"My client was too poor and disadvantaged to take responsibility." - Three Articles On Wealth And Power

Three articles today in the ADN about wealth.  Actually I'm guessing that one of them is about wealthy people, but the other two clearly are.  And while I saw them in the ADN, my links go to the original sources.

The first was originally a New York Times article about how the 400 wealthiest people have what amounts to their own private tax system that allows them to avoid billions in taxes.  And they use some of that saved money to give millions to support political candidates and organizations that support their loopholes.  I don't see anything wrong with financially supporting your political beliefs, but I do see something wrong with getting that wealth by cheating the system that allowed you to gain wealth in the first place, and I do have a problem with individuals and companies contributing such huge amounts to the political process that their political influence upsets the democratic ideal of one person - one vote. I'm using the blog here as a note pad because I need to follow up on this article.

The second article was what the ADN now labels "Talkers."  I found a Guardian article that gives more detail.  This article is about a couple who have gone to South Korea to clone their recently deceased dog for $100,000.  This is the one I'm assuming involves wealth. There are a lot of questions raised here and because dogs can be such an emotional issue, I don't want to raise them quickly and without careful thought.  Plus I want to know a little more about the couple involved.  The article says almost nothing about who they are and I'm just assuming they have some wealth if they can afford to do this.  And if there isn't significant wealth here, there certainly is an issue here about power.  But I do want to note this for now.  And if any readers have reactions, please leave a comment or send me an email.

The third article, again tracing back to the NYT, was about the young man who escaped a prison sentence after killed four folks in a drunk driving accident when his lawyer made up the 'affluenza' defense -

"he was too rich and spoiled to take responsibility"

The only way a court should accept such a plea is if the parents then become responsible for their kid's crime.   This sounds like the Twinkie defense. (The link says Twinkies played no role in the verdict, so maybe we should be skeptical about the role a affluenza too.)

I guess that public defenders are too rushed, too uncaring, too overburdened, too ethical, or not creative enough to come up with the 'poverty' defense - "my client was too poor and disadvantaged to take responsibility." 

". . . if you can turn off the mind and look only with the eyes, ultimately everything becomes abstract," Ellsworth Kelly and Haskell Wexler

The LA Times had two front page obituaries of people whose names weren't on the tip of my tongue. But they both struck me as people I would have liked to have known.

The first obituary was about Ellsworth Kelly, an abstract artist.  Here are a few things about him from the article that caught my attention.

The key to creative inspiration was in the world around him, not in other artists' studios or at the Louvre. If he paid close attention to, say, the contour of a window, the shape of a leaf, the play of light and shadows on man-made and natural forms, his art would emerge.
"I think if you can turn off the mind and look only with the eyes, ultimately everything becomes abstract," the artist told an interviewer in 1991, reflecting on the evolution of his work. Six years later, when a Kelly retrospective exhibition — organized by New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum — appeared at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, he told a Times reporter: "I'm not searching for something. I just find it. The idea has to come to me … something that has the magic of life." [emphasis added]

I like the conceit that if one can "turn off the mind and look only with the eyes, ultimately everything becomes abstract." That describes part of what this blog is ultimately about:  exploring how we know what we know.  How much of what we see in the world, we see because of the models in our heads that cause us to see what we've already been trained to see and to label in just one way.  People who don't know much about flowers may see "a rose" in many flowers because that may be one of the few flower names they actually know.  A police officer may see a life threatening man because his understanding of black men comes from movies and television and not from close black friends.  But if we can 'turn off the mind" then we can see the world fresh again, with all sorts of new possibilities.

Here are some pictures from the blog that show my attempts to see new things in the ordinary.

None of these were pictures I sought. They found me.

I'd note that none of these images was altered, except for the frame added around the onion.

I'd note the idea that the models in our heads cause us to not see what is really there was shown in a different light on an NPR piece this morning, talking about how the gambler's fallacy also tricked judges, loan officers, and others who made decisions about people.  The study showed they consider how the previous decision went when they are making the current decision.


The second obituary was about cinematographer Haskell Wexler.  These words grabbed me:

Despite his success shooting big-budget films for major studios, Wexler, a lifelong liberal activist, devoted at least as much of his six-decade career to documentaries on war, politics and the plight of the disenfranchised.
“His real passion was much larger than just making movies,” said son Jeff Wexler a few hours after his father's death at a hospital in Santa Monica. “His real passion was for human beings and justice and peace.”

Isn't that really what's important?  Justice and peace for human beings?  Our society is so distracted by the demand to acquire material goods, that we're all to willing to look the other way when confronted with injustice and war.  We excuse ourselves because we 'don't have time to get involved' or we 'couldn't make a difference anyway.'  Yet, if we don't do something, who will?  If we don't elect representatives who care, who will?   There are lots of stories about ordinary 'powerless' people who have made a difference.  You don't have to save the world, you just have to make it a little better than you found it.  If half the people did this, we'd be in a much better world.   The Wexler obituary reminds me that I need to do more.

And you've probably seen some of his films, like Who's Afraid Of Virginia Wolfe?  or Bound For Glory  or One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest or In The Heat Of The Night.   If not, you might want to look them up.

Less well known and less seen was his feature directorial debut, Medium Cool.  I remember when I was a trainer for a Peace Corps group at Hilo, Hawaii.  Medium Cool was playing with another film, but the newspaper didn't say which one was playing first. (They still showed double features in those days where you paid once to see two films.)  So I called the theater and asked which film was playing first.  He responded, "Which one do you want first?"  After a second to digest this, I said, "Medium Cool."

From the obituary:

"Described by Wexler as “a wedding between features and cinema verite,” the drama about an emotionally detached TV news cameraman was partly shot in Chicago during the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention. 

At one point, as the camera inches closer to a tear-gas cloud and a wall of police officers, a voice off-camera famously can be heard warning, “Look out, Haskell — it's real!” 

Considered “a seminal film of '60s independent cinema,” “Medium Cool” was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2003."

Meadowlark Lemon Takes His Leave

I saw Meadowlark Lemon and the Harlem Globetrotters at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.  I thought it was in the early 1960s, but the only mention I could find online of the Globetrotters around that time at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium was in a history of the auditorium:

"And on February 3, 1959, Wilt Chamberlain and the Harlem Globetrotters whipped the Los Angeles Rams in a basketball game, 80-56." 

Whether it was that game or a later one in Santa Monica, I just remember laughing very hard and being totally amazed at what these guys could do with a basketball.  I'd note that some of the first UCLA basketball games I went to were also in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

Below is a snippet of Meadowlark and the team that will give those who never saw the Globetrotters an idea of what they did on court.

Below that is a longer documentary that puts their comic talents into the context of their amazing athletic talents and race relations in the United States and the world - the real importance of the Harlem Globetrotters.

"Men love their mothers, but spend their lives trying to win their fathers’ approval. " Paul Jenkins Opens Up A Bit

Paul Jenkins' Sunday columns tend to be full of bluster, Republican invectives against liberal positions; they're party line, fact-light, tirades.  On a level of right-wing political nastiness with Trump as an eleven, Jenkins tends to be in the 4 - 7 range with occasional outbursts that go higher.    I've always wondered where his rigidity and meanness to others comes from.  Is it just a role he's playing as the token local regular conservative columnist or does it reflect who he really is?  My sense has been that what you write does reflect who you are to some degree.

Sunday, Jenkins wrote about saying goodbye to his 93 year old father.  In that piece, he tells us a bit about who he is and how he got that way.   Having lost my 93 year old mother this year, I can understand what it's like.

He offers some strong and sex stereotyped ideas.  I think that while his generalization may often apply, and surely apply to him,  I've found that the roles he talks about can be reversed or shared in different ways by both parents.

"Fathers make men. Mothers polish them, smooth the rough edges, make them human -- but fathers make them. They are our first role models, the guys we emulate -- until, as teens, we decide they are stupid -- the guys who imprint upon us, in ways good and bad, a roadmap for our lives. Men love their mothers, but spend their lives trying to win their fathers’ approval."

Paul and my relationships with our parents were much different.   I had an easy relationship with both parents (who amicably divorced when I was about five), and I always felt I had their love and approval,  Though that didn't mean I could do whatever I wanted.  My parents were reasonable, strict, but flexible, and we could talk about why a rule mattered or didn't.  And if my argument was good, I could get them to change their minds.  There was one important rule my mom insisted on:  we did not go to bed mad at each other.

Jenkins didn't have that with his dad.

"Mine was perhaps the proudest, hardest man I have known. He knew the Depression’s hunger, the Dust Bowl’s calamity. He lived a life of personal honor. He would never lie. Never cheat. Never take advantage. There was right; there was wrong. He was an absolute stickler for personal responsibility and accountability, grim death on tardiness. It was the military in him, I suppose. “3 p.m. does not mean 3:01,” he would growl. “It means 2:55.” 

"A stern-looking man, even in his last years he could freeze people with a piercing look I have seen a million times. An imposing figure not to be trifled with, at 93 he still was tall and thin. He walked with his back ramrod-straight, and, this always amazed me, still squared his corners when he turned. He hated slouching and had very old-fashioned ideas about punishment.
 A free spirit, I rebelled early and we got along like a sackful of cats. He was, I was certain, quite insane. By my late teens, we were estranged. I escaped into the Army and we rarely communicated."

My dad grew up during WW I in Germany when food was scarce and then lived there through the post-war depression and as the Nazis gained power.  My mother was born after WW I, but was in Germany longer and suffered the humiliations and fears of Jews as the Nazis began their harassment of Jews.  She didn't get out until September 1939 as a 17 year old, leaving her parents behind.  So while I'm sure that Mr. Jenkins senior had it difficult, my parents had it at least as hard.  But debating who had it hardest is not a fruitful path.  In any case, I think a loving family trumps survivable, economic hardship.

After Jenkins' mom died in 2007, he writes that he and his dad started talking by phone and  that his dad talked to him for the first time about his early years, the military, and how he met Jenkins' mother.

He ends the piece dramatically,  telling us that his dad had a strong influence on him, for better and worse.

"Dads leave imprints. I am who I am largely because of my father. The good and the bad. I wish I had known him better. I wish I knew whether he approved.

I came to conclude long ago, that 'maturity' comes when we develop adult-adult relationships with our parents.  If they can't handle that, then the adult child learns to understand how they got the way they are, recognizes they can't change, and forgives them.  Their words no longer have the power to hurt.  Their approval is replaced by our own self-awareness, our own ability to self-evaluate, and ultimately, self-approval.  Jenkins, it seems, never got there.

In my unprofessional, but human, way of thinking, I'm guessing that all those columns in, first, The Times, then the Anchorage Daily News, and now in the Alaska Dispatch, were attempts to win the approval of father figures in the Republican party and in the oil industry.  All the money in the world can't buy peace if one is still seeking his father's approval.

Ultimately, we are all born into this world.  If we're lucky, our parents raise us and we learn to deal with others, first from our relationships with our siblings.  Then we, again if we're lucky, get some schooling, find a partner, and work to support our own families.  We watch our kids grow up, maybe have grandkids, and then we die.  These are the basics that nearly all human beings share, whether they're rich or poor, Americans or Syrians, Republicans or Libertarians or Democrats, male or female or somewhere in between.  We all face the ultimate questions of who we are, how to live, and how to deal with our impending deaths.  Everything else is decoration, often used to successfully avoid facing the critical questions.  I'd note that the academic field that deals with those fundamental questions is philosophy, part of the humanities that a number of politicians are trying to cut.  They'd rather we discuss which products we want to buy than what is a good life.

But with the death of a parent, we're forced, at least briefly, to face the most fundamental human questions.

And that's what Paul Jenkins seems to have done when his father died.  And in writing a bit about it, he shared his humanity with us, something he doesn't do much in print.  And when we share those fundamental issues, we see that as humans, we are all facing the same issues.  And when we make ourselves vulnerable by sharing our questions and doubts about life, we make ourselves approachable.  We are no longer any of the labels we mask ourselves with or are given by others.  We're just human beings.  And then it's easier to talk to each other and stop competing, stop trying to beat each other, and have a chance to share and work together to make this a better world for all.

I hope Paul Jenkins doesn't stop this self reflection now that his father's ashes have been laid to rest.  I hope he continues to reflect on who he is and who I am and who everyone he meets is.  That he sees us all as humans who also want the approval of their parents, and how the experience of gaining that approval (or not) shapes them, and that he can be sympathetic to them.

Pelicans, Herons, And More, Ballona Creek

After dropping off family at the airport, we stopped to walk along Ballona Creek on a sunny, cool, windy Christmas day.  Here are some birds we saw.




From the National Park Service:

"Brown pelicans weigh about 8 pounds and measure a little over 4 feet in length, with a wingspan of over 6.5 feet. The 6 subspecies of brown pelican are similar in appearance with slight differences particularly in breeding plumage. Sexes look similar, though males are slightly larger. Brown pelicans have short, dark legs, long, broad wings, a large, heavy all-brown body, and a huge bill. Webbing between all four toes makes the brown pelican an awkward walker, but a strong swimmer. In basic plumage, adults have a white neck and belly, pale yellow head with occipital crest, a brown body, brown eyes, a throat pouch that is reddish orange, and a billface that is paler at the base and tipped with yellow. As the breeding season approaches, the distal end of the bill turns reddish, the proximal end of the throat pouch brightens to a poppy-red, the iris turns a yellowish white to light blue, and a white stripe runs down the pouch side of neck, while the rest of the neck stays dark brown. Colors start to fade during the onset of incubation, and the yellow feathers on the head are replaced with white feathers."

From All About Birds:

The Sanderling’s black legs blur as it runs back and forth on the beach, picking or probing for tiny prey in the wet sand left by receding waves. Sanderlings are medium-sized “peep” sandpipers recognizable by their pale nonbreeding plumage, black legs and bill, and obsessive wave-chasing habits. Learn this species, and you’ll have an aid in sorting out less common shorebirds. These extreme long-distance migrants breed only on High Arctic tundra, but during the winter they live on most of the sandy beaches of the world.

It says 'black legs' and this one appears to have a gray leg.  I'm checking this out with my bird expert.

This is a surf scoter.

White crowned sparrow.

Western grebe

And a great blue heron

From Audubon:

"Widespread and familiar (though often called "crane"), the largest heron in North America. Often seen standing silently along inland rivers or lakeshores, or flying high overhead, with slow wingbeats, its head hunched back onto its shoulders. Highly adaptable, it thrives around all kinds of waters from subtropical mangrove swamps to desert rivers to the coastline of southern Alaska. With its variable diet it is able to spend the winter farther north than most herons, even in areas where most waters freeze. A form in southern Florida (called "Great White Heron") is slightly larger and entirely white."

Rest On The Flight To Egypt

This is one of those posts I could never, in a million years, have predicted I would put up here.  I found a 1994 calendar tonight.  (Unfortunately, it was good in 2015, but there are only six days left of this year.  The calendar is good again in 2022, which isn't that far off.)  It's a drug company promotional calendar which my mom got many of because she worked in a doctor's office.  It's paintings from the State Museum of Berlin.

detail from Altdorfer's Rest on the Flight from Egypt, 1510

Looking up pictures in a calendar, today with access to the internet, allows one to gain much greater depth of understanding than was easily available in the past.  So as I was checking on different pictures in the calendar, I looked up "Rest On The Flight To Egypt."  As with the previous pictures I looked up (this one is December) I expected to find it quickly.  I did, and I didn't.  I got a lot of hits for a picture of the same name by Caravaggio (1596-7), but the one in the calendar is by Albrecht Altdorfer and is dated 1510.


So I looked a little more and found a website that lists over 100 paintings with that same title!  You can see the list with links to the various versions here.  I guess that isn't so remarkable for biblical stories, but it did surprise me.

Here's Wikipedia's description of the subject matter (of the Caravaggio painting):

"The scene is based not on any incident in the Bible itself, but on a body of tales or legends that had grown up in the early Middle Ages around the Bible story of the Holy Family fleeing into Egypt for refuge on being warned that Herod the Great was seeking to kill the Christ Child. According to the legend, Joseph and Mary paused on the flight in a grove of trees; the Holy Child ordered the trees to bend down so that Joseph could take fruit from them, and then ordered a spring of water to gush forth from the roots so that his parents could quench their thirst. This basic story acquired many extra details during the centuries.

Caravaggio shows Mary asleep with the infant Jesus, while Joseph holds a manuscript for an angel who is playing a hymn to Mary on the violin."

From the photo I took of the calendar, you can't quite make out that Altdorfer's angels are also playing music, but with a small harp and a flute like instrument.

Actually, I thought I was going to put up pelican and other bird pictures today.

Jews And Christmas

In the early 1990s, my Mormon dean gave me an article to read. He had always made comments about Jews being special and made exceptions for me on various things because I was Jewish. For instance,  he opposed the opening of a day care center on campus because little kids should stay home with their moms. When I pointed out that he had said I couldn't afford to live in Anchorage if my wife didn’t work as well, and therefore we needed day care, his response was that we were different, we raised our kids with much more care.  (He didn't know us well enough to reach that conclusion without his Jewish stereotype.)

It seemed that Christmas was a good time to share a part of this article, he gave me, written by Steve Siporin, a Jewish professor living in Logan, Utah.   It began as a requested talk to an honors program in 1990. The talk was open to the public and was later published in a liberal Mormon journal, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Though, one or two years later. I know for some the term "liberal Mormon"  is an oxymoron, but the journal existed and pushed the limits regularly, to the point that in 2014 the editor was excommunicated.

In the article, "A Jew Among Mormons",  Siporin discusses the special relationship Mormons have with Jews, how well his family was treated by their Mormon neighbors, and he points out that the first two Jewish governors in the US were in Mormon country - Moses Alexander in Idaho (1914) and Simon Bamberger in Utah (1916).

He also talks about Jews at Christmas time, the focus of this post.  This is one Jew’s experience with Christmas. I suspect it represents the views of many Jews, but certainly not all and maybe not even most. But for those who are offended by changing Merry Christmas to Happy Holidays and other forms of removing the religious aspects of Christmas from schools, perhaps this will give them a different perspective.

“We [Jews] carry history not only within our holidays, rituals, and books, but within our families as well. We have faced the same difficulties for many generations. Christmas, for instance, was the time of year I hated most as a child; but I was not the first (or the last) Jewish child to feel that way. At Christmas, all the differences between my non-Jewish friends and me grew larger. (One precocious Jewish child in Logan recognized the defining power of the holiday when she referred to Jews and Christians as "Hanukkah people" and "Christmas people.") I felt that overwhelming feeling of alienation most strongly in public school where Christmas seemed to take over the curriculum from Thanksgiving until the end of the year. I remember the stressful feeling during the long days of rehearsing Christmas plays and singing Christmas songs in school. Would I betray my religion by singing these songs that were clear expressions of a different religious belief? The argument that "you could just sing it but not believe" didn't cut it, even with an eight-year-old. Was it wrong to disobey my teacher and call attention to myself by not singing? My mother faced the same problem in the 1920s, and she told me how she used to sing out "loud night" instead of "silent night." Her powerless, child's protest might seem laughable to us, but how else could she maintain her dignity?
The point is that the same thing happens to my children today in Logan. When Christmas approaches, our usually sensitive system suddenly suspends the separation of church and state. Ethnocentrism takes over and runs amuck. To protest puts one in the position of Scrooge in the perennial favorite, A Christmas Carol. To protest is to spoil everyone's fun, to refuse to join in and be a part of it all. But Jews cannot, by definition, be part of Christmas, if they are to be Jews. 

During Christmas, I still want to disappear, as my ancestors did during Easter when it was unsafe for Jews to be seen in public. They hid in their homes, and I suspect that today many Jewish children are torn between wanting to hide and wanting to join. How often can one explain oneself? A simple, innocent question like "What did you get for Christmas?" sets up the conflict, even in children: Do I have to explain, to a perfect stranger, that I'm Jewish and Jews don't celebrate Christmas, and maybe embarrass him? Do I just lie and say I got X? This problem, of course, is not particular to Jews living among Mormons but to Jews living among Christians. 

I often wonder at the ‘Christians’ who say they feel persecuted in the United States.  Every president but one has been a Protestant.   Most of the governors and most heads of corporations have been white male Protestants.  Christians have had most of the positions of power in the United States from the very beginning.  And Christian ideas have been part and parcel of American culture.

It's true, that with the various civil rights movements from women's, black's, and gay rights, non-Christians have also begun to stand up for their rights, when in the past, they felt they had no power to protest the imposition of Christian religious traditions in public institutions, particularly schools.  I understand that Christians see this as taken something away from them, something they took for granted.  But to the rest of us it was something they imposed on everyone else, contrary to the notion of separation of church and state, contrary to the constitutional ban on government imposed religion.  It was a special perk that came, not from the constitution, but from the same kind of power that kept blacks and women and gays second class citizens in their own country.  Perhaps the excerpt above will show people how including religious practices in school truly discriminates against non-Christians.

And I would add, that this doesn’t mean schools shouldn't have classes that teach about different religions.  I think it would be wonderful for everyone to know about the many religions they don't belong to.  Though this has to be done carefully because even members of the same religion would disagree about what should be said about their religion.

And I can even foresee a day when different religious holidays can be recognized in schools.  It will be a time when no one religion is dominant, when no one is saying "The US is a Christian nation."   A half-hearted, "OK, let's add a Chanukah song so we can get on with the Christmas celebration," doesn't qualify.  It needs to be a genuinely respectful approach to different religious traditions.

But that can't happen until everyone is not just tolerant, but respectful, of other world views.  Non-Christians don't really want to celebrate Christmas any more than Christians want to celebrate the holidays of other religions.  Though I'd point out that since Christians embrace the Old Testament as well as the New Testament, there's little in a Jewish service that would be contrary to their religion.  But since Jews do not recognize Jesus Christ as the Messiah, the main aspects of Christianity contradict the beliefs of Jews.

There's a difference between celebrating and sharing.  Sharing and learning about the holidays of different religions can, if done well, happen in public schools.  But the actual celebration of the holidays, which includes worship, should be done in the respective houses of worship and homes of the believers.  Many folks already get this.

But given the evangelical nature of some Christian denominations one wonders whether there aren't ulterior motives.    The mission statement of the Southern Baptist Convention is:

"As a convention of churches, our missional vision is to present the Gospel of Jesus Christ to every person in the world and to make disciples of all the nations."

Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus and Sikhs and Bahá'ís and Jains and atheists can't help but be fearful that the Christmas program at school is, for some, a means not of just sharing their holiday,  but also is a way of 'presenting the Gospel of Jesus Christ to every person."

And as long as the leading candidate for president among the Republicans wants to ban Muslims from entering the US, we know that we aren't anywhere near that level of respect in the US.

I'd recommend the whole article,  "A Jew Among Mormons."  It's got lots of good insights.

[Sorry for those seeing this reposted - Feedburner problems again. This seems to be getting all too common.]

The Modern Family

I'm at the living room table at my Macbook.

My daughter is on the couch with her Macbook.

My son-in-law is in the easy chair with his iPad.

And I can see my wife in the kitchen with her iPad.

My granddaughter is in bed.   She doesn't have an electronic device.  She's been delighted with the
old phone we found in the garage.

I guess in a different era, after saying all we wanted to say to each other, we'd be watching television or reading.

But we did get a lot of things done today.  Couple of trips to the thrift shop to drop things off.  Got the picture back from the framer.  Got rid of some stuff on FreeCycleand found a a stroller there to use while my granddaughter is here.  Dug out the flower bed where the plumber thinks the roots are getting into the pipe, then he came over to dig further.  Talked to the IRS this morning, after a 40 minute wait, only to be told that because I didn't have my CAF number, she couldn't talk to me.  Mind you, I've spoken to IRS agents on the phone seven or more times this year and none has refused to talk to me without my giving them the CAF number.  They've checked the computer records and saw I had the right to talk to them about my mom's account and they talked to me.  The only thing Ms. Rutherford let slip today was that she could see I had a CAF number.  Actually, I don't believe I ever got anything telling me what it was.  For 2014 an agent got oral permission from my mom back in January I believe for me to represent her and he wrote that into the record.  And he told me to apply for 2015.  But for this year no one ever told me the number.  And no one has ever used that to not talk to me before.  I tried to call back, but got the recording that they were busy and to call back another day.  That's just a little bit of the day's chores.

There was also a rather frightening incident where I was trying to make a left turn.  I'd eased out to the center when there were no cars coming from my left, and was waiting for a clearing on the other side of the street.  A car appeared on the left and didn't see me until very late and slammed on the brakes and stopped about three feet from me.  My passenger thought he'd been texting and looked up and saw me. I know if he was looking where he was going, he should have seen me there long before he braked.  Cars on the other side then stopped and waved me on to make my left turn.  If he had waited another two seconds to look up and brake, I'd probably not be writing this now.  I just sat there watching the car come at me.  I couldn't go forward into the traffic.  I guess I could have jumped onto the passenger's lap, but I don't think I had time to get out of the seatbelt and do that.  And would being further from the impact location make up for not having my seatbelt on?  I didn't think of any of this until hours later.  I wasn't scared at the time.  I just watched it as though I wasn't involved. But later the awareness of how close I was to a life altering event broke through.  I'm a pretty careful driver, but I put myself into a vulnerable spot trying to make that left turn.  We put our trust in other drivers every time we're on the road, but how we drive increases or decreases our risks as well.  All this is to say, readers, drive with care.  Go a little out of your way rather than make difficult turns on busy streets.

The very best part of the day was I a ten minute conversation in gibberish with my granddaughter.  It was a back and forth exchange of nonsense sentences with intonations that made them into declarative sentences and questions, expressed surprise or mock disagreement.  There were smiles, serious expressions, and lots of laughter.  So much fun.  A wonderful reason to be careful and stay alive and mobile.

[Sorry for those seeing this reposted - Feedburner problems again. This seems to be a morning problem.]

Oil Jobs Down. Parnell, What About All Those Jobs SB 21 Was Supposed To Create?

Let's see.  If I recall right, Governor Parnell's every other words were Jobs and SB 21. and the oil and gas industry was plastering the state of Alaska with ads saying how jobs would be lost if people voted for repealing the tax credits the legislature had given them in SB 21.    Despite all the money they spent, the initiative lost by only by a small margin.

And now the ADN has this article about lost jobs.

Oil, gas industry jobless claims up 7th month in a row
Jeannette Lee Falsey Alaska Dispatch News

 Jobless benefits claims are down in Alaska and across the country, but the same cannot be said for the state’s oil and gas sector. The lack of available work has boosted the number of former workers in the extraction and support industries who have filed for unemployment, according to the state labor department. Year-on-year increases in existing unemployment insurance claims by laid-off oil and gas workers began in May 2015, about one year after oil prices began falling. In November, 895 former workers in the sector were receiving jobless benefits, up from 463 for the same month in 2014. . .

Can you imagine how they would be blaming the lost jobs on the repeal of the tax credits if the initiative had passed?   But, I have to acknowledge, the oil companies never promised anything, it was their lackeys in the governor's seat and in the legislature who made claims about increasing jobs.   It's just like Shell blamed government regulation when it was pretty clear that the main reason they  pulled out of the Chukchi this fall was because their drilling produced nothing and the price of oil had tanked.

Now, I understand that government regulation can be quite an obstacle.  I just did another phone round with the IRS today and I feel anyone's pain who has to deal with people like Ms. Rutherford.  And I'm all for simplifying regulations whenever possible.

But it's my observation that the voluminous regulations are due to company lawyers finding loopholes and exploiting them, resulting in more and more regulations.

But we also know that without the government looking out for environmental risks, the oil companies would do in the Arctic what they've done around the world where there aren't good regulations.  Where the oil companies' bottom line is greater than the treasuries of the countries they're working in.  And where it is easy to bribe governmental officials for the permits they need.

And we're always hearing about the great private sector and how entrepreneurs take risks, but they also create LLC's (Limited Liability Corporations) to limit their liability.  They know going in that government regulations have to be met.  It's part of their business plan.  So moaning about it after the fact (well, also during the process) is just so much spin to avoid the responsibility for failing to find oil, or for an environmental catastrophe, or firing employees.

I've got tons of other stuff to do besides this post, but let me give you a few links to show that I'm not making this all up.

The Price of Oil: Human Rights Violations  

Myanmar's Oil and Gas 

McSpotlight on the Oil Industry

Effects of Oil Drilling (on Indigenous People)

And for those who remember the Exxon Valdez spill and the Deepwater issues, you'll note these things happen in the US too, but not quite as egregiously.

"You're telling me what my own experience was?"

Ifemelu is a Nigerian living in the United States.  For a while she'd had an affair with a very attractive  and wealthy blond man.  She now has a black American boyfriend, Blaine.

"Some years later, at a dinner party in Manhattan, a day after Barack Obama became the Democratic Party's candidate for President of the United States, surrounded by guests, all fervent Obama supporters who were dewy-eyed with wine and victory, a balding white man said, "Obama will end racism in this country," and a large-hipped, stylish poet from Haiti agreed, nodding, her Afro bigger than Ifemelu's, and said she had dated a white man for three years in California and race was never an issue for them.
"That's a lie," Ifemelu said to her.
"What?" the woman asked as though she could not have heard properly.
"It's a lie,"  Ifemelu repeated.
The woman's eyes bulged.  "You're telling me what my own experience was?"
Even though Ifemelu by then understood that people like the woman said what they said to keep others comfortable, and to show they appreciated How Far We Have Come, even though she was by then happily ensconced in a circle of Blaine's friends, one of whom was the woman's new boyfriend, and even though she should have left it alone, she did not.  She could not.  The words had, once again, overtaken her, they overpowered her throat, and tumbled out.
"The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not.  We all wish it was not.  But it's a lie.  I came from a country where race was not an issue .  I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America.  When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person, race doesn't matter when you're alone together because it's just you and your love.  But the minute you step outside, race matters.  But we don't talk about it.  We don't even tell our white partners the small things that piss us off and the things we wish they understood better, because we're worried they will say we're overreacting or we're being too sensitive.  And we don't want them to say, Look how far we've come, just forty years ago it would have been illegal for us to even be a couple blah blah blah, because you know what we're thinking when they say that?  We're thinking why the fuck should it ever have been illegal anyway?  But we don't say any of this stuff.  We let it pile up inside our heads and when we come to nice liberal dinners like this we say that race doesn't matter because that's what we're supposed to say, to keep our nice liberal friends comfortable.  It's true.  I speak from experience."
. . . The poet shook her head and said to the host, "I'd love to take some of that wonderful dip home if you have any left," and looked at the others as though she could not believe they were actually listening to Ifemelu.  But they were, all of them hushed, their eyes on Ifemelu as though she was about to give up a salacious secret that would both titillate and implicate them. 

Ifemelu then offers the reader examples of incidents where her white boy friend didn't see the racism as well as some where he did.  When she went to get her eyebrows waxed and the Asian hairdresser said they didn't do 'curly.' He got that.

"When they walked into a restaurant with linen-covered tables, and the host looked at them and asked Curt, "Table for one?" Curt hastily told her the host did not meant it "like that."  And she wanted to ask him, "How else could she have meant it?"  When the strawberry haired owner of the bed-and-breakfast in Montreal refused to acknowledge her as they checked in, a steadfast refusal, smiling and looking only at Curt, she wanted to tell Curt how slighted she felt, worse because she was unsure whether the woman disliked black people or liked Curt.  But she did not, because he would tell her she was overreacting or tired or both. . ."

I'm back to reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah again, after putting it down to read 

book club books.  Adichie's depiction of race issues is amazing.  She beautifully articulates the way people deny that race matters, and the frustration victims feel over and over again, and how those feelings are aggravated by white partners who tell them they're being overly sensitive.

I find the line 

The woman's eyes bulged.  "You're telling me what my own experience was?"

particularly provocative here, because that's what people of color ask when whites deny their accounts of racism.  Here the poet uses it when Ifemelu denies the poet's claim that race was never an issue with her white boyfriend.  Lots to think about.


[Sorry for those seeing this reposted - Feedburner problems again.] [Again, the reposting resulted in immediate pick up by other blogrolls, while the original post had not been picked up for over 12 hours.]