Merry Leafmas!

Once a year the good people at the City of Portland Bureau of Transportation (i.e. the Streets people) come around and hoover up the leaves that fall in the streets and on the "city strip", the string of land between the outside of the sidewalk and the curb.

This is called "Leaf Day" because that's what it is; a single day (which varies depending on where you live) where this process takes place.

Ours here in the "97203" was yesterday, 12/18.

Note that the idea here is that the City is removing the "City's" leaves; the ones that fall on City property but are a more general mess and potential catchbasin plug.

So of course every Portlander worth their "Keep Portland Weird" bumper sticker cheats like a motherfucker; front yard, side yard, back yard...if a rake can reach it, the leaf falling in those private properties goes into the gutter for the City to haul off. Everyone politely pretends this doesn't happen.

So, like any good holiday, the key is in the anticipation and preparation; raking, sweeping, and blowing the leaves out into the street. Waking up early (or staying up late) to move cars and trucks out of the street out front to invite the City crew in.

And then the magic begins!

First the front-end loader shows up. The basket thing piles up the leaves and bundles them down to the street corner. There another loader with a standard bucket loads them into one of the City dump trucks cab-ranked nearby.

This, as you can imagine, is not really surgical. A lot of gunk and leaf debris remains behind:

That's why the water truck comes along and sprays down the street, washing this junk into the gutter.

Finally the sweep/vacc truck hoovers up this stuff, leaving the street sparkling clean for, well, at least the rest of the day.

And the wonder of :Leafmas is done for another year.

What's kind of sad is that I realized that "Leafmas" is as much or more of a genuine holiday for me than the big conventional holiday it's always adjacent to. Christmas is kind of "meh" for me. I have not a shred of religiousity, and the current American commercially bloated "Christmas" is an embarrassing  travesty.

But Leafmas?

It's both practical and satisfying, a sort of community ritual that pushes all my civic buttons. Like the ideals of religion, it brings us together in a common cause to make our world a bit better.

So a merry and peaceful Leafmas to all who celebrate!

Go Directly To Jail

 

This is what was left behind when the funny farmers came and hauled off our "Jesus wants me to show you my tits" homeless Crazy Lady last May.

Now, our Portland area "Mr. Potter Association" (People for Portland, two lies for the price of one, since these folks are not "people" in the humane sense and they're certainly not "for Portland" in any way but "make Portland more like Lake Oswego") have a new homeless-question poll out.

"Portland-area poll finds huge appetite for tougher tactics on homelessness".

Because of course it did.

Because a huge chunk of people want simple answers to complex problems, want a hammer to make everything that bugs them into a nail.

Lots of people are assholes, too, but that's a whole different thing.

But think about this.

What are "tougher tactics"?

Force.

That's the bottom line, isn't it?

"An overwhelming majority of Multnomah County voters say...people in crisis living on the streets should be required to undergo addiction or mental health treatment.Only 25% of Multnomah County voters said that treatment for people experiencing mental health or substance use disorder should be voluntary; 67% believe “we need legal tools to encourage and compel people to get help. "

How?

How do you "require" some doper to get clean, or some nutter to take their meds?

"Legal tools"? A band saw? Pliers?

"Legal tools". Just say it straight; you junkies and loonies are gonna get straight or go to fucking jail.

Because we have all the money and jail space to shove a bunch of crazy junkies for being crazy junkies, right?

Fuck me runnin'.

"Nearly three-fourths also back a proposal by Mayor Ted Wheeler to enforce a citywide daytime camping ban..."

That's the latest Wheeler gimmick, BTW; force the hobos to pack their shit every morning. And then...what? Hump their ruck all over town? Drive their RV up and down Interstate Avenue from 8am to 8pm?

The Good People for Portland are nutty enough about the hobo camps as it is. Can you imagine the reaction to wandering groups of encumbered homeless people like some sort of Mongol horde with shopping carts instead of horses? And this is the supposedly GOOD idea the Portland city government is proposing?

Nothing has changed since I wrote about this last time. Or, for that matter, since I first wrote about it two years ago. And nothing has changed the conclusion I wrote then:

"...there he is, with his tent and his trash and his stolen bikes and his encroaching on your public space with all of that and his personal problems. You drive him away and he just becomes some other Portlander's problem and the people those Portlanders drove away come to camp in your patch.

So I still don't have a good answer to the "homeless problem"; the solution will take time, money, and interest we aren't willing to invest, and without the solution we're stuck with these filthy camps in every public space."

Except people like "People for Portland" and the angry Potters they polled are more angry and more vicious and less willing to invest time, money, and interest in actually figuring out ways to get these poor bastards out of the parks and off the streets rather than fantasizing about jailing them.

Am I happy about the "homeless problem"?

Look back up at the picture. That was just one person, in one place. That's unacceptable for a dozen reasons. 

No, I'm not "happy" about the homeless situation.

But I'm at least realistic about it.

While the big megaphone in the hands of these People for Portland is just shouting their nonsense, as random and pointless and unrealistic as the ranting of the Jesus Tits lady, all over the sky above and with about as much hope of actually solving the problem.

Trail of Tears

Just to the west of the Little House there's a City park, the Peninsula Crossing Trail, that runs along the east bank of what we call "The Cut", the immense railroad cut that runs through North Portland from the Willamette River side - where the vast Albina freight yards are located - to the Columbia.

The Bride and I discovered it soon after it was opened in 1996. Back then I could still ride a bike and we did, enjoying the quiet wooded trail between the busy and largely-bike-lane-free-at-the-time North Portland arterial streets.

That's actually a pretty good picture of how the trail would have looked for, oh, about a decade or so.

Then Portland's "homeless problem" metastasized. 

Today the trail looks more like this:

 

Most housed North Portlanders won't stray onto the trail anymore; it's not worth the debris and the random whacko and the ride is no longer peaceful and pretty.

Like most Portlanders, I'm frustrated and angry. Almost every public space is now inhabited, and nearly all the habitations are a sour sprawl of...well, everything; filthy clothes, bags of trash, broken bicycles and cars...they're trashpits. There's a reason nobody ever went for a walk in the city dump.

But, like most Portlanders, I'm also baffled by what to do about these camps.

I mean...I know the real answer. It means building a mass of cheap, low-cost rental and housing units. It means staffing organizations that will provide support and structure for the people moved out of the camps and into the housing - both in the form of "support" like addiction programs and medical and/or psychiatric care - and "structure", like nannying them to take their meds and go to the job training programs.

But...here's a good example of why even with all this - and I should note that "all this" is a fever dream; nobody in Portland will vote the taxation it would take to do all that - I despair of figuring out a way to deal with this homeless mess.

The link above takes you to the tale of one "Gary O'Connor", who lived and died - violently - along a similar trail in Southeast Portland. 

The article tries hard to make O'Connor into a sympathetic character, but can't avoid noting that:

"O’Connor couldn’t read or write and resorted to stealing...(h)e struggled with addiction...Court records show O’Connor had burglary convictions in Multnomah County and at the time of his death had a warrant out for his arrest in Clackamas County, where he was accused of giving police a false name and criminal trespassing."

So let's assume you get this guy into a subsidized house. You get him a into a drug addiction program. You get him back in school - at 45 years old, mind - to learn to freaking read and write and do simple math.

What then? Who's going to hire this guy? A former crook and tweaker who lived half his life illiterate? Frankly, I'm guessing you'd have to assign a sort of parole officer/social worker/nanny to the dude full time to keep him from deciding that stealing bikes was less difficult and demanding than his job stocking shelves at Kroger.

Multiply that by thousands or even tens of thousands; people with health issues who need medical help, people with drug issues, people with emotional issues or mental health issues. People who, honestly, prefer to steal rather than punch a clock.

I mean...to be brutal, if this guy was a pet you'd take him to the vet and have him put down. He'd just be too much trouble.

But he's not a pet, he's a person. A troubling, troublesome person, but a person. So you kind of have a moral dilemma on your hands. He's a huge sink of time, money, and trouble, and one who is very like to reward all that investment with...very little. 

But if you don't make that investment, there he is, with his tent and his trash and his stolen bikes and his encroaching on your public space with all of that and his personal problems. You drive him away and he just becomes some other Portlander's problem and the people those Portlanders drove away come to camp in your patch.

So I still don't have a good answer to the "homeless problem"; the solution will take time, money, and interest we aren't willing to invest, and without the solution we're stuck with these filthy camps in every public space.

You never hear the carcinogen that gets you...

A friend of mine posted a link to an article in one of our newsweeklies about a teensy little problem in Southeast Portland:

"Within days, state officials are slated to release the alarming results of a monitoring program of airborne heavy metals, including arsenic, conducted this past October in inner Southeast Portland, the Mercury has learned. The state Department of Environmental Quality and the Oregon Health Authority plan to announce that DEQ data indicate a monthly average of 49 times the state air-safety benchmark level for the neurotoxin and carcinogen cadmium, and 159 times DEQ's air-safety goal for the carcinogen arsenic...most immediately at risk are two Portland schools — Cleveland High School and Winterhaven K-8 — and a 100-child, private day care facility on the nearby Fred Meyer corporate campus that serves children as young as six weeks old."

Unsurprisingly, this young woman was horrified; "Yowza. This should NOT be a loophole!" she observed.

The thing is, I've worked on more than a few DEQ projects and I put it to her that the real problem was that this wasn't a "loophole" in the sense that the facility in question - a specialty glassmaker - was slipping through a flaw in the rules.

Oregon DEQ's rules are contained in the Oregon Adminstrative Rules, or OARs, and the regulation involved here is OAR 340 and its various divisions. If you go read the rules defining regulated pollutants it's pretty chastening how much airborne contaminants are permissible.

And that's critical. The term used in the regs is "PSEL": Permissible Site Emission Limit". Note that the linked Merc article says this:

"...DEQ data indicate a monthly average of 49 times the state air-safety BENCHMARK LEVEL for the neurotoxin and carcinogen cadmium, and 159 times DEQ's AIR-SAFETY GOAL for the carcinogen arsenic..." (emphasis mine).

Notice what's NOT there?

Yep.

There's no indication that the glass plant has exceeded its PSEL. Meaning that if it hasn't, there's no grounds for enforcement. DEQ can't bust 'em if their emissions are high...but within their PSEL. The PSELs aren't written to account for the surrounding of the emitter, in most cases, so here the proximity of schools and day-care centers doesn't factor in, either.

So the real problem is reducing the PSEL...and that's kind of a nightmare.

Just to give an example, the federal EPA sets what are known as "PEL" - permissible exposure limits" for hazardous materials. The Nation Institute of Occupational Safety and Health - NIOSH - sets something call a "Recommended Exposure Limit", or REL. Typically RELs are lower - sometimes MUCH lower - than PELs. Why?

Here's a great explanation from the blog Chemdaq:

"NIOSH RELs are supposed to be based on the best available science (using human or animal health effects data). "OSHA PELs, on the other hand, are subject to the rulemaking and political process, meaning that the interests of all parties involved are taken into consideration. Thus, OSHA does not have the luxury of relying strictly on science. Establishing PELs sometimes even come down to court rulings.

To be frank, the OSHA PEL is not the safe limit below which harm cannot occur. Rather it is the legal limit (i.e. what is “permissible”), below which serious harm should not occur to most people. Thus, while the OSHA PEL represents the legal exposure limit, it does not necessarily represent the desired exposure level. To that extent, the NIOSH REL is the more appropriate number."

So we're happily poisoning ourselves - just a little, just a bit, just a smidgen at a time, perhaps...oer perhaps not - because to reduce those poisons to a level where "serious harm should not happen to ALL people" would cause other people not to make money or to lose their jobs.

Or, as Donald Trump would say; "PEL? PSEL? Schmel! A little cadmium never hurt anybody! Regulations just cripple our job creators' ability to make YUUGE wealth creation for wealthy, job-creating winners who win!"

Is there an easy answer here?

No.

But I can tell you what's the wrong goddamn answer. And that's the one that you hear all the time from "conservatives" and "job creators" and which I put into the Libidinous Visitor's big, fat, mouth.

Primum non Nocere

I wrote the other day about how tiring it was looking around at the seemingly bottomless ocean of venal and stupid that is much of my country at the moment.

Here's exactly the sort of thing I was talking about, and why it's so frustrating, courtesy of Fred Clarke at slacktivist;

"Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, discussing the free-rider problem created by the millions of uninsured, spoke of “...the social norms that allow — that — to which we’ve obligated ourselves so that people get health care.”

Scalia responded, “Well, don’t obligate yourself to that. Why — you know?”

Justice Scalia’s remark there isn’t addressing the Affordable Care Act or its constitutionality. He is addressing an earlier law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1986. That’s the law encoding the “social norm” Verrilli mentions — the law that requires hospitals to provide emergency care to anyone in need regardless of their ability to pay.

Scalia’s suggestion was that this law be dismissed. Or perhaps just disregarded because, eh, it’s just a law, so whatever. He did not try to say that it was unconstitutional — it clearly is not. He was simply suggesting that he finds it inconvenient and thus that we, the people, ought not to have written into law a social norm that runs counter to the social Darwinism he seems to prefer."

Now I'm willing to accept that there's an argument to be made for and against the notion of how sick and injured people's care can and should be paid for.

What I can't accept is the argument for just NOT caring for these sick and injured people at all.

That's...beyond callous. Clarke calls it stupid, idiotic.

But I'd call it worse. I'd call it insane.

And suicidial.

Let me explain why, and use an analogy I know pretty well.You all probably know that I was a medic in the U.S. Army. I am proud of that, proud that the guys I served with called me "doc" and seemed happy to see me roll up with my bag of health care. I liked that I was their country doctor and was asked for medical advice on everything from head lice to erectile dysfunction (and I had a hell of a time with that one, I can tell you...)

But, here's the thing.

Why should an army bother with medics?

I mean, a wounded soldier is useless. He or she can't fight, they can't work. Even worse - they suck up valuable resources away from combat power. Another soldier has to stop fighting and care for them. Other soldiers have to carry them - often requiring an expensive vehicle or aircraft and all its logisitical tail - back to where another soldier - a highly paid surgeon - can treat them.

And there's worse!

Then a fully staffed hospital must be organized to care for this useless soldier. Nurses and medics for daily care, doctors, therapists. If the soldier is so badly injured that he or she cannot return to duty - and let's not be all swoony, the whole point of a hell of a lot of this medical care is to get that trooper back to work; the motto of the Army's Medical Corps is "To Conserve the Fighting Strength" and don't you forget it - the Army still doesn't stop wasting time, money, and people on them.They are shipped back to a CONUS medical center where they are taught to live as best they can. Often it's not great, but compared to the injured soldiers in earlier wars the U.S. trooper has a pretty damn good deal.

Starting with all those expensive medics.

Why? Why the hell would any sensible military organization waste all this stuff?

Okay, you know the answer and so do I; it's part of the contract.

One way armies get soldiers to fight - smart armies, armies that understand how people think - is to make sure those soldiers understand the Deal. You fight for me, I'll take care of you when you get hurt.

Which is why, by the way, that old soldiers like me tend to scream at the VA when it fucks up, or at other people or politicians when they fuck with the VA. Because they're trying to renege on the Deal. And that's why, for all that it probably drives them crazy, none of our deficit-"hawk" politicians is willing to go all budget-cutty on things like medical treatment for wounded soldiers. They know their ridiculous expeditionary wars in central Asia are not popular - imagine just how not-popular they'd become if messed-up GIs started falling all over the sidewalk?

But these jokers, both the professional funnymen like Tony Scales and the non-made guys like zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan (thanks, Charlie), don't seem to understand that societies have a very similar dynamic down underneath.

Once we moved along from the Hobbesean world of pure tribalism - and even most tribes works on the basis that you care for your helpless young, old, and sick - we developed a sort of Deal; the stinky common people worked their asses off, and in return the nobility went easy on them from time to time.

This has taken a hell of a lot of different forms throughout the centuries, from largesse, panem et circensus to Henry Ford paying his rivetheads three bucks an hour.

It isn't a giveaway. It isn't charity. It's part of The Deal, and when the people on top, the people like Scalia, forget that, things can go to hell in a hurry;

"We were hardly seated before a head at the end of a pike was presented at the window. Tison’s wife screamed loudly; the murderers thought it was the queen’s voice, and we heard the frantic laughs of those barbarians. Thinking that Her Majesty was still at table, they had raised the victim’s head so that it could not escape her sight; it was that of the Princesse de Lamballe. Though bloody, it was not disfigured; her blond hair, still curling, floated around the pike."

The U.S. Army isn't a perfect organization by any means, and it, like any other big corporation, can do some damn dumb things when it tries.

But it is also charged with doing one of the most damn deadly difficult things ever invented - fighting wars. And in doing so has learned that some things just don't make any sense at all, and screwing around with the privates, and leaving them to die when they get sick, or hurt, is the quickest way to break the damn Deal. And that when the little people are finally, throughly convinced that you are willing to let them fucking die before lifting a finger or spending a nickel to do something, well, they tend to figure they have nothing to lose, and from there the discussion usually deteriorates. Into something less pleasant.

Putting heads on pikes and such.

So I'm not sure if Scalia and his intellectual siderunners are, as Clarke believes, stupid, or just, like the Princesse de Lamballe, greedy and shortsighted. Or like I suspect, all the above and to the extent that it makes them functionally suicidal; if they got what they wanted they'd put us on a path that would make a real revolution, a genuine, bloody, civil explosion, not just inevitable but necessary.

But whatever there reason, their hearts or their shoes, the effect seems to be the same; a longing for a world where people don't act like people - who can be tossed out to croak and won't destroy their society if it shows it doesn't care about them.

I honestly have no idea how this nonsense will end. But if it ends, as at least one prominent conservative seems to think it should, with the poor bleeding out at the door to the emergency room, well, then...

...how fucking stupid and suicidal would that be?

Sigh.

Like I said; the damn ocean of stupid just seems to go on forever.

Over the Mountains

Sorry for the light posting - I was out of town all last week working in Walla Walla, WA (a place I am told by a native drysider should always be referred to as "the town so nice they named it twice") and was off the net. I have a crazy busy day tomorrow than then should be back on schedule.

I did want to make a brief observation on the latest news-time obsession; the murder of young Trayvon Martin.

Y'know what the really messed up part was?

That the shooter wasn't immediately escorted to the Crossbar Hotel.

Because I'll give you all the rest of the "backstory" here. You know what I'm talking about, right? All the things this is supposed to "tell" us about the U.S. circa 2012?

The perception of young urban black guys as dangerous and scary. The possobility that young urban black guys ARE dangerous and scary. The degree to which this makes it dangerous to be a young black guy. The throwaway quality of life as a young black guy.

Race. RacISM. Class. Bad Laws. Inequal Justine Under Bad Laws. Republicans vs. Democrats.

The fucked-up-ness of writing a law that makes it possible for a knucklehead with a weapon to, in effect, go looking for a fight. The overarching place that race and class plays in American life. The sociology of race, class, weapons, and American urban life. The propensity for places like Florida, where being an ignernt goober is no disqualification for public life, to make fucked-up laws that enable knuckleheads with a 'tude to pull a hogleg whenever they feel disrespected, or spooked, or like scaring somebody, or for no goddamn reason at all.

Let's just take all those as a given, K?

But even given all this, the fucked up part of this story, for me, doesn't come until the local constable doesn't even attempt to take the shooter downtown and book him for manslaughter.

At least.

Because, as we discussed earlier about the Afghan shooter, when you don't do that, you make it obvious to everyone that the dead guy (or women, or kids) doesn't really matter to you.

And when you do that you prove that you've forgotten that the important thing is that the village remained quiet.

Let's thing about what the law is for; what it's "supposed to be for, and what it really IS for.

We all like to cling to the ideal that the law is ground rules for our society; the lines on the playing field. And how we're supposed to be all "equality of opportunity", liberty, and justice for all. But, look, we already know that there are two laws in this country, or, rather, one law that, in its impartial majesty, forbids rich and poor alike to steal bread and sleep under bridges.

Steal a car, steal a stereo, and you'll probably end up in jail.

Steal an entire pension fund, steal a family's house, steal a company and run it into the ground and put thousands of people out of work?

You'll probably get a job on the Securities and Exchange Commission and never lose a night's sleep.

So we've pretty much admitted by our actions that we don't really CARE about that part of our laws.

But the other part of what the law is for is to keep everyone inside society's fences. To maintain just enough public order that we don't get convinced we're in some sort of Hobbsean war of all against all and then start acting like that. To maintain "public order" in the same way that the rules of engagement of an Army of Occupation are there to convince the occupied that doing what the foreigner tells them to is healthier than planting mines in the roads at night.

So, sure, I'd like my country to actually have one law for rich and poor, powerful and powerless. I'd like to believe that the magnificent words over the courthouse door "Equal Justice Under Law" were true. I'd like for there to be good work, decent work, living-wage work for everyone who wants it. I'd like for my country to be the best it can for the most people it can.

But I'll settle for just enough equality to keep the village quiet.

Because unlike a lot of people - unlike nearly all of our wealthy white folks, the people who are benefiting from the kind of nation where people like Trayvon Martin are, and are shown to be, disposable - I remember what happened the LAST time this country was so open an oligarchy that even the dimmest prole could figure out that both ends of the stick he or she was going to get were dirty.Yeah, that.

We forget that the Gilded Age and the Ragtime Era had a scary edge to them, because the people on the Outside knew they had no way in and many of them decided to kick the thing to pieces rather than put up with that. We had a president assassinated, the first one outside wartime. Anarchists and Reds were under every patrician's bed, and armies of Pinkertons and goons - and the real Army - was employed to "fight them". This damn situation lasted until the Depression, when the New Dealers forced some of the oligarchs to bend a little to stave off what happened to Italy in 1922 and Russia in 1917.

And I'm on the wrong side, here: the kind of people I was then were the ones shot down by troops breaking strikes, beaten by company goons, lynched by American Legion thugs, and railroaded by corrupt judges. They were shot by people very like this Zimmerman who shot the kid Martin; because they didn't like the way my sort of people; poor people, union people, working-class people, looked.

Like I've said here before; the United States was founded as a sort of oligarchy and can work perfectly well as one.

But it's not much fun unless you're an oligarch and, can you tell me, sitting there reading this, that you feel lucky?

I didn't think so.

So while I'm sorry for Martin, his family, nice black guys everywhere, and my country in that we've made it possible for jackholes like Zimmerman to exist, because of who I am and where I am I have a vested interest in keeping the lid on enough to keep my society from flying apart.

So, for me, the important thing here, now, is that this shooter goes to jail. Goes to trial. Gets convicted - assuming the evidence shows that he did what he seems to have done, pursued an unarmed man into a fight and then killed him - and spends a long, long time in prison. Hell, we all have an interest in seeing that the people who use bloody-handed methods to emphasize the fucked up things we believe swiftly take the long step to the end of the short rope that German soldier took in Pont-avec-Crap back in 1878.

Because if we don't; if we convince enough people that the law is for you and not for me, that they might as well be hung for what they did do rather than what they didn't and some ignernt asshole thinks they did...well...

...then the village becomes unquiet and we've taken the first steps up the pass over the mountains of madness.

In Case I Wasn't Clear

Here, from Matt Taibbi, is a little chart showing the top donors to the current GOP frontrunner as well as the the last two presidential victors:So now...is it all that surprising to understand how, regardless of who gets elected, we seem to be governed with the intention to comfort the comfortable and, well, afflict the afflicted?

In all honesty things WOULD have been worse under a President McCain. But it's a difference is degree, and right now for those of us not in the two-yacht family the boat seems to be foundering - slower than we'd have gone down with Captain Crashboom and the Half-baked Alaska at the helm, but, still - the ocean looks damn cold, and awful deep, and the prospect of a steamship on the horizon looks awful dim.