What Do I Know?

It's June 4: Remember Tiananmen

2026-06-04T10:38:20.067-08:00

tiān'ānmén: 天安门 - Gate of Heavenly Peace

[from: https://contextualchinese.com/%E5%85%AD%E5%9B%9B%E4%BA%8B%E4%BB%B6]

I arrived in Hong Kong in July 1989 for a year to teach at Chinese University of Hong Kong. Tiananmen had happened barely a month before.

In May of 1990 I took a group of Hong Kong students to Beijing at the invitation of the Ministry of Personnel to learn about Chinese Civil Service Reform. One student couldn't come because his father thought it was too dangerous. We had planned the trip so we would be back in Hong Kong well before the one year anniversary.

This is a picture of the Forbidden City in May 1990 from Tiananmen Square. Here's a post with more pictures of that trip.

Just as the Trump regime is busily erasing government information and history that's not supportive of their ideology

China [is] Erasing Tiananmen Massacre Memory As 37th Anniversary Nears

But in this digital world, information can't really be suppressed forever. Individuals, organizations, in the US and around the world, are and will be the preservationists of US history.

And the same is true for Tiananmen.

From The Guardian

So this post is my contribution on this 37th Anniversary of Tiananmen to keeping the memory alive.

Here's a link to an old post about the iconic photo of Tankman.

How to Organize My Books

2026-05-29T11:49:30.049-08:00

I have books. There are books in pretty much every room in the house, though we don't keep books in the bathrooms.

The other day I wanted to show someone a book, but I couldn't find it. (Bob, if you're reading this I did find it just now when I went down to take these pictures.) I'm also looking for some of my old journals in hopes they can ground me as I write vignettes about my Peace Corps experiences. This is spurred on by my writing group. Basically, I took a class through OLÉ - the lifelong education program through the University of Alaska Anchorage.

I thought signing up for a writing class would help me write the book for my youngest grandchild. The other two grandkids got their own books already. This one was going to be about her great grandmother, whom she is named after. And it worked. I wrote parts each week and I have the basic text done. Now I have to work on the illustrations and mesh them with the text.

But when the class was about over, the convener said that the weekly meetings would continue and that some of the members had been in the class for several years already. About that time I got an email from the National Peace Corps Association that gave a step by step how-to booklet on writing about your Peace Corps experience - from the writing to finding an agent and a publisher.

So I started writing. But while I could find a couple of old journals that covered my Peace Corps time, others were missing.

So tackling the biggest bookshelf seemed like a good project.

Organizing books sounds easy. Do it by topic. Or should it be by genre - fiction or non-fiction or poetry or travel books? What about books that span different topics or genres?

I started with topics. I pulled out the bird books and the ones that help to identify insects and plants, and mushrooms. This was going fine until I had books that fit the topic, but not the shelf. Too big.

There's another problem with sorting books - it's hard not to start reading them. The Shape of Thought is a book about writing - which is relevant to the writing class.

Maybe I can add some ideas to the group. (People are invited to read other writing than their own on occasion.) The book says writing has three basic purposes:

entertainment
explanation
convince

Really, is that all? I have to think about it. But then the book offers ten patterns with which to do those things:

Basic Structures: Introduction, Body and Conclusions
Narration
Description
Definition
Process Analysis
Classification
Comparison/Contrast
Judgment
Cause and Effect
Problem and Solution

Each pattern is a chapter with writings of famous and not so famous writers. I jumped to the last one in the book, written by Art Buchwald that advocated for gun stamps for the poor, because "no American citizen, no matter what his financial status, would be deprived of his right to bear arms." And "Many of the poor are to blame for this condition [not owning a gun]. They would rather buy food with their money than guns," [If it's not obvious, Buchwald was a satirist.]

And I also got distracted by The Iliad of Homer, translated by Richmond Latimore.. I read, and, thanks to a great instructor - Dr. Pasinetti - enjoyed The Odyssey in college. But I never read The Iliad. And having toured the remains of the ancient city of Troy last October while we were in Turkey, I had lots of questions. So I read a few pages of the Iliad but mostly I read the introduction which is 55 pages long.

The intro covers a number of topics - the plot, questions about Homer and when and where he lived, the Greek Gods' roles in all this, etc. I just wanted a better sense of the plot.

"The essential story may be summarized as follows: Paris, also called Alexandros, was the son of Priam, who was King of Troy, a city in the north-west corner of Asia Mior. Paris on an overseas voyage was entertained by Menelaos in Sparta, and from there carried away, with her full consent, Helen, the wife of Menelaos. He took her back with him to Troy, where she lived with him as his wife. The princes of Greece thereupon raised a force of a thousand or more ships, manned by fighters, with a view to forcing the return of Helen. The armada was led by Agamemnon, elder brother of Menelaos, the King of Mykenai . . .The fleet assembled in Aulis in Boiotia and made for Troy. There the Greeks landed after a fight, but were unable to take the city. For nine years they remained before Troy, keeping the Trojans on the defensive, and storming and plundering various places in the vicinity. In the tenth year, Agamemnon the most powerful chief, quarreled with Achilleus, his most powerful fighting man. Achilleus withdrew from the fighting, and kept his followers idle as well. In his absence, the Trojans, led by Hector (a son of Priam and brother of Paris), temporarily got the better of their enemies and threatened to destroy the ships. Achilleus returned to the fighting, killed Hector and routed the Trojans."

But why did Achilleus and Agamemnon quarrel? That's revealed later.

"Chryses, priest of Apollo in Chris, a small place near Troy, comes to the camp of the Greeks to ask for the return of his daughter, Chryseis, who has been captured and allotted to Agamemnon as his concubine. Agamemnon refuses, and Chryses prays to Apollo to avenge him. Apollo inflicts a plague upon the Greeks. When there is no end in sight and the people are dying, Achilles calls an assembly of the chiefs to consider what can be done. With the support and encouragement of Achilleus, Kalchas the soothsayer explains the wrath of Apollo. Agamemnon, though angry, agrees to give the girl back and propitiate the god, but demands that some other leader give up his mistress to him, in place of Chryseis. When Achilleus opposes this demand, Agamemnon takes away Briseis, the concubine of Achilleus. . ."

Of course, we all know that Troy was sacked to recover the kidnapped Helen. But from the description it would appear that every 'leader' in Agamemnon's fleet had his own concubine, and Agamemnon appropriates his best fighter's concubine as his own, leading Achilleus to withdraw from fighting which leads to Hector's initial victory.

In light of the Epstein scandals today, one (at least this writer) can't help but think that men's need for sex objects plays an oversized role in society and in the suffering of humankind. After all, they did battle for ten years over a stolen woman! The Greeks almost had their ships destroyed by Hector, again over a stolen woman (Agamemnon's taking of Achilleus' concubine.).

In the case of Troy and Greece, there were two powerful entities who fought it out. And Achilleus had leverage to use against Agamemnon. But today we seem to have a class of rich men who have found a way to exploit women with little or no counterforce. (Along with not so rich men who have some other skill that allows them inclusion in the club.)

To be clear, I'm exploring this idea here rather than making firm conclusions. And while the men of Ancient Greece and Troy may have done battle over specific women, what seems clear from the discussion is that the women had no say in any of this. Homer translator Latimore tells us that all the leaders of Agamemnon's army had mistresses.

I'm leaning toward some sort of conclusion that for at least the last 3000 years (the sacking of Troy as related by Homer, whether history, historical fiction, or fiction happened about 1300 BC and women have only gotten the right to vote, the right to an education, to spend money without their husbands' permission, to compete for 'men's' jobs in the last 100 years or so. (I'm assuming there were some brief periods in isolated locations where women had, for a time, some of these rights.)

Not to mention dragging thousands of others into suffering the wars of the egocentric 'leaders - the soldiers and sailers, the citizens of Troy and surrounding areas, and today the Ukrainians still being bombarded without mercy by Putin's military. Not to mention the people of Gaza and Lebanon and Iran and elsewhere around the world.

And in the United States, we now have a president whose treatment of women is not different from the ancient Greeks and that seems to have brought the misogynists out of the woodworks. This is a more universal problem than USians realize. Is it built in to men's genes? Some men's genes? Is it nurtured by parents, by society? Is it curable?

All this from trying to bring order to my book cases. And that's just a tiny fraction of how I spend my time. The garden beckons. Fighting the corruption of the GOP beckons. My bike and the bike trails beckon.

Of course, I don't raise questions here, without checking online after I've done my own brainstorming. Here's a list a ways to organize one's books from WikiHow

by genre
alphabetically
by color
by subject
chronologically
put rare or valuable books in a noticeable spot
by how much you like them
by how much you use them
by size
by date you got them

To a certain extent I use the following: 1, 4, 6, 7, and 9. It seems to me that organizing by color is for someone who sees books as decoration rather than reading material, but that's just my first reaction and I'm willing to be corrected.

Fresh Greens In Anchorage

2026-05-22T17:00:52.767-08:00

An acquaintance told me about Anchorage Greens. It's sort of near the Campbell Creek south bike trail, so on my way back, after the moose, and after the Taku Lake, I took the exit to Taku Elementary and on to Old Seward.

Getting across Old Seward on the bike took a while. It's between Old and New Seward. This unique food store is on 1207 E. 73rd (but it doesn't go through to Old Seward, so you have to take 72nd.)

(The sun made a few brief appearances yesterday. You can see the bit of blue sky. Windy too.)

Inside is a green paradise.

Here's the hydroponic growing room

And here's Aiden, who also grows mushrooms.

The link to their site gives more info.

Lake Otis Elementary School Wake

2026-05-20T15:38:05.883-08:00

Back in April I wrote about the School Board meeting when the Board voted to close Lake Otis, Fire Lake, and Campbell Stem schools.

Tuesday afternoon, Lake Otis Elementary, where I've been volunteering in a third grade class for the last three years, held a wake. They called it a tribute.

Lots of folks showed up - alumni, former LO teachers, parents, current students, and folks from the neighborhood.

More people were inside.

And the hallways were lined with boxes teachers and staff have already packed to go to Tudor and Rogers Park schools that seem to be taking most of the Lake Otis students next fall.

There was plenty of pizza.

Sweets

And there was a little bit of healthy food.

Below is Steve Waldron who went to Lake Otis when it opened in 1955!

Here's a picture of all the School Board Members who came. To be fair, they were at a special school board meeting. The school didn't have a lot of options though. It's the last week of school

The musicians had moved into the cafeteria and a lot of the kids were dancing to the music.

Here's a future student, but probably not at Lake Otis. I say 'probably' because when enrollments eventually go back up, maybe it will reopen as a local neighborhood school

There were a couple of tables with old yearbooks

I didn't get to find out why this young man was at the event. I assumed he was an alumnus or the older sibling of a kid at Lake Otis now. But the opportunity to get the picture happened quickly and I took it.

Denali Time

2026-05-18T00:00:26.340-08:00

We've been going up to Denali National Park in the spring before the busses take tourists into the park for over 20 years. It's a brief time when you can drive out to Teklanika campground (30 miles in.) Once the busses begin, the road is closed at Savage River (12 miles in.)

It's a time before things turn green, but there are fewer people around, campgrounds (but they were $55 a night, half that for Senior and other National Park Pass holders) are easy to get, and you can take your time, stopping where you want, as long as you want, taking in the magnificent views, and animals.

This year there was still more snow than normal - lingering from this record breaking winter. When we complained that we had seen no caribou at all (normally guaranteed) we were told that they are late arriving this year, probably because of the snow.

We left Anchorage Thursday morning, with some sunshine in Anchorage, but as we drove north it got cloudy and we had short bouts of rain and wet pavement then dry pavement much of the way.

There was a surprisingly good view at the Denali view point at mile 135. You couldn't see Denali, but you could see all the smaller mountains. (these are eight and nine thousand foot peaks.)

People at the viewpoint tend to talk to each other and ask where everyone is from. When they learned we were from Anchorage they wanted to know which mountain was Denali. I had to say, "None of them. It's the one towering above behind the clouds." Then I checked my camera and found my picture from exactly two years earlier and shared it. (The bottom photo was with a telephoto lens so there's some distortion between the two, but you get the point.)

As I compare the two images, it's interesting that there was more snow two years ago, because that definitely wasn't the case north of the mountain, in the park. The mountains you see in the top picture almost look like they are part of Denali in the lower picture. But they are all separate mountain peaks, about half the height of Denali.

Gas prices were interesting. The cheapest in Anchorage is around $5.49. In Wasilla, there are stations advertising $5.19 and a few on the outskirts with $4.99. (Anchorage has a local tax on gas that raises the price.) The Talkeetna turnoff station has $4.95 for the lowest grade.

But in Cantwell, where the old Native run station seems to be closed down, the Vitus station is raking it in. (Yeah, regular was $6.45/gallon.)

We were tired when we got to the campground and made dinner and got into bed. It wasn't sunny, but it also wasn't as cold as we expected.

One of the many awesome aspects of Denali is its vastness. You can see wild landscape that seems to stretch out forever. Below are two photos meshed together because one wide angle picture is way too small. And as one tourist we met says, "The pictures don't come close to capturing it."

Below are some more photos from Friday, a gray day with occasional sprinkles.

Here's J walking down from the Teklanika parking lot and viewpoint where the road ends. You can walk the mile down to the bridge over the Teklanika River. Though beyond the bridge was closed off due to " a scheduled bear capture operation." (This for research, not to remove the bears.)

This is a view from the bridge. It's not a black and white photo, but looks lie one.

There are a couple of large ponds (not sure how big it has to be to be called a lake) near the Teklanika campground where we can normally see waterfowl. One still had a lot of ice and I didn't see any birds.

But the other one had Northern Shovelers. Pictures in bird books often show the males with green heads. These had black heads. I asked the bird guide on Saturday and she said the green shows iridescent when the sun is right.

We were stopped at an overview, relaxing when a car stopped and asked if we'd seen any caribou. They hadn't either, but they said there was a bear about 3 miles down the road.

And not much later, we saw a driver looking out over his car. Following his gaze we saw a big blonde bear sleeping on the tundra. After a while, he raised his head, move a little further away, and crashed again.

This raven was making a racket.

There were lots of ptarmigan on the road. They're in the process of transitioning from the white winter plumage to the summer brown.

When we got back Friday afternoon, there was someone parked in our campsite. I wouldn't even mention this - he simply didn't see the paper clipped on the site marker, and since the site across the road was nice and was empty, we just pulled in there. But I'm mentioning it because the vehicle was

from Storyteller

unlike any I'd ever seen. It was dark gray, almost black and looked like a combination of a truck and a tank. It was big. The license plate said Storyteller and I mentioned he could tell us a story. No, he said, that's the name of the company that makes the vehicle. He'd driven this thing up from Birmingham, Alabama and I don't know why I didn't take a picture.

But I looked up Storyteller when we got home. It's a company that makes very expensive and fancy campers.

The picture is from Storyteller. The sticker price for this model is $799,784 or $5385 per month.

There are different models and this seems to look like the one we saw. Look for it in Anchorage this week, where the driver was going to meet his wife who flies up to Anchorage regularly for work.

I guess there is a market for luxury goods for all those in the $50 million and up category.

The next morning there was sun and we'd found an 8:30am bird walk listed on the Denali Website at Mountain Vista trail, near the Savage River campground. We turned out to be the only visitors for the walk and our guide, Autumn, was great. She identified a number of small birds by their calls and some we saw. And at one point, we saw that Denali was out of the clouds.

I identified the bird on the right, which is a heftier bird than the picture shows, as a gray jay, but Autumn told me it is now called a Canada Jay.

Below is a white crowned sparrow. When we mentioned the bear and I showed her a picture, Autumn thought it might have been one of the bears that had been tranquilized.

The artwork below is what I'm calling 'stained ice' - which was naturally formed on the trail.

As magnificent as the park was on Friday, the sunshine on Saturday added to its glory.

Below you can see the landscape with Denali seeming to rise over the horizon.

And a closer look at North America's tallest mountain through the telephoto lens.

And then we turned around and headed to the Alaska Geographic bookstore next to the Visitors Center and then toward home.

We had lunch at a pullout along the Nenana River, just north of Cantwell. The 'shoreline' in the middle on the other side of the river is actually large blocks of ice stacked up. As we ate, ice floated by along the river. The Denali rivers flow north, into the Nenana, and then the Yukon according to Autumn.

A couple of hours later we got back to the Denali South Viewpoint. It had clouded up again as we drove south, but we walked back up to the viewpoint, where three young men from Orange County, California told us the mountain had been out. There had been a cloud obscuring the middle, but the bottom and the top had been visible. As we chatted, one of them said he thought the mountain was visible again. I took this picture, but it wasn't until I got home and looked carefully, could I see the white of the mountain showing through the grayer clouds.

Now we're back home. It's gray and the weather app says that won't change in the next ten days. Temps will get up to 50˚F (10˚C) and a little above. But the plants know summer is coming and the birch leaves are showing green, though they aren't fully open.

This All Sounds So Familiar

2026-05-13T19:34:51.666-08:00

From Peter Pmerantsev, How to Win an Information War

"Describing the allure of such reality-denying propaganda, the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, who had fled Nazi Germany and eventually immigrated to the US in 1941, described how Germans, lost in "an ever-changing, incomprehensible world . . . are obsessed by a desire to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no longer
bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects. . .What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part."
Instead of "evidence," whether fake or real, what people were looking for was a larger sense that they were special, that they were surrounded by enemies, that they were part of a common destiny. Fealty to the leadership became a value in itself. The Nazi leadership could often change their policies - at one moment the USSR was an ally; the next moment Germany war at war with it - but such inconsistencies didn't matter, thought Arendt. In a world where Germany was portrayed as being surrounded by malign, deceptive, endless conspiracies, the leaders duty was to lie:

"The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood . . .they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness. . .
The essential conviction shared by all ranks, from fellow-traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating and that the "first commandment" of the movement: "The Fuehrer is always right," is as necessary for the purposes of world politics - i.e. world-wide cheating - as the rules of military discipline are for the purposes of war." (pp 90-91, emphasis added)

Why Books? Some New Ones At the Library

2026-04-29T09:46:04.256-08:00

While picking up my next Book Club book at Loussac Library, I went up stairs to peruse the new book section. In this day of 300 character social media posts, I find books a great place to retreat to a deeper way of knowing about the world.

So here are, in no real order, some of the books I looked at in the New Books section.

Hush: How to Radiate Power and Confidence… by Linda Clemons (for an audio intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FyKL-6OvyE )

I saw Hush first This is a self-help book to give the reader "power and confidence." The "without saying a word" more than suggests it's going to be about body language. There's a link above to an audio intro to the book by the author, who let's you know she can tell all your secrets by the way you hold and move your whole body as well as parts of your body.

Language is Gesture - by David McNeill I saw this second book, ostensibly on an overlapping topic a bit later. This is more of an academic book outlining this idea that language is based on gesture.

"Abstract:

A new way of viewing language, as a dynamic mode of meaning-making of which gesture is a fundamental part.

When David McNeill began his work on gesture more than forty years ago, language and the action of speaking were regarded as separate realms. But language, says McNeill in Language Is Gesture, is dynamic and gesture is fundamental to speaking. Central to his conception of language, and distinct from linguistic analysis, is what McNeill calls the “growth point,” the starting point of making thought and speech one. He uses the term “gesture–speech unity” to refer to the dynamic dimension of adding gesture to speaking. It is the growth point that achieves this unity, whereby thought is embedded in gesture and speech at the same time.

Gesture is the engine of language. It is foundational to speaking, language acquisition, the origin of language, animal communication, thought, and consciousness. Gesture is global and synthetic and brings energy; speech is linear and segmented and brings cultural standards. The growth point is a snapshot of an utterance at its beginning psychological stage, the starting point of unifying thought and speech. Growth points create gesture–speech unity by synchronizing a bundle of linguistic features with a gesture that carries the same meaning. This gesture–speech unity is a form of thought, a unique form of cognition." [From Linguist List]

I found the similarity of the covers of these four books interesting.

The Rolling Stone's review title is

"OZZY OSBOURNE’S ‘LAST RITES’ MEMOIR IS HAUNTING, REVELATORY, AND OFTEN DEEPLY SAD"

Rolling Stone offers 14 things they learned that hadn't been in other Osbourne bios. There was nothing I needed to know, but if you're a big Osbourne fan, maybe , . .

From Kirkus on Sumner:

"A skillful blend of legal history and biography that honors the 19th century’s foremost champion of civil rights..".

Given today's Supreme Court ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act, perhaps we can bring Sumner back to life to help fight again for civil rights. The decision is 36 pages. Kagan's dissent is 48 pages.

Also from Kirkus on Lionel Richie's book:

"There’s an abundance of love and gratitude in this wildly entertaining, utterly charming memoir."

Roosevelt, also from Kirkus

"Roosevelt’s forceful life is portrayed as the embodiment of America 'as it was meant to be.'

Baier, chief political anchor for Fox News, is a prolific biographer whose volume on Theodore Roosevelt joins his works on George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan. The author’s portrait of the 26th president draws on Roosevelt’s writings, diaries, letters, speeches, and other biographies. Baier sketches Roosevelt’s transformations to politician, president, soldier, writer, and naturalist. . .

This portrait of an iron-willed president digs only so deep."

I wonder if the author embraces Roosevelt's trust busting and preservation of natural wonders in National Parks.

When All the Men Wore Hats, Susan Cheever

The Cheever book looked particularly interesting, though I've only read a few of her father's short stories.

From Spectrum Culture:

"When All the Men All Wore Hats, the second study by author John Cheever’s daughter Susan, follows Home Before Dark, her longer 1984 memoir, inevitably repeating some of the material. Both accounts blend candor and tact, respect and pain, as she delves into his sense of never quite belonging to the patrician New England-New York smart-set her father limned.
John came from a checkered New England legacy, one that, like the many floundering characters in his short stories, trended downward. Susan archly observes: “The New Yorker was the stern father who would occasionally hand you a dollar and tell you to go and buy yourself a new fifty-dollar shirt.” Cheever’s standout stories mostly had been published before the 1966 success of the adaptation of The Swimmer into a Burt Lancaster film, and John didn’t publish more than a handful of stories at the magazine that had cemented his mid-century reputation after that."

Cloud Warriors, Thomas E. Weber

From Princeton Alumni Weekly:

"As his reporting proceeded, Weber began to focus on why more accurate forecasts don’t necessarily translate into better outcomes, in lives and property saved. Weather satellites, radar stations and the specialized scientific knowledge to understand the data they produce are all important, he concluded — but a key, underappreciated factor is how to manage human psychology.
A turning point came with Weber’s interview with a social science expert who traveled to locations that had recently been struck by tornadoes. As her colleagues were focusing on estimating wind speeds and damage patterns, this researcher was asking community members about the warnings they’d heard before the storm and how they decided to take the actions they did.
“I realized then that there was a huge push in the weather world to start better understanding people, as well as the atmosphere,” Weber says. 'The real issue is, how do you get people to make the safest decisions? You have to communicate that to people in a way that gets them to treat it with a gravity that is appropriate to the danger. It’s a complicated chain of events.'”

Empty Vessel: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge, by Ian Kumekawa

From the New York Review:

Over the past few decades journalists and academics have chronicled the “lawless ocean,” documenting widespread human rights abuses in the shipping and fishing industries and what might be termed “the outlaw sea.” In Empty Vessel, Ian Kumekawa, a historian at MIT and Harvard, finds that the seas are in fact replete with laws—but that many of them are designed to get around other laws, to exploit or create loopholes, or to obtain regulatory and tax advantages, all with the goal of maximizing profits for shipping companies. This parallel offshore universe of laws and contracts was slowly built up by lawyers, corporations, and territories that function as tax havens, enabling them to reap profit without paying their due—and becoming central to what we call globalization.

Empty Vessel tells the story of a single barge, from its construction at a Swedish dockyard nearly half a century ago to its current status as a rusty, “laid up” accommodation barge for oil workers in the port of Onne in Nigeria. (The book also cursorily follows its sister ship, an identical vessel built at the same time, which had a similar course over the years.) By tracking the ship’s many lives—as a floating barrack for British troops during the Falklands War, as a prison ship moored at Pier 36 in Lower Manhattan and then in Portland, England, and as a temporary housing barge for assembly line workers in West Germany—Kumekawa charts the dramatic transformations that the world economy has undergone since the 1980s: globalization, the decline of manufacturing, financialization, neoliberalism. The ship’s trajectory lays bare both the physical infrastructure of the global economy—in the form of ships, ports, and the workers who operate them—and the invisible legal architecture without which it would be impossible.

The Injustice of Property - Steven Przybylinski

From Project Muse:

"With the rise of homelessness in many U.S. cities, municipal governments are sanctioning organized encampments as an official strategy for sheltering unhoused people. Examining the shortcomings and consequences of these municipal policies, The Injustice of Property explores how unhoused individuals living in self-managed encampments navigate and organize themselves within and against the confines of liberal property systems. Through ethnographic research in Portland, Oregon, a paradigmatic city in advancing this model of homeless shelter, Stephen Przybylinski details the everyday struggles of self-managed encampments to highlight how key contradictions inherent to liberal ideology maintain property as a means of structuring sociopolitical equality. He argues that justice cannot be realized for unhoused communities within the liberal model of private property due to how liberalism and liberal ideology prioritize the rights and values of property over the personal rights of self-governance.

The Injustice of Property is a conceptually robust and empirically rich account of the limits of liberal thinking regarding what “just” property relations look like for unhoused and housed people alike. The book shows that while encampment communities struggle to establish alternative property relationships to the traditional model of private ownership, the injustices that residents of encampments face provoke a necessary reevaluation of how beneficiaries of property systems influence who can become housing stable and on which terms. This insightful book reveals how the injustices surrounding Portland’s encampment communities reflect the limits and injustice of liberal property more broadly."

The Cost of Being Undocumented, by Alix Dick and Antero Garcia

From interview on UUWorld:

Dick: I would like people to understand that the decisions that immigrants make were never made lightly. Nobody leaves home by choice. When people read this book, I want them to understand that what happened to me could happen to anybody. It’s a privilege to think that tragedy will never hit you.
A black-and-white portrait of Antero Garcia, couthor of "The Cost of Being Undocumented."
Antero Garcia: Taking the “cost” part of the title, I hope readers see that the costs of undocumented life are so much more than just financial numbers. Sure, we offer a financial estimate of what living undocumented has cost Alix at the end of the book. However, more importantly, I want readers to understand the toll of living away from family, of navigating language and social barriers, of losing the opportunities for youthful joy in a new country. The financial costs also go both ways: while existing economic reports point to the fact that undocumented individuals actually provide a net-benefit to the U.S. economy, Alix’s story also highlights the ways wage theft, out-of-pocket medical expenses, and inaccessible university costs actually extract even more income for the most marginalized individuals in this country.

I pulled out a few more books, but this is a good enough selection. In this time of social media, influencers whose test for truth is how many viewers they have and how much money those viewers bring, and a president who's truth is measured by his own perceived best interest, taking a mental vacation from all that and reading a few books feels like a luxury.

And it's a good time to support your local library. Most have a new book section. You can even find a comfy chair and just lose yourself in the library.

Changing Seasons - Yard, Trails, Critters

2026-04-24T15:48:29.184-08:00

Our front yard (south facing) no longer has any snow. The tulips have poked out of the ground in a bed in front along the house. Back yard still has some but it's retreating quickly.

The bike trails along the streets I've been on are all clear of snow, with some residual ice in shaded spots and large puddles of water here and there.

The trails along the the greenbelts are not quite that far along. some are clear - from Goose Lake parking lot to UAA has pavement all the way, though at some points it's narrow.

The trail from Goose Lake parking lot toward the Chester Creek trail along Northern Lights to the Alaska Native Medical Center is clear.

There was a guy in a pickup truck doing spins in the parking lot. He was the only vehicle in the lot. He straightened up and drove away. Not sure if it was because he saw me on the bike, or he was just ready to go.

Chester Creek south (from Lake Otis) to the Peanut Farm is clear in some spots and covered in snow in other parts. This picture is just north of the bridge under International Airport Road.

I passed a couple of rabbits near Loussac Library. I backed up and they were still there, not moving.

They didn't move when I pulled out my phone and took their picture. Nice birch bark too.

There was a pair of mergansers in the creek between UAA dorms and the dining commons. (Thanks Dianne for the identification.)

And at Lake Otis Elementary yesterday, the kids got a visit from the Bird Treatment and Learning Center (Bird TLC) and they brought along a Peregrine Falcon. The kids were quiet so as not to agitate the falcon and asked a lot of great questions.

They listened quietly in rapt(or) attention. (sorry, couldn't resist, it's completely accurate.)

Oe more related note. We had a lot more snow this winter and the weather stayed a lot colder longer. For many weeks our daily high temperatures were below our normal low temperatures. So the snow and ice clung to the ground far longer than normal. And to top it off, last year the sidewalks and trails cleared much earlier than normal.

All this means I'm way behind in my biking. Today, April 24, 2026, my total is 70 kilometers. Last year on April 24, I was at 180 kilometers. Can I catch up with last year's pace? I'm guessing not, though last year I did do 100k weeks. My total last summer was just over 1600 kms, or 1000 miles. We'll see how things go as the trails get clear of snow.

But biking is back on the agenda, even if we have trouble getting out of the 40s F, and going outside to get the mail or take the compost out, doesn't require putting on a coat anymore.

Five Links Worth Checking Out - Definitely #1

2026-04-22T21:06:06.052-08:00

I used to blog daily, but I started this before most social media were active. In fact I didn't realize a blog was part of social media when I started.

I didn't intend to be a curator, but Bluesky, Spoutible, and other sources often unearth interesting articles that are worth sharing. So here's another menu of interesting readings that taught me things I didn't know or know about.

1. Card Catalog - Teaching you how to think like a librarian in the age of AI.

Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here's How to Use It.

40 Google features to find exactly what you need, the alternative search engines that do things Google won't, and the reference desk framework underneath all of it.

HANA LEE GOLDIN, MLIS FEB 24, 2026

These really are shortcuts on google searches. Some examples:

"The minus sign
removes a word from your results entirely. Put it directly before the word with no space: jaguar -car returns the animal, mercury -planet returns the element or the musician depending on your other terms. Precise, effective, and useful any time a word you’re searching carries more than one meaning.
The asterisk *
works as a wildcard for any missing word or phrase. Try: “the * of artificial intelligence”. The asterisk stands in for whatever word you can’t remember or want to explore. It’s invaluable for chasing down half-remembered titles and quotes, and it surfaces the full range of ways a phrase gets used across different contexts, which is useful for research that starts from a concept rather than a specific source.

intitle: and inurl:
let you filter by the structure of a page rather than just its content. intitle:”media literacy” returns only pages where that phrase appears in the actual title, not just mentioned once in passing. inurl:gov intitle:”AI policy” finds government pages where AI policy is the stated subject. Combined, they’re considerably more precise than keyword searching alone."

I tend to use DuckDuckGo as my browser and I was wondering if these would work there. Turns out there is a list of alternatives to using google. Here's what it said about DuckDuckGo:

"DuckDuckGo is free, doesn’t track your searches, and supports all the operators covered above. It also has a feature called !bangs: type !w before any search to go straight to Wikipedia, or !scholar for Google Scholar. It turns the search bar into a shortcut launcher for wherever you want to land, without a company logging where that is."

Lots of useful tips. I've bookmarked the page because I know I'll want to look at it to remind me of shortcuts I'm not using. I'm going to try out at least three a day.

2. The Situation: But Wait! There’s More! (From Lawfare blog)

Katherine Pompilio, Benjamin Wittes

Tuesday, April 7, 2026, 2:46 PM

About their interactive chart to document habeas corpus cases in the United States courts that the Trump administration is not in compliance with.

Sorry, the image isn't big enough. It's just a screenshot, but here is the link to the interactive chart.

3. STRENGTH THROUGH NUMBERS (his website and the title of his book)

The Strategist’s Fallacy in American politics

The average American voter does not think about politics the way elite strategists and pundits do

G. ELLIOTT MORRIS

OCT 28, 2025

This one is for those of you who rather not read too much - It only has the introduction in front of the paywall.

4. RUMINATO POLITICS

The People vs. Donald J. Trump

This presentation to a jury of his peers is also a handy, comprehensive reference to his crimes when you debate those somehow still on the fence about this maniac

CHARLES BASTILLE APR 06, 2026

"On behalf of all decent Americans, I am calling for a citizen’s arrest.
Let us waste no more time. Let the proceedings begin. This post includes a comprehensive list of 39 separate crimes against the people of the United States. There are more, either not appearing here or not yet uncovered.
Defendant: Donald John Trump.
Charges: High crimes and treason. Nary a misdemeanor to be found because they’re all felonies. Felonious like a mafia boss, with loads of Diddy thrown in for extra effect. The worst human in the public realm.
Jury: The jury is you.
The judge in this case: Whoever happens to be wearing a nice, black, terry cloth bathroom robe while reading this."

It then goes on to list crimes committed by Trump and his entourage, with links.

5. 'AI Is African Intelligence': The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back

Jason Koebler March 16, 2026

"Every day, Michael Geoffrey Asia spent eight consecutive hours at his laptop in Kenya staring at porn, annotating what was happening in every frame for an AI data labeling company. When he was done with his shift, he started his second job as the human labor behind AI sex bots, sexting with real lonely people he suspected were in the United States. His boss was an algorithm that told him to flit in and out of different personas."

There's a 45 minute video interview with Michael Geoffrey Asia. If you open it at the website, there are no ads. If I embed it from Youtube, it's got ads. So it's better to just go to the website.

·

Alaska Press Club Conference - Quick Look Friday

2026-04-18T22:20:00.000-08:00

The Alaska Press Club conference was this week in Anchorage. I've been attending at least since 2011.. As a blogger, I wanted to see what 'real' journalists were thinking and doing. All the conferences have been well worth my time.

I gave up trying to capture everything, even everything in just one session. There just wasn't time between session to write things up. Besides, it's an opportunity to meet different people.

I'm just going to give you a sense of what some of the people were doing at the conference. There were evening events which I didn't attend.

Katie Eastman

Her panel was: Human Connection: Documenting Real Life Makes Our Stories Stronger

Katie is the "Manager of Storytelling" at a Tulsa television station KOTV. She offered a basic framework for how she 'gets access' to the people in her stories and then shared examples of stories she's done and how the framework applied.

Access was key for her.

EMOTION Universal Experience Focus What is that universal thing that can connect people?

VIDEO Natural sound Understanding See who you are in your own space,

Find a space that is more universal. In the first example she was in a high school gym, which is a pretty universal experience.

The photo to the right illustrates a problem that in the room we were in - you can't light the speaker without also lighting the screen. In this case the screen is lit and the speaker isn't.

Katie Orlinsky Ethics and Access for Visual Journalists The second Katie spoke about her career as a photographer with examples from Mexico (homeless migrants, some prisoners), Mali, and then Alaska - Iditarod, caribou, permafrost, and some village life.

As I look back to the title, she did talk about being sensitive about how you think about and treat the people you photograph. In one example she'd asked two young women if she could photograph them and they said no. She offered them the chance to change clothes and put on make up and they agreed.

In the picture, you can see one of her National Geographic covers.

B.A. Parker How to Approach First Amendment Issues with Vulnerable Communities.

If you listen to NPR at all, you know B.A. Parker as the voice of Code Switch. This was probably the session I got most out of. There were various examples with nicely laid out slides that included audio clips. This one looked at the behind the scenes debates at NPR about the use of the word

"Racism"by the journalists. The fight was over being able to use the word or just giving examples of behaviors and actions and letting the listener draw their own conclusions. My sense was that this was where the Trump administration was winning and the NPR position was anticipatory compliance. This was an example of Michele Obama's 'we take the high road' that just

Students

There was a student showcase over lunch. Nathan Pobieglo did a presentation of a video story he did on a loon cam.

Murat Demir, below, a reporter for the UAA Northern Lights newspaper, discussed his use of the Public Records Act to get information on why a taxidermy exhibit in the Consortium Library was removed - it turned out there were serious contamination issues.

Alaska Federation of Natives, President, Co-Vice Chair, and Attorney panel on Subsistance

It seemed that if this many AFN heavy weights were going to be at the Press Club Conference, I ought to go. It was, in their words, an abbreviated version of a much longer presentation, and we would be glad we got the short version.

I understood their basic concern was that Subsistence Fishing was being much more regulated than other categories of fishing even though it only represented about 1% of all fish caught.

Then they went into the many conflicts between Federal and State rules and laws as including different official definitions of subsistence and an Alaska Supreme Court case that gives all rural residents, not just Natives, but denies those rights to Natives living close to Anchorage.

For those who want to know more about this issue, there's a video on the AFN site.

A few of the people I met. Kaitlin Armstrong who's the host and executive producer of the Alaska Myths podcast.

Jamie Diep is Education Reporter at KTOO in Juneau and Mari Kanagy works for the Anchorage Daily News in Juneau.

And Steve Suo is from Pro Publica. He was up from Oregon, but Alaska is part of his territory.

I also met Lina Mariscal of Alaska's Spanish language paper and learned more about this bi-lingual journal. I'd put up a picture, but it really didn't turn out well and I didn't catch her a second time. But check out Sol de Medianoche.

Hungary?

2026-04-13T12:36:00.002-08:00

Most of us know that Peter Magyar decisively defeated Viktor Urban in the election yesterday in Hungary. But Who is Magyar? What does the future hold? What lessons does it have for our elections in the US?

Below is a videotape from Deutschwelle (the German state funded radio and television network) in English, interviewing Kim Lane Scheppele. From the Princeton Department of Sociology:

Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is also a faculty fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her primary field is the sociology of law and she specializes in ethnographic and archival research on courts and public institutions. She also works in sociological theory, comparative/historical sociology, political sociology, sociology of knowledge and human rights.
Professor Scheppele’s research examines the rise and fall of constitutional government. After 1989, she moved to Eastern Europe, living in Hungary and Russia for extended periods, studying the way that new constitutions were being enacted and entrenched. After 9/11, she examined how constitutions fared under the stress of anti-terrorism campaigns with their repressive new laws, both in the United States and elsewhere. After the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, she has studied the way that democracies have come under stress, focusing on the rise of new autocrats, particularly those who are elected on populist political platforms and who then use the law to undermine constitutional institutions. Now, she concentrates in particular on changes within the European Union – exploring the way that the EU has had difficulty holding its own against national popular movements that brought about Brexit and the rise of illiberal autocracies among the member states. She has published widely in both social science and law journals, in both Europe and the US. She is a frequent commentator on the Verfassungsblog.
Professor Scheppele’s work has been widely recognized. In 2014, she received the Kalven Prize from the Law and Society Association for scholarship that has had an important influence on the development of socio-legal studies, and in 2016, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also an elected member of the International Academy of Comparative Law and serves as a “global jurist” on the executive committee of the International Association of Constitutional Law. She served as the elected president of the Law and Society Association from 2017-2019. Her book, Legal Secrets, won Special Recognition in the Distinguished Scholarly Publication competition of the American Sociological Association as well as the Corwin Prize of the American Political Science Association.

Anchorage Municipal Election This Week And School Board Decision To Close Schools [Updated]

2026-04-10T18:08:00.003-08:00

[UPDATE: Added two photos just below, and screenshots of voting results for props 1, 9, and 4 at the bottom.]

Basically, the votes counted so far have put candidates for Assembly and School Board who are considered the more liberal candidates ahead.

Except for Assembly District 4.

On election night (April 7, 2026), Janice Park was trailing Dave Donley by 89 votes. But tonight she's moved ahead.

[UPDATE April 11, 2026: I remembered that I had pictures of these two candidates. Donley at the School Board where he argued against closing the schools. Park at a campaign event for Bill Hill. ]

Dave Donley

Janice Park

The next night (April 8, 2026) Park was trailing Donley by 79 votes

On April 9, 2026. Park was trailing by only 21 votes.

And tonight, April 10, 2026, Park moved ahead by 21 votes. There are 60 unresolved votes - presumably these are questioned ballots and I'm sure both candidates will be watching those closely.

Meanwhile the two school bonds continue to have more no votes than yes votes.

Proposition 1 is behind by 747 votes.

Proposition 9 is behind by 566 votes.

I can't help but think that voters, especially parents at schools scheduled to be closed or given to charter schools, were not going to vote for funding for Lake Otis Elementary (to be taken over by the charter German immersion school) or for funding for the Campbell STEM school which is now planned for closure.

The Board had a financial shortfall to work out. If these numbers continue, they're going to have a larger shortfall. They really are out of touch if they didn't see this coming.

And as I mentioned in the previous post, since all the left leaning candidates beat right leaning candidates, under normal circumstances, the school bonds should have passed. Bonds for parks and for the performing arts center and the library passed.

I'd also note that the Police bond looks to be going down to defeat as well. I don't know what happened there. Police used to always get their bonds passed. Is there a new public wariness about the police due to ICE or other issues? I really have no sense of what is happening there.

Announced today, the parents of Campbell STEM school have filed suit to keep their school open. And I heard something about Rilke Schule (the German school) parents not happy about the change. I don't know how many, but let's see how that plays out.

And an ironic note - Dave Donley is one of the two School Board members to vote against closing the schools.

[UPDATED April 11, 2026: Here are the April 10 updates for Props 1, 9 (Schools) and 4 (Police)

You can see all the results at the Muni Elections page.

The propositions have a much larger vote count because they are voted on by all Anchorage voters while the Assembly candidates are chosen only by people in their districts. School Board candidates, while technically in districts, are voted on by all Anchorage voters. ]

School Board: Listening, But Not Hearing the Public [UPDATE 1]

2026-04-07T20:33:00.005-08:00

The Anchorage School Board met last night and in the public hearing time, there were parents there from two schools - Campbell STEM and Hanshew Middle School.

Campbell Stem parents were complaining one more time about how their school - the only nationally accredited STEM school in Alaska - is scheduled for closure next fall because of budget shortfalls. But parents raised issues that the numbers weren't really accurate. They didn't count the five or six preschool classes Campbell has. And the loss of sixth graders was a problem the Board caused when they moved sixth graders to middle school. Parents (and one board member) questioned why they had almost no notice about the closure. It was only announced on Friday of a three day weekend and the meeting was Tuesday. That is the technical three day notice, but looks more like trying to sneak it past the public. And there was no time to pass it by the Community Council. I'm not sure that the Superintendent, who is relatively young and fairly new to Anchorage even understands the importance of Community Councils. They are in the Anchorage Charter and are intended to keep politicians from doing things behind the local community's back.

The Hanshew parents were complaining about a school administration that they characterized as secretive, uncooperative, vindictive. One student (and his mother) complained that the son was suspended as retribution against the mother speaking out against the administration. Another said the principal thwarted the PTA's efforts to organize parents, raise money for the school, and to help the school in general.

So we had one school that really likes the school and teachers and program and another that really does not like their school and administration. Neither felt heard by this board.

Many years ago, for a TV production class, I made a movie about the closing of the Grandview Gardens Library. The first half is about how the administration gathered a bunch of numbers which clearly showed it made sense to close the library. It was too close to Mt. View Library and a new library was opening on Muldoon and the Loussac was opening. So Grandview clearly should be closed.

The second half was interviews with the public who used the library and they told with lots of emotion what the library meant to them and how they gathered signatures for a petition and took it to the Assembly after 4th of July weekend and the Assembly agreed to keep it open.

I used this film as a case study in my graduate public administration classes. After the first half, I asked students if closing the library was a good decision. Most students agreed it was. But then I asked the students the same question at the end of the second half, and many of them changed their minds.

But there was a sort of appendix in which the head librarian said that after the fact, it turned out that the new Muldoon library attendance numbers were good, Mt. View library numbers were good, and that Grandview Garden library numbers even increased. So everyone was happy and the planners' predictions didn't pan out.

I tell this story because I think this is what happened with the School Board. They got bad news from the State - their budget would continue to get cut. They tried to figure out how to manage the cuts, and closing three schools was their answer. It would allow the continuation of some sports. Two of the closed schools would be taken over by Charter Schools.

I volunteer in one of the schools that will be taken over by a charter school - Lake Otis. Lake Otis is a Title 1 school. It's very diverse and most of the kids get free lunch and breakfast because they come from low income families. I'm guessing the parents were not at the school board last night because the parents aren't as politically savvy, and because many of them could be targets of ICE if they showed up in protest. And if ICE isn't paying attention that closely in Anchorage, it's still a reasonable fear.

I also suspect that members of the School Board had private meetings with the Charter Schools that will take over Lake Otis and Fire Lake. How else could they know that the parents of those charter schools would want to move to the closed schools? Why didn't that happen in public. It's been publicly stated that the Rilke Schule, the German immersion school, had previously been paying about $600,000 in rent for the building they used to be in. These are NOT parents with serious financial problems. And they are not diverse. Who negotiated and why was that not public? Or at least publicly disclosed after the fact?

There are a lot of unhappy parents. Both Lake Otis and Campbell Stem had been named in bond packages recently. Voters approved the bonds because they wanted the improvements to those schools (and others.) But now the Board is going to divert those funds to other projects than what people voted for.

I'm rushing this post, because I want to post it before the Anchorage election results tonight. I believe that the Board has grossly not listened to the public, to its students and their parents. They've made decisions based on purely 'rational' number crunching (and probably on some side dealing with the two charter schools) and ignored the heart and spirit of the community.

And I suspect that Bond proposal #! - for school bonds - is going to fail, in part because of the behavior of the Board in closing these schools. There's a second bond for funding teachers. It's a one time payment. Will that go down too? I don't know.

School Board - Carl Jacobs in particular. If the bonds fail, it's on you. You shoved these closures through. Your numbers - many of which the public has heard about in general, but not specifically, seem packaged to get what you decided was best for the public. And, I understand, how you could reason yourselves into this. But a bizarre side effect of our seriously disturbed president's war on Iran, is that Alaska's income this year is going to go up, because of the increase in the price of oil. And there will probably be money to keep Lake Otis and Campbell Stem and Fire Lake going for one more year. And after that we will have a new governor.

And there are sources of money other than the State that School Board members could have pursued. We didn't hear about those efforts. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary imagination and effort, not tired number crunching.

OK, I'm done before the first of tonight's election numbers are in.

UPDATE 8:40pm - I was wrong. The first vote count was already in when I posted this. With 17% of the vote counted and posted at 8:12, the school bonds were both losing. It's close.

Bond Prop 1 is yes 49.17% to no 49.49% (yes - 20,708; no 20,831).

Bond Prop 9 is yes 48.94% to no 49.84% (yes - 20,600; no 20,978)

All the other bonds are passing, with only one - the special police area Bond - even close. 49.79% yes and 47.76% no.

I'd note that 17% of thte vote, this early in the evening, is a pretty high turnout. We've had many Municipal elections where the turnout wasn't much higher. But turnout has been up significantly since the Municipality went to (mostly) mail in elections. Last year (2025) the final turnout was only 25%. Mostly because the regular polling places are not open, just a few places, lie City Hall, Loussac Library, and one in Eagle River. There are drop boxes throughout the Municipality. And I suspect the early reporting is due to early voting.

I'd also note that that most of the more liberal candidates are leading, so the school bonds, in normal times, should be ahead. One exception is in my district. At this point relatively conservative Dave Donley is slightly ahead of more liberal Janice Park (47.03% to 45.72% - 3,196 votes to 3,017 votes). Donley has signs up all over while I have yet to see a sign for Park. And Donley was one of two School Board members (he's termed out this year) who voted against the school closures.

But that doesn't mean these early numbers will hold. We'll see.

Government At Work (No Irony Here)

2026-04-04T11:38:00.001-08:00

Break up has arrived in Anchorage. It waited until almost April this year, but finally, the messy harbinger of warmer weather, of white replaced by green, is with us.

Below is a picture of the small lake at the end of my street. (The Municipality had already sent in plows to scrape the ice off the roads in our subdivision. They even (for the first time) posted No Parking signs every hundred feet or so in the ice berms the day before.

So the streets were in good shape on April 1. It was just at the last 100 feet to the main road where things were bad. I had to walk through this obstacle course on my way to and from my volunteer gig at my local elementary school.

Looking from the other side of the lake and ice field.

On Tuesday, March 31, when I got back home, I called the Street Maintenance Department and explained the problem.

On Thursday, April 2, when I was walking to school, there was a big truck with hoses at the corner, and on my way home, the water was mostly gone, but not the ice.

But by later in the day, the ice was gone too and the sewer drain had been cleared so newly melting snow had a place to go. If you look closely at the photo below you can see the drain on the left just below the middle - the black rectangle.

This is a kind of responsiveness we haven't seen in Anchorage for a while.

People tend to notice government when it doesn't work. When it's working fine, we take it for granted and don't notice the mostly invisible work being done to keep things running smoothly.

So I just want to thank Mayor Suzanne LaFrance's administration for being responsive and clearing the streets.

I'd also note that during the winter, the sidewalk snow plows along Lake Otis - at least between Tudor and Northern Lights - were out early after every snow storm and making a walkable space for pedestrians.

No Kings Anchorage

2026-03-30T16:32:00.002-08:00

There's still nearly a foot of snow on the ground. Fortunately, the temperature warmed up during the day into the 20s so if you were standing in the sunshine, it was not too bad.

This is a bit late because I was having trouble loading photos - you'd think after all these years that wouldn't happen.

When I got there I moved up onto the hill on the south side of the Town Square. There was about a foot of snow, some of it reasonably packed, but some steps had me sinking down into the snow. The view from here was not conducive to a good view of everyone.

So after a while I moved over to the steps at the Performing Arts Center. (You can see people there on the far left about in the middle. The view from there, while still not perfect was much better as you can see below.

How many people were there? Not an easy job to calculate from the ground. There were clearly a lot more people than had been at a previous protest demonstration at the Town Square that had about 2,500 people. I tried counting a cluster of 50 and then trying to see how many clusters there were. It really was hard to do that accurately, so I'll leave a broad ranged guess of 3000-5000 folks.

Snow - Still Here, Still Covering The Ground, But Its Days Are Numbered

2026-03-29T18:21:00.001-08:00

It's been a cold winter and it's been a snowy winter.

On March 9, 2025 - there was no snow in our back yard.

Today, March 27, 2026 - the yard is covered with about a foot of snow.

Until last week, I was leaving the house around 9:15 am in below 0˚F weather.

Last week all our high temperatures were below the normal low temperature. [Tried to post this a week ago, but I couldn't get Blogger to accept my photos, so two weeks ago our teams were way below normal.)

This past week the temps have shifted up slightly. My I've walked to Lake Otis School in below +10˚F each day. Highs have been 28˚-31˚F. And it's been sunny. The weather app shows us slowly moving up in the next ten days.

But it finally looks like were going to shift upward, slowly

We're having bright sunny days and the snow is evaporating more than melting because the temps have been below 32˚ F.

Most of our street is ice free because the Municipality had plows out scrapping the snow and ice off the pavement. Thought there is a bad spot down at the corner at Lake Otis.

Some of the evaporating snow is pretty dirty.

But a lot starts to look like clouds and cotton candy as the water is sucked out.

And in some spots it drips.

As I mentioned, this was supposed to go up a few days ago. I had hoped to put up pictures of Anchorage's No Kings Day yesterday, but having trouble loading pictures here. That seems to have been overcome and I'll get the No Kings Pics up soon.

Navigating Social Media - Just Find And Read The Good Stuff

2026-03-21T18:45:02.813-08:00

[This starts with an introduction that you can easily skip. "Starts Here" is where I get into some recommended reading. Not books, Not 280 character platitudes. But serious, thoughtful articles.]

INTRODUCTION

'Influencer' as used today is a disgusting word for me. I was reminded of this last night when we watched Manosphere on Netflix. Louis Theroux interviews 'manosphere influencers,' basically men who populate social media on various platforms advocating for a world of alpha-males and subordinate females and showing off their (apparent) wealth. Basically, it would seem they are using the internet to make as much money as possible. It doesn't matter to them if they say hateful and stupid stuff; truth and reality are irrelevant. Just hits and followers.

As a novice blogger 19 years ago, I quickly learned that various businesses were willing to compensate me to plug their products (always said, no thank you) and that the more controversial my headlines, the more hits I would get. (That was back in the day of Sarah Palin, and if I mentioned her in a headline, I'd get considerably more hits.)

I wouldn't say the show is hard-hitting, but for people who don't wander off into the darker corners of the internet, it's probably enlightening. It helps to understand where the White Christian Nationalist and bullying cosplayers in the Trump administration get their material. The BBC has its own review that highlights some young men who follow the toxic ranters and say, "Wow, I didn't know it was that bad." Is that supposed to reassure us?

In the worlds of Twitter, and TikTok, Only Fans, ad nasuem, this has become a way for some folks to make decent money, and has turned what was once a potential international communication, exchange of ideas platform, into a medium whose monetization logic promotes hate and extremism.

But even among those platforms who offer no hate (well try to minimize it), there's still a good deal of attention seeking and fluff. You can read a 2013 post explaining my reluctant dive into Twitter. I stopped checking Twitter when Musk bought it and moved to Spoutible and Bluesky. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, but the toxicity is kept to a minimum and both get me links to stories and articles I wouldn't see elsewhere. I share a few below.

POST STARTS HERE

There is so much 'news' happening daily that it's almost impossible (and unnecessary) to have a deep understanding of everything. Rather, I wanted to point out some articles that cut through to the guts of some issues.

The Worst Acquisition in History, Again: Warner Bros. by SCOTT GALLOWAY

"After six months and eight failed bids, the Ellisons made the Warner Bros. Discovery board an offer they couldn’t refuse. The potential Netflix acquisition would’ve been akin to fusing LVMH and Walmart — HBO’s prestige TV and Warner’s iconic IP, plus Netflix’s scale. Paramount Skydance buying WBD is the fusion of a dog and a car bumper traveling 80 miles an hour. Spoiler alert: It’s not going to end well."

This is an amazing piece that tells a story I did't get about this merger elsewhere.

Also A Review of Habermas - Matthew McManus

Jürgen Habermas died last week at the age of 96. He'd kept writing almost to the end.

"To some, Habermas is the greatest philosopher of our time. . . For others Habermas is the court philosopher of the German center-left SPD or perhaps at most the EU."

I briefly dipped into the world of Jürgen Habermas as a grad student. I was mightily taken by what I read, but never took the time to delve deeper into his other works. But he's an important figure in 20th Century thought who, I'm guessing, most people have never heard of. This is a chance to learn a bit about him in a relatively easy essay on two books about him. (This is a substack article that while not requiring money, does make you pay with your email address. I have found putting a fake email seems to work, at least for now.)

Nicholas Field: Double Book Review: Newsom and Shapiro Memoirs Shed Some Light on 2028 Hopefuls

I think Governor Gavin Newsom has been useful in the fight against Fascism, but I wouldn't want him to be president. I didn't know much about Governor Shapiro beyond election headlines. This article raises some issues we should pay attention to. In any case, Nick Field gives more background to store as the presidential primaries come into view.

‘The dream is to be a standup, but everyone who knows me says: Please don’t’ – Riz Ahmed on chaos, comedy, and defying categorisation" - Simran Hans

The arts are important to human life. I didn't know this performer, but found the interview interesting.

This article includes Riz
in various fashion shots

I'm going to check out Relay on Netflix tonight to see him act.

Anyone paying attention has noticed the rising number of people of South Asian heritage in a variety of fields in the US and the UK. This interview gives a glimpse at what the world looks like from their perspective.

"Ahmed describes Mirza [his wife] as 'a truly creative person' whose writing 'floors me every day', though he says they try not to discuss work too much at home. 'I probably try and hassle her for her opinion on things a lot more than she needs to hassle me for mine on writing. She doesn’t want my GCSE English ideas,' he says, self-deprecatingly.
But while he may wear it lightly, Ahmed’s intellect is no secret. A working-class British Pakistani kid from Wembley who won a scholarship to private school, he got into Oxford to study politics, philosophy and economics, a typically star-making degree favoured by politicians, broadcasters and public intellectuals. He has never felt as if he was a natural fit for the establishment, but has always found a way to navigate it."

A reminder that people of color often have much better credentials than their white counterparts, credentials that belie the claims that somehow they got their positions through 'DEI.' He sounds like a much healthier male than those interviewed by Louis Theroux.

"How often does he see his parents these days? 'All right, Auntie. Jesus Christ! You’ve got me on the hook here. Lemme get my calendar out,' he says, pretend-reaching for his phone. 'I try to see them very regularly,' he says. Every week, every month? Ahmed looks at me quizzically. 'Are you Asian?' he says, noting my own Punjabi-Sikh heritage. 'You’d have a chappal flying at you through space and time if it was every month.' A chappal is a slipper, jokingly deployed by Asian parents of all backgrounds as a form of discipline. 'Of course, at least every week. A few times a week.'”

I've got a few more saved up, but this should keep you more than occupied if you follow the links.

The Long Winter - Snow Finally Removed In Our Neighborhood

2026-03-14T21:35:00.003-08:00

Temperatures like -5˚F and lower have been pretty common morning temperatures. Temps like these weren't uncommon in 20 or 30 years ago, but they didn't linger for three months. There might be a spell of cold (down to -20˚F) for a week or even two. But the below zero temps didn't hang around all winter. More recently there have been winters when it never got below zero and others when it only happened a few times.

This winter is different. It's been below zero frequently since early December.

[If you're confused, it's an indoor/outdoor thermometer. Red is for inside and navy blue is for outside.]

And here it is mid March and it's still below zero when I check the thermometer in the morning.

The chart below from the Anchorage Daily News gets the point across . Two days our high temperatures were below the normal low temperatures. Three other days they were just slightly above the normal low.

And we've also had lots of snow. One morning there was a deep horn blowing outside. I looked out to see a garbage truck faced with a car parked on one side of the street and the berm on the other side so far out in the street that the truck couldn't get past. I went out and talked to the driver. "I can't do this street because I can't get by." I asked if I could bring my garbage can around to the other side so he could take it. I did and he did. And then the guy came out to move his car. I think he works the night shift.

But at one corner, the snow was piled up so high and so far out into the street, you couldn't see if there were cars coming down the cross street.

But this Thursday afternoon, there were plows on the street and they had no parking signs in front of every house for Friday. I've suggested some kind of notification so that people could move their cars for the plows, because you never know when they are going to come. So this is a big improvement. I managed to get my car up our driveway.

Then Friday, they spent the whole day in our subdivision plowing snow and shooting it into dump trucks to haul away.

It takes about 30 seconds to fill a dump truck. They have a line of dump trucks, so as soon as one is full, the next one pulls up. I'm not sure where they are dumping all the snow. It couldn't be too far because the trucks were back in line quickly.

Our street is back to its normal width. The surface of the road was scraped as far as they could go. Still some snow, but not the several packed down inches.

Of course, today we got more snow, but so far it's really only a light dusting.

And Friday was the day the stove man was coming over to fix the oven door, which decided not to open when my wife wanted to get some chicken legs and yams out. But with the snow plows, there just was no place for him to park. He kept calling after each job to see if it was clear for him. Eventually I was able to get my car out of the driveway and over to the university and he could get into our driveway.

Let me add that I'm reading Coming Into The Country which was released 50 years ago next year. This is a book club book. I read it when I got to Alaska, when it came out. Much of the book is focused on Eagle, Alaska and the folks who live in cabins along the Yukon tributaries near Eagle. Those folks had normal temperatures in the winter of -20˚F to as low as -60 and -70˚F. So -10˚ is not that big a deal. You just have to be dressed for it.

Anchorage Snow 2025 and 2026

2026-03-09T15:04:00.004-08:00

March 9, 2025

March 9, 2026

If you look closely, you can see a leaning tree in the 2025 picture, upper right. It's firewood now.

What doesn't change is the change in daily sunlight as we move closer to the equinox. The sun is almost at the deck today.

It's Daylight Savings Time Again Today So The Legislature Has Yet Another Bill To End It

2026-03-08T20:48:00.000-08:00

We set the clocks ahead again last night or this morning. And the Alaska legislature has a bill to end Daylight Savings.Again [I suspect the link to the Anchorage Daily News is paywalled for non-subscribers.]

The session I blogged the legislature from Juneau (2010) there was also a bill. And it seems there's one every year. So I'm not expecting it to pass.

From an Alaskan perspective there are extra wrinkles in all of this.

1. When I first got to Alaska in 1977 the state had four (yes 4) time zones. That was ended so it was easier for Alaskans, scattered across so many time zones, to know what time it was everywhere else in the state and for airlines and their passengers to stay sane traveling in the state.

2. Besides size, Alaska is north. In the summer much of the state never actually gets dark. In the winter much of the state has, at the winter solstice, five hours or less from sunrise to sunset. So school kids are going to go to school or come home in the dark no matter what. In some places both. (Though when there is a white ground cover, it isn't quite as dark as you would expect.)

3. I don't think we're going to end Daylight Savings time this year. But I expect that one day it will happen. Maybe on the national level. But the legislature meets in Juneau, and as the post below says,

"People in Southeast Alaska have a real issue because they are basically in Pacific time, so they get less light in the evening while the sun comes up 3am at solstice."

Below is that 2010 post on Daylight Savings time:

Thursday, March 18, 2010

HB 19 to End Daylight Savings Time

The other two meetings going on right now are dealing with issues of far greater impact on Alaska I presume. But this is one most Alaskans can understand easily and are impacted by most directly and tangibly.

Here is the table with copies of emails and letters for and against the bill.

[Update: I looked through these and they are all dated March 18 and some 17. Actually this stack is misleading. I didn't realize I have one big stack twice. The vote was 62 for HB 19, 18 against, and four had other options, like get the US to change, but not just Alaska.]

Sen. Olson and Sen. Menard listen to phone testimony on the ending daylight savings time in Alaska.

Rep. Anna Fairclough, the bill sponsor, responded to the comments received through the mail, email, and by phone today. She said there were two reasons that have real justification for not changing:

1. People in Southeast Alaska have a real issue because they are basically in Pacific time, so they get less light in the evening while the sun comes up 3am at solstice.
2. The difficulty in coordinating with people outside of Alaska. (I think this was the second one)

Other than these two points, most people prefer getting rid of daylight savings time. A lot of this is about having to change and the disruption that causes with relatively little daylight impact for most Alaskans (further north and west than Southeast.)

Other issue: Why don't we just spring forward and stay on daylight savings time the whole year. There area a couple of issues:
1. Feds, not states, can change time zones.
2. Western Alaska would be even further off of sun time (opposite problem of Southeast.)

Meeting was adjourned just about 5pm with the decision postponed.

A South African Jewish Podcast On The War On Iran (Updated)

2026-03-05T18:53:00.004-09:00

I've been keeping too busy. There are different events to comment on. The attack on Iran seems to be on the top of the list, though it shouldn't displace so many other things, like ICE and the Epstein files.

The video below is from a podcast/Youtube channel called the South African Jewish Report. After all the fatuous speculation in the US media, this is a refreshing change. It is a discussion from people who actually know something.

There's a lot missing. They treat the US and Trump as important allies in the attack on Iran. My sense is that like others have figured out, you need to stroke Trump's ego. They don't do that directly, but neither do they say anything negative about Trump.

The podcasters have two guests:

Col. Miri Eisin and Brig. Gen. Amir Avivi

Miri grew up in California and got her college education in Israel. She was part of the higher ranks of Israeli military and, she tells us, she now advises the military. She explains that the military brings her and others in to look at and critique their plans. Of the two, she seems to have a larger perspective, a more balanced and nuanced view of the world. At one point she tells us that as someone who grew up in the US and has many relatives there, and whose first language is English, she sees things a bit differently from other Israelis including the other guest.

She hopes that a new regime, made up of leaders of a new generation in Iran, will abandon the goal of eliminating Israel. She hopes there is a new Middle East focused more on economic development and peace. That's how it came across to me.

Amir talked about the golden age of Israel arriving now, it will become an economic giant, and Jews around the world should be ready for Aliya - return to Israel. (Ironically, I saw an article today that said more Israelis are emigrating than immigrating.

While Miri says a problem for Israel, with its dominant military power, has often been that they did not know when to stop and often went on too long. Amir disagreed and said too often they stopped too soon.

But basically, they see the goal of this war as regime change in Iran. They portray Iran as the many headed serpent which funds and arms groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations and they quote the Ayatollah as having declared the goal to destroy Israel.

[UPDATE Sunday, March 8: In the video, Miri emphasizes that they are leaving the Iranian oil production sites alone so that the next Iranian government will have a source of income. But reports today say that oil facilities have been attacked.]

My sense is that having the US as a partner in this war gives them cover as well has the fire power of the US. But they also make it sound like this is an Israeli operation, based on sophisticated intelligence gathering.

Some context:

The whole situation is not black and white. I made a series of posts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which you can see here.
Israel is 20,770 square kilometers (8,019 square miles). The most similar sized US state is New Jersey at 22,591 square km or 8,722.58 square miles.

When the the Twin Towers were destroyed in 9/11, the US went to war with Iraq and

The September 11 attacks were the deadliest terrorist attacks in human history, causing the deaths of 2,996 people, including 19 hijackers who committed murder–suicide and 2,977 victims. (Wikipedia)

That comes out to about 0.00087% of the US population. And the US immediately went to war against

When Israel was attacked on October 7, they went to war to eliminate Hamas

In total, 1,195 people were killed by the attacks:[22][e][f] at least 828 civilians[22][23](including 36 children[24] and 71 foreign nationals)[24] and at least 367 members of the security forces. 364 civilians were killed while they were attending the Nova music festival and many more wounded.[39][40] At least 14 Israeli civilians were killed by the IDF's use of the Hannibal Directive.[41][42] About 250 Israeli and non-Israeli civilians and soldiers were taken as hostages to the Gaza Strip. (Wikipedia)

That comes out to 0.0124% of the Israeli population.

Why Was Stephen Colbert Told To Pull James Talarico Interview?

2026-02-22T13:31:00.003-09:00

Fascist states censor. They want to control what people believe to be true.

Stephen Colbert interviewed Texas state representative James Talarico, a Democratic candidate for US Senate in Texas. His opponent in the upcoming primary is Member of Congress Jasmine Crockett. Both appear to be strong candidates. Both have Democratic detractors. Or bots doing it. I've seen social media posts saying Talarico isn't really a Democrat and will be another Fetterman. And there are those that say a Black woman can't win in Texas.

But, apparently the White House doesn't want Talarico to be the Democratic candidate. Watch the Colbert show where Colbert tells us that CBS didn't let him play the Talarico interview, but that you can see it on Youtube. (By the way, Colbert did interview Jasmine Crockett July 2025.) (Googling "Colbert interview with Jasmine Crockett July 2025" gave me four pages of links to stories about the Talarico interview!! I had to work to find the link to the Crockett interview.)

And then watch the interview that was blocked, on Youtube.

I'm guessing that the Republicans are more concerned that a white guy who's a Christian pastor will be more more competitive against the eventual GOP candidate than a fiery, smart Black woman. Or they think that it will be easier (and more fun) for them to smear the Black lady than the choir boy. But there's backlash against Talarico from the left too.

"There's a definite battle waged on behalf of
the old guard "dems" who believe that a safe
white man is always the answer. . ."

I'm not sure they're wrong. But I'm also not sure they're right.

We've been told that Texas was going to go blue with Beto O'Rourke and then with Colin Allred , both formidable candidates. So I'm not counting my Senators before they're elected.

But Trump's heavy handed misadministration has set up 2026 to be the year of the Democrats. One could well argue that if it doesn't happen this year, it's not going to happen. But it will eventually, given that the demographic shifts continue. And that's one reason ICE is trying to deport as many people as possible.

But non-citizens can't vote and don't vote (no matter how loudly the GOP yell about the need for every voter to prove they are citizens), so at this point they aren't thinning the rolls through deportation. Though the SAVE Act would have a massive impact on elections. [The SAVE Act link goes to a post from May last year, and there have been some changes, but you can see this is intended to prevent as many people as possible from voting, particularly those more likely to vote blue, like women.]

From what I've seen, both Talarico and Crockett are formidable candidates. Will Talarico get more white Christians and maybe get votes from Republicans? Possibly. But will a white candidate cause Black voters to skip voting because he beat their bright and most in-your-face Black candidate? Will Crockett get out the Black vote that other candidates haven't reached?

Step one is the primary, which has already begun in Texas. From the Texas Newsroom via the Texas Standard:

"Texas voters can now cast their ballots early for the state’s March 3 party primaries. The results of these elections will determine who represents Republicans and Democrats on the ballot in November.
Despite the important role party primaries play in state politics, Texas has consistently seen low voter turnout for them. Take 2022, during the last midterm election year. During those primaries, only 3 million Texans cast ballots — just 17% percent of the state’s registered voters at the time.
Because relatively few of Texas’ more than 18 million eligible voters show up for these elections, that means those who do vote have an outsize influence on the Lone Star State’s political landscape."

Somewhat relevant to all this is the video below I came across of Texas Rep. Barbara Jordan telling us what impeachment is all about in 1974. I've been a giant fan of Barbara Jordan since I first came across her about that time. Just listen to the authority in her voice. But with no condescension or sarcasm. (or am I missing it?) If I were doing a movie that had God as a character, her voice would be perfect.

Epstein Files - An Archeological Find That Will Be Dissected Forever

2026-02-19T16:57:00.003-09:00

There are so many pages of documents in the Epstein files that have been released so far, that any kind of definitive conclusions are a long way off. They have to be read, put into some kind of context, and links between documents have to be figured out. Then links between the Epstein files and other data bases - court records, news articles, and other breaches like the Panama Papers. Plus, many released files are still redacted and unredacted in ways they shouldn't be (hiding names other than victims, not hiding all the victim data.)

What's public so far is about 50%. There are millions of files left, which the administration seems to hope they won’t have to release. People speculate these have more damning information in them. That’s one logical train of thought. Another is that the DOJ staff aren’t that organized that they can separate out the worst. Another strategy would be to have them be nothing revealing as a way to tease, and then shut this all down. That doesn’t seem too likely either.

When I looked into one set of the Epstein files - court documents - there were hundreds of pages of routine court documents as lawyers made motions and set deadlines that seemed to be of little consequence, with a few more substantial documents about the specific court case (Epstein suing someone, Wexner?, but nothing terribly revealing stood out to me at first glance. Boring procedural motions and rulings mostly.

Some online commentators are writing breathtaking headlines, overusing words like "BREAKING" and "BOMBSHELL" (all caps in originals) pointing to a newly revealed name, or evidence of the very sexual nature of Epstein and his clients/friends.

Whether there is an important story or it's just more clickbait can be discerned by whether the 'punchline' is revealed in the social media post or whether you have to click to find out the allegedly important nugget. Most of those nuggets will be micro level news.

The meaning and context of everything will take a while to tease out. After all, historians are still finding new twists to justify new biographies of people like Abraham Lincoln and there is far less actual information about Lincoln than there is, probably, about Epstein and his buddy Donald.

The Bigger Picture

It’s clear to me that there is a bigger, complicated web of connections, influence, and crime. Some sex trade related, some financial, some political, some national security related. And while I write ‘some’ as

though these are all separate categories, I’m sure the Venn Diagrams will show a lot of overlap.

I’ve seen several story lines that seem pretty likely and worth thinking about already: The first is the idea that the culture of male power (sexual and otherwise) over young (and even older) females is not restricted to Epstein’s island and other properties or Mar-a-lago.

1. Rather it IS the culture of the US and probably most of the world.

From Carole Cadwalladr's Substack, How to Survive the Broligarchy, We all live in Jeffrey Epstein's world , here are a couple of excerpts to give you a sense of her story (and which will come as no surprise to most women and the men they trust to talk to):

“Epstein has given us an extraordinary portal through which we can now see how hostile state influence, criminality and the impunity of the billionaire class are intimately enmeshed. That’s the piece I still want to write. But we can’t understand any of this until we realise that Epstein isn’t just a doorway, he’s also a mirror. His culture is our culture.

The latest tranche of Epstein documents made it obvious. Consider all the “contrarians” and “anti-woke” warriors who show up in the latest dump: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Larry Summers, Steve Bannon, and of course, Donald Trump. With apologies to George Carlin: It’s a big club, and the worst people are in it — because their interests are all aligned. Pushing back on social justice, it turns out, was coordinated.
Being able to see their emails makes something very clear: The “anti-woke” movement was not a genteel intellectual inquiry, made by disinterested parties who cared deeply about free speech. It is a social circle of powerful people who feel threatened by #MeToo. Reading through the emails, it’s possible to see that Epstein himself coordinated pushback against #MeToo. Looking back, it seems obvious that sinking #MeToo also led to where we are now: a place where laws simply don’t apply if you have enough money and power. The same players are involved.” (Emphasis added)

2. "kind of a super concierge" In this one, Epstein is a fixer for powerful people, to the point that a lot of people owe him favors. This one gets into financial issues (to an extreme with Wexner) and politics

Molly Jong Fast's New York Times opinion piece, says the Epstein files show that it's more than just sex, "Mr. Epstein won favor and friendships by acting as a kind of superconcierge." Here's an excerpt:

"Many people stuck with him even after he had gone to jail in 2008 in Florida for sex crimes, and in some cases even after he landed in jail again in 2019 on sex-trafficking charges. Back then, the plight of the victims often seemed to be an afterthought. That’s most likely because whatever they received from him in the past — access to career-enhancing people, access to young girls and an endless supply of freebies — might still be on offer. This is the nature of the Epstein files: It’s the record of what a global class of very privileged, accomplished and self-important people want to get gifted.

Sometimes it was a Prada bag. Other times it was a flight on Mr. Epstein’s jet, or a weekend at his island. Sometimes it was a donation to a charity or school. Or a job for their kid working on a Woody Allen film, or a shortcut for Mr. Allen’s own kid to get into Bard. Sometimes it was a “tall, Swedish blonde.” Other times it was a young woman who might be a “a little freaked by the age difference.”
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In writing about an earlier tranche of emails, in The Times, Anand Giridharadas asked: “How did Mr. Epstein manage to pull so many strangers close? The emails reveal a barter economy of nonpublic information that was a big draw. This is not a world where you bring a bottle of wine to dinner.”

Inside dope wasn’t the only thing Mr. Epstein had on hand. The picture provided by the latest files shows how Mr. Epstein won favor and friendships by acting as a kind of superconcierge. Sometimes that meant sending the helicopter to pick up guests, as Mr. Epstein offered to do for Elon Musk in a 2012 email, writing, “How many people will you be for the heli to island?” On another occasion, Mr. Musk asks his concierge Epstein, “Do you have any parties planned?” Mr. Epstein provided private plane trips, internships, Apple Watches, Hermès bags, extra-large zipper sweatshirts (those went to Steve Bannon), nearly $10,000 worth of boxers and T-shirts (Woody Allen) and an XXL cashmere sweater (Noam Chomsky). And then there’s the resistance Substack star Michael Wolff, who is all over the Epstein files, who emails Mr. Epstein, 'Shoes are very nice. Thanks.'”

3. Epstein's Russian connections - This one takes us into national security and politics

From Phillips P. O'Brien's Substack, Phillips's Newsletter, we get: "Why Does A Narcissist Accept Humiliation? Epstein Might Be The Answer."

"... another batch of millions of documents from the Jeffrey Epstein files were released and they made a very strong case that Epstein was closely linked to elements in Russian intelligence. There were trips, emails, and other assorted hints that Epstein was associated with and even coordinated activities with members of the Russian intelligence service. The evidence was strong enough that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a man not prone to histrionics or overstatement, said that the Poles were investigating whether Epstein had been a Russian agent. Tusk’s exact words in a government meeting were:"

Even if the next set of documents released by the Department of Justice includes a video tape with a naked Donald Trump humping a 14 year old, that won't be the end of the insights we learn about the United States, about the very rich, about male privilege, especially while male privilege, about the network of ultra rich, and even international links to nations that are not considered our friends that amount to serious breaches of national security.

It's going to take many years to map out all the connections and how those connections set up a class of people who, for the most part, have been above the law, and have perverted democracy in many ways.

Stay tuned. But don't hold your breath. This is not a television mystery that ends with a neat conclusion after 90 minutes. This is more like an archeological dig that will take decades to tie up the many threads and loose ends.

Bohemian Waxwings Harvest Our Mountain Ash Tree Berries

2026-02-04T19:00:00.002-09:00

Grey shadows streaked across our window shade Sunday morning and I knew the waxwings were back.

And when I slowly pulled up the shade, there they were, feasting on the berries.

What is my favorite Alaska bird? The Bohemian Waxwings are among the top five. They come in flocks of 50 or more and swoop down to tree in smaller squads. Then they fly off and another squad takes over.

The lighting was tricky with the birds between me and the sun. There was also a dirty window between me and the birds.

But they are such elegant birds with their crests, the light grey bodies adorned with yellow bands on their tails and black and red and yellow adornments on their faces. These aren't my best waxwing pics, but they give you a sense of why I so enjoy their visits.

Here's a post from 2015 that has better pictures.