Fighting Back And Staying Sane

We came back home to a beautiful spring day.  While we were gone I got bits and pieces of 'the news,'  but mostly I was focused on grandchildren and friends.  These and the natural world are the true antidotes to the overdose of stupid* the USA is experiencing.

So, here, I'm going to give some excerpts from recent Alaska Dispatch News pieces along with their antidotes.

From Sen. Cathy Giessel:

"Some express dislike, even disdain, for businesses that employ thousands of our fellow Alaskans.  That animosity clouds the source of our prosperity, of what made the last two generations of families and businesses in our state an astonishing success."

This sounds good enough that I'm sure many people think, 'Yeah, that's right.'  But let's get real.

• I don't know any people who have disdain for businesses that employ thousands. They have disdain for businesses that treat their employees badly, that leave the environment worse than they found it, that take the wealth of Alaska to their various corporate headquarters outside the state rather than reinvesting here.
• It wasn't generations of families and businesses that caused our astonishing success.  It was the huge deposits of oil and the fact that the state owned the oil that caused our financial success and jobs.  Yes, oil companies played a big role in extracting that oil, but they also made huge profits from that oil.

I could go through her whole commentary line by line and point out what she doesn't mention.  But not now.

The antidote?   The amazing tulip in our front yard.    (I've photoshopped these images because the backgrounds tended to be messy and photoshop can be a fun distraction.  The originals are below.)




From an Ed Rogers commentary on Trump firing Comey (originally in the Washington Post)

"What it [Comey's firing] is, however, is the president following sound advice from a serious, credentialed and experienced leader in whom he has entrusted great responsibility.
The Rosenstein memo makes the reasoning behind Comey's firing nonpartisan and completely bulletproof."

Barf bags are in the seat pockets in front of you.  Real journalists, not Trump apologists, write, also in the Washington Post and reprinted in the ADN,

"The president already had decided to fire Comey . . . Trump gave Sessions and Rosenstein a directive:  to explain in writing the case against Comey. 

Rosenstein threatened to resign after the narrative emerged from the White House Tuesday evening cast him as the prime mover of the decision to fire Comey and the president acted only on his recommendation, said the person close to the White House . . ." [emphasis added]

For severed political spin nausea, here are some hosta shoots poking out of the ground.

OK, you get the point.  I don't need to add more examples of bullshit here.  I'm sure you've got way more than enough, so just take the antidotes.  Here are some lilac buds.

Some lily leaves exploding out of the earth.

 And there was a mailbox with a week's worth of mail.  Photoshop seemed like a good way to transform these mostly pieces of junk.

Here are the original pictures.  Except for the lily leaves.  I accidentally put the final version in, but I have to move on.  I hope my pictures inspire you to go out and look closely at the wonders of nature that surround us.

*Stupid is only one of the ills we are suffering. And using terms like stupid doesn't help cut through the conflicting ways of interpreting the world around us.  Probably it's more about the evil of people who produce create bogus facts and attack truth who are rewarded by the people who eagerly feed on the alternative realities like a drug for their emotional holes.

Morning Visit To Japanese Tea Garden

We did an early morning visit with our grandson to the Japanese garden in Golden Gate Park.  A wonderful time to visit - early morning sunshine and hardly any other people.  And the koi and the various bridges over the water and the pagodas all kept the youngen's attention.

Quick SF Observations - Preschool Education, Aggressive Cars, Butterfly Wing

I've been watching a couple of kids (almost three and someone older) negotiate some pretty fancy playgrounds the last couple of days and I'm impressed at all the learning they're doing.  It's all about testing balance and strength and grip.  They're learning what their muscles can do, how far they can stretch or lean.  I watched my grandson today (the one under three) as he worked his way across a net.  He had to step on a shaky surface, keep from slipping through the holes, find handholds, and pull himself up onto a platform.  When he finally made it to the top he did a little dance shouting, "I did it!"

This is serious work.  Can you jump from rock to rock?  How do you get up different kinds of 'ladders'?  And while both the kids worked hard to master their challenges, it was also amazing the difference in ability the four months difference makes.

Sometimes they need a little help - a hand to hold, a suggested hand hold - but mostly they were better off just working it out themselves.

This is why I haven't had time to write here.

But here are a couple more pictures from the last two days.

This butterfly wing was caught while feeding on orange slices at the California Academy of Sciences rain forest exhibit.




And these two cars were in the underground garage.  These were two human-less parked cars, that struck me as appearing unusually aggressive.  Maybe there should be a special word for anthropomorphic for objects that were created by humans (as opposed to natural objects.)  And, I guess words that distinguish between living and non-living things.

Family Time And SF Street Drama Adventure

Today was a family day with our son and daughter-in-law and their two kids.  A ferry ride to Sausalito and just some good time.  I'm slowed down a lot because the heel I thought was now ok, started acting up again.  It was last a short issue last August.  But J got me a small ankle brace and a cane and I was ok.  But we didn't push it.


There was a mystery yacht in the Sausalito harbor.  J found a reference to it as Attessa III or IV.  While it has the general shape of Attessa IV - including the helicopter - Attessa IV has much more sculpted lines.  And Attessa III seems much stubbier.  So it stays a mystery.   You can compare the different Attessas (owned by Montana billionaire Dennis Washington to the ship we saw (below.)

 


We went back by bus in different groups.  I had the last part on my own.  There was a bit of a ruckus at the back of the bus.  One guy was in a slightly different world than the rest of the riders.  He had a new white t-shirt covering his face from his nose down and was physically agitated and another passenger was saying he should get off the bus.  They weren't being aggressive, but it wasn't quiet either.  A woman nearby me was catching it on her iPhone - in case it escalated I guess. They guy came to the front of the bus and sat on the other side of the woman sitting next to me.  She was in her 50s or so and acted as if all was normal.  Some younger women moved to the back.  He went to the back of the bus.  The women came back to the front.  Then got off at the next stop.  At my stop, the woman next to me got off as well as three more younger women.  And the man.  Who crossed the street with all of us.  Then he started talking to one of the women who had pulled back from the cross walk and had gotten behind a bus stop shelter.  I didn't feel any personal threat so I told the woman to just walk with me and we'd go to the small lobby of my hotel just ahead.  She did and he followed and I positioned myself between them.  He asked for money and he'd leave us alone. We kept walking, I talked calmly, and we were getting close to the lobby.  Almost there and a police car pulled up and called him to stop harassing us.  While the officer was talking to him we went to the lobby.  She just needed to get to the end of the block and across the street to pick up her mail at a postal station.  So we walked together while the officer was still there with him.  When we got her mail, the police car was gone and we saw the man ahead at the corner where she needed to get the bus.  But as the next bus left, she saw him on it.  When we got to the corner, he wasn't there and she got her bus.  When I got back to the hotel lobby - it's really a 50s style motor in - the man at the desk said the officer had asked to see the man's id  and then let him go.  I don't think he ever touched the man.  They just talked, and the man did seem aware it was a police officer.

And, apropos nothing other than San Francisco, there was a Ouija Board exhibit at the airport.  It's spelled with an 'a' at the end, but when I was a kid they were called 'ouiji' boards.

House Republicans Pass Bill Just To Say They Passed Bill To Kill Obamacare

That was my impression.  That they would say anything to anyone to get them to change their vote to yes.  What's in the bill was irrelevant.  Whether it was good policy or not was irrelevant.  Whether it made the people of the US better off or not was irrelevant.  Trump and Ryan said Obamacare repeal and replacement was their top priority.  They missed the 100 day mark, but now they got it.  Passed the House anyway.  It was just a symbol.

And as I read today's ADN on why our Rep. Don Young changed his vote to yes, it seems he believes that it was just symbolic.

From Rep. Don Young:

“'This bill we passed today will not become law. It’ll be changed as time goes by. But unless we move it, or move a vehicle, nothing’s going to happen, and that’s not good,' Young said Thursday in an interview after the vote."

He was 'promised' there would be changes to protect Alaska which reports say comes out worst of all states under this legislation.

“I got a commitment from the speaker to take care of the disproportionate cost — we and Illinois are really hurt the worst but we think we can take care of that,” Young said. 

“And I know we have the money, about $19 billion that can be dispersed” to offset costs, he said. “I’ve talked to the Secretary (of Health and Human Services) — Dr. (Tom) Price — and he assures me that (Alaska) will be made whole, if it was to become law.”

I'm not a big Don Young fan, but he is a wily politician and he either knows that this bill won't make it through the Senate as is, or even at all.  Or he believes he'll get what he was promised.  Given this administration, I suspect the former.

And Alaska's US Senator Lisa Murkowski confirms my impression:

"Murkowski said she fears the House “is basically trying to just build the votes rather than build good policy,” and get the “monkey off its back” to pass the bill along to the Senate."

November 2018 is going to be the most interesting and probably the  nastiest mid-term election in a long time.

Is Trump Turning Lemons Into Hotels?

The LA Times had a story yesterday about the lifting of a 16 year old ban on lemons from the north of Argentina.

“We were completely blindsided,” said Joel Nelsen, president of the California Citrus Mutual, an industry advocacy group. “They just flat-out ignored us, and that’s completely unacceptable.”

That doesn't sound like the Trump who was going to protect American business and agriculture from unfair foreign competition.

Meanwhile, a November CNN Money piece talked about Trump and his daughter's post election phone call with the president of Argentina.

"The question is whether Donald Trump and his children are using their newly found political power to push the deal across the finish line. It would raise questions of yet another conflict of interest between Trump's business empire and the White House.
Trump spoke to Argentina's president, Mauricio Macri, on November 14 and Ivanka Trump also briefly came on the call, according to Macri's spokesperson.
The two go back a long way. Macri has a similar background -- his father was a billionaire real estate developer, and the Macri family did a real estate deal with Trump in New York in the 1980s. Macri and Trump were friends at the time, and Macri has known Ivanka since she was a kid."

But maybe we shouldn't jump to conclusions so fast.

The LA Times article on the lemons goes on to say:

"In December, President Obama’s administration said it would lift the ban, which had been imposed after complaints by producers in California that the Argentine lemons carried diseases.
But a month later, Trump’s administration issued a 60-day stay on the decision. That stay had been extended, stalling the return of imports from one of the world’s top lemon producers to its largest market."

So this was something that was already decided by Obama, and Trump stopped it for two months.  OK, at this point, Trump is going against Macri's interests and is with the lemon farmers.  Then it goes on:

“We [the lemon growers] disagreed with the Obama administration, but this rule now belongs to the Trump administration and it flies in the face of the administration’s priorities, which are to protect domestic agriculture, U.S. businesses and U.S. jobs,” Nelsen said. [Nelsen is the spokesperson for the lemon growers]

He [Nelsen] also said serious questions remain about the hazard posed by pests that could hitch a ride on Argentine fruit and damage U.S. groves.

The article mentions that we get lemons from Mexico and Chile.  Do they have better pest inspection and control than Argentina?  Or is this just 'fake news' from the California lemon industry to stop a competitor?  Good questions to pursue.

The CNN article, further down, also raises questions about the relationship between Macri and Trump.

"The two haven't always been close though. Macri threw his support behind Hillary Clinton in September."

So we don't really know all the details and motivations.  It could be that Trump held up Obama's change of policy to retaliate against Macri for supporting Clinton (who, like everyone else at that time, thought she would win.)  And now perhaps they have made up and part of the negotiations included lifting the lemon ban in exchange for hotel approval.  We don't know.

This is why so many of us are angry that Trump ignores legal and ethical standards that he  should divest his business interests and that his kids play such a big role in the business and the administration.

Even if he did everything totally above board - something that is hard to picture - there would still always be the appearance of conflict of interest, and the appearance that Trump is using the presidency to improve his business.

But Trump rejects that.  The November CNN piece ends with this quote from Trump:

"Prior to the election, it was well known that I have interests in properties all over the world. Only the crooked media makes this a big deal!"

Trump seems to think he can badmouth anyone, but if anyone turns the tables, it's a lie.  No matter what the real motivations for the lifting of the lemon ban, this man is seriously ill.

Variations On A Rose

The roses where we visited today were a brilliant red.   Here's a close up of one with variations using Photoshop filters.  With each filter I get to see a slightly different aspect of the rose.

Here's the original picture with the blown up portion highlighted.

And here's another rose, whose lower level occupant made me think of these not as flowers, but as dwellings.   This used the posterize filter which highlighted the bug better.

Morning Anchorage Woodpecker, Evening LA Sunset

So much to write about, but things that need some thought and time to get closer to right.  A quick trip to LA to do more work on my mom's house, then to San Francisco for some grandchild time.  The new baby over two months old now, so time to see her and her older brother for a few days.

So, you just get a couple of pictures.




I heard a woodpecker as I was putting stuff into the compost heap yesterday morning before we left.  And then I saw it.  The angle from the deck wasn't as good, but I took it before it flew away.  I think it's a downy woodpecker, but hard for me to tell for sure with these shots.







The flight was uneventful.  I'm trying to read The Camp of the Saints, supposedly one of Bannon's favorite books.  It's hard to get through, but it does help me understand how people could have voted for Trump.  I'm trying to figure out how to convey the sense I get from the book to do a post on it.  Race is a big factor - the need to protect the white race, but it's more than that.  Stay tuned.

We got into LA about 7:30 as the sun was setting.  I was thinking about the 10pm sunset in Anchorage, that gets later each day.

Intercept: NSA Spied On Japanese At Captain Cook Hotel During International Whaling Conference In 2007

An April 24, 2017 article in The Intercept covers various instances of surveillance work related to Japan, based on reports they say they got last week from Edward Snowden.  The end of the article is based on the report they link to, which I've copied below.

It reports on how they spied on the Japanese delegation at the 2007 International Whaling Commission meeting in Anchorage.   It has a strangely school-boy prank "look what we did" quality to it.  And 20 miles from an office on Elmendorf to the Captain Cook Hotel seems a bit far.  Judge for yourself.

"DYNAMIC PAGE -- HIGHEST POSSIBLE CLASSIFICATION IS
TOP SECRET // SI / TK // REL TO USA AUS CAN GBR NZL
(S//SI//REL) Special-Delivery SIGINT: How NSA Got Reports to US Negotiators In Time for Them
To Be of Value
FROM: ooooooooooooNSA Representative to Department of Commerce (S112)
Run Date: 07/13/2007
(S//SI//REL) Imagine that you represent the US at an international forum. You and your allies from other nations are trying to win a key vote, but the opposition camp is lobbying furiously and it's really coming down to the wire. You would dearly love to obtain some SIGINT that lets you know what the other side is up to, wouldn't you? But if the meetings are being held in a remote location, how can NSA get it to you? 

(S//SI//REL) For scenarios like the above, NSA improvises! Recently I was fortunate to serve as the NSA on-the-ground support to just such an international forum - the meeting of the International Whaling Commission. "The International Whaling Commission?" you ask. The IWC recently held its 59th annual meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, where the 77-member commission voted on several whale conservation measures, which the US government supports. When the meeting ended on 1 June, the anti-whaling camp won, but the outcome was not clear going in. 

(S//SI//REL) Japan again hoped to end the 21-year-old moratorium on commercial whaling, but failing that, lobbied for votes supporting other pro-whaling proposals. New Zealand had the target access, and collected and provided insightful SIGINT that laid out the lobbying efforts of the Japanese and the response of countries whose votes were so coveted. US officials were anxious to receive the latest information during the actual negotiations in Anchorage. But how do you get GCSB* SIGINT to the IWC Chair at the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage? 

Japanese

(U) Japanese delegates listen on the opening day of the International Whaling 

Commission meeting in Anchorage, Alaska in this handout photo taken May 28, 2007. (Reuters) 

(S//SI//REL) Everything comes together in the global cryptologic enterprise. We contacted the Alaska Mission Operations Center (AMOC) at Elmendorf AFB in Anchorage and were assured that they could accommodate us, even though we would be showing up at work on the Sunday before Memorial Day and working the holiday. Department of Commerce funded the TDY for a Commerce Intelligence Analyst and me, NSA's External Representative to Commerce. I admit to being skeptical that we would get all AMOC had promised - immediate access to NSANet and MAUI. But it was really true! In no time the airmen on duty had me up and running on NSANet with access to MAUI and a working printer. 

(S//SI//REL) The time difference from New Zealand to Alaska worked in our favor, as the very latest collection was ready for distribution first thing in the morning, before the IWC convened. The AMOC is located about 20 miles from the hotel where the IWC meeting took place. I took a 30-minute cab ride to the AMOC daily at 7:00 a.m. in order to retrieve the latest SIGINT products, which I placed in my locked bag. My Commerce colleague picked me up in her rented vehicle and together we couriered the SIGINT to the hotel. The US delegation had a private conference room with a lock. We arranged to have the room emptied at a specific time and then distributed the material to the fully cleared delegates to read in silence. When everyone finished we couriered the material back to the AMOC and shredded it. 

(S//REL) We knew the delegates valued the material simply because they took time from their very hectic schedules to be there and read it. The pointing and nodding was also a good indicator. Two US delegates from Commerce and two from State read, as well as two New Zealand and one Australian delegate. Was the outcome worth the effort? The Australian, New Zealand, and American delegates would all say "yes." I believe the whales would concur. _______________________________________________________________________

(U) Notes:

*GCSB = New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau"

The lead story in the article also has an Anchorage connection.  It's about how a Japanese spy agency recorded the Russian pilots who shot down the Korean Airline passenger jet that briefly strayed into Russian territory in 1983.  That flight, KAL 107, refueled in Anchorage before it was shot down.

[UPDATE 9:30PM:  I should have added this originally.  From Wikipedia:

"Signals intelligence (SIGINT) is intelligence-gathering by interception of signals, whether communications between people (communications intelligence—abbreviated to COMINT) or from electronic signals not directly used in communication (electronic intelligence—abbreviated to ELINT). Signals intelligence is a subset of intelligence collection management."

Why Bad Politicians Hate Good Academics - Mouhcine Guettabi Explaining His Research on Economic Impacts On Two Alaskan Boroughs

There's a war going on against academics as well as against the media.  People who try to uncover the truth are never the favorites of people in power and often they are persecuted.  (See this and this, for example. Journalists are being killed in a number of countries including Trump's role model, Russia.  But first he wants to get rid of the First Amendment.  While that may be just distraction or hyperbole, the trouble with liars is you don't know when they are serious. You get the idea.  Tracking down fake news takes up time that could be better spent.)


Dr. Mouhcine Guettabi's Presentation at ISER

Friday at noon, I went to a display of what good scientists do to get near the truth.  And why bad politicians hate good scientists.

Economics professor and researcher at UAA's Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER,) Mouhcine Guettabi,  gave a talk.

I don't claim to understand all the details of his formuli, but what was so refreshing was listening to how he treated the 'truth.'

He never claimed to have it.  He qualified everything he said.  And, in fact, the whole presentation was a preliminary look at work in process (he even said he didn't think he could say 'in progress') in front of about 25 others, many of whom know the subject and the methodology well.  He wanted them to critique his methodology, to challenge his tentative claims, to help him get closer to the elusive truth.

After hearing so many politicians attack or embrace statistics to 'prove' that their policies are working, regardless of whether the claim has any validity, I found Guettabi's talk to be like a walk in the wilderness.  Instead of the noise of politicians trying to spin everything in their favor, we just heard the pure sound of good minds struggling with the difficulties of really knowing things.


Impacts of Red Dog Mine on NWA Borough and Oil Price Increase on North Slope Borough


These were the issues Guettabi was wrestling with:

1. How did the opening of the Red Dog Mine in the Northwest Arctic Borough impact people in the borough?
2. How did increasing oil prices affect employment in the North Slope Borough?

Of course, in situations like this, you don't really have a control group to measure against.  The big problem was how could he know what each of those boroughs would have looked like if a) there had been no mine or b) there had been no sharp increase in oil prices?   

He attacked that problem by creating hypothetical 'twin' boroughs that he could compare them with on a variety of measures.  He took all the Alaska boroughs and found the handful whose numbers in the years prior to the Red Dog Mine's beginning (and before the oil price spike) and used those 'twins' to compare the 'after' years.  How did the hypothetical 'twin' boroughs do compared to the actual NWA Borough and the NS Borough? So he had different groups of boroughs for different measures (since the ones with the closest matches were not the same for the different statistics he was looking at.)

Here's my transcript of what he says on the video below:

"However, I have all these boroughs that had no mine, so let me use information from those other boroughs in order to construct a unit that looks as much as possible like the Northwest Arctic Borough before the mine was created, and therefore the difference, essentially, between the outcome I actually observe, right?  So this is, for example, employment in the Northwest Arctic Borough in 1992 minus the weighed average of employment in that ‘twin’ would give me, arguably, the effect that I’m interested in, which is what is the actual effect of the  mine itself."

I don't want to go into all the details - well, even if I wanted to, I couldn't get too far.  But I just want to highlight

• how difficult it is to really know how living communities or political subdivisions are impacted by things
• how painstakingly good scientists work to find ways to answer these questions
• how humble good scientists are and how welcoming they are to other experts reviewing and challenging their thoughts and methods
• how different this process is from the way bad politicians 'prove' cause and effect

And while President Trump offers an extreme example of a bad politician* I think you can all find lots of examples of other federal, state, and local politicians who range from careless with numbers to  creating their own totally unjustifiable conclusions from the data they have.

And let me also note, that these are simply attempts to check on the impacts in these boroughs.  Guettabi recognizes that there are many factors that could go wrong and he worked hard to consider them in his model.  Most, if not all, of the data Guettabi is using (this is a work in process as he said) comes from governmental data sources.

And my guess is that this is precisely why some politicians are trying to defund data collection in key agencies.  Without good data, scientists, journalists and others, can't demonstrably refute politicians' false claims.  The NRA's successful campaign to limit the Center for Disease Control's (CDC) gun violence data bases) is a good example of this.

Data sets aren't as photogenic as physical violence, but destroying them is a form of structural violence and in many ways just as important.  It's an assault on how we know things, how we get closer to 'truth.' And whether we have good data to make good policy decisions.  

*"bad politician" here means one whose approach is to highlight whatever makes him look good (whether it's true or not) and attack his opponents or detractors (whether it's true or not) rather than focus on getting everyone together and solve our collective problems.