"Cut And Spend"

Republican tongues let slip "tax and spend" the way normal people say 'um.'   I'd like to point out an alternative view of government - "cut and spend."  As when the cuts you make cost you more than what you save.  This catalyst for this discussion came from this Tweet I saw:

Click to enlarge and focus

For those approaching elder status, it says,

"Cost of Chicago police brutality settlements in 2013: $84.6 million  Savings from closing half the city's mental health clinics: $1.7 million"

The savings in the police department in training, inadequate supervision and accountability systems, from hiring officers with poor education,  poor empathy, and poor ethics, lead to high lawsuit costs that then cause some to justify closing mental health clinics that will lead to more conflicts between the mentally ill and the police.

But before writing this post I had to check on the numbers.  They fit what my personal models of the world would predict, which is all the more reason to double check them rather than assume they are accurate.

I found the police costs in this SunTimes article.

"Brutality-related lawsuits have cost Chicago taxpayers $521 million over the last decade — that’s more than half a billion dollars. . .
In 2013 alone, the city paid out $84.6 million in settlements, judgments, legal fees and other expenses, more than triple the budgeted amount.
That’s a huge expenditure for a city with billions of dollars in unfunded pension obligations, and a budget crisis severe enough to force mental health clinic shutdowns, reduced library hours and higher fees for water, parking and other services.
We’re not suggesting victims of police brutality don’t deserve to be compensated — in some cases no amount of money can make up for ruined lives and lost loved ones — but at a time when Mayor Rahm Emanuel is contemplating painful tax and fee increases to deal with the pension crisis, the budget impact of police misconduct is huge.
The half-billion spent on these cases could have built five state-of-the-art high schools and more than 30 libraries, repaved 500 miles of arterial streets, or paid off a big chunk of the pension bill."  (emphasis added)

And I found the mental health numbers (for 2013, the same year as the police lawsuits) at Chicago Reader:

"The mayor says he saved an estimated $2.2 million with the closings. But as the activists point out, he doled out $500,000 to private mental health providers to help pick up the slack. So he really only saved $1.7 million—in a budget of more than $6 billion—while firing 33 employees. They were among 125 medical employees, most of them black or Hispanic, who got the ax in Mayor Emanuel's first budget."

(I would note, for the record, that the mayor in question here is a Democrat and was Obama's chief of staff when he first became president.  A smart guy, but the danger for smart folks is that they think they understand everything.  And Emanuel clearly doesn't.  Or, these issues aren't his key agenda and he thinks he can let them slide while he pursues whatever he's trying to get out of being mayor.)

The cost of municipal payouts is often hard to figure out.  The Municipality of Anchorage, at least in the past, used to require a non-disclosure clause in their settlements, so the person who wins the lawsuits cannot tell people how much they got paid.  The Municipality spokespeople would then say, "I'm sorry, for privacy reasons, we cannot disclose the amount of the settlement."  They'd make it sound like the privacy of the employee or the citizen was being protected, when in fact it was to avoid embarrassing the the Municipality the way Sean's tweet does.

Cutting doesn't just lead, in many cases, to higher costs for the city.  It can also lead to higher costs for citizens.  Cuts in police may lead to more crime and more vehicle crashes, both of which also lead to higher insurance costs.  Cuts in teachers may lead parents to hire private tutors for their kids.

The spinoff costs are harder to track down and people who only think one-step-at-a-time, have trouble seeing these impacts. And the spatial equivalent to one-step-at-a time is seeing each detail separately, in isolation, and not seeing all the details linked together in the big picture.  Or, in this case, not seeing how the mental health cuts were tiny compared to the cost of the police brutality settlements.   Another reason that everyone should be required to play chess.  OK, I hope I've made my point.  Rambling on surely won't make it any better.

Famous People Born In 1916 - Three Still Alive

I'm going to do this one a little differently this year.  Rather than wait until it is all 'done' I thought I'd build it slowly and let you see it grow to completion.  I think I have everyone up.  There are other sites that list people born in 1916.  For instance this biography website.  Some seem like they have everyone born that year.  Other sites have fewer.  I used several loose criteria:

• Had I heard of them?
• Were they significant in the world or their culture when they lived?
• Did they make an important contribution to humanity?  
• What were my feelings about them and did I have any kind of connection to them?

Most I've heard of.  Most had some significant role to play.  Adriana Caselotti was the voice of Snow White in the Disney movie and Ruth Handler had a significant role in creating Barbie - for better or worse, a major influence in 20th Century United States.  Iva Tigori was better known as Tokyo Rose.   I figure the Nobel Prize winners, though unknown to most of us, made an important contribution.  And I've read Herbert Simon and C. Wright Mills' work.    I've stopped worrying about whether I cover everyone I should.  It's my blog, so it's my choice.

 My goal is to get people's information up at least by their birthdays.  So I've put up Maxene Andrews - one of the Andrews Sisters - up today because her birthday is January 3, making her the oldest of this year's cohorts.

I'm also trying out grouping them by their professions.  I may or may not have a lot about any individual.  With Maxene Andrews, I've just got a link to her obituary and a video that probably tells essentials for people who don't know her.

The only other people I've got done are Ruth Handler and  John Burnside.  I didn't know who they were and so when I looked them up, I took some notes, and it seemed the best place to keep the notes was in the post.

Still Alive
There are three on the list who are still alive: Actors Olivia de Havilland and Kirk Douglas, and author Beverly Cleary.   Beverly turns 100 on April 12, Olivia on July 1, 2016, and Kirk has almost a year left until December 9, 2016

Two people on the list - Betty Grable and Harry James - were married to each other for a time.


So, enjoy, learn some history, and watch this post evolve in the next few months.

Music Harry James March 15, 1916 -July 5, 1983 67	Dinah Shore Feb 29, 1916 - Feb 24, 1994 78 A popular singer of the mid 20th century, a bit too sweet for me. Pearl Bailey helps with this rendition of Mack the Knife.
	Yehudi Menuhin April 22 - March 12, 1999 82
Maxene Andrews Jan 3, 1916 - Oct 21, 1995 79	MS Subbulakshmi Sept. 16 - Dec 11, 2004 88

from Wikipedia

Science/Academic

Francis Crick June 8 - July 28, 2004 88 Nobel Prize

Herbert Simon June 15 - Feb 9, 2001 84 Nobel Prize
Alexander Prokhorov July 11, - Jan 8 2002 85 Nobel Prize
Edward C. Banfield Nov 19 - Sept. 30, 1999 82
C. Wright Mills August 28, 1916 – March 20, 1962
Shelby Foote Nov 17 - June 27 2005 88 Historian


Politicians
Aldo Moro Sept. 23 - May 9, 1978 61
Edward Heath July 9 - July 17 2005 89
François Mitterrand Oct 26-Jan 8 1996 79
Gough Whitlam July 11 - Oct. 21, 2014 98
Harold Wilson March 11- May 23, 1995 79
Eugene McCarthy March 29 - Dec 10, 2006


Actors
Gregory Peck April 5, 1916 - June 12, 2003 87

Jackie Gleason Feb 28, 1916 - June 24, 1987 71

"His penchant for fine food, generously poured scotch and beautiful women; his ability to dominate a room, a stage or the screen; his taste for custom-made suits, monogrammed shirts and the ubiquitous red carnation; his appetite for the biggest, the best and just a dollar more than the other guy made, all became a part of the Gleason legend which began on Brooklyn’s Herkimer Street in 1916."(from his website.)

 Glenn Ford May 1- Aug 30, 2006 90
Dorothy McGuire June 14 - Sept 14, 2001 85
Betty Grable - Dec, 18, 1916 - July 2, 1973  56
Olivia deHaviland July 1, 1916 (born in Tokyo) Still Alive at  99
Sterling Hayden March 26 - May 23 1996 80
Kirk Douglas   Dec. 9, 1916 - Still Alive at 99
Adriana Caselotti May 6 - Jan 19, 1997 80

Business/Creators





Ferruccio Lamborghini April 28, 1916- Feb 20, 1993 76




Ruth Handler Nov 4, 1916 - April 27, 2002 85

Image from Mascjecashwell

From Barbiemedia:

"Ruth and Elliot Handler founded Mattel Creations in 1945, and 14 years later, Ruth Handler gave the world the Barbie doll.  When asked her relationship to Barbie, Ruth simply replied, "I'm Barbie's mom." The inspiration for Barbie came as Ruth watched her daughter Barbara playing with paper dolls.  Barbara and her friends used them to play adult or teenage make-believe, imagining roles as college students, cheerleaders and adults with careers.  Ruth immediately recognized that experimenting with the future from a safe distance through pretend play was an important part of growing up.  She also noticed a product void and was determined to fill that niche with a three-dimensional fashion doll.
Several years and many designs later, Mattel introduced Barbie, the Teen-Age Fashion Model, to skeptical toy buyers at the annual Toy Fair in New York on March 9, 1959.  Never before had they seen a doll so completely unlike the baby and toddler dolls popular at the time."

Not everyone is enthusiastic about the influence of Barbie on girls.



News
Walter Cronkite Nov. 4, 1916 - July 17, 2009 92
Daniel Schorr Aug 31 - July 23, 2010 93

Writers

Irving Wallace March 19 0 June 20 1980 74
Harold Robbins May 21 - October 14, 1997 81

Roald Dahl Sept 13, 1916- Nov 23, 1990 74

Beverly Cleary April 12, 1916 - Still Alive at 99








Other
Iva Toguri July 4, 1916 - Sept 26, 2006 90

Inventor/Activist From LA Times: John Burnside November 2, 1916 – September 14, 2008 From LA Times: "A onetime staff scientist at Lockheed, Burnside had an interest in optical engineering that led to his inventing the teleidoscope, a variation on the kaleidoscope that works without the use of colored glass chips and instead uses a lens to transform whatever is in front of it into a colorful design. In 1958, he launched California Kalidoscopes, which became a successful Los Angeles design and manufacturing plant. In the 1970s, Burnside created the Symetricon, a large mechanical kaleidoscopic device that projects colorful patterns; it was used in a number of movies, including the 1976 science fiction film 'Logan's Run.'"

From The Wild Hunt: "After meeting in the mid-sixties, Burnside and Hay blazed a trail for the still nascent Gay rights movement. They were protesting the exclusion of Gays from the military back in 1966, and appeared on television together two years before the Stonewall riots. Unlike some Gay rights advocates, Burnside was not an assimilationist, preferring that Gays develop their own unique culture and spirituality. This impulse lead to the creation of the Radical Faerie movement in 1979."

Revenge Porn, Equal Benefits for Transgender Employees, Vaccinations, Sexual Violence Ed, State Lichen, And Other New California Laws

The LA Times listed a slew of new laws that came into effect today.  Sounds like something like something all major newspapers ought to do.  ADN, you working on the Alaska new laws story?  I can't find a list of new Alaska laws, though there is plenty online about the Alaska's new marijuana law.

Here are some of the new California laws from the LA Times article.  You can see the whole list here.

Here's one that has the potential to impact Alaska, especially if other states copy it:

• The state’s two major public employee pension funds must sell holdings in companies that derive at least half of their revenue from mining coal used to generate electricity by July 1, 2017.

Here's something I talked about in a two posts in November -  So, How About Wrongful Treatment Insurance? and "Fair and Moral Compensation" - A Followup Post.  It's really a token, but at least it's acknowledgement of a moral duty.

• The state will increase compensation for innocent people who are wrongly convicted from $100 for each day behind bars to $140, to reflect inflation.

Here are the others

• Prosecutors are allowed to seek forfeiture of the images and storage devices used in “revenge porn” cases, in which an estranged romantic partner posts nude or sexual pictures of the other person online
• Law enforcement agencies must obtain a search warrant before looking at private emails, text messages and GPS data stored in smartphones, laptops and the cloud
• Requires short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb to alert users that if they are renters, listing their home on the site could violate their lease agreements.
• Companies with state contracts worth at least $100,000 must provide equal benefits to transgender employees.
• Bans concealed weapons on college campuses.
• Crisis pregnancy clinics certified by the state must post notices that California has public programs providing affordable contraception and abortions.
• The word “alien” will be removed from California's labor code to describe those not born in the United States.
• The vaccination law eliminates the ability of parents to waive immunization rules for their children based on personal beliefs. Though the law takes effect on Jan. 1, it allows parents to delay the vaccinations until July 1 if they filled out a request before New Year’s Day. But almost all students will have to show proof of immunization shots for the start of the new school year this fall
• High schools that mandate health courses must provide lessons aimed at preventing sexual violence and the concept that both parties must consent to sexual relations.
• Students are required to take sexual health classes unless their parents object — the classes are now voluntary — and the lessons must include the teaching to be inclusive of different sexual orientations.
• Cheerleaders for professional sports teams are considered employees, not independent contractors, and therefore are eligible to receive a minimum wage, workers' compensation and other benefits.
• Designates lace lichen, commonly known as Spanish moss, as California's official lichen.

One imagines that Texas and California are polar opposites.  JRLawFirm let's us compare a bit.  In some ways it's true.  While California banned concealed weapons on campus, Texas did the opposite.

• Senate Bill No. 11, which will take effect on August 1, amends the Texas Government and Penal Codes to allow handgun license holders, in some circumstances, to carry a concealed handgun on public and private colleges and universities in Texas, as well as other independent institutions of higher learning (does not apply to public junior or community colleges until August 1, 2017).

But in other cases they are moving in the same direction.  Texas also took action against 'revenge porn' and they're requiring a search warrant for cell phone and wireless devices.

• It is now illegal to broadcast or disclose private, intimate, visual material if that material was disclosed without the person’s consent, the material was not expected to be disclosed, the disclosure of the material caused harm, and the disclosure revealed the identity of the person in any matter. This is now actionable in criminal as well as civil court, per State Bill 1135, effective September 1st, 2015.
• Police must now obtain a search warrant in order to search a persons’s cell phone or wireless communication device, per House Bill 1396, which will take effect on September 1st, 2015.

And while California now has an official lichen, Texas now has an official hashtag  - #Texas.  I'm sure there will be a lot more activity involving the hashtag than the lichen.

Why Sen. Giessel Was Wrong Not To Swear In Oil Company Witnesses In April 2014

[This leads up to an LA Times article on oil company deception about climate change. You can skip down to the bottom, but I'm trying to tie a number of things together.]

In April 2014 there was an Alaska Senate committee hearing on SB 21 - the bill that gave oil companies huge tax credits and is now aggravating the Alaska budget situation already hurt by falling oil prices.  Sen. Cathy Giessel was the chair.

Sen. Hollis French requested that witnesses be sworn in.  Giessel responded in part:

“We are to conduct ourselves with some decorum, and to spring that on people who are coming to testify would simply be unprofessional of us,” Giessel said. “I’m not an attorney, as the previous speaker is, but it is my understanding that the preparation for testimony under oath is a different type of preparation than simply coming and providing information.” [emphasis added]

My original post on this at the time has much more detail.  I did point out at the time that the oil companies were not "simply providing information" and linked to the extensive presentations they had prepared.

Giessel is one of the oil industry's strongest  supporters in the legislature.  Pat Forgey, in a 2013 article on the oil industry's influence in the legislature, wrote:

"Next, Senate Bill 21 went to the Senate Resources Committee, chaired by Sen. Cathy Giessel, R-Anchorage. Giessel is married to Richard S. Giessel, who manages R&M Consulting's Construction Services business. The company touts its petroleum ties on the firm’s website, starting with construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline and continuing with recent work on various gas pipeline proposals.
Cathy Giessel's financial disclosure forms show Richard Giessel was paid between $200,000 and $500,000 last year."

Forgery's article looks at the lax conflict of interest rules that allow legislators with such clear conflicts to participate this way in the legislature.

Why shouldn't people testify under oath?  If the oil companies had nothing to hide, then they should have said, "Of course we'll testify under oath."

So, why all this history?  

Because in many ways, we've learned that the oil companies are either just wrong or flat out lying.  Here's a Fortune piece on BP that chronicles how their actual safety programs were far sketchier than their public pronouncements.  I looked at Shell's safety plans for the Chukchi back in 2013 and found them to have a lot less operational substance than one would expect.  And when the Kulluk had problems I reported on that, including this post which shows how empty of content their press reports were. 

And today, the LA Times tells us this once again in a story about how oil companies knew that climate change was real, but their advertisements denied the science was trustworthy.

“Let’s face it: The science of climate change is too uncertain to mandate a plan of action that could plunge economies into turmoil,” the ad said. “Scientists cannot predict with certainty if temperatures will increase, by how much and where changes will occur.”

One year earlier, though, engineers at Mobil Oil were concerned enough about climate change to design and build a collection of exploration and production facilities along the Nova Scotia coast that made structural allowances for rising temperatures and sea levels.

So, Alaskans, as we prepare to vote on all the members of our state house of representatives and a third of the senators in November 2016, let's get smart about the people we elect.

The oil companies are NOT our enemies, but they are more like business adversaries.  Businesses are supposed to compete, that's why the market is supposed to work.  Even when they cooperate they are always testing each other.  The Alaska Republican Party wants us to believe everything the oil industry says.  And when there is major oil related legislation, oil industry employees turn out en masse - in the middle of work days - to testify.  Of course, they want to look good to their bosses, they want to protect their jobs.  So do the legislators who get strong financial support from the oil industry.

The State is already at a disadvantage when dealing with the oil companies, because so much of our proprietary information is public information, while the oil companies won't share theirs.  If you already know all this, then help educate the doubters by helping to gather and package information that shows:

• the oil companies aren't our friends, they're adversaries - they want our resources at the lowest cost they can get
• oil companies are headquartered outside of Alaska and their top executives have no long term interest in Alaska's future good
• oil company contributions to Alaskan communities are calculated business expenses to gain public support and they are all tax deductible
• oil companies don't tell the truth all the time - sometimes they think they do, but they're wrong, and sometimes, like the LA Times piece shows, they flat out lie
• many legislators are beholden to big oil - some are oil company employees, others have business ties to them, and others just get important campaign donations from them, and they help them get our resources cheap
• which legislators are most compromised and which stand up for Alaskans and the future of Alaska

If any of this comes as news to you, do your duty as a citizen and get informed before you vote.

"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.