In Argentina, There Was A Love That People Showed For Each Other

I don't have pictures, because these moments came when I didn't have my camera out, and because I'm hesitant to intrude in intimate moments, but let me give you several examples of the caring I saw among people in Argentina.

1.  People greet each other with hugs that include cheek to cheek contact

I don't know the rules of who hugs who like this.  Certainly family members, but also work colleagues, friends, and even we received this treatment from people.  This contact is male-female, female-female, and male-male.  I think this - I want to say intimacy, but maybe it's because my US cultural perspective sees it that way - physical contact breaks down barriers that handshakes can't.


2.  I saw lots of fathers really enjoying being with their young children

Men would have their kids on their shoulders, or mock battle with them, men would become little kids themselves in their play with their children.  And there was an obvious love that sparkled in the eyes of parent and child and showed in the natural smiles they shared.  I'm not saying there aren't cold fathers in Argentina, just that I saw a lot more pure love showing than I see in the US.

3.  Mate bonding

I've mentioned mate in a few posts already.  It's a kind of tea that Argentines (Uruguayans and Chileans) drink from small gourd cups through metal straws. I guess gourds were the original cups, but they also use ceramic cups.  Everywhere you see people with their mate cups and a small thermos to replenish the hot water.

Bus drivers, people walking down the street, teachers, everybody drinks mate and it's a ritual.  People don't toss their mate cups the way Americans toss their latte cups.
But I'm talking about mate again here because people share their mate.  They share their metal mate straws.  The only thing like it I can think of in the US would be people sharing a joint.  

     Here's the bus driver on one of our tours adding hot water to his mate.













And here he's sharing his mate with the guide.

  

4.  Airplane Safety Video

Aerolíneas had an animated safety video - all the stuff about seat belts, oxygen masks, that we see or hear every time a flight is about to take off.  What made this animation different was that when the mother put the child's oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, the mother lovingly and ever so fleetingly (and unconsciously) she strokes the child's cheek.  And when the mother is shown helping the child get on his life rest, again, she reassuringly tousles his hair.

I've never seen anything like that in an airline safety message before.  And while there are commercials that show that sort of thing, I don't think I've ever seen one as natural as this.  I could be wrong, but I felt like the artist just put the love into the animation and no one objected.  Though it's quite possible they spent hours debating this.  But for me, the outcome was one more example of a human bonding that I saw lots of in Argentina.  (We weren't in Chile or Brazil long enough to make such observations.)


OK, that's it.  In this time of great interpersonal nastiness unleashed by the US president, I thought it important to shine a little lot of these acts of love.  I have no illusions that Argentinians aren't capable of evil - they demonstrated that in the 70s and 80s.  But these moments of caring did catch my attention.

Puerto Rico Got Rid Of Its Governor. Alaska, Now It's Our Turn

Puerto Ricans got 25,000 people out in the streets to protest their governor and after about a week he's announced his resignation.

Alaska's governor, apparently taking orders from his Outside handlers, is poised to destroy Alaska as we know it.  As I've written before, the only explanation that makes sense to me is that the Koch brothers want to defund government so that there are no obstacles for Outside corporations to plunder Alaska's resources.  No university scientists to challenge their reports, no government regulators to monitor their activities, no public processes to hinder their profits.  And, based on what happened at the Dunleavy chaired hearings a few years ago on Erin's Law, he personally would like to weaken public schools to the point that people either home school or demand vouchers for private schools, including religious schools.

Our university's Board of Regents has already declared financial exigency because of the budget cuts, and Anchorage's Mayor has declared Civil Emergency because of the impact of cuts on health and safety.

Puerto Rico's population is around 3 million. (Google searches give a variety of numbers, many estimates based on the 2010 census data, plus an AP report from April saying the population has dropped 4% since Hurricane Maria.  So, for my purposes here, 3 million is close enough.)

25,000  is .8% of Puerto Rico's population.  Yes, less than 1%.

Alaska's population was 736,239 in 2018 according to the State Department of Labor.  So, if we go for 1% of our population, that would be 7369.  7000 is a good round number.

So, if all the groups that are working to overturn the Governor's draconian (yes, that term has been used in the past, but this time it's not metaphorical) can get together and we can get 7000 people to rally around the Atwood Building - 550 W 7th Ave - where the governor's Anchorage office is, for a week, maybe we can get the kind of attention Puerto Rico has gotten.  I don't think we can persuade Dunleavy to resign.  He's not paying attention to Alaskans.  But maybe we can get some more momentum for overriding his vetoes and/or impeachment.

Is this an achievable number?  It's a tiny fraction of our population, but when that many people take to the streets, as Puerto Rico has shown, people pay attention.  We don't need the same 7000 people every day.  And if smaller rallies appear in other towns and villages, the world would notice.

Large rallies should be in addition to all the other pressures being put on our politicians to save Alaska form this impending calamity.

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.         

      

Eclipse Was Transcendental

After the eclipse my body felt like it had been through a terrific yoga session, or meditation, or a long massage.  There was a feeling inside that all was well.  But our host wanted to beat the traffic back so I had to nurse the feeling in the car.   We were in a beautiful desert setting.  Cars scattered here and there along the road with people enjoying the event.

Not nearly as much time for blogging as I need, so here are a few pictures.  Hope I can get more up eventually. (Note:  I decided not to try to compete with those with the equipment and know-how to take pictures of the eclipse itself.  Concentrated more on the event.  You’ve all seen better moon blocking the sun pics than I could offer.).

  

Here’s where we parked.  I took lots of pics of this scene during the eclipse, hoping to show the change in light.  But actually, the sun is reallllllly bright and even with the moon covering more than half, there isn’t much change.  It wasn’t til the very end that it got much darker.  And those pics are blurred because the time the camera took.  I’ll try to show that sequence later.

People just after the eclipse.

J and O with their eclipse glasses.  The glasses make it possible to actually see the moon covering the sun.  Otherwise it is just too bright to see anything - besides they say you’ll damage your eyes without them.  The glasses essentially turn everything black, but the small disk of the sun.

A split second after totality.  (I’m assuming that, because it’s still got a sense of the dark disappearing.)

As we’re driving back, people still out in their viewing spots.

The long line of cars driving back.  There were police standing along the side of the road now and then.  But everything seemed pretty orderly.  Three hours later when we walked over for dinner, there was still a line of cars returning in the dark.

Hotel Bohemia, Mendoza, Argentina

The travel agent in Buenos Aires put us into this hotel.  We lucked out.  It’s an old family house in what our driver from the airport called  a good residential neighborhood.  The owner (I’m assuming he’s the owner), Alberto, is the kind of person who seems to make everyone feel like they are his special friend.  That first night he showed us that he was cutting the seeds out of grapes before

making grape jelly.  He was also making orange marmalade for the guests’ breakfast.  He also bakes the breads and croissants.


Here, you can see the grapes, the grapes that have already been pitted, and the pits.  We spread it on our breakfast bread the next morning.

And below is the dining room where each of the ten rooms has a designated table.

I’m putting up this post because it’s relatively short and I need to go to bed.  But also because this is a great little hotel with incredible service for each guest.  But that still leaves the winery tour yesterday (two wineries and an olive oil ‘factory’), the birding in Iguazu, and today’s trip into the Andes where we went back to December in Anchorage (translation:  it snowed.)  

In Addition To The Water . . .

Showed pictures mostly of water going down hill yesterday and the day before at Iguazú.  So now let’s look at some other distractions.

 Figs.

 

Those critters begging at the table are coatimundi   They’ve become a pest in the park.  My wife saw jump on the table and swipe an ice  cream from a woman eating at a table like this.

 There are lots of signs telling people not to feed the coatis.  Like the one below that warns about both monkeys and coatis.    In the middle of the sign is a picture of puncture holes on someone’s hand.    Yet despite the warning, people crowd around the sign to  get pictures of the capuchin monkeys, sitting on the sign.  And below on the left a woman with kids is feeding the monkeys bread.

 I

 

More later.  [Here are a couple more.]

   

Imagining And Accomplishing - A Chinese Video Offers A Great Metaphor Of What Citizens Climate Lobby Is Doing

It's amazing what some human beings can imagine, and then accomplish.  This video is short but it will lift your spirit.  And everyone needs a lot of spirit lifting these days.

😳 pic.twitter.com/N0lsqXatY9

— Carl Zha (@CarlZha) June 9, 2019

But it's also depressing how so many get stuck with the routine, and refuse to use the imagination they were born with to do the things that need to be done - like fighting climate change.  And we're in a particularly difficult time where people focus on stopping things rather than making the world a better place.

Yesterday was the monthly Citizens Climate Lobby meeting and the speaker was Dr. Shi-Ling Hsu.  His book, The Case for a Carbon Tax:  Getting Past our Hang-ups to Effective Climate Policy pulls together all the issues to show why a carbon tax with dividend is the most effective and most likely single act people can take to slow down climate change.

It's a little pricey, but maybe you can find it in your library.  The author has his own eight page precis of the book online here.  I'm sure most of you will never read it, so here's my outline of Chapter 1 which pulls together all the key points:

Chapter 1:  IntroductionGlobal Climate Change the dominant environmental issue of our time.
    Basic Dynamic and ImpactGreenhouse effect - GH gases like carbon dioxide trap the heat.  Balance disturbed by CO2 emissions since Industrial Revolution.
Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius reported build up of ‘carbonic acid’ in the earth’s atmosphere 1908 creating the possibility of earth growing warmer.  As Swede, he thought this was good.
But since at least 1970s people knew of possible dire consequences. Not just warmer weather, but heat waves and droughts, water shortages, more violent storms, rise in sea levels ‘jeopardizing trillions of dollars of real estate worldwide.”  Heating causes more heating as warm temperatures unlock methane from the frozen tundra “unleashing a GH twenty-five times more powerful than carbon dioxide.”
    Societal Impacts Political DilemmasIncreasing inequity as equatorial countries impacted harder, mostly less developed, less wealthy.  Northern, mostly more developed and wealthy have less impact.  Leakage problem:  If developed Northern nations cut back, price of oil drops, developing countries will snap it up and little gained.  Also, most of the problem caused by Northern developed countries which have used the most oil.  Developing countries believe the rich countries used their allotment already and now it’s poorer countries’ turn.  Thus the need for world wide cooperation.  But there’s resistance to a global response:

1. China v. US  - Both, together, largest emitters - 40% of world’s CO2 emissions. in 2006 when China became the world’s biggest emitter.  China sees itself as developing country and wants to catch up with what the US has used already.  But they have engaged the climate change problem.  The US has contributed 240 gigatons into the atmosphere from 1950-present. US still uses 4X the carbon per person than China.  

1. Rest of the world. (Even if China and US agree, saving is only 40%)

1. Generously assuming that European Union would support bilateral US-China agreement, brings us to 55%, with 45% left over. India? 5%   Russia?  5%  Brazil?

• The Big Question:  How will diverse nations come together to curtail emissions of GHes?  Burning carbon products and emitting CO2 is such a part of our economies, hard to imagine changing.  “ . . .most developed countries [are] taking some steps to address climate change..  Most developed countries seem to accept that their participation in an agreement to reduce emissions is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition to bring about global cooperation in addressing climate change.

• Alternative to do nothing without knowing if others will reciprocate = do nothing.  So developing countries could undo reduction efforts.  US doesn’t know its efforts will succeed, but does know if it does nothing the world “will hurtle toward an historic and frightening climatic experiment.”

• Climate change poses security threat   - “poor countries left with nothing to lose by violence, and the sheer numbers of dispossessed could overwhelm the ability of rich countries to insulate themselves from climate-induced unrest.”  US Department of Defense is “developing policies and plans to manage the effects of climate change on its operating environment [and] missions.”

• Imperative to act - what could work? - “Because of the leakage problem, global engagement with the reduction of GH is absolutely necessary, and almost every country, developed or not, has to be a party.  What can possibly be proposed, that could satisfy almost every country in the world” 

• Purpose of the book: - explore the options and argue that a carbon tax is currently the most effective means of reducing emissions.  Tax is levied on emission of quantity of carbon dioxide.  

• Basic level:  levied on fossil fuel, at some transaction point before combustion, basically a sales tax on the carbon content of fuel.  CO2 most abundant GH, regulating it the most important aspect of controlling GH.  CO2 is most long lived GH gas -  remaining in atmosphere 100 years after emission -  need to start now.

• Book proposes a “carbon tax on fossil fuels, expanded to include a few other sources of GH emissions that can be monitored and measured with relative ease.”

• Why right now?  - Politically difficult.  No perfect policy.  Some others more popular, but can’t stop climate change.  Tax would start out modest and gradually increase allowing less drastic adjustments. 

• The longer we wait, the more difficult and disrupting it will be to fix things.  “Doing something modest now is vastly preferable to finding just the “right” GH policy.  

• Not the only needed policy.   Other options also needed.  Carbon tax doesn’t preclude other options.  No jurisdictional conflicts between feds and states/provinces. No problem having carbon tax AND cap and trade.  No legal obstacles to carbon tax.  “More work  will certainly need to be done in addition to a carbon tax, but there is no first step more important, more effective, and more flexible than a carbon tax.”  

• Carbon tax idea not novel,  - but all the arguments for it never collected together before.   Easy to cherry pick flaws of carbon tax, but real task to comprehensively compare carbon tax to other alternatives.  This book does that reducing the most important considerations down to ten arguments for a carbon tax and four against.

• Explores psychological barriers to carbon tax - Reviews human cognitive bases when processing information and weighing different options, biases that are mutually reinforced by public opinion polls that ask questions that contain subtle but powerful bias against certain policies.    Economists’ assumptions that humans act rationally is false.  People’s bias against taxes causes misjudgments and misperceptions about policies.  Book applies research findings that come closest to answering ‘why people dislike the carbon tax as a way of addressing climate change.”

Chapter 2  describes “a typical carbon tax and three alternative policy instruments: a cap-and-trade program, “command-and-control” - type policies or standards and government subsidies.
Chapter 3 sets up ten considerations for choosing a policy to reduce GHes.
Chapter 4 explores challenges to carbon taxes including political barriers, including its perceived regressiveness and how to pay off industries that will be disadvantaged, such as the coal industry.
Chapter 5 addresses the psychology of carbon taxes.  Approaches thus far have hidden the real cost of mitigation.
Chapter  6:  Changing Political Fortunes?
Chapter  7:  Conclusions

Why do I write about  Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL) so often?

Here's why.  CCL:

1. Has the right objective
2. Goes after that objective as efficiently and effectively as any organization I've ever seen
3. Uses constituents from its local chapters (in 87% of all congressional districts) to lobby their members of congress to pass the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act
4. Focuses on building relationships with members of congress through respect and providing the best available information
5. Embraces an inclusive approach that treats everyone as a human being and a potential ally
6. Works with many other climate change groups

Studies show that people who believe that climate change is real, often have no idea of how they can meaningfully work to slow it down.  Well joining CCL is an easy and empowering way.

There are chapters throughout the US.  You can find your closest chapter here.  

And there are many chapters outside the United States.  You might find one near you here.

Like the guys dancing on the bar in the video, the founders and members of CCL have used their imaginations to come up with a viable idea and they are doing an heroic job to make it happen.

They need your help.  You don't have to join CCL to lobby your member of congress, but it doesn't cost anything to join.  And finding all the other people working for this goal is very gratifying.  And it's empowering.  Over 1500 volunteers are in Washington DC for the CCL annual conference and to lobby Congress.  

One of the resources I found most interesting and encouraging is a document with the statements of the many different religious and spiritual groups in the US on climate change.  Many people don't even know their group has taken a stand on this issue. 

Consequences For Unruly Airline Passengers

I was reading a twitter thread about a journalist who got harangued by her Trump supporting seat mate on a plane ride.  She had the window seat and felt trapped as he ranted about how the media lied and wrote fake news and were the enemy of America.  Fortunately, the flight attendants responded quickly when she rang the alarm button and got her another seat.

But as I thought about it, why she should she have to move?  He's the one who should be inconvenienced for his bad behavior, not her.  He should be moved.  Maybe there should be some 'time-out' seats for such passengers like there is for kids who can't behave.

OK, I understand that airlines aren't going to leave seats unused in this seat-squeezing era.  And often trying to make the belligerent passengers on the plane move can cause them to become more hostile and dangerous.

BUT, such passengers should be guaranteed that they'll get off the plane with a 'no-fly' penalty.  It's something the FAA should enforce across all airlines and the length of the penalty should be appropriate to the disturbance and the passenger's record.  And refusing to move when asked to would surely increase the length on one's ban.  And important people shouldn't be able to get their penalties waived, though if they're wealthy enough they can probably hire private planes.

Are there due process and other legal questions involved here?  Due process surely.  We don't want passengers arbitrarily punished.  Passengers witnessing such a situation should get their phones out and record the incident because sometimes the victim can't while it's happening.

I would guess that being banned from planes is something that doesn't have to go to the courts, but I'm not sure. Not being able to fly might jeopardize some people's jobs, but that seems to be a good  incentive.  But they wouldn't be deprived of 'life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness" as they would with a jail sentence.  Well, maybe it would hinder their pursuit of happiness a bit.  But it seems that people who harass others probably are already having difficulties in their pursuit of happiness.

I'm sure some attorney would find a way to sue on behalf of such a client, but attorneys for the airlines and FAA should be able to  draft a workable policy.  It would include some descriptions of unacceptable behaviors.

The basic violation would be:
Physically or verbally disturb another passenger or passengers after being told to stop.

Then examples of what that looks like and levels of severity would be listed along with the consequences.

Other passengers would be encouraged to record such incidents and to alert flight attendants before it escalates.

These problem passengers would then be added to the no-fly list (probably more reasonably than others have been put on that list.)

After writing this I checked online whether such consequences already exist.  A 2010 NBC article cites a woman who was banned from a flight for using her phone after being told not to (she says was turning it off) :

“The airlines keep their own lists,” Bresson added. And those multiple no-fly lists create “a lot of confusion.”

That uncertainty is shared by officials at the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, a labor union representing more than 50,000 flight attendants at 22 airlines.
“Our (internal) air safety people aren’t even sure if those who have been charged with flight crew interference are even on the list,” said Corey Caldwell, spokeswoman for the AFA. “We would be interested to find out if people who have been charged — not found guilty but just initially charged with flight crew interference — even get on an airline (no-fly) list.”

A 2014 ABC  report says:

"American Airlines spokesperson Josh Freed said the airline has its own no-fly list -- separate from the government's -- that unruly passengers could potentially be added to.
'When we handle cases of disruptive passengers, one option is denying future travel,' Freed said. He stressed that that rarely happens. .  .
Delta Airlines and United Airlines, two other airlines involved in recent flight diversions, did not respond to ABC News' request for comment."

[I'd note that declining to comment sometimes happens because people weren't given enough time before the story aired.  That said, I emailed the media folks at Alaska Airlines on Wednesday May 1, and held up this post hoping I could add their policy on this, but I've heard nothing back.  If I do, I'll add it here or in a new post.]

Limits Of Religious Freedom, How Do We Know Who Is Good?, And How Many Wheelchairs Do Airlines Lose Or Break A Month?

The title doesn't necessarily reflect the aim of the authors of these three stories, but it does reflect what I took from them.


1.  Limits of Religious Freedom.   This is as good a description of how I view freedom of religion's boundaries.

From Washington Post article on South Bend, Indiana mayor, Pete Buttigieg,  running for president.  The article also offers a way to pronounce his name offered by his husband.

“Our right to practice our faith freely is respected up to the point where doing so involves harming others,” he said. “One of the problems with RFRA* was it authorized harming others so long as you remembered to use your religion as an excuse.”

*Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 2015

Of course, this still leaves lots of room for debate on what 'harming others' entails.

The article also discusses Buttigieg's own religious faith (it's not uninformed) and his bid to get the religious left more active in the next round of elections.


2.  Judging People In The Era Of Non-Stop Headline News

This next one is about James Comey and it raises interesting questions about who becomes a hero and who doesn't in our modern age.  It seems - she doesn't say this, but it's my takeaway - we often judge people nowadays by one action rather than the totality of their lives.  (And you can also question why we're judging other people rather than working on ourselves.)

From the Bulwark:  Why Do We Love To Hate James Comey?

"Comey has six children, all with the same woman. He has been married to his wife since roughly the Pliocene epoch and in his spare time they serve as emergency foster parents for homeless kids. No, really. He explained to NPR that, as foster parents, they often get more love out of these relationships than they put into them, even. “Little boy who came to us born a month premature in a homeless shelter to a drug-addicted mother and born in very very difficult circumstances so we got him right out of the hospital,” Comey said of one of his many foster children. That baby boy was later adopted, but, as NPR reports, the Comeys still watch him a couple times a week. “[W]e’ve stayed very close,” Comey said. “We’ll look after him his whole life.”
As I said: A good man. A fine human being.
But good people can still be annoying as fuck and James Comey is proof of this."

3.  The importance of diversity in the legislature.  From the LA Times:

"The largest U.S. airlines damaged or lost a daily average of 26 wheelchairs and scooters used by disabled passengers in December, according to a report championed by a lawmaker who lost both legs while serving in Iraq.
From Dec. 4 to Dec. 31, the 12 largest carriers damaged or lost 701 passengers’ wheelchairs and scooters, according to the first report of its kind from the U.S."

It took a wheelchair bound Senator - Tammy Duckworth of Illinois who lost her mobility in a helicopter crash in Iraq - to require the FAA to report such losses.

It took a disabled US Senator to get attention paid to this problem.  I don't know how many people bring their wheelchairs to the airport each day.  I know there's usually five to ten waiting for passengers when I get off planes, so the total number of wheelchairs might be huge and 26 per day isn't that high a percentage.  But it's HUGE for the person who needs the chair.  Can you imagine being dependent on your wheelchair to get around and find out when you got off the plane, yours had been lost or damaged?


Enjoy your weekend!

John Martin's Coming Home After Sailing To Russia And Getting Temporary Housing

The Anchorage Daily News had a story yesterday about John Martin being deported to the US by the Russian authorities.  Last year he set off to sail to China to find his ex-wife and his son.  He made it to Russia and was first in the hospital and then later sent to a Moscow jail.  But apparently the Russians are giving him back without demanding anything in exchange.

March 2012

I've written about John Martin a few times on this blog.  This link includes a video of him at the Assembly meeting when they passed a ban on sitting on the sidewalks which seemed to be aimed at John.

It has links to other posts I did, including when he was camped in front of city hall after the ordinance was passed.  I asked him why he thought he hadn't been kicked out.  He didn't know, but said that the Mayor went across the street to get some coffee and was bringing one back for him.


Michelle Theriault Boots did a good job in the the story about John's sailing to China - telling a lot more about his rather turbulent life.  That link is definitely worth reading if you want to get a better understanding of John.  It's one of the millions of stories of people for whom life doesn't always work out the way they'd like, but he's found ways to give his life meaning and purpose.

My Brain Is Exploding Trying To Capture In A Title All The Connections I'm Thinking

This post got started by this tweet.

Administrative Theory & Praxis has announced a call for papers for a new special issue titled "Toward Prefigurative Public Administration"! Special issue editors are Dr. Jeannine Love (@JeannineMLove ) and Dr. Margaret Stout. Check out the call here: https://t.co/27YV0vbHaO

— PA Theory Network (@patheory) October 3, 2018

The PA Theory Network was the professional group that I felt most at home with in the world of academic public administration.  It was the only group that I knew of that rewarded folks who seriously challenged the accepted assumptions.

When I read this I wasn't quite sure what 'prefigurative public administration' was - I haven't kept up with the literature too well since I retired.  But it sounded worth going to the link in the tweet.  That got me to stuff like:

Call for Papers: Toward Prefigurative Public Administration
Special Issue Editors: Drs. Jeannine Love and Margaret Stout

"Contemporary public administration continues to struggle with how to address the deeply interdependent issues that comprise the “wicked problems” (Rittel & Webber, 1973, p. 155) of sustainability—including social, political, economic, and environmental crises. Responses to this challenge have been shaped by ontological assumptions that drive strategies for knowledge production and understandings of “best” practices. As a result, ideas about effective governance have shifted over time; from government modeled on military style hierarchy in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, to business-oriented models and privatization in the late twentieth century, to collaborative network governance at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Within this latest turn, proponents of governance networks argue that coordinating responses to complex policy challenges across jurisdictional and sectoral borders can yield “collaborative advantage” over traditional governance approaches (Huxham, 2000). However, assessments of actual governance networks yield poor results. It has been argued that despite the rhetorical commitment to collaboration, these governance networks perpetuate the practices of hierarchy and competition (Stout & Love, 2019) and that new social movements more effectively function as collaborative networks (Love & Stout, 2018). This symposium therefore asks what public administration can learn from such sources."

Yes, jargon filled sentences like this are why I'm blogging rather than writing academic papers these days.  But, in the writers' defense, most of the readers of announcements like this understand this shorthand for more complicated ideas. If a carpenter had to describe a 'hammer' every time he needed to mention one, it would take forever.  In any case, I sensed that some of my own frustration with mainstream public administration was embedded in this call for paper proposals.  I could possibly write about stuff like this that calls for an entirely new way of thinking about the structure and purpose of governments.

So I scrolled down to see the bibliography.  The first on the list is:

Dixon, Chris. 2014. Another politics: Talking across today's transformative movements. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

OK, I thought, this is getting better.  Chris was a high school classmate of my daughter's.  He's one of the nicest, most thoughtful, respectful people I know.  And he's seriously dedicated to making a better world.

So, two of my worlds are coming together here.  In fact, Chris and J and I  had dinner, serendipitously, together at the Thai Kitchen this summer.  But I haven't actually read any of Chris' books or articles.  So, I looked up the book reference.  I can get it on Amazon.  But my sense is that's not where Chris would want me to buy it. If you read on you'll understand.  But I found a link to a paper that was probably the precursor to the book.  

So I've been reading it online, while watching the surf pound off the balcony.  (I did my bike ride this morning at 8am on a new route I discovered - it goes along a main highway, but it's more than a painted line on the side - it's separated by grass as well.  It allows me to ride my 30 minutes out without anything to slow me down, and it goes by the visitors center for the wildlife sanctuary I've been visiting. It's all connected.  A good ride.)

So Chris' paper is an attempt to map out the various anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist,  non-sectarian movements that are working for a world without oppression.  He's showing where they came from, where they overlap and where they have differences.

The terms - including anarchists, but not so much anti-authoritarian - all seem to identify what people are against (and he notes that) instead of what they are for.  I guess when someone is beating you, you are against being beaten first and foremost and you'll worry about what comes next when the beating stops.

Some of the movements he mentions that overlap include:
1.  Anarchism

2.  Global Resistance to Neoliberalism

3.  Prison Abolitionism

5.  Women of Color Feminism

All of these need explanation for the average person, including me, to grasp.  They aren't terms that our history books and dominant political system look kindly on.  That should tip people off right away that maybe there's something here.  So I should spell this out more.

He says, in part, about Anarchism (clearly talking about the modern version):

"The first strand begins in the anarchism of the 1990s. The mostly young people involved in this anarchist politics and activism were connected through a series of predominantly white and middle-class subcultural scenes, often rooted in punk rock, across the U.S. and Canada. They set up local Food Not Bombs groups,10 learned direct action skills through militant queer organizing and radical environmentalist campaigns, supported U.S. political prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal, worked to inject art and imagination into activism, organized anarchist convergences and conferences across North America, and developed a network of anarchist bookstores and political spaces known as infoshops."

Then, Global Resistance to Neoliberalism.

A second strand has its origins in the international revolt against neoliberalism, especially growing from the global South. Building on legacies of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles, this started in the 1980s with widespread popular mobilizations against austerity measures mandated by the International Monetary Fund. By the early 1990s, meetings of neoliberal institutions like the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO) faced massive protests from Bangalore to Berlin.13 And then, on January 1, 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation stepped onto the world stage by seizing seven cities in Chiapas. “Ya Basta!” (“Enough!”), they said in opposition to the Mexican government and neoliberalism.

Anarchism in the Global Justice Movement  [The formatting of this paper seems to slip an extra strand in here, but clearly this is part of Global Resistance.  If my severe abbreviation here is problematic for you, the link to the whole paper is above, and here.  And perhaps get a copy of the book, which I'm sure is an improved version of all this.]

"Through the global justice movement, thousands of people participated in anti-authoritarian approaches and politics. At the same time, this cycle of struggle provided opportunities for anarchist and anarchist-influenced activists to wrestle with their own limitations in the context of a growing movement. Longtime radical and writer Elizabeth ‘Betita’ Martinez raised some of these with her widely circulated essay “Where was the color in Seattle?”19 This critical intervention and subsequent ones fostered widespread discussion. While the conversations were most visible around the racial composition of summit mobilizations, they opened up a range of crucial issues: the relation between global justice mobilizing and community-based organizing; the question of building strategic and effective broad-based radical movements in Canada and the U.S. linked to other movements across the globe; and how to confront hierarchies of race, gender, class, age, and experience as they were being reproduced in movement spaces."

Prison Abolitionism - finally a term that most people can, I think, understand.  But I suspect many would  exclaim, "but we need prisons."

"A third* crucial strand leading into the anti-authoritarian current has its origins in popular struggles against policing and prisons, especially in communities of color.
In 1998, the radical edge of this movement came together at an ambitious conference in Berkeley, California called Critical Resistance (CR), out of which developed an organization of the same name. Since then, individuals and groups affiliated with and inspired by CR have played a vital role in the movement against the PIC, whether through CR chapters in places such as Oakland or New Orleans or organizations such as the Prisoners Justice Action Committee in Toronto.27
Many abolitionists also have begun to explore alternatives to state-based strategies for dealing with violence in communities and interpersonal relationships. This approach has opened small but significant spaces for organizations and communities to experiment with ways of reducing harm and resolving conflict."

#BlackLivesMatter would fit as one of the groups he's talking about.

[See the book White Rage by Carol Anderson for much more detail on how the prison system has extended slavery for blacks in the US up to today.]

*[The way the paper was formatted, I got this as the fourth strand, but I suspect the extra one was either number 1 (Anarchism) or 3 Anarchism and the Global Justice Movement.  I'm sure this was all worked out in the book.]

5.  Women of Color Feminism

"Both the anti-capitalist current in the global justice movement and prison abolitionism draw upon and connect with a fourth strand, which is usually known as anti-racist feminism or women of color feminism. This sort of feminist politics has roots in earlier struggles, but it bloomed in the liberation movements of the 1960s and came into its own more fully in the 1970s and 1980s. And although this politics took many routes, they all started in a similar place: radical women of color, many of them lesbians, criticizing the limitations of existing movements to account for their experiences of oppression. Coming together in groups, conferences, publishing collectives, and
social scenes, these activists began creating shared politics grounded in their lives and struggles. Through these collaborations, they also constructed the category “women of color” as a new radical political identity."

Chris takes these strands and then goes on to write about what they all have in common:

1.  refusing exploitation and oppression,
2.  developing new social relations,
3. linking struggles and visions, and
4. grassroots nonhierarchical organizing

He says that what they are all striving for is "another politics" which he describes

"One useful way to understand another politics, it seems to me, is as an emerging political pole within anarchism and the left more broadly. A growing set of anti-authoritarians are staking out this pole through work significantly based in the four principles I laid out above. With these politics and related practices, this pole draws many activists and organizers who are fed up with the problems and limitations of much contemporary anarchism in North America and yet remain committed to the best of the anarchist tradition: a far-reaching critique of domination, a dedication
to prefigurative politics, a commitment to building popular power, and an unbending belief in people’s capacity to create a world where we can all live with dignity, joy, and justice."

And he raises a number of questions anarchists face.  (Go read the paper for those.)

It occurred to me that if someone wants to understand what is happening in the US Senate today, I'd argue it is a clash between the capitalist, authoritarians - represented by McConnell, Trump, Kavanaugh, etc.  versus the people who are left out of power - the poor, people of color, lgbtq, immigrants.  

Chris talks about the various movements doing grass roots recruitment among ordinary citizens  caught up in these struggles, but don't see how it is structured or what they can do about it.  And I couldn't help thinking that these many organizations involved in these movements also need to be reaching out to the Trump supporters who are also victims of the capitalist and authoritarian systems.  But the Right has captured them with false narratives about race, immigrants, foreign workers, and fear of losing 'their' power.  

I'd say what Chris is doing in this paper is trying to look past the point when the beating stops and what we do then.  And as I think about public administration and how all this works into an alternative way of achieving those common goods that we need to work collectively to achieve, there are still lots of questions.  

But yes, the Founding Fathers were fighting injustice and authoritarian rule, but their vision of who deserved justice and equality before the law were restricted by the social values of their day.  

Normally, I'd let this sit overnight, but I could rework this over an over again.  So, please excuse any sloppiness you see.  But you can point it out and I'll try to make repairs.  Thanks.

And, anyone who got this far, if you have a better title fire away.  

Ibis At Kealia Pond National Wildlife Reserve

I got out a little earlier today (about 7:20am) and biked the highway toward Lahaina til it connected with the main highway, then turned back and stopped at the Kealia Pond Reserve.  First, I have to apologize.  In the interest of packing light, I left my telephoto lens at home.  Second, I've decided to break up this Reserve visit into more than one post - there's no need to try to cram everything into one post.  There was lots to catch the eye and ear and brain.  So this one will concentrate on the ibis - which I'm assuming is the white faced ibis, though it's not the breeding season so the white face isn't out.




From the Fish and Wildlife Service:

"White-faced ibis
Most distinguishable by its long down-curved bill. As many as 4 individuals have been observed at the refuge during summer, possibly not migrating to their mainland breeding sites."

Well, you can't see the long down-curved bill in the picture above, so look closely below you can see the beaks of a couple of birds.

This one just gives you a sense of the location of the pond.












Here's a sign about this reserve that is pretty disturbing.

The disturbing part?

"Today, less than 10 percent of all Hawaiian wetlands remain."

Think about it.  Wetlands are important habitat for birds, insects, fish.  And they are water gets filtered.  They also are how nature protects the land during flooding - so as we think about Hurricane Florence, I'm sure that much of the flooding happened because wetlands along the coast as well as along the rivers have long been turned into farmland, houses, factories, and other development.

Which Parts Of A Man's Life Matter? Good Bye John McCain

It was only 2008 and when John McCain plucked Sarah Palin out of relative obscurity and opened the way for the totally unprepared to run for president.
He's also known to have been something of a womanizer when he was younger.  And the privileged son and grandson of an Navy admirals.  From NYT books:

"As far back as he could remember, Johnny McCain knew he was going to Annapolis, knew it with such unshakable finality that he never really thought twice about it, at least not seriously. It was part of the air he breathed, the ether through which he moved, the single immutable element in his life. He also knew that if he said what he thought — hold it, screw Annapolis, the place sucks — shock waves would reverberate through countless generations of McCains, shaking a military tradition that could both inspire and bully."

Roberta gave birth to Johnny at Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone on August 29, 1936. The timing was auspicious. The base commander was his grandfather, who earlier that month, at the advanced age of fifty-two, had earned his wings as a naval aviator. Johnny's father was stationed nearby, at a small submarine facility. Jack McCain was transferred to New London a few months later, but for that brief period Panama became the epicenter of three generations of a family whose distinguished naval service would eventually span the great national upheavals of the twentieth century, from World War I through Vietnam and its still murky aftermath.
Johnny's father and grandfather may have made history, but nobody ignored his mother, the spunky, occasionally ditzy Auntie Mame of Navy wives. Though the family lived on Jack's salary, Roberta Wright McCain was born to wealth. Her father struck oil in the Southwest as a young man, made his fortune, and retired at forty, soon after Roberta and her identical twin, Rowena, were born. 

His time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, no doubt, played a huge role in his calling out 'enhanced interrogation' as torture.  His last years he became a hero to the left as he stood up to Trump and voted to save Obama-care.

I recount all this on the evening of McCain's death - to ponder why some men are brought down by actions that other men can weather.   Some of it's timing - in the #metoo era, Sen. Franken left the Senate for behavior that was relatively mild compared to what other men got no penalty for.

I suspect in McCain's case, he was given a lot of passes due to being a prisoner-of-war in terrible circumstances.  And while he was sometimes impulsive - choosing Palin, for example - people tended to trust his sincerity and willingness to stand up for his principles.

I do think, though, that we ought to be discussing how we evaluate a person's life - how we balance the good and the bad.  Who gets passes and who doesn't.

Standing For Salmon, Registering Voters, Visiting Photographer

Stand for Salmon is a group that got an initiative onto the November ballot that would better protect salmon habitat in Alaska.  An industry group, made up of mining and other resource extraction companies, is calling themselves Stand for Alaska, to oppose Ballot Initiative 1.

I haven't read through the initiative - it's about eight pages long.  I can do that.  But it was disqualified by the Lt. Governor (who supervises elections) and Stand for Salmon sued.  The Alaska Supreme Court has now ordered the initiative to be on the ballot, but with some changes.  We have to wait to see what the Lt. Governor's elections team does before we can know exactly what will be on the ballot initiative.  My basic understanding is that the initiative would bring back some of the protections Alaskans had before the legislature failed to renew our Coastal Zone Management Program.   The elimination of the program, which gave coastal communities much more say in projects, was supported by resource extraction organizations that didn't like all the public participation that slowed down or ended their project approval processes.  But that's my general impression and I have to get into the details soon.

In the meantime, you can start at Ballotopedia which gives much better coverage than I could give at this point.

All this introduction leads into the Salmon BBQ that Stand For Salmon threw at the Cuddy Family Park, Friday evening to celebrate Alaska Wild Salmon Day.  (Yes, that's a state recognized day.)

I was asked to help out at the Citizens Climate Lobby table and when I arrived, there was already a
large crowd walking around and lining up for BBQ salmon.  (Salmon was free, beer you had to pay for.)


I also brought along my voter registration forms.  I figured this would be a good place to register folks.  The first person I asked had moved up from California and hadn't registered here yet.  Bingo.  He had an Alaska drivers license.   But then, everyone else I asked was already registered, many in other states or countries.  Then folks told me they thought everyone was registered because of the automatic voter registration when you apply for the Alaska Permanent Fund check.  I'd forgotten about that.  Here's what the Permanent Fund Website says:

"On November 8, 2016, Alaska voters approved Ballot Measure 1 (15PFVR) which will automatically register eligible individuals to vote when they apply for a Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD), unless they opt-out. The Division of Elections webpage has more information.
A mailer from the Division of Elections will be sent to Alaskans who applied for their PFD from March 1, 2017 (effective date) to March 31, 2017 and whose address on their PFD application is different than their voter record address, or to applicants who are not currently registered to vote."

So Alaska has taken a different direction from a lot of other states that are trying to purge folks from the voting lists.  The only eligible unregistered voters are those who are turning 18 since the last PFD check and people who just moved to Alaska and haven't filed for the PFD check yet.  And, of course, those few folks who don't apply for their checks.  I'm guessing any way.  I have to check Monday with the elections office.  I also want to know how to register homeless folks.  I'm sure they've figured this out, but address is a mandatory

There were lots of tables with information from various non-profit organizations like CCL.  There was music, and, of course, the salmon.

I did get one more voter registered - a 20 year old who was in line waiting for his salmon.  He said he wasn't interested in registering and when I asked why not, his answer didn't make sense to me, so I pushed a bit.  "It doesn't matter if I vote."  I responded that the people who didn't vote could have changed nearly every race if they had vote. He still wasn't interested in voting.  "If you register, you don't have to vote.  But if you don't register and you change your mind, you won't be able to vote."  His response was that he didn't have time to register.  Now I had him.  "You're waiting in line to get free salmon.  You can fill out the form before you get your salmon."  And he took the form and pen and filled it out.  The couple behind him, when he gave the form back to me, congratulated him on registering to vote.

I talked to a lot of folks, including one gentleman who had three expensive looking cameras wrapped around him.  He's a photographer from London who's in Alaska talking to people about their views on climate change.  He was amazed at some of the folks in Utqiaġvik (formally Barrow) who didn't believe that climate change was caused by humans.  When I asked more, he did say they worked for or had worked in the oil industry.  The photographer, Laurence Ellis, said this was for Document Journal.  He sounded like someone who was worth noting here.  At the very least, he will be interpreting his version of Alaska to the world.   I only wish I'd worked a little harder when i took his picture with my low end Canon Powershot.


Toward the end of the event, everyone was invited for a giant photo of the event.  I'd guess most people had already left.  But there was still a good crowd.

[UPDATE August 13, 2018:  Coincidentally, the next post turned out to be about standing for salmon literally.]