On Martin Luther King Day in Oakland

For those of us who are seeing San Francisco succumb to the pressure of too much money chasing too little land, it is easy to imagine that the wonderful, chaotic, multi-everything Oakland across the Bay is bleaching away as well. And there is lots of objective reason to think this is true: in November, Oakland ranked as the country's 5th most expensive rental market. (Yes, San Francisco was Number 1.)

But the MLK Day march in Oakland's downtown presented a tableau of how much resistance and hope still remains.

The Oakland still lives stands together.

Families march together ...

... and chant together.

A choir prepared to raise their voices.

Organizers had prepared for all comers.

Victims were remembered; firing Suhr is actually a San Francisco priority.

The "Sangha for Black Resistance" gave silent witness.

Oakland still lives. Resistance still lives.

Good listening: check out "Intersection" in case it disappears ...

Last week the young billionaire owner of the New Republic, Chris Hughes, announced he was putting the venerable magazine up for sale. Apparently losing millions on opinion journalism is not much fun for a Facebook founder.

A little over a year ago, Hughes' changes to the magazine sparked mass departures by long time writers and editors. Good riddance, I thought. I considered the old magazine a nest of snotty entitled white men who claimed to be "liberal" but seldom saw a U.S. military adventure they did not love, who uncritically championed Zionists' right to expropriate Palestinians, and who happily published defamation of poor people, treating propaganda as social science. From my vantage point, the new regime was a big improvement, often interesting. New writers Suzy Khimm, Jeet Heer and Brian Beutler are a distinct upgrade on policy and politics.

And best of all was bringing in Jamil Smith from the Melissa Harris-Perry show and giving him a podcast called Intersection. The show absolutely lives up to its billing:

Every two weeks, senior editor Jamil Smith will discuss and debate issues surrounding race, gender, and all the ways we identify ourselves and one another. We hope the conversations with everyday folks, activists, politicians, and you, too can help us all understand identity a lot better.

Recent shows have highlighted body image issues, the police murder of Tamir Rice in Smith's hometown, the conflicted identities of Black Republicans, and pop culture critic Janet Mock on being a very different transgender role model than Caitlin Jenner.

Let's hope the sale of the New Republic doesn't kill off this extraordinarily vibrant media project. You can sample or subscribe for free at iTunes.

For a wintry Sunday morning

Go ahead, give nine and half minutes of your life to watching this video. Set the image to full screen, relax and enjoy.
This put me in mind of Psalm 19:

1The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
2Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
3They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them. ...

Then consider this:

Unprecedented: Simultaneous January Named Storms in the Atlantic and Central Pacific
As we ring in the New Year with record to near-record warm temperatures over much of Earth's oceans, we are confronted with something that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago: simultaneous January named storms in both the Atlantic and Central Pacific. The earliest named storm on record in the Central Pacific, Hurricane Pali, formed on January 7, and now the Atlantic has joined the early-season hurricane party, with Subtropical Storm Alex spinning up into history with 50 mph winds in the waters about 785 miles south-southwest of the Azores Islands. The average date of the first named storm in the Atlantic is July 9; the Central Pacific also typically sees its first named storm in July.

Dr. Jeff Masters, Wunderground

The Anthropocene makes for interesting times.

H/t Climate Denial Crock of the Week.

Death penalty likely to be on ballot in California in 2016

As this Field Poll shows, it's going to be a hell of a fight. Democrats, independents, Latinos, African Americans, and people under 45 seem, marginally, ready to make life sentences without parole the ultimate penalty. A campaign emerging from Death Penalty Focus is working to put an initiative to do that on the ballot in November 2016. They call their measure the Justice that Works Act.

Meanwhile prosecutors and others who want the state of California to kill more prisoners are collecting signatures for a measure to make executions easier to accomplish. More here. This group starts out ahead among whites, Republicans and Protestant Christians.

The electorate in November 2016 is likely to look more like the former group than the latter, but the campaign is sure to be hard fought and emotional on both sides.

Snapshot from the new Mission District

Every Thursday morning around 10 am at 24th Street and Bartlett, any interested observer can catch a glimpse of what tech money and tech workers mean to the culture of this city.

At the massive granite SF Public Library building, a line of women pushing strollers curls around the corner. They are queuing up for the "Toddler Tales" story telling program, offered in English and Spanish.

It's wonderful that the Library offers this introduction to reading. That's the job of this vital institution.

But I can't help noticing that most of these children appear to be blond and blue-eyed and their caretakers appear mostly Latina. Are the women mostly nannies working for the newcomers, for the two-income affluent families who are the only people who can afford to move in here? It certainly looks that way. Where are the nannies' children? Do they have a chance to attend "Toddler Tales"? The library does its best to provide for all, but I wonder.

Friday cat blogging

This can be somewhat disconcerting six inches above my face at first light. The smidgen of fang showing is the reason Morty is not considered "show quality."

But how mighty is it?

Freedom of speech is a central creed. A portion of the citizenry may tolerate coerced confessions, warrantless searches, and inadequate spending on lawyers for the poor, but Americans tend to take personally their right to speak. Rights preserved or violated in the criminal justice system look remote to upstanding citizens who cannot identify with accused murderers, thieves and drug dealers. The right to speak, however, affects everyone who chooses to exercise it.

The people portrayed in these pages attest to the resilience of free speech used both to voice ideas and to try to suppress the ideas of others. ...

In Freedom of Speech: Mightier Than the Sword, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist David K. Shipler offers a series of stories about contemporary free speech controversies in the U.S. The book continues the themes of his Rights of the People and Rights at Risk which explored how we have allowed our fear of terrorism and our fear of the (usually racially defined) Other to erode freedoms we think are embedded in our legal codes. In the first he seemed repulsed when describing how authorities had used the 9/11 atrocities as an excuse to extend lawless violation of civil liberties long the norm in communities of color to the rest of the population. In the second book, he seemed more habituated to ongoing abuses: ours has become a mindlessly fearful culture where principled resistance to authority has become exceptional.

This third book is an empathetic, intelligent, meticulous account of several contexts in which U.S. citizens have recently fought free speech fights. The flashes of indignation Shipler showed in the earlier volumes are largely absent. He calls himself "close to a First Amendment absolutist" but his object here is to understand more than to expose -- and certainly not to condemn broadly. Even where he seems to find restrictions on speech appalling, his touch is light.

On some of his topics I found the result enlightening. He carefully explores parental efforts to censor what books high schools may ask their children to read. Instead of portraying the protesting parents as narrow-minded bigots, he really allows them to explain what they are so afraid of. Their anguish turns out to be that their children are growing up in a too rapidly changing world, an understandable perception, even if not one that should control what young people may study.

Shipler's old indignation shows through in his chapters on the persecution of government whistleblowers and the national security state's attempts to intimidate and muzzle the reporters who tell their stories. We should grateful for journalists like James Risen who Shipler interviewed extensively for this chapter.

A section on "the cultural limits of bigotry" explores how changing rules of acceptable discourse -- no, it is NOT okay to say "ni__er" or "faggot" in public these days -- have left many citizens feeling silenced. Society at large sometimes punishes transgressors who break these mostly unwritten rules, like NBA team owner Donald Sterling who was forced to divest, though without losing his profit. But mostly, people who won't get with the program simply retreat to the welcoming silos of the right-wing subculture, bruised and angry. And since Shipler wrote, they have found Donald Trump to give voice to their fury.

Shipler seemed to me at his weakest in recounting how the Jewish Community Center in Washington DC let itself be bullied by conservative donors into booting out a much-celebrated little theater for mildly exploring some of the contradictions of Israel-Palestine. This is not a benign story; the inability on the part of much of the Jewish establishment to allow honest conversation about Israel is an active impediment to peaceful solutions, not some minor side-show. But Shipler doesn't go there.

Shipler is a thoughtful reporter; even a weak book from this author is worth reading. Presumably he has grouped the various topics in this volume together because he senses there's a connection under the general rubric of "free speech" from which we could learn. But he hasn't quite pulled out a connecting thread here. Since he seems committed to exploring the contemporary meaning of "civil liberties," maybe there will be a further volume in this series?

Seen in the 'hood

These are in a slightly different vein than much of the social commentary affixed to walls around here.

Somebody has it in for the tech giant.

Maybe the neighborhood traditions of political expression are catching? Now if these protesters would just make common cause with earlier residents ... I can dream.

The State of the Union in fraidy cat nation

The Prez should go for the truth shot tonight, but we are told that he won't.

In the Times, Peter Baker lays it out:

Here is what he probably will not say, at least not this bluntly: Americans are more likely to die in a car crash, drown in a bathtub or be struck by lightning than be killed by a terrorist. The news media is complicit in inflating the sense of danger. The Islamic State does not pose an existential threat to the United States.

He will presumably not say this, either: Given how hard it is for intelligence and law enforcement agencies to detect people who have become radicalized, like those who opened fire at a holiday party in San Bernardino, Calif., a certain number of relatively low-level terrorist attacks may be inevitable, and Americans may have to learn to adapt the way Israel has.

By all accounts, Mr. Obama is sympathetic to this view, which is shared by a number of counterterrorism veterans who contend that anxiety has warped the American public’s perspective. But it is also a politically untenable argument at a time when polls show greater fears about terrorism than at any point since the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001.

It's bad if he fails to go there. This country will continue to be mired in roiling racial anxiety and the enthusiastic embrace of authoritarianism so long as we refuse to learn this essential fact. He loses nothing, personally, if he warns us away from our panic. While we remain panicked, all our demons run wild.***I've decided, reluctantly, that I'll watch the show tonight. Usually I abstain. But not this time. For all his myriad faults -- deportations, failure to prosecute both banksters and torturers, persecution of whistleblowers and allegiance to self-serving government secrecy -- this man has been the president most sympathetic to what I hold dear that I expect ever to see. Strange but true. I, no less than my panicked fellow citizens, need to learn to live with political ambiguity and uncertainty.***UPDATE: The Prez said as much as he could in the home of the fearful:

... as we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands. Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks and twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages pose an enormous danger to civilians and must be stopped. But they do not threaten our national existence. That’s the story ISIL wants to tell; that’s the kind of propaganda they use to recruit. We don’t need to build them up to show that we’re serious, nor do we need to push away vital allies in this fight by echoing the lie that ISIL is representative of one of the world’s largest religions. We just need to call them what they are — killers and fanatics who have to be rooted out, hunted down, and destroyed.

Better than nothing. Let's do what we can to discourage the inevitable "collateral damage."

Histories hidden in plain sight

On Sunday, the Green Bay Packers eliminated the Washington Racial Slurs (h/t Gregg Easterbrook) from the NFL playoffs. Good riddance.

Monday's news was that the residents of the appropriately named Whitesboro, New York, have voted overwhelmingly to retain town logo.

Defenders contend this depicts a "friendly wrestling match" between the pioneering settler, one Hugh White, and an unnamed Oneida Indian.

After all, this sort of history has been blessed. Last spring the good Pope Francis canonized Padre Junipero Serra, founder of the string of missions that "civilized" California natives by enslaving them.

I want justice – not Guantanamo

Our friend, Phyllis Rodriguez, activist and mother of 9/11 Victim Greg Rodriguez, wrote this appeal through Amnesty International on the 15th anniversary of the opening of the shameful U.S. gulag in Cuba.

My son Greg was 31 years old and worked on the 103rd floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center.

I first learned he was there on the morning of September 11. But it wasn’t until 36 hours later that I learned he had perished. Through the shock and pain of my grief, I was afraid of what our government was going to do in the name of my son and my family.

I felt that causing suffering to others in the name of my son and the almost 3,000 people who died that day would make things worse for us and the world. In some ways, my fears were realized.

Today, the detention site at Guantanamo begins its 15th year of existence. We need 100,000 people to send this message to President Obama through Whitehouse.gov: Close Guantanamo.

There are 104 detainees still in Guantanamo. Most of them have been held without charge for more than decade. They face the prospect of dying behind locked doors, without ever having been tried for a crime.

At least 29 of them were held in “black sites”, or secret detention centers, before being transferred to Guantanamo. Many if not all of these individuals were tortured – sexually abused, beaten, forced into coffin-shaped boxes, hung from the wall wearing only diapers and made to feel they were literally suffocating to death.

The cycle of violence will never end unless we put a stop to it. Guantanamo cannot provide us justice. And I do not want politicians to use my son’s memory as justification for keeping people at Guantanamo.

This is a shameful period of our history. And it’s gone on far too long.

Join me in telling President Obama: Not in my name. It’s time to close Guantanamo. If 100,000 people take this action by the end of the month, the rules state that the White House will have to issue a response.

After you take the action at Whitehouse.gov, please be sure to verify your email address or it won’t count. We must reach 100,000 verified signatures. We must close Guantanamo.

Thank you for your support.

Decoding the interminable election: some campaign basics

None of this is particularly novel, but it is (or should be) interesting to people trying to understand what really happens in U.S. elections. We're in for a long season of polls, advertising, and candidate appeals. It can't hurt to deconstruct some unyielding underlying realities.

Let's jump off from a recent Pew Research Center report looking at why their polling failed to adequately predict the size of the Republican margin in contested corners of the 2014 elections. Their conclusions say something about how it all works.

Those of us who follow polling sometimes suspect that the pollsters aren't getting a sample that is genuinely representative of people who vote. Perhaps they can't find enough people willing to answer their questions? Or they don't call cell phones? Or they canvass too few people of color so views in those communities are not represented?

Pew does not attribute polling miscues to these failings. They contend their samples are adequately mathematically adjusted to overcome these sources of bias. Instead, they conclude that the questions they have been asking are not very good at determining how likely respondents are to vote. Most of us like to think of ourselves as good citizens, so saying we'll vote reinforces our self-satisfaction. We tend to say we will vote whether we actually do or not.

Pew went back and checked their respondents against the publicly available voter file. Who we vote for is secret, but whether we voted is a matter of public record. And what Pew discovered about the 2014 results told them why they underestimated the Republican vote:

Fully 73% of pre-election registered voters who supported a Republican candidate in the pre-election survey ultimately turned out to vote on Election Day, based on verified vote from the voter file. By comparison, only 61% of registered voters who supported a Democratic candidate were verified to have voted.

As an campaign junkie, I find it easy to respond "Well, duh ..." Doesn't everyone know Democrats are less likely to vote, especially in off-year elections, than Republicans? The difference in turnout also correlates with age, income, and minority status quite closely, as does party identification.

In the past, polls have built their samples from randomized telephone numbers and considered whether their respondents will actually vote as a secondary question. Pew now questions whether these queries get realistic answers and is considering whether there might be other ways to predict who will actually vote.

Campaigns approach building lists of voters to contact from the opposite direction. They look at the history of all registered voters. Voting is a habitual activity. They can assume that most people who have voted regularly in similar elections in the past will vote in the next one. Then there are people who have never yet voted or have voted occasionally -- these can be desirable targets for efforts to get them to vote. Perhaps they can be persuaded to participate ...

Of course campaigns are not interested in voting for citizenship's sake. They want to turn out supporters to vote for their candidate. In our current deeply polarized context, party registration -- mostly Democratic or Republican -- is strongly predictive of how a registered voter will cast her ballot. So if a state records a party preference (31 do at present, but varying numbers of voters "decline to state"), that is a major factor in choosing who to target. Publicly available birthdates (in some registration systems) reveal voters' ages. And data files created and massaged by the political parties do a better job every year of attaching information on the race, religious affiliations, and even some attitudes of individual voters.

Given the improving quality of available voter files, the real problem for campaigns is whether they can organize themselves to use whatever money and contact methods are available to reach those valuable needles in the registration haystack: people who would vote their way if only they actually voted.

This is laborious, expensive and takes smarts. Most turnout campaigns fail to maximize their resources for this purpose; it is simply too hard to do enough to have much result. They settle for making random noise -- or default to pushing robocalls to people who would cast a ballot anyway.

People (like me) who've worked in this field think that at best turnout campaigns can increase their candidate's vote by perhaps 1-3 percent. Of course, in a truly close election, that is the difference between winning and losing.

It's only a game -- yeah, sure ...

Too much football yesterday ... the slug fest in the rain between Cincinnati and Pittsburgh left me wrung out and all I did was sit in front of a TV. This game confirmed pretty much everything Gregg Easterbrook says about the game: in its brutal ugliness, it mirrors the contradictions of our society. This context did however completely contradict his prediction axioms: the team with both the better record and the home field lost.

More thoughtful blogging will have to wait til Monday. For now I seem to be immersed in NFL playoff football.

Saturday scenery: guard lions in the city

Until I started Walking San Francisco, I had no idea that purveyors of domestic lion statuary had been so ubiquitous and apparently popular.

Not every example is quite so sober as the standard porch lion pictured above.

This one seems to be trying to enhance his magnificence, not very successfully.

Is he sleeping off a good meal? I wouldn't count on him to do much guarding.

Though the eyes are the most notable feature, I also had to wonder whether the mold for this one had been a horse in a previous casting lot.

What's this fellow been smoking?

Somehow the damage here makes this cat even more impassively powerful.

I have scores more San Francisco lions; every neighborhood provides more examples. There will be many more lion posts.

While Mayor Lee is sworn in ...

amidst the dignitaries and the security apparatus, San Franciscans call out for justice ... justice for Mario Woods ... justice for Amilcar Perez Lopez ... justice for Alex Nieto ... all killed by the San Francisco Police Department.

As the football season wanes ...

... it's time for a football post. I'm almost ready to look beyond the gridiron season, but not quite yet.

Gregg Easterbrook writes the Tuesday Morning Quarterback column at the Times. And he has a new book: The Game's Not Over: In Defense of Football that I've had around the house for the last month. His title -- The Game's Not Over -- served as something of a mantra around here through end of the NFL regular season and the Armpit Bowls (more on those later.)

This isn't a deep book, but it's fun. Easterbrook's defense of football is essentially that, with all its faults, it is just the right sport for the nation we are.

... though the NFL is riven with problems, the league is here to stay. America's love affair with the National Football League should continue far into the future. ...This book began by proposing that the National Football League has assumed such an outsized role in United States life both because the games are so good and because the NFL holds up a mirror to the internal conflicts of American society.

The first factor, the quality of the games, extends beyond the outstanding skills of the players. As a living chessboard, professional football engages the mind. Many sports offer interesting action but few regularly cause the audience to say, 'I wonder what strategy will be used next?'

... The NFL's combination of strength, speed, power and thinking results in the perfect sport for a strong nation of rising education levels.

... the question of America's proper role in the world will be with us for generations, and is reflected in the king of sports. The United States is a musclebound superpower that's never really sure how to behave. Professional football is a musclebound superpower sport that can't make up its mind what's right either. The United States and and professional football were made for each other.

Corporate greed, a willingness to injure in pursuit of wealth and dominance, sexism and racism are all there, but Easterbrook predicts the sport will survive.

Much of where he goes from those observations seems poorly argued to me. I find his speculation implausible that young U.S. males do worse in school than girls because they bang their heads routinely playing football from an early age. But his proposed remedy, banning the tackling game until kids are at least 13 as their pro-QB father did for Eli and Peyton Manning, seems a sensible idea that might even catch on among a slew of measures meant to reduce head trauma. ***About those Armpit Bowls -- this is the name I give to those end of season contests which pit small schools you never heard of (East Armpit U. v. West Crackerjack College) against one another in order to round out a full diet of 40 games in the last two weeks of December. Watching most of these on TV is one of my annual seasonal pleasures. These small schools thrust onto a bigger stage often bring imagination and passion unmatched by the complacent football power conference teams. This year's offerings didn't disappoint. The first weekend's contests of the obscure (including Alcorn State vs. North Carolina A&T; San Jose State vs. Georgia State; Ohio vs. Appalachian State) were exciting games. I can't say that for the much hyped "New Year's Six," including the college playoff semi-finals, all six of which were pretty much yawners.

Average margin of victory of the eight college bowl games played on Dec. 31 and Jan. 1: 27.3 points.

Peter King, MMQB

Sure, I enjoyed watching Stanford run rings around Iowa in the Rose Bowl, but this wasn't much of a game.***And just for the record, in case you missed Jerry Seinfeld interviewing the President on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee:

Seinfeld: What sport is politics?

Obama: It's probably most like football. ..Because a lot of players, a lot of specialization, a lot of hitting, a lot of attrition, but then every once in awhile, you'll see an opening, so you hit the line, you get one yard, you try a play, you get knocked back, now it's like third and fifteen, ... you have to punt a lot. But every once in a while you'll see a hole and then there is open field.

Yup -- our national game.

Friday cat blogging

How am I supposed to get anything done? Let's just hope Morty hasn't been sending emails ...

Evolving words

When Donald Trump spouted off that Hillary Clinton had been "scholonged" in a debate, Josh Marshall jumped into the subsequent media storm with some evidence that Donald Trump may have grown up in a place (Queens) and time (the 1950s) when the usage was without explicit sexual content and simply meant "thoroughly defeated." Nothing about this was meant to let Republicans' favorite blowhard off the hook:

... I find it interesting that this might actually be a usage Trump knows from his childhood that he might use with less consciously sexual meaning that we might imagine. This isn't defending Trump. As I noted this morning, I found his description of Clinton's using the restroom as "disgusting" wildly more offensive than "schlonged." We have more than enough examples of Trump's calling women "fat pigs" and a long catalog of other woman-hating phrases to make a clear judgment on the guy. ...

Well, maybe and maybe not. Is anyone, including the Donald himself, sure what the guy "really" means?

But this got me thinking about another word in wide common usage in several eras whose meaning has changed pretty radically during my lifetime. Interestingly I think the expression is now on its way out of any usage.

When I was an aspiring Berkeley radical and hippie in the 1960s, certain that we could not trust anyone over 30, the world was divided into two camps. There was our tribe of the young and enlightened -- and outside our circle, in hopeless social conformity and ignorance, there were the "straights." Straight people just didn't get it that a new world was aborning. They demanded that boys cut their hair, girls forgo sex, and all of us should finish school and get a damn job! "Straight" meant conventional and boring but usually too out of it to be threatening.

Twenty years later, "straight" had acquired a different meaning -- it had come to refer to heterosexuals, especially ones who were hostile to our LGBT "lifestyle." These straights might get gays fired, toss us out of apartments, reject people with AIDS, bar us from church, or beat us up. Some straight people were just uniformed and could come around to know us, but some were dangerous. To call someone "straight" implied a need to be wary.

As LGBT people's presence in society has become widely considered "normal," even when not fully accepted, the latter usage of "straight" seems to have gone away. I don't miss that.

I do miss the former usage of "straight" -- it wasn't always hostile. Sometimes it just meant people who didn't understand ... Thinking about this, I wondered what I might call such people now and was at a loss. That is, I was at a loss until I remembered that J.K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame had given us a contemporary alternative: folks who just don't see the magic are "Muggles." Now there's a useful category.

Public displays of normal humanity not allowed

During Tuesday's announcement of a slew of gun control measures that won't pass this Congress but might be enacted in some better day, President Obama cried in public. At the Kennedy Center Honors in tribute to Carole King, Aretha Franklin performed "Natural Woman" and the Prez teared up in delight.

At long last, we can see some emotion in this man whose political stock-in-trade has required him to repress evidence of every human feeling. No Black man who showed his emotions freely could have been elected President. White America would have called him "violent", or "angry," or "biased" or "weak" or even "pathetic" if he'd just acted human. On those rare moments when Obama responded without repressing himself -- saying the Cambridge police acted "stupidly" when they arrested Professor Gates on his own doorstep; mentioning that the murdered Trayvon Martin could have been his son -- he was roundly attacked and forced to equivocate.

Obama is not exactly letting it all hang out these days, but it sure is nice to see a more rounded man than we've glimpsed in the past.

We all better get ready for at least eleven months and perhaps eight more years of watching how we constrain the emotions we are willing to see coming from leaders who aren't senior white males. I'm no fan of Hillary Clinton (she's too bellicose for my taste), but I cringe at the storm of crap I can expect this woman to endure. This description rings true to me:

Hillary Clinton absolutely cannot express negative emotion in public. If she speaks loudly or gets angry or cries, she risks being seen as bitchy, crazy, dangerous. (When she raised her voice during the 2013 Benghazi Senate committee hearings, the cover of the New York Post blared “NO WONDER BILL’S AFRAID.”) But if Hillary avoids emotions—if she speaks strictly in calm, logical, detached terms—then she is cold, robotic, calculating.

You’d think the solution might be to put on a happy face, to admit to emotions only when they are positive. But it turns out that people hate it when Hillary Clinton smiles or laughs in public. Hillary Clinton’s laugh gets played in attack ads; it has routinely been called “a cackle” (like a witch, right? Because she’s old, and female, like a witch); frozen stills of Hillary laughing are routinely used to make her look “crazy” in conservative media.

She can’t be sad or angry, she can’t be happy or amused, and she can’t refrain from expressing any of those emotions. There is no way out of this one. There is no right way for her to act.

... You’d think, given the impressive amount of unfair and often cruelly personal scrutiny this woman faces, it would make sense for her to be pretty cautious about how she presents herself in public. Bizarre, then, that Hillary Clinton has developed a reputation in the press for seeming distant—even secretive or paranoid! It’s almost as if, after a quarter-century of being attacked for her appearance, personality, and every waking move, breath, and word, Hillary Clinton is highly conscious of how she is perceived and portrayed, and is trying really hard to monitor her own behavior and behave in ways people will accept. Which is “disgusting,” of course. We want “authentic” candidates.

Hillary is sure to evoke every nugget of sexist, agist sewage that lurks in the ugly crevices of our polity.

Those of us who don't warm to Hillary better be ready to have her back against this stuff, even while we critique her policies and political inclinations. If we can't straddle that complexity, we're showing ourselves as unserious about women's equality.***Naturally there has been buckets of political science research on how the electorate reacts to women candidates. I found this synopsis from a paper by Nichole Bauer persuasive -- and worth remembering as we watch the coming campaigns.

Voters do not automatically consider female candidates to be weak, passive, or emotional. At the onset, gender stereotypes are not an obstacle for female candidates. But support can be reduced if voters see campaign messages – in speeches, ads, websites, or news reports – that describe the woman candidate as caring or compassionate. Female candidates need to be incredibly strategic in crafting and controlling their campaign image. As long as they avoid invoking feminine stereotypes, voters will evaluate them in nonstereotyped ways.

Good luck ladies.

Stop digging deeper holes!

I've been wondering for awhile how our rulers would spin the news when our Little Wars that Aren't Quite Wars -- in Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Nigeria, Afghanistan and perhaps other undisclosed venues -- produced undeniable, dead, U.S. troops. Such a death is reported today in Afghanistan.

This particular death seems even more wasted than most as it took place in what for decades has been one of the least strategically significant, most heavily fought-over, corners of that unhappy battleground.

The American casualties came during a push by Afghan and American soldiers to clear territory between Marja and the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, according to Afghan military officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the press.

The brilliant reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran has written the story of the bloody futility of fifty years of military campaigns across that region. I summarized his curdling tale of waste, futile carnage, private greed, and internecine military posturing around Marja in this book report. Apparently the U.S. is still repeating follies that date all the way back to the late 1940s!

Photo shows U.S. Marines near Marja in 2010, via Wikipedia. The ditch they are hunkered down in is presumably one of those drainage channels U.S. contractors built in the 1950s.

Dueling damnations in the 'hood

Most Saturday mornings, Spanish-speaking preachers shouting through microphones in the 24th Street BART plaza seem to hope that warning of certain hellfire to come will draw souls to Jesus.

Someone provided an alternative suggestion. I did not see who left this ... a literate panhandler, a neighborhood activist, who knows?

What to do when the raiders come

*Do not open the door for immigration agents.

*Do not answer the questions of immigration agents. You have the right to remain silent—even if you are detained. You do not need to give your name or identity documents. You have the right to speak with a lawyer.

*Do not lie or show any false documents.

*If you are at work or on the street or in a public place, ask the immigration agent if you are free to go. If the agent says yes, walk away slowly and calmly.

*If you are at home, ask the officer if they have a warrant. A warrant is a paper signed by a judge giving the officer permission to enter your home. The warrant will specify what areas of your home they are allowed to search. If the officer has a warrant, ask them to slip it under the door. Only then should you let them in.

I doubt this information is directly relevant to people who read this blog -- except that people who read here ought to know these things occur. Yesterday I recived this advice in an email from the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). Our Heimat Security spooks have let it be known they plan to deport hundreds of families in the new year.

Murder rates and national histories

Last week Josh Marshall offered the thought-provoking suggestion that a better way to think about the U.S. murder rate (5 per 100,000 according to World Bank data) is to situate our country within the rest of the nations of the Americas, rather than comparing it to Europe's lower rate which is closer to 1. He goes on to finger the Americas' "original sin": the coerced labor and slavery systems that colonizing Europeans imposed to extract quick fortunes.

... these were all in critical ways engineered societies based on various kinds of forced labor and violence.

... These are quite simply societies permeated by histories of violence. But more than just that, they are societies where very often the police are not people you go to when you need protection, justice or other things which we think (or hope) you go to the police for. The police are people you want to keep your distance from. They are sometimes little more than the armed force of the landlords or the powerful. And when you can't go to the police, you tend to seek private vengeance, which is to say that in [a] highly exploitative and violent society, the 'oppressed' are most often themselves trained to violence. When you can't go to the police, when the police are not there to serve and protect but to control, disputes tend to get settled through private violence - which again, generates high rates of assault and murder.

... This brings us back to the US crime rate and particularly the Southern murder rate. Why has the South always had a much higher murder rate than the rest of the country? The answer seems obvious: slavery. The role of violence and labor is much, much more similar to the Greater Caribbean than any other part of the United States. ... The United States is part of the Americas and not just in the obvious geographical sense. While it is distinct in many ways, the US (and not just the South) had its fundamental origins as a settler society, which created basic patterns which are still with us today.

As Marshall says, all of this is a thought experiment carried on at an extremely general level, not a proof. His suggestion is intuitively plausible, although I think also of the force and violence which drove dispossessed poor people in the United Kingdom to labor in 19th century mines and mills. Also interestingly, the murder rate in long-colonized and exploited Ireland is no higher than that in the rest of Europe.

The northern Caribbean "murder zone" does stand out. Honduras (92),Guatemala (35), Jamaica (39), Puerto Rico (26), Mexico (22) ...

I responded to reading Marshall by wondering about that other semi-Caribbean country: Nicaragua. It's murder rate is 11, twice that of the U.S., but less than half of many of its neighbors. And this is despite being the poorest country on the South American mainland. Why is Nicaragua different?

People in the United States who have any awareness of Nicaragua at all (and are not themselves Central American immigrants) probably think of it as that place which suffered a bloody civil war during the Reagan administration. From 1979 through 1990, U.S.-backed proxy forces fought the Sandinistas, a popular nationalist government with socialist aspirations. Before 1979, the country was ruled by a kleptocratic dictator who treated rural people as disposable labor on his private preserve, a regime very much in Marshall's category of "forced labor and violence". Nicaraguans rose up, threw the guy out, and, despite the war, have lived under elected governments of varying honesty and political cast ever since.

Apparently today Nicaragua is one of the more peaceful nations in the region. Different sources suggest different reasons for the country's current relative good peacefulness.

A Hemisphere Focus paper from the Center for International and Strategic Studies emphasizes that Nicaragua is neither a source or a consumer of the region's valuable and vicious drug trade.

In the Christian Science Monitor, Hannah Stone focuses on Nicaragua's good fortune in having a different migration history in the 80s than its neighbors. Since the U.S. treated Nicaragua as an enemy state, the northern colossus was not where people fleeing violence sought refuge.

Nicaragua does not have a significant presence of the biggest, and most notorious, Central American gangs – the Mara Salvatrucha 13, or MS-13, and Barrio 18, or M-18. These both have many members in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, as well as in the US. Part of the reason for their presence in these countries, and not in Nicaragua (or its neighbors in the southern part of the isthmus), is migration patterns. Large numbers of people emigrated from the Northern Triangle countries to the US in the 1980s and 1990s, often settling in Los Angeles. Here, some young people formed self-protection gangs, which morphed over time into large-scale criminal organizations like MS-13 and M-18. These structures were exported to the northern half of Central America in the 1990s, via the US policy of deporting convicted gang members after they had served terms in prison.

Many observers express concern that drug dealing might yet infect this Central American oasis.

The Economist offers the most radical explanation for Nicaragua's low murder rate. This organ of free market orthodoxy credits Nicaragua's popular revolution for implanting a viable system of law and some justice.

Nicaragua's distaste for its neighbours' mano dura (“iron fist”) policies grew out of the 1979 revolt against the Somoza dictatorship. “We didn't know how to be police. We only knew we didn't want to be like the Somozan Guard,” says Aminta Granera, a former nun and guerrilla who leads the [nation's police] force [to this day].

Officers are aided by 100,000 volunteers. They include law and psychology students; 10,000 former gang members, who mentor youths via baseball in the barrios; and nearly 4,000 domestic-violence victims, who persuade women to speak out. Amnesty International, an NGO, highlights the frequency of rape, which is made worse by a blanket ban on abortion: last year a 12-year-old was forced to give birth to her stepfather's baby.

Still, confidence in the police is the highest in Latin America after Chile. ... "They had just gotten rid of a repressive dictatorship," [historian Jeffery] Gould said, "so when the Sandinistas took over, they set out to create a different kind of police force, in tune with the local population and their needs, rather than being oppressive.”

Judy Butler, an American journalist who’s lived in Nicaragua for 31 years, said “there was a cleaning out of the military and other structures of government that never happened in ... Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras." ...

Maybe the experience of struggling for liberation -- for autonomy and justice -- implants a positive corrective within societies born in violence, even if the forces of popular liberation encounter setbacks. That seems worth musing on even within our own American nation.

In looking up murder rates, I also noticed that Cuba, another Caribbean former slave state, has a rate of 5 per 100,000, the same as that of the United States.

My kind of Christian

There are many variants of Christianity that I find loathsome or, at best, to be fled as fast as possible.

There was the complacent mainline Protestantism of my youth whose function seemed to be to ratify and bless the existing social divisions of power, wealth, and prestige among the attendees. There are many sorts of contemporary fundamentalism which encase "salvation" (from human impurity I think) in comforting Know-Nothingism and flat-earth anti-intellectualism. And there are also Christian efforts to erase the historic wisdom of our faith tradition and to make ourselves so hip and groovy that I want to puke.

Nadia Bolz-Weber is none of these; she is my kind of Christian. As she says in Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People she has

never understood how Christianity became quite so tame and respectable, given its origins among drunkards, prostitutes, and tax collectors. .. what I know for sure is that God is always present in love and in suffering.

She's a sharp writer, an ordained Lutheran pastor, the founder of a congregation -- the House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver -- and fun to listen to (lots of interviews available out there) and to read. In fact, she's made her own church so attractive that, in the afterword to this book, she begs the curious to check it out online, not to insist on visiting and crowding out the regulars. I liked that. Just because we appreciate something, we don't have to grab ... wish San Francisco's gentrifiers knew that.

In this book, the reader is offered a cycle of sermons for the church year, though no reader unfamiliar with that annual round needs to notice. Liturgical Christianity has its own calendar that almost insensibly acts upon those participating in its round of teachings. Bolz-Weber is entirely within the tradition. I vaguely remember reading that books of sermons were popular in the 19th century, though I couldn't find any ready reference online that confirmed my historical notion. This book could bring that interest back.

So it seems appropriate to share a couple of little tidbits of what she writes about preaching as her art form; when asked to give a talk about preaching, she began preparing by asking her congregants to tell her what they valued:

Almost all of them said they love that their preacher is so obviously preaching to herself and just allowing them to overhear it. ... Never once did Jesus scan the room for the best example of holy living and send that person out to tell others about him. He always sent stumblers and sinners. I find that comforting.

... Sometimes the fact that there is nothing about you that makes you the right person to do something is exactly what God is looking for. ...

How often are we reminded that preaching changes and can surprise the preacher? Yet here this rings so true. It is sometimes said that all preachers really have just one message that they repackage week after week and season after season. This woman's message is certainly that God loves us as we are. How shocking!

Since we are in the season of Epiphany, when the infant Jesus was shown to foreign visitors and the empire's flunky King Herod is said to have massacred innocent babies while trying to find and destroy this new "king" (all myth-inflation as far as we know), I thought I'd quote a bit of what Bolz-Weber writes about that story.

... the Epiphany story of Herod and infanticide reveals a God who has entered our world as it actually exists, and not the world as we often wish it would be. God's love is too pure to enter into a world that does not exist, even though this is often how we treat Jesus, as if we are trying to shelter him from reality. We often behave as though Jesus is only interested in saving and loving a romaniticized version of ourselves, or an idealized version of our mess of a world, and so we offer him a version of our best selves. With our Sunday school shoes on, we sing songs about kings and drummers at his birth, perhaps so we can escape the Herod in ourselves and the world around us.

... the world into which Christ was born was certainly not about a Norman Rockwell painting. The world has never been that world. God did not enter the world of our nostalgic, silent-night, snow-blanketed, peace-on-earth, suspended reality of Christmas. God slipped into the vulnerability of skin and entered our violent and disturbing world. This Christmas story, the story of the Slaughter of the Holy Innocents, is as much a part of Christmas and Epiphany as are shepherds and angels.

Go look this woman up on YouTube. She is a Christian pleasure.

Saturday scenery: faces of the city and beyond

Once you start looking for them, it's amazing how many visages are looking at you from surfaces in the city.

Some are mere doodles ...

Some are someone's art ...

And some are decorative. I wonder, is this someone's household guardian sprite?

Now he's not threatening.

And she's lovely. Why do I assume the proper pronoun is "she"?

And she/he is a little absurd.

This supportive character looks anxious.

There's a curious fellow. Why do I think this is a fellow?

Nice use of line.

This one is from afar ... nearly to Stinson Beach on the Dipsea Trail.

And this lost creature was in the Tennessee Valley in Marin County.

This haunting countenance was truly far afield -- outside the harbor town of Kotor in Montenegro.

Most pictures from Walking San Francisco.

Friday cat blogging

Happy New Year!

Encountered on a wall while Walking San Francisco.