Bloom

Flower box in late June with a corner of the garden in front, created by Margaret and Siena.  More to come.

Under the Dome of Heat and History (Updated)

Under the Capitol Dome, the willful ignorant engage in political congress over nothing but their sad ambition.  Under the Washington dome of air traffic protection, top administrators look for the deal that makes them feel rich, and they never really do.  While their professional underlings sweat for the good of the country.  They are the air conditioned nightmare.

And now, under the heat dome that is expanding to eventually cover the contiguous United States, people and their infrastructure as well as all of life suffer.  The Washington Post:

"Since the past weekend, the first intense heat wave has kept a tight, sweaty grip on the eastern United States. As of Tuesday morning, about 80 million Americans were under some type of heat advisory. Forty-four of the 50 states expected to reach at least 90 degrees Tuesday afternoon. Expect both of those statistics to grow through the end of this week, as the brutal heat wave intensifies and expands to include the western part of the country.

On Monday, Washington, Philadelphia and New York all reported heat indexes — or “feels like” temperatures — in excess of 100 degrees. Record-warm overnight low temperatures were set in Albany and Burlington, Vt....

The Midwest has been roasting since the end of last week. Heat indexes this past weekend in Chicago were regularly in the 105-to-115-degree range. The excessive heat caused at least one road to buckle in Wisconsin, according to a contributor on Reddit’s r/weather forum. And a bridge was deformed because of the heat in Chicago, according to WREX...."

And it will continue and spread through the week:

"High pressure domes like this tend to dominate the atmospheric landscape, shunting the jet stream far to the north and keeping everything under them locked in a pattern of hot and humid weather.

Not only is the current upper-level high going to stick around, but also it’s going to become stronger and larger over the next several days. Over the weekend, the same ridge of high pressure that has been dominating the weather over the East will expand west. Forecast models expect the dome of high pressure will eventually encompass almost the entire Lower 48.

The extent of this heat wave over the weekend not only will be uncommon, but also the high pressure is going to be intense. So intense, in fact, it may lack historical precedent."

We used to call these "heat waves" but their length and intensity is turning them into slow motion Katrinas in terms of present suffering and long term consequences.  Everything about them was predicted in global heating models, in longitudinal studies, in the gathering of other historical data such as through the study of ancient ice.

So no surprise, only denial.

Those in command under the domes of decision,  you deserve to roast.  The rest of you under this heat dome this week, don't take it lightly: drink lots of water, stay out of the sun, stay as cool as you can.

Update: It's not just US. The Post follows up Wednesday with a global view:

From the normally mild summer climes of Ireland, Scotland and Canada to the scorching Middle East, numerous locations in the Northern Hemisphere have witnessed their hottest weather ever recorded over the past week.

Large areas of heat pressure or heat domes scattered around the hemisphere led to the sweltering temperatures.

No single record, in isolation, can be attributed to global warming. But collectively, these heat records are consistent with the kind of extremes we expect to see increase in a warming world."

Meet My Moka

This is my new Moka.  This particular brand calls itself an Espresso Maker but purists say not.  It doesn't technically make espresso.  It is generally called a moka.

It's very simple, very quick and makes coffee that's close to espresso.  It's a simple design that has worked for generations.  These days mokas are aluminum, as this one is.

I just got this to replace one I've had for years.  I took photos of it while it was bright and shiny.  It won't look like this for long.  In fact, it no longer does.

The Trinidad Trek

A sunny day, windy even on the Head until just about here, the last ocean side panorama just short of the summit.  Also where my camera batteries gave out.  But not my batteries--I made it to the summit again this year.  I mean, there were five year olds that did as well so it's not Mount Everest.  And I did resent the folks running up the trail.  But I enjoyed the climb and the various views, the greens and blues, the lights and darks, the smells of the trees and bushes, and especially a delicately lit bower near the summit where a bird sang to me.  It was either "Happy Birthday" or "Move Along, Nothing to See Here."

Never Die Young

This video clip from the Tonight Show starts with the best live version I could find of James Taylor doing his song "Never Die Young" which I post on the occasion of my 72nd birthday.  The 1988 clip continues with an interview in which JT is winsome but his prepared comic lines fall flat.  Still it's a charming interview. Sail on, sail on.

Turning 72: I Dwell in Possibility

It was a pretty good 72nd year.  No one close to me died, or came down with a serious illness or injury, though I certainly know people my age with significant health challenges.  The exception is our beloved cat Pema--we're currently nursing her through a terminal illness, making this a sad and anxious time. But as for my health, I'm looking forward to my annual trek up Trinidad Head later today. Yesterday I set my home court record with 7 straight midrange baskets (I can't in good conscience call them "jumpers") and 9 out of 10, before I missed two in a row.

I'm pleased with writing I did this past year, including what amounts to drafts of two short books which I have cleverly hidden within my blogs on the Internet.  My recollections--first of books, but especially of my senior year of college fifty years ago-- went very well, by my own lights anyway.  The process was fascinating. Reclaiming context through factual research seemed to evoke and free memories, some of which came to me in the act of writing.

Lately I've had episodes of visual memories, which have been rare before now. I'm not good at visualization.  "Imagine yourself on a beautiful beach" etc. has never worked for me as a meditation or relaxation technique, for example, if it depends on seeing it.  But lately, visual memories have come almost unbidden, and once I've had them (usually on the edge of sleep but not always), they more or less remain accessible.

The past, both culturally and personally, remains my focus, my fireplace (which is what "focus" means.)  I'm interested in depth, reiteration, a more thorough exploration, rather than new places and experiences.  Fortunately I don't have to defend that choice.  "Don't Want To, Don't Need To, Can't Make Me, I'm Retired."

At the same time, I am exploring new ideas, though they tend to be more like going farther along a path I darted down for awhile before.  Some of these bear upon that other area of concern, the future.

The future has looked dark many times in my life, probably most times.  But there was always an idea or two that suggested the possibility of light coming into being. That is less so now.

The newest ideas I'm still learning about are actually 20 or 30 years old.  It was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, for example, that the scientific ideas informing the Gaia hypothesis were percolating.  Its basis was formulated even earlier, in the late 1960s when I was in college (but it was so unorthodox that it never would have been mentioned in a science class.)  In studying the atmosphere of the planet Mars, James Lovelock discovered that the physics and chemistry of that planet predicted what it was like.  But the physics and chemistry of Earth does not describe its actual atmosphere.  There is another element determining and regulating Earth's atmosphere, and keep its temperature fairly constant despite changes in the heat coming from the sun.   That element is life.

The Earth is self-organizing and self-regulating through its specific lifeforms. Living systems, from the smallest bacteria to the entire surface and atmosphere, self-maintain.  That makes the Earth a single system, and by some definitions,  a kind of organism.

The implications were vast, and go beyond ecology--the study of the Earth as our home--to the study of the Earth as our body.  The idea of Gaia was an immediate magnet for various New Age enthusiasts but in the late 1980s, William Irwin Thompson and the Lindisfarne Association published a couple of collections of essays derived from conferences the Association had held since the early eighties. (Gaia: A Way of Knowing, and Gaia 2: Emergence).

The authors were serious people, including James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, the scientist who helped him develop the hypothesis, as well visionary cybernetic pioneer Gregory Bateson, visionary neurobiologist Franciso Varela, physicist Arthur Zajonc, botanist and popular writer Wes Jackson, economist and futurist Hazel Henderson and W.I Thompson himself, who promoted the idea that Gaia could be the guiding idea of cultural transformation in the 1990s.

As far as I can tell, there didn't turn out to be a guiding idea of cultural transformation in the 1990s, nor do I know of any guiding idea since.  At best, some segments of society sort of caught up to ecological ideas of the 1960s and 70s.  Others got sidetracked by computer technology to contemplate bogus ideas like "the singularity" or just got sucked into the social media vacuum.

But lately I have been reading Slanted Truths, a book of the mid-90s, a somewhat shaped collection of essays by Lynn Margulis and her son Dorion Sagan. (He is also the son of Carl Sagan, and has taken on his father's job of popularizing science, though he's much more his mother's son in the science he attempts to popularize.)

Their essays were mostly published separately in periodicals and are often repetitive (which is actually good, since the ideas are still new and the science unfamiliar) so it is an immersive experience.  (These writings are however more coherent than either of the authors speaking: Dorion does not have his father's skills and both are pretty unorganized in the events YouTube has preserved, though Margulis is nevertheless magnetic and occasionally mesmerizing.)

Margulis herself transformed life sciences by concentrating on microorganisms, and showing the crucial role they played in evolution.  She also showed that these are the organisms upon which Gaia's ability to self-regulate depend, more than any other.  Bacteria is the essential lifeform to maintain the life of planet Earth, including its atmosphere.

I am reading this in the context of a year in which it seems that the collapse of civilization within the next century, and perhaps the fall of the American Republic much sooner, seems more and more likely.  On a somewhat longer timeline, the fate of the human species is in question.  If the climate crisis and mass extinction are as bad as they seem they will be, homo sapiens may be facing enough reduction that extinction is possible.  In a previous climate crisis, homo sapiens were down to perhaps 2500 beings in one small location.  Coming back depends on how extensive the changes are, and for how long.  Nuclear weapons complicate this further.

Mass extinctions may wipe out all large mammals and perhaps too many keystone species we don't even know about.  But the ultimate threat to life seems to depend on what happens to the oceans, and whether we end up killing them.

Margulis and Sagan leave me with at least this hope for the future of life: that bacteria are likely to endure and adapt, and since from them in time came all of the species we know, they can just start again.  Raccoons or rats or even ants may be faster to develop but then, does the planet want to go through all this again?  I sometimes wonder whether a species that invented helicopter gunships even deserves to survive.  Maybe evolution will settle next time on a scenario like that in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Galapagos, in which descendants of humans are more like porpoises, who frolic in pools with fins, incapable of building anything.

For the near future, Gaia offers some possibility of offsetting the worst effects of global heating, in that we don't understand exactly how life regulates the atmosphere.  Perhaps that self-regulation can overcome excessive global heating, although it seems there is unlikely to be enough time to adapt.  But maybe.

Which suggest another source of hope: our ignorance.  We think we know a lot, but all we've learned are a few limited mechanisms and how to do some stuff, mostly through trial and error.  We've just done too much of it, on too large a scale. Because in part there are too many of us.

In fact we know almost nothing about our world and our universe.  Steven Wright used to joke: "I bought a packet of powdered water but I don't know what to add to it."  We don't really even know what water is.  We certainly can't make the stuff.

We've made up all these categories and theories that soon reach their limits, though we insist they are universal, they are "laws."  Science has at least acknowledged that Newtonian physics doesn't apply in all realms. (And that's because we know how to do some stuff using the math of quantum mechanics, but we have no idea why they work.)  It took recent scientists like Lynn Margulis to begin showing that Darwinian evolution in its traditional definition doesn't apply to everything alive, or even to the origin of species.

Margulis and other microbiologists also showed that many of the assumptions made about how life works in general was based only on larger lifeforms: animals and plants.  But many of those "rules" don't apply to microorganisms such as bacteria.  Either these rules operated in a limited field or they are generally mistaken.

We use definitions as tools and then get captured by our definitions.  The most interesting philosophical essay I read this year, by Galen Strawson, suggests that the conundrum of consciousness as a non-physical phenomenon may lie in a restricted definition of "physical."   The universes of the very small and the very large have shot down a lot of our middle-range assumptions and definitions.  With dark matter, dark energy and all the other more or less theoretical aspects of the universe, exactly what "physical" means is (or should be) in doubt.

So maybe there's something we'll learn that we can't now foresee, something that will make enough of a difference to avoid catastrophe.

For those younger than me who will live in the future, hope is a daily commitment to make things better.  Hope isn't what you feel, it's what you do.  For me, looking at a future that extends beyond imagination, I am buoyed by possibilities we can begin to imagine but can't quite imagine, way beyond anything fantasized in Silicon Valley.

So I greet the beginning of my 73rd year with a poem by Emily Dickinson.  She was a favorite of Lynn Margulis (though admittedly not of mine)--I saw a line of this one that was sort of quoted by Dorion Sagan.  The whole poem however is what I want to say:

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

P.S. I've added a "birthdays" label to such posts in prior years.  But two of the more extensive are on another blog: Turning 60 and Turning 65.

Senator Evil

I'm going on a news fast and this is my last topical post for awhile.  In light of the latest news concerning the Supreme Court, I wanted to share Jonathan Chiat's observation:

Democrats have won the national vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, which, with the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, will have resulted in the appointment of eight of the Supreme Court’s nine justices. And yet four of those justices will have been appointed by presidents who took office despite having fewer votes than their opponent.

There are lots of reasons for this short-circuiting of democracy on the road to authoritarianism but at this moment I think mostly of someone who is as close to purely evil as anyone I can even imagine: Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.  He is completely without patriotism, statesmanship or any sense of justice.  And he has driven a dagger into the American system of government.

After defying the Constitution's intent for the sitting President to fill a Supreme Court vacancy by denying to even allow hearings for President Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court--a step no other congressional leader has ever dared--on the pretext that the seat fell vacant too close to an election (though it was 8 months before the 2016 election), McConnell will try to ram through the antipresident's nominee a few weeks before the 2018 elections.  He will do so without the slightest shame for his own blatant hypocrisy.

This was not the first nor the last of his shameful acts, his evil acts, utterly at odds with the constitutional government our founders established.  In January 2009 he held a meeting with congressional Republicans to announce a strategy: Republicans would violently oppose every proposal that President Obama made to Congress regardless of its merits, regardless if it was something Republicans had previously supported and even if it was something Republicans had previously proposed.

Then in 2016 McConnell compounded his irresponsible opposition to the President's constitutional function in nominating a Supreme Court Justice by committing treason.  When briefed on the US intelligence community assessment that a foreign adversary, Russia, was attempting to interfere in the 2016 elections, he refused to condemn it in a joint statement with President Obama, and threatened the President, telling him that if he took action or made strong public statements, he would accuse him of partisan political motives.

McConnell doesn't care if we have a chief executive taking orders from the Kremlin.  McConnell doesn't care about anything but winning partisan political battles, pleasing his big bucks overseers and keeping power.

Hell has room for lots of Republicans.  McConnell gets pride of place in the inner circle.

US District Court Order: Find the Babies Now

On a day when the Supreme Court sanctified discrimination on the basis of religion by upholding Homegrown Hitler's Muslim country travel ban, a federal District Court ordered the government to reunite separated children with their parents, and to stop indiscriminate separation of families at the border.

Specifically the judge ordered that all children under 5 be reunited with their parents within 14 days, and all other children within 30 days.  Additionally, every child must be able to speak to a parent by telephone within 10 days.

The order was the result of a class action suit before a District Court in San Diego.  The judge, Dana Sabraw, was appointed by G.W. Bush.  The order read in part:

"The facts set forth before the court portray reactive governance — responses to address a chaotic circumstance of the government's own making," he wrote. "They belie measured and ordered governance, which is central to the concept of due process enshrined in our Constitution."

Earlier in the day, seventeen states sued the federal government over the separations:

States are now seeking a court order to reunite families and end the separation practice by declaring it "contrary to the Constitution".  Tuesday's lawsuit states that Mr Trump's order does not mandate the end of family separation and says nothing about reuniting families who have already been separated.

It also calls the policy "an affront" to the states' interests in maintaining standards of care for children and preserving parent-child relationships. "The policy, and the administration's related conduct, has caused severe and immediate harm to the States and their residents."

Both suits cite laws insuring that children remain with their parents; taking children away requires due process.  They accuse the administration of breaking laws.

It's not clear what effect the San Diego order has on these suits brought by the states of California, Washington, Massachusetts, Delaware, Iowa, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Virginia plus the District of Columbia.

Where Are the Babies?

The question is Lawrence O'Donnell's, and it is the pertinent one.  It has been widely reported that infants have been separated from mothers at the border.  It is an human rights outrage that it is not a matter of public information where these babies are.

Reporters and Members of Congress have been given limited tours in a few child prisons.  They have seen a few infants, mixed in with older children, at some part of the process.  (Some of these children have already been moved several times.) But basically the infants are being hidden.  Which raises the question: why?

So where are the babies? What kind of care are they receiving?  What is the state of their health?   How many have been hospitalized?  And a question that by now is extremely pertinent: have any of them died?

Some of the captive children are in foster care homes (as in New York, where they sleep in foster homes and report for duty at the prison during the day.)  How were these foster homes selected?  What standards did they have to meet?  On what basis were children accepted into these homes?  Are they in the charge of "foster parents?"  What is the status of these babies?

This has gone on a long time and it is likely to go on much longer. Reporters can't find evidence that the government can really even match parents with their children, so reunification, if indeed it occurs, will take much more time.  In one prison the average time children have been in captivity is over 50 days now.  With new camps being prepared to imprison families and to separately imprison children on military bases, how much longer are they going to be hidden in these black sites, as if they are terrorists?  Or are they already on the baby market?

Until there is a complete public accounting of these children, especially these infants, all speculation as to their welfare is reasonable.

The United Nations should be sending in teams to do an accounting of these babies as an emergency humanitarian mission.  For this is not just a national scandal, it is a matter of global relevance.

Captive Families: The Suffering Has Not Ended

The administration has succeeded in getting their human rights abuses at the border off the front page.  A phony executive order (which few believe is even legal, let alone effective), a temporary suspension of arrests and imprisonments until new military concentration camps are built, and a few photos purporting to be of reunited families, have opened up media space to the usual trivia and a few other important stories, like the onrushing recession caused by the antipresident's tariffs by whim.

But the suffering has not ended.  The system is still in chaos, and the information flow is only slightly improved.  Stories abound that asylum seekers are being told that they will be reunited with their children only if they volunteering return to the central American country where (in many cases) their lives and the lives of their children are endangered.  And, some observe, there is no reason to believe these reunions will actually occur.

Meanwhile the military continues to build its tent cities concentration camps.  First person accounts emerge of horrible prison conditions, and even camp managers are speaking out about this stupid, cruel policy that is still harming children.

Immigration is turning out to be Homegrown Hitler's Big Lie of the year.  In fact, the vast majority of immigrants in the US are here legally.  Applying for political asylum is a legal process.  The proportion of the population comprised of illegal immigrants in the US is very low, about 3%.  Their share of the job market is the lowest in the western democracies.  Per capita, they commit fewer crimes in the US than white native born Americans.

Harley-Davidson isn't moving jobs to Europe because of immigrants into America. That company is doing so because of the antipresident's tariffs.  The racist hysteria that grips the R party is an adrenalin diversion, a pernicious denial.  And it is far from over.

America Torturing Children...and Their Parents (With Update)

From the Guardian:

"Here’s a quick update from the United Nations human rights office, which has said that Trump’s decision to stop separating children from their parents doesn’t go far enough and may amount to torture. From the AP:

Human rights office spokeswoman Ravini Shamdasani said Friday that “children should never be detained for reasons related to their or their parents’ migration status”.

Shamdasani urged the US to overhaul its migration policy, such as by relying on “non-custodial and community-based alternatives” under the “logic of care” rather than that of law enforcement."

Why would they say that?  A pediatrician who has worked for a decade with migrant children talked to the New Yorker about what she saw and experienced in one of the prison camps.  For instance:

The number of young children in detention facilities rose sharply. “The population I’ve been starting to see is younger, and it scares me,” Hart said. “These are little people, little babies. And they are ill-equipped to fend for themselves. They’re so totally traumatized. They don’t cry like normal kids. They don’t interact like normal kids.”

The doctor--Alica Schaffer--met an eight year old boy, surrounded by four men watching him:

"The boy had been in custody for over a month. One of his guardians told me that he had been ‘acting out’ and threatening to harm himself, by jumping from his bed. This man told me, ‘I’m his clinician,’ but he was definitely not a doctor. I don’t know if he’s a social worker, a medical assistant, a housekeeper. I have no clue. But he obviously had been granted some sort of authority in regard to assessing children and determining what their needs are. He wouldn’t provide basic background. I couldn’t find out any information because he would say, ‘I’m not at liberty to tell you that’ and ‘You don’t need to know that,’ even though a lot of my questions were relevant to taking care of the child. I was asking things like ‘Where are his parents?’

“This boy seemed devastated—quiet and withdrawn. He barely spoke. I asked if he needed a hug. I kneeled down in front of the recliner, and this kid just threw himself into my arms and didn’t let go. He cried and I cried. And to think he’s been in a facility for a month without a hug, away from his parents, and scared, and not knowing when he’ll see them again or if he’ll see them again. While I held him, I heard the men standing behind me muttering that I was ‘rewarding his bad behavior.’ Thankfully, it was in English, so I don’t think the boy understood what they were saying, but it just revealed their attitudes toward these kids."

Meanwhile the apparent White House change is policy is creating more chaos, and more captives.  The New York Times reports:

Lt. Col. Jamie Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said the Pentagon is preparing to shelter as many as 20,000 migrant children on four military bases: Little Rock Air Force Base in Arkansas; Fort Bliss in El Paso; Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Tex.; and Dyess Air Force Base near Abilene, Tex.
It was not immediately clear on Friday where the parents of children would go if they will no longer be separated from their families."

And that's not all:

"The U.S. Navy is preparing plans to construct sprawling detention centers for tens of thousands of immigrants on remote bases in California, Alabama and Arizona, escalating the military’s task in implementing President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy for people caught crossing the Southern border, according to a copy of a draft memo obtained by TIME."

Update: The LA Times reports via Time that one of these bases is the US Marine base at Camp Pendelton, where preparations are underway to build a tent city "to detain as many as 47,000 migrants from Central America and other locations."

The militarization of concentration camps is a frightening change and profound threat to democracy.

How long will children continue to be imprisoned, with or without parents?  If the administration gets its way in court, indefinitely.  The Guardian again:
Also Friday, a group of nearly a dozen independent human rights experts commissioned by the UN said the new US policy “may lead to indefinite detention of entire families in violation of international human rights standards”.

  And indefinitely could be a very long time.  This NYTimes story also says:

"Federal immigration courts faced a backlog of more than 700,000 cases in May, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, at Syracuse University. In some courts, the average wait for an immigration hearing was over 1,400 days; some hearings are being scheduled beyond 2021 before an available slot on the docket is found."

The U.S. Government Is Engaged in the Human Trafficking of Children

Cover of next week's New Yorker evoking the Statue of Liberty and also
Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"

The horror just accelerates as we learn more.  Numerous reports of children separated from their mothers at the border being secretly transported--leaving and arriving in the dead of night-- to be imprisoned in other parts of the country.

They are in New York City, Chicago, Seattle, Pittsburgh, the Bay Area, Los Angeles and elsewhere.  They were transported without the knowledge of local or state officials, and currently without granting access to these officials, including health officials.

 There as well as near the border, no one is permitted to see or talk to these children, or to see inside facilities, and report on what they've seen.  (Some do anyway.)  No photos, no images come out of them except a few smuggled photographs and those that the government creates and distributes.

Moreover, there is widespread agreement that the identities of these children are unknown--unknown!--not only to the public but to their captors, agents of our government.  They don't know the names of these children and they have not kept records that tell them who their parents are.  Information that some children had with them was reportedly taken away from them.

The new tent prisons are among those that are created and controlled by corporations who are, according to the New York Times, making a billion dollars.  Conditions inside such facilities in the past have included maggots in the food, child abuse and sexual abuse.  Meanwhile the Administration has applied to the relevant court to suspend the requirement for state and local licensing of these prisons, which means potentially worse conditions and certainly more secrecy.

The secrecy, the stripping of identity and secret transport goes beyond child abuse, goes beyond the concentration camp.  It is now the human trafficking of children.

This is the legal definition of human trafficking: The transportation or commercial exchange of an individual by coercion or deception for the purpose of exploitation.  These children are being coerced and transported for the purpose of commercial and political exploitation.  Everything about it fits the definition, even before we start asking questions about where particularly the youngest are likely to end up--in the hands of adoption agencies perhaps.

An immigration judge is quoted as pointing out that standard procedure means that if the government takes your wallet you get a receipt.  But this government is taking children without any accountability.

These prisons are refusing to disclose information or permit inspection by public officials.  The totalitarian nature of this is scheduled to increase as reports are that the U.S. military is being ordered to prepare prisons for 20,000 migrants, and military lawyers (known as JAGs) are being ordered to act as prosecutors of migrants.  This coming just after the current administration ended funding to support legal advocacy for children caught in the system.

The lives of at least 2300 children have been harmed forever, with physical and psychological effects that will last their entire lives.  There are babies who have lived an eighth of their lives imprisoned and separated from their mothers.

What this is doing to the rule of law, to human rights, to human decency is incalculable and ongoing.

Two Children, Two Americas

Executive Disorder

At best, the antipresident's executive order may curtail the imprisonment of more children and their functional disappearance--from public knowledge and in particular from their parents--and change that to the indefinite imprisonment of children together with their parents.

 Thus the progress from infant, toddler and child concentration camps to something a bit more like the Dickensian debtors prisons that housed entire families in the early to mid 19th century.

But it's not even clear that the end of family separations will happen, and especially happen soon.  There are reportedly no new orders to federales on the border.

Meanwhile, some 2,300 or more children already separated have been sent out to a reported 14 states with no plan for ever reuniting them with their parents--something that looks dangerously like federal child trafficking.

What the antipresident hoped he would accomplish by what was clearly a surrender and exposure of the lies he and his discredited minions have been telling was this: (1) to make himself a hero and (2) get the story away from the attention of voters as well as governors, mayors and major businesses, like the airlines announcing they won't fly these separated kids to any more states.

Neither has worked so far.  The media is not buying it, and they are still asking pertinent questions.  The momentum begun just a few days ago continued Wednesday in other sectors.  In particular, there's a lot more money headed to the border to provide legal representation and bail money for asylum seekers and others caught in this policy.

But as migrant concentration camps grow as combinations of prison and terrorist black sites, we'll see whether the media and the public exhibit more staying power than they have in the past.

Save the Children

Tuesday ended with the AP report that begins:

The Trump administration is reportedly operating three "tender age" detainment facilities in Texas, where undocumented babies and toddlers are sent after being forcibly separated from their parents.

The Associated Press reports that at least three facilities housing hundreds of children are already operational in Combes, Raymondville and Brownsville, Texas, while a fourth in Houston is being planned.

Also with a report of Rachel Maddow breaking down on air when trying to report on the AP's findings.

Several reports from the White House and elsewhere today said that the White House is delighted at the growing outrage because they see this only as a winning political issue with their base.  Meanwhile, normally articulate or at least blabbermouth politicians and reporters are practically speechless with horror at what is happening in America.

But Tuesday was also Juneteenth, the anniversary of the end of slavery in Texas and the Confederacy, celebrated as essentially the end of slavery in the US.  On this occasion, Jelani Cobb in the New Yorker noted that slavery had always entailed separating families and for an even longer period, selling African American children into slavery.  In other parts of the country--in California in particular--Native American slavery especially involved selling children.  And in a real sense, this practice has continued:

"Even the current system of child welfare reflects systematic biases regarding the removal of children from their parents’ homes. Black children were overwhelmingly more likely to be taken from their homes than white children, even when they faced problems of similar severity at home."

Now we are embroiled in controversy separating brown families and imprisoning toddlers, and possibly longer term exploitation.  This specifically is the responsibility of the current administration.  Cobb continues:

"On this Juneteenth, we have received the ambivalent blessing of clarity. We recognize the historic demise of an institution that justified the separating of parent from child in Texas only to see that phenomenon occur in a different time, under different circumstances, but with a similar trauma inflicted on children. The central value of history is to serve as inoculation against the stupidity, ignorance, and cruelties of the past. Yet the rearguard implications of Trumpism have been apparent since the day in June, 2015, when he rode down the escalator in Trump Tower and announced his Presidential campaign."

But as Helaine Olene writes in the Washington Post, children are more generally the victims of poor health care, education and poverty itself, as well as racial prejudice:  "Our politics reflects our almost inhuman ability to tolerate making children — especially poor and minority children — take it on the chin again and again."  And this is without even discussing school shootings and gun violence victims more generally--many of them children.

The plight of the children imprisoned at the border should broaden awareness on how often the insidious games adults play are paid for by the suffering of children, the maiming of lifetimes from a tender age.

Moves Toward the End Game

By complete coincidence, the United States just pulled out of the UN Human Rights Council, a day after the head of it criticized the US policy of taking children from asylum-seekers at the border.

Meanwhile NBC News has an interview with a former director of the immigration police who confirms that due to poor record keeping and other bureaucratic problems, some separations may become permanent, leading to thousands of immigrant orphans.

Analysis of data performed by reporters for McClatchy news services suggests that US officials may have already lost track of some 6,000 unaccompanied migrant children.  Obviously this doesn't bode well for the children separated from their parents.

While AG Jeff Sessions unsuccessfully tried to dodge Nazi comparisons, Homegrown Hitler lived up to his name by asserting that migrants "infest" America.  He says America doesn't need more judges to decide asylum cases, it needs a Wall.  But the most chilling and portentous play from the Nazi playbook is his reported intention to accelerate his anti-immigrant venom and use it in his campaign rallies.  

Homegrown Hitler is right on track.  He's created chaos everywhere--in the federal system, the courts, the country, the world.  He's established a cult that consumed a former political party. He's got a police force in ICE.  And now he's set to motivate his xenophobic and racist base, in the guise of nationalism, with the twin tools of cruelty and demagoguery.  

The conventional wisdom would say this is a political effort to secure the base.  But that can't win elections, especially when no electoral college is involved.  But it is the Nazi playbook for an eventual dictatorship.  Can Brownshirts at the polling places be far behind?

Now that the political establishment is just about unanimously opposed to these family separations--and even one of the most dishonest and evil men in America, Mitch McConnell wants to pass a bill ending them--it will be interesting to see what Republicans catch on to the fact that Homegrown Hitler's efforts are basically separate from them, that he is building a Nazi Party within the Republican Party, and that's going to be increasingly evident in the coming months.

Don't Worry, It's Just "Alien Children"

Monday was the day that the issue of asylum-seeking families being torn apart by American border agents just exploded.  The current First Lady, and even more strongly and to the point, the four living former First Ladies publicly condemned the policy, beginning with a Washington Post oped and tweets by Laura Bush, joined by statements by Michelle Obama,  Rosalyn Carter and Hillary Clinton.

More voices on Capitol Hill condemned the policy, including Republicans--notably also not supporting the antipresident's lie that it is the law.  Even a partisan stiff like Senator Lindsay Graham said plainly that the antipresident could end it with a phone call.

The antipresident tweeted back, his press secretary dissed Laura Bush, and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen lied about the policy while doubling down on it. In her White House press briefing, she continually referred to the children involved as "alien children."  That's what the blond lady said.

She claimed that only Congress can stop it--an assertion that could soon come back to haunt her or the administration.

Then came the release of audio from inside one of the intake centers, with the unforgettable voices of young children: a 6 year old pleading to call her aunt to come and get her, and an unknown children repeatedly calling for "Papi."  Reports described the children as "screaming" but this child was not screaming, she was utterly desperate.

As desperate as this moment was, health experts are talking about the future effects of such trauma and the imprisoning itself.  The characterization of the day by experts, reports and pundits was "child abuse."

But in addition to the political and humanitarian fury that dominated the news on Monday, there was actual new information--all of it portraying the situation in even worse terms.

New information confirmed that the pace of separations has increased to nearly 70 families a day.

Several news outlets reported that many if not all of these family separations are being forced on asylum-seekers--people escaping from being murdered by repressive governments and drug dealers (including those who own banks) in Central America.  Some brought children to save them from being forced into gangs by drug dealers.

They are legally entitled to apply for asylum, but border agents are stopping them from entering the US at official ports of entry so they can apply.  Consequently many are avoiding the official ports of entry to enter illegally so they have standing to apply for political asylum under US law.  It is at this point--after a long and dangerous journey escaping for their lives--that they are arrested and their children taken away.

Jonathan Blitzer in the New Yorker reported that the government has no plan or procedure for reuniting these families.  Others report that there appears to be no tracking of parents and children after they are separated to even know who the parents of the children are.

Another reporter who interviewed children released from a facility said that conditions were poor inside, and that children were stripped of all their possessions, including pieces of paper bearing the phone numbers of relatives in the US.

A shortage of qualified social workers and caregivers was reported.  A shortage of judges to hear the mounting cases of the parents is predicted.  A separate story this weekend said that because of this administration's shrinking-the-government cutbacks, there are dangerously few trained prison guards in federal prisons, with secretaries, teachers and other personnel drafted to guard prisoners.

There were reports of parents deported but their children left behind, and a report of a child who was told her parents might be deported and she might be abandoned.

There still have been few reporters or officials allowed into these facilities, and those who have are restricted in what pictures they can take, no film, and they haven't been permitted to speak with prisoners.  All of this would be permitted for--and demanded by-- a UN human rights visit of a POW camp.

Those camps that have been visited have all been for older boys.  A reporter asked Homeland Security chief Neilsen what is happening to the girls.  She said she didn't know.

There was a later report that some Members of Congress toured a "facility" where girls were imprisoned, along with toddlers and infants.  They witnessed one of the girls changing the diaper of an infant, because no one else would touch the baby.

America Is Imprisoning Children (Updated)

The United States of America is imprisoning children, after ripping them away from their mothers and fathers.  Here's how it is being done:

"According to public defenders, immigration agents told some parents that their children were being taken for a bath, or taken briefly for questioning. It took hours for parents to realize their children had really been taken away indefinitely."

Shades of the Nazis, offering a nice shower but delivering poison gas.

"Nick Miroff of the Washington Post revealed that one father died by suicide in a detention cell, the night after his 3-year-old had been physically ripped out of his arms.
According to CNN, one mother reported that her child had been taken from her while she was nursing. The mother claimed she was placed in handcuffs when she tried to protest."

Update 6/16: The government admits to taking nearly 2,000 children away from their parents in the first few weeks of the program, an average of 48 a day.  Some observers believe this is an undercount.   A Border Patrol chief says that the current rate could soon double.

A doctor who visited a shelter for young children was interviewed by the Washington Post:

"But the first child who caught the prominent pediatrician’s attention during a recent visit was anything but happy. Inside a room dedicated to toddlers was a little girl no older than 2, screaming and pounding her fists on a mat. One woman tried to give her toys and books to calm her down, but even that shelter worker seemed frustrated, Kraft told The Washington Post, because as much as she wanted to console the little girl, she couldn’t touch, hold or pick her up to let her know everything would be all right. That was the rule, Kraft said she was told: They’re not allowed to touch the children.

“The really devastating thing was that we all knew what was going on with this child. We all knew what the problem was,” Kraft said. “She didn’t have her mother, and none of us can fix that.”

According to NBC news, there are as many as 11,000 children imprisoned: infants, babies, toddlers, young children, adolescents.  Some have been kept in cages.  But nobody knows the actual number.  The media has seen only one facility--a converted Walmart--with more than 1500 boys, but nobody has seen others, particularly with infants, babies and toddlers. [see update above]  Even at that one facility, reporters weren't permitted to speak with inmates or in most cases to take photos.

We do know that the existing prisons are overcrowded, and the administration is set to build tent cities, the first one in Texas to hold hundreds of children in this improvised concentration camp or gulag, which will not be subject to the regulations governing health and safety in for example the Walmart prison.

White House spokesperson S.H. Sanders was heavily questioned on Thursday about this human rights abuse.  One outburst by a media rep has been widely featured, but not this one, noted by Politico:

“It's a policy to take children away from their parents," Acosta said. "Can you imagine the horror these children must be going to, when they come across the border, they're with their parents and suddenly they're pulled away from their parents? Why is government doing this?”

“Because it's the law,” Sanders said.

That is first of all a lie, as every legitimate news organization affirms.  It is not the law, but a policy to separate children from their parents unique to this US government.  The antipresident himself blames the policy on congressional Democrats because they won't join the administration's cruel and unnecessary immigration legislation.  As if Republicans didn't hold majorities in both houses anyway.  But even to pretend to hold the future of these children as items of blackmail in a political fight is beyond cynicism and well into Hitlerland.

It is a policy established by AG Jeff Sessions, who also wants everyone to believe it is the law, as he justified it by quoting a Biblical passage from St. Paul, which out of context says that laws must be obeyed because they are the instruments of God.

As Ed Kilgore comments:
Those who are unacquainted with the Bible should be aware that the brief seven-verse portion of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans has been throughout the ages cited to oppose resistance to just about every unjust law or regime you can imagine. As the New York Times’ Yoni Applebaum quickly pointed out, it was especially popular among those opposing resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act in the run-up to the Civil War. It was reportedly Adolf Hitler’s favorite biblical passage. And it was used by defenders of South African Apartheid and of our own Jim Crow."

Sessions himself is pretty selective about which laws he thinks are God's will: the Affordable Care Act's guarantee that care will be covered for pre-existing conditions being one of them that must be the devil's work.

Senator Feinstein of California has introduced legislation that simply and directly reverses this policy and prevents families from being broken at the border.  If Republicans are so flummoxed by the law let them vote to change it.

But no one expects that to happen.  So Americans take to the streets--first locally, as in California on Monday, on a related aspect: the treatment of asylum seekers:

"In what is likely the first in a series of immigration-related protests, several hundred people came to a rally outside the Otay Mesa Detention Center on Sunday demanding the release of asylum seekers fleeing gang violence and state repression.

They were taking up the cause of asylum seekers who –for the most part–have voluntarily turned themselves at the border. Little did the protesters know their own participation in the event would lead to harassment by border authorities.

Protests are spreading nationwide in the wake of horrific reports of abuse and mistreatment by immigration agencies. People are speaking out against a President who refers to immigrants as ‘animals’ and implements policies inflicting punishment on people whose rights to due process are rapidly vanishing."

Conditions in one facility for these captives involved virtual slave labor.

The first national protests on the separation of children from parents and the imprisonment of children were held on Thursday, as thousands of Americans marched in an estimated 30 US cities and towns.  That will have to be just the beginning of protest.

The New York Times coverage on the Los Angeles demo began:

"Drawing on an American history of cruelty, from the conquest of the Indians to the slave trade to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, activists in this city gathered on Thursday to voice outrage at what they see as the latest affront to American values by the Trump administration: splitting up migrant families at border crossings, and confining children in detention facilities.

“I think we are fighting for the heart and soul of America,” Yolanda Varela Gonzalez, a teacher and activist, told a crowd of several hundred protesters in MacArthur Park, before they marched to an immigrant detention center in downtown Los Angeles."

Help On the Way

‘Resist’ is too passive.”
Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan

The political primaries so far this year suggest big changes could be coming.  There's more progress in inclusiveness, even to the extent of including First Americans--in the nomination of the candidate who could become the first Native American woman in Congress.

A general trend for more nominated women candidates, especially among Democrats, is even more conspicuous in several states, most recently Virginia, where women candidates for the House are now the majority of nominees.

Among the women joining the trend are Obama alums, some of whom are coming out of retirement to run.  The Politico piece begins:

So many Obama administration alumni are running for office this year that the former president’s staff has lost count, but it is keeping close tabs on whether they’re winning their primaries—and nearly all are, everywhere around the country.

Jenny Durkan, who ran for Seattle mayor and won, is one example.  And it isn't just that the Obama administration found and nurtured highly talented and committed people, who thought they might rest awhile during the Hillary administration but have since been motivated by the antipresident to run for office.

It's that when they identify themselves as Obama people that voters flock to them.

Lauren Baer, a former State Department aide who is running for a U.S. House seat in Florida, said she’s found voters are “incredibly nostalgic for the Obama era now.” “To the extent that people know about and hear about my ties to the administration, that reminds them of a time when the government didn’t always get everything right, but tried its hardest to work in the best interest of all Americans.”

These candidates also have the Obama alum network of political expertise and fundraising connections to call on.  For them, and the candidates new to politics, and especially women and candidates of color, everything will depend on turning out voters who didn't vote last time.  If they strike a spark, help could be on the way.

The Daily Nightmare

Prompted by a couple of suicides by persons famous in New York, the New Yorker published an article on the increasing number of Americans killing themselves.

It repeats some points made before that nevertheless bear repeating: that suicides are to some extent social, and there would likely be many fewer suicides or even attempts if there were fewer guns in the closet.

But it brings us up to date on other factors. Certain new drugs, like opiods, are complicit, as are other social factors. "A third of Americans are sleep-deprived, and sleep deprivation has a devastating effect on mental health. The mental-health system has deteriorated; according to Schwartz, there is less access to good care in most parts of the country than there was fifteen or twenty years ago. Rates of teen depression have risen since 2011, and students are carrying more debt and face more uncertainty about their lives. Despite a growing economy, people who are employed today do not feel confident that they will be employed tomorrow; with automation, many jobs feel terribly precarious. And the social safety net is being reeled in at every opportunity."

In certain high-stress occupations suicide is an invisible scourge: "... more policemen die of suicide than die on the job; more soldiers die of suicide than die in combat; more firefighters die of suicide than die in fires."

Then there's the terrible pressure of the current national regime. "There is another factor that should not be underestimated. On a national stage, we’ve seen an embrace of prejudice and intolerance, and that affects the mood of all citizens.
The viciousness that has become normalized, when added to the cultural addiction to the media moment, increase the feeling of being alone in one's particular misery. "There is a dearth of empathy, even of kindness, in the national conversation, and those deficits turn ordinary neurosis into actionable despair."

Look no further that the human crisis created by the current administration's cruel and inhuman policy of splitting up families and incarcerating children of those deemed illegal immigrants. This policy itself has led to at least one suicide.  Thousands of children face irreparable trauma from these acts that stink of Nazism.

 Were this occurring in any other country or any other time, there would be a UN resolution and world condemnation.  We might even expect it from some countries (and indeed it may be par for the course in say North Korea) but who would ever have believed it would happen in the United States of America.  Now we know why our brutal dictator wannabe loves him the brutal dictator of North Korea.

But even for those who are not under severe pressure, like many of the New Yorker's readers, there is a price to pay for continually feeling that the world has gone crazy, that it is in some respects almost literally upside down.

In this article, its writer Andrew Solomon offers a personal observation:  "My psychoanalyst said that he had never before had every one of his patients discuss national politics repeatedly, in session after session."

And why not?  We don't necessarily expect our President to be very smart or totally truthful.  But the antipresident astonishes a little more every day, with statements, tweets, speeches and lately a press conference in which everything he said was untrue, made up or a demonstrable lie.  Everything.  As for smarts, here's a recent headline: Mother of School-Shooting Victim: Meeting Trump Was ‘Like Talking to a Toddler’  Or this:Teacher corrects White House letter with 'many silly mistakes,' sends it back to Trump.

That's not about style points.  It's about the need to trust the leadership of the United States, and it's gone, thoroughly, and on the most basic levels.  Even worse, there is apparently no one better in the White House, no one even close to competent.  How about the state department spokesperson who evidently didn't realize that the US and the Nazis were not allies on D-Day?  It happened, and almost no one noticed.

The national anxiety grows as it becomes apparent that the head of the US government amounts to a paid agent of the Russian government, and that he is doing everything in his power to further the Russian agenda in the world, and to weaken the US.  And the Republican party with control of the other two branches of government are letting him do it, without a peep.

For those of us who lived much of our lives with the Soviet Union as powerful adversaries capable of ending our lives at any moment, it is beyond surreal.  For decades the Soviet Union was the second most powerful nation in the world.  Now Russia, with an economy smaller than the state of California, is accomplishing what the Soviet Union could not.

Evidence grows that Russian meddling swung the British vote to exit from the European Union, coordinated with at least one of the Brexit leaders.  Weakening European unity and the Western alliance is Russia's wet dream.  Evidence is growing of the extent of the conspiracy to take over the US government, and the extent of its success.

In just the past week, the antipresident did his best to wreck the Western alliance while proposing that Russia reenter the G-8, which he followed up by giving Russia and China everything they could want in relation to North Korea.  How can we cope with this happening, while those in power in Washington pretend that it isn't happening?  Ask your psychiatrist.