Saturday scenes and scenery: grasses still stand tall

It's been a strange autumn in drought-stricken northern California. We've had a couple of moderate rain storms, but temperatures have remained comfortably in the 60s and most days have been bright and clear.

Anticipating that one of these days El Niño storms will drive me off the hills, I've been out on the trails every chance I can seize.

The pampas grass is thriving everywhere. It seems to be an invasive species from the Andes, considered noxious by horticultural purists. I'm rather fond of it. These hills were cleared of whatever was native here many decades ago.

New York Times has amnesia

On Wednesday, the French authorities said they had carried out more than 414 raids across the country, arrested 64 people and placed another 118 under house arrest.

Under the emergency, the authorities are permitted to conduct raids and make arrests without first obtaining a warrant. But as soon as someone is arrested or property is seized, the regular legal system kicks in. Suspects in terrorism cases are already allowed to be held without charge for up to six days.

In the United States, even in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, raids on that scale would have created a storm of criticism, but the French, only 10 months after Islamist radicals attacked the newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket, have generally accepted the crackdown as necessary.

November 20, 2015

Actually, by November 2001, the Times was reporting that somewhere between 500 and 1000 miscellaneous Muslim males, of varying immigration statuses, had been picked and held, largely incommunicado, mostly without charges or lawyers.

Then as now, this wasn't law enforcement; it was a panic attack. Like the French, few in the U.S. objected to this blanket racial and religious profiling. None of those swept up in this dragnet were ever charged with terrorism. Perhaps the French can undercover some real perps? That doesn't seem to be what dragnets do.

California's roll of dishonor

The following Democratic Congresscritters voted Thursday to further impede some minuscule number of refugees from the Syrian civil war from reaching our shores.

• Pete Aguilar (CA-31)

• Ami Bera (CA-07)

• Julia Brownley (CA-26)

• Jim Costa (CA-16)

• John Garamendi (CA-03)

• Janice Hahn (CA-44)

• Scott Peters (CA-52)

• Raul Ruiz (CA-36)

The current panic is Republican hate theater. The "vetting" (bureaucratic hoops and endless delays) to which refugees are subjected is so cumbersome that we have allowed entry to less than 2000 people, mostly children and elders, in the last four years.

These cowardly Congresscritters are aiding Daesh (ISIS), demonstrating that we share the terrorists' disdain for victims of violence. Would they have voted to leave Anne Frank to her fate under the Nazis in 1939? Most likely. In the spring of that year, according to the Holocaust Museum, Congress allowed a bill to die in committee that would have admited 20,000 Jewish children.

Resilience and Remembrance

The Transgender Day of Remembrance #TDOR is observed annually on this day to remember those who lost their lives in acts of violence against gender non-conforming people.

The organization Strong Families has created a Trans Day of Resilience Art Project for the occasion. See the rest of the images at the link.***Meanwhile, there remains a generation of transpeople who transitioned before the current outburst of affirming awareness and remain extremely vulnerable to mistreatment for the offense of becoming themselves. According to a transman named "Marc," these older people often

"don’t have families of origin. They don’t have spouses, family or children,” he says. “If you don’t have those people advocating for you, you’re far more likely to be abused in a living facility or nursing home.”

For this highly marginalized group, the idea of going into an assisted living facility is a nightmare. Michelle Evans’s worst fears about care facilities came true just after she transitioned.

Evans, a 59-year-old trans woman from Orange County, Calif., knew from a young age that her body and mind were at odds, although it took her nearly a lifetime—over 50 years—to fully transition. About a year after she did, she broke both legs in an accident and was forced to stay in a nursing home after surgery. Except that no nursing home would take her, she says.

When she finally found one that would, it insisted on putting her in the men’s ward. Evans protested and eventually ended up with a room of her own, but she says the doctor in charge told her that identifying as a female was “wrong.”

The doctor eventually stopped Evans’ hormone treatments and took her off blood thinners—medication she needed after her surgery. Soon Evans developed dangerous blood clots in her legs. A friend finally intervened and took her back to the hospital, where she was told she had only 24 hours to live—the clots had made it to her lungs.

Evans survived and won a cash settlement -- but what can repay her for such trauma? Read her story and more here.

Friday cat blogging

By popular request, here's Morty, being himself.

Apparently he has been posing for some stencil artist -- so I had to conclude while finding this on a lamp post while walking for 596 Precincts.

Fraidy cat nation

A Central Maine newspaper knows what it thinks of Governor Paul LePage's attempt to ban Syrian refugees.

The anti-refugee argument goes like this: At least one of the killers in Paris was carrying a Syrian passport and he appears to have come into Western Europe on the migrant trail, along with hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria’s brutal three-way civil war. Since it is difficult to tell real refugees from impostors, the argument goes, the U.S. can’t risk helping any of them.

This is ridiculous.

If they had been pretending to be tourists instead of migrants, would we end tourism? If they had been hiding in cargo ships, would we stop world trade? No, and we should not abandon people in need just because we’re scared.

A young New England friend has no truck with the fear among her friends:

... you are scared they are going to make a bomb and blow you up? Well, you are American. America is home of the brave. You are suppose to be BRAVE dum dum, and if you aren't, go move to Switzerland, oh wait, Switzerland is accepting refugees.

Republican cowards just want to keep us scared witless, I guess.

Working day and night but without work

What if a "reform" made the life of 1.5 million U.S. households with approximately 3 million children dramatically more challenging -- and scarcely anyone but the unfortunates themselves noticed? In $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America that's what social scientists Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer document, both vividly and convincingly. The "welfare reform" of 1996 has created a huge, largely invisible class of destitute families who struggle to get by in our cash economy with only the tiny sum that the World Bank uses as the marker of deepest global poverty.

Our intuition is not entirely accurate about who these families are:

... the experience of living below the $2-a-day threshold didn't discriminate by family type or race. While single mother families were most at risk of falling into a spell of extreme destitution, more than a third of the households in $2-a-day poverty were headed by a married couple. ... the rate of growth [in this extreme situation] was highest among African Americans and Hispanics. Nearly half of the $2-a-day poor were white.

Food stamps (SNAP) and a few housing subsidies help, but since around 2000, the number of these extremely poor people has increased 50 percent.

These researchers went looking for people in this category whose stories were representative in both small and large cities and in rural areas. They thought it might be hard to find suitable subjects; in fact it was relatively easy. The book delves deeply into the stories of eight families, their survival strategies, their ups and downs (instability is the name of the game when you are that poor), their delights, and their values.

There's no question the 1996 welfare reform has had an effect. Meant to wean poor mothers off "dependence" and get them into the labor force, there's no question that today to be in $2-a-day poverty is work. And paying work is what poor people now most want, but struggle to find and keep.

The "welfare reform" assumed a stable growing economy where everyone could get jobs and poor working people would be buoyed by the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) which raises the effective incomes of low wage workers. But the EITC does nothing for the officially unemployed. For a while in the late 1990s expansion, "reform" more or less "succeeded," at least for some, though many still cycled from crisis to crisis, in and out of wage employment. But when the economy stagnated and then crashed in the '00s, there turned out to be no safety net for many.

And the poor have internalized the values of the reformers. A single mom insisted that

... to be a good parent, she had to model the value of education in getting a job. For these single mothers, the idea of returning to welfare violated their views of what being a good parent required, adding a self-imposed stigma to the potent societal stigma that came with claiming benefits ...

As far as they know, "welfare" is something that "they don't give out no more." Even at the depths of the 2008 economic implosion, TANF (state-run cash assistance program) rolls didn't grow; the poor expect no help from the state.

Edin and Shaefer report the difficulties the low-wage work market throws up that prevent really poor people from getting and keeping jobs: lack of transportation, need for internet access, expensive housing, short shifts, unreliable schedules, and always racial discrimination against African Americans. This is all true for most low wage workers. But the people who fall the furthest often have additional obstacles to escaping from poverty:

... they've had their share of hard luck; they've made their share of bad moves; they have other personal liabilities (asthma, or the same name as a notorious ex-con, for example); and their kin pull them down as often as they lift them up. ...

To a large extent, chance determines who stays employed and scrapes by and who falls out of the job market.

So what do $2-a-day people do? Move in with family members, often no better off or exploitative. Sell their blood plasma. Collect scrap metal and recycling. Illegally self off their food stamps to buy clothes for kids. Learn the round of food pantries and clothing giveaways. Sell the use of their kids' Social Security numbers. Learn to get by with society's scraps, to reuse and do without. Go hungry. Dream. There are few people who work harder, but we call these people unemployed.

These authors believe that the "reform" which trashed the safety net became possible, even inevitable, because

any program so out of sync with American values was doomed to fail. [Cash assistance] created a class of outcasts forced to trade their sense of citizenship for relief. ...

Our approach to ending $2-a-day poverty is guided by three principles: (1) all deserve the opportunity to work [for money]; (2) parents should be able to raise their children in a place of their own; and (3) not every parent will be able to work, or work all the time, but parents' well-being, and the well-being of their children, should nonetheless be ensured.

Nice ideas, but count me skeptical. Rapid changes -- technological, cultural, racial, international -- and the fears they unleash, are making this a pretty nasty society these days. Too often, too many of us, wish we could wish the Others (Those People) away. Too often, too many of us, shut out awareness of others' pain. A viable safety net arises from the knowledge "we're all in this together." Too often, too many of us, think erroneously that we're on our own.

And the very poor have no choice but to keep working away to survive.

Obama talking sense

This post may disturb some of my leftish friends, but I'm thanking my stars in the aftermath of Paris that we have a President who is seven years in office. He never has to face a misinformed, xenophobic, and easily frightened electorate again. He has learned that U.S. power has many limits. And he still shows some instinct to avoid "dumb" wars. Obama was goaded into telling the press a lot of truths Monday at the G20 summit in Turkey.

“What I do not do is take actions either because it is going to work politically or it is going to somehow, in the abstract, make America look tough or make me look tough.”

... he said large numbers of American troops on the ground would repeat what he sees as the mistake of the Iraq invasion of 2003 and would not help solve the terrorism problem around the globe.

“That would be a mistake, not because our military could not march into Mosul or Raqqa or Ramadi and temporarily clear out ISIL, but because we would see a repetition of what we’ve seen before,” Mr. Obama said. Victory over terrorist groups, he said, requires local populations to push back “unless we’re prepared to have a permanent occupation of these countries.”

... he said he would not be pressured into “posing” as a tough president by doing things that will not make the situation better to satisfy his critics.

“Some of them seem to think that if I was just more bellicose in expressing what we’re doing, that that would make a difference,” he said. “Because that seems to be the only thing that they’re doing, is talking as if they’re tough.”

... “The people who are fleeing Syria are the most harmed by terrorism; they are the most vulnerable as a consequence of civil war and strife,” Mr. Obama said. He added: “We do not close our hearts to these victims of such violence and somehow start equating the issue of refugees with the issue of terrorism.”

Without naming him, Mr. Obama singled out a comment by former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, one of the Republicans seeking to succeed him, for suggesting the United States focus special attention on Christian refugees. “That’s shameful,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s not American. It’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”

New York Times

Now we've seen him back off a lot of other relatively sane things he said before. Maybe he'll crumble and plunge us into more ground war this time too. He did that in Afghanistan. Not only will the Republican clown show howl for his head, but the C.I.A. is already trying to use Daesh atrocities to justify more and better spying. Will he give them their latest wish list? Can he keep his grip on reality?

In truth, the U.S. practice, as opposed to promises, of providing refuge to escapees from Syria stinks -- less than 2000 admitted since the civil war broke out.

And the Syria policy -- a preposterous attempt to defeat two sides of a civil war at once -- is not likely to succeed.

But people in the United States who know better than to respond to Daesh crimes with more atrocities need to be making our voices heard. For the moment, that means having this deeply flawed President's back. He certainly can't stay his course if left out on a limb among the hostile mob.

Teaching moment, off the field

How often do we hear such simple good sense from a football star? This is enough to make me proud that Rodgers is too a Cal Berkeley alum.

Before the start of the game at Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wis., an unidentified spectator appeared to yell, “Muslims suck!” during a moment of silence, which preceded all N.F.L. games on Sunday.

...Asked about the gesture honoring those killed in the Paris attacks, Mr. Rodgers said: “I think it’s important to do things like that. We’re connected, a connected world — you know, six degrees of separation.”

He then paused and added: “I must admit though, I was very disappointed with whoever the fan was who made a comment that I thought was really inappropriate during the moment of silence. It’s that kind of prejudicial ideology that, I think, puts us in the position that we’re in today, as a world.”

New York Times

Disaster for all but the happy few

Lyricist Sheldon Harnick knew the score, in 1959 writing the cheery line in the song "Merry Minuet": "What nature doesn't do to us will be done by our fellow man ..."

In The Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make the Rich Richer and the Poor Even Poorer, John C. Mutter provides an academic account of this present day fact. Like many of the storms Mutter recounts, this book begins slowly, carrying only a hint of its powerful and distressing conclusions. Careful chapters catalog the general categories of "natural" catastrophe, their effects, but most importantly the nearly universal character of their aftermaths.

The Columbia professor in Earth and Environmental Sciences and International and Public Affairs defines the sequence of the phenomena he discusses:

The important thing to recognize is that disasters are processes, not single events ... The first phase takes place before the event [-- the quake, the storm, the flood --] occurs. It is when societies should be preparing for disasters that will surely come, but typically do not ...The second phase is the event itself ... The third phase, which is talked about the least, is what happens after the disaster. ... It is the period of time when individuals try to get back on their feet and societies try to function in some semblance of the way they did before the disaster. ... No one has a formula for how to recover quickly, effectively, or completely. Some societies succeed very well and might even prosper from the experience; some don't.

Mutter's book is not all doom and gloom. Though worldwide media saturation means that we are more aware of terrible events halfway round the world than we might have been until recently, in fact he concludes that lower rates of extreme poverty have lowered the annual death toll from "natural" disasters from 120,000 in 1970 to 20,000 today. Not that we really know; he goes to some lengths to explain how poorly the toll of most events is counted. And most events don't even show up in national GDP calculations because the kind of wealth destroyed in disasters -- especially property rights in land -- aren't part of that economic abstraction.

But mostly -- whether in Haiti or China after earthquakes, in Sri Lanka and Japan after tsunamis, or in Myanmar or New Orleans after cyclones -- a dreary pattern can be documented.

Post disaster situations ... are fertile ground for some and wastelands for others. An elite few make out-of-sight decisions about rebuilding or not rebuilding, about who will benefit from the lucrative contracts that will be part of any reconstruction and who will not. But more important are the actions of another elite group (perhaps with some of the same members as the first), operating outside media scrutiny, to exploit an opportunity to reshape society in order to secure its hold on power and capital.

... What all these cases do reflect is an ordering of society and a geography of poverty and wealth that increasingly put physical and financial distance between the classes. And every disaster, because it harms the lower ranks and merely inconveniences the upper, separates us more and more.

Mutter's conclusion extrapolates his model to climate change:

It's completely expected that in a world of great inequality that the outcome of a natural disaster will also be unequal. Disasters may well affect everybody, rich or poor, in some way, and they are never pleasant for anyone. We want to believe that a disaster is a moment when everyone pulls together, but it is not. It is a moment of pulling apart because the effect on each group is so different, and the way each group can cope is vastly different. ..."

... What is very likely to happen is that the true injustices of disasters will increase. As the gap between the wealthy elite and the 99 percent grows and grows, it will become easier and easier for the elite to control the outcomes of disasters amid the chaos. And that is no accident. ... it is because inequalities can be made greater still by the actions of those who have power. The disaster itself provides a cover, a sort of shield to hide behind, a distraction. Most people will believe that what is going on is natural, but the natural part of the drama of disaster is over fairly quickly.

Many natural scientists believe that burgeoning climate change will increase the frequency of extreme weather disasters, including intense droughts, prolonged rainfall, and strong storms. ... A smaller and smaller habitable planet will be asked to serve the needs of a much larger number of people. ... the elite will grab more and more habitable land for themselves, leaving the majority in the badlands. If there is anything certain about climate change, it is that it will send us further apart than we already are. Natural disasters teach us how it will be done.

If the poor, Black residents of New Orleans, especially those who were never able to make it back to the city, had known about Mutter's theoretical construct, might they have been more able to fight back against displacement? They certainly already had known for generations that elites considered them throwaway people. But wider understanding of how "natural" disasters always are seized upon by the wealthy to enhance their existing advantages might at least have helped them pick their fights in the traumatized aftermath.

This is not a fun read, nor is it particularly cogently written. I picked up a few historical tidbits I may pursue one day, for example that the 1906 San Francisco quake was followed by vigilante murders of poor residents, just as happened in post-Katrina New Orleans. But I'm glad to have a stronger familiarity with the ugly pattern. After all, I live in earthquake and tsunami country; this typology could be all too personally relevant.

Once again: our grief is not a cry for war

As we recoil from the atrocity in Paris, the bombing of a Shi'a neighborhood in Beirut, and the downing of a Russian civilian airliner, it's worth remembering there are two groups who are delighted by these events.

Obviously the perpetrators are delighted -- presumably that means ISIS, ISIL, IS, Daesh or whatever it is called. Surfing the web, it is possible to read pundits, scholars, and general bloviators of numerous stripes and tendencies explaining how the recent string of crimes represent a strategic shift by that force. Some of these theories may be correct, but in the heat of the moment, it probably would be smart to suspend judgment, investigate, and respond with more thought than emotion. Among the pundits, I like the speculation by Gilbert Ramsay, a British international relations scholar:

If there is a reliable strategic purpose to terrorism it is simply this: to shake things up. To change things. To kick over the table and play a different game instead. The best way, always, to win that particular game is not to accept the invitation to play.

The other group that is delighted by these events are the permanent war hawks of the U.S. national security state. These "delighters" screwed up so badly after the terrorist crime of 2001 that a generation has come along who are somewhat inoculated against their hysterical fear mongering. The most diverse generation ever is not down with their elders' Islamophobia, racism, and defense of imperial domination. The right wing Slate columnist William Saletan is salivating over the disillusionment he hopes will follow the current round of atrocity.

If you’re one of the millions of young people who enjoyed this period of relative comfort, I’m sorry tell you that it’s coming to an end. If Madrid, London, or Mumbai didn’t wake you up, Paris should. ... If you grew up watching thousands of Americans die in Iraq, along with many thousands of Iraqis, it’s easy to say that the Iraq war was a mistake. ... In a world full of religious violence and terrorism, you’ll have to choose among some bad options. ... You might have to send American troops abroad. You might have to join the fight yourself.

We can expect from our domestic right-wingers a full scale assault on the "Iraq War syndrome" -- the successor to the Vietnam syndrome. We the people may be slow sometimes, but we do eventually notice when our leaders blunder into fruitless imperial wars and the experience fosters a reluctance to go abroad [seeking] monsters to destroy.

We can trust Republicans to delightedly bang the war drums. Daesh gives them the enemy they need. We can't trust the Democrats not to embrace war fever, even if somewhat reluctantly. This country still needs people of good will to rein in the follies of our rulers.

Graphic dates from Sept. 22, 2001. Still true.

Sign of the times: R.I.P. the daily fish wrap

My neighbor still receives that daily print edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. When I go out in the morning, there it is in the drought-parched yard.

She lives behind the gate.

I used to throw the paper over the bushes. But it has lately become so slight that it gets stuck in the bushes.

It does, however, slide easily under the gate.

"Fish wrap" is what the late, lamented San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen affectionately called the paper that employed him.

Houston trans folks explain: "it's not about the bathrooms"

These are the folks who need to take the lead on this fight for non-discrimination. It's a lot for the rest of us to ask of them.

Why is this guy so repulsive?

I find Ted Cruz' appearance stomach turning (and that's without taking into consideration anything he stands for.)

I'm not alone in this. Paul Waldman confesses the same feeling:

... a necessary confession: I find Cruz utterly repellent, on a real gut level, and most of the liberals I know feel the same way.

That's no basis on which to make rational political judgments, but it is what it is. There's a self-satisfied smarminess about Cruz that is just inescapable. His manner is always exactly the same, the varieties of human emotion distilled down to a smirk and a sneer. He's about as charming as the lawyer who sues the school district because his kid got a 99 instead of 100 on a geography quiz.

Or may as charming as Martin Shkreli, the greedy pharmaceutical billionaire. Though pictures of Shkreli don't make him quite as bad looking.

An odious appearance is unusual in a major politician. Why is this guy so repulsive?

Friday cat blogging

Let's give Morty a Friday off and look at some amazing cats I ran across in an otherwise unremarkable San Francisco neighborhood while walking 596 Precincts.

These improbable felines were glued to the exterior of a quite ordinary gray van.

I rather suspect that the creator worked from photos.

I found them pleasantly antic.

Who covers their car with patchwork cats? Beats me.

Yes -- the climate is out of whack

Do you still know people who doubt the climate is warming because "hey, it snowed a lot last winter?"

Argument doesn't often change minds, but here's a visualization that might help a few:

Click "Learn more" on the lower left for a simple explanation. Click on the 1950s to see how much more out of balance climate has become over the decades.

Thanks to Hunter Cutting and Climatenexus. If for some reason this widget isn't working, try that last link.

Why do men wear ties?

My busy day on Tuesday meant that it was late evening before I read a news site and discovered the Republicans had put on another episode of "Presidential Survivor." (This appropriate "debate" description via a communications prof named Patrick Stewart.)

I haven't paid any attention to anything any of these characters may have said; they aren't uttering anything but rubbish, so I don't have to.

But occasional pictures have left me with a nagging question: why do men wear ties? They trot out there in their dark suits uttering inanities and the sole differentiation between them is the color and perhaps fabric of their neck wear.

Actually it was the Donald who got me going on to this question. He not only wears ties: he favors shiny, solid color ones that probably are quite expensive but look to me merely slick and cheesy.
I tried asking the web my question, but Google and Wikipedia offered little help. Neckties are apparently the successor to a garment called the "cravat" but that doesn't explain the "why."

The most convincing answer I ran across was this:

... the cravat is the forefather of the present day tie. Men continue to wear one because they believe that it gives them an air of intelligence and authority far greater than they actually have. If a tie gets you the job, it says a lot about the people who hired you.

Seeking justice and keeping love alive

When the San Francisco Police Department shot and killed Alex Nieto on Bernal Hill in March 2014, they didn't just do away with some anonymous, no-count, young Brown male -- they killed a City College student pursuing his dreams, raised in the neighborhood, embedded in a family and an extended Mission community that loved him.

Yesterday friends, community and family came together on the windy steps of the old Federal Building to celebrate a judge's decision to allow to allow a civil suit against the killers to go forward. Trial date is now set for March 1, 2016. The two dignified persons on the right are Alex's parents.

Members of Danzantes Xitlali invoked the earth's directions.

Mission activist and poet Tony Robles read a poem for homeys.

And Benjamin Bac Sierra reported the sworn testimony of a witness, an individual unknown to any of Alex's friends, who had seen the killing and whose story convinced a judge to send the case to trial.

Under sworn testimony and critical examination, a neutral third party witness of the killing swears Alex Nieto never pointed or activated a taser at Officers. The witness observed Alex walking casually and coolly as though he had no idea that the police were after him (and we now know that Alex had no idea that anyone had called the police on him BECAUSE ALEX NIETO HAD DONE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG).

It is undisputed that the Officers did not give any warnings before they opened fire on Alex Nieto with 48 shots that ultimately killed him.

To be continued.

Overrun by the Google buses

Signs have gone up in the 'hood announcing a meeting on November 17 at City Hall. These list the locations where Google buses have been stopping under the "Pilot Program" which was our local rulers' ruse for legalizing the use of the city of San Francisco as a transit hub for Peninsula tech companies. Yes, the list is long.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency has issued a report on this venture. I'm sure the beleaguered employees assigned to write this document did their best. But what comes through is an agency without any independent capacity to gather data, which received only sporadic cooperation from shuttle operators, and which was grossly understaffed to either verify that information or enforce any limitations on bus behavior. Some of the underlying tone of the report is almost plaintive.

Despite these limitations, some of the conclusions within these writers' bureaucratic jargon suggest that double-decker tour-bus size vehicles flooding city streets makes for tensions:

Shuttles block travel and bike lanes about 35% of the time that they stop...

Keeping streets safe, keeping transit moving, and preventing shuttle-zone blockages are key objectives of enforcement, but are not reflected in citation data ...

More enforcement staffing, and a focus on enforcement both at shuttle zones and along shuttle routes, would assist in keeping traffic flowing smoothly throughout the shuttle-zone network ...

The vast majority of community feedback focused on large shuttles being unwelcome on the streets, especially residential streets ...

Real-time shuttle vehicle data would greatly assist the SFMTA in regulating and managing commuter shuttle activity ...

According to the report, the "Pilot Program" was mandated to "provide a positive partnership" between the tech companies that hire the bus companies and the City as well as "increase acceptance of commuter shuttles by community members." To that end, it emphasizes that Google buses

reduce drive-alone trips, vehicle miles traveled, and greenhouse gas emission.

I'm quite willing to believe the Google buses do all those good things.

But I remain galled by the arrogance of tech companies which have simply appropriated San Francisco for their unfettered convenience without regard to the costs they inflict on those of us already here. It's not the workers who ride the buses who are at fault here or even the bus companies that the tech giants hire. It's the corporations which expect to operate without meaningful check or regulation while raking in billions.

Make Election Day a federal holiday!

Love this campaign!

Sign on at this petition.

Here come the bathroom wars

Since the defeat at the polls of Houston's civil rights ordinance, I've been thinking what we can learn from afar from this campaign experience.

Houston voters struck down a non-discrimination ballot measure Tuesday, delivering a blow to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights movement that had campaigned heavily for passage.

Prop. 1, known as Houston's Equal Rights Ordinance, would have barred discrimination on the basis of race, age, military status, disability and 11 other categories in a variety of areas. (Religious organizations and institutions would be exempt from the requirements.) 

It was HERO's protections on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, however, that attracted the most attention and made the ballot measure the center of the LGBT community's efforts this election.

The circumstances in which such measures are fought are always particular and immediate to their place and time. But each also may offer some insights useful to the continuing struggle for full equality for any of us who differ from conventional norms.

There are always recriminations after a defeat like this. Michelangelo Signorile provides a catalogue for this occasion:

Political strategists warned LGBT activists in the days ahead of the vote: There was little Spanish-language outreach, no big ad buy in Spanish-language media -- in a city that is 44% Hispanic -- countering the lies of the opposition, who'd certainly been doing their own outreach. Monica Roberts, a long-time African-American transgender activist, warned of little outreach in the black community, which makes up 24% of the city. ... And no ads by LGBT rights proponents held the equal punch that the nasty hate ads embodied. Instead, they overwhelmingly ran nicey-nice ads about good neighbors and equality and human dignity.

I have no way of knowing whether that is a fair assessment of the campaign's failings. I've certainly seen and experienced similar indictments after gay rights campaigns before -- and these complaints were usually somewhat accurate. The people who get us into and lead these fights -- economically secure, usually white, LGBT leaders -- are usually not the same people as the queers who would have to put themselves on the line in their own communities to win them.

And this time around, the right wingers and Christianists made sure the fight was about public bathrooms. Apparently we walked into this one.

Restrooms are not specifically mentioned in the measure, which is why conservatives were accused of fearmongering. Still, it was the ordinance’s supporters, not its opponents, who appeared to first raise the issue of bathrooms last year. A draft of the bill included a section, later removed, that would have let transgender people use the bathroom that best reflected their gender identity. Opponents seized on the issue and never let go.

Weeks before Election Day, the Campaign for Houston aired a TV ad that shows a man stepping into a woman’s restroom and hiding in a stall. Then a girl wearing a school backpack walks in. The ad, shot in black and white, ends with the man entering the girl’s stall and shutting the door. It was one of several ads they released, but “the one we ran the most,” Mr. Woodfill added.

Creepy and false, but damned effective.

Public bathrooms are always a bit fraught for most women -- maybe most people. After all, we enter them in order to perform what most of us think are very intimate function -- in a place open to strangers! My friend, Rinku Sen, explains cogently why we (all humans) are so good at perceiving "race" even when we are not aiming to be "racist."

The last two decades of neuroscience have revealed the existence of implicit bias, an unconscious form that determines our behavior, even without instruction to discrimination. Such bias stems from the human brain's efficiency and its programmed need to determine in a flash who is in our group (safe) and who is not (dangerous).

And just as quickly we filter our reactions to unknown persons by tribe and race, we also filter for gender -- anyone of the "wrong" or of hard-to-determine gender creates anxiety. Bathrooms are the perfect arena for this.

Once upon a time, pretty much all LGBT people inspired this kind of gender anxiety in pretty much everyone (even some gay people). The accomplishment of the gay movement, through mass coming out and a lot of individual bravery, has been to render many of us just a normal part of the social fabric.

But some people (not all LGBT) who can't or won't conform to gender norms still set off alarms in the anxious environment of public bathroom. I know -- I'm a 68 year old white woman-identified woman who has that effect in airport restrooms. It's annoying to have women gasp when you emerge from the stall. This reaction is no threat to me, but it might be to a young person or a person of color using what others thought was the "wrong" facility.

We can expect right-wingers to run with this anxiety as far as they can stretch it. In California, proponents of an initiative to repeal the right of students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms of the gender with which they identify have until November 20 collect enough signatures to qualify for the 2016 election. They just might do it; that will probably depend on whether national anti-gay organizations have thrown down the money to do the job.

Even if this threat passes as previous initiative attempts have, the Houston defeat means fights over bathroom access aren't going away. Some of the most vulnerable members of our communities will be on the line in these fights. How are we all there with them?

Graphic via Media Matters which has taken up the thankless task of reminding journalists that equal rights are not solely about bathrooms.

Saturday scenes: Nicaraguan children

At the risk of being trite, an awful lot of Nicaraguan children are simply adorable.

During my recent trip with El Porvenir visiting rural water projects, these young people watched us -- and we watched them.

We are after all a curiosity.

This fellow has had a growth spurt and outgrown his crutches. It was a wonder how undisturbed the dogs at this farm seemed by extra people wandering around.

She's too cool to stare, but not to pose.
***El Porvenir is an non-governmental, people-to-people organization that "partners with the people of Nicaragua so that they can build a future for themselves. Clean drinking water is at the core of El Porvenir; sanitation is necessary to ensure that the water is clean. In addition to sustainable water and sanitation projects, we work with communities on health and hygiene education and reforestation."

Honoring the troops for profit

Senators John McCain and his fellow Arizona Republican Jeff Flake (great name) have revealed that the War (Defense) Department (DOD) has been paying for those displays of hyper-militarism that mar our professional sports contests. Apparently billionaire sport owners have to be bribed to strut their patriotism.

Over the period 2012-15, the Senators' report claims the total of such expenditures was some $6.8 million -- chump change in the military budget, but enough to envelop sports viewers in martial enthusiasm.

These paid tributes included on-field color guards, enlistment and reenlistment ceremonies, performances of the national anthem, full-field flag details, [as well as] ceremonial first pitches and puck drops.

[Some football examples:] The National Guard paying the Seattle Seahawks for the “opportunity for up to 10 soldiers to re-enlist pre-game on the field” at a 2014 game;

The Air Force paying the Cincinnati Bengals $4,960 for 60 club level tickets;

The National Guard paying the Indianapolis Colts for use of a luxury suite, autographed items, pre-game field visits and cheerleader appearances

Some football teams whose participation were apparently worth top dollar to the military:

• Atlanta received $879,000

• New England Patriots, $700,000

• Buffalo Bills, $650,000

On the other hand, San Francisco's lowly 49ers only pulled in $125,000. I guess either the team or the fans struck somebody in the patriotism industry as losers. Maybe both.

A goodly number of these payments seem to have gone to ensure that favored military VIPs could enjoy luxury boxes.

Over this weekend we'll be seeing numerous Veterans Day tributes at football games. I wonder what the military is paying for those?

See also Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk; apparently author Ben Fountain intuited even more than he imagined about the perfidy of these "tributes to the troops."

Friday cat blogging

I had thought to give Morty a day off this Friday, but how could I resist sharing this?

Beware bovine insurrection: nation building from the bottom up

How to put down a revolt whose prime manifestation is nurturing and milking 18 cows?

This was the problem that confronted Israeli authorities bent on subduing the Palestinian town of Beit Sahour near Bethlehem in the Occupied Territories in 1988. The Wanted 18 is a complex true story of national identity, juvenile enthusiasm, courageous resistance, non-violent action for justice, community organization, political sophistication and political betrayal. And, improbably, it is laugh-out-loud funny.

Amer Shomali's film is also the antithesis of yet another talking heads documentary, rich in line drawings and claymation as well as archival footage, reenactments, and interviews with those who lived it.

The film has been submitted as Palestine's entry this year for Academy Award nomination.

An international peace and justice organization, Just Vision, brought the film to the University of San Francisco this week. Just Vision describes its mission:

... to contribute to fostering peace and an end to the occupation by rendering Palestinian and Israeli grassroots leaders more visible, valued and influential in their efforts.

They have the infrastructure and funding to assist groups in arranging free showings of this exceptional work.

I'm not very visually literate, but this film worked brilliantly for me. Days after seeing it, I'm still thinking about what this Palestinian town learned about resistance and non-violent struggle. Highly recommended.

Forced migration: our shame amid the world's pain

This isn't about the million plus people fleeing hunger and violence currently trying to make their way to Europe, at least it is not solely about those unfortunate people.

As this map shows, when people are displaced by war, they usually, and first, move to places nearby. The Syrian war has pushed huge numbers of people into neighboring countries. Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey have all been remarkably welcoming. A lot has been asked of countries without huge resources and plenty of their own problems.

And this migrant flood, melding with other refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and other African parts, now pushes into Europe, providing a canvas on which the proto-fascist regime in Hungary reverts to barbed wire and a German chancellor strives to demonstrate that her country has learned it racial lesson. (Maybe it has; time and politics will tell.)

Meanwhile, the U.S., which bears deep and continuing responsibility for the deadly chaos in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria and elsewhere, is doing diddly-squat to to help these people. As of October 21, 1,854 people from Syria have been admitted here in the last four years. It takes two years for a refugee to navigate the bureaucratic hoops of a process more sensitive to excessive fears than too human need. And these are usually the relatively affluent and educated among the migrants.

George Packer, in a forthcoming New Yorker comment, shares some of the history of United States behavior when our wars have unsettled populations.

[After our Indo-China war,] In the end, the U.S. admitted more than a million Southeast Asian refugees. ... It’s easy to forget that every act of American generosity toward refugees has had to overcome stiff resistance based in ignorance. Historically, Presidential action has made the difference. After the Second World War, Congress passed legislation that made resettlement in the U.S. harder for Jewish victims of Nazism than for Germans uprooted by the war Hitler started.

... The Obama Administration is allowing the Atlantic Ocean to shield us from the human consequences, as if geography and moral responsibility were the same thing. Long ago, the President decided that American military intervention couldn’t resolve the Syrian war. That’s not a reason to exercise humanitarian restraint as well.

Packer's right of course. The U.S. can take a lot more of this current flow of displaced people with barely a blip of inconvenience. We're that big, that rich and that accustomed to incorporating diverse peoples.

But amidst our failure to take responsibility for that human migration across the oceans, we need to keep in mind that we are also still the destination for another flow of desperate people from much closer to home. And these people too are on the move from violence we've unleashed. These are the young escapees from Central American gangs who were so much in the news a year ago. Those gangs exist to service our country's drug addiction; they take root under the kleptocratic regimes we prefer for their countries.

Joseph Sorrentino charges at In These Times that there's a reason why we've been hearing less about this migrant flow lately.

... the Migration Policy Institute reported in September that Mexico is on target to deport 70 percent more Central Americans this year than last, while U.S. deportations are expected to be halved. Not only is Mexico doing our dirty work by deporting Central Americans, we’re paying for it: According to an October 10 New York Times article, we gave Mexico tens of millions of dollars in fiscal year 2015 to prevent these refugees from reaching our border.

It’s stunning that U.S. [Customs and Border Protection] is ignoring the fact that, by its own admission, the Central Americans it wants to deport are fleeing violence that has not ceased—which would make them legitimate refugees. CBP recently announced that “conditions related to the economy and violence in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala have not improved.” Yet in the same announcement, the agency calls people “illegally crossing the border” from these countries “a top priority for removal.”

I know, as much as I know anything, that people who are so desperate that they’ll literally risk their lives to reach the United States won’t be stopped by Mexican immigration agents dragging them off trains and using Tasers on them; by Mexican police forcibly removing them from buses; or by the threat of local gangs robbing, kidnapping, maiming or killing them. And they certainly won’t be stopped at the U.S. border by more walls, fences and agents. As long as conditions in Central America don’t improve, refugees will keep fleeing north. And by law, we should be taking them in. Why are we ignoring the crisis that is happening right on our doorstep?

My emphasis. Good question.

Graphic via Albuquerque Journal.

UPDATE: As of November 5, the New York Times reports:

But not a single child has entered the United States through the Central American Minors program since its establishment in December [2014], in large part because of a slow-moving American bureaucracy that has infuriated advocates for the young children and their families.

Election day reminders for San Francisco

Dia de los Muertos

On this Day of the Dead, I find myself thinking of Margarita Donnelly who died last Christmas Eve.

Born in Venezuela to U.S. parents, she always made her childhood in the tropical jungles where her father was working sound magic and mischievous. Playing with her Venezuelan peers, she described living in a world of wonders invisible to and incomprehensible to her parents.

Return to the United States in adolescence and what felt like incarceration in rigid Catholic schools came as a shock. Given the times, she found her way to the Haight and San Francisco State -- Margarita was a natural-born hippie and she never stopped being one.

From San Francisco, she made her way to Corvallis, OR where she found her life work. She became the founding editor of Calyx, which still "nurtures women’s creativity by publishing fine literature and art by women." Keeping that project alive, vibrant and funded became her vocation.

Sometime in the late '70s, Margarita recruited Erudite Partner to read the magazine's voluminous flood of poetry submissions. E.P. didn't stay in that role forever, but thereafter, Margarita was always a presence in our lives. When her pursuit of women's literature and the funding therefor brought her to San Francisco, we always saw each other. Whenever we drove north, Corvallis was a certain stop-over.

Margarita traveled to Nicaragua in 1986 on a delegation that E.P. led for Witness for Peace to see for herself the results of the U.S.-funded Contra war.

Just last year, when we took off on the 14,000 mile bookapalooza for Mainstreaming, an event organized by Margarita was the first stop. During a pleasant several days with Margarita, we picked raspberries for freezing, just as she did every spring. Yet Margarita already knew that the cancer in her body was not responding to medical interventions. She wasn't so much struggling with the disease as just going on living her life as she wanted, just as she always had.

Margarita is survived my her daughter, son-in-law, two beloved grandchildren and hundreds of women and men who reveled in her joy in living. I miss her.

A more conventional obituary is available here.

Couldn't we just choose to look around?

As of today, we're back on "standard time." The only benefit that I can see to this monkeying around with "time" is that it may become slightly more likely that we'll have a chance to pause and gape at this when on our way home in the gathering dark.

For the next four months, I'll be yearning for longer evening light.