The Hitchhiker

I was riding home along 36th and was waiting for the light to change on the median between the north and south bound lanes of the New Seward Highway when I saw the hitch hiker with his thumb out and his skateboard in his other hand waiting for a ride south.

I was thinking about my days hitchhiking Europe as a student and the time I hitched to northern Wisconsin from Chicago.  Would I pick this guy up? 

Cars were whizzing by.  And then a car braked and pulled over.  A yellow cab.  The hitch hiker ran to the window and they talked.  The cabbie got out and opened the trunk.  The skateboard and a small day pack went in.  At that point I finally pulled out my camera and got this shot just after the hitchhiker got into the cab.   My light changed and I pedaled on home wondering if the cab put on the meter or not. 

"I love the way he lights up around his kids" and other Republican speech thoughts

First, let me take something totally out of context, the way the Republicans are running with Obama's inept comment about entrepreneurs. 

Here's Romney's comment about his running mate Paul Ryan:

"I love the way he lights up around his kids . . ."

Wow, I thought when I heard this.  But it makes sense from a man whose religion forbids smoking.  It must be thrilling to see someone have the freedom to light up around his kids.  Of course, I'm assuming it meant tobacco and not that medicinal herb, cause then we'd need to know about Ryan's health issues. 

Fortunately for the Democrats, they don't have to take an out of context comment like this and run ads riffing on it, because Romney and his colleagues like Rep. Akin say enough real stuff to give them serious political ammunition.

I heard Marco Rubio and part of Romney's speech.  A few quotes from Rubio I thought worth commenting on:

"Our national motto is "In God we Trust," reminding us that faith in our Creator is the most important American value of all."

It's interesting that Romney, a little later would say:

"And I will guarantee America's first liberty: the freedom of religion."

Let's remember exactly what the First Amendment to the Constitution says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Given the first Amendment's prohibition on the establishment of religion by Congress, it seems strange to claim 'faith in our Creator' as the most important American value of all. I understand the First Amendment was to get government out of the religion business and letting people practice as they please.  I would think justice and freedom would be higher on the list.

 Wikipedia reminds us "In God we Trust" was not the motto of our founding fathers. 

Never codified by law, E pluribus unum was considered a de facto motto of the United States^{[citation needed]} until 1956 when the United States Congress passed an act (H.J. Resolution 396), adopting "In God We Trust" as the official motto.^[4]

And reports tell us that the convention protestors were not allowed to assemble any closer than 10 blocks from the convention.


Rubio spoke movingly about his dad.

My dad was a bartender. . . A few years ago during a speech, I noticed a bartender behind a portable bar at the back of the ballroom. I remembered my father who had worked for many years as a banquet bartender.

But I couldn't help think that if everyone in the US shared Mitt Romney's values about drinking alcohol, Rubio's dad wouldn't have had a job.

And then there was the homage to the convention theme of American exceptionalism:

"For those of us who were born and raised in this country, it's easy to forget how special America is. But my grandfather understood how different America is from the rest of the world, because he knew what life was like outside America."

Rubio's granddad, as I understand it, before coming to the US only knew Cuba - the country the US has been boycotting since Castro came to power over 50 years ago.    I have no doubt that Rubio's grandfather loved his life in the US, and his gratitude for living here is appropriate.  But I'm not buying his expertise on how things are in all the rest of the world 'outside America."  There are a lot more options than Cuba. 

The US is an amazing country and has been an inspiration to people around the world.   But so was Germany before WW I. After the humiliating Treaty of Versailles,  Hitler promised Germans he'd regain their former greatness.  Rubio suggests Romney, too, will restore the US to its former greatness and beyond:

Mitt Romney believes that if we succeed in changing the direction of our country, our children and grandchildren will be the most prosperous generation ever, and their achievements will astonish the world.

Pride is one of the seven deadly sins.  Given that Rubio had already ranked faith in the creator as his number one value, you'd think he would remember this line from Proverbs:

Pride goes before destruction, And a haughty spirit before stumbling.

I hope you realize this has not been a review of Rubio's (and certainly not Romney's) speech.  I've just taken a few lines.  Some of my comments are more serious than others.

I hope enough Americans realize, when they hear speeches like this analyzed by the media, that they too are taking what they see as the most interesting lines or the lines most likely to gain hits for their online articles.  Listen to or read the speeches yourself.

Rubio's speech.
Romney's speech.

Suffering Nature-Deficit Disorder? Try A Dose of Alaskan Mountains and Clouds

Never heard of Nature-Deficit Disorder?* I hadn't either until this morning, but I have known that being out in the woods, even in the mini-woods of our back yard, makes me feel better.

Saturday going to Hope was sunny and I stopped a couple of times to be near natural water.  Sunday, coming back, when it was cloudy, I had more time to stop here and there and walk around in natural settings, places where the human impact was almost invisible.  (Though the sound of traffic sometimes invaded those spaces since I wasn't far off the road.)

So I'll post some pictures of those moments over the next few days so you can take a break.  And maybe find some local natural spot.  The coolth of the air, the fresh smell of rain, the sounds of water and wind, are all more than pictures can convey.

And then I learned today:

*Richard Louv, the award-winning author of Last Child in the Woods, will be at the Wendy Williamson Auditorium on September 6th at 7:00 pm. He will talk about his recent book, the Nature Principle, Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder, as well as the research from his earlier work on the connection between youth and nature.  More info at Chugach Children's Forest.

FAIRBANKS folks - you get him the day before, Wednesday, Sept. 5. More here.

Both events are billed as FREE.  (Someone's paying, but you won't have to pay at the door.  But you might consider donating to the organizations that are sponsoring Mr. Louv.)

Now go outside and stick your finger or toes in the water, smell the tree bark, taste an herb or berry or something else growing wild. 
 

Wasn't There Room In The Cab For The Last Kid?

 

Seen waiting for a light on Tudor near the Seward Highway.

Hope Last Saturday Night

My book club met in Hope Saturday.  One of the members has a cabin there.  After the discussion (John McPhee's The Control of Nature) and dinner, we walked into downtown Hope.  Note, the 2010 Census says there are 192 residents.  Not sure if that counts the summer residents, and it certainly doesn't count the campers on the beach.

We walked down to the muddy banks of Resurrection Creek.  This is where it flows into Turnagain Arm.

The Super Saturated Sugar Strings was playing at the Seaview Bar.  I'd met some of the band at the Out North fundraiser earlier this year.

Early Anchorage Election Report Shows Higher Republican, But Overall Low, Turnout

As I glance through the early returns (8:59pm)  it appears that Republicans were out voting more than Democrats and others.  Race after race shows more votes cast in the Republican ballots than the Democratic ballots, with just a few exceptions.

This led me to believe that Prop. 2 would be doing poorly and that was the case.  It's losing - 62. % NO to 37. % YES.

Prop. 1 is a tossup at this point with Yes slightly ahead.

Turnout appears low in the precincts reporting - under 10% if I read it right.

I was number 93 at my polling place voting machine around 3pm.  They said they had 1200 registered. (But those numbers are always very high because they are so slow at getting rid of people who have moved out of state or died.)


Here's a link to the latest results HTML  or  PDF.  (The 9:15pm posting is now up)

How Many Ways Are There To Steal An Election? And Why Doesn't Anyone Care?

Americans have long taken pride in their free elections and think of voter fraud in the US as something part of history (Such as Chicago's slogan "Vote early and vote often" and stories of people voting using the names of dead voters.)

We are even proud to send observers to countries where democracy is new and governments untrustworthy.  But we have plenty of stories of problems in the US.

Alaska has a primary election today.  Given Anchorage's municipal election fiasco in April, voting machine expert and blogger Brad Friedman has posted about our voting machines and the elections practices that make them vulnerable to fraud in today's election:

Of course, there are "tamper-evident" security seals placed over some of the most vulnerable parts of the optical-scan systems, and those could never be defeated without leaving visual clues behind, right?

Well, funny thing. In Alaska, when a security seal is discovered broken on their tabulation computers --- if they are discovered broken --- poll workers are instructed to simply replace it with another one and start the voting, as both several poll workers, as well as an Alaska election official (who has now been fired) confirmed with The BRAD BLOG. Several seals, the now former Alaska election official told us when she still had a job, are provided to poll workers to make replacing broken seals very simple, as seen in this next photo...

So why would Election Officials in the Last Frontier instruct poll workers to simply replace broken seals before the election, which would seem to defeat the entire point of using "tamper-evident" seals in the first place? It's a good question, especially when these machines --- which will be used once again in more than 1,000 jurisdictions in all or parts of 24 different states during this November's Presidential Election --- have been shown by many many official studies over the last decade to be incredibly vulnerable to nearly undetectable manipulation.

I would note that this is not a case of local bloggers being asleep, they have helped Friedman get information for this post.



 The Economist has an article about stealing elections that lists several ways to steal an election.   First a few based on a study by a University of Essex researcher.

1.  blatant ballot stuffing (is declining)
2. alter election laws (increasing)
   [Republicans have used 'voter fraud' as an excuse to require photo id's to vote in a number of critical states.  We know that a large proportion of people without photo id's are likely to vote Democratic (and student id's with photos are not allowed in some states).  Documented cases of voter fraud are almost non-existent in these states.  Critics are calling this 'election-fraud' NOT voter fraud. See NY Times "The Myth of Voter Fraud.]
   
3. gerrymandering unlosable constituencies
   [The Alaska Redistricting Board, while more careful than past boards, has managed to endanger seats of members of the Senate coalition and Fairbanks Democratic Senators and representatives by how they drew the lines.]
4. vote-buying, using state resources in campaigning, and exploiting partisan media.
   [More common outside the US, however the Citizens United Supreme Court decision appears to have had a similar effect by unleashing unlimited private money, in some case undisclosed, that can be spent influencing voters.  And Fox News was already doing this without contributions.]
5. Some fraud masquerades as incompetence.  From a Duke study by Judith Kelly (also in the Economist article)
1. "Too few voting slips, patchy voter lists, and long queues at polling stations distort elections as surely as burnt ballot boxes and bribes. Yet election observers are likely to withhold their worst scoldings if the line between cock-up and corruption is unclear."
   [This is a large part of the problem we had in Anchorage in April] 
6. "intimidation, sabotage (doors being glued shut, for example, in Russia) or manipulation" of poll watchers.
7.  "Another dodge is to invite more than one mission" of poll watchers (external groups coming to verify elections.) 
   
   Then there's a whole new way to steal elections in the last 20 years:
8.  Tampering with Voting Machines
   Here is a video from Princeton University showing how to steal an election by messing with the software.
   
   
   

We use Diebold machines in Anchorage.  Our last election showed a number of irregularities, including seals that can easily be tampered with.  Our election officials allow voting machines to overnight with election workers and election workers are told not to worry about broken seals.  [SEE, I CAN JUST WRITE THAT WITHOUT BOLD PRINT OR EXCLAMATION POINTS, BECAUSE I TOO NOW TAKE IT FOR GRANTED.  We're like the slowly boiling frogs.  Wow, finding a boiling frog link even explodes that myth.]

If I were going to steal an election by tampering with the machines, I'd try out some things in elections before I wanted to strike.  Maybe someplace remote, like Alaska.  Test things out, lull the public into believing that, "well there are problems, but no one actually fixed the election."  That happened in Anchorage in April.  Few seemed to care about all the well documented problems, "because none of the races was close."  Then I would try it out on a specific race.  There's a perfect one to try this on today.

In today's election, international mining interests and other resource developers like Shell ($150,000 contribution)  had raised, by the end of July, over $700,000 to defeat proposition 2.  (Those supporting proposition 2 had only raised $150,000.)  The resource exploitation industry has an obvious interest in preventing the reactivation of the Coastal Zone Management program that existed for over 25 years in Alaska until the governor and the legislature could not agree on legislation to extend it.  The video shows how little it would take to manipulate the voting machines.

We do have the advantage of having back up hard copies of ballots.  But the Anchorage election in April showed how those hard copies could be mishandled.  There were many, many questions  about what happened to the hundreds and hundreds of questioned ballots.  If any of the races had been decided by less than several hundred votes, there would have been no way to verify who was really elected.

Alaskans,   elections are the foundation of democracy.  Are we going to hold state election officials and legislators accountable for making our elections incorruptible?

And what happens here is happening in different scenarios around the country.  So all you non-Alaskans have work to do as well.  And if anyone thinks that last sentence ignored my international readers, you're included.  The Irish threw out €54 million in voting machines because they weren't safe from tampering.   [Mac users, you can get the Euro symbol (€) by typing Option+Shift+2]

Do we need to call the UN to send election observers to the US in November? 



Other sources on stealing elections:

Foreign Policy has an article on how to steal elections that's quite similar, though it is focused on  countries with few checks and balances.

The vulnerablility of voting machines from ars technica.

A long Alternet piece on stealing elections has this subtitle:

Americans cling to an idealized image of our political integrity, but a look at how we run our elections tells a very different tale.

Gallup Poll senior editor David Moore has written a couple of books on this topic as specifically relates to polling and public opinion.  


I realize the title promises something on why we don't care about this.  I could change the title, but I think it's probably as important as the part on stealing elections.  Let me start a list of things that make sense to me.

1. People commiting election fraud have gotten the media to focus on VOTER fraud.
1. OK, I'm guessing about who is doing this, but googling the question comes up with stories about VOTER fraud, not election fraud. 
2. Those making money off voting machines have a vested interest in people believing they are safe.  
2. People don't know there's a problem because we don't change our basic beliefs easily.  Americans have been taught that American democracy is untouchable.  That's in part what the Republican platform title "American Exceptionalism" is all about.
3. Some people don't care as long as it benefits their side.
4. Americans are overwhelmed by things they should be worried about and so they do nothing about any of them.  (Or pick an issue and work on just that one.) 
   
   
   Readers, you have to supply the rest.

Wings

Think of this as a memorial to a dragonfly that died on my windshield.

If The Democratic Convention Were Postponed By a Hurricane . . .

You know that some of those conservatives who regularly talk with God would be telling us about divine intervention.

But, since I checked before posting this, it seems a lot of others have made similar observations.

Dana Milbank at the Washington Post fills out this thought most clearly:

By their own logic, Republicans and their conservative allies should be concerned that Isaac is a form of divine retribution. Last year, Rep. Michele Bachmann, then a Republican presidential candidate, said that the East Coast earthquake and Hurricane Irene — another “I” storm, but not an Old Testament one — were attempts by God “to get the attention of the politicians.” In remarks later termed a “joke,” she said: “It’s time for an act of God and we’re getting it.”
The influential conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck said last year that the Japanese earthquake and tsunami were God’s “message being sent” to that country. A year earlier, Christian broadcaster and former GOP presidential candidate Pat Robertson tied the Haitian earthquake to that country’s “pact to the devil.”
Previously, Robertson had argued that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for abortion, while the Rev. John Hagee said the storm was God’s way of punishing homosexuality. The late Jerry Falwell thought that God allowed the Sept. 11 attacks as retribution for feminists and the ACLU.

Science anyone?

Good Websites To Stretch Your Imagination

Image from bumbumbum

I found this arresting sculpture by  Bruno Catalano  at bumbumbum. You can also go directly to Catalano's website to see more sculptures and links.

Image from flavorwire

Flavorwire has a post on the 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World

Image from Ready Made

Getting a little less grandiose, Ready Made has some creative projects you can do at home, like this grass couch. 

Image from Radass

And finally, from Radass, a way to recycle the utilitarian shipping pallet. They have 34 different ideas for projects.








We haven't exhausted all the new possibilities in the world.  We just have to be playful and creative.