Would The US Be Different If Women, Or People of Color, Or Blind People Had The Power Of White Males In Our Society

I've often spoken to my friend L about what it means to be blind.  The human-created world is designed by sighted people.  What would be different, I asked L, if blind people had designed things?  She was uncharacteristically silent.  She'd never asked herself that question despite being a blind activist.

And I think we should start thinking about how the world would be different if women had the power of men.  Or African-Americans had the power of whites.  Or a coalition of people of color.  Or atheists.  How would things be different?   A thought experiment if you will.

Let's be clear.  Despite the fears of evangelical Christians that they are being discriminated against and despite the fears of white middle class workers that their cultural identity is disappearing, white males, are still firmly in power.

Let's just look at some numbers.  (Except for presidents - one Catholic and the rest Protestants - I couldn't easily tease out the religion information.  It won't be as stark as the president numbers, but I'm sure the vast majority of the people in these top positions are Christians.)

	White	Other	Male	Female
US Presidents	98%	2%	100%	0%
US House	79%	21%	81%	19%
US Senate	90%	10%	79%	21%
Fortune 500 CEOs	96%	4%	94%	6%
US Population	77%	23%	49%	51%

Sources:  House and Senate, Fortune 500 gender, Fortune 500 race, US Population

The numbers come from different years, but they give us a stark example of how white males overwhelmingly hold the top positions of power in the US government and in the largest corporations.  Only the US House of Representatives is close to matching the population race statistics, and even there it's a four to one advantage for whites. (I'd guess that gerrymandering people of color into packed districts plays a part here.  Black Reps often get 60-90% majorities when they are all packed into a few districts, thus wasting votes for Democrats that could have made other districts more competitive.) It's also four to one for males even though females make up slightly more than half the population.

I understand that most white males probably don't feel that powerful.  And they aren't.  They can't find a job, and if they have one it doesn't pay as much as it should.  They're kids don't listen to them.  Even Trump must be complaining about his lack of power to do things.  Individually most Americans don't feel too powerful.  But look at those numbers!   The people in power in this country have been white males since the beginning, and the rules have been made by people who see the world from a white male perspective.  If the average white male doesn't feel powerful, just think how the average female and the average person of color, or the average non-Christian must feel.

Would women earn as much as men if the top positions gave them the high level power men have  now?   Would birth control costs not be covered in many health insurance policies while viagra is?  Would there be universal child-care?  Or would men stay home and take care of the kids?

Would prisons be populated disproportionately by people of color if they sat in these top positions of power?  Would black wealth be equal to white wealth?

People these days don't have much alone-without-a-screen thinking time.  But I'm going to challenge you to imagine how the world if different groups of people had controlled the top positions of government and business the way white males have.  What laws would be different?  How would our lives be different?

Perhaps we all feel so powerless because the gap isn't so much about gender or race as it is about class.  For a while we had a viable middle class and the gap between the salaries of those at the top of the organization weren't nearly as extreme as they are today.  And with that money, the wealthy can use sophisticated advertising techniques to convince white males it's about race and gender, not about class.

Perhaps the biggest fear of white males as they feel power slipping away (though the numbers show that their perceptions are quite different from the facts) is that people of color and women will treat white males the way white males have treated people of color and women.  That is a scary thought isn't it?

Should Anchorage People Move To Avoid N. Korean Atomic Bomb?

It's hard for most people to imagine how close Anchorage is to Korea.  When Korean Air flew non-stop, we could get to Seoul in about seven hours.   Flying over the pole works.  We got to Paris last summer in about ten hours (not counting the time on the ground in Iceland).  That's about how long it would take to fly to New York if there were non-stop flights.

It helps to see these distances on a polar map.  Don't mind my messy lines.

Original Polar Map from Winwaed blog

Pyongyang to Anchorage = 3564 air miles
Pyongyang to Honolulu = 4597 air miles
Pyongyang to San Francisco - 5597 miles


Does my title question strike you as alarmist?  I'm sure that a lot of people in Houston are asking themselves if they should have heeded warnings, warnings that said climate change was making more forceful storms and that Houston's development in open areas needed to drain water in a flood plain would result in disastrous floods.

With the news this weekend of a much larger nuclear weapon than previously tested in North Korea, I think it's reasonable to ask this question about staying or moving.  So let's look at the key questions:

1.  Can and will North Korea build a bomb and intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching Anchorage in the next year or two?  It's looking increasingly possible.

2.  If they can, would they use them to target the US?  Americans have a highly distorted view of the world.  In our minds, its ok to have troops and ships and planes stationed all over the world, yet we got crazy when the Russians tried to put missiles into Cuba in 1962.  Other countries also don't like 'enemy' troops so close by.  We've had troops in South Korea since we fought North Korea in the 1950s.  Of course the North feels threatened.  We like to joke about how crazy the North Korean leadership is (and it's certainly unique in the world today), but according to a Heritage  Index of 2017 US Military Strength the US has

"some 54,000 military personnel Department of Defense civilian employees in Japan" and  "maintains some 28,500 troops in Korea." 

Yet any attack on the US by North Korea, let alone a nuclear attack, would be suicide.  But if they thought we were attacking them, I don't doubt that they would attack us - if they could - as well as the much more populated nearby South Korean target.  That 'mutual assured destruction' was supposed to be the deterrent during the Cold War.

3.  If they could and they would, would Anchorage be the target?  Hawaii probably has much more appeal.  There are more people in Honolulu and a large US military presence.  When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the US military presence in Alaska was tiny in comparison.  Seattle and San Francisco and Los Angeles are much better targets.  But Anchorage is closer.
Today Anchorage has a joint army/air force military base with a combined population of about 11,600.   The US tests anti-ballistic missiles from Kodiak, Alaska against potential attacks from North Korea which would make a tempting target as well.
The most compelling reason, in my mind, to attack Anchorage is that it is the closest US target, meaning the US defenses would have less time to respond.

4.  What could stop them?

• Chinese and Russian influence on North Korea
• Economic sanctions - these could make it impossible to complete their weapons, or it could just make them more desperate.
• Conducting ourselves less threateningly - if Pyongyang thinks a US attack is imminent, if we could find a way to convince the that's not the case, it might work.  But if preparing for a US attack is simply a way to keep the North Korean population afraid of war and supportive of the government, it won't.  
• Anti-ballistic missiles maybe.  They seem to have a spotty record with targets they knew were coming.  

So, is it time to look at real estate outside of Anchorage?  I'm sure few Alaskans are going to move at this point because of North Korea.  While Alaska did have a monster earthquake in 1964, relatively few people died and most people here now, weren't here then.  We feel safe.    Just as the people of Houston did a few months ago. Moving means disrupting our lives. But if the odds of an attack seem low, the odds of surviving a successful attack would be nil.  Only a tiny fraction of the people in Houston died.  That wouldn't be the case here.  

Stretching Credulity - Anchorage Police Need 40 Hours To Provide Data To Reporter

Here's the tweet from an Anchorage reporter:

My FOIA request to APD was answered. It's only going to cost $1,600 to learn how much SWAT overtime has cost the city in 2017. What a deal! pic.twitter.com/oCkFS02Uiw — Travis Khachatoorian (@ReporterTravisK) August 31, 2017

APD = Anchorage Police Dept     MOA= Municipality of Anchorage

A Related Story

Back in 1982 or 3 when I was working in the Human Resources department of the Municipality, a request came in from the League of Women Voters.  They wanted to see how much women and men got paid for the same work.  They asked if they could have it in two weeks.  The person who handled that had it done in an hour or two.  Then she held on to it for a week.  I asked why.  If they know I can get this information this fast, they'll be flooding me with requests.

I understood the logic, though I wasn't completely comfortable with it.  But they had started with a two week request so it seemed ethically ok.

Jumping ahead 35 years to the present - A Few Thoughts

1.  MOA should be tracking overtime routinely.  The Municipality should be on top of overtime for all the departments, just as a matter of keeping spending down.  When you get enough overtime in a department, it's time to start weighing whether it wouldn't be cheaper to hire new employees.  Every 40 hours (or so depending on the department) of overtime would pay for a new employee working regular time.  Departments with hundreds of hours of overtime  are paying time and a half when they could be hiring new employees to work at the normal pay scale.  This article about overtime at the Fire Department would suggest the MOA is keeping track of their overtime at the Fire Department.  APD has similar issues, so it would make sense they were tracking that too.

2.  Modern computers make tracking this sort of information almost instantaneous.  If the MOA was able to get the information in the League of Women Voters story above in two hours or less in 1984, then there is no reason that the information that Travis Khachatoorian  requested can't be found in an hour or less 35 years later.  If they can't do that, they need to hire some competent computer programmers in Finance.

3.  The first five hours request processing time should be free.  OK, I'm using 2011 information here, but John McKay's Open Government Guide says the first five hours should be free. See page 9.  Also go to page 37 to begin the section on electronic records.  I'm not sure if the laws have changed or not, but electronic records capability are much faster now.  There are also provisions that allow for waiving fees in the public interest.

My Conclusions

There are several possible (not mutually exclusive) conclusions:

1.  The MOA is using archaic software that makes it hard for them to get this information quickly.  The scandal over the SAP computer project lends some credibility to this conclusion.

2.  The MOA can get the information much more quickly than they say, but doesn't really want the information out and is hoping the reporter will find another story to pursue.

3.  The MOA finance department is not the right department to ask for this sort of information.  Possibly payroll could do this more quickly.  But Travis says he asked the APD for the information, so they should have sent it to the right department.

4. This should be a very easy thing to find out on the computer.  If it isn't  the computer expertise at the MOA is much worse than the SAP problems suggest.

My gut says the problem is with number 2, but I'd need to get more data to be certain.

It's So Much Easier To Destroy Than To Build

This is so obvious.  Something we all know.  Yet we need to be reminded regularly.

I was reminded this morning as I took apart the jigsaw puzzle we'd worked on intermittently since June and only finished this week.  Here's what the finished puzzle looked like after two months of 'construction':

And here's what it looks like now - after about a minute of work:

We drop a porcelain bowl that shatters in seconds.

We see this when a wrecking ball or a fire takes down a building.  All the time to acquire the money and materials and designs.  All the time to gather the people who put those materials into place and then maintain them.  The time to gather the furniture, the pictures on the wall, the photographs, the shared events, and other memories of a place.  Years of work and play can become rubble in minutes.

We see this in a violent death.  Years of becoming a human being - the learning, developing, building relationships destroyed in an instant.

And, less obviously, Trump has been trying to dismantle the government.  Pulling out of the Paris Agreement.  Banning transgender folks from the military.  Cracking down on immigrants and threatening to end DACA.

And Trump's also finding out how difficult it is to create things - like a healthcare program where “Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.”

We've been watching the speed of destruction in Houston this week.

Yet, destroying individual items, buildings, people is much easier and faster than destroying larger systems - a city like Houston, the US government,  the ecosystem of the earth.  With slow-building disasters, you have time to avert them.  But the gradual nature also lulls people into not seeing what is happening and where it leads.

I worked for NOAA during the year that Reagan was elected and came into office vowing to cut back on government.  I'd been there long enough to see that the agencies were made up of people with years of experience all over the country.  They understood weather, oceanography, atmosphere, marine mammals.  They also understood the vast network of people who monitored these things to make weather forecasts, to map the coastlines, to protect seals and whales.

As Reagan planned (unsuccessfully) to dismantle agencies like NOAA, I saw not just interchangeable parts that could be easily rebuilt by ordering so many meteorologists and atmospheric scientists off the shelf.  Rather I saw complex networks of human beings that over the years, working together on various projects in different locations, had built an understanding of how to make the organization work and had built an understanding of who to call on for this expertise and that.  They'd built, through years of interaction, a trust amongst each other.  Something that takes a long time to build.  A commodity we aren't seeing among the people Trump has gathered to help him in the White House.

So, the thought that some NOAA agencies might be axed, was horrifying.  So much that had been built up over so long would be lost and could not be replaced except over another very long period.

I think about this as I hear that Trump wants to cut the State Department by a third.  Wants to get rid of the special envoys for the Arctic and for Climate Change.

Fortunately, human systems, human communities are not as vulnerable to instant destruction (unless all the humans are destroyed).  In fact, bureaucracies are designed to resist quick, impetuous changes.  But that doesn't mean a lot of damage can't be done.

One last thought:  how do we come to understand why some people either don't see or don't care about such destruction of things and people?  Don't understand or don't care about what will be lost?  What can we do, as a society, in the way parents rear their kids and schools educate them, and societal structures encourage or discourage them, that minimizes the number of folks vulnerable to such destructive impulses?

A Sprinkling Of Sun; A Family Of Mergansers

It's been rainy lately.  I try to sneak in a bike ride when the rain pauses and streets are only damp.  So when I got up this morning and saw the sunshine sprinkled into our yard, I decided to bike right away before the predicted rain came back.

Once I was on the bike trail I started thinking about the platform that looks out over the creek.  It's had a chain link fence blocking it with a "Park Closed" sign since last summer. The ramp to the overlook wasn't all that even so they might have thought it was unsafe.  Or they may have closed it because it had become a hangout for homeless folks.  I thought:  I really need to check whether they're ever going to open it.

And then I rounded the bend and there was a Muni vehicle in front of the walk way, and more important, no fence.  I stopped and talked to the guys at the truck.  The part of the platform that was over the creek was having trouble.  The creek was messing up the post that held it up.  They'd cut off about half the platform.  But it was now open.



I went out onto the deck to see how much was left - about half - and looked out over the creek to see what looked like a family of mergansers just below me.

I got a good bike ride in and then came home to eat breakfast and read the paper - while we still have one now that the ADN has filed for bankruptcy and the Binkley family of Fairbanks is set to be the new owners, maybe.

Did a number of things on my to-do list today.  I finally called the name I'd gotten of someone who can fix my turntable and dropped it off with him.  An interesting man.

Late August In Anchorage: It Gets Dark Again At Night And There Are Raspberries

I took out the garbage tonight at about 10:30pm and it was dark!

It's the end of August and in 30 weeks it will be the equinox when everyone, everywhere gets the same amount of light.  Then those of us further north, get more and more darkness.

But it's also the time when I can go out into the backyard and pick raspberries every day.

There's lots to write about.  I've been trying to imagine what it's like to be in Houston these days.  We are seeing lots of pictures of roads turned into rivers and someone posted a picture of a guy catching a fish by hand in a foot of water in his living room.  But it's not like everyone in Houston has been washed out of their homes.  It's just that the media focus on the most dramatic scenes.  The Guardian reports that:

"More than 2.3 million people live in Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city. Tens of thousands of homes in and around Houston are semi-submerged and thousands of people have sought emergency shelter from the wind and rain. Officials estimate that 30,000 residents are likely to need shelter."

My calculation says that 30,000 people is 1.3% of Houstonians.  I'm not hearing much about the other 98.7%.

And it feels like we're in a constant bombard of craziness from, it's not clear.  Trump supporters?  Russian bots?  Right wing propaganda mills?  A combination?  So many counter attacks to take the attention off of Trump, to try to put anti-trumpets on the defensive.  To let them pass unanswered leaves some people vulnerable to believing the nonsense.  Things like "where was Obama during Katrina?"  (He was representing the state of Illinois in the US Senate.)  But to have to keep answering everything takes our eyes off the really important and damaging destruction of the Trump administration.  Like dismantling the State Department.  Is that part of his instructions from Putin?

Netflix has the Manchurian Candidate.  If you've never seen it, you should.  If you have, it's time to see it again.

I haven't had a chance to write about my short jury duty call.  I got called for a jury, along with 59 other potential jurors.  Jury selection took two days and 30 potential jurors, including a current state legislator.  Eventually they got 14 (two alternates), and I was never more than an observer of the jury selection.  The legislator didn't make it onto the jury either.

Remember the number above - 1.3%.  The media want sensational stuff to get your eyeballs for their sponsors.  And that's true for all the news, not just Harvey.  Remember, for every person who gets shot on any given day, over 300 million people didn't see or hear any gunshots.  But those stories aren't as interesting.  So don't let the news get you down.  Just turn it off and go for a walk or a run or a bike ride.  Get into a park or a garden or the woods or by the ocean or other natural waterway.  Take advantages of what you do have and be kind and loving to those who don't have.

Puzzling Over Escher

I found an old jigsaw puzzle in the garage when I was decluttering.  I'm not a jigsaw puzzle person.  I figure they are just time sinks without much gain.  In a time when there was no radio or television, not to mention internet, maybe they might have been a way to pass the time, but I'm much too busy to need a jigsaw puzzle in my life.

According to puzzle warehouse,

The origins of jigsaw puzzles go back to the 1760s when European mapmakers pasted maps onto wood and cut them into small pieces. John Spilsbury, an engraver and mapmaker, is credited with inventing the first jigsaw puzzle in 1767. The dissected map has been a successful educational toy ever since. American children still learn geography by playing with puzzle maps of the United States or the world.

Yes, I learned the 50 US states that way.  That's a great use of puzzles.






But I do like MC Escher.  So I pulled the puzzle box upstairs and started putting the borders together.

So I came to this as jigsaw novice.  But it did seem to me that there were certain difficulties in this puzzle"

• black and white
• white border
• lots of similar features scattered throughout the picture

 I can imagine that a Jackson Pollack would be a lot worse, but this one seemed more than enough of a challenge.



So, if you can't group pieces by color, what do you use?  Starting with the border, I found I had to group pieces by shape, since all the pieces were simply white.  This was back in June I think.  Because then my daughter arrived for several weeks and she got us past just the border.  But it was clear there was one missing piece.  There simply was not another piece that had one totally flat edge, yet there was a missing piece in the lower right hand side.

At some point I decided to take pictures of the puzzle each night, just so we could remind ourselves that we did actually make some progress.

This is August 18 with some of the loose pieces in the middle.  We got to a point where we stopped trying to add to what was already in the puzzle and try to work on pieces that had similar images.  I say images because they weren't all that clear.  You can see the hole in the lower right hand corner on the border.  Even when there were no pieces left, that was still a hole.

Here's August 19.  We've taken the extra pieces out of the middle of the puzzle, mostly.  There is progress from one day to the next, but you have to look closely to see it.


Somewhere along the way I tried to count how many pieces were already in the puzzle and how many were left.  The box said there were 551 pieces and my numbers were far short of that.  So in addition to the problems I mentioned above, we also had an undetermined number of missing pieces.


But by this point we were going to push all the way to the end.


Here's some more jigsaw history from puzzle warehouse:

"Puzzles for adults emerged around 1900, and by 1908 a full-blown craze was in progress in the United States. Contemporary writers depicted the inexorable progression of the puzzle addict: from the skeptic who first ridiculed puzzles as silly and childish, to the perplexed puzzler who ignored meals while chanting just one more piece; to the bleary-eyed victor who finally put in the last piece in the wee hours of the morning.
The puzzles of those days were quite a challenge. Most had pieces cut exactly on the color lines. There were no transition pieces with two colors to signal, for example, that the brown area (roof) fit next to the blues (sky). A sneeze or a careless move could undo an evening's work because the pieces did not interlock. And, unlike children's puzzles, the adult puzzles had no guide picture on the box; if the title was vague or misleading, the true subject could remain a mystery until the last pieces were fitted into place." [emphasis added]

Well, we did turn into those folks addicted to getting this thing done.  How long would this have taken if there was no picture on the box?  That's something they wouldn't even allow at Guantanamo. I ended up looking at the cover picture very closely trying to figure out from the background, which piece of pillar fit in which part of the puzzle.

We kept switching from grouping the pieces by shape and then by content (as hard as that was to figure much of the time) and then by shape again.






Here's August 23.  Some days we only got a few pieces added.  But if you look closely, we did fill in some holes and filled in along the inside edges.


















August 26 and things seemed to be moving faster, after all there weren't as many pieces to choose from any more.  And it seemed like there were far fewer missing pieces than I had thought.

And then, on August 27 we were out of pieces.  There were only nine missing pieces.

So, now we have to figure out what to do with this puzzle.  After all that work, just taking it apart and putting it into the box seems terrible.  Some things you make are intended to disappear - like a pie.  But it's anti-clutter season in our house, so this will go back in the box, and we'll give it a way.  And the next victim will at least know that there are nine missing pieces.


It did make me think of the assignment I had in the computer art class.  We had to digitally recreate a masterpiece.  I certainly learned a lot more about the picture I had chosen.  And in this case I got to know Escher's painting in much more detail than I ever would have.
Also learned to look at shapes AND content.  There were lots of different shapes but they fell in clear patterns.  Here's an example of three-knobbed pieces.

And I was reminded once again that slow but sure wins the race.  Well, I'm not sure about the race, but it does get the puzzle done.

And jigsaw puzzles, like other puzzles, take you out of daily routine.  The work on the puzzle seems to block out other things.  The other parts of your brain get a rest.

Jigsaw puzzle benefits lists 42 benefits of doing jigsaw puzzles.  I think this sentence gives an overview - though not the specific individual benefits.  Those are at the link.

"The educational value of doing a jigsaw puzzle is twofold: first, by building up a base of useful individual skills; secondly, by transferring these skills to other situations where they can be applied to solve new problems." 

Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back - Transitioning On Transgender Awareness and Rights

When conservatives cry about liberal control of the national agenda, they think about gay marriage, the shrinking white majority, pornography, legalization of marijuana, loss of public Christian displays.

When liberals cry about conservative control of the national agenda they think about ever increasing abortion restrictions, shrinking government, public funding going to private schools,  tax cuts, the wealth gap, rollbacks of regulations on the environment and corporate mergers and finance, about the attacks on evolution and science in general.

People who identify as liberal or as conservative all seem to think 'the other side' is winning and destroying the country.

Ignorance plays a big role in this,  That's certainly been the case with gay rights.

In this post I want to talk about the issue of transgender rights. On the one hand, great progress has been made, on the other hand there is a backlash to take it back.

At the national level, Trump has decreed that transgender folks should no longer serve in the military.   (I'd agree with this policy if it included all people of all sexual identities.)

On the local level, the forces that have fought gay rights forever here, have now put an initiative on the April Municipal ballot that would roll back transgender rights in Anchorage.

Growing up in the US, I never even had a word for transgender folks (and even now I'm not sure I'm using the right words).  If I search my memory, I'd say my awareness of the issue was when Christine Jorgensen had a sex change in 1951.  I was really young back then, but somehow the news got through to me.  I obviously had no real understanding of what had happened, just that a man had turned into a woman.

I think my real transformation came from reading.  There was Roberta Muldoon in The World According to Garp who was written as just another character who happened to have had a sex change.  The book that really focused my attention on the experience of a transgender person was Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex.  (You can listen to the book on Youtube.)

My son had a college classmate who later transitioned to female.  I've spent time with him before and her after, but we didn't talk much, if any, about the transition.

[I'm running out of time here.  The above is to give people some references to this topic, but I don't pretend this is the best list.  It's my personal list.  There have also been a number of films on this topic I've seen at the Anchorage International Film Festival over the years:  The Prodigal Sons, From This Day Forward, and Real Boy.  All have added nuance to my still limited understanding. So I'm going to leave links here for people who haven't encountered transgender folks and want to understand this better.  And below I'll give people some things they can do to help others understand.]


What You Can Do #1

More recently, I got to know Scott Schofield when he came to Anchorage and headed Out North theater.  He was back again this summer performing his piece, Becoming A Man in 127 Easy Steps.

Yesterday I got an email from Scott saying he's working on making his performance piece into a movie.  So if people want to be supportive during these times of transgender rights backlash, this is a way to do it.  Your contribution will help make this film a reality.  And the more people who see the film, the more people will 'know' a transgender person and have a better understanding of what this is all about.  And they'll get a more complex awareness that our binary male/female dichotomy is not nearly as simple as that.   Here's a short video of Scott explaining the film project.






What You Can Do #2   

I got a another email today pointing me to a presentation here in Anchorage by

"Mara Keisling. She has served as the director of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) for 14 years and is one of the country’s most prominent transgender civil rights activists."

 Wendy Williamson Auditorium  (UAA)

7 pm  Tuesday (August 29).

The email goes on to say:

"The focus of our discussion with Mara will be, first and foremost, how we can most effectively fight Prop 1, the harmful anti-transgender initiative on the April 2018 ballot in Anchorage. This ballot question is drawing attention from national organizations—like the NCTE—because it is, unfortunately, the worst anti-transgender ballot initiative in the country.
Through her work with the NCTE, Mara has been on the front lines in so many fights similar to what we’re facing now in Anchorage. Her guidance and words of wisdom will be indispensable, so you will not want to miss out tomorrow."

Even if you aren't sure where you stand on the initiative, this would be a good chance to get to hear a person who has been prominent nationally on this issue.

Trump Supporters In The News This Week - Who Are They Really? Arpaio, Black Guy For Trump, Roger Stone, and Sam Clovis

The names and images flash past us quickly on the radio, TV, Facebook, Twitter, newspapers or wherever you get what passes for news these days.  There are so many different characters that most of us never really know who they are.   Here are a couple of Trump cronies you might want to know more about.

Joe Arpaio - Trump just pardoned Sheriff Joe.  How bad is he?  You already know about his racial profiling of Hispanics, and his role in pushing the Obama-is-a Kenyan bullshit. (Sorry, it's the right word), but there were other tricks too.  Here's a story from the Phoenix New Times* about how he staged an assassination attempt on himself including framing the fake assassin.

"In 1999, Arpaio's staff rigged the entire fake assassination plot – just so he could get his mug on TV.
News cameras were already rolling when deputies arrested Saville. Gullible TV reporters gobbled up Arpaio’s story about a local Unabomber who was plotting to kill America’s “toughest” sheriff.
In 2004, a jury found Saville innocent of all charges. Not only that, but it ruled that Arpaio’s minions helped buy the bomb parts themselves and “entrapped” Saville in a TV-ready murder plot.
Arpaio was re-elected just months after the jury verdict. (Journalists John Dougherty and Janna Bommersbach unraveled the tale in separate articles).
“Jurors listened in disbelief as testimony showed it was the sheriff’s money that purchased the bomb parts, and an undercover officer who drove Saville around to buy the parts,” Bommersbach wrote.
Records show that the final payment to Saville went out on August 28, 2008. The total $1.1 million that taxpayers spent to settle with him doesn't include money that the county attorney spent prosecuting him, or funds paid to deputies who worked long hours to frame him."

Here is the Phoenix New Times list of key stories they've written in the last 20 years on Arpaio.

*Since I didn't know this newspaper, I did check on line.  Wikipedia says that the Phoenix New Times has been reporting on Arpaio for a long time and the editors were arrested over an Arpaio story and the paper eventually won $3.75 million for false arrest.

Screen Shot from Daily Kos

Black Guy For Trump -  Maybe you saw this guy prominently behind Trump when he gave his 75 minute speech in Phoenix this week.  Well, here's some background on him from The Daily Kos.



That story links the website on his T-shirt in the picture.  Here's the first thing I saw there:

​​​ "The Real K K K Slave Masters Revealed, 2Thess.2:1-11 & they
are CHEROKEE Indians (Hidden Babylonians). The reason GOD​
YAHWEH chose TRUMP to be President is to be the  White & Black
Man's DELIVERER from the Babylon, like the Gentile  King CYRUS,
Isa.45:1-6!"

Roger Stone -  The other day, Fox News, among others, reported that Roger Stone

"'The people who are calling for his impeachment are the people who didn’t vote for him. They need to get over it. They lost. Their candidate had every advantage,' he said, pointing out that the Hillary Clinton campaign spent $2 billion dollars compared to the Trump campaign's $275 million.
'Sorry, he whipped her a**. It’s over. You lost,' Stone said. 'Try to impeach him. Just try it. You will have a spasm of violence in this country, an insurrection, like you’ve never seen.'

So who is this Roger Stone whose words are important enough to quote on Fox and other places?
If you have Netflix, find Get Me Roger Stone to see his life story starring Rogers Stone.  But if not, you can read the sordid tale on Wikipedia.  Here's a short excerpt:

"When he was a junior and vice president of the student government at a high school in northern Westchester County, New York, he manipulated the ouster of the president and succeeded him. Stone recalled how he ran for election as president for his senior year:
'I built alliances and put all my serious challengers on my ticket. Then I recruited the most unpopular guy in the school to run against me. You think that's mean? No, it's smart.' . . .
As a student at George Washington University in 1972, Stone invited Jeb Magruder to speak at a Young Republicans Club, then successfully asked Magruder for a job with Richard Nixon's storied Committee to Re-elect the President.[29] Stone then dropped out of college to work for the committee.[30]
Stone's political career began in earnest with activities such as contributing money to a possible rival of Nixon in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance—then slipping the receipt to the Manchester Union-Leader. He also got a spy hired by the Hubert Humphrey campaign who became Humphrey's driver. According to Stone, during the day he was officially a scheduler in the Nixon campaign, but: 'By night, I'm trafficking in the black arts. Nixon's people were obsessed with intelligence.'[31] Stone maintains he never did anything illegal during Watergate.[30]"

Image from Science 

Sam Clovis - Trump's nominee for for science advisor at the United States Department of Agriculture  (USDA) who will be in charge of $3 billion of research and education money.  No satirist could have made up a more ludicrous nominee.  Here's the Pro-Publica piece on Clovis.  A snippet:

"Clovis has never taken a graduate course in science and is openly skeptical of climate change. While he has a doctorate in public administration and was a tenured professor of business and public policy at Morningside College for 10 years, he has published almost no academic work.
Clovis is better known for hosting a conservative talk radio show in his native Iowa and, after mounting an unsuccessful run for Senate in 2014, becoming a fiery pro-Trump advocate on television."

You'll note it says he has a doctorate in public administration.  Since that's my field, I wanted to know where it was from.  Clovis' Linked in page says it's from Morningside College in Sioux City Iowa.  I checked Morningside College's website.  It says they have two graduate programs:  A masters in education and one in nursing.  It's Saturday, so I can't call Morningside College.  So there may be some explanation.  Maybe they had a program in the past.  But I couldn't find it on the website.

[UPDATED August 27, 2017:  Responding to Mike from Iowa - I should have given the link to the Clovis Linkedin page.  Here's a screen shot showing what is listed on education there.]

Calling Bullshit For Credit At UW - Or Bookstore Talks At UAA

Carl Bergstrom ( Biology), and Jevin West (Information School) are offering "Calling Bullshit."  Their website is worth looking at - they are posting all their materials. [I've fixed the link, sorry, not sure what I did the first time.]


Locally, the UAA bookstore is offering an interesting selection of speakers in September.  From an email from Rachel Epstein who organizes these things.  You can see the whole list through December.  (Click on Calendar when you get there.  Details if you click the individual talk.)

Thursday, September 7 from 5:00 pm-7:00 pm
Author Heather Lende discusses The Local and Community in Small Town Alaska Politics 

Monday, September 11 from 5:00 pm-7:00 pm
Dr. Sharon Emmerichs presents The Kingdom of our own Language: Language as Space and Nation in Shakespeare


Tuesday, September 12 from 5:00 pm-7:00 pm
Conflicts and Climate Change with Dr. Frank Witmer and Dr. Jennifer Schmidt
At this event, Dr. Frank Witmer presents his research analyzing causes of violence in Sub-Saharan Africa and Dr. Jennifer Schmidt discusses climate adaptation in the Arctic and TUNDRA


Wednesday, September 13 from 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Darren Prokop presents his Book, Global Supply Chain Security and Management:  Appraising Programs, Preventing Crimes


Thursday, September 14 from 5:00 pm-7:00 pm
Darrel Hess presents "Leave It To Beaver, Cocaine & God: My Journey to Community Engagement"

Friday, September 15 from 3:00 pm-5:00 pm
Dr. Shinian Wu presents Linguistic Challenges in Learning Chinese

Saturday, September 16 from 1:00 pm-3:00 pm
Dr. Sebastian Neumayer presents Fiber Infrastructure and Natural Disasters

Tuesday, September 19, from 5:00 pm-7:00 pm
Xuanyi Qu and Yang Liu present WeChat Culture and Functions in China
Saturday, September 23 from 1:00 pm-3:00 pm
Doug Vandegraft presents More Notorious Bars of Alaska
Tuesday, September 26 from 5:00 pm-7:00 pm
Xiao Wang and Yuan Tian present Financial Management with Cellphones in China

Wednesday, September 27 from 5:00 pm-7:00 pm
Artist Thomas Chung presents Art and Everything Else