Power Profiling
We hear a lot about racial profiling, where innocent people are harassed because they "look" like they are trouble.I'd like to offer a reverse phenomenon that I would call POWER PROFILING where we...
View ArticleAlaska State Funded Lewin Group Study Doesn't Support Gov's Decision To NOT...
Last week Alaska's Governor Sean Parnell announced he would NOT expand Medicaid under the ACA.The long secret state funded Lewin study which was finished back in January 2013 [and updated in April],...
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Using Anti-Terrorism Laws To Stifle Environmental Protest - Careful With The...
Not quite two weeks ago, a group of protesters locked themselves to the entrance of Devon Towers in Oklahoma City, while a few others unfurled a Hunger Games inspired banner inside. They were...
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When Is It OK To Hold Public Meetings In Secret? The Coliseum Case
The ultimate reason for government openness is to allow the public to keep their officials accountable. It's a value I hold strong here at this blog. This is a story about a government agency not...
View ArticleNational Right Wing Context Of Alaska State House Sustainable Education Task...
This is Part 2 on the Task Force. Part 1 gives an overview of the different contexts of this report and focuses on the task force membership. All three House members are Republicans and the other...
View ArticleThe Science Guy Takes On The Creationist - A Preview Of Ham's Arguments
[This post is not yet another debate whether they should have a debate, but a look at what Ken Ham actually says.]Background for those not following this: Bill Nye (the science guy) is scheduled to...
View ArticleHow To Shoplift Without Getting Caught - This Only Works For Whites
In 2005, Larry Summers, then President of Harvard, raised questions about the disparity in the number of men and women in science, offering, as one explanation, genetic differences between males and...
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Evangelicals Struggle To Love Gays
Jim Minnery of the Alaska Family Action which includes the Alaska Family Council was holding a Love Your Gay Neighbor Q&A Friday night at East High and although I was tired, it seemed like...
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What If Marriage Was Only Expected To Last Until The Last Kid Turned 18?
An LA Times article called "Middle-raged woman" caught my attention the other day."I think there are some people for whom long-term marriages really work; it's a wonderful thing to see. But...
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Brat Wins With 8% of Registered Voters - Will Cantor Pull a Murkowski?
By now, anyone reading this already knows that Republican House majority leader Eric Cantor lost his primary election Tuesday June 10 to David Brat.I'm writing this from Alaska and I don't know much...
View ArticleChina White Paper Changes Rules of Hong Kong's Basic Law
Police crackdowns on protesters make good television. And even without video or photographs, the stories have concrete images that readers and listeners can quickly comprehend.But technical wording...
View Article"Money's capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic . . ."
I'd been reading David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years so I had a newly focused understanding when I read this sentence from the LA Times story on the pending Detroit bankruptcy settlement:"The...
View ArticleIncumbency Is Not Forever: The Difference Between A 'Nobody' And A...
The way labels affect how people treat each other has always fascinated me. When I was a doctoral student and teaching my first graduate classes, I tried an experiment that was very revealing, though...
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The Ebola Volunteer Watch Resort
Medical volunteers are desperately needed to help with Ebola patients. But long quarantine periods are making it more difficult to get volunteers. From the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM):...
View ArticleNow That Pot's Legal In Alaska, How Do You Get It?
Pot's legal in Alaska as of today, but buying and selling it isn't yet. The legislature has to set that part up. So what should a law abiding Alaskan who wants to smoke some legal pot do? I thought...
View ArticleIdeology Is A Bitch
Ideology allows you to answer all questions with slogans. It allows you to ignore facts. It lets you skip serious analysis and it lets you do horrendous harm to civilization without guilt.In...
View ArticleObama Offers Refuge On US Land To Nine Climate Threatened Nations
President Obama today announced that the US would provide new homelands for the nine most climate-change endangered island nations in the world (see table below). Here is part of the text of the...
View ArticleRefugees Dying In Boats Is Not Unique To the Mediterranean In 2015
The world's media is focused on the deaths of boat people fleeing Africa for Europe. There's a lot of wringing of hands and talk about how to 'fix the problem."It would make more sense to step back...
View ArticleAlaska Gov Walker Hires Mediator For Legislature
Governor Walker has hired a mediator to try to get the two houses of the Alaska legislature to resolve their differences and pass a budget. The governor has already had to send out layoff notices to...
View ArticleUniversity of Alaska President Search Part 1: The Cultural Conflict
The members of the Board of Regents spend countless hours of their lives reading documents and going to meetings. They make decisions that will affect the future of Alaska in all kinds of ways. I'm...
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