Local resistance has already won one skirmish ... take this national!

Here's an off-the-shelf resistance project that people in cities and towns seeking to be "sanctuary cities" can and should get moving on ASAP. You can learn not only why, but how, at TrumpINTELPro.

Those of us who've been around for awhile remember when the U.S. government, in the form the F.B.I., was at war with the civil rights movement, the Black Liberation struggle especially the National of Islam, the American Indian Movement, and the anti-Vietnam war movement. COINTELPRO tried to shame the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. into committing suicide by sending him audio tapes from bugged rooms where he'd had sexual trysts. There is evidence that the F.B.I. had a role in the assassination of Malcolm X. This was not "intelligence" gathering; the F.B.I. was in the business of playing dirty tricks on citizens with anti-government political opinions. Targets died.

TrumpINTELPro explains that the new President has promised to bring this kind of government repression of "enemies" back.

Donald Trump is implementing Putin's KGB tactics; he seeks to fulfill promises of unlawfully using FBI resources by creating a Muslim registry, deporting millions of innocent undocumented people, and disrupting constitutionally protected activism. We chose the name "TRUMPINTELPRO" because we’re prepared to make him own his carnage, and this legacy, by placing it all in his name.

... Many cities across the country have sanctuary laws that protect immigrant community members, Muslims, and protesters. These laws are designed to protect local police officers from doing dirty work for ICE and the FBI. The current administration is attacking these cities. Donald has already signed an executive order threatening to strip billions in federal funds from sanctuary cities across the country. ... We are ALL at risk. As Americans in this moment, we must unite and rally in allegiance to the laws that Trump is so determined to ignore.

Many local police departments have already been pulled into working with the federal government through Joint Terrorism Task Forces. Participation in these JTTFs is voluntary for cities, but most do. Police departments lend officers to the feds; this is how the F.B.I. extends itself into thousands of communities which they would otherwise never have the manpower or information to touch.

[Under existing laws,] the FBI can spy on us, putting informants in our places of worship and harassing us at home or work, even if they have zero evidence that we have done something wrong. In fact, they can do this even if they KNOW that we have done nothing wrong. And, yes, they are doing this to people all across the country. ... Trump's plans for religious and race-based profiling depend deeply on this partnership.

... Here's the real shady part: The FBI usually won’t allow officers to tell their supervisors what they are working on. Therefore, there is no real way to locally track what the officers are doing or to make sure that they are not violating state or city law. ... we have seen that the JTTF is behind much of the FBI's unchecked harm to American residents.

But the federal government is not paying for local cops lent to the JTTFs. We can set the rules for their participation.

Let’s make sure that anytime our local police work with the FBI, it is on our terms. Let’s make sure that our voices are heard by demanding officers follow the laws that we have established.

Protect our officers! Give them something clear to point to if and when the FBI asks that they violate a state or local law. It is the officer's duty to follow said laws; however, in all likelihood, the FBI doesn’t know or care about enforcing them. Still, officers that aren't compliant with local or state law could face lawsuits. Requiring that police adhere foremost to our local law actually benefits the community and the police.

TrumpINTELPro outlines how to get your local police out of the business of helping the F.B.I. to repress dissent. If our local assertion of "sanctuary" for Muslims, immigrants, LGBT people and whoever else the Donald attacks is to be meaningful in the days to come, this is vital.

This campaign can be won. We know that because the prototype campaign has been won in San Francisco. And such a campaign puts all law enforcement on notice that local citizens expect them to abide by the decisions of local governments and to obey the laws. TrumpINTELPro teaches how to take such a campaign national.

Resist and protect much.

It's raining again ...

I should be thrilled after years of California drought, but I confess I'm getting a little sick of this. Running in the rain is a lot less fun than running in dry weather. And when there is lots of water, there is also mud, another deterrent ...

But this is good -- the drought is finally broken, right? I decided to put some brains cells into finding out.

Here's the good news according to the California Weather Blog:

Most of the state currently sits at or above 150% of average for the Water Year to date, and some spots are well over 200%. This marks the wettest first half of the rainy season in many years, and perhaps the best news is that much of this water has actually fallen in frozen form as snow in the Sierra Nevada. In fact, the current snow water equivalent in California is the highest in 22 years–since the memorable storms during the winter of 1995.

Why should we be glad that so much of the precipitation takes the form of snow? Existing water systems depend on winter snows, not run off.

The melting of the spring snowpack determines how much water feeds critical reservoirs in 11 Western states. That water helps sustain Phoenix, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and other cities, as well as farms and mountain ecosystems, through hot, dry summers.

Yet the warming climate points to less and less snowpack in the mountains of the West -- even if we don't have drought conditions. The Weather Blog explains how this will play out in the heavy rains of this year.

... this prodigious mountain snowfall has not occurred because it has been particularly cold. In fact, data show that temperatures to date have–for the seventh consecutive winter–been above average, though not by as wide a margin as during recent record warm winters. ... It’s pretty clear that the huge influx of Pacific moisture in recent weeks, combined with “just cold enough” temperatures, was the real driver behind this fortuitous snowpack turnaround.

This recent experience is interesting in light of expected future changes to Sierra Nevada snowpack as California’s climate continues to warm. Big snowfalls like the January 2017 event will still sometimes occur even in a much warmer climate, but future storms that might historically have been “just cold enough” will instead be “not quite cold enough,” and associated precipitation will be much more likely to fall as rain, rather than snow.

In fact, scientists foresee a drastic rise in the elevation at which rain becomes snow over the next century.

The snow line will rise by an average of 950 feet across six Western mountain regions by century's end. The study, by a team of University of Utah scientists, was published online in the journal Geophysical Research Letters last month.

And warming conditions will do more than lower water run off.

Researcher Alex Hall used a complex computer model to look at what would happen to the Sierra Nevada mountains if [carbon] pollutants kept entering our atmosphere at the current rate.He found that by the end of the century, average temperatures could climb by 7 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit and average land area covered by snow could fall by 50 percent.

Even worse, this reduction in snow would likely fuel more warmth, since as snow melts it exposes land. Since land isn’t as reflective as snow, it absorbs more heat and adds more warmth to the area around it. Hall said it’s a feedback loop that spells trouble for the snowpack.

Sure would be nice to have a government that was trying to reduce carbon emissions and plan for our dryer future. We have something like that in California, but in Washington the oil barons reign ...

Resist and protect much. The quality of the lives of those who come after us depend on what we do now.

Let's give credit where credit is due ...

This was the New York Times teaser on a story about the plummeting appeal of Trump branded products in retail outlets. Short summary: mass retailers are deciding they don't want the aggravation that goes with the Trump name. Having at least half the country pissed off at them isn't good business.

But the headline disguises the real story here. Popular consumer boycotts aimed at pressuring retailers don't just spring up without organization. This is not solely about individuals following their consciences when they spend money. Smart organizations are picking vulnerable targets (hint: any corporation that judges its advertising image is vital to its sales) and letting people know that not buying Trump junk makes one small, mildly hurtful, statement of disgust with our cartoon First Family.

The Times article does name one such effort: #grabyourwallet. This seems to be just a Google list of targets, but in the era of social media, such a list can go far, especially with national, conflict-averse, enterprises. Smaller, regional, and more niche marketers are likely to be impervious without more organization. And if the boycott needs to go more deeply -- saying not just "I won't buy Trump," but also "I won't come in your stores that feature Trump" -- organization requires at least rudimentary means to deliver the message to the target.

Sum of Us has been organizing boycotts of bad corporate citizens for years; among other efforts, they have a campaign that is driving mainstream advertisers off Trump's favorite "news" platform, the Breibart website. That's targeting.

I'm sure boycotts will become even better organized as we move through Trump incumbency. That's what the family gets for trying to loot the country as a closely held commercial extortion racket.

I learned all this in my head, in shivering limbs, and in my feet when I worked on the United Farm Worker Union boycott of grapes in the northeast for several years in the '70s. Si se puede! Boycotts can be powerful.

On the occasion of Super Bowl 2017

Yeah, I'll watch anyway, among my longstanding comrades in escapism via socially acceptable brutality. But the brutality is feeling stale.

From the hood: 'nature red in tooth and claw"

A few feathers were the first sign of something out of the ordinary. We usually have nothing more than an excess of impossible-to-eradicate oxalis.

These outliers were soon joined by far more in the driveway.

Ah yes, there's a hawk in the tree.

A pigeon made a nice meal for the better part of an afternoon.

Of popular sovereignty and collapsing constitutions

Four items briefly noted. Dramatic churn in what we may have thought immutable political arrangements in these days would be easy to miss amid the rush of everyday drama from the Trump regime. Here are some straws in the wind.

• Last fall, citizens of South Dakota passed new ethics and campaign finance rules by a 52 percent initiative vote. Last week, their Republican dominated legislature and governor threw that measure in the trash can -- and even made it impossible for their voters to bring it back by another initiative.

  An emergency provision means the [repeal] bill would take effect immediately and couldn't be referred back it to the ballot. ...
  
  Rapid City resident Michelle Smith said before the [legislative] vote that it's wrong that the voters' voice is being overturned. She cast a ballot for the initiative and came to the Capitol to support it.
  
  "I've spent a lot of time saying, 'Somebody needs to do something,'" Smith said. "I'm somebody."

  So much for government by the people.

• Meanwhile, in Britain, a vote of the British parliament kicked the legs out from under their several hundred year old "unwritten constitution" when they decided that a narrow national popular vote to leave the European Union must override their historic mandate and prerogative to govern through parliament. Writing at Open Democracy, Adam Ramsey and Anthony Barnett explain:

  ... a referendum which must be respected even if it upturns the views of MPs kills off parliamentary sovereignty. It is the people of Britain who are sovereign now.
  
  For a democrat, this is a good thing in many ways. It ought to be the people of this country who have the ultimate power to decide on the most important matters. But, here’s the problem. What we can now refer to as the old constitution had rules and procedures and, at least on good days, checks and balances. ...
  
  If we are to accept the new reality – that the people have spoken and must be heard; that it is us, the citizens of this country, who are the ultimate arbiters, then that means we too need rules and procedures. We need to figure out how we are to organise our new-found power. We need, in other words, a democratic constitution. Because without codification, the abstract idea of popular sovereignty is a path to tyranny. The people must be in charge, but that means we must organize ourselves to ensure minorities are respected, that there are proceedures for us to change our minds, and that the information put before us is honest. ...

  The need is the more urgent since the Scottish National Party won the vast majority of seats from its section of the country and stands against Brexit, for a far more equitable society, and popular sovereignty for the Scottish people exercised through the Scottish parliament. That is, so-called "Great Britain" is breaking up. We probably ought to notice.

• And then there are manifold questions about the viability of the U.S. constitution. Legal scholars Jack Balkin and Sanford Levinson have been discussing this for a decade, long before our 18th century document yielded the present President, elected with a minority of the vote, who recognizes no constitutional restraints. Here are some abbreviated comments by Balkin:

  Demagogues do not usually sneak up unawares. Members of the public often know that demagogues are selfish, unethical, and unscrupulous, but they convince themselves that turning to such leaders is the only way to smash corrupt institutions and solve the country's problems. Once in power, however, demagogues become tyrants, bringing republican government to an end. This is the traditional story of how republics decay and fall. ...How well does the traditional account of the decay of republics match our present situation? The resemblance is altogether frightening. ...
  
  ... The credibility of a demagogue like Trump stems from his promise to shake up the lethargy of government, to bring change, and to improve people’s lives. The source of his power is also the source of his greatest vulnerability. To defeat him, one must bog him down, divert him, frustrate him, waste his energies. ... ... these kinds of leaders fail because people actively oppose them They fail because their political coalition begins weakened and falls apart in the face of constant political opposition. ... Above all, to defeat a demagogue whose power comes from the promise of change, one must make change difficult, and impede the smooth progress of his Administration’s ambitions.

  Democracy and Dysfunction is absolutely worth reading in its entirety; although written by high-end lawyers, it is accessible to anyone who are willing to invest a little effort.

• And one more lawyerly contribution to understanding this moment: Mark Graber, in The Normal Politics of Abnormal Presidents takes up what we need to do now that our constitutional order is failing us.

  The normal politics that generated an abnormal president highlight the necessary repairs that must be made to the American constitutional order to prevent Trumpism.  If constitutional order A in the normal course of operation generates constitutional order B and constitutional order B is a terrible regime, constitutional order A has severe design flaws and cannot be restored merely by a temporary expedient that removes a particular manifestation of political outcome B.  ... If Donald Trump were to disappear today, the combination of campaign finance laws, media practices, party politics and sheer bigotry that produced Donald Trump will likely produce some variation on Donald Trump in the foreseeable future. ...
  
  ... The challenge that the normal politics of abnormal presidents present is finding the resources in the existing constitutional order for upending that regime with the understanding that the means by which this order is upended will likely become the normal politics of the next era.  A military coup that overthrows Mr. Trump provides the foundation for the military coup that overthrows President Elizabeth Warren.  If the left gains power through riots in the streets and general strikes, then opposition to a leftwing government is likely to take the form of riots in the streets and general strikes.  The best solution and the most challenging one is a campaign aimed at mobilizing voters under the most difficult circumstances for mobilizing voters since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

  I agree profoundly with that last paragraph. Not being a lawyer, I'm also in favor of every popular initiative to impede the demagogue -- strikes, marches, blockades, Congressional call-ins, pray-ins, and modes of popular protest we haven't invented yet -- but we need to use the levers of popular sovereignty as much as possible along the way or we won't like where we arrive.

Friday cat blogging

How am I supposed to get anything done?

Enjoy this, part 2

This video is not directed at the people who read this blog. I doubt my blog is read by many Black people between 18-35, if any. But on its own terrain, this video is not that different from the clip in the previous post. I think the people who do frequent this site might learn from seeing that.

Enjoy this

The video is from a psychologist named Glenda Russell who lives in Colorado. I had never heard of her, but I like it. It's snappy and heartening.

When cynicism and nihilism win

Peter Pomerantsev, a British TV producer of Russian-dissident heritage, sought glamour and fortune in the land his parents fled. Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia serves up a vivid portrait of a broken society where only cynicism and nihilism thrive. If Pomerantsev is to be believed, and I see no reason to doubt him, Putin's Russia is a dystopian reality TV show cum sadistic Synanon Game cum indissoluble marriage to a cruel, battering spouse. All this masquerades as an illiberal democracy, complete with chimerical institutions of law and justice. In fact, the autocrat and his captive kleptocrats rule through intimidation and corruption. The picture is incredibly depressing.

It took Pomerantsev a decade of experience in Moscow to suss this out.

It was only years later that I came to see these endless mutations not as freedom but as forms of delirium.

The book recounts his immersion and gradual repulsion; if a reader will go there, reading this account is to ingest a foul despair.

And yet -- and yet-- there's a huge amount of context missing in Pomerantsev's stories, that I can't help believe should be essential to framing any glimpse of contemporary Russia. Whatever nightmare is going on there is the end product of a couple of hundred years of disorienting horror that cannot have failed to leave its residue in a crushed populace: czarist autocracy; a cruel communism that destroyed any credibility for humane socialism; the Stalin cult amid terror; a genocidal assault from Nazi Germany on Slavs and Jews and communists; the unheralded collapse of empire; neoliberal capitalism delivered as shock therapy; Party bosses who morphed into mafia bosses; and an oil extraction economy benefiting oligarchs while leaving most in miserable poverty. No wonder Putin's flimflam is so effective in upholding his rule. Russia is a deeply broken society; Putinlandia is the product of all that history, not just of a particular secret policeman turned tinpot autocrat.

Does the presidency of Donald Trump suggest that the U.S., also, is irretrievably broken? Do we face a similar descent into fantastic delirium? Trump is, after all, an insecure, soulless, made-for-TV character with a greed for lucre and a lust for power. Can he and his enablers substitute cynicism and disgust for the hopes of the majority for a democratic path toward an equitable, sustainable future?

Answering those questions is our fate. And we have some advantages. The places in this country which are not broken, which power some 64 percent of the economy, most of the culture, and which resonate most with our multi-faceted history and diversity, had no part in electing Donald Trump. People with hope for a better future are a majority with some material and many moral assets. The system didn't work for us in 2016; can we work the remnants of the system to reassert ourselves? We'll have to do what accumulated horrors made impossible for a broken Russia: choose hope, work together in all our integrity and multiplicity, and nurture our best values everyday, all around each of us. This is our time.

Resist and protect much.

Horrors encountered while skimming the news ...

The plastic appurtenances that surgeons implant on the chests of women who have had mastectomies enjoy about as much feeling as this decorative figure's nipples. Yet, those surgeons claim wondrous results and get paid as if they were gods.

In a season of appalling assertions, this is right up there:

“Our focus has been on what women look like,” said Dr. Andrea L. Pusic, a plastic surgeon at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who specializes in breast reconstruction and studies patients’ quality of life after breast surgery. “What it feels like to the woman has been a kind of blind spot in breast surgery. That’s the next frontier.”

The focus on how breasts look and feel to other people, rather than how they feel to the patient, speaks to the fact that women are still largely judged by their appearance, said Victoria Pitts-Taylor, a professor and the head of feminist, gender and sexuality studies at Wesleyan University.

“There’s such a strong cultural gaze at women’s breasts,” Dr. Pitts-Taylor said. “It does raise the question: Who is breast reconstruction for?”

If fact, women who go the whole hog on reconstruction encounter a variety of complications and disappointments as the article details.

Having recently accompanied a friend who was planning for radical mastectomies, I've seen how focused the medical profession is on encouraging women to "make themselves whole" by undergoing breast reconstruction. I don't remember whether they told her the things would have feeling. She went without, without internal conflicts.

But why would you want to risk more surgery and pain, if the result was no use to you, only to make you more visually pleasant to others? I don't get it.

A tangled web of inhumanity

Apparently the Disunited States of Trump/Bannonland doesn't love either refugees or Jews.

Readers here probably know that the White House managed last Friday to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a proclamation that omitted Jews from its catalogue of the victims.

The White House proclamation, you may not know, replicates the orthodox Russian reading of historical 20th century barbarities. Some twenty-seven million Russians died in the German invasion (that was on top of the 20 million some that Stalin killed in the 1920s and '30s while forcing peasants into a shitty industrial economy). Western/U.S. memories of the era are different. We think "we" won the war. Not so most Russians -- and their view is not baseless.

... throughout the Cold War, recollections of the Allied victory in the Soviet Union and the West were very different. The West underestimated the losses suffered by the Soviet people, barely recognizing that Stalin’s readiness to sacrifice millions enabled the West to lose fewer lives. The Soviet Union acted oblivious to the war in the Pacific, did not remember the generous assistance of the American lend-lease act, and continued to resent Western nations for their delayed engagement in the war in Europe.

In the U.S.S.R., it was never acknowledged that Stalin and Hitler had made a secret agreement to divide Poland as part of the non-aggression pact they signed in 1939; the Katyn massacre of Polish military and civilians, in 1940, was blamed on Germany; and the post-war occupation of Eastern European nations and the installation of repressive regimes in those countries were portrayed as their free choice of the Communist path.

While the West came to regard the Holocaust as the main tragedy and lesson of the Second World War, in the U.S.S.R., the focus was on the tragedies of the Nazi occupation of Soviet territories and the heroic victories of the Soviet people; the word “Holocaust” was barely known.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russian views of this history began to expand, as did Western understanding of the enormity of Russian suffering. But Putin's autocracy liked the old narrative of the Russian nation standing alone. The magnitude of Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jews was again pushed into the background. After all, Jews barely counted as proper "Russian" nationals.

Holocaust deniers like the Russian history narrative.

And so, apparently do the leaders of our current regime.

Those leaders, as they have made so obvious, don't like refugees either. Or really, they don't like anyone who they think should be kept on the outside of their Big Beautiful Wall. They've got approval from another fan of walls: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The little rogue Jewish state has so polluted the memory of the Holocaust that he can blithely suck up to Washington's Jew-despisers to add heft to his own appropriation of Palestinian lands behind his wall. I guess Trump/Bannon think they have their Jewish flank covered. Not among the Jews I know.

Back in the 1930s, the U.S. did its own denying of Jewish refugees from the Nazis. Our forbears famously turned back a shipload of 937 refugees from Hitler who had made it all the way to our coasts -- but lacked immigration papers. About a quarter were later among the massacred; we easily expunge that heartless episode from the national memory.

My name is Manfred Fink. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered at Bergen-Belsen pic.twitter.com/2LFnB5yp3n

— St. Louis Manifest (@Stl_Manifest) January 27, 2017

Software developer Russel Neiss and Rabbi Charlie Schwartz have created a Twitter memorial to the unfortunate passengers on the doomed ship, the St. Louis.

Sometimes when this country has done wrong, 30 or 70 or more years later, we try to untangle the web with an apology. So it went with the Japanese internment or the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.
Sometimes we never apologize at all: think the attempted eradication of the continent's natives or the importation of African slaves.

In some future, will we apologize to the world because, when we were the richest, most powerful, country in the world, we closed our borders to the planet's most desperate people in a fit of misplaced fear? Some of the answer to that question depends on what we do now.

Can we do better today? Resist and protect much.

Giddy with glee over terror attacks

There's one possible response to the Great Tangerine's (partial, so far) Muslim ban that I think those of us who are furious about this latest violation of national decency should steer clear of.

A NY Times article from Saturday morning exemplifies what I think we must avoid:

The unintended consequence of President Trump’s directive, many experts believe, is that it will make the risk [of terrorist attacks] worse.

... the president’s order appears to address not a rational calculation of risks but the visceral fears that terrorists set out to inflame.

The argument boils down to various more and less measured assertions that a blanket prohibition will thrill the Islamphobic segment of the Trump base, but will hurt "homeland" security.

Folks -- get over it. Weakened security, further inflammatory examples of bigotry and mistreatment of Muslims, are a feature, not a bug, for the Trump administration. Terrorism is wonderful for their plans; we're much more compliant when we are shitting in our pants. They need us scared stupid of imams and other bogeys under our beds.

I never was a "9/11 truther" -- a believer in the conspiracy theory that the GW Bush administration had a role in the attacks on New York and DC. But I was always a "delighter" -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. loved them a good made-for-TV terrorism spectacle. It softened up the country for the mad imperial adventures in the Middle East they had long lusted after.

A few small scale terrorist eruptions in this country that can be blamed on Muslims from anywhere in the world including the US itself would make the current administration giddy with glee. Autocrats love terrorism; when not doing it themselves, they use our panic to shore up their unpopular regimes.

Trump's buddy Vladimir Putin rode to power after apparently using the secret police to blow up apartment buildings and blame Chechen separatists. who he warred against. (The Chechens are some pretty nasty customers in their own right; there are NO virtuous terrorists.)

This gleeful delight in terrorism almost certainly doesn't include all the security spooks who are charged with actually preventing terrorism. Many, even most, are no longer the ignorant bigots they were in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Some still are of course; elements in the FBI, in addition to putting a thumb on the scale for the Great Tangerine against Clinton, harassed random US Muslims in the run up to the November election.

We have to hope that the more responsible spooks in the bureaucracy, and perhaps some inkling that the administration itself might get blamed if they are too obvious about encouraging domestic terrorism, will constrain the Trump administration. The former might be a real obstacle; the latter might prove a weak bulwark if the autocrat feels himself slipping.

Meanwhile, today US airports are engulfed in protest as I write this on Saturday afternoon. A court has issued a partial stay.

We the people are going to have to fix the mess that we the people have made. Resist and protect much.

When much else fails, there are socks

Hand knit socks. Soft and warm.

Erudite Partners turns them out with great delight.

The bed as drying rack became necessary because California's drought seems to have broken, at least here in the north of the state.

Why Trump lies compulsively

This week the Great Tangerine is oozing voluminous doses of crap, centering on falsehoods about crowd sizes and nonexistent voting by ineligible humans. Yawn. All this is meant to divert attention from the actual damage he's plotting and fronting for, but we know that. Still, it seems worth making two points.

1) He really does have to do this because apparently he really is simply an insecure narcissist. It's not a pose. He can't stand being unappreciated, unloved.

2) The only way such a useless, incompetent horde of grifters can survive the crashing disapproval Trump will earn from a disappointed people (only 36 percent approval now and falling already) is to raise a mob against the messengers. He is rousing his dwindling base to attack the media. They are plenty alienated and willing. But they are a definite minority and not likely to increase.

Jamelle Bouie nails the reality:

Donald Trump is not immune to attack. He isn’t actually Teflon Don. He is a novice, an unpopular executive with a deep need for public affirmation. That final fact is his chief weakness—the thermal exhaust port of this unified Republican government. For opponents of Trump, now is the time to exploit it.

I'm not saying Trump is completely weak. The same disapproving poll reports that 53 percent of US residents are optimistic about their own lives over the next four years. When that drops, he's truly toast -- something that will present its own problems.

Meanwhile we resist to preserve and protect as best we can.

Friday cat blogging

Usually Morty ignores the television. But a National Geographic show on big cats caught his attention. It almost seemed as if he wanted to be able to move as smoothly as this stalking wild hunter.

Sustainable municipal power

It's not everything, but it is one thing. I've signed us up for CleanPowerSF, the municipal program that seeks to deliver cleaner (less fossil fuel-derived) electricity to San Francisco residential consumers.

By aggregating San Francisco’s demand for energy, CleanPowerSF leverages this demand to generate and source cleaner energy that protects the environment and supports our local economy. CleanPowerSF offers cost-effective, cleaner energy alternatives for your homes and businesses. Because CleanPowerSF is not-for-profit, ratepayer funds will be reinvested locally in energy efficiency programs and new renewable energy facilities.

... CleanPowerSF generates more of your electricity from cleaner, renewable resources, like solar and wind. Our GREEN product contains 35% renewable energy, for your home or business, sourced principally from Bay Area wind energy projects. This cleaner energy will continue to be delivered to you by PG&E.

Being a mildly suspicious type, I turned to the environmental publication Grist to find out whether this was a scam. According to what I found, cleaner power consists of something called a Renewable Energy Certificate (REC).

... RECs are indeed a totally legit way to support the development of greener, cleaner energy. Let me explain.

All electricity, whether it comes from a solar panel, hydroelectric dam, nuclear power plant, or coal, looks exactly the same once it gets dumped into our national energy supply, aka the grid ... Now, REC providers don’t actually change where your electricity comes from. Instead, they pay a third company ... to generate electricity. ... it’s a nifty system for several reasons. For one, it lets you financially support green energy projects even if you don’t have them in your neck of the woods. It helps make the overall energy mix in the grid cleaner. And it allows you to completely offset your personal electricity footprint by replacing any carbon-emitting power you suck from the grid with new electricity derived from renewable sources.

Since this is a new business, Grist suggests that we check any offer of "clean energy" against a third party verification site, Green-E. And CleanPowerSF is certified; apparently our offset will be 100% wind power.

CleanPowerSF is a joint state/city/utility program, part of California's ambitious sustainability efforts. I like that. Individual efforts aren't going to solve fossil fuel pollution; we're going to have to make society-wide efforts to have a chance. And the simpler we can make it for people to help out, the better. When fully implemented, San Franciscans will have to affirmatively opt out to avoid clean power! RECs may be available from private vendors in other places. Check the Green-E site.

Here's a simple video which does a pretty good job of explaining about RECs.

A day away from writing

Yesterday that was in my jaw. Today it is not. A blood clot fills the hole, sealed by stitches. I'm resting. Back tomorrow.

Media consumption diet

Today a friend offered this:

I'm doing my best to boycott / not listen to any Chump speeches / press conferences for as long as I can. It's a self-preservation thing (gotta watch the blood pressure and anxiety levels) but also a strategic thing. He lies half the time (or more), retracts the other half, and almost all of it is nonsense, not to mention white supremacist, sexist, anti-immigrant, anti-poor people and anti-planet. ... We have to get smart, people, and play the long game. The stakes are too high to do anything else.

To this I respond a loud AMEN. Part of keeping our sanity is controlling how much bullshit we have to sort through.

An article from Politico describes the perils of the Trumpian information environment. The orange con-man is working hard to get into our brains.

What happens when a lie hits your brain? The now-standard model was first proposed by Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert more than 20 years ago. Gilbert argues that people see the world in two steps. First, even just briefly, we hold the lie as true: We must accept something in order to understand it. For instance, if someone were to tell us—hypothetically, of course—that there had been serious voter fraud in Virginia during the presidential election, we must for a fraction of a second accept that fraud did, in fact, take place. Only then do we take the second step, either completing the mental certification process (yes, fraud!) or rejecting it (what? no way).

Unfortunately, while the first step is a natural part of thinking—it happens automatically and effortlessly—the second step can be easily disrupted. It takes work: We must actively choose to accept or reject each statement we hear. In certain circumstances, that verification simply fails to take place. As Gilbert writes, human minds, “when faced with shortages of time, energy, or conclusive evidence, may fail to unaccept the ideas that they involuntarily accept during comprehension.”

Our brains are particularly ill-equipped to deal with lies when they come not singly but in a constant stream, and Trump, we know, lies constantly ...But Trump goes a step further. If he has a particular untruth he wants to propagate—not just an undifferentiated barrage—he simply states it, over and over. As it turns out, sheer repetition of the same lie can eventually mark it as true in our heads.

Ah, yes, today he's selling voter fraud snake oil.

We do have a defense mechanism: we can make thoughtful choices about what information we consume and how we consume it.

I have a confession to make. As yesterday's post showed, I'm a news consumer formed by the Vietnam-era. By that I mean that I have almost never in a long life trusted government statements, especially about our foreign military adventures, but even about most anything. I've worked a long life in politics of various kinds. I've seen a fair number of politicians in action. By and large, I don't consume anything they say either, at least not by way of TV or video. I might listen to some audio or scan the text of a pronouncement, but infrequently. In general, I try to wait a little until the dust has settled before consuming complicated stories. For one ancient example, although I was surrounded by headlines and shouting TVs, I intentionally didn't attempt to understand the ins and outs of Watergate/the Nixon impeachment until after that crook resigned; I waited til All the President's Men came out. Far more recently, I didn't really try to understand the ins and outs of Obamacare until Dems finally managed to write the law.

Yet I've never felt seriously under-informed. As I've written here before, I scan the New York Times for a general picture of what the talkers of the world are talking about. On most topics, the headlines are plenty. Most of my input comes from other sources; these days I'm liking Talking Points Memo, Slate, and Vox. On this blog, I'll usually find a mainstream source for anything contemporary I want to discuss, but my reflections have often been spurred by something I encountered elsewhere, including from the sites on the blog list at the right.

I ignore Twitter. Half a decade ago I assembled a list of interesting reporters to follow. It worked for awhile, pointing me to journalism I might want to read. But then most Twitter users, including the journalists, turned the platform into a playpen for clever self-display, so I've stopped caring.

I do consume podcasts, particularly those from the same sources I also read online. That's because podcasts work well with my running habit.

And I still read widely in that obsolete source: books! Historical experience both alarms and reassures. It can help us survive Trump; after all, we're writing our own saga of defending democracy and decency in a mature capitalist, multi-ethnic, over-burdened society and planet. Let's make it a good story!***UPDATE on how I read news: this morning, the Washington Post has a headline that reads "Trump signs executive orders clearing way for oil pipelines to move forward." That's a story there is no point in reading. We knew he'd do that. Soon enough, in other venues, I'll be able to read how Native nations, water protectors, and friends are responding. That's worth reading.

Graphic stolen from Slate.

Five O'Clock Follies, the Credibility Gap, and the Trump cabal

It looks as if the Trump press operation is going to replicate the Five O'Clock Follies. This label was invented by bored and increasingly skeptical journalists in Saigon during the United States' war in Vietnam. It described daily military briefings which consisted of fantastic stories of exaggerated "enemy" body counts (dead Vietnamese) meant to promise an unattainable victory. (Karl Marlantes has described the pressure put on combat leaders to inflate their kills.)

The bullshit spewed by Trump's flack Sean Spicer on Saturday was such a stew of insult and fabrication that the old gray New York Times called it for what it was:

... at the White House, he dispatched Sean Spicer, the press secretary, to the briefing room in the West Wing, where Mr. Spicer scolded reporters and made a series of false statements.

He said news organizations had deliberately misstated the size of the crowd at Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Friday in an attempt to sow divisions at a time when Mr. Trump was trying to unify the country, warning that the new administration would hold them to account.

The statements from the new president and his spokesman came as hundreds of thousands of people protested against Mr. Trump, a crowd that appeared to dwarf the one that gathered the day before when he was sworn in. It was a striking display of invective and grievance at the dawn of a presidency ...

Okay, so we already knew that Trump is a hypersensitive narcissist who can't admit realities that don't cater to his inflated ego. Let's keep reminding media with microphones their responsibility is to the public and the country, not to this puny cry baby.

But back to the original Five O'Clock Follies ... In the early years of the Vietnam war, reporters dutifully reported what they were told. The shared national effort against dictators and fascism in World War II had made the government something close to a trusted source. But gradually they realized that the U.S. government was asking them to participate in a theater of the absurd. That realization was not broadly shared back home in the wars' early years. But as that era's journalists became more cynical, their stories added to what came to be called the Credibility Gap. Many of us in the US came to consider much of what the government tells us, especially about wars of empire, to be presumptively false.

The Credibility Gap born of the Vietnam years has never entirely closed. We are not accustomed to believing what official sources tell us -- because we know they lie -- especially about far-flung imperial adventures. The Iraq war brought this back with a vengeance.

Pretty much the only time the Credibility Gap has narrowed since 1968 has been when we thought ourselves under terrible immediate threat, as immediately after the 9/11 attacks. When we are very afraid, suspending habitual skepticism becomes tempting. We yearn for a good, honest government that will keep us safe -- even when we know we're not likely to get one. In such moments, we're more likely to believe false assertions if the government is peddling them.

The Trump crew is going to have a terrible relationship with the journalistic media because their boss lives in an alternative universe. And people willing to see it already know this, millions of us. The administration can't and won't earn credibility by telling the truth -- that's off the table from the get-go in Trump world.

So the Trump cabal need to keep as many of us as they can scared and helpless. That need is the source of the dire picture of the country Trump peddled at his inauguration.

The antidotes to this Trumpian worldview are courage and self-initiated action. We resist when we practice courage. We resist when we work with others in many different arenas, even if our efforts seem slow and small, to build the more equal, more just, and more loving society that we want. This is the antidote to what the con man and his enablers have to offer. Let's do it.