Good Morning Vietnam!!

Here's a morning view from our balcony. The flag is part of our balcony.



I was going to add an audio from the movie Good Morning Vietnam, but when I looked for it, I got to a website that has original audio from soldiers in Vietnam, including this audio of the actual DJ Robin Williams played saying Good Morning Vietnam that someone taped off the radio. When you listen, no, it isn't broken. He just has great lungs.


And when I went onto Skype to see if I could get through to my son, the skype phone rang and it was my father's cousin in Brussels calling. I had found her skype number several months ago, but she's never on. So she must have seen my request to contact her and answered. So we talked for the first time in over a year. She must be 86 or 87 but there she was in living color. And we were still in bed. That was fun, but switching to German was a litte tricky. Fortunately, she can understand my frequent English words. It was the Thai that slipped in that confused her.

OK, we need to get up and explore Hanoi.

In Hanoi

J went back to the embassy while I was reviewing the paper, then came back to get me because she hadn’t taken the receipt. By 2:15 pm we had the passports back with new visas. The street looked pretty jammed, so we bagged the idea of going to see the farmers who are demonstrating at Government House and grabbed a cab back to the airport. While we were in the cab, after the driver and I chatted a while, I asked if he could explain the red shirts and yellow shirts to me. Basically he said:

The yellow shirts go to demonstrations with guns and sticks and they stay, like they did when the shut down the airport. They hurt the economy. They don’t believe in democracy [they do support the government that came in through a coups]. When they break the law, nothing happens to them. But when the red shirts break the law they get punished right away. The yellow shirts are communists. [Has he been looking at the pictures on my blog?]

Well, that’s certainly the opposite of the story I get at work. But then, in Bangkok, the majority support the government and it is a yellow shirt stronghold. In Chiang Mai it’s the other way around.

Here are the early birds already at the gate.

Our plane waiting as the sun sets in Bangkok.

We made it to the airport fine and I’m now typing on the flight to Vietnam.
Flying out of Bangkok

Later - it's now almost 11pm March 5, 2009 in Hanoi.

All went well. But at the customs the guy took my passport and walked away. Then came back. Then he wrote down 5/3 and pointed to the visa that said 6/3. I turned the page and showed him the new visa. He really didn't know what to do with that. He took the passport over to someone else who came back to me and spoke some English. I explained about the two visas. He said, one day, no problem. Yeah, thanks, tell that to Air Asia. Anyway, we got through. Then trying to change money. The ATM didn't work. The airport rate was 17,000 dong to the US dollar. Well it wasn't that rounded off. They had told us to get a mini-bus but warned us of touts getting us into a taxi. After getting pointed in the wrong direction and told the minibus wouldn't leave for two hours, we found out that we were in the wrong place. The minibus driver wanted double the price they told us in the airport. Then people moved us to the public bus and we ended up on that going to town. It was full. Joan had a seat, then people pointed to a seat in back. The man next to me spoke great English. He works for a Japanese electronic company and was visiting his girlfriend who checks passports at the airport. That's him in the back of the dark bus as it bounces along.

He got us to the end of the line - in the old quarter where our hotel is
- and into a cab for the next 2 km.

Here's Thu, the lady I'd been communicating with by email about the room, getting the info she needs from our passports. The lady in the back was making us a fruit plate and tea for J and lemonade for me.

And here's the view from our little balcony.

And here's our room from the balcony.

So now we have to figure out what to do for the next few days. There's pressure to get out on a tour. I don't think we're going to Halong Bay - everyone's recommendation - because of J's tendency to get seasick. The info comes back that the water is flat and calm, but J's pretty sensitive. We'll see. Anyway, your up to date in real time almost.

The Man Without Qualities - A Chapter that May be Skipped . . .

Some time ago I said I’d try to post excerpts from this book by Richard Musil, and Austrian novelist who died in 1942. The more I read, the more I’m struck by the insights Musil has. But it is also a strange novel as the characters seem all to be more generalized figures that Musil can use to talk about human behavior in general, than real, specific people. But I find Musil to be insightful, over and over again. Of course when someone thinks someone else is insightful, it just means they agree.

The other night I read a chapter with this title:

28 A chapter that may be skipped by anyone not particularly impressed by thinking as an occupation (p. 115)

Unfortunately, nothing is so hard to achieve as a literary representation of a man thinking. When someone asked a great scientist how he managed to come up with so much that was new, he replied: “Because I never stop thinking about it” And it is surely safe to say that unexpected insights turn up for no other reason than that they are expected. They are in no small part a success of character, emotional stability, unflagging ambition, and unremitting work. What a bore such constancy must be? Looking at it another way, the solution of an intellectual problem comes about not very differently from a dog with a stick in his mouth trying to get through a narrow door; he will turn his head left and right until the stick slips through. We do much the same thing, but with the difference that we don’t make indiscriminate attempts but already know from experience approximately how it’s done. And if a clever fellow natural has far more skill and experience with these twistings and turnings than a dim one, the slipping-through takes the clever fellow just as much by surprise; it is suddenly there, and one perceptibly feels slightly disconcerted because one’s ideas seem to have come of their own accord instead of waiting for their creator. This disconcerted feeling is nowadays called intuition by many people who formerly, believing that it must be regarded as something suprapersonal, have called it inspiration; but it is only something impersonal, namely the affinity and coherence of the things themselves, meeting inside a head.

It goes on, and I hope my daughter is reading this part:

The better the head, the less evident its presence in this process. As long as the process of thinking is in motion it is a quite wretched state, as if all the brain’s convolutions were suffering from colic; and when it is finished it no longer has the form of the thinking process as one experiences it but already that of what has been thought, which is regrettably impersonal, for the thought then faces outward and is dressed for communication to the world. When a man is in the process of thinking, there is no way to catch the moment between the personal and the impersonal, and this is manifestly why thinking is such an embarrassment for writers that they gladly avoid it.

Bangkok Stop on Way to Hanoi

[Thurs. March 5, 2009, 12:50 pm Thai time] OK, for those of you who are thinking of us out here with green tinged thoughts, let me say that not everything is perfect and especially planning travel adds bits of tension that I could certainly do without. I know this will get no sympathy, but I just want you to know that we have to work for some of this. Another volunteer called yesterday to ask what I thought about her visa options. Thailand lets Americans in without a visa for 30 days. Then you have to leave and return. You could get a visa for 60 days before you come, but we didn't. Last year we could take a bus to the Burmese border, cross the border, then return for another 30 days. But those days ended last December or so. You only get 15 days on those trips, and you are limited to two such trips. She'd been planning to go back on a Burma border run when she found that out. So she was headed to Cambodia. And that's why we took our trip to Kuala Lumpur last month. If you fly back, you still get 30 days.

So this time we planned ahead and got a visa for Vietnam and booked our tickets with a night at a friend's house in Bangkok on he way. But then he called and said he had to go to Kathmandu on business could we stop over on the way back from Vietnam.

Well, I do need to work and J is teaching Swe, but we do have long stopover in Bangkok Monday, so we can meet a while. But then we thought, we should just go to Vietnam a day early. I changed the ticket and now we'd be arriving March 5. But our visa was valid beginning March 6. But surely we can wait in the airport until midnight (we were scheduled to arrive at 8:30pm). Then I found out that no one would be at work on Tuesday when we were going to be back. More demonstrations in Bangkok.

And so I was able to change the ticket to return on Tuesday, not Monday for not too much extra. But it said pending. At the Chiang Mai airport it still said pending and he said check in Bangkok. We had all day in Bangkok, because we thought we were going to be visiting Jim and his wife. Jim was in my Peace Corps group stationed in Maesod, nearby where I was. He lives in Bangkok.

So we got to the Air Asia counter in Bangkok and he fixed the return ticket. Mind you, on Air Asia you can't book from Chiang Mai to Hanoi. You have to book Chiang Mai Bangkok roundtrip. Then Bangkok-Hanoi roundtrip. And if your Air Asia flight is late and you miss the connection, you need to get a new ticket. So we left time for delays. But the price is relatively low. But rising with the changes. So, after he changed the ticket, I asked, unofficialy, about our visa situation. He said it wouldn't work. Air Asia wouldn't let us fly. We couldn't wait at the airport in Hanoi like we thought.. He checked with his supervisor. NO WAY. He gave me a phone number of the Vietnamese Embassy. While I was calling, Rachel, another AJWS volunteer in Chiang Mai, showed up to change her ticket. If we had planned to meet here it wouldn't have been so easy.

After trying the embassy several times, I looked for wifi to see if there was another number. No free wifi. The information desk gave me another number. The line was busy, but my phone kept autoredialing and finally connected. The man said if we got our visa from Bangkok he could change it, but we couldn't fly today if we didn't change it. Well, the travel agent sent it to Bangkok. So Rachel was meeting her friend out front to get a taxi to someone's house. We all got in the cab and we got dropped off at the Embassy and they went on. But it was 11:35am and the sign said closed from 11:30-1:30.

But someone came out, so we took advantage of the open door and went in. To the window. I explained and he said I'd talked to him. It turned out that our visa was done in Khon Kaen, not Bangkok. If in Bangkok we could have done it free. But he said he could do a new visa for 1400 Baht each (about $45) each. Did we have pictures? Luckily we did. Come back at 3:30pm.

Our plane leaves at 6:30pm. We should be able to make it back to the airport in time. I was thinking that since we were in town, I could go out to Government House where the farmers are demonstrating, but there isn't going to be enough time now.

So we got lunch at a street noodle shop and now we're in the lobby of the Meridian hotel where I can do the work I had planned to do while waiting at the airport. I have a manuscript to review for a journal.

So, there is a lot of little stuff that has to get done when traveling like this. And even though I know that everything will turn out all right, there are still the adrenalin moments as you wonder how you're going to make it all happen. And I haven't even talked about booking a hotel in Vietnam. I think we did ok. A new place in Hanoi called the Hanoi Boutique Hotel in the Old Quarter. It just opened in January so they've got low prices. We'll see if that works out well.

I have a bunch of other little posts to catch up on, but I really need to read this manuscript. It's the second time round - I was a reviewer on the first round so I need to do it.

Meanwhile we're just down the street from the embassy and J will check earlier to see if the visas are ready.

Thai army chief denies existence of secret American prison

From Thaivisa.com

Thai army chief denies existence of secret American prison

General Anupong Paochinda. Photo: MCOT

BANGKOK: -- Thai army chief General Anupong Paochinda on Wednesday strongly denied reports that a secret United States prison existed in Thailand where suspected terrorists were held.

The denial followed a report in the Bangkok Post newspaper that documents supplied to the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that a secret jail existed in Thailand, where some suspects were tortured for information.

"I can say 1 million per cent that a secret jail like this has not existed in Thailand," General Anupong said.

One million percent? The higher the percent is above 100%, the more suspicious I get.

CSAs and other Creative Ways to Sell Vegies

One of the functions of my organization here, and ones it works with, is to help farmers be self-sufficient and sustainable. But ultimately you must have a market for your goods. Tok (it's an unaspirated T that sounds a lot like a D) is working on his dissertation and has been working with farmers for a couple of years now. And despite his T-shirt (a gift he told me) he talks about marketing and about going to a seminar on branding. Last year he took me out to Mr. Diraek's farm when I got here. And last week we talked about getting consumers to buy shares in the farm. I talked about people I knew in Anchorage who did just that, and got a huge box of fresh vegetables every week or so all summer. I promised him I'd get him information on how people do that in the US. So here's some of that information. With pictures of today's trip out to one of the farmers' markets where they sell their organic produce.

I discovered the word is CSA or Consumer Supported Agriculture. It's done a variety of ways. From Local Harvest:

A CSA, (for Community Supported Agriculture) is a way for the food buying public to create a relationship with a farm and to receive a weekly basket of produce. By making a financial commitment to a farm, people become "members" (or "shareholders," or "subscribers") of the CSA. Most CSA farmers prefer that members pay for the season up-front, but some farmers will accept weekly or monthly payments. Some CSAs also require that members work a small number of hours on the farm during the growing season.

A CSA season typically runs from late spring through early fall. The number of CSAs in the United States was estimated at 50 in 1990, and has since grown to over 2200.

UMassVegetable gives a detailed description of CSAs. Here's a bit on how they work:

How Does CSA Work?

Money, Members and Management

A farmer or grower, often with the assistance of a core group, draws up a budget reflecting the production costs for the year. This includes all salaries, distribution costs, investments for seeds and tools, land payments, taxes, machinery maintenance, etc. The budget is then divided by the number of people the farm will provide for and this determines the cost of each share of the harvest. One share is usually designed to provide the weekly vegetable needs for a family of four. Share prices reflect many variables and average between $300 and $600. Flowers, fruit, meat, honey, eggs and dairy products are also available through some CSA.

Brookfieldfarm.org explains what a share includes on their farm.

What's in a share?

• Between 5 and 18 lbs. (14 lbs. avg.) of produce each week from the first week of June ‘til Thanksgiving
• We think this will be sufficient produce for 2 adults (non-vegetarian) or 1 adult (vegetarian)

All shares also include:

• a variety of Pick-Your-Own (PYO) vegetables, herbs, berries, and flowers (we harvest about 90% of the food for you - but some items are strictly PYO - beans, peas, cherry tomatoes, flowers, and strawberries)
• the opportunity to purchase our own bulk produce at wholesale prices for canning and freezing
• the opportunity to purchase Brookfield Farm raised beef and pork
• a weekly newsletter during harvest season with recipes, farm news, and other good stuff!
• access to Brookfield Farm's 50 acres of land for recreational use
• the opportunity for your family to participate in educational programs and seasonal festivals

A Share is Seasonal:

• Throughout the season, your weekly share is made up of the freshest vegetables available from the farm. The variety and amount in the share depend on the season and the weather.
• Here’s a sample of what you might get in one week’s share in June and September: (You can click the link to see what's in the shares)
  

Here's link to a photo tour of the Brookfield farm.


Heirloom farms has 'workshares' as well as CSA:

What is a Workshare?

A workshare is someone who works 8 hours a week from the middle of May through the end of October in exchange for a share of the farm's produce. Workshares differ from one-time volunteers and CSA members who perform a work commitment in that they develop some skill and speed over the course of a season, which gives them an important role to play in meeting the farm's labor needs.

These are jackfruit.

This is Khiew - it means green. Mr. Diraek is her husband. She was tired after getting up around 4am to get things to the market by 5 or 6am. We got there late when most people had already left. She said this was hard work. Tok showed me a powerpoint yesterday where he's got various marketing ideas in the works - from CSA's to home and office delivery. In some ways, this is really a return to Thailand's past where food was grown with natural fertilizers and not full of pesticides and farmers sold their produce locally. And it's also part of a worldwide trend. They key is making it work right. As Khiew's tired face shows this isn't easy. But they are doing the most important job - producing good food.

These are the prices agreed upon by the farmers. They're a good buy.

And here is one of the farmers' id certifying his organic credentials. A New York Times article today says that consumers aren't always aware that US organic labeling doesn't mean the food is safer than non-organic food. It's only about how it is grown. That farmers work hard seems to be true around the world. But they are trying out new ways to connect with consumers.


Continuing with the varieties of CSAs,

Alaska's Glaciervalleycsa expands the idea by getting produce from Outside Alaska as well as Alaska (it's year round). The interesting thing is that you can order a
box (they choose what goes in the box) when you want, but you don't have
to get a box every week. One reader posted a message that this wasn't really a CSA because they imported food from elsewhere. The response was, well, if they are going to provide food year round in Alaska, they have to. Are the vegies they get any different from what Safeway and Fred Meyers sells? I don't know.

And there is even a site that advertises for
Internships, Apprenticeships, and Jobs on Organic and Sustainable ...
Here's a site looking for organic volunteers and employees. It says
"Educational Exchanges in Sustainability" This appears to be the page
for Alaska farms. I'm not excited how the site looks on my computer.

Here's from one of the Anchorage Daily News blogs about CSA's in the
Anchorage area.


And an Alaska Farm: Alaska Organic Farm

To what extent can Alaska farms feed Alaskans? How much can rural Alaskans grow in the summer? In greenhouses in the winter? You can argue that these kinds of grown foods aren't traditional foods, but they would be much healthier than a lot of the food sold in rural Alaska.

More on Community Development Ideas - Ohio

[Wed. March 4, 2009 11:30am Thai Time]
Sunny, a returned Peace Corps volunteer who served in Nepal and returned to Anchorage to become a math teacher and now works at UAA, forwarded an article from NPR. It's about two young men who have returned to their rural Ohio hometown to help out after a plant closure put people out of work. This is the kind of local community empowerment and idea creation and implementation that I've tried to get at in the two pieces on Rural Alaska. Here's a snippet, the link has the whole article.

Rembert is 24, with dark hair and a beard. He almost bounces with enthusiasm. He also was accepted to the Peace Corps and was set to go to Ecuador. But then, DHL Express, Wilmington's largest employer, announced it was going to shut down its domestic air-freight operations, leaving thousands without jobs.

"As soon as the announcement came out I knew, wow, this is going to be some sort of case study in how a small community deals with, you know, an incredible economic shock," Rembert recalls. "So I came back, and I immediately started a blog."

That was his way of trying to figure out what to do. Rembert and Stuckert like to talk things over a lot. And they began to think that maybe some of the Peace Corps philosophy, of helping communities help themselves, might be just what Wilmington and surrounding Clinton County needed — that this might be a chance for some real economic change. Something, Stuckert says, that would last.

We've become a nation of employees who are dependent on organizations - government and business - to hire us, pay us, etc. We work so hard that we don't have much time for real community involvement, real oversight over government agencies and over corporations. It seems that one of the responses to the current economic problems is to have more people take control of their own lives with small scale businesses and cooperatives.

Rather than throw away items because it costs more to fix than to buy a new one, let's take advantage of the people who know how to repair small appliances and who need work. Let's take advantage of all the 'resources' we throw away each week and find ways to reuse them. Let's do more support of local farmers this coming growing season and grow more at home as well.

Larger organizations also serve some purposes, but in the last 15 years or so, we have allowed, encouraged takeover after takeover, until we had organizations that were so large, that so many people depended on, that when they went bad, everyone was hurt. And economists think that we have to pour billions of dollars into saving them. In the meantime, we need to be creative, take initiative, and become a community that doesn't wait for politicians and ceo's to tell us what we can and can't do.

Interesting Google Search Terms - February 2009

Here are some of the Google search terms that got people to my blog this past month that were interesting or strange or reveal problems with Google search. And while people got here through other search engine, the search terms of other engines are always as clear as google's.

• story of famous person who want to know english
  

An interesting query. They got to the post of famous people born in 1909, one of the more popular posts.

• why people born

This is like asking the meaning of life. This one got to the same page as the one above. I don't think they found the answer.

• names of famus people the discoverd bits of the earth

I should have noted where this searcher was from. While some Americans make fun of people whose English isn't quite right, a lot of US born Americans couldn't write that much in any language besides English, even with errors. Not sure what they were looking for, but this was another famous people of 1909 hit.

• how old would you be if you born in 1908?

This one got to famous people born in 1908. And may actually have gotten the answer there. Here's someone who can spell, write grammatically, can search google, but can't figure out the difference between 2009 and 1908.

• on planes why do famous people get to be in firstclass easy and normal people have to try hard to get in?

Um, because they have first class tickets? Also got to famous people born in 1909.

• maimonides and stress management

The reader got to a book review of a biography of Maimonides. This also reflects a problem with google - that gets worse below - of showing words from totally unrelated posts or parts of a blog and linking them together. Here they got to me because I had Maimonides and a link to the blog Stress Management and Other Things. Google takes them to the first scrap of a post. That's why I put up the "Can't Find It?" box in the upper right corner - for people whose answer might be here, but Google dropped them off at the wrong post.

• drunk i stole a card reader what do i do?

This got directed to the post that explored the rumors that Track Palin had a choice between jail or the army.

• how to get in a hotel room without getting caught

This got them to probably the most viewed post of the month, Let's Get Real About Mary Beth Kepner. It certainly got the most hits on a single day - the day after the New York Times carried a story that featured her prominently. Yes, there was mention of a hotel room in that, but not about sneaking in. We could put this one with the one about famous people getting into first class.

• i looking 4 job bakery in bangkok

Another Google result that mixed terms from different posts. This person got to Charlie's Bakery in Anchorage.

• do foxes go into rabbit holes

I'm sure my blog doesn't answer this question literally, but maybe figuratively. This search got to the post about the blog Tom Anderson read before heading to prison. Preparing to go into the Rabbit Hole, gave some excerpts from an account of life in a minimum security prison.

• what does it require to live there in alaska

This surfer got to To Live or Die in Wales, Alaska and the Ethics of Outside Writing About Alaska. That's probably a skewed view of life in Alaska. Good, one more who might go to Seattle instead of Anchorage.

• rid trees of doves

The post with the picture of the crested serpent eagle, where this person landed, also mentioned the spotted dove. I didn't ask Tony if crested serpent eagles would rid your tree of doves. I think they eat snakes, but maybe other birds too.

• hamatria anger

I love searches like this. I had no idea why they got to my blog, but sure enough, in the post about Ted Stevens and the Seward Sealife Center, I quoted someone else on hamatria anger. So I learned something from my own blog.

• linksys rules for radicals

This got to the famous people born 1909 post linked above where there is a brief bio of Saul Alinsky who wrote Rules for Radicals. It's interesting how brains work. This isn't the first person to get here this way. We tend to take sounds and match them to the closest thing we have in our brain to that sound. At least that's my experience. So someone hearing "Alinsky" who has never heard that name before, but has heard of linksys, hears linksys rather than Alinsky.

• linksys router hijacked

I love people who google this. It makes me feel good to know that someone is going to actually get an answer to the problem and that I'm paying forward all the people who have answered my questions about how to use the computer. But this one had a scary twist to it. It came from a computer at the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. If they get their router hijacked what all else happened that we don't know about.

Of course, this is a good example of taking a scrap of information and jumping to unfounded conclusions. Maybe it was just an employee whose home router was hijacked and he was making good use of downtime at the office.

• The Death of Tony Ball in Chiang Mai

Google not doing it's job too well. I knew that Tony Ball was alive on Saturday, and even after that because we've exchanged some emails. But what did the searcher get? She got to a review of the movie "Whirlwind." Here's the blurb you'd see on Google:

What Do I know?: What Basic Need Does the Death Penalty Serve for ...

The reason they support the death penalty is what I would call one of the gut .... Sommersturm at CMU Film Space · Birding with Tony Ball · LOL in Thai · Earthal Eclipse? .... [January 13 - We're in Chiang Mai, Thailand until April] ...
www.whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/2009/03/what-basic-need-does-death-penalty.html - 19 hours ago - Similar pages

There are five different posts merged into there. Google gives you the one with the first word in the search - in this case - death. But I looked at what else that person got.

Look at this:

WORLDTWITCH - Thailand Natural History Resource Guide - Birding ...

Maekok River Lodge - Rare birds of Ban Thaton by Tony Ball ... south Wales, who was murdered in a guesthouse in Chiang Mai in August 2000. Last month, a Scottish backpacker Mark Lemetti, 24, was beaten to death in southern Thailand. ...
www.worldtwitch.com/thailand_tours_travel.htm - Similar pages

You'd certainly think that Tony Ball had been murdered in 2000 in a guest house if you didn't read this carefully. But Tony Ball is in one post and ..."south Wales, who was murdered" is a different post.

So the person who got to my blog, it appears from the sitemeter tracks, never found the pictures of Tony alive and well on Saturday morning.


That's it for this month.

What Basic Need Does the Death Penalty Serve for People?

[Monday, March 2, 2008, 11:40 pm Thai time]

Why is this issue important to you?

I’m sure that the desire for revenge is hard-wired into human brains. It’s part of our DNA. If someone wrongs us, we want them punished. But what is different about humans who actively support the death penalty from humans who oppose it?

I don’t know the answer, but as Alaskans once more consider whether to reinstate the death penalty we should be asking people on all sides to look deep into their psyches to search out why this issues is important to them and if it isn’t, why not?

Siri Carpenter, at the American Psychological Associations Monitor cites Phoebe C. Ellsworth, PhD, a professor of law and psychology

"When people have committed themselves to strong support of a position, a position that is ideologically self-defining, of course it is hard to change," explains Ellsworth, "because it would look as though the commitment were not real--as though they are fickle about values they claimed were very important."

Since Ellsworth considered the death penalty 'ideologically self-defining," and since the percentage of Americans supporting the death penalty had dropped from 75% to 60% by 2001, she and colleague Samuel R. Gross, JD, wanted to know what psychological factors accounted for the drop.

The psychological factors Ellsworth and Gross have identified include:
* New information. Strongly held attitudes are more likely to shift when people believe they have new information, in part because they can "save face," even as their views change. In the late 1990s, Ellsworth and Gross maintain, heightened awareness of cases of innocent people being sentenced to death and increasing publicity about DNA evidence in capital cases made the problem of wrongful convictions appear new to many people, leading them to change their attitudes.
* New script. New information about wrongful convictions has been reinforced by a new "script," or way of organizing one's thinking about the criminal justice system.
"Ten years ago," notes Ellsworth, "the idea that you could have someone who was wrongly convicted and sentenced just seemed implausible to many people." More recently, however, stories of incompetent lawyers and of police who ignore alternative leads in investigating cases have replaced people's belief in a fair judicial system and made the notion of wrongful convictions more salient. Ellsworth argues that this new script, or shift in what information is salient, has weakened public support for the death penalty.
* New sources. Prominent republicans, including George Will, Pat Robertson and Illinois Gov. George Ryan, have publicly expressed reservations about the death penalty. Such unlikely sources of opposition to the death penalty have probably helped shift public opinion, Ellsworth argues. As she puts it, "It doesn't identify you as a liberal weenie anymore to say you're against the death penalty."
* New option. In 1997, the American Bar Association called for a moratorium on executions until it can be certain that the death penalty is administered fairly and impartially. And last year, Gov. Ryan announced such a freeze in his state. This option allows people to change their attitudes without betraying their earlier beliefs or appearing to join the enemy, Ellsworth and Gross argue.
Princeton University social psychologist Penny S. Visser, PhD, observes that the social psychological forces that Ellsworth and Gross identify share a common feature.
"In a sense, they provide political and psychological cover for changing a long-held attitude," she says. "They allow a person to maintain--to themselves and to others--that their old position was correct then and that their new position is correct now."

But this is rational stuff. I'm looking for the deeper psychological reasons. Things that cause people to feel strongly and thus push them to act or not act. Things that cause people to change a strongly held ideological stance.

A Gallup Report written by Lydia Saad posted last Novemer 2008, suggests that since 2001 the numbers haven't changed and remain about 64% in favor of the death penalty. She adds that most people do not believe the death penalty is a deterrant. The reason they support the death penalty is what I would call one of the gut level feelings.

Open-ended questions asked in previous years have shown that most Americans who favor the death penalty do so because they believe it provides an "eye for an eye" type of justice.

She amplifies this a bit in the conclusions:

According to a 2003 Gallup study, close to half of Americans who supported the death penalty cited some aspect of retribution for the crime as the reason

Is that what caused Reps. Mike Chenault and Jay Ramras to feel strongly enough to sponsor a bill to reinstate the death penalty?

I couldn't find anything from Jay Ramras on the topic and an email sent last week hasn't been responded to. But Mike Chenault has a statement on his legislative webpage about this bill.

Here are some quotes from it. (I'm excerpting points I think are of interest, not just selecting things to make him look good or bad. You can look at his whole statement at the link above to see if I'm leaving out anything important.)

The impetus for HB 9 really comes from what I view as society's inability to reform or rehabilitate certain criminals.


People who commit the most monstrous of crimes will not have the opportunity to reoffend if a death sentence is imposed.

He agrees with the majority cited in the Gallup Poll above:

I don't believe it's a deterrent to crime, I believe it should be an option for the justice system to brandish against the most heinous unremorseful criminals in our society.

He goes on to talk about a man awaiting trial in Federal Court for "the torture and brutal murder of another woman" who wouldn't be facing a possible death sentence if the Feds didn't have jurisdiction and he had to be tried by the State of Alaska.

He also anticipates a common objection to the death penalty:

No one supports innocent people being put to death for crimes they did not commit. .

Though I would add that some would be less concerned than others if such people were put to death. He goes on to say that

I've included safe guards in the legislation to help ensure that people are not wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death

I appreciate that he’s honest enough to recognize that ‘help ensure’ is the best that we can do here. He doesn’t write, ‘that will prevent.’ Would he lose sleep if an innocent man were put to death because of his bill?

And he's not worried about costs - which is a reason, according to the New York Times, a number of states are looking to get rid of the death penalty.

Another argument against the death penalty is the cost associated with keeping someone on death row. Frankly, I don't believe that cost should get in the way of dispensing true justice.

Now, if I were a real, paid journalist, I would look up Chenault's record on funding rural justice programs to see if he is consistent on this.


But my question is, what is it that deep down motivates people to fight to impose the death penalty when there are so many other important issues out there? People don't usually tell us their deep down unconscious reasons for doing things, mainly because they're unconscious reasons and they aren't aware of them. We have to look at clues. If we want to know what animals went by last night, we can look for tracks in the snow. This is like that, but much more slippery. Rep. Chenault does leave this track in his statement:

As a husband and father, I can tell you that I empathize with people whose families are hurt or killed and they take the law into their own hands. I want this legislation to give Alaskans the confidence that we have a system of justice they can rely on to handle the most heinous members of our society.

I'd rather rely on a system of education, employment, and law enforcement that prevented such crimes in the first place. The death penalty wouldn't bring my family member back.

But I recognize that this certainly gets to a fundamental issue that faces all human beings - that we cannot control everything. However much we might try, we can't control the world, only how we react to it. But not everyone recognizes that.

"As a husband and father." What does that mean?

Here's where things get dicey. I'm going to create a story to explain the above. That's all I'm doing - trying to come up with an explanation. It's a hypothesis, a guess. Read it with that in mind.

The husband and father is, in our culture, as in many others, supposed to protect his family. But when someone violates our safe space and kills a wife or child, that husband has failed in his duty to protect. In addition to the loss of a family member is the guilt one feels for not being able to protect them. And I’d go on to hypothesize that one way that guilt can be assuaged is to kill the murderer - after the fact. The death doesn’t bring back the lost family member, but it shows that I have done my duty by avenging my loved one’s killer. And that may explain why for some people, settling the score is more important than being 100% certain you are taking revenge on the right person. Or perhaps that need for revenge convinces one that this is the right person, even when it isn't. We need to take action. We do. And we don't want to know it was against the wrong person.

I too am a husband and father and I too have thought about my inability to protect my family from things that could happen to them. But I also recognize that life is full of dangers that I can’t protect my family from. I’d rather see us spend money that educates people how to parent better, how to reason better, and how to cope with frustration in non-violent ways. I'd rather see money spent to work with kids as they develop their moral competence so that fewer people are likely to commit heinous crimes.

What do we do with socio-paths? These are the people that Chenault fears - people who have no functioning conscience - who commit the kinds of heinous crimes that Chenault wants to use the death penalty for. These people are ‘morally disabled.’ Most have figured out how to live in society without becoming serial killers. But how do we prevent the Ted Bundy’s? And if we fail, does the death penalty offer "true justice"?

And why, when so many good people die daily for no obvious reason, should I care about saving the life of a killer? Because society intentionally killing someone is different from an individual or a natural phenomenon killing someone. We are better than that.

Perhaps my deep down motivations arise from the knowledge that my grandparents - all four of them - died in Nazi Germany because they were Jews. The death penalty for Jews was legal there. OK, I know some of you are saying, "But, that's a whole different story." I'm not talking here about rational reasons, but about deep down gut reasons. The reasons that cause us to seek out rational reasons to argue for our gut reasons. But I could add rational reasons to that argument if pushed.

Basically, if the question is life over death, and there is any doubt at all, we should pick life. If we put the death penalty off the table, if we take it away as an option, then we can start in on discussions about alternate forms of justice for the heinous crimes that Chenault talks about. And we can, more importantly, talk about what factors in society increase and decrease the likelihood that people will turn to crime. And then ways to dismantle the factors causing crime and supplementing those factors that increase the likelihood that people will become law abiding community members.


Civilization is about learning to curb our destructive impulses when the our instincts kick in. We generally believe that physical fights are not the way to solve problems and it is mostly illegal to hit another person. Even though it may well be a genetic inheritance from the times when self-defense was the only defense. We have constraints on sexual contact as well.

Laws don't prevent everyone from hitting or raping others, but they do establish expectations of how people should behave. And the vast majority of people, most of the time, abide by these limits. Not simply because the behaviors are illegal, but because laws make sense, generally. We have created alternate ways to settle disagreements - not always satisfactorily I acknowledge. (I could write several more posts on the wrongheaded restraining of natural behaviors too - like making young kids sit still for long periods of time when their natural behavior is to be active, or preventing women from breast feeding.)

I think the call for revenge is one of those impulses that society should find alternative ways to resolve. South Africa developed its Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Another approach is Restorative Justice which

focuses on restoring the losses suffered by victims, holding offenders accountable for the harm they have caused, and building peace within communities.

And, of course, putting money into prevention as well as intervention would help eliminate much of the need for revenge in the first place. The idea of prevention is found in many fields, including prevention of domestic violence and sexual assault and prevention of school violence, just to name a couple. Lots of tools are out there.

And we know from story after story - whether it is the Hatfields and the McCoys, the Mafia, Palestine and Israel - that revenge often leads to a continuing cycle of revenge.

So, what's in your psyche that causes you to react strongly for or against the death penalty? I don't want to hear a list of rational arguments. I want you to look down deep to see if you can find those unconscious stirrings that get your juices flowing on this topic.

Birding Challenges

One view from our balcony is this mass of leaves and branches and vines. We hear the birds, but if they aren't moving about, it's really hard to see them. There was a olive backed sunbird moving about when I took this picture, but when I enlarge this and scan each square inch I only see something that looks a little like a bird, but I think it's just a leaf.



But this red bellied squirrel (that's what Tony Ball called it and the websites I looked at didn't really have any good pictures but some mentioned a red bellied squirrel in Thailand) has been entertaining us since we got here. I also saw a striped squirrel in the trees on the other side at the same time, but not clearly enough to get a picture. The red squirrel's belly is vaguely the same cinnamon color as the lettering in the picture.

The pictures from the book are from นกเมืองไทย
by นายแพทย์บุญส่ง ดสขะกุล, the second link is to a site in
English telling about the book's author:

Dr Boonsong Lekagul (1907–1992) was the most important personality in shaping the modern conservation movement in Thailand , and devoted most of his life to the study and conservation of wildlife. The country's national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, and current high level of environmental awareness, are part of his priceless legacy.

But yesterday (Sunday) we got a good look at a green billed malkoha (170) outside our balcony. We've seen these before last year and this, but it took a while to be sure. The long tail, underneath is striped white and dark. That's what got us to the malkoha in the bird book, but we never saw one close enough or sitting still long enough to see much more of it. But Sunday, even though mostly hidden in the tree, the bird is big enough that we could see the head now, the tail later, and then it got out on a distant branch and we could see the whole bird clearly in the binoculars. Definitely had a green bill and red patch on the eyes. Very cool bird. It was back again this morning, so maybe I'll be able to get a picture of it before we go back to Alaska.


There's also been a brownish bird - well in small flocks of up to about 7 or 8 - that looked sort of like a bulbul, but really not too distinctive. Tony Ball suggested Saturday that it sounded like a streaked eared bulbul. But you look in the book and there are a bunch of birds that look a lot alike and you have to go back and look for details. One trick that makes it easier is to look at the maps to see which birds are in your area (though this isn't foolproof.)


Sunday, when the birds came by, I looked carefully at one that got close enough, for the white streaks, and sure enough they were there. Tony also reminded me that the pictures in the books are of one bird in one pose in one lighting condition, and in this case, as rendered by the artist. So colors aren't always quite what they seem. So our not so green birds do fit here.