Mr. Yang has the most detailed and comprehensive set of policy proposals we have ever seen at this stage in the campaign. Democratic Party Leadership in Iowa

Andrew Yang is a serious candidate and he deserves our serious attention as hard and strange as that may seem. A couple of days ago, Michele was at a monthly local lady’s lunch and, when asked who she liked in the Democratic Primary, she answered “Yang”, everybody the table looked at her like she was kidding. Nobody took him for a serious candidate, dismissing him as another businessman who doesn’t know what he is doing. First, the implication is that Trump doesn’t know what he is doing and that is the problem; I think that is dangerously wrong. Trump knows what he is doing, he so knows what he is doing that he has been able to take over the entire Republican Party (he did not lose even one vote in the house on the question of impeachment). Yang may actually be the best Democratic candidate to beat Trump because he is one of the few candidates that actually understand why Trump is President in the first place. He is also better connected to the real world – both the problems and the solutions those problems suggest – than most of the professional politicians who are looking at the world from inside the Washington bubble.

Still, “He is better connected to the real world” is what I told myself when I voted for Bill Clinton and then, again, when I voted for Barack Obama. In both cases, their agenda of change ended up being co-opted: the newly elected Presidents were isolated and their new real-world filtered through Washington groupthink. Holding their ground and changing that Washington groupthink is very hard for anybody to do and it is necessary to make any real change. But it is possible, both Roosevelts did it. Still, it is my biggest worry with Yang. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are anomalies, insiders running as outsiders and they are probably best suited to resist Washington Group Think. But I have another concern about both Sanders and Warren.

What concerns me about Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders is that they are almost my age. Close enough to my age so that we have the same general world view and that results in 50s answers to today’s problems (and that is the only thing that bothers me, I want to quickly say, I would be thrilled to vote for either one). To give an example of what I mean, Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Facebook. She wants to use antitrust laws that were basically designed to break up Standard Oil in 1911. Yang thinks that is outdated thinking. He suggests an alternative, he wants us to be paid for being the product that Facebook is selling. It is an entirely different way of solving the problem. Sure, Facebook should be stripped of all its recent acquisitions, like Instagram, but that still leaves a huge company that monopolizes its econiche and isn’t practical to break up. Because Yang is 30 years younger, from a generation that much better understands today’s world, he doesn’t reflexively relate to an outdated concept.

An argument against Yang would be that he isn’t a politician, but he is a politician, of sorts. Yang has been around politicians and involved in politics while running Venture for America. Venture for America is a non-profit, founded by and originally run by Yang, to rejuvenating local economies through entrepreneurship training. He is a card-carrying capitalist and a Liberal (seeing the devastation in those local economies is what got him interested in running for President in the first place). To rejuvenate an economy one has to swim in political waters and he did a good job of it, to quote his Website: The Obama White House even named me a Champion of Change in 2012 and a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship in 2015.

What I most like about Yang is that he has thought about the issues and his answers match my answers which are, obviously, correct. The Policy section of the Yang2020 website is detailed and seems to financially balance. His first three issues are not Climate Change and that bothers me but when he does get to Climate Change, on the second line, it is obvious that he realizes the urgency of doing something…fast! He is a backer of the Green New Deal and is so serious about the climate that he starts his Climate Change Plan with Our planet is a mess...The past four years have been the four hottest on record, and July 2019 was the hottest month ever recorded. Greenland is expected to lose 440 billion tons of ice this year, a rate that was the “worst-case scenario” for 2070. The West is on fire, the middle of the country is flooded, and the Atlantic is seeing hurricanes of increasing frequency and intensity. In Alaska, salmon are dying because of the heat. All the while, the top 5 US oil and gas companies posted revenues over $760 billion (1), and the federal government subsidized the industry to the tune of $26 billion annually (2).

During the debates, Yang keeps saying versions of “The United States is run by the almighty dollar”, and that sums up his point of view on taking on climate change. Yang thinks money is a more powerful controller than regulation and his budget of $4.87 Trillion over twenty years is heavy on research – everything from $800 million invested in geoengineering research methods to 90 billion to establish and fund the Climate Change Adaptation Institute over 20 years, all the way to $5 billion invested in research for sustainable materials over 5 years – but the biggest item, by far, is $3 trillion to finance loans for household investments in renewable energy over 20 years. The last item really gets to the core of the Green New Deal in which the modernization and decentralization of the grid by Union workers is a central tenant.

As an aside, I first met, so to speak, AOC, a day after she joined the Sunrise Movement’s picket line in front of Nancy Pelosi’s office. It was a news conference or an interview, I forget which but I haven’t forgotten AOC, she was the most refreshing politician I heard in years. She talked about Climate Change and the Green New Deal, which I’d never heard of, and the Sunrise Movement, which I also had never heard of. When asked what her top priority was and she said “Global Climate Change”, and, when she was asked what to do about it, she said, “Fix the grid, harden it and decentralize it”. That was an odd answer to me, Fix the Grid just didn’t seem like a top priority. About a month ago, The US Army War College put out a report, Implications of Climate Change for the U.S. Army, and one of the major issues was The Grid. The War College said, The increased likelihood of more intense and longer duration drought in some areas, accompanied by greater atmospheric heating, will put an increased strain on the aging U.S. power grid and further spur large scale human migration elsewhere. Power generation in U.S. hydroelectric and nuclear facilities will be affected. This dual attack on both supply and demand could create more frequent, widespread and enduring power grid failures, handicapping the U.S. economy. Sitting in the dark last month, during two PSPS events, I’ve had time to think about The Grid but, obviously, Yang, along with AOC, the Sunrise Movement, and the U.S. Army, has been thinking about it for years. End aside.

I know Andrew Yang seems like a novelty candidate, but he isn’t. I’ll leave with a quote from the Yang2020 website, I urge you to join me. No one else is going to build a better world for us. We’re going to have to do it ourselves. Together.

and, we are told, it will stay on, at least during the next announced PSPS. How quickly the whole thing becomes common, last night – at dinner with the lights on – I had to ask what the initials PSPS stood for when Craig referred to the pending outage. Now I see the Governor is also using PSPS, now we all know PSPS means Public Safty Power Shutoff. Public Safty Power Shutoff is so descriptive and yet we know that it took some work to come up with a name that works so well as an initialism. As an aside, I thought it was an acronym but to be an acronym, it must be pronounceable as a word. End aside.

Still, SPSP entering our common lexicon does not lessen the effect. For some people, it is a huge inconvenience, for us, I am well aware, the SPSP has been a pretty minor event. That minor event is only on a sliding scale, however. On an absolute scale, the PSPSes are still a big inconvenience. The first time the power went out, it was pretty warm but this last time, the temp was in the mid-forties and that is cold to be sitting around in and even worse when getting up in the dark. The only way to really get toasty is to go to bed or leave the house. Our home is no longer a refuge from the outside world, now, the outside world is a refuge from our home. That is stressful.

I am glad this is happening, though. The fires are exposing our generation’s failure to leave the next generation with a safe home. Our government has failed us and failed our children for generations to come. For me, the most painful part is that, in California, this has happened under the Democratic Party. Our Public Utility Commission has not fulfilled its job in that it has not controlled PG&E or made us safer. Here, big money is still running the game.

It is Saturday afternoon and we are told – by phone from PG&E, by email from PG&E and the County, and by text from PG&E and the County again – that our power will go out at about five. It is strange, getting ready for the power to go out. Run a last load of laundry, run the dishwasher, charge everything that can be charged – although there is charging available at the local Fire Department – and wait. It is a warm day, in the 80s, with only a hint of wind but, we are told, that will change on Sunday.

Our emergency plan is to go down to Redwood City for dinner and then see Downton Abby. We’ll come home in the dark, using our headlamps to get from the car to the house, go to sleep and wake up Sunday morning (presumably in the daylight). We have water and gas so we can function pretty close to normally during daylight hours but it will get old very fast if this lasts for more than 48 hours.

A celebration of the genius of nature and human ingenuity, Bioneers connects people with solutions and each other. From the Bioneers Website.

Michele and I went to the Bioneers Conference last weekend at the Marin Civic Center. It is held here every year not just because, in many ways, Marin County is the epicenter of the kind of ethos that Bioneers is based on, but also because the Civic Center and its attached Conference Center is such a great location. The Civic Center was one of the last designs designed by Frank Llyod Wright and it is stunning.

As an aside, when I was in my early twenties, my dad and I toured the Civic Center twice, once when it was under construction and once when it was finished but not fully occupied. I was not very impressed and looking at the buildings now, I’m not sure why. As I recall, both tours were by Warren Calister, a local architect who was terrific in his own right and part of the conversation was about details that were eliminated or changed because of cost, a much easier task because Wright had died before the start of construction. Wright was a Victorian architect, he started his career in the late 1880s, and he was a master of fussy little special details based on some local idiosyncrasy but he was also a master of space. One space I particularly liked was the then-new County Library. It is under the dome that connects the two wings and is a gentle dome; I can still remember the surprise of wonder when we first walked in. Today, the details do not seem as important and the flow of the facade and play of space are enough to wow me. End aside.

“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people, but it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.” David Orr

Michele has been going to Bioneers for years but this was the first time she has brought me along so everything was new to me. And, I think, a little new for Michele also because this year, everything was about Climate Change. Roughly, the Conference is organized around a series of morning inspirational talks in the main auditorium – again by Wright – and small discussion groups in the afternoon. I enjoyed the discussion groups much more than the larger morning sessions. The morning sessions were entertaining and inspirational but I was a little disappointed. I think it is because I’ve been watching the Democratic Debates and they are filled with “I will do XXXX when I’m president” and these speakers, who have no aspiration to be President and will never be in a position to set policy, spent their time talking about the problem, the urgency of the problem. Some in very inspirational ways, one woman, who had just gone through the pain of childbirth, suggesting “What if the darkness in our world right now is not the darkness of the tomb but the darkness of the womb. What if American is not dead but a country waiting to be born?”, and another woman, currently battling cancer, compared Trump to chemo in cancer treatment, toxic but needed to cure the body politic. It did not surprise me that this was an anti-Trump crowd, but what did surprise me is that every speaker, referred to the government as an oligarchy. Here the government is an oligarchy is a given and that is a little worrying.

The afternoon sessions were more about solutions than problems, or, more accurately, what various people are doing in response to Global Climate Change. One afternoon I listened to a round table that included several farmers, I expected to hear different ideas for dealing with Climate Change but the farmers are pragmatic, they are reacting to reality. One was a citrus farmer from the Los Angeles basin and she said that, as someone who wanted to keep farming, she was mulling over the choice of changing her plants to the kind of crops that used to be grown in Syria and Eygpt or move a couple of hundred miles north. She figured that she had about a decade to make the change. Another farmer said that, in twenty years, the Napa Valley will only be good for Madeira and Tequila, if you want to grow Pinot Noir grapes, you’ll have to move to Oregon or Washington.

As an aside, the pragmatism of the farmer reminded me of the pragmatism of Exxon in the late 1970s. When Exxon senior scientist James Black confirmed that the science of Global Climate Change is real and burning fossil fuels causes it, Exxon did two things. The first is that they started a massive disinformation campaign to hide their scientific information while trying to debunk other evidence that verified the science. The second is that they started raising their offshore oil-drilling platforms to compensate for the expected rise in sea level.

By far, the most feel-good, optimistic and hopeful, program I saw at Bioneers was a session on The California Education and the Environment Initiative. It turns out that, in 2016, the same year Donald Trump was elected President, California passed a law requiring schools to teach the curriculum through the prism of what they call the deep relationship between humans and the natural world. Apparently, in 2016 I wasn’t paying attention to much of anything other than Trump and missed this completely. Bioneers had a panel of a guidance counselor from Rialto, a chemistry teacher from Cupertino – both exuding a sense of deep service, for lack of a better way to say it – and a senior from a nearby school tell us how they changed and are changing their curriculum and it was inspiring. Rialto and Cupertino are at the extreme ends of the California educational spectrum, as well as the extremes of the financial and cultural spectrums and Marin is, well, Marin.

Rialto is in Southern California, in the subset known as the Inland Empire, it is about 60 miles east of Los Angeles and 60 miles west of Palm Springs and qualifies as drive-through, if not flyover, country. The guidance counselor, Juanita Chan – what a great California name BTW- said that the school district is heavily Hispanic and black. And poor, the area never really recovered from the shuttering of the nearby Kaiser steel mill and most of the other heavy manufacturing facilities in the area. About 96% of the students are considered minorities, over 80% qualify for the free breakfast and lunch program and only about 7.7% go on to graduate from a four-year college (as opposed to about 20% statewide). Ms. Chan is in charge of STEM and college prep programs and she talked about how running the STEM courses through the lens of the environment has made the students more interested in college prep as well as science.

Kavita Gupta, a National Geographic Grosvenor Teacher Fellow, is the chemistry teacher from Cupertino, in Silicon Valley, and she said that she had the exact opposite problem from Rialto, her students spend too much time on schoolwork and not enough on life (over 77% graduate from a four year college and less than 2% qualify for the free lunch program). Cupertino is also a minority-majority city but, in this case, it is about 67% Asian and 26% white. Gupta, who is from India and speaks with a slight Indian accent, says that a trip to the Galapagos changed her life and she wants to pass that on to her students. She does that through the framework of the environment and our deep connection to nature.

Strangely enough, sort of, this new way of organizing everything from Chemistry to History was developed by CalRecycle’s Office of Education and the Environment (and who even knew there is such a thing as a CalRecycle, let alone that they have an Office of Education and The Environment?). They start with five basic principals like People Depend on Natural Systems and detail those principals with concepts like Methods used to extract, harvest, transport, and consume natural resources influence the geographic extent, composition, biological diversity, and viability of natural systems. The Principles and Concepts are then interwoven with the curriculum. The Dollars and Sense of Food Production is a suggested book for Second Grade and a highschool senior recommendation is Agricultural and Industrial Development in the United States (1877-1914).

The last speaker was Caleb Jordan-McDaniels, a senior at Redwood High School. He looked and talked like he had been sent over by Central Casting and I mean that in the best possible way. Caleb told us about his senior project that was exploring ways to generate electricity through tidal action. He thinks that the most efficient solution seems to be an underwater kite with the kite itself based on the wings that an African tree grows to disburse seed pods.

Just sitting there, listening to him, made me feel more hopeful about the world.

All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world, but they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi referring to the Squad

There is a battle for control of the Democratic Party – or its soul – between the old leadership, Nancy Pelosi (77), Steny Hoyer (78), and Jim Clyburn (77) among others, and a combination of young progressives that includes The Squad. I should probably start with a disclaimer, I am on the side of the young progressives and, especially, the four women of The Squad (in the picture above starting from the left, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez known as AOC, and Rashida Tlaib). They are young, strong, loud, and damned smart; and I think they are the best thing that has happened to the Democrats in years. They are also minorities, Puerto Rician, Black, Muslim; women who have traditionally lived on the margins, with a long history of being powerless, coming from areas that are chronically underserved. As an aside, I think that the incubator of being minority women and marginalized is somehow important to their superpowers. The same goes for Emma González and Greta Thunberg. These young women – and there are others – are staggeringly self-aware and self-confident. End aside.

I’m always happy to see a complementary Editorial on them (especially in the NYT, who has not been especially complementary to them). This Editorial, by Barbara Ransby, postulates that “The Squad” Is the Future of the Democratic Party and she starts her argument with:

Representative Ayanna Pressley broke with traditional diversity politics last month when she said at a conference in Philadelphia, “we don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.” Instead, “we need you to represent that voice.”

The members of the so-called squad who were also on the panel nodded in agreement. They are the defiant and unapologetic voices of the communities that produced them. Since being elected last fall, these four progressive Democratic congresswomen have pushed the limits of what most liberals mean by the contested term “diversity. ”

When Nancy Pelosi made the statement quoted at the top, the house had just had a vote in which the majority of the House voted yes as told, and these four women, along with a few others, voted no. But the Speaker is wrong and out of touch, these four women are speaking for their constituents and that is their strength. AOC’s Tweet: I’m not running from the left. I’m running from the bottom. says it all. Somewhat surprisingly to me, those issues are almost the same as mine. When asked what was the highest thing on their list, the biggest problem, the answer all four gave was “Global Climate Change”. Of course! They are young, they are probably not going to skate through the apocalypse like Nancy Pelosi and I most likely will, they will live their life in a changing world that is deteriorating in many ways. But, even more germane, they think Climate Change is the biggest issue because their constituents are worried, they are already being hit. Not surprisingly, their issues are closer to the average Democrat than Pelosi. Contrary to the Speaker’s statement they are much louder than four votes. I recommend that you give the Editorial a quick read.