Blogiversary

I've been writing this blog, in this antiquated medium, for 19 years, ever since 2005.

No post today. I'm doing what makes me happiest, walking out of doors. See you soon enough.

I give up

I'm on the fifth day of a nasty cold (not covid, per tests) and blogging that requires a brain seems unimaginable. 

So I won't try. Back soon.

Burnout musings

I seem to be experiencing some kind of bloggy burnout. I have multiple items I'd like to write about, but somehow can't muster the energy to create the posts. (I do work on these -- trying for accuracy and giving credit where it should go.)

So I'll default to this recommendation: 

I used to survey people experiencing burnout. Here’s what they taught me. 

Most of this is not what's ailing me, but it's charming. The link is a gift article.

Back soon.

Blog housekeeping notes

If you read this blog on a desktop or a tablet, you'll notice some changes to these pages. I decided that it was time to clean things up a bit.

The photo above shows what may get lost during the upcoming campaign season: Reno, Nevada is a beautiful place, when you get away from the casinos and when the air is clean. We'll be there through mid-November, duking it out for the Dems. Campaigns coincide with fire season, so clean air is not a given. But early in the morning and at sunset, the skies and surroundings can be breathtaking. Maybe by November, I'll have photos of the same duck pond and surrounding peaks after the first snow ...

Erudite Partner and I report for campaign duty in Reno at the end of the first week of July.

In the right sidebar, I've added links to summary posts about what's at stake in the 2022 midterm elections: governors, Senators, and Secretaries of State. After all, that's what we'll be focused on.

And here's a link for anyone who might want to get paid to dip deeply into the electoral fray this fall in several locations with UniteHERE, the national hospitality workers' union.

I've shortened the blog list at the right, cutting back to odd web outposts you might not encounter -- or, some of them, even want to encounter. I like a lot of variety. Makes me think.

Will I post every day during the campaign? Maybe not. This round will be a test of my aging body and stamina. But I've posted regularly if not deeply through campaigns before, so we'll see. I post to focus my own thinking, oftentimes, as well as share with others.

This very week will be a test of how much I'm driven to post. If it seems burdensome, I won't. The Erudite Partner and I are taking three days away at a hot springs to mark some significant birthdays. "Significant birthdays" are ones divisible by five -- and these qualify. Imagine I'll put up a few things here, if only pictures of relaxation before the storm.

On into campaign season ...

Taking Banksy's advice today

The long campaign season and returning to a city filled with smoke leave me pooped. I need a day off. Back as soon as energy returns. It will; it always has.

Too tired -- and busy -- to post

Here's the view out my front window in this most lovely of rain-drenched California springs.

Blog pause for reflection

Could the unthinkable have arrived? Could Donald Trump have become simply boring?

Sure, this evil clown is still far too close to power to let down our guard. He's still an inciter of racial hatred. He nourishes bigotry and feeds ignorance daily. He must not become President.

But it sure looks as if he won't. A presidential season which might have been expected to be a cliff-hanger is being made a snoozer by a theatrical bozo. You can say this for Trump: he delivers the unexpected.

Other facets of the political to-and-fro should take center stage for me henceforth. Let's see if I can hold to that.

A few numerical milestones for New Years Eve 2015

1100/100 -- This year I "ran" (well, ambulated rapidly) 1100 miles over trails and asphalt paths. That was what I'd hoped for. Since 2008 when I adopted my current record keeping software, I've run over 8000 miles. This past year I also "hiked" 100 miles, by which I mean I wore boots and carried a light pack. Some of that was in the mountains of Montenegro, the rest on California hills. All of this was a delight and I'd sure hope to traverse similar distances next year.

81 precincts walked and photographed. "Precincts" are the small areas into which cities are carved for the purposes of organizing polling places. In December 2012 I started the 10-year project of photographing all 596 San Francisco precincts. Having completed 201 (not all posted on the site yet), I'm slightly ahead of schedule and still fascinated. Almost every time I venture out, I think something like "Oh, this one has nothing interesting -- what can I shoot?" Then I bring the pics home and work through them and discover, "yes, that was quirky" and less frequently, "Nice shot!" Given the extremely rapid changes happening in San Francisco, I'm glad that the 20 or so shots from each precinct that never go up on that blog are documenting sights and neighborhoods that could be swept away any day by the new economy. Maybe when I finish walking, I'll do something with those kinds of pictures.

480 posts at this site this year; 5080 since 2005, some serious, some silly, and some in between. What a world! I continue to think it worth modeling that we can practice political and ethical engagement with the country and the world we live and love in. When new acquaintances ask me, "what do you do?" I sometimes answer "I AM a blog." Not true, but I do try to produce coherent, researched, and thought-provoking content in this space. I learn a lot from doing it. I don't expect all my subjects to interest anyone but me, but some people do seem to appreciate the variety of topics.

Happy New Year to all who visit here!

Bloggy day off and suggested read

By the time anyone sees this, I'll have spent 3 days offline in the Sierra foothills and, I hope, decompressed a bit. Back tomorrow ...

If anyone is looking for something longer to chew on, I suggest this significant print review of Erudite Partners' book from The Christian Century.

Why do I blog?

This site has been chugging along for ten years as of today.

Some thoughts on the question in the title:

• I blog because I want to model that it is possible to draw out of the encounters and accidents of daily life some insights into political and social systems. That sounds grand. I mean such things as noticing that a restaurant has put a surcharge on your bill for "Healthy SF." That's the local program that insures the uninsured. You start noticing things like that and pretty soon you find your immersed in the economics of health insurance, of the restaurant industry, and even immigration policy. That's good!

• I blog because I've lived a long life in politics, inside the electoral system and outside in the social movements of our time. I think I've learned something along the way and this place is a venue in which to share what I observe.

• I blog because I think some things need to be said that people with institutional obligations or personal ambitions cannot or will not say. As I say to any organization for which I consult, "don't let me near any funders!"

• I blog because good things do happen. Sometimes it is truthful to feel hope or delight and to say so!

I had taken it into my head to do a significant redesign of the blog, but Google in its wisdom has upgraded the HTML in the underpinnings of these things, so I would have lost my all the paragraph breaks in the archives. I probably could have figured out how to avert that, but I have things to do ... that's blogging, an avocation, not a job. I settled for some clean up and a new picture.

You get what you pay for and Blogger has been good to me.

Blogging break today

Back ASAP. Did you ever feel there is just too much to think about?

Saturday scenes and scenery: labor takes center stage at #NN13

I'm plenty old enough to remember when the labor movement didn't always play nicely with community activists -- and when community activists too often scorned the labor movement.

Not anymore, at least at this year's Netroots Nations in San Jose. San Jose has long been a hotbed of labor/community cooperation, but the labor's fulsome support to the big conference of progressive activists is heartening.

Attendees were given a union-sponsored goodie bag ...


... kept in touch on a free WiFi hook-up provided by the Communications Workers ...


... given the opportunity to try on firefighting garb in front of a real ladder truck in the exhibit hall ...


... welcomed by a display of what "educational reform" is like for students and teachers ...


... plied with buttons and stickers ...


... offered a beer ...


... served with gusto by union-member convention center workers.

A great time is being had by all and eventually I'll share some of what I've learned, but the conference has another day to go, so these snapshots will have to do.

Easter Monday

Karen Armstrong understands why I spent so much of last week at church services:

Religion ... is a practical discipline in which we learn new capacities of mind and heart. Like premodern philosophy, it was not the quest for an abstract truth but a practical way of life. Usually religion is about doing things and it is hard work. …

If you don’t do religion, you don’t get it. In the modern period, however, we have turned faith into a head-trip. Originally, the English word “belief”, like the Greek pistis and the Latin credo, meant “commitment”. When Jesus asked his followers to have “faith”, he was not asking them to accept him blindly as the Second Person of the Trinity (an idea he would have found puzzling). Instead, he was asking his disciples to give all they had to the poor, live rough and work selflessly for the coming of a kingdom in which rich and poor would sit together at the same table.

New Statesman, March 2013

And so -- now that Christ is once again risen from the grave "trampling down death by death" -- I think I'll take a day off from blogging.

Google (Blogger) makes me happy

After months of not being able to make changes in the blogroll at the right below, last night without notice I discover I could once again work the widget that enables me to post the list. And so I put in a happy hour cleaning it up.

Google is in the process of upgrading the interface for Blogger, as it is with that for Gmail. I don't much like "the improvements," but hey, it's free. It's a heel-kicking moment.

A Facebook detractor's vindication: something smelt rotten here

Thanks to Barry Ritzholz writing in Washington Post, I've learned that Facebook counts me as a "Daily Active User" for the purposes of its gazillion dollar IPO (stock sale). The truth is I hate Facebook; if I want to interact with friends, I contact them. I cruise the World Wide Web for the opportunity to encounter the new and unfamiliar, not to float in my social circle. I pass through Facebook only for practical purposes to check on occasional event invitations.

But I'm a "Daily Active User" because this blog automatically publishes to Facebook, whether anyone looks at it there or not. This is accomplished by some blog widget whose source I've forgotten.

But to make the maximum amount of money for Mark Zuckerberg and friends, Facebook has invented some vastly inflated metrics to describe its usage. Ritzholz reports:

Facebook’s SEC data [purported] to show how fast the firm was growing. FB was becoming a “daily habit for more users,” and the numbers from the IPO filing were extraordinary: 845 million Monthly Active Users and 483 million Daily Active Users.

MAU? DAU? I had never heard of either metric, and novel accounting for public companies is always a red flag. Don’t just take my word for it, ask a Groupon investor.

It turns out that Facebook "users" don't necessarily visit the site. If you hit a "Like" button anywhere or, automatically publish there from another site as I do, your "usage" has been invoked inflate Facebook's value.
Ritzholz summarizes his conclusions:

What I learned from Facebook’s filing was that they have 161 million active users who actually go to Facebook.com each month. That’s not shabby -- but it’s a far cry from the MAU claims of 850 million. That definition of active users is probably overstated by a factor of 500 percent. I suspect that the $100 billion valuation may be overstated by nearly as much.

Facebook may turn out to be the goose that laid the golden egg yet, but somehow this detractor is not surprised that there are some phony implications in its self-description.

Good changes coming: time to end the death penalty

Changes are coming at this blog. For the first time in a long time, I've taken a demanding job that will thrust me into the thick of a serious electoral fight. While I doubt that the blog will go silent (I never lack for running commentary on our politics and society, not to mention photos), there may be days when nothing new comes along. Or perhaps other days when content here is a few lines and a link pointing of some piece of writing that interested me.

I've taken the position of field director for the SAFE California campaign. We seek to replace the death penalty with a sentence of life without parole. That is, if a criminal act so harms individuals and/or California society that our hunger for justice makes us long to kill the perpetrator, instead we'll ensure that person gets locked up for the rest of his/her life, no exceptions and no fooling.

The initiative measure will be on the 2012 ballot. We put in death sentences by popular vote in 1978, so we can only end them in the same way.

It's not as if a law enforcement environment including the death penalty has done the state any good. According to U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Arthur L. Alarcon, the near bankrupt state of California has spent $4 billion on the death penalty since 1978 -- and executed all of 13 people. Meanwhile, 46% of murders and 56% of rapes go unsolved. Maybe if we were putting more resources into solving crimes than into failing to execute people we'd be safer? We have hundreds of people already locked up on "death row" who are absorbing our money while our cops seem unable to investigate violent "cold cases."

And, of course, the risk that we might execute an innocent person never goes away. There's entirely too much evidence that Texas recently put to death Cameron Todd Willingham for setting a fire that killed his children. But the convincing "expert" testimony leading to his conviction had no scientific basis; he was almost certainly innocent. Mistakes can happen: in March 2011, a man named Franky Carrillo was released from prison in California after 20 years of incarceration for a murder he did not commit.There's no correcting a "mistake" when the death penalty is carried out.

When I tell people that I am working on a California campaign to end legal executions, they usually ask something like: "but don't California voters believe in the death penalty?" And if the questions is asked like that, many people agree. But we like a lot of other things as well: public safety, low taxes, good use of state resources, a legal system that delivers prompt and reliable justice for all. A majority of the electorate is well on the way to understanding that the death penalty actually impedes these other goods that they value. The campaign's job is to help people solidify that emerging understanding; when they do, a majority are willing to go with a system that ensures that really dangerous criminals never come back on the streets.

I won't be writing about the campaign much, though I am sure that I'll occasionally share vignettes from the process. The death penalty is a deeply emotional subject; the thought of executing another human being forces most of us to ponder what we believe and value. Occasionally I may have experiences to share, but mostly campaigns are to be lived (and survived) first and analyzed only later.

An end to the internet as we have known it?

Those of us for whom using the Net is a staple of our work and our lives need to be aware that, like previous "revolutionary" citizen-participation technological innovations such as radio, there are forces that want to shut us down.

The owners of intellectual property want to get paid for their products. They are threatened by the creative use we make of their artifacts on blogs, on YouTube, via Twitter and will make in environments only imagined today. Note I said "the owners" -- those complaining about our vigorous free use are less the creative artists whose products we share and build upon, more the corporations who buy the artists' work and want to control reselling it to the rest of us. (There's that 1% problem again …)

Rebecca MacKinnon, in an oped article in the New York Times, explains how the proposed "Stop Online Piracy Act" would be as dangerous to free speech in the United States as is China's Great Internet Firewall.

The House bill would also emulate China’s system of corporate “self-discipline,” making companies liable for users’ actions. The burden would be on the Web site operator to prove that the site was not being used for copyright infringement. The effect on user-generated sites like YouTube would be chilling.

YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have played an important role in political movements from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park. At present, social networking services are protected by a “safe harbor” provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which grants Web sites immunity from prosecution as long as they act in good faith to take down infringing content as soon as rights-holders point it out to them. The House bill would destroy that immunity, putting the onus on YouTube to vet videos in advance or risk legal action. It would put Twitter in a similar position to that of its Chinese cousin, Weibo, which reportedly employs around 1,000 people to monitor and censor user content and keep the company in good standing with authorities.

Compliance with the Stop Online Piracy Act would require huge overhead spending by Internet companies for staff and technologies dedicated to monitoring users and censoring any infringing material from being posted or transmitted. This in turn would create daunting financial burdens and legal risks for start-up companies, making it much harder for brilliant young entrepreneurs with limited resources to create small and innovative Internet companies that empower citizens and change the world.

Creators need to be paid for their creations, but our society needs robust free speech. The money barons are closing in and we know they do own Congress …***
Meanwhile, there are other threats to our use of the internet that may be even more serious. In the guise of helping us find the results we want or would like, based on our past internet behavior, search engines and web sites are tailoring what we see when we visit them. Think about it: my Google search results for any particular term do not look like yours; the same goes for the suggested articles the New York Times offers me: you get different ones. In many ways, the personalized commercial internet will be more constraining than a government-censored one.

Eli Pariser calls this living in "The Filter Bubble." He explains clearly in less than 10 minutes here.

The internet is showing us what we want to see, not what we need to see. … you don't decide what gets in … and you don't decide what gets left out. … We're seeing a passing of the torch from human gate keepers to algorithmic ones. … We need to make sure these algorithms have encoded within them a sense of civic responsibility … we need [the authors of these filter rules] to give us some control so we can decide what gets through and what doesn't.

You can also read Pariser's The Filter Bubble for more. Hint: I found it in an old fashioned information channel -- the public library. Recommended.***
This seems an appropriate place to serve notice that Facebook has announced that as of November 22 it will no longer allow import of blog posts.

"You currently automatically import content from your website or blog into your Facebook notes. Starting November 22nd, this feature will no longer be available, although you'll still be able to write individual notes."

Apparently they want me to have to visit their useless site daily. Ferget it … I had friends before Facebook and expect to have them after.

Artifacts from a happier sports era

We're cleaning out obscure corners of our kitchen preparatory to long overdue remodeling and came across these improbable items: once upon a time, our sad sack pro football team was highly sought after advertising partner. Wonder if that "training table bread" was as spongy white as looks likely from its plastic wrapper?


Those were the days, the last time the local gladiators were dominant. Watching the 49ers flounder has become a painful weekend ritual -- just perhaps can the current assemblage bring them back from zombie-land? Time will tell. We fans have practiced modulating our hopes so the lows won't be so low.***Over the next week or so, a combination of trying to work adjacent to the remodeling and dental surgery is likely to reduce my attention to this blog. Regular posting will resume as the dust settles.

Hiatus

I have the flu. Regular blogging will resume when the shivering, chills, feverish spikes and sweating stop. Has anyone else ever had strange scratchiness under the soles of the feet while running a fever? Just thought I'd ask.

What's the green "tweet" thingy?

Observant visitors will have noticed that every post here now comes with a little green "tweet" button. If you are so inclined, and you use Twitter, you can click on that button and you'll be taken to your twitter account to send on a tweet noting the post.

If you are not using Twitter, you are probably asking, why in the world would you want to? I asked that myself until recently, but I am now finding that joining the flow on Twitter is making me aware of writing and opinions I would like to see and would otherwise have missed.

You've probably heard that Twitter consists of 140 character "tweets" that ostensibly answer the question "what are you doing?" People on Twitter "follow" each other's tweets. And if you have anything you value to do in life, you probably don't want to know on a minute by minute basis what your friends are doing!

That's not how I use Twitter. Instead, this is what I'm doing. I've always chosen which books to read, and which journalism to scan, and which blogs to follow, by establishing a more or less conscious list of people whose information and opinions I've learned to value. It used to be (like last year!), when I'd encounter a new candidate for that list in an online venue, I'd put a Google alert on the name and read mentions of them for awhile, figuring out whether I really wanted to follow them.

Now, many interesting thinkers seem to have adopted Twitter. I don't have to mess with Google alerts. They tweet their stuff and they tweet what interests them, often just as interesting. If I follow them on Twitter, I can sample the stream. I don't have to attend to all of it, but can dip in and out.

This development has me tweeting myself -- moderately. Every blog post gets tweeted automatically (sometimes twice -- I'm working on the glitch). Occasionally I'll throw out a tweet about an interesting article I've run across online. And if I'm at some more or less political event, I might tweet a "twitpic" -- a picture.

For a thoughtful rant (nice idea, huh?) on the authority of various forms of communication, try this from Coturnix. And I should say that the previous post here on health reform journalism owed a lot to Twitter folks @emptywheel and @jayrosen_nyu.