Some Much Needed Civil Service History

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 was 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 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 his policy as well as his 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, and 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 idealist young 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 turn the page.

From Stolen Intellectual Policy To Heteropessimism To Climate Catastrophe Greeting Cards

A link to Capacious led me into a rabbit hole that didn't let go for several hours.  As an academic, I found the first story too real and too chilling a possibility. And also quite relevant to one of the presidential candidates. The other two I'll touch on here were much further outside my normal world.  The journal Capacious does have room for many things.

A Tweet sent me to Capaciousjournal to read an article ["How Intellectual Property Theft Feels"  Jordan Alexander Stein] by an English professor who submitted a book proposal on Cotton Mather to Yale University Press.  One reviewer gave it a green light.  The other said no.  Several years later, she gets an email about a new book from Yale University Press - on, you guessed it, Cotton Mather with a blurb that very closely copies her original proposal.  And then she finds out the author is the reviewer who nixed her proposal and the editor is the one she originally sent the proposal.  

She finds that her options are slim but minimally she wants an apology and an acknowledgement of the hurt this has caused her.  She gets neither. 

Her article covers a wide range of topics.  Money wasn't particularly an issue, because, as she says, books on Cotton Mather are aimed at a tiny niche audience. Aside from the deceit, a general despicableness of this sort of crime (I call it a crime, she says the law is fuzzy. The university classifies it under moral lapses) it caused real damage to the writer.  

"Having to look back at the past five years of my career, I suddenly saw that I’d mostly stopped researching and publishing on Puritan writers. Nor in that time had I attended even a single one of the field’s multiple annual conferences. All the Mather books in my office had been pushed into a corner where I now found them hibernating under five winters of dust. The humiliation I had felt years before as a response to the ad hominem nature of George’s reader report had knocked me off my professional course. It had happened by no means necessarily, and perhaps not on anyone’s part deliberately, but, I reluctantly found myself admitting, it had happened absolutely." (p. 103)

Essentially the reviewer/thief/author and the editor got away with it.  Nothing bad came of it for them (at least in the awareness of Jordan Alexander Stein.)  

And this seems emblematic of the age we live in.  Where the norms have broken down and the wheels of justice are too slow to keep up.  Trump perhaps will become the patron saint of sociopaths.  The Supreme Court has even awarded him with immunity that is probably broad and slippery enough for him to escape punishment for anything.  

Stein goes on to say this was not about money, but reputation.

"Universities meanwhile don’t operate at merely human levels; they have more abstract things like brands to protect. From their perspective, this kind of dust-up wouldn’t be about personal relationships, even when financial considerations are not involved. (Never mind that the university whose press Martha works for and which has published George’s edition of Mather is so incomprehensibly wealthy, and again the money at stake would be so little, that even the upper-limit damages from any hypothetical lawsuit of mine would be to them about as negligible as a rounding error). More typically, the issue is about the priceless thing called reputation. Universities do not want to be seen as having done something for which any liability must be assumed. What universities seek to protect is symbolic. And they protect it very well." (p. 106) (emphasis mine)

It's not like any of this is new.  Professors stealing the ideas of others is an age-old practice.  What is new is that there are many more platforms from which to call it out.  

 

While scrolling through the online copy of Capacious, I found several other articles that reminded me that people are thinking about and writing about things I have not given much attention to.  

[I'd note the links here.  The basic Capaciousjournal.com goes to a table of contents for the current edition - Vol. 3 No. 2  (2024).  This page has links to some of the articles in this edition - including the next one on Heteropessimism.  But the other articles can be found by clicking the PDF file for the whole edition.  Which I had to do to find the article above.  So for Stein article, you have to scroll down.  The Heteropessimism link takes you directly to that article.  The Greeting Card article you have to scroll down - it's right below the Stein article.]

"Heteropessimism and the Pleasure of Saying 'No.'”Samantha Pinson Wrisley

I have reactions to this article, but it's a discussion I have not been a party to (the article has 42 or 43 references) so I'll keep my thoughts to myself, just listen, and offer this quote from the author. 

 "I take the heteropessimistic connections between feminism and incel to their logical conclusion, showing that feminist heteropessimism’s inherent essentialism affectively cements the incongruous ideological positions of feminism to incel’s sexual nihilism. I conclude with an argument for the naturalization of negativity as part of a broader move toward accepting the ambiguities of heterosexual desire and the antagonism(s) that drive it."

After rereading this quote, I realize it most readers won't catch the drift of the article.  Basically, as I understood it, Wrisley argued that one area of feminism looks at heterosexual relations as difficult because they can't stand the men necessary to have heterol relationships.  She saw a similarity between this attitude and that of incels who are virgins because they can't attract women to have sex with them.  Both, thus being characterized as 'heteropessimistic.'

Finally:  "Greeting Cards For the Anthropocene"  Craig Campbell 

This one starts out with 

"In 1971 it cost only 50¢ for an eight page list of twenty-five Greeting Card companies in the USA and Canada that were buying greetings, captions, and ideas from hopeful writers."

He offers some examples of what the card makers wanted in people's pitches.  Using this idea, he moves closer to the present:

"In 2019, under the auspices of the Bureau for Experimental Ethnography, we launched the Greeting Cards for the Anthropocene project.2 We sought to understand climate feelings first by making cards for an invented category of ‘Climate Catastrophe’ in the greeting card aisle of the local pharmacy."

 The article includes some examples of related letters and such greeting cards. 

In many ways Capacious does what I set out to do in this blog long ago - look at things we often overlook, or look at what we see, but differently.  It rearranges the furniture of the brain.  And reminds me to do more of this sort of posts.  

Brian Taylor Cohen Interviews Heather Cox Richardson - Watch This!

This is an important interview by Brian Taylor Cohen, one of the brightest and most articulate commentators (I want to say on the air, and he does appear on cable news, but he's also a powerful presence on the internet via Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms) and Heather Cox Richardson, an important US historian who uses history to inform current events.  

A couple of points they make that jumped out at me. 

1. Taking Over World Money Supply. She talks about how Trump is 78 years old and not in great health, and could leave Vance in charge.  Vance is Thiel's pawn.  Peter Thiel is a 'tech bro' interested in crypto currency and this could lead to taking control over the world money supply.  

2. Whenever there is a new technology, and she lists mining, cotton, diamonds, copper, oil as examples, there are no regulations at first and a few people get very rich and powerful to the detriment of everyone else.

(#1 and #2 are intertwined starting around 5:45 to about 7:40)

3.  Trump's succeeded because his actions are so outrageous that people can't conceive he's being real.   They want to take away abortion, get rid of medicare, etc. people don't believe it.  They're planning that.  We need to take it seriously. (about 8:30 min)

4.  The Big Lie. If your roommate steals $20 you can get mad at him.  But if he schemes to take over your family's bank account, retirement funds, your family's  house, it's beyond comprehension.  Don't have emotional groundwork to get mad because it's too outrageous to imagine.  That's what Trump has done.  Of course the Supreme Court wouldn't give the President to commit crimes in office, but they did.(about 10:50)

5. History- Turning on a Dime - History taught me that American society can turn on a dime.  I've been waiting and it didn't happen.  But since Biden pulled out of race, the US has turned on a dime.  (about 17 min)

There's a lot in between that links each of the points together worth listening to.  

This video has two very bright people dissecting what's happening and where we seem to be going.  

At the end they push two of their books probably worth reading:

Richardson:  Democracy Awakening coming out in paperback in October

Cohen:  Shameless  How Republicans used long term plans to change the US, which we can see most clearly with the Supreme Court.  

Seventy Nine

"79 is a prime number... 79 has 2 factors, 1 and 79. It's the 22nd prime number . . ." from Prime Number fandom

ELIE WIESEL

I have lived here for some twenty years, more than anywhere in the world, and yet I have devoted only a few pages to New York in The Accident and one chapter in The Gates of the Forest. Why? Because I have not yet exhausted my childhood. Words grow, age, die, and I am still interested in that metamorphosis. And the words that I use are still those that relate to my childhood.  Elie Wiesel, The Art of Fiction No. 79

Encyclopedia Britanica

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

"Whilst I alone did call upon thy aid,

My verse alone had all thy gentle grace;

But now my gracious numbers are decayed,

And my sick muse doth give another place.

I grant, sweet love, thy lovely argument

Deserves the travail of a worthier pen;

Yet what of thee thy poet doth invent

He robs thee of and pays it thee again.

He lends thee virtue, and he stole that word

From thy behavior; beauty doth he give

And found it in thy cheek. He can afford

No praise to thee but what in thee doth live.

 Then thank him not for that which he doth say,

 Since what he owes thee thou thyself dost pay."

Sonnet 79 

79 MILES = 127.138 KILOMETERS

People born in 1879:

Albert Einstein

Leon Trotsky  

E. M. Forster

Paul Klee

Edward Steichen

Will Rogers

Wallace Stevens

"In 2013, there were 79 death sentences handed down across 15 states. At the time, that was the second-lowest number of condemnations since the U.S. Supreme Court restored the death penalty in 1976." Alabama Reflector

Vesuvius

"In autumn of 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius violently spewed forth a cloud of super-heated tephra and gases to a height of 33 km (21 mi), ejecting molten rock, pulverized pumice and hot ash at 1.5 million tons per second, ultimately releasing 100,000 times the thermal energy of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[5][6] The event gives its name to the Vesuvian type of volcanic eruption, characterised by columns of hot gases and ash reaching the stratosphere, although the event also included pyroclastic flows associated with Pelean eruptions.

The event destroyed several Roman towns and settlements in the area. Pompeii and Herculaneum, obliterated and buried underneath massive pyroclastic surges and ashfall deposits, are the most famous examples.[4][5] Archaeological excavations have revealed much of the towns and the lives of the inhabitants leading to the area becoming the Vesuvius National Park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site." Wikipedia

"Rule 79. Records Kept by the Clerk

Primary tabs

(a) Civil Docket.

(1) In General. The clerk must keep a record known as the “civil docket” in the form and manner prescribed by the Director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts with the approval of the Judicial Conference of the United States. The clerk must enter each civil action in the docket. Actions must be assigned consecutive file numbers, which must be noted in the docket where the first entry of the action is made."  The rest is here. 

Psalm 79

A psalm of Asaph.

1 O God, the nations have invaded your inheritance;

    they have defiled your holy temple,

    they have reduced Jerusalem to rubble.

2 They have left the dead bodies of your servants

    as food for the birds of the sky,

    the flesh of your own people for the animals of the wild.

3 They have poured out blood like water

    all around Jerusalem,

    and there is no one to bury the dead.

4 We are objects of contempt to our neighbors,

    of scorn and derision to those around us.

5 How long, Lord? Will you be angry forever?

    How long will your jealousy burn like fire?

6 Pour out your wrath on the nations

    that do not acknowledge you,

on the kingdoms

    that do not call on your name;

7 for they have devoured Jacob

    and devastated his homeland.

8 Do not hold against us the sins of past generations;

    may your mercy come quickly to meet us,

    for we are in desperate need.

9 Help us, God our Savior,

    for the glory of your name;

deliver us and forgive our sins

    for your name’s sake.

10 Why should the nations say,

    “Where is their God?”

Before our eyes, make known among the nations

    that you avenge the outpoured blood of your servants.

11 May the groans of the prisoners come before you;

    with your strong arm preserve those condemned to die.

12 Pay back into the laps of our neighbors seven times

    the contempt they have hurled at you, Lord.

13 Then we your people, the sheep of your pasture,

    will praise you forever;

from generation to generation

    we will proclaim your praise. From Biblegateway

"79. After 45 years of travelling and teaching, the Buddha had reached his eightieth year. Although his mind was strong, he felt that his body was getting weaker. He realised that his life was coming to an end. So he decided to go north to the foothills of the Himalayas, the region where he was born. He wished to enter the final nirvana, or freedom from suffering. On the way north, the Buddha and Ananda stopped in the Bamboo Grove Village, in the kingdom of Patali. The Buddha decided to stay there for the rainy season."  From Buddhanet

What Do Octopuses Feel?

I started this post a week or so ago.  And I previously posted about David Scheel's book, Many Things Under a Rock.  But our book club met this past week and David Scheel, an Alaska Pacific University (APU) professor, attended the meeting.  I would like to spend more time on the book, but it's due at the library and I have many things on a list to do. So this is pretty quick and dirty.  [He would have much preferred, he said only half jokingly, that we bought our copies rather than borrowed from the library."]

Scheel at our meeting comparing the
anatomy of a stuffed octopus 
to a real octopuses parts

In his book about his study of octopuses* one of the questions David Scheel, asks is, "Do animals share some feelings, like hunger and fear?"

Prior to this question he described observing an octopus leave the protection of its den, to search for food.  There's the conflict between fear (and the safety of the octopuses den) and wandering out in search of food, where it's more vulnerable to predators.  

Scheel writes:

"Do animals share some feelings, like hunger and fear?  These feelings are imperative and evolutionarily ancient.  There are perhaps no more basic feelings than the urges to eat and to avoid being eaten.  Australian physiologist Derek Denton named these ancient and demanding urges the primordial emotions." (p. 191)

We learn from Scheel that Denton identified other primordial emotions:  

"thirst, breathlessness (air hunger), food hunger, pain, salt hunger, muscle fatigue, sleepiness, the urge to pass urine, the urge to defecate. sexual orgasm, and the urge to regulate body temperature." (p. 192)

I guess I can accept the notion that these are 'feelings.'  We 'feel' hungry, thirsty, horny, like we need to pee, or need air.  But are these emotions?  We don't need to quibble about words if we agree to define them, for the purpose of the discussion.  But going a step further, Scheel asks whether octopuses are self-aware.  

He discusses octopus activity when different predators are nearby and tells us they act differently depending on the type of predator.  They are extremely cautious and tend to stay in their dens when a lurking, lunging predator lies waiting.  

"Octopuses do not react in the same way to every predator.  An octopus may freeze briefly or adopt a more camouflaged body pattern when a fast moving predator looms into view, but once the predator has passed normal activity returns. Swarming predators, such as he sometimes aggressive Ocean Leatherjakets, are usually ignored if near the den despite the fact that they can mob and kill an octopus that finds itself without shelter. . . Only the presence of a particular kind of predator shut down octopuses for the entire day - a sit-and-wait predator that lurked motionless nearby, awaiting a careless move." (pp. 207-208)

I'm comfortable accepting that this shows an ability to categorize, in this case, different categories of predators.  But whether this is a sign of self awareness is a different issue for me.  It could be an inherited ability passed on from octopuses with it, because it enabled them to survive better.  

Scheel also describes an encounter with an octopus.  He's following an octopus from a distance.  At some point the octopus is aware that Scheel is there.  He has his eye on Scheel as he hides the rest of his body by flattening it and changing its colors.  Scheel tells us that being able to hide itself from a predator shows that the octopus understands what the predator can see.  I realized that I had never thought about that particular skill - the ability to understand how and what another creature can see.

In another example, he tells us about having eye contact with another octopus.  Scheel looked away for a second and the octopus noticed that distraction and took advantage of it to disappear.  

I'm not sure why this surprised me.  I have assumed without thinking, that most animals can do this.  Again, is 'other awareness' a sign of consciousness?  Of self-awareness?

I don't know.  And Scheel, both in the book and at our book club, emphasized that our knowledge of octopus behavior is in its infancy.  Observing wild octopus is challenging,  and biologists aren't sure what captured octopus behavior reflects wild octopus behavior. Knowing what an octopus is thinking and even if it is thinking is a real challenge. At this point much of what we know is speculation based on limited observation and for further research to confirm or reject.  

I do recommend the book.  I said at the meeting that I found it very readable.  The chapters were clearly written mixing octopus encounters and observations with thoughts about octopus behavior and even inclusions of other animal behavior (Scheel studied lions in Tanzania for example.)  But that I found one chapter, maybe two, enough for one sitting. The end of one chapter didn't demand I read the next one.  Scheel said that made sense, since many of the chapters were written as stand alone articles.  

*I asked before the meeting formally began why 'octopuses' instead of 'octopi.'  He said it was a long story and then we got distracted and the meeting began.  I asked because in the book it was always octopuses, not octopi.  

Biking Stories This Week - Moose, Innocence, Post Cards, Bike Lanes, Big Leaves

 The moose are out this week.  Tuesday, walking toward Goose Lake we ran into a cow and calf.  Two bikers and a runner had already alerted us, as they were looking for alternate routes.  We got close enough to see them through the trees and walked back.  

Thursday, biking to up Campbell Airstrip Road, I passed a young bull with a nice growing rack.  It was the part of the trail that separates from the road.  Where I'd been warned by a driver a couple of years ago that they'd seen a bear on the trail.  So when I get to this part, I ring my bell a bunch to no one is surprised I'm there.  And down below the trail was the moose.  On the way back, I looked for him down below and there was nothing there.  Then there he was right next to the trail.  Turned back and took the road down.  Where I was able to get this picture.   You can see he's almost on the bike trail.

Then I stopped in the Botanical Garden.  They have a great plant sale.  Well, they sell plants all summer.  There's a good selection of interesting plants - local and not - that do well in Anchorage.  The plant sale is right at the front so I think you can buy plants without paying admission.  But the whole garden is worth some exploration.  And things change in there every week as different flowers start to show.

Here's some Shieldleaf Rogersia at the Garden.   These are very large leaves - the sign says China, Korea.  

They grow in the shade and my yard has lots of shade so I bought one about three years ago.  Bugs have been eating at it each year before it gets real big.  But this year it's looking better.  

Friday I had a couple of stops to make downtown.  First I dropped in at the Alaska Innocence Project.  They help prisoners who claim they were wrongly convicted and have evidence to back their cases.  They helped get the Fairbanks Four freed several years ago.  

I took an Óle course  several years ago, taught by Bill Oberly the (now retired) director and was highly impressed with their work.  

Prisoners don't get a lot of sympathy from the public, and innocent people behind bars is one of the biggest injustices in our society.  Since

Since it was a beautiful day we met in their conference room on the roof.

That's Francisco on the left and Jory on the right.  Here's a short video - under 2 minutes - that I recommend.  It talks about why people are wrongly convicted and how many there are.  

On the way to their office I found the new protected downtown bike lane.  I'd read about it in the Anchorage Daily News, but forgot about it until I came across it.  What an improvement.  No dodging pedestrians on the sidewalk or cars in the street. I could relax and just ride.  But there's not much of it - less than 1/2 mile I'd guess.  And then to get to the office I had to go back to the streets.  It even has its own street light with red and green bikes.  

Next stop was at Tim's to pick up some postcards to mail to voters.  This is probably the least painful way for introverts to be actively working to save Democracy.  [If you think I'm being alarmist, let's talk.  The mainstream media are treating the election as if Trump were a normal candidate.  He's not. Mainstream media only look reasonable in comparison with Fox.  With the Far Right capture of the Supreme Court, a Trump presidency would be the end of democracy in the US.] In this case the Environmental Voters Project combined with the Citizens Climate Lobby.  Tim's in a log cabin downtown, but this one has been modernized a bit.  It even has a touchpad to unlock the door.  

I have some work to do.  

Today was a spectacular day.  I picked up a book that was on hold at the library for me.  I think I requested it six or more months ago - The Sympathizer by Viet Thang Nguyen.  It won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the first 15 pages pulled me right in.                                           I'm still working on Many Things Under a Rock - a book about octopuses.                                                           From the library to the post office to get post card stamps and to mail a letter to my grandson who is away at camp.  The post office was closed, but I could mail the letter.                                                        Finally I could bike on.  As I said, it was a beautiful day - our warmest of the year I'm sure.

                                                                                      I doubt  the official temperature,
which is measured at the airport, was 77˚F (26˚C), but it was a nice, nice day.  

I went up Arctic to the Campbell Creek bike trail near Dimond and then back down the  trail past Taku Lake and eventually home.  I've gone, as of today, 475 kilometers, this summer.  (That means since the trails were clear enough of snow to ride.)

We had salmon on the deck this evening - with loud rumbles of thunder in the background.  That's not something we get often in Anchorage - sometimes none in a year or three.  

So keeping it fairly light today.  Happy Fathers' Day to all of you lucky enough to have this awesome responsibility. 

Blogging Block - Mushrooms And Octopuses

I've got a bunch of started posts, but finishing them gets hard.  Don't want to just be another opinion without strong evidence.  Don't want to post simple stuff that has no meat.  Don't want to say what others have already said.  And it's summer - Anchorage is green and the temperature has crept up to cool but comfortable.  The garden's been taking my time up - I do enjoy seeing everything that's popping up.  Seems most of the perennials have survived the winter.  Also have been pulling up dandelions - first, to get them before they go to seed and second to add the greens to the compost pile.  Still have lots of dead leaves and they need to be layered with fresh greens (and the kitchen compost).

Found a couple of morels had popped up yesterday.   

And getting that picture up reflects one of my obstacles - my airdrop to my laptop stops working after a while and I have to shut everything down and reboot to get it to work again.  

I'm reading David Scheel's Many Things Under a Rock:  The Mysteries of Octopuses for our next book club meeting.  I'm enjoying it immensely.  It's a pleasure to read, I'm learning about octopuses - what they prey on, who preys on them, and how they evade their predators, for starters.  

David Sheel teaches at Alaska Pacific University and has accepted our invitation to join us when we discuss his book.

Sheel writes that "many things under a rock" is a translation of the Eyak word for octopus.

Here's a sample:

"The giant Pacific octopus of Port Graham that had defeated the butter clam mentioned earlier ha taken the heavy bivalve in its suckered arms.  But she was to learn the limits of her strength.  With many suckers on multiple arms attached around both halves of the clamshell the octopus no doubt had tried to pull open this armored prey, perhaps with some patience.  The sucker attachment requires no persistent force, but the octopus has to pull continuously with its arms to pry apart the clam halves, while the clam resists, applying opposing force to hold itself closed. 

Watching an octopus apply this pressure can be a quiet affair.  If the clam wins, this may be a motionless tug-of-war.  With small clams, a giant Pacific octopus quickly and smoothly pulls the clamshell open, sometimes with enough force to break one of the clamshells.  The day octopus opens clams and pries loose prey from their holdfasts on the reef with a series of sharp pulls, its who body jerking until, sometimes with an audible crack, something breaks and the inner flesh is accessible.  The day octopus is very fast, often breaking into its prey or moving on within less than a minute, whereas the gist Pacific octopus my spend a few minutes to tens of minutes opening prey by pulling.  

In its battle with this large butter clam, the octopus tired first.  The clam was too strong, and did not yield to the octopus's strength.  So the octopus tried something else.  On the outside of the clamshell were no fewer than I've separate marks, two marks on one have of the clamshell and three marks on the other side.  The marks were small ovals mea by the giant Pacific octopus.   Each of those was an attempt by the octopus to get through the shell.  

These tiny oval perforations are drill marks.  Octopuses have inside their mouths a radula, which is a rising organ used to break up food.  The radula itself is a ribbonlike membrane  that runs between two muscle groups and lies over and between the posters, two muscularhydrostats.  Our human tongue, as well as octopus arms and the elephant's trunk, are muscular hydrostatic - anatomical constructions that use fluid pressure generated by muscle contractions rather than a rigid skeleton to allow movement.  Inside the octopus mouth, the bolsters can direct the pressure of a bend in the radula ribbon.  Along the length of the radula are rows of micro teeth.  Muscles at either end pull the radula back and forth, rasping it over and wearing away the surface against which it is applied.  

The radula begins the work of drilling, and is sufficient itself to make a hole.  But it cannot penetrate too deeply.  Beyond that, the salivary papillae, also tipped with a few rasping teeth must take over.  The salivary glands secrete enzymes that break dow the shell of prey such as crabs or this clam.  The papillae delivers the caustic secretions directly to the drill site, chemically dissolving the shell, and making it easier for the tooth-tipped salivary papillae to rasp away."

If you are having trouble imaging an octopus radula, here's a picture google says is an octopus radula.  Unfortunately, the link resulted in "Page Not Found."   I don't quite see the rest of the octopus so I'm still a bit confused.  But this helps a little.  

Additionally, I'd note, as I have on occasion that I am still posting about the Respiratory Disease Reports from State every week.  There's one more today.  You can find those at the Respiratory Virus Cases tab above (just under the orange banner.)  You can also go there with this link.  But I'd rather you find the tabs so you can check it any time.  This week COVID cases are up significantly while only one RSV case was reported, and the flu cases are down slightly.

So, many things under a block.  

The Street - A 1946 Primer On Structural Racism

 My bookclub is reading The Street by Ann Petry this month.  

It was first published in 1946.  Remember that date.  It says on the cover of the 1976 edition that it has sold over a million copies.  

It's a story of an attractive young Black woman living in Harlem at the end of WW II, struggling to find a path to a better life.  It shifts here and there to the stories of other characters she deals with, but it's basically Lutie Johnso's story.

What I find of most interest is that 

• this book got published in 1946
• that many copies were sold
• that the message seems to have little impact on White understanding

I'm guessing about the last point.  Perhaps it caused a number of White folks to adjust their assessment of Black folk in the United States an to better understand the enormous obstacles they faced.  And maybe I'm just frustrated that it has taken so long to change White thinking,  After all, it was 1953 when James Baldwin's first book - Go Tell It On The Mountain - was published.  But Richard Wright's Native Son was published in 1940.  

A 1992 NYTimes article about the republication of The Street gives us more background about the author and how the book got published and that it was a big hit right away.  

Scattered throughout the book, Lutie Johnson reflects on al the obstacles Black women (and men) faced.  How impossible it was to get ahead, to escape poverty.  How the housing was terrible, paying the rent difficult.  Black men had trouble getting jobs, so the women worked and quickly became single mothers whose kids had no safe, healthy places to go after school until their mom's got home from work.  

Here are a couple of pages to give an example of Lutie's reflections.  This first one is when her husband was laid off and in desperation, Lutie takes a job in Connecticut as a maid.  This leaves her husband home to raise their young son.  

The facing page tells us that her boss' mother has come to visit over Christmas.  The sentence begins on the previous page:  "A tall think woman with ... cold gray eyes..."

And this second passage is much later.  While Lutie was out of Harlem most of the month working for White people in a large house, her husband took up with another woman.  Lutie has quit her job and is back in Harlem in a depressing, small apartment with her son.  

On the previous page she had, walking home,  encountered a woman whose head was bleeding.  

"Yes, she thought, she and Bub [her eight year old son] had to get out of ... 116th Street.  

In the 1992 New York Times article we learn that Ann Petry grew up comfortably in a small town in Connecticut.  

"Mrs. Petry's grandfather was a chemist and her father a pharmacist who owned his own drugstore in town. Her mother was a barber, then a chiropodist and finally started her own linen business. Mrs. Petry graduated from the College of Pharmacy of the University of Connecticut and worked for a time in the family shop. A Comfortable Childhood

Theirs was one of the few black families in this old Connecticut town then, and still is today, but the incidents of prejudice, said Mrs. Petry, have been few. Hers was a childhood of privilege, especially for a black child of those days. Two working parents, family all about, enough money for hair ribbons, new shoes, warm meals and college. Mrs. Petry came to known firsthand the traumas of the street only after she married in 1938 and moved to Harlem."

I'm still puzzled about the impact this book had.  Over a million copies had been sold by the time the 1992 paperback version was published.  Who were those people?  How did they react?  How many did anything to make the lives of Black folks easier?  How many were White?  Black?  

This book wasn't talking about the suffering of Black people in the South.  It was about people in New York City.

The original review of the book, says it was published in February 1946.  A bit of context - Donald Trump was born June 14, 1946.  I'm guessing neither of his parents read this book.  

One other thought:  As I read this book and imagined who might have read the book, I got this image of all the people who had ever read it gathered together for a week to talk about the book and what actions they could take to change things.  To a degree, social media moves us in that direction.  Not all the readers of a book, but a significant number can share the experience.  

Philanthropy, Benjamin Franklin, Daniel Defoe

 I'm reading Benjamin Franklin's Last Bet by Michael Meyer.  Since my bookclub discusses Ike's Gamble Monday, this title seemed like a possible follow-up.  

Basically, in his will Franklin left 1000 £ to his two cities - Boston where he was born, and Philadelphia where he moved after leaving Boston.    The money was to be used to make loans to men starting up in the trades.  (Franklin himself had been helped by people when setting up his print shop.)  They had ten years to pay the money back at 5% interest.  He calculated that this money would grow over two hundred years to a much larger sum.  I haven't gotten far enough into the book to know how successful this was.  I do know that after 100 years, the Boston fund had a value closer to what Franklin had calculated than the Philadelphia fund.  But the Boston fund had made fewer and fewer loans. The author also tells us that Franklin hadn't figured on mechanization and industrialization replacing small tradesman with factories.

But that's not what this post is directly about. Rather it's about Franklin's devotion to the idea of charity.  

Inspirations:  Mather and Defoe

"There was also a Book of Defoe's," Franklin remembered in his memoir, "called An Essay on Projects,  and another of Dr. Mather's, call'd Essays to do Good which perhaps gave me a Turn of Thnking that had an Influence on some of the principal future Events of m Life. . . .

"A bankrupt Daniel Defoe wrote An Essay upon Projects while hiding in Bristol from a London creditor empowered to imprison him.  Published in 1697, two decades before Robinosn Crusoe  brought him fame, Projects laid out Defoe's ideas for social improvement.  These included the education of women, the creation of unemployment benefits, a lottery to benefit charity, fire insurance,  proportional taxation based on income, mortgage interest capped at 4 percent, and a public assistance scheme called the Friendly Society for Widows."  (pp. 124-125)

Franklin Fund Raising Tips

"'I therefore put my self as much as I could out of sight,'  he related in his  autobiography, 'and stated it as a Scheme of a number of Friends, who had requested me to go about and propose it to such as they thought Lovers of Reading. [He was collecting money to build a library.] In this way my Affair went on more smoothly, and I ever after practis'd it on such Occasions and from frequent Successes can heartily recommend it.  The present little Sacrifice of your Vanity will afterwards by amply repaid.'"

"As much as he downplayed his own philanthropy, Franklin came to realize that sometimes the best way to get people to donate to your cause was to publish the names of those who had already contributed."

"By convincing the state assembly to match any amount raised up to £2,000, Franklin secured 'an additional motive to give, since every man's donation would be doubled . . .'"

I guess folks who study philanthropy know this, but I didn't realize such practices went back to Franklin.  I suspect some aspects might be even older than Franklin.  

There are a lot of fascinating tidbits about Franklin, about the beginnings of the nation, and other random ideas.  Here's one quote from the book that made me pause and think:

"In 1800, ten years after Benjamin Franklin's death, only one American in twenty lived in a town of more than 2.500 people.  Four out of five Americans farmed land." (p.107)

Rachel Epstein Book on John Haines - May the Owl Call Again

 Someone left a link to this book in a comment on a totally unrelated post - at least I didn't see any connection.  

But Rachel worked in the University of Alaska Anchorage bookstore for many years and put together many (100?  200?) forums in the bookstore.  Usually there was an author (or two) speaking, but sometimes it was on a topic of current interest.  

They were small intimate affairs where the audience had lots of opportunity to interact with the speakers.  

These soirees were exactly what should be happening on a University campus.  

I'm sure this is a noteworthy book so I'm delighted to let people know about it.  

From the Amazon page.

"Alaskan poet John Haines has been gone for more than a decade now, but his singular voice stays with me—the deep quiet of it and its enchantment, the spareness of his lines—Li Po transposed to the far north. Much else is here to muse on and admire—his charming letters to Rachel Epstein, photos of his homestead in Richardson, transcripts of talks given, memoirs of a vanished Alaska, selected essays, notes on the imagination’s relationship with the natural world, even recollections of his service on a destroyer in the Pacific toward the end of WW II. May the Owl Call Again is a moving and memorable collection, and at its heart is Haines’ haunting poetry.

—Marc Hudson, poet, translator, and an emeritus professor at Wabash College.

His most recent book of poems is East Of Sorrow.

May the Owl Call Again bears witness to the last years of Haines' life—his thoughts, humor, melancholy, a profound awareness of Alaska’s rhythms, and his struggles with engagement in a broken world. But, above all, it is a meditation on friendship and the solace of intimacy that can be found in the handwritten page. It’s a testament to care, the aches of connection and solitude, and the consolation of finding kinship with another. I found myself reading it all at once and walking away with a profound sense of gratitude for Epstein sharing this Haines with all of us. 

—Freya Rohn, poet and founder of Ariadne Archive"

For Anchorage folks I'd recommend calling Writers' Block bookstore ((907) 929-2665) to order it if it's not in.  Buy Alaskan authors writing about Alaskan people from local Alaskan bookstores.  

JB MacKinnon Speaks On His Book "The Day The World Stops Shopping"

Wednesday night my daughter and I went to Bainbridge High School to hear author J.B MacKinnon.  He was interviewed on stage by local Bainbridge resident Becky Rockefeller whose a founder of the Buy Nothing movement.  She was a knowledgeable and perceptive interviewer.  

The discussion was exciting.  Mackinnon's ideas about changing consumerism were realistic - "if we cut back shopping by 25% one day, the economy would collapse" - and there were lots of examples of people who have chosen non-consumer life-styles.  

A key concept for me was the idea of one-world living.  Not sure what your first thought was when you hear that term, but mine was not what he was talking about.

He was talking about how many planet earths were required to sustain a country's level of consumption.  He said the US needed about five or six planet earths to supply the resources for all that we consume of the long haul. (He said he didn't remember the exact number.)  When he was writing the book he looked for countries that were one-world or less.  The most attractive life at the level, at the time, was Ecuador.  

But he also said that 1977 in the US fit that standard too.  I was alive and aware at that time and it wasn't a burdensome life.  

I realize that one reason I'm blogging less frequently is that trying to do it right takes more time than I seem to have.  So I'm going to use a shortcut and offer this YouTube with MacKinnon so you can get a sense of his ideas yourself. 

 

Reading - Demon Copperhead and If I Survive You

Demon Copperhead won a Pulitzer Prize and has had lots of publicity so I won't add much to what's out there, only to note some similarities to If I Survive You.

First I read Demon Copperhead for my bookclub.  A deep dive into being poor in Appalachia.  The hero in this David Copperfield inspired novel struggles to survive in a world shaped by addiction.  Author Barbara Kingsolver makes it clear that the addiction is the fault of the pharmaceutical companies whose owners and operators profit off of getting as many people addicted to opioids as possible.  Anyone who comes in contact with the health field and has some insurance of agency to subsidize their habit - foster kids, vets, the elderly, those employed with health insurance in any level job is fair game.  But Damon (Demon) has David’s (Copperfield) pluck and resilience as he bobs up and down in rural western Virginia, mostly.  (Thought I'd blogged about this one already, but I only mentioned it in passing.)

[As I move to If I Survive You, I'd say the main characters share struggling to make ends meet, being part of groups that are discriminated against (in Copperhead it's being from rural Appalachia) though Demon knows well who his cultural people are, just not his birth family.  Both are trying to overcome their own self doubts, though Demon seems more successful.  In some ways not having family may have given him an advantage over Trelawny who is in a constant fight with his father and brother.]

[I started this yesterday, but I'm adding a few notes today (Oct 3) but I'll leave what I wrote yesterday in the present tense.]

Now I’m on my second plane today and I’ve finished If I Survive You.  This book, by Jonathan Escoffery, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.  It was among five and this one was at Loussac Library and available just before we left.  

It started out being about a youth, Trelawny, trying to figure out who he was.  Not personally, though, of course, that’s always there, but who did he belong to/with.  His parents and brother were born in Jamaica, but he was born in Miami and people keep reminding him that he speaks white which alienates him from the family and pretty much everyone else.  The Hispanics take him in at school, thinking he’s one of them and they pity him because his parents don’t speak Spanish. When they find out he’s Jamaican, they drop him.  “Am I black?” is a question he gets varying answers to until he gets to a midwestern college where everyone assumes, yes, he is.  

But then the book veers into many other directions.  The father/son and sibling relationships are painful to him and the reader.  It’s not clear to me to whom the “YOU” in the title refers - his father?  His brother?  The family?  Himself?  The world?  

The book took me around south Florida and introduced me to a lot of folks struggling with different ways to keep a roof overhead - musicians, an arborist, a boat captain for rent, school teachers, a nursing home flunky, and in the end a very wealthy couple with their own devils to overcome.  

It feels like this is more a collection of stories than a novel; the same characters run through most of the stories.  The one that haunts me most is “Splashdown.”  In it we see Trelawny's cousin finally meeting the father who he's never met.  But the nursing home chapter ("Independent Living") is a mini expose of that industry.  and the final chapter ("If I Survive You") is equally gripping and kinkier.  They all explore how the need for money causes people to do things they probably wouldn't and definitely shouldn't.  The last one adds a more direct example of privilege folks using a poor man for their own (apparent) gratification and that cause him conflicts between his moral standards, personal dignity, and money.  It essentially asks, how much money will it take to get you to do X?  When the money is small change to the offering party but significant to Trelawny.  

I don’t regret reading this book, but at the end I am haunted by the characters and their struggles. 

This is the United States we live in today, where there are a few people who have managed to vacuum obscene amounts of wealth out of everyone else.  Then there are others who would appear to live quite comfortably.  But over the last three or four decades, the rules of engagement have changed enough that more and more people are sliding out of the comfortable faction into the world of economic (not to mention psychic) struggle the characters in this book deal with daily.  

    

Thinking about this book as I reread what I've written - first on the plane when I finished the book and now as I add and edit - I know this is a book that I won't forget.  The scenes are so real that I almost feel like I was there.  

Unchecked Reporting From A Source Who Hadn't Yet Figured Things Out

This is a tale about a journalist who writes an article based on what a friend with a new high level job in DC told her.  She pretty much writes what he says.  But it turns out his story is wishful thinking.  I just offer this as an example of bad reporting in case anyone is collecting such stories.

[Aug 31, 2023 - I've made some minor edits that, at most clarify, but don't change anything substantive.]

Miles Taylor writes in  Blowback about having arrived at the Department of Homeland Security to be "John Kelly's top intelligence and counter-threats advisor."  Taylor came into this position having worked as a Congressional staffer and in the W. Bush administration.  He'd been warned against taking a job in the Trump administration, but was pleased that someone like John Kelly would be in a high level position where he could help keep Trump in check.  

And, in fact, he was told early on that Kelly and allies had already kept Trump from doing some crazy shit.  [Sorry, that's not my style, but it seems like the most appropriate way to say it. "Prevented him from taking dangerous actions" just seems too tame.]

So barely a month on the job Taylor meets with a journalist friend.*

"Not long after starting, I caught up with a reporter friend.  We sat outside drinking cocktails not far from the White House, enjoying unseasonably warm April weather.  I confidently told her there was an "Axis of Adults" emerging inside the Trump administration - comprised of Kelly, Mattis, Tillerson, and others - who were keeping it on track.  She pushed back gently.

"They know what they're up against?"  she asked.

"They realize this is a tumultuous White House," I explained, "and they were serving as a leveling influence over fractious personalities . . .protecting the country from enemies both foreign and domestic." (pp.53-54)

Let's be clear here.  Taylor's been there a month or less in April 2017.  

"The reporter ran a story in the Daily Beast --"New Power in Trumpland: The Axis of Adults" - and asked to use the quote.  I agreed, hoping others would take comfort in knowing it wasn't all chaos in Trumpland." (p. 54)

Let me also say that Taylor has turned out to be one of the most consistent Republican voices against Trump.  He was the guy behind the Anonymous letter to the New York Times, while he was still in the government. The letter that alerted the world to how bad things were in the Oval Office.  I give him credit for sharing his early-on-the-job naïveté.  He goes on:

"In hindsight, I was probably sending the message to a few particular people - like the mentor who'd reached out to warn me against going into the administration.  And maybe, I was still trying to convince myself." (p. 54)

He closes that section with:

"I fell asleep easily in the early days knowing I'd made the right decision.  The Trump administration was starting to function, thanks to capable deputies who knew how to run the government. 

Like most bedtime stories, this turned out to be fiction." (p. 54)

So I googled Daily Beast "New Power in Trumpland: The Axis of Adults" and there it was.  As a blogger I have some sense of the dynamics of getting stories.  But since my blog is a hobby, not a job, I don't have the pressure to impress anyone or to get lots of hits.  The times that's happened it was simply because I managed to get an idea or story that took off.  

But I've read criticisms of reporters getting cozy with sources and then being used as conduits to publish an administration's story the way the administration wants it told. Or covering the strategy of the elections instead of the issues. (See for example Jay Rosen's "The savvy turn in political journalism.") I'm guessing this story would fit into savvy, but wrong.  So here's part of that Daily Beast story.

"There’s a new band in town that’s guiding national security by quietly tutoring the most powerful man in America. Never-Trump Republicans who’d been apprehensive about President Donald Trump are celebrating the trio’s influence, calling Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Homeland Secretary John Kelly the “Axis of Adults.”

Through near daily contact with the trio, as well as Trump’s National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster and CIA director Mike Pompeo, Trump’s world view appears to be morphing more closely to match hawkish conservatives of the Bush administration.

They point to the men’s influence in the Tomahawk strike in Syria—in contrast to Trump’s isolationist slogans on the campaign trail; the outreach to China, compared to Trump’s threats to launch a trade war; a possible escalation of the war in Afghanistan; and Trump’s hardening stance toward Russia.

None of these key national security chiefs were part of the Trump campaign, or movement. They are seen by those who work most closely with them as loyal to the office of the president but still getting to know the man himself, said a senior administration official, speaking anonymously to describe the interactions just 11 weeks into the fledgling presidency."

That's Miles Taylor, the "senior administrative official speaking anonymously." 

So, the reporter meets a friend for drinks (she didn't mention that part) and he relates his early impressions of the new administration.  Things he's been told.  And which he tells us, a few years later in his book. he soon realized were fiction.

But she got her story for the Daily Beast, a story that simply reported Taylor's fantasy about how the adults were taming Trump.  She accepted her friend's (an anonymous senior administrative official) story as true.  And the Daily Beast ran with it as true.  And it was true in the sense that a senior administrative official said it.

I guess I'd also call into question a story that outs those adults - it likely put them on a Trump watchlist as people who thought they were smarter than he was.  

How did this "Axis of Adults" fare?

Wikipedia says that as head of Homeland Security Kelly 

According to the New Yorker, 

Kelly left the DHS with a reputation as one of the most aggressive enforcers of immigration law in recent American history. His record belies the short length of his tenure. In six months, Kelly eliminated guidelines that governed federal immigration agents' work; vastly expanded the categories of immigrants being targeted for deportation; threatened to abandon the Obama-era program that grants legal status to undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children; and has even broached the idea of splitting up mothers and children at the border to "deter" people from coming to the U.S.[39]

The DHS under Kelly "became one of the few branches of the federal government that has been both willing and able to execute Trump's policy priorities."[39] Unlike other agency heads, Kelly did not clash with Trump.[38]

Who bent whom to his ways? Seems he was bent enough to be asked to be Trump's Chief of Staff, but that's when things went south..  

"On December 7, 2018, CNN and others reported that Kelly and Trump were no longer on speaking terms and that Kelly was expected to resign in the coming days.[55] On December 8, Trump announced that Kelly would be leaving at the end of the year.[56]"

Tillerson and Mattis tried hard to be the adults, but it didn't work out.  From the Atlantic

"Now [December 2018] Mattis was becoming more and more isolated in the administration, especially since the defenestration of his closest Cabinet ally, the former secretary of state Rex Tillerson, several months earlier. Mattis and Tillerson had together smothered some of Trump’s more extreme and imprudent ideas. But now Mattis was operating without cover. Trump was turning on him publicly; two months earlier, he had speculated that Mattis might be a Democrat and said, in reference to NATO, “I think I know more about it than he does.” (Mattis, as a Marine general, once served as the supreme allied commander in charge of NATO transformation.)"

But then a lot of people thought they could be the adult who could check Trump's impulses.  

That's all.  I just wanted to highlight this one example of an anonymous source who didn't really know what he was talking about getting reported as truth, with apparently no further fact checking.  

*He calls her a 'reporter friend.'  Reporter is probably the better word.  But it's also a bit ambiguous whether she is a friend who is a reporter or a reporter who became a friend.  I'm guessing that she was a friend first, but that's not clear.