My Alaska Mail In Ballot Has Seven Candidates For US President

 We got our mail in ballots the other day and when I opened mine I was surprised to see so many presidential candidates on the ballot.  

Ballotpedia lists six of these candidates.  James Janos, it turns out, was nominated by the Alaska Green Party.  Ballotopedia lists another Green Party candidate - someone nominated by the national Green Party.  

But since none of these candidates was invited to the presidential debates, I'll give Alaskans a bit of background on the lesser known candidates with links to more information.  

Roque De La Fuente

"De La Fuente was a 2018 Republican candidate who sought election to the U.S. Senate from California, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wyoming.[2][3][4] He was defeated in those states' primary elections. The United States Constitution does not establish specific residency requirements for United States senators, stipulating only that a senator must be an "inhabitant of the state for which he shall be chosen." Residency requirements vary by state."

James G. “Jesse Ventura” Janos

"James G. “Jesse Ventura” Janos – United States President – Green Party Nominee

Other:

Jesse Ventura is a former professional wrestler, actor, political commentator, bestselling author, naval veteran, television host, and politician who served as the 38th governor of Minnesota from 1999 to 2003."

Jo Jorgensen

"Jo Jorgensen is the 2020 Libertarian Party presidential nominee. She was nominated at the Libertarian National Convention on May 23, 2020, becoming the first woman to lead the party's presidential ticket.[2][3] Her running mate is entrepeneur and podcaster Jeremy "Spike" Cohen.

Jorgensen framed her campaign as an alternative to Democratic and Republican policies she said created trillion-dollar deficits and led to involvement in expensive and deadly foreign wars. "Big government mandates and programs created these problems. To solve them, we need to make government smaller – much, much smaller," her campaign website said.[4]"

Brock Pierce 

"Brock Pierce is an independent candidate for president of the United States in 2020.

Pierce is an entrepreneur with experience in Blockchain technology and digital currency. He co-founded the cryptocurrency Tether. He also launched several philanthropic efforts, including the Brock Pierce Foundation and Integro Foundation.[1]"

 

Don Blankenship

"Don Blankenship – United States President – Alaska Constitution Nominee

Other:

Don Blankenship is a coal miner who rose to become CEO of Massey Energy Company. Blankenship said, 'I am running for President to let people know how dire the American situation is and what must be done to fix it. We cannot survive as a country if we do not stop the Republican and Democrat nonsense.'”

I have voted third party on occasion, knowing that my vote in Alaska would have no impact because I live in a red state.  But this year, it doesn't matter.  Every vote counts, even if it isn't reflected in the electoral college.  

The Guitar Center And New Sagaya - Two Very Different COVID-19 Strategies

First, we've taken COVID seriously.  Shopping has only been by online ordering with home delivery or (mostly)  curbside pickup.  Until we went to Denali in early September and had to go into the campground store to pickup our reservation, I hadn't been inside anywhere except our house and car since March. 

The Guitar Center Gets An A

So it was with great reluctance that I agreed to go the Guitar Center to pick up an electronic keyboard for my wife for her birthday.  It's something she's wanted since watching our granddaughter learning piano and  learning a bit with her.  The Guitar Center said they only allow five customers in at a time, one per section of the shop.  Masks were required.  I had tried to order it online and get curbside pickup - but they charged about $70 for that.  They had what I wanted in stock and if I came in to pick it up there was no charge.  

Lots of friends have been shopping with masks and they haven't contracted the virus.  I've been reading that wearing masks greatly reduces the spread.  It sounded like the conditions were ideal.  I parked in the lot.  There's a sign outside where people are to line up.  (No one was in line.)  The door was locked.  Someone let me in.  They had my stuff at the counter.  I paid.  Someone carried the keyboard out to the car.  It's a large store with lots of room.  One other customer came while I was there.  They unlocked the door and let him in.  

New Sagaya Gets an D-

On my wife's actual birthday, I was getting curbside pickup at Carr's.  But I hadn't ordered any kind of birthday cake and they said they couldn't add to the order.  So, given my good experience at the Guitar Center, I decided to go to New Sagaya and pick up something tasty at the bakery.  You just walk in.  The bakery was ok, the employees were masked, and he put on gloves to get the pastries and put them in a box.  Since I was already in the store, I figured I could pick up a few things we haven't had for a long time - like sushi, and a veggie wrap.  There were a lot of people in the store.  You could not pass through and maintain any kind of distance.  I only saw one customer without a mask covering his face.  

But then I got to the checkout.  There are four, but only two on one end were open.  They're close together.  At best, in my row (not the one on the end) I would be back to back with the cashier in the end row probably less than two feet separation.  But there was a second employee standing next to that other cashier talking to my cashier (casually, not about business) with her mask below her chin.  

I was surprised.  I would have to be less than a foot from her if I passed through.  I was next in line, but about three feet back.  I asked her to put on her mask.  She turned and faced the other way.  I quickly got my stuff and left.  

I called the store and asked to speak to the manager.  I told him my tale.  He said he knew who I was talking about and would take care of it.  

But it's more than the one employee.  They have four registers.  Only two were being used.  They really should only use every other checkout line.  They shouldn't have so many people in the store that you have to pass within a foot or two of other customers.  They should monitor the doors and limit how many people are in the store.  

And an employee who is that close to customers without a mask should be fired.  Sorry.  They have less control of customers and masks, but for employees, this should be unacceptable behavior.  

We did enjoy the pastries, one with a candle in it.  I don't know what it's like inside other stores, but that was my experience.  And I only went in because it was my wife's birthday.  

We have to decide if we're going inside for flu shots.  We went to the Alaska Regional Hospital drive through flu shot event last week.  We called first to see if they had the stronger version for seniors.  The lady said they did.  She also said it was really crowded (at 6pm - they opened at 5:30) and we should come closer to 8 (when they close).  We got there at 7:10 and the line wasn't too bad.  There were actually several lines.  But they had run out of forms to fill out.  When we got to people holding needles, they gave us a form.  We said we wanted the stronger version.  They didn't have any left.  If we took this one could we get a stronger one later?  No, you shouldn't get the other one if you get this one.  So we left.  

We'll try again this evening.  We'll go earlier.  If it doesn't work, we'll probably go to Walgreen.  Not something I want to do.  [UPDATED October 6, 2020 10pm:  There was a very long line when the drive thru flu shots opened up at Regional, but they had five open lines and things went much faster than I expected:  maybe 40 minutes.  Arm's not too sore either.]

But I did hit 600 kilometers on my bike this week, and that's only from when I got the odometer working, early June I think.  

Hope you're all staying well.  We're being a little extreme, waiting as doctors and researchers learn more about the habits of this virus.  And there's no guarantee that it won't mutate and learn different behaviors.  

So, There's This Virus. It Needs A Human Host. If It Can't Find One It Dies.

There's been lots written about how the virus spreads.  And as I started writing this post, I googled questions to make sure I was right.  But I couldn't figure out the questions that would lead to the kind of answers I was looking for. (Not ones that supported my beliefs, but ones that factual detailed how the virus spreads.)  Most of the posts about how the virus spreads are dated March or April of this year.  Others have no date whatsoever.   This was the closest I could find and is dated September 18.  It's from the CDC:

"The virus that causes COVID-19 is thought to spread mainly from person to person, mainly through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or talks. These droplets can land in the mouths or noses of people who are nearby or possibly be inhaled into the lungs. Spread is more likely when people are in close contact with one another (within about 6 feet)."

 

The point I'm trying to make is this:

• Humans are the host for the COVID-19 virus.
• If the virus can't get to another host (another human) from the original host, the virus can't spread.
• People (whether they know they host the virus or not) can prevent the virus from spreading to another human by:
• Staying home alone until the virus is out of their system (until they are better, basically)
• If they must have contact with other people:
• Not broadcasting droplets or aerosol sprays containing the virus (by breathing, talking, coughing, singing, etc.)  on or near other human beings 
• People around them wear protective gear - masks minimally, and for first responders, other appropriate protective gear.
• The infected person wears a mask

If the virus can't find a new host, it dies.  If all infected people prevent the virus from finding another host, the pandemic will end.  It's that easy.  It might take a month or two for most of the viruses to die because of lack of a new host.  

Instead, fear about the economy caused many politicians to open places where spreading happens.  Many politicians refused to require masks. Or wear one themselves. The economy would take a hit if things were shut down for two months.  But then it could open.  Fear of the virus is keeping the economy down as much as, if not more, than government restrictions on businesses.

That doesn't mean, after we starve most of the viruses out there, everything will be perfect.  There will be people in whom the virus keeps thriving longer than normal.  There will be people traveling from other places carrying the virus.  But just wearing masks would radically slow down the spread of the virus.  

Instead the virus is finding millions of hosts.  Why?

• Lack of understanding these basics.
• Lack of concern for other people. ("I'm young, it won't hurt me if I get it.")
• Lack of self-discipline. (People who need to go to weddings or bars before this is over.)
• Underlying personal issues individual humans have that make them defy the obvious. ("Wearing a mask infringes on my freedom.")
• Mixed messages from science on one side and religious leaders and the Trump cult on the other side

That's all.  It's not that hard to understand.  

Shaggy Manes - Late September/Early October Gift From Nature

 On my bike ride Saturday, I noticed a patch of lawn where shaggy mane mushrooms had just pushed up out of the ground. 

Shaggy manes turn black when they're past their prime and become inky.  So I was concerned about all the black.  But it turned out to be dirt they'd pushed up as the erupted into the world from underground.  There were probably a couple of dozen in this area.  And it was public land so when I chose a few good ones, I wasn't poaching.  In the pictures above and below here, you can see why they are called shaggy.  

So I continued my bike ride and stopped back to get some mushrooms.  

Here they are, ready to be cleaned. 

Cut up.

And then cooking.  

With a little garlic and onion in butter (a rare treat in our house), they're delicious.  With the second batch I scrambled some eggs in with them.  

To me, these mushrooms are like a free gift from nature.  You just have to come across them at the right time, and they're yours to pick and enjoy.  

Los Angeles Times Mea Culpa

This is from a long confessional apology by the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times: 

"For at least its first 80 years, the Los Angeles Times was an institution deeply rooted in white supremacy and committed to promoting the interests of the city’s industrialists and landowners. No one embodied this aggressive, conservative ideology more than Harrison Gray Otis, the walrus-mustachioed Civil War veteran who controlled The Times from 1882 until his death in 1917. The modern notion that journalism’s core precepts include uncovering hard truths and exposing inequity would have been foreign to Otis and other press barons of the last Gilded Age. Far from a mission of “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable,” his newspaper stood for the raw exercise of power, and he used it to further a naked agenda of score settling, regional boosterism, economic aggrandizement and union busting.

Otis was a Lincoln Republican who had fought on the side of the Union and opposed slavery. But his Times was a newspaper aimed at the mostly Protestant white settlers who migrated to California from the Midwest and the Plains in the decades after it was seized from Mexico in 1848 and admitted to the Union in 1850."

Do you think the fact that the owner of the LA Times (he bought it two years ago) is a person of color has anything to do with this statement?  From the Guardian:

"Patrick Soon-Shiong has spent decades trying to cure cancer and made a biotech fortune in the process, making him one of California’s most successful, enigmatic billionaires.

Born in South Africa to Chinese parents, he rose from humble origins and ended up in Los Angeles where he has thrived as a surgeon, scientist and entrepreneur. “The richest doctor in the history of the world,” Forbes magazine declared in 2014."

The apology goes on to spell out examples of the paper's own institutional racism:

"It was not just that The Times saw fit to hire white men almost exclusively for its newsroom; the stories it told were largely for and about white people, which meant Angelenos weren’t getting an accurate account of their city, region and state at a time of rapid change.

Typical of the paper’s attitude was a 1978 interview in which Otis Chandler airily dismissed Black and Latino readers: “It’s not their kind of newspaper. It’s too big, it’s too stuffy. If you will, it’s too complicated.”

Chandler later stepped back from that, saying the paper was looking for readers in the “broad middle class” and “upper classes” regardless of race or ethnicity. “We are not a paper that’s sought after in the lower-class areas,” he said."

I would like to think this would have been written even if this hadn't been the year of BLM becoming mainstream.  But the apology itself acknowledges the influence of George Floyd's murder.  

The brutal death of a Black man, George Floyd, on May 25 while in the custody of police in Minneapolis shocked the world. It also prompted news organizations like The Times to reflect on how they cover, frame and promote stories at a time when the 24/7 news cycle moves faster than ever. Amid nationwide demonstrations over racial injustice, members of the Los Angeles Times Guild established caucuses for Black and Latino employees. The caucuses have called for improvements in coverage, hiring and career development, a public apology for The Times’ poor record on race, and equal pay. They have insisted, rightly, on reframing and recentering our coverage of communities of color.

 I hope it sets an example for other organizations to reflect on their pasts and redesign their futures.  And the future of the United States.  Here's what the Times pledges:

The Times will redouble and refocus its efforts to become an inclusive and inspiring voice of California — a sentinel that employs investigative and accountability reporting to help protect our fragile democracy and chronicles the stories of the Golden State, including stories that historically were neglected by the mainstream press. Being careful stewards of this new company, privately owned but operated for the benefit of the public, is our first obligation. But that stewardship will also require bold and decisive change. If we are to survive as a business, it will be by tapping into a digital, multicultural, multigenerational audience in a way The Times has never fully done.

 

Jerusalema - Take A Happy Break

The LA Times has a story today:

"Singer Zikode said she is thrilled to see so many people around the world dancing to the song.

“When I saw the president [Cyril Ramaphosa] announcing that everyone should celebrate today’s Heritage Day by dancing to ‘Jerusalema,’ I quickly jumped up, raised my hands and shouted!” Zikode said in Zulu.

“I was so happy,” she said. 'God has lifted me up because of the success of this song, and everyone is dancing to my voice.'” 

Just take a break and enjoy the music and enthusiasm.  Better yet, get up and join.  

Below is a video with the composer talking about how amazed he is that this song has taken off like this.  

Sorry about the ads on these, but when you get something going this viral, YouTube encourages you too monetize.  

Two Netflix Series - Borgen and Away - Feature Mothers In Critically Important Jobs. Plus Rached

I'll try to keep this short.  Trying to write on something a little lighter than the elections. Think of it as notes to readers about Netflix offerings they might want to watch or avoid.  

BORGEN and AWAY

The ten year old Danish series BORGEN features a woman propelled into the position of prime minister of Denmark.  The new Netflix series AWAY features a woman as the commander of a mission to Mars.  

Both have to deal with sexism in the job (though not all that much) along with the work demands that make  it hard to pay adequate attention to their children - each has a teenage daughter, the Danish prime minister also has a younger son.  

Birgitte Nyborg's constant task is keeping together a coalition of parties with different priorities.  Emma Green, Captain of the Atlas, has an astronaut from India, China (the other woman and mother), England/Ghana, and Russia to keep together.  But there's also her former astronaut husband who has a stroke after liftoff and anxious daughter back on earth to distract her.  

I was struck by how we were watching these two series at the same time and how each treated the difficulties of a married woman in a traditionally male position.   BORGEN flows quickly from crisis to crisis fairly organically while with AWAY the crises - both technical and interpersonal - seem more contrived, and like Indiana Jones, Emma always seems to narrowly escape disaster.   

BORGEN has three seasons and we're near the end of season two.  I thought in the trip to negotiate between the northern Islamic area and the Christian south of a fictional African country, Brigitta's preparation for such a difficult diplomatic trip seemed woefully inadequate.  We only saw the first part of this adventure and if the upcoming summit in Copenhagen falls apart, I won't be surprised.  But the show has a way of giving Brigitta lots of narrow victories.

I think BORGAN is well worth watching.  AWAY is certainly not must see tv, but not a total waste of time.  

RATCHED  

This Netflix series is like the most exquisite and decadent dessert in the bakery display case.  The colors are rich, the costumes and sets delicious, the actors arch,  and the camera makes love to it all.    It's noir in technicolor with the appropriate campy creepy music.  There's very little nutrition in this evil concoction. And there's lots of gratuitous gore.  But it's visually pretty spectacular.

It's the back story of Nurse Ratchet from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (which Netflix is also pushing right now.)  

That Cuckoo's Nest connection is probably what made me watch the first episode.  I read Cuckoo's Nest at the end of my Peace Corps time in Thailand and was possessed with the question "Who wrote this?  Why?  How did he know all this stuff?"  And soon after I was working at a Peace Corps training program in Hilo when a new trainee had the book Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.  I read the blurb on the back that said it was about the author of Cuckoo's Nest.  It's not cool to use your position to get favors, but I was so obsessed I asked the trainee if I could borrow the book right then.  I consumed it that night and gave the book back the next day with my curiosity satisfied.  

RACHED really has nothing to do with Cuckoo's Nest.  It's just a gimmick to play off the name recognition of Nurse Rached to produce a highly stylized and visually beautiful, but empty, confection of a series.  It's a wicked distraction from today's COVID and Trump nightmare.

“This was a time when the phrase gender bias didn’t exist, except gender bias existed,” - Stories of RGB's Law School Classmates

 An article in Slate, The Other Women In RGB's Harvard Law Class  from July of this year looks at the lives of the nine other women in Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Harvard class.  I started pulling out quotes to be teasers for people to read the article.  But what should I be highlighting - the discrimination they faced as women at Harvard Law and getting jobs?  Or should I focus on their accomplishments?  A little of both made sense, but then could I leave any out so I wasn't quoting so much?  Especially after yesterday's post that took a lot from Rosling's book?  

I've gone through and edited out most of what I'd highlighted.  You really should read the original article.  Or, down at the bottom of the article you can listen to it while you're doing something else.

All in all it's compelling reading.  Echoing some themes from the Rosling post, 

• Things change so slowly that we don't really see the progress.  But an article like this helps make it clear.
• Things can be both better and still bad.  The conditions for women are much better today, but there is still much room for improvement.

Carol Brosnahan, born 1934

She was accepted into Wellesley, where she studied economics. Then she took a job on Wall Street, researching investments for wealthy clients. “I wasn’t allowed to meet the clients, because women weren’t supposed to be managing their money,” she recalled.

She stayed at the job for a year, during which she got engaged. “My fiancé said it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to work, but I could go to school,” she said, which is how she began an application to Harvard Law School. 

But while she got along well with many of her male classmates, her professors often singled her out in humiliating ways. She recalled the night when Dean Erwin Griswold asked the women why they were there in law school, taking the place of a man. 

By the fall of 1960, Carol had stopped working altogether. She had three children in under four years. Between the second and third pregnancies, the family moved to the Bay Area for Jim’s job with the U.S. attorney’s office there. When her youngest daughter was still an infant, Carol took the California bar exam—her second certification, after Arizona—as she began to feel she was “going crazy” staying at home. So she took a job with the Continuing Education of the Bar, which provides training and publishes books for practicing lawyers. She began editing and writing books on the law, focused on poverty, bankruptcy, and tenant law. Jim was supportive, but “my husband didn’t change diapers,” she said. “He was a great dad, but the household and the children were my responsibility. It was a lot of juggling and not very much sleep.”

Even as she moved up in the agency, she found that her career growth was limited. “This was a time when the phrase gender bias didn’t exist, except gender bias existed,” she said. Though she had been at CEB more than a decade, she said the director refused to give her the same title as her male colleagues. “And that’s what got me to put my name in for a judge—gender bias.” Eventually, she got a call from a man in Gov. Jerry Brown’s office to inform her she would be appointed to the Berkeley municipal court. “And tell Jim you got this one on your own,” the man said.

Rhoda Solin Isselbacher, 1932–2015 

Her family thinks Rhoda entered Harvard Law as the school’s first-ever pregnant student. She once told an entire lecture hall that she couldn’t be expected to walk to another building to use the women’s restroom (the only one in the entire law school), and instead proposed that she could use the lecture hall’s men’s room, as long as she put a sign on the door. The men agreed. 

Rhoda had child rearing help—from nannies. In 1993, when Ginsburg was named to the bench, Jill Abramson wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal about how the careers of the other women in the class of 1959 were shaping up. Rhoda told Abramson the story of being pulled away from a client meeting to take one of her children to the hospital for a dog bite. “My husband’s a doctor, why isn’t he on his way to the children’s hospital?” she remembered thinking. “But fathers didn’t do that back then.”

In the mid-’70s, Rhoda became in-house counsel at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, then known as the Sidney Farber Cancer Institute. (Rhoda negotiated the deal that led to the name change.) She had recently undergone two years of chemotherapy for breast cancer, and the job felt personal. At the time, biotech was giving rise to knotty legal and ethical questions about patient rights, clinical trials, and intellectual property. “It was a new area of law she spearheaded,” her son Eric remembered. She set up one of the very first patient advocacy programs in any hospital in the country.

After 10 years, Rhoda was forced to resign when Kurt became the founding director of the competing Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center. To avoid any conflict of interest, she returned full time to the small law firm where she’d spent most of her career, Epstein, Salloway, and Kaplan—which later became Epstein, King, and Isselbacher.

Virginia Davis Nordin, 1934–2018

After graduating, Virginia found that potential employers were unwilling to take her seriously. She told the Journal in 1993 that in those early interviews, she was often asked if she had plans to get married or have children. “You’d end up discussing your theories on birth control and nothing about your credentials,” she said. She landed a job clerking for a federal judge in San Francisco and went on to work as in-house counsel to a New York shipping company—a job she loved but ended up quitting because, as she told the Journal, her boss sexually harassed her.

Wiltrud F. Richter, born 1935

There were warning signs from the start. During the application process, she was interviewed by a man who cautioned her not to get married and drop out. “Harvard thought it was doing a groundbreaking thing by accepting us. That was made very clear,” she said.

When classes started, she found that no men would even greet her, except for a few fellow Swarthmore graduates and one professor. “Nobody else, literally,” she said. “It was like living on an island by yourself. … They didn’t want women.” Trudy doesn’t remember ever interacting with her fellow female students. She lived alone, sharing a hallway and bathroom with an architecture student. “We exchanged a few words every day,” she recalled. “And that exchange was very important to me because otherwise nobody was talking to me.” Even her professors ignored her, she felt.

Her first job as a lawyer was with a legal services firm, working on its family law cases. She later opened her own practice for low-income clients—handling everything from family law matters to misdemeanor defense. She also represented minors needing approval for abortions, pro bono, and helped women fleeing domestic violence obtain court orders. But she wasn’t able to make enough to even cover malpractice insurance and had to close after a year.

She spent the next decade working for the Disability Rights Center of New Hampshire. While there, she filed an amicus brief with the New Hampshire Supreme Court in defense of a man who was convicted of a crime for having sex with a mentally disabled person under what she believed to be a discriminatory statute. The court agreed with Trudy and ruled that a person with a disability who is genuinely able to consent to sex can do so. Another time, she resolved a case involving two deaf parents and helped spare them from losing custody of their children. “I don’t think anyone would account for my life in terms of major legal successes because of the kinds of clients I had, and the kinds of issues we had,” she said. But she took pride in her “good legal imagination.” 

Her list of championed causes grew long over the decades. She campaigned to end the death penalty in New Hampshire, pushed to have her Unitarian Universalist church convert to solar power, and lobbied for legislative relief to undocumented immigrants. For five years, she supported a family from Bhutan as they transitioned to American life and used her legal training to draft a manual for other volunteers to do the same. The manual remains the one relied on by the church for its refugee program today. In 2018, at age 83, Trudy was arrested for participating in a die-in with the Poor People’s Campaign in New Hampshire. “Overall, it seems to me that the things I’ve done that I’m proudest of have not necessarily always been part of my work as a lawyer,” she said.

Marilyn G. Rose, 1934–2011

 “She had a real passion for serving the underprivileged,” her stepson Tim Childers said. “It was so much a part of her nature.” As a lawyer, she successfully argued a case that redefined how low-income people and people of color across the country could access health care, and its logic undergirds the entire health care law reform movement.

Marilyn never complained to her husband or stepchildren about her experience at Harvard. If anything, Tim and Teresa recall, she seemed to have thrived there. But it was also one of the first places she started advocating for systemic change—in her second year, she was denied membership in Harvard’s all-male public defenders program because women could not be sent to jails to interview male defendants. So she and fellow classmate Eleanor Voss publicly lobbied to have women allowed into the program, arguing that even without access to jails, they could still do plenty of work. Marilyn didn’t end up benefiting from her crusade, but the program opened up to women the year she graduated.

According to her husband, Bobby, Marilyn graduated with honors and then watched male classmates with worse grades land jobs at firms that had rejected her. Some companies openly admitted that they didn’t hire women. So she “had to go work for the government, the only place that offered her a job,” Bobby said. After a stint at the National Labor Relations Board, she transitioned to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (now the United States Department of Health and Human Services). She found a comfortable fit in the Office for Civil Rights, where she helped desegregate hospitals and mental institutions.

Flora Schnall

After graduating, Flora remembers a frustrating string of interviews. “The only thing that kept me looking was that I knew that Ruth hadn’t gotten a job,” she said. “I felt if Ruth, who was first or second at law school, couldn’t get hired, I just had to keep looking.” Through connections, she landed a job as assistant counsel to Nelson A. Rockefeller when he was governor of New York. “It was just sheer luck,” she said. “I was the only woman in the office, and they wanted a woman in the office.” The job thrilled her. 

Betty Jean Shea, born 1934

Betty Jean was confident she would excel at Harvard, but since she had a friend who had been among an even earlier group of women there, she knew it wouldn’t be easy. “She said it was challenging, but she also said it’s sometimes fun to be the only girl there.” The experience could be fun, Betty Jean said, but for the most part she felt she was ignored by the professors, with the notable exception of Barton Leach and his “ladies’ day,” which left her feeling under attack. Her fellow students were no better, often asking her what she was doing there. “Young men would blithely ask that question to you directly,” she said. “I’d just say, ‘I’m interested in the law, and I couldn’t figure out a better place to go.’ ” She found solidarity with her roommates Flora Schnall and Carol Simon. “We could tell stories and laugh about a great many things that wouldn’t be so easy to laugh at if you didn’t have them with you,” she said. “It made it easier to take it less personally.”

 

Betty Jean’s first major job after graduation was as an attorney for the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, where she rubbed shoulders with influential New Yorkers. It was the best job she ever had, she said, but even there she faced discrimination: She said that she was hired by a man who felt “uncomfortable” hiring women and did so only to please his more progressive boss. She recalled that once, when attending a luncheon at the all-male New York Stock Exchange, she had to arrive through a freight elevator to a separate entrance, because the regular elevator was “for business, it was for men”—even though she was there to give a speech on a new regulation she had helped draft. Afterward, she called up the president of the New York Federal Reserve, whom she didn’t personally know, to complain. He promised not to send any more speakers to the exchange until they changed the policy. They did,

 

Alice Vogel Stroh, 1935–2007

Despite having excellent grades, Alice was rebuffed by almost all the firms she applied to. She eventually found an opportunity at the agrochemical company Monsanto, which at the time was looking to hire women. She landed a job in their legal department—one of just a few women at the time doing corporate litigation. She stayed for eight years.

She left the job after she got pregnant, but it’s unclear whether she quit or was simply taking her maternity leave. Her daughter was stillborn. A grieving Alice wrote to Monsanto, telling them she would “not have the joy of being a mother” and asking to return to her job. Monsanto had already filled the position with a man. “She was almost pleading for them to reconsider taking her back,” Elizabeth said. “She had worked so hard to get to where she was, but as soon as she stepped aside to have babies, then that door closed very quickly for her.” She adopted her first of two daughters that same year and left the legal profession to become a full-time mother.

Eleanor Voss, 1936–1958

On Nov. 13, 1958, Voss was riding as a passenger on a motorized scooter when it collided with a taxi cab in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, intersection, killing her. After her death, her friends and classmates from Goucher created a fund, the Eleanor Voss ’56 Fellowship, to send one graduating senior to law school each year. It continues today.

So many good reasons to volunteer or give money or both before November 3.   

Applying Factfulness To Why People Might Vote For Trump Part I

[I thought I would just take a few of the ideas from Rosling's book and them apply them to Trump supporters to see why he still has so many.  But as I started making the list, I realized that so many of the obstacles to good decisions he mentions are relevant.  And because the book has great end of chapter summaries, it's easy to give an outline (though that leaves out most of the examples that help readers understand the points.)  So I'm adding this note on top to say, this post will outline those key points I wanted and I'll do a follow up post applying them to our current political situation.  As I went through them again, I realized they also illustrate problems among those opposing Trump as well.  And I recommend going to the links - particularly to the fact test and to lgapfinder.]

Factfulness::  Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think  by Hans Rosling, starts out with a self test on facts about how the world is doing, which you can take here.  The first question is:

1. In all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary

school?

 a.  20%

 b.  40%

 c.  60%

In the book he relates the many different places he's given the test - to college students, business people, bankers, doctors, heads of international organizations, Nobel Prize winners, etc.  All the groups, he tells us, scored worse than chimpanzees.  (Who randomly choosing one of three options would get 33% right.)

The questions all relate to how human beings are doing around the world.  He argues they are doing much better than most people think.  And everyone in the West, he argues, think everything is getting worse, because we have mental models of "US" and "THEM" - US being being relatively rich (mostly) Western societies and THEM being the poor starving masses in the rest of the world who will never, ever be able to catch up to how we live in the West.  

Reality, he argues, is much different.  Rather than US and THEM with a giant unbridgeable gap between the two, he presents us with a different model.  One without a gap.  Instead, he says there is US which he calls (income) Level 4, then Level 3, Level 2, and finally THEM in Level 1.  The gap is filled with five billion people.  Levels 1 and 4 have one billion each.  So, most people are in that gap most people mistakenly see.  In fact, the website he and his co-authors (his son and daughter-in-law) set up to present the data they use to convince people their world views are wrong, is called Gapminder.  (Any one who's ridden a subway in Britain or a relatively recent British colony will hear in their heads the warning "Mind the Gap")  

Here's how he describes the levels:

Level 1 - making $1 a day

Five kids, spend hours/day walking barefoot to get water with the single family bucket.  They gather firewood for cooking, little or no access to medical care, the same porridge for every meal. (1 billion people)

Level 2 - making $4 a day

Buy food you didn't grow, raise chickens, sandals for kids, bike, more buckets, less time getting water, gas for cooking, kids can go to school instead of finding firewood. Electricity, but not reliable. Mattress to sleep on. (3 billion people)

Level 3 - $16 from multiple jobs.  Cold water tap. Stable electricity improves kids' homework.  Buys fridge, motorcycle, can travel to better paying job.  (2 billion people)

Level 4 - >$33 a day

Rich consumer.  >12 years education.  You've been on an airplane on vacation.  Hot and cold indoor water.  Can eat out once a month and buy a car.  (1 billion people)

At the Gapminder website on Dollar Street you can see pictures of families at all four levels (it seems that each column is a level) in different countries.  And, of course, you'll notice that there are people living at all four levels in most countries.  

Most of the book talks about why people are so misinformed about facts about the world and how to counteract them.  We have a number of built in human instincts that might have been useful to human beings tens of thousands of years ago, but today can get us into trouble.  We have to learn to control them.  

The Gap Instinct - The tendency to polarize things, to see an unbridgeable gap between rich and poor, them and us.  Remember to:

• Beware comparisons of averages
• Beware of comparisons of extremes
• The view from up here - Things are distorted (as the view from Level 4)

The Negativity Instinct - tendency to see and report on the bad things that happen, not the good.  Remember:

• Better and bad - things can be getting better and still be bad, it's not either/or
• Good news is not news - doesn't get reported the way bad news does
• Gradual improvement is not news - slowly improving conditions aren't newsworthy
• More news doesn't equal more suffering - often bad news due to better surveillance of suffering, not a worsening.  Our news and social media bring us lots of bad news
• Beware of rosy pasts - The good old days are much better in hindsight than we people lived them

The Straight Line Instinct  - this is seeing a trend and assuming it will always be that way.  Remember to:

• Not assume straight lines - many trends are not straight lines but are curves.  We may be only looking at a short part of the line.  (He talks about various trends, but about population particularly for this one.  He argues that as people improve their wealth and move up to a higher level, they have fewer children and that all the population experts agree that at about 11 billion people the world population will level off.  

The Fear Instinct - Frightening things get our attention.  Our natural fears of violence, captivity, and contamination make us systematically overestimate these risks.  To control the fear instinct, calculate the risks.

• The scary world:  fear v reality - the world seems scarier than it is because it has been filtered by your attention filter or by the media precisely because it is scary
• Risk=danger x exposure - The risk is not related to how scary something is, but by a) how dangerous it is and b) how much you're exposed to it 

The Size Instinct - Lonely numbers seem impressive (large or small).  How to get things into proportion:

• Compare - Single numbers alone are misleading.  Look for comparisons (with past numbers, numbers in other locations, etc.)  
• 80/20 Rule - Generally, a few things account for most of the impact.  Figure out the 20% that's most important
• Divide - Amounts and Rates tell different stories.  Comparing countries, say, the numbers are misleading.  Look for rates per person instead.  

The Generalization Instinct - Categorization is necessary to survive, but categories can be misleading.  We have to avoid generalizing incorrectly.

• Look for differences within groups - find ways to break them down into smaller and smaller categories
• Look for similarities across groups - and ask if your categories are correct
• Look for differences across groups - do not assume what applies to one group applies to another (what applies to Level 4, for example, applies to other Levels)
• Beware of "the majority" - Majority just means more than half, there's another 49%
• Beware of vivid examples - Vivid images are easy to recall, but they may not be representative
• Assume people are not idiots - When things seem strange, be curious and humble and think.  In what way is this a smart solution?

The Destiny Instinct - Many things (such as people, countries, religion, and cultures) appear to be moving in a constant direction because the change is so slow, but slow changes gradually become big ones.  

• Keep track of gradual Improvements - small change every year can become a huge change over decades.
• Update your knowledge - Some knowledge goes out of date quickly.  Technology, countries, societies, cultures, and religions are constantly changing.
• Talk to Grandpa - think about your values are different from those of your grandparents
• Collect examples of cultural change - Challenge the idea that today's culture must also have been yesterday's and will be tomorrow's.

The Single Perspective Instinct - A single perspective can limit your imagination, better to look at problems from many angles to get a more accurate understanding.

• Test your ideas - Have people who disagree with you test your ideas
• Limited expertise - Don't claim expertise beyond your field.  Be humble about what you don't know.
• Hammers and Nails - From the saying: "If you give a young child a hammer, he will think everything needs pounding."  If you get good with a tool don't use it too often.  If you have analyzed a problem in depth, you can end up exaggerating its importance.  No one tool is good for everything.  Be open to ideas from other fields.
• Numbers, but not only numbers -  Love numbers for what they tell you about real lives.
• Beware of simple ideas and simple solutions - History is full of visionaries who used simple utopian visions to justify terrible actions.  Welcome complications.

The Blame Instinct - He told a story in this chapter about a problem with a pharmaceutical company for not looking for solutions to poor people's diseases.  A student of his suggested someone should punch the CEO in the nose.  He replied, I will see him next week, but if I did that would it solve the problem?  He answers to the board.  Should I punch them in the nose too?  They answer to shareholders who want profits.  Should I go after the shareholders?  Retirement funds hold lots of pharmaceutical stocks that help pay pensions for old folks.  When you see your grandfather next week, maybe you should punch him in the nose.  The desire to find a scapegoat is universal, but things are more complicated.  

• Look for causes, not villains - spend your energy on understanding the multiple interacting causes, or system, that created the situation.
• Look for systems, not heroes.  When someone claims to have caused something good, ask whether the outcome might have happened anyway, even if that individual had done nothing.  Give the systems the credit.

The Urgency Instinct - When often rush decisions because of a perceived, but not necessarily true, urgency.  Control this by taking small steps.

• Take a breath - When your urgency instinct is triggered, your other instincts kick in and your analysis shuts down.  Ask for more time and information.  It's rarely now or never and rarely either/or.
• Insist on the data - If something is urgent and important, it should be measured.  Beware of relevant but inaccurate data
• Beware of fortune tellers - Any prediction about the future is uncertain.  Beware of of predictions that fail to acknowledge that.  Ask how often such predictions have been right before.
• Be wary of drastic action - Ask what the side effects will be.  Ask how the idea has been tested.  Step-by-step practical improvements are less dramatic but usually more effective.

I'll put a link to Part II here when it's ready, but I'm guessing that readers can start applying these instincts to both Trump supporters and opponents.  

Happy New Year

The Jewish New Year begins at sunset this evening.  The passing or Ruth Bader Ginsburg makes it bitter sweet as we mourn her, and ask forgiveness from those we have done wrong.  The next ten days, according to Jewish tradition, is when people's fates for the next year are written.  

Unlike most years, it's a small intimate table for two, though we'll do the initial blessings via zoom with friends and then join services via zoom a little later. Shana Tova.  Happy New Year to all.  May we be able to come together again sometime in the next year.  While it will be 2021 on the Western calendar, we move into 5781 on the Jewish calendar tonight.