EJ David: "We don't want people to not see our color, but to value our color as equal to theirs."

EJ David is speaking.  [This talk was outstanding and is well worth reading this whole post.]

Thanking, all the folks who made this possible.  The folks at First Alaskans.  The room at Egan Center is full.  

My culture - core value is Kapwa -  "a shared inner self"  we are all connected, who one exists in another.  You are all my kappa.

[Warning:  This is a rough transcript of DJ's talk]

I was born in the Philippines.  A place colonized by Spain, then by the US.  Grew up in context of Western ideas.  Common for light skin Filipinos to see dark skin as ugly, unacceptable.  Regard English fluency as intelligence.  Everything made in USA regarded as good quality and Filipino items lower quality.  And I bought into it.  No choice but to absorb it, like air.  It was my world.  I  hated my brown skin.  I stayed away from the sun.  Thought I had to learn perfect English.  I lost my sense of kapwa with darker Filipinos.  I internalized the oppression of my culture.  I wanted to separate myself from the Philippines, to be in Disneyland, New York City.  My dream came true as teenager when I moved to Barrow, Alaska.  

Not exactly Disneyland or NYC.  Lessons I learned in Barrow.  I love Barrow because it's where I began to wake up.  I saw how the Inupiaq people value their culture and world view and began to ask why I didn't have that.  Filipino is born wanting to be white.  I also saw the struggles of our Inupiaq brothers and sisters.  Became conscious of discrimination I faced because I saw Inupiaq people faced.  I realized we aren't born hating ourselves.  Racial oppression was the teacher.  How does it affect all of us.  

Developed a lot of relationships.  Five main thoughts to share with everybody:

1.  Racism still exists, even in Alaska

National conversation on racism now.  It didn't go away and suddenly came back.  Racism just went underground, became more subtle and hidden.  Still very real.  Just not on the national consciousness.  Took recent tragedies to bring it back to national consciousness.  

But not here in Alaska.  Most common reason  - "Who cares what's happening in Lower 48 cause there is no racism here in Alaska."   On FB page someone wrote, we should not make a problem where there isn't one.  Anchorage has the most diverse neighborhoods.  Alive and well here, more subtle, but here.

Comes out in Social Media.  After Mike Brown tragedy, many Alaskans commented - they should be disappointed their son was a thug.  And more.  Lots of nasty comments.  Refugee brothers threatened last year, messages painted on their cars.  Messages to immigrants, like me, that we aren't wanted.  

Justice - Fairbanks 4 in prison for murder they didn't commit.  But 4 men who were caught on camera killing an immigrant.  White man texting who hit native man, got 18 months.  Supreme Court justices who question native links to their villages.  

Racism alive and well in Alaska.  Racism not dead, it's deadly.  Communities already suffering, maybe even dying, of it and we don't even know.

2.  We need to become aware and address modern forms of racism - these more subtle, invisible forms of racism.  Can't just focus on the outrageous.  We notice them.  I'm not surprised, because in touch with reality, we know it exists.  What is threatening to me is the seemingly large number of people who are emboldened by those outrageously bigoted statements and actions.  We are bound to have outlyers, but what scares me is the seemingly large numbers of people who agree with the hate.  I feel surrounded by hate and bigotry. We have to address the invisible, subtle racism.  That's the part that lets racism hide and even come off as acceptable.  It leads us to question our reality, our experience.  "Did I just experience racism or am I being overly sensitive?"  We blame ourselves for being offended by it.  Instead of changing system of racism, we change ourselves, internalizing our oppression.  These racist conditions do not allow us to reach our full potential.

3.  A colorblind melting pot ideology is problematic.  Easy solution is to not see race.  Like seeing race and color is racism.  On the surface looks attractive.  Catchy buzzwords.  Seeing race is not the problem.  Racism is.  Seeing color isn't why racism exists.  Pretending to not see color doesn't solve racism.  It doesn't bring people of color up to be equal.  Color blindness denies our existence, our experiences.  Our racial identities are part of who we are and our connections to others.  We don't want people to be blind to them.  Don't want people to ignore these parts of us.  We are proud of who we are, so we want people to see and respect the entirety of who we are, including our color.  We don't want people to not see our color, but to value our color as equal to theirs.  Colorblindness makes race a topic we shouldn't talk about, which means we can never address and solve racism.  Says we should all be the same, all blend together, ignores what makes us unique.  The melting pot concept tries to erase us, erase our culture, our race.  MLK's dream to be judged not by the color of our skin, but the quality of our hearts.  Not because he didn't value the colors, but because he wanted them all to become equal.  Rather than become color blind, we should be come race conscious.  Research seems to support that.  Being colorblind can lead us to thinking, feeling, and behaving in very biased was.  Research suggests we need to become more racially aware to become aware of our biases and privileges.  We need to become color conscious, not color blind.  We are able to hold multiple world views, we don't have to just hold one.  We don't need to become just one.  We can learn to respect multiple world views.  

4.  Seeing and celebrating diversity is not enough.  In Anchorage we talk about how diverse we are and how awesome we are.  But we also need to ask, who are the people in power?  They do not reflect the diversity we are talking about.  We have never had a non-white governor or mayor.  Assembly members don't even come close to the diversity we are so proud about.  This tells us that racial equality is a problem.  A part of racism is power, so this power imbalance shows that racism is alive.  Look at all the stats - education, health, justice system, socio-economic status, types of jobs.  All these disparities are here.  Further, racism is very common here and affects all these health concerns - nationally and locally.  Research shows all this.  Negative health impacts of racism is intergenerational.  How do we move our communities forward?  How do we make our leadership reflective of our community?  How do we go beyond galas and celebrations?  How do all of us get opportunities to reach our full potential.  

Over the years I've had friends tell me, "Hey EJ, why are you still talking about racism?"  Hate the game, not just the players.  Yeah, I hate the game too.  Let's change it and make it better.  Let's make it fair, equal and just for all groups.  

5.  Acknowledge, see how we are all connected, all kapwa.  Let's remember our shared inner selves, our shared humanity.  Remember and acknowledge all the social identities we have.  Not just racial oppression, also sexism, homophobia.  Not unique to people of color.  Not related to racial and ethnic groups.  Also experienced by many groups in US.  Women.  LBGTQ community.  Need to make connections between our experiences to the experiences of other groups.  See all oppression and see the enormity of it.  And develop desire to overcome it.  

Smooth And Wise - Some of US's Most Astute Observers Of Racism In Anchorage Monday And Tuesday

First Alaskans are having a blockbusting conference on racial equality Monday and Tuesday with outstanding national and local experts here.

Here's the whole program.  Things start at 8am Monday, but you could probably drop in whenever you have time.

Also, you can watch the keynote speakers live online.


Here's one of J. Smooth's recent videos.




And Tim Wise's.  Tim's been here before with Healing Racism In Anchorage and I got to meet him then.  He was fantastic.  He knows his stuff!




Here's more on some of the speakers from First Alaskans' website:

Panigkaq Agatha John-Shields & Piiyuuk Olivia Shields (Yup’ik) – powerful mother/daughter educators for indigenous knowledge systems and advocates for racial equity.

Tim Wise – among the nation’s most prominent antiracist essayists and educators. He has spent the past 20 years speaking on methods for dismantling institutional racism.

Maori Whanau – featuring Kate Cherrington and invited guests – the indigenous peoples of New Zealand have a unique voice and experience that can inform and inspire us to look beyond the status quo at what is possible when respect for indigenous peoples is the foundation upon which the wider racial equity movement is built upon.

Jay Smooth – a New York-based hip-hop scholar and cultural commentator, best known for his award-winning Ill Doctrine web video series, shares messages that both call out what is happening while giving solid instruction and ideas on how to transform our society.

Gyasi Ross – an attorney, author, and spoken word artist from the Blackfeet and Suquamish Reservations. Ross uses storytelling to deepen the understanding of Native American and social justice topics, giving us the opportunity to better understand, from a creative, cultural, and political context how history, oppression, and laws work.

E.J.R. David – a professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage, from Barrow, known for his advocacy and commitment to his Filipino heritage, and his research and publications on micro-aggressions, internalized oppression, and post-colonial psychology, to name a few. He is also a founding member of We Are Anchorage and is a member of the FAI ANDORE Visionary Council.

The 1491s – a sketch comedy group based in the wooded ghettos of Minnesota and buffalo grass of Oklahoma using humor to bring light to issues that indigenous communities face in America today.

There will also be an array of other Alaskans dedicated to racial equity, with powerful stories and expertise to share. The speakers will also have an opportunity to host interactive workshops and dialogues for deeper connection to their work, methods, and knowledge.

The theme is built upon respect and inclusion, and the summit is open to those interested in advancing racial equity as a shared value of all Alaskans. This is a working summit, so participants should be prepared to be part of making it a great experience. It will be an intergenerational, multicultural gathering, and youth under 18 are welcome with a chaperone. Our goal is that participants will leave the summit inspired and prepared to act and engage in exponential change at all levels – systemic, institutional, interpersonal, and personal.

Media credentials are available upon request. The registration fee will be waived for students and Elders.

Updates On Old Posts - Porno Condom Use in LA, Paxson's Poster And Creole Cowboy

Life moves along and things I've blogged about evolve.

An LA Times story the other day says a settlement looks close in the lawsuit against an LA vote to require porn actors to wear condoms.  The original post was in 2012  when voters approved the measure, and there was a follow up in 2013 when the first court decision came out. Apparently the condoms will stay, but the enforcement will be weaker.





And this year's Anchorage Folk Festival poster was done by Paxson Woelber, who I interviewed in 2009 when two of his short animations were in the Anchorage International Film Festival.




And don't miss the last night of the festival - Sunday, starting at 7pm at Wendy Williamson auditorium at UAA.  Jeffrey Broussard & the Creole Cowboys will play again.  The festival is free and it's one of the events that makes Anchorage a great place to live.

Is this part an update?  Well, the poster leads to the festival and I've got posts from previous folk festivals.
2015.  
2014.
2011.
2011.  This one has Kabala Shish Kebab.
2008.  Cajun and Creole is pretty popular up here.


There's a bit of video from Friday night to give you a sense of what they're like.  And only a sense, since I recorded this with my tiny Canon Powershot.  If you go to the festival, you'll get to hear their sound for real.  They'll be a number of other acts before them, you can come when you want.  Friday the auditorium was packed.

Why Did The Japanese Bomb Pearl Harbor? Has Anything Changed?

The China Mirage tells the story of how missionaries serving in China and wealthy descendants of opium traders (like both the Roosevelt presidents) believed in the Christianization and Americanization of China and were easy prey for the Soong sisters who were married to Chiang Kai-Shek, Sun Yat Sun, and the richest man in China, banker H.H. Kung.  Their Chinese father had gone to college in the US in the late 1800s and became a Methodist.  And saw how much money Christians were sending to China and decided to take advantage.  All three sisters had gone to Wesleyan college in Georgia and spoke excellent American English.  Their brother TV Soong, graduated from Harvard and played an important role negotiating with top American leaders, including President Franklin Roosevelt.


Author James Bradley makes the argument that the Soong family took advantage of Americans' desire to believe that China was ready to become Americanized and Christian.  They helped form, with a number of prominent Americans, including the son of American missionaries in China, Henry Luce, the owner of Time  and Life magazines, The China Lobby.  Bradley tells us Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Mayling were on Time's cover more than any other people on the planet, including being Man of the Year in 1937. The Lobby painted this greatly misleading picture of China for politicians and the American public.

This false image of China played well and led, according to author Bradley, to disastrous results in China and Southeast Asia.  By aligning with the Soongs and Chiang Kai-Shek, Americans failed to see the rise of Mao in China and speeded up World War II's spread  into the Pacific. The US gave money and weapons to the Soong-Chiang alliance to fight the Japanese who had invaded Manchuria, but Chiang was more interested in fighting Mao and Ailing, the oldest sister, was more interested in filling her husband's bank.

There are lots of examples in the book of Americans dealing with the Soong-Chiangs - Americans who spoke no Chinese and had no background in Chinese history or present.  They'd go to China for a week on tour led by the Soongs, and come back with reports of their great army and how some military help would keep the Japanese at bay.  Bradley even says that the Soongs staged war zones and suggests that the Japanese soldiers they showed them in the binoculars were really Chinese actors.  The results almost always that the Soong's, with their perfect American English, good looks, and charming ways, successfully sell their highly misleading story of China and China's affinity to the US.

Overlooked was Mao's growing power and bond with Chinese peasants who made up most of the population, the loyalty and enthusiasm of Mao's army, or the incompetence of Chiang's army, and Chiang's interest in fighting Mao rather than the Japanese.  And not known to most, was that many of those Americans - missionaries, diplomats, businessmen - who lobbied for the Soongs, were also on their payroll.

Here's the plan one of their American educated Chinese employees offered to gain US support:

"1.  Recruit American missionaries, arm them with evidence of Japanese atrocities, and have them return to the U.S. to give testimony and speeches. (Tong emphasized that the American target audience would not know that the paid missionaries were acting as agents for the Soong-Chiang syndicate.  Tong wrote that he would 'search for international friends who understand the realities and politics of the Chinese war of resistance and have them speak for us, with Chiinese never coming to the fore.')
2.  Hire Frank Price (Mayling's favorite missionary) to lead the missionary campaign.
3.  Recruit American newsmen and authors to write favorable articles and books."

Besides lobbying for money and arms, they were lobbying to stop the US from selling oil and steel and other materials to Japan, which Japan used to invade and bomb China.  People at the State Department feared an embargo would prod Japan to retaliate.  At the very least, Japan would head south to take over the oil in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia).  Having read other accounts of this battle in FDR's administration, I'm surprised that Bradley never (well, I still have another hundred pages to go, but I'm 3/4 into the book) mentions another argument - the money that US oil companies were making and and how that was helping an economy still recovering from the Great Depression.

Probably, you can see where I'm going with all this.  We know this is still going on today.  Who did the Bush administration rely on for advice on invading Iraq?  Which Afghans and Syrians have been advising our government on Afghanistan and Syria?  To what extent have Western educated natives of those countries been able to have undue credibility because their knowledge of English and of the US was so superior to our knowledge of their countries?  And how misleading were their assessments of how the war was going and how was their own personal wealth affected?

There were Americans who understood what was going on in China.  The US embassy's military attaché in China, in 1936, Colonel Joseph Stilwell, for example,

"observed Chiang's dragooned 'scarecrow' soldiers:  many were less than four and a half feet tall, under fourteen years of age, and barefoot.  Stilwell wrote in his diary, 'The wildest stretch of the imagination could not imagine the rabble in action except running away.'

Forty pages later,

[Colonel Stilwell] wrote:  'No evidence of planned defense against further Japanese encroachment.  No troop increase or even thought of it.  No drilling or maneuvering.  Stilwell also observed Mao's warriors, about whom he noted, 'Good organization, good tactics.  They do not want the cities.  Content to rough it in the country.  Poorly armed and equipped, yet scare the Government to death.'"

Then there's the secret army that FDR sends to China (led by the man who will be Stilwell's biggest nemesis later when Stilwell's in command of the US military in China.)

"Roosevelt was now running an off-the-books secret executive airforce through Ailing's front companies.  Claire Chennault was a private contractor - a mercenary - being paid by the China Lobby.  Roosevelt was sheep-dipping:  taking U.S. personnel, cleansing them with the fiction of their resignations, and then sending them off as secret mercenaries.  Today, many mistakenly believe that Chennault's mission was an American invention controlled by the U.S. military, but when he returned to Asia, Chennault reported back to Washington not through American military channels but privately, through his boss, T.V. Soong."

Bradley argues that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor because Dean Acheson managed to block oil shipments in August 1941 without Roosevelt knowing.  This, plus the mercenary air force in China, and the movement of US navy ships to Hawaii, sent signals to Japan that led the Japanese to do what neither the Japanese nor the Americans wanted - start a war between the two nations.  While our history books paint the Pearl Harbor attack as a dastardly, the US was already supplying China with bombers and pilots - offensive weapons that could be used to attack Japan.

Disturbing that not much has changed.  Even though we have better access to information about what our leaders are doing, there is still much we don't know.  And Edward Snowden is still in Russia because they don't want us to know.  Democracies are in a quandary.  There's a need for voters to be able to assess what their leaders are doing, yet you don't want your enemies to know as well.  But better understanding of the Soongs well funded and massive campaign at the time, might have helped people ask for a more accurate assessment.  It will be very interesting to hear what Obama and others have to say in 20 years about who was doing what to influence our foreign policy in his administration.

I'm a little skeptical of Bradley.  I think he too may be overly sold on his own thesis.  Despite the power of the China Lobby, FDR's leadership style has his subordinates constantly in competition.  Instead of groupthink, there seemed to have been epic battles over policy, with FDR getting to hear a wide range of views.  Though the groupthink link above gives the failure to anticipate the bombing of Pearl Harbor as an example.  The book makes it clear that Secretary of State Hull was vehemently opposed to the oil embargo in fear of prodding the Japanese into a Pacific war, but I don't think bombing Hawaii was what they had in mind.  This may not have been so much groupthink as failure to understand what the Japanese were thinking.  There's an interesting passage in the book where Secretary of State Hull negotiates with the Japanese ambassador, a former naval admiral whose English was poor.  They didn't use an interpreter and the book's account has the ambassador not understanding Hull's warning and sending back to Japan a totally incorrect interpretation of Hull's message.

While we are warned that history repeats itself, it's also true that picking the wrong examples from history leads to bad assessments.  The domino theory was a key argument to get into Vietnam after Eastern Europeans fell into the Soviet sphere in 1946.  But was it the right one?  Would the Southeast Asian countries have fallen one-by-one to Communist leaders had we not gone to war in Vietnam?  That's still debated, but in part, we supported authoritarian pro-Western leaders (at least those who portrayed themselves that way as did the Soongs) over the nationalist, anti-colonial leaders, like Ho Chi Minh, who found support from the Soviets when we rejected them.

Life is endlessly complicated and seeing through the complications to the real issues is too.  Probably why a candidate like Trump appeals to a sizable minority - he makes it all simple.  He tells them what they want to believe, just as the Soongs did.

[Update Jan 31, 2016:  I should have mentioned that a 2012 post goes through Doris Kearns Goodwin's description  (in No Ordinary Time) of the lead up to the attack on Pearl Harbor.  Bradley's book cites Goodwin's book, and there's nothing that's inconsistent, but the two emphasize different details.]

Officials Shoot Oregon Protestor - What Does The Video Mean?

Officials shot one of the Oregon protesters at a road block.  They've released the video.  Lots of thoughts go through my head. 

Once more, why aren't officers trained in non-lethal restraint and capture? A shooting and a death should be the very last resort.   Cops who kill should be thought of as failing to do their jobs.  But they need better training.   I think of Asian martial arts masters whose training is for self-defense, and who use their control of their bodies to disarm their enemies. But a gun is so much easier. No years of training of the body and the mind.  Just pull a trigger.

I can't help but think - well, white guys get shot too.  But that's not the answer.  No one should get shot except in the most extreme circumstances.  I think the approach to wait things out was good.  Let the cold and the boredom take down the protesters.   The buildings are high priority places, particularly in the winter.  But then, why this?  Where's Zorro with his whip when we need him?  Where are all the Kung Fu masters?

I think of how people watching this who have no sympathy for the protesters, DO have sympathy for other protesters, and vice versa.

I think, in the future, others who see this will think:  if they're just going to die anyway, why not crash into the vehicles and take some cops with them, rather than swerve off into the snow?   Or maybe he thought he'd get around them.   This does counter the report that he was on his knees with his hands held high, but it still doesn't look good.

OK, these are all things that go through my head as I watch the video.  Maybe it only means that a cop, in a high adrenalin situation panicked and pulled the trigger.





The bigger issues are why Americans are angry and divided.  They involve the income disparity in the US.  College grads facing graduation with huge debts that cut down their options.  They need to get a job and pay off the debts.   They have less room to fail.  Of course, that's a luxury that Americans have had - second, third, and fourth chances - that other people around the world don't have. Many don't even have first chances.  

And even those who went into 'sure career' fields, like petroleum engineering, find out that timing is everything.  And it's older folks facing retirement with not much savings.  It's hard working folks who have saved their money who think their success is solely their own doing, who don't see the help they got along the way.  And feel no sympathy for those who didn't have the skills or the will power or the luck to retire financially comfortable.  And maybe they've got money, but the pursuit of that money has left many of their family members wounded.

The reports of white males' life expectancy dropping surely tells us something about the fears behind their bravado.

" Mortality rates were 60% to 76% higher than they would have been if the trends of the 1980s and 1990s had continued in West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Oklahoma."

Six of the seven mentioned are in the top ten most religious states.  And six are the six poorest states in the country (Oklahoma is #13.)

Anger and violence breed anger and violence.  Cooperation and generosity require a basic level of self-confidence and trust.  Yet even the most bitter are willing to give their money or their time to help others.

There are no easy answers.  We need to start talking to each other, stop demonizing each other, find common ground.  We need to stop fomenting hate and giving attention to those who do.

Ramble, ramble, ramble.

One thing that I can only hope might come from this video:  Angry white males watching this might, for even an instant, relate to angry blacks watching their sons shot by police.  Though most of the blacks we've seen killed on video last year were unarmed.

41˚F And Treacherous

41˚F sounds pretty reasonable for an Anchorage January evening.   But freezing rain on already cold streets is nasty.

A sheet of ice on the street.

Senate Majority Poll Finds 48% Of Survey Takers Support A State Income Tax at 25% Of Federal Income Tax

When I got the email survey last week from the Senate Majority, my eyebrows went up a bit when I saw that their income tax question pegged the tax at 25% of the federal income tax.  I'd just heard the governor's state of the state address where he proposed a 1% level.

Surely, this was meant to suppress the income tax support, I thought.  And today's ADN had a commentary by Dermot Cole making that same point.

And now I got an email with the results of the poll.  I checked the question on income tax first.  Even at 25% of the federal tax, 49% responded positively!  That must be a surprise to the Senate majority.

Click to focus 

There are several full blog posts to write about here.

1.  About the governor's state of the state address - which I thought was a refreshingly clear, straightforward, and honest outlining of the situation.  He laid it all out.  This much is our gap.  We can:

• Cut
• Use Permanent Fund and Other Reserves
• Raise New Revenue

He pointed out that cutting all state employees wouldn't put much of a dent into the deficit.  For some people, shutting down government is the only way they will start to see all the things they depend on the state government for.  Immediate impacts will be no state troopers, no snow plowing or other road maintenance, prisoners would all starve in their cells or have to be released.  You think you'd have trouble flying because Alaska hasn't adopted real ID drivers' licenses, wait until we have no licenses at all, or license plates.  What will the Canadian border folks do with all our out of date plates trying to go through?  The airports would shut down.  Then there are things that will take longer to happen - people will start getting sick from things like bad water.  But that's another post.

The governor offered some options - what he wanted from the Permanent Fund (no limits, but the dividend would come off oil royalties, not investment earnings as I understood the speech), what size income tax (1% of Federal), and no sales tax.  He explained why he made the choices he did - income tax would capture those who were not residents of Alaska but worked here and sales tax is local government's way to raise money and he didn't want to add a state sales tax on top of the local taxes.

And then he said he wasn't set on the specific options, but he was set on the outcome.  He got the biggest applause when he said, "I will always put Alaska’s future above my own.  I didn’t run for gov to keep the job, but to do the job."

2.  About the different revenue options and who wins and loses from each.

Since corporations don't get Permanent Fund Dividends but they do pay income taxes, you can guess what they want.  More money from the Permanent Fund and no income taxes.  We should tap into the Permanent Fund, because that's what it was set up for in the long run - to be an endowment for Alaska.  The non-renewable oil could be turned into renewable capital, and a portion of the state's budget could be funded from the interest.  They key is how big a hit the Permanent Fund should take now and whether income taxes should also be added in.

Poorer folks get a bigger benefit from the PFD than the wealthy.  They would pay less in income taxes.  And they would pay a bigger percent of their income on a sales tax than the wealthy.

And who has the money to sway the public?  The poor and middle income or the wealthy and the corporations?  You can see where this is leading.

GCI has already started a coalition to push for big hits for the Permanent Fund.

But 48,2% in support of an income tax that's 25% of the federal tax is huge!

But the legislative majority hasn't been too good about paying attention to what people think if it's not what they think.  They're still suing the governor over medicaid expansion, despite overwhelming public support.


I'd also note that the * with the explanation for the 25% figure (that's what Oregon has) was NOT on the survey itself.

Here's a link to all the poll responses.

What's Jamie Love Doing These Days?

When we got to Anchorage in 1977, Jamie Love, as the founder and director of the Alaska Public Interest Group (AKPIRG) was reviled daily in the Anchorage Times for raising questions about equity, about the environment, about anything that challenged those with power.  I don't have the constitution to take that kind of regular abuse and I was in awe of him.

Stephen Cysewski posted a FB link to a Guardian article about Jamie today, fighting big pharmaceutical companies whose patents often mean people die because they can't afford the jacked up price of drugs.  It's worth reading.  One more person who cut his teeth in Alaska and went on to make a big difference in the world.  Way to go Jamie.

It begins like this:

"On a hot August afternoon in 2000, four Americans arrived for a secret meeting at the central London penthouse flat of an Indian billionaire drug manufacturer named Yusuf Hamied. A sixth person would join them there, a French employee of the World Health Organisation, who was flying in from Geneva, having told his colleagues he was taking leave. 

Hamied took his guests into the dining room on the seventh floor. The room featured a view of the private gardens of Gloucester Square, Bayswater, for which only the residents possess a key. The six men sat round a glass dining table overlooked by a painting of galloping horses by a Mumbai artist (Hamied has racehorses stabled in three cities). The discussion, which went on all afternoon and through dinner that evening at the Bombay Palace restaurant nearby, would help change the course of medical history.
The number of people living with HIV/Aids worldwide had topped 34 million, many of them in the developing world. Hamied and his guests were looking for a way to break the monopoly held by pharmaceutical companies on Aids drugs, in order to make the costly life-saving medicines available to those who could not pay.
 Hamied was the boss of Cipla, a Mumbai-based company founded by his father to make cheap generic copies of out-of-patent drugs. He had met only one of the men before – Jamie Love, head of the Consumer Project on Technology, a not-for-profit organisation funded by the US political activist, Ralph Nader. Love specialised in challenging intellectual property and patent rules. For five years, he had been leading high-profile campaigners from organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières in a battle to demolish patent protection."

Here's the whole article. 

I Don't Believe In Contests, But . . .

Today was supposed to be the deadline for submitting material to the Alaska Press Club Annual Contest.  These are awards the organization gives out to its members every year.  There are lots and lots of categories and not too much about how they are judged.  My understanding is that the submissions are sent out to judges out of state - a different judge for each category - and they decide.

Each submission costs $15 to send in by the early deadline and $20 by the late deadline.  Today was the early deadline, but I got an email saying it was extended until tomorrow.  The fees, from what I can tell, help pay for the Press Club, which puts on an annual conference that has pretty interesting speakers from around the country and beyond.  I've done a few posts from the conferences over the last couple of years.

I'm leary, though of these kinds of contests.  Do they really mean anything?  I submitted stuff for a couple of categories a few years ago in the hopes that there weren't many bloggers who would submit and if I won, I could then point to my Press Club award as some sort of independent evaluation that the blog was not just one of the thousands of Alaska blogs.  I even won a couple of awards which served my purpose.  The next year all my submissions were lost.  I got a refund eventually.  Last year I got a couple more awards - in the best news and current events blog category and in the best commentary blog category.  I even got an award in the arts reporting, which wasn't restricted to blogs.

I have continued to participate in the contest because I find it useful to go through a year's worth of posts and assess how well I did.  Are there posts I'm proud enough to submit?  Reviewing them makes me proud sometimes and often makes me cringe.

So I'm hoping to have a list of posts to send in tomorrow for the best news and current events blogs category again.  And also maybe a couple of other categories.  Looking through the list of categories, it appears they've combined the news blog and commentary blog and added a 'best feature blog' category.  I've been trying to review the year's worth of posts, and I have some long lists of potential ones to submit, but I'm glad for the extra day.  But winnowing them down to about ten to package together is hard.

I was trying to get posts that I thought were good and important.  But as I made a last sweep through Blogspot's back pages that shows number of hits and comments, I was surprised by which posts had the most hits.

Comments about computer problems score high.   I don't get that many hits.  It's hard to say because the two different measures I use differ wildly.  Statcounter says I average about 9000 page views a month or 300 a day.  GoogleAnalytics gives me about 1500 - 2000 page views a day.  That's a big gap.  Of course, those hits aren't all for the current day's post.  There are over 5000 posts in the archives and google send people into those older posts.

My hypothesis about the relatively low number of comments is that my writing is usually not confrontative or inflammatory.  It's more calm and reasoned.  People don't feel compelled to disagree or correct errors.  Another possible explanation is that many posts are so long and complicated that people never get to the comment button.  But I get enough feedback from folks that the people who matter in particular issues do read what I write about those issues.

So, this list is much longer than I can offer the Press Club, and these aren't necessarily my favorite posts, though some are.  They're just the posts with the greatest number of hits (from Blogspot.)  I'm putting the number of hits and comments next to them.  If there's only one number, it's the number of hits and there were no comments.

Here are posts that the most readers saw.

Sitemeter Out of Control  -  2374 hits  24 comments
http://whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/2015/06/sitemeter-out-of-control.html

Happy Thanksgiving Political Correctness  1648    I do think this is an important post.  I was very surprised to see it had gotten so many hits.

Selma's Garbage Bag Problem  -  1156  6   Again, surprised about this.  This is not a very important post, though it does fit the 'how do you know what you know?' theme of the blog.

Famous People Born In 1915 - It Was A Very Good Year  -  1117   -  This is an interesting post and it makes sense that lots of people got here.  There was a follow-up post or two.

The Impact of Modern Day Shaming - 784  14   - Not a bad post, it looks at how people judging others on the internet can really disrupt others' lives.  A little herd mentality.  Another ways of knowing post.

Hello Statcounter Goodbye Sitementer - 567  -  This is a followup to Sitemeter Out of Control.

Why I Live Here - Quill Bailey and Rachel Barton Pine, and Eduard Zilberkant Play Down The Street - 507 4   I really like that this one did well.

Would More Women Police Officers Reduce Police Violence?    - 496  A solid post.  One I'm considering for my list for the Press Club.

Soon I'll do the posts that I liked the post.

Serendipity? Coincidence? Or Is Everything Just Connected?

We tend to see coincidences all the time, that there's a million to one chance of these things happening.  But I'm convinced it's just that most people are bad at math and worse at statistics and probability.  I did a post in 2014 on a chance meeting I had once where it turned out the odds were not really as great as they first seemed.

That's all introduction to two connections that came from reading last week.  Amazing how reading books fills in holes in one's knowledge.  I'd picked up two books from my daughter and son-in-law's bookshelves while waiting for things to get moving.  One fairly deep, one more a sensational "action packed thrill ride" as the back cover described it.

1.  Here's a headline from last week:

"Putin's agents accused of killing Litvinenko left polonium radiation in British embassy"

Normally, I'd have just read the polonium part and it wouldn't have meant anything.  It would have been just another word.  Even though I didn't understand it, I got the context, and probably wouldn't have looked it up.  Though blogging has gotten me to look up things a lot more so I don't miss something before I post.

But I've been reading a biography of Marie Curie - Obsessive Genius  by Barbara Goldsmith.  As part of Curie's discovery of radioactivity and of radium, she and her husband Pierre also discovered another radioactive element which she called polonium after her native country Poland. (Her maiden name was Sklodowski.)  The discussion of the process of discovering polonium suggests the difficulty of separating it from other substances and of measuring it, but also of its power:

"Pierre scrawled in their workbook that Marie had produced a substance accompanying bismuth that was 17 times more radioactive than pure uranium alone, then two weeks later 150 times as radioactive, then 300, then 330.  The radioactivity of this last substance was so great that Marie was convinced she had discovered a new element.  But how to confirm it?  A sure way was by a fetid now as spectroscopy and the EPCI was fortunate in having a resident expert in this field, Eugéne Demarçay.  Spectroscopy involved the heating of an element until it became a glowing gas and then refracting the light it emitted through a prism.  This resulted in a rainbow pattern of light, or spectra.  No two elements produced the same pattern of light.  .  .  Demarçay tested Marie's substance but said it was not sufficiently pure to produce a spectrum.  Though bitterly disappointed, she marched back to the laboratory.  Within ten days she had, in her words, "obtained a substance 400 times as active as uranium alone."  Demarçay tested this substance, but once again could not produce a clear spectral line." [p. 86]

But given other researchers racing to publish, they published their results, with appropriate qualifications, and eventually, the existence of a new element, polonium, was established.


2.  Jack Reacher, the hero of Lee Child's Bad Luck And Trouble, finds himself in Seattle (as I do right now.)  He had to immediately get to LA.

"[He] bought a one-way ticket on United to LAX.  He used his passport for ID and his ATM card as a debit card.  The one-way walk-up fare was outrageous.  Alaska Airlines would have been cheaper, but Reacher hated Alaska Airlines.  They put a scripture card on their meal trays.  Ruined his appetite."

I did have to smile.   I fly on Alaska Airlines a lot.   I also had to look at when the book was published. Copyright was 2007.  I remember those prayer cards.  They were religiously fairly bland, but still irksome to have a corporation that had me locked in to flying tube for several hours telling me that I needed to pray.  But the cards are gone now.   Alaska Airlines didn't stop using the prayer cards until 2012.  Of course, the free meal trays on flights are also gone.  I wonder how long it took Alaska Airlines folks to find out they'd been slammed in a "#1 New York Times Bestselling author" as the book jacket proclaims.  I guess that means that at least one of his books had been number one, but not this one.


Coincidences?  That I read about polonium in the news and in the book at just about the same time?  No.  Many books I read connect directly to something else that's going on while I'm reading the book. If you read a lot, you're going to know more.  If you know enough stuff, you're going to find connections to what you know everywhere.  And as you know more, words like polonium take on deeper meanings, ideas grow from slogans to complex relationships.  You start seeing patterns.  Things start to make sense. The complexity part was one of the reasons I posted the cartoon the other day.