God is greater than your God," confident they are praising their Lord. In fact they are setting up the prerequisite for the oppression of the wrong-believers and the unbelievers.

But a politics that does not spring from some kind of moral vision -- some kind of generous moral vision -- is just narrow self-interest projected on society. The magic of the market, the extraordinary abundance we enjoy thanks to invention and competition, can blind us to the necessity to extend community to all and to bind ourselves together. That's what a democratic polity does when it is working. It's hard, but the alternatives are horrifying.

I am already curious what the First Lady might do when she finds her feet in a post-presidency. Not until after four more years, of course. But freed from the need to measure every word, what will Michelle do?

Obamacare upheld; now what?

You can almost see the invisible crown above that smug face.
Since I've written so much about the ACA mystery house that Congress and the Prez erected to extend availability of health care to significantly more of us, I suppose I must comment. Thoughts, in no particular order:

• Now we know, if we didn't already, that our system of government has become something of a revolving monarchy. Yesterday one judge got to decide for the country who has a chance and who dies among millions of people. (Yes, I know, some days we have other kings -- Presidents and maybe spooks and generals. And last decade we had a VP acting as king. We do monarchy these days.) Didn't we once fight a revolution against that sort of unaccountable power? Oh, no, I misunderstood -- we fought a revolution so rich people wouldn't have to pay taxes to the king …

• Why did yesterday's king do what he did, endorse something he obviously detests? There are theories. Maybe he wanted to immunize his court from the charge of being nothing but a Republican obstacle to the progress of the nation? Maybe he harkened back to his days a legal flack for insurance companies and hospitals -- the health care corporations that stand to profit from the ACA? Or , just maybe, he recognized that if he weren't Chief Justice of the Court he wouldn't be able to get health insurance himself, being 57 and having experienced a small seizure?

• What will the limitations the court imposed on extending Medicaid do in the real world? Apparently "states rights" are so sacrosanct that seven judges were willing to allow miserly states to opt out of providing help to poor people for acquiring health care. If the obvious candidate states opt to maintain their ideological purity and reject Federal help to extend care, some 2 million people in Texas and nearly as many in Florida will still be without access to doctors in the next decade. That's okay with seven Supremes. Somebody has to compromise you know -- our monarchs will compromise them.

• Mitt Romney the Republican candidate can now spend the campaign running against Mitt Romney, the Massachusetts governor. Let's hope his grudging Tea Party fan boys find this confusing.

• I will boldly predict that the health care law decision will play little role in deciding who gets elected President. People already hate it, love it, or tolerate it. But mostly, no one believes in it. Whoever thought it was a smart idea to enact something that would not begin to help people for four years condemned this initiative to long term controversy. Perhaps this was someone who never had to worry about getting health care -- like all our elites?

Friday cat blogging

Morty knows I'm coming ...

Two beers

Haven't done one of these posts in awhile. Here in San Francisco, even restaurants that really would prefer to sell you a good bottle of wine frequently offer unconventional (if expensive) beers. Here are two I've enjoyed lately.


Great can. Aooni is tasty for a Japanese beer. Some reviews call it "bitter" but I just thought it had a bit more flavor than many IPA-type brews that appear this light colored.


This "Seat of the Devil" is bottled in Sardinia by Birrificio Barley. It's a bit caramel flavored. Not sure it is worth $18 a bottle, but interesting.

On the road today. Politics return tomorrow.

Warming Wednesdays: a locally owned electric coop?

They sat at a table outside a supermarket, hawking memberships in an electric power cooperative. Their motto, from the Vineyard Power Cooperative website:

"Own your power -- take control of your energy future."

Their hope:

to produce electricity from local, renewable resources while advocating for and keeping the benefits within, our island community. 

Our host on Martha's Vineyard bought into this alternative utility company at its beginnings; she paid a $75 fee, she thinks. Today the buy-in price is $150; it will rise to $975.

What do you get for your money? Not electricity, yet. You get the satisfaction of trying to launch a replacement to the greedy energy behemoths. You are helping to demonstrate that clean(er) renewable electric generation is possible. You are doing the right thing and maybe your investment is a sign of things to come. You show you understand the limits of our climate-destroying energy system and you are willing to do something. There are a lot of less socially useful things you could do with your money.


Vineyard Power's most visible project to date is this solar array at Cronig's (a supermarket) parking lot in the town of Vineyard Haven. According to their website,

This 210kW photovoltaic installation - to be built in two stages - will produce over a quarter of Cronig's electricity, equal to the combined usage of about 35 average Vineyard homes. 

The cooperative is bidding on blocks of offshore ocean area in which to build wind turbines. Their target blocks are far further away and probably less controversial than those being developed by Cape Wind.


For the moment, what you can do in Cronig's parking lot is plug in your electric car, if it uses this kind of connector.***I'm something of a skeptic about the world-changing potential of small cooperatives. I've seen organic vegetable coops come and go, popularizing better food, but ultimately succumbing to the market power of huge competitors. Likewise, back in the days when women were frequently denied credit, I helped start a couple of credit unions oriented to doing business by and for women. These thrived for awhile, them died of poor management and small scale. It's really hard for niche marketers to survive in the big bad capitalist world, though they can popularize good ideas.

If I were a Vineyarder, I'd buy in to Vineyard Power. But I'd consider it an ideological donation --worth the current low price, but not much higher. Joining up would make a statement about where we need to go to produce safe energy. That's one among a multitude of initiatives that need to be done.

A former President indicts his country's human rights record

You might think a scathing oped by an 87 year old former President would get some notice -- but Google Trends shows no particular attention to this piece from the New York Times. Some choice excerpts from Jimmy Carter:

Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended. This development began after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has been sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public. …

With leadership from the United States, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948 as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” … The declaration has been invoked by human rights activists and the international community to replace most of the world’s dictatorships with democracies and to promote the rule of law in domestic and global affairs. It is disturbing that, instead of strengthening these principles, our government’s counterterrorism policies are now clearly violating at least 10 of the declaration’s 30 articles, including the prohibition against “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Recent legislation has made legal the president’s right to detain a person indefinitely on suspicion of affiliation with terrorist organizations or “associated forces,” a broad, vague power that can be abused without meaningful oversight from the courts or Congress (the law is currently being blocked by a federal judge). This law violates the right to freedom of expression and to be presumed innocent until proved guilty, two other rights enshrined in the declaration.

In addition to American citizens’ being targeted for assassination or indefinite detention, recent laws have canceled the restraints in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to allow unprecedented violations of our rights to privacy through warrantless wiretapping and government mining of our electronic communications. Popular state laws permit detaining individuals because of their appearance, where they worship or with whom they associate.

Despite an arbitrary rule that any man killed by drones is declared an enemy terrorist, the death of nearby innocent women and children is accepted as inevitable. … We don’t know how many hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed in these attacks, each one approved by the highest authorities in Washington. …

Meanwhile, the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, now houses 169 prisoners. About half have been cleared for release, yet have little prospect of ever obtaining their freedom. American authorities have revealed that, in order to obtain confessions, some of the few being tried (only in military courts) have been tortured by waterboarding more than 100 times or intimidated with semiautomatic weapons, power drills or threats to sexually assault their mothers. Astoundingly, these facts cannot be used as a defense by the accused, because the government claims they occurred under the cover of “national security.” Most of the other prisoners have no prospect of ever being charged or tried either.

President Carter laments that these crimes against international law, domestic law, and common humanity undermine the moral influence of the United States. That is, he's still a defender of United States' preeminence. But what if we've become indefensible? That's the question for the next generation.

Go read Carter's entire indictment.

Photo shows the former President stumping for his son in 2006 in Reno, Nevada. The younger Carter lost that election; the former President was still a vigorous champion.

Sausage-making at the birth of the nation

Historian Pauline Maier's Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 left me wondering whether our fundamental government structure could have been put in place if the 24/7 news cycle, the internet, blogs, and accompanying public agitation had existed in the late 18th century. The Constitution excited passions, but the sheer length of time it took for news and people to travel ensured that the fights were localized, first in the various lightly populated jurisdictions within which delegates were elected to ratifying conventions, and then in the state conventions themselves. Nine states were required to bring it into force; eleven states eventually came along (and the laggards gave in) but the process involved the kind of compromising and legislative sausage-making that looks mighty ugly on close inspection.

The Constitution itself was written by an assembly of delegates in Philadelphia who closed their deliberations to the public. There they worked out numerous compromises, some very unpopular. There was to be a Senate, an undemocratic body whose members would be chosen by state legislators rather than directly elected; would serve for six year terms which were considered very long; and would include two members from each state without regard for relative populations. There was the notorious (the adjective was applicable, even then) compromise that counted slaves as 3/5ths of a person for the purposes of electing Congressmen; moreover the Constitution allowed the continuation of slave importations for another 20 years. And the new government framework included no bill of rights, something some states already had in their founding documents. It was by no means a foregone conclusion that the Constitution would win favor with enough states.

Maier tells the story very much as it was lived; acrimonious state convention by successive state convention. Pennsylvania led off; its pro-Constitution leaders (the "Federalists") rammed an affirmative vote through over the objections of an angry minority who proceeded to carry their objections to successive state conventions. Massachusetts had one of the more democratic state conventions -- though Federalists had a clear majority, they determined not to create angry losers, listening to weeks of objections and accepting the idea the Constitution might need amendments after ratification. Virginia's convention was the most high-powered intellectually; neither side knew whether the other might have come in with a majority. Revolutionary War-era orator Patrick Henry spoke passionately (and lengthily) against the new system; James Madison honed his arguments in favor, arguments that came to be recognized as the most complete rationale for the structure. By the time New York elected its convention, Federalists and anti-Federalists had organized themselves into contending parties; the majority of the state's delegates were elected as opponents of ratification. Federalists were mainly located in New York City, representing large landowners, merchants and skilled tradesmen. The small-holder dominated, agricultural rest of the state wanted none of this novelty. But during their convention, they learned that nine states had already ratified. Moreover, New York's Federalists proved willing to listen to the need for amendments after ratification, finally carrying the day.***Maier's narrative is exhaustive and I found it somewhat dry and exhausting. Still there were numerous bits that gave me a more rounded sense of the country's early debates.

• Then as now, policy choices were often about whether proposed structures would lead to taxation. The people we revere as the Founders aimed to create a government with a wide power to tax; they couldn't imagine an effectual government without that power. Californians could take notice.

• George Washington had a nice turn of phrase for the push by some to hamstring the new federal government in favor of state governments; he called this effort attachment to their "darling sovereignties."

• Political action that properly deserves the label "grass tops" -- faux populism funded and inspired by elites -- is no novelty. Maier includes a fascinating account of New York City's "Federal Celebration" in which a huge procession pulled a scale model of a ship, the Hamilton. Fascinatingly, the parade's date was chosen in part so as not to clash with a Jewish holiday. I had no idea the Jewish population of New York so large that far back.

***The best of the debate over the Constitution drove its participants to try to discern thoughtfully what governance for a revolutionary people who charished "liberty" might look like. Because the Federalists won, they've largely written the history, so we are less aware what the other side was arguing for. With that in mind, I appreciated Maier's presentation of the arguments of Melancton Smith, a New York anti-Federalist, who offered a subtle alternative conception of who would best represent the people.

He proceeded to … describing the nature and function of representation in a republican government as he saw it. Representatives, Smith argued, should together be a microcosm of their constituents. They should "be a true picture of the people; possess the knowledge of their circumstances and their wants; sympathize in all their distresses, and be disposed to seek their true interests." That concrete knowledge of the people's needs and circumstances was better known by "men of the middling class of life . . . than those of a superior class" from which, he feared, the members of Congress would all be drawn. Smith described that "superior" or "first class in the community" as its "natural aristocracy," even though he knew his opponents would deny that any such class existed in the American republic. In every society, Smith explained, "birth, education, talents and wealth, create distinctions among men as visible and of as much influence as titles, stars and garters." Men so distinguished naturally command respect. They could also organize themselves more readily than the people at large. As a result, where the number of representatives was small and the districts large, elected offices would seldom go to substantial yeomen "of sense and discernment." A government controlled by the "few and great" would be, for the masses, "a government of oppression."

Smith denied suggesting that "the great" lacked honesty or principles. All men hold the same passions and prejudices, but the circumstances of their lives "give a cast to the human character." Men in "middling circumstances" had fewer temptations and were less able to gratify those they had. As a result, they tended to be "more temperate, of better morals and less ambition than the great" who consider themselves above the common people, demand respect, and have many of the same feelings as hereditary aristocrats. "Will anyone say" Smith asked, "that there does not exist in this country the pride of family, of wealth, of talents; and that they do not command influence and respect among the common people?" He did not propose to exclude such "natural aristocrats" from office, since "they would be more dangerous out of power than in it." Smith also conceded that they were more capable of grasping "extensive political and commercial information, such as is acquired. by men of refined education." A government should be "so framed" to admit such men "together with a sufficient number of the middling class to control them." He thought a representative body "composed principally of the respectable yeomanry" -- like the ratifying convention -- was "the best possible security to liberty" because the body of every nation consisted of that class, and when its interest was pursued "the public good is pursued."

Smith's position was the direct opposite of James Madison's in the tenth number of The Federalist. Madison saw the threat of majoritarian tyranny in the direct representation of a community's various interests.

***Reading this book, I found myself wondering whether I would have been a supporter or an opponent of the Constitution. Of course it wouldn't have mattered a whit -- women had no voice in these debates.***As is the case with many of the books I describe here, I "read" this one as an audiobook. This was not enjoyable. The reader seemed little interested in quite a dense text. But worse, he was addicted to a mispronunciation of the name of one of my ancestors who figured prominently. Mr. Elbridge Gerry, according to family lore, pronounced his last name more like the steel town in Indiana than like Ben & Jerry's. The mispronunciation is common, according to the Massachusetts Historical Society. It grated on my ear.

Too busy at the Gay Pride celebration to blog today

The SAFE California campaign is taking our message to the streets at San Francisco's mammoth festivities today.

I spent yesterday afternoon distributing these stickers. Conversations with my fellow citizens about the November ballot measure to replace the death penalty with sentences of life in prison without parole are fascinating, as usual.

There are some who feel that justice is impossible if the state doesn't reserve the right to kill people who commit awful crimes. But there are many who understand that our death penalty law has created a dysfunctional, expensive monster that isn't delivering either justice or safety.

They are not surprised to hear the 46 percent of murders and 56 percent of rapes each year are not solved, while money is lavished on keeping the death system going. When they think about it -- and, naturally, few do until we speak with them -- they readily believe it would be cheaper to just give offenders one trial and then life in prison. And very few of the folks we speak with are comfortable with the unavoidable risk that California could execute an innocent person.

Back to the streets ...

Saturday scenes and scenery: on the beach at Aquinnah

The path to the ocean runs across a grassy heath.


In this season, the grasses are remarkably purple. Does amber come later in the summer?


The clay cliffs are dramatic.


Even more so, up close.


This detail reminded me of the cliffs from which are cut the canyons of ancient Petra in Jordan.

The town of Aquinnah on Martha's Vineyard island in Massachusetts is the home of the Wampanoag tribe and also of secluded compounds enjoyed by wealthy summer residents. Its beach is worth walking in any season.

Friday cat blogging

Got to make sure the human doesn't slack off ... I'm never sure what I was supposed to be doing when I get that look.

Politically ambidextrous pick up truck

On the one hand, Obama is not trusted ...


On the other hand, Romney is scorned …


This washer and dryer mechanic is going to vote, but he doesn't cast his vote without weighing his choices.

On immersion in a psychotherapeutic Christianity

Psychological anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann has written a book that aims to

explain to nonbelievers how people come to experience God as real.

When God Talks Back presents a convincing thesis: with a boost from the cultural stew of the 1960s, many U.S. Christian evangelicals teach themselves to experience a feel-good God by practicing the feeling through prayer practices. That is, their God experience is all about feeling and practice.

…the remarkable shift in the understanding of God and of Jesus in the new paradigm churches of modern American Christianity is the shift that the counterculture made: toward a deeply human, even vulnerable God who loves us unconditionally and wants nothing more than to be our friend, our best friend, as loving and personal and responsive as a best friend in America should be; and toward a God who is so supernaturally present, it is as if he does magic and as if our friendship with him gives us magic, too. God retains his holy majesty, but he has become a companion, even a buddy to play with, and the most ordinary man can go to the corner church and learn how to hear him speak. What we have seen in the last four or five decades is the democratization of God -- I and thou into you and me -- and the democratization of intense spiritual experience, arguably more deeply than ever before in our country's history.

Luhrmann shares years of respectful participant research. She treats her subjects as sympathetic, intelligent people. The result is interesting, but the book left me with lots of questions.

• Does it ever bother any of these people that their image of God seems to be unequivocally masculine, always "he"? Luhrmann doesn't address the question, a common one in other contemporary faith explorations. And most of these evangelicals she describes seem to have been women -- though this may reflect that their culture is homosocial, so she had more access to women.

• Does it mean anything to these Vineyard Christians that one of the founders of their denomination was gay? For the record, this inspired hippie was named Lonnie Frisbee.

  … someone at Calvary asked John and Carol Wimber [Vineyard founders] over dinner whether they were able to deal with Lonnie's homosexuality with compassion. The next day Lonnie was fired from visible ministry. (To be fair, Lonnie was also married at the time. Pastors are not supposed to be having affairs.) Within months, he left the church and was more or less expunged from the historical accounts of both Calvary and the Vineyard. In the early 1990s, Lonnie Frisbee died of AIDS.

• How could U.S. culture have become so ahistorical, so intellectually solipsistic, that it is acceptable to educated adults to read the Bible without thought of its historical context? I'm just too much the historian to be able to imagine this.

  There is no sense that texts from the past hide from us behind authorial intentions we can no longer understand, or that they were written for a social and economic community we do not live in now. On Sunday mornings and in house group, we would read the most obscure and historical texts -- Judges, for example -- as if they were written for us, to help us understand how God wanted us to be with him. This is a common style of reading in evangelical churches.

It seems unfair to fault a book for not answering my questions -- Luhrmann has done a fine, approachable, thoughtful job of answering hers. But I finished When God Talks Back feeling that a lot was missing and wondering -- how can so many of my sister and brother Christians, for I am one of these too, live within a consciousness of God's goodness that so little challenges the conventional pieties and practices of life amid the wealth, power, injustice and violence of the contemporary empire? They cherish their Bibles.

…evangelical Bibles are scrawled on, highlighted, underlined, starred, stuffed with notes and Post-its, and personalized with the possessive aggression of an urban boy spraying graffiti on a wall. Mine.

But do these cherished Bibles change them -- or merely comfort them, merely serve as talismans denoting their essential lovableness? If the latter, contemporary complacent Christianity has birthed a strange fruit.

Warming Wednesdays: Romney v. the planet

Today's post is outsourced to the New York Times Sunday editorial.

Mr. Romney has plainly decided that satisfying his party’s antiregulatory base is essential to his political future. But the policies he espouses would be devastating for the country and the planet. If there are doubts on that point, the most recent findings from the International Energy Agency should dispel them: the agency reports an alarming one-year increase in global greenhouse gas emissions, largely because of increasing coal use around the world.

¶ The agency also said that keeping global temperatures below a dangerous threshold is “still within reach” if nations aggressively reduce fossil-fuel consumption while nurturing low-carbon alternatives. And where is Mr. Romney on that? Nowhere.

¶ The man who once worried about climate-driven sea-level rise in poor countries like Bangladesh now says things like “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet,” as if mainstream science were wrong and humans had nothing to do with it.

¶ On coal, the governor who once stood in front of a Massachusetts coal-fired power plant and said, “that plant kills people,” recently whirled through Craig, Colo., talking up coal and accusing President Obama of making it “harder to get coal out of the ground.”

¶ On oil and gas, Mr. Romney is wholly in the drill now, drill everywhere mode championed by House Republicans. If his spokesmen are to be believed, he would open up vulnerable and legally protected public lands to drilling. Despite his proclaimed belief in a competitive free-enterprise system — and his concerns about the deficit — Mr. Romney is determined to maintain the oil’s industry’s preposterous $4 billion-a-year tax breaks.

¶ When Mr. Romney talks about energy, he means what he calls “real energy” — he-man energy like coal, oil and natural gas, not what he contemptuously dismisses as Mr. Obama’s “imaginary world where government-subsidized windmills and solar panels could power the economy.” Or as he once said, “You can’t drive a car with a windmill on it.”

¶ Meanwhile, the self-described risk-taker who once touted clean energy as “an economic engine very much like biotech” now regularly denounces Mr. Obama for taking risks.

Will the people of the United States elect this horrid whore for the oil companies and the flat earth brigade? It looks too close to call at present.

Despite every other legitimate concern, we cannot ignore that our economic and social system is rapidly making the planet less habitable. So I will be posting "Warming Wednesdays" -- unpleasant reminders of an inconvenient truth.