if you have some time to kill, a book review I just wrote on Brian McAllister Linn's, The Echo of Battle: The Army's Way of War is now up at the Michigan War Studies Review.

123 murders in 12 days

The news from Juárez only receives national attention when it is politically convenient or at an anniversary point (look for year end accountings of the murders) but the death rate there is nothing short of totally astonishing and appalling.

Sixteen people were killed this weekend, 6 on Friday, 10 Saturday. There have been 123 murders in December so far and 2,487 murders this year.

123 murders in 12 days, yet unless you seek out this news in Mexican newspapers (or live in El Paso) there is total silence about it.

This is clearly an insane and out of control crisis. And there is no question--the blood is on our hands.

For all of the talk of expanding our commitment to the failed (or non-)state of Afghanistan it really is time to heighten the realities back in our neighborhood of the failed state we collectively as Americans are producing in Mexico. We might not be actually pulling the triggers but we are encouraging it every day we continue prohibition. Simple.

And this isn't charming 1920s gangster in Hollywood films, these are evil drug murderers every bit as pathological as the fundamentalists in the Taliban, using the same tricks, but who don't even profess to believe in anything but making a profit anyway. Unlike the Taliban they are not on the other side of the planet, and are not supported by the local populace, and they can actually be defeated too.

But instead we are quite literally trashing the future of American power and economic might in the sinkhole/shithole of Afghanistan for no true strategic purpose.

If you listened to Obama's speech announcing the troop increase you may have noticed his mention of the cost of the misadventure. This is the first time I am aware of a President making this kind of concession that we are flat broke and that this is war is really a massive financial risk as well as a threat to our military. Fortunately we can just conjure money out of thin air.

There is that nagging reality that legalization of drugs would raise a lot of money too. The only response on the pro-prohibition side is basically that, uh, 'drugs are really bad, can't you see that?' If anyone can find any argument for prohibition that is not at base this subjective, fundamentalist premise, please do share. It is pedantic (but necessary still) to reiterate that every argument made against drugs can be made against booze, the source of a stunning array of social pathologies.

here is a list that has recently made the rounds, I came to it (along with this nice collection of links on the tax benefits of legalizing marijuana) from Taxprof Blog.

"CNN has published a 50-state ranking of the potential tax revenues that could be raised by legalizing and taxing marijuana, based on state-by-state marijuana consumption, from Jeffrey Miron (Harvard University, Department of Economics), Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition. The study projects $778.2 million from taxing marijuana; here are the Top 20 states:

1. California ($105.4 million)
2. New York ($65.5 million)
3. Florida ($48.2 million)
4. Texas ($46.6 million)
5. Ohio ($34.8 million)
6. Michigan ($32.4 million)
7. Illinois ($31.6 million)
8. Pennsylvania ($30.5 million)
9. Washington ($22.0 million)
10. Virginia ($20.9 million)
11. North Carolina ($20.6 million)
12. Georgia ($19.3 million)
13. New Jersey ($19.3 million)
14. Massachusetts ($18.4 million)
15. Indiana ($17.8 million)
16. Colorado ($17.6 million)
17. Missouri ($15.6 million)
18. Minnesota ($14.3 million)
19. Oregon ($14.1 million)
20. Maryland ($13.9 million)

no clean coal, and no clean coal executives either

I sometimes wonder if anyone associated in a management capacity with a coal company is anything other than a venal, corrupt, and evil presence seeking to pollute, cheat, rape, and otherwise destroy the environment and the health and safety of local communities. I haven't seen any evidence to the contrary. But there is a whole lot of evidence that they will lie and cheat even in the face of known dangers to health, all to make a buck.

Here is a recent example--the just-released evidence to show that Dominion Virginia Power executives knew that fly ash was not "as safe as dirt" as they claimed when they used it to build a community in Chesapeake. Quite the opposite:

"The executives anticipated public questions, and rehearsed and parsed their answers. They drew lines on what to share with regulators and what to hide.

In one memo about preparing for a public hearing, a participant wrote, “Do not mention hazardous vs. drinking water. Just say 'completely non-hazardous.’”

It worked. State regulators raised little resistance. Local officials trusted the energy company’s judgment and granted approval.

But court records show the trust eroding as the 1.5 million tons of coal ash, containing hazardous materials, flowed into the rural community by the truckload.

More than 400 people have sued Dominion, the golf course developer and owners in Chesapeake Circuit Court this year for more than $1 billion in damages. Residents contend that the energy company ignored consultants who told them hazardous materials would leach into drinking water wells. They called the development a “toxic waste site masquerading as a 'golf course.’”
...

In handwritten notes of a March 2001 meeting among golf course developers and Dominion officials, the team frankly discussed an arsenic problem in the groundwater under the Chesapeake plant. Officials needed to practice answers for residents’ queries.

The author of the handwritten notes is not identified in the lawsuit. The person attended several high-level meetings involving company officials from public relations, legal and environmental engineering departments. The notes were filed with the court by attorneys for the residents. They were found among more than 1,300 pages of documents filed in two suits since March.

Lawyers who brought the lawsuit on behalf of the residents declined to comment for this story.

Before an early 2001 public hearing, officials prepared a list of sample questions.

For example, to answer whether the ash was a danger to the wells that supplied water to all the residents, the memo suggested that in a probable worst-case scenario, the groundwater leached from the coal ash would meet six of eight federal standards for drinking water. In a handwritten aside, the author warned not to mention the material was “hazardous vs. groundwater.”

In a final note preparing for the hearing, a practice question asked, “How will the golf course help this community?”

The answer included another question: “A golf course also increases the property values in the area.” It was punctuated, in parentheses, with a question mark.

In another meeting about environmental issues, Dominion and CPM officials discussed deeper problems.

“If public thinks ash is benign, what happens if/when citizens find out what may be different?” an April 2001 memo noted. The author noted that Dominion has given DEQ some information, “but they don’t have all info (have some worse).”

Max Bartholomew, a spokesman for Dominion, attended many of the planning meetings, along with officials from CPM, according to the notes.

In June, Bartholomew assured then-Mayor William E. Ward that the company monitored the fly ash and there were no environmental concerns that the city should be aware of. The City Council approved the project."

Up in Richmond last evening I enjoyed talking to a couple people with the kind of mindset you really only find in the South--conservative libertarian, committed to the outdoors, and yet also socially conscious supporters of urban renewal in the so-called progressive stripe. That is, committed social activists who are also engaged with a full range of understanding of social and economic complexities and not simply armed with certainties. Displaying the kind of social commitment minus self righteousness which is a good model for others to adopt but which is depressingly rare in the "progressive" community and totally absent in the faux-populist reactionary of the Sarah Palin-supporting type mouthing meaningless platitudes about the virtues of the common man. To be truthful, the political spectrum fails in the face of the urban problems in American and especially in the South, so endemic and so intense in Richmond, Petersburg, Norfolk, and Portsmouth, to name a few communities.

I have been meaning to do a photo essay of empty lots in the city center of Norfolk, just to document it and also to give others a sense of what it is like. What does it mean for a city of limited space to have so many empty lots, often most of entire blocks? It means collapse.

Here was a couple who actually give a hoot about regular people and demonstrated the commitment by doing the insane and moving into the most socially and economically blighted area of Richmond--Church Hill. Yes, it is one of the most historic and architecturally important areas of the city, but that hasn't prevented it from becoming a dangerous slum. There are something like 3000 abandoned properties in Richmond and 2500 or so in Church Hill. It isn't especially hard or impressive to be "progressive" when you are already surrounded by other educated, bicycle riding, compost-making, avocado-eating, community-building, arts-supporting types. It is a hell of a lot harder in the middle of a violent, drug-smeared ghetto where the social fabric is nil and the interest in repairing it (and the political will and money to do so) is totally nonexistent. I wouldn't want to deal with it myself, truth be told, but am impressed that others have the fortitude and commitment to do it.

It helps that beautiful 110 year old houses can be had there for $18,000. True, that is $17,800 more than you can get houses for in Detroit, but the weather is better down here. Detroit is essentially the more extreme version of Church Hill.

It is hard to fathom what a wasteland big swaths of Richmond are, especially contrasted with the very vibrant, well maintained, and very appealing rest of the city. Just outside of the main nice parts of the city are neighborhoods as devastated as anywhere in the country. It has a third world feel, this sharp division between development and collapse. Also third world is the popular acceptance attitude of this level of inequality and social catastrophe. The divide is especially stark when you include Richmond's sprawling, cookie-cutter suburbs with every chain store and restaurant and neighborhoods of generic Mcmansions on cul de sacs. This is a pattern repeated cancer-like across the US, of course, but made especially egregious in Richmond (and Chesapeake and Virginia beach) since it is happening right now when people should know better -- do know better-- but don't give a shit.

Anyway, all of this is just to quote a line this man had which captured his mindset perfectly. He said, "I like cities because I like farms." If you support the countryside and the maintenance of open spaces and natural areas, you need to support urban renewal and we all need to face the realities that much of urban America outside of the expensive disneyfied cities is in a state of crisis that truly cannot afford to be ignored if we wish to arrest our descent as a society and a nation.

Longtime Nunal readers will recognize Wayne Willis' low bro in this picture. Turns out an ethnomusicologist in Ohio has it posted on his page, along with some other interesting photos.

Looking up some old articles in the Forum, I happened on this article called "Russian Jews as Desirable Immigrants" from 1893 (and very much of its time) which is interesting for any number of reasons, not least the emphasis on the radicalism and social orientation of the immigrants. According to the author description Van Etten spoke "the German-Jewish dialect) and was an organizer of the Woman Cloak-maker's Union.

"The Russian Jews are naturally radicals on all social questions. They have come from a country which represents to them only tyranny and oppression, and social questions have a deep, absorbing, and personal interest to them. Another fact that increases the radicalism of the educated Jews is that, not being an abiding people, they have no strong prejudices in favor of any established party. Thus from the force of circumstances as well as by natural inclination they find their natural and congenial place among the ultra-radical workingmen. Thousands of the disciples of Karl Marx may be found among the organized Jewish workingmen. Their intense desire to study and to discuss social questions I have never seen equalled. Scores of great agitation meetings are held weekly on the East Side. A few weeks ago a meeting called to discuss immigration was attended by over six thousand persons, while thousands were unable to obtain admission. A similar call for a meeting issued to native American or to Irish workingmen would probably have brought but a few hundreds."

"...The Jews are a temperate people, and the saloon is not likely to become an element in their social or political life. Instead of beer or strong alcoholic liquors, they drink enormous quantities of tea and coffee. Coffee-houses are numerous on the East Side and serve as the gathering-places of the Jewish working men and women....Every night from ten to twelve these coffee-houses are crowded with students and workingmen, manj of whom drop in from the numerous trade and agitation meetings which are nightly held in the Jewish quarter. The recreations of a people are commonly the truest indication of their real character. The frequenters of these dingy little coffee-houses are men rough and uncouth in appearance, poorly dressed and often dirty and unkempt, but a lady or a scholar would find nothing offensive in their conversation. They discuss trade matters, political economy, philosophy, the works of Karl Marx, Krapotkine, Tolstoi, Tchernyehewsky, and Zola. Almost any Jewish workingman you might chance to meet in these circles would be able to discuss intelligently these authors and their works."

I haven't actually expired but since some people have asked I thought it would be good to note that here. You'd never know it by the neglect here at Nunal, but so it goes

But I have to say though that there has been an inverse relationship to the amount of pages I have written and the number of blog posts I have not put here. The end is in sight. It is a beautiful sight.

But it is too bad since I can't really go backward because I will never adequately capture the events of the past month or so. I have had a whirlwind of adventures though since last we spoke, to Louisiana twice, Mexico City once, and Florida too just to round out my semi-circumnavigation of the Gulf of Mexico.

Having gone to the Society of Ethnomusicologists conference in the D.F. I have to say that ethnomusicology is a superior field in most respects. The good papers on interesting topics (there were of course plenty others of less interest) stand among the most thoughtful and interesting work being done, at least to my mind. And the fact that music performance is part of the conference was even better.

The best stuff I heard was Música Huichola, which I had never heard before and definitely not live. It is extremely mesmerizing music on the world's crappiest looking folk fiddle accompanied by the world's crappiest looking folk jarana-type thing. Actually the fiddle was very cool, with it had a huge deer head at the peg head that was almost bigger than the instrument. The whole body was carved out of a single piece of wood, rounded bacjk. The sound is thin, edgey, crappy, and completely perfect.

The music was otherworldly, with vocals just edging into and alongside these repetitive fiddle riffs. Utterly mezmerizing. If I ever get the video from the guy sitting next to me I will post it.

The Huichola are from Jalisco and I guess they are a peyote using people. A very famous ethnomusicologist standing next to me afterward pointed out a beaded mask they were selling and said "when you take peyote people's faces look like that." He seemed to know. Actually, that was the case with several of these guys.

I was wondering how much these musicians were being folklyric for the gaping ethnomusicological types but my guess with these guys in particular was not much. (the last group that played was very self-consciously theatrical and definitely folklyric entertainment. I mentioned to someone afterward (from an Ivy League school, so one might have thought he had a brain, or at least half of one) that it was like watching a band at colonial Williamsburg. His answer was "what's that?")

The reason I didn't think of them as faux-backwoods was that they really were from the sticks. The guy playing the mando-jarana thing spoke no Spanish at all, only Huichol. When I asked the fiddler afterward how it was tuned, he took it to be a stupid question and at first refused to answer. He finally told me one string was D and the rest just sort of followed. He indicated the rest of the strings with a wave of his hand. (Though when a young woman asked him the same question a short time later he was extremely attentive...)

The music reminded me a great deal of the sacred fiddle-guitar music of the Aztecs, (of which there is a Smithsonian LP floating around). U think that stuff was from Veracruz but I can't find the liner notes just now.

That is some great stuff, I highly recommend it, even if many people I play it for look at me with a slightly uneasy expression like I am insane.

From what I gathered the Huichola have Aztec roots and what I heard was sacred music too, so it would all make sense that it was similar music.

I can't seem to find much of this stuff in a quick minute of youtube searching but here there is a very little bit at the very start for the first 40 seconds, that kind of whiney fiddling


I guess there is some real diversity in the Huichol music. The bass really changes everything, the other stuff sounds really European influenced.

Here is something the uploader titled "huicholes de nayarit" but they are playing norteño music, really great country sounding stuff,. Pinguinos del Norte style. And also some spot-on bass playing. Great anyway, worth hearing even if it is not what I heard. I love the dude filming singing off key occasionally (sounds like more than a few of my own videos, rule one to be never sing when filming...):



Two other brief mentions of some music I had a chance to hear. Over at Plaza Garibaldi, the heart of Mariachi playing in the D.F., we happened to visit it on Saint Cecilia's Day. She being the patron saint of mariachis, this was good timing. I've never been there before so I can't compare it, but the crowd was definitely big and the music great. The crowd, no matter what the age, seemed to know all of the songs and many people sang along. A really enveloping experience, and a lot of fun. At one point on stage some mariachis acted out a cockfight described in a song-- with real cocks fighting on stage. Not something you get to see in the U.S.

There were also some son jarocho bands plying the crowd and they were excellent. Funny too, from everybody's response. I stood there and caught some words and knew it was supposed to be funny but it was beyond me at this point.

That same night back at the hotel and 1 in the morning a friend and I were sitting in the lobby having a beer when we were almost-quite literally knocked out of our seats by a banda playing for a wedding downstairs. It was so sudden and so loud, hard to describe it but truly felt like being pushed over. The wedding had had a salsa band playing for awhile, but the banda came on at 1 am and proceeded to play until after 3. They played the best music I heard down there, loud, tight, and racuous and just flat-out great. We went and listened at the door, as did a few others from the conference who had been hanging around. The women were asked in to join the dancing at the wedding. My friend turned to me and asked if I thought Mexicans standing at the door listening to a band at a wedding at a fancy hotel in NY would be invited in to join...

Mexico City is an incredible place that I won't even try to characterize here, though I will post this video of a guy rolling on, and washing his face with, glass in an intersection to make money. He made the exact same series of glass rolling manuevers after each of several traffic light changes we saw, yet didn't seem to make any money. This is a tough line of business.

Of course we are doing our best to expose Lark to absolutely everything we can. Her intellectual development in the past couple of months has been unbelievable, truly exponential in terms of language ability and knowledge base--numbers, the alphabet, colors, shapes, all of these key things that she suddenly just knows and can speak about with authority. New words and concepts. She is constantly surprising me with what she says, knows, and remembers. None of this process would be new to parents of older kids but I have to say that watching her just blossom as a sentient individual being is the most incredible thing I have ever been involved in.

It is worth mentioning given the hype of Sesame Street's anniversary this week that she has learned all of these things without ever once being sat down in front of the tv. Though her previous daycares did turn one on in the afternoons during pickup time. And somehow she has managed to learn every single Sesame Street character. Maybe a little tv is not a big deal and Sesame Street is good and blah blah blah, but I can't really see setting her down in front of a tv and shudder at the idea that she would be clamoring for it. It helps that ours is on a wheeled cart in a back room and we have to wheel it out to watch something, a.v.-cart style.

But just because I see tv as the Great Satan doesn't mean I have totally avoided educational tools. I got a cd called "Learn and Sing Chinese with Mei Mei," which has consumed Lark's attention for huge blocks of time. She is, in fact, obsessed with it on a scale I never anticipated. She will sit on the couch or draw while listening to it and then periodically pulls out a Chinese word. If it means she will learn Chinese, or at least some of the tones, without any effort than all the better.

Here was an unintended consequence of playing things to entertain Lark. I happened upon a 45 of the song "Ghostbusters", which I thought might amuse her a bit. Turns out she became completely obsessed with the song instantly. It is musical crack cocaine. (And has about the same social value, I should add, though is possibly less destructive of society. There is a line in that song that says "bustin' makes me feel good.") We have to limit listenings to after mealtimes or nothing would transpire around here. TV might have been better than "Ghostbusters".

I do kind of wonder what Lark thinks Ghostbusters means in the total absence of a context for it.

She also wants to listen to Little Jimmie Dickens all the time, but I leave that cd in the car so have the excuse of only listening to while in transit. Though on any single drive I hear these songs a half dozen times each at least.

Recently I have been attempting to use Little Richard to cut a musical firebreak and get her into something else (his music being wholly perfect and impossible to supplant) and this has worked a bit. But the fervor for "Ghostbusters" remains unbroken

Believe me, we play her a wide variety of everything and she has zeroed in on these and only these songs. She will listen to conjunto or old time music but has not yet to understand their position in things.

So currently her song obsessions stand at the following. In order of current obsession:

"Ghostbusters"
"Walk Chicken Walk," (Little Jimmie Dickens)
F-O-O-L-I-S-H M-E" (Little Jimmie Dickens)
"Katy Daly" (Ralph Stanley)

and in Skye's car:
"Kiss me over the garden gate" (Polecat Creek)--which she learned all of the lyrics to just by listening to it

I am just looking forward in the coming months to playing Ernest Tubb's "Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer" for her, as it is possibly the greatest version of this fine song-- the reason for the season.

Here is a fairly bizarre computer generated video for that Los Tigres del Norte song "La Granja" that they refused to be prevented from singing. I know I only dimly have grasped what everything represents, and a friend of mine who is an anthropologist specializing on the politics of corridos (though now working on a fascinating comparative project on whale meat eating cultures that i wish I had come up with) is not fully sure what it all means either. Apparently the Mexican commentators on youtube are not sure either. But the gist is pretty strident.

It helps to read the lyrics while listening to it. Do let me know if you have any interpretations of its meaning.

"La Granja"

Si la perra esta amarrada
Aunque ladre todo el día
No la deben de soltar
Mi abuelito me decía
Que podrían arrepentirse
Los que no la conocían

Por el zorro lo supimos
Que llego a romper los platos
Y la cuerda de la perra
La mordió por un buen rato
Y yo creo que se soltó
Para armar un gran relajo

Los puerquitos le ayudaron
Se alimentan de la granja
Diario quieren más maíz
Y se pierden las ganancias
Y el granjero que trabaja
Ya no les tiene confianza

Se cayó un gavilán
Los pollitos comentaron
Que si se cayó solito
O los vientos lo tumbaron
Todos mis animalitos
Por el ruido se espantaron

El conejo esta muriendo
Dentro y fuera de la jaula
Y a diario hay mucho muerto
A lo largo de la granja
Porque ya no hay sembradíos
Como ayer con tanta alfalfa

En la orilla de la granja
Un gran cerco les pusieron
Para que sigan jalando
Y no se vaya el granjero
Porque la perra no muerde
Aunque el no este de acuerdo

Hoy tenemos día con día
Mucha inseguridad
Porque se soltó la perra
Todo lo vino a regar
Entre todos los granjeros
La tenemos que amarrar
[ La Granja Lyrics on http://www.lyricsmania.com/ ]

here is a blogger named David Ortiz''s opinion:

"The Cast:

* El Granjero – This is the “Farmer” who lives in “La Granja” or the farm. He represents the Mexican people and is the worker. He keeps the country running through hard labor and becomes a victim due to the drug trade.
* La Perra – This is the “dog” that is kept chained up … it represents insecurity caused by the political party PRI once they failed to control the “narco-state” that as political entity they held a monopoly on.
* Puerco (Puerquitos) – This is the “Piggys” and refers to “politicians” but those in particular from the PAN political party that rely on “pork” to enrich themselves much like in the United States. The difference between “porking” in Latin American and the U.S. is that money is set aside for a job like a road … let’s say $100,000.00 and only about $10,000.00 is actually spent on the construction … no one ever knows what happens to the other $90,000.00 … wink, wink … or is it oink, oink!
* El Zorro – This is the “fox” and is a direct representation of the former Mexican President Vicente Fox who belongs to PAN. Not much interpretation needed on this one.
* El Gavilán – This is the “hawk” that based on the context of the song I believe refers to Juan Camilo Mouriño Terrazo who was a PAN politician that died in November 2008 under unusual circumstances after the small plane that was carrying him crashed in an upscale-neighborhood, Las Lomas, as it was descending to land in Mexico City. Mouriño was the Secretary of the Interior for current President Felipe Calderon and was “in charge” of the “War on Drugs” in Mexico.
* Los Pollitos – These are the “chicks” who are a direct representation of the “press” and like little chicks they like to talk.
* El Conejo – This is the “rabbit” and it can be interpreted to represent “drug dealers” or the “narco-state” in Mexico.

The Lyrics with my Translation:

Si la perra esta amarrada
If the dog is tied up
Aunque ladre todo el día
And it barks all day
No la deben de soltar
You should not let it go
Mi abuelito me decía
That is what my Grandfather would tell me
Que podrían arrepentirse
Those would regret it
Los que no la conocían
That did not know her

Por el zorro lo supimos
We found out from the Fox
Que llego a romper los platos
Who arrived to break plates
Y la cuerda de la perra
And the dog’s leash
La mordió por un buen rato
The Fox bit for a good while
Y yo creo que se soltó
And I believe it has been freed
Para armar un gran relajo
To create a big mess

Los puerquitos le ayudaron
The piggys helped out
Se alimentan de la granja
They feed themselves from the farm
Diario quieren más maíz
Daily they want more corn
Y se pierden las ganancias
And they lose the profits
Y el granjero que trabaja
And the farmer that works
Ya no les tiene confianza
Does not trust them anymore

Se cayó un gavilán
A hawk has fallen
Los pollitos comentaron
The chicks are asking
Que si se cayó solito
Did it fall by itself?
O los vientos lo tumbaron
Or did the winds bring it down?
Todos mis animalitos
All my animal friends
Por el ruido se espantaron
Were frightened by the noise

El conejo esta muriendo
The rabbit is dying
Dentro y fuera de la jaula
While inside and outside of the cage
Y a diario hay mucho muerto
And daily there are many dead
A lo largo de la granja
All over the Farm
Porque ya no hay sembradíos
Because there are no crops
Como ayer con tanta alfalfa
Like there was yesterday with so much hay.

En la orilla de la granja
On the edge of the Farm
Un gran cerco les pusieron
A big fence was built
Para que sigan jalando
So that they have to continue to work
Y no se vaya el granjero
And the farmer cannot leave
Porque la perra lo muerde
Because the dog is biting him
Aunque el no este de acuerdo
Even though he does not agree

Hoy tenemos día con día
Now we have day by day
Mucha inseguridad
More insecurity
Porque se soltó la perra
Because the dog has been unleashed
Todo lo vino a regar
And messed up everything
Entre todos los granjeros
Amidst all the farmers
La tenemos que amarrar
We have to tie her down."

I've been so delinquent at posting on Nunal that even Skye is complaining.

I never even posted any pictures from Halloween. Lark carved a pumpkin, which is still rotting out front.



She had a great costume all picked out but of course refused to wear it before entering the party she was going to. (Apparently she misunderstood the whole task of looking cute for the pictures.)

I've been spending most of my time deep in the thickets of extradition and any chance I get some time I have been trying to be outside. Norfolk may have virtually nothing to offer for itself, but the weather sure is nice. It has been sunny and in the high 60s or 70s up until today, which is all rain and strong winds. This is about the best time of year here, clear, dry, warm, and just about perfect.

We took Lark for her first bike ride down on the Dismal Swamp bike trail. Beautiful trail that runs right along the canal, barely anyone on it too of course, despite it being absolutely perfect bike weather. The whole time Lark keep saying 'I want to go faster."

One reason she was pretty stoked to go for the bike ride is getting to wear a helmet emblazoned with rabbits. She like posing with the helmet at least as much as riding. And, being sharp, she kept saying "I'm posing!"


The nice weather has been a boon for these crazy daisies I have planted on the side of the house eight years ago. They have grown to over 10 feet tall. They usually get tall, but tend to fall over and look kind of raggedy. This year has been especially good for them, though I don't think they will survive the rain today.

I don't think Creigh Deeds' loss for the Governor's seat was a comment on Obama, I think it was a comment on his own pathetic campaign and simpering personality coupled with the lackluster performance of old whatshisname in there at moment. I don't know of a single person who carried a whit about Deeds, even among the state policy obsessed. Plus, sources who know (having served him a drink in a bar) say that Deeds was a poor tipper. Who needs that?

Mark Warner was a good governor who helped pull the state back from oblivion under Gilmore, the GW Bush of state politics, and as a result he was rightly well liked all the way into the Senate. Tim Kaine has not done anything well that I can think of. Maybe he hasn't even done anything at all. Deeds was a sacrificial lamb as I see it. It didn't help that he was a bozo.

The Republicans now have the governor and a tight control of the state house at a time that the state is tottering on collapse and gridlock. With such a clear field of action, the effortless incompetence of the party is going to shine through, no question about that at all. Want to bet no soil will be turned for a high speed rail project in the next several years?

I was driving home from dropping the Lil Buddha off at school today and noticed a billboard for Coke which advertised a two-pack of 50 oz. bottles in a convenient carrier with the tagline: "Enough for your meal." What kind of mean calls for 100 oz of coke? Terrifying.

"when the train is rolling, everybody wants a ride"

I see they finally got around to posting my review of this film about Peruvian saxophonists.

I read that memoir on life at Hampshire College in the 1980s (and was lucky enough to get a free copy) and can confirm that, indeed, absolutely no one could possibly be interested in it even if they did go to Hampshire in the 1980s. Though I wish it luck.

Los Tigres del Norte, the most successful and well known Norteño band, again demonstrates their mettle.

Tigres del Norte nix Mexico show, cite censorship

The Mexican "norteno" band Los Tigres del Norte says it has canceled a planned appearance at an awards ceremony after organizers allegedly asked it not to play the biting political commentary song "La Granja."

The song's lyrics appear to lampoon former officials and also allude to the violence unleashed in the government's war on drug cartels.

(I do wonder why the AP put "norteno" in quotes and misspelled it to boot? As a liberal "webpage" Salon it might be expected to fix this, if only to demonstrate a clue that this whole "norteno" thing exists.

Billboard has more of a clue, and more detail too, if you are interested.

"Los Tigres del Norte aren't performing at tonight's (Oct. 28) Lunas awards at Mexico City's Auditorio Nacional-- either because of official censorship or because of a creative disagreement with the event producers, depending on who you ask.

The veteran regional Mexican act held a press conference in the Mexican capital today to say that it was canceling its performance at the awards, which honor live entertainment in the country, because they were asked not to perform its single "La Granja." The song, a critique of corrupt governments that pursue power at the expense of the common man, has been compared to George Orwell's book "Animal Farm."

The band's leader, Jorge Hernandez, reportedly blamed the awards show organizers' request that Los Tigres not perform the song during its closing set on a directive by Mexico's federal government against playing "La Granja.""

"Is you the Professor?"*

This is really an essential article, if a depressing one, about the collapse in literacy for college graduates.

"The first survey had been taken in 1992 using a sample that accurately represented the entire adult population age 25 and up. The NAAL grouped respondents into four categories, below basic, basic, intermediate, and proficient according to their reading abilities. These were tested in three categories of literacy labeled prose, document, and quantitative. Prose literacy denotes the ability to search, comprehend, and use information in continuous texts. Document literacy means the ability to do these same things employing noncontinuous texts in various formats. Quantitative literacy involves having the knowledge and skills to work with numbers and figures, a figure that changed very little between 1992 and 2003 when the second assessment was made.

The other two categories showed a precipitous decline in literacy among college graduates aged 25 and older. In 1992 40 percent of all graduates were found to be proficient in prose and 37 percent demonstrated proficiency in document literacy. In 2003 the percentages were 31 percent and 25 percent respectively. Over a period of eleven years the proficiency of all approximately 37 million college graduates had declined sharply, in prose by nearly a quarter and in document literacy by almost a third. (The performance of high school graduates declined as well, from 5 to 4 percent in prose and 6 to 5 percent in document proficiency.) Apart from the oldest graduates having died the addition of ten, or at most eleven, graduating classes to the pool of college graduates, meant that the members of these classes had to have scored very badly indeed to drag down the averages of the entire population by so much."

Of particular importance is its clear-eyed assessment of one big part of the problem, which is the Big Lie of the way the whole system works, or doesn't:

"Accordingly, publicizing the NAAL results would force universities to admit that they are charging students and their families more and more to learn less and less, an ugly truth that seems to be in everyone’s interest to ignore. Not surprisingly students seem content with a system that fails to prepare them for life in the work force but offers them four or five years of enjoyable irresponsibility. Murray Sperber, whose Beer and Circus (2000) is must reading on this subject, calls this arrangement the faculty/student nonaggression pact, according to which instructors pretend to teach and students pretend to learn. Everyone gets good grades or evaluations and presumably goes home happy. Further, since new buildings are paid for with bond issues and do not come out of the regular budgets many universities have spanking new dorms and student facilities, which mask the reality of deferred maintenance, lessened security, and other expedients. Wage slavery is disguised also, since students can rarely tell the difference between adjuncts and tenured faculty members.

So we have the modern public university on the undergraduate level, where grade inflation is rampant, student skills diminish with every passing year, what passes as teaching is conducted by exploited adjuncts and faculty members who no longer care about standards—for students, that is, the drive for ever-more qualified professors continues unabated. It is a central irony of our situation that while mediocrity among undergraduates is tolerated and even encouraged, the professoriat demands excellence of its members, and of graduate students too as they are potential members. It appears that the only people responding to this crisis are employers, who increasingly require college graduates applying for jobs to take writing tests, on site so they can’t cheat—a sad measure of our failure to teach either skills or ethics."

* a question actually asked of me the first day of class a couple of years ago. My response was "Is I the professor?? I be the Professor." That made me chuckle, though later I thought it could have caused some problems if only the student had recognized what was going on.

A guy I knew in college wrote a memoir about those years, it is being marketed as "a strange and salacious memoir of life at the ultimate hippie college during the height of Reaganomics."

As a product of that ultimate hippie college I am, of course, curious about what it might say. I knew him fairly well and my band Powerslave's first show was opening for the Supreme Dicks, who seem to be the focus of the book from the blurbs. I do hope Powerslave is given the attention it deserves...

My wife just asked "who could possibly be interested in that book other than someone who was at Hampshire in the 1980s?" I can't really think of anyone, but you never know.

The author, Richard Rushfield, has begun posting pictures on a blog. The pictures really look old, I think as a quality of the film and the switch in recent imagery. I recognize everyone in the pictures but only remember some of them. That is me sleeping in the picture from his Oct. 6 posting. he says the people look bummed out, but I would say "asleep" is more accurate.

"if attacked, fight back"

This past weekend I went for a walk in a redwoods park south of the city, here is the sign at the head of the path warning about mountain lions:

I'm in the endgame out here and so trying to get as much done before heading back to the Norfolk. But I have to say that I can't wait to get back to see the Lil Buddha. Skye sent me some pictures of her this morning:

Ralph Stanley clearly has a good publicist these days. I've been looking forward to reading his book. A friend of mine in New York said the Strand already has copies for 50% off, should you find yourselves there.

I think each Virginian should be issued a copy as a function of citizenship in the Commonwealth, but so far that has not happened. If Deeds wants to be governor he should put it in his platform.

As I mentioned, I have quite a bit of time taking the BART (and waiting for it for astounding amounts of time). I recently finished reading the Count of Monte Cristo, which is among the longest book I have ever, though not a difficult one at all. Not the best choice to carry around perhaps, but fun to read.

The book is a strikingly violent revenge fantasy in which happiness and vengeance is available through the combined attainment of limitless wealth and harnessing of the power of an angry God. Or at least that is what I got out of it.

I was interested to find out that the Count himself rarely had to sleep because of a mixture of opium and hashish that he rolled into little balls and ate each day.

Who knew that 124 mile long collections of "sea mucus" are out there, filling the seas?

Here is the story.
Here is some video.

Share the wealth

Over the weekend I went to the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate park, which is a free festival with several stages and upwards of 750,000 people in attedance (the Examiner says 800,000). A columnist in SF Chronicle wonders if this means it is getting too big since this number was "nearly the population of San Francisco".

The "free" part helps the crowds, no doubt, but the line-up was all A list bands and the whole experience was a lot of fun.

There were I think six total stages, I listened mostly to the bluegrass. I think Ricky Skaggs put on the best show of the bluegrass bands. He played almost entirely Stanley Brothers songs, all very traditional bluegrass and all very well played of course. Ralph Stanley played his usual set without any surprises, always good to hear him. Though I was sad Jack Cooke wasn't there. Earl Scruggs played and was not really up to it anymore, but he is 85 years old and I am glad to have gotten to see him before he goes on to his reward. I am sure he was stoked to be on a stage in front of that many people. Hazel Dickens sounded great, of course.

Maybe the best set I saw overall was the Knitters, which is John Doe and Exene Cervenka's country band, they sounded great and really put on a fine show with some great song choices and some key X songs too. (though, truth be told, their version of "Rank Strangers" was rough. Nobody can sing that song right except Ralph.)

That festival was, without a doubt, the most people I have ever been around in a single space, it was crazy how huge that crowd was. But it was amazingly orderly and low key despite the crush of people.

That mellowness was probably helped by the constant and quite enormous clouds of marijuana smoke drifting over the crowd the entire day. It is illegal to smoke tobacco in the Park, which they kept announcing from the stage. Then they would ask people to be courteous if they were smoking weed, so as not to blow the smoke on other people. It was, to be sure, a true SF experience.

The festival is put on by a local billionaire named Warren Hellman as his gift to the city. He is a bluegrass and old time music fan, and plays some old time banjo (he sat it with Earl Scruggs and played, competently, "soldiers joy"). The fact that he puts on this free concert, which according to the local paper is the biggest concert in the U.S., is in itself is amazing. Must be nice to be a billionaire.

It would make sense if all clawhammer banjo players were billionaires. That would be a just world. There would be a whole lot more of everything good, in that case.

Billy Bragg played at the festival and made some fatuous comment about how great it was to have this major music festival not sponsored by a corporation. Everybody cheered.

I wanted to ask him if he thinks it is better to have such insane levels of personal wealth in a country that one guy can throw a free party for 800,000 people without breaking a sweat while the state it happening in is actually bankrupt and furloughing people, the education system is being hollowed, the air and water poisoned, etc.

Might those funds be better spent if the public got a hold of them to fix the social pathologies of this state? Is an oligarchical system generating limitless wealth for the few better? Working class hero Billy Bragg seems to think so. Wouldn't, perhaps, a publicly owned corporation constrained by local, state, and national governance being a good corporate citizen by sponsoring an event be more welcome than a billionaire aristocrat dribbling funds on a grateful and adoring peasantry only too happy to be shown the grace of his generosity? Just wondering.

On the other hand, if he has to spend it, better on music for 800,000 than a private island somewhere.

Be Water Tight

Here is what happens when you are not water tight





all handled with nerves of steel by the lovely Skye.

At long last we all met up this weekend so I wouldn't have to endure more time without seeing the Lil Buddha while I am out here. She was looking particularly cute this weekend. And strikingly fashionable to boot.

This isn't turning into Conjunto Great Quote of the Day, but this one is good from Santiago Jiménez from the interview in ¡Puro Conjunto! , which is a great book.

he said "I thought that accordion music had a very happy rhythm, simple though it might have been, but very happy--which is the thing in music that makes people happy: happiness."

I came across this short (and earnest) documentary on John Donald Robb which is worth watching if only to see the old pictures. The Musical Adventures of John Donald Robb in New Mexico Robb was a composer and folklorist who recorded 3000 examples of a variety of Hispanic folk music in New Mexico. There is an incredible online digital library of his field recordings, all free and worth wandering into right now.

I've written about this before. The University of New Mexico seems to have conveniently hidden it away so it is harder to find than it was, or at least it seemed that way to me.

I gather it is the 20th anniverdary of the John Donald Trust, which made the film. Now it all makes sense.

The film also a very earnest commentator who looks like William Macy and ends up being Robb’s grandson, an anthropologist at Berkeley.

I've been reading interviews with some of the original generation conjunto musicians (conducted by Kay Francine Council in 1978) as I prepare to write an encyclopedia entry, and I've definitely learned some memorable things.

One of them is that when Tony de la Rosa started playing, his father (a professional musician) whipped him because he didn't want any of the kids to be musicians. It didn't work. Another interesting factoid is that when de la Rosa started playing professionally in a vaudeville show in Kingsville, he did so in blackface.

I wish she had asked some more questions about that! But she let this incredible fact slide right by.

Tony de la Rosa's description of his approach to playing the accordion is something else. He says he got his whole beat from Country and Western music, especially a fiddler named J.B. Burris. De la Rosa played in country bands for quite a while.

Here is de la Rosa describing his playing.


"I'm mad all the time. I'm mad at myself when I pick up that accordion because I should be playing it better. When I play at a dance, my teeth and gums tighten up. I've got a feeling for a song. I've spent ten hours recording one song. You start choking inside..."

And

"It brings out the animalistic...I'm throwing it out, like a knife at the audience. It could turn into a total brawl at a dance. It's like making love."


Here is some footage of him opining some, and playing some incredible music of course, throwing a knife.



The other great line from these interviews is from Hugh Gonzalez, a bajo sexto player. The transcript has the interviewer interjecting a question and then this repsoinse so even though the typing makes it seems like this is her speaking it is surely Gonzalez. Anyway, after extolling Macias bajo sextos as the best, he disdains mexican made instruments with this abstract line: "The Mexican bajo sounds like a lady walking down the street with a bucket of water."

Your search for patterns could be making you smarter (but don't tell the paranoids)

This past weekend was the Berkeley old time music festival. It was a superb time, there are so very many great musicians around these parts and many more that came from out of town. People are extremely friendly too, the whole thing had a good vibe as they say out here in California. The square dance was great too.

I've never been to a festival in a city, it worked fairly well since after the official events people had house parties that lasted all night and there were many opportunities to play. Maybe the best sign that it was a real festival is that I stayed up all night playing. The BART stops running at 12 so the only real choice was to keep playing and not sleep. A friend of mine had a 6 am flight so we played until it was time for him to go to the airport (and, incredibly, a ride materialized from a talented guitar player as well).

I went to most of the events, but since all good things happen at the same time I was forced to choose between seeing Benton Flippen play on Friday night or seeing Los Cojolites, a son jarocho band. Los Cojolites played in an old theatre about four blocks from where I am living, so it was no contest really.

I have to say, it ain't bad having these kind of choices. In a perfect world you either don't have to choose, or you have these choices, hard to say which.

That band was incredible, extremely tight and just dead on. They had a dancer who added a lot to the songs as well, dancing on a hollow box that kicked out the sound, really a phenomenal show. They have a lot of video up on youtube, none of which capture the intensity of them playing live, but this gives you a reasonable sample:



I got to see Benton play anyway, since he was aroudna ll day saturday. I guess he played until about 2 am on Friday, and then was back on it the next day. At one point he was looking pretty wiped out and freaked everybody out, they called for a doctor and everybody gathered around. But he was fine, and sounded more than great when he played the dance that night. 89 years young and still sounding every bit the great fiddler, incredible.

My friend Fiddling Chuck, who longtime Nunal readers might remember as the guy who played the Korea shows with me in the gone but not forgotten past, came out here for the Berkeley festival. He is playing now with a band called the Magnolia Serenaders and they won first place in the band contest. Not too bad. Here they are:

words can't really capture what is going on here.

I recently finished Roberto Bolaño's 2666. It is a stunning book in all ways, I've only begun digesting it a couple of weeks later. Hard to describe or characterize in any brevity here so I am not going to try. A hell of a read, really funny in parts, beautifully written, suspending, and labyrinthine (cliched to call it that) without being dense and never even toeing that line of unreadability that people like Pynchon cross with impunity. I haven't found a review that says much, though there are a great many that manage to convey its power and originality and overall wonder without really giving any actual guidance as to what to make of it. Maybe the best description was this one from Adam Kirsch: "According to Proust, one proof that we are reading a major new writer is that his writing immediately strikes us as ugly. Only minor writers write beautifully, since they simply reflect back to us our preconceived notion of what beauty is; we have no problem understanding what they are up to, since we have seen it many times before. When a writer is truly original, his failure to be conventionally beautiful makes us see him, initially, as shapeless, awkward, or perverse. Only once we have learned how to read him do we realize that this ugliness is really a new, totally unexpected kind of beauty and that what seemed wrong in his writing is exactly what makes him great."

2666 made perfect sense to me in the structure, but my brain is (mis)wired int that way, and thinking about has made me think more directly about my own meandering paths.

Big shoes to fill

I had never heard of Larry Knechtel -- but of course it turns out my friend Matt not only heard of him, he also played on a bunch of records with him and had this to say.

Somehow I don't think that makgeolli is going to displace a drink like Patrón as a luxury beverage on the global markets.

State support for traditional Korean liquor

"There’s been a lot of talk about globalizing Korean cuisine lately, but cuisine is more than just food.

Thus the government announced yesterday a project to promote traditional Korean liquor, with the promise of a 133 billion won ($106.7 million) subsidy to the traditional liquor industry over the next five years.

The plan, announced by the Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, the Finance Ministry and the Presidential Council on National Competitiveness, aims for $1 billion in exports of Korean traditional liquor by 2017. Last year, Korea exported $230 million of such alcohol.

“By improving the quality of our liquors and providing more choices, we will be able to boost the popularity of Korean liquors,” said a ministry official who declined to be named.

The government also hopes to resurrect 50 now-extinct traditional liquors by 2012. The food ministry estimates 360 liquors were popular during the Joseon Dynasty but are not produced anymore. To revive them, documents and historical records that detail their creation and consumption will be studied, the ministry said.

The government also plans to introduce a labeling system for liquor, under which manufacturers will have to inform consumers of where their ingredients were produced.

Internet sales, now prohibited for alcohol, will also be allowed for traditional liquors only, the ministry said. The ultimate goal is to develop a “flagship drink” to represent Korea, like wine for France, beer for Germany and sake for Japan, the ministry said. The rice wine makgeolli is one candidate.

But the distilled tippler soju is not - because, the ministry said, it doesn’t count as traditional. The government defines traditional liquor as made by the agriculture industry with locally cultivated ingredients. Most soju products are made from imported or artificial ingredients."

It does invite the question about what precisely are the artificial ingredients in soju. This would explain its similarity to rubbing alcohol and its world-class hangover producing qualities.

No shortage of loonies around either, which is no surprise. I was in a co-op today and saw a large poster that said "free the political prisoners! Free Sirhan!" Can this be right? There is a movement to free Sirhan Sirhan?

The power of the pedestrian here is really something else. Cars actually stop for you in crosswalks. Yup, they even anticipate your crossing the street and stop preemptively. I had a guy in a pick-up truck wave a sheepish apology to me with a guilty look on his face because he didn't adequately stop as I approached the curb. Civilized, sure, but I was thinking there must be some major fines to compel this kind of compliance.

Nice as this all is for pedestrians, it strikes me as vaguely dangerous as well, lulling people into a false sense of safety which would be destroyed in any other city where no such niceties apply. Like my own, for instance, where motorists go out of their way to try to run you over.

The day I arrived there was a protest in front of Boalt Hall about the return of John Yoo -- architect and/or tool of the Bush torture policy -- which launched a defense of Yoo's academic freedom by Dean Christopher Edley of the Law School. Here is the text of Edley's email. I think it is a thoughtful approach to the issue and though I personally think Yoo is merely one (and not the biggest) of the unindicted war criminals of the Bush administration, the case for academic freedom here seems to be to indisputable.

Edley wrote in part:

"What troubles me substantively with the analyses in the memoranda is that they reduce the Rule of Law to the Reign of Politics. I believe there is much more to the separation of powers than the promise of ultimate remedies like the ballot box and impeachment, even in the case of a Commander in Chief during war. And I believe that the revolution in sensibilities after 9/11 demanded greater, not reduced, vigilance for constitutional rights and safeguards.

What of the argument made by so many critics that Professor Yoo was so wrong on these sensitive issues that it amounted to an ethical breach or even a war crime? It is true, I believe, that government lawyers have a larger, higher client than their political supervisors; there are circumstances when a fair reading of the law must—perhaps as an ethical matter—provide a bulwark to political and bureaucratic discretion. And it shouldn’t require a private plaintiff and a Supreme Court ruling to make it so. Few professions require an oath at entry, but law does. Oaths must mean something.

Assuming one believes as I do that Professor Yoo offered bad ideas and even worse advice during his government service, that judgment alone would not warrant dismissal or even a potentially chilling inquiry. As a legal matter, the test here at the University of California is the relevant excerpt from the “General University Policy Regarding Academic Appointees,” adopted for the 10-campus University of California by both the system-wide Academic Senate and the Board of
Regents:

Types of unacceptable conduct: … Commission of a criminal act which has led to conviction in a court of law and which clearly demonstrates unfitness to continue as a member of the faculty. [Academic Personnel Manual sec. 015]

This very restrictive standard is binding on me as dean, and in any case disciplinary authority over faculty is lodged not with deans but with the Provost, Chancellor and Academic Senate. But I will put aside that shield and state my independent and personal view of the matter:

I believe the crucial questions in view of our university mission are
these: Was there clear professional misconduct—that is, some breach of the professional ethics applicable to a government attorney—material to Professor Yoo’s academic performance now? Did writing the memoranda, and any related acts, violate a criminal or comparable statute?

Absent very substantial evidence on these questions, no university worthy of distinction should even contemplate dismissing a faculty member. That standard has not been met."

and here is an interesting critique of it on Opinio Juris.

Blogging has been light as I have relocated to California for a time. Not that it is hard to blog out here, since there is wireless everywhere--I've just been busy.

I'm out here cranking away on my extraterritoriality book, fortunate enough to be a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society, which is affiliated with the law school at UC-Berkeley. It is a great place to be, very supportive and interested in what I'm working on. The other visiting folks out here are legal scholars but all have a social science angle which makes their work really interesting.

Beautiful place to be and a truly excellent place to work. Having a nice office to work in is great, having these incredible libraries right here (particularly the law library and the Bancroft Library ) is incredible, but most of all just having the time to work uninterruptedly is the key.

Though being away from the Lil Buddha and the lovely Miss Skye is no fun.

I only mention that the weather is essentially perfect out here (sunny but cool and comfortable) because it is so miserable this time of year at home in Norfolk and it seems worth gloating about it, even if I can only enjoy it for a time. I spent some days in Santa Ynez before coming up here and the weather was even more perfect down there, warm, dry, perfect. Though our car was covered in ash from the Santa Barbara county forest fires, which was strange. The fires were off in the mountains but it was easy to see the smoke and the helicopters going to drop water on them.

For those of you not closely keyed into the beleaguered sensibilities of historians of American foreign relations (a subject that often consumes academic historians but interests few others), Tom Zeiler's direct piece at HNN clarifies why this field remains vital and important and readily dismisses the doom- and nay-sayers. Worth reading.

I was at that SHAFR conference and also specifically at the huge meeting about changing the name of the field and/or the journal or organization, it was a really interesting and thoughtful conversation. I appreciate the comments of the founders of the organization, it was a rare opportunity to have them gathered and thinking about what they created decades ago.

Most of the proposal were interesting. I have some of my own that I was planning to submit to the SHAFR newsletter, so I am sure to put something up on Nunal along the way.

One thing I took away from some of that discussion was that a certain small group of hotshot transnational historians at the verymost elite institutions in the U.S. believe the field should be changed in name, direction, and intent in order to perfectly serve their narrowly specialized and extremely current theoretical modeling while rejecting any understanding of the true lineage or meaning of the field. (Hence, disparaging remarks from the same crew about the founder's comments, which seemed anti-historical as well as disrespectful).

Is that a precise characterization of the whole? Well maybe not entirely, but there was that flavor to it. When one person made a comment about how popular international history was among the new crop of graduate students at Harvard as an example of the direction we all should be going in, I did marvel at the unseemly fealty to hierarchy among this group dedicated to transposing-- if not actually overturning -- these privileged stuctures in their scholarship. Obvious point, yes, but things look different on the nether (subaltern) end of the food chain.

I myself have certainly (and for years) bemoaned the unalloyed insanity of the rest of the historical field in rejecting or sidelining diplomatic history and the stufdy of power, and have never understood those diplomatic historians who are twisted up about this rejection and therefore anxious to find a new master to serve.

Is it hackneyed to cite "Ronin" here? Oh wait, everybody dies in that movie, so forget it.

But, I must note, following trends is not something I can do readily or even at all. To mix realms, I just say that I'm an old time banjo player, for pete's sake, hardwired in the genes to ignore things that are fashionable, trendy, or popular-- let alone employable in hard times or not.

I was reading about the spanking new and sure-to-fail U.S. poppy eradication plan in Afghanistan at the moment (paying farmers not to grow poppy) and was struck by the fact that that whole country would be certain death for me aside even from the inherent danger of the bombs, snipers, firefights, and so on. The story was accompanied by a picture of Marines holding a huge sack of poppy seeds which had a hole with the seeds pouring out. Since a few poppy seeds or a single flower is enough to put me into anaphylactic shock and likely certain death I was pretty happy not be over there. Even if I am curious to learn how the beekeepers manage their hives there.

And speaking of bees, my old friend Bill Dixon (those of you who know him will not be surprised to hear this) has been in Afghanistan for a while-- after spending two and half years in Baghdad! Fearful he is not. He's been sending me pictures and stories of life over there, just incredible to hear. I have meant to post them because they are a hell of a lot more interesting than what filters to the papers but keep not blogging much.

This past week he ended up in a region called Shakar Dara about an hour north of Kabul, which means "Sweet Valley,". Bill says "it is amazingly beautiful and the people are incredibly friendly. In the 80's it was a brutal killing ground for Russian conscripts, but it's okay now as long as I go with Afghan friends who know some locals. I've adopted a bunch of the kids and show up regularly with school supplies and candy."

The name of the area may come from the beekeepers there. I have posted a bunch of Bill's pictures below. Aside from Eva Crane's work I haven't read much about beekeeping in the Middle/Near East. I am surprised to see, perhaps wrongly, that they more or less use Langstroth equipment. The cloth inner cover is a bit different, but definitely would work and is cheap. The frames look the same, though the empty space makes me curious. I like the entrance closer, easy with such a small entrance.

I would have guessed that there were more top bar hives in Afghanistan, but of course that would not be useful for migratory beekeepers. I wonder what backyard Afghani beekeepers use. I wonder if it is appropriate to use the term "backyard" when discussing Afghanistan.

On a side note, a friend of mine just today mailed me that book by the Scot who walked across Afghanistan. I'll see if he mentions beekeepers. I am guessing not since my friend who mailed me the book is also a beekeeper, so this might have been the kind of thing he would have mentioned. Or, perhaps, he liked the book because of its insights into Afghani beekeeping. In any case, I'll read it and report back.

I love the colors in these pictures, the contrast between the bightly painted hives and the monocolor landscape, just striking.















That's Bill with some honey, he says it is delicious.

I haven't been blogging much, in part because I have been trying to balance all things at once from the book on empire to my own personal ever-expanding beekeeping empire.

I just moved a beehive up to an undisclosed location in the heart of Richmond, on a bluff overlooking the James River. This is a breathtaking spot. I am going to put at least one more hive in this spot. Here is the hive.



I need to figure out what that plant is behind the bees, they love it. They were all over it early in the morning (6 am). Any clue what it is?



And here is the vista the bees have:




Not half bad, no? I have high hopes for this yard.

Lark just turned two. Still trying to get my mind wrapped around that, hard as it is to believe how fast these two years have gone. But great to experience it-- she is so utterly a little person with intense emotions in all directions (often straight up and down). Everyday she gets more interesting and interested, you can see her just absorb everything.

And let me say that if there is a better feeling than having your daughter yell 'daddy' and run into your arms and kiss you I can't imagine it.

We had a birthday party for her at Clifftop again and for some reason we took almost no pictures of it (or of the whole festival). There are a few Here is Lark blowing out the candles. She had so much fun doing it she did it again. "Again" is up there as one of her favorite phrases. "Again" is a good phrase to have at your disposal at an old time music festival. lark would often say that at the end of a tune.




We played some music and Lark danced with a bunch of kids who came, her favorite being Amelia, see here. Lark kept going and the combination of excitement from spinning in circles for an hour and being powered up from eating Skye's brownies meant she was firing on all cylinders late into the night, the whole thing was a lot of fun.




Most of the time it was raining during the festival, which meant days of Lark splashing through puddles. I wish I had taken more pictures of her in and out of the puddles, she was soon covered in mud and loving it, but here about the only image I have is her at the start following the prime objective of running top speed for any puddle.

I ran up to the National Archives to grab some more material the other day before I leave for points west. (Those of you who know me surely by now have some insight into this drive to get yet-more).

I was working in some late 19th century Army records, which are really fantastic materials even if a bit limitless and lacking in clear finding aids. The archivists know there way around though I got a staggering amount of stuff, I took a few thousand pictures. There is a feeling of accomplishment doing that, but of course I have only done a cursory reading of them to see if they are interesting. So, another mountain of stuff to whittle away at, though this is easily done. The richness of those materials makes me think of focusing even more on the Army in a future project. And I didn't even scratch the microfilm yet...

Anyway, the point of this is not to discuss the Archives, but to discuss something much more important-Mexican food.

When I got to the Archives out in Maryland I fix lunch out at my truck. Not having that option this time I was resigning myself to the the usual cubicle worker fare. But it turns out there was a Mexican joint not too far away that had some really good food. They had some good tacos a bit beyond the basic--a cabrito taco that was really well executed, and some variations on chicken tacos--chicken and cebollita and chicken and chorizo and onion one that were good. But what I thought was most welcome and which made the meal were the chapulines tacos, grasshopper tacos. I had never had them before, it is a Oaxaca specialty but not one I have seen very commonly in these parts. Generally I am not a big fan of eating bugs (longtime readers will remember me talking about the bugs for sale on almost every corner in Seoul), though drone bee brood sauteed with garlic is pretty good. I am not opposed to trying most any bug . The chapulines were very tasty, citrusy and more tender than you might expect.

Have you noticed that there are a lot more smokies on the roads these days?

I am sure it is because the states are broke but can't exactly raise taxes. What easier and more regressive way to raise money than to unleash cops to pull over people for significant crimes like speeding, failing to signal when they change lanes (or, in many parts of the state, to be DWB)?

There are noticeably tons of police out here in the Great State of Illinois, and apparently the fines have gotten huge for tiny infractions (one mile over, for example). I've been noticing a similar increase in the police presence on the highways in Virginia. Driving on 95 to DC at the end of last week I saw at least one police car in every turn around on the road and/or a pulled over motorist. I am not exaggerating--in the space of the 90 minute drive from Richmond I saw a cop waiting to pounce or issuing a ticket almost the entire time.

I am sure Nunal is not alone in seeing absolutely nothing at all unseemly, let alone untoward, in Goldman Sacks reporting huge multi-billion dollar profits and giving huge salaries and bonuses at a time when the taxpayers have given away billions of dollars to the firms that owed Goldman money such as AIG, when the government oversaw the dissolution of Goldman's competitors, all under the steely guidance of former Goldman execs who have resisted efforts to tighten the regulatory structures that might somehow interfere with such all-American hog wallowing. And Nunal is equally confident that you will agree that we the taxpayers out in "real America" should not think that the oligarchs lavishing ever-increasing riches on themselves should be asked to pay more in taxes so the unemployed and underemployed in the rest of country can have something as outrageous as health insurance.

I am visiting my folks with the Lil Buddha and typing this on my mom's computer, which means it will be short since she has her computer arranged on a sideboard thing such that it is virtually impossible to use. The keyboard is on a slide out thing that bounces a good 1.5" with each key stroke, and the mouse pad is in a drawer (on top of the drawer contents), you pull out the draw and put the mouse in it to use. Not really adequate for even the barest fulmination here on Nunal.

Not much time either, Lark is going in all directions at once. She is having a great time, especially playing with all the old toys we had growing up (nothing in this house ever being discarded)--cars and trains being her favorites. But one thing that has really caught her eye is the toy chain saw. I never registered that we had grown up with a toy chain saw (complete with working trigger so kids can gain a rudimentary understanding of the functioning of a real chain saw) but I would have liked to have been in the planning room when it was pitched. Well made little thing too, four decades old and in perfect shape.

I can't post a picture of it because I don't have my cord to connect the camera to the computer. So I did a google search for toy chain saws, and it seems they still make them, very realistic ones. (this is a real toy, not the whole genre of Texas Chainsaw Massacre toy chain saws, which I think of as more of a specialty item). Now I know what Lark's go-to present is going to be for all the birthday parties she is invited to.

And you can see the advanced state of Lark's development in this video, where she explains what is on her mind at the moment.

The total failure of the daycare system is this country outside of the elite circles and certain costal enclaves is a clear sign of the failings (if not outright failure) of the marketplace. It is an interesting analog to the health care crisis. As any parent will tell you, it is almost impossible to find affordable and acceptable daycare (and good daycare is a whole other order more difficult) despite the fact that it is essential to have if one has a "job".

This is as strange as it sounds. Somehow the market has utterly failed in supplying the demand. It isn't as if people have stopped churning out babies (exhibit: Palin family). Every daycare facility that is not either a Christianist front or a death trap with kids wallowing in their soiled diapers has a waiting list of a year or more. All of them are expensive. All of them have inconvenient hours. And, all of the daycares serve garbage as food and refuse to let you bring in your own. They all revert to a mantra of 'FDA' standards as if the ketuchp-as-vegetable standard is a benchmark of quality. The government insists that children be fed a meat at every meal. This meat item is generally something of the faux-meat variety, like chicken mcnuggets

Up until a couple of months ago, we did have a daycare that was relatively inexpensive, very friendly, clean, and competent, did not especially hassle us about food, and was open until 8:30 pm, which was helpful given the impossibility of getting anywhere by 5:30. It closed.

The daycare we are using at the moment is purely a stopgap measure for a few more weeks. It is not an especially bad place, but definitely not one that I think is providing nearly enough of a challenge or learning opportunity for the Lil Buddha.

I will give but one example. It is actually the reason I thought to sit down here. When I went to pick up Lark at daycare yesterday afternoon I was astonished and a bit horrified to see a group of older kids sitting in a semi-circle while a woman with an utterly expressionless face held up a book and turned the pages. She wasn't reading the book. Instead, there was a boombox playing a recording of the book being read. The daycare worker simply turned the page. This was difficult for me to comprehend. It is certainly pre-literate, and seemed perhaps even a bit psychotic. What kind of lesson could the students have been learning to have the book read to them by the machine?

We extracted honey today from the hives at the school. One (1) student showed up to help, which a charitable sort might not consider too bad I suppose, given it's midsummer and all. But it does bespeak a certain lack of obsession on the part of this year's class. Lack of obsession has no place in a beekeeper's heart. Though, it is true, fewer students meant less honey fell off the truck than is often the case.

I think we got a bit over 100 pounds today, with a several more supers (another 70-80 pounds perhaps) still waiting to be capped by the bees before being harvested. Not bad for a bunch of bugs, especially given the apocalypse I returned to last year.

I am supposed to be getting pictures soon and will post them -- if and only if they show me as I was, heroically and stoically getting stung multiple times by the one particularly ornery hive, all so you can sweeten your tea.

This is working a bit backward, but the whole period of being on the road started with Skye and Miss Lark and myself headed to the mountains for few days of getting away from Tidewater, very welcome and much needed.

Like a true member of this family, Lark insisted on spending the drive thoroughly surrounded by her possessions. The dominant phrase of the weekend was "more dinosaurs".



She never once let go of that dinosaur. Lark seems to be defying convention and gender restraints in her love for dinosaurs. We'll be in Chicago in a couple of weeks and when we get to the Field museum it is possible she will explode.

Since we were driving right by Rockfish Gap I insisted that we stop and visit General Lee. Skye was not excited but, like the Army of Northern Virginia, I won on sheer willpower.

Last year when we hiked through Rockfish Gap on the AT (one of the few places the AT crosses an interstate in Virginia) we stopped at the run down little tourist info spot that sits there in the midst of about a half dozen decaying buildings. I had totally forgotten about it but in an act of supremely good timing my friend Chip sent me the photos from two years ago just before we headed up the same way.

This time around the man behind the counter, who was extremely nice, looked like a homeless guy, down to the snaggly teeth, stained clothing, and unzipped zipper. General Lee didn't look much better.



I love the water stain on the ceiling.

Lark was a wee bit afeared.



Note the death grip on the dinosaur.

Nunal has been fairly static except for the periodic apologies for the lack of posting..usual disclaimers...

I've been all over for the past couple of weeks. I just spent several very enjoyable days at the conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. I presented a paper on my research on extraterritorial crime, extraterritorial abduction and extradition which basically compressed a couple chapters of the book I am writing. I thought it was pretty good and, more importantly, other people did as well. One never knows, toiling away in obscurity. The paper was, as you might imagine and as one historian said, rather "densely constructed", or as I would describe it more directly -- following the lyrics to one of Lefty Frizzell's great songs--"so round, firm, so fully packed." if you want to read it, send me an email and I can send it to you. (But that doesn't mean you won't still be on the hook to buy the book when it is finely done.)

Going to the SHAFR conference is always both very interesting and rewarding, not least because it is one of the few times that I am around people who understand what I am talking about. Really smart people too, I never ceased to be amazed how accomplished and sharp all of these historians are. I think more so than ever, or at least more interesting works are coming out, particularly those about American empire.

Before, during, and after the conference I spent some very welcome days in the National Archives. It is, perhaps, the one place in the world where I effortlessly attain perfect concentration. Not exactly a zen state, but definitely a productive one. I am not sure why, but having absolutely nothing else to do but read these old documents must have something to do with it. This becomes doubly true on the days it is open until 9 pm, where you can have 12 uninterrupted hours. That is, twelve hours of reading things that possibly nobody else in the world wants to read and, in some cases, certainly nobody has read since they were created since I untie notes in ancient string that disintegrates at the touch.

The sheer relentless torrent of material is something that needs to be experienced. I've been looking at borderlands cases from the 1870s, which come in batches of hundreds of boxes...

I'm a sucker for good (or at least, fun to page through) reference books, and maybe especially for field guides. Sometimes I feel like I have field guides to every damn thing on the planet, stationary, slithering, flying, whatever. But there are always others.

I've been really pleased, for instance, that next to the microfilm reader at the VWC Library there stands an unexpectedly beautiful book--Lichens of North America. Anytime I need a break from nineteenth century shenanigans, there it is. (Sure you can view it on google books, but you don't get the full impact). To actually learn the lichens awaits a new day.

Now a new book just came out about the Weeds of the South, and it is a masterpiece. Beautiful book with excellent images.

My students (and maybe my neighbors) will find the authors' definition of the South a bit broad (it includes the Ohio River Valley quite far north) but weeds don't follow invented regional distinctions, I guess.

I was interested, but not surprised, to learn that there is a whole field called "weed science" with their own association. No I haven't joined. Yet.

If you spend time with beekeeping old timers, as I do whenever I can, you realize that they always know exactly which plants are blooming and for how long. This goes double for the obscure weeds, which bees love and often get a lot of nectar from. I realized I needed to get much sharper on weed identification (I was already there on weed appreciation. It helps to be interested, as most of the grass on my lawn are weeds. My theory is that when mowed it becomes "grass').

Each of the weeds in this book deserves a narrative, even demands one. In this book we get only taxonomic description and sometimes a short statement describing each weed's salient characteristics. These are too brief, maybe closer to a zen koan. The narratives await their author.

There are, of course, some great names of weeds. I will toss out a few at the moment:

Apple of Peru (which we seem to have a lot of)

Pale Smartweed

Cancer-weed (which is not toxic)

Devil's guts (there are lots of devil thisthatortheother weeds, almost too easy)

Nap-at-Noon--also called "sleepy dick" and "Star-of-Bethlehem". This weed has something called "cardiotoxins" that will kill people and animals. I need to double check, but I believe half of my lawn is Nap-at-noon.

Nipplefruit Nightshade--grows in Florida and Gulf coast of Texas--"the poisonous fruit is used to kill feral dogs, rodents, and cockroaches in Central and South America"

Plant from Hell (also called Tropical Soda Apple)

My blogging has been so light that it has been awhile since I reiterated Lark's dominance of the cutest toddler category.

A couple of pictures in the house...after realizing we hadn't taken a picture in the last five minutes...or something like that.





Lark sporting her new 'do, courtesy of yours truly:





Here lark was discovering the marvels of putting ice from a cooler on top of her head:

You may recall that one of the swarms at VWC had moved into two empty medium supers stacked up. The bees have moved up and out of these boxes into regular Langstroth hives, so I dismantled it. Here is what it looked like (bottom view).


It is actually pretty neat, in part because I put the regular boxes on top and they comb which was damaged when I pried it open initially was slowly aligned to the new frames.

Here are the two frames that were in the top box when the swarm moved in. You can see the comb they built underneath.



Here is the comb from the box.

Beekeeping may be illegal in Norfolk, but the bees sure as hell don't know it. I just recently got another swarm call in Norfolk. Like the last one, this was close by too.

These bees had moved into a garbage can. I think they had been there for at least a couple of days since they built up some nice comb. I gave the comb, which was fresh, white and beautiful, to the lady who called me about the swarm, she is going to use it for furniture polish.





The bees were extremely gentle even though they might be considered a nascent hive rather than a full blown hive. I managed to find the queen and grabbed with a little queen-grabber device (that is the technical term), so the whole thing was a snap.

I used some other really technical tools to remove them--my swarm bucket of course, and then an empty Tecate box that was rolling around in my truck. Turns out the Tecate box was the perfect thing to get the bees out of the trashcan --2x4s and other stuff snarled together. The box was easily molded to the side,. I got most all of the bees.

The bees are in the bucket in this photo.




The woman who called me was not terrified as some are, but not getting too close either. She asked me if I was worried about driving around with the swarm in my truck. I said no. In fact, I was on my way to pick up Lark at daycare.

I thought she would ask if my daughter was afraid of bees. Instead, she asked: "does your daughter know that you are insane?"

No, not yet, she is still too young.

If you have access to the Wiley-Blackwell Synergy database (or whatever name it has these days) you can read my article which finally just came out last week: "Latino Migrant Music and Identity in the Borderlands of the New South," Journal of American Culture 32:2 (June, 2009): 114-125.

I am not allowed to post a pdf of it (since Blackwell thinks that might interfere with the half dozen people or so in the world who might ever read it), but I definitely can email you a copy of it if you are interested...

I've been planning to continue study of the music at Mexican rodeos in NC and Virginia (I have already been to several, but there is always more of this rigirous research to be done), but work has been slow on that front since I have been holed up with the extraterritoriality book. And now I find that the next rodeo in Manassas isn't scheduled until Sept 13 (Noon-8, at the Prince William County Fairgrounds, in case you are making a schedule) and I'll be in Berkeley by then. But there are some scattered smaller ones I am going to try to make before then. having hit a rodeo south of San Antonio on a brutally hot Sunday afternoon back in May I now have a new high standard with which to compare all future events.

Time has little meaning in the summer. That would be by way of explanation why I haven't posted in something like two weeks.

A sizable chunk of my absence from Nunal was due to the Mt. Airy Fiddler's convention, which is one of my favorite experiences of the year. Partly because I was gone at it--and partly because of a longish recovery curve upon returning back...

Though not the largest old time convention in the South, it surely is one of the best. Mt. Airy stands at the core of Surry County, which is the heart of a still-living tradition of old time music making that is unequaled anywhere else. (Notable enough that a friend of mine is writing a dissertation about it). It doesn't hurt that pioneer old time fiddler Benton Flippen is still around, and that Mt. Airy has the WPAQ radio station (Voice of the Blue Ridge) maintaining the flame.

At the fiddlers convention there is, of course, music day and night. I generally played until 4:30 or so each morning, and then went to sleep to bands playing well past dawn. Mt. Airy draws both old time and bluegrass musicians from all over (though this year I thought there was marginally more old time music). So, if you like the real, traditional bluegrass that has been snuffed out in so many other places, this would be the place to hear it.

There are contests in all instruments at Mt. Airy, but what I like is getting the chance to go play. The people I most enjoy playing music with I generally only see at fiddlers conventions in the summer. Nice to live to another season to have the opportunity.

Republicans really, really never want to win an election again

"Former GOP congressman Tom Tancredo (Colo.) also took Sotomayor to task for membership in the National Council of La Raza, labeling the nation's largest Hispanic advocacy group as "a Latino KKK without the hoods or nooses."'

Meanwhile, bloviating fool Rush Limbaugh compared her to David Duke...

I can't really figure out why we are supposed to be saddened by the decline and deaths of local newspapers. These papers are terrible and I think their disappearance is going to have every little overall impact. Whatever small contribution they make could be done much better online. This is not necessarily the case with the major newspapers also in crisis at the moment. The disappearance of these papers will have a very real, even drastic impact on our political life. But even in this case, much can be done by the new media. Small papers like the Virginian-Pilot that once were decent little papers with a purpose are now nothing more than a waste of paper and ink. Most of these papers have been owned by huge media corporations which have eliminated any distinctiveness or independence (the Courier-Journal comes to mind). They have been "local" only in the vaguest sense for years, even decades, and are instead just AP stories embedded in large furniture store and hearing aid ads. The Op-Eds are usually syndicated pieces, often ones that appeared several days earlier in the NYTimes or the Washington Post. The local columnists are reason enough not to read the paper given their aggressive stupidity. Even the feature fillers are grabbed off the wires, so here we regularly read wire stories in the 'Daily Break' section about new trends in Dallas in articles that aren't even minimally rebadged for the local market.

That all said, I do get the Pilot delivered to my house, if only to read about the local crimes of regular appalling violence that are the hallmark of "the 757". I like to read the paper over breakfast, and have no option to get the Times delivered in this area so I am stuck with the Pilot. But almost everyday I wonder why I am wasting my money.

Though I was surprised to learn today that Virginia Beach has 2,321 licensed vehicles.

how it should be done

For all the growing optimism that we may be pulling out of the downturn, there has been appallingly little discussion of the fundamental rot at the heart of our economic (and, let's be honest, moral) system built upon debt and consumer spending...and debt, debt, and then some more debt. This optimism is based on growing credit (also called "debt") and consumer spending, while the savings rate is zero or below zero. The obvious truth is that we can't forever borrow money and spend it without one day paying the (Chinese) piper, but nobody is willing to push for change in other directions.

Meanwhile, things are much different in Asia where they, like, you know, build things and export them. And where the rich save their money in banks, of all places. The wealthy in Korea spend a lot too, but if you are saving 31% of your income that seems ok.

"Korea’s wealthy save more money and spend less than their peers in other Asian countries, according to a recent consumer survey of 4,106 people in top income brackets in eight Asian countries including Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore.

In the poll by Visa Card, 91 percent of Korean respondents said they save every month, comparable to results for China and Singapore and close behind India’s 94 percent. Only 74 percent of the Australian rich save monthly, slightly lower than 78 percent in Japan.

Wealthy Koreans said they put an average of 31 percent of their monthly incomes into bank savings, the highest among all the respondents and far higher than the overall average of 23 percent. Belying the widely-held belief that they are the heaviest savers in Asia, Japanese polled said they only deposit 16 percent of their monthly income in the bank.

Bank savings was by far the most common financial investment among Koreans, with 99 percent saying they owned such accounts, followed by 77 percent with life insurance accounts and 57 percent with financial investment fund accounts.

The report also showed rich Koreans spend about $1,299 on average each month, which ranked them as the sixth-biggest spenders among the eight countries.

At the top were the Australia rich, who said they spend an average of $3,861 each month, followed by $2,541 for Japan and $2,327 for Singapore, though spending patterns may depend on price levels and currency rates against the U.S. dollar.

Visa polled people in the top 20 to 40 percent income bracket across Asia from September to October last year.

Several people have asked me what I think about the situation in Korea (i.e. the posturing by North Korea) though, it is worth noting, I have no particular expertise in North-South relations. But my sense from reading those that do is that this is not a crisis but instead the theatrical periodic demand of the North to be taken seriously and to have attention. respect, and possibly funds focused on it. I am persuaded that North Korea acts rationally, though I think it does indeed represent a danger not just to Asian peace but especially in terms of global weapons proliferation. So far everybody is playing their scripted part--the sabre rattling of the North is met with enhanced levels of readiness, stern words from ROK and American leaders, reaffirmed support for ROK and Japanese security, further apocalyptic threats from the North. Obama, not dramatic by nature and not stupid and rigid like Bush, is unlikely to feed the issue (one good sign is that John Bolton is warning of doom, surely that is a sign that Obama is doing something right). Now it is just a matter of cycling it down and avoiding even the naval clashes that have of late been the main focus of conflict. Of course, the whole game is a bit more dangerous when there are nukes involved...

In what must be some kind of record, the goldfish are already dead.

This is a worthwhile piece about post-apocalyptic (specifically post-nuclear) novels. It links up Mccarthy's The Road with some recent, lesser, mass-paperback post-nuke books. The piece is both funny and thoughtful (Ron Rosenbaum calls them "nuke-porn" books), and free of the usual snark that tends to hollow out pieces in Slate.

His consideration of McCarthy's book is worthwhile. Rosenbaum would, of course, have no way of knowing that I had discussed the current context of The Road much the same way he did when I gave a brief talk on it to our freshmen class last August...

I think the Road stands as an important and striking book and the quality of its writing makes it stand out from most all the post-apocalyptic works. One aspect of its power is the starkness of the writing. And the lack of politics. McCarthy is not using the apocalypse to flog a current political point, and so little is indicated about the main character that he could, in fact, be anyone. And the specific apocalypse is never made clear--it could well have been a natural extinction event.

Rosenbaum could have included the spate of new books and tv shows about the natural world after people disappear. I would classify some of these works as genocide fantasy, often by left-leaning environmentalists who wish people would just go away so nature could be restored, cities and especially suburbs would disappear, and huge ranges of birds and bison would come back. The tv shows might be a bit less political--my feeling is that they are just looking for an outlet for computer graphics and this pseudo-documentary style doesn't require the narratives a disaster film has.

What makes the 'world without us' crowd especially scary is that the genre never details how or why people disappear, they just do. It is genocide fantasy minus the messy details. Cut to image of trees growing in the middle of city streets...

Of course, there has long been a religiously-based genocide fantasy (or fantasies) in the form of pre-millenialism, but that is worth a discussion at another time (or not).

Speaking of nuke-porn and genocide fantasies on the part of the literati, I have been waiting for a good opportunity to write something duly harsh about World Made by Hand, by James Kunstler, which I had been led to by a New Yorker piece that described him and his blog (Clusterfuck Nation). That blog can be ok reading at times if you like a screed. Yet his novel is, simply, garbage. It veers dangerously close to white supremacist fantasy in seeking to populate a new perfect community in which there is no diversity, only white, Christian small towns modeled on some fictional historical model of homespun salt-of-the-earthiness coupled with rigorously defended purity and homemade style.

The book is formulaic in the way that a decent post-apocalyptic novel should be (right down to the gratuitous tour of the ravaged and returning-to-nature landscape), and the writing is workable even if the story is flat. It ends weirdly with the introduction of a human termite queen with extra-sensory powers?--don't ask.

But what makes this novel really terrible is its thick vein of self-righteousness. The hero takes evident glee in the demise of a lifestyle that was not fulfilling or 'real' a life, if you read it clearly, that the author just considers fundamentally tacky. The pre-collapse world rested on hollow things and meaningless tasks, whereas the truly discerning in the new world get everything they want and everybody is fulfilled because real work is fulfilling. And so on. Old(er) men like the protagonist, virtuous as he is by function of embracing the post-apocalyptic world, is rewarded by having a young beautiful recent widow move in with alacrity (crowding out the mistress...you see how it functions as fantasy).

The 'world made by hand' that Kunstler creates is an old timey New England town that is wholly white, a town standing as a refuge from the racial apocalypse that seems to be ongoing down in Maryland and points south. (By contrast, race does not appear as a factor at all in McCarthy's book, and in most post-apocalyptic films, society is almost unbelievably well integrated).

It is hard not to read Kunstler's book as tacitly embracing a notion of lily white virtue, the flip side of the current reality of dying, boring small towns in marginal areas being outstripped by vibrant yet often turbulent multiethnic cities. If the book was set in the South it would scream Klan fantasy, putting it in the northeast only obscures this theme a bit. Indeed, the protagonist in the novel finds a sympathetic compadre in the white, violent, sterotypically fundamentalist Virginian, who arrives in town with cult (and muscled enforcers) in tow and helps the town to retain its stability and order. At first you are led to think there is going to be conflict with this auslander, but it is this hand-tooled violence blended with faith (all under the eye of the ESP termite queen) that helps the hero clean up the town and blah blah blah. Boring, actually, but disturbing that a post-apocalyptic fantasy on the anti-development left supposedly heralding a new sense of purpose so prominently lacks a sense of actual community, or humanity.

It can only make matters worse to point out that though Kunstler makes the hero a fiddler, he makes him a contra fiddler. What could be worse in the doom of the future than the survival of the contra?

Me, I want no part of the apocalypse if the soundtrack is contra tunes. Give me the old time Pentecostal songs any day. Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down!

Americans don't get riled up to protest. Give away billions in taxpayer money to financial fatcats with no accountability--no worries. Refuse to punish war criminal torturers--no problem. The battle cry is...moo.

Koreans, on the other hand, live in a vibrant democracy and their political action is a bit more direct. Here is a striking photo of union protesters in Daejeon using sharpened bamboo spears to attack riot police.



(an article about the current state of rioting in Korea, quoting a Sogang professor, is here)

Lark has been into fish recently, so I went to buy her some goldfish. In typical fashion, this little project has ended up being both more complicated and more expensive than any reasonable person would anticipate. The goldfish themselves cost a quarter each. The filter was something like 1000 times more expensive, and ended up being powerful enough to whip these poor little bastards around the fishbowl so thoroughly as to be useless. One solution was simply to keep replacing the two-bit fish, but I chose the more humane idea of using a larger tank. As you might I expect, I have a fish tank sitting patiently in the garage for exactly this purpose. I used to keep Hector the giant Central American millipede in it, until he expired and I put him in the freezer awaiting future rebirth when science advances to the point to do so. So now there are two little goldfish in an unnecessarily huge tank. They are supposed to be able to live for 20 years. I give them a couple of weeks, tops.

Yes, Lark continues to be the smartest and cutest child on the planet. She counts now, in unbearable and almost too-cute fashion: "One, two, yellow." She has also learned how to drive.

I am just back Monday evening from my annual section on the Appalachian Trail. We did 76 miles, which is a bit shorter than our hoped-for 100 mile yearly mileage. I am no more ravaged than usual. The trail is grueling, but I've learned my lessons over the years and do some amount of training yearround and so can walk without pain today, which has not always been the case when I've completed a section. It helps that Virginia has more forgiving trail than North Carolina (extremely hard) and North Georgia (brutal).

I've been hiking the AT with a friend of mine (also a historian, in South Carolina) for 10 years this summer. We've made it up from Springer Mountain in Georgia to the northern reaches of the Shenandoah National Park. It would have been nice to get half way at the end of a decade(Harper's Ferry is considered the traditional halfway point though I think it is not fully half way) but that will not be the case. But I'd still like to finish by age fifty, if possible.

(I will not dwell here on the reality that I'll be 50 in a decade...)

This year we plugged the one section we had missed a couple of years ago, when our trip was truncated and we didn't get to do this part. Last year, for a variety of reasons, we did a more northerly section north of Waynesboro. We have both had a nagging feeling about this undone 76 mile section, so it feels good to have knocked it out. It ended up being some of the nicest trail we've hiked. Of particular note was the 1 mile or so stretch down into Buena Vista along the James River, really a nice little piece of walking with the wide river on your left and some rocky bluffs on your right. (In Virginia, "Buena" is pronounced to rhyme with "Moon-a"). Perhaps the nicest view were just out side of Salem on McAfee Knob (which, as you might expect, is pronounced in the mountains 'MAC-afee'). This is a steep little mountain with stunning views from steep cliffs. Several miles along from that were the Tinker Cliffs, which also had amazing views. I don't hike the AT with a camera so I can't post pictures of myself up there (though my friend is supposed to send me some), but here is one I swiped from the interschnitzel:



Beautiful spot. We had some reasonably good mileage days, and on that day we did 21 miles, so topped a bunch of mountains only to end up in Daleville Virginia in the evening, eating Mexican food. Or what passed for Mexican food in Daleville.

Next year we'll continue on toward Maine.

Things for which there should be German words

I haven't posted in almost a month because I have been basically traveling nonstop since the semester ended and haven't really had time to sit down with Nunal. Cataloging my travels can't possibly be of interest, but having spent 10 days in South Texas I can confirm that this remains a bright spot on my personal map. A few days in Florida confirms the opposite. I also spent some time in the superb libraries at the University of Texas at Austin, so the Yin of conjunto music and barbacoa tacos in San Antonio was balanced with the Yang of the Benson Latin American Collection library.

I left town with a feeling that was extremely hard to capture--that powerful sense of anticipation and relief (cresting as the semester came to a close) that I have an upcoming sabbatical that begins the instant the semester ends. I was thinking there likely is a 21-letter German word that captures this ineffable feeling--if you know what it is, let me know.

I am told there is already a English word for the feeling of returning from a sabbatical...

(As long as I am on the subject of things for which there should be long German words, it occurred to me in the Orlando airport that there should be a word describing the feeling of being stuck in that particular airport surrounded by double XL Americans waddling around).

Corridos de Caballos Famosos

I've been thinking about the astounding Kentucky Derby results and wondering if any one is going to write a song about the winning horse, Mine That Bird.

There are a couple very relevant traditions of horse songs that should, in a perfect world, yield at least a few songs about this horse.

Not least, there is that great Kentucky tradition typified by "Molly and Tenbrooks", which, of course, is the quintessential horse racing song based on an 1878 race at Louisville (before even there was a Churchill Downs). Even more importantly, this is one of the most historically significant bluegrass songs. It was one of Bill Monroe's favorite songs and it was the song that the Stanley Brothers first recorded in the style of music picking invented by Bill. To quote Richard D. Smith, who wrote an essential biography of Bill Monroe, that recording "proved that Bill's music had gone beyond being the sound of just one band. It was now a true, recognizable genre." (p. 93).

So someone should absolutely write a bluegrass song about this horse. (And yes I know, what passes for "bluegrass" nowadays ain't nothing close to bluegrass, but there are still plenty of good players out there to step up to the task).

Another reason I think there should/must be a song about Mine That Bird is that the horse industry in Kentucky nowadays is reliant on Mexican immigrant workers (see, for starters, Brian L. Rich and Marta Miranda's "Sociopolitical Dynamics of Mexican Immigration in Lexington, Kentucky, 1997 to 2002,") and, it goes without saying, Mexican music is not unfamiliar with the topic of corridos de caballos famosos.

When I started thinking about horse songs I immediately return to the many corrdios de caballos Los Alegres de Teran recorded, and of course, more conceptually, the full albums I have straightforwardly called "Caballos Famosos", which cover the many Mexican regional styles, some of which are truly great collections, by Miguel Aceves Mejia (Mariachi), Los Halcones de Salitrillo (Norteño), Los Huracanes del Norte (also Norteño), and Grupo Laberinto and Banda Jerez (both playing banda). (I am not including Valerio Longoria's "Caballo Viejo" on this list because it is not exclusively dedicated to caballos). The Norteño versions are the best to my ear.

I realize now that I am going to have to buckle down and figure out which is my favorite of these corridos, which may take some time. Good thing the summer is nigh in a few days.

For a stopgap I'll put a vote in for "Caballo Alazan Lucero" as sung by Alegres de Teran. Singing doesn't get much better than that, though Los Donneños do a good job on that one. I don't think it would really be a stretch to say that if we consider Los Alegres as analogous to Bill Monroe then Los Donneños are the Stanley Brothers.

And from what I see poking around Antonio Aguilar recorded three volumes of Corridos de Caballos Famosos, which clearly I should locate just to be complete, though he isn't my favorite.

There should be a Corrido de Extrae Esa Aves. If one doesn't appear soon I may have to commission it...

(btw, I think I got that imperative form right but if not, forgive my execrable knowledge of Spanish)

On a side note, the International Museum of the Horse at Kentucky Horse Park is hosting an exhibition called Arte en la Charrería: The Artisanship of Mexican Equestrian Culture, which is surely a sign of the times. And something to see, too, if I can get up there before September.

At least they aren't harvesting their organs, yet

Geez, how thin skinned do you have to be to be offended by this sort of treatment given to passengers on Aeromexico flying into freedomland Singapore:



The space age microfiber get-ups are cool, but the scanner is the winner

And no wonder they are freaking out over there and quarantining people--this is a disease in which literally tens of people are really sick.

China, predictably, is reacting with a combination of excess and speed:

"Since Thursday, when an infected passenger from Mexico City arrived in Hong Kong, Chinese health officials have been rounding up his fellow passengers, as well as some Mexican travelers on other flights who showed no sign of illness. The man who arrived Thursday is the only confirmed case of swine flu in China.

Among those the authorities have sequestered are a number of Mexican passport holders who had not been home in months, including a consular official in Guangzhou who was briefly held and tested after he returned to China from a trip to Cambodia.

According to Mexican consular officials, those taken from their hotel rooms included some families with small children, who were initially told that they would be tested for the H1N1 virus and released, but were later informed that they would be held for a week.

Ma Zhaoxu, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said the quarantine measures were justified given the fast spread of the new flu strain.

“We hope Mexico could proceed from the overall interest of joint response to the disease, fully understand the necessary measures we have taken, and handle the issue in an objective and calm manner,” he said in a statement.

Mexican citizens are not the only ones being quarantined. On Sunday, a group of 29 exchange students from the University of Montreal in Canada were confined to a hotel in the northern city of Changchun, university officials said Monday. "

It makes perfect sense to quarantine Canadians, as they are part of NAFTA.

Recall that China, in a mad rush to lock up the residents of the same continent of the possible origin of this flu, is the same country that produces poisoned children's toys for the world market by the millions that are then distributed around the world like little baby-brain-damaging time bombs (not even to mention the state-sanctioned sale of poisoned milk for its own kids).

Lark seems to have become a little girl overnight. She suddenly looks the part of a kid rather than a baby. Her unsurpassed cuteness is still unsurpassed.



Here she reads to her Penguin, named Qua.



And she is talking in sentences. Well, kind of sentences. She uses articles all of the time now, as in "a book", "a dog". I think you will agree with me that there is a lot of meaning in the addition of "a". Taken in conjunction with pointing I take to be her speaking the full sentence "This is a book which I find interesting, though with not as well developed a story as we found in Tickly Octopus" and "Look, that is a dog pursuing a squirrel, a thing it does out of instinct."

I know this is semi-old hat for the computer literate, but it utterly blows my mind that google maps has the street level feature of looking 360 degrees in front of almost any address. How in the hell does this work? I can't figure it out unless satellites can provide that sort of lateral view. It has been a while since I wasted time on google earth and the level of detail really has hopped up. It used to be that you could just see a satellite image with some detail (I could tell it was my old Ranger parked in the driveway, for example). But the street view is amazing. This is not me being easily impressed, it is really hard to fathom.

Here is the street scene in front of Lerma's Nite Club, the classic conjunto club in San Antonio.

If you don't know what I am talking about try plugging your address in. Here is the street view of my house. It was taken sometime last summer since my renter's car is in the driveway. You can also see my both of my neighbor's two pieces of shit, one of which used to be permanently parked in front of my house, and the other of which remains to this day parked across the street. But don't worry, it is started once a week. Early on sunday mornings, cranked over, and over, and over.

Virginia Beach has taken the radical step of allowing the almost-free practice of religion.

"The City Council voted unanimously to let a group of Buddhist monks hold religious services at their home in Pungo.

The monks can hold mediation services on Sundays with no more than 20 people, and festivals must be held elsewhere. The monks cannot put more statues in their yard, and the landscaping must be maintained. The conditions of the use permit approved by the council were outlined in a tentative settlement filed in federal court in March.

The monks and some followers had filed a federal lawsuit claiming that the city had violated their religious freedoms by denying them a permit last year. Some of the monks’ neighbors said they were concerned about traffic and a religious institution springing up in a residential area."

I am sure you can sympathize how shocking it can be when religious institutions spring up in residential areas. From my house a careless rock thrower would have to take careful aim not to hit a church--everything from catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist, to some that seem a bit more direct like the New End-Time Harvest Church of Restoration and some church called, oddly and bit unnervingly, Solutions.

Sometimes I like to think virtue gets rewarded.

This weekend brought in some unbelievably perfect weather, the kind of crystalline days that make the spring in Virginia about perfect. My first thought upon stepping outside was that, after several miserable days, it was a perfect day for swarms.

But through sheer force of will (and because I have so much to get accomplished at the moment) I went to the library and read microfilm of nineteenth century correspondence.

Clearly this produced some good Karma. After a couple of hours my cellphone rang informing me of a swarm only a couple of miles away. I went and grabbed it and hived it and was back in the library within a couple of hours.

The swarm was pretty good size and easy to grab on a low branch. I just shook it into a bucket and off I went. This was a fortunate swarm, I need some more bees to get the strawberry honey at my yard in Pungo.




More interesting than the swarm was the place it chose to sojourn. The house was in a rough section of Norfolk and had some of the key hallmarks of such--chainlink fence in the front yard, numerous handlettered 'no trespassing' signs, and, of course, a barely restrained pitbull tied to a frayed rope in the front yard. You can see one of the signs in the first picture. Unfortunately I was not really in a position to take a lot of pictures.

The bees didn't seem to mind the surroundings.

The Navy Seals are not the only government officials out shooting people. Tidewater police are doing their best to take no prisoners:

No weapons in car of men killed by Chesapeake police

"City police recovered more suspected drugs and bullets, but no weapons, from the car of two men shot and killed by Portsmouth police last week."
...Records filed Wednesday with a search warrant in Circuit Court showed that Chesapeake police, who are investigating the April 9 incident in the Holly Cove neighborhood, seized several items including four bullets, a bullet fragment from the seat behind the driver, suspected marijuana, a bag containing a white substance, a digital scale, $27.98 in cash and two cell phones."

Four (4) bullets, $27.98 in cash and two cell phones. Some bigtime drug kinpin killers, no?

here is a possible source of the four bullets--they went through these guys' bodies:

"The men killed were Demetrius D. Edens, 28, of Chesapeake, who police said was the driver, and Darren S. Wilson, 25, of Virginia Beach. Edens died of multiple wounds to the chest and neck, and Wilson died of a shot to the head."

In other police killings:


Man fatally shot by Portsmouth police was wanted fugitive

And the local civilian bloodletting is also reaching for the stars:

Two teen brothers and girl are shot, injured in Portsmouth
One teen shot in Portsmouth home from hospital

At least one of the three teenagers shot Wednesday in the 1500 block of Richmond Ave. has gone home from the hospital, police said Thursday.

A second male victim, the brother of the released one, remained hospitalized in stable condition. Police on Thursday could not confirm the status of the third victim, a girl.

The brothers were standing outside a duplex when they were shot, while the girl was wounded inside one of the residences. Police were still looking for two people in an older blue Ford Crown Victoria with tinted windows whom they suspect fired the shots just before noon

Police describe man sought in slaying of Virginia Beach teen

Following up on my class' discussion today of extraterritorial jurisdiction, the expert government assassination of the teenage pirates, and the question of what to do with the captured pirate, this discussion from Eugene Kontorovich is interesting:

"Just an Honest Fisherman

A professor of piracy often deals with eye-patch and hook jokes. Many people who find this academic specialty intriguing loose interests when they learn that modern pirates wear jeans, tee-shirts and flip-flops, or when they’re feeling natty, fatigues. They certainly don’t fly a black flag. They have very bad personal hygiene: forget Johnny Depp and Cary Elwes.

Yet the ordinary appearance of pirates leads to a potentially serious problem in prosecuting them.

Universal jurisdiction only applies to pirates. Captured Somalis are likely to insist in court that they are not pirates but rather simple fishermen, erroneously seized by a foreign navy. What makes the claim compelling is that most pirates are in fact fishermen. Piracy is not a full-time job. Simply having weapons on a boat would not distinguish the pirates from many other Somalis. Establishing the very identity or even nationality of captured individuals will be difficult, as they are unlikely to possess identification. (This will also make it hard to know whether a captured pirate is a minor; or even what nation he comes from, making consular rights and other issues quite difficult to administer.)

Such challenges must be taken seriously, because the alternative is the detention of innocent civilians. To be sure, treating the detainees as civilians would require giving credence to some dubious factual claims. However, the same is true of many Guantanamo detainees captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. They have claimed that they were innocent passers by, aid workers, tourists, minors, or simply ignorant of the nature and aims of the organization for which they worked. Regardless of their plausibility, these claims won significant sympathy for the detainees. Moreover, U.S. courts have held that because the power to detain depends on the foreigner’s status as a combatant, detainees can appear before tribunals to challenge the factual basis for being classified as a combatant even before a full trial for their alleged crimes.

Quite simply, making a criminal case against armed foreigners seized in remote parts of the world is very difficult. These concerns are not speculative. Evidentiary problems have already forced the U.S. Navy to release most of the pirates it seized in the wake of its January 2009 agreement with Kenya. Even though they were caught in response to a distress call from a commercial vessel, the evidence was “not ironclad.”"

in an earlier post, he offered some links to his articles which are very much worth reading:

Many of the issues about the legal regime for responding to and prosecuting pirates that have arisen in the wake of the capture of a U.S. vessel this week are discussed at length in my forthcoming scholarly essay entitled “A Guantanamo on the Sea": The Difficulties of Prosecuting Pirates and Terrorists, to be published in volume 98 of the California Law Review. I wrote it several months ago, before the piracy problem had attracted major attention, but due to the slow production schedules of law reviews, it won't be published for some time, so I thought it would be appropriate to share the central ideas informally now. (For background on the issue, one can consult a short briefing paper I wrote for the American Society of International Law, International Legal Responses to Piracy off the Coast of Somalia.)

If we are supposed to be mortified about the casual-U.S.-marijuana-user-fueled violence in Mexico should we really be celebrating the extraterritorial triple killing of the Somali pirates by Navy Seals? Even if the killing was cinematically cool?

My students were all excited about it today until I pointed out that the pirates were teenagers. (Of course, here in Norfolk we leave the killing of teenagers to other teenagers).

Writer Lindsay Beyerstein said it plainly enough: "Enough dead teen pirate porn already"

The banner headline in the Virginian-Pilot this morning said, boastfully and with more than its fair share of posturing: "THREE SHOTS. THREE KILLS". The Washington Post featured the same phrase, in fact.

Obama, deftly avoiding early, administration staining debacles like Desert One or Black Hawk Down incident had at least the good sense to parade a dog around today instead of landing on an aircraft carrier and declaring the mission accomplished.

One thing that I think is deserving mention that has surprised me quite a bit is that there are any U.S. flag ships at all. I thought they had all gone offshore like the manufacturing base.

There may be some good news about stopping Colony Collapse Disorder:

"ScienceDaily (Apr. 14, 2009) — For the first time, scientists have isolated the parasite Nosema ceranae (Microsporidia) from professional apiaries suffering from honey bee colony depopulation syndrome. They then went on to treat the infection with complete success.

In a study published in the new journal from the Society for Applied Microbiology: Environmental Microbiology Reports, scientists from Spain analysed two apiaries and found evidence of honey bee colony depopulation syndrome (also known as colony collapse disorder in the USA). They found no evidence of any other cause of the disease (such as the Varroa destructor, IAPV or pesticides), other than infection with Nosema ceranae. The researchers then treated the infected surviving under-populated colonies with the antibiotic drug, flumagillin and demonstrated complete recovery of all infected colonies."

Universities and colleges are making cutbacks all over the place, but vaunting over the sad stupidity of Brandeis selling off its art collection last fall is Florida State, which is planning to eliminating whole departments.

Among the losers are majors that just might be of interest in Florida, like Oceanography, or of interest to students living in the modern era, like Software Engineering.

Here is the full list:

"Programs targeted for elimination:
Anthropology
Apparel Design
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics
Geological Sciences
Molecular Biophysics
Oceanography
Hospitality & Golf Management
Physical Education
Science Education (College of Education)
Geography
Behavioral Psychology
Software Engineering
Art Education
Ceramics
Sculpture
Studio Art
Recreational Management
German
Slavic Languages
Demography
Art Administration

Fortunately, they are so far planning on keeping a winning major like "Creative Writing with an Emphasis in Business". This last one should be helpful for the Wall Street accountants who have been inventing profits all of these years (...I'll be here all week).

The New York Times numbingly keeps running the same article about gun sales in Texas and other southwestern states to Mexican drug gangs. This is no longer "news" per se, now it is the kind of drumbeat they once sustained over the gender discrimination at the Masters (if memory serves). Oh, and the reporting they ran emphasizing the need for a war in Iraq, there are certain echoes of that. For such an austere newspaper, their advocacy journalism can be tired, not to mention tiresome.

My guess is that the paper thinks if it keeps running the same article about the danger of guns over and over that there will suddenly be a national movement to regulate guns. Their calculations seem clear--Mexican drug gangs buy American guns, therefore American guns should be regulated to stop Mexican drug violence.

I have this suspicion that if guns couldn't be easily bought in Texas by billionaire drug gangs, they might have to spend marginally more buying superior weaponry from their Latin America connections, who operate in a region awash with guns (many of them from the U.S., see below). It is almost too obvious to point out that it wouldn't take much to push aside a few kilos of coke and add in some weapons.

The Times is without a clue in other ways too, not least of which is the almost total absence of interest in broaching the radioactive gun debate. Obama is far too savvy a politician to do this, at least yet. And now that Dems have started winning in the south, why destroy that with fruitless anti-gun posturing? Why lose Virginia now that it has moved so firmly into the Demcoratic camp?

I haven't seen the article stressing the root cause of the Mexican drug violence, which is, of course, the teenager behind your garage toking up as you read this very blog post (maybe even your son or daughter. Or you).

But it is true that the United States is the cause of much weapons violence in the world. It supplies 38% of the arms sold in the world today.

'I'm Naturally Radioactive...You Are Too!''

I've been doing some research on nuclear weapons manufacturing (not in the interests of making one, but to gauge the environmental impact of them) which has brought me to some interesting spots on the web.

I stumbled on this site for the American Nuclear Society, which is some kind of trade group. I'll confess I didn't read their various position papers, though I was struck that they are not placed in numerical order. And that the numbers don't seem to correspond with the years either. The papers are organized in the following descending order: 11, 40, 50, 12, 76, 82, 73, and so on. These are the same people reading the gauges in the nuclear plants...now what did the red line mean?

They also peddle a bunch of stuff. I was struck by this stickers.

''I'm Naturally Radioactive...You Are Too!'' Stickers....A popular giveaway item for exhibit booths, legislator visits and at utility visitor centers. These stickers also are used by many teachers as classroom "awards" to the student" scientist of the day."

It sounds like a good slogan for Palin 2012.

I also liked the "Atoms Family Activity Book," for schooling children through grade 5 of the positive benefits of their friend, Mr. Atom. I guess this stuff didn't die out with Howdy Doody after all.

It is a fine world we live in when you can buy an 1860 slide with a sample of Ichaboe island guano on it.

As promised, here are a few pictures from Portsmouth, Ohio. I was there for the Appalachian Studies Association conference, giving a presentation on my research into Latinization of Appalachia. Portsmouth is about as far away from here as you can get and still be in southern Appalachia. It is right on the Ohio River near Ashland, Kentucky. (where we stopped by and saw the house locations of legendary old time fiddlers JW Day and Ed Haley) It is right in the area where there are some magnificent indian mounds. We saw one, the more spectacular ones were a bit more of a drive.

The conference was at Shawnee State University, which has a very nice and well set-up campus. Here is a view of the Ohio with the Kentucky hills on the other side. The campus was at the base of this bridge over to the left.


The flood wall (the town was massively flooded in 1937) along the river has a mural painted on it which is designated the longest piece of art by a single artist in the world. This is a very Midwestern style claim. I can confirm that this mural was indeed very long.

Here is a panel of it, featuring Great Ohioan Roy Rogers, who was born with the less melodious name of Leonard Franklin Slye just down the river in Cincinnati and raised in Duck Run.


here is the end of the wall at the gate:


Portsmouth is definitely among the most economically ravaged towns I have ever seen. Even by Rust Belt standards this place was downtrodden. It sits right where the Big Scioto River meets the Ohio and was once evidently a prosperous and lively town. There are a lot of sell built and even beautiful old buildings stretching back to the Antebellum period. But prosperity has totally left this place. The town is mostly abandoned and boarded up, some it rather dramatically so. The houses in the town are all very run down as well.

I didn't have a good camera with me and I was walking around at dusk, but these pictures give you a bit of a taste of the place.

Some of the buildings were nice old ones and well kept


or this 1830 house, which was a coffee and tea shop (now failed):


this was the scene along the old main street in the town, parallel to the river,







the wildest one was hard to photograph because of the way the cars were parked. But it was a building with a normal looking facade and a big window, but when you looked through the window there was no building behind it, just a big lot and a parked truck.



but there were ways to be happy in town.

21st century American success stories

It is interesting news to discover that that your suspicions are true: Portsmouth and Suffolk really are among the very worst places in Virginia, at least in terms of something as basic as high school graduation rates.

"The Portsmouth and Suffolk school systems have two of the highest dropout rates in the state - nearly one in five students who entered ninth grade for the first time in 2004 left school within four years before graduating, according to Virginia Department of Education data released Tuesday.

"When you've got a dropout rate of 18 percent, there's no silver lining," said Kevin Alston, Suffolk's assistant superintendent for administrative services. "That's 18 percent of our students that we're failing."

One other South Hampton Roads school division - Norfolk - had a dropout rate higher than the state's rate of 8.7 percent. Thirteen percent of students in that city left school early, placing Norfolk among the bottom 25 of the 131 Virginia districts reporting data.

Chesapeake (6.9 percent) and Virginia Beach (5.5 percent) were below the state rate.

The latest public high school dropout statistics provide the most accurate picture of what's happened at Virginia schools over the past four years, said Charles Pyle, a spokesman for the state education department.

Across the state, 8,347 students left high school early over the four-year period. The rates ranged from 0 percent in Falls Church and Highland County to 31.1 percent in Petersburg.

South Hampton Roads has five of the 34 high schools - not including alternative campuses - that reported dropout rates of 15 percent or higher - Portsmouth's Wilson (26.2) and I.C. Norcom (21.6); Norfolk's Lake Taylor (21.6); and Suffolk's Lakeland (23.7) and King's Fork (20.8)."

You read that right, Portsmouth's Wilson high school has a drop out rate of 26.2%. Over one quarter (I could do this math because I graduated H.S.)

Good thing those drop outs can all find good paying jobs assembling the new electric cars...in China. Maybe they could sneak into the empty containers piling up at the International Terminal and smuggle themselves into China.

Norfolk's Lake Taylor has a cool 21.6% drop out rate. That is the school next to the VWC campus, incidentally.

The 31.1% rate in Petersburg is simply insane.

This is the same high school district that lacks even accredited schools. It has been in the news recently because a local basketball player who couldn't even maintain the incredibly low 2.0 GPA needed to compete in high school sports in Chesapeake transferred to Petersburg, where they don't even pretend to have standards. He transferred to a school the newspaper describes as "the only high school in the state that has been denied accreditation for 2008-09 because of continued low student achievement."

But hey, the new environment has been great for his future: "He leads the team in rebounds (8.6) and steals (2.1) and is drawing recruiting interest from George Mason, Virginia Tech, Charlotte and High Point."

Now, to be sure, a bright spot on the Virginia Map is Falls Church, with a 0% drop out rate.

I am sure that the difference between Falls Church (0%) and Petersburg (31.1%) has nothing whatsoever to do with vast inequalities of wealth.

The paper here, often supremely useless, has been running daily articles on the piece of whatever-it-was that fell from the sky and that was heard and seen from NC to Maryland. Now they are saying it was a meteor.

The various theories floated out there by the NASA officials and the changes to them seem designed to give people something to suspect.

We were in the living room at that time on Sunday night and heard a huge boom and felt the house shake a bit. We both thought that it was somebody throwing something heavy onto the porch. I thought maybe it was somebody protesting the dogs barking, or just run of the mill hooligans. It definitely is wild that the meteor could make the house shake like that despite the fact that it was hundreds of miles off of the coast.

Oh, sorry, I meant the "meteor".

Surplus? What's a surplus?

Since the U.S. is not likely to be posting such a headline in the near future (or ever, if China does indeed succeed with its plan to be the world leader in electric cars) we might as well enjoy this headline that the JoonAngDaily has today:

"Trade surplus hits a record monthly high of $4.6 billion
The Korean trade surplus for March was $4.6 billion - a record high, the Ministry of Knowledge Economy said yesterday.

The news comes a day after the central bank announced that the country saw a $3.6 billion surplus from its February current account balance, signaling the possibility of an economic recovery."

This is a picture of an anti-North Korean riot in Seoul. It is from the New York Times:



Why does the main clashing with the police seem to be holding a squeeze honey bear?

"I hear a lot of buzzing, you know it sounds like my little honey bee"

I spent the weekend at the Appalachian Studies Association conference and will describe it and the town it was in in greater detail (with some pictures) when I have more time. For now, after an eight hour drive home there are a few more pressing things I have to do first.

But I did want to post this video, in anticipation of the new beehives we are installing on campus Monday afternoon. The packages of bees have already arrived and the weather is supposed to be good, so I'll just quote Muddy Waters: "Sail On, My Little Honey Bee, Sail On."

Besides bees, Obama is bringing a couple more things to the White House that have not been seen commonly in recent times: openness:

"Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton each had four prime-time news conferences from the East Room during their eight years in office, according to Martha Joynt Kumar, a professor of political science at Towson University. Obama has already held two in little more than two months in office. "

clarity:

"Responding with his most partisan comment of the evening, Obama said his Republican critics should look to their own history with the federal budget, accusing them of having "a short memory" when it comes to deficits.

"As I recall, I'm inheriting a $1.3 trillion annual deficit from them," he said."

We are not alone

If you have the nagging feeling that the Geithner-Obama plan to alleviate banks of any responsibility for their own mismanagement, stupidity, and criminality and to funnel your tax money to needy hedge fund operators so they can increase their profits at zero risk and sip champagne with their banker friends is unseemly or even bad policy, well.. some Nobel Prize winning economists are right there with you.

Exhibit A: Joseph Stiglitz: Geithner plan will rob American taxpayers: Stiglitz

"HONG KONG (Reuters) - The U.S. government plan to rid banks of toxic assets will rob American taxpayers by exposing them to too much risk and is unlikely to work as long as the economy remains weak, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said on Tuesday.

"The Geithner plan is very badly flawed," Stiglitz told Reuters in an interview during a Credit Suisse Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's plan to wipe up to US$1 trillion in bad debt off banks' balance sheets, unveiled on Monday, offered "perverse incentives," Stiglitz said.

The U.S. government is basically using the taxpayer to guarantee against downside risk on the value of these assets, while giving the upside, or potential profits, to private investors, he said.

"Quite frankly, this amounts to robbery of the American people. I don't think it's going to work because I think there'll be a lot of anger about putting the losses so much on the shoulder of the American taxpayer."'

Exhibit B: Paul Krugman:

"...Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, has persuaded President Obama to recycle Bush administration policy — specifically, the “cash for trash” plan proposed, then abandoned, six months ago by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

This is more than disappointing. In fact, it fills me with a sense of despair.

After all, we’ve just been through the firestorm over the A.I.G. bonuses, during which administration officials claimed that they knew nothing, couldn’t do anything, and anyway it was someone else’s fault. Meanwhile, the administration has failed to quell the public’s doubts about what banks are doing with taxpayer money.

And now Mr. Obama has apparently settled on a financial plan that, in essence, assumes that banks are fundamentally sound and that bankers know what they’re doing.

It’s as if the president were determined to confirm the growing perception that he and his economic team are out of touch, that their economic vision is clouded by excessively close ties to Wall Street. And by the time Mr. Obama realizes that he needs to change course, his political capital may be gone."

On his blog Krugman puts it even more plainly:

"Why am I so vehement about this? Because I’m afraid that this will be the administration’s only shot — that if the first bank plan is an abject failure, it won’t have the political capital for a second. So it’s just horrifying that Obama — and yes, the buck stops there — has decided to base his financial plan on the fantasy that a bit of financial hocus-pocus will turn the clock back to 2006."

the old stuff is the good stuff

I recorded some old time tunes (two from West Virginia and one from Virginia) with a friend of mine, a particularly good old time fiddler. We had made a demo before and now made a for-real recording for a tribute cd project that I will write about sometime soon when it is complete.

Never having recorded in a professional studio (or on anything more robust than a handheld MP3 recorder or, back when, on reel to reel for the hell of it) it was an interesting experience. Not to mention an expensive one. The difference in the sound is total.

You can enjoy the tunes here.

I knew him when...

So I am happy to see that a guy I went to grad school with was awarded the biggest prize in American history, the Bancroft Prize. For his first book, no less! The book is Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War. It is about mining in the west, not in the Appalachian killing fields. I will confess to not having read it yet, though the fawning reviews (even in the New Yorker, which is uncommon for an academic book) ever since it came out made me think it was a good one. And that he had a good publicist.

For the moment I am putting whatever energy I might have to spare for reading about mining in the west mostly into Pynchon's typically magisterial and gargantuan Against the Day. And I am in a holding pattern in that book, no river landing in sight just yet for me.

Andrews' acheivement seems especially impressive when you figure he is sharing the prize with Drew Gilpin Faust, a fine historian and the president of some school up in the northeast*, and Pekka Hämäläinen, who not only has one of the coolest last names possible but who wrote a book I have read which is indeed a masterpiece: The Comanche Empire.









*(yup, that very same one that trained the Wall Street wizards who created the credit default swap)

Bee the change

Whatever the missteps so far, the Obama White House has proven itself a leader in at least one very positive way: reminding the nation that there should be beehive in every backyard and showing the way.

Obamas to Plant Vegetable Garden at White House

"The Obamas will feed their love of Mexican food with cilantro, tomatillos and hot peppers. Lettuces will include red romaine, green oak leaf, butterhead, red leaf and galactic. There will be spinach, chard, collards and black kale. For desserts, there will be a patch of berries. And herbs will include some more unusual varieties, like anise hyssop and Thai basil. A White House carpenter, Charlie Brandts, who is a beekeeper, will tend two hives for honey."

The power to tax is the power to destroy

Like anyone with a tiny bit of brain I am appalled and angry at the greed and venality of the AIG bonus payments. Stupid, unfair, likely criminal, yes, yes, yes, all of these things. "It's an outrage". The word "outrage" Obama and his many underlings trotted out today is so overused as to become hackneyed (Politicians love to parade their outrage. Try reading about events in the 1880s, "outrages" were declared on an excessive, near-daily basis. I was in fact just writing about that earlier today).

Robert Reich, generally good for a quip, had the best solution: the feds should finally just take over AIG, cut it up, and give the worthless parts away to either Fox News or North Korea.

Truthfully, though, isn't this whole Monday morning mini-shit storm just a red herring? A diversion from what truly ails us?

Like all such media storms, it will be replaced with some other issue for the talking heads in a few days, and the mouthing of faux populism by people like Charles Schumer (!) calling for confiscatory taxation will have no more actual political cost, or real impact, than the wearing of out-of-style clothing.

Meanwhile, we are still being hoodwinked. What is a $165 million dollars in bonuses when we have frittered away billions on we don't even know what? We've wasted $200 billion on AIG alone, much of that money going to pay off foreign banks who made bad investments. Oh yes, I know, it's an outrage

The more profound raw deal we have been force fed is simply not being made manifest, why is that? Why hasn't there been the same red hot fury at the garagantuan and onging waste of federal tax dollars in the bank bailout stretching back to last fall? Why has nothing been done to punish those who are guilty in any number of ways?

One bit of theatre was effectively managed last week to make it seem like the guilty are paying a cost--they have already convicted and sent Madoff to prison.

But who cares? He stole from gullible private investors willingly forking over their money in the pursuit of individual wealth. The failing banks on Wall Street have destroyed the American financial system and dragged the world into recession. Billions of dollars in publicly held wealth has evaporated. And the bailout comes out of our pockets with the full force of state taxation authority (you will recall John Marshall's comment quoted at top). We are told we have no choice (Bernanke: "we have no choice"), and we are given additional no choices in the matter, and indeed it was designed expertly by those in the know to give us no oversight or way out.

Madoff at least made up statements for people to read and admire. All we are getting in return for our billions is cheap theatre tuned to the 24 news cycle.

Incidentally, why are these AIG contracts so sacred? Aren't most contracts filled with outs anyway? (AIG used to think so). The UAW contracts with GM were considered not only un-sacred but objects of scorn. Their unilateral revision was trotted out as the essential precondition for the future of the entire American auto industry. Why can workers' contracts so readily be annihilated while those of masters of the universe? (That was a rhetorical question.)

Let's hope Obama figures out that, among other things, Tim Geithner is a financial Jeremiah Wright. He is fostering and peddling extremist folly and playing to the fringe elements of his own constituency (which is Wall Street, not the taxpayers and voters). It is time to cut him loose before his utterly skewed world view is allowed to destroy the onward progress of needed "change we can believe in."

Things fall apart...

...but they aren't supposed to in Germany.

Don't they engineer things over there with some degree of skill (as in: German engineering). It ain't Minneapolis, after all.

The archives building in Cologne just collapsed, total failure in six minutes.

The tragedy is what was in there:

"The private papers of the Nobel prize-winning novelist Heinrich Böll, one of Germany's most powerful postwar writers, have been lost under the rubble. They include the drafts of books, corrected manuscripts, letters and radio plays. The writer was born in Cologne and insisted before his death in 1985 that the papers be moved from Boston to his home town.
Lost, too, were manuscripts of essays and articles written by Karl Marx when he was editor of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne in the 19th century.

Letters written by the philosopher Hegel, lyrics and notes written by the composer Jacques Offenbach – who composed The Tales of Hoffmann – edicts issued by Napoleon and King Louis XIV, and the personal papers of Konrad Adenauer, West Germany's first Chancellor and former mayor of Cologne, were also lost.

If they are ever recovered, the documents will almost certainly be irretrievably damaged.

"We are talking here about 18 kilometres of extremely valuable archival material, of absolute importance to European culture," Eberhard Illner, the head of the city archives, said. "Now the memory of a European city has been destroyed. I can only hope, but cannot believe, that some of these fragile documents survived under tonnes of concrete and steel."

The archives included the minutes of all town council meetings held since 1376. Not a single session had been missed, making the collection a remarkable resource for legal historians.

The earliest document stored in the building dated back to 922, and there were hundreds of thousands of documents spread over six floors, some of them written on thin parchment. A total of 780 complete private collections and half a million photographs were being stored."

The Böll and Adenauer seem especially terrible, since those collections had no equal anywhere else. And so much of this stuff survived the WWII destruction of Cologne too. Really tragic.

And not a small amount of supidity involved either:

"When the building was constructed, a small nuclear-bomb proof chamber was included in the cellar to protect the most precious pieces. But in recent years, the chamber has been used only to store cleaning material.

There was even less warning of the collapse of the building than would have been given during a nuclear attack. Workers on the rooftop heard a cracking noise and immediately alerted the 26 people using the archives at the time. Less than three minutes later later, the building was flat."

Ghosts of the Confederacy

I haven't seen these before, but I am not surprised to learn that the Commonweatlh of Virginia even puts Robert E. Lee on license plates:



I have my bees in Chesapeake in an undisclosed location on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp. This gives you an idea of the neighbors:

Beekeepers among you will note that in that picture of Lark eating honey, it was coming from a shallow honey frame the bees moved up into and put some brood in. Those hives ate through two deeps and a shallow of honey this winter, which is a much more than usual and makes me think it is essential to leave a lot more honey on the hives each fall. I have never used chemicals in this beeyard and the bees all survive year in and out, even when I was in Korea. I think the key is conservative management. Also could be called, in this instance, "not enough time to take off honey in the fall". But it worked out well.

I spoke with the state apiarist at the short course and he thinks that major problem recently has been the annual drought mid and late summer has killed nectar flows and so bees have been left with woefully insufficient stores.

The warm weather was great for the Lil Buddha too. She had a seriously surf and turf weekend.

Skye and Lark came over to the short course. Lark strode with great purpose and cleared the fields of dandelions.



And to confirm that being a parent requires production of stereotypically cute pictures, here is the obligatory moment when =Lark discovered real ladybugs:


(Yes, even in this short afternoon Lark went through a series of clothing changes)

Then it was off to the beach. It was impossible to get a picture of her with the crappy little camera I brought because she was never still, but here is a crappy little video.


I am going to get one of those little USB cameras, just haven't gotten around to it. That should insure that Nunal becomes almost unbearable.

Lark also had a chance to eat some honey right out of some comb from my hives in Chesapeake. This went over big.

It was in the 70s and up to 80 on sunday, which is just exactly what we need around here. "We" being beekeepers, in this particular formulation. The nectar is flowing and all of my hives are looking just as they should at this point in the early spring.

The timing of the good weather was especially perfect since the Tidewater Beekeepers Association and the VWC Beekeeping Association put on beekeeping short course over at the campus. I didn't do the planning this year aside from arranging the facility, but I did give a presentation oj the history of beekeeping and hive management and talk people through the VWC hives. And there were a lot of people-- 70 showed up to learn how to keep bees, which is a huge number. It is almost enough to give you faith in the future.

That many people crowded around the hives made it basically impossible to get a picture that was worth a damn, but these give you the idea of the scene out there. I am supposed to get other people's pictures and will post them when I do.

I was really glad to see that most people exhibited zero fears of the bees. The spring is the best time to introduce people into the hives--the bees are gentle, they are all thoroughly stoked to be out gathering nectar, the promise of the year is all laid out right in front of you.




That is C.E. Harris in the middle, one of the master beekeepers in this whole area.







That guy explaining about the frame of bees in the middle of the last picture is Bob Schwartz. Here Bob clipped the wings of a swarm queen: (you clip the wings to minimize swarming. Best to practice on drones...) I like this picture because of the one hovering worker over on the left.




I have learned a lot from Bob over the years, he is one of the local guys who has been in the bees for decades hand has experience coupled with hundreds of hours of observation. I got started keeping bees with his advice, along with that of another guy I won't name here so I can tell you his technique of teaching beekeeping--first you showed up at his place in rural Virginia Beach on a warm morning by 10 am. Then you poured yourself a large glass of scotch. Then you went in the hives. Refresh glass. Repeat. Building muscle memory in the service of the bees, or something like that. It is this kind of handcrafted beekeeping that gets lost in the current generation.

Beekeepers are uniformly an eccentric bunch. (That might really surprise you). One of the things that I like about beekeepers is that unlike academics or musicians (my two other circles) there essentially are no egos involved. or at least none made manifest. It is about the bees. This definitely makes it the polar opposite of academia. Maybe what some of the fancy-panted academics out there really need to do is log some time in the beehives.