Sorry for the low-tech rerouting, but: 

If you reached this page because of a link to a numbered item that is no longer on my main page, you can get to it by adding "#" and the number -- e.g. "#904" -- to the end of the URL above.

J. has a good point about the amateur border patrollers currently making the Arizona desert a more nervous place for everyone. He wants to know just what kind of security checks are being applied to these "civilian volunteers -- many of whom were recruited over the Internet." What's to keep these goons from doing their own smuggling, of a venal or even a politicized kind? I mean, quis custodiet ipses etcetera, know what I'm saying?

3/30/05, 12:55 p.m. (Link here)

Y'know, the "Rapture" cult isn't all that surprising, considering how we all used to be afraid of dying in a nuclear war but we're not so afraid of that any more. Feelings of dread, once you're used to them, don't just go away for everyone. If the original danger (or rather, the perception of it) fades, sometimes folks need a new receptacle for their fears.

Got thinking about it today because I'm one of these people who gets tunes stuck in my head, and this morning's tune was Tom Lehrer's cheerfully morbid "We Will All Go Together When We Go." There's a line midway through:

...You will all go directly to your respective Valhallas.
Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollahs...

Which is not to say that the perception of impending doom is normal, healthy, or inevitable, nor that the idea of instant translation to Heaven -- by invitation only, yet -- makes any logical sense. Just to say that the Rapture folks aren't just getting millenial for no reason. They're sublimating a kind of fear that people of all political persuasions cooperated in building up during our scary 20th Century.

3/30/05, 9:58 a.m. (Link here)

In case anyone still thinks the filibuster debate is dull, let's consider it in Hollywood terms. Remember Mr. Smith Goes To Washington? Remember that long scene at the end in which Jimmy Stewart heroically speaks for nearly twenty-four hours to save his beloved valley for a children's camp? (OK, a boys' camp; it was 1939. Nothing's perfect.) As he talks and talks, public opinion comes around to his side, the corrupt old windbag who was selling him out becomes ashamed of himself, and government of the people by the people for the people doesn't quite perish from the earth after all? Remember that? OK, folks, that is a filibuster. Now, the way they do things now, it's really that a bunch of Senators tag-team each other in one-hour shifts. So no more drying out in the Senate steam room in advance to avoid the call of nature. (True story, and it was that old incubus Strom Thurmond who did it. Like I said, nothing's perfect.) But the great thing about the filibuster as we know it now is that it takes a vote of 60 Senators to shut one down. That means 41 Senators can keep a filibuster going. So as long as the minority party isn't hopelessly outnumbered, it's a protection against the tyranny of the majority.

Now, go call somebody in Congress about this upcoming filibuster vote. If you won't do it for me or for yourself or for America, at least do it for Jimmy Stewart.

Now, I wrote the above without noticing that People for the American Way remembered Jimmy Stewart's filibuster too. Fortunately, they did, and they've put together a pretty good TV ad using it. Which BTW makes the point that Republicans used the filibuster in the past, also as a protection against untrammeled majority rule. (Cf. Thurmond, who was, yes, a Democrat at the time, but that was back when the Democrats were the party of racism.) Anyhow, go have a look at the ad. Oh, and they're collecting money to get it on the air.

3/29/05, 2:53 p.m. (Link here)

Last night I was reading a book of essays written primarily in the 1980s. Some of it had to do with environmental issues. It accepted as natural the notion that Ordinary People in the American heartland -- farmers, ranchers, small-town business owners -- do sometimes oppose the desecration of natural landscapes by large industrial and public-works projects. It took as ordinary fact, not a matter for snickering, that the beauty of a place has value, and that industrial side-effects such as groundwater contamination can cause genuine diseases and measurable economic harm. It was, in other words, written several years ago.

The purpose of this post is to suggest that readers who wish to retain their bearings in these United States may be well served by reading just about any political book that was written fifteen or twenty or twenty-five years ago. Just to see how far our public frame of reference has shifted. Just to recognize how pinched the acceptable conversation has become, and how defensively people have begun to speak when they advocate basic civic precautions such as keeping industrial chemicals out of people's kitchen faucets.

We can't keep living in this sad, scared post-2001 present. We've got to keep referring to benchmarks made in times that, in retrospect, were less dire than we thought.

3/28/05, 2:53 p.m. (Link here)

Ever notice how the entire weblogging community has these periodic fits of narcissism? Happen to notice there's another one in progress this week? I mean, cripe, every weblog I look at has another damn post about weblogging. And, yes, I'm falling in with the pattern here too of course. But I'd at least like to apologize for same. I've had a complicated and depressing week here or I'd find something more original to say.

In the meantime, persons interested in San Francisco news should see Malik Looper's gloss on the the exceptional saintliness of St. Boniface Church.

3/27/05, 1:47 p.m. (Link here)

Atrios has kindly renewed an important old point about the unfair equation of "family" with "female."

On a related note, I never did understand how Salon for several years got away with calling its women's-issues section "Mothers Who Think." Not personally being a mother, I never felt qualified for membership in the category, nor eligible to submit any of my own work for use therein. Funny thing being that the title was probably a form of cod-feminism, not an intentional practice of prejudice. For someone over there I guess women with children counted as women (which made their ability to think mildly surprising); women without children counted as not-quite-men. It's strange. I looked recently & the MWT category seemed to be gone. Hope so.

[P.S. Ben asked for an explanation of the use of "cod-...," which he guessed might have to do with me being from Massachusetts. It's a Britishism borrowed from Net friends meaning (I think) "bad imitation of," as in "cod-Shakespearean verse."]

3/26/05, 10:38 p.m. (Link here)

Catblogging, sort of --

Yesterday we had shamefully neglected to feed the Edgie on time and next thing we looked she was in the house with a half-dead rat. As in, "I'll get my own dinner, then." We were very impressed but of course we had to take it away, carefully, at the tips of some disposable chopsticks. She's still looking for it. J., attempting feline psychology, had to say, "She misses her little crunchy friend." Now I can't get that out of my head.

Cat is at present sitting on the only available mouse, which is on this desk, hence complicating logistics for yr correspdt.

3/25/05, 6:00 p.m. (Link here)

Strange de Joel, when I noted someone behaving oddly on a Tenderloin sidewalk: "Whaddaya expect? This is Hyde Street, not Jekyll Street!"

3/23/05, 1:26 p.m. (Link here)

I'm frequently grateful not to have children in these United States at this time of our history. This is one more reason why.

3/22/05, 2:42 p.m. (Link here)

Only In San Francisco, cont'd:

A marijuana, erm, dispensary (?) has moved into a former paint shop on a corner near here. Appropriately I suppose, since long ago that space housed a legendary gay bar. I've walked past the sign in the window several times today so hope I'm reciting it correctly from memory. IIRC it goes like this:

While we respect a patient's right to medicate, PLEASE do not smoke (including tobacco) within fifteen feet of the door.

This is a strange town. Smoking dope is medical treatment; poverty is a crime. I don't get it.

3/21/05, 6:35 p.m. (Link here)

J's mother has a hot-pad in her kitchen drawer that I wouldn't believe if I hadn't seen the thing. It was a political giveaway to the little ladies of a suburban California congressional district at least twenty years ago. It says, "Don't get burned! Bill Duplissea opposes the Equal Rights Amendment."

Awareness of such things is an extra reason for supporting this week's reintroduction of the ERA. Another good reason, if you need one, is that it's a rare choice by the decent liberals in Congress to make a hopeful proposal of their own instead of just playing defense.

3/21/05, 12:38 p.m. (Link here)

This morning I learned of the death of Midori Shimanouchi Lederer, a great and quietly brilliant American who lived an amazing variety of lives. After an especially difficult experience in the Japanese American Internment, she achieved a successful career as a Hollywood publicist and spent her "retirement" as the founder of a social service agency in New York City. Her New York Times obituary doesn't do justice to such a life.

I was one of the people who had the good fortune to interview her about her experiences in the Internment. My article, which partly discusses her time imprisoned at the Tanforan racetrack, is still posted at the Bad Subjects website. She was too modest to mention all her achievements and honors, but some of them are listed in this awards ceremony bio.

Her husband, attorney Peter Lederer, has kindly sent me updates from time to time, and it was his sad note that arrived this morning. He mentioned a while back that she was being interviewed for an oral history project. I hope that record gets preserved and remembered. She had a tremendous story to tell.

[UPDATE: A further obituary note in this Asian Week column.]

3/19-3/20:

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Two comments on the Schiavo case deleted here because I just don't have the heart right now.

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3/19/05, 2:04 p.m. (Link here)

I dunno, catblogging, manblogging, something like that...

3/18/05, 2:30 p.m. (Link here)

Good meaty arguments that could use a few more players are going over at Horizon -- Pro sports salaries, Orwell criticism, sci-fi dystopias, Bill Moyers, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," and more. Go take a look.

3/17/05, 11:49 a.m. (Link here)

Some mornings I wake up with a ten-pound cat on my chest. Other mornings I get up and read the news. Works out to the same damn feeling. Go read Echidne and Billmon. I'm feeling too disgusted to be original.

3/16/05, 2:11 p.m. (Link here)

Lest we forget, the Manchester Guardian on Prague in March 1939.

3/15/05, 11:49 p.m. (Link here)

This British article talks with a true ring about "the homeless" but what it means by "the homeless" is people suffering from very serious demoralization or outright whopping mental illness -- the people who are still living outdoors in a society that makes it easy for a reasonably sane person to get indoors. I'd guess the writer is on the level; I'd guess the people he's talking about are really the way he describes. The thing is, they're in England.

My point in noting this is, people shouldn't apply an English or even a Midwestern American idea of "the homeless" to San Francisco or the other really expensive American cities. It's just incredibly useless and patronizing to pretend that people living outdoors here are too crazy or disorganized to "accept" shelter. No, the problem is that the typical unsubsidized small single hotel room in a bad neighborhood in San Francisco typically costs six to eight hundred dollars per month -- which eats up all, or most, or possibly more than all, of the public benefits available to a single adult, even considering the higher pay rate of federal disability benefits. The result is, quite a few people at a relatively high level of education and competence are living homeless in San Francisco. Here, homelessness is just kind of a natural consequence of prolonged unemployment. Corollary: arguments about shortage and lack of opportunity that would have a higher hypocrisy quotient in other towns are very much more persuasive here.

3/15/05, 9:49 p.m. (Link here)

Hope from a strange and grim source, but still hope, is what I see in articles like this one about soldiers and their families opposing the Iraq war. Hope no matter what you think of the war, almost. Because what these people are doing is healing the division that formed during the Vietnam War between the opponents of that war and the families of the people who agreed to fight it. As the article I've cited says, if it becomes clearer that "supporting the troops" does mean wanting them home in one piece, then the national conversation about war is going to change.

3/14/05, 7:22 p.m. (Link here)

I'm very excited. Craigslist is going to beam a swatch of classified listings, including one of ours, into outer space for the amazement, amusement, edification or otherwise of whatever extraterrestrial beings may be listening.

So I guess if a three-eyed alien, one-eyed purple people eater, 60-foot space bimbo, or other interstellar entity shows up to examine our used futon frame, we've got no one to blame but ourselves.

3/14/05, 3:30 p.m. (Link here)

Item four in today's Garchik column is a symptom of something, I think. It's about our mayor, who is a sometime college baseball player and still in his thirties, going out to play catch in the park outside City Hall. So a "street person/mayoral adviser" yells, "Who's running the city?" and that's the punch line of the item. It's a cute item, makes ya smile. I'm not complaining about the item itself, not really.

But like I said, it's a symptom of something. The "street person" is beginning to fill an old narrative role that hasn't been filled in the U.S. in a long while: the low-status comic/wise Greek chorus leader who has special license to mock or advise the great. England's comic Irishman, Cockney or urchin, 19th-century America's comic Southern black, the Russian "holy fool," the slave or child in the ancient story who has nothing to lose in pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes. Think about, for example, the apparently-homeless old (incidentally, black) wise man who speaks straight to the audience in the movie "Bulworth." Isn't he perfectly a Greek chorus leader?

What bugs me about these figures is, they emerge in the humor and folklore of unequal societies. A licensed joker or truth-teller matters more in a society where people of middling status feel they can't speak their minds.

For another aspect of what I mean, look at the same Garchik column's item two, in which a group of "street people" are arguing about the Theory of Relativity. "..."No, man,'' yelled one, "energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Everyone knows that, man.''..." The punch in the joke comes from the incongruity of very poor people knowing about something as fancy as Einstein's theories. And, yeah, I laughed too. But it's got uncomfortably much in common with an old issue of Punch that Orwell was marvelling over some time in (I think) the 1930s. A group of caricatured English workmen are piled into a new automobile and they're announcing, "We've bought the thing!" The humor being in the notion that poor people should have a use for such a thing at all.

Say I'm fussing over nothing if you like, but I do think we're re-acquiring the sense of humor of a stratified society, and it bugs me.

3/13/05, 8:38 p.m. (Link here)

Evil Fox pod people have taken over the Simpsons. In tonight's episode, the Simpsons go to China. Borderline-racist jokes, bad Chinese accents, and gratuitous musical dragons, but that's not so aggravating as the main plot point: the claim that Chinese baby girls can't be adopted except by members of traditionally married families. This being nonsense. We know a lesbian couple who have adopted two Chinese daughters. But their kind of loving family isn't Fox's kind, so naturally that's not what we get to see on TV.

[LATER:...OK, they're almost half forgiven for the next episode with the sympathetic presentation of Americans cut off prescription drugs and the hilarious Canadian Ned Flanders-fest ("I like the cut of your gibberish!")]

[P.S. Gene's spotted the other redeeming feature of the China episode.]

3/12/05, 5:52 p.m. (Link here)

Am hoping muchly that bloggers bigger than yrs truly have noticed the hundredth anniversary of Lochner coming up in April. What's Lochner? It's the privileging of employers over workers. It's the claim that government has no business protecting the public. It's the notion that freedom's just another word for no rights whatsoever. It's what the men in the White House want to take us back to if they can just finish unmaking that pesky New Deal. Go read the case and see if it isn't deja vu.

3/11/05, 8:24 p.m. (Link here)

It's annoyingly servile when news reporters refer to the men in the White House as "the administration." (They could at least say "the Bush administration." There will be other administrations, and there have been others. This too shall pass.) But where does AP get off calling Schwarzenegger "the administration" too? Schwarzenegger may be a big lunk personally but he's not a governing colossus. He's just the current occupant of the governor's office. Not even the "governor's mansion." There still isn't one. He and Maria are still living in that hotel suite.

3/11/05, 9:48 a.m. (Link here)

Guest catblogging today: this is my dad's cat Chester. At least we think he's a cat. He can swivel his head nearly all the way around so we wonder if he's really a kind of owl. ("Owlblogging time" --?) Caption per owner: "I like to cook my brains."

3/11/05, 10:38 p.m. (Link here)

More over here for any folks who still think the Taser is used only as a safety measure against uncontrollable dangerous maniacs. [UPDATE: argument on same is developing at Horizon]

3/11/05, 9:52 p.m. (Link here)

Strange de Joel says, "There should be a Blogmobile -- a van that goes around and gives shut-ins and poor children the ability to blog...." OK, never mind.

3/11/05, 9:50 p.m. (Link here)

Never thought I'd say this, but three cheers for the House of Lords, standing firm through a very long night for habeas corpus and the known laws of ancient liberty.

3/11/05, Thursday afternoon (Link here)

Not much new to say here today but I've been posting over at Horizon, where a conversation about shotgun weddings and punk cuisine has derailed into a rout of feral chickens, killer bookcases, and parrot turf wars.

3/09/05, 5:37 p.m. (Link here)

I've just posted Ben's comments on our home savings idea separately, on a supplementary page, so anyone who doesn't mind working through the arithmetic can take a look. He's got some interesting points.

At the end of which he notes the point that I thought was the important one to begin with: that there should be some tax-rewarded way for renters to save money toward a home in a conservative manner rather than commit to an actual home purchase too soon, with too low a downpayment and too high a mortgage. It's just really sad to think of people working two and three jobs to support "The American Dream Of Homeownership" while all the time fearing that if someone in the family gets sick they'll face foreclosure, a wrecked credit rating, and nothing to show for their efforts.

3/09/05, 11:06 a.m. (Link here)

Morning madness:

- The Fafblog is very funny on red-herring/gramophone talk in the White House swimming pool.

- I got to see Judge Dondero this morning and realized that purely because of his name I'd been expecting a Thunder God on the bench.

- Ben points out that I mean "trademark," not "copyright," in yesterday's item and he's entirely correct.

- I am shortly going to get around to posting Ben's thoughtful & detailed comments about the home savings idea.

3/08/05, 2:47 p.m. (Link here)

...so per this morning's Chron, UPS claims to have copyrighted the color brown.

"Good grief," sez Strange de Joel, "You can't even take a poop without paying the corporations."

3/07/05, 8:28 p.m. (Link here)

Selma was 40 years ago yesterday. Alongside all the obvious things to say, I'd like to ask whether we still have the same capacity to be shocked at official abuses of power.

3/07/05, 11:48 a.m. (Link here)

I wish someone would explain what the Bush Administration wants to do about Social Security disability benefits while it's destroying the Social Security old-age pension system. How often do the people in this debate pay attention to the fact that the inability to earn money does often have medical causes?

BTW, Ben Brumfield has some sensible objections to the idea about home purchase accounts. At first glance I gather his main point is that people who are at the point of buying a house, unlike retirees, are likely to be in a higher tax bracket than when they were saving up, so paying taxes all at once on a previously saved lump sum would therefore not be to their advantage. More on this when I've digested his letter.

3/06/05, 3:05 p.m. (Link here)

Like I was saying, I cover some tax law issues for a technical magazine. So I subscribe to an online IRS announcement feed that mostly sends out new regulatory decisions, plus a smattering of press releases about G-men nabbing crooked accountants. Once in a while, though, I get a whiff of what it must be like to work in Washington these days. For example, last January 13 a "media advisory" arrived from the Treasury Department about a press conference to be held that afternoon on a dull if financially important regulatory announcement. (In case anyone cares, the announcement was this one.) The "advisory" concluded with some awfully strict rules for attending the press conference: "COVERAGE: Pen and Pad Only. Please e-mail dates of birth and social security numbers for clearance to Treasury to Frances Anderson at [her email address] by 12:30 PM." Now, for all I know, maybe they had a reason to ban recording equipment and background-check all attendees. Certainly it's normal for people to submit to background checks in order to get long-term press clearance for government buildings, and that's for good reasons anyhow. (Otherwise dubious characters like that Gannon fellow might start sneaking in.) But it's strange to imagine having to get your Permanent Record inspected just so you could drop by a government building and listen to a dull speech about taxes. From this distance it seems like all of D.C. has been living in a permanent fog of fear for three and a half years now. It must be terribly hard on everyone's blood pressure and attention span out there. Think about it that way and it's possible to feel sorry for the entire fear-stewed bunch of them, regardless of party.

3/05/05, 1:53 p.m. (Link here)

J. has a really good idea for our legislators. This is in all seriousness. It's a way to help those of us who can save money but can't buy a house, so on top of paying rent instead of gathering equity, we're losing that lovely mortgage interest deduction. He says there ought to be a way to save up home purchase funds in a pre-tax account, as with some kinds of retirement accounts, until such time as the savers become able to make a downpayment on a real house. At that point they pay income taxes on the contents of the account, but those tax obligations are offset by the tax advantages that our legal system routinely grants to homeowners. We're not economists, nor really tax experts (I write professionally about some kinds of tax law but not this kind) so there might be some defect in the reasoning here, but it sounds to me like an idea that's both helpful and in tune with the current ownership-society/personal-account rhetoric emerging from Washington. Takers, anyone?

3/05/05, 1:44 p.m. (Link here)

The four blocks of Clement between 36th and 40th streets are where bad golfing and city budget problems meet....

3/04/05, 9:15 a.m. (Link here)

Friday catblogging:

3/04/05, 8:51 a.m. (Link here)

About Justice Scalia's comments at oral argument on the Ten Commandments case this week, Chron letter-writer Michael Stevens is on the money.

...Scalia called the Ten Commandments "a symbol of the fact that government derives its authority from God," and added, "That seems to me an appropriate symbol to put on government grounds."

The Declaration of Independence holds that "governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."...

3/03/05, 8:59 p.m. (Link here)

Right across from an article on Trotsky, the March 14 edition of The Nation is advertising "Better Dead Than Red" buttons.

Talk about yer bargain basement of history.

3/03/05, 6:18 p.m. (Link here)

There's a lot to be depressed about in this Housing Assistance Council newsletter but I want to call special attention to the item midway down about the Labor Department. It's quoting the Wall Street Journal as saying the Labor Department has decided to stop doing its annual study of farmworkers. This is terrible. If people who work on farms aren't identified as farmworkers in public statistics then the special misery of people who work on farms becomes that much less visible.

3/03/05, 4:28 p.m. (Link here)

Just going to quote a sad comment from Body and Soul here that deserves amplification.

3/03/05, 1:38 p.m. (Link here)

Had a chat with a lawyer in line at the courthouse just now. He's one of these people who enjoys litigation. I'm working on a theory, so I asked him if he played cards. He said no, not really. But craps, yes. Oh, and blackjack. Funny, I'd thought of cards and chess as the games similar to litigation, but according to this guy it's cards and dice. We talked, and agreed, some more about the way a litigator has to manage certainties and uncertainties, both of which keep changing, not to mention that you can't control the facts of your client's story but you can control when and how the information comes out. Kind of strange, isn't it, that our dispute resolution process has so much in common with gambling?

3/02/05, 4:57 p.m. (Link here)

San Francisco. Love the place, hate the place. Reason for both in one breath is Steve Rubenstein's lead from s'morning's Chronicle:

Cable car fares, which have already climbed halfway to the stars, are about to complete the trip...

3/01/05, 10:07 a.m. (Link here)

So Schwarzenegger has a plan to put solar panels on California rooftops. Sez Strange de Joel: "Who does he think he is, Governor Sunbeam?

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