The ways of bureaucracy are strange indeed - but occasionally forehead-smackingly funny, too. For instance, the Alaska Department of Transportation calculates that one is 20 percent of two.

We disagree.

There used to be two summer Bellingham runs a week; starting this summer, there will be one. Even those few hereabouts who like that idea agree that if you used to have two, and now you have one, you now have half as much as you used to have.

There are those who think this is a good thing, as it pertains to the Bellingham run. They say that if we are going to have an "Alaska" Marine Highway System, our priority ought to be Alaska cities, not some city in Washington. Fair enough - short-sighted and wrong; but at least it's a point of view that has a philosophical underpinning.

But DOT would rather argue about the percentage.

That's a distraction from the point that our state is slashing and weakening our only highway from here to the rest of the world, and it's not a very well orchestrated distraction. It would be laughable, if they weren't damaging Alaskans.

The division thinks if they don't call it a 50 percent cut, then it won't be. So they are insisting that no one characterize it that way. According to the DOT, the way you figure out the amount the summer run has been cut is not to compare summer schedule to summer schedule, but whole year to whole year.

Of course, DOT doesn't publish schedules for a whole year at once.

But for this silliness to work, pretend that it does. Compare the whole-year schedule of the past to the whole-year schedule of the present, and shazaam! Now the Bellingham run is slashed by "only" 20 percent, they say.

Guess we just aren't used to doing things the "transparent" way.

Summer is the busy season for the Alaska Marine Highway run from Bellingham to Ketchikan and the way many people begin their trips from the Lower 48 to all points in Alaska. Tourism is a powerful economic force in Alaska.

Summer can, indeed, be viewed as a season of itself - much as the marine highway itself views it, in publishing its schedule. So as to the question of whether one is half of two, we respectfully but thoroughly disagree with the DOT's argument that it isn't.

And saying it louder, or patronizingly - as was the case at a hearing last week in which a DOT administrator scolded Capt. William Hopkins, a Ketchikan member of the Marine Transportation Advisory Board - doesn't make one equal 20 percent of two.

'Cause you know what? It isn't.

It's bad enough - in fact, it's inexcusable - that the commissioner of the department doesn't know much about the ferry system or the DOT's 2030 plan, when speaking to the House Transportation Committee.

It's even worse - if there are degrees of inexcusability - that the man who heads the ferry system, the man who was supposed to come back to the House with the answers, instead has to look to his aides for the most basic answers about the system he has been leading for a year. What communities does the ferry system serve? is an example of one of the difficult questions he couldn't answer without help.

The emperor has some tailors the state DOT might want to employ. We hear those tailors are into "transparency," too.