What's Keeping Me From Blogging?

So much . . .

Weekly trips to pick up our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) [It's a USDA website so go quick before the regime either takes it down because it's too 'woke' or it crashes from neglect or incompetence.]

They use salt - some Alaska salt - and mix it with things for use in cooking, eating, and making your house smell better, like in the simmer pots.  

I've highlighted soap artist (seriously, what she does is art!)  Kit before.  She showed me a prototype of a soap she's working on that will have a Rorschach test on it.  I asked if there are psychiatrist interpretations included.  Those, she assured me, would cost a lot more.  Learn more at MirthAlaska.com. 

There was a long line at the WIC table.  This market is in the lowest income area of Anchorage and the Grow North Farm here - sponsored by RAIS (Refugee Assistance and Immigration Service), a part of Catholic Social Services - is an urban farm worked by refugees.  

It was gray and threatening, but not raining all that day, but it finally came down on the ride home.  It was so light it really only got my clothes slightly damp.  And my odometer with drops.

I've gone past my 1600 km goal for the summer - one reason I guess I haven't blogged as much.  All that biking along Anchorage's green bike paths has been good for my physical and mental health during this disastrous time in US history.  

The picture below was on an earlier ride on the Campbell Creek south trail.  And I'm delaying today's ride to get this post up.

The mushroom isn't connected to anything else in this post, but of course mushrooms and fungus in general are connected to everything underground.  You can't really tell but this one was five or six inches across.  Growing right next to the compost pile.  

  
                                                                      

Again, a somewhat random picture here.  Walking down the steps after a routine doctor visit at Providence, I was greeted with the lovely sounds of live piano music.  The acoustics in the huge atrium entrance are great and the notes pulled me over to listen to the end and thank the musician.

Our power, phone/internet went out during the windstorm a week ago Friday.  This downed cottonwood was the culprit.  Chugach Electric had the power back on the next morning when we woke up.  Alaska Communications took until Tuesday or Wednesday to come out and then they didn't have the equipment to fix it right, so while the phone line and internet are back on, the wire is lying on the ground and about two feet off the ground in some places I have to walk.  In what world is that acceptable?  Alaska Communications is so terrible!  The techs I have to call now and then and those who come out to the house are generally very good.  It's just the management that has promised me fiber every summer since 2023 and not delivered that pisses me off.  And the website that has the circle of death spinning hopelessly when I try to pay online, and then they charge me a %25 late fee because I couldn't pay online.  With no grace period.  None.  Visa emails me three days before to remind me to pay my bill.  ACS emails three days after it's due to say, "We screwed you again."  I'm ready to cut that cord forever.  

Got that off my chest.  

Our neighbor did hook us up to his power with a series of extension cords to power the refrigerator since we didn't know how long it was going to take to get the power back.  We decided to go to Queen of Sheba for dinner that night.  Here's David, the owner and chef, chatting with us after our meal.  

Ethiopian food is truly special and delicious.  Anchorage folks, go eat there and keep them in business.  The prices are reasonable for this day and age.  

It's between Northern Lights and Benson - on Dawson.  

So, probably this should have been three or four blog post spread over the week.  

But I'm not done.  I've been reading several books at once, but I'll just highlight Caraval.  This was a recommendation from my 12 year old granddaughter.  When I told her I was number 25 on the waiting list at Loussac Library, she said, "I told you that you'll never get it."

But I got an email saying it was mine to pick up.  I understand why people read it.  Each chapter ends with a cliffhanger of sorts.  And I think the author has synesthesia, because every feeling is associated with a color, some vibrating.  Lots more descriptions of odors than you normally see too.  And I don't think Nancy Drew ever had chills from the touch of a young man's bare chest leaning against her. 

I'd say this teen fiction is the gateway drug to adult romance fiction.  

Moving along - I'm still overwhelmed with the barrage of outrageous statements and actions spewing from the White House.  Here are a few images that I've saved as I try to find new ways to ask my junior US Senator how long he thinks he can wade in this filth before he is sucked under completely.  He gleefully points at what he sees as 'wins' for Alaska, while the president tramples the constitution by kidnapping people off the streets, invading US cities with our military, ignoring judge's orders, bombing boaters in international waters, gerrymandering Texas to squeeze out Democratic house seats, and on and on and on.  I didn't even mention Epstein.  And Dan Sullivan turns a blind eye to all of that in exchange for some oil drilling permits.  

My previous post was on the normalization of the word normalization.  Nothing could illustrate that point better than this post by His Travesty.   

What previous president could have done something like this and not been impeached?  Some say it's just 'a humorous bit' but I did a paper on government humor once.  What I learned was that government humor that is self deprecating is fine, but government humor that punches down is NOT fine.  

And then his Vice Travesty defends another military operation off the coast of Venezuela:

Has anyone seen any evidence that these are cartel members (just like we haven't seen any evidence that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a member of Tren de Aragua gang)?

I copied this one for Labor Day.  We're back to the time when business owners could call on the government to bring in troops to break up labor unions.  And when I say 'break up' I mean that literally.  But they stood in solidarity until they won their rights which have benefited most of us.  (You know, 40 day weeks, paid overtime, health benefits, the right to grieve bad treatment, etc.)  We have to be as brave and persistent now to prevent what's happening today.  

I don't believe ignorance is greater now than it was.  But the propaganda forces of the fascists have powerfully taken advantage of that ignorance, and the latent fears of white America.  They've taken all the damage to the working classes done by exporting jobs and increasing the income gap and blamed it on Black people and immigrants.  

 I remember when the first polio vaccines became available and we got poked at school.  My small pox vaccine scar no longer really shows, but I was inoculated.  

Public health programs have saved more lives than medical treatment of individuals.   As I look for good links to explain the importance of public health to society, I see that some of the most important public health initiatives - clean water and sewage systems - are so taken for granted that they aren't even mentioned.  But we haven't always had clean water and sewage systems.  And parts of the world still don't have them.  

President Nixon famously had an enemies list.  But no president has ever, so blatantly used the powers of the federal government to go after his perceived enemies.  The president is publicly telling the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute people who oppose him.  And as a blogger, I found this cartoon a bit close to home.  

I tell myself I'm just a tiny voice out in the wilderness and they have much bigger targets than me.  But I also notice that Google says my recent posts have way more hits that I usually get.  Stat Counter has always shown far fewer hits than Google, but they also track individual visitors.  I can't tell if I really have more hits or whether there are more bots.  In times past when there were lots more hits, it looked like someone scraping my blog for content, and more recently for AI.  But when that happens you can see a single user going to thirty or more different pages per day.  So many hits on a single page is different.  

In any case, I want people to stay strong and be engaged in fighting this regime to preserve our democracy (not to mention our health and economy and general well being.)  Do what you can.  And take breaks to laugh, enjoy nature, good friends.   Find like minded people.  And know your rights.  

And a teaser for a post I hope to put up this week.  

From Animalspot.net

Normalcy In A Time Of Terror [Updated]

 [Scroll to bottom for update]

Imagine having to worry that masked thugs could come to your home, your work place, your car and just drag you off in handcuffs, put you on a plane to prison, and possibly ship you to another country's prison.  

A growing number of people in the United States don't have to imagine this.  They're living it.  And it will get worse now that the US Congress approved 

". . . more than $160 billion that are going to immigration enforcement and the deportation operation. So when you break it down, that means $46.5 billion to building the rest of the border wall, $45 billion to immigration detention centers, nearly $30 billion to hiring and training ICE staff, and $3.3 billion to immigration court judges and attorneys." (from Laura Barron Lopez NPR)

But there are different amounts cited by different outlets:

The annual budget of Immigration and Customs Enforcement alone will spike from about $8 billion to roughly $28 billion, making it the highest funded law enforcement agency in the federal government.  (NYTimes July 13, 2025 - paywalled)

Since those numbers are way beyond what most people can comprehend, here are some comparisons:

• Senate appropriators tack on $22 billion to defense spending bill for $853 billion topline   
• USA Facts says the Department of Education spent $268B in 2024 and was 4% of the Federal budget
• While most of Social Security’s benefits are funded by the payroll taxes collected from today’s workers, the program has also accumulated $2.8 trillion in trust fund reserves over the past four decades.[3] During that period, Social Security’s income exceeded its costs, and the program invested the surplus in interest-bearing Treasury securities. Over the next nine years, those reserves will make up the difference between Social Security’s income and costs.

But don't trust these numbers too much.  It's hard to find consistent numbers online, and I don't really know how much of the money goes to contractors, particularly contractors who make significant campaign contributions.  Consider those just vague comparisons. 

If Donald Trump and the Republican Party in general have their way, they will use their government power to go after any and all who oppose them.  They've already begun.  All the people who were fired from the US government for example.  

The integrity of our institutions is disintegrating quickly (think about the Congressional and US Supreme Court roles in checking the power of the president), and our elections (See Texas remapping its election districts to eliminate five Democratic seats).  [Do I really need to put in links on the Supreme Court and the Congress?  Okay - here and here.]

Acting Normally

Meanwhile, most people in the US are going about their business as if things were normal.  They  assume that the worst violations of human rights will not affect them personally.  And for the time being they are probably right.  

But the government's shadow is getting closer.  Universities are being forced to pay protection money to Trump.   Media outlets that criticize Trump are being attacked.  Ask Stephen Colbert.  

But we do have to go about our lives.  Yesterday I went to the post office and mailed a package to my son for his birthday.  I dropped off some books at the library and looked at the new books section.  

People go to work.  They buy groceries, clean their houses, mow their lawns.  Walk their dogs, go to their kids' soccer games.  

In Nazi Germany people kept their lives as normal as possible under very abnormal circumstances.  But nearly every German family was impacted.  Hitler Youth sucked up most of the genetically suitable kids, including girls:

"The League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel [BDM]) was the female section of the Hitler Youth, its role was to indoctrinate girls into the beliefs and ideals of the Nazi regime.  The BDM focused on developing girls into women who were dedicated to Nazism, dutiful housewives, and whose role within in society was to become a mother. Girls were to grow-up with an unquestioning understanding of the intended role of women in the Third Reich. BDM members were required to have German parents, be in good health, and conform to Nazi racial ideals."  [From a British Holocaust Museum.]

Check out Victor Klemperer's book, I Will Bear Witness.  There are two volumes of his journal during the Nazi period and WW II.  (The link takes you to the Internet Archive where you can read Volume I online.) Of Jewish ancestry, but a Protestant since his family had converted when he was a child, and married to a gentile, this WW I veteran and university professor felt safe.  

But as we go about our daily lives, we must also pay attention to what is happening and find ways to prepare and to resist.  All authoritarian regimes want you to obey.  To comply before they even tell you to.  The more that people resist, the harder the regime has to work.  The people protesting ICE raids across the country make a huge difference, especially people filming ICE agents acting like the Gestapo and breaking car windows and beating people up.  Sharing the video clips online helps people understand.  The people of Nazi Germany didn't have tiny video cameras or social media to post the things they saw.

For those, like myself, who are not darker skinned and whose citizenship is based on being born in the US to US citizens, we may be safe for now, unless we have a job that seeks to figure out truths - whether it's climate science, US history, female anatomy and health care, reporting the news, or even using social media to spread truths.  

All those camps the Immigration Mafia are building.  What do you think will happen to them once the first wave of immigrants have been shipped off to authoritarian regimes to be forgotten?  The next level of enemies of the state will fill them if Trump (and his evil advisor Stephen Miller) gets his way.  

I advise everyone who may be 'safe' now to start finding ways to resist.  

I've been taking letters every Monday to the downtown offices of my three US legislators offering them information and my thoughts about pending legislation.  The picture shows a day when the door was locked and people left their letters under the door at Senator Sullivan's office.

I've gone to demonstrations.  

I've attended forums where issues and legislation have been discussed. 

And I've donated money to organizations I think are most effectively fighting back.  

Sometimes I wonder if these things make a difference.  But I know they do.  Minimally they signal to other resisters that there is opposition they can join.  Even if my legislators don't do as I want, I know that their staffers are reading the letters and learning something.  

My one body protesting won't change the world. But hundreds of bodies in Anchorage, thousands in Alaska, and millions in the US will make a difference. Remember, Trump is obsessed by crowd size.  

I'm retired so I have more time than most.  But everyone can find ways to slow down the erosion of democracy, stick their fingers in the holes of the dike holding back fascism.  

Right now I'm thinking through two things:

1. How do we find the most effective actions to take within our time constraints and abilities?  I'll try to post those ideas when I think through them.  At this point I can see three basic goals:
1. Gum up the works, slow down the destruction - law suits against all illegal actions help here and ordinary people can help this by financially supporting those organizations on the forefront of suing the regime.  It doesn't have to be a lot.  But it has to be a lot of people giving $5 regularly.  Organizations like the ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, the NAACP, and attorneys like Marc Elias.  These folks were well prepared for the Trump regime and have been winning suits against the government.
2. Inspiring others to vote, to get politically active, to get folks stirred up.  Large rallies that get lots of publicity help.  But I'd like to see rally organizers do more than get people out.  They need to sign them up and get them committed to regular action.  
3. Getting those who didn't vote to vote.  The Environmental Voter Project identifies people with an environmental interests, but who don't vote.  Then they train volunteers to call them and get them to vote.  Their self reported evaluations suggest they are quite effective.  
2. Developing a score card for a person's activism.  It's easy to burn out on going to rallies and writing letters or post cards to legislators and voters.  I'd like to develop a weekly (monthly?) check sheet or score card where people can check off things they've done.  I have a target of how many km I want to bike this summer and knowing I'm adding kliks gets me out more often and going further.  Apple watches get people to walk 10,000 steps. Something similar for activists would help inspire people to be regularly active.  

When I get this better thought out I'll post it.   

For now, everyone should try out some forms of resistance as often as possible.  Start with, maybe two kinds of action repeated once or twice  a week.  Some actions that are reasonably comfortable, and then slowly increasing the number of actions each week.  And then start stretching your comfort zone.  Below are some links to get you thinking about what you can do that fits your time constraints.

• Here's Ten Ways You Can Resist Now
• Don't Just Do Nothing. Here Are 20 Things You Can Do To Counter Fascism
• How to Legally Fight Fascism in Your Community
• Fighting Fascism in Italy
• 40 Ways to Fight Fascists:  Street Legal Tactics For Community Activists

I'd note that keeping one's life as normal as possible is good for everyone's mental health.  Do fun things when you can, but also resist when you can.      

[UPDATED August 1, 2025, 2pm:  I forgot to include this chart (from the CATO Institute , a conservative - Libertarian 'think tank' ) that counters Trumps campaign claims that the immigrants were all rapists, murderers, and gang members and that he was going to get them.  

65% have no criminal record at all!  If they were all criminals, ICE shouldn't have trouble finding them.  But they can't.  Because it was all campaign fiction to stir up resentment and anger.  

Trippy - A Well Written And Fascinating Look At Psychedelic Treatments

[You'll figure out pretty quickly, I think, that I enjoyed reading this book.  I wanted to read the next chapter as soon as I finished the previous one.  Aside from introducing people and situations outside my normal realm, Ernesto Londoño raises lots of interesting legal and ethical issues.] 

TRIPPY took me on a fascinating journey through Latin American ayahuasca [the pronunciation is pretty easy if you think of the h as a w] retreats and US psychedelic
retreats/treatment centers.  The focus is on psychedelics and their effect on people, mainly on people with serious hard-to-treat issues like depression, suicidal thoughts, trauma.  But this gets more complex as the author, Ernesto Londoño, pulls in a number of related issues such as the conflict between running a spiritual retreat and a for profit enterprise, the psychological impacts of war, the conflict (in the US) between religious freedom and drug laws, how black market (my term, not his) psychedelic treatments serve patients who find standard medical approaches to their problems ineffective, which raises serious questions about why the established field of medicine took so long to find better ways to treat PTSD and other mental problems.  

Before I go further, let's give a bit of background. 

"Ayahuasca is prepared by boiling crushed chunks of an Amazonian vine called Banisgeriopsis caapi -which wraps around trees in the rainforest in serpent like formations - with the leaves of a shrubby plant called Psychotria viridis, or chacruna.  The leaves contain the psychoactive compound, but when taken alone, an enzyme in the stomach neutralizes it.  The vine, however, inhibits that metabolic process, inducing dramatic alterations in perception and sensations." (page 66)

The author previously worked at the Washington Post reporting on local DC police and court issues and as a war correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then as an editorial writer for the New York Times.  The book  begins when he was the New York Times Brazil bureau chief.  So he's a serious reporter.  

In the book, he also tells us a lot about his own life issues.  His coverage of the ayahuasca retreats in the Amazon jungle to a ketamine clinic in San Diego includes his own drug experiences at the places he writes about.  I think that gives him deeper insights than had he merely played the objective observer.  He also is often the skeptic and raises issues with some of the places he visited and offers others' critical as well as positive reports.  He interviewed a lot of people, both practitioners and academics studying psychedelics.  (I know, 'a lot' is vague, but he's always stepping back to find out what others think as well as the what the owners, the employees, and participants have to say.)  He tells us that he always identifies himself as both a participant and a journalist.  

The book called out to me from the new books section at Loussac library.   And while I came of age in the 60s, I didn't experiment beyond pot.  Being a student in Germany for a year and after graduation a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand was trippy enough for me.  I haven't read Michael Pollan's book that reviews say strongly advocates for psychedelic experiences.  So maybe this book would tell me what I need to know.  

The book was a wild and informative ride.  While the main vehicle was psychedelic experiences, those experiences lead us into lots of unexpected adventures with interesting people and interesting religious, legal, ethical issues not only of drugs, but also war and sexuality and trauma and medicine.  

 Most of the people Londoño describes come to these retreats to deal with depression, trauma, addiction and other mental disorders.  This includes the author who, as the NYT bureau chief in Brazil finds himself lonely and depressed and decides to report on an Amazonian retreat and to test the curing powers of ayahuasca.  In the posh Costa Rican retreat, much later in the book, a lot of the clientele are more well-to-do, but there's an emptiness in their lives.  [As I wrote that, I thought that 'but' might not be the right word.  Simple pursuit of wealth as Trump and Musk demonstrate, doesn't lead to happiness.  But (again) Musk is reported to be addicted to MDMA (which is looked at later in the book) and that clearly hasn't had a therapeutic, enlightening effect on him.]  We also get to USian retreats that incorporate as churches in hopes of avoiding the Drug Enforcement Administration and have focused on US veterans with PTSD and other war related traumas and who haven't found relief from nightmares and suicidal thoughts through VA psychiatrists or alcohol.  

Londoño also consults regularly with scholars - through their written works and through personal interview - and gives us threads throughout the book about the twists and turns of the legal landscape of medical psychedelic experimentation and research - most notably with Nixon's 1971 War on Drugs prohibition, which shut down a lot of promising research.   

There are also the discussions of how far back ayahuasca was used by Amazonian people - with claims ranging from thousands of years to hundreds.  

We learn about the people who run the retreats and clinics, the people who own them, and the clients.  It's not always pretty.  There are stories of sexual impropriety, of death, but mostly of profoundly changed clients.  Or is that positive response brought on by the group and organizer pressure to let go of one's doubts and embrace the ayahuasca so that one can get the full benefits?  Londoño always raises these questions.  

Are these really healing retreats or are these cults?  This question bothers him, but he seems to conclude that since people leave, they aren't cults, even though the requirements to trust the facilitators and the drugs seem to overlap with cult like instructions.  A question I had was about the people, the author included, who go to many retreats and keep imbibing the ayahuasca.  In the author's case, he tells us there are other buried issues to be explored.  (He also mentions that the concoction is foul to taste and usually induces vomiting, buckets provided.)

He talks about going to a gay only retreat and how that differed from the others.  And as he writes about the problems other retreaters hope to heal, Londoño writes about his own demons.  How he learned about mental health issues in his family growing up in Bogota, Columbia.  After writing about the war traumas of veterans, he begins to think about the traumas he brought back from Iraq and Afghanistan as a correspondent.  

The discussion of the veterans, fed up with the VA's inability to cure their PTSD, mentions at one point that it costs $230 billion a year for the Veterans Administration  to treat PTSD!  The vets he connected with did find a profound relief that the VA couldn't provide.  But in the MDMA experiment we only hear about Chris and not the others in the experiment.

That cost of PTSD treatment doesn't tend to be mentioned in defense budget debates or to recruits.  And that doesn't take into account the individual and cumulative costs to the individual veterans, and their families, whose lives are destroyed, even though their bodies work.  At some point he mentioned that more military die of suicide than they do in battle.  

Another telling comment came when interviewing Dr. Matthew Pava, who was in charge of research funding at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the Defense Department.  And who approved a $27 million experiment that was searching for new compounds that change the brain without the hallucinogenic effects.  What he really needs is a drug that will allow him to get soldiers back into battle quickly, and that doesn't seem to be likely with psychedelics.  

"In recent years, he said, 28 percent of service members medically evacuated from frontline positions are sent home after being diagnosed with a mental health condition.  According to a 2021 study, roughy 23 percent of active-duty service members had been diagnosed with depressive disorder, a rate far higher than that of the civilian population."[page 264]

Yes, there are depressing issues (but there's a cure for that now) but also very heartwarming stories of people who have overcome debilitating mental problems.  The subtitle of the book - The Peril and Promise of Medicinal Psychedelics - is accurate.  

So maybe I do need to go back to Pollan's book to find out why someone without depression and suicidal thoughts should use psychedelics.  And I'd note, Londoño mentions a lot of other books on various aspects of psychedelic medicines.  

NOTE:  In the course of the book, we learn a lot about the author.  He feels almost like a friend.  And toward the end we learn that quit his job with the New York Times and he's moved in with his veterinarian boy friend in Minnesota to write the book and is unsure of what will happen next.  And I wanted to know how that turned out.  After I wrote this post, I googled Ernesto Londoño and found this New York Times article on today's LA  ICE raids and citizen protests.  The bio link says:  

"I’m a reporter for The New York Times based in Minnesota, covering news in the Midwest and keeping a close eye on drug use and counternarcotics policy."

Rewind - Grandkids Were In Town

 I've got six post started from the press club.  My SF grandkids and their parents were here last week.  The world social, political, legal, and economic foundations are being multiple times daily by the current US president.  

With the press club posts, I took notes here (on Blogspot), but it didn't seem right to just post notes, yet there were so many panels that I didn't really have time to do the panelists or my readers right, so they are just dangling there as 'drafts.'  

While most Anchorage bowl snow was gone when the grandkids arrived, we did find some puddles sealed in sheets of ice, which they had a great time breaking and then holding large pieces.  They also liked bouncing sticks off of a still mostly frozen Goose Lake on bike ride to Goose Lake. Then on along 

Northern Lights, the back of APU, and home.  I knew my grandson would be fine - because he and I did a long bike ride in SF last year.  But my granddaughter was also a champ.  I'd warned them there might be some snow still on the trail, but by it was all gone, which disappointed my grandson.  But he found dirt path that went off into the woods and still had some snow.  And off he went.  (He's 10 and she's 8.)

We also made it to the bead shop in the Golden Donut mall at Lake Otis and Tutor.  There are all kinds of beads and other string able objects like porcupine quills.

At the west end of the mall is the Stars of Alaska Rock Shop.  I'd put it on the list of places to take visitors to Anchorage.  

It's a crazy crowded shop full of, rocks, of course, but also fossils, and amazing things.  

How about a mosasaurus skull.  Actually, I don't think that was for sale.

Owner Martin Warfield was unpacking a new shipment of Amonites - 'an extinct cephalopod mollusk' - that lived 280 million years ago.

Here's a closer look at a half of one.  

  Another big hit was Bosco's, Anchorage's really good comic, games, sports cards, etc. shop.  As was Title Wave used book store.  

And Wild Scoops Ice Cream shop.  

  

And a hike at McHugh Creek.

We saw the eagle on our hike.  

So that's some of what's been going on.  Other silly problems, like not having a port in my newish (late last summer) MacBook Air for my SD card from my telephoto lens.  Which I corrected today.  But that's why I never got up a picture of the April 5 Anchorage demonstration against the Trump administration.  But now that I have the card reader, I may put some up.  It was crowded.  

And I'm still working with my 3rd grader every day as a volunteer at my local elementary school.  He's doing well.  And I've got 200 km on my bike since we got back in March.  So I'm keeping busy.  

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

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

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

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

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

From the August 31, 2024 post:

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's pretty much all I want to say.

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

Introduction to Robert Caro's The Power Broker 

Part II is here.

Discovering Islands Around The World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Live?

That's the question raised in a book I picked up at the Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle during Thanksgiving.

I've just started reading Sarah Bakewell's  How To Live or A Life of Montaigne.  The picture puts the book into the context of the life I'm living at this moment, which, I hope will make more sense after you've read a couple of excerpts.  

"This idea - writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity - has not existed forever.  It had to be invented.  And, unlike many cultural inventions, it can be traced to a single person:  Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a nobleman, government official, and winegrower who lived in the Péirgord area of southwestern France from 1533 to 1592."    

I no longer assume that people reading something like the end of the last sentence will automatically determine how long Montaigne lived (not quite 60 years), or the historical context (he was born forty years after Columbus reported the existence of a part of the world that Europeans hadn't known existed.  Or maybe some descendants of Vikings knew but others didn't.  I don't take this for granted because long ago I realized that things I do aren't necessarily the same things that other people do.  Though I expect that regular readers of this blog figured that out before I mentioned it.  Or would have if I hadn't placed this parenthetical paragraph here.  The author will offer some more historical context in the following.

"Montaigne created the idea simply by doing it.  Unlike most memoirists of his day, he did not write to record his own great deeds and achievements.  Nor did he lay down a straight eyewitness account of historical events, although he could have done;  he lived through a religious civil war which almost destroyed his country over the decades he spent incubating and writing his book."  

Again, if I didn't know what religious civil war was being referred to, I would have stopped reading and looked it up.  Here's a link to give you more about the French religious wars of the 16th Century.  Meanwhile further south, the Spanish Inquisition was going on.   I think the fact that he lived in difficult times makes the book more interesting to us today as we slide into our own version of an inquisition to rid the country of immigrants and other 'undesirables' in the eyes of Trump's people.  

"A member of a generation robbed of the hopeful idealism enjoyed by his father's contemporaries, he adjusted to public miseries by focusing his attention on private life.  He weathered the disorder, oversaw his estate assessed court cases as a magistrate, and administered Bordeaux as the most easygoing mayor in its history.  All the time, he wrote exploratory, free-floating pieces to which he gave simple titles:"

At this point author Bakewell lists a number of his titles.  I'll skip that.  I'm not trying to copy her book, but rather to focus on ideas I found stimulating.  This was just the context.  And you'll note that while she says he lived in difficult times, the fact that he went on with his life as a nobleman and ran his estate as well as served as the mayor of Bordeaux, suggests that despite the wars, he was privileged enough for them to be irritants rather than serious interferences into his life.  But this musing is based on the words in that paragraph, not further research, so take it with a grain of salt. 

 

"He used [his] experiences as the basis for asking himself questions, above all the big questions that fascinated him as it did many of his contemporaries.  Although it is not quite grammatical in English, it can be phrased in three simple words:  'How to live?' 

"This is not the same as the ethical question, 'How should one live?' Moral dilemmas interested Montaigne, but he was less interested in what people ought to do than in what they actually did.  He wanted to know how to live a good life - meaning a correct or honorable life, but also a fully human, satisfying, flourishing one.  This question drove him both to write and to read, for he was curious about all human lives, past and present.  He wondered constantly about the emotions and motives behind what people did.  And since he was the example closest to hand of a human going about its business, he wondered just as much about himself."

And now we'll get to some of the questions he pondered.  And I hope you will find them to be pretty close to ones we ponder today.  

"A down-to-earth question, 'How to Live?'  splintered into a myriad other pragmatic questions.  Like everyone else, Montaigne ran up against the major perplexities of existence:  how to cope with the fear of death, how to get over losing a child or a beloved friend, how to reconcile yourself to failures, how to make the most of every moment so that life does not drain away unappreciated.  But there were smaller puzzles, too.  How do you avoid getting drawn into a pointless argument with your wife, or a servant?  How can you reassure a friend who thinks a witch has cast a spell on him?  How do you cheer up a weeping neighbor?  How do you guard your home?  What is the best strategy if you are held up by armed robbers who seem to be uncertain whether to kill you or hold you to ransom?  If you overhear your daughter's governess teaching her something you think is wrong, is it wise to intervene?  How do you deal with a bully?  What do you say to your dog when he wants to go out and play, while you want to stay at your desk writing your book?  

In place of abstract answers, Montaigne tells us what he did in each case, and what it felt like when he was doing it.  He provides all the details we need to make it real, and sometimes more than we need."

Okay.  That's your appetizer.  I haven't read further in the book than this, but I thought that this book probably has lessons for the current world.  Though as I read it again to type the words into the blog, I also wonder whether the author is phrasing things in a way that sound perhaps a little too contemporary.  

I much prefer reading books that are not being reinterpreted today, so that the contemporary applications are ones I see, not ones that are spoon fed to me.  But since I haven't read the rest of the book yet,  or anything Montaigne wrote, don't blame Sarah Bakewell yet.  Though her opening paragraph was about people being fixated on telling the world, through the internet, their every action and thought.  

But I'm being overly careful (some would say picky).  I'll give you a better informed opinion later when I've finished the book.  But I think the book might help people overcome the temporal bias that we in the present are far more advanced than people in the past.  Technically that may be true, but as human beings capable of thinking, or moral contemplations, of understanding human behavior, and advanced concepts, the ancient people were just as capable as we are, given what humans understood about how the world worked.  Though many had a better lived understanding of how nature operated than many, if not most Americans today.  

A final note.  I'm not blogging as much as before, in part because life is keeping me busy on other things.  And I have too many things I want to write about.  If I don't get back here sooner, have a Merry Christmas or a Happy Hanukah, or Kwanza or Solstice, or whatever celebration you observe this time of year.  

ADDED Jan 8, 2025:  The image below is for my Jan 8 comment.  I've put it here since I can't put images into a comment.