The American Revolution As An Exit From The British Empire

In response to a comment on a post about Brexit a couple of weeks ago , I noted that the North American colonies'  break from England was also a contentious exit:

"I know the British establishment felt the same way when the North American colonies voted for independence. Our US history books paint it as a singularly good thing, but there was just as much angst in the colonies over it. Perhaps this vote gives us a new perspective on 1776. Or not. At least the EU is not sending troops to prevent this."

So it seemed appropriate to write with this view in mind for the 240th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

In the meantime, it became clear that others had made the same mental leap when I saw a tweet that mentioned "Amerexit."

"Happy #Amerexit my ex colonial chums

— Hari Kunzru (@harikunzru) July 4, 2016"

I don't want to belabor the point, but merely remind those who celebrate the Fourth of July this year, that at the time of the Declaration of Independence, there was much opposition and the conflict was bitter.

Here's an excerpt of a letter the former Massachusetts governor, Thomas Hutchinson wrote in response to the Declaration of Independence:

"I should therefore be impertinent if I attempted to show in what case a whole people may be justified in rising up in opposition to the powers of government, altering or abolishing them and substituting, in whole or in part, new powers in their stead; or in what sense all men are created equal; or how far life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness may be said to be unalienable. Only I could ask the delegates of Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas how their constituents justify the depriving more than an hundred thousand Africans of their rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and in some degree to their lives, if these rights are so absolutely unalienable. . . 

From a disposition to receive willingly complaints against rulers, facts misrepresented have passed without examining. Discerning men have concealed their sentiments, because under the present government in America, no man may, by writing or speaking, contradict any part of this Declaration without being deemed an enemy to his country, and exposed to the rage and fury of the populace.”  [emphasis added]

Pennsylvanian John Dickinson, who had enjoyed great popularity when he led the opposition to the Stamp Act, could not bring himself to sign the Declaration.  From the History Net:

Yet on July 1, 1776, as his colleagues in the Continental Congress prepared to declare independence from Britain, Dickinson offered a resounding dissent. Deathly pale and thin as a rail, the celebrated Pennsylvania Farmer chided his fellow delegates for daring to “brave the storm in a skiff made of paper.” He argued that France and Spain might be tempted to attack rather than support an independent American nation. He also noted that many differences among the colonies had yet to be resolved and could lead to civil war. When Congress adopted a nearly unanimous resolution the next day to sever ties with Britain, Dickinson abstained from the vote, knowing full well that he had delivered “the finishing Blow to my once too great, and my Integrity considered, now too diminish’d Popularity.” 

"Indeed, following his refusal to support and sign the Declaration of Independence, Dickinson fell into political eclipse. And 234 years later, the key role he played in American resistance as the leader of a bloc of moderates who favored reconciliation rather than confrontation with Britain well into 1776 is largely forgotten or misunderstood. 

To be a moderate on the eve of the American Revolution did not mean simply occupying some midpoint on a political line, while extremists on either side railed against each other in frenzied passion. Moderation for Dickinson and other members of the founding generation was an attitude in its own right, a way of thinking coolly and analytically about difficult political choices. The key decision that moderates ultimately faced was whether the dangers of going to war against Britain outweighed all the real benefits they understood colonists would still enjoy should they remain the king’s loyal subjects. 

Dickinson and his moderate cohorts were prudent men of property, rather than creatures of politics and ideology. Unlike the strong-willed distant cousins who were leaders of the patriot resistance in Massachusetts—John and Samuel Adams—moderates were not inclined to suspect that the British government was in the hands of liberty-abhorring conspirators. Instead, they held out hope well into 1776 that their brethren across the Atlantic would come to their senses and realize that any effort to rule the colonies by force, or to deny colonists their due rights of self-government, was doomed to failure. They were also the kind of men British officials believed would choose the benefits of empire over sympathy for suffering Massachusetts, the colony that King George III, his chief minister, Lord North, and a docile Parliament set out to punish after the Boston Tea Party of December 1773. Just as the British expected the Coercive Acts that Parliament directed against Massachusetts in 1774 would teach the other colonies the costs of defying the empire, so they assumed that sober men of property, with a lot at stake, would never endorse the hot-headed proceedings of the mob in Boston. Yet in practice, exactly the opposite happened. Dickinson and other moderates ultimately proved they were true patriots intent on vindicating American rights."

Dickinson's letter opposing the Declaration can be read here.

There are a lot of differences between the situation in 1776 and the one today.  I'm not suggesting the Brexit decision was a good one or that the Declaration was a bad one.  I'm merely saying that in both instances there was great uncertainty, a lot of emotional attachments to both sides, and a great deal of conflict.

The colonies were breaking away from the country that owned them.  Great Britain is backing out of an agreement they choose to enter.  In both situations there are people who see the rules coming from 'outside' are restricting the freedom of the nation and its citizens.  And in both cases the consequences of making a split were uncertain.   And those who signed the Declaration faced hanging if the British caught them.  Those who pushed for Brexit merely face the scorn and ridicule of the world's media.

For Americans, it's important to remember that what we take for granted as a great moment in world history was hotly contested and the outcome was not at all certain.

Happy Independence Day.

Where Are The Oldest Buildings In Anchorage?

According to the Crow Creek Mine brochure, they're at Crow Creek Mine.

The sign says, "Commissary 1898."  Of course, there was no Anchorage at the time and I'm pretty sure that Crow Creek Mine didn't become part of the Municipality of Anchorage until the Borough and the City merged to become the Municipality of Anchorage in 1975.

So, we could argue that the oldest building in Anchorage ought to be the oldest one put up inside the city limits of Anchorage at the time it was built.  Or that the oldest buildings that are within the boundaries of the present Anchorage qualify, as Crow Creek Mine has.

Here's another of those buildings at Crow Creek Mine.  Took visiting relatives there Saturday because one of them wanted to pan for gold.

For $20, you get a gold pan, a shovel, a bucket, gold panning lesson, and a little seeded gravel so everyone goes home a winner.  I decided to be the observer.  But our family got some gold.

More importantly, they had fun.

Here's a bit of old pipe that was lying on the river bank.  

We also did the hike in to the tram afterward and checked out the Winner Creek gorge before heading home.

Spruce Coming Back In Parts Of Kenai After Spruce Bark Beetle

After Seward, we camped at Ptarmigan Creek campground.  This used to be full of huge old spruce trees.  Then in the 80s for 15 to 20 years there was a massive invasion of spruce bark beetles.  From KDLL interview with National Resource Conservation Service forester Mitch Michaud and John Morton, supervisory biologist with the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge:

"A spruce bark beetle outbreak isn’t unusual — we tend to have one every 50 years or so, but the severity and duration of this one were significant. It’s still seen as the biggest outbreak in North America. . . "  [emphasis added.]

With so many trees dying, there was a great danger of fire, so many trees were cut, and at the campground.  Sort of like Bob Marley with a  buzz cut.

But all around the campground area there are hundreds and maybe thousands of young spruce trees pushing up.  There might have been giant die-off, but the seeds were patiently waiting in the soil.

Most of the green in that picture is spruce.  There's a hemlock in the middle foreground and some deciduous shrubs and trees, but maybe thirty or forty spruce trees too.

Seeing things over a span of time helps give perspective on how nature works.  We can get that perspective by living a long time in one place or by reading observations of indigenous peoples in the area and scientists and others who track this sort of thing.

But according to the KDLL interview, it's not the same all over.  Near Homer the spruce doesn't seem to be coming back.

"That’s partially due to fire, which is another huge driver of change in a forest. Again, fire is not an unusual or even necessarily unhealthy occurrence in a forest, but the changing fire pattern is having an effect. Grass grows back quicker than trees, and burns more easily. More-frequent, more-intense fires on the southern peninsula are leading to more grassland growing in than trees."

Exit Glacier Was Here

Kilroy may have been here, but there are no signs that he ever was.   But I remember when Exit Glacier was here - the sign says it was in 1998.

It was extremely disappointing when our guests got to this point and Exit Glacier was gone.  Well, it's still back there, but according to the sign it was right here in 1998.  

Here's a picture with a very similar view in 2003.  Still, the glacier had retreated significantly, but there was still much more of it.

2008 picture from this post

 I don't remember exactly where it was when, but I know when I first went to Exit Glacier - I believe the summer of 1983, maybe 84 - there was no bridge over the Resurrection River.  There was a ranger and a lot of hip waders.  You walked through the water, then all the rest of the way to the glacier.  And the glacier was all the way out to the flat rocky plain.  You could go up to it and touch it, and even venture into  a little ice nook.  That all ended a few years later when a chunk of ice broke off and killed a tourist.  Ropes went up to keep people a safe distance away - say 20 or 30 feet.

But you were right there up close to this massive glacier that went several miles up the mountain.  Soon after a path was begun up alongside the glacier and you could get magnificent views from above.  You can still do that, though there's less glacier up there too.  But it's still magnificent from up there.





The trail has gotten a little tamer.  The summers of volunteers hauling rocks around to make steps and drainages means the trail isn't all muddy.  (Or is it simply because there has been much less rain this year?)  But my old knees talked to me as I went down the rock steps.  Flatter hikes I say, though this is my favorite.

But the trail is still spectacular.  I remember when you had to cross this creek from rock to rock, not over a sturdy wooden bridge.

And while I've been in beautiful gardens created by humans, none of them can compare to this whole mountain of lush green, of water, of ice, of rock, and of flowers.

We even saw a bear, not too terribly far off.  Unfortunately, my son-in-law and grandchildren were on the other side of the bear from us and I wasn't sure how close I had to go to the bear to get to them.  It turned out fine and a ranger later said he sees the bear every day and it's learned to keep away from the people.  

One more flower.


Yellow monkey flower -

"Mimulus guttatus has been a model organism for studies of evolution and ecology. There may be as many as 1000 scientific papers focused on this species. The genome is (as of 2012) being studied in depth"  (From Wikipedia)

Supreme Court Chooses Facts Over Malarky In Texas Abortion Case

Most people seemed to understand that the 2013 changes in requirements for abortion clinics in Texas  were just smokescreens.When the case finally made it to the US Supreme Court, Justice Breyer called them on it (from Mother Jones):

"Justice Breyer explains several times in his opinion that the court did not buy Texas' argument that the admitting privileges and ASC requirements benefit women's health. "Nationwide, childbirth is 14 times more likely to result in death," he wrote, "but Texas law allows a midwife to oversee childbirth in the patient's own home. Colonoscopy, a procedure that typically takes place outside a hospital (or surgical center) setting, has a mortality rate 10 times higher than an abortion." Breyer adds in a parenthetical that he repeated from the bench, and that Justice Kagan mentioned during oral arguments in March: "The mortality rate for liposuction, another outpatient procedure, is 28 times higher than the mortality rate for abortion." Of the admitting privileges requirement, Breyer writes bluntly: "We add that, when directly asked at oral argument whether Texas knew of a single instance in which the new requirement would have helped even one woman obtain better treatment, Texas admitted that there was no evidence in the record of such a case."

Since Texas lost at the lower court level, a four-four tie would have meant Texas lost their case (and the women of Texas had won.)  But with Kennedy joining the majority, it means that even without a new Obama or Clinton appointee, abortion rights for women who need them, are safe at the Supreme Court for a while.

Texas lawmakers' intention to circumvent the law of the land by pretending to make rules to protect the safety of women getting abortions didn't pass the red face test.  Breyer cited those examples of more dangerous procedures that don't have the same kinds of restrictions to show it wasn't safety they were concerned with.  There really ought to be a way to make such lawmakers accountable for all the heartaches and extra expenses it caused women, not to mention the disruptions to many clinics, and the time wasted taking this to the US Supreme Court.  But I suspect some of those lawmakers are smirking and happy for all those issues I just listed.

For the whole Supreme Court decision, click here.

Christopher Constant Is Running For Assembly

At PrideFest I came across Chris Constant's campaign table.  I'd heard of Chris and had just read his piece in Anchorage Press on the aftermath of Orlando.

Since I think that there should be as much information about all candidates for office up and available for all to consider, I asked Chris if we could do an interview.



It's pretty much unedited, except the freeze frame at the beginning and ending.

Anchorage PrideFest Photos

I'll let the photos do most of the talking.  I'd note that there were a lot more exhibitors than I recall from last year.

Cormac and Anton were so striking that I asked if I could take a picture and post it here.  They obviously said ok.

I'm afraid most of the other pictures are here more to document some of the organizations that hosted booths, than for the photography.

I first connected with the Alaska Workers Association at a previous PrideFest.  This is a group of volunteers that works to help workers who have no other organized support.

The local branch of Moms Demand Action.

Petroleum Club of Anchorage made its first appearance at a PrideFest.

National Park Service.

Hilton Hotels

Dogs of all sizes and shapes were there.















The Anchorage Neighborhood Health Center.

And there was plenty of food - here's Bear Mace Bites.

AARP Alaska.

There was HIV and Hep C testing.

The Writer's Block Bookstore and Café is coming soon on Spenard where the old adult books store used to be.  They had architects plans for the new building where writers and readers will be able to hang out, buy books, read, and maybe even write.

They predicted an October opening date.  We'll see.

The Alaska Club.

More food from Mimi's Kitchen.

Wells Fargo was there.  

The Family, from the University of Alaska Anchorage.  

And the National Organization for Women.  

There were lots more booths, and I have a video of a candidate for the Assembly that I'll post separately.  At first PrideFest had booths around the perimeter.  But over the years there have been more in the middle as well.  This seems to be the biggest yet.  

Lots of people, lots of rainbows, lots of kids and dogs.  Lots of smiles and lots of people talking.  

Gunnar Knapp and Steve Colt 'Retire'

Gunnar Knapp has been an important participant in Alaska public policy as an economist at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Alaska Anchorage.  He's
studied any number of issues, but his focus was on fisheries.  He became one of the world's experts on the economics of fisheries.  This last year he's played an important role in presenting the facts of the Alaska budget in clear and understandable ways.   I'm afraid that effort has been lost on the key players in the legislature.   But a lot more Alaskans understand the seriousness of our problem and the most reasonable options for dealing with it, thanks to Gunnar's work.

While I never worked for ISER, there was a period of years when my office was in with the ISER faculty and staff.  Not only were all the ISER faculty very sharp and very hard workers, but they got along with each other productively.  Few of the ISER folks are naturally outgoing, but all had very high professional standards, they understood that they worked for the public, and they found ways to make each other do their best.   Music was a common denominator.  Many of the ISER faculty and staff are excellent musicians.  Gunnar has a strong and beautiful singing voice (he's sung for the Anchorage opera) that sometimes floated through the office suites.  I'm not sure he always was aware he was singing.  You can see more about him at this link.

The ISER faculty have always had the challenge of only being partially funded by the state.  They
had to make up the rest of their salaries through contracting studies.  This offered additional challenges - they had to be out soliciting work, yet they had to resist clients' desires for favorable outcomes.  As university faculty, they had to publish work in academic journals while getting enough contracted work to get their salaries paid.

But their reputation for impartiality and technical excellence has made ISER one of the most respected and influential parts of the University of Alaska.  The data they've collected over the years has played a vital role in understanding the state budget and economy, in understanding the welfare of Alaska's children, and understanding Alaska's fisheries, to name just a few areas.

And they are all thoroughly decent, caring people.  Well, a few may not seem like they are, but once you get past their shyness, they are.

Steve Colt came to Alaska from MIT and has had an interest in energy across the state.  You can get a sense of the many projects he's worked on at the link on his name.  Steve said he'll be teaching full time at APU in the fall.  

Today there was a retirement gathering at the UAA library for these two important Alaskans, and a number of notables were there.  Vic Fisher, who created ISER some fifty years ago in Fairbanks.  Lee Gorsuch, who took over from Vic and eventually became Chancellor at UAA.  Scott Goldsmith, a professor emeritus from ISER.  Lots of other important people were there - the staff that makes it possible for the researchers to get their work done and distributed, other faculty from ISER, former Regent Chancy Croft and former Borough manager Jack Roderick.  I was able to get a few pictures, but I had a 5:30 commitment and since this event was scheduled until 5pm, I didn't pay attention to the time.  It was close to 5:30 when the last speaker spoke.  But I did try to catch a few faces.

Former ISER IT guy Jim Kerr juggles his tribute to Knapp and Colt

ISER has a whole set of younger faculty who have come along over the years and have had the benefit of working with these faculty, so the tradition will carry on.  ISER is one of the better known units at the university because so many of their reports are cited in public policy debates, yet the humanity and professionalism of this group is probably not well understood by the general public.  But I can attest to the good work they do.

Here's a link to the list of ISER publications, most of which are available online.  They've monitored so many important issues over the years.

"Roy Cohn was one of the most loathsome characters in American history, so why did he have so many influential friends?"

Or,  how and why do 'good' people allow 'evil' to flourish?

I posted about the relationship between Donald Trump and Roy Cohn the other day.  But then I saw lots of other articles on line about Cohn.  From all accounts, Cohn was cold.  Heartless and ruthless.  Yet the rich and famous surrounded him.  Barbara Walters was a lifelong friend.  Nancy and Ronald Reagan had him (and his young boyfriend) over at the White House.

So, after noting his close relationship with Trump, and what that might mean about Trump, I started thinking about how a man like that was so well protected by supposedly respectable people.  (Of course, one possibility is that they weren't as respectable as people think.)

I  had this post part way done.  Then Wednesday I got an email from Netflix saying that Spotlight, the Academy Award winning film about the Boston Globe  reporters who exposed the breadth of the Catholic Church molestation  and its coverup, was now available.  It was a movie we'd missed and wanted to see.  (It's a very good film.  A modern day All the President's Men.)  It too raises the same questions - why did so many people - in the church and out - look the other way?

So back to the main question from Robert Sherrill at The Nation::

"Roy Cohn was one of the most loathsome characters in American history, so why did he have so many influential friends?"

Here are some excerpts from the Sherrill article that make my (and his) point:

"Von Hoffman reminds us that Cohn "lived in a matrix of crime and unethical conduct," "derived a significant part of his income from illegal or unethical schemes and conspiracies," and thrived "cheek by jowl with so many men of sharp practice and dim luster in business and politics" that Cohn's pal Joey Adams, the comedian, would say of Cohn's dinner parties, "If you're indicted you're invited."

Yet,  the 'respectable' showed up too:

But important unindicted people were invited, too. And they went. Large slices of the upper crust of New York and Washington snuggled up to him, laughed and entertained one another with stories about his crimes as though they were choice insiders' jokes, and wrestled for the privilege of partying with Cohn and his crooked and perverse friends. Why choose his company? The sleaze of Roy Cohn was no secret. Why ignore it? Why excuse it? The only important questions forced on us by these books have nothing to do with Roy Cohn, but everything to do with judges and lawyers and publishers and writers and TV stars and politicians and developers–the wealthy and the powerful people who for many years ate Roy Cohn's shit with a grin.

Unfortunately, despite reciting all the things that made Cohn loathsome,  Sherrill  doesn't actually answer the question of why.  Though he repeats the question:

"And what were people like Geraldine Ferraro and Alan Dershowitz ("who was a somewhat well-disposed acquaintance of Roy's") doing at other Cohn parties and showing up as character witnesses when he was about to be disbarred?"

Here are some hints from a long Life magazine memorial by Nicholas Von Hoffman:

Peter Fraser, Cohn's twenty-something New Zealand born lover in Cohn's final years:

"People would ask me how could I be associated with somebody who did all these awful things in the 1950s," he says. "I don't know about any of that."

In the early 50s, a high school friend has Cohn over for dinner and overhears Cohn talking to Walter Winchell on the phone,  about destroying another newsman:

"And here was Roy Cohn saying, "Now, Walter, we could play this up, and we could do that, "and listening to this thing, I should have said, if I had had any guts, "Roy, that's outrageous", please leave. "But I didn't." - Anthony Lewis, columnist for The New York Times"

Probably the most common reason - it was symbiotic, they helped each other:

"For 40 years Roy had been taking care of the Newhouses, billionaire owners of newspapers and magazines, and for 40 years the Newhouses had been taking care of Roy."

And

"Zion, a former New York Times reporter, admits that Cohn did many favors for him, including helping him expedite a liquor license for a saloon Zion was buying, and he admits that Cohn was 'the best source I had" for news tips. In return, says Zion, he gave Cohn "advice" on how to handle the people at The Times. As for other things Zion did for Cohn, he says vaguely, "He never asked me to do anything I wouldn't have done for him anyway.'"

From SFGate:

"Many of [Barbara] Walters' other friends were horrified that she would even talk to Cohn, but what Walters reveals for the first time in 'Audition" is that Cohn somehow got a warrant for her father's arrest dismissed. .  .
Cohn liked to hint that they were more than friends "because I was his claim to heterosexuality," Walters says. 'He never said that he was gay, he never admitted to me that he had AIDS. He was a very complicated man. He died, alone, up to his ears in debt. He had been disbarred and he was hated. And I might have thought the same way, but he did something when my father was in trouble, [and] I never forgot that.'" 

Some, suggests Elizabeth Mehren in an LA Times book review of von Hoffman's biography of Cohn, just didn't understand exactly who he was:

". . . many people knew vaguely who he was without knowing fully what he had done. Those who were of age in 1950 would remember strongly the workings of the McCarthy committee, in which Cohn, as chief counsel, was the man who routinely asked witnesses, 'Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party.' Younger people would recognize Cohn from the pages of People magazine: a regular at Studio 54, the frequent dinner companion of Barbara Walters, a guest at the White House, the lawyer of rich and famous divorcees."

Another quote from Mehren offers another explanation why so many hovered around Cohn's light:

". . . as Steven Brill, editor in chief of the American Lawyer and a longtime critic of Cohn has said, Roy Cohn was like an automobile accident, the kind that makes rubberneckers stop and stare. "People are drawn to Roy Cohn that way," Brill told Von Hoffman."

Ultimately, it would appear that there was a giant web of connections and favors and threats.  Cohn could help you if you helped him, and he could harm you if you crossed him.  Sort of like a mafia boss - at least one of whom was part of Cohn's circle.

And in the movie Spotlight, we see how the Catholic church dominated Boston.   So many people in so many important positions - in the police department, the courts, the newspapers, the government, the businesses -  were part of the Catholic club, had gone to Catholic schools, been altar boys, still were members of the church, gave to Catholic charities.  As some of the victims said, when a priest talked to you, it was like talking to God.  The web was more than human.

And the key people at the Boston Globe were also part of the club and had ignored evidence that several different people had left them years before the movie begins.  It takes an outsider - a new editor, a Jew new to Boston -  to assign the story to Spotlight, the investigative team at the Globe. And it's an Armenian-American attorney who's been doggedly filing lawsuits in the court system for victims.  Other attorneys had been settling cases directly with the church, yielding small monetary settlements that required confidentiality agreements guaranteeing the secrets would be kept.

Ultimately, I think that if we can get deep into another person's psyche, we can understand why they do the terrible things they do.  That doesn't mean we excuse them.  But unless we understand why people go bad - whether it's some inherent biological cause or environmental factors, or both - we can never design ways to minimize the number of people that go bad, so to speak.  Talking about 'God's will" or  "agents of Satan" doesn't cut it for me.  That suggests there is nothing that could have been done to set the individual onto a more positive life path.

And with Cohn, some argue it was feelings of insecurity in a society that looked down on Jews and did worse to homosexuals.  Michael Kruse writes in Politico:

"He was a tangle of contradictions, a Jewish anti-Semite and a homosexual homophobe" 

His self-loathing, in this narrative, made Cohn fearful of exposure and humiliation, and thus he covered his own vulnerability as a Jew with his own anti-semitism and as a homosexual with his own homophobia.


The Takeaway

Cohn - and to a lesser extent the Catholic church portrayed in Spotlight - is the example of this post, but not the main point.

That's the issue of how 'good' folks protect 'bad' folks.  That's the question we should all be asking about the people in the news today.  It's the issue also we should ask ourselves about the people in our own lives that we should be calling out, or at least not giving the cover of our approval.


[UPDATE May 14, 2018:  Here's a New York Magazine article from April 29,2018 that covers similar ground in more detail and explores why none of the prominent Democrats at that time called out Cohn and, in the years since, Trump.]

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.