One year ago today ...

You too can work against crazy gun violence. Learn how here. This is a very powerful video.

You can also look in on events created by Beyond Tucson as the community strives to heal in the wake of the shootings of their Congresswoman and her constituents.

Saturday scenes and scenery: you never know what you'll see on the street

There it is, parked as if it were the most normal sight in the world.


But where do you stand to launch the ball?


I must capture this moment ...

Beyond spacious skies …

I'm always loved knowing that one of the country's iconic patriotic songs, "America the Beautiful," was written by a 19th century lesbian and feminist, Katharine Lee Bates.

Now Paul Krugman passes on that there is a forgotten third verse that denounced the Robber Barons of Bate's day.

America! America!

God shed his grace on thee

Till selfish gain no longer stain

The banner of the free!

Take that Mitt Romney -- apparently the mergers and acquisitions candidate is fond of the song.

Maybe some of the Occupiers should try singing that at many contemporary pols when they go all patriotic on us.

Photo is of the view from the summit of Bunsen Peak in Yellowstone National Park, looking northeast toward the Absarokas mountain range.

Friday critter blogging

No tempest here, just lovely tea at lunch with colleagues yesterday. Busy today ... perhaps more later.

L A is a great big freeway ...

But at 9:30 am today, an accident had blocked the north bound lanes of the 5 and slowed the south bound lanes to a crawl.


The result was novel emptiness.

Republican clown show

This is a political blog. Therefore I'm supposed to have an opinion about the Republican clown show just concluded in Iowa. Here's all I can manage: the clown show must eventually end in the nomination of Mitt Romney, even though no one but Mitt Romney really wants Mitt Romney. Its hard to even muster a serious opinion about people and a process so utterly without responsible content.

On the horse race level, Romney's "victory" with no more votes than he recieved in 2008 which seems properly considered a humiliation. I mean, the guy has been running for President for over 4 years and he can't do any better?

But dammit, I'm not interested in the horserace; I'm interested in the future of my country and the world. And these people are clowns at their best. At their worst, they are self-seeking liars, bigots, and proud ignoramuses. Among the Republicans, the only semi-plausible candidate is a

dishonest flip-flopper who only discovered his right-wing beliefs when pollsters told him it would advance his ambitions.

Steve Benen

This is what a political party becomes when it collects all the people who hate government (and sometimes others and even each other.) No wonder the nitwits who seek to lead it into battle don't seem remotely plausible candidates to lead the nation.

Warming Wednesdays: are we (am I) ready for the electric car?

It's not a gas pump. It may soon become ubiquitous. You can find the nearest one here.


San Francisco has quite a few; I think their installation may have been assisted by Federal stimulus money.


When I noticed this one, a city owned car was hooked up to it.

People who know about this kind of thing maintain that electric cars really are less polluting and that wide adoption would push less carbon into the atmosphere. I have to wonder about that last, given our dependence on burning coal for electricity production, but I'll take it on faith. Here are Jay Tankersley and Ben Holland from the Rocky Mountain Institute:

If widely adopted, electric vehicles could improve air quality, reduce dependence on oil, and spur domestic economic development. …

… traditional hybrid cars account for only about 2.0 percent of 2011 sales in the U.S. through October. For electric vehicles to have their full impact, the adoption of this technology must leapfrog that figure.

“History tells us it took hybrid sales over six years to reach a mass market tipping point,” says Mark Perry, director of product planning for Nissan Americas. “We see customer demand reach the same level for electric vehicles in half the time.”

The advantage of an electric vehicle over another alternatively fueled vehicle, such as a hydrogen fuel cell or natural gas vehicle, is that the infrastructure necessary to power them is largely available. Drivers can plug their cars into their home, or in a charging station at their apartment complex, and leave for work with a fully “fueled” vehicle every morning. And for most trips, publicly available charging stations will not be vital.

So maybe it's not whether we have enough charging stations that will determine whether we move to electric cars.

These authors name other obstacles:

Although the vast majority of U.S. drivers travel less than 40 miles a day (a statistic mirrored by recent Nissan Leaf driver data), many car buyers want the option to drive across the country. 

I had to cringe when I read that. That's exactly how I feel: access to a roadtrip-suitable car is a fantasy of freedom for me. When I was young, I drove back and forth across the country, soaking in its wonders and pain. The idea that I might be confined to 40 miles between plugs feels like forced confinement. But what if that attitude is unsustainably anti-social? Or can industrial designers find compromises that satisfy both individual freedom and the unquestionable need for less polluting, less congesting transportation, especially in cities? Or does my "see the USA" generation simply need to die off?

Despite every other legitimate concern, we cannot ignore that our economic and social system is rapidly making the planet less habitable. So I will be posting "Warming Wednesdays" -- unpleasant reminders of an inconvenient truth.

On the powers of government

Here's a story usually published in some form at the beginning of each year:

Eight states will ring in the New Year with a higher minimum wage, under state laws that require wage floors to keep apace with inflation. San Francisco, one of the few cities that sets its own minimum wage above the federal level, is also raising wages for the lowest-paid workers in the new year. It will become the first big city in the country to require companies to pay their workers more than $10 an hour.

That sign in the picture above is now obsolete.

I imagine most people reading this blog don't think much about minimum wages. I remain grateful that the Feds, states and cities try to set a floor. There needs to be some generally recognized level below which workers' compensation can be named as exploitative and just plain wrong. Perhaps surprisingly, I've observed that, however difficult efforts to raise minimum wages are in legislative settings, they pass pretty easily once put on the ballot. I suspect that the class of persons who vote can't imagine living on the pittance that is the "minimum" -- and few of them own restaurants or run employment services for home health aides trying to pay as little as possible.

In a year in which we are facing a Supreme Court decision on whether the Federal government can create a mandatory system of (semi-) universal health care provision, it might be instructive to look back at how minimum wages came to be. I'm drawing here on Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, a volume I recently wrote about here.

During the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the question of whether governments, state and federal, could mandate minimum wages repeatedly reached the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court repeatedly ruled a resounding "no" -- neither level of government was to be allowed the legal authority to tell business owners what to pay their workers. These decisions were emblematic of the great conflict of the era: could government use its powers to try to create a stable and sustainable economy or was it barred from meddling with property? FDR responded to these decisions with what he called a plan for "court reform" -- he would add judges to the Supreme Court, presumably judges who would approve the New Deal's economic agenda. Opponents won the war of political spin -- the plan is remembered as "court-packing" and was repudiated even by Roosevelt's friends. But then something surprising happened. David M. Kennedy's volume takes up the story:

Congress, including large elements of the president's own party, was by now in open rebellion against the Court-reform plan. The Court itself delivered the killing blows, though in laying Roosevelt's plan to rest it also opened a new constitutional era. On Easter Monday, March 29, the Court handed down an opinion in a case that at once tolled the knell for Roosevelt's proposal, even as it heralded the dawn of a judicial revolution. Like many great cases, this one had its origins in the commonest grit of everyday life. Elsie Parrish was a chambermaid who had swept rugs and cleaned toilets for nearly two years in the Cascadian Hotel in Wenatchee, Washington, a dusty farm town on the Columbia River plateau. Upon her discharge in 1935, she asked for $216.19 in back pay, which she was owed under the terms of a Washington State minimum wage aw enacted in 1913. West Coast Hotel Corporation, the Cascadian's parent company, offered to settle for seventeen dollars. Elsie Parrish sued for the full amount. The corporation thereupon challenged the constitutionality of the Washington law.

Chief Justice Hughes himself delivered the majority opinion in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish. The Court had decided in favor of Elsie Parrish, Hughes declared, speaking with Olympian authority in language that signaled a new willingness to defer to legislatures on economic matters. Slowly, the significance of Hughes's pronouncement sank in. Astonishingly, the justices had voted by a five-to-four majority to uphold the Washington State minimum wage law -- a statute effectively identical to the New York law that the same Court had invalidated by the same margin in Tipaldo only a year earlier!

The decision in Parrish amounted to "the greatest constitutional somersault in history," declared one commentator. "On Easter Sunday," said another, "state minimum wage laws were unconstitutional, but about noon on Easter Monday, these laws were constitutional." …Parrish dealt with a state law, not a federal one, but it proved a fateful harbinger. …The Wagner Act's [labor relations act] constitutionality depended on a broad construction of the commerce power, which the Court had been unwilling to recognize in its Schechter and Guffey Coal Act decisions. Now Hughes ignored those precedents, enunciated just months earlier by the same Court, and ruled that the Wagner Act fell within a constitutionally legitimate definition of the commerce power. …Just six weeks later, the same majority … voted to uphold the unemployment insurance features of the Social Security Act, and the even more comfortable majority of seven to two sustained the act's old-age pension provisions.

Roosevelt didn't have to pack the Court; the justices changed their minds. I find it improbable that our contemporary, oh-so-political, Supreme Court will put aside anti-government shibboleths in order to understand the Constitution is a way that allows government intervention in health care. But I could be wrong. Linda Greenhouse who knows more about the Supreme Court than most anyone after covering it for the New York Times for decades, dares predict that the justices will not narrow the government's powers in order to strike out against Obamacare. We'll see, won't we?

UPDATE: Here's this year's San Francisco Minimum Wage announcement:

How about those 49ers?

Muralists pose in front of their new creation at 23rd Street and Mission.

I often tell people that San Francisco progressives survived the Reagan-Bush I era by cheering for the 49ers. Perhaps we can recapture some of that meaningless delight watching our gladiators in this decade.

Besides the '9ers' playoff berth, we can also celebrate that the Dallas Cowboys no longer can claim to be "America's team." These days, more of us choose the publicly owned Green Bay Packers over Jerry Jones' prize 'Boys.

One last day of college football …

Oh, I know, "BCS bowls" and a hypothetical "national championship" drag on for another week -- but I'm a traditionalist. New Years Day marks the end of the college season, whatever the TV networks and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) may be selling.

Before I go couch-potato myself in front of super-sized young men beating each other up gracefully, I wanted to share some of the many links I've collected this year about the "sport." (And no, none of them are about pedophilia hiding in the showers of prestigious institutions -- that's a "sick men meet self-satisfied institutions" problem, not a football problem.)

Historian Taylor Branch started the season off truthfully with "The Shame of College Sports" in The Atlantic. His charges against the system are explosive:

... after an inquiry that took me into locker rooms and ivory towers across the country, I have come to believe that sentiment blinds us to what’s before our eyes. Big-time college sports are fully commercialized. Billions of dollars flow through them each year. The NCAA makes money, and enables universities and corporations to make money, from the unpaid labor of young athletes.

Slavery analogies should be used carefully. College athletes are not slaves. Yet to survey the scene—corporations and universities enriching themselves on the backs of uncompensated young men, whose status as “student-athletes” deprives them of the right to due process guaranteed by the Constitution—is to catch an unmistakable whiff of the plantation. Perhaps a more apt metaphor is colonialism: college sports, as overseen by the NCAA, is a system imposed by well-meaning paternalists and rationalized with hoary sentiments about caring for the well-being of the colonized. But it is, nonetheless, unjust. The NCAA, in its zealous defense of bogus principles, sometimes destroys the dreams of innocent young athletes.

The NCAA today is in many ways a classic cartel. Efforts to reform it—most notably by the three Knight Commissions over the course of 20 years—have, while making changes around the edges, been largely fruitless. The time has come for a major overhaul. And whether the powers that be like it or not, big changes are coming. Threats loom on multiple fronts: in Congress, the courts, breakaway athletic conferences, student rebellion, and public disgust. Swaddled in gauzy clichés, the NCAA presides over a vast, teetering glory.

My emphasis. Read it all.

And yes, the system has a racial component that is obvious on every TV screen. Watching the other day, a friend commented "there are a lot more old white guy coaches in the colleges than in the pros, right?" I don't have the figures, but it sure looks that way. Professional teams have to at least interview Black coaches and sometimes hire them; colleges look to be led most often by professional "good old boys."

At the end of the season, in the New York Times, business columnist Joe Nocera tried to envision how college football could be organized more equitably.

There are five elements to my plan. The first is a modified free-market approach to recruiting college players. Instead of sweet-talking recruits, college coaches will instead offer athletes real contracts, just as professional teams do. …

The second element is a salary cap for every team, along with a minimum annual salary for every scholarship athlete. The salary caps I have in mind are pretty low, all things considered: $3 million for the salaries for the football team. …

Every player who stays in school for four years would also get an additional two-year scholarship, which he could use either to complete his bachelor’s or get a master’s degree. That’s the third element. …

The fourth: Each player would have lifetime health insurance.

And the fifth: An organization would be created to represent both current and former college athletes. It may well turn out to be that this body takes on the form of a players’ union, since a salary cap is illegal under antitrust law unless it is part of a collective-bargaining agreement.

That's right: college football players need an institutional voice of their own as well as (probably) legislation that limits the exploitation that institutions of "higher learning" may engage in.

I consider myself knowledgeable about the game and its structures, but until this year I'd suppressed consciousness of the central fact college athletes' lives: "scholarships" are granted in one-year increments. A dissatisfied coach can throw a kid out of college at any time, if, in the coach's opinion, he slacks off on training, or doesn't develop as expected, or even gets too absorbed in scholastics. Athletic scholarships are given to win prestige and money for the institutions, not to help athletes prepare for life. The system is more than a little disgusting.***Yet like so many, I love to watch college football. The athletes are capable of such amazing and graceful feats of controlled savagery; in the best games, they appear to care so much about winning and losing. It's grand spectacle. But pay the athletes!

Occupy the new year

As we walked dark streets from the train station toward our friends' New Years gathering, there was this:Seeing it, I was reminded of this:

TERRY GROSS: I wonder what your reaction is to seeing the Occupy movement in the United States take hold, inspired in part by the Arab uprisings.

[NEW YORK TIMES CORRESPONDENT] ANTHONY SHADID [on a brief U.S. holiday from his base in Lebanon]: I tell you, this - again, this is something I haven't reported so I'm probably not going to sound - I'm probably not going to offer anything all that insightful, but you know, it does strike me - I think when you look across the Arab world, absolutely, but even elsewhere, this idea of old kind of paradigms coming to an end and that people are searching for something that can represent them better, that's more meaningful to their lives, that somehow maybe transcends these older institutions that have held sway over so many places for so long - interestingly, I mean just as a kind of footnote here, or even, you know, a side note here, is that you often hear this from Islamists. When I was talking to Rashid al-Ghannushi, a very prominent Tunisian Islamist leader, he made the very same point to me, that what he was seeing going on with Occupy Wall Street, with the Arab Spring, was that, you know, people were looking for ideologies that were different.

Of course he was volunteering his ideology as a replacement, but I think that sense of things coming to an end is very powerfully felt in a lot of places right now. And I think that adds to this, you know, the anticipation and anxiety, you know, of what's so often pronounced and what you hear so often in so many places.

Something, many things, aren't working. We want something new. Directions are not yet discernible. After a long patch when institutions seemed immutable -- a season when we tried to manipulate institutions or tinker with their margins -- we want something new. But what that new something will look like, we'll only find out in the living of its birth.

2012 could be an exciting year. Despite the vast inertia of all that is, the year is not likely to bring only what we now imagine.

New year arrives

Goodbye 2011 and good riddance; hello 2012, what's next?



One down, mostly. One to go, dismally slowly. Future wars to avoid and avert; part of our human condition.

This is what a political opening seized looks like: New Deal history

At this time of year, I'm always tempted to announce the book I've enjoyed, or admired, or learned most from over the past year. Some years, I resist this silly temptation, but today I won't. My "Best Book" for 2011 was Stanford historian David M. Kennedy's Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945.

Thinking about possible choices, I was a little surprised to realize that several grand historical surveys had made the greatest impression on me. This is not how history is supposed to be written by "serious" historians; most academic history digs into a niche in past time, striving for accurate description of details we can never fully know, often getting lost in minutia. Grand sweeping tomes seem excessively ambitious, a dangerously pretentious over-reach. One of the attractions of Kennedy's book is that he dared to chronicle such a long and episodically diverging period and got away with it. At the very least, it would have been possible to envision quite separate volumes about domestic concerns from 1929-39 and the World War II years that followed. But he makes them feel a single epoch, just as they were lived. I was often awed by how gracefully he wove in all the themes that a contemporary historian wants to be sure to include -- women's experience, the implications on events of the country's historic racism, the tiny gay minority who occasionally stuck their heads up in this period. This is not easy as the records were created and left by others. ***Over time I'll pull other tidbits from Kennedy's opus to try to get perspective on our own times, but right now I want to share the most significant insight I took away from this volume: Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal program was not only an effort to restore employment to pre-Depression levels; he was out to change and stabilize the country's economic and political realities much more broadly. Here's Kennedy explaining:

Why did [Roosevelt] reject Roy Howard's [a newspaper chain owner] counsel that "there can be no real recovery until the fears of business have been allayed" and instead insist on gratuitously provoking business and thickening its anxiety? Those questions elude easy answers if… one assumes that economic recovery was Roosevelt's highest priority. But if one recognizes that lasting social reform and durable political realignment were at least equally important items on Roosevelt's agenda, then some of the mystery lifts.

I report that and think -- well, isn't that obvious? No it is not. Neither Barack Obama nor his critics seem to be responding to the Lesser Depression with this level of ambition. The 2009 stimulus and subsequent muddled economic pump-priming are aimed at restoring the status quo from before the bubble of the 00s, not rebuilding something stronger, fairer and better. Pressures -- the 99 percent movement and acknowledgment of rising inequality -- are mounting, but there's no sign that elites yet feel they have no choice but to encourage a new plateau of stability.

It's worth following Kennedy's description of how Roosevelt moved from plugging holes as banks collapsed in the first days of his administration to pushing through a program for long term economic stability. A significant feature was something we're not even considering these day: there was a great mass of people for whom the Depression was nothing new, just as the Lesser Depression is today, though since Bill Clinton we've learned not to even mention the perennially poor. Eleanor Roosevelt's reporter friend was sent out to chronicle life in the country outside the bright lights of the big cities -- Washington could do with some of that today.

As Lorena Hickok's travels progressed, she gradually came to acknowledge the sobering reality that for many Americans the Great Depression brought times only a little harder than usual. … The "old poor" were among the Depression's most ravaged victims, but it was not the Depression that had impoverished them. They were the "one-third of a nation" that Franklin Roosevelt would describe in 1937 as chronically "ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." By suddenly threatening to push millions of other Americans into their wretched condition, the Depression pried open a narrow window of political opportunity to do something at last on behalf of that long-suffering one third, and in the process to redefine the very character of America.

It took elites awhile, as it has since the financial panic of 2009, to understand that this wasn't just a temporary economic hiccup.

[The President's advisor Harry] Hopkins himself was soon speaking of workers who had passed into "an occupational oblivion from which they will never be rescued by private industry. . . . Until the time comes, if it ever comes," he argued, "when industry and business can absorb all able-bodied workers -- and that time seems to grow more distant with improvements in management and technology -- we shall have with us large numbers of the unemployed. Intelligent people have long since left behind them," Hopkins continued, "the notion that. . . the unemployed will disappear as dramatically as they made their appearance after 1929. . . . For them a security program is the only answer."

In response to gathering pressure from the left (LaFollete, Sinclair Lewis, unions and Communists) and the right (Father Coughlin and Huey Long) Roosevelt pushed through what we think of as the New Deal in the second two years of his first term.

The unifying design of that program took different forms in different sectors of the nation's life, but the overall pattern of the Second New Deal taking shape in 1935 was becoming clear. In the social realm, the dominant motif was security; in the economic realm, regulation (which was security by another name); and in the physical realm, planned development. In all those domains the common objective was stability. No other aspiration more deeply informed the Second New Deal, and no other achievement better represented the New Deal's lasting legacy. Roosevelt now sought not simply recovery, nor merely relief, nor even the perpetual economic growth that would constitute a later generation's social and political holy grail. Roosevelt sought instead a new framework for American life, something "totally other" than what had gone before…, something that would permit the steadying hand of "that organized control we call government" to sustain balance and equity and orderliness throughout American society. Roosevelt's dream was the old progressive dream of wringing order out of chaos, seeking mastery rather than accepting drift, imparting to ordinary Americans at least some measure of the kind of predictability to their lives that was the birthright of the Roosevelts and the class of patrician squires to which they belonged. …It was a dream now brought within reach of realization by that same Depression and by the sense of possibility and the political fluidity it induced.

Will the country ever get there again?***
"Honorable mentions" for 2011's "best book":
Paris 1919
Empire of Liberty
In hard times, history comforts. Somehow our forbears muddled through; we might too.

Keeping on, keeping on

I'm sure no one cares but me -- yesterday I passed the 1000 running mile mark for the year.

There were costs, but I'll willingly take them.

That missing ad for Lowe's

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the big-box hardware chain Lowe's had bowed to an Islamophobic pressure group and pulled its ads from a reality TV show that featured a U.S. Muslim family.

Here's suggested replacement ad, directed by Gregory Bonsignore and starring Rizwan Manji and Parvesh Cheena, both of whom starred in the NBC sitcom Outsourced. Enjoy.



H/t Religion Dispatches.

Line drawings in the 'hood

He struts about, taking the space.


He pokes his head up to take a look around.

Who is he? I don't know, but the city is more interesting for the adornment.

Laws we could do without

This week John G. Lawrence, who involuntarily lent his name the Supreme Court decision that legalized consensual, private gay sex in 2003, died privately as he had lived. Lawrence and his friend Tyron Garner had their bedroom invaded by Texas police and were dragged off to the station in their underwear to be convicted of the misdemeanor sodomy in 1998. According the Lawrence's obituary, Lawrence was not an activist, just pissed off at how he was treated. His name ended up on the decision that legalized the ordinary lives of LGBT people.

A significant fact about this landmark case seldom mentioned then or even now is obvious in this picture of Garner and Lawrence celebrating the Supreme Court decision with a supporter. Would Texas police have invoked the sodomy law if the couple had been of the same race? There's no way to know, but in 1998 prosecutions for "sodomy" were already few and far between.

The obituary quotes Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion in the case:

The U.S. Constitution's framers "knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress," Kennedy wrote.

That got me to thinking -- what current laws will look to future generations as no longer "necessary and proper," but instead wrong-headed and oppressive? Naturally my nominations reflect my politics and I may be oblivious to some possibilities, but here's what came to mind:

• Criminalization of small quantities of recreational drugs. Legalizing marijuana is not my cause, but prohibition has failed. There must be a better approach to the reality that some people don't seem to be able to use drugs responsibly than a bloated prison system and enriching illegal drug dealers.

• Powerful guns in the hands of private citizens. Target shooting and hunting are sports, but no ordinary individual needs to own automatic weapons whose only function is to kill other humans. Law enforcement would have less justification for its heavy armament and tank vehicles if there were less high-powered weaponry floating around. A New York Times article this morning points out that "typical permit holder — middle-age white men — are not usually major drivers of violent crime." Did they ask any women who they feared with guns? I wouldn't be surprised if "middle-age white men" weren't right up there among those feared.

• The many private property rights that currently trump protection of the environment. Our cavalier attitude -- if we own it, we can do what we like with it -- is an artifact of a resource rich and sparsely inhabited planet that no longer exists. Law is going to have to enforce responsibility on individuals to protect the commons. If we can't find a way to do that, our societies will perish.

• The death penalty. People who commit horrendous offenses must suffer punishment to make society whole, but we can stop ordering their deaths as retribution. State killing fails in its objectives; few find closure, no good thing is created, at great cost and social trauma. Let's stop doing it.

What suggestions for conventional yet wrong-headed laws come to mind for readers?

In praise of public defenders

Since I'm working these days on the initiative to end death sentences in California, I'm more than usually aware of the inequities in our criminal justice system. Despite the earnest efforts of courts and lawyers (at least most of them, most of the time), the legal system is neither efficient or reliably fair.

A New York Times editorial reports on a study of one aspect of this that confirmed everything I've observed.

[A Philadelphia] study examined murder cases of indigent defendants with similar profiles in the city from 1994 to 2005. The conviction rate of clients represented by staff lawyers working for the public defender association, a nonprofit organization that the city pays for its services, was 19 percent lower than those represented by court-appointed lawyers working alone. Their expected time served in prison was 24 percent lower, and they were far less likely to get a life sentence.

Philadelphia’s public defenders, who are randomly assigned to represent one out of every five indigent defendants accused of murder, are paid decent salaries, have money to hire expert witnesses and work in experienced teams. Court-appointed lawyers, representing the rest, are poorly paid, tend to take on more cases than they can handle and generally practice without feedback from other lawyers. As a result, the study concludes, defendants with court-appointed lawyers often get inadequate counsel, in violation of the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment, and are vulnerable to greater punishment, in violation of the Eighth Amendment.

It's as if the city of Philadelphia had set up a scientific experiment to discern what method of providing lawyers to the poor achieved better results -- and the results are in.

But wouldn't providing better legal representation cost a lot of money? Well perhaps, but we are talking about depriving people of their freedom, so we ought to get it right. And the same study suggests the cost may not be so large as we intuitively think.

... if the state helped to improve the quality of counsel, it would achieve fairer outcomes, and possibly reduce prison costs by over $200 million. The citizens of Pennsylvania would benefit, as well as the indigent defendants.

All this accords with what I've seen when friends ended up before the courts; see a longer description here. Overworked public defenders do a very professional job of representing people who've tumbled into the junkyard of society; we need more, not less, of them.

If animals could talk ...

There's an enduring and endearing legend in European folklore that on Christmas Eve, in commemoration of the Event in the stable, animals for one night possess human speech.

It is said that humans do not want to actually hear what the animals are saying because, even though they have the gift of speech just one day a year, they usually don’t have many kind things to say about their human masters.

Temple Grandin, writing with Catherine Johnson, in Animals in Translation offers a different window into what animals might be saying if they could speak and we could understand.

Temple Grandin is a scientific student of animal behavior whose prescriptions have become the standard for large scale animal farming in the United States -- she credits being autistic with helping her make sense of what she observes in animal behavior. Here's how she explains:

Animals in Translation comes out of the forty years I've spent with animals. It's different from any other book I've read about animals, mostly because I'm different from every other professional who works with animals. Autistic people can think the way animals think. Of course, we also think the way people think -- we aren't that different from normal humans. Autism is a kind of way station on the road from animals to humans, which puts autistic people like me in a perfect position to translate "animal talk" into English. I can tell people why their animals are doing the things they do.

Grandin has a lot to tell us. Anyone at all interested in animal behavior will be interested in this book, though she seems to me more attuned to dogs and large animals than the critters I see more of in my life that is, domestic cats. Don't I wish I knw what they were thinking. And Grandin sure can make us think. Consider this:

With dolphins, researchers have pretty much reached the conclusion that much of the killing they do serves no evolutionary purpose. Dolphins will slaughter hundreds of porpoises at a time. The only imaginable evolutionary reason for this would be if porpoises compete with dolphins for the same scarce resources, like food. But they don't. Porpoises eat different food than dolphins do. Killing a porpoise doesn't increase a dolphin's chances of surviving and reproducing in any way. The only conclusion is that dolphins kill porpoises because they want to.

I don't know why animal violence happens, but when I read through the research literature I'm struck by the fact that the animals with the most complex brains are also the ones who engage in some of the nastiest behavior. I suspect people and animals probably pay a price for having a complex brain. For one thing, in a complex brain there may be more opportunities for wiring mistakes that will lead to vicious behavior. Another possibility is that since a more complex brain provides greater flexibility of behavior, animals with complex brains become free to develop new behaviors that will be good, bad, or in between. Human beings are capable of great love and sacrifice, but they are also capable of profound cruelty. Maybe animals are, too.

Grandin is so insightful and refreshing for a quality of observation well-exemplified in that passage: she treats human and animal behavior as very similar -- and equal -- mysteries. It's a stance that yields some very thought provoking moments. For example, she tries to answer the human question: are animals as smart as people?

Grandin starts with the observation that humans think smarts equate with language. But there are people who grow to adulthood and function without language -- they are born deaf and live in places where they have no exposure to the language of signs. So she plumbs accounts of the human language-less.

There are probably lots of language-less people in the world. Usually they are people who were born deaf into communities too small to have anyone who spoke sign language, and too poor to have schools for the deaf. But there are also some language-less people who were born into middle-class American homes but were never taught sign. Their brains are normal, and they had normal parents with normal incomes who loved them. They weren't poor and they weren't abused. The only reason they don't have language is that they were never exposed to language.

Susan [Schaller] became interested in language-less people when she volunteered to teach Ildefonso, a deaf mute Mexican immigrant who was raised in a town that had no education for deaf children. A Man Without Words is the story of her work with him. Susan discovered that Ildefonso had no concept of language at all. ...

The main difference between Ildefonso and people who have language is that he was missing a layer of abstract thinking. For instance, he didn't have the categories of real and fake. … He also didn't have just and unjust as abstract categories. It's not that he didn't have morals or a conscience. Susan doesn't say a lot about this, but she writes that Ildefonso became upset one day when she kept insisting on paying for his lunch after he had signed that he wanted to pay. Ildefonso got more and more angry until finally he signed, "God. Friend. Burrito buy I."

"He connected God and friend and placed them above burrito buying," Susan writes. "His anger was that of a religious instructor. I was properly rebuked for my concern for the material world. Who had more money was trivial." Later on he asked her what "God" meant, but he had already figured it out on his own. Susan writes that he had guessed that the word "God" stood for "unseen greatness, apart from and more important than the tangible stuff in front of us."

Although Ildefonso had the idea that there was something greater than the material world, he didn't seem to have any concept of human justice. He had no idea whether it was just or unjust for the green men [immigration police] to catch him and take him back to Mexico; he just knew that's what the green men did, so he needed to stay away from the green men. He was trying to understand the rules, without realizing there were principles behind the rules.

Ildefonso was an innocent. He didn't see all the good and bad that people do, and he didn't know there could be good and bad rules, either. After he learned language, he was sad to learn of the terrible things people do. Animals are innocents, too. Even when animals are treated badly by humans, or see other animals treated badly by humans, they don't seem to develop the abstract categories of just and unjust. Like Ildefonso, animals try to learn the rules without seeming to realize there are principles behind the rules. Since they don't know there are principles underlying the rules they don't realize that the rule itself can be just or unjust, or that a person could be breaking abstract principles of justice. Animals live much closer to the plain facts of the situation.
But the important thing to realize is that Ildefonso's innocence was not the same thing as being stupid, or unable to think. Ildefonso wasn't stupid, and he functioned as a person of normal intelligence and reasoning ability or even above-average intelligence, given that he had been able to immigrate to a foreign country, find work, and manage his life while struggling with a huge disability.

This means that when it comes to animals, we should not equate innocence with lack of intelligence. The fact that a dog never rejects a nasty owner doesn't make him stupid. …

… The lesson from Ildefonso is that although language does make thought more abstract, without language you can think more abstract thoughts than probably anyone has believed possible.

I think for normal people language is probably a kind of filter. One of the biggest challenges for an animal or an autistic person is dealing with the barrage of details from the environment. Normal people with language don't have to see all those details consciously. But I see them, and animals do, too. The details never go away, either. If I think of the word "bowl," I instantly see many different bowls in my imagination, such as a ceramic bowl on my desk, the soup bowl at a restaurant I ate at last Sunday, my aunt's salad bowl with her cat sleeping in it, and the Super Bowl football game. I think that probably happens to animals, too, and 1 wonder what Ildefonso's visual memory was like while he was still a language-less person.

There's a picture: most humans as creatures who constantly filter and organize an onrushing flood of signals, largely unconsciously and apparently effortlessly. I sometimes wonder whether, because we can, we are predisposed to multiply the layers of complexity and and number of stimuli until we either train our faculties to deal with them or our brains and societies frizzle in the attempt. Temple Grandin makes me think about things like that.

San Francisco Christmas Eve: sights of the season

Joy to all!