Beautiful On A Gray Day, Spectacular On A Sunny One

It's gray today, but so beautiful out.

And when it was sunny the other day, it was amazing.

Oil, Power, And Three Books

A story on NPR Friday talked about petcoke dust from refining tar sands crude oil.

Crude oil from Canada's tar sands is providing a booming business for American refineries, but residents of one Chicago neighborhood complain that a byproduct of that business has become a health hazard. They want towering mounds of a dusty substance known as petroleum coke, or petcoke, moved out of the city. And as NPR's Cheryl Corley reports, Chicago is now requiring one company storing the substance to do just that.

I'd note that it mentioned that the plants were owned by the Koch brothers - a good reason for them to try to make people believe that global warming isn't caused by human use of carbon based fuel.

I posted the other day about Keystone pipeline protesters in Oklahoma City against bringing tar sands oil through their state and being arrested on anti-terrorists grounds.sting

I also checked out the new books section at the UAA library this week.  There are lots of interesting books on important subjects.  But too many folks get all they know these days from sound bites and sketchy internet posts.  Good books that focus on a topic can give someone a reasonably comprehensive understanding of an issue.  Good books that is.  Or a couple, just to make sure the book is reasonably balanced.

Here are three I found that are related to these stories.

The first, Cold, Hungry, and In The Dark,  challenges 'common knowledge' about fracking and the belief that our oil shortage days are over. Keystone and fracking are different things, but they are brought to you by the same industry.  From Art Berman's forward to the book:

"When something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  This is particularly true about shale gas.  Shale gas is a commercial failure.  That is not what the exploration and production companies that produce gas or the mainstream media and sell-side brokerage companies that help promote the plays tell the public.
Over the past 5 years, I have evaluated, published and spoken about shale gas plays.  I am a petroleum geologist and I make my living evaluating prospects and plays based on fundamental geology and economics.  Shale gas does not pass the test.
I have written about a phenomenon that I cal "magical thinking."  Magical thinking focuses on gas production volumes but does not consider cost.  This is its catechism:  because the volume of shale gas production is great, it must therefore be a commercial success;"

Author Bill Powers is a Canadian investment manager.  Is he badmouthing shale oil to promote Canadian tar sands?  I couldn't find evidence either way, though it seems like his bias is finding good investments, in which case he should be seeking 'truth.'

Putting things into another context is From Enron to Evo:  Pipeline Politics, Global Environmentalism, and Indigenous Rights in Bolivia.   Evo refers to the indigenous Bolivian president.  Derrick Hindery argues that despite the green and indigenous rights image, Evo has sold out to big oil.

Watching how oil takes over a place like Bolivia gives us a sense of what they are doing in Alaska and other places.  And the influence they have on our officials.  But we know that already. 







 Putting things into an even bigger perspective is this huge book that looks at our modern day issues as they played on in the 17th Century.  This book is huge - 902 pages - which means not too many are likely to read much of it.  The publisher's blurb says:

Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides – the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were not only unprecedented, they were agonisingly widespread.  A global crisis extended from England to Japan, and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa. North and South America, too, suffered turbulence. The distinguished historian Geoffrey Parker examines first-hand accounts of men and women throughout the world describing what they saw and suffered during a sequence of political, economic and social crises that stretched from 1618 to the 1680s. Parker also deploys scientific evidence concerning climate conditions of the period, and his use of ‘natural’ as well as ‘human’ archives transforms our understanding of the World Crisis. Changes in the prevailing weather patterns during the 1640s and 1650s – longer and harsher winters, and cooler and wetter summers – disrupted growing seasons, causing dearth, malnutrition, and disease, along with more deaths and fewer births. Some contemporaries estimated that one-third of the world died, and much of the surviving historical evidence supports their pessimism.

Parker’s demonstration of the link between climate change and worldwide catastrophe 350 years ago stands as an extraordinary historical achievement.  And the contemporary implications of his study are equally important: are we at all prepared today for the catastrophes that climate change could bring tomorrow?  [emphasis added] 

Alaska Redistricting Plan Now Final - Just The Bill Is Left To Settle

Fairbanks Superior Court Judge Michael McConahy made two short rulings [see both below] today.

The first declares the Alaska Redistricting Board's 2013 plan to be the official plan until the next decennial census.

You can see the statewide and area maps at the links below.

• 2013 Proclamation Statewide Map
• 2013 Proclamation Anchorage Map
• 2013 Proclamation Mat-Su Map
• 2013 Proclamation Fairbanks Map  
• 2013 Proclamation Kenai Map  
• 2013 Proclamation Southeast Map

For all the other documents - including individual district maps - click here.

The second addresses a dispute between the parties - as I understand it - over who is the prevailing party and public interest litigant status.  The judge gives the parties until January 22, 2014 to file motions regarding those issues and how fees and costs should be allocated.


This will be of particular interest given the change in the law which has led the state to charge Vic Fischer and Bella Hammond for their litigation over Pebble Mine.   In this case, while the challengers did not prevail in this part of the litigation, they certainly prevailed in the earlier parts and I can't see how any objective person could believe this wasn't a public interest litigation that has benefited the state, even if they did not prevail in this last portion.

First order:  

Alaska Superior Court Order Regarding Final Judgment in Redistricting Case by Steve

Second Order:   


Superior Court Fairbanks Alaska: Ruling on Redistricting Board Case - Prevailing Party Fees by Steve

Clutter War: Happy Birthday Glen

Today, the floor is more cluttered, but the closet is emptier.  This is the room that has served as our staging area.  This first happened ten years ago when we were gone for a year and rented out the house and used this room to store things we didn't want to leave out.  Since then, this is the room we put things that we don't need elsewhere or just want to hide when people come over.  I've had pictures of this room up before - use the label clutter war.  But we're having someone move in with us for a year in February and so this room has to be habitable.  

Some things are easy:  boxes of stuff quickly thrown in here without too much review.  I'm able to go through some boxes and get rid of most things - either trash or find a way to recycle.  The Arc called and took stuff away this week already.  But other things - like the 30 year old art work from my daughter I posted the other day - is more difficult.

And so is this:

My brother died in a work accident in August 1975 when my son was just a year old.  I hadn't seen this letter for years.  So this goes into one of the caches of letters from family and friends.  This is not something people of the future will have to worry much about.  Most everything today is electronic and searchable.  But there is something about holding this envelope that Glen held, wrote on, with a stamp that he licked.

Oh, and today, December 20 would be his 61st birthday.  Happy Birthday Glen, wherever you are.  We've missed you terribly all these years. 







By the way, here's a picture of this room cluttered and cleaned back in 2010.

AIFF 2013: Tu Eres Un Homme - Best Of The Fest Encore Showing Tonight

I think we have to pick a winner, because we don't have time to simply compare movies without actually coming up with "the best."

Best of The Fest Tonight (Thursday) 6:30  Ak Exp Large 7:30 Ak Exp Small 8:30 Ak Exp Large

I liked this film and I don't have a problem with it being 'the best' but there were other films that shouldn't have been bumped.  But since this film plays again tonight at the Alaska Experience Theater, I'll write about it now in hopes people will make the effort to go see it at 6:30pm.

It's French.  It deals with a decent family that has been rendered dysfunctional because of an accident the young son had.  And probably the father had some control issues already.  But nothing that can't be worked out.  The characters are likeable and the audience is on their side.

At the center of the film is the relationship between the 20 year old babysitter and his ten year old kid he watches over - they become good friends that is unexpected given the age difference.  But they are both smart and both are outsiders - and the babysitter seems to understand his ward's needs.  It's a chaste, but loving relationship.  I told the director that I'm looking forward to the follow up when Leo is 20 and Theo is 30.

And that's one of the neat things about the festival - we got to talk to a lot of the film

Cohen and Prada Getting Best Feature Award

makers and Benoit Cohen and producer Matthieu Prada were very available and that allows me to say more about the film than I otherwise could.

The opening scene is extreme closeups of Leo.  Cohen said afterward that he wanted to show the intimacy with which a family member, probably a parent, can look at a child.  The original opening didn't quite work, he said, and this was added later.

When Theo comes into this family's life, he begins to interrupt the dysfunctions that arose after Leo's accident:  the overprotection of Leo, the withdrawal of the mother, the need for control of the father.

Cohen said it had a small release in France but it wasn't extreme enough for the French audience.  The hints of illicit relationships don't turn into adultery or pedophilia.  It has done much better in the US film festival circuit where it has won a number of awards, including Best Feature here in Anchorage. 

This Youtube is only in French, but the film tonight will have subtitles.  




Leo and his mother are Cohen's real life son and wife.  He wanted to capture his son just before he began to change into adolescence and that caused them to rush production a bit. He said there were some issues with working his son long hours for the film.  In the beach scene he got tired of running back and forth.  I suggested the scene where he was buried int he sand gave him some rest and Cohen raised his eyebrows and said he was buried for four hours.

This film raises for us what has been lost by society's paranoia about touching kids.  The fears of incest and pedophilia have resulted in widespread prohibitions against touching by professional adults working with children.  The film challenges that response and suggests that there is a need for more non-sexualized touching and non-sexual intimacy.

It plays tonight with the animated film winner Mr. Hublot which is incredibly richly and beautifully animated.  It's a Luxumbourg/French film.  As with other animated films in the festival, it seemed that all the film makers' energies went into the visual and little was left over for a story to match the imagery. 


7:30 - in the other theater - Documentary winner McConkey plays with Super Short winner Anatomy of Injury.  McConkey was an extreme skier and base jumper.  The film shows lots of his feats and does some exploration of why he was so driven to such extreme activities. 

8:30 - back in the big theater - Best Short Documentary The Guide along with Best Snowdance Film Mike’s Migration and Best Short Lambing Season

Lambing Season director Jeannie Donohoe (R) at Awards Ceremony

I liked The Guide.   Biologist E.O. Wilson visits Gorgongosa National Park in Mozambique.  The real focus is on the young local man whose dream has been to be a park guide, but he's now thinking about being a biologist.  I haven't seen the other two yet, but have heard very good things about Lambing Season. 

Charging Environmental Protesters With Terrorism - The Potential Dangers of Glitter

A group of protesters from locked themselves to the entrance of Devon Towers in Oklahoma City.

Tulsa's Channel 9 report focused on the protesters.  The target, other than Devon Towers, is never mentioned.  The closest they come to explaining the reason for the protest was the term "anti-fracking protesters" and giving the names of the organizations sponsoring the protest:  "Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance and Cross Timbers Earth First."

The reporter, Lisa Monahan, says,

"although they had nothing to say to authorities, the protestors had plenty to say about their agenda."

What did we hear about their agenda?

"I don't know if I was scared, but I was angry."

That's it.  That's the plenty they had to say about their agenda.  Was the agenda in the original piece cut by the station editors?  It sure makes Monahan look bad. 

Channel 9 concludes the report with a list of charges that included:

"Biological attack by throwing an agent or substance"


According to one of the protesters,  Eric Whelan,

"the black substance was simply glitter,  it was just to make good pictures and video and to make it pretty."

The Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance website gives us more explanation about the protesters' target and agenda: 

Devon Energy is a key player in the deadly tar sands industry. And though Devon Energy has been touted as practicing the safest and greenest form of tar sands extraction, the form of extraction that Devon practices, steam assisted gravity drainage, emits 2.5x the greenhouse emissions as open mining according to the Pembina Institute. Additionally, since 80% of tar sands reserves lie too deep within the earth to mine, this type of extraction will utilize 30x more land area than open mining.
“I’m opposed to the industry’s blatant disregard for human wellbeing in the pursuit of profit,” said Cory Mathis of Austin, TX—one of the activists locked down inside Devon. “These industries poison countless communities, often deceive and coerce folks into signing contracts, and when that doesn’t work, they use eminent domain to steal the land. Texas and Oklahoma have long been considered sacrifice zones for the oil and gas industry, and people have for the most part learned to roll over and accept the sicknesses and health issues that come with the temporary and unsustainable boost in employment.”

TransCanada Teaching Police and FBI how to use Terrorism laws to prosecute protesters

Vice.com puts this into a larger context of TransCanada training police and FBI on how to use anti-terrorism laws to prosecute environmental protestors.

When they got to jail, they found out they were being charged with a "terrorism hoax," a state felony punishable by up to ten years in prison.
Their attorney, Doug Parr, has been involved in dozens of protest cases like this one in Oklahoma and Texas. In other arrests, protesters have faced trumped-up charges, but this is a radical escalation. "I've been practicing law since the 1970s. Quite frankly, I've been expecting this," Parr said. "Based upon the historical work I've been involved in, I know that when popular movements that confront the power structure start gaining traction, the government ups the tactics they employ in order to disrupt and take down those movements."
TransCanada has been putting pressure on law enforcement to do exactly that. In documents obtained by Bold Nebraska, the company was shown briefing police and the FBI on how to prosecute anti-pipeline protesters as terrorists.
In Ohio, the Athens County Emergency Management Agency recently held a training drill that involved a fake anti-fracking group. The scenario was meant to prepare emergency first responders for a terrorist attack. Focusing the training on non-violent environmentalists caused such an uproar that the county had to issue a public apology.

Image from KWTV

Look at Sarah Totten as she was interviewed by KWTV channel 9 Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Image from KWTV

And here's Eric Whalen interviewed by KWTV.










Above are two of the protesters from tv news screenshots.  They looked terribly normal and non threatening.  But here is another set of pictures that Channel 9 says were the four who were arrested.  It takes these clean cut white kids (yeah, we're profiling here) and makes them look a lot edgier.  I'm not sure if this image was from the television station or from the police. In both cases, it's problematic. 

Image from KWTV

I'd note that before I wrote this post, I did a bit of googling to be sure I was getting the story reasonably correctly.  I do this when responding to stories I find online to be sure I'm not responsible for spreading hoax stories like the one the Anchorage Daily News reported about a SF school that was reported to having suspended a kid for wishing an atheist teacher a Merry Christmas.  That story quotes a psychologist on how we tend to believe what we want to believe:

"We tend to apply lower standards of evidence to information that confirms our predispositions," said Brendan Nyhan, assistant professor of government at Dartmouth College. "What that means in practice is people seize onto these online nuggets that confirm what they believe.
"They're certainly unlikely to seek out information to see if it's true."
Yet research shows that even if confronted with a correction to false information, it won't change people's minds, he said.
"Even in the case where someone accepts that this story is false, it isn't clear that they'll accept an actual 'war on Christmas' is false," Nyhan said. "No one thinks they're misinformed."

 This doesn't just apply to conservatives who seemed to have been the major group that keep this atheist story spreading.  Liberals can be just as vulnerable.  So constantly check your crap detectors and make sure they are working.   

Keeping People We Love Nearby Through Plants And Flowers

Most of our indoor plants were originally cuttings from my mom's yard, which is a jungle of many, many different plants that do well in her coastal LA climate.  Every now and then one of the migrants in our house puts on a show.  The Poor Man's Orchid (that's the name I've always known it by, but I think it's some type of bromiliad) is now in the final stages of blooming.  These two pictures show a little bit of the emergence of the flowers over the last two weeks.

The pink spike appears one day when I'm watering and eventually the buds come out, drop, and open.

I'm afraid my photos don't do it justice. 

But having these plants here in Anchorage means I have a part of my mom here with us all the time.  We have other plants from my mother-in-law, who is no longer alive, but the plants, which thrive mean she too is always with us. 

And we have a big mountain ash in front of the house that my son planted when it was barely more than a twig. 

AIFF 2013: Best Of The Fest Thursday At Alaska Experience Theater

The schedule for Thursday is:

Time	Place	Films
6:30 pm	AK Exp LARGE	Best Feature:  Tu Seras Un Homme Best Animation:  Mr. Hublot
7:30 pm	AK Exp small	Best Documentary: McConkey Best Super Short:  Anatomy of Injury
8:30 pm	AK Exp LARGE	Best Short Doc:  The Guide Best Snowdance Doc:  Mike's Migration Best Short Narrative:  Lambing Season

"Tu Seras Un Homme" (You Will Be A Man) is a French film about a somewhat dysfunctional family that finds its way back to functional.  It's lovingly made - starring the director's wife and son among others - and I plan to see it again to see if I can catch things I missed the first time around. 

"Mr. Hublot" is visually spectacular, though the story it tells is somewhat empty.  That's a problem I had with a lot of the animation - the technology offers potential for fantastic imagery.  And it's ok to just have a visual feast, but if there's a good story too, it's usually much better.

"McConkey"  Ski daredevil turned base jumper does amazing and crazy stuff until he does something crazy but not amazing.  The film does some probing in what drove McConkey to continually push to do more extravagant and dangerous stunts.  I can't help but give some of the credit to Red Bull and other sponsors who encourage people to risk their lives like this. 

"Anatomy of Injury" - I think I saw this, but don't remember it.

"The Guide"  - Biologist E. O. Wilson meets an amazing young local guide at Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique.  An interesting short doc.

"Mike's Migration" - didn't see it. 

"Lambing Season"  didn't see it but heard very good things about it. 

AIFF 2013: Bambi or Invective - Thinking About Film Criticism

Seeing lots of movies last week has me thinking about movie reviews, their purpose, their effects, and one's qualifications to write them in the first place.  I do want to write about some of the films I saw and also about the festival's awards.

So, when I found Maureen Dowd's column in the Anchorage Daily News today, (in the NY Times a couple days ago) on the "Bambi Rule,"  I read it with care.

Should reviewers be nice or critical?  Here's the argument for being nice:

"Eggers chided Harvard students: 'Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic, and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them.'”

And here Dowd quotes Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic:

“'Rebecca West established what she called ‘the duty of harsh criticism,’ and she was right. An intellectual has a solemn obligation to speak out negatively against ideas or books that he or she believes will have a pernicious or misleading effect upon people’s understanding of important things. To do otherwise would be cowardly and irresponsible. “If one feels that a value or a belief or a form that one cherishes has been traduced, one should rise to its defense. In intellectual and literary life, where the stakes may be quite high, manners must never be the primary consideration. People who advance controversial notions should be prepared for controversy. Questions of truth, meaning, goodness, justice and beauty are bigger than Bambi."

It's much harder to critique a film when you've met the film maker.  And this is good.  It forces me to distinguish between the film and the film maker.  I need to write about the film, I need to write about it from my perspective (rather than an omniscient reviewer perspective), and I need to be constructive.  When I wrote during the festival, it was to give potential viewers an idea of quality and topic so they could decide among the many choices, but I didn't want to do spoilers.  After the festival, now that I've had time to think, I can write more meaningfully about the films.

Basically, I want to write so that the film maker is not mad at me after reading a review.  (Well, not mad for long anyway.)  It's hard enough to make a film without having people who haven't made a film tear it apart.  I try to write using the same frame of mind I used to critique my graduate students' papers.  The point is to help the student write a better paper next time.  That requires me to avoid evaluative terms as much as possible and use concrete examples of what I liked and disliked.  I'm usually right about what I like and dislike, but the odds go down when I talk about what's 'good' and 'bad.'

That said, standing up for important values when someone trashes them is also important.  I've only been harsh in my AIFF  movie criticisms over the years when I thought the film makers had acted very badly (The Dalai Lama's Cat) or when there was a particularly ethnocentric movie (Exporting Raymond.)  But even in those reviews, I tried to stay objective and gave detailed examples of why I was bothered. 

The Dowd piece, I'm guessing, looks to the extremes - the smarmy reviews that almost seem part of a public relations campaign (and NPR and ADN participate in this along with all the other media) and the nasty insults that are often more reflective of the reviewers' problems than the work reviewed. 

All that said, I'm hoping to post my thoughts on the features - narrative and documentaries - and on the animation program.  And I'll slip in a few of the shorts, but I didn't see enough of them.  Coming soon. 

Clutter War: How Do I Throw These Things Away?

The Film Festival is pretty much over - just a couple best of the fest nights. 
Time to get back to normal life.  Our film maker guest departed last night. But we've got a Chinese teacher who's going to move in soon and his room has been our storage closet. 

So I went down to get something done there.  But much of what is stuffed in the closet is stuff that has already been sorted and retained two or three times already.  How do I throw this stuff away:

Click to Make Clear

  Here's the front - a porcupine.

Here's the back:

Do I need to keep this?  Of course not.  But how can I toss it?  Especially as I watch the little girl who made it raise her own daughter now? 

And this calendar will be good again in . . . 2040.  If I'd have cleaned this stuff earlier, I could have used it in 2112.