Addendum to the Rittenhouse saga

Way back in late October, I wrote that I did not expect that Kyle Rittenhouse would be convicted for his killings in Kenosha. Bias in favor of white men with guns and the murky circumstances prevailing in civil disturbances made it likely that the young man would walk. And so events played out.

But I wondered what Rittenhouse might do after acquittal:

... will Rittenhouse lend his celebrity as an acquitted killer to the white nationalists who have defended him? Or might he have the decency to slink off and do some growing up in obscurity? If the judicial process is unable to name the reality of what went down, that's the best we can hope for.

I am more than a little shocked to learn that, despite a turn on Tucker Carlson's Fox News hate-fest and a visit to Mar-a-Lago, Rittenhouse seems to have been freed by the verdict to express remorse. On the podcast “You Are Here” on the right-wing network the Blaze, Rittenhouse had this exchange:

“Congratulations,” [host Sydney] Watson said Monday to Rittenhouse. “Good job, you.”

Rittenhouse, 18, responded that the killings were “nothing to be congratulated about.”

“Like, if I could go back, I wish I would never have had to take somebody’s life,” he said.

“Well, hindsight being 20/20, probably not the best idea to go down there,” Rittenhouse said. “Can’t change that. But I defended myself and that’s what happened.”

... Responding a listener’s question, Rittenhouse also said on the podcast that he plans to destroy the rifle he used in Kenosha.

“You’re not going to, like, sell it?” Watson asked, suggesting to Rittenhouse that he could make a lot of money.

“We’re just having it destroyed,” Rittenhouse reiterated. “I think that’s the best thing, and that’s what I want to do with it.”

He's obviously been well coached that, even though he has been acquitted, he must continue to claim he fired his AR-15 in self-defense. But it seems just possible that he'd like to retreat out of the glare of publicity and just have a life. That's no comfort to people who cared about the two men dead and one maimed. Maybe he's conning us all ... but maybe it shows more moral and intellectual balance than I expected.

• • •

Note to San Franciscans -- it was great to see that the byline on this story from the Washington Post credited Julian Mark, until recently a stalwart reporter at Mission Local. Good move for Mr. Mark.

They are back!

After being shut down for nearly two years by the pandemic and then for remodeling, story hour at the Mission Branch of the San Francisco Public Library is underway again. When I dropped by the door to pick up a book on hold. this was the scene.

One of the librarians gushed, "We've missed them so much."

Guess the drought has at least one benefit ... The remodeling is expected to go on for another 18 months at least.

Friday cat blogging

She stares me down. Does Janeway know she's beautiful? Does such a question exist for a cat? Or does she just see her big playmate and occasional lap approaching?

Beyond shameful

A US federal agency is denying humanitarian parole to Afghan refugees ... and apparently running up a tidy profit on their applications.

A press release on December 7 from Jewish Family and Community Services-East Bay, an agency which has helped hundreds of Afghans resettle in the United States over the last decade, tells the sad story:

This week, the U.S. government began denying humanitarian parole applications and dashing the hopes of thousands of Afghans awaiting rescue.

Since [August], thousands of Afghans in communities across the U.S. have been desperate to rescue their loved ones who were left behind. The only legal channel available to most has been the dim hope of humanitarian parole. After months of inaction on these urgent petitions, this week, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) began denying them and extinguishing any chance of rescue.

... USCIS finally [has] began processing these cases – only to deny them.

The wave of denial letters received by immigration advocates across the U.S. this week articulate—for the first time—a set of stringent new criteria that will exclude the vast majority of Afghan humanitarian parole applicants from eligibility. According to JFCS East Bay Director of Immigration Legal Services, Kyra S. Lilien, “Redacted copies of these denial letters began popping up on listservs from immigration attorneys across the U.S. this week. No one has reported receiving a ‘request for evidence,’ as is the norm before USCIS denies a case. Instead, we all got these flat denials.”

... USCIS reports that it has received more than 30,000 such applications. At $575 per person, USCIS has likely taken in about $17,250,000 in application fees from these filings, making this process look like a classic “bait and switch” scam.

What does USCIS ask of applicants? “Documentation from a credible third-party source specifically naming the beneficiary and outlining the serious harm they face and the imminence of the harm in the location where the beneficiary is located.”

JFCS likens this to asking for "a notarized statement from their persecutor."

We know the Biden administration is running scared about immigration. They are terrified of taking political hits for admitting brown people to the country. And the Know-Nothing MAGA faction won't let up on the scare stories.

But show a little guts, Joe! 

Biden did demonstrate some courage by pulling out of Afghanistan. The politically easy play would have been to do what both Obama and Trump did: bluster a bit and try to sweep the failed two-decade war out of view.

But there remain human beings, many of whom thought they might have U.S. protection, who've been left behind to be raped, tortured, and slaughtered. And now some bureaucrats will be allowed to deny them for improper paperwork? This is shameful if not criminal.

The doctor is on the move politically and sometimes on the way out

Michael Tomasky of The New Republic noted a data point that I found fascinating; apparently doctors have switched sides in the contentious U.S. political landscape.

Historically, doctors as a group have been far more Republican than Democratic. But bless you, Google, because I learned something researching this column. A survey came out in 2019 showing that doctors were, for I believe the first time, more Democratic than Republican: 36 percent independent, 35 percent Democrat, 27 percent GOP. Among the reasons cited is the fact that the vast changes in the business of health care have made more doctors employees of large organizations rather than self-employed small-business people. 

I [Tomasky] don’t doubt that that’s true, but I feel pretty confident that the change also has to do with the fact that the Republican Party is full of people who think man walked with dinosaurs and who have spent the last 20-odd months in the embrace of a death cult. ...

This smiling image of a generic doctor is what Kaiser Permanente presents when you are waiting for a telemedicine appointment.

There have been additional changes in the medical system which may have a lot to do with this medical political migration. According to New York Times Business:

Female doctors make less than their male counterparts starting from their very first days on the job, according to a large new study. Over the course of a 40-year-career, researchers estimated, this pay gap adds up to at least $2 million. ... Comparing wages between men and women with the same amount of experience, the researchers estimated that, over a simulated 40-year career, male physicians earned an average of $8.3 million while women made roughly $6.3 million — a nearly 25 percent difference. ... Even within specialties, the calculated wage gaps were sizable: highest among surgeons, at around $2.5 million, and lowest among primary care physicians, at nearly $920,000. 

... While roughly the same number of women graduate from medical school as men, women make up only 36 percent of working physicians. ... Offering more paid family leave and more flexible scheduling, [Christopher Whaley, a health economist at the RAND Corporation] said, or making salaries more transparent, could help women earn their fair share.

In a system where the generic doctor is a woman, the pandemic played hell with the lives of all women health care workers, from the top medical echelon through the nurses, orderlies and janitors. Alongside male colleagues, those caring for COVID patients feared infecting their families. Burnout struck many. Some women doctors were cooped up with small children while trying to do their jobs from home. All these women medical professionals were probably being paid less than male colleagues. No wonder many leave all that training and hard won expertise behind in exchange for saner lives.

Updates on the ongoing coup

Journalist Barton Gellman who sounded the alarm about Trump's planned coup before the 2020 election is back with a big, scary report on the ongoing danger. Not fun stuff, but you probably need read it: Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun.

I particularly noticed in this telling who the MAGAs with guns seem to be: angry, hurt, middle-aged and older white men who live in proximity with growing populations of neighbors of color. Sure sounds like too many of the men I used to work adjacent to when I worked in construction.

It's not easy to see what most individuals can do beyond the obvious: help win fair elections for candidates who support democracy and combine with like-minded others to defend them. Before the 2020 vote, organized labor and community groups developed a plan to defend the vote. Good. We can be there as needed.

But there are more angles to understanding our danger than Gellman's alert reaches. I want to highlight two such.

In the Washington Monthly (no pay wall), David Atkins reminds democracy defenders that we are the majority.

Democracy’s defenders have an advantage: They do, in fact, represent the majority of America and are also the main drivers of the country’s culture and economy. Blue counties produce more than 70 percent of America’s GDP. U.S. cities—overwhelmingly blue—are responsible for the vast majority of the country’s cultural and economic output. Blue states are overwhelmingly donors to the states that despise them and seek to disenfranchise them. The nation’s most successful companies are typically located in ultra-liberal areas. And the country is becoming more diverse and more urban every day. Americans under 40 are overwhelmingly progressive. This is the present and future of America.

Successful fascist movements and authoritarian coups generally require not only a fervent base of cruel, fundamentalist backers. They also need the support, cooperation, and acquiescence of social elites. Most of all, they need the public to roll over and go along with it.

If the Republican Party decides to declare victory by selecting conservative electors even when they lose, change the rules to ensure that they never lose again per the Hungarian model, and allow a Republican president unchecked dictatorial powers—all of which are not only possible but, in fact, likely outcomes within just the next few years—it will actually be doing so from a position of weakness.

That intuition of their own weakness is part of what the MAGAs are so mad about.

And wisewoman Rebecca Solnit reminds at least half the population that, in a sense which is heightened by the Supreme Court's assault on legal abortions, we've been here before if we choose to notice.

Appeasement didn’t work in the 1930s and it won’t work now. That doesn’t mean that people have to be angry or hate back or hostile, but it does mean they have to stand on principle and defend what’s under attack. There are situations in which there is no common ground worth standing on, let alone hiking over to. If Nazis wanted to reach out and find common ground and understand us, they probably would not have had that tiki-torch parade full of white men bellowing “Jews will not replace us” and, also, they would not be Nazis. Being Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes is all part of a project of refusing to understand as part of refusing to respect. ...

... What do you do with people who think they matter more than other people? Catering to them reinforces that belief, that they are central to the nation’s life, they are more important, and their views must prevail. Deference to intolerance feeds intolerance.

... This is what marriages were before feminism, with the abused wife urged to placate and soothe the furious husband. Feminism is good for everything, and it’s a good model for seeing that this is both outrageous and a recipe for failure. It didn’t work in marriages, and it never was the abused partner’s job to prevent the abuse by surrendering ground and rights and voice. It is not working as national policy either. Now is an excellent time to stand on principle and defend what we value, and I believe it’s a winning strategy too, or at least brings us closer to winning than surrender does. Also, it’s worth repeating, we won, and being gracious in victory is still being victorious.

"Being gracious in victory" is indeed of required of us should that option be available. How wearing, but true.

Tell the children the truth

George Takei, the character Hikaru Kato Sulu on original Star Trek, and a "resistance fighter" by his own declaration, has shared what was wrong with hiding from children the hard truths of their own history and the history of their country. He learned the hard way.

These days, a premium is being placed on whether white kids might feel bad about their own heritage after learning about things like American genocide, slavery or internment. But no one asks what it’s like for minority kids to learn about these things.

When I was growing up inside internment camps, my parents tried to shield me from the horror of what was happening. I even recited the Pledge of Allegiance daily from a classroom inside the barbed wire. “With liberty and justice for all,” I said, not grasping the irony.

It wasn’t until I was older that I began to question what had happened. It made me very angry, not only at the country that did this to us without cause, but against my own father. “You led us like sheep to slaughter!” I cried. He was silent. “Maybe we did,” was all he said.

That tore at my family. No one wanted to talk about how painful those years had been, not in our household, not in most Japanese American households. To do so was to relive that very real pain. But the truth has a way of pulling you back into it.

I spent the latter half of my life telling our truth, however painful it was. The truth matters because without it we cannot ever truly heal. Without it, we cannot ever learn from our horrific mistakes. To avoid the truth is to avoid our sacred obligation.

When the right tells white parents that their children are being made to feel bad about our history, remember first that this isn’t just about white children. It is about all of us. Japanese American children, Black, Native and Latino children. We owe them the truth, too.

We need to reframe the current debate around truth, not around kids’ assumed fragility. I lived through years of internment and still didn’t know the truth until I came to ask the right questions. Our experience should be more than a thrown away paragraph in a history book.

Without a full accounting of our true history, we cannot ever break the cycle of denial and recurrence. The same system that produced the horrors of the past cannot be reformed without painful examination under the lens of truth. That is what we must demand and teach.

Photo from California Museum in Sacramento.

Magic and more

This morning in church on the second Sunday in Advent, the Christian season of waiting in joyful hope for the divine child, one of our prayers asked: "may every heart prepare you room." The "you" in the prayer refers to Emanuel, God-with-us.

Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age by Richard Beck, a professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas, is about just that -- about practices that humans can and have adopted to make room for the intuition of the immanence of Something More, something divine. I think most everyone enjoys flashes of feeling that there must be something more, something bigger and hopefully better, than our daily, almost mechanical existence. But mostly we shy away from wonder and imagination.

Beck proposes:

Living as we are in a skeptical world, the journey back toward enchantment starts with a disenchantment about our disenchantment, cultivating a disillusionment with our doubts. ... if your entire life has been devoted to putting question marks next to everything—especially the things you hold most sacred—is it any wonder we’re all feeling a bit fragile and anxious? I think it’s time to question some of those question marks.

He urges first that we'd be more grounded, and more amenable to encountering Something More, if we could acquire/reconnect with a more child-like delight in response to the world around us. From there, the book dances lightly through the value of Christian seasonal liturgy and ceremonies, pantheism, Celtic spirituality, contemplative practices, mysticism and fairy stores. It's a broad and, for a quasi-evangelical Christian, quite broad-minded survey of a wide landscape of spirituality.

I enjoyed this book -- but -- if you've read this far you may have guessed there is a "but." I am influenced in my experience of Hunting Haunted Eels by having consumed the audio edition. It is possible that reading this in print (or Kindle) might not have given me such a strong sensation of a sort of Christian bait-and-switch. The reader's voice reeks of authoritative, white, patriarchal Protestant Christian preaching. In a book in which Beck gives ample evidence of being aware that there are other avenues to approaching experience of the divine, somehow I suspect he thinks they all lead back to a sadly cramped culture.

• • •

According to Historic UK the magic eels of Beck's title are reputed to dwell in the convent which the Welsh St. Dwynwen established on the island of Llanddwyn.

... a well named after her became a place of pilgrimage after her death in 465AD. Visitors to the well believed that the sacred fish or eels that lived in the well could foretell whether or not their relationship would be happy and whether love and happiness would be theirs. Remains of Dwynwen’s church can still be seen today.

St. Dwynwen seems to be a sort of Welsh St. Valentine -- a patroness of lovers.

Hanging this book on the story of Dwynwen's well reminded me of the temple of the Bhutanese Buddhist "mad monk" Lhakhang where couples come to ask for fertility. Somehow, I don't think Mr. Beck would be comfortable with the iconography of that potently magic place. Here's a photo that shouldn't get my post categorized as pornographic.

 

 

Not my druthers, but not to be disdained, either.

Michigan school shooting

I don't usually look to Twitter for ethical instruction. But this, from The Rude Pundit, brought me up short.

What the kid did at Oxford High School is horrific. He should be punished. He should not be charged as an adult.

His parents, though, should be imprisoned in a hole under the jail.

Every once in a while, I see just how much liberalism has changed. It used to not even be a question on the left that it’s wrong to charge kids as adults and to do so is just part of this country’s wrongheaded approach to “justice.” But, from the responses, I guess no more.

He's right (the RP's Twitter pic is of a "he"). This particular crime feels so egregious, it was easy for me to forget that I've campaigned against the death penalty and excessive sentences for people who were under 18 when they were guilty of crimes. We know teenage brains have not yet developed all the connections fully formed in adult brains. (Some parental brains may be just as disconnected, but what to do with those people is different problem.) What the kid did is bad enough. We don't raise the level of civilization by pretending this was an adult shooter.

One of the tweet comments captures where I sit on this:

My head agrees with you. My gut does not.

Here's the shooter's mug shot:

• • •

And while we are at it, here are the names of the victims who died:

Hana St. Juliana, 14; Madisyn Baldwin, 17; Tate Myre, 16; and Justin Shilling, 17

More teens.

What's really behind inflation?

There are plenty of opinions, some conflicting.

This may not be the most judicious take on why food and gas prices are rising, but it is a certainly part of the story. Big businesses are raising prices because they know they can. Pandemic battered consumers find no alternative but to pay up.

Business leaders are admitting that corporations are using the narrative of hyperinflation as an excuse to raise prices on you and increase profits for themselves. ... The largest corporations in America have never made more money. ... Corporations are seizing the opportunity to engage in massive profiteering because they can.

The Republican Party is there for the one class it always coddles: plutocrats.

Christopher Ingraham of  The Why Axis thinks he knows what these high profits should mean:

What it says to me is that firms have plenty of wiggle room to create better conditions for their employees — they can clearly afford the higher pay, more generous benefits and more flexible arrangements that workers are increasingly demanding.

The Washington Post's super smart (really, pay attention to her), plain-speaking business columnist Catherine Rampell believes she knows how to describe the current inflation:

The main reason price growth is up has to do with constrained supply not keeping up with booming demand. That is, the pandemic has resulted in worker shortages, supply-chain disruptions and other bottlenecks in the United States and abroad. These problems are happening at the exact same time that cooped-up consumers are eager to buy even more stuff than they did pre-pandemic.

... Arguably, recent U.S. fiscal policy may have exacerbated this dynamic: Biden and the Democrats enacted stimulus payments and other government transfers earlier this year, which gave consumers more cash to spend. Now consumers are spending that cash.  

...Aside from some vague rhetoric about Democrats’ “big spending” habits, though, those checks are not really what Republican politicians are criticizing Biden for. Perhaps with good reason: The spring stimulus checks were extremely popular, including among Republican voters. ...  So they’re peddling “war on Halloween” hokum instead.

The chair of the Republican National Senatorial Committee (the fundraising arm of GOPer campaigns) Florida Senator Rick Scott announced to the Wall Street Journal: "This is a gold mine for us." 

You can always be sure -- the current Republican Party doesn't care who gets hurt, as long as they hold power.

Friday cat blogging

 

This found feline patrols tall grass in the St. Francis Wood neighborhood. Intruders raise suspicions, I think. Might we interfere with her mice? But her girth suggests life is good.

Elder wisdom

Stevie Jo Payne writes on Twitter: "I've been given a second chance. When I was a young man I didn't do enough to voice my convictions because I was a coward."

According to his bio, he was "United States Navy 1961-1965. I am a high school dropout who finished high school post navy, started college at 29, graduated at 57. No sense of humor."

I can't agree with that last.  

The tweet is wildly popular. It should be.

I have no idea if I would warm to Stevie if I met him, but you gotta like his spirit. 

The end of democracy doesn't always require an insurrection

There's a slow motion coup against majority rule being carried out in this country, if we look around.

Here's Anat Shenker-Osorio, a progressive Democratic political consultant, opining on Twitter: 

GOP learned two lessons from 2020: it was too easy for people of color to vote and too hard for them to sabotage the election. They’ve taken concrete steps to “fix” both and we are still pretending they’re a political party.

From the other end of some spectrum, here's Charlie Sykes, the longtime conservative Wisconsin talkshow host who now helms the Never-Trumper publication the Bulwark:

"If people believe there is an existential threat to democracy, then they should act like it. The Justice Dept. should act like it, the Congress should act like it, the administration should act like it, and to date I don't think that they have."

It was good to see the Washington Post taking seriously the ground level efforts of Republicans to corrupt and take over the local machinery of elections in contested states: Trump allies work to place supporters in key election posts across the country, spurring fears about future vote challenges.

In Michigan, local GOP leaders have sought to reshape election canvassing boards by appointing members who expressed sympathy for former president Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 vote was rigged.

In two Pennsylvania communities, candidates who embraced election fraud allegations won races this month to become local voting judges and inspectors.

And in Colorado, 2020 doubters are urging their followers on conservative social media platforms to apply for jobs in election offices.

A year after local and state election officials came under immense pressure from Trump to subvert the results of the 2020 White House race, he and his supporters are pushing an ambitious plan to place Trump loyalists in key positions across the administration of U.S. elections.

Heather Cox Richardson offers a clear summary of the Freedom to Vote Act now hanging fire in the Senate.

The Freedom to Vote Act would standardize elections and make it easier to register and vote, and it would overturn the laws passed since January 2020 by Republican-dominated legislatures to replace nonpartisan election officials with partisans. It would also end partisan gerrymandering, stopping the extraordinary maps Republican-dominated states are creating to give themselves commanding majorities of their states’ legislatures and Congressional delegations regardless of what the voters want. 

Protection of our elections is imperative as Trump and the Republican radicals in Republican-dominated states are cementing their hold on election systems, making it virtually impossible for Democrats to win.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate federal elections, overriding state election laws. Congress can do this. Even West Virginia's erratic Senator Joe Manchin is more or less on board with this; he negotiated it. The lone holdout, who must vote for it to enable the Democrats in the Senate to pass it, is Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema who seems to have sold her soul to conservative donors. Her devotion to maintaining the undemocratic filibuster rule which clogs up the Senate could doom our democracy.

Experience in working elections has shown me that determined people can overcome a lot of election hurdles to get out to vote. It was inspiring to speak with Georgians while phone banking last December in the run-off races which gave the Democrats their razor thin majority in the Senate. These elderly African American women (the people who answered the phones were mostly women) knew they were going to vote come Hell or High Water. Turning them out was only the easiest part of our mission: we worked to turn them into organizers who would make sure every member of their families was going to the polls. Obstacles like long lines and bans on handing out water to the voters waiting in those lines weren't going to stop them. They expected the system to try to keep them from voting and they weren't about to be stopped by any interference.

But if the systems that administer and tally votes are corrupted, it won't matter who got the most votes. Helping people find their way to the polls won't matter. That's the shape of the GOPers' slow motion coup: they can't win a nationwide majority contest when people are paying attention. Contemporary Republicans cower in fear of an aggressive racist demagogue who thrives on division and hate and wants to use the U.S. government to enrich himself and his family. Many GOPers have become imitators. If U.S. democracy goes down this way, it will be a sad and even globally disastrous end.

No more graveyard shifts?

The Great Resignation -- maybe we should call what we're living the Great Labor Discontinuity -- has confused and confounded economists. Having been given some involuntary breaks by the pandemic from the endless of treadmill of meaningless jobs, some people seem to be thinking differently about work. And some are no longer willing to do jobs that destroy  body, mind and spirit.

Erudite Partner asks: An End to Shift Work?

Your doctor can’t solve your shift work issue because, ultimately, it’s not an individual problem. It’s an economic and an ethical one.

There will always be some work that must be performed while most people are sleeping, including healthcare, security, and emergency services, among others. But most shift work gets done not because life depends upon it, but because we’ve been taught to expect our patio furniture on demand. As long as advertising and the grow-or-die logic of capitalism keep stoking the desire for objects we don’t really need, may not even really want, and will sooner or later toss on a garbage pile in this or some other country, truckers and warehouse workers will keep damaging their health.

We are not even at the beginning of seeing what the Discontinuity might imply.

Priorities

Click to enlarge.

According to the wisdom of economic guru John Maynard Keynes, "Anything we can actually do we can afford."

It's abundantly clear what we choose to do.

No further comment. By way of congressional Representative Pramila Jayapal.

A new German government, climate crisis, and migration

Economic historian Adam Tooze has passed along elements of the platform adopted by the "traffic-light coalition" composing the newly elected German government. Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats are out. The Social Democrats (the red element), the Greens, and the Free Democratic Party (the cautionary yellow right of center), are in. Olaf Scholz is the new Chancellor -- federal Prime Minister, roughly speaking. 

For anyone who retains an impression of Germany as a the homeland of European regressive nationalism and conservatism -- and after Nazism how could we not? -- this description of the German government's intentions is simply stunning:

“We are united by an understanding of Germany as a diverse society of immigration.” 

In the 1970s-1990s, when the current generation of German leaders were growing up, any such statement would have been politically explosive. 

They continue: “Migration has been and is today a part of the history of our country. Immigrants, their children and grand-children have helped to build our country and shape it. The 60th anniversary of the guest-worker treaty with Turkey is symbolic of that.” 

Like the last Red-Green government, this one promises to modernize Germany’s citizenship laws. This time it will permit multiple citizenship. Naturalization will normally occur after 5 years, or 3 years in the case of exceptional integration performances (sic) (Integrationsleistungen) ... 

Any mention of the concept of ‘race’ will be expunged from the German constitution.

Outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel nearly capsized her government by responding generously to the refugee crisis created by war in Syria. The increasing strength of the proto-Nazi ADF party followed; Merkel was forced to backtrack. The new coalition appears ready to try again to incorporate migrants.

Tooze identifies the underlying and urgent emergency that this new German coalition understands:

This is a government that embraces the climate challenge and has the political backing to do something about it. It has no excuses. Germany is pivotal to Europe’s climate ambitions. And, more generally, the success or failure of this government will tell us a lot about the capacity of sophisticated democracies around the world to adapt to our 21st-century polycrisis.

Climate change prompts new challenges to states and to modern civilization itself from the natural world -- drought, fire, frost, flood, pestilence, and more. Climate change makes civil society and governments unstable. Climate change leads to forced human migration and increased flows of refugees at national borders. These are the great challenges of the 21st century.

• • •

This banner hung on Madrid's City Hall. Why in English?, I don't know. Spain serves as a major entry point for migrants to the European Union, often unwillingly.

British politician David Miliband heads the International Rescue Committee which provides aid to people affected by humanitarian crises all over the world, including people displaced by climate crisis. Founded by the refugee Albert Einstein, the organization got its start in Europe during World War II providing assistance to displaced people. Miliband told the Washington Post that people in the United States could use some simple education about the world's migration challenge.

What do you think people tend to misunderstand about refugee crises, about refugees? 

It’s really important that those of us in America or Europe remember that nearly 90 percent of the world’s refugees are in poor countries, not in rich countries. It’s a myth that Western Europe or the U.S. are bearing an unsustainable burden of refugees; the vast bulk of refugees are in low- or middle-income countries.  

Myth number two is that refugees are displaced for a short period of time, when in fact the averages are closer to 20 years than five.  

Myth number three — this not a short list — is that this is all about young men on the move, when it’s families, with about half of the world’s refugees under the age of 18.  

And myth number four is that refugees are in camps, whereas we know that 60 percent of refugees in the modern era are in urban areas — like Beirut, Istanbul, Islamabad. 

... So we need to change the way we do humanitarian aid. We need to provide education as much as we need to provide water and sanitation. And we’re very clear that a feminist approach is important, not just because two-thirds of our clients are women and girls, but because women and girls face double, triple, multiple vulnerabilities and inequalities, that the structures of power that face them are deeply unequal, and we need to take that into account.

There is nothing in the way the world is currently organized that suggests that the world will see fewer refugees in coming years. Local and international conflicts over power and resources will force people to flee. Climate change guarantees more people will be leaving their homes, both voluntarily and involuntarily. Those of us lucky enough not to be displaced, those of us in rich countries, need to face up to this prospect and figure out what we can do for the less lucky. Our own countries can become better for a well-managed, humane migration influx.

SFPD crime notice larded with self-congratulation

On my Thanksgiving Day walk around the neighborhood, I saw this weathered flyer stapled to a phone pole.

Click to enlarge. It's worth reading.

In case you didn't bother to enlarge, this reports that a homeless man was found burned in his sleeping bag nearby. The notice goes on to report that, after transport to General Hospital, the injured man died.

It begs for assistance in solving the crime. 

The Chronicle ran a cursory report of the death. I found no report of any subsequent arrest -- I may have missed something.

But that sad atrocity is not really the impetus for this post. I write to call attention to what appears below the plea for assistance:

Click to enlarge. This one is essential reading.

The SFPD used the murder notice to toot its own horn. 

The San Francisco Police Department stands for safety and respect for all. Hailed by the New York Times as a major city department "where police reform has worked," SFPD continues to break ground with its voluntary Collaborative Reform Initiative ...

There's a link to a police website puffing their "voluntary" compliance. 

No mention that under Trump, the Justice Department dropped efforts to force compliance with 272 needed reforms identified in 2016. The California (state) Department of Justice took up the case and, in December 2018, "found the SFPD to be 'not in substantial compliance.'" 

Many of the areas in which the SFPD was found wanting are substantive. They concern the prohibition of a dangerous chokehold once used by SFPD officers; the SFPD’s communication and reporting systems around officer-involved shootings; and informing the public about how to report officer misconduct.

The review was summarized in a Dec. 28 letter from the Cal DOJ to Chief Bill Scott. It found the department to be out of compliance with six of the 13 recommendations mentioned in the letter. The 2016 federal review of the department made 272 total recommendations in the wake of several controversial police shootings and a scandal in which officers exchanged racist, homophobic, and sexist text messages. More than two years later, the police department is still working to meet the recommendations.

By last summer, it was not clear that the SFPD had made substantive changes. Reforms were proceeding slowly.

 “The big picture is SFPD seems much more committed to being perceived as accomplishing significant police reform, than actually doing the most important pieces of it,” [former ACLU police practices attorney John] Crew said of the department’s update. 

... Spanning from one to four years, the timeline gives the impression that several critical recommendations like regular employee evaluations and a commitment “to reviewing and understanding the reasons for the disparate use of deadly force” will not be implemented anytime soon. And the timeline for the reforms has already been pushed back repeatedly, so these estimates provided by the SFPD are uncertain. 

Meanwhile, here in the city as we live it, the SFPD continues to embarrass itself. One of the top headlines in the Chronicle today reads Experts baffled by video showing San Francisco police apparently watching as burglary unfolds. You got to read it to believe it -- corruption or just napping?

No wonder SFPD wants to toot its horn on murder notices on telephone poles ...

• • •

The murder victim was named Luis Temaj. No arrests appear to have been made in this case.

Friday cat blogging: Thanksgiving edition

In which Janeway helps us set up the dining table.

 

Before we unfold the table cloth, we place a more-or-less impermeable oil cloth directly over the wood. Janeway wants to know what's under there ...

 

She burrowed all the way across this new cave ...

 

What an exciting new place to play we've made for her.

We spread out the covering table cloth ...

Once the table is set, there's more to explore. Fortunately, she's not the sort of cat who leaves her hair wherever she goes. We shoo ... she returns when our backs are turned. 

The unfamiliar presence of guests scares her off during the feast. Afterward, she settled on my lap, all sweetness. She had had an exciting few hours ...

ADDENDUM: Janeway surveys the trimming of duck remains for soup ...

When the turkey won the day ...

On this day, so lethal to turkeys, it seems right to raise up a brave (and irritable) turkey which achieved its purpose.

Some years ago, while running in Marin County, I intruded on this fellow's territory. Presumably there was a turkey hen and little ones somewhere near by.

I had bare legs. A feinted kick and fast departure seemed smart and off I sprinted. Score one for daddy turkey!

• • •

We have much to be thankful for. In two high profile murders of Black men, in the past year the apparatus of law has been able to take notice of the crimes. And Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, is president. Let us give thanks for living to fight another day ...

A terrible courage, craven greed and women's solidarity

Here's a headline I wish I'd written, but didn't quote when I excerpted from the article's content: Overthrowing Democracy Requires Overthrowing Feminism? This came back to me watching the fate of #MeToo-proclaiming Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai -- isn't her brave declaration and the subsequent behavior of the people and institutions around her a succinct demonstration of where much boldness for freedom can be found?

Look at the scenario and cast of characters:

• Peng tells the world she was sexually imposed upon by a high-ranking Chinese Communist Party leader.

• Within 30 minutes, Peng's social media post is disappeared by the government censorship apparatus.

• Next Peng herself is disappeared.

• The international Women's Tennis Association (WTA), the governing body of her sport, demands Peng's freedom and expresses willingness to forgo playing in China, a huge market for their sport, if Peng is not freed. That would be 10 tournaments down the drain next year.

• The Chinese government issues a transparently false email and some images claiming that Peng is A-Okay.

• Prominent international women tennis stars like Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams speak out about Peng. The current world No. 1 male tennis star Novak Djokovic chimes in as well.

• Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee, participates in a strained video call with Peng. He reports "she prefers to spend her time with friends and family right now." He comes away assuring the world that nothing will get in the way of his organization's lucrative Winter Olympics in China in February. All's well as far the IOC is concerned.

• All is not well as far as the WTA is concerned. The WTA said the recent videos "don't alleviate or address the WTA's concern about her wellbeing and ability to communicate without censorship or coercion," per the BBC.

• Lord Sebastian Coe, President of World Athletics, chimes in to support the IOC's brush off of Peng. Male sports moguls stick together.

Sadly, it's unlikely any of this ends well for Peng.  But it's sure a clear cut demonstration of who in sport is all about money and who cares about justice for women. The Chinese government and male sports bosses appear very much in sync with each other. As usual, the athletes, most especially the women, are just products to merchandise and stoke bureaucratic egos on the way to the bank.