KUAC, the Foraker Group, and clean desks

Well, this afternoon I finally sent a note to Jake Poole to find out what was going on with the KUAC Task Force results. The task force had submitted their report on February 11, and I'd heard nothing since. So later this afternoon, I was cleaning up my desk, and I discovered a letter from the Office of the Chancellor (dated Feb. 27) that I hadn't yet read. Turns out that the chancellor had asked the Foraker Group to review the recommendations and help the university figure out what to do.

Teach me to lose my mail.

The KUAC Listeners Alliance still hasn't updated their website, which I find rather annoying. The listeners are still out here, hoping to find out what's going on.

The Librarypalooza 2006

is over, almost. Whew. Well, it's over, but the post-palooza stuff (getting the last items to bidders, returning unsold items to donors, thank-you cards and calls, post-palooza review meeting, etc.) is not yet over. That's going to go on for quite a while. In the meantime, Kate, Margaret, and I are recovering from the main event, along with the other volunteers. We all got a bit crabby there for a while, but man, it was an EVENT! Great music and dance, lots of extremely nifty things, good dinner, hilarious fashion show, and, well, more fun than you can shake a stick at. We did really, really, well.

Now we just have to convince the ECA that having a library building in the village is really worth it. We've got a good chance (lots of support so far!), but it's not absolutely certain until the resolution is passed. Last year's resolution was more vague, and no money was changing hands for land or buildings at that time.

Hoo. I'm going to go crawl into bed now.

Duct tape

An interesting little story on Wired News discusses one of the world's greatest tools ever: duct tape. Turns out, duct tape (originally actually called "duck tape" because of its water-shedding ability) isn't very good for use on ducting. But it's good for just about everything else.

A quick search on the web reveals The Duct Tape Guys, the Duck Tape Club, Red Green's movie Duct Tape Forever, the Duck Products site (of course), and more fun sites than you can shake a stick at. Check out the Duct Tape Promwear....

Deffeyes and Diamond

Dr. Kenneth Deffeyes gave a talk last night at the UAF campus on the problem of peak oil production and the resultant potential for shocks (probably massive) to our economic system. Richard Seifert of the Alaska Energy & Housing Program gave the introduction. David James and I had gone to lunch with him, Seifert, Phil Loudon, Milt Behr, and Gary Hall, and then later listened to his talk. Very interesting, and, although I didn't agree with all of his points of view, his facts seemed quite solid. One interesting point he made was that when a system reaches its capacity and becomes stressed, system behavior, or in this case, pricing of oil, becomes very subject to the factors that influence price (say, a couple of warm winters in New England), and gets both erratic and extreme. It parallels queueing theory, he said, and showed us a graph of oil prices, fairly stable up through the nineteen forties, but then getting wild extremes up and down from the seventies onward.

He made a few modest suggestions about conservation that I hadn't heard or thought of before, but of course now they seem obvious. The two main areas to be hit hardest by reduced availability of oil are transportation and agriculture. So one practical way to reduce oil consumption is to grow a garden, store root vegetables, and can foods. Thus, one has more food locally grown, food that doesn't require the oil to ship it (and if grown organically, no petroleum-based pesticides or fertilizers, but he didn't think much of organic agriculture as a way to feed billions of people), and food that isn't shipped in the middle of winter. He said he hates turnips and rutabagas and parsnips, which store well, but (sigh) we've got to change the way we live.

The News-Miner has a front-page article today on his presentation (good for them!).

Next week, Jared Diamond is coming to UAF on the 28th at the Davis Concert Hall at 6 pm to give a talk on the subject of his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The UA Geography program is doing a series of lectures for the International Polar Year, and I think Diamond is the first one on the roster. Here's a review of Collapse on Grist Magazine. I plan to attend this lecture also.

These men's books are available at Gulliver's. I have a couple of Diamond's books (Guns, Germs, and Steel; Collapse) but I don't have Duffeyes' books yet (Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage and Beyond Petroleum: The View from Hubbert's Peak). I plan to get them.

Lallapalooza & Book Bash, oh my!

The second annual John Trigg Ester Library Lallapalooza & Book Bash is coming up this weekend (Sunday the 26th), and I'm helping to organize the do once again. There's massive amounts of work involved in setting up a fundraiser: arranging the locale, coordinating the entertainment, soliciting donations for food & auction items, finding and organizing volunteers, setting up, taking down, taking donations and dealing with cash, running around answering questions during the event, and so on. It's an incredible amount of fun, too.

Last year I got a bit panicky, both before and during the event, but this year I know what to expect and we're better organized and have more people helping out.

Should be fun. For the rest of this week the library board will be contacting the last few donors, making up cool book baskets, rehearsing in the fashion show, that sort of thing.

For anyone contemplating organizing a fundraiser, there's a great book called Fundraising for Non-Profits that proved VERY helpful.

Don't forget the thank-you notes! VERY important.

Don Young voted yea

Our representative voted in favor of a food labeling bill that will, if it passes the Senate, make it impossible for Alaska to require that farmed salmon be labeled as such. The National Uniformity for Food Act would prevent states from requiring different labeling than that of national requirements. Since state requirements are often more comprehensive than national ones, such as our farmed fish labeling requirement and our GM fish labeling requirement, this bill will prevent states from exercising their rights and will result in lower labeling standards. The genetically modified food labeling law was passed unanimously in the Alaska legislature.

So why didn't Don Young pay attention? He has struck a blow against Alaskan fishermen and fish processors.

Working on Vanishment

This is one of several collages that I'm working on for a show, Vanishment, that will be up in May at the Annex, with art by Kate Billington, Amy Cameron Luick, and I. I haven't titled this one yet, perhaps "Green Seas." It's one of a set of double doors, but it could be rearranged horizontally as shown as a room divider or a single door or some such.

Can't have employers offering benefits to their employees, nossirree

Babblemur makes an extremely important point about a constitutional amendment in another state against civil unions and domestic partnerships. Wisconsin State Representative Gregg Underheim (a Republican) spoke on the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh campus about this, and Babblemur was there:

Most people speak about the amendment from an emotional point of view, myself included. Opponents argue that it is discriminatory and an issue of human rights. Proponents argue that it is about defending family values. The jist of Underheim’s position against the Amendment was rational, and basically Constitutional. He spoke of what he saw the role of constitutions to be: structure, process, and protection. Constitutions are designed to define the structure of government, the process whereby government operates, and the protections people are given against government. Constitutions limit the rights and power of government, not people.

“This Amendment would cross a dangerous line,” he said. “It would change for the first time the very nature of constitutions.” He stated that once ’social policy’ is put in a constitutional context it both changes the nature of the constitution, and changes the role of elected representatives. “People elect their representatives, who pass legislation that defines social policy. If the people don’t like the way their representatives vote, they send someone else. Once social policy is written into the Constitution, that crosses a dangerous line.” He said. “Once one person or group is denied rights in the constitution, you set a precedent. Where will it stop? Which group of people might be denied rights next?”

At least Wisconsin has a few sane Republicans in their legislature.

Another very significant point about our own cute little discriminatory amendment proposal here in Alaska was made March 9 by Jeanne Laurencelle in a letter to the editor (of the News-Miner:

the newest constitutional amendment is designed to prevent employers from offering the compensation packages they want to offer. That's right, they want to legislate compensation! Unlike other laws which are set up to protect employees, this one is all about bashing employees.

So: employers can't be allowed to give benefits packages that should only be for properly married people (in the Wacko Religious Right's opinion) to anybody else, like (gasp!) heterosexual couples living in sin! or (GASP!) homosexual couples! Shame on those employers! shame! shame! We'll make all those job benefits criminal!

"No other union is similarly situated to a marriage between a man and a woman and therefore, a marriage between a man and a woman is the only union that shall be valid or recognized in this State and to which the rights, benefits, obligations, qualities, or effects of marriage shall be extended or assigned." [emphasis added]

Dear, dear, dear. What mean-spirited times we live in.

KUAC report on line

The final task force report, without the miscellaneous documents, is now appended to the minutes for the final meeting on January 23rd and posted on KUAC's website. The missing appendices are:

Appendix A: Background discussion
Appendix B: Excerpt of minutes with discussion of the forum
Appendix C: The four op-eds from the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

Attached CD: Documents
*Final Report
*All of the minutes
*Audio of public forum
*Four editorials with explanatory statement
*Letters to the editor compiled by Jan Dawe

The CD was provided to the Vice-chancellor, Jake Poole, and, I believe, KUAC management. I don't know if it was provided to UA President Mark Hamilton, Chancellor Steve Jones, the Faculty Senate, the Board of Regents, or the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly, all of whom also were to receive a copy of the report.

Food bill disguises something rotten

The Organic Consumers Association sent out a little press release recently on a bill up for vote in the House that would require uniformity of food labeling, HR 4167, the National Uniformity for Food Act. The bill would apparently prevent states from passing labeling laws that are more stringent (or really, different in any way) than national ones, and would overturn existing laws. California isn't too happy about this. What this would mean for Alaska is that farm-raised salmon would no longer have to be labeled as such, so people getting their fish in the stores wouldn't be able to tell from the label whether the fish is wild-caught or grown on a farm. But I bet they could tell once they tasted it.

With all the new and exciting things they can do to food these days (pesticides, genetic manipulation, wild-caught vs. farmed, hormones, miscellaneous additives and chemicals and colorants and ripeners and so on), it is becoming more important to know what is in your food, where it comes from, and how it is treated. Different states emphasize different things, depending on their own food industries. California has the most stringent laws, and a huge organic food industry. The idea of big gummint telling the states what to do (and what they can't) has, naturally, originated with the House Republicans, and is being pushed by the Grocery Manufacturers of America and a group called the National Uniformity for Food Coalition.

The Coalition makes a good point, that what's not safe in one state shouldn't be considered just fine in another. It's inefficient having all these different labeling standards. And us poor consumers can get SO confused. They say, "The law would prohibit the states from requiring warnings on food labels that differ from those imposed at the federal level." However, what they don't say is that the bill will also thus bring the safety standards down to the lowest common denominator; the least informative and the least safe. No info on hormones, on GM foods, etc.

The Coalition includes companies like Campbell Soup, Del Monte, Coca-Cola, Hershey, Minute Maid, Nestle, Procter & Gamble, Tropicana—extremely large and powerful companies, multinationals.

KUAC minutes update

I sent an e-mail to KUAC asking about the missing minutes and the report. I got an e-mail back from Greg Petrowich saying he'd look into it, and voila! the missing minutes appeared the next day.

No report yet, though.