"When You Find Hypocrisy In The Daylight, Look For Power In the Shadows" - Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse At Barrett Hearings

I didn't see all of the Amy Coney Barrett hearings.  But of what I saw, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse had the most insightful things to say.  He stepped back and put this particular nomination into both the context of recent events and also much longer term events.  As he says, he's looking beyond the stage of the puppet theater of the hearing to see who's pulling the strings and pushing the sticks that move the puppets.  

Most important is his following the money that:

• Has spent 40 years educating law students in a very conservative way of interpreting the law.
• Funded shadow organizations that make multiple  Friend of the Court filings on the court cases they have themselves created
• Also funded Federalist Society that gives Trump his Supreme Court nominee names

He looks at where the money comes from and traces most of it back to the same few people.

He then says, while the media have focused on abortion and LGBTQ rights (which are important), the real story deals with 80 cases that were decided by 5-4 rulings along partisan lines.  These cases had four themes important to large corporations:

• Unlimited Dark Money - that allows the wealthy and corporations (yes those do overlap) control legislatures that make the rules and even to get people appointed as head of federal agencies that regulate them.  Citizen United is the key decision here, but there are many others
• Knock the Civil Jury Down - The powerful can't control civil juries like they can control Congress.
• Weaken Regulatory Agencies - particularly pollutors to weaken their independence and strength
• Voter Suppression and Gerrymandering - making it harder to vote for citizens who might vote against their interests - Shelby County decision on no factual record against overwhelming support on the other side, that knocked out voter suppression protections and a bunch of states started suppressing the vote.  Same on gerrymandering.  

Whitehouse makes a great presentation providing the evidence clearly.  This is critical to getting a good sense what's happening and why Democrats are upset with this nomination.  The Republicans have been packing the courts for years and years - through 

• creating a legal theory, Originalism, that I consider the Intelligent Design of Constitutional Law, and 
• through blocking Democratic nominees and holding off Merrick Garland, so they could fill those seats

I don't put up that many third party videos here.  Only ones I think are really worth your time.  So please figure out a good time when you can listen and then do so.

While we're on this topic, let me also point out that the words "extreme liberal" is not the opposite of "extreme conservative."  

"Extreme liberals" on the court have worked hard for individual rights - desegregating schools, supporting voting rights, giving women equal rights to men, recognizing the rights of LGBTQ folks.

"Extreme conservatives" have fought all those individual rights in favor of the rights of corporations, going so far to apply the individual rights in the Bill of Rights to corporations.  

The liberals are much more in synch with the beliefs of most US citizens.  The conservatives push legal theories that go against what most citizens hold, but they do a good job of marketing their contrary positions, by framing abortion as murder, and just outright lying.  

The two articles below offer more on this:

Mother Jones article on Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse comments at Barret hearing: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/10/watch-sen-sheldon-whitehouse-school-amy-coney-barrett-on-dark-money/

Here's a piece written by Sheldon Whitehouse spelling out the dark money interests in shaping he Supreme Court and how they do it.  

Los Angeles Times Mea Culpa

This is from a long confessional apology by the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times: 

"For at least its first 80 years, the Los Angeles Times was an institution deeply rooted in white supremacy and committed to promoting the interests of the city’s industrialists and landowners. No one embodied this aggressive, conservative ideology more than Harrison Gray Otis, the walrus-mustachioed Civil War veteran who controlled The Times from 1882 until his death in 1917. The modern notion that journalism’s core precepts include uncovering hard truths and exposing inequity would have been foreign to Otis and other press barons of the last Gilded Age. Far from a mission of “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable,” his newspaper stood for the raw exercise of power, and he used it to further a naked agenda of score settling, regional boosterism, economic aggrandizement and union busting.

Otis was a Lincoln Republican who had fought on the side of the Union and opposed slavery. But his Times was a newspaper aimed at the mostly Protestant white settlers who migrated to California from the Midwest and the Plains in the decades after it was seized from Mexico in 1848 and admitted to the Union in 1850."

Do you think the fact that the owner of the LA Times (he bought it two years ago) is a person of color has anything to do with this statement?  From the Guardian:

"Patrick Soon-Shiong has spent decades trying to cure cancer and made a biotech fortune in the process, making him one of California’s most successful, enigmatic billionaires.

Born in South Africa to Chinese parents, he rose from humble origins and ended up in Los Angeles where he has thrived as a surgeon, scientist and entrepreneur. “The richest doctor in the history of the world,” Forbes magazine declared in 2014."

The apology goes on to spell out examples of the paper's own institutional racism:

"It was not just that The Times saw fit to hire white men almost exclusively for its newsroom; the stories it told were largely for and about white people, which meant Angelenos weren’t getting an accurate account of their city, region and state at a time of rapid change.

Typical of the paper’s attitude was a 1978 interview in which Otis Chandler airily dismissed Black and Latino readers: “It’s not their kind of newspaper. It’s too big, it’s too stuffy. If you will, it’s too complicated.”

Chandler later stepped back from that, saying the paper was looking for readers in the “broad middle class” and “upper classes” regardless of race or ethnicity. “We are not a paper that’s sought after in the lower-class areas,” he said."

I would like to think this would have been written even if this hadn't been the year of BLM becoming mainstream.  But the apology itself acknowledges the influence of George Floyd's murder.  

The brutal death of a Black man, George Floyd, on May 25 while in the custody of police in Minneapolis shocked the world. It also prompted news organizations like The Times to reflect on how they cover, frame and promote stories at a time when the 24/7 news cycle moves faster than ever. Amid nationwide demonstrations over racial injustice, members of the Los Angeles Times Guild established caucuses for Black and Latino employees. The caucuses have called for improvements in coverage, hiring and career development, a public apology for The Times’ poor record on race, and equal pay. They have insisted, rightly, on reframing and recentering our coverage of communities of color.

 I hope it sets an example for other organizations to reflect on their pasts and redesign their futures.  And the future of the United States.  Here's what the Times pledges:

The Times will redouble and refocus its efforts to become an inclusive and inspiring voice of California — a sentinel that employs investigative and accountability reporting to help protect our fragile democracy and chronicles the stories of the Golden State, including stories that historically were neglected by the mainstream press. Being careful stewards of this new company, privately owned but operated for the benefit of the public, is our first obligation. But that stewardship will also require bold and decisive change. If we are to survive as a business, it will be by tapping into a digital, multicultural, multigenerational audience in a way The Times has never fully done.

 

Why The Emirates and Bahrain Are Recognizing Israel? Seth Abramson Outlines Red Sea Meeting in 2015 To Coopt Trump

Today it was announced that Israel and Bahrain have agreed to diplomatic ties.  This follows a similar recent arrangement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.  

I'm sure these deals are happening now, shortly before the election to spruce up Trump's diplomatic victories.  But Seth Abramson has outline a well documented story of how Trump  is being played by those countries rather than Trump arranging these deals.  

So here are a few quotes from Seth Abramson's book, Proof of Conspiracy which begins with this chapter summary:

"In late 2015, after Donald Trump has formally announced his candidacy for president, a geopolitical conspiracy emerges overseas whose key participants are the leaders of Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt.  These six men decide that Trump is the antidote to their ills:  for Russia, U.S sanctions;  for Israel, the lack of Arab allies;  for Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt, perceived threats emanating from Iran.  The conspirators commit themselves to doing what is necessary to ensure that Trump is elected.  Trump's presidential campaign is aware of and benefits from this conspiracy both before and after the 2016 election." (p. 1)

Here's a bit more from page 2:

The story of the Red Sea Conspiracy begins with a man named George Nader.  As reported by Hearst in the Middle East Eye, toward the end of 2015 Nader - then an adviser to the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Zaey al-Nahyan (know as "MBZ") - convened, with his patron's permission, a summit of some of the Middle East's most powerful leaders.4  Gathered on a boat in the Red Sea in the fall of 2015 were Mohammed bin Salman (known as "MBS:), deputy crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who would shortly become the heir apparent to the throne of the Saudi Kingdom;  MBZ himself, by 2015 the de facto ruler of the Unite Arab Emirates;  Abdel Fattah el Sisi, the president of Egypt;  Prince Salman bin Hamad, the crown prince of Bahrain; and King abdullah II of Jordan.  Nader, the improbable maestro of these rulers' clandestine get-together, intended the plan he posed to the men to include the nation of Libya, but no representative from that nation attended the gathering.5 (p.2) 

The intent of MBZ and MBS according to Abramson (and all the claims he makes are well footnoted with reports from various public sources) is to rearrange the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) by replacing Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar with Egypt, Jordan, and Libya,  This would eliminate its association with the Persian Gulf and

"remaking it as, instead, an alliance constituting 'an elite regional group of six countries, which would supplant  [the GCC and] . . .form the nucleus of [a coalition of] pro-U.S. and pro-Israeli states' in the Middle East.9" (p.3) 

 The intent is a Middle East force that would support the US and be a force against the influence of Turkey and Iran.  Libya and Jordan do not end up in this group.

The chapter, in fact the book, goes on to fill in lots of the details of how this took place and how the Trump administration was involved.  

"According to an opinion piece in the Washington Post, 'If you're the Saudis, the nice thing about Trump is that he lacks any subtlety whatsoever, so you don't have to wonder how to approach him.  He has said explicitly that the way to win his favor is to give him money.  He has established means for you do do so - buying Trump properties and staying in Trump hotels.' 39 (p.8)

"...Trump's financial history with the nations of the Red Sea Conspiracy, as well as the two nations the conspirators seek to improve relations with, Israel and Russia, is long and illustrious.  Trump has properties or other assets in two former Soviet republics, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Israel, and Egypt;  he therefore maintains financial ties to three of the four nations involved in the conspiracy and one that stands to directly benefit from its successes."41 (p.9)

Abrahams suggests this is a strong reason for Trump's resistance to releasing his income taxes.  

Part of chapter one is a biography of George Nader - who organized the "Red Sea Summit" and was a key witness in the Mueller investigation and was arrested in 2018 on child pornography charges and was convicted in 2020.

At the end of the chapter Abramson outlines the goals of the 

"Red Sea Conspiracy, variously referred to by its participants and in the media as the 'grand bargain' or the 'Middle East Marshall Plan."

The hope was to a) elect Trump who would then  b) drop sanctions against Russia who would then c) withdraw support for Iran and Syria.  Abramson then lists the post-bargain expectations:

1. Isolate US allies Turkey and Qatar (where news media Al Jazeera is based) from the US
2. Get US assistance against Iran and help Saudi Arabia and UAE become nuclear powers
3. Get US and Russia to do massive infrastructure development in Middle East and deflect from Israeli-Palestinian debate
4. Establish pro-Israeli, pro-US military alignments with Sunni Arabs 
5. Suppression of pro-democracy forces in and out of the US in the face of growing autocracy in Israel and US Arab allies - Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Egypt

Lots of Trump's policies and actions - ignoring the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, scuttling the Iran nuclear deal, moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, the obsequious treatment of Putin, pulling out of Syria - are all consistent with this narrative.  

I have no connection with Abramson other than following him on Twitter and having read the first two books in his Proof series:  Proof of Collusion and Proof of Conspiracy.  Both were like in-depth Cliff-Notes on all the scandals surrounding the Trump presidency.  Detailed descriptions of the characters whose names - like George Nader - show up briefly in the headlines then are quickly forgotten as new names replace theirs.  The books also detail the complicated stories of connections and money that the news media only skim the surface of and most Americans are too distracted to study enough to comprehend.  

I would also note that Proof of Conspiracy has so many endnotes that the publisher left them out of the book and set up a website where readers can get to them.  Without the footnotes the book is 569 pages.  So, I've left the endnotes in the quotations and you can look them up at the link.

I wasn't planning on this post, but with both United Arab Emirates and Bahrain announcing diplomatic relations with Israel less than two months before the election, it seems important that Americans understand that Trump is the pawn here, not the chess master.  

I'd also note that Abramson's third book in the series, Proof of Corruption, just came out this week.  

This Story Encapsulates A Lot Of What's Wrong With The United States

 From an LA Times article:

McDonald’s has sued former Chief Executive Steve Easterbrook, alleging that he fraudulently hid details of three sexual relationships with employees when the board fired him in November over a separate relationship with a subordinate.

In a securities filing and a document lodged with the Delaware Chancery Court, the fast-food chain said it was seeking to recover the compensation and severance payments it allowed Easterbrook to leave with. Equilar, the executive-pay consultancy, reported at the time that his severance deal was worth about $40 million .

McDonald’s would not have approved the separation agreement had it known the extent of his “inappropriate personal behavior,” the company said, but would instead have terminated him for cause.

" the board fired him in November over a separate relationship with a subordinate."

1. He was fired for cause, yet got to take home $40 million!!
2. Severance pay of $40 million (for just one employee!) for a company (McDonald's) that pays so little that its workers qualify for food stamps.

My theory incorporates two key components:  

1. How corporate boards, made up of other corporate executives, all benefit when an executive gets the highest possible compensation package, because that sets the standards for their own boards to set their own compensation.  
2. "Temporary" tax cuts on the wealthy, gave boards more incentive to raise compensation to make as much money as possible while the taxes were lower.  

Steve Clifford outlines the argument for point 1 in The Atlantic article:

How Companies Actually Decide What to Pay CEOs:     

I know—for over 20 years, I helped craft some extremely generous executive-compensation packages.

He talks about the shift from using internal equity as the model (keeping the ratio between the highest paid and the average worker pay reasonable) to the external equity model where the compensation of the top executives in a corporation should be competitive with other top executives.  This meant, he writes, internal equity went from 20:1 or 30:1 in the 70s, to the situation in 2014 where 

500 of the highest-paid senior executives at U.S. companies made nearly 1,000 times as much money as the average American worker, after taking into account salary, bonuses, and stock-based compensation.

The article explains exactly how compensation committees on Boards of Directors actually set executive pay and why it spirals higher and higher.  

The second point is harder to definitively prove, but Bush's tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 along with cuts to inheritance taxes means that the wealthy get wealthier much faster and the gap between the rich and the poor gets wider and wider.  Here are a couple of articles that go into more detail:

• The Legacy of the 2001 and 2003 “Bush” Tax Cuts
• Wikipedia entry on Bush Tax Cuts

I believe that a large inequality gap has lots of harmful consequences to democracy:

• The wealthy have an outsized influence on elections through unlimited campaign contributions and ability to lobby federal, state, and local, legislators
• Employers have far more power over employee wages and working conditions through their ability to get Congress to weaken union power
• More people are living from pay-check to pay-check and thus their employers have more leverage over them for a variety of issues - forced overtime, less time with their families, forced arbitration for disputes, etc. 

But proving these things is complicated. 

As you might imagine, Heritage Foundation scholars argue that there is no evidence the inequality endangers democracy.  

But all this hinges on a number of assumption about morality.  While the Christian bible talks endlessly about charity and helping the poor, our basic philosophy about work - The Protestant [Work] Ethic - assumes that those who are poor have themselves to blame.   It ignores the elaborate rules and procedures that are devised to justify a $40 million severance package for someone who had an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate in a company where most of the employees are for working minimum wage.  

And in our increasingly technological work places, where machines are rapidly replacing workers, we need a different mechanism than work for the basic distribution of wealth.  And in a world where the imperative of the market ignores the environmental and human damage of corporate externalities, we need to find an sustainable economic system more in balance with the natural world.

Short Takes - RPCV Joins Alaska SC, Maxwell Arrest, Racism Like Apple Pie, Russian Bounty

Note: Another big COVID increase today.  Click COVID tab above for daily updates on state case counts

1.   Alaska's newly appointed Supreme Court justice Dario Borghesan is an RPCV (Returned Peace Corps Volunteer) who served in Togo.



2.   Just hearing her name on the news for being involved with Jeffrey Epstein doesn't give you a sense of Ghislaine* Maxwell's role in the Jeffrey Epstein world.   The Netflix series Jeffrey Epstein:  Filthy Rich brings their crimes clearly into the light.  And how well connected rich people can get away with things on a scale 'normal' folks would never even imagine.  Well worth watching.


3.

“Racism is so American that when you protest it, people think you’re protesting America.”

— romy🦋 (@romyreiner) July 2, 2020

This says it all.  But for many people it makes no sense at all.  Which proves the point.**



4.  Did Russia pay the Taliban bounties to kill US troops?  Of course.  Just like we armed and paid the Mujahideen to do the same in Afghanistan when the Soviet Union took over there.  But since Afghanistan bordered the Soviet Union** and the US is half a world away - it's much easier for Russia to do.  But even with the geographic advantage, the Soviet Union was forced out of Afghanistan.


*Throughout the Netflix series the pronunciation of her name was in serious conflict with my natural visual bent.  I'd have done better had I never seen it written.  But this is irrelevant.  She's a seriously evil person and her arrest may bring some comfort to her many victims.

**I realize this is a bit enigmatic for those who don't think of racism as being like apple pie.  If this leaves you scratching your head, just leave a (civil) comment and we can talk about it.

***Tajikistan and Turkmenistan were then part of the Soviet Union.  Today they are independent countries and are between Russia and Afghanistan.

Social Media And Trump's Attempts To Shut Down All Unflattering Information

Here are some links you might find worth following up on.

Substack is a group trying to counter the growing power of Facebook and Google by starting their own subscription based site that journalists can join:

Substack -

"This is one of the key reasons we started Substack. We’re attempting to build an alternative media economy that gives journalists autonomy. If you don’t rely on ads for your revenue, you don’t have to be a pawn in the attention economy – which means you don’t have to compete with Facebook and Google. If you’re not playing the ads game, you can stop chasing clicks and instead focus on quality. If you control the relationship with your audience, you don’t have to rely on outside parties to favor you with traffic. And if you own a mailing list, no-one can cut you off from your readers."

Meanwhile we find out (officially anyway) that Facebook has been lying to us:

Bombshell report reveals Facebook knew for years about its dangerous potential — but rejected the warnings

"Despite internal research that Facebook’s platform was exploiting and exacerbating divisiveness among its users, top executives ignored the findings that the algorithms were doing the exact opposite of the company’s stated public mission to bring people together.
That’s according to new reporting Tuesday from the Wall Street Journal which in a comprehensive dive into the company’s treatment of its platform’s capabilities to divide users found that executives knew in 2018 what the site was doing to users but declined to take action.
“The most persistent myth about Facebook is that it naively bumbles its way into trouble,” tweeted New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose. 'It has always known what it is, and what it’s doing to society.'”

Trump Admin Doesn't Want To Tell Us Who They Gave The CARES Money

If you put money down on March 27 on a bet that the Trump administration would do its best to block oversight of the $2-trillion coronavirus rescue program, congratulations: You’ve won the bet.
Since President Trump signed the CARES Act 81 days ago, he has fired government inspectors general who had been assigned the task of monitoring the disbursements of this cash to businesses big and small.
The day after he signed the act, Trump signaled his intention to restrict the information his appointees can submit to Congress about rescue program spending.
Trump’s Treasury secretary, Steve T. Mnuchin, flatly declared this month that he wouldn’t disclose the names of small businesses receiving loans through the act’s $600-billion Paycheck Protection Program.
 

Meanwhile Trump's trying to keep us from reading John Bolton's book.

“I will consider every conversation with me as president highly classified. So that would mean if he wrote a book and if the book gets out, he’s broken the law and I would think he would have criminal problems,” Trump added, later claiming he hadn’t viewed the book’s contents. 

Even if he had any legal chance to stop the book's distribution to the public, there's no practical possibility.  CNBC says the book is #1 best seller based on pre-sale orders, and Trump's niece's tell-all book is #5. And the Washington Post writes (in an article republished in the ADN) that the book is

"due to go on sale June 23 and has already been shipped across the country."

If the book has been sent to bookstores, there is absolutely no way that someone isn't going to leak a copy, even if Trump's law suit succeeds.  Bootleg copies will get out.

But all this raises the complicity of the Republicans in the US Senate who refused to call Bolton as a witness in the impeachment trial.  And refused to take any step to oppose Trump's stonewalling Congress and the people of the USA.

So, in your weekly email to your members of Congress (all my US based readers do this of course, right?) you  request they make public where the CARES Act money has gone, prohibiting government agencies from requiring Non-Disclosure Agreements (Bolton's cleared the book with NCS to be sure there's no classified information), and generally putting pressure on Trump to rehire the various Inspectors General and other watchdogs he's fired, and to comply with subpoenas for various officials.

It Doesn't Take That Long To Catch Up With Key People's Backgrounds - Mitch McConnell and Gretchen Whitmer

If anyone asks you about specific reasons Senator McConnell shouldn't be reelected, this article in the New Yorker by Jane Mayer will give a long, long list.

"The costs of the Senate’s dysfunction stretch in all directions, and include America’s vulnerability in the face of the covid-19 outbreak. For seven years after Obama’s signature domestic achievement, the Affordable Care Act, passed, in 2010, Republicans in Congress tried at least sixty times to repeal it. In 2017, McConnell, who called it “the worst bill in modern history,” led the charge again and, among other things, personally introduced a little-noticed amendment to eliminate the Prevention and Public Health Fund at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which provided grants to states for detecting and responding to infectious-disease outbreaks, among other things. The fund received approximately a billion dollars a year and constituted more than twelve per cent of the C.D.C.’s annual budget. Almost two-thirds of the money went to state and local health departments, including a program called Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity for Prevention and Control of Emerging Infectious Diseases, in Kentucky.
Hundreds of health organizations, including the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, sent a letter to McConnell and other congressional leaders, warning them of “dire consequences” if the Prevention Fund was eliminated. Public-health programs dealing with infectious-disease outbreaks had never been restored to the levels they were at before the 2008 crash and were “critically underfunded.” The letter concluded, “Eliminating the Prevention Fund would be disastrous.”
In a column in Forbes, Judy Stone, an infectious-disease specialist, asked, “Worried about bird flu coming from Asia? Ebola? Zika? You damn well should be. Monitoring and control will be slashed by the Senate proposal and outbreaks of illness (infectious and other) will undoubtedly worsen.” The cuts, she wrote, were 'unconscionable—particularly given that the savings will go to tax cuts for the wealthiest rather than meeting the basic health needs of the public.'”

And if you hear the name Gretchen Whitmer and you're wondering why a first term governor is being considered by Biden for his number two spot, Politico had a long piece on Gretchen Whitmer.  Here's just a snippet:

"Whitmer’s journey to this office begins with her father, Richard, a Lansing legend who worked for Governors George Romney and William Milliken. Long before he became one of the state’s private sector heavyweights—president and CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan—Dick Whitmer was a trained lawyer who rose up the governmental ranks to eventually lead the Department of Commerce.
His wife, Sherry Whitmer, was a powerhouse in her own right, an assistant attorney general under Frank Kelley, Michigan’s longest-serving attorney general and a godfather figure to young Gretchen and her two siblings. Although Dick and Sherry Whitmer divorced when Gretchen was 10, they instilled in their children a shared love of public service and a shared set of values.
“Neither one of them were ideologues. My mom probably would have been described like a Reagan Democrat, and my dad was a Milliken Republican,” Whitmer says, leaning forward on a blue-cushioned chair. “In Michigan, that’s theoretically a Democrat and a Republican, but it’s pretty close on the scale.”
The eldest Whitmer child grew up harboring no political convictions, much less political aspirations. She dreamed of being a sportscaster for ESPN. This owed to no particular athletic prowess; her adolescent nickname was “Gretchen Gravity,” a nod to her frequent falls, and overall lack of coordination. (These days she goes strictly by “Gretchen”—or sometimes, in an exaggerated Midwestern twang, “Gee Dubya.”)"

How To Use LAX's Taxi, Lyft, Uber Lot

LAX's new system for taxis, Uber, and Lyft began rather disastrously at the beginning of November this year.  We'd heard it was a little better, but weren't sure how we were going to negotiate it.  Turned out to be reasonably easy.  There are big light green signs all over telling you how to get to the new lot - via shuttles that stop on the inside lane by those same green signs.

We asked an employee about when to order the car.  J has Lyft and I have Uber (which I got last summer when we were in Argentina and there was no Lyft).  She said to do it before getting on the shuttle.

Shuttle came quick and wandered through a maze of curving roads.  (It was 8:30 pm on a Monday so we decided not to take the bus.)  I ordered the Uber on the bus and got a code number and instructions to go to 2A, 3A, or 4A.  When we got off the bus there were lots of people helping people figure out what to do and where to go.

Taxis were in one place, Lyft in another direction and there were long lines of cars waiting to pick people up.  Not that many people.

At the front of the line there was someone guiding people into cars.  We got into the next car and gave the driver our PIN.  With the canopy and lights, and all the staff directing people, it felt like going to some big event with crowd control.

So the difference here is that you aren't ordering a specific driver - just the next one in line, like in a taxi line.  And the driver said, from his perspective, he doesn't get to screen the customers.

Normally, Uber drivers, he said, anyone with a rating of less that 4.8 (out of 5)!  That's a pretty high standard I thought.  But here, he has to take whoever is next in line.  Of course, we don't get to pick drivers either.  I asked what got people a good rating.  Tips* and then whether you're decent people.  I suspect it's more about whether you're a jerk.  But still 4.8 out of 5 is a high bar.  If you've taken as few Ubers as we have, one 2 rating would make us untouchables.  If you had a hundred rides a few big negatives wouldn't matter, but I'm not sure how a jerk would get enough rides to render a 2 from someone not a big deal.

I asked what our rating was.  Turns out were a 5, but that's only out of three rides.  Ali, our driver, was a 4.95.  He said we could find our own rating, but I haven't figured out how.  But, of course, Google to the rescue.  Turns out you need 5 rides for your rating to show up on your profile.  We aren't there yet.

Anyway, it was easy, one-third cheaper than a cab (though I don't know if their price has gone down since Uber and Lyft are now here big time).  Though when the crowds get really bad next week, not sure how easy this will be.

And I'd note that the big red and white billboard in the back was for My UBER Lawyer, offering to help with accidents and other problems with Uber.

*I tend to tip cab (and Uber and Lyft) drivers generously since I drove a cab out of LAX long ago after graduating UCLA and before Peace Corps training resumed.  I needed to earn some money and this let me beach during the day and then work the 4pm to midnight shift.

Lunch With Rich Curtner (AIFF) And Visit to Seward Highway Planning Meeting

I had lunch with the chair of the Anchorage International Film Festival to catch up on change to how things are being done this year.  Here he's checking films on his phone.  There have been some significant changes with a non-local Festival Programer who is also a film maker who lives in Norway.  Some of that has to do with which films got selected into the festival.  There still were local programmers, but the last word went to the Ida.

Also there were no 'films in competition.'  All films that were selected are eligible for prizes.  But
the juries this year are only partially local.  There are also international jurists and the final decisions rest outside of Anchorage.

And Festival Genius is out and GOELevent is in.  Those are film festival websites for managing the schedules and online ticketing.  I'm just starting to play with GOELevent and there have been some glitches - films that didn't show up when searched and things like that.

Will there be Audience Awards this year?  Stay tuned.  The board meets Saturday to work out remaining decisions.  I did a short video, but I'm having trouble between iMovie and Youtube.  Good thing I tried today so I can get this cleared up before the festival starts.

I'll catch up more on this later.  It was a beautiful sunny day.  A little cooler this morning, but no snow at all and the only ice I saw riding over to lunch was in puddles.

Later I went to Loussac to check out the public meeting on the midtown transportation project.  Basically it's focused on the Seward Highway between Tudor and Fireweed.  They've been working with some community councils and it's a big, long term project.  36th would go under the Seward Highway, then the highway would go below ground under Benson and Northern Lights.

The more I think about this, the more I think there are better ways to spend half a billion dollars.

The bottom/left is going north, the toplight  is going south.  The white box on the right side is Midtown Mall (old Sears Mall) and the white boxes on the upper left are Fred Meyer.  Seward Highway goes underground just before Benson and comes back up after Northern Lights.  They don't have any plans for the large space between the north and south lanes.  


This is another view.



But they also said that most of the traffic coming from the south is going to midtown, so there will still be a lot of traffic crossing Tudor, 36th,  Benson,  Northern Lights, and Fireweed.  There were some predictions of increased traffic in the next 20 years, but even with the long light at 36th and Seward Highway, I can still get most places in Anchorage in 15 minutes (except at 5pm when it might take 20 or 25 minutes.

90% of the 1/2 billion dollar price tag would be paid for by the Federal government, or at least that's the plan.  I can't help but think that the construction industry is going to be the big winners here and folks in Anchorage will get years of torn up roads and then some marginally improved traffic at the end.

Pedestrians and bikes should come out better with wider trails and easier crossings of the Seward Highway.  I don't enjoy crossing the highway on my bike, but I've learned how the lights work and just relax as I wait for them to change.  And I watch out for people making right turns when I have the walk sign.

The only part that I endorse 100% is a fix for the tunnel along Chester Creek at Seward Highway.  Here's a picture of the tunnel and the pipe for the creek now from the east side.  Riding on a bright day, you get into the tunnel and it's hard to see.  Even on a gray day.  And the creek is reduced to a pipe going under the highway.

This is significantly better for bikes, walkers, joggers, and fish.

The biggest benefit is for people driving north and south through midtown.  They won't have to stop for lights.  But people going into midtown will have to stop for lights and people on the east-west streets will still have to cope with lights and traffic coming off the highway.  Pedestrians get shorter streets to cross (going east and west) but it will now take two lights to get across both directions because the median between north and south lanes will be significantly wider.

I want to see clear estimates for how much time people will save.  They mentioned pedestrians who have died in this area crossing streets in the last ten years or so.  The speaker (not the slides) went on to say, "That's just non-motorized deaths."  Really?  These are deaths of pedestrians running into each other?  I'm guessing a motorized vehicle was involved in all the pedestrian deaths.  How many deaths would prevented if we spent $500 million on Medicaid including much better mental health treatment?  A lot more than six I'm sure.

Those are my initial thoughts.  More trees along the Midtown mall parking lot would improve things for a lot less, and fixing some sidewalks.  I think about the Tudor bridge with the very narrow sidewalks.  Why didn't that get reasonable sidewalks from the beginning?  Or when they widened the highway more recently?

What corners are they going to cut when funding doesn't match their current dreams?  Non-motorized transportation will get shortchanged yet again?

I need to be convinced with more details that show this will
a)  indeed improve the flow of traffic significantly
b)  make things much easier for pedestrians, bikes, runners, etc.
c)  give us more bang for our buck (or more benefit for the cost) than spending money on health care and education.

I do recognize that this money is tied to Federal highway monies, so we can get it for the roads, but not the other areas that probably would see much greater benefits.

Thoughts On Pebble Mine After 6 Classes

I've been to six of the planned eight OLÉ classes on Pebble Mine. Here's my sense of this mega project to extract copper, gold, molybdenum, and other metals in a remote area adjacent to the world's largest salmon fishery.


1.  Obsession:   Anyone who wants to undertake a project of this scope in the United States has to be an obsessive gambler. The amount of time and effort it takes to get all the permits, to get to the site, to put in infrastructure, to put in all the safety procedures, to woo the local communities, and to so raw mining and then to clean up everything is enormous.   I suspect that for some people this is a challenge, like climbing the peaks of the world's highest mountains.  I imagine for all who undertake such projects, the promise of great riches is a key factor.  And apparently, getting a project along a certain part of the way, means the project can then be sold to someone else.  And I'm not exactly sure who's money is at risk and what sort of tax benefits some may get out of losses in a project like this.
For example here are some of the Pebble Mine presentation slides that show a sense of the enormous scope of the project without getting into minutiae:

They have to process such enormous amounts of ore because the amount of valuable minerals is a tiny fraction.

This is just the site for the current 20 year planned mine.  There's a much richer ore deposit to the east of this, but it's buried under bedrock and harder to get at.  No one seems to believe that this project is going to end after 20 years.  That's just the point where they will begin this process over again to then go after the rest of the ore.

2. Complexity.  There is no one person who has the knowledge and experience to be able to assimilate all the data in order to make a yes or no decision on a project like this.  There's way too much technical data from too many different areas.  We've been told about tests of chemical reactions, groundwater studies, surface water studies, acidity, toxicity, bulk tailings and pyritic tailings,  porphyry intrusions, how copper affects salmon's ability to smell, the many federal and state regulations, and  growing demand for copper in green economy,

Here's an overview of the Baseline Study - an attempt to document the existing conditions.  Who is really going to read 30,000 pages?

3.  Many Decisions.   There isn't just one decision.  There are many permits and approvals to get - some of which can stop the project.

On the left are the US Army Corps of Engineers authorities.  On the right are other federal laws. (clicking on any of the images will enlarge and focus them)

And there are approvals and permits needed from Alaska.

And here are all the groups involved in the Army Corps of Engineers Environmental Impact.

Although we got charts showing the decision making process, no one ever said who exactly makes the final decision.  Is it just one person?  Or several people?  We still have two more sessions so I can ask next week.  (I'll miss the last session, unfortunately.)

4. Risk.   In fact, this is NOT a technical decision. Ultimately it's a decision about risk.  How much risk is there and is that risk worth the possible consequences?  It's about the level of comfort with risk the decision maker has.  There isn't just one risk, but many.  At the extreme is the potentially catastrophic consequence of destroying the salmon in Bristol Bay.  McNeil River bears are also nearby.  Then there are the possibilities of lesser impacts on the salmon and other parts of the environment around the mine site.  On the other side are the benefits, which the Pebble folks identified as employment for local people and the importance of copper in the new green environment.  And, of course, the hundreds of millions of potential profit.

Here are some slides from the presentation of Bristol Bay Native Corporation which opposes the mine:

And this slide from the Pebble Mine folks:

5.  Ultimately It's A Values Based Decision.  Aside from the decision maker(s) comfort with and exposure to risk in this situation, this all boils down to two opposing world views:

1. The United States is based on individual freedom and capitalism which allow, even encourage, individuals and corporations to go out and exploit the world's God given natural resources to become rich and make the general economy better
2. Human beings are part of nature, not APART from nature.  Humans have been exploiting the planet and now it has reached the point that human caused climate change will make life and survival for humans and most other species of life much harder.

6.  The Decision.   The decision on Pebble will probably be determined not so much by all the technical details that are being presented, but by where on the spectrum between World Views #1 and #2  the decision maker(s) sit.


7.  Money.  As I review all this, I realize that one important aspect* of the Pebble Mine project has not been discussed in the class - how the project is being financed.  I made the assumption in #1 above that this was a gamble.  But bits of conversation after class with presenters makes me question that.  At one point I made a comment about Northern Dynasty (the company that has been at the lead in this project) and someone said, they won't be the ones who actually carry all this out.  They will be sold out.  So I have questions about how a deal like this is put together.    Who actually has money at risk?  Who is investing in this?  What are their motives?  How much of the expenses of doing all the preparation costs are only paper losses?

These all boil down to who is actually risking how much money and what do they stand to gain?  To what extent do tax payers end up underwriting this because of tax deductions for business expenses or tax offsets for losses?

*Of course there are other important aspects that haven't been discussed that I haven't yet thought of, I'm sure.

What's The Difference Between a Memoirs and a Memoir? And an Autobiography? But That's Just The Hook. There's Also Kimani. [Updated]

I follow  Kimani Okearah @theKimansta on Twitter.  He's a photographer for the Sacramento Kings.  Well, that's not exactly right.  He's a photographer for Vox News and he covers the Kings for them.  I follow a number of folks who experience life differently than I do just to keep tabs on worlds I don't know well.  Mostly there's basketball in his Tweets, but also stuff on race, and health, and things I'm not really sure what they are about.  But there's something sweet and decent about him. I've grown to like him.

It turns out one thing we have in common is an interest in film.  He's working on a documentary.  It's called 30 Year Memoirs of a Crack Baby.  He's the crack baby and he has, among other congenital health issues, a seriously problematic large intestine.

But as I read the title I wondered, why is it memoirs instead of memoir?  So I googled.

[UPDATE 8/15/19:  Kathy in KY commented that the boxes for Memoir and Autobiography had the same texts.  (I've corrected that.)  But then that leaves this post without a distinction between memoir and memoirs.  So here's one from the blog Memoir Mind  that seems to make sense:

"Writing about one's whole life is writing one's memoirs, plural. It's more akin to autobiography, in which you tell all about what happened, often with intense detail, the personal version of the kind of research a biographer would do if they were writing a life about you. Memoirs tend to be more informal than autobiography, but still have that life-encompassing feel. Most of the people who write them are well-known - that's how and why others would buy an entire book about their entire life, or multiple books about their entire life.
Memoir, on the other hand, the currently hot trend in writing and the topic of this blog, is focused on a particular time in one's life, or a theme or thread."

And, back to the original post, below is the bigger picture with the corrected illustration.]

The Author Learning Center explains the difference between a memoir, autobiography, and a biography.    And if you look closely in their summary of a memoir, the second bullet offers a brief note on the difference.

Text comes from The Author Learning Center 

Kimani is asking for a lot of money on GoFundMe, but films cost a lot to make.  He's an expert on the topic.  And since it's a memoirs, it will be a "1st person POV" and less "formal and objective" than a memoir. [And since it's a memoirs, it will be about his whole life, not just one time, theme, or thread.]

I'd urge you to go to his GoFundMe page.  Read it.  And if you weren't born to crack addicts and taken from your parents at 6 months and put into foster home and kicked out of that home as soon as you turned 18, you're probably had a lot more 'privileges' than Kimani has had.  So you could share some of your privilege by checking out his site.

And making a donation.  It doesn't have to be a lot.  $5 would do, but if you're going to go to all the trouble, you might consider making a larger contribution.

He hasn't had a contribution for a couple of days.  I think it's because people would rather look away.  But please, overcome that urge, and give him five minutes.  And when the movie is showing (at the Anchorage International Film Festival I hope), you'll know that you helped make it possible.

I'm not putting up his picture.  I want you to imagine what he looks like.  And then go check how well you conjured up his image.  I'm going to check how many people linked from this page to his GoFundMe page.    Yes, I can do that (and so all other websites.)

Blast From The Past - Charter for the Development of the Alaska North Slope

This was originally posted on February 2, 2009.  It's been read a few times in the last day or two by people whose computers leave the following tracks: "Alaska State Government."  It's about a fund that was set up at the merger of ARCO and BP that was required to donate a certain amount to the University of Alaska annually.

Just so interested parties know what's being considered by someone in our state government.

..............................................

When I wrote a post about the Conoco-Philips ads in the ADN some time ago, the "Charter Agreement" came up and I wrote:

I also know that CP makes other contributions to the community such as $100,000 to the Museum in 2007. And there was a $3.68 million gift to the University of Alaska also in 2007. But we need to put an * on that. The University of Alaska press release on the gift also says,

The annual gifts stem from a charter agreement between the oil companies and the state regarding the BP merger with ARCO in the late 1990s. Part of the charter agreement identifies public higher education as a top priority for charitable donations . . .

So a minimum amount of contribution is required by this Charter Agreement that was a condition for the BP-ARCO merger. I called Scott Goldsmith, the author of the ISER report, to find out how to get access to the Charter Agreement.He wasn't sure if he ever actually saw a copy, but said he'd check for it tomorrow. [Update: I also called UAA Advancement and later the UA Foundation called and said they would find the Agreement and email it to me .] On the internet, nearly all references I find about BP or ConocoPhillips contributions to the University have that standard clause in them.

Well, a few days later, I got an email from the University of Alaska Foundation with a copy of the charter. But we were in high gear preparing to go to Thailand and what with the traveling and getting into things here, I didn't get around to posting that agreement. (It's down below) I haven't had a chance to study the whole charter, but I expect there is plenty to chew on.

For the time being, let's just look at the part that discusses community charitable contributions:

D. Community Charitable Commitment. Within three months after the merger is completed, BP and ARCO [what BP wasn't allowed to buy of ARCO because it would have given BP monopolistic power in Alaska eventually became Conoco-Philips if I got this right] will establish a charitable entity dedicated to funding organizations and causes within Alaska. The entity will provide 30% of its giving to the University of Alaska Foundation and the remainder to general community needs. Funding decisions by the entity will be made by BP and ARCO, with the advice of a board of community advisors. BP and ARCO will provide ongoing funding to this entity in an amount that is equal to 2% of BP's and ARCO's combined aggregate net Alaska liquids production after royalty times the price for WTI. Specific entity funding levels will be calculated annually on the same date each year, referencing the liquids production and the average NYMEX WTI prompt month settlement price for the 12 months immediately proceeding the calculation.

So here are some questions I have:

1. Who monitors these contributions to be sure that they are making the contributions required?
2. How do members of the public find this out?
3. Are they contributing what they are required to contribute?
4. Are they contributing more than they are required to contribute? (If not, can either company seriously claim to make charitable contributions? This was simply a business deal, a required cost of doing business in Alaska and not really charitable donations.)
5. Who is on these boards and are the meetings announced and public?

A quick Google search got me to the BP website. Searching there for charter agreement I got a copy of the 2007 annual report on the Charter Agreement for 2006. It is four lines over four pages - for the whole charter agreement. Plus a cover letter to Governor Sarah Palin. The part on charitable giving says this:

COMMUNITY CHARITABLE GIVING

The BP Board of Community Advisors met in February, 2006, at which time they
reviewed 2005 community spend [sic] and plans for 2006.

BP spent more than $10.2 million in support of community programs in 2006,
consistent with the formula detailed in the Charter.

Approximately $3 million was contributed to the University of Alaska Foundation
(1/3 of community investment).

ConocoPhilips's website gave me this message:

Connection to server www.search.conoco.com failed (The server is not responding.)

Why do I think that is the extent of the oversight? Even BP didn't think it was important enough to proof read it carefully. Am I being too cynical? Did the Governor's office demand back up information so they could see how the 2% times the price of WTI? I don't know. What about all the other issues in the Charter? What sort of scrutiny do they get? Just this brief annual report?

Since I'm pretty busy right now in Thailand, I'm going to have to hold off on pursuing these questions. Though I might send them to my representatives in the State Legislature.

Meanwhile, here is the rest of the Charter. I hope other bloggers and non-bloggers start reading it carefully to see whether the oil companies are living up to the agreement. I guess first we ought to figure out which state agencies are responsible for keeping track.

Charter for Development of ... by Steve on Scribd

University Of Alaska Cuts Part Of Koch Plan To Cripple Climate Science in Alaska?

Alaska Public Media had a story this morning on how the cuts to the university budget could decimate the climate change research being done by University of Alaska faculty.  Research that is critically important to our understanding of climate change and how fast it is happening.  It's important to the state, but also important to climate change research worldwide.

In a previous post I speculated that the hit Dunleavy made on the University was intended to wipe out expertise that could challenge the reports Outside corporations submit for permitting their extraction of Alaska resources.  That's totally consistent with the goals Dunleavy's patrons - the Koch brothers and others.

But I wasn't thinking big enough.  A hit to the climate change research being done in Alaska would also be consistent with the Kochs' climate change denial agenda.  (See the Koch sponsored climate denial organizations list here, for example.  Or here.)

Right now, the President of the University of Alaska should be tapping foundations and large donors around the country and around the world to help keep the university running until we get rid of our governor.

But it seems to me that saving the climate change research in Alaska should be a top priority and a great way to gather support for the University of Alaska in general.  Alaska is one of the most climate affected states.  Maybe not so much by numbers of people affected, but by the huge physical impact climate change is having on our land, oceans, sub-surface permanent-frost, our glaciers and ocean icepacks.

The Public Media piece featured one climate change researcher from Juneau.  He talked about how his research funding from Outside of Alaska brought in way more money than his salary.  How many other such researchers can there be in Alaska?  Let's make a wild guess of 50 statewide - researchers who are regular UA faculty.

Let's say their average salary and benefits come to $100,000 apiece.  It could be more, but that's an easy round number to work with and will give us a ballpark figure.

$100,000 X 50 = $5,000,000.   In today's world, that's not a lot of money.  Forbes say there are 5000 families in the US with over $100 million - and that's just "cash deposits, securities and life and pension plans." Not real estate or businesses or art.

Surely amount those 5000 there are people who would be willing to pay the salaries of Alaska's climate researchers for a year.  Even if my estimate is way off and we need $10 million, that's chump change for billionaires.

Jim Johnson, how many million dollar donations have you brought to the University since you became president?  Now's the time to huddle with Rasmuaon'a Diane Kaplan to get some leads on where to get the money to save our climate researchers.  Not to mention the other threatened faculty.

Meanwhile, I'd call on retired faculty in the state,  many of whom get good pensions, to volunteer to teach classes for free in the fall if there are gaps in their specialties so that students can get the classes they need to graduate.  I've already sent a message to UAA's chancellor offering to teach and to help sign up others..  (And if we're really lucky, we won't have to because the legislature and the governor will find a way to avoid these big cuts.

If Republicans Don’t Have A Problem With Detention Centers On Human Rights Grounds, Maybe They Will For Wasting Taxpayer Money

CQ reports that the US government is paying contractors over $700 a day to house children in border detention camps.  They cite an NBC report based on information from a Department of Health and Human Services administrator.

“The cost of holding migrant children who have been separated from their parents in newly created "tent cities" is $775 per person per night, according to an official at the Department of Health and Human Services — far higher than the cost of keeping children with their parents in detention centers or holding them in more permanent buildings.”

You can slice and dice the numbers anyway you want, but there are a couple of things that are obvious here:  The government is paying way too much.

This is either because:
A.  They are horribly inefficient
B.  They are making contractors very rich
C.  They have no imagination to figure out better ways to do this
D.  They want the detainees to suffer as much as possible to deter others
E.  They want the detainees to suffer as much as possible because they are sadistic
F.   A combination of some or all of the above

But we could put all these people into decent hotels and feed them well at these prices.  Someone’s getting rich.  Someone who’s probably benefiting from the new tax law.  Someone who probably contributed significantly to the Trump campaign.  (I said probably.  I don’t have the facts.  Let’s consider this a suggestion for a journalist who needs a good story.)

And yes, I agree with anyone who thinks that NBC should have given the name of the person who supplied the numbers.

Cathedrals, Bank Lines, The Disappeared And Their Killers

I really owe you more than pictures, but it’s hard keeping track of and sorting out my impressions and what I’ve been told.  People I see on the streets - what they look like, what they wear, their constant cell phone use - look exactly like the people I see in the US.  Pizza and hamburguesas and beer are among the most popular foods here in Cordoba. But these folks live among buildings that, in a few cases, go back to the 1500s.  They walk down narrow streets with little shops on every block - at least in this neighborhood - with fresh fruit and vegetables, eggs, and a few other items, that are right next to bakeries with all sorts of decadent sweets.  There’s history here (not counting the original people prior to European conquest) that makes even the US east coast seem young.

Argentina has free health care and free higher education.

US citizens have a way of feeling superior to the rest of the world, but there’s more to culture than military superiority.  Of course, this is what I’ve discovered every time I’ve been to a new (for me) part of the world.  People are people.  And everywhere you go there are very smart, sophisticated people.  People with great common sense and wisdom.  And there are jerks.  When we were surveyed at the airport by someone from a tourism agency, we were asked to rate a number of things.  I asked if we were going to be asked about the people.  No, we weren’t.  Well, I said, you should ask us.  The people were absolutely the best part of our trip.  Tolerant of my terrible Spanish and always wanting to know “De desde son?”  Where are you from?  And Alaska always elicits a smile and ‘frio.’

That said, here are the pictures.  These are two days old.  We walked up to Plaza San Martin, the center of Córdoba, Argentina’s second largest city.  While we were at the Museum of Memories, a group came in with a guide speaking in English and when we listened in we got invited to join.  It’s a company that puts on free tours - it’s up to you to decide what to pay the guide.  The group was mostly Spanish speakers and the English speakers got a much shorter version.  And two dropped out during the two hour plus tour, leaving just us.

But first here’s a picture from our 8th floor balcony.  Airbnb had a two bedroom apartment  for under $50 a night.  It’s by far the most spacious place we’ve stayed.  Well, the Buenos Aires homestay was bigger, but we didn’t have it to ourselves.            

  

I couldn’t pass up the shadows - also from the balcony.

 

This is the inside of the main Cathedral on Plaza San Martin.  If you’ve been reading the blog lately, you’ve  heard this name before.  San Martin, someone said, was the George Washington of Argentina.  But he was more than that.  Besides getting Argentina free from Spain, he did the same in Chile.  Then passed the torch to Simon Bolivar in Peru.

Here’s a view of the plaza. It’s much warmer here in central Argentina.  Up to about 70˚F in the afternoon.

    

Here’s the cathedral from the plaza.

Construction of the Cathedral began in 1582 according to Wikipedia and it was finished in 1709.  For the historically challenged, the Mayflower got to North America in 1620 and George Washington was born in 1732.

If you look closely below, you can see a long line of people at the bank.  We’ve seen shorter lines before and asked.  Someone suggested about a Friday lineup that people were getting money out for the weekend and wanted to get their money in case the ATMs ran out of money over the weekend.  In this case, it was Tuesday after a holiday weekend.  (This is here because it was on the way to Plaza San Martin.)

 

The Museum of the Memories is in a former detention and torture center from the 1970s when the government rounded up suspected opponents.


The Free Tour guide (in the red in the center) said about 30,000 people disappeared.  Tortured to death, shot, and others were  thrown out of airplanes over the ocean.  Children were kidnapped and given to other families.  I knew some of this.  Netflix has The Official Story up - well it’s here in Spanish without English subtitles.  It’s about this period.

 I was going to save this museum for a post all its own, but I have so many backed up photos I should just put it up.  It’s a chilling account.  30,000 people is a tiny fraction of the population.  But if it’s your son or daughter or husband, it’s everything.  And all the relatives and friends and acquaintances of 30,000 people is enough to spread terror among millions of others that they will be next.  Sort of like undocumented Americans waiting for ICE to knock on their doors.
 
Buzzfeed reported in May that over 52,000 people were being held in ICE detention centers.  The vast majority of these are decent, innocent people fleeing violence in their own countries.  But the Trump administration is full of heartless people who easily rationalize the evil they are doing.  Here is a picture of some of their Argentinian colleagues from the 70s and 80s.

.  The guide mentioned that the detention center that houses the museum is right next to the cathedral and part of the cabildo - the main government building of the province.  Both were complicit.  

Here are a few more memories.

This giant (5 or 6 feet high) fingerprint is made up of names of the disappeared. There were several more such fingerprints on the wall.    

A courtyard in the detention center.

A poster about one of the young women who disappeared.

Another victim.

And interrogation room, I think.

The difference between what happened in Chile and what’s happening today is great.  We still have enough accountability that people aren’t being actively and intentionally  tortured or thrown out of airplanes into the ocean.  But it’s not because some of the people in charge wouldn’t do those things if they could.  They did it at Guantanamo.  We still have some safeguards.  But being locked up indefinitely without adequate food and, bad sanitary conditions, having your kids separated from you, is all pretty terrifying by itself.  We’re watching the cold-bloodedness of Mike Dunleavy in action.  He would have gone along with the men in the picture above.  And I’m guessing the 22 legislators who went to Wasilla and refused to vote to override the vetoes  have moral compasses that don’t recognize evil either.