Voting Rights Act and Planning the End Game

Tuesday's redistricting board meeting began at 10:08am. I'd already dropped my computer off at MacHaus after it stopped working after they put in a new fan. I'm trying not to whine here, but I miss my laptop, which is why this hasn't been posted sooner. But every change makes us see new opportunities right?

Tuesday's meeting had three main parts:

1. Discussing feedback from the round the state public hearings. I want to look at this in more detail, but I'd say that the board is a little behind the times when it comes to public hearings. Their public planning was pretty off-the-cuff - minimal notice as I've documented before, little or no education packets that would give participants an idea of the statewide requirements that caused them to do things that didn't seem to make sense to local areas - particularly the Voting Rights Act requirements that led them to pair Ketchikan and Kodiak. Locations were added because someone asked to be added, with no discussion of how that would benefit things. No consideration was given to using all the teleconferencing available today (ie skype, and the other internet video meeting programs) to deal with distant places. In Southeast they had between 3 and 33 people show up at meetings. While I'm sure people were glad to see that the board took time to send people to some remote towns, I never heard the board discuss the tradeoff's in time and money. I'm a strong believer in public participation, and I've seen it done professionally. This wasn't. And it's not clear how they are going to use the feedback. Some, clearly will be useful to make minor adjustments to improve socio-economic cohesiveness. In other cases, if two people testified they liked the Rights or AFFER plan better, is that a representative sample of the 17,755 people in a district and does it make sense to cite those two to justify use of one plan or the other? But they did say things today like, "Most people at the meeting thought . . ." as though it mattered in any statistically meaningful way.  Again, if it pointed out local conditions the board didn't know, it might be helpful, if it was just unsupported opinion, it's questionable.   [I realize that I've shifted into analysis here and have only given a little back up data. But this is something I do know a little about and I'll try to support my basic view better in another post. My sense is that the board more or less copied what was done in previous redistricting boards without really giving much thought to it. Say, in contrast to hiring an expert as they did with the Voting Rights Act information. I understand that they knew they had to get an expert for the VRA because they need pre-clearance from the DOJ and it's very complex. But doing participation right is also more complicated than posting a schedule on the State online public notice website and then showing up in towns around the state. And, they obviously did more than that because they had to arrange for rooms to meet in etc. But if you disagree with me, then show me the notice that was given to people and the information given them so they could prepare before the meetings with meaningful comments. From what I could tell, many people showed up because they were contacted, not by the board, but by one or more of the groups that prepared plans.]

2. Voting Rights Act discussion with their contracted consultant Lisa Handley by phone. I posted a lot of the basics Monday after the post-meeting discussion. I'm going to skip over the details of this for now - it's late and I have an early morning meeting. The key issues were:
1. the groundrules for what was needed to get approval from the DOJ had shifted a bit. The percent of Natives and which Natives (Voting Age Population -VAP - not total population), after Handley's analysis of voting patterns from 2002 to 2008 changes things a bit. When the board asked for firm numbers, the consultant said, it isn't that easy, and listed various factors that would change the basic percentage needed - such as whether whites added to a district had voted in a bloc with or against Native bloc preferred candidates. Member Holm got a bit testy at one point and said, basically, "Our job is to draw lines to meet benchmark numbers. When you don't give us a number, then we can't draw maps."
Despite the changes, she basically said that eight of the Minority effective or influence districts looked good and there was only a problem with one Senate district. And that some of the privately drawn plans seemed to have gotten nine good districts, so it could be done. Attorney White wasn't sure if those other plans had used total or voting age population.

In a discussion during the break, someone said that these numbers were coming really late - after the draft plan had already been done - because in previous redistricting exercises, the Legislature had done the administrative work for the board and they can do sole source bidding. But this time the Governor's office took over and they had to do competitive bidding which has a much longer time line to completion. That is something that needs more verification. My guess would be that competitive bidding is better for lots of reasons, but it just needed to be done soon enough to get the analysis done in time to be used in the draft plans.

3. Strategy to finish the plan by June 14.

Order of regions.  They seemed to agree that it was necessary to get the rural districts set first because they needed to meet the Voting Rights Act criteria.  The rural maps might or might not impact the urban areas, so they should wait until the rural areas were done.   Member Brody observed something like, "We spend 90% of our time on the rural areas, and 10% on the urban areas, where most of the population live."

Amount of deviation.  Some seemed to think that if the deviation in the urban areas weren't quite so tight (mostly under 1%) then it might be easier to get the VRA requirements met.

Group of pairs/individuals.  Deja vu time. The debate on whether pairs of members/staff should work on maps on their own in the mornings and then have the whole board discuss them in the afternoons was a big part of the discussion back in March on how to do the draft plan. The main advocate for everyone doing things together in the meetings was member Bob Brody. PeggyAnn McConnochie Tuesday was the main advocate for doing individual preparation before the meeting on the grounds that there simply isn't enough time, though this seemed to be preferred by most of the others too.

I think some of this is just personal style. Some people work better alone, others in groups. If I were on the board, I'd need time to study stuff on my own first. But someone else mentioned to me after the meeting that political manipulation can take place more easily out of public view.  This person also acknowledged that it's hard for more than two people to do this together.

I'd say if there were clear groundrules set up (and they discussed groundrules too) then individuals would have guidance on what they could and couldn't do on their own.  Particularly about whether they would or wouldn't pay attention to where incumbents live and if they'd try to draw lines to preserve incumbency. They agreed at an early meeting in March that this would not be a criterion, but when they publicly worked on Southeast for the draft plan, they did discuss how incumbents were affected.  They either claimed not to know the impact on incumbents (for Fairbanks) or just didn't mention it (for Anchorage.)  Did they have lists of incumbent addresses when they finished the Anchorage maps?  No one said.  Or did some people know this information and make changes with this in mind while others didn't know?  We don't know.  This DID NOT come up at the meeting.  But given that people have charged that gerrymandering was a big factor in the last two redistricting processes, it seems reasonable to raise these questions for this one.

Chair Torgerson adjourned the meeting just before 2pm until 10am Wednesday. (I'd brought a sandwich knowing the chair hasn't given many lunch breaks in the past.)  One of the spectators pointed out to staff after the meeting that public notice said the Wednesday meeting would begin at 2pm, so, I was told after the meeting by staff it won't start until 2pm.

I think the time crunch is going to hit the board hard soon.

I'd also mention that Lisa Demer of the ADN was there Monday and Tuesday, so look for a story there.  I don't see one up yet.

Computer Not Well

I got the computer at 5:20, then we went to the Bear Tooth to see Of God and Men. Long, slow, but interesting. French monks in Algeria whose health clinic has been serving the local community for a long time. Terrorists begin killing people. The monks have to decide whether to stay or leave.

Got home. Loaded the video. Did some editing, then tried to save it in Quicktime. The computer suddenly shut off and went black. Tried again. Same thing within five minutes. The third time I realized that the computer was hot. (They had replaced the fan, I wasn't expecting that.) I got and ice pack and put it under the metal rack I use for about 20 minutes until it cooled down. After that, it wouldn't even start. It began, but then was suspended in the white screen. Shut it down and then next time it did the shut down, black routine again. It's never shut down like that before.

I have a bad feeling about this.

I'm on J's computer now.

Executive Session Results - New Director, Voting Rights Consultant Tomorrow

Taylor Bickford and Jim Ellis were made Executive Director and Assistant Director respectively when the Alaska Redistricting Board came out of their executive session. (I've left my Macbook at the MacHaus to get a new fan, so this is more a summary than usual. Probably all most of you need anyway.)

The second issue they discussed in the executive sessionb was litigation. What Chair John Torgerson revealed in the open session was:

1. Voting Rights consultant Lisa Handley will be on the phone tomorrow to answer questions about her analysis of the data. (It wasn't clear what time she'd be speaking.)
2. She will be in Anchorage in person next Tuesday, May 24.
3. Her analysis of the voting in Alaska's recent elections changes the percentages of Native population necessary for qualifying as Majority/minority, majority/effective, and majority/influence districts.

After the meeting Attorney Michael White spoke to spectators - namely folks from AFFR and the Rights Coalition who had questions about the numbers mentioned in the meeting. (I have some of this on video, but downloading on my wife's computer is giving me interrupted audio, so I'll rely on what I remember. I'm hoping to be able to pick up my Macbook later this afternoon.)

The notes I have include the following information:
1. The benchmark that the board will be judged against from last time will be:

House:
Minority/Majority Districts - 4
Minority/Effective Districts - 1
Minority/Influence Districts - 1
Sentate:
Minority/Majority Districts - 2
Minority/Effective Districts - 1

2. The House seats are likely to be fine (I understand this to mean it should be possible to draw maps meetng the minimum population requirements), the third effective Senate district is the problem.

3. The threshold for effective districts, statewide, has gone up to 41.?% (up from 35%) statewide, though in some districts it was different. In District 6 (the huge district from McCarthy over Fairbanks down the Yukon) already last time it was 49% - which is just one percent from being a majority district. District 37 - had a lower threshold for being effective.

In fact there were lots of questions about the terms 'influence' and 'effective'. What I understood was that 'effective' is now the DOJ's preferred term but that Lisa Handley should address all this tomorrow.

The other issue that came up was that the DOJ would be looking at voting age population, not total population. From what I understand most of the plans that have been submitted used total population, not voting age population.

4:16pm The MacHaus just called to say my computer is ready. More later

Board Remembers Director Ron Miller Then Goes Into Executive Session

Redistricting Board Monday May 16, 2011
10:30am
Present: John Torgerson, Marie Greene, Jim Holm, Bob Brody
By phone: PeggyAnn McConnochie (stuck in Juneau: great weather, bad plane)
Staff: Taylor Bickford, Michael White

Others: Bill McAllister (Channel 11), Lisa Demer (ADN) Randy Ruedrich (Republican Party), Rick Mueller (AFFR).
Problems with the streaming. [They weren't able to call out on their phones for a while when they were to go onto streaming, so the streaming audio didn't work. They were working on it and trying to get it up for the short period when the board comes out of executive session - maybe around 11:45 or noon]

10:38am - Called to Order
Torherson: Ron’s funeral to go to when we finish up. Leave here - [staff members] Taylor [Bickford] and Jim [Ellis] are pall bearers, we need to be gone by 12:30.


Approve the agenda. Approved.
Motion to go into executive session.
Brody: Perhaps we should enter on the record the absence of our director.
Torgerson: I suppose we could.
Brody: Since our last meeting Ron Miller died unexpectedly of a heart attack. A shock and surprise for us all. Funeral today.
Holm: I had the chance to spend three days with Ron Miller, driving to Glennallen, Galena, looking at caribou, swans, snow geese. Wonderful time, great weather. Makes you question . . . the time you spend with your family and kids. All precious moments. Got to know him well. Very nice man.
Greene: I too, my condolences to the family. He made me feel comfortable and really appreciate that. Helped me greatly here. We should have a moment of silence.
Torgerson: Services today at 2pm
Brody: Very unpretentious, helped with little things like coffee, Condolences to his family. He was looking forward to being Mr. Mom.
White: He was an extraordinary gentleman. He will be missed. Condolences to his wife and family. Hard to walk up the stairs without thinking about Ron not being here.
Torgerson: Move to executive session.
PeggyAnn: They are trying to board this flight. Maybe I have 30 minutes.


Sepctators cleared from the room.


The Agenda items for Executive Session are:

A: Discussion of personnel matters - presumably they are talking about the now open position of executive director and possibly whether to fill it with Taylor Bickford the assistant director, since he and other staffer Jim Ellis were not included in the executive session.
B: Discussion of potential litigation issues

11:05am - while all the other spectators left, I stayed in the office because I left my camera in the board room when they emptied it for executive session. They just called Taylor and Jim back into the room and I got my camera. I’ll head out now to find wifi so I can post this.

More Broken Glass: Potter Marsh Vandalism

You'd think a photo of a piece of paper on a post would be easy.  But the wind was blowing and the light was glaring and I was being attacked by Arctic Terns.  OK, we did see a couple of Arctic Terns but they weren't attacking.


Here's a good assignment for a writing class:

Write a 1000 word essay about the vandalism at Potter Marsh with the vandal as the narrator.

You know that it must have felt like the right thing to do at the time.  Where does that sort of anger toward the world come from?  (See, I'm already assuming anger.)

But I'd brought my own binoculars so I could still see the few birds braving the cold wind.   A few green winged teals and what I think were American widgeons where the nicest we saw.   It's times like these that I covet a bigger, better camera with a telephoto lens. 

 

 

BTW, the vandals missed a few of the scopes.  

Breaking Glass - "You think I want to spend fifty-five years down there in that - celotex interior! with - fluorescent - tubes!"

We invited friends to go with us to see The Glass Menagerie, but they opted out.  I sort of understood.  Isn't this one of those mandatory plays that's depressing and hard?  I remember long ago seeing a movie or the play, but it didn't make a lasting impression.

But it's considered one of the great American plays by one of the greatest playwrights.  So we went.

Right off, as the tiny Out North theater space darkened, I was struck by the music - unfortunately not live - but still invoking a mood that fit the play perfectly.  (I later asked the director about the music since I thought it worked so well.  He said he hadn't liked the CD that came when they bought the rights to do the play, so he composed the opening piano part himself and pulled together other music for other parts.)

A mother, son, and daughter with a limp.  Dad, whose portrait hangs over the mantle, we learn as the play proceeds, was a charmer who one day just up and left.  The southern society Mom had grown up in - complete with ritualized gentleman callers - has now been replaced by factories and, in her case, poverty.  Only the son's meager income at the shoe factory keeps the family barely surviving the Depression of the 1930s in St. Louis.

Stage before the play began

The family members, collectively and  individually, are all outsiders.  For Mom, poverty keeps her an outsider from her DAR sisters, and she lives in a fantasy world of her lost Southern upbringing.  Laura, the daughter, with her bad leg (the script calls for a leg brace, but they played it with a shoe with a very high lift) was an outsider in school where she was painfully shy.  And Tom, the son, with his interest in writing, and his strange mother and sister, never fit in with the guys at school either.    All this sets up the basic conflict:  Mom wants to marry off Laura.  Tom works at the shoe factory to support the family but desperately wants adventure which he tastes nightly at the movies.  Laura is fine in the cocoon of home, tending her glass animals.  Beyond the walls, she gets sick. 

Mock up of the set

And the family tensions eloquently explode (Scene 3 excerpt from absolutenglish):

AMANDA: You're going to listen, and no more insolence from you ! I'm at the end of my patience !
[He comes back toward her.]
TOM: What do you think I'm at? Aren't I supposed to have any patience to reach the end of, Mother? I know, I know. It seems unimportant to you, what I'm doing - what I want to do - having a little difference between them !You don't think that -
AMANDA: I think you've been doing things that you're ashamed of. That's why you act like this. I don't believe that you go every night to the movies. Nobody goes to the movies night after night. Nobody in their right mind goes to the movies as often as you pretend to. People don't go to the movies at nearly midnight, and movies don't let out at two a.m. Come in stumbling. Muttering to yourself like a maniac! You get three hours' sleep and then go to work. Oh, I can picture the way you're doing down there. Moping, doping, because you're in no condition.
TOM [wildly]: No, I'm in no condition !
AMANDA: What right have you got to jeopardize your job - jeopardize the security of us all? How do you think we'd manage if you were -
TOM: Listen !You think I'm crazy about the warehouse? [He bounds fiercely toward her slight figure.] You think I'm in love with the Continental Shoemakers? You think I want to spend fifty-five years down there in that - celotex interior! with - fluorescent - tubes! Look! I'd rather somebody picked up a crowbar and battered out my brains - than go back mornings! I go ! Every time you come in yelling………
that God damn 'Rise and Shine!'- 'Rise and Shine!' I say to myself, 'How lucky dead people are ! 'But I get up. I go! For sixty-five dollars a month I give up all that I dream of doing and being ever! And you say self - selfs' all I ever think of. Why, listen, if self is what I thought of, Mother, I'd be where he is -G 0 N E ! [Pointing to fathers picture.] As far as the system of transportation reaches! [He starts past her. She grabs his arm.] Don't grab at me, Mother!
AMANDA: Where are you going?
TOM: I'm going to the movies!
AMANDA: I don't believe that lie!
TOM [crouching toward her, overtowering her tiny figure. She backs away, gasping]: I'm going to opium dens ! Yes, opium dens, dens of vice and criminals' hang-outs, Mother. I've joined the Hogan gang, I'm a hired assassin, I carry a tommy-gun in a violin case! I run a string of cat-houses in the Valley! They call me Killer, Killer Wingfield, I'm leading a double-life, a simple, honest warehouse worker by day, by night a dynamic tsar of the underworld, Mother. I go to gambling casinos, I spin away fortunes on the roulette table ! I wear a patch over one eye and a false moustache, sometimes I put on green whiskers. On those occasions they call me -El Diablo ! Oh, I could tell you things to make you sleepless ! My enemies plan to dynamite this place. They're going to blow us all sky-high some night ! I'll be glad, very happy, and so will you ! You'll go up, up on a broomstick, over Blue Mountain with seventeen gentlemen callers! You ugly - babbling old - witch. [He goes through a series of violent, clumsy movements, seizing his overcoat, lunging to do door, pulling it fiercely open. The women watch him, aghast. His arm catches in the sleeve of the coat as he struggles to pull it on. For a moment he is pinioned by the bulky garment. With an outraged groan he tears the coat of again, splitting the shoulder of it, and hurls it across the room. It strikes against the shelf of Laura's glass collection, there is a tinkle of shattering glass. LAURA cries out as if wounded.]
[MUSIC. LEGEND: 'THE GLASS MENAGERIE'.]
L A U R A [shrilly] : My glass ! - menagerie. . . . [She covers her face and turns away.]

The Glass Menagerie opened on Dec. 26, 1944 - Williams was 33 - in Chicago.  And if you do the math, you'll figure out that he would have been 100 years old this year. 

As I said at the beginning, I saw going to the play more as an assignment, but the acting was superb and the play proves itself as an enduring classic.  I suspect it will touch a lot of people in our own time of Depression and where many young adults find themselves living back home with their parents instead of having adventures out in the world.  And Mom's life in memory of a Southern charm eclipsed by a new soulless, industrial culture will seem familiar to many who have seen the rapid changes brought on by technology during their lifetimes.

There are only four characters.  Amanda, the mother, played by Scarlet Kittylee Boudreaux.  The son Tom, played by Max Aronson.  The daughter, Laura, played by Sarah Bethany Baird.  And the gentleman caller, Jim, played by Patrick Parker Killoran.

I was lost in their world with them for the duration.  Everything they did was right.  I really don't know how Laura pulled it off, but her change from painfully shy to fully engaged at the end worked perfectly.  

[OK, I need to explain this last picture.  I've learned with my tiny Canon Powershot, that stage lighting tends to wash out the faces unless I set the camera to a few steps darker than the meter automatically would do.  But since I don't shoot during the play (unless they say I can) I forgot about my camera, and only quickly pulled it out to get the actors bowing.  But it was too late to change the setting.  And then they were gone.  It was too bright and trying to get the faces better exposed in photoshop made for weird effects.  So I tried the glass filter (this is the Glass Menagerie, right?), and it wasn't that successful either, but I think the effect works better than the original. (If you double click it, you can see it much better than blogspot shows it.)  And if you know the actors, you would recognize them.]


This is, as I said, one of the great American plays.  A terrific production [really, I do support Out North, but I wouldn't lie to you either] is playing in town that makes this a great evening out in an intimate little theater where you can see the expressions on the actors' faces because you're that close.    It's playing until May 22, Thursdays-Sundays.  Get more information at Out North.

"Great minds discuss ideas . . . "

From goodreads.com:

"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

How many of you can read this as simply descriptive of how things are and not judgmental?

Descriptive, say, like "Great athletes compete in the Olympics, average athletes play softball and ski after work, and poor athletes watch television"?

Somehow, "poor athlete" doesn't overlap with a moral assessment the way 'small minds' does in this quote.  I'm trying to figure out why.   Surely we can recognize that people with 'great minds' have some abilities that people with 'small minds' don't have in the same way great athletes can do things average athletes can't.

Yet 'small minds' seems to say much more about who you are as a person, than does 'poor athlete.'  Maybe it's because people with small minds don't know this fact about themselves.  After all, it's just easier to know a good athlete when we see one.  An athlete's ability is much more tangible than a great mind's ability.  We can see someone consistently sink the ball in the basket or run faster than anyone else.  But only in very specific situations do we see that someone's mental ability is tangibly better than our own such as when someone gets the last word in a spelling bee right, or wins a chess tournament or on Jeopardy. Or can fix our computer. 

But these are specialized abilities, almost oddities.  She's very smart, but . . . A great mind is something more than the ability to finish a Sudoku in ten minutes.   We know there are different kinds of intelligence, not just the linguistic/rational/spatial intelligences thought to be captured in IQ tests. Is a great mind one that has many of them?  Actually, Howard Gardner, who developed the concept of multiple intelligences, also has identified five different minds - 

• The Disciplinary Mind: the mastery of major schools of thought, including science, mathematics, and history, and of at least one professional craft.
  
  
• The Synthesizing Mind: the ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines or spheres into a coherent whole and to communicate that integration to others.
  
  
• The Creating Mind: the capacity to uncover and clarify new problems, questions and phenomena.
  
  
• The Respectful Mind: awareness of and appreciation for differences among human beings and human groups.
  
  
• The Ethical Mind: fulfillment of one's responsibilities as a worker and as a citizen.

Maybe the higher percent one has of all five, the closer one gets to being wise.


Is Eleanor Roosevelt's aphorism insightful or just a snarky put down from an intellectual woman who, because of her wealth and position, was the target of a lot of gossip?

Why is discussing events less important than discussing ideas? And discussing people even less important?  People and events are, it seems to me, the raw data necessary for the ideas of social science and philosophy.

I think we, collectively, need people with a wide variety of skills - people good with their hands, with plants and animals, with machines;  good at music and art, at raising children, at bringing people together,  at taking risks, at avoiding risks.  All these skills are necessary at different times for individual survival and communal prosperity.

One could argue that the progression Roosevelt offers is one of expansion.  At the narrowest level, the focus is people. Putting the individuals into context gets us to events.  And finally we back up further and see those events, not as random or unique, but in a larger context of more enduring ideas about what is good, what is right, what is important, etc. 

Part of me likes the elevation of people who discuss ideas, but not at the expense of people who discuss other things.   One can discuss people, events, and ideas in order to improve the general quality of life or to enhance one's own importance and power over others.

This riff could drift in many different directions.  How do we even know a great mind when we meet one?  How many great minds are there for every thousand people?  What is a great mind even?

Given the anti-intellectualism of some groups today, I think it's important for us to work on understanding what it means to be 'smart.'  In that respect, this post follows up on thoughts I've posted about on elitism.

Our current great political divide compels me to ponder why so many people seem to think they know so much more than they do, and to dismiss people who know far more.  (I'm talking about all folks who are certain about what they know, whether they dropped out of high school or continued on to get a PhD.) All of us need to expand our understanding of why we believe what we believe and how we test our truths.

Of course, Eleanor Roosevelt was probably using 'small minds' in the dictionary sense - narrow-minded; petty; intolerant; mean - and by reinterpreting it literally, I've made an issue out of nothing.

Alaska Redistricting Board: Live Streaming of Meetings And Updated Website

I subscribe to the Alaska Redistricting Board emails.  (Anyone can here.)  Friday I got one which announced that the meetings next week will have live audio streaming.  This means that people can listen in on the discussions on their computers from wherever they are and across the state.  Some past meetings have been available statewide.  The initial board meeting, as I recall, was delayed because of problems with the statewide audio feed.  The two statewide public testimony held in the Anchorage LIO were available statewide.  And at least one Juneau public hearing was broadcast as video and audio. 

Update:  Live Streaming of May 16-20 Alaska Redistricting Board Meetings 

Anchorage, AK - The Alaska Redistricting Board today announced that it will provide live audio streaming of scheduled Board meetings for May 16-20, 2011 via http://alaskalegislature.tv.

Detailed information about all Alaska Redistricting Board meetings and events can be accessed at http://www.akredistricting.org/calendar.

All Board meetings are public meetings and anyone needing special accommodations is requested to call (907) 269-7402 or email info@akredistricting.org.

The Alaska Redistricting Board is responsible for redrawing Alaska's legislative election districts every ten years after the federal Census.  For more information about the redistricting process in Alaska, please visit http://www.akredistricting.org.  

### 

CONTACT:

Taylor Bickford, Assistant Director

Phone:  (907) 269-7402

Email:  tbickford@akredistricting.org 

The board's website has also been updated.  The "History" and "Media Center" tabs have been removed and replaced with "Draft Plans" and "Archive."

Draft Plans tab has the

• district and regional maps, GIS, and population data for Option 1 and Option 2  
• Reports, maps, and/or Population and GIS data (not all groups submitted all items) for each of the private plans:
• Alaskans for Fair Redistricting (AFFR is an Alliance of Union and Native organizations)
• Alaskans for Fair and Equitable Redistricting (AFFER is headed by Republican Party chair)
• Rights Coalition (Democratic Party)
• Alaska Bush Caucus 
• City and Borough of Juneau
• Bristol Bay Borough
• City of Valdez

These are plans submitted March 31, but not the revised plans submitted May 6, 2011.

Archive tab has agendas and audio tapes for most of their

• Board Meetings and
• Public Hearings

All the Plans have been up since right after they were submitted.  Some of the audio has been up already too, but there are fewer missing meetings now, it appears. 

Click on image to go to Board Webpage

The Board also now has a window on the front page (right hand column below "Public Comment") that lists the dates and times of their scheduled meetings.  This improves the ease for people trying to find out the next meeting.  And with the audio streaming of these meetings makes access to what the board is doing easier for people across the state.  Clicking on each meeting gives more information, though they are still having trouble with the linked Google maps.  To my knowledge, the meetings will be at their office:


411 West 4th Avenue, Suite 302
Anchorage, AK 99501


Their Facebook page has also been updated.

The World Ends October 21. Followed By The Next 10,000 Years

[Sorry, Blogger wasn't working for a long time yesterday, and today I had things to do.]

According to Harold Camping of Family Radio Ministry in Oakland, California as reported in the Baptist Press:

the rapture will occur on May 21, 2011 and God will destroy the world 153 days later on October 21.

But while the Baptists don’t disagree with the idea of the end times coming (after all, their members helped keep the Left Behind series on the best seller lists), they just don’t date it May 21, 2011. 

Ralph Tone at the Baptist Press continues:

Should we join the movement? Probably not. Biblical teaching can be an inconvenient truth to those who would set a month, day and year to Christ's return.

Jesus left no doubt about the futility of playing the dating game when he told his disciples three times in Matthew 24 not to go there:

-- "But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father (Matthew 24:36).

-- "Therefore keep watch because you do not know on what day your Lord will come" (Matthew 24:42).

-- "The Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect Him" (Matthew 24:44b).

But that’s not their only objection.  It seems Camping doesn’t like organized religion at all.  Tone continues:

Somewhat lost in the hoopla over doomsday dates is Family Radio's more sinister teaching that Christians should not be part of a local church. Yes, you read right. Family Radio is not local church friendly.

The tract further states, "The Holy Spirit has abandoned all churches (and) those still following any church on May 21, 2011 are not saved"

The Next 10,000 Years

Across the Bay from Camping’s headquarters, The Long Now Foundation is building a 10,000 year clock.  They are concerned that the world has lost its sense of the future.  Michael Chabon, in an essay (pdf) linked on The Long Now website, talks about how tangible,  exciting, and worth living for, the future recently was.  But now the future seems to no longer exist.  Chabon writes it had been a long time since he'd given any thought to the world ten thousand years off.

At one time I was a frequent visitor to that imaginary mental locale. And I don’t mean merely that I regularly encountered “the Future” in the pages of science fiction novels or comic books, or when watching a TV show like The Jetsons (1962) or a movie like Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970). The story of the Future was told to me, when I was growing up, not just by popular art and media but by public and domestic architecture, industrial design, school textbooks, theme parks, and by public institutions from museums to government agencies. I heard the story of the Future when I looked at the space-ranger profile of the Studebaker Avanti, at Tomorrowland through the portholes of the Disneyland monorail, in the tumbling plastic counters of my father’s Seth Thomas Speed Read clock. I can remember writing a report in sixth grade on hydroponics; if you had tried to tell me then that by 2005 we would still be growing our vegetables in dirt, you would have broken my heart.

It wasn't all good - lots of the images were negative:

Sometimes the Future could be a total downer. If nuclear holocaust didn’t wipe everything out, then humanity would be enslaved to computers, by the ineluctable syllogisms of “the Machine.” My childhood dished up a series of grim cinematic prognostications best exemplified by the Hestonian trilogy that began with the first Planet of the Apes (1968) and continued through The Omega Man (1971) and Soylent Green (1973). Images of future dystopia were rife in rock albums of the day, as on David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs (1974) and Rush’s 2112 (1976), and the futures presented by seventies writers of science fiction such as John Brunner tended to be unremittingly or wryly bleak.

So, what happened to the future?

I don’t know what happened to the Future. It’s as if we lost our ability, or our will, to envision anything beyond the next hundred years or so, as if we lacked the fundamental faith that there will in fact be any future at all beyond that not-too- distant date. Or maybe we stopped talking about the Future around the time that, with its microchips and its twenty-four-hour news cycles, it arrived. Some days when you pick up the newspaper it seems to have been co-written by J. G. Ballard, Isaac Asimov, and Philip K. Dick. Human sexual reproduction without male genetic material, digital viruses, identity theft, robot firefighters and minesweepers, weather control, pharmaceutical mood engineering, rapid species extinction, US Presidents controlled by little boxes mounted between their shoulder blades, air-conditioned empires in the Arabian desert, transnational corporatocracy, reality television—some days it feels as if the imagined future of the mid-twentieth century was a kind of checklist, one from which we have been too busy ticking off items to bother with extending it. Meanwhile, the dwindling number of items remaining on that list— interplanetary colonization, sentient computers, quasi-immortality of consciousness through brain-download or transplant, a global government (fascist or enlightened)— have been represented and re-represented so many hundreds of times in films, novels and on television that they have come to seem, paradoxically, already attained, already known, lived with, and left behind. Past, in other words.

Most telling is his comparison of his childhood notion of the future and his son's.

If you ask my eight-year-old about the Future, he pretty much thinks the world is going to end, and that’s it. Most likely global warming, he says—floods, storms, desertification—but the possibility of viral pandemic, meteor impact, or some kind of nuclear exchange is not alien to his view of the days to come. Maybe not tomorrow, or a year from now. The kid is more than capable of generating a full head of optimistic steam about next week, next vacation, his tenth birthday. It’s only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. He sees himself as living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange and bewildering book.

He wrote all this after hearing about the 10,000 year clock being designed by the Long Now Foundation.  

The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects , as well as to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today's "faster/cheaper" mind set and promote "slower/better" thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

*The zero in front of 1996 above is in recognition of the need for five digits when you talk about 10,000 years. 

So, why does this matter?  Stewart Brand, one of The Long Now Foundation founders (and 40 years ago of the Whole Earth Catalogs) writes:

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth. 

The mechanism is a 10,000 year clock and the myth . . . Well, the myth isn't so clearly spelled out, but it seems to be grounded on replacing "today's 'faster/cheaper' mind set" with  "'slower/better' thinking."

I grew up in a household where money wasn't spent carelessly (in the literal sense of taking care to think about why one was spending money).   The idea was to buy things of quality that last - my grandfather's pocket watch, for example, which was purchased probably before 1920, still works.   I posted in December 2007 about all this and how our consumer society has created a story about how we need to buy and throw away constantly.  This is tied to our daily economic reports, which, on the one hand, complain that Americans don't save enough and are falling deeper in to debt, but, on the other hand, that we aren't spending enough to keep the economy going.

The 10,000 year clock is a visible symbol of thinking further out.  This kind of thinking isn't new.  Europeans planned medieval cathedrals which took up to 100 years to complete, knowing they might never see the finished buildings.   Some North American Native peoples believed that decisions should consider the implications for the next seven generations so that one's descendants inherit a healthy land.

Few if any of our national and state or family decisions consider anything near that.  The clock project is an attempt to recapture a different way of thinking about time.

Signs of Anchorage Summer

Green, brown, and white is one way to describe the different times of the year in Anchorage.  Or light and dark.  Spring and fall are more like curtains opening and closing the main act of Winter, and the shorter but just as spectacular Summer act.

By the calendar, summer doesn't start for five weeks, but the sun doesn't set until after 10pm already, and we're seeing green poke out, and today the sun was warm.  Is that spring?  By my calendar it's summer already.  The first dandelion is already mirroring the sun.  And we had our first breakfast out on the deck yesterday.

And the birch leaves out front are halfway open.



 The names of the seasons are just labels, created by people who lived where there were four distinct seasons.   In Thailand it was rainy and dry, or hot and hotter.  Growing up in LA, the English season names never made sense.  And in Anchorage, the labels don't quite fit either.