Replying to @NJBeisner While I recognize Slavery was a stain on history. I strongly feel the 100yrs following in some ways was bad or worse. However, we have given much to the Black Community by ways of welfare, affirmative action, preferential treatment over decades. If it taught anything to anyone, it did more harm than good. A Tweet by Mark Clabaugh @clabaugh_mark May 9Christian, Florida Resident, #AmericaFirst outdoorsman. I believe in God, Family, the Constitution, Rule of Law,

The purpose of affirmative action is to ensure equal employment opportunities for applicants and employees. It is based on the premise that, absent discrimination, over time a contractor’s workforce generally will reflect the demographics of the qualified available workforce in the relevant job market. U.S. Department of Labor Website.

“I live in a box, [that says) Careful: Discuss Civil Rights Law or Law and Race Only. Warning! Affirmative Action Baby! Do Not Assume That This Individual is Qualified! Pamela Paul, Opinion Columnist in The New York Times quoting Stephen L. Carter in his book “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby”

Affirmative action didn’t change the ingrained racism in our culture. But it certainly benefited individuals who got jobs they never would’ve been considered for. Karen Amy in a comment on a blog post.

I started writing about Affirmative Action, and then it got lost in my very long queue of unfinished posts. When the Supreme Court judgment on Affirmative Action came out, I was enraged, and then I started to wonder why the judgment bothered me so much. I am not an Affirmative Action advocate, I don’t think it works as advertised and is actually counter-productive. I think what bothered me, and still bothers me, about the Supremes is that, although we are a racist nation and race – our relationship to race anyway – has been tearing our country apart for our entire history, the majority of the Supreme Court justices don’t seem to even acknowledge that racism still exists.

I don’t know what to do about our racism, and I don’t know anybody who does, but I do know what we are doing, including Affirmative Action, isn’t working and the Supreme Court seems to be pretending that everything is just honky-dory when they rule against Affirmative Action or for race-based gerrymandering.

While I am against Affirmative Action I want to quickly add that I also agree with Karen Amy when she says Affirmative Action certainly benefited individuals who got jobs they never would’ve been considered for. But I don’t think getting jobs for a small number of people is the goal, or, at least, it shouldn’t be the goal of the Federal Government. The goal of the Federal Government should be to ensure that all our fellow citizens are treated equally and taken as a whole, minority groups in the United States are still not treated equally. They are not much better off today than they were in, say, 1970.

The biggest problem with Affirmative Action is that it stirs up and unites a large minority, mostly White, that is already upset with their life, and they want to blame it on somebody else, usually Black people or immigrants, especially Hispanic immigrants (although Jewish People seem to always make most shortlists). They already feel – with some justification – that they are getting the short end of the stick from the Federal Government and, having Black people get special privileges further entrenches their anger.

Additionally, Affirmative Action presumes that their race is the only problem that Black people have which, of course, is not true. Underserved neighborhoods, police that act like an occupying army, and systemic poverty are major problems Black people face on an almost daily basis. Actually, the academic achievement gap between high- and low-income families is nearly twice as large as the Black-White gap according to a 2011 study by Stanford and 40% of homeless people in the US are Black, yet, Affirmative Action ignores these as factors.

I like the Texas system in which the top ten percent of graduates from every high school in Texas are automatically accepted at the University of Texas which bills itself as A big-time collegiate experience at the No. 1 public university in Texas. A top-40 world university. It seems to me that this is race-neutral but does compensate, at least partially, for schools in poor – saying “poor” but really meaning purposely underfunded schools – areas.

California does not have? use? Affirmative Action, having voted against it in 1996 – and the Board of Regents voted against using SATs in 2020 – and now uses what they call a more holistic approach. By way of full disclosure, California has two University systems. The more prestigious and rigorous is the California University System – ten schools including Cal at Berkeley, UCLA, Davis, & Santa Barbara – which lost minority students when they dropped Affirmative Action in 1996 (although they are starting to get them back). Today the California University System demographic breakdown is Black students @ 5%, White students @ 20%, Hispanic/Latino 37%, and Asian students @ 34% (plus mixed race and other). By way of reference, the state’s total demographic racial breakdown is 6.5% Black, Asian 15.5%, White 36.5%, and Hispanic/Latino 39.4%.

As an aside, the less expensive California State University System – thirty-two schools including San Francisco State, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and Cal Poly Pomona, Cal State Long Beach, and the always terrific Sonoma State – gained minority students when Affirmative Action was dropped. End aside.

Our government has passed thousands of laws that are like band-aids covering wounds without actually treating the wound itself because treating the wound is too politically sensitive. Affirmative Action is one of those band-aids. We constantly talk about correcting the damage done by the legacy of slavery. Clearly, that damage is very real; it is the damage purposely caused by destroying the enslaved people’s language and their culture, by breaking up their families to destroy a people’s history, to put them out of any context. Still, as staggering and comprehensive as that damage is, it is not the only problem Black people face today.

Additional damage is caused every day by the way Black people in the United States are treated in 2023. I read that the main reason the University of California is having a hard time getting Black students is because they still feel discriminated against partially because there are so few programs and facilities to support Black students. The state does seem to be improving the support for Hispanics/Latinos who are, after all, the majority population group in the state (and probably have been since we became a state in 1850).

To end this, I want to tell a story and add a link to an inspirational story in the LA Times. My story starts when I checked in to my newly assigned Battery at Fort Bliss, Texas, having just transferred from a Battery in Namyang, Korea. When I checked in, the Battery Clerk asked me what race I wanted to be listed as on the roster. The choices as I remember them were, Caucasian, Black – probably Negro, actually – some definition for Hispanic, Asian, and Other. The clerk was a draftee – an irreverent draftee, I should add, which was not unusual in the conscription Army of the 60s – an East Coast Jewish guy named T. J . Yanik (which I now find out is a pretty common name). It turns out that The Department of Defence requires that each unit, down to the Battery level, report the racial breakdown of the unit. Yanik had been putting himself down as Other for the preceding couple of months, and he wanted to know if I wanted to join him, I said “Sure, why not.”

A month or so later he asked me which Other I wanted to be. It turned out that the report first went up the chain of command to Battalion Headquarters where some clerk attached a form that said something like OK, or Accepted, then up to Ft. Bliss Headquarters where another clerk did the same. From Ft. Blis, it went to Fourth Army Command, then the Department of the Army, and, finally, to the Department of Defense where some clerk asked, in writing on a separate form, what Other meant. It then came back down the Chain of Command, from DOD to the Dept. of Army, to 4th Army, Ft. Bliss, the 6th Missile Battalion (HAWK), and then down to “C” Battery. The original form now had something like twelve additional papers stabled to it the top half asking what Other meant.

Yanik said he was putting down Jewish, did I want to join him? Although I thought this was becoming a joke and he was having a hard time keeping a straight face, I still said, “Sure” and up the chain of command it went. Shortly thereafter, the 6th Missile Battalion shipped out to Viet Nam, and I transferred to an Instructor Unit where I taught HAWK to German Luftwaffe personnel at the Orogrande Missile Range. I lost track of Yanik and the 6th Missile Battalion, but I did hear that I was being changed from Jewish to White by the DOD.

It seemed to me that there was just so much paper being used, so many people doing, essentially nothing, all pretending it was fixing the problem. I best remember my unit in Korea, in which we had a large group of Black soldiers but all of them were in the launcher platoon as I remember, none of them were radar mechanics or operators, and all the officers were White. We looked integrated on paper, but we weren’t really.

Lastly, The Los Angeles Times had a touching/interesting/inspirational story about a gang member who turned his life around and ended up at Cal. I heartily recommend it.

Nearly 50 million Americans are set to face triple-digit temperature this week amid a sprawling dome of heat that will engulf most of the southern United States. Heat advisories are in effect in Florida, Texas and New Mexico, while excessive heat watches and warnings blanket much of Arizona, Southern California and Nevada. Washington Post, July 10, 2023.

Last week, maybe the week before last week, our Earth was the hottest it has been since we’ve been keeping records. This is not an outlier, this is the future our world is moving into. This is the future we are going to have to live in.

Our politicians – the world’s politicians and the world’s autocrats, almost everybody governing, really – are acting like Nero while Rome burned so this is a good time to email them. I know that there are people who don’t believe that we are in a worldwide global climate crisis. Hell, there are people who still believe, or say they believe, the world is flat but they have to work pretty hard at it. It takes a lot of data ignoring to think the world is flat.

Like flat-worlders, anybody who doesn’t believe we are in a climate crisis and that the crisis is getting worse every day has to work at it. They have to disbelieve 99% of the world’s climate scientists. They have to disbelieve the Catholic Church, the Department of Defence, the Department of Transportation, etc…I’m going to skip making a long list here because the real answer is that virtually everybody who has studied the climate knows we are in a man-made crisis.

If the climate is an issue for you, let your government know that. Tell your Congressperson and Senators you are going to vote based on what they do to help us survive. If it is not an issue, ask your kids or grandkids if it is an issue for them. That’s pretty much all I have to say. Register, VOTE.

The seven lakes in Pioneer Basin are spread across an alpine valley on the Mono Creek drainage, west of Rock Creek. Surrounding the valley are peaks named after the Big Four, pioneer California businessmen who backed the construction of the first transcontinental railroad – Stanford, Hopkins, Crocker, and Huntington. Pioneer Basin Backpacking – High Sierra TrailsHigh Sierra Trailshttps://highsierratrails.com 

Prestigious Rose Breeder Names Its New Bloom for a Black Gardener: For more than 60 years, David Austin Roses has named new varieties after historical British figures, All of them white. The Dannahue, which honors Danny Clarke, changed that. A headline in The New York Times.

Black people are better at everything. Said Rudi Spangenberg, while standing in our living room after trying to level an entrance awning.

The Huntington Museum and Library is located in San Marino, California. The first time I went there was probably in 1958 or 1959, when I was a freshman or sophomore in college. I was not impressed. San Marino, itself, was a white, upper-middle-class town, milquetoast from my angry young man’s point of view, and the Museum fit right in. The second and third times I went were probably in the early to middle 70s; I had discovered the desert and cactus and skipped the Museum and went directly to the garden, which was spectacular and still is.  

The fourth time I went to the Huntington was with Michele shortly after we first met, in the early 90s, and I wanted to show her the garden. The fifth time was last week when Michele took me down to greater LA for my birthday. We went to see the Huntington cactus and succulent garden. However, she also wanted to see a painting that the Huntington had recently acquired, and I wanted to see some prints – monotypes, I think – made from Gee’s Bend quilts.

Michele wanted to see a painting by Kehinde Wiley who is a Black artist whose career has taken off since his first show, at the Hoffman Gallery, in Chicago in 2002. Wiley’s career then went into hyperdrive after President Obama chose him – Wiley – to paint his – Obama’s – Official Presidential Portrait. A couple of days before we went to the Huntington, we saw a Wiley show in San Franciso’s de Young Museum. It was of several huge portraits of Black people, posing in traditional Old Masters style. Most of Wiley’s paintings are men and the images have a subtext that’s not natural. Are they dead? The whole show was shown in very dark galleries in which the only light was reflected off the paintings, which really showed off the paintings in an Elvis on black velvet sort of way. For me, even though the show was difficult to see because of the glare of the shiny paintings in the very dark rooms, the show was a knockout.

But those pictures were in San Francisco, and we were at the Huntington Museum, where, when we first walked into the American Art Building looking for the Kehinde Wiley painting Michele had read about, we passed a huge Sam Francis from his Grid series. Seeing a major piece of American abstract art at this staid Museum was a shock. It turns out that the Huntington Museum has transmogrified into a much more exciting place.

We had a hard time finding the Wiley, which was incongruously in the portrait gallery of the European Building. In a room full of what I would call vanity portraits of the rich, upper-class English gentry was the most famous treasure of the old Huntington, Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The Museum purchased Blue Boy a hundred years ago, and, to celebrate the purchase’s centennial, they commissioned a complementary contemporary portrait. Blue Boy which I think was originally named A Portrait of a Young Gentleman, portrays a White, wealthy, young boy who just oozes his belief in his own class superiority. This was the Museum I remembered from my prior visits, but, across the room from the Gainsborough is a new Portrait of a Young Gentleman by Kehinde Wiley. The two paintings are wildly different and strangely the same.

One is White gentry, and the other is Black street, but they are both in the same pose and they both look down at us with a look of self-satisfaction. Neither is arrogant but they are damn close; they both seem to know they belong here.

I am not a big fan of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg but, in an interview probably ten years ago,o she said something that still haunts me. When asked when she would be happy with the number of women on the Supreme Court, she answered: “When there are nine women on the Supreme Court.” The interviewer sort of guffawed and said something like, “Seriously?” and RBG said “Why not? There were only White men on the court for over two hundred years.” Think about that for a minute, for well over two hundred years, only White men decided what was legal. Those same men – or the same class of men, to be more precise – ran everything. It just seemed like the natural order of things. It isn’t the natural order, and it shouldn’t be, but it did seem like it.

For most of that time, the White Male Power structure wasn’t even questioned. “Of course, women shouldn’t vote. They are too emotional.” “Of course, Black men shouldn’t coach an NFL team, they aren’t smart enough. Hell, they shouldn’t even play quarterback.” White men telling themselves that they are superior is the original Affirmative Action. When that Affirmative Action is eliminated, when the applicant pool can contain anybody, when results are all that count, often a White man isn’t the best person for the job. When being White doesn’t automatically give an advantage, the result is often different.

That is sort of shocking. I understand that shock; I can feel it in my soul, and I was brought up in a liberal family. For someone brought up knowing White men are superior, for someone who can’t see their own White privilege, it must be too shocking to take in. It is easy to justify not being at the top by thinking, even saying, “They cheated, they just got the job, position, award – whatever – because they are Black, they are obviously not better or more qualified than me.”

There must be hundreds of White men who are superb artists and could do a great job at painting a contemporary Portrait of a Young Gentleman, but, looking at the Huntington Gallery, full of White, entitled, men with Gainsborough’s Wiley’s Portrait at one end and Wiley’s Portrait facing it at the other end; it seems obvious that commissioning Kehinde Wiley was the right call.

Over the years, human beings have shown that we’re very good at destroying habitats. Now we have to show that we’re smart enough and thoughtful enough and caring enough to restore what we have ruined. from Nature’s Best Hope, (Young Readers’ Edition) by Douglas W. Tallamy.

My father, Alfred J. Stern, who my sister and I always called Daddy, was a nice guy, not always a good man, but always a nice guy. He was humorous, friendly, kind, and generous. He was a Democrat, but, more importantly, he was a democrat. He died in May of 1968 at the age of 61, about a month before I turned 28.

My family was not interested in California’s wildness, not many people were in the 50s, we – the collective we – were interested in California’s wild lands as a blank canvas to be covered by man’s creations. I was going to say that my family were not outside people but that is not true, however, to us, outside meant the backyard in the San Francisco suburbs. In the summer of 1956, my mother heard about and suggested I go on a thirty-day trip led by Jules Eichorn, my former eighth-grade teacher. It was a backpack in the Sierras although nobody in my family even knew what a backpack was. As an aside and sort of as proof of our lack of wilderness knowledge, my mother bought me a pair of motorcycle boots to fill the boot requirement. End aside.

The trip was billed as a thirty-day trip from Independence – which I had heard about because it was President Harry Truman’s hometown – to Bishop which I had never heard of. I imagined a road trip. It turned out that the actual trip was a hike in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, carrying everything on our backs, from a trailhead outside of Independence, California to a trailhead outside of Bishop, California, with much of the walking done above timberline. For the first time in my life, I felt the enchantment of the Wild, in the solitude, for the first time in my life, I felt the Mystery. Those thirty days changed my life.

I think it also changed my father’s life. When Pat Brown won the governor’s race, my dad was offered one of the political appointments that are part of the perks of the winning party. Daddy chose the Chairman of the California State Park Commission which shocked almost everybody including me. He then set out to enlarge the system with a huge increase of funds from a Bond drive. He became a proponent of saving California’s little remaining wild land and its slowly vanishing history. The Park Commission had the money and they used it to buy land and build facilities.

One of my favorite memories is Daddy’s excitement when the Park Commission bought the Ed Z’berg Estate at Sugar Pine Point on Tahoe’s West Shore and he and his fellow Commissioners spent the night in the mansion. Another story Daddy loved to tell was about taking Governor Brown on a camping trip to a wilderness lake that the State Park Commission wanted to buy. It was what is called Glamping now and included an airdrop of ice for the five o’clock cocktail hour.

One of the ways that Daddy and I bonded was by arguing. Not fighting arguing, more like discussion arguing. We argued over politics and the changing world of the sixties, we argued over the Vietnam War and the murders of students by the National Guard at Kent State, and, probably in 1967 or 68, we argued over a crazy idea that he loved; running a tramway from Palm Springs at to a point within San Jacinto State Park at 8,516 feet. The landing spot is about a five-and-a-half mile walk to the Peak at 10,834 feet. Daddy thought the tram would be a marvel.

Mount San Jacinto is one of three major peaks that surround the Los Angeles Basin. The other two are Mount San Antonio at 10,064 feet and San Gorgonio at 11,502 feet. Mount San Antonio has a ski area near the top but the other two peaks are Wilderness areas and are rare treasures. In early 1966, I had climbed, walked really, spending one night near the peak of San Jacinto and it was breathtaking, an exquisite alpine wilderness ten thousand feet and about a three-hour drive from 12,534,000 million people. I thought this is a sacred place and should be protected, that the solitude would be destroyed by the tram, and my dad thought people who couldn’t make the walk, or didn’t even want to – for that matter – should still have the opportunity to enjoy the mountain. Reflecting back and adding a dash of projection, I think he thought, even without the solitude, people like him could taste the miracle of the natural world.

Last weekend, Father’s Day Weekend, to find some sun, Michele and I drove to Palm Springs and took the tram up Mount San Jacinto. It was not my first trip on the tram, but it was my first time in about fifty years. It brought tears to my eyes. The tram building is what is now called Mid-Century Modern or – strange to my ear – just modern. It reminded me of my dad and so did the people milling around at the top.

I now understand that Daddy was right about the tram. I also now realize that I’ve felt this way for a long time. The solitude backpacking can provide takes a lot of space but there is still a lot of wild space left in California. The top of the tram is not that kind of space, it is obviously not wild, and the people that have made it there are not the same people as those who are backpacking into Pioneer Basin and they probably never will be. Even so, everybody I saw was enjoying themselves in the cool mountain air and some of them might even have their lives changed.

Thanks, Daddy.

We went down to LA to get some sun and heat for my Birthday. The sun and heat thing is not working out but we had a great dinner.

More later.