Kansas Dresners
Tuesday, March 07, 2017
An Open Letter Delivered to Representative Lynn Jenkins on Elections and Investigations
7 March 2017
Dear Representative Jenkins,
If our republic is to be a democracy, to represent the will
of the people, to effect the sovereignty of the citizenry, then elections must be
carried out in the most fair, reliable, and transparent way possible.
Ensuring that votes cast are counted reliably (much more
important to have a clear result and a verifiable paper trail than to have answers
quickly), and that citizens have easy access to the ballot, are critical civil
rights issues that the Sessions-led Department of Justice must not be allowed
to let fall by the wayside.
Regulation of political expenditures is clearly necessary,
well beyond our current system that allows money to flow into local, state, and
national campaigns without being accounted for or accountable. Contribution
limits have clearly failed to keep the wealthiest people and corporations from
leveraging their resources into outsized influence, but that doesn't mean that
abandoning the idea of a level playing field makes any sense: rather what's needed
is greater transparency, a relatively easy fix in the age of internet access,
so that all donations are accounted for and credited.
And, needless to say, while it's not at all unusual for the
international community to take an interest in US politics, the intersection of
interests and careers between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin's Russia
and his kleptocratic oligarch associates is bizarre. While the idea that the
Obama administration wiretapped the Trump campaign without proper warrants and
protections is absurd (and if they had, why wouldn't they release any of the
information they gatherered?!), a careful examination of how overseas computer
intrusions were coordinated with domestic political actors, a proper audit of
voting results, and a serious discussion of how US policy is being reshaped are
absolutely necessary.
Conflict of interest laws are supposed to protect the
citizens of this country from leaders who put their own interests and their
family interests ahead of the common welfare. Nepotism, self-dealing, personal
enrichment are violations of the public trust and need to be consistently and
coherently punished. Congress has a critical role to play in making sure that
the executive branch is living up to the standards which the American people
have historically expected and deserve; for the last eight years, at least,
Congress has taken that role somewhat seriously, and there is no reason for
that to change.
Respectfully,
....
¶ Tuesday, March 07, 2017 0 comments
Tuesday, February 28, 2017
An Open Letter on Health Care Delivered to Representative Lynn Jenkins of Kansas
Here is the text of my letter:
February 28, 2017
Dear Representative Jenkins,
The Affordable Care Act, also known as
"Obamacare", is one of the best steps forward in American health care
in the last half-century, expanding access to health insurance and requiring
that insurers cover actual medical costs much more consistently and comprehensively
than ever before. It's true that health insurance costs and health care costs
have continued to rise, but at lower rates than before the ACA was in force.
It's true that some administrative aspects of the law have been complicated,
but any business in which for-profit entities are required to pay for services
is going to face resistance. It's also true that a majority of Americans
believe that the law needs to be 'fixed' but only a small minority actually
believe that repeal and return to pre-ACA conditions is necessary; many more
people believe that health care needs to be more
widely available, more affordable,
and that the way to achieve that is by expanding
the reach of the law, not retracting it.
The biggest barrier to full access and reasonable costs that
the American health care system faces is profits. Insurance company profits
come from shortchanging customers, and health care profits come from
overcharging customers. Neither of those are going to change without legal
protections for health care consumers, which is to say, people. Those
protections must come in two forms: legal requirements that insurance cover the
full range of health care issues, and accountability for both insurance
companies and health care providers. I'm not talking about price comparisons:
health care isn't a television or car, but a fundamental necessity; people
can't be required to know more than doctors and accountants to navigate the
system. Having local officials makes the system more responsive to local needs:
this is why state-level regulation needs to be maintained.
Medicare and Medicaid are very efficient systems for
providing health insurance, and Americans deserve the widest possible access to
those services. Spending on non-profit insurance and health care systems has a
massive stimulating effect on the economy, supporting jobs, helping people to
maintain their employment, shifting spending away from administrative excesses
towards productive services and consumption. Expanding health insurance access so
that it's portable and reliable and affordable also has a stimulating effect on
the economy, empowering entrepreneurship, business creation, artistic ambition.
Expanding health insurance access so that people with existing medical
conditions can maintain health care access saves money in the long run, and
saves lives.
Health care is like education: it's a social good that looks
like a private good, and an expensive thing that pays for itself in economic
growth and social success. Health care spending is a lot like education
spending: comprehensive systems run by serious professionals who are dedicated
to the success of their patients/students work better than systems seeking
profit. There are ways in which both education and health care could be improved,
but making them better for investors and speculators is not one of them.
Respectfully,
Jonathan and Anna Dresner
¶ Tuesday, February 28, 2017 0 comments
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Winfield 2011
Thursday and Friday we were at the 40th Walnut Valley Music Festival, aka "Winfield." Woody's been a few times; I went once before; this is, of course, Max's first trip. Being the 40th year of the festival, there were a great many old favorite performers, so lots of names we recognized. We were only there for two of the four days (the campground celebrations started a week earlier), but it was fun, and Thursday, in particular, was uncrowded. You can see the performers and grounds here.
¶ Saturday, September 17, 2011 0 comments
Thursday and Friday we were at the 40th Walnut Valley Music Festival, aka "Winfield." Woody's been a few times; I went once before; this is, of course, Max's first trip. Being the 40th year of the festival, there were a great many old favorite performers, so lots of names we recognized. We were only there for two of the four days (the campground celebrations started a week earlier), but it was fun, and Thursday, in particular, was uncrowded. You can see the performers and grounds here.
 | The first thing we did was Linda Tilton's Ukulele workshop. Usually, Winfield workshops are more showing than teaching, but this was a solid, hands-on basic class. |
 | As you can see, we were bundled up: the temperature didn't get much above 60 for two days, and the drizzle and wind kept it chilly. It was a good year to be selling official sweatshirts.... |
 | John McCutcheon is one of the most reliable and popular performers at Winfield, and a great guy. In addition to his own solo work, he invited Notorious up for a few songs, and joined in Bryan Bowers sets at least twice. |
 | In addition to the main stages, Winfield has a very lively campground jam tradition, with some groups returning year after year, with themes and logos. "Froggy Mountain" is the camp which some of Woody's Kansas City friends maintain, including Mike, who's one of the Kansas City Ukesters. |
 | More jamming! (Note the official limited edition Froggy Mountain frog cap! Most of the camp groups aren't that organized, but we did see some which involved great effort and focus). |
 | I wasn't trying to be anonymous, but Max and I were messing around and his hat ended up hanging from my cap. Naturally, he got a shot. |
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Little Balkans Days and Gutters
That was last weekend. This weekend was more a-little-of-this-a-little-of-that, including a little it-might-rain-again-someday home repair (and it rained last night, thank you very much!) which did have the unfortunate effect of disturbing the amphibian below. Max was my spotter, and photographer, while I fixed the back, and helped clean out (and sweep up after) the front gutter/mulch pile.
This is a test of an animated gif. If it's working you should see flashing train lights:
¶ Sunday, September 11, 2011 0 comments
 | Our traditional Little Balkans Days observances starts with the train ride. We got some extra tickets along with the family pack, so brought one of Max's friends. |
 | The next stop after the train is usually the petting zoo, yes. Max is getting a bit big for the pony rides, but the camel holds him just fine. Then we wander through the Car Show. |
 | This year we checked out the folk-life show, though the music didn't hold Max's interest all that well at times, he found ways to amuse himself. |
That was last weekend. This weekend was more a-little-of-this-a-little-of-that, including a little it-might-rain-again-someday home repair (and it rained last night, thank you very much!) which did have the unfortunate effect of disturbing the amphibian below. Max was my spotter, and photographer, while I fixed the back, and helped clean out (and sweep up after) the front gutter/mulch pile.
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This is a test of an animated gif. If it's working you should see flashing train lights:
¶ Sunday, September 11, 2011 0 comments
Friday, July 29, 2011
Underhill Academy Takes Shape
How is homeschooling like moving? Everything changes, and everything has to be moved. Well, maybe it only feels that way.
This is how the Family Room looked at the start of the project. Note the Lego-strewn desk and table, the haphazardly packed blue wire shelves, the piles...
Stage One: Clean out under the desk and table, consolidate legos
The Legos were a particular challenge, and weren't completely done until the very end, because we kept finding legos up to and including the final floor sweeping.
Next, the wire shelves, which had become more or less random collections of... stuff.
With the basic infrastructure in place, it was time for finishing touches: the built-in shelves, and then... putting everything that he was keeping back somewhere. This meant putting stuff back in the wire shelves (saving the top ones for folders) and other places, including a lot of toys and mementoes which needed to go in his room.
So, after a lot of that, the room finally looks like this:
Now we're moving on to phase two of the project. Phase two? Yeah, well when you change part of a system -- in this case a major room in a household -- that much, it affects other parts of the system. Look at the office:
Moving Woody's old desk out of there, and making room for school files, meant processing and shredding large quantities of old papers, moving a file cabinet to make room for the desk, and generally reexamining how a lot of things were stored. I went through years worth of bills and papers, sorting and shredding and recycling. We've found things long thought lost -- that second bin for frisbees and balls was full of miscellaneous stuff we didn't know what to do with when we moved, including Japanese chopstick holders in the shape of tops and the instruction manuals to most of the power tools I bought in Hawai'i.
Now we're working on Max's room: moving a few boxes of toys upstairs means that we need room for more stuff, so he's doing the same process there: pull out everything, decide whether it's garbage, give-away or keep, and figure out how to put it all back. And we just bought a few hundred dollars worth of frames for posters and pictures that hadn't been put up yet. We'll be done... someday.
Many thanks to Grandma Marcia for her help getting the process started and moved to the middle stages. ¶ Friday, July 29, 2011 2 comments
This is how the Family Room looked at the start of the project. Note the Lego-strewn desk and table, the haphazardly packed blue wire shelves, the piles...
Stage One: Clean out under the desk and table, consolidate legos
 |  |
 | Note the cleared desk, the elimination of piles around the desk, and Max playing with something he hadn't seen in a year or more. |
The Legos were a particular challenge, and weren't completely done until the very end, because we kept finding legos up to and including the final floor sweeping.
 |  |
 | Once the Legos were basically organized, though, the rest of the room could start shifting. Note that the keyboard moves from next to the Lego table over to where the pie chest with the games was, and vice versa. |
Next, the wire shelves, which had become more or less random collections of... stuff.
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 | Once the shelves were emptied, we turned them sideways, to make room for that shiny new (OK, we've had it for ten years, but we haven't used it in a while and I cleaned it up) table and new (actually new, thanks to Grandma Marcia) drawers. |
With the basic infrastructure in place, it was time for finishing touches: the built-in shelves, and then... putting everything that he was keeping back somewhere. This meant putting stuff back in the wire shelves (saving the top ones for folders) and other places, including a lot of toys and mementoes which needed to go in his room.
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So, after a lot of that, the room finally looks like this:
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 | As you can see, the wire shelves are still mostly empty -- a lot of stuff is going upstairs -- and the balls and games are under control. |
Now we're moving on to phase two of the project. Phase two? Yeah, well when you change part of a system -- in this case a major room in a household -- that much, it affects other parts of the system. Look at the office:
Moving Woody's old desk out of there, and making room for school files, meant processing and shredding large quantities of old papers, moving a file cabinet to make room for the desk, and generally reexamining how a lot of things were stored. I went through years worth of bills and papers, sorting and shredding and recycling. We've found things long thought lost -- that second bin for frisbees and balls was full of miscellaneous stuff we didn't know what to do with when we moved, including Japanese chopstick holders in the shape of tops and the instruction manuals to most of the power tools I bought in Hawai'i.
Now we're working on Max's room: moving a few boxes of toys upstairs means that we need room for more stuff, so he's doing the same process there: pull out everything, decide whether it's garbage, give-away or keep, and figure out how to put it all back. And we just bought a few hundred dollars worth of frames for posters and pictures that hadn't been put up yet. We'll be done... someday.
Many thanks to Grandma Marcia for her help getting the process started and moved to the middle stages. ¶ Friday, July 29, 2011 2 comments
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Limericks
For the Mushroom FM birthday, Woody's making her listeners compose limericks to get a free t-shirt. Relatives not allowed, but Max and I got to demonstrate homemade limericks to inspire them. Max did one he made up on the way to school, and I did two that I wrote this morning:
For Passover, most Jews eat matzo(r)
We eat it plain, sometimes with butter
instead of flour
we grind it to powder
and cook it with eggs, oil, water
People say that they like history
But they just mean the Channel. Not me.
I'm not big on war.
Ice truckers? They bore.
I explain how things came to be.
The scan isn't perfect. Nor the rhyme. But for improv it's not bad.
For Passover, most Jews eat matzo(r)
We eat it plain, sometimes with butter
instead of flour
we grind it to powder
and cook it with eggs, oil, water
People say that they like history
But they just mean the Channel. Not me.
I'm not big on war.
Ice truckers? They bore.
I explain how things came to be.
The scan isn't perfect. Nor the rhyme. But for improv it's not bad.
Labels: poetry
¶ Saturday, April 23, 2011 0 comments
Thursday, March 17, 2011
March Maxness
¶ Thursday, March 17, 2011 1 comments
 | After two snow-day cancellations, the PTO gave up trying to have the science fair, but we didn't. After some communication with the school, and Max's teacher in particular, she decided to stage a 3rd grade science fair, invited the other teachers in the grade to have kids bring in their undisplayed projects, and view the results. Well, only Max and his friend Logan actually did, but they had a blast, showing all three of the 3rd grade groups, one after the other, their science chops. Below is Logan's demonstration of breaking down water to gas with electricity flowing through pencil graphite: you can see the bubbles! Max's project, of course, can be found here. |
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 | The science fair was a nice release after a tense week: State Reading Assessment tests. The tests themselves were about an hour's work, spread over three days, but they've spent the last few weeks getting the kids so worked up about them that it's a wonder any of them wanted to go to school. Last week they did all kinds of 'dress funny to show your spirit' stuff: this was "Dress Up Day." |
 | Yesterday Max was messing around while we were in the kitchen, and I heard him and Woody joking about getting an updated rocking horse picture.... so I took one. Not the same without the sailor suit, though! |
 | Our other project this week was the Alligator Cake! We were asked to bring something good for the Purim Oneg, and Max has wanted to make this "Princess and the Frog" cookbook cake since we got the book, so we did. Spearmint-leaf toes and scales, M&Ms, too. Yogurt Pretzels for teeth, eyes. white bundt cake and white icing with a few score drops of food color and a teaspoon of peppermint extract. As you can see below, it's not quite the same as the book, but not bad for an historian..... |
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Thursday, January 20, 2011
Science Fair 2011
Which dissolvable materials will make cloth fireproof? I want to learn this because I read that alum makes cloth fireproof, and I wanted to find out whether that was true, and whether other dissolvable materials would make cloth fireproof too.
Alum makes cloth fireproof if you use a low-heat flame. The same is true of Borax, water, salt, and Epsom salts. With the hotter flame, the cloth soaked in all of these burned some, but not as much as when dipped in the other solutions or when not dipped at all. Baking soda made the cloth burn more slowly than plain cloth with both types of flame, but not as slowly as alum, salt, and Epsom salts. Dawn made the cloth burn more, with both the low and high flames. With the high flame, sugar made the cloth burn much more than plain cloth, but less than Dawn did. With a low flame, cloth dipped in sugar did not burn very much. See the chart for the details.
Borax and Alum were supposed to make cloth fireproof. They did, but not very well. Dawn and sugar were very flammable. The rest were somewhere in between. In the future, we could test other kinds of cloth or other solutes.
¶ Thursday, January 20, 2011 4 comments
The Flame Game
What Burns What Doesn't
By Max Dresner
The Question: What I hope to Learn
Which dissolvable materials will make cloth fireproof? I want to learn this because I read that alum makes cloth fireproof, and I wanted to find out whether that was true, and whether other dissolvable materials would make cloth fireproof too.
 | Materials
|
 | Equipment
|
The Steps
First, we had to get all the materials. Some were common household objects, but some were harder to get. We bought the last bottle of alum at the pharmacy. The rest was easy to get at Wal-Mart. | Next, we cut the cloth into squares with 12 squares on a side and labeled them. |
 | Then, we made the solutions... |
 | ...and dipped the cloth in them. We hung them to dry for a day. |
 | The next day, we lit one piece of cloth dipped in each solution with a very small blowtorch. We started outside, but it was too windy, so we had to move into the garage after trying the plain cloth and the first attempt with cloth dipped in water. I hoped at least one would explode, but no such luck. |
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 | The final day, we lighted the second batch of cloths with a regular-heat lighter in the garage, with the garage door closed. |
Results
Alum makes cloth fireproof if you use a low-heat flame. The same is true of Borax, water, salt, and Epsom salts. With the hotter flame, the cloth soaked in all of these burned some, but not as much as when dipped in the other solutions or when not dipped at all. Baking soda made the cloth burn more slowly than plain cloth with both types of flame, but not as slowly as alum, salt, and Epsom salts. Dawn made the cloth burn more, with both the low and high flames. With the high flame, sugar made the cloth burn much more than plain cloth, but less than Dawn did. With a low flame, cloth dipped in sugar did not burn very much. See the chart for the details.
Conclusions
Borax and Alum were supposed to make cloth fireproof. They did, but not very well. Dawn and sugar were very flammable. The rest were somewhere in between. In the future, we could test other kinds of cloth or other solutes.
| After Treatment | High Heat | Low Heat | |||||
| Name | Stiffness | Color Change | Flammability | Squares Burned | Flammability | Squares Burned | Notes |
| No Solute Ø | None | None | Burns a short period | 4 | Burns some | 3 | The burn looks like flowing lava |
| Water H2O | Almost none | None | Short | 5 | Almost none | 1 | The fire starts after the flame is lifted |
| Alum NH4Al (SO4)2 | Stiff | Patchy | Small | 5 | None | 2 | Snow-like substance on cloth, turns black, intense smoke, doesn't burn well |
| Salt NaCl | Slightly stiff | None | Almost none | 3 | None | 1/2 | |
| Sugar C12H22O11 | Very stiff | None | High | 30 | Not deeply scorched | 1 | Almost impossible to bend |
| Epsom Salt MgSO4•7H2O | Stiffer | None | Moderate | 22 | None | 1/2 | |
| Borax Na2B4O7 •10H2O | Slightly stiffer | Sparkly | Almost none | 5 | Almost none | 1 | Snow like substance covering cloth |
| Baking Soda NaHCO3 | Slightly stiffer | None | Slightly flammable | 4 | Crawling ember | 1 1/2 | |
| Soft Soap (Dawn) | None | Slightly flakey | Highly flammable | 134 | Tall long flame | 12 | |
