For leaders of losing campaigns: on doing the right thing

What are the ethical obligations on the leadership of a political campaign to level with fervent supporters when/if they become certain the campaign is going to lose? Those supporters are the life blood of the entire enterprise. We're not only talking donors here; we're also talking about activists who give their time, their energy and their love to meaningful campaigns. These are gifts that are not to be scorned.

Yet sometimes the leaders who organize and promote all this energy have good objective knowledge that they cannot prevail. What do they owe their people?

I have had far too much experience of this situation. Here's one of my bottom lines: You are never obligated to say straight up to the media that you know you can't win. They'll want you to. I've had a microphone pushed in my face on election eve, essentially asking me to provide upbeat sentiments in a losing cause and I've complied. I'm not obligated to help the journalists get their story, though you should not outright lie to them.

On the other hand, you do owe it to your core supporters to prepare them for the blow. If the campaign was worth doing, the candidate worth electing, the measure worth passing or defeating, their commitment is the most valuable product of the campaign.

Your approach to this obligation may differ, depending on what your objective was from the beginning.

Sometimes you've known throughout that you were playing defense. For example, in the 1990s, California voted repeatedly on ballot measures which aimed in various ways to stem the changing demographic tide that was rapidly making us a "majority minority" state: restrictions on services to immigrants, ending affirmative action, preventing bilingual education, mass youth incarceration. Many white voters couldn't get enough of these measures and they were the people voting. Until more of the emerging majority of people of color and younger whites came into the electorate, these were going to pass. And they did. In those fights, responsible leadership mobilized communities to fight back at the ballot box in addition to expressing moral outrage. Campaigners knew they wouldn't win -- but they could learn to fight in this arena as well as in the communities and thereby help turn the tide. These campaigns were no time for pretending to ungrounded hopes; instead what mattered was to cultivate real hopes for real change over time.

Many campaigns are a closer ethical call for their leadership than this kind. Suppose you are working for a candidate or a measure that began the electoral season trying to make a point, but not expecting to win outright. But then the campaign went well, enthusiasm mounted, volunteers seemed to come out of the woodwork, it all proceeded so smoothly ... maybe you could win after all? If you are paying attention to your fundamentals -- the political context, maybe polls, the other side's assets -- your analytical brain tells you the miracle is not going to happen. But you are surrounded by eager hopeful people who begin to think victory is in sight. I've experienced this with candidates who've put their hearts on the line in a losing cause. The only ethical statement I've found to make to my own people at that point is to reiterate that, if everything were to break just perfectly, we might sneak through to a victory. But that is going to take everyone doing their part in a disciplined way and working for the best outcome possible. At the very least, let's not leave anything in the tank. This way, when you fail as you know you must, your people can at least be proud they did their all in the most effective fashion possible. You owe them this experience of efficacy.

The worst situation is when you chose the fight thinking you were going to win, then find yourself caught in an electoral battle in which your best understanding of the data tells you that you will lose. This happens to candidates and sometimes the affirmative side of ballot measures too often. It's a brutal situation. Ethical action requires going back to basics: your campaign's most important asset is your supporters. Lead them through the process, but never, never, never neglect to affirm and thank them for the gift of their hearts. They aren't getting paid; you are. You may want to engage in recriminations born of dashed hopes, but that is a luxury responsible leaders do not wallow in.

Nobody does this stuff perfectly. But good leaders can try. And, besides, sometimes your campaign wins and then you probably know that's coming also!

Mountain hazards

There's a much viewed video floating around the net that you may have seen -- a man being blown about by 175 kilometer per hour (109 mph) winds at the summit of New Hampshire's 6,288 foot high Mt. Washington on May 16. If you've missed it, here it is.
Outside magazine seized on the occasion of its popularity to publish a hardy perennial story about the number of people this little mountain kills regularly.

Why does such a small mountain kill so many people? One reason is obviously the extreme weather. “Mount Washington sits at the intersection of several major stormtracks,” explains Weather Observer Tom Padham. He's stationed at the mountain’s summit, and gave us a tour of his weather station. The jet stream carries nearly every storm moving west-to-east, and southwest-to-northeast across the country, right over Mount Washington. There, they intersect with weather systems moving south-to-north, up the Atlantic coast. ...

... During the summer, when risk of avalanches and icefalls abates, danger to hikers persist. The trails themselves—including the popular Tuckerman Ravine Trail—are strewn with loose, basketball-size rocks. Practically the entire trail is one big tripping hazard, just waiting to twist an ankle, and, if that happens, you won’t be able to walk off the trail under your own power. ...

Close enough to the northeast urban conurbation that a summit can be had in a day trip from Boston, or an overnight from New York, the mountain offers some of the best, and most easily-accessible hiking and skiing in the region. 250,000 people are said to visit each year. Doing that is as easy as pulling into the parking lot, and hitting the trailhead. There’s warning signs, there’s stories, and there’s even guides you can hire, but most people are content just to head out for a walk, and see what happens; ignorant of the weather, the terrain, and the dangers. It’s tempting to say that the government should step in, and require permits, or better patrol the trails, but it’s also easy to conclude that if someone is going to set out on a mountain notorious for its death-rate and extreme weather in flip flops, that they’d find a way to die elsewhere if this hike wasn’t available. 

My mother enjoyed telling the story of how she was almost the victim of this attitude. As a young girl, she spent several happy summers at a girls camp in Vermont where she learned the pleasures and rigors of camping and hiking in New England. But her parents decided that her summers ought to be more purposeful: one year she was packed off to a coastal camp where the girls were supposed to practice their French speaking skills. The counselors were inexperienced young women from Europe having a summer adventure in the wilds of America. "They had no idea how to run a camp!" recalled Mother.

These counselors took it into their heads to lead their charges to climb Mt. Washington. As Mother recalled the adventure: "They had no maps. The fog came in, we couldn't find the trail. Soon we were just wandering around, wet and miserable in the dark." Mother and her mates made the group sit down, cover up as best they could with the few garments they'd brought along, and not wander through a long, cold night. Finally in the morning the party was able to stumble down the mountain, cold but not harmed.

The incident was enough to keep her parents from sending her back to this "improving" camp. She never forgot to respect mountains afterward. Her French speaking never amounted to much either.

Here's a photo of the young women of mother's group at Camp Beau Rivage in the summer of 1920. She's in the center of the back row.

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.