"Don’t call them “at-risk.” They’re “at-promise" And 3 Other Articles Of Interest

Let's start off with some good news.  If you're only going to link to one of these articles, I recommend this one.   There are better ways to do things.  For one things, being smaller and close to your people helps.   I also want to disclose that the head of Fledge is a close relative.

Novel Holding Company Africa Eats Has Raised $1.8M For Its Impact Startups (Forbes)

About a year ago, Fledge, which operates about 10 impact accelerators around the world, launched Africa Eats, a holding company with 27 agriculture and food-focused Africa-based graduates of the networks’ programs. The goal: supporting entrepreneurs on-the-ground with an intimate understanding of how best to address hunger and poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since then, the company has raised close to $2 million—and, despite the pandemic, the portfolio companies are doing fine.

Another good news story, where calling attention to labels can make a difference.  Not 'at risk.'  'At promise.'  Most kids want to be good people, they just need support for those dreams.

Caring for the environment helps South King County kids recovering from trauma or hardship find a sense of purpose  (From the Seattle Times)

"This summer, Park, Amine and Tracy are among two dozen mostly South King County youth learning to be stewards of the environment. 

They clean urban lakes during kayak patrols, plant trees, learn field mapping skills and test water quality in streams and rivers on state parks and public lands. They’re on water or trails several days each month. They’re paid $15 an hour for the work — enough to keep most of them from having to take other part- or full-time jobs that would otherwise consume their days — and they’re getting leadership training so they can help lead conservation and pollution prevention efforts in the future. . .

Many of the youth involved in Unleash the Brilliance have faced early adverse experiences “on steroids,” says Dorsey. Amine was peer pressured into regularly using drugs in middle school; his grades and relationship with his parents tanked. Park’s family faced bankruptcy. Other youth bore witness to their parents’ addictions, moved around a lot or lived in extreme poverty. Some have a history of being incarcerated, skipping class or facing delays graduating from high school. 

Dorsey sees them for their potential. Don’t call them “at-risk.” They’re “at-promise,” he says."

How much do your peers impact your behavior?  This Atlantic article addresess peer pressure and vaccination.  

The Anti-vaccine Con Job Is Becoming Untenable:  Why targets of deliberate deception often hesitate to admit they’ve been deceived

"Something very strange has been happening in Missouri: A hospital in the state, Ozarks Healthcare, had to create a “private setting” for patients afraid of being seen getting vaccinated against COVID-19. In a video produced by the hospital, the physician Priscilla Frase says, “Several people come in to get vaccinated who have tried to sort of disguise their appearance and even went so far as to say, ‘Please, please, please don’t let anybody know that I got this vaccine.’” Although they want to protect themselves from the coronavirus and its variants, these patients are desperate to ensure that their vaccine-skeptical friends and family never find out what they have done. . .

Shifting from an individual to a relational perspective helps us understand why people are seeking vaccination in disguise. They want to save face within the very specific set of social ties that sociologists call “reference groups”—the neighborhoods, churches, workplaces, and friendship networks that help people obtain the income, information, companionship, mutual aid, and other resources they need to live. The price of access to those resources is conformity to group norms. That’s why nobody strives for the good opinion of everyone; most people primarily seek the approval of people in their own reference groups."

Do you know whether your insurance company is insuring coal companies?

U.S. INSURERS FAIL ON CLIMATE ACTION:   Global insurers make coal increasingly “uninsurable”; whole industry fails to act on oil & gas  

LONDON (December 2, 2020)—U.S. insurance companies lag behind their global peers and play a key role in enabling the fossil fuel industry, the Insure Our Future campaign revealed today in its fourth annual scorecard on insurers’ climate policies. 

Insuring Our Future: The 2020 Scorecard on Insurance, Fossil Fuels and Climate Change finds that most European and Australian insurers no longer provide coverage for new coal projects, which has made it harder and costlier to secure the insurance that coal projects need to operate. Coal companies face rate increases of up to 40%. Controversial projects—like the Adani Group’s Carmichael coal mine in Australia—are finding it hard to obtain insurance at all. This demonstrates the insurance industry’s unique power to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels.  

 More useful for most folks is the scorecard here.  

Unfortunately, smaller companies like All State and State Farm aren't listed here.  They are both independent companies.  But Geico is owned by Berkshire Hathaway which is one of the worst offenders.

 

Not Learning From History. Not Knowing Statistics

 The Anchorage Daily News headline today:

"Sicker and younger:  Unvaccinated people drive new trend"

I couldn't help but mentally edit  Pastor Martin Niemöller's famous quote about the Nazi's victims.

First they [it] came for the socialists [nursing home residents], and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.[a nursing home resident]

Then they [it] came for the trade unionists, [other seniors and immuno-compromised] and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.  [a senior or immune-compromised]

Then they [it] came for the Jews,[unvaccinated] and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. young

Then they [it] came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

A major problem driving all this is STATISTICAL IGNORANCE.  People simply don't understand statistics, so terms like 'flattening the curve' or 'cases per 100,000' don't really mean anything.  The graphs are just pictures of curves and straight lines.  

And newspaper headlines and Tweets don't help.  Either the writers and editors don't understand statistics or they are intentionally trying to mislead.  (Sure, it's rarely either/or, they might just be rushing and not thinking)

Do I need to explain these Tweets?  Yeah, I guess, some folks won't get this.  

The original tweet (Ken Dilanian) highlights that 125,000 fully vaccinated Americans tested positive for COVID.  There's no mention of: 

1. what the time period was
2. how many of them were asymptomatic
3. how many had minor symptoms
4. how many were hospitalize
5. how many needed a ventilator
6. how many died

And Derek Willis also points out that if you realize that this was .08 percent of all the 164 million people who have been vaccinated, the amazing effectiveness of the vaccines are highlighted instead of making it sound like the vaccinations are ineffective.  

One last thing that I've mentioned before, but isn't talked about enough.  The longer the virus is able to find refuge in human hosts, the more potentially deadlier and more contagious variants can evolve.  (And you have to understand and believe in evolution to understand that point.)  So, the more people who are vaccinated (locally, but also world wide, cause people travel and virus hitchhike on those travelers) the fewer refuges there are for virus to mutate.  

It seems to me we're all in a leaky boat together in the ocean.  The water is up to our ankles.  A small but vocal group of the passengers want to drill holes in the bottom of the boat to let the water drain out.  Those are the anti-maskers and the anti-vaxxers.  

Will Anti-Maskers Kill Halloween?

 Here's a letter to the editor in the Anchorage Daily News today.

For sight impaired, see letter written out below

I have to admit he packs a lot into such a short letter.  

Personal liberty:  He's trying to curtail other people's personal choice to wear masks.  Wonder how he feels about tattoos.  

• What about people who have made or purchased attractive masks and now enjoy them as a fashion statement?  
• What about people who have relished the ability to hide a disfigurement on their face or just something they don't like about how they look during this time when many others wear masks?
• What about people with low immunity who need a mask for more than just COVID?
• What about scuba divers and snorkelers?
• I was going to say 'what about' here too, but we already know that these people never liked face coverings that some Muslim women wear.  
• What about White Nationalist protesters who want to hide their identity from surveillance?

Halloween:  His 'No Masks ever" is pretty broad.  Is this also part of some religious group  that thinks Halloween violates sacred beliefs?  Will they still be yelling 'no masks ever' three months from now?

Ideological Symbolism - People who are so emotionally upset by masks, it seems to me, see masks as rebukes to their belief systems.  Every mask, to them, must seem like someone saying, "You're wrong."  I'd note that many of these same people also get irate about people of color complaining about racist language.  They tell them to not be so 'sensitive.'  

Willful Ignorance - Who is guilty of mask stupidity?  It seems to me it's the anti-maskers.  [Does anyone else think it's bizarre that we even have that word?] In answer to the question in the letter - vaccinations protect about 90-95% of the vaccinated from getting COVID.  But we don't know who that 5-10 out of 100 are.  It appears - the scientists are studying this as it happens and evolves so most conclusions are tentative - that for most vaccinated people who do get infected, there will be mild or no symptoms.  However, they can infect others. So the masks both protect the person wearing it and other people.  But people like the letter writer do not seem to care about other people, at least those who disagree with their world view, so it's hard for them to understand such feelings as empathy or caring.  

Ultimately anyone has the right to wear a mask for any reason, except those committing crimes with a mask to hide their identity.  I'm actually hoping that masks will become a fashion.  At least with masks, unlike with tattoos, you can change them or just leave them off.  

[Technology that reads the internet for those with sight problems can read text and make it into audio, but cannot read text in images, so it helps to write out such text.]

The Letter:

"No Masks

Stop this mask stupidity.  If you're vaccinated and it works, why wear a mask?  This ridiculous nonsense must stop.  No masks ever.

-Nicholas Danger, Anchorage"

8.2 Earthquake - Didn't Feel It In Anchorage

 Not sure if others in Anchorage felt it.  We did not.  

Right now there are tsunami warnings but haven't seen any reports of actual waves.

I can't imagine and 8.2.  The 7.1 quake we had November 30, 2018 was more earthquake than I ever want to experience again.  8.2, if I understand my Richter scale right is 10 times stronger than 7.2!

I put up the map because the location of the quake won't mean anything to most people outside of Alaska.  

Click to Enlarge And Focus - Source

My sympathy goes out to those who were effected and my hope is that no tsunamis develop.  If there are tsunamis they could impact far more than Alaska.  

Looks like tsunamis will be under 1 foot in Alaska areas.

Message #4 from @NWS_NTWC. Max tsunami height forecasted to be under 1 foot at the following locations: https://t.co/Sld7v12aA8 pic.twitter.com/uaRX20jeq5

— NWS Alaska Region (@NWSAlaska) July 29, 2021

Made It To Kamphaengphet Saturday In My Summer Anchorage Biking Trek

Back in May I described my itinerary - Chiangmai to Bangkok - 745 kilometers.  I'm doing this on the bike trails of Anchorage.  The original post gives a bit of background to this  way of giving me a reason  - beyond the sheer joy of being on a bike whizzing through the woods - for this technique.  Knowing how many kilometers I have to cover gets me out on days my body would rather not.  But once my feet are pushing pedals, I'm glad I'm out riding.  There's also a map showing the distances between key points.  

Kamphaengphet is kilometer 445, so I'm over half way.  That's good, because biking season  is also half over.   ( I have an old bike with studded tires for winter, but I don't do long bike rides when there is snow and ice)

This stop is particularly special because I spent two years in Kamphaengphet teaching English as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 1960s.  Below are some pictures from that time - a world much more closely connected to the past than it's connected to the present.  

These are from an album I put together while I was there.  Black and white photos I could get developed at the local photographer shop. The place where people could get portraits done.  But Kodak and Fuji slides had to be sent to Hong Kong or Australia to be developed.  That was minimally a two week process.  I think of my grandkids who probably don't even know about film and are used to seeing the picture the instant it's taken.  (I checked with my oldest and she did not know.)

This picture seems appropriate - me on a bike on the road in front of the school with the temple ruins and the water buffaloes in the background.  My house was on the school grounds, up on stilts, with two other 'apartments'  for teachers in the same building. The soccer field was between my house and this road.  So I had a view of the old temple chedis.  Here's a great link that explains the names of the different parts of Thai temples. My bike was my main form of transportation, though my colleagues had motorcycles too.  Peace Corps didn't let us have motorcycles but at that time the current ban on even riding on the back of a cycle didn't exist.  Peace Corps says the ban came after they figured out that most Peace Corps deaths came from motorcycle accidents.  My experience would have been significantly different had I not been able to ride on the back of motorcycles.  (Sorry for the blur, I didn't take this picture.)

This was one of my students.  Soccer was a big part of school life and since the best soccer field was directly in front of my house, a big part of my life.  It was out on this field that I set up the portable record player/radio that I'd bought when we stopped in Hong Kong on the way and played records in the moonlight when my trunk finally arrived.  I also played soccer there and started my love of jogging running around the field.  And the chedi was always there in the background.  At that time you could walk over and climb up on it and sit and contemplate the world.  Now it's part of a National Historic Park and has a fence and admission fee.

A short distance from the school in the forest were several more impressive temples.  I used to walk or bike over to be alone with these ancient structures - about 600 or 700 years old.  The Buddha on the left was part of a temple called The Temple of the Four Positions.  This was the sitting position.  There was a standing Buddha, a reclining Buddha, and a less common walking Buddha.

The elephants surrounded to top of another temple more in the hidden in the woods, up on a bluff overlooking the River Bing. [Mae Nam literally means mother water, or river and usually proceeds the name of the river.  So sometimes you see names like Mae Nam Bing River.  Which is sort of redundant.]  I'm not sure how many elephants there were all around the temple (It was called something like Temple With Elephant Around it) but there were a lot.  The English book we used had stories in every lesson - stories from British history, US history, and Thai history, so I learned about Thai heroes of various wars against Burma, Laos, and Cambodia.  This temple looked out toward the mountains over which the Burmese army would have had to come.  

There was no television reception in my town.  So 'commercials' were live.  Here's the medicine salesman gathering a crowd with his microphone and cobra.  When enough people showed up, he'd get the mongoose out of the box and have a battle between the leashed mongoose and the well drugged cobra. And then he'd sell all sorts of medicine.  

And this is why I was here.  To teach English to MS 3 students at the boys' school.  MS 3 translates to about 8th grade.  They were fantastic students and we generally had a great time.  Our teacher training back in DeKalb, Illinois had been excellent.  We had 50 minute lessons for each chapter.  Each class would start with about five minutes of pronunciation drills.  There are lots of sounds in English that don't exist in Thai.  There are only about nine final consonant sounds in Thai.  Most English consonant clusters are real challenges for Thais because they don't exist in Thai.   Steve became Sateeb. (There's no v sound in Thai, let alone a final v.  The closest Thai has is a final b.  Other v's become w.)  Then ten minutes of vocabulary - lots of creative activities to get across the meanings without using Thai.  Then we had grammar drills, ideally using the sounds from the pronunciation drills and the vocabulary from that drill.  Then we'd read from the story and ask questions about the story.  Everything in English.  Thai not allowed.  Some of the things they learned best were classroom instructions that got used every day.  Stand up.  Sit down.  Louder please.  Stop talking.  Who wants to read first?   Open your books.  Repeat after me. 

About the kid with the bare feet.  No, it wasn't that he didn't have shoes.  Thais just take their shoes off before they go inside.  So outside the classroom would be lots of shoes.  

This is the old Burmese stupa and temple across the river.  On Buddha's birthday everyone went there and in the full moon, carried candles around the stupa.  It was a connection they had to their ancestors who had done the same thing for hundreds of years.  

So it was exciting Saturday knowing that I'd made it to Kamphaengphet on my summer biking adventure.  While I rode through cool birch and spruce forests in Anchorage, I was imagining the dusty roads, the wonderful people and their smiles, the delicious food, and the temples as they were back in 1967-69.  

This is just the tiniest peeks at my three years living with Thais.  Three years that dramatically rewired my brain.  The temple pictures are here because Buddhism wasn't really a religion, it was a way of life and permeated everything.  A good Buddhist doesn't even kill a mosquito.  And there was a tolerance for everyone.  There were, of course, economic differences among people, but even the king prostrated himself before the great Buddha statues.  I'm using the past tense here because I'm writing about that Thailand back then.  I've been able to spend time in Thailand since then and while the basics are still the same, the gap between the US and Thailand technologically has gotten very small.  Back in the 60s, Thailand was a different world, a different time, from the US.  No longer.  

Today I did another 16.5 km so I'm on my way to Nakorn Sawan.  This is the longer between stops and I remember the dusty red dirt road in the last three hours of my trips back from Bangkok.  Lots of rice and mountains that looked like growths on the mostly flat landscape.  I'd note that all these roads have long since been paved.  

Saturday Trip To Portage

 

Our first stop was Bird Point, to get a little beach time.  The weather was cooperative and I found I nice big flat rock to get a short nap in.

xxx

View from my rock.

Some lichen friends were enjoying the sun too on a nearby rock.

And the trail was full of pink clover and white yarrow.

There's a trail that goes along much of the road going to Portage Glacier. Here's the map.

The trail has different kinds of vegetation along the way.

Where we started, we were on the edge of a lake and there was a hanging glacier up on the rocks.  This used to be a key view point before they put the trail in fairly recently.

Here's a quiet stream with a rock garden above it.  The plant world just needs water to get a foothold, even on this vertical rock wall.

And this part of the trail has spruce trees hanging with moss.

A picnic table along the trail.

  

A faster running creek with mossy edges.

While I am a graffiti fan, this is not a place where human efforts add to the beauty.  

The angle of these grass seeds far outshines the paint on the rock.

Then we drove the little bit more to see what Portage Lake looked like that day.  

When we got to Alaska nearly 50 years ago, the glacier extended well into the lake and there were always house sized icebergs floating in the lake.  But it's been quite a few years since the glacier retreated out of the lake and back up into the mountain.  

But there was a 'tiny' iceberg floating on the other side of the lake.  I say tiny because way over there it doesn't look that big.  And compared to the old icebergs we used to see, it's pretty small.  But you can also gauge it against the snow poles on the road in the background.  They're there to help drivers see the road when the snow gets really deep.  I'm guessing they're about 15 feet high and the iceberg appears to be longer than the poles.  

Any day you get out of the house and leave your screens behind for the natural treats of Alaska is a great day, and it was.  

 

Good Time To Visit Anchorage Botanical Garden

 There's a great display of rhododendrons right now at the garden.  The early ones have big seed pods.  It's just past the fire station off Campbell Airstrip Road.  Same parking lot as the Save High School.

And then there are the ones that are in full bloom.   

Someone had a camera set up to take time-lapse photos these.  

Rhododendrons play a huge role in traditional Chinese art.  Next time you see a Chinese scroll look at the flowers carefully.  

And, of course, there are plenty of other things blooming as well.  I try to stop by at least once a week on one of my bike rides so I can check out the every changing selection of plants to buy.  

I think this is a globe flower, not quite in bloom yet.

And below are Martagon Lilies.

Spaghetti

 

Anchorage Assembly Have Mid-Day Work Session on Homeless Issues

 I went to the Assembly Homeless Public Hearing today.  There were about 40 people in the audience and about 25% were wearing masks most of the time.  

Let me  highlight what I took away from the meeting.  These were the three issues that seemed to be problems that were raised for the Assembly to try to resolve or at least understand.

• Measurement - HMIS (Homeless Management Information System)  - They've come a long way since I took the Olé 8 week homeless class.  To plan for the future they have to count the homeless.  They have to be able to identify the different kinds of homeless - those who have lost a job or had overwhelming medical expenses;  those who are working but don't earn enough; those who are chronically homeless, perhaps addicted or mentally ill or badly physically disabled.  Several people mentioned a man with no hands who is homeless.

Click on Image to Enlarge

Then there is the issue of tracking these individuals.  This chart tells us that most of the agencies dealing with the homeless are now inputing information.  But COVID meant HUD required additional data and the work of inputting it all is becoming a problem and all that additional info is making the system harder to use.  But they also said that Anchorage has been cited as the location with the most complete data base tracking of homeless.  

These aren't problems unique to this data base.  Competing interests for which data to include, how to integrate the data, and usefulness to end users are always problematic.  And the more you add the slower it all gets and harder to use.  

Again, click to enlarge

• Obstacles Homeless People Face Getting Service 
• One speaker mentioned that people get to her agency with complaints of not being helped by other agencies.  An Assembly members asked why the others couldn't help.  The answer was:  Different agencies have different grants which often restrict who they can serve - maybe women with children, youth, long term homeless, disabled.  Or they are funded to provide a specific service.  
• The data base is supposed to help coordinate these kinds of problems, but, as I understood it, it's easier to find programs than to track individuals as they use services of different programs
• Problems Getting Appropriated Funding To Service Providers
• The Assembly has appropriated monies for different agencies, but the process of actually getting the money to them is slowed down by federal requirements.  The slide below was put up in part response to this question, but I don't see that it addresses the issue in detail

A number of agency heads or high level employees answered questions from the Assembly.  

David Rittenberg is the Brother Frances Shelter Program Director

Jasmine Boyle is the Executive Director of the Anchorage Homeless Coalition.  When I took the homeless class we heard her name often and she was scheduled to talk to the class several times, but there were always crises that came up and I never got to see her before today.  

Lisa  Sauder is the Executive Director of Bean's Cafe.

[Sorry, I was sitting on the left and got only profiles.]

There were slides that showed numbers of homeless in recent years in summer and winter.  There were predictions of the numbers of beds needed this winter.  Most of the slides about how many homeless at the meeting are at this url.

But I left sort of scratching my head.  What was the goal of this meeting?  Was it for the Assembly to get information?  Most of this they should already have.  Was it a public education meeting?  There wasn't much public there.  (Maybe it was televised, I didn't check.)  For me the three bullet points above seemed to be the things the Assembly members found most helpful - the measurement issues, the obstacles to getting service, and the hold up of the appropriated money getting to the service agencies.  

But the critical issues - what's going to happen when the federal funds to keep Sullivan Arena open as a homeless shelter end in August? - well I didn't see much progress toward answering that question.