On affordable housing

Yesterday turned out to be a day for me to think about housing. As most observers and all residents of the Bay Area know, we've got too much money, primarily from the tech economy, chasing too little housing. This is an atractive place to live if you've got money and folks just keep on coming. The consequence is that many (even most) low- and many middle-income people are under threat of being forced out of their homes and will not be able to find affordable alternatives.

Three vignettes from my day:

Subsidized housing: I spent the morning with a disabled friend who is one of the lucky ones. For two decades, she's lived in a rent-subsidized apartment in a building managed by a non-profit. Because she'd been hospitalized last year, the non-profit had never completed the HUD paper work that certifies her eligibility for 2017 or for this year. It's absence was a crisis. She's healthier now, so we sat with a social worker while she slogged through it. Beyond establishing that she still can't work and lives on Social Security, the paper work consisted of a reams of forms to sign asserting she'd been told she had various rights that she most likely would never dare assert. She was in a cooperative frame of mind -- and has no choice -- so she signed and helped the agency clean up its work product. The social worker wanted to help my friend, but she too lives within a paper maze with an eye over her shoulder toward an unsympathetic housing bureaucracy in Washington. Nobody gets to keep their dignity -- but my friend still has her apartment!

Cities and contemporary urbanism: The environmental/sustainability writer whose work I most appreciate is David Roberts at Vox. I spent part of the afternoon reading and pondering three articles he's recently written from interviews with urbanist Brent Toderian who led city planning for Vancouver, BC (a very pleasant city from what I've seen of it). If you care about how we can have more sustainable, livable cities, you might like these articles:

• Walkable urban areas can become playgrounds for the rich. Is there any way to prevent that?

• Dense urbanism is great for downtowns. But what about suburbs?

• Making cities more dense always sparks resistance. Here’s how to overcome it.

I can't say that I'm completely convinced by "new urbanism"; the lived reality of a changing city feels messier and far less just than planners seem willing to contemplate. But thinking is happening here.

Upzoning and equity: An organization that calls itself YAH! (Yes to Affordable Housing -- they are going to have to work on that name unless they have a hell of a marketing budget) sponsored a panel of progressive housing policy wonks in the evening. YAH! -- and its panelists -- think better city and regional policies really can improve equitable provision of home places for individuals and communities. YAH!'s statement of organizational aspirations is impressive. They've come up with a list I can live with.

Video of event is here.

Nothing is going to happen without citizen pressure; the power of rapacious wealth drives cities in less humane directions. But you start by getting some people up to speed, thinking, and talking about solutions -- enough little meetings can have big impacts. If people who care about affordable housing organize ... who knows. There's the energy of necessity in this movement.

Voting advice sought

My ballot for the June 5 California primary has arrived. No applause here. I am not excited about my choices in the statewide offices, to say the least.

Gavin Newsom seems to have an insurmountable lead in the race to replace termed out Gov. Jerry Brown. Gavin was a lousy mayor of San Francisco: all symbolic theater, no progressive policy or governing competence. (In this, the opposite of the retiring Brown.) Oh yeah, he was also a big player of our favorite game of Hate the Homeless. I guess he's good looking, if you like tall straight blondes who wear expensive suits. He's led all the polls, mostly by substantial margins.

In the crazy top-two open primary system we've afflicted the state with, the only question in June is who wins a chance to spend millions of dollars running against Gavin in the November election. The two candidates who get the most votes in June get to play out the string. Party affiliation doesn't matter. If the top-two are both Democrats, that's who gets to advance.

The most likely Democrat to come in second would be Antonio Villaraigosa, former mayor of Los Angeles. When he was coming up in politics, he seemed a plausible guy to give California its first modern Latinx governor. People of various Latin ancestries are the largest ethnic group of California. It's time. But Villaraigosa's career has taken a sad political trajectory. In pursuit of the big time, he's made himself the conservative alternative. The cops and the charter school entrepreneurs are his big funders and supporters. These are not people I want a governor listening to. Apparently he hopes he can put together conservative Dems and GOPers who have no choice from their own party to make a run at Gavin in the fall.

California being California, where Trump is an abomination and the Republican Party close to vestigial, Newsom would much prefer to run in the fall against a Republican than against Villaraigosa, even though he likely defeats either opponent. So he's running attack ads now highlighting Republican John Cox's endorsement from Trump and the NRA -- he's trying to raise the guy's profile among Republicans and lift him above Villaraigosa. For Gavin's purposes, running against a weak Republican would be a gift.

The thing is -- in the fall, having two Democrats running against each other for Governor (and two Democrats running for Senator as well, a near certainty) would help create an environment that will be all the better for flipping many of the 14 California Congressional seats held currently held by Republicans. With no candidates at the top of the ticket, we can hope that many GOPers just will stay home, while Democratic enthusiasm for capturing Congress still is running sky-high.

This background leads to my voting advice query: is this the year for tactical voting?

Since Gavin is sure to get the most votes in June (and almost certainly in November), should I vote for Antonio Villaraigosa even though I loath the idea of electing him, because this might help the more significant project of winning a Democratic Congress?

Or should I vote for the best of the also-rans running for Governor, candidates who can't possibly break through like Delaine Eastin?

Comments welcome and urged!

What follows exploded ideals and lost empire

The other day, along with the news that internal scandals and squabbles had deterred the Nobel Prize Committee for Literature from picking a winner this year, commentators explained that the groups' founding charge was to choose the finest literary oeuvre of “an idealistic tendency” anywhere in the world. (The description of the committee's work at the link is quite interesting.)

I hadn't known their charge. In fact, I hadn't much thought about why they choose the authors they have named.

But then, when they chose the Belarussian/Russian writer Svetlana Alexievich in 2015, like most English speakers, I'd never heard of her either. Reviewers in the US refer to her as an analogue to Studs Terkel, a careful listener who shapes interviews with multiple subjects to construct a panorama of life in post-Soviet Russia and its borderlands. Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, the final text of a five volume series, consists of vignettes from the Gorbachov, Yeltsin, and early Putin eras (1985-2010). From her introduction:

Communism had an insane plan: to "remake the old breed of man, ancient Adam. And it really worked. ... Perhaps it was communism's only achievement. Seventy plus years in the Marxist-Leninist laboratory gave rise to a new man: Homo sovieticus. ... I feel like I know this person; we're very familiar, we've lived side by side for a long time. I am this person. And so are my acquaintances, my closest friends, my parents. ...We're easy to spot! People who've come out of socialism are both like and unlike the rest of humanity -- we have our own lexicon, our own conceptions of good and evil, our heroes, our martyrs. ... Back then, we didn't talk about it very much. ... I'm piecing together the history of "domestic," "interior" socialism. As it existed in a person's soul. ... It's where everything really happens.

In this book there are the harrowing stories of people who came back from Stalin's murderous Siberian labor camps; and of traumatized guards who moved west or lived on out on the vacant steppe. There is much from survivors of the Great Patriotic War (World War II for us), the deep well of Russian national pride derived from surviving and defeating Hitler. The thaws and perestroika of late Soviet time are captured as eras of remembered kitchen table discussions of literature and philosophy. In Moscow, such discussants thrilled to protect Yeltsin from a Communist Party counter-coup which might have overthrown Russia's emerging "democracy," only to discover all they've got out of capitalism and imitating the West was stores full of cold cuts and vodka, and always, blue jeans. Alexievich writes of hunger and murders, of suicides and marriages, and of refugees from parts of the old Soviet Union whose birthplaces are now new countries which have spit them out to live as undocumented refugees in today's Russia. These are not easy stories; the implosion of a state is a miserable thing for people involuntarily living through it.

I asked everyone what "freedom" meant. Fathers and children had very different answers. Those who were born in the USSR and those born after its collapse do not share a common experience -- it's like they're from different planets.

For the fathers, freedom is the absence of fear; the three days in August when we defeated the putsch. A man with the choice of one hundred kinds of salami is freer than the one who has only ten to choose from. Freedom is never being flogged, although no generation of Russians has yet avoided a flogging. Russians don't understand freedom; they need the Cossack and the whip.

For the children: Freedom is love; inner freedom is an absolute value. Freedom is when you are not afraid of your own desires; having lots of money so that you'll have everything; it's when you can live without having to think about freedom. Freedom is normal.

... In the nineties ... yes, we were ecstatic; there's no way back to that naïveté. ...

I recently saw some young men in T-shirts with hammers and sickles and portraits of Lenin on them. Do they know what communism is?

I would not describe this volume as having "an idealistic tendency" according to the Nobel committee's injunction. Do truly great writers ever let their readers off so easily? While we're once again being encouraged to suspect and even hate Russia (most likely with cause), I particularly recommend Secondhand Time. Russians are people, survivors of a painful, complex, sometimes idealistic, sometimes brutal, history. We're better people when we open ourselves to what understanding we can of different histories and lives. Alexievich offers us a window.***As is often the case, I read this massive book by ear (22 hours worth!). I would highly recommend absorbing it in that way; the audiobook is a performance in many men's and women's voices, increasing the immediacy of the individual narrators. Another reviewer had a different plausible suggestion: just open this enormous volume anywhere and read a few pages at a time. It's not really chronological; I can imagine it holding a honored place in a bathroom reading rack.

California universities getting the job done

I often complain here that media centered on the East Coast miss that some very good things are happening in California. Sure, we've got horrible problems, but a culture and institutions that might get us through this sad period in the country's history IS being built here.

And I often joke that I ended up in California 50 years ago (from the frozen east) because the state was practicing brain drain: making available a public university system unequaled anywhere.

And we're still doing it -- though we could always do better. The prosaic chart above, from the Atlantic, tells a story: low income students (Pell grant recipients) enroll in the campuses of the California system at a high rate -- and actually graduate at high rates. The UC system could function better (it could pay its faculty better and its administrators less) but it is still serving as the engine of the state.

And at a time when the right devalues education generally, that's worth celebrating.

Oddments from the 'hood

Somebody had an idea to highlight.

In the Mission, a goodly fraction of stores simply closed down in celebration of International Workers Day.

We don't like ICE.

We also protest gentrification.

It's not just the Mission where people have something to say; this strong statement hangs out opposite Ocean Beach.

Resistance: ethical standards matter, even if this clown forgot

It's easy to take recent episodes involving the president's long haired former doctor as comic relief amid the swirling morass of Trump scandals. Sure, the doc looks like he escaped from some back-to-the-land commune. And Dr. Harold Bornstein's purported assessment of Trump's health in 2015 -- "astonishingly excellent," “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency” -- never seemed that plausible. Now we learn that after the inauguration, Trump muscle men (some in U.S. government employ) raided Bornstein's office and made off with the originals of Trump's health records. Those records both belonged to the doctor and were searched out from among other confidential records. Oops. Then Bornstein passes on that he allowed Trump to write his own 2015 "health assessment." It certainly reads like everything we expect from the Tweeter-in-Chief.

But medical ethicists point out, in depth, that, in the service of Donald J.Trump, Dr. Bornstein has been breaking the rules of his profession.

If Trump did dictate the letter to Bornstein, Bornstein’s license to practice medicine should be revoked, said Jonathan D. Moreno, an ethics professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.

“He has said that he lied, that he signed something under duress. Well, that’s tough,” Moreno said. “As a doctor, your obligation is to the well-being of the patient, which includes the ongoing care of the patient. And if he felt he couldn’t go along with it, he didn’t need to sign it.”

... when their patients are celebrities or people who wield enormous power, some doctors can lose their way. Several experts noted pop star Michael Jackson’s ability to get his doctor to prescribe the powerful sedative propofol.

 With “athletes, movie stars or the president, sometimes the balance gets tipped,” said Chris Winter, a neurologist at Charlottesville Neurology and Sleep Medicine in Virginia and author of “The Sleep Solution.”

Said [Robert D. Truog, director of the Harvard Center for Bioethics]: “I believe, in working with celebrities or politically powerful people, it can be very difficult to hold that line. But it’s critical that we do hold that line because the trust of the public is at stake.”

As Trump's next doctor, Admiral Ronny Jackson, found out, getting involved with Trump can leave once honorable figures hung out to dry.

Once again, I'm reminded of one of Yale historian Timothy J. Snyder's list of impediments to destruction of democratic government in On Tyranny:

Professions can create forms of ethical conversation that are impossible between a lonely individual and a distant government. If members of professions think of themselves as groups with common interests, with norms and rules that oblige them at all times, then they can gain confidence and indeed a certain kind of power. Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as “just following orders.” If members of the professions confuse their specific ethics with the emotions of the moment, however, they can find themselves saying and doing things that they might previously have thought unimaginable.

In the Trump era, it's often been lawyers who've been called to choose between professional ethics and advantage or advancement. Diplomatic corps professionals who adhered to their own standards and therefore opposed this president's election have been blackballed from the State Department. Professional ethics can undergird resistance to a culture of lying and abuse of power in many arenas of public service.

The Australian military has passed about a demanding maxim which seems peculiarly suitable to rising above our aspiring authoritarian president's ethical swamp:

The standard you walk past, is the standard you accept

There are standards far more important than loyalty to Dear Leader.

Friday cat blogging

It's not uncommon that I observe a perky critter while Walking San Francisco.

What appears to be sibling rivalry makes a nice bonus.

For the record: episodes in game of "Hate the Homeless"

For decades, San Francisco has been a city without enough affordable housing for its low income residents. Too much money has been chasing too little supply since the 1980s, a crisis only made more drastic by our current tech prosperity.

But hey, we're liberals here! We like to feel good about ourselves.

But hey, we also don't want to step over the people and their belongings that end up on city streets.

Smart politicians exploit our ambivalence by initiating round after round of "Hate the Homeless" in which we get to complain about how unhoused people damage the city we are so proud of -- and often to vote to make these people disappear, magically -- without providing the expensive and difficult solution they need: affordable housing.

Acting Mayor Farrell is running another round of "Hate the Homeless," probably as a trial balloon for a run in 2019 against whoever is elected mayor on this upcoming June 5.

So let's look at the record:

• In November 1992, we passed a law aiming to outlaw "aggressive panhandling" -- though courts said people retained a free speech right to beg.

• In 1999, the Chronicle reported:

  Destitute once again made a target as election nears

• In 2002, the Chron trumpeted:

  Newsom begging bill ready

• In 2003, a rare outbreak of realism, then-State Senator John Burton called out the home truth:

  "What bothers me is that politicians and political consultants are going after the poor for political gain," Burton said. "I just find it offensive. Last I checked, it's not a crime to be poor."

• On April Fools day in 2005, Mayor Newsom was saying

  "Homeless woes can be solved."

• In 2006, a downtown mall opened.

  Police say they've been told to roust homeless.

• In 2007, the city made its enforcement priorities explicit:

  SoMa patrols to shepherd homeless away from tourist areas

• In 2009, the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty spoke up.

  S.F. called one of toughest cities on homeless

• And so, by December 2009, we were told:

  'Sit/lie' law needed to stop bullies on Haight.

  Naturally, we passed a (redundant and seldom enforced) law to outlaw sitting on sidewalks.

• In 2016, Supervisors Mark Farrell and now-State Senator Scott Weiner set up another round of the game, sponsoring ballot measures to criminalize tents on streets and encouraging the cops to prioritize "quality of life" offenses.

  In that November, we dutifully passed Measures Q and R -- although neither added any legal or practical heft to the city's response to homelessness. But hey, we'd done something!

It's probably only fair to San Francisco to mention that twice in the last thirty years we've rejected "Hate the Homeless" measures at the ballot box -- each time because civic leaders thought that impressing us with their compassionate liberalism was more advantageous than punching down on the already beaten down.

We can do better. Unhoused people demand of us who live inside that we do better; they have every moral authority to condemn us. We need political leadership that isn't playing games. Based on past history and likely electoral outcomes, we can't expect anything from a Governor Newsom; he's been one of Hate the Homeless' more enthusiastic promoters. But local mayoral aspirants should be pressed on their housing policies. That doesn't stop after we select the next one. It took decades for the city's human crisis to become as bad as it is and it will take time to dig out of the mess the more fortunate among us have imposed on the unfortunate.

The solution to homelessness is housing

San Franciscans gathered at St. John the Evangelist Church last night to listen to people who'd been made subjects of Acting Mayor Mark Farrell's latest round of the city's perennial game of "Hate the Homeless." People living on the streets have nowhere to go, but Farrell's minions can and do douse them with water, cut up their tents, confiscate their property -- and push them to the next block.

Farrell wants to be real-deal mayor. He's setting himself up to run in 2019 as the guy who solved homelessness. Without housing, cruelty is just cruelty.

Share documentation of the city's assault on the unhoused at SweepsWatch.

International Workers Day 2018

As a matter of history, May Day was initiated to commemorate the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886 when a bomb blast broke up a rally for the eight hour day and both police and demonstrators died in the ensuing gunfire. Socialists internationally adopted the observance while it was suppressed in the US.

But since the vast immigrant marches of 2006, May Day in Oakland has been going strong. The holiday takes its culture from the working class as the that class really is in California: heavily immigrant, low wage, and female.

It's still about traditional labor demands ...

... but it's always also about the security of our undocumented work force.

Sadly, too many working people of color are not secure from trigger happy police.

Placards carried the names of some victims.

For all the seriousness of the cause(s), marchers had a good time.

There's a lot of joy in marching for justice.

Vermont Governor Phil Hoff, RIP

Working for Phil Hoff's failed Senate campaign in 1970 was my first semi-professional effort at electoral politics. Hoff was an up-and-coming Democrat who had shown unusual integrity by breaking early from President Lyndon Johnson's policy of escalating war in Vietnam. I believed then, as I believe now, that we win when we push such figures forward, even if we have to picket them afterward.

I'm doing something I seldom do here, just dropping in the whole of Hoff's obituary from a good source, Daily Kos Elections. They do a good job. I'll interpolate a few comments in italics:

Philip Hoff, whose 1962 win made him the first Democrat to serve as governor of Vermont in 108 years and only the second one ever, died Friday at the age of 93. Hoff had been elected to represent the entire city of Burlington in 1960: At the time, every one of the state's 246 towns and cities had its own state representative. He launched a bid against GOP Gov. F. Ray Keyser not long after, and the freshman legislator looked very much like a longshot. Keyser had won his first term 56-44 in 1960 as Richard Nixon was beating John F. Kennedy 59-41 in the state, and the GOP looked as strong as ever in a state that they had never lost in a presidential election since the party was formed.

However, Hoff benefited from his own Kennedy-esque charisma as well as a big split in the state GOP. A group of party leaders were frustrated with Keyser, and they were furious when he awarded a key contract for the Green Mountain Racetrack to an out-of-state firm. The group created the Vermont Independent Party and nominated Hoff (Vermont allows candidates to be nominated by multiple parties), which allowed Republicans unhappy with Keyser to vote for Hoff without actually having to vote Democratic. Hoff won 50.5-49.5 and shouted on election night, "A hundred years of bondage broken! A hundred years of bondage broken!"

As governor, Hoff successfully pushed to have the state House expanded to 150 members, abolished the poll tax, and increased state funding for education. Hoff also was a vocal supporter of the Civil Rights movement and started the Vermont-New York Youth Project, where black teenagers for Harlem were brought to the state for summer programs. The project was controversial in the Green Mountain State, where many white residents claimed he was just bringing inner-city problems to their backyard. He would later say he'd gone further than voters wanted, but said he had no regrets. Hard to imagine what it must have been like for the imported teenagers, but he was trying ....

Hoff was close to President Lyndon Johnson, who became the first Democratic presidential candidate to ever carry the state in 1964 as Hoff was being re-elected 65-35. Hoff won his third term 58-42 against Republican Richard Snelling, who would eventually become governor. But Hoff would split with his friend Johnson over the Vietnam War when he came out against escalating the conflict. Hoff did not seek re-election in 1968, and he briefly was touted as a possible vice presidential candidate; however, he took his name out of consideration when he learned his friend, Maine Sen. Edmund Muskie, was being eyed for the post.

Hoff ran for the Senate in 1970 against GOP incumbent Winston Prouty, but the campaign did not go well. By 1968, it was well-known in political circles that the governor had a drinking problem, and the GOP very much reminded voters about it. At a fundraising dinner, state House Majority Leader Walter Kennedy mentioned Hoff's heavy advertising and joked, "You've seen him plastered -- all over the landscape." Days later, Hoff acknowledged he had a problem as governor, but said he'd overcome it. Hoff ended up losing 59-40.

The campaign was an exercise in damage control; we had half a dozen young progressive Senators arrive to campaign for our candidate who they viewed as a peer. The most interesting was Indiana's Birch Bayh who shared his own history of getting sober. This was heady, self-revelatory, stuff at the time. Prouty died only a year later, trailed by rumors of alcoholism.

Hoff did get elected to the state Senate in 1982, where he would serve until 1989. The next year, Hoff was the first mainstream politician to back former Burlington Mayor Bernie Sander's successful independent bid for the U.S. House. While retired, Hoff remained active in politics, and he was an early supporter of both civil unions and later same-sex marriage.

I can't say I knew Phil Hoff; I was just a kid doing campaign work and learning the nuts and bolts, much of it from the AFL-CIO's Committee on Political Education (COPE). But I do remember one moving episode: I was assigned to escort Hoff on a sweep through central Vermont towns that had only recently seen their woolen mills run away to the South for lower labor costs. Locals were mired in stunned confusion, angry, and grieving for lost certainties. Phil was magnificent in these places, empathetic, and also able to remind people of the possibility of hope.

Some of Hoff's obituaries call him the "man who changed Vermont", presaging its current progressive politics. He was quite simply a decent guy.

What happened to Stevie Juarez in Gilroy?

Over the weekend we attended the lovely wedding of two young friends in a family backyard in the southern Salinas Valley. On the way home, we stopped for gas in Gilroy -- and drove by this little community demonstration.
Stevie Juarez, 42, was well-known and well-liked in his East Gilroy neighborhood, a father, a son, and a football playing friend. On February 25, Gilroy cops, looking for a suspicious person, came upon Juarez lying on the ground. According to the Gilroy Dispatch:

Juarez died shortly after police responded to a 911 call on Feb. 25 reporting a suspicious person in a residential yard on the 7400 block of Chestnut Street.

When Juarez saw the responding officers, he fled on foot, over fences and onto rooftops of other homes, according to police. When officers caught up to him lying on the ground in front of a home, they tried to arrest him but Juarez allegedly struggled against them. Police said they used a variety of force techniques to subdue him, including a Taser and a carotid restraint. During the struggle, Juarez fell into medical distress and was transported to San Jose Regional Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.

As of April 26, police are "still investigating" how Jaurez died in custody. Officials say officers acted "lawfully" and "appropriately" but family and friends naturally expect to be told more. The Gilroy cops have insinuated that Jaurez may have been involved with meth and pointed out that he had a jail record. Community members think this is a smokescreen thrown up after an unjustified killing.

“(The police) will do everything they can to make him this person who deserved to be executed by police,” said Laurie Valdez, whose husband was shot and killed by San Jose State University police in 2014. “You remember who he was. Make that the narrative.”

The local paper certainly worries that local history shows there is more to be investigated than authorities have let on.

For local activists and the survivors of Steven Juarez, a chief source of danger in some Gilroy neighborhoods is that entity that is supposed to keep them safe—the Gilroy Police Department.

Archbishop Quinn leaves a message

The job of Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco was not easy back in the days when our city was becoming an epicenter of gay demands for full civil rights. While crossdressing men insisted on flouncing around in nuns' habits, the Church labeled officially homosexuality "intrinsically disordered." Then those homosexuals, including some wearing clerical collars, started dropping from a "gay plague" -- HIV/AIDS. A formerly well-mannered, respectable, and devout Catholic city was become an anarchic center of insurgent cultures.

As far as this detached non-Catholic lesbian could tell, Archbishop John R. Quinn (serving 1977-1995) navigated this toxic mix as gracefully as any Catholic bishop in the U.S. His pastoral response to AIDS included allowing the inclusive ministry of Most Holy Redeemer Parish in the Castro District and supporting Coming Home Hospice where so many gay men went to die.

Moreover, the Archbishop was well attuned to the explosive wars in Central America whose refugees and partisans were so much a part of the city. When members of the right wing military murdered Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero in March 1980, Quinn called the assassinated prelate "a voice for the poor and the oppressed." He attended his funeral in San Salvador, a massive popular gathering which was broken up by military gunfire; Quinn reported vividly on huddling helpless within the terrified crowd that hid in the cathedral building.

After his retirement (he lived on until 2017), Quinn turned to studying and writing Church history. His last work, Revered and Reviled: A Re-Examination of Vatican Council I, eventually became available through our public library, so I took a look.

I'm well read in European history, but I don't really have the necessary background knowledge to evaluate the accuracy of what Quinn offers here as historical narrative. In his telling, Vatican I, the mid-19th century Church council, is principally remembered for asserting the dogma of papal infallibility. He describes the drive to establish the idea as a consequence of the upheavals of the French Revolution in the context of Europe fragmenting into nation states which reduced the temporal power of the papacy. He brings forward the arguments of the minority of bishops who were opposed, pointing out how a monarchical/imperial papacy played poorly in those states which were democratizing. And he insists that subsequent propagandists of papal infallibility treat the resulting proclamation as a much broader assertion of papal power than the council actually authorized.

Ecclesiastical politics are as labyrinthine, sometimes ruthless, and often as fascinating as any other. Quinn lived long enough to see the current modest and pastoral pope in office -- the book seems almost a parting gift to today's incumbent. Quinn writes

My aim in writing this book has been to show that Vatican I is not an obstacle to the path of synodality so emphatically embraced by Pope Francis, nor does Vatican I proclaim a sovereign and absolute primacy outside of and above the bishops with a highly centralized governing of all church life. ... History plainly shows that the petrine mystery has taken different forms at different periods in history. ... the dogmatic definitions of Vatican Council I do not foreclose the collegial exercise of the primacy as more fully elaborated in Vatican Council II. ...

... And so, the Church of the twenty-first century, as it embraces and learns from Vatican I, could greatly profit from [Cardinal John Henry] Newman's penetrating insight:

"One cause of corruption in religion is the refusal to follow the source of doctrine as it moves on, and an obstinacy in the notions of the past."

Saturday scenes and scenery: auto hood ornaments

While Walking San Francisco, I'm always on the lookout for interesting hood ornaments.

They are not as common as they once were. Perhaps that had something to do with my anarchist friend who years ago made a sport of breaking off those Mercedes markers. The MG one looks tougher.

The truly old ones aren't gaudy.

This one on a Hudson (ca 1954) conveys solidity.

On the other hand, Chief Pontiac and the Plymouth bird are kind of weird. Once upon a time, cars were far more magical. Soon, if the driverless future ever arrives, they'll just be mechanical conveniences, like washing machines. Bye, bye romance. Good riddance I say.

Teachers won't to take it anymore ...

Ever since the Great Recession began in 2008, states have been responding to shrunken tax revenues by cutting funds for schools. Mostly that means holding down or cutting teacher salaries and benefits.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

Most states cut school funding after the recession hit, and it took years for states to restore their funding to pre-recession levels. In 2015, the latest year for which comprehensive spending data are available from the U.S. Census Bureau, 29 states were still providing less total school funding per student than they were in 2008.

... In 19 states, local government funding per student fell over the same period, adding to the damage from state funding cuts. In states where local funding rose, those increases usually did not make up for cuts in state support.

In West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and now Arizona and Colorado, teachers have had enough of pay freezes and increasing payments for health insurance. They want respect and to be compensated for the undeniable value of their work.

Most of us agree with them according to an NPR/Ipsos poll.

Just 1 in 4 Americans believe teachers in this country are paid fairly. Nearly two-thirds approve of national teachers' unions, and three-quarters agree teachers have the right to strike. That last figure includes two-thirds of Republicans, three-quarters of independents and nearly 9 in 10 Democrats.

... the 63 percent approval rating of "national teachers' unions" among the general public was 21 points higher than the approval expressed for "the U.S. Department of Education leadership."

That difference was driven by Democrats, 80 percent of whom approved of the unions, while just 37 percent supported the Department of Ed. Among Republicans, 55 percent expressed support for unions and 54 percent supported the Education Department.

Until it breaks through, you never know where insurgent energy for justice will come from, but it is often contagious once it breaks through.

Friday cat blogging

Ordinarily while Walking San Francisco, any cats I meet are behind windows. But very occasionally, I see a cat just going about its business.

This Siamese was intent on wherever it was going. There aren't many neighborhoods car-free enough for outdoor cats, but this west side area was quiet.

It did deign to notice the human with a camera when I got a bit ahead of it. Correctly deciding I presented no threat, we parted ways at the end of a block.

A ghost unmasked and disempowered

The arrest of the East Area rapist who preyed upon women in the Sacramento area and parts south in the 1970s and early '80s plunges me into regretful memories.

A woman who I can call a significant acquaintance was one of his victims. She might have become a friend, but the trauma impelled her to flee the state. The crime to some extent derailed her life plans. She's now deceased, I think.

For years, atrocious crimes connected to this mysterious figure continued, and the authorities couldn't seem to do anything. He haunted women's bad dreams.

And now law enforcement has seized him, based on DNA evidence, probably available because of a 2004 state mandate we voted into law. One of the backers of that initiative is quoted at the arrest press conference:

“To the victims, sleep better tonight, he isn’t coming through the window ...”

I know just enough to know that was my friend's enduring nightmare ...

Assuming this nasty old man is the right guy, I'm grateful they finally got him.

And since the jurisdiction is Sacramento, one of the rare counties where this still happens, the local prosecutor will probably seek the death penalty. More killing won't help. Just lock him away!***To feel something of the particular horror this criminal inspired, read Michelle McNamara at the New Yorker.

Yet another test of what kind of country this is

Today the Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether to uphold President Trump's Muslim Ban 3.0. Though somewhat more carefully drawn than previous versions, this executive order essentially blocks entry into the United States by most people from the Muslim-majority countries of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. The government says they are acting to keep out people who threaten our security. But Trump hasn't been shy about saying that he'd really like "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." Just before issuing this version of the ban, he tweeted that the restrictions "should be far larger, tougher and more specific - but stupidly that would not be politically correct!"

It remains to be seen whether this Court wants to make the country party to ugly religious bigotry by affirming Trump's ban.

Meanwhile Muslims in this country live within a climate of increasing threat. The Council on American-Islamic Relation's annual civil rights report documented

a 17 percent increase in anti-Muslim bias incidents nationwide in 2017 over 2016. This was accompanied by a 15 percent increase in hate crimes targeting American Muslims, including children, youth, and families, over the same period.

Of particular alarm is the fact that federal government agencies instigated 35 percent of all anti-Muslim bias incidents recorded in 2017. This represents an almost unprecedented level of government hostility toward a religious minority within the United States, and is counter to the American value of religious freedom.

What's it like for US Muslims these days? Too much of this:

• Virginia: “It just feels like a nightmare. Just a bad dream and we’re gonna wake up from it,” said an American Muslim couple whose apartment was broken into and vandalized while they were out of state visiting family. They received a call about the break-in and returned home to find “f*** Muslims” written on the wall, their Quran torn to shreds, and all their valuables gone."

• California: Two American Muslims who were cousins were held at gunpoint by an automotive body repair shop employee. The employee made several derogatory comments, including “go back to Afghanistan,” “all you [people] are alike,” and “get out of our country.” He then pulled out a gun and accosted the two American Muslim customers.

• Michigan: An American Muslim family had their children taken by Child Protective Services. They requested that the children be placed in an American Muslim family’s home but were told that none were available. The children were instead placed with a strictly practicing Christian family. The American Muslim family was threatened with complete separation from their children if they refused to consent to their children attending church services with the foster family.

• Ohio:The U.S. government denied a Muslim man, married to an American Muslim U.S. citizen, an immigrant visa for nine years. During the course of their unusually delayed application process, the couple had four children together and the Muslim applicant missed an opportunity to accept a full scholarship to earn his doctoral degree in psychology at an American university. This caused extreme hardship to his family. The U.S. Consulate refused to provide the couple with any reason for the visa delay, other than to state that it was in “administrative processing.” CAIR Ohio’s Columbus chapter filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem. Consequently, the Consulate was compelled to grant the man his immigrant visa. In December 2017, he was able to join his wife and children in the U.S. after a nine-year wait.

• Oregon: Vandals spray painted “ISIS” in large red letters on the walls of the Abu Bakar Islamic Center in Portland. New Jersey: The Islamic Center of Passaic County received a spate of eight phone calls containing death threats over the course of 24 hours. The callers used profane language and stated they would kill the attendees and “burn [the] mosque down.”

Globalization, an interconnected world where cultures and faiths and social structures meet and sometimes collide, is scary. It's also here, a fact. Freedom of (and freedom from) religion is one of the pillars that can made a global society work. No wall can roll back the global reality. In its better moments, this country has held up religious freedom as a core principle. Is that true today?

We can house some homeless students ... why not?

Yesterday afternoon as I got out of my car across from Buena Vista/Horace Mann School, a small, slightly diffident, white woman approached me.

"Do you live at this house?" she asked.

"Yes, I do. Is everything okay?"

"Do you know they are planning to put homeless families in this school?" she continued.

"Why yes -- I think it is a great idea," says I. And with that we were off on a long, utterly civil discussion. Suffice to say, she feels the school is failing her child who has special needs and, she explained, doesn't get the program she needs. She believes the school is failing all its children. She doesn't think it should take on one more thing.

I don't really know whether it's true the school fails many kids. I am confident that the teachers over there are doing their best; few people teach in inner city schools except from devotion to the kids. I also am pretty dubious that any of us have good measures of educational success, since I think testing kids all the time only makes it harder to help them learn.

And I do like the idea of using school facilities to house a few of the many school families who have no stable place to live in our crazy, inflated housing environment. According to the school, there are some 60 such kids among their students. There are thousands of students in unstable living situations in the city. We should use the facilities the city already has to reduce some tiny fraction of this crisis situation -- or so I think. It's fine to demand that it be done thoughtfully and carefully, but we don't want the novelty of the idea to overwhelm its promise.

So it was nice to see that three Buena Vista/Horace Mann School parents have explained why they want this to happen in an oped in the Chronicle. Here's how they explain their support:

Buena Vista school can meet its homeless students’ needs now

 Principal Richard Zapien, walks the floor of the gymnasium, where the shelter would be located at Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 school in San Francisco, Calif

We are two moms and a dad trying to raise kids in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Every day we see the effect this is having on families at all income levels at our children’s school — and how devastating it is to our most low-income families.

Last month, one of us saw a mother scolding her two kids not to run in the playground after school. When we asked why, she shared that she didn’t want them to get dirty because they are living in their car and can’t bathe or easily wash clothes. It was heartbreaking to hear.

One of us knows a mom of three who stayed in an abusive relationship because she felt she had nowhere else to go — she and her kids lived with him. At one point, her third-grader started to kick the walls of his classroom. It pains us to think of the trauma that this child was going through. ...

Go read what these parents have to say.

Why are the National Parks so white?

This sharp short video answers that question succinctly -- and includes a multitude of old pictures from America's Best Idea (if you weren't a native person who was dispossessed in order to create them.)