A Nature Break - Just Relax And Enjoy

We did a short hike along the trail up toward Wolverine Peak Sunday evening.

My favorite part is crossing the creek and watching the water rush by.  So here's a moment out in the woods on the hillside above Anchorage.

Warnings To Republicans And Democrats - No Hope And Listen Liberal

Several weeks ago, checking out the new books at Loussac library, I found these two which seemed to offer political symmetry.

No Hope is subtitled "Why I left the GOP and you should too."  Listen Liberal is subtitled "What Happened To The Party of the People?"

I've read No Hope, but only the first and last chapters of Listen Liberal, so I'll talk about Jimmy Lasalvia's book in this post, and Thomas Frank's in a later post.  Spoiler:  Frank's book seems the much weightier of the two.

Lasalrvia's book is basically his justification, as a gay Republican, for being the gay spokesperson for the Republican Party for as along as did.  Basically, he says he's an economic conservative who's gay and was trying to get the Republicans to be more tolerant of people who weren't straight, white males.  He also felt that by supporting Republicans in a conspicuous way - as a founder and head of GOProud - he would also show Republicans that there were conservative gays and that they should change their gay intolerance and court gay voters.  There are some successes along the way, but in the end he realizes the Republican party was getting worse not better.

I went along with his story for a while, but soon concluded that he was like the skinny kid who who never gets picked.  He wants so bad to be on the Republican team, but, geez, he's gay, no way.  He tries so hard to prove he's a Republican team player - he's for smaller government, less taxes, and he bemoans Obama's failed _(fill in the blank)  policies.  He wants so hard to prove that just because he's gay doesn't mean he's not a good Republican.  He can't understand why they don't get his belief that they need him more than he needs them.

I like Jimmy. He's a decent guy.  He's loyal. He's sincere.  But it takes him forever to get it.  Even when all the other gay organizations are dissing him for defending Republicans, he gamely says, "hey, you have to be a team player."  Team player is his mantra.  You want me to debase myself, ok, I'll do it to prove I'm a team player.  For example:

"Again, I compromised my integrity to uphold the Republican code." (p 133)  

There are successes.  GOProud gets to be a CPAC sponsor, but no senior Republican officials show up for their big dance party, that's supposed to show the world that Republicans can be cool.  And when CPAC gets a new executive director, they cut GOProud out.   GOProud seems to have survived as long as it did mainly because they get a few big donations, like from gay billionaire Peter Thiel.  And Ann Coulter comes to one of their fundraising events.

Throughout the book Lasalvia is swimming up the Republican stream that just has too many barriers.  When the Romney team won't even talk to Lasalvia, he slowly starts to get it.  Despite his belief that the Republicans need him to diversify, they see him as poison and want nothing to do with him.

I wanted to be able to sit down with Laslavia and talk to him.  He tells us he grew up as a military brat and that most people on the bases were pretty conservative.   And in the book, his conservative beliefs tend to boil down to slogans.  I'm guessing, that if he hadn't had to face up to the fact that he was gay, he would have been perfectly happy on the Republican team, even bashing gays.

But he did turn out gay and so he saw this one flaw in the conservative narrative.  Not because he was thinking more deeply, but because it kicked him in the groin.  But when he writes about other Republican positions, it's always superficial talking points.  Things like:

"I focused on Obama's failed record, the poor economy, and the need for Romney's management skills in the White House."

I wanted to say to him, "Jimmy, exactly what was the economy like when Obama took office?  How is it worse now?  Jimmy, you've seen the flaw in the Republican stance against gays, women, and people of color.  Maybe you should examine more deeply their economic positions as well.  You're just spouting slogans.  You need to reexamine everything you believe."

The book offered some behind the scenes snippets of the Republican party - mainly in the arena of gay policies.  It reads fast.  But partly that's because you don't have to think too hard about any of it.


What I've read so far of Listen Liberal is a much deeper analysis of mainstream Democratic thought.  I'll try to do a post on it when I've finished it.  The basic thrust I've picked up so far is this:

Democrats have always been fighting against inequality, for the lower and middle classes getting a fair share of the economy.  That fight has always been about the distribution of money.  That worked when blue jobs that didn't require a high school education could keep people in the middle class.  If money is the first hierarchy that separates the economic classes, today, there's a second hierarchy - the professions - that also separates the classes.  And the Democrats have sided with the educated  against the rest.

OK, that's my take at the moment and it makes a lot of sense.  The Republicans have voiced the concerns of the uneducated - abortion, immigration, guns, the terrorist menace.  But, let me read some more so I can spell out his argument more accurately.

Putin's Syrian Strategy Seems To Be Working As Brits Poised To Vote On Their EU Membership

I've been assuming for a while now that one of Putin's strategies in Syria is to increase the number of refugees flooding into Europe.  This helps to raise tension and conflict in the EU countries and ultimately to break down cooperation across Europe, not only in economics, but in military strength and commitment along Russia's borders.  Less unity means it's harder for Europeans to stand united against Russia.

The influx of refugees has done all of this and more.  On World Refugee Day (today), we're only a few days away from the British vote on whether to stay in the EU or not.  [UPDATE June 25, 2016:  they voted to leave the EU.]

Forbes seems to think that the refugees themselves will eventually make Europe more anti-Russian than it is today. That may be, but in the meantime, European unity is being severely tested. And the lives of millions of refugees are being being uprooted.




As the son of refugees who survived Nazi Germany because they were able to get out, my heart is with all refugees.

". . . attack, counterattack and never apologize."

The title comes from a Washington Post article describing Roy Cohn as Trump's lawyer and mentor.  For those who don't recognize the name, Cohn was the model for the Angels in America character who personifies evil.  The son of an influential judge, Cohn began young as Sen. Joe McCarthy's aide in the Congressional Red and homosexual witch hunt in the 1950s.  His career goes morally downhill from there, according to the article.

The point of the authors, though, is that he took in Trump and introduced him to the power brokers of New York and Washington DC and taught Trump his basic strategy: attack, counterattack and never apologize.

What we've seen from his tweet torrent, this does seem to be how Trump works.  He certainly hates to apologize.

It's worth reading the whole thing as we try to understand the phenomenon of Trump.

And it seems Cohn's story shares the Orlando shooter's closeted homosexuality.  Well, we don't know if the shooter had any actual gay encounters, but he seems to have been drawn to gay venues.  Cohn apparently was much more active sexually, but he witnessed (even participated in) the career and sometimes life destroying outing of homosexuals with Sen. McCarthy.

One wonders whether the shooter's rampage and Cohn's ruthless pursuit of power were both related to some sort of homophobic self-loathing. And fear of being outed. The article mentions Cohn's portrayal in Angels in America, and when I googled the two together, I got to a series of compelling Youtube excerpts.

Like this one where Cohn's long time doctor tells him he has AIDS and Cohn insists he's not a homosexual and he has liver cancer.  He's more concerned about being exposed as gay (and thus as a member of a group without 'clout') than he is about the terminal diagnosis.  I can't embed the video, but here's the link.

And the Washington Post article is also worth reading.  The authors' book on Trump comes out in August.  Good timing on their part.

[UPDATE July 21, 2016:  here's a follow up post on Cohn I did on June 24 -  "Roy Cohn was one of the most loathsome characters in American history, so why did he have so many influential friends?"]

If The Media Called Them "Alienated Losers" Instead of "Lone Wolves" Would There Be As Many Shootings?

Reporters keep referring to the Orlando killer as a 'lone wolf.'  I get it.  But I also get that one of the reasons youngish men carry out acts like this is to get some form of glory and notoriety, to prove that they have power, that they aren't nobodies.

I'd like to suggest that the media  substitute "alienated loser" for "lone wolf" in their reports of such attacks.   We know that such shooters, in part, hope for some sort of glory from their actions.  A Guardian story tells us:

"The Orlando gunman used Facebook during his deadly rampage, apparently seeking to gauge reaction in real time while also vowing more attacks. . . "

"Lone Wolf" has a romantic appeal.  Other potential shooters might find the image of a 'loser' less appealing than that of the 'lone wolf."   Knowing that one's loser status will be the headline, rather than the more appealing 'lone wolf' image might help discourage such attacks.

 A PoliceOne article by Scott Stewart acknowledges the unwarranted mystique in the term not just for the shooters, but for the media consuming public:

"It is only when we set aside the mystique of the lone wolf and look at the reality of the phenomenon that we can see the threat is often far less daunting in reality than it is in theory."

A 2015 Mother Jones article by Mathew Harwood raises another problem with the term 'lone wolf'.  First he offers a definition:

"Lone wolves are, by definition, solitary individuals, almost always men, often with mental health problems, who lash out violently against civilian targets. At least in some fashion, they are spurred on by belief. Researcher Michael Becker defines it this way: "Ideologically driven violence, or attempted violence, perpetrated by an individual who plans and executes an attack in the absence of collaboration with other individuals or groups." Although you wouldn't know it at the moment in America, the motivation for such attacks can run the gamut from religiously inspired anti-abortion beliefs to white supremacism, from animal rights to an al-Qaeda-inspired worldview."

Then he focuses on the use of the idea of the lone wolf to foment fear, particularly of Muslims,  and justify greater surveillance by law enforcement.  Harwood points out:

"Inside the United States, 136 people died due to individual terrorist attacks between 1940 and 2012—each death undoubtedly a tragedy, but still a microscopic total compared to the 14,000 murders the FBI has reported in each of the last five years. In other words, you shouldn't be losing sleep over lone-wolf attacks. As an American, the chance that you'll die in any kind of terrorist violence is infinitesimal to begin with. In fact, you're four more times likely to die from being struck by lightning. If anything, the present elevation of the lone-wolf terrorist to existential threat status in Washington creates the kind of fear and government overreach that the perpetrators of such attacks want to provoke."

He also says that about 25% of lone wolf terrorists are

". . .  involved with, and often directed or encouraged by, a government informant or undercover agent. This adds up to about 25% of post-9/11 cases of lone wolfism in the US, though the label is hardly accurate under the circumstances. These are essentially government stings, which not only inflate the number of individual terrorism incidents in the US, but disproportionately focus law enforcement attention on American Muslim communities."

I noticed that the British press have used the term 'crazed loner' to describe the killer of MP Jo Cox.  I had considered 'alienated loner' as well as 'loser.'  But this is, in part, a propaganda war, and I think 'loner' still has some cachet, whereas, at this point, no one really wants to be called a loser*.

Words matter as symbols.  The media cannot deprive shooters of publicity by simply ignoring terrorist attacks.  We do need to know what is happening.  But they can stop the sensational coverage and they can stop glorifying shooters with terms like 'lone wolf' and reframe the image with terms like 'alienated loser.'



*I'd note that there are no 'solutions.'  Everything keeps evolving .  It's always possible  to take a pejorative term and give it a new, positive meaning.  And the meaning of 'loser' could morph as well. And so tactics that work now need to be reassessed and adjusted as things change.  And, as I've said before, our larger focus should be on building a society that doesn't create alienated losers in the first place.

Plane Spotting - Why They're Rumbling Over Anchorage This Week

China Air

If you drive out to the very end of Northern Lights Blvd and then past Point Woronzof, you'll see guys standing by their cars with telephoto lenses taking pictures of planes at the Anchorage airport.







But this last week I've been able to do that from my back yard deck.  Instead of flying off over Cook Inlet, planes are flying over the Anchorage bowl.  LOUDLY!  And with the great weather we've been having, I've been spending a lot of time on the deck, which has become our de facto dining room and my office.

UPS

They rumble over sometimes minutes apart, sometimes more.  It's pretty loud.

Polar

So I called the airport to see what's up.


I talked to John Stocker who told me that there is construction work on the north-south runway - things that have to be done every year and in the summer - like painting markings.  The noise will continue until June 25, except for Sundays.

I asked what happens during the night (since the noise stops during that time.)  Work on the runway is from 7:30am until 7:30 pm.

Korean Air

Mr. Stocker said the project was well publicized.  That may be, but I missed their publicity.  I did try the airport website before calling, but my search didn't yield any answers.  They may be there, but even looking at a section called 'noise abasement'  I couldn't find anything specific about this week, just long term planning reports. I even looked at the pdf on construction projects which doesn't seem to include this.  Each project talks about benefits, but they don't talk about negative impacts like noise.  It's hard to even figure out that the north-south runway is involved.

In any case, until June 25 - another week - we have a steady flow of jets flying over the bowl.  

There Was A Reason I Stopped Climbing Flattop

I stopped climbing Flattop years and years ago.  Trudging up a steep gravelly slippy slidey trail with lots and lots of people got old.

But something got into me today and I decided I wanted to go up the Flattop trail.  J said she wanted to come along, despite the fact that she hates climbing up and she broke her wrist a couple years ago negotiating the sidewalk in Santa Monica.

But with our State Park parking sticker in the window, we drove up to the Glen Alps parking lot and started up.  It wasn't quite as bad as I remembered at first.

The steps from the parking lot are gone and a new winding trail starts things.  But it goes up pretty quickly.  We first climbed Flattop when we arrived to Alaska not quite 40 years ago.  Our bodies are a lot slower than they were.

J was telling me to just go on ahead, so I pulled out my camera and started taking pictures of butterflies and flowers while she moseyed along.  I'm not sure what kind of butterfly that is.  I couldn't find it in my Insects of South-central Alaska book, nor looking fairly quickly online.  But I did find this tribute to Kenelm Philip - apparently the premier collector and student of Alaskan butterflies.

Wild geraniums.

At this point it looked like the trail was leveling off for a while and it had this fancy post and chain fence.   But it was a short-lived break.

When we first got to the 'steps' we thought, wow, they've improved this a lot since our last visit.  But these railroad ties were at various angles, and the dirt packed against them had been washed out in may places, so these were tricky walking.   

I'd say except for one woman, we were probably the oldest folks on the trail that we saw.  Most were half our age or less.  And it was warm to hot still at 9 and 10 pm when we were out.  

We did run into a six year old who was not happy at all.  The man I assumed was her dad said she'd been fine to the top, but coming down she had begun to cry.  My grandpa mode is just below the surface, so I talked to her about the trail, the chocolate bar I'd left in the car, but would have given her if I hadn't, and how our kids had spent a number of years ready to turn back on our hikes, then one day, said, "We'll wait for you at the top."  I didn't get a smile, but she did stop crying and maybe her dad got a little more sympathy for her limits as a hiker.  

Somewhere along these steps J decided it was getting too treacherous for her and decided to sit on the side and wait for me.  

I went on a little further.  Below is a picture of the people climbing the ridge toward the top.

I got to the second 'saddle' and started up the last part.  We'd been going up almost an hour already and I was thinking when our son would run up and back in 30 minutes.  

I was also thinking about my heel which after several years of issues hadn't bothered me at all in several months.  (I should probably write an update on that saga.)  And  mostly I thought about J sitting on the side of the trail.  

I looked back with my telephoto lens to see if she was still in view.  

No, those two guys were probably on the 'steps' but she was well below them and that ridge.  So I turned around and found her quickly enough.  We got down, as usual, much faster than we got up. 

It was a big energy booster though.  It felt good to be out and about.    The last couple of years with us flying down to visit my mom every month made it too easy to not get out into the hills above and around Anchorage.  But I'm going to get my money's worth from our parking stickers this year.  

Using ISIS as Cover

Watch the media patterns after mass shootings and other disasters.  They start by broadcasting whatever tidbits they can find and filling in with lots of 'woe is us,'  'pray for the families,' and trying to figure which current narratives explain what happened.  Was he homophobic?  Was he Muslim?  Was he a terrorist?  An Immigrant?  Oh, he pledged his allegiance to ISIS and he's Afghan (did I forget that he was born in the US?), presto, this is a radical Muslim terrorist attack.

And, did you notice that the only facts they were sure of at the beginning weren't always right.  "50 killed"  "That number will surely grow." Now we're being told it's 49 killed and so far the rest are still alive - six in critical condition.

We all have narratives in our heads - stories that help us organize 'facts' into a coherent explanation of the world.  And it looks like politicians, and maybe eve the shooters themselves, these days might be manipulating our narratives to hide their personal conflicts and demons.  Or to divert our attention from the weapons used.

We don't know anything for certain, but one thought I had from early on, is being supported by some evidence.  NOTE:  This is a thought experiment - exploration of possible explanations.  It's NOT truth, it's thinking outlaid 


ISIS as cover. Number 1.

A few LGBT folks in the area are saying that they've seen the shooter at the Pulse, frequently.  That he's got a profile on a gay hookup app. Suggesting that perhaps this young man was a somewhat-closeted gay man.  This narrative suggests he couldn't come out to his family and was terribly conflicted and frustrated.  His internalized homophobia turned against himself and other gays who lived a life he couldn't.

What better proof of his straight masculinity than massacring gays and then using the banner of self-proclaimed Muslim saviors to cover your own personal problems?

[UPDATE June 17, 2016:  Here's some support of this idea from a Slate article:

"Orlando may be another variant, then, of what the French scholar of Islam Olivier Roy has called the “Islamicization of radicalism.” Islam is used by an individual already on the edge of violence to justify his actions and give him status to at least one audience, as indeed has already happened to Mateen. Details on Mateen’s background are still trickling in, but his ex-wife claimed he was abusive in their marriage and not particularly zealous in his faith."]

ISIS as cover. Number 2:

From The Hill:

"Instead of focusing on the weapon that was used, there should be a focus on radical Islam. The focus should not be on the weapon, it should be on the individual’s heart and the cowardly acts that he performed."

This narrative says it's all about the shooter; the guns he had are irrelevant.

Really?!  For the survivors, in the long run, it really doesn't matter if he was a self hating gay, if he was treated badly because he looks suspicious in the dominant American world view.  It doesn't matter what any of the shooter's issues were in terms of getting past the carnage.  Yes, it would help if Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christian pulpits spoke to their congregations about love instead of attacking women and the lgbt community.

But if disturbed people - whatever the cause of the issues, whether it's biological or sociological - didn't have such easy access to automatic weapons, there'd be people still alive in Sandy Hook, Columbine, Roseburg, and San Bernadino, and Orlando.

Instead we hear each time about mental health and terrorists, and strong denials by politicians supported by the gun industry controlled NRA.  First it was Al Qaeda, now it's ISIS.    ISIS is the distraction that keeps us from talking about the first steps that we can do to cut down on the slaughter taking place across the United States.  And that's because of the Congress members who hear NRA money pouring into their campaigns.


This is not about logic, it's about power.  It's about courage. Or rather lack of courage.  It's about electing politicians who care more about the people they represent than about their own egos and power.  Politicians who are willing to risk their jobs for what's right.   And we're moving to a situation where anyone who opposes the gun lobby runs the risk, not only of losing their office, but even losing their lives.  Ask Gaby Giffords what she's doing about this.


ISIS as cover.  Number 3:

But bigger than the guns, is that we're living in a society that produces way too many alienated and angry men.  Again, there are lots of narratives explaining this.  Some argue we've turned our backs on God or there are too many immigrants.

The bigger, overarching context for the alienation, in my view, is our competitive society that is structured to enrich a relative few and impoverish many.  Until the system is recalibrated that alienation will continue.  We need recover some of the economic security that has been destroyed.  People need to feel economically ready to have a family.  Then they need the time to love their children and teach them to love themselves.

We also have to learn how to focus on what's important instead of the increasing number of distractions the internet offers us all.  Including this blog.  We need to take care of our selves, our families.   The people around the world both envy our material wealth and personal freedom and they fear what it will do to their own societies as the world begins to look more and more the same. As we lose the rich diversity of cultures that offers us many possible ways of living.   And that's why organizations - if we can even call it that - like ISIS become symbols of defiance.  Why guns become symbols of manhood.  Why Trumps become symbols of rebellion.  People are desperate for meaning in their lives, for something to believe in, for hope.

I remember years ago when someone in China first gave me a copy of China's Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States.  Of course, it's a response to American reports on human rights violations in China, but still it is sobering to review it.  To see what we look like in others' eyes.  We need to think carefully of the two gods that Americans rely on - the one in the bible and the invisible hand of the market.  Because those are the solutions we're given when confronted by the ISIS cover - pray to God and let the market take care of things.

It ain't working in my eyes.

Being Smart Beats Beating

How necessary is torture to get information from terrorists?  As a teenager I read about the Gulag and Nazi Germany and other settings where people got tortured.  I wasn't particularly looking for torture stories, but they came up in many books I read.  I soon realized that these stories of torture were always written by the people who were tortured, not by the torturer.  But I wanted to know what was going on in the head of the torturer.  How could one human being inflict such horrible pain on another?

It's still one of the questions I keep gathering data on (not in any rigorous manner, but I note things as they come up.)   The debates over torture in the television show "24" (skip down to "This wouldn’t have been a problem. . . in the link) were of great interest to me.  The show was one of the media that popularized the idea that torture was acceptable if the person being tortured knew about a plot that would, say, kill two hundred civilians.  Of course, that begs the question how the interrogators know the suspect knows this.  The issue came up in real life over torturing Guantanamo prisoners and John Yoo's lawyerly defenses of torture.

Stuck somewhere in my brain was the idea embedded in the Fifth Amendment - that one cannot be compelled to testify against oneself.  Our founding fathers knew that torture victimized the innocent and that subjects of torture would tell their interrogators whatever they thought they wanted to hear.

So when I read this article in the LA Times yesterday, I found evidence that supports my view of all this.  (And, of course, I recognize that we all tend to believe what we want to hear, so I'm offering this, as evidence, not proof.)  Here are some excerpts, but it's worth reading the whole thing:

"Hanns Scharff was a master manipulator, but not in the stereotypical Gestapo-like ways that usually come to mind. His tools were kindness, respect, empathy and guile. He told meandering stories, took detainees on long strolls in the countryside and left them alone in his office to read the U.S. military newspaper, Stars and Stripes. He provided hard-to-find cigarettes and even let one captured U.S. pilot take a short flight in a German fighter plane. But all the while, without them even knowing, he was swiping their secrets. .

"He died in 1992, well before the U.S. war on terror commenced. But his methods began getting a second look amid the fierce national debate over the harsh interrogation tactics used by the George W. Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks. President Obama and others have condemned some of those methods as torture. 

Former CIA officials have defended the rough techniques as useful, but a 2014 Senate report found that the agency’s use of torture failed to stop any imminent plots. 

Sometimes, it even backfired, the report concluded. At least one suspect “sang like a tweetie bird,” according to a CIA official quoted in the report, before he was tortured. But after being subjected to harsh interrogation, he provided no other useful information, according to the report. Amid the debate, the FBI-led interrogation unit began funding research to scientifically analyze various interrogation practices. It plans to soon release a report detailing best practices. 

Though Scharff’s techniques had been long known to U.S. officials, the research confirmed for the first time that it actually works better."  [Emphasis added]

A Brief Visit to Potter Marsh To Check Out The Birds

Northern Shoveler

We took a break yesterday and went to Alaska.  Well, it's just about ten minutes down the road from Anchorage and sometimes we forget to take advantage of living here.  There was lots of traffic on the Seward Highway coming back, so we decided to just hit Potter's Marsh and check out the birds.

There were dramatic clouds to the west when we turned back.  

At the end of the boardwalk (going inland) there's an eagle's nest and usually eagles nearby.  Can you see the eagle in the trees?  Hint:  look for the white head.  (You probably have to click on the picture to enlarge and focus it.)

Here's a closer shot.  In the one above there's a white tree trunk in the middle.  The eagle's in the cottonwood tree to the left of it, a little above the the midline.

And below is the nest.  There's a white head poking up.

I liked the ducks all lined up on the log, though it didn't come out that well in the picture.

And here are some green winged teals.  The green of the wing is under and doesn't show in this picture