WhirledView

Chickens Coming Home to Roost?

By PHK

The chickens may be returning to the roost, but where does that leave us now?

This has not been one of those sultry "Porgy and Bess" summers when nothing happens as the fish jump and the cotton grows high. It’s a summer when most everything has gone wrong – from creationists flogging – seemingly successfully – their latest bid for supremacy-of-the-blind through the teach-the-intelligent-design-canard which will dumb down US high school science education even further to hurricane Katrina destroying much of the colorful city of New Orleans thanks to rising temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico. Yet since the canny Cajuns apparently built the oldest part of this low-lying city on higher ground than those who came later, the Old French Quartier, at least, might still be there – or at least salvageable. Does anyone know?

Meanwhile, the Bush Administration has told us that global warming doesn’t exist. So why should the U.S. sign the Kyoto Protocol? This international agreement is only a first, timid step on the way to help slow climate change and thereby retard submersion of coastal cities throughout the world - including our own. Maybe Bush’s EPA should rethink its head-in-the sand policies? Sometimes hard science and the scientific method do offer something of practical value. I’m not saying Kyoto would have saved New Orleans, the treaty is foremost a symbol of intent, but more real and immediate attention to the deleterious effects of global warming might make a difference for Venice or even Charleston’s “Catfish Row” in the future.

Then there’s Plamegate –or Rovegate depending on your perspective and the imbroglio in Iraq becoming – well – an ever bigger imbroglio. The new U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilizad now says that the infant Iraqi constitution can still be changed before it is submitted to the voters in October despite the painful drafting process with its multiplicity of missed U.S. imposed deadlines. Regardless, W has just spent five oblivious weeks of this long, hot summer cycling away in Texas – assiduously toning and tanning, I suppose, his brawn – but certainly not his brain.

Refugees

by CKR

As the first week of May 2000 slid into the second, I had a bedroll and an overnight bag with some clothes and other stuff in the back of my Subaru Forester.

The Cerro Grande fire blossomed beyond the boundaries set for a controlled burn, but it was stopped by several thousand firefighters on the south side of Los Alamos canyon in an uneasy truce. The Laboratory was shut down; fires were smoldering at its edges, and the several thousand commuters from Santa Fe and the Valley would make evacuation more difficult if it became necessary.

The beginning of May is a windy time in northern New Mexico, and a front was due on May 10. That would be the make or break day, although the truce and lack of breeze lulled some residents into believing the fire was under control. Mornings tend to be calm, but thermals around the mountains mean that afternoon is the windiest.

As I drove to Sombrillo Nursing Home to check on my mother that morning, I noticed one state police car after another. It’s not unusual to see one in town, but I was thinking more about my mother’s agitation as she saw smoke pouring over the city and into the valley several days before. A stroke had taken her ability to speak, but she made her agitation and its cause clear. She was still agitated, not least because the dining area now contained a pile of garbage bags loaded with the supplies that sixty people in various stages of incapacitation would need if they had to be evacuated. The staff assured me that many people with pickup trucks had volunteered, that First Presbyterian Church in White Rock was their evacuation destination, and that I could stop by and pick up my mother if that was possible during an evacuation but they knew it might not be.

I could see wind in the trees as I drove home. I had KRSN, the local radio station, on, as everyone did now. KRSN would give us first notice of an evacuation. They were watching the wind gauge closely. I ate an uneasy lunch as the smoke climbed higher.

Hurricane Katrina

The Tattered Coat is providing excellent coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

via Public Org Theory.

Tradition and the New – Part 2

by CKR

Traditions are constantly being renewed, pace the purists who would freeze them at certain preferred points in time. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” is now a traditional part of Christmas in the United States. Gene Autry first recorded it in 1949. The mix and style of the arts displayed at Indian Market change slightly every year. Both Rudolph and the newer manifestations of Indian art can be attributed to commerciality, but I would guess that at least one reader has some fond Christmas memories attached to that song.

I love folk costumes. They require all the varieties of needlework, most of which I do more or less competently, so figuring out how they’re done and how I might incorporate them into a project is part of the fun for me. In most places they are worn only for special occasions or exist only as heirlooms, grandmother’s wedding dress in a box.

When I went to Estonia for the first time, I saw postcards in a series that was clearly modern, but the photos looked straight out of the nineteenth century: folk costumes of the various regions. Men and women posed formally against filmy gray painted backgrounds of trees and small houses. Some were in stiff dance poses. I quickly overcame an initial temptation to track down the entire series (how many cards, I had no idea). I don’t recall on which trip I learned about the song festivals, but I knew that I would have to attend. The singers and dancers in the accompanying dance festival would be attired in those folk costumes. I also love to sing and to listen to others.

Tuesday Baby Lizard Blogging

Must have been a clutch of lizard eggs hatched recently. This little guy is maybe four centimeters long, much smaller than in the enlarged photo you'll get if you click on this one. She wouldn't stay still long enough for me to put any kind of marker nearby. Right up by my front door, though.

Here are the Mexican sunflowers PLS gave me, greeting the sun.

And those nice little purple flowers I was pulling out under the mistaken impression that they were Russian thistle.

Chelsea, Yes! Jenna, No!

By PLS

At last a woman president! Conservative ideologues are planning to hit the comic books shelves with a dystopia set in 2021 America. The President will be Chelsea Clinton, evidently.

I haven’t the slightest notion of Chelsea’s political ideas, but her personal life in college seems to have been considerably more circumspect than that of the Bush girl children.

Chelsea has no arrest record for repeated misuse of alchohol or illegal narcotics. She seemed more interested in studies than rowdy parties. The same is true of Amy, Carter’s daughter.

Republicans are constantly railing about Democrats’ lack of family values. But Democratic Presidents seem to do a much better job at raising their children.

On the basis of the record, then, better Chelsea or Amy as president than either of the Bush Terrible Twins.

And could anyone feel safe if the protectors of the social and political order were the likes of G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North? Both are convicted felons. Their commitment to democratic values is highly suspect. Those slippery creatures are the heroes who will rescue us from the envisioned Chelsea regime.

Heaven help us!

But then the current crop of Republicans have the illusion that Heaven is always helping them, so maybe we’ll have to depend on ourselves.

Come to think of it, the proposed heavily unhumorous, cel-by-cel Democrat bashing is beginning to seem like a tremendous campaign boost for whoever becomes the Democrat candidate for president in 2008. Are the originators Democrats in disguise?

There's talk that the concept is an exercise in ambiguity designed to appeal to both sides of the political fence. Nothing I've read so far suggests that the originators have enough imagination to deal creatively and intelligently with the present much less the world as it may be in 2021 or even 2008.

But they are creating lots of buzz.

The Base Reacts

Terry Neal notes that some supporters of the war in Iraq are voicing concern about the establishment of religion clauses in the Iraqi constitution. The Family Research Council, for one. What they say is

It is not now clear how the provision on human rights and democracy will relate to those making Islam the basis of law. There is also a question over whether a freedom of religion clause will apply to groups or to individuals. Freedom of religious belief and practice is the most fundamental of liberties, and without it, it is doubtful that other democratic freedoms can truly exist.

Two points here: 1. This is President Bush's base in the religious right that is questioning the Iraqi constitution. 2. I am wondering whether the FRC's concern is freedom of religious belief for the Iraqis or their ability to proselytize there.

I have run into them in Tallinn shops. Estonian friends have asked me about religious groups offering schools and representing themselves as being from the US government. I have watched them on flights into and out of Kazakhstan and heading in other directions out of Europe. Fundamentalist Christian missionaries. I haven't posted much on them because I don't know as much as I'd like to and don't know how to find out. I spent a couple of hours on the internet researching that question from Estonian friends, and didn't find out much that was useful, except that the organization was located in Texas and was clearly a conservative Christian group, not connected to the US government as far as I could see.

It's their right to preach their religion. I just wonder what it's doing for the US in the rest of the world.

Tradition and the New

by CKR

I’ve had a cluster of ideas gestating for some time now. A post by hilzoy at Obsidian Wings made me decide to work on them for WhirledView.

One of the good things about blogging is that you can form your ideas as you go. I did a bit of that a while back on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (click on Nuclear Issues under Categories).

I came back from Kamchatka with new eyes (as the Buddhists say) after two weeks with no access to the internet. I thought before I left, and still think now, that the business in Iraq is sucking all the oxygen out of all political and international relations discussions. It pulls me in and sucks all the other ideas out of my head.

So I’d like to step back from that for a while, if it turns out I am able to.

I’ll also echo hilzoy’s caveats: I’m working these ideas out as I go, and I may be totally off base. But that’s worth doing from time to time, too. Making new mistakes can show you things you didn’t see before.

And now I’ll start.

Last month, PLS wrote on Santa Fe and its International Folk Art Market. Last weekend, I attended Santa Fe’s Indian Market, the original folk art market. The hotels and streets began filling up early last week, and the climax came early Saturday morning. By nine o’clock, it was almost impossible to get close to many of the stands. Mutton stew and frybread is a pretty heavy brunch, but the lines were lengthening at the food stands too.