AIFF2020: Dinner In America: A Movie I Shouldn't Have Liked, But I Did

 I'm falling way behind here.  I'm pretty much picking pictures based on the photo, title, and description.  Here are some I think are worth watching.

Narrative Features

I really didn't expect to like Dinner in America   It starts off in an institutional dining room.  Someone throws up on his tray of food.  I almost stopped it right there.  But I didn't and we get to follow an out of control drug dealer (no, that's just one of his personas) have family dinner in three different homes, do a lot of crazy shit (sorry, that's the best description), and win over both of us.  This is a good movie.  Filmed in Michigan.  

Small Town Wisconsin was filmed in Wisconsin.  We even get a tour of Milwaukee.  Another main character who does lots of things that don't endear him to the others characters or the audience.  A little past midpoint we discussed abandoning the film.  We didn't.  It would have been a mistake.  

Foster Boy - This is more Hollywood than film festival.  It has two well known (there may have been others) actors - Matthew Modine and Louis Gossett Jr. - and  Shaquille O’Neal is the executive producer.  This is a court room drama.  A rich, conservative corporate attorney is assigned, against his will, a pro bono case of a 19 prisoner who is suing the foster care corporation that placed him in about a dozen homes.  A compelling film with appealing heroes and appropriately nasty villains.  

Of the three, I'd say Foster Boy had a number of loose ends - where I couldn't quite believe a) the lead attorney didn't get suspicious faster about his son's cancelled trip or b) all the dirty tricks that happened over Thanksgiving weekend.  I attribute b) to squeezing events that happened over a longer period of time into a couple days to fit the condensed time line of the movie.  The film said it was a fictionalized account of a true story.

Shorts  I think are worth watching:

Masel Tov Cocktail - I've already written about this, but I'm including it again just in case you missed my earlier mention.  At this point, this is my favorite film of the festival.  This was a tricky project and it all fit together wonderfully.  It couldn't have been told as well in any other format than film.  

 Cake Day - A good story told economically and movingly.  

Woman Under the Tree  - Maybe a bit longer than necessary, but it's a well told tale of a homeless woman.  

The Marker - Like Cake Day, a good story told well.  

Happy (Short) Films -  I've added this category because this festival is heavy with issue films.  Here are two shorts, particularly Pathfinder, that present the beauty and wonder of the natural world.  

 Pathfinder - A small group of adventurers put up a slack line high up among snow peaks in Norway with Northern Lights in the background.  Pure joy.

Sky Aelans - Also up in the mountains, the people of the Solomon Islands are protecting the mountain environment.  The camera shares some of the wonders up there worth their care.  

I still have lots of movies to see.  There appears to be a lot worth watching.  More later.  

AIFF2020: Sapelo And A Strong Recommendation For The Last Days Of Capitalism And For Grab My Hand: A Letter To My Dad

Usually Saturday is really busy during the festival with films starting as early as 9 am some years.  But we've somehow gotten into a routine with Netflix that we never watch before it's dark.  (Well, in the summer, before 8 or 9 pm anyway.)  So it didn't seem right to start til late afternoon.  We saw one documentary feature - Sapelo - one shorts program - The Best Ships Are Friendships - and one narrative feature - The Last Days of Capitalism.  

Sapelo is a documentary about. . . well, that's a bit of a problem.  It starts out, it seemed, to be about the Black people who have been living on the island, a ferry ride from mainland Georgia,  for 200 years.  There are lots of pauses to just look at beautiful vistas of the island.  But it meanders into a story about two brothers, their grandmother.  How old are the boys?  Don't remember being told.  I do remember that an older brother was 14, so I'm guessing these two were maybe between 9 and 11.  The grandmother adopted the mother too.  Some of it feels like a reality show.  Some of it feels like an invasion of the kids' privacy, particularly as we watch one of the boys having anger management problems and there's talk of his medication.  He's wearing an ankle bracelet for a while and in the end he's been sent to a detention center.  By the end I felt like these boys were being exploited.  They weren't capable of giving consent.  Was it the grandmother who gave consent?  What was she told they would be filming?  

On the other hand, a unique way of life was being captured.  Well, the end of a unique way of life.  The boys may well treasure this intimate portrait of them when they are older.  But making it public doesn't feel right to me.  

What was the relationship between the Swiss filmmakers and the people on the island.  We never see from or hear about the film makers except near the beginning when one of the boys looks up at the camera and apologizes for his language

The Last Days of Capitalism -  Wow.  Just picked this from the website knowing nothing about it and we were totally absorbed by two actors - Sarah Rose Harper and Mike Faiola.  We had no idea where it was headed.  This was not your ordinary movie fare.  This is what I love about film festivals.  Will I wake up in the morning and wonder what I was thinking?  Not sure.  I just know that we were hooked til the very end.  Recommended.  (Not saying much about the content.  Just know that it is two people probing each other.  Drugs and alcohol and a fair amount of money are involved.)  My hat is off to writer/director Adam Mervis.  

All of the shorts were worth watching.  Grab My Hand: A Letter to My Dad was the one that stands out as visually striking and clever and beautiful and it was the right length for the story.  Nothing unnecessary.  I just don't know why they didn't call it Gatecheck.  Be sure to watch this one.  Camrus Johnson, thanks for this film.  Latchkeys was sweet - I mean that in the best way.

Goodbye Rafer Johnson

One more hero in my life moves on.  The picture below was taken two and a half years before I'd enter UCLA as a freshman.  The legacy of Johnson and C.K. Yang and their great sportsmanship (Is there a non-sexist term?) was one of many attractions UCLA held.  At that time, California students who graduated in the top 12.5% of their high school class, were automatically admitted.  Tuition my first semester was something like $68.  And we lived a 30 minute bike ride from campus so my parents were pleased they wouldn't have to pay room and board.  

From LA Times

The Photo Description:  "Rafer Johnson puts on a weightlifting demonstration for Boy Scouts at UCLA in July 1960 as his track teammate C.K. Yang kneels and smiles.  A little more than a month later, Johnson would edge Yang for the decathlon gold medal at the Rome Olympics."

From LA Times:

"He was something special at UCLA

‘Greatest of all Bruins,’ Johnson remained a regular at many events.

By Ben Bolch

Sixty years after he edged a UCLA training partner on weary legs in one of the most dramatic finishes in Olympic history, Rafer Johnson ’s presence continued to blaze on campus like an inextinguishable flame.

He was a regular at track meets and basketball games and gymnastics meets even as his health declined, always graciously accepting requests to pose for photos with anyone who asked. He was also a confidant to longtime athletic director Dan Guerrero, serving as a special advisor who offered wisdom and guidance that no pricey consultant could match.

Johnson’s legacy as a decathlon champion and humanitarian, not to mention his trusted friendship, made it especially meaningful for Guerrero to be part of dedicating the Betsy and Rafer Johnson Track last year at UCLA’s Drake Stadium.

“It’s not a stretch for me to say that Rafer was the greatest of all Bruins,” Guerrero said Wednesday upon learning of Johnson’s death at his home in Sherman Oaks at age 86.

“When you think about it, apart from his athletic prowess, which placed him in history among the most heralded of all athletes, he passionately and selflessly and humbly dedicated his life to better people and our society whether it was through his work with Special Olympics, mentoring young students or his commitment to civil rights. He was a giant, there was no question about that, and while this description is probably thrown around rather capriciously, in this case it’s true. . ."

 Here's a second article they have titled:  Appreciation: Rafer Johnson was more than a great athlete; he was a great man

And if you can't get into the LA Times, here's the Wikipedia entry on Rafer Johnson.

*I'd note that Wikipedia says that C.K. Yang died January 20, 2007 at age 73 in Los Angeles.  

Applying Factfulness To Why People Might Vote For Trump Part I

[I thought I would just take a few of the ideas from Rosling's book and them apply them to Trump supporters to see why he still has so many.  But as I started making the list, I realized that so many of the obstacles to good decisions he mentions are relevant.  And because the book has great end of chapter summaries, it's easy to give an outline (though that leaves out most of the examples that help readers understand the points.)  So I'm adding this note on top to say, this post will outline those key points I wanted and I'll do a follow up post applying them to our current political situation.  As I went through them again, I realized they also illustrate problems among those opposing Trump as well.  And I recommend going to the links - particularly to the fact test and to lgapfinder.]

Factfulness::  Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think  by Hans Rosling, starts out with a self test on facts about how the world is doing, which you can take here.  The first question is:

1. In all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary

school?

 a.  20%

 b.  40%

 c.  60%

In the book he relates the many different places he's given the test - to college students, business people, bankers, doctors, heads of international organizations, Nobel Prize winners, etc.  All the groups, he tells us, scored worse than chimpanzees.  (Who randomly choosing one of three options would get 33% right.)

The questions all relate to how human beings are doing around the world.  He argues they are doing much better than most people think.  And everyone in the West, he argues, think everything is getting worse, because we have mental models of "US" and "THEM" - US being being relatively rich (mostly) Western societies and THEM being the poor starving masses in the rest of the world who will never, ever be able to catch up to how we live in the West.  

Reality, he argues, is much different.  Rather than US and THEM with a giant unbridgeable gap between the two, he presents us with a different model.  One without a gap.  Instead, he says there is US which he calls (income) Level 4, then Level 3, Level 2, and finally THEM in Level 1.  The gap is filled with five billion people.  Levels 1 and 4 have one billion each.  So, most people are in that gap most people mistakenly see.  In fact, the website he and his co-authors (his son and daughter-in-law) set up to present the data they use to convince people their world views are wrong, is called Gapminder.  (Any one who's ridden a subway in Britain or a relatively recent British colony will hear in their heads the warning "Mind the Gap")  

Here's how he describes the levels:

Level 1 - making $1 a day

Five kids, spend hours/day walking barefoot to get water with the single family bucket.  They gather firewood for cooking, little or no access to medical care, the same porridge for every meal. (1 billion people)

Level 2 - making $4 a day

Buy food you didn't grow, raise chickens, sandals for kids, bike, more buckets, less time getting water, gas for cooking, kids can go to school instead of finding firewood. Electricity, but not reliable. Mattress to sleep on. (3 billion people)

Level 3 - $16 from multiple jobs.  Cold water tap. Stable electricity improves kids' homework.  Buys fridge, motorcycle, can travel to better paying job.  (2 billion people)

Level 4 - >$33 a day

Rich consumer.  >12 years education.  You've been on an airplane on vacation.  Hot and cold indoor water.  Can eat out once a month and buy a car.  (1 billion people)

At the Gapminder website on Dollar Street you can see pictures of families at all four levels (it seems that each column is a level) in different countries.  And, of course, you'll notice that there are people living at all four levels in most countries.  

Most of the book talks about why people are so misinformed about facts about the world and how to counteract them.  We have a number of built in human instincts that might have been useful to human beings tens of thousands of years ago, but today can get us into trouble.  We have to learn to control them.  

The Gap Instinct - The tendency to polarize things, to see an unbridgeable gap between rich and poor, them and us.  Remember to:

• Beware comparisons of averages
• Beware of comparisons of extremes
• The view from up here - Things are distorted (as the view from Level 4)

The Negativity Instinct - tendency to see and report on the bad things that happen, not the good.  Remember:

• Better and bad - things can be getting better and still be bad, it's not either/or
• Good news is not news - doesn't get reported the way bad news does
• Gradual improvement is not news - slowly improving conditions aren't newsworthy
• More news doesn't equal more suffering - often bad news due to better surveillance of suffering, not a worsening.  Our news and social media bring us lots of bad news
• Beware of rosy pasts - The good old days are much better in hindsight than we people lived them

The Straight Line Instinct  - this is seeing a trend and assuming it will always be that way.  Remember to:

• Not assume straight lines - many trends are not straight lines but are curves.  We may be only looking at a short part of the line.  (He talks about various trends, but about population particularly for this one.  He argues that as people improve their wealth and move up to a higher level, they have fewer children and that all the population experts agree that at about 11 billion people the world population will level off.  

The Fear Instinct - Frightening things get our attention.  Our natural fears of violence, captivity, and contamination make us systematically overestimate these risks.  To control the fear instinct, calculate the risks.

• The scary world:  fear v reality - the world seems scarier than it is because it has been filtered by your attention filter or by the media precisely because it is scary
• Risk=danger x exposure - The risk is not related to how scary something is, but by a) how dangerous it is and b) how much you're exposed to it 

The Size Instinct - Lonely numbers seem impressive (large or small).  How to get things into proportion:

• Compare - Single numbers alone are misleading.  Look for comparisons (with past numbers, numbers in other locations, etc.)  
• 80/20 Rule - Generally, a few things account for most of the impact.  Figure out the 20% that's most important
• Divide - Amounts and Rates tell different stories.  Comparing countries, say, the numbers are misleading.  Look for rates per person instead.  

The Generalization Instinct - Categorization is necessary to survive, but categories can be misleading.  We have to avoid generalizing incorrectly.

• Look for differences within groups - find ways to break them down into smaller and smaller categories
• Look for similarities across groups - and ask if your categories are correct
• Look for differences across groups - do not assume what applies to one group applies to another (what applies to Level 4, for example, applies to other Levels)
• Beware of "the majority" - Majority just means more than half, there's another 49%
• Beware of vivid examples - Vivid images are easy to recall, but they may not be representative
• Assume people are not idiots - When things seem strange, be curious and humble and think.  In what way is this a smart solution?

The Destiny Instinct - Many things (such as people, countries, religion, and cultures) appear to be moving in a constant direction because the change is so slow, but slow changes gradually become big ones.  

• Keep track of gradual Improvements - small change every year can become a huge change over decades.
• Update your knowledge - Some knowledge goes out of date quickly.  Technology, countries, societies, cultures, and religions are constantly changing.
• Talk to Grandpa - think about your values are different from those of your grandparents
• Collect examples of cultural change - Challenge the idea that today's culture must also have been yesterday's and will be tomorrow's.

The Single Perspective Instinct - A single perspective can limit your imagination, better to look at problems from many angles to get a more accurate understanding.

• Test your ideas - Have people who disagree with you test your ideas
• Limited expertise - Don't claim expertise beyond your field.  Be humble about what you don't know.
• Hammers and Nails - From the saying: "If you give a young child a hammer, he will think everything needs pounding."  If you get good with a tool don't use it too often.  If you have analyzed a problem in depth, you can end up exaggerating its importance.  No one tool is good for everything.  Be open to ideas from other fields.
• Numbers, but not only numbers -  Love numbers for what they tell you about real lives.
• Beware of simple ideas and simple solutions - History is full of visionaries who used simple utopian visions to justify terrible actions.  Welcome complications.

The Blame Instinct - He told a story in this chapter about a problem with a pharmaceutical company for not looking for solutions to poor people's diseases.  A student of his suggested someone should punch the CEO in the nose.  He replied, I will see him next week, but if I did that would it solve the problem?  He answers to the board.  Should I punch them in the nose too?  They answer to shareholders who want profits.  Should I go after the shareholders?  Retirement funds hold lots of pharmaceutical stocks that help pay pensions for old folks.  When you see your grandfather next week, maybe you should punch him in the nose.  The desire to find a scapegoat is universal, but things are more complicated.  

• Look for causes, not villains - spend your energy on understanding the multiple interacting causes, or system, that created the situation.
• Look for systems, not heroes.  When someone claims to have caused something good, ask whether the outcome might have happened anyway, even if that individual had done nothing.  Give the systems the credit.

The Urgency Instinct - When often rush decisions because of a perceived, but not necessarily true, urgency.  Control this by taking small steps.

• Take a breath - When your urgency instinct is triggered, your other instincts kick in and your analysis shuts down.  Ask for more time and information.  It's rarely now or never and rarely either/or.
• Insist on the data - If something is urgent and important, it should be measured.  Beware of relevant but inaccurate data
• Beware of fortune tellers - Any prediction about the future is uncertain.  Beware of of predictions that fail to acknowledge that.  Ask how often such predictions have been right before.
• Be wary of drastic action - Ask what the side effects will be.  Ask how the idea has been tested.  Step-by-step practical improvements are less dramatic but usually more effective.

I'll put a link to Part II here when it's ready, but I'm guessing that readers can start applying these instincts to both Trump supporters and opponents.  

Bev Beeton, I'm Glad I Got To Know You

 The Anchorage Daily News has an obituary for Beverly Beeton this week.  

I was a faculty member at the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) when Dr. Beeton became Provost.  She was a formidable presence.  My description of her at the time was something like this:

"I've never seen her wearing less than $1000, and she speaks like Katherine Hepburn.  Does anybody speak like that naturally?"

My sense was that Dr. Beeton had a one hell of a facade, one that had been carefully developed.  I made a goal of finding the human being behind that facade.  It wasn't a high priority, more like a curiousness.  

One day the opportunity came.  I was chosen to chair the committee that nominated the people who would get honorary degrees.  And Dr. Beeton, as Provost, oversaw that committee.  She invited me out to lunch to talk about how the committee would work.  

A couple of years before that (my dates are a little fuzzy, but it was close to that time) I had gotten a grant to create a class that would focus on women in public administration.  The proposal was to get five prominent women public administrators and give them the freedom to design a class to "pass on the wisdom of women administrators."  We had three women who had been state commissioners, one Native Alaskan woman leader, and a Superior Court judge (who eventually would become an Alaska Supreme Court Chief Justice.)  They were given the freedom to design the class and Arlene Kuhner, an incredible English professor, and I would figure out the mechanics of making it work.  

The structure they gave us was a panel of women administrators each week addressing a different topic with lots of time for Q&A. They invited the women administrators and set up the subject, Arlene and I took care of all the academic work, though the five women, if I recall right, got to see some of the work the students did.   It was a great class and I learned a lot.  I recall one of my students, a man from China, telling me afterwards how impressed he was that all these women were so smart and capable and how it made him realize how China was wasting so half its human resources by not giving women equal access to important positions.  

So, at the lunch,  after discussing the committee work, I mentioned the class and how it had been run as a lead in to this question:  "You're the most senior woman administrator at the university (this was before we had any women Chancellors).  You must feel somewhat isolated."  The ice was broken and from then on we had an entirely different relationship.  We talked about that isolation, about the problems of sex discrimination, and lots of other administrative issues.  

I remember one time she told me that she wanted to set up a more objective evaluation system where administrators and faculty would have to develop measurable outcomes.  That was something I had my graduate students do for their jobs in one of my classes.  But I always told my students that it was useful for them to do for their own jobs, but it was impossible to do really well. And it was easy to misuse the results of such measurements.  Especially if someone just focused on the numbers and not the context of the numbers.  There are just too many important, but hard to measure aspects of their jobs. 

My response to Bev (by then she was Bev to me) was that it was a difficult but interesting exercise and suggested that she set up an example of how to do it for her own job as Provost.  Her response was, "My job is just too variable and complex to be able to do that."  My response was, "That's what every other administrator and faculty member will say.  If you can't do it for your own job, then it doesn't seem fair to ask others to do it."  I never heard about that project again.  

But this started out being about getting past the facade and learning about the real human being inside.  After our first lunch and the committee meetings that followed, I was in her office for something and mentioned that my daughter, a Steller Alternative School student at the time, was taking a spring break hiking class in Utah.  I had resisted at first.  Why do Alaskan students need to go to Utah to go hiking?  Well, she countered, we're going to learn about Utah too.  I asked a colleague of mine who was from Utah for an assignment for her.  He suggested she read Wallace Stegner's Mormon Country.  She agreed she would. 

When I explained this to Bev, she really opened up.  She'd grown up in rural Utah in a not particularly academic setting.  She felt very much like she didn't belong there.  She really wanted to get out of Utah, as far away as possible.  She was even a fashion model in New York, I think, for a while - which began to explain her very un-Alaskan high style way of dressing.  She got herself through school.  But essentially became as different a person as she could.  And once I got past that facade, I got to meet a very warm, accomplished, and charming woman.  

We didn't become the kind of friends who see each other out of work  - though I did run into her once on a garden tour.  We didn't have a lot of opportunities to talk about non-university issues.  I only learned from the obituary, for example, that she'd been married twice and had children but we were allies of a sort who liked each other at the University.  

One other observation.  Bev was a smoker.  When the university banned smoking indoors, small knots of people could be seen huddled outdoors in the dead of winter, smoking.  It created a cohort group of people from various parts of the university hierarchy who had smoking in common.  Their basic connection was that they were smokers, but they got to develop other things they had in common as well.  

I haven't seen Bev in years, but my world is poorer knowing she is no longer with us.  

This wandered a bit.  It's memories, not an academic paper.  It is a reminder that there is a human being inside all the people around you.  A person who is hidden behind whatever facade they've intentionally or unintentionally formed.  Try to talk to the human being - especially in these days of high conflict - instead of just to the facade.  

Get Out Your Brooms And Caring

From Nabih Bulos, a reporter in Beirut, published in the LA Times and other places.  He was near the blast and still can't account for two hours right after the blast, nor can he recognize the photos on his phone.  He woke up on the ground with an eye swollen shut and cuts on his arms.  I've picked out the hopeful part, the part that I think most Alaskans, masked or not, would do in an emergency:

"Nevertheless, a picture emerges of two things. One is that I was extremely lucky. The other — and this is a surprise for a card-carrying misanthrope like myself — is that people can be incredibly, almost irrationally kind in times of crisis.

One friend offered his car. Another drove my fiancee and me more than an hour outside Beirut to find a hospital that wasn’t inundated with casualties. A friend of my brother’s — whom I had never laid eyes on before — arranged for his neurosurgeon buddy to set up a CT scan appointment and eye examination, and chauffeured me from hospital to hotel to clinic. Everyone helped — no hesitation, no questions asked.

That generosity seems everywhere. In my neighborhood, roving bands of broomstick-toting volunteers walk around battered streets and apartments, sweeping away blood-soaked glass shards, pulverized furniture and the other detritus of lives shattered. Others grab tools, salvaging what materials they can to board up entrances and restore some semblance of normalcy for shell-shocked residents. Dozens of charitable groups and mutual aid organizations have reoriented themselves to dealing with the tragedy. All this is done in the almost complete absence of the state, whose carelessness appears to have caused the cataclysm in the first place."

Actually, we're in the middle of a slow motion emergency.  Let's get out those brooms and start sweeping away the epithets, the demands for trivial rights, and pick up our responsibilities to each other and to our democracy.  

Garth Jones Leaves A Big Hole As He Leaves Us At 95

I saw the obituary in the ADN yesterday morning before my bike ride.  The picture was of a man who lived  at least 25 years before I met him - young and handsome.

As I rode, it hit me that this man influenced my life more than most people I've known - if it weren't for Garth Jones, it's unlikely I would have ended up in Alaska.  He was the Dean of the School of Business and Public Administration in the late 1970s and was looking to fill a position.  He contacted his colleagues at USC, where he had taught earlier and one of them showed me the job announcement.  I'd been in Anchorage about 8 hours - from 6am to 1pm - about eight years earlier after Peace Corps training.  I'd gone home to LA for the weekend and then flew to Anchorage to meet the plane that was carrying us all to Tokyo, then Hong Kong, then Bangkok.  It had been a spectacular August day and I was astounded by how beautiful it was.

But I wasn't finished with my dissertation and had seen too many people who had taken jobs before finishing their degrees.  It was clear I needed to finish before leaving so I didn't apply.  But the faculty member had stayed another year and when I was finished, the position was open and I applied and was selected.

So in September 1977 I met Garth Jones, my new boss, and the only other faculty member there with a degree in Public Administration.  He was also probably the oldest member of the SPA faculty.  And I'd never met a person like him in my life.  He nurtured me and he drove me crazy.  Over the years he shared a lot about his life, and while I was trying to impress him as a young faculty member, he seemed also trying to impress me.

Early on I remember a dispute we had.  The university had $10,000 allotted to open a childcare center.  I had two children under 4 years old.  A preschool on campus would be perfect for us.  Garth was 100% opposed.  University money should be spent on students and college education, not child care.  So Garth, I continued, supposed someone donated $10,000 to the University that could only be used for day care, would you still be opposed?  Yes, I would.  Young children should be at home raised by their mothers.

He came from a poor Mormon sheep farming family in southern Utah. At times there wasn't a lot of food, he'd tell me. He married into Mormon royalty.  Women were supposed to stay home and take care of their kids.

But, Garth, I argued, you told me I couldn't afford to live in Anchorage if my wife didn't work.  So how can she work if we don't have child care?  You're different Steve.  You're Jews and you value education and take care of your kids well.  It turned out that Garth had a strong admiration for Jews, though it didn't always come out in ways that sounded complimentary.

What this exchange meant to me was that while we disagreed strongly on a number of important issues, Garth would be honest with me if I pushed past his initial assertions.  It was also my first introduction to his, sometimes odd, but sincere admiration for the value that he felt Jews put on education and scholarship.

Garth also had an inherent thirst for learning which, in his telling, made him something of an oddball in his community as a kid.  He had read voluminously and there were lots of words he had read, but had never heard anyone say out loud.  For a number of these book-learned words, he had his own unique pronunciation.  He'd made his way through college and into the State Department and ended up in Pakistan where he helped establish the discipline of public administration there and helped teach the members of the civil service.  As someone from a poor background, he was not a typical foreign service officer.  He learned Urdu and got along too well with the locals.  When he was reassigned to Indonesia the same thing happened.  He told me he got chastised for getting too close to the natives.  Perhaps my Peace Corps experience in Thailand was something he could relate to when he saw my application.

When he came back he got a faculty position at USC which had faculty who had had grants to help with Garth's public administration work in Pakistan.  He also published an article that was critical of the State Department bureaucracy that was unusual in its very personal tone as well as its frankness.  I immediately gained a lot of respect for Garth when I eventually read the article.

"Failure of Technical Public Administration Abroad:  A Personal Note" begins:

"Am I a Dodo?
Thirteen years of one’s professional life is a sizeable period to devote largely to one cause: technical assistance in public administration abroad. Ten of these years were spent in Southeast and South Asia, equally divided between Indonesia and Pakistan, and three years were spent in Los Angeles serving as the academic advisor to the University of Southern California Pakistan project. Since November 1956, my life has been almost completely absorbed in reforming or building public administration systems in Asian cultures-and I mean absorbed. During my last tour abroad, six weeks short of five years, I spent only two weeks in the United States and only six weeks away from Pakistan. My professional perspective of foreign aid is solely field oriented. My knowledge of Washington operations remains largely confined to memoranda, periodic meetings with headquarters personnel in the field, short and hurried debriefings in Washington, and scholarly works. Washington operations in my mind represent a rather confused, and I guess, distorted picture. I have never spent enough time in Washington to understand the real "bureaucracy" if that is ever possible.
With my return to the United States in September 1969, I felt for the first time in my professional life that I was a "Dodo." Was I professionally obsolete in my chosen vocational field of foreign aid? My thinking on the subject appeared certainly out of keeping with the current trends as I "felt" and "saw" them in the field.
Few persons - practitioners and scholars alike - question the prerequisite of a reliable public administration system for mounting a successful, planned development program. Beyond this, little can be written. Technical assistance in public administration the world over is yearly being given less importance in planned development programs. I do not believe that this decline necessarily indicates that the mission of technical assistance has been successfully accomplished, but rather that those of us who have a vested interest in public administration technical assistance have not been able to convince those who exercise "real bureaucratic" power that we have a valid body of knowledge which is useful in the development process."

As a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV) I could relate to someone on the ground in Asia thinking that those in Washington DC (the headquarters in Bangkok, even) didn't have an understanding of things 'on the ground' upcountry.

This slightly renegade outsider perspective also tied us together.

There's lots of posts worth of Garth stories, but let me just note a few more issues:

Donations - Garth amassed a enough money, that he was regularly setting up scholarships for students, research awards, and donations to academic programs he thought were doing important things.  

Marie - No post about Garth would be complete with mention of his wife Marie.  She was a force of nature and a fearless promoter and protector of Garth.  If you were on her good side, your life was made easier.  If you were on her bad side, watch out.  She also fiercely watched out for their children as did Garth.

Racquet ball - Garth was winning racquet ball games with much younger opponents well into his 60s.  He didn't run around much on the court, but he would regularly put the ball in the farthest corner from you, or he'd hit so it died and rolled on the ground after barely touching the front wall.

Mormon Rebel - Garth wrote regularly for a Mormon journal called Dialogue. The link goes to an issue with an article by Garth.   It's a journal on the fringes of the faith, enough so that its editor at one point got excommunicated.  While Garth was regularly meeting with local Mormons giving counsel and help as needed, and considered himself a devoted Mormon, he didn't necessarily agree with all their policies.  I remember him talking about birth control and the problems he saw with large families, where children ended up raising their brothers and sisters because there were too many for the parents to give close attention to them all.  His support and contributions to the Dialogue were one way he expressed this.

The world has lost a truly unique person, full of contradictions, who spent his whole life working to make the world a better place.  I can hear his chortle like laugh as I write this.  The closest I ever heard him come to swearing was his regular exclamation - "What in Sam Hill!!" - though Hill usually sounded like it had an 'e' in it.

In Case Anyone Doesn't Appreciate What A Medical Giant Dr. Anthony Fauci Is . . .

Fauci, image from NIH

Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases testified before the House Oversight and Reform Committee today.  He said a few things that directly contradict the President

• that the death rate from COVID-19 is ten times that of the flu.  
• that it's going to get much worse before it gets better.  

This is the guy who oversaw the fight against AIDS.

People who are just hearing his name for the first time, might think he's just another faceless bureaucratic swamp dweller.

If so, you are wrong.  Really wrong.   This guy is about the best we could have fighting COVID-19.  Not only does he know the epidemiology, he also knows how to make the bureaucracy work.  

But since contradicting this president publicly isn't good for one's job in the government, people need to let your Senators know that you support Fauci over Trump on how to handle the virus.

If Trump retaliates against Fauci, it would be like the Vatican condemning Galileo.

Here's part of his bio listed at National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases:

"Dr. Fauci has advised six presidents on HIV/AIDS and many other domestic and global health issues. He was one of the principal architects of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a program that has saved millions of lives throughout the developing world.
Dr. Fauci also is the longtime chief of the Laboratory of Immunoregulation. He has made many contributions to basic and clinical research on the pathogenesis and treatment of immune-mediated and infectious diseases. He helped pioneer the field of human immunoregulation by making important basic scientific observations that underpin the current understanding of the regulation of the human immune response. In addition, Dr. Fauci is widely recognized for delineating the precise ways that immunosuppressive agents modulate the human immune response. He developed effective therapies for formerly fatal inflammatory and immune-mediated diseases such as polyarteritis nodosa, granulomatosis with polyangiitis (formerly Wegener's granulomatosis), and lymphomatoid granulomatosis. A 1985 Stanford University Arthritis Center Survey of the American Rheumatism Association membership ranked Dr. Fauci’s work on the treatment of polyarteritis nodosa and granulomatosis with polyangiitis among the most important advances in patient management in rheumatology over the previous 20 years.
Dr. Fauci has made seminal contributions to the understanding of how HIV destroys the body's defenses leading to its susceptibility to deadly infections. Further, he has been instrumental in developing treatments that enable people with HIV to live long and active lives. He continues to devote much of his research to the immunopathogenic mechanisms of HIV infection and the scope of the body's immune responses to HIV.
In a 2019 analysis of Google Scholar citations, Dr. Fauci ranked as the 41st most highly cited researcher of all time. According to the Web of Science, he ranked 8th out of more than 2.2 million authors in the field of immunology by total citation count between 1980 and January 2019.​"

I probably should copy the whole bio just in case it doesn't stay up on this site.  

Stephen Miller - Trump's Fanatic Racist Aide

I thought I had put up a post on Stephen Miller long ago, but I couldn't find it.  Eventually, I looked in my drafts - started posts I never posted and there was one just after Trump's inauguration that offered links to background on Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Roger Stone.  I eventually covered Stone in one post, and Bannon.

The link on that page for Miller looked at his high school days and beyond.  He was clearly troubled already then.

I was reminded of that by this new piece from the New Yorker which looks at how he leads the extreme and cruel immigration policies.

"One participant in the November meeting pointed out that El Salvador didn’t have a functioning asylum system. “They don’t need a system,” Miller interrupted. He began speaking over people, asking questions, then cutting off the answers.
As the meeting ended, Miller held up his hand to make a final comment. “I didn’t mean to come across as harsh,” he said. His voice dropped. “It’s just that this is all I care about. I don’t have a family. I don’t have anything else. This is my life.”
Miller, who is thirty-four, with thinning hair and a sharp, narrow face, is an anomaly in Washington: an adviser with total authority over a single issue that has come to define an entire Administration. “We have never had a President who ran, and won, on immigration,” Muzaffar Chishti, of the Migration Policy Institute, told me. “And he’s kept his promise on immigration.” Miller, who was a speechwriter during the campaign, is now Trump’s longest-serving senior aide. He is also an Internet meme, a public scourge, and a catch-all symbol of the racism and malice of the current government. In a cast of exceptionally polarizing officials, he has embraced the role of archvillain."

"He asked to head the Domestic Policy Council, an influential but amorphous group inside the White House. The position gave him proximity to the President and insulation from congressional scrutiny; he would issue, rather than implement, orders. “The rest of us have to testify before Congress. That’s a check. If you’re going to have your ass hauled before Congress, you’re not going to feel comfortable breaking the law,” a former top Administration official told me. 'Miller will never have to testify for anything.'”

"In the days leading up to Trump’s Inauguration, Miller and a close associate named Gene Hamilton, another former Sessions staffer in his mid-thirties, drafted an executive order called “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States”—the travel ban.
When Trump signed it, none of the top officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which was in charge of enforcing the ban, had been notified in advance. Travellers with valid visas were suddenly trapped at American airports, unable to enter the country; refugees who, after years of waiting, had been vetted and approved for entry were turned back. Thousands of protesters and civil-rights attorneys began congregating at airports across the country, and Senators Graham and McCain issued a statement saying that “we should not turn our backs on those refugees who . . . pose no demonstrable threat to our nation, and who have suffered unspeakable horrors.” Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law and senior adviser, was enraged. The next day, when the President’s senior staff assembled in the Situation Room, Miller told John Kelly, the head of D.H.S.; Tom Bossert, the President’s homeland-security adviser; and officials from the State Department, “This is the new world order. You need to get on board,” according to an account in “Border Wars,” by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear."

While many of Trump's appointees have either seen themselves as people who could hold Trump back, or people just happy to be able to put their Trump service on their resumes, Miller is one who clearly has Trump's ear and pushes Trump towards his worst decisions on immigration.    

Paywalls And Sharing Good Articles - Immigration Activists, Tribal Contracting, War Is Hell, Flawed Humans,Why Trump Won't Win

Some thoughts raised by things I've recently read.  But first a note on paywalls.

I understand that newspapers want online readers to spend some money for the privilege of reading.  Newspapers are struggling to stay alive.  Many have not survived.

Early on - maybe ten years or more ago - there was a proposal for newspapers to have a collective fee, so that people didn't have to pay every time they visited an online newspaper.  You could buy a pass for a group of them and they could figure out how to divide the money based on hits from subscribers.  That doesn't seem to have happened.  I have an online subscription to the LA Times and the Anchorage Daily News.  I rarely read anything any more in the NY Times or the Washington Post.

This is problematic particularly for journalists and researchers who need to look at lots of things.  This was noted on Recall Elections Blog as a problem in tracking the various recalls around the country.

I say all this because a number of links here go to the LA Times and many of you may not be able to get direct access to the articles.  I'd note you can probably get there via your public library or find a reprint somewhere online.  Try different browsers, try private browsing, remove media cookies from your computer.


Immigration - LATimes article on Washington State activists making it harder for ICE - King County banned flights taking immigrants out of the state, so they have to go to Yakima, where protestors show up for flights.

What is happening on this front in Alaska?  Could Anchorage ban the use of our airport for these activities?


Tribal Membership And Minority Contracts - Giving federal contracts to businesses that claim Native American tribal status that is recognized by the state (Alabama in the article) but not by the feds.  Only 5% of federal contracts are set aside for minority/women owned businesses, but it's a lot of money.

Article says nearly $1billion has gone to Alabama companies with dubious claims to Native heritage.

Alaska Native corporations have done well with these contracts.  However, I would like to see more investigation on the structure of some of these.  Are they simply ways for larger white owned companies to buy Native participation so they can get the contracts?


When War is Hell In Movies

Lots of war movies are patriotic calls to support the current war.  But an LA Times article on the new film 1917 notes:

"WWII films tend to be stories of victory, BUT WWI movies SHOW the horrors OF A SEEMINGLY SENSELESS FIGHT."

Their list of notable realistic WWI movies turns out to include nearly all non-Hollywood films.  Would the misery of actual warfare on screen discourage potential enlistees?  Probably not those 17 and 18 year olds who are desperate to get out of the house and out of school and be heroes.

Or maybe all 17 year old boys should get school assignments to visit vets with various long term war related illnesses to find out what war does and what the Department of Veterans Affairs doesn't do to help.


Flawed Humans

Queen and Slim writer Lena Waithe, again in the LA Times, writes about how she got the idea and then wrote the film.  This sentence struck me:

"And, ultimately, my deep love and admiration for these two very flawed and extremely human characters never failed to pull me through. And I think it’s because for me Queen and Slim aren’t just characters in a movie, they’re two fictitious people that represent all of us."

One of the tropes that dominate how we see the world is the notion of right and wrong.  The American justice system is based on finding out whether someone is guilty or not guilty.  The Republican response to the impeachment of Trump has been to point out other people as guilty - most notably Hunter Biden, but many others as well.
But this quote adds nuance to the idea.  These two people have killed a cop in self defense.  But being black, the fear they won't be believed.  So now they actually break the law by fleeing.  And presumably, as the movie progressive, we learn more about their flaws.  We all have flaws.  We're all guilty of something.  Christianity has based a whole religion on that notion.  

This quote reminds us that even though they are flawed, they need to be judged by their actions, not their flaws.  It also reminds me that privilege (whether it's white privilege or any other privilege) means that you're more likely to be forgiven for your flaws.  We know, for instance, that young people of color are more likely to be sent to a detention center than white kids.  It's the difference between 'kids will be kids' so call their parents to pick them up, and assuming they're just no good.


Why Trump Won't Win Reelection

Here's a prediction based on voting patterns.

"Of course 2016 showed that we need to look beyond the national polls and focus on the swing states. But there too the news is encouraging. In Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, since Trump took office, his net approval ratings, which started out on the plus side, have fallen — disastrously.
In Pennsylvania they decreased by 17 points, in Wisconsin by 20 points, in Michigan by 22 points. In the midterm voting, those three swing states all elected Democrats in 2018. Wisconsin elected a Democratic governor to replace a Republican and reelected a Democratic senator; Pennsylvania reelected a Democratic governor, and Democrats there took three House seats away from Republican incumbents.
In Michigan, which the Democrats lost to Trump by 11,000 votes, the Democrats had a huge victory in 2018, sweeping the elections for governor and senator and flipping two House seats. Voters also banned gerrymandering and created automatic voter registration, which together will bear fruit in 2020. All this explains why I’m quite certain we’ll be free at last from Donald Trump on Jan. 20, 2021."

But the author acknowledges he also wrote about why Trump couldn't win in 2016.  I'm convinced in a free and fair vote, Trump will lose.  But with voter suppression, voter disinformation campaigns, and potential cyber attacks on voting machines  I'm less confident.

El Sueño Americano

The only word in the title that might give non-Spanish speakers any difficulty is Sueño, and the poster on the left should clear that up.

This post is based on an exhibit at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.  We went because they have an excellent children's space called Noah's Ark which I've posted about before.

There was enough for four or five posts, and given I still have grandchildren around, I'm just going to focus on one and try to get this done quickly.

Here's the artist's statement.  I saved it in higher than normal resolution in hopes you could read it.

Let me highlight this paragraph:

"These confiscations struck me as wrong.  The cruelty of stripping away such personal items from vulnerable people is dehumanizing, both to those whose belongings are taken and to those who enforce the policy."

Combs and Brushes

A few things here:

• The artist, Tom Kiefer,  started this in 2007, during the 2nd Bush administration, so dehumanizing immigrants isn't something that began under Trump.
• As someone who worked at a US Border Control Facility, he noted that it dehumanized the officials who enforced these policies as well as the victims.

And people are leaving ICE.  From the Los Angeles Times in January 2019:

"In March 2017, McAleenan said Customs and Border Protection normally loses about 1,380 agents a year as agents retire, quit for better-paying jobs or move. Just filling that hole each year has strained resources."

This is from an article that is focused on recruitment:

"In a sign of the difficulties, Customs and Border Protection allocated $60.7 million to Accenture Federal Services, a management consulting firm, as part of a $297-million contract to recruit, vet and hire 7,500 border officers over five years, but the company has produced only 33 new hires so far. " [Emphasis Added]

Some Items Confiscated

A large percentage of ICE agents are Latinx according to this Pacific Standard article by Khushbu Shah.  He reports on the 100 interviews by Assistant Professor David Cortez who examined the relationships these officers have with their jobs and why do their jobs.

"Cortez has found that many of the agents he spoke with drew a distinct line between their empathy and their careers. A Latino agent in Texas recently told Cortez he is aware that he might be on the wrong side of history, but the money was too good to quit. The cities where many of the agents come from in the Rio Grande Valley are some of the poorest in the state of Texas, a state in which nearly one in five people lives below the poverty line. The starting salary, in turn, under Customs and Border Protection is nearly $56,000, well above the region's median household income of $34,000."

This is the inscription plate from a bible with notes on travel through the desert and other dates and notes.

Gloves

These are pain tablets.


It's important to remember that the oppressor is dehumanized as much as the oppressed.
And to connect a few more dots, the breaking of unions has allowed the lowering of salaries for many jobs as well as the loss of health benefits and pensions.  And these conditions make it easier to recruit people into the military and other sorts of occupations where people are dehumanized.

And today is nearly the end of 2019 and we're just seeing these images, which began in 2007, now, 12 years later.  Justice takes so much longer than the original acts of abuse and criminality.  

NO, NO, NO - They're Using Vaclav Havel To Sell Guns

Here's the email I got yesterday:

Hey Steve,
Vaclav Havel isn’t just the one man perhaps most personally responsible for bringing down Communism -- he was also cool and with a compelling personal story.
I noticed on your website that you’ve talked about Vaclav Havel in the past, http://whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/2009/07/open-letter-to-obama-from-central-and.html so I assume you’re still interested in the topic, and what better time to re-address his life than the day the Berlin Wall fell -- November 9, 1989.
We recently published Vaclav Havel: The Forgotten History of the Political Dissident Who Founded the Czech Republic which chronicles the life of one of the men who did tireless and often dangerous work to tear down Communism.
When you get a minute do you think you could give it a look-see and let us know how we could make it better?
https://ammo.com/articles/vaclav-havel-forgotten-history-founder-czech-republic-political-dissident
Stay free,
- Alex Horsman

My post that Alex links to just mentions Havel as part of a long list of Central and Eastern European statesmen asking the President Obama not to forget them because there are other pressing issues like Iraq and Afghanistan. Another post focuses much more on his ideas.  Havel's resistance was much more sophisticated than guns.  He developed theoretical models of how authoritarianism worked, so that people could find ways to fight it - not by shooting at it, but by taking it apart.  Using Havel to sell guns is like using the Joker to raise funds to help hungry refugee children.  Bizarre.

I realize SEO (Search Engine Optimization) folks spend their time trying to get links to their material.  I get comments daily from people in places like India, Vietnam, Ghana, who write glowing praise of a post  in slightly odd English that has some vague connection to a subject in a link they leave. The most persistent topic lately is on my posts that mention vampires, telling people how to become a vampire.

But this one is a little different.  It was an email.  I've gotten things like this before, often asking me to let them do a guest post on my blog.  But this is just asking me for a comment.  So I checked out the article.  What struck me first was that this is a site that sells weapons and ammunition!

That's why I left the url, for the really curious, but didn't put in a link.

The article is about Vaclav Havel and starts:

"Our historical unsung heroes are generally impressive figures. But there are very few one might accurately call “cool.” This is an exception. Václav Havel, the founder of the modern-day Czech Republic (also known as Czechia) is undoubtedly cool by any definition of the word. A political dissident under the Soviet-backed regime, he served hard time in Communist prisons rather than bend the knee to their authority. His moral courage acted as a beacon of hope for the entire resistance movement behind the Iron Curtain."

I never thought of Havel as a hero for the gun set, but reading that paragraph, I can see it.  But, of course, Havel was an intellectual, a playwright, not a gun packing survivalist.  But here he's being repackaged for the rabid right, who would take up arms to overthrow the coming.  From the Atlantic:

"Havel's revolutionary message -- which helped oust the world's second strongest power from his country, but which Americans and in that moment the American Congress have not always been ready to hear -- is that peace does not come by defeating enemies, it comes by making people free, governments democratic, and societies just. "The idea of human rights and freedoms must be an integral part of any meaningful world order. Yet, I think it must be anchored in a different place, and in a different way, than has been the case so far. If it is to be more than just a slogan mocked by half the world, it cannot be expressed in the language of a departing era, and it must not be mere froth floating on the subsiding waters of faith in a purely scientific relationship to the world," he said in a 1994 speech."

But as I read the gun seller's post on Havel, it's relatively accurate.  It talks about his upper class background and his literary career.  It does seem wrong to me, even like appropriation, for a gun seller to use Havel to sell guns and ammo.  And Havel is only one of a nine other "Unsung Heroes" in their Resistance Library.  Others:

• S.B. Fuller: The Forgotten History of a Legendary Black American Entrepreneur
• Annie Oakley: The Forgotten History of the Most Iconic American Woman Sharpshooter
• Edward Snowden: The Untold Story of How One Patriotic American Exposed NSA Surveillance
• Sam Colt: The Forgotten History of America's Legendary Firearms Inventor and Manufacturer
• Davy Crockett: The Forgotten History of the King of the Wild Frontier & the Battle of the Alamo
• Susan B. Anthony: The Forgotten History of the Woman Who Inspired the 19th Amendment
• Milton Friedman: The Forgotten History of the Godfather of Conservative Libertarianism
• Vaclav Havel: The Forgotten History of the Political Dissident Who Founded the Czech Republic
• Charlton Heston: The Forgotten History of America's Favorite Actor and Gun Rights Advocate

Not sure how many of these could be considered "Unsung" heroes.  Havel is pretty sung.  So is Davy Crockett and Susan B. Anthony.  How would Snowden feel if he knew he was being used to sell guns?  I guess he'd say his name had been used in worse ways.  I get Annie Oakley, Sam Colt, Davy Crockett, and Charlton Heston.  They all have connections with guns.

And I guess it's legitimate counting the others as freedom fighters.  But is putting them here simply recognizing them as heroes of freedom or is it a way to coop them and their legacy to promote guns and in the fight against any form of gun control?

I've long believed that if you go far enough to the right and far enough to the left, there is a lot of overlap and anti-authority similarity.  But the anti-government wing of the Republicans tends to be more for a libertarian individual's freedom to do whatever he wants, while on the left it's for more to get the government to respect the rights of everyone, not just the individual protesting.

Maybe that's my biased view.  Or maybe there's ground here for the left and right to discuss some common ground.  I don't know.  My gut reacts strongly to Vaclav Havel being used to sell guns, which is ultimately what this website is about.

A Chilean Student's View Of Chile's Current Upheaval

This a follow up to yesterday's post on Chile's protests and government response.  It's based on a Skype chat with Sebastían, my college student friend in Santiago.  He was the catalyst for yesterday's post.  I'll use some images of the Skype chat to give a sense of this 'interview' but I've abbreviated it somewhat to cut out repetition and side conversations. I've made the images as big as I think I can fit them here.  You may have to work a bit to read them, but the visual of the chat seemed to capture our chat better than just the words.

I began by letting him know I'd posted about our previous chat (he'd said it was ok),  about the protests, whether he had any comments, (he did) and  by asking how he got to school today if the subway stations were damaged.

[Note:  OCDE - mentioned below- is Spanish initials for OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ]

Let's look at that picture of crowd for a subway train in Santiago at peak time a little larger.  

Also, some clarification - "minimum salary is 300,000 clp (Chilean pesos).  300,000 clp would be (today) $413. That's per month.  Here's a chart from wage indicator.org that shows 300,000 clp is below what a single person needs to live.  

Data for Chile Sept. 2019 - From wage indicator.org

Let's catch up a bit. First he sent me to an instagram that shows Chile's current president Pinera saying "Estamos en guerra" or "We are at war." Then it shows president Pinochet saying almost the exact same words 30 years ago. [I couldn't figure out how to get the GIF from Instagram to here (this is just a screenshot, but if you click on the image below, it will take you to the GIF.]




And an Instagram response:

(We are not at war)

Then he sent me to this video on Twitter, shot from a window above, of police or military, who could be snorting coke.  Or not.  You can judge for yourself.

PACOS JALANDO! pic.twitter.com/lByZsJcXo8

— gonzalosoyyo 👑 (@gonzalosoyyo) October 20, 2019

And this video Esto pasa en Chile - This is happening in Chile.  It begins with the president saying we are in war.  Then it has shots of the police attacking citizens.  Some particularly troubling ones include police cars intentionally running over people fleeing.

 

There is so much conflict around the world now:

• Hong Kong 
• Kurds in Syria
• The British are in knots over Brexit
• Venezuela 
• Yeman 
• Refugees in camps around the world
• US president facing impeachment

It's easy to not pay attention to what's happening in Chile.  But one of the Instagram sites Sebastían sent me to had this message:

"Friends of the world TV is not going to show this, help us to make visible. THE POLICE AND THE MILITARY ARE KILLING PEOPLE!"

Which included this:

"KNOW THAT IN CHILE TODAY, OCTOBER 2019 THE PEOPLE TIRED AND THE PIÑERA GOVERNMENT IS REPRESSING IT WITH DEATH, THE SAME AS IN THE PINOCHET DICTATORSHIP.."
[Translations from Google Translate.  Overall it's a messy translation so that's all I'll offer.]

Here's the Spanish from the Instagram, but I can't seem to get the link right on my Mac - it works on my phone.

que nosotrxs no lo vivimos, nosotrxs lo estamos viviendo. Amigxs del mundo la tv no va a mostrar esto, ayudenos a visibilizar. LA POLICÍA Y LOS MILITARES ESTÁN MATANDO GENTE! DESPUÉS DE UNA SEMANA DE MANIFESTACIONES DETONADAS POR EL ALZA EN EL TRANSPORTE PÚBLICO, QUE INVOLUCRARON LA EVASIÓN EN EL PAGO DEL MISMO, INFILTRADOS EN LAS MANIFESTACIONES COMIENZAN A REALIZAR MONTAJES TANTO DE INCENDIOS, BARRICADAS COMO DE SAQUEOS, PARA ASÍ EL INCOMPETENTE QUE TENEMOS POR PRESIDENTE, TENER EXCUSAS PARA DECLARAR UN TOQUE DE QUEDA Y SACAR A LOS MILITARES A LA CALLE VELANDO POR "EL ORDEN PÚBLICO" QUE SUS MISMOS PERKINES HAN DESTRUIDO EN BASE A MONTAJES. HOY ES EL 3ER DÍA Y YA HAY FALLECIDOS Y GENTE DESAPARECIDA. QUE SE SEPA QUE EN CHILE HOY, OCTUBRE DE 2019 EL PUEBLO SE CANSÓ Y EL GOBIERNO DE PIÑERA ESTÁ REPRIMIENDOLO CON MUERTE, IGUAL QUE EN LA DICTADURA DE PINOCHET. .HERMANX QUE ESTÁS AQUÍ SI TE TOMAN #DITUNOMBRE GRITALO! Y QUE APAREZCAN TODXS LXS QUE HOY NO ESTÁN! ..NO QUEREMOS MÁS MUERTES NI MÁS DESAPARECIDXS. NO QUEREMOS TU MIERDA DE DOCTRINA DE SHOCK!!! FOTO: CONCEPCIÓN @afpphoto

A Man Called Ove Didn't Impress Me

I'm finishing up A Man Called Ove, a Swedish book that has apparently been pretty popular.  There's even a movie I'm told.  It's for my book club.  I wasn't overwhelmed.  I don't think I've

gotten any great insights.  The writing isn't particularly interesting - short sentences and short words. Sort of like an adult children's book.   It does help people to understand (for those who don't) that inside gruff, introverted, rule following nitpickers (at least inside Ove) there's a decent person whose back story makes his behavior less objectionable.

I guess I also realized that I had a stereotype of Swedes being more rational and polite than the people of most other countries.  If this book is representative, I was wrong about that.

Here's a bit on death and judging from near the very end.

Chapter 39 begins

"Death is a strange thing.  People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it's often one of the great motivations for living.  Some of us, in time, become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury.  Some need its constant presence to even be aware of its antithesis.  Others become so preoccupied with it that they go into the waiting room long before it has announced its arrival.  We fear it, yet most of us fear more than anything that it may take someone other than ourselves.  For the greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by.  And leave us there alone.
People always said that Ove was "bitter."  But he wasn't bloody bitter.  He just didn't go around grinning the whole time.  Did that mean one had to be treated like a criminal?  Ove hardly thought so.  Something inside a man goes to pieces when he has to bury the only person who ever understood him.  There is no time to heal that sort of wound."

[UPDATE Sept 10, 2019:  I found a NYT review that focused on the author.  Fredrik Backman does say that he is somewhat the model for Ove.

"A colleague . . . wrote a bog post . . .about seeing a man named Ove explode with rage while buying tickets at an art museum, until his wife intervened.
"My wife read the blog post and said, "This is what life is like with you,"  Mr. Backman said, 'I'm not very socially competent.  I'm not great at talking to people.  My wife tends to say, your volume is always at 1 or 11, never in between." 

So that makes a lot of sense, and I guess it means that there are lots of women out there married to Oves.  I'd guess the Sonjas (Ove's wife in the book) recognize this much faster than the Oves.]

The US Department of Compassion Announced A Growing Shortage Of Thoughts And Prayers

That was my reaction to the Odessa shooting.  The rest of this is me thinking out loud while my nieta* is off with her mom for a bit.

But I've also been thinking about what we're going to need globally as climate change forces people out of their traditional homes through floods, droughts, disease bearing mosquitos and other critters expanding their range.  Normal crops in areas will fail as conditions change.  Refugees will be on the move for more hospital climates.  Well, for food and water and relief.

That's already happening in places.  Alaska native villages are being forced to move from their coastal locations because heavy waves are eroding the shoreline.  The waves are there because normally sea ice prevents the formation of waves most of the year.  No longer.

The Syrian civil war was caused in part by a years long drought that led farmers to move to the cities.  That led to many refugees trying to get to safe countries.  That's a taste of the future.

Even those who profess to not believe climate change is real talk about mitigation rather than prevention.  They think that we should take steps to adapt.  Yes, of course.  Where we can.  Are you listening South Pacific nations?  Are you listening  South Florida?  I guess people in Manhattan can make the third floor of buildings the new entrances and work with Venetians on gondolas.

Of course, there will need to be technical fixes.  People are creating floating cities in the South Pacific for nations that will be underwater soon.

But one thing I haven't heard people talk about is lessons in civilization and community.  There are organizations working with indigenous peoples around the world to help sustain their languages and cultures.  Others working with poor farmers and others.  But their stories don't generate clicks for new media they way violence and fear-mongering do.  But we do hear after many disasters that communities pull together and help each other.  After fires, floods, mass shootings, there are outpourings of volunteers and of money to help the victims.  But what happens when everyone is the victim?

Tapping Into People's Natural Goodness

We need to learn how to tap into that love we see in times of crisis. The love parents have for their children.  The camaraderie we're told soldiers feel during war.  What is that and how do we grow it? We need to study it and find out how it works, who does it, and how to nurture those kinds of reactions in the hearts and minds of everyone.  What is the difference between those who come after disasters to loot and those who come to help?

Disaster movies are a very popular genre, but how many teach people community survival behaviors?  (That's a sincere question, because those aren't my top choice of entertainment.)

We have a Department of Defense (which should more truthfully be called the Department of War as it once was.)  And we also need a Department of Compassion, or, if you prefer, a Department of Peace.  Humans are capable of both good and bad.  Under the right conditions - child rearing, schooling, national values, and role models - more people will be peaceful, caring, and happy.  Under the wrong conditions, more divided and violent.

This week research was announced that attempted to find a homosexual gene.  It's more complicated than that.  Genetic disposition for sexuality, they say, is all over the genome, and environment plays a role as well.  I suspect the same is true for sainthood as well as sociopathy.

The Netflix series Mindhunter, which added new episodes recently, follows two FBI agents, helped by a university professor, who decide that interviewing imprisoned serial killers to find out why they do what they do.  That start out doing this secretly and are chastised when they're found out.  But they already have enough insights for catching other serial killers that the Bureau lets them continue.  In a basement office.  The most persuasive argument is something like "who knows why serial killers do what they do better than serial killers?"

We should be doing the same thing with mass shooters (and I'm sure there are people who are already doing this.)(I looked.  Didn't find much, but here's a 2018 article about a project tthat was going to start interviewing mass shooters.)  (And here's Dr. Jillian Peterson, the head of that study doing a Ted Talk May 2019.)

And I suspect they will find out the same thing that the Mindhunters learned (this is based on a true story):  that they all had serious self image problems due to absent and/or abusive parents.

This trail leads to lots of different areas - rights of parents, education of parents, birth control, abortion, foster care issues . .  just as starters.  The Department of Compassion - as I write this I realize we need both the Departments of Compassion and Peace - one more on the individual scale and one on the national scale.  But they overlap, because ultimately, 'nations' don't make war, the individual people in control of the military make war.

That sentence took an abrupt turn and never got finished.  The Department of Compassion would work on all these micro and macro environmental factors that impact how kids learn to feel good about themselves and how they learn to work with and for others instead of against them.

That's enough for today.  Remember that every human you encounter is, surprise, a human, with a whole history trailing them.  And a mind, and feelings, and a sense of self.  Imagine what that person doesn't know about you, and there's just as much you don't know about them.  Try to connect to all those people in a way that makes them feel better for having interacted with you.  Just a genuine smile as you pass someone on the street.  And I guarantee you'll discover the people around you have rich and interesting lives that will make you feel better too.  99.9% of the people you pass are NOT people you need to fear.  (I just made up that number.  I don't know if it's true.  I suspect it's definitely not if you are a person of color or a woman.  But even the people who might do someone harm, probably won't do harm most of the time or to most of the people they encounter.)


Glossary
*nieta is Spanish for granddaughter