Home Building - Are Stellers Moving In? And Home Show

There were four Steller Jays poking around under the dead leaves in the backyard.  Yes, the snow is pretty much gone, except on the north side of the house, and that follows the shadow line as the sun gets higher each day.

The Stellers seem to be having a territorial fight over our backyard with some magpies in the last couple of weeks.  But I haven't seen more than three at a time before this morning.  This one came up on our deck.  The others were too far away and obscured by the branches of our still bare high bush cranberry bushes to get a decent shot.  The last time we had a magpie nest in our yard, we lost access to half the yard to screeching, dive-bombing magpie parents.  But we also got to see a nest full of chicks learn to fly.

Stellers have seemed more comfortable with people, often coming very close.  But that might not be true if they have babies.




 It's gray today, after lots of sunshine.  While the bike trails through the woods are still full of snow, the last two days I've been able to take a loop along the street-side bike trails/sidewalks with only a little water here and there.  But even with a fender on the back tire, my jacket or backpack shows I've been on the bike.





We went to the home show yesterday.  I still object to having to pay to get to have companies pitch to me, but since we have some long delayed home repairs - starting with our front porch.  We're comfortable with it, but guests do make comments.






Last time we went was long ago at the Sullivan Arena.  There's an advantage to having lots of companies related to homes all in one place.  We got to talk to lots of folks.  Even a company that uses a helical drill to put in metal posts instead of sonotubes if we switch to wooden steps, which we're thinking about.  But it seems they're a lot more expensive.

I talked to Adam about rain gutters.  Our old plastic ones I put in myself long ago, still are working fine, except the down spouts keep detaching from the gutters.  The part you use to hold the downspouts in place has broken in each case and the ones they have are for a different size.  Adam sells metal ones.  They also have some heat wires to put on the roof along the overhang that create places for the melting snow to get to the gutter instead of building up big ice dams.  We also got ideas for window upgrades - they even sell electric shutters for windows.

I also got to talk to some solar energy folks.  For under $10,000 (plus a federal rebate of 30% until 2019) I could get solar panels installed on our house.  They aren't useful, he said, in the three darkest months, and the price that MLP buys back energy is too low to be worth it, he claimed it would pay for itself over a period of time.  I didn't catch how long, but I did notice the average electric bill prices they listed were higher than ours.  So, while gun sales have dropped after Trump's election, perhaps solar buyers may be rushing to get their panels installed before the subsidies drop. 

A woman named Lisa, who was here from Minnesota, was selling, what I learned now online, is a "whole body vibration" machine for 'only' $2495.  I did get to stand on it and do some exercises.  It essentially vibrates and is supposed to help muscle tone.  This was a whole technology I knew nothing about.  Whether it actually does what they claim, is not really proven by science according to science based medicine website which seemed to one that wasn't industry based.  I did see them online ranging in price from $3999 to under $200, though the lower ranging ones only had a base and no handles.

What stood out as we walked around the basketball arena at UAA's newish sports center where vendors had their booths - plus a few more in adjacent areas - was the number of mortgage companies and realtors.  While I'm sure they were there when we did this in the Sullivan Arena long ago, they seemed to make up a much larger proportion of the vendors.

What Are Your Ethical Responsibilities To Your Pets?

Next Tuesday evening, you can find out:

The UAA Ethics Center and Philosophy Department is please to welcome philosopher, Prof. Gary Varner, Texas A & M to campus for a free, public symposium.  Prof. Varner who will be speaking on 

Pets, Companion Animals, and Domesticated Partners: Ethics and Animal Companions on 

April 18th 

between 6-8 pm in Library 307.  

Abstract: Prof. Varner is author of Personhood, Ethics, and Animal Cognition: Situating Animals in Hare's Two Level Utilitarianism (Oxford University Press, 2012).  In this presentation, he will introduce stipulative definitions of terms "companion animal," "domesticated partners," and "mere pet."  He will argue that the institution of pet-keeping is justifiable, but that the justification is stronger for companion animals than for mere pets, and that it is stronger for domesticated partners.

Post Civil War Supreme Court Good Example Of How Biased Court Can Do Terrible Things - Part I

"The codes required that blacks sign annual labor contracts with plantation, mill, or mine owners  If African Americans refused or could show no proof of gainful employment, they would be charged with vagrancy and put on the auction block, with their labor sold to the highest bidder.  The supposed contract was beyond binding;  it was more like a shackle, for African Americans were forbidden to seek better  wages and working conditions with another employer.  No matter how intolerable the working conditions, if they left the plantation, lumber camp, or mine, they would be jailed and auctioned off.  They were trapped.  Self-sufficiency itself was illegal, as black couldn't hold any other employment besides laborer or domestic (unless they had the written consent of the mayor or judge) and were also banned from hunting and fishing, and thus denied the means even to stave off hunger.  More galling yet was a provision whereby black children who had been sold before the war and hadn't yet reunited with their parents were to be apprenticed off, with the former masters having the first right to their labor.  Finally, the penalty for defiance, insulting gestures, and inappropriate behavior, the Black Codes made clear, was a no-holds-barred whipping." (White Rage, p. 19)

That paragraph was to get your attention.  It describes the post Emancipation Proclamation, post civil war conditions in much of the South.  As I wrote this post chronologically, this was toward the end.  But it begged to lead off the post.  It most graphically shows how diabolically southern states reintroduced what was essentially slavery.  They were able to do this, and continue it into the 20th Century, in part because the Supreme Court found legal points with which to override the obvious injustices that were perpetrated against blacks.

I'm reading Carol Anderson's White Rage:  The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide for my next book club meeting.  This is a difficult book to read because it tells painful stories.  And as much as I like to think that I've dug deeper into race stuff than the average white American, this book is filling in details of stories that, if covered in history books, were done so in sweeping generalities that didn't make the continuing post-civil war de facto slavery and evil clear.

In Part I of these posts, I'm relating the conditions that led to staggeringly atrocious court decisions after the civil war.  Without these contextual details, the court decisions are dry and lifeless with no hint of the real tragic impact they had on people's lives.

How many of us can explain Plessy, Dred Scott, or even the 13th, 14th, or 15th Amendments, let alone their impact on the lives of African-Americans?  

The key point of the chapter I'm now reading - the post civil-war period - is that while African-Americans had been emancipated, they were still virtually slaves.  And there was wholesale unpunished slaughter of African-Americans in the South, and sometimes in the North as well.  How did this work?

After a quote about the 1863 Draft Riots in New York City where black men and women were attacked, the men hanged or beaten to death and sexually mutilated, Anderson goes on to write:

"This violence was simply the most overt, virulent expression of a stream of anti-black sentiment that conscribed the lives of both the free and the enslaved.  Every state admitted to the Union since 1819, starting with Maine, embedded in their constitutions discrimination against blacks, especially the denial of the right to vote.  In addition, only Massachusetts did not exclude African Americans from juries;  and many states, from California to Ohio, prohibited blacks from testifying in court against someone who was white." (p. 12)

After the civil war, the government needed 'an absolute resolve' to protect and assist the four million newly freed slaves and recognize them as citizens of the US.  They needed, first, to make sure that the old slave owning leaders of the South didn't come back into power, Anderson writes.  But Lincoln wanted to go easy on the rebel leaders.

"His plan for rebuilding the nation required only that the secessionist states adopt the Thirteenth Amendment and have 10 percent of eligible voters (white propertied males) swear loyalty to the United States."  

"One official stationed in the now-defeated South noted, 'Wherever I go - the street, the shop, the house, or the steamboat - I hear the people talk in such a way as to indicate that they are yet unable to conceive of the Negro as possessing any rights at all.'  He further explained how murder, rape, and robbery, in this Kafkaesque world, were not seen as crimes at all so long as whites were the perpetrators and blacks the victims.  Given this poisonous atmosphere, he warned, 'The people boast that when they get freedmen affairs in their own hands, to use their own classic expression, 'the niggers will catch hell.''" (pp. 12-13)

Picking out what to quote here is hard.  I'm trying to give a sense of the tangible conditions Anderson writes about as well as the legal and economic structures put into place to maintain the servitude and second class non-citizenship of newly freed slaves.  Suffrage, despite the need, was not part of Lincoln's plan, which was consistent with Lincoln's prior views.

"'I am not," Lincoln had said, 'nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.'" (p.14)

If this wasn't bad enough, it got much worse after Lincoln was assassinated.  Andrew Johnson was a Tennessee Democrat.  Anderson tells us that Johnson had, during the war, blasted the Confederate leadership and wealthy plantation owners, but from the perspective of a poorer white, who felt they should be punished as traitors. But his anger at the white leadership did not include any sympathy for the blacks.

The civil war, Anderson says, was, in Lincoln's and in Johnson's minds, just for preserving the union, while Southerners had made it clear that their departure from the union was to preserve the institution of slavery.  Johnson's antipathy toward the white aristocracy of the South evaporated.

"First, within weeks after taking office, Johnson pardoned scores of former Confederates, ignoring Congress's 1862 Ironclad Test Oath that expressly forbade him to do so, and handed out full amnesty to thousands whom, just the year before, he had called 'guerrillas and cut-throats' and 'traitors . . .[who] ought to be hung.'  Beneficiaries of his largesse included the head of the Confederate Army, Robert E. Lee, and even CSA vice president Alexander  Stephens.  Even more shocking, given Johnson's decades-long resentment against and vilification of the 'damnable aristocracy,' his generosity and forgiveness extended to the planation owners themselves." (p. 15)

Except for the opening quote, we haven't even gotten to the really evil parts of all this.  First Anderson was setting up the context.  This didn't all happen without some pushback in Congress. They set up an organization to help freed slaves learn how to handle their new emancipation.  The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Land's

"charge was to lease forty-acre parcels that would provide economic self-sufficiency to a people who had endured hundreds of years in unpaid toil."

Land was reserved for them in various places, like coastal Georgia and South Carolina.

 But as president Johnson did little to follow through on that.  General Oliver O. Howard, the Freedman's Bureau head immediately began plans to transfer the lands.  Anderson quotes W.E.B. Du Bois on Howard,

"Howard was neither a great administrator nor a great man, but he was a good man.  He was sympathetic and humane, and tried with endless application and desperate sacrifice to do a hard, thankless duty.  Howard made clear that whatever amnesty President Johnson may have bestowed on Southern rebels did not 'extend to . . . abandoned or confiscated property."(pp. 15-16)

But President Johnson began immediately to subvert Howard's mission, relieving him of his command and

". . . commanding the army to throw tens of thousands of freedpeople off the land and reinstall the plantation owners." (p. 16)

Anderson tells us that Johnson had long been a supporter of the Homestead Act,  having pushed well before the Civil War for taking plantation land from the rich and giving it to the poor.  But not to blacks.  And all the Confederate leaders he had pardoned, were now elected members of Congress and leaders of their states.

"As he welcomed one 'niggers will catch hell' state after the next back into the Union with no mention whatsoever of black voting rights and, thus, no political protection, he effectively laid the groundwork for mass murder.
One of the president's emissaries, Carl Schurz, recoiled as he traveled through the South and gathered reports of African American women who had been 'scalped,' had their 'ears cut off,' or had been thrown into a river and drowned amid chants for them to swim to the 'damned Yankees.'  [Steve's note: Think about how that phrase became normalized enough to be the name of a popular New York musical about a baseball team without any lingering trace of this horrible context.]  Young black boys and men were routinely stabbed, clubbed, and shot.  some were even 'chained to a tree and burned to death.'  In what can only be described as a travelogue of death, as he went from county to county, state to state, he conveyed the sickening unbearable stench of decomposing black bodies hanging from limbs, rotting in ditches, and clogging the roadways.  White southerners, it was obvious, had unleashed a reign of terror and anti-black violence that had reached 'staggering proportions.'  Many urged the president to strengthen the federal presence in the South.  Johnson refused, choosing instead, to 'reside over .  . . this slow-motioned genocide.'  The lack of a vigorous  - or for that matter, any response only further encouraged white Southerners, who recognized that they now had a friend in the White House.  One former cabinet member in the Confederacy 'later admitted that  . . . the white sSough was so devastated and demoralized it would have accepted almost any of the North's terms.  But . . . once Johnson 'held up before us the hope of a white man's government,' it led '[us] to set aside negro suffrage' and to resist Northern plans to improve the condition of the freedmen.'  Thus emboldened, Virginia's rebellion-twined leaders planned to 'accomplish . . . with votes what they have failed to accomplish with bayonets.'" (pp. 17-18)

And so the southern states began to reestablish their white supremacist governments.  This next quote does mention one of the court cases we'll get into in Part II of this post.

"The delegates at Louisiana's Constitutional Conference in October 1865 were so confident in the president's support and their reclaimed power that they resolved, "We hold this to be a Government of white people, made and to be perpetuated for the exclusive benefit of the white race; and in accordance with the constant adjudication of the United States Supreme Court' - specifically, the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1856, wherein Chief Justice Roger B. Taney had stated explicitly that black people have 'no rights which the white man is bound to respect.'  The Louisiana delegates concluded 'that people of African descent cannot be considered as citizens of the United States.' (p. 18)

Mississippi was next.

"As noted by Du Bois, the notorious Black Codes 'were an astonishing affront to emancipation' and made 'plain and indisputable' the 'attempt on the part of the Southern states to make Negroes slaves in everything but name.' (p. 19)

And here, back to the opening quote, which is worth repeating, is how they did that.

"The codes required that blacks sign annual labor contracts with plantation, mill, or mine owners  If African Americans refused or could show no proof of gainful employment, they would be charged with vagrancy and put on the auction block, with their labor sold to the highest bidder.  The supposed contract was beyond binding;  it was more like a shackle, for African Americans were forbidden to seek better  wages and working conditions with another employer.  No matter how intolerable the working conditions, if they left the plantation, lumber camp, or mine, they would be jailed and auctioned off.  They were trapped.  Self-sufficiency itself was illegal, as black couldn't hold any other employment besides laborer or domestic (unless they had the written consent of the mayor or judge) and were also banned from hunting and fishing, and thus denied the means even to stave off hunger.  More galling yet was a provision whereby black children who had been sold before the war and hadn't yet reunited with their parents were to be apprenticed off, with the former masters having the first right to their labor.  Finally, the penalty for defiance, insulting gestures, and inappropriate behavior, the Black Codes made clear, was a no-holds-barred whipping." (p. 19)

In Part II, we'll look at some of the Supreme Court decisions that made it possible for the South to reinstate de facto slavery right after the Civil War.

It's also worth thinking about how some people talk about how blacks have had plenty of time to rise up from slavery.  The civil war ended, they remind everyone, in 1865.  That's over 150 years. Anderson shows us in this book that black lives did not improve much, if at all, after the civil war.  For many they got worse.   Slavery, in reality, didn't end in the South until much later.  But significant legal barriers to equality didn't end in the 1960s either.  These many barriers have made it significantly harder for African Americans to get financing from banks to start businesses and buy homes, to even legally buy homes in most neighborhoods, to get equal education, to get jobs, to even avoid prison.  As the movie 13th*  documents, many laws like the ones in the opening quote here, made it easy to target African American men for arrest and imprisonment.  The prisons then turned them over to farms and other businesses that needed manual labor under plantation slavery conditions. In fact the intent of the laws was to insure a cheap supply of labor.  Many people's home deeds have covenants that forbid selling the homes to blacks.  While the covenants are no longer valid, they were written in such a way to make it nearly impossible to remove them from the covenants.

*13th which refers to the 13th Amendment, was nominated for best documentary academy award and won many other awards.  It's available online through Netflix and is well worth watching for people who want to understand how our system perpetuates racial prejudice and discrimination for the financial benefit of private prison owners and others.


[UPDATE April 18, 2017:  Part II is now up here.  And Part III is up here.

"Ex-mayor sues San Diego over wife’s implant rupture"

Now that's a headline you don't see everyday.  The LA Time's lead sentence is:

 "Former San Diego Mayor Roger Hedgecock and his wife are suing the city over a 2015 fall she took on a damaged sidewalk that allegedly ruptured her silicone breast implants and eventually required replacement surgery."

I never heard of Hedgecock until I read this article.  There's a lot here, just in this one sentence, to allow people to make all sorts of conclusions.

1.  He's a former San Diego mayor suing the city he headed

2.  Damaged sidewalks can be a serious issue.  My wife painfully broke her wrist a couple of years ago because of just such a sidewalk in Santa Monica (we didn't sue Santa Monica)

3.  She had breast implants

As I say, there are lots of ways to react to this story.  Here are three that jump out to me immediately.

A.   When is it reasonable to sue the city over bad sidewalks and when should the pedestrian just be careful?

B.   Why would the former mayor sue his own city?

C.   Do we really need to know about her implants and what difference might it make?

A.   When is it reasonable to sue the city over bad sidewalks and when should the pedestrian just be careful?

My mom lived on a street with Italian Stone Pine trees that caused 6 inch upthrusts of the sidewalk and the roots rumpled the streets so bad that city had to put up white and orange striped saw-horses to warn the cars.  There was frustration among the neighbors that the city didn't fix things (they eventually did after about five years), but people knew to walk carefully.  LA is so big that if everyone who got injured tripping over a sidewalk sued, it would bust the budget.  So it seems to me there are a several (not mutually exclusive)  reasons why someone might sue:

1.  to get the city to take fixing the sidewalk seriously

2.  because one couldn't afford health insurance and needed to pay the doctor bills

3.  because a lawyer said you could make a lot of money

For me, the first two are legitimate - especially if you donate most or all of what you win for #1.  

B.   Why would the former mayor sue his own city?

Checking out Mayor Hedgecock on Wikipedia, this seems fairly easy to figure out.  He was elected in 1983.  

In 1985, Hedgecock was charged with several felonies related to receiving over $350,000 in illegal campaign funds and was forced from office because of the scandal.[5] All the key players, including Hedgecock's associates and the financier himself,[6] admitted in sworn statements that they knowingly and willingly broke the law when they conspired to funnel the money from a wealthy financier into Hedgecock's 1983 mayoral campaign.[7] Though Hedgecock claimed none of it was true, he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and was found guilty of twelve counts of perjury, related to the alleged failure to report all campaign contributions. Since California, like most other states, does not allow convicted felons to hold elected office, Hedgecock was forced to resign on December 5. His first trial ended in a mistrial by to a hung jury after the jury deadlocked 11-1 in favor of conviction. However, two of the 12 jurors in the first trial submitted sworn statements that the jury bailiff, Al Burroughs, provided them alcohol and tried to pressure them into finding Hedgecock guilty. State prosecutors then conducted an investigation into the possibility of criminal jury tampering. As part of the investigation, Burroughs admitted trying to influence the verdict. Under California Superior Court rules, any attempt on a bailiff's part to influence a verdict is "serious misconduct" that can be grounds for reversal. However, prosecutors refused to release the transcripts of their investigation interviews to Hedgecock's attorneys.[8]
An appellate court in San Diego ruled in 1988 that the judge presiding over the second trial "who had announced from the bench that he believed Hedgecock was guilty -- was wrong to block release of" the transcripts to the defendant. Hedgecock was still denied access to those documents for two more years until he appealed to the California Supreme Court, which ordered the transcripts released. In that appeal, the Supreme Court threw out the 12 perjury convictions and set aside the remaining conspiracy charge pending a hearing on Hedgecock's motion for a jury trial on grounds of jury tampering.[8]
The defense finally obtained the transcripts in October 1990. The next month, Hedgecock reached a deal with prosecutors in which he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy in return for no jail time or retrial. As part of the deal, a judge reduced the felony to a misdemeanor and dismissed the case on December 31.[8]

I can understand there was no love lost to San Diego from  Hedgecock.  But it does sound like he was guilty and eventually got off most of the counts because of attempts to sway jurors, which is indefensible, but is not necessarily related to whether he was guilty or not.  

C.   Do we really need to know about her implants and what assumptions do people make about them?

I really can't think of any reason we needed to know about the implants.  I don't see how it matters what injury she got, except, perhaps if there was a statute of limitations issues and it took a long time to understand the injury had happened.  

It seems to me there are a number of basic reasons to get a great implant

1.  to attract attention by getting really big breasts

2.  to build self esteem because one has almost no breasts at all (#1 probably fits here as well)

3.  to help in transitioning from male to female

4.  as part of recovery from breast cancer or other damage to one's breasts

According to UPI, Hedgecock met his wife in 1970 and they were married in 1975.  So he isn't married to some much younger woman with humongous breasts.  I'm guessing this was related to breast cancer.  And it's really no one's business.  

Which leads to another question:  Should the media even mention this?  

There's a dilemma here.  If they don't mention it, people will want to know what medical problem arose.  The public will speculate all sorts of possible damage.  And one could argue that if they really wanted to keep it private, they didn't need to sue the city.  But that means that people with legitimate complaints, but who must reveal private conditions to complain, are less likely to seek justice.  

It certainly didn't need to be in the headline - except to get readers to read the story.  (I was going to use a different verb there, but it seemed in bad taste.)

Looking through more of Hedgecock's biography, he seems like an interesting guy.  He was (is?) a surfer, which is pretty much part of growing up in Southern California.  But his father was ill and he had to work.  He had severe enough acne that it got him out of the draft during the Vietnam War, according to Revolvy.   He attended UC Santa Barbara and Hastings Law School and worked as an environmental lawyer.  He was involved in rock music as a promoter and musician.  Wikipedia reports:

"In the months before the infamous Altamont Free Concert, security was provided by the local Hells' Angels motorcycle club to whom Hedgecock paid a signing bonus of a case of Jack Daniel's.[16]
In 1986 he formed a band with well-known San Diego journalist Thomas K. Arnold called The Arnold-Hedgecock Experience. Arnold was a writer for the Reader, San Diego Magazine, the Los Angeles Times and numerous other publications; in the early 1980s he also engineered 1960s pop star Gary Puckett's comeback. They recorded a cover of "Louie, Louie" and donated proceeds to St. Vincent de Paul, a local charity; they played several concerts around town, including opening for The Kingsmen in Oceanside in front of 10,000 people.[17]"

More recently he's been a conservative talk show host who caused a stir by inviting a White Nationalist onto his program and five years late got national attention again when

"he claimed on his radio program that public schools in the United States teach “hatred of white people” and “hatred of white privilege” and that public schools are 'as anti-American, anti-West and anti-white as you could imagine.'[14]"

In times past, people were known in their communities and people knew how to judge what they said based on past experience.  Our world got much more anonymous as transportation improved and people could move around and recreate themselves.  But with social media today, anonymity can quickly be countered.  But if people don't do a little homework when they read about some event, they can jump to conclusions that aren't warranted.  Or they can give someone the benefit of the doubt they don't deserve.  Most importantly this goes for politicians running for office.  A recent ADN story gave several reasons why people didn't vote in the recent municipal election including lack of time and lack of interest.   And I understand, but really, it's not all that hard to do the work of living in a democracy.  So in this post I wanted to know a little more about this story, and it didn't take too long to find out.  Though it did take a lot longer to write it up.  

Dandelions And Chickweed Aren't Weeds

This blog is about how you know what you know.  When you look out at your garden and see lots of little yellow flowers what do you see?
1.  sunshiny color brightening your yard
2.  weeds
3.  nutritional food
4.  medicinal herbs

It all depends on who was able to shape your brain.  The chemical companies that need you to think they are weeds so they will buy their poisons?  A Korean friend who eats dandelion leaves regularly? An herbalist who taught you about natural cures?  Or your brain may have competing models in your head about dandelions.

When I first learned that dandelions and chickweed are edible, after a few summers fighting 'weeds' in my garden in Alaska, I toyed with a book that I would call "50 recipes of dandelions and chickweed."  But I had lots of other things to do and never wrote it.

So when I saw this book - The Boreal Herbal:  Wild Food and Medicine Plants of the North, by Beverly Gray - in the book section of Costco, I started turning pages.

There are pages and pages of plants you'll see if you hike anywhere in Alaska.  (Beverly Gray, appears to live in the Yukon.)  Besides the obvious dandelions and chickweed, it includes uses for all sorts of common plants including spruce tips and devil's club.






Here's part of the section on dandelions:

click to enlarge and focus

And here's a little bit from the chickweed section.

There was a big stack of them at Costco on Debar last week.  This is a great field guide (though it's kind of big to carry around) as well as a guide to food and medicinal uses.

I mentioned the book to someone Saturday.  As I described it, she asked, "The one written by Beverly Gray?"  "That's the one."  She'd taken a workshop with Gray and couldn't say enough about it.

I think about the story of the Japanese visitors who were visiting an Alaskan cannery and were appalled to see all the fish roe being tossed.  That encounter resulted in a significant new export product for Alaskan fishers.

We have an abundance of nutritious plants in Alaska.  Judicious harvesting could lead to another market.  Our forests are a rich source of healthy foods.

We Like Majority Rule, Except When We're Not In The Majority - HB 175

HB 175 is currently in the House Judiciary Committee.   Here's the whole bill.

A BILL
FOR AN ACT ENTITLED
"An Act ratifying an interstate compact to elect the President and Vice-President of the United States by national popular vote; and making related changes to statutes applicable to the selection by voters of electors for candidates for President and Vice-
President of the United States and to the duties of those electors." [emphasis added]

HOUSE JUDICIARY 

GRUENBERG 120   1:00 PM   M W F 

Standing Committee

	CHAIR:	Representative Claman*
	VICE-CHAIR:	Representative Fansler*
		MEMBER:	Representative Kreiss-Tomkins*
		MEMBER:	Representative LeDoux*
		MEMBER:	Representative Eastman
		MEMBER:	Representative Kopp
		MEMBER:	Representative Reinbold
		ALTERNATE:	Representative Millett
		ALTERNATE:	Representative Stutes *

 *indicates members of the House majority.  So this should get out of the committee and could pass in  the House.  Senate fate is probably not too good.  Republicans love the electoral college and come up with all sorts of arguments to keep it.

Here's a letter in the Alaska Dispatch News today that proves my point - you don't like 'majority rule' if you're in the majority and you like it when you're in the majority.

"Without Electoral College …
The benefit of the Electoral College can be seen by subtracting the state of California from the equation. Without California, Trump won by 2 million popular votes and well over a hundred electoral votes. Subtract New York as well and he won by 3 1/2 million popular votes and two to one in the Electoral College. Do we really want one or both of those states dictating policy to the whole rest of the country? As it is, just those two guaranteed blue states mean Democrats can count on almost a third of the electoral votes needed to win the presidency before the election even starts.
— Bill Tolbert
King Salmon"

So, majority rule is bad if Trump loses (popular vote) and good if he wins (electoral college.)  But what is this nonsense about "without California" and "without New York"?

California, with 37 million people is  about 12% of the US.  New York, with a population of over 19 million, makes up about 7% of the US population.  So Bill Tolbert has no issue with deducting nearly one-fifth of the US population to get his numbers.

He also neglected to take out the second most populous state - Texas - with 25 million people, or about 8% of the US population.  I can't imagine why he would have skipped Texas. (I*)

Tolbert's argument is like saying, if it weren't for the heart attack, he would have lived to 80.  And if it don't count his cancer either, he could have lived to 90.  Creating alternative worlds through mathematical fiction.

Time For Everyone To Voluntarily Leave United Airlines

I watched the video of the man being dragged off the plane.  WHATTTTTT????????????  FOR REAL???

OK, Alaska Airlines once removed a passenger for insulting a female crew member.  And more recently they had a woman leave the plane for being disruptive and insulting to the man sitting next to her because he'd supported Trump.  But neither was physically dragged off.  Watch how politely the flight attendant spoke to the unhinged woman passenger.  And in both cases, the passengers were at fault.

From what I can tell (given the sketchy info available so far), United decided to bump four passengers so that four United crew could get to work, presumably, at the destination, Louisville.  In my experience passengers don't generally board until the bumping is taken care of.   In this case the passengers were already on board.

The airline says they offered $400 then $800 vouchers to people who would voluntarily get off.   No one volunteered.  Then, they say, they picked four people randomly.  Presumably they would all get the $800  that was offered to people who voluntarily left the plane, but I don't know that for sure.

Three passengers got off 'without incident.'  The fourth said he was a doctor who had patients to see the next morning.  He also was of Asian descent.

The passenger did nothing wrong except insist that his valid ticket for that flight be honored.  The airline screwed up by overbooking the flight and boarding the passengers first and then insisting that four get off.  They should have thought about their crew members before filling the plane.  Once it was filled, there was no reason why their crew should have precedence over paying passengers. Even before the passengers boarded the plane, there's no reason crew should have precedence.  How did they pick him?  Was he flying on frequent flyer miles? Was it because he was Asian?

If they needed to board sky marshals, I might give them a little more leeway.  But the passenger said he had to get to work the next morning which was no different from the United crew having to get to work.  And crew members are much more interchangeable than a doctor seeing his patients.

I applaud the man for not backing down.  The airline employee used terrible judgment when he forcibly dragged the passenger off the plane.

I can't believe that there wasn't a single person on the plane who couldn't have been persuaded to take the $800 voucher (or move if necessary) to free up one more seat.  They could have even offered to let them wait between flights in the United board room.  There were lots of other options.  They could have even found another crew member to substitute in Louisville.  Surely they do that all the time when crew call in sick.

I understand that an unruly passenger might need, on occasion, to be forcibly removed from a plane.  One who might be endangering other passengers.  I don't know how often passengers are dragged off like this man was.  Here's a story about an abusive United passenger causing a Sydney - San Francisco flight to divert to Auckland, but the video shows him walking off on his own power.  And the passenger was the problem.

But this man was only standing up (or in this case sitting down) for his rights.  The airline overplayed its authority to make these decisions, which they have for airline safety requirements.  Not to fly they screw up and need to fly their own crew around.

I'm guessing the pressure to fly on-time played some role in this.  There was also some machismo in the security guy having his authority challenged.

I have to give a big cheer for cell phone videos that document what happens.  Of course they can be edited to distort what happened, but it seems that most of these get up pretty quickly and are from ordinary folks who aren't editing before they post.

I don't normally write about something like this where all the facts are not clear yet.  Perhaps it's because family matters have made me a frequent flyer over the last several years, but this one hits home.  And I'm ready to eat crow if it turns out the passenger wasn't a doctor and did something, besides refuse to give up his rightful seat, that legitimately provoked his removal.  But it will be hard to justify dragging him out.  But I'm ready to say I was wrong if time proves I jumped the gun.  And my wife and I volunteered, when getting our boarding pass, to bump and when they offered us $400 each on flight that was leaving right away (though with stops on the way), we said ok.  Before we got on the plane.

The United CEO's non-apology letter doesn't help. In fact it suggests that the problem starts at the top of the company.  I agree you should support your employees when they take the difficult, but right, action. I cheered on Alaska for backing up their crewe when they booted the man who demeaned the female crew member.   But not when it's the airlines fault.

I hope lots of regular United passengers start checking out other airlines.  Given the leggings incident a couple of weeks ago, and this saga (video below), I'd say that United has a serious problem.

My Tire Got Screwed

It was pretty easy to see why I had a flat tire.  Fortunately, the car was in front of the house and I have a great neighbor who loves working on cars.

First he unscrewed it.  You can see the grayish mark of the head of the screw and the hole in the middle.  He had a tool to go in the hole and clean it out.

Then he pulls out this sticky rubbery strip - looked like sticky licorice - and threaded it into another tool and applied the glue.

And then he shoved it into the whole.  The two ends go up as he pushes down.  Then he pulls out the tool and there's just a bit of the two ends sticking out when he's done.  He fills the tire and we're back in business.

Good neighbors make life so much better.  Thanks Roy.

What Does "Pay Their Fair Share" Mean?

Alaska's budget is about $4 billion short.  The legislature is battling to balance the budget.

Republicans, pretty much, want to do it by cutting the budget.
Democrats say it's been cut to the bone over the last couple of years and that revenue needs to be raised.

In a recent blog post I quoted a letter to the editor which called on teachers to take a pay cut to preserve their colleagues' jobs.   I pointed out that it seemed unfair for only teachers to take a pay cut.  Everyone benefits from kids getting a good education.  Everyone should take a pay cut.  And that there was a way already set to do this, and it was done in most other states.  It's called an income tax.

I, of course, knew that this term is like blasphemy to conservatives, particularly to wealthy ones.

Oliver, who comments here once in a while, suggested, in a comment to that post, that we have a sales tax instead.  After a discussion about all the people who would not pay an income tax, including those who make less than $14,000, Oliver concluded that:

"Not what I would call fair or everyone paying their fair share."

I took some time to think about and respond to his comment.  When I tried to post my comment, there was a problem and it wouldn't post there.  I had thought about making it all a new post, but figured the discussion should stay with the original post and comment.  Then I tried again and it said my comment was too many words.  So I'm making this a new post.  You can see the old one and Oliver's comment in full here.

My response:

1.  For the sake of this discussion, I'll just accept the numbers that Oliver offered.  I agree in general principle that as many people should pay the tax as possible.  I would point out that as of 2016, there were 198,617 residents 18 or under, many of whom would live in families that paid an income tax.

2.  It's long been understood that a sales tax is a regressive tax, meaning the poor pay a larger percent of their income in sales tax, and that it 'hurts' them far more than it 'hurts' wealthier people.  Even if wealthier people pay more in sales taxes.  I won't go through that argument here.  That link also discusses the reasons for a progressive tax, like most income taxes, in which higher income people pay a higher percentage of their income. (Assuming there aren't enough loopholes to make the higher rates moot.)

So I would just like to focus here on the idea of "everyone paying their fair share."  More particularly, on the underlying assumption of that.



The Problem Of The Work Ethic In The 21st Century World

The work ethics that most Americans can quote goes something like this:  hard work and diligence are morally good.  There are some corollary assumptions:

• that if you work hard, you will do well
• wealth is the result of hard work
• poverty is the result of laziness

  reminds us that work wasn't always seen as having intrinsic value, particularly manual labor.  The Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans saw work as something to escape, to have slaves do.   It wasn't until the Reformation that work became holy.  Luther equated one's vocation with one's calling from God.  But, with Calvin, according to History of Work Ethic, work didn't make you good, it was a sign that you were predestined to be good.  

"Central to Calvinist belief was the Elect, those persons chosen by God to inherit eternal life. All other people were damned and nothing could change that since God was unchanging. While it was impossible to know for certain whether a person was one of the Elect, one could have a sense of it based on his own personal encounters with God. Outwardly the only evidence was in the person’s daily life and deeds, and success in one’s worldly endeavors was a sign of possible inclusion as one of the Elect. A person who was indifferent and displayed idleness was most certainly one of the damned, but a person who was active, austere, and hard-working gave evidence to himself and to others that he was one of God’s chosen ones (Tilgher, 1930, p. 53-61).
Calvin taught that all men must work, even the rich, because to work was the wil of God."

In any case, today, most of us, at least subconsciously if not explicitly, tend to look down on the poor and give respect to the wealthy.  But despite this general rule, there have always been exceptions:

1. Those who inherit wealth only work if they want to or their families require them to. If they do work it’s often in jobs provided through family connections
2. Slaves worked, but didn’t get paid for their work - their masters took the benefit, and those lost wages are still reflected in our society’s wealth inequality.
3. Women didn’t work outside the house unless economics forced them to.  Married women whose  husbands had enough income to support the family worked at home.  Depending on how much the husband earned, the woman might work hard in the house or might have help to do most of the work.
4. People who were physically or mentally ill or disabled may or may not have worked depending if they could find something that matched their abilities  
5.  Children may or may not have worked - it depended on the family income and where they lived.  Farm kids often worked from a young age.  Child labor outside the house/farm expanded greatly in the industrial age for poor families.  And conditions were often horrendous.

Today, we still have this moral value attached to wealth and working.  Not working, or at least being poor, is seen in the US as a moral failing.  We may provide services for the homeless, but we tend to blame their homelessness on lack of a work ethic.

A Change In the Nature Of Work

The myth is that the work ethic was useful once in a time when everyone had to work for the family and the society to survive.  That may have been true of families, but most societies in history had workers and those who lived off the work of the rest.
The work ethic was probably a convenient tool when human economies became industrialized and workers were needed in the factories.   But our economy has changed.

Trump has blamed immigrants for taking away American jobs though we know for the most part immigrants take jobs that Americans either don’t want to do, or skilled positions for which employers can’t find enough qualified Americans.

The Real Job Thief Has Been Automation.  

From the time that science was applied to management in the US (around the early 1900s) workers were seen as a problem. Early Management Science tried to make factories more efficient by making people more machine like.  People no longer created a whole product from the beginning to the end.

Instead the process was broken down in to separate pieces, and factory workers did the same 10 - 90 second action over and over again all day.  The joy of work, of having a craft and doing it well, was replaced by tedious, boring work.  First this was with factory work, but then it spread into other fields.  Some of the last fields are education and medicine.  The technology of distance education, for example, reduces teaching into components.  Teachers prepare, with the help of teaching technicians, videos, reading assignments, etc. before the class begins.  Everything is put on line and the teacher may have no role except to comment in discussion groups. And a new teacher could step in and appropriate the work of the teacher who designed the class.   Doctors are no longer working in private practice.  They are now mostly employees of hospitals.

What Will We Do With Our Leisure?

This change was already anticipated in the 1950s and 1960’s when weekly magazines had cover stories with titles like “Automation:  What will people do with all their leisure time?”  They were predicting 30 hour work weeks.

What they forgot was that we have a capitalistic society where profits go to the owners of the companies.  So, as work got automated, some employees did get more leisure - they lost their jobs.  The remaining employees often ended up working more than far more than 40 hours a week.

Companies then used automation to out-source a lot of the remaining work to customers - think about self-service gas and grocery checkout, ATM machines,  skipping travel agents and booking your own tickets on line.  Now we even have to check ourselves in and get our own baggage claims.

Instead of 30 hour work weeks, we have far more unemployed, and a much greater income gap between the heads of corporations and their employees.

Are You Ever Going To Wrap This Up, Steve?

The point of this long explanation is that people are unemployed because our society doesn't need everyone to work to produce the goods and services that we want.  In fact, we do it more efficiently with more machines and fewer workers.

But our value system is still based on a society that needed every able bodied person to work.  I’m guessing that you, like most people, are still thinking in terms of those old values.  But owners of companies have an incentive to automate and get rid of jobs - it’s cheaper and machines don’t have personal lives that interfere with their work.

So that’s why I’m not persuaded by your argument that with an income tax, some people don’t contribute their fair share.  That language implies a moral shortcoming on the part of those who will get something for nothing that echoes the Protestant work ethic.

Most, if not all of those people who don’t earn enough to pay an income tax, also didn’t get a fair share when it came to things like good parents, skills that are rewarded in our school system and job market, good mental and physical health, and other factors that impact who will succeed and who won’t in our society.  Brawn which was marketable in the past, is much less in demand.

The systems we have for allocating pay are also very skewed.   How hard you work is not necessarily related to how well you do or whether what you do makes society better or worse.   Should the people who get rich selling alcohol have some extra responsibility for the people who die at the hands of an alcoholic?   Should a teacher get tax credits for inspiring a student to succeed despite a difficult upbringing? [UPDATE a little later:  When I wrote this, I didn't know that a bill has been introduced in California to exempt teachers from state income tax.0

An important measure of human beings for me is how they play the hand they were dealt at birth.  Those who are given a lot, owe a lot more than those who were dealt a lousy hand.  In my ideal world, people's moral worth would be measured by the ratio between the benefits one receives and what one gives to society.  Ideally, everyone would be at least 1:1.

The people who camp in the woods along the bike trails would mostly like a decent home and income and only camp in the woods when they chose to.  But their skills and life experiences have gotten them to a point where they really can’t get out of their ruts without some serious interventions.  Our health care non-system caused many people to self-medicate, with alcohol being the legal drug, but lots of illegal drugs have also been available.   American individualism still attributes poverty to the laziness of the individual.  Other countries recognize that the social, political, economic systems play a big role in who succeeds, financially, in life and who doesn't.

I  don’t have a problem paying higher taxes to offset what they can’t pay.  I wouldn’t want to trade places with them.  And I also know that as the percentage of poor gets bigger, the more brutal society gets, even for the wealthy.

I would love a society where people are nurtured as kids and helped to discover and develop their skills and talents so we have far fewer people who can’t make it on their own.  But we also have to figure out how to distribute wealth when there just aren’t real jobs for a large segment of society.

And so "paying their fair share" doesn't mean that everyone pays in money.  Lots of people are paying with abusive parents,  with learning disabilities that weren't overcome because their school saw them as problems kids not teachable kids, with skills that are no longer valued, with trauma from war or crime, and in many other ways.

This Debate Isn't New

And I'd note, these conflicting  ways of looking at the world aren't new.  Hilary Mantel, in Bring Up The Bodies, describes how Henry VIII's chief minister,  Thomas Cromwell's attempt to hire the poor to build much needed infrastructure was treated by Parliament:

"In March, Parliament knocks back his new poor law.  It was too much for the Commons to digest, that rich men might have some duty to the poor;  that if you get fat, as gentlemen of England do, on the wool trade, you have some responsibility to the men turned off the land, the labourers without labour, the sowers without a field.  England needs roads, forts, harbours, bridges.  Men need work.  It's a shame to see them begging their bread, when honest labour could keep the realm secure.  Can we not put them together, the hands and the task?
But Parliament cannot seee how it is the state's job to create work.  Are not these matters in god's hands, and is not poverty and dereliction part of his eternal order?  To everything there is a season:  a time to starve and a time to thieve.  If rain falls for six months solid and rots the grain in the fields, there must be providence in it;  for God knows his trade.  It is an outrage to the rich and enterprising, to suggest that they should pay an income tax, only to put bread in the mouths of the workshy.  And if Secretary Cromwell argues that famine provokes criminality;  well, are there not hangmen enough?" (emphasis mine.)

I'd note that Thomas Cromwell lived from 1485 - 1540 and Martin Luther lived from 1483 -1546.
John Calvin lived from 1509 - 1584.

Another Reason Not To Have Your Bills Paid By Direct Deposit

From the BBC:

"When the police knocked the door down they found a mountain of mail in the hall and Henry Summers was inside, dead. He had been dead for three years, undiscovered, because all of his bills were paid by direct debit."

The journalist goes on to tell the story of who this man had been.