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posted by CKR
The language is Ingrian, the location Estonia. Ingrian is one of a group of Finno-Ugrian languages nearly extinct. Veljo Tormis has collected and arranged many folk songs from that group of languages.
Update (10 am): And even more so! The roadrunner is back, sunning in her usual place! I hope I didn't scare her...
by CKR
Update (1/8/08): Consensus statement here.
Next post in this series (1/6/08)
First, some procedural stuff. I invited bloggers and others to contribute their thoughts to the development of US nuclear weapons policy. The next step, the one you see here, is that I would summarize the ideas, agreements and disagreements. Although I think my leanings on this subject are obvious to those who have been reading WhirledView, I have tried to do this in an even-handed way. I have rephrased some of what’s been said, but I don’t want to misrepresent. Please comment or send me an e-mail if you think I’m too far from what you said.
This summary is a bit lumpy. It's not yet possible to smooth everything out; we need some negotiation. I’m asking that contributors try to work toward a consensus in their next round of posts.
I have promises (promises, promises!) from a few more potential contributors. Contributions are still welcome, starting from scratch or responding to points already raised, on a single point or a grand unified theory, from bloggers, commenters, or others who want to participate. You can send a contribution to me via e-mail or post it on your blog.
I’ll summarize our progress again on January 7, unless more earthshaking events intrude.
My questions and comments are in italics. I have divided up topics somewhat arbitrarily, but I think they make sense. This probably does not represent a final organization.
Contributors so far:
Michael van der Galien
Continue reading "The Bloggers Develop Nuclear Weapons Policy – The First Round" »
by CKR
One of the world's great writers died this week. Jaan Kross was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature a number of times. Much of his work has been translated into English.
The Tsar's Madman and Professor Martens' Departure, the two of his novels that I have read, deal with some of the same themes of The White Ship. Aino Kallas was writing before the Soviet occupation, and Kross after, so his novels contain an additional layer of history through which Estonia's nineteenth century is seen.
His writing is exquisite, the characters strongly drawn so that we feel their conflicting loyalties and necessities. Anselm Hollo is an outstanding translator. I can only claim to having read Kross's work in English, but I recommend it highly.
Some photos here.
Update from Eric Dickens: For a longer list of the novels that Jaan Kross wrote (of the 16, only three are available in English translation) please have a look at the Three Percent website, run from Rochester University, New York State, where I have recently posted a quick overview of all the main novels he wrote.
Other people have written, in English, in more detail about specific books, but I wanted to also mention the books that have never appeared in English, plus his 600-page autobiography, which appeared in 2003.
I myself have translated two books by Kross into English; Anselm Hollo, the Finnish-American poet, a further two. But that's all there is in English. There are six of Kross' works in French, some also in German, Swedish, Dutch, Russian and in Finnish, which language closely resembles Estonian.
Further update by CKR: The link that Eric gives us is an outstanding overview of Kross's novels. Suur tänu, Harra Dickens! I'll also add to the list a lovely little volume that I picked up somewhere, either Milwaukee or Tallinn: The Rock from the Sky, five of Kross's short stories (novellas?), probably translated to English through a Russian translation of the Estonian. It was published in 1983 by Raduga Publishers.
A review of one of Kross's books translated into English.
by CKR
We’ve got a great response so far to my call for a blog-tank on nuclear weapons policy. But there are still a few more folks I’d like to hear from, some of whom have directed their attention to Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.
I have finished reading all of the books I mentioned in that earlier post, except the last chapter of Jonathan Schell’s The Seventh Decade, and I may weave some of their insights into my compilation. I also watched “Dr. Strangelove” again as part of my preparation.
The discussion is open to anyone, not just bloggers or non-specialists. I wanted to start with people who think about policy but who aren’t necessarily specialists in nuclear policy. I wanted to get a discussion going that could spread to ordinary voters. But if there are specialists out there just aching to get a word in edgewise, I welcome you, and I’m sure our discussants will as well. If you have a longish contribution that you want to e-mail, please do.
Thanks to everyone who has participated so far, especially those who have been spreading the word, and nudges to those who haven’t.
I’ll start working on my compilation. I hope to have it completed by the end of the weekend.
by CKR
My outdoor thermometer read three degrees this morning before sunrise. Then the wind came up. I’m not even thinking about scraping the inch of snow that fell last night off my stairs and driveway. Fortunately, the wind is helping to clear it. The temperature is going up fairly quickly; it’s twenty degrees at about noon, and tomorrow is supposed to be warmer.
One day last week, the birds snarfed down an entire brick of suet in a single day, so I figured that the cold weather meant I would need more suet. I loaded two bricks into the net feeder before the worst of the storm hit, and this morning I put hot water in the birdbath.
For me, I made bread yesterday and soup today. I also got out the underwear I bought at Stockmann’s in Tallinn on the way to Moscow one December.
I thought I was seeing at least one female Cassin’s finch (Carpodacus cassinii, first photo above), and yesterday I saw the male, too. The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology has a nice page on how to distinguish house, purple and Cassin’s finches, which are fairly similar. I find that the most distinctive markings are the female’s darkly striped face and the male’s relative unstriped breast.
There was a western bluebird, (Sialia mexicana) too, just for a short time, gone when I returned with the camera. Probably drawn to the suet, so I’ll keep alert.
No roadrunner lately. I’ve got a dish of insect-flavored suet pellets (yum!) out for her. Something eats the pellets from time to time, but I haven’t seen it. She showed up first on Christmas last year, but it was much snowier then.
And then there’s the stickler for accuracy. It’s a bird feeder, right? So this sharp-shinned hawk, Accipiter striatus (or maybe a Cooper’s hawk, Accipiter cooperii) says he’s a bird, and the feeder has some of his favorite food: juncos, bushtits, house finches….Yeah, after reading this, I think it’s a sharp-shinned hawk.
By PLS
She was ambitious. She was intelligent. She was articulate. She was beautiful. She was brave. She is dead.
The news was shocking—and somewhat expected.
Of all the aspirants to power in Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto was the most implacable in her opposition to regressive Islam. As a highly educated and sublimely confident female politician, she posed a danger to the militant Islam project in Pakistan in a way the Islamist-pandering, on-again-off-again secularist Musharraf never did. Nor did her arch-rival Nawaz Sharif, a follower of the very conservative, missionary-oriented Tabligi Jamat. Nawaz accepted exile in Wahabi Saudi Arabia, after all, while Benazir Bhutto in exile was at home in London and, on the Arabian peninsula, in the far more tolerant Emirates.
One thing no one has mentioned (to my imperfect knowledge anyway) in the course of sketching Benazir’s route to death in Rawalpindi yesterday, is that she encouraged a resurgence of the arts in Pakistan during her second prime ministership. A feminist poet who had to seek refuge in India during the puritanical military dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq not only returned to Pakistan but was given a position in the government’s cultural hierarchy. Female artistes were able to present classical dance programs in public, not only Kathak, which flourished in Muslim courts, but Bharat Natayam, which is a South Indian dance form. Painting thrived, too, with modern miniatures, some very witty and contemporary, pouring out of the art schools of Lahore. Non-religious classical music could also be enjoyed in public. People breathed freely. Well, some did. Others gnashed their teeth and insisted that female leadership was inconsistent with Islam.
Benazir was so articulate that one was tempted, at times, to think of her as glib, as if the word democracy might be falling a bit too trippingly from her tongue these days. But during her last term in power, there was indeed an opening up of life in Pakistan, the sort that’s consistent with the individual freedom that underlies the vital functioning of democratic institutions. Indians recall that she sought rapprochement with Pakistan’s huge neighbor, too. No doubt she was mightily constrained by the Pakistani army (as was Nawaz Sharif, when he was in power). And there were those corruption charges! Of course, even the Pakistani army is not exactly pure when it comes to extra-curricular financial opportunities, but the charge always resonates, as indeed it should.
I was more than a little amused during those long months when the Bush administration pushed for the never credible shotgun marriage that a Bhutto-Musharraf government would have been. Suddenly Benazir Bhutto had become the last best hope for democracy in Pakistan. What a turnabout! Ten years ago, when I was in Karachi and Benazir was in power, my diplomatic colleagues denigrated her as a hysterical ineffectual female and hailed Nawaz Sharif as a reality-based businessman America could work with. When I suggested that my dear male colleagues might be confusing style with substance, they pooh poohed the very possibility of sexism tainting their reports. Ha!
If the personally secular Musharraf has been a bit two-faced about his relationship with radical Islam, in the border areas and elsewhere, Nawaz Sharif is personally and openly of a conservative stripe as a Muslim. I found myself speculating (uncomfortably) as to whether, in the drive toward victory in the upcoming parliamentary elections, Nawaz might have made an unholy alliance with potential Islamist assassins. I am, now, convinced that such was not the case. I’ve watched the clip showing his reaction to the assassination at least five times. The anguish in his face is too total and too nuanced to be phoney. The man is shocked and distraught. The facial expression of “President” Musharraf, on the other hand, is stony and unreadable. Anything is possible, as Benazir herself suggested, openly. However, Musharraf's declaration of three days national mourning seems fairly striking. That’s high honor paid to an upstart woman. It’s not likely to increase his popularity with those who have tried to kill him in the past.
So what will happen with those elections? Was Benazir’s assassination a rather nasty way to get them called off? Was her death instrumental—or the whole point of the matter? I don’t know.
Finally, if Benazir had lived and become PM again, would she have been more broadly successful than previously? Only if critical elements of the army had chosen to support her and her goals, for a change. Would they have? That, too, I do not know. Nothing in Pakistan is more opaque than the collective thoughts of the all powerful army which poor George W. Bush naively thought he understood and could use for his own purposes. Billions and billions of dollars later, he knows better, I hope.
By PHK
I’m not good at crystal ball gazing but it seems to me that although the State Department managed to get its act together enough to play passport issuance catch-up over the past six months to the point where the wait-time is reportedly four to six weeks for regular processing and no more than three weeks for expedited processing, whether this will last is something else again. Why it took Congressional pressure and media criticism to force State to clean up the mess last summer is beyond me – but nevertheless, the outside pressure is clearly what made the difference.
State’s new Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy, Moira Hardy, the Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Consular Affairs, and everyone else involved should thank their lucky stars this holiday season that Congress put its foot down and told the administration and its recalcitrant Department of Homeland Security to postpone the full implementation of the Western Hemisphere Initiative (WHTI) until June 1, 2009 or later - like it or not. At least someone has some common sense.
When the WHTI is fully implemented everyone who crosses the US borders by land or sea as well as air will be required to have a valid passport or a “smart card.” This could quadruple the number of American passport holders and yet again inundate the passport agencies unless the State Department is prepared to ramp up its passport issuing office capacity substantially yet again between now and then.
Why DHS’ continued urging that this final piece of the law be implemented sooner rather than later is beyond me. Exactly how many of the 9/11 hijackers, for instance, came into the country sans passport and across a land or sea border from Canada, Mexico, Bermuda or the Caribbean? Not one. If I remember correctly they entered on questionable student visas issued by private American flight schools where they learned to take-off but not land. Who exactly monitored that rather bizarre behavior – where was the FBI when we needed them? I’m also not convinced that a piece of paper makes a difference in the overall scheme of things. Then again, it’s not exactly as if we don’t have our home-grown terrorists either – think Oklahoma City bombing. What does seem to make a difference, however, is strong intelligence work and alert border officials. That’s where I’d put my money if I lived in 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, NW.
I suppose, however, if a would-be terrorist happened to cross the US border by foot sans passport, it would make DHS look bad. Frankly, I think this passport-by-land requirement is foremost nonsense and essentially a bureaucratic CYA game – but that comes from my cynical nature having worked for the U.S. government for 27 plus years and having experienced more than my share of terrorist alerts, scares and disasters overseas.
Continue reading "Passport Update: What’s In Store for 2008 " »
by CKR
In contrast to the recent political smoke-blowing over religion, I’d like to suggest a meeting-ground within and between religions.
Spiritual/ethical/religious conviction is rooted in experiences that tell us yes, this is how the universe should be. The experience may be a lifetime in an established religion and family that provides an ongoing feeling of rightness, or it may be a revelation that utterly contradicts what has gone before.
Our religious texts document these varieties of enlightenment. The Old Testament prophets, Gautama, Muhammed, Jesus, and their followers, and many more. Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez. The names that most of us recognize are those of people who saw that the social system needed change and did something about it. The quieter recognition that one’s own life needs changing doesn’t make the headlines but it is just as real.
But the experiences have much in common: the feeling that this is the way things are meant to be. That may mean that something is wrong, it must be changed, and somehow I will have the strength to make the change. Or it may mean that I must work harder to spread the good I have received. The feeling is so strong that it seems like it must be coming from outside the self.
But in order to share it, or even to explain it to oneself (because we humans do mull these things over and over), we must use words, and experience never fits completely into words.
Actions can supplement and reinforce the words, but even this combination is insufficient to explain or to convince. The experience may have been within a community, and the community may already have scriptures or stories that provide ways of talking about the experience.
Even though the words are not enough, repeating them reinforces that they feel right, and being in a community keeps some of that experience alive even as what doesn’t fit is sheared off, forgotten. It is not far to believing that my community only understands, and the others are mistaken.
If the people in the community need to feel that they are special, another of those feelings that we humans so easily fall into, they will see the pieces of experience they have sheared off in other communities and condemn them for emphasizing wrong experience, wrong words, heresy.
That is what we see today. Those who are content with the words and who must feel they are special find it easier to be vocal than those who recognize the insufficiency of words and the necessity of humility.
But we need more voices for the commonality of our experience, that we are related by our experience, and for the responsibility that flows from that experience.
“Do not be afraid. Listen, I bring you news of great joy, a joy to be shared by the whole people.” By the whole people, the angel said.
Some of today’s related thoughts:
E. J. Dionne
By PHK
The full moon over the Sandias at night.
Downhill skiing on six inches of powder snow on a sunny week day when the kids are in school and the Texans in Texas. The oboe, the right reed and a great teacher. Family and friends. Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul and Other Colors. Finding autographed copies of Tony Hillerman books at Page One – Albuquerque’s largest indy book store. Vivaldi’s “Gloria,” Part Five. (Beautiful oboe solo. Sorry couldn’t find part five on Youtube.)
Doves nesting in our Hawthorne tree. The bobcat duo sunning themselves on our back wall one January afternoon.
Gian Carl Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors’ “Shepherd’s Dance” (great oboe duet from a wonderful 20th century opera commissioned for television) performed by the Santa Fe Symphony at its December 2007 Christmas concert. Danae Kara’s performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s “Three Piano Concertos” (1997) on CD. Now available again in the U.S. via Amazon. Rachmaninoff’s “Vespers” performed by the Santa Fe Desert Chorale August 2007 and just released on CD but not yet listed on the webpage. Robert Greenberg’s 48 lesson series “How to Listen to and Understand Great Music” from The Teaching Company.
Ray Orley and Kristen Loree in “Duet for One” at Albuquerque’s Sol Arts Theater. This performance should be repeated. “Cities of Light: the Rise and Fall of Islamic Spain” produced and directed by Robert Gardner and shown on PBS.
Friends and colleagues from the World Affairs Forum and WhirledView.
That “ah ha” moment when a post finally comes together. The satisfaction of being quoted in the MSM on a story I had first written about five months earlier. E-mails and letters of encouragement from friends and long lost friends who reconnected - usually via WhirledView. The gradually increasing acceptance of blogging, blogs and bloggers as legitimate sources of information, influence and opinion even by some in the MSM.
Tomatoes from my garden that lasted into December. Zucchinis that grew far too big. Lesson learned by this amateur gardener: zucchinis hide out in camoflage on the ground underneath the huge leaves. Strawberries and iris that take over the garden in spring. 
Snow on the Sandias in winter. Organic rasberry jam from Heidi’s sold at the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market. My two amaryllis bulbs which refuse to bloom in winter but do so profusely when I set them out under the Hawthorne tree in summer.
And, finally, the Santa Fe Plaza and the St. Francis Cathedral Basilica at night during the Christmas season.
To all of WV readers, thank you so much for your comments, your tips, your help and your continued interest and support. Season’s Greetings, Happy Holidays - and to all a good night.
Photo credits: All photos by PHKushlis.
by CKR
We’re past the longest night. Reason enough for all the celebrations we’ll be holding over the next couple of weeks. Here’s some nice Celtic stuff about solstice observation and its equivalent in one of my favorite New Mexico places.
So here’s some light blogging while those nuclear policy posts continue to flow in and the nights are still long, but getting shorter.
The birds have been active at the feeders. I’m not as faithful as I might be about keeping the hopper feeder filled, but I probably should pay more attention to it over the next few days. We had about six inches of snow last night, and it looks like it won’t make it up to freezing today, although the sun is melting the residue on my shoveled driveway. That may even take another day. The birds need their food.
I pour hot water into the frozen birdbath and occasionally tip the accumulated ice out. Our temperatures have fluctuated wildly; Thursday night the birdbath hardly froze. I’ll distribute photos through this longer-than-usual ramble. One day, for about twenty minutes, the flock of piñon jays appeared, forcing the flicker back to the Russian olives, which she nibbled desultorily, but then decided that, damn it, it was her feeder too. The bushtits (Psaltriparus minimus) have been around quite a bit, keeping me company while I shoveled this morning, but they also hit the feeder regularly. Minimus is right! They are only a little bigger than hummingbirds!
And the amaryllis has finished blooming. Just leaves now.
The week started with a meeting in Los Alamos on Monday night under strange circumstances. The church secretary warned me that Canyon Road, the route I usually take in front of the church, was barricaded off “for the movie.” I had been reading about the filming of “Brothers,” with Jake Gyllenhaal and others (I remember his name best because of that double a, Swedish I think in his case, but so like Estonian), but my impression from the Santa Fe New Mexican was that it was being filmed in Santa Fe.
Coming down Rose Street, I saw a group of people huddled outside the church, some wearing military uniforms, and bright BRIGHT lights focused on the sanctuary’s stained glass windows, another bright light on the other side in Canyon Road. As the church secretary had warned me, the west side of the parking lot was full of trucks containing electronic equipment. But there were spaces left where I usually park.
I had to walk through and past that clutch of extras on the sidewalk. They looked at me strangely, but it seemed to me they were the strange ones, in costumes of some decades back I think, although it was fairly dark. In any case, not the kind of thing I’ve seen recently in Los Alamos.
I was informed by the others in my meeting that the filming has been in various places around Los Alamos, perturbing traffic.
More and more movies are being made in New Mexico. Back in the forties, many of the natural landscapes were used in movies; there’s a wonderfully funky old hotel in Gallup where Ronald Reagan and others stayed. When I came to New Mexico and first drove over the little ridge just before the plain around Ghost Ranch opens out, I recognized it from old movies, although their black and white had not come close to the reality.
But there’s a downside. As a New Mexican, I had to see “The Milagro Beanfield War,” and a wonderful movie it was. But one scene puzzled me. It’s where the bulldozer takes off by itself. It trundled across the sagebrushy plains west of Taos, as I expected from the book. Toward the Rio Grande Gorge, I expected. Then it suddenly fell off a cliff of Bandelier tuff near Los Alamos. I couldn’t figure out whether it was supposed to have made it through the mesas, valleys and arroyos between the two places, and then I realized: if you didn’t live in New Mexico, you wouldn’t know how far that cliff was from the plain. Then I had to catch up with what I missed while pondering that.
Familiarity with the locations is not necessarily a benefit.
A small note that bloggers working on posts for the discussion on nuclear policy might find interesting. Carson Mark, a decade or more ago, suggested that our thermonuclear bombs could be defanged simply by allowing the tritium in them to decay, and not replacing it. Tritium has a twelve-year half-life, so in fifty years you’re down to one-sixteenth of what you started with, just by natural processes. It’s seemed to me that without a pit manufacturing facility, the United States can just let the rest of our nukes decay out of capability. Today the Washington Post tells us that older F-15s may have to be grounded because of the metal fatigue that comes with years of use. Of course, everyone would have to agree to let their armaments deteriorate simultaneously.
Oh, and we decided to make tritium in civilian reactors, breaching the separation of weapons and civilian uses of nuclear power.
The Los Angeles Times reminds me that I wanted to offer an alternative viewpoint on Barack Obama’s drug use. Maybe, at this late date, when we all know that practically all baby boomers inhaled (that can include at least two choices), it’s salutary to have a candidate who can admit that that’s what he did. We can assume the other campaign staffs are working hard to find the evidence of most recent use. Do we really need to be quite so hysterical about all this?
And, finally, here’s a Christmas story that I quite enjoyed.
Jon Entine: Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People
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