WhirledView

Out of the Loop Again: Anti-war demonstrators and the missing NYT

Not to mention the Democratic Leadership

By PHK

Here we go again. Buses are rolling into Washington, D.C. for what the organizers claim will be the largest anti-war in Iraq demonstration since March 2003. But where is the New York Times? And, for that matter where will the Democratic Party leadership be tomorrow? It’s as if the Times has its head in the sand once again and the Democrats are afraid to touch the demonstration because, oh my gosh, it’s being organized by America’s political left.

Meanwhile, Georgie-porgie rallied his troops on Thursday in a well-covered speech at the Pentagon. We’re told he plans to be away from Washington tomorrow. Just as well. He probably wouldn’t like what he saw. Maybe he and the Democratic leadership – which apparently also plans to be away from the Capital according to Knight Ridder – will cut brush together and bike around Crawford. Then maybe some mint-juleps on the lawn while the other half of Texas tries to flee Rita?

Or no, the news reports that he’s watching the anti hurricane disaster preparation from the US military command in Colorado. I’ll bet the command is just thrilled. Is Laura now planning to skip the Library of Congress’ National Book Festival? Or maybe not. Whatever. She appears to have far more fortitude and common sense than her husband and is, therefore, more likely at least to make a politically intelligent decision about whether or not to attend the annual event of one of her pet charities.

I wouldn’t have known about the Sept. 24 anti-Iraq war demonstration if Elizabeth D. Dyson, a Washington attorney, hadn’t tipped me off. She inspired me to do some research and then write a post about the fact that the protest and the Laura Bush supported National Library of Congress Book Festival are scheduled for the same day in downtown DC – one on the Ellipse, the other on the Mall.

There was little press attention then – and only today have I seen MSM articles – beginning with the quirky and generally right-wing Albuquerque Journal which carried AP and Knight Ridder stories about the upcoming demonstration(s) and who and who isn’t planning to be in town.

Too Many Chinese Boys: Ideas Anyone?

By PLS

Because the Han generally prefer sons who can pass on the family name, China’s One Child policy had a predictable effect: a bumper crop of boy babies. Now there are too many young men and not nearly enough brides, so girls across the border in Viet Nam are in danger of kidnaping, evidently, by frustrated Chinese bachelors hot to tie the knot.

This demographic crisis was the subject of the middle lecture in a series of three delivered by Dr. Marcus W. Feldman in Santa Fe this week under the auspices of the Santa Fe Institute. The series, offered as the Twelfth Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lectures, was entitled “Molecules, Machines and Mathematics: Issues in Biological and Social Evolutionary Theory,” and colleague Cheryl and I attended all three.

Cheryl is a scientist and I am a–who knows what, but let’s say over-educated humanist, so we spent some time dutifully batting around the mathematical and cultural implications of Feldman’s ideas about “niche construction.” It was a very sober discussion.

Then we got down to the really interesting question. What on earth is China going to do with all those randy young men?

A few thoughts came immediately to mind.

The charming extra man or two is the dream scenario of every Western hostess, but their overindulging female guests are not going to wake up happily as abductees to China the next morning.

The Good Life: A Hot Bath, Good Food, A Body-Easing Bed

By PLS

And in quick succession.

In short, notions of luxury get very basic when you’ve been trekking all day on steep mountainsides, however beautiful, however dramatic.

Yes, the ever-changing perspectives on Mt. Blanc were stunning. So was everything else about the Alpine landscape: the gentle high meadows, the solemn verticalities, the grassy valleys with their glacier-fed streams, the late summer flowers, the delicate larch groves, the soaring eagles, the sonorous cow bells. But shower/ dinner/sleep–that’s all that was transcendently desirable toward late afternoon while I was hiking (sometimes bouyantly, sometimes close to exhaustion) around Mr. Blanc (altitude 14,500 feet) for eleven days.

I hasten to note that the classic route kept our band of trekkers well below the summer snow line. Though we were often above tree level, the highest passes we crossed didn’t quite reach to 8,500 feet. Even so, the landscape on the major cols had a bleak severe look that warned we must never take safety for granted even as we indulged ourselves in a way that couch potatoes would find utterly absurd. When the sun was out, it was hot enough to have us sweating until we could pause, jettison our day packs and peel layers off. When clouds dumped rain, or a sharp wind roared through a pass, our fingers froze and the blast practically blew us off our feet, a reminder of winter on the way. Already some of the superbly hospitable refuges (or refugios) that offer affordable, yet delicious real food and good wine and even a night’s blanket and bunk bed were closing for the season.

The Tour du Mt. Blanc slices through France, Italy and Switzerland for 100 miles, and an average day’s regimen involves (1) climbing 3000 feet, (2) descending 3000 feet, (3) sauntering occasionally and never for long on some only comparatively gentle ups and downs. Mr. Blanc, it seems, isn’t a single white-frosted peak like a volcano; it’s a massif with subordinate peaks of all sorts, thanks to the very different erosive properties of its geologically complex constituents. Many peaks are so knife-edged they can hardly balance a single snowflake. Others look deceptively recumbent under a blanket of eternal whiteness. We were simply walking–another word is rambling--around the massif. The fitter or more ambitious climb the peaks, often to exalt, occasionally to die.

About that word “eternal.” It used to be the obvious word, but the famous glaciers that fill the high valleys and appear to glue the peaks together are receding. At their lower levels they have a distinctly shrunken and pathetic look, hunched down in grooves they once made but no longer fit. The sad image of a post-coital penis comes to mind. A review of the paintings, engravings and photos in the Alpine Museum in Chamonix, France, little more than an hour’s drive from Geneva, indicates that glaciers once encroached much more closely on the little town that is now a major resort city–think hiking, climbing, skiing, paragliding, cycling, the works.

We started and ended our trek in Chamonix, and from the balcony of my hotel room I took pix of Mt. Blanc, eg. the culminating peak, and of a nearby glacier. I also photographed the dun-colored half pipe the river of snow and ice should have filled.

I’d planned to do a WorldView story on those retreating glaciers, you see, but my camera lost interest on day two. Result: no photo story for WorldView. Suffice it to say that Alpine tourism authorities are already coping with shorter ski seasons and shorter ski runs. They aren’t sneering at the science behind theories of global warming; they’re facing the evidence.

The Ornament of the World: Can faith and reason coexist?

By PHK

A Book Review Essay

Rosa Maria Menocal’s The Ornament of the World is history I missed in high school and college. Maybe the curriculum is different nowadays – but I’m skeptical – at least from what I’m told by my students – and from the mostly blank looks on faces of all but the most avid history buffs when I mention Al Andalus. This was the incredible Islamic civilization that flourished in south Spain when the rest of the Europeans shivered in drafty castles, stone hovels and log cabins while self-serving popes dispatched armies of crusaders to the Holy Lands to expel the Muslim Infidel.

Those Middle Eastern Crusades ended, with the exception of Sicily, unsuccessfully. But Europe’s borders were porous and what transpired profoundly influenced European civilization as much, if not more than it did the Muslim world itself. Without the Arab centers of learning that began with the Abbasids in 8th century Baghdad and included Spain’s Cordoba and Toledo where ancient Greek classics were not only preserved, but also translated into Arabic, and the scientific, technological and mathematical knowledge of Chinese and Hindu scholars incorporated into the expanding Arabic knowledge-base, the western world might still live in those dank, cold dwelling places and the history of the New World would have taken a different course.

Menocal’s enchanting book is written not for the scholar but the educated layman. It is a finely polished gem. Hers is a complex story every bit as intricate as those swirling arabesques that grace the ceilings of mosques turned churches and palaces cum museums of Andalusian Spain.
She tells us of a highly advanced civilization based in the Spanish caliphate of Cordoba (929-1031) – a city on a bank of the Guadalaquivir River – which was once the Muslim world’s fourth most important and holiest city.

Hurricanes and Warm Water

by CKR

I'm impressed with Hurricane Rita's rapid ascension from a mere tropical storm last night to a Category 5 hurricane today. So far, Rita's path seems to be toward Texas rather than New Orleans. Galveston is being evacuated, as is New Orleans.

I've heard the comments about global warming and its effect on hurricanes, so I did a quick Google search to see what I could find.

Here are some water temperatures for the eastern Gulf. Temperatures at Pensacola, Florida, and Dauphin Island, Alabama, are well above the averages for September. Likewise, temperatures in the western Gulf are uniformly above the long-term averages. I'd like some temperatures further out into the Gulf, but I haven't been able to find them.

A couple of studies of Hurricane Opal (1995) seem to show that it gained strength over warmer water. The Gulf of Mexico is warmer than the open ocean (east of Florida) because it is shallower, just as your kid's backyard pool gets warmer than the lake. Opal intensified as it moved into the Gulf, just as Rita has. But Opal also passed over a warmer eddy within the Gulf, and its surface winds almost doubled in velocity, from 35 meters/second to 60.

Two papers on one hurricane, along with current Gulf temperatures, do not constitute a full scientific study, but they do seem to be pointing in the direction of higher Gulf temperatures and more intense hurricanes.

The American Meterological Society wants a subscription for full access to their journal articles, but they provide long abstracts. Thanks to them for that convenience.

Tuesday Fall Blogging

Fall starts Thursday, but there are some sure signs.

The aspens on the mountains are just beginning to turn. (Sorry--this is a rather long telephoto shot, and I haven't figured out how to clear the atmospheric haze with Photoshop yet.)

Intelligence?

by CKR

Brad Plumer marvels over what we don’t know in Iraq, nor what to do with it. I am one of the unlucky ones who can’t comment on his blog nor leave trackbacks (could be my computer, but who knows), so I’m hoping Brad will check in here.

As I just noted, our intelligence on North Korea isn’t so hot either, and of course we all know how it stacked up with what we actually found in Iraq.

Kevin Drum hits on something that’s been gestating in my brain for a while and that I think bears on the question of why US intelligence seems to be so lousy. Kevin goes one direction with it, but I want to go another. (Can’t leave trackbacks at Kevin’s site either.)

The point of the executive departments is that they oversee activities that require some expertise. For this reason, they are largely staffed with civil servants. Although the proportions of political appointees keep growing, the responsibility of the civil servants is to develop and maintain specialized knowledge in their areas. So Treasury, which Paul Krugman mentions in the piece that got Kevin’s attention, hires economists. State hires political scientists and language specialists along with generalists and others who have some understanding of other countries. The various science agencies and national laboratories hire scientists. FDA and CDC hire medical people. NOAA hires atmospheric scientists.

The North Korean “Deal” and American Nuclear Posture

by CKR

Kevin Drum ponders the lack of commentary on the North Korean “deal” in the blogosphere. I’m not sure there’s really a vacuum there, but if there is, I suspect that it’s because we’re all suffering from news overdose. I know I am, and I also know that there’s a depressive reaction to disasters.

ZenPundit offers some provocative comment, and nadezhda replies in the comment section.

Arms Control Wonk provides the text of the statement and confirms my suspicion that it’s a lot like the much-Bush-administration-reviled 1994 Agreed Framework.

The MSM hailed the statement yesterday as though it were a done deal, but there’s a lot more negotiation before that happens. Still, it’s good to have some preliminary agreement.