Do Not Send Fruit (and other cautionary tales)

As we've mentioned before, we get a box of produce from Full Circle Farms every week. With each box, we usually receive around four oranges, a few apples or pears and some other fruit, like some kiwis, a lemon or a lime. If we don't eat all that fruit right away, it starts to pile up.


This is all the fruit we've accumulated recently. That's a lot of organic fruit.

That's right! Organic!

So Samara put it to good use and made a giant batch of fruit salad. Anyway, the point is: if you were thinking of sending us fresh produce, don't. We have other preferences for care packages.

While I was at work today, I tried to snap a few other photos. There was a giant raven on top of a lightpost nearby, but those pictures didn't turn out very well. I did take a picture of the Canyonero in the parking lot at the courthouse. Yes, that's a pink dumpster. Yes, that snow pile from clearing the parking lot is as tall as my knobby-tired SUV.

Thanksgiving is coming up tomorrow. We've got a couple of folks coming over to enjoy food with us. In addition, I may be helping the judge with a little snowmobile moving operation that will require me to drive a snowmachine. That's pretty exciting! (For the uninitiated, a snowmobile is called a snowmachine or snow-go here in Alaska.)

I am a little disappointed this evening, to be perfectly honest. You see, Samara called me this afternoon and asked whether I wanted to be an emergency foster parent. SAFE has a children's shelter, but they can only take a maximum of 5 kids, and they were already full. So when they had a new baby come in because his mother was in jail temporarily, they needed to find a placement for this little 5-month-old boy. Now I'm not sure I want my own kids yet, permenantly, but I was looking forward to taking care of this baby for a while. Kids that age are cute. But, as it turns out, they found another family to place him with by the end of the day and we didn't have to crunch through the paperwork to take a baby home.

On the other hand, I guess this will be a more laid-back weekend than if we had a baby to deal with.

While I'm on a roll, let me tell you about another thing that I've recently run across. This is something that's probably not completely unique to rural Alaska, but I bet it's not often seen elsewhere. Alaska has two things that are probably not found in many places: native villages and cultish Christian sects. First, Alaska is different than a lot of the lower 48. See, down there, the US government pushed Native Americans farther and farther west and onto reservations. In Alaska, natives weren't treated well by any means, but instead of reservations, you have tribes that still remain in the area where they originally settled. There are native villages with tribal governments all over the place, and they have some valid claims to sovereign rights.

Now I don't claim to know much about tribal sovereignity and the related law, but I think that the treaties with Alaskan natives weren't broken as often by the US government, especially since Alaska has plenty of open land (that no one really wants since it's covered in snow) and Alaska didn't become a state until 1959.

I'm getting off track here, but the point is that these tribes have an attractive quality: they have the right to run their own courts, if they choose.

The other thing that Alaska attracts is people that don't like the government too much. Alaska has a strong Libertarian tradition, and there are a fair number of Christian sects that would rather be ruled by God's law than man's law. In fact, there are some particularly icky folks (read: racist "Christians") who feel that they are "sovereign citizens" and aren't subject to the jurisdiction of state or federal courts.

Now these folks seem to be getting together. I've seen some native defendants in criminal courts getting together with non-lawyer "advocates" who are advising them that the court somehow doesn't have jurisdiction. These poor folks are refusing to accept court-appointed counsel or to do anything meaningful in their own defense, and they're going to end up in jail unnecessarily. But they're doing it because the "Christian" loonies are convincing them to make their standard anti-government arguments with a tribal sovereignty spin. Their arguments are somewhat attractive to someone with a simplistic worldview.

One argument, for instance, is that since court documents capitalize the person's entire name, the court isn't actually referring to the actual person, and therefore cannot exercise proper jurisdiction. Another argument involves asserting one's Sixth Amendment right to counsel, while simultaneously refusing to accept court-appointed counsel and not hiring one own's counsel. The advocates of this theory feel that they've hit upon some perfect Catch-22 wherein the court can't allow them to be prosecuted because their Constitutional rights are being "violated." Of course, that's simply not the case.

These folks file long documents with the court that cite English common law, law dictionaries and miscite Supreme Court cases. They display a fundamental misunderstanding of legal concepts and sometimes even babble incoherently. They make semantic arguments that they think are somehow ironclad methods of preventing their prosecution in Alaska's state courts.

You know what I think is the stupidest part of this whole thing? These folks are paranoid about the government, and yet they fail to see that the government is pretty much going to do whatever it wants as long as the majority of people let it. Even if they came up with the perfect argument by researching ancient legal documents, treaties, federal and state constitutions, and nutty semantic interpretations, the courts are just going to keep doing what they've been doing for decades. No judge or supreme court justice is going to suddenly rule that you don't have to allow a court to have jurisdiction over you unless you specifically agree.

Mao said that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. I guess in a democracy you've got the couple with that with the consent of the governed, but since most of the governed can't be bothered to care, I'd say the combination of the government's strength and the governed's apathy means that our courts can pretty much maintain the status quo no matter how linguistically brilliant your stupid legal arguments are.

Sorry. That was a long rant. But the point is, Alaska has some idiotic crackpots, and they're not exactly helping the jailed native people who already live in an environment dominated by poverty and alcohol.

On a final note, Alaska can be a dangerous place. One of Samara's co-workers lost her sister tonight to a snowmachine accident. We don't know the full story yet, but my understanding is that she had some type of snowmachine accident and no one found her until she was already hypothermic. They did their best at the hospital to revive her, but couldn't. It's cold out here, folks, and sometimes that cold kills.