Agenda CEG Meeting – November 19, 2021 4:00 pm Mount Baker & Zoom & Channel 371 Katherine Graubard, Facilitator Rick Baugh, Minutes
Report of Last Month’s Activities – Past events: David Domke First & Second Talk – Pt 1 & 2 of 3 (Peggy Newsom)
Sawant Recall & Soap Box
Coming events:
DATE/TIME
EVENT
Place
Nov 22, Mon – 3:00 p.m.
David Domke – Beating the Filibuster Pt 3 of 3 (Newsom)
Mt. B & Zoom & 371
Dec 7, Tues – Voting
Sawant Recall Vote
Jan 21, Fri – 4:00 p.m.
CEG Meeting
Mt. B & Zoom & 371
Updates on Involvements in Civic Organizations: WACCRA: Rick Baugh Interview of Mary Ann Hagan: Her years of music Involvement Discussion on Future Activities Ideas on topics and speakers for future meetings. Next CEG Meeting (New Meeting Date – 3rd Friday of the Month) Fri., Jan 21, 2022 at 4:00 Mt. Baker.
Tuesday, November 16th at 7:30 p.m. – Third District City Council Recall Forum
Wednesday, November 17th at 3:00 p.m. – Skyline Soapbox – Third City Council District Recall
CEG Reminder – Third District Recall Forum and Skyline Soapbox
SPECIAL ELECTION – DECEMBER 7, 2021
This is your friendly CEG reminder and invitation to join us for two related events.
Tuesday, November 16th at 7:30 p.m. – Third District City Council Recall Forum
Please plan to join representatives of the Recall Sawant Committee and the Kshama Solidarity Committee for our 3rd District Recall Forum. Kim Street will serve as our Moderator and Karen Knudson as Timer. Don Clark has agreed to act as host, and will introduce the participants.
Wednesday, November 17th at 3:00 p.m. – Skyline Soapbox – Third City Council District Recall
Also please plan to join our Moderator Steve Ellis and Timer Mary Montgomery for our final Skyline Soapbox of the year. As it is a single issue, not a collection of candidates and ballot issues, each resident will have up to three minutes to express their views on whether Councilmember Sawant should or should not be recalled and removed from office.
These events will be held in the Mount Baker Room, and will be available for viewing on Zoom and on Channels 370 and 371
Background:
The question on the ballot is not simply a matter of a re-do of the election. It is a determination by the voters as to whether Councilmember Kshama Sawant should be removed, but should she be removed for cause. The State Supreme Court has concluded that the voters should decide whether Councilmember Sawant actually committed one or more of the three acts listed below, and if so, were the actions sufficiently egregious as to warrant removal from office. The three alleged acts are:
1. Use of City Resources To Support a Ballot Initiative and Failure To Comply with Public Disclosure Requirements Related to Such Support.
2. Disregarding State Orders Related to COVID-19 and Endangering the Safety of City Workers and Other Individuals by Admitting Hundreds of People into City Hall on June 9, 2020, When It Was Closed to the Public.
3. Leading a Protest March to Mayor Jenny Durkan’s Private Residence, the Location of Which Councilmember Sawant Knows Is Protected under Confidentiality Laws.
Ed note: I think in some sense we’re all beginning to adjust to whatever the new normal is. We’re not sure yet, we’re uneasy, but COVID will recede into the background of our daily lives–just one more thing to worry about. We can hope and pray that this is not a glimpse of the future. I doubt it. Let’s see the glass half full and get on with life.
Corridor in an abandoned penitentiary. Image from Shutterstock.
After Craig Baxley connected a plastic tube to vials of drugs to stop the heart of a condemned South Carolina inmate, he asked God to forgive him.
In the bathroom near the execution room, Baxley sank to his knees and recited the Lord’s Prayer, praying, “Deliver us from evil.”
“Yet something evil seemed to stick,” the State reports. “From that day on, Baxley felt like a different person. Nightmares replaced his previously sound sleep. Painful knots invaded his stomach. Anytime he became nervous, his hands started to drip with sweat like they did in the death chamber.”
Baxley was a former Marine who had trained next to friends who died in the 1983 Beirut Marine barracks bombing. He had seen men stabbed to death in prison after he began work for the South Carolina Department of Corrections. But his friends noticed a change after the execution.
“A Southern Baptist who attended church every Sunday,” the State reported, “Baxley became convinced that killing others for the government had condemned him to hell. He stopped going to services and started thinking about suicide.”
The State spoke with Baxley and nine others involved in executions in the South. The newspaper learned that those who were most affected were people who administered the lethal injections or pressed the button for the electric chair.
Jim Harvey oversaw prisons, including the one in Columbia, South Carolina, where the executions took place. He developed the rules for executions and chose the executioners before his retirement in 1998. He didn’t want volunteers because he didn’t want someone like that working for him.
He told a reporter from the State that nobody enjoyed the job and nobody wanted to do it. He was consumed by stress before executions, and afterward at home, he was quick to become angry. He no longer supports capital punishment “because there’s so much inequity in who gets the death penalty,” he said.
Baxley was officially considered a volunteer, although he and another executioner, Terry Bracey, said the work seemed like a condition for promotions. They carried out the death penalty in the early 2000s after Harvey left the job. When they asked to take a break, they were told that they would lose their leadership roles if they stepped aside, they told the State.
They later quit and sued for intentional infliction of emotional distress and violation of their rights. They also filed workers’ compensation claims for disability caused by the stress. Both were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. Both need medication to sleep.
The suits and workers’ compensation claims were tossed, although both men do receive disability retirement benefits.
Another former executioner killed himself, the newspaper learned.
Executions were paused in South Carolina in 2017 after the state ran out of lethal injection drugs. The state is preparing for new executions after lawmakers approved death by firing squad. And the electric chair is an alternative that’s still on the books.
“The tools of death could next be electric volts, bullets or a drug cocktail,” the State reported. “Regardless of the method, executions are likely to return to South Carolina.”
Posted inCrime, end of life, Essays|Comments Off on Executioner was convinced he would be condemned to hell; others also suffer long-term effects
Ed note: I never imagined that each tree has its very own unique DNA. This science helped to prosecute tree poachers in our own beautiful Olympic forrests.
By Vimal Patel Nov. 10, 2021 in the New York Times
In the spring and summer of 2018, a crew of poachers had been chopping down trees by night in the Olympic National Forest in Washington State, federal prosecutors said.
On Aug. 3, they came upon the wasp’s nest.
It was at the base of a bigleaf maple, a species of hardwood tree with a shimmering grain that is prized for its use in violins, guitars and other musical instruments. The crew was selling bigleaf maples to a mill in Tumwater, using forged permits, prosecutors said. Logging is banned in the forest, a vast wilderness encompassing nearly a million acres.
The timber poachers sprayed insecticide and most likely gasoline on the nest, and burned it, the authorities said. But they were unable to douse the fire with water bottles, so they fled, prosecutors said.
The fire spread out from the forest’s Elk Lake area, near Hood Canal, burning 3,300 acres and costing about $4.2 million to contain, prosecutors said. It came to be known as the Maple Fire.
On Monday, the leader of the illegal operation, Justin Andrew Wilke, 39, was sentenced to 20 months in federal prison, prosecutors said. In July, a jury had convicted Mr. Wilke of conspiracy, theft of public property and trafficking in illegally harvested timber, among other charges, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington.
GROWING OLD GRACEFULLY – (Written by a woman to women, but…..)
I have no idea how to do that…
Maybe…
Don’t complain too much…just enough
You are not the center of the universe, though your aches, pains, lumps and faltering organs point to you as the center. Enough physical tribulation and little else exists.
You are not the center of the universe of your descendants. Was your grandmother the center of your universe? You are lucky if young relatives text quarterly.
Don’t wear a lot of blush, aka rouge, or low cut dresses with the ladies hanging out. Today’s breasts have lost the war with gravity and are not the breasts of yore. Red cheeks and ladies out are both done on our campus. I notice geriatric décolletage makes men look away rather than towards. Kind of like looking at the scene of an accident.
My whole body looks like the scene of an accident. But it’s breathing and still here.
Is still existing how to age gracefully? Good enough for me. The older I grow, the more existing seems like a miracle.
Seattle Forest Week is running from November 6th to November 13th. We have several events happening in Freeway Park this week in partnership with Trees For Seattle for Seattle Forest Week.
Today (November 10th) at 1pm we have a virtual Tree Tour on Instagram Live on the profile @treesforseattle. The walk will detail the variety of tree species that call Freeway Park home.
This Saturday (November 13th) at 10am there will be an in-person Tree Tour just like the virtual one happening today. The public is invited to attend this one in-person.
Following Saturday’s Tree Tour will be a bulb planting party in the park at 11:30am. We’ll be planting tulips, pansies, and daffodils to bloom in the spring. Coffee and snacks will be provided to all.
I’ve attached our Forest Week poster for your convenience. Please pass this info along to your residents, guests, and customers.
Cultivating Compassion: 2021 Virtual Creative Aging Conference Friday, December 10, 9 am–3 pm PST Rooted in a discussion of compassion and empathy, this one-day virtual conference will focus on how we care for ourselves, each other, and the natural world. An exciting range of speakers from different disciplines and life experiences will offer perspectives on the many ways we seek and build connections across time, culture, and language. Continuing education credits will be offered.
Love, Loss, and Kimchi Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart Author, Singer/Songwriter, Japanese Breakfast Sara Dickerman, Food Writer
The Grandmother Effect Lynda V. Mapes, Environmental Reporter, Seattle Times Jay Julius, Fisherman; President, Se’Si’Le; and Former Chairman of Lummi Nation
In rereading “Travels with Charlie” recently, I came upon Steinbeck’s commentary about Seattle as he and his precocious dog traversed the country. Does his description of our city echo with your views some 60 years hence in 2021? Is he too pessimistic? When does progress become destruction?
“I remembered Seattle as a town sitting on hills beside a matchless harborage–a little city of space and trees and gardens, its houses matched to such a background. it is no longer so. The tops of hills are shaved off to make level warrens for the rabbits of the present. The highways eight lanes wide cut like glaciers through the uneasy land. This traffic rushed with murderous intensity. On the outskirts of this place I once knew well I could not find my way. Along what had been country lanes rich with berries, high wire fences and mile-long factories stretched, and the yellow smoke of progress hung over all, fighting the sea winds’ efforts to drive them off.
This sounds as though I bemoan an older time, which is the preoccupation of the old, or cultivate an opposition to change, which is the currency of the rich and stupid. it is not so. This Seattle was not something changed that I once knew. It was a new thing. Set down there not knowing it was Seattle….I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.“
As we approach the end of the year, it is my pleasure to invite you to my upcoming virtual town hall to have a conversation about the work that I have been doing during the first half of the 117th Congress. I am looking forward to answering your questions about the past year and what’s ahead.
This event will take place on Tuesday, November 16 at 6:00 PM PST. If you would like to join the event, please register here.
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