Too true ...

All this technology is making us antisocial pic.twitter.com/ajY1zvZdP7

— History In Pictures (@historyepics) February 10, 2015

Drifting into the next war in Ukraine?

View image | gettyimages.com

The U.S. is currently party to several wars in the greater Middle East -- against ISIS, against (someone) in Yemen, against (someone) in Somalia -- and probably some more in that area. We've indicated we'd like to stick a toe in against Boko Haram, but so far the Nigerian government is resistant. We aren't really out of Afghanistan, though the remaining U.S. sacrificial targets are ordered to keep their heads down.

We make war on the cheap these days: we infiltrate our spooks and/or mercenary contract killers; we blast the unlucky (and occasionally guilty) with drones; we only show the country's colors when these little wars pull in the full panoply of bombers and cruise missiles.

And now the usual suspects -- John McCain, various other neocons and apparently Obama's nominee to be War (Defense) Secretary Ashton Carter -- think throwing advanced U.S. arms to the Ukrainian government in Kiev would be a great idea.

Sensible people keep trying to explain to our more foolish rulers why this is stupid (in addition to pointing toward a criminal escalation of human misery). Here's University of Chicago international relations professor John J. Mearsheimer in the New York Times:

... the United States cannot win an arms race with Russia over Ukraine and thereby ensure Russia’s defeat on the battlefield.

Proponents of arming Ukraine have a second line of argument. The key to success, they maintain, is not to defeat Russia militarily, but to raise the costs of fighting to the point where Mr. Putin will cave. The pain will supposedly compel Moscow to withdraw its troops from Ukraine and allow it to join the European Union and NATO and become an ally of the West.

This coercive strategy is also unlikely to work, no matter how much punishment the West inflicts. What advocates of arming Ukraine fail to understand is that Russian leaders believe their country’s core strategic interests are at stake in Ukraine; they are unlikely to give ground, even if it means absorbing huge costs.

Great powers react harshly when distant rivals project military power into their neighborhood, much less attempt to make a country on their border an ally. ...

Yeah. Think how we'd react if some European power tried to arm Cuba against us ... how long has getting over that one taken?

And here's Stephen M. Walt from Harvard pointing out that jumping further into this conflict, in addition to amounting to poking a hornet's nest with nukes, is a recipe for failure and humiliation:

Ukraine’s fate is much more important to Moscow than it is to us, which means that Putin and Russia will be willing to pay a bigger price to achieve their aims than we will. The balance of resolve as well as the local balance of power strongly favors Moscow in this conflict. Before starting down an escalatory path, therefore, Americans should ask themselves just how far they are willing to go. If Moscow has more options, is willing to endure more pain, and run more risks than we are, then it makes no sense to begin a competition in resolve we are unlikely to win. And no, that doesn’t show the West is irresolute, craven, or spineless; it simply means Ukraine is a vital strategic interest for Russia but not for us

Among others who know better can be included the Germans.

The German foreign minister [Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier] recalled that a Canadian colleague at a NATO meeting last summer had asked whether Russia should be seen as “a friend, partner, enemy or opponent to us.”

“Perhaps,” Mr. Steinmeier said, “this is easier to answer when you are further away from the conflict region. Our experience in Europe — in good times or bad — is that Russia remains our neighbor.”

This would be a great moment for President Obama to apply his most sophisticated policy principle: "Don't do stupid stuff!"

Torture opponents encroaching on John Yoo's home turf

Erudite Partner and distinguished others will be discussing torture and accountability at the Law School at U.C. Berkeley on Thursday afternoon.

There's no reason to expect the Boalt Hall professor who wrote the legal cover rationale for the Bush administration's torture program will be there, but you can be.

No frackin' way ...

Several thousand Californians joined a March for Real Climate Leadership in Oakland on Saturday, calling on the Governor Brown to ban fracking for oil extraction. In times of historic drought, fracking not only pollutes and wastes the state's dwindling water supplies, but also sustains carbon pollution. (Click on any photo to enlarge/see as a slide show.)

Though Oakland is ground zero for protest in California these days, this didn't seem a home grown crowd.

From north ...

and south ...

and further south yet, they came.

There was a good sprinkling of students ...

as well as a plentiful supply of classic northern Californians.

It's not just the fracking that presents a danger to our lives. Once they get the oil out, they have to transport it through our communities.

People get understandably pissed off about having their water polluted.

Some people aren't going to take it.

Keeping hope alive ...

In the measles zone in the 'hood

By way of the New York Times. Note, the low rate of vaccination is not the consequence of parents opting out via the idiosyncratic "personal belief exemption." The low vaccination rate in the neighborhood school seems a result of new immigration status and poverty.

I would not be surprised to hear that the San Francisco Unified School District contests these numbers; nor would I be surprised if the true percentage is still very high.

Saturday scenes and scenery: for the birds

If you were a bird, would you risk settling on something with that head decorating it?

Come to think of it, I seldom see birds alighting on bird baths. In this instance, that's been rectified.

Often the bird's place has been usurped by someone else ...

Somehow I don't think those wings would fly.

Then there's the situation in which the birdbath itself is missing.

All photos are out takes from 596 Precincts - Walking San Francisco.

Wild times -- and we thought we were just normal

Bear with me on this one; I really don't know quite what I think of David Talbot's Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love, a narrative of San Francisco's tumultuous passages from the 1960s through the early 1980s.

His story was, after all, much of my life. I was a Berkeley student exploring the other side of the Bay at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in 1967; I remember staying clear of the throngs to listen to a solitary woman playing a guitar and wailing keening songs while sitting under a tree; that was Buffy Sainte-Marie. (She's still powerful; check the link.)

I remember mass stops of young Black men during the hunt for the Zebra killer. I learned to hang sheetrock while renovating the International Hotel and welcomed busloads of older Black women from the People's Temple who marched alongside white hippies defending that residence for retired single Filipino men.

At the free restaurant, Martin de Porres House, where I lived, we refused the bulk food extorted from Randall Hearst by his daughter Patty's kidnappers -- but we gladly accepted the bags of provisions that our homeless friends brought us from that misbegotten boondoggle. Mayor George Moscone rallied to our defense when the Health Department sanctioned us for feeding the hungry without a permit (so did Fr. Quinn, the Catholic Archbishop.)

When Diane Feinstein was choosing a supervisor to succeed Harvey Milk, I joined many who lobbied for a lesbian woman. (We lost, getting Harry Britt instead; he turned out pretty well.) When Milk and Moscone's murderer, Dan White, got off with a slap on the wrist, I wrote up the ensuing satisfying orgy of burning police cars for a lesbian newspaper. And I celebrated with everyone else when Bill Walsh's 49ers became a dynasty of football winners who the rest of the country could never quite erase with the label "effete."

So I lived Talbot's story, perhaps a little closer to the ground than his sources and so, though I'm glad that he told it, I often also had a different view. Not a contrary view, but a different view.

Some things he got terribly right. One of these was the descent of the scene in the Haight into anguished violence.

But as San Francisco's revolution spread -- carried by the music, the drugs, the underground railroad of wandering youth -- the poison in America's soul was also billowing. You could feel it more and more on the streets of the Haight. San Francisco was no longer only a haven for the country's restless dreamers but also for its wrecked and ruined.

The 1960s turned sour in large part because of the endless bloodletting in Vietnam. The soul sickness leached everywhere as the war came home, but nowhere more than the Haight. where many ravaged veterans sought solace. The music that GIs listened to in Vietnam, and the magazine spreads of hippie revelry, promised a halcyon world far him the blood and mud. But many of them found it was not easy to leave the war behind; they brought it home with them. Life in the Haight grew more violent and disturbing. The drugs got harder.

The Haight was nowhere I wanted to be by as early as 1969.

Talbot clearly has great sources in the old labor-Communist (Hallinans et al.) San Francisco that battled the old Irish-Italian Catholic San Francisco. And he's worked to have some sense of the Black and Asian forces that struggled to be heard underneath of those conflicts and around the various newcomers.

But I don't think he has much grasp of the struggles of gays and of Mission and Excelsior Latinos to find their place in this melange. Diane Feinstein's long ascendancy was not some peaceful afterward to the terrifying years about which he writes for those groups. Her "Mommy knows best," patronizing style disgusted grassroots activists. Her prissy prudery was no help to the gay community struggling to change sexual practices with the appearance of HIV infection. She offered nothing to tenants nor to the movement to curb downtown oriented Manhattanization.

And these civic skirmishes never stopped. As late as 1989, the San Francisco Police Department rioted in the Castro, attacking gay individuals and bars. Struggles over retaining a place for middle and working class people in this spatially constrained peninsula continue to this day. They get heated in ways that are not so different from the 1930s labor battles on the waterfront that preceded Talbot's era.

Perhaps our forms of political expression became slightly less wacky in the years after Talbot's period, but as late as the first Gulf War San Franciscans were still opposing the national imperial eruption by seizing the Bay Bridge; within a week of the 9/11 attacks, we enjoyed a "Power to Peaceful" concert in Precita Park.

The current explosion of property values and consequent expulsion of the less affluent may, finally, render San Francisco an ordinary city. (As of 2014, after this book, Talbot seems to have concluded that the class war in the city is lost.)

But maybe not. This place has a potent history of absorbing disruptive changes. Maybe we'll weather a few more and remain an interesting place. In any case, Season of the Witch is a significant contribution to what must always be incomplete and tendentious slices of that history.

Friday cat blogging

This one seemed to suspect I was too close for comfort.

Old Mission relic consumed by fire

Demolition contractors are gathering.

Not far from where I live, eight days ago a fire gutted an old three story building on Mission Street. One resident died and 64 people are homeless, as are nearly two dozen small businesses which occupied offices on the second floor and the store fronts at ground level. The neighborhood feels as if a hole had been gouged in its heart.

A passerby on his bike knew what he could do: launch a GoFundMe appeal for the residents. Zack Crockett thought he might raise about S2000. So far, the fund has collected over $110,000 which will be distributed through Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA).

Crockett is also sharing what he has learned of the lives of our displaced neighbors via the web site where he works, Priceonomics. At the link, he shares the interrupted story of Salvadoran immigrant construction worker Toni Segovia and of two young women whose families now wonder where they will end up.

The girls, who had just applied to college less than a month prior to the fire, each have a distinctive dream. Mayra, who has “always been interested in helping people,” wishes to attend the nursing program at Dominican University in San Rafael, about 30 minutes north of San Francisco. Perla would like to attend Syracuse University in New York and work toward becoming an early childhood education teacher -- though, the disaster has impacted her desire to leave home, and her family.

“Now that everything happened, I don’t want to go as far away,” says Perla, softly. “I can’t leave everything the way is it, now that this happened. It would make it more difficult to move on.”

“I’ve worked so hard to have a better future,” adds Mayra, “and now I feel, like, guilty for leaving to college.”

The hard truth is that the Mission is no longer hospitable to the sort of naturally occurring community of low income renters which occupied that building. There are legal protections for the displaced people, but they are weak. And there are no protections for the small businesses that have scratched out a living in the odd corners of our streets.

... When incidents like this happen, tenants are legally entitled to return to their units, once the units have been repaired, at their former rent prices. There are, however, many loopholes to this. If a tenant accepts his security deposit back or takes any other financial offer from the building owner, for instance, he could lose this right. What’s more, if 75% of the building is deemed “a new development” upon restoration, this right is terminated, essentially punishing the tenants for the severity of the fire. With damages on Toni’s building estimated at over $8 million, this is a likely scenario.

Staying in the Mission -- the only place Toni, Perla, and Mayra have ever called home in America -- is a major concern.

“Our rent didn’t raise too much -- only, like $60 every two years,” says Toni. “Our unit was the biggest one in the building, and we paid less than $1,100 [per month].” Finding something comparable in San Francisco’s increasingly-heated and crowded real estate market will be a daunting task.

The hyperlocal news site Mission Local, itself one of the displaced small businesses, has provided extensive coverage of this neighborhood trauma.

More collateral damage amid creative destruction

Due to various domestic interruptions, I am posting this from a bookstore cafe this morning.

And the subject of this post is that the place where I am sitting is about to shut down. Borderlands is a wonderful sci fi, fantasy, and mystery bookstore that has been in my Mission neighborhood, if not forever, at least for more than a decade.

Borderlands is not -- entirely -- a casualty of the tech economy. Sure, it suffers from the usual vicissitudes of book selling these day: competition from giant online retailers that can always undersell brick and mortar establishments and from rising rents as our little corner of the world morphs into a playground for comparatively affluent tech worker newcomers. But squeezed by these realities, it was the voter mandate to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour by 2018 that did this place in. I'll let Borderlands owner tell his story:

Borderlands supports the concept of a living wage in principal and we believe that it's possible that the new law will be good for San Francisco -- Borderlands Books as it exists is not a financially viable business if subject to that minimum wage.  Consequently we will be closing our doors no later than March 31st.

Many businesses can make adjustments to allow for increased wages.  The cafe side of Borderlands, for example, should have no difficulty at all.  Viability is simply a matter of increasing prices.  And, since all the other cafes in the city will be under the same pressure, all the prices will float upwards.  But books are a special case because the price is set by the publisher and printed on the book.  Furthermore, for years part of the challenge for brick-and-mortar bookstores is that companies like Amazon.com have made it difficult to get people to pay retail prices.  So it is inconceivable to adjust our prices upwards to cover increased wages.

The change in minimum wage will mean our payroll will increase roughly 39%.  That increase will in turn bring up our total operating expenses by 18%.  To make up for that expense, we would need to increase our sales by a minimum of 20%.  We do not believe that is a realistic possibility for a bookstore in San Francisco at this time.

What I take from this is that the business has always been extremely precarious. If bumping several part timers up to $15/hour will raise the payroll 39 percent, the payroll wasn't much to begin with. This is confirmed by Alan Beatts's explanation that he only made $28K last year, in a year when the bookstore was marginally profitable. Borderlands has simply been hanging by a thread all along. The entire essay is worth reading at the link.

Though I'm not an aficionado of the sort of fiction they sell, I've always loved Borderlands as the place where I first learned that there was a breed of cat known as the Sphinx. Meet Ripley, long in residence here, and now sadly deceased.

Just a bit more football ... while thinking about journalism

During the season, I not only waste my time watching the big men beat each other up, I waste even more time reading football commentary. So, now that it's over, I turned to my sources for one last dose of the drug for the year and ended up thinking how the varieties of football journalism mirror many other tensions among which we all live.

Football coverage seems to go in two quite different directions these days. There's the classic style: inclined to highlight the "heroic," gently opinionated, a little gossipy, yes, even a bit jock-sniffing. The work of Peter King at Monday Morning Quarterback is a delightful example of that genre. He knows everyone, forgives much, and shares his pleasure in the sport.

The other contemporary genre aims to turn football analysis into objective numerical measurements. Modeled on what Sabermetrics has done for baseball, these writers seek to understand football games and plays quantitatively. Bill Barnwell at Grantland churns out reams of this exhaustively and charmingly. Here's a sample from his rumination on the Seahawks seemingly inexplicable decision to pass on the one yard line at the end of the Superbowl -- the pass that a Patriot intercepted, deciding the game.

In fact, this season it was more dangerous to run the football from the 1-yard line than it was to throw it. Before Sunday, NFL teams had thrown the ball 108 times on the opposing team’s 1-yard line this season. Those passes had produced 66 touchdowns (a success rate of 61.1 percent, down to 59.5 percent when you throw in three sacks) and zero interceptions. The 223 running plays had generated 129 touchdowns (a 57.8 percent success rate) and two turnovers on fumbles.

Stretch that out to five years and the numbers make runs slightly superior; they scored 54.1 percent of the time and resulted in turnovers 1.5 percent of the time, while passes got the ball into the end zone 50.1 percent of the time and resulted in turnovers 1.9 percent of the time. In a vacuum, the decision between running and passing on the 1-yard line is hardly indefensible, because both the risk and the reward are roughly similar.

The key phrase there, of course, is “in a vacuum.” This wasn’t a vacuum. This was the Seahawks and the Patriots ...

This stuff is fan-candy, making the reader feel knowledgeable and a participant in the game's sacred mysteries. It may also be great analysis -- or not. Most of us are not equipped to know.

What strikes me is how similar these two sorts of journalism are to various sorts of media engagement with U.S. politics. On the one hand there's political campaign coverage that tries to discern the character and principles (if any) of political figures. That's the classic genre, pioneered by Theodore White in 1960, practiced subsequently by Walter Shapiro and Bob Woodward, and brought up recent times by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman on Mitt Romney and David Remnick on Barack Obama.

Then there's the scientific (or sometimes pseudo-scientific) genre pioneered by Nate Silver in a number of venues and now living at FiveThirtyEight where campaign politics and sports co-exist on an ESPN site. The New York Times has its own version of a data driven journalism site at the Upshot. I think Justin Wolfers writing there gets the award for the most charming "scientific" explanation of why the choice by the Seahawks to pass at the one yard line was likely "right" (though disastrous.)

A key reason that [running back Marshawn] Lynch has been so successful is that his coach has been playing a mixed [random pass or run] strategy all season. Lynch has accumulated impressive numbers in part because opposing defenses have had to be concerned about [quarterback] Russell Wilson’s passing. And so Lynch’s history of success when playing as part of a mixed strategy says nothing about how successful he would be if his opponents knew for sure his coach would call a running play.

Game theory points to the possibility that [Seahawks coach Pete] Carroll’s decisive call was actually the result of following the best possible strategy, and that this is a strategy that involves an element of randomness in play-calling. This leads to the intriguing possibility that if that fateful final play were to be run in a dozen parallel universes, with each coach continuing to play the same mixed strategy, the actual plays called would differ, as would their outcomes.

Delightful whimsy there, and possibly true.

This approach is not so happy when what is at issue are public policy choices. What government does and doesn't do needs to be undergirded by smart quantitative analysis which is what both sports and campaign journalism offer ever more smoothly. It should be the business of policy journalism also to explain what is at issue -- say for example, how the ACA/Obamacare is expected to increase the number of insured individuals and cut the growth of medical costs. Most journalism is not so good at this sort of thing. (There are exceptions; I'm thinking of Sarah Kliff at Vox for one.) It frequently wades so deeply into the weeds so quickly that most of us throw up our hands in hopeless confusion. Or, alternatively, it just defaults to quoting uninformative on-the-one-hand-on-the-other hand sound bites that do not elucidate.

Good policy journalism in a democracy should uncover and draw out what values underlie policy choices. Taking, for example, the ACA/Obamacare: citizens need to be able to think about and discuss why (or why not) we might choose to shoulder the cost and complexities of making sure that more individuals have access to health care. Why do we want to undertake this difficult project? Why is it important to curb costs? Who gains and who might be hurt and do we have criteria for making choices between winners and losers? Policy journalism isn't usually very good at going to first principles; it simply assumes we know the answers to such questions. But do we?

Most of us, most of the time, have to default to trusting that somebody somewhere does know. If we're Democrats, we look to leaders who carry the D label; Republicans look to the other guys. That's not wrong, but we need a better bridge between policies and more personal allegiances. Oddly enough, old fashioned classic sports writing does that rather well for sports. Though the quants provide us with intellectually fascinating new metrics in policy as well as in sports, the best of our human interest journalists still have a lot to show us as well.

Super Bowl finally over

You either saw it or you didn't. That was exhausting and I don't know whether I'll have the strength to post tonight for Monday morning.

Bye-bye football for another season. Can't say I'll miss you. That's the nice thing about entering the offseason: by the time it arrives, I'm ready to reclaim the ridiculous number of hours I spend watching big men beat each other up. This year has been unsavory. Might I perhaps be ready to forgo the NFL come next September? Not ready to say right now.

The public and the scientists

There's a graphic floating around the web that comes from a Pew study about science and society. The general public thinks differently than the scientists:

Mostly I'm on board with the scientists, not too surprisingly. But I find it interesting to think a little about the items on which I part company with them.

• I have qualms about using animals for research. Sure, all life is pretty brutal, though we don't like to think about it. And I eat animals. Yet I believe we should only do research on animals when our big brains and ingenuity can't come up with any alternative. And I don't trust that scientists think searching diligently for alternatives is important. I may be wrong.

• I'm glad to see that scientists aren't close to unanimous in endorsing the safety of foods on which pesticides have been used (most all commercial foods.) It seems to me that we may not entirely know what we doing to ourselves with these poisons. Can science really promise that all or even most of the possible dangers have been thoroughly studied? Not if studying them would cost the companies whose costs are lowered by pesticide use.

• On the item on nuclear power plants, I think the scientists are being bamboozled by their own cleverness. Yes, science has learned how to release energy from atoms. That's remarkable all right. And we may even know what it would take to shield ourselves and posterity from the toxic byproducts of our ingenuity, though I don't think we've yet demonstrated that capacity. (The U.S. has thousands of tons of "legacy" nuclear waste sitting around waiting for safe disposal.) Though the engineering know-how to manage nuclear energy production may exist, I don't trust that we have to social capacity to build and manage this energy safely. And this question is not within the domain of science; the general public may very well have a clearer experiential idea of what social systems can do than the men and women in the labs.

• The more extreme forms of offshore drilling evoke the same reaction that I have to nuclear power: the technology for doing it may exist, but what makes us think we can use it safely and without major damage to oceans and shorelines? Nothing, if the experience with BP in the Gulf of Mexico is taken seriously.

• And then there is fracking. Here I think there is mammoth evidence that oil extractors don't give a damn about the environmental effects of their process. And it looks as if the scientists too have their doubts. That's what you get when your process causes earthquakes and the companies doing it refuse to release data on what chemicals they are injecting into the earth.

• I skipped over the item on GMO foods. On this, I'm with the scientists; farmers have been modifying plants as long as humans have been growing them. But even though I'm somewhat convinced this is safe, I've voted to require that the producers label their GMO products. The public may be untutored, but we have a right to know.

Do you find that you agree with the scientists? If not, do you know why? This seems a worthwhile exercise.

Saturday scenes: "Help Wanted" in San Francisco

I remarked to my small business owner friend that I'd passed a lot of signs of boom times in the few blocks on the way to her store.

"Yeah -- they are always hiring. They pay crummy wages."

"They complain when the people who take the jobs leave as soon as they find something in the East Bay. They don't understand they don't pay them enough to live here."

FWIW.

Central America needs more benign neglect

I can only note with horror that Joe Biden is spinning an Administration plan to turn its attention to Central America. Say it ain't so Joe! Not that tired trope again!

The United States' preoccupation with wars of empire in west and central Asia over that last 15 years has allowed our southern neighbors to get on with developing their own governments and resources. By and large, they are one hell of lot more peaceful and their people live significantly better than back when when Ronnie Reagan and the Reps were obsessing over the red tide rising south of the border, threatening to overrun Harlingen, TX.

Having seen our butts kicked further afield, Joe seems to be promoting a turn to afflict the south again. He's offering to help with "security," with policing. Last time around that meant death squads in El Salvador and genocide against the native population in Guatemala.

He wants to encourage "transparent and fair" legal systems. Hey, we could do with a little of that here at home: how about stopping with the leak prosecutions, reining in the NSA spooks, and prosecuting US war criminals responsible of torture and aggressive war in the last decade? That would encourage lawfulness elsewhere.

He wants Central American economies to attract international investment. Curious. Last I noticed they had. The cash (and the risk taking) are just not coming from the United States. Nicaragua found a Chinese backer for its alternative to the Panama Canal. The project may be an ecological and human disaster, but hey, it's their disaster.

If we want to help Central America, we can stop being a market for drugs. The drug war is a sickness here that fuels many horrors for the neighbors.

Friday cat blogging

While Walking San Francisco, I was observed.

Morty has taught me that these sisal scratching posts are popular. Who knew?

Flushing Afghanistan down the forgetery

View image | gettyimages.com

Afghans are still dying; U.S. troops are still dying. The U.S. taxpayers are still paying for it.

But what we get for our money is now classified.

In late December, as they do every few months, American military officials in Kabul sent a trove of data to the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction for its quarterly report. Over the years, such figures have told an often dispiriting story about Washington’s enormous investment in the country’s security forces, laying out their size, readiness, attrition level and the state of their infrastructure.

Five days later, military officials followed up with an unusual request. Commanders in Afghanistan informed the inspector general’s office that they had decided to classify the bulk of that data. The decision came after the military, late last year, classified a periodic report that the inspector general has used over the years as the primary source to assess the state of Afghan forces. ...

The excuse for making the report secret is that revealing what they are doing with the money will help the enemy (whoever that is.) It will also go a long way toward protecting the incompetent, the inept and the merely corrupt.

But hey, that's the signature feature of this empire's phony wars.

Purgation and perplexity in the classroom

A PORCUPINE! ... March 21, 2011
Best assembly ever -- wild animals. We get a fox, opossum, porcupine, a red tailed hawk and great horned owl. A porcupine! How ya gonna beat that? At the end of the day. the school secretary says that there was a baby opossum outside her house once and her husband called the SPCA and they came and picked it up. I figure it might have been the one we saw today and probably grown-up opossums warn their offspring that "if you are bad and don't listen to us, you'll wind up spending your whole life going to assemblies of school children."

You get the sense that Tom Gallagher sometimes wonders whether he did something heinous in a former life that earned him a more than a decade wrangling obnoxious middle schoolers whose teachers have taken a day off. Sub: My Years Underground in America's Schools is a sort of enhanced diary of those encounters and a fascinating window on what really goes on in public schoolrooms in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is a delight. I laughed out loud often. Meanwhile, almost insensibly, Gallagher's deeper concerns show through: these schools, despite most people's best intentions, are failing too many young African Americans. And closer you come to that reality, the less easy it is to imagine easy improvements.

On my second day on this job, let's get serious here for a moment. Third period has seven black kids out of a class of thirty and I have to jump start four of them. One has no book because he forgot it. I give him a hall pass to go get it from his locker, but he comes back saying it wasn't there. Another is spending his time cleaning his binder; two girls are drawing. None of this is antagonistic today, as it was with the kids I kicked out yesterday, but these are the only kids that I have to push.

This is a sort of situation that is repeated all over the place and it's the kind of thing that almost no one knows how to talk about, so they don't. For instance, I haven't even really discussed it thus far. I usually don't even keep notes about how many of the kids I throw out are white and how many are black. But if I really get to talking to someone about what being in the schools is like, I invariably tell them it seriously heightens one's awareness of the plight of black America, a topic to which I shall return frequently.

***In one class a black girl with serious vision problems and special large print books complains about the Chinese kid coming up to another Chinese kid across the table from her and asking questions "in their stupid language." "At least we speak another language," the kid says. I tell them both to stifle themselves.

In sixth period the kids have to look up definitions. One of their words is "Martian," but it's not in the dictionary. I give one girl a hint that it has to do with a particular planet. She says, "Pluto?" The kid I gave a referral to is back. He's not disruptive -- other than drinking a can of soda -- which is not allowed in class, but but does no work. I wonder what you do with kids like this in the long run. I tell him he's going to spend the rest of his time in the counselor's office and learn nothing at this rate. He says, "What about when I graduate?" I don't say what's on my mind -- that when he graduates there's unfortunately an excellent chance that a bench in a police station will replace the one in the counselor's office. ***At one point, kids who've been doing nothing but talk say they want to work in the hall, but when the aide indicates this is not done, I shoo them back in the classroom. One says, "We'll do our work." I tell him I doubt it, to which he replies, "You say that because I'm black." The aide upbraids him on that and he sits down and continues to noisily do nothing until the aide tells him to go to his proper seat which he refuses to do, and I send him to the counselor ...

Does this guy actually thinks he's discriminated against because he's black, or does he just say it because it gets a reaction? Actually, although I think he's wrong, I don't know that his analysis -- if it really is that -- is any more wrong than most of what goes around on the topic these days. Certainly there are people who think he won't or can't do school work because he's black, although not too many of them will say that publicly these days. And there's others who'll say that his work is poor because his school or his teachers are failing him. And I don't think they're actually on the mark either, to the extent that they think that the primary cause of black students' difficulties lies in unequal treatment or unequal expectations within the educational system. He's not being sent out because he is black, and he's not not doing his work because he's black, and yet insofar as he thinks that his race has everything to do with his relations with the educational system, he's right. ...***And I finish the day in a tranquil island of Algebra Class where a girl who asks me for help is apologetic for asking for the second time. Wow, is that a change! ... Ms. J [the regular teacher] is black, and I really wonder how she feels about the fact that her two best classes -- the Algebra classes -- have not a single black student in them, but I'm sure I'll never speak with her about it. At least I can report a measure of equality on the racial front, though -- the list of students I have ejected from class [throughout the full day] already includes black, white, Asian, and Latino.

And so the beat goes on. The kids think Gallagher looks like Jack Nicholson; some like him a little, some don't. He "yells at children professionally."

He is willing to suggest that maybe African Americans having arrived in this country involuntarily as slaves has something to do with the black kids' troubles -- but he is not on some doctrinaire riff. He's just busy trying to cope.

Can the adults learn to talk with each other more honestly about race and education? Gallagher offers plenty to chew on, entertainingly.

As the utility of scaring people with the gay menace wanes ...

Here's a little bit more on the fearful fantasies occupying our Republican fellow citizens: Paul Waldman at the American Prospect points to a developing conflation of xenophobia and Islamophobia that he thinks may replace hating the gays as a central theater of culture war:

... a rumor recently began circulating that in many countries in Europe, Muslims have established areas where not only are non-Muslims afraid to go, but where police refuse to go and some version of Sharia law has replaced the actual laws of the country.

... away from debating about what is or isn't happening in Europe, to what might be coming to the United States. Family Research Council head Tony Perkins, an extremely influential figure among the religious right, recently warned that Dearborn, Michigan, and "parts of Minneapolis" are now ruled by Sharia law. In response, Representative Keith Ellison—one of two Muslim members of Congress, who represents Minneapolis—sent Perkins a warm and patient letter inviting him to the city, where he could see that while there are many Muslim Americans who live there, all federal, state, and local laws remain in effect.

While you might think that any whipped-up fears having to do with Muslims are about terrorism, this is as much or even more about immigration. It's an exaggerated version of what so many find disturbing when they see significant numbers of immigrants in and around their communities: that the new arrivals will make them feel like aliens in their own home. People will be speaking a different language, eating different foods, participating in a different culture, and all of it will seem strange and unsettling. ...

The good news: the right is losing on gays, and it will lose on demonizing our latest wave of immigrants, eventually. That's the story of the country.

Noted in San Francisco's Civic Center plaza on a nice fall day. We may be under siege by a wave of tech zillionaires, but as usual, the city by the bay is cheerfully living the conservatives' nightmare.

Fraidycats, the Kochs' errand boy, and Ms. Democrat

So the Republican presidential clown show had its first big meetup in Iowa this weekend and the people who make their living reporting on all these things are enjoying their first outing. Apparently Sarah Palin gave a "bizarro" speech. The rest of the aspirants competed to warm whatever it is that conservatives have in place of hearts. Mostly I intend to forgo this poisonous topic, but I'm letting myself go just this once (for a long while.)

One tidbit that might pass unnoticed deserves highlighting. John Bolton, a crackpot conservative foreign policy intellectual who was George W.'s ambassador to the U.N. (an institution he despises) apparently made quite a hit with his mantra: "it's a dangerous world." Of course it is, but probably less so for citizens of this country, surrounded as we are by two oceans and living under something like the rule of law, than for just about anyone on the planet. But it's the business of the GOP to keep our more credulous fellow citizens scared out of their wits. So prepare for lots of Big Fear.
***A friend questioned me over the weekend about which of these lilliputians I think will end up running in 2016. Just for the heck of it, I'll record an early prediction here: look out for Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. He's made a career of demonizing the largely Black population of Milwaukee, repeatedly elected as the county executive by white surrounding suburbs eager to quarantine the darkness in the city. As governor, he made it his main business to break Wisconsin's state employee unions and fought off a labor inspired recall campaign. He demolished a highly plausible woman opponent in the 2014 cycle.

So what if he's an unprepossessing errand boy for the Koch brothers who can't move an audience? He seems to me to have the right qualifications to survive while the rest of these clamoring idiots and self-referential assholes tear each other up. And bring on Hillary: he's already shown he's a tough guy ...

Of course I could be wrong, but I bet some of the money guys for the Reps look at Walker as plausible compromise from among the circus.
***Speaking of Hillary, I'll repeat here what I always say about her. Once we elect her, I hope she proves me wrong, but I don't trust any promises she may make to move the country in the direction of greater economic equity. She's run with the wrong crowd, Wall Street and Walmart, for too long. But if she's the Democrat, we must elect her. The majority of us can't afford a president who works only for whites and the one percent. I'll even work to elect Hillary. But since I live in safely Democratic California, I glad I don't have to cast my single personal vote for her!