Young Mountains

2008 Revisited: Stripping delegates! Haircut planting!

2009-11-12T14:00:00.005-05:00

Well this is interesting:

Remember the mess that was Florida, Michigan and the earliest Iowa caucus in history?

Turns out some of the complications were orchestrated by the Obama campaign.

In his new book "The Audacity to Win" Obama campaign manager David Plouffe confesses they tried to "box in" Clinton after the Democratic National Committee's Rules and Bylaws Committee decided to strip Florida and Michigan of their delegates as punishment for holding primaries earlier than allowed.

Waaay back in the day i wrote an editorial in the Round Table about this. I don't think i kept a copy, unfortunately. At the time, i wrote things that were pretty much in line with what Plouffe now discloses: Michigan and Florida's delegate-strippings (sounds dirty, doesn't it?) were politically-motivated punishments against DNC bylaws, and worked in favor of Obama to the detriment of Clinton. Both Florida and Michigan favored Clinton, so by excluding them Obama's campaign got a huge boost.

As TPM notes, none of this is "earth-shattering." In hindsight i'm still a bit upset, but not unreasonably so, because Obama is still a politician and what he did is good politics. There are some revelations, however, that really skirt the bizarre:

Among the juiciest [bits] is another Plouffe confession that Obama researchers planted the Edwards $400 haircut story with Politico.

Of that old editorial, i do remember promising not to vote for Obama in the 2008 election. Definitely ate those words.

Maintenance, November 2009

2009-11-11T15:30:00.005-05:00

- Today was a beautiful time to work on the Frankenbike, it being Veterans' Day and sunny. Unfortunately, i spent the better part of the afternoon scouring the house for her key. Turns out it was still in the bike--not the ignition, which i had checked earlier, but the seat cover latch. Fantastic. Nonetheless, i now have a drill and a new clutch cable, meaning i can finally get into the crankcase to replace the damn thing.

- The folks let me know that Christmas (my 2007 Camry), and most Toyotas produced from 2004 onwards, have an unresolved "issue" that sometimes results in a stuck accelerator. Ruh-roh. This made news when an off-duty CHP and his family were killed due to a stuck accelerator in their Lexus. This raises the question of why a police officer didn't take the obvious steps to resolve the issue (shift to neutral and kill the engine), but not being in the car at the time it's hard to judge.

- I bought the Windows 7 upgrade at the student rate ($30) and installed it successfully...after eighteen hours of wrangling. Microsoft and Digital River really botched this one. I quite literally had issues at every single step of the install process, and ultimately had to resort to the good ol' double install trick* to get the damn thing working.

That being said, i'm incredibly happy with W7. It's a much slimmer OS than Vista, and Microsoft did a great job ironing out most of the kinks and inconsistencies of both Vista and XP. I also can run in XP mode for the ancient programs geology demands i use. Lastly, i'm up to 64-bit architecture now, and the processing boost is really, really great.

* If you do want to upgrade from 32-bit Windows Vista/XP to 64-bit Windows 7, Microsoft requires a clean install of a full-version of Windows 7, not the upgrade. This means an upgrade key won't work. There's a workaround for this, found here, that will let you use an upgrade key to do a clean install. This means anyone buying Windows 7 can get a full installer for the price of an upgrade--pretty sweet!

Lost in Color Space

2009-11-10T14:32:00.009-05:00

Color space conversion is annoying the hell out of me. Take a look at this picture, taken from the first Portland post. This was taken in Adobe RGB color space, but like all web images, was improperly converted to sRGB (Standard RGB) color space during upload.

This is the same image, except using Adobe's Adobe RGB to sRGB converter, instead of Google's direct translation. Notice the more vivid reds.

Shorter Scott: the colors are different and i'm not happy. A technical discussion as to why they are different follows, and if you process images with Photoshop it may behoove you to read on. Monitors typically define color as a function of three channels, or base colors: red, green, and blue. By varying the "colorfulness" (difference from gray) of each channel, you can simultaneously vary the hue, saturation, and brightness of your particular color. If you quantify the channel variations, the colors can actually be mapped to Cartesian (x, y, z) coordinates--they can be represented as a volume. When calibrated to a known color reference point, this color map becomes absolute--a true color space.

Each channel has 256 layers, so 256 x 256 x 256 = 16.7 million possible colors. Bitchin!

sRGB is by far the most common color space, mainly because our color photoreceptors (cone cells) are most sensitive to those three wavelengths. However, another tetrachromatic (4-channel) color space--CMYK--is preferred for print. These colors--Cyan, Maroon, Yellow, and Key black--correspond to ink used in most printers. CMYK color space encompasses a different area of color space, or gamut, than sRGB. This can result in inaccuracies while printing, and also means some colors possible in CMYK space cannot be represented in sRGB space.

Hence Adobe RGB--a color space designed to represent CMYK space using RGB colors. Speaking objectively, Adobe RGB represents an improvement upon sRGB because it can accurately portray a greater gamut than sRGB. Personally, i prefer Adobe RGB because it gives more vibrant reds and greens, which are important when shooting landscapes. It's also the default setting in Photoshop, so i was using Adobe RGB long before i knew there was a compatibility issue. A big one.

Here's the issue: both Adobe RGB and sRGB have 16.7 million possible colors, but Adobe RGB has a larger gamut. Therefore, it must represent a greater range of color using the same amount of colors. This means that the spacing between colors in Adobe RGB is greater than the spacing between colors in sRGB. Therefore, one color represented in Adobe RGB will have different color values of R, G, and B than the equivalent color in sRGB. Because of this mismatch, a red-155 in sRGB will be less vibrant than a red-155 in Adobe RGB.

With me so far? A particular RGB value in Adobe RGB is not the same color as the same value in sRGB. The sRGB color is less duller than the Adobe RGB color with the same value.

And now here's the problem: sRGB is the web standard--every photo site that i'm aware of, from Flickr to Facebook to deviantArt to Picasa, uses sRGB. When images are uploaded, the host will interpret Adobe RGB color values as though they were sRGB colors. This means that colors are changed during the upload process. The result? Images processed in Adobe RGB appear bland and flat, compared to sRGB images--even though Adobe should show a better range of colors.

Furthermore, because web browsers will automatically do this conversion, you simply cannot use Adobe RGB images for the web, without risking the loss of color information. Within Photoshop there is an option to accurately convert an Adobe RGB image into its sRGB equivalent, but this means all of my images to date have come out different than i've viewed them on my hard drive. Really this is just me being anal about my images, but really i just have this thing about when i'm not portrayed accurately [PDF].

You can read more about this problem here.

The PJG

2009-11-10T08:24:00.008-05:00

Portland has the best Japanese garden i've yet to see in the states. Situated in the hills west of town, Portland did a simply great job of isolating the park in its urban setting. Esteban and i took an afternoon off and went to investigate.

We were fortunate to visit Portland during their peak leaf-peeping time. The weather was surprisingly good; temperatures were balmy, the clouds strangely burned off by midafternoon, and it rained only once during the entire conference period. On this day Portland's perpetual cloudiness gave a great diffuse light--perfect for foliage.

One thing that differentiated PJG from other gardens is their noncommercial photo policy. I've agreed not to market any of these pictures, and it's easy to see why they're so anal about this--it's nearly impossible to take a bad picture in the place. This says quite a bit about the Japanese aesthetic, and even more about how that spartan ideal of beauty has influenced contemporary photography.

Also in the Washington Park area: the International Rose Test Garden and the Hoyt Arboretum, among other venues.

For those in Chicagoland / Beloit, Rockford has a surprisingly good garden, even if it is a bit noisy--the Anderson Japanese Gardens.

Portland

2009-11-09T17:47:00.009-05:00

Three weeks ago i was in Portland, Oregon, basking in what most people agree is the city that best approximates Pinko Commie Heaven. Bush I dubbed it "Little Beirut," which makes little sense given the city's demographics. UC paid my way to Portland because i was presenting results from the Death Valley work; you can find an abstract here. The entire conference was at the Oregon Convention Center, which is capped by those two glowing spikes in the foreground. The skyline of Downtown Portland lies behind.

Geographically, Portland is divided by the Willamette River, with the downtown on the west bank. Someone compared it to Cincinnati, which i suppose works if you move all of downtown Cincinnati across the Ohio. Barring that, Cincinnati is contemplating putting in streetcars, using Portland as a model.

Portland's Pinko Commie status, as well as Cincinnati's streetcar plan, are based on Portland's simply stellar environmental record. There's pretty much consensus that Portland is the greenest city in the United States (1 2 3 4 5). Perhaps the most tangible aspect of Portland's green initiative is the seamless integration of their streetcar, bus, and light rail systems. Public transit within the downtown area is free, meaning i was constantly shuttling across the Willamette to catch lunch before the afternoon technical sessions. The area is also fully supported by Google Maps. Add Portland's bike ethos and you have a metropolitan area that was, while i was there, quieter and completely free of traffic snarls.

People often lose sight of the fact that green initiatives can benefit in ways that have nothing to do with being "green." Portland's just another example of the quality-of-life improvements that green initiatives can bring to a city.

On a completely separate note, Portland has an excellent Japanese Garden, which is where Esteban and i spent an afternoon after our sessions.

Can't forget the food carts. This place does an authentic Loco Moco!

Lapse Rate

2009-10-27T09:22:00.010-04:00

Hi friends and family, i'm back from a week of geology in the Pacific Northwest. Presently i'm up to my nuts in grading and organizing pictures for the departmental photo contest, so for now you'll have to content yourself with this totally mediocre view of Mount Hood, "Oregon's most recently active volcano."

Pre-Chicago Nerd Pron

2009-10-08T14:05:00.005-04:00

Pollster Strategic Vision LLC is in a bit of trouble after a failure of transparency in regards to their survey methods. Folks at 538.com took it to a new level when they found seemingly non-random non-uniform distributions of trailing digits (e.g. 53-47 McCain-Obama). In a recent post, they use Fourier analysis to determine the likelihood of the discrepancies to be the result of a systematic methodological error. The result:

The Strategic Vision result, on the other hand, or something more extreme, would occur by chance with probability only 0.00019. That’s not as low a p-value as the results obtained without filtering the non-uniform components, but it’s still very low -- less than one chance in 5000 to have occurred by chance alone.

In other words, statistics demonstrate that Strategic Vision has been cooking their books. "Nerdgasm," indeed.
* * *
On a slightly related note, Tom Levenson (director of the science writing grad program at MIT) pretty thoroughly dissects Megan McArdle's entire mode of thinking. McMegan inexplicably shares blogspace with TNC and Sully over at The Atlantic. She is known for blogging as "Jane Galt" and lying. Levenson establishes McArdle as a truly professional cherry picker of knowledge, not knowing--or not caring--enough to think critically about the data sources she uses. If you can get through it (4,000 some words), you get a great analysis of how the phrase "conservative think tank" (or liberal think tank, for that matter) is irrevocably oxymoronic.

Shorter version at BJ.
* * *
Chris Mooney (different Chris Mooney) has the latest debunking of climate myths. Unfortunately this is something we will never get enough of. 27%!

Represent, Michigan.

2009-09-25T15:24:00.000-04:00

[US Senator John] Kyl: "I don't need maternity care" in my benefits package. [US Senator Debbie] Stabenow fires back: "I think your mom probably did."

(HT: Feministing)

Ticino

2009-09-25T10:14:00.004-04:00

Ticino, my favorite Swiss canton, is featured in the New York Times' fall travel issue of Thtyle. Awesome! I did my undergraduate research in Ticino, which comprises most of the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. It is without a doubt the best place in the world to do research. I got to sample lots of the local cuisine, which is predictably a hybridization of northern Italian and "mountain" food. This article brings back warm, satisfying memories of steaming plates of polenta and lots of wine.

Another thing the article nails is how freaking rainy a Ticinese summer can be. This raininess was the focus of my undergraduate research, which correlated the local precipitation high with more intense glaciation over the last 2 million years. Hooray for science and venison stew!

Census worker hanged, "fed" written on chest

2009-09-24T10:08:00.003-04:00

Of course we shouldn't jump to conclusions. Southeastern Kentucky, especially the Public land, has a bit of a problem with drugs. Or, the guy could have secretly been an ACORN worker who killed himself to smear the Teabaggers. Or, he could be the first victim of a serial killer named Fred who also just happened to be a horrible speller, as well.

I definitely hope it's not related to Michele Bachmann and her census-concentration camp link. Even Glenn Beck backed off that bomb a while ago. And i hope it was just coincidence that the body was found on 9/12.

Damn. To think that i suggested this job to friends, and now this. Whatever happens, it's a pretty sorry state of affairs when a meth killing is the positive outcome of the story.

the R word

2009-09-24T09:01:00.012-04:00

Maybe not so much "Racism," but "Reconstruction?"

I like to call the following maps the "How Race Matters" map series.

This is a map (metadata) that illustrates Presidential voting shifts by county between 2004 and 2008.

This is a map (metadata) that illustrates the percentage of African Americans, by census tract.

aaand this is the Hispanic population (metadata), percentage by census tract.

Watch carefully how vote shifts to the Republicans in the South eerily corresponds to the "less black" census areas. It appears that, for the South, there's a pretty strong negative correlation between vote shifts to Obama and % of African Americans. Most notably, see Arkansas, Louisiana, eastern Oklahoma, northeast Texas, and the Appalachian areas (northeast Mississippi, northern Alabama, all of Tennessee and the mountain regions of Kentucky/Virginia/West Va/Pennsylvania).

Hispanics are also notably absent from counties that shifted Republican, the exception being Florida, with its traditionally conservative Cuban voting base. It's interesting how vote shifts in Texas parallel the Hispanic population to a greater degree than the African American population.

The caveat here is that Indiana, North Dakota, and Montana all recorded major shifts towards Obama, yet they're arguably whiter than the rest of the South. Within the South, the race correlation isn't much seen in the Old South, mostly VA and NC, but partially SC, GA - although SC/GA may be due to a larger concentration of African Americans. The correlation is strongest in the Deep South (SC-GA-AL-MS-LA). It's almost completely absent everywhere else.

So: In the South, it's clear that large numbers of black people voted for Obama, and equally large numbers of white people voted for McCain. Elsewhere this dual relationship just doesn't seem to exist. Race definitely plays a part, although maybe in an oblique way: Southern politics still smarts at the effects of Reconstruction and the Northern betrayal, which stems from the Civil War, which stems from race. A lot of these voters were alive when segregation was still active, and undoubtedly that experience colors a lot of peoples' political thoughts. Context, it appears, is key.

More astrophotography

2009-09-20T14:13:00.005-04:00

Segueing right back into dedicated photography, here's another very long exposure from the Out West trip. More by coincidence than design, Jen's family times their June Lake/Yosemite trip right over the Perseid meteor shower. (Fun fact: the meteors are called the Perseids because they appear to shoot out of the constellation Perseus!) The Cox-Bauers are thus treated to a spectacular meteor shower in one of the darker corners of the country. I took the above picture (~7 min exposure) in a vain attempt to capture the meteors, and learned by error that this is a very hard thing to do. Although far outmatching any meteor shower i've seen before, the Perseids are still don't give off very much light. I learned that you pretty much have to crank up your film speed to stratospheric heights and restrict yourself to relatively short exposures (probably a few seconds). The end result was a fairly happy surprise.

The stars at the corners bow outward due to pincushion distortion of the lens (10mm ultrawide).

Another longish exposure. This was taken on a county highway somewhere north of Elk Mountain, Wyoming. The light on the horizon is the Sinclair refinery, 45 miles to the west.

Revelation: the total mileage of that trip was around 7,500.

"The meat on the cutting board wasn’t the only thing butchered tortured."

2009-09-17T14:36:00.006-04:00

If you read Newsweek, perhaps you've seen this David Hume Kennerly picture adorning the table of contents. With a knife, Cheney prods a piece of still-mooing beef (read: it's covered in blood), and Newsweek quotes his acceptance of illegal interrogations.

This was not the original photograph. The actual photograph can be seen here; Newsweek cropped away two thirds of the original (centered on Cheney's family) to focus on the former Veep enhancing his steak.

It's an instructive lesson on the importance of composition--the message of the photograph is completely different post-cropping--and also of what damage editors can wreak on photographs. What galls me about it is that Kennerly was still credited as the sole photographer, so it leaves the reader with the impression that Kennerly was responsible for the rather sinister composition. This is a pretty serious sin in photographic circles, as it's a borderline infringement (at best) on the National Press Photographers' Association's Code of Ethics.

For the record, Newsweek did offer an explanation--of sorts.

We doubt any reasonable reader would, in David’s phrase, think something “sinister, macabre, or even evil” was going on in that image as presented.

Uh-huh. Ho-kay.

Part 2 of a series: Because we're poor.

2009-09-17T14:30:00.002-04:00

A common defense of our present system of health care goes as follows:

If Canada's single-payer health care system is so great, why don't Americans go to Canada for treatment?

Aside from the fact that this is not historically true--and there must certainly be a reason why Americans purchase drugs in Canada--what strikes me about comments like these is the utter lack of logic and class awareness. Logically speaking, this statement is a form of denying the antecedent, a logical fallacy that is a special case of non sequitur. The form of the argument is as follows:

If P, then Q.
Not P.
Therefore, not Q.

Phrasing the original statement syllogistically yields

If Americans go to Canada for treatment, then Canada's health care system is good.
Aemricans don't go to Canada for treatment.
Therefore, Canada's health care system is not good.

The problem, of course, is that the condition does not necessarily follow from the premises. There are many reasons why Americans may not go to Canada for free treatment (namely, it's illegal). This does not mean that Canada's system is worse, just that it's not legal for Americans to mooch services from our northern neighbors, while it is legal for Canadians with money to pay for American services. What immediately struck me about this whole argument, though, was that people who would benefit the most from free Canadian health care are those Americans who lack coverage Stateside. They're also the ones who could least afford a jaunt to Canada for lengthy treatment. Hence, they won't go to Canada.

And it seems to me that people are losing sight of the fact that health care reform is designed to help the poor. Frankly, conservatives in politics are not poor, have never been poor, do not know anything about being poor, and so at a fundamental level are poorly equipped (intended) to talk about anything pertaining to poverty.

Take this article, which comes up second when you google "american uninsured." Aside from its self-defeating argument that government programs will save us from government programs, it's patently obvious that the writer ("Conservative Cutie") is fucking clueless as to the nature of poverty. I mean, who the fuck puts quotation marks around "poverty line?" Oh, right, someone who doesn't know there's no such fucking thing. Are you referring to the poverty guidelines, or the poverty thresholds, honey? But what's more important than picking nits with her ignorant slop is her incapability of understanding how hard it really is to meet the poverty line. She begins by casually referencing the "myth" of the "working-class family caught in the trap of making too much money for Medicare but not enough to pay for insurance premiums."

No! This is not a myth! This Is Fucking Happening!

Does she have any concept of how hard it is for a individual or family to hit her poverty line? If you make the federal minimum wage ($7.25) and work full time (40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year), you will make $14,500 BFT. This means that, alone, you are above the poverty line, and if there's another person in the household you will be above the poverty guidelines if you work ten hours more than 50 weeks. At the same time, if you up the number of members of the household it becomes increasingly difficult for two earners to balance the benefits of working and paying for insurance, or not working and not paying. This is assuming all earners have jobs, which in this day in age isn't guaranteed at all. And private insurance has its hidden costs: the best coverage screws you with premiums; the cheapest coverage is worthless unless you get hit by a truck. And still screws you with premiums.

And so, way back in the day i'd work with people who would regularly go jobless whenever their children got sick.

The author does note that there's a distinct relationship between age and lack of coverage (she exaggerates; see newer data [PDF]). She echoes a wider trend of commentators who place blame on uninsured young adults for their impact on health care costs, because it's always a good idea to alienate your youngest voter base. Their argument, variably, is that these "young invincibles" distort the scale of the health insurance crisis in the United States. They are only uninsured temporarily, primarily because they've yet to become good adults with jobs and health care and a sense of personal responsibility. Et cetera.

The truth, to which most of you can attest, is that we're poor. Graduate school pays me a stipend of little more than $13k/year, which of course keeps me in the limbo between true poverty and financial security. Calling us irresponsible isn't going to help matters much--if we could all get $40k per year with benefits, for Christ's sake we would. Unfortunately, we can't. And while the right often has difficulty looking into the future--understandable, since the conservative tradition is rooted in, well, tradition--any idiot could tell you that today's job market doesn't bode well for the young and uninsured, with commensurate effects on the health care crisis as it stands.

This is, ultimately, my selfish, personal problem with the Baucus plan. It mandates that we have insurance, but it offers no concrete provision that the government will make it affordable. For me, at least i have a (considerable) safety net in case the shit really hits the fan. What we should concern ourselves with is what's going to happen to those without any fallbacks, and whether attempts at crafting a political bill sacrifices something vital--that it works--in the process.

Part 1 of a series: But you want socialism? Why would anyone want socialism?

2009-09-16T13:21:00.006-04:00

People keep reminding me that most people support a public option. So let me remind you: most voters want [PDF] a public option. Most voters don't like Baucus' toothless Vichy liberal proposal, which appeases away the public option. Now, most doctors also support some form of public option. This is fairly concordant with the opinion of the polled public in general (73% of doctors; 72% of the public).

So, what gives? Why is the public option even being debated, much less removed from Congress' pet reform plan?

I divide opponents of the public option into two groups. The first opposes public health care on the basis of principle, whether that principle is small government or the invisible hand or the bullshit this one asshead tried to feed me about the "principle of subsidiarity." (doing some research, it's a regurgitated Catholic diktat formulated to enshrine free market capitalism to combat the Reds. Go figure).

The principle of subsidiarity respects the freedom of the individual and recognizes that person-to-person or community-to-community help is the best way to help others and respect their human dignity. A governmen-run [sic] healthcare system, in ways such as the inevitable rationing of care, disrespects the freedom to decide for oneself about one's own health. Government-run healthcare also violates the principle of subsidiarity by denying individuals, and low level groups like insurance companies, from making the decisions about healthcare. Government-run healthcare, by being so removed from individuals, is not and can never be in the position to make respectful or even efficient decisions about a person's health (for examples, look at the horrible government-run healthcare systems in Britain and Canada). Moreover, the idea of government-run healthcare is extremely socialist by denying free market capitalism. Since when is it evil for the practice of medicine to be a business?

People who walk this path i doom to a very special part of hell, moreso for the painfully fallacious logic than his argument that no coverage is better than coverage that doesn't meet his standards. (Yeah, okay, assface, there are 50 million uninsured who'd be happy to talk about this outside. But i digress). His arguments are so god damn circular that his ass ends up in his mouth, every time. There are no fewer than five instances in which the author begs the question. Ipse-dixitism. Red herring. Massive appeals to tradition. The list continues.

This is saying nothing about the fact that this whole debate over capitalism vs socialism is utterly peripheral to the matter at hand: how best to provide health care. Most of his rhetorical circle-jerking results from his refusal to discuss whether or not free market capitalism is doing us any better a job than the "socialist" systems in Europe. Instead, he takes for granted the fact that these are bad, our system is good, the principle of subsidiarity is patently true, and the public option "inevitably" results in rationing.

This isn't a discussion about politics. This is a discussion about how to provide the best health care for the most amount of people. Maybe socialism, as a system, just works better.

This all tells me he's probably never even met, much less discussed health care, with a recipient of "horrible government-run healthcare systems in Britain and Canada." Take Emiko, our newest housemate in the Cliftonhaus. Emiko is a UK national, and her latest encounter with her horrible government-run health care system in Britain was when she went to the emergency room to deal with a cyst that had left her incapacitated her with pain. The hospital staff expressed amazement that she was still conscious, gave her a battery of opiates, plus general anesthesia, and removed it promptly. They then kept her in the hospital, instead of discharging her immediately.

Her bill? £0.00.

I don't want to commit a hasty generalization here, but--damn. I'd take that treatment in a heartbeat. We did some calculations and determined that Emiko's UK taxes are roughly double that of ours in the US, but anyone familiar with premiums and payouts nowadays know that this is still a damn good deal.

But here's where i show my bias. As a member of our second-lowest income tax bracket, the amount i'd pay for health care by doubling my taxes is still a staggeringly good deal, compared to what i'd have to pay for decent coverage. This is not true of those in higher income tax brackets. Undoubtedly they'd take a hit, and this brings us to our second group: those who oppose the public option out of self-interest--because the personal impact of altering the status quo outweighs the benefits to others.

I actually respect the core of this argument. They're only being honest--hopefully they've done the math and figured that the potential risks outweigh the potential benefits. Of course, there's plenty to disagree with--you know, civil society, equal opportunity, the foundations of the nation--but i can't disrespect someone who says, quite reasonably, "Altering the status quo will adversely affect me, and i cannot in good conscience support something that would harm me."

The number of people who actually believe this, though, are really quite few. Which i'll address in tomorrow's post. Look at me, a series blogger!

Recipe: The Melon of Socialism

2009-09-15T17:25:00.006-04:00

In addition to subversive thoughts and hot dog dinners, Esteban has brought a delicious drunken melon concoction north from Chile. It's similar to a vodka watermelon, but with this you drink straight from the thing. So far we've spread the melon manifesto at several gatherings, always resulting in rave reviews and revolutionary thoughts. So in the interest of providing the workers with both the instruments and subjects of ~~labor~~ pleasure, here is the recipe.

The Melon of Socialism
Serves one to six

1 honeydew
1 bottle of a sweet, very cheap white wine
sugar

The Revolution
1) Select a honeydew (green melon) that sounds hollow when knocked--the more hollow it sounds, the better. Use a knife to carve a hole in the top, then scoop out the seeds and pulpy center with a spoon. Continue to enlarge the central cavity by shaving off chunks of the melon from the inside. DO NOT remove these chunks; rather, leave them in the cavity to flavor the wine.

2) Fill the cavity halfway with wine. Add sugar to taste. The wine should be quite sweet.

3) Traditionally, the melon is passed around the whole group, with each person drinking straight from the melon. If you're one of those squeamish bourgeois girly-men, you could ruin it by pouring it into individual glasses. After about 15 minutes, or when the wine is exhausted, use a spoon to remove the wine-soaked chunks of melon, and eat them. Carve off more chunks of melon, add more wine and sugar, and continue.

Bring Back Kristol?

2009-09-15T10:48:00.012-04:00

After sacking Bill Kristol, the New York Times was left with not a whole lot in terms of conservative columnists. We're left with the closeted misogynist Douthat and the nebbishy David Brooks. Brooks' latest column is a masterpiece of losing touch.

Most of Brooks' editorial is a fairly stock wistful nod to the Greatest Generation and how they embodied the very image of modesty by not gloating after nuking the Japanese. But, what struck me was this passage:

When you look from today back to 1945, you are looking into a different cultural epoch, across a sort of narcissism line. Humility, the sense that nobody is that different from anybody else, was a large part of the culture then.

Off the top of my head, some people who would have disagreed:

- Japanese American servicemen, coming home to find their families in camps
- African American servicemen, coming home to segregation
- American Indian servicemen, coming home to reservations
- Hispanic Americans, post-Zoot Suit Riots, to say nothing of, you know, constant discrimination
- African Americans, segregated
- Women, who found that men were still in charge of everything, after all
- the GLBT community
- Socialists
- People who everyone thought were socialists, weren't, but suffered anyway

Among others.

This, among all other things, is why centrist conservatism is doomed. The perfect conservative social ideal is one that embraces the mid-Century as the epitome of Americanism. Pay no mind to segregation, or internment, or workplace discrimination, or homophobia, or misogyny, or how the threat of nuclear war kept society orderly. A perfect society is one that with working men, housewives, straight obedient children, where blacks ate separately and Hispanics work in the fields, if at all.

People don't like being told that the perfect world is apartheid South Africa.

Unfortunately, the new face of conservatism isn't very centrist, just as ignorant, and with several additional doses with CRAZY. Said absence of crazy in the Times may explain why today's paper also featured a dean at Pat Robertson's pet university explaining what socialism means to him (hint: it's not public access to the means of production). Gooood one.

Cathedral Peak

2009-09-03T15:38:00.004-04:00

A good deal of this day was spent with Walt, family friend of the Cox-Bauers and co-proprietor of Caffe Trieste Berkeley. I may have inadvertently caused his wife Terry much future distress by fervently encouraging him to pursue his near-term dream of climbing Cathedral Peak, in the foreground. At Cathedral Lakes we did some scrambling up some nearby slopes, which are heavily slabbed and thus easily climbed. The slabs are also studded with large (2-4 cm) crystals of potassium feldspar, making for good footholds and some friction on the otherwise polished surfaces.

The trail to Cathedral Lakes again starts from Tuolumne Meadows. It's pleasantly flat for most of the way, which makes up for the large amounts of sand on the trail. There's a spring midway through that's a treat, and at the end are the lakes themselves. Here Alex stands on the shore and does her Frank Lloyd Wright impression.

"How'd you photoshop that cloud in there?" the Jeffs asked.

The Moon and Mars

2009-09-02T12:17:00.010-04:00

The day prior to Glen Aulin, we hiked the Mammoth Crest trail to what Walt colloquially refers to as "the Moon" and "Mars." Both are in the Muir Wilderness of Inyo National Forest, in the vicinity of Mammoth Mountain. Above is the trail to Mars, so called due to its barren, reddish appearance. Turns out our Mars is a cinder cone, composed of basalt, which is also what real Mars is made of.

Mammoth Mountain. The mountain itself is a dormant volcano, and is a clear example of why excess carbon dioxide is not good for the environment. Someone who shall not be named made the claim that elevated levels of carbon dioxide were responsible for the tremendous relative size of insects during the Carboniferous (300 Ma), using this as an argument as to why we shouldn't worry about emissions. This is wrong on two counts. First, oxygen--and not carbon dioxide--was most likely responsible for the large growth of invertebrates and plants. Second, and more importantly, carbon dioxide is toxic. Which is, i guess, not as obvious to laypersons as it is to a geologist. Plants use CO₂ for respiration, and actually grow more with slightly elevated CO₂, but in excess they suffocate and die. Mammoth periodically releases waves of CO₂, killing trees en masse and occasionally posing a hazard to skiers.

aaand the Moon. It gets more moon-ish when the trail leads up to the ridge on the right.

Glen Aulin

2009-09-01T11:59:00.010-04:00

The day prior to the Clouds Rest disaster, the old folks did Saddlebag Lake, while us young folks did the 5.5 mile trail to Glen Aulin HSC. The 5.5 mile trail follows the Tuolumne River towards the valley floor. A guide described the trail as "manic-depressive."

Trailhead was at Tuolumne Meadows and this is fairly typical of the scenery over the first three miles or so. In the background are Cathedral Peak and Fairview Dome.

Tuolumne Falls. Stopped here for a sandwich lunch and toe dips.

Alex and Seth. I really like this one! Alex's "I'M HUNGRY" face seems to add urgency to this photograph.

Recipe - Goonies Sauce!

2009-08-27T11:44:00.032-04:00

In the distant past when i worked at Ritter's, we'd occasionally carry a custard flavor called "Jerry's Kids' Crunch," which was a blend of vanilla and M&M's that we sold to benefit the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Of course, we had a plethora of people asking exactly what was in Jerry's Kids' Crunch, and when afternoons were slow we'd answer, "Jerry's Kids." It was kind of like playing Russian Roulette with your job, but in my experience customers who heard the joke invariably laughed longer and harder than we did.

This actually has nothing at all to do with what i'd like to talk about today. It just occurred to me that naming this delicious heirloom tomato sauce the "Goonies Sauce" might result in the same sort of, uh, confusion that was endemic to Jerry's Kids Crunch. But The Goonies have been on my mind since i passed through Astoria a few weeks back, and it seemed appropriate that any recipe featuring heirloom tomatoes--nature's tastiest deformed giants--pay homage to the original man-beast who taught us the redeeming qualities of ugly large things.

* * *

*Ma Fratelli at work.*

The HEY YOU GUYS Heirloom Tomato Sauce
serves 6 or something. Takes 3 hours, intermittently attended to

5 lbs heirloom tomatoes
1 lb Bob Evans™ uncased sweet Italian sausage
8 tbsp olive oil OR 1 stick butter
1 large onion
1 restless mother
5 cloves garlic
Soy sauce and/or salt, and pepper, to taste
1 bunch fresh basil
2 lbs pasta (traditionally rigatoni, fettucine, or bucatini, but i used thin spaghetti w/o problems)
Parmesan

Because i’m still in Portage and somewhat bored, when dear mother said she was cooking Wednesday’s dinner i offered her a deal: for $20, i’d cook the family pasta--with a bitchin' sauce. The problem was i'd left Marcella in Cincinnati so i didn't really have a traditional recipe at hand. It therefore became a bastard sauce: ill-fitting, non-traditional, and damn tasty enough for our own household giant (pops) to devour three plates of the stuff. What made the sauce really great wasn't so much the basil or the prolific usage of Italian sausage, but rather the tremendous amount of Centre Street Market heirloom tomatoes used in its production.

Supermarket tomatoes are bred for aesthetics, being brightly colored and shapely and uniform and really quite bland. They’re the sorority girls of the tomato community. Theta Pi Gamma excepted. Please don’t kill me, Jen. Heirlooms, on the other hand, are your typical liberal arts college student: chunky, misshapen, often blotchy, and difficult to grow. By far they rise above these cosmetic deficiencies with their incomparable diversity and intensity of flavor. They’ve earned their “heirloom” moniker by virtue of the countless breeds traditionally passed down through individual families, although popular varieties are beginning to be grown on something approaching commercial scale. I picked up 5 lbs of one of these varieties, the Brandywine, which is this red meaty deal with a sweet, rich, almost smoky flavor.

*"The only thing we serve here is tongue! You boys like tongue?"*

These also happen to be three times as expensive as your typical roma. See? The metaphor works.

When buying heirlooms, the important thing to remember is that the vast majority of cosmetic defects don’t extend beyond the skin. One of the Brandywines had what appeared to be a giant, moldy, festering wound on its crown, but the damage didn't even get to the flesh. The same rules for normal tomatoes also apply to heirlooms: store them in the open, ripen the unripe in a paper bag, and holy crap you better not put them in the fridge.

There are two versions of this recipe: the high fat version, and the less high fat version. You’re pretty much screwed fat-wise when using Italian sausage, but you can significantly reduce your saturated fat intake with a few nontraditional substitutions that would make Marcella Hazan roll over in her grave, if she was dead. Because i'm a good son and want to keep my parents alive for as long as possible, i followed the less high-fat path; high-fat substitutions are given in italics.

*We may be the only family that eats bread with a pasta dinner.*

The Process
1) I pick a mix of overripe and underripe tomatoes for sauces. Overripe tomatoes yield an especially dense flavor and dissolve easily over heat. Underripe tomatoes give you chunks. You can first blanch and skin the tomatoes, but to save time i usually leave the skins on. Wash off any dirt and crush the overripe tomatoes with your hands, envisioning what Ma Fratelli did to Sloth as a baby. Coarsely chop the underripe tomatoes and add them to the mixing bowl.

2) Cook the sausage over medium heat in a skillet. The goal here is to draw off some of the truly enormous amount of fat contained within. Chop the sausage as fine as you can, and when brown, pat the sausage dry with paper towels. Set aside.
For the high-fat version, do not pre-cook the sausage. Instead, skip to Step 3.

3) Convince your mother to chop the onion. In a wide soup pot, add the oil (or butter) and onion and turn the heat to medium-high. Cook the onions until translucent, stirring constantly, then add the cooked (or uncooked) sausage. Continue to cook the sausage and onions, longer if the sausage is uncooked, until fat begins to run freely from the sausage.

*"You are my greatest invention."*

4) Add the tomatoes and several dashes of soy sauce. And old friend once confided that his Italian grandmother’s secret ingredient was soy sauce, but she would murder anyone who spread the rumor that Nonna was cooking an Oriental Bolognese. I’ve used it ever since and it seems to a positive note to rich, tomato-based sauces as this. Add salt to taste and turn the heat to high.

5) When the sauce is boiling, reduce heat so that it simmers gently. Simmer for several hours, your mother stirring occasionally, until the sauce has reduced considerably (about half by volume). It took me several years to figure out that the secret to good fresh tomato sauce is that you have to cook the hell out of it. This boils off the water and leaves you with a thick, velvety tomato sauce with insanely concentrated fresh tomato flavor. If too much water evaporates, you can stir in half-cup increments of additional water without harm--it just evaporates anyway.

*Sloth love chunky tomato sauce!*

6) When ready to serve, wash the basil, pat dry, and tear up a reasonable amount of leaves. Add most of the basil only after you’ve removed the sauce from heat. This preserves the sweetness of the fresh basil, which dissipates when cooked, and aesthetically keeps the basil from blackening. Reserve some basil as garnish.

7) Give your best “HEY YOU GUYS” and summon everyone to the table. Serve over pasta with cheese and some basil leaves.

Support Scientific Research - Experiment with a Geologist!

2009-08-26T21:36:00.006-04:00

In my effort to develop an actual workflow for photo processing i've been experimenting a bit with RGB curves and photo filters. For a good deal of my eastern Sierra pictures i've applied a somewhat consistent set of alterations. You may see more of them in the future, so after you've seen enough let me know what you think. Above are red firs on the Green Lake-East Lake trail, Hoover Wilderness, Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest.

Aaand these things. Don't know what they are. Also on the Green Lake trail, Hoover Wilderness.

"This time it is real - all must die, and where could a mountaineer find a more glorious death?"

2009-08-25T14:35:00.008-04:00

-John Muir

I'm back from what's turned into two months of constant travel, mostly in India by motorcycle but more recently within North America by car. There's a lot of catching up to be done, but i'd like to start with the end: last Friday, the 14th of August, i witnessed a woman fall off the north face of Clouds Rest in Yosemite National Park. Several days ago i learned that she died in the hospital and i'm shook up again and need to write.

Clouds Rest is not the highest point in Yosemite, but as the highest point abutting the valley proper, the peak offers what is arguably the best view in the entire park. The treeless summit is one of the only sites where you can look down on Half Dome, a thousand feet below. It also offers an uninterrupted 360° view of the high country. The trail from Tenaya Lake is well-maintained and devoid of hazards until the last quarter mile, where the trees give way to bare, jointed, very steep bedrock. At points, the path narrows to 5 feet with tremendous drops on both sides. Wikipedia calls Clouds Rest an arête, but i think it’s more of a nunatak. Whatever. The slope falls away a hundred feet to the south into red firs and Tenaya Canyon beyond. The north face is a sheer bedrock face, dropping nearly a mile to the valley floor.

Our group (Jen’s family and friends) got an uncharacteristically early start, arriving at the trailhead at 8 AM to clear 40° weather. Typically we wouldn’t make the trailhead before 11. We all benefitted from the excellent weather and made good time up the first set of switchbacks to Sunrise Junction. Here we split into faster/younger and slower/older groups, so at the time of the accident we young folks were already enjoying the view from the summit while the older group struggled with the final stretch. At the summit, we were all on edge because Larry was still ill with a stomach bug and Walt was an admitted acrophobe. Mike and i started down to check on the rest of our party, somewhere in the queue of hikers struggling up the ridge. We high-fived an elated Walt as he reached the summit, and were proceeding to check on Larry when we heard a commotion on the trail below.

Walt would later tell Terry that what you remember of a traumatic experience stays with you for life. But exactly what you remember depends on a number of things. Terry was hiking behind the woman who fell, so she saw the whole thing: the victim’s attempt to make a short hop, then lose her balance, then disappear over the lip. Both Seth and Mike, observing from a distance, saw her actual fall down the face. Barbara remembers the sound. My own memory is unclear. I remember the first of the shouts, and i know i turned around to look, but i don’t remember seeing anything. I thought, someone’s having a panic attack, and i start towards the source. The first thing i distinctly remember is Terry’s scream, which is when a light came on deep inside my brain and i took off sprinting down the ridge.

* * *

When walking, your motion relative to the ground is fast. It’s all perspective, it’s the reason 70 miles per hour in a sports car feels faster than 70 in a Suburban. When you’re on a bridge, catwalk, or ledge, your motion relative to the earth’s surface is insignificant. So on this particular stretch of exposed trail, you are subject to the unnerving sensation of two surfaces moving beneath your feet at very different speeds. If you are focused on the path, which you probably are, the entire world off the path appears to spin. Jen compares the effect to vertigo, and in effect it’s largely the same. Your stability goes to hell, along with--more importantly--your mental balance.

Getting over exposure to elevation is something that, as a climber, you have to defeat before it defeats you. I didn’t have any trouble with the ascent, and didn’t give a second thought to the exposure on this, my very rapid descent. It didn’t hurt that i was roaring with adrenaline and had severe tunnel vision, as if i were a camera stopped all the way open so that my depth of field was narrowed to a hair’s breadth. It was fugue, such that there was nothing, absolutely nothing in the world but the sliver of path and the clutch of hikers ahead. Somehow in this state i overtook several hikers on the narrow path, i think, and only came out of it when Terry screamed, for a second time, “Don’t Run!”

By this time i was at the site of the fall. I saw Terry, looking deathly, and next to her a woman from a different party crouched on all fours, shouting down the mountain, “We’ll come get you, we’re coming, we’ll help you, oh God, please help her, you have to help her.”

I thought briefly, this can’t be happening, shit like this doesn’t happen to me, and looked over the edge. She had come to rest on the north wall as it shallowed a hundred feet down, motionless, on her side, with a sheet of blood issuing from her head. I thought, that’s it. No way in hell could anyone survive that.

More people gathered at the rim. In shock, all were still acting and speaking individually, to themselves, not yet comprehending that the next part had to begin. Someone shouted that this should be called in, which seemed to wake us with a start. I shouted back uphill to raise someone on the floor with our walkie-talkies; on the summit, we were receiving transmissions from every idiot tourist in the valley. By chance, Larry had also brought along a two-way CB radio. Both turned out to be moot, as no fewer than five people immediately produced cell phones and asked whether or not they should call 911. Which was odd. Of course you should call 911.

Now a whole medical history was produced and repeated with almost practiced efficiency. Someone else asked if anyone had a rope--not to move her, but to get down. I remember thinking, it’s not worth it, there’s nothing we can do, plus i’ll be damned if there’s a way to get people to her without causing another accident. But there were doctors, and a climbing cardiologist no less, part of a backpacking group headed west from the summit. The doctor took one look over the ledge and, without thought, both the doctor and a companion began to descend via a ledge i hadn’t seen that led straight down the rock face. Shit, i thought, how had i not seen that?

As the doctor and company switchbacked slowly down the face, her hand jerked—scared the hell out of me. Then she started to move. At least three people shouted at her to lie still, but—my God—she was alive. The impromptu rescue party reached her soon after, and reported that she had a pulse, was conscious, and was speaking to them. Incredible.

I was quickly becoming a spectator so i turned to the rest of our party, most of whom were still at the summit and needed to get down safely. Walt had turned around immediately, and arrived shaky and slow. We collapsed together on a wide rock bench on the other side of the ridge to wait for Terry, who incredibly continued to the summit. People were still asking about rope. At this time a ranger arrived out of absolutely nowhere, obviously having made the last stretch of bare rock at a full-out run. He announced that a helicopter was twenty minutes out.

Walt turned to me and asked, “Did anyone go down to get her?”

I said, yes, a doctor who had outdoor experience had climbed down to see what he could do.

“I’ll say,” he started, “they’re heroes.”

* * *

Coming down with the group, i felt something slipping inside. I fiercely smothered it, but at the base of the summit pitch everyone’s composure seemed to fly apart and i found myself crying with the rest of our party. In addition to the force of the experience, nearly everyone had thought that it was one of us who had fallen. “It’s not you i want to hug,” someone said, “it’s you.”

As the helicopter arced overhead and began to hover, we paused and i began to formulate what-ifs. What if i have gone down with the rescue party? What if i have waited down the trail for the entirety of our group to catch up? With the amount of blood i should have guessed that it was a scalp injury, which is often difficult to close. I should have recognized that i was able, i could have easily scrambled down that route, closed her hypothetical scalp wound, or helped to stabilize her condition in whatever way i could.

The mind games of the overconfident are nothing if not insistent.

I played one more part: the helicopter dropped two paramedics while hovering insanely close to the ridge crest (see below). It then departed while the paramedics stabilized the victim, but returned twenty minutes later to retrieve her. At this point someone remarked that it would be a kind gesture to contact the rest of the victim’s party, who had wisely decided to quickly hike back to Tenaya Lake. Feeling guilty for not doing anything, i volunteered to act as runner, and caught up with them a mile down the trail.

Here, perhaps, i made a mistake. I knew that the helicopter had come and was reasonably sure at least one of those runs took the victim to a hospital. I knew that she was conscious and lucid when the doctors were attending to her. And, even though i couched the statement in uncertainty, the words did come out: “I think she’ll be all right.”

She wasn’t, ultimately. What i didn’t know was, that while conscious, her condition was extremely unstable. Rangers reported that she was near shock during the helicopter recovery. They brought her to Yosemite Clinic, and there she passed away.

* * *

At the trailhead some of us were questioned by a young, nervous ranger whose sole job was to make sure there was no foul play. What did you see happen? Did you see any foul play? Where were the nearest people to the victim standing? Was there some reason you looked towards the scene of the incident? Are you sure you saw no foul play? We asked if he knew how she was doing, and he said that he was not at liberty to discuss. Perhaps he already knew.

This is my best guess as to what happened. The “trail” is completely unmarked above the treeline, and for the most part follows the ridge. It’s the broadest and flattest route up towards the summit, albeit the most exposed. At the point of the incident, there is a three-foot wide gap in the ridge that requires a long step/short hop to get over. However, a wide rock bench develops just below the ridgeline, on the south side. If you scramble maybe four feet down to the bench, you bypass the gap to rejoin the ridge line on what i thought were very obvious rock steps hewn into the granite. From what i can piece together, the victim attempted to cross the gap in the rock and, perhaps distracted by the spinning valley below, was thrown off balance. The weight of her pack then pulled her backwards and off the edge.

It would be a gross error to place “blame” on an inexperienced hiker dealing poorly with exposure. For one, other members of her party expressed surprise that Kathy, of all people, would have fallen. She was a strong hiker, experienced, in the lead going up to the summit. Perhaps more importantly, nearly everyone i both observed and later talked with elected to jump over the gap, instead of taking the bypass. Few people seemed to even notice the presence of the rock steps, and despite seeing the accident, descending hikers were still bridging the gap instead of taking the bypass. A form of mild “summit fever,” maybe, in which hikers fail to notice safer routes that temporarily veer off the obvious course.

You could say that the Park Service did a poor job of adequately marking the trail. Conversely, you could also argue that the entire system of trails insulates hikers too much from the route finding and progressing at a safe pace. But i wouldn’t blame the National Park Service for loose policy on a potentially hazardous route. Out of both necessity and philosophy, the Park Service allows visitors quite a bit of latitude in their behavior, and this is one of the intrinsic draws of National Parks and wilderness areas. Every day we assume a certain amount of risk: walking across the street, messing with electronics, drinking questionable milk. Every day we make mistakes—note the next time you trip or stumble. It’s an adult individual’s responsibility to accurately assess their level of acceptable risk, and not depend on anyone else to make the judgment for them. All the written trail guides make it very evident that the final hundred vertical feet are very hairy, and if you lacked a guide it’s soon obvious just how daunting the previously tame trail becomes.

But even the soberest risk assessment cannot account for flukes, freaks of nature, or just dumb luck. Take the latest widely-publicized National Park accident: in Acadia NP in Maine, a rogue wave swept seven people off a viewing point that only thirty minutes prior was visited by none other than the Park Superintendent. There is always the remotest chance that your one misstep per day could happen at precisely the wrong moment. At Clouds Rest there was no wind, the weather was perfect, the trail clean, the hiker seasoned.

If the Park Service were to do anything, the simplest solution would be to abandon the Clouds Rest trail and restore the area to wilderness status (the Krakauer solution). Anyone who wished to get to the summit would have to spend considerable time navigating the alpine forest and slopes, and would presumably possess enough experience to safely ascend the last exposed stretch.

We’re fortunate that park policy is, for the most part, free from our society’s tendency to rob the world of enthusiasm by rendering the slightest hazard idiot-proof. There are no guard rails at the Grand Canyon because, by god, this is the one place in the country where we assume that any adult who falls into the biggest hole in the continent has considered and accepted the consequences of dancing on the canyon rim. People who seriously attempt risky hikes or climbs do so with the express knowledge that they are tempting mortal hazard with their actions.

Kathy’s obituary describes what transpired as a “tragic accident.” I’m not happy with this. “Accident” contains what Wikipedia describes as a “generally negative probabilistic outcome” that, to me, implies an avoidable result of inattention. “Tragic” does the same. Kathy was in the lead, highly experienced, doing something close to her heart. Despite the trail bypass, despite the crowded path, i do not view the slip as either preventable or a result of carelessness. I also cannot believe that anyone who dies doing something they loved could be said to have died a solely lamentable death.

Update / High Plains

2009-08-24T13:38:00.008-04:00

So i've been a bit busy since you've last heard from me: India, the Canadian Rockies, the Bay Area, Yosemite, and most recently laser eye surgery. I'm currently in Kalamazoo convalescing, so as an apology for being tardy, take these pictures.

I made the drive from Lee Vining, California, to Chicago, Illinois, in thirty-five hours. I slept for one hour. Here i slept with a host of trucks and woke to dawn over western Nebraska--one of the most beautiful mornings of my life.

Going backwards in time. A few hours earlier i had stopped near Elk Mountain, Wyoming, and drove twenty minutes north off I-80 to walk around and get some night shots of the stars over Wyoming. You have not seen stars until you have seen stars in Wyoming. This was about a twenty-two minute exposure.

Summer Reading I: Culture & Imperialism, Edward Said

2009-07-20T04:09:00.010-04:00

I solicited summer reading suggestions from select few people, and promptly ignored all of them. My apologies for this. The problem, as always, was too little time at the bookstore prior to departure. So far i've been left to the peculiar selection at Ladakhi bookstores, which are full of Osho and the Dalai Lama and, strangely enough, Edward Said.

Culture and Imperialism (1993) was his effort to broaden the spatial and conceptual range of his basic critique in Orientalism (1978): the power within Western "culture" negatively colors our view of the colonial and post-colonial world (virtually everywhere), and without this cultural justification, colonial expansion could not have occurred. He argues that, even today, elements of our "culture": the news media, television, Glenn Beck, et al., act as knowing or unknowing agents of a new type of imperialism: the expansion and maintenance of broadly Western interests abroad.

Reading Said in India is a hoot. He offers that no one was really fooled by T.E. Lawrence romping around Arabia in native garb, and it was only the implicit threat of British power that allowed him this luxury. Similarly, Rudyard Kipling's Kim realized a fantasy of westerners to travel as natives in a foreign country, sufficiently engrossed while at the same time protected by their status as sahib. Too many people in Ladakh have taken this fantasy as reality, and this attitude triply manifests itself as affectation (clothes, jewelry etc), an inflated sense of grandiosity, and a despicably condescending attitude towards the "natives" whom they encounter.

More than anything Said is troubling. He wrote this 16 years ago and all his outlined problems still stand. Today's New York Times holds a column by Thomas Friedman, incidentally about Greg Mortenson. I always considered Friedman well-intentioned, if a bit farcical and prone to emotional appeals. I'd never really considered him dangerous ante-Said, but read:

Indeed, Mortenson’s efforts remind us what the essence of the “war on terrorism” is about. It’s about the war of ideas within Islam — a war between religious zealots who glorify martyrdom and want to keep Islam untouched by modernity and isolated from other faiths, with its women disempowered, and those who want to embrace modernity, open Islam to new ideas and empower Muslim women as much as men. America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were, in part, an effort to create the space for the Muslim progressives to fight and win so that the real engine of change, something that takes nine months and 21 years to produce — a new generation — can be educated and raised differently.

And now Said:

...such writing as this is symptomatic of the intellectual will to please power in public, to tell it what it wants to hear, to say to it that it could go ahead and kill, bomb, and destroy, since what would be being attacked was really negligible, brittle, with no relationship to books, ideas, cultures, and no relation either, it gently suggests, to real people (360).

It's author [The Republic of Fear, Kanan Makiya] later became a celebrity not because his book makes a scholarly contribution...but because its obsessive and monochromatic 'portrait' of Iraq perfectly suits the need for dehumanized, ahistorical, and demonological representation of a country as the embodiment of an Arab Hitler (367).

In both cases Said is referring to justifications for the first Gulf War, but from what Friedman leaves out of his column, Said's passages apply just as evenly. We are allowed that Mortenson's school is built in the Panjshir Valley in the northeast, but we are given no indication of the ethnicity served: whether Pashtun, Uzbek, Tajik, or Hazara; whether the school's clients are Shi'a or Sunni, and Friedman assumes (or maybe elides) the knowledge that this region of Afghanistan was never controlled by the Taliban. From the way Friedman describes it, the Panjshir Valley may as well be a moonscape void of people or history. I mean this literally:

Imagine if someone put a new, one-story school on the moon, and you’ll appreciate the rocky desolateness of this landscape.

These are Friedman's words, and from the way he describes the locals, perhaps it would have been better for Mortenson to build in the Sea of Tranquility:

But there, out front, was Mortenson, dressed in traditional Afghan garb. He was surrounded by bearded village elders and scores of young Afghan boys and girls, who were agog at the helicopter, and not quite believing that America’s "warrior chief" [Adm. Mike Mullen]...was coming to open the new school.

Friedman is, unfortunately, what passes for an American intellectual today. For many he's America's key emissary of globalization. Which is terrifying. When an "intellectual" as influential as Friedman fails to escape crude stereotypes of the backwards, ahistorical native in a land without a past, his self-proclaimed dream of a world as a level playing field sounds flaccid, cynical, and--dare i say it--imperialist.