No Muslim ban, now or ever!

For the moment, the Trump/Bannon Muslim ban has been put on ice by two courts in Hawaii and Maryland. San Franciscans turned out Thursday to roar their rejection of the president's attempt to make the country white again.

The event was organized by the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), bringing together a broad coalition of groups who are unanimous in rejecting the Trump/Bannon racist strategy.


As Julia Carrie Wong who writes about tech for the Guardian tweeted:

Pretty cool that Muslim ban blocked by Chinese-American AG arguing on behalf of Syrian-American plaintiff before a Native Hawaiian judge.

This world of difference is what Trump/Bannon wants to whitewash from the land. They can't do it so long as people can overcome the fear; that's a heavy ask because the fear and the harm along the way will be all too real for those upon whom it falls.

The times require both "NO" and care from all who can.

Cats for St. Pats

It's important to someone that their stone cats partake in the celebration.

Green tinsel anyone?

And yellow clover?

We all have our own ways of celebrating cultural holidays.

Encountered while Walking San Francisco.

California: what does it mean to be a sanctuary state?

People of many faiths, from every corner of California, marched and lobbied in Sacramento on Wednesday in support of several bills now in the legislature that aim to enforce our state's rejection of the Trump administration's effort to "Make America White Again".

SB54 would bar police and sheriffs from arresting or detaining people just for immigration violations unless a judge issues a warrant. State and local law enforcement agencies would not be able to help investigate immigration violations, inquire about someone's immigration status or provide addresses to federal immigration officers.

... the committee also voted along party lines [all Democrats in favor] to advance SB6, which would provide $12 million to pay lawyers for immigrants facing deportation, and SB31, which would bar state officials from sharing data if the federal government creates a Muslim registry.

San Francisco Chronicle

Clergy led the crowd out of the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament.

At 86, Dolores Huerta is still marching for justice.

Roughly: "God, who rules this country, brought me here -- and I'm staying!"

The crowd spread out at the Capital grounds.

A few folding chairs are a nice touch after a march.

As one speaker insisted: "No tiendo miedo. No fear. We have been here before." And another warned: "We are not passive. We are aggressive!" We'll see what what our political leaders do in this moment.

The burdens of hyper-masculinity

Why do right wing racist thugs go in for wack-doodle blonde hair displays? Both Trump and the Netherland's Wilders get their color out of a box. Guess it is worth remembering that in nature, the peacock whose image we call to mind, is the male ... Poor boys, so much work to be beautiful.

We don't know what comes next

The historian Eric Foner is known, among other works, for his mammoth volume, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 which I've recently discussed here, here, and here.

But five years before he published that opus, he presented the Walter L. Fleming Lectures in Southern History at LSU. These were published as a small book, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy. In this, he took a comparative tack, examining how freed people fared in other societies where slavery and similar bound labor systems had been ended, including Haiti, the British Caribbean, colonial Africa, and Russia where serfdom persisted under czars. Looking at Reconstruction in the post-Civil War South through these experiences, he notes that the permanent (if, for years, more nominal than actual) extension of voting rights to the ex-slaves made the U.S. experience essentially different. For a decade, former slaves took part in and held a share of political power in the former Confederacy. After presenting an overview, he zeroes in on strikes in the Combahee River area rice fields, showing how newly empowered ex-slaves tenaciously held on to their labor rights, even as the broader Reconstruction project was abandoned by the federal Congress.

In summary, he offers this quote which I found suggestive in another time when apparent gains for the freedom of so many us are once again under threat of cutback.

... the English socialist William Morris reflected on how historical struggles never seem to reach a definitive conclusion: "I pondered all these things, ... how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name."

If those of us working for racial and gender justice thought we could trust gains were permanent, we've been shown to be wrong. But the battle doesn't end and new struggles may presage new gains, gains not entirely envisioned yet. Morris -- and Foner -- are onto something, something whose shape we cannot yet see, but which our actions in this time will shape.

Promises, promises

Something to keep in mind as Republicans flounder about trying to repeal Obamacare -- trying to prevent poor people from having access to doctors so they can cut taxes for rich people.

Via TPM. And here's another one:

President Trump himself has said: “There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.”

via Abbe Gluck at Vox

Is there a political penalty for breaking promises? Unless something unexpected happens, we're going to find out. Political penalties aren't accidents; activists make sure they are felt. Share this graphic if you wish.

When values lead to exile

This memoir, Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran, is the story of what a vicious, insecure, rather stupid, dictatorial state will do to break someone it decides is a threat. It's not fun. It is, however, human and instructive.

Shirin Ebadi was an educated Iranian nationalist, a judge in the Tehran city court, who welcomed the 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah. When the new Islamic regime solidified its power, it fired her from her post, relegating her to the secretarial pool. For a decade, she could not work in her field, but was finally permitted to practice law again in 1993. For the next decade, she argued for human rights, most especially for improved legal status for women, children and refugees, all within an Islamic legal framework. She was jailed and heavily pressured. Ebadi gained so much international notice that she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. The prize afforded her work some degree of protection from a hostile state and enabled her to travel widely.

This volume describes the closing down of space for human rights work in Iran after the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 and her involuntary exile after his disputed re-election in 2009.

Over and over, Ebadi tried to maintain that "human rights" efforts did not mean that she was a political dissident. Her cause was the rule of law within the Iranian nation. She certainly did not aim to be an agent of the Iran's Western enemies, but the government could see her through no other lens.

I was not an opponent of the state -- I was a human rights defender, and I based my criticisms of the state on legal grounds. But authoritarian governments are not fond of shades of gray; they cannot tolerate any criticism at all ...

... I had been a judge and was now a lawyer, and the law concerns itself with intent and the results of intent. If the state intended the best for its citizens, then it needed to demonstrate that in its behavior toward them. It could not arrest journalists, throw them in prison, inflict all manner of psychological torture and abuse on them, and then dispatch an agent to talk to me about America "exploiting" my objections to this.

And this determined woman would not give up. She defended members of the Bahai faith who the Iranian clerical state considers traitorous apostates from their version of Islam, worthy of prison or death. She exposed the death penalty for children; she protested torture and illegal imprisonment of people who the regime declared enemies. And she was hard to silence because the Nobel had given her international standing.

And so, the state looked for ways to reach into what she held dear, her family -- and thus to break her will to keep agitating for the rule of law. The story builds toward the Iranian intelligence service's great triumph: drawing her loved husband of three decades into a "honey trap" (an illicit liaison) and forcing him through shame and then torture to denounce her work on video. The ending is dramatic, but I found the one of the episodes on the way to that horrible end most illuminating.

The state had finally started going after my family. It wasn't just content with me anymore. I had witnessed this over the years with many of my clients, dissidents and activists, whose relatives suffered state intimidation, were hassled and threatened and sometimes blackmailed or imprisoned, all "collateral damage" in the quest to get the original target -- the dissident or activist or journalist in question -- to drop their activities. It was the dirtiest of the methods the security agencies used, exploiting these families and their emotional ties.

Ebadi recognized that she was the target when the authorities seized her daughter's passport and summoned the young woman for interrogation. She explained was happening to her daughter Nargess and husband Javad.

"This a test," I said as we sat down around the table. "It's a test to see if I'll cave, if they can use Nargess to get to me. If we react, they will try to use her forever. But if I stand firm and don't respond, they'll realize they'll need another tactic."

Nargess took up her mother's perspective; she was willing to fight. The test came when the authorities summoned the daughter for questioning on a day when Ebadi was supposed to fly to an overseas seminar.

... intelligence agents had timed their little game purposefully. Would I leave the country, knowing that my daughter was sitting in a government office with the officials of a ministry that just years prior had plotted my assassination? Would I board the plane and turn my back on my daughter .. would I blink?

... But I understood that if I postponed my trip by even a single day, in order to ensure that Nargess came home safely and that her passport would be returned, they would spot my weakness. That would be the real danger. They would know then that they could use Nargess against me, and it was that I feared more than anything. If they concluded that she was my weakness, there would be no telling what they might do to her next, or to me. ...

Ebadi flew; the officials handed her passport back to Nargess. And so the state eventually went after her husband, then her sister, and a through a legal pretext, the family's property, forcing Ebadi into lonely permanent exile in London. She's not crushed though; hence this terrible telling of their tale.***It felt problematic reading this memoir in the USofA, knowing that the Iranian state is supposed to be my Enemy Number One. (Or is it Number Two, after North Korea? Who knows, on any given day.) The Islamic Republic seems a despicable regime, but then, so is mine. This is the dilemma of western peaceniks. It's not as if our wars of this century amounted to a defense of the rule of law and humane values, for all the verbiage our rulers spew. The War on Terror has confused "the left" because there have been no "good guys" on some anti-imperial side to applaud. Can we make a consistent stand for peace without illusions? Hard, but needed.

All the more reason to listen sympathetically to others, like Shirin Ebadi, stuck in the same painful place, defending values that seem to have no home base.

Saturday scenery: San Francisco's glass and steel new downtown

City residents who don't often venture into the heart of the financial district/corporate playground downtown can find the current building boom quite astonishing.

It's a world of shiny glass and steel down there ...

As well as projected fantasies.

Will any of this hold up as well as this 1920s facade? I found myself wondering while Walking San Francisco.

Stirrings of freedom: somehow it's worse when a girl does it?

Last fall a sprinkling of professional athletes, following the example of Colin Kaepernick, started kneeling during the national anthem in protest of injustices visited on Black people. It was never a huge number, but something novel was happening.

The politics/sports nerds at FiveThirtyEight recently produced a podcast on these protests and professional athlete activism in general. One insight: where once coaches and teams could squelch such uppity behavior by threatening to cut short a performer's career, the top players in pro sports nowadays make so much money and are so valuable to teams, they can get away with far more political expression. And when a few stars step out, there is more room for others.

I hadn't realized that any women had taken up the kneeling protest, but here's Megan Rapinoe from the U.S. National Women's Soccer Team.

The U.S. Soccer Federation is fighting back. Here's Ken Reed from League of Fans on that decision.

U.S. Soccer Takes on Role of Third-World Dictator
In the wake of women’s national team member Megan Rapinoe’s decision to kneel during the national anthem last September in protest of injustices she was seeing in the United States, the U.S. Soccer Federation has issued a new rule REQUIRING all players to “stand respectfully” during the Star Spangled Banner.

If you took the “U.S.” part out, and inserted “Syria” or “North Korea” in front of “Soccer Federation” you would understandably think the new rule had been passed down from dictators Bashar al-Assad and Kim Jong-un.

What happened to the First Amendment, the thing that more than anything else separates us from Syria and North Korea? ...

You can read the rest at the link.

Rapinoe has said she'll stand this year, as has Kaepernick (if he catches on somewhere). But these aren't children; athletes are adults and they have growing support for expressing political opinions. FiveThirtyEight's Harry Enten reported that a majority of U.S. residents express support for athletes' right to make public political statements -- though a majority also don't approve of their doing it in the context of the anthem. Most likely, there will be more ...

Friday cat blogging

Morty checks out the world outside. He's a little ghostly.

San Francisco: Women turn out for women

On the way to the International Women's Day rally yesterday at Civic Center, I didn't know how large it would be. It had not been much publicized in the networks I'm part of.

I needn't have been concerned ... for an hour, women in red, bearing their signs, drifted across the plaza. The crowd eventually numbered over 1000, I think.

A native woman blessed the proceedings.

That's Conny Ford from the local Labor Council addressing the crowd over the completely inadequate sound system.

The best of our current batch of Supervisors, Sandra Fewer and Hillary Ronen, also took the podium.

But the best aspect of the rally, for me, was that I seemed to know more people at the mic than in the crowd. There's a new generation of activists aborning.

These ladies have got it!

War is a hard habit to kick

Erudite Partner has published another of her occasional think pieces via TomDispatch. This one explores what variant of all-war, all-the-time the world is likely to get from the Great Tangerine:

American Carnage: Fighting the Forever War
In his inaugural address, President Trump described a dark and dismal United States, a country overrun by criminal gangs and drugs, a nation stained with the blood seeping from bullet-ridden corpses left at scenes of “American carnage.” It was more than a little jarring.

Certainly, drug gangs and universally accessible semi-automatic weapons do not contribute to a better life for most people in this country. When I hear the words “American carnage,” however, the first thing I think of is not an endless string of murders taking place in those mysterious “inner cities” that exist only in the fevered mind of Donald Trump. The phrase instead evokes the non-imaginary deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in real cities and rural areas outside the United States. It evokes the conversion of millions of ordinary people into homeless refugees. It reminds me of the places where American wars seem never to end, where new conflicts seem to take up just as the old ones are in danger of petering out. These sites of carnage are the cities and towns, mountains and deserts of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, and other places that we don’t even find out about unless we go looking. They are the places where the United States fights its endless wars.

During the 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump often sounded like a pre-World War II-style America First isolationist, someone who thought the United States should avoid foreign military entanglements. Today, he seems more like a man with a uniform fetish. He’s referred to his latest efforts to round up undocumented immigrants in this country as “a military operation.” ...

Read it all at the link.

Can law survive permanent wartime?

Rosa Brooks is not a "delighter."

Delighter is the label I affix on George W. Bush, and even more on Dick Cheney and his minions. The 9/11 attacks served their purposes by offering an excuse to escape U.S. and international constraints on projection of lethal U.S. force wherever they saw or imagined enemies. And, conveniently, their Global War on Terror also freed the President and his executive branch from domestic democratic (small "d") expectations of judicial and legislative oversight, all in the name of "homeland security." The falling Twin Towers were a bonanza for politicians aspiring to increase presidential power to the detriment of legal limits.

President Obama seemed as if he might scale back some of the Bush-era power grab. But he didn't get there. Discovering a president had available military snipers who could kill Somali pirates with just three shots... in the dark, from the deck of a rolling ship must have been a rush. And understanding that he'd be blamed if some more competent terrorist than the underwear bomber succeeded on his watch, Obama retained much of the Bush-era global war abroad and furthered erosion of privacy and transparency at home.

Rosa Brooks is a Georgetown law professor, an expert on national security, international law and human rights issues. She served at the Pentagon working on these issues for a couple of years at the beginning of Obama administration. How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon recounts her evolution from skepticism about US imperial adventures, through approval of Bill Clinton's "humanitarian" bombing in the Balkans, to horror at Bush's unbounded permanent war. She wanted a role in inventing something different. This book is the record of her further developing understanding of security, the U.S. military, and what has survived as a "rule of law" framework after a decade and a half of the Forever War.

The attacks might have been defined as egregious acts of criminality -- mass murders, or massive crimes against humanity, for instance. The United States instead chose to define the 9/11 attacks and the U.S. response as an "armed conflict" ...

So who was "right"? Were the 9/11 attacks "crime," or "war," or something in between: Isolated attacks triggering a temporary U.S. right to use force in self-defense, but not a full-fledged armed conflict? ... If we think of law as being game-like, you could say that these positions posed entirely novel questions that the rules of the game simply didn't address. ... In the "real world" of law and war, new actors and new technologies present [new] challenges: sometimes the rules just don't offer a right and wrong answer.

This book is a serious attempt to bring together an informed humanitarian and legal description of where the U.S. had come to in 2016 in our military and imperial ambitions and how evolving international law might both constrain and justify those actions and postures. It is a very good book full of fact and humane intent. She wants us to get real: there's insight here into the implications of targeted killings in faraway lands, of the drone war, of cyberterrorism, and of the increasing primacy of the U.S. military in all aspects of the state.

It's an exploratory book. According to Brooks, we've come to exist in a "blurred" condition somewhere between a formerly relatively clearcut "wartime" and "peacetime". If we are to have rules at all, we will need to imagine new ones.

... we can create new rules and institutions for global decision making. We tend to forget this. Instead we defer to the lawyers [asking questions outrun by realities.] We should be asking a far more urgent question: What kind of world do we want to live in -- and how do we get from here to there?

These questions might have gotten a hearing in a Hillary Clinton administration -- maybe, if people of good will had applied constant pressure. Under the Trump regime, we face an administration whose notion of legitimate power seems to derive from the chest thumping displays of jungle apes. It's going to take everything we've got --and a lot of luck -- to impose any limits.

Nonetheless, though probably it's not immediately applicable, I still want to highly recommend Brooks' take on war and law. I'm not anywhere near as confident as she is that U.S. military supremacy can be a global force for good. And I written in the past about what good soldiers do when misused and abused.

But for all my distrust of some of Brooks observations, she is the sort of lapidary thinker who gives legal reasoning a good name. If we ever get the chance to put Humpty-Dumpty together again, we need this woman. She's another one who probably ought to run for office if we're serious about democracy.

"No institutional counterweight ..."

Jay Cost is a conservative political analyst who writes for the right wing Weekly Standard. He can be annoying (and is here.) Not my kind of guy. But I think his warning in this series of tweets points to realities that we, progressives who are chortling about Trump and his minions tying themselves in knots about their Russian connections, forget at our peril.

Democracy dies when the spooks are a law unto themselves. All the more reason to demand a thorough, legal, and bipartisan investigation. Sure, at present, the GOPers want to hang on to their chance to grab all the goodies. But this, too, is about the survival of our semi-democratic polity.

Tools for resistance: Daily Action

Erik Loomis worries:

I’ve been a little bit concerned in the last couple of weeks that things seem to be going back to normal for a lot of liberals, who are horrified but moving on with their lives.

I get that, though I'm perhaps not quite as worried as he is, because I am fortunate to live among groups who are both trying to find ways of leaping into resistance and of building toward the far better society we want to birth out of this ghastly regime.

If the Great Tangerine's antics have got you down, your best chance of feeling better is to do something. And we live amid technological aids that make doing something remarkably easy. Here's one option.

If you have a smart phone, sign up with Daily Action. Every day you'll get a text with a phone link that will fill you in on what the day's target is and give you short, simple prompts about a message. Targets are your Senators, your Congressperson, and sometimes other government officials. In most cases, after you enter your zip code, the message will also offer to put the call through for you.

I've been using Daily Action for about two weeks. Calling Congress is not natural behavior for me. Mostly I find the idea of politely asking the unfortunate staffers who have to take these calls pretty feeble stuff. Protests and loud eruptions are closer to my natural style. But I also believe we have to keep our political time-servers aware that we've got them in our sites. We're pissed, we're not going to take it, and we expect them to do the right thing.

Congressional staffers say phone calls do make their bosses take notice. No other form of contact (except turning up at representatives' offices) does more to get their attention. So on that level, this is effectual, so long as enough of us bother to keep it up.

And, so far, the folks putting out the Daily Action have been imaginative. The GOPer/Trump regime spews out outrages as fast as it can; we'll have no want of targets.

This kind of action isn't going to win any battles right now, but right now what resistance is doing is simply trying to throw as much grit as we can into the machine before it grinds up everything (and every one of us) that makes for what's good about the country.

Here's Loomis again:

The reality is that you never know what is going to lead the spark for massive change. Maybe none of this does. But maybe it does. And if you don’t keep trying to organize actions that empower yourself and your friends and family, the spark never happens.

***In preparing to write this, I did a low-key search for other systems that send prompts for phone calls to influence the powerful. I didn't find any. They must exist. If anyone reading this has suggestions/experience with some other system, please leave a note in comments. I'm not particularly endorsing one system, just passing along that I've found this one something that I will do.

Resistance on the march

Yesterday marchers again crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama recalling that bloody episode in the long struggle for democratic rights for all of 52 years ago. Watch the video and listen up, if you've forgotten or never knew what that struggle for Black freedom from Jim Crow looked like. Even history some of us remember can come to feel awfully remote.

On this anniversary, the Rev. William Barber described the struggle today:

... America is reeling from the political extremism unleashed by the first election in half a century without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. In the midst of our present crisis, the blood of Selma's martyr's cries out as clearly as in 1965: America cannot suppress the vote of any one group without hurting everyone in this democracy.

... After the end of Reconstruction in 1877, unfounded accusations of voter fraud became the basis for literacy tests, poll taxes, and other voter suppression tactics. Though challenged in the courts under the 15th amendment, Jim Crow voting laws were upheld for decades because they did not deny the franchise based on an individual's race. But after Selma, the Voting Rights Act recognized that their intent and effect was the suppression of African-American votes and the destruction of the progressive coalitions that black political power made possible.

We cannot make sense of President Trump's unsubstantiated claim of 3 to 5 million illegal votes in last year's election apart from this history. "Voter fraud," though proven to be statistically irrelevant in modern elections, has been the primary justification for voter suppression bills in 22 states since the Supreme Court stripped the Voting Rights Act of its power in their 2013 Shelby decision. ...

... Even more sinister than they lie of voter fraud is the lie that voter suppression only hurts black people. The policies of progressive coalitions that include African-Americans, Latinos, LGBTQ, poor and working people today are now, as during Reconstruction, policies that lift up the good of the whole. ... Diverse coalitions of people who are willing to put their bodies on the line to expose extremism offer the greatest hope of reviving the heart of our democracy.

How appropriate that also yesterday, Bernie Sanders and Danny Glover headlined a march in Canton, Mississippi in support of Nissan auto workers struggling for union rights.

With a white nationalist demagogue in power and his Neo-Confederate Attorney General doing his worst, the song's lyrics still carry the message we can be sure rings true:

Marching the freedom highway
March each and every day
Marching the freedom highway
March each and every day
‎
Made up my mind, and I won't turn around
Made up my mind, and I won't turn around
‎
Keep on marching on freedom's highway

Arkansas atrocity

It's hard not to feel that the coarsening climate -- the foul fog of aggression mixed with panic in which the belchings of the current administration immerse us daily -- has something to do with this planned atrocity. The governor of Arkansas has scheduled executions for these eight men, convicted murderers all, over a ten day period in April, at the rate of two a day.

Governor Hutchinson explains the rushed pace is needed because the state's supply of one of the drugs it uses to kill is about to pass expiration. Authorities may not be able to acquire more. Drug companies are stopping making products used for state killings; I guess they don't want their brand to carry that burden.

Lawyers for the men have appealed. If appeal fails and Arkansas carries out Hutchinson's plan, it is hard to imagine that such an orgy of mass slaughter will "bring closure" to the families of victims or leave Arkansas prison staff unmarked. Enough killing has already happened.

Saturday scenery: Great Blue Heron

She stalks the marshes along San Francisco Bay.

Human constraints on engineering solutions

If like me, you live in earthquake country -- or unlike me in "tornado alley" or on an historic hurricane track -- you might find Robert Muir-Wood's The Cure for Catastrophe: How We Can Stop Manufacturing Natural Disasters interesting reading. This is a survey, rich with stories and anecdotes, of how natural forces -- tectonic plates, storms, rising seas -- interact with what he calls "disaster culture." The latter is the accumulated knowledge that human societies preserve and can nurture, if they so choose, of what actions help survival in infrequently experienced extreme circumstances. Inherited culture teaches people how to take care of themselves, for example by evacuating at the first hint of an oncoming storm or running for high ground before a tsunami hits. Modern engineering can improve human and social outcomes in natural disasters, but without continuing care for culture, building codes will be evaded and memories of how to survive will be lost. Muir-Wood is calling on scientists and governments dealing with catastrophes to take a much broader view of their task.

I particularly appreciated his account of reactions to San Francisco's 1906 earthquake. These days we commemorate that shaker with some civic enthusiasm. But not then.

In those days, Japanese scientists were, of necessity, leading the world in inventing modern seismology, the study of earthquakes. Hearing of the 1906 trembler, the most ambitious exponent of the new discipline, Fusakichi Omori, set sail for California.

On arrival in California on May 18, Omori was astonished to discover that while there were leading science and engineering universities around the San Francisco Bay, there were no earthquake researchers. California was an increasingly sophisticated society, and fast losing its frontier and gold rush mentality, but it retained a deeply held prejudice that engaging in earthquake research would imply there was a tangible "earthquake problem."

... On July 11, inspired by Omori, a conference was held in Berkeley "for all those interested in seismological equipment on the Pacific coast." ... He brought with him a gift for the University of California at Berkeley -- one of his own design seismic recorders. The equipment was gratefully received, as the university had no hope of obtaining a recorder through state funding. ...

However fieldwork in California proved a challenge for a dapper Japanese gentleman: Omori was stoned by a gang of children on Mission Street in San Francisco and assaulted for being a suspected strikebreaker in Eureka.

... the 1906 earthquake had only served to intensify and popularize the culture of "earthquake denialism," led by the "boosters" intent on suppressing any earthquake research or publicity that might threaten Californian prosperity or discourage immigrants from relocating to the state.

Within a week of the April 19 earthquake, the San Francisco Real Estate Board passed a resolution to rebrand the "San Francisco Earthquake" as the "San Francisco Fire." ... No memorial was erected to commemorate those who died ... Even a century later, in 2003, when an attempt was make to erect a brown commemorative historical sign at Daly City, the closest land location to the epicenter (and a community founded by refugees from the disaster), the initiative was twice rebuffed by the mayor, who explained: "We don't need a blemish on Daly City's shine."

At length, the study of seismology did take root in California, but only after decades of neglect and protest.

It's interesting to consider this history in the context of climate change denialism today. We humans just don't want to face the disruptive consequences of natural processes smashing up against and into populations. These days, it is possible to imagine that planning and engineering could much reduce the impacts of natural catastrophes on people; we know how to build in resilience that would mitigate the effects of storms and earthquakes. Societies that are rich enough even do a good deal of this. But, in general, we are not good at remembering and holding onto consciousness of threats that are sporadic and infrequent.

Experience suggests it is going to take frequent, fearsome consequences of global warming before we realize that mitigation and built resilience are essential. And that means things will get a lot worse before there's much chance of their getting better.

Friday cat blogging

What are you?

Do you scratch cats? I did. How could I resist?

Encountered while Walking San Francisco.

Signs of Democratic life

I didn't watch or listen to Trump's big speech on Tuesday. I don't understand why anyone should: he just makes stuff up and lies. Attend to what he does? Sure. And if it is as evil as it appears to be, get in the way. But I don't rot my brain by listening to him.

But it appears I did miss something. In addition to the Democratic response by the former Kentucky governor, over on Telemundo and Univision, Astrid Silva was giving the Democratic Spanish language response and it's a doozy.

Even if you don't speak Spanish, watch this young Nevada DREAMer for a bit. She's awesome.
I wonder if they'll try to deport her? I'm sure our thuggish border cops and President Bannon would just love to. If she ever is allowed to become a citizen, let's run her for office!

Here's some of what she said, for the linguistically challenged (like me).

... During his first weeks as President, Trump signed executive orders that endanger our entire community. He took actions that focus specifically on hurting immigrants and refugees. He is spending resources on targeting working immigrant families for deportation, he wants to spend billions of dollars to build an unnecessary border wall, and he’s looking for ways to deny entry to our Muslim brothers and sisters.

He made it very clear during his presidential campaign that he wanted his supporters to believe that all immigrants are criminals and refugees are terrorists. And recently, he directed immigration enforcement agents to arrest and deport any undocumented person they find, essentially legalizing racial profiling and setting in motion his mass deportation plan. Among the people that ICE arrested, are mothers, fathers, DREAMers with DACA, a victim of domestic violence, and many more.

... Instead of closing the door on Muslims and insulting countries around the world, President Trump should work with our allies to combat and defeat ISIS and other terrorist, and seek peace. Instead of standing behind oil companies and special interests, undoing the progress we’ve made to combat climate change, President Trump should be a leader and protect the quality of our air and our water. Because we only have one planet, and if we destroy it, what are we going to leave for our children?

Latinos suffer more from asthma than other groups. The state of our environment is key to our wellbeing. Instead of getting rid of the ACA, which gave health insurance to millions of Latinos, Trump and Republicans should make improvements to the program so it can cover more people and cost less.

Republicans want to defund Planned Parenthood, even though community clinics provide preventive and primary medical care for hundreds of thousands of people.

...We are living in uncertain times that are completely abnormal. In which the administration constantly questions the media and tries to actively destroy their credibility.

We can’t let these actions become normalized.

H/t to Dara Lind for flagging this for those of us who don't watch Spanish-language TV.

Ash Wednesday in the Mission

Congregations that have declared their intent to provide sanctuary to particular undocumented immigrants and refugees who might be seized by Donald Trump's ICE force gathered to walk through the streets on this Christian day of remembrance of our human failings and fragility. St. Agnes (Catholic), St. John of God (Catholic), and St. John the Evangelist (Episcopal) have taken active steps to serve in this manner.

After processing through the neighborhood, a growing crowd halted before the doors of St. John's to ring bells and sing our determination to resist assaults on our neighborhoods.


This felt a potent way to mark the beginning of Lent. One wise speaker countered our knowledge of our inadequacy: "we each do what we can ... this is what God calls us to ..."

Subversive suggestions

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

For President Obama, the Bible (the Old Testament, not the New). For President Trump, the Bible (the New Testament, not the Old).

President Obama has a great degree of the compassion recommended in the New Testament, but many of us who admire him wish he would sometimes, like the Old Testament God, figuratively hurl fire and brimstone at his domestic political opponents (I recognize that the drone strikes he has authorized are a literal kind of fire and brimstone, but at least he’s not playing with the idea of pre-emptive nuclear attacks).

President Trump has no problem with loving his followers and smiting his enemies, but he needs to learn humility, generosity and self-sacrifice from the New Testament Jesus, who washed the feet of the poor, fed the hungry, respected women and rejected the corruption of the establishment.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

This Pulitzer Prize winning, Vietnamese refugee, oh-so-contemporary denizen of the conflicted USA, seems to me to exemplify what so frightens Steve Bannon and our other anti-cosmopolitans. This is a man who sees all sides and still holds on to values that can mean life and death. Lots for me to learn here. I plan to write soon about Nguyen's non-fiction essays, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War.