Occupy attrition

Occupy Philly appears to be going out not with a bang but a whimper. What was accomplished in other cities by tear gas, pepper spray, and mass arrests will be accomplished in Philadelphia by rain, cold weather, and political out-maneuvering.

Friday jukebox: Nina Simone

Let me tell you what I got
That nobody's gonna take away
From this woman

Friday jukebox: Pink Martini

you looked into my bloodshot eyes and said

is it too soon if I call you

Sunday

MSNBC sees conspiracies in a mayors' teleconference

MSNBC reports breathlessly that a dozen-odd American mayors participated in a conference call last week, but that the mayors "deny colluding on 'Occupy' crackdowns." The call was part of near-weekly verbal communications that members of the United States Conference of Mayors regularly hold, and the conversation apparently naturally turned to the various Occupy actions happening in everyone's cities. And coincidentally, there were clear-outs and crackdowns in multiple cities between the teleconference and MSNBC's investigation for this report.

But investigation into what? Collusion about what? MSNBC begs a huge question here: that's it's improper or illegal for the mayors to talk about a challenge common to all of them and discuss solutions. And so what if they coordinated clearing out the encampments? So what if they "colluded"? What does colluded even mean here? Is there an accusation that mayors from different cities shared funds or police forces or matériel?

Perhaps the conversation went in the direction of, "I'll clear out my city's Occupy if you clear out yours," or "We'll use our pepper spray and riot police if you do, so nobody looks worse than anybody else." But even if it did, how is this "collusion"? And even if it is "collusion," how is this a problem? What laws would have been broken (outside of opening themselves up to §1983 liability for various police excess issues -- does MSNBC mean conspiracy to deprive Occupiers of their civil rights under §1983? Something tells me the article's premise is not that deep)?

And here I thought it was only radically politicized people and the insane who saw conspiracies everywhere.

Occupy Philly: control yourselves

Channel 6 answered my not-so-rhetorical question from yesterday, "[I]f the Occupy movement is truly so anarchist and leader-less, why doesn't a contingent separate itself out, splinter away, and offer to negotiate separately, away from the bad-faith consensus-blockers?"

One group of Occupy Philly protesters spent the day preparing for confrontation, another faction was meeting with city officials trying to defuse the situation and work on relocating the encampment.

A group calling itself Reasonable Solutions has distanced itself from the bizarro hardliners who are gearing up for a pepperspray 'n' bulldozer showdown with police by retrenching, defacing the transit concourse with graffiti, and "[leaving] a trail of human waste" on the lower levels of Dilworth Plaza.

You know what separates humans from animals? Choosing not to defecate where we sleep. You know what separates adults from children? Choosing not to protest perceived injustice by inappropriately dealing with our bowel functions.

If Occupy Philly can't get this nonsense under control, then public sentiment, which is at best ambivalent about Occupy groups -- for god's sake, don't read the comments on that news article -- will seriously go south. And by "public sentiment," I mean the sentiment of even hard-core radical feminist commies like myself.

I walked through Dilworth Plaza this morning about 8:00. Maybe one tent out of ten is correctly pitched, tied down tightly, and kept neat. I dig that it's a challenge to properly maintain a campsite over weeks or months, and not everybody spent time with the Girl and Boy Scouts or Guides when they were kids -- but damn, read the instructions that came with the tent, take away your trash, and keep your site neat and clean.

Late last night, I got e-mail asking if I would kindly volunteer to serve as a Legal Observer if (when) the police start clearing out the camp. Someone justify to me why I should help out the bad-faith operators who've decided to piss and shit all over my city. I'm not going to be a tool to help those Occupiers avoid jail time or even a police beat-down.

Now, the Reasonable Solutions people, that contingent I'll be happy to help out.

Dilworth Plaza renovation supporters: tools, fascists, or the 1%?

If I'm a person who lives and works in Center City Philadelphia, and I support the proposed renovations to Dilworth Plaza, does that make me a tool, a fascist, or a member of the 1%?

The proposed renovations seek to address some real problems with the current space. Right now, it's a paved wasteland with pedestrian barriers, blocked views, and multiple elevations that break up the space into many unattractive, unmaintained areas. The plan is to transform it into an open greenspace with a lawn area, water features, and improved access to the underground hub where the Broad Street Line, the Market-Frankford El, and the subway-surface trolleys intersect (67-page PDF). The suggested glass-enclosed stairways will bring to mind transit entrances in such cities as London, Tokyo, and Paris, and the concourse below will see sunlight for the first time since it was created and capped, making it more inviting and probably increasing its perceived safety. The proposed changes will make the space a workers' lunch oasis in the very noisy traffic junction around City Hall, and a more likely weekend destination for residents and tourists. For crying out loud, they want to put in rain gardens!

But Occupy Philly characterizes the plan thus:

The renovation, in its most general significance, is a privatization of public space, an enclosure of the commons in favor of a falsely sterilized, for-profit, private park of amusements for the privileged.

Really? Because what I see in the proposal is a re-imagining of the Plaza that benefits transit users, serves city residents and workers, and brings in tourists who spend money and support jobs in places around Philly that aren't only the historic district around Independence Hall. Also, "in its most general significance" (whatever that means), the plan keeps the Plaza open to the public; it doesn't make it private at all.

Why does Occupy Philly characterize the plan so inaccurately? And why take the stupid ad hominem pot-shot at the people who will use the Plaza when it's turned into more of a welcoming, green public park?

Occupy Philly could have found the proposal and read it easily -- the document I found is dated 2009 but I figure it's close to the final proposal, and it turned up when I simply googled "dilworth plaza proposal." And if they were really supporting the non-1% of Philadelphians who walk in and around the Plaza every day as they go to work or school, or do business in City Hall, or use the concourse to access SEPTA, Occupy Philly would cooperate and move across the street to the space at the Municipal Services Building.

But they aren't, and that's a big reason why I think that they are infiltrated, and that they've been infiltrated for weeks. And I'll quit thinking that as soon as they quit calling me the 1% for being a person who's really looking forward to having Dilworth Plaza brought into the 21st century.

Or back to the 17th, as the space where City Hall sits right now was one of the city's 5 original public squares:

Let every house be placed, if the person pleases, in the middle of its plat, as to the breadthway of it, so that there may be ground on each side for gardens or orchards, or fields, that it may be a greene country towne, which will never be burnt & always wholesome.

William Penn's Instructions to his Commissioners, William Crispin, John Bezar, & Nathaniel Allen, 1681

This is what a textbook case of infiltration looks like

So Occupy Wall Street's Zuccotti Park encampment is being bulldozed away, and any reasonable voices that would have conceded leaving Dilworth Plaza here in Philly have been blocked by individuals who are either stubborn-headed or acting in bad faith or both, and I imagine it will compel a Zuccotti-like showdown at City Hall any day now.

And of course Mayor Nutter is taking the opportunity the bad-faith operators have handed him to have a legal basis for bulldozing Occupy Philly as well: people are relieving themselves on the plaza instead of in the porta-potties; there's been an alleged sexual assault; there's respiratory illness going around because people aren't washing their hands and they're sleeping in the cold and damp; and, well, Dilworth Plaza is smelling pretty damn ripe lately. And when the group comes to "consensus" that it won't leave City Hall and move across the street, the mayor can say with very good plausible deniability that the group is being unreasonable, that it has changed and is different from the original rabble-rousers, and that something will have to be done soon.

I say there are "bad faith" actors in the Occupy consensus process because that's what the nonsense in Seattle the other day looked like: a few individuals deliberately blocking reality-based consensus for unclear reasons, but for reasons that will result in the disintegration of the protestors' united front. COINTELPRO is long gone, of course, but this is what happens when there's been some textbook undercover operatives work and coordinated infiltration.

But if the Occupy movement is truly so anarchist and leader-less, why doesn't a contingent separate itself out, splinter away, and offer to negotiate separately, away from the bad-faith consensus-blockers?

Another thought, I saw on the Twitter (and repeated without clear verification) that the NYPD had declared a no-fly zone over Zuccotti park for the duration of the clearing out, pepper spraying, and bulldozing. Attention, news media attorneys and Occupy Wall Street's lawyers: subpoena the security cam videos!

When fertilizations are "persons," miscarriages are homicides

Photo: a human blastocyst, formed about 5 days after a spermatazoon has fertilized an egg cell. Or, in Mississippi, an American citizen with a full complement of civil rights.

So both the Democratic and Republican candidates for governor in Mississippi have gone on record supporting passage of the fetal personhood initiative in that state. The state attorney general says he'll enforce it, too; and Mitt Romney has said in the past that he "absolutely" supports fetal personhood ballot measures. But I wonder if they're all fully on board with the very realistic consequences of such a law if it goes into effect.

Mississippi's Initiative Measure No. 26, if successful, will amend the state's constitution to "define[ the word person] to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the equivalent thereof[.]" So it would attach the full legal rights of a "person" to not just a fetus at the point of extra-uterine viability, and not just pre-viability, but to pre-fetus stage. Pre-embryo stage, pre-blastocyst stage, pre-morula stage, pre-zygote stage. It attaches full legal "person" rights to the instant that fertilization happens and there is a conceptus.

I don't see how this law can be uniformly enforced without monthly pregnancy tests of all fertile women in the state of Mississippi. I'm not being facetious here. (If I were being facetious, I'd ask if the rabbit industry lobby were behind Measure 26.) It's a serious question, because not every fertilization results in a successful pregnancy -- likely some 50% of all fertilizations result in early pregnancy loss, perhaps even 75%.

Early periods happen. Late periods happen. They happen to women whose cycles are otherwise regular like clockwork; they are business as usual to women whose cycles never grooved into predictable regularity. They happen whether or not a woman has gotten up to shenanigans that would put her at some risk of pregnancy. But one of the best indicators that fertilization has happened is a late period. Does Mississippi's definition of personhood mean that a woman would now have a legal duty to motor on over to the drugstore every time she's a day late?

And what about those miscarriages again? Most early miscarriages, more than three-fourths of them, occur in the first trimester because of a health or age issue beyond the woman's control, or because of "cytogenetically abnormal" embryos -- pregnancies that perish because the result would have been unviable for genetically horrific reasons.

And in Mississippi, every early miscarriage, because it happens to a "person" with the full complement of civil rights, would be a homicide of some kind. Every homicide has to be investigated to determine whether it was intentional and what charges should be pursued. But you can never really tell, with any one menstrual period, whether there was a fertilization; a period simply means that an implantation failed to occur, not that there was no fertilization. And never mind the "morning-after pill," which prevents pregnancy by kick-starting uterine sloughing so that a fertilization, if it happened, cannot implant: what about the women in Mississippi who are currently using non-hormonal IUDs? Every month, there may have been a fertilization that did not result in implantation -- thus, there was a miscarriage. And thus, there was a death of a "person," and thus, there was a homicide. When miscarriage is a homicide, then every menstrual period is a crime scene.

Do the leaders and other citizens of Mississippi understand that? And if not, why are the proponents of Measure 26 not explaining it that way? And how do they propose to handle infertility treatments that result in the creation of surplus human embryos? If an IVF-created embryo doesn't survive implantation, what kind of homicide is it? Does Measure 26 ban the operation of IVF clinics in Mississippi?

Still underemployed

Still stumbling along, seriously underemployed. Not making my overhead this month, and believe me, my overhead is pretty low already. Spending time when I can in free seminars and panels covering my preferred areas of practice.

Interviewed for a professional position at a prestigious local university back in August. Never heard back, and only learned that they selected another candidate when I logged into the school's job search site. Really? I expect that from a law firm or legal recruiter or fast-food restaurant chain, but chrissakes, not for this level of work.

You know how you look at a short document or a page of a newspaper for so long that you no longer really see what you're reading, the words become meaningless, and you start seeing the complementary colors of the text? I'm like that with my resumé at this point.

Chickenhawk Romney wants the Iraq war to last forever

Mitt Romney, born in 1947 but who did not serve in Vietnam, doesn't want the Iraq war to end (MSNBC). How many of his 5 sons, born between 1971 and 1981, have served or are currently serving in the armed forces?

Survey says: zero. Remember? While other men of my generation served in Desert Shield and Desert Storm[1], Mitt Romney's sons were serving their country by serving their dad's political campaigns (CBS, 2007).

Shame on Romney. He couldn't care less how long we pour lives and treasure into Iraq because his horse in the race is interest in the private equity firms that own the brands that the Pentagon contracts with to operate the war. His bank account, not his family, is affected; and less war means less money to him. Unlike the 99%, to whom more war means more personal loss. You want war, you go risk your own sons. It's really pretty simple.

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[1] Not to mention a high-school and college friend of mine who served in Desert Storm to pay for his university degree, spent the rest of the 1990s marrying and starting a family and serving his community as a police officer, and then got sent back to Iraq for the current war. One could say that he served twice so that one of Romney's sons wouldn't have to; but I wouldn't say that to the toddlers he left behind for his second tour in the desert.

Friday jukebox: Amos Lee

Feel that wind rushin' by

Brooklyn needs a new Rosa Parks

The B110 bus, which runs between [New York City neighborhoods] Williamsburg and Borough Park, has been run by Private Transportation Corporation since 1973, under a franchise with the city. [...] Even though a private operator runs the bus, it was awarded the route through a public and competitive bidding process.

But women sit in the back while men sit in the front. The only females allowed in the front are very young girls who happen to be traveling with a male caregiver. And not because the rule is merely an unspoken tradition:

Guidelines, posted in the front and the back, said that "when boarding a crowded bus with standing passengers in the front, women should board the back door after paying the driver in the front" and that "when the bus is crowded, passengers should stand in their designated areas."

Because this bus is part of the public transit system (it is run under some kind of franchise arrangement with MTA), this gender segregation is a civil rights problem.[1] Kudos to Mayor Bloomberg for calling the operators out on it:

[T]he mayor said that segregating men and women was "obviously not permitted" on public buses. "Private people: you can have a private bus," he added. "Go rent a bus, and do what you want on it" (NYT via MSNBC).

To paraphrase a departed Philadelphia local who was no hero of mine, this is America. When riding the bus, you can sit wherever you damn well please.

It's a slippery slope. One day it's a community saying that it offends their religion for women and men to sit together on the bus because it's immodest, and the next day it's a community calling little girls "sluts" for going to school and vandalizing the facility.

It's also a constitutional problem for this bus to operate with its MTA-looking number. If your god requires your congregation to gender-segregate itself in public, that's fine. Who am I to challenge what your god has told you? Just don't look to the government for financial help or recourse though the courts to facilitate and enforce that segregation. This informal -- and really, it's not very informal -- gender segregation on quasi-private buses should be nipped in the bud.

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[1] Though at least nobody's being denied service or having their fares confiscated because the bus operator doesn't think they conform to the gender sticker on their transit pass.

I am not surprised these two links came across my desk at about the same time this morning

Within 5 minutes of each other, these 2 links came across my screen this morning:

A very large (no pun intended) majority of American workers are overweight or obese or have a chronic health problem (WSJ).

"Ranch Dressing And Other Delights," a podcast episode discussing a few of the most horrifying entries at Allrecipes.com, includes links to American culinary masterpieces like Taco in a Bag, mayo-and-ketchup-based Pink Dippin' Sauce, and an E-Z casserole made with two types of canned corn, macaroni, a half-cup of butter, and a half-pound of processed cheese (The F Plus).

Correlation is not causation, but I think I'm going to have celery for lunch today anyway.

Back to work and bills after a weekend conference

Plowing through my to-do list after a 3-day conference, including following up with a potential client I should have naggedfollowed up with last week to see if they'll hire me (maybe they don't want to since I'm in only my second year of practice), signing up a client interview for later this week, and sending some free-information-but-not-legal-advice to an art student with a couple of copyright and invasion of privacy queries.

I met a bunch of art students at a meeting recently. One of the student's classmates came up to me after the meeting and told me that he planned to go to law school so that he could finance his art projects on his attorney's salary. I asked him to think about how he would create his art when he's starting from a position of $150,000 in law school loan debt but no job (i.e., plenty of time but no money to make his art with), or $150,000 in law school loans and a job where he's billing 2,000 hours per year (i.e., plenty of money if he keeps his lifestyle reasonable, but no time to make his art in).

And then I told him, simply, not to go to law school.

Anyway, speaking of scratch, I'm about halfway to making my overhead costs this month. But, hey, everybody! How's that new iPhone working for you?

Tnx to readers far and not-so-far afield

Quick note to say thanks to Cup O' Joel, Pine View Farm, and Delaware Liberal for their kind links to my "uncertainty" post last week: "uncertainty" means different things to different people, and declining to hire more staff because of "uncertainty" about future economic and legal conditions is nonsense when your company makes a billion dollars in profits every quarter.

So that's why my mobile device has been flaky lately

Looks like one for the RISKS Digest, to me:

Sporadic outages of BlackBerry messaging and email service spread to the U.S. and Canada on Wednesday, as problems stretched into the third day for Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa. [...] Unlike other cellphone makers, [Research in Motion] handles email and messaging traffic to and from its phones. When it encounters a problem, millions of subscribers are affected at once. There are about 70 million BlackBerry users around the world.

(MSNBC.) I heard about the overseas outages the other day and was kinda hoping against hope that it wouldn't reach North America.

Regulatory uncertainty versus food insecurity

The trope is that big businesses aren't creating jobs because of "uncertainty." Would someone please explain to me the nature of this uncertainty? GE paid no federal taxes in 2010 and its profits have regularly exceeded $1 billion per quarter. Private equity wizards, Tea Party financiers, and terror profiteers Charles and David Koch are (each or both, but at this level it hardly makes a difference) worth $25 billion -- which sounds like a number you'd make up to exaggerate for comedic effect, you know?

What is the uncertainty here? You hire someone and pay them $28,000 a year, or $120,000 a year? That will have an almost literally negligible effect on GE's profits. What am I missing in the math? GE makes over $1 billion extra every quarter; they'd pay the hypothetical new hire some $7,000 or $30,000 out of that. The Kochs add some new, highly capitalized business or a family of brands to their equity portfolio, and they've spent, what, a few hundred million dollars out of their $25 billion.

I guess "regulatory uncertainty" is the phrase spoken trippingly on the tongue as well. But really? The argument is that businesses won't hire now because they don't know if the rules will change in the future, making their permanent employees more expensive. But OSHA is notoriously understaffed and underfunded and has been for years and multiple administrations. It's not as if some new rules or increased enforcement will happen any time soon to wreck your factory's productivity. As for the energy sector (oil drilling, fracking, and so on), how many actual jobs are we talking here, versus, for example, Exxon's $10 billion in quarterly profits?

Why do people repeat the "uncertainty" line without making the people who claim uncertainty explain it?

I'll tell you what uncertainty is. It's not knowing whether you can pay the rent or put food on the table next month. And states are cutting TANF left and right. TANF -- thank you, President Clinton -- is difficult to get in the first place, offers no childcare to moms while requiring them to go to work, and discriminates against non-married, non-nuclear families.

I said it yesterday and I'll say it again. It's no wonder that there's a tent city at City Hall, and I don't see why anybody there would hurry up to leave. There's nothing left to lose, and the critics are free to hire them so that they move into a higher tax bracket.

Philly's new tent city

Quite the tent city has sprung up in Dilworth Plaza. There's even a family-size tent for nursing mothers and their babies and toddlers. I feel a little regret that I'm not in a position to take part in Occupy Philly and that I can't yank my daughter from school and go on a camping trip to City Hall. But I need to keep hustling for work; and if I want to be available to help any participants who need legal representation, I should try to stay away from the protests. The occupation is on a different scale from taking my daughter to a march or demonstration for a few hours, too.

Though I did walk her through a few days ago, to let her see what the big deal was. And on Friday morning I checked in with one of my contacts from the anti-Iraq War protests in 2003.

Interesting to see how the protestors are taking care of themselves. They have a food tent, a "FAQ" table, and other areas where people can gather and share news and help. They are clearly there for the long haul, incoming rain this week and forthcoming winter weather be damned.

But what else are they going to do? It's not as if they're facing the end of their 2-week vacations and have to go back to work -- if they have work, they're cashiers, baristas, or crafting artists, or they're doing something else irregular and seriously underpaid despite having obtained the bachelor's degree that should have put them into a middle-class lifestyle, or at least kept them in a reasonable working-class lifestyle. They have nothing better to do and nothing to lose, because they were replaceable cogs at their jobs anyway.

Of course, the critics who want them to pack up and go get a job are perfectly free to hire them.

But actually, what I'm hearing when I walk by is a lot of supportive honking from the traffic passing them at 15th and Market Streets.

Friday Jukebox: Robert Plant and Alison Krauss

It's crazy how it all turned out
We needed so much more

Philadelphia Film Festival's 20th Anniversary Film Festival

One of the city's innumerable film festivals is coming up soon. Convince me that I should make it the same full-contact sport that I used to. Or at least convince me which dozen films I should go see.

Oooh, wait -- a new Coriolanus with The Tree of Life's Jessica Chastain and a lot of explosions, starring and directed by Voldemort? Holy cow, I'm not sure how you can go wrong with that, except by not going to see it.

And something called Sleeping Beauty from Australia that bears some suspicious resemblance to Story of O, at least from the trailer. . . . Oh, and from the official website's synopsis, as well.

OK, so tell me which ten other films I should go see. But please don't suggest Barton Fink; I prefer Miller's Crossing.