"There lies the main difference between childish imaginings and imaginative literature."

 

From Ursula LeGuin's No Time To Spare, a book of essays that chews on topics from old age to writing.  In "It Doesn't Have to Be the Way It Is"(June 2022) she muses about what liberties storytellers can take with reality before losing their readers.  

"The fantastic tale may suspend the laws of physics - carpets fly; cats fade into invisibility, leaving only a smile - and of probability - the younger of three brothers wins the bride, the infant in the box cast upon the waters survives unharmed - but it carries its revolt against reality no further.  Mathematical order is unquestioned.  Two and one make three, in Koschei's castle and Alice's Wonderland (especially in Wonderland), Euclid's geometry - or possibly Riemann's - somebody's geometry, anyhow - governs the layout.  Otherwise incoherence would invade and paralyze the narrative.  

There lies the main difference between childish imaginings and imaginative literature.  The chid "telling a story" roams about among the imaginary and the half-understood without knowing the difference, content with the sound of language and the pure play of fantasy with no particular end, and that's the charm of it.  But fantasies, whether folktales or sophisticated literature, are stories in the adult,  demanding sense.  They can ignore certain laws of physics but not of causality.  They start here and go there (or back here), and though the mode of travel may be unusual and here and there may be wildly exotic and unfamiliar places, yet they must have both a location on the map of that world and a relationship to the map of our world.  If not, the hearer or reader of the tale will be set adrift in a sea of inconsequential inconsistencies, or, worse yet, left drowning in the shallow puddle of the author's wishful thinking."

I don't know how many of you, reading this, were spurred to think about how childish Trump's stories are.  What's charming in children's stories definitely doesn't age well when told by adults.  

And what does this tell us by Trump's audience?  

"The hearer . . . of the tale will be set adrift in a sea of inconsequential inconsistencies, or worse yet, left drowning in the shallow puddle of the author's wishful thinking."

To be fair, LeGuin does distinguish between oral and written story telling.   In the previous essay, "The Narrative Gift as a Moral Conundrum" (May 2022) she writes:

"Storytelling is clearly a gift, a talent, a specific ability.  Some people just don't have it - they rush or drone, jumble the order of events, skip essentials, dwell on inessentials, and the muff the climax.  Don't we all have a relative who we pray won't launch into a joke or a bit of family history because the history will bore us and the joke will bomb?  But we may also have a relative who can take the stupidest, nothingest little event and make it into what copywriters call a gut-wrenchingly brilliant thriller and laugh riot."

While Trump does have a presence, I'm not sure he fits this description of story teller either.  It's more like he embodies the misery of his followers and allows them to act out their frustrations and blame their problems on anyone but themselves.  Trump was, up to a point, the successful version, or their own angry selves.  

 

Taking Advantage of My Air Drop Working Again

 My phone asked me to log in with my Apple ID today.  On a whim, I tried Air Drop after and it worked.  So, in what I hope is a long window, I'll put up some pictures.  

Grow North is the farm in Mountain View where the Refugee Assistance and Immigration Service of Anchorage Catholic Social services grows food for the summer and operates a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) with once a week pick ups and sells fresh vegetables and some baked goods as well during the week.  You can't get much fresher food in Anchorage unless it's from your own garden.  

The garlic and the picture of the farm are from last week.  

This week's box includes:

• Classic cauliflower,
• Crunchy kohlrabi
• Unique malabar spinach,
• Tasty bok choi,
• And some lovely sage for the herb of the week!

From the email that CSA subscribers get:

"Malabar spinach seems like it would retain similarities to that of regular spinach. The plant uses the name spinach in it, yet the ironic part of that the two could not be more different. Malabar spinach grows on a vine, granting it the nickname of vine spinach, whereas regular spinach grows from the ground (like many leafy greens)."  

This Goose Lake as I rode by  The ducks hang out here because its's  spot where people feed them.

On a completely different bike ride, out past Taku Lake, they've had the big blue sign up much of the summer, but the little one just popped up.  If you can't read the small sign (which I'm guessing you can't) it says, "We are upgrading the skatepark!"  It also says the construction budget is $1.2 million. I know we've had inflation over the years, but really?  $1.2 million for curved concrete?  Curious how much profit the contractor, also listed as "Street Maintenance and Grindline Skate Parks LLC" is making.  I realize they may be doing more than just the skateboard park, but it would be nice if there was a watchdog group which gathered all the data on summer construction projects and evaluated how the money was spent.  

In other construction news, the ACS fiber optic team was out on Crescent in Geneva Woods today.  We're on the Lake Otis side, but all this area is getting wired.  That bright orange wire is popping up all around the neighborhoods.  

And it's mushroom season.  Here are some making appearances in my yard.

Don't have time now to research these.  The orange one is an amanita - hallucinogenic and al over Anchorage now.  It can also make you really sick.  Not planning on eating any, though I'm waiting for the King Boletes and the Shaggy Manes.  

But I have started eating the olive bread I made last night.  It came out well.  The one in the back is a dill experiment.  (We got lots of fresh dill from Grow North Farm last week.)

Meanwhile J got off the phone this evening with her long time friend (does 45 years count as long time?) who lives on the Haleakala foothills in Maui.  Her house is far from Lahaina, but there is also a fire up in that neighborhood as well and she's been evacuated and is staying with friends.  If I recall right, Maui has its share of eucalyptus trees, and their oil burns easily.  May the fire be quickly extinguished and your house survive.  

". . .the spoken word is no more than breath."

 In No Time To Spare Ursula LeGuin writes about her fascination with words.  

"When asked to talk about what I do, I've often compared writing with handicrafts - weaving, pot-making, woodworking.  I see my fascination with the word as very like, say the fascination with wood common to carvers, carpenters, cabinetmakers - people who find a fine piece of old chestnut with delight, and study it, and learn the grain of it, and handle it with sensuous pleasure, and consider what's been done with chestnut and what you can do with it, loving the wood itself, the mere material, the stuff of their craft.  

"Woodworkers, potters, weavers engage with real materials, and the beautify of their work is profoundly and splendidly bodily.  Writing is so immaterial, so mental an activity!  In its origin, it's merely artful speech, and the spoken word is no more than breath.  To write or otherwise record the word is to embody it, make it durable, and calligraphy and typesetting are material crafts that achieve great beauty.  I appreciate them.  But in fact they have little more to do with what I o than weaving or pot-making or woodworking does.  It's grand to see one's poem beautifully printed, but the important thing to the poet, or anyhow to this poet, is merely to see it printed, however, wherever - so that readers can read it.  So it can go from mind to mind."

I put my Ukrainian English learner through the opening charges of Jack Smith's indictment this morning. His English isn't good enough to do that alone, but he can grasp the key points of this historic document with the help of a guide. There are words he should know, and I'm trying to connect him to the fact that he is living when we are facing the most important trial in US history. 

We examined words like defendant and prosecutor.  "Claim falsely" made sense when I pulled him back from his wrong turn ("falsely is like waterfall?", no, false is the opposite of true) and after several attempts to explain 'claim' he realized he knew the term from 'baggage claim.'  I started the lesson with a slice of bagel and a gob of raspberry jam, which I spread with a knife.  So I could use the image when we came to 'the Defendant spread lies . . .'  

Smith's indictment is amazingly clear for a legal document.  He (and his associates) knew it had to be understandable to the average American adult.  It's not dumbed down, but rather most of the legal jargon is couched as tangibly as possible with sentences as grammatically simple as possible.  Not the long convoluted sentence encrusted with Latin terms you often see in legal documents.

'The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won. He was also entitled to formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means, such as by seeking recounts or audits of the popular vote in states or filing lawsuits challenging ballots and procedures. Indeed, in many cases, the Defendant did pursue these methods of contesting the election results. His efforts to change the outcome in any state through recounts, audits, or legal challenges were uniformly unsuccessful.' [Link to the indictment]

OK, 'outcome-determinative' is not an everyday term, but 'outcome' of an election is not hard to get. 'Determinative' is clearly related to 'determine' which is fairly common and not to hard to make clear.  I talked to a lawyer friend and asked if perhaps that term 'outcome-determinative' was a translation from the Latin.  He said, "No" but suggested it was probably a legal term of art that has been an important phrase in other cases. That led me to Google and I found this sentence in 

"An "outcome-determinative" test was set forth, the essence of which was that if the determination of an issue would have a decisive influence on the outcome of the case, then that issue was one of "substance." [from a 1965 North Caroline Law Review article]

 While in the indictment sample above says the defendant has the right to publicly say falsely there was 'outcome-determinative' fraud and even to say he actually won, the indictment uses this term eight more times later on to demonstrate that Trump knew his attempts to overturn the election were based on lies about election fraud and lies that he had won.  The term is used in a list of presidential advisors who told him there was no evidence of 'outcome-determinative' fraud, starting with:

"The Defendant's Vice President-who personally stood to gain by remaining in office as part of the Defendant's ticket and whom the Defendant asked to study fraud allegations-told the Defendant that he had seen no evidence of outcome-determinative fraud."

Earlier in a previous LeGuin chapter "Readers' Questions," the author writes that it is relatively easy and interesting to respond to vary specific questions of 'imaginary fact,' like one about her use of the name Sparrowhawk.  

"Is this the New World sparrow hawk, Falco sparverius, or one of the Old World kestrels . . .?"

But that more general questions are much harder to respond to - questions like, 'why do you write?" and the most vexing questions are about meaning.

"Meaning - this is perhaps the common note, the bane I m seeking.  What is the Meaning of this book, this event in the book, this story . . .?  Tell me what it Means.

But that's not my job, honey.  That's your job. . .

"Meaning in art isn't the same as meaning in science.  The meaning of the second law of thermodynamics, so long as the words are understood, isn't changed by who reads it, or when, or where.  The meaning of Huckleberry Finn is."

I imagine law fits in somewhere between fiction and science.  Ideally, much closer to science, but the current Supreme Court majority has moved it much closer to fiction.  And legislation in some Republican dominated states to change how history is taught, or medicine is practiced, are also attempts to create fiction - an alternative reality.  

Terms  like 'outcome-determinative' come to have specific meanings in law, in an attempt to make it more science-like and less interpretive than fiction.  But even science articles are only attempts to capture reality in words.  Sometimes they are successful, over even close.  Other times new discoveries prove the old writings inaccurate.  

For those of you concerned about why I chose the title of this post, I can only say it was the most poetic phrase I found in LeGuin's paragraph on words.  But my brain took this post in other directions.  But it's still the most poetic phrase.  Would you rather I title this Outcome-Determinative?  Even 'outcome-determinative' when spoken is no more than breath.

GCI To Abandon Internet. Will ACS Follow? But Alaska.net Has Value GCI.net Doesn't Have

The Anchorage Daily News reported the other day that GCI (one of the local phone and internet companies) will end its email service by mid 2024.  

I understand that email giants like Google Mail have much glitzier email options than a local telephone company is likely to match.  But I am concerned that we will be down to just a couple of totally dominant email companies before long. 

[If you don't want to hear about ACS sluggishness and fiber optic, skip to the bottom.] 

Since I don't have a GCI account I wasn't worried.  But I do have ACS - formally the Municipality owned telephone company that went on its own and later got bought out by ATN International.  While technical help is still reasonably good when I call, trying to get information about anything else is almost impossible.  

I had much better response from the FCC in Washington DC when I complained about a rate increase that was going to be used, ACS said, "to upgrade internet speed."  Since I'm in a mid-town pocket that still gets 1 MBPS, I tried to find out if my neighborhood was planned for optical fiber.  No one could tell me.  I got answers like:

ACS: They don't show the maps.

Me:  Why not?

ACS: Because they don't want angry customers when it doesn't happen as scheduled.  

Me:  Is my neighborhood even scheduled at all?

ACS:  I can't tell you that. (I don't know.)

The FCC sent them communications saying they needed to respond in 30 days.  When they didn't, FCC said that was unusual.  Same thing after 60 days.  After 90 days someone said they'd bump up my request to someone who could do more.  Still no response.

When I called the FCC again, they said they'd gotten a response.  I said I didn't.  FCC (not ACS) sent me a copy.  I had objected to paying increased amounts to pay for upgrades if my neighborhood with the slowest service ACC has (my package was grandfathered in and they don't offer internet in my neighborhood any more) wasn't going to be upgraded.  

ACS' response was:  We are unable to upgrade service.  Of course I checked out other options, but in Anchorage we're limited.  GCI customers complain about GCI bitterly.  Aurora Broadband can't reach my neighborhood.  (Note - I'm in midtown.  Just over a mile from ACS headquarters.)

So about five weeks ago I was surprised when a young man was at my door to sign me up for ACS fiber optic.  He said it would be ready in 3-4 weeks.  Then email I then got from ACS said 9-14 weeks.  But they really are putting in fiber optic lines (they're bright orange.)  I talked to a supervisor who said he's just in charge of the outside lines (underground and by telephone pole) and someone else would be attaching it to the house.  Before the snow flies, he said.  

All that brings me around to ACS email.  Losing your email account is a pain because you have to figure out how to transfer important email somewhere else.  I suppose there must be relatively easy ways to do that.  Losing an email address called GCI.com is no big deal.

But ACS email addresses are Alaska.net.  Therewhen Alaska USA Federal Credit Union changed its name to Global Federal, the letters to the editors at the ADN were swamped with complaints.  

I'm worried that I will lose my Alaska.net email address the same way.  And I have no confidence whatsoever that ACS and its East Coast owners care one bit.  They'll follow GCI's lead and force us to find other email providers.  

They don't realize that many of us would rather have a balky email account that isn't part of a giant corporation that likely is data mining our email.  And with the Alaska.net in the name, we feel the same way that Alaska USA members felt.  

So I hope there's some local entrepreneurs ready to buy or otherwise acquire the Alaska.net email addresses should ACS decide to abandon it.  

Climate Reality Spreading - 'Death' Valley Adds Another Victim

The weather around the world this summer is likely to convince a lot of people that climate change is serious.  That it is changing the conditions of living that we have simply taken for granted and assumed would continue.  

LA Times reporter Hayley Smith, started this story talking about covering disasters including floods and wildfires, but the heat at Death Valley

 ". . . was a different kind of beast, something most people alive have yet to experience. One park visitor described it as like an open oven; another like a blow dryer to the face . I imagined it was more like the surface of the sun, or like someone had left the lights on in hell. 

It was in those circumstances that I met Steve Curry."

She was interviewing tourists at Zabriski Point.  Then she caught my attention:

"Suddenly, my colleague, photojournalist Francine Orr, spotted a lone figure scrambling up a nearby canyon and snapped his photo."

Francine Orr sounded familiar.  I checked my blog to be sure.  Orr spoke to this year's Alaska Press Club Conference in April about photographing COVID victims inside a few LA hospitals during the pandemic. She had gotten permission to photograph patients inside a hospital just as COVID was about to start and she took striking photos.  

I posted them on my COVID page (You can scroll down to April 18, 2023, but I'll repost them here since I never put them up here in the main part of the blog. The photos and the presentation were powerful.) 

Francine Orr, LA Times at AK Press Club Conf

Over the weekend I attended the Alaska Press Club Annual Conference and the last speaker I heard was Francine Orr of the LA Times.  She's a photographer who got permission to take pictures in a hospital in LA just as COVID was beginning and continued doing that for a couple of years.  If people had been seeing her pictures daily, perhaps more people would have taken more precautions.  Here are a couple of the pictures she showed.  

Francine Orr, LA Times at AK Press Club Conf

Francine Orr, LA Times at AK Press Club Conf

Francine Orr, LA Times at AK Press Club Conf

But back to Death Valley and Steve Curry.  

"He was from the Sunland neighborhood of Los Angeles, he told us from beneath his wide-brimmed straw hat. He was 71."

He was on his annual hike there in Death Valley and they offered him more water (he had one water bottle), a reprise in the air conditioning of their car, even a ride back to the trailhead.  

"The park service advises visitors not to hike in the park after 10 a.m. during extreme summer temperatures, but Steve was chipper. He said he was an experienced outdoorsman, and he was determined to finish his round-trip solo hike to Golden Canyon.

"Already, a scalding wind was blowing through the park, overheating our electronic equipment and turning metal door handles into hot irons. Francine and I could bear only a few minutes of it before diving into our cars for the relief of air conditioning, but Steve was persistent. He said he had completed extensive training and was getting ready for another hike in August. 

"What we now know is that Steve did finish his journey, but just barely. He collapsed outside the bathrooms at Golden Canyon at about 3:40 that afternoon and died shortly after. Though the coroner has not yet confirmed his cause of death, officials said they believe it to be heat-related."

 

Smith tells us she ended up meeting Steve's widow and wrote his obituary. 

"He said he was an experienced outdoorsman"

The world is changing.  Our experience of the world as we have known it doesn't necessarily prepare us for the world that is here today and the one it is evolving into because oil companies and their allies have been spreading and continue to spread misinformation to continue making money.  Foolish venal people are not a problem if the consequences of their folly only affects them.  But in this case the world is suffering and will continue to suffer because of them and the people unwilling to stand up to them.   

"It's been two months since I blogged. Considering that I am . . ."

From Ursula LeGuin's No Time To Spare:

"It's been two months since I blogged.  Considering that I am on the eve of my eighty-fifth birthday, and that anyone over seven-five who isn't continuously and conspicuously active is able to be considered dead, I thought I should make some signs of life.  Wave from the grave, as it were.  Hello, out there!  How are things in the Land of Youth?  Here in the Land of Age they are rather weird."

While for me, it's only been four days, and I still have daylight between now and 85, I am over 75 and don't want to be considered dead yet.  

For years and years I blogged pretty much daily.  And when I'm engaged in an important story (say Redistricting) blogging does take front and center in my life still.  But I've also given myself permission to take days off.  But don't want to have too many blank pages here.

So here's a list of other distractions:

1.  Technical - Getting photos from my phone to my laptop stopped working

I thought I'd conquered this, but the AirDrop stopped working again and the original fix didn't stick. Photos are an important part of this blog (at least for me).  Monday, when we went for a hike, I took along my bigger Canon so I could use the memory card to get the pictures onto my MacBook.  After two photos the battery stopped working.  

So I reverted back to the phone.  I'd find a way.  I figured I could upload the pictures to Blogspot (the blog site I'm using) on my phone. Easy Peasy.  But I couldn't.  I googled.  Here's what I found on google support::  (Google bought Blogspot long ago as well as other independent apps I've used for the blog)

"If your photo is on your phone, it is probably in Apple Photos. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there is no direct upload from Photos to Blogger. You must therefore export the image to your phone as a jpg. Then you can upload it into Blogger using the "from device" option in the Blogger post editor.

I do not know how to export the image to your phone as a jpg. But once you copy it into Blogger, you can delete the jpg file."

Or on Apple discussions

"iPhoto pictures no longer upload to Blogger with Mojave 10.14.6 update installed"

I've been thinking I might need to get a more current iPhone and even upgrade my laptop (it's about nine years old and the letters on six keys are no longer readable), but I have pulled out my old Canon Powershot and I'll use that until then.  It has a memory card I can insert into my laptop.  But as I think about it, I'm sure the newer laptops no longer have a spot to insert a memory card.  

2.  Other things - Reading online

Twitter and Spoutible - Despite everything, Twitter still alerts me to important items of (I hate to use this term because it's so overused) 'breaking' news, particularly Anchorage and Alaska related things.  Mainly because I've been careful to pick who I follow, I don't get a lot of garbage tweets. But as Twitter goes X-tinct,  Spoutible is getting more 'useful' Spouters (useful here meaning people who put up things I want to hear about) but I'm still getting too many "Hope you all are doing great this morning!" Spouts.  There's nothing wrong with them, but that's not why I'm on Spoutible.  

Spoutible also got its Android app up and then a couple of weeks later the IOS app was ready.  I downloaded it, but I couldn't type in the login info.  My keyboard didn't work.  Their announcements had said that the iPhone 7 still had some problems, so I deleted it.  When I downloaded it again a few days ago, I could log in.  But the keyboard doesn't work when I try to reply or to Spout.  

I've put Twitter and Spoutible under Reading.  I spend way too much time on these apps.  They were supposed to give me tips for blog posts (and they do) as well as back up information I can use to support my arguments on the blog.  But they are also addictive.  It's like fishing or slot machines, you're always hoping the next one will be good, and enough are, that you keep casting or putting more money in, when you should just walk away.  

3.  Other things - Reading books

I've got the following three books that I'm actively working on:

Boy, I didn't realize how relatively poor the images are on the Canon Powershot compared to my phone.  Demon Copperhead is for my September book club meeting (but I thought it was for August so I started it because it's long). No Time to Spare is the August book.  It's essays Le Guin wrote late in life (as the quote at the beginning of this post suggests) and so far it's focusing on being old.  She's not sugar-coating things.  Blowback is by Miles Taylor, a Republican who worked as a high level Homeland Security appointee in the Trump administration and is using the book to warn people about how crazy Trump is and the kinds of things to be expected in a second Trump administration.  Because Trump wanted to do them (and in some cases did) during his presidency.  But this time, Taylor warns, Trump and the conservative interests that back him, are better organized to make them happen.  Basically like establishing a Fascist regime supporting the wealthy and making life harder for everyone else, particularly those who aren't white, Christian, heterosexual men.  

As I figure out ways I can contribute to protecting democracy in the 2024 election, books like this give me facts to convince non-voters why they need to vote. Non-voters are the key.  But I'm not giving up on Trumpers either though that's time spent doing more work for smaller gains.  

But while people say the hard core Trump supporters are a cult, immune to reason and reality, I know that people leave cults all the time.  Cult-Escape is just one of many websites (not necessarily the best) for people thinking about getting out.  I also know that the Trump cult is reinforced by trolls who spew out misinformation at high volume, whether they do it on their own, for money, or with the support of foreign governments.  They exaggerate the number of people who support the Trump world of lies.  

There are several other books, newspapers that tempt me away from the blog (all in the guise of keeping me informed and giving me material for the blog.)

3.  Other things - local events

I listened in on the Alaska Board of Education hearings on a policy to ban transgender girls from girls sports. (You can find the written testimony here, here, here, here, and here.) While I have lots to say, the anti-ban crowd made many good arguments I don't have to duplicate.  

But what no one mentioned (while I listened in anyway) was the fact that the Board began the meeting with a Christian prayer that ended with "in Jesus' name."  

Here's a government board, holding a public hearing on a policy that is being heavily pushed by Christian Nationalists (and other Christians who would legitimately reject the Nationalist part) and beginning with a Christian prayer, that excludes those who are agnostic or atheists, and members of religions that do not worship Jesus Christ.  I can only think of two reasons for this:

1. To show their power to add their religion into their governmental function - that they can get away with this
2. Because they are so sheltered from the non-Christian world that they don't realize how offensive this is to people who don't see the world the way they do.  

(A PEW Trust study copyrighted in 2021 found that 37% of Alaskans identify as in religions other than Christianity or no religion. That's more than 1/3.  Under 

"Frequency of participation in prayer, scripture study or religious education groups among adults in Alaska"

fully 69% responded "seldom or never.")

If the Board is so out of touch with people who are not devout Christians that they can open this public meeting with a Christian prayer, imagine how out of touch they are with transgender youth!  This is not a representative body of Alaskans making this decision.  Even the Alaska legislature rejected this and the Governor has now asked a body that he's (mostly) personally appointed to do what the people's elected representatives wouldn't do.  

OK, so that by itself is a synopsis of a blog post I've been thinking about.  

There was also Juneteenth and Gay Pride which I didn't post about because I couldn't easily get my photos up.  

4.  Other things - biking and the garden

I took my bike in for a service yesterday.  There's a regular clank sound every time my right pedal is forward. It's been about four years and I've ridden it a lot (for an old man anyway) each summer. As of yesterday I've biked 762 km (473 miles) since April.  Last year my goal was 1000km which I passed and I'm well on my way to doing the same this summer.  I put it down here only because it takes up about five or six hours a week.  But mentally the biking is good for my blogging.  

Reviewing this before posting I realize I left out the gardening part.  I'll just say my favorite gardening book is No Work Garden.  Much of the hill in our backyard is natural - birch, alder, high bush cranberry and other local fauna.  We've focused on perennials which come back on their own. And the front lawn, much to the chagrin of our neighbors (though they've come to accept it over the years) is clover right now along with rock garden perennials along the sidewalk.  Gardening enthusiasm is highest in the spring when the snow is gone and things start poking out of the earth.  I have put in hours of weeding and thinning, and I do just enjoy wandering the yard to see all the daily surprises.  

5.  Other things - Netflix

We're currently juggling The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, Suits, Friday Night Lights, and random other movies or short series that some variety.  After watching several seasons of Suits I've concluded we would all be much better off if we had script writers to help us with our day-to-day interactions.  

Netflix takes a toll in my blog writing time.  

6.  Other things - Tutoring English

One of the more delightful activities this spring and summer has been tutoring a Ukrainian refugee in Ketchikan in English.  His English is good enough to communicate what he needs to say, but we're adding vocabulary, pronunciation (both sounds and sentence rhythms), grammar, and cultural nuances.  We were paired by Catholic Social Services' Refugee Assistance and Immigration Service (RAIS) and it's a great match, pedagogically and personally.  We tend to have a good time even though I work him hard.  Planning lessons and actually doing the lessons take up four to eight hours a week, depending on if we meet once or twice a week.  Twice a week is the norm.  

There are other things as well - the general maintenance people have to do in their lives, paying bills, getting things cleaned and repaired, getting and preparing food (fortunately, my wife has done the lion's share of this in recent years in part because she's not that excited about my cooking), and I'm sure you can add to the list.  

But I'm committed to writing here on important topics.  But I must say, that the local political and legal events I spent so much time on in previous years are being better covered by others now.  Twitter has been a big addition there as well as more local reporters covering events.  That just wasn't the case back in 2006 when I started blogging.  And it took me a while to jump from more mundane blogging to more public affairs blogging.  

Have a good weekend.  We're having more sun and warmth than we did earlier this summer.  But compared to much of the world, the weather has been very comfortable and the air quality good.  

78

 

Image from Google Image search - Mejor Bingo Online

Bears, Bison, Glacier, And Sun

My daughter and granddaughter are visiting and Thursday was our day for an adventure.  We headed for Girdwood and checked out Virgin Falls, that I first learned about earlier this summer.   

Soup and sandwich at the Bake Shop, then down to the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center.  I'm not a zoo fan.  Well, as a kid I was a zoo fanatic.  Between the old LA zoo and the stuffed animal tableaux at the County Museum, I got to know about animals from around the world.  It was only later I became aware of how difficult it can be for the animals.  

The Center, as I understand it, only takes in orphaned, injured, or other found animals.  And for the larger animals, there's way more room than at most zoos.  Wikipedia says there are about 800 acres and these are only Alaska animals.  But the small animals - porcupine particularly - the cages are way too small and they were pacing pathologically.  There were two, in separate cages.  One only had three legs so it probably wouldn't survive on its own.  And the bald eagle was in much too small a cage.  I couldn't look.  These shouldn't be in cages, but I'm guessing it was injured as well.  

But the brown bears have a large area.  I found a 200 acre reference to the wood buffalo habitat, so I'd say the bears probably have roughly the same amount. 

  Nevertheless, Thursday they were up against the fence close to the people watching.  I suspect they find the people as interesting as we find them.  

I got a little carried away with the bear pictures.  

There were musk oxen from Northwest Alaska.  

And wood bison. Turns out, the world was down to about 300 wood bison at the turn of the 20th

Century, all in Canada.  
 

This very wildlife conservation center played a big role in bringing them back to Alaska and building up the herd before they began returning them into the wilds of Alaska.  Wikipedia says that they devoted 200 acres to their habitat.

My granddaughter's picture

There were a number of other animals as well - wolves, caribou, and smaller animals.  Also elk - which we don't see in SouthCentral Alaska, but are in other parts. 

No mountain goats or Dall sheep, 

Then off to the Byron Glacier hike at Portage Lake.

Here's a similar picture from last year.  

Needless to say, there's a lot less ice and snow here than when we were first here back in 1978.  It even seems like a lot less than there was last summer.  

AirDrop Is Back - Demolished Housing, New Trail. Abandoned Kayak, Skateboard Park [UPDATED]

 Some time back, not too long ago, my Air Drop stopped working between my phone and my MacBook.  I checked online but couldn't make it work.  I'd get the Blu Tooth connected both ways, but the airdrop wouldn't happen.

So lots of pics on my phone just stayed there.  I tried other work arounds.  When I plugged my phone into my computer I got a screen that wanted to download everything from my computer to my phone and there was no way I could get rid of it other than just unplugging.  

Frustrated, today I tried again.  But this time instead of searching for Blu Tooth solutions, I looked for AirDrop solutions.  I got this HelpDeskGeek page with a whole table of contents of approaches.  Quickly I found a good prospect - Open Finder on Mac.  Then Set Air Drop To Open To Anyone.  

That was the magic trick.  Somehow it had gotten switched to Open To No One.  I'm back in business and can now post some pictures here.

But there's a large backload of things I passed on - Juneteenth Festival, Gay Pride March and Festival, and a bunch of other things.  

I'm just going to focus mostly on some pics from (mainly) yesterday's bike ride to highlight changes going on.  

This first pic is from June 4th.  A new homeless camp showed up on the 'off-ramp' from the Campbell Creek bike trail to Dowling.  

About a week ago, it had been reduced to this:

    

And yesterday, it looked like this:

Yesterday's turnaround point was the AARP fitness spot just south of Taku Lake.  

There's construction going on down the trail there (toward Dimond).  Someone recently told me they're building a skateboard park.  

Also heading out yesterday, I noticed someone kayaking in the creek, but there were trees around and I didn't see too much, except it was a red kayak.  On my way back, the kayak was blocking the bike trail.  

Didn't look good.  Nobody was around. But I figure if they got the kayak out, the people got out too, but not sure why they left their stuff there.  That's an old restaurant in the background that they've been slowly working on, including adding landscaping.  It says Creekside something on the other side.   Behind me is Peanut Farm and Arctic Roadrunner.  

Meanwhile, just down the block from our house, I discovered at the beginning of the ride that an old house was demolished.  It's been there at least since the 70s.  It was there two days ago, but this is all that was left yesterday:

The tape says something about asbestos.  It was on a double lot.  Presumably Anchorage will get some new housing.  A single family house?  A duplex?  Two houses?  Stand by.  

Other changes.  I noticed a bike headed up the hill near the forestation at Campbell Airstrip Road at Tudor a week ago.  I decided to see what was there.  It's a wide new gravel path that goes up, south of Tudor.  It starts not too far from Tudor but gets further into the woods.  Then there's a long downhill to this long bridge across what I'm guessing is sometimes wetlands.  

[UPDATED July 16, 2023:   It's called the Chugach Foothills Connector.  Steve Johnson left comment with this link to a Muni page describing the project and the ribbon cutting will take place July 23,2023 at the bridge in the picture below:

"The event will take place on July 26th, 2023 from 4pm to 5pm. If you are driving to the event parking is available at the Benny Benson School's Parking Lot. The rib​bon cutting will take place on the boardwalk in the center of the trail.​"

Thanks, Steve] 

Past the bridge, with some bear poop to remind me this wasn't a place a lot of people went before this trail was put in.  

Then it veers back toward Tudor and the power line right way.  It ends where that power line is.  There's a small path that continues.  And the new trail turns left into a housing area just past where Tudor curves into Muldoon.   There's a big sign that says Neeson Construction is doing this project, but all the paper work was about Alaska employee rights, not anything about this trail and whether it will stay gravel or eventually get paved.   I came out onto Muldoon at Regal Mountain Drive.

And yesterday I got my summer (starting April) biking total up to 603 km.  60% of my target of 1000 again this summer.  

[UPDATE July 16, 2023  below is the map of the project:

For sharper version visit the Muni website

The Point Is Not Just To Take Back Rights, But To Do It So Fast And Furiously That We Can't Keep Up With The Outrages - 303 Creative

 In a couple of days the Supreme Court threw out Affirmative Action for colleges and universities (and surely employment and other areas will be challenged soon); blocked Biden's waiving of $10-20,000 in student loans (ignoring the word 'waive' in the law that gave him the right to do that); and allowed a would be (but not actual) wedding website designer to refuse to take gay couples as clients.  

I suspect they intentionally timed the one case hailed by supporters of democracy - the voting rights case - earlier so that these three would all be together and there'd be less time to analyze them and protest.  

For the most part, lots of pundits are using these cases to get hits and likes.  Some are even worth reading.  But I want to just think out loud here about the 303 Creative case - the wedding website case.  

I posted in the past about the baker and about the photographer who didn't want to make a wedding cake for, or take photos of gay weddings.  Some of those same issues arise. 

Here I want to just lay out ideas as I try to understand this case and how it affects one's religious beliefs and what other collateral damage it might lead to. 

And I'm also setting aside the allegations that have come up after the decision that this whole scenarios was made up.  Or the arguments that the courts don't rule unless some harm has been done, but they skipped that standard in this case.  

As I said, I'm just thinking out loud here.  (And maybe even venting a bit as we reach a point similar to the post civil war court that used states' rights as an excuse to ignore the massive civil rights violations perpetrated against former slaves.)

PROBLEMS FOR THE COURTS

1.  How do you distinguish a true religious belief from an excuse to discriminate?  How did Lorrie Smith pick gay weddings to block?  Is it really a deep religious belief?  Or is it dislike/hate of gays that is being masked by religion?  When the Constitution was written, I think 'religion' was more concrete.  Today there are thousands of different Christian denominations?  Where do they all come from and what prohibitions can various ones have that the Supreme Court will eventually say allows them to discriminate against some target?

Homosexuality is not mentioned in the ten commandments, but Lorrie couldn't possibly make a website for a gay couple.  Would she refuse a wedding website for a couple that have been living together unmarried for five years?  And maybe have some kids?  What about businesspeople who cheat their customers and their employees?  Would she refuse making a site for them?  

If Lorrie belongs to a church that is part of the Southern Baptist Convention, which does not allow women to be pastors, how would she react to a client who was a woman pastor and wanted a website?  Would she refuse?  Based on her being a woman?

Many Christian denominations believe women should stay at home and raise babies.  Could someone from one of them refuse to make a website for, say, a woman lawyer?  

2.  When you look at all the things that a religion professes, how do you determine which ones are critical in that religion and which ones are not central requirements or prohibitions?  How does the Court decide which belief of any religion is an important enough one to allow the holder of that belief to discriminate against protected classes? 

If a congregation believes whites are superior and other ethnicities are inferior, can they then discriminate against people of color?  Last week I would have said the answer is a loud NO, but today I have no idea how the Supreme Court majority would rule.  

The Bible lists hundreds of rules.  Rules that Orthodox Jews follow, including a number of dietary restrictions.  Eating shellfish or pork, for example, are called out as abominations.  Why are those rules ignored?  Should the Courts look at whether someone practices all the rules or just identifies a few that trouble them enough to discriminate?  

3.  How do the justices weigh one right against another?  Is being denied service from a business because of one's sexual orientation - even when laws clearly protect against this - a lesser right than someone's professed religious convictions?  What happens in a small community where there aren't many choices of businesses?  Does the gay couple have to simply move so they can find vendors who will serve them?  Doesn't sound very American.  But perhaps MAGA's remember when whites - particularly in the South - were, legally, superior, and that's the world they want to return to.  

4.  How do you separate your own personal beliefs when they agree with one side or the other?  At what point does recusal become mandatory?  In this court, for the conservative majority, it seems recusal isn't necessary because they are all above human bias that could cloud their view.  At least in their own minds.  Note the expensive trips and vacation that various judges never reported and say would not affect their legal decisions?  

ALTERNATIVES FOR THE WEB PAGE DESIGNER

This was not a case where anyone tried to resolve the issue.  This was a case put together to invalidate Colorado's law that make discrimination against LGBTQ folks illegal.  And as mentioned above, the issues argued - that a gay man requested a wedding website - apparently didn't even happen.  There are other ways that Lorrie Smith, the designer, could have handled this (assuming she had such a request.)

1.  She could make it clear on her website that she adhered to a religion that only sanctioned male/female marriage and that she wanted to help such couples celebrate their weddings.  She's not, then refusing gay couples, but she's making it clear that's not her interest.  People don't enroll their kids in religious affiliated schools unless they are comfortable with their kids getting that school's religious instruction.  Gay couples would not ask such a website designer to design their wedding websites for several reasons:  

    1.  They don't trust such a person to make them the website they want

    2.  They don't want to financially support a business that doesn't approve of their wedding.

The only time a gay couple might ask for her services would be to create a legal basis for challenging her legal right to deny them. (What Lorrie Smith was doing to challenge the Colorado anti-discrimination law.)  If she doesn't deny them, there's no problem.  If they push, she can offer them one of her basic templates.  If they don't like them, they can go elsewhere.  Just as a bride, who  doesn't like a wedding dress in one store, can go to another.  

2.  She can politely decline and give them the names of three other web designers who specialize in gay weddings, or at least, who do gay weddings.  Unless she is so opposed to gay weddings that she won't help them in any way.  That would probably be proof that the 1st Amendment angle Lorrie Smith's case used, was just an excuse to discriminate.

3.  More radically, and much less likely, she could meet with the couple and learn about them as people, what being gay means to them, and why they want to get married.  

Well, I guess I had less to say about this than I thought.  Basically, this seems to show that this was not so much about  protecting 1st Amendment Rights as it was about sending a case to the Supreme Court that could create the first wedge to break down anti-discrimination laws protecting the rights of LGBTQ folks.  

I realize for some that might be a giant leap, so let me explain.  Normal business folks try to work out things with customers when they ask for services the business doesn't offer.  I gave examples of how this could have been done.  But none of that seemed to have happened.  And it now appears that there never was a request by a gay couple. (Though I'm not sure how the Colorado attorneys failed to contact the alleged client.)  Rather this was a case designed by group that has been fighting against LGBTQ rights for years now.  It was created to be a test case and they believed, correctly, that the current Supreme Court would look favorably on their argument.