Friday cat blogging

You might not think that a cat would choose to survey the world from the dubious comfort of a blue naugahyde perch, but Morty rather likes this spot.

Early 19th century United States elections: "Rousing the sluggish to exertion"

Brutal election ads are an old story; Andrew Jackson depicted as a jackass.

Since I work on mobilizing and turning out voters, I was delighted to encounter the phrase in this post's title, spoken by a party election operative, in Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought. Howe's volume chronicles the beginning of the two-party system (then Democrats and Whigs) in U.S. politics, the populist eruption associated with the President Andrew Jackson, and the communications revolution that enabled mass democracy.

His picture of the expansion is not of a sterile or decorous politics. The Democracy, as contemporaries labeled the Jacksonians, could verge on acting like a mob.

The typical antebellum American polling place displayed many of the worst features of all-male society: rowdy behavior, heavy drinking, coarse language, and occasional violence. (This rude ambience, in fact, was one of the reasons offered for excluding women from voting.) Commonly, two or three weekdays would be set aside for each election and declared holidays so men could come to the polling place and vote.

…Voting was sometimes oral and seldom secret. Even where written ballots were used, they were printed by the rival parties, each on paper of a distinctive color to make it easy for poll-watchers to tell which one a voter placed in the ballot box. A ballot would only list the names of the candidates of the party that printed it. To cast anything other than a straight party vote, a man had to "scratch his ticket' -- line out a name and write in a different one.

… When some states proposed requiring voters to register in advance, the Democratic Party generally opposed it. The prevailing electoral practices encouraged a large turnout, party line voting, and various forms of partisan cheating, including vote buying and intimidation. Absence of secrecy encouraged most men in each community to vote the same way. …

We have made some progress in running elections so as to give at least an appearance of fairness. Yet these unruly assemblages were creating a set of democratic realities then unequaled in the world. For one thing, the new nation rapidly did away with the property qualifications that even revolutionary 18th century political men had thought necessary to an orderly state.

During the years after 1815, state after state abolished property requirements for voting; the actions of Massachusetts in 1820 and New York in 1821 attracted particular attention. Historically, such qualifications had been defended as ensuring that voters possessed enough economic independence to exercise independent political judgment. Now, voting increasingly came to be seen as the right of all adult males, at least if they were white. Reflecting the new attitude toward the suffrage, none of the states admitted after 1815 set property requirements. The change in opinion largely antedated industrialization and typically occurred before a significant population of white male wage-earners had appeared. …

They usually excluded free black men from the broadened suffrage. They did not realize that their new rules would enfranchise an industrial proletariat and the large influx of immigrants who would begin to arrive in the 1840s, for they did not foresee the appearance of either. As a result, suffrage liberalization occurred in many places with relatively little controversy. …The widespread change in the conception of the suffrage, from a privilege bestowed on an independent-minded elite to a right that should be possessed by all male citizens, reflected in part the success of the American Revolution and general acceptance of its natural-rights ideology. …

Practical as well as principled considerations operated to broaden the suffrage in the young republic. Eager to attract settlers (who boosted land values), the newer states saw no reason to put suffrage obstacles in their path. Some of them even allowed immigrants to vote before becoming citizens. This in turn put pressure on the older states, which worried about losing population through emigration westward.

The increasingly effective system of communications -- canals, turnpikes, the telegraph and the national postal system -- changed politics: naturally skilled political operatives quickly figured out how to exploit new means of spreading their messages.

Political pamphlets had been around for a long time, and there were also political books, for campaign biographies appeared of every presidential hopeful; but the most influential segment of the political media was the newspaper press. By 1836, both administration and opposition newspapers flourished in all parts of the country. So long as they exempted slavery from criticism, they enjoyed freedom of political expression everywhere. …

On occasion, the communications revolution could itself become the subject of partisan debate. In 1832, the Senate spent a week debating a measure to grant all newspapers free postage. Supporters argued that it would promote political awareness among the electorate and help unify the nation. Opponents complained that it would enable people in the countryside to subscribe to big-city newspapers and undercut the local markets of the small-town press. The proposal went down to a narrow defeat, 22 to 23, with all Jacksonian senators voting no. Then as now, those who defined themselves as outsiders distrusted the influence of metropolitan opinion-makers.

In this system, heading up the Post Office became an office akin to leading Fox News in our day. President Andrew Jackson appointed a member of his kitchen cabinet, Amos Kendall, to this vital post. Kendall proceeded to use his office to build up his party.

In his nurture of the Democratic Party, Kendall synthesized the power of the press over public opinion with the power of patronage to create a network of self-interest. Although the customs offices, land offices, and Indian agencies all provided federal jobs, the postal system dominated the patronage machine that made the national Democratic Party work. The expansion of the Post Office thus fostered both the communications revolution and the development of a modern party system. Even before becoming its formal head, Kendall largely controlled appointments to branch post offices.

Though the period saw the rise of a bumptious democracy, it certainly was not only a time of broad empowerment for some. The new nation's popular program included stealing Native American land (the contemporary language was "Indian Removal"), entrenching African-American slavery, an aggressive war of choice to grab half of Mexico, and denying the first sputtering assertions of women's rights. This was not democracy for everyone -- yet it inspired a level of participation we have a hard time equaling. "Rousing the sluggish to exertion" ...

by fair means or foul, the party leaders did their job effectively enough that voter turnouts increased to the point where they compare favorably with those of today, despite longer hours of work and the difficulties of getting from the family farm to the polling place.

Milestones

U.S. Army Pfc. Michael McKinney, a combat infantryman with the 1st Platoon, Delaware Company, Team Apache, 1st Battalion, 501st Infantry Regiment, Task Force 4-25, climbs a hill during a patrol to search for weapons caches outside Saparah, Khost province, Afghanistan, Aug. 1, 2012. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Kimberly Trumbull/Released)

According to the New York Times, Specialist James A. Justice of the Army who died at a military hospital in Germany was the 2000th U.S. military death in the Afghanistan war.

Nearly nine years passed before American forces reached their first 1,000 dead in the war. The second 1,000 came just 27 months later, a testament to the intensity of fighting prompted by President Obama’s decision to send 33,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in 2010, a policy known as the surge.

... According to the Times analysis, three out of four were white, 9 out of 10 were enlisted service members, and one out of two died in either Kandahar Province or Helmand Province in Taliban-dominated southern Afghanistan. Their average age was 26.

The dead were also disproportionately Marines... Though the Army over all has suffered more dead in the war, the Marine Corps, with fewer troops, has had a higher casualty rate: At the height of fighting in late 2010, 2 out of every 1,000 Marines in Afghanistan were dying, twice the rate of the Army. Marine units accounted for three of the five units hardest hit during the surge.

Another Times article does point out:

Among [Afghan] civilian dead, estimates typically reach well beyond 100,000, but a precise reckoning is unlikely to ever be known.

Meanwhile USA Today reported:

[U.S.] Soldiers killed themselves at a rate faster than one per day in July, the Army announced Thursday. There were 38 deaths either confirmed or suspected as suicides, the highest one-month tally in recent Army history, the service said.

What was this war for, anyway? Does anyone remember?

Listen up

An old Maine veteran recognizes courage:

I couldn't see how anyone who had been in combat could ever be cruel to anyone again … it takes a great deal of bravery to be a lesbian … marriage is too precious a thing not to share.

Mainers United for Marriage are once again asking their fellow citizens to affirm that love makes a family. With ads like these, they have a chance in November. It's enough to remind a person that something very good can come from all this electoral sound and fury. Mainers need our help.

Where are they now?

The people in this picture are Iraqis we met in Damascus in 2006. They had fled the Iraqi city of Basra, when after the U.S. invasion of 2003, militias began a campaign of "religious cleansing." These Christians had lived side by side with Muslim neighbors, both Shi'a and Sunni, all their lives, but in the chaos of war, community broke down. They saw friends and relatives killed and they fled.

Their lives in Syria were hard. Syria would not allow them to work, but at least it allowed them to live unmolested. Their children had little future, but they were alive.

The current violence in Syria is particularly devastating to the still large population of Iraqi refugees who had fetched up there. Cathy Breen from the Catholic Worker community in New York has worked with displaced Iraqis in Syria for years. She describes their situation:

“Can you help us!” cries the voice over the phone from Damascus. “
There are explosions and killings in our neighborhood. We are afraid
to leave the apartment. Where can we go?” I have no words to
advise or comfort them. We are helpless to know how to intervene on
their behalf.

Many months have passed since I last wrote you. Reports of the tragic
plight of Syrians having to flee the violence of their country have
been filling the media. The UN has officially asked neighboring
countries to remain open to Syrians. But the same countries are
closed to Iraqis, and the media is silent regarding the precarious
situation of Iraqi refugees in Syria. They have no option other than
to return to Iraq…. to the country from which they were forced to
flee.

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t receive an email or desperate phone
call from Iraqi refugees we know in Syria, from trusted Iraqi
translators who know them, or members of their families living here or
in Canada. I just received news that yet another Iraqi refugee
family in Syria has returned in desperation to Iraq. In haste they
took one of the free planes sent by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al
Maliki from Damascus to Baghdad.

A UN refugee agency official reported on Tues, Aug. 7th that more than
22,000 Iraqis have fled the violence in Syria for their home country
in less than three weeks. (AFP, Aug. 7, 2012, The Jordan Times). And
we see the violence in Iraq escalating. In June of 2012, at least 544
people were killed in Iraq. Last month, July, the death toll was at
least 325, with 700 wounded. We are fearful for the well-being of
those returning. Will it be like going from the frying pan back into
the fire?

Just recently an Iraqi family with three little boys and a one-year
old daughter returned to Iraq. Iraqi children were being kidnapped
with break-ins and killings escalating in their neighborhood outside
of Damascus proper. About two weeks ago, they related to us that
they are now back in Iraq, in a dangerous area going from “friend’s
house to friend’s house.” While in Syria they were accepted for
resettlement to the U.S. They want to know what hope, if any, there
is for them?

Breen can be reached by email at this link.

Sitting comfortably oceans away, people in the United States can forget about our shameful war of destruction without purpose on the people of Iraq. We should not be surprised if others cannot.

A new country: speed, communications, and hope

A communications revolution is the underlying theme of historian Daniel Walker Howe's volume covering the years 1815-1845 in the Oxford History of the United States: What Hath God Wrought. The title phrase is what inventor Samuel F. B. Morse tapped out as the first long distance demonstration of his brand-new telegraph. Along with canals, railroads, turnpikes, newspapers, and the Post Office, the new means of interacting changed society, religion and human horizons in what was still a new, vast and deeply experimental democracy.

This is not the most tightly drawn narrative among the volumes of the monumental Oxford History that I've read. Howe sometimes seems to jump from topic to topic, offering a dab of economic history here, a literary tidbit there, mixed with a smidgen of expansionist early American imperialism as a side dish. I suspect that 30 years from now this volume may seem anachronistic, a reading of this slice of early United States history extremely resonant of the concerns of the first decade of 21st century during another communications revolution, but perhaps missing other not currently obvious unifying themes. But that's just an intuition; I nonetheless was gripped by the variety interesting information Howe offers and will be sharing some some over several posts.

Here's an introductory sample of the sort of observation that makes this such an insightful commentary on the present:

In 1837, Emerson had published his ode for the monument to commemorate the Battle of Concord "Here once the embattled farmers stood / And fired the shot heard round the world." The memorable lines were hyperbole -- the sound of the American Revolution resonated around the Atlantic but not the Pacific.

James Marshall's discovery of gold in the Sierra had a better claim to triggering an event in global history. California was the first state to be settled by peoples from all over the world. (Indeed, it remains the most ethnically cosmopolitan society in existence today.) Endowing an occurrence in such a remote place with global historical consequences were the nineteenth-century developments in communication: the mass newspapers that publicized the finding, the advertisements that sold equipment and tickets, the increased knowledge of geography and ocean currents, the improvements in shipbuilding. Although the travel times to California seem long to us, the Gold Rush of 1848-49 represented an unprecedented worldwide concentration of human purpose and mobilization of human effort.

To those who lived through it, the well-named "Rush" seemed a dramatic example of the individualism, instability, rapid change, eager pursuit of wealth, and preoccupation with speed characteristic of America in their lifetime. It also testified to the power of hope, and hope built the United States.

That is, according to Howe, our state, so recently seized from Mexico in an aggressive war of choice, was already in 1848 playing the role it still often fulfills -- exploring the cutting edge of technological and human invention. Then as now, the rest of the world looked on in mixed envy, delight and horror -- and then often emulated us. I wish he'd given a citation for the assertion that California is still the "most ethnically cosmopolitan society in existence" -- not that I can name a rival off the top of my head.

It's never boring being a Californian. ***Further posts about this monumental book will take up Howe's depiction of pre-Civil War politics (these folks invented political parties and mass democracy) and their religious enthusiasms and conflicts. Like Howe, I find his subject matter too broad for a simple, short entry.***Other volumes in the Oxford History I've written about here include: Empire of Liberty and Freedom from Fear.

Many death penalty opponents were once supporters

Something I've learned from working on the current campaign to replace California's death penalty with life in prison without parole as the sentence for heinous killers: people who have seen up close how the death penalty works (or fails to work) are some of the most articulate supporters of Prop. 34. They know we could do better at using our resources to move toward justice that works for everyone.

I've passed along previously the reflections of Ron Briggs who worked to pass our current death penalty and of Donald Heller who wrote the law. They have been key movers of Prop. 34.

Retired California Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno describes himself as supporting the death penalty. While on the court, he voted to uphold some 200 death sentences. But he thinks it is time for California to give it up. In the official ballot arguments for Prop. 34, he asserts

“… there’s no chance California’s death penalty can ever be fixed. The millions wasted on this broken system would be much better spent keeping teachers, police and firefighters on their jobs.”

Recently he elaborated:

“I would think that we could fix the system, make it more efficient and actually faster, but I just don’t see that coming anywhere in the future,” said the former justice, a Gray Davis appointee who retired from the court in February 2011. “In California the people may be willing to support the death penalty in principle but they’re not willing to fund it.”

The costs amount to $184 million a year, according to a study last year co-written by another death penalty supporter, Arthur Alarcon, a judge on the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That covers the extra expenses of trials, appeals and maintaining a Death Row that now houses 725 inmates. On average, their cases take more than 20 years to decide — prompting Moreno to observe that when death sentences get overturned, “I don’t see how you can realistically retry those cases.” Death penalty appeals also take up more than 25 percent of the caseload of the state Supreme Court, which automatically reviews every verdict in a capital case.

Enough. In November we get a chance to end this broken system, to ensure we never execute an innocent person, and to stop this waste of California's scarce tax dollars.

Saturday scenes and scenery: the fallen

I find these very upsetting to encounter as I wander about town. If I were a writer of fiction, I'd make up stories about them.


Bicycle down. Still intact as far as I can see, but how long will it remain that way?


This is more serious. As an urban driver who must part in small spots, I approach pulling into a space next to a scooter with terror. Just a nudge could knock the thing over. Perhaps that happened here.


This one was a bigger target -- could foul play have been involved?


This looks like a classic story line. Megaton monster meets slight object, apparently glued, not embedded, in concrete. But why hasn't someone moved it away from the curb or even walked off with it? I didn't do anything either.

LA musings

View out my window in Burbank.

I've been in Los Angeles this week. I've worked politically with folks here for many years and I've learned a few things that sometimes surprise people who haven't worked here. For example, in organizing volunteers to do electoral outreach, you have to understand that Angelenos don't have much of what I think of as "range." In other parts of the state, people think little of driving 20 or 30 miles take part in activities on an issue they believe in. Here, few will do anything that asks them to drive to a place a couple of towns over. You just have to accept this. They have a pervasive horror of the possibility of getting stuck in THE TRAFFIC.

And it can happen. It happened to me in a mild way the other morning on my way from Burbank to downtown LA. Sitting there on the freeway, penned in and not moving, I gradually realized that the tractor trailer next to me was pulling one of those aluminum 40 foot pens with holes all over the body -- and that inside the pen were what looked like hundreds of live hogs, presumably on the way to be slaughtered. We rested adjacent to one another for a few minutes, then the traffic unclogged and I pulled away.

Now that is a sight you'd never see within San Francisco city limits. The hog truck just wouldn't be there. Very few big tractor trailer trucks take the freeway through San Francisco because, with the city sitting out there on the tip of its peninsula, there is almost always a more efficient way to move freight north and south. In southern California, if you are going north and south, unless you are way out in the desert, you pass through some part of Los Angeles. So LA is integrated in the economic life of the region, both glamourous and grungy. Meanwhile San Francisco sits a little apart, wealthy to be sure, but not so immersed in life's productive grit, more a locus of brains and money on the move.

Thanks for the insight, hogs.

Friday cat blogging

Morty gets a rest this week. Instead, here's a scientific explanation and demonstration of how cats land on their feet. I would NEVER do that to Morty. Never.

H/t WonkBook.

Groping to name who we are

The Census Bureau is struggling to find survey terms that enable people to identify themselves according to "race" and "ethnicity" in the words that they themselves use. As the demographic mix of the country changes, the terms in which people understand their own identities also change. The result will undoubtedly seem jarring to some people, while to others it will simply state the obvious. According to Hope Yen:

The recommendations released Wednesday stem from new government research on the best ways to count the nation's demographic groups. …The research is based on an experiment conducted during the 2010 census in which nearly 500,000 households were given forms with the race and ethnicity questions worded differently. The findings show that many people who filled out the traditional form did not feel they fit within the five government-defined categories of race: white, black, Asian, Pacific Islander and American Indian/Alaska Native; when questions were altered to address this concern, response rates and accuracy improved notably.

For instance, because Hispanic is currently defined as an ethnicity and not a race, some 18 million Latinos – or roughly 37 percent – used the "some other race" category on their census forms to establish a Hispanic racial identity. Under one proposed change to the census forms, a new question would simply ask a person's race or origin, allowing them to check a single box next to choices including black, white, or Hispanic.

The other changes would drop use of "Negro," leaving a choice of "black" or African-American, as well as add write-in categories that would allow Middle Easterners and Arabs to specifically identify themselves.

I'm fascinated that many Latinos, just at the moment when they are making their communities felt within the national polity, apparently want to label themselves a "race." Historically in the United States, where "white" and "black" defined who was on top and who was held down, getting out of a race check box and assimilating as a kind of "white" was part of coming into full citizenship. But current Census research apparently finds that Hispanics or Latinos want to be called a "race."

Other interesting findings about our racial understandings turned up in this Census research:

• "Removing the term 'Negro' from the census form did not hurt the response rates of African-Americans. While some people in 2000 indicated that the term still had relevance to them, this number has steadily declined since then."

• "Under the proposed changes, the number of people who reported multiple races increased significantly. The multiracial population is currently one of the nation's fastest growing demographic groups."

• "When provided write-in lines, as much as 50 percent of people who checked their race as 'white' wrote in an ethnicity such as Italian, Polish, Arab, Iranian or Middle Eastern. More than 76 percent of black respondents also wrote in an ethnicity, such as Jamaican, Haitian or Ethiopian."

We care a great deal about racial categories, though we may not be entirely sure what we mean by them -- about whether we experience them as islands of solidarity, as cultural comfort zones, or as elements in a national mosaic. I'm most fascinated by the general insistence people are showing on naming their own race. As Cornel West preached, race matters.***Census categories used to describe "race" have been changed in every ten year version of the survey. There's a fascinating history of the evolving history of racial categories in this Wikipedia article. One of the consequences of changing racial definitions is that is hard to compare population numbers complied under different definitions.***What John Holbro at Crooked Timber pointed out may hold another clue to our emerging national identities:

… here’s my one thought, after the Ryan nomination. There are no WASPS on either ticket, either for President or VP. Also, there are no WASPS on the Supreme Court. Also, the Speaker of the House is a Catholic and the Senate Majority Leader is a Mormon. It’s a political commonplace that it’s pretty damn crazy that a black man named Barack Hussein Obama got elected President. But suppose you went back in time – set the Wayback Machine for ‘Best and the Brightest’ – so you could listen to all the botheration about Kennedy running for President. Suppose you could just interject: ‘dudes, dudes, in just 50 years, a Mormon and a Black man will be duking it out for President, and that’ll be a big deal, granted. But there will be no WASPS whatsoever at the absolute top of the political system, and people won’t even notice. Get over it.’

When change is accomplished, it ceases to be notable.

Warming Wednesdays: the Presidential campaign

Out of my (limited) concern for fairness, I decided I'd hit the web sites of the contenders and see what they have to say -- not about each other -- but about human-generated climate change. I've ventured into the sewers, so you don't have to.

First up, Governor Romney: well, hmmm … that was difficult because his site doesn't seem to have a search function. I emailed them and asked where it was. Now I'll be getting email all campaign season … just so you get this post.

I poked around -- and found the following which seem somewhat relevant under "Energy:"

• Ensure that environmental laws properly account for cost in regulatory process

• Amend Clean Air Act to exclude carbon dioxide from its purview

• Expand NRC capabilities for approval of additional nuclear reactor design

Really that was the closest to a mention of the most significant threat facing the country and species I could find on the site -- proposals that amount to letting energy producers do any damn thing they please in order to boost their profits.

As expected, President Obama does better. Yes, there's a search function and it returns lots of entries for climate. Here's part of one from last Earth Day:

But time and again, we've seen that our opponents are willing to play politics with the health of our natural resources—and the American people—just to protect the bottom line of their special-interest allies.

If it was up to them, we'd have no EPA working to protect our kids from harmful air pollution or make sure our water is safe to drink—polluters would once again have a free pass. And I probably don't need to remind you of their views on climate change.

...We simply can't afford a White House that is skeptical about the human impact on climate change and continues to give Big Oil taxpayer giveaways at a time of record profits.

Not very specific, but the right sort of words. Now I don't trust Obama on this. I've lived through his equivocations over the last four years too. But progress begins when politicians know they have to say the right thing, even if they don't yet do it. We have to re-elect this guy in order to have a chance to live to fight another day.***According to Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, the candidates would not suffer with the voters if they talked forthrightly about the dangers of the global warming. Majorities know climate change is happening. Candidates might however suffer with the energy interests who fund campaigns and political parties.

Warming Wednesdays will go on break for the rest of the election season. I have meant to use these posts to stretch myself -- to push me to sites and reading material that changes and deepens how I understand the science, politics and the culture of global warming and those who reject action to respond to it. But as we work to win the Yes on Prop. 34 effort, I'm not going to have the mental space to be stretched.

Warming Wednesdays will be back; global climate change is the most pressing threat to human well-being.

War is no game

This is what the remains of a man who has just stepped on a mine looks like. Yes, he died, despite the best efforts of medics.

NBC's exploitation of the imagined attractions of soft war porn, the TV show Stars Earn Stripes, has drawn the condemnation of nine Nobel Peace prize winners. The laureates say that the program pays homage to no one and is “a massive disservice to those who live and die in armed conflict and suffer its consequences long after the guns of war fall silent," according to the Nobel Women's Initiative. Here's the full text of their letter.

An Open Letter to Mr. Robert Greenblatt, Chairman of NBC Entertainment, General Wesley Clark (ret.), Producer Mark Burnett and others involved in “Stars Earn Stripes”:

During the Olympics, touted as a time for comity and peace among nations, millions first learned that NBC would be premiering a new “reality” TV show. The commercials announcing “Stars Earn Stripes” were shown seemingly endlessly throughout the athletic competition, noting that its premier would be Monday, August 13, following the end of the Olympic games.

That might seem innocuous since spectacular, high budget sporting events of all types are regular venues for airing new products, televisions shows and movies. But “Stars Earn Stripes” is not just another reality show. Hosted by retired four-star general Wesley Clark, the program pairs minor celebrities with US military personnel and puts them through simulated military training, including some live fire drills and helicopter drops. The official NBC website for the show touts “the fast-paced competition” as “pay[ing] homage to the men and women who serve in the U.S. Armed Forces and our first-responder services.”

It is our belief that this program pays homage to no one anywhere and continues and expands on an inglorious tradition of glorifying war and armed violence. Military training is not to be compared, subtly or otherwise, with athletic competition by showing commercials throughout the Olympics. Preparing for war is neither amusing nor entertaining.

Real war is down in the dirt deadly. People—military and civilians—die in ways that are anything but entertaining. Communities and societies are ripped apart in armed conflict and the aftermath can be as deadly as the war itself as simmering animosities are unleashed in horrific spirals of violence. War, whether relatively short-lived or going on for decades as in too many parts of the world, leaves deep scars that can take generations to overcome – if ever.

Trying to somehow sanitize war by likening it to an athletic competition further calls into question the morality and ethics of linking the military anywhere with the entertainment industry in barely veiled efforts to make war and its multitudinous costs more palatable to the public.

The long history of collaboration between militaries and civilian media and entertainment—and not just in the United States—appears to be getting murkier and in many ways more threatening to efforts to resolve our common problems through nonviolent means. Active-duty soldiers already perform in Hollywood movies, “embedded” media ride with soldier in combat situations, and now NBC is working with the military to attempt to turn deadly military training into a sanitized “reality” TV show that reveals absolutely nothing of the reality of being a soldier in war or the consequences of war. What is next?

As people who have seen too many faces of armed conflict and violence and who have worked for decades to try to stop the seemingly unending march toward the increased militarization of societies and the desensitization of people to the realities and consequences of war, we add our voices and our support to those protesting “Stars Earn Stripes.” We too call upon NBC stop airing this program that pays homage to no one, and is a massive disservice to those who live and die in armed conflict and suffer its consequences long after the guns of war fall silent.

Sincerely,

Jody Williams, Nobel Peace Prize, 1997

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize, 1984

Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Prize, 1977

Dr. Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize, 2003

President José Ramos-Horta, Nobel Peace Prize, 1996

Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Nobel Peace Prize, 1980

President Oscar Arias Sanchez, Nobel Peace Prize, 1987

Rigoberta Menchú Tum, 1992

Betty Williams, Nobel Peace Prize, 1977

Often the Nobel committee gives their award to statesmen whose, hopefully pacific, impulses they want to encourage. That explains, for example, the somewhat ridiculous prize given to President Obama in 2009.

But this list consists almost entirely of people who have actually seen the carnage of war. They know what they are talking about. NBC should be ashamed.

Van Jones sets out to rebuild the dream

My friend Van Jones has a new book, Rebuild the Dream. The cover is visually a little too red, white and blue for me. But, as he has always been, Van is charming and insightful about his own political evolution, his brief participation in the Obama administration, and where we might go from here to win the country back for the 99 percent.

In the book's introduction, Van strikes me as overly careful. He writes

… I was not among the hundreds of thousands of well-wishers in Chicago who flooded into Grant Park to cheer him on [on election night, 2008]. I was in Oakland, California, far from the center of the action. I watched history unfold on a flatscreen television, sitting with my family on the sofa at a friend's house. … If anyone had suggested that night that I soon would be relocating to serve a tour of duty in Obama's White House, everyone would have chuckled. It would have seemed impossible. .

Nonsense. I remember seeing Van a week or so after the vote and asking when he was going to DC. That night he scoffed, but soon he was off to work in the White House for a green economy. And not long afterward, the wacko right media whiners successfully made an example of him for having come up in genuinely leftist circles in the San Francisco Bay area. Here, actual communists were plentiful and leftwing nut-cases all too common as well. Not surprisingly, Van could be tied to some of our outliers and he was, becoming an early scalp for Obama's right wing foes. He still appreciates the President:

Every time President Obama stands behind the presidential seal, he offers millions of children -- of every color and hue --the irrefutable proof that they can be anything they want to be when they grow up. It is easy to be dismissive or cynical about this point, but we should not take it for granted. Who knows what magic his example is doing in the minds of youth around the world? Obama makes an inestimable contribution every day -- not just as a president, but as a precedent.

This book is Jone's effort to figure out where do we all go from here. In that effort, he recalls the struggles of the Bush era, recounting a movement history that is in some danger of being erased under the burden of subsequent disappointments. In his view, the struggles of that era gave birth to the movement that eventually elected the President and we'd be swallowing a right wing narrative if we forgot that.

In many ways, the movement that elected Obama was born in 2003, taking the form of a massive, desperate effort to derail Bush's planned invasion of Iraq. …the antiwar mobilization failed to prevent the war, but it became the sign -- and the seed -- of things to come. …

… flourishing of electoral activism [against Bush] was much bigger than Senator Kerry's official presidential campaign. … it was much broader in scope than the Democratic Party. In 2004. we saw the birth of a genuine pro-democracy movement -- standing up against the entire apparatus of one-party rule in Washington, DC.

…A bottom-up movement fueled by hope and demanding change ended GOP domination [of politics] in just twenty-four months. In the 2006 midterm elections, no House, Senate, or gubernatorial seat held by a Democrat was won by a Republican. Not only did Democrats not lose any seats, but they also gained, winding up with a 233-202 advantage in the House of Representatives, and achieving a 49-49 tie in the United States Senate (or 51-49 advantage, if you counted Independents Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman).

Obama's election in 2008 was the ultimate fruit of that movement -- a movement that said "Yes WE can!" not "Yes HE can!"

So what went wrong after 2008? Jones rehashes, briefly, the administration's political mistakes and especially the contradictions that killed Organizing for America once it became a subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee (and thus could not push Democratic party obstructionists.) But he focuses on what happened among social movement activists:

…looking back, I do not think those of us who believed in the agenda of change had to get beaten as badly as we were, after Obama was sworn in. We did not have to leave millions of once-inspired people feeling lost, deceived, and abandoned. We did not have to let our movement die down to the level that it did. The simple truth is this: we overestimated our achievement in 2008, and we underestimated our opponents in 2009.

…Among those who stayed active, too many of us (myself included) were in the suites when we should have been in the streets. …the main problem was that the movement itself was naive and enamored enough that it wanted to be absorbed and directed. Instead of marching on Washington, many of us longed to get marching orders from Washington. We so much wanted to be a part of something beautiful that we forgot how ugly and difficult political change can be …

Of course it didn't matter what we fantasized -- political struggle flowed on and pretty soon rightwing populism (and racial anxiety) was as energized by the Obama presidency as we had been by Bush's usurpation and his wars. But with people continuing to suffer from the one percent's depredations and unable to get any relief from the political system, people took to the streets in the Occupy movement last fall and gave us the 1% v. 99% political frame we all struggle within today. Jones affirms the Occupy movement -- but he insists that to remain significant, the movement kindled by immediate need has to move into new arenas.

… thus far, Occupy Wall Street has not tried to occupy the institutions of established, formal political power (for example, elections and political parties). Many at the core of Occupy don't want to engage with political institutions in that way. Some fear being co-opted by the Democratic Party, labor unions, Moveon.org, or by more established political activists (like me!). Rather than getting caught up in all the electioneering, Occupiers are choosing to focus on the hard, risky, and often-thankless work of direct action protest. They are committed to building their own community, presence, and power through direct, participatory democracy. They fear that too much entanglement with the existing system would kill their independence, idealism, and chutzpah.

For Occupy -- as the bright spearhead of a much broader movement -- that choice is sensible. But it almost certainly cannot serve all the needs of the broader movement, which potentially includes millions of people. Tens of millions of people are not going to be taking part in consensus-based general assemblies anytime soon, and even if they could, the existing system would still impact every aspect of their lives. Some groups need to step forward to make sure that the interests and ideas of the 99% are represented in political campaigns and in the established halls of power. …

These conclusions underly Jone's current initiative, the Rebuild the Dream movement. In the movement's own words:

Rebuild the Dream is a platform for bottom-up, people-powered innovations to help fix the U.S. economy. Using 21st-century digital technology, we advance highly inventive solutions that are designed to protect and expand the middle class, while creating pathways to prosperity for those who are locked out of it. Our goal is to put America back to work—and pull America back together.

Color me a bit of a skeptic. Movements are made when people who feel they have nothing left to lose take extraordinary action -- this has a whiff of think tanks and funder focus-groups about it, not people's enthusiasm. Time will tell whether it can grow into authenticity.

But like Jones, I believe that progressives win the changes we need when we pursue both an inside and an outside political strategy. He says this clearly:

I believe in both electoral politics and peaceful protest; they are two blades of a scissor, and both are needed to make real change. Some see marches, sit-ins, and public demonstrations as unruly, scary, or out of fashion -- so they reject protests. Others think our democracy is so corrupted by big money and media madness that participation is beneath them -- so they reject electoral politics. I believe that progress is made from the bottom up and from the top down. Therefore, I believe that nonviolent direct action and smart voting are the twin keys to meaningful change.

This seems quite right to me.

There have been several generations of highly talented, charismatic progressive citizens who failed to grasp or were unwilling to take up the arduous work of carrying left ideas inside the halls of power as well as on the streets. Van Jones' life is actually an example how many of these potential leaders seem to have ended up on side tracks. If he had come up in the 1950s in a place where there was any chance for a Black lawyer of his talents, most likely he would have tried his hand at electoral politics. But in the '80s and '90s, outside advocacy careers seemed possible and to have more integrity, so politics was often left to less capable and less committed community leaders. Part of retaking our democracy has to be reaffirming the moral respectability of political struggle inside institutions. It's all very well to be pure, but somebody has to get in there and govern. Those people should include the best of our community leaders, not just the most ambitious. Democracy only works for the people when the people are willing to struggle within it. That, for some, means taking up the demeaning life of day to day politics.

Time will work its magic

I guess I like this. It reminds me that the most searing events of my life -- the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam war -- have already sunk in the mists of history as far as most people around me are concerned.

Several items here need forgetting: I'd propose the Reagan Presidency, the Berlin Wall, and Clinton's Impeachment for that category.

Quite a few of these items I never noticed in their prime, like Return of the Jedi and New Coke.

2036 looks to be a very good year, flushing away the memory of a grandly distorting occasion of deadly theater.


I am reminded of Issac Watt's paraphrase of Psalm 90:

...The busy tribes of flesh and blood,
With all their lives and cares,
Are carried downwards by the flood,
And lost in following years.

Time, like an ever rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day. ...

I find nothing mournful in contemplating time. Time moves on.

Cartoon via Ryan Cooper at the Washington Monthly.

Piling on Rep. Ryan

Nate Silver must inhabit a different universe than mine. He refers to Congressman Ryan as "young, attractive ..."

Looks more like an undernourished, undistinguished mid-life guy with a five o'clock shadow to me. But I will admit to not being much of a judge of male attractiveness.

Nuns bless hotel staff at conference

These women know whose labor enhances care in the world and where to look for authentic experience of the Good.

The male leadership of some religious institutions, so much so.

Via Thomas Fox, National Catholic Reporter.

Romney and Ryan race to stop the 21st century

These guys better hope that voter turnout among people under 60 who live outside depressed cultural backwaters is close to non-existent. These guys simply don't live in the same country as the rest of us. Their wealthy, male, white guy playpen is gone for good. If we vote, they are history.

Democracy at work

Democrats don't want to see more headlines like this!

What do you do when you are a candidate for office and want people to vote for you? You find out what your potential constituents care about -- and push for it. And then push some more and claim credit for it.

This seems to be what some Democratic Senate candidates are currently attempting.

With Latinos poised to play a major role in the 2012 elections, Democratic Senate candidates in the Southwest are following suit — urging the national party to add the DREAM Act to its national platform. Senate hopefuls Rep. Martin Heinrich in New Mexico, Rep. Shelley Berkley in Nevada and Richard Carmona in Arizona are leading the charge.

The DREAM Act passed the Democratic-led House in 2010, but died in the Senate. Despite widespread support for the measure among Democrats, the DREAM Act has never been on the party’s platform. In 2008, the party called simply for “comprehensive, not piecemeal” immigration reform. This time, the platform drafters are strongly considering adding the DREAM Act. …

Putting the DREAM Act in the party platform would draw a bright line between the two parties and could forces Mitt Romney to discuss his vague position on immigration reform. A typical Romney statement on his immigration plan: “I will address the problem of illegal immigration in a civil but resolute manner,” he told Latino elected officials in June.

TPM

These Senate candidates didn't invent the DREAM Act. This measure would provide a path to legalization and citizenship for young people who were brought into the country without documents as children. The initiative exists because of years of brave community organizing by the youth and their families themselves. There's nothing radical about it; the country needs more of the energy and zest for participation that characterizes these folks.

President Obama has endorsed the DREAM Act and moved toward implementing some of its provisions through an executive order. He needs Latino voters too.

Republicans want Latino voters, but the white supremacist passions of so many of their adherents drive away most Latinos who are not willing to serve as "talking dogs" -- freakish outsiders in a hostile environment. Being a token who defies your group's norms can sometimes get you a really fancy job -- just look at Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. But, especially for the community minded, that sort of alienation is not something most people are willing to take on. So until or unless Republicans make their peace with the aspirations of the growing Latino population, they'll continue to make Democrats of most Latinos.

This is popular democracy working itself out.

Friday cat blogging

Too often, I don't know quite what Morty wants. There's something missing, those big eyes seem to say. But I can only distract him with a little scratching behind the ears. And somehow, that's not all ...

BART congeals

The dry announcement reports -- system back on schedule after delays. As I snapped this, downtown train platforms were just beginning to clog up at rush hour. That's what happens when a hub goes down at the wrong moment.

I'm not complaining. BART mostly works quite painlessly to move a lot of people with only minor friction. But scenes like this remind one how sensitive the system is to local failures.

Texas justice

This is appalling on so many levels, I barely know where to begin.

On Tuesday, Texas executed a murderer named Marvin Wilson. In 1992, Wilson believed a man named Jerry Williams had turned him over to the police for possessing cocaine. So he killed Williams. These were not nice men; I feel pretty sure I would not have wanted to meet either of them in a dark alley.

But according to a previous Supreme Court decision in a 2002 case, Texas had no business killing Wilson. According to appeal filings, Wilson had an IQ of 61, well below the generally understood minimum of 70 that defines mental retardation.

Marvin Wilson has the mental development of the average first-grader. He sucked his thumb into adulthood; he cannot use a phone book; and he doesn’t understand what a bank account is. As a child he would sometimes clamp his belt so tightly that he would cut off blood circulation. He couldn’t figure out how to use simple toys such as tops and marbles, and he was tormented by other children, who called him names like “dummy” and “retard.”

Texas was determined to kill him despite his low IQ. So they pushed ahead and the Supreme Court voted, without comment, to allow it. Scott Lemieux sums up the implications of this decision:

Apparently, states are now free to define mental retardation however they see fit, which is essentially indistinguishable from just explicitly permitting states to execute the mentally handicapped. Texas's execution of Marvin Wilson was cruel and unusual, but the Eighth Amendment can't prevent injustices if nobody is willing to enforce it.

***A Texas judge cited novelist John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men in which a sympathetic Lennie kills without understanding to explain that Wilson could be executed despite his intellectual disability. He just wasn't as sympathetic as Lennie and lived in the world of social service bureaucracies. Steinbeck's son expostulated on learning of the Texas ruling:

My father was a highly gifted writer who won the Nobel Prize for his ability to create art about the depth of the human experience and condition. His work was certainly not meant to be scientific, and the character of Lennie was never intended to be used to diagnose a medical condition like intellectual disability. I find the whole premise to be insulting, outrageous, ridiculous and profoundly tragic. I am certain that if my father, John Steinbeck, were here, he would be deeply angry and ashamed to see his work used in this way. And the last thing you ever wanted to do, was to make John Steinbeck angry.

***The Guardian newspaper reported Wilson's last words:

Wilson “smiled and raised his head from the death-chamber gurney, nodding to his three sisters and son as they watched through a window a few meters away.” He then told them that he loved them, and said his last words:

“Y’all do understand that I came here a sinner and leaving a saint,” he said. “Take me home, Jesus, take me home, Lord, take me home, Lord!”

I guess Wilson figured he was going "home" -- as we all wish to, whatever that means to us.

Fierce, poetic and brave

I remember vividly the first time I heard Chavela Vargas' gravelly voice. My partner and I at that time (mid-1970s) were newly un-closeted lesbians, still groping to live into our novel and semi-outlaw identity. My partner, in addition, was struggling to take in what it meant that she had a Mexican father, though she had been raised by white-bread, suburban Californian parents.

One day we heard a recording of this amazing, emotional singer. And we knew, immediately and instinctively. "She's a dyke!" Somehow this insight meant a lot.

When Vargas died this week at age 93, her obituary confirmed our instinct.

At 81, she announced that she was a lesbian.

“Nobody taught me to be like this,” she told the Spanish newspaper El País in 2000. “I was born this way. Since I opened my eyes to the world, I have never slept with a man. Never. Just imagine what purity. I have nothing to be ashamed of.”

On the eve of her Carnegie Hall debut in 2003, she looked back on how her singing had changed over her career. “The years take you to a different feeling than when you were 30,” she said in an interview with The Times. “I feel differently, I interpret differently, more toward the mystical.” ...No immediate family members survive.

Enjoy and wonder.

Global view

This map of where the Washington Post stations foreign correspondents sat at the side of a web page, not drawing attention to itself, but interesting nonetheless. I know newspapers (perhaps especially one whose economic well being depends on a test prep company) are in decline these days. But apparently nothing much that matters is expected to happen in all of sub-equatorial Latin America, or sub-Saharan Africa aside from Kenya, or Indonesia which is home to the world's largest Muslim population, or even the continent of Australia. Or, for that matter, even in our huge neighbor to the north.

I decided to look at where some other notable papers have staff. The American Journalism Review reported a census of foreign correspondents in early 2011.

Not surprisingly the New York Times has a goodly crop of bureaus -- and unlike the Wapo, they have people in West Africa (Dakar), Jakarta, Johannesburg, and Sao Paulo. That's a bit bigger world. The Wall Street Journal reaches into a few more places including Buenos Aires and Lagos.

But if you really want reach in your news, the most extensive coverage will come from Bloomberg News with global staff of more than 2,300 in 146 bureaus (101 are foreign) in 72 countries. They have extensive staff in all of Latin America and sprinkled across Africa. And they shine in covering what they call "Asia Pacific" with bureaus in Melbourne and Sydney and even in Wellington, New Zealand.

Does this matter? After all, if something unexpected erupts anywhere in the world, journalists can parachute in at a moments' notice. And they will. And these are usually serious professionals who try to give their audience an accurate picture of what they encounter. But is our "globalized world" actually still quite small, our information constrained by commercial concerns? After all, we in the United States are notoriously uninterested in people who live in foreign lands. It probably will never pay to have a bureau in Kinshasa, even though millions have died over the last decade in the ongoing war in the Congo.

No conclusions -- just awareness that the world is so much bigger and more diverse than the picture of it that a moderately conscientious citizen can expect to derive from the media.

Meet Nathan. He's a tough guy!

Okay, I'm watching the Olympics on TV again. And along comes this Nike ad. Go ahead, watch it. It's only one minute long.

This is Nathan. He is 12 years old. He's from London, Ohio. Greatness is not beyond his reach, nor is it for any of us.

I don't know if Nathan really has greatness ahead of him, but I forgive Nike a lot for putting his image out there as an example of admirable striving.

When we're in a panic about the "obesity epidemic," it is just so easy to demean kids (and adults) who are fat. Look -- we're fat because there is a more food around than our species evolved to have easy access to. We pack it on, genetically programmed to try to defend our bodies against scarcity.

I'm glad we live in a society in which calories -- if not always healthy foods -- are readily available. As a species, we don't quite know how to cope with this unfamiliar abundance. But it is worth remembering that too much of a good thing is still better than not enough at all.

Liberties and privileges

In the United States, the right to vote is nowadays affirmed as a basic right of all people, not a privilege granted by an indulgent state.

William Galston has posted an inquiry into the philosophical roots of the new crop of Republican-initiated voter suppression laws and rules at The New Republic. He says they aim to change our understanding of this basic right. Voter ID requirements that will be especially burdensome to poor and aging voters, additional hoops added to registration procedures, and cut backs in early voting periods all spring from a view of the franchise that is very different from that which most United States people embrace.

Last year, Minnesota House Speaker Kurt Zellers said, “I think [voting is] a privilege, it’s not a right. Everybody doesn’t get it because if you go to jail or if you commit some heinous crime your [voting] rights are taken away. This is a privilege.”

This claim rests on an obvious confusion. Anybody who believes in the Declaration of Independence will affirm that liberty is among our inalienable rights. Nonetheless, certain sorts of crimes are thought to warrant incarceration, which is a deprivation of liberty. Does that transform liberty from a right into a privilege? Of course not.

The real logic is different. Our society presumes (as some do not) that all human beings are equal in their possession of both human and civil rights and that the burden of proof in restricting those rights must be set very high. Some people argue that no reason is compelling enough to override the right to life, for example, which is why the death penalty will always be a contentious issue.

Hardly anyone makes that argument about liberty, which is why life sentence without parole is widely regarded as a legitimate substitute for the death penalty. Without the ability to deprive some law-breaking citizens of their liberty, our entire justice system would come crashing down. But no one thinks that turns liberty into a privilege.

Voting is much the same. All citizens are presumed to be equal in their right to vote. Yes, most felons do forfeit their right to vote, at least temporarily. (We argue about whether permanent forfeiture is legitimate, even after felons have “paid their debt to society.”) But if we take the equal right to vote seriously, we must not pass laws that implicitly treat voting as a privilege some are fitter than others to enjoy.  To confuse that right with a privilege is to change the understanding of American citizenship, and not for the better.

My emphasis.

Because I am working on a campaign that would replace the death penalty with a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole, I've had to think hard about what values ought to underly our legal system.

I am profoundly convinced that all of us have a right to expect justice that works -- and that a tough system that keeps people who commit terrible crimes in prison is something that law-abiding citizens deserve. At the same time, we want a justice system that ensures that the state never risks executing an innocent person. We know mistakes are possible. We can never be certain that we have not killed an innocent person so long as the death penalty is possible.

In the debate over the death penalty, we confront, along with daunting waste and cost concerns, quite fundamental questions about how our society can ensure more authentic justice for all. It doesn't surprise me that Galston goes to this issue when looking for analogies to the interplay of inalienable rights with privileges. The discussions do have a lot in common.

The history of liberty in the United States has been about the gradual expansion of voting rights from a few propertied men to nearly everyone. This expansion is part of our gut understanding of what our liberty means in this country. It is a terrible thing to see Republicans willing to undermine fundamental liberties -- to make participation in elections more difficult for people who might vote against them -- in order to win partisan advantage.

Travel's got me down

San Diego, round-trip, yesterday; Orange County and John Wayne Airport last weekend. Glad I can take BART near to my door. Home today, but too pooped to blog.

Gabby Douglas flies

Nice profile of the all-round women's gymnastics victor in today's paper.

“I have an advantage because I’m the underdog and I’m black and no one thinks I’d ever win,” she said. “Well, I’m going to inspire so many people. Everybody will be talking about, how did she come up so fast? But I’m ready to shine.”

And shine she did, ending Thursday night with her hand on her heart, watching the American flag being raised in the arena. In the stands nearby, her family — including her mother and her stand-in parents — huddled together and beamed.

But I have to ask -- can't someone manufacture "flesh colored" athletic tape that comes closer to matching the skin tones of the many peoples of the world?

Friday cat blogging

Morty appreciates our habit of leaving computer bags lying around the office. Whether in chairs or on the floor, he appropriates any comfortable padded perch.

War-o-tainment atrocity

This week, not only is the Yes on 34 campaign reducing my attention to this blog, but then there are the Olympics. Like most everyone else who is a fan of athletic prowess and not a saccharine nationalist, I find NBC's coverage pretty disgusting.

But an ad last night for a fall TV show headlined by retired general Wesley Clark hits a new low. The premise of Stars Earn Stripes is that celebrities play at war, earning money for "military-based" charities.

Roots Action has mounted a protest:

On "Stars Earn Stripes," celebrities will pair-up with members of the U.S. military to compete at war-like tasks, including "long-range weapons fire." Only there won't be any of the killing or dying.

Our wars kill huge numbers of people, primarily civilians, and often children and the elderly. NBC is not showing this reality on its war-o-tainment show any more than on its news programs. Other nations' media show the face of war, giving people a very different view of war-making...

While 57% of federal discretionary spending goes to the military, weapons makers can't seem to get enough of our tax dollars. In the spirit of transferring veterans' care to the realm of private charity, "Stars Earn Stripes" will give prize money each week to "military-based charities" in order to "send a message." We have our own message that we will be delivering to NBC: Dont lie to us.

One of NBC’s corporate parents, General Electric, takes war very seriously, but not as human tragedy -- rather, as financial profit. (GE is a big weapons manufacturer.) A retired general hosting a war-o-tainment show is another step in the normalization of permanent war.

The least we can do is sign this petition.

A very good day: Thanks Obamacare!

Yeah for #ThanksObamacare.

Warming Wednesdays: When new technologies mature

An encouraging article about a report on increasing global production of renewable energy in USA Today points out a fact that should have been obvious to me, but which served as a good reminder of what it looks like whenever a new technology is emerging.

The report's authors said the demise of companies such as Solyndra, Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt, Solar Millenium and Solon was a sign that the solar industry is maturing.

"In 1903, the United States had over 500 car companies, most of which quickly fell by the wayside even as the automobile sector grew into an industrial juggernaut," the report said. "Today, the renewable energy sector is experiencing similar growing pains as the sector consolidates."

Of course. I grew up very aware of the demise of those early auto companies. This building was just blocks from my house and Buffalonians often mentioned the lamented Pierce-Arrow.


No cause for complacency, but perhaps the move to less destructive energy is another transition we can accomplish. We have to.

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.