A Break From Politics - Campbell Creek Impressions

These photos are of Campbell Creek yesterday late afternoon, modified a bit with photoshop.

From a bridge (near Lake Otis), modified using the posterize filter.

And the same picture using Curves.  (I still use Curves experimentally - I can't really plan the effects I'm going to get.  I probably should look for some lessons online.)

And for those of you who want to see the original.

What exactly do photographers do when they manipulate pictures in programs like Photoshop?  Is this artistry or enhancement or deception?  What you get from the camera - the third picture here - doesn't exactly portray what the original was like.  Aside from the obvious cropping out - in the sense - the rest of the picture, the camera doesn't capture  the light and colors the same way the human eye does.  And, of course, different eyes and different brains see the same scene differently.

This sort of playing around(experimenting may be too pretentious here, though not if people do this more systematically) can give us ways to see things in the scene we can't see with the naked eye.  It can also hide things we might originally see - and if someone does this to deceive, then, well it should be evaluated the way one would evaluate any deception.  How serious was the deception?  To what extent should the victim have been paying more attention?  How badly was the victim(s) hurt?  Those sorts of questions.

Here's another picture of Campbell Creek further down the bike path.  This one is looking south. (The first ones were looking west).

I used the posterize filter to get this one too.

I think many, if not most photographers do some fiddling with their pictures now just to get a nicer looking picture - playing with the saturation, contrast, exposure buttons are the most obvious ways.  Cropping is basic.  But even the earliest black and white photographers played with their images in the dark room to achieve similar improvements to what they had caught on the negative.

All the images are looking down from bridges, into the sun's reflection on the water.

Kavanaugh Impressions After Two Days of Hearings

I don't know what's in Kavanaugh's head.  I can only speculate based on what I saw as he answered questions from friendly and unfriendly Senators.

1.  He's smart and has a great memory for details.  Except when he doesn't.

He was able to rattle off the numbers of different Federalist Papers and who said what within them.  For example, when Sen. Lee asks him what his Greatest Hits list of Federalist Papers.  Though his ease here is helped by the fact that he teaches classes on this topic and this was from a friendly Senator, so he may have known what the question was in advance.  (Though if that's the case, then he's also a great actor, as he seems very surprised by the question.)



 He could give details about why he decided various cases the way he did - including the facts in the cases.  He's very quick with all this.  Though as you can see in this exchange with Sen. Klobchar, he seems to be talking about facts of the case to avoid answering the question at times.  There are other examples where a Senator tries to move him along saying they've heard his answer to someone else about the context and just please answer the question.   Here's Sen. Klobuchar asking about how Kavanaugh came up with a pricing test in an anti-trust case.

But at other times, he couldn't remember at all.   As in this exchange with Sen. Harris over whether he ever talked to any attorneys at President Trump's firm.  Suddenly, this guy who could answer every detail of every case, can't remember.

CSPAN has posted the entire nearly 8-minute exchange between Kamala Harris and Kavanaugh on the Mueller probe. It is worth your time. pic.twitter.com/ezJVEuDeUK

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) September 6, 2018

Now, he says that he doesn't know all the attorneys that work at that firm and asks Sen Harris to give him a name.  She won't do that.  She clearly believes that he is just refusing to answer.  And his demeanor looks a lot like the proverbial deer in the headlights for a good part of this. In contrast to his confidence in other places.

2. Someone, please, ask him if he has ever been wrong about anything"

 At some point, I tweeted that plea. Sometimes very smart people don't realize the limits of their knowledge, and eventually I began to feel that way about Kavanaugh.  When Ted Cruz asked about what he's learned from coaching his daughter's basketball team, he basically said:
1. The importance of coaches
2. The effect you can have on people's lives
You can listen yourself.

Brett Kavanaugh on coaching his daughters' basketball team: "Coaches can have such an impact I think on building confidence." pic.twitter.com/Bff2OiQfVE

— Fox News (@FoxNews) September 6, 2018

He didn't learn anything from the girls themselves that he didn't know before. It just confirmed how much good he was doing for the girls. He didn't learn that, say,  he talked too much sometimes, that they often could do things without his help. Nothing like that.  What he learned was how important he was in their lives.

At another point, he was asked a friendly question about who his audience is when he writes decisions.  His answer was (and I couldn't find that part again now) something like - academics, law students, other judges;  that he hoped his reasoning would help them.  Again, his wisdom is so great, it will help other see the light.

Putting these two responses together with Kavanaugh's relationship with the Federalist Society, I began to think.  But here's a bit more on Kavanaugh and the Federalist Society (from Bloomberg):

"The answer [to the question about how to insure that conservatives get on the Supreme Court after Roe v Wade] was the Federalist Society, a group that has skillfully, brilliantly and patiently educated and nurtured legal conservatives from law school through their careers. Few civil society groups in U.S. history have been as effective. 

There’s nothing nefarious here. The Federalists are remarkably open and transparent. To become an insider, one simply needs to be genuinely smart and genuinely conservative. Over dozens or even hundreds of repeated interactions, mostly organized around intellectual exchange, members get to know one another well. The informal hierarchy that results informs judicial appointments, as it was always intended to do. 

Kavanaugh has long been understood to sit at the top of that informal Federalist hierarchy. Clerking for him was the most coveted job a young conservative could get right out of law school. Nearly all of Kavanaugh’s law clerks went on to clerk for the Supreme Court. That’s extraordinarily rare. Among current judges, only Merrick Garland (nominated by President Barack Obama to the Supreme Court but never voted on by the Senate) has a comparable rate of success. The point is simply that the network, from law students all the way to Supreme Court justices, understood Kavanaugh’s place and saw him as a likely future justice."

There was also some discussion of Kavanaugh meeting with the Black Student Association at Harvard and how he coaches students there on how to get into the pipeline to clerk for the Supreme Court.

3.  The Church of the Federalist Society

In some ways, you could liken the members of the Federalist Society to a group of true believers who work hard to recruit new members and train them in their conservative doctrine and teach them how to insert that doctrine into the courts so that decisions come out consistent with their conservative ideology.  (The Democrats want their take on justice  - which favors the poor and those excluded more, and favors regulation over large corporations - on the court as well, though not nearly in such an organized way, not nearly as effectively.)

So, as I got the sense that Kavanaugh really believes in how right he is about the law, and how he's a great influence on his daughters' basketball team, and how he writes his court decisions so that they will stand as lessons to other judges, law students, and legal scholars, his visits with the black students at Harvard was another part of this.  He's like a true believer who evangelizes for his cause.  While he's polite and respectful at these hearings, he's also right, in his mind, about everything.  And he's an originalist when it comes to the Constitution, just as evangelicals are literalists when it comes to the Bible.  (It appears I'm not the first, by a long shot, to make this comparison.)

There were various times when it was pointed out that Kavanaugh was pushing the law further than anyone else.  In the anti-trust case against Whole Foods for example.  And that didn't bother him at all.  Or that not only was he pushing harder, but other conservative judges took issue with him.  But he wasn't disturbed by this either.  Because he's part of an legal cult (my word, not his) that he believes will eventually fill the courts so that his interpretations will get more supporters over time.

4.  But as smart as he is, he's ruled by doctrine, not by the humans who come before the court

He was repeatedly questioned about his decision in the Garcia case - a 17 year old asylum seeker who got to the US and was detained and then found out she was pregnant.  She went through all the hoops to get an abortion in Texas where she was in custody.  But the Feds, who held her, weren't allowing the abortion.  Kavanaugh, in his dissent, wanted her to get a sponsor so she could get some counseling before having the abortion.  This despite the fact that she'd done what the law required to get around parental consent - she'd gotten cleared by a judge.  Kavanaugh argued that she still had time before the cut off point for abortions in Texas.  But he was hammered hard on this - that he'd added new hurdles for the 17 year old that weren't in the law. He offered a reference that said it was permissible. His interrogator responded, but it wasn't required by the law.  That he'd added it to her burdens here.   The key insight for me here, was how Kavanaugh was wrapped up in legal arguments, not in the extra days or weeks his preferred decision would add to the girl's agony of trying to get the abortion done and over with.  Was he still acting as a coach?  Did he see her like one of his basketball team who would benefit from his counseling?

Sen Booker also asked him about his decision on a South Carolina (I think) voter id law.  Booker gave the example of a 90 year old black veteran who had voted in a previous election but was told he wasn't registered.  He got a drivers license, got a birth certificate, and was asked for further documents, and only got registered when he held a press conference with the governor.  Again, despite a number of clear facts about race discrimination against blacks, he found - as I recall this right - no problem with the voter id law.  His defense was that the other justices found the same.  Booker tried to get Kavanaugh to see that this was no different from the poll taxes that had kept blacks from voting for decades in the South.

Again, I see more concern with clever law that will be adopted by others, than with justice and the consequences to actual human beings.  The legal evangelist spreading the gospel.   That, of course is the positive interpretation.  The negative interpretation would be that he had no problem with the voter id law because it would exclude likely Democratic voters.

I'd note also that another Democratic senator suggested that Kavanaugh's dissent on the Garcia abortion case was what caused him to be added to the Supreme Court nominee list after being left out of two previous lists.  It was argued (I'm using the passive voice here because I can't remember which Senator it was) that his dissent was a signal that he was amenable to Trump's promise to appoint a judge who would repeal Roe v Wade.

5.  Republicans loading Court while they can

With the blocking of the appointment of Merrick Garland for nine months and now the rush to get Kavanaugh approved before the November election - despite the fact that the committee hasn't gotten all the documents that had been asked for.*  Another senator pointed out that Kavanaugh had warned against hasty judicial decisions, but that this hasty decision (the confirmation) wasn't being delayed.  I suspect that Kavanaugh will be approved.  If he isn't, the Republicans could possibly approve someone before new Senators come on board in December, but it would be much harder.  But that assumes that the Democrats can gain a majority in the Senate, which is not a certainty, though the president is doing his best to make that happen.

*There was plenty of party-line debate on this.  The Republicans claiming they got all they needed and the Democrats saying, but there's still more that has been withheld in an unprecedented (for a supreme court confirmation hearing) claim of executive privilege.  And that they'd only gotten the 400,000 (or some such number) pages of documents the night before.  Though one of the Republicans suggested that data technology could help them get through it all in an hour or so. (I'm not sure if he said an hour, but it was a very short time.)

6.  Some impressive women and people of color in the Senate

Amy Klobuchar was knowledgable, tactful, and thorough.
Cory Booker was able to ask difficult questions with respect, but also with persistence.
Kamala Harris and Mazie Hirono took no crap.  They were tough and didn't apologize for their aggressive questions.  My impression was that they are US Senators now and they're not going to allow anyone treat them in any way except as full equals.  And their performances probably help confirm the idea that people of color and women have to be twice as good as white males to get where they are.
That's not to say that white male Senators like Whitehorse  and Durbin weren't also firm interrogators.

I don't claim to know what Kavanaugh's thinking.  I can only speculate based on how he answered questions in the first two days of his confirmation hearings and my ability to interpret such behavior.  But I offer this as one way to interpret all this.  I'm going to post this now, but I'll proof it again tomorrow morning.  (Well, it's 2 hours into the morning already.)


[I tried to embed these videos from C-SPAN, but Blogger is embedding my Blog Banner instead, so I'm giving you links to the videos at C-SPAN.  I was able to embed some Tweets that had videos in them.]

BlacKKKlansman and Crazy Rich Chinese - Rediscovering Going Out To See Movies

Last Tuesday, it was rainy and I suggested we go see BlacKKKlansman.  The theater isn't far, but it was raining, but worse we fooled around and didn't have time to walk.  And when we got there, the lines were long.  But when we got to the front we were surprised that the tickets on Tuesday were only $5.75.  And then, inside, the seats were leather-like recliners.  Hmmmm, the theater wants to woo us away from Netflix.  Or at least to share some of our Netflix time.

BlacKKKlansman's - that's getting to be a hassle to type out - biggest draw was that it was a Spike Lee movie.  But I have to say it was basically a slick detective flick, but with a black point of view.  And the ending - with the scenes that yelled out:  Hey, this is relevant today - look, here's David Duke being pals with Trump - were not great film making, but I understand Lee's feeling that his point might be over people's heads.  At least the people who needed his message.

Tonight we walked over and saw "Crazy Rich Chinese".  I've following EJR David's discussions of Filipino and other brown Asians being the hidden Asians, lost in the word Asian.  And here you can read  a Singaporean writer of Gujarati descent view of how darker skinned Singaporeans are depicted in the movie.  The debate over what any specific movie needs to cover - especially when it represents people not normally represented in Hollywood - is to be expected.  No one can make a film that represents everyone the way the want to be represented.  The idealist answer is to let each filmmaker make tell their own story.  But that assumes others have access to make a film and gain major distribution of it.  After all, "Crazy Rich Chinese" is one of the few Hollywood movies to have such a predominantly Chinese cast.  How do the various Indian groups, the Arabs, and Peranakan gain access to Hollywood resources to tell their stories?

I hope Trump skips this movie.  It makes him look like a low-rent developer, and that might piss him off and lead to a war with Singapore.  And as Trump starts to realize that his Singaporean meeting with Kim Jun-un was big win for Kim and a big loss for Trump . .   I'll leave that to your imaginations.

[UPDATE Sept 5:  A reader emailed to point out that the name of the movie is "Crazy Rich Asians".  Yes, of course.  But I was trying to call people's attention to EJR David's criticism that it's not about "Asians" but about Chinese, and that the term Asians often means East Asians, not darker skinned Asians like Filipinos and Indians and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis.  ]

No, No, No - Bill Walker's Not A Progressive - Confusing Rational For Progressive - Updated

This was in a letter to the editor Sunday in the Anchorage Daily News (ADN):

"Instead, the three-way race pits two progressives against each other, encouraging them to battle it out between themselves while the conservative has no real opponent."

The Republican Party has been mean and nasty and obstructionist and focused on narrow partisan hardball tactics, particularly since  Obama was elected.  (Of course, it has nothing to do with race, wink, wink.)  A prime example was McConnell's,

"Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term."

And despite bringing the approval of judges to a near standstill, and blocking even debate on Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland completely, they have the nerve to complain that the Democrats want to get documentation before considering Brett Kavanaugh now.  Senators used to refer to each other as the Honorable Senator from ...  Now they make personal attacks:

'I question their sincerity. ... What more do they need to know?'

[I assume I needn't mention the elephant in the White House because everyone is fully aware of his total lack of any kind of social decency or conscience.]

This all leads to how people are now confusing someone being polite and rational as being Progressive.  Maybe that augurs well for Progressives in November, but I would like to point out that being Progressive isn't simply about being rational and well mannered.  It's about policy that include all Americans, about taking care of those who have greater hardships and obstacles, about having access to affordable health care, about focus on the community AND the individual, about breaking down legal and social structures that help the rich get richer and insure that poor stay poor.  It's about America as the democracy that sets an example to the world and recognizes that it's immigrants who have kept the US vital and creative and economically strong.

Bill Walker was a Republican until the day he filed as an Independent to run for the Alaska governorship.  He did this to avoid running in the Republican primary where he'd lost the primary four years earlier.  Compared to Dunleavy?  Walker is definitely a better choice, but for a Progressive there can't really be a question between Begich and Walker.  Walker told us in 2014 he was running for Governor to get his gas pipeline put in.  That's been his focus.  And he has seemed often to be the only adult in Juneau.  Though the other Republicans have refused to take the state's financial dilemma seriously and the Democrats didn't have the power to get other revenues sources.  But Walker is also a pro-life Republican.  And  even with his dedication to the pipeline project, it hasn't happened and more and more people are skeptical it ever will.  His Chinese 'partners' are known to be corrupt.  And even with Trump pushing coal, alternative energy is the future, and not the distant future.  Close enough that the cost of the pipeline is likely to be unrecoverable by the time it's built.  The Chinese are sending their first experimental cargo ship to Europe through the Northwest Passage because global warming is making that viable.  And I'm pretty sure that tankers will be able to take North Slope LNG directly from Prudhoe Bay by the time any pipeline is finished.

If I had to pick a Republican to be Governor, Walker would be probably one of the least harmful.

But he's not a progressive.  He's about as progressive, as Richard Nixon, under whose watch we got The Clean Air Act, The Clean Water Act, The Environmental Protection Agency, the opening of China, and the Privacy Act.  And Roe v Wade was decided by the Supreme Court while Nixon was president.  Nixon didn't talk publicly about Roe v. Wade, but when his office tapes were released much later, he'd acknowledged the need for abortion at times (in case or rape or a black and white baby.)

Decency and rationality are important qualities in politicians.  When I watched the Watergate Hearings live back in the 1970s, all the members of the House Judiciary Committee displayed those characteristics - whether Republicans or Democrats.

The attention to John McCain's various memorials this past week reflect this same hunger for decency and rationality on the national level.  It didn't used to be a Progressive monopoly.   If McCain had died on the campaign trail in 2008 after selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate, I assure you Democrats wouldn't have been fawning all over McCain.  It's only now, seeing McCain's principled stands in contrast to a truly awful Republican president, that his passing has been honored so lavishly.  Democrat after Democrat has said, "I honor him as a genuine human being and statesman, even though we disagreed on most issues."

I asked Tom Begich (and to Mark) in July why Mark decided to run.  Their polling data at the time showed Dunleavy winning in a head to head race with Walker, so jumping into the race, as they saw it, wasn't 'giving the election to Walker.'  Tom was hoping that after the primaries, they could look at the polls and decide which one should run.  So rather than splitting the vote, Begich felt his entering the race was the only way to block Dunleavy.  That post with video is here.  

The deadline to withdraw a name from the ballot is any day now.  But if both stay in the race, no one should be confused about there being two progressives.  There are two decent candidates, two conservatives, and one progressive.

[UPDATE a little later:  Jeanne at Mudflats spells out Walker's conservatism in much more detail.]

[UPDATE Sept 4, 2018:  And the idea that Begich and Walker are both progressives is exactly the message the Republicans want Alaskans to believe.  This, from Must Read Alaska, the blog of Suzanne Downing*:

"Begich and Walker both occupy the same space in the electorate — the progressive, Bernie Sanders Democrats and others on the political left. Dunleavy has the political right locked down."]

* Downing is identified in some older opinion pieces as the Communications Director of the Alaska GOP, but I can't find any mention of her on the current AK GOP website.

Jute And Tute

Been working outside today in the backyard.  So here's a short one.  A couple of items you might have missed.


Is jute coming back?  An LA Times article says India hopes to make it the ancient textile of the future.

"Now India is betting that jute — an ancient textile whose harvesting and production have scarcely been touched by modern technology — could be a fabric of the future.
Amid a global push to reduce the use of plastic for environmental reasons, India is promoting jute — better known in the United States as the fiber used in burlap — as a material for reusable shopping bags, home furnishings, clothing, even diapers and women’s sanitary pads.
Indian officials tout the humble fiber’s eco-friendly qualities. Extracted from the bark of a tall, reedy plant, jute requires less water than cotton and almost no pesticides, absorbs more carbon dioxide for its size than most trees, and is totally biodegradable."

Modern World:  Galveston Man Booked A Prostitute – And She Turned Out To Be His Wife

 "She was furious to learn her husband had been hiring sex workers, although he was equally angry to learn his wife had been freelancing as a prostitute."

Unfortunately, the article didn't answer all my questions.  Did they have sex in the motel?   Did she get paid?  Sounds like they didn't since other guests at the motel complained about "the disturbance."  But the that's not clear.  The last line of the article says:

"The husband may now face charges under tough Texas prostitution laws, which make it illegal to engage in any type of sexual activity in exchange for money or some other form of compensation – even if it is with one’s own spouse. "

I'm not sure why I think this is worth mentioning.  I can't quite articulate it yet, but this seems to be a story that tells a lot about modern United States life and culture.  Or maybe it's a broader theme - about humanity in general.  I'm sure someone could create a profound movie around this headline.

Muldoon Farmers Market - Beautiful Vegies, Interesting Mix of Vendors, New Park

On the grounds of the old Mann-Leiser Greenhouse in Muldoon, there's now a new playground and on Saturday mornings, til it gets too cold, a farmers' market.

The farmer who grew these is originally from Nepal.

These two kabobs, the corn, a half a potato, and a roll - this was all $5 at Bub's Kabobs and BBQ.  The prices are low, Cindy told me, because they want to build up a client base.  This is definitely one of the best deals in town.

Here's Cindy and her daughter Brittany.  Bub's in the back at the grill.

A real mix of ethnicities.  And options.

It's where Debarr dead ends on Muldoon.

And here's Jerriane, one of the people who helped get the park and the market going.  I met her during the garden tour at the end of July and I finally made it to the market.

So, if you don't live on that side of town and haven't seen what's all going on there, Saturday morning (they're open until 2) would be a good time to see how that part of town is changing.

They also had music,  some food trucks, arts and crafts items too.

The Birther Movement Is Alive And Well In the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP)

Trump got lots of mileage claiming that Obama wasn't born in the United States and thus wasn't eligible to be president.  He knew, all along, that his accusation was false.  But it played well to the sizable racist population that was smarting at the idea of a Black president.  It also got Trump lots of attention and Obama's team had to use up resources (emotional, creative, financial) and time fighting the lies, time that could have been spent constructively.

Well, it's clear now that the Birther Movement is alive and well in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), as they question the birth locations of United States citizens who live along the Mexican border.  And it has the same effect of playing to Trump's anti-immigration and racist die-hard fans as well as distracting attention and resources and time from other issues (I don't think I need to list them, though some, I'm sure we don't even know about.)

As the noose around the Trump administration tightens, Trump actions are only going to get meaner and more destructive.  We need to brace ourselves and hang tough until this poison is out of our system - or at least down to a much less toxic level.  (Am I engaging in progressive hate speech here?  I am using a strongly negative metaphor, but I think it's backed up by the example of Trump's administration trying to strip US citizens of their citizenship.  We can argue endlessly about whether there actually are some people whose midwife falsified their place of birth 30 or 40 years ago, but there's a reason we have statute of limitation rules, and it only applies, if at all, to a tiny fraction of the people being harassed.   And these 'crimes' are nothing compared to all the ways that ICE and CBP are treating asylum seekers.)

And to help keep up your spirits, here are some signs of change  as summer prepares to hand over our lives to autumn.

The mountain ash berries seem particularly abundant and large this year.  The Bohemian waxwings will be happy when they come to harvest them during the winter.


















The rose hips are also big and red and abundant.  They're still hard, but before long they will be soft and sweet and full of vitamin C.












And this mushroom has also joined the party in our yard.  I first thought I'd just post the picture without looking it up.  I've got things to do while the sun is out.  But I decided that's not me on this blog.  So I looked for my field guide to mushrooms.  But in all the moving stuff round this summer it's not where it used to be.  So after 15 minutes I gave up and made a feeble attempt online to identify it.  I give up for now.  If anyone knows, please leave a comment.  But it's a handsome mushroom.

Here's What Real Heroes Do - They Take Big Risks To Do The Right Thing

There are countless people you rarely hear about who fight to protect those who don't have the power to protect themselves.  They risk their careers and sometimes their lives to do what's right.


Richard Sipe - ex-priest who worked hard to expose sex abuse in the Catholic Church.  This LA Times piece tells some of his story.

". . . Sipe was ordained in 1959 and soon became aware of priests who had relationships with adults and children. Later, he worked at a Baltimore psychiatric institute where abusive priests were sent for treatment and evaluation, and he began documenting their stories. With the help of his future wife, a psychiatrist at the institute, he published a 1990 book called, “A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy.”
Sipe, an expert witness in hundreds of clergy abuse cases, argued that celibacy and abuse were connected. We’re sexual creatures, he said, so celibacy is an unnatural expectation, and sex and sexual abuse are rampant among priests.
Those who abuse minors, he explained, have a convenient racket going. Peers may keep quiet because they’re predators too, and even if the abuse is reported to superiors, they’ve got reasons to maintain the code of silence. Maybe they don’t want to damage the image of the church. Or maybe they have their own sins to hide.
So pedophiles remain in ministry, or they’re shuffled to another parish, or to Mexico. Often, there’s no attempt to explain what’s happening to parishioners, to call the police or to do the most basic, caring, human thing — to offer an apology, comfort and support to victims. . . 

Hugh Thompson - Stopped My Lai massacre before it got worse.

" . . . Who were the people lying in the roads and in the ditch, wounded and killed?
"They were not combatants. They were old women, old men, children, kids, babies."
Then Thompson and his crew chief, Glenn Andreotta, and his gunner, Lawrence Colburn, "saw some civilians hiding in a bunker, cowering, looking out the door. Saw some advancing Americans coming that way. I just figured it was time to do something, to not let these people get killed. Landed the aircraft in between the Americans and the Vietnamese, told my crew chief and gunner to cover me, got out of the aircraft, went over to the American side."

What happened next was one of the most remarkable events of the entire war, and perhaps unique: Thompson told the American troops that, if they opened fire on the Vietnamese civilians in the bunker, he and his crew would open fire on them. . . ."

[Thanks Dennis for this one.]

Avoiding The Dark Because It's Too Nice To Stay Inside

Yesterday, after watching Dark Money at the Bear Tooth, the sun came out.  Not so dark.  So I did a bike ride around the Universities bike trail.

South fork of Chester Creek runs through the UAA campus.

Goose Lake was telling the sky, Backacha.

And even though the sun was getting down low on the horizon, the amanita mascara were brightening up the groundscape everywhere.

And this morning when I took the kitchen scraps up to the compost, I picked my morning raspberries.

But I am still thinking about Dark Money.  It's not that I didn't know the basics - how Citizens United has made it possible for large corporations to invisibly support candidates with tons of unmarked campaign dollars - but the details of the movie's example of stealing seats in the Montana legislature is still disgusting.

I'm not sure how many hurdles would have to be overcome, but what's bothered me about politicians getting to office through various undemocratic shenanigans is that no one really gets punished.  Laws that get passed by such politicians stay passed, benefiting their shadowy supporters and screwing everyone else.  (OK, the guy in the movie got fined about $60,000, but I doubt his supporters didn't help him out there.  He didn't resign, though his term was up shortly.)

 Besides murky campaign help, I include gerrymandering as well. Today's ADN had a Washington Post  article about how a federal appeals court had found - once again - that North Carolina had illegally gerrymandered the state so that while Republicans had 53% of the vote they got 77% of the state's delegation to the US House.

“I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” said Rep. David Lewis, a Republican member of the North Carolina General Assembly, addressing fellow legislators when they passed the plan in 2016. “So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.”

He added: “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”

To say this out loud, in public, shows that he knows there's nobody who's likely to hold him accountable.

At least the judges understood that the Republicans had essentially stolen that last three elections and weren't inclined to let this next election go as is - despite how late it is in the election cycle.  After all, it's late because the Republicans kept appealing the decision and making more mischief.

"He said the court was leaning against giving the North Carolina legislature another chance to draw the congressional districts.
“We continue to lament that North Carolina voters now have been deprived of a constitutional congressional districting plan — and, therefore, constitutional representation in Congress — for six years and three election cycles,” Wynn wrote. “To the extent allowing the General Assembly another opportunity to draw a remedial plan would further delay electing representatives under a constitutional districting plan, that delay weighs heavily against giving the General Assembly another such opportunity.”

This sort of stuff is a threat to the whole idea of democracy.  The movie made it clear how corporations can set up shell organizations to hide money and then spend tons of money on last minute ads that lie about  and smear their anointed candidate's opponent.  And once they have them elected, the movie narrator said, there's no longer even the need to lobby, because they own that official.

I don't think removal from office, prison terms, even nullification of ill-gained legislation are too harsh a punishment for the both the corporate manipulators and their elected stooges.  And people like Rep. David Lewis.  These are domestic (well not all the corporate funders are necessarily domestic) terrorists, taking over our democracy.

Have some fresh raspberries.

The Elephant In The Womb And Other Kavanaugh Protest Signs At Anchorage Rally

The street was wet and the sky was gray and my let's go biking mantra sounded a bit flat.  But there was a rally downtown to protest the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.  I'm much more for a rally about things people want to do, rather than things they don't want.  But, really, from my perspective, Kavanaugh would push the court way to the right, making decisions that favor the wealthy (corporations and individuals) and harm the overwhelming majority.  Kavanaugh would continue to interpret the bill of rights to apply to corporate 'persons' over individual human persons.  And we've already heard that he doesn't think a sitting president can be indicted, constitutionally.  I know people are focused on abortion, but in my mind, that's a proxy issue - one that gets a certain set of people imagining evil doctors torturing babies to death - but it's the advertising that gets people to support a judicial candidate who will find ways to ignore the blatant gerrymandering that some Republican dominate states have undertaken, and allows them to find ways to make it much harder for Democratic voters to vote.

It wasn't actually raining.  So I stuck a raincoat into my backpack and enjoyed my ride downtown via the Chester Creek bike trail.  And found a parking spot at a street light right next to the rally.  Here are some photos and a video.

I like a good play on words, so I thought this was a pretty nifty poster.

And the group was gathering post cards with people's messages to Sen. Lisa Murkowski, on the other few Republican Senators who's shown any backbone at all since Trump was elected.  I can't even imagine all the things she's being offered in exchange for a yes vote here.

It started drizzling as I was on my way home, but it never rained very hard.  Being out on the trail, moving blood through my veins is always a reward.