A little bit of crazy from an ocean farmer

My friend Bren Smith farms seaweed -- kelp -- in Long Island Sound. High end restaurants in New York City have made the plant a delicacy. Here's a recipe by way of the food magazine Bon Appetit. Kelp also can serve as biofuel and the farm also raise clams and shellfish, For Smith, it all started with the oysters …


Don't miss the moment when Smith explains

"I'm not a foodie -- I eat at the gas station most nights …"

Then listen up as Smith describes his work -- also explained at the site Thimble Island Oyster Company.

For decades environmentalists have fought to save our oceans from the perils of overfishing, climate change, and pollution. All noble efforts — but what if environmentalists have it backwards? What if the question is not how to save the oceans, but how the oceans can save us?

That is what a growing network of scientists, ocean farmers, and environmentalists around the world is trying to figure out. With nearly 90 percent of large fish stocks threatened by over-fishing and 3.5 billion people dependent on the seas as their primary food source, these ocean farming advocates have concluded that aquaculture is here to stay.

But rather than monolithic factory fish farms, they see the oceans as the home of small-scale farms where complementary species are cultivated to provide food and fuel — and to clean up the environment and fight climate change. Governed by an ethic of sustainability, they are re-imagining our oceans with the hope of saving us from the grip of the ever-escalating climate, energy, and food crises.

… We face a bitter new reality: Mitigating the effects of climate change may force us to develop our seas to save them — and planet. This re-imaging of the oceans will be heart-wrenching and controversial. Our waters are revered as some of the last wild spaces on Earth — ungoverned and untouched by human hands. If we develop our oceans, farms will some day dot coastlines, mirroring our agricultural landscape. But in the face of the escalating climate crisis, we have little choice but to explore new ways of sustaining humanity while protecting the planet.

People like this give me hope our species can adapt in the Anthropocene age our activity has brought us into.

Warming Wednesdays: why you are freezing your butt this winter

Just in case you run into Ted Cruz or Rush Limbaugh who think that current freezing temperatures in the central and east United States prove that the planet isn't warming, here's a video that explains why melting arctic ice leads to bitter cold weather. Meteorologists call what is happening "arctic amplification." The Jet Stream -- the motor of "the weather" -- both passes further north in its gyrations and also gets "stuck."

Brrr.

H/t Climate Progress.***And then there's what happens under that freezing weather. Several years ago in a column on gay aging, I highlighted the story of a 93 year old man who froze, apparently as a lethal consequence of social isolation and cold temperatures. That's one predictable result of very cold winters: more lonely deaths. So, naturally, our politicians are cutting subsidies to poor people for heating costs through sequestration and the deficit slashing mania.

Damn right, their opposition was political

Apparently the new Robert Gates (Secretary of War under both Bush and Obama) memoir contains what the author considers a damning detail:

He writes: “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . . The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”

If true, I say "hip, hip hooray!" Gates presents a picture of two politicians listening to their constituents who had by 2006 figured out that George W's Iraq war was a pointless exercise, murderous to Iraqis and US soldiers alike. The conventional stance would have been to insist that "national security" required the US to find a formula for "victory." Skepticism, founded in awareness of public opinion, was evidence that these two recognized the countervailing pressure of democratic (small "d") politics. More power to 'em!

Really?

"The United States, reluctant to intervene in bloody, inconclusive conflicts, ..."

Does the New York Times still employ copy editors?

Hours of operation

Some businesses run on a schedule that is the opposite of my internal clock. This one is a diner. I wonder if it is a viable strategy? After all, San Francisco has a crippled transportation system that barely functions after midnight, despite being a "big city."

Anachronism watch

The United States has usually prepared for its wars after getting into them.

So wrote historian James McPherson introducing a military history segment of his Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, published in 1988. I wonder how many readers feel that something is amiss when they encounter that. I certainly feel than I've lived a longish life span in a nation armed to the teeth, always determined to be prepared for any war, any where -- and sometimes eager to start that war itself.

Has McPherson's observation ever been true of this country since 1945? I don't think so. We may have been prepared for the wrong war, but, oh, have we ever been prepared, at whatever cost in treasure and in displacement of democratic values.

Plain speaking

This neighborhood business is refreshingly honest about its product. Successful too, as far as I can see.

Elder bashing 2: remember those who were incarcerated

In the 1970s, the United States lived through a cultural upheaval unleashed by the sexual and civil rights revolutions -- and a genuine spike in crime, possibly as a consequence of lead poisoning from gasoline. We responded politically by increasing penalties for many offenses, especially those that were drug related, and jailing offenders while throwing away the key through "3 strikes" laws.

Result: now we've got a lot of old men (it's mostly men, mostly of color) who have served 20 or 30 years behind bars, pose little danger to society, and will have a very hard time if released. When we do let them out, (hey, releases save governments money!) they have to survive without social support after we've made them unfit for freedom as elders.

The incarceration of vast swaths of the American public is now an aging issue. Our prisons have increasingly become homes for the aging, as there are now some 125,000 prisoners age 55 or older, nearly quadruple the number there were in 1995. Many of these prisoners are serving life sentences, but others soon will be released into society facing special hardships because of their age. They will join a massive and steadily increasing population of aging ex-offenders who always will bear the scars to their mental, physical and financial well-being that come with having been a prisoner in America.

… While nearly every American is facing a retirement crisis, ex-offenders will be fortunate to go into their mid-60s with any retirement savings at all. Formerly incarcerated people face a unique challenge to their economic security as they approach retirement. Social Security is the primary source of income for nearly half of all retired Americans, but a worker is required to earn credits to qualify. Generally, Social Security eligibility occurs after ten years of work. Eligibility for Medicare comes along with it. For the many Americans who have served overly long sentences, largely because of harsh minimum sentencing guidelines, ten years of work might be hard to come by.

… While many vulnerable older Americans can turn to public assistance programs for help, the options for former felons are often much more limited. Certain felons cannot receive federal housing assistance in many jurisdictions. Twelve states, including two of the three states with the largest prison populations in the country, ban people convicted of a drug felony for life from SNAP (formerly food stamps). Twenty more have modified disqualification, such as by requiring a drug test or restoring eligibility after a specified number of years.

… Research has shown that the average prisoner has a health status comparable to someone 10 to 15 years older than their calendar age. Seventy percent of older adults in prison have some type of medical problem, with rates of physical and mental disabilities such as dementia much higher than the general population of a similar age.

… In effect, our country's broken criminal justice system has condemned substantial parts of whole generations to impoverishment and ill-health of mind and body in their old age. Add to this voter disenfranchisement laws in many states, and we have fashioned a human rights disaster - a permanent under-caste of poor old people who are denied even the tiniest voice in our democratic system.

Conor F. McGovern, Truthout

There are encouraging signs that the country is recovering from our fear-induced incarceration binge. We are sending less prisoners into the pipeline these days. But currently released elders face an impossible, cruel old age.

This post is an installment in an occasional series on what I see as an escalating campaign to villify the growing population of old people, world-wide. Yes, there are a lot of us these days, but we cannot justly be made scapegoats for the world's problems. Part 1 here.

Saturday scenes and scenery: Sunset in the Outer Sunset

 

Those of us who live in other parts of San Francisco think of the south west reaches of the city as the fog belt. 

But in the winter, at just the right time of the evening, the sky can take on amazing hues.

I happened on this light show while taking photos for my photoblog: 596 Precincts -- Walking San Francisco.

New Years musings: on getting them wrong

'Tis the season to think about my own errors of the last year and what I might do to avoid making similar ones in the future.

Edward Snowden: When Snowden's NSA revelations, first burst on the scene. I was suspicious of the guy. Obviously I was interested in his material -- had expected its existence but was thrilled to see it emerge -- but his picture and his story put me on alert for a phony. So did his apparent political innocence in thinking he could find protection in Hong Kong and later getting stuck in Russia.

Was Snowden some kind of annoying libertarian techie? So it seemed. I don't look to that kind for political wisdom. It didn't initially give me a good impression of Snowden that he seemed hooked up with Glenn Greenwald. I was an enthusiastic reader of Greenwald from the beginnings of his civil liberties-oriented blogging career, but I soured on him when he seemed to take every political disagreement as an occasion for all out war on everyone who disagreed with him.

But I now think I was being bigoted about Snowden (giving him a bad rap for being a young white guy) and probably also about Greenwald. The releases seem to have been done well, responsibly, and effectively. Like a lot of folks, I've come to be very grateful to both men. Now even the New York Times is urging the US government to ease up on Snowden and a former State Department official concurs.

Pope Francis: I didn't pay much attention to his election, except to note that he'd vocally opposed legalization of gay marriage in his native Argentina (didn't succeed in that intervention, by the way.) I was open to charges that he'd sided with the murderous military in their Dirty War against the country's leftists and youth in the 1970s and '80s. Wasn't supporting fascists what princes of the church do?

But in practice, he is apparently the last thing I expected from a Pope: a Christian. His emphasis on inclusion, humility and care for the poor are the fruits the Gospel might lead us to expect from the followers of Jesus, but so seldom what we (those followers) offer the world, especially by way of our institutions.

James Carroll's thoughtful New Yorker profile offered a clue to what motivates the Pope's humble approach to his absurd position. The future pontiff was a mere 36 years old when he assumed responsibility for and authority over Jesuits in Argentina just as the crimes of the junta were taking off. His own early mentor, a woman named Esther de Careaga, was one of many kidnapped and dumped from a helicopter into the ocean. In the face of authoritarian horrors, priests were divided about standing with their poor flocks or trying to keep their heads down. The current pope admits

“My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative.”

At least two Jesuits were taken by the military and tortured, though they survived. The Dirty War had tens of thousands of victims who did not.

According to Carroll, drawing on interviews with Jesuits and the pope's own statements:

The years of the Dirty War form the general ground of the Pope’s striking self-criticism: his experience, one Jesuit told me, was “searing.” After leaving office as Provincial, [the future pope] was rector of a Jesuit seminary for a time, then worked on a dissertation for a degree in theology. He was sent to a Jesuit house of studies in Córdoba, Argentina, as spiritual director, yet these were wilderness years for him. He told [Jesuit journalist Antonio] Spadaro that in Córdoba he “lived a time of great interior crisis.” In an earlier interview, he had confided, “I had to learn from my errors along the way because, to tell you the truth, I made hundreds of errors. Errors and sins.” He told Spadaro bluntly, “I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech.”

This Pope acts in ways that make me want to believe that he wants to exemplify the possibility of our turning away (repentance) from past wrong acts. None of us who have not faced threats to our personal survival and responsibility for the survival of others under murderous tyranny can lightly make judgments -- though we naturally will.

Maybe we can learn something from this pope. What a pleasant surprise!

I still suspect the Roman Catholic ship of state will founder on the iceberg of treating women as fully equal humans. But meanwhile, I'll enjoy knowing Pope Francis is increasing the sum total of good in a fractured world.

Good news for San Franciscans

The City Attorney's lawsuit against the private accrediting agency that is seeking to shut down City College has led to an injunction that forbids any such action until there has been a trial on numerous charges of political bias and conflict of interest.

City College of San Francisco's accreditation cannot be revoked until a trial can determine whether a commission acted lawfully in deciding that the vast school was so poorly run that it should be shut down, a judge ruled Thursday.

... The ruling allows City College to continue trying to repair the many administrative and financial deficiencies that put its accreditation in jeopardy in the first place. But it means that accreditation could not be revoked unless the commission won at trial.

But [Judge Curtis] Karnow's ruling indicates he thinks [City Attorney Dennis] Herrera would win at trial.

San Francisco Chronicle

Many locals have always claimed that the accrediting outfit's action has not been about correcting City College's organizational deficiencies, but rather about imposing "market" (read capitalist) values on the community institution. Some background here.

The sun is up, the year is new ...

and I'm inhabited by a rhinovirus delivering fever and chills. This will pass.

Says it all ...

The world can no longer afford old people

That blog headline states the message of an Associated Press story proliferating around the world as we enter 2014. Make no mistake -- there are real social strains that flow from the world's longer life spans and from growing global inequality that funnels wealth to the top of the pyramid, but that is not what articles like these are about. Articles exploring the terrible burden elders place on our societies are ideological propaganda, much like the endless din of stories about the horrors of the "national debt." They serve to soften us up for shredding whatever collective responsibility we have taken for old people.

Over the next week or so, I'm going to write a series of posts about various elements of this elder bashing campaign.

Here's a prime example: a judicial decision last month allowed the bankrupt city of Detroit to cut and escape its obligations to its retired workers. People who work for government routinely accept lower wages for the security of better benefits, including pensions. Lots of cities and states neglected to pay into pension funds adequately. Now they want to escape the consequences of mismanagement by breaking their promise to older people who can't fight back.

James Surowiecki, in the New Yorker, has provided a cogent summary of the situation.

Tis the season for taking retirement benefits away from public workers. …

… politicians often just let pension contributions slide, passing the bill on to future taxpayers. … Governments also got in the habit of promising workers higher pensions in the future so that they would accept lower wages in the present. To make matters worse, whenever pension funds looked especially robust public employees lobbied for higher pensions, and politicians were all too willing to grant them. ...

Everyone pushed off the day of reckoning, with no real thought for the taxpayers who would eventually have to foot the bill. Now that that day has arrived, you can see why governments want to claw back some of the benefits that were handed out. But this would be unjust: state and city employees worked for those benefits—teaching kids, policing the streets, and so on—and they often did so for lower wages than they would have accepted with no promise of a pension. Governments should live up to their obligations, but we can’t let them make irresponsible promises again. The temptation to defer expenditure is intrinsically hard for politicians to resist. We need reforms to control costs and to insure that governments actually pay their bills.

Go read it all.

Surowiecki has some ideas for future remedies that don't consist of screwing old people. All government workers should fall under the Social Security system -- for historical reasons, some now do not. Moreover a federal law could mandate that whatever pension obligation any unit of government should take on, it must pay into the pension fund every year, come hell, depressed taxes, or high water. Corporations are subject to such a law; their obligations receive federal insurance in return.

Instead cities, states and other units of government can be expected to spend 2014 and decades beyond trying to to wriggle out of what they promised their former employees.

A forgotten anniversary and a forgotten war

Two hundred years ago, on December 30, 1813, British soldiers and their native allies sacked the frontier settlement at Buffalo, New York, taking revenge for the burning by Americans of the Canadian town of Newark earlier that year. These events were part of what people in the United States call the War of 1812.

I don't know if the British even have a name for this little war. U.S. President James Madison led a divided nation into the fight; war proponents' motives were mixed. Though the Brits had conceded independence to their colonies 20 years previously, they acted entitled to interfere in U.S. seagoing commerce as part of their continent-wide struggle with Napoleonic France. Meanwhile, western settlers thought maybe British pre-occupation with Europe gave them a chance to seize Canada. The U.S. was economically and organizationally ill-prepared to fight the world's pre-eminent empire. Only British inattention limited U.S. losses to a few frontier skirmishes like the burning of Buffalo, the humiliating sack of the scarcely-built U.S. capital at Washington, and adoption of a grandiose, unsingable national anthem.

The burning of Buffalo was however important to launching my ancestors on course to becoming prosperous citizens of what later became an important trading settlement and eventually a major industrial city in the 19th century. The St. John family -- Gamaliel, Margaret and their 11 children -- had moved to the head of Lake Erie in 1807 and to Buffalo in 1810. From a Mrs. Chapman who had bought it from the Holland Land Company, the family purchased a lot for $4200 (serious money for the time!) and

… the frame for a house, forty feet square, standing on blocks, and back of which was an appendix of twenty feet square, one and a half stories high, enclosed and floored, having a chimney with the old-fashioned fireplace, and baking oven by the side of the fireplace.

… The lumber for the covering and finishing of the house purchased of Mrs. Chapman was all drawn from Williamsville; the logs for which had been cut and drawn to the saw-mill during the winter previous (the winter of 1809-10), The shingles for the house were all made during the same winter by my father and his boys, Elijah and Cyrus. ...

The cellar was made of the dimensions of the whole house, and the stones with which the walls were laid up were drawn from the quarries of Judge Erastus Granger on the banks of the Three-mile Creek, east of the then village of Buffalo.

A St. John daughter's recollection

At first the frontier war provided an opportunity for entrepreneurship. But in June 1813, Gamaliel and his son Elijah drowned while seeking to deliver supplies to U.S. forces that had invaded Canada. So when it became apparent that the British and Indians were coming to sack Buffalo, Margaret St. John was a widow with 8 children. Most residents including most of the St. John children fled, but Mrs. St. John and a daughter and, across the road, a woman named Sarah Lovejoy, remained behind. Family accounts report that Mrs. Lovejoy tried to defend her property. The St. Johns saw Sarah Lovejoy struck down by an Indian with a hatchet.

Mrs. St. John appealed to a British officer to save her, a widow with many children, from the same fate and for whatever reason, her house remained the only one standing in the settlement after the sack. In the following days, as the settlers filtered back into the scene of desolation, Mrs. St. John was able to offer them shelter, setting up something like a boarding house. She and her children prospered. The young generation married successfully. When in 1825 the Erie Canal brought frontier Buffalo closer to the nation's centers of commerce, St. Johns became pillars of the community. Margaret St. John died at age 69 in 1847. She was my great, great, great grandmother, a relationship I find hard to imagine. There must be quite a few descendants.

On the occasion of this 200th anniversary, Patrick B. Kavanagh has been trying to inform contemporary western New Yorkers about the bloody history of the area.

When war passes over a landscape, it often leaves unmistakable traces behind. From Gettysburg to the Somme, places that once were battlefields can seem to hold the memories of the dead in the very soil underfoot, the wind in the trees.

Not in Western New York. The Niagara Frontier was a field of war 200 years ago, and also a war graveyard. The Niagara Frontier was one of the most deadly, if not the deadliest, of the killing fields in the War of 1812. "No other place in North America saw more action," said Patrick B. Kavanagh …

What would he like people to realize, or to understand, about these figures?

"Just what happened here," Kavanagh said. "The people. This 30 miles. From Buffalo to Fort Niagara, on both sides -- these people lost everything."

"Like Mrs. Margaret St. John," he continued. "When the war starts, she's a wife and a mother of 11 children. By the time Buffalo is burned, in December, she's a widow with 8 children. She lost children and her husband."

When the United States blithely invades and bombs other people's countries, we show we've forgotten what war on our own turf means, I think.***

A CNN/ORC International poll found that only 17 percent of Americans support the war in Afghanistan, down considerably from the 52 percent who backed the conflict in December of 2008. A staggering 82 percent of the country opposes the war, according to the poll. 

TPM

Another forgotten war grinds on. I doubt if there are many Afghans who want the killing to continue.

Residue from my Armpit Bowl binge

Good news, I guess. Now they've got a few women among the officiating crews. There were two women working the Fight Hunger Bowl -- aka the Emerald Bowl and the Diamond Walnut San Francisco Bowl. It can't hurt those amped up young men to have to defer to "girls" wearing the striped shirts.

Less good news: if you watch bowls, you learn about the prevalence of UVTRs -- the acronym stands for "undisclosed violations of team rules." It seems as if most teams have sent some players home for UVTRs. Since the conduct in question is undisclosed, it is not immediately clear what the offenses may have been. Google reveals samples from past bowls ranging from drunken assault with a broken bottle, to groping women, to smoking marijuana (hey, what will change when that's legal?) to pissing off a hotel balcony.

My favorite is the Notre Dame star who responded to his suspension by apologizing for "poor academic judgment." Huh? My sharp partner who teaches college students didn't hesitate to diagnose that one: "he got caught plagiarizing, passing off someone else's work as his own. Lots of them do that."

Fifteen bowls glimpsed and some enjoyed -- twenty yet to go ...

Tis the season ...

Out at Ocean Beach, the surfers are swarming toward the water's edge …


... to catch the low, steady rolling waves.


Photographers wait for a magic shot.


And there are casualties of the season.

Northern California is lovely during a warm winter drought.

Saturday scenes and scenery: just an ordinary building

While traveling last month, I found myself  in Paro, Bhutan, sitting across from this commercial building. For Bhutan, this is an ordinary, modern, commercial building, nothing special. I thought to photograph the painted figures that encircle it -- they too are nothing unusual. Similar motifs cover every other building of similar size in the town.

The central panel portrays the four harmonious friends of Tibetan bhuddism.

These four mountain creatures run around the frieze. Every moderately prosperous building and residence that I saw in Bhutan was covered with such paintings. They aren't for tourists; they are there because Bhutanese like them. They advertize prosperity and right concern for the order of things.

These women sat on the steps of the building, consulting over a knitting project.

 

In the street, a cow might wander by.

Click on any of these photos to see enlarged.

More on homelessness

7 am, Christmas morning 2013, San Francisco

After I put up a post two days ago with photos of some of San Francisco's unhoused residents, a friend raised issues about the way we think about these folks -- especially about our assumptions that "homelessness" is a consequence of pushing people out of mental institutions or results from addictions. She referred me to the National Coalition for the Homeless and particularly to their factsheet "Why are people homeless?"

Mental Illness: Approximately 16% of the single adult homeless population suffers from some form of severe and persistent mental illness (U.S. Conference of Mayors, 2005). Despite the disproportionate number of severely mentally ill people among the homeless population, increases in homelessness are not attributable to the release of severely mentally ill people from institutions. Most patients were released from mental hospitals in the 1950s and 1960s, yet vast increases in homelessness did not occur until the 1980s, when incomes and housing options for those living on the margins began to diminish rapidly. According to the 2003 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Report, most homeless persons with mental illness do not need to be institutionalized, but can live in the community with the appropriate supportive housing options (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2003). However, many mentally ill homeless people are unable to obtain access to supportive housing and/or other treatment services. The mental health support services most needed include case management, housing, and treatment.

Addiction Disorders: The relationship between addiction and homelessness is complex and controversial. While rates of alcohol and drug abuse are disproportionately high among the homeless population, the increase in homelessness over the past two decades cannot be explained by addiction alone. Many people who are addicted to alcohol and drugs never become homeless, but people who are poor and addicted are clearly at increased risk of homelessness. Addiction does increase the risk of displacement for the precariously housed; in the absence of appropriate treatment, it may doom one's chances of getting housing once on the streets. Homeless people often face insurmountable barriers to obtaining health care, including addictive disorder treatment services and recovery supports.

Or, less formally, people listening and responding to voices that don't exist for the rest of us are terribly visible on the streets, but they are not all or even most of people without housing -- only the most obvious. A fraction of homeless people are addicts, but that is more a condition that makes their poverty harder to overcome than a precipitating cause of their loss of shelter. This certainly fits what I've seen among precariously housed people I've known; several seemed to become drunks as their lives collapsed on the street rather than being on the street because they drank.

No one denies that these folks need a wide variety of forms of help, but none of that is likely to do much good until people have secure housing.

Another Christmas greeting

This one from the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). Old Saint Nick doesn't do borders ...

Christmas has left me pooped. 'Nuff for now.