Note To Carly Fiorina: Solving Nation's Problems Harder Than Rocket Science

From Friday's news:

"For GOP presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina, solving the nation’s biggest challenges is pretty simple — “it’s not rocket science,” as she likes to say."

I watched Neil Armstrong land on the moon in an elementary school classroom in Thailand.  It's one of the moments that moved me to the field of public administration.  I thought to myself, having lived in Thailand for two years by then and with the Vietnam war close enough that I could get the Armed Forces Network out of Saigon on my radio at night, "If humans can land on the moon, why can't we find ways to feed, house, and school  all the people in the world, and provide them basic health care?" 

As I pondered what I would do after Peace Corps, I came across public administration.  It seemed to be a field of study that might address that question - it was a generalist field that borrowed knowledge from other disciplines and applied that knowledge to real human situations.

Public administration seemed broad enough to let me pursue answers to other questions that Thailand raised. Things like: is there a way to combine the best  of the communal aspects of Thai society with the best of the individualistic parts of the US society?

And I was also curious about why the US free press that I grew up believing in was NOT reporting about the US planes that were flying over my house on their way to bomb Laos and North Vietnam.  If I knew it was happening, then the many journalists in Thailand and Vietnam surely knew.  The Laotians knew, the North Vietnamese knew, and no doubt the Chinese and Russians knew.  But officially it wasn't happening and the American public was not reading about the bombing in their newspapers or seeing it on the nightly news.   Why not?

I began to realize that getting people to the moon was relatively easy.  The rocket science part - doing the calculations and building the machines - was basically modeling and crunching numbers.  The hard part was getting people to do things, getting Congress to agree on funding and then coordinating folks scattered across the nation. 

Getting people to agree on systems that equitably distribute resources among the peoples of the world is far more difficult.  The political, social, economic, and cultural webs of humans are hard to weave but easy to rip apart. 

So, from my perspective, if Fiorina thinks handling government problems isn't rocket science, she's right.  But if she thinks, as this quote suggests, that it is easier than rocket science, she's dead wrong.  It's way harder.

In physics, the laws of nature  are stable.  What happened ten years ago will happen again tomorrow.  You can calculate the speed and direction of a rocket and of the moon so that you can land the one on the other.

In the social sciences, there are some observable principles, but the people we study in social science don't obey those laws as scrupulously as the moon obeys Newton's laws. 


It's often difficult to test theories because you can't find two comparable cities (or states or nations)  to use in experiments.  But if we could, another problem arises.  People are sentient and willful.  When they know what scientists think they will do, they can change their behavior - for their own good, like cutting down smoking, or to prove their independence, like not cutting down smoking.  

If government were as easy as Fiorina seems to think, millions of people wouldn't be in prison, wouldn't be homeless, wouldn't be addicted to drugs and alcohol, wouldn't be killing each other in our cities and in war zones.  We would have adjusted our carbon use years ago and avoided the impacts of climate change we are experiencing already.  Members of Congress (and leaders in other nations) would be heroes because they would have supported projects that resulted in prosperity, equity, and the successful pursuit of happiness for all people.


Note:  I'd like to say I went into public administration because getting to the moon was the easy task and because figuring out how to get human beings to collectively solve collective problems was the much harder challenge.  While that is partially true, it's also true that I don't really have much of an aptitude for physics (though both my kids have physics degrees) and I have much more of an aptitude for public administration. 

"If we want more stability in state services, there’s a simple answer"

That was the title of an ADN editorial board editorial Sunday.  

First and most obvious, if there were a simple answer it would have been found long ago.  There are no simple answers in politics or government (which are not the same things, though they overlap.)

So what is that simple answer according to the editorial board?

After listing numerous shortfall's in this year's budget, they tell us:

"There’s also a simple solution that would go far toward helping restore that stability: Honesty in the budgeting process."

I agree that honesty in the budget process is helpful for the public to understand what's going on.  But is it simple?  Hell no.

First, the budget has to account for billions of dollars, so it's going to be long and complicated no matter what.  But sure, there are ways to make it easier to follow or harder to follow.
Second, the politicians - the governor and the legislators - who are trying to please constituents and funders with rewards that might not be appreciated by most, try to hide those items.   Questionable special favor allocations or cuts are well hidden in rows and columns of numbers that are hard to comprehend.
Third,  in these times of ideological warfare, many items will come under attack no matter how good they are for the general public.  Either they're ideologically unacceptable for one side or the other, or they might appear as a 'win' for one side and loss for the other.
These are just a few reasons why achieving a transparent budget is NOT simple.

Let's move on to the third paragraph of the editorial:

 "Sometimes, as with the senior benefits program, speedier processing of benefit applications results in more people than expected joining a program, draining funds more quickly. But failing to foresee scenarios like that - or deal with them swiftly when they arise - is a failure of leadership. Like not considering prices below $60 per barrel of oil as a realistic possibility for tax purposes, as happened before the 2014 price slump, failing to recognize or plan for the possibility of an uptick in benefit recipients is an indictment of our elected and appointed representatives."

OK, usually people are complaining that government doesn't act fast enough.  But when they do, they get criticized too.  Are they saying that by getting eligible people into the program quickly, the cost is too high?  If so, it's one of the few times I've seen government criticized for doing too good a job.

Let's look at the failure of leadership comment.

"But failing to foresee scenarios like that - or deal with them swiftly"   

Government is not a business where the CEO has the final say.  In a democratic government, decision making power is divided in different ways.  Broad policy making is supposed to be reserved for elected officials and their helpers, the high level appointed officials.  Career public servants are then asked to fill in the mechanical details of,  and then carry out, the policies.

But it's more complicated than that.  Power is split between the governor's office and the legislature (and, if needed, the courts.)  But the legislature is further split between the Senate and the House.  And each of those bodies is split between Republicans and Democrats and a few independents.

Leadership in such a situation isn't easy.  What's needed is peacemakers, maybe even therapists, as much as leaders.  But how do you make peace with people who see you as the enemy and whose supporters (voters and funders) tell them not to compromise?

In contrast, a marriage is simple.  There are only two policy makers and possibly some subjects of the policy (children.)  Often in a marriage, one of the two policy makers dominates the other.  Occasionally, the two work together in harmony.  But frequently they fight and disagree on everything.

Ask any divorce attorney how 'simple' it is to get angry spouses to work out the settlement of their property, and custody of the kids, even of the dog.


Then the editorial talks about oil tax credits.

 "they’re a classic example of the state’s destabilizing tendency to make a promise and then leave those who make plans based on that promise holding the bag, making residents wary and businesses disinclined to make investments in Alaska."

And to not look partisan, the editorial suggests the administration oughtn't renege on the two year school funding or senior benefits.

But this is the nature of a two year legislature that cannot commit funds beyond their two year session. (And since the new session just began, last year's commitments aren't law.)  It's also the nature of the power of large corporations to extract benefits from a legislature it paid for (in campaign contributions, in propaganda campaigns, and strong arm lobbying.)

When a commitment is made against the strong objections of the minority, then when that minority gets more power, that commitment will be challenged.  The oil companies have been telling Alaskans for years how they're going to pick up and leave if they don't get their way.  Well, either they've been bluffing or they've been getting their way.   [Figuring out comparative tax regimes is even more opaque than the Alaska budget.  Here's a long essay on whether Alaska oil taxes are fair by King Economics Group.  Unfortunately it doesn't compare our taxes to those of other oil producing states and countries.   And, it turns out, Ed King, according to his LinkedIn page,  has been Alaska's Chief Economist since Dunleavy took control in December 2018.    This ISER report also is focused only on in-state.   This OPEC comparison of oil taxes isn't about the industry taxes, but taxes at the pump. Finally, this ADN article says ConocoPhillips' Alaska region is its most profitable by far.  But that's not the point of this post, but I didn't want to make a statement without some backup.]

In the last paragraph, the ADN comes to its conclusion.

"So what’s the better answer? Make the hard choices — fund services fully or be up-front about the fact that they’ve been cut — instead of kicking the can down the road."

So, now they seem to be acknowledging that the 'simple' answer is really a 'hard choice.'  They don't talk about who has been kicking that can.  About the Republicans being in power for most of the last ten years when the budget kept going up, or how the Democrats have been trying to raise revenues with income or sales taxes, but the Republicans continue to block that.

Their simple isn't simple.  It's pap.

Here's a headline that caught my eye several years ago.

"For GOP presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina, solving the nation’s biggest challenges is pretty simple — “it’s not rocket science,” as she likes to say."

Here was my response:  Note To Carly Fiorina: Solving Nation's Problems Harder Than Rocket Science  It delves into other aspects of the difficulty of good government.

Why It's Easy To Stay A Trump Loyalist

One's political loyalties, are, at base, emotional.  Whether you're for Trump or against him, emotions play a big role.

Trump does a great job of distracting attention from what's really important.  His Twitter ranting keeps the Left occupied with disbelief, outrage, and non-stop explanations of why Trump is wrong, demented, lying, evil, and/or (pick your own adjective.)  Making the Left angry (a too commonly felt emotion these days)  is one of the things Trump supporters love about him.

Meanwhile there are many ways that Trump is using his presidential power to help himself and his financial supporters - from filling his hotels to cutting regulations and on and on.  A few of these are covered briefly and sporadically the media.  They spend much more time covering his tweets or the horse-race aspects of the Democratic nomination processes. (Who's ahead or behind and why.)

Refuting Trump's claims to his followers is hard, not only because of Fox Lies (a better title than News)  and trolls from wherever, but ALSO because the stories are so complicated.

Seth Abramson keeps telling us to pay attention to the details of the Trump shenanigans.

I've been following Seth Abramson  on Twitter for a couple of years now.(I can't figure out how to tell when I started following someone on Twitter, but it's at least before Proof of Collusion came out.)  He's been tracking all the media reports on Trump related activities for his books Proof of Collusion and Proof of Conspiracy.  These are two excellent ways to get the big picture of many of Trump's convoluted intrigues.

IT'S EASY TO STAY A TRUMP LOYALIST BECAUSE  all the intrigue is so complicated.  There are so many players and so many things done clandestinely. Abramson's books are like the program you get at the baseball game or the theater that explains who all the players are.

Abramson has a long Twitter thread today which makes this point.  I'm embedding the thread at the end of this post because I realize lots of my readers don't use Twitter and don't know quite how it works. Tweets can only  be 280 characters.   A thread is a series of linked Tweets so someone can tell a longer story.)

The thread explains the Trump Ukraine history from today, back through the July 24, 2019 phone call through to March 2016.

Here's some of the thread:

Seth Abramson
@SethAbramson
2/ The Ukraine scandal is *insanely* complex. My research suggests it's *more* complex than the Russia case—which was already wild as hell...but media *must* find a way to explain it to America during this "lull" in the impeachment story. *Teach* America about the Naftogaz angle.
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3/ Here's the simple version: Trump has been laundering campaign donations using Giuliani and Parnas in exchange for helping the two men do business in Ukraine. All of which is part of a shakedown of Ukraine to politically *and* financially benefit Trump, Putin...and nobody else.
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4/ The Ukraine scandal begins in *March 2016*. Yes—I'm serious. Trump has been scheming over how to use Ukraine to his benefit for *over four and a half years*. The July 25 Zelensky call was a *minor episode* in a *years-long* course of conduct that was criminal, start to finish.
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5/ Within *two days* of pro-Kremlin operative-in-Ukraine Paul Manafort joining Trump's campaign in March 2016, Trump—whose only Ukraine policy to that point was "let Russia have Crimea without penalty"—was *directing his national security team* to deep-six all lethal aid to Kyiv.
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6/ So Kremlin agent Manafort—who signed a deal with Putin lieutenant Deripaska in 2006 to aid Putin in America; Google it—joins Trump's campaign and *immediately* Trump is *proactively* setting up an anti-Ukraine foreign policy that goes *beyond* opposing sanctions on Russia.
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7/ Within *days* of Russia's hack of the DNC being caught, that same Kremlin agent—Manafort—is telling Trump Ukraine did it, not Russia, and Trump is going on the stump and saying "no one knows" who did the hack. Folks, this... *isn't* rocket science for a criminal investigator.
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8/ Trump then spends the next two years trying to ensure Manafort doesn't talk to the feds... partly by *threatening Ukraine* out of assisting Mueller. And that includes blocking military aid to Ukraine...*in 2017*. And yet we're pretending this is all about one call in mid-2019?
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9/ I mean *jeez*, do people realize Mulvaney was only *made* Trump's acting chief of staff in December 2018 (but Trump made *sure* he kept his OMB job!) *because* Mulvaney helped Trump shake down Ukraine in late 2017 and early 2018? That is *how Mulvaney got his damn job*, folks.
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Here are a couple more:

15/ The president's personal attorney as recently as 48 hours ago *flew on the private jet* of the chief villain in this whole story, Dmytro Firtash.
That's right: the degrees of separation between Trump and the chief villain of this years-long story is {*checks math*}... *one*.
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16/ Except it's not! It's *zero*. Because—surprise ending!—it turns out that Donald Trump was going to *go into business with Firtash* in the late 2000s, in a deal that was to be set up by... hmm, let me check my records... someone pretty obscure, surel—
—Paul Manafort.
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17/ Is anyone surprised Trump lied about how well he knows Manafort, just like he's lied about how well he knows Felix Sater (that lie was under oath!) or Lev Parnas or even (now that he's saying he never told Giuliani to go to Ukraine, and doesn't know who his clients are) Rudy?

It's so complicated that most Lefties trying to dispute Trumpies don't really have an inkling of all the details and those that do have trouble keeping it all straight.

Here's a link to the whole thread.

And I shouldn't neglect wishing a Merry Christmas to those celebrating.  Tonight is the fourth night of Chanunka.  Some might say that the fact that one of the holiest days of Christianity is a national holiday is proof that Christians hold a privileged role in the US.  But others might argue that Christmas as it's celebrated in the US nowadays is proof of the power of capitalism instead.

Enjoy your life whatever you celebrate.  Find good in every day and everyone.  

Second Applicant Incredible: Laurel Hummel, Vet and Geographer

Here are my very rough notes, no time to clean them up a bit before the next candidate.  But I can't image them finding a better qualified person for this job.  Familiarity with Alaska, GIS, and on and on.

Warning:  Very rough notes:

12:30  - Laurel Hummel

Torgerson: All board members present.  Another Executive Director applicant. 
Hi, thanks for joining us today, taking time, how do we address you.  Dr. ? 
Hummel:  Gloria [Laurel] is just fine.
Torgerson:  First want to clarify terms of the job.  State position, but once maps approved by court, the board will dissovle and everything go away.  We expect to be done about Feb. or March 2014, lots of ifs, could go on more.  Have election plan in place for 1014 elections and filing deadline is June 1.  We want complete and approved plan at least 30 days prior to election itself.  Then job would consist of closing down the office, archiving records.  Might be a year and two months.  Whatever.  Not a full time position
Hummel:  I recognize the irony  the better you do your job the sooner you’re out of the job.
Torgerson: ------ some folks thought it was a full time position.  Just want to make it clear.  Broadcasting and people listening on line don’t have info.
Walk us through your managerial
Hummel:  30 years of mgt and leadership experience.  Retired last summer from career in US army.  20 years intelligence office.  Tenure track position in geography.  Switched tracks became educator and leader in education.  Wide variety of leadership AND staff positions.  Stints in operations, intelligence and security.  Here in Alaska. Company command positions manged ??? people through two levels of command.  13 occupations.  I’m a geographer, human geographer.  One who understands culture and people’s connection to place.  My doctoral study focused on alaska.  How did US military figure into alaska particularly in Cold War era, particularly politically.  How did Alaska of today affected by US military.  When I became a doctoral candidate and completed work at University of Colorado in Boulder.  We moved back to Alaska and looked at the 400+ installation and categorized them.  Complicated relationship the military had with Alaska Native population.  Looked at the environmental spoiling the military was responsible for and the medical experiements and how that colored the relationship, territorial guard and National Guard.  I wouldn’t call myself an Alaskan scholar, but a small piece of Alaska I studied with vigor.  Geography community and opened people’s eyes of complexity.
Also worked in advisory capacity.  Done a lot of staff work - hr, intelligence, - giving advice and opinion with discretion when asked for.  Being in intelligence requires some deft movement becuase always trying to predict the future in chaotic circumstances.
Internal consultatn to translate geographic knowledge in ??  Consultant to LA Times? 
Secretary of Defense.  A lot of high stress situations - Iraq, Afghanistan.  doesn’t faze me.  I believe this positions requires some leadership, but more supervisory, putting a great staff together.  Come to appreciate, if choice of 100% mission, but late or 90% on time. . .  Oral communication.  Legislative advocacy at national level.  Board member of Geographers group 10,000 members, on specific projects involved with legislative advocacy.  Haiti earthquake information center???  Project to bring mroe regions of the world into the geographic community.  Persuasive written communicator, know that’s important to this job, to take complex things and write them persuasively  I brought two books I co-edited.  Markers mark a couple of items I wrote at beginning - intro and prologue.  Tried to take something complex to make it not only understandable, but also interesting.  If I failed, don’t hire me, if I succeeded, please consider me.
Good at inspiring staff. Hire for energy, intelligence, and can train for skill. 
I believe in treating teams very well.  Both people working for me and others.
A lot of coalition building in my career.  Difficult in some environments.  Everyone has a different version of the truth.  From that person’s perspective, that is the truth.  But there all these facets of the truth.
Also believe that I have emotional intelligence - understanding what other people value, how they look at the world, and what they’re thinking, even if they aren’t really saying what they are thinking.  Example of coalition building - in Afghanistand I was in charge of all the programs bringing the first women into ????  Extremely difficult. 95% involved didn’t believe it should happen.  But it did.  I was able to cajole people with this is what is in it for you.  Or this is the big picture.
Discreiton and judgment.  Classified environments.  What you can share and not share.  In this position.  Category - what you have to share, should share, can’t.  things that have to be shared with the public and that’s how it should be.
Come from climate that values ethics.  I hold the highest ethical standards.
I see a big difference - where there’s an enemy.  Here I see no enemies.  Press and people are not enemies.  Educational background not just in geography, but also systmes engineering.  You mentioned shutting things down at the end.  ED really needs to be assessing what needs to be  .. . . happens every ten years.  a shame if we reinvent the wheel every ten years. 
Masters Degree in Strategic Leadership - all about astutely lead and manage public organization.  Feel very qualified for the position.  Exciting.  Natural position for a geographer.  I understand the better you do the job, the sooner you’re out of work.
Torgerson:  Thanks for your service.  An incredible resume in keeping us safe.
Hummel:  That was my honor. 
Torgerson:  Need to call back to LIO there’s a terrible echo.  Stand by. 
We’re back.  Can you tell us your experience with Alaska geographer and Alaska Natives.
Hummel:  Got to travel a lot around state and meet with Alaska Native leaders and Anchorage community and people interested in military history.  Don’t know if this is a quiz and want me to tell you what I know or whether I do have knowledge.
Torgerson: Member Greene will ask more questions.  You’ve answered a lot, go to the next one.  Knowledge of state’s travel policy, open meetings act, and administrative procedures act.
Hummel:  I know what I’ve seen on-line, I’ve read them, pretty clear cut.  We have counsel to bounce question on so we are operating properly.  Never worked in the environment of these specific rules.
Torgerson:  And we have a lot of help.
Next question on your staff work you’ve already answered well.
Next deals with numbers, excel spreadsheets, mapping.
Hummel:  Taught quantitative reserarch methods.  Now stats well.  Qualitative research research as well.  I’ve taken GIS courses, but haven’t taught them.  Have used them in work ARC and other…  At one time with ??? And Geo Express.  Worked on prject we did laser imaging detection and ranging.  Radar with ???   Familiar with GIS software which compresses  . . . Not sure what Alaska uses and I’d have to get refamiliar.  Would take me a bit to get back.
Torgerson:  Our plan is our new director would hire a GIS person to be part of the staff and we have one we’ve used in the past at the D of Labor and he will be available too.  One part time when actually drawing and one on staff.
Hummel:  These skills are very perishable.  Either someone currently working with this or just out of school.
Torgerson:  You sound like you have good skills here. 
Hummel:  Do you use ARC products.
Torgerson:  Yes, exactly.
Website design?
Hummel:  To be honest in DoD by the time we were invested in web technology I was at a rank where others took care of it.  Ancillary teaching products  - power point , spread sheets - I’m a whiz.  But websites?  Not so much.
Torgerson:  One mroe:  Any constraints on when you might start?  Just an idea.
Hummel:  I have a commitment to Lower 48 ???? aside from that.
I have to check the dates ???
Torgerson:  Close to four weeks from now? 
Hummel:  I understand you’re on a tight time line.
Holm:  Thank you for your sevice.  You were an officer?  I’m curious what a human geographer is compared to a demographer.
Hummel:  Thanks for the question.  Population geographer is one type.  Medical, ???,
Demographer studies hatching, matching, and dispatching - birth rates, mortality, death rates.  Population geographer studies all that in the context of a specifc place.  For example.  I worked in Africa, trying to use the fertility rates.  How many children per women, does that have impact on civil wars, acssesiblity of water, availability of land, and whether that predicts stability, falling apart and making war.   Demographer cares about the stats, Population geographer takes the numbers further to see how the numbers affect a place and how secure and stable theya re, their economy.  That’s one type fo human geographer.
Holm:  My question from your understanding of what we do, how does that impact what you want.  You mentioned not reinveting the whell.  What do you expect to accomplish in the job.
Hummel:  The mission of the board is to draw the fairest, legal and defensible maps of the state.  Part of that has to do with socio-economic integration - how people make their living and all these are factors that go into where these boundaries should move. 
If you apply one factor, maybe you violate another.  Determine the best fit.  Not all the categories the same importance.  I know some questions about federal or state mandates.  Have to weight this.  ????  …. population, geography, social, economic weigh all that data to come up with the best fit boundary line. 
Greene:  Thank you for joining us.  Very interesting.  I notice relationships with Alaska during Cold War, 2001 AFN, this tells me you’ve gone out to Rural Alaska, can you elaborate which regions.
Hummel:  Barrow, Nome, Shemiya, Bethel, SE, Hoonah, Sitka,
Greene:  Did you meet with local leadership in those communites.
Hummel:  I was there with back pack, camera, note taking.  I had to ask permission, I was on private property.  Place like Anderson near Clear Air base.  [missed a bunch here]  person who wanted to focus on Native ways of knowing and I picked up on that idea because it is a wondeful one.  I did a project on how the curriculum in public schools could be done better.  If you could use the concept of the fishwheel - you could teach math and art and reading and  . . = keeps kids interested.  Learning community, you learn synergistically.  Very gratified that a lot of people thought it was good idea.  Wasn’t rocket science but it was well received.
Torgerson:  Interesting
PeggyAnn McConnochie:  You already answered my question about mapping software.  I’m a software junkie.  You have no problem going back and becoming good at ARC again.
Hummel:  I’d go back and get the cobwebs off. 
Torgerson:  Other questions?  Do you have any questions for us.
Hummel:  I had a few but they’ve been answered.  I want to thank you for your service because you are volunteers in service to the public.
Torgerson:  I will call when the board makes a decision.  Probably do that subject ot reference checks.  Thanks for coming in.
Stand at ease until 1:20.  We’ll continue right on through.

What Do Evil And Plague Look Like?

Let's start with Evil.  I first learned Alex Gibney's name when Taxi To The Dark Side played at the 2006 Anchorage International Film Festival.  The story of the Afghan taxi driver who ends up tortured and dying in Baghram Air Force Base.  It was powerful and my favorite doc that year and probably my favorite film overall.  And it went on to win an Oscar for best feature documentary.  Gibney has made a lot of films since then.

Netflix has Slumloard Millionaire up now, a look at Jared Kushner's real estate world.  One section of the film looks at how Kushner bought rent controlled apartment buildings in NYC and then practiced all sorts of harassment techniques to get renters out - ceilings fall in from floods above, jackhammers all night, nothing repaired, toxic materials, etc.

Then there's the story of 666 Fifth Avenue which Kushner bought when prices were sky-high, just before the 2008 crash.  And how he then had to scramble to find money to pay his debts.  Among the schemes was squeezing low income tenants in his various buildings - and the film particularly focuses on the Baltimore area.  There are late fees, tacked onto rent that get deducted so that the renter hasn't paid the full rent which allows for more fees the next month.  Meanwhile the renter doesn't know any of this is happening and just keeps paying the regular rent and falling further behind. While this nickle-and-diming can't raise what Kushner needs, over thousands of tenants it adds up.  A reporter walks the neighborhood and shows us all the doors with shaming notices prominently taped onto people's door.  Then there's the lady who has complained about the lack of repairs in her apartment and gotten a signed waiver to leave her lease.  Three years later she starts getting notices from JKSomethingLLC.  She has no idea who that is.  They are demanding $3000 for cutting out on her lease three years ago. She no longer has the waiver, she never thought she'd still need it.  Fortunately, an investigative reporter finds her and writes about her.  That gets her an attorney who locates the housing records that prove her allegation she left legally.  And JK suddenly and magnanimously agrees to drop the bill.

This is just evil.  And this is one of the key people advising the president.   Some even say he's running a shadow coronavirus task force made up of business leaders.  But we don't get daily reports from them.  The behavior highlighted in the movie is fair warning for Kushner's task force is to help him and business campaign supporters figure out how to siphon off as much of the money earmarked to fight Coronavirus as possible.  helps himself and his father-in-law to every spare dollar they can get off the government.    Trump even referred to the head of Carnival Cruises today as his friend Micky who is offering cruise ships for non-COVID-19 hospitals.  I'm sure 'offering' as in I'll only charge twice what I would make if all my ships weren't sitting idle now.  (I'd note that Carnival owns Princess Lines.)


Now let's switch to Plague.  Here's a paragraph from an article by Jennifer Cooke, a plague expert.  She wrote her dissertation on the Bubonic Plague and then converted it to a book.  She writes about how she hadn't expected to experience one.

"What can I tell you about contagious epidemics? What will happen to us? Soon, we will see people scared of one another. Soon, a celebrity with COVID-19 will die. Soon, infected houses will display a sign warning delivery drivers and neighbours. Or non-infected houses will, attempting to reassure. Soon, there will be pets without owners, newly made strays fending for themselves. The most vulnerable will suffer even more. Domestic violence rates will sky-rocket. We will see armed forces patrol the streets. We will tell each other incredible stories we have heard of cruelty, of misery, but also of heroism, of generosity. There will be social unrest. There will be cult weirdos and strange beliefs, doomsters baying about the end of times. There will be exploiters, quacks, and fraudsters. But there will also be simple kindnesses, more phone calls between family members, between friends. We will all work less, if at all. There will be absurdity. And there will be incredible community support, for the people by the people. There will be ingenious new forms of entertainment and the revival of older forms that we have forgotten or stashed at the back of the cupboard. There will be incredible boredom and a lot of cleaning. This is what my knowledge tells me."

There's lots more there.  She also gets into Daniel Defoe's book on the plague, which ADN write Michael Carey also wrote about today.   There's also a link to the original Journal of The Plague Year for people who want a preview of what's coming.  (Times are different.  Science plays a bigger role now, but we still have many religious charlatans who use calamity to their advantage.  (As I recall, every natural disaster during he Obama years was a sign from God.  I don't see that so much not that the charlatan in chief is in office.)

Indigènitude and Revisiting History

We start out learning that 'history'  is what's written in the history text books.  It's generally a chronological account of what happened in the past.   It's got the names of key people - kings. presidents, rich people, and others who were famous for something in their era.  It's got lots of dates.  It has stories that explain what happened and these stories all manage emphasize and support important cultural values. 

Events that seem to contradict the cultural values - like slavery in the US - are either left
out or written about in a way that sugar coats them or, as with slavery's abolition, made to prove that the cultural values win in the end.

I think most people understand, at least vaguely, that history isn't exactly an accurate account.  We say things like, "History is written by the victors."  And we have terms like 'revisionist history.'  But I think the inculcation of the cultural myths really sticks in the subconscious - unless you are in one of the groups that history (what actually happened) didn't favor.

And I've read a fair amount of challenges to even the notion of history as we know it.  And so, as I read the passage below, I basically understand it and agree, but I imagine a lot of people rolling their eyes and make jokes about academic navel gazing and using terms like psychobabble.

"I have suggested that "history" belongs, significantly, to others.  Its discourses and temporal shapes are idiomatic and varied.  A concept of "historical practice" can help expand our range of attention, allowing us to take seriously the claims of oral transmission, genealogy, and ritual processes.  These embodied, practical ways of representing the past have not been considered fully, realistically, historical by modern ideologies that privilege literacy and chronology.  Historical practice can act as a translation tool for rethinking "tradition," a central process of indigenous survival and renewal.  For example, native claims for recognition, land, cultural rights, and sovereignty always assume a continuity rooted in kinship and place.  It is easy to understand this sense of belonging existentially backward looking - tradition as inheritance, as a "residual" element in the contemporary mix.  However, when conceived as historical practice, tradition is freed from a primary association with the past and grasped as a way of actively connecting different times:  a source of transformation (Phillips, 2004).  A vision of unified history thus yields to entangled historical practices.  Tradition and its many near synonyms (heritage, patrimoine, costumbre, coutume, kastom, adat)denote interactive, creative, and adaptive processes."

But I think this author, James Clifford, is writing about very complex subjects and is using the specialized language of his field.  He's using words a little differently than they are used in every day language.  But because he's writing about topics that tend to fall into what we call social science or humanities, people think they should be able to understand it.  When physicists or biologists get off into specialized language on complex issues, especially when they throw in mathematical formulas, people just accept they don't understand it.  But something like history, we think, should be transparent.

It's so easy to dismiss things we totally don't understand.  The advantage that those working in the natural sciences sometimes have, is that they use tangible experiments that demonstrate what they are talking about.  They can give you email or send a rocket out into space and bring back photos to prove their theory works. 


Why does this even matter?  I haven't read enough to be sure where he's taking this, but for me, it's important to untangle the threads of the histories woven by the dominant groups in society and reweave in the legitimate roles of the people who have been thrown off their land and whose legitimacy has been left out of the patterns of history.  (Boy, that was a forced metaphor!)  I'm particularly intrigued by what he's saying about indigenous peoples.

Things like:

Indigenous people have emerged from history's blind spot. .  .

Today the word "indigenous" describes a work in progress. .  . (p. 13)

Like negritude, indigènitude is a vision of liberation and cultural difference that challenges, or at least redirects, the modernizing agends of nation-states and transnational capitalism.  Indigènitude is performed at the United Nations and the International Labor Organization, at arts and cultural festivals, at political events, and in many informal travels and contacts.  Indigènitude is less a coherent ideology than a concatenation of sources and projects.  It operates at multiple scales:  local traditions (kinship, language renewal, subsistence hunting, protection of sacred sites); national agendas and symbols (Hawai'ian sovereignty, Mayan politics in Guatemala, Maori mobilizations in Aotearoa/New Zealand);  and transnational activism ("Red Power" from the global sixties, or today's social movements around cultural values, the environment and identity, movements often allied with NGO's).  (p. 16)

 Just something to chew on.  

Returns is Clifford's third book on this theme. 

The Martian - Book or Movie?

When I read the book, I kept being surprised at the level of detail author Andy Weir took me through.  He didn't just say that Mark Watney created water using the oxygen and hydrogen he had, but he went through very specific details about how he did it.  I was amazed that he was doing it and also that I didn't get bored.  I got a general idea of what he was actually doing.

So the movie's glossing over the details was unsatisfying in the beginning.  I kept wondering how those in the audience who hadn't read the book knew what was going on.  Would they understand why he was doing this or that.  They didn't know why the MAV blew up or why he cut off the roof of the rover and stuck a bubble of plastic on it.

In the interview afterward screenwriter Drew Goddard said that he didn't understand all that Weir had explained in the book and that the audience didn't need to know exactly how he created water, just that he needed the water to survive.  And, of course, the movie doesn't have time for that kind of detail.  They even left out the huge storm that almost wipes things out toward the end.  But actually, in the book, that seemed like a plot device to add to the tension, and really wasn't necessary.  But then a number of the disasters, individually, weren't necessary.  But collectively they were needed to demonstrate how difficult surviving would have been.

In fact, after the film, the first question from the LA Times writer Meredith Woerner asked each of the panelists was how long they thought they could survive on Mars. Production designer Arthur Max said, after a pause, "About a minute." The others didn't give a lot longer. Radiation would do you in they said and a suit strong enough to protect you would be way too bulky to be able to do anything in. I think it was good to get that out of the way - hey, this is fiction and despite all the science used to get Mark out of each problem, the book and movie never deal with the fundamental problem of radiation.

In the end I was marveling at how manipulatable humans are, as we get emotionally involved in this
set of images on a screen that we know is made up. In a situation that couldn't have happened. Yet we go with it anyway.

Sorry about the quality of the picture, but it gives you a little sense of the four panelists and the interviewer. From left to right: interviewer, Meredith Woerner; screenwriter Drew Goddard; composer Harry Gregson-Williams; director of photography Dariusz Wolski; and production designer Arthur Max.

I'd like to add more about the discussion, but it's late and we fly home tomorrow and still have to get the house a bit more presentable for our friends who will be staying here.  Though I'd like to add that I didn't catch all their names at the time and had to check when I got home.  It was only then that the screenwriter's comment about having grown up around scientists in Los Alamos, New Mexico clicked.  But after checking on Robert H. Goddard,

"American engineer, professor, physicist, and inventor who is credited with creating and building the world's first liquid-fueled rocket, which he successfully launched on March 16, 1926"

I could find no mention of him having any children.  Maybe there's a connection that I just didn't find, but it seems fitting for a Goddard to do the screenplay of The Martian.

Both the book and movie were worth watching.  I found the book much more compelling, but I think the movie would have been better if I hadn't read the book.

[UPDATE Jan 7, 2016 7:15am:  I forgot to mention that the credits went on forever, but apparently didn't list everyone involved.  At the very end the credits said something like "Over 15,000 people were employed to make this movie."  That's a good thing in and of itself I guess, but just think if we could mobilize whatever it takes to make school a positive experience for every child.]