What's The Big Deal About "The Warrior Within" at Wasilla High School?

The new sculpture at the main entrance to Wasilla High School is causing controversy.  Soon after it was emplaced, it got covered over:

WASILLA — Jim Dault and Shala Dobson are proud to display their artwork at Wasilla High School. After all, the Meadow Lakes artists are Valley residents and have a familial connection with the school.
That’s why Jan. 29 was an exciting day, Dault said. That’s the day they installed their sculpture “Warrior Within” in front of the Mat-Su Borough School District’s largest high school. Three days later, however, the $100,000 work of art, contracted through the state’s Percent For Art Program, was covered by tarps and has remained under wraps since.
 
The reason? Some students think the stone and concrete sculpture that features a pair of shields surrounded by feathers resembles female genitalia. The oblong shields, one made of aluminum and another of bronze, are emblazoned with warrior symbolism, the artists say in a description of their project.
 
“Emerging from the powerful stone form are two warrior shields encircled by glowing feathers,” the description says, adding the art is a monument to the warrior spirit. “The bronze shield has a hand impression showing ‘good deeds.’ The aluminum shield has a flame symbol representing the ‘spark of inspiration.’ The stone form represents the strong material from which a warrior is made.”
 
That’s the message the artwork conveys, Dault said, and he and Dobson are now working with the school to help educate students and parents about the art and its ties to Wasilla High and its Warrior mascot.

But by Saturday, the statue had been uncovered:

WASILLA - The cover has come off a controversial piece of public art at Wasilla High School.
Days after the "Warrior Within" was installed in front of the school Jan. 29, WHS Principal Amy Spargo had the 12.5-foot-high sculpture covered after fielding concerns from some students and parents that the work resembled female genitalia.
 
It had been covered until about 6 p.m., Friday while the school continues to work with the artists, Meadow Lakes residents Jim Dault and Shala Dobson, to educate students and the community about their artistic interpretation of the warrior spirit.
 
Spargo said she's putting together a committee of community members, students, parents and administrators to review the piece. In the meantime, the tarps are off in preparation for this week's parent-teacher conferences, she said.
 
"It was already scheduled to be uncovered for the parent-teacher conferences," Spargo said.
Dault and Dobson said Friday afternoon they didn't know about the plan to uncover their work, but that they are pleased with the development.
 
"I think it's great, that's what it's meant for," Dobson said. "We're very happy. That's what we wanted to have happen, and we wanted to do the presentation so they could understand the symbolism of the ‘Warrior Within.'"

I drove by on Saturday afternoon, on my way home from picking up garden supplies.  Here's what it looked like:

The Warrior Within - image by Philip Munger

 It certainly makes a statement.  According to sculptor Jim Dault, the inset resembles a Zulu warrior's shield:

"Those shields are in the same shape Zulu warriors use," he said. "A warrior's greatest battle is within himself, and for a warrior, patience has a great reward. Everyone has to answer to the warrior within themselves."

Here's a Zulu shield:

Here's a South African statue of a Zulu warrior with his shield:

A commenter at the Frontiersman noted:

I've also got to mention that I think the most ironic part of covering up the artwork is now it looks like a phallic symbol with a condom. The most ironic part of this article is the "Photo of the Day" on the next column has a Girl Scout riding a phallis with a lasso around the neck. THAT'S what should be censored!

A lot of things in nature resemble genitalia, female or male.

A collection of Willow Leaves:

An Alder Leaf:

Chinese Elm leaves:

A Diamond Willow Leaf:

A Feltleaf Willow leaf (my favorite Willow):

Quick - cover those trees before the foliage comes back!

And not just in nature.  How about in automotive design?

Mr Whitekeys uses a picture in his show that shows Colony High School's sign with the "Y" missing, so that it spells "COLON HIGH SCHOOL."

Just like junior high and high school kids don't need much help to start thinking about sex, the commenters over at The Immoral Minority's story on this don't need any prodding to relate all of this hubbub back to you-know-who, their fixation:

LMAO !!!
A vagina, they have a vagina sculpture!! Is this in honor of all the pussy the Palin family has put out over the years.

XXXXX


Somebody should stuff a toy baby in the opening to represent all of Sarah Palin's grandkids that were conceived at Wasilla High School during their lunch period.

XXXXX


The ultimate tribute to Wasilla HS most famous underage pregnant student alumni Bristol Palin.

XXXXX


10.06 "Was this Bristol's second job, posing for the artist?"!!!LOL. Maybe too many of the male students immediately thought of the Palin girls when they saw this? Bristol probably thnks there is nothing wrong with it, after all THAT is how she became famous. That and wine coolers in a pup tent.

XXXXX


Surely Sarah Palin is highly honored that Wasilla HS has a statue of her right out front.

.... and so on.

And it was just nine months ago that Wasilla High School's strangely prudish attitude to the arts was front and center -The Bohemian Rhapsody fracas.

Regarding the sculpture, the controversy, and the work's future, my friend Howard Bess has some thoughts:

The decision to uncover "Warrior Within" was also hailed by Howard Bess, a Valley community activist and Palmer Arts Council board member. The council's board met Wednesday evening to discuss what it viewed as censorship of public art.
 
"I'm very glad she did it," Bess said of Friday's unveiling. "It was the point of view of the board - unanimous - that the covering of it was unfortunate. As far as the artwork itself, there really needs to be public education and discussion. Good artwork will always produce both wonder and discussion. Negative comments about it should simply be seen as part of the community discussion."
 
While the future of "Warrior Within" is still in doubt, Bess said he believes the school should support the public process that already has concluded and leave the sculpture where it is.
 
"My personal hope is they leave it right where it is," he said. "The idea of removing it completely, I don't think that would be a good solution. Let the artwork speak for itself."

I taught a class at WHS for thirteen years.  Sometimes we created controversial art.  Most of it wasn't.  A parent wanted me fired for having us perform music in 1996 that predicted Rep. Vic Kohring might end up in jail some day.  She didn't succeed.  I predict the sculpture stays if people support it and its premise.

A side note - as art, the "Warrior Within" doesn't impress me at all, but I'll defend it to the hilt.

WAR-WAR--PEACE--WAR-WAR

Will the NOAA Puget Sound "Party Boat" Story Force Lubchenco Out at NOAA?

The story broke beyond a few fishing blogs late this week, with coverage in the Seattle Times and elsewhere:

Federal fish cops in Seattle bought a $300,000 luxury boat to spy on whale-watching tours — but didn't go through an appropriate bidding process, held barbecues onboard, ferried friends and family across Puget Sound to restaurants and resorts, and used the boat for what one visitor called "a pleasure cruise."
When confronted, one federal employee in Seattle misled inspectors about how the vessel was used, and one interfered with federal investigators, according to an internal investigation by the Commerce Department. Those documents were released Friday by U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass.

At issue is a 35-foot, 14-passenger boat purchased by federal agents with the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) using money seized from fishermen who violated the law.

The 2008 purchase wasn't illegal, according to the Commerce Department, but federal agents manipulated the acquisition process and misrepresented the urgency and need for the vessel.

 Brown is calling for NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco to step down:

On Friday, Brown said the boat was a symbol of wasteful Washington spending and NOAA's damaged relationship with fishermen.

Brown repeated his request that President Obama fire NOAA Chief Jane Lubchenco.
"This needs to change and accountability starts at the top," he said. "If not now, when? If not for this, then for what?"

NOAA said it has completely overhauled its enforcement program since the inspector general's findings.

Why is it being called a "party boat"?

The first time a fisheries-service agent boarded the boat in June 2008, he brought his wife and a friend. They ran out of gas, called Seattle Harbor Patrol and had to be towed back to the Ship Canal.

They refueled and motored the boat through the Ballard Locks to the dockside Boat Shed Restaurant in Bremerton, had dinner and then returned to Seattle.

A month later the same agent took the boat to Poulsbo for lunch and went back to Seattle. He picked up some friends who brought aboard a six-pack of beer and sped down to Gig Harbor for dinner at Tides Tavern. One passenger told investigators the trip was "every bit a pleasure cruise."

A few days later, the same employee briefly got stranded in the boat in a shipping lane while taking his wife to a restaurant in Everett.

Twice that summer, while the boat was moored at Elliott Bay Marina, a fisheries-service employee grilled burgers and hot dogs with a small group that included at least two other special agents. A supervisor told an employee his wife could come aboard any time and "kick back and watch TV." One agent later told investigators the gatherings kept up the vessel's appearance as a recreational boat and not an unmarked-police vessel.

Once in August 2008, the boat ferried around a special agent's visiting parents, eventually dropping them off at the Semiahmoo Resort in Blaine, Whatcom County. The boat that day blew out a $10,000 engine as a result of what investigators called "operator error." The boat's first use in an actual undercover capacity didn't take place until the next summer.

When internal investigators learned about the boat in 2010, one employee gave such contradictory answers, investigators called the statement "disingenuous and not credible."[emphases added]

 Here's Brown's C-SPAN moment on this:


Back in late 2008, when Obama announced Lubchenco's appointment to head NOAA, I was thrilled. How novel, I thought, compared to Bush, for Obama to hire a scientist to head a scientific agency.  Some of my friends were more wary, predicting that her time at the Pew Charitable Trust would propel her relentlessly toward privatization of collective fishery resources.  When, on a visit to Nome in mid-2009, Lubchenco professed to not know anything about the serious depletion of Yukon River King salmon through bottom fish trawler bycatch, I began getting more wary of her professionalism.

Later in August 2009, I confronted Lubchenco and others on Obama's so-called Oceans Task Force, to fix the salmon depletion problem or face the curse of history:

This testimony is offered in memory of Segundo Strongheart of Nunam Iqua, who passed away early this past Tuesday, as he struggled to support his family and heritage.

My name is Philip Munger. I live in Wasilla, and teach cultural history at the University of Alaska Anchorage. I’m best known as a composer of “classically-based” music. In 36 years in Alaska, I have also worked in many other fields, including a 26-year relationship with commercial fishing or other blue water maritime activities. I have a strong love of science, and have raised my two kids to be scientists: One is now a graduate of the Huxley School of Environmental Science. The other is pursuing studies at Humboldt State University in green fisheries restoration.

I’ve observed the degradation of the overall habitat upon and around the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers, as the ongoing catastrophe has accelerated. It is increasingly clear that unless something radical is done soon to assure far higher returns of salmon to these and other areas, the runs will be ruined forever.

Of particular concern is the decimation of the Yukon River Chinook and Chum salmon stocks. I am one who strongly believes the bycatch paradigm of the Bering Sea trawlers has crossed the area from very poor policy to cultural genocide.

Salmon are the basis of some of the most beautiful, long-lasting and resilient of the world’s existing cultures. The Yupik are emblematic.

• When the Phoenicians and others were cutting down the vast cedar forests in Lebanon, the Yupik were beginning to fish the lower Yukon.

• When the Roman Empire and vernacular Latin were dying, people had been speaking a language today’s Yupik would recognize as their own for over a thousand years.

• When the Norse navigated the North Atlantic, the Volga and the Black Sea, the Yupik were expanding up the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers.

• When a language we can now recognize as English began to exist, Yupik culture was thousands of years old.

Yet, within the mere past 25 years, the foundation of this vibrant culture has been ripped apart.

I have never seen a better example of how cross-governmental jurisdictional problems can be used by an industry to destroy one of America’s first peoples.

Nancy Sutley - Dr. Jane Lubchenco - David Hayes - Admiral Thad Allen - Heather Zichal -- and, YES - Sen. Mark Begich and President Barack Obama:

Unless you act very soon, and very, very sternly to end the depredation of the Bering Sea and other Gulf of Alaska trawl fisheries, the miserable survivors of this once-proud, vibrant culture, will soon sing imprecatory, damning songs to your eternal memories, blaming you for their Holocaust.

Lubchenco's reign at NOAA has been increasingly criticized.  Obama's proposed reorganization of several Federal departments includes the possibility of moving NOAA from the Department of Commerce to the Department of Interior:

When President Obama last spring released a video soliciting ideas on modernizing government to better compete in the 21st century economy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was about to get thrown into the mix. “Move NOAA from DOC to DOI,” read a suggestion tagged No. 1979 and ranked No. 1439 in the White House compilation. “I think it paints a bad picture when we are supposed to be managing and conserving marine resources and we are under the Department of COMMERCE” rather than the Interior Department, an anonymous NOAA employee said in the submission.

Months later, after a lengthy consultation process, such a transfer ended up a part of the Obama administration’s proposal to seek congressional approval of authority to consolidate six major business and trade agencies.

It makes sense, so it probably won't happen.  In regard to fisheries, the big ocean pirates that represent the offshore trawl industry do not want NOAA moved, as they're able to manipulate the regulatory regimes there very well under Lubchenco's unwatchful eye.

Both of Alaska's U.S. senators (Alaska area catch of seafood represents half of U.S. landings) are deeply indebted to the 1%ers who run our offshore vacuum cleaning trawl fleets.  Lisa Murkowski even coddled her fisheries assistant, Arne Fuglvog, after her staff knew he was about to be indicted for years' worth of criminal fisheries violations.  Mark Begich, mouthing the desires of the ocean pirates, defended keeping NOAA in the hands of Commerce's corrupt paradigm:

On Capitol Hill, a skeptical view came from Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, chairman of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard. On Jan. 13, he said he was “not sure burying NOAA in an already overburdened Interior is a good idea.” Noting Alaska is “producer of more than half of the nation’s seafood,” he said, “the proper management of our fisheries is vital to thousands of jobs in Alaska and to protecting this precious resource . . . I’ll be asking tough questions as this proposal moves forward.”

 Tough questions like "Do you know the mailing address of my PAC?"

Occupy Fisheries - A Positive Move Offshore

I. The Occupy Movement is mostly an urban action so far.  That will change markedly come spring.  And the 1% are doing everything they can to pre-empt this.  One example is the growing move, pushed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to criminalize documentation of egregious practices at giant feedlot farms, slaughter houses, and - by extension - most kinds of 1%-owned agribusiness.  Ag Gag laws are being proposed around the country, most recently in Utah:

Utah is the latest state considering Ag Gag legislation that would make it illegal to take photos or videos on farms without the owners’ prior consent.


The bill, HB 187, would make “agricultural operation interference” a class A misdemeanor on the first offense and a third-degree felony on the second offense. The bill was introduced by Rep. John Mathis, who wants to do away with what he called “animal rights terrorists.”


“There are groups with the stated purpose to do away with animal agriculture, and that’s egregious ― that’s egregious to me,” Mathis told legislators this week. “The animal welfare movement has become an animal rights movement, and that’s wrong.

The same kinds of egregious legislation proposed or enacted related to corporate ranching and farming happens in the oceanic fishing industry.  Every day.  Somewhere.

Here in Alaska we've done a better job than most states or Canadian provinces at keeping the fisheries the state directly controls from being decimated.  Offshore, it has been an entirely different matter.  Increasingly, access to harvesting offshore bounties is being divided up between a smaller and smaller number of big players.

For instance, regarding a fishery the state controlled when I began commercially fishing here in 1973 - North Gulf and Copper River salmon - there are now more salmon coming into this area than there were 40 years ago.  Offshore, in 1973, there were North and South Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, Russian, East German and Polish trawlers prowling to within a few miles of the coast.  The U.S. based trawlers were far smaller than these very large factory ships, and the giants outnumbered us too.  Most large U.S. boats operating offshore were fishing halibut, King crab, shrimp or scallops.  The cod, pollack, ocean perch and other species were being scarfed up by foreigners.  Even then, the offshore biomass was decreasing.

With the advent of the 200-mile limit and creation of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-administered fishery councils, regulations, monitoring paradigms, tax codes and so-called "share" or "entry" programs were implemented that have one step at at time delivered this treasure over to the 1%  At the same time, of course, worldwide oceanic fish biomass has been reduced to shocking levels by practices even worse than those resulting from NOAA oversight.

I've been trying to follow a number of offshore fishery issues important to Alaska since I began my own blog, Progressive Alaska, in 2007.  I've failed to keep up, and that is irritating, as it is so important to us here, and things are going downhill for these fisheries so fast.

It has become increasingly obvious that the largely foreign-owned, Seattle-based offshore midwater trawl fleet is decimating halibut, King salmon and other stocks through out of control bycatch.  These vessels are poorly monitored overall, and probably waste far more than they report.  More than any other action, the bycatch waste is spinning off its effects to the commercial, sports and charter halibut fleets, and to Alaska Natives in villages along Western Alaska rivers.

The trawlers and their owners are so politically powerful that they are able to get bycatch monitoring or reduction tabled, ignored or even vilified every time the issue comes up, more dire than ever.  Alaska reporting on this by mainstream media has been spotty.  By far the most damning of bycatch crimes and negligence have been bloggers and small news outlets.  Blogger Wiglaf at the Tholepin wrote a week ago:

If you follow the proceedings of the faux judiciary-like process the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council uses in order to appear to be sufficiently respectful of its responsibilities to the fisheries it 'manages,' you can often see them telegraph their punches, and reassure their various supporters.  So it was this last meeting.  The movement to do nothing in regard to the criminal bycatch of high value species (among others) by the drag industry became clear when Chris Oliver made an (out of focus) YouTube video touting the Council's concern over bycatch but weaseling about how much it was going to cost draggers.  Talking out of both sides of your mouth, Mr. Oliver, especially when it is put on video tape is never a good idea.  Crying about how cutting bycatch will cost the Kodiak draggers ten million dollars in lost revenues while not addressing the 4.4 million pounds of halibut waste at a current ex-vessel value of seven dollars a pound or 30 million dollars lost to the longliners, commercial charterers, sportsfishermen, and subsistence users is negligence, written large.  Little mention is made of the fact that some draggers are able to avoid much halibut bycatch and others are filthy fishers.   The Scientific and Statistical Committee finally spoke up chastising the Council process by admitting that making decisions affecting the health of the Gulf of Alaska based on, not just poor information as to observed catch, but purposefully gamed information, is a grave error.  Kudos to the SSC for having more courage than we expected them to have and by taking back some of the high ground to which the scientific community is supposed to adhere.

In his next article, Tholepin linked to this article on trawler bycatch at the Alaska Jounral of Commerce:

Less than a year after telling the public Gulf of Alaska halibut bycatch would be reduced in 2012, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council has bowed to a variety of pressures from bureaucratic to biological, and cuts won’t take effect until at least 2014.

There are stories about how the 1% are running the show in offshore fisheries all over the planet.  They've raped many, many places, destroying coastal fishing cultures that had survived for thousands of years.  It is why we have Somali pirates on the level they now exist.  Most used to be coastal fishermen.  The fish are gone, raked up mostly by large factory ships.

II. Maybe we need an Occupy Fisheries movement.  There already is an Occupy the Oceans movement.  One of the people involved is blogger Dan Bacher:

As the Occupy movement spreads throughout the nation and world, sustainable fishing communities, consumer groups and grassroots environmentalists have mobilized to stop the 1 percent from stealing ocean public trust resources from the 99 percent.


This week the U.S. Congress is expected to vote on a critical bill that would continue a recently instituted ban on a wasteful government program that gives large corporations control of the nation’s fishery resources, in effect privatizing the ocean’s public trust resources.


The Obama regime is promoting a “catch shares” program for fisheries that, like the Wall Street bailouts, will concentrate money and natural resources in fewer hands. Corporate environmental NGOs promoting the catch shares fiasco are heavily funded by the Walton Family Foundation (WalMart) and other foundations that represent the 1 percent (http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/08/19/wal-marting-the-oceans).


The ban has broad bi-partisan support. On November 3, nineteen Members of Congress from seven Eastern Seaboard states signed a letter urging Congress to not fund the Obama administration’s catch shares program.

My friend John Enge has proposed the term "Occupy Fisheries."

Occupy Fisheries is catching on in Alaska it seems. Family fishermen are speaking up in a way I haven't seen in years. For certain these folks have been disenfranchised for shedding light on the plunder of Alaska's fish resources by 'the few,' with help from the stacked government deck, including their own neighbors on important citizen committees. Oh, but the good news is that they 'got theirs.'

I liked it so much, I created my first facebook group today - Occupy Fisheries:

Please join if you want to help share articles, blog posts or whatever about people around the planet trying to keep the oceans from being killed by overfishing, pollution and other stupidities or greed. Especially, please post links here to information about people making a real difference in regaining control of oceanic resources by real people.

I hope the group catches on.  Time is running out.

Democracy Now Covers Iran Warmongering in the U.S. Press (Even Worse Than Before Iraq)

Obama's War on Whistleblowers Expands

Graphic Display of 2011Earthquakes Worldwide

Hat tip - Crane-Station

Massive GOP Vote Fraud in Maine Caucuses

Rachel Maddow:


WXIX Cincinnati (of all places):


Brad Friedman:

The state GOP itself has stolen the state for Mitt Romney in Maine's 2012 Caucuses. Period.

Might Romney be the actual winner once all votes are actually cast and counted? Perhaps. But the fact is, the Maine Republican Party has purposely blocked that from happening and the apparent loser in all of this --- beside the voters of Maine --- is Congressman Ron Paul who, according to the official results reported by the state GOP last Saturday night, "lost" to Romney by just 194 votes.

Adding to the outrage, the election fraud was perpetrated by the Chairman of the state's Republican Party, Charlie Webster.

Readers of The BRAD BLOG may well remember Webster as the man who spent months attempting to wholesale disenfranchise thousands of legal student voters in the state of Maine, on the entirely fraudulent basis that they were committing "voter fraud" because they were out-of-state students who, living in Maine and going to school there most of the year, should be, nonetheless, barred from voting there.

Federal law clearly states otherwise, allowing such students to vote in Maine. And even the Sec. of State there, Republican Charles E. Summers, Jr., who investigated Webster's "evidence" for his case, found it to be entirely baseless. (Though that didn't keep Summers himself from sending threatening letters to many of those perfectly legal student voters, in apparent hopes of intimidating them into not casting their votes in The Pine Tree State.)

While Webster was pretending that massive voter fraud was occurring in Maine, he has now, himself committed a massive case of election fraud by announcing the winner of last week's Maine Caucuses as Mitt Romney despite his full knowledge that voters in at least three different counties have been entirely disenfranchised, with their votes not included in his "final" results. Many of those voters haven't even been allowed to cast their votes yet at all.

Last Saturday Night, the scheduled end of the week long state caucuses, Webster announced before live television cameras with much fanfare: "I'm now gonna announce the winner of the Maine GOP poll. And that winner is Mitt Romney."

But Webster was lying, and committing a massive act of knowing election fraud in the process as he made his announcement.

In his article on this, Friedman goes on to document many other cases of GOP organizational voting frauds in tis primary-caucus-straw poll cycle.  It should serve as a warning that in November 2012, GOP-controlled states will resort to voting fraud on an unprecedented scale.

Glenn Greenwald on the Alyona Show, Discussing Media Duplicity and Lies on Iran

For Judy on Valentines Day

Two Swans over Neklason Lake - Philip Munger