Joe Miller With Polish - Meet Dan Sullivan

Image from AG Confirmation Hearing

Department of Natural Resources Commissioner Dan Sullivan's resignation was announced yesterday and pundits already are weighing his chances in the 2014 US Senate race. 


In February 2010 after listening to the confirmation hearings for Dan Sullivan to be Attorney General (he'd already served in that position for 8 months) I wrote, in my normal understated way, at the end of my post:

"I wouldnʻt be surprised to see Mr. Sullivan running for Governor or Senator sometime."

I knew at the time that this was a man who would definitely be a player in Alaska politics.

Here was a marine, Harvard and Georgetown graduate, attorney, Presidential Fellow working with Condoleezza Rice, married into a solid Alaskan political family from Fairbanks with strong anti-government ideology.

His strategy, he told the Judiciary Committee, was to work with other Attorneys General to collectively sue the federal government on a list of topics from endangered species to tribal sovereignty.  My impression was that this is a guy who plans for everything and readjusts quickly to stay the course when the unexpected happens. 

This guy is Joe Miller with polish.  Joe Miller for the man in a suit and tie and the women around them in their dresses and heels.  Joe's ideology packaged for the moderate and polite.  At the time I thought he'd be a shoe-in for whatever he ran for in Alaska.  It's not that his views are more moderate, just his presentation and style. 

Judiciary committee chair Jay Ramras fawned over Sullivan so shamelessly at the hearing in 2010, that I felt obligated to talk about how to even report it:

"Itʻs hard to be purely a reporter (in the literal sense) and not to add shading on the confirmation hearing for Dan Sullivan. In fact, simply presenting the cold facts would hardly convey the very warm reception Sullivan received. Committee Chair Jay Ramras did everything but blow kisses at the nominee and his in-laws (former Fairbanks Rep. Hugh ʻBudʻ Fate and former UA Regent Mary Jane Fate) who were in attendance."

The only attempt to do the serious oversight work of a confirmation hearing came from Rep. Heron of Bethel who questioned Sullivan on his stand on Native Sovereignty.  Sullivan said his concern was for the rights of non-Natives and Natives who were not members.  He went on to tout a cooperative approach with Natives in getting transportation infrastructure. That sounds more like using the power of the Native organizations to get what Sullivan and the Parnell administration wanted than any interest in Native rights.

This questioning was telling given the State of Alaska's recent appeal to the Alaska Supreme Court on behalf of a man that a tribal court declared an unfit parent.  Despite the Governor's much vaunted "Choose Respect" program to stop domestic violence, it appears that tribal courts are more dangerous to the Parnell administration than men who beat their girlfriends "so badly he broke three of her ribs and collapsed one of her lungs."

You'd think perhaps Sullivan's mother-in-law, a Koyukon Athabascan, ought to have some influence on him.  I realize that this case is under a new attorney general, but it has the fingerprints of Sullivan's strategy for court challenges to pursue his strong and active anti-government regulation stance.  

You can hear some of that discussion between Herron and Sullivan  in this four minute video I made at the hearing.



You can also hear him recite his background to the committee in the video below:

Comparing Truncation in 2001 and 2011/13 - Alaska Redistricting Board

 "The data does not indicate whether that seat was a mid-term truncation or not."

So wrote Michael White in a memo to the Alaska Redistricting Board.  Truncations (see explanation of truncation at the bottom of the page) happens at the very end of the process of redistricting.  The house seats have been created and then the Board has to pair the house seats into senate seats.  The house seats are numbered and the senate seats are lettered. 

This post was going to finish my truncation posts, but it's turning out to be more complicated.  So this one basically compares the 2001 Board's approach to truncation to the 2011 Board's approach.

Two years ago, in a post on truncation, I quoted a memo from Board attorney Michael White:

"Where there is substantial change to the population of a district, and the previous district is mid-term in 2012, Egan appears to require the incumbent's term be truncated and that an election be held.  What constitutes a substantial change is not defined by law or court decision.  In 2000, the three districts the board found substantially similar, all had less than 10% change in population between the previous plan and the new plan. The next highest percentage of maintained population was 66.2%.  The data does not indicate whether that seat was a mid-term truncation or not. " [See the 2000 Proclamation of redistricting here.]

The 2001 Board's Truncation Process

Actually the data do tell us.  I looked at the 2001 Board's Proclamation Plan. (It's a little complicated because they too had two different plans.  This is from the first one, but for truncation and assigning two and four year terms it appears they did them the same way both times.) It says:

"Second, that the terms of the incumbents of seven senate districts—C, E, G, I, M, O, and Q under the old identification system--be truncated because their districts have been substantially changed by this redistricting plan, and that the terms of the incumbents of three senate districts--A, K, and S under the old identification system--not be truncated because their districts are substantially unchanged, and

Third, that the 17 senate seats for which there will be elections in 2002 be assigned 2-year and 4-year terms according to the following schedule, which uses the new system of identification:

2-year	4-year
A (no election)	B
C	D
E	F
G	H
I	J
K (no election)	L
M	N
O	P
Q	R
T (no election)	S

From the record, you can extract the process the 2001 Board used for truncation.

Step 1:  (I began the quote above with step 2.) They identified the seats that might need truncation - all the mid-term seats. (The 2- year column above.)  That is the seats that had run in the most recent election (2000) and whose terms were not up until 2004.  Since the senate seats are staggered - ten run in one election and the other ten run in the next - ten would have two more years to serve and sit out the next election (2002) and ten would, in the normal cycle, be up for election in 2002.  So they just looked at the ten seats that had two more years.

Step 2:  They determined which of those ten districts had substantially changed.  They found that three seats were substantially the same:  District A had 95.9% of its population the same.  K had 87.6% the same, and T had 98.2% the same.   (Since K was 87.6% it really was a bit lower than the 10% or less that White wrote in his memo.)  These three were NOT truncated and so are marked "(no election)" because the incumbents will finish the remaining two years in their terms and next stand for election in 2004. 

Step 3:  The other seven districts with two more years to serve were found to be substantially changed and so they were truncated.  Whoever was serving in those districts would have to run again in 2002, just two years after they were elected to a four year term.

Step 4:  They decided that the seven truncated districts would run for two year terms that would end in 2004 - when their terms would have ended if they hadn't been truncated.   In effect these districts got a double hit - they were truncated and then they would only be elected for two years.  But this would keep them in their regular staggered cycle.  

The other ten districts (old letters B, D, F, H, J, L, N, P, R, S) whose seats were up in 2002 anyway and would have run for seats good until 2006, would all have four year terms ending in 2006.    

So, in effect, the only seats with four year terms, that would have been up for reelection in 2004, would still be up for election in 2004 because the seven that were truncated got two year terms until 2004, and the three that weren't truncated wouldn't have to run again until 2004.  At that point they would all run next in 2008.


2001 Board Had Elegant Solution

As I see this now, the 2001 Board found an elegant way to make this work.  Only seven districts were actually affected by having their term length altered by the Board, yet the Board still took care of all those districts that needed to be truncated AND they kept the Senate staggered as constitutionally required with minimal disruption.  Just seven seats were affected.  The terms of the other 13 were left completely alone and served out the terms they were elected to and stayed in the same staggered rotation.  

I would note that based on these documents, Mr. White's advice to the Board that "In 2000, the three districts the board found substantially similar, all had less than 10% change in population between the previous plan and the new plan" appears to be wrong.  

1. Of the three midterm seats not truncated, seat K (87.7% the same) had  more than 10% change.  
2. There were other districts that had less than ten percent change.  B was 100% the same and S was 91.6% the same.  It's clear also that the other ten districts (including B and S) weren't considered for truncation because their terms were up in 2002 anyway. 
3. If you click here, you'll get to the 2001 Board's truncation plan and you'll also see that Mr. White appears to be wrong about the next highest percentage.  It wasn't 66.2%.  In fact none is listed at 66.2%.   If we don't count the other two districts over 90%, B and S (B kept the same letter, S was T),  the next highest percentage is E (previous P) at 68.8% and then G (previous N) at 67.7% and  H (also previous N) at 66.9%.  The next one is  N (previous F) at 66.6%.  Of those four, the one with the highest percentage, E (68.8%), was truncated.  The other three were not because their terms were up in 2002 anyway.
4. White appears to be wrong about the fact that the report doesn't indicate if the next highest percentage was a two or four year seat.  As I said in 3), E (68.8%) was a seat not due to expire until 2004 and it was truncated to 2002. 

The 2011 Board's Truncation Process

As I mentioned, truncation is one of the last things the Board has to do.  The hard part of creating the house district lines is done and they just have to pair the completed house seats.  In addition to the Alaska constitutional standards of compactness, contiguity, and socio-economic integration, they also are supposed to consider 'proportionality.'  I don't completely get this term (as they used it) but basically they said that if a borough had enough population for four house and two senate seats, then all those seats should be in the borough and not split with other boroughs.  The idea is that their size in population should be reflected with a proportional number of representatives.  (Like the other standards, it might have to be given some slack because it competes with other standards.  In this case, Fairbanks had enough population for 5.5 seats.  The .5 remainder had to be paired with someone outside the borough. 

I intended to explain the process this 2011 Board used.

But, in hindsight, they really hadn't thought out the process too clearly.  White's memo, if anyone remembered it by the time they got there, did not seem to reflect a careful review of the 2001 process as the errors of fact indicate.  Also, the Board did this twice - in 2011 and then when that plan was tossed, again in 2013.  Both times what you saw at the meeting was kind of confused.  I was going to offer the steps the Board used, but I think now it makes more sense to talk first about the standards they had.

Standard 1:  The senate seat letters had to follow in order the numbers of the house seats.  So A had to pair house seats 1 and 2.  B had to pair house seats 3 and 4, etc. (This is not unreasonable.  It's how it was done before.  But I don't remember hearing anything that said it had to be that way.

Standard 2:  Seats that had substantially changed, would be up for election at the next election (2012 the first time and 2014 this time around.)  My point here is that they really didn't pay that much attention to which seats were mid-term and which were up in the next election.  Their focus seemed to be on districts that had changed a lot.   I think Michael White (the Board's attorney) might have mentioned 'mid-term' now and then, but it wasn't as though anyone was listening.  They clearly did not divide all the seats into two groups of ten - the mid-term seats and those due to run again in the next election anyway.

Standard 3:  Determining which seats would be two year and which would be four year was divorced from what a seat's normal cycle was.  Their principle here was basically procedural, not substantive.  They wanted the two and four year terms to alternate alphabetically.  It did not (at least publicly) take into consideration what the original seat's normal election would have been, the way the 2001 Board did.  They didn't distinguish between seats that had been truncated and those that would have run in the next election anyway.  A was to be four year, B two year, C four year, etc.  This was particularly confused this second time around because the seats for the 2012 election had been equally arbitrarily chosen.   No one mentioned whether some districts had been truncated twice plus given a two year both times or not.

Their argument at the time (2011) was this would make it random and would keep them from biasing the decisions.  If I recall right, in 2011, they brought the list of lettered senate seats into the meeting, so that wouldn't have prevented them from massaging the list before hand.  I'm not saying they did, but it wasn't a transparent process.  For instance, no one ever explained why the counting of house seats started in Fairbanks instead of Southeast Alaska as it previously had.

Standard 4:  This one was voiced by Board member Peggyann McConnochie. She declared that the seats within a city or borough had to be staggered too.  At one point she said that contiguous seats should be staggered.  Given that districts often are contiguous to more than one other district, this would be impossible.  McConnochie never said where this city and borough staggering standard came from.  It makes a certain amount of sense, but it's clearly not in the Alaska constitution and attorney White had said there were no guidelines for how to do this part of the job.

Step 1:  If there was a step one, it was a fairly chaotic process where they tried to fit the senate letters to the house numbers and debated back and forth.  At the time I wrote that it sounded like they were exhausted from the setting up of the house districts and that they really hadn't thought this next step out.  The transcript reflects this.

Step 2:  A member of the audience says something about the need to change some of the house district numbers so the senate seats letters will fall right.  I'd note, as I did at the time, that having an audience member speak to the board was pretty extraordinary.  Audience members can talk to board members during breaks and before and after meetings, but when the Board is in session, only Board members, their staff, and invited guests (pretty rare - like the Voting Rights Expert they hired) can speak.  Everyone else must listen only.  The exception is when they had public testimony and people were given a set amount of time to address the Board.  At Board meetings others didn't address the Board.

But this time, an audience member spoke up and suggested a way out of the knot they were tying themselves up in.  Also, of note, is that the audience member they allowed to address them was Randy Ruedrich, former chair of the Alaska Republican Party.

Step 3:  Adjourn for about half an hour.

Step 4:  Come back with a new list and then alphabetically divide them into two year and four year seats.

There's another decision of importance here too.  Somewhere in all this, before the break, the Board determined that their previous standard of 10% of less change in a district's population would be lowered to 75%.  (Actually, in the end, I seem to have missed where it happened, the standard was lowered to 70%.  In 2001 a district that was 68.8% changed was truncated.    The current Board did this explicitly because John Coghill's seat was 77%.  And White had told the Board (incorrectly as I pointed out above) that all the 2001 districts that were not truncated had less than 10% change.


The Consequences

I'm going to save most of this for a later post.  Going through the truncation list and the new terms assigned to each district is tricky.  Their lists have seat letters only - no incumbent names.  And this time, since they made two different plans, it has added complications.  And this post is already very detailed.  So I'll get some charts ready that I think will make it easier to see the changes in districts from the 2010 election to the 2012 election and what is planned for 2014 and beyond.  In brief, though, for now:

The 2001 board had fairly simple and elegant plan.  Split the seats into those that had to run in the next election and those who had two more years to go.  Only the second group was considered for truncation.  Of the ten, seven had to be truncated.  When it came to two and four year terms, they kept all the districts in their original rotation.  Only seven seats were affected.

The 2011 board didn't seem to take the regular staggered rotation into consideration and put every seat up for a lottery for two or four year terms.  Trying to figure out the consequences is pretty difficult because of the changes in the district letters and because they did this twice. I'm still working on these. 

[Whoops, I accidentally posted this.  I'm going to leave it up, but reserve the right to fix any typos I missed in the morning.]





Truncation:   Senate terms are for four years, while house terms are for only two.  Senate seats are also staggered.  Half (10) are voted on in one election and the other half (10) in the next election two years later.  If redistricting significantly changes the constituency of a senate seat, then a large number of the voters of the new district are represented by someone they didn't vote for.  Thus, senate seats with significant changes are subject to truncation.  This means that regardless of when the term is up for the sitting senator, the population should be able to participate in choosing their senator in the next election.

So, all the new districts whose terms expire in 2016 that have a significant change will be up for election in the next election (2014).  Those up for election in 2014 will be up again anyway so they don't need to be truncated.  But this messes up the staggered terms, so some have to be designated as two year terms and others as four year terms to get ten up for election one year and the other ten the next election. The 2012 election used a new redistricting plan in which all but one of the seats were truncated and then the Board assigned two or four year terms to them. And now they have to do that again. 

The Beer Up Here - Alaskan Beer App - And Ben Kerosky's Last Anchorage Stand - iPhone 5c

The Beer Up Here is an iPhone app that allows folks to track down all the Alaska breweries, their beers, and the places that serve them.  Two guys from Eagle River put it together  - one a beer fanatic and the other a software guy.  If you're looking for a place to get a good local beer, this app will tell you where they are available, how they are made,  
and what's on tap that day.  I was impressed.  

Joe Tranquilla

At Wednesday night's Alaska Apple Users Group (AAUG) Joe Tranquilla sounded pretty obsessive in all the details that he has in the app, plus serious photos.  Anyone looking for places to drink Alaskan beers or just to know what all is available, should check out this app.  As he explained, they keep things constantly updated.



Here's The Beer Up Here blog's latest post (Sept. 7, 2013):

"We just added the 300th beer to the app! The Broken Tooth Beg, Yarrow or Steal – a saison with hand-picked Alaskan yarrow and juniper berries. Our initial release included 255 beers. So we’ve added 45 beers in the 35 days the app has been live. That’s an average of more than one beer a day. If you buy the app, you get all those beers and a growing database for the price of a beer. Thanks for the support!"

Someone asked about the cost of the app.  It's $4.99.  He said he gets about $3.50 for each one bought and Apple keeps the rest.  Also says he gets his check about every six weeks, though Apple says they pay monthly.  If they hold the money on 1 million apps for an average of three weeks, they could pick up a nice amount of interest every month.  I bet they get more than my credit union is offering. 

The second half of the meeting was a presentation by UAA grad and long time Apple representative in Anchorage - Ben Kerosky.  Ben's leaving tomorrow by car for Seattle where he takes on a new job which will include visiting Apple outlets around the Seattle area.  (J and I will follow him a few days later down the highway.) 

Ben's last hurrah at AAUG was a presentation on the new iPhones 5c and 5s.  He had a 5c that he demonstrated with.  I still have a dumb phone, but I attend

Ben Kerosky and Apple 5c Demo

these meetings  so I at least know what others are spending their money on and figuring out if anything does things I need bad enough to spend the money on. 

One nice feature I didn't know about is a Do Not Disturb button that lets you shut off the phone when you don't want to hear from others - like during the night. 

It does allow, he said, someone who calls twice in a row to break through the barrier, so he suggested you only let friends do this.  And I'd be careful which friends. 

He also answered one of the questions I had about the 5s' new fingerprint id.  You can have up to five different people and you can also use a pass code as a back up. 

Ben has been one of the youngest folks to attend on a regular basis and he does it as part of his job.  I suspect with the younger crowd, all they friends give them the info that the older crowd gets at these meetings.  We're going to miss Ben, he's been a great resource at the AAUG and at Best Buy. 

The Alaska Apple User Group meets on the (as of this month) second Wednesday of the month at the BP Energy Center.  You can check the AAUG website too.  They have some spectacular iPhone Photography winners for 2013.  These are really fantastic images.

UPDATES: Green Screen Mystery, Campbell Creek Under Seward Highway, and Sugar Shack Reopened

Chong Kim is the project engineer in charge of the Seward Highway reconstruction from Tudor to Dowling, which includes the Campbell Creek bike trail.  I'd gone for a bike ride today to keep some hold of my sanity and looked for the DOT office behind the donut shop at Lake Otis and Tudor.


He apologized for not answering my phone call.  I'd left a message asking when the bike path would be done.  He said he was still trying to pin down the contractor before calling me back, but since weather is such a big factor, it's hard to say.  He figures about 2 or 2.5 weeks until it's all done.  By September 30th.  [I'd posted anyway a few days ago with then and now pictures.]

[UPDATE Oct 11:  I've updated with pictures from Oct. 9.  Mr. Kim told me maybe next week.]

In our chat I had a minor revelation.  He looked at the pictures I took last week of the path and he pointed to some hardware connected to the ground and then pointed to some green, transparent fabric on the wall in his office.  They will attach some fencing to that hardware.  Suddenly I had a flash - those strange green screens we'd seen where the Campbell Creek trail goes under Martin Luther King Blvd.  The ones with the images of the skier, biker, and walker.  The screens that we'd shaken our heads over in wonder at who would have put such boring art up.  I made some disparaging comments in a post this summer about a similar (unfinished) screen (below) where the Campbell Creek trail goes under the new bridge at Dowling.  (You used to have to cross the street at this point.)

It turns out these are to keep trail users from being covered with snow by a snow plow clearing the road above them.  Another reminder to myself to not jump to conclusions, but if it's strange, to assume there is something I'm not getting. Am I going to wait next winter to video tape a snow plow at this spot?  Don't hold your breath. 

It all makes sense now.  As it turns out, he said the Feds (EPA and another agency) say they may not plow into the creek anyway from the Seward Highway, but Chong said debris falls from passing vehicles so it's still good to have there. 

A Hopeful Note

I also talked to the office engineer who said, when I wanted to know the date for the bike trail completion, "You and everybody else.  That's the only thing people call to ask about."

I just want to document that piece of feedback about public interest in the bike trails, because I doubt that they are keeping track of that sort of feedback for the DOT administrators or for the legislators in Juneau, some of whom think people who ride bikes are anti-capitalists. 

And finally, the Sugar Shack reopened today.  It's not giant news, but this is a small local business that got trashed by vandals last May.  The thoughtless vandals cost this business almost four months of business and inconvenienced all the people who pass by here and regularly stop for a beverage.

Anchorage Gets 5pm Jolt (4.2)

A very short but sharp earthquake jolted me a few minutes ago while I was on the phone with my mom.  This was not one of those quakes where you say, "Was that an earthquake?"  But I don't think I felt it for more than a couple of seconds.

The Alaska Earthquake Information Center (AEIC) doesn't have the magnitude yet but it was 2 miles from Eagle River.  Here's from their site:

[UPDATE 5:18:  Earthquake Track is calling it a 4.2.  Not that big as earthquakes go, but as I said, it was a sharp jolt.]

Preferred Hypocentral Solution:

Local Date:	Tuesday September 10th, 2013
Local Time:	05:02 PM AKDT
Universal Time:	09/11/2013 01:02:58.648 UTC
Magnitude:	Unknown
Latitude:	61.3217
Longitude:	-149.5222
Depth:	17 miles (28 km)
Author:	oa_opDbg

This earthquake was:

2 miles (2 km) E of Eagle River

5 miles (8 km) SSW of Chugiak

7 miles (12 km) NE of Fort Richardson

10 miles (16 km) ENE of Elmendorf AFB

15 miles (23 km) ENE of Anchorage

18 miles (29 km) S of Wasilla

23 miles (37 km) SW of Palmer

28 miles (45 km) N of Hope

29 miles (47 km) NNW of Girdwood

32 miles (51 km) SSW of Hatcher Pass

34 miles (54 km) SSE of Willow

34 miles (54 km) SW of Sutton

48 miles (76 km) NW of Whittier

57 miles (91 km) ENE of Tyonek

58 miles (93 km) N of Moose Pass

59 miles (94 km) N of Cooper Landing

69 miles (110 km) NE of Sterling

70 miles (112 km) SE of Skwentna

72 miles (115 km) SSE of Talkeetna

74 miles (118 km) NE of Nikiski

78 miles (125 km) NE of Soldotna

79 miles (127 km) NE of Kenai

85 miles (136 km) N of Seward

91 miles (145 km) NE of Kasilof

91 miles (146 km) E of Mt. Spurr

99 miles (159 km) NE of Clam Gulch

99 miles (159 km) E of Hayes Volcano

101 miles (161 km) NNW of Chenega Bay

101 miles (162 km) WNW of Tatitlek

107 miles (172 km) W of Valdez

115 miles (183 km) NE of Ninilchik

123 miles (197 km) ENE of Redoubt Volcano

251 miles (401 km) SSW of Fairbanks

566 miles (906 km) WNW of Juneau

Cal Worthington -" a cross between Dale Carnegie and Slim Pickens" -Joins His Dog Spot

I just got an email with a link to the Cal Worthington Wikipedia page:

Image from LA Times

Calvin Coolidge "Cal" Worthington (November 27, 1920 - September 8, 2013) was an American car dealer well known throughout the West Coast of the United States, and to a more limited extent elsewhere due to minor appearances and parodies in a number of movies. He was best known for his unique radio and television advertisements for the Worthington Dealership Group. In these advertisements, he was usually joined by "his dog Spot," except that "Spot" was never a dog. Often, Spot was either a tiger, a seal, an elephant, a chimpanzee, or a bear. In one ad, "Spot" was a hippopotamus, which Worthington rode in the commercial. On some occasions, "Spot" was a vehicle, such as an airplane that Worthington would be seen standing atop the wings of while airborne. "Spot" was officially retired in the mid-1980s; however he was mentioned occasionally in his later commercials.
According to a profile published in the Sacramento Bee in 1990, Worthington grossed $316.8 million in 1988, making him at the time the largest single owner of a car dealership chain. His advertising agency, named Spot Advertising, had Worthington as its only client and spent $15 million on commercials, the most of any auto dealer at the time. He sold automobiles from 1945 until his death and owned a 24,000-acre (9,700 ha; 37 sq mi) ranch located in Orland, California, north of Sacramento.

Cal Worthington was a fixture on Southern California TV when we left for Anchorage in 1977.  What an unpleasant shock to find out his tacky ads were on TV in Anchorage as well.  'Spot' was a bizarre menagerie of animals he posed with in his ads.  But he was a very smooth talker. 

Here's the beginning of the LA Times Obituary:

Cal Worthington, the Oklahoma native whose old-time carnival flair built one of the most successful car dealerships west of the Mississippi, has died. He was 92.
Worthington died Sunday while watching football at his home on the Big W Ranch near Orland, Calif., said Brady McLeod of the Miles Law Firm in Sacramento, which represented Worthington.
Described as a cross between Dale Carnegie and Slim Pickens, Worthington was best known for his wacky television pitches that had him wrestling with a tiger, flying upside down on an airplane wing or riding a killer whale. His sales antics with his “Dog Spot” drove a career that took him from a three-car lot on a patch of Texas dirt to a multi-make dealership empire that grossed billions of dollars and stretched from Southern California to Alaska.

'You cycled up from Argentina then?' 'Yep' 'Why you wanna do that?'

We met Steve Fabes because he was having dinner with a friend at the Thai Kitchen Saturday night.  Nothing too remarkable about him until I asked him what brought him to Anchorage.

Cyclist Stephen Fabes in Anchorage after 33,000 miles

His bike.  He started out in England, rode south to Cape Town, took a three month break, then flew to Argentina and rode his way up to Alaska.  He's been on the road three years.  He's in Anchorage AFTER riding the Haul Road to Deadhorse.  He's taking a month in Anchorage - which includes a local presentation at the World Affairs Council tentatively scheduled for September 20, 2013.  Then he'll fly to Australia to continue his bike journey of across  six continents. 


He's a medical doctor back home in England and he's made stops at medical clinics along the way.  But biking 54,339 km (33,000 miles) thus far isn't too lucrative, so he has a crowd-funding campaign planned for this month to help  cover the rest of the way.  I don't imagine his expenses are high.  As I understand it, he's got housing in Anchorage through someone who contacted him through his website.

One could argue that there are more compelling causes than paying for a relatively well off guy's five year bike trip around the world, but you could also argue that it's no different from putting down money for a  movie or book or any other sort of entertainment.  His blog offers a great adventure most will only dream of, allowing us to ride along and see the world from the seat of his bike.  And after spending some time talking to him, I have no doubt that he will eventually give back far to the world far more than people contribute.

As you'll see from the excerpts below, he's a damn good writer with a serious vocabulary. 

These excerpts from his blog "Cycling The 6" are from the loooong Yukon/Alaska post which is full of great description and photos:

Day three on the Haul Road began with the sound of rain drilling onto my tent and the words of Paul and Duncan echoing through my mind. 'It's not so bad' they told me 'unless it rains'. The unpaved parts of the road are coated with calcium carbonate for the benefit of the truckers but the bane of cyclists. When it rains the surface transforms into a brown goo, the consistency of toothpaste, which sticks to everything. That day was a mud bath as the road continued to get churned up by the downpour. I camped by a river and lugged my bike down to the bank, submerged it and scrubbed her clean, the next day was dry and I grew optimistic that the worst was over, the worst of course, was still to come. .  .


I arrived finally to the Arctic Circle to get my obligatory shot by the signpost. The Arctic Circle is the southernmost latitude in the Northern Hemisphere at which the sun can remain continuously above or below the horizon for 24 hours. A tribe of tourists shambled past me with a tour guide who was pointing out notable arctic vegetation whilst giving a nature documentary-like narration, but the camera lenses of the crowd became focused on me instead of the flora. I half expected the tour guide to continue...

'And here we have a cycle tourist. It's a solitary male, you can tell from the brown crust of peanut butter in the facial hair. They migrate to Alaska in the summer and are scavengers by nature and will eat vast quantities of anything available, often picking up morcels from the ground, sniffing them, shrugging and devouring the find. This one's been on the road a while, notice the veneer of filth, the wild stare and the pungent odor. We like to keep the cycle tourers wild, so try not to feed them. Look, there, he's scratching his arse, we believe that's a courtship ritual.'  . . .

As I cycled over the north slope which was a vast, even expanse of tussocks and pools, up sprang my old compadre - the Shadow Cyclist. 21 months ago in the southern Argentinean city of Ushuaia I watched the same shadow cyclist, sinewy and sinister, stretched out to my right into the wind-blasted Patagonian scrub. As I rode north through the Americas the setting sun to my left would bring to life the Shadow Cyclist and he traveled with me. As my shadow glided over the tundra my mind was a whirlpool of memories, full of the weird places I'd been and the people that coloured them. In the distance the dark blots of roaming muskox could be seen on the plains, and up above snow geese honked as they flew in their malformed Vs and Ws, heading to warmer climes, as I continued to the top of the continent.

Arriving in Deadhorse:  

There were no dancing girls to welcome me in and put a wreath around my neck, instead an oil worker came over to me -
'You cycled up from Argentina then?'
'Yep'
'Why you wanna do that?'

You can read the whole post here - and see posts from across Europe, Africa, and up through South America.  

Trying Out My New Head

I asked J to get me my other head this morning.  I did a lot of research online before picking it.  It has the bayonet attachment, rather than the screw on. With the screw on heads some folks said if you don't start it right you could be facing backward when it's screwed in all the way.  There's another kind with a zipper but it didn't get good reviews.  It can get floppy. 

I was ready to get up but my eyes really didn't want to open fully and so the other head seemed a good option.  It's been resting a few days and should be wide awake and fresh and ready for anything.   The manual, which is built in, says I can set it for cheerful and optimistic and erase all the nagging chores I need to do and block out all news of current events. It will give me a totally fresh outlook - maybe it will even be sunny out when I'm wearing that head.  I got the tech app for it too, so I should be able to figure out my phone, my camera, and all the programs on my computer. 

This post is unrelated to the fact that I'm reading Oliver Sacks' Hallucinations.  So far I've only read about Charles Bonnet Syndrome (CBS) which only affects blind people.  Though it may have been influenced by Anonymous' comment on the last post about hoping to have some reflection time over the weekend.

The Role of Climate Change In The Syrian Revolution

[The Syria connection is toward the end.  But I urge you to read my synopsis of the talk because Paul Beckwith really helped me better understand  the dynamics of how the warming works and how it causes massive flooding in some places and droughts in other places. And that background helps add credibility to his comments on Syria]

At today's Citizens Climate Lobby meeting, the national speaker we heard via phone, was University of Ottawa climatologist Paul Beckwith who spoke about how the melting in the Arctic affects the rest of the planet.  [You can hear the whole talk here - it begins a few minutes into the meeting.]   The gist was:

The temperature difference between the poles and the equator results in global wind patterns that greatly affect weather. 

Hot air rises, creating a low pressure area.   The temperature difference creates a pressure difference between the poles and the equator and that pressure difference causes air to move from high pressure areas to low pressure areas near the surface of the earth. 

Because the earth is rotating, the air doesn't move in a straight line. Curves to the right in the northern hemisphere and the opposite in the southern hemisphere.  This curvature to the right generates the jet streams, which are high altitude winds which circle the earth - sort of a boundary between the upper and lower atmospheres - so these winds typically move from west to east and there will be some waviness, but what is happening now. 

Warming Faster at the Poles Lowering Temperature Differences World Wide
With the elevated greenhouse gases in the atmosphere there is more absorption of the heat that is leaving the earth so it's trapping that heat and causing an overall warming.  In the Arctic the white of the sea ice and snow on land reflect the heat.  But as the ice and snow melt, the poles absorbs more heat causing the Arctic to warm.  North of 66˚ the rate of warming is 2-3X the rest of the planet.  As you move north, the increase is magnified more - 4, 5, even 6 times.

Because the Arctic system is warming faster than the rest of the planet, it's lowering that temperature difference.  So there is less of a pressure difference and less need for the air to move northward.  This slows down the jet streams. 

As they slow down the land ocean temperature difference increases and the jet streams get much wavier as they slow down and they tend to get locked into position relative to where the oceans and continents are.

Important because jet streams guide weather and storms.  And because overall temperatures are warmer, there's more evaporation from the oceans and more water vapor in the atmosphere. 

More Moisture and More Energy and Slower Air Movement = Bigger Storms Here and Drought There
For every degree Celsius increase in temperature there's 7% more water in the atmosphere.  It rises, cools, condenses, and forms clouds.  When it forms clouds, it releases energy.  So more water vapor and more energy in the atmosphere means more intense storms.  And the storms are moving slower, so if you have a massive storm system carrying  huge amounts of water, it's not moving as quickly as it used to move.  That's why certain areas get massive torrential downpours.  In Canada this summer this led to flooding in Banff and Calgary - a $3 billion event -  and a month later the same thing happened in Toronto.   They had 3 inches in an hour, 5 inches in an evening.  Those cities don't have infrastructure that can handle that.  Manila recently had 2 feet in a day or two.  While they are used to monsoons, normally it would be 1 foot in a week or two.

At the same time, these storm systems depositing large amounts of water on specific regions means that water is not traveling to other regions where it used to go.  They are getting less than normal rainfall because storms are sticking and not traveling as far and as fast.

The Syria Connection

Then he added the kicker.   In answering a question about how to respond to those who claim climate change is natural, he talked about how the strange weather patterns today are far more frequent and intense than in the past. 

He was talking about how these climate changes are causing social disruptions.  And he used Syria as an example.  What hasn't been mentioned much is that Syria's been having a five year drought that has devastated farming.  He said that of 8 million farmers, 3 million fell into poverty.  A large number of these farmers moved to the cities and were unemployed.  While he didn't claim this was the cause of Syrians joining the Arab spring, it certainly may well have been the tipping point. 

Since I had missed this point about Syria, I looked it up.  Here are things others are saying about this.  I've just taken a bit.  You can see much more at each link.



 From The Bulletin (Aug 2012):

"Among the many historical, political, and economic factors contributing to the Syrian uprising, one has been devastating to Syria, yet remains largely unnoticed by the outside world. That factor is the complex and subtle, yet powerful role that climate change has played in affecting the stability and longevity of the state.  .   .

From 1900 until 2005, there were six droughts of significance in Syria; the average monthly level of winter precipitation during these dry periods was approximately one-third of normal. All but one of these droughts lasted only one season; the exception lasted two. Farming communities were thus able to withstand dry periods by falling back on government subsidies and secondary water resources. This most recent, the seventh drought, however, lasted from 2006 to 2010, an astounding four seasons -- a true anomaly in the past century. Furthermore, the average level of precipitation in these four years was the lowest of any drought-ridden period in the last century. .  .

It is estimated that the Syrian drought has displaced more than 1.5 million people; entire families of agricultural workers and small-scale farmers moved from the country's breadbasket region in the northeast to urban peripheries of the south. The drought tipped the scale of an unbalanced agricultural system that was already feeling the weight of policy mismanagement and unsustainable environmental practices. Further, lack of contingency planning contributed to the inability of the system to cope with the aftermath of the drought. Decades of poorly planned agricultural policies now haunt Syria's al-Assad regime."

From The Climate Desk  (March 2013):

"In Syria, prior to the unrest that eventually exploded into revolution and armed conflict, Syria had experienced an unprecedented drought, lasting about five years. In 2011, NOAA produced a report showing that the Mediterranean littoral and the Middle East had significant drought conditions that were directly related to climate change. And then we found some reporting that had been done over the course of the drought which were showing that in Syria the drought, connected with natural resource mismanagement by the Assad regime, had led to a mass exodus, rural-to-urban migration, as farmers lost their livelihood. The UN estimated that about 800,000 people in Syria during the course of the drought had their livelihoods entirely destroyed. In the run-up to the unrest in Syria, a lot of international security analysts, even on the eve of the exploding unrest, had determined that Syria was generally a stable country, and that it was immune to social unrest and immune to the Arab Spring. It was clear that there were some stresses underneath the surface, and those migrations that we’re talking about, internal migrations, also put pressure on urban areas that were already economically stressed, and that was added on top of refugees that had been coming in from Iraq since the US invasion.

The Atlantic (Sept. 2013):

 Syria has been convulsed by civil war since climate change came to Syria with a vengeance. Drought devastated the country from 2006 to 2011.  Rainfall in most of the country fell below eight inches (20 cm) a year, the absolute minimum needed to sustain un-irrigated farming. Desperate for water, farmers began to tap aquifers with tens of thousands of new well.  But, as they did, the water table quickly dropped to a level below which their pumps could lift it.

Syria has been convulsed by civil war since climate change came to Syria with a vengeance. Drought devastated the country from 2006 to 2011.  Rainfall in most of the country fell below eight inches (20 cm) a year, the absolute minimum needed to sustain un-irrigated farming. Desperate for water, farmers began to tap aquifers with tens of thousands of new well.  But, as they did, the water table quickly dropped to a level below which their pumps could lift it.

The domestic Syrian refugees immediately found that they had to compete not only with one another for scarce food, water and jobs, but also with the already existing foreign refugee population.  Syria already was a refuge for quarter of a million Palestinians and about a hundred thousand people who had fled the war and occupation of Iraq.  Formerly prosperous farmers were lucky to get jobs as hawkers or street sweepers.  And in the desperation of the times, hostilities erupted among groups that were competing just to survive.   .    .

Campbell Creek Bike Trail Under Seward Highway Almost Ready

The target date for completing the bike trail under the Seward Highway is Fall 2013.  The trail is there, but the path hasn't been paved nor has the path otherwise been finished off.  But they have completely new bridges in and we walked by there the other evening.
[UPDATE October 19, 2013 - It semi-officially opened today and is open for riding.]

From the west side you can walk the trail, under the highway bridge.

Here's what this looked like in 2007.]

 

When the State does a project, they tend to obliterate the landscape and then build it back up from scratch.  I'm sure they have good reasons for it.  In this case the bridge has been expanded greatly.  Before there was just a little edge along the path under a bridge you had to duck to get under in spots.  Now the space next to the creek is bigger, it seems, than the creek.  

Here's what this spot looked like in May 2012:

 

And here's going under the bridge the other day:

And near the same spot in 2008.  This was the whole trail then right against the water.  And when the creek was really high, the whole trail was gone.  The heavy equipment is between me and the water above - also the orange fencing is along the water.  And the bridges were shorter and lower.

There are four bridges - (from the east) first the frontage road, then the northbound highway, southbound highway, and the western frontage road.  Here's a little past the first bridge (maybe even the second one.)

And here's what that used to look like:

 

Once you get out from under the highway, instead of the one-bike winding path through the fireweed, there's more bike superhighway up to this bridge which is blocked for now.   At the right times, you can watch the spawning salmon from this bridge.  We're very close to The Wild Berry tourist trap at this point, just west of the Seward Highway (see map below). 

Getting to this bridge used to look like this:

Turning around at this point, it now looks like this:

One more picture of the bridges - now looking east from the west side. 

And here's a map for the area.  I started on the east and went to the west, then turned around and went back where the wooden bridge was blocked off.

When this is done, you'll be able to ride from downtown out to Westchester Lagoon up the Chester Creek trail to Goose Lake and the the University crossing either over or under all streets via tunnels and bridges.  At the university you have to cross a parking lot and a few streets to get to the bridge at Tudor and Bragaw (now Elmore), and then on the Campbell Creek bike trail.  There's a bit of a break in the trail at Lake Otis, but then you get back on a wooded trail that will go under the Seward Highway and then on to just past Victor near Dimond coming out at Dimond High School.  Then there zigging and zagging through neighborhoods to connect to the trail in Kincaid park, and from there you can get back downtown.

The Trails of Anchorage site  says it's 13 miles from Kincaid Chalet to Goose Lake, and I'm guessing it's not much less for the rest of the loop I described.

Here's a link to the Arctic Bicycle Club.