Helping Mom

It's grey outside, but warm and muggy here in LA.  Lots to do.  The car battery was dead.  The kitchen sink faucet is leaking all over.  There are two letters from the IRS, one saying she owes money in one, and the other saying she didn't file, but there's a credit.  Well, they can't know she owes money if she didn't file.  I talked to the accountant who said yes, it was filed and it's just a question of the IRS locating the account where the payroll company put the withheld taxes for the caregiver.  I called the IRS and after going through their voice mail, the electronic voice said they are very busy now and to call back later. 

Then there's the picture that fell off the wall.  The screw that held the wire came out of the frame.  I'd rescrewed it in at a different spot, but apparently the wood is no good on that side and it can't hold the weight of the picture.  The picture is big and heavy and was frame about 40 years ago. 

There's always lots to do when I come to visit my mom.  It's ok though.  I'm glad she's still around to visit.  And she so enjoyed skyping with her great-grandkids last night.  But I need to take care of these things before jumping back into my other posts. 

I've been thinking lately about how life is about keeping up with things, not falling too far behind, and sometimes actually moving ahead. 

Leaving Anchorage On A June Night

The last post had the sun peekabooing through the fog bank from the airport last night.

Denali about 11:20pm

Here are some photos after the plane took off about 11:15pm.

The Alaska Range over Cook Inlet as we took off to the north, then looped to the west to fly down Turnagain Arm.

Then we flew over the mountain ridges and over Prince William Sounds.  This was about 11:30pm. 

Anchorage Sun Cools Off In Coastal Fog

Almost 11pm, at the airport, waiting for our flight. The sun dipped into the fog bank. It's almost solstice so despite our 11:10pm departure, the sun was still up.

When Is A Bear Not A Bear? Face Saving Medicaid Review?

From yesterday's Alaska Dispatch:

The Alaska Legislature plans to hire a consultant to help lawmakers separate “fact from fiction” in the debate over expansion and reform of the public Medicaid health care program.
The Legislative Budget and Audit Committee, chaired by Rep. Mike Hawker, R-Anchorage, on Friday issued a request for proposals for what it called an “independent professional policy resource.”

While I try to step back here and look at things from all sides and present the facts.  But sometimes doing that seems disingenuous.   It's like saying, "There's a large four legged furry animal, bigger than most dogs with sharp teeth that stood up on its hind legs and sniffed the air.  Some say it is a bear and some said they couldn't see it well enough to tell."  The people who can't be sure are generally those who have a vested interest in their not being a bear.  Maybe it's because

• they've always believed there are no bears in the area, so it must really be a big dog.   Or  
• they told you flat out that there are no bears around, and it's hard to admit being wrong.  Or
• they have a vested interest in their being no bears - like they're being paid to keep bears away.

Medicaid expansion is the bear wandering around Alaska.  Republicans have believed it's bad since they first started calling it Obamacare.

• Some believed this through genuine belief that the market is the best way to do everything, despite the fact that the market was leaving millions of Americans uncovered, particularly people who really needed coverage. 
• Some were with Sen. McConnell who declared "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."  Anything the president wants, they oppose it and Obamacare, along with Medicaid expansion, has always been a key target.
• Some, with an eye toward national conservative PAC's that promise money for candidates who vote against Medicaid expansion and to defeat those who vote for it, Republicans (and Democrats) have a vested interest in preventing Medicaid expansion.

The irony is that states who refused to set up their own insurance exchanges are now facing the possibility of losing all federal Medicaid funding.  And they brought it own themselves.  They sued the federal government on a technicality.  The bill says there can be subsidies for people in states with a state exchange and they've argued those without a state exchange, using the federal exchange instead.  Their intent was to end the subsidies and thus kill Obamacare.  But now it's turning out that those states will be cutting off millions of citizens from affordable health care and huge costs will be shifted to those states.

They're charging Obama with not preparing for the possibility that the Supreme Court rules in their favor, which now they see as a catastrophe.  Obama, a constitutional lawyer, is just saying that he can't imagine the court ruling against Obamacare.   I'm sure behind that objective mask, he's got a big smirk as he thinks, "These guys brought this on themselves, let them squirm."

That's all some of the background behind yesterday's headline about the Alaska majority caucuses spending more money that they have repeatedly said we don't have, for a "report."

I'd just remind them that former Republican governor Parnell commissioned a study on Medicaid expansion from a conservative think tank.  He kept that study secret - even though it was paid for with public money - until the very last minute.

He kept is secret with good reason:  The facts contradicted his anti-expansion decision.

"Under our baseline participation assumptions, expanding Medicaid would cost the state $200.6 million more over the 2014 to 2020 period, compared to not expanding Medicaid, for a total increased cost of $240.5 million.  However, the state would receive $2.9 billion in additional federal funds and fewer individuals would remain uninsured.  Additionally, this new cost would comprise only 1.4 percent of total Medicaid costs from 2014 to 2020 (Figure E-4).
 To minimize state costs under expansion, the state could also elect to implement expansion under a number of alternative design scenarios."

 I posted about this study and Parnell's decision on it in detail here.

The legislature doesn't need to spend more time on yet another study.  All they have to do is do their jobs.  Sit down and read the original study.  There are a number of legislators who, I'm sure, would have trouble understanding the study.  But Hawker, who's cited in the article, is a retired CPA.  He should be able to understand that study and know we don't need yet another study.  But he's also the legislator most responsible for the opulent redo of the Anchorage Legislative Information Office that everyone agrees is way above market value. 

The conclusion that makes the most sense to me (which doesn't mean its the right conclusion) is that another study could cite new evidence that would allow the Republicans to let the governor, on his own, expand Medicaid without any serious opposition from the legislators.   And if that is the case, then the already stressed Alaska budget will take another hit so the Republican majority's ego can be massaged.

This is really a bear.  But if that's what it takes to get Medicaid expanded in Alaska and adding health care coverage, many say, to 40,000 people, so be it.  But I hope the people of Alaska - particularly those who have given up on the process and stopped voting - realize how the Republican majority's talk of fiscal carefulness is belied by most of what they do.  The list of the legislators - particularly those from Anchorage and Mat-Su - who took excessive per diem during the special session is just yet one more piece of evidence of their lack of concern for the people of Alaska.

[Feedburner failure repost]

How Plastics Saved The Elephant

I ran across a Scientific American article on the history of plastic.  It reminded me how much history has to teach us and how much of it we don't know. 

Thai work elephants 1967-8

"elephants, the paper warned in 1867, were in grave danger of being "numbered with extinct species" because of humans' insatiable demand for the ivory in their tusks. Ivory, at the time, was used for all manner of things, from buttonhooks to boxes, piano keys to combs. But one of the biggest uses was for billiard balls. Billiards had come to captivate upper-crust society in the United States as well as in Europe. Every estate, every mansion had a billiards table, and by the mid-1800s, there was growing concern that there would soon be no more elephants left to keep the game tables stocked with balls. The situation was most dire in Ceylon, source of the ivory that made the best billiard balls. There, in the northern part of the island, the Times reported, "upon the reward of a few shillings per head being offered by the authorities, 3,500 pachyderms were dispatched in less than three years by the natives." All told, at least one million pounds of ivory were consumed each year, sparking fears of an ivory shortage. "Long before the elephants are no more and the mammoths used up," the Times hoped, 'an adequate substitute may [be] found.'"

 Plastics.  It's mind boggling to know that humans nearly wiped out elephants 150 years ago, just so they could play billiards!

The savior of the elephants?

Plastics freed us from the confines of the natural world, from the material constraints and limited supplies that had long bounded human activity. That new elasticity unfixed social boundaries as well. The arrival of these malleable and versatile materials gave producers the ability to create a treasure trove of new products while expanding opportunities for people of modest means to become consumers. Plastics held out the promise of a new material and cultural democracy. The comb, that most ancient of personal accessories, enabled anyone to keep that promise close.

There was even a contest to find a substitute for ivory so they could keep making billiard balls when the supply of ivory was gone.

The need for natural material to make combs almost wiped out the hawkbill turtle.  In fact plastics - first made from plant material and then from oil - saved a lot of creaturers.

Celluloid could be rendered with the rich creamy hues and striations of the finest tusks from Ceylon, a faux material marketed as French Ivory. It could be mottled in browns and ambers to emulate tortoiseshell; traced with veining to look like marble; infused with the bright colors of coral, lapis lazuli, or carnelian to resemble those and other semiprecious stones; or blackened to look like ebony or jet. Celluloid made it possible to produce counterfeits so exact that they deceived "even the eye of the expert," as Hyatt's company boasted in one pamphlet. "As petroleum came to the relief of the whale," the pamphlet stated, so "has celluloid given the elephant, the tortoise, and the coral insect a respite in their native haunts; and it will no longer be necessary to ransack the earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer."

 As the human population increases, we make heavier use of critical materials, up to the point that we may use them all up - and in the case of animal based materials, cause extinction.  If we are lucky, we find a substitute to give relief to those natural sources. 

But then we get dependent on the new material to the point of endangering the natural world again.   And the local humans who live in that now destroyed natural environment.

Our petroleum use, which saved the whale a hundred years ago, is now causing climate change.  Today petroleum based sports enthusiasts, like the billiard players, continue their dangerous games.  But the rest of us are guilty too.  We can't get free of our addiction to fossil fuel powered cars and airplanes and electricity.   Some, though, are rushing to create alternative sources of energy and finding ways to wean humans from oil. Meanwhile those companies that have gotten rich off of fossil fuels, are fighting any curtailment of the source of their wealth and we continue to buy their products to fuel our lifestyles which we can't imagine without fossil fuels.

And our search for other natural resources as well as our growing human population's encroachment into forests continues to make the survival of non-human species like the elephant and the tiger and millions of smaller, non-iconic species iffy. 

The whole article is fascinating and has lots more details.

"Alien forms of historical consciousness and discourse" - For Example: Arapaho Narrative Past

Each language has its own words that don't exist in other languages, its own grammatical quirks, its own intonation and rhythms that allow them to convey ideas or feelings that can't be expressed as precisely or even at all in other languages.

All this came as a slow realization over the years.  Learning German and having to use it as a student in Germany brought the first glimmers of this understanding.  Learning Thai and living in Thailand expanded my sense of how language shapes how we know things.

This awareness has made me realize that each language (and the culture it represents) is like a volume in the encyclopedia of human knowledge.  Losing a language and culture is like losing a part of the encyclopedia.  We lose what that particular culture has learned from its experience in its time and place in the world, its unique knowledge gained from solving the problems of survival it faced.  The culture overall may not seem like an 'important' culture, but how do we know that?  Much, if not most, of its cultural richness is invisible to people who don't know its language.  And there are so many cultures that most of us don't even know exist. 

But back to how languages shape how we see the world and how we negotiate it.  A simple example.

In English, gender is conveyed, incidentally, by the simple words  'he' and 'she'.  We automatically reveal the gender of the person we speak about.  We don't really have to reveal the gender of the person acting when we speak.   In Thai and Chinese, the equivalent words (third person singular) do not distinguish between males and females.  The terms are gender neutral  But in Thai, there is no exact translation for the English word "I."  Instead, there are two different words - one that males use and another that females use.  When a speaker uses the closest Thai word to the English "I" the speaker reveals his or her gender.  Well, not always.  There are other words that can be used in place of 'I" that instead of gender, reflect the speakers' relationship to the listener.  They could use another word that indicates they are younger or older than the listener and other kinds of status relationships between themselves and the listener.

You simply cannot translate these words from one language to the other without some sort of explanation in the translation.  The words just aren't in the other language.

This morning I heard about the Arapaho narrative past, which was explained as a tense which reflects that the speaker didn't not personally experience the events he's relating.  (I can't find where I heard this - something on the radio.)

What I could find on line focuses mostly on how to understand attempts to translate from Arapaho (and other languages):

Click image to see clearer            Screenshot from Algonguian Spirit

Or, from a paper on these issues for ethnographers from Academia:

 "An understanding of non-Western histories requires not only the generation of documents and an expanded conception of what constituted documentation but also a determined effort to try to comprehend alien forms of historical consciousness and discourse." [Fogelson 1989: 134][emphasis added]

Another misplaced strategy is to impose wholesale the structures of myth to history without establishing the connection in real practices and interaction. Myth contains materials for history but does not structure it totally. The results of a reified myth approach are structures existing "nowhere" in real sociocultural space and time, much as in Levi-Strauss's analysis of myth. In the Arapaho context, "right ways of doing things" (as expressed in forms of the verb nee'eestoo-) precede instruction in myth. The shapes, rhythms, and forms of practice retain primary generative force over cognitive structures, mythologic, or even thought world. Myth is neither a charter for social action nor a model of Arapaho thought. The most sacred myths were told only to a very few people of requisite age and ritual preparedness. To generalize from certain myths to history, then, is misplaced concreteness. Rather, it is necessary to look at social practices the select or reflect mythical and historical material. Of course, myth and history often converge, though not in a direct way. They show up as bits and pieces among so much other material people exchange communicate.

Arapaho Project offers a very technical description of the tense: 

Sound Changes in Words:

      Often in Arapaho, when prefixes and words combine, the sounds change at the combination points. This makes it hard sometimes to recognize what the original form was. The most common changes involve the letter -h-, and are as follows:

      nih (past tense)  + h- > nih’-

                                he’ih (narrative past tense)  + h- > he’ih’- 

For people dealing with Arapaho myths, all this technical detail is important.  But for others (like me) it's a springboard to other ideas about how different language forms could change how we know things.

Why Does This Matter?

So, when I heard this concept of Arapaho narrative past, my ears perked up.  I started thinking about the idea of a tense that is used when telling a story that is not your own story.  Using that tense alerts listeners to the speaker's relationship to the story.

Think about how this might affect things.  Politicians and business folks, when relating stories, would, simply by their use of grammar, have to indicate whether the story they were relating was their own story or someone else's. Think about other ways a language could embed truth telling into its syntax, making harder to lie, or at least easier to figure out that someone was lying. 

I'm not saying that's what Arapaho narrative past exactly distinguishes, I'm just extrapolating other possibilities.  When I looked this Arapaho language phenomenon, I see I'm not likely to understand it exactly, but it does seem to distinguish between talking about myth and some more than real world story from the everyday kinds of stories.  That listeners know that what is being related is not of this world, that the words are supposed to be understood as describing another state of being.

Even in reading English that was written two hundred years ago, we lose a lot because we don't know, really, the way people then thought about the world, what things we assume that they wouldn't have.  We know they had different ideas about slavery, about the roles of men and women, about food, about health, about religion.  And, we think that we, in hindsight, can understand what they meant when they wrote something.  But truly we can't really put ourselves in their world.  After all, twenty year olds today talking about the 1960s are talking about a very different reality than the one I lived in the 60s. They take the outline of events, void of all the color and nuance of the times, and replace it with the color and nuance of their own times.

It's not simply historical consciousness and discourse that's hard to understand.  We have alien forms of consciousness around us in our own communities speaking in what appears to be our own language.   You could say this about  some of the Republicans and Democrats in Congress, or our own Alaskan legislators, who take the same 'facts' and decorate them with their own cultural meaning.  

That's a lot of what the citations above from the ethnographers are talking about.  I'm not judging here, simply pointing it out as an inevitable cross-cultural barrier to understanding.  The first step to dealing with the gap is to at least be aware of it. 

[UPDATE June 15, 2015:  I forgot to add a link to a related previous post on evidential language, in which the speakers give evidence for the claims they make.

"Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something."]

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Why Zoning Laws Matter - Landscaping: The Case Of Northrim Bank

This is the site of the now closed Northrim Bank branch office at 36th and Old Seward.  Notice the beautiful carpet of asphalt. Nothing is marred with soil or green in this picture.  (Though to be fair, there were a few bushes up along the building on the other side.)  This building was at this location long enough that the old Municipal code Title 21 for landscaping commercial property applied.  You can see how strict the code was.

This is where the "hybrid single point urban interchange" is planned for 36th and New Seward.  Given the state of the budget, maybe we can be spared the engineers' overbuilt creativity with exit lanes on the left, not the right. 

Now here is the new Northrim branch that just opened this week about a mile away.

And here it is from the other side. This landscaping is only a few weeks old and it already looks a million times better than their old location.

And a lot better than this location used to be. I don't have handy a good picture of the old lot, but you can get the idea from this picture of the rebuilt Sugar Shack coffee stand after it was vandalized and burned.   It's almost the same view as the one above, just a little closer.  Basically the whole space where the bank and parking lot sit now was just dirt with maybe a little bit of asphalt on one side and some weeds along Lake Otis. When we moved in here in the late 70s this lot was all birch trees. Then they all got cut down one day and it sat empty for years and years until the Sugar Shack was put on it.

I'm not sure whether the bank did this just to meet code or if they went beyond what the code required.  But I do appreciate it.

They even put trees and bushes in the ally, on the other side of the fence from the parking lot, giving the neighbors a bit of green screen. Some might say that the old Sugar Shack and old Northrim landscaping is the 'real' Alaska.  But I'd say the real Alaska was when this lot was all birch trees.  But I'll take this new landscaping over the open dirt space that's been here. 

Finance Committee Amendments - More Session Starting At 8AM Tomorrow

They're offering a series of amendments that I can't find online.  They've passed them out, but can't really figure them out as we go.

They just said something about holding until tomorrow morning, which means the bill won't pass tonight. 

Amendment 1:  Suicide awareness and prevention training
Amendment 2:
Amendment 3:  Deletes Sec. 14, insert new - "does not require an athletic coach who is an unpaid volunteer to report child abuse or neglect
amendment 4:
Amendment 5 - conjectural from Miccichi - delay until June 30, 2017 to understand impacts  (on hold until tomorrow at 8am)

I couldn't keep up with this all, but basically Reps. Tarr and Millett were asked if they were ok with the changes and that there are still finishing touches that will happen tomorrow morning.

An interesting part was Sen. Dunleavy asking Millett and Tarr what was it, besides the opt in and opt out parts, that caused people in the House to say they wouldn't vote for the bill?  He didn't get the answers he wanted and eventually called for more dialogue rather than battling in the press.  I'm not sure why he was asking.

It sounded like he was trying to figure out what, if anything, would be safe to put back into the bill, but that's speculation.  

Sort of Restored HB 44 (Erin's Law) Testimony Done at Sen Finance

Erin's Law public testimony is done. 

Finance committee's changes returned the key parts of Erin's and Bree's Law - it's mandatory for schools, it's opt out for parents, no longer opt in.  And it now covers K-12 again. 

There are 27 sections of the bill that add in many of Sen. Dunleavy's wish list.  But the worst of his amendments are gone - the prohibition on contracting with abortion providers, and some of the parental rights sections that undermined kids rights to access to this training.

The committee is going to recess and do some amending and are hoping to be back  at 4:45 to look at amending this based on the testimony.

Testimony was overwhelmingly for adopting the original bill that was passed in the house.  I didn't hear anyone deviate from that.  There were personal stories from victims of abuse and from parents of abuse victims.  There was testimony from people in the field of fighting abuse. 

Things are in a much better state now. 

Finance Committee Rewrite of Erin's Law Has Big Improvements

I'm at the public testimony for HB 44 Erin's Law.

I wrote up a synopsis of an earlier post that argued that at least 2000 kids would be molested because of the changes from the original Erin's Law to the Senate Education Committee Substitute.

When I got here, I was quickly shown by a friend that there is a new committee substitute bill from the Finance committee.

There are lots of small changes have improved the bill significantly.

• Schools have changed from 'may' back to 'shall' have this program.  That's the biggest benefit.
• Parents now have to 'opt out' as in the original, instead of 'opt in' as in the rewrite.
• And the kids covered are once again K-12, not just 7-12.  
• The prohibition on contracting with abortion providers is gone.

Things are much improved.  I'm hopeful.  I need to compare the two bills carefully to see what is gone and what is still there.

Here's a link to the working draft of the new bill.