Every once in a while my mind spins out totally absurd scenarios. I assure you this is complete fabrication, but just for fun, imagine. . .
Afghan Mineral Wealth Part of DOD Afghanistan Exit Strategy
So, you've heard about the trillion dollar mineral discoveries in Afghanistan. I'm guessing this is really a desperate plot to get out of Afghanistan without the Taliban taking over. The US is hoping that they can broker some sort of face saving deal to pull out of Afghanistan. Then, even though the Russians left Afghanistan with their tail between their legs the US is hoping all that mineral wealth will lure the Russians back and they'll have to fight the Taliban. This time though, the US won't be arming their enemy.
Sarah Palin to Become BP Spokesperson in US
By now you've all heard that Sarah is headed for the UK and is even setting up a photo opportunity with Margaret Thatcher. But the real story is that she's been negotiating with BP to become their North American spokesperson. She's going to work it all out. You thought she made money with the book and tv deals; this one will make all that sound like peanuts. But we'll never get the details. Before long, the little people will be back shouting Drill Baby Drill.
Thinking about Palin getting a photo with Margaret Thatcher, who's been suffering from dementia since 2003 - her daughter said, in 2008,
The death of Sir Denis Thatcher in 2003 was “truly awful” since she “kept forgetting he was dead”
made me think of our kids getting their pictures taken with the stuffed moose that used to be in Tok.
OK, for those of you who come here for more sober posts, I'm blaming it on the spectacular solstice we had yesterday. It went straight to my head.
A friend, whose garden is already doing really well, dropped a bag of fresh greens off the other day. Since we didn't get back until the very end of May, we have no home started seedlings this year. Plus where we used to grow vegetables has gotten pretty shady over they years.
We did join a CSA this year - that's Consumer Supported Agriculture. I learned about those when I was working in Thailand and wrote a long post about it then, including links to some Alaska CSAs.
This is a way to support local farmers by agreeing in advance to buy a box of freshly grown food every one or two weeks. J set this up and I think we pick ours up every two weeks. We joined with other friends and we'll split the bounty.
I'll post more about this option later. This one we joined brings up food from Seattle during the winter so it's not really all local. Until we have more greenhouses using alternative fuels (such as the Seeds of Change program that will use steam from the Municipal electrical plant), we're not going to have many local vegetables here in the winter.
This bok choi and lettuce was fantastic. Thanks D.
We went downtown to check out the Juneteenth Festival and the Solstice activities yesterday. It was pretty gray with light mist coming down now and then and finally rain when we left. But it didn't seem to bother anyone. People were having fun.
People waiting for the next band to play.
The Rollergirls were still there, but we missed the show.
Audrina from The Hills was there for photos and there was a steady line of people.
And the reindeer sausage folks were out.
Non-motorized activities kept the kids busy.
At 4th and F there was a series of different dance demonstrations.
There's a new Cake Shop on 4th.
A block of Corvettes on display
The Juneteenth celebration on the Park Strip was pretty sleepy.
The ACLU and the Alaska Right to Life had adjacent booths.
More non-motorized fun for the kids
Even on a gray day, it was fun to stroll around downtown and see people we knew and people we didn't. Then we stopped at the museum which we haven't seen since the opened the new exhibit halls while we were gone. Another post for that.
You can fret.
You can curse at BP and call them all kinds of nasty names.
You can wash oiled seabirds (probably doing more good for your ego than for the birds.)
You can send assistance to the people whose livelihoods are affected.
Or you can start using less fossil fuel. Here's one simple thing you can do:
. . .dryers are the most energy-intensive "white good" in the house, so it pays to use them efficiently.
HA! Even better is to use a clothesline. Michaelbluejay writes on a page devoted to calculating energy use related to washing and drying:
The Japanese are way ahead of us on that one -- they use most of the modern conveniences we do, but clothes dryers aren't among them. Even in the luxury apartments, you'll see the residents hanging their laundry out on their balconies. I asked my Japanese friend what they do when it rains for a solid week, and she said, "We just hang the laundry up inside."
I wanted to be able to tell you exactly how much one load on the line instead of the dryer would impact US energy use. It's not easy because it varies and because there are different ways to calculate. Most sites focus on how much you save in dollars per year (assuming, I guess, personal gain is more appealing that doing general good.) But here are some numbers. The US Department of Energy has a chart which shows energy consumption per appliance. It shows about 9000 Kwh/year for the average US household dryer use.
Note: You need to have a sense of humor when you read all these statistics. Earlier I had a quote that says that dryers use the most energy of "white goods" in the house, which this chart doesn't show. And the The California Energy Commission says, "A dryer is typically the second-biggest electricity-using appliance after the refrigerator." Maybe refrigerators come in more colors.
The U.S. emits the equivalent of about 118 pounds of carbon dioxide per resident every day, a figure that includes emissions from industry. Annually, that's nearly 20 metric tons per American -- about five times the number per citizen of the world at large, according to the International Energy Agency.
See, this isn't easy. (A lot of the 118 pounds per day is industrial, not household.) First kilowatt hours now pounds of carbon dioxide. And this WSJ article focuses on washing, not drying. But, hidden in the article is perhaps the most useful (though who knows how accurate?) bit of information:
The biggest way to cut the environmental impact of cleaning clothes, however, is to stop using a clothes dryer. Drying laundry outside on a line, Tesco says, will cut the carbon footprint of every load by a whopping 4.4 pounds.
It's clear that dryer use is an area where we can, without a lot of trouble, reduce energy use. Yes, it will take up a little more time to hang up the laundry, but it will also provide some exercise, get you outside, and perhaps you can also notice the flowers and the birds. Plus the laundry has that great outdoor smell. Though I've talked to some people who always got their laundry from a dryer and think the feel and smell of dryer clothes are natural.
So, big deal. What difference will it make if I hang up the laundry instead of using the dryer? It's the collective impact, not just one person. But as you hang up a load and a million others do the same it starts to matter. Just like the impact of one potato chip is no big deal. It's the second and third and one hundredth potato chip that leads to headlines like in today's ADN for this NY Times story: "Plus-size trend grows on retailers."
Look, you don't have to stop using your dryer altogether. But if one million households (the Census Bureau estimates (p. 7) about 103 million households in the US, so that is just under 1% of all the households) dried one load a week on the line instead of in the dryer it would save 118 million pounds per year, which happens to be the same amount as the average American uses per day times one million.
It's a start. It's a couple of potato chips less. And once you get used to doing it once a week, adding a second load a week isn't all that hard.
Technology was supposed to make our lives easier and there is no doubt that the washing machine has liberated American women from hours of hard work per day. (I know that might sound sexist, but when washing machines were introduced, women did most of the household laundry.) But sometimes the old technology works better in the long run and the new technology isn't better, it's only better for corporate profits. (OK, corporate profits help the economy, except nowadays a much larger proportion of those profits are going to executives rather than to the workers and suppliers.)
My 88 year old mother has never had a dryer and to this day hangs her laundry to dry every load. Now she does live in Southern California so that helps. But you can hang things out to dry inside as well. And in the winter when heating systems suck the humidity out of the house, hanging the laundry to dry adds a bit of moisture to the air.
And there are lots and lots of ways to hang out your clothes. We have a 25 year old Cordomatic that we can use outside or inside.
Tiptheplanet gives you more options for air drying racks than you ever thought existed.
And when you've gotten used to hanging out the laundry, here are some other things you can do:
(1) Use space heaters to heat only the rooms you're in, (rather than a central system that heats the whole house), and turning off the heat when you're not home.
$80
$1023
(2) Use ceiling fans instead of the air conditioner
$100
if you don't already have ceiling fans
$438
(3) Turn off lights you're not using
$0
$274
(4) Use a clothesline or a laundry rack instead of a dryer
And everyone is responsible for getting two more people to hang up their laundry once a week too. This is something you can do and know that you are making a difference instead of fretting about the oil gushing into the Gulf.
For movie folks, we had a pretty dry run since we left for Juneau back in January. We've seen a couple in theaters, the two experimental movies in Berlin, and we saw The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo last week at Bear Tooth. J has read the first two books in this trilogy. She said the movie follows the book closely. I thought it had great characters - particularly the girl with the dragon tattoo. It's neat in this US centric modern culture to have a book written by a Swede become a giant US best seller and then have a Swedish team make it into a movie. It's a looong movie, but I was completely into the film the whole way. However, it does center on sick violence against women. I mention this because my daughter has pointed out how many movies include violence against women. I realized, she's right and what's worse, most of us haven't noticed this as unusual. What does that say about how much a part of American life violence against women is?
We finally stopped at Blockbusters the other night and picked up some movies in the foreign language section. The first one neither of us had heard of:
The Band's Visit.
It's a delightful Israeli movie about an Egyptian band of about eight people who fly to Israel for the opening of an Islamic-Israeli Center. But they mix up the name of their destination, get on the wrong bus, and end up at a desolate Israeli village.
It's a great story about travel and cross-cultural humanity and while it's an Israeli movie - English is the common language of the Israelis and Egyptians in the movie. A very low key but satisfying movie in which you slowly get to meet people and then get to go past your initial stereotypes of them and get to really know them.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
I'd heard this name over and over again and really had no idea what it was about. I wouldn't have guessed. The editor of Elle magazine has had a stroke and now has a condition in which he's fully conscious, can see and hear, but can't move or talk.
The film does a great job of seeing the world from his perspective and I found it totally fascinating.
The therapist works out a method where she reads the alphabet (organized in order of frequency of the letters*) and he blinks his eye when she gets to the letter he needs. It's agonizingly slow, but they do amazing things with this. Reminds us how easy our lives are in comparison. It turns out to be an American movie, but they filmed it in France at the actual hospital where he was and it's all in French with subtitles. I know that puts some people off, but get over it.
*After sleeping on the movie, it seems to me they could have come up with much more efficient system. Just dividing the alphabet into four groups would have cut out a lot of work.
A critical issue in Alaska and the rest of the world is the health of the ocean and the creatures that depend on the ocean.
Groundswell Fisheries Movement is run by long time fisheries participant/experts. Here's what they say about themselves:
Fisheries activists bring you the latest fish tales from Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska…and statewide fisheries politics. This site is designed to post up archived FISH POLITICS AND POLICY articles of the GROUNDSWELL FISHERIES MOVEMENT, primarily by its founder, Stephen Taufen and key players such as Victor Smith, Shawn Dochtermann, Ray Metcalfe and others. The site will feature former AlaskaReport.com articles, Op-Ed pieces published in “The Fishermen’s News” under the BONSAI BUCCANEERS IN THE FISH REPUBLIC OF ALASKA series, and other industry media; as well as new perspectives.
Book mark it. Or look for new posts on my Alaska blogroll in the right side column.
The New York Times notes Bloom's Day today with an editorial about a corporate executive who sent Bloom's Day cards to 16 of his best executives in 1954.
Two years earlier . . . W. D. Gillen, then president of Bell Telephone of Pennsylvania, had begun to worry about the education of the managers rising through the company’s hierarchy. Many of these junior executives had technical backgrounds, gained at engineering schools or on the job, and quite a few had no college education at all. They were good at their jobs, but they would eventually rise to positions in which Gillen felt they would need broader views than their backgrounds had so far given them.
Gillen took the problem to the University of Pennsylvania where they set up a
10-month immersion program on the Penn campus, what amounted to a complete liberal arts education.
Besides classes and seminars and vast amounts of reading, they also did field trips to museums and concerts and to study the architecture of the cities nearby.
Perhaps the most exciting component of the curriculum was the series of guest lecturers the institute brought to campus. “One hundred and sixty of America’s leading intellectuals,” according to Baltzell, spoke to the Bell students that year. They included the poets W. H. Auden and Delmore Schwartz, the Princeton literary critic R. P. Blackmur, the architectural historian Lewis Mumford, the composer Virgil Thomson. It was a thrilling intellectual carnival.
Finally, they struggled with James Joyce's Ulysses.
It was clear as the students cheered one another through their final reports that reading a book as challenging as “Ulysses” was both a liberating intellectual experience and a measure of how much they had been enriched by their time at the institute. . .
The institute was judged a success by Morris S. Viteles, one of the pioneers of industrial psychology, who evaluated its graduates. But Bell gradually withdrew its support after yet another positive assessment found that while executives came out of the program more confident and more intellectually engaged, they were also less interested in putting the company’s bottom line ahead of their commitments to their families and communities. By 1960, the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives was finished.
The whole article is well with thinking about. The problem with a good education is that it is liberating.
After finishing the last post on the South Carolina primary elections, I kept poking around. What I found first was election results from the 2008 Democratic primary in South Carolina and they were so completely bizarre I couldn't believe them. And with good reason, they were totally wrong. All the Obama results were 0% with just a few votes per county even when there were thousands of African-American voters. I mention this to remind people to think when they see things on the internet. When it's too strange to be true it probably isn't. Fortunately there was a link to the same results in a different format. They seemed much more sensible - Obama won with 55% of the vote. But let's try thinking again. In 2008, Obama got 55% of the Democratic primary vote in South Carolina.
In 2010, Al Greene took the Democratic primary with 59% of the vote! According to Charleston South Carolina's Post and Courier these are the election results for last week's Democratic primary election for the US Senate:
U.S. Senate - Dem Primary
June 09, 2010 - 04:54AM ET
South Carolina - 2109 of 2109 Precincts Reporting - 100%
Name
Party
Votes
Vote %
Greene , Alvin
Dem
99,970
59%
Rawl , Vic
Dem
69,572
41%
Let's think about this for a bit. First, a small discrepency:
In 2008 the Post and Courier says there were 2259 precincts and in 2010 there are only 2109 precincts. There's probably a good explanation, but we do need to find out what it is.
Now, let's think about the 2008 primary election. The first really serious female presidential candidate and the first serious black presidential candidate were both running and getting tons of attention. Everyone was worked up about this and there was lots of national attention on the primary elections that day. Plus, John Edwards from neighboring North Carolina was on the ticket.
So an extremely articulate black candidate with lots and lots of publicity running against two white candidates, Obama, got 55% of the vote in 2008.
In 2010, an inarticulate black candidate with no publicity and no funding running against one white candidate with high name recognition and good funding got 59% of the vote. Something is bizarre here.
You can say, "But far fewer voters actually turned up to vote, only about 1/3." But, presumably, the voters who turned out this time around would be more likely to be party regulars who pay more attention to the elections and are better informed. They would have looked at the two candidates and seen that the one was totally off the wall. The other candidate was white - like 62% of South Carolinians (though the percent of white Democrats is probably lower, it still appears to be over 50%.) I know almost nothing about North Carolina politics, but nothing I've read yesterday and today suggests that Vic Rawl had high negatives.
When something doesn't look right, we should look a little harder. Sometimes we can explain the problem. Like the other day while running, I sensed the color of the trees was funny. I looked up and one of the birches had been broken near the top and it was hanging down. Oddity explained. Now, these numbers in South Carolina, plus Greene's inability to answer questions about things like where he got the money to run and reports of problems with the computers all raise serious questions. These were paperless touch screen computers so voters don't have, and the voting machines don't produce, any independent hard copy of the votes. There are serious questions about electronic voting and it's quite possible that South Carolina could be the first example of voting machine rigging on a large scale.
Or, it could turn out to be as simple as voters voting for the candidate with the same name as a famous gospel and soul singer.
[Update 3:30pm June 16: This Huffington Post blogger found a lady who said she voted for Al Greene because his name sounded like the singer. The blogger writes as though this were further proof of South Carolina's problems, we all know that name recognition is a major goal in politics. After all, Californians elected a governor because his name was the same as a movie star. What's the difference?]
After Tuesday's election results, the most curious story for me is the victory of Al Greene in the Democratic Senate race in South Carolina. When I saw a video of him talking to the press the bells and whistles really began to go off. Here's yet another video.
Was this guy for real? What were the Democrats doing during the campaign? How come all this comes out only after the election? How could an inarticulate candidate nobody knows, who didn't campaign, beat a well funded party backed candidate? It's pretty remarkable. There's a bigger story there one way or the other. Either there's some monkey business or there's a new lesson to be learned. But given Greene's dreadful presence on tape, the former seems more likely than the latter.
I was puzzled by the lack of attention it got compared to stories about California's rich women execs or Arkansas' Governor's race, or even the other South Carolina race. Maybe these got more attention immediately post election because these were the ones that had been hyped the most pre-election.
The media were looking the other way, so they weren't ready for the Greene story, but I suspect it will turn out to be one of the biggest. It has Watergate writ small all over it. I know, every hint of political scandal is compared to Watergate, but this potentially about political sabotage by the other party just like Watergate.
My first questions were:
1. How does an unknown, inarticulate, black candidate with no political history and no campaign expenditures knock off a white judge in a conservative southern state in a US Senate primary? (According to Wikipedia, in 2000 the state was 62% white, 29% black. Presumably a larger percent of registered Democrats are black than the state population.)
2. Why didn't his obvious weaknesses, not to mention the pending felony charge, come out during the primary campaign?
So I started looking around.
A TPM story June 10 says there are two more odd cases of black candidates running for office in South Carolina in Democratic primaries with no party support and no financial disclosures. One lost (Gregory Brown who ran against sitting black Democratic Representative and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn), but the other, like Greene, won too.
In the third race that Clyburn calls suspicious, the 1st Congressional District, Frasier won even though the establishment-favored candidate, Robert Burton, raised and spent $100,000. Frasier's campaign didn't file any details about his spending with the FEC. But he's far from a first-time candidate, having run nearly three dozen times -- and losing -- for elected office. Frasier has run as a candidate for both parties, and has even been accused of being a Republican plant and not qualified to be a candidate in the past, according to local press accounts.
Frasier doesn't have a campaign Website or Facebook page we could find, but Frasier beat Burton by about 2,200 votes or 56%-44%.
So people are accusing the three of being Republican plants. Theoretically that shouldn't matter. Primary voters should be able to see through the ruse and not elect them. Except the South Carolina primary is an open primary. Republicans could vote in the Democratic primary. So far, though, I haven't seen any documentation of pushing Republicans to vote for these candidates - letters, emails, etc. Surely if this were a significant factor, there'd be some documented evidence. Maybe it will come out yet.
But down in South Carolina, Jennifer, at Indigo Journal, a self proclaimed progressive blog* (hey, this is South Carolina, who knows? it says:
Founded in 2008 by Tim Kelly and Jennifer Read, IJ is a news, analysis and action website dedicated to building a strong progressive community in the reliably red Palmetto State*)
suggested on June 11 that there was not a Republican conspiracy:
While national pundits and activists foam over the possibility of some nefarious GOP plot at work here in the Palmetto State (a scenario I find weak at best), the real question S.C. Democrats should focus on is why didn’t their front-runners mount more sophisticated campaigns?
Today, June 14, Jennifer, has posted losing Democratic Primary candidate Judge Vic Rawl's statement calling for an investigation into the election which he says are riddled with irregularities.
First is ongoing analysis of the election returns themselves, which indicate irregularities.
Second are the many voters and poll workers who continue to contact us with their stories of extremely unusual incidents while trying to vote and administer this election.
These range from voters who repeatedly pressed the screen for me only to have the other candidate’s name appear, to poll workers who had to change program cards multiple times, to at least one voter in the Republican primary who had the Democratic U.S. Senate race appear on her ballot. . .
Third is the well-documented unreliability and unverifiability of the voting machines used in South Carolina. It is worth noting that these machines were purchased surplus from Louisiana after that state outlawed them.
South Carolina's Election Commission says it's confident its voting system are reliable, and Commission spokesman Chris Whitmire rebuffed the claim by Vic Rawl (whom Greene defeated in the primary with over 100,00 votes, just under 60%) that South Carolina purchased its machines second-hand from Louisiana after the state stopped using them. South Carolina bought its machines directly from ES&S, Whitmire said.]
According to the Rawl campaign, there are too many irregularities in Tuesday night’s results to let the election go uncontested. Fair enough. Let’s do some due diligence digging. But I still say, had Team Rawl stepped up their communications game prior to primary day, we wouldn’t be dealing with this drama. Case in point: we’ve received more press releases from the Rawl campaign in the last 5 days than we did during the entire primary season. Just sayin’.
However, Tim, also at Indigo Journal, writes in a later post today trying to figure this out by following the money in the Brown campaign (the person who ran unsuccessfully against Rep. Clyburn.
Brown’s campaign was run by Preston Grisham – a longtime aide and former campaign manager for, you guessed it, Joe Wilson. [Steve: You remember the guy who interrupted Obama's speech before the joint House and Senate by shouting out, "You lie"?]
Brown’s disclosure forms (here, here and here) show he paid Grisham’s consulting firm more than $23,000.
The truly perplexing thing, though, is just where Brown got this money – or any of the $54,000 he spent on his campaign. As of his latest filing, Brown reported raising a grand total of $830. He ended his campaign last Tuesday with a deficit of over $53,000.
“Say Joe Wilson and a group of well-heeled Republicans cook up a scheme to cause Clyburn to have to spend his cash and to “help” the Democrats nominate a Senate candidate that can be hung around the whole fall Dem ticket’s neck,” said a source we spoke with this afternoon.
“On March 1, Brown’s campaign cuts Joe Wilson’s former campaign manager a check for $12,500 for marketing,” our source continued. “We don’t know what the hell kind of “marketing” Preston Grisham provided Brown, but we do know that shortly thereafter, an unemployed Alvin Greene has $10,400 for a filing fee to run for the U.S. Senate.”
As I said, it’s a stretch to take this all the way to Alvin Greene. But we do now have not one, but two, Democratic primary candidates who haven’t disclosed where thousands of dollars in campaign cash came from, and we have Joe Wilson’s – and/or elephant poop – all over one of those candidates.
that Frasier has a home and several businesses in Maryland and far fewer legal ties to his purported home on Wadmalaw Island.
but the County Board of Elections and Voter Registration determined he's a resident.
So, there are some facts, but a lot more speculation at this point. But I also remember hearing about some burglars at the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building. That's all it was at first, a petty burglary. It took a long time before people believed that Nixon was connected to that.
Let's go back to my initial questions and see where we are.
1. How does an unknown, black candidate with no campaign expenditures knock off a white US Representative in a conservative southern state? Possible answers:
The white Dems didn't campaign, according to Jennifer
There were serious voting irregularities with second hand voting machines
And after writing all this I have more questions on this:
In the House upset, what is the racial make up of the House District? Was it majority black so that a black candidate against an unknown white candidate could win? Jennifer says that in the last couple of days there were high profile tv ads so voters could see he was black.
In the US Senate race, could the voters have voted for Al Greene because they associated his name with gospel and soul singer Al Green?
2. Why didn't Al Greene's obvious weaknesses, not to mention the pending felony charge come out during the primary campaign?
Jennifer suggests that the party backed Democratic candidates didn't take their opponents seriously and simply didn't campaign. This isn't too unusual when someone has a fringe candidate or two running against them. They want to save their money to campaign in the general election.
I looked back through the Indigo Journal posts to March and didn't really see any coverage of Greene, Brown, or Frasier here either. There was one post "Trouble for Demint" that had a quote that listed Vic Rawl as "Democratic Challenger," with no mention of Greene. The quote mentioned that Rawl hadn't done any advertising - but the implication seemed to be that his polling numbers against Demint were that high even though he hadn't started to campaign. There was no comment about him needing to campaign. This wasn't a post by Jennifer. But, to be fair, it seems that Jennifer wasn't posting much earlier.
So it will be interesting to see where Gregory Brown got the $52,000 he's supposed to have spent when he only raised $850. And where Al Greene got his $10,000 filing fee. And where Fraser got the money for his television ads.
*As an Alaskan blogger who was pigeon-hoed by non-Alaskans right after Sarah Palin's VP nomination, I don't want to perpetuate that sort of silliness. I just wanted to point out that I first saw Indigo Journal today and have to judge by what they say about themselves and what they write. But given the story was about a suspected phony Democrats, I couldn't resist the dig. Their posts seem legitimately progressive to me.
The death of Sir Denis Thatcher in 2003 was “truly awful” since she “kept forgetting he was dead”
