How is the Alaska Redistricting Board Like the Pakistani Government? Either They Are Incompetent or They Are Intentionally Concealing

The Alaska Redistricting Board has its final public hearing Friday May 6, 2011.

Where?  Anchorage Legislative Information Office (LIO) 714 W. 4th Ave Room 220.
When?   Presenting plans from 9am-12am.
               Public testimony from 2pm- 6pm

NOT IN ANCHORAGE?  You can go to your nearest LIO office or

listen to the Audio-Stream at: http://alaskalegislature.tv.

Alaskans with no access to an LIO may testify via the toll-free number 1-855-463-5009.


But how would anyone know this?  As of 10pm Thursday May 5, it's very hard to find on their website or their Facebook Page says nothing is scheduled.   Let me show you.

Double click to enlarge and sharpen all the images.

 

 Here's what I see when I open the page on my laptop.  Pretty picture.  But information would be nicer.  I have to scroll down to get that.  

Double click to enlarge and sharpen

This is their main page.  The last news item (today is May 5) was on April 13.  Now if you work really hard and read all the fine print there are two places on the right where you can get a pdf link to a five page document which has tomorrow's meeting on the bottom of page 3 and top of page 4.  Why can't they just post it clearly on the first page?

Are there other pages on their website you can find this more easily?

FAQ's, almost 2/3 of the way to their deadline, are coming soon.

 

[Again, double click to see it clearly.]  In the Media Center tab we find out their last press release was March 8.

Their last public notice was April 12 and it takes you to the state public notice page for an old public notice.

 

Their calendar page has a small notice and when you click on the morning part you get this pop up window that gives you the time and says Alaska Legislative Information office.  And there's a map link.

It gives the Juneau office address.  (The physical meeting is in Anchorage, but it is available statewide at LIO offices.)

Well, maybe it's on their Facebook page. 

 Good try.  There's even something only 15 hours old, but nothing I can see about the May 5 meeting.  Let's try the Events page.

You have no upcoming events!!

I happen to know that there's one more place to look - the State of Alaska public notice webpage. 

At first I didn't see the board listed.  I had to go through it again before I found it.  And I clicked on it. 

It says April 24, 2011, Statewide Teleconference.  But it's now May 5.  I'll click it anyway.

And BINGO! I'm rewarded for my patience.  Let me get out my reading glasses. (You'll notice I've already made this extra large - it bleeds into the side panel.)

Before March 22, I'd never ever been to the State Public Notice Website.  I  didn't even know it existed.  But on that day I asked Board Chair John Torgerson how they were planning to let people know about the meetings.  And he told me about this website.  You can see and hear for yourself.  I also asked if they were going to put any notices or ads in newspapers.  You can see in his body language as well as hear his words in the video.

This is 2011. Government agencies have learned a lot about how to educate the public about what they are doing and how to participate in the process.

The Department of Transportation hires consultants to help them set up meetings for the public where they walk people through maps and models so people can see how roads are designed and where they are planned so that citizens can give them useful information about how the project will impact neighborhoods and ways it could be improved for everyone's benefit. I went to one about Tudor and Lake Otis and another about the Seward Highway last fall.

I don't see anything like that happening here. And this isn't the first time their website and Facebook page didn't have information about an upcoming meeting. Almost exactly one month ago, on April 4, I had a post Is The Redistricting Board Hiding? which found almost exactly the same problems as today.  The staff made all the necessary updates the next day when I pointed this out.  But really .  . . again?

GW Bush said something about being fooled once . . .  

This is a board whose job is highly political and from the git go, people assume that because there are four Republicans and one Democrat,  the Board is going to try to draw the lines to favor Republicans.  Politically gerrymandering is against the law according to the board's attorney.  So not being as open as possible only raises those suspicions about what they are trying to hide.

People are speculating whether the Pakistani government was incompetent and didn't know that for five years Bin Laden  was living within spitting distance of the Pakistani West Point  or did they know and just not do anything about it.

I can't help but wonder if the Redistricting Board is incompetent or intentionally making it as difficult as possible for people to know where the meetings are.

In part, it doesn't make sense to hide.  The various groups with the most stake - the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, and several other politically active groups - all know how to find the board.  Not making it really clear on the website only discourages the general public who don't have enough information to make too much trouble anyway. 

What Bush Couldn't Do in Seven Years, Obama Does in Two - Bin Laden Reported Dead

Just got back from a bike ride and was about to delete my ThaiVisa news feed when I saw the words:

U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to announce on late Sunday evening that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has been killed in Pakistan, nearly 10 years after the devastating attacks of September 11.

The White House confirmed that Obama would hold an unprecedented late-night news conference, but gave no details. All the major news networks in the United States cited sources saying that Bin Laden had been killed.

According to Fox News, Osama bin Laden was killed over a week ago by a U.S. missile in Pakistan. CBS News, NBC News and CNN also said that Bin Laden's body is in possession of the United States.

The cynic in me is wondering how the right, particularly the crazy right, are going to deal with this.  Let's see.  GW made it his mission to find and kill Bin Laden.  The BBC quoted Bush on Dec. 14, 2001:

"We're going to get [Bin Laden] Dead or alive, it doesn't matter to me." 12/14/2001 [32]

But by the time he left office seven years later, he Bin Laden neither captured nor dead.

The Kenyan, Muslim, socialist president (as some on the right like to characterize Barrack Obama) managed to do the deed in a little over two years. 

Nixon's attorney general used to say, "Watch what we do, not what we say."  Good advice then and now.  Bush said.  Obama did.

Clearly this is a huge symbolic event, and symbolism is everything.  But how much actual physical threat was Bin Laden these days?  I don't know.  And how will the symbolism play in the Muslim world?  We'll see.

At least former President GW Bush handled it well:

This momentous achievement marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001.

"The Air Conditioned class has very little in common with the sweating masses"

A Muslim friend from that part of the world emailed me a link to the recent NY Times article about the CIA employing Afghan President Karzai's brother and prefaced it with these comments:

How simply it works: pay a collaborator to keep the insurgency going so that the issue is alive (central asian energy, China / Russia encirclement ...) and the new Great Game is played at the cost of 600 American lives this year alone... And you need not pay for the insurgency which sustains itself from the opium trade. The Taliban insurgency legitimises the West's occupation of and war on the poor of Afghanistan.

What this story points to is what's going on in Pakistan. The Military top brass and the political elite are in cahoots with the likes of CIA, et al whose agenda for the region they have adopted as their own in exchange for $1.5 billion a year [the actual amount is substantially more, of course]. The Air Conditioned class has very little in common with the sweating masses and have no choice other than be the accomplice of the ruling clique. That in essence is what is going on there.

[Note: I asked my correspondent what was meant by "war on the poor of Afghanistan" and the response is at the end of this post.]

We'd already had glimpses of that relationship in Pakistan in George Crile's book, Charlie Wilson's War. If you saw the movie, that was more like musical comedy whereas the book was a very readable, but also well researched and fact rich look into what happened in the 1980s. For some other sources on this topic see Tomdispatch which makes my point about the movie, but stronger:

Open Steve Coll's aptly titled book, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, at almost any page and you're likely to find something that makes a mockery of the film Charlie Wilson's War.

The Times story begins like this:

Brother of Afghan Leader Said to Be Paid by C.I.A.

By DEXTER FILKINS, MARK MAZZETTI and JAMES RISEN
Published: October 27, 2009

KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House...

For the whole Times article go here.



Response to the question about "war on the poor":

What I meant by the "war on the poor" is the simple statistic provided by some international article: $233 billion on the war effort and $1.5 b.on humanitarian aid. In the last three days, Hillary has changed her ways and actually engaged with the people of Pakistan by visiting a saint's shrine and engaging with students at a university rather than returning after talks with the President. She has dished out a billion dollars in Pakistan over three days (already committed but symbolically given out at universities and the like).

What I mean by the war on poor is that "collateral damage" is almost always the poor. The drones and their super efficient missiles rarely ever kill the rich. The immoral leaders of our wretched land have such rosy lives ...even in their death they have tens of doctors to let their soul out softly. Robert Mugabe is said to have a team of Chinese doctors permanently settled in Harare to give him aphrodisiacs at age 86.

As a former Finance Minister of Pakistan (and a great intellectual at Columbia Mahboobul Haq whose Poverty Curtain was akin to the drawing of the Iron or the Bamboo curtain across the developing world) once remarked privately (and told to me personally by the Minister's teacher): "Sacrifices are always paid by the poor...and thanks God I am not poor)

While million dollar tanks or hummers roll by and while the million dollar planes bomb the hell out of all, the poor have no running water or sanitation...

So all wars are essentially against the poor whose leaders are already on the payroll of the UFOs. [Unidentifiable Foreign Organization.]

At the end of the day, the world is about winners and losers. Someone makes money at the expense of the others. Although I espouse an abundance mentality (i.e. that there is enough for all of us if we just shared it fairly), the human race is about a hundred or so Warren Buffets controlling so much wealth that it exceeds many national economies. This imbalance means that someone's wealth comes at someone else's expense. Every time that a Nike shoe is bought in the US, Nike and Wallmart make x number of dollars to add to their overflowing tills (their shareholders make money) - but do the Indonesians or the Pakistanis who produce those shoes get a fair deal - or for that matter do the Wallmart employees get a better rate because their employer is better off. No their wages are determined by that immensely creative contraption of Mr. Adam Smith: the invisible hand of the market. As someone said, a sucker is born every minute: so for every fat banker there a thousand "sub-primes" and their foreclosures who have paid for flabby middle parts.

Empires are not built form nothing. In past ages they were built from the blood and bones of the vanquished, now while the poor buggers remain alive they continue to provide producers with their muscles and captive markets. [You must have heard of the Fair Trade Label whose coffee is five times more expensive than the Maxwell House on our tables ..because they pay Ethiopian traders five times what the MNCs [MultiNational Corporations] pay].

In the process of creation and consumption of wealth, some people create more than they can consume and others have to consume more than they can produce - i..e they are too poor to provide for two meals. What happens to that wealth? They invest to make it produce more wealth ...from where.

Money is not created out of thin air. So when the US spends on Mr. Karzai to get results it wants, Mr. Karzai also goes out to make his money - from whom. The drug lords who make their money from the addicts of Kabul - and New York. Technically, these addicts are rational actors but are they really? What about learned helplessness of the slaves - now called African Americans.

Midnight Soapscum Year 2 Episode 2 - Live Original Stage Serial in Anchorage

[If you want to avoid my way too long and highly tangential intro, you can go straight to my comments on the performance.]

Where else can you see live stage serials? I'm sure they must be out there, but Google didn't help. I did find videos of Pakistani stage shows - the Urdu language shows didn't work, but the Punjabi ones did. But I'm not sure these are serials or television or live stage.

I found a blog post about writing in serial form, even writing a serial on her blog, but despite the post title "Writing on Stage: Coming to terms with serial writing" I couldn't find any stages in the post.

And then I got this:

STAGE 4: CREATING A SERIALS PREDICTION & ISSUE
Now that Horizon knows how many copies of a serial you take, how often the serial should be claimed and who your vendor is, you can now create a prediction pattern and set an issue to begin the prediction pattern with.
1. Use Item Search/F2 to bring up the item search box and search for the relevant journal.
2. Send to/F10 the title to ‘Serials Control’.
3. Ensure the correct copy for your location has been selected and click the Prediction button located along the bottom of the window

Then there's Todd's Serial Blog and his other blog Todd Gault's Serial Experience. Both seem to be about movie serials.

I found a post by a young Indian actor looking for work on Cinechance that seems to be an electronic classified section for actors to find work in India.

About Myself :

hi guyz ,m vikram frm delhi.m 21 yrs of age nd graduating. i hav worked in serials for dd "do behne" , & "kabhi dhoop kabhi choan" both directed by reputed director "mr shiv kumar".also done one ad film for india tv. i love to act nd travel..........[emphasis added][And before you make fun of his written English, his bio says he also speaks Hindi and Punjabi]

And I learned from StageNews that

The BBC’s drama production department has announced a restructure of its senior staff, with head of series and serials Kate Harwood promoted to the role of controller of series and serials.

But that's television and radio.


I also learned that there is a software called live theater:

Live Theater 1.2 description
Live Theater - with the help of the software Live Theater TM you will be able to arrange the live broadcast from theater, TV etc. to a wider range of the Internet audience.

It is highly recommended to use broadband Internet connection for using Live Theater.

Here are some key features of "Live Theater":

· Broadcasting of live streaming video over Internet from any possible external video signal sources (video camera, web camera, video capture card etc.).
· Re-broadcasting over Internet of any source of TV signal, digital and analog.
· Broadcasting of the prerecorded video files.
· The areas of use are not restricted by the above mentioned. Live Theater can be used for any other purpose of brodcasting [sic] streaming video over Internet.
· The main advantage of Live Theater is ability of broadcasting of high-quality video without purchasing the expensive hardware and password protection from watching by an unauthorized user.

One problem I had with 'live theater' was that it monopolized the google hits for that search term.

So why all this esoteric trivia? Because I was trying to find out how unique Christian Heppinstall's Midnight Soapscum production at Out North is. Just because I can't find anything about live theatrical serials doesn't mean someone isn't doing them. After all, I didn't find Soapscum googling variations of stage/theater/serials/ etc. either. But given the obstacles to producing a play a week, I bet it's not happening too many places.


Christian's first run of Midnight Soapscum was a live, theatrical serial about a centenarian Russian emigre and her porn studio empire in San Francisco and it first ran over a couple of months in Spring 2007.

And now it's back - five new episodes of Midnight Soapscum. This time the subtitle is: Goes To Hell.

Just the idea is pretty amazing. Live, original episodes, performed weekly, with local talent. Christian's cranking out an hour and a half of material a week! And it's good! It moves along, it's funny, and the acting is first rate.

Think of this as Saturday Night Live as a political sitcom performed on stage before a live audience. No broadcasting. No huge budget.

Christian not only writes and directs Soapscum, he also stars as Svetlana Smirnov. That's him as Smirnov in the poster. He uses the episodes to comment on a wide variety of current issues and personalities. [Update: Christian emailed me to say that he's not directing this time. Jon Minton is. Sorry Jon.]

This year's incarnation takes place days before the 2008 election and the focus is on whether Smirnov is going to support Proposition 8. Characters include, besides various porn actors from the studio, Marie and Donny Osmond, Todd and Sarah Palin, a terrorist chained in the basement who turns out to be Osama Bin Laden, Barack Obama, four amazing aliens, and a slew of others.



Here, the Palins are plotting. . . well, I can't quite remember what they were plotting. The script takes so many twists and turns. The guy in the tie is Obama.









The cast is so big they could have a full house even if there was no audience. And I suspect they'd have almost as good a time without an audience. The second person in red with the two story blond wig, sitting above the cast on the right[left - somewhere between third grade and a couple of years ago I knew the difference between left and right], is NOT Svetlana, but the narrator who keeps the audience appraised (and well behaved) of what all is happening between scenes. She also had the list of all the characters and named them before and after the show. But I didn't write them all down and there was no program.


But is it any good? The acting is good and considering they didn't have a lot of time to learn the script - and they have a new one next week - I don't remember any flubs. The jokes would be funny to liberals but it might get tedious for conservatives. The people we were with thought it was a bit too long - partly, I think because it doesn't start until 10:30pm and it ended just past midnight. Considering what they were trying to pull off and their low budget, I thought it was amazing. (I have two standards. One is an absolute standard. The other is based on quality/cost. This one did pretty well on the absolute standard and would have swept the Tony's on quality/cost.)

And we have it here in Anchorage at Out North (you can buy tickets online) for three more episodes. And don't worry if you missed the first two episodes, it doesn't matter, trust me.

Christian has a pretty strong background in theater. I met him when he took some public administration classes with me. But he already had a masters in theater and had performed and/or directed in San Francisco, New York, and Budapest where he lived for several years. He's also the director for the Anchorage Theater of Youth and has been active in HIV/AIDS education. He's bright and aware and it shows in Soapscum.

Bent Alaska has the details of when the other episodes will be presented.

Word of the Day - Newspeak

The Republicans have taken the principles of George Orwell's fictional language in the book 1984 to help win elections since Ronald Reagan and even earlier. Swiftboating John Kerry was probably the low point - taking a war hero, who was running against a draft-dodger and turning his heroism into a lie. That's precisely the sort of thing that Newspeak, Orwell's future language of thought control, was designed for, to turn truth on its head.

From the Newspeak Dictionary:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.

To give a single example - The word free still existed in Newspeak, but could only be used in such statements as "The dog is free from lice" or "This field is free from weeds." It could not be used in its old sense of "politically free" or "intellectually free," since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.

The Republicans have taken Madison Avenue marketing techniques and applied them ruthlessly and effectively to presidential politics. Part of their campaign was to take all the words that Democrats used to describe themselves and to turn them into pejoratives. Their biggest achievement was to essentially take away the word liberal as a positive label. Feminists were converted to feminazis. When the Democrats tried to get rid of racist and sexist terms, they were vilified as promoting political correctness. . The Republicans even took to calling the Democratic Party the Democrat Party and linked "tax and spend" to the word Democrat. It became hard to talk about being a Democrat without using words that had been poisoned. I suspect they consciously attempted to use the principles of Newspeak - "making other modes of thought impossible" - to make talking about traditional liberal issues impossible. Sarah Palin tried to do this with the term 'community organizer' when she mocked Obama in her acceptance speech.

On page 4 of the online copy of 1984 Winston sees the Ministry of Truth which has three slogans of the Party painted on it:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

This was the goal of the Swiftboating campaign. In this election we see it in the stealth campaign that says Obama is a Muslim. If you tell a lie often enough, people believe it.

The Two Minutes of Hate begins on page 10. The Republicans have multiplied this into nearly 24 hours of hate on talk radio and Fox News. The image below comes from books.google.com.

I'd always thought that the fact that Bin Laden was still alive and free somewhere proved the ineffectiveness of the Bush Administration. But after rereading that passage, perhaps they find that Bin Laden far more useful alive, as the icon of evil, just as their mentors in Oceana used Goldstein.

Democrats who believe that truth and rationality are important for all voters are totally missing the boat. Yes, we need to expose all the lies for those who still use reason. But we also have to constantly examine language to be sure it isn't being shaped in ways that limit our ability to think. By talking about and demonstrating the manipulation of language, we can help people see how they are being manipulated.

First Views of Singapore

My son met with me a Singapore packet including some money, guidebook, maps, transit pass with S$25 (about US$20), and a chocolate chip cookie. Here we're changing trains.
Just out of the Somerset train station onto Orchard Road. Then we walked up a street that has 1920's style houses still on it to J's apartment - on the seventh floor in a much more Western modern apartment than we had in Chiang Mai.
Among other things on the bulletin board in the lobby is this wanted poster for Singapore's Bin Laden who aparently escaped from prison while on a toilet break.

These two pictures are the view from the balcony of the apartment building across the road.
We dropped stuff off and then took Kona, the dog, for a walk. It was about 10:30pm (I lost an hour coming from Thailand) on the big shopping street Orchard Road on Saturday night. Here's a girl band in front of a mall.


And J and Kona in front of the visitors center that was still open. We went in and I got some advice on things to do while J's taking final exams.

Picking the Right Story to Interpret the 'Facts'

Philip commented on the last post about Charlie Wilson's War:

Back through the 70s, I read a lot about the USSR. Current affairs and history, mostly dealing with musical life there. Between knowledge from that and talking to friends who had worked or studied there, I felt that the USSR was already teetering close to the edge before the mid-70s.

Hedrick Smith's _The Russians_ came out in 1975, four years before the Afghan invasion, during the middle of the short Ford administration. The book fairly clearly describes the already existing structural flaws that led to the collapse of the USSR fourteen years later.

It is possible that by forcing the Soviet government to spend more on defensive and counter-offensive weapons during the 1980s the US sped the inevitable along, but I doubt we'll ever know.

I've discussed in previous posts - particularly this one about "a black-hole bully, punching the nose of a passing galaxy" - how humans interpret facts based on the stories in their heads. Those stories - models, theories, narratives, we use many different words - get into our heads in different ways. Which story gets to be the interpreter of any collection of 'facts' at any point in time in any individual's brain, is a mystery. And I would wager most of us aren't aware of the stories we have that compete to interpret the world around us. Some we can identify - though they may not be the real story - others work in our heads without our ever actually articulating them.

Phil does a good job articulating the basis for his interpretation of the fall of the Soviet Union and he may be right - the Soviets were on the decline and, at best, the defeat in Afghanistan just sped that up. But I'm not so sure. The Soviet Union fell when the people stopped obeying. They simply withdrew their willingness to obey. When individual dissidents did that, the government could deal with that. But when the entire population did it, the government simply dissolved. (OK, this is my story, greatly influence by Vaclav Havel's "The Power of the Powerless". Click on the title for excerpts of the essay and here for a discussion that applies Havel's story to the US today.) The loss of young Soviet lives in Afghanistan and the eventual defeat in Afghanistan brought the people of the Soviet Union to the point of being able to withdraw their cooperation with the government. To simply stop cooperating with the regime. Then the radical capitalist crusaders with their "capitalism as the savior of humankind" ideology rushed into the Soviet Union to spread their Gospel. The initial euphoria dissipated as the pitfalls of unbridled capitalism - greed, inequality of wealth, followed by inequality of justice - resulted in a relative few Russians getting fabulously wealthy and the vast majority seeing their physical standard of living fall. Now, they seem to be sliding back into traditional Russian totalitarianism. So, Afghanistan may have made that moment of change possible. Without Afghanistan, things would have gotten bad, but they could have kept the Soviet infrastructure and more carefully adopted aspects of the market, as has China. The point of this post is not to decide who is 'right' but to illustrate how stories help us (for better or worse) interpret what we accept as 'facts.'


On NPR's Day to Day this morning (you can listen to it here,) the real Charlie Wilson says that the arming of the Mujahideen was his greatest achievement and he repeats the final message of the movie - that all we needed to do was fund the schools and infrastructure of post-war Afghanistan, and it wouldn't have left open for the Taliban to take.

But I can't help but wonder. At the end of the film we see Charlie Wilson half-heartedly, and unsuccessfully, arguing with his committee colleagues that they need to just put $1 million into education for Afghanistan. He worked a lot harder for arms than he did for education. I suspect his story is influenced by his own part in it all and his need to feel good about helping the Afghans defend themselves. But if he'd have fought for schools with 1/10th the zeal he'd fought for stingers, surely he could have raised a few million for schools. This "I did the right thing but Congress didn't follow through with schools" story doesn't quite ring true to me. Bringing the Soviet Union to its knees is a better story for Charlie Wilson, than bringing the Taliban to power in Afghanistan and allowing Bin Laden to train Al Qaeda there.