Noam Chomsky on the Teabaggers

Four weeks ago, American linguist and war critic, Noam Chomsky took questions during an appearance at the Commonwealth Club of California:

A Tribute to Teabagger Erudition

Here's a collection of right-wing signs, many of them from 2009 teabagger rallies. Their erudition speaks loudly on behalf of their real message:

hat tip to Lu

Good Thing We Moved the Floats Yesterday

Yesterday, my next-door neighbor and I retrieved our floats from a cove where they settled in after being sheared off their mooring in a wind storm. Here I was, towing it out of the icy corner of the cove Sunday:
This morning, when I got up at 5:00 a.m, the wind was dying down, but the lake was still mostly ice-free. At 6:00 a.m, the wind stopped. At 8 degrees Fahrenheit, the lake froze over during the next 90 minutes.

Here's the lake at about 3:00 p.m. this afternoon:

Is The Crazy Woman Really a Teabagger?

The sometimes clever, sometimes obtuse, sometimes dismally clueless people who write Sarah Palin’s material for her have come up with their latest – "Hoffman, Baby, Hoffman!"

Unlike most of her facebook stuff, she may have even actually written that gem.

Over the weekend, I got several emails from people outside of Alaska. Essentially, they asked, "Does Palin really support the Teabaggers?"

Well…
The Mudflats has more.

Could the Oasis of the Seas Have Been Built in Seward?

This ship is about to enter service. It is huge, and is the largest cruise ship yet built.

It was built in a city in Finland. The city, Turku, is more than 100,000 people smaller than Anchorage. Turku's metro area, of about 300,000, is slightly smaller than that of Anchorage.

Turku is situated at 60 degrees, 27 minutes Northern Latitude. Seward, Alaska is situated at 60 degrees, 7 minutes Northern Latitude. Anchorage is at 61 degrees, 13 minutes NL.

Turku's citizenry is highly educated, and they find jobs:

"The city is also a renowned high-tech centre – the Turku Science Park area in Kupittaa hosts over 300 companies from the fields of biotechnology and information technology, as well as several institutions of higher learning."

Turku - again over 100,000 people smaller than Anchorage, has its own medical school, affiliated with one of its several universities.

The construction of the ship above, the Oasis of the Seas, brought over $1,000,000,000.00 into the city's economy. Its sister ship is on the ways, due to be completed in 2010. The shipyards are full of many ships being constructed, including ferry boats, cargo ships and other vessels. The company that built it probably paid about 12 per cent of their local profit to local income taxes.

The union workers who built it make an average of about $65,000 U.S. From that they pay an 18 percent local income tax. Additionally, their national (very graduated, with few loopholes) national income tax is high. Their medical care is what we would call "socialized medicine."

Many Alaska politicians lament the prospects for our future, once the oil runs out and the pipeline becomes disused. They threaten cuts in every realm of the public sector. Anchorage, with a zero percent sales tax, significant property tax (Turku's property tax is around five mils), and no local income tax, is cutting services right and left, with no practical solutions planned for long-term local infrastructure sustainability. Turku is rapidly expanding its higher education institutions and other public sector services, particularly in low-impact transportation, such as light rail.

Back in the mid to late 1990s, a number of high tech companies in the lower 48 were considering relocating in southcentral Alaska, either in part or totally. Few did. Why?

A young man, employed to research the environment for high tech in the Mat-Su Valley, came to stay with Judy and me for over two weeks in 1998. His final report, made after interviewing city officials in Wasilla (then-mayor Sarah Palin couldn't fit him into her busy schedule), Palmer, the Mat-Su Borough and the borough school district, was that relocation was inadvisable. The quality of local education, which had been high in the early 1990s was, as his report put it, "in a free fall." Politics, at the time, he observed, were in the hands of "a few conservatives who believe the world is only a few thousand years old and may end very soon."

The company, instead of relocating to the Wasilla area, moved to Whitefish, Montana and the outskirts of Spokane.

Our Alaska politicians have become so oil and mineral development centric, so protective of the use of the permanent fund to be reserved exclusively for individual dividends, so hostile to unshackled higher education, that we are selling ourselves and our future very, very short.

Turku is just one of many cities as far north as Anchorage or Seward that seems to manage to do well, with or without oil.

The keys to long-range economic development are a quality environment for education from pre-school through doctoral studies; politicians and administrators with true vision; affordable medical care for all; and freedom from the severe limitations on critical thinking that come from trust in the biased, sometimes hateful practices of fundamentalist religions, be they Christian, Muslim, Judaic or any other weird sect.

This Week's American Casualties in Obama's Wars

Beginning this week, Progressive Alaska will start honoring our most recently killed Service Men and Women killed in the past seven days of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Army SPC Eric N Lembke, 25, of Tampa, FL
Army PFC Kimble A Han, 30, of Lehi, UT
Marine Cpl Gregory MW Fleury, 23, of Anchorage, AK
Marine Capt Eric A Jones, 29, of Westchester, NY
Marine Capt David S Mitchell, 30, of Loveland, OH
Marine Capt Kyle R Van De Giesen, 29, of North Attleboro, MA
Army SGT Eduviges G Wolf, 24, of Hawthorne, CA
Army PFC Devin J Michel, 19, of Stockton, IL
Army SPC Brandon K Steffey, 23, of Sault Sainte Marie, MI
Marine LCpl Cody R Stanley, 21, of Rosanky, TX
Army SSG Luis M Gonzalez, 27, of South Ozone Park, NY
Army SGT Fernando Delarosa, 24, of Alamo, TX
Army SGT Dale R Griffin, 29, of Terre Haute, IN
Army SGT Issac B Jackson, 27, of Plattsburg, MO
Army SGT Patrick O Williamson, 24, of Broussard, LA
Army SPC Jared D Stanker, 22, of Evergreen Park, IL
Army PFC Christopher I Walz, 25, of Vancouver, WA
Army CWO Michael P Montgomery, 36, of Savannah, GA
Army CWO Niall Lyons, 40, of Spokane, WA
Army SSG Shawn H McNabb, 24, of Terrell, TX
Army SGT Josue E Hernandez Chavez, 23, of Reno, NV
Army SGT Nikolas A Mueller, 26, of Little Chute, WI
Army SFC David E Metzger, 32, of San Diego, CA
Army SSG Keith R Bishop, 28, of Medford, NY
Army SCP Robert K Charlton, 22, of Malden, MO

This week's casualties bring the total number of allied servicemembers killed in Iraq to 4,673; in Afghanistan, 1,502. During the same period, Iraq Body Count lists 69 Iraqi civilians killed.

October, 2009 was the deadliest month for US forces in Afghanistan since the beginning of the invasion.

Two Contrasting Scenes

Our daughter, Julia, at a Halloween costume contest in Issaquah, Washington on Saturday. She got 3rd place:
Me, this afternoon, towing our two floats that blew away early Halloween morning. Our next door neighbor eventually helped too. We both ended up jumping into the icy water and getting wet up to our waists. The dock is back in place. Note the ice on the dock decks, and along the far shore:

PA Arts Sunday - November 1, 2009 - El Sistema de Venezuela

I was tempted to write this post about Alaska, Venezuela, comprehensive music education and ways out of poverty in Spanish, in honor of what has been accomplished in Venezuela, but the message needs to get across here, not elsewhere.

I've been partly spurred on by the extent that the trip by Venezuelan Ambassador to the United States, Bernardo Alvarez, to Alaska this past week, slipped under the radar. The Alaska Public Radio Network ran a story on his visit. The Anchorage Daily News ran a pre-visit teaser, but no real story. Alaskans for Peace and Justice notified members that Ambassador Alvarez was visiting. Friday he was at a reception at the new Conoco-Phillips Integrated Science Building at the University of Alaska Anchorage for two hours. I couldn't make it there.

Last winter, when we had a governor who only went to the most impoverished part of Alaska - the Wade Hampton Census District (per capita income = $8,717) - to bring Bibles and cookies, and Rep. Mike Kelly, an influential state legislator telling people in that all but treeless area to "go out there and cut your own wood or do something for yourself. ... I don't know how many of the 200-plus villages have a wood supply within a rock toss, but there's a lot of them because I've been to a lot of them," the Venezuelans, through CITGO, delivered needed fuel vouchers to the needy in the Alaska Bush.

Venezuela, whose per capita income is almost half again larger than that of Southwestern Alaska ($12,806 for Venezuela, $8,717 for Wade Hampton) is often cited as being poverty-stricken and prone to violence. It is. And so is rural Alaska. In Alaska, which is the richest state in the richest country in the world, the richest city just eliminated almost 90% of their municipal support for the arts:

Imagine earning $261,000 in the year 2009 and finding out that in 2010 that number will be $34,000. Excuse me…$34,191. You might need that extra $191., and we don’t want to forget about it.

That’s what new Mayor Dan Sullivan wants to do to arts funding in Anchorage. For those of you who don’t have your calculators handy, that’s an 89.9% cut from 2009 to 2010.

This move basically eliminates funding for the arts community in our city. Welcome to Anchorage with Dan Sullivan at the helm.

Venezuela, which like Alaska, derives much of the country's income from the petroleum industry, rather than drastically cutting the arts this past 15 months, has expanded such programs, particularly programs designed to use the arts to help lift kids' hearts, bodies and minds away from poverty, gang violence and substance abuse:


The most outstanding product yet of this system - that's what it is called El Sistema - has just become the musical director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. Gustav Dudamel is the most meteoric young orchestral leader in the world. Here he is directing the best of Venezuela's hundreds of youth orchestras in London two years ago:

And here is Maestro Dudamel directing the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, in the second movement of Dmitri Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, playing it far better than did the Anchorage [Adult] Symphony about three years ago:


Alaskans love the arts, but our politicians are among the most startlingly anti-public-funded-arts elected officials in the country, perhaps the world. Sure, we have many schools with decent music and art programs. But there has never been a state-level approach to integrating the fine and performing arts into the lives of our kids and their families.

Every time there is an economic downturn, arts education is one of the first items placed on the chopping block. Yet Alaskans probably pay about twice as much in overdue video rental fees as they do on arts education.

image composite - kids in Emmonak making a cake out of mud; kids in a small Venezuelan village, playing instruments paid for by their government

Bill Moyers' Interview Saturday with Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald is emerging as the most articulate progressive spokesperson questioning the wisdom of the Obama administration's war, torture, rendition, detention, freedom of information and domestic policies. Saturday Bill Moyers interviewed him. Here is the interview:

Part I:


Part II:


Part III:

Good Girls! - Bad Boy!!

During the protests and demonstrations in the wake of the fixed Iranian election this past summer, demonstrators shared information via twitter and other instant messaging tools. The U.S. State Department not only applauded these efforts of democracy advocates, they pressured twitter to delay scheduled maintenance on the system to help the activists keep in communication there:

Media across the globe have been focusing on a "Twitter Revolution" in Iran as hundreds of thousands of street protestors purportedly mobilized their demonstrations using the microblogging service. So great has the notion of Twitter's role in the Iranian protests become that the U.S. State Dept. reportedly asked the company to defer some maintenance. Twitter says it rescheduled maintenance work from June 15 to later the next day, or about 1:30 a.m. in Iran. "It made sense for Twitter…to keep services active during this highly visible global event," the San Francisco company said on its blog.

Twitter has been used by citizen activists demonstrating for democracy in other countries besides Iran - Guatemala, Nicaragua, Cuba, Palestine and Moldova, to name a few. So what happens when demonstrators use twitter in the USA under the Obama administration?

An anarchist social worker raided by the feds wants his computers, manuscripts and pick axes back. He argues that authorities violated the U.S. Constitution and the rights of his mentally ill clients while searching for evidence that he broke an anti-rioting law on Twitter.

In a guns-drawn raid on October 1, FBI agents and police seized boxes of dubious "evidence" from the Queens, New York, home of Elliott Madison. A U.S. District Judge in Brooklyn has set a Monday deadline to rule on the legality of the search, and in the meantime has ordered the government to refrain from examining the material taken in the 6 a.m. search.

Madison, who counsels more than 100 severely mentally ill patients in New York, seems to have first drawn attention from the authorities at September's G-20 gathering of world leaders in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There he was arrested on September 24 at a motel room for allegedly listening to a police scanner and relaying information on Twitter to help protesters avoid heavily-armed cops -- an activity the State Department lauded when it happened in Iran.

A week later, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, armed with a search warrant and backed by a federal grand jury investigation, raided Madison's house, which he shares with his wife of 13 years and several roommates. The squad seized his computers, camera memory cards, books, air-filtration masks, bumper stickers and political posters -- all purportedly evidence that the 41-year old social worker had broken a federal anti-rioting law that carries up to five years in prison.

But a closer look at the court documents leaves the unmistakable impression that Elliott Madison is yet another casualty of the government's nasty, post-9/11 habit of considering political dissidents as threats to national security.

Elliot Madison's attorney, Martin Stolar notes:

In this day and age, federally authorized agents entered the private home of a writer and urban planner and seized their books and writings. The warrant's vagueness and lack of specificity encouraged the agents to use their own discretion and their own views of the political universe to seize, or not to seize, items which they thought were evidence of a violation of the federal anti-riot statute. The law and the Constitution do not allow this. If there really is a grand jury investigation with possible future prosecution under [a federal anti-rioting law], the use of this statute as applied to demonstrations, demonstrators, and their supporters has profound 1st Amendment implications.

The Patriot Act was hastily created, and is, in most part, extremely ill-advised. Every time functionaries of the Obama administration act as has happened in the case of Elliot Madison, larger and larger doubts are raised in the minds of those who care about our freedom.

Here is a segment of Democracy Now from October 6th, that featured an interview with Elliot Madison:


image - composite of Iranian women demonstrating and Elliot Madison