Monday, February 24, 2025

Civil Service - Who Are These People ET Are Firing? - Part II

INTRO:  Part I is here.  

If you find this topic dry and hard to get your head around, then you are half way there.  Because some of the most important things to know about government are dry and hard to get one's head around.  And that makes it easy for politicians to bamboozle voters with falsehoods and misinformation.  

So if you want to understand why ET's firing of civil servants (most of government employees) is a violation of law and various regulations, you'll have to buck up and read carefully.  Even take notes.  

This content is based on testimony I gave in a local discrimination case.  So I had to pare it down to as simple an explanation as possible so that I didn't lose the jury.  The attorney was nervous that his expert would talk over their heads, but when I was done he was relieved that I'd made it very easy to understand.  And the jury said the local government was guilty.

So good luck.   [I explained ET in the Intro to Part I, but it's not critical.]



From a February 19, 2018 post: 

Graham v MOA #9: Exams 2 - Can You Explain These Terms: Merit Principles, Validity, And Reliability?

The Municipality of Anchorage (MOA) Charter [the city's constitution] at Section 5.06(c) mandates the Anchorage Assembly to adopt
“Personnel policy and rules preserving the merit principle of employment.”   AMC 3.30.041 and 3.30.044 explain examination types, content, and procedures consistent with these merit principles.  
Âs defined in the Anchorage Municipal Code Personnel Policies and Rules,
“Examination means objective evaluation of skills, experience, education and other characteristics demonstrating the ability of a person to perform the duties required of a class or position.” (AMC 3.30.005)
[OK, before I lose most of my readers, let me just say, this is important stuff to know to understand why the next posts will look so closely at the engineer test that Jeff Graham did not pass.  But it's also important to understand one of the fundamental principles underlying government in the United States (and other nations.)  And I'd add that the concepts behind merit principles are applied in most large private organizations to some extent, though they may have different names. 

Jeff Graham's attorney made me boil this down to the most basic points to increase the likelihood I wouldn't put the jury to sleep.  So bear with me and keep reading. 

And, you can see an annotated index of all the posts at the Graham v MOA tab above or just link here.]  


Basic Parts of Government In The United States

Governments can be broken down into several parts.
  • The elected politicians who pass the laws and set the broad policy directions (legislature)
  • The elected executive who carries out the laws.
  • The administration is led by the elected executive - the president, the governor at the state level, and the mayor at the city level.
  • Civil Service refers to the career government workers who actually carry out the policies.  There are also appointed officials at the highest levels who are exempt from some or all of the civil service rules.

Merit principles are the guidelines for how the career civil servants are governed.  

So What Are Merit Principles?

Probably the most basic, as related to this case, are:
  • Employees are chosen solely based on their skills, knowledge, and abilities (SKAs) that are directly related to their performance of the job. 
  • The purpose of this is to make government as as effective and efficient as possible by hiring people based on their job related qualities and nothing else.  
  • That also means other factors - political affiliation, race, color, nationality, marital status, age, and disability should not be considered in hiring or promotion.  It also means that arbitrary actions and personal favoritism should not be involved
  • Selection and promotion criteria should be as objective as possible.   


So Steve, what you're saying, this sounds obvious.  What else could there be?

Before the merit system was the Spoils System.  Before merit principles were imposed on government organizations, jobs (the spoils) were given to the victors (winning politicians and their supporters)   The intent of the Merit System is to hire the most qualified candidates.

In 1881, President Garfield was assassinated by a disgruntled job seeker, which spurred Congress to set up the first version of the federal civil service system - The Pendleton Act.

Only a small number of federal positions were covered by this new civil service act, but over the years more and more positions were covered and the procedures improved with improvements in the technology of testing.  The merit system, like any system can be abused, but it's far better than the spoils system.  Objective testing is a big part of applying merit principles.


What does 'objective criteria' mean? 

Objectivity has a couple common and overlapping meanings:
  • Grounded on facts.  Grounding your understanding or belief on something concrete, tangible.  Something measurable that different people could 'see' and agree on.
  • Unbiased.  A second, implied meaning from the first, is that you make decisions neutrally, as free as you can be from bias, preconceived ideas.  That’s not easy for most people to do, but there are ways to do it better. 


What Ways Can Make  Tests More Objective And Free Of Bias?

I think of objectivity as being on one end of a continuum and subjectivity being on the other end.  No decision is completely objective or subjective, nor should it be.  But generally, the more towards the objective side, the harder it is to introduce personal biases.* 

objective ...............................................................................................subjective



First Let's Define "Test"

In selection and promotion, we have tests. Test is defined as any thing used to weed out candidates, or rank candidates from poor to good.  So even an application form can be a test if it would lead to someone being cut out of the candidate pool.  Say candidates are required to have a college degree and someone doesn’t list one on an application.  They would be eliminated already.  

Again,  how do you make tests more objective?

There are two key terms we need to know:  validity and reliability.

What’s Validity?

Validity means that if a person scores higher on a test, we can expect that person to perform better on the specific job.  
Or saying it another way, the test has to truly test for what is necessary for the job.  So, if candidates without a college degree can do the job as well as candidates with a degree, then using college degree to screen out candidates is NOT valid.  

And what is reliability?

Reliability means that if  a person takes the same test at different times or different places, or with different graders, the person should get a very similar result.  Each test situation needs to have the same conditions, whether you take the test on Monday or on Wednesday, in LA or Anchorage, with Mr. X or Miss Y administering and/or grading the test.  

How Validity and Reliability Relate To Each Other

To be valid, the selection or promotion test must be a good predictor of success on the job. People who score high on the exam, should perform the job better than those who score low.  And people who score low should perform worse on the job than people who score high. 

BUT, even if the test is intrinsically valid, the way it is administered could invalidate it.  If the test is not also reliable (testing and grading is consistent enough that different test takers will get a very similar score regardless of when or where they take the test and regardless of who scores the test) the test will no longer be valid.  This is because the scores will no longer be good predictors of who will do well on the job. 

How do you go about testing for validity and reliability?
This can get complicated, especially for  factors that are not easy to measure.  I didn't go into this during the trial.  I wanted to point out some pages in a national Fire Safety Instructor Training Manual used by the Municipality of Anchorage, but I was not allowed to mention it.  It talks about different levels of validity and how to test for them.  It also says that for 'high stakes' tests, like promotion tests, experts should be hired to validate the test.  The jury didn't get to hear about this. But it's relevant because as I wrote in an earlier post, the people in charge of testing, and specifically in charge of the engineer exam, only had Level I certification, which allows them to administer training and testing designed by someone with Level II certification.  It's at Level II that validity and reliability are covered.  

There really wasn't need to get detailed in the trial, because the oral exam was so egregiously invalid and unreliable that you could just look at it and see the problems.  And we'll do that in the next posts. 

That should be enough but for people who want to know more about this, I'll give a bit more below.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Extra Credit

*"the harder it is to introduce bias"  There are always ways that bias can be introduced, from unconscious bias to intentionally thwarting the system.   When civil service was introduced in the United States, there was 'common understanding' that women were not qualified for most jobs.  That was a form of bias.  Blacks were also assumed to be unqualified for most jobs.  Over the years many of these sorts of cultural barriers have been taken down.  But people have found other ways to surreptitiously obstruct barriers.  

Merit Principles

If you want to know more about merit principles I'd refer you to the Merit System Protection Board that was set up as part of the Merit System Reform Act of 1978.  

A little more about reliability problems (because these are important to understand about the engineer promotion exam)

In the main part of this post I wrote that all the important (could affect the score) conditions of the test need to be the same no matter where or when or with whom a candidate takes the test.  Here are some more details
  • Location - If one location is less comfortable - temperature, noise, furniture, lighting, whatever - it could skew the scores of test takers there.
  • Time -  could be a problem in different ways.  
    • All candidates must have the same amount of time to take the test.  
  • Instructions - all instructions have to be identical
  • Security of the test questions - if some applicants know the questions in advance and others do not, the test is not reliable.

The scoring, too, has to be consistent from grader to grader for each applicant. 

And there are numerous ways that scoring a test can go wrong.
  • Grader bias  - conscious and unconscious.   Raters who know the candidates may rate them differently than people who don’t know them at all. 
    • The Halo effect means if you have a positive view of the candidate, you’re likely to give him or her more slack.  You think, 'I know they know this.' 
    • The Horn or Devil Effect is the opposite - If you already have a negative opinion about a candidate, you consciously or unconsciously give that a candidate less credit.  These are well documented biases.
    • Testing order bias affects graders and candidates.  
      • After three poor candidates, a mediocre candidate may look good to graders.  
  • Grading Standards - Is the grading scale clear and of a kind that the graders are familiar with?
    • Are the expected answers and how to score them clear to the graders?
    • Do the graders have enough time to calculate the scores consistently?
  • Grader Training -
    •  If they aren't well trained, it could take a while to figure out how to use their scoring techniques, so they score different at the end from the beginning. 

How Do You Overcome the Biases In More Subjective Tests Like Essays, Interviews, and Oral Exams?

Despite the popularity of job interviews, experts agree that they are among the most biased and result in the least accurate predictions of candidate job performane.  Or see this link.

You have to construct standardized, objective rubrics and grading scales - this is critical, particularly for essay and oral exams.

On November 9, 2016 when the electoral college vote totals were tallied, everyone saw the same facts, the same results.  But half the country thought the numbers were good and half thought they were bad.

When evaluating the facts of a job or promotion candidate, the organization has to agree, before hand, what ‘good’ facts look like and what ‘bad’ facts look like. Good ones are valid ones - they are accurate predictors of who is more likely to be successful in the position.   Good and bad are determined by the test maker, not by the graders.  The graders merely test whether the performance matches the pre-determined standard of a good performance.



What’s a rubric?

It’s where you describe in as much detail as possible what a good answer looks like.  If you’re looking at content, you identify the key ideas in the answer, and possibly how many points a candidate should get if they mention each of those ideas.  It has to be as objective as possible. The Fire Safety Instructor Training Manual has some examples, but even those aren't as strong as they could be. 

Good rubrics take a lot of thought - but it's thought that helps you clarify and communicate what a good answer means so that different graders give the same answer the same score.

Here are some examples: 
UC Berkeley Graduate Student Instructors Training
Society For Human Resource Management - This example doesn't explicitly tell graders what the scores (1,2, 3, 4, 5) look like, as the previous one does.
BARS - Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales - This is an article on using BARS to grade Structured Interviews.  Look particularly at Appendices A & B. 
How Olympic Ice Skating is Scored - I couldn't find an actual scoring sheet, but this gives an overall explanation of the process.

My experience is that good rubrics force graders to ground their scores on something concrete, but they can also miss interesting and unexpected things.  It's useful for graders to score each candidate independently, and then discuss why they gave the scores they did - particularly those whose scores vary from most of the scores.  Individual graders may know more about the topic which gives their scores more value.  Or may not have paid close attention.   Ultimately, it comes down to an individual making a judgment.  Otherwise we could just let machines grade.  But the more precise the scoring rubric, the easier it is to detect bias in the graders. 


Accountability

Q:  What if a candidate thinks she got the answer right on a question, but it was scored wrong?

Everything in the test has to be documented.  Candidates should be able to see what questions they missed and how they were scored.  If the test key had an error, they should be able to challenge it. 

Q:  Are you saying everything needs to be documented?

If there is going to be any accountability each candidate’s test and each grader’s score sheets must be maintained so that if there are questions about whether a test was graded correctly and consistently from candidate to candidate, it can be checked. 

In the case of an oral exam or interview, at least an audio (if not video) record should be kept so that reviewers can see what was actually said at the time by the candidate and the graders. 

Q:  Have you strayed a bit from the Merit Principles?

Not at all. This all goes back to the key Merit Principle - selecting and promoting the most qualified candidates for the job.  There won’t be 100% accuracy. But in general, if the test is valid,  a high score will correlate with a high job performance.  But unless the test is also reliable, it won’t be valid. The more reliable the test, the more consistent the scores will be under different conditions and graders.  The best way to make tests more reliable is to make them as objective as possible.



Sunday, February 23, 2025

Civil Service - Who Are These People ET Are Firing? - Part I

Intro:  Civil Service and Merit System are terms most Americans have heard, but I'd guess that few could tell you, very accurately, what they mean or anything about their history or why they are important bedrocks of American democracy.  

Part I - is a repeat of a post I put up last August 31, 2025.  Part II will be another old post.  It gets into more detail and is based on testimony I gave in a discrimination case years ago.  Although there will be repetition, I'm sure that will be helpful for readers to grasp the concepts. 

This topic is critical to understanding why what is happening right now is both illegal and will lead to serious damage to the U.S. government's ability to efficiently and effectively serve the people of the United States.  

*ET - my conflation of Elon and Trump, though someone else thought it meant Evil Tyrant.  Evil Twins might also work.  Maybe Elon and Trump can journey to Mars and it can then have its original meaning of Extra Terrestrial.  


From the August 31, 2024 post:

From the August 31, 2024 LA Times: [Note the digital and facsimile editions have different titles.]

 


As someone who taught public administration at the graduate level, I'm well aware of the lack of knowledge of what 'the civil service' is.  So let me give you some background.  

Before the civil service was created in local, state, and federal governments, we had what is often called "the spoils system."

Briefly, 'to the victor, go the spoils.'  Winning candidates gave jobs to the campaign supporters.  This was the payoff for working on a campaign.  Qualifications were not nearly as important as loyalty.  This included positions as low as garbage collector and as high as the head of the budget.  

Aside from the incompetence and corruption this led to, it also meant that whenever someone from a different party won, the whole government was thrown out and new people were put in place.  And had to learn from scratch, generally without any help from the fired former workers.

Political machines, like Tammany Hall in New York, would recruit new immigrants coming off the ships to work on their campaigns with the promise of a job if they won.  [US citizenship was not required to vote back then.  That changed later.  The Constitution gave the states the power to run elections and decide qualifications to vote.  The Constitution didn't ban women from voting, the states did.]

At the national level, this came to a head when Andrew Jackson was elected president and invited 'the riffraff' that elected him to the White House in 1830.  But it wasn't until a disgruntled office seeker assassinated President Garfield in 1881 because he didn't get the position he sought, that Congress got serious. 

In 1883 they passed the Pendleton Act that set up a civil service system based on merit.  

Merit, as in the 'merit system' means that positions are filled based on merit, or on one's qualifications for the job, not on who you know.  

Local governments in New York and Boston didn't move to merit systems until the early 20th Century.  

Those merit systems weren't perfect.  The inherent biases of the day meant that women and Blacks weren't qualified except for what Trump would call 'women's jobs' and 'Black jobs.'  

And even today, the top level jobs in most governments are still filled with people who are loyal to the head of the government - whether that's a mayor, governor, or president.   Not only does that include cabinet officials but a top layer of 'exempt' positions.  Exempt meaning they are not covered by the merit system.  They can be hired and fired at will.  Usually the newly elected official picks people based on their loyalty to the policy as well as their professional qualifications to do the job.  But clearly that second part doesn't always happen.  The only check on this, is a required vote of approval by a legislative body - the US or state Senate, a City Council.  But if the newly elected executive  has a majority in the legislative branch too, that approval is often pro forma.

People hired through a merit system process also have job protections.  They cannot be fired except for cause - for violating the law, the policies or procedures, for gross incompetence etc.  Whereas the appointed (exempt) positions don't have such protections.  

After his 2016 election, Trump was frequently frustrated by career civil servants, who didn't jump to follow his often illegal instructions. The media have dubbed these people (who included many appointed positions as well) 'the guardrails' that kept Trump somewhat in line. He wanted the Justice Department to punish people who opposed him.  He did battle with the civil servants in various regulatory agencies who followed the law rather than Trump's illegal bidding.  


So, when we hear that Trump wants to destroy the civil service, as stated in the LA Times headline above, this is what we're talking about.  

He doesn't want a system that hires qualified people who cannot be fired except for cause.  (Again, for cause, means they have to do something that violates the laws, the rules, or is grossly incompetent or corrupt.)  He wants government workers that do his bidding without any resistance, without them telling him 'it's against the law.'

He wants to fire all those people who were hired based on merit (their qualifications to perform the job).  These include Democrats, Republicans, and non-partisan employees.  He wants to replace them with people whose main qualification is undying loyalty to Trump.  


That's pretty much all I want to say.

One of the very best books on this subject is Robert Caro's The Power Broker.  It's a biography of Robert Moses who played a major role in getting a merit system in place in New York.  It's a massive [1168 pages] book.  But it is also riveting as it goes into detail on how the young, idealist Moses evolved into the powerful and corrupt power broker of New York. And in doing so tells the story of the civil service. Not only did the book win the Pulitzer Prize, it was also selected on most lists of the 100 best non-fiction books of the 20th Century. I challenge you to read the first hundred pages and not want to keep turning the pages.

Introduction to Robert Caro's The Power Broker 

Sunday, February 16, 2025

Discovering Islands Around The World

I found the following passage intriguing.  And since it is bad form to copy whole passages of other
books without adding value or a new context, I should say a little bit more.  

In the film about diving in unexplored underwater caves, Diving Into The Darkness, that was featured at the Anchorage International Film Festival last December,  an astronaut says cave divers' explorations were much more dangerous than that of the astronauts because they were totally on their own, out of contact with the rest of the world.  If they had a problem, they had to overcome it on their own.

Think about how much more that applied to the sailors of the past - especially those who went on long voyages of exploration.   

 "It took Western civilization* about 1500 years to discover all the oceanic islands, and it appears that Captain Cook and his lieutenants were almost the only people in all that time who took their surveying job very seriously.  

The probability that an island will be found by sailors depends on its size, its distance from a home port, the number of voyages from  port, the freedom of action and spirit of adventure of captains, the likelihood of ships' being driven long distances by storms, and so on.  All in all, it is not surprising that the largest oceanic volcano, Iceland, was the first to be discovered, in the fourth century A.D., by the Norsemen, who lived not far to the east.  They colonized the island by the ninth century and roamed the northern seas - which contain few oceanic islands.

The next phase of discovery was in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Portuguese, Spanish, and other European explorers began to seek a sea route to the spice and silk of the East.  Just as Columbus accidentally found the vast area of the Americas, so others sighted tiny oceanic islands or ran aground on them.  In 1420 the Portuguese Zarco discovered the Madeira islands, for the last time, when storms drove him west from his exploration of the coast of Africa.  A Genoese map of 1351 shows that contact had been made before - the islands are only 670 km west of Africa and the Straits of Gibraltar.  The Azores, even further west, were already known to the Carthaginians, who left coins, and Arabian geographers.  They were discovered for the last time in 1432, when Van den Berg was driven on the islands by a storm.  Although the Azores are in three widely separated groups, all nine islands were found and some even colonized by the Portuguese within twenty-five years. . .

As the Europeans sailed farther south, further discoveries were made apparently for the first as well as the last time by man.  These included the cluster of the Cape Verdes in 1456;  the tiny, isolated, mid ocean islands of Ascension, in 1501, and St. Helena, in 1502.  Clearly, the explorers were tracking far into the Atlantic to follow the latitudinally zoned winds.  The Portuguese reached oceanic islands in the Indian Ocean soon after.  Mauritius in 1505, and Reunion in 1513.  All of the islands discovered to this time had several features in common.  They were high volcanoes, active or dead, uninhabited, and wholly lacking gold, diamonds, or anything else offering quick profit.  Some were ironbound by great cliffs  but even these had a few protected anchorages and fresh water, so the islands had some use.  Moreover, being high, they were visible from great distances and thus hardly hazardous to navigation.  

So when Magellan entered the Pacific, in 1520, he had some knowledge of oceanic islands.  We may pause to consider what else he knew and his situation.  He knew about the trade winds.  After beating his way through the straits that bear his name it could hardly have escaped his attention that he was in the wrong latitude to sail west.  Not to mention that the known riches of the East were in the Northern Hemisphere.  His ship was marginal for the voyage and his supplies were already low.  Considering all these factors, his only logical course was to sail northwestward until he reached the tropics and the gentle, persistent easterlies of the trade winds.  This he did.  

The state of the science of navigation in Magellan's time enabled him to determine latitude at sea, but not longitude.  Indeed, in those days before surveying by triangulation, no one knew longitude very well on land , either.  The course being steered and speed made through the water could be measured, but wind and sea drift were always uncertain, and often hopelessly so after a series of storms.  As a consequence, the longitudinal positions of ships not infrequentlywere in error by hundreds of kilometers and occasionally by more than two thousand kilometers.  Not until Captain Cook's time, in the late eighteenth century, were nautical chronometers accurate enough to permit determinations of longitude.  Even two centuries after Cook, positioning errors of 15 km to 30 km were common in celestial navigation.  Not until the invention of electronics and artificial satellite navigation in the 1960s and 1970s did a ship at last know where it was most of the time.  Then, naturally almost everything that had been discovered had to be relocated."

From H. W. Menard, Islands, Scientific American Library, 1986, (pp. 6-9)



*Reading The Adventures of Amina Al Sirafi  recently also piqued my interest in this passage.  And is also a reminder that there were non-European discoverers as well who are documented in Western libraries as well as the European discoverers.  The book does mention this.  It also mentions the plant and animal 'discoverers' that made their way to distant islands.  



But I also wonder how much better we know where we are today, with the constant flood of social media misinformation?  

I don't just mean if we're in the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of Power, but whether we're in a democracy, a failing state, an insane asylum, or a fascist dictatorship, or all of them at once.  

You can probably get Islands at your public library.  Loussac library in Anchorage doesn't have it, but they can get it from several University of Alaska libraries.    [Not sure how well that library search link will hold up, but we can try.]


Monday, February 03, 2025

Whoops, Forgot the Title: Tech Bro Plans For The Future

[Overview:  The key here is the video.  Find 30 minutes to watch/listen.  It puts lots of important things into place.  The rest of the post includes thoughts I had about the video and the people described in it.  Something about the narrator of the video.  But the video is the important thing.  It's not just someone's opinion - it's a well documented overview of the role of the billionaire tech bros in the Trump election and administration


This video came across my screen this morning.  It offers much more depth to the previous post  that said a coup was happening.  While we all knew that the tech guys were involved - Musk, of course, and that Peter Thiel bought Vance's election to the Senate and the vice presidential nomination, etc. - my impression had been that Project 2025 had been something from the Heritage Foundation - (from the ACLU):
"Project 2025 is a federal policy agenda and blueprint for a radical restructuring of the executive branch authored and published by former Trump administration officials in partnership with The Heritage Foundation, a longstanding conservative think tank that opposes abortion and reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrants’ rights, and racial equity."
The Heritage Foundation has been around a long time and among other things, created a whole conservative law society that groomed right wing attorneys with their ideology and got them onto the Supreme Court.  

But this video outlines a different set of influences for Project 2025 - libertarian leaning, billionaire tech bros.  And as we watch live - but not like we watched January 6 live - Elon Musk sucking up government data, this video makes much more sense of what's happening and why.   


   

Here's an outline of the video from the YouTube channel:

"chapters
00:00-01:00 Introduction
01:01-04:25 The Dark Agenda of Tech VCs
04:26-07:10 Networks and Patchworks: Reinventing the State
07:11- 09:44 Praxis and Pronomos
09:45 –12:37 Making it a Reality 
12:38 –18:03 Vance, Thiel, and Yarvin
18:04 –19:28 Tech and Project 2025
19:29-20:00 Butterfly Revolution Step 1: Campaign on Autocracy
20:01-21:42 Butterfly Revolution Step 2: Purge the Bureaucracy 
21:43-23:00 Butterfly Revolution Step 3: Ignore the Courts
23:01-23:50 Butterfly Revolution Step 4: Co-Opt the Congress
23:51-25:06 Butterfly Revolution Step 5: Centralise Police and Powers
25:07-27:54 Butterfly Revolution Step 6: Shut Down Elite Media and Academic Institutions
27:55-28:35 Butterfly Revolution Step 7: Turn Out the People
28:36-29:40 Conclusion"
While this may make things seem worse, I'd argue that this guys had the right set of skills to get rich in the tech age in the US, but their smarts are limited.  As Musk has shown with Twitter, there are important interpersonal skills he's lacking.  When I read Atlas Shrugged in my late teens, it only took me about 150 pages to realize how repulsive the main characters were.  But these guys think they know much more than they do, and want to create a libertarian world where they are free from government interference, where they are the government (and thus free to interfere with others.)

Now, I can understand how a bunch of rich techies with no serious background in the history of government, liberty, democracy, etc. can feel oppressed by government that seems to (and in many cases probably is) be a bit behind the changing technologies, but is trying to apply regulations to the industry and, even worse, tax their earnings.  But that's only because they think their tech ability and the fact they got rich makes them smarter than everyone else.  Sort of like doctors who think they have expertise in every other field beyond medicine.  

So while I expect they're going to do a lot of damage to democracy, the world economy, and the planet* (by not fighting climate change particularly), I also think they're going to have a lot of failures and a lot of disagreements with each other and with the older legal far right architects of the US move to fascism.  

But understanding what's happening is the first step to effective corrective steps.  

* "doing damage to . . .the planet" - I'd like to clarify that 'damage to the planet' is a human-centric idea.  The planet, it seems to me, follows the laws of nature.  Does a volcano do damage to the planet?  I'd say it changes the planet, but 'damage' is a word that judges the change negative.  Climate change will make life more difficult for many plants and animals.  Some will probably thrive.  As I think about this, probably the only 'objective' use of 'damage the planet' would be to describe its total annihilation at which point pieces of the earth would, I guess, scatter in space, and still exist, but in a different way.  


Who is the narrator, Blonde Politics/The Silly Serious? 

Finally, I've never seen this YouTube presenter before,  I was impressed with the presentation, but I did want to at least minimally vet her before sharing with my readers.  So I did look her up.  Here's what I found in a quick search.  She's Australian Joanna Richards.

"Hey.

I am a writer, actor, and academic.

I love to create art, and feel fortunate to be able to blend my various interests to create meaningful work. Above all else, I love to laugh, and make others laugh! Using art to tackle important and controversial topics, I hope to create work that challenges people without making them feel defensive.

My academic research focuses on the relationship between gender, political authority, and language philosophy. I frequently appear in print and on television to discuss issues relating to gender and representation. Sometimes I am on tv pretending to be someone else!

Please reach out if you want to chat.

Affliations

Institute for Governance Policy Analysis - Doctor of Philosophy (in progress)
University of Canberra - Bachelor of Philosophy (First Class Honours)
Moscow Art Theatre School - Fine Arts Conservatory (Stanislavski Intensive)

Australian National University - Bachelor of International Relations"

The reach out seems serious.  At the bottom of the page it says:  

"email: hello@joannarichards.com     Currently in: New York City"

   

Solano, California - one of the cities tech bros are trying to create  

On the video, Joanna talks about one the tech bros billionaires goals to build private tech, corporate owned cities.  Which made me think of stories I read when I still had a subscription to the LA Times about tech billionaires buying up land in northern California to build such a city.  Only the story didn't get into the more sinister underpinnings Joanna mentions.  You can read an AP story about this here.  They did qualify to put the proposal on the ballot, but later withdrew it.  But they're planning to be back in 2026.  And as I listened to the video again, Joanna does mention Solano. (about 11:40 in the video).


[Let me add one more note:  I'm using Tech Bros as the technical term for white men who get rich through IT and generally think they know more than everyone else and that the rule of law doesn't apply to them.  This definition is open for editing.]

Saturday, February 01, 2025

The Coup Is Happening But Media Aren't Treating It That Way

There's a coup happening in DC.  There's no other way to describe it. 

The president is nominating and the Senate is approving candidates whose basic qualifications are loyalty to the president

He's illegally firing employees and  shutting down federal funding to the states.  

He's implemented 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada.  

The Republicans in the Senate are approving his nominees.  

He's fired all the heads of agencies that deal with airline travel and safety, then blamed two crashes on Biden, women,  and people of color.  The new N word is DEI.  

He's fired a large number of federal attorneys and FBI agents.  

He's wiping out all traces of programs that work for justice for people who aren't white hetero males.

His unelected, unapproved, honorary vice president (some argue the true president) Elon Musk has slipped into key agencies and people are worried he's collecting data for his own business uses and other nefarious purposes.

Gutting important health and other websites.

He's released water from a dam in California that was being saved up for when it's needed in the summer.  

This is just a tiny fraction of the acts he's taken.  

Even if Congress stood up to Trump, he would simply ignore them and do what he wants.  Who is to stop him?  (I'll try to address this question in another post.)

What seems to drive his decisions?  There seem to be four key factors, though readers can probably think of others:

  • Getting everyone to focus on Trump.  He just can't deal with being ignored or criticized
  • Punish those who don't kowtow to his whims
  • Whip up the fear and anger of his supporters
  • Reward his wealthy supporters


No mainstream media mention coup yet

While the main media outlets might mention his actions, none that I've seen have put it all together and called it a coup.  When I google Trump coup - everything that comes up is about January 6, 2021. Cyber coups are as easy to convey visually as military coups.  

But on social media, people are starting to call this what it is.  Here are just a couple of examples:

From Bluesky/ was bustling with coup references today.

"But the longer we fail to recognize the current situation for what it is—a slow-rolling coup attempt—the longer it will take for us to recover."


A privatization coup of the US government?

[image or embed]

— David Corn (@davidcorn.bsky.social) February 1, 2025 at 3:25 PM


Not just a coup but a coup by a corrupt Putin- and Nazi-aligned foreigner. Too bad we no longer have a real DOJ.

— Andrew Wallingford (@andrewwallingford.bsky.social) February 1, 2025 at 2:02 PM


Another step in the coup & Trump still doesn’t realize Musk has taken charge.

[image or embed]

— Dana Houle (@danahoule.bsky.social) February 1, 2025 at 10:00 AM


https://spoutible.com/. didn't offer as many examples when I searched for 'coup'





Even on Musk's own Twitter people are calling it a coup






Democrats are still talking about winning the 2026 Congressional races, as if there will be free and fair elections.  But Trump's team has studied all the possible ways to disenfranchise opposition voters and ways to game the electoral process, I can't imagine that the next elections will be conducted with a fat thumb on the scales.  

At the moment, most people are living pretty much the way they were six months ago.  Except for dark skinned immigrants, pregnant women with complications, LGBTQ folks, people are still going about their lives relatively normally.  

They haven't grasped that soon they will be affected.  Maybe when disaster funds are withheld, or people they work with disappear, or their health care or social security are sharply reduced or disappear.  

But most authoritarian governments in world history end.  Some faster than others.  Find ways to resist in your community - whether it's joining a group, contacting your federal representatives on a regular basis, confronting disinformation when you hear it, and many other ways.  Here's Robert Reich's list of ten things to do to resist.  

I'd note Reich reminds people to find joy in their lives - get out and appreciate the beauty of nature, of art, music, a meal with family and friends, play with your pets.  

Sunday, January 19, 2025

Jeremy Lansman Has Left Us

I learned today that Jeremy Lansman, a very complex, intelligent man with many talents, and not a few loose ends untied, passed away on December 28, 2024 at his home in Grabouw, South Africa.  He and I had very different skills.  He knew as much about birds and plants as I knew about power lines.  Yet we also had much in common and we had a wonderful and playful relationship in which we both learned from each other.  

He's a legendary figure in the community radio world and he's the only person I know who thinks that electrical towers of any kind improve the landscape.  To the point where I have photos of such things in my files, because of him.  

There's so much more to say about him, but this will have to do for now.  

There will be a celebration of his life in his garden in Gabrouw, South Africa on February 15, 2025.  



Google doesn't tell us much about Jeremy, but here are a couple of links.  Just search 'Jeremy Lansman' when you get to the pages.

[Note:  not to be confused with Baltimore's "Jeremy Landsman, the developer/pot-dealer/money-launderer chronicled in City Paper's coverage until his January 2013 sentencing, is out of prison and heading to Hawaii."]


https://pacificanetwork.org/kopn-celebrates-50-years-of-service-to-columbia-missouri-the-people-run-the-radio/

https://www.kopn.org/about/history/

https://people.well.com/user/dmsml/kfat/

https://kpfa.org/episode/5368/

https://pacificanetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/CAMPAIGN_57.pdf

https://sites.google.com/site/robertfeldman23/plays-and-short-stories/kbdy-clothesline-radio-if-wishes-were-fishes-we-d-all-cast-nets

https://acrnewsfeed.blogspot.com/2020_05_17_archive.html?m=1


Jeremy was in my life weekly, often daily, for maybe five or ten years before he went off to South Africa.  He was a good friend and I already missed him when he left Anchorage.  He left with bizarre blood issues that had him scouring the internet to figure out ways to lengthen the dire prognosis he got from his doctors.  And he lived another life still during the years in South Africa.  

Miss you.  

Monday, January 13, 2025

Fladry * A New Word For Me

 Jacob poetically deplored all the bad news in a comment to the last post.  

So here's something entirely different.

I'm reading a book for my book club called Fuzz  by Mary Roach.  She shadows people who are dealing with animal/human conflicts around the world.  It started with bears, then to elephants, and now I'm in a chapter on leopards.  

The forestry official working with villagers in northern India has set up solar powered lights that intermittently go on and off during the night, which, they surmise, mimics people with flashlights, which keeps the leopards at bay.  But the villagers wanted to leave the lights on all night, which, they say, is less effective.  At that point, Roach tells us rangers had similar problems in Colorado trying to convince ranchers to use fladry.  

So here's something very different - an explanation of how to use fladry.  


Where did this word come from?  Here's part of a discussion on the etymology of the word from German Language/Deutsche Sprache::

"Fladry' is a comparatively recent adoption in English from Polish, with a putative origin in German. The Double-Tongued Dictionary gives this definition and partial etymology:

fladry n.pl. a string of flags used to contain or exclude wild animals. ... Etymological Note: According to Polish Scientific Publishers (Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, SA), fladry is the plural of flader, which comes from German. It is not specified which German word, but it’s probably related to flattern ‘to flutter.’ It is probably not related to the Polish flÄ…dry, the plural of flÄ…dra, which according to the Oxford PWN Polish English Dictionary (2002, Oxford University Press) means “1. flounder, flatfish; 2. slattern, slut.”

I have found 'fladry' in English in the sense of "a string of flags etc." as early as 1993, in a technical paper titled "Status and Management of the Wolf in Poland" (Biological Conservation; see, for example, the abstract)."

Saturday, January 11, 2025

The Palisades Fire - Personal Connections And More General Thoughts

We're back in Anchorage.  As we went to the airport in the late afternoon Friday, there seemed to be a lot less smoke blowing from the Palisades fire toward the ocean.   By the time we took off, it was dark out and while we sat on the wrong side of the plane, we could still see the flames through the window on the other side as we banked to the north.  It was the first time we saw actual flames.  

I grew up in LA and my mom lived in our house for 65 years.  So I know the area fairly well.  Especially the west side where the Palisades fire is.  I've seen huge changes over time and I have some thoughts, having been in LA when the fire started.  

We discovered KCAL on the radio while we were driving - which had the most up-to-the-minute and detailed coverage of the fires.  You can watch the KCAL coverage here.  I listened again this morning from here in Anchorage.  I know the places they're talking about, but even if you don't it's pretty addicting and I don't recommend watching more than 15 minutes at a time.  


History - Marquez, Will Rogers State Park, UCLA, Santa Monica Pier

Here's a recent map from the Los Angeles County Emergency site.  These maps keep being updated.  I've done a screenshot of an area of importance to me.  The orange is mandatory evacuation areas.  The yellow is a warning area - be ready to evacuate.  I'd note I was still getting alerts on my phone as we were headed to the airport.  



My mom's house is down at the bottom, just below the Santa Monica Airport which is the border between SM and Los Angeles.  It's a long way off from the mandatory evacuation area.  It probably doesn't look that far, but the fire is mostly in mountainous areas - large lots, hillsides covered with (now) dry brush.  The land between mandatory evacuation and be ready to evacuate areas and my mom's house is much more urban.  Directly above my mom's house is the concrete and asphalt runway of the Santa Monica Airport.  

I went to school at UCLA.  As you can see, the Evacuation Warning area touches the northwest corner of the campus.

My last two years at UCLA, I was a noon duty aide and afterschool playground director at Marquez Elementary School.  It's one of two schools that burned down Thursday.  Every day, about 11:30am I took off from UCLA and rode along Sunset to Marquez Elementary School.  Sometimes I napped in the nurse's office between lunch and after school duty.  Other times I rode the last mile or so of Sunset to the beach where I played volley ball and body surfed.  

One of my favorite places in LA was Will Rogers State Park.  This was the great Cherokee cowboy/actor/humorist's estate where he could escape Hollywood.  It had his house and other buildings including a large stable for horses and a polo field.  And the surrounding area had beautiful hiking trails.  It was pretty much the only thing around when I first went there.  I remember seeing quail there.  This picture is from a 2011 blog post.  More pictures of the area around the Will Rogers estate are in a 2021 post.  It appears to have all been destroyed.  Will Rogers died in a plane crash with Wiley Post, in 1935 outside of what was then called Port Barrow, Alaska.  

If you don't know much about Rogers, I urge you to read his Wikipedia entry.  And/or watch this Youtube talk from 1931 much of which applies today.  

In more recent years, when I come down to LA, I bike down to Venice Beach and then north along the coast up to the where Pacific Palisades meets the ocean.  In the previous post, I put up a picture from a recent ride, looking up at a couple of houses on the bluff above the ocean there.  

The Santa Monica Pier, which is just about where the SA of Santa Monica are on the map, has also been a favorite spot in the LA area.  We took the grandkids to the pier on New Year's Eve before going to see Cirque Du Soleil which was in a tent in the pier parking lot.  And the pier is still there and likely not in danger, despite earlier reports that it was, and what almost certainly was a fake photo of the pier with the sky full of flames behind it. Though the Cirque Du Soleil tents are gone.  

On Wednesday, the second day of the fire, I biked (with a good mask on) to the pier and a little beyond it.  Here's a video I took from the pier.  Downtown Santa Monica is where the  tall buildings are to the right.  


Today's map has the evacuation line right up to the ocean for a good part of it.  But at downtown Santa Monica, the air was relatively clear and was still reasonably so a couple of miles north of the pier.  I rode beyond the pier until I could see that up ahead the smoke was down on the highway and bike trail.  I didn't need to get that close to thick smoke.  But you can see, in the picture below, a runner, without a mask, heading for it.  I'd note that as a Jr. High and High School student, LA air frequently looked like that and on the worst days, we'd get a pain in our chest when we breathed deep.  


I'd also mention that Pacific Palisades was the home of "Weimar on the Pacific."  

"In the 1930s and 40s, Los Angeles became an unlikely cultural sanctuary for a distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals—including Thomas Mann, Theodore W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, and Arnold Schoenberg—who had fled Nazi Germany. During their years in exile, they would produce a substantial body of major works to address the crisis of modernism that resulted from the rise of National Socialism."

If you don't know these names (and I acknowledge that most people probably don't, despite their being important cultural figures), and others mentioned in the linked book announcement, I'd urge you to google them.  They're pretty remarkable people.  My mother had connections to Schoenberg family through her work, and through the owner of the dress shop who was featured in the film Woman In Gold. who hired Schoenberg's grandson to represent her in her fight against the Austrian government to recover pictures stolen from her family by the Nazis.  My mom shopped at her store and sent me clippings from the newspaper of the lawsuit while it was happening.  

Another member of the group was Leon Feuchtwanger.  When I was a high school or college student, my father took me to visit an older German woman in West Los Angeles or possibly Santa Monica.  Close to the yellow evacuation warning area today.  I could be wrong, but I believe this was Leon Feuchtwanger's widow, Marta.  (My father also fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s.)


The End, But Not The End

I wanted this to be one integrated post, tying a number of different ideas together.  But while I think some of my readers could read on beyond this, I've got several more topics and there is already a lot in the links to explore.  So I'll save the others for tomorrow and maybe the next day.  


Coming:

1.  Development in the hills -  Why have people built way up in this area known for fires?

2.  Pacific Palisades and Malibu, and now Brentwood ( especially Mandeville Canyon), Encino on the valley side are some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, probably the US.  Would we be paying such close attention if this were a poorer neighborhood?  Would a poorer neighborhood be getting all the resources coming in to help like this?

3.  The idea of ownership and loss - humans are short term inhabitants on earth.  We don't 'own' the earth, or anything else really.  We are the temporary guardians until the 'properties' are lost, sold,, destroyed, stolen, or by the death of the people who believe they own them.  

4.  Phone Alerts  - I kept getting loud alerts on my phone with warnings to evacuate immediately

5.  How television news (in particular) distort reality by showing the most sensational snippets and ignoring the fact that most people are going on with their lives normally.

6. Warning to Anchorage hillside residents, and people everywhere who live in wooded hillsides. Or any area that is threatened by nature's reaction to Climate Change.  



Wednesday, January 08, 2025

Parts Of LA Are Burning

 It was very foggy several days ago, from what I could tell, mostly within three or four miles of the coast.  




So, this afternoon, as we were driving home from errands that got us as far east as Beverly Hills, and we saw a wall of clouds off to the west, I assumed it was a fog bank.  Though it looked a bit odd, and it seemed to be more north and to the south was still clear.  

When we got home, I walked around the block to take some pictures.  





We were listening to KJZZ, and didn't hear any news of the Palisades fire.  It was pretty windy, and I thought the off shore wind was keeping the fog to the coast.  

It was much later that we heard about the fire.  And then, as I was reading about the fire, almost midnight - an alarm went off on my phone.  


We're about six or seven miles, as the crow flies from the Palisades.  Malibu is even further.  When I bike to the beach and then north through Santa Monica and to Will Rogers State Beach (back in Los Angeles), Pacific Palisades is above the ocean.  Those areas are up in the foothills of the Santa Monica mountains.  We're down in more city area.  

Here's a picture of a couple of houses up on the bluff at Pacific Palisades from my bike ride along the ocean the other day.  




But I did just go outside and while the moon is bright, the air is starting to get smoky.  

And we've had three more alarms go off on my phone.  The last one is for folks in Topanga Canyon to be ready to get out.  





And another alarm just went off but I didn't get a screen shot.  The alarms really screech.  It's 1:15am.  I really don't think we're in any danger.  When I was growing up, we would see the red glow up in the hills, but it never got out of the hills.  

But these are different times.  I probably should leave my phone on, just in case.  But I don't think I'll get much sleep if I do.  

Our tickets back to Anchorage are for Friday night.  

Here's the LA County Emergency map for right now.  We're about where the black star is.  That looks much closer than I realized.  But that orange blotch along the ocean is the evacuation area, NOT the fire area.  There is all of Santa Monica between the evacuation area and us.  As you can see there is another fire to the east.  But I'll leave my phone on.  It's 1:30 am as I post this.