The fascination of war

Dead soldier at siege of Petersburg, Virginia, 1865. Wikimedia.

When I was in elementary school, I was a budding Civil War buff. I have a vivid memory that my fourth grade teacher let me bore my classmates for the duration of an entire period, lecturing about my hand drawn maps of the movements of the the Union Army of the Potomac and Robert E. Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg. I knew my stuff, or thought I did.

By the time I went to college, I had put that enthusiasm aside. My age peers were getting blown to bits in Vietnam in a war I believed was both stupid and immoral. War didn't seem an amusing board game anymore. Nothing that has happened in my lifetime has changed my growing conviction that "anything war can do peace can do better."

So I was brought up short as I read James M. McPherson's This Mighty Scourge to come upon passages like this one describing the Confederate general's strategic choices:

One way to approach this matter is by way of an analogy from football, in which most coaches would agree that the best defense is a good offense. Of course Lee knew nothing about modern American football, but he would have understood the slogan. … In other words, we [out-numbered and out-gunned Confederate forces] can can only win if we keep our opponent off balance with an imaginative offense.

I can no longer think about war as an intriguing game. I no longer believe that "we" can "win" wars. In my lifetime, our wars have not been about victory in any meaningful sense -- and unless you think invading Grenada was a "war," the United States hasn't "won" our military adventures.

But the Civil War is challenging to this perspective. This became a different (and better) country because, though the experience of the war, Union aims changed and were achieved, at least formally. The Great Rebellion (the Confederacy) was forced, violently, to surrender.

During the Civil War, Northern war aims as well as national and military strategies changed as the conflict expanded from a limited war intended to restore the antebellum status quo into a "hard war" intended to destroy enemy resources including slavery and to mobilize those resources on the Union side, to bring an end to the social order sustained by slavery, and to give the United States a "new birth of freedom."

Civil war enthusiasts obsess about the technologies and innovations of combat pioneered in this conflict and argue whether this was "the first modern war." Given where "modern wars" have taken us -- through the foul mud of trench warfare, poison gas, saturation bombing, nuclear bombs, drones -- I find this fascination macabre and the converse of attractive.

But I shared this gripping hobby as a very young person. Why do some people (mostly male people?) indulge that fascination? Why do some of us move away from this? Does it matter?

James McPherson's Civil War history raises that conundrum for me, an arena of questions I'd forgotten. Guess I'll have to read his magnum opus: Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era.

This is my third post on McPherson's essays; on interpretations of the conflict here and on whether John Brown was terrorist here.

Warming Wednesdays: Solar is a way to go -- but adopting it is not simple

I guess I'm weird. Despite the author's warnings, I've been fascinated by David Robert's series on electric utilities.

There's very little public discussion of utilities or utility regulations, especially relative to sexier topics like fracking or electric cars. That's mainly because the subject is excruciatingly boring, a thicket of obscure institutions and processes, opaque jargon, and acronyms out the wazoo. Whether PURPA allows IOUs to customize RFPs for low-carbon QFs is actually quite important, but you, dear reader, don't know it, because you fell asleep halfway through this sentence. Utilities are shielded by a force field of tedium.

So what is the the Grist columnist discussing here?

In very short summary, he's all for "small is beautiful," distributed power generation from residence scale units such as that provided by rooftop solar panels. But he is too honest to pretend that when utilities ask "but who is going to pay for building and maintaining the grid?" they are entirely blowing smoke. So long as residential solar is a scare novelty (as the proud sign pictured here proclaims), a tiny number of solar-equipped customers can freeload off the rest of us who are paying for all the maintenance of the power system through our regulated rates. But as distributed solar spreads, at some point it will become unfair if some people's meters spin backward.

We can't trust the electric companies to level with us as that happens; they are in business to squeeze as much profit out of us as they can, regardless of the true economic facts. Besides, utilities make money by projecting increased power demand, borrowing to build more plants and other capacity, and receiving regulated returns on these expenditures. If a lot of us create our own power sources, that model of making a profit will stop working.

This model is already getting creaky. According to Roberts,

… demand for utilities’ services is slowing. Depending on which forecasts you believe, electricity consumption may even begin declining in some states over the next few decades.

Why? Some of it is merely the “offshoring” of industrial activity. But a substantial chunk is the recent explosion of energy-efficiency technologies and investments. ...

Alongside that, individuals now have the power to generate their own electricity with solar panels and other distributed generation technologies. Utilities do not own that distributed generation; it’s an investment upon which they receive no returns. And it represents a reduction in demand for what they are selling, a reduction in use of their grid infrastructure, and a reduction in the need for future power infrastructure.

The thing is, for the foreseeable future, we do need an electric grid and somebody is going to pay for it. If enough solar customers can "make their meters spin backward," eventually that's going to break the utilities' business model. But we still need the grid. Solar advocates say we are nowhere near a crunch on this and besides, utilities, as legal monopolies, have become accustomed to benefiting from bad planning -- planning that ignores how distributed generation reduces their costs.

This discussion is an example of why the arrival of abrupt climate change is so difficult to deal with in a democratic fashion. There are genuine problems that require technical solutions -- on top of the political and scientific puzzles such unprecedented change throws at our societies. If people are going to retain any say about how our societies respond to this, more of us are going to have risk encountering the "force fields of tedium." Or at least reading smart interpreters.

Despite every other legitimate concern, we cannot ignore that our economic and social system is rapidly making the planet less habitable. So I will be posting "Warming Wednesdays" -- reminders of an inconvenient truth.

Guantanamo shame

Assistant federal defender Carlos Warner represents 11 detainees housed at Guantanamo Bay. Ten of the men he represents have joined a 3 month long peaceful hunger strike against their decade-long detention without trial or hope. He describes in detail what his clients are experiencing, the ugly mechanics of the force-feeding inmates are being subjected to.

These are innocent men who have made a decision to die because our government will not release them. Instead of releasing them, our government chooses to force feed them …

President Obama says he wants to close our misbegotten gulag, but he has failed to do so. The national shame drags on.

Community-based education under threat across the country

Jobs with Justice, United Educators of San Francisco (that's the K-12 teacher union), and San Francisco City College teachers and students led a spirited noon rally today in the Mission in support Chicago teachers who are fighting school closings. City College faces its own crisis as its accreditation board is threatening to yank its approval, apparently because of differing priorities from those of this community institution. A more thorough exploration of that fight is here. CCSF will get the verdict sometime this summer.

Protesters made phone calls on the spot to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel and to John Rizzo of San Francisco's elected Community College Board.

In defense of talking points and message discipline

Alex Pareene at Salon offers a good rant in response to the liberal outfit Message Matters apparently thinking it is doing something helpful by distributing "talking points" to some email list of pundit types it calls "influentials."

On the topic in question -- how to defend the Obama Justice Department for broadly snooping in the Associated Press's phone records -- he is probably right that they have taken up a lost cause.

Like all talking points, these talking points were dumb and full of weird weaselly language and made worse by the fact that each claim was designed to be repeated by people on TV who presumably don’t believe what they say or at least don’t really care that much. “For those interested in pushing back against partisan attacks while the rest of us grapple with the larger questions, here is language to guide you,” the memo said.

Pareene is probably right that "liberals are proudly bad at message discipline." And when our friends in high places are doing something dumb -- or just plain wrong! -- we'll call them out on it, I hope.

But I want to offer a defense of "message discipline," usefully understood. It is possible to adopt "talking points" with political integrity -- progressives make a terrible mistake if we refuse to consider why we might want to.

Good talking points derive from listening to the way that people think about issues. Yes, I mean polling and focus groups -- and also the educational experience of trying to talk with our fellow citizens about the issues we care about. Guess what? There are a myriad of ways to think about most everything and many people are not going to think as we do. So convincing people of anything starts with listening. I suspect polling and focus groups are too often more art than science, but if that kind of data is available, we should study it eagerly. Listening is part of democracy in practice, often not a reassuring experience.

Good talking points reach through the superficial level on which we experience day to day life to touch the values that we all use to filter new information and ideas. An example of what I mean: the cause of marriage equality for LGBT people took a huge leap when we started talking less about "equal rights" and more about loving each other. Straight people by and large are barely aware that marriage confers lots of legal goodies; all that stuff about property sharing and health insurance and survivor benefits is so taken for granted that the fact that these perks have been denied to gay people is invisible. But straight people know about loving their partners and making a family; they can understand we want that too.

Message discipline doesn't mean brainlessly repeating only one thing. In fact, a good message and good talking points take off from shared values but recognize that different audiences care about different aspects of issues. Sometimes that means we have to talk about issues we care about putting the emphasis where it matters for our audience, even if it is not where we might individually choose to put it.

An example of this comes from the campaign to end California's death penalty that I worked on last year. The underlying value question to which we knew we must present an answer was people's fear that without the state having the option of a death penalty, somehow "justice" could not be done when hideous crimes were committed. We wanted to assure people that justice would still be possible without a death penalty, so we needed to educate people to the fact that sentences of life without parole are terrible punishments. But we also recognized that different facets of the situation spoke to different people. For some, what mattered is that a death penalty that costs huge sums but is almost never carried out is not justice. For some, the fact that so many poor people and people of color seem to fill death row showed there is no justice. For some, the ever present danger of the state executing an innocent person is what worries them and makes for fear that there is no justice. Always the message spoke to a different way to achieve more justice, but we didn't have to speak the same way to everyone. (Safe California didn't win this in 2012, but we came very close. The struggle will be won.)

Good talking points are arguments that we are willing to make because we believe what we are saying is true. Lots of people think that message discipline means lying for a cause. It doesn't and it can't. People aren't dumb, though often they haven't thought much about lots of issues they encounter. But if you'll listen to them, there is a chance they'll listen to you. You may have to talk a lot about aspects of your issue that are more important to your audience than to you, but you should not feel you are lying. And if your message is true, you won't.

If you are going to engage in politics, to campaign for individuals and issues, to seek to convince people democratically to adopt particular policies and goals, you owe it to your cause to adopt a measure of message discipline. It's not about you. It's about us -- about what kind of country we are trying to make, together. You don't always get to run your mouth without thinking -- though you are certainly free to do so. We are fortunate to have built that kind of country.

Was the abolitionist John Brown a terrorist?

A few days ago I included the pre-Civil War abolitionist John Brown in a list of "terrorists." Several friends have asked me if I really believed that. Was John Brown, who tried to incite a slave revolt by leading a bungled raid on the federal garrison at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, in 1859, really a terrorist?

James M. McPherson's This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War includes an essay on this question. He certainly doesn't paint Brown as an attractive figure, at least for secular modern people. Brown moved to the Kansas territory in 1855 when it was up for grabs whether the newly opened area would enter the Union as free soil where slavery was outlawed or, alternatively, would extend the Southern institution. The competition for the territory led to a shooting war and the sacking of the town of Lawrence by pro-slavery forces. The same year, a pro-slavery Senator caned an abolitionist Senator in the Senate. McPherson describes Brown's reaction:

For Brown these events were the last straw. He was a strict Calvinist who believed in a God of wrath and justice. In appearance and character he was an Old Testament warrior prophet transplanted to the nineteenth century. He considered himself God's predestined instrument to strike a blow for freedom. "We must show by actual work;' he said, "that there are two sides to this thing and that they (proslavery forces) cannot go on with impunity." He told his company to prepare for a "radical retaliatory measure." When one of them advised caution, Brown exploded: "Caution, caution, sir. I am eternally tired of hearing that word caution. It is nothing but the word of cowardice."

The next night Brown led four of his sons and two other men to carry out their retaliatory measure for the earlier murders of five free-soil settlers. Brown's party seized five men -- who were proslavery activists but had not participated in the murders -- from their homes along Pottawatomie Creek and split open their skulls with broadswords.

Brown was clearly not a temperate character. But this was not a temperate moment. The national impasse over the continued existence and expansion of slavery had dogged national politics for three decades. In the absence of resolution, the issue simply became more superheated. Under the Constitution, there probably was no legal way to end slavery because of Southern over-representation in the Senate and the two thirds of the states required for an amendment. The pro-slavery forces could apparently permanently block any legal route to abolition, even one that included compensation to slave owners.

In hindsight, it seems no wonder at all that a person who felt a prophetic call to achieve abolition might have turned to violence. At the time, Brown's adoption of bloody force in the interests of freeing slaves and his raid on Harpers Ferry evoked significant support from some "respectable" Northerners. After he was captured,

[Ralph Waldo] Emerson caused a sensation with his pronouncement that Brown was a "new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death -- the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious as the cross."

Reactions like Emerson's naturally fueled white Southern terror that their Northern brothers and sisters had become ready to see them murdered by their "property." The gulf between the moral systems of South and North became less bridgeable; Lincoln's election seemed to herald the South eventually losing its national veto; and the war came.

It is not hard to see John Brown as a terrorist whose provocative acts hastened the end he sought, the climatic clash between slavery and abolition. Most of us applaud the outcome. Yet his acts -- unlawful violence against people and property to force political ends -- fit anybody's definition of terrorism.

So is terrorism sometimes justified by the morality of its ends? I hope not. In most of historical experience, good ends sought by way of indiscriminate violence have devolved into meaningless slaughter far more often than such eruptions have led to better societies. I do think John Brown was a terrorist. And I think terrorism is wrong.

But I am also glad that my Unionist ancestors fought and won the Civil War, creating the possibility for our democratic experiment to further evolve. I guess I'm an indecisive wuss about this. One of the advantages most of us in the United States have enjoyed over more recent history is not to have had to decide such questions in real life. That's the democratic polity I find worth struggling for.

Oh yes -- McPherson too avoids coming down definitively about John Brown.

Both Brown and [Confederate General Robert E.] Lee saw themselves as soldiers in a just war and therefore claimed that their acts were not unlawful but justified under the laws of war. Brown professed to act under the government of God; Lee acted under the government of the Confederate States of America. Whether both or neither was a legitimate government I leave to the reader.

This is one of a series of posts arising from my encounter with This Mighty Scourge. Another is here.

A good match

Nice to see that Craigslist is the lead sponsor for today's Bay to Breakers cross-city footrace and mobile party featuring costumed runners, centipedes, nudity, alcohol, and other happy lunacy.

The venerable race -- it's the 102nd running this year -- has been a bit of an orphan of late. It belonged to the San Francisco Examiner newspaper until that afternoon paper was divested by the Hearst corporation. Several corporate sponsors have taken on the race since the last vestige of the Examiner morphed into a throwaway freebie about 10 years ago. Craigslist seems a good fit for a wacky San Francisco tradition that defies institutionalization.

Saturday scenes and scenery: Clarion Alley

In the 1980s and 90s, if a visitor to San Francisco seemed the sort who should be shown street art, I'd take her to Balmy Alley. The predominately Central American struggle themes pictured there still resonate for me. But nowadays, I'd probably start with Clarion, a little street between Valencia and Mission just south of 18th Street.


The fences and garage doors here offer a wild mix of subjects and styles, just like our city these days.


Some are bucolic, though foreign to most of us.


Others celebrate courageous struggle.


Others are not easy to interpret, even subtle. That's an accomplishment on an old wood fence.


A comment on our enthusiasm for threat inflation perhaps?


Haunting.


Frightening and all too recognizable, these dogs of war.


Tamara Ching is celebrated as godmother to transgendered and otherwise gender fluid people in Polk Gulch.


Then there's a musical Eden for a respite.

I trust my next tourist will enjoy this show.

These photos are by-products from my photoblog project: 596 Precincts -- Walking San Francisco. If intrigued, take a look and sign up for sporadic email updates.

Once upon a time, the U.S. fought a war at home

Thoughtful Ta-Nehisi Coates suggested that if a person wanted to learn more about the U.S. Civil War era, one had to read the historian James McPherson. I have been doing this and will do more. I began with an anthology of his short articles: This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War. I was bowled over by my emotional reaction to this book.

McPherson's lead essay -- it gives the book its title -- is devoted to the historiography of the conflict -- essentially to dismissing various, sometimes quite influential, historical theories that the Civil War was about anything but whether this would be a country that continued to endorse racially demarcated human slavery. Contemporaries were clear about this:

… the new vice president of the Confederate States of America, Alexander H. Stephens, said in a speech at Savannah on March 21, 1861, that slavery was "the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution" of Southern independence.

...The old confederation known as the United States, said Stephens, had been founded on the false idea that all men are created equal. The Confederacy, in contrast, "is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth…"

Yet after the Union victory, many historians worked hard to promote alternative explanations for a conflict that killed over 600,000 soldiers. Former Confederate rebels wanted back into the U.S. national narrative without the moral stigma of having fought for what was now considered an immoral social system; over time, the victors too wanted to forget the bitterness. By the early 20th century, many Progressive Era historians promoted the idea that the fight was really over incompatible economic systems.

"Merely by the accidents of climate, soil, and geography," wrote Charles A. Beard, doyen of the Progressive school, "was it a sectional struggle" -- the accidental fact that plantation agriculture was located in the South and industry mainly in the North. … For some Progressive historians, neither system was significantly worse or better than the other -- "wage slavery" was as exploitative as chattel bondage.

Southern historians claimed, influentially, that it had all been about their ancestors attachment to "state's rights." McPherson demolishes this:

Of all these interpretations, the states-rights argument is perhaps the weakest. It fails to ask the question, state's rights for what purpose? State's rights, or sovereignty, was always more a means than an end, an instrument to achieve a certain goal more than a principle. … In the antebellum South, the purpose of asserting state sovereignty was to protect slavery from the potential hostility of a national majority against Southern interests -- mainly slavery.

In fact, McPherson works to clarify that Southern politicians only gave primacy to "states' rights" arguments when they were losing what had been a vise-like grip on the federal government.

… state sovereignty was a fallback position. A more powerful instrument to protect slavery was control of the national government. Until 1861 Southern politicians did this remarkably well. They used that control to defend slavery from all kinds of threats and perceived threats. They overrode the rights of Northern states that passed personal liberty laws to protect black people from kidnapping by agents who claimed them as fugitive slaves. During forty-nine of the seventy-two years from 1789 to 1861, the presidents of the United States were Southerners -- all of them slaveholders. … Two-thirds of the Speakers of the House, chairmen of the House Ways and Means Committee, and presidents pro tern of the Senate were Southerners. At all times before 1861, a majority of Supreme Court justices were Southerners.

This domination constituted what antislavery Republicans called the Slave Power and sometimes, more darkly, the Slave Power Conspiracy. … By 1850, when the number of free and slave states was equal at fifteen each, the free states contained 60 percent of the population and 70 percent of the voters but sent only 50 percent of the senators to Washington. [The three fifths compromise, counting Negro slaves as 3/5 of a person, embedded in the Constitution,] gave slave states an average of twenty more congressmen after each census than they would have had on the basis of the free population alone. The combined effect of these two constitutional provisions also gave slave states about thirty more electoral votes than their share of the voting population would have entitled them to have.

Southern politicians did not use this national power to buttress state's rights; quite the contrary. In the 1830s Congress imposed a gag rule to stifle antislavery petitions from Northern states. The Post Office banned antislavery literature from the mail if it was sent to Southern states. …

Because we read history with hindsight generated by outcomes, what's not easy to recapture is that when the Civil War began, the North as well as the South was gripped by a strong feeling of having been unjustly treated by the other side. If Southerners felt insulted because Northerners labeled their slavery "immoral and unworthy," Northerners felt Southern willingness to break up the country would be a repudiation of what their ancestors have won in the Revolution, a democratic republic of (white, male) equality.

Lincoln and most of the Northern people were not willing to accept the nation's dismemberment. They feared that toleration of disunion in 1861 would create a fatal precedent to be invoked by disaffected minorities in the future, perhaps by the losing side in another presidential election, until the United States dissolved into a dozen petty, squabbling, hostile autocracies. The great experiment in republican government launched in 1776 would collapse, proving the contention of European monarchists and aristocrats that this upstart republic across the Atlantic could not last.

*** I've been thinking for several weeks about why this book touched off strong emotional reactions in me. I read widely on a good many pretty disturbing subjects, but this evoked real feeling. Some thoughts:

• My ancestors were Union partisans. Though they mostly avoided actually fighting, they were active Republicans, political supporters of Lincoln. One was a U.S. diplomat in France, working to discourage Napoleon III from jumping in on the Confederate side.They believed their ancestors had fought against injustice and won -- and I was raised to think they had carried on that heritage in the Civil War.

• As a young student of history, I recall being alternatively confused and attracted by the various strains of Civil War historiography. Growing up during the African-American freedom struggle in the South, I never put much stock in the states-rights/War Between the States version of the story. That seemed sectional sleight of hand. But I do remember being much attracted by the Beard clash of economic systems paradigm, if only because it seemed to treat Northern workers as if they mattered. But, really, I have no attachment to any of the historical explanations that erase slavery. Come on -- four million black people in bondage unequivocally mattered!

• But what really sets me off is that contemporary Republicans seem bent on recreating the "Slave Power Conspiracy" in modern dress. The Senate is even more unrepresentative now than then: 38 million Californians get the same two votes in the 100 member body as 564,000 residents of Wyoming? And then there's the filibuster; with the current party breakdown, states with just a third of the country's population can block legislation or Presidential nominations. States are again attempting nullification of federal laws they don't like, such as any gun control measures. Our unrepresentative institutions can't do what majorities understand needs to be done, so our politics are consumed with insignificant media-driven kerfuffles. We can't even take up the real challenge to our system and the world -- abrupt climate change. Before the Civil War, our ancestors put off dealing with slavery and its implications for the nation for two generations; we still have too many of their busted governmental institutions and we don't have 70 years to waste before taking measures to limit the havoc unconstrained carbon emissions are wreaking.

No wonder pondering the last great rift in U.S. history renders me anxious and angry.

McPherson's essays are so rich I think I'll be writing at least a couple more posts jumping off from them.

Friday cat blogging

Readers will be reassured to know that I compose these posts while under watchful supervision.

Gender fluidity

Uh-oh. As noted in the previous post, some people wouldn't like this:

These choices were included in a survey sent out by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. They are clearly gathering information to improve their public image and fund pitches. And they get props for noticing some people do not experience gender as binary.

Why don't they just come out and say what they really mean?

They want uppity women to remember their place -- mutely following the guys in the dresses and purple hats. The purpose of the Catholic Church's opposition to gay rights and marriage equality is to shore up the crumbling pillars of male domination over women. Here's San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone bemoaning the Minnesota state decision to legalize same sex marriages.

"It is the height of irony that the Minnesota legislature decided, and the governor signed into law, the redefinition of marriage just after we celebrated the unique gifts of mothers and women on Mother's Day," he said in a statement the bishops' conference released Wednesday.

National Catholic Reporter

The further we go toward recognizing that human societies make choices about how we organize ourselves, and that we can expand those choices to allow greater human possibility and dignity for more of us, the harder it becomes to insist on traditional patriarchy. Too bad, guys.

Prescriptions for overcoming "well-informed futility syndrome"

Sandra Steingraber has an unusual ability to make toxicology and environmental science understandable to an uninformed lay reader -- and Raising Elijah: Protecting Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis is consequently an impressive book. Here's her summary:

In the absence of federal policies that are protective of child development and the ecology of the planet on which our children's lives depend, we serve as our own regulatory agencies and departments of interior....

Thoughtful but overwhelmed parents correctly perceive a disconnect between the enormity of the problem and the ability of individual acts of vigilance and self-sacrifice to fix it. Environmental awareness without corresponding political changes leads to paralyzing despair....

We feel helpless in our knowledge, and we're not sure we want any more knowledge. You could call this well-informed futility syndrome. And soon enough, we are retreating into silent resignation rather than standing up for abolition.

Her son is named "Elijah" in memory of the Illinois abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy who was murdered by a pro-slavery mob in 1837. This woman is serious about standing up for the truths she discovers in her work and parental experience.

And she's not into sitting around feeling helpless. In fact, on April 30, she completed a 10 day jail term for blocking the entrance to a natural gas facility that has invaded her 'hood, the Finger Lakes region of New York State.

“I would do it again in a minute. …Being new to civil disobedience, I’m still learning about its power and its limitations…

But I know this: all I had to do is sit in a six-by-seven-foot steel box in an orange jumpsuit and be mildly miserable, but the real power of it is to be able to shine a spotlight on the problem.”

Steingraber reminds us that we will have the quality of life and democracy that we can win from elites who want to exploit for profit both all of us and the natural world. The book is an accessible introduction to toxics in our daily lives, especially addressed to parents.

Warming Wednesdays: where are your local temps are headed as carbon emissions continue?

The Wunderground weather site has a section which uses your location to draw a graph of scientists' projections of expected temperature change in your locality. You may have to enter your location under the "Climate Change tab/Local" tab; I can't confidently predict what your path might be because Wunderground knows my location already.

Here's what they show for San Francisco:

It does precipitation as well. Again, here's our city by the bay. Looks like rain.

The projections are based on the models used by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) studies. There's lots to explore here.

Despite every other legitimate concern, we cannot ignore that our economic and social system is rapidly making the planet less habitable. So I will be posting "Warming Wednesdays" -- reminders of an inconvenient truth.

Defenders of Israel throw a hissy fit

American Muslims for Palestine board chair Dr. Hatem Bazian announces a campaign that will put this sign on San Francisco buses for the next month.

This bus sign campaign is yet another free speech effort -- we see a lot of them around here, what's the big deal?

Unless I'd happened on one of the buses, I probably wouldn't have noticed this effort. Nor would I have thought much about it. I have no trouble believing retired South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu when he calls Israel an apartheid state. He's got no axe to grind; in fact, as far as I know he labors in retirement for peace and justice. And he knows plenty about systemic discrimination and exclusion. I'll take his word for it. And the ad itself, highlighting the fact that U.S. taxpayers are paying for systemic discrimination and exclusion, seems simply true to me.

But the campaign got a higher profile on my mental horizon when emails started flying by about a clutch of organizations -- the Jewish Community Relations Council, the Anti-Defamation League, and the American Jewish Committee -- branding the ads as "inflammatory rhetoric designed to delegitimize Israel's very existence," "extremist language," and "bigoted lies and demonization." It seemed as if the triggering word was apartheid. Jewish Voice for Peace jumped into the fray with a collection of other people in addition to the Archbishop who have uttered the dread word:

• Archbishop Desmond Tutu: "I am aware that many of our Jewish brothers and sisters who were so instrumental in the fight against South African apartheid are not yet ready to reckon with the apartheid nature of Israel and its current government...But I cannot ignore the Palestinian suffering I have witnessed, nor the voices of those courageous Jews troubled by Israel's discriminatory course." Tampa Bay Times, April 30, 2012

• Israeli Defense Minister (and former Prime Minister) Ehud Barak:"As long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state." (2010)

• Israeli newspaper Haaretz editorial:"The de facto separation is today more similar to political apartheid than an occupation regime because of its constancy. One side - determined by national, not geographic association - includes people who have the right to choose and the freedom to move, and a growing economy. On the other side are people closed behind the walls surrounding their community, who have no right to vote, lack freedom of movement, and have no chance to plan their future. " (2007)

• Former Israeli Minister of Education Shulamit Aloni:"Jewish self-righteousness is taken for granted among ourselves to such an extent that we fail to see what’s right in front of our eyes. It’s simply inconceivable that the ultimate victims, the Jews, can carry out evil deeds. Nevertheless, the state of Israel practices its own, quite violent, form of Apartheid with the native Palestinian population." (2007)

• B’Tselem,The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories:This report deals with one of the primary, albeit lesser known, components of Israel’s policy of restricting Palestinian movement in the Occupied Territories: restrictions and prohibitions on Palestinian travel along certain roads in the West Bank. This phenomenon is referred to in the report as the “Forbidden Roads Regime.” The regime, based on the principle of separation through discrimination, bears striking similarities to the racist apartheid regime that existed in South Africa until 1994. In the roads regime operated by Israel, the right of every person to travel in the West Bank is based on his or her national origin. Forbidden Roads: Israel’s Discriminatory Road Regime in the West Bank, Btselem, 2004

• On 21 April 2010, the South African government expressed "the greatest concern" over: Israeli Infiltration Order 1650, saying that the order has a broad definition of "infiltrator" and unclear terms as to which permits would allow a person to reside in the West Bank, as well as how valid residency might be proven. The South African government said the terms of the order are "reminiscent of pass laws under apartheid South Africa."

Two comments on this controversy:

The ADL has zero credibility with me on anything about apartheid. My friend Jeffrey Blankfort has described the ADL's program in the 1980s and 90s in San Francisco which included funneling "intelligence" from San Francisco police files about US activists to the South African apartheid secret service. I've always assumed that this was the reason that the day after my working group arrived in Cape Town in 1990 to help anti-apartheid newspapers upgrade their technology, we received what seemed a clumsy visit from state security. The men at the door said they were roofers and must look over the house; there was nothing wrong with the roof.

Secondly, it raises my hackles when anyone tries to stifle discussion by outlawing particular language. Israel's existence is not at stake -- unless it manages to commit suicide by fatally alienating all its neighbors and its friends. The charge of legal, forceful systemic discrimination and exclusion of Palestinians by Israelis in the Occupied Territories and even within the 1948 borders is simply true. You can't expect people not to point this out. And pitching a hissy fit when people do won't stop anyone.

What are they hiding this time?

Nothing new about government secrecy …

except the extreme enthusiasm with which the Obama administration seeks to protect it.

The A.P. said that the Justice Department informed it on Friday that law enforcement officials had obtained the records for more than 20 telephone lines of its offices and journalists, including their home phones and cellphones. It said the records were seized without notice sometime this year.

… In an angry letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Monday, Gary Pruitt, the president and chief executive of The A.P., called the seizure, a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into its news gathering activities.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” he wrote. “These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the news gathering activities undertaken by The A.P. during a two-month period, provide a road map to A.P.’s news gathering operations, and disclose information about A.P.’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”

The various phone companies involved are set up technically to grab such information whenever the government asks for it. In investigations of leaks of "national security secrets," the Obama administration has sought twice the number of indictments issued under all previous administrations combined.

The investigation, thought to involve publication of news of a Yemen-based terrorist plot to bomb an airliner, is one of two announced by the Justice Department last June. The other involves leaks to the New York Times about US-initiated cyberattacks on Iranian nuclear facilities. The Times has no knowledge of seized phone records in that case.

What this is really all about is whether the government can intimidate the press. The government wants to be free to decide which of its war-on-the-cheap projects the citizens get to know about. For the moment, we're a nation tired of declared wars and occupations. But our leaders (and particularly our spooks) have lots of places they want to project U.S. power. Maybe some of these efforts actually do protect us. Maybe some of them are monumental screw ups or even crimes that will ultimately make us less safe. None of them can be debated democratically if the government can succeed in hiding them in the name of "national security."

Want to keep on top of these machinations? I suggest reading Marcy Wheeler. She often has the story months before the "news" media.