Would Confucius Have Cut The Education Budget?

As Alaska's legislature is busy cutting the state education budget and trying to use what public money is left to give to private schools through vouchers, it might be a good time to get a bigger perspective on this.  The University of Alaska Anchorage Philosophy Department with an assist from the campus Confucius Institute is putting on a conference titled "Living Ethically in the Global World." 

The conference is pretty wide ranging and open to the public.  On the first night, there will be a community panel at East High School.   This was planned before the Governor, in his Orwellian way, declared this the "Year of Education."  I'm not sure the question in the title will be answered, but the recipient of the 2013 Confucian Prize will be on the East High panel.  So you can ask him if he doesn't address the issue in the panel.

“The Priorities and Ethics of Educating” Thursday, March 27, 2014 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm Community Panel at East High School Auditorium Panel: Andy Josephson, UAA Graduate and Alaska State Representative (It appears that Rep. Josephson's legislative duties will keep him in Juneau.) Roger Ames, 2013 Confucian Prize Recipient; Maria Williams, Director of Alaska Native Studies at UAA; Ed McLain, UAA College of Education Respondent: Francisco Miranda, UAA Department of Languages

This is actually both the Ninth Annual UAA Undergraduate Philosophy Conference and the UAA Ethics Center's Inaugural Convocation.

Here are some of the paper titles I pulled out of the program:

“Drawing from the Same Well:  Eastern Thought in Christian Ethics” “Yup’ik Culture is also Confucian” “Role Ethics in the Yijing” “Human Rights and Daoism: An Alternative Chinese Perspective” "Confucian Role Ethics for Women: A Response to Roger T. Ames’ Vocabulary” “The Impossible Junzi and Global Ethics” “Eastern Tones:  What Can Contemporary Acoustics Learn from Yin-Yang?” “Taking Responsibility: Toward a Sixth Confucian Relationship (with Notes from my Life as a Dean in China)” “Confucian Revivalism and Its Role in Chinese Society and Education”

You can find the exact times and locations for each of these in the program embedded below.

And here are the Universities that will be represented (in addition to UAA):

Prospect College and Taigu College (Chongqin and Shanxi Province, PRC) Renmin University (Beijing, PRC) Northeast Normal University Belmont University (Nashville, Tennessee) University of California Santa Cruz Loyola Marymount University University of San Diego (California) Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (Yongin, Korea) University of Wales (Great Britain) University of Hawai’i at Mānoa Central Washington University University of San Diego (California) Adrian College

I'd note that the UAA  Department of Public Administration has had a long going relationship with the public administration program at Renmin (People's) University in Beijing and I taught there in 2004. 

I checked and all the panels are open to the public at no charge. Fortunately, we'll be back in Anchorage.   Here's the full program:

Living Ethically in the Global World

And I'd urge people to get off the internet merry-go-round and take a few moments to think about the title of this conference: Acting Ethically in a Global World. What are some of the topics you would explore under that heading? Talk about it over dinner with your parents.

As Michigan Judge Allows Gay Marriage, Good To Remember Alaskans Who Sowed Seeds 20 Years Ago

A federal judge struck down Michigan's ban on gay marriage.  As most breathing Americans know, this is just one more in a string of such decisions in states including Utah, Texas, and Kentucky, and following the US Supreme Court decision last year.

In light of this, it's useful to remember that Gene Dugan and Jay Brause, an Anchorage couple then, sued the State of Alaska over this same issue back in 1994.

From Religious Tolerance:

"The plaintiffs asked that the existing Marriage Code be declared unconstitutional because it violates two rights guaranteed by the Alaska constitution: their rights to privacy (their right to be let alone) and their rights of equal protection. Wagstaff pointed out that there are over 100 state statutes that provide rights and protections to married couples which are not available to homosexuals who live together in a permanent partnership. The Alaska Constitution forbids gender-based discrimination, yet is withholding privileges from Brause and Dugan solely because of they are both male."

From Superior Court judge Peter Michalski's ruling:

"It is the duty of the court to do more than merely assume that marriage is only, and must only be, what most are familiar with. In some parts of our nation mere acceptance of the familiar would have left segregation in place. In light of Brause and Dugan's challenge to the constitutionality of the relevant statutes, this court cannot defer to the legislature or familiar notions when addressing this issue." He ruled that "marriage, i.e., the recognition of one's choice of a life partner, is a fundamental right. The state must therefore have a compelling interest that supports its decision to refuse to recognize the exercise of this fundamental right by those who choose same-sex partners rather than opposite-sex partners."

This was not the first such ruling in the US.  Hawaiian courts had also found no reason to ban same-sex marriage.  Thus the last two states admitted into the union, were the first to recognize same sex marriage.  But it wasn't to last.  In Hawaii and in Alaska constitutional amendments limiting marriage to one man and one woman passed and in both states the courts bowed to the new constitutional language.

Alaska's a small state and people tend to know each other.  I've met a lot of people that I write about.  In the case of Brause and Dugan and Judge Michalski, I should say that I know them well enough that I've eaten dinner at their homes.  But that doesn't change the facts that Alaska was on the forefront of attempting to legalize same-sex marriage.  What's different is inside the brains of the American public, including the judges who are ruling. 

In a recent post a commenter challenged my trying to understand the thinking of people with whom I disagree.  This shift in the way people think about same-sex marriage is, for me, evidence that such theoretical speculation pays off.  But, of course, it also needs a lot of other. more action-oriented strategies by many different people. Minds have changed radically in the last 20 years. 

I would note that Jay and Gene couldn't wait for Alaska to change and moved to the UK where they could get married.  And Jay, using the more formal version of his name, Jacob, is a regular and thoughtful commenter on this blog.

I know that each positive court decision helps salve the wounds they received in their battle, which seemed so Quixotic at the time.  They know that their fight in Alaska did help set the groundwork for the victories in recent years.  And it's one of those quirks of life I find so amazing, that they can walk around London (or wherever they happen to be) without anyone knowing the historic role they have played.  But you can read about it in detail at Religious Tolerance.  Judge Michalski is now retired, but he too, can rest easy, knowing that he made a decision back in the dark ages, that would eventually be recognized as the right decision.  And then there's former Sen. Lyda Greene who helped keep Alaska in the dark ages by sponsoring the Constitutional Amendment limiting marriage to one man and one woman.

You can read Judge Michalski's decision here.

Note:  Since I drafted this yesterday and slept on it before posting, 300 couples have married in Michigan before a Federal judge put a stay on further marriages pending appeal. 

Dogs, Long Time Frame, Cloudy Descent - Random SF/LA Shots

There are lots and lots of dogs walking their owners around San Francisco.   Lots of shops have water bowls set out for them and most allow dogs in. 
















The Long Now Foundation was closed as we walked by, but they'll be back in a while.  It's an organization founded by Stewart Brand (of the Whole Earth Catalog) and others.  They're building a ten thousand year clock. 

"The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years."

Their website has an essay by Steward Brand, of the Whole Earth Catalog and one of the Long Now founders which says this quote from Dennis Hillis helped start the clock project:

 "When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 02000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 02000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an

ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium."

 For me, 1984 was the year we were moving toward.  Then 2001.

We were at the Long Now because we were headed for greens for dinner.  But they were closed for a private party.




I took this shot as we headed back for the car and another place to eat.

 

Talking about about greens, I thought this Plant Exchange idea was worth posting.  Lots of people have too much of one thing in their yards and not enough of other things.  I'd love to see this happen in Anchorage.  Just a spot to bring extra plants and exchange for ones you'd like. 













Our trip to the Bay area was much too brief, but we got to see my son and his wife and other good friends.  And soon we were back over an overcast LA and slipped down through the thin cloud cover. 



They announced we'd be on the ground in 15 minutes.  I thought we were further away than that, and once we got over the opening of Marina del Rey, we wandered around the LA airspace and finally landed in 20 minutes.  But it took another 20 minutes before we got a place to park. 




Here's one last shot I took as we meandered around LA waiting to be cleared to land.  A freeway interchange. (As you can tell, I used the little camera.  We were cutting down on what we carried on this trip and my bigger camera was on the don't take list.)

I found myself trying to trace all the connections from one direction to another.  I see how you can switch from the vertical freeway to the horizontal freeway and go either direction.  But I only see a way to turn right from the horizontal freeway to the vertical one.  There's a little something above the loop on the right and below the one on the left, but I can't figure out what they're for. Maybe they go down to a street below.   My other camera would have made this all much clearer.  (No I don't even know what interchange this was.  You can see park area below, and there was a lake on the upper left.)

The Christian Nation Myth

There were four candidates in the 1912 US presidential election.  In Nonbeliever Nation, David Niose uses that election as a benchmark to show that the impact of the religious right on the 2012 election was not really part of the American tradition.  He quotes each of

the four candidates.

Woodrow Wilson, whom he describes as the most religious of the four: 

"Of course, like every other man of intelligence and education I do believe in organic evolution.  It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised."

Theodore Roosevelt:

"Thank Heaven I sat at the feet of Darwin and Huxley."

William Howard Taft:

"I do not believe in the divinity of Christ," he wrote in an 1899 letter, "and there are many other of the postulates of the orthodox creed to which I cannot subscribe."

Eugene Debs:

"I don't know of any crime that the oppressors and their hirelings have not proven by the Bible."

Niose argues that secularism was the position of most politicians, Democratic, Republican and other until the rise of the Moral Majority in the late 1970s.  They, he writes, have skewed politics back into the idea of the US being a Christian nation.  In contrast to the 1912 candidates he offers some quotes from 2012 Republican hopefuls.

"Today, a full-century after the era of Roosevelt and Wilson, we routinely see presidential candidates assure voters that they are doubtful of the theory of evolution, pandering to a large segment of the electorate that believes the world is just a few thousand years old.  Rick Perry, for example . . . lucidly conveys America's intellectual decline by expressing his views on evolution this way:  "God may have done it in the blink of the eye or he may have done it over this long period of time, I don't know."  Evolution "is a theory that's out there,"  Perry explained, but it "has some gaps in it."  The Texas chief executive is by no means an anomaly, as other major political figures, such as Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and Mike Huckabee, have made a point of emphasizing their refusal to accept evolution theory, and even former president George W. Bush favored teaching creationism, disguised as so-called intelligent design, in public schools."

 Niose is arguing in the book that, in fact, a significant portion of the US population does not believe in a diety, but they have not identified themselves as secular.  Thus statistics suggest that the US is a much more religious nation than it really is.  This includes the 20% that answer "none" or "don't know" when asked what religion they are.  It also includes those people who do not practice a religion or believe in a religion, may still identify with the religion they grew up with, and might say "Catholic" or "Methodist" if asked. 

He points out that just 15% of the US population would be 50 million people, which would be more than the combined total of Methodists, Lutherans, Pentecostals, Presbyterians,  Jews, Mormons, and Muslims.

His goal is to get secular Americans to identify as such to demonstrate a) that the US is NOT a Christian nation, as argued by the religious right, and that there are many secular Americans, and b) to get make secular Americans a potent political force to counter the power of the religious right.  Secular Americans aren't out to attack other religions, but to stand up for their own rights and to prevent the fervently religious from using government to enforce their own religious beliefs on others. 

I'm only about a third of the way into the book, but I thought I'd share this much for now.  It's a topic that I wrote about last November when my attention was caught by the tornado survivor who responded on national television to Wolf Blitzer's question about thanking the Lord for surviving, by saying, after a pause, "Well, actually, I'm an atheist."  I realized how prejudiced the US is against atheism when I found myself surprised that they hadn't cut that part out of the broadcast. 

David Niose is identified as the President of the American Humanist Association. 

50 Years Since UCLA Bruins Won Their First Basketball Championship

My first semester at UCLA, Spring 1963 (yes, back then you can start school and graduate in the mid-semester, not just June).  I remember watching the basketball championships on a big tv screen in the student union.  UCLA lost somewhere well before the championship game.

But the next semester, things were different.  Walt Hazard, Gail Goodrich, Fred Slaughter,  Keith Erickson, Kenny Washington started off with a bang.  They won their first few games and then there was the LA championship (I don't recall the exact title of the tournament) at the Sports Arena.  They were playing Michigan, a traditionally good team.  A friend in LA had a boyfriend from Michigan who told us UCLA hadn't played any real teams and when they played Michigan, the winning streak would be over.  I just recall the first four minutes of the game, where UCLA put its full court press on display for the first time that I think it really got noticed.  At the end of four minutes it was 16-0 UCLA and they went on to win 30 games that season with no losses.

Every game was a nail biter as we wondered if they could extend their winning streak, which they did into the final game against Duke.

This all came back to me in January when I was cleaning things out in my mom's garage and ran across my copy of the mid-March 1964 Sports Illustrated with the cover story on UCLA's win.  I decided to wait until March to post it, but it seems, the picture I took is on an older sound card and the magazine is back home in Anchorage now.  But this is the time, so I'll put the picture up when we get back to Anchorage.

[UPDATE:   I posted the cover and the article here on the exact 50th anniversary of the Sports Illustrated date.]

A couple years later I remember watching the Freshman team with the new recruit Lew Alcindor, play the national champion varsity team and win.  A sign of even more championships to come.

UCLA basketball and football helped me understand the power of group spirit (and insanity), as the whole school, it seemed, had its spirit lifted and dashed if the team won or lost.  I got over that after I graduated, though at times in my rural Thailand town, I could listen to UCLA basketball games late at night coming via the Armed Forces Network in Saigon. 

Visiting My Chinese Grandson And His Grandmother

D was a student of mine in Hong Kong 20 some years ago and helped me with research in Beijing.  My family attended his wedding in Beijing and he's been to visit us a number of times in Alaska and now he's a college professor himself, doing very well. He's like a third child for us. 



So in addition to visiting our other son here in the San Francisco area, we're here to visit our new 6 week old grandson, J.  A special bonus is that J's biological grandmother is here from Beijing, where we last saw her ten years ago.

D stopped at a Chinese grocery on the way home.  Lots of interesting food available.

The fish department announced itself to my nose as soon as we got inside.  Lots of fish, live and not.  Turtles and fat frogs too.

And disappointingly, for an Alaskan, is this package of farmed Canadian salmon. 

Lots of great fruits and vegetables and fungi.  The jackfruit on the left is an old reminder of Thailand where it is common and strangely grows from the trunk of the tree. 

For dinner, J's grandmother made Jiao Zi (dumplings) from scratch.  First the dough, then she cut the little round dough pieces and flattened them for wrappers, the filling, and then she boiled them.  Delicious.





Mind your stereotypes here.  While it's easy to see a quaint older woman, with limited English, visiting from China to help with her new grandson, this is actually a retired physics professor who is also an accomplished artist.   


As we walked around the block with J and tried to retrieve our meager Chinese vocabulary, we traded English and Chinese words for the flowers we saw - azaleas, wisteria, rosemary, iris, and on and on.  I couldn't help thinking about the magnificent day she and her daughter (the new mother) took us to see the peonies in the park in central Beijing.  Acres and acres of magnificent blooms.  She waited until the ideal day when they were all blooming.  That's the day I started to understand peonies.  Growing up in  Southern California, I just never appreciated peonies.  They're really a more northern flower.

Missing Malaysia Flight 370

I haven't commented on this because everyone else has and because I have nothing to add.  But as I listen to all the speculation, I do have some thoughts on what might have happened.   Some of the key factors would seem to be:

• Intentional or Unintentional?
• Who?
• Why?

The chart starts to outline those choices:

The Why?

If it's intentional the two basic motives (I'm sure there must be more) that I can think of are personal and political/terror.

Personal could be any situation where someone wants revenge or to collect insurance or ??? - possibly in a way that can't be traced.  A business feud, a family feud, or any of the many different reasons people get very angry at each other.

Political/terror would be a situation where some group with relatively little legitimate power is using terror to make their statement.

That brings us back to Who?  There are the usual suspects

• Al Qaeda and various offshoots.  
• But this plane was headed to China and had lots of Chinese passengers.  And just on March 1, there was a terrorist attack in Kunming which the Chinese government tells us was mounted by Uighurs during the China's National People's Congress. So there's a possibility there too.
• Some organization that's either under the radar or not previously connected with terror attacks.

What?

If it was unintentional, something mechanical happened in the plane and it just went down.  But how do you account for the change in flight direction?  Were the pilots trying to go back after there were mechanical problems but the problems were too much?  Why no messages to aviation controllers?  Lots of questions here.

But if it was intentional, there are different options.

Personal

•  I'm not quite sure what would be required to bring down a plane while one passenger attempted to kill another.  I suspect a gun wouldn't be enough. 
• If someone loaded explosives into someone's luggage, this could have done the trick.
• And someone on the ground attacking with missiles seems a stretch, especially since they were flying at such a high altitude.  

And none of these scenarios is consistent with the plane making a radical course change and continuing to ping for so long


Political/Terror

Petronas Towers from What Do I Know?

Kidnapping - Uighurs possibly thought they could kidnap a plane full of Chinese hostages and negotiate with the Chinese government for concessions.  But given the other Uighur attack with knives in a train station, this seems like a pretty sophisticated plot.  And there is little likelihood the Chinese government would honor any promises that were made to save hostages.  More likely there would be harsh reprisals.

Suicide attack - The last major successful airplane suicide attack was 9/11.  Could plotters have tried to duplicate that effort by attacking the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur?  They were, for a while, the tallest buildings in the world.  What if they tried to take over the plane, but somehow the attempt was thwarted like the third plane in the 9/11 attacks and the plane went down? 


Obviously there are many possible scenarios.  I have no crystal ball, but I suspect that the eventual story, if we ever learn it, will fall within these options. 

Whatever the final story, one can't help but feel great sympathy for the passengers and for their families and friends as the agony of waiting drags on. 

The Views Never Get Old - Anchorage To LA

After nearly a foot of fresh snow Friday night, the sun came out Saturday and it was beautiful.   You can feel the warmth of the sun in March which isn't true in January.  I really was wondering why I was leaving.  Oh yes, to visit my mom and son.  We added a quick trip to San Francisco from LA.  It would be a lot easier if we could stop in SF on the way down or up, but it was much cheaper to just fly to LA and then add the SF trip to that.  Ah, the joys of airline ticket pricing.

With the weather pattern we had, we took off to the east right over town so we had a close up look of Anchorage with fresh snow. 

Bigger and sharper if you click on it

To the left of center is the Seward Highway-Dimond intersection.  It's NOT a black and white photo.






And here's a view of more of snowy Anchorage.

According to the passenger next to us who was from Soldotna, the weather pattern caused a United flight to Anchorage to land in Kenai.  Problem was when they were supposed to proceed on their trip to Anchorage, they had a security problem.  Kenai doesn't have big passenger jets landing there and if there are fewer than 50 passengers, they don't have to go through security.  So Kenai doesn't have the necessary security for a big plane.  Not sure what they did.  (I checked to see if the ADN already covered this story.  They did talk about it, but not the security part. So read this as something heard, but not confirmed.)

Our route to Prince William Sound was a little different and I saw some different views, also partly because of all the fresh snow.  I need to find a geologist or glaciologist to find out about the patterns in the snow.

These are all better if you click them

 

And there wasn't much to see until we arrived in LA.  Still trying to learn how all the different options work on my Canon Rebel.  So the color is a little off in this night shot.

We've been arriving early so often on these flights that I'm beginning to think they overestimate the times so that their on time arrival record is better.  And this time I got pre-screened and J had to go through the regular security.  With my back not completely better yet, that was nice.  I had to go through regular twice on the last trip while J got pre-screened. 

[The last post doesn't seem to have been caught by feedburner.  I thought we were over those problems.]

AIFF 2013: Best Animation Winner Mr. Hublot Also Gets Academy Award

The timing of this post shows you how much my life has been interfering with my blogging.  The Oscars were announced two weeks ago, but I'm only getting this up now.


There's no question that visually and technically, this short animation is perfect.  But I was taken by a couple of other short animated films in the Anchorage festival that showed more originality.  Animation Hotline and The Rose of Turaida both had great unusual visuals and interesting content.  I wrote about the whole program - albeit briefly - here.  But there are some visuals from them.

I guess I shouldn't feel too bad about my tardiness.  Mr. Hublot's website lists the AIFF win, but only says Academy Award nominee for Best Animated Short.  

Screen shot taken March 16, 2014

I do understand how keeping up with all your digital media isn't easy, but I think if I'd won the Academy Award, I'd have gotten that up on my main website. 

March Snow and Sun

People have been talking about an early breakup.  That happens every year.  But given that we've had breakup all winter, one starts to think, maybe . . .  Yesterday when I walked to the library, there was lots of exposed bike path, lots of melting ice, mini lakes in the potholes.  You could even see bare earth being exposed.

You can see a little bit around the tree trunk and the edges of the creek.   But later, coming home from dinner, the snow flakes seemed to be racing to the ground.

 

This road had been bare a little earlier.

And then this morning, we had seven or eight new inches.  Again, I'd cleared the deck completely before this latest reminder that it's still winter.   

 

But the sunshine is heating up the house and you can tell the equinox is just days away.  And this afternoon we head south again to look in on my mom, and it's supposed to be 85˚ in LA.  It's better here, really.