TOP TO BOTTOM [and] LET'S NOT FORGET

South-Central Alaska experienced a massive chinook/warm-up beginning New Year's day, for four days. Well-above freezing temperatures of 5-8C (41-47F) were accompanied by strong southeast winds and rain in some areas, and so here around Anchorage, half the snowpack melted, and our nordic skiing trails were reduced to slabs of dirty, wet ice, which then  re-froze into treacherous sheets. 

With conditions like these, skiing became less attractive and so running and hiking were going to have to substitute. So last sunday the 9th, we decided to summit Konoya Point, behind the Chugach Front Research Centre, a very prominent point visible right out our windows.

The trail ascends quickly up the drainage of the North Fork of Campbell Creek, reaching the tree-line of 760 metres (2500 ft) in about 5 KM. It was a mild sunny day, about -5C (23F) at the start, just a 100 metres or so above sea level, thanks to high pressure ridging still dominating the area. In fact, a very unusual pattern was occurring, an exceedingly strong, record-breaking high pressure ridge was in place over western Alaska (more on this later). 

Since I wasn't sure how much snow would be on the route, and in what condition, I wore my Katoola shoe chains over my boots, which are like mini-crampons, and brought my snowshoes in my pack, in case we had to go through deep, loose snow. But the strong winds (probably well in excess of 100 kph or 60 mph) the week before had blown off much of it above tree-line, and what was left was packed brick-hard. I never ended up using my snowshoes, and with the Katoola's, felt like a fly climbing a wall, on the steep, sometimes icy sections. 

Just above the first bench, above tree line, around 1000 metres (3300 ft.), we could see 5315 metre (17,450 ft) Foraker shining in the distance. Denali is just beside it, behind the slope. We often get more clearing and nice sun in the winter, when we have offshore flow from the interior.

Anchorage was bathed in fog below, and colder, under it's valley temperature inversion. Probably around -12C (10F).  The downtown skyscrapers (such as they are...not much by lower 48 big city standards!) were just visible poking through.

Our objective was visible above, the 1433 metre (4700 ft.) summit of Konoya. It's mostly just a steep walk, very steep in some sections, but there are some rocks to clamber over at the very top.

Since we didn't get started until just after 1030, we had lunch about halfway in, around 1400, on  a nice little ledge, not far beneath the summit. Once we got above 1220 metres (4000 ft.), a northeast breeze, probably just 10-20 kph, combined with the temperatures around -7C, made it feel cooler. 

Homer and Mattie both were having a great time exploring the icy, rocky, snowy expanse. Homer still can walk about anywhere, but his back legs are weaker now, since he's 14. Just below the summit, the trail gives out, and the rest of the way is finding the best way, with some rock scrambling. 

Homer actually chose to stay behind for the summit "push", I think due to his weaker back legs. Mattie of course, is unstoppable, and so she chose to appear in my self-timed picture there. It was a little windier, probably around 20-30 kph, so we didn't stay up too long, and it would be getting dark in a few hours. The part of the trail down in the canyon near the start was exceedingly icy, and we wanted daylight for that.

Heading back down, the Anchorage "bowl" began to be bathed in the gentle rays of the late afternoon winter sun. Denali and Foraker, being fully visible, as well. The Chugach Front Research Centre is right at the base of these slopes, but we have to take a circuitous route on different trails, to reach this area. 

More of the city began to appear, as the fog burned off a little. Sure is a beautiful place we live in. I can't think of any cities with terrain like this, so close at hand, except maybe Salt Lake City. The pack ice in Cook Inlet had been pushed to the west side and had melted substantially, by the New Year's warm-up. The inlet never freezes solid, our 8 metre daily tidal range prevents that from happening, no matter how cold it ever gets. 

There are certain times when Homer's wolfiness becomes more apparent. I always love it when he is walking in settings like this, and that really comes out. As far as I know, he is at least one-quarter wolf, though I know very little of his background, what his parents were like. I'd like to find out. Wolf hybrids have gotten a bad rap, Nimbus, the gentle wolf/husky giant I had for six months in 2006, was the sweetest, kindest, most timid large dog I had ever met.
http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2009/10/alaska-sled-dogs-edge-of-wild.html

As we got lower, and the lighting more orange and subdued, the "fata morgana" mirages began appearing more prominent in the mountains across the inlet. These are caused by strong temperature inversions in the atmosphere, the density gradients in the different layers act as lenses, distorting distant features. These little mountain-tops near Redoubt (the larger volcano, with just a bit of steam issuing forth) were looking rather interesting, so we had to stop and get a picture. By this time we were back below tree line.

We finished up around 1700, just as darkness descended. What a fantastic day for an outing like this. When the days get longer, we'll be able to do 30-50 km traverses across even higher ridges from this area. Looking forward to it!

Since this was the top of the terrain, around the Anchorage Bowl, our next outing several days later, was to hopefully explore the bottom. Specifically, to ski part of the Iditarod trail in the beautiful 2000-2300 metre (6500-7500 ft) deep canyon of the Eagle River, about 25 km north of the Anchorage bowl. This deep canyon receives no direct solar radiation for at least three months in winter, and is usually the coldest spot in the entire area. We were hoping it hadn't warmed up as much in there with the New Year's chinook, so that the skiing would be better, than here in town. 

Sure enough, when we arrived there on 1/13, it was -26C (-15F), but the ranger working at the Nature Centre, told us it was unski-able. They had four days of temperatures starting 1/01, of 5-8C (40-46F), with rain and strong east winds funneling through the deep canyon.  Yep, the trail was just a solid slab of dirty ice, totally unski-able. I just kept walking in my ski boots, hoping that the further I went in, the better it might get, but it was getting worse! In some places, the snow was just in patches of ice, looking like late April or early May! So we only walked about 4 km in, then came back out. What a disappointment. We headed back to Hillside Park in Anchorage, where I classic skied with Homer and Mattie running along-side, for a few hours.

Speaking of warm-ups, chinooks, and high pressure ridging, the pattern we had in Alaska 7-10 days ago was very unusual, and worth commenting on. 

In this image, a standard 500 millibar analysis for the 11th of January, something really stands out. 500 millibar analyses are a standard reference level meteorologists use in weather forecasting. Millibars are an atmospheric pressure unit, sea level pressure is usually around 1000 millibars. The height at which the pressure equals a certain value is a function of the air-mass temperature. The warmer the air-mass, the higher these heights will be for a given pressure, since warmer air is less dense, and will occupy more volume. Thus, the 500 millibar charts, are a contour map, showing forecasters the flow pattern (parallel to the contours) and features at this level, around 4800 to 6000 metres (depending on the temperature, 15,700 to 20,000 ft). 

Well, on this map, above, what looks like a bubble, over Alaska, is an exceptionally strong high pressure ridge, a mass of warm air. 500 mb heights reached 5830 metres in the centre of it, over 600 metres higher than average for this time of year. Free-air freezing levels were as high as 3050 metres (10,000 ft) in western Alaska inside it. Think about that, there in arctic Alaska, in early January, except for shallow surface-based temperature inversions (because of no solar heating), the temperature was above freezing all the way up to 3050 metres! These heights are measured by radiosonde balloons twice daily world-wide, and the database extends back to 1948. This ridge is the strongest one to ever have occurred over Alaska in winter, since the beginning of the measurement database. And the second strongest ever recorded, period, in this part of Alaska! The colour shading on the map is the temperature at the 850 millibar pressure level, also temperature-dependent, but generally, around 1250 to 1500 metres (4100-5100 ft.)  What this shows, is that the air at 850 mb in this high pressure ridge, is of the same temperature of that in most areas around 30-38 degrees north, the subtropics. That warm subtropical air was brought north to the Arctic by a south flow ahead of lows much further south. This always, and has always been occurring. Just in the past few decades, this pattern is stronger, more persistent, and more frequent. This would have been exceptional in June or July, but in January, what gives?

Transport of warmer air poleward by the jet stream, is how the global energy balance between the tropics and poles is maintained. Again, since the Earth's atmosphere is warming due to the increasing levels of CO2 and methane from fossil fuel combustion and deforestation, these ridging patterns are therefore becoming stronger, more frequent, and more persistent. It is actually fortunate this one occurred in January here. Had it been in summer, a strong warm spell and drought would have led to high fire danger in the Alaska Interior. The extreme drought, heat, and wildfires in Russia last summer, as well as in Australia two years ago, were caused by excessively strong, record-breaking, high pressure ridging. Something we'll be writing more about in the coming months. 

                                  LET'S NOT FORGET

Today, of course, is the 82nd anniversary of the birth of America's most prominent spokesman for peace, civil rights, and political and economic justice. Dr. Martin Luther King. Rather than write a new tribute to this great man, who was murdered by the corporatocracy on the 4th of April, 1968 (exactly one year to the day after his landmark speech where he spoke out strongly against the Vietnam War and US militarism in general), we think this one from a year ago speaks quite well. 

http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2010/01/remembering-what-he-died-for.html

His murder was a great loss to the world. He was just beginning to gather momentum in his push for social and economic justice in the US, after his civil rights work. Which was why he was murdered. We often wonder, what things would be like, had this not happened. Would the Vietnam War have ended sooner? Would the US have become less militaristic? Would we have a more sane and just political and economic system here, more in line with the rest of the "developed" countries, with things like universal health care and jobs programmes? Let's all remember, just exactly why it was that he was murdered, and not let what he was working for go unfulfilled. Cheers.

SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN? [and] THE BAD WITH THE GOOD

                        SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN?

We came across this article on the BBC News web-site week before last. It is about a new technology under research that is very interesting, and potentially, could go a long way, if developed fully, to meeting much of the World's energy needs. Take a look, then we'll give you our view on this interesting research. 

23 December 2010 Last updated at 14:11 ET

New solar fuel machine 'mimics plant life'

By Neil Bowdler Science reporter, BBC News

 

In the prototype, sunlight heats a ceria cylinder which breaks down water or carbon dioxide

 

A prototype solar device has been unveiled which mimics plant life, turning the Sun's energy into fuel.

The machine uses the Sun's rays and a metal oxide called ceria to break down carbon dioxide or water into fuels which can be stored and transported. 

Conventional photovoltaic panels must use the electricity they generate in situ, and cannot deliver power at night.  Details are published in the journal Science.

The prototype, which was devised by researchers in the US and Switzerland, uses a quartz window and cavity to concentrate sunlight into a cylinder lined with cerium oxide, also known as ceria.

Ceria has a natural propensity to exhale oxygen as it heats up and inhale it as it cools down.

If as in the prototype, carbon dioxide and/or water are pumped into the vessel, the ceria will rapidly strip the oxygen from them as it cools, creating hydrogen and/or carbon monoxide.

Hydrogen produced could be used to fuel hydrogen fuel cells in cars, for example, while a combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide can be used to create "syngas" for fuel. It is this harnessing of ceria's properties in the solar reactor which represents the major breakthrough, say the inventors of the device. They also say the metal is readily available, being the most abundant of the "rare-earth" metals. Methane can be produced using the same machine, they say. 

Refinements needed:

The prototype is grossly inefficient, the fuel created harnessing only between 0.7% and 0.8% of the solar energy taken into the vessel. Most of the energy is lost through heat loss through the reactor's wall or through the re-radiation of sunlight back through the device's aperture. But the researchers are confident that efficiency rates of up to 19% can be achieved through better insulation and smaller apertures. Such efficiency rates, they say, could make for a viable commercial device.

"The chemistry of the material is really well suited to this process," says Professor Sossina Haile of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). "This is the first demonstration of doing the full shebang, running it under (light) photons in a reactor." She says the reactor could be used to create transportation fuels or be adopted in large-scale energy plants, where solar-sourced power could be available throughout the day and night. However, she admits the fate of this and other devices in development is tied to whether states adopt a low-carbon policy. "It's very much tied to policy. If we had a carbon policy, something like this would move forward a lot more quickly," she told the BBC. It has been suggested that the device mimics plants, which also use carbon dioxide, water and sunlight to create energy as part of the process of photosynthesis. But Professor Haile thinks the analogy is over-simplistic.

"Yes, the reactor takes in sunlight, we take in carbon dioxide and water and we produce a chemical compound, so in the most generic sense there are these similarities, but I think that's pretty much where the analogy ends."

The PS10 solar tower plant near Seville, Spain. Mirrors concentrate the sun's power on to a central tower, driving a steam turbine

 

Daniel Davies, chief technology officer at the British photovoltaic company Solar Century, said the research was "very exciting".  "I guess the question is where you locate it - would you put your solar collector on a roof or would it be better off as a big industrial concern in the Sahara and then shipping the liquid fuel?" he said.

Solar technology is moving forward apace but the overriding challenges remain ones of efficiency, economy and storage.

New-generation "solar tower" plants have been built in Spain and the United States which use an array of mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto tower-mounted receivers which drive steam turbines.A new Spanish project will use molten salts to store heat from the Sun for up to 15 hours, so that the plant could potentially operate through the night. 

This is really exciting. Think about it, CO2, the greenhouse gas pollutant that is building up inexorably in our atmosphere, from fossil-fuel combustion, and that is poised to reach 550-600 ppm concentration by mid-century (it is now about 392ppm), could actually be converted with sunlight, back into fuel. A cycle that would add no net CO2 into the atmospheric system, if developed and implemented on an emergency, mass scale, world-wide. The 550-600 ppm CO2 concentration expected to be reached in mid-century, is one not seen by humanity, ever. Global climate-change modeling suggests world-wide average temperature increases of 3-5C with this. Which may not seem cause for alarm, but we've already had about a 1C increase since 1900. And we've documented what has, and is occurring here. The Arctic Ocean summer-ice shrinkage, which is happening far faster than modeling had been suggesting. Increasing forest-fire severity and longer fire season duration in Australia, North America, and Russia/Siberia. A stunning 40 percent loss in the production of phytoplankton in the oceans, since 1950, which is the base of the marine food chain, due to warmer seawater. Droughts and floods on every continent, more frequent, and more severe. 

So do we think this research will receive the funding and emphasis it deserves, by the US, and other developed countries? Unfortunately, no. Because we know who really dictates policy to the US and to different extents, the other industrialised countries.

http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2009/10/capitalisms-dirty-warssecrets.html

Which is to say, producing hydrogen, or natural gas this way, would not be as profitable, as oil extraction/use currently is, for the large corporations. So, there will have to be concerted pressure on politicians by the populace in the US and all the other industrialised nations, to shift resources and attention to alternative energy research and development, before global sea-level rises of up to ten metres, from Greenland, and northern Canadian island rapid ice sheet melting occurs. How much longer do we have, before this could happen? 30-40 years, at best. 

http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2009/12/what-seems-likely-based-on-what-weve.html

The US defense budget is now almost a trillion dollars annually, after factoring in the costs of the Iraqi and Afghani occupations. More than all the rest of the World combined, and at least six or more times that of China, the next biggest spender. And what is there to show for it?

You aren't seeing these kind of images on the US corporate media, but this is what is occurring, and has been, in Iraq and Afghanistan, on a daily basis, for many years now. Afghanistani military operations have now gone on longer than any other US war? Why?The UN has estimated that for 47 billion USD, all the people in the World, who need clean water, could be provided it. Think about that. One-twentieth of the annual US defense/offense outlay. Which do you think would bring greater global good-will and safety?

"...A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." (4 April, 1967)

But it is corporate profit that drives our military spending, operations, and governmental policy, in general. Which is why the new solar technology we just presented, will have a tough time expanding, unless big changes occur in our system of government. We'll leave it to you to judge for yourselves, about where the US is, as a nation, spiritually speaking, according to MLK's guidelines. 

                         THE BAD WITH THE GOOD

We often scan the BBC News web-site, just for quick updates on fast-moving global events, such as natural disasters, political upheaval, etc.. The A.P.R. understands that although it is from a European country, and hence, less likely to be corrupted by the usual US corporate media's sports/celebrity/fluff bread-and-circus pulp for the masses, it still is an entity of the U.K. government. And hence, not to be fully trusted for some categories of news and events. But when we came across this, yesterday, we were appalled! This is blatant propaganda, and for us, totally untrustworthy. So much so, we are even going to seek a second opinion on this, more on that to come, in the weeks ahead. But for now, give this a look, supposed Peruvian Shamans, in a ceremony.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/12091748

There are so many things wrong with this, it's hard to know where to begin. Firstly, any shamanic practitioner world-wide, who knew the truth about Wiki-leaks exposes of how the global elite works, and it's courageous head, Julian Assange's travails as he faces possible extradition, to the US, followed by torture and murder or a long prison sentence, would never behave in this way. 

Second, most shamanic practitioners, world-wide, don't engage in behaviours like that anyway, cursing and demonising actual people. They are healers, who access alternate levels of reality to gain information and energy to heal their people, and bring beneficial things like rains for the crops, or locations of animals to hunt for their food supply. 

It's frankly disgusting, that these people were put up this way, probably by the Peruvian government, with some help from the US/UK. To soften up the populaces of both these countries, for Julian Assange's likely deportation and torture. 

As Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, in the Reagan Administration, astutely puts it: 

http://counterpunch.org/roberts12302010.html

"Today the press is a propaganda ministry for the government. Any member who departs from his duty to lie and spin the news is expelled from the fraternity.  A public increasingly unemployed, broke and homeless is told that they have vast enemies plotting to destroy them in the absence of annual trillion dollar expenditures for the military/security complex, wars lasting decades, no-fly lists, unlimited spying and collecting of dossiers on citizens supplemented by neighbors reporting on neighbors, full body scanners at airports, shopping centers, metro and train stations, traffic checks, and the equivalence of treason with the uttering of a truth. 

     

Two years ago when he came into office President Obama admitted that no one knew what the military mission was in Afghanistan, including the president himself, but that he would find a mission and define it. On his recent trip to Afghanistan, Obama came up with the mission: to make the families of the troops safe in America, his version of Bush’s “we have to kill them over there before they kill us over here.”

No one snorted with derision or even mildly giggled. Neither the New York Times nor Fox News dared to wonder if perhaps, maybe, murdering and displacing large numbers of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen and US support for Israel’s similar treatment of Lebanese and Palestinians might be creating a hostile environment that could breed terrorists. If there still is such a thing as the Newspaper Publishers Association, its members are incapable of such an unpatriotic thought.

Today no one believes that our country’s success depends on an informed public and a free press. America’s success depends on its financial and military hegemony over the world. Any information inconsistent with the indispensable people’s god-given right to dominate the world must be suppressed and the messenger discredited and destroyed.

Now that the press has voluntarily shed its First Amendment rights, the government is working to redefine free speech as a privilege limited to the media, not a right of citizens. Thus, the insistence that WikiLeaks is not a media organization and Fox News turning in a citizen for exercising free speech. Washington’s assault on Assange and WikiLeaks is an assault on what remains of the US Constitution. When we cheer for WikiLeaks’ demise, we are cheering for our own."  Cheers.   

SOLSTICIAL GREETINGS 2010 [and] DOWN AT THE BEACH

                 SOLSTICIAL GREETINGS

Solstices have great meaning to those of us living in the Northland, especially the Winter Solstice, as it means now that our short days will be getting minutes longer every day, and our low mid-day sun, creeping back higher, giving us a little more warmth. At least here in the Anchorage area, we get a minimum sun angle of five degrees above the horizon, low, but still just enough to slightly add a few degrees of warmth to the day. 

We here at A.P.R. like to imagine what our distant ancestors in pre-Roman and pre-Christian Europe did to observe these significant times, since they were even more important to them, tied so strongly to the rhythm of the seasons, as they were. These people who raised Stonehenge (and it is still unknown how, 4-5000 years ago!), and left all manner of strange stone monuments and structures tied to geographical and seasonal patterns throughout Europe.

It is also the time to reflect on the previous year's events. Rather than focus on the sad, dangerous, or unhealthy ones, let's at least see what we can be thankful for. Sarah Van Gelder in this article, gives us ten hopeful stories: 

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/12/23-3

10 Most Hopeful Stories of 2010

There was plenty of disappointment and hardship this year. But the year also brought opportunities for transformation.

by Sarah van Gelder

It was a tough year. The economy continued its so-called jobless recovery with Wall Street anticipating another year of record bonuses while most Americans struggle to get work and hold on to their homes. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continued, and spilled over into Pakistan and Yemen, and more American soldiers died by suicide than fighting in Afghanistan. And it was a year of big disasters, some of them indicators of the growing climate crisis.

World leaders, under the sway of powerful corporations and banks, have been unable to confront our most pressing challenges, and one crisis follows another.

Nonetheless, events from 2010 also contain the seeds of transformation. None of the following stories is enough on its own to change the momentum. But if we the people build and strengthen social movements, each of of these stories points to a piece of the solution.

1.    Climate Crisis Response Takes a New Direction. After the failure of Copenhagen, Bolivia hosted a gathering of indigenous people, climate activists, and grassroots leaders from the global South—those left out of the UN-sponsored talks. Their solution to the climate crisis is based on a new recognition of the rights of Mother Earth. Gone are notions of trading the right to pollute (which gives a whole new meaning to the term "toxic assets"). Instead, life has rights, and we can learn ways to live a good life that doesn’t require degrading our home.

The official climate agreement that came out of Cancún was weak and disappointing, although it did represent a continued commitment to work to address the challenge. But the peoples' mobilizations, and the solutions born in Cochabamba, continue to energize thousands.

Meanwhile, Californians voted to uphold their ambitious climate law, despite millions spent by oil companies to rescind the measure in November's election. And cities—Seattle, for one—are moving ahead with their own plans to reduce, and even zero-out, their climate emissions.

2.    Wikileaks Lifts the Veil. The release of secret documents by Wikileaks has lifted the veil on U.S. government actions around the world. While the insights themselves don't change anything, they do offer grist for a national dialogue on our role in the world—especially at a time when our federal budget crisis may require scaling back on our hundreds of foreign military bases, our protracted overseas wars, and our budget-busting weapons programs. Likewise, the traumas inflicted on civilian populations and on our own military are spurring fresh thinking. We now have data points for a bracing, reality-based conversation on the future of war—the kind of conversation that makes democracy a living reality.

3.    Momentum is Building for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons. The ratification of the START Treaty is an important step in the right direction. And the National Council of Churches, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and others from across the political spectrum have joined UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in calling for an even more ambitious goal: the end of nuclear weapons.

4.    Resilience is the New Watchword. As familiar sources of security erode, people are rebuilding their communities to be green and resilient. Detroit, a city abandoned by industry and many of its former residents, now has over 1,000 community gardens, a six-block-long public market with some 250 independent vendors, and a growing support network among small businesses. Around the country, faith groups and others are forming Common Security Clubs to help members weather the recession and consider more life-sustaining economic models. Communities are becoming Transition Towns as a means to prepare for breakdowns in society that may result from any combination of the triple crises of climate change, an end to cheap fossil fuels, and an economy on the skids.

5.    Health Care—Still in Play. The passage of the Obama health care package seemed to lock us into a reform package that maintains the expensive and bureaucratic role of private insurance and props up the mega-profits of the pharmaceuticals industry. But the story is not over. The decision by U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson to strike down the individual mandate in the health care reform may begin unraveling the new health care system. As insurance premiums continue their steep climb, some are advocating expansion of Medicare to cover more people—or everyone. Thom Hartmann points out this could be done with a simple majority vote in Congress—expanding Medicare to everyone was what its founders had in mind in the first place, he says.

Vermont is exploring instituting a statewide single-payer healthcare system. The United States may wind up following Canada’s path to universal coverage, which began when the province of Saskatchewan made the switch to single-payer health care, and the rest of Canada, seeing the many benefits, followed suit.

6.    Corporate Power Challenged. Small businesses are distancing themselves from the Chamber of Commerce, which promotes the interests of mega-corporations over Main Street businesses. And there are more direct confrontations to corporate power. The citizens of Pittsburgh, Penn., passed a law prohibiting natural gas “fracking,” and declaring that the rights of people and nature supersede the rights of corporations. Other towns and cities are adopting similar laws. The biggest challenge will be undoing the damage of the Citizens United decision, which opened the floodgates to wealthy special interests to spend what they like on elections. Groups around the country are gearing up to take on the issue, with a constitutional amendment just one of the potential fixes.

7.    A local economy movement is taking off as it becomes clear that the corporate economy is a net drain on our well-being, the environment, communities, and even jobs.  A “Move Your Money” campaign inspired thousands to close their accounts with predatory big banks, and instead, to open accounts at credit unions and locally owned banks. Schools, hospitals, local retailers, and families are increasingly demanding local food. Farmers markets are spreading. Independent, local stores have huge cachet as people look local for a sense of community. And the experience of one state with a budget surplus and very low unemployment is capturing the imagination of other states—North Dakota’s state bank is creating a buzz.

8.    Cooperatives Make a Comeback. A new model for local, just, and green job creation is gaining national attention. Leaders in Cleveland, Ohio, created worker-owned cooperatives with some of the strongest, local institutions (a hospital and university) promising to be their customers. The result: formerly low-income workers now own shares in their workplace and earn family-supporting wages. They can plan for their families’ futures, knowing that their jobs can be counted on not to flee the country. The model is spreading, and people now talk about how to bring "the Cleveland model" to their cities.

9.    A Turn Away from Homophobia. The revoking of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is just the most dramatic sign that the country has turned away from homophobia. A widespread anti-bullying campaign sparked by the suicide of Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi led to an “It Gets Better” campaign with videos created by celebrities and others.

10.   Social Movements Still Our Best Hope. Thousands gathered in Detroit in June for the second US Social Forum, an event that galvanized grassroots social movements from across the United States. In Toronto, the meeting of the G20 was greeted by thousands of protesters, many of whom were subjected to police beatings and gassing. The Cancún climate talks brought caravans of farmer/activists and global justice activists as well as greens to press for a meaningful response to the climate crisis. Social movements are alive and well, even though they are disparaged or ignored by the corporate media, which choose to instead shower attention on the well-funded Tea Party. And movement leaders are connecting the dots between Wall Street’s plunder, growing poverty, and the climate crisis, and setting priorities instead for people and the planet.

The turbulence of our lives is increasing, spurred by the crises in the economy and the environment, growing inequality and debt, military overreach, deferred peacetime investments, and species extinctions. Turbulent times are also times when rigid belief systems and institutions are shaken, and change is more possible. Not automatic, and definitely not easy, but possible. The question of our time is how we use these openings to work for a better world for all life.

Sarah van Gelder is co-founder and executive editor of YES! Magazine, a national, independent media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions for a just and sustainable world. Sarah is executive editor of YES!

It is so easy to get caught up in all the bad and dangerous events and situations in today's socio-political and environmental scene. So it's all the more vital to step back occasionally, and see what has gone right, in the past, and what is currently happening, that is hopeful. Not just in the World at large, but in our own lives too. So look back on your accomplishments and happy times this past year, there were many, and there will be many more! 

Let's take a quick look at how some things have changed in the last 50 years, for the better, here in the United States. In 1960, if you were a person of colour, that is, black, hispanic, indigenous, or asian, your prospects for employment, were much lower. You would have faced much greater harrassment in general, from law enforcement, for no specific reason. If any white person were to claim you were bothering them, the police would side with them, not you, and if you were assaulted or harrassed because of your ethnicity, you would have had no recourse. And of course, you had no real voting rights, or recourse if denied housing or loans because of your ethnicity.

http://www.splcenter.org/civil-rights-memorial/civil-rights-martyrs#

In 1960, if you were a young single woman, you would have faced significant societal disapproval, if you were to remain unmarried beyond your late 20s. Forget about birth control, or pre-marital sex, those things were not encouraged, or approved (though they were still widely engaged in) of in 1960. 

In 1960, the air pollution in Los Angeles and New York, was much worse than it is today (though it's still not good!). In 1960, not much thought was given to environmental protections, and large industrial areas on the East Coast were blighted with air, water, and land pollution.

So those are just a few things where significant progress has been made in our society in the past 50 years. And how did they come about? Through direct action, by supporting movements for peace and justice, racial  equality, and environmental respect and protection, that were out protesting and demonstrating. Only then did the politicians respond. 

                                                DOWN AT THE BEACH

We are truly blessed in Anchorage to have not just the Chugach Mountains, to our east, to recreate in, but  semi-protected coastal areas as well. The Anchorage Coastal Trail runs through much of this, from downtown, then around the peninsula that is Anchorage, separating the Knik Arm of Cook Inlet, from the Turnagain Arm.

The Alaska Progressive Review staff love to spend time here as well as in the mountains. We even have a real beach, Point Woronzof, which is about a 2 km expanse of sand and gravel beneath the bluffs on which Anchorage International Airport is perched. And which offers beautiful views across Cook Inlet, to the wild and undeveloped Alaska wilderness. In summer, we can swim here and have a nice bonfire, while in winter, skiing on the Coastal Trail, on the bluff above, is a treat.

Although your lead editor had to work on the actual day of the solstice, this past 21st, I had yesterday off. I had wanted to celebrate the Solstice, and the fact that here in Cook Inlet, we have the northernmost winter semi-open water in North America, by plunging in to the icy waters, at least for a few seconds.

But it was not to be. As you can see here, at the Point Woronzof beach, although there is plentiful open water further out the Inlet, due to the high tidal ranges (8 metres!), a shorefast ice ledge drops 1-2 metres to the water, which is an undetermined depth. Unless I were to be roped up with my climbing harness on, with someone onshore to pull me out, to drop in here, would be to stay in!

So, the best I could do under the circumstances, was just a roll in the snow. But it was invigourating, and a good way to start out the new year. Since it was a cool -18C (-1F), with a light breeze, I wasn't bare for very long.

Today continued sunny and cool, under the northerly flow of dry, cold air from the interior. Although on days like this, it may be -40C north of the Alaska Range, here, where the wind is blowing, it was much warmer, only -12C (14F). Of course, the wind was blowing, in the exposed areas like Point Woronzof, as high as 30-60 KPH, but it still is better than having to deal with -40C!

So we decided to skate ski the entire Coastal Trail, which runs from downtown Anchorage, to Kincaid Park, south of the airport. We started at the Earthquake Park trailhead (this is the park which used to be a subdivision that slid into Cook Inlet during the 1964 quake, with many fatalities there...), and first skied north up to downtown, stopping at Westchester Lagoon. This is a small lake, fed by Chester Creek, that freezes solid, and then is maintained for ice skating.

When we got to the lagoon, and went out on it for a bit, Homer got a little uneasy. His footing on the ice is not as solid as Mattie's, since he has a little arthritis in his back legs. Much of the snow was scoured off the lake, by the north winds, in the part of it not maintained for ice skating.

So we then went back south to Earthquake Park, with the wind at our backs. About 2 KM south of Earthquake Park though, we got into a strange area. The snow turned brown, and I lost my glide completely. I was skiing on sand! I stopped immediately. I didn't want to lose my glide wax, but more importantly, did not want to destroy the gliding surface of my skate ski. On classic skis, we often sand the kick zone to roughen it up. Holds the grip wax on better, and when you do lose it, the sanded zone can still give you some grip on the snow. Just what you do not want on your skate skis!

So, I quickly soft-stepped back to where the snow was uncontaminated, and skated back out of there. What was happening, was that sand/dirt was blowing up the bluff in the strong north winds, and depositing there. So we had to go back to Earthquake Park, then drive past the dirty area, to the Point Woronzof parking area, the site of our Solstice Roll yesterday. We got back on the trail here, and had a beautiful time skiing/running down to Kincaid Park, then back.

Here is a little of what we saw:

Our tremendous tidal ranges in Cook Inlet move alot of water, in very short times. So massive ice chunks like these can be seen, stranded at low tide.  These must easily be three metres thick!

We love just seeing the interesting textures and patterns in the shorefast and moving packs of ice, in the waters flowing in the outgoing tide.

All in all, we just did about 30 KM today, on our back-and-forth outing on the Coastal Trail. But it sure was beautiful, and not bad skating conditions, considering the gusty north winds. How fortunate we are to live in such an interesting and diverse environment. Cheers, and Happy Solstice!

IT'S EASY TO FORGET

that amazing changes happened, for the better, in many countries without seeming warning, just over 20 years ago. Who can ever forget the fall of the Berlin wall, and the joy so many East Germans felt gaining their freedom, and re-uniting with their western half. Who would have thought that would happen, just a few years before? Yet, East Germany (and Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, etc..) were collapsing from within due to their repression and hypocrisy, under the thumb of their mafia-like Stalinist bureaucracies.

We here at the A.P.R. sometimes fall into a funk, because we know so many people in this country continue to believe and act completely against their own interests, supporting the current two-party duopoly, that supports the increasingly corrupt, sociopathic, and globally menacing corporate oligarchy that runs our government. A system that puts corporate profit not just ahead of any support for people's needs, but is diametrically opposed to meeting them. With an increasingly desperate working class populace, because of higher and higher unemployment, wages and benefits can continually be cut. 

The logical progression in this sequence, a Shock Doctrine, in every sense of the word, http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2009/10/capitalisms-dirty-warssecrets.html, is a complete roll-back of all that the labour movement fought suffered, and died for in the U.S., over the past 120+ years. The end of the 40 hour work week (to be sacrificed in the name of "economic recovery and national security"), minimum wage,   unemployment benefits, medical benefits, paid vacations, and workmen's compensation. A return to the predatory and dangerous times of 1900. 

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/news-ludlow-massacre-pictures

When you couldn't trust the food, water, or drugs, because of no oversight and regulations, and if you were injured on the job because of unsafe working conditions, you would be cast out, left to fend for yourself. Destruction of the environment accelerating (China's air pollution, because of it's non-existent environmental protections, now reaches California and is responsible for a third of it's pollution loading!). This is what the corporate media is pressuring us to accept, by demonising the government (military and police excepted!). The first step of which was the two-year salary freeze for federal employees, two weeks ago. Next will come hiring freezes, then layoffs and retirement age increases and benefit cuts. Which is already happening for many state and local government employees. Don't think so? It's already happening, and all these things we just mentioned, will happen within ten years, if people don't rise up and resist.

One of our favourite writers lately is Chris Hedges, who appears regularly on our most-used news-sites, Counterpunch and Common Dreams. He always tells things as they are, and provides cutting-edge insight and analysis. We found this article inspiring:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/12/13

No Act of Rebellion Is Wasted

by Chris Hedges

I stood with hundreds of thousands of rebellious Czechoslovakians in 1989 on a cold winter night in Prague’s Wenceslas Square as the singer Marta Kubišová approached the balcony of the Melantrich building. Kubišová had been banished from the airwaves in 1968 after the Soviet invasion for her anthem of defiance, “Prayer for Marta.” Her entire catalog, including more than 200 singles, had been confiscated and destroyed by the state. She had disappeared from public view. Her voice that night suddenly flooded the square. Pressing around me were throngs of students, most of whom had not been born when she vanished. They began to sing the words of the anthem. There were tears running down their faces. It was then that I understood the power of rebellion. It was then that I knew that no act of rebellion, however futile it appears in the moment, is wasted. It was then that I knew that the Communist regime was finished.

“The people will once again decide their own fate,” the crowd sang in unison with Kubišová.

I had reported on the fall of East Germany before I arrived in Prague. I would leave Czechoslovakia to cover the bloody overthrow of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu. The collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe was a lesson about the long, hard road of peaceful defiance that makes profound social change possible. The rebellion in Prague, as in East Germany, was not led by the mandarins in the political class but by marginalized artists, writers, clerics, activists and intellectuals such as Vaclav Havel, whom we met with most nights during the upheavals in Prague in the Magic Lantern Theater. These activists, no matter how bleak things appeared, had kept alive the possibility of justice and freedom. Their stances and protests, which took place over 40 years of Communist rule, turned them into figures of ridicule, or saw the state seek to erase them from national consciousness. They were dismissed by the pundits who controlled the airwaves as cranks, agents of foreign powers, fascists or misguided and irrelevant dreamers.

I spent a day during the Velvet Revolutionwith several elderly professors who had been expelled from the Romance language department at Charles University for denouncing the Soviet invasion. Their careers, like the careers of thousands of professors, teachers, artists, social workers, government employees and journalists in our own universities during the Communist witch hunts, were destroyed.  After the Soviet invasion, the professors had been shipped to a remote part of Bohemia where they were forced to work on a road construction crew. They shoveled tar and graded roadbeds. And as they worked they dedicated each day to one of the languages in which they all were fluent—Latin, Greek, Italian, French, Spanish or German. They argued and fought over their interpretations of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Goethe, Proust and Cervantes. They remained intellectually and morally alive. Kubišova, who had been the most popular recording star in the country, was by then reduced to working for a factory that assembled toys. The playwright Havel was in and out of jail.

 

The long, long road of sacrifice, tears and suffering that led to the collapse of these regimes stretched back decades. Those who made change possible were those who had discarded all notions of the practical. They did not try to reform the Communist Party. They did not attempt to work within the system. They did not even know what, if anything, their protests would accomplish. But through it all they held fast to moral imperatives. They did so because these values were right and just. They expected no reward for their virtue; indeed they got none. They were marginalized and persecuted. And yet these poets, playwrights, actors, singers and writers finally triumphed over state and military power. They drew the good to the good. They triumphed because, however cowed and broken the masses around them appeared, their message of defiance did not go unheard. It did not go unseen. The steady drumbeat of rebellion constantly exposed the dead hand of authority and the rot and corruption of the state.

The walls of Prague were covered that chilly winter with posters depicting Jan Palach. Palach, a university student, set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square on Jan. 16, 1969, in the middle of the day to protest the crushing of the country’s democracy movement. He died of his burns three days later. The state swiftly attempted to erase his act from national memory. There was no mention of it on state media. A funeral march by university students was broken up by police. Palach’s gravesite, which became a shrine, saw the Communist authorities exhume his body, cremate his remains and ship them to his mother with the provision that his ashes could not be placed in a cemetery. But it did not work. His defiance remained a rallying cry. His sacrifice spurred the students in the winter of 1989 to act. Prague’s Red Army Square, shortly after I left for Bucharest, was renamed Palach Square. Ten thousand people went to the dedication

We, like those who opposed the long night of communism, no longer have any mechanisms within the formal structures of power that will protect or advance our rights. We too have undergone a coup d’état carried out not by the stone-faced leaders of a monolithic Communist Party but by the corporate state. We too have our designated pariahs, whether Ralph Nader or Noam Chomksy, and huge black holes of state-sponsored historical amnesia to make us ignore the militant movements, rebels and radical ideas that advanced our democracy. We opened up our society to ordinary people not because we deified the wisdom of the Founding Fathers or the sanctity of the Constitution. We opened it up because of communist, socialist and anarchist leaders like Big Bill Haywood and his militant unionists in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).  

We may feel, in the face of the ruthless corporate destruction of our nation, our culture, and our ecosystem, powerless and weak. But we are not. We have a power that terrifies the corporate state. Any act of rebellion, no matter how few people show up or how heavily it is censored by a media that caters to the needs and profits of corporations, chips away at corporate power. Any act of rebellion keeps alive the embers for larger movements that follow us. It passes on another narrative. It will, as the rot of the state consumes itself, attract wider and wider numbers. Perhaps this will not happen in our lifetimes. But if we persist we will keep this possibility alive. If we do not, it will die. 

All energy directed toward reforming political and state structures is useless. All efforts to push through a “progressive” agenda within the corridors of power are naive. Trust in the reformation of our corporate state reflects a failure to recognize that those who govern, including Barack Obama, are as deaf to public demands and suffering as those in the old Communist regimes. We cannot rely on any systems of power, including the pillars of the liberal establishment—the press, liberal religious institutions, universities, labor, culture and the Democratic Party. They have been weakened to the point of anemia or work directly for the corporations that dominate our existence. We can rely now on only ourselves, on each other.  

Go to Lafayette Park, in front of the White House, at 10 a.m. Dec. 16. Join dozens of military veterans, myself, Daniel Ellsberg, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern, Dr. Margaret Flowers and many others who will make visible a hope the corporate state does not want you to see, hear or participate in. Don’t be discouraged if it is not a large crowd. Don’t let your friends or colleagues talk you into believing it is useless. Don’t be seduced by the sophisticated public relations campaigns disseminated by the mass media, the state or the Democratic Party. Don’t, if you decide to carry out civil disobedience, be cowed by the police. Hope and justice live when people, even in tiny numbers, stand up and fight for them.

There is in our sorrow—for who cannot be profoundly sorrowful?—finally a balm that leads to wisdom and, if not joy, then a strange, transcendent happiness. To stand in a park on a cold December morning, to defy that which we must defy, to do this with others, brings us solace, and perhaps even peace. We will not find this if we allow ourselves to be disabled. We will not find this alone. As long as a few of us rebel it will always remain possible to defeat a system of centralized, corporate power that is as criminal and heartless as those I watched tumble into the ash bin of history in Eastern Europe. 

Powerful stuff, thanks Chris. This very night I saw a clip on MSNBC of Madeleine Albright, the ex-US ambassador to the UN in the Clinton administration, speaking about tax cuts and the economy. She derisively referred to "bleeding hearts", i.e., liberals, not being realistic. So let's put this in perspective. A pillar of the political system in this country is saying that it is not realistic, or desirable, to show empathy or concern, for one's fellow human beings. And that is certainly reflected in what has been happening in this country, since 1980, especially.The trends are ominous.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/post_1394_b_795001.html

 

One of our favourite books of all time, to which we have referred previously,

http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2009/12/what-seems-likely-based-on-what-weve.html,

is The Dispossessed, and astounding tour-de-force science fiction/utopian novel by Ursula K. LeGuin (who is from Portland, OR).  I first read it when I was 17, and was stunned by it's power and strong comparisons to our current society. Written amazingly, in 1973, it tells the story of a great and misunderstood physicist, Shevek, living in a utopian anarchist colony on the moon (to which they fled) of an Earth-like planet that has a greedy, sociopathic/militaristic society, much like ours. And his adventures as he returns to his home-world, to try and re-unite the two worlds. Naively returning to the home world under the auspices of accepting a Nobel-like physics prize, he quickly realises that the governments on them just want his research for their own gain. So he then flees and joins the left-wing opposition/underground. Which stages a massive rally and general strike on the eve of forced conscriptions for an unpopular, immoral, and unjust war. He gives a beautiful speech, in front of the main center of government in the U.S.-like country he was in: 

"Annares [Shevek's home-world] had no flag to wave, but among the placards proclaiming the general strike, and the blue and white banners of the Syndicalists and the Socialist Workers, there were many home-made signs  showing the green Circle of Life, the old symbol of the Odonian movement [that fled the home planet Urras, to the moon Annares] of two hundred years before.  All the flags and signs shown bravely in the sunlight...

There might have been a hundred thousand human beings in Capitol Square, or twice that many. The individuals, like the particles of atomic physics, could not be counted, nor their positions ascertained, nor their behaviour predicted. And yet, as a mass, that enormous mass did what it had been expected to do by the organisers of the strike: it gathered, marched in order, sang, filled Capitol Square and all the streets around, stood in its numberlessness restless yet patient in the bright noon listening to the speakers, whose single voices, erratically amplified, clapped and echoed off the sunlit facades of the Senate and Directorate, rattled and hissed over the continuous, soft, vast murmur of the crowd itself. 

There were more people standing here in the Square than lived in all Abbenay, Shevek thought, but the thought was meaningless, an attempt to quantify direct experience. He stood with Maedda and the others on the steps of the Directorate, in front of the columns and the tall bronze doors, and looked out over the tremulous, somber field of faces, and listened as they listened to the speakers; not hearing and understanding in the sense in which the individual rational mind perceives and understands, but rather as one looks at, listens to one's own thoughts, or as a thought perceives and understands the self. When he spoke, speaking was little different than listening. No conscious will of his own moved him, no self-consciousness was in him. The multiple echoes of his voice from distant loudspeakers and the stone fronts of the massive buildings, however, distracted him a little, making him hesitate at times, and speak very slowly. But he never hesitated for words...

"It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know of our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing, You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. And you have is what you are, and what you give. 

I am here because you see in me the promise, the promise that we made two hundred years ago in this city-the promise kept. We have kept it, on Annarres. We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premieres, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Annarres you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution.You canot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."

As he finished speaking the clattering racket of police helicopters drawing near began to drown out his voice. 

He stood back from the microphones and looked upward, squinting into the sun. As many of the crowd did so the movement of their heads and hands was like the passage of wind over a sunlit field of grain. 

The noise of the rotating vanes of the machines in the huge stone box of Capitol Square was intolerable, a clacking and yapping like the voice of a monstrous robot. It drowned out the chatter of the machine guns fired from the helicopters. Even as the crowd noise rose up in tumult the clack of the helicopters was still audible through it, the mindless yell of weaponry, the meaningless word.

The helicopter fire centered on the people who stood on or nearest the steps of the Directorate. The columned portico of the building offered immediate refuge to those on the steps, and within moments it was jammed solid. The noise of the crowd, as people pressed in panic toward the eight streets that led out of Capitol Square, rose up into a wailing like a great wind. The helicopters were close overhead, but there was no telling whether they had ceased firing, or were still firing; the dead and wounded in the crowd were too close pressed to fall. 

The bronze-sheathed doors of the Directorate gave with a crash that no one heard. People pressed and trampled toward them to get to shelter, out from under the metal rain. They pushed by the hundreds into the high halls of marble, some cowering down to hide in the first refuge they saw, others finding a way through the building and out the back, others staying to wreck what they could until the soldiers came. When they came, marching in their neat black coats up the steps among dead and dying men and women, they found on the high, grey, polished wall in the great foyer a word written at the height of a man's eyes, in broad smears of blood: DOWN

They shot the dead man who lay nearest the word, and later on when the Directorate was restored to order the word was washed off the wall with water, soap, and rags, but it remained; it had been spoken; it had meaning."

Cheers.