Redistricting Board Gets Preclearance From DOJ

The Alaska Redistricting Board announced today that it received preclearance from the the Department of Justice for the Amended Proclamation Plan: 

Anchorage, Alaska - The Alaska Redistricting Board announced today that its Amended Proclamation Plan has received "preclearance" from the U.S. Department of Justice.

A copy of the preclearance letter is available for download here. 

Alaska Redistricting Board Chairman John Torgerson issued the following statement this afternoon:  

"Now that the Amended Proclamation Plan has been approved by both the Alaska Supreme Court and the U.S. Department of Justice, the 2012 elections can move forward without interruption. This is an important milestone for the Board and for the state of Alaska. We have worked hard to balance the multiple competing legal standards in building a plan that will fairly represent all Alaskans. Today's decision validates those efforts."

Under Section 5 of the federal Voting Rights Act, a number of states - including Alaska - are required to submit new redistricting plans to the U.S. Department of Justice for review in order to ensure that the proposed change is free from discriminatory purpose or effect and will not result in retrogression. An Alaska redistricting plan is retrogressive if it is drawn in a manner that worsens Alaska Native voting strength as compared to the previous district configurations.   

 Detailed information about the Section 5 review process can be accessed at http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/vot/sec_5/about.php. 

This means that the Department of Justice did not find the plan to be retrogressive - or to give Alaska Natives less of a chance of electing candidates of their choice than the last plan established ten years ago.  Alaska needs the preclearance before its plan can be implemented.  Since the Amended Plan is relatively close to the original plan that was rejected by the Alaska Supreme Court for other reasons, the preclearance was expected, but not certain. 

However, the letter from Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez does say lack of objections by the Attorney General "does not bar subsequent litigation."

This Amended Plan was approved by the Alaska Supreme Court for the August 2012 primary and the November election.  But it was accepted by the Supreme Court because the Board said there wasn't enough time to create a new plan the way the Court required in time for the election.  So it would appear that the Board either has to come up with another plan that gets Supreme Court and DOJ approval - for the rest of the decade.  Or, they have to convince the Supreme Court to let them permanently adopt the Amended Plan. 

Alaska's DMV Director, Whitney Brewster, To Head Texas DMV

Brewster in Juneau March 2010

From a Texas Department of Motor Vehicles News Item:

TxDMV Board Selects Whitney Brewster as New Executive Director
On June 27, 2012, the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles (TxDMV) Board announced the selection of Whitney Brewster as the agency’s new executive director.

Brewster currently serves as the director of Alaska’s Division of Motor Vehicles and has led the agency for the past five years. Previously she directed Alaska’s Division of Elections, was deputy chief of staff for the lieutenant governor and worked for the Alaska State Legislature.

“Following a very thorough search process and careful consideration, we believe that Whitney Brewster is the best person to lead this agency into the future,” said TxDMV Board Chairman Victor Vandergriff. “Whitney is a visionary who can effectively guide us toward our strategic goals of being performance driven, customer focused and dedicated to delivering optimized and innovative services to Texans.”

The complete item is here.

Whitney was a student of mine at UAA, is very capable, and this is a big loss for Alaska. Whitney, I wish you well.

I'd been getting a lot of hits today from Texas to this old post that mentioned Whitney which led me to poking around on google. 

Night to Day - LAX to ANC

Leaving from the Lower 48 in the summer at night flying north to Anchorage always gives that bizarre experience of flying from dark to light as it gets later at night.

We left LAX at 8:55pm.

Leaving LAX 8:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (PDT)

Still light to NW - 9:01 PDT

12:25 am PDT (11:25 Alaska DT)

Looking North 12:26 am PDT (11:26 ADT)

Over clouds 1:01 am PDT (12:01 am ADT)

Over the Chugach Range 12:34 am ADT

Approaching ANC at 12:47am ADT

Waxing or Waning?

The crescent moon in the western sky looked like a backward C.  So, was it moving toward fullness or newness?



Taking the picture with my little camera is tricky.  I played around, but mostly I kept getting too much light and so you couldn't see the crescent.

I finally got it by setting it on automatic, night.

So, is it waxing or waning?

There are lots of websites that answer that question, but most of them are pretty complicated.  Or maybe this one (below) made sense because I'd seen so many already.  This is from eudesign:

"When Coming (or rriving), it is really departing.
When Departing (  ), it is really coming."

Another way of telling is this:

L-E-FT hand curve = D-E-CREASING.
R-I-GHT hand curve = -I-NCREASING.

Would You Convict A Man Who Beat Up His Abuser?

The LA Times  has a story by Maria L. LaGanga in Thursday's (June 21, 2012) edition about a man on trial for tracking down and beating the priest who raped him (when he was seven) and his four year old brother then made him perform incest on his brother.  The article reports that the Deputy District Attorney Vickie Gemetti showed a larger than life picture of the beaten priest and told the jury that William Lynch (now 45) beat him. 

"The defendant planned and executed the violent attack against the man who molested him 30 years ago,"  she continued, saying Lynch acted as a vigilante.  And revenge, Gemetti said, "is not a defense, ever, to a criminal act."

Knowing that the other side had powerful evidence of its own, she showed

. . .a nine-minute video of Lynch describing for the San Jose Mercury News how Lindner had raped and strangled him and forced him to commit incest as the priest watched.

Then she told the jury that the evidence in the trial "will show that he molested the defendant all those years ago."

In addition, Gemetti said, Lindner [the priest] "will probably lie to you" and say the abuse never happened.  But Lynch is the one on trial, she said, and "the evidence in this case will establish the defendant beat this man. It will be undeniable."

 I'm a firm believer in rule of law.  Having the community at large bring someone to justice has lots working in its favor.  It substitutes the emotionally distraught victims with people who can more objectively determine the guilt of suspects.  It also moves the punishment to the more neutral government which is upholding the rule of law and away from family, shutting off never ending feuds and chains of revenge.  But there are many situations where the justice system has fallen down, even in the United States, from unpunished lynchings to DNA proven wrong convictions. That said, what happens when the rule of law doesn't work?

That appears to be the case here.  The two Lynch boys kept quiet (the priest had threatened to do terrible things if they told anyone) until they were in their 20s when the younger brother told his parents and the boys brought a civil suit against Lindner to get him out of the classroom.

The case was settled for $625,000, and Lindner was removed from Loyola High School in Los Angeles, where he had been teaching.  The church never informed law enforcement about the allegations. 

The statute of limitations is up for the 67 year old Lindner.

What exactly did Lynch do?

Witnesses testified during the preliminary hearing that Lynch had punched and kicked the elderly priest, yelling:  "You ruined my life.  Turn yourself in.  You molested me."

(67 Elderly?    Elderly is a state of mind and health, not an age thing, but that's a different post.)

I found myself writing ex-priest, but I looked through the article to see if he is an 'ex.'  He's called Father Lindner in the story and it says he was assaulted in his Jesuit retirement home. 

No one (except the the priest) seems to be disputing the molestation or the later beating.  The only dispute seems to be whether this was revenge or whether Lynch, who, the article says, has "suffered from depression and alcohol abuse and twice attempted suicide," simply "needed to confront Father Lindner about what he'd done."

OK, so if you were on the jury, given this much information - and at trial there is always more - how would you vote?  Guilty or Not Guilty?  You can read the whole article here before making your decision.

From AA to Yoga at Venice Beach

Ran down to Venice Beach this morning.  Blue,  blue sky.  Not too warm.  Took off my running shoes and socks and went down to the water.  Modest surf, nice kelp.

















On the beach there was a large crowd for the Sunday morning AA Meeting.  (I know AA is anonymous, so I took the picture from far away and I don't think anyone could be identified.  The resolution is low enough that blowing it up won't help.)

And a little further down the beach was Brad's Yoga.





And then I got off the sand.  Put my shoes back on and ran back. 

Alaska Airlines Sneaking Milk Runs Into Their Seattle-LA Options

Inside Q400

We took my mom home from Seattle yesterday.  I have to say, it didn't quite register when I made the reservation and it said it stopped in Santa Rosa.  I was looking at departure time and price.

We've been flying between Anchorage and LA for over 30 years now and the Seattle - LA flight has almost always been non-stop.  A few times there was a stop in Portland.  But now it seems Alaska Airlines is listing a bunch of their local flights (via Horizon Air) as Seattle-LA flights among the options.  We flew in a little Q-400.  But it took 4 hours from Seattle to LA (including 30 minutes in Santa Rosa.)  It will only take 5 1/2 hours to fly to Anchorage non-stop from LA Tuesday. 

I've been on small planes like this for short trips - like Chicago to Cleveland - but this was a long time to be on a small plane.  And when we landed in Santa Rosa we were tipping and bouncing a lot as we got close to the ground, but we landed ok, with just one bounce.

[UPDATE 5:30pm Alaska Time:  On Alaska's behalf, they would say, I'm sure, they are giving people more options.  After all, you could get a flight from Anchorage to Juneau that stops in Cordova and Yakutat.  But those are on 737s and they don't increase the flying time so much.  Yes, I could have thought this through a little more before booking the flight, but it was such a change from what I'm used to that I didn't think about it.  This post is simply a warning to others to pay more attention than I did.]

". . . the idea that injection is safe rests on science that has not kept pace with reality, and on oversight that doesn't always work."

Externalities are the costs of production that are not reflected in the price of goods because they are passed off by the manufacturer to the community as a whole.  The most common example is pollution.   Milton Friedman, in his classic Capitalism and Freedom called them Neighborhood Effects.  Neighborhood effects, he said, were one of capitalism's failures and a reason for government regulation.   But many of today's capitalists acknowledge no failures and see all regulation as bad.  These aren't really market capitalists, it would appear, rather they are capitalists whose philosophy is based on a need for personal wealth and power, not how economics works.

Here's an example why from Propublica:

No company would be allowed to pour such dangerous chemicals into the rivers or onto the soil. But until recently, scientists and environmental officials have assumed that deep layers of rock beneath the earth would safely entomb the waste for millennia.

There are growing signs they were mistaken.

Records from disparate corners of the United States show that wells drilled to bury this waste deep beneath the ground have repeatedly leaked, sending dangerous chemicals and waste gurgling to the surface or, on occasion, seeping into shallow aquifers that store a significant portion of the nation's drinking water.

In 2010, contaminants from such a well bubbled up in a west Los Angeles dog park. Within the past three years, similar fountains of oil and gas drilling waste have appeared in Oklahoma and Louisiana. In South Florida, 20 of the nation's most stringently regulated disposal wells failed in the early 1990s, releasing partly treated sewage into aquifers that may one day be needed to supply Miami's drinking water.

There are more than 680,000 underground waste and injection wells nationwide, more than 150,000 of which shoot industrial fluids thousands of feet below the surface. Scientists and federal regulators acknowledge they do not know how many of the sites are leaking.

Federal officials and many geologists insist that the risks posed by all this dumping are minimal. Accidents are uncommon, they say, and groundwater reserves - from which most Americans get their drinking water - remain safe and far exceed any plausible threat posed by injecting toxic chemicals into the ground.

But in interviews, several key experts acknowledged that the idea that injection is safe rests on science that has not kept pace with reality, and on oversight that doesn't always work.

 The whole Propublica piece is here.

Short term profit for long term health problems of human beings. 

Stunning Beauties In The Volunteer Park Conservatory

It's been a rainy day in Seattle, but I got to spend it with all the people in our immediate family line - my mother, wife, son, and daughter - plus a few other newish family members.  And we spent some of our time at the Volunteer Park Conservatory.   We got there pretty close to closing time so I didn't get enough names to go with the flowers.  So just sit back and enjoy nature's spectacular imagination.

Look at the face on this orchid.

Bromiliad  Flower

This one goes by Cryptanhus Fosterianus 'Elaine'.

Another Bromiliad Flower Up Close

White Passion Flower

Cerebral Chewing Gum

On page 3 of Under the Frog,  Tibor Fischer writes, 

"The streetsweeper was a sort of cerebral chewing gum that Gyuri popped in on long journeys." 

Cerebral chewing gum.  A little more substantial than eye candy.  Gyuri was on the train, chewing on the benefits of being a streetsweeper, a job that seemed possible, anywhere, and

"wouldn't need an examination in Marxism-Leninism, you wouldn't have to look at pictures of Kákosi or whoever had superbriganded their way to the top lately.  You wouldn't have to hear about gamboling production figures, going up by leaps and bounds, higher even than the Plan had predicted because the power of Socialist production had been underestimated.  Being a streetsweeper would be quite agreeable, Gyuri reflected.  You'd be out in the open, doing healthy work, seeing things.  It was the very humility of this fantasy, its frugality that gave the greatest pleasure, since Gyuri hoped this could facilitate its coming to pass.  It wasn't as if he were pestering Providence for a millionaireship or to be handed the presidency of the United States.  How could anyone refuse a request to be a streetsweeper? 

This book, which the author bio and everything I can find online says,  was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1992, is full of such cerebral chewing gum.  Images that are startlingly fresh and potent, as Fischer follows Gyuri (also with the surname Fischer), a Hungarian basketball player through the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

One of the more endearing characters is the Jesuit Ladányi who was a former champion of eating contests.  He talks to the 19 year old Gyuri about his belief that it was time to leave Hungary (1949.)

"'Not at all.  Firstly, as I'm sure you know, it's not easy to get out any more, and secondly, and I should point out this is not an idea patented by the church, matter doesn't matter.  It's not physical conditions that count, but your opinion of them.  Take the farmer in the small village in the middle of China who is the happiest man in the world because he has two pigs and no one else in the village has got one.  Living isn't like basketball, it's not a question of points, but what's here.'  Gyuri saw Ladányi touch his forehead with his forefinger.  'You only lose if you give up - and if you give up you deserve to lose.  In basketball, you can be beaten.  Otherwise you can only be beaten if you agree to it.  You're lucky, you're very lucky.  We're living in testing circumstances;  unless you're very dull, you should want to be stretched.'" (pp. 76-7)

Of course, this paragraph neatly espouses a belief of this blog - what matters is how your head interprets the 'facts' your senses send it.  And that constantly being stretched is a good thing.  So, savor the fact that we live now in testing circumstances. 

The originality, and occasional oddness, of Fischer's prose caused me to look to see who the translator had been.  None was mentioned.  In the bio I discovered that Fischer is British.  Online I discovered he'd been born to two Hungarian basketball players,  who'd only come to England three years earlier.

There was a torn piece of paper in the book on which was written, "This is Carol's book, return it to her. M"   So, Carol, as soon as I'm done, it will be yours again. Thanks.

Here's a follow up post - Women I Almost Slept With.