A walk, a fest, & other results of research
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Joel Pomerantz
Oct 14, 2024, 10:56:23 PM10/14/24
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Hi friend,
As a member of the Thinkwalks list, you may have become used to emails mostly aiming to sign you up for my exploration walks.
This email offers vastly more.
Walk announcement
WiggleFest on Sunday
Hydrology research tidbits
My travels ahead
Social and political history around the elections
A video version of my flood walk with ShapingSF
An update on Musick Creek, the nature preserve we started
A note about donations to Thinkwalks, etc.
A vote note
Thinkwalk on Friday evening the 18th - Parnassus area
Friday evening is predicted to have pretty good weather. The walk will be 100 minutes long and will focus on the process and tentative conclusions of my research on historical springs near UCSF Medical Center. We’ll start at 5:45 p.m. on Parnassus. We’ll walk a couple blocks of steep hills, but not far, with lots of discussing and examining the landscape. Maximum 12 people. Make a donation at the end of the walk ($10 to $40 suggested) with cash or digital. There’s a twist to this walk. I’m trying an experiment since so many people have complained that my walks fill too quickly, before they have a chance to arrange their plans. Half the 12 slots will be reserved for people who haven’t been on a Thinkwalk this year. Sign up by emailing me. I’ll let you know whether you made it on the list as soon as I can, and where to meet.
WiggleFest this Sunday, from 12 to 5
Come to a street party on Steiner at Hermann. We'll be celebrating the Wiggle as a neighborhood. I’ll have a Local History table there, with stuff to look at. I plan to publicly confess having named the Wiggle, which is a zig-zag route bicycles use to avoid hills.
Spring Valley and the complexity of names
My research conclusions have frequently been at odds with standard stories and traditions. This is notably the case with the naming of the first major spring source for the Pueblo of Yerba Buena (SF village before it was SF). The flow of water came out of a deep cleft, a narrow gully almost 80 feet deep, between Clay Street and the location of today’s Cable Car powerhouse. Tradition has this as “Spring Valley.” The water flowed to the never-properly-mapped Yerba Buena Cove, which is now the flat area east of Montgomery Street downtown. But it may have been named Spring Valley—if it even was called that before it was filled in—because the people who exploited the spring for profit were forming a company named after their neighborhood of residence, elsewhere. The Spring Valley Water Company (originally Water Works) was the company that won the for-profit water game, locally. It then was forced out of business by municipalization.
Their neighborhood, with 100% certainty called Spring Valley, was today’s Cow Hollow—over Russian Hill from this gorge. There, the north slopes of Pacific Heights had many springs. Their water flowed down (northward) to the flats, at which point they were mostly blocked by sand hills. From there the water percolated through to the bay. The water backed up and formed pools as it absorbed into the dune edge. These little lakes never stayed static in their shorelines, making it hard to map them on my historical map! How do you map a lake without a static shoreline? It would be arbitrary, so on my poster map, the edges are purposely smudged. The largest was sometimes known as Washerwoman’s Lagoon. It was referred to as possibly being a “Laguna de Manantial” somewhat off-handedly in Anza’s diary—the first written account we have. This caused yet more naming confusion, creating false rumors of a freshwater lake in the Mission District.
I’ll be visiting and at a conference in the D.C. area starting a week from now, and back after the elections. It’ll be my second major Amtrak adventure this year!
Why Trump is likely to win
In a rare glimpse at my social historian sideline, I’m going to share my contextual analysis, outside the usual hydrological research for which I’ve become known. But everything is related, and our assault on Earth systems is humanity's worst problem. Whether we allow continued disaster is contingent on whether politics can implement (or at least accept) a sharp turn away from fossil fuels, right away.
So, why is Trump, the known problem-child, able to even be in the arena, and maybe win? Some of it is the long shadow of hate politics, some is incompetent Democratic Party politics, some is the strategic advantage held by Republicans and Trump, as an expert swindler. There are certainly other factors, but I think these are some of the biggest, and they lead me to think he’ll win.
1. Democrats, especially during the Clinton presidency, took working people and union support for granted. They leaned into the already-begun reliance on large corporations for campaign money, making them more beholden to the machine of profit than to the human public.
2. This presidential race suffers under the taint of Racism and Sexism. I capitalize them since they are, sadly, institutions. This is not specifically about Harris. Mean-spirited organizing against Obama infused racism into a wider public conversation. Likewise, organizing against Hillary Clinton’s run fanned the embers of sexism.
3. Democrats haven’t done themselves any favors, and never built a coherent strategy of bringing Americans who feel abandoned, scared, and distrustful back together. I would have said “white Americans,” but right now it looks like many Black folks are defecting to Trump for this very reason. Obama abandoned his progressive cadre of organizers abruptly upon taking office, despite progressive values being more in line with a majority of Americans’ actual policy desires and moral values. For 20 years, the Democratic Party actively suppressed progressive presidential candidates who had momentum (Howard Dean, Bernie Sanders, in particular). Democrats continued to try their luck using inconsistent and ineffective responses against ramped-up, powerful, and deceptive messaging by the Right. Hillary Clinton exemplified this inconsistency and bungled messaging when she said said “half” of Trump supporters fit into a “basket of deplorables,” while the other half are people who feel the government has let them down and need understanding and empathy. The lack of clarity about who she found deplorable, itself a terrible concept, helped sink her ship. Meanwhile politically involved Progressives were troubled by her aggressive foreign policy as Secretary of State, like her handling of the coup in Honduras against the leftist president Zelaya. And especially by her direction to the DNC to screen out Sanders when he was the most popular politician in the country. Obama carried out more extrajudicial killings (with drones) than any other president.
4. Over the years, politics in America became more divisive, starting with the efforts of Newt Gingrich in Congress. Right-wing Tea Partiers, then mainstream Republicans, and eventually Trump adopted various Progressive tactics, like grassroots organizing and civil disobedience, albeit without the usual trappings. Organizing on campuses by the Federalist Society was a method that had been largely the province of the Left. Direct action tactics helped stop the count in the 2000 Bush-Gore race, and the co-optation just grew from there. Plus Trump expanded his bullying wholesale, like the surprisingly effective rhetorical strategy of accusing others of the very things he is legitimately criticized for. He knows the power of insults and aspersions, and of intransigence and endless repeats.
5. In a time when we are seeing the result of Reagan’s “trickle-down” economics, which predictably left just a few people with vast economic power, Trump has the resources of the extremely wealthy—not just his own grifted wealth. Their thumbs on the scales have more weight than ever, due to extreme Supreme Court rulings about money in politics. Trump’s selfish ambition is being used by aggressive and cutthroat legal wonks and corporate PACs to establish what they hope is an anti-democratic regime in which financial accumulation is not hindered by regulation and fairness incentives. One little-discussed aspect of Reagan’s legacy is that the main disincentive against accumulating vast wealth has been removed. The 90% top tax rates of the 1970s—imagine that!—were rarely wielded because they were so effective at discouraging people from becoming that extremely wealthy. Now, without those limiters, we have a few hundred billionaires setting global direction. Both the Wealthy Few and an outsized proportion of the Multitudes have ended up as vocal critics of government. The struggling majority, living harder lives thanks to Reaganomics, have ever stronger—and correct—hunches that their needs are rarely considered in policy decisions. Everyone is compromised by Profit Motive. It’s no wonder the government no longer facilitates copious opportunity or even safety, to the extent it ever did. Now it absolutely can’t. With financial corporations on bailout welfare, and overall mega-money in politics, and with the resulting MAGA flavor in the Supreme Court, government no longer seems to have the funds for robust public benefits. Politicians hide their compromises, i.e. their bedfellows, in order to continue getting donations from the rich. This hypocrisy and deception is now obvious, and itself undermines public trust. That collapse of trust begets political extremes. With all that, it’s no wonder the “good numbers” of today’s economy aren’t generally influencing votes.
6. Trump appeals to the one thing that brings Americans together: team spirit. Many people don’t care about policies or politics as much as they simply want to feel like they’re on a team—a powerful team.
Deep breath, now. 1…2…3… And back to more usual Thinkwalks topics.
Armchair Thinkwalking—a video tour
Last December, to finish their 25th year, Chris & LisaRuth at Shaping San Francisco had me lead a Thinkwalk about flooding. The discussions and presentations at each stop were recorded as video by Chris Carlsson and they ended up on archive.org. The sound is mostly good, given the loud streets. It’s a rare chance to go on an “armchair Thinkwalk.” I shy away from digital media because I like to meet and interact with—and learn from—my audience. But here’s one you can click.
https://archive.org/details/1862-flood-thinkwalk-with-joel-pomerantz-dec-2-2023 Or here: https://www.shapingsf.org/public-talks/archive_video_2023.html#Thinkwalk_vid
The nature preserve I started
From 2018 to 2020, my nature education efforts were focused on creating a nonprofit, so that it could purchase 134 acres in the Sierra and join the community there to save it from possible development. The place is Musick Creek, and the nonprofit is Musick Creek Confluence. Many of you gave generously. To date, we've raised $160,000 of the $175k purchase price and paid almost no interest. It’s no longer the overwhelming task it was, because I no longer have a big role there, I’m happy to say. Nearer community members are handling most of the admin duties. And they are much better than I am at the main important projects now presented: forestry (including education), land stewardship, and making connections with granting agencies. The infamously hot Creek Fire of September 2020 blasted from the National Forest through the property on the windiest, most destructive day. This obviously had its major down sides and is quite depressing in some ways. I was the last to camp there before the fire struck and it’s still in my dreamscape. But it also opened up many opportunities, including community-building and increased access to some pools of public monies earmarked for recovery and climate.
My main role in the nonprofit at this point is running one of their projects—Thinkwalks! Yes, my SF nature education work is under their nonprofit umbrella. Aside from the land purchase, Thinkwalks has attracted between $8,000 and $21,000 in any given fiscal year of the four years so far. I’m amazed and I deeply appreciate this (not as much as I appreciate your enthusiasm, your curiosity, and your active participation in the place where you live, though). You can legally write off your smaller donations under $250 without a receipt. If your giving levels are high enough and you itemize, I’ll happily provide a receipt from Musick Creek Confluence, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, for your taxes.
Here’s another resource I’ve begun to compile for people who like to donate. This link will bring you to a list I’ve partly finished that makes donations to some of my favorite organizations easier. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QxCsV5qq8JoK_R7DbVcaJlACo_tTcAPfs-x1U7pL75c/edit?usp=sharing
Lastly, and since you somehow made it to the end of this email, feel free to ask me how I plan to vote and based on what thinking. With so much state and local stuff on the ballot, we need to share ideas, and if mine are helpful to you, I offer them. Many of you probably got the blue text-heavy door propaganda from the League of Pissed-Off Voters and I agree with all their comments. My sister babysat their founder, Billy Wimsatt, in 1977!
Meanwhile, here’s another resource or two: each election cycle, my data-hoarder acquaintance Aaron does an analysis of which congressional campaigns are most underfunded *and* most likely to flip a seat. Here are links to his data.
Links allow a donation split among the most strategic, and also give lists of most strategic.
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/strategically-blue-house-2024
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/strategically-blue-senate-2024
Enough already!
Joel
P.S.: It’s been confirmed by DNA: Christopher Columbus was a Spanish Converso (force-convert from Judaism) who came from Valencia, Spain, not from Genoa, Italy, where he fled. And his trip was funded by three rich Spanish Jews, not Queen Isabelle. Many such refugees came to the “New World” permanently. Even Junipero Serra was a Converso. In Serra’s case, it was his parents who were forced by the Inquisition to convert. He became a radical and extreme Catholic.
___
thinkwalks.org <http://thinkwalks.org/> (articles and a bit about my walks)
seepcity.org <http://seepcity.org/> (maps)
musickcreek.org <http://musickcreek.org/> (see above!)
415-505-8255 (flip phone)
As a member of the Thinkwalks list, you may have become used to emails mostly aiming to sign you up for my exploration walks.
This email offers vastly more.
Walk announcement
WiggleFest on Sunday
Hydrology research tidbits
My travels ahead
Social and political history around the elections
A video version of my flood walk with ShapingSF
An update on Musick Creek, the nature preserve we started
A note about donations to Thinkwalks, etc.
A vote note
Thinkwalk on Friday evening the 18th - Parnassus area
Friday evening is predicted to have pretty good weather. The walk will be 100 minutes long and will focus on the process and tentative conclusions of my research on historical springs near UCSF Medical Center. We’ll start at 5:45 p.m. on Parnassus. We’ll walk a couple blocks of steep hills, but not far, with lots of discussing and examining the landscape. Maximum 12 people. Make a donation at the end of the walk ($10 to $40 suggested) with cash or digital. There’s a twist to this walk. I’m trying an experiment since so many people have complained that my walks fill too quickly, before they have a chance to arrange their plans. Half the 12 slots will be reserved for people who haven’t been on a Thinkwalk this year. Sign up by emailing me. I’ll let you know whether you made it on the list as soon as I can, and where to meet.
WiggleFest this Sunday, from 12 to 5
Come to a street party on Steiner at Hermann. We'll be celebrating the Wiggle as a neighborhood. I’ll have a Local History table there, with stuff to look at. I plan to publicly confess having named the Wiggle, which is a zig-zag route bicycles use to avoid hills.
Spring Valley and the complexity of names
My research conclusions have frequently been at odds with standard stories and traditions. This is notably the case with the naming of the first major spring source for the Pueblo of Yerba Buena (SF village before it was SF). The flow of water came out of a deep cleft, a narrow gully almost 80 feet deep, between Clay Street and the location of today’s Cable Car powerhouse. Tradition has this as “Spring Valley.” The water flowed to the never-properly-mapped Yerba Buena Cove, which is now the flat area east of Montgomery Street downtown. But it may have been named Spring Valley—if it even was called that before it was filled in—because the people who exploited the spring for profit were forming a company named after their neighborhood of residence, elsewhere. The Spring Valley Water Company (originally Water Works) was the company that won the for-profit water game, locally. It then was forced out of business by municipalization.
Their neighborhood, with 100% certainty called Spring Valley, was today’s Cow Hollow—over Russian Hill from this gorge. There, the north slopes of Pacific Heights had many springs. Their water flowed down (northward) to the flats, at which point they were mostly blocked by sand hills. From there the water percolated through to the bay. The water backed up and formed pools as it absorbed into the dune edge. These little lakes never stayed static in their shorelines, making it hard to map them on my historical map! How do you map a lake without a static shoreline? It would be arbitrary, so on my poster map, the edges are purposely smudged. The largest was sometimes known as Washerwoman’s Lagoon. It was referred to as possibly being a “Laguna de Manantial” somewhat off-handedly in Anza’s diary—the first written account we have. This caused yet more naming confusion, creating false rumors of a freshwater lake in the Mission District.
I’ll be visiting and at a conference in the D.C. area starting a week from now, and back after the elections. It’ll be my second major Amtrak adventure this year!
Why Trump is likely to win
In a rare glimpse at my social historian sideline, I’m going to share my contextual analysis, outside the usual hydrological research for which I’ve become known. But everything is related, and our assault on Earth systems is humanity's worst problem. Whether we allow continued disaster is contingent on whether politics can implement (or at least accept) a sharp turn away from fossil fuels, right away.
So, why is Trump, the known problem-child, able to even be in the arena, and maybe win? Some of it is the long shadow of hate politics, some is incompetent Democratic Party politics, some is the strategic advantage held by Republicans and Trump, as an expert swindler. There are certainly other factors, but I think these are some of the biggest, and they lead me to think he’ll win.
1. Democrats, especially during the Clinton presidency, took working people and union support for granted. They leaned into the already-begun reliance on large corporations for campaign money, making them more beholden to the machine of profit than to the human public.
2. This presidential race suffers under the taint of Racism and Sexism. I capitalize them since they are, sadly, institutions. This is not specifically about Harris. Mean-spirited organizing against Obama infused racism into a wider public conversation. Likewise, organizing against Hillary Clinton’s run fanned the embers of sexism.
3. Democrats haven’t done themselves any favors, and never built a coherent strategy of bringing Americans who feel abandoned, scared, and distrustful back together. I would have said “white Americans,” but right now it looks like many Black folks are defecting to Trump for this very reason. Obama abandoned his progressive cadre of organizers abruptly upon taking office, despite progressive values being more in line with a majority of Americans’ actual policy desires and moral values. For 20 years, the Democratic Party actively suppressed progressive presidential candidates who had momentum (Howard Dean, Bernie Sanders, in particular). Democrats continued to try their luck using inconsistent and ineffective responses against ramped-up, powerful, and deceptive messaging by the Right. Hillary Clinton exemplified this inconsistency and bungled messaging when she said said “half” of Trump supporters fit into a “basket of deplorables,” while the other half are people who feel the government has let them down and need understanding and empathy. The lack of clarity about who she found deplorable, itself a terrible concept, helped sink her ship. Meanwhile politically involved Progressives were troubled by her aggressive foreign policy as Secretary of State, like her handling of the coup in Honduras against the leftist president Zelaya. And especially by her direction to the DNC to screen out Sanders when he was the most popular politician in the country. Obama carried out more extrajudicial killings (with drones) than any other president.
4. Over the years, politics in America became more divisive, starting with the efforts of Newt Gingrich in Congress. Right-wing Tea Partiers, then mainstream Republicans, and eventually Trump adopted various Progressive tactics, like grassroots organizing and civil disobedience, albeit without the usual trappings. Organizing on campuses by the Federalist Society was a method that had been largely the province of the Left. Direct action tactics helped stop the count in the 2000 Bush-Gore race, and the co-optation just grew from there. Plus Trump expanded his bullying wholesale, like the surprisingly effective rhetorical strategy of accusing others of the very things he is legitimately criticized for. He knows the power of insults and aspersions, and of intransigence and endless repeats.
5. In a time when we are seeing the result of Reagan’s “trickle-down” economics, which predictably left just a few people with vast economic power, Trump has the resources of the extremely wealthy—not just his own grifted wealth. Their thumbs on the scales have more weight than ever, due to extreme Supreme Court rulings about money in politics. Trump’s selfish ambition is being used by aggressive and cutthroat legal wonks and corporate PACs to establish what they hope is an anti-democratic regime in which financial accumulation is not hindered by regulation and fairness incentives. One little-discussed aspect of Reagan’s legacy is that the main disincentive against accumulating vast wealth has been removed. The 90% top tax rates of the 1970s—imagine that!—were rarely wielded because they were so effective at discouraging people from becoming that extremely wealthy. Now, without those limiters, we have a few hundred billionaires setting global direction. Both the Wealthy Few and an outsized proportion of the Multitudes have ended up as vocal critics of government. The struggling majority, living harder lives thanks to Reaganomics, have ever stronger—and correct—hunches that their needs are rarely considered in policy decisions. Everyone is compromised by Profit Motive. It’s no wonder the government no longer facilitates copious opportunity or even safety, to the extent it ever did. Now it absolutely can’t. With financial corporations on bailout welfare, and overall mega-money in politics, and with the resulting MAGA flavor in the Supreme Court, government no longer seems to have the funds for robust public benefits. Politicians hide their compromises, i.e. their bedfellows, in order to continue getting donations from the rich. This hypocrisy and deception is now obvious, and itself undermines public trust. That collapse of trust begets political extremes. With all that, it’s no wonder the “good numbers” of today’s economy aren’t generally influencing votes.
6. Trump appeals to the one thing that brings Americans together: team spirit. Many people don’t care about policies or politics as much as they simply want to feel like they’re on a team—a powerful team.
Deep breath, now. 1…2…3… And back to more usual Thinkwalks topics.
Armchair Thinkwalking—a video tour
Last December, to finish their 25th year, Chris & LisaRuth at Shaping San Francisco had me lead a Thinkwalk about flooding. The discussions and presentations at each stop were recorded as video by Chris Carlsson and they ended up on archive.org. The sound is mostly good, given the loud streets. It’s a rare chance to go on an “armchair Thinkwalk.” I shy away from digital media because I like to meet and interact with—and learn from—my audience. But here’s one you can click.
https://archive.org/details/1862-flood-thinkwalk-with-joel-pomerantz-dec-2-2023 Or here: https://www.shapingsf.org/public-talks/archive_video_2023.html#Thinkwalk_vid
The nature preserve I started
From 2018 to 2020, my nature education efforts were focused on creating a nonprofit, so that it could purchase 134 acres in the Sierra and join the community there to save it from possible development. The place is Musick Creek, and the nonprofit is Musick Creek Confluence. Many of you gave generously. To date, we've raised $160,000 of the $175k purchase price and paid almost no interest. It’s no longer the overwhelming task it was, because I no longer have a big role there, I’m happy to say. Nearer community members are handling most of the admin duties. And they are much better than I am at the main important projects now presented: forestry (including education), land stewardship, and making connections with granting agencies. The infamously hot Creek Fire of September 2020 blasted from the National Forest through the property on the windiest, most destructive day. This obviously had its major down sides and is quite depressing in some ways. I was the last to camp there before the fire struck and it’s still in my dreamscape. But it also opened up many opportunities, including community-building and increased access to some pools of public monies earmarked for recovery and climate.
My main role in the nonprofit at this point is running one of their projects—Thinkwalks! Yes, my SF nature education work is under their nonprofit umbrella. Aside from the land purchase, Thinkwalks has attracted between $8,000 and $21,000 in any given fiscal year of the four years so far. I’m amazed and I deeply appreciate this (not as much as I appreciate your enthusiasm, your curiosity, and your active participation in the place where you live, though). You can legally write off your smaller donations under $250 without a receipt. If your giving levels are high enough and you itemize, I’ll happily provide a receipt from Musick Creek Confluence, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, for your taxes.
Here’s another resource I’ve begun to compile for people who like to donate. This link will bring you to a list I’ve partly finished that makes donations to some of my favorite organizations easier. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QxCsV5qq8JoK_R7DbVcaJlACo_tTcAPfs-x1U7pL75c/edit?usp=sharing
Lastly, and since you somehow made it to the end of this email, feel free to ask me how I plan to vote and based on what thinking. With so much state and local stuff on the ballot, we need to share ideas, and if mine are helpful to you, I offer them. Many of you probably got the blue text-heavy door propaganda from the League of Pissed-Off Voters and I agree with all their comments. My sister babysat their founder, Billy Wimsatt, in 1977!
Meanwhile, here’s another resource or two: each election cycle, my data-hoarder acquaintance Aaron does an analysis of which congressional campaigns are most underfunded *and* most likely to flip a seat. Here are links to his data.
Links allow a donation split among the most strategic, and also give lists of most strategic.
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/strategically-blue-house-2024
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/strategically-blue-senate-2024
Enough already!
Joel
P.S.: It’s been confirmed by DNA: Christopher Columbus was a Spanish Converso (force-convert from Judaism) who came from Valencia, Spain, not from Genoa, Italy, where he fled. And his trip was funded by three rich Spanish Jews, not Queen Isabelle. Many such refugees came to the “New World” permanently. Even Junipero Serra was a Converso. In Serra’s case, it was his parents who were forced by the Inquisition to convert. He became a radical and extreme Catholic.
___
thinkwalks.org <http://thinkwalks.org/> (articles and a bit about my walks)
seepcity.org <http://seepcity.org/> (maps)
musickcreek.org <http://musickcreek.org/> (see above!)
415-505-8255 (flip phone)
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