Bike Testimonial

Doug, my UK friend who's coming to visit in two weeks forwarded an email from someone he'd met in Australia who'd been a physician's assistant in Fairbanks and gave him some advice about this trip to Alaska. (Surprisingly close to what I'm working on.) She now lives in Georgia. In the closing she wrote:

We have our own gas crisis going on which I'm sure you've heard about. It has inspired me to start riding my bicycle to work. I did it today for the first time, and was surprised to find out it took me only 10 minutes! I guess I should have been doing that long ago!

[Picture is the bike bridge over Northern Lights near Goose Lake]

Good and Bad Landscaping

THE GOOD




By the UAA theater arts building they've had this stone lawn for a long time that allows you to drive over the lawn, but not have a sterile paved driveway. Even though the green isn't thick, it looks good.





THE BAD

Down the street, when they built this duplex, they had a crew put black plant cover cloth all over this small hill and then covered it with rocks. Presumably this was intended to eliminate the need to do any yard work here. At the end of winter, the sidewalk is covered with the rocks.Time flies, so I don't remember if it was two or three years ago that they did this, but if we are lucky, the green will totally cover the sterile rocks before long .

Summer's Here, Really!

For Anchorage folks who think summer has forgotten about us, there are signs it's really here.



The iris have mostly bloomed and faded.
















To be replaced by the daisies














And the dianthus.






And the ladies mantle.


















But with the cool weather and grey skies, I can't blame anyone for mistaking the cottonwood seeds for snow. On the left is the whole cotton pod. On the right are the scattered seeds caught up against edge of the grass. In the middle is a clump of seeds.

What's the Largest US National Park?- Post 5: Kennecott Copper Mill

[click here for all the Wrangell-St. Elias Posts]

For me, the highlight of the trip to Wrangell-St. Elias National Park was the Endecott Mill. Copper was what opened up this area. When the first train left Kennecott in April 1911, Lone E. Jansen writes in The Copper Spike, what appears to be the most thorough book on the topic:

It was loaded with ore so rich that it was not even milled, but simply shoveled into sacks as it came from the mountain. The ore from the mine averaged 70 percent pure copper.

The first copper train was expected to be 60 cars long to bring down the great backlog of ore; however, since insurance could only be obtained on a value of up to $250,000 the train was reduced to 35 ore cars. These cars carried 1,200 tons of copper ore, valued at the maximum insurable amount, $250,000.

And things shut down rather abruptly in 1938. The tour of the mill (the mines are further up the mountain and not open for tours at this point) is unlike most US historical tours. It feels like nothing has been touched since they walked out. Nothing has been prettied up. This mill has not been Disneyfied. [All pictures can be enlarged by double clicking on them.]


The private tour - $25 per person, $10 for under 12 - is about two and a half hours. I think there is also a free Park Service tour, but I'm not sure. You walk through town past this pile of gravel where the creek flooded a year or two ago - can't remember all the details - and then past those freshly painted red buildings you go up a path through the underbrush to the top of the mill. The tour starts at the 14th floor - the top - of the mine. In the picture above you can see the mill from below and then looking down back at the town from the very top of the mill. Here, from the top, you can see some remnants of the tram (I'm pretty sure that's what this picture is) and the mountains above the mine where the copper was). The copper was hauled down in big buckets on the tram.

Miners got up to the mines, and their dormitories, by riding the tram or a 3 or 4 mile walk. They had to sign a no-liability form first, and according to our guide, a number of people weren't able to duck low enough and got whacked. He said the death records weren't well kept, but a lot of people died or got badly injured. They had a hospital of sorts on site.


These are a couple of the buildings along the creek that flooded not too long ago.













These are pictures inside the mill.














Everything in here, we were told, is original, including all the stairs. But as I look at the pictures, surely not the safety stripes, and possibly not the hand rail. But that was what made this all so remarkable. There were still tools lying around, scraps on the floor. Actually, I suspect it might have been tidier when it was a working mill. It's good we started at the top rather than at the bottom.




These tables were where ore was shaken in water to separate the copper from the rest of the rock. People worked in this mill and in the mine for 12 hour shifts. When one worker was getting up, the one he shared a bed with was finishing up. They had two holidays - Christmas and July 4th. So it was appropriate to be there July 4th.







This is a closer look at one of the slurry tables. There's linoleum on a wood base, then wooden slats to catch the various sized chunks from the ore.



At the end of the tour we were back on the main street at the bottom of the mill. Here's a picture looking back up at the bizarre building we'd just toured.




We went across the street into the power plant at the end of the tour.


One can't help but think about this strange chapter in US history. Here was this incredibly rich copper mine but it was separated from regular transportation routes by rugged mountains, rushing rivers, in country that was cold (temperatures get well under -40˚ which is the same in F and C) and snowy in the winter and thick undergrowth and hungry mosquitoes in the summer. The railroad to Kennecott from Cordova is 196 miles long, crossing rivers, gorges, and in one case five miles right over a glacier. Repairs had to be made every year. Janson writes

From the beginning, the Copper River and Northwestern was really more than a mining railroad. It was glamor, adventure and excitement. Its construction had truly been "man against the wilderness." Its people, such as M.J. Heney, E.C. Hawkins[There's only a bit about Hawkins, but this is in an interesting on-line book Alaska, An Empire in the Making published in 1913 two after the completion of the railroad], Dr. Whiting[The link has a picture about 3/4 down the page of Dr. Whiting performing the autopsy on Soapy Smith], Jack McCord and "Big Mike" Sullivan, seemed bigger than life, their achievements almost beyond the power of description, and therefore a challenge to writers to try, somehow, to describe them.(p. 149)

The tour guide told us that net profits for the Guggenheims and JP Morgan owned mine were $100-200 million, or over $1 billion in today's dollars. The workers got paid well by the going wage but the work must have been punishing and we don't know how many died. Lone E. Janson writes in The Copper Spike:

The Cordova Alaskan reported that, "A rumor from some disgruntled source in Valdez that the wages for unskilled labor would be cut from $3.50 to $3.00 a day, a reduction of 50 cents for a ten-hour day, is not the case, although unskilled labor in the states at $1.75 per day is plentiful." (p. 72). . .

Someone I talked to said that she'd heard that the Chinese workers on the railroad were treated terribly and many died. I could find nothing in The Copper Spike about Chinese workers.

"The railroad was built," said old-timer Dick Janson Sr.,[a relative of the author?] "by what they call 'station men.' Two or three men would form a 'companie' which contracted for different jobs at so much per cubic yard of rock or dirt moved, or in railroad construction, so much per station.

"They followed the heavy construction around the world, these station men, and they knew each other from other jobs and other places. Like on the Copper river, I worked with men from the Gillevara Ofoten, the Iron Ore mountain in Sweden, which is the world's farthest north railroad. . .

"Most of the station men were Scandinavians, and they had some colorful names. Sometimes you worked with a man for years and never knew his real name. There were such handles as Pickhandle Jones, The Norwegian King, Shoot-em-up Sweede, Crooked Swede, Hurry-up Jones, and the like.
...The men were of assorted nationalities, some with exceedingly unpronounceable names. If a Mr. Mxlovopovsky appled for work, the paymaster would fix a firm eye on him and pronounce, "From now on your name is Jack Robbins.". . .

Another oddity of the paymaster's window was the fact that horses were on the payroll, that services brought in exactly the same manner as a man's. (p. 72)

[The use of quotations was inconsistent in the original.]



Here's an Alaska-Yukon Railroad bibliography
I found working on this post.

Was Olson Wearing the Wire? [NO]

[Later: Anonymous points out in a comment below that Lisa Demer's ADN article says the FBI were in the next booth taping the conversation. Given they were listening to Bill Allen's phone, they would have tipped off about the breakfast meeting.]

At Alaskan Abroad, Dillon speculates from the conversations cited in the indictment that Senator Olson was cooperating with the Feds.

The question that comes to mind reading the Cowdery indictment is whether Sen. Donny Olson was cooperating with the feds at the time of the June 25, 2006 breakfast meeting with Cowdery? You have to hope so, otherwise it's pretty hard to explain away this conversation:

According to the indictment, Bill Allen asked Olson: "So you need . . . some money here pretty quick, huh?"

Olson nodded his head affirmatively and told Allen that he could use his money "to get out there" and campaign.

Olson: How much are you good for?

Allen: What?

Olson: How much are you good for?

Allen: Oh, we can probably go 25.

Olson: That's a good start...

In the previous trials, only one had an active informant throughout - the Anderson trial. Frank Prewitt, helped set up the scheme that got Anderson indicted, was wearing a wire. That was in 2004 already. (After Allen agreed to cooperate he made one call to Pete Kott to get him to verify something on tape - I think it was about getting money for polls done by Dave Dittman. And there was only one situation in the Kohring trial I recall - a meal with Frank Prewitt who carried the wire.)

Allen and Smith weren't brought into the FBI office until the end of August 2006. Before that they didn't know they were being listened to. So in June 2006 neither of them would have been carrying a wire.

But if Allen and Smith weren't working undercover yet, who was carrying the wire? Since Cowdery is the one being indicted, it wouldn't have been him.

The FBI was monitoring Suite 604 in the Baranof Hotel and was listening to Allen's and Smith's telephones. But in the previous trials, when there was tape from a restaurant conversation, one of the people in the conversation was carrying a mic or a video camera. Or was there another person at the breakfast? The indictment says:

On or about June 25, 2006, COWDERY met with COMPANY CEO and
State Senator A for breakfast at a restaurant located in Anchorage, Alaska.

No one else mentioned at the breakfast. So maybe Olson was wearing the wire.

Cowdery Indictment

Here's the indictment itself:

Cowdery-indictment source prod affiliate 7 - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: Cowdery-indictment source prod affiliate 7

From the indictment we can see the key players and the charges. I'm pulling out excerpts from the first part of the indictment and posting the whole indictment below.


The Players:

JOHN COWDERY ("COWDERY") was an elected member of the Alaska
State Senate, having been first elected to the Senate in 2000. COWDERY represented
District O, located in Anchorage, Alaska. He was reelected to the Senate in November
2004.

"COMPANY A") was a privately held company that was incorporated in a State other
than the State of Alaska. COMPANY A was a multinational corporation that provided
services to the energy, resource, and process industries and to the public sector.
COMPANY A was comprised of multiple subsidiary companies and, collectively,
COMPANY A was engaged in interstate commerce in connection with the foregoing
projects.
[This has to be VECO]

"COMPANY CEO" was the Chief Executive Officer and principal owner
of COMPANY A.
[Bill Allen]

"COMPANY VP" was the Vice President of Community and Government
Affairs of COMPANY A.
[Rick Smith]

State Senator A was an elected member of the Alaska State Senate.
[Donny Olson]

STATE SENATOR B was an elected member of the Alaska State Senate.
STATE SENATOR B resigned from the Senate in 2006.

[Dillon at An Alaskan Abroad says this is Ben Stevens. But Stevens, in my recollection, did not resign from office, he simply did not run for reelection in 2006. The Feds are usually precise with details like this.]

The Charges

Conspiracy and Bribery

As I read this, the charge is that Cowdery conspired with Bill Allen and Rick Smith to bribe Senator A (Olson) to vote in favor of the version of the PPT tax that Veco was supporting. Then the same facts are used for the bribery charge. So count one is for conspiring to bribe and count two is for actually bribing. From the indictment (p. 10)

COWDERY also told COMPANY CEO that, when he had talked to State Senator A, COWDERY said, "Well, I could probably get some money, but we gotta get a commitment that you're gonna vote for the PPT and the . . . gas contract." COWDERY told COMPANY CEO that State Senator A said "he had
no problem with that."

NOTE: Some of the peculiarity of the language of the indictment itself is due to the need to match the indictment to the law. As I recall from the earlier trials, you need various elements:
a. “an elected public official”
b. to ‘knowingly and unlawfully conspire, confederate, etc…”
c. the government entity (State of Alaska here) has to receive more than $10,000 in federal funding
d. the ‘anything of value” “to influence or reward” has to be over $5000
Also, there has to be interstate commerce, thus the explicit mention of that in the description of Company A.

WALL-E

The opening of the movie is spectacular. The visuals are breathtaking and for the first half hour or so I was totally taken in. There is no dialogue as we see a little robot scoop garbage, crush it into cubes, then place the cubes into piles that dwarf the nearby skyscrapers in an abandoned city in dark earth tones.


I can see growth-at-any-cost conservatives shake their heads and make snide comments about liberal Hollywood brainwashing children with this sort of pollution-killed-world followed by images of bloated humans too fat to walk living in some sort of evil utopian mix of Las Vegas and a cruise ship, way out in space.

But despite the visual technology and the opening environmental gloom, the story is basically the conservative Disney formula with anthropomorphic robots who fall in love and save humanity.

I couldn’t help thinking about what Disney messages I was absorbing as a kid when I saw Snow White, Cinderella, Bambi, and all the others. The fairy tales, well, Disney just adapted the stories that were already in our culture. Sure, the various male and female roles of those stories have been well deconstructed. But what about in this movie?

Although the she robot - Eve - is Macly sleek and beautiful and the he robot - WALL-E -is, well, a geek, that isn’t so different from Clark Kent or Spider Man. And, after all, Eve is merely a probe acting mechanically and WALL-E is the one who gives her the plant that changes everything, who sneaks into the spaceship and starts a rebellion among the ship’s robots. And the movie is called WALL-E, not Eve. Cinderella and Snow White at least got the title roles, even if they had to wait to be saved by men.

And what message does the movie give us about humanity? Despite the obvious and bleak environmental message, the movie is giving us a pretty conservative feel good, we-Americans-can-overcome-anything-because-basically-we-are-the-best. You can trash your planet, then leave and wallow, fat and lazy, in do-nothing luxury for 700 years, and still manage to suddenly regain your physical and spiritual strength to fight oppression and recolonize the world. So grab another Coke and butter up that pop-corn.

Good science fiction and good fantasy require suspension of disbelief as the story violates one or two basic truths of life as we know it. But from there on it needs to be internally consistent. Once Dorothy got dropped into Oz, everything was perfectly reasonable and consistent. This story wasn’t. There were lots of little loose ends. The precious plant that signals the ship can return to earth, despite being naked in outer space, still lives. It was well protected throughout, there was no need to flash freeze it outside the ship with just some minor wilting.

The Captain, on the one hand has to look up words like 'soil,' but spits out 'mutiny' at the Hal clone computer running the ship. If 'soil' dropped out the vocabulary after 700 years, surely 'mutiny' would have too after 700 years of total rule by the robots and computers.

It never was clear whether these were the same people who left earth 700 years ago who somehow stayed alive for all that time or if this was many generations of earthlings later. If the former, how did they live that long? There were children on board - it would be even stranger if they had stayed children all that time. But the human blobs who couldn’t get off their floating lounge chairs, needed help moving if they fell off, and spoke to each other via cell-phone like screens even though they were right next to each other, surely didn’t have sex. In fact, the two who were interfered with by WALL-E at one point accidentally touched hands and their looks of surprise suggested this was a totally new experience.

I wrote most of this and then looked to see if it had already been said. I found a list of many reviews and read a few from the top of the list (people who gushed) and a few from the bottom (people who gave mixed reviews.) Some of what I wrote was said by everyone I read, but most were so dazzled by the good parts they didn't reflect on how, rather than breaking new ground, the robots (such as the anti-contaminant robot) say, were just mechanical versions of the mice in Cinderella Or they simply saw such things as homage. Kenneth Turan of the LA Times, a reviewer I generally like, interprets it this way:

Daring and traditional, groundbreaking and familiar, apocalyptic and sentimental, "Wall-E" gains strength from embracing contradictions that would destroy other films.

I saw it as pushing and then running out of steam and going back to cliché. When I started blogging it never occurred to me to talk to the people in court I was writing about. I watched as the real reporters did. Well, of course, that's how you get your story. But when I did, finally, make contact with my 'subjects' I also realized that it changed the relationship. And when I wrote I found myself having to fight back toward objectivity. Reading Turan's review, I can't help but wonder whether the LA Times' long time reviewer knows the people who made this film and whether that colored his review. I have no idea, but just a thought.

The reviewer who came closest to capturing my reaction was SF Chronicle reviewer, Mick LaSalle, who probably doesn't know the Pixar people, wrote

What we have with "WALL-E" is 45 minutes of a masterpiece and another 50-odd minutes of dithering - there as a concession that you can't market a 45-minute movie.

Cowdery's Indictment - FBI's View, His Attorney's View, Gov. Palin's View

For people (like me) who were not paying attention, Sen. John Cowdery was indicted today. The Anchorage FBI website has the following media statement:

FOR IMMEDIATE CRM

THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2008 (202) 514-2007

WWW.USDOJ.GOV TDD (202) 514-1888

ALASKA STATE SENATOR INDICTED ON PUBLIC CORRUPTION CHARGES

WASHINGTON–John Cowdery, a current member of the Alaska state Senate, was indicted on charges arising out of a federal investigation into public corruption in the state of Alaska, Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Friedrich for the Criminal Division announced today.

A two-count indictment returned by a federal grand jury in Anchorage on July 9, 2008, charges Cowdery with one count of bribery and one count of conspiracy. The indictment alleges that Cowdery and his co-conspirators, including Bill J. Allen, the former chief executive officer of VECO Corporation, and Richard L. Smith, VECO’s former vice president, corruptly offered and agreed to give financial benefits to another state legislator (State Senator A) to influence and reward State Senator A in exchange for State Senator A agreeing to perform official acts as a member of the Alaska State Legislature.

The indictment specifically alleges that VECO Corporation, which at the time was a multinational oil services corporation, had a significant financial interest in contracts with oil producers in Alaska and, consequently, supported certain oil and gas legislation pending in the Alaska state legislature in 2006. The indictment further alleges that, in exchange for $25,000 – characterized as political campaign contributions – Cowdery, Allen, Smith and others sought an agreement with State Senator A that would require State Senator A to vote in favor of the oil and gas legislation favored by VECO. Cowdery and the alleged co-conspirators agreed to this plan, according to the indictment, through a series of telephone calls and in-person meetings.

If convicted, Cowdery faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison on the bribery count and a maximum penalty of five years in prison on the conspiracy count, as well as a maximum $250,000 fine for each count.

An indictment is merely an accusation and defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty at trial beyond a reasonable doubt.

To date, there have been seven criminal convictions arising out of the ongoing investigation into public corruption in the state of Alaska. Thomas T. Anderson, a former elected member of the Alaska House of Representatives, was convicted in July 2007 and sentenced to five years in prison for extortion, conspiracy, bribery and money laundering for soliciting and receiving money from an FBI confidential source in exchange for agreeing to perform official acts to further a business interest represented by the source. Peter Kott, a former Speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives, was convicted in September 2007 and sentenced to six years in prison for extortion, bribery and conspiracy. Victor H. Kohring, a former elected member of the Alaska House of Representatives, was convicted at trial in November 2007 for attempted extortion, bribery and conspiracy, and was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. Four other individuals, including Allen and Smith, have pleaded guilty to felony public corruption charges.


This case is being prosecuted by Trial Attorneys Nicholas A. Marsh and Edward P. Sullivan of the Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section, headed by Chief William M. Welch II, and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Joseph W. Bottini and James A. Goeke from the District of Alaska. The ongoing investigation is being led by the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation.

Senator A, according to the ADN is Democrat Donnie Olson of Nome. Like the other Department of Justice press releases, when talking about convictions, it only mentions the charges that the defendants were found guilty on, not the ones where the defendants were acquitted.


The ADN has a lot of material up on their website and Cowdery's Attorney's Statement and Governor Palin's statements come from their links. I'll look through the indictment and see what's of interest in their and perhaps post the whole thing. You can double click to enlarge the images below.




And here's the Governor's statement asking Cowdery to step down from his Senate seat.




Hmmm. Do you think the Governor had anything specific in mind when she wrote these words? Look carefully for the hidden message.

Today’s news is A Good reminder that we must continue to be vigilant In defending Alaska's sovereignty against those who would undermine it in an attempt to sell out Alaskans. As we move forward, let me remind everyone that this administration is committed to putting Alaskans and their interests first, as we develop our resources in a responsible and ethical manner.

Vertical Farming - Bicyclemark interviews Professor Dickson Despommier

Pam at Grassroots Science sent me to Cizenreporter.org a while ago when he was podcasting from Thailand. Today she pointed out this podcast on Vertical Farming. I'm wary of moving farming into new high tech directions. While understanding the science is useful, the maximizing short term profits application of science to agriculture is what has made food such political issue today. And I just saw WALL-E last night so that too, I'm sure, is adding to the skepticism.

But bicyclemark at Citzenreporter.org is an example of what can be done with blogs and podcasts.

Go to the site to hear the interview.

bm269 Vertical Farming and the New Agricultural Revolution

Published by bicyclemark at 11:11 pm under Audio

There is more to urban farming than just growing crops on empty lots in cities. In fact, there is a type of urban farming that involves growing alot more food in tall buildings, making use of the latest innovations of crop growing and energy usage. My guest, Professor Dickson Despommier of Columbia Universty explains what vertical farming is why it is so important for the future of human existance.

What's the Largest US National Park?- Post 4: Camping with 5 Kids and their Parents

We met this family on a camping trip two years ago. We got to like each of the kids.(Well, only four of them were on that trip.) When our own second kid came we quickly understood that 1 + 1 equals more than 2. But five? Actually, they have the tent raising and lowering routine down. They do know how to push each others' buttons, but they also clearly love each other and are comfortable together.

I hope the pictures and video can convey a little. Top is waiting for the fireworks, with J in the picture too. This was about 11:30 pm.






There was a fair amount of reading by some of the kids.






And occasionally the parents had a moment together.





It was really clear how expensive a big family can be. It was $5 one way per person in the van from McCarthy to Kennecott. That's $35 for a 4.5 mile ride. (We walked back.) Then the mill tour was $25 a head, $10 for under 12. Two kids got to go with Dad and me. The others got to eat lunch at the lodge. (Most meals are home cooked for obvious reasons.) Here are the lucky two that went on the tour. They were mighty jealous when they found out the others got to eat lunch out. Also, I understand that there is a free ranger tour, but it was several hours later.



On the way to McCarthy we stopped to wash up at this crystal clear creek with water that woke you up much better than caffeine.






Here's S practicing flying.













This was the first morning at the Chitina campground. The wind was down, the air temperature was comfortable, and almost no mosquitoes. The video below shows the kids around the campfire.










Dad got to sleep too.