Sullivan's Unity Speaker Swann Paid Enough for One Muni Job

[Note: My condolences to the Mayor and his family on the death of his father, former Mayor George Sullivan. Sullivan senior embraced all people, loved life, and always had a twinkle in his eye.] [Note 2, Friday morning: Anon at 6:22 this morning commented that the ADN has a story on this which, in its final sentence says

Erkmann, the city spokeswoman, says Swann waived his speaking fee and that the state Republican party is paying for his visit.

That resolves one question raised here, and fortunately in a very positive way. As I said in my comment responding to Anon, I think it is one of our roles to raise these sorts of questions so that others can respond and explain things they might not have thought necessary to explain. It clears up misunderstandings. We all win. Of course it helps if the questions are asked reasonably and while I try to sound reasonable, I'm probably not always as successful there as I could be. So keep the statement in mind as you read this post.] Sullivan's unity dinner will have a speaker who gets paid more for eating dinner and giving an hour speech than some Municipal employees make in a year. Nixon said, "Don't listen to what we say, watch what we do." Deep Throat, the FBI insider who fed Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein tips on Watergate, told them to "Follow the money." Always good tips when watching politicians and Dan Sullivan watchers - at least those who want to know what is really happening - are advised to follow them. Mayor Sullivan's been telling us how broke the Municipality is and how he has to cut the budget bad. He asked the unions to cut back to 37.5 hours a week. But they say he didn't answer the questions about how the changes would be handled or about future cutbacks, according to Don Hunter's Wednesday's ADN story. OK, if the mayor has some serious cuts to make, the idea of everyone getting a small cut in order to save other people from losing their jobs altogether isn't unreasonable. But it also isn't unreasonable for the unions to want to know the details - that's where the devil is supposed to be hiding, right? We do know that Hunter wrote:

[Human Resources Director] Usera said some layoffs would likely be necessary even if the employees accepted shorter hours.

Shannyn Moore demonstrates why she's the Alaskan news person who is regularly a guest on national television news with a post Wednesday where she ties a lot of issues together. Here's one point that came out of her post:

. . . Lynn Swann, hired for the “Mayor’s Unity Dinner” is also the headliner for a Republican fundraiser on the same day. Hmmm…unity? What is unifying about a former Pittsburgh Steeler and Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate, with a $40,000 speaker fee?

Actually, if you follow the link, it says that his speaking fee starts at $40,001 plus expenses. So let's get this straight. The Municipality is millions short, and the Mayor is paying $40,000 for a speaker at the unity dinner? That's more than a low-end Muni employee including benefits would get for working a year. (According to this ad for Municipal lifeguards , a range 7 position, has an annual salary range of $25,313.60 - $32,260.80. Even with 40% more in benefits, someone at the low end of the range would get less than $40,000. I've put a copy of the ad at the bottom since it probably won't be up forever.) Note that KTUU reported August 19 that budget concerns threatened Parks and Recreation including swimming pools. It would appear that the September ads for lifeguards means the pools are staying open. "Don't listen to what we say, watch what we do." We'll say we have to close swimming pools, but we advertise for life guards. We need the unions to cut, but we can spend $40,000 on dinner speakers. Now we've made some assumptions here. We don't know what the fee actually is. It could be more, and with expenses, surely is. But perhaps the Republican fundraiser is paying the fee and/or the expenses or the Republicans along with the Muni are splitting the bill somehow. But it is probably something we should know. The Municipality elections are officially non-partisan, so the Mayor's office paling around with known Republicans to get a speaker for his unity dinner . . . no, let's drop that line of reasoning. But the Mayor's office, minimally, should tell us how the bill for Swann is being paid - how much is the Republican Fundraiser paying and how much is the Municipality paying, and can we see copies of the checks please? [In the spirit of full disclosure, I was in grad school at USC at the same time Swann was winning the National Championship there.] If the Republican Party has offered Swann to the Mayor free, on the face of it, things would appear a little better. But we know that politicians don't give things away for free, particularly Republicans some of whom embrace greed as an important value. Shannyn's piece muses that there are foundations being laid for Sullivan's 2014 Senate race against Begich and links Bill Starr's accusations of Begich to all this. She also adds information that refutes Starr's accusations. It's all in the same post. But, why is anyone paying a $40,000 speaker fee when our Municipality is hurting as badly as the mayor claims? If the Republicans have that much money to throw around (surely the Municipality isn't paying, is it?), why not use it to help victims of domestic violence, or part of a police officer's salary? Why pay a Pennsylvania politician to come up here to talk? There are plenty of people of color who charge far less than that who specialize in cross cultural harmony. There are even a number of Black Alaskans who could and would give inspirational speeches for less than $1000. Maybe even free. But maybe not Republicans. Is money really the point in all the sky is falling rhetoric? Or is this to scare Anchorage residents into going along with Sullivan's sales tax plans? Are Republicans just keeping the money in Republican hands? Wouldn't it be better for our economy to keep it in Alaskan hands? Are they paying for future favors on the national level? Don't get me wrong. I know Democrats do this too. But up until now the dinners formerly known as 'diversity' were about celebrating the ethnic richness of our community and not about spending lots of dollars to import partisan politicians. People have questioned how the mayor who just vetoed an ordinance giving gay, lesbian, bi, and transgender members of our community protection against discrimination could then hold a diversity dinner. Well he couldn't. He had to change the name to unity. Folks raised questions about his support of diversity. Shannyn's story raises another question about his support of diversity:

This Friday, Mayor Dan Sullivan will cross the picket line at the ONLY boycotted hotel in Alaska for his “unity” dinner. In May, the Hilton workers overwhelmingly voted to place their hotel under boycott because their employer degrades their quality of life. Make no mistake, the media war being waged against the unions is partisan politics as usual.

These employees are among the lowest paid workers. And they represent some of the non-white members of the Anchorage community. [By the way, some folks are putting on what they are calling A True Diversity Dinner that same night. It will only be $10 a piece reflecting the economic hard times our city faces. Go to the link for more information.] The union members are challenging the management of the Hilton Hotel which is owned by the Blackstone Group. Who's Blackstone? Wikipedia reports:

Over the course of two decades, Blackstone has evolved into one of the largest private equity investment firms globally. In 2007, Blackstone completed a $4 billion initial public offering to become one of the first major private equity firms to list shares in its management company on a public exchange.^[3][4] Blackstone is headquartered at 345 Park Avenue in New York City, with more than a dozen additional offices in the United States, Europe and Asia. [Columbia Sussex.

One of the union organizers commented below and said the Anchorage Hilton is owned by Columbia Sussex, not Blackstone. Wikipedia says Blackstone owns Hilton and China Daily says Blackstone was buying Hilton in 2007. But I'm sure the union involved knows better.] Private equity investment firms. Aren't these the guys that get the $50 million bonuses? And they're quibbling over fifty cents an hour and working conditions for hotel staff? I bet they've spent more on a weekend vacation than the employees make in a year. [This is probably moot since Columbia Sussex owns the hotel, not Blackstone. But Wikipedia's entry for Columbia Sussex doesn't paint a pretty picture. Here's an excerpt:

On November 20, 2007 the New Jersey Casino Control Commission started its investigation into the renewal of the license of the Tropicana Casino & Resort, as well as whether its parent companies, Adamar of New Jersey and Columbia Sussex, are suitable to hold a casino license. Critics including Fred Burro, the Tropicana's former General Manager, testified before the Casino Control Commission on November 28, 2007 that Columbia Sussex CEO William Yung III had ordered him to make $40 million in payroll cuts, and when he opposed the layoffs, Yung became irate and fired him.[2]. In another incident, the National Environmental Health Association has refused to pay the Tropicana a portion of its $97,000.00 bill for a convention held at the resort because of reported bedbugs, roaches, rude employees, poor quality food and other unsanitary conditions.[3]

But remember, I got the original information on Blackstone from Wikipedia too, so don't bet the farm on this information.] Now, this dispute started in May, before Sullivan became mayor. So he can't say, "Well, we were already booked and couldn't move it." He picks the one hotel that has a labor dispute A hotel owned by a huge New York based corporation that sucks money out of the local Anchorage community by treating its Anchorage based employees poorly. He's going into the dinner formerly known as diversity past a picket line of Hispanics, Asians, etc. Maybe that's why it's called unity and not diversity any more.. Didn't the convention center have space? If Shannyn is right about the Senate race, I bet Sullivan can pick up a lot more money from Blackstone when he runs than he can from the hotel workers. "Hey guys, I booked a unity dinner in your hotel when it was being picketed, think what I can do for you in the US Senate." OK, this is all speculation based on the facts that are out there. But if we learned anything from the FBI surveillance of Alaska politicians, it's that we don't know squat about what they are doing behind closed doors. And we don't have the resources or the authority to track them like the FBI can. So if we take stray facts from here and there and hypothesize them together, we're still probably missing most of it. But maybe we'll see a bit of it. Let's remember history.

"Don't listen to what we say, watch what we do." "Follow the money."

Palin in Hong Kong

I tried to find some Hong Kong bloggers reporting on Palin there. Mostly it's foreign press blogs. Maybe that's because Hong Kong doesn't care about Palin. Or because the press was shut out of the speech. But here's one local blogger, Hong Kong Life, describing the CSLA - the forum where she spoke:

WSJ noted that Palin has never been to East Asia and isn't exactly famous for her mastery of public speaking or her expertise in finance and international affairs. But CLSA spokeswoman Simone Wheeler said it isn't necessary to have financial background to be speaking in the prestigious event.

There are basically two groups that compose these noted speakers. First are the conventional, ultra-savvy financial / political leaders like Alan Greenspan, Michael Robert Milken. The other group are composed of celebrities either for entertainment or taking diverse views. This includes Bob Geldof, Boomtown Rats lead singer turned anti-poverty activist, and singers Sir Elton John, Macy Gray, and Tom Jones.

We don't know if Sarah Palin would be grouped with entertainers (she is entertaining enough during the election campaigns by the way) because her topic isn't disclosed and the event was off-limits to media. Not until she opens her mouth and starts talking.

Hong Kong's South China Morning Post's story began this way:

Palin's handlers take the conservative approach

A triumph of low expectations? Quite possibly, but as always with Sarah Palin, that depends on who you talk to....

The main event instead was a tightly choreographed speech and question-and-answer session behind closed doors. Talking to attendees, it was clear Palin was determined to brush aside criticism of her ignorance of world affairs and burnish her international credentials while painting herself as a "small c" conservative. The "drill, baby, drill" rhetoric of her stump speeches, geared to firing up American conservatives, was replaced with an international edge and a touch more humour and nuance. She spoke for more than 90 minutes, part of a paid engagement that her aides have admitted will help pay legal bills. . .

"She seemed to relish the chance to show us really who she is and what she thinks ... I thought she gave a good account of herself," one Republican banker said. "She mentioned Reagan and Thatcher and small government and fiscal discipline ... that was all good stuff for this crowd. She didn't mention either of the Bushes or Obama [by name] once."

Not everyone was as generous. Some described people nodding off, walking out or even reading a newspaper at one point. Others dismissed her foreign policy ideas as the stuff of a high school project. She skated over global finance, and many noted that it did not appear as if she had written the speech herself.

A Frenchwoman who attended said she felt Palin was campaigning. "It was a goodwill speech without referring to what is happening. Maybe as governor of Alaska she did well, but she's not for the presidency. You get the impression she doesn't know the world is changing and that the US is not the power it used to be."

The Hong Kong Standard used a piece from and AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, REUTERS:

Palin's Asia debut speech divides investors

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Former US vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin divided an international Hong Kong audience of financial big-hitters at her first speech outside North America yesterday with some leaving in disgust.

The wide-ranging speech by the former governor of Alaska at the CLSA Investors' Forum covered international terrorism, US economic policy and trade with China, but was closed to the media.

Some listeners praised her forthright views on government social and economic intervention but others walked out early.

"She was brilliant," said one European delegate. "She said America was spending a lot of money and it was a temporary solution. Normal people are having to pay more and more but things don't get better."

In a speech lasting about 75 minutes, Palin slammed the current US government on spending and health care and praised the economic policies of former US president Ronald Reagan, delegates said. "We got into this mess because of government interference in the first place," Palin said.

A US delegate leaving early said: "It was awful, we couldn't stand it any longer."

And this is from the (London) Timesonline:

Sarah Palin’s first ever visit to East Asia began with a monologue that invoked the spirit of Margaret Thatcher, sounded “unmistakably” like a pitch for the 2012 presidency and was described by several members of the audience as “long, humorless and George W Bush-like”. . .

“I’m going to call it like I see it and I will share with you candidly a view right from Main Street, Main Street USA,” the former vice-Presidential candidate declared, before launching into prepared remarks on the Alaskan fishing industry.

Several audience members reportedly walked out of Ms Palin’s speech 30 minutes before the end, citing “more important things to do” or describing the talk as “too partisan and too much like a speech at the Republican convention”.

One senior fund manager told The Times that the 80-minute lecture, and the lack of an opportunity to fire any questions at Ms Palin, was a disappointment. “You would think that with her team of speechwriters and a supposedly media-free environment Palin could have afforded to be either funny or thought-provoking, but she was neither,” she said.

Interesting, the Times piece says "lack of an opportunity to fire any questions" but the South China Morning Post piece mentions "a tightly choreographed speech and question-and-answer session". The Times piece is quoting an attendee, the SCMP mentions it as part of their own reporting.

Snow Leopard Black Screen Disease Update

[Update Oct. 3 - see this later post for the solution to my problem. Doesn't mean it will work for you, but it seems to have solved my problem.]

This video will show you the ongoing problem I've had with my MacBook since installing Snow Leopard. You can see all the posts tracking this for the last couple of weeks.

In short, Stephen at the Apple Help and I have been talking back and forth trying to work this out. We reset the SMC and the parameter ram (no, I don't know exactly what that meas either, just that he walked me through doing that), I took it to the local MacHaus for a hardware diagnostic and nothing was wrong there. We reinstalled Snow Leopard. Still got a black screen. I finally noticed the problem only happened when I left the computer or stopped using the keyboard AND the adapter cord was plugged in. When it was only on battery (or when it was at the shop and they used a different power cord) the problem didn't happen. Over the weekend I tested this hypothesis and on battery no problem. The three times I used the cord, it went black when I stopped typing a few minutes. I left Stephen a confirmation message.



So yesterday Stephen called to say he'd gotten my phone message and he was FedExing the new adapter.


This is what I found this morning. We thought he wouldn't be able to ship it out until today since it was 5pm in Dallas when we talked and that it would get here Friday. But I saw it was already on a truck in Anchorage at 8:30 this morning!






Here's the old adapter cord. Can this really be the problem? It only began when I installed Snow Leopard. How do the adapter and the software interact to equal black screen?






And here's the Fed Ex truck pulling up in front of the house. It's 11:30am Anchorage Time. (All this is happening as I'm doing this post.)


And here's the new adapter.

It's plugged in. I'll go eat something now and leave it to turn black. Or, hopefully, not. Then I'll finish this post.



20 minutes later: Sorry to report: I still have black screen disease.

Equinox, Termination Dust, and Temple Bells

Rain Monday. Wind gusts all night. On the mountains the rain was white. The equinox was Tuesday morning according to National Geographic. If you go to the link, you'll see that they have someone who disputes the idea that on the equinox everyone on earth has the same amount of day and dark.

But don't be fooled by the notion that on the autumnal equinox the length of day is exactly equal to the length of night. The true days of day-night equality always fall after the autumnal equinox and before the vernal, or spring, equinox, according to Geoff Chester, a public affairs specialist with the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.

In any case, as of Tuesday every place south of Anchorage gets more light than we do until next spring.



Their video doesn't mention this though. They too found the magic music source that showed up on Dennis Zaki's moose film. But it also has the omniscient voiced narrator who tells us "The Truth." (This sort of music and this sort of narrator are so ubiquitous in nature movies and documentaries that we take them for granted. But once you start to hear them for what they is - a totally human artifice added to movies to give them the ring of 'truth' and authority - you can't help but smile. Ah, you think, another cliche movie soundtrack trying to sneak its message into my consciousness.)





Our backyard is changing colors. The chaise lounge, barbecue, and sweet peas are still out, but fall is on the way in.

















Birch (and a few red mountain ash) leaves cluster on the edge of the driveway.










While the pansies act as if nothing has changed.











After my Thai lesson I listened as the wind rang the bells at the Wat.

(I used YouTube today because Viddler took so long, YouTube was up first even though I uploaded at Viddler much earlier.)




In the afternoon the termination dust was easier to see. It's a bit late for the first powder on the mountains, but no one is complaining.

Holy Hullabaloos - Picking Books for a Book Club

This was only my third time with this book club. I volunteered to host because I just don't know what my schedule is going to be like and I figured this one would work. The host is supposed to have some food that is connected to the book. This book is a law professor's road trip to the locations of the dispute in key Supreme Court cases on the separation of church and state. There wasn't a lot of food in it - there were some animal sacrifices in a Santeria religious group in Florida (Church of Lukumi Babalu Ave., Inc. v. Hialeah) which included killing and then eating a goat among other animals. There was a lot of beer. There was Limburger cheese in Wisconsin (Wisconsin v Yoder.)

I was able to find some goat meat at Sagaya and J got it really tasty and stringy by today. We also had some Wisconsin cheese, but couldn't find any Limburger in Anchorage, which is probably just as well.


I'm spending a lot of time on the food, because the book was disappointing.

Jay Wexler says he was inspired by a couple of road trip books to write this book the way he did. Despite (or perhaps on account of) being a Boston University Law professor and former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg, his attempts at making this a 'fun' book for dim law students didn't work. He came across as socially perceptive as the Forty Year Old Virgin.

The book's concept was to give the reader the key separation of church and state issues by highlighting the important Supreme Court cases on this topic AND by describing his road trips to towns where the cases took place. Ideally this would give us insight both into the law and into the actual impacts on the communities where the events took place. I found the law coverage is pretty sketchy - there's not even a list of the cases, they aren't in the table of contents, there's no index, and some times I couldn't even find the case name - and the visits are pretty superficial. And he regularly paints himself as "the creepy liberal academic from Boston" who is something of a doofus:

"Luckily for me Meg had asked me before to write up a list of questions . . . it saved me from having to think too much during our conversation." (140)

Surely, Ginsberg's law clerk wasn't trying to convey himself as walking into a meeting with the Chaplain of the US Senate without any preparation. Was this supposed to be a joke? I didn't read it that way at the time and only now see this the only possible explanation. After all, fourteen pages before he told us that he'd printed out and read the previous six months of sermons. This attempt to dumb himself down, to not look like a wonk. just doesn't ring true. He's trying too hard to be one of the guys. He isn't. The frat jocks this seems to be aimed at are more likely to remember the part when he got drunk in an Austin bar than they are to remember any of the court cases.

While his road trip stories fill in some background for the cases, his interviews, at least as portrayed in the book, are pretty superficial. They add some sepia tones to the cases. There were some better parts - like the discussion of the emergency room doctor who sued to get 'under God' taken out of the pledge of allegiance - but I can't find them now to cite them because the book is so badly labeled. The chapter titles were chosen, apparently, for alliteration rather than illumination. (Hasidic Hallabaloo, Santeria Skirmish, Amish Agitation, etc.) Since he makes references to cases and people in each chapter that aren't the main topic of the chapter, and there's no index, and no list of cases (I know I'm repeating myself, but these are serious omissions, especially if he wants these used in law school classes) it's hard to use this as a reference book to the cases. I got the sense that he rushed to finish this and that his editor didn't spend a lot of time on it either.

The parts that illuminate the main court cases in this 238 page book could have been covered in 40 or 50 pages at most. You can get a lot of the basic ideas of these important cases online in a few minutes.

This link gives you a list of the key Supreme court decisions on separation of church and state with a brief synopsis of the precedents set.

And here's one with a synopsis of the principles the court considers in deciding separation of church and state cases.

We do get a little bit more discussion of the cases than these lists. But even his interviews with people involved in the cases are too shallow to add much value. Maybe the jokes work better in a classroom where you get feedback from the students and can adjust.

One member of the book group defended the book on the grounds that he learned about separation of church and state Supreme Court decisions and that the author, though a strong advocate for separation and a self-declared atheist, urged people to be respectful of those advocating the other point of view. And I agree that I learned something from the book. But we can say good things about a lot of books, but with so little time and so many books, I want to read books that are brilliant, or at least very good.

The disappointment of a number of us in the group led to a discussion of how to pick better books. One person said it was all about the subject for him. Another likes good writing and how the story is told. I feel that there are so many books out there, really good ones that we will never have time to read, that I'd prefer to have great books - that teach me new things and change how I think about the world and that have interesting, if not exciting, writing and structure.

So how do we pick such books? Do we just go with prize winners? Nominated books? I can pick them for myself by hanging out at the bookstore or library and reading enough to get sucked in or turned off. But even then, if I'm wrong, I can stop reading. But if a whole group is reading, you have to plow through.

So, from the American Booksellers Website, here's a list of different book awards as a start for coming up with a list of seriously good books. (The first two categories are children's books.)

The Randolph Caldecott Medal

The John Newbery Medal

Booker Prize for Fiction

National Book Awards

National Book Critics Circle Awards

Nobel Prize for Literature: 1950 to Present

PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

The Pulitzer Prize: 1950 to Present

The Quill Awards

The American Book Awards / Before Columbus Foundation

Awards from the American Booksellers Association

Indies Choice Book Award (2009 - current)

Book Sense Book of the Year Award (2000 - 2008)

American Booksellers Book of the Year (ABBY) Award (1991 - 1999)

Checking out the Indies Choice Book Awards above there I found The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski which won the best author discovery award for 2009. You can start reading it at the link. It didn't take long for me to decide to suggest it for our book club.

[Update: Here's what Jay Wexler posted on "Holy Hullabaloos: The Blog" today:

September 22, 2009
"as socially perceptive as the Forty Year Old Virgin"

Here is a guy who really did not like Holy Hullabaloos!

I have to give him credit for being a good sport for linking to this post. In an Aug. 27 post he praises Ketchikan, Alaska whose library stocks Holy Hullabaloo (Loussac doesn't) and whose newspaper reviewed the book.

I came across a review of the book in the Ketchikan Daily News! That's right, the two newspapers that have reviewed my book are the Boston Globe and the Ketchikan Daily News.

You can also see him in a bit of video at a book store trashing his own work.]

Frank Schaeffer on Evangelicals - Max Blumenthal in Anchorage Next Weekend to Tell us Personally

Frank Schaeffer:

"In the early 1970s the evangelicals like my late father and James Dobson decided that the our society had fallen so far "away from God" and so far from "America's Christian history" that it was time to metaphorically decamp to not just another country but to another planet:. In other words virtually unnoticed by the media and mainstream political operatives, a big chunk of American society seceded from the union in all but name.

What they did is turn the white race-based in "Christian school" movement of the 1950s into a countercultural phenomena. As tens of thousands of new Christian schools opened, it was no longer just about "protecting" white kids from minorities and African-Americans. It was about protecting your children from Satan in other words the United States government's long reach through the public school system. The generation raised on the belief that the US government is illegitimate because it is trying to "impose" non-biblical laws on people has hit the streets. . .

Ah, helps make sense of all the people who didn't want the president talking to their school kids. GW Bush was ok because they believe he is one of them.

These are the people who grew up indoctrinated into an alternative reality. Today they are out there waving signs of Obama dressed as Hitler. They are buying weapons and ammunition. Some are in the growing and revived militia movement. They are Dick Armey's foot soldiers. People like Armey and Beck can count on the ignorance of their dupes. It's against their religion to read a real newspaper, watch anything but Fox or go to a real school."

Linda at Celtic Diva has been running some pieces on the religious right that help explain some of the craziness that is going on in the US today. The quote above and those below are from a long piece Linda posted by Frank Schaeffer, the son of a well-known evangelist. Schaeffer has left the movement, but not before being among the architects of various evangelical campaigns including anti-abortion. He apologized publicly for his role in Dr. Tiller's murder.

Basically Schaeffer's saying that the Evangelical right has pulled its kids out of public schools for home schools or private evangelical school and has indoctrinated them into a theocratic mindset where people who do not believe in their God are evil. Their interpretation of the bible, not the Constitution, are their law.

Evangelical Red Guards

Over the last 30 years Evangelical fundamentalists have managed to do what Chairman Mao failed to do with his Red Guards: indoctrinate a whole generation of evangelical people to see their own society as the enemy and act like subversives from within the culture. These people are more anti-American than Al-Qaeda. The "Christian Reconstruction" movement is working for theocracy. Reconstructionism (of which Gary North is one leader) says that the law given for the political and legal ordering of ancient Israel is intended for all people at all times.

He warns that kindly liberals - Obama included - who want to rely on reason simply do not recognize what they are dealing with. These folks, according to Schaeffer, play by totally different rules. He gives the example of being ahead in a chess game and thinking you are winning when your opponent pulls out a lead pipe and beats the crap out of you. Different rules about winning.

I was born in the United States because a man named Adolf Hitler mobilized a demoralized German youth and many of their parents after the humiliations of post World War I Germany. The most scientifically and culturally advanced nation in the world succumbed to pure emotional hate and pride in fatherland. The rational, educated Germans didn't believe that Hitler had a chance. My mother barely got out of Germany before World War II broke out. This was a real event in my family. So I've grown up understanding that the US was not immune from this sort of thing. There are structural differences between the German government then and the US government now that make the US less vulnerable. But 'less' doesn't mean invulnerable.

Schaeffer's narrative makes the people we've been seeing on television and here in Anchorage understandable. They're denial of facts, their black and white approach to good and evil, their hatred of the government. They see the world as differently from us as do Islamic fundamentalists. But they look and sound just like us (on many topics) so we're apt to overlook the warning signs. They are the product of years of schooling in this. (Note: I know that school, all schools, turn off a certain number of the students, so not all graduates of such schools turned out that way. But enough to make good footage for Fox News and other television news programs who need some action footage to keep viewers. And they are devoted. Wait til we see the first Evangelical suicide bombers in this country.) Schaeffer calls this the enemy within. We can't make the same mistake the reasonable Germans made in the 1930s. The Bible is much more powerful than Mein Kampf.

I understand people's doubts. This is the United States, we're different. Yes, so was Germany, so was every once-great nation. We aren't outside of history. I heard Schaeffer a while back on Fresh Air. You can listen to the Schaeffer interview and judge for yourself whether this guy is credible.

More immediate for us in Anchorage though is Schaefer's list of people who have got it right:

The real story of the Religious Right and their power to destroy is told by Max Blumenthal in Republican Gomorrah, and Jeff Sharlet in The Family and by me in Crazy For God. What our books have in common is the understanding that you can lose in the political system but still "win" -- according to your destructive agenda -- if your agenda is non-political but rather religious and apocalyptic in nature.

Max Blumenthal will be in Anchorage next weekend to talk at a couple of venues.

This poster [double click to enlarge and read it better] comes from Phil Munger [Update 9:30am: see Phil's clarification of the poster source in comments] who is helping to arrange for Max's trip to Anchorage. I learned as a college student that going to hear people tell their stories live is one of the most powerful ways to learn. I urge everyone to attend these events so you can judge for yourself whether you need to rethink what is going on. You can even listen to him on the radio

Saturday afternoon
The Shannyn Moore Show 5-7pm AM radio 700.

You can also make contributions to help pay for Blumenthal's visit at Progressive Alaska.(Upper right corner PayPal button.) A later post there gives a lot more information about Blumenthal.

Blumenthal's book Republican Gomorrah is currently #15 on the New York Times non-fiction best seller list.

UAA - Saturday September 26
8pm UAA Arts Building 150

Anchorage Unitarian Universalist Fellowship -
Sunday 12:30pm-2:30pm

Gout

Gout is a kind of arthritis that has been known since ancient times. Hippocrates called it “the disease of kings” because of its association with a rich diet. In reality, there are a number of factors that can lead to gout, and diet is part of this larger picture. [Gout.com]

Why am I telling you this? Because I spent yesterday not being very royal with a toe so sore I didn't get out of bed. I'll spare you the photo, but my left big toe is much bigger and redder than my right big toe.

So, how did this happen? Well, it did happen once about five and a half years ago when we were in Portland for six months. That time I suffered much longer (I'm assuming the meds will kick in by tomorrow and now it only hurts when I walk on it or bump it) because first I had to find a doctor, get an appointment, etc. This time I knew what it was and I have a great doctor who is extremely responsive and helpful. But why did I get this? From foods to avoid on gout.com

• Meat items that are particularly high in purines include beef, pork, lamb, and “organ meats” (such as liver, kidney, and brain), as well as meat extracts and gravies.

These foods are almost never on my plate, so they're not the problem.

• Reduce or eliminate alcohol consumption, especially beer.

Again, very rarely. This is not it.

• Reduce your use of oatmeal, dried beans, peas, lentils, spinach, asparagus, cauliflower, and mushrooms.

Hmmmm, I eat oatmeal almost every day. And last week I had more than usual amounts of spinach and mushrooms.

Another 2004 study did find meat and seafood to increase the chance of gout in men. But

In this specific study, though, not all purine-rich foods were associated with an increased risk of gout. There was no increased risk associated with a diet which included:

* peas
* beans
* mushrooms
* cauliflower
* spinach

Even though these foods are considered high in purines. Choi's team also found that low-fat dairy products decrease the risk of gout and overall protein intake had no effect. Ultimately, diets shown to be connected to gout are the same kinds of diet linked to cardiovascular disease.

Gout.com goes on to suggest:

Dietary and lifestyle changes may also help:

* Maintain a healthy body weight and a well-balanced diet.
* Avoid alcohol, especially beer.
* Exercise regularly.

Well, I already do all these things. I recall, but can't find, an old Mark Twain quote. He was recommending various vices like smoking and drinking because, he said, when you get sick and the doctor tells you to give them up, you'll have something to give up.

Ongoing Mac Problems

[Update Oct. 3 - see this later post for what the Snow Leopard problem was for me. Doesn't mean it will work for you, but it seems to have solved my problem.]

My relationship with Stephen at the Apple Help Desk is growing much closer. It's all due to installing Snow Leopard. I have his direct line and his email. My black screen continues to show up. When it was at the MacHaus, they never saw the problem and their hardware diagnostic was negative. After a day at home, it came back.

So, what could it be? I've been trying to isolate factors.
1. It happened after I installed Snow Leopard. It seemed to go fine after Stephen walked me through resetting the parameter ram and the SMC.
2. But after I added Rosetta (I'd left it off when I installed Snow Leopard) it started again.
There's one other factor that I'm pretty sure of:
3. It only seems to go black when I'm plugged into my Mac adapter. I don't think it has gone black when I've worked on battery only. And at the MacHaus, they didn't have my adapter and they never had the problem.
4. It doesn't happen while I'm working on the computer, it happens when I stop for a while - go to get a phone call or do some other errand away from the computer. A few minutes away is enough.

It went black a couple of times yesterday and after I rebooted twice, I decided to leave the cord unplugged except when I needed to recharge the battery, but if I was going to get up I unplugged the cord. Stephen had me reset the SMC and parallel ram again yesterday afternoon, but it went black again. I left a message. (He's in Dallas and it was after he left work.) But I didn't plug it in again and it was good overnight and today. When Stephen called today about 1pm, we reloaded Snow Leopard, but he had me plug into another outlet to see if the outlet was a problem. I went to pick up J and when I got back it was finished installing, and the screen was black and unresponsive.

So I'm battery again now and we'll see. He said if it went down again, he'd send a new power adapter.

Meanwhile I did find out my friend does NOT have lung cancer. Now, that is very good news. And J's back. Also good news.

Making salads for Rosh Hashona dinner with friends.

The Hills Are Alive . . .

Seeing the Chugach Mountains from town is one of the perks of living here in Anchorage. The changing light and seasons mean that the familiar always has a different look and while waiting at a traffic light you can look up into the wilderness and now it's close by.
This was Tuesday on the way to a meeting, waiting at the Glenn Highway and Bragaw. (Yes, sometimes I drive if the places I'm going are too far apart to get to on a bike, or if I have to carry something that doesn't fit in my backpack. Or the weather or roads are dicey...)

This was after lunch today at the Thai Kitchen.
The golds and reds are starting to show.

Dennis Zaki took his video camera up to Powerline Pass (about 20 minute drive from downtown Anchorage) the other night and got these great shots of bull moose hanging around, waiting for the mating season to officially open.

The Magnificent Moose from Dennis Zaki on Vimeo.

After I watched the video, I emailed him to say I thought the video was great, but that the music was kind of cheesy.

"As many times as I've been up there," I wrote, "I've never heard any music."

He wrote back:

"Yes it was weird, the music just started playing as soon as I got there!"

So, yes, Rogers and Hammerstein were right.

Where's Political Music of the Bush and Obama Eras?

After posting the video on Mary Travers in the previous post, I realized that while there was a reason I posted it, lots of people would have no idea of the significance of Peter, Paul, and Mary and the many other musicians of the sixties. Just posting it without saying anything would mean little. I realized I needed to supply a little context. So here it is.

In the early sixties we had the civil rights movement which overlapped with the anti-war movement which came a bit later. Both these movements were accompanied by an incredible musical score. I almost said background music, but while it was ALWAYS in the background, there were times when it was front and center stage.

Peter, Paul and Mary (Travers of the previous post) were part of this musical rhetoric that kept people inspired through difficult times. They were just a part of a whole army of musicians supplying strong, melodic, and uplifting anthems. So I supplemented my memories of those days with a Google search. Ask.com says:

Civil rights would have been won without the participation of blues, gospel, and folk singers and songwriters, but the participation of musicians and the effectiveness of sing-alongs certainly helped an incredible amount.

The songs on this list don't even begin to capture the hundreds of tunes that have been written about civil rights in America (and around the world), but if you're looking to learn more about music during the civil rights movement, this is a good primer for your journey. [Go to the ask.com link for their list of most important songs.]

PBS had a fund-raiser documentary on Freedom Songs of the Civil Rights Movement with a three CD box set. It looks like it will be on at 10:30 this Saturday night (Sept. 19) in Washington, DC at WETA and again Monday night.

The point though, is that there was an incredible musical back up to the movements. Folk songs were big in the mid-60's and there was something called the 'hootenany' which was folk song singalongs. There was even a hootenany television show.

"MTV Unplugged?" Nope, it's Hootenanny, the ABC-TV series that capitalized on the popularity of folk music during the early 1960's. If it's remembered at all today, it's as the show that blacklisted Pete Seeger, a last gasp of McCarthyism that led to a boycott by Bob Dylan; Joan Baez; Peter, Paul & Mary; The Kingston Trio - practically every folk act that meant anything to the masses.

But when Hootenanny appeared in March 1963, it held a lot of promise. Each segment was taped at a different college campus, the audience consisting of students. Shows ran for a half-hour on Saturday night, and featured four acts. The music was literally non-stop. Host Jack Linkletter (eldest son of Art) would quickly introduce each artist or group, and they all took turns after doing a song. During the thirty minutes a "headliner" act did three or four songs, two supporting acts did two songs apiece, a third act (usually a soloist) did one song, and everybody joined in for the closing number - usually something simple like Goodnight Irene or "Little Liza Jane."[Michael J. Hayde writes More at tvparty.com about many of the acts that appeared - he says his dad audio taped all the shows. ]

As the Vietnam War began to heat up in the sixties, some of these artists crossed over to the anti-war movement and their music, along with the addition of rock and roll protest songs, were important inspiration.

Which raises the point - where are the stirring anti-war anthems of today? Where are the folk songs that call the health care victims to the streets, arm-in-arm? I'm the first to admit being out of touch with today's pop music, so I'm sure others might be able to jump in and tell me where to find it. Clearly rap taps into the kind of urban frustrations that Pete Seeger tapped into, but too often rather than pointing toward ways to overcome, it turns into violent, misogynist rants. It's not that there aren't rappers who have a more positive message, but in the sixties, there was no one in the US who didn't know Blowing in the Wind and We Shall Overcome.

If that kind of music, with that kind of reach and power, exists today, I don't know about it. And we need it. To lift our souls through the nastiness of today's politics, just as the music lifted us above the nastiness of racism and the politics of the Vietnam War. Racism and war? Hmmm, We're still embroiled in those fights today. Where's the inspirational music of today?

Good Bye Mary Travers

YouTube from adelfred.
[Update: I've added some context to this in the next post. And if you follow the link to Blowin in the Wind, you can see Peter, Paul, and Mary 30 or 40 years earlier, singing one of the most important anthems of the civil rights movements.]

What happens to your trash?

I was getting ready to go to bed but first I had to take out the trash that's collected tomorrow. But then there was the NY Times in my email. You know how going to bed at ten ends up going to bed at 2am.

According to the NY Times:

Through the project, overseen by M.I.T.’s Senseable City Laboratory, 3,000 common pieces of garbage, mostly from Seattle, are to be tracked through the waste disposal system over the next three months. The researchers will display the routes in real time online and in exhibitions opening at the Architectural League of New York on Thursday and the Seattle Public Library on Saturday.

The MIT site tells us:

TrashTrack uses hundreds of small, smart, location aware tags: a first step towards the deployment of smart-dust - networks of tiny locatable and addressable microeletromechanical systems.These tags are attached to different types of trash so that these items can be followed through the city’s waste management system, revealing the final journey of our everyday objects in a series of real time visualizations.

I couldn't find where online the garbage is being tracked. At least I can track most of our summer, raw, kitchen vegetable scraps. They go about 50 feet to the compost heap and then get scattered onto our various flower beds after the worms and other bugs take care of them and the leaves and our neighbor's grass clippings.

But it would be interesting to find out where some of the other stuff goes. I hope not out to the trash island floating in the North Pacific.

The Seattle Public Library, which is one of the partners in this, will have an event Saturday, Sep. 19, 2009, 11 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.:



But I have to take the trash out now.

Krestia on Goldberg

I cringed when I heard that Jonah Goldberg was coming to talk to UAA students. It's not that he's a Conservative columnist, it's his style. My sense is that he's Rush with an academic veneer. His columns seem meant to anger, to distract us from real issues. Bring up Conservative columnists and Liberal columnists, but ones who bring their biases to what they study to illuminate and raise questions that cause us to rethink something we think we already know, or to start to grasp something we're scratching our heads about.

But I did think I should at least go and hear what he had to say, but I completely missed it by not keeping track of when it was supposed to be.

Fortunately, the Press went, and Krestia at the Anchorage Press wrote an interesting review of Goldberg's talk. (I say 'interesting' because I don't know how accurately he reported the talk, but what he wrote was interesting.) The basic point he says Goldberg made was that these are great times to be a journalist. I don't want to say much more since I wasn't there and you can read Krestia's column yourself at the link above.

Alaska Blogger's House Burns Down

[UPDATE 9-16-09 10:30am: Tea said I could post this picture from her blog. She also added a comment below. When I pressed her she said gift certificates to Sears would help - she's got 9 kids to clothe. Also looking into setting up a pay pal account for her.]

Tea N Crumpet's house burned down. Here blog Stress Management was one of the early ones and she writes about living in Wasilla with nine kids. There's not much I can say, but I did want to note it here. You can read about it at the link above and a follow up post from today.

The Red Cross was there along with the Firefighters with vouchers for a hotel. She did save her laptop as she mentions on my post below about mine being in the shop. No one got hurt, but Tea seems to have gulped some smoke retrieving her laptop and purse. (I have it back. The diagnostic on the hardware showed nothing wrong and the problem didn't appear while it was in the shop. I'm just using it now for the first time. My fingers are crossed it's ok.)

Tea, my heart goes out to you and your family. We do want to know how we can help out as you work your way back to some form of normal.

Do lasers work by focusing sound waves?

Take out a piece a paper and write the numbers 1-10, then mark the answers to the following questions:

True or False? (you've got a 50/50 chance)

1. Lasers work by focusing sound waves.

2. It is the father's gene that decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl.

3. All radioactivity is man-made.

4. The center of the Earth is very hot.

5. The universe began with a huge explosion.

6. Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria.

7. Electrons are smaller than atoms.

8. Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth? (I know this isn't a true or false question, I didn't write this quiz)

9. Human beings are developed from earlier species of animals.

10. The continents have been moving their locations for millions of years and will continue to move.

These are some of the questions on an international survey reported in Science and Engineering Indicators 2006.

I found this in my ongoing attempts to understand why so many people believe in government death panels, believe that medicare works well and they don't want the government taking it over, and other such silliness. (We get distorted ideas about the world.  On television ten thousand people seems important, but one million people is less than one-half of one percent of the adult US population.)

The best that Americans did on the questions above (the data for United States was 2004) was about 78% of people got the correct answer on questions #4 and #10. That means that about 22% of the folks got these two questions wrong. (Of course this was a sample of the US adult population - you have to understand some statistics and probability to understand the counter-intuitive notion that you can sample a small portion of the population and predict accurately what the whole population 'knows.' But assuming good statisticians were in charge, that means about 42 million people don't know the answers to #4 and #10.) (Remember, if people guessed on all the questions, the odds are they would have gotten half of them right.)

38% got question #2 (the father's gene) WRONG.

More than 40% got question #6 (antibiotics) WRONG.

I guess the most shocking was that 40% got question #8 (earth around the sun?) WRONG. For me this is more shocking because it is the most tangible concept and one that we can actually see and don't need too much coaching from grade school teachers to get. Maybe they should have asked about whether the earth was round or flat too.

Perhaps less surprising, but more disturbing were questions #5 (universe began) and #9 (human development from earlier species.) I say less surprising because it's a lot easier, conceptually, to understand that some giant bearded God, who leans from the clouds on the Vatican ceiling, created the universe and human beings than it is to understand the big bang theory or evolution. But over 65% got #5  and 58% got #8 wrong! I would add another caveat though. Reading beyond just the headline statistics, I found that when the question was phrased, "Scientific theory holds that ..." the correct/incorrect ratio flips. So, 20% know about the big bang and evolution, but just don't believe it. The other 40+% . . . who knows?

So how'd you do on the test? You can see the answers and the stats for the US, China, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, EU-25, and Russia on this page from the National Science Foundation. This particular test is a few years old - the US and EU data are 2005. How many know what EU-25 means? Some must because I do get hits from people in Europe.

What does this have to do with anything? Do people really need to know any of this stuff? Not to lead their daily lives, but they do if they expect to have a clue about global warming, nuclear energy, stem cell research, and whether the earth is more than 6,000 years old. Or what various public policies are about. I suspect that a lot of people have knowledge in some areas, but not others.

I also don't think that there's a correlation between political parties and knowing the answers, but I suspect that the people who believe what Sarah Palin says, on the whole, do less well on this than the average person. But that's simply a guess, but it would be interesting to find out.

So what happens when someone doesn't know something? I'd say there are a couple of key options. They can

1. Pretend like they do know.

2. Keep quiet and hope nobody asks them a question that will reveal their ignorance

3. Acknowledge they don't know and feel stupid and helpless.

4. Acknowledge they don't know and decide to find out the answers.

The scary thing is people who are confronted with their ignorance - get asked questions like those above or those right below - see they don't know the answers, but then go on to believe that their opinion on any of a number of public policy issues is just as good as someone who knows all the answers. Ignorance really means not knowing how much you don't know.

If the questions above seem a little distant from our daily lives (in a sense we can use modern technology and generally live our lives without understanding how it works, but since we are voters, our ignorance imperils all). Here are some questions relevant to terms we hear and/or are expected to make decisions about in the course of our daily lives.

1. An acre equals how many square miles? (When you hear that a fire burned 2,000 acres, do you have any idea how much that is?)

2. How much is the Anchorage [replace with your own city] Municipal budget? (If we don't even know how much the budget is, how can we say it is too high?  How do we know that our taxes are too high? Compared to what? How much would we pay for what our local government does if we had to pay private companies?  )

3. How many milligrams of salt are recommended for an adult per day?(This apparently varies from country to country.)

4. What are the five most populous countries in the world?

5. Write one word in a language that doesn't use the Roman alphabet.

The first three questions cover concepts that are in the news every single day, yet most people can't answer them, though I'd guess number 3 will get the most right answers.

The last two we may not face every day, but wouldn't it be nice to know something about the countries of visitors and immigrants we meet?  Shouldn't we all be able to point out on a map where those five countries are? How about when we have a strong opinion about one of those countries? Those five countries make up 46 percent of the world's population. I'd say that we should know them before knowing the names of five deodorants or how many times Lindsay Lohan was arrested.

And the last one. You can survive without reading any Chinese characters, or not being able to read sushi in Japanese. But I promise you a lot of Japanese can read Starbucks in English.  I think non-Roman alphabets act like curtains to most people born in the US. They seem completely impenetrable. But they aren't really. Billions of people read Chinese, Russian, Arabic, or Hindi. 

In ten hours almost anyone could learn to read 20-50 words in a language with a different alphabet.  If you had a good teacher or a good book and the discipline to apply yourself. (Ten of the 20 most populous countries use non-Roman writing.)

Sorry.  I'm getting a little carried away here. I just want people to remember that few of us use a very large percent of our brains.  We have a lot of excess capacity.   Nevertheless, even people who use very little of that capacity are able to deceive themselves into thinking that their opinion is as good as anyone else's. Somehow, "the right to one's opinion" has morphed into "my opinion is as good as yours."

Until we each face our relative ignorance and gain a little more humility (if you aren't humbled looking at all the books in a library, what does that suggest?) we have little hope of getting along and taking care of the planet in a way that will sustain life.

Acres.

Anchorage Municipal budget.

Salt.

Populous Countries.

Black Screen Back so Back to MacHaus

The evil black screen came back last night after almost two days with no problem. As long as I don't leave my computer for more than a couple of minutes, I have no problem, but then it goes black and I have to reboot. Stephen at Apple thinks it might be a hardware malfunction and since it's still under warranty I can take it in to MacHaus and have them do a diagnostic. I did learn that the first call to Apple got me to the first level people and the second call on the same case number got me to a higher level expert who gave me a direct number back to him.

I hope this doesn't take long. Computer stores don't give loaner computers like some car places do when the car's being repaired. Besides, my computer is much more personalized than my car ever was. While I can blog from my wife's computer, all my stuff is on this one. But I do have everything backed up on the external hard drive.

Anchorage Daily News Updated Photo Policy - Icon-Sized Photos Usable

On August 14 I posted about the new acting police chief Steve Smith. The post incuded a photo of Smith I'd taken. The ADN posted an excerpt of the post and the photo along with a link to my blog.

I had done a post about the ADN letter to another blogger to take down a picture he'd gotten from their website and I'd supported the ADN's decision. But I also pointed out that the ADN had used blogger photos without permission in the newspaper and newsreader. While I favor general openness, I accepted what some people argue - that a photo is a complete work and so using the whole photo wasn't the same as taking a brief excerpt of text. The rules are evolving here and part of me is for sharing everything as long as there is proper credit and links. But when some people take other people's work stuff for profit, that isn't acceptable to me.

I wrote again about my own personal evolving guidelines for blogging two weeks ago and talked about photo policy there too. (There's another one where I talked about photo policy on pictures of kids.)

So, when the ADN had my photo of Smith up I emailed Mark Dent, who runs the ADN Newsreader, with copies to other higher ups at the ADN including publisher Pat Dougherty. I felt a little bad ratting on Mark like that without giving him a chance to make a correction first, but this was an issue bigger than him, and they needed to know their paper wasn't following the policy they insist bloggers follow.

I got an immediate reply from Dougherty apologizing, something about policy and actual practice needing to get in sync, and that the photo would be down before I got the email. Well, it wasn't. And it wasn't down later either. Mark sent an apology too saying he would take it down and there was some reference to fair use and 'icon-sized' photos. I asked him whether he was saying people could use 'icon-sized' photos of ADN pictures and he referred me up to the policy makers. I didn't follow up on it then, but last week when I checked out a sitemeter link from the ADN newsreader I found that the picture was still up and sent another email to the ADN.

I don't post the contents of private emails to me without the permission of the emailer, so I sent another email to Pat to ask if I could post his response and he wrote that was fine with him.

So, here's what I asked:

So, Pat, is the ADN policy now that it is ok to post 'icon size photos' even if they are copyrighted and you don't have permission? If so, I assume that means that is t[w]hat bloggers can do with ADN photos. Please clarify.

And he responded:

That's correct. I realize "icon-sized photo" is a term of art, without a precise definition. The intention is simply to provide our readers with the visual information that a photo is available by following the link provided. We try to do that with small versions of the photo that don't supplant the experience of viewing the photo in its full published form.

We are assured that's an appropriate fair use.

It's worth noting that the point of the Newsreader is to make it easy for readers to find content -- text or photos -- on sites other than our own. I have no issue with someone else doing the same with our material. [emphasis added]

"Supplant the experience of viewing a photo in its full published form" is definitely a term of art too. Thumbnail is a tiny picture that I interpret as smaller than what the ADN has published on the newsreader. Icon sized is what you see when you use Google image. Another aspect here is how big the photo file is. The basic question is, if the viewer clicks on the photo will it show up the same size or be much bigger. Originally, my photo of Smith could be enlarged on the ADN site, but they eventually changed that. [Now I can't even find the post anymore.] In fact it looks like they really are using smaller photos on the newsreader now, though most can be enlarged because, presumably, the ADN has copyright permission since they mostly are from AP or other Alaska newspapers.

I would note that when I googled - "icon-sized photo" fair use - I got this:

However, if you look up thumbnail sized photo and fair use, you get a lot of hits.

Wikipedia tells us this interpretation of the Fair Use Doctrine comes from

Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation (280 F.3d 934 (CA9 2002) withdrawn, re-filed at 336 F.3d 811(CA9 2003)) is a U.S. court case between a commercial photographer and a search engine company. During the case ownership of Arriba Soft changed to Sorceron, the operator of the Internet search engine Ditto.com. The court found that US search engines may use thumbnails of images (size limits not determined), though the issue of inline linking to full size images instead of going to the original site was not resolved.

Clearly a thumbnail of an image that someone searches for on a website or search engine is a different animal than the pictures at the ADN Newsreader. The Newsreader is more an extension of the ADN's news service, though Dougherty does phrase his reply to give it the search engine spin. But I'm not going to hire a lawyer over that. And the pictures the ADN is using now are getting pretty close to the size of the icons of pictures Google uses in Google image search results.

But Pat's email does say that the ADN photos can be used by bloggers without asking permission IF they are "icon-sized." Or better yet, thumbnail sized.

Kids Enjoy Chinese Cultural Fair in Anchorage

Yesterday afternoon I invited the daughters of friends to go to the Chinese Fair at UAA put on by the Confucius Institute. In the end, their parents came too. I was a little underwhelmed after the quality of Thursday night's performance. But even though the Student Union hadn't been transformed visually into a Chinese village fair, it turned out that the activities were good ones that got the kids and the adults involved.



Each table had some aspect of Chinese culture. This one was called Chinese toys and this was a game where you had to use chopsticks to move tiny beans from cup to cup.





This kid was really getting into the chance to learn some Chinese calligraphy. You can see the character for river (the three vertical lines) and below the character for mountain.





There was also origami - I didn't think to ask about the Chinese claim to what I thought was a Japanese artform.




There were also people who would write people's names on these tags using Chinese characters.













I was hoping to add something about Confucius Institutes in general but if I'm going to get this up, I'll have to leave that part for later. They are sponsored by the Chinese government through the Ministry of Education and they are a way for China to promote Chinese language and culture. There has been some criticism that this is a means of Chinese propaganda and even espionage. But I think the same claims can and have been made for Western organizations that do the same thing. One particular issue with universities is the extent to which the funding agreements give control to the Chinese over curriculum of regular university classes on language and China. One way universities have dealt with this is not by having the CI within academic units - such as the language department or other departments which might cover aspects of Chinese politics, history, etc. in their courses. My understanding of how this works at UAA is that the CI is NOT housed in an academic department, such as Languages, but separately with International Programs which has taken the place of the old American Russian Center.

The benefits, if this works out as hoped, will be extra resources to improve opportunities to study Chinese language in the Anchorage School System and the university and help for the business community that want to tap Chinese markets and resources. If this is going to be more than a symbolic presence, I suspect there will need to be more resources and a clearer focus on a few things that can be done well.

That's actually the gist of what I had to say. Perhaps I'll get up a post with more details another time.

Guests to Airport and Checking Out Consumer World

I took our guests to drop off their rental car. Since they wanted to go to McCarthy in Wrangle-St. Elias National Park, they had to get a local company that allowed driving on the McCarthy road. The look of the place was a refreshing change from the standard airport car rental clones. Even on a rainy morning it was bright and cheery.




Coming back from the airport we often pass this giant furniture store that popped up on this corner a few years ago, but we've never gone in.

Still a little embarrassed by the saggy hide-a-bed couch our guests slept on, I decided to just see what Bailey's has to offer. I haven't looked at furniture in Anchorage for many years. I just remember it being expensive and with a limited selection. I didn't get far on this early Saturday visit before Pam asked if I needed any help, coffee, soft drink, etc. I said I was just looking and she left me alone. Later, I did catch Pam and her trainee, DeLynn 'lying down on the job.'







I wandered into what I thought was a small section. Hah! The Home Theater section is bigger than most Anchorage furniture stores. There I ran into Pam and DeLynn again. It looked like I had to retrace my steps and they came along. It was very low key, I think it was clear I wasn't going to buy anything, but they did want to show me around and make sure I saw the waterfall.







Above the waterfall to the second floor is a large rock wall with various birds and other animals. I'm not much of a big time consumer and this is not the kind of place I spend much time, but since I prod others to go places they haven't gone before, I think I have to take my own advice, so there I was.

Most of the furniture is just not my taste, but I thought the prices were reasonable by Anchorage standards, though I can't judge the quality well. And, if nothing else, on a cold wintry day, this store might be a good place to go walking. You can go up and down the stairs and there's lots of room, plus they give you free coffee.

Somehow I feel compelled to say this is not a paid store ad, it's not even an ad. It's just part of Anchorage and so is fair game for this blog. And Pam and DeLynn were delightful hosts.