Bad Camera Day

Yesterday the sky was blue blue.  The water in the park was mirror still.  The pictures were all around me waiting to be captured.  And as I pulled out my camera it got caught on the open sound card door. Damn, I'd left the card in the computer when I downloaded pictures the night before.

But today, clouds bled the richest blues from the sky.  A breeze rippled over the reflections in the water.  The great pictures were hiding.  So here's one from when we were landing in Seattle Monday. I think this is the Bremerton ferry coming into Seattle.

What Makes A Self Made Man? Why Is "Earning It" "The Old-Fashioned Way"?

The cover has his picture and the words:

"The Self Made Man
USC Trustee Mark Stevens built success the old-fashioned way.  He earned it." 

I don’t know Mr. Stevens and this response isn’t about him.  

It’s about whoever wrote the text on the cover.  

I have a couple of problems:

These are weary cliches that promote the myth of the old Protestant Work Ethic.  What actually makes him a self made man?  

There’s nothing in the article that is linked to this title and subtitle.  It’s as though someone just picked the cliché out of thin air.  

So, what makes him a self made man, as though he alone is responsible for his success?  Let’s see. 

The article says 

• he was adopted by a family that included an electronics test engineer father.  
• Who, by the way, got his training from the Navy.  

We know nothing about his birth parents, but do you think he would have done as well in life if his birth parents kept him and they were addicts?  

• Is it possible that his adoptive father had an influence on his choice of occupation?  
• What if he had gone to a school that was wracked with violence and drugs?  
• What if he hadn’t had teachers who took an interest in him?  
• Who paid for the scholarships that enabled him to go to USC?  

Many successful people do think of themselves as self-made men.  But that ignores all the people who helped them along the way, all the institutions paid for by people they never met, that helped them gain skills and connections.  It ignores the society they live in that has a strong economic system that gives (some) people (more) opportunities (than others).  

Let’s look at the second part of the title:  “build success the old fashioned way.  He earned it.”

Why is earning one’s success ‘old fashioned’?  Is there an implication that successful people today no longer work hard and earn their success?  What exactly did he do so much better than the rest of us to 'earn' his billions?  What percent of his clients' earnings did he get to keep?  In this case does 'earning it' mean he just picked a profession that is structured to make a few people obscenely rich?

Lots of people work hard to earn a living, but not in fields that so richly reward them for their work. When someone becomes a billionaire, it suggests to me that others have paid an exorbitant price for the service or product that got the billionaire so much more money than 99.9% of the population.  

I think of school teachers, of farm-workers, of wait-people in restaurants, nannies, truck drivers, and many many others.  Our society is structured in such a way that certain occupations don’t get richly rewarded (economically)  no matter how hard the people work.  And a few are wildly compensated.  

Let’s be careful about the clichés and have the cover titles reflect that the title-writer actually read the article.  

And again, I want to reiterate, that these questions don't reflect on Mr. Stevens at all.  He isn't quoted as thinking he is 'self-made' and didn't get help from countless other people and institutions along the way.  

How Fast Is A Knot? Why? And Childhood Dreams.

Our San Francisco weekend was spend either with the grandkids or sleeping.  Here's a glimpse.


There it is.

"The number of Knots that slipped through a sailor's hand in 28 seconds denoted the speed of the vessel in Knots."

And

"A Knot is placed every 47ft - 3 in."

This knotty info was in the bookstore at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Site, right near Fisherman's Wharf.  We got to board an old ferry and this tugboat - Hercules.

They also have a workshop where craftsman restore old boats and ships.  I was intrigued by the 3rd label on this set of drawers of tools.

What was in the Childhood Dreams drawer?  It turned out to be wrenches, but I guess it represents why a lot of the volunteers spend time there working on the boats.






Here's the view from the roof of the building at the AirBnB we're staying at.  It's a great, large bedroom and bathroom in a fifth floor apartment.  The owner is at the other end, and while we're allowed to use the kitchen and living room, we don't have much time.  And it's only six blocks from the family.  And it was a great price.

This Guy Really Doesn't Want You to Pee or Park In His Driveway

We're in San Francisco visiting grandkids and their parents.

While waiting for the order to come, out side in the intermittent sun and it was suggested I take my grandson up the street so he wouldn't fidget too much.  We got to a little driveway with these two signs.

This is obviously a recurrent problem because this person went to great lengths and spent a bit of cash to make these signs.

I stopped at the end of the last sentence to check if he did post any video of violators on Youtube.  Closest I could find was this video about using pee-repelling paint in San Francisco.  It causes the liquid to bounce back on the perpetrator.  Probably not helpful for homeless people who don't have easy access to clean clothes or a washing machine.

[If you're visually impaired, the top picture shows a no-peeing sign (silhouette of a man peeing with a red circle and line through it) and then two other images.  First a man peeing against the wall, then a Youtube sign.  The second picture shows a metal sculpture of a tow truck pulling a car.]

Dear Sir, Couldn't You Have Held Off The Rain Another Couple of Hours?

The last few days have been mildly frantic - I try to remember to breathe slowly, remind myself that none of this is very important, get in a bike ride, etc. - as we tried to get the house ready for rental.  A company called TurnKey is handling it and so far their reps have been terrific.  It's sort of a cross between AirBnB and a Vacation Rental company.  But they're good for folks like us who live far away from the property.

I only wish my mom could see what her house looks like now.  The stuff inside, couldn't have been done while she was still living here.  The commotion would have just been too much.  But the deck outside would have been great.  But she wanted bricks - "Mom, how are you going to go down the stairs and then negotiate bricks in your wheel chair?" - and I countered with a wood deck at the same level of the living room - "No, the opossums and raccoons will get underneath".  It was a stand off.
But she would say regularly, "When I'm dead, you can do what you want."  So now there's a beautiful wooden deck that I know she would have loved.


Anyway, here's some light relief from a book I found in the house, published in 1942, called Dear Sir.  These are supposed to be letters that government agencies received from citizens.  I picked a few quickly.  Trying to get short ones, so you get an idea.

"Navy Relif Fund
Los Angeles
Gentlemen:
Enclosed find my check for $2.00.  You'll pardon me for not signing it, but I want to remain anonymous.
A FRIEND

Col. Arther Mc.Dermott;
Selective Service
535 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York
After four months of Army life and much sober reflection I have decided that I cannot support my wife the manner to which she has become accustomed on my army pay of $50 amonth.  Please consider this my resignation from the armed services.
Private Leonard K----------

OPA*
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Gentlemen,
Please tell me if I must give my right aeon my application for a food ration book.  I am really 43, but my husband things I'm 36.If I tell him the truth he will probably divorce me.  Please answer my question by writing me by writing to the newspaper in the personal column addressed to "Belle of the South", and please say it is ok to falsify your age.Thank you very much.  I hope you will be able to keep me from getting a divorce and still keep me eating.
Worriedly yours,
Mrs. ....

You get the idea.

They predicted heavy rains to start last night - periods with .5 inches per hour.  The ground was wet when we woke up this morning, but the rain was barely a mist.  I was able to keep cleaning up, throwing out trash, etc.

But it just started raining heavily.  Time to abandon our usual bus ride to the airport in favor of calling a Lyft.  You can't really see the rain coming down, but we'd be pretty wet before we got to the bus stop, let alone waited for the bus.  It had snowed and the temps were in the 30s when we left Seattle last week, so I left my raincoat for my warmer coat.  San Francisco is supposed to be rainy too, but there are two grandkids there to warm us up.

*OPA was the Office of Price Administration

Slack Line Juggler Santa Monica Beach

This post is dedicated to my friend JK.

Another day with workers putting in moulding, doing electrical work, and various odds and ends at the house.  Phone calls to arrange further stuff, moving furniture, figuring where to hang pictures, and other work preparing my mom's house for rental for most of the year when we're at home in Anchorage.

I couldn't wait to get on the bike and ride down to the beach and then north along the beach bike trail.   I try to go earlier, because it gets more crowded as it gets closer to the sunset.  Today I had to stop and take some pictures. First, they had a much longer slack line than I've seen there before - it's the first one you see in the video.  Then on another wire was a juggler.  I also pan on the trail so you can see the traffic I have to navigate in this section of the trail, just south of the Santa Monica Pier (which you can see in the background.  Watch for the roller coaster.)



That spot on my camera is getting annoying. Sorry.

Once I get past the pier, the traffic thins out.  There is one short row of houses, separated from the beach by the public bike trail.

And there was a film crew camped out in one of the parking lots.

And I was getting back to the point where I leave the beach and head home, the almost full moon was rising to the east.

And to the west the sun was slipping down toward the ocean.

Here's why I did the video - you can see that a still shot just do this juggler justice.  You need to see the balls moving while the juggler goes up and down on the slack line.

Happy Birthday Mom

We've been working from early morning each day trying to get my mom's house ready for renting.  We got new beds, cleaned the yard just to fill the compost garbage for Monday night pickup, fussed with the alarm system, got the electrician, someone to steam clean the sofa and other upholstered furniture.  We visited my 96 year old step mom, who was briefly awake and engaged in a limited way.  I got ride in to the beach to simply to work off all the anxieties that were building up - it worked.  We had the electrician and the repair man.  Moving furniture back into the house from the garage now that the wood floor has been sanded and redone.  Maybe the car will fit in tomorrow.

picture from previous visit

Also squeezed in a trip to the cemetery today to wish her happy birthday.  I cut some flowering jade plant, a bird of paradise, and some epidendrum from my mom's yard, and we took out some of the dead flowers from last time and stuck in the new ones.  My wife's parents, my brother, and another close family friend are there too.   Last year I put some soil in the vases and stuck the jade plants in.  A caretaker at the cemetery waters them and the jade plants are growing and healthy.  So the flowers were just to add some color for a while.  She would have been 96 today.

And so as I was sorting out the books I opened Erich Maria Remarque's Shadows in Paradise to see why my mom  still had that book.  Here's the prologue:

"I lived in New York during the last phase of the Second World War.  Despite my deficient English the midtown section of New York became for me the closest thing to a home I had experienced in many years.
Behind me lay a long and perilous road, the Via Dolorosa of all those who had fled from the Hitler regime.  It led from Germany to Holand, Belgium, Northern France, and Paris.  From Paris some proceeded to Lyons and the Mediterranean, others to Bordeau, the Pyrenees, and across Spain and Portugal to Lisbon.
Even after leaving Germany we were not safe.  Only a very few of us had valid passports or visas.  When the police caught us we were thrown into jail and deported.  Without papers we could not work legally or stay in one place for long.  We were perpetually on the move.
In every town we stopped at the post office, hoping to find letters from friends and relatives.  On the road we scrutinized every wall for messages from those who had passed through before us addresses, warnings, words of advice,  The walls were our newspapers and bulletin boards.  This was our life in a period of universal indifference, soon to be followed by the inhuman war years, when the Milice, often seconded by the police, joined forces with the Gestapo against us."

My mom's Via Dolorosa was a little more straightforward.  At age 17 she finally got her visa and a ticket to sail from Hamburg to New York.  It was late August 1939 when she left home for Hamburg, leaving her parents behind.

Reading this and thinking of my mom and other family members whose trips were more arduous and followed Remarque's path more, the journeys of today's refugees seemed more real, and I seemed more connected.  Lacking visas, at the mercy of local police, finding word from relatives wherever you can (for those with cell phones today, this is probably easier), and getting advice from other travelers - some of it good, some of it not - wherever you can.

Getting To Know Some Local Transgender Folks Before You Vote On Prop 1 On April 3

We are taught to think of gender as an either/or case of male or female.  It's just how you're born.

But we have lots of evidence that it's not that easy.  If it were, all men would have strong 'male' traits and women would all be 'feminine.'  But we know that's not how it is.  If we took all men, I'm guessing we'd get a bell shaped curve of 'masculinity' and 'femininity.'  A similar curve for women would overlap that for men.

Many cultures recognize the fluidity of gender and the fact that some people clearly do not fit the gender category their private parts seem to indicate.  A number have special roles for people who seem to carry both genders.

Many babies are born with ambiguous genitalia and doctors have traditionally decided what gender they should be right after birth, often with surgery to make the baby conform to the doctor's decision.

This is all relevant in Anchorage now because Jim Minnery  and the Alaska Family Council and friends have gotten Prop 1 onto Anchorage's April 3 local ballot.

So I want to post some video I made at a panel discussion last August here in Anchorage.  Mara Keisling, the Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, moderated this panel with three local transgender folks and two parents of transgender kids.

Here's a link to the ballot measure and explanations at Ballotopedia.  (I found that site easier to read than the Municipality's site on this.)

On first blush, I can understand the idea of women not wanting men to use the women's bathrooms, though since women don't use urinals, it's my understanding their public restrooms all have private stalls.  So that should be, for the most part, moot.  Locker rooms and showers are perhaps a different story. Or so the sponsors of Prop 1 would  tell you.  (Actually, they'll tell you public bathrooms are a problem.)

Current Anchorage law allows transgender folks to use the bathroom that they identify with.  No problems have been brought to the public's attention that I know of.  The number of transgender people in Anchorage is very small.  The problems the initiative's sponsor cite are all hypothetical. And unlikely. I doubt too many men will dress up like a woman just to spy on women in the women's restroom.  And they could do that now and it would be illegal if they weren't transgender and were there to spy on women.

I also understand, and am more sympathetic with, the opponents' argument.  I suspect their key objection is the initiative's essential denial of transgender identity.  Even the US military recognizes this, but Prop 1 would make the gender listed in someone's birth certificate the only thing that counts.  Here's a statement from Nobodyaskedme.org (part of the Prop 1 campaign):

"In September of 2015, the Anchorage Assembly forced an ordinance upon residents that allows men to enter women’s spaces — public bathrooms, showers, locker rooms and changing facilities." 

I think this shows clearly that they deny the existence of transgender people.  There is nothing in the ordinance that allows 'men' into women's restrooms, only transgender people who identify as women.  I'm not trying to answer all the questions people have about transgender folks here.  I'm not that well-versed myself.  But I know that for a number of people, the physical gender parts don't always match the mental gender identity of people.  I also know that nobody in their right mind would claim to be transgender if they weren't.  There's far too much heartache and prejudice that comes with such an identity.   I'd also note that the Assembly passed the ordinance 9-2.  That's not even close.  That's not 'forcing.'  The representatives of the vast majority of Anchorage voted for the current ordinance.  If people were 'forced' they could have voted out people at the last Municipal election.

As both of the parents on this panel in the video say, 'before I had a transgender child, I really knew nothing about what the word means.'  My own knowledge, while probably more extensive than the average person's, is still sketchy, but I did post last August about my own education on this topic,  just before Mara Keisling moderated this panel.

This Guy Nails It - Overton Window And How Trump Recalibrates "Normal"

Here's what I realized back in the early 70s: the Vietnam war protestors who were burning draft cards and pouring blood over Selective Service files, were making conservatives crazy, but they were making my quieter protests seem much more rational and reasonable.  And this phenomenon seemed true for all sorts of issues.  The crazies on the extreme push the conversation.  My ideas, that seemed extreme before, now seemed moderate.

I've been saying that that's what's happened in this country in the last 20 years - but now to the right.  Ronald Reagan, then Fox News, and talk radio have redefined normal.  My best example of this is Richard Nixon - the 'evil president' under whom we got the Clean Water Act, The Environmental Protection Act, The Freedom of Information Act, The Privacy Act, the opening to China, and on and on.  But the right has pushed the scale so far to the right that all those things now seem far left.

So Carlos Maza explains all that in this video.  I'd had no name for this phenomenon.  Carlos calls it  the Overton Window and explains it in terms of Trump.  But of course, the US political debate had shifted way to the right way before that.*  Here's Wikipedia's description.




*I'd note that people on the right would say things have been shifted way to the left, and on a few issues they're right - gay rights and legalization of marijuana for example.  But I would argue that in part this has to do with the fact that there are plenty of gay Republicans and pot smokers, so they've been infiltrated from inside on these issues.  But on guns, climate change, consumer rights, tax fairness, deregulation, the money of the very rich who have a vested interest in these issues has helped push things way to the right, compared to where we had been going.

Snow In Seattle, Cold And Clear In LA (And Simon Winchester's Pacific On The Way)

It snowed yesterday on Bainbridge and my granddaughter couldn't get enough playtime.  Throwing snow at me, eating snow, making little snow people, rolling in the snow, and just reveling in the bright, bright sunshine.  Slides go really fast when you're wearing a slippery snow suit.  Lots of laughing and running and reveling in nature's white gift.



By today there was a thin layer of cloud, threatening to snow again.  But we were able to walk to the ferry and then to the train to the airport without rain or snow.

The security line was snaked all around, we saw police officers, a dog sniffing people lined up.  Fortunately we were in pre-check so the wait was short.  I booked the flight via Alaska Airlines, but our flight was on Virgin.  The plane coming in was late and we left 25 minutes late, but we eventually got to LA a little early.  I'd been wondering why nearly all our flights in last couple of years have been on time or early.  I finally surmised that Alaska simply projects the flight to take longer than they need to.  That way, they score high for 'on-time' flights.  Even if they leave late, they get where they're going on time or even early.  But I hadn't had the time to try to check the details - like see how long other airlines say a flight from city A to city B should take.  And then I heard a piece on NPR the other day that confirmed my suspicions.  It's probably not a bad thing.  As they said on the show, people are happier when they get somewhere early than if they get there late.  I just found a 2015 article on this phenomenon.

Anyway, the Alaska-Virgin merger is moving along.  I watched Alaska Airlines baggage vehicles loading our Virgin flight.

I got to do some reading on the flight.  I'm reading Pacific for our next book club meeting (well, the next one I can attend.)  The first section has been a page turner, except it was so depressing that I didn't want to read it.  Simon Winchester picks 12 events from 1952 that took place somewhere in or around the Pacific.  The first one is about nuclear bomb testing in the South Pacific, and he highlights the US cavalier approach to the people living where they wanted to do their testing - Bikini Islands.  Arrogance, racism, relocation of people to much less suitable islands, and using people as human Guinea pigs.  There are plenty of bad guys to go around in these 45 pages or so, but I'll just mention Alvin Cushman Graves.  Winchester gives him little slack for his handling of Pacific nuclear tests, particularly the last one that was significant more powerful than he expected and devastated, once the people of Bikini and sent radioactive material over a large area of the Pacific.  Neither the Atomic Heritage Society (not unexpectedly), nor Wikipedia give any details of the Castle Bravo test.  From Winchester:

"The solid compound in the new bomb was lithium deuterium, an amalgam of lithium and isotopic hydrogen.  And no one knew exactly how much hydrogen it would release, or how big the detonation would be.
The testers would soon find out.  And because of the other uncertainty - over the weather, and more specifically, the direction of the winds on detonation ay - a great many others would find out as well."  

The normal winds had been blowing toward the west, the normal condition, and the US had put out a vague warning for ships to stay out of a 57,000 square mile 'danger area.'  Though they didn't explain the danger.  However, the night before the test, the winds switched to the east.  And at sunrise there was a powerful gale in upper altitudes.

"Graves was told of the wind direction and knew that radiation would spread downwind and contaminate, at the very least, Rongelap Atoll.  But he had his orders, which were to proceed with the test without delay.  Moroever, whatever the wind direction might be, no one had any idea how much radiation would be produced.  Not that this was strictly relevant, of course, since Graves still cleaved robustly to his views about the malingerers who had concocted all this fuss about radiation being so terribly dangerous." [pp 70-71]

He gave the order to detonate the bomb.  I'd note that Graves was a physicist who had been in charge of nuclear testing and himself had almost been killed in an accident that killed the man next to him.  Doctors thought he would die, but he did recover.  Though many suspect his fatal heart attack 20 years later was related.

"At 6:45 am on that clear, windy, blue-sky Pacific morning, it was as if the world had suddenly stopped, blinded by a vast white light of an intensity never before experienced.  The iron gates guarding some terrible inferno seemed to clang wide open and unleash a ball of fire and shock waves and roarings of unimaginable speed, violence, and loudness.  A white fireball four miles across was created in less than one second  A minute later a cloud of debris ten miles tall and seven across rocketed into the sky.  Ten minutes on, it was twenty-five miles tall and sixty miles across."

It uncashed huge amounts of radiation and quickly arrive at Rongerap Atoll, 120 miles to the east where the islanders had no idea what was happening.  As they became ill with radiation poisoning.  They were evacuated after being hosed down several times.

"We were like animals,"  said an islander named Rokko Langinbelik, who was twelve at the time.  "It was no different from herding pigs into a gate."

While Japanese fisherman who also were in the path of the radiation got treated quickly by Japanese doctors, the islanders were not.

I really hadn't intended to get into all this but it's eating away at me.  The treatment of the Marshall Islanders and the callous denials that the US had done anything wrong, even blaming the Islanders for their own tragedy.

You can read more on their fate, which continues to this day, at this site on Bikini Islanders. 

While the book transported me far out into the Pacific, the map on the screen in the seat back in front of me, had airplane located off the coast of Africa.

Only 8000 miles from Los Angeles.

Nevertheless, soon we were in the LA basin which was clear, cool (for here - in the high fifties (F)), and windy.

Downtown and the mountains beyond were crystal clear.  We were at my mom's house in just about an hour from landing, via public buses.  The house is in good shape now after the work we had done last time and while we were gone.  But we have a busy week ahead of us before seeing the other grandkids in SF, then a little more time in Seattle.  And finally home.