Friday cat blogging

Sometimes Morty is a ghostly presence.

San Francisco murders

The Washington Post published an interesting, if slightly overdone, graphic investigation yesterday examining cities where more than half of murders go unsolved. I've pulled out their map of our city here. In areas outlined in blue, two of three murders were followed by arrests of suspects; in the orange blocks, less than one in three killings led to an arrest. It will surprise no one that Bay View, Visitation Valley and Inner Mission/SOMA are decidedly orange. It surprised me that the Tenderloin seems to receive more effective policing. (Maybe it's a Twitter effect?) Over 11 years, 51% of San Francisco's murders never led to an arrest.

The article does not report interviews with the SFPD, but I suspect what reporters learned elsewhere is not so different from conditions here.

Homicide arrest rates vary widely when examined by the race of the victim: An arrest was made in 63 percent of the killings of white victims, compared with 48 percent of killings of Latino victims and 46 percent of the killings of black victims. Almost all of the low-arrest zones are home primarily to low-income black residents.

... “It’s one of the best indicators of how well a police department and a community work together,” said Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer. “If a police department can’t solve the greatest crime, the most egregious crime affecting society, what faith would you have in that police department?”

[Many police officials] blamed the low arrest rates ... on frayed relationships with residents and on witnesses who are unwilling to cooperate. ... Retaliation is a real fear.

... [In Indianapolis] “I think there’s an expectation that their police department, or those public servants, look like a representative of the people that they serve,” Police Chief Bryan Roach said. “So right off the bat, we don’t look like the community that we serve in that area.”

Detective Marcus Kennedy, 58, who is retiring next year after more than three decades with the department, said he thinks cases go unsolved because some of his colleagues spend too much time at their desks instead of working the streets.

Kennedy, who is black, said his peers also have failed at times to treat people in the community with respect. “Some detectives, you know, not to call them out, but I mean they’ll piss people off real quick. Just with an attitude,” he said.

From Managua, Nicaragua: El Porvenir is staying and working

A letter from Rob Bell, Executive Director

There are an increasing number of news articles about the crisis in Nicaragua. We want to let you know how El Porvenir staff and communities are being impacted. Because of safety concerns, the Peace Corps and other foreign volunteer groups have left Nicaragua, but El Porvenir is staying for many reasons:

• We are committed to our mission: Partnering with Nicaraguan communities on life-changing and life-saving water and sanitation projects is what we do.

• Our staff is primarily Nicaraguan who are known in the areas they work in; so far, they are less impeded by the road blocks than others. Our staff live in Nicaragua, and this work is their livelihood. They aren’t going anywhere, and El Porvenir isn’t either.

• Our work is more important than ever as government funds once earmarked for water and sanitation are being diverted into dealing with the crisis.

Despite the continued effectiveness of El Porvenir and its staff to provide life changing improvements to rural Nicaraguan communities, there have been impacts and procedural modifications resulting from the crisis:

• There are gas shortages in Camoapa and Waslala. Cement in San Lorenzo recently ran out. With the road blocks, we expect the shortages to continue. That might slow us down with project completions, but it won’t stop us.

• Our Managua staff are required to leave early most days because buses don't run after 3 PM. Outside of Managua, there aren’t many buses anymore. If you’ve ever traveled to Nicaragua, you know that buses are a main form of transportation.

• Once a month, one staff member from each of our field offices comes to Managua for a meeting. This month, one couldn’t come because he would have had to cross through 5 of the 38 road blocks set up across Nicaragua. Our staff usually pay C$20-30 (C$ Cordoba, Nicaraguan currency: Approximately C$20 = US$1) to take the bus; in one instance, a staff member had to pay C$200 to get through just one of the road blocks. So far, our staff have been able to get through local road blocks without issues.

• To protect our staff during the crisis, we have implemented increased security procedures to include no travel at night, avoiding areas without cell phone coverage, keeping phones charged at all times, informing co-workers of where staff are going and their projected return time, as well as many other procedures. We are doing everything possible to keep our staff safe.

We are fortunate to continue our important work during this crisis and are truly appreciative of the support we have received from all of you. If you’d like to make a special gift to keep projects moving forward and give hope for a brighter future, please do so at El Porvenir.

What's the point?

This plea is scratched on a bench in immigration court where I sat in during a deportation hearing yesterday. The message is nowhere near as dramatic as Senator Jeff Merkley's videoed effort to investigate an immigration detention center for undocumented children in Brownsville. But both images bear witness to the Trump regime's cruel effort to Make America White Again.

Jose, whose hearing I attended, is the very type of the sort of immigrant caught up in the ICE dragnet. He came to the US from Mexico 24 years ago at age 15, driven by family poverty. He has worked here without papers ever since in the sort of unstable pick-up jobs that undergird the economy: yard cleaning, landscaping, laying down asphalt paving, tile hauling. He described his work history, exhaustively and proudly. I felt as if I was in the presence of a living instance of Marx's "reserve army of labor" -- a man used as hands and a back that can be summoned when the job is too painful or too dirty to attract people who have any other option, and then can be cast aside when his utility to employers has passed.

Jose formed a relationship, fathered a daughter, broke up with his child's mother -- but faithfully provided $200 a week in child support for nine years. He just kept working. He fell into the traps that are poverty. A broken taillight in 2001 led to a ticket for driving without a license (he was undocumented after all) -- but he never found out he had a ticket hanging over him because the notice was mailed to an address he'd left for another job ... He just kept working. In the superheated Bay Area housing market he decided the rent was just too high to allow him to continue to support his daughter, so he started sleeping in his car... He just kept working. Somebody complained, he was arrested in September 2017, and has been in immigration detention ever since, fighting to stay in this country with his child.

Another bit of unfinished legal business hangs over his case. He was found guilty of a DUI in 2014 and funneled into "diversion." Somehow he came up with the money to pay $2400 to the owner of a car he had sideswiped and partially completed a nine-month alcohol education program for which he was charged $200 a month. He claims to have given up drinking. But the program charges were more than he could earn and continue to support his daughter, so after four months he gave up the program. ... He just kept working. In detention, he's still proudly working; he told the court all about his voluntary work in the jail kitchens.

There are certainly legal justifications for Jose's deportation. But do we really want to deport someone who has lived, gainfully and usefully, among us for a quarter of a century and who is the loving responsible father of a US citizen child? Jose is collateral damage of several decades of Congressional inaction on the realities of immigration in the southwest US. Should his life be crushed because successive people with power never got around to creating equitable systems and rules?

What's the point, except to Make America White Again?

Yesterday's hearing was inconclusive, continued until a Stanford child specialist recruited by Jose's non-profit lawyers can evaluate the impact on Jose's daughter.

Aspiring governor in the 'hood

Awakened early by an over-friendly cat on my face, I looked out the front window at dawn to see this: Antonio Villaraigosa amidst a film crew, warming up for a quick take. He looked small and a little lonely amidst the techs and handlers (all white as far as I could see).

Tomorrow's election could well be the end of a flame out for Villaraigosa. The once promising Los Angeles mayor has to manage to come in a weak second to Gavin Newsom in order to be on the ballot in November. He's got a couple of Republicans on his tail; some polling says the voters will send him home.

Failing campaigns are brutal on candidates and their entourage.

Villaraigosa performed his riff and within an hour the little assemblage had disappeared. Maybe you'll see the product on TV?

Why doesn't the US get anything done anymore?

It's easy to lament apparent stasis in this country. We used to be able to build the interstate system and go to the moon. Nowadays, in my own 'hood, it took us 24 years to replace a bridge (the Bay one) proved unsound by an earthquake in 1989. We seem to have lost our get-up-and-go.

Tyler Cowen, a George Mason University libertarian economist and all-round public intellectual, has explanations, outlined in The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream. Since the guy knows something about everything and offers -- highly selective -- facts to buttress his assertions, the book is good mental exercise.

Essentially his thesis is that our society is too comfortable, averse to change, unwilling to experiment, stuck. Well maybe. There is data to show that people don't move as much as they did in earlier epochs, that many measures of economic growth and perhaps living standards have been flat for decades (except for the one percent), that government has a hard time accomplishing much.

But I remain unconvinced that Cowen has been willing to look at all the implications of the trends which distress him. I'll just throw some shade at a few points.

• Perhaps students out of high school and college don't leave their parents' households these days because we've made college debt unaffordable. That could be solved with free college if we really believed that young people and the country would benefit from college. That's how we got free public primary school education -- at one time we decided we needed it and made it happen.

• Maybe it is time to develop an economic framework that does not assume unlimited growth? In our bodies, unlimited cell growth is called cancer. It kills. Might Cowen's precious free market economy not be the eschaton, but rather a primitive way of organizing human societies that is ecologically unsustainable and which our successors will overcome? We don't now know how to better produce and allocate resources, but neoliberal capitalism is a human invention, not a social framework imposed by a Creator. We might just figure out how to do better.

• Cowen convincingly reports that only 10 percent of government spending is really subject to Congressional allocation. The rest goes either to benefits we've decided make for a decent community -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, etc. -- or what we call Defense which means war fighting capacity. Horrors -- if we try to do anything that challenges "complacent" fiddling at the margins, we'll create an unsustainable national debt. That's just bullshit. He never once points out that government income is elastic: we decide its size by deciding how much to tax. There's money in this country, lots of it in the possession of people who already have enough for a good life. Taxes can redistribute considerable amounts without serious harms. In fact, whenever even the center left, the Democratic Party, has political power, we do redistribute wealth moderately and the debt is lowered. Thinking about the country's budget situation without taking the power to tax into account is intellectual malpractice.

Cowen is a smart, glib, guy who has a way with disparate information, but I can't call him wise. This is a not a book to take on faith, but I did find it good intellectual exercise, as, I suspect, did Cowen.

Changing times

As regular readers here know, although I am decidedly not an Evangelical Christian (I'm of the Episcopalian flavor of believer), I try to track how political and social trends are roiling my frequently estranged co-religionists.

There's a rather nice survey article in the New York Times today about how matters of sex and gender are vexing Evangelical educational institutions. If interested, it's here.

But just as I got into reading it, this almost throwaway sentence grabbed my attention:

Moody [Bible Institute], like many evangelical and fundamentalist schools, adheres to a “complementarian” theology of gender — meaning that God created men and women for separate, complementary roles in family and church life.

Yikes! -- we apparently now live in a world in which a particular, by implication contestable, definition of "gender" has to be spelled out to ensure the reader knows just what is being discussed. Twenty, or certainly forty, years ago what is spelled out here would have been simply the nature of "reality." But no longer.

That makes me glad. Our broad social understanding of "gender" is becoming inexorably enlarged, even among people who are neither much thinking about the matter and/or who feel no personal need for changes. That's how change works.

A love scribble for the times from a San Francisco store window

Recently a friend wrote:

I have no idea what to do with the sheer volume of lies ... I feel overwhelmed to the point of despondency...

So are we all. Yet we go on in this time of trial, go on with the daily doing of what needs to be done -- resisting where we can, reminding ourselves that cruelty and injustice are never alright, protecting if we are able, and building toward a more beloved community, always.

The writer of this window note knows. Here's the text, transcribed.

We have mourned enough these past months. We have shed tears for the country we love and the values we hold dear. We have lived in the hollow of what is left behind.

We can not surrender to more tears because of this. We are leaping into grief as if we have embraced it as a form of recreation.

WE ARE NOT WHAT WE HAVE LOST. WE ARE NOT WHAT HAS BEEN TAKEN FROM US.

If we do not cherish what remains, we will all become as nothing.

WE ARE NOT BROKEN. WE ARE ALL AS WHOLE AS WE WILL EVER BE AGAIN. ... and in the end, when we cease to be, we will all become memories.

For now, we were born for these times, and we are TOGETHER IN THIS.

That election next Tuesday ...

I'm no fan of the "ranked choice voting" system we use in local San Francisco contests. Like many well meaning "reforms" to elections, I think it is a gimmick, promising a technocratic solution to discontent with politics. We often don't like the available candidates or feel that none of them deliver what we thought we voted for, so we look for mechanical solutions to what are really problems caused by our disengagement from community problems.

But if you want to explore how our voting system works, this video from San Francisco Elections is not bad.

I learned something else while looking into this. Often San Francisco results don't come out for several days after Election Day. I thought this had something to do with the difficult mechanics of counting in this system -- but no, apparently not. Election officials are waiting to be sure all the legally postmarked ballots are in. Then, according to the Chron,

... once all votes have been submitted, computing the results usually takes about an hour, according to John Arntz, director of the city’s Department of Elections.

Friday cat blogging

Some animal's job is simply to be beautiful. The humans, on the other hand, are falling down on their job of washing the windows.

Encountered while Walking San Francisco.

No on Proposition H and other short takes

A friend asked whether I was going to post my usual run-down of how I was voting on San Francisco's ballot measures -- and I said, no, I just couldn't get excited about any of them.

But on further reflection, that's not entirely true. Proposition H is a truly mendacious piece of garbage that demands denunciation. The Police Officers Association (POA) has been accustomed for decades to bullying Chiefs and politicians to protect bad cops who pay no heed to law or good order -- and getting away with it. Protest against unpunished killings of civilians and the revelation of a culture of corruption and racist text messages within the department led to a Blue Ribbon Panel investigation, intervention by the Obama-era Justice Department, and eventually the replacement of the Chief by an outside professional. In the wake of all this, the civilian Police Commission spent months negotiating a policy for equipping the cops with Tasers (electric stun guns) under careful rules to discourage misuse. (I'm not trusting, but at least they made rules.) This pissed off the POA; hence Prop. H.

Prop H would undermine important policies by the Police Commission and the Police Chief that require de-escalation before use of force.

If Prop H passes, San Francisco police will be allowed to use a Taser on someone who is unarmed and poses no immediate physical threat, or on someone who says no to a police order due to confusion or mental illness. The Prop H law would also undermine much of the de-escalation training the police department is undergoing. ...

If it passes, it can only be changed through another expensive election or a four-fifths majority vote by the Board of Supervisors. It's reckless and unprecedented to strip the Chief and Commission of their power to regulate how a dangerous weapon is used by police officers.

No on H (No to this POA power play) has lined up the entire political community, including our very conservative interim mayor Mark Farrell, all the major mayoral candidates (except Angela Alito who is running for office in some bygone decade), the District Attorney who too often defers to the police, and the current Police Chief. The NO campaign is what I call an ethical shower opportunity; city elites get to improve their odor, cheaply. Let's just hope we the people can kill this terrible POA power grab. ***Okay -- here are my short takes on some of the other city propositions:

• Yes on C: fund Child Care for low and middle income San Franciscans.

• No on D: funding for some kind of housing. Why not to vote for housing? Because this thing is just dirty politics designed to kill the Child Care proposition; if D gets more votes, even if Prop. C passes (though with less votes), Prop. C is wiped out. Kind of the definition of "rigged," don't you think? This piece of trickery is why Supervisor Breed can't win my vote for mayor.

• Yes on F: Funding for lawyers for tenants facing evictions. Now that's a real housing proposition. Landlords won't be able to run over undefended tenants.

DA has declared open season for SFPD shooters

Relatives of two men killed by officers of the San Francisco Police Department held an angry, gut wrenching press conference yesterday to denounce District Attorney George Gascon's decision not to prosecute the shooters.

Standing with her attorney John Burris, Gwen Woods, mother of Mario Woods, spoke from her heart.

"I heard them say they had to stop Mario, no they didn't because they just went ballistic with the gun when our babies were coming home from school,"

"I love that kid and he's worth me fighting for, he was the best of me."

... "I will never let you forget his name, Mario Woods, Mario Woods, Mario Woods!"

ABC Channel 7 news

Jose Gongora Pat, the brother of murdered Luis Gongora Pat, also poured out his anguish. Two officers drove up to where Gongora Pat was sitting against a wall and within 30 seconds had pumped six bullets into the Mayan homeless man.

"Les hablo hoy con el corazon partido. Yo amo a mi hermano Luis, hoy y siempre...y voy a buscar justicia..."

"La policia que mata, que se valla a la carcel...mi lucha es con la injusticia."

The family is also represented by Burris in a wrongful death lawsuit

Public Defender Jeff Adachi spoke aloud the conclusion implied by the DA's refusal to prosecute SFPD killers, if not for murder, even for misdemeanor use of force.

The DA's decision is a warning to the black and brown communities that police officers will face no accountability.

A very British socialist and a very British socialism

A few years ago, a British friend gave me a "What Would Clement Do?" T-shirt and complimented me that I was the only Yank she knew who might understand it. She was exaggerating my erudition; though I'd heard of British Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee, I didn't know hardly a thing about him. And so, eventually, I picked up historian John Bew's exhaustive biography, Clement Attlee: The Man Who Made Modern Britain.

Bew advocates vigorously for the historic significance of his subject:

... it is difficult to think of another individual through whom one can better tell Britain's story form the high imperialism of Queen Victoria's Jubilee of 1887, through two world wars, the Great Depression, the nuclear age, and the cold war, and the transition from empire to commonwealth.

Born in the late 19th century into Britain's comfortable middle class, Attlee was on his way to a genteel conservative life via a second tier public (private) school, Oxford, and reading for the bar, when he took a detour into the London slums (Stepney, Limehouse) and emerged a convinced socialist. Amid the frothy political currents of the day, he took up with the pragmatic socialists -- as opposed to the airy intellectuals or dogmatic Marxists. These socialists eventually amalgamated with the trade unions to form the Labour Party. The Great War (1914-18) pulled Attlee into combat; amid the slaughter at Gallipoli and later in Iraq, he was lucky enough to suffer wounds which took him away while his units were decimated. He came out of the war a respected major, a leader of men, and returned to campaigning for socialism in London's East End. He was elected to Parliament in 1922 proclaiming:

"I stand for life against wealth ... I claim the right of every man, woman and child in the land to the best life that can be provided. Instead of the exploitation of the mass of the people in the interests of a small rich class, I demand the organization of the country in the interests of all as a cooperative commonwealth in which land and capital will be owned by the nation and used for the benefit of the country."

... [In those years] socialists may have remained deeply unsatisfied with the situation in post-war Britain, but the point that Attlee was making was that they no longer had any excuse for failing to participate. He threw down the gauntlet to those who believed they were 'above the rough and tumble of a local election', or above the need for compromise on politics. He condemned the "revolutionary idealist" who rejected democratic participation. This type of extremist would "criticise and condemn all methods of social advance that do not directly square with his formulae and will repeat his shibboleths without any attempt to work out their practical application."

The Great Depression of the 1930s with mass unemployment and near starvation among the working class tempted him toward a less 'democratic' radicalism envisioning implementing "socialism by decree" if Labour should ever gain power. But the rise of fascism in Europe changed his views:

the British Labour Party should define itself as standing for democracy over totalitarianism. Whether that totalitarianism was fascist or communist was essentially irrelevant.

It didn't help that he experienced the communists in East End London as violent thugs, all too similar to British fascist Oswald Mosley's followers.

In 1935, Attlee was elected leader of the parliamentary Labour Party. He was thought a weak choice, but had supporters in all factions. He had led his party to support full self-government for India and had lent his support to the fighters of the Spanish Republic, visiting soldiers in that civil war. The party now put forward what was seen as a "moderate" program:

A Labour government would nationalise the Bank of England, coal, electricity, cotton, and transport. Unemployment would be tackled and the means test for welfare would be abolished.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Party in government was appeasing Hitler abroad and failing to bring prosperity at home. As British resistance to the Nazi sweep across Europe crumbled in 1940, the old war horse Winston Churchill came in as Prime Minister and formed a government of national unity, bringing in Labour with Attlee as the party's leader. Bew speculates that for Churchill in that terrible moment,

... if turning Britain socialist was the price of victory, it was one he might be willing to pay.

Meanwhile, Attlee offered his understanding of what Labour's war aims ought to be:

"It would be an error to think changes are only needed in dictatorship countries, or after the war Western democracies can return to their rear positions unaffected..." [Labour was fighting not only against fascism but also] to make "the world safe for the ordinary man and woman of whatever creed or color," and for the "fundamental decencies of life."

Churchill and Attlee worked as successful wartime partners. Attlee's experience in the 1914 war had reinforced his gut level patriotism and given him a sense of the social mobilization required to win an existential national struggle. The Labour ministers were thought to have made essential contributions to war mobilization. And then -- dramatically -- in 1945 just as hostilities were being completed, the British electorate voted the Conservatives out of power and installed the Labour Party with Attlee as prime minister.

The residue of the war greatly assisted Labour in carrying out its program. The nation had become accustomed to a mix of disruption, solidarity and shared sacrifice. Wartime controls on finance and industry meant that it was possible with minimal disturbance to nationalize key economic sectors in accord with long stated aims. And Labour turned the aroused energy of the nation to creating the National Health Service (over the objections of many doctors) and building housing for the returning soldiers. Concurrently, independence finally came to India, signaling the end of empire though further decolonization took another decade and a half.

No British government of the twentieth century was as active, in terms of legislation passed, as the Attlee administration when it came to changing the relationship between state and society.

By 1951, Labour's leaders, largely men (very few women) who had carried the nation through the war against fascism, were quite simply tired. Voters returned the Conservatives to power in that year; Attlee remained party leader until 1955 -- a run of 20 long years at the highest level of British politics.

Obviously, Attlee's career played a huge role in shaping the Britain that endured at least until Margaret Thatcher's Conservative regime (1979-90) and in some ways until today, though its legacy of enlightened social policies is always under assault. He wasn't ever a heroic or larger than life leader like his contemporary Churchill; people tended to underestimate him, but he certainly helped bring change gracefully to a Britain losing its empire and its world position, all for the benefit of its people. Not bad.

One of John Bew's themes in this biography is how Attlee's socialism differed from pretty much all the other variants that thrived in the 20th century. He was not ideological in the common sense.

For Attlee, British socialism had a pre-history which long predated the theories of Karl Marx. [He looked to the writings of Romantic poets, to Percy Blythe Shelley, to John Ruskin, to Edward Morris .... but] ... aesthetic or idyllic socialism could take one only so far. The nation and the state could not be wished away; in fact Attlee came to think of them as positive instruments of change. [He was formed in part by the American Edward Bellamy's forward looking socialist vision ...] "the Golden Age lies before us and not behind us, and is not far away."

Improving conditions for workers, such as wages, working hours, insurance and healthcare, was the first battle the Labour movement should fight. .. while he believed that it was necessary to insert some science into socialism, there was a danger it would become too mechanical and systematized, and lose sight of the citizens it was supposed to liberate. "The besetting sin of the scientific type of social reformer is his failure to make allowance for the idiosyncrasies of the individual."

For an extended time, this British socialism worked for most citizens. Eventually a rapacious modern capitalism replaced it and Labour for a long time lost its moorings, whether in opposition or in government. As the current Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May stumbles through Brexit, Labour has regained much popularity -- can it again find a way to look ahead? "What WOULD Clement Do?"

A test of civic faith

In this tough season for hope for a more righteous country, lawyers have taken starring roles in resisting rot. Donald B. Verrilli Jr was the U.S. Solicitor General under Obama; that means he was the government's lawyer, arguing the government's cases for good or ill at the Supreme Court. Last week he described our condition at graduation at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles.

... Of course, our Constitution and our laws are just words on a page. And the courts that enforce our laws are just human institutions like any other. The world’s most oppressive regimes have constitutions. They have laws. They have courts. And very often their constitutions and their laws proclaim the same commitments to human rights and to the rule of law as ours do. What ultimately distinguishes us from those kinds of regimes is whether we really believe in those words on the page and whether we make the sacrifices that a genuine commitment to these values demands. What matters is whether we have faith.

Let’s not mince words. Our civic faith is undergoing an extreme test.

I am not talking about disagreements over policy. In our democratic system we will always debate and disagree about policy, and we should. That is how we learn and grow and prosper as a nation. Something much more important is at stake.

We have a President who tries every day to undermine the public’s confidence in the rule of law – who sows doubt about the integrity of the women and men of the Department of Justice and the FBI (women and men whose integrity and commitment to public service I saw up close every day for the better part of eight years when I was in the government), a President who demands that his political adversaries be thrown in prison, who attacks the integrity of judges when they rule against him.

We have racists and Nazis marching with torches in Charlottesville Virginia chanting “blood and soil” like they did in Germany in the 1930s, and a President who refuses to call them what they are.

We have unprecedented attacks on the free press, criticism dismissed as “fake news” and critics threatened with financial ruin.

And some version of this occurs virtually every day, to the point that it is now defines what is normal in our political discourse.

And it’s not just the President. Our political leaders routinely forsake compromise, demonize opponents, and sell out the long term health of our constitutional system in order to gain maximum short-term partisan advantage.

This is taking an enormous toll. More and more people believe that the system is rigged, that our institutions are corrupt, that our Constitution and laws are just words on a page – just tools to be manipulated in the service of selfish interests. This is a test of faith.

Of course, it is overdoing it to sacralize the U.S. Constitution. As the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison insisted in 1832, by accommodating continuation of slavery, that Constitution amounted to

the most bloody and heaven-daring arrangement ever made by men for the continuance and protection of a system of the most atrocious villany ever exhibited on earth.

Memorial Day was originally called Decoration Day -- a day set aside to place flowers on the 600,000 some casualties of the Civil War that ended slavery. That war led to amendments to the Constitution that made U.S.-born males of color full citizens. Women had to keep agitating for another half century. And wherever some could and can, some people who have enjoyed power have tried to constrain the emerging citizenship of their neighbors.

Our test of faith remains: can we make the laws and the Constitution an instrument for greater justice and wider democracy? In our history, when laws have served grander purposes, it has been because we the people made it so. It remains as it did in Garrison's time, up to us.

H/t for the Verrilli speech to Paul Rozenzweig at Lawfare.

Let the winds blow

I have written before at length about community struggles over development of wind energy offshore of Martha's Vineyard Island in Massachusetts. Nothing about the process has been easy. The island and nearby Cape Cod are both populated by very determined environmentalists and very participatory citizens who want all the t's crossed before they warm to a big, novel project. And many of them enjoy enough economic and educational privilege to insist vocally on their views being heard.

But after decades of process, the state has signed a contract for an offshore 800 megawatt wind energy project that will power 400,000 homes in the next few years. The company whose bid won was smart to enlist a broad cast of local Bay State supporters.

A New Course for Offshore Wind. from VineyardWindMA on Vimeo.

This will be the first large wind project off the United States; we'll be playing catch up to many European countries in developing this resource, but at least we're getting started.

And, according to David Roberts, the Donald's backward regime doesn't seem to be impeding this move. In fact, Roberts is hopeful.

Donald Trump has a long history of hating on wind power — at least wind farms that threaten to block his views or impact his commercial operations. (He tweeted against a Scottish wind farm near one of his golf courses 60 times and reportedly wrote the country’s first minister at the time a series of unhinged letters about it.)

But Trump’s personal obsessions don’t seem to be dictating policy in this area. In April, the Department of Interior came out in strong support of the offshore industry. Secretary Ryan Zinke wrote an op-ed boosting the industry and DOI announced two new leases off the coast of Massachusetts amounting to 390,000 acres.

... it really does look like the US is getting into gear. The US Department of Energy predicts around 22,000 MW of offshore wind by 2030. But like so many other clean energy technologies, offshore wind already seems to be advancing and getting cheaper faster than anyone expected. My bet is that DOE’s number, like the vast bulk of predictions about renewable energy to date, will prove wildly below the mark.

Watch out for those camels; they take over

Erudite Partner's latest article for Tom Dispatch is available on Salon.

They are like the camel’s nose, lifting a corner of the tent. Don’t be fooled, though. It won’t take long until the whole animal is sitting inside, sipping your tea and eating your sweets. ...

She warns that U.S. killer drones are spreading, anchoring deadly operations without much public disclosure in the Middle East, Asia Minor, Central Asia, Africa, and even the Philippines. And that's not the half: under Trump just who they are targeting has become less clear and which government agencies are choosing those targets has become more obscure. And now the Marine Corps is trying to develop a drone that won't even need a human operator with a joystick to launch fire and fury from the skies. ...

Read all about it.

Insurgent judicial hopefuls

We've got a novelty on the San Francisco June primary ballot: four experienced public defenders trying to unseat four incumbent Superior Court Judges. This doesn't happen often. The resurrected Bay Guardian endorsements explains why:

Under the state Constitution, Superior Court judges are elected officials, but the law has a loophole: If a judge steps down in the middle of their term, the governor appoints the replacement. And unless someone comes forward to challenge that incumbent, the race never even appears on the ballot. The vast majority of judges in the state who retire or otherwise leave the bench do so in the middle of their terms. So it’s rare that an open seat comes up.

Obviously this system ensures that political insiders, the sort of lawyers who know governors for example, have the inside track on being appointed. There's nothing underhanded about this, but it does tend to mean that governors of both parties appoint people who aren't boat-rockers. And mostly the voters never get any say.

Like most people who think about judicial elections, the idea makes me a little queasy. I don't want judges signaling their political opinions on the campaign trail or, especially, raising campaign money from the kind of people who give to obscure candidates -- rich people with controversial interests. I want judges doing their honest best to apply the law, not looking over their shoulders for fear of an electoral challenge.

The Trump era has reminded me that there can be social value in institutionalism -- that adhering to regular order can be a bulwark against demands from a demagogue who incites and claims his legitimacy from popular excitement.

But the regular order in the local legal system and the courts has not been good, or fair, or honest to a lot of people. Just today, the regular legal order that protects cops who shoot irresponsibly absolved the killers of two local citizens.

And the judicial insurgents -- Phoenix Streets, Maria Evangelista, Kwixuan Maloof, and Niki Solis -- have put in the time in the San Francisco Public Defender Office to know all too much about what the justice system looks like to folks who are in trouble, poor, mostly of color, mostly without powerful, "respectable" advocates. Our PD office is an extraordinarily well run branch of the city government. Judges with their experience would genuinely diversify the local bench.

The challengers are running a campaign that highlights that they are Democrats and that the judges they are challenging were appointed by Republican governors. This is not so surprising; we used to have Republican governors. But the judges they are challenging seem to be registered Democrats, just like the challengers. That is, they are San Franciscans. We pretty much don't do Republicans around here, even at the exalted reaches of society.

I wish the challengers had skipped the partisan appeal which is a bit of a red herring and stuck to promoting the diverse experience they would bring to the local bench. They are experienced, well-qualified attorneys who would bring something new to the courts. We need that. I will be voting for them.

Friday cat blogging

Let's give Morty pride of place today. Here he considers whether the out of doors might be more interesting than frightening. He is easily shooed back inside any open door; in truth, he's a bit of a wuss, a fine survival attribute in a housecat.

Sign of a toxic brand

I know Republicans aren't popular around here, but apparently across the state, the GOP is dying. According to the centrist "nonpartisan, nonprofit" newsletter CALmatters:

Out of 2.6 million Californians who have registered to vote since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, [political consultant Mike Madrid] told me a mere 3.1 percent were Latinos who registered Republican. The stat shows how the largest segment of California’s population has turned against the GOP.

It surely does.

Google as "digital truth serum"

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is forthright about the point of Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are:

... social science is a real science. And this new, real, science is poised to improve our lives.

Count me as mildly skeptical, for reasons I'll outline below. Nonetheless, this book is fun, easy to read, and full of suggestions for more exploration.

He's a good explainer: he introduces the concept of data by pointing out that his grandmother's life experience watching family relationships has likely made her the one of his relatives with the most sophisticated view of what he should be looking for in a potential wife. Good catch, that.

But the data that Stephens-Davidowitz wants us to appreciate, as he does, is the tracks left by of our digital explorations, Google searches, and choices on the site PornHub. We are (usually) individually anonymous as we move about the net, but the aggregate of our web behavior tells an awful lot about us as a society.

The power in Google data is that people tell the giant search engine things they might not tell anyone else.

In 2015, when Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik shot up his office party killing fourteen people in San Bernardino, then-President Obama went on the air urging us all to reject painting any community with a broad brush.

That evening, literally minutes after the media first reported one of the shooters' Muslim-sounding name, a disturbing number of Californians had decided what they wanted to do with Muslims: kill them. The top Google search with the word "Muslims" in it at that time was "kill Muslims." ... While hate searches were approximately20 percent of all searches about Muslims before the attack, more than half of all search volume about Muslims became hateful in the hours that followed it.

...Obama asked Americans to "not forget that freedom is more powerful than fear." Yet searches for "kill Muslims" tripled during his speech.

The PornHub searches Stephens-Davidowitz examines actually seem somewhat comforting in comparison to the hate searches. Sure, people look for some pretty weird sex stuff. But overall

... there's something out there for everyone. Women, not surprisingly, often search for "tall" guys, "dark" guys, and "handsome" guys. But they also sometimes search for "short" guys, "pale" guys, and "ugly" guys. ...Men frequently search for "thin" women, women with "big tits," and women with "blonde" hair. But they also sometimes search for "fat" women, women with "tiny tits," and women with "green" hair.

And yes, he uses search data to conclude that about 5 percent of men are gay, though in most of the country, half of those are still in the closet. He admits to being unable to use any of the varieties of web data to figure out how many lesbians are out there.

And so the book goes on, disgorging fascinating data-derived observations, some of which seem more plausible than others, but all of which seem at least suggestive of potential for future study.

Yet I did not come away convinced that I was being introduced to a new triumph of social science. I've lived at the intersection of data and purposeful activity for years. That is, I have at lot of experience with some of the largest data sets anyone worked with before they had access to Google: election participation statistics and results. When working on a campaign, I've often found myself trying to calm someone waving a new poll: "Hold on! We already know where that district leans because we have the much larger polls which were the past elections." Sometimes results can change, but the underlying data set from which to work has been complied over the years by election authorities.

(By the way, the flap over Cambridge Analytica was an example of confusion over the utility of data. That kind of data-based profiling of voters is always very tempting to some, but apparently as is usually the case, the election pros who got the stuff from Cambridge Analytica found it useless. Voters chose Trump; the election was not manipulated by a sneaky data company.)

What we can do with that big data comes down, in large part, to how imaginatively we can query and reinterpret what we already know. I don't think what we do with search data is any different. What we learn from it will be largely determined by the rigor and creatively with which we choose to question it. And that's not science, as science is often understood using the natural sciences as the frame of reference. Social science remains more a mix of art and science -- modern cosmologists might agree.

For all my skepticism, Stephens-Davidowitz's little book is great fun for anyone who cares about data's possibilities.