Another Great Anchorage Summer Night

Shining Lights - Carol Comeau

A friend was organizing the Shining Lights dinner at the Sheraton Hotel and J was helping out Saturday and Sunday. This started as a synagogue event that honored people who were members of the congregation or the greater Jewish community each year and was held at the synagogue and was fairly low key. Last year's honoree was Jim Gottstein. The award honors individuals whose career is dedicated to public service and that demonstrates the highest level of character, integrity, and ethics. For the most part I think the people honored have fit that description, though one year, while we were out of the country, someone seems to have hijacked the award and they made a a terrible choice.

The event is also supposed to be a fund raiser as well. This year's five honorary chairs are the CEO's of BP, CIRI, BP Alaska, and JL Properties - none members of the Congregation or the Jewish Community to my knowledge - and the President of the Rose Foundation. Watching Joan and considering it was at the Howard Rock Ballroom at the Sheraton and all these corporate I was beginning to think this was going to be over the top.

But Carol Comeau is really an ideal recipient for this and the night turned out moving and inspiring. Here's are a few clips from the evening. I'd like to say highlights - but that implies I picked the best. Unfortunately I have limited room on my cardreader and so I video and hope I get some good parts to post. And the room was dark. And we were way in back. But you can get a sense of the evening.



Carol Comeau was the honoree this year and from my perspective it was a good choice.

Another Anchorage Biking Plus - Late Sunsets

Riding home from the Shining Lights dinner last night.
It's about 10:15 as I get onto the bike trail in the middle of town, yet in this ancient woods. The sun's behind the clouds for a moment. The cool spring's delayed the greening. It's beautiful nevertheless.



I stop and wait a few minutes for this moose to wander a little further from the trail.



Almost home, now, I catch a glimpse of the sun setting from 36th. It's 10:30pm. Solstice is still a month off.

The Price for Lunch with an Alaskan Politician

At Sunday night's Shining Lights dinner, Temple Beth Sholom's annual award dinner, which this year honored Anchorage School Superintendent Carol Comeau (I'll do more on this later) there was a silent auction. Among the many, many items up for auction were (separate of course) lunches with Mayor Mark Begich and with Senator Ted Stevens.

I got there just as bidding had closed.
$125 was bid for lunch with Ted Stevens. I'm pretty sure this was the final bid. A person was circling the final bids on each item and was a few items away from this one when I got this picture.
She'd already circled the Mark Begich lunch for $250 when I got to it a few seconds later.

Why People Don't Like Bicyclists and Why they Should Get Over It

Today's ADN has several biking articles, which reminded me I had started putting together a video of my ride to the office in Chiang Mai. I'd wanted to find a way to strap the camera to my chest as I rode, but that never happened. Finally I just tried biking one handed and that worked. Sort of. Here's the daily ride I had, pretty much in real time, but using clips put together over several days.


Now that we're back after two and a half months without a car, we're reassessing all our daily transportation - can we walk? can we bike? Can we do this without using fossil fuel? A lot of the time we can't, but a lot of the time we can.

As gas gets more expensive, biking becomes more of an option for other people as well. But why are some people so torqued by bicyclists? I've thought about this a lot. I think people get irritated for different reasons - about anything, not just bikes. Sometimes it's legitimate because someone has done something rotten. Often though, the anger is more about the angry person than the target. Here's my list of reasons people don't like bicyclists.

• Problems with the cyclists
• Cyclists driving in traffic without regard to the dangers they are causing to themselves and others - this is especially a problem in the winter when drivers have enough trouble with slick streets already
• Smug, arrogant cyclists who use their cyclist status as a holier than thou platform

• Problems with the angry person suggesting deeper emotional reactions to cyclists
  
• For some people, having a car is a symbol of success. Perhaps they had hard times growing up, perhaps it was pounded in by parents, but a car shows you've made it. Cyclists are seen as losers who haven't made it, or cyclists' talking about the merits of cycling seem to be attacking them as drivers.
• For some people cars are a symbol of progress and development and cyclists are seen as greenies who would stop progress. This can be tied up with one's faith in capitalism as the only true path. People on bikes are thus seen as childish and preventing the economy from developing the way it should, essentially they are attacking the American way in these folks' minds.
  
• People with health and weight problems may feel mocked or slighted by slim bikers zipping along in their tight shorts.
• Some people are just mad at the world and bikes just make one more target - it's easy to play bully to a cyclist when you're in a Dodge pickup
  

I'm sure readers can add reasons. But it seems that one way to get past seemingly intransigent problems is to step back and look not at the apparent issue, but address the underlying problems. We need to stop using bikes as symbolic whipping posts for other issues. As we face the need to cut back on energy use, we could learn that there are plenty of viable ways to use less fossil fuels.

In addition, people have all sorts of reasons why they can't use a bike to commute to work.

• Reasons people can't commute to work by bike
• need to stop along the way to shop, pick things up
• takes too much time
• no place to shower at work
• too far away
• too dangerous
• too cold
• need to wear nice clothes at work
• what if my kids got sick at school and I had to pick them up?
• I have to carry things that I can't fit on a bike
  

We could add more and more such reasons. Many are valid, but only up to a point. This isn't an all or nothing proposition. There's no reason why we can't have hybrid car/bike/bus commuters. Someone could bike a couple days a week, when they don't have to be dressed up. Or they could leave an extra set of clothes or two at work. Buses have bike racks, so you could bus the bike to work and ride home.

The danger parts are legitimate in many cases - but if more people got serious about biking, bike lanes could get bigger and could be kept free of debris and could be well plowed. Cold is sometimes an issue, but if people can be out all day skiing or snow machining, they can bike 30-60 minutes each way to work.

When we are faced with something new, the normal reaction is to think about how it is going to cause problems. What we won't be able to do. The list above gives some reasons people offer why biking to work is impractical. But there are also benefits which are unseen. Things that make me feel great when I can use my bike instead of a car.

• The benefits of biking
• Individual
• Little or no traffic on the bike trails (of course that's a good reason not to encourage too many people to start biking to work)
• Get exercise on the way to work or on an errand (and Anchorage is cool enough, and biking allows one to move forward while coasting, and biking always creates its own breeze so one needn't get all sweaty)
• Great scenery along the bike trails - I'm literally in the woods part of the way instead of on city streets
• Great parking - free parking close to where I need to be
• Time to think and reflect
• No gas bills when I ride
• It just feels good
  
• Community
• One less car per cyclist on the road (carpoolers excepted)
  
• One more parking space per cyclist (carpoolers excepted)
• Less oil used
• Less pollution
• Healthier population - lower medical costs
• Happier population

This is not an all or nothing proposition. Not everyone can do their jobs without the storage space and speed of a car. Not everyone can ride a bike every day. And while the oil savings, for instance, of one commuter may seem negligible, if 30 million people (10% of the US population) rode a bike and saved one gallon of gas per work day, that would be 30 million gallons of gas. That isn't going to save the world by itself, but if we take a US Department of Energy estimate prepared for then Senator Frank Murkowski that there is

a mean or expected value of 10.3 billion barrels of technically recoverable undiscovered oil in the ANWR coastal plain

and that there are 42 gallons of gas in a barrel of oil (it's more complicated than that, but that will do for now)

That comes to about 432,600,000,000 gallons of gas from ANWR. Divide that by those 30,000,000 a day saved by the hypothetical bikers and you get 14,420 days. Divide that by 260 workdays per year (we'll forget about all the people who work on weekends) and you get 55 years. So, just having 10% of the US population save 1 gallon of gas a day by biking to work would save the equivalent of ANWR's mean estimated oil in 55 years. (And that's estimated, it could be less. And it could be more.) That cumulative amount of savings is not insignificant.

(On the other, according to the Department of Energy's Weekly Petroleum Status Report for the Week Ending May 9, 2008 (page 6), in the US

Over the last four weeks, motor gasoline demand has averaged nearly 9.3 million barrels per day.

While barrels of motor gas and barrels of crude oil appear to be slightly different, if everyone - including commercial drivers - took a one day driving holiday per month, we'd save the equivalent of ANWR's estimated mean value of 10.3 billion barrels of recoverable crude in about 10 years.

Humans are amazing. We're amazing in how easily we get used to the status quo and don't want to change. But we're amazing in how we can solve problems and come up with totally unexpected solutions to problems.

So bike to work at least once this summer. Or bike part way to work and take a bus the rest of the way. And if you can't bike, find some other way to move your muscles and save gas.

Mangoes

Mr. Sukeaw, a leader in one of the villages (you can see him the day I met him) my organization in Thailand worked with, complained that I was leaving before they were picking the mangoes. So I recently got these two photos. (The woman is Bon, one of my co-workers who helped a lot to explain things to me.) He gets something like 9 Baht per kilo of mangoes - about 30 cents for maybe six mangoes.
And I just bought this plastic package of mangoes at Costco for $6.49 here in Anchorage. I suspect these are Mexican mangoes, but hypothetically, who all got the other $6.19? Why does the farmer, who does most of the work and takes most of the risk, get only 4% of the final sale price?

Four US House Candidates Talk to HACA

The Hispanic Affairs Council of Alaska hosted a candidate forum this afternoon at the Mountain View Community Center for the US House Race. It was a chance to see all the candidates except the incumbent.





All of them were a refreshing change to polite and respectful compared to Don Young, who, we were told, was unable to make the audio conference connection because of a change in travel scheduling. But he offered to meet with the HACA board when he's back in the state. Hmmmm, what is a better setting for getting your ideas across? A forum set up with four other candidates where each is limited to two minute responses, or a private meeting with the board?


The format was interesting. Candidates were NOT asked the same questions. They had too many questions to do that. But at the end, candidates were able to choose one of the questions they weren't asked.

I got there late and heard Sean Parnell, responding to a question on NAFTA, saying that he believed in free trade, therefore, yes, Mexican buses should be allowed into the US.

His next question, on how to lower the Hispanic dropout rates in school, was a chance for him to talk about incentives, namely the incentive scholarship that he had something to do with. He said incentive or incentivize about 6 times in his two minutes. He never addressed the Hispanic part of that question.



Next he was asked about Federal reimbursements for translations/interpreters for patients with limited English. He responded that if those Americans are entitled to health care, I don't see how we can say no. (I'm not using quotes because that's close but probably not exactly what he said.) Then he changed the subject to agree with Berkowitz about allowing out of state health insurance.

And then he was asked,Which Presidential candidate has the best economic plan for the country? He said he was speechless and then regained his speech and talked about economic stimulus - reducing economic barriers, gas tax holiday, need to move forward on alternative energy, reduce demand, conservation, and reduce the deficit. He appeared to not know what McCain's economic plan was so he changed the topic to something he was prepared for. He never did name a presidential candidate.

When offered the chance to to pick a question he hadn't been asked, he talked about how we all benefited from the oil pipeline and how the next big thing was the gas pipeline.

Finally, for the last question - what makes you the best person for the job? - he talked about the difference between success and greatness. Success is achieving things. Greatness is who we are as a people (I wasn't sure now if he was talking about Alaskans or himself) our core. Great - who we are, I'm calling Alaskans to greatness. Limit government growth, stimulate individual initiative. Make a change, make difference.

Overall, Parnell talked in platitudes, in generalities. He started from an ideological stance each time - free trade is good; incentives are good, economic stimulus is good - but never got into the subtleties of the issues or got very concrete or detailed. Just being polite isn't good enough for me. We just saw what the prosecutor called a "politely corrupt" legislator sentenced to 42 months. I don't mean to imply that Parnell is corrupt, but just that being polite isn't enough. Even though it's a positive change from our current Congressperson.



LeDoux suffered from the same problem of generality, though to a much lesser extent. She was "in general" against vouchers, but wouldn't rule them out in situations where poor kids in failing schools were concerned.

She was for expanding the rural dental assistant program.

When asked if we were in a recession, said Alaska was in better shape than most of the country, but that yes, we were. She mentioned the high price of fuel and that we should never give up on ANWR, as well as finding alternative energy sources. I know that ANWR is the Holy Grail for Alaska Republicans, but if we couldn't open it with a Republican US Senate, House, and President, what makes them think it will get opened by a Democratic controlled House and Senate and perhaps President? I know that they think that $120/barrel oil changes things, but squeezing out whatever little oil there only postpones the day of reckoning a bit and contributes to global warning. When I think about the millions of dollars Alaska has spent on lobbying for ANWR unsuccessfully while cutting $10,000 here and $40,000 there for social programs, I just have to shake my head and wonder. Sorry, didn't mean to veer off there.

When she got the chance to pick a question she'd not been asked before, she jumped to discuss No Child Left Behind (NCLB) which she called a total failure. Then went on to use ideology to explain what it was a failure - the Feds shouldn't be telling the communities how to educate their kids. And there was something about Anchorage having a lot of bilingual kids, but I didn't catch her point on that part of it.

Finally, when asked why she should be the candidate, she said that an important part of leadership is never say "die." She then went on to relate how in 1992 she lost her husband and a son in a car accident, how she didn't even want to get up in the morning. But she had two other kids and needed to continue her law practice and that is what she did. "I've been tested. Been through hell and back. I know I can fight for you." Can't argue with that. That was the only time I really felt I heard directly from her heart during the forum.



OK, now I've boxed myself in. Giving so much time to those candidates, it's only fair to go through each of the questions for the other two candidates. Not sure I can do it. When I graded student papers, I always felt I needed to write more on the papers that I thought were lacking something, because those students needed more direction. But the good papers also needed encouragement and challenges. So here again, I find that I needed to justify my sense of the two candidates who were less impressive by giving more detail. The other two candidates conveyed to me a much stronger grasp of both details of the implications of policies and laws (such as No Child Left Behind) and they understood the larger context. But then if you don't like the unequal coverage of what the candidates said, you can go to the next forum and hear for yourself I guess.

Benson, when asked about drivers licenses for illegal aliens got to the practical issues immediately. Of course (I'm writing here) there are logical, rule of law, standards for saying no to such drivers' licenses, but Benson said that she'd been in an accident the other day and she wants everyone driving to have a license so they can get insurance. She did it again on her next question on NCLB, she had the jargon acronyms on the tip of her tongue. HQT for example. Sure, she said, it sounds good, we all want Highly Qualified Teachers, but when a village has only a couple of teachers, they can't be HQT in every subject.

When asked, "What are your priorities for vulnerable populations to gain access to health care?" she quoted John Edwards' recommendation to move from the terminology of access to the terminology of provision. Then rattled off numbers - 30% of Alaskans at some part of the year don't have adequate health care. Then she went into another practical example of a guy with an injured hand who got bandaged up instead of the getting the surgery he needed because he didn't have insurance. Now he's on disability. How is that cost effective she asked.

Berkowitz was also fluent on the issues, spoke from the heart, and filled his time with specifics that showed his familiarity with the topic. When asked about seniors getting cut off by doctors when they get onto medicare, he said first, we need more doctors, need to grow more here, get a medical school in the state. Second, find solutions so doctors don't lose money when they treat medicare patients. There was a range of options he said, but the real question is why the system is broken? We need to solve some of the problems ourselves - expand Denali kid care, buy health insurance across state lines. (I'm not so sure about the economics of a medical school, but I do know that people who go Outside to school, usually don't come back to Alaska.)

There was a look of glee on his face when he was asked about alternative energy. "I love this question" he said and then listed all sorts of potential energy sources in Alaska - geothermal, solar, the bark beetle killed lumber, wind. He then listed three key objectives here:
1. Lower utility bills and create jobs
2. Need for Alaskans to respond positively to Global Warming because we are the most affected state and need to set an example for the rest of the country
3. Get energy independent - I see, he said, a time when every house is energy self sufficient.


My personal favorites here were the two Democrats. But it wasn't merely because of the stands they took. Benson and Berkowitz were both clearly far more able to talk about each topic in great detail, offering a sense of understanding - intellectually and in human terms - all the issues that were addressed. From Parnell I mostly heard platitudes and he didn't answer all the questions, preferring in some cases to change the subject. Maybe that was the luck of the draw of questions, but I don't think so.

Berkowitz made the point sometime during the forum that it's important with a Democratic Congress, to have a Democrat. Of course that was the argument Stevens and Young gave every year until the Republicans were no longer in the majority. But as head of the minority in Juneau, Berkowitz knows well how little one gets done. I suspect that will be a theme we hear a lot from Democrats in this election.

Why Isn't China Helping the Burmese Victims?

Frank asks in a comment on my post on the difference between a hurricane and a cyclone,

do you know the earthquake in Wenchuan of China on May 12?

I'm pretty sure that Frank is one of my former students who lives in Beijing. It isn't always easy for people in China to gauge what the rest of the world is hearing about China.

So, yes Frank, the news here is dominated by stories about the earthquake and about how well the Chinese government is responding to the earthquake and how Chinese citizens are all volunteering to help in any way possible. For the most part the news is strongly positive, and I'm wondering a little bit about how the reporters are getting the stories. Who are the interpreters? How are they getting to the various sites? What is happening in areas where Western journalists are not getting access? I don't know, I'm just a little skeptical.

For the western readers of the blog who aren't sure where the earthquake and the cyclone happened, here are some maps.

You can see on the first map where China and Burma are in relationship to Alaska. (And for those of you wondering why Alaska is the benchmark, well, I live in Alaska. Since we have to see everything in the Main Stream Media from New York or LA's perspective, it does the NY and LA types some good to see that not everyone thinks that they are the center of the universe.)


And then this map shows where Sichuan Province (the location of the earthquake) is in relationship to where the cyclone did most damage in Burma. It's only about 1000 miles apart. The same approximate distance as:
Berlin-Istanbul Moscow-Prague Bangkok-Hong Kong Cleveland-Dallas
Pittsburgh-Miami Boston-St. Louis San Francisco-El Paso Los Angeles - Seattle

I'm thinking about the enormous difference in response between the Burmese cyclone and the Chinese earthquake. Sichuan is about 1000 miles away from the Irrawaddy Delta where the cyclone had its biggest effect.

China is the major supporter of the Burmese government. Without China's economic and political support, the Burmese regime would fall. Some news reports have said that China's openness to the world press in the earthquake disaster is aimed at showing that China is a world player that can handle emergencies. And the contrast between the way China is handling the earthquake and the way Burma is handling the cyclone is extreme.

But I can't help but wonder why, with Burma on its border, and with so much influence over the Burmese government, China hasn't helped to save tens of thousands of lives in Burma. They could have leaned on the military leaders quietly and even gotten publicly invited to assist. So they wouldn't have to worry about setting a precedent for interfering with the internal matters of another country. What they are doing in Sichuan proves they can do this work. So they certainly could have gone into Burma.

Perhaps Burmese lives aren't important, only Chinese lives. Helping the victims of the earthquake in China effectively will help China's world image. But not nearly as much as helping the victims in Burma would.



By the way, my post called "What's the difference between a cyclone, hurricane, typhoon, and tornado?" got listed as the first blog post in Google Trends "Difference between hurricane and cyclone" which was number 90 on May 6 and suddenly today is sending a lot of folks my way. I should have my highest single day hit count (I think I got to about 270 once during one of the trials). I was never aware of Google Trends and I'm not quite sure how it works. And very few have stopped to see more than that one page.

California's Same-Sex Marriage Ban Overturned

From CNN:

"There can be no doubt that extending the designation of marriage to same-sex couples, rather than denying it to all couples, is the equal protection remedy that is most consistent with our state's general legislative policy and preference," said the 120-page ruling.

It said that the state law's language "limiting the designation of marriage to a 'union between a man and a woman' is unconstitutional, and that the remaining statutory language must be understood as making the designation of marriage available to both opposite-sex and same-sex couples."

Those who have been working so hard, like Senator David Vitter

to protect traditional marriage as being between one man and one woman

have always puzzled me. Didn't they read the bible? Many of the biblical kings had more than one wife. And even Senator Vitter practiced the time-old custom have having only one wife, but women on the side.

Marriage has been an economic and political event throughout history. It was a way to establish (at least publicly) the parentage of children, a way to make truces between families, and to pass on property and wealth. The idea of love as the basis of marriage is rather recent. In India today arranged marriages are still common and love develops or not as the marriage progresses.

So if two people of the same sex fall in love and want to share a home, and to share medical insurance and all the other things that men and women share in marriage, I fail to see the harm in that.

It seems there is a distinction here between religiously sanctioned marriages and state sanctioned marriages. I strongly support the idea that various religions - which people join voluntarily - can make their own restrictions about who they want to marry. But the state should not discriminate against people who want to share their lives together simply because they are both men or both women.

Just as bans against interracial marriages seem outrageous today, the bans against same sex marriages will seem outrageous 30 years in the future.

Sandhill Cranes in Flight

I posted my digital video, but it took some time for my film from my old faithful Pentax to be developed. So, here are a couple of shots of the cranes flying.