Nightmare for anti-militarists

Kevin Drum makes a plausible prediction about next year's presidential race (once we get through the foolishness and the Republicans settle on someone):

Right now, everyone thinks the Iran treaty is going to be the big foreign policy issue of next year's election. Maybe. But I think interest will fade after it's a done deal. Instead, ISIS will probably dominate the conversation, and Republicans will have to put up or shut up. If President Obama's limited strategy of training and airstrikes isn't working, are they willing to commit to a large-scale intervention using ground troops? That's likely to be the big foreign policy issue of the election.

He's riffing off Professor Stephen Walt's sensible observation that the entity called ISIS, or ISIL, or Islamic State or Daesh seems to be successfully establishing itself as the effective government of a goodly swath of Sunni Muslim former Syria and Iraq and isn't going to be dislodged by U.S. bombing and ineffectual, fragmented enemies. As Sarah Chayes would highlight, at present it has banished a humiliating, exhausting culture of corruption from its conquests and that would give any governing authority a novel legitimacy. Even the New York Times documents this:

... its officials are apparently resistant to bribes, and in that way, at least, it has outdone the corrupt Syrian and Iraqi governments it routed, residents and experts say.

“You can travel from Raqqa to Mosul and no one will dare to stop you even if you carry $1 million,” said Bilal, who lives in Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Syria, and, out of fear, insisted on being identified only by his first name. “No one would dare to take even one dollar.”

... increasingly, as it holds that territory and builds a capacity to govern, the group is transforming into a functioning state that uses extreme violence — terror — as a tool.

I hope we can be confident that, whatever provocations the aspiring caliphate may pull off before next year, the outgoing Obama administration is unlikely to dump U.S. troops into the fray. The Prez seems determined as I write to go out without "doing stupid shit", an admirable policy framework we could use more of.

But Drum may be right that an argument about whether the U.S. should go crashing into another war could become a central issue next fall -- and the idea has disquieting implications.

For Hillary Clinton, this will require some fancy footwork. Aside from her Wall Street ties, distrust of Hillary over her hawkishness is probably her greatest liability among Democratic voters.

On the other hand, we can count on any Republican to promise to (re)establish imperial dominance by maximum force and violence. Anything less would unmanly, un-exceptional, unAmerican. And just consider, that nominee could be named Bush ...

People who care about peace can't allow this horror show to develop without loudly raising up a picture of a more peaceable posture. Otherwise we'll be as organizationally enfeebled as we found ourselves after the 9/11 attacks.

Choosing life

In Kansas City, Missouri, there's a blogger who calls herself "Blue Girl." Blue Girl is seriously pissed off with the dickheads who released a heavily edited video of a Planned Parenthood doctor discussing how to transmit donated fetal tissue to research facilities. She used to work in just such a lab and she has lived what she is writing about.

The morgue is downstairs, connected by tube and elevator.

So we do the autopsies.

Sometimes, that autopsy is on a stillbirth, and sometimes it's on a neonate that was born alive but didn't survive.

Those are the really quiet ones.

We have in front of us a perfectly healthy full-term infant.  Except it's dead.

... I have stood at that table and searched for the elusive cause of death to give a family grieving the greatest loss imaginable an answer to the question they must have an answer to. "Why me? Why my baby? Why???"

... The causes of fetal demise are varied, but that doesn't matter to the family going through the loss. To them, no one has ever hurt this bad, felt this much pain, been this mad at God...

And that is what pisses me off so bad about the latest attack video on Planned Parenthood.

And guess what, pro-lifers? If you get the fuck out of the way and stop playing "gotcha" and setting up front groups with no other purpose than to entrap a Planned Parenthood (only 3% of their work is abortions) official discussing a topic that is inherently unpleasant on hidden camera so they can heavily edit the footage, research can happen and less wanted children will die. These people are so monomaniacally stupid it makes me want to scream.

Let's talk about organ transplants for a second.  Everyone knows someone who got a new-to-them-organ.  That is really icky if you think about it...taking organs out of one dead person and putting them in several other live ones, and I bet most pro-lifers check the box on their license anyway. Well, guess what? if we harvest a heart in KC that goes to Denver and two kidneys that go to Des Moines and Wichita and corneas that go across town to KU Med and a liver that goes to someone here in town at another hospital, part of that processing includes a shipping and handling fee. I'm trained in this shit, you don't get the butcher from Hy-Vee to process organs for shipment.

I know what the doctor was talking about is a topic that makes people uncomfortable, and makes people squirm, but the tissue and organs she talked about preserving as doomed fetuses were aborted were shipped to labs -- much like, hell, EXACTLY like -- the one I used to work in, those tissue samples, those intact defective organs, allow for medical advances in the fields of perinatology and neonatology, and those advances mean the pathologist and the technologist have a lot fewer opportunities to clasp hands and say a silent prayer before beginning an autopsy on a stillbirth or a dead neonate.

As Blue Girl says -- do read it all -- the practice of medicine is ICKY! But all that icky stuff saves lives. Having just seen a friend brought back to life by a donated kidney from a grieving family, I'm touchy about this.

H/t Ed Kilgore.

A head scratcher post: now what?

Every time I turn around, a new study pops up suggesting that people in this country are deserting their historic Christian religious affiliations. Here's a recent one if anyone needs one.

There are now approximately 56 million religiously unaffiliated adults in the U.S., and this group – sometimes called religious “nones” – is more numerous than either Catholics or mainline Protestants, according to the new survey. Indeed, the unaffiliated are now second in size only to evangelical Protestants among major religious groups in the U.S.

... More than 85% of American adults were raised Christian, but nearly a quarter of those who were raised Christian no longer identify with Christianity. Former Christians represent 19.2% of U.S. adults overall.

The "nones" -- some fraction of whom identify as "spiritual but not religious" -- tend to think Christianity is about guilt, condemnation and hypocrisy. They are not fans of claims that churches are being denied liberty.

Fr. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit and a senior analyst for the National Catholic Reporter writes about the concerns of Douglas Laycock, a professor of law and religious studies at the University of Virginia. Laycock thinks that religious leaders who claim "religious liberty" -- though unspecified he clearly is talking about Catholic bishops and the evangelical Christian right -- are effectively delegitimizing and marginalizing themselves and their institutions.

"For tens of millions of Americans, conservative churches have made themselves the enemy of liberty." He fears that more and more Americans are coming to perceive claims of "religious liberty" as a cover for believers who are trying to impose their views on others.

This is more interesting coming from Laycock than it would be from me, because he was one of the drafters of the federal Religious Freedom and Restoration Act, a version of which brought infamy on Indiana last spring amid accusations that it would legalize homophobia.

"One of the ironies of the culture wars is that religious minorities and gays and lesbians make essentially parallel demands on the larger society," he writes. "I cannot fundamentally change who I am, they each say. You cannot interfere with those things constitutive of my identity; on the most fundamental things, you must let me live my life according to my own values."

Each side of the sexual revolution sees itself as opposing a grave evil and protecting a fundamental human right.

... Laycock quotes Colorado State Sen. Pat Steadman as telling those who wanted a religious exemption to a bill he authored, "Get thee to a nunnery and live there then. Go live a monastic life away from modern society, away from people you can’t see as equal to yourself, away from the stream of commerce where you may have to serve them."

Laycock grounds his perception of what is happening in this country by looking at the history of established religion in France. In that country, religion was the enemy of the anti-monarchical revolution, of democracy, of liberty and equality. So liberty is identified not with protecting religious expression but with tamping down religious power: France has regulations against wearing Muslim headscarves, against some kinds of evangelism, and has tight controls on religious schools which are funded by the government.

We don't have to look across the ocean to see what can happen when religion becomes identified with repression. The Mexican government is officially secular, despite the religiosity of the country. Does anyone still read Graham Greene's novel The Power and the Glory? It's potent, in a somewhat horrifying way.

In this country, religion has largely lost the power to dictate personal morals. (Yes, abortion access is a partial exception to this generalization; it's not yet clear where the country will come out there.) If anything is going to save "religious liberty" amid the secular tide, it is probably going to be religion's perceived weakness as much as the enumerated guarantee against governmental interference in the Constitution's First Amendment.

Yet societies do need some kind of moral compass. Whatever we use for that function is not going to be traditionally Christian or even religious. Where do we find it?

Wayback machine: unconvincing lipstick on too many pigs

A psychologist is a mental health professional who holds a doctoral degree (not medical) earned by studying some aspect of what makes the human mind tick. Col. (Ret.) Larry C. James Ph.D. was the professional sent by his superiors to the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo and then to Abu Ghraib in Iraq to clean up the public relations and all-too-real messes that the Bush administration's "war on terror" had wrought. He describes his work clearly and cogently in Fixing Hell: An Army Psychologist Confronts Abu Ghraib.

He seems a decent guy, smart, a capable leader who cared about the U.S. troops he found in these hellholes. When he arrived in Guantanamo in January 2003, a younger psychologist he had mentored, Major (Dr.) John Leso, told him what he had been seeing.

.. .The bar for what might be considered abusive was raised higher and higher, and the leaders at the base turned their backs on conduct that was, at a minimum, questionable. The interrogators learned that they could try pretty much whatever they wanted to get the prisoners to talk, and a lack of good information often just spurred them to attempt something more extreme

... he had received increasing pressure to teach interrogators procedures and tactics that were a challenge to his ethics as a psychologist and moral fiber as a human being. ... He witnessed many harsh and inhumane interrogation tactics, such as sexual humiliation, stress positions, detainees being stripped naked, and the abuse of K-9 dogs to terrorize detainees

James takes pride in improving conditions at Guantanamo for three underage detainees; the U.S. eventually shipped them home after a year. We are not told whether our government ever came up with any rational basis for holding these young men.

He reports anecdotes about trying to teach untrained, immature soldiers how to extract information without abuse, probably succeeding in mitigating the worst violence.

Much of the culture at Gitmo in 2002 and 2003, perhaps due to the anger over 9/11, involved projecting one's rage onto the detainees.

It is hard to believe that James' intervention reached deeply into the structure of the place however, as we know from Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantanamo Diary that the Mauritanian was being tortured while James was at the base.

After Seymour Hersh blew the whistle, including pictures, on torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004, James was sent to try to clean up that U.S. embarrassment. On first inspection of the place, he retreated to his room to cry and pray. And then he sussed out the totally screwed up realities of the U.S. invasion and occupation that revealed themselves at that iconic location: the hopeless ignorance about Iraq and Iraqis at all U.S. levels; the absence of a clear mission after Saddam was blown away; the rafts of generals, bureaucrats and contractors who hunkered down in air-conditioned Baghdad quarters, providing little direction to revolving groups of GI personnel suffering in the field on one year deployments. Because the U.S. political leadership had seen their project delegitimized by the torture story, and because the military was concerned for its "honor," James' demands for resources, better officers and more training probably had some positive effect at Abu Ghraib. But, of course, since the army still didn't know what it was doing, waves of new prisoners -- mostly guilty of no active wrongdoing -- kept washing through the system, making new enemies for the occupation and of the occupiers with each raid and detention.

James is very affecting when he writes about what our wars do to our own soldiers. He recounts how a warrant office and interrogator

often talked about how she had seen two interrogators blown apart by a mortar attack. ... "Sir, they died right in front of my eyes ... One of their body parts were laying on the ground. I stood there dazed when the medics picked them up and put them in a body bag. After a while, I couldn't do my work and I just cried a lot. Sir, we didn't have no psychologists, no chaplains or anybody to help us deal with this. Colonel, sir, it was shameful how they just left us there with no help."

James agrees. This neglect was shameful.

Precisely because James is such a sensitive observer of the harm done to U.S. troops, his mystification about the motivation of men he labels Taliban (how did he know?) in Cuba and among Iraqis at Abu Ghraib strikes me as strange. He does know he has seen hate before: when a prisoner called him "kaffir" and promised to slit James' throat,

he reminded me of the hate I saw in the eyes of many Klansmen as a young [black] boy in Louisiana. Also, like the Klansman of old, no reason, no logic or amount of information could change this detainee's mind nor clear his heart of the hate and evil he spewed. His rage was foul and almost inhuman.

While I sure as hell wouldn't want to meet this prisoner, his rage seems utterly human to me. Alien beings had crashed through his world, destroyed the structures of livelihood, family and security and added to the insult by presenting themselves as models of decency and civilization. Most of us would feel pretty murderous.

One of Colonel James' objects in this book is to rehabilitate Major General Geoffrey D. Miller who commanded at Guantanamo in 2002 when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was pushing for abusive interrogations and was then sent to Iraq to "GTMO-ise" detainee treatment. James' mentions none of this, praising Miller repeatedly for supporting James' work. Human rights organizations view Miller as one of the most visible authors of the U.S. torture policies.

Since James' book is a call for command responsibility to prevent crimes incident to war, his defense of Miller rings hollow. And, though he claims to have understood from before our invasion that "a group of angry Girl Scouts could have posed more of a threat to our national security than Iraq did," he repeatedly tries to pin responsibility for the Abu Ghraib outrages on the eight GI reservists whose photos blew the scandal sky high. He apparently can't imagine that the top levels of military and civilian leadership should bear responsibility. How can there be responsible leadership if we absolve the powerful authors and enablers of the crimes?

A Wayback machine post is about something I've dug into that is tangential to E.P.'s new book project. The topic seems all the more pertinent with the release of the report on how leadership of the American Psychological Association abetted government torture.

Segregation lines in U.S. cities

The Washington Post's Wonkblog has published an interesting set of demographic maps which highlight the human-made barriers which mark lines of racial demarcation. These turn out to be remarkably durable. When I left Buffalo in 1965, east of Main Street was mostly black, the west side very white. The area just south of the "Main Street" label on the map was just turning black. The street may be even more of a barrier now than then, since it has acquired trolley tracks since I left.

We did go across, because the Sears store (long closed) was on the other side as was the route to the airport, but there was with a sense of crossing over a barrier.

What's new since then is the concentration of Latinos and Asians (Vietnamese mostly I think) on the west side along the Niagara River. At first the Latinos were Puerto Ricans, then Central Americans in the '80s, now I expect more Mexicans. That area was Italian and Irish in my youth but I guess those folks moved north to the suburbs.

I grew up in the east-most corner of the blue (white) rectangle that is just northwest of the "M" on the map.

Horror and rage come in waves

What to do? Start by signing the Color of Change petition asking Loretta Lynch's Justice Department to get involved.

Friday cat blogging

Some precincts seem to harbor many cats in windows.

This area, in the Inner Sunset, was particularly well supplied ...

... even if not all the felines were animated.

A agreement among "morally dubious" people and states

At Vox Max Fisher has an interview with Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. That is, he's found someone to talk with who is capable of making a substantive evaluation of the Iran nuclear deal, not just indulging in political posturing.

Lewis is pleasantly surprised at what the negotiations have produced. He gives it an "A" for moving concretely in the direction of preventing nuclear proliferation.

... there was always a deal to be had here if reasonable people could make reasonable compromises. I never really count on that, but it seems like they did it.

... I was talking to a colleague who is unhappy [with the deal], and it's kind of fascinating. He's unhappy because, he said, "We spent eight years, and the deal we got is not better than the deal we could have gotten eight years ago." And it's like, oh, no kidding. That's not an indictment of the deal, my friend, it's an indictment of eight years of fucking around.

... If you are interested in the nonproliferation piece — how to say this. As a deal, this is what deals look like. Actually, they usually don't look this good. So if you don't know that...

... When I read people saying, you know, "I can't believe we're making a deal with these morally dubious people," I understand why a regional security specialist might feel that way.

But when you work in the arms control field, they're all morally dubious people! These are people who are building nuclear weapons — there are no not-morally-dubious people involved.

I don't know whether Lewis really means the implication of what he seems to be saying. The conversation is ambiguous, possibly intentionally. Perhaps delving into what nuclear weapons really mean for human beings while working on nonproliferation breaks down comfortable imperial illusions that there any good nuclear powers.

No one should have nuclear weapons. No state should be getting its way by threatening another with annihilation. Any deal that chips away at the nuclear threat is a move in the right direction. As I pointed out above, Lewis gives this one an A.

The whole Lewis interview is absolute worth reading.

District 3 candidate is lost

Apparently the Supervisor who Mayor Lee appointed to shill for the tech companies doesn't even know where her district is located. I was surprised while walking toward City Hall to see that she'd opened a campaign office in District 6.

Or perhaps she has located herself right where she belongs, where the money flows. Apparently her real job is to protect AirBnB's profits.

Credit where credit is due

Congratulations to all the diplomats who achieved what looks like reasonable give-and-take between adversaries. I wish the Republicans in Congress could learn from this, but I'm not holding my breath.

And congratulations to all the peace advocacy groups that were ready when the news came through to work on mobilizing their constituencies to defend the deal. Miracle of miracles, they managed to combine on a joint petition to begin assembling their forces. That probably took some major diplomacy in itself. If you haven't signed yet, now is the time. Click the link.

Sadness and determination in wake of murder

San Franciscans gathered outside City Hall today to remember Kathryn Steinle, who was murdered while walking with her family on the Embarcadero on July 5, and to put some stuffing into any of our politicians who might take right wing braying about the crime as reason to revoke policies protecting the constitutional rights of immigrants.

The victims of stupid, random gun violence are supposed to black people, brown people, poor people, not suburbanites strolling in the city. This awful crime has been candy for immigrant-haters: the Donald Trumps, Fox News, and their angry compatriots.

This woman testified to what used to happen before it was made city policy for our law enforcement to require warrants before they would hand residents over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She called the police to report a crime and ended up in immigration detention until her community and lawyers were able to bring her back to her family.

Let's hope our authorities have the guts to resist calls to use a terrible case to undermine good law.

A sigh of disgust ...

Best comment I've seen on the German choice to bring down Greece democracy via Euro-politics:

The Germans try to destroy Europe ever fifty or sixty years or so, so we were due.

Comment at LGM

Here's a bit of Paul Krugman, slightly more measured:

... we have learned that the euro is a Roach Motel — once you go in, you can never get out. And once inside you are at the mercy of those who can pull your financing and crash your banking system unless you toe the line.

Europe was supposed to be a part of the world that more or less worked for its peoples. That seems to have been a misapprehension.

Somebody learned something from Afghanistan

If they'd been born in each other's countries, they might have swapped places.

In 2011, a brave Afghan woman leader, Malalai Joya, toured the U.S. explaining to peace movement audiences that the Karzai government imposed by our invasion had merely replaced the Taliban with rule by thieving warlords who robbed and oppressed the people.

In the same year, Sarah Chayes, a former National Public Radio reporter who worked in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2009 on economic and political development, was touring countries where the Arab Spring uprisings were unsettling long standing power arrangements as a special advisor to Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. And she, too, was trying with very little success to explain to anyone with the power to make change just how kleptocracy was giving the lie to every project embarked on by U.S. forces.

Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security is Chayes' complex statement of the simple conclusion her unusual life trajectory has led her to: the indignities and injustices of "acute and systemic corruption" provide the sparks that turn habitual discontents into violent eruptions of protest, of revolution. When minor functionaries can demand bribes as a matter of right, when no one's property is safe from expropriation by some politician or landlord, when even the smallest business transactions required greased palms, when the most ordinary tasks require accepting humiliating subordination to crooks, eventually people will rise up.

The central insight from Chayes' years of work in Afghanistan is that, in a kleptocracy, government is just organized extortion.

Karzai was not, as conventional wisdom had it, doling out patronage. He wasn't distributing money downward to buy off potential political rivals. If anything -- with exceptions especially before elections -- the reverse was true. Subordinate officials were paying off Karzai or his apparatus. What the top of the system provided in return was, first, unfettered permission to extract resources for personal gain, and second, protection from repercussions.

... The whole system depended on faithful discharge, by senior officials, of their duty to protect their subordinates. The implicit contract held, much as it does within the Mafia, no matter how inconsequential the subordinate might be. Every level paid the level above, and the men at the top had to extend their protection right to the bottom.

... what if the Afghan government wasn't really trying to govern? ... Perhaps GIRoA [military-speak for the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan] could best be understood not as a government but as a vertically integrated criminal organization -- or a few such loosely structured organizations, allies but rivals, coexisting uneasily -- whose core activity was not in fact exercising the functions of state but rather extracting resources for personal gain.

... I was often asked, moreover, why it was so hard to find honest people to serve in government. If that government was actually a crime syndicate in disguise, the dearth of good people was no surprise. Mafias select for criminality, by turning violation of the law into a rite of passage, by rewarding it, by hurting high-minded individuals who might make trouble. An absence of integrity within this system did not mean Afghans as a people were intrinsically or culturally corrupt. ... constructive men and women had been stripped out -- and by now might prefer to stay clear. "No one would dirty his clothes getting near this government," a Kandahar-area farmer exclaimed to me once.

... That was the Afghan government. It was not incapable. ... Governing -- the exercise that attracted so much international attention -- was really just a front activity.

Having come to these insights, Chayes achieved next to nothing to help Afghans. Some U.S. generals, including Mullen, did act as her patrons for occasional periods. She had the opportunity to travel much of the world -- Tunisia and Egypt (she speaks Arabic), Nigeria, Uzbekistan -- and test her understanding that it is corruption, not ideology or religion, which ignites violent upheavals, expressed in each instance within each country's culture. In this book she also interweaves what sages in the Western European and Islamic traditions wrote about bad governance and corruption. She throws off some interesting historical speculations about what enabled societies grounded in the European enlightenment to substitute law for the more historically common rule by kleptocrats. And she even dares to ask whether contemporary financial oligarchs in the United States might not be succeeding in restoring the dominion of arbitrary pillage.

This is a far better, more subtle, well argued, interesting book than I've conveyed here. It resists summarization.

It is very hard to unstick significantly how I understand the world. I've been working on constructing a framework within which I make sense of events for a lifetime. Greatly to my surprise, this book has moved some of my basic understandings. I think most readers might experience a similar shift. Read it and see.***Inevitably, I do have two caveats to this endorsement.

Chayes describes her repeated experience of more observant U.S. and European soldiers and development workers in Afghanistan who could see the society's corruption, but dismissed its significance with a breezy assertion: "that's just how these people do things." Since she likes and respects (some) Afghans, she was able to look beyond that cultural dismissal. But she never raises what seems obvious to me as a white person working to be attuned to white supremacy. I am all too reminded of pundits and bad sociologists who ascribe the miseries of poor brown and black neighborhoods to a "culture of poverty." When we go abroad to conquer, we take our national racist assumptions with us.

And then, how can I trust what Chayes sees when she is not explicitly critical of that national drive to go abroad to conquer? U.S. forces never had any business setting up a "government" in Afghanistan. We had a right to demand that bin Laden and his confederates be turned over for trial. But it was up to Afghans to clean up their corner of the world. No good has come from our rooting around in what we never understood and, after much pain and (mostly Afghan) suffering, we decided not to pay for.

I get that Chayes is striving for results. She includes a significant chapter called "remedies." But I wonder whether without more root and branch critique of the international power structure whether there can be remedies. That's for us to find out.***I read this book by ear. Chayes narrates her own text wonderfully; she is determined to share what she has learned and I have great respect for that.

Richmond neighbors march against bomb trains

They fear they could be next. In Lac-Mégantic, Quebec in July 2013, a freight train carrying Baaken formation crude oil from western Canada exploded, killing 47 people and burning down 30 buildings in the small downtown.

Residents of the Atchison Village community are in the "blast zone." The Richmond Kinder Morgan oil train facility has received permission from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District to bring these trains to the rail yards adjacent to their homes.

Roger Lin, an attorney with Communities for a Better Environment, explained the litigation against passage of the oil trains.

A drummer from Idle No More led several hundred marchers past the rail yards on a sunny Saturday.

At present lower oil prices have interrupted the shipments. But this pause may not last."If you don't stop it, we will block it."

This is the sort of direct threat to life and limb about which people can work together. Groups involved include: APEN, CBE, ForestEthics, CBD, Sunflower Alliance, Idle No More, Sierra Club SF Bay Area Chapter, 350 Bay Area, Artisan Hub, CNA, Martinez Environmental Group, Bay Area Refinery Corridor Coalition, Crockett-Rodeo United to Defend the Environment, Benicians for a Safe and Healthy Community, Movement Generation, AFSCME District 57, Alliance of South Asians Taking Action (ASATA), and Bay Area Labor Committee for Peace & Justice.

It's World Population Day, says the U.N.

The theme this year is "Vulnerable Populations in Emergencies," particularly women and girls.

There are more and more people involuntarily on the move. A recent report concluded that the number displaced by wars grew from 51 million in 2013 to almost 60 million in 2014.

If this were the population of a country, says UNHCR, it would be the world’s 24th largest.

“We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres declared in a press release issued earlier today and marking the report's release.

“It is terrifying that on the one hand there is more and more impunity for those starting conflicts, and on the other there is seeming utter inability of the international community to work together to stop wars and build and preserve peace,” he added. ...

• In Africa, the outbursts of hostilities, many of which are sectarian in nature, have consumed eight countries, including Côte d'Ivoire, the Central African Republic, Libya, Mali, northeastern Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan and, more recently, Burundi. ...

• In the Middle East, Syria, Iraq and Yemen remain ablaze ...

• in Europe, Ukraine has spawned a displacement crisis subsuming more than more than 1.3 million people, mostly across the country's eastern provinces of Dinetsk, Luhansk, and Kharkivska. ...

• In Asia, meanwhile, the unresolved tensions in Kyrgyzstan and in several areas of Myanmar and Pakistan, [as well as fighting in Afghanistan,] continue to force people across the countries' borders.

And the worst of displacement often falls on women.

UNFPA said women and adolescent girls who are caught up in humanitarian emergencies also face much greater risk of abuse, sexual exploitation, violence and forced marriage during conflicts and natural disasters.

In addition, many women who survive a crisis become heads of household, with the sole responsibility of caring for their children.

They often have to overcome immense obstacles to provide health and care for children, the sick, the injured and the elderly, and bear the heaviest burden of relief and reconstruction. As a result, they may neglect their own needs as they care for others, UNFPA said.

I have a neighbor who walked across Cambodia with children to escape the famine and murders of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. She and her family made it. People are remarkably resilient. But our memories are shaped by the survivors' existence. Many, often most, don't make it.

What can we do to stop the train?

Last week, Bree Newsome's heroism in pulling down the Confederate battle flag (before the the South Carolina legislature got around to it) inspired a little conversation here about solitary acts of resistance. Usually what looks lonely is the fruit of a movement of many.

In 1987, Vietnam veteran turned peace activist Brian Willson's act of resistance, lying in the path of a munitions train in Concord, California, cost him is legs. This was most emphatically not a solitary act. A small, noisy community of people had planted themselves near the tracks determined to let the world know that death and destruction in Nicaragua began right there. Good friends were part of that community. Within days after Brian was maimed, thousands from the Bay Area flocked to a rally at the site; the Rev. Jesse Jackson likened the tracks' purpose to the trains to Nazi death camps; and we pulled up several hundred feet of rails with picks and crowbars. By coincidence, the San Francisco Symphony was on strike that week and a little band of musicians played "I've been working on the railroad" while we dug.

Willson has trudged on, on artificial legs, raising opposition to U.S. imperial wars. There is currently a fund raising push to raise the last $35,000 for Paying the Price for Peace whose trailer is posted here. It tells the story of Willson and other U.S. vets who have sought to impede wars. We should not forget.

Friday cat blogging

I think that is what you call a "baleful glance." Encountered while walking for 596 Precincts.

Parking in San Francisco

Yesterday I had several hours to kill between appointments. It might have made sense to drive near to the distant upcoming event and while away some time in a cafe, a pleasant prospect. But I didn't do this. Why? Parking!

Parking in San Francisco is a very fraught subject. My car was parked in a space in my neighborhood for which I have a sticker that allows long term occupation. I wasn't about to surrender this and go somewhere else where I might have had to practice my parking juggling skills. This kind of consideration probably supports neighborhood businesses, but it also has the interesting effect of segmenting us into local enclaves or promoting resignation to the inefficiencies of (fairly good) public transit.

For the moment, my scope is quite wide. I'm willing to walk about 1.5 miles to get somewhere I want to go, if public transportation isn't convenient and I have the time. But I can't assume I'll always be able to be so mobile.

If driving were not an option, I would never have made an appointment for a class across town at 5:30 pm. But driving is an option, so I did.

More fraught parking does reduce some the frequency with which I choose to drive, probably a good development for sustainability. This isn't a bad thing, but it is an ever-present reality in this booming San Francisco.

The boom is driving the parking shortage, as it is much else. Since 2010, San Francisco has added some 50,000 residents. That's a lot of cars as well as people. Also, Uber (without taking its competitors into account) has signed up 15,000 drivers in the city. From the look of the cars Uber drivers use, these aren't the beaters their families count on. These are new or newish vehicles. All those cars have to go somewhere.

San Franciscans think a lot about parking. And we express ourselves. These examples were collected while walking 596 Precincts.

Maybe we'll someday get to this.

A Republican nightmare is here

A headline from NPR tells the story: Census Data Confirms: Hispanics Outnumber Whites In California.

Anglos, as non-Hispanic whites are known here, now number 14.9 million, and Latinos have edged them out with a population of 15 million.

[Roberto Suro of the University of Southern California]: Immigration brings in young adults. Young adults are at the peak of their fertility, and the white population has been aging. So baby boomers produced a lot of babies in the 1980s, bringing us the millennial generation, but since the 1990s, boomers have mostly been beyond childbearing. ... The white population is actually - in terms of natural increase in the United States, it's shrinking.

... Right now, because of the earlier waves of immigration and the earlier fertility, there are lots of Latino young people who are coming online every year - native-born citizens who are turning 18 and moving into the electorate.

... In California, there are 4.8 million Latinos under 18. There are 2.4 million whites under the age of 18, so there are twice as many Latino young people as there are white young people. That is enormous demographic power because that means 10 years from now, there will be twice as many Latinos of childbearing age as there are whites of childbearing age ...

A recent Pew poll makes it abundantly clear that Republican horror about the newcomers is not limited to people who arrived here without legal papers. They just plain don't want any immigrants.

They aren't going to have their druthers. If they are lucky, very likely the people who care for them in frail old age will come from this immigrant stream. And thinking that there's a way to stop the demographic change is like Canute trying to hold back the tides. They need to get used to world that is and meet the neighbors!

Puzzling conversations

Carla Power is a U.S. journalist, a former Newsweek correspondent who now writes for Time. She enjoyed a curious and lucky upbringing in a series of Islamic countries in less conflicted times. This book, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran, is a pondering on a year's conversations with Sheikh Mohammad Akram Nadwi, a longtime friend and colleague from a shared Oxford academic project.

The Sheikh, educated in madrassas and at university in his native India, is a deeply immersed scholar of his tradition who also serves as a day-to-day religious leader to many British Muslims. He lectures and answers questions from students that range from theological puzzles to whether it is licit to use hair dye. To a Western observer, he seems an exotic figure because he has recovered the stories of thousands of Muslim women who historically played the roles of jurists and interpreters of belief. His teaching about Muslim women separates out what he considers cultural accretions to Islamic practice from a core system of belief that he finds in the Quran. But he is not some kind of modern re-interpreter of the faith -- he's a traditionalist.

Power often finds the gulf between the way she thinks and what the Sheikh teaches wide -- possibly unbridgeable. She writes about hearing the Sheikh provide counseling to the parents of a young girl who had become pregnant without marriage. His whole concern was for helping the girl and the family find practical ways to go forward together, despite allowing no slack for such loose morals. Power explains:

In my creed, sex, drugs and rock and roll, and any number of other explorations were fine, so long as nobody got hurt. Such tolerance derived from the assumption that this life is all we have and that every individual has freedom. Akram's tolerance came from a belief in just the opposite: in a God-centered universe, nobody has freedom and nobody has the right to judge others. That is God's job.

The impression that I have long had of Islam is that, more than European Christianity, it demands communal solidarity and equity among all the people (at least those within the faith circle.) No unjust judges here! Thus I was interested in this exchange:

I [Power] had always been taught that justice was the cornerstone virtue of Islam, occupying much the same position that love does in Christianity. Prophets were sent to bring justice to the people through their messages. Polygamists are counseled to be just with their wives, and merchants to make fair deals in the marketplace. "A just leader," the Prophet Muhammad is reported to have said, will be "the most beloved of people to God," while the "most hated" would surely be a tyrant. ...

I called the Sheikh to ask about justice. "It's the basic tenet of Islam, right?" I asked.

A pause.

There was justice, ultimately, he said, but it would not necessarily arrive in this life. Allah would provide it in the Hereafter.

Sheikh Akram is a quietist. His religion is all about living in submission to God, to Allah, come what may. That is, after all, what the Arabic word islam means. He projects simplicity and calm.

Yet to Power -- and to me -- the contradictions held inside his lived belief remain unfathomable. This book left me reflecting on whether perhaps I find that true of single minded practitioners of any religious tradition. We live these things rather than think them ... yet there are scholars and counselors and prophets and holy fools. This was a book to read slowly and allow to seep inside. It stirs more questions than answers. They seem gentle, healthy questions -- something of a rarity in our noisy lives.

Sharing the 'hood

Down my Mission district street, there's a wide set of stairs where a group of young men sometimes congregates. They sit and talk and smoke -- and never seem any kind of threat to me, though I'm instinctively wary of groups of young men.

The residents of the building have apparently decided to set up some ground rules. These seem quite reasonable and the sign has stayed up for nearly a month, so I guess co-existence is working.

Greeks vote a resounding NO

View image | gettyimages.com

This is a story about democracy breaking through. We've had dramatic political events in the U.S. recently -- it's not likely that many of us have been paying much attention to what has been going on in Greece and the European Monetary Union. But Sunday's 61 percent vote against further economic measures that would immiserate ordinary Greeks in order to placate northern European bankers should invigorate everyone who prefers democracy to plutocracy.

Sure, Greek governments in the '00s ran up some huge debts, debts the country was never likely to repay. Note the lenders were probably smart enough to know that, but they trusted the European Union project to save their speculating asses.

Comes the 2008 recession and by 2010, Greece can't pay up. So in that year, the European Central Bank, European Commission and the International Monetary Fund (the Troika) sent enough cash to Greece to enable the private creditors (mostly French and German banks) to escape their losses. In return Greece has had to cut government services, raised taxes and slashed pensions. This sent the Greek economy into a tailspin -- twenty-five percent unemployment and collapsing small businesses sent some people to picking through garbage for food. Meanwhile, all this pain is doing no more than pay interest to the Troika. Greece is never going to pay off the principle on the original loans. Repayment was probably always impossible; with a trashed economy, default is a certainty.

Meanwhile, the Greek people decided they couldn't forever let technocrats and Northern European elites decide what their lives would be like -- or if they'd even survive. In January of this year, exhausted Greek voters turned to the party of the Coalition of the Left, Syriza. Syriza promised to negotiate a better deal with the Troika. Over several months, led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Troika said the bankerly equivalent of "screw you and we will take your mother as well as your money." Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras finally said we'll just put that "offer" of yours up to a vote of the people. That is what happened Sunday. Greeks thumbed their noses in return.

Economist Paul Krugman says this is a good thing and he knows a lot more about it than I do.

... we have just witnessed Greece stand up to a truly vile campaign of bullying and intimidation, an attempt to scare the Greek public, not just into accepting creditor demands, but into getting rid of their government. It was a shameful moment in modern European history, and would have set a truly ugly precedent if it had succeeded.

But it didn’t. You don’t have to love Syriza, or believe that they know what they’re doing — it’s not clear that they do, although the troika has been even worse — to believe that European institutions have just been saved from their own worst instincts. ... democracy matters more than any currency arrangement.

Just maybe, Greece will now have to leave the Euro, the common currency used by most of the states of the continent. This may be economically painful, but it is not clear that fate will be worse than being dictated to by (mostly) German plutocrats. And people insisting on self-determination against bankers is almost always inspiring.

Rebuild the Churches

It does my heart good to see that my little Episcopal parish is on the list to raise money for the Rebuild the Churches Fund. It looks like many churches will collect a significant sum for Black churches burned in the backlash against national revulsion at the Charleston massacre.

It's one thing we can do. Our neighbors are hurting. Some of the fires may not be arson. But I warm to concrete actions more than "conversations." The cause is good.

At St. John's, we have community memories of being recipients of this sort of effort. When our congregation's building was dynamited to make a fire break after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, donations from the generous Episcopalians of the East Coast financed the current Perpendicular Gothic edifice. It's visually impressive -- and a struggle to maintain.

Saturday scenes and scenery: from the trails

I had thought to write a serious post for Independence Day about "what's a country for?" Maybe someday I will. But today I need a bit of a break, so instead I'll offer a little of what I love most about this place, the scenes I encounter while running outside.


Here's the view over the Bay from the ridge off of San Bruno Mountain. The crow and I were entranced.


This road runs up into the Gerbode Valley in the Marin headlands.


Despite (or perhaps because of) the drought, there were lovely wild flowers in that area this spring.


The drought brings terror of fires. This fire road is above Lake Chabot near Castro Valley.


Below San Andreas Lake on the Peninsula, deer come out in the open to munch on the well-watered grass.


I don't even have to leave the city to find trails. In Golden Gate Park, I get to share hidden ways with mounted patrol cops and their mounts who look to be enjoying the day.

A drunk, an addict, a father and a journalist

David Carr's media column for the Times only became a regular stop for my browsing shortly before his death last February. As journalism struggles to find a way to pay for significant reporting, he tried to keep it real. The columns at the link are still worth reading: informative, tough, and compassionate.

I knew he had written a memoir of his years as an addict and drunk. I didn't want to read it. I've never been much interested in white, straight, mid-Western boozer males.

But after he died -- in journalistic harness, collapsing at his desk -- I decided to give the book a chance. It is titled The Night of the Gun: A reporter investigates the darkest story of his life. His own. As far as Carr's life story goes, I was right to avoid it; descent to the bottom is not interesting except to the participants.

But there's more going on here. Carr really did give his memories of multiple foggy episodes the full fact-checking treatment. The title derives from his discovery that his memory of his best friend pulling a gun on him during a particularly extreme binge was completely false. He was the one who had brought the gun into their quarrel. There's chapter on chapter of that sort of thing, including some woman beating and a lot of crack cocaine.

Still, why might anyone want to read this painful book? Perhaps because it is both wise and possibly truthful, or at least it expands a reader's apprehension of the categories of human truth.

Regular people, people who are not drunks or addicts, will drink too much, get a horrible hangover, and decide not to do it again. And then they don't. An addict decides there is something wrong with his technique ...

Somehow, twin daughters who needed him and a stalwart (second) wife helped Carr pull out of the pit he dug himself. Journalistic talent clearly helped too. Woes await the recovering drunk who isn't employable ...

And even Carr's description of his bottoms has its endearing moments. During one crazed moment, he describes himself alone, talking to his dog, Barley, a Corgi mix.

... I'd ask her random questions. Barley didn't talk back per se, but I saw the answers by staring into her large brown eyes.

Am I a lunatic? Yes. When am I going to cut this shit out? Apparently never. Does God see me right now? Yes. God sees everything.

Sobriety didn't come for a long, long time, but when it came, Carr relished being "normal." He concluded:

You are always told to recover for yourself, but the only way I got my head out of my own ass was to remember there were other asses to consider.

I now inhabit a life I don't deserve, but we all walk the earth feeling we are frauds.

***I read this book by ear -- and I do not recommend that version. When I borrowed the hard copy from the library, I was delighted to discover it was full of pictures of people, police reports and newspaper clips that are not to be missed.

Friday cat blogging

I think Morty likes the heat from the lamp.

Love can grow larger

Newly elected Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop the Rt. Rev. Michael Curry makes a point.

Yesterday the General Convention of The Episcopal Church -- bishops, clergy and laity making like a legislature -- brought our marriage ceremonies and definitions into line with the expansive expression of love that is sweeping the land. Good for them.

According to a friends I count on to know a thing or two, the new PB explained at his press conference:

"It's marriage. It's not gay marriage. It's not straight marriage. It's marriage."

That's done, thanks to decades of patient, urgent struggle, much pain and some joy. Now can my church gets its mind and heart around other justice agendas?

Greece; Iran; terrorism; doors opening, maybe

Things I think that I think about the situation we're in ... some, guardedly, hopeful. While other events wrung me out over the last few days, I can't let pass three developments foreign and one domestic.

Tourist photo from Athens

1. Does it seem to anyone else that the German government and European banking elites are treating Greeks much as rural state legislators treat cities where people of color are the majorities -- as stupid, incompetent, foolish, lazy and incapable of self government? In Europe, are Greeks the blacks?

Nobel winning economist Joseph Stiglitz might concur:

We should be clear: almost none of the huge amount of money loaned to Greece has actually gone there. It has gone to pay out private-sector creditors – including German and French banks. Greece has gotten but a pittance, but it has paid a high price to preserve these countries’ banking systems. The IMF and the other “official” creditors do not need the money that is being demanded. Under a business-as-usual scenario, the money received would most likely just be lent out again to Greece.

But, again, it’s not about the money. It’s about using “deadlines” to force Greece to knuckle under, and to accept the unacceptable – not only austerity measures, but other regressive and punitive policies.

2. Sometime in the next ten days, the U.S. and its partners in nuclear negotiations with Iran will or will not come up with a deal to prevent further bomb making for some period of time. If there is a deal, there'll be war in the U.S. Congress between the administration and the fully bought and paid for representatives of the Israel Lobby in both U.S. parties. Oil industry friends of the Saudis will be doing their best to scuttle the deal as well. It's going to be one of those times when people who care about peace will have to push for spine transplants for our legislators.

It is worthwhile remembering a little of the backstory of U.S./Iran relations. In addition to using the C.I.A. to impose the Shah's dictatorship over Iranians in the 1950s, the U.S. supported chemical war by Iraq against the revolutionary Iranian people during the 1980s. Robin Wright in the New Yorker explains:

Officially, the United States was neutral. But Washington did not want Iran to win, so U.S. intelligence provided satellite imagery of Iranian positions to Iraq, along with military options. With American and other foreign guidance, the Iraqis constructed a replica of Faw for practice runs.

Iraq also used U.S. intelligence to unleash chemical weapons against the Iranians in Faw. U.N. weapons inspectors documented Iraq’s repeated use of both mustard gas and nerve agents between 1983 and 1988. Washington opted to ignore it. At Faw, thousands of Iranians died. Syringes were littered next to bodies, a U.S. intelligence source told me; Iranian forces had tried to inject themselves with antidotes. The battle lasted only thirty-six hours; it was Iraq’s biggest gain in more than seven years. The war ended four months later, when Iran agreed to a cease-fire.

... U.S. intelligence estimated, at the time, that Iran suffered more than fifty thousand casualties—deaths and injuries–from Iraq’s use of nerve agents and toxic gases. A senior Reagan Administration official told me that he was ashamed of the covert U.S. role at Faw and during the final period of the war.

No wonder we're not buddies with Iran.

3. Last Friday, militants linked plausibly with ISIS killed scores of people in Tunisia, Kuwait, and France. Probably fortunately, most U.S. media where too preoccupied to notice. U.S. media have lately pointed out that, since 9/11, nearly twice as many people in this country have been killed by right-wing (racist) extremists as by Islam-tinged nutcases.

And 4, here at home: Some recognition that our legal system of mass incarceration and brutal punishment is off the rails seems to be infiltrating the rarefied precincts of the Supremes. And it is the "centrists" who are talking. First, out of the blue, Justice Kennedy questioned the constitutionality of unbounded solitary confinement in prisons. Then Justice Breyer raised the likelihood that application of the death penalty, in the words of former Justice Potter Stewart, is as random as being struck by lightening.

The problem, Breyer suggests, may be irresolvable. We can have executions without long delays, or we can have the procedural review necessary to avoid unfair executions, but we can’t have both. If the Constitution requires both, the death penalty may well be unconstitutional.

It's a start.