Thai Elections - March 2, 2008

Tomorrow, Sunday, (it's Saturday afternoon in Chiang Mai as I write) is election day for the Thai Senate. I know an election is going on because of all the signs up and the election trucks. Plus where I work they are supporting one of the candidates and so there was election work going on and the truck have been at our compound. But I wasn't sure of the date.

Apparently, according to this Bangkok Post story not that many Thais really know that much about the election either.

There's a senate election?

By Mongkol Bangprapa

Despite campaigns by the Election Commission (EC), fewer than 30 per cent of Thais were able to tell a pollster that they know there is to be an election for 76 senators countrywide on March 2.

According to the latest Suan Dusit poll by Suan Dusit Rajabhat University, of the 3,266 people surveyed, only 29 per cent could tell the interviewers how important the election is for the parliament, while 57 per cent said they had "scant knowledge" of it.

A surprising 12 per cent of respondents admitted they knew nothing of the coming election.

Most people surveyed admitted they were less aware of the senate election than they were of the Dec 23 election for House of Representatives.

There are 18 people running for the seat from Chiang Mai I was told - one seat per province - and the candidate my Thai colleagues are supporting is one of the candidates who has a chance to win. They think he needs at least 100,000 votes. This is for the Senate.

74 people have already been appointed to the Senate, according to MCOT English News. The rest get elected tomorrow.

Election Commission names 74 appointed senators

BANGKOK, Feb 19 (TNA) - Thailand's Election Commission on Tuesday announced the appointment of 74 members of the Senate who will represent half of the Upper House while the other half will be elected nationwide on March 2.

The 74 senators represent a ratio of 6 men to one woman. The oldest is 72 years old and the youngest 42.

EC secretary general Sutthiphon Thaweechaikarn said the appointed senators came from diverse backgrounds including academics (15), government officials (14), private sector (15), various professions (15) and other sectors (15).

They represent almost every field of career from university lecturer to former national legislator, lawyer, journalist, medical officer, nurse, engineer, architect, former provincial governor, farmer, university student, telecommunication specialist and financial expert.



Bangkokians dominate the list with 43 representatives while five are from the South, three from the North, two from the Northeast and 21 from the central region.

Asked if there has been behind-the-scenes lobbying for the seats, Mr. Sutthiphon affirmed that the screening committee has thoroughly and carefully studied the background of each appointee and the votings among committee members were carried out in an open manner.

The EC allows 30 days for anyone objecting to the appointment to file his/her complaint while those disagreeing with the screening committee's decision can file their complaints with the Supreme Court within one year.

The appointed senators will be in office for three years. The other 76 senators, one from each province, will be elected nationwide on March 2. They will serve for six years. (TNA)

J's Back in Town

Friday, February 29, 2008 10:40pm (This is my Thailand time, the blogger stamped time is normal Alaska time)
Got up early and enjoyed the birds a bit.



I tell my students to do something you've never done before every day, so I decided to ride the bike to the airport and we could take a song tao home. The map showed a road that cut through neighborhoods and missed all the detours with the one ways at the moat around the city center.



I even asked a policeman if I could get to the airport taking that road before leaving the main road. He said yes, in Thai and English, with that "look the foreigner is riding a bike to the airport" grin on his face.

And the road was quiet and peaceful. Too quiet and peaceful for such a useful short cut to the airport. I stopped to get a picture of this delightful potted backyard fence. (Catherine, that one's worth double clicking on to enlarge it.) And then I took I got to a dead end. Various people assured me there was no link to the main road. I could even see the high fence of the golfing practice range that's there, but there were no ways to get through. But I got to the airport in time. Joan was ready to walk, not ride a song tao back. (I better put up a picture before long. It's a (usually) red pick up with a covered bed that has a bench on each side for passengers.







Two people walking with a bike (fortunately J didn't take much to Singapore and her small duffel fit into the basket) on Chiang Mai streets is not the easiest thing to do. As you can see, sidewalks disappear.




But sometimes we walked through parking lots, and this new building even had a ramp!





Before long we were at the vegetarian center - where'd I'd been taken for lunch once before - and stopped for brunch. The yellow sign says 0 Baht, You still can eat. This has some sort of Buddhist affiliation and they had clothing recycling, and there were separate garbage bins for glass, plastic, paper, food, etc.



Although the first block on my bike this morning felt chilly, it's been getting hotter - at least a lot more humid. When we got back from the airport, (It took about two hours including brunch, and we walked pretty slowly, hampered by my having to get the bike up and down curbs and steps along the way) I really wanted a shower. I shut off the water heater in the bathroom, the 'cold' water was even warmer than I wanted.

Then off to work to get my presentation ready for Monday morning. I think it will be fine. I've had different people look at different parts of the presentation, so there is someone who understands my intent and can help when I need the right word in Thai.

Taxi Drives from Discovery Side to HBO

The good news is that Discovery Channel has worked out a deal with HBO who will air, Anchorage International Film Festival (AIFF) feature documentary runner up, but Academy Award winning, Taxi to the Dark Side in September.

So my grim fear that Discovery Channel's link (through its Military Channel) to the Defense Department's America Supports You program that I discussed several days ago meant that their intent was to block it from being shown on television was wrong.

And in defense of AIFF judges, they chose a movie that had its own historical and Northern interest - The Prize of the Pole - about Robert Peary's grandson's quest to learn more about the Greenlanders that Perry took back to New York with him. Anchorage was an appropriate place for that movie to win an award as the movie examined how a Euro-American adventurer used Native peoples for his own glory with no apparent concern for the people whose lives he essentially destroyed. The legacy of similar ventures still plagues many Alaska Natives today.

Someone at PSI is Checking on Frank Murkowski

Performance Systems International is an international human capital consulting firm that helps build business success by enhancing and aligning organisation, team and leadership activity.

We work with our clients’ unique culture, challenges and business aspirations to convert strategy into practice, achieve meaningful change and realise long-term organisation development.

I don't know if it is idle curiosity or professional, but someone there looked him up today.


And someone at the National Futures Association looked up "fbi agent sean mcdermott."

National Futures Association (NFA) is the industrywide, self-regulatory organization for the U.S. futures industry. We strive every day to develop rules, programs and services that safeguard market integrity, protect investors and help our Members meet their regulatory responsibilities.

Managing risk by trading futures and options on futures contracts is a vital component of the global economy. Every business day tens of millions of futures contracts are traded on an increasingly broad spectrum of products, including agricultural commodities, oil, precious metals, equities, treasury bonds, financial indexes and foreign currencies.

Investor confidence is crucial to the success of the futures markets, and the best way to gain investor confidence is to ensure that the highest levels of integrity are demanded of all market participants and intermediaries.

In these cases if I reveal my sources, people will stop googling on their corporate internet servers and then I wouldn't learn these things. Is this a little like accidentally hitting redial on your cell phone and leaving a message on someone's voice mail?

Feds Busy Elsewhere - CH2M Hill Played Veco in Ohio

While Alaskan's are all absorbed in our own corruption scandals, the Feds seems to be pretty busy all over the country. Here's a website covering what they call the Cleveland Ohio Water Scandal.

One of their entries mentions CH2M Hill:

Prominent Cleveland consultant Nate Gray and five others indicted in federal probe of corruption in Ohio, New Orleans and Houston

The 45-count indictment charges Gray with creating a secret machine that corrupted public officials with cash, Super Bowl tickets, massages and limousines. Also charged were former Houston building department director Monique McGilbra, prominent Cleveland lawyer Ricardo Teamor, consultant Gilbert Jackson, former Honeywell Inc. salesman Brent Jividen and Cleveland City Councilman Joseph Jones. The indictment also accuses Gray of bribing then-East Cleveland mayor Emmanuel Onunwor involving a no-bid, $3.9 million contract with Denver-based CH2M Hill, which managed the water and sewer systems in East Cleveland starting in March 2002. According to federal prosecutors, CH2M Hill provided as much as $10,000 a month in consulting fees to Cleveland engineer Ralph Tyler, who carried the money to Gray, who used it for bribes. Attorneys for CH2M Hill and Tyler say their clients did not know the money was used for bribes. Cleveland Plain Dealer_ 1/19/05 [Emphasis added]

This could be called old news, but they [the Feds] apparently are still at it. When I reported the changing of the guard at the Veco building, I gave CH2M Hill the benefit of the doubt.

With luck Anchorage is getting a new corporate player with strong ethical standards that will work generously with our community

But commenters weren't as generous. And this story about consulting contracts that were bribes, sounds terribly familiar to what happened with the Alaska Company they bought. Let's watch these guys carefully.

Part of My Daily Life Here

Beginning of my bike ride to work in the morning. Passing here part of Wat Pa Daeng where we went to Macha Bucha ceremony. The steps up to that part are just a short ways ahead.

I'm sure this is the source of much of the crowing before sunrise and much of the day. At lunch the other day we went through the ways we say animal sounds in Thai and English to much laughter. Cockle Doodle Doo had them rolling.

My boss and the T shirt he hates.

A small fish pond in the work compound. One of the people cleans it and feeds the fish regularly.

One of the offices in the compound. I went down here to work on an English editing project today. It was in Word and I thought it made sense to do track changes in word. I think it would have worked just as well and been easier had I done it on my Mac. But it was an interesting report - about training village youth how to be local reporters of what is happening since their local stories don't normally get covered. Then the stories go up on a website and others make it to mainstream media. This would be a neat idea for Alaska too. The way they finished the concrete in this building is quite attractive just as it is.

There are a lot of nice houses between home and work. I posted pictures of former Prime Minister Thaksin's brother's house the other day. Thaksin returned to Thailand today after the new government allowed his return. The BBC spent a lot more time Gee Whizzing about the new terminal at Beijing's airport than they did reporting Thaksin's return. This house is one of my favorites. It preserves traditional style and isn't as ostentatious as many of the places, though this garden surely takes a lot of work to keep up.

Dogs do like sleeping in the road.

And drivers do avoid them. Remember, they drive on the left side in Thailand.

My boss had these worms on his jacket at lunch yesterday.

Walking back through Wat Ramphoeng from lunch. There's enough in there for me to take a picture a day.

When is a Term not a Term?

Thursday, February 28, 2008, 10:34pm
The ADN says that Dr. Peter Mjos is challenging the City Clerk's decision to let Dick Traini run for a fourth term because the charter says you can only serve for three consecutive terms. The City Clerk's decision is based on an opinion written by a hired attorney. The attorney concludes that partial terms were not intended to be counted in the term limit provision and since Traini's first term here (he had served prior to that and then was defeated by then future mayor George Weurch if I recall correctly.) There's lots here to chew on.

1. The political consequences of this lawsuit for this race and the next mayoral race
2. How good is the opinion of the hired attorney?

1. Political Consequences

1. For this race. If I understand it right, there are only two candidates. If Traini were deemed ineligible to run, then his opponent Elvi Gray would win. But it also seems to me problematic to have a candidate yanked off the ballot by the courts and for the voters to not have a choice. This could cause a backlash. What if the courts don't finish by election day, and Traini wins. Then the court says he shouldn't have run? The people voted for the term limit provision, but they also would have voted for Traini despite the term limit provision. They would be saying with their votes that the term limit provision doesn't include partial terms.
2. For the upcoming mayoral race. If, in fact, Mark Begich runs for the US Senate, (and that has gotten more likely while I was writing this) and gets elected, a big 'if', he would leave his mayoral position several months before the next mayoral election. If I remember right, the Assembly chair would become acting Mayor. It seems to me better to decide this issue now in an Assembly election than to have it still an open issue if we have a partial term mayor running.


On the one hand, if the law is ambiguous - and if it weren’t the City Clerk would not have asked for an opinion - it should be clarified. But ideally the timing for the clarification should be such that if a candidate is eliminated, others can run for that office. Levesque’s opinion is dated January 7, 2008. I don’t know when the Clerk made her decision or when it was made public - before or after the closing date for candidates to file. To that we must add the time it would take a citizen to decide to file a law suit, since that isn't a casual decision.

On the other hand, are the additional few months Traini served worth depriving his constituents a choice in the election? Shouldn't there be another way to challenge the meaning of the law so it could be done between elections when it doesn’t have immediate consequences on specific people and specific political races?

Does the motivation of the person filing - for political reasons or to clarify the law on principle - matter? Can we ever know the real motivations? Could it be a mix of both? If it is for political gain - to Elvi Jackson’s advantage if Traini were to be found ineligible - one could also say that Traini pushed the limits by running for a fourth term when there was a three year term limit. (He's not the first according to Levesque's analysis - Ossiander did it on the School Board and Daniel Kendall did it on the Assembly. That doesn't make it right, it just means no one challenged them.) Even if the ruling is technically in his favor, it would seem to violate the spirit of the charter. While an attorney’s opinion went in his favor, only a judge’s opinion or a charter amendment could - as I understand it - be legally binding.


2. Levesque's Opinion

Joseph N. Levesque, the attorney who wrote the opinion for the City Clerk concluded

A review of the language used in the MOA Charter term limit provisions reveals that the term limits for elected offices are for either two full consecutive three-year terms or three full consecutive three-year terms. The meaning of the language is clear and unambiguous, partial time served through either appointment or election does not count for the purpose of counting terms. Both the available legislation history and established precedent support this conclusion.

To write that the language is clear and unambiguous seems to suggest that his client, the City Clerk, is a little dim. If it's so clear and unambiguous, why does she have to hire an attorney to tell her that? But an attorney once told me that if he wrote an opinion, it would be a strong, firm opinion, whichever side of the issue he took. So maybe this just reflects that, once Levesque decided it should go for Traini's position, he went for it strong.

How does Levesque reach that conclusion? Partly by logic and partly by referring to the legislative history and intent. The logic doesn't work for me at all. The history and intent - at least the part he refers us to - is more supportive.

The "Logic"

I'll comment on a few things he writes, the whole opinion is here.

Quote 1: (Levesque cites McQuillin whom he describes as "a legal authority on municipal law")

Although an unambiguous statute prescribing the term of an officer will be construed as written, where the legal provisions prescribing the term is [sic] uncertain or doubtful an interpretation will be adopted that limits the term to the shortest time. (p. 2)

So if the Municipal Charter isn't clear on this, we should adopt an interpretation that limits the term to the shortest time possible. That would mean, not allowing someone to run for a fourth consecutive term even if one term was only a partial term. But Levesque comes to the opposite conclusion quoting McQuillin again as saying "the phrase 'term of office'... means the fixed legal period during which the incumbent may legally hold the office."

Do you think the Charter Commission that wrote this language read McQuillin and knew that this was 'the' definition of 'term'? Levesque's opinion talks about 'terms,' 'full terms,' and 'partial terms." Each one uses the word 'term.' But let's move on.

Quote 2: Here Levesque is citing a case called Pope.

"No person shall be elected as a member of the city council for more than two four-year terms..." According to the courts [sic] reasoning, the words 'elect' and 'appointed' have different meanings and a 'four-year term' is not the same as a 17-month term. (pp. 2-3)

But in the Pope case the law specifically said 'elected' and in the Anchorage charter, the word is NOT 'elected' it's 'served.' "[a] person who has served on the assembly for three consecutive terms may not be reelected to the assembly until one full term has intervened."

Note: it says "three consecutive terms" (not full terms) but it also says, "until one full term has intervened." So when they were writing this, they were aware of the difference between full and not full terms. When they wrote about how many consecutive terms someone could serve, they didn't use the word full. But they did use it when they wrote about how much time must intervene before one can be reelected. I would guess this is the precise language on which Mjos is basing his challenge.


Quote 3 - I include this under logic rather than intent, because it is so logically flawed.

Morever, if the intent was for the term limits to include partial terms then language addressing partial terms would have been included. (p. 5)

Don't buy a used car from this guy. You could just as easily make the opposite argument: "If the intent was for the term limits to only be full terms, then language addressing full terms would have been included." This is pure sophistry. And since they did, as I pointed out just above, include 'full term' when talking about how long one had to wait before being elected again, one could logically imagine that they didn't intend the consecutive terms to be full terms or they would have said so.

Since Levesque himself uses the term ‘partial term’ and the charter talks about ‘three year term[s]’ and “two year term[s]” (for mayor), it would seem that the word ‘term’ means time spent serving as assembly member, however long that turns out to be. There could be partial terms, two year terms and three year terms, but all are ‘terms.’ Thus a partial term is a term. The charter prohibits three consecutive terms.


Legislative History and Intent

Levesque cites the original Charter Committee Report #4 and the Charter Review Commission Report to get to the intent of the ordinance. This is after citing legal precedence that legal intent trumps the literal meaning of the law.

He has two citations that logically support his position that one has to serve consecutive FULL terms before term limits apply. (Or should I say "full term" limits apply?)

Intent Quote 1: On page 6 of Levesque's opinion, he cites Committee Report #4:

The charter will limit the Mayor to two successive full terms. A policy question for the Commission is whether a limit on successive terms of Assembly members should be imposed...

He has already decided that what applies to the Mayor regarding full or partial also applies to the Assembly (and School Board) and that from this it means the Commission clearly intended it to mean full terms.

My problems with this are:

1. This is plucked out of Report #4. I'd have to know how many reports there were and what they said (did a Report #6 change its mind?) and read the context of this quote to be sure it means what he says it means. And given some of the other stuff he's written here, I'm not inclined to do that without checking.
2. If the Commission discussed full terms and partial terms and were conscious of this distinction, why, in the end, didn't they say 'full term' when they wrote the Charter? Perhaps at the end, they voted to strike the term 'full.' Of course, I'm playing devil's advocate here. The rest of the context may well support his contention.

Intent Quote 2: On page 8 Levesque writes:

The Charter Review Commission recommended that the term limit provisions be evaluated and voted on by the public, but that any adopted term limits be applied prospectively allowing any incumbent eligibility "to run for two additional full terms."

From this he concludes that they meant (for the Assembly) consecutive 'full' terms. I didn't know you could run for partial terms. And this is talking about what the limbo Assembly members (those serving when the rules were being changed) could do.

It's possible the Charter members did mean what Levesque says the meant, but it isn't possible logically, from these scraps of evidence to jump to the conclusion that Levesque presents:

A review of the language used in the MOA Charter term limit provisions reveals that the term limits for electd offices are for either two full consecutive three-year terms or three full consecutive three-year terms. The meaning of the language is clear and unambiguous, partial time served through either appointment or election does not count for the purpose of counting terms. Both the available legislation history and established precedent support this conclusion.

Personal Note

Anchorage is a small town. Dick Traini was a student of mine and I respect him and have voted for him. But Elvi Gray's positions are closer to mine and I have contributed to her campaign. Furthermore, I know Dr. Peter Mjos and even posted a picture of him on the ski trail not too long ago. I'm also trying to balance my desire to share all I know with my obligations to respect the confidentiality of personal conversations I've had with friends. The rules about sources are being debated for professional journalists, and as a citizen blogger, the trust of my friends and family trumps my obligations to my readers. I don't want my friends to stop talking to me if they fear I'll blog it. If I can find an independent source of information, I might use that but not confidential conversations.

I also don't believe in term limits. I recognize that the system tends to favor incumbents, but term limits imply the public is too dumb to vote right and so we have to prevent them from reelecting someone. But it is the law, and we should follow the law or change it. One way to do that is to challenge it when one has legal standing to do that.



My Conlusion

My conclusion is that this is not clearcut and that a hired attorney is not how we determine law. Getting this to a judge gives us a final decision. But it is also problematic that this decision is coming so late in the game that if Traini were determined to be ineligible, another candidate could not run. I also think that things could get seriously messy if the decision is not final before the election and/or Traini should win and then be declared ineligible. It would put a cloud over Elvi Gray if she got elected that way. It would be better for her to ask the voters, as part of her campaign, to show the meaning of the term limits by voting for her and not voting for a candidate who, if elected, could serve more than nine consecutive years, which would seem against the intent of the term limits.

But I think it will be messier if this issue is not resolved before the next mayoral election when there could potentially be a candidate running who will have served a partial term. If reelected, would that person be able to run for a third consecutive term? (Mayor is limited to two terms.) We need to get this cleared up. Unfortunately, it appears that the only way to do that is to challenge a candidate who is running for a fourth term.

In in the big scheme of things, if someone can serve an extra year, even two, it probably is no big deal. But I don't think that things are nearly as unambiguous as Levesque would have us believe.

Happy Birthday Mom

Just in case the card doesn't make it on time, I'll wish you a happy birthday from here. This is two years in a row I'm in Thailand on your birthday. The one thing that wouldn't have worked out well if you'd have come with J is that we live on the fourth floor and there's no elevator.

Well, at least J and J2 are together today. The rest of us are scattered, as you celebrate - I know you don't like me putting your age down so I'll just say, a birthday with two even numbers that add up to 14 and the larger number comes first.

Lineated Barbet and Mystery Bird

Thursday, Feb. 28, 2008 12:20am

At lunch at the same place as yesterday, the white crested laughing thrushes were gone, but this bird was there instead. But I can't figure out what it is.



I thought maybe a minivet, but the colors are definitely not right and I'm not sure of the shape. But it certainly modeled nicely for us, showing all sides for anyone who really knows their Thai birds.


When I got home, I heard a bird calling from not too far and there was this largish bird sitting on the bare tree top a 100 yards away or so. With the binoculars it was very clearly visible - yellow orange beak, yellow rings around black eyes, and the wings and back green like a parrot.
It was fairly easy to narrow this one down in the book. And when I then googled lineated barbet images, it was clear that was what it was. It was there quite a while, but just out of range for a good picture. Here's a picture showing the overall setting, and then one greatly enlarged.

Getting the Thai and English Together

As I try to read through the Thai in my organization's work plan, the words that I've put on my list are now recognizable. But as I work toward Monday's seminar with the people in the office, I realize that I have to use more of the Thai in my presentation and things I hand out. As I move to asking questions about how exactly they are determining whether they have reached their goals or not (and thus how they will write their next set of goals) I need to use the Thai. They do have a basic structure of goals and expected outcomes, which they needed for their Oxfam grant. So I've been reading the English and Thai and meshing the two. Without the English, I would be hard pressed to get the exact meaning of the Thai, but with the English, and Thai2English.com I can work it out. So that's what I've been been working on today.

Working Barefoot

One of the many things I like about where I'm working is that I can work barefoot.

Prosecution Responds to Kohring's Requests

Brendan Joel Kelley reports in the Anchorage Press website about the prosecution's response to Vic Kohring's motion for a retrial and the recusal of Judge Sedwick. Here's an excerpt:

The government refers to Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure that—barring newly discovered evidence—any motion for a new trial would have had to been filed no later than November 12, 2007, within seven days of the guilty verdict.

The government also aggressively argues that Kohring’s supposed discovery that the Sedwicks were related—7 to 10 days after his conviction—doesn’t constitute new evidence.

“Assuming for a moment that a ‘deep animosity’ truly existed between Kohring and Mrs. Sedwick in or around 1998, it is illogical and unreasonable for Kohring to suggest that he did not realize the familial relationship between Mrs. Sedwick and the assigned trial judge during the several months prior to his trial or, at the latest, when Mrs. Sedwick was reportedly in the courtroom near the end of the trial,” a portion of the government’s argument reads. “Kohring’s ‘new evidence’ argument might have some air of plausibility had Mrs. Sedwick’s last name been Jones or Smith, but Sedwick is a surname that is not commonplace within Alaska.”

I had pretty much the same reaction when I heard about this in early February:

And it never occurred that Judge Sedwick might be related to this Sedwick who he says was "worst political rival and enemy" until the end of the trial? How many Sedwicks do you know? I certainly would be asking questions if the judge hearing my case had the same name as my worst political rival and enemy. I wouldn't wait until a few days before my sentencing to bring it up.

[A few minutes later: Phil Munger's report on on Kohring's response to the prosecutors' filing is worth reading. A real scoop.]

Work, birds, running, French movie, laundry, NY symphony in Pyongyang

Spent most of the day working on my seminar. Preparing a presentation in Thai and English with pictures to help get the points across. My Thai is frustrating. On a basic level - market Thai - I’m fine. But when I wander off to try to explain things of a more complex level (and some things not so complex) I stumble, my tones are terrible, and I feel kind of stupid. I really need a good teacher who can diagnose my Thai and design a lingual and cognitive therapy that will get the most improvement in the shortest time.

At lunch, Bun and I walked over to Wat Ramphoeng and ate in the lovely garden. A pair of striking white crested birds with a black band through the eye hopped around in the trees around us taunting my Canon.
My shots are great, but you can see them. It appears that one was much more black and white, the other had a lot more brown. After going through the Thai bird book, I’ve decided that they must have been White Crested Laughing Thrushes. (And in the lobby with internet connection, I've confirmed it.)


The temple dragon was much a more cooperative photo model.

After work, I rode my bike over to the track at Chiengmai University - maybe a kilometer a way at most - and finally ran. Time, traffic, heat, and particularly dogs have been my excuses for not running. But I pushed myself over there and did eight slow laps around the track. I’m guessing I did a little over two miles. That’s ok for the first time in weeks. And I hate going around the track - it’s so easy to stop. When you go off on a run, once you get out there, you have to come back. But going around the track you can stop at any time. But it was very pretty. Here’s a shakey picture of Doi Suthep from the track.


Rode through the campus afterward to the main gate and had dinner at the vegetarian restuarant we ate at yesterday for lunch. Very good. When I got back to the southern gate, it was locked. There was enough room to walk through between the posts, but the handle bars wouldn’t fit. I was seeing if I could lift the bike high enough for the handle bars over the poles - I could but I couldn’t get through the narrow opening holding the bike - when a guard showed up and unlocked the gate to let me out.

Did some laundry and watched a French movie with English subtitles. I’ll post about television here soon. We have a wide choice of national televisions. Watched Hong Kong television with Japanese news programing in English covering the New York Philharmonic Orchestra playing in Pyongyang. This was a very political event, with the announcer speculating on the timing a day after the new, hard-line toward North Korea, South Korean president Lee Myung-bak's inauguration. With China, the first event was ping-pong, here it’s the symphony. Who says orchestras are apolitical?

The internet isn’t working again, so I’ll go downstairs and use the wifi and then go to bed. It’s Tuesday and J won’t be back until Friday morning. The manager offered me his car to go pick her up, but I don’t think it’s worth it for that one short trip. The soi is very narrow and you drive on the left side. But it was a very nice offer. He has a sticker to go through the Air Force compound so it’s just a quick shot.

Democracy v. Capitalism - Discovery Channel Takes Taxi to Dark Side

Anchorage folks had the opportunity to see this year's Academy Award winning feature documentary , Taxi to the Dark Side, before it was released to theaters. The Anchorage International Film Festival showed it here in December.

It was my choice for best documentary, but an arctic themed movie won that title here.

But while Taxi beat out Sicko for the Oscar Sunday night, it turns out director Alex Gibney has sold the broadcast rights to the Discovery Channel because they told him, “Look, we love this film. We’re going to give it a broad and very prominent airing.”

Now they are putting it on the shelf because it is "too controversial." Below is an excerpt from a Democracy Now interview (where you can get the whole interview) earlier this month:

ALEX GIBNEY: Well, it turns out that the Discovery Channel isn’t so interested in discovery. I mean, I heard that—I was told a little bit before my Academy Award nomination that they had no intention of airing the film, that new management had come in and they were about to go through a public offering, so it was probably too controversial for that. They didn’t want to cause any waves. It turns out, Discovery turns out to be the see-no-evil/hear-no-evil channel.

AMY GOODMAN: They bought the rights, though.

ALEX GIBNEY: They did.

AMY GOODMAN: So they own it.

ALEX GIBNEY: They own the rights for the next three years. They own the broadcast rights. It’s currently playing in theaters, where people can see it, but we had hoped that it would have a broad airing on television. And indeed, you know, one of the reasons I went with Discovery was because they had told me, “Look, we love this film. We’re going to give it a broad and very prominent airing.”

AMY GOODMAN: But if they still own the rights, can they just not air it for three years and keep you from airing it anywhere else?

ALEX GIBNEY: Yes, they can. That’s their right, because they paid for it. Now, we’re hoping that they’ll agree to sell it to somebody else, you know, maybe for a profit, if they need to do that. But I’m hoping at the very least that they’ll allow somebody else to take it on so it can be shown to the American people.

While this appears to be a strictly business decision -

"that new management had come in and they were about to go through a public offering, so it was probably too controversial for that. They didn’t want to cause any waves"

- there's a real possibility that Taxi never had a chance to get on the Discovery Channel, because Discovery also owns the Military Channel which joined with the Department of Defense program "America Supports You." From a news release dated October 10, 2007:

America Supports You recognizes and facilitates citizens’ support for our military men, women and families, and communicates that support to members of our Armed Forces at home and abroad. The Military Channel and America Supports You first worked together in support of the 2006 Freedom Walk in Washington, D.C. to mark the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11 and honor veterans, past and present.

“We are so pleased that the Military Channel has joined the America Supports You team,” said Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Allison Barber, architect of the America Supports You program. “With their capacity to reach large audiences on an ongoing basis, the Military Channel will help broaden national awareness about America Supports You and connect many more people to the ways they can support and serve the troops and their families.”

The Military Channel brings viewers compelling, real-world stories of heroism, military strategy, technological breakthroughs and turning points in history. The network takes viewers “behind the lines” to hear the personal stories of servicemen and women and offers in-depth explorations of military technology, battlefield strategy, aviation and history. As the only cable network devoted to military subjects, it also provides unique access to this world, allowing viewers to experience and understand a world full of human drama, courage, innovation and long-held traditions of the military. Visit the Military Channel online at www.military.discovery.com.

While I thought that Taxi did a good job of taking "viewers “behind the lines” to hear the personal stories of servicemen and women," somehow, I don't think Taxi to the Dark Side tells the story that the Defense Department wants large audiences to see.


The idea of wealthy people and organizations buying silence for ideas they don't like, or buying accolades as Exxon did with the Anchorage Concert Association last Saturday, is contrary to the free and open debate of ideas that our Constitution was intended to promote. In Confessions of an Economic Hitman we also heard about how the author was paid very well NOT to write a book about what he knew.

Thanks to Battlefield of a Peaceful Warrior for the link to this story. Peaceful Warrior also provides a link to the Discovery Channel to urge them to air the movie. (Beware, you have to fill out a lot of information first and it is really designed to get questions about their current shows. Trying to find other ways to contact Discovery proved difficult. The corporate website is impenetrable - its a very slick, but real-information-free site. You can read about the various corporate officers (26 listed, five women, none in program related positions). But there is no contact information at all. No business information.)

However, the America Supports You news release does give us phone numbers and email addresses for two Discovery Channel employees.

Contact:
Jill Bondurant
Discovery Communications, Inc.
(240) 662-2927
Jill_Bondurant@discovery.com or
Kate Hawken
(240) 662-2947
Kate_Hawken@discovery.com

The idea of buying a film or book of current political relevance and then locking it away so no one can see it (not quite the situation here since it is in theaters now) is clearly in conflict with the idea of free speech. One could say that Gibney didn't have to sell, or should have had a clause in the sale that gave him back the film if it didn't get airplay. But Gibney is a film maker, not a business man or an attorney. People who have great skill in one field, usually don't have the time or aptitude to develop skills in other areas. But given his film topics, he is politically savvy, but still got taken in here.

What would you do if you were offered $1 million for rights to your important political work? (I have no idea what Discover paid, the million is purely hypothetical.) Would you just take the money? Or would you stick by your principles?

I recall when a friend got hired by Alyeska Pipeline. They paid him way more money than he'd ever made before. But there was an expectation that they were buying his loyalty and silence too. How many people get that kind of job, then get subtly pressured into moving to a better neighborhood and living a spendier lifestyle? To the point where they are now just getting by, even at that much higher income?

That's when you become ethically susceptible - where the loss of your job jeopardizes your mortgage, your health insurance, your kids' college education, or even just the glitzier life style and the new 'friends' that come with it. If you buy into that, then they can get you to do things that compromise your basic values, compromise what you deep down know is right, to protect your new life style. If you've been coopted cleverly enough, you might actually believe it all.

Blogging Notes - What I learn from Sitemeter Data

A few observations about visitors to the site from Sitemeter.

• All hits from Thailand list Bangkok as the location. I know that people from Chiang Mai have been here, so I suspect everything gets routed through Bangkok.
• "Victor Lebow" and "famous people born 1908" (and variations thereof) continue to be Google search words that bring in a fair percentage of hits.
• Someone at Naussau Insurance Company got here googling "how often do pirates take over cruise ships" Hmmm, was that just idle curiousity or is something happening?
• "Taxi to the Dark Side" got a bump from winning the Oscar for best documentary
• "Maytag A207" gets a couple of hits a week, suggesting there are others trying to keep their old washing machines alive

[Later, and this one hurts: From Istanbul, Turkey "writing rejection letter to a person in need of charity"]

๋ีMonday - random shots

I got a good look at a Koel this morning. It had been kuuuuwow- ing in the tree, but I couldn't see it. Then it flew out and over the building. Unmistakable. But gone to fast to even think about the camera. I pass this temple on the way to work. It's Wat Pa Daeng, where we went to Macha Bucha. Then you saw the stais from the top.



As we got into the pickup to go for lunch, I was told that the vegetarian restaurant we'd been to before was closed because of Macha Bucha. So we went to another vegetarian restaurant north of the Chiang Mai University campus. By the main entrance.






It was really good - B160 - a little over a dollar a piece.
I took this picture to help me remember where this place was. That's the entrance to Chiang Mai University in the background,



And this T shirt was for sale in a shop next to the restaurant.


At the office I'm working on a seminar to kick off my actual management coaching - I'm working on a Keynote (Mac's powerpoint) presentation. This allows me pictures, the words written to help people understand them better, as well as Thai words for key terms that I can't remember, because I never knew them. While I'm not a Powerpoint fan in general, if you do it right, especially when there are language barriers, the written word helps considerably, as will the Thai words and the visuals.


On my way to work and back, I pass this huge property with two houses that you can see from the road. We stopped at my apartment on the way home after lunch so they could see it. They thought it was overpriced. But we went back by the large property, so I pointed it out. It belongs, they gold me, to former prime minister Thaksin's younger brother. Thaksin was ousted by a military coups and exiled. Rumors say he's coming back soon, now that his party won the last election.



Here's a glimpse at the main house

And this is the front gate.

Organic Strawberry Party

Monday, February 25, 1:30am
I went to an organic strawberry party last night (Sunday). All the food had some sort of strawberry connection.

M. on the left is a volunteer in the compound where I work and one of the hosts for the evening. The man on the left was the main cook.

Even the miang kam, a northern Thai specialty, had a strawberry accent in the sauce. And along with all the traditional foods you wrap in the miang leaf (ginger, lime, coconut, hot pepper, peanut, onion, and dried shrimp) there were pieces of strawberry too. This is a favorite treat of mine from the old days which is getting harder and harder to find these days.

Recently married, she's not a Thai, but an American of Philippine heritage working for an NGO here, and he's meditating.

We had a strawberries on a string game.

And mostly a lot of people, Thai, American, French, Dutch, Irish (that I was aware of) working in various NonGovernmental Organizations - mostly related somehow to organic farming and/or sustainable farming got a chance to talk and eat great food. All in support of organic strawberry growers in nothern Thailand.

"the only thing wrong with tainted money is there tain't enough of it"

The title comes from the Grantsmanship Center News by way of Mike Burns raising the question "when is tainted money "keepable"?

The topic comes up because of Phil Munger's letter to the Anchorage Symphony about tonight's (in Anchorage it should be happening as I start to write) concert underwritten by Exxon/Mobil and the Association's custom of asking the audience to applaud the donors. Phil felt that since Exxon hasn't paid the plaintiffs in the 1989 oil spill case and that the final arguments are going before the Supreme Court this week, that rather than applaud, they should ask the audience to observe a moment of silence for those plaintiffs who have died waiting for their settlements. [Note: Munger isn't just some crank off the streets. He's a professor of music at UAA who has composed a number of serious musical pieces, at least one of which, I believe, the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra has premiered.]


The letter Munger got back said, "While some organizations exist to engage political and economic issues, that is not the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra's mission."

It was also my intent when I started this blog to stay out of political issues. However, it became clear to me that to say nothing was to support the status quo. To accept Exxon's money and then to ask the audience to applaud Exxon is a political act whether the Orchestra wishes to acknowledge that or not.

The question then is whether there is anything wrong in that. First, is the money 'tainted.' Second, must all tainted money be declined?

Looking for guidelines on this topic was interesting. I couldn't find much in the way of guidelines for declining charitable contributions.


Jewish law has thoughtful guidelines for giving charity.

The Talmud describes these different levels of tzedakah, and Rambam organized them into a list. The levels of charity, from the least meritorious to the most meritorious, are:

1. Giving begrudgingly
2. Giving less that you should, but giving it cheerfully.
3. Giving after being asked
4. Giving before being asked
5. Giving when you do not know the recipient's identity, but the recipient knows your identity
6. Giving when you know the recipient's identity, but the recipient doesn't know your identity
7. Giving when neither party knows the other's identity
8. Enabling the recipient to become self-reliant

These guidelines really were developed for individuals, not corporations. They suggest that the most meritorious giving is when the giver doesn't know who gets the money and the receiver doesn't know where the money comes from. And the money helps move the recipient to self-reliance. So, ideally, Exxon-Mobile would have, under this standard, given money to a third party who would give the money to the Orchestra without the Orchestra knowing the source or Exxon knowing who got it. And it would be given in such a way that it would help the Orchestra become self sufficient.

Of course, this is a high standard. Orchestra board members and donors would all tell you very little money would be donated on those terms. But that also means that they aren't doing it simply to be good citizens and because they believe in the orchestra. If they want their name on it, it means Exxon's (and others who give) purpose is to be seen as an organization that supports the community. The intent is to improve its image. And there is nothing wrong with that.

But what guidance is there for organizations for evaluating whether money is 'tainted' or not? It's hard to find.

Politicians decline money, or give it back, if they think accepting it would lose them votes. From MSNBC

Jack Abramoff has already pled guilty and many politicians, including President Bush, are rushing to return money linked to the disgraced former lobbyist.

The decision is made, not on moral grounds, but practical grounds.

Ethics of receiving organ donations revolves around whether donors risk their lives because of their poverty to the benefit of wealthy receivers. This is a clear moral decision that is in opposition to market rules - let the buyer and seller make their own deal. Of course, the ideal market assumes the buyer and seller have an equal ability to walk away from the deal.

Department of Interior has a list of prohibited sources of donations
D. Prohibited Sources

1. Departmental agencies, or employees on behalf of their agencies, should not accept (or solicit or accept under a cooperative Foundation program) donations from persons and entities who:

(a) Have litigation pending with, or have or are seeking to obtain a contract, lease, grant or other business, benefit or assistance from the agency that would receive the donation.

(b) Conduct operations or activities that are regulated by the agency that would receive the donation.

(c) Appear to be offering a gift with the expectation of obtaining advantage or preference in dealing with the Department or any of its agencies.

These are really conflict of interest issues, concerned with whether the donations affect agency decision making or appear to, not with whether the money is tainted.

This is similar to the James Beard Foundation Code of Ethics which discusses donors' rights and discusses avoiding donations from suppliers and others with business with the Foundation that might bias business decisions. But they don't talk about dealing with tainted money.


Blind trusts are one option so that one does not know where the money is coming from. Here's a Maryland ruling about a judge setting up a blind trust for his legal defense. But once again, here the purpose is to avoid bias or compelling donors to give, not with whether the money is tainted.

The one article I found that dealt directly with the question of accepting tainted money was again using Jewish law, discussing the Marc Rich pardon case. Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz identifies three problematic aspects of receiving charity from questionable sources:

1. Accepting Charity from Disreputable Figures
2. Charity With Ulterior Motives
3. Speaking on Behalf of a Donor: Corruption or Advocacy?

The Orchestra, like most non-profits, needs money. Large corporations have lots of money. So the Orchestra has to wrestle with the question of whether they should take money from an organization that first soiled Alaska with the biggest oil spill we have ever had, and second, has fought the court judgments for almost 20 years, leaving plaintiffs without the payments the courts ruled for them. Of course, Exxon has every right to take this to the Supreme Court. And I'm sure there are people on the Orchestra board who are fully supportive of Exxon's actions in Alaska.

You could make a good argument for accepting the money, even money from someone with a disreputable past. If someone has amassed a great fortune, through questionable means, should they not be allowed to try to make some amends by giving it away later on.? But if that is what they are doing, the charity receiving the money could set conditions for accepting it. According to the Jewish guidelines it would be better to give it away anonymously. Without the recipient even knowing where it came from.

Ideally this would be a blind trust for donors so that they don't know where the money went and the receivers don't know where it came from. And gifts that make the non-profits more independent of future donations would be the best.

But Exxon doesn't fit into the reformed sinner category. They plea before the Supreme Court this coming week, I believe, to appeal the judgment made in the oil spill nearly 20 years ago. Even the State of Alaska and several living former governors have briefs in opposing Exxon on this

One story that explains corporate giving as honest interest in improving the communities where they live. And I'm sure there are Exxon employees who believe this story. It's in their moral interest to believe they work for a good, ethical company. But just like large corporations want politicians to need lots of money so that they can have influence on them, having financially starved non-profits makes it possible for large corporations to launder their reputations, cheaply.

And at the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra washing away oily memories comes pretty cheap. To get into the Maestro's Circle, the highest level of donor according to their website costs a mere $1500 or more. Even I could afford that if I really, really loved classical music. In contrast, the Anchorage Opera has four levels above that:

Sustainers ($2,500-$4,999)

Benefactors ($5,000-$7,499)

Guarantors ($7,500-$9,999)

Founders ($10,000+)

Now Exxon's 2007 after tax profits were about $40 Billion. Let's say they kicked in $40,000 (I'm guessing it might not be that much, but it's easier to calculate. Someone making $100,000 before taxes, if I calculated this right, would have to donate 10 cents to donate an equivalent percent of their income. [We're working with a lot of zeros here and it's late, so someone check the math.]

Do we applaud those who worked hard last year and gave ten cents to the Orchestra, the same percentage of his net profit that Exxon gave?

A lot of people have complained about how Anderson, Kott, and Kohring took money from lobbyists in return for favors. All three have said, in their own defense, "The money didn't change how I voted or what I did. I already believed in these causes." But most of us know it was wrong.

And we've all (except Ray Metcalfe) winked and nodded at the money our Congressional delegation has brought home. And we know that it is no coincidence that Exxon is getting itself applauded at the Atwood Center the same week it is announcing "a new project to develop and produce hydrocarbon resources from the Point Thomson field on the Alaska North Slope" and just before the US Supreme Court will hear its appeal on the Prince William Sound oil spill.

So it seems that Munger is asking the Orchestra to ask itself what they are willing to do to get Exxon's money? He didn't ask them to give it back. He only asked that they not have people applaud Exxon this week in Alaska. But hey, I've got a dime I'm willing to contribute, that's a larger percent of my income than Exxon's donation was of its income. Will you read my name and ask for applause for me too?

Gays Depicted in Temple Paintings

From the Bangkok Post:

Mention homosexuality and many Thais will blame it on recent Western influences. Ask Varaporn Vichayarath what she thinks, however, and she would simply smile before providing a list of old temples with murals depicting same-sex courtship.

Yes, homosexual courtship between both men and women.

And yes, at temples.

"Contrary to conservative beliefs, homosexuality has long existed in our society, as evidenced by these mural paintings," said Varaporn, a book editor who has researched the topic.

The rest of the story is here.

J Should be Taking Off as I Post

Sunday, Feb. 24, 2008 11:15am
The advantage of an early Sunday morning flight is that there's no traffic, it's cool (it says 66F/19C), the monks are out with their alms bowls, and you get to see the sun rise. Our cab was waiting for us when we got downstairs 15 minutes early.



Here's J at the airport. Isn't she beautiful? Even squinting into the rising sun.

From getting into the cab to saying goodbye at the passenger lounge entrance, even getting a lot of red lights, and not taking the short cut through the air force compound, to the passenger lounge took 20 minutes total. It's a three hour flight to Singapore on Tiger Airways, an Australian discount airline I found online. Our son has school break next week so they should have a good time.


I was going to walk back in the cool morning air. If you have the right decal on your windshield, you can go through the air force compound to the airport. It's a direct shot, maybe a couple of kilometers at the most. But the cab didn't so we had to go around the long way, compounded by one way streets that take you out of the way around the moat of the old city center. But the cab driver thought pedestrians didn't need a pass. He was wrong. I thought about hitching a ride with someone who had a pass, but decided to walk the other way.


But I got pestered by tuk tuk drivers and song tao drivers and finally said ok. He dropped me off at the entrance to the soi. A soi is a street off a main street. Alley isn't the right translation. The main street here is Suthep (the name of the mountain, means angel in Thai, and was the Thai name I was given long ago because it is close to Steve.) So we live on Tanon (road) Suthep, Soi 4.



I had the song tao driver (I looked, but don't seem to have a picture of a song tao - it means two rows. It's a pickup truck with a covered bed and in the back are two rows of benches for passengers to sit on. In some places they go on regular routes. I'm not sure if that's the case here, most seem to be for hire like taxis here) drop me off where at the soi entrance on Suthep Road.
After getting most of the way up the soi, I saw the sign announcing our place - Baan Nai lek - and thought I should take some pictures in the early morning light. (It's the white sign on the pole on the left that says 300 meters to go.) It's about a seven minute slow walk up from the main road.

And a little further is the sign for Mi Casa. We're told this is an expensive Mediterranean restaurant. Expensive is a relative term - dishes are B200 - B500 (about $12-15) I was told. One day.













Here's the old house it's in and the hours it's open. Maybe we'll try it for lunch one day.







They're still working on this, though there are people inside in the afternoon. (You could see this building and the white fence in the pic with the yellow Mi Casa sign) Not sure what it is. There's what seems to be a recording studio back closer to the road. You can see our building in the background.






A little closer. Just after I took this picture, a huge rotweiler threw itself against the gate next to me. He was inside the fence.












And here at the entrance to my building are three members of the welcoming committee. There are dogs all over. The ones that bark the most are inside a closed gate. Most just move out of the way. A couple of times dogs have chased the bike a little, but those times people called them back.





And since I haven't posted a picture of my bike yet, I thought I'd get our parking lot. My bike is the green one on the other side of the white barrier.

I was going to have this posted before J's plane took off, but my daughter got skype and called and we talked for over an hour. If you don't know about skype and you make long distance calls, especially overseas, you should know. Two people with skype can chat, talk, and video for free. If you have skype you can also call regular phones for very low rates. The sound quality is usually better and I'm told the encryption is very good too. I'm sure the CIA and FBI will be working on skype calls before long if they haven't already though. Skype.com

I've got a seminar to give next week some time, so that's what I'll work on today. More on that later.

Organic and Almost Organic

Today we checked out the twice a week vegetable market that Chiang Mai University's agricultural program hosts. Local farmers with "blotsanpit" (no pesticide, but chemical fertilizer, but, we were reassured by one of the professors from the program, there are no residues in the vegetables sold.) This happens Wednesdays all day and Saturdays until 1.

They even had free lunch. A huge vat of fantastic rice. It was made of rice, taro root, sesame seeds, and peanuts. There were also large pots with different cooked vegetables. We were quickly invited to sit down near the professor who spoke good English. She'd even been to Alaska because she'd written about Alaska's natural resources extraction policy including the Permanent Fund.

















And she told us about yet another healthy vegetable place - in the southeast corner of campus, pretty close to where we live. So we walked over there on the way home.


This one is open every day, inside a little building, with air conditioning, and lots of beautiful fruits and vegetables and other products like honey, soap, shampoo, and fruit juices. We loaded up and went home.

Walk With Care

Motorcycles and scooters rule Chiang Mai. One person told me that there are busses, but the wait is too long and then you have to walk. Everyone seems to have a motorized two wheeler. There are a few others on actual bicycles. And walking isn't easy at all. And I'm not talking about the weather which has been pleasantly cool and dry. Cool means between high 80s in the day, but down into the mid 60s at night.

Here's what pedestrians face.




Sidewalks are the parking lots of the ruling class.




Does the placement of this phone booth suggest that anyone thought pedestrians were important?



And then there is the issue of crossing the streets. Here there is a continuous flow of cars. There are no crosswalks at most corners and even when it seems like there is a green light, the traffic patterns have cars turning right, then left across where pedestrians have to cross. I have seen a couple places where there were actually lights in the middle of a block that would stop traffic and let pedestrians pass, maybe three of those so far.


And even where there are reasonable sidewalks, like on the Chiang Mai University campus, when you get to the gates going off campus, suddenly the sidewalks stop and you have to walk in the traffic lane to get out.

So, as I was contemplating maybe we should give in and get a motorcycle while we're here, Melissa told me that yesterday a French-Canadian volunteer was killed yesterday in a motor accident where, apparently, a motorcycle was involved.

I have my bicycle and the short ride to work is fairly easy and I could get about town fine. And J is good with her feet. And there are the red little jitney trucks if you have to go further or carry something. And for tomorrow morning's trip to the airport to send J off to visit our son in Singapore - he has school break next week - we ordered a taxi.

Wat Suandok - Chiang Mai

Yesterday we walked into the old town of Chiang Mai. On the way we stopped at one of Chiang Mai's many temples. This one has done will by catering to tourists with a yen for a little more serious encounter with Buddhism. They have daily Monk Chats in English and meditation retreats. And they have foot and body massages for










Erick, this pictures for you. I got you the dark green one on the right. It's the Buddha in the picture above, if I understood right.



And when we were back on our way, we ran into this monk from Cambodia who's going to University at the Wat. He spoke really good English and we chatted for 15 or 20 minutes. It reminds me of what I've known, but it's so easy to forget. Monks are just young (and older) men who had their heads shaved and traded jeans for orange robes. Of course, they also have some reason for wanting to become a monk. It was really bright out and so I couldn't see my camera screen too well so I didn't realize his eyes were facing left.

Thais use the same word for work and party

Friday, February 22, 5:13pm
I've known the word งาน since I first studied Thai. It means work. But it also shows up in words like งานวัด which is a wat festival. But it wasn't until today when I was preparing a Keynote (Mac's version of Powerpoint) presentation for next week in both Thai and English and had to look up the word 'network' which can be translated as ข่ายงาน. (The second syllable is งาน) Thai2English.com (which is making my life MUCH easier) then takes the two parts of that word and translates each.

งาน pronounced ngaan means:

1. work ; job ; task
2. party ; celebration

I'd never made that connection. No wonder Thais enjoy life so much.

And while I'm speaking of Thai, I mistranslated the word on the sign I saw the other day. I'll make a correction in the post itself too. I said it meant 'safe from poison" and it may mean that , but it isn't exactly the same as organic. It means that no pesticides were used, but they probably used chemical fertilizers. Chiengmai University's agricultural department will have a market Saturday selling pesticide free food.

And making the Thai words larger seems to have messed up the size of the English words, but I don't have time to make it perfect, sorry.

Macha Bucha, Wat Pa Daeng, Chiang Mai

The monk we met the other day at Wat Pa Daeng invited us to come for vientien on Macha Bucha, so we did come back. It is the closest wat (temple) to our place.



[Saturday morning: I can't see the video at all on Firefox, but I can on Safari]

After we went out to the main street, got food from various stands, and ate at home.

Birds and Bats

We're like in our own little treehouse with wall to wall windows looking out into the fourth floor level of trees. There are lots of birds - we hear a lot more than we see, and see lot more than we can catch with the camera - and last night we noticed all these birds flying into the tree, but they weren't birds. You can see this bird's long tail, but not the head. I think it's in the magpie/treepie family. Dianne? Catherine? Is there enough here to identify? The tail is so distinctive. It was probably 2 feet long from tip of the head to end of the tail. Maybe longer.




Then yesterday night there were maybe 20 or 30 bats swooping back and forth just beyond our balcony and in the trees. You could hear the wings hitting the leaves. Otherwise they were silent. So I put it on flash and the child/animal setting and started taking pictures. I got a bunch like this one of the trees but with no obvious bats. You can see the fruit in the tree (like usual, you can double click to enlarge the pictures) if you look carefully and the way the were sometimes hovering I assume they were going after the fruit. I couldn't tell for sure what kind of fruit it is.



Then, I finally got one. There's a way to get rid of red eye on people, but there's no way to get rid of white eye I know of, on animals. This seems to happen with dogs (the fox I got at Elmendorf last August had this in the flash picture) and bats. How are their eyes different from human eyes that the flash reflection is different? But that's pretty much all you can see of this bat.




Finally, bingo, I got the whole bat. First you see the eyes, but then you can see the whole animal in flight. I'd say there were 18 - 24 inches in wingspan. Very cool watching them fly around. If you are ever in Portland, Oregon, the zoo there has a bat exhibit with special lighting so you can see the bats clearly flying around, hanging around, and various states in between.

[2/21/08 My son emailed me this:

In mammals, the rods and cones actually face backwards, towards the retina. Dogs and cats have a retroreflective layer in their retina which reflects light back into the rods and cones, improving their night vision.

(retroreflective means reflects back in the same direction it came from. you can get the same effect from the inside of the corner of a cube with shiny sides)]

J made it safe and sound

We've spent the last two days walking around the neighborhood and around Chiang Mai. (Note: everyone is out of the office on various trips and meetings and today is a holiday) Here are the steps down from Wat Pa Daeng, the temple just up the street. We went in and began talking to one of the monks. I pulled out my vocabulary list and we had an impromptu joint English and Thai lesson. Then he posed in front of the Buddha in the sanctuary. Today is Macha Bucha day. I couldn't find a whole lot on line explaining the holiday, but here's a little from Saranair.com

Macha Bucha Day is the important Buddhist holy day (on a fullmoon of third lunar month) celebrates the occasion when:

• 1,250 of the Lord Buddha's disciples spontaneously gathered to hear him preach without any schedule

• all of them were ‘Arhantas', the Enlightened One, and were ordained by the Buddha Himself

• and the Buddha gave those Arhantas the principles of the Buddhism, called "The Ovadhapatimokha".

So on the day like this, Buddhist all over the world would go to the temple to offer food to the monks, Vien Tien (candles light procession), listen to Dharma talk, enjoy the good deeds at the temples.


We'll go tonight at 7pm to vientien - walk around the temple and the chedi three times with the candles and leave an offering for the monks. There were a lot of places selling prepackaged stuff today, but the bucket they mostly come in was too much to carry around all day. I'm hoping we can get stuff at the wat, though this is a reltively small wat. But it is just up the street. And now we know one of the monks.




We also got to see our building from a different angle. We're on the top floor looking out into the trees on the left. In the next post I'll put up a couple of views into those trees.

I'm down in the lobby now using the wifi which doesn't get all the way up to the fourth floor and the dsl connection isn't working right. It says we're connected to the internet, but every website times out and we get nothing. So today/s pictures will have to wait.

We also walked around the Chiang Mai university campus which is very close by. A woman who asked if we needed help turned out to be a graduate of the political science and public administration program so she ended up taking us to see the Dean of the Social Sciences who teaches public administration.

We also checked on the swimming pool at the university. It is Olympic sized, costs B300 a year membership (just under $10) and B30 each swim. So Joan will sign up there. The fancy boutique hotel across the street from us where two nights (about $300) in the cheapest room costs more than one month in our room only lets hotel guests use the pool. We can't even buy our way in, but we can eat at the restaurant. Thanks.

And we had dinner at a Vietnamese place nearby. The food is great. But I was really impressed with the windows. Someone obviously didn't like the dark wall. So I'm guessing they had the wall smashed open put in the windows. But left the wall so you could see how the liberated the room from the dark. It takes a lot of guts to actually do something like this and leave it like this. I think it works and makes a strong statement.

Devi Mandir Chiang Mai

SND_2556 uploaded by AKRaven









We met at Devi Mandir, Chiangmai's Hindu temple. First I met M. who works in my compound but for a different NGO (non-governmental organization, the international word for non-profit) that is working on sustainability. She's been working at home mostly which probably explains why I haven't met her yet. Me and S. and Grib were also there. Mike, who met in Chiang Mai last year when he had just arrived to work for the AJWS was also there, coincidentally, with his brother. The services reminded a lot of Anchorage, though here the room was filled with Thais. The person who led the prayers, a powerful yogi according to Mike, told us afterward he doesn't speak Thai and so he did the talk in Hindi since most of the Thais here do not understand English either (nor Hindi). But they did know the chants. And, as you can see in the pictures, this is a much more ornate temple than the one in Anchorage.

It turns out that Mike lives just down the street from us, less than a quarter of a mile away.

There was a heavy downpour while we were in the Temple, the first rain since I've been here. I was also able to pick up a good (save looking) electric teapot and what I thought was a hot plate at the Central Department Store at the mall. But I'm not sure how to make it work and the box says induction cooker. I have to look it up on line.

Catching Up

Well, catching up never happens, but rather than worry about getting things up from Friday, I'll just put up some stuff on today and let the other stuff get up when I can do it.

My bike ride to the office is a delight. I pass a couple of wats (Buddhist temples) and more or less rural areas even though we are in town. A few noodle shops, mostly homes of various sizes and styles. I'll try a video one day soon. You've seen some of that in the house hunting post. The weather has been cool - down into the sixties at night - and the humidity low so it's been comfortable. I stopped here for breakfast this morning.

The office is getting empty. There's a meeting in Lampang, neighboring province, and others are going to Bangkok. I've been getting into the office close to 9am the last two days and today I was the first one there, so my 10am arrivals weren't all that bad. So hardly anyone is around this week which is good since J comes tomorrow morning. Everyone is gone so I was wondering how I would pick her up. But Grib came by today and offered to pick me up to get Joan. Since no one was there - at least in my organization, there are other people from the other organizations - I left early and went back to the market I'd been in last night. Most of the shops that had household stuff were closed last night. Today I did fine and got some of the things I wanted before Joan got here - hangers, a pair of plates, bowls, mugs, and fork/spoon/knife sets, a pot, and flowers. Actually they look like much less than when I bought them. But there are two bunches of mums, a bunch of orchids, a bunch of roses, and a clump of fragrant gardenias, and a jasmine bud necklace. I cleaned things up this morning and when I got the hangers home hung up Joan's clothes that I brought along.

Poor J is somewhere between Tokyo and Bangkok. And won't be here til tomorrow morning.

Tonight the AJWS volunteers in Chiang Mai are meeting tonight at the Hindu temple. There's something going on and then vegetarian Indian buffet afterward. I'm going to see if I can get an electric burner on my way, so we can do a little cooking in here.

Here's a view from the bedroom. The living room view is similar. I've seen already a lesser (I think) coucal and a red whiskered bulbul (the link has a great photo) and another bulbul like bird that had an red/orange chest and white neck. I couldn't find anything like it in the book.

I can sit at my desk here and be bird watching. At night we have interesting bird sounds. I recorded some, but realize I lost it. But that one has been back each night. We also get roosters crowing out there from about 4am on and sometimes the neighboring dogs get yappy. But it hasn't been disturbing for some reason. I saw a bunch of roosters around the closest wat this morning when I rode to work.

And I've learned there's another word for organic. This one basically means 'safe from poison".

Enough, I quick nap and then off before it's dark. I brought a rear bike light from home. I called Sak at the bike shop about buying a new one tonight on the way to the temple, but he's playing tennis, but he said to call on the way back, maybe he can open the shop for me. That's Thailand.

Overnight in the Farmers House

Monday, February 18, 10:50pm [I decided to leave blogger to do its own time stamping and that I would try to add my local time and date at the beginning of the posts.]

[You can see the details on the pictures much better by double clicking on them.]


After the fair we walked back to the house we were going to stay with the honor, who had whiskers on his chin and a warm smile with bright eyes. He opened the mats where we were going to sleep, pulled out some sheets and blankets, pillows, and giant green mosquito net. I was pretty wiped out and climbed into bed. But the wife brought out a tray of food at 11pm. You can see Doc and the Farmer eating, shot through the green mosquito net.

We laughed because Doc was cold and I said I was warm. We guessed at the temperature - it was 25C or 77F. Outside that sea of air we walk through hit us now and then with a cool current. But I got up first in the morning and you can see Doc still snoring in the mosquito net.

You can slso the wife (sorry I don't have her name and would probably not use it if I did - and yes, I did ask permission to post the pictures) cooking breakfast - the one in the video a couple of posts ago. Across is a picture of her grand daughter getting ready to ride her bike to school. I got a couple of her drawings which were pretty remarkable for a seven year old. I gave her the camera and she took the picture of Doc sitting alone at the table.



Finally there's a picture of one of the villagers sitting with Doc. M had collected surveys for Doc's doctoral dissertation about the villagers and their relationship with the new factories.




I took a short walk and got this rice paddy, the corn that is being grown for Cargill Coporation, this weed which they all said was medicinal, and the viscious guard dog on the bridge.


I'm really tired and need to go to bed. I'll do more about Friday morning in another post. But I do want to say that going out there was both personally and for work, a great thing to do. I have a much better understanding of the sophistication of the farmers as well as how well the organization is doing. Doc was clearly a favorite of many of the people we saw. You'll see in the next post on this the posters they had made which show their way of life, all the different vegetables and herbs they grow, what things the women of the village do, and even the seeds from all they grow.

As I close this off, J should be at the airport, even on the plane in LA for her long, long trip here. Just got an email from my mom who is back from taking her to the airport.

The Fair

The fair was put on to raise money for the school on whose football field the fair is being held. Everyone had to pay to get in. And then there was food and drinks. Lots of drinks.




We're in Northern Thailand so there is a lot of Northern food, including roasted beetles.

Doc is getting some of the food to bring back to our table.













This guy brought along his own stash of Shark brand liquor.











There were only a few fireworks and by the time I got the fireworks setting on my camera, they were over. So this shot gives you an alternative view.



In the background you can see the dance stage. The band played loud Thai songs, I wouldn't even hazard a guess what I would call the style. How about electified Thai. As part of the fund raiser, people paid Baht 10 per dance to go up on stage to dance. Each time masses of people went up the ramp for the privilege. The people around me were urging me to go up too and I agreed on the condition that Doc does as well. He said he didn't dance. I did have thoughts like, "I wonder how many people that stage can hold without collapsing?" and "Is it close to capacity?" Doc said that they have collapsed because there were too many people.







I generally do not use the flash, because it totally changes the atmosphere. The darkness of these pictures captures what it was like much better than a flash, even if you can't see all the details. But on request I did take some flash pictures too.

Note the red and blue ice buckets. One of my thoughts - sorry that's just how my brain works - was, who's going to clean all this up? This is a Thursday night. I asked if people had to go to work in the morning. They did. And would there be school? There would.






Doc got hold of the camera for a bit.





They kept persisting I should go up and dance. Being pestered to drink and dance and such things was common when I was a young peace corps volunteer, but the last few times I've been in Thailand people were told by my 'handlers' to not insist and they didn't. But here I was with farmers and factory workers who were, in some cases, drinking themselves sily - see below - I was the farang in the crowd. "I said I would dance if Doc dances." "He is going to dance." They said triumphantly. The picture with the squiggly lights gives you a much better sense of the night and the dancing stage than had I used a flash.



You think they've had enough? Back in the old days - yeah I know that phrase gets tiresome to hear - at least the places I was, the women, at the very most had a few sips of weak beer. If women's liberation is measured by drinking with the boys, some of these women were liberated.



Remember the blue and red ice buckets. Well, here are all the lids together, the water buckets together, and the buckets together the next morning.

When are we? Time Zones and the Blog

My blogger account is set for Alaska Standard Time. So the last post, for example, says on the top "Saturday February 16" and on the bottom of the post "8:28pm". But I'm in Thailand and I just posted it. Here it's Sunday February 17, a little after 2pm now.

What makes more sense? To just leave it? Or to change it?

Blogging Comments on Immigration and Education

I made a comment over at Independent Alaskan. It got fairly long and required a fair amount of time, so I thought I'd post my response here too. Independent Alaskan wrote about Gil Sanchez running for the Anchorage School Board. Rocknak commented:

Well, if this happens, I'm sure he will do whatever he can to make it easier for the illegal children in the district to make it through the system. Thank you NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND. Let's see how dumbed down our schools can get!

Here are some facts for taxpayers:

The ASD bilingual department currently serves about 4,700 students, plus there are another 2500 that "exited" the system last year who need to be monitored for two years. The current budget for this year is $11,015,820. It goes up to $11.77 million next year.

That 11.77 million would be a great help to the thousands of underpriviledged American children in this state.

It's pretty common for humans everywhere to divide people into us and them and then to pick facts that reinforce the how them are screwing over us. So here was my response to Rocknak:

Rocknak, here are some different facts for taxpayers:

The average home value in Anchorage is $275,999. We pay about 7/10 of one % of home value for ASD. I calculated this from the How to Read a Tax Bill page on the muni website.
So the average household that pays direct property tax (not people renting who pay it through their rent) pays about $1,855 a year to the School District. I would also note that a portion of the bilingual education money is federal money, not from Anchorage property taxes. So the $11 million that you cite, Rocknak, wouldn't all be available if you cut the program to use the money elsewhere.

Now, if you have kids or grandkids, and most households in Anchorage do, that's an incredible deal. The Northern Academy tuition in Anchorage ranges around $12,000 (varies by grade levels). I couldn't find the tuition for Anchorage Christian Schools on their website.

But even if you don't have kids, the community advantages of kids having a public education available are significant, even if we only talk about the crime rate if large numbers of kids never went to school.

And let's remember that when comparing costs of private and public schools, that private schools don't have to admit the most expensive kids (one's with various severe disabilities - physical, mental, social, or emotional). And when comparing test scores of private and public students let's also remember (in addition to not having to keep 'problem' kids) private schools have kids whose parents care enough to pay more for them to go to private school and parental interest is a big factor in how kids do in school.

And some more facts. Rocknak suggests that we should reallocate the money we spend on "non-American" kids to "American kids." The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that Anchorage households spend an average of $529 a year on alcoholic beverages. That's 28%, or more than 1/4, of what my calculations above show they pay for ASD through their property tax. But I guess Rocknak thinks that it's better to take the money from the bilingual program rather than dipping into his beer money. I'm not saying we shouldn't consume alcohol, but when we compare how money is spent, we often restrict our comparisons. Why just look at other ASD expenditures? Why not look at all the other uses of our money? According to the same BLS list, Anchorage per household expenditures on entertainment were $4,297, more than twice the national average, and more than twice what we pay ASD through taxes.

Another way of responding to Rocknak is to ask: what is the difference between an American child and a non-American child?

What causes someone born in the US to be worthy of special privileges that someone, say born in Brazil, shouldn't have? Maybe Americans shouldn't be allowed to listen to Bossa Nova music since they weren't born in Brazil. It's just an accident of fate that one human soul gets born in the US as opposed to somewhere else. A human child is a human child. Why should a selfish, lazy American citizen (no I'm not saying all Americans are like that, it's an example) have more opportunities than a public spirited, hard-working non-American? (Nor am I suggesting all non-Americans are saints.) I'm just pointing out that in terms of human rights, national boundaries are completely artificial and change frequently over history. The US took most of California, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona by military force from Mexico, for example. That raises other questions about who the illegal residents of those states really are.

And in your calculation Rocknak, you didn't distinguish between the American kids (legal US citizens born in the US) who get bilingual aid. I would guess that many if not most of the kids in the program are American citizens. So, the money spent on them IS money spent on underprivileged Americans. Though not all of them are underprivileged, just like the kids in speech or other special ed programs are not necessarily underprivileged.

The issue shouldn't be, take the money from these kids and give it to another group. The issue should be how do we pay for a reasonable education for all the kids. And it isn't just the kids that 'get' the education. We all get the collective benefits of kids who do well in school, feel good about themselves (and thus aren't as likely to cause trouble), and who can eventually make positive contributions to our community and society. If you don't believe that look at the economies of countries where kids don't get access to education.

Brief Thai lesson

This started out as a post on the village fair I went to Thursday night. But the intro seems worthy of a separate post all its own.

All Thais have nicknames. The person at work who took me to the village is nicknamed 'Doc'. Actually, I think I've spelled it 'Doc' in English because he's a doctoral student, but I don't think it means that in Thai. I'm not sure how it's spelled in Thai so it's hard to look up. I think (I started to write 'know' but I realize most things that people have told me in Thai, it's safer to think of as "might be') someone said his nickname starts with the letter ต rather than ด
The ต has a little dip on top and is pronounced as though you were saying Tea, but without breathing out a puff of air. If you put your hand in front of your mouth when you say Tea out loud, you'll feel a little air coming out. Linguists call this an 'aspirated' sound - because breath comes out. Now try to say it without the air coming out. (Unaspirated.) That's the ต sound. The ด is like the English letter D. The two letters are very similar, but not the same. Listen here to the difference. NOTE: Click on the yellow arrow NOT the link which will take you to jamglue.

Thai letter ต imported by AKRaven

Thai Letter ด imported by AKRaven

(In the second audio clip he says the Thai sound of the letter - is we would say "dee" - and then the word that starts with the letter that is used when kids are taught the alphabet. In this case the word is 'dek' or child.)

It can be pretty hard to hear the difference, but think how people learning English must feel. We have so many more different sounds and some with very subtle differences. This is no more difficult than the difference between, say, "rode" and "wrote". And if you listen to how people actually say these in a sentence, they often don't even say the sounds. The difference is really that you hold the 'o' in rode but you stop it quickly in 'wrote.' Or bead and beat. Or 'slip' and 'slipped'. We barely make the sound. For Thais who don't have a final 'd' sound or a 'pt' sound it is very hard to hear the differences.

Another subtlety of Thai are the loops in the letters. I didn't look closely enough and instead of ด, I typed ค, which is one of the aspirated K sound letters. Can you see the difference between the two letters?*

Attribution and Technical Note: I got the sounds from http://www.thai-language.com/ (You can go to each letter through the purple box on the left panel.) But to embed them in the blog so you could listen to them here instead of finding the right buttons on the website, I uploaded them to www.jamglue.com and then took the embed code and put that in my post. It is pretty incredible what tools are available to do this with. Thanks to the invisible techies who make all this possible.

*Difference between the letters: Look at the direction of the loop in the middle of each.

Breakfasts

There's lots to post about, I'll start slow. This was a typical breakfast at the Pooh Guest House for me. Rice soup with fruit and vegies. You could order eggs or whatever. Comes with the tab of about $30 per night. I think this was Thursday morning.
Friday lunch I was taken to a vegetarian center. If you only have one item with your rice the price is 0 Baht. I had several different dishes so it came to 25 Baht. The official exchange rate is about 32 Baht to the dollar.

This was Friday's breakfast which was sticky rice and four other dishes of greens and fish.
. Doc and I spent the night at this home in the village about an hour out of Chiang Mai. Below is the video of part of the breakfast talk. My understanding is that it is Northern Thai dialect, which is pretty close to Central Thai just pronouncing the words a little differently and some different words altogether.


[February 18: I was going to give a brief synopsis of the conversation at breakfast, but decided that given the Northern dialect and the rustiness of my Thai, that I better not. Good thing. I did get bits and pieces, but I put them together wrong. The guy was complaining about how the factories are not hiring workers over fifty now.]

Guest Post by Catherine Senungetuk

Since Guest Posts are hot these days and I'm already hot because I'm in Thailand, which is why I can't post about Anchorage, I thought I'd put up a guest post taken from an email from my friend Catherine Senungetuk.


February 14, 2007

This morning I'm meeting with Deborah Schildt about the possibility of collaboration... she's a filmmaker (maybe you saw her film about roasting little ground animals in Mongolia a year ago "How to Roast a Boo-Dog" I think it was called) we were both so inspired after seeing that performance [Bridgman and Packer] - she was at the same one and that's where we hatched this idea... I was so moved because I wanted to do something for my show in Cordova that was more multi-dimensional than a painting on the wall....

Joe has been attending the AK Forum on the Environment Conference, today he'll participate in an elders circle. I'll be seeing my acupuncturist and then checking out the new chocolate store in town that a friend has recommended.

Joe and I went to the opera Sunday - our neighbor's brother directed it and they had some comp tickets. Oh my goodness, I might be an opera fan now. It was the most amazing thing I've ever heard. I'm still awestruck. I didn't know the human voice could do those things. The set was also quite well-designed.

There are Short-Eared Owls out by the airport - we saw one on Sunday before we went to the opera. It's fun to see such a large bird, and they're fairly uncommon to have around in the winter.

Plans Change

Bing's grandmother is ill and he left for Petchbun last night. I got invited to lunch at a vegetarian restaurant, then we went to a bike shop, then to the one I'd gone to first and rented a bike. Back at work Doc invited me to go out to some villages tonight. Not sure what that means but it sounded like we might sleep over in the village. So I biked to the new place and put down the deposit. Then home. Quick shower and I'll go back in a few minutes.

House Hunting in Chiang Mai

Spent a little time each day looking for places to stay. Here's a glimpse of things I saw - first day in a car, second day walking to work and on the back of a motorcycle. There are houses and some turned out to be more like private dorms for students. Apartment houses. But finally someone in the office brought in a brochure that turned out to be the perfect place. Well, pretty good. It's in a quiet pocket, but a few minute walk to a main road. It's also about a 20-30 minute walk to my office. As you can see, I found my card reader to download the pictures.






Here's the place I liked, I've described it to Joan and she says to take it. So I'll go by today again. They are decent sized rooms, great windows, lots of trees around and view of Doi Suthep, the mountain next to Chiengmai.






They don't expect people to cook.



It's on the 4th floor, so we won't have to go to the gym, just up and down the stairs. It includes tv, internet. Electricity and water are extra. That makes sense since I'm sure farang (foreigners - actually I've heard people say "people from other countries" mostly rather than 'farang" this trip)tend to use a lot of water and electricity. Altogether it should be around $325 per month I'm guessing.

Mauer and Kizzia's Story on Seward

Jetleg had me awake at 4am yesterday and as I tried to go back to sleep, Monday's ADN story on Seward's part in the FBI investigations by Rich Mauer and Tom Kizzia wandered back into my consciousness from when I had quickly read the story on line a couple days earlier.

I have a couple of observations and a couple more details on the story.

Summary:

1. Rich and Tom did a fine job of reporting.
2. In this case the City of Seward public administrators (the career bureaucrats) courageously fought the decisions of the politicians, even putting their jobs on the line.
3. The case of Tylan Schrock again shows the corrupting power of power.

1. Rich Mauer and Tom Kizzia's good journalism.

Rich and Tom have been holding this story for a long time. I know Rich was interviewing people in the Seward city government back in August. I have two former students in Seward and I talked to one of them about all this back then. Rich was trying to get interviews. Would the student's job be in jeopardy for speaking to the press? The prospect was strong. The student had been warned by the then City Manager not to raise issues (just in the office, let alone the press.) So I only mentioned the story obliquely not wanting risk my former student's job. So while Rich had much of this story back in August, he held onto it until he got all the corroborating evidence - the documents he requested from the city, the key interviews (while the ex-student was already talking to the FBI, the student did also agree to talk to Rich.) And Rich has been respectful of the people he interviewed recognizing that they were taking risks just talking to him. So, all in all, this is some outstanding journalism that the people of Anchorage should be appreciative of. And it's part of a growing collection of pieces that the ADN, Rich particularly, has been offering the public on these topics. (I don't mean to downplay Tom's part in this, but I have talked to Rich about this story, but not to Tom.)

2. Public Administrators vs. Politicians

This is a distinction that is often lost on most people when they complain about government. It's really a story for another post. But I would point out it is the career politicians who do the daily work of government, who carry out the laws that politicians pass. And in the Seward story, it was the public administrators who strongly opposed the City's purchase of the earmarked property. What isn't mentioned in the story is that the public administrators put together a powerpoint presentation for the City Council that showed point by point the contractual relationship between the City and the Sealife Center and why, if I remember the details correctly, they shouldn't even allow the Sealife Center to purchase the property. The hope was that while enough Council members had personal interests in the property, at least the public would see what was going on when the powerpoint was shown at the meeting. But the Council decided to show the powerpoint in a closed session. At least one of the public administrators had foreseen this possibility and had distributed CD's of the powerpoint to some key Seward citizens, and the city manager approved posting it on the city website. The council (or maybe just the mayor) had it removed soon after, and the city manager was removed as well. The good news is that the fired city manager was elected mayor of Seward in the November election as were some less conflicted council members and the jobs of the public administrators who fought this are now much more secure again.

3. Tylan Schrock and the power of power

Tylan was also one of my students. He was very bright, very competent, and eager to make the world a better place when he graduated. In the Mauer/Kizzia story, Tylan is portrayed as the evasive director of the SeaLife Center, who appears to have arranged for the SeaLife Center to buy the property when the City of Seward said 'no', and who has recently announced his upcoming resignation.

I know Tylan pretty well. I was one of the people who recommended him for the job as assistant to the city manager at Seward when he graduated. And it was the right thing to do. Tylan had everything right and going for him. And he did such a good job for the City that they moved him over to the SeaLife Center because it belongs to the City and was not doing well. And since he moved there it has been doing very well. But it is important to note this line from the article:

The Alaska SeaLife Center has long been a favorite of Stevens, who has steered more than $50 million in federal funds to the nonprofit facility since it opened in 1998, including more than $3.5 million in the most recent appropriations bills. Schrock has been executive director for more than seven of those years.

There's no question that the SeaLife Center would be nowhere without the initial funding and continuing support of Ted Stevens' earmarks. (But I would also add that even with money an organization can be poorly managed. In fact having lots of money can make people careless - just watch the legislature. So while the money made Tylan's job easier, it alone didn't guarantee the success of the Center.)

My point, though, is that the Center was overwhelmingly dependent on Ted Stevens' earmarks. And remember that this earmark for purchasing McCabe's building was made in 2005. That was still a time when most Alaskan's were willing to look the other way while Ted was passing them money. It is easy to jump in and criticize Tylan, but it is also easy to see how difficult it might be to say no to person whose continuing financial support has made your organization possible.

That was how you played the game back then. It would be interesting to get a list of the people who have said 'no' to Ted Stevens when he was giving out money. Tylan didn't know the unofficial rules of the game were about the change. Neither did Anderson, Kott, or Kohring.

Now, we only have Mauer's story on this, so I don't want to say that Tylan is guilty of anything at this point (though Mauer's story is consistent with what I have heard myself). I'm not sure that he actually broke any laws. But let's assume that Tylan did knowingly arrange to use the earmark to buy the property through the SeaLife Center. My discussion above is only to understand why it happened, not to condone it.

The employees at the City of Seward had, in fact, said 'no' to the deal. They knew it was a bad deal and politically motivated. While the City of Seward is nowhere as dependent on Stevens as was the SeaLife Center, the employees themselves were risking their jobs in this action. And the City Manager lost his job. And, now, three years later Tylan has tendered his resignation (apparently, from what I've heard, not under pressure from the board) anyway. Doing what is right pays off in the long term.

As I watched the three trials last year I couldn't help but think about Pleasure Island in the movie Pinocchio.

Pleasure Island serves as a haven for wayward boys, allowing them to drink, smoke, and vandalize without recrimination. One of those boys is Lampwick, a tough bully of a boy that Pinocchio befriends. He smokes, drinks, plays pool, and then gets turned into a donkey. (from Duckman)

Luckily for Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket, his conscience, helps him escape that fate. (While googling on this I found an accounting ethics book that uses the story of Pinocchio to help talk about ethics.)

Juneau is a lot like Pleasure Island. It's full of temptations, and three of the wicked boys who were sent to Juneau have been turned into donkeys. If anyone has any weaknesses the lobbyists in Juneau, like Stromboli, the puppeteer on Pleasure Island, exploit them. So far, the people who have been tried and convicted have been among the exploited. Anderson and Kott and Kohring are not wicked people, though they all had issues that made them exploitable. Three of the exploiters - Bill Allen, Rick Smith, and Frank Prewitt (and to a lesser degree Bill Bobrick) - have all made deals with the FBI and the Prosecutors. Maybe that is why they were the exploiters and not the exploited. They were smart enough to see the writing on the wall. I keep hearing rumors that more indictments are due any day (and since I'm not getting the ADN at my doorstep here in Thailand, they may have already come - I better look online before I post this.) and am hopeful that the drug lords (in this case money and power were the drugs) will be among the indicted, and not just the addicts.

This whole culture of power and money, I think sucked Tylan into a situation where he didn't thnk he could say no to the people who had made the SeaLife Center, itself a worthy institution, possible.

Quick Update

Going to visit some of the villages today with Bing. Not sur what that means. I worked on my work plans yesterday - writing in details of the general plan AJWS gave me before I came. Mostly working on strategic planning and staff development. Also found a place I think we'll take. It just feels right and the location is good and the price is reasonable by ex-pat standards and amazing by US standards if expensive to my co-workers.

I misplaced my card reader so I can't post any picture until I find it or get a new one. Had lunch at Wat Rampoeng yesterday. Turn out to not be 'down the street" from work, but next door. Very peaceful place. And they apparently have a fair number of foreigners meditating there.

Note: The blog is on Anchorage time. In Chiang Mai it is Feb. 14, 8:10am. Happy Valentines Day. Joan will be here Tuesday if all goes right.

Work - Day 1

Awake early again. 4am. Yesterday Grib and I got to the offices at 10. It really isn’t very far out - 3 or 4 kilometers at most in a pocket of less urbanity just south of Chiengmai University. The office is among a cluster of NGO offices all related to sustainable development, rights of local people, etc. I don’t recall ever being with Thai activists who were self identified that way.

Everyone was great. Patient with my slow Thai, ready to answer any and all questions and to get me settled in as easily and quickly as possible.

Here are my immediate co-workers.



And an overview of what the organization is doing. The five things the project is focused on:

Land, water, Forest land, debt, and prices of products.







Had lunch with Bing who eventually revealed that he has an extensive English vocabuluary. Then we drove around the area looking for places for rent. The only place we actually went into would have been perfect except that it would qualify as an extreme ‘fixer upper.” We went back to the office and looked on the internet. A friend of someone they knew had two places for us to look at. One is in a brandnew (no electricity yet, the pool is “½ month away from completion” - my interpretation was it won’t have water till we are back in Anchorage) hotel these people own. The rooms are ready and beautiful, but it’s kind of far away and the neighborhood isn’t very exciting. They also showed us a house they own. Again, it was very nice its way, but Joan would be pretty isolated and I’d have a long trek to work.


Some of the new vocabulary I’m working on:


Coordinate
Federation
Natural Resources
Organic (the Thai word is the same as the Thai word for eagle อินทรี , with an extra letter อินทรีย์ . The pronunciation is easy to remember - “In Sea”)
Land Reform
Action
Support
Empowerment

Lazy Sunday

Yesterday was spent doing errands. I was able to plug into the modem at the Guest House front office directly this morning to post and check email.. The router for the wifi wasn’t working. Then I went off to do my errands - get Thai money, get a sim card and program for my Thai cell phone
that we bought last year, lunch, found a bike shop, but put that on hold, got a bunch of bananas, then came home. All this I did in a big mall that everything I needed with air conditioning. But I really hate these malls. The picture is where I bought the cell phone, one of about 50 similar little cell phone shops in the same location at the mall.




While things are very commercial, there are still hints of old Thai culture like this Wat (temple.)








This is a typical street scene. When the bicycles became motorcycles and then cars, the streets just weren't ready and pedestrians and bikes really get little consideration in the infrastructure.


Here's another temple I walked through on the way back to the Pooh Cottage Guest House where I'm staying.




Melissa, the volunteer who had moved out last night was back because she’d left her towel here. She told me a little about apartment hunting and showed me the apartment she’d chosen, about a five minute walk away. The street is an expat section with lots of high rise apartment/condotels in all stages of construction. Her room is a spare white hotel room like setup. The main attraction is a large swimming pool on the third floor. B5000 /month, or about $150. But it’s pretty barren - lots of concrete, very little green. I felt a little guilty, I guess I should have spent the day looking at apartments. But she lives in New York City and so she’s more intuned with that sort of activity. We’ll see what the people at my organization have in mind for me.

Here's Melissa's pool.


We agreed to meet at 6:30 and go to the Sunday Night market. The weather was comfortable in the evening and we walked around a lot and found a very plain Thai restaurant with good food in the middle of the market.

Today Grib picks me up at 9:45am to take me to meet the staff at my NGO (Non-Governmental Organization.) I'm staying a little vague my work relationship with these people is more important than blogging. I'll try to write about this in as much detail as I can without compromising confidentiality and general human trust.

Some Thai Headlines

Saturday's paper was with this morning's (Sunday) breakfast. Here are a few of the stories from The Nation.[Link is apparently to the current edition. As part of my internet addiction withdrawal program, I'm not going to pursue how to get the Saturday edition.]

Noppadon: Thaksin to come back before May

The foreign ministers says that overthrown prime minister is due back soon now that his party has won the recent election.

Thaksin's wife Khunying (like Mrs. not her name) Pojaman had said earlier that her hsuband would return in May to defend himself aginst charges of abuse of power...

Street racers complete 'shock therapy'

After five days of 'shock therapy' at the Baan Metta Remand Home, 74 teenage boys arrested for street racing [motorcycles on a main street in Bangkok] were yesterday relaeased into the embrace of their waiting parents.

"I'm very glad that I'm going back home with ou, Mum. I will obey what you tell me," one 17 year old boy...told his mother ....

Department of Juvenile Observation and Protection director-general...said shock therapy was aimed at improving youth's behaviour in the short time. The authorities instructed them in many activities to improve their discipline, life skills and moral ethics, including painting, listening to sermons by monks, studying laws and practising military drills.

"On the fifth day of the program, they looked completely different fromt he first day, when ti was obvious that they were serious and distraught. Now they look cheerful..."

Producers Irked over price cuts

[The government has identified 30 items to have price cuts]

Aids activists fear about-face by Chaiya

Paisan and others met with Chaiya [new health minister] to ask him not to revoke compulsory licensing on Aids medicine. During the meeting Paisan mentioned that he might need to take weedkiller if he lost access to the medicine. "Then Chaiya said he would send jan flowers," Paisan said.
Thais lay jan in crematoriums as they bid their last farewells to the dead.

This was on the first page of the paper.


Shooting Death - Police tale fabricated: Pornthip This is about a 'top forensic doctor' (she has hip spiked hair in the picture) saying the police had to be lying about how a Canadian tourist was killed.

Valentine Kits

Members of the World Bank Youth Club hand out roses and condoms in Bangkok's Siam Square yesterday in a campaign ahead of Valentine's Day to urge young Thais to refrain from unsafe sex.

"Teachers needed, not computers."


Corruption Scandal: Saprang blames his 'crooked' friends

Enough, I've got things to do.

Arrival in Chiang Mai

When I first arrived in Kamphaengphet many years ago as a 22 year old, many of the men asked me, leeringly, มา ถึง แล้วหรือ ยัง? Have you arrived yet? The slang meaning - have you gotten laid yet? Fortunately, they had taught us this slang before we got to Thailand so we were in on the joke, but it didn't stop people from asking and laughing hard. I have arrived in Chiengmai in the literal sense only. And no one has asked. I got picked up at the airport by Grib who is the Chiang Mai representative of the American Jewish World Service (AJWS) who we'd met last year when we were here and taken to the Pooh Guest house. By about two I was asleep and with a few brief sleepy intervals, stayed that way until this morning's breakfast.


View from my room



The wifi in the guest house isn't working so after a great breakfast of boiled rice soup, some Thai sweets, I'm sitting at the front desk with my laptop connected to the internet. Soon I'm hoping I will reduce this addiction. I have to get to an ATM for some Thai money and to a place to see if my I can renew the old simcard in the phone we bought last year when we were here. I start work tomorrow Grib said and have to look at a couple of housing options nearer the office. Joan should be headed for Seattle in a few hours - if I've got my dual time function on my watch working right - and then LA and should be here in ten days. I'm already missing her.

Scott Gant: We’re All Journalists Now

Attorney Scott Gant takes up two causes in this book.

1. The Supreme Court needs to better spell out the Constitutional role of the press - recognizing that the press has some unique rights, as government watchdogs, above those of individual free speech.
2. The dominant model of journalists needs to be broadened from 'professional who is employed by a print or broadcast organization' to the 'activity of reporting events to the world through any medium' (not exact quotes, I returned the book to the library before I left) - internet is the key focus here.

As a blogger I only began thinking (and blogging) about journalistic privileges when the trials I was blogging about suddenly allowed ‘journalists’ to bring cell phones and laptops into the courtroom, but not other non-attorney attendees. So this book’s topic has a lot of interest for me. I posted a brief snippet when I first checked the book out, and finally got it finished before I left. Waiting to be on jury duty helped me get through it. So let me post this while my brain is partly still in the US and my 'normal' life.

Gant is passionate about the need for special privileges for journalists, mainly for shield laws to protect them from divulging the identity of sources, but also for access to events and documents in their role as watchdogs for the public.

He recognizes, though, that it might be possible to win universal recognition of journalistic privileges he wants, but have it limited to a narrow definition of journalist, which would cut out bloggers and others. So, he is also passionate about reframing the concept of journalist from it describing a profession to describing an activity. This, then would include all people who are reporting with the intent of telling others what is happening. He would get rid of requirements of training and certification as a journalist, of percent of income received as a journalist, of employment by a traditional journalistic medium such as newspapers, tv, radio, magazines.

On the way he walks us through the legal history of press rights, pointing out that the Suprement Court has tended to lump press freedoms into individual free speech rights and thus not accorded the press any special privileges as the press. It is mainly state laws which inconsistently give some rights in some states, but not in others - particularly shield laws. Custom, too, defers privileges to the press - the White House, Congression, and Supreme Court all have special access and facilities for selected journalists.

He also recognizes that there are some counter arguments and tells us why his soutions outweigh them.

His best arguments (from my perspective) are:

1. The government shouldn’t be in the business of licensing the press. This concern is precisely why press rights are mentioned in the First Amendment. The biggest concern is that the government use this right to affect the content of journalism. But he does recognize there are some reasons to distinguish who is a journalist - particularly in situations where there is limited access, such as a courtroom.
2. While the Constitution was written when ‘media’ (a word that didn’t then exist) was, literally, a printing press, and access to a press to print one’s opinion was relatively easy, the world is different now. Most traditional newspapers are now owned by conglomerates, not by families. These conglomerates see their media holdings as a business, not as a watchdog, and that these conglomerates now use the media directly or indirectly as part of their marketing campaigns.
3. Thus, bloggers are more truly reflective of what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they put ‘freedom of the press’ into the US Constitution.
   

This is worth reading for those seriously interested in these issues, but be warned, it is repetitious. Most of it can be skimmed because he pushes the same points over and over and you are bound to read them even if you skip around. The legal history had the most hard information and least amount of opinion.

Even though he’s opposed to the notion of the government certifying journalists, he does talk about standards for journalists that relate to the activity of gathering information with the intent to report it. The real thorny question is the shield law question. Who should get the right to withhold information about criminal activity? If everyone can blog, at what point would attorneys advise their clients to start blogging so they got shield law protection? Like all the hokey religions that form so they can get a tax deductible status. (As I wrote that I wonder how many there actually are or whether I'm just repeating an urban legend. I couldn't find anything with a quick google on the topic. Here's one I found that's sort of related.) Gant at one points mentions that a journalist got the information with the intent to publish as one criterion. Though my first day in the courtroom was not with that intent in mind, I had been blogging, and it was a natural outcome of attending the trial.

I basically agree with Gant’s direction and pushing the idea of an activity rather than a profession. There already are, as he points out, lousy journalists who otherwise meet the standard criteria and outstanding bloggers who don’t. But he is also battling, as he recognizes, an uphill battle. I think these may be the first salvos and it will be a long hot battle.

In the meantime, I would push for an even more radical concept shift - that bloggers not worry that much about whether they become ‘mainstream journalists’ but rather push the boundaries of how one gathers and reports important information. Few of us are going to get called before grand juries and while the traditional media get information from the traditional places, we can look in other places instead. Meanwhile, the custom that has afforded journalists non-statutory privileges, the same will happen for good bloggers, and already has as some courtrooms and Congressional hearings with limited space have allocated some of that space to bloggers.

In Transit in Taipei - Happy Chinese New Year

We parked our van at a friends on the hillside - of course, 6 hours before moving it for two months, the snow plows come down our street to clear the berms. When I said it was lucky I was home and could move it, the guy said, "Yeah, otherwise it would have been towed." That's crazy. They give you no warning they're coming and you can't park in front of your house? But a project for when I get back. Here's the view on our way bck from the hillside.

The woman in front of me waiting to check-in at the Airport had flown up to Anchorage to catch this plane to Taipei and then was going on to Vietnam where her husband was in the hospital very ill. He couldn't even talk. When we got to the counter she was told she couldn't go because she didn't have a visa to Vietnam. She said she was told she could get one at the airport because of the emergency. But since she had no letter or anything, they said no.

I suggested she could go at least to Taipei and then figure out things from there. Though that was iffy since it's Chinese New Years, but they said ok. Inside the terminal, I was able to go on the internet and find out she could get a visa at the airport in Pnom Penh, Cambodia, which neighbors Vietnam. She has a friend there and that's where she's headed now.




The plane had red Chinese paper with black characters posted around the plane for New Years. And it was packed. But I had a good sleep by the window.



This was a 747 - no seat back videos or legroom. Here we are about 90 minutes out of Taipei.



I was able to switch my Taipei-Bangkok-Chiang Mai ticket to a Taipei-Chiang Mai ticket, but only here in Taipei. Here's the little internet oasis. My Macbook is on the ledge outside the room on the right.

It was 48F and raining when we landed.

[A little later: I didn't need to stand by the wifi booth because there's free wifi at the gate too. But there were some free computers available in there. So, Taipei Airport is a free wifi zone.]

And the Academy Award for Best Travel Agent goes to

Lynda McMahon of Navigant. Well, it's been a number of companies, reflecting the path of American businesses buying each other up over the years. It was about 1991 when someone connected me to Lynda to help plan a graduate class that studied Chinese Civil Service Reform in Anchorage, Hong Kong, and Beijing. Lynda has saved my tail and generally made my life easier ever since.

Think of it. A travel agent who is smart, cheeky, laughs at my bad jokes as if they were funny, and knows how get things done. I even got a call from an assistant to the President of Delta once to apologize for how they handled a trip. Lynda had gotten through to someone who got the complaint to the top. She also got me to Bangkok on that trip after Delta change my return from a 16 hour trip from Bangkok-Seoul-Anchorage to about a 36 hour trip through LA, Salt Lake City and an overnight somewhere at my expense.

And the last two weeks she did 50 little things to make my trip easier and faster. So, if you are looking for a fantastic travel agent, I owe her big time for all she's done over the years. Her number is 907 seven eight six three two two six. (If you call her, congratulate her on the Oscar and tell her Steve says thanks, thanks, thanks.)

And so I'm presenting the Oscar for life time achievement as a travel agent to Lynda McMahon.

And I did find the bird book, but not the extra battery. The plane leaves at 2:45am.

Almost Gone

Spent the day making lists of things to do before I go. Getting stuff out for the suitcase. Looking for things I want to take. The Birds of Thailand book is still missing as is my spare battery for my digital camera. But got things straightened out with my students and their thesis advisors and we met for dinner tonight. Prepped for the house sitter and the friends who are car sitting our van so it's out of the way when the snow plows come.

So, as much as I was tempted to write about Kohring's swipe at Sedwick I've resisted. All I can say is this: They started out with a long brief alleging all sorts of improprieties by the FBI in an attempt to quash the evidence collected in the search of his Wasilla office. Things like being under arrest in his office and not allowed to call his attorney or go to the bathroom. All of that was refuted by the prosecution in a brief and later in court. It was full of holes. I can't help but believe the same is true of this latest attempt. I sat through almost six weeks of trials in Sedwick's courtroom last year. This judge was the most patient, respectful, and fair person I've seen in a long time. And it never occurred that Judge Sedwick might be related to this Sedwick who he says was "worst political rival and enemy" until the end of the trial? How many Sedwicks do you know? I certainly would be asking questions if the judge hearing my case had the same name as my worst political rival and enemy. I wouldn't wait until a few days before my sentencing to bring it up.

I was in the courtroom for the closing arguments. I don't recall anything different about Kohring - that he appeared more agitated because of the presence of this worst enemy whose name is Sedwick. How much research do you have to do to find out that the judge and the former commissioner with the same uncommon name are related? I'm sorry, this just sounds so totally bogus to me.

If Kohring really wants to know who's taking advantage of him, I'd suggest he look closely at his attorney who's lifted over $100,000 from Kohring. How many more billable hours is this new little escapade? At one point Browne required that the prosecution bring every single FBI agent who monitored the tapes to fly to Alaska to verify the tapes. He was quoted as not caring about making the government go to great expense. (The attorneys in the other two cases waived this requirement and let one agent verify all the tapes.) There's a reason that most people who are indicted plea and never go to trial. It seems to me with a different attorney, Kohring might have saved himself the trial and a lot of money.

Anchorage Democratic Caucus - The Video

The previous post has pictures and commentary. This one is the video.




Pictures and video of the Fairbanks caucus.

Pictures of the Matsu caucus.

Jam Packed Anchorage Democratic Caucus

[Video in next post.]

I already had a suspicion that the Anchorage Democratic Caucus would be crowded. We've never really had a caucus before that had any impact. But this time we were on the media hyped Super Tuesday. People who would normally vote on a primary would be out. When I turned off Lake Otis onto Debarr, I began to wonder. I'm not usually on the road at 5pm, but things didn't move.



Five minutes later I was only a little further. Were all these people going to Begich Middle School for the Caucus? Then we had four or five more miles like this. No way. I followed the lead of some other cars and turned left before Costco and then got onto Bragaw and then the Glenn. Here things were whizzing along.



Until just after the 1/2 mile to Muldoon sign. Then we were back to a crawl. But I once on Muldoon it was easy to the Fred Meyer parking lot, and I found a spot and walked over a block to the school. .






It was a clear cold night and the mountains were spectacular, even if my photography isn't. It was 6:10pm. This normally 15 minute ride had taken over an hour. The caucus was supposed to start at 5:30pm. Well, they'd have to wait for everyone to get through the traffic.













This is NOT the school parking lot. These are fire lanes.






Finally got to the building and saw into a packed room.





Here are the people in the hallways.








Looking the other way. It was wall to wall people. There were lots of Obama and Hilary signs, but no signs to tell you what to do or where to go. People at the door were handing out registration forms. But I was already registered. I was supposed to get a blue card and then go to my district room. But this was the line to get a blue card. Someone said I could go to my district room without a blue card and sign in there. Where was my room? No one seemed to know. I wandered up and down the halls going into classrooms and asking what district it was. There was one map that showed the rooms and the districts. But it was only the second floor and mine wasn't on it.





Down at the end of the hall was another map that showed the room numbers, but not the districts. No one there had any idea. So I wandered back on the second floor (the first floor was too crowded to move.)







I made it to the gym where there was yet another mass of people. This is where the lines, if you can call them that, were headed. This is where people were getting blue cards and room assignments. But they were giving up. Someone had a mike and was telling us what room to go for what district. Finally. And we didn't need blue cards. When I got back down to the other side of the building, I wrote the name of my district and the room number on the map, but it was on plastic and my pen wasn't very good.



Once inside the room, packed with about 100 people or more, the loud speaker system started working. Here it was easy. We divided into Obama side, Clinton side, and uncommitted. People had also been allowed to write their names down on a Clinton or Obama sheet of paper and go. Not counting the people who signed up, we were 59 for Obama and 20 for Clinton. The uncommitted split 3 for Obama and 2 for Clinton. A few more stragglers added to the vote count later. It was about 7:40 now.









They were then going to pick delegates to the May Democratic convention in Alaska. I decided to go home. It was about 8pm.
And on the east end of town, a little chillier than when I'd gotten here. That's in Fahrenheit. It would be minus 21 C.

Despite the chaos, no one seemed at all upset. Everyone was excited. It was an event. I saw so many people with registration forms. You had to be a Democrat to participate. So people were either new voters, or switching from undeclared or Republican, or one of the other possible designations. Obama was clearly the source of lots of excitement, but there wasn't any animosity between the Obama and Clinton supporters that I saw.

Blog Ethics - Sex Sells and so does Victor Lebow

I always find surprises in the google search topics that get people to my site. Dennis at AlaskaReport (by the way check out their story on Don "Corleone" Young while you're there) recently shared that he has an entertainment section because that's what people want - along with stats showing Heath Ledger, Britney Spears, and other celebs being top hits. So I shouldn't be surprised with all the people googling Bambi Tyree. In the last 40 or so site views six were looking for Bambi from:
Sophia, Bulgaria
Miami, Florida
Las Cruces, NM
Cranberry Twp, PA
Philadelphia, PA
Spokane, WA

Do you think if her parents had named her Martha things would have turned outdifferent?

On the other hand 10% of the last 100 were still looking up Victor Lebow, including someone from Ankara, Turkey. If you got here looking up Victor Lebow, go here. While in LA I looked up Victor Lebow I found a Victoria who lived near my mom. I phoned her and after a number of calls to relatives "I hadn't talked to in 55 years" she said that the Victor Lebow who wrote about American Consumerism is not related to her family. But the Victor Lebow from Wichita, KS whose picture I posted is a relative. So that confirms my suspicion they were two different people.

Also had someone from the US House of Representatives look at yesterday's chart of Blacks in Congress, and finally, someone got here googling:

"Carnival cruises send passenger flowers."

Media Ethics Note: Sometimes people do send me links to stories they'd like me to link, like the Corleone story. If I do link to these stories it's because I think they have something worthwhile. And I'm not above critiquing the stories people pass on to me. This doesn't happen a lot, but I mention it here because I think people should see what happens behind the scenes. Is it unethical for me to link to that story? No. Does the fact that AlaskaReport sometimes links to me a problem? It could be if I posted their stories because I thought it would keep them promoting my stories. This is the beginning of ethics creep. It starts out innocent enough, all with good intentions, but if one isn't careful, one's judgment gets lazy. I'm not a politician and I'm not making policy decisions based on favors others do for me. But readers should know if the newspapers, tv shows, or blogs they read are pushing stories or omitting stories because they might affect their advertising.

I say this because a lot of blogging chatter is about how to pump up site views. Trading links among sites is a popular means. I don't think this matters much for personal blogs among friends. But it does for blogs that edge into journalism. At the very least, there should be disclosure. So, let me disclose that last week when Alaska Report linked to my speculations about why Murkowski left the US Senate to be governor of Alaska, my site views for that day more than doubled. But I linked to the Don Young story above because it adds a few tidbits to what we know.

Obama or Clinton?

The US voters are making history with the Democrats virtually assured that either a man with African heritage or a woman will be their candidate for president. Tomorrow night is the Democratic caucus in Alaska. From what I hear, there will be a large turnout in Anchorage, possibly even stretching the capacity at Begich Middle School for the Anchorage caucus. But which candidate is the best? I've boiled this down for me to three criteria.



General Electability in November

Are Americans less racist or less sexist? Or put another way, are they more willing to vote for a man with African heritage or a woman? Blacks, with 9% of the seats in the House of Representatives reflect their 13% of the US population much better than do women with 16.1% in the House. But in the Senate, where whole states, not gerrymandered districts ,vote there is only one African-American - Barrack Obama - for 1%. But women have 16% of the 100 seats. That still means 84% men in the Senate and House.


[2/5/08: Added the missing decimal point Ropi pointed out in the comments. This post was postponed because I had trouble finding reliable numbers for blacks in Congress. That story is in the previous post. A good webstie for information on women in politics is Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.]

David Broder has an interesting article on districts where women win.

The scholars could find no significant differences in terms of geography or social characteristics between those districts that elected African American men and African American women. Almost without exception, they were heavily Democratic, urban and working class.

But the picture is very different for white women running for Congress. "Female Democratic House members tend to win election in districts that are more liberal, more urban, more diverse, more educated and much wealthier than those won by male Democratic members of the House," they write. "They come from much more compact, 'tonier,' upscale districts than their male counterparts."

The fact that a woman and a man of African heritage are the finalists for the Democratic nomination says a lot about the changing demographics of the United States. I we are in a period of flux - the old rules are starting to dissolve, but I don’t know that the new rules are in place yet either. Will enough voters ignore gender and race to elect and man of African heritage or a woman as president?

Stand on Key Issues

I don’t think they are too far off on the issues, though Obama focuses on the fact that he never supported going into Iraq and Clinton did. But it isn't simply the issues we face now, but the issues that the President will face once in office - the 9/11's and Hurricane Katrina's that weren't anticipated. Which candidate has the imagination to find better ways to do things?

Ability to get things done

No matter how great their policies are, without the competence to get them through Congress, they have nothing.

Hillary Clinton surely has learned a lot of lessons in the eight years Bill was President. As a former first lady and second term Senator she knows a lot of people both in the US and overseas. Of all these people, how much does she owe them and how much do they owe her? More particularly, which people does she owe? The Clintons also have a high negative rating among a sizable minority of people. This could cause the kind of constant sniping Bill Clinton faced during his eith years. These are people who will always be trouble. On the other hand, Bush has much higher negatives and has managed to get his way a lot of the time.

Barrack Obama has less experience and presumably fewer connections, and fewer people he owes. He is inspirational, but you also need administrative mechanics to make things happen. His campaign shows that he is able to attract competent people to help. Obama is able to articulate people's hopes for a better way. That can be powerful for a while, but then some tangible things need to be achieved.

Either of the two will have to attract competent teams to develop good policies and to get them passed by Congress. It seems to me that Clinton’s strength and weakness here are her connections to the existing power structure. Obama’s strength and weakness are that he has fewer of the ties and can take us in a new direction.

May the best...candidate... win.

How Many Black Congress Members?

[Dec. 2, 2008 Update: Here's an update to the chart and this post.]

The quick answer appears to be 40 voting members and 2 non-voting members in the House of Representatives and 1 US Senator (Obama.). But I'm not completely sure.

You'd think this would be easy to find on the web. Someone should have a quck number. David D. Kirkpatrick wrote in December 2005

The number of blacks in Congress has grown to 43 from just 13 at the founding of the Congressional Black Caucus in 1969. But although the 2006 election elevated some caucus members to prominence, it did not add to the group's numbers. Its 43 members still make up less than 10 percent of the House and 1 percent of the Senate. By comparison, blacks make up about 13 percent of the population.

Encarta and Wikipedia both have tables of all the Black congress members ever. You have to go through the lists and separate out those whose dates of service (for Wikipedia) end in -present or (for Encarta) - . EthnicMajority has 42, but two are non-voting and one is dead.

But the two lists don't match. Wikipedia has five more people than Encarta. The Congressional Black Caucus website lists 43 people in the Black Caucus, but that includes Senator Obama (the only black Senator), two non-voting members (DC and Virgin Islands), and one deceased whose seat apparently won't be filled until the November 2008 election.

Going through the three lists (Encarta, Wikipedia, Black Caucus) I've come up with a total of 40 black voting members members of Congress. (DC and the Virgin Islands each have one non-voting black member. ) It's quite possible I missed one or added one. I'm not sure quite what it means that this number is not readily available. Below is the chart I came up with.

[August 20, 2008 - Stephanie Tubbs Jones suffered an aneurism and passed away today]

Mauer's Thorough Piece On Allen Rumors

I'm leaving for Thailand Friday and I've got to let go of some of this compulsive blogging, but I did mention the Hopfinger/Coyne article in the Press the other day. It was first. But Rich Mauer's piece in today's ADN is a much more solid and informative report. Mauer did find a Fed who could say that they had asked the APD to drop the investigation.

[US Attorney Frank] Russo acknowledged "there were allegations along the lines of his (Allen's) involvement with Bambi Tyree," but said he asked Vandegriff to suspend the Allen investigation for purely practical reasons: The Boehm case was complex, with dozens of witnesses, and Boehm himself had a high-powered, three-attorney defense team that fought at every opportunity. Nearly 1,000 documents were filed, and that was in a case that never went to trial.

"We said, 'Hey, why don't we put this aside until later. We have enough to focus on,' " Russo said. That was his only concern, he said.

I realize that people's sexual behavior is an ever surprising revelation and that we should never dismiss things as impossible (how long did people not believe stories about priests?), but if I had to bet, I'd put my money on the story that says Allen was Tyree's friend and he felt obligated to watch over Tyree's kids after Tyree died. That's consistent with with the man I saw testify in the Kott and Kohring trials.

I could be wrong here, but I think this story line isn't going anywhere. But the article is important in that it fills in a lot of gaps that people were filling in with all sorts of speculation.

10 Below

I was all ready to run early this morning. The sun wasn't over the mountain yet, but it was light. But I foolishly checked the thermometer. And the storm door was covered in ice crystals. Maybe if it gets up to five I might go run. After three days in a row in LA, I'm itching to be out moving again.

[The details are better if you click on the picture.]

The Noodle Shop is now Yak and Yeti

The Spenard building that housed the old Korean Noodle Shop, a wonderful place to go, that closed a year or two ago now hosts Yak and Yeti, a new Himalayan restaurant that the ADN has already reviewed. Last night some of the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer in Anchorage met there for dinner. It's been nicely redecorated, the service was cordial, and the food good. We were warned to get there early (5pm). Good advice because by 6pm there were ten or 15 people waiting to be seated. Since we were taking up that much room ourselves, we left a little earlier than we would have.

Evening Sky Out of LA

A couple of views out the window before it got dark Friday.

Mom's January flowers

LA may have looked so ungreen when I flew in because it is ...January and lots of the trees are pretty naked. One forgets that about LA because there are so many other trees and bushes that don't lose their leaves. here's a sample or what's blooming in my mother's yard right now

Eating Indian and Bosnian in LA

I've meshed two pictures of my mom at Pradeep's Indian restaurant in a two story strip mall on Washington near Marina Del Rey. It was nice to sit out in the sun, though even with the glass shield, the breeze was a little chilly by the end of lunch. That was Wednesday.

Friday, on the way to the airport, we went to a Bosnian restaurant in another strip mall, this time on Overland near Pico. I'd found it on a blog that highlights good, interesting, little restaurants in LA.




I don't recall ever eating at a Bosnian restaurant call Aroma and it wasn't until last night at SeaTac with eating with my daughter and telling her about the Bosnian immigrant picture I'd posted that I began to wonder whether my brain had perked up at "Bosnian" because of the picture and description I'd read and posted. Any way, it was very good. And we were snuggled into a little corner with nice warming sun as a group of men nearby had a very animated conversation in what I assumed was one of Bosnia's languages. I had the Burek, sort of like a calzone made of phylo dough. Mine had spinach inside. I took one to go for my daughter.



And this doesn't really fit anywhere better than it does here. But at the 99¢ Store, they've kept all the prices at 99¢. But now instead of a dozen eggs for 99¢, you get half a dozen according to my mom.

Venice Beach Spiritual Center

This center is free. Well, if you drive you have to pay to park. But for walkers and bikers there's no charge.

This is one of the places I go in the world to remind me who I am and to get reconnected with the earth. Along this strip of California beach I learned the rhythms of the ocean and spent much of my childhood and young adulthood. The power of the these waves has as much hold on me as the mountains and forests of Alaska.

Run to Venice Beach

Just about two miles from my mom's house is Venice Beach. So here's the halfway point of my run down Rose to the beach. It's early Friday morning so all the hustle and bustle of Venice Beach - the booths, the bikes and skaters, not yet there. The rest are pictures as I complete the return trip.






This funky old neighborhood right up against one of the world great beaches - lots of sand, good surf - is still a mix of all kinds of income groups. The buildings are still mostly old. I think this neighborhood shows the positive effects of Prop 13 which froze property taxes back in 1977. While the freeze seems to have hurt infrastructure, the University, and other public programs and caused real disparity issues between people who have lived in their homes a long time and newer buyers, here it seems to have allowed people of modest means to stay in their homes while the value of their coastal property soared. If they hadn't had the freeze, many of the people here would not have been able to afford the proerty taxes as land values so close to the beach went way up.








The values have tempted a lot of people to sell and there are lots of fixed up places and totally torn down and rebuilt places. And Main Street has become a pricy shopping spot.







But the people I pass are not wealthy people by a long shot. But they do live near the beach which is a spiritual wealth. Many beach communities have no place for the people who live here and that, I think, is a positive by product of Prop. 13. I was running and I didn't feel right taking pictures of the many colorful looking folks, so you'll just have to imagine.


This new condo sign caught my eye. I'm 90% sure this is where the Pioneer Bakery used to be. There was agreat little shop that sold wonderful bread here at reasonable prices, but it was a small part of the bakery that used baked bread for the whole Pioneer Bread Company and it always smelled good here. This should be called the Pioneer Condos and they should have a little bakery - including the aroma of fresh bread - on the grounds.






A lot of places have just been spiffed up like this one, but the building is still relatively modest by Southern California beach standards.



Now I'm passed Lincoln and nod to this lady caring for her garden as I did the last two days and whenever I'm visiting my mom.






This whole area was swamp when I was growing up here. Just small dirt hills, among wetlands with opportunities limited only by our imaginations. In fact, Rose didn't go through then. Now it's a public golf course - certainly much better than more houses - and relatively ordinary people play golf here.




And now I'm close to Walgrove and almost home. I love the smell of the eucalyptus trees here. I've got a little bowl of leaves at home that I can sniff whenever I need a quick trip to LA.

LA was definitely warmer than here

The sun IS shining and it is above 0 F (it's 6). Let me catch up on some of the LA pictures. Flying in on Tuesday - lots of puffy white clouds but otherwise crystal clear. Here's the Pacific just off LA as we turn in to swoop over the city.









The land is covered with whipped cream clouds. A bit of beach shows through the clouds.







I was struck by how little green I could see. It was all roofs and streets from the air. Except for a couple of parks or golf courses or cemetaries.

Tree Cutting - Another Perspective

When my family moved into this house in the late 1950s, I was taller than the tree (foreground on the right of the picture with the white tape.) Now the trees make a canopy over the street and wreak havoc with the sidewalks and the driveways. The roots cause the sidewalks to lurch up in strange ways.





My parents have paid for the driveway and sidewalks to be repaired a number of times.. When the city asked my mom recently if she would give permission to have it removed, she said yes. She doesn't walk on the sidewalk any more because she's afraid of falling. Here you can see the newest bulge - it hasn't been that long since my mom had to pay for the old sidewalk to be repaired. It had sharper upthrusts and big cracks.


I have mixed feelings about this. The street has been transformed from a barren new subdivision into a tree covered oasis. But my mom's tree does seem to lean way over into the street. I suspect it makes sense to take out a few trees at a time and plant new ones that won't have quite the root problems. Let them grow, and slowly replace them all gradually. That would keep the flavor of the street, and allow for a gradual change over time. We'll see. This is the only street in the subdivision that I know of to have this particular kind of tree.





But when I came back from my run, I saw there was a sign on the tree. I guess the execution is not yet a done deal. The neighbors may have a say. (Apparently one other neighbor also agreed to have their tree cut down.)