Saturday scenes and scenery: sunrise running on the Vineyard

This scene has awaited me at 5:15 am most mornings for the last two weeks when I fit in a run before my ailing friend is awake.

The sun's light is so fresh at dawn.

Most of the trees have not yet leafed out, but a few are in full flower.

The true wild life -- white tail deer, skunks, scared cottontail rabbits -- don't hang around to be photographed by the lumbering human. But the sheep are curious.

The island's wild turkeys seem to have no qualms about holding their ground in the middle of roads.

NY Times fail

The New York Times duly headlines the forced resignation of San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr today. Nice that they notice the doings on the far left coast, I guess. But apparently their reporter has no sources more contemporary than former Mayor Willie Brown who left office in 2004 and his tame preacher sidekick, the Rev. Amos Brown.

Get a grip Timesman ... there are plenty of Black activists in San Francisco with more immediate, informed commentary on the rogue police department. And if you were paying attention, you'd know that the SFPD is just as trigger happy when encountering Latinos in the gentrifying Mission as Blacks in the Bayview.

Friday cat blogging

I might hope that Morty was looking out the window waiting for me to come home. But I know all too well that he's really hoping to draw the pit bull from back yard into another frenzy of rejection.

The thing about (some) dogs is that they can be lured into the same teasing trap over and over and over again ... "why won't you play with me?"

San Francisco's ineffectual mayor is "very uneasy"

A 27 year old Black woman is dead, shot by his police department in the Bayview this morning. She was driving a car they identified as stolen. When chased, she seems to have crashed the car. First accounts do not suggest that she did anything to threaten officers. The story will undoubtedly expand and may shift when investigated. In the absence of criminal charges against the shooters, it is impossible to tell which accounts of these shootings are truthful. This is the fifth shooting of a "suspect" of color who was in no position to harm officers in the last two years.

SFPD chief, Greg Suhr, will be called up upon again to perform his role as community punching bag for his trigger happy cops. The picture is from his last such performance, after the police killed Luis Gongoro Pat in April.

UPDATE: Suhr resigns. Lee claimed credit -- but would not promise a nationwide search for a professional replacement. Kudos to all who put pressure on the city. But we can't stop pushing.

Sun energy from automotive waste land

Cronig's Market in West Tisbury, Mass., is building a solar panel array over its parking lot. When completed, in addition to feeding the electric power grid, each supporting post will carry a plug-in charging station for electric vehicles.

So long as customers will be arriving in cars -- and it is hard to envision any other future out here in country -- this seems a good use of an expanse of asphalt.

Massachusetts seems to have quite an array of incentives for such facilities.

It sure would be great to see this become a common feature of parking lots across the country.

improbable, but true

Worth noting: An openly gay man is a major party nominee for Senate in KENTUCKY and no one seems to care. #KYSen

— Kevin Robillard (@PoliticoKevin) May 17, 2016

A little over 20 years ago, I worked with a gay man who was run out of Kentucky liberal politics because of his sexual orientation. Now this.

Pessimism is easy; hope is hard but it wins

If we want more victories, those of us who are progressive need to celebrate the wins (always partial but still real) that we pull off, while we press on for more and better. This seems obvious but ...

Instead we trap ourselves in gloom. Timothy Burke, a professor in History at Swarthmore, acerbically describes how this works in academia:

There is a particular kind of left position, a habitus that is sociologically and emotionally local to intellectuals, that amounts in its way to a particular kind of anti-politics machine. It’s a perspective that ends up with its nose pressed against the glass, looking in at actually-existing political struggles with a mixture of regret, desire and resignation.

Move #1: Things are worse now. But they were always worse.
Move #2: No specific thing is good now, because the whole system is bad.
Move #3: It’s not fair to ask people how to get from here to a totalizing transformation of the systems we live under, because this is just a strategy used to belittle particular reforms or strategies in the present.
4. It’s futile to do anything, but why are you just sitting around?

If that's too abstract, try this description from one of my favorite sports writers(!), Gregg Easterbrook. The gloom around us is pervasive.

... optimism itself has stopped being respectable. Pessimism is now the mainstream, with optimists viewed as Pollyannas. If you don’t think everything is awful, you don’t understand the situation!

Easterbrook thinks our apocalyptic gloom is a social sickness. The Republican presidential pretenders, led by the presumptive nominee, bellowed through a competition to proclaim how awful our condition is. Meanwhile Bernie says things are so bad only a "revolution" (his sensible social democratic one) will save us. Lots of polls show most of us think somehow we're on the wrong track.

But people will only struggle to make change when they believe their efforts will indeed win them better lives. If we want to change the world, we can't wallow. We have to find enough hope to keep on keeping on whether to rein in racist cops, or win a living wage, or turn the country away from imperial military adventures.

Let's listen to that observant football writer again:

Though candidates on the right are full of fire and brimstone this year, the trend away from optimism is most pronounced among liberals. A century ago Progressives were the optimists, believing society could be improved, while conservatism saw the end-times approaching. Today progressive thought embraces Judgment Day, too. Climate change, inequality and racial tension are viewed not as the next round of problems to be solved, but as proof that the United States is horrible.

And yet developing the postindustrial economy — while addressing issues such as inequality, greenhouse emissions and the condition of public schools — will require optimism. Pessimists think in terms of rear-guard actions to turn back the clock. Optimists understand that where the nation has faults, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work.

... The lack of optimism in contemporary liberal and centrist thinking opens the door to Trump-style demagogy, since if the country really is going to hell, we do indeed need walls. And because optimism has lost its standing in American public opinion, past reforms — among them environmental protection, anti-discrimination initiatives, income security for seniors, auto and aviation safety, interconnected global economics, improved policing and yes, Obamacare — don’t get credit for the good they have accomplished.

In almost every case, reform has made America a better place, with fewer unintended consequences and lower transaction costs than expected. This is the strongest argument for the next round of reforms. The argument is better made in positive terms — which is why we need a revival of optimism.

Belief in better possibilities isn't enough to win, but we don't win without such an animating belief. Pessimism is easy; hope is hard, but it enables change.

Street propaganda

For the next few weeks, I'll be participating in a MOOC (massive open online course) from the University of Nottingham in Britain. The subject is Propaganda and Ideology in Everyday Life. Let's see what these academics come up with; if this proves interesting to me, I'll comment here.

Meanwhile here are some examples of street propaganda from one of the precincts I've photographed for Walking San Francisco. Click on any of these images to enlarge.

Someone thinks pasting Post-It note size messages on poles is the way to spread a message.

What do I know? This individual may be right.

Clearly, there's a particular bone being picked here. The anonymous author (not good for building confidence when spewing opinions if you are not willing to put your name on them) seems to have an idée fixe about the nature of contemporary life. Not saying those opinions are wrong, but I can question if this is the way to deliver them convincingly. And a some design assistance might command more respect ... or not.

When is an election not an election?

Walter Shapiro has covered decades of primaries. This year those primaries have once again exposed messy contradictions in the process.

For all its faults, the 2016 campaign has one shimmering achievement: The presidential race has identified a form of representative democracy that arouses more bipartisan hatred than the United States Congress.

Because in many states we go to the same polling place we'll go to in November and vote with the same machines, we think of primaries as just another election that for some unknown reason is held at a weird time of year. Most of us don't bother to vote, since this isn't the real election. But it is just an election, isn't it?

Well, no. Presidential primaries are "intra-party deliberations" by which political parties chose their candidates in the general (November) election. Though it looks like they are part of our governing system, they aren't (although in most locations state governments pay for them and use them for "non-partisan" balloting for some offices.)

It's when we think of primaries as just another majoritarian election that their peculiarities stand out. In fact, the presidential primaries are a messy sequence of accreted practice, a hodgepodge deriving from various historical periods. The direction of the developing candidate selection process is generally toward offering the option of universal participation -- but the system is full of holes and pitfalls. I'm just going to comment briefly on a few of the systems that various states and the two parties have used this year. There's been a lot of clarifying commentary and the season is not over yet!

• Caucuses: What could be more "democratic" (small "d") than neighbors getting together in a high school gym to compare candidates and press for their choice of candidate? Well -- almost anything, according to Josh Marshall who maintains that caucus processes are the most effective voter suppression method in politics today. Participation is way lower than in primary elections; people who can't give two hours of an evening to the process, such as parents and many workers, are disenfranchised, as are folks who fear they can't figure it out in front of their neighbors. More people vote in states with primary ballot systems and voters have a clearer understanding of what they are doing.

• Closed primaries: Because the New York State primary unexpectedly took place before nominees had been decided by earlier states, the strict rule requiring potential voters to have signed up with a party preference months in advance came under a spotlight. The rule excluded some number of independents who expected to be able to vote in the presidential primary. Most states have more lenient rules, or open primaries, or simply no party registration at all, but New York's system came into being for a democratic (small "d") reason. Unlike most states, New York has several viable small parties -- Working Families, Greens, etc -- that have electoral influence. Without some such provision, they fear the Dems and GOPers could "steal" their nominations with a relatively few last minute party switchers who vote on their line for the major party candidates.

• Super delegates: Hey, if we get to vote for our presidential candidate choices, how come there are so-called "super-delegates" who get to vote at party conventions without having to face any voters? Both parties have these, 712 for the Dems, 437 for the GOPers. They consist of elected officials like governors and congresscritters, and people who run the party apparatus like chairs of state committees, etc. The argument for including them with special status in the nomination process is that they are the people who keep the parties going when politics is not front and center of popular attention. Whenever a nomination contest is close, the side with less support tries to round them up; but since this is a deeply majoritarian country, such efforts are likely to fail. I guess this year's messy process should teach us to "never say never" to any possible outcome, but I have some sympathy with the idea that the people who do the day to day party work should get a role.

• Top two primary: Fortunately this abomination doesn't extend to the presidential contest, though we have it for all state voting in California. Washington does this too. If we had it for President, we'd probably get a ballot in November with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and no GOPer on it. If Alabama used it, the choices would probably be Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. How anyone could think this is a good process tweak, I can't imagine. It actively and intentionally suppresses minority parties.

The political scientist Julia Azari has been writing thoughtful commentary on the presidential primary process throughout this season.

One of the reasons advocates for human rights and other freedoms tend to also favor open political processes is that we assume good institutions will choose leaders who will protect freedom and justice. Open elections are certainly better in this regard. But they're not a guarantee that parties and candidates who rely on bigoted appeals or talk about curtailing freedoms won't win sometimes.

This is especially important when we talk about American institutions in historical context. ... The old convention system, with its brokers and geographic organization, was more pluralistic — it was easier, under the pre-reform convention system, to ensure that a party nominee was acceptable to most factions within a party. As we are now learning, the current primary system allows a candidate to be nominated with a plurality of voters if no strong opponent emerges.

But here's the thing: While these old institutions were far better at avoiding a conundrum in which a party nominates a candidate that many of its members don't really like, they were hardly a bulwark against failures of substantive democracy. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with American history can point to at least a few instances of racism, sexism, and xenophobia.

... the lesson of the 2016 nomination season is that procedural democracy cannot be counted on to protect substantive democratic values at all times. Leaders and ordinary citizens have to actually face up to the difficult questions about race, gender, and other forms of inequality, about the human tendency to form groups and be awful to each other, and about the history of doing so that lurks beneath the surface of so many democracies.

The entire article is worth taking the time for, as is her earlier musing focused less on the GOP nomination of an extra-Party demagogue and more on the experience of Sanders partisans in this season.***Much as flying to Massachusetts feels as if I'd suddenly dropped into a different phase of spring, it also feels as if I'm in a different phase of the political season. Here the TV advertising deluge has long come and gone. Partisan passions, in full flood some weeks back, have receded. The Presidential contest is faraway -- important, perhaps scary, but somewhere else. Meanwhile, in the California I left behind, core partisans were just warming up for the June 7 crescendo.

There is much to criticize about the length of our presidential candidate selection process. But one national cataclysmic election day is plenty for one year. We are probably better from the seasonal variations and respites. Or so I suspect.

Social goods and individual goods

The Barna Group, an evangelical Christian polling firm, looked into how people think about pornography in US society. The distress their findings caused the study's conservative religious sponsors is well-illustrated in this graphic.

Their respondents rank most all the options they were offered as more immoral than viewing porn! In the accompanying verbiage, the Barna authors offer a plausible picture of why this is:

"While it may seem crazy that younger generations see not recycling as a greater evil than watching pornography, it’s also true that not recycling—as well as most of the other activities ranked above pornography—has a societal impact,” points out [Roxanne Stone, editor in chief at Barna Group.] “Watching pornography, on the other hand, is perceived by many as simply an individual choice. Affecting no one but me. ..."

The emerging Millennial generation is often described as more socially concerned than many of their predecessors. Well good for them. They face the task of creating the social cohesion needed by a diverse society to solve massive social problems. Glad to see they have their heads screwed on properly.

The question posed for me by Barna's graphic representation of their findings, is why so dismissive of the moral implications of recycling? Recycling may seem trendy and trivial, but it is an attempt to conform personal behavior to the common good -- pretty much an unalloyed positive moral impulse. What's not to like in this finding?

I'm not a fan of many values in much porn, but this isn't about that. It is about the choice many young people make to assign greater moral weight to social structures than to individual behaviors. That orientation is becoming pervasive and may be life preserving in our circumstances.

H/t to The Lead for the Barna link.

Saturday scenes and scenery: spring flowers

A quick trip to rural New England from northern California in mid-May feels as if I'd gone back a season.

My mother-in-law calls these determined little blooms pushing through cracks in the terrace Johnny Jump Ups. According to the link, they are natives of Spain and Pyrenees. From fairly high up I suspect as they've insinuated themselves in a climate that is not balmy.

One thing for sure: the free range chickens in these parts don't need no Easter egg dye.

It's a big, complicated world, especially for women

A few years ago, I had the privilege of joining in an all-women's trekking trip in Nepal. We didn't go any higher than 12,700 feet or climb any mountain. But we did walk in the Sherpa region of the Khumbu Valley just below Mount Everest. It was high enough and rough enough to give me great respect for and considerable trepidation about those high places.

Our leader was Lhakpa Diki Sherpa pictured here. She was obviously a very esteemed athlete, the Nepalese women's mountain running champion. She had represented her country in several European races. We naturally gasped in her wake, though she simply led us carefully and competently. It was hard to suss out just what her relationship was to the porters and other guides (male) with the group. She was shy when speaking perfectly adequate English.

Her ambition, if something better didn't come along as a consequence of her athletic prowess, was to go to the capital in Kathmandu and study bookkeeping/accounting so she could always have a job. It seemed a small bore ambition for such an exceptional woman, but it was what she could see ahead.

I thought about Lhapka Diki when I read the extraordinary story in Outside of the first Nepalese woman to summit Everest and make it down alive. Lhakpa Sherpa (Sherpa names are limited) went back and climbed the big rock five more times. Yet today, she's an obscure in-home health care worker and 7-Eleven cashier in Hartford, Connecticut, raising her two children as a single woman.

Notions about women's roles, the strange and often ugly conjunction between Sherpa talent for heights and Western mountaineers who depend on the Sherpas, the Nepalese culture, and global migration make Lhakpa Sherpa's story a window on our times. Highly recommended.

When I travel, I try to remember that I am not culturally equipped to see the whole of what is going on. My interaction with Lhakpa Diki was of that sort.

Friday cat blogging

Emerson shows his inner panther to a visitor. Though long, lanky, and given to exploring every unfamiliar nook and corner, really he's just a lover boy.

Yet another primary election: some San Francisco choices

For many San Franciscans, yet another primary election means the arrival of a weighty hunk of newsprint. It doesn't have to be that way and the online version is actually pretty well designed by the standards of a ballot pamphlet.

Sure -- by now we all pretty much know where we stand on Bernie and Hillary. But what about all the other local contests? A friend asked me for a cheat sheet, so here goes.

The story in U.S. Senate race is Attorney General Kamala Harris, the endorsed Democrat versus ??? for the November ballot. ??? will likely turn out to be Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez, also a Democrat. This is a consequence of the crazy top two primary system California has stuck itself with -- and the fact that the California GOP has pretty well collapsed at the state level. I support Harris as slightly more progressive than Sanchez, though I don't expect much.

The significant local office on the ballot is CA State Senate, District 11 (east side of the city mostly.) That's the seat Mark Leno is term-limited out of. That contest pits Supervisor Jane Kim v. Supervisor Scott Wiener. Kim has become a stronger and stronger supporter of affordable housing, tenant rights and firing Police Chief Suhr. Wiener never met a real estate profiteer or developer he didn't love. Because of the top two primary nonsense, we'll have to vote on this contest again in November.

The other local legislative offices don't much matter. The incumbents are going to win with little opposition in November, whether we like 'em or not. There's a judge race too. I don't think we should be electing judges and I know nothing about these people, so no comment.

Weirdly, some of San Franciscans most important votes will come in what I think of as the "Student Council" races, the contests for membership in the Democratic County Central Committee. This body gets to make Democratic Party endorsements in the November election; having them make progressive choices can really help get us better Supervisors and state legislators. For the last couple of years, the real estate interests, tech companies and developers have managed to take control of the committee -- after all, who bothers to vote on the "Student Council"? Well, we have to if we want better local office holders. So, I'll list here some progressive choices, courtesy of the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club.

SF Democratic County Central Committee, Assembly District 17:
Alysabeth Alexander
Tom Ammiano
John Burton
David Campos
Petra DeJesus
Bevan Dufty
Jon Gollinger
Pratima Gupta
Frances Hsieh
Jane Kim
Rafael Mandelman
Sophie Maxwell
Aaron Peskin
Cindy Wu

SF Democratic County Central Committee, Assembly District 19:
Keith Baraka
Brigitte Davila
Sandra Lee Fewer
Hene Kelly
Leah LaCroix
Eric Mar
Gabriel Medina
Myrna Melgar
Norman Yee

This election's batch of local propositions are unexciting, except that Prop C needs a big YES vote to remind the powers-that-be they must get moving to fix the housing shortage. It may not accomplish a lot, but it is a start.

The other props have only token opposition from fringe folks so I imagine they'll all pass, even Prop D from the Supervisors calling for automatic investigations of police shootings. Wait for the November ballot for more fireworks over housing, homelessness, and our trigger happy cops.

And some people think kids have dumb ideas

Great. Let's have open season on gender nonconforming students in high school bathrooms by encouraging girls to carry pepper spray.

“Depending on how the courts rule on the bathroom issues, it may be a pretty valuable tool to have on the female students if they go to the bathroom, not knowing who may come in,” [Rowan-Salisbury school (NC) Board member Chuck Hughes] said.

Salisbury Post

We can only hope the courts allow the Department of Justice to stop any federal funds these sadly deceived adults are receiving.

Coming apart at an accelerating rate

Think of it as a tightly woven ball of yarn that is gradually, under centrifugal forces, coming unwound. I find this visualization of global temperature increases quite scary.
I understand that the Celsius scale is how science thinks about temperature, but I am convinced that part of why people in the United States have such a hard time thinking abstractly about human induced climate change is that we think in Fahrenheit. Just for reference, 1.5 degrees Celsius equals 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit; 2 degrees C means 3.6 F. The metric system, including the C scale, is used by all the earth except the 3 percent located in the United States.

Both systems date from the early 18th century, but the C system was included in the metric system in 1790. English speaking countries mostly held out for Fahrenheit until the 20th century, but the United Kingdom led a shift to C in 1965. Congress passed a law in 1975 that would have encouraged a transition to the world standard, but since it was voluntary, and our right-wing friends didn't truck with no imported measuring systems, the attempt crashed under Reagan. Thanks, Ron and the Reps -- setting back science however they can.

History for pleasure and mind expansion

Many people (most?) read fiction when they want a little escapism. I read sweeping histories of times and places about which I know little as a break from the US and modern European tomes I take more seriously. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Cambridge University classics scholar Mary Beard filled that bill perfectly.

The initials SPQR were ancient Romans' own abbreviation for the "Senate and People of Rome" -- their label for the obscure town that became an empire. Rather than writing a chronological story, Beard weaves together contemporary sources in which Romans recorded what sort of polity they thought they were building, from the time when Rome was an unprepossessing village with a founding myth of about heroes raised by a wolf through 212 CE when an emperor declared all free residents of a domain encompassing the whole Mediterranean world and beyond were to be "citizens" of Rome.

Beard is not a reverent writer. For example, the emperor Caligula, insofar as his name comes down to us, is remembered as a cruel sadist and an extravagant pervert. This author reveals that the name "Caligula" was a childish nickname, akin to "Bootikins." More careful subjects (reigned 37-41 CE) would have addressed him as Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus.

She has a wonderful gift for helping us understand how events may have looked to contemporaries. She refers to the expansion of Roman rule from one small city to encompass the entire Italian peninsula (fourth century BCE) as "Rome's Great Leap Forward." And then she qualifies:

... the Romans did not plan to conquer and control Italy. No Roman cabal in the fourth century BCE sat down with a map, plotting a land grab in the territorial way that we associate with imperialist nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For a start, simple as it sounds, they had no maps. What this implies for how they, or any other "pre-cartographic" people, conceived the world around them, or just over their horizons, is one of history's great mysteries. I have tended to write of the spread of Roman power through the peninsula of Italy, but no one knows how many -- or, realistically, how few -- Romans at this date thought of their homeland as part of a peninsula in the way we picture it. A rudimentary version of the idea is perhaps implied by references in literature of the second century BCE to the Adriatic as the Upper Sea and the Tyrrhenian as the Lower Sea, but notably this is on a different orientation from ours, east-west, rather than north-south.

Go ahead, accept this opportunity to let your mind be blown.

The book is full of such tidbits. Who knew that in ancient Roman cities, built much as Mediterranean cities still are in something like "apartment blocks" on narrow streets, the well-off would have lived at the bottom and the poor in the upper stories. Why? Because the great urban danger was fire. Smoke rises; the poor lived over comfortable people's kitchens and had little chance of getting out if a conflagration occurred -- which it often did.

SPQR is fun history and good for mind expanding.

Mary Beard writes a blog named A Don's Life which is as idiosyncratic and charming as her historical writing. Brits know Beard as a fixture on the BBC and as a cheerfully undaunted older woman participating in multiple media.

"Art in the service of political power"

Marin County residents Tom and Lilka Breton opened a Museum of International Propaganda in San Anselmo last Saturday. The venture displays their eclectic and fascinating collection of visual artifacts, mostly 20th century, that meet their criteria for the label "propaganda."

I'll let them explain what they mean, from a poster that introduces the display:

What is Propaganda
Propaganda is the calculated manipulation of information designed to shape public opinion and behavior to predetermined ends, as desired by the propagandist. It is usually emotional and repetitive, either designed to increase enthusiasm for a proposed utopian world or to escalate rage and hatred of a designated enemy, often a religion, an economic or political system, a race or a special group. Propaganda, in its essence, is art in the service of political power. ... The best sign that propaganda has succeeded is when the people who faithfully toe the propaganda line actually believe they are acting this way of their own free will.

Other country's propaganda tends to evoke either amusement (as the heroic Kims above might inspire) or repulsion and terror, as for example, this Nazi German SS-Death's Head ring.

Many regimes have an image of women that reinforces state power. Here's a fine late Stalinist Soviet example.

This Women's Suffrage poster from the pre-World War I Pankhurst movement looks quite benign ... until you remember these ladies went in for burning politician's houses, smashing windows and assaulting policemen ...

Wars evoke denunciations: This Cuban poster (accurately) convicts Richard Nixon of slaughter in Cambodia and Laos ...

The Spanish Republic denounced the fascist bombing of Madrid in 1937 with images of broken children. In general, most cultures at war are far more willing to show graphic pictures of victims than US media consumers are accustomed to.

This image from 1988 pictures both the Kremlin and Washington as vampire bats supplying bombs (by way of Saddam Hussein's Iraq) to murder peaceful Iranians. By the standards of war propaganda, it is quite attractive.

War propaganda from the United States is notable for its racist content. From 1917, German Kaiser Wilhelm as a black ape??? Apparently that's how someone thought to mobilize the US masses.

In 1941, the Japanese enemy becomes an invading buck-toothed rat ...

This strange collection will be open Wednesdays through Sunday; admission is free. Definitely worth a visit.

Click on the pictures for larger images.

Media, manifestos and other manipulations

These days one of my favorite podcasts is On the Media. Don't be put off by concern this is just endless criticism of Fox News -- or more exposés of journalist bias. After 15 years doing the program, Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield have figured out how to define anything that interests them as within their subject matter. The result is idiosyncratic, eclectic, informative, and often funny.

For example, on the linked home page as I write, there are programs about a 1957 film whose plot has elements of the Trump moment, exploration of the legal battle over access to academic archives that may contain evidence of crimes by the IRA in Belfast, and a dissection of the propaganda battle over a drug that may -- or may not -- treat female sexual dysfunction.

Or, if podcasts aren't your thing, you can read Brooke Gladstone's comic book: The Influencing Machine. Like the show, this is serious reporting and reflection, delightfully presented. Gladstone plays the same role she often adopts in her interviews: she's the endlessly curious innocent who asks all the embarrassingly ignorant questions you wish weren't ordinarily skipped by less secure journalists. Here, she recounts the history of the interaction between technology and media, from ancient Mayan artists through Twitter addicts. She punctures the various pomposities that journalists have adopted in each epoch. She doesn't have a high opinion of many practitioners of her own craft -- or so her character here suggests. (If she really had as low an opinion as she conveys, I don't think she'd be able to attract so many media figures to submit to interviews on her show. From the sound of these, they like and trust her.)

The book includes an observation on U.S. journalism worth remembering. She highlights the pattern through which U.S. governments draw us into wars. Whether it was the first Gulf War, the Spanish-American conquests, World War I, Vietnam, or Iraq II, the pattern is the same.

Whether dead babies, the sinking of the Maine and the Lusitania, the attacks in the Gulf of Tonkin, or Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, the premises for going to war usually are built on partial or total fabrications. Fundamentally, this is because our government does not trust us to come to the right conclusion -- that is, to go to war.

... Combat reporters focus on the fighting. The reason, our reason for fighting, is lost in the fog of war. And once that's lost, it takes a long, long time to recover.

Yet she is not about to blame our ignorance or distraction entirely on governments.

Once I was confronted by a gaggle of high-ranking Chinese journalists who pointed to several instances in which American news outlets pulled their punches when reporting on the Bush administration and the Iraq war. They said they proved the American media were afraid of the government.

That's ridiculous, I replied. The American media are not afraid of the government. They are afraid of their audiences and advertisers. The media do not control you. They pander to you. ...

Both the podcast and Gladstone's comic are U.S. media at their best: diligently researched, thoughtful, and vastly entertaining.

Remembering Fr. Daniel Berrigan

The photos that appear here are scanned from a book that seems to have disappeared from historical consciousness, A Spectacle unto the World: The Catholic Worker Movement by psychologist Robert Coles, with photos by Jon Erikson. I am feeding them here into the vast maw of the world wide web that they may not be forgotten.

When Fr. Dan was released from Danbury Federal Prison in 1972 after serving his sentence for burning draft files at Catonsville, he came to the First Street house of the New York Catholic Worker to say mass among the community.

The kitchen table on which meals were prepared served as his altar.

Here Frank Donovan receives the blessed bread.

Jon Erikson was horrified by the poor quality of his publisher's reproduction of these photos; my scans have further degraded them. But they retain some power nonetheless.

Good news for discouraged San Franciscans and other Yanks

London has elected a new mayor, a Muslim of South Asian origin from the Labour Party. He states his priorities:

[Saddiq] Khan had said he would make solving London’s housing crisis a key priority, and place a freeze on public transport fares for four years.

He said he would set a target that half of all new homes should be “genuinely affordable” and promised to boost landlord licensing, as well as name and shame rogue landlords.

The Conservative campaign against Khan tried to make him out to be a Muslim extremist, unsurprisingly.

Don't know if he can deliver anything, but it is always good to see the voters get tired of the hate.

Four decades of European barbarism

The title of Ian Kershaw's history, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949, got my attention by getting the periodization right. We've achieved enough distance on World War I and World War II to see them as just a single, awful, very long, war -- a convulsion emanating from one continent that engulfed the globe.

When I read a sweeping history written for a popular audience that covers material in which I'm moderately well read, what fascinates me is the historiography, how the author has chosen to structure his story. This British historian of Hitler's Germany is wonderfully clear about the frame in which he is writing: his subject is

four interlocking major elements of comprehensive crisis, unique to these decades: (1) an explosion of ethnic-racist nationalism; (2) bitter and irreconcilable demands for territorial revisionism; (3) acute class conflict -- now given concrete focus through the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; and (4) a protracted crisis of capitalism (which many observers thought was terminal).

Most European history currently being written in English is bent on correcting an overemphasis on western and northern Europe prevailing during the Cold War when Russia's trauma's and the dramas and horrors of central Europe were ignored "behind the Iron Curtain". If this volume did nothing else, its insistence that Russia, and the Baltic States, and the Balkans and all the other countries of the continent matter along with Britain, France, Germany and the Scandinavians makes a necessary correction to many previous narratives.

Often Kershaw emphasizes continuity as well as change. This is particularly true in reference to violent anti-Semitism whose potency he documents in the societies of Eastern and Central Europe throughout the period, from well before the first "Great War" and into the aftermath of Nazism's unspeakable culmination.

In seeking to understand the Europe that emerged from war's barbarism, Kershaw again identifies four themes that pointed into the next era:

... beneath the surface of Europe's dark age people's lives did continue to be shaped or reshaped in quiet transitions, unbroken if not untouched by the trauma... [These included] economic and social change[s], the role of the Christian Churches, the reaction of intellectuals and the 'culture industry'.

I would not have thought of the churches, since I would have assumed the carnage ended their widespread influence, even hegemony, over social life. Kershaw showed me I was generalizing too much from northern European experience.

This is a very good survey of some awful times and places. My chief complaint is that its broad European focus obscures the role of world wide empire in the war(s). Kershaw's sharp attention to all parts of Europe leaves little room for anything beyond cursory mention of the impacts of that continent's rivalries elsewhere. Sykes/Picot is more mentioned than explicated, as are the seething Indian subcontinent and Indochina. There was a lot of world and a great deal of war that gets short shrift here, as does the agency of non-European peoples.

This volume is the eighth part of a Penguin History of Europe series. Kershaw is to be the author of a subsequent volume bringing European history up the present. It will be interesting to read how he writes of a time when Europe became, though still rich and influential, so much less central to global developments. That's a big shift. And Kershaw is writing it in a moment when the configurations of European stability seem more precarious than in several decades. I look forward to whatever he writes; he's an insightful narrator.

Friday cat blogging

At Erudite Partner's book launch event at the University of San Francisco, her friends gave her a bouquet of tulips. Morty appreciated the digestive aid she'd brought into the house.

The 'hood reacts to GOP nominee

These went up on bus shelters this morning ... somebody (or several somebodies) have it in for the guy in various idioms. Just in time for Cinco de Mayo ...

So this is the Republican nominee

A week ago this man repeated a vicious fairy tale of murder and magic that he maintains exemplifies how he'll deal with the problems of the world.

Go apologize to your Muslim neighbors. You may have trouble holding up your head if you think about it. Dana Milbank has a thorough run down of violent attacks on Muslims apparently arising out of the permission this man is giving his followers.

Then, follow Jamelle Bouie's advice every day through November 8:

Take a breath and say this aloud: Donald Trump will be the Republican Party’s nominee for president of the United States.

Say it again: Donald Trump will be the Republican Party’s nominee for president of the United States.

We will not let him become President.

A sustainability miracle

Until about three years ago, I hadn't lived with a dishwasher since college -- over 40 years. We lived in older houses and kitchen improvements mattered less than many other things. Then we finally upgraded the kitchen enough to make it functional, and put in this magic machine:

And now one or the other of us remarks every third day: "I love having a dishwasher!"

But is this wonder appliance good for the planet or bad for the planet? Good for the water supply or bad for the water supply?

Fortunately, that essential environmental publication Grist provides an answer, one I found a little surprising.

Estimate how much time it would take you to wash all of your dishes:

If it’s two minutes or less for the entire batch: Hand wash.

If it’s over two minutes: Use the dishwasher.

The best option: If you have enough plates and cutlery to do so, put your dishes in the dishwasher each night, then run it when it’s completely full. ...

Turns out we've been doing this right and can feel virtuous when using the wonder appliance. It seems that

kitchen sinks spew about two to five gallons of water per minute. If you’re letting your sink run the entire time you’re washing dishes, you’ve already used the same amount of water as a dishwasher after two minutes.

I had no idea; I just thought we'd acquired a serviceable convenience.

To my Hillary-supporting friends ...

You know which ones you are: mostly women, not so young, accomplished, fighters whose lives have been about negotiating a minefield of sexist disrespect and disregard, who see in our likely next president one of your own. You've changed what's possible for women over your lives and you want more. You see in Hillary a champion for the best of the feminism -- that belief in women, in yourselves, that got you through some hard times -- and want it extended to all women. I've worked with you and I profoundly respect your guts and grit.

But what if Hillary in office disappoints? Sure, you're pragmatists, so you expect some of that, but enduring the let down is never simple or easy.

I've got a book suggestion for you. In The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America, a journalist and preacher out of the black church tradition, Michael Eric Dyson, mulls what to make of the experience of electing an unanticipated, almost miraculous, figure who (partially) embodies both your pain and hope -- and how to live with the real world result.

In reading this book, if we're white, we need to understand we're eavesdropping on someone else's conversation; this isn't primarily for us -- except that if Obama's presidency means anything, it means we've ALL been dealing, somehow, with the great national conundrum of white supremacy and race for eight years.

Race is the defining feature of our forty-fourth president's two terms in office. Obama's presidency is a lens to sharpen the details of American ideas about race and democracy. His presidency also raises the question of how much closer the election of a single black man may bring us to a more just and inclusive society. ... What we learn about Obama says a lot about what we learn about ourselves; his racial reality is our racial reality.

Dyson lays out his project:

I have offered principled support for the president in tandem with far more sustained criticism.

In particular, Dyson mourns that being the president of the United States has meant that Obama could not share in the internationalist, anti-imperial vein within black culture.

As the nation flexed its muscles as a global empire, it created an even more complicated situation for black citizens: as they were being eyed suspiciously by white citizens, America's growing global presence inspired black folk to become even more empathetic toward international struggles for human rights. The sense that they were citizens of the world often gave them courage to fight for their rights at home. It also gave blacks moral leverage to highlight the hypocrisy of America's playing moral cop of the world while denying basic human rights to its black citizens.

Holding accountable one of your own in whom you've invested hope is not emotionally simple.

Obama [has been] wedged between the obstructions of the right and and the obsessions of racists ... Some African Americans feared that the obstacles Obama faced would be used as an excuse not to help blacks, lest he appear to pander to his tribe. ... Obama has searched for the best way to talk about race without raising the ire of whites, but here his struggle has been less acute; he has worried little about losing black support.

... Race has gained such artificial importance in this country that one group could hog most of the resources for itself and leave all the other groups gasping for legal and political air. Obama often takes the knowledge of racial division as his undeclared starting point. By not stating it too much, or too loudly, he can rush past the traumatic memory of race to its positive resolutions. ... Obama is willing to underplay evidence of black suffering while promoting a naively optimistic view of the depth and pace of racial progress, as he did in the aftermath of the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson in August 2014 and Eric Garner a month earlier in Staten Island. Obama's appeal to his biracial identity as a means of resolving racial conflict has at times only served to heighten anxieties and muffle legitimate concerns ...

... Obama seems to feel he cannot hold white folk's feet to the fire even as he warms up to criticizing black folk explicitly. ...

Yet at the end of his presidency, Dyson concludes that Obama has found a way through the eye of the needle.

In the year following Ferguson ... Obama found a way to be the president of all America while also speaking with special urgency for black Americans. ... It is undeniable that presidential attention to a population and its issues can buttress the belief that democracy is for all Americans. ....

Michael Eric Dyson's The Black Presidency is both fascinating as an assessment of this president completing his term and a gift to all progressives of all races and sexes who have to figure out how we might encounter the likely next one. I "read" this book in an audio version; Dyson narrates it himself. He's a preacher and the result is wonderfully engaging.***A Clinton presidency is sure to confront many people who respond to her with enthusiasm with moments of ambivalence. Our first woman president can be trusted to care about matters that were abstract (and perhaps not worth fighting over) to her predecessors -- for example, repealing the Hyde Amendment which prevents government-financed insurance from covering abortion. That's going to take some doing with a Republican forced-pregnancy Congress.

On the other hand, many people who support Clinton, though wanting safety and security, aren't really looking for an endless series of U.S. armed interventions around the world. Clinton seems inclined to muscular military power projection. Obama's sensible "don't do stupid shit" policy (for all his drones, spooks, and his "looking forward not backward") seems likely to give way to American hegemony as usual. Lots of Clinton backers aren't going to like that. How will they negotiate the emotional contradiction of seeing "their" president as war-maker?

Of one conclusion we can be sure: she'll be preferable to Trump!

To my Bernie-supporting friends ...

While you grieve, please -- please -- take a hard look at what has happened in this primary season and rejoice a little too.

Bernie (who I will vote for in the California primary) has come closer to pulling socialism (or at least social democracy) into the mainstream than any U.S. contender since perhaps Eugene V. Debs.

But Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee because of the choices of the most excluded group in our democracy, African Americans -- especially women -- in the Deep South. If we believe that the Beloved Community -- or the Revolution -- should mean that "the last shall be first," we're seeing it, whether it accords with our druthers or not.

I sometimes think that when the southern states seceded in 1860, the North should have just let that backward region go. In fact, Southern absence from Congress enabled the legislation that laid the foundation for 19th century U.S. prosperity. Never would have happened with the plantation gentry around. Of course letting the South go would have also perpetuated slavery, a grotesquely immoral choice as abolitionists, black and white, noisily insisted at the time.

And I sometimes look at our own time and wish our national politics didn't have to take into account the bitter, biased, and ignorant views too often embodied in southern Republicans. But for Democrats to just back away from the solid white Republican south would be to abandon the most disenfranchised citizens of our country. Southern blacks lose and lose again, out-numbered by white voters who monolithically oppose their interests. (That's if they are allowed to vote at all, not robbed of their ballots by discriminatory laws.)

In this primary, the votes of Democratic Party black people in the South have MATTERED for the first time in a long time. Maybe the first time ever at the national level. If you are a serious progressive or leftist or whatever we're calling ourselves these days, that has to gladden your heart, even as you come to terms with the country's resistance to the nominee you hoped for. Bernie coming up short just means there's more work to do for a more just society. We've been in that hard place for a long time.***Part of the background noise of this awful election has been emerging evidence that a lot of white citizens have pretty dismal views of their present condition and prospects -- to the point of rising opiate addiction and suicide rates. (Also enthusiasm for the Donald which seems to me a little suicidal in itself.) Less well advertised is that black citizens are the most optimistic group in society. In specific, blacks even think the economy is doing well.

African-Americans rated the economy as good by a ratio of about four to one, versus about two to one for white Democrats and an even narrower margin for white Democrats without a college degree. A Times/CBS News poll in December found that, relative to two years earlier, roughly three times as many African-Americans said their family’s financial situation was better as said it was worse, while Democrats without a college degree were almost evenly split on this question.

Noam Schieber, New York Times

There are genuine rising expectations going on here.

Yet with those expectations comes a caution based on history. Journalist Farai Chideya commentating at 538 has some suggestions as to why older (and many younger) African Americans think Clinton is a better bet:

... a candidate speaking to the issues that a demographic cares about isn’t enough, no matter your race, and particularly so for black voters. Many black voters could support Sanders’s positions, but if they don’t think he knows how to wrangle Congress, there’s a risk in voting for him. ... one of the roles the president plays is interacting with Congress and pushing (or aiming to block) the passage of legislation. And black and white voters have very different experiences with government when it comes to supporting legislation. [A] University of Chicago study shows how, all other factors aside, black support for legislation means it’s less likely to be passed. If white voters support a bill, it’s much more likely to be passed and adopted. But if black voters support legislation, it’s actually less likely to pass.

That argues that black voters may have a tactical interest in an establishment candidate they think can work behind the scenes in their interest, and there’s a perception that Clinton may be better at insider politics.

Prudential concerns aside, most successful candidates have to prove able to speak to the hearts of at least some fraction of the electorate. We white people may not hear it, but Clinton clearly knows how to signify to many black people that she gets what matters. I was astonished to read this passage in Michael Eric Dyson's The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America. After the Charleston massacre at Emmanuel A.M.E. Church, Obama confined his early comments to putting the murders in the context of other gun slaughters. Dyson thinks Hillary Clinton's response made room for Obama to become "racially unshackled" in his response to Dylann Roof's crime. She

... offered the country a far more comprehensive engagement with the racial politics engulfing Charleston and the nation. Clinton anchored her comments in black history; she acknowledged that African Americans had celebrated, the day before her speech, Juneteenth, "a day of liberation and deliverance" ... Clinton expressed confidence that the black folk in Charleston would draw on their faith and history to see them through: "Just as earlier generations throw off the chains of slavery and then segregation and Jim Crow, this generation will not be shackled by fear and hate."

Clinton argued that "it is tempting to dismiss a tragedy like this as an isolated incident ...." Clinton laid out the facts: blacks are nearly three times more likely than whites to be denied a mortgage; the median income of black families is $11,000, while for whites it is $134,000; nearly half of black families have lived in poor neighborhoods for two generations, compared to just 7 percent for whites; black men are more likely to be stopped and searched by police, charged with crimes, and sentenced to longer prison terms than white men, 10 percent longer than white men for federal crimes; black students suffer the vast re-segregation of American schools; and black children are 500 percent more likely to die from asthma than white children. ...

Clinton's remarkable oration was steeped in black culture and and charged with sophisticated analysis, and was a remarkably honest reckoning, by a major American politician, with both intimate and institutional racism -- racism of the heart, and racism in the systems of society. ...

At a moment of horror, that's a national politician calling out white supremacy. Let's the rest of us white folks try to do at least as well as Hillary Clinton.