"It's like being a 5 year old trying to catch up . . ." New Rep. Alan Dick

I met new District 6 (Interior Alaska north of Fairbanks) representative Alan Dick today and asked him what it is like getting started in Juneau.   Here's what he said:



He defeated Democratic incumbent Woodie Salmon in November.  District 6 is the largest state house district in the US according to a Christopher Eshelman article in the Fairbanks Newsminer on Rep. Dick.

Capitol's Quiet - Lawmakers at Energy Council in DC

That's from one of the many tv monitors scrolling the meeting schedules in the Capitol.

BASIS - the Legislative website - tells it more clearly in the adjournment announcements for both houses of the legislature.

Checking today with the Legislative Affairs Office,  I learned that 14 of the 20 State Senators have traveled to Washington for the Energy Council Conference:

Senator John Coghill (R)
Senator Fred Dyson (R)
Senator Cathy Giessel (R)
Senator Charlie Huggins (R)
Senator Lesil McGuire (R)
Senator Linda Menard (R)
Senator Bert Stedman (R)
Senator Gary Stevens (R)
Senator Joe Thomas (R)
Senator Tom Wagoner (R)
Senator Johnny Ellis (D)
Senator Lyman Hoffman (D)
Senator Donny Olson (D)
Senator Joe Paskvan (D)

And 14 of the 40 members of the House went

Rep. Tammie Wilson (R)
Rep. Anna Fairclough (R)
Rep. Eric Feige (R)
Rep. Carl Gatto (R)
Rep. Craig Johnson (R)
Rep. Bob Lynn (R)
Rep. Lance Pruitt (R)
Rep. Dan Saddler (R)
Rep. Paul Seaton (R)
Rep. Reggie Joule (D) (But part of the House Majority)

Rep. Chris Tuck (D)
Rep. Scott Kawasaki (D)
Rep. Neal Foster (D)
Rep. Berta Gardner (D)


It's not easy finding hard information online about the "Energy Council" Conference.  People seem to have pretty much the same blurb as this one from a Tim Bradner piece at the Alaska Journal of Commerce:

The council is an association of legislators from energy-producing states, Alberta and one foreign nation, Venezuela.
Senate President Gary Stevens said legislative leaders will hold a press conference while the state's lawmakers are in the nation's capital to talk about what they are doing, and will hold another press conference when they return to Juneau to explain what they accomplished.
Besides the meetings of the council itself the Alaska lawmakers will also meet with important federal officials, such as at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the agency that regulates pipelines and hydroelectric projects, both important in Alaska. [I guess Canada isn't a foreign nation.]

For a bit more, Representative Joe Green wrote about the 2002 Energy Council and House Minority Leader Beth Kerttula wrote about the 2010 Conference.

Keeping Track of Education in the Legislature with Shana Crondahl

I've been getting comments from Shana Crondahl for a while now on this blog - particularly last year when I was in Juneau.  So I thought while I was down here it would be a good idea to get in contact with her.

She's from Juneau and knows her way around the legislature and her job is writing a newsletter on education issues going through the legislature.  She also started a blog which she updates now and then. (Since I only have the ten most recently updated blogs in the Alaska Blogs section on the right, it only pops up now and then when she makes an update, but you can go to it here.  The blog is just a teaser for the much more complete reports she does.)

We had lunch at the Silverbow.  It's still cold and windy here.  (Someone told me about flying in and it got so bumpy at 30,000 feet that the flight attendants just kneeled on the floor and held onto their carts.)  So I wanted a hot soup.

Here's a video I took at the end.  I caught her a bit by surprise, but she was a good sport.  I should have been paying more attention to those lights, sorry.



If you're interested in learning more about the Alaska Education Update the contact information is in the title box at the top of the blog.

Bitter Milk

There's been a book on the table where I'm staying called Bitter Milk.  I've been trying to imagine what it might mean.  Think about it.  What is bitter milk?  Why would it be the title of a book on women and teaching?   Pause a bit and think about it.  I know.  Today we just want the answers.  So most of you are going to rush ahead to see without stopping to think about it.  But such brain exercises are important to keep our grey muscle agile.  But the instant gratification google offers us is making us forgot to take those pauses and let our brains do the thinking.  So look at the clock on your computer screen - better yet if you have a timer set it for 30 seconds - then shut your eyes and think about bitter milk for half a minute.  Yes, you do have 30 seconds to spare.  That's all I ask. 

OK.  That was kind of nice, to close your eyes and think for 30 seconds, wasn't it?  Here's what the author says in the preface:

In Sri Lanka, young women sometimes experience psychotic responses to adolescence as they struggle with the ambivalence provoked by the separation from their families.  In Medusa's Hair the anthropologist Gananath Obeyeskere tells us that these periods of distress are called "dark night of the soul" experiences.  He describes a ritual tonic that the afflicted girls drink to release them from their trouble.  It is called bitter milk and is a mixture of milk and crushed margosa leaves, the same bitter potion that mothers apply to their nipples when they wish to wean their babies.

 I can imagine author Grumet sipping bitter milk and swishing it gently in her mouth as she tastes and feels its meaning:

Bitter milk, fluid of contradictions, love and rejection, sustenance and abstinence, nurturance and denial.

She then goes on to say that these are the contradictions of teaching and her book explores these contradictions as she tries to understand what teaching means to women.  

Best Jobs For Abusers - Is the Stanford Prison Experiment Relevant?

While reading the emails sent to Rep. Sharon Cissna (I've posted some excerpts here)   I read a number of reports from people - both men and women - about the invasiveness of the 'pat-downs' they've endured.  Many of these people are older women who have had mastectomies, but also men and women who are amputees and/or have metal replacements for hips and other parts of their bodies.  They are people like my nearly 90 year old mother who are not likely to be terrorists suspects, but because of surgical procedures and TSA's screening protocol, are now likely to have their groins and chests touched by TSA agents.  (My mom, like many of the email writers, won't fly because of this.)

There were lots of lists of "best jobs for _____."  Here are some examples:

• Best Jobs for Moms
• Top  Jobs for Disabled Individuals.  
• 25 best jobs for introverts      

Link to See Complete Cartoon

Why not a list of best jobs for abusers?  People who want to use their power over others - to humiliate them, whether sexually or otherwise, or even just to take advantage of their vulnerability.

I'm not sure whether the priesthood in the Catholic church is a good job option for abusers any longer, plus it takes a lot of preparation to get those jobs.

Prison guards and nursing home jobs also give opportunities for abusers to take advantage of vulnerable people.

And TSA now must be seen as one of the best options.  In the others, the abuser tendencies are not sanctioned and are grounds for dismissal and criminal prosecution if discovered.  But at TSA, they are official policy.  And for the exhibitionist abuser there's a bonus to abusing people openly in a public place. 

Sarcasm Alert:  I learned teaching that not everyone gets sarcasm.  I remember one class where the students kept telling a classmate, "He's being sarcastic.  He doesn't really mean it."  I mention it here because while it might appear I'm taking this lightly, I'm not.  This is serious stuff.  And while I'm confident that most TSA workers are upstanding employees who are only trying to do their difficult jobs well, there are TSA workers who enjoy touching people's "junk" and otherwise humiliating them.

But why are the normal TSA workers willing to rub their hands in the groins and on the breasts of elderly women and men who clearly are not terrorists?    I suspect that for the normally non-abuser TSA employee,  the  Stanford Prison Experiment is relevant here.

In that controversial experiment, Dr. Philip Zimbardo set up a mock prison using Stanford students who had been chosen because of their emotional and psychological stability. They were divided into prisoners and guards. They very quickly got into their roles and the guards were soon abusing the prisoners so that six days into the two week experiment it had to be called off. Dr. Zimbardo explains what happened - with footage of the experiment - in the YouTube video I found posted by mr1001nights.





I'd note there has been a lot of criticism about the ethics of this experiment which is addressed in the Stanford Prison Experiment link.

I would guess the same dynamics work out with TSA workers. They get into their roles and learn to believe that passengers should obey them and that groping them is very appropriate behavior and if passengers resist, they probably deserve punishment. The TSA workers have an added incentive - their paychecks and perks, which they would lose if they protested their orders.

So, even if all the TSA employees were psychologically and emotionally well adjusted when they began their jobs, if the Stanford Prison Experiment lessons are valid here, they would fall into abusive roles.

The Milgram experiment had a similar result - where people off the street are found to give greater and greater electric shocks (or so they think) to learners who miss the questions. Unlike in the Stanford experiment, Milgram's 'learners' were actors who were not actually being shocked. But Milgram's experiment demonstrated how normal people would stray way beyond the bounds of appropriate behavior if told to do so by an authority. YouTube has footage of the Milgram experiments too.

I think the TSA workers have similarly strayed way beyond acceptable behavior in their intrusive pat-downs of people who have absolutely nothing to link them to terrorism except that their artificial hips set off the metal detector or their mastectomies looked strange in the scanner.

Cold Wind, Overlapping Roles, University Boosters Caucus, Blogging

I saw on BASIS that the new UAA Chancellor Tom Case was going to be in Juneau today.

(S)UNIVERSITY BOOSTERS CAUCUS OTHER COMMITTEE *
Feb 28 Monday 4:00 PM CAPITOL 106
Special Legislative Briefing:
Welcoming Chancellor Brian Rogers of UAF,
Outgoing Chancellor Fran Ulmer and Incoming
Chancellor Tom Case of UAA, and Chancellor
John Pugh of UAS
Final Update from Chancellor Ulmer and
Celebration of her Career in Public Service

Being a blogger sometimes puts me in conflict with other roles I have.  With my children, it's clear.  They are mentioned only when necessary, not by name, briefly, and if more than that, with their permission.   But I've been blogging about the UAA chancellor search that picked Tom Case.  As a former faculty member at UAA who served under then Dean Tom Case, I was in a potentially awkward position.  I didn't hesitate to identify my relationship with Case and the fact that my experience suggested his integrity was not something I questioned.  But I hadn't talked to him since last March (or April)  and I did feel the need to talk to him about all this.



So, I took off into the piercing downtown Juneau wind - it got colder and windier since I posted the video of Saturday's wind.  But whatever loose snow there was to make that Saturday video convincing has been blown away.  Sunday we were going to walk the seven or eight blocks to the Nickelodeon to the see the Academy Award nominated animated shorts, and the wind was so strong, we turned back and drove.  It wasn't as bad today, but it still is a factor to calculate as you take each step.   



I did get to see Tom Case and we did get to spend some 'quality time' together and affirm our respect for each other and I got to identify my concerns - which he indicated he'd already read.  I don't think there is much to blog about here.  I did say I was talking to him in various capacities.  More it was a private checking-in between two people who haven't talked for a while and making sure we were both still ok with things.  I know he learned a lot as dean and I know that he was already more sensitive to academic culture than President Gamble has so far proven to be.  He also assured me that President Gamble has learned a lot in the last month. 

For *Photo Details See Below

The Booster Caucus is basically Senators and Representatives who support the University - mainly from the three main campus sites of Fairbanks, Juneau, and Anchorage.  Today's main activity was to honor outgoing UAA Chancellor Fran Ulmer.  Ulmer's career has included being city council member and mayor of Juneau, state legislator from Juneau, Lt. Gov., head of the Institute for Social and Economic Research at UAA, and Chancellor of UAA.  But that's just a list.  She is one extremely smart, efficient, and personable person who has impressed me since I first met her.  If only the world had seen Fran Ulmer as a representative of Alaska instead of a certain former Governor, they would have seen a one of the many extremely talented women leaders whose hard work in support of Alaska has helped make us as good as we are.

You don't have to take my word for this. You can see Ulmer for yourself wearing yet another hat - member of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling - when she spoke in the Capitol today at lunch.  




*Photo Details:  From right to left - Sen. Linda Menard, UAS Chancellor John Pugh, UAA Chancellor Fran Ulmer, UAF Chancellor Brian Rogers, incoming UAA Chancellor Tom Case, Rep. David Guttenberg, and Rep Sharon Cissna

(OK, I had a couple of pictures.  One close and one with more people in it.  The close one wasn't as clearly focused as this one.  So, instead of having two of the same picture, I opted to cut most of the others out so you could see the four chancellors up close.  But, it turned out that Sharon Cissna was on the edge of this.  Since I've done several posts on her this week already, I didn't think I needed her in this one as well.  But cutting her out would have cropped the picture too closely.  Now that I've said all this, I guess I should show you what the original picture looked like before I cropped it.

The extra people on the left (excluding the photographer) are Sen. Joe Thomas and  Rep. Bill Stoltz and on the right side (l-r) Reps. Pete Petersen, Tammie Wilson, Anna Fairclough, and Sen. Johnny Ellis.)

Did TSA Know Sharon Cissna Was A Politician?

Some of the emails sent to Rep. Cissna, who refused to submit to a TSA 'patdown' last week, suggested that as a politician she probably got better treatment than others might have.  So when I had a chance to talk to her Friday, I asked if she had told them that she was a politician.  Her answer was basically 'no.'  She answers more fully in the video.

If Conservatives reject Darwin, how can they embrace Social Darwinism? Thoughts on seeing ASEA at State Capitol

While state employees in Wisconsin are demonstrating in protest of their Governor's move to end collective bargaining, Alaska's unionized employees - mostly represented by the Alaska State Employees Union  - were happily doing what lots of groups of Alaska residents do:  walking the state capitol, talking to legislators about issues, and posing in front of the Capitol building for a picture just as the Key Campaign folks had done the day before.

I don't want to get into the pros and cons of labor unions.  *My short personal sense of unions is at the bottom of the post.

But thinking about unions,  Walker's attack on them in Wisconsin, and their beginnings in the US, brought social Darwinism to mind.  Darwin's Origin of the Species came out in 1859 and Darwin's theory about evolution was debated through the Europe and North America and other parts of the world.

One of the offshoots of Darwinism was something called Social Darwinism.

Social Darwinism was a sociological theory popular in late nineteenth-century Europe and the United States. It merged Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection and Herbert Spencer's sociological theories to justify imperialism, racism, and laissez-faire (i.e. conservative) social and economic policies. Social Darwinists argued that individuals and groups, just like plants and animals, competed with one another for success in life. They used this assertion to justify the status quo by claiming that the individuals or groups of individuals at the top of social, economic, or political hierarchies belonged there, as they had competed against others and had proven themselves best adapted. Any social or political intervention that weakened the existing hierarchy, they argued, would undermine the natural order. [Emphasis added]

Social Darwinism was embraced by the ruling class because it justified their wealth and relieved them of any obligation to help the poor. This was 'scientific' support for the market and competition.

Social Darwinism lost influence during the Great Depression but the term came back in the era of Ronald Reagan.

But given that in 2009 only 4 in 10 Americans professed to believe in Evolution and in some states people are supporting the teaching of Creationism and Intelligent Design in schools, it seems that there is an inconsistency. 

If the hard core Republican base doesn't believe in Darwinism, why are they supporting a party that seems to continue to believe in social Darwinism, continues to favor policies that help the very wealthy and cut supports for the poor?


I can find fault with unions just as easily as anyone.  But those who attack the flaws of unions seem to overlook the equally, perhaps more, problematic faults of business.  Just because the private sector has faults, we don't call for abolishing it, nor should we try to abolish unions.  We should set up safeguards that increase the likelihood that both will do what they do well and not do what they do poorly.



Without unions, individual employees are at the mercy of organizations (I'm not talking Mom and Pop businesses here) with the resources and information that tips every confrontation in favor of the organization against the employee.  Unions provide a base of knowledge for workers - knowledge of the organization's policies, precedents, historical practices, and knowledge of the law and their rights.  Unions give some power to people at the bottom of the heap.  Power to fight abusive bosses, unfair and illegal work and pay practices, power to fight illegal orders and unfair termination.  Without the counterbalance of unions, managers - in public as well as private organizations - have overwhelming power over workers. 





*My Short View of Unions
The fight between unions and management is about power.  My experience, as an employee and as a reader of history, is that American workers are inherently anti-union.  They believe in the individual over the group.  They only vote for unions when management has been so overbearing and unreasonable that joining a union looks like a better alternative. 

And because, despite our rhetoric, we are only moderately good at democracy (look at how many people don't vote and can't tell you the individual candidates' positions). 

And so unions, which are ostensibly more democratic (officers are selected through elections of the members rather than appointment from the top), are easily taken over by those who like to play power games. 

The people on top of organizations aren't very different.  There will be times when unions have sway and times when they have to make concessions (such the current economic downturn).  A good reading of history suggests that without unions, working conditions would be dismal.  And even employees in non-union organizations have unions to thank for things they take for granted, like 40 hour weeks, vacation and sick pay, and a myriad of other benefits. To get a reminder of US working conditions before unions, read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.  It's short and available free at any public library. 

Costco Changes Fish Policy

Last July I posted this in the post  "Costco Reigns as Biggest Offender" from a Greenpeace report

. . . And while most U.S. supermarkets could stand to improve their sustainable seafood policies, Costco reigns as the biggest offender. Everything at Costco is huge—the same is true of the store's environmental footprint. Of the 22 IUCN Red List species, Costco sells 15: Alaskan pollock, Atlantic cod, Atlantic salmon, Atlantic sea scallops, Chilean sea bass, grouper, monkfish, ocean quahog, orange roughy, red snapper, redfish, South Atlantic albacore tuna, swordfish, tropical shrimp, and yellowfin tuna. The store's fish coolers really serve as a one-stop shop for oceanic destruction. . .

 Greenpeace has a new message up this week:

Costco has agreed to remove over a dozen red list items, pursue better practices in aquaculture and assume more of a leadership role in the ongoing global effort to develop a more sustainable tuna industry.

If you want to know all the specifics (I know I like hearing about all the details), Costco has publicly announced that they’re going to:

-- Eliminate 12 red list species, which will not return unless the company can find an MSC-certified option. This is certainly not perfect—we’d like to see these unsustainable options off the shelves until the populations recover—but it’s a major step forward. The species are:

     - Atlantic cod
     - Atlantic halibut
     - Chilean sea bass
     - Greenland halibut
     - Grouper
     - Monkfish
     - Orange roughy
     - Redfish
     - Shark
     - Skates and rays
     - Swordfish
     - Bluefin tuna

-- Pledge to play more of a leadership role within aquaculture;

-- Partner with World Wildlife Fund to examine their remaining wild-caught species and determine how to best transition to the most sustainable alternative; and

-- Acknowledge the role that the canned tuna industry plays within the global sustainable seafood movement and is in the process of shifting to more sustainable tuna sources in all sectors (fresh, frozen, and canned).

It’s fantastic that Costco's leadership has taken some incredibly important steps forward. Still, this is just the beginning—the company has a long way to go, and just as we monitored the continued progress with the victory around Trader Joe's, we’ll also be keeping an eye on Costco to make sure that they follow through on these policies and continue improving their stewardship towards the oceans.

I'm quoting from Greenpeace, which is touting this as a big victory, because I can't find anything about it on the Costco site.  Here's what I got when I used their search tool:

And the link shows what I got when I just searched for 'fish".

Windy Day in Juneau