Flag flaps

Last week students at UC Irvine -- apparently a sort of subcommittee of student government -- sought to ban flags, including the Stars and Stripes, from the lobby of the student government offices. Predictably (this is Orange County after all) a lot of people went ballistic. Higher levels of student government, the university administration, and politicians galore condemned and reversed the initiative. The flag was never disturbed, anywhere on campus.

As of three days ago, the UC Irvine Chancellor was still trying to get the internet rage machine turned down. He wasn't much succeeding.

On Thursday, veterans gathered at the campus to stick up for their flag.

Meanwhile, at Pine Bush High School, sixty five miles northwest of New York City, some students and parents were up in arms over a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in Arabic.

“I think it should be spoken in English. This is America,” resident Joyce Larsen said.

The district said the school’s foreign language department arranged to have the pledge recited in different languages for National Foreign Language Week, which was last week.

Andrew Zink, the senior class president, usually gives the morning announcements and recites the pledge. He said he allowed an Arabic-speaking student to handle the pledge duties Wednesday.

“The intention was to promote the fact that those who speak a language other than English still pledge to salute this great country,” the district said in its statement.

“Had it been done in Spanish first or Japanese first, we wouldn’t be having this conversation today,” Principal Aaron Hopmayer told [CBS2’s Lou]Young.

... Some locals told Young they actually found the district’s apology [to anyone offended by the Arabic pledge] offensive.

“They wouldn’t have to apologize to me or my family for that,” New Windsor resident Patrick Brown said.

Probably the principal does know his community. Does he, or anyone at Pine Bush, know the origin of the Pledge?

The Pledge of Allegiance was written in August 1892 by the socialist minister Francis Bellamy (1855-1931). It was originally published in The Youth's Companion on September 8, 1892. Bellamy had hoped that the pledge would be used by citizens in any country.

Bellamy's kind of pledge might be more to the liking of contemporary young people. The older siblings of these students aren't much on the flag-waving bandwagon according to polling assembled by the Christian Science Monitor.

Just 32 percent of Millennials say US is "the greatest country in the world," compared with 48 percent of Gen Xers, 50 percent of Baby Boomers, and 64 percent of the Silent Generation, according to Pew. Likewise, Millennials are most likely to say America is not the greatest country in the world. ...

American National Election Study found that 45 percent of Millennials say the American identity is extremely important, compared with 60 percent for Generation Xers, 70 percent for Baby Boomers, and 78 percent for Silents.

Only 67 percent of Millennials said flying the US flag made them feel very or extremely good, compared with 94 percent of Silents, according to ANES.

Friday cat blogging

Morty appears such an innocuous fellow when he is passing an afternoon napping. Don't be fooled; at 4 AM he's up and about, often trying to rouse us by grooming our heads. This provokes me to cat tossing. He's not easy to deter.

Obama afterthoughts

Obama Regrets Not Closing Gitmo On 'First Day'

Watching the Prez approach the end of his administration, you get the sense that he entered office as the last true believer in the myth of a predominantly benevolent, democratic (small "d"), nation ruled more by considered law than by avaricious interests and irrational passions. He's had quite an education.

"We're here to help ..."

Thanks to Noam Chomsky for a little visual history of the imperial impulse that I'd not seen before.

One of the first [national] myths was formally established right after the King of England granted a Charter to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629, declaring that conversion of the Indians to Christianity is “the principal end of this plantation.” The colonists at once created the Great Seal of the Colony, which depicts an Indian holding a spear pointing downward in a sign of peace, with a scroll coming from his mouth pleading with the colonists to “Come over and help us.” This may have been the first case of “humanitarian intervention” — and, curiously, it turned out like so many others.

Chomsky is seldom invited to appear in the "paper of record" for all his international acclaim. The whole article is worth your time.

Credit where credit is due

The provisions of Obamacare -- enabling young people to stay on their parents' insurance to age 26 and to buy insurance through the exchange markets that Republicans are trying to kill -- have enabled 16.4 million people to be covered. Sixteen million people have at least a chance of seeing a doctor if they are sick or injured.

We're all going to be sick or injured one day.

Paying off insurers and hospitals was a crazy way to do the job, but Obamacare is working for a lot of people.

H/t TPM.

It takes a movement ...

Today we celebrate the 153rd birthday of Homer Adolph Plessy. Who was Plessy? His carefully orchestrated protest against segregation was the earliest civil rights test case brought to court that I know of (I could be wrong).

Born in Union-occupied New Orleans in 1862, the young French-speaking Creole grew up in the Louisiana city under Reconstruction (1865-1877). In the racial categories of the day, he qualified as an octoroon, 7/8s white. Thus, according to the law, Plessy was black. He could pass if he wished but he didn't. But Plessy grew up watching the equal rights of people of color eroded by the terrorism of the White League and then by laws mandating segregation by race.

An interracial group of New Orleans residents formed the Comité des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens) to oppose legal segregation. They recruited Plessy to test the separation of races on the railroad.

To pose a clear test, the Citizens' Committee gave notice of Plessy's intent to the railroad, which opposed the law because it required adding more cars to its trains.

On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket on a train from New Orleans and sat in the car for white riders only. The Committee had hired a private detective with arrest powers to take Plessy off the train at Press and Royal streets, to ensure that he was charged with violating the state's separate-car law and not some other misdemeanor.

Four years later, the case against the segregation law had worked its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Plessy's lawyers argued that under the 13th and 14th amendments, he had been deprived of a right (a seat he had paid for) without due process of law. The Supreme Court of the day disagreed, allowing Louisiana's state ban on integrated seating to overturn federal promises and such state laws to prevail until the 1950s.

Plessy legitimized the state laws establishing racial segregation in the South and provided an impetus for further segregation laws. Legislative achievements won during the Reconstruction Era were erased through means of the "separate but equal" doctrine. The doctrine had been strengthened also by an 1875 Supreme Court decision that limited the federal government's ability to intervene in state affairs, guaranteeing only Congress the power "to restrain states from acts of racial discrimination and segregation". The ruling basically granted states legislative immunity when dealing with questions of race, guaranteeing the states' right to implement racially separate institutions, requiring them only to be "equal".

Visiting the Plessy memorial last summer, I was thrilled to learn that this famous test case, even though it was lost, was a product of collective organizing by engaged citizens.

The media usually treats people who take action for justice as if they are only legitimate if their action was a spur of the moment thing, an impulse, not part of any concerted plan. This is seldom the case when people begin to rise up effectively against systems that keep them down.

The classic case is that of Rosa Parks whose determined refusal to go to the back of the bus in 1955 and subsequent arrest kicked off the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It takes nothing away from Parks' legitimacy that others had refused to accept the segregation rules before her, that she was a member of the NAACP which was developing multiple civil rights challenges, and that she had studied non-violent action at the Highlander Folk School. She didn't spring out of nowhere -- she emerged from an engaged community.

That's how effective movements for justice work.

How defense of white supremacy built the Christian right

Once upon a time, evangelical Christians were a progressive constituency in the life of the United States. In the 19th century, evangelicals were a force for abolition of slavery and equal rights for women. They supported public schools and even sometimes criticized the rapacious avarice of capitalism. But for the first half of the 20th century, reeling from ridicule during the Scopes Monkey Trial during which their Bible beliefs were made a laughingstock, they largely withdrew from public life. Religious historian Randall Balmer's Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter makes the case that the pious Georgia politician and 39th President brought them back into the political fray through his forthright affirmation of faith. His presidency then became the hinge that served the purposes of conservative leaders determined to incorporate evangelicals into their right-wing "moral majority." It's an ugly story and Balmer tells it economically and convincingly.

People who came of political age after the 1970s may be surprised to learn that in the preceding decade or so, the religious affiliations of presidents were not front and center concerns. Carter changed that.

Carter's declaration [of born-again Christian faith] represented a departure from the norm in presidential politics. Ever since John F. Kennedy's speech before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960, in which he declared his absolute fidelity to the First Amendment and foreswore any influence from "outside religious pressure or dictates," a candidate's religious views simple did not figure into presidential politics. Few Americans knew, for instance, that Lyndon Johnson was affiliated with the Disciples of Christ or that Nixon was nominally a Quaker. Nixon's mendacity changed that equation, and Carter astutely recognized the desire on the part of voters to know that their president possessed a moral compass. Carter, the Sunday-school teacher, came by it honestly, and he spoke the language of born-again evangelicalism fluently.

Having won office by -- honestly -- positioning himself as the moral alternative, Carter ran an administration that was earnest and often inept. He signed the treaty returning the Panama Canal to that country. He proclaimed fidelity to human rights concerns in foreign policy and sometimes even acted on this stance. He had a lot of bad luck, notably being in office when Iranian revolutionaries seized U.S. hostages in Tehran, tickling the national bellicosity.

And he ended up a victim not only of his own failures, of the ongoing distrust among labor and liberals for a culturally conservative southern president, but also of his own white evangelical kind, who were mobilized by far right activists. It is in telling this part of the Carter story that Balmer shines.

... Evangelicals in the late 1960s and throughout most of the 1970s by and large refused to see abortion as a defining issue, much less a matter that would summon them to the front lines of political activism. Abortion simply failed to gain traction among evangelicals, ... Meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, during the summer of 1971, the messengers (delegates) to the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution that stated, "we call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental and physical health of the mother."

...Ever since Barry Goldwater's campaign for the presidency in 1964, [conservative activist Paul] Weyrich had been trying to organize evangelicals politically. Their numbers alone, he reasoned, would constitute a formidable voting bloc, and he aspired to marshal them behind conservative causes. Weyrich had the blueprint in place. "The new political philosophy must be defined by us in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition."...But Weyrich's dream, still a hypothetical coalition, which he already referred as as the "moral majority" (lower-case letters), lacked a catalyst. ... Weyrich, by his own account, had tried various issues to pique evangelical interest in his scheme, including abortion, pornography, school prayer, and the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.

Snubbed on these issues Weyrich recognized by the mid-l970s the necessity of a multi-pronged approach to mobilize evangelical voters. First, he needed to enlist evangelical and fundamentalist leaders in his political crusade; once the leaders were onboard, grassroots evangelicals would follow. Opposition to abortion, as it turned out, would be the secondary, populist issue ... that would energize grassroots evangelicals in the late 1970s. Evangelical leaders, however, had shown little interest in abortion ...

Weyrich found the issue that cut with Evangelical leaders in court decisions denying tax exempt status to institutions like Bob Jones University that practiced racial discrimination. Defending the right of their institutions to remain segregated moved them as nothing else had.

Although there is no evidence to suggest that the Carter White House participated in drafting the regulations, Jerome Kurtz, the lRS commissioner, proposed on August 2, 1978, that schools founded or expanded at the time of desegregation of public schools in their locality meet a quota of minority students or certify that they operated "in good faith on a racially non-discriminatory basis." Evangelical leaders interpreted the IRS proposals as an unwarranted abrogation of their religious freedom. ... When Conservative Digest catalogued evangelical discontent with Carter in August1979, the Internal Revenue Service regulations headed the list. Abortion was not mentioned. ...

... Evangelical leaders, prodded by Weyrich, chose to interpret the IRS ruling against segregationist schools as an assault on the integrity and the sanctity of the evangelical subculture, ignoring the fact that exemption from taxes is itself a form of pubic subsidy. That is what prompted them to action and to organize into a political movement.

And so in 1979, conservatives ousted more moderate leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention (Carter's denomination) and then in 1980 supported the Republican divorced Hollywood actor. Ronald Reagan launched his campaign from Philadelphia, MS where civil rights workers had been murdered, signaling to his sympathies to white segregationists. And most white Christian evangelicals are still running with the party of reaction.

Carter comes off in this telling as a lonely, admirable, individual -- one whose putative constituency perhaps never existed. Not rich, he had to rebuild his bankrupt peanut farm when he returned to Georgia. He chose to leave the local Baptist congregation that had been his home church and join another which was racially inclusive (though insolvent). There was always a cost to sticking with his convictions. Since leaving office, he's built houses with Habitat for Humanity and traveled the world on various peace missions, some of them somewhat fruitful. And through it all, he's taught Sunday school.

Let's bomb, bomb, bomb Iran for Bibi!

Some right wing twit named Joshua Muravchik wants the U.S. to attack Iran, right now, no negotiations, none of this squishy jawing with other peoples, just blow 'em to bits. He liked the Iraq war too; in fact, he seems never to have met an aggressive U.S. war he didn't like. I hope the Washington Post is enjoying the infamy it is acquiring by publishing this tripe.

I actually read the thing. Muravchik's claim is that Iranians aren't human. They are governed by what he calls "ideology," meaning by that they are incapable of wanting the best for themselves and their children. Why they'd rather die for their "ideology" than negotiate for peace! Therefore we must kill them.

There is a country in the Middle Eastern neighborhood whose leaders too often sound like that, refusing to negotiate for peace (begins with "I" and ends with "L," not " Q" or "N"); Muravchik thinks those leaders' "ideological" blinders are just hunky dory.

What no one seems willing to point out about U.S. relations with Iran is that Iranians make a good case that we started the hostilities. We overthrew the most democratic government they ever had, more or less by giving an adventurous CIA agent his head -- or perhaps to please some oil companies. That government was succeeded by a vicious tyrant whom we propped up for reasons of geopolitics. When they got around to overthrowing the tyrant, we invited him into our country. (We used to offer retirement to used dictators; now they are usually offed, see also Saddam Hussein.) Then some Iranian hotheads got pissed off and seized our embassy and its people. They then played footsie with a right wing Republican running for office (Saint Ronnie R.) and we got the hostages back. Then we supplied both sides in their war with Iraq, pleased to fuel a mass slaughter on a par with World War I. 

So now we must hate Iran forever? Perhaps only because we’ve behaved atrociously toward an ancient people who carry dim but vital memories of ancient empire and don't like to be humiliated.

At present, we're more or less on the same side with Iran, trying to tamp down ISIS.This is a tricky and unstable tactical coincidence, but the Iranians have an advantage we don't in that part of the world: that they are there and we aren't. Yet.

Oh yes -- we are required to bomb Iran because some Israelis (not all -- including for example Israeli intelligence leaders) fear Iran. Projection, maybe? Israel is the strongest military power in the area with some 200 nukes. It can take care of itself!

The United States should be looking out for U.S. interests, not Israeli ones. The interests of everyone in the world (except maybe the military/industrial complex) are served by peace, not war. That should be the object of U.S. power, not Mr. Muravchik's fantasies.

Faces under our feet

They are more common than you may realize until you start looking for them.

Some are quite complex.

Others are rudimentary.

Here someone sought permanence.

The antic ones evoke a smile.

Out-takes from Walking San Francisco.

Our time is coming ...

If I judged books by their covers, this one would be way up there. Fortunately Dr. Muriel R. Gillick, a staff physician at Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates and a Professor of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School/Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, has written a book worthy of its wonderful cover. The Denial of Aging: Perpetual Youth, Eternal Life, and Other Dangerous Fantasies shares her perspective on how we age in this country, focusing first on Medicare, then on the various living options for people who can no longer care for themselves, and ending with a call to the newly old and demographically enormous boomer generation to work for improvements -- improvements that will determine our own fates.

Here's a sample of Gillick's insights and blunt style:

Medicare is an excellent program-for the most vigorous of older people. It is no surprise that Medicare serves very robust elders well, since it was originally designed to provide coverage for older patients with episodic, reversible disease. It works beautifully for a person with an acute illness such as a kidney infection or gallstones, which typically requires a brief hospital stay and a short course of treatment -- antibiotics for the former and surgery for the latter.

But if Medicare is a good program for robust elders, it is profoundly inadequate for people who are frail or who are nearing the end of life. The reason for this inadequacy is that it favors institutional care over home care, it supports technology-intensive treatment rather than labor-intensive care, and it fails to provide adequately for chronic diseases. And people who have multiple medical conditions or are near the end of life fare best with care that keeps them out of hospitals, that helps them manage chronic illness, and that substitutes low-technology treatment for invasive therapy.

Our government insurance systems and the training of medical professionals conspire to rob elders of agency when we become frail (and most of us will.) Medicare doesn't pay for what many old people need to stay in their homes: occasional household help, perhaps to clean, do laundry or cook. Unless relatives step in, elders don't get help from the system until/unless they are sick or injured enough to require hospitalization. And Medicare doesn't cover long term nursing home care; for that, elders must become poor enough to qualify for Medicaid, the state program for the indigent. All of this means systemic preference for the most expensive ways of caring for old people -- and persistent calls to cut the burden to the taxpayer.

Doctors are ill-prepared to help old people hang on to what independence our bodies allow and to make choices that are in accord with our individual values and preferences. Everything about their training makes them aim to defeat disease and decay -- that's medicine's "dangerous fantasy" to which old people are too often sacrificed. Gillick believes it is the doctors job to help patients decide when enough is enough.

... the risk that geriatric medicine might lengthen life without improving its quality is real. The debate about whether existing approaches to care will lead to "compression of morbidity" in which the period of disability and dependence shrinks while overall lifespan grows, or instead to increasingly long periods of frailty, is far from settled.

This book with the wonderful cover was published in 2007. These issues seem to be getting more widespread discussion these days, post-Obamacare, in such works as Dr. Atul Gawande's Being Mortal and Dr. Angelo Volandes' The Conversation. Dr. Gillick continues her reflections at the blog Life in the End Zone.

I should add, if looking for conversation about and among elders, you might like Time Goes By.

Friday cat blogging

As I walked along the fence, I was observed.

Fifty feet further on, another silent presence. Might there be a relationship?

Encountered while Walking San Francisco.

Second chance citizens

This country is beginning to notice that we over did it. Scared by a real crime wave in the 80s (possibly a consequence of childhood exposure to lead) and, habitually inclined to treat black and brown males as threatening throwaway people, we locked up a larger proportion of our population than any other country in the world.

Now we're beginning to regret it. The costs of incarcerating a felon for a year run around what it costs to attend a public college. And according to the same report, prison terms are "criminogenic." Great word coinage that.

Intuitively, that makes sense: You're locking someone up, away from family and employment, in a place where their only companions are ... other criminals. It would be small wonder to find that when they emerge from an institution, their best employment opportunities lie in the fields of mayhem and mountebankery. But that intuition now has data to back it up: Juveniles who are given harsher sentences are more likely to end up back in the criminal justice system. So the cost to law-abiding citizens may not just include the cost of imprisonment, but also more crime.

We've begun to let some folks out; California voters passed Prop. 47 last fall, leading to reduction of nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors.

But what if, when these people get out, they can't get jobs because employers don't dare look beyond their criminal records?
This Brave New Films video supports a campaign to "Ban the Box" -- to prevent employers from asking prospective employees about their criminal records until they have at least interviewed them. You can sign a petition at that link which will connect you to PICO National Network.

The All of Us or None campaign works in California at removing the many obstacles to bringing people out of prison and back into the community including removing gang injunctions, clearing their records where possible, and restoring voting rights.

The National Employment Law Center publishes an excellent map that shows where victories in the campaign to "Ban the Box" have already been won. California is one of those places.

"You're not going to shoot someone for stealing a bicycle?"

Henry Morales of CARECEN flanked by Abu Qadir Al-Amin on the left.

One of the speakers at a press conference of religious leaders organized by SFOP-PIA at San Francisco City Hall this morning asked just that this morming. On February 26 in the Mission, the San Francisco Police Department did shoot Amilcar Perez-Lopez for that apparent offense. It has since come out that he was probably the owner of the bicycle in question and that the Guatemalan immigrant may not have understood the cops who were challenging him.

Shootings of black and brown people, mostly young men, just keep on coming. You might think that police departments, however integrated some are, think that's their job.

The joys of learning

There's no better way to learn how something novel works than to try it. In that spirit, I've joined a MOOC -- a Massive Online Open Course. This one is World War 1: Changing Faces of Heroism offered by the University of Leeds.

I've just started, so I can't really comment on the content; but you know I probably will eventually.

The online environment in which the course is offered is something called Future Learn. It is very much based on the idea that we all have different learning styles -- some of us are primarily visual learners, others learn best by ear ... so all materials are presented in multiple styles: videos, text, recordings.

There's a video explaining this, from which I captured the image above. I simply found it interesting. I do "read" a great many books by ear, often while running or walking. Sometimes I feel that I have really comprehended the current book; other times not so well. I think I'll try to collect samples and figure out what makes the difference. The readers? The sort of material? What other factors?

Isn't learning fun?

(By the way, the educational theory that we use different learning styles is currently being vigorously debunked by neuroscientists. Oh well ....)

A little more about Selma, 50 years on

In the Times, as he often does, Charles Blow explains why racial relations seem so white hot in Amerkkka these days.

According to the Census Bureau, “The U.S. is projected to become a majority-minority nation for the first time in 2043,” with minorities projected to be 57 percent of the population in 2060.

In response, fear and restrictive laws are creeping back into our culture and our politics — not always explicitly or violently, but in ways whose effects are similarly racially arrayed. Structural inequities — economic, educational — are becoming more rigid, and systemic biases harder to eradicate. But this time the threat isn’t regional and racially binary but national and multifaceted.

So, we must fight our fights anew.

This does go to the heart of our times. I know. I live in California. (And I write this post periodically, because it is still true and still matters.)

You see, in California in the 1990s, the state was very close to its own racial tipping point, reached in 2000. No "racial" group forms a majority here. And guess what? We're fine!

We were not fine in the 1990s. I wasn't just blowing smoke when I was running around telling funders they had to pay for voting rights and citizen participation projects in the state -- that we were becoming the new Alabama. During that decade, the shrinking white majority repeatedly tried to hold off demographic change by popular vote.

In 1994, we voted that we hated (Mexican-origin) immigrants and wouldn't provide those people education for their kids, health care, or other social services. (Fortunately, federal courts mostly said "no" to these attempts by the state to preempt national law and policy.) In 1996, we voted to outlaw efforts to ensure that all groups got a fair chance at public higher education; wouldn't want white prospective students to have to compete with those people. That ban on the affirmative action is still in place and diversity in the University of California system has not yet recovered. In 1998, we voted to ban multi-year bilingual education. Wouldn't want to coddle those people. Let'em speak English, even if they are kids and just arrived.

But demographic change marched on. And though those people are still a minority of the registered electorate, those people voted for Democrats near unanimously. And enough whites also voted for Democrats, so the California Republican Party became vestigial, annually searching for some way to "reinvent" itself. And now the state mostly tries to undo the damage from those years and stumble toward a sustainable future which is going to take the best efforts of all of us.

California is no paradise of racial harmony. Our police departments still kill young people of color with little pretext; they just killed an inoffensive Guatemalan immigrant in my neighborhood last week.

But we're over the hump on demographic change. People struggling to get there in the rest of the country should look to California and feel hope. Change is hard; there have been and will be more casualties. But change very well may not take as long as it looks as if it might from where we are stuck today.
***Just one more irresistible moment from Selma. Diane Nash, along with James Bevel, organized the 1965 march. She believed in vigorous nonviolent action for freedom and justice then and she still believes in it now. Last Saturday, she didn't march with the dignitaries -- the participation of George W. Bush detracted too much from what she still holds dear.

... I was not happy there was not a seating section ... for the 'foot soldiers,' the people who actually crossed the bridge 50 years ago ... I think the Selma movement was about nonviolence, and peace, and democracy and George Bush stands for just the opposite, for violence and war and stolen elections. And George Bush's administration had people tortured.

... I think today should have been a celebration of nonviolence. ... it is definitely one of the most significant social inventions of the 20th century. ...

Who knew? Workers and unions gain in Silicon Valley

I admit it. Amid the daily email deluge, communications from the California Labor Federation usually go straight to "delete." But last Friday one such email flew in; I read it; and I learned there interesting developments underway for the people who service the tech industry on the Peninsula.

Apparently the workers who drive buses for Facebook employees to the company's Menlo Park facility voted in November to join the Teamsters. They have now ratified a contract with the contractor, Loop Transportation, that hires them. It looks as if they've gotten a good deal:

Among the provisions of the contract is a pay hike from about $18 an hour to about $24.50, employer-funded family health insurance for full-time employees, more holiday and vacation time, a 401(k) retirement plan and adjustments to workers schedules.

Loop drivers had complained they work marathon shifts that start at 5:45 a.m. and end at 8:45 p.m., with a five-hour break in the middle of the day -- insufficient time for most of the drivers to do anything besides sleep in their cars or in one of the four beds the company provides in a rest trailer. The deal guarantees a minimum six-hour work day and extra cash for split shifts.

Not bad. And thus it is not surprising that bus drivers for Apple, eBay, Yahoo, Zynga and Genentech also have decided to unionize by a vote of 104-38. The numbers may seem small, but of such small victories are overall improvements for workers scratched out.

Meanwhile the deal for the Facebook drivers is not yet final. According to PC World:

The agreement was sent to Facebook for approval as the paying client.

If Facebook has approval on the agreement, the pretense that these people work for a contracting intermediary seems seriously threadbare. Would "Loop Transportation" even exist without the tech companies? Not likely.

Concurrently, Google and Apple seem to be moving away from the contracting-out model for the services that make possible the tech cocoon. According to the same PC World report, both giants have chosen to take their security workforces in-house, paying better wages and offering better benefits. Good for the workers.

What's happening here? I don't expect corporate high-flyers to assume higher costs out of the benevolence of their hearts. One spur might be union organizing rumblings: a community-labor partnership, Silicon Valley Rising, has come together to encourage more responsible corporate practices.

And I don't think all this worker progress in the South Bay is completely unrelated to the flack the tech companies are catching in San Francisco as their highly paid employees turn the real estate market upside down. Allowing some of their low paid people to enjoy union representation pretty well ensures that many unions aren't going to ally themselves with progressive San Franciscans who are looking for ways to curb the tech invasion. They may still offer verbal support -- after all they represent many middle class workers in San Francisco, especially in the public sector -- but they are not likely to throw down for something highly contentious like a ballot measure taxing speculation in housing.

These things are always tricky. As Derecka Mehrens, executive director of Working Partnerships USA explained:

"For every tech job created, there are four jobs created down the supply chain in the region," Mehrens said. "We don’t want the tech industry to go anywhere. It's a job producer."

The same article concludes that maintaining a middle class presence in Silicon Valley is going to pressure from

outside the market — like the labor movements, unions, industry and activists coalitions, and policy demands represented by Silicon Valley Rising. ..[Activists] are going to have to take the jobs the market will generate, and make them middle class.

Just maybe, we are seeing enough economic recovery so as to create an upward pressure on wages which smart organizing can surf toward worker benefits and rights. About time!

The hardness of the women's lives

Robert A. Caro's multi-volume biography of President Lyndon Johnson is like no other historical/journalistic opus I can think of (except perhaps Caro's own epic life of Robert Moses.)

The first volume, The Path to Power introduces the young Johnson and carries him through his failed Senate campaign of 1941. This takes a good 880 pages.

Johnson was an extraordinarily unpleasant boy and young man: self-centered, ruthless, cowardly, sycophantic toward powerful older men, dishonest, devoid of integrity -- and, until the setback that ends this volume, remarkably successful at clawing his way from poverty into power.

Someday I may write more about some of the insights into U.S. politics that Caro offers in this 1982 volume. (He's still working on Johnson even now; at this point, I just hope he finishes before life finishes him!)

But today, to honor International Women's Day, I want to pass along some excerpts in which Caro describes how Johnson's white women constituents in the rural Texas hill country (think outside of Austin) lived during Johnson's boyhood and the Depression.

But the hardness of the farmer's life paled beside the hardness of his wife's. Without electricity, even boiling water was work. ... without electricity to work a pump, there was only one way to obtain water: by hand.

... If the source was a well, it had to be lifted to the surface -- a bucket at a time. ...

And so much water was needed! A federal study of nearly half a million farm families even then being conducted would show that, on the average, a person living on a farm used 40 gallons of water every day. Since the average farm family was five persons, the family used 200 gallons, or four fifths of a ton, of water each day -- 73,000 gallons, or almost 300 tons, in a year. ...

A farmer would do as much of this pumping and hauling as possible himself, and try to have his sons do as much of the rest as possible (it was Lyndon Johnson's adamant refusal to help his mother with the pumping and hauling that touched off the most bitter of the flareups with his father during his youth.)

... But the water the children carried would be used up long before noon, and the children would be away -- at school or in the fields -- and most of the hauling of water was, therefore, done by women. "I would," recalls ... Mary Cox, "have to get it, too -- more than once a day, more than twice; oh, I don't know how many times. I needed water to wash my floors, water to wash my clothes, water to cook. . . . It was hard work. I was always packing [carrying] water."

Carrying it -- after she had wrestled off the heavy wooden lid which kept the rats and squirrels out of the well; after she had cranked the bucket up to the surface (and cranking -- lifting thirty pounds fifty feet or more -- was very hard for most women even with a pulley); most would pull the rope hand over hand, as if they were climbing it, to get their body weight into the effort; they couldn't do it with their arms alone. ...

The Hill Country farm wife had to haul water, and she had to haul wood. Because there was no electricity, Hill Country stoves were wood stoves. ... A farmer would try to keep a supply of wood in the house, or, if he had sons old enough, would assign the task to them. (Lyndon Johnson's refusal to chop wood for his mother was another source of the tension between him and Sam.)

... The necessity of hauling the wood was not, however, the principal reason so many farm wives hated their wood stoves. In part, they hated these stoves because they were so hard to "start up." The damper that opened into the firebox created only a small draft even on a breezy day, and on a windless day, there was no draft -- because there was no electricity, of course, there was no fan to move the air in the kitchen -- and a fire would flicker out time after time. "With an electric stove, you just turn on a switch and you have heat, " says Lucille O'Donnell, but with a wood stove, a woman might have to stuff kindling and wood into the firebox over and over again. ...

In part, farm wives hated wood stoves because they were so dirty, because the smoke from the wood blackened walls and ceilings, and ashes were always escaping through the grating, and the ash box had to be emptied twice a day... they hated the stoves because they could not be left unattended. Without devices to regulate the heat and keep the temperature steady, when the stove was being used for baking or some other cooking in which an even temperature was important, a woman would have to keep a constant watch on the fire ...

Most of all, they hated them because they were so hot. When the big iron stove was lit, logs blazing in its firebox, flames licking at the gratings that held the pots, the whole huge mass of metal so hot that it was almost glowing, the air in the kitchen shimmered with the heat pouring out of it. In the Winter the heat was welcome, and in Spring and Fall it was bearable, but in the Hill Country, Summer would often last five months. Some time in June the temperature might climb to near ninety degrees, and would stay there, day after day, week after week, through the end of September. ...

No matter how hot the day, the stove had be lit much of the time, because it had to be lit not only for meals but for baking; Hill Country wives, unable to afford store-bought bread, baked their own... As Mrs. O'Donnell points out, "We didn't have refrigerators, you know, and without refrigerators, you just about have to start every meal from scratch."

... Since -- because there was no electricity -- there were no refrigerators in the Hill Country, vegetables or fruit had to be canned the very day they came ripe. ... Canning requited constant attendance on the stove. Since boiling water was essential, the fire in the stove had to be kept roaring hot, so logs had to be continually put into the firebox. At least twice during a day's canning, moreover -- probably three or four times -- a woman would have to empty the ash container, which meant wrestling the heavy, unwieldy device out from under the firebox. ...

Canning was an all-day job. So when a woman was canning, she would have to spend all day in a little room with a tin or sheet-iron roof on which a blazing sun was beating down without mercy, standing in front of the iron stove and the wood fire within it. And every time the heat in that stove died down even a bit, she would have to make it hotter again.

... And there was no respite. If a bunch of peaches came ripe a certain day, that was the day they had to be canned...

... every week all year long -- every week without fail -- there was washday. The wash was done outside. A huge vat of boiling water would be suspended over a larger, roaring fire and near it three large "Number Three" zinc washtubs and a dishpan would be placed on a bench. ... A week's wash took at least four loads: one of sheets, one of shirts and other white clothing, one of colored clothes and one of dish towels. But for the typical, large, Hill Country farm family, two loads of each of these categories would be required, so the procedure would have to be repeated eight times.

... For each load, moreover, the water in each of the three washtubs would have to be changed. A washtub held about eight gallons. Since the water had to be warm, the woman would fill each tub half with boiling water from the big pot and half with cold water. She did the filling with a bucket which held three or four gallons -- twenty-five or thirty pounds. ... Another part of washday was also a physical effort: the "punching" of the clothes in the big vat. "You had to do it as hard as you could -- swish those clothes around and around and around. They never seemed to get clean. And those clothes were heavy in the water, and it was hot outside, and you'd be standing over that boiling water and that big fire -- you felt like you were being roasted alive."

... Tuesday was for ironing. Says Mary Cox, in words echoed by all elderly Hill Country farm wives: "Washing was hard work, but ironing was the worst. Nothing could ever be as hard as ironing."

The irons used in the Hill Country had to be heated on the wood stove, and they would retain their heat for only a few minutes -- a man's shirt generally required two irons; a farm wife would own three or four of them, so that several could be heating while one was working. ... Since burning wood generates soot, the irons became dirty as they sat heating on the stove. Or, if any moisture was left on an iron from the sprinkled clothes on which it had just been used, even the thinnest smoke from the stove created a muddy film on the bottom. The irons had to be cleaned frequently, therefore, by scrubbing them with a rag that had been dipped in salt, and if the soot was too thick, they had to be sanded and scraped. ..

... the irons would bum a woman's hand. ... A Hill Country farm wife had to do her chores even if she was ill -- no matter how ill. ... Many [women suffered third degree perineal tears in childbirth according to a federal study,] "tears so bad that it is difficult to see how they stand on their feet." But they were standing on their fee and doing all the chores that Hill Country wives had always done -- hauling the water, hauling the wood, canning, washing, ironing, helping with the shearing, the plowing and picking.

Because there was no electricity.

So Congressman Johnson got them electricity. This served his interests; he formed a livelong alliance with the engineering firm of Brown and Root which evolved through various permutations into a subsidiary of rapacious government contractor, Halliburton. Without Brown and Root, Johnson would not have been a Senator or President.

But Johnson brought the rural Hill Country electricity and changed those women's lives forever.

A message to young people: "Get in good trouble!"

If you haven't seen this, mark the 50th anniversary of the march in Selma, Alabama that signaled the breakthrough for voting rights for African Americans by taking 5 minutes of your day to listen. Congressman John Lewis, who was there and got his skull cracked by segregationist police, speaks slowly and deliberately -- and truthfully.

...weve made too much progress, we're not going back ... we must be hopeful and optimistic... we can do it!

Saturday scenes and scenery: life pushes through

In this strange Northern California winter without any winter weather, at least some growing things are doing just fine.

This would have been a problem -- maybe a flooded intersection -- if we'd had rain.

But we didn't and the grass is doing fine.

Out-takes from 596 Precincts - Walking San Francisco.

Friday cat bloging

Morty would almost certainly agree with the proposition that he hasn't been getting his share of attention lately. He's becoming a predictable senior gentleman, drifting from one preferred napping location to the next with only occasional efforts to scratch my pant leg or disrupt Erudite Partner's spinning.

But he can still terrorize the neighbor's juvenile pit bull -- now that's good sport for a slightly malevolent old guy.

Rally for CCSF Civic Center

It looks a little dilapidated, but the signs in the front windows show why it is loved. The Civic Center campus of City College of San Francisco (CCSF) provides just what the Tenderloin neighborhood needs: free instruction that enables poor and new immigrant people to master enough of the basics to improve their chances in this expensive city. That certainly seems like doing its job.

And doing the job was what the students and faculty here were about until, three days before the spring semester began, they were told with no warning that their Eddy Street facility would be closed for seismic upgrades. Students were shuffled off to other buildings, some outside their neighborhood. It is not clear how much education was disrupted and/or whether some students were just lost.

The shock of the sudden closing lingers. Faculty and staff consider the unexpected move another outrage perpetrated by an imposed special trustee put in place in response to an attack on the college by an unaccountable, private accrediting commission. The elected City College board was deposed. It's taken a court case to get CCSF's foes to back off. But democracy won't be restored until the elected trustees are back on the job.

Meanwhile, the closing of the Civic Center campus raises fears. At a rally on Thursday, former city Supervisor and state Assemblyman Tom Ammiano named the specter that hangs over the campus: in this gentrifying city, the old building occupies valuable real estate. Might CCSF's unelected detractors be intending to cash in on the property? After all, this campus just serves some poor, Asian, Brown, and Black folks.

If that's the plan, there are plenty of San Franciscans that will put up one hell of a fight.

The war is a con

The Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter James Risen documents in Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War what engaged citizens should be shouting from the housetops: the "war on terror" is a boondoggle and a swindle. It's great for enriching entrepreneurial profiteers and empowering authoritarian elites. But the threat to most of us from fanatical terrorism is minimal; the U.S. is not going to collapse any time soon. How long will we allow "national security" crooks to rob us blind and politicians hyping ignorance and bigotry to dominate our imaginations and to dictate our often murderous actions?

No wonder the Obama Justice Department threatened Risen with jail for years, trying to make him divulge who spilled the beans to him in one instance. No wonder that it looks as if one whistleblower, Jeffrey Sterling, who may have talked to the reporter, is going to get the book thrown at him under the Espionage Act. Those of us who have not been following Sterling's case may be surprised to learn, as I did recently on his conviction, that Sterling, who is Black, was likely disaffected because the government managed to get his employment discrimination complaint against the CIA thrown out under the "state secrets" doctrine. While working for the government, Sterling uncovered $32 million in Medicare fraud.

According to Risen, fraud has been the name of the game since 9/11 and certainly since George W. Bush invaded Iraq. After that U.S. invasion our government shipped "pallets of cash" to the Baghdad. A few U.S. military officers were caught pilfering several hundred thousands of dollars from the stash, but most of it was appropriated by some of our pet Iraqi "leaders" who promptly shipped $2 billion to a bunker in Lebanon. Our parsimonious rulers who can't find the money to help the unemployed here have done nothing to get it back.

Then there were the snake oil salesmen like David Montgomery who claimed to be able to decode secret messages from Osama bin Laden hiding in Al Jazeera broadcasts. The sellers of new technologies of death and destruction, the drone merchants, also made out like the bandits they are. No problem to them that the U.S. only multiplies its enemies while pursuing its infatuation with video game war from the skies.

There's lots more. Read it and weep.

But I am going to share a small bit from Risen's chapter on what he calls "the war on decency" -- the United State's embrace of torture in the "war on terror." In that context, he names specific authors of our crimes who seldom are fingered so explicitly.

Perhaps the most important reason that the use of abusive tactics spread was because it fit perfectly with how the Bush White House wanted to prosecute the new "global war on terror." From the outset, President Bush and Vice President Cheney saw the fight against al Qaeda as a national security issue rather than a criminal problem to be dealt with by law enforcement. For Bush, the decision allowed him to disassociate himself from his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton. But Cheney had even deeper motivations; he wanted to roll back the reforms imposed on the executive branch in the 1970s, when he served in the White House under President Gerald Ford. Although torture had never been condoned in the Untied States, Cheney wanted to demonstrate that there were virtually no limitations on presidential power in time of war.

We tortured to demonstrate that a President could torture and no restraint could stop him. In the absence of prosecutions, nothing that Obama has said or done changes that. There's no reason to hope Hillary would be any different, much less any of the Republican clowns. We are just another torture state. Al Qaeda won.

We can be glad we do still have James Risen, still kicking after the Justice Department finally let him off its hook:

A fair and impartial jury in Boston?

A federal court in eastern Massachusetts has sifted through a pool that began with 1373 prospective jurors from the area and selected 18 to sit in judgement on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, accused of the Boston Marathon bombing and associated mayhem.

Judge George O’Toole says the persons selected are "fair and impartial."

I have to wonder what the judge means. If ever there were a trial about which the whole world has an opinion as to whether the defendant did the deeds in question, this is one. The prosecutor has him on video, dropping off the bombs; it has been shown on TV. If these people were living in the area, they were locked down during the manhunt for the two perps. The entire community (and many more) raised money for the victims and thrilled to "Boston Strong." If the jurors weren't living under a rock, they feel part of this event, part of the reaction to the crime. From all the way out here on the west coast, I "know" Tsarnaev is guilty, for goodness sakes.

Apparently the judge did most of the pretrial questioning of potential jurors himself. According a fascinating article from radio station WBUR News whose reporters attended the entire long procedure:

O’Toole asked each potential juror if he or she had formed an opinion of Tsarnaev’s guilt or innocence. Many of them responded that indeed they had, and invariably they presumed Tsarnaev was guilty. Asked how they came to that opinion, they said they had seen, heard or read coverage in the media.

So the judge then asked these people, "Can you set aside your opinion?"

I have to wonder, how many prospects were going to tell this important black robed old white guy: "No, I can't be fair." One defense-oriented jury expert called the judge's questioning "brow-beating." But many people said they could give up what they believe to true. So the judge insists that the process has delivered a fair jury, despite polls showing that 58 percent of area residents believe Tsarnaev did it. Actually, I'm surprised the number is that low. O'Toole denied repeated defense motions to move the trial.

But getting people who claimed to have an open mind was only part of Judge O'Toole's hurdle in seating a jury. He also had to find jurors who would be willing to vote for the death penalty. That's the law. In a death penalty case, if you think the state should not be in business of killing offenders, you are barred from the jury.

Now maybe, if you think the death penalty is wrong and you live somewhere like Georgia or Texas or even California's Orange County, you are branding yourself as outside of community norms, some kind of crackpot. And just maybe, that's reason to exclude you from a jury in a locally important case. But you are not an outlier in the Boston area. Massachusetts has no death penalty; an effort to reinstate such a penalty after the marathon bombing fizzled. A Boston Globe poll in 2013 showed that 57 percent of locals supported life in prison without parole for Tsarnaev (note pretty much all respondents think he's guilty) and only 33 percent want death.

But this is a federal trial and prosecutors want an execution. So the judge was required to hunt for citizen outliers with unusual opinions to sit in judgement on the defendant. And he found people who satisfied his idea of fairness.

John Pucci, a criminal defense lawyer in Springfield, commented on the likely attributes of "death-qualified" jurors:

"By dint of (jurors') willingness to impose the death penalty, they might be more willing to accept the government's version of what happened as compared to people that are opposed to the death penalty."

There's unfortunately considerable research showing that such juries tend to be prosecution friendly.

Perhaps insistence by prosecutors (that means the federal Justice Department) on seeking the death penalty will have more influence on the outcome of this trial than any of the jurors who have to sit through the proceedings. Or perhaps not. Juries can surprise.

80,000 human beings entombed; it is not just Guantanamo

As of 2013, there were 80,000 men and women in solitary confinement in the United States, some of them as young as 14 years old. In this illustrated op-ed video, artist Molly Crabapple explains the psychological and physical trauma suffered by those forced to spend 22-24 hours a day alone — sometimes for arbitrary reasons, like reading the wrong book, or having the wrong tattoo — in a grey, concrete box. (According to the U.N. 15 days in solitary is torture.) “There is no limit to how long someone can be held in solitary confinement,” says Crabappple. “And very little evidence is needed to justify holding a person in solitary indefinitely.”

This video is well done. I searched for statistics about the racial breakdown of the people in solitary. There don't seem to be any easily accessible. That's not surprising. These hellholes continue because most of us don't know about them. The closest I could come to information on race was an article by law professor Margo Schlanger, who finds over-representation of people of color in the rare cases she could surface reliable data.

I've become a Lenten exercise for some Jehovah's Witnesses

The envelopes and the letters appear authentically handwritten. My uninvited correspondent wants to help me:

It is our privilege to share in a work that is being done by volunteers in more than 239 lands. In all these lands people are being invited to benefit from a program that helps people learn the Bible's answers to such questions as: why do we grow old and die? ... We engage in this activity because we are genuinely interested in our neighbors. Our work is not commercial.

The concern seems genuine. So far I've gotten two of these.

I have a vision of nice respectable women sitting someplace that looks like a school room, churning reams of these out in fulfillment of their evangelical duty. I wonder, why am I a target? If they have the equivalent of a good voter file, they know I am female, older, white, a long time homeowner. Perhaps I'm not so different from them -- except that I am. So it goes ...
***Oddly enough, I did a project not too different from this for the Obama campaign in 2008. Volunteers mailed partially hand written letters to potential voters they had never been able to reach by any other means. I calculated that 24 volunteer hours might yield 6-12 additional votes for our guy. I wonder if the Jehovah's Witnesses get that high a return?
***Given that we are into March, when Californians mark farmworker organizer Cesar Chavez' birthday, I'll trot out my favorite Chavez story. When I did a brief stint on the United Farmworkers boycott in New York City, an order came from the man himself in Delano: "Find out how they get those ladies to stand on the corners all the time with their tracts." I don't know whether anyone ever ventured over to the Watchtower to fulfill that instruction.
***I'm afraid the post's headline is a cultural faux pas. Jehovah's Witnesses don't observe Lent. Or Easter either. Now I know.

No additional comment

H/t TPM.

A stupid expenditure that saved lives

Worth noting: statistical analysis shows that the 1.3 billion taxpayer dollars in abstinence education insisted upon by conservatives as a condition for funding AIDS prevention programs in Africa under George W. Bush was "largely waste."

The study, done by a second-year student at Stanford Medical School for a professor with an expertise in cost-benefit analyses, caused a major stir in the room where it was presented [in Seattle last week].

The researcher, Nathan Lo, analyzed records showing the age of people having sex for the first time, teenage pregnancy and number of sexual partners in international health surveys that have been paid for by the State Department since the 1970s.

...Global health specialists came to the microphone to congratulate Mr. Lo. Advocates who had long opposed the American policy that sought to prevent AIDS by promoting abstinence and faithfulness applauded.

“That was fantastic,” said Dr. Gilles van Cutsem, medical coordinator for Doctors Without Borders in South Africa.

Staff members from the government program that Mr. Lo had accused of wasting money — Pepfar, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — came up afterward to quietly congratulate him. When they realized a reporter was present, they nervously asked that they not be named.

Guess this just goes to show that it takes an outsider to point out that the emperor wears no clothes. People who lived through the epidemic in this country could (and did) predict this, but it took somebody who didn't need the grant money to prove it.

This is not to say that U.S. AIDS programs in Africa under Bush II were all useless. In fact, they were probably the closest thing to a successful feature of that awful presidency. Here's Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, not usually a Bush fan:

When the Bush administration inaugurated the program in 2003, fewer than 50,000 HIV-infected people on the African continent were receiving the antire­troviral drugs that keep the virus in check and halt the progression toward full-blown AIDS. By the time Bush left office, the number had increased to nearly 2 million. Today, the United States is directly supporting antiretroviral treatment for more than 4 million men, women and children worldwide, primarily in Africa.

This is an amazing accomplishment, especially because it wasn’t supposed to be possible. ... the conventional wisdom was that the drug-treatment regimens that were saving lives in developed countries would not work in Africa. Poor, uneducated people in communities lacking even the most basic infrastructure could not be expected to take the right pill at the right time every day. When the drugs are taken haphazardly, the virus mutates and becomes resistant. Therefore, this reasoning went, trying to administer antiretroviral treatment in poor African countries might actually be worse than doing nothing at all.

The Bush administration rejected these arguments, which turned out to be categorically wrong. Africans are every bit as diligent about taking their HIV medications as are Americans or other Westerners. ...

"Children have to be taught to hate..."

When the world gets me down, I consume sports journalism. Yes, it's usually trite. It's also often sycophantic jock-sniffing. But when one of these guys opts to get serious, sometimes there gold at the core. Enjoy this improbable lesson from a Texas sportscaster.

Not much winter, definite sign of spring, and trouble ahead

In this strange winter without winter weather (and rain), I see this has pushed its head up in the front yard.

Scientists are suggesting we haven't seen anything yet, that there is an 85 percent chance of a drought lasting as long as 35 years in the Southwest by the end of this century. That will make for some mighty dry soil. Obviously, parched soil means parched crops and parched people.

About a millennium ago, drought is thought to have done in Pueblo cultures. What's facing us is different because, in addition to cyclical lower rain fall, higher temperatures in the context of global warming will cause what water remains to evaporate more rapidly.

The coming megadroughts will have profound effects on water resources and agricultural productivity. Water rights in the West were carved up during the 1920s, one of the wettest periods in the past 500 years. "It's kind of bad luck that we based our water accounting on those really wet decades," [Benjamin] Cook, [a climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies,] said. And the West's population explosion between 1980 through 2000 also coincided with wetter than normal decades. Now, with nearly every drop of surface water legally claimed, cities and famers make up any deficit by tapping nonrenewable underground aquifers, which are already straining to meet current demands.

"The future of the United States west of the Mississippi is hot and it is dry," said Kevin Anchukaitis, a paleoclimatologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who was not involved in the study.

I almost feel guilty, enjoying this strange season in-between, before parts of California become unlivable.

H/t A Change in the Wind for pointing to the drought article.