"Our Representatives Are Still Helping Other Customers, Please Continue To Hold"

After waiting two hours to talk to someone who said she couldn't help me and then transferred me to another line where I've been waiting for over an hour, I started thinking that maybe the IRS needs to contract with an Indian call center.

Among the anti-tax, anti-government crowd are those business people who know that if they starve government, then there will be less enforcement of the rules and they can get away with more sketchy business and safety practices.  They'll hire lawyers who will concoct complicated legal responses that exhaust the thinning staff of the IRS and other agencies.

Meanwhile, law-abiding citizens have to wait for hours (literally) to talk to someone who might possibly be able to figure out how to get their organization to put the pieces together so that they'll stop sending me letters incorrectly saying I owe them money.

Here's the problem.

We hired a caregiver to take care of my mom when she could no longer walk and take care of herself.

We hired a national payroll firm to take care of calculating the taxes and paying them to the state and the federal governments.

So the company sent in the withheld federal taxes.

My mom's accountant sent in her income tax return, which included those withheld taxes as the payroll company said should be done. 

The IRS has not been able to connect the money they got from the payroll company to the tax return they got from the accountant. [As I learned from the guy I eventually talked to, the personal side of the IRS is separate and doesn't communicate well with the business side.]

My mother is getting letters saying that her personal returns owe X thousand dollars.
She's also getting letters saying that they have received X thousand dollars but there is no tax return.

The two parts of the IRS aren't talking to each other.

Despite the fact that

1.  The accountant has sent them letters documenting the connection between my mother's social security number and the Employer ID number and that the payments were made and the returns filed.
2.  I talked at length to an agent back in March or April and he clearly understood the issue and took extensive notes for the file.  He talked to my mom to get me power of attorney for the 2014 returns and told me what form to fill out for the 2015 return, which I did.

I sent the two new letters that were awaiting me at my mom's in LA last week to the accountant so he could respond to them.  But he also suggested I try to call them as well.  I had tried to call already, before talking to the accountant, but the recording I got then said they were too busy and to call again the next day.  It's more than the next day and the first number I called said to call later.  The next number (there's one number on the letter saying my mom owes X dollars and another number on the letter that says they have the money, but my mom needs to file a return) put me on hold for two hours before someone answered.  How many people can sit by the phone for two hours?  I at least could put it on speaker phone and do other work and my wife was around to take care of our grand daughter whom we're taking care of this week.

This agent was less than helpful or understanding.  She never even took my mom's name or social security number.  She just decided I needed to talk to the business side and said, "I'll transfer you."  Then I got told by a recording that the wait would be over 60 minutes.

[I've been writing this as this was unfolding, so I typed the next part 90 minutes later.]

But the man who eventually answered, about 90 minutes later, quickly grasped what I was saying and outlined how to fix it.  The tax deductions for the caregiver, despite what the payroll company said and despite what the accountant did, should not have been reported on my mom's personal tax return, but should have been file on a 941.  I wrote down what I understood and he said that was basically it.  He agreed it was unfortunate that it took so long for the IRS to answer the phone.  And it was too bad I couldn't have the accountant on the line too so he could answer the technical questions I didn't know and could ask things I didn't know to ask.  But he won't tie up his phone for two hours on hold.  He also agreed that the two sides of the IRS - business and personal - don't seem to talk to each other better.

So I have a tentative solution now which includes amending my mom's 2014 tax return - ugh.  
If we funded the IRS properly, it wouldn't take so long to answer the phone.  If they answered the phone, people wouldn't get so frustrated and could solve their problems before lots of penalties and interest fees pile up.  But this also make people angry at the IRS so they are amenable to the anti-government folks arguments, vote for simplistic anti-tax politicians, and make things even worse.  And the big polluters and tax dodgers get away with their shenanigans because the government doesn't have enough staff to handle their cases.  We see that with schools too - the campaigns to trash the public schools, cut their budgets.  This makes schools more crowded and parents more pissed off about schools.

On the positive side is that the man I talked to actually stayed in the office until 6pm his time on the Friday of a three day weekend to be sure he understood what I was explaining, to look up the returns and find that indeed the money was where I said, and to listen to me reread my notes.

Now I have to send my notes to the accountant who is going to say, I'm sure, we did some of the things already and that what he did was perfectly legit.   Grrrrrr.  We'll see.

[Reposted because of Feedburner issues.]

Peace Corps Reunion Portland

This is just a quick filler post.  My Peace Corps group is together for the second time since our official tour of duty ended in 1969 (though some of us stayed a third year and others lingered in the Peace Corps or in Thailand other capacities).  I did manage a break yesterday morning - the hotel has bikes for guests to use - and road along the river and some old routes from when we lived here in Portland in 2003. 


It took me a bit to figure out what Greenland was, but I stopped to snap a picture of Alaska's future.  I think Oregon's ahead on this because they've had more organized medical marijuana sales.

I really haven't had my camera out that much.  I've been enjoying reuniting with old friends, some whom I haven't seen in close to 50 years as well as meeting their equally interesting partners. 


And we're living out the reality of how unreliable memory is.  Some of us remember things that no one else does.  Others remember some parts of our training and others don't recall them at all. 






We talked in the bar, at breakfast, on the shuttle, at the Japanese garden.







Here's a sloppy group picture from our dinner Saturday night.  Some folks are totally recognizable after all these years and others not at all. 

There's a few more than half of the original group who went to Thailand to teach English together in 1967. 

And this morning a bike event is happening outside our hotel window.  I haven't had time to process all this.  Maybe there will be more later. 

U Of Alaska President Search Part 4: Finalist Johnsen Meets With Community (and me) At UAA

My blogger identity and my human identity came together yesterday afternoon when I went to the newish sports center at UAA for the community forum with president finalist Jim Johnsen.  Fortunately, I thought it was at 4pm so, while I didn't get there until 4:10, I was early for the real time of 4:30.  I checked out the view from the Sports Grill looking through the glass wall down to the

arena floor.  (Someone later asked Johnsen whether more student residences wouldn't have been a better use of the money than this slick arena.  He diplomatically said he tried not to second guess past leaders' decisions, knowing that various factors come together in a way that make some decisions right in the context.)




Anyway,  I used my extra time to call my mom who went back on hospice earlier that day, and I waited for the tv interview to end, before I went over to talk to the finalist, knowing that neither of us were probably too excited about meeting given that I'd posted the day before my belief that he had padded his resume over publications.  He said, "Hi Steve" as I walked over and we shook hands as I acknowledged the awkwardness, he thanked me for at least giving him a heads up email before posting, and we got past it and chatted amiably.  If he would have preferred to make me vanish, it wasn't obvious, and I sincerely told him that if he becomes president that I would support him however I could.  I'm not a confrontational person and coming face-to-face with the man I'd just written about was uncomfortable, but we both worked to put each other at ease.

It wasn't til after the event that I thought back to several weeks ago when I asked if I could interview him then and he said the search committee had told him not to talk to folks before the campus visits.  I think my inability to talk to him (other than brief emails) prior to posting put us both at a disadvantage.  It set me up to wonder why the regents didn't trust him (or the media) enough to let us talk and made him less of a person and more of a character in a story where I had to fill in the details.  The email exchange we had over the publications was cordial but factual and we didn't discuss why he characterized them as he did in the resume.  If we had met and talked, I know we would have gone into more depth that would have given him a chance to give his view of the resume.   As I think about all this now, I realize that in our former interactions back in the late 1990's, we were cast in adversarial roles - he was labor relations director and I was grievance coordinator for the union.  And with him based in Fairbanks and me in Anchorage, when we met it was basically over business. 

There were appetizers out and people found their way up to the grill and by the time Chancellor Case introduced him there were about 40 people in the room.  He gave his introductory comments - which he's repeated maybe ten times in the last two days first in Juneau and yesterday in Anchorage [Fairbanks]- articulately.  He went on to answer people's questions - about graduation rates, how the university can participate in the state discussions about the economy, about tuition and other student fees, the residence halls v. the sports center - knowledgeably.  He spoke in detail revealing a good grasp of the Alaska situation and awareness about what's done Outside in similar situations.

He doesn't have the commanding presence of the generals - past president Hamilton, current president Gamble - which is not a bad thing.  Nor does he have the nice guy presence of the third general - Chancellor Case - who introduced him at the gathering.  He said he's used to thinking about himself as a bit of an introvert, but that he really has enjoyed the past two days getting to talk to so many people.  And perhaps that's a good description of his manner - the introvert working hard to pass in an extrovert role.  That's an observation, not a criticism; I can relate to that myself.

"Alien forms of historical consciousness and discourse" - For Example: Arapaho Narrative Past

Each language has its own words that don't exist in other languages, its own grammatical quirks, its own intonation and rhythms that allow them to convey ideas or feelings that can't be expressed as precisely or even at all in other languages.

All this came as a slow realization over the years.  Learning German and having to use it as a student in Germany brought the first glimmers of this understanding.  Learning Thai and living in Thailand expanded my sense of how language shapes how we know things.

This awareness has made me realize that each language (and the culture it represents) is like a volume in the encyclopedia of human knowledge.  Losing a language and culture is like losing a part of the encyclopedia.  We lose what that particular culture has learned from its experience in its time and place in the world, its unique knowledge gained from solving the problems of survival it faced.  The culture overall may not seem like an 'important' culture, but how do we know that?  Much, if not most, of its cultural richness is invisible to people who don't know its language.  And there are so many cultures that most of us don't even know exist. 

But back to how languages shape how we see the world and how we negotiate it.  A simple example.

In English, gender is conveyed, incidentally, by the simple words  'he' and 'she'.  We automatically reveal the gender of the person we speak about.  We don't really have to reveal the gender of the person acting when we speak.   In Thai and Chinese, the equivalent words (third person singular) do not distinguish between males and females.  The terms are gender neutral  But in Thai, there is no exact translation for the English word "I."  Instead, there are two different words - one that males use and another that females use.  When a speaker uses the closest Thai word to the English "I" the speaker reveals his or her gender.  Well, not always.  There are other words that can be used in place of 'I" that instead of gender, reflect the speakers' relationship to the listener.  They could use another word that indicates they are younger or older than the listener and other kinds of status relationships between themselves and the listener.

You simply cannot translate these words from one language to the other without some sort of explanation in the translation.  The words just aren't in the other language.

This morning I heard about the Arapaho narrative past, which was explained as a tense which reflects that the speaker didn't not personally experience the events he's relating.  (I can't find where I heard this - something on the radio.)

What I could find on line focuses mostly on how to understand attempts to translate from Arapaho (and other languages):

Click image to see clearer            Screenshot from Algonguian Spirit

Or, from a paper on these issues for ethnographers from Academia:

 "An understanding of non-Western histories requires not only the generation of documents and an expanded conception of what constituted documentation but also a determined effort to try to comprehend alien forms of historical consciousness and discourse." [Fogelson 1989: 134][emphasis added]

Another misplaced strategy is to impose wholesale the structures of myth to history without establishing the connection in real practices and interaction. Myth contains materials for history but does not structure it totally. The results of a reified myth approach are structures existing "nowhere" in real sociocultural space and time, much as in Levi-Strauss's analysis of myth. In the Arapaho context, "right ways of doing things" (as expressed in forms of the verb nee'eestoo-) precede instruction in myth. The shapes, rhythms, and forms of practice retain primary generative force over cognitive structures, mythologic, or even thought world. Myth is neither a charter for social action nor a model of Arapaho thought. The most sacred myths were told only to a very few people of requisite age and ritual preparedness. To generalize from certain myths to history, then, is misplaced concreteness. Rather, it is necessary to look at social practices the select or reflect mythical and historical material. Of course, myth and history often converge, though not in a direct way. They show up as bits and pieces among so much other material people exchange communicate.

Arapaho Project offers a very technical description of the tense: 

Sound Changes in Words:

      Often in Arapaho, when prefixes and words combine, the sounds change at the combination points. This makes it hard sometimes to recognize what the original form was. The most common changes involve the letter -h-, and are as follows:

      nih (past tense)  + h- > nih’-

                                he’ih (narrative past tense)  + h- > he’ih’- 

For people dealing with Arapaho myths, all this technical detail is important.  But for others (like me) it's a springboard to other ideas about how different language forms could change how we know things.

Why Does This Matter?

So, when I heard this concept of Arapaho narrative past, my ears perked up.  I started thinking about the idea of a tense that is used when telling a story that is not your own story.  Using that tense alerts listeners to the speaker's relationship to the story.

Think about how this might affect things.  Politicians and business folks, when relating stories, would, simply by their use of grammar, have to indicate whether the story they were relating was their own story or someone else's. Think about other ways a language could embed truth telling into its syntax, making harder to lie, or at least easier to figure out that someone was lying. 

I'm not saying that's what Arapaho narrative past exactly distinguishes, I'm just extrapolating other possibilities.  When I looked this Arapaho language phenomenon, I see I'm not likely to understand it exactly, but it does seem to distinguish between talking about myth and some more than real world story from the everyday kinds of stories.  That listeners know that what is being related is not of this world, that the words are supposed to be understood as describing another state of being.

Even in reading English that was written two hundred years ago, we lose a lot because we don't know, really, the way people then thought about the world, what things we assume that they wouldn't have.  We know they had different ideas about slavery, about the roles of men and women, about food, about health, about religion.  And, we think that we, in hindsight, can understand what they meant when they wrote something.  But truly we can't really put ourselves in their world.  After all, twenty year olds today talking about the 1960s are talking about a very different reality than the one I lived in the 60s. They take the outline of events, void of all the color and nuance of the times, and replace it with the color and nuance of their own times.

It's not simply historical consciousness and discourse that's hard to understand.  We have alien forms of consciousness around us in our own communities speaking in what appears to be our own language.   You could say this about  some of the Republicans and Democrats in Congress, or our own Alaskan legislators, who take the same 'facts' and decorate them with their own cultural meaning.  

That's a lot of what the citations above from the ethnographers are talking about.  I'm not judging here, simply pointing it out as an inevitable cross-cultural barrier to understanding.  The first step to dealing with the gap is to at least be aware of it. 

[UPDATE June 15, 2015:  I forgot to add a link to a related previous post on evidential language, in which the speakers give evidence for the claims they make.

"Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something."]

]

Hiring A Mediator: Is Alaska's Governor Trying To Be The Adult?

Governor Walker has hired a mediator to try to get the two houses of the Alaska legislature to resolve their differences and pass a budget.

The governor has already had to send out layoff notices to state employees and if the budget isn't resolved by, well the new fiscal year this budget is supposed to cover begins July 1.   Below is my rough sense of what is happening in Alaska policy unmaking. 

Overview of Sticking Points

1.  Last year the legislature passed a $2 billion a year tax break for oil companies which includes big tax credits - to the tune of $700 million this year.  The Republican majorities in the House and Senate tell us this is contractual and can't be changed.  Though they have no problem breaking other contracts such as labor agreements. 

2.  The price of oil plummeted,  sharply cutting the state's basic revenue source.

3.  The budget passed by the legislature had a $3 billion gap between expenditures and revenue. 

4.  The state has a lot of money in different funds - mainly the Alaska Permanent Fund and the Constitutional Budget Reserve (CBR).  But the legislature needs a 3/4 majority to get into the CBR.  Democrats were needed to get to the CBR and they wouldn't go along with the budget unless the Majority approved Medicaid expansion, union contracts whose raises the legislature had previously approved, and a version of Erin's Law to teach kids how to protect themselves from sexual abuse.

5.  The majority talked about moving money around in the Permanent Fund which on technical grounds would let them tap the CBR with a simple majority.  This move only needed a majority, but six of their own, sensing political suicide (even talking about messing with the Permanent Fund Dividend Checks everyone gets has been taboo) and severe limitations on future budget options, refused to go along. 

6.  The governor refused to sign a budget that was $3 billion in the red and sent it back to the legislature, set up a special session in Juneau (the state capital), and told them to fund union contracts, pass Medicaid expansion, Erin's Law, and a balanced budget.  (The governor is a former Republican who ran as an Independent because he didn't think he could get through a Republican primary.  During the campaign, he teamed up with the Democratic gubernatorial candidate who became his Lt. Gov running mate.  A major National Guard scandal for the sitting Republican governor helped Walker become governor.)

7.  The Republican majorities in the House and Senate threw a hissy fit and refused to meet in Juneau.  They held ten and 15 minute meetings - long enough to open and adjourn - and then called their own special session in the newly, and luxuriously, refurbished Legislative Information Office in Anchorage.

8.  The House majority and minority caucuses finally came up with a compromise budget - which got a few things the Democrats wanted (no Erin's Law, no Medicaid) along with a promise to vote for access to the CBR, but only IF the senate went along. 

9.  The Senate rejected the House compromise and sent back their own new budget.

10.  This budget was rejected by both the Democrats and the Republicans unanimously in the House.

So that gets us to now.  The governor announced that he'd hired a man who mediates business disputes.  The governor is an attorney who is used to working through business deals with mediators if nothing else works.  

This seems to me like a logical and reasonable approach.  The governor says the legislature is squabbling over 1% of the budget and seemingly is willing to risk shutting down the government over what he thinks are really tiny differences.  I would guess that while the financial differences are small, the ego differences are still pretty big.

My main question when I heard about the mediation offer was about separation of powers.  I would suspect given the already mentioned bruised egos, having the governor meddle with the legislature by hiring a mediator would add even more capsaicin to an already fiery stew.

But it is the kind of thing an adult would do.  I think of something I heard during the Alaska political corruption trials in 2007 -2008.  I believe it was someone working with the prosecution who observed that the businessmen (there were no women indicted) all quickly came to settlement agreements while the politicians were the ones who tended to go to trial.   The businessmen, he hypothesized, knew how to assess their situation and cut their losses while the politicians protested to the end that they didn't do anything wrong.

The governor tends to take more of a business approach than the Republican politicians in power in Juneau (well, in Anchorage at the moment), despite their non-stop pro-business rhetoric.  And lest I be accused of picking on the Republicans, let me say in my defense, that they are, and pretty much have been, the folks who call the shots in Juneau.  The Democrats are relegated to scraps that fall from the Republican table.  They haven't had any power over anything until their votes were needed for the CBR.  The Democrats, from my perspective, have still been meek in their demands (maybe requests is a more accurate term) but the Senate seems galled that they have to acknowledge their existence at all. 

The Impact Of Modern Day Shaming

“Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death,” he wrote. “It would seem strange that ignominy should ever have been adopted as a milder punishment than death, did we not know that the human mind seldom arrives at truth upon any subject till it has first reached the extremity of error.”

This is a quote from  Benjamin Rush, a physician in Philadelphia and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.  It's  in Jon Ronson's long New York Times Magazine article on public shaming in the age of social media, How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life.

Sacco posted a sarcastic tweet that people immediately jumped on as racist.  In her words, to Ronson,

“To me it was so insane of a comment for anyone to make,” she said. “I thought there was no way that anyone could possibly think it was literal.”

She tweeted from Heathrow just before boarding a plane for Cape Town.  Little did she know about the firestorm that would greet her when she landed.

Ronson, not only follows up on Sacco, but other people whose lives have been turned upside down by people piling on online.  In one case, there was a picture that the person "didn't realize that her mobile uploads were visible to the public."  It took four weeks before the photo was discovered and she lost her job.

In another case, a guy at a tech conference, made a bad joke about computer body parts, quietly, to the guy sitting next to him.  The lady in front of them stood up, took his picture.

"She tweeted the picture to her 9,209 followers with the caption: “Not cool. Jokes about . . . ‘big’ dongles right behind me.” Ten minutes later, he and his friend were taken into a quiet room at the conference and asked to explain themselves. Two days later, his boss called him into his office, and he was fired."

The article is well worth reading.  It looks at how things are taken out of context and people's lives are, at least temporarily, destroyed.  And even if someone's words are in context and inappropriate, the impact of cyber shaming is totally disproportionate to the crime.  If someone went to court for this, it would be a minor embarrassment and cost.   But it wouldn't cost someone their livelihood.

This gets Ronson to look up the history of shaming in the US.  Which led to the opening quote.

"The pillory and whippings were abolished at the federal level in 1839, although Delaware kept the pillory until 1905 and whippings until 1972. An 1867 editorial in The Times excoriated the state for its obstinacy. 'If [the convicted person] had previously existing in his bosom a spark of self-respect this exposure to public shame utterly extinguishes it. . . . The boy of 18 who is whipped at New Castle for larceny is in nine cases out of 10 ruined. With his self-respect destroyed and the taunt and sneer of public disgrace branded upon his forehead, he feels himself lost and abandoned by his fellows.'”

Of course, Tweets, often alert us to something well worth reading, and I thank Mark Meyer, for retweeting about this article.

Something to chew on.  Pause and think when you're about to post a questionable joke or in anger.  Or when you're feeling righteous indignation about something you see posted online.  Find out the truth first.  Remember the golden rule - think how you'd feel if you were on the receiving end.

[UPDATE Feb 17, 2015:  Here's the December 2014 Gawker post by the guy who spread Justine Sacco's tweet to  infamy.  They met, six months later.  Here are a couple things he says about all this:

Twitter disasters are the quickest source of outrage, and outrage is traffic. 

Fortunately, traffic doesn't make or break this blog.  It's good to know people are reading it, but I don't need to stir up fake outrage to boost traffic. 

And, as it turned out, Justine Sacco is not a racist monster. She is a kind and canny woman who threw back cocktails, ate delicately, and spoke expertly about software. She was friendly, very funny, instantly relatable, and very plainly not a cruel sicko. We talked about college, jobs, home, family, and work—she'd recently landed on her feet as the communications boss for a small New York startup, and seemed to be happily rebuilding her career. . .

Sacco was not depressed, or even slightly bitter, and said she bore no resentment towards me at all. She'd only wanted to meet up, she explained, because I owed it to her. I should get to know her before ever writing about her again. There was no catch, no setup, no tricks—she just wanted me to consider her a person, and not a meme.  .  .

 This is the point I try to make over and over again.  We shouldn't take something that a person spent a few seconds of their life doing and use it to judge a person.  We all do stupid things now and then.  Think about the stupid things you wouldn't like to have the world use to write your epitaph.]

Dantzing With Pollsters - Follow Up

Yesterday I did a  post about ways to respond to political pollsters that raises questions like what do you owe telephone survey folks?  The only things I said you owe them are some respect and friendliness, because it's not an easy job.  I just got a call from a local Anchorage number - 268 2121.  It's a bit late for calls, but I answered it.

Caller:  May I speak to Steve?
Me:  Whose calling?
Caller:  Tanya.  I'm from MRS.
Me:  [She sounded tired, and remembering my advice, I answered in a very friendly]     Hi Tanya, how are you doing tonight?  What is MRS and where are you?
Tanya:  McQuire Research Service, in Nevada.

Well she was clearly pleased to get a friendly response and, in her words, "not to be yelled at."  But I did tell her about yesterday's blog post and she asked if I wanted to do the survey.  Since she'd identified her company, which I'd said yesterday legit pollsters should do,  I said, 'Sure."

Tanya:  How likely are you to vote next month?
Steve:   Barring getting hit by a bus . . . you know Tanya, actually, I plan to vote next Monday when early voting starts.  So I'm definitely voting in October, not next month.
Tanya:   . . . .
Steve:  If I say I'm not voting next month, that ends the survey, doesn't it?
Tanya:  Yes . . .
Steve:  I guess they didn't write the question very well, because I'm sure they don't care when I vote, do they?  But since I'm not going to vote next month, and I answered honestly 'no,' you have to end this right?
Tanya:  Yes,

I thought I heard an unspoken, "but . ."

I hope she still gets paid, even though we only did the first question.  But she shouldn't be penalized if people don't plan to vote.  That's information too.  I should have asked her. 

[OK, this post is sort of a stall.  I'm working on several longer posts that aren't quite right yet, and this seemed like an easy filler.  But if you didn't see the original post Dantzing With Pollsters, that has a little more meat.

I don't generally watch television or listen to much AM radio, so I'm relatively spared a lot of the political advertising.  The mailed advertising doesn't make noises and is easy to put into the recycle bin.

But I noticed tonight, getting a Youtube clip for a post I'm working on, that I got a Dan Sullivan ad linking Mark Begich to Obama before the video.  But I had to play the video several times and then I got Begich ads with a women talking about how Sullivan would interfere between her and her doctor at her clinic. 

Dantzing With Pollsters

I didn't answer, waiting for them to leave a message.  They called twice yesterday.  Once he must have been paying attention to something else and missed the message because he said, "Steve?"  six or seven times on voice mail.

But they left no messages.  I googled "Dantz 925 948 9469" and got 2012 stuff at 800Notes:

"R Squared

30 Sep 2012

Just got a call today from that number. This is research center conducting statistics for the upcoming elections. The agent asks: "are you going to vote during the upcoming elections?" And you answer yes or no. That was it.

Caller: Research Center

Call Type: Survey"

"Maria

1 Oct 2012

This number has called me several times in the past few days. I don't pick up and they don't leave a message. I tried calling back, but it said the number wasn't in service."

Why are they calling?

Well, basically, they are calling you to get information from you that they get paid to gather.

OK, pollsters call for different reasons.

1. On the top of the pecking order (for me)  are academic researchers who are trying gain understanding of some issue or human behavior and the results of their research will be available to all and might give us more insight into how the world works.
    
2.  Political pollsters whose data are available to anyone.  They are trying to get a handle on a coming election or some other issue.  And to improve their reputations so clients will pay them to do private polls. 
    
3.  Pollsters who get paid by a political candidate so that candidate can see how close the election is and to figure out the best way to reach voters with his message or get voters to actually vote.


4. Pollsters who get paid by PACs or other political operators who want to figure out how to get a particular candidate elected or a particular initiative to pass or be defeated.

It's not unreasonable during an election, to try to get a sense of how likely it is for one candidate or another to win, especially if you are one of the candidates.  Nor is it unreasonable for candidates to try to get a sense of which issues are most important to the voters.  But some candidates do this more honorably than others.

And nowadays, when outside PACS have tens of millions of dollars to spend to manipulate an election, things get less honorable and reasonable.


What Do You Owe The Pollsters?

They're making money off of your information.  You didn't invite them to call.  In fact you may even be on the "do not call registry."  While I think there can be a public benefit for answering the calls of academic pollsters, and there are honest politicians who are legitimately gathering information to better get their message out (rather than to pander to whatever the voters seem to want to hear),  it's hard to tell which pollster is which.

A good, legitimate pollster will tell you which organization they work for, but not necessarily who their client is, particularly if it's a political poll.  Knowing the client might bias the respondent's answers.

Basically, I've come to the conclusion that I don't owe them answers.  I don't owe them picking up the phone, answering their questions, or if I do answer, I don't have an obligation to tell the truth. 

I do owe them a modicum of respect and friendliness.  After all, these are people who are trying to earn a living in difficult economic times.  Of course, this goes with all transactions.  And if they are not respectful or friendly back, you don't even owe them this.  Though, staying polite, if uncooperative, shows them you are a nobler person.

Can You Have Fun With Pollsters?

Happiness is all about finding the positive in what you encounter in life.  Look toward these calls as an opportunity to be playful.  Some options.

Pollster:  Hello, I'd like to ask you some questions about the upcoming election.
Answer:  No problem, I charge $120 per hour, with a 15 minute minimum.  Send me a $30 check and when you call back I'll be happy to answer for up to 15 minutes.

Pollster:  Hello, I'd like to ask you some questions about the upcoming election.
Answer:  And I'd like to ask you some questions too.   Let me ask you some questions and depending on your answers, I'll then let you ask me.
1.  Who do you work for and where are you calling from?  [This one they should answer - at least the polling company, not the client]
2   And what client is paying you to do this poll?
3.  How much are you getting paid per hour?
4.  If your company is getting paid and you're getting paid for my information, don't you think it is reasonable that I get paid too?

Pollster:  Hello, I'd like to ask you some questions about the upcoming election.
Answer:  Sure, no problem, but I don't promise to answer honestly.  [This has sometimes ended the call and other times not.]

Pollster:  Hello, I'd like to ask you some questions about the upcoming election.
Answer:  Hey, I'm sorry that the economy is so bad that you've had to stoop to making these kinds of calls.  What did you do before?  or What is your degree in?

If you get a particularly nasty push poll (where they give you leading questions and the poll isn't to get information, but to influence your vote by slandering a candidate) you can
1.  record the call (in Alaska it's legal to record a call if one party knows it's being recorded - for an overview of this one-party consent nationally see here) and then send the recording to the slandered candidate so they know what's going on.  If both parties must consent in your state, you can simply tell them "I hope you don't mind but I record all my calls" or you can just ask if they mind and if they do, say, "Sorry then. Goodbye."
2.  move to your computer and type up their scripts as they read them.  You can ask them to slow down and repeat questions because you can't hear them or because you need to think about it.  You can make a 30 second call take five minutes.  It will drive them crazy.  And you can send your transcript of the questions to the candidate they are trashing.

Another activity is to try to get the pollster off their script.  If it's a legitimate poll, they should be asking each person the exact same question and not give any extra information, except to repeat the question.  But these folks have been doing a lot of calling and they can get bored and might be susceptible to a little subterfuge of their polls.

Again, try to ascertain what kind of poll it is.  The most reputable will tell you who they are and possibly what the poll is about (if that doesn't bias the information.)  For instance:

Pollster:  Hi, I'm calling from the University of X and I'd like to ask you some questions about health care.  The information will be confidential, your name will not be on the response sheet I keep, though we will have a coded identifier. 

But remember, a lot of university polling is done, not really for academic research, but because the university is being paid by a client to gather the information.  Sometimes this might be for a state agency, other times it could be for a private company.  You can ask and if they won't tell, you can politely decline.

Make this into a little dance of wits.  A game you play with the pollsters.  With a little imagination you can change how you view pollsters, change them from a nuisance into   pollsterade.  Think of each new call as a challenging game.  Some of the callers will enjoy it too if you're polite and clever about it. 


One more catch - robot calls.  You can't play with them usually because they aren't programed to hear you.  The best I can think to do is just not respond and make them use up as much time as possible before they automatically hang up.  If they do respond to voice, tell them you only respond to real people. Or try "Operator" to get a real person.  But don't hold your breath. 

Do The Math

All points of the political universe have issues with education in the United States today.
Unfortunately, the polarization has gotten to the point where people with different political views don't talk much.

But this poster from the California Endowment points out very starkly why we need to stuff our ideological righteousness and start talking to each other how to improve schools.

The dollar figures are annual costs for prisoners and students in California. 

Image from screenshot from The California Endowment video

There is no question that it's better to spend money on education than on incarceration.  Now let's stop bickering, stop being distracted by ideology, and start paying attention to our kids.  If we don't plant these seeds right and give them the resources they need, the future is bleak. 

New Books Set Off Brain

After the Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL) meeting Saturday morning I went to the UAA library.  I didn't intend to but first I was reminded that the bike trail is now blocked so they can build a new parking garage.  After taking the detour, I found the rest of the bike trail full of runners and didn't think I should try to bike through them.  So I gave up and looked through the new books at the UAA library.

As I perused them a phrase from the CCL meeting repeated by the guest speaker, Rear Admiral Len Hering (ret), Adult Conversation, came to mind.  He was referring to people in the United States talking seriously about climate change.

But in the library's new books section, there were so many books on a variety of different topics.  What I suspect they had in common was Adult Conversation.  That is, people had spent a lot of time researching the topics before and as they wrote their books, and they were offering more than just platitudes.

One of the first books I picked up was nobody's business  by Brian M. Reed.  A book on modern poetry.  Stuff that the author says doesn't look like poetry even.

"I confess that during the first George W. Bush administration I poked fun at these assorted un-poems when talking with colleagues in private and when advising students about what they should be reading.  I was startled when the later began to push back.  The first rebels were independent-thinking upper-division undergraduates and charismatic incoming MFA's who had seen poems such as Rodney Goenke's "Pizza Kitty" on YouTube and who reverently passed around  scarce copies of books such as K. Silem Mohammad's Dear Head Nation (2003) as if they were saints' relics.  I was mystified." (p. 130)

He goes through some poems.  One is a series of lines from a computer.  He wonders how this can be poetry.  They've simply lifted part of something from the internet.  One of the poems seems to be a bit better..

  This is "Eaten by Dogs."  He writes more:

"It can be difficult to say for certain, but this passage seems to be a list of captions that originally accompanied photographs by a leftist journalist name Dahr Jamail.  One can still find photos by Jamail with the captions "Man making "Shubada' sign  . . . about to be shot" and "No comment" on the the Fifth-Estate-Online website, as well as another of his photos captioned "Iraqi insurgent partially eaten by dogs -- November 2004" on Apacheclips.com. 16  The statement "viewed X times" replicates a common format for reporting a Web page's hit count."

You might well be wondering what this is all about and why I'm pointing it out.  Well, Dahr Jamail, at one point lived in Anchorage and spoke several times here of his journalism.  I wasn't sure if I was blogging yet at that time, and apparently not.  The only post I can find that mentions him is this one.  

And then back to the question about whether this can be considered poetry:

". . . As so often happens, the question contained within itself the answers.  Certain of my best students were innately suspicious of the self-aware, erudite authors held up by cultue czars and well-meaning professors as models for them to admire and emulate.  The radical gestures of negation that most irritated me about post-9/11 anti-poetry -- its blank indifference to liteary history, its scorn for conditional markers of craft, and its disdain for politsh and perfection -- were in fact the very attributes that appealed to them.  Moreover, they read these gestures as profoundly political in inspiration, that is, as calculated attacks on institutional norms and practices that not only shape literary careers but also preside over the formation of obedient, well-disciplined neoliberal citizens-subjects.  Watching their nation plunge headlong into overseas wars on dubious pretenses, these youthful men and women were angry  They did not understand their fellow Americans who, although they might loudly express their dislike for their government, would never dare break windows, march without a parade permit, or endanger their chances for a glowing letter of recommendation.  Here at last were poets whose outrages against decorum were extreme enough to give voice . . ." 

 On the one hand, this is the kind of extensive examination of minutiae that made me leave English after I got my undergraduate degree.  Yet, it also points out what isn't obvious - to the author himself at first even.  He finds profundity in these seeming non-poems.  At least they speak profoundly to his students.  And as I looked at other books (which I'll try to cover in less detail in other posts), it was clear this was simply another example of similar topics, but in this case expressed in poetry.

Reed teaches at the University of Washington which added one more personal connection for me since one of my kids graduated from there and I've spent more time there in recent years than any other campus besides UAA. 

 [It's late.  I'm falling asleep as I write.  But I want to post and I'll check for typos in the morning.]

When Is It OK To Hold Public Meetings In Secret? The Coliseum Case

The ultimate reason for government openness is to allow the public to keep their public officials accountable.  It's a value I hold strong here at this blog.  This is a story about a government agency not being open. 


The other day I had a photo and personal comments on the LA Coliseum.  Today, the LA Times has

an article enttitled: 

"Coliseum incurred big expense in trying to keep USC lease talks secret"

It begins:  

The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum was flirting with insolvency, but that didn't stop its government overseers from incurring hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses to keep secret their deliberations on a new long-term lease for the stadium.

Starting with the US Freedom of Information Act and going through various state and municipal open records acts, there is usually an exception for private negotiations.  If you're bargaining over a lease, it generally isn't a good idea to let the other side know what your last best offer is.

But, apparently, in this situation, the two sides were not adversarial.  The Coliseum Commissioners, according to the article, 

"The emails, along with others obtained earlier under the California Public Records Act, show the Coliseum's top executive granting nearly every wish USC had for the negotiations and then helping the university build and maintain political support for the lease."

About the Coliseum

Background from Wikipedia (which reflects the agreement that was negotiated in secret):

The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, colloquially known as just "The Coliseum", is a large outdoor sports stadium in the University Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, at Exposition Park, that is home to the Pacific-12 Conference's University of Southern California Trojans football team. It is the largest football stadium in the Pac-12.
It is located next to the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena in Exposition Park, across the street from the University of Southern California (USC). The stadium is jointly owned by the State of California, Los Angeles County, and the City of Los Angeles, and is managed and operated by the University of Southern California. The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission, which has board members drawn from the three ownership interests, provides public oversight of the master lease agreement with USC. Under the lease the University has day-to-day management and operation responsibility for both the Coliseum and Sports Arena. The 98-year lease took effect on July 29, 2013 and was signed by the parties on September 5, 2013. The agreement requires the University to make approximately $100 million in physical improvements to the Coliseum, pay $1 million a year rent to the state of California, maintain the Coliseum’s physical condition at the same standard used on the USC Campus, and assume all financial obligations for the operations and maintenance of the Coliseum and Sports Arena Complex.^[7][8]

Disclosure versus Confidentiality

There are some legitimate reasons not to release some government information.  Individuals who cooperate with the government and legitimately fear retaliation should be protected.  Say, when there is gang violence or shakedowns of shop owners, and someone offers help to the police, that person's identity should be protected if it's likely there will be retaliation.  And businesses who provide the government environmental or safety information about their company, should have trade secrets that are involved, kept secret so their competitors can't use it to their advantage.  Without such protections, businesses are less likely to cooperate, just as in the previous example, witnesses are less like to cooperate.

The 1966  Federal Freedom of Information Act sets out a list of exemptions using the kind of reasoning I've outlined above. 

Exemption 1: Information that is classified to protect national security.  The material must be properly classified under an Executive Order.
Exemption 2: Information related solely to the internal personnel rules and practices of an agency.
Exemption 3: Information that is prohibited from disclosure by another federal law. Additional resources on the use of Exemption 3 can be found on the Department of Justice FOIA Resources page.
Exemption 4: Information that concerns business trade secrets or other confidential commercial or financial information.
Exemption 5: Information that concerns communications within or between agencies which are protected by legal privileges, that include but are not limited to:

1. Attorney-Work Product Privilege
2. Attorney-Client Privilege
3. Deliberative Process Privilege
4. Presidential Communications Privilege

Exemption 6: Information that, if disclosed, would invade another individual's personal privacy.
Exemption 7: Information compiled for law enforcement purposes if one of the following harms would occur.  Law enforcement information is exempt if it: 

• 7(A). Could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings
• 7(B). Would deprive a person of a right to a fair trial or an impartial adjudication
• 7(C). Could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy
• 7(D). Could reasonably be expected to disclose the identity of a confidential source
• 7(E). Would disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions
• 7(F). Could reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of any individual

Exemption 8: Information that concerns the supervision of financial institutions.
Exemption 9: Geological information on wells.

Ultimately, we're weighing the short term public interest in knowing versus the long term public interest in having people cooperate with law enforcement and other government officials.   We have to find the balance between keeping secret or revealing certain kinds of information.   We want businesses to voluntarily provide information (including sometimes trade secrets) to government agencies that monitor them.  We want clients to be honest with their attorneys.  We want presidential advisers to be candid with their policy advice.  If allowing that information to be confidential, and it's not critical to government accountability, then no problem.  But sometimes the public needs to know some of that info in order to evaluate public decisions. 

The public interest is so important that California makes it the test in some cases of disclosure or not.

"In order to withhold a record under section 6255, an agency must demonstrate that the public’s interest in nondisclosure clearly outweighs the public’s interest in disclosure. A particular agency’s interest in nondisclosure is of little consequence in performing this balancing test; it is the public’s interest, not the agency’s that is weighed. This “public interest balancing test” has been the subject of several court decisions. In a case involving the licensing of concealed weapons, the permits and applications were found to be disclosable in order for the public to properly monitor the government’s administration of concealed weapons permits.

The last example, of course, highlights the reason, in a democracy, for transparency:  the public's ability to monitor the government's decisions and actions.  They give a number of other examples of cases where they ruled for disclosure because the public interest was so strong. 


The problem with secrecy

But whenever there is secrecy, there is the temptation to abuse that secrecy.

In the Coliseum case it appears the secrecy was used to hide how the public's representatives (the coliseum commissioners) gave USC all the advantages at tax payers' expense.  (I say apparently because the LA Times was part of the lawsuit to get the information.  They have a vested interest in showing that their lawsuit was legitimate.  I've no evidence their report is biased.  Evidence in their favor is the court's decision to make the data public.  But we should take nothing for granted.) 

The public interest is so important that, California makes it the test in some cases of whether to disclose or notn-disclosure.

"In order to withhold a record under section 6255, an agency must demonstrate that the public’s interest in nondisclosure clearly outweighs the public’s interest in disclosure. A particular agency’s interest in nondisclosure is of little consequence in performing this balancing test; it is the public’s interest, not the agency’s that is weighed. This “public interest balancing test” has been the subject of several court decisions. In a case involving the licensing of concealed weapons, the permits and applications were found to be disclosable in order for the public to properly monitor the government’s administration of concealed weapons permits.

The last example, of course, highlights the reason, in a democracy, for transparency:  the public's ability to monitor the government's administration. 

My sense is that negotiation with an adversary is a good reason to keep information secret - though not necessarily the negotiation meetings.  In any case, after the negotiation is done, there's no reason not to make all the proceedings public. 

But, in this Coliseum case, the participants definitely did not want people to know what they did.

The question now is, if the public representatives do not work for the public in good faith, shouldn't that invalidate the agreement? 


Sham public hearings

USC Senior Vice President Todd Dickey, who also received the email, responded: "If you want us to hold an open house … and listen to 500 people speak for 5 hours, and maybe answer a few questions, I guess we can do that, but I see no value in that at all."

I think this attitude is pretty common among people used to having power and getting their way.  USC is a private university that has raised $3 billion in its current campaign to raise $6 billion.  The senior vice president is pretty used to dealing with very wealthy people who tend to get their way.  Some examples of the kinds of people he probably works with comes from the USC fundraising page:

• An anonymous $20 million gift will endow student support at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the USC School of Social Work and the USC Marshall School of Business. 
• Selim Zilkha has pledged a gift of $5 million to the Keck School of Medicine of USC to fund a new endowed chair in Alzheimer’s disease research. 
• A $1 million donation by USC Dornsife alumni has established the Linda and Harlan Martens Endowed Director’s Chair for the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.

Not only is the top of the USC hierarchy used to dealing with wealthy folks, they also can get those folks to lobby for them.

"Some of the emails the government sought to keep under wraps show that the stadium officials and USC collaborated in securing backing for the lease in City Hall and Sacramento.
In one exchange, Sandbrook asked Dickey if he knew an alternate commissioner who represented then-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and might attend a lease meeting.
"Damn, no I don't," Dickey replied. "We need to get to the Mayor so he can encourage her to support the lease."
After receiving a report that Villaraigosa was miffed at not receiving advance notice on the lease terms, Dickey wrote to Sandbrook and then-commission President David Israel, that USC President Max Nikias and others had been lobbying the mayor:
"Tom Sayles has been in constant contact with the Mayor's office trying to get them to support the term sheet," Dickey said in the correspondence, referring to a USC administrator. "We even had President Nikias call the Mayor and he got him today."
Villaraigosa's two representatives on the commission voted for the lease.

And they can reward those who cooperate with them:

The former mayor, now a USC faculty member, did not respond to interview 

I'm not saying this was a quid pro quo deal.  The former mayor certainly has a lot of knowledge to share with students and he makes USC's diversity stronger.  But there is the appearance of something fishy here. And, for my own disclosure, I would add that I graduated from what is now the school he was appointed to.


What's my point? 

This isn't a gossip blog.  When I post stories about specific events it's usually to either document what's happening and/or to make some larger point.  Since the LA Times has already done the documentation here, I need to put this in a larger perspective.  So, my points probably boil down to:

1.   The openness of public information is a cornerstone of democracy.  Without it, there is no way to keep public officials accountable.
2.   When information is not disclosed, people should be suspicious and should demand its release.  
3.  People everywhere should remember what the secret emails reveal in contrast to the public statements:

private communication	"If you want us to hold an open house … and listen to 500 people speak for 5 hours, and maybe answer a few questions, I guess we can do that, but I see no value in that at all."
public communication	"To support a public and transparent process, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission and the University of Southern California are jointly releasing a list of points of agreement that will serve as the basis for continuing negotiations on a modified lease between USC and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission."

Both those quotes come from the emails that the LA Times lawsuit revealed.



THEN, I hope people apply this to their own local and state officials.  Recognize when you hear people proclaim their support of transparency, especially after opposing requests for more openness,  that what they actually said in private was probably the opposite. 

I think about how the DOWL Engineering group has held public hearing after public hearing with fancy charts and how they took public testimony which showed over and over again that the vast majority of the people were opposed to extending Bragaw through the University.  Yet despite that testimony Anchorage's mayor managed to work a last minute deal to get $20 million to put the road through anyway.  And then we hear it will actually cost yet another $20 million.  The public process was a total sham.  It was only to meet legal requirements.  

I think about how the Anchorage Assembly allowed weeks and weeks of testimony on an ordinance to add gays and lesbians to our local anti-discrimination ordinance.  People in  were even bused in from Matsu to testify against the ordinance.  And the hearings continued long enough that we changed mayors - from one who said he'd sign the ordinance to one who vetoed it.

And then that same mayor exclaimed about changes in the Labor Ordinance, "This was one of the most open, comprehensive public processes."   Sounds a lot like the qote above.  Fortunately, the audience at the Assembly meeting that night was heavily labor and they knew the truth.  

AIFF 2013: Bambi or Invective - Thinking About Film Criticism

Seeing lots of movies last week has me thinking about movie reviews, their purpose, their effects, and one's qualifications to write them in the first place.  I do want to write about some of the films I saw and also about the festival's awards.

So, when I found Maureen Dowd's column in the Anchorage Daily News today, (in the NY Times a couple days ago) on the "Bambi Rule,"  I read it with care.

Should reviewers be nice or critical?  Here's the argument for being nice:

"Eggers chided Harvard students: 'Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic, and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them.'”

And here Dowd quotes Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic:

“'Rebecca West established what she called ‘the duty of harsh criticism,’ and she was right. An intellectual has a solemn obligation to speak out negatively against ideas or books that he or she believes will have a pernicious or misleading effect upon people’s understanding of important things. To do otherwise would be cowardly and irresponsible. “If one feels that a value or a belief or a form that one cherishes has been traduced, one should rise to its defense. In intellectual and literary life, where the stakes may be quite high, manners must never be the primary consideration. People who advance controversial notions should be prepared for controversy. Questions of truth, meaning, goodness, justice and beauty are bigger than Bambi."

It's much harder to critique a film when you've met the film maker.  And this is good.  It forces me to distinguish between the film and the film maker.  I need to write about the film, I need to write about it from my perspective (rather than an omniscient reviewer perspective), and I need to be constructive.  When I wrote during the festival, it was to give potential viewers an idea of quality and topic so they could decide among the many choices, but I didn't want to do spoilers.  After the festival, now that I've had time to think, I can write more meaningfully about the films.

Basically, I want to write so that the film maker is not mad at me after reading a review.  (Well, not mad for long anyway.)  It's hard enough to make a film without having people who haven't made a film tear it apart.  I try to write using the same frame of mind I used to critique my graduate students' papers.  The point is to help the student write a better paper next time.  That requires me to avoid evaluative terms as much as possible and use concrete examples of what I liked and disliked.  I'm usually right about what I like and dislike, but the odds go down when I talk about what's 'good' and 'bad.'

That said, standing up for important values when someone trashes them is also important.  I've only been harsh in my AIFF  movie criticisms over the years when I thought the film makers had acted very badly (The Dalai Lama's Cat) or when there was a particularly ethnocentric movie (Exporting Raymond.)  But even in those reviews, I tried to stay objective and gave detailed examples of why I was bothered. 

The Dowd piece, I'm guessing, looks to the extremes - the smarmy reviews that almost seem part of a public relations campaign (and NPR and ADN participate in this along with all the other media) and the nasty insults that are often more reflective of the reviewers' problems than the work reviewed. 

All that said, I'm hoping to post my thoughts on the features - narrative and documentaries - and on the animation program.  And I'll slip in a few of the shorts, but I didn't see enough of them.  Coming soon. 

AIFF 2013: Sarah Knight Talks About Her Film Vino Veritas

It's 1:30 am Saturday.  I saw Vino Veritas last night and I really want to be in bed now, but I have some video to share with folks who are thinking they might want to see this film.

Knight (r) talking to audience member after showing

It's a good film.  It's in the Virginia Woolf genre - two couples together in a house and they start talking more candidly than normal.  It's gentler than Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and last year's festival example of this genre, Between Us.


It's much too soon for me to write about this film.  I need to think about it more.  For example, Benz (who directed The Words I Love) asked me if I thought it made a difference that it was on Halloween.  Yes, if it weren't Halloween we wouldn't learn that Claire had no identity of her own, except when she won the Halloween costume award each year.  But as I thought about his question more, I realized that the three characters who took the truth serum wine, were all dressed in costumes that were not who they really were.  The one who did NOT take the truth serum was dressed in his real life doctor gown.

I need more time to tease out insights like that.

Vino Veritas plays today (Saturday, Dec. 14, 2013) at 4pm at the Alaska Experience Theater.  Bring your spouse.  

In the meantime, you can watch the video of Sarah.

Did You Tell Your Kids You Love Them Today?

"I want to tell you that from the moment you were in my belly, I loved you dearly. I love you then, today and always. You are my world, my everything. Without you, there's no me."

That's the letter high school football player Damian Sanchez got from his mom when his football coach sent letters home asking the parents to write down how they feel about their sons in a letter.

Then he had the players bring them back in a sealed envelope.  One day he had them all together for a meeting and passed out the letters.

What happened next took everyone by surprise. For the next 15 minutes or so, wherever Matsumoto looked he saw players sobbing — against walls, in corners, bent over in chairs.
"I've never seen anything like it," said Shalls Jacome, the team's 22-year-old offensive coordinator.

Letters of love

Players read letters their parents wrote to them.

Cesar Orozco, a senior offensive lineman, broke down when he read what his mother had written in Spanish: "You know deep inside I love you. And you're the most important thing in my life. You know I would die for you."
"I don't really get told that at home," Cesar said. "For me to be reading that, it really touches me."
John Mercado, a sophomore lineman, sobbed so hard reading his mother's letter that he had to pause before finishing. He had come close to quitting the team when his parents lost their jobs and needed financial help.
His mother wrote in Spanish: "I'm very proud. You're the nicest kid I've ever raised and during hard times you don't ever ask for anything."

 This is more than just a feel good human interest story.  This is a pretty stark and amazing testament to everyone's need for love.  While it makes total sense and I've believed that if everyone had a loving, caring family, there would be no wars, it still was surprising.   It's worth reading the whole thing.  We should always try to find the human being hidden in the bodies, and behind the facades, all around us.  When you find that real person inside  you can have authentic conversation and communication. 

Here's the link to the whole LA Times story. 

[Feedburner note:  This post was up on blogrolls in less than 15 minutes.  The two previous posts took two hours or less to get to blogrolls.  I'm hoping this was a problem that feedburner had and now they have fixed it.  We'll see.]

Do You Miss Civil Discourse About Important Topics?

I got this email today.  Looks like I missed the first two discussions, but the next one is tomorrow (Tuesday) evening at Loussac from 6pm-7:30pm.

Let’s Talk Anchorage
Dialogues in Democracy

Join a conversation on “What is the Role of Government?” this Tuesday, October 22, from 6:00 to 7:30 in the Ann Stevens room at the Loussac Library. Engage in a respectful, facilitated conversation, share your knowledge and learn what others think.



“Dialogues in Democracy” is a program of “Let’s Talk Anchorage”, a collaboration between the Anchorage Public Library and Alaska Common Ground. It will convene a community conversation each Tuesday night until the end of November.  The list of topics is as follows:

1.    October 8: Violence in America
2.    October 15: UAA Conversation Salon – Information is not Knowledge: How Media Influences our Reality [1 and 2 already happened.]
3.    October 22: What is the Role of Government?
4.    October 29: Educating for Democracy
5.    November 5: Library will be closed. No dialogue on this date.
6.    November 12: UAA Conversation Salon – Information is not Knowledge: How Media Influences our Reality
7.    November 19: Inequality for All – A discussion of the film
8.    November 26: What is a good society?

The Corporate State Of Alaska - And Now GCI and ACS Officially Create AWN

[This post has been sitting here partially written as I travel around and play grandpa, visit my mom, and I don't seem to have the time to get it done right.  Then there was more redistricting.  I didn't quite understand all the implications of this, but the potential negatives were being sent to me by my friend Jeremy Lansman who is one of the best informed people on radio, television, and other electronic technologies of communication.  I was going to claim my 'blogger's license' (a relative of poetic license) and just post it in draft form because I thought the issue important and I didn't see a lot of coverage elsewhere.  But it appears to be a done deal now so I'm putting this up as it was last March, with the addition of part of the Begich press release I got this morning.]

From a press release I got via email today:

"U.S. Sen. Mark Begich offered his support following today’s announcement from Alaska Communication Systems (ACS) and General Communications Inc. (GCI) that the two companies closed a transaction to create the Alaska Wireless Network (AWN), after receiving approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).  AWN is a wireless infrastructure joint venture that will combine the wireless networks of ACS and GCI.

“I applaud ACS and GCI for their willingness to be innovative and aggressive in the telecom sector,” said Sen. Begich. “They will not only be working together to build this robust wireless network, but they will also continue to compete for customers. It is critical for Alaskan companies to find ways to attract customers as big businesses, like Verizon Wireless, enter into the Alaskan marketplace.”

This begins the long rambling background to what's been sitting in my draft post file since last March 23:

One of the arguments for Alaska Statehood was to gain sovereignty and control over Alaska resources. Alaska had been essentially a colony that was exploited by different corporate interests like fishing, timber, and copper.  Decisions about Alaska resources were made by corporations operating Outside the state.

Today again, after only six years since the first political corruption trials began and about a dozen Alaskan politicians and businessmen were convicted of various forms of abuse of public trust, the Republicans have regained full control of the Senate, House, and Governor's office and things are in full swing.

We have a governor - a former Conoco-Philips lobbyist - who has been using the governor's office to try to give the oil companies about $2 billion a year tax cuts - while arguing we don't have enough money to take  care of relocating Alaska native villages that are threatened by the effects of oil on the climate. [Since I wrote this, the bill was passed and the referendum to repeal the bill has gotten enough signatures to get on the 2014 ballot.]

Fishing is still a murky mix of Alaska fisherman and international fishing companies.

Providence Hospital is already the largest private employer in the state, charges a lot more for health care than the rest of the US, and I'm guessing a lot of that money goes to the Providence mother ship Outside. 

The Governor has also helped get rid of coastal communities' rights to have a say on development that affects their livelihood and way of life by helping to destroy the coastal zone management act.  So that now the state with the most coastline is the only coastal state without a Coastal Zone Management Act.  This is part of the process of getting rid of any obstacles to big business development, any bumps along the way where the public can stand up and demand some sort of accountability. 

The Citizen Initiative to keep cruise lines from dumping their wastes in Alaska waters (among many other things) has now been gutted.  

In each case, the common theme is that large, Outside corporate interests, supported by the governor and the Republican leadership in the House and Senate, have worked to overturn protections for the Alaskan environment and people.  And most Alaskans either think this is good, don't know anything about it, or feel helpless to do anything, or they just buy new apps to distract themselves from all this.

GCI-ACS Merger

Now let's look at one more situation that is happening more quietly behind the scenes.  GCI (General Communications Inc.) has submitted a request to the Federal Trade Commission (FCC) to share facilities in rural Alaska with ACS (Anchorage Communications Service).  GCI has also is seeking to buy a CBS affiliate and an NBC affiliate.

[Note:  ACS was ATS, Anchorage Telephone Service, a telephone utility that was owned by the Municipality of Anchorage.  The City sold the telephone service and it is now a private company.  GCI is an Alaska based company that began as a private company offering competing telephone service, cable, and internet.]

This is noteworthy because GCI now controls about 70% of cable.  It's also noteworthy to remember that Ted Stevens was flying on a GCI plane with GCI executives to a GCI retreat that he regularly attended when he and others died when the plane crashed.  (Yes, the US Senator should know people from all sectors, and Stevens did.  But it's clear that those with big bucks who can host our politicians on sweet fishing junkets have more say than those of us who can't.  Not because their message is more right, but because they have more access and influence.)


Jeremy Lansman, the owner of Fireweed Communications, including KYES, Anchorage Channel 5, has submitted comments to the FCC.  (I'd note that KYES is one independent  locally owned televisions left in the United States.)  Unfortunately, the arguments are fairly abstract and complex.  There are a whole lot of issues intertwined from costs to consumers in dollars, to accessibility of programming, to democracy itself.  Here's an example from Fireweed's initial filing:

Part VI: Risks of Monopoly
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has stated that in enforcement of the Sherman Anti-Trust and Heart-Scott-Rodino act is necessary to look beyond the situation of the present moment to see if a monopolist might have power to increase consumers’ costs in the near or far future28.    Furthermore in the area of Information Communication Technology and Broadcasting, that apart from keeping the marketplace working, it is well understood that freedom of the press is a prime condition to enable democratic processes of the forming of opinions.    There are two different, albeit related issues at stake here. Even if a door hinge manufacturing monopolist can charge outrageous prices, hinge technology (for example) would not affect our democracy. However, the nature of Technology that transports news, opinion, and viewpoint would automatically influence the nature of our democracy if in any way the technology were used in a way that might favor one opinion over another. Even entertainment TV drama carries and brings across the normative value system of the scriptwriters and their view of the world in terms of past, present and future. For this reason concentration of control of the technology of media deserves a much higher level of scrutiny than other goods and services.

[Since I wrote this, he's posted more challenges, as have others.]

I contacted Fireweed owner, Jeremy Lansman, a friend of mine, and gave him a set of questions that I though might make this clearer to the public.  Here are the questions and answers:

What Do I Know?   1.  What will be the possible
consequences for the Alaskan consumer?

Lansman:  I can see two extreme  outcomes, and possible shades between the
extremes.  One, especially in the rural areas...   a nasty monopoly.  
In this scenario the two companies, ACS and GCI, would own the only
physical facility Alaska Wireless Network (AWN) in the bush, and would
not be price regulated, and could charge the owners (ACS and GCI) a lot
more than it would had competition continued. ACS and GCI would pass the
monopoly cost along to consumers.  AWN would be very profitable, and
pass the profits back to its owners, who would be rewarding their
investors with monopoly "rents".

In another extreme scenario the common company, AWN, would only charge
its reasonable costs, not have profit, and pass the savings of joint
operation on to ACS and GCI which then would pass the savings on to users.

In the first scenario you might see some resemblance to Aleyaska
Pipeline.  The Alaskan oil pipeline is jointly owned by oil producers,
and charges producers to transport the oil to Valdez. Aleyaska is price
regulated, a big difference.  We found nothing about regulating AWNs
rates. The State of Alaska tax revenue gos up if the oil companies
charge less to transport oil, so the owners have an incentive to raise
prices, in order to reduce taxes. Increased in transport fees are given
back to the owners, so the argument is about what is a fair price for
transport.  As the pipeline is regulated, the tussle over fair pricing
is played out at in public at the regulator, the Regulatory Commission
of Alaska (RCA).  Unless special provisions are put in place, AWN will
not be subject to price regulation.  So all that could take place in
private.

  What Do I Know?  a.  in urban areas

Lansman:  AT&T and soon, if their plans pan out, Verizon, will have physical
facilities (towers) in urban Alaska.  From what I have read, economists
believe the ideal number of mobile phone competitors is three.  Fewer
results in less competition, thus higher prices, while more results in
more physical facility cost, thus higher prices.   This theory is not
iron clad, as one of the highest per minute cost locations in South
Africa with 3 operators, and lowest cost is India with far more than 3. 
Anyway, with AT&T, Verizon, and  GCI maybe combined with ACS we will get
3 or 4 competitors, so the expert forecast might be that the result in
urban AK would be close to ideal.


What Do I Know?   b.  in rural areas

Lansman: I covered that above.

What Do I Know?   2.  Consequences for television
stations in general or KYES and how does that affect the viewer?

Lansman:   As I point out, TV viewing is migrating to various platforms, and
studies show a rapid uptake of use by mobile devices.   I defined TV to
include any audio/video material that is sent to multiple viewers, at
any time.  That makes your videos .. the ones you post.. TV.   So the
question I raise, can AWN, GCI or ACS block your videos...er...pardon...
short TV shows?  THe answer is a conditional yes.  I believe they cannot
on "wireline" internet.  That I think is covered under the new network
neutrality rules.  The same rules do not apply to "wireless".  Wireless
is known as cellular.  However, we see some new services that link to
your mobile device.. which might be a tablet, or cell phone, or laptop
with a cellular dongle. The services might be special wi-fi signals that
operators send out in hot spots, or might be little cell phone base
stations that people are putting into their homes, or may be regular
cell towers. So, I believe that if ACS and GCI live with net neutrality,
all will be well in terms of overt censorship.

On the other hand, GCI will have quite a powerful influence over
conventional TV broadcast.  And a lot of people still use conventional
TV.  The influence GCI has will be due to their cable penetration.   The
leverage will be very powerful.  Until most viewing migrates to other
signal streams.. GCI will be able to determine who wins in the TV game.
  
What Do I Know?  3.  How could GCI and ACS get the
economies of shared rural facilities yet still protect internet and
television and phone users?

Lansman:  One way?  Make AWN a not-for profit.  You have any ideas?  As for TV,
apply net neutrality to AWN and its users.  As for GCI and the network
affiliates?  Maybe the purchase just cannot be allowed. That is, GCI has
an incentive to shut down competitors.   Think about that.
 
What Do I Know?: 4.  Could Verizon provide the
competition and thus lower all the internet and phone service?

Lansman:  I doubt it.   It is not efficient to build overlapping rural cell
service... besides GCI and ACS get federal funding, broadband and
Universal Service money for their rural services.   I don't yet know a
lot about how that works.




Those who say government is the problem forget that Business essentially runs government - through lobbies, campaign contributions, and their access to Congress and ability to influence them.

I don't know if this deal is good or bad for Alaska.  We have two locally started companies  in competition with national giants.  Perhaps consolidation makes some sense for Alaska as they compete against the big players.  But I do know that our Anchorage internet access costs more and is much slower than you get Outside and GCI and ACS have been the big players there.  

And media plays a big role in influencing how people vote.  The media that package the news for most Americans is getting more and more consolidated.  

From here.