Mastodon

Well who knows what is hap­pen­ing to Twit­ter, where most of my stray writ­ing has gone in recent years. My lifeboat will be at Mastodon.

Happy Kitzmas!

I wrote this back when I worked at NCSE, and it still brings me joy. If you don’t recall the events of the Kitzmiller v. Dover tri­al, there are great resources at TalkO­ri­gins and per­haps the defin­i­tive con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous account in The New York­er (as well as the books ref­er­enced in the poem below).

’Twas the night before Kitz­mas and all through the land,
No cre­ation­ist was stir­ring, not even Ken Ham;
The briefs had been draft­ed and filed with great care,
In hopes that Judge Jones’s decision’d be fair;
The plain­tiffs were nes­tled all snug in their beds,
While Bill of Rights visions ran round in their heads;
And Nick blogged for PT, and Vic played The Boss,
And fret­ted and fussed o’er the chance of a loss,
When over the wires there arose such a clat­ter,
I sprang from my bed to see what was the mat­ter.
Away to Net­NewsWire I flew like a flash,
I start­ed my brows­er and cleared out the cache.
The rul­ing I found at the fed­er­al court
Was a ver­dict I knew I would love to report.
For what to my won­der­ing eyes should appear
But a hun­dred-plus pages, all writ­ten so clear,
With lawyer­ly flour­ish like ten score trom­bones,
I knew in a moment it must be Judge Jones.
More sharp­er than razors the experts they came,
Whom he cit­ed, and mar­shaled, and quot­ed by name:
“Now, Miller! now, Alters! now, Padi­an—why not—
On, Robert T. Pen­nock! on, For­rest and Haught!
The Estab­lish­ment Clause says that Pan­das must go,
ID isn’t sci­ence; heck, Fuller says so!”
The case had been brought in a fed­er­al court
When the Dover school board thought it wise to con­sort
With Dis­co. ’tute shys­ters who sold them a line:
“Don’t call it cre­ation, but ID should be fine.”
As rats that behind the Pied Piper did flow,
The school board had tak­en the DI’s say-so;
The teach­ers they ordered to point to ID,
“Evolution’s a the­o­ry, with gaps, don’t you see!”
A book had been bought to be put on their shelves;
Who pur­chased the book? No one knew, maybe elves.
More like­ly, a church group had ponied the dough,
But when pressed on the point Buck­ing­ham had said “no.”
His lies how they win­kled! His obstruc­tion so crude!
In the face of such efforts, eleven folks sued.
Tam­my and friends brought the ACLU,
Steve Har­vey and Roth­schild joined pro bono too,
The quar­tet was fin­ished by Richard B. Katskee,
With sci­encey back­ing from Nicholas Matzke.
(The oppo­site side was in sad dis­ar­ray:
For Dem­b­s­ki and Mey­er had scut­tled away,
While Min­nich and Fuller and Michael J. Behe
Gave tragi­comedic per­for­mances, e.g.
Com­par­ing ID to a view like astrol­o­gy—
I think that Jeane Dixon is owed an apol­o­gy.
The More Center’s Thomp­son was no Machi­avel­li;
His case was as firm as a bowl full of jel­ly.)
To the court came reporters, in need of news hooks,
And Lau­ri and Gordy and Edward wrote books.
And Matthew wrote also, of Darwin’s own breed,
Each one of their books is a crack­ing good read.
Jones heard the case fair­ly, not tip­ping his hand,
Though the case it moved slow­ly, and forty days spanned.
His rul­ing was thor­ough, at times it waxed furi­ous,
That board mem­bers lied he con­sid­ered per­ju­ri­ous.
By then an elec­tion had sort­ed their hash,
Still Jones fined the board around two mil­lion cash.
In read­ing the rul­ing I filled up with glee,
The flaws of ID for the whole world to see!
In schools ’cross the nation I knew folks would say—
“Hap­py Kitz­mas to all, and to all a good day!”

By Josh Rose­nau and Glenn Branch, with apolo­gies to Clement Clark Moore.

Lab leaks and why expertise matters

Of late, I’ve been try­ing to under­stand the spike in enthu­si­asm for the so-called “lab leak” claim about the ori­gin of SARS-CoV­‑2, the virus that caus­es COVID-19. To me, and as far as I can tell, to the major­i­ty of peo­ple with the exper­tise and train­ing to judge these things, a lab escape is far less plau­si­ble than a zoonot­ic spillover from some wild bat pop­u­la­tion, or some inter­me­di­ate species which picked up the virus from bats and then spread it to humans. 

Zoonot­ic spillover is how SARS and MERS became epi­demics, and so its pret­ty rea­son­able to expect the same thing hap­pened with COVID-19. It’s also how we get Ebo­la, Lyme dis­ease, rabies, West Nile, zika, and a bunch of oth­er dis­eases that remain rel­e­vant to mod­ern life. We can’t always trace the exact site or wild pop­u­la­tion where that spillover hap­pened. So it’s pos­si­ble we might nev­er find the source of SARS-CoV­‑2, or that it might take a long time.

One of the things that seems to plague these dis­cus­sions is that non-sci­en­tists’ expec­ta­tions about how sci­ence works are often not how sci­ence actu­al­ly works. So peo­ple look­ing for signs of some­thing nefar­i­ous at the Wuhan Insti­tute for Virol­o­gy will latch onto some nub­bin, from which they spin up a grand the­o­ry of how a lab escape could’ve hap­pened. But it turns out to be built on sand, because of things most peo­ple don’t know and usu­al­ly have no rea­son at all to know.

For instance, today I got into an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion with the New York­er’s James Surowiec­ki. We were dis­cussing a pas­sage from Lind­say Bey­er­stein’s excel­lent New Repub­lic piece. She points out that most peo­ple envi­sion­ing a “lab leak” pic­ture researchers hold­ing giant tubes full of virus, any one of which might slip and unleash the Apoc­a­lypse. Bey­er­stein writes:

the pop­u­lar ver­sion of the lab leak the­o­ry that posits that Covid was tak­en from nature and escaped in its wild form. The prob­lem with that sce­nario, [Dr. Angela Ras­mussen] told me, is that a swab from a bat con­tains very lit­tle infec­tious virus. Each bat weighs less than half an ounce, and each sam­ple is basi­cal­ly a Q‑tip swiped briefly over a bat’s mouth or anus. These sam­ples are stored in vials in the freez­er; they’re not like­ly to spill or leak, the way dis­as­ter movies have primed us to suppose.

Surowiec­ki replied ask­ing about claims that WIV may have kept wild bats on site, which might have more read­i­ly spread virus­es than an errant cot­ton swab. It’s a claim that’s cir­cu­lat­ed in the more con­spir­a­to­r­i­al parts of the lab leak dis­course, but is hin­dered by the fact that there’s no evi­dence beyond a video of unclear prove­nance and some ambigu­ous quotes in pop­u­lar press accounts to sug­gest that there ever were bats held at the facility.

Now, I’ve nev­er done research in Chi­na, nor have I tried to keep bats in a lab, but I have been involved in aca­d­e­m­ic ani­mal research, catch­ing mice in the field and releas­ing them after brief mea­sure­ments. I know that the jump from that sort of research to car­ing for cap­tive ani­mals is an absolute­ly enor­mous leap from a prac­ti­cal stand­point and in terms of admin­is­tra­tive bur­den. Is it impos­si­ble that WIV did that? No, not impos­si­ble. But it would be a heavy lift, and should leave some pret­ty clear trails to fol­low, none of which exist. 

Oth­er than a few sec­onds of footage of a bat (from the wrong fam­i­ly) being han­dled in a lab some­where (not nec­es­sar­i­ly at WIV), advo­cates point to a pair of quotes, which Surowiec­ki cit­ed, from research col­lab­o­ra­tors from the US who are claimed to have waf­fled on whether WIV might have worked with cap­tive bats. Here he cites Peter Daszak, a US researcher who co-authored grants with WIV staff, receiv­ing fund­ing from US agencies. 

Also, I don’t under­stand why Daszak tweet­ed of WIV “They DO NOT have live or dead bats in them,” only to lat­er total­ly back off that statement.

— James Surowiec­ki (@JamesSurowiecki) June 29, 2021

Surowiec­ki notes that Daszak lat­er declined to rule out the pos­si­bil­i­ty that WIV had any bats, sug­gest­ing that Daszak was backtracking.

You’re right, but also we did­n’t ask them if they had bats. I would­n’t be sur­prised if, like many oth­er virol­o­gy labs, they were try­ing to set up a bat colony. I know it’s hap­pen­ing in labs here and in oth­er countries.

— Peter Daszak (@PeterDaszak) June 1, 2021

I looked around, and found a fuller ver­sion of Dasza­k’s first quote, which lim­its his claim sig­nif­i­cant­ly. He said, “This piece describes work I’m the lead on and labs I’ve col­lab­o­rat­ed with for 15 years. They DO NOT have live or dead bats in them. There is no evi­dence any­where that this happened.”

To me, that seemed sig­nif­i­cant­ly dif­fer­ent. But Surowiec­ki answered, “I don’t get it. The WIV is one of those labs that he’s col­lab­o­rat­ed with, and he issued a blan­ket denial that it had live or dead bats.”

And that makes sense! It seems like Daszak first says the lab isn’t doing this work, then says “we did­n’t ask them if they had bats.” 

But to me, and to an aca­d­e­m­ic researcher like Daszak, WIV is not “a lab.” It con­tains prob­a­bly dozens of dif­fer­ent labs, most doing noth­ing of inter­est to Daszak. It’d be like sug­gest­ing that because Daszak works with NIH researchers, he must know all about every ani­mal colony NIH main­tains. Daszak com­ment­ed on the labs he col­lab­o­rates with, which would also be the labs most focused on sar­be­covirus­es like SARS-CoV­‑2. Rather than being self-con­tra­dict­ing, Dasza­k’s com­ments make total sense in this light: he’s say­ing that the work he knows about does­n’t involve live bats, but he can’t say there are no live bats any­where in the entire, large research cen­ter. Con­tex­tu­al knowl­edge changes our inter­pre­ta­tion, and thus shapes how we weight the like­li­hood of a secret bat colony.

A sim­i­lar thing hap­pened when we talked about the prac­ti­cal­i­ties of actu­al­ly keep­ing such a colony, and keep­ing it secret. I could cer­tain­ly imag­ine it being prac­ti­cal for a field researcher to grab a mouse and bring it home for the week­end, but I also know it would go against their train­ing and all sorts of stan­dards for ani­mal care and use. It would be against all sorts of rules, some of which may be dif­fer­ent in Chi­na, but oth­ers are enforced by US fund­ing agen­cies (which would hold for­eign researchers to sim­i­lar stan­dards as US facil­i­ties), and are enforced by pub­lish­ers as well. There’s no rea­son for a non-sci­en­tists to know those details, but it’s a firm bar­ri­er to some sort of ad hoc bat zoo at WIV. They want to pub­lish in Sci­ence, Cell, and Nature, and they can’t (regard­less of any reg­u­la­to­ry dif­fer­ences between the US and Chi­na) if they don’t get eth­i­cal review for that research, and doc­u­ment that review and the con­di­tions of the ani­mals’ care at the time of pub­li­ca­tion. If they were work­ing with cap­tive bats, we’d see evi­dence in their pub­lished research, and like­ly in reg­u­la­to­ry paper­work sub­mit­ted with NIH and oth­er fund­ing agen­cies in the US, if not in China. 

On top of the bureau­crat­ic bar­ri­ers to this work, Bey­er­stein tweet­ed a link to this inter­est­ing paper on grow­ing inter­est in bat research, and the chal­lenges of keep­ing a colony, espe­cial­ly of the insect-eat­ing bats that are host to SARS-like virus­es. Unlike a rat that you catch and bring home in a cage, a bat that you bring to the lab needs a lot of room to fly, and often requires elab­o­rate work to get it to feed. If they main­tained any sort of colony of horse­shoe bats, that would prob­a­bly have mer­it­ed its own research pub­li­ca­tion. Maybe mul­ti­ple papers. And it’d require main­tain­ing a sub­stan­tial facil­i­ty and staff to care for the bats, maybe the size of a net­ted-in soc­cer field or more. Not some­thing easy to hide. They’d prob­a­bly con­sult with oth­er peo­ple out­side of Chi­na who have done sim­i­lar work. There would be a trail of evi­dence in research papers, con­struc­tion, and con­ver­sa­tions with col­leagues out­side of China. 

The few quotes that peo­ple cite as evi­dence some cap­tive bats may have been kept at WIV all sug­gest some­thing extreme­ly casu­al, and there’s just no sign that you could run such an oper­a­tion at all casu­al­ly. Here’s what it takes to feed a colony of insect-eat­ing bats:

The high­light­ed sec­tion here is rel­e­vant, since the horse­shoe bats at issue for SARS-like virus­es are insec­tiv­o­rous. Not some­thing done casu­al­ly, or only record­ed in the kick­er to one ran­dom pro­file of a researcher. pic.twitter.com/QH00Z2ZxRj

— Josh Rose­nau (@JoshRosenau) June 29, 2021

Again, no one who isn’t a bat biol­o­gist has any rea­son to know all of that. How dif­fer­ent coun­tries, fun­ders, and pub­lish­ers reg­u­late ani­mal care and use, and what biol­o­gists have to do to main­tain a research colony, are miles from most peo­ple’s dai­ly expe­ri­ence. Exact­ly what aca­d­e­mics con­sid­er “a lab” is irrel­e­vant to most peo­ple’s lives. There’s absolute­ly no rea­son for any­one out­side the field to know these details. But each of them shapes our intu­itions, and the upshot is that ideas which seem implau­si­ble to the sci­en­tists clos­est to the ques­tion can seem much more plau­si­ble, indeed may seem most like­ly, to those far­ther away.

Lab leak advo­cate Ali­na Chan inad­ver­tent­ly made this point a few days ago when she wrote this:

One thing I’ve noticed is that experts in the hard sci­ences (math­e­mat­ics, CS, physics) afaik are more like­ly to think that SARS-CoV­‑2 has lab ori­gins.

But more experts in the life sci­ences afaik seem to think that a nat­ur­al ori­gin is more like­ly.

Could it be a mat­ter of priors?

— Ali­na Chan (@Ayjchan) June 27, 2021

It is about pri­ors. It’s incred­i­bly telling that peo­ple with informed pri­ors think a lab leak is extreme­ly unlike­ly and that zoono­sis is most like­ly, while those who know less about the murky day-to-day of bio­log­i­cal research find the lab leak intu­itive­ly like­ly. Even at a dif­fer­ent lev­el of abstrac­tion, biol­o­gists see these issues through dif­fer­ent lens­es. Biol­o­gists know that there are a lot of bats (about 1200–1500 species in the world, many unde­scribed), and that bats are good at hid­ing but trav­el all over. They also know that bats have a lot of virus­es and that those virus­es are good at hid­ing, and that there are a ton of ways a virus could leap to farmed ani­mals, or ani­mals that are caught live in the wild and brought to mar­kets in big cities like Wuhan. That’s a causal chain that makes sense if you’ve stud­ied bio­di­ver­si­ty or tried sam­pling these things in the wild. At the same time, it all can eas­i­ly seem incred­i­bly ten­u­ous to peo­ple who rarely see bats and don’t real­ize just how lit­tle we real­ly know about the bio­di­ver­si­ty all around us. But human error? We all see that every day.

Avengers and literary truth

Not to dredge up old fights, but a top­ic we dis­cussed on the blog back in 2009 has cropped up in a cou­ple of recent essays. The issue is whether there is a form of truth that lit­er­a­ture can con­vey, per­haps even a lev­el of lit­er­ary truth which can­not be con­veyed through oth­er means. The top­ic came up orig­i­nal­ly in the con­text of ways we might inter­pret reli­gious texts, but it applies more generally.

So, in this week’s New York Times book review sec­tion, we have an exchange between the edi­tors and review­er Mohsin Hamid in which Hamid explains:

I’m a polit­i­cal ani­mal. How the pack hunts, shares its food, tends its wound­ed — these things mat­ter to me. So I write about them. Fic­tion and non­fic­tion are just two dif­fer­ent ways of lying to try to get at truths. Fic­tion lies by fab­ri­cat­ing what isn’t there. Non­fiction lies by omit­ting what is. Doing both is use­ful: it keeps me aware of sen­tences, a novelist’s obses­sion, and the pow­er of the void that sur­rounds them, a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion of journalists.

And in The Guardian, Avengers star Tom Hid­dle­ston (he plays Loki), explains the val­ue he sees in super­hero movies:

Actors in any capac­i­ty, artists of any stripe, are inspired by their curios­i­ty, by their desire to explore all quar­ters of life, in light and in dark, and reflect what they find in their work. Artists instinc­tive­ly want to reflect human­i­ty, their own and each oth­er’s, in all its inter­mit­tent virtue and vital­i­ty, frailty and fallibility.

I have nev­er been more inspired than when I watched Harold Pin­ter speak in a direct address to cam­era in his Nobel lec­ture in 2005. “Truth in dra­ma is for­ev­er elu­sive. You nev­er quite find it but the search for it is com­pul­sive. The search is clear­ly what dri­ves the endeav­our. The search is your task. More often than not you stum­ble upon the truth in the dark, col­lid­ing with it or just glimps­ing an image or a shape which seems to cor­re­spond with the truth, often with­out real­is­ing that you have done so. But the real truth is that there nev­er is any such thing as one truth to be found in dra­mat­ic art. There are many. These truths chal­lenge each oth­er, recoil from each oth­er, reflect each oth­er, ignore each oth­er, tease each oth­er, are blind to each oth­er. Some times you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fin­gers and is lost.”

Big talk for some­one in a sil­ly super­hero film, I hear you say. But super­hero films offer a shared, faith­less, mod­ern mythol­o­gy, through which these truths can be explored. In our increas­ing­ly sec­u­lar soci­ety, with so many dis­parate gods and dif­fer­ent faiths, super­hero films present a unique can­vas upon which our shared hopes, dreams and apoc­a­lyp­tic night­mares can be pro­ject­ed and played out. Ancient soci­eties had anthro­po­mor­phic gods: a huge pan­theon expand­ing into cen­turies of dynas­tic dra­ma; fathers and sons, mar­tyred heroes, star-crossed lovers, the deaths of kings – sto­ries that taught us of the dan­ger of hubris and the pri­ma­cy of humil­i­ty. It’s the every­day stuff of every man’s life, and we love it. It sounds cliched, but super­heroes can be lone­ly, vain, arro­gant and proud. Often they over­come these human frail­ties for the greater good. The pos­si­bil­i­ty of redemp­tion is right around the cor­ner, but we have to earn it.

This con­nects nice­ly with a piece John Wilkins blogged a cou­ple years ago, attempt­ing to clar­i­fy what it means to be a god:

Philoso­phers have always treat­ed the deity as a high con­cept enti­ty, some­thing that has the attrib­ut­es of per­fec­tion: all-know­ing, all-pow­er­ful, omnipresent, omnibenev­o­lent and so on. This is a view of God that is pre­sumed in most dis­cus­sions of athe­ism, the exis­tence of God, the prob­lem of evil and the like. But it is a very rare view of God in actu­al, you know, reli­gions. The reli­gions of the Folk have divine deities of all kinds, rang­ing from the all-too-human and fal­li­ble vari­ety of Norse and Irish mythol­o­gy, through to the dis­tant and unknow­able gods of Epi­cu­rus. So what sort of a test should we apply to divinities?

I pro­pose a rough and ready kind of test I call the Greek Pan­theon Test: If it would be a god in the Greek Pan­theon, then it’s a god. Of course, a num­ber of divini­ties not includ­ed by the Greeks, the Titans, would also be divini­ties in my book, but that is a mat­ter of restrict­ing divine beings to Olym­pus, which is a cul­tic mat­ter. If Chronos were unknown to the Greeks, he’d def­i­nite­ly be includ­ed as a god when they were giv­en a description.

…

Now the coun­ter­in­tu­itive out­comes of this test: angels are gods. St Michael is indis­cernibly dif­fer­ent from Thor or Mars or Huitzilopochtli as a god of war. Saints are gods. Mary and the Evan­ge­lists play a role as inter­me­di­aries between the High God and wor­ship­pers, just as the Vyan­taras in Jain­ism, or the Demi­urge in Pla­ton­ism and the dai­mones in Greek mys­ti­cism. Jinn are gods. They have, as the Dis­ney film put it, “super-phenomenal cos­mic pow­er­s”. Prophets can also be gods. Ances­tors, espe­cial­ly in the Con­fu­cian tra­di­tion, are gods. Devas in Tibetan Bud­dhism are gods. Any reli­gion which has super­hu­man agents in it, has gods, no mat­ter what the philo­soph­i­cal­ly pure elite the­ol­o­gy may say.

The Justin Bar­rett view of gods as “Minimal Coun­ter­in­tu­itive Agents” – effec­tive­ly humans with super­hu­man pow­ers – ties in with this. A god is a super­hero or supervil­lain. They are like us in all respects except their abil­i­ties or some oth­er super­stim­u­lus fea­ture. This is the folk view of gods, and it is some­thing that phi­los­o­phy of reli­gion had bet­ter come to terms with sometime.

Not only is Thor a god in the Norse pan­theon, he’s also a god in the Mar­vel pan­theon, and so too is Spi­der­man, and Super­man and Bat­man on the DC side. Whether writ­ten as sequen­tial graph­ics on a page, or pro­duced as a movie, or writ­ten out as a nov­el, or passed down as oral tra­di­tion and edit­ed into a canon over mil­lenia, peo­ple use such god­like fig­ures to work through com­pli­cat­ed ideas about why the word is as it is, how we ought to behave, and how we can make things bet­ter. The adven­tures of Super­man and Bat­man and John Con­stan­tine offer argu­ments about how things should be, and the lit­er­ary tech­niques they use are not so far from what you find in the para­bles and alle­gor­i­cal let­ters of the Chris­t­ian New Tes­ta­ment or the clear­ly lit­er­ary sto­ries told in the Old Testament.

Rec­og­niz­ing that truths exist in these lit­er­ary works does­n’t require sci­ence to sur­ren­der any epis­te­mo­log­i­cal ground, nor does it require us to take any stance for or against the claim that there is some addi­tion­al form of truth in reli­gious texts.

The great sci­ence writer Stephen Jay Gould expressed an ele­ment of this in his essay Wide Hats and Nar­row Minds:

But if we laugh with deri­sion, we will nev­er under­stand. Human intel­lec­tu­al capac­i­ty has not altered for thou­sands of years so far as we can tell. If intel­li­gent peo­ple invest­ed intense ener­gy in issues that now seem fool­ish to us, then the fail­ure lies in our under­stand­ing of their world, not in their dis­tort­ed per­cep­tions. Even the stan­dard exam­ple of ancient non­sense – the debate about angels on pin­heads – makes sense once you real­ize that the­olo­gians were not dis­cussing whether five or eigh­teen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infi­nite num­ber. In cer­tain the­o­log­i­cal sys­tems, the cor­po­re­al­i­ty or non­cor­po­re­al­i­ty of angels is an impor­tant mat­ter indeed.

And, in a world before cal­cu­lus, the amount of space occu­pied by an infi­nite num­ber of infi­nite­ly small objects was hard­ly a triv­ial mat­ter. Here, angels were standins for the sorts of fic­tion­al objects sci­en­tists often invoke: point mass­es, mag­net­ic monopoles, fric­tion­less sur­faces, etc. Angels were the only object every­one involved could coher­ent­ly con­ceive of that exist­ed in great num­bers but might have no mass or vol­ume, so they were invoked to clar­i­fy a con­fus­ing and com­plex math­e­mat­i­cal prob­lem. Just as these sorts of sci­en­tif­ic fic­tions show us truths about sci­en­tif­ic real­i­ty, char­ac­ters in fic­tion­al works let us take ideas to a lim­it and per­ceive truths about real­i­ty we might not have seen otherwise.

To me, and no mat­ter what fic­tion­al engi­neers say, this view enno­bles lit­er­ary works, whether we are track­ing Job’s tra­vails, Ahab’s mono­ma­nia, or Joss Whe­do­n’s take on the Avengers. 

Solidarity forever

Hand in hand together

We shall not be moved 

“We Shall Not Be Moved,” Trad. civ­il rights song 

On Wednes­day, Novem­ber 2, the peo­ple of Oak­land peace­ful­ly, polite­ly, closed down­town Oak­land and the Port of Oak­land – the nation’s fifth busiest port. 

It’s hard to say how many peo­ple spent at least part of their day at the inter­sec­tion of 14th Street at Broad­way. Broad­way was closed for two long blocks, the side streets were, too, and all were filled with peo­ple. The plaza in front of City Hall was filled as well, with tents, with free food, with DJs, with silkscreen­ing sta­tions, with speech­es, and with impromp­tu teach-ins. Occa­sion­al­ly, a large mass would gath­er and march off to protest in front of a bank or oth­er cor­po­rate male­fac­tor, but those march­es left the cen­ter of the strike filled with people. 

At its peak, I’d guess there were over 5,000 peo­ple present, and in the course of the day, I’d be amazed if few­er than 20,000 par­tic­i­pat­ed. I’ve seen esti­mates as high as 100,000, which strikes me as high but not implau­si­ble. By the end of the day, the City of Oak­land and var­i­ous oth­er local busi­ness­es had instruct­ed employ­ees to leave work ear­ly, and many sim­ply told their employ­ees not to come to work. 

My employ­er remained open, but I took the day off to see his­to­ry made. This is the first gen­er­al strike in the Unit­ed States in almost 55 years, and the con­text of this strike is dif­fer­ent from those that came before. I doubt any strike as suc­cess­ful as this has been assem­bled in so lit­tle time, with so lit­tle direct involve­ment from orga­nized labor. In less than a week, the orga­niz­ers seemed to have planned for every con­tin­gency, and accom­plished all their major goals for the day. And they did so peace­ful­ly, and with bare­ly more than a token police pres­ence. I saw a police car block­ing off Broad­way when I biked in that morn­ing, but even that pres­ence was gone by the afternoon. 

The crowds came for myr­i­ad rea­sons. Unions had tents set up, where they talked about their work, ral­lied their mem­bers, and pro­vid­ed some insti­tu­tion­al mem­o­ry. Var­i­ous social­ist and com­mu­nist fac­tions had tents and tables, too, as did the Black Pan­ther Party. 

But it was­n’t all pol­i­tics. Next to the Black Pan­thers was the Bud­dhist med­i­ta­tion cir­cle, where peo­ple sat in silent med­i­ta­tion all day, amidst throngs of peo­ple and not far from the mas­sive sound truck, jammed with ampli­fiers and peo­ple exhort­ing those mas­sive crowds. Else­where, an inter­faith tent host­ed ser­vices. Food jus­tice groups orga­nized a teach-in, and all day there were long lines wait­ing for the free food sup­plied by groups like Food not Bombs. 

Musi­cians per­formed live in the plaza­’s amphithe­ater, and a DJ spun records on Broad­way in front of the Oak­lan­dish shop (which was closed for the day). Inside the plaza, crowds danced as DJs hyphy and hiphop spun by var­i­ous dif­fer­ent DJs. A brass band wan­dered through, and a jug­band ensem­ble took up res­i­dence in an office build­ing breezeway. 

Anoth­er long line led to a silkscreen­ing sta­tion, where strik­ers could make their own sign that read “Hel­la Occu­py Oak­land.” Oth­er folks hand­ed out signs that read “This is our city and we can shut it down.” For myself, I brought some mark­ers and card­board, mak­ing a sign that read “Sol­i­dar­i­ty For­ev­er” on one side and quot­ed a line from that clas­sic labor hymn on the oth­er: “With­out our brains and mus­cle not a sin­gle wheel can turn.” While I was draw­ing that sign, two young guys of high school age asked to bor­row my mark­er, and made their own signs. The spare card­board I brought was­n’t hard to pass along to folks in need, and oth­er folks made signs out of a mas­sive pile of card­board in the mid­dle of the tent city that has been Occu­py Oak­land’s per­ma­nent home for these last weeks. 

There were arts and crafts areas for chil­dren, too. I’d guess that 10% of the crowd was under 10, and there were blocks and crayons and toys for them in a chil­dren’s tent. Just like their par­ents, these kids were putting their imag­i­na­tion to work, build­ing a bet­ter future. 

Fes­tive as the atmos­phere was, peo­ple did come to protest, and to put those signs to work. Some peo­ple blocked the entrance to a Citibank office build­ing direct­ly across 14th street, and march­es went fur­ther afield, to protest in front of var­i­ous cor­po­rate offices. There were 3 major march­es dur­ing the day, and var­i­ous small­er ones. On the march I fell in with, I arrived short­ly after the win­dow at a Chase bank had a brick thrown through it, and the cracks in the glass were still crack­ling out­ward as I walked past. That was the only sign of vio­lence I saw that day, and no one was cheer­ing it. 

For var­i­ous obvi­ous rea­sons, the media cov­er­age of the day focused on a few bro­ken win­dows and some oth­er van­dal­ism, but to do so tru­ly miss­es the point. What vio­lence took place involved per­haps 1% of 1% of the peo­ple present, and for the most part, those crowds policed them­selves. A few peo­ple turned out hop­ing to start trou­ble, and a few of them suc­ceed­ed, but it would be wrong to let those iso­lat­ed inci­dents shade our per­cep­tion of the day. 

Every­one I met and every­thing I saw at Occu­py Oak­land was filled with joy, and it felt like noth­ing so much as an enor­mous street fes­ti­val. Every­one was friend­ly, every­one felt con­nect­ed to a big­ger cause, and every­one was hav­ing fun. The news heli­copters over­head could­n’t cap­ture that part of the sto­ry, but there were loads of reporters on the ground with us, and there’s sim­ply no way that they could have come away with any­thing but a pos­i­tive impression. 

At one point, a large group of peo­ple spon­ta­neous­ly joined hands and began danc­ing in a giant and grow­ing circle. 

A Team­sters Union truck pulled in for a while, blast­ing music and pump­ing up a dif­fer­ent part of the crowd. 

Tibetan monks and a Native Amer­i­can leader sang chants together. 

Cler­gy at the Inter­faith tent sang “this lit­tle light of mine.” 

Folks shared tips on which sand­wich shops were open, and where you could recharge your cell phone. 

Giant and some­times obscure ban­ners flapped over­head. “Death to cap­i­tal­ism” stretched across 14th street, while the large and cryp­tic “Biore­gion­al Frac­tion­al Bank­ing” ban­ner seemed to pop up every­where. A cou­ple of kids whose par­ents had let them skip school car­ried signs in sup­port of teach­ers, while a 1 year old had a sign strapped on her back say­ing: “Too small to fail.” 

The same, for­tu­nate­ly, can­not be said of the gen­er­al strike. While small­er than the orga­niz­ers had hoped, it closed down com­merce through down­town Oak­land for the day, and empha­sized the oft-repeat­ed chant: “Whose streets?” “Our streets.” Not the banks’ streets, not the police’s streets, not even the City Coun­cil’s streets. Ours. And we made good and noble use of them. 

Begin­ning at 4, much of the crowd made its way to the Port of Oak­land, the his­toric cen­ter of the city’s econ­o­my. The goal was to pre­vent the night shift from being able to clock in, shut­ting down a dif­fer­ent part of the city’s com­merce for the night, remind­ing the multi­na­tion­al elites that they move jobs and goods and mon­ey around the globe only at the suf­fer­ance of the folks who work in these cities. The port work­ers sup­port­ed the strike, but had agreed to a con­tract clause for­bid­ding them to strike. By block­ing the gates to the port, we gave them an excuse to do what they want­ed to do anyway. 

So off we marched, in sev­er­al waves of a few thou­sand. The 2 mile path to the port was packed with peo­ple, four lanes across, for hours that night, with crowds still stream­ing in at 7, when I had to head back. 

Inside the port, the same fes­tive atmos­phere pre­vailed. The brass band was there, and some­one was sign­ing songs over his own ampli­fi­er. Folks were chat­ting with the remain­ing work­ers inside the port fence, cel­e­brat­ed with them as they came off shift and drove out. The few truck dri­vers parked along the port road seemed bemused and did­n’t object to the crowds who climbed on top of their cabs and con­tain­ers to get a bet­ter view. I tweet­ed: “The only thing more beau­ti­ful than the Port of Oak­land at dusk is 5000 peo­ple march­ing on the Port at dusk.” 

Heli­copters and geese crowd­ed the skies over­head, and even cam­eras in the heli­copters could­n’t cap­ture the entire mass of pro­test­ers. If there were few­er than 10,000 peo­ple in those march­es, I’d be amazed, because they filled the entrance road for hours. I hear the police are esti­mat­ing 7,000, and orga­niz­ers claim 30,000. My guess would’ve been 15–20,000 any­way, which splits the dif­fer­ence nicely. 

I’d always want­ed to spend and evening pho­tograph­ing the port’s cranes at sun­set, so on top of the sheer joy of watch­ing the 4‑lane road fill up with miles of cheery pro­test­ers, I had a great time try­ing to find the per­fect shot of the port. You can see a big­ger sam­ple of my pho­tos at Flickr; I took 320 pho­tos that day, which I whit­tled down to my favorite 38. 

By the time I left, the Port Author­i­ty was well on its way to offi­cial­ly shut­ting down the port for the night. Trucks were backed up at the entrance to the port, and there were (unfound­ed) rumors of police mass­ing to evict the protest. Much lat­er that night, pro­test­ers occu­pied an aban­doned build­ing and invit­ed the non­prof­it that for­mer­ly used the space to return and con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing ser­vices to the home­less. Riot police respond­ed to that, and after pro­test­ers lit a bar­ri­cade on fire, the police fired off some tear gas. But despite hav­ing massed around Oscar Grant Plaza itself, and despite fears that the bloody police riot of a week ago might repeat, the police remained calm, and pro­test­ers helped pro­tect shops whose win­dows were bro­ken by drunk and dis­grun­tled troublemakers. 

My sense of the day was much like what Jaime Omar Yassin describes:

Words fail, I was sim­ply moved by the real­i­ty of all these peo­ple com­ing down to engage in an ‘ille­gal’ action that just a week ago would have been con­sid­ered rad­i­cal and sub­ver­sive, but today was filled with hap­pi­ness, com­mu­ni­ty, respect and love. And the pow­er of such a mobi­liza­tion to silence and dis­pel the police, the pow­er of peo­ple to write the rules of pub­lic space. That’s some­thing I’d nev­er thought I’d see in my lifetime. 

I don’t know what will come of this. Will I see this again in my life­time? Again in 2011? Will this change what hap­pens in Wash­ing­ton, DC, or in Sacra­men­to? Will this sort of protest spread, shut­ting down the streets of Man­hat­tan or of Wash­ing­ton for a day? It’s too soon to say. 

But I know that it changed me, and it feels like it changed Oak­land. Even the for­bear­ance of the police sug­gests a change. A week ago, who would have pre­dict­ed that they would stay out of the way of the unau­tho­rized block­ing of major streets and the Port, and that they would respond­ed about as min­i­mal­ly as pos­si­ble to a act of civ­il dis­obe­di­ence that dam­aged prop­er­ty? (Their behav­ior was­n’t per­fect: they arrest­ed some legal observers and jour­nal­ists along with who­ev­er set the fire and broke into the build­ing, but progress is progress.) 

As I said before the strike, the goal was not to force some pre-deter­mined list of demands on the city. The goal, as the poster said, was to show, “This is our city and we can shut it down.” That means we can also start it up again, and shape what the city will be and do. What shall we do with that knowl­edge and power?

The plight of the pragmatic progressive

Dave Roberts writes a dia­logue on the notion of growth in mod­ern pol­i­tics and eco­nom­ics. On one hand, he notes that eco­nom­ic growth has been the most pow­er­ful engine for gen­uine­ly improv­ing human well­be­ing, and on the oth­er hand, that it’s doomed to run out, and that even as it can improve well­be­ing, it typ­i­cal­ly cre­ates mas­sive inequal­i­ty, hurt­ing peo­ple rather bad­ly. There’s no viable alter­na­tive to growth to keep the world turn­ing, but there’s no viable expla­na­tion of how we can con­tin­ue grow­ing faster than our resources can recov­er. Ulti­mate­ly, we wind up with this dilemma:

The idea that we’re going to become rad­i­cal­ly more egal­i­tar­i­an, with sub­stan­tial­ly more mod­est mate­r­i­al expec­ta­tions, and we’re going to do so vol­un­tar­i­ly and peace­ful­ly, in less than a cen­tu­ry … that’s uni­corn porn. 

I hear lots of hap­py ideas from the anti-growth folk, but I’ve nev­er heard any­thing even close to a prac­ti­cal polit­i­cal plan to get from Point A — a coun­try gripped by fears over the deficit, sus­pi­cious of gov­ern­ment, hos­tile to tax­es, leery of social engi­neer­ing — to Point B, a vision of the future that would make John Lennon blush. “Imag­ine there’s no growth …” 

Until that plan emerges, I’m going to stick with try­ing to wring incre­men­tal gains for jus­tice out of social demo­c­ra­t­ic cap­i­tal­ism. It does­n’t work as well as one might like, but noth­ing else seems to work at all.

On so many polit­i­cal issues of the day, I find myself tak­ing that same stand, the prag­mat­ic I‑wish-that-rad­i­cal-plan-exist­ed-or-was-plau­si­ble-but-for-now-let’s-do-this-thing-that-will-work stance that gets me labeled an accom­mo­da­tion­ist in some cir­cles, and an Oba­ma-wor­ship­per in others.

That isn’t to say there’s no place for ide­al­ism in pol­i­tics gen­er­al­ly or in my own pol­i­tics. Thore­au urged us to imag­ine our cas­tles in the sky, after all. But he also told us to build our foun­da­tions under them. And some­times there’s sim­ply no foun­da­tion capa­ble of sup­port­ing an idea.

And so we come to the Pres­i­den­t’s speech tonight. He pro­pose a pack­age of pay­roll tax cuts and small busi­ness tax cuts and unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fit exten­sions and assis­tance for laid-off teach­ers and cops and fire­fight­ers and con­struc­tion work­ers, all paid for not with free mon­ey the glob­al mar­kets are offer­ing us, but by clos­ing tax loop­holes for cor­po­ra­tions. I don’t think that’s enough. I think we need mas­sive invest­ments in infra­struc­ture. I think the Pres­i­dent need­ed to lay out a plan to tax the hell out of car­bon emis­sions, that mon­ey spent to build wind farms and solar facil­i­ties and geot­her­mal gen­er­a­tors and high­ly effi­cient trans­mis­sion lines and high speed rail across the coun­try. And also to fix and upgrade bridges across the coun­try. And to build new schools and fill them with mod­ern labs and com­put­ers, the facil­i­ties to learn 21st cen­tu­ry tech­nolo­gies includ­ing mol­e­c­u­lar bio­sciences. And heck, build more post offices and parks and mon­u­ments, any­thing that gets peo­ple working.

No plan that can be paid for by clos­ing some tax loop­holes can do the job. A big tax on incomes over $1 mil­lion would help. So would a hike in cor­po­rate tax rates, and cap­i­tal gains rates. Cor­po­rate income is up late­ly, but indi­vid­ual income is down, sug­gest­ing that it’s worth more for cor­po­ra­tions to keep their mon­ey than it is to invest in work­ers. That’s a prob­lem of tax incentives.

That’s what I want­ed to hear from the Pres­i­dent. A plan that would be rem­i­nis­cent of what FDR offered when he swept into office, not one like Bill Clin­ton sug­gest­ed in 1993. Because this econ­o­my is a lot more like the Great Depres­sion than it is like the first Bush reces­sion.

But that plan would­n’t even uni­fy the Demo­c­ra­t­ic cau­cus in 2011. FDR came to office with mas­sive majori­ties, and with a pub­lic on the verge of overt rev­o­lu­tion. Her­bert Hoover, cam­paign­ing for anoth­er term in 1932, encoun­tered crowds urg­ing, “Hang Hoover!” After Hoover lost, and a wave elec­tion tossed out 158 incum­bents (the sec­ond wave elec­tion in a row), vet­er­ans and the unem­ployed marched on Wash­ing­ton, chant­i­ng “Feed the hun­gry! Tax the rich!” In addi­tion to the Hunger March in DC, thou­sands marched on Colum­bus, Ohio, to sack the capi­tol and “estab­lish a work­ers’ and farm­ers’ repub­lic.” Thou­sands occu­pied the Nebras­ka state­house, and marchers in oth­er cities took over munic­i­pal build­ings and banks. In Iowa, farm­ers joined togeth­er to lay siege on Sioux City, Des Moines, Coun­cil Bluffs, and Oma­ha, bar­ri­cad­ing roads and tear­ing down jails to free their arrest­ed com­rades. Judges and lawyers who approved fore­clo­sures were lynched or beat­en. Then the banks ran out of mon­ey, leav­ing depos­i­tors pen­ni­less and farm­ers reliant on loans unable to plant crops.

Robert Caro quotes James Mac­Gre­gor Burns on that long stretch between the Novem­ber, 1932 elec­tion and the March, 1933 inauguration:

Cri­sis was in the air-but it was a strange, numb­ing cri­sis, strik­ing sud­den­ly in a West­ern city and then in the South a thou­sand miles away. It was worse than an invad­ing army; it was every­where and nowhere, for it was in the minds of men. It was fear.”

The Con­gress elect­ed first in 1930 and then in 1932 was over­whelm­ing­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic, and was ready to act. For two years, they’d passed bills to aid farm­ers, home­own­ers, and the unem­ployed, with each pro­pos­al vetoed by the indif­fer­ent Hoover. As soon as he was out of office, Con­gress and the Pres­i­dent could act quick­ly to estab­lish all of the pro­grams they agreed were necessary.

That’s not the sit­u­a­tion that faced Pres­i­dent Oba­ma in 2008, let alone today in 2011. While he had a Demo­c­ra­t­ic Con­gress, his mar­gins weren’t wide, and many of those Democ­rats were unwill­ing to take strong action. The pub­lic was­n’t uni­fied in demand­ing any par­tic­u­lar actions; con­fused by the TARP mess, they weren’t even sure which par­ty stood for what. Pres­i­dent Oba­ma has wound up tak­ing the blame for a reces­sion start­ed by his pre­de­ces­sor, and wors­ened by the aver­sion of con­ser­v­a­tives in Con­gress toward stim­u­la­tive spending.

So while I wish the Pres­i­den­t’s speech were much stronger, I also know that he set his sights low because he knows that even the small pota­toes he’s ask­ing for are too much for this Con­gress. I want a bold, pro­gres­sive plan, but the sort of plan that would excite me will encour­age con­ser­v­a­tives in Con­gress to dig in and demand their own super­crazy ideas, and then where are we.

So how do we get from A to B? What can I, or the Pres­i­dent, or you, do to cre­ate a move­ment that will demand a new New Deal, the sort of real change the coun­try needs?

Socioeconomic differences set in early

Kevin Drum reports on an essay by James Heck­man that would be depress­ing if it weren’t pre­dictable. The basic idea is expressed in this graph:

Drum summarizes:

The chart shows achieve­ment test scores for chil­dren of moth­ers with dif­fer­ent lev­els of edu­ca­tion. Chil­dren of col­lege grad­u­ates score about one stan­dard devi­a­tion above the mean by the time they’re three, and that nev­er changes. Chil­dren of moth­ers with less than a high school edu­ca­tion score about half a stan­dard devi­a­tion below the mean by the time they’re three, and that nev­er changes either. Rough­ly speak­ing, noth­ing we do after age three has much effect.

Drum echoes Heck­man’s sug­ges­tion that this means we should cut way back on reform efforts aimed at sec­ondary edu­ca­tion, and even ele­men­tary school­ing, and spend that mon­ey on ear­ly child­hood interventions.

I tend to agree, with caveats. Stan­dard­ized test scores don’t tell you much about how gen­uine­ly edu­cat­ed peo­ple are. As we see, these tests are basi­cal­ly mea­sur­ing socioe­co­nom­ic sta­tus, and one of the best things we can do to improve the next gen­er­a­tion’s prospects is keep­ing kids in school, and get­ting them off to col­lege, and then keep­ing at-risk stu­dents in col­lege. Peo­ple who drop out of high school usu­al­ly do it for eco­nom­ic rea­sons, and that’s espe­cial­ly true of peo­ple who don’t com­plete col­lege. But inter­ven­tions that improve the num­ber of stu­dents com­plet­ing high school and col­lege should have sig­nif­i­cant effects in the long run.

The focus on test-tak­ing brought on by NCLB and the cur­rent crop of reforms can’t do much to encour­age peo­ple to stay in school, or to become life-long learn­ers. Stan­dard­ized tests dis­cour­age inde­pen­dent study and inno­v­a­tive think­ing, which is the name of the game in any good col­lege, let alone high school.

There are ways that the edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem can be and should be reformed, but what this tells us is that the prob­lems we face can’t be faced by fir­ing teach­ers and shut­ting down schools. An edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem that rais­es up the low­est-per­form­ing stu­dents needs to be focused on issues of pover­ty, class, and race that lim­it stu­dents’ options. 

The V‑word

Via Salon.com’s Broad­sheet, we get this help­ful reminder of basic facts about human anato­my. Be warned that some par­ents might not want to explain the pic­ture to small chil­dren, or per­haps to their boss­es. It’s safe for work, though.

Read more “The V‑word” →

Bush to veto children’s insurance bill

A White House spokesman explained that the pres­i­dent will veto a pro­pos­al in Con­gress because it “would dra­mat­i­cal­ly expand the Chil­dren’s Health Insur­ance Pro­gram, … encour­ag­ing many to drop pri­vate cov­er­age, to go on the gov­ern­ment-sub­si­dized program.” 

One can see why the Pres­i­dent would not want to help poor­er chil­dren get health insur­ance at low cost. We already knew he does­n’t care about black peo­ple, and had long sus­pect­ed his antipa­thy to the poor.

The pro­pos­al in Con­gress would add $25–40 bil­lion to the pro­gram, which is admin­is­tered by the states. The new fund­ing would be paid for by an increase in the cig­a­rette tax. Rais­ing that tax would have the added ben­e­fit of reduc­ing smok­ing, a major risk fac­tor for par­ents and chil­dren. The non­par­ti­san Con­gres­sion­al Bud­get Office esti­mates that the added spend­ing would cov­er 4.1 mil­lion unin­sured chil­dren, ensur­ing pre­ven­tive care in a crit­i­cal period.

The Pres­i­dent also objects that the bill does not include his pro­pos­als to reform health insur­ance, but the Sen­ate chair­man respon­si­ble for the bill explained that the Chil­dren’s Health Insur­ance Pro­gram must be fund­ed by Sep­tem­ber, and the unpop­u­lar Pres­i­den­t’s sug­ges­tions don’t have enough trac­tion to move through Con­gress on that time­line. Sen­a­tor Bau­cus, at least, would rather put chil­dren’s health above polit­i­cal concerns.

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