Life Without Government Intervention: Kowloon's Walled City Photos

Ron Paul's supporters have scored a victory in Maine and at the recent Alaska Republican Party convention.  Many of them cite Ayn Rand as their inspiration.  The least government possible sounds good, but here's an example of what it can look like.  

 I spent the 1989-1990 school year teaching at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.  One of the places that always fascinated me in a strange macabre way was the walled city of Kowloon.  When you landed in the Kai Tak airport, it seemed like the wingtips were almost touching the buildings and you could see people through the windows.  Here's a shot from an old photo album where I put two pictures together (pre-photoshop) showing not only the outside facade of the walled city but also a plane coming in for a landing.  I never ventured inside the city.  The stories were of crime and triads (criminal gangs) and worse.  Police, it was said, never ventured inside.  It was a city within a city.  But it was right next to the airport and in the center of town.  And we would go nearby because the best Thai restaurants in Hong Kong - with amazing mango and sticky rice  - were very close to the walled city.

But Canadian photographer Greg Girard and Ian Lamboth did go inside, for five years, learning about it and taking pictures.  This Mailonline article offers some of his photos and some narrative about this city in a city.   Definitely worth a look for people to understand that humans are incredibly adaptable.   The pictures are MUCH better than my old fading snapshot. 

In the highly government controlled Hong Kong, the walled city was an example of life without government.  It was a haven for food processors and all sorts of people who wanted to escape government regulations. 


From the article:  

The area was made up of 300 interconnected high-rise buildings, built without the contributions of a single architect and ungoverned by Hong Kong's health and safety regulations

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2139914/A-rare-insight-Kowloon-Walled-City.html#ixzz1uD4A7ZXl

Both Kai Tak airport and the walled city are now gone.  Today, instead of landing in downtown Kowloon (the mainland side across the harbor from Hong Kong Island), you land out of town on another island in a modern airport and take the train into town.  Thanks J1 for the link.

Vulture's Picnic, Rating the Audience, The Wrong Answer Faster, and Other New Books

A UAA book I checked out in January escaped someplace on the West Coast this spring so I went to pay for the book. (I'm not that late - faculty can check out books for the whole semester.  They told me to wait in case it showed up.  It was called Standards and the chapter I read was terrific.  I can't believe someone could find a library book and not make any attempt to get it back home.)

 I find it hard to get past the New Books shelf when I'm at the library. If I didn't have a blog, I might just disappear in the library. There are so many books on so many topics. Despite the difficulty of writing a book, there are plenty of people doing it. For those of you who have abandoned libraries for the internet, good books get you more than superficial tidbits. Really good ones give you a good overview of a topic with enough background to understand the basic issues. Here are a few I saw. Please excuse my photoshop experimenting. Some worked ok, others I learned something from. But I've too much to do to make them perfect now.

They can all be enlarged a bit by clicking on them.

How about some books on oil and energy?

 

Music?

Books looking at different aspects of media.

Get into other countries - literature, law, superstition.  The concept here was ok, but the execution needs some work.  The bottom book is Superstition as Ideology in Iranian Politics: From Majlesi to Ahmadinejad by Ali Rahnema.

Biology books - genetics, cognitive biology, and Feathers:  The Evolution of a Natural Miracle by Thor Hanson. 

Here are three books with German themes. Das Amt is all in German - the title translates as The Official and the Past: German Diplomats in the Third Reich and the Federal Republic.  There's the history of the German firm Krupp.  And then there's the book on Robert Musil.   (Musil was Austrian, but he wrote in German.) I've written about Musil before.  Here's a more abstract post and one that is more concrete. He's a German writer who wrote The Man Without Qualities [sometimes translated as Characteristics].  Think about what such a man would be like.  When I saw the title I knew I had to read it.  It took a while to find it.  It's a very cerebral book.  I've only read about 180 pages.  Not because it isn't good, I just had other things to do and it needed close attention.  I also read another of his books - Young Törless.  So a book that will help me understand Musil - it's the one I checked out.   I could have added the Brahms book to this group. 


The table of contents below is from Expeditions in Mathematics. 

The second book is In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman:  Mathematics at the Limits of Competition by William J. Cook.  Then there's The Wrong Answer Faster:  The Inside Story Of Making the Machine that Trades Trillions.  


The first two books are about African Americans and I snuck* the third one in because it had Soul in the title as did the second book. 

Think about all the authors spending a year of five writing these books.  And because they are here, you might spend a second or two on them.  And before you pay money for some entertainment or distraction, consider that all these books and more waiting for you to borrow them for free at the Consortium library at UAA.  And no you don't need to be a UAA student to check out a book.  A Muni library card will do. 

*The spell check doesn't recognize snuck, but it's a regionalism that rolls off my tongue.  Sneaked can't compare.

For Many Alaskans Holidays Mean Planning Ahead

Mother's Day is next Sunday.  For people like me - whose mother is far away - that means getting out a mother's day card tomorrow if I want to be sure it gets there.  And both our kids are along the west coast, but further south, so their mom won't have her children home either.  Trade offs.  Somehow as good as Skype* is, it's not the same as all being together for dinner.  And as I write this, I realize that for some of you, the distance is what keeps you sane.

So, Alaskans, this is fair warning.  Go make a card or buy one (if you must) and write something you've never told your mom about a good thing she did that you still appreciate, and get them in the mail tomorrow!

*When Jason LeRose was here for the Alaska Press Club Conference he said it bothers him when broadcasters and bloggers say things like, 'this interview was done via Skype." He thought we shouldn't be plugging a particular company.  We should say something like, via "video chat."  He's right, of course.  But for me, skype is like google.  They just created a term for something that didn't exist before, and it's a term that rolls off the tongue.  Is skype the kleenix of video chats?  I've been thinking about this since he said it and this seemed like as a good a time as any to get it out here. 

Take care everyone and enjoy your Sunday, and get those cards in the mail.  Really, physical cards that your hands have touched and that you write on are so much better than email cards.  (If you're a good psychologist, you won't be upset about me telling you what to do.  You'll realize I'm really telling myself to do this and hoping that doing it so publicly I won't put it off.  And at the very least, my mom will know I'm already thinking about it.)

'SuperMoon' Anchorage

The Anchorage Daily News carried an LA Times story today about tonight's 'supermoon.'

We got a preview coming out of the Thai Kitchen last night.

But Earthsky quibbles with the word 'supermoon.'

We astronomers call this sort of close full moon a perigee full moon. [The LA Times article also mentions perigree.]  The word perigee describes the moon’s closest point to Earth for a given month. But last year, when the closest and largest full moon occurred on March 19, 2011, many used a term we’d never heard: supermoon. We’ve heard this term again at this 2012 close full moon. What does it mean exactly? And how special is the May 5, 2012 supermoon?

. . . Will you be able to notice with your eye alone that tonight's full moon is bigger or brighter than usual? Astronomers say no, but it'll be fun to stand outside under tonight's full moon and know the moon is closer than it has been since March 19, 2011.  The word supermoon didn’t come from astronomy. Instead, it came from astrology. Astrologer Richard Nolle of the website astropro.com takes credit for coining the term supermoon. In 1979, he defined it as:

…a new or full moon which occurs with the moon at or near (within 90% of) its closest approach to Earth in a given orbit (perigee). In short, Earth, moon and sun are all in a line, with moon in its nearest approach to Earth.

You can read more at Earthsky.

Brad Friedman Rips Apart Election Commissioner's Testimony

[Consider this a guest post, by Brad Friedman.]

L.A. based investigative journalist and the Brad Blog(ger) Brad Friedman specializes in election fraud and issues with Diebold machines and other voting machines.  Based on the bio on his website the Los Angeles Times called him:

"The state's most persistent blogger-watchdog on the dangers of voting technology."

The New York Times wasn't so parochial:

"Perhaps the most dogged critic of electronic voting machine technology in the blogosphere."
 --The New York Times

[Of course I checked these quotes.  The NYT quote is linked.  The LATimes blog Feb. 7, 2007 comes up with the quote on google, but I can't get to the link.]


He's been watching the Anchorage April 3, 2012 election carefully.  Since I wrote some posts on the election, I've been included in emails among a group of people concerned how the election was conducted.  Brad too is part of this group.

He watched the Assembly meeting (I'm assuming online) Thursday night.  He sent out an email which took her [Election Commissioner Gwen Mathew's] testimony apart paragraph by paragraph.  And he's given us permission to use it.  Thanks Brad for letting us post this, but more importantly applying your expertise to our election. His critique is so damning about the competence and knowledge of our local election commissioner that I'm posting it here for all to evaluate.

(I must confess I was committed to another event last night that was scheduled before the special Assembly meeting was.  But check Bent Alaska's comprehensive listing of links to the election coverage.)  

[UPDATE:  note the correct spelling is Mathew, not Matthews.]

Here's Brad's email:

"As Gwen Matthews told me personally on the phone, she had not read any of the many security analyses and reviews of Diebold (pronounced DEE-bold, since approximately 1859 when the company was founded) op-scan systems. That was apparent tonight in her testimony for the Assembly as she simply either made things up about Diebold in CA, or repeated what someone had told her.

"Here's part of what she said, which was so wrong in so many ways that I'll post what she said, and then respond line-by-line below it...

GWEN MATTHEWS: In 2003, in California, the Superior -- some court, I can't remember what it is -- they ruled that the Diebold machines were not good for elections. But that is the touch-screens in California. These are much different. The touch-screens, they had software, firmware, hardware issues -- which, by the way, were resolved --  and, but these machines are simple scanning machines and counters. They're very basic. The only security risk would be the memory card that is in each Diebold machine. 

Through the years, I have worked elections as well. And they do occasionally come off. I mean part of our procedure is the night of the election, we take the memory cards out of the Diebold machines, along with the tapes -- the zero report tapes -- and the election results and we put them in their own envelope. And we take them to City Hall and we hand them to people who 'do all that stuff'.  So, it's not unusual for the security seals to break, because they're supposed to that night.

If you're concerned about the security of this, you have to have a motive, you have to have opportunity, you have to have expertise to program that card, plus I don't think they sell that kind of equipment at Radio Shack. I think it's rather specialized. 

These machines are "overnighted" [she means sent home on "sleepovers" with poll workers], but I think it's unreasonable to assume that someone would want to break into that many precinct chairmen houses and get away with it and have no trail of that. 

One last thing. These machines are easy to check, because they have a paper trail. You can have another machines with -- and by the way Jacqueline [Duke] programs these, she's the only administrator, she has an observer when she does it -- um, and you can run through the same ballots through that machine.  It has a paper trail, which was a factor of the court case in California. 

"Good lord. Not even close. On any of it. Let's go graf-by-graf (sorry!)

GWEN MATTHEWS: In 2003, in California, the Superior -- some court, I can't remember what it is -- they ruled that the Diebold machines were not good for elections. But that is the touch-screens in California. These are much different. The touch-screens, they had software, firmware, hardware issues -- which, by the way, were resolved --  and, but these machines are simple scanning machines and counters. They're very basic. The only security risk would be the memory card that is in each Diebold machine. 

"The 2003 suit she's referring to doesn't actually have anything to do with security of the Diebold machines. It was a qui tam case, filed by Bev Harris of Black Box Voting, concerning the fact that Diebold had defrauded the state by lying about their touch-screen voting machines. This was discovered after Stephen Heller, a whistleblower at Diebold's law firm Jones Day, found that Diebold was planning to lie to state officials about having illegally inserted uncertified firmware into their machines in Alameda County (and one other, as I recall).

"The Secretary of State at the time, Kevin Shelley, decertified the touch-screen systems in the state entirely after that incident, and Diebold eventually paid $3.5m (as I recall) to settle the Qui Tam fraud lawsuit.  It had nothing to do with the actual security of the systems themselves, but the fact that Diebold had lied about it all to officials and installed uncertified firmware.

"Those issues were not "resolved," as Gwen says. Rather, a new Sec of State came in later, Bruce McPherson, appointed by Schwarzenegger and simply certified the same touch-screens (and had Diebold guys working out of his office -- literally) that Shelley had previously decertified.

"He did that in 2006, even after the December 2005 Leon County, FL Hursti Hack which showed how, not only could the Op-scan memory cards be gamed, but so could the memory cards in the touch-screens and, most disturbingly, the GEMS central tabulator itself.  That -- not the 2003 fraud case --  is what is referred to in the 2006 Security Analysis commission by McPherson, that I quoted from in my original report on the Anchorage election mess. As I wrote (but Gwen failed to read, I guess):

The findings of the post-Leon County Security Analysis in California [PDF] revealed, among other things:

Memory card attacks are a real threat. We determined that anyone who has access to a memory card of the [Diebold Accuvote op-scan], and can tamper it (i.e. modify its contents), and can have the modified cards used in a voting machine during an election, can indeed modify the election results from that machine in a number of ways. The fact that the the results are incorrect cannot be detected except by a recount of the original paper ballots.

The analysis went on to warn that the hacker "was indeed able to change the election results by doing nothing more than modifying the contents of a memory card."

"It would be safest if it is not widely used until these bugs are fixed (they never were) and until a modification is made to ensure that the...attack is eliminated." The scientists wrote that "strong procedural safeguards should be implemented that prevent anyone from gaining unsupervised or undocumented access to a memory card, and these procedures should be maintained for the life of all cards. ... Any breach of control over a card should require that its contents be zeroed (in the presence of two people) before it is used again."

"There would be no way to know that any of these attacks occurred; the canvass procedure would not detect any anomalies, and would just produce incorrect results. The only way to detect and correct the problem would be by recount of the original paper ballots," they found.

"That had nothing to do with the 2003 fraud case!

"When Matthews says, about her "amazing" machines that  "The only security risk would be the memory card that is in each Diebold machine," it's clear she hasn't bothered to read any of the security reports about these machines -- as she told me that she had not!

"That, of course, is just one report. There have been many many others finding all of the above and even much worse. In 2007, the newer CA Sec. of State Debra Bowen did a "Top-to-Bottom Review" of all e-voting systems in the state of CA. You can peruse the reports here which led her to decertify BOTH the touch-screen AND the op-scan, which was conditionally recertified with, among other security requirements, tamper-evident seals that, if broken, would de-certify the machine for use in an election.

"Here are those many reports -- often redacted for security reasons, to remove the most helpful stuff for hackers:

CA's "Top to Bottom Review" of E-voting systems:
Executive Summary

Decertification (and reasons why)

Source Code Report

Red Team Report (HACK TESTING!)
Documentation Review Report

"A year later, the Sec of State of Ohio, Jennifer Brunner, commissioned another study by her own state. Here are those results (Diebold had been renamed "Premier" by then to try and shake off some of the taint they had earned from all the fraud suits and decertifications and whistleblowers, etc.)

OH's EVEREST Study:
Premier System Executive Summary Report (PDF)
Premier System Technical Manager's Report (PDF)
Premier System Technical Details Report (PDF)

"Back to Gwen's statement tonight:

Through the years, I have worked elections as well. And they do occasionally come off. I mean part of our procedure is the night of the election, we take the memory cards out of the Diebold machines, along with the tapes -- the zero report tapes -- and the election results and we put them in their own envelope. And we take them to City Hall and we hand them to people who 'do all that stuff'.  So, it's not unusual for the security seals to break, because they're supposed to that night.

"'Hand them to people who 'do all that stuff''". Love that. Anyway, no, the security are not supposed to break. They are supposed to be cut at the end of the night by the poll workers. If they just break on their own, it kinda defeats the purpose of security seals.  Yes, they are crappy, and actually can be gamed (removed without breaking them, and then re-applying them), but that's hardly the point.

If you're concerned about the security of this, you have to have a motive, you have to have opportunity, you have to have expertise to program that card, plus I don't think they sell that kind of equipment at Radio Shack. I think it's rather specialized. 

"Fair enough. You have to have "motive…opportunity [and] expertise".  There are plenty of folks who have all of the above. Take, for instance, Jacqueline Duke. Her motive would be clear: Make sure her old boss won the election and that the ballot measure he opposed (Prop 5) did too. Of course, she would have both the opportunity and the expertise to game the system, because, as Gwen says as well, " Jacqueline programs these, she's the only administrator".

"Not saying she did it. Just saying that she had all the requirements to game the entire system. Many others did as well. For example, the "people who 'do all that stuff'", as Gwen mentioned.  And yes, poll workers could do so as well. More on that in a moment.

"As far as the equipment required. Well, Harri Hursi programmed his memory card for the Leon County Hack seen in Hacking Democracy by purchasing a crop scanner off the Internet for less than $100 dollars. Pima County, AZ did the same thing when they wanted to test, they say, how easy it would be to do what Hursti did.

"But no equipment is needed at all to simply change results on the GEMS central tabulator. That is done with a few keystrokes by "the people who 'do all that stuff'", if they like.

These machines are "overnighted" [she means sent home on "sleepovers" with poll workers], but I think it's unreasonable to assume that someone would want to break into that many precinct chairmen houses and get away with it and have no trail of that. 

"As the Princeton Diebold Virus Hack of 2006 showed -- (I broke the story at Salon and in a more detailed version at The BRAD BLOG, the hack was later demonstrated, among many other places, live on Fox "News") -- a single memory card can be loaded with a virus that then passes itself either from machine to machine, or straight into the GEMS tabulator affecting all cards and results in the election.  One needn't "break into that many precinct chairmen houses" to do this.

"Gwen is absolutely clueless about which she speaks, and is clearly repeating what she's been told by the Diebold reps (who are now either ES&S or Dominion, whichever one Anchorage uses as their vendor since Diebold was sold off.)

One last thing. These machines are easy to check, because they have a paper trail. You can have another machines with -- and by the way Jacqueline [Duke] programs these, she's the only administrator, she has an observer when she does it -- um, and you can run through the same ballots through that machine.  It has a paper trail, which was a factor of the court case in California. 

"Nothing that she mentioned "was a factor of the court case in California." She simply made that up.

"A so-called "paper trail" is no good if you don't examine it. By refusing to allow the Assembly to hand count the paper ballots, it does no good whatsoever to have a "paper trail". In allowing someone like Jacqueline Duke (who worked for a guy on the ballot) to program the machines (with some unnamed "observer"), train the pollworkers to ignore broken security seals, and then take custody of the "paper trail" (the ballots) themselves for a month before anybody ever gets to examine even one of those ballots by hand, makes a mockery of the entire system.

"That Gwen Matthews is the author of the report used to determine whether that election should be certified or not is a joke. That she serves as the Election Commissioner of Anchorage is an insult. That she would blatantly mislead and/or lie to the Assembly in making her presentation by offering absurd "facts" that have absolutely nothing to do with reality is both an outrage, and merits a LOUD call for her to removed from her post -- along with Jacqueline Duke, by the way -- immediately.

"Good luck guys. You folks may use any or all of the above on the record any way you see fit. IF you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Brad

Again, thanks Brad for so generously sharing your expertise on this issue.

Forcing Social Equality on the American People

The Savannah News pinned the blame [for the Philadelphia transit strike] directly on "Mrs. Roosevelt's persistent efforts to force social equality on the American people." (p. 540)

Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time spends a fair number of pages on Eleanor Roosevelt's interest and work to take down barriers to equality for blacks.  I've covered some incidents in previous posts.  And here.   This post is  one more.  And given that people in Anchorage voted to deny such rights to LGBT Alaskans, it seems worth while to go back into history. The people opposing LGBT rights sound a lot like people who opposed rights for blacks back in 1944.

There had already been countless incidents of black service men in the South and southwest not being able to buy bus tickets (they had to wait in the colored line until all the whites had gotten their tickets, including people who came way after them) to get back to base, or get on buses that only had room in white sections, or being beaten, even killed if they tried to defy Jim Crow laws.  One story was of the outrage of not being allowed to eat in the white (and only) dining room, and watching German prisoners of war, eating inside.  (p. 521)

The War Department, finally in July 1944 required all military transport and facilities, including those in the South, to be accessible equally to all soldiers regardless of race.

The Fair Employment Practices Commission was set up to make sure racial equity was practiced for civilians in war needed jobs.  Mostly, Goodwin writes, they capitulated  to business, labor, and the Southern block.   They succeeded only when black workers filed complaints or businesses complied voluntarily.  (p. 537)

August 1, 1945 there was a massive transit strike in Philadelphia.  It began when a group of black workers requested the chance to compete for positions above the lowest rank.

Under duress, the company announced a new round of qualifying examinations, open to anyone, for the position of motorman.  William Barber, a young Negro who had started with the transit system as a laborer and worked his way up to a welder, was one of fifty who took the exam.  "The exam was a written test, math plus some general questions,"  Barber recalled.  "Eight of us passed.  I got a ninety-eight, one of the highest scores. . . " (p. 538)

But when Barber came to work the first day, there were no trolly cars on the street.  The white workers went out on strike with calls to keep the Negroes out and to refuse to teach them the jobs.  On the third day of the strike, FDR ordered the army to take control of the Philadelphia Transportation Company because people couldn't get to work at war related jobs, and things quickly turned around.

"The citizens of Philadelphia turned against the strikers.  "In whatever degree the PTC walkout is based on race prejudice, it is wholly indefensible and thoroughly un-American,"  the Philadelphia Inquirer editorialized.  "It represents nothing but insult and injury to millions of Philadelphians." (p. 539)

And the Savannah News chastised Mrs. Roosevelt for forcing social equity on the American people.  But blacks now could have motorman jobs.

"The first runs were tough,"  William Barber recalled. "People spit at me.  I almost lost my temper, but I said, No, I'll just take it.  I'm setting an example.  And gradually things settled down.  I remember one day a woman with a bad attitude came in.  I called her stop and she missed it.  She started screaming at me.  "Look, lady," I said.  "If you don't leave in one minute, one or the other of us is going to be meeting our maker very soon."  With that, everyone on the bus burst into cheers and the lady shut up.  (p. 540)

Change can happen.  Social change can happen.  We're a long ways past 1944, but prejudice, while affected by social, political, and economic institutions, resides ultimately in people's hearts.  And many parents have stopped inoculating their children against hate and prejudice.  But when leaders take strong stands, backed by forceful action, things change.  Even in Philadelphia in 1944, it appears that most people were not worried about having black bus drivers.  They just needed strong leaders to make it happen.  Unfortunately, we don't have enough strong leaders in Anchorage to make discrimination against LGBT folks illegal.  And there seem to be enough religious leaders who think it's their duty to keep the discrimination legal.  Even today, almost 70 years after blacks got the right to be bus drivers in Philadelphia.

But ultimately, they can only delay the inevitable.  What's going to happen when a gay serviceman or woman is refused an apartment in Anchorage?  Fortunately, most people who rent are just concerned that the tenant pays on time and keeps the place in decent shape.  But every now and then someone loses a job or an apartment or a loan because of prejudice.  And many people live in fear that it will happen.   Is that what people mean by 'fear mongering'?

New Seward Repairs and Campbell Creek Bike Trail Start Today for Two Years

Between Tudor and International Airport Road

First Southbound - Starting May 2 - the frontage road will be closed.  They're getting it ready to take the Seward Highway traffic for when it gets closed down, later.

Then they'll do the same Northbound.  From DOT (with some reformatting): 

The Department of Transportation, in partnership with QAP, is working to improve the New Seward Highway, from Dowling Road to Tudor Road. Improvements will include

• added lanes, 
• resurfacing and 
• Campbell Creek bridge replacement.  

The Homer Drive and Brayton Drive frontage roads will also be improved with

• resurfacing and 
• the addition of multi-use trails. 

We will do our best to keep you informed as work continues, and appreciate your patience and cooperation during construction. This project is scheduled to be complete by June 2014.

In addition to the highway work - the bike trail along Campbell Creek under the Seward Highway is scheduled to be completed.  Here's a picture from 2007.  You have to walk your bike and duck low.   They also say they will have trails along the frontage roads when they are done.


There will be a public hearing Thursday night at Dimond High

A PUBLIC OPEN HOUSE will be held at the Dimond Center Hotel (700 E. Dimond Boulevard), on Thursday May 3, from 7:00pm to 9:00pm. Project teams will be available to review the scope of work and provide detailed information about the project. 

Redistricting Board's Supreme Court Appeal

The crux:

The transcripts from the April 24 meeting say:

BOARD MEMBER MCCONNOCHIE: My first motion would be to authorize our counsel to appeal the trial Court's April 20th decision to the Supreme Court. I so move.

I  thought that was fairly vague.  What exactly were they appealing?  All of it?  Some of it?  On what grounds?

So after the meeting I asked Board attorney White what they were appealing and on what grounds?  He refused to be recorded but agreed to answer otherwise.  Thus what I have is not as precise as it could be.  What I heard him tell me was that they needed the court to give them guidance on how to comply.   There was frustration in his voice.  It sounded like he was saying, "I give up, just tell us what you want so we don't have to keep guessing what you want us to do."

Then, the Board's website (April 25) adds a bit more detail:

The Alaska Redistricting Board voted unanimously today to appeal Judge McConahy's recent decision in 2011 Redistricting Cases v. Alaska Redistricting Board with the Alaska Supreme Court.

The Board will ask the court to overturn Judge McConahy's decision and approve the Amended Proclamation Plan as adopted on April 5, 2012. [emphasis added]

These are the important dates that come out of the Supreme Court's order posted on the Redistricting website April 27, 2012.  I put them into table form. 

May 1, 2012 4:30pm	May 9	Week of May 21
Petitions for review of Superior Court’s 4/20/12 order	Responses to the petitions for review	Oral argument if allowed.

From the Supreme Court order posted on the Board's website, I figured these are the important dates.  Presumably, shortly after May 1 and May 9, the petitions and responses will be posted on the Board's website.   And if it's decided oral arguments before the Supreme Court are needed, the dates will be announced there too. 



The Background, in more depth, and translated so normal people can understand (I hope)

Keeping track of the Redistricting Board is getting harder.  The Board is being good about posting things on their website and emailing people who sign up, but they've been to the Superior Court a couple of times and now they are on their way back to the Supreme Court.  And things are happening sporadically.  It's easy to get distracted by other things.


What is being appealed this time? 

The Hickel Process

The first time round, the Supreme Court told the Board that it hadn't followed the Hickel Process and to redo its plan using the Hickel Process.  [What is now being called] the Hickel Process was spelled out in Hickel v. Southeast Conference, a 1992 Alaska Supreme Court case on redistricting.  It said

“[t]he Board must first design a reapportionment plan based on the requirements of the Alaska Constitution. That plan then must be tested against the Voting Rights Act. A reapportionment plan may minimize article VI, section 6 requirements when minimization is the only means available to satisfy Voting Rights Act requirements”

I understand this to mean that the board needed, originally, to develop a plan that met the Alaska Constitutional requirements. (You can see the Board's list of various requirements, including the state constitutional requirements, they must meet, here. )

Mainly this means that every house district needs to be compact (as small as possible to get in the required number of people - 17,755/district); contiguous (every part must be connected);  and socio-economically integrated (the people in the district must be seen as much as possible to have the same interests.)  I've said, somewhere here before, I'm not sure it's possible to get every district close to equal size AND have every district compact.  The state is just too big and the population too spread out.  So creating a map that complies with the state constitution and demonstrating that can be tricky. 

Then, when a constitutional plan is created, if that plan does not also meet the requirements of the federal Voting Rights Act (VRA), the Board can make what minimal adjustments to the original plan it absolutely must make, to make it also comply to the Voting Rights Act.  Since the federal Voting Rights Act legally trumps the constitution, there can be some minimal deviations from the constitutionally perfect map, if the deviations are the only way to meet the VRA.

The Supreme Court ruled the first time that the Board developed its plan with the VRA in mind mainly and did not first come up with a constitutional plan.  It told the Board to come up first with a constitutional plan.  The rationale behind this was that the court needed a baseline constitutional plan against which it could measure any deviations required to comply with the VRA.  They'd take the districts in the baseline map and compare districts in the new VRA compliant map to check the deviations were the minimal they could be to get VRA compliance. 

So, the Board redid their plan.  They assumed that the parts of the plan that were not challenged, could be considered as meeting the state constitution.  They worked on the parts that had been declared unconstitutional by the courts.  Fixed them. (Obviously the parties that filed with the court didn't agree they did fix them.)  And sent it back.

Judge McConahy at the Superior Court then responded:

• The Hickel Process required them to show that every district was constitutional, which they hadn't done.
• And that in Southeast Alaska the districts had been drawn in a way to create what was called a Native Influence District which at that time was assumed to be required by the Voting Rights Act. McConahy says Southeast was 'compact enough' because of the necessary influence district.  But in the mean time such a district (Native Influence)  has been shown to be no longer required.  But this meant the districts in Southeast hadn't needed to be tweaked so they were 'compact enough.'  So the judge told them now to make the compact - without the qualifying enough.
• So McConahy said, "The matter is REMANDED to the Board to draw a redistricting plan solely compliant with the Alaska Constitution and to make findings of fact sufficient to allow this court, and the Alaska Supreme Court, to "independently measure each district against constitutional standards."

The Board's attorney's analysis - handed out at the April 24 meeting but I can't find a copy on the Board's website - of Judge McConahy's order says, in part:

In sum, the trial court rejected the Board's Amended Proclamation Plan because the Board did not redraw every House district or make specific findings that each and every district meets the constitutional standards.

As I reread McConahy's order I don't see where it says the Board had to redraw every district.  It DOES say that they have to show that every district is constitutional.  The Board simply assumed that the districts not challenged in court could be considered constitutional.  The only districts they bothered to demonstrate as constitutional were the ones the court found problematic.  The judge did specifically mention the districts in Southeast for the reasons mentioned above.  They were clearly drawn originally in a way that stretched constitutional standards in order to create a Native influence district.  McConahy said:

"The Board did not make specific findings by district, that each of the unchanged Proclamation Plan districts satisfied the requirements of the Alaska Constitution."

I see that only saying that they had to show that the unchanged districts did meet the Alaska Constitution's requirements.  Not that they had to redraw them all.

Of course, if they don't meet the requirements, they'd have to be redrawn.  And if you redraw a line for one district, you will have to redraw the line of at least one other district.  Possibly more. 

And yes, the Southeast districts need to be redrawn.  But if the rest of the districts can be shown to be constitutional - as the Board believes - they merely have to go through each district and explain why they believe that.  They don't have to redraw them all.  But they have to look at each district objectively enough that an outside body would also agree.  Not finding them constitutional because they need them to be.  As I implied above when I said this is almost impossible, I think that there will have to be at least one very large - hardly compact - district because of Alaska's geography.  They should just say that and that they don't know how else to get all the districts within a legal deviation from the 17,755/district without at least one less than ideally compact district.  They could point to similarly large districts in all the private plans.  But they shouldn't try to pretend that district meets the compact standard. 

At least that's how I see.

What's Going To Happen?

It seems to me the Supreme Court is going to side with the Superior Court and they will be scratching their heads trying to understand why the Board is having so much trouble here.  Whether that consternation shows through in their decision or not remains to be seen.

Today (Tuesday May 1) petitions are due.  The Supreme Court's order says all of the original petitioners are eligible to file again.  If there is a new amicus party that wants to file, they have to "move for leave to participate."

The Board's been good about posting all the court filings so maybe by Wednesday we can see what they look like.  People with access to the State Court docket online should be able to get them tomorrow as they get filed.  

Then there's a week for everyone to respond to all the petitions. 

Obama Can Learn From FDR

I'm sure that folks around Obama have read No Ordinary Time, in which I now have about 80 pages left for tonight.  (I'm 50 pages from my scheduled 100 per day for the last three days, but I didn't count the 36 pages past page 600.) 

There are many similarities between Roosevelt facing the 1944 election and Obama facing the 2012 election.  (There are many dissimilarities as well.) 

Race - A lot of Southerners (and Northerners) are incensed over racial issues.  FDR's  [I usually don't use acronyms without spelling them out, but I figure that people should know this stands for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but there's no reason everyone should, so there it is.] constant push to get the navy and other services to treat all military men equally regardless of race is a big issue.  Eleanor's constant championing of equity gets her many hateful letters.  It seems that Obama's being half black by itself has stirred similar strong feelings in a very vocal minority. 

Economy - FDR came into office with a huge economic crisis he inherited from his Republican pro-business predecessor, much like Obama. 

War and returning veterans - FDR, in 1944, was in a war in Europe and Asia and Africa that was winding down.  The US had been officially in that war since Dec. 7, 1941.  Obama finds himself waging two, maybe three if you count Yemen, wars in the Middle East, which are also supposed to be winding down.  Roosevelt was pushing hard to prepare the economy for returning GI's - with housing, unemployment insurance, the GI bill for college funding, and other issues.  Obama has as well and has to let people know this in the campaign. 

Here's part of a speech Doris Kearns Goodwin offers, that FDR gave to Teamsters in Washington DC, which apparently was broadcast to the nation.

After joking a bit about his advancing age,

Roosevelt proceeded, with a voice that purred softly and then struck hard to ridicule the Republicans for trying to pass themselves off every four years as friends of labor after attacking labor for three years and six months.  "The whole purpose of Republican oratory these days seems to be to switch labels.  The object is to persuade the American people that the Democratic Party was responsible for the 1929 crash and the depression, and that the Republican Party was responsible for all the social progress under the New Deal.

"Now,"  he said drawing out his words, "imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery - but I am afraid that in this case it is the most obvious common or garden variety of fraud."  Indeed, he went on, when he first heard the Republicans blaming the Democrats for the Depression, he rubbed his eyes and recalled an old adage: " 'Never speak of rope in the house of a man who has been hanged.'  In the same way, if I were a Republican leader speaking to a mixed audience, the last word in the whole dictionary that I think I would use is the word 'depression.'

The audience loved it.  They howled, clapped, and cheered. . .   (p. 548)

It seems to me that Obama, when he's talking genuinely from his heart about what he believes, can be just as charming and convincing as FDR.  I'd like to see him come out in this campaign, not defensive, but offensive.  We somehow seem to think that Fox news and modern talk radio invented political hit men.  But they've been alive and well in FDR's time and earlier.  

Homophobic? Maybe You’re Gay

That's the title of a New York Times article today.

Here's what I wrote in 2009 in a post I recently reprinted as the topic came up again in Anchorage over Prop. 5.

When people focus so strongly on demonizing people over their sexual practices, one wonders what they themselves are trying to hide. Is the lashing out at others a way of projecting punishment for their own desires or guilt? Is it 'just a veneer?" I'm sure for some that is the case. What drives the others to such extremes?

All this made me think we could end vocal nastiness against gays if we had evidence that such behavior indicated repressed homosexuality among the strongly anti-gay.   If their vocal homophobia is a way to hide their own same-sex attractions, then exposing homophobia as a sign of homosexuality might cause them to stop taking those stands because a strong homophobic position would be simply outing yourself. 

It's nice to have one's hypotheses supported by scientific studies.  Of course, there's always the temptation to accept studies that support your beliefs without careful scrutiny. I need to read it more carefully.   Nevertheless, I'll offer a bit from this New York Times article that supports the notion that some (some, not all) homophobes have same-sex attractions themselves. You can judge for yourself.

[I'm not sure who can read the NYTimes online anymore.  They've limited how many articles non-paying subscribers can read.  But if you have an Anchorage library card you should be able to read the article through the library website.  Here's the link and title if you can't get to it this way.  "Homophobic? Maybe You’re Gay" by Richard M. Ryan and Robert S. Ryan.  April 29, 2012.]

Using this methodology we identified a subgroup of participants who, despite self-identifying as highly straight, indicated some level of same-sex attraction (that is, they associated “me” with gay-related words and pictures faster than they associated “me” with straight-related words and pictures). Over 20 percent of self-described highly straight individuals showed this discrepancy.

Notably, these “discrepant” individuals were also significantly more likely than other participants to favor anti-gay policies; to be willing to assign significantly harsher punishments to perpetrators of petty crimes if they were presumed to be homosexual; and to express greater implicit hostility toward gay subjects (also measured with the help of subliminal priming). Thus our research suggests that some who oppose homosexuality do tacitly harbor same-sex attraction.

What leads to this repression? We found that participants who reported having supportive and accepting parents were more in touch with their implicit sexual orientation and less susceptible to homophobia. Individuals whose sexual identity was at odds with their implicit sexual attraction were much more frequently raised by parents perceived to be controlling, less accepting and more prejudiced against homosexuals.

It’s important to stress the obvious: Not all those who campaign against gay men and lesbians secretly feel same-sex attractions. But at least some who oppose homosexuality are likely to be individuals struggling against parts of themselves, having themselves been victims of oppression and lack of acceptance. The costs are great, not only for the targets of anti-gay efforts but also often for the perpetrators. We would do well to remember that all involved deserve our compassion.

My understanding is that Jerry Prevo had a very strict (ie controlling) father who certainly would not approve a gay son.   There are places, Jerry, where you can talk to people about your repressed desires.  Places where you'll be shown a compassion you have not shown to others.   And as my post cited above shows, you have plenty of brethren among homophobic clergy and politicians who have turned out to have same-sex attractions.