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.

Operation Joint Chihuahua

The arrival of 3,200 Mexican troops into Juárez has slowed the killings down to an average of only 1 a day for the beginning of March, which is down from the 28 killed during the first three days of February.

There are 8000 troops on the streets of Juárez. Try to imagine a similar scene in the United States.

(In Michoacan, there was a grenade attack on the Uruapan city police chief's house and a police station. Try to imagine a grenade attack in the US.)

But the Mexican military is really serious about defeating the billion dollar drug cartels this time--they have new uniforms. What billion dollar drug cartel could possibly surmount that level of operational sophistication?

"Enrique Torres, the spokesman for Joint Operation Chihuahua, the federal government's initiative to battle the drug cartels, said the wave of new soldiers is part of an overall plan to regain the trust of the 1.7 million residents of Juárez.

Without getting into specifics, Torres said one of the obvious changes is that the latest platoons of soldiers are dressed in new uniforms. This will make it easier for residents to distinguish between Mexican soldiers and the cartel's commandos, who dress in military fatigues and are to blame for the ambushes and executions.

"These uniforms cannot be duplicated," Torres said. "They have markings that will be easy to distinguish."

Those markings were not revealed in an effort to keep the cartels from duplicating them."

Nunal's Mexican sources tell us that the un-duplicatable markings look like this:

"We have never confronted a case as extreme as this before,"

As you probably know, the Supreme Court just listened to a case about how Massey Energy's CEO (and mountaintop removal king) Don Blankenship used $3 million to put a lapdog on the West Virginia Supreme Court to manipulate justice

""We have never confronted a case as extreme as this before," Justice John Paul Stevens commented from the bench. A brief by the Conference of State Chief Justices said the amount spent on behalf of Benjamin in West Virginia's 2004 election is the largest in any judicial election in U.S. history.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Tuesday that this case involves a "very unusual situation, with a defendant who is a prime culprit. Don Blankenship is charged with driving [Hugh] Caperton out of business. ... He is a perpetrator." She added that "due process is denied by the likelihood of bias, the probability of bias and the appearance of bias."

Justice Anthony Kennedy said political contributions in this case were "obviously improper. ... How do we secure confidence in our judges?" "

Dahlia Lithwick is in her usual fine form in discussing the case at Slate. I particularly love the phrase "the extravagant weaselliness of Chief Justice Benjamin"

"Blankenship's $3 million represented 60 percent of the total funding of a 527 group called (what else?) "And for the Sake of the Kids." The group ran creepy election ads accusing McGraw of (what else?) setting a pedophile loose in the schools. McGraw lost his seat on the state high court to an unknown lawyer called Brent Benjamin. And in a Disney-like rotation of the circle of life, the newly elected Chief Justice Benjamin then voted 3-2 to reverse the verdict against Massey. Asked to recuse himself from hearing the case, Benjamin refused. Twice.

Who says you can't get good help anymore?

The Supreme Court is in a tough spot in Caperton v. A.T. Massey. The legal claim here is that Americans have a due-process right to a judicial system untainted by the appearance or likelihood of bias. And appearances alone are sometimes enough. Indeed, the facts here are so completely grotesque, they cause the usually mild-mannered John Paul Stevens to proclaim: "We have never confronted a case as extreme as this before. This fits the standard that Potter Stewart articulated when he said, 'I know it when I see it.' " "
...

"But the extravagant weaselliness of Chief Justice Benjamin sits uneasily beside an almost complete absence of law that might curb it. The advocates struggle to scrape together a handful of precedents, along with bits of the Constitution's due-process clause, in what rapidly starts to look like a constitutional comb-over.

If Olson is undone for the lack of a limiting principle, Frey is hard-pressed to explain away Justice Benjamin's deaf-dumb-and-blindness in keeping himself in this case. Justice Stevens immediately lights into Frey because the facts of this case are so dreadful. Frey points out that Justice Benjamin didn't know Blankenship, didn't benefit financially from his election contributions, and couldn't have controlled Blankenship's actions. Chief Justice Benjamin, if anything, is a victim of this hateful $3 million campaign gift.

Justice Souter points out that the standard of "appearance of impropriety" is codified in the judicial ethical canons, and Kennedy observes that he sort of likes appearance of impropriety as a standard, because it is neutral and objective. Frey replies that it is not the job of the Constitution's Due Process Clause to protect "the reputation of the judicial system." This prompts Stevens to retort: "You don't think the community's confidence in the way judges behave is an important part of due process?" Frey says no.

It's the kind of no guaranteed to rouse the Sleeping Hamlet in Kennedy, who all but splutters: "But our whole system is designed to ensure confidence in our judgments. … Litigants have an entitlement to that under the Due Process Clause." Come to think of it, this is Justice Kennedy's dream case. There's a huge problem. (Judicial elections are undermining judicial integrity.) There is virtually no precedent or statutory guidance. Someone will have to make some shit up. The court appears split 4-4. And it's all about appearances. Start the presses! The "sweet mystery of judicial integrity" passage practically writes itself!"

Considering the substance of the newly released Yoo memos, Balkin puts it plainly:

"These two disowned claims lie at the heart of the Cheney/Addington/Yoo theory of presidential power-- namely, that when the president acts as commander in chief Congress may not restrict in any way his military decisionmaking, including decisions about detention, interrogation, and surveillance. The President, because he is President, may do whatever he thinks is necessary, even in the domestic context, if he acts for military and national security reasons in his capacity as Commander in Chief. This theory of presidential power argues, in essence, that when the President acts in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief, he may make his own rules and cannot be bound by Congressional laws to the contrary. This is a theory of presidential dictatorship.
...
The October 2008 and January 2009 memos are the Bush OLC's way of distancing itself from its conduct during the period when John Yoo was at OLC and when the Cheney/Addington/Yoo theory reigned supreme. It is important to recognize that these two memos are largely concerned with disowning particular broad claims of constitutional law, and they do not disown any of the Bush Administration's specific policies regarding surveillance, detention, and interrogation. Indeed, after John Yoo left the OLC the Bush OLC was able to justify many of these policies without the Cheney/Addington/Yoo theory, by arguing for example, that applicable legislation should be read very narrowly or that Congress had authorized what the Bush Administration wanted to do in the September 18, 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force. No one should confuse these memos with a reversal of Bush Administration policy-- instead, they are an attempt to disown a particular theory of unlimited Presidential power that was an embarrassment to the professional standards of the OLC. In this sense what is remarkable about these two memos is not that they change any concrete practices but that the OLC felt the need to reverse itself years later and to disavow a particular type of reasoning-- reasoning which sought, in secret, to justify a theory of Presidential dictatorship."

The lack of similarly alarmed comment on the Bush administration's bald assertion of unchecked authority from conservative legal sources is striking, and sad.

Math, it just adds up...

Square Root Day revelers to party like it's 3/3/09

"Count on Tuesday's alignment of the calendar to add some excitement to the lives of at least a few math geeks.

Tuesday is Square Root Day, a rare holiday that occurs when the day and the month are both the square root of the last two digits of the current year. Numerically, March 3, 2009, can be expressed as 3/3/09, or mathematically as √9 = 3, or 3² = 3 × 3 = 9.
...
Celebrants are expected to mark the occasion by cutting root vegetables into squares or preparing other foods in the shape of the square root symbol.

Square Root Day occurs only nine times in a century. The last one occurred on February 2, 2004, and the next will occur in seven years on April 4, 2016. "

The news just goes from bad to worse about the Bush administration's claims of utterly unconstitional, dangerous, and tyrannical authority. Now a new batch of John Yoo-penned memos have been released.

"The secret legal opinions issued by Bush administration lawyers after the Sept. 11 attacks included assertions that the president could use the nation’s military within the United States to combat terrorism suspects and to conduct raids without obtaining search warrants....
...
In a memorandum dated this Jan. 15, five days before President George W. Bush left office, a top Justice Department official wrote that those opinions had not been relied on since 2003. But the official, Steven G. Bradbury, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel, said it was important to acknowledge in writing “the doubtful nature of these propositions,” and he used the memo to repudiate them formally.

Mr. Bradbury said in his memo that the earlier ones had been a product of lawyers’ confronting “novel and complex questions in a time of great danger and under extraordinary time pressure.” "

Any thought to the idea that the Bushies suddenly realized that Obama, or anybody else, might be able to make use of the police state authority they claimed?

"The opinion authorizing the military to operate domestically was dated Oct. 23, 2001, and written by John C. Yoo, at the time a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, and Robert J. Delahunty, a special counsel in the office. It was directed to Alberto R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, who had asked whether Mr. Bush could use the military to combat terrorist activities inside the United States.

The use of the military envisioned in the Yoo-Delahunty reply appears to transcend by far the stationing of troops to keep watch at streets and airports, a familiar sight in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. The memorandum discussed the use of military forces to carry out “raids on terrorist cells” and even seize property.

“The law has recognized that force (including deadly force) may be legitimately used in self-defense,” Mr. Yoo and Mr. Delahunty wrote to Mr. Gonzales. Therefore any objections based on the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches are swept away, they said, since any possible privacy offense resulting from such a search is a lesser matter than any injury from deadly force.

The Oct. 23 memorandum also said that “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully.” It added that “the current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.”

Mr. Yoo and Mr. Delahunty said that in addition, the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally bars the military from domestic law enforcement operations, would pose no obstacle to the use of troops in a domestic fight against terrorism suspects. They reasoned that the troops would be acting in a national security function, not as law enforcers.

In another of the opinions, Mr. Yoo argued in a memorandum dated Sept. 25, 2001, that judicial precedents approving deadly force in self-defense could be extended to allow for eavesdropping without warrants.

Still another memo, issued in March 2002, suggested that Congress lacked any power to limit a president’s authority to transfer detainees to other countries, a practice known as rendition that was widely used by Mr. Bush."

How could any self-respecting Southerner support the Republican party when Bush was claiming that the Posse Comitatus act was irrelevant? This is an issue that has deep resonance in the supposedly proudly independent South (and no, I am not bothering to ask about people from other regions, as they repudiated Bush in the 2008 election and already made it clear that this is a country of laws rather than would-be kings).

These are terrifying claims. I am sure the Obama administration is releasing them to give people a sense just how lawless and dangerous the Bush regime was, and that is a good thing.

In a related, albeit more expansive way, this consideration at Balkinization of the uses of an atmosphere of crisis by both Bush and Obama is worth a reading.

I haven't been posting for a while, in part as a result of the flu (the gift of daycare keeping giving) and also because I was preparing to give a talk on the "US and Rising" to the World Affairs Council of Hampton Roads. The talk was last saturday and it went well and was a lot of fun too. Nice to be with a couple hundred people really interested in discussing the impact, intent, and trajectory of American foreign relations. The audience was really diverse, ranging from a variety of active duty NATO sorts and retired military sitting in the front to educators and students in the back to at least one contra dance caller I know from years ago who happened to be attending.

What was I doing talking about the future, you may ask. I'm a historian, after all. Despite appearances, I do not have predictive power. Uncanny hindsight, absolutely. Unusually perceptive abilities for the readily apparent, no doubt, but no ESP or future annihilating vision.

This required me to consult a huge array of sources by various writers of all stripes with a like-inability to tell the future. But arm yourself with enough conflicting opinions and you are more or less good to go.

We spoke a lot about China, as you would expect, and about the clear-eyed assessment of American empire and its costs, goals, intent, and impact. It is interesting to me how different a talk I gave this week than I might have just a few months ago given the combination of a downward spiral in the global economy but (some) heartening signs from DC.

I am going to see if I can figure out how to load my presentation on Nunal.

One rising power I spent some time talking about is the narco power which is in control in Afghanistan and attempting to throttle Mexico.

It helps that the news all week has suddenly decided to focus on the situation in Mexico. Then flow of weapons south of the border has gotten a lot of press coverage, yet somehow, the discussion rarely turns to the insatiable American desire for drugs that is the root cause of the problem.

Drug violence is nothing new, though the scale in Mexico is really astounding. It makes me wonder exactly how violent and unstable it can get before there really becomes something to the notion of cyclical revolution. Also interesting to me is the globalization of terrorist forms such as beheading videos and beheading displays. These have spread from the utterly perverse, deeply ideological, and ritualistic bloodletting of al Qaeda to the utterly perverse but tactical murders undertaken by Mexican drug gangs. I didn'st see any prediction of this. It is really astonishing and worth some consideration, is it not? I don't see suicide bombings being next, but when drug gangs adopt the approaches of apocalyptic terrorist organizaitons it is starting to seem less like a law enforcement issue and more like a systemic crisis.

For the last question of my talk somebody asked me to walk them through the scenario of drug decriminalization. Of course I did with some gusto. The question was almost like a perfect plant.

As I have written here before, it's hard to find a downside to restoring liberty to our twisted and utterly failed system of (non-)interdiction, mass incarceration and property theft. Instead we can open a rich market opportunity for local, US-based growers (many of them in the impoverished Appalchians), utterly eliminate the need for unconstitutional police actions and property seizures, totally eliminate drug gang violence (or nearly so), stop filling the prisons as a form of race and class warfare, stop supporting nasty regimes abroad, allow countries like Mexico (6000 dead and counting) and Columbia (where $4.9 billion in aid = 15% rise in coke exports) to have a chance to live in peace, reign in the prison-industrial and military-industrial complexes, let freedom ring and so on.

Oh, and tax the lucrative cash crop and make a bunch of public money. Virginia, facing a multi-billion budget crisis, could be flush and stable. The spending side is already taken care of...or at least the ideas are in place. Maybe, just maybe, the secret to stabilizing our balance of payments is unleashing ourselves from thralldom to this "war".

I heard this report about power usage in modern homes the other day and it got me thinking. The story focused on digital photo frames, which have exploded in popularity of late. There is a seemingly innocuous device that in fact sucks power constantly. A fact in the story struck me--back in 1975 the average home had 1-2 plugged in devices. Now the average total is more than 25.

So I decided to do a count of what we have plugged in here at home -- 39 different devices.

That number really shocked me. It doesn't even include things that are plugged regularly but not constantly, such as chargers for cell phones (2), digital cameras (3), laptops (2), guitar amp (1), vacuum (2), at least a half dozen power tools, and probably a bunch of other crap that I can't think of. Good grief. Those are 39 things we use. And I am hardly a technological or gear oriented type.

Our electricity comes from mountaintop removal coal, which makes me definitely part of the problem. Fortunately Virginia Power is now willing to charge me a bit more a month (2 bucks) to have my power come from sustainable sources. Though that hardly makes the fight against mountaintop removal anything less than still the central environmental and moral issue of our time.

I do have a digital photoframe, it was a gift a couple of years ago. I actually haven't taken it out of the box yet. That isn't due to any kind of heightened consciousness--just plain old laziness.

This chart about says it all



This is in an article about evolution and its enemies, from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life(via Andrew Sullivan)


The Pew center presents some data on Sarah Palin's Real America that should make you very, very afraid:

"Recent public opinion polls indicate that challenges to Darwinian evolution have substantial support among the American people. According to an August 2006 survey by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 63 percent of Americans believe that humans and other animals have either always existed in their present form or have evolved over time under the guidance of a supreme being. Only 26 percent say that life evolved solely through processes such as natural selection. A similar Pew Research Center poll, released in August 2005, found that 64 percent of Americans support teaching creationism alongside evolution in the classroom."

It is interesting to me that, unlike a sad number of others, so many Buddhists embrace scientific knowledge and rejecting delusional mythological fantasies.

In a discussion on BuddhaNet about why Buddhists don't believe in god (which Pew links to), there this this series of questions and answers:

"Question:
'But if there are no gods how did the universe get here?

Answer:
All religions have myths and stories which attempt to answer this question. In ancient times, when humankind simply did not know, such myths were adequate, but in the 20th century, in the age of physics, astronomy and geology, such myths have been superseded by scientific fact. Science has explained the origin of the universe without recourse to the god-idea.

Question:
What does the Buddha say about the origin of the universe?

Answer:
It is interesting that the Buddha's explanation of the origin of the universe corresponds very closely to the scientific view. In the Aganna Sutta, the Buddha describes the universe being destroyed and then re-evolving into its present form over a period of countless millions of years. The first life formed on the surface of the water and again, over countless millions of years, evolved from simple into complex organisms. All these processes are without beginning or end and are set in motion by natural causes.

Question:
You say there is no evidence for the existence of a god. But what about miracles?

Answer:
There are many who believe that miracles are proof of god's existence. We hear wild claims that a healing has taken place but we never get an independent testimony from a medical office or a surgeon. We hear second-hand reports that someone was miraculously saved from disaster but we never get an eyewitness account of what is supposed to have happened. We hear rumors that prayer straightened a diseased body or strengthened a withered limb, but we never see X-rays or get comments from doctors or nurses. Wild claims, second-hand reports and rumors are no substitute for solid evidence and solid evidence of miracles is very rare. However, sometimes unexplained things do happen, unexpected events do occur. But our inability to explain such things does not prove the existence of gods. It only proves that our knowledge is as yet incomplete. Before the development of modern medicine, when people didn't know what caused sickness people believed that god or the gods sent diseases as a punishment. Now we know what causes such things and when we get sick, we take medicine. In time when our knowledge of the world is more complete, we will be able to understand what causes unexplained phenomena, just as we can now understand what causes disease.

Question:
But so many people believe in some form of god, it must be true.

Answer:
Not so. There was a time when everyone believed that the world was flat, but they were all wrong. The number of people who believe in an idea is no measure of the truth or falsehood of that idea. The only way we can tell whether an idea is true or not is by looking at the facts and examining the evidence.

Question:
So if Buddhists don't believe in gods, what do you believe in?

Answer:
We don't believe in a god because we believe in humanity. We believe that each human being is precious and important, that all have the potential to develop into a Buddha - a perfected human being. We believe that humans can outgrow ignorance and irrationality and see things as they really are. We believe that hatred, anger, spite and jealousy can be replaced by love, patience, generosity and kindness. We believe that all this is within the grasp of each person if they make the effort, guided and supported by fellow Buddhists and inspired by the example of the Buddha. As the Buddha says:

No one saves us but ourselves, No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path, but Buddhas clearly show the way.
Dp. 165"

My bee class got in some hives this week since it was warm enough for the bees to fly.

The swarm that had made its hive in the empty box has moved up and into a Langstroth hive quite neatly.


The queen is at about 1 o'clock.




One of the swarm hives didn't survive the winter, here is the dead cluster. A good learning tool at least. (Even the dead cluster seems to freak out the student in the back).

Spring is in the air...


the daffodils (at least those protected from the wind on the side of the house) are already blooming...




my camillas are close...






...and love is in the air, in the form of ostrich burgers.






You know you're a valentine when you wife arrives with ostrich. Nothing bespeaks eternal marital love more than consuming grilled ostrich flesh.

Unless it is the boots made of the ostrich leg that I received as a birthday present

I just read -- and was astonished by --Novels in Three Lines by Félix Fénéon. Like so many great things, I happened on it randomly and then wondered how come I never knew about it before, so perfect a thing.

Fénéon lived one of those lives you would be hard pressed to make up:

"Félix Fénéon (1861–1944) was born in Turin (his father was a traveling salesman), raised in Burgundy, and came to Paris after placing first in a competitive exam for jobs in the War Office. He was employed as a clerk there for thirteen years, rising to chief clerk, and was considered a model employee. During this time he also edited the work of Rimbaud and Lautréamont, reviewed books and art (he helped to discover Georges Seurat), and was a regular at Mallarmé's Tuesday evening salon. Fénéon was active too in anarchist circles, and in 1894, after the bombing of a restaurant popular among politicians and financiers and the assassination by an Italian anarchist of the French president, he and twenty-nine others were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy—though in the subsequent so-called Trial of the Thirty Fénéon and most of his co-defendants were easily acquitted. Soon after, Fénéon became the editor of the Revue Blanche, where he featured Debussy as his music critic and André Gide as his book critic and published Proust, Apollinaire, and Jarry, as well as his own translation of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. After the Revue Blanche folded, Fénéon went to work as a journalist, first for the conservative Le Figaro, then, starting in 1906, for the liberal broadsheet Le Matin, for which he composed the pieces collected in Novels in Three Lines. In later life Fénéon sold paintings at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery and for a while ran his own publishing house. In response to a proposal to publish a collection of his own work, he remarked, 'I aspire only to silence.'"

Well, I have apsired to many things, but thus far silence ain't been it.

I've been thinking about Fénéon's work this weekend since I've been buried deep in reading Mexican writings about violent border events along the Rio Grande in the 1870s and 1880s. I just keep coming across some stunning lines. The stories are always interesting, but it is easy at moments to admire the language and cadence. And, to a lesser extent, the punctuation, which is odd and makes you want to break them into verses. Some of these lines could easily also just drop right into a corrido. And maybe have, or, perhaps, will.

a small sampling of what I mean:

These lines describe the random murder of a blind man named Antonio Muñoz by Mexican soldier named Zeferino Avalos on the Texas side of the Rio Grande in 1879.

"The circumstance of the murdered man being blind, imparted to the crime a character of notable atrocity." M. Ruelas, April 29, 1879

The following come from the Superior Tribunal of Coahuila final sentence January, 29, 1879:

"That while in the middle of the river he drew his pistol and fired two shots toward the Mexican side in the direction of several women washing.

Being rebuked for this by the boatman, he replied in a haughty tone that 'when he wished to kill a man he killed him.'

"Having crossed the Rio Grande, he went toward an unfortunate blind beggar, who, guided by a boy about twelve years old, was six or eight yards from the water's edge, and Avalos, having drawn his pistol, pointed it at the unhappy blind man at a yard's distance from him, when he tired, the victim falling to the earth, dying instantly."

"That from the evidence of several witnesses it appears that Zeferino Avalos, while intoxicated, is a provoking, quarrelsome, and cruel and treacherous man, which detestable qualities caused him to be feared by the people.

That on the other hand, the unfortunate blind man, Autonio Mufioz, was of a prudent and peaceable character, and having an unimpeachable name."

"When Avalos approached he said he wished a prayer said, to which Muñoz replied, refusing, saying that he did not know how to say prayers; that he lived by his work, so as not to ask alms; and that as he said this the murderer fired the shot which deprived him of his life."

this all really begs to be sung by Los Alegres de Teran, no?

A Real Stimulus plan, Mexico City style

"With midterm elections looming in July, Mayor Marcelo Ebrard has been rather creative in his attempts to make life more livable for the people of this sprawling metropolis, which finds itself clogged with traffic, overwhelmed by smog, prowled by criminals and reeling from the global financial crisis.

The mayor dumps sand at public pools to create artificial beaches. He bans cars from major roadways on Sundays and turns them into sprawling bike paths. The largest skating rink in the world, one that makes Rockefeller Center’s patch of ice look puny, went up in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s central square, for the second straight year over the Christmas holidays.

This weekend, for Valentine’s Day, the government is sponsoring a mass kiss-in, in an attempt to break the world record and raise awareness about domestic violence. “Bésame Mucho,” or “Kiss me a lot,” was recently adopted as the city’s motto by tourism officials, and Mr. Ebrard is expected to preside over the event, though his staff was not sure whether he would be publicly smooching his wife, a former soap opera actress.

But the free Viagra is what had Mr. Posadas, a retiree, hemming and hawing on a recent afternoon. After reading an announcement about Mr. Ebrard’s latest gesture, he summoned the courage to broach the topic of his erectile dysfunction at a local government health center. After undergoing an in-depth health exam and receiving a lecture on the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases, Mr. Posadas recently became among the first men in the city to be issued a handful of government-subsidized pills.

Apparently, they worked. “Now, I’m able to fulfill my wife,” he said. Mr. Posadas, the father of two and grandfather of six, acknowledged that his sex life had slowed somewhat in recent years.

The initiative may be more about politics than anything else, and with nationwide elections looming in July, candidates across Mexico are beginning to lay the groundwork for their campaigns.

To bolster the fortunes of his leftist Party of Democratic Revolution and to further his own dream of becoming the country’s president in 2012, Mr. Ebrard has pushed to legalize abortion and gay civil unions in the capital and crack down on illegal street vendors and unlicensed taxi operators, who have long been associated with crowds and crime. His plan to expand subway and bus service is ambitious and popular....

....“Everyone has the right to be happy,” the mayor said, noting that many of the poorest elderly people do not qualify for employer-based health plans and have been abandoned by their families. “They don’t have medical services, and a society that doesn’t care for its senior citizens has no dignity.”

An estimated half of Mexican men over the age of 40 experience difficulties achieving erections, said Dr. Irán Roldán, a specialist in geriatrics who helps run the new program at Mexico City’s Department of Public Health. But the subject has not been one that many men have felt comfortable talking about before."

this wins for worst pseudo-rational argument:

"Getting men into public clinics with the promise of free erectile medicine, Dr. Roldán said, could help them get treatment for other related health problems, like diabetes, hypertension, obesity and depression. “This is a public health problem,” she said.'"

This worthwhile Zakaria column definitely makes the case of the supreme competence of Canada* especially in comparison with the cascading failures and economic crisis in the U.S.






*Editor's Note: Canada is that country up north of here.

Today's is Darwin's 200th birthday, I thought this was relevant in some way.

Every other year I teach a class on Asian History, usually focused on Modern East Asia. This year I am giving much greater attention to Korea in the class and we are reading several books on Korean topics.

Something I had my student's read this week has been resonating in my mind: Yi Ik's late eighteenth century critique of Catholic missionaries arguments, which ended with this:

"But the Europeans embrace the miraculous and the mysterious. The more perplexing the evidence, the more easily the ignorant are seduced by it. This being the case, they have no right to complain that only evil spirits delude people. The teachings of their Lord of Heaven do at least as much damage to the hearts and minds of people....
There is no subject these Westerners have not exhaustively explored and nothing too profound for them to understand, so it is really a pity that they have become mixed up with such nonsense."

“This is for God that sav my sol.”

I managed to miss this NY Times article about the song "Poor Ellen Smith" but since I sing it all the time I am glad that a friend of mine sent it to me.

40 isn't old if you're a tree

I just turned 40, which I think means that I can no longer even officially pretend to be anything but old.

Though as both a historian and an old time musician I generally don't have a problem with that category of old. Maybe it will improve my fiddling.

And, it definitely took the edge off of the whole aging process to get this fine bajo sexto:



Turning 40 and sticking around here seemed wrong in so many ways, so we headed to New Orleans. There we did a bunch of the things that are best done in New Orleans--eat, drink, listen to music. Etc.

Here is a picture of Skye and Lark standing in front of the place Skye used to live in when she was Lark's age, on Bourbon Street.



Since we are discussing Plessy v. Ferguson in my survey class this week, those students might be interested to know that we stayed with friends in the French Quarter right around the corner from the church that was Homer Plessy's spiritual home. I would have taken a picture of it but can explain here why I didn't. It is a bit complicated.

One thing I did in NO was remove some bees from a friend's house. There had been a hive there for the past few years so I brought down some equipment to take the bees out. I contacted a local beekeeper who dropped off a nuc for me to put the bees in. I spoke on the phone with him a number of times but actually never met the guy--he dropped the nuc off at the house and then came to pick it up after I left. That was kind of strange, but nice to be able to make that kind of connection.

The bees ended up being above a window and down along the side of it, which made it as three comb deep six foot hive. There was quite a bit of honey in the hive and some friendly bees.

Here is why I don't have any pictures of this visually interesting bee removal (or of Homer Plessy's spiritual home)-- as my friend was moving the ladder, he dropped it on my other friend who was holding my camera taking the pictures. The series looks like this:

Watch out Bucky!

My old friend Van Mobley is running for State Superintendent of Schools in the Great State of Wisconsin--and he is in the lead in raising money.

Van's website accurately captures his essence. Wisconsin will never know what hit it.

Privacy rights restored (temporarily)

Speaking of Youtube, there has been an interesting little privacy wrangle with the White House webpage in the past week or so, as the Obama administration sought to exempt youtube from the rule providing for secure privacy in citizens using the official webpage. Youtube of course places tracking cookies on all users, and this is true for webpages in which youtube videos are embedded. (no word yet on the ability of youtube to watch you while you watch, but far off can that be really?). But such tracking is not compatible with federal law. For a brief time, the Obama administration gave a free pass to youtube to violate the law and invade your privacy. Now, as bloggers raised concerns and awareness, Obama has backed off.

The details of this can be found on the great privacy issue blog on CNET which is worth your time: Surveillance State

Nunal seems to be all about youtube of late, but it is pure happenstance, I assure you.

Mark Campbell, who gives a presentation of old time fiddle styles each year at VWC during the Winter Session, has just posted a portion of his presentation. He plays "Jimmie Johnson" and then he and I play "John Brown's Dream."



The other videos he has loaded are worth a look too (like his tips on Lundy's "Julie Ann Johnson" and the "Rowe's Division" with the savant kid fiddler)

This is the kind of resource that is at once a cool use of the technology and also completely and utterly bonkers: online backup guitar tracks for fiddlers from the California State Old Time Fiddlers Association.

thoughts a week in

The first week of a presidency doesn't signal a whole lot, but the signals are good. Surely we can be grateful that the listing ship of state is at least throwing the worst abuses off the side to lighten our journey and being us back into alignment with laws we invented.

{that metaphor could have been worse}

For the President to end torture as a matter of official policy and to move to close Guantanamo prison camp--well that makes me not wonder why I am standing idly by in the face of banal evil in a catastrophically ever-more immoral nation. It is not a far step from illegal detention and state torture to state murder, just a hop. Bush kept asserting that we don't torture, but he was lying. Obama says we don't torture, and so it is, we no longer do. So President Obama has pulled us back from the brink. The import of this can't be underestimated.

I heard Alberto Gonzalez on the radio today decrying Holder for calling waterboarding torture and saying that this kind of language will unduly restrain the hand of CIA torturers who might suddenly be concerned that their actions have consequences. Since Gonzalaz is still willing to stand and defend his crimes, it only seems sensible to try him and send the clear Nuremberg message that crimes against humanity get punished.

Obama's reorientation of the role of the federal government to pragamatic competence was signaled pretty strongly in the much quoted line of his inaugural address

"What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them— that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account — to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day — because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government."

This seems very sensible and at the same time very broad. It shows that Obama has understood a major problem of the past eight years, which has been consistent and supreme incompetence, and the major flaw of the times, which is the rhetorical grandstanding that makes useful policy decisions impossible.

But the language of pragmatism can be put to any use, not all of them small-d democratic, so we should not be over enthused. Much care must be taken when we are looking for government to work well. Recall that that government under the Constitution is designed to work slowly and inefficiently. The greater the inefficiencies, the greater the protection of liberty.

The floating of the idea of nationalizing the banks, spoken by Pelosi this past weekend and in serious and wide discussion since, is an example of this kind of transformation. In a manner of speaking, Bush nationalized big parts of the financial sector, but the regulations were so lax that he essentially just gave away billions of dollars to the banks. This was never meant to be a real nationalization, it was the last gasp of the criminal no-bid giveaway that has been the hallmark of the Bush kleptocracy.

But real nationalization on pragmatic grounds--that to me seems like a corporatist attempt to compete with the unfree and quasi fascist capitalism of China. That seems like system repair rather than systemic reform along with long over due house cleaning/brush clearing/choose your analogy. Since Obama doesn't have a fake Texas ranch to go "clear brush on" maybe he can wield his machete a bit closer in the financial centers.

other random thoughts:

Obama's inclusion of "non-believers" was interesting, as so many people have pointed out, but I haven't heard anyone wonder why he left Buddhism off of his list. This seemed like a bizarre omission. There are 3-4 million Buddhists in America at least (according to the Pluralism Project at Harvard), which is about half of the number of Jews or Muslims and so a sizable number. There are only perhaps 1.3 million Hindus in the U.S. Perhaps Obama was signaling he views it more through a philosophical than religious lens (they are not "believers"?). My feeling is that including Hinduism had a political purpose given the situation in India, while listing Buddhism would have marred the flow of langauge and yielded little benefit. Those would be the political considerations involved--it is not possible to know what the karmic results of his decision will be.

(Elsewhere, there floats the thought that Obama is the "first Buddhist President.")

This was a really interesting article on the unusual partisan sharpness of Obama's tone in his inaugural.

One last thought, a minor one: Am I alone for thinking that "toiled" is a tired word and should be retired? How many presidential speeches use this word? We need a poli sci number cruncher to write a program to quantify my sense that this word is overworked. Maybe Americans used to toil, but I think we offshored a lot of out toiling, which is, in fact, a big part of our problem.

buyer beware

With the economy in a free fall, the disaster striking American beekeepers and the honey industry might not be in the forefront of your mind, but it should be.

(I digress: There is something about honey that brings out the core self-amusing qualities of headline writers (these aren't necessarily admirable qualities).

I wrote a review of three new books on colony collapse disorder for the Virginian Pilot that was published Sunday. I can't link to it as they have rather unhelpfully not put it up on the web for reasons I don't understand. Why this paper hoards some of its content for the unreadable paper edition I don't know. Perhaps this is an indication why there have been zero (0) takers for the paper when it was recently on the sales block. Yup, all because they didn't post my book review.)

I think we were talking about bees and headlines. The headline for that review was "Plight of the Honeybee," which I liked I will admit.

A friend today sent me this article about the illicit honey trade which is headlined "Honey Laundering".

some of the conclusions:

"Among the P-I's findings:

* Big shipments of contaminated honey from China are frequently laundered in other countries -- an illegal practice called "transshipping" -- in order to avoid U.S.import fees, protective tariffs or taxes imposed on foreign products that intentionally undercut domestic prices.

In a series of shipments in the past year, tons of honey produced in China passed through the ports of Tacoma and Long Beach, Calif., after being fraudulently marked as a tariff-free product of Russia.

* Tens of thousands of pounds of honey entering the U.S. each year come from countries that raise few bees and have no record of producing honey for export.

* The government promises intense scrutiny of honey crossing our borders but only a small fraction is inspected, and seizures and arrests remain rare.

* The feds haven't adopted a legal definition of honey, making it difficult for enforcement agents to keep bad honey off the shelves."

An incredible list. That last fact is my favorite--honey hasn't been legally defined. Since this is truly a product that is not finalized until the bees say it is good to go and cap it, and which cannot be made in any other way, only the Feds would have difficulty making a definition of it.

Here's how it works:

"In August, 350 drums containing 223,300 pounds of Chinese honey were shipped from Hubei Yangzijiang Apiculture Co. in Wuhan, China, and loaded on a ship in Shanghai. Within a month, the shipment arrived at Tuglakabad, an import warehouse near New Delhi.

There, according to Indian Customs reports, the honey marked "for re-export purposes" was accepted by Apis India Natural Products. The drums still contained instructions from the Chinese company, saying the load was to be shipped to America's biggest and oldest honey cooperative -- Iowa-based Sue Bee Honey. Two containers of the honey reportedly were shipped to Norfolk, Va., and three more went to Jacksonville, Fla.; all were later routed to Iowa.

"We do not buy Chinese honey," said Sue Bee Vice President Bill Huser. Then he quickly added: "We're trying not to buy Chinese honey. Someone could be trying to bamboozle us.""

That correction is interesting. That "USA" label on the big packers brand means nothing at all if the honey is actually blended with the Chinese poison. You might as well be spreading disease-resistant staph bacteria on your toast.

and there is more:
....

"The U.S. imported 237 million pounds of raw honey last year. But honey brokers, bee experts and foreign customs officials say they're suspicious that seven of the top 12 countries appear to be exporting far more honey than their domestic bees produce or their export agencies acknowledge. These countries include Vietnam, India, Thailand, Russia, Taiwan, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Some of the honey laundering is so brazen, it's hard to believe there haven't been more arrests, yet federal law enforcement agencies refer to the Chicago arrests as the only ones they can recall.

Countries that have few if any commercial beekeepers, such as Singapore, are now exporting significant quantities of honey, records show. That includes the Grand Bahamas, which has been listed as the country of origin for honey shipped into Houston, authorities say.

"I have a difficult time seeing the Grand Bahamas as a major honey producer," said David Westervelt, a Florida state apiculture inspector. "It's an island. You move bees on there and they'll die."

And other countries that locally produce mostly dark, strong-tasting honey, such as India, Vietnam and South Korea, are shipping tons of the more marketable white honey.

Vietnam is now the No. 2 honey exporter to the U.S., second to Canada. But Vietnamese honey officials say much Chinese honey is being transshipped through their country, citing 24 containers that arrived in Los Angeles earlier this month.

"When the Chinese first got into trouble with this antibiotic adulteration, all of a sudden Vietnam became a major exporter of honey to the United States," said Mike Burgett, professor emeritus in entomology at Oregon State University who has monitored Southeast Asian beekeeping for 27 years. "I know damn well that the Vietnamese bee industry cannot be pumping out that much honey."

We are rapidly entering a world where seemingly everything gets captured and posted online. Philip K. Dick wasn't far off. But you already knew that.

I came across another video from Lark's birthday at Clifftop, this captured from another angle and cut into a montage of images from the festival. We sing happy birthday to Lark at 1:43 and then there is a snippet of the same tune that is in the West Virginia public television documentary.





Makes me wonder what else is out there...

It's been a while since I posted a picture of the lil Buddha. Now she's learned to climb on the couch, unveiling a whole new world of verticality.



And, yes, her hair has moved through an early period Dana Carvey-esque phase, through Rod Stewart, onto full-borne mullet.

we's famous

I just happened on this documentary made by West Virginia Public Television about the Clifftop festival (Appalachian String Band festival). Clifftop is the best week of the year without a doubt. There are many homemade videos of jams up on youtube to watch. I'm sorry to say that I didn't think this pro documentary really captures the festival at all, not its size, scale, diversity, depth, or overall magnificence. The pacing is a bit off. And weirdly it doesn't really capture so much of the music made there, though there are some nice bits with Lester McCumbers, for example, and a few others. Since you can't swing a dead cat without hitting an incredible jam at Clifftop it is kind of strange that the filmmakers didn't try some dead cat swinging, though maybe that is expecting a bit much. They seemed to stay on top of the hill rather than wander into the thickets below, but they did get to some of it at the end. Clifftop can't really be captured that way anyway.

The film does have its moments. I am sure you'll agree that without doubt the best moment in the film is at 22:30, when the film crew came to Lark's first birthday party! Our music sounds pretty good, especially as its coming after a particularly somnolent jam (how'd they ferret that out??)

Several people have asked me why I haven't written about Obama's inaugural, but the plain answer is that I just haven't had a chance to sit down with the text of it. But I will...

My friend Justin Catanoso came to speak on campus last night about his new book about his cousin who was made a saint by the Catholic Church. The book is appropriately titled: My Cousin the Saint. It was a great talk and good fun to hang out with him and his wife (I met them both many years ago at an old time music festival in West Virginia and usually only see them there).

Justin is firing on all cylinders--there is a blog in Cincinnati (describing itself as "a blog celebrating the Catholic Church, primarily in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati", a description which falls well under the rubric of "know your audience") which named Justin Number 3 of the "top ten list of the most fascinating Catholics of 2008." Number one is the Pope. Number two is Nancy Pelosi. So number three ain't bad. I'm guessing the pope gets first place every year.

Here is Anita Bartholomew directly echoing what I wrote back in mid-December: end the stupid, costly, and ineffective drug war.

"With our economy going to pot, President-elect Obama has promised a “top-to-bottom audit to eliminate spending for programs that don’t work.” So, here’s a sane, simple proposal to save the country billions of dollars a year: end the war on marijuana users.

This failed and counter-productive program is an assault on people who pose virtually no threat to themselves or anyone else, certainly no more than that all-American "Joe Sixpack" revered in our recent presidential election.

Yet, getting caught with a few seeds or trace marijuana residue on a pipe is enough in some jurisdictions to trigger an arrest. Most who favor continuing the war assume that law enforcement focuses on sweeping up kingpins and members of cartels. But, here’s a sobering statistic. Of the 872,000 arrests in 2007 for marijuana-related offenses, almost 90 percent were for simple possession of the dried vegetation in question. The typical arrestee is younger than 30. Think college-age kid caught lighting up a joint. Now, multiply that by 775,000 — that’s where a significant chunk of your drug war dollars are going.

The price of deploying an army of local, state and federal cops, prosecutors and guards to arrest, try and imprison the perpetrators of this non-scourge? Using data from 2000, Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron estimated it as $7.7 billion4 per year while a 2007 study, by public policy expert Jon Gettman, figured it closer to $10.7 billion 5 per year.

Most of that money is eaten up by law enforcement according to Miron, with $2.94 billion going to prosecution costs in 2000, and less than half a billion toward incarceration.

Add in the revenue we’d eventually gain if marijuana were regulated and taxed like alcohol and tobacco (from $6.2 billion to as much as $31.1 billion per year), and you’re talking real money."

.....

We could use those lost billions right now. Estimates of the combined savings from legalizing marijuana, and revenues from taxing it like alcohol or tobacco, range from $13.94 to $41.8 billion per year. That’s enough to pay for all or most of President-elect Obama’s proposed ten-year, $150 billion alternative energy investment. Or it could contribute roughly one-fifth to one-half of the $75 billion per year estimated cost of Obama’s proposal to extend health insurance to all.

The inauguration traffic is projected to be so intense that they are flashing warnings here on the signs usually reserved for rush hour information--and we're three hours south of DC.

Being a partisan of the tamale, I've had big ambitions about making them for some time. But I've been warned. A student of mine, who is from El Paso, told me that it was simply impossible to make a tamale following a recipe. If I couldn't learn from my grandmother, forget it. (This would limit me to roast chicken, brisket, and chopped liver, so I sallied forth).

Other friends of mine who grew up watching their mothers or grandmothers make them warned me that it was going to be a long process and a lot of work. They weren't kidding about that.

A man can work up a powerful thirst making tamales. Fortunately, there is a Mexican remedy for that.

I was most recently reinvigorated to make tamales after we ventured to a supposedly famous tamale joint in the Mission in San Francisco at the end of December. This is a place making tamales since 1904. Good name (I don't know if TR ate there, but perhaps) and a cool sign...



...but the tamales were not good. The sign can't make up for a bad tamale. I thought the problem was that the masa was far too dense. And they were expensive (nine bucks for one (1) tamale, rice, and beans!) I've had infinitely superior tamales in North Carolina, and of course superb tamales in Texas, and then there is that tamale shop in Mexico City that Skye still talks about where that could make you weep they were so good. So to find such a weak offering in the Mission...that is a concern.

So we'll make better ones ourselves. With the frigid weather keeping us indoors, we set aside some time to make tamales. I thought we would be eating at maybe 7 or 7:30. We sat down at midnight. But the labor and wait was worth it.

We made traditional red chile pork tamales. The meat was the easiest part.


The sauce had a lot of steps but was pretty easy to make actually. Not too hot, but a bit of a kick. from this



to this, in 10 easy steps



It was the masa that was the killer. It didn't help that the mixer we have is a classic old 1950s era mixer that is, to put it rather directly, a piece of useless shite, so we were mixing this all by hand. The books all mention that this was the old and slow and labor intensive way of doing it. Yup.

Lots of this, hours of this.


It is all about getting your choice of fat properly whipped and integrated into the masa. What you are trying to get is for a ball of the masa to float in water. It sounds insane to try to float dough and I can confirm that it seems impossible. Ours never floated. We finally made the executive decision not to worry if the masa ended up being too dense. It wasn't, thankfully. (Once source we consulted said you can never get masa to float if made with masa flour.)

I am determined to get it to float at some time.

The assembly is actually pretty easy. Nothing made it to the floor.



Skye and her first tamale:



I can't explain why it looks like I'm missing tooth in this photo of me with my first tamale...



Ready to cook:



midnight dinner!



As soon as this batch was done it seemed essential to make more without delay Next week--chicken tomatilla tamales! And a new mixer!

I have brought a series of fascinating people to campus over the past couple of weeks, starting off with a really fine poet named Gregory Orr. I had happened across one of his collections by pure chance (The Caged Owl) and after reading it was really moved. I was glad to discover that he teaches just up the road at UVa. As you would expect, hearing the poems read is an entirely different experience.

But most of the people I brought to campus have been musicians--old time banjo players and fiddlers. I have other people coming in this week.

But so far the most interesting of them all has been Wayne Willis. No surprise there.

(Wayne, of course, being the subject of the film Skye and I have been making for the past 5 or 6 years, maybe longer...)

I asked Wayne to come and play some music (he is a great dobro player in the traditional style) and I asked him to display some of his inventions. Some of them are incredible, like the Dispenz-a-Cig, which he built at his mother's request to dispense his dad's cigarettes in 15 minute increments.

Here is Wayne showing how the Dispenz-a Cig worked. It is quite a brilliant device:


Wayne has invented and built a huge array of instruments, including enough dobro style instruments for a full band--the lowbro (a bass) the banjo dobro (the name is escaping me) and my favorite, the Guitbro, which is a double necked and double sided instrument.

Here is Wayne playing with his son Jerry on the Lowbro and his brother, Brother Lloyd Willis (also called Slim) on the five string.




Here is Wayne holding his banjo-bro (I will find out the official name and report back):




Here is a portrait of Wayne playing the Guit-Bro:



And here we are after the talk playing it at the same time. This was harder than it looks since I have a good foot on Wayne.

When I was in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago I was amused to see these Obama veladoras in a window. I never got around to posting it on Nunal since time has a been a bit short.

Turns out this is only the beginning. I had sorely underestimated the amount of stuff being peddled with Obama's face on it.

The New Republic has a photo essay of some of the choice items which is worth a look: Kitsch You Can Believe In

Now, this is a family blog, of course, but if an establishment organ (yes, pun intended) like the New Republic finds it appropriate to run a photo of this collectible, who are we to protest?




sign of the times: this is made in the USA.

Today I got the following announcement of this upcoming banjo and fiddle workshop in Norfolk (see below).

What struck me was the choice of venue. This is just three blocks away from where the Maury High School football player was murdered two days ago (headline: "'He'll always be a starter' for Maury" )

Psst--don't tell Ken Perlman and Alan Jabbour or all the hapless banjo players out there:

"KEN PERLMAN & ALAN JABBOUR
MASTERS
OF
MELODIC OLD TIME BANJO
&
SOUTHERN OLD TIME FIDDLE

SUNDAY JANUARY 18TH 2009
WORKSHOPS & CONCERT
2-4PM 7:30PM
suggested donation of $20 for each event
PARKPLACE BAPTIST CHURCH
430 W. 31ST STREET, NORFOLK, VA 23508
AT 31ST & COLONIAL AVE.
Parking in rear of church & across the street
please arrive a half hour early

Ken Perlman
"The Heifetz of the Banjo"
The Chronicle Herald (Halifax, Nova Scotia)
Superb instrumentalist, acclaimed teacher of instrumental skills,
gifted performer, award-winning folklorist, Ken Perlman is surely a
welcome addition to any festival or concert-series lineup. Ken is
both a pioneer of the 5-string banjo style known as "melodic
clawhammer," and a master of fingerstyle guitar. He is considered one
of the top clawhammer players in the world, known in particular for
his skillful adaptations of Celtic tunes to the style. On guitar,
Ken's sparkling finger-picked renditions of traditional Celtic and
Southern fiddle tunes are simply not to be missed. He draws his
material from traditional sources -- the music of Scotland, Ireland,
Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island and the American South. His
approach to the music, however, is highly innovative. He has
developed many new instrumental techniques, and much of his
repertoire has never before been played on 5-string banjo or guitar.
Around the folk scene, Ken is often referred to as a musician's=2
0musician -- a player whose style is so accomplished and unique that
other musicians go out of their way just to hear him.
Ken is an acclaimed teacher of folk-music instrumental skills. He has
written some of the most widely respected banjo and guitar
instruction books of modern times, and he has been on staff at
prestigious teaching festivals around the world. He has also served
as director, or co-director for several banjo and music-instructional
camps, including American Banjo Camp, Banjo Camp North. Bath Banjo
Festival, Maryland Banjo Academy, Midwest Banjo Camp, Northeast
Heritage Music Camp, and Suwannee Banjo Camp.
Also an active folklorist, Ken has spent over a decade collecting
tunes and oral histories from traditional fiddle players on Prince
Edward Island in eastern Canada. Two outgrowths of his research are a
tune book called The Fiddle Music of Prince Edward Island and a two-
CD anthology of field recordings called The Prince Edward Island
Style of Fiddling (Rounder Recordings). In 1997 and '98, each of
these works received awards from the Prince Edward Island Heritage
Foundation for helping to "preserve, interpret, and disseminate our
province's fiddling heritage."






Alan Jabbour

Alan Jabbou r was born in 1942 in Jacksonville, Florida. A violinist
by early training, he put himself through college at the
University of Miami playing classical music. While a graduate
student at Duke University in the 1960s, he began documenting
oldtime fiddlers in the Upper South. Documentation turned to
apprenticeship, and he relearned the fiddle in the style of the Upper
South from musicians like Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia, and Tommy
Jarrell of Toast, North Carolina. He taught a repertory of oldtime
fiddle tunes to his band, the
Hollow Rock String Band, which was an important link in the
instrumental music revival in the
1960s.

After receiving his Ph.D. in 1968, he taught English, folklore, and
ethnomusicology at UCLA in 1968-69. He then moved to
Washington, D.C., for over thirty years of service with Federal
cultural agencies. He was head of the Archive of Folk Song at the
Library of Congress 1969-74, director of the folk arts program at the
National Endowment for the Arts 1974-76,
and director of the
American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress 1976-99. Since
his retirement, he has turned enthusiastically to a life of
writing, consulting, lecturing, and playing the fiddle.

I missed this story but a friend of mine just sent it to me. Scientists have apparently discovered that cocaine has an effect on honeybees. It's true.

"The research, published in The Journal of Experimental Biology, advances the knowledge of reward systems in insects, and aims to “use the honeybee as a model to study the molecular basis of addiction,” said Gene E. Robinson, director of the neuroscience program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a co-author with Dr. Barron, and Ryszard Maleszka and Paul G. Helliwell at Australian National University.

The researchers looked at honeybees whose job is finding food — flying to flowers, discovering nectar, and if their discovery is important enough, doing a waggle dance on a special “dance floor” to help hive mates learn the location.

“Many times they don’t dance,” Professor Robinson said. “They only dance if the food is of sufficient quality and if they assess the colony needs the food.”

On cocaine the bees “danced more frequently and more vigorously for the same quality food,” Dr. Barron said. “They were about twice as likely to dance” as undrugged bees, and they circled “about 25 percent faster.”

The bees did not dance at the wrong time or place. Cocaine only made them more excited about the food they found. That’s like “when a human takes cocaine at a low dose,” Dr. Barron said. “They find many stimuli, but particularly, rewarding stimuli, to be more rewarding than they actually are.” "

Maybe the peer reviewers were ingesting low doses of coke and found this research more rewarding than it actually is.

I just got this announcement from the Stonewall Jackson Hotel in Staunton, Virginia. It is a nice old hotel.

"At last, some change you can believe in!
We are not talking politics here, but talking about saving some cash! As the inauguration of our 44th President is almost upon us, the Stonewall Jackson Hotel is putting a promotion together to mark this historic occasion by offering an exclusive rate to all our email subscribers of 44.00 per night.
• Simply stay two consecutive nights and pay $44.00 per evening.
• If two nights do not fit in your schedule, we can provide a one night visit for 88.00. Either way, you start off the year with your own bailout plan."

What would it mean to mark Obama's inauguration by staying at the Stonewall Jackson? Maybe I will wait to craft my response until Lee/Jackson/King Day.*



*for non-Virginians, that is the official name for "Robert E. Lee/Stonewall Jackson/Martin Luther King, Jr., Day," the day before the inauguration.

The Big Lie of Clean Coal

It was only a matter of time before there was another disaster, and just in time for Christmas we see the terrible results of coal burning further polluting the waters of the southeast.

"A wall holding back 80 acres of sludge from a coal plant in central Tennessee broke this week, spilling more than 500 million gallons of waste into the surrounding area.
The sludge, a byproduct of ash from coal combustion, was contained at a retention site at the Tennessee Valley Authority's power plant in Kingston, about 40 miles east of Knoxville, agency officials said.

The retention wall breached early Monday, sending the sludge downhill and damaging 15 homes. All the residents were evacuated, and three homes were deemed uninhabitable, a TVA spokesman told CNN.

The plant sits on a tributary of the Tennessee River called the Clinch River.

"We deeply regret that a retention wall for ash containment at our Kingston Fossil Plant failed, resulting in an ash slide and damage to nearby homes," TVA said in a statement released Tuesday.

TVA spokesman Gil Francis told CNN that up to 400 acres of land had been coated by the sludge, a bigger area than the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Video footage showed sludge as high as 6 feet, burying porches and garage doors. The slide also downed nearby power lines, though the TVA said power had been restored to the area.

Francis said Environmental Protection Agency officials were on the scene and estimated the cleanup could take four to six weeks.

Some of the goop spilled into the tributary, but preliminary water quality test show that the drinking water at a nearby treatment plant meets standards."

Uh-huh. First one to the tap gets to drink the longest. I nominate the members of the Bush administraition who have so thoroughly devastated the effectiveness of the "Environmental Protection Agency".

One way to sense the scale of this disaster is to see the flyover posted in Youtube.

Maybe this happened just in case there was any single thing that occurred during the Bush years that was not a disaster.


The New York Times has this astounding statement: "The Environmental Protection Agency does not regulate fly ash as a hazardous waste material but is considering doing so, said Laura Nilles, a spokeswoman for the agency."

The fly ash sludge that has polluted this area is the same kind of fly ash that was used to such toxic effect in Chesapeake, as locals here have been hearing about for months, where fly ash was used to build a golf course and essentially create a Love Canal for the residents unlucky enough to buy over there.

Those pushing for electric cars might think for a second where all that "clean" electricity comes fron, the costs of it, and the need for real clean alternatives.

El Paso, the Paris of the southwest, or the Bhutan of the southwest, or something

My experience in El Paso was both very favorable and very productive for my research, so I definitely can't complain.

That town has a very distinctive feel, which is just another reminder of the vastness and diversity of the U.S. and which makes the whole country so damn interesting. El Paso also feels a lot different from South Texas, which figures since it is 550 miles to San Antonio, for example, and I think it is different than other places I've been in the southwest. The look of the city, the feeling on its streets, the overall vibe in the places I visited all make for an interesting experience.

Lots of good murals, too, it is a visually interesting city despite the generally dusty and or rundown vibe in large parts of it. Some nice vistas when you get up in the mountains too.

The Sacred Heart Tortilleria




You could call this "the obligatory Virgin of the Guadalupe picture", but it is worth noting that this is on the side of the House of Pizza.



I need to go back and take the time to scour the whole city for murals for myself. I have a feeling this has been done. (yup-- right here, for instance or this.) I simply did not have the time to do it since it was long since dark when I got done everyday until the last day (I was maximizing time losing my eyesight on old documents and microfilm).

So, I didn't get to explore the city as much as I would have liked, but I did get to explore a bit. I stayed right downtown in one of the oldest hotels in the city, was the El Paso Hotel now called the Camino Real. I like these grand old and now slightly shabby hotels. And El Paso still has a downtown, albeit one that shuts tight at 6, at which point it is a ghost town. But during the day the streets are absolutely packed. This is in big contrast with Juarez across the river, which is reportedly empty. I didn't go over there, in part because I didn't have the time and in part because I didn't have the inclination given what is going on. I wish it weren't so but it is. I was interested though not surprised to hear people talking a great deal about the violence over there. During the week I was in El Paso there was a spectacular murder of a new police official and a body with head wrapped in plastic found in the Rio Grande. Over the weekend there were 20 murders, including 2 cops. The El Paso Times had some broad coverage of it on Sunday.

Magnitude of Juarez bloodshed, fear surprises many

"When the drug war in Juarez began earlier this year, everyone thought it was a fleeting thing, that life would get back to normal after a couple of months and a few executions. The cartels, officials predicted six months ago when the number of dead was 400, would simply go back to their business of smuggling dope into the U.S.

Instead, in the past year, Juarez has become one of the most violent cities in the world -- certainly in the Americas -- with more than 1,500 homicides, a number that escalated starting in the middle of the year.

"No one could imagine that this was going to happen, much less to this extent," said Jaime Torres, a Juarez city spokesman. "What we are seeing on a daily basis is surprising and stunning. No one was prepared for this, and it has changed this city."

The changes in this city of 1.3 million are evident no matter where you look:

# The streets are now patrolled by armed soldiers riding on top of pickups.

# Some businesses, including pharmacies and doctors' offices, lock their doors during the day, opening only after a customer is checked out.

# Restaurants have but two or three guests during the day. At night, most restaurants are closed.

# More than half of the stalls in the city's major mercados are empty.

# And Avenida Juarez, the tourism district known as the Juarez strip, is void of tourists, even on weekends and weekend nights.

Manuel "El Manny" Gonzalez has a front- row seat on Avenida Juarez that allows him to see what is happening to his beloved town. For 15 years, he has spent his weekends shining shoes and selling cigarettes on the strip at the foot of the Paso Del Norte port of entry.

Sandwiched between the Kentucky Club, Tequila Derby and the Caliente Club, Gonzalez used to be a busy man. At night Dec. 13, the only people in the area around him were club workers and taxi drivers.

"There are no more Americanos," he said. "No more students, no more soldiers. Look around; there is no one here. It started in January and has slowly gotten worse."

Some blame the U.S. economic crisis, others the peso devaluation, and others the U.S. for forcing U.S. citizens to have passports to re-enter their homeland. But mostly, Juarez residents say the drug war has them scared, scared of going out, scared of being targeted.

"With what is going on, no one wants to be in the wrong place at the wrong time," said Juarez resident Ofelia Gomez Lucero, who was getting on a bus across the street from City Hall on Monday. "By 6 at night, the streets are empty. El temor existe (The fear is real.)"

You won't be surprised that the food was a key part of my time there. How better to express the perfection of the offerings than this fine Sunday morning breakfast plate of barbacoa and carnitas tacos about four blocks from the border crossing:



I am quite sure it would take many more moons there to locate the best spots. I can definitely commend Gussie's Tamales as an ideally realized food.

I was doing research at the University of Texas at El Paso. It is worth noting something that was a big surprise to me: the whole campus is built using Buhtanese style architecture. It's true.

Bhutanese architecture features "dzongs," or fortresses, square or rectangular stone buildings first built around the 12th century. Belonging to large, powerful families, these castles were inhabited by local lords who ruled over their lands. In the first half of the 17th century, the dzongs began to act as monasteries as well. The dzongs in Bhutan were built in strategic places such as the meeting of two rivers, the top of a hill or at the entrance of a valley. Some are quite intricate, having been built in stages and being comprised of up to 20 temples.

Steep walls slope inwards and roofs form broad overhanging eaves. Black-rimmed windows inaccessible from the outside stand out from the massive white walls. A wide red stripe just below the roof indicates the religious nature of the building. White referred to these fortress-monasteries as "castles in the sky." In a Bhutanese dzong, the large inner courtyard is surrounded by buildings of two or three stories, and a huge tower known as an "utse" stands in the middle, housing the various temples.

A photograph by White of the "Paro Dzong" supposedly is the inspiration for Old Main. The low hipped roof, the ornamental frieze of tile and brick just below the roof interrupted by the windows of the top story, and the "battered walls" which increase from top to bottom by seven inches per ten feet are among the major Bhutanese features of this building.

Trost agreed that the stark, simple architecture of Bhutan fit the terrain and climate of the Southwest, especially the mountainous site of the new school. In 1917, Old Main was built, and is now a national landmark. The other buildings included the chemistry building, a dormitory and the power plant. Trost also designed a fifth building, Kelly Hall.

Most of UTEP's buildings reflect Bhutanese influence, including the Business Administration building, the Library and the more recent Undergraduate Learning Center, completed in 1996. Miner Village, the new dormitory complex set to open in fall 2001, features 12 dorms also in Bhutanese style.

....
For most of the campus, however, traditional architecture has been copied from Bhutan down to the prayer wheels in front of the museum. Every detail has been replicated except for the fact that the Bhutanese built their massive structures without the use of nails or blueprints. [I love that detail] El Paso and its university have the distinction of being the only location in the Western Hemisphere to reproduce Bhutanese architecture."

I had no clue. Kind of interesting, isn't it?

The scale of the buildings is quite large, and in addition there are prayer flags and many exhibits scattered around.





There is also a huge book with photographs of Buhtan on display in the library. It is the largest book in the world, 133 pounds. (a Texas sized book, if you will).



Ok, but what the hell was I doing there amidst all of those Bhutanese splendor?

I went to find materials on the Cutting Case, as I mentioned, and also material on the Mexican Zona Libre (free trade zone) and the American response to it.

UTEP and the city public library both had a bunch of material that doesn't circulate and which is not elsewhere, so there were some rich pickings.

Part of the fun of doing research is happening across all manner of other random stuff too. Makes it hard sometimes to stay on target, but, of course, many times it is the odd little thing you pick up that launches a new project.

I was poking though the El Paso County jail records from the 1880s and was amazed to find that the official record book had columns inquiring if the prisoners escaped or were discharged, and another column that asked for the actions taken after the escape. This was a common occurrence-- a huge number of the prisoners in the early part of the decade! There didn't seem to be any connections between escape and where people were from. I thought maybe most of the people were Mexicans who used the proximity of the border to escape. But there were many others: Andy O'Brian from Ireland, arrested for assault and attempt to murder on Dec 9, 1881, escaped, James Jackson, an African-American from Kentucky, in for forgery Jan 4, 1882, escaped.




There is a certain poetry in these listings, depending on who was writing the names in the book presumably, or on the information supplied by the arresting officers for the category "special marks of peculiarities as to prisoner, or their history". These are glimpses of the kind of stories that are impossible to recapture but that you know were eye opening—

Such as

W. Bowers, arrested 18 Feb 1884, "very heavy square built"
Wm. W. Goodrich, 33 years old from NY, remarks: "Insane just released from Lunatic Asylum in Mars" in for "swindling, committed to jail, Feb 27, 1884.

J.G. Heays, from Ireland, remarks: "U.S. Soldier Poc [sic] Marked Sullen downcast expression" in for "aiding prisoner to escape jail" committed Mar 1, 1884

Dlanacio Olguin, Mexican, "Pock Marked No Beard scar under Left Eye" in on May 9, 1884

Fal Johnson, a mulatto "Two middle fingers on Right Hand off and Left Eye out" Aug 29, 1884, wanted for a murder in Huntsville, TX.

T. J. Smith, "yellow" complexion "mulatto negro sharp features scar on left side of head stammer when talking" in for murder Mar 2, 1885

W. Cresswell, "3 fingers off Left Hand" American in March 28, 1885, "assault with attempt to murder"

M.P. Dolan "No Beard" [?] and "Left Thumb Off" in for "embezzlement over $20 April 23, 1885

Wesley Lewis, "bald head & Heavy Mustache" in for "embezzlement of cattle" May 11, 1885

Abraham Peterson, a light colored Swede, the note is "seems to be partially Insane" arrested for "attempt to commit burglary" June 24, 1885

Sim Lum "Chinaman" arrested Aug 24, 1885, reason was "made mischief".

Gussie Manning, under "county or state in which born" it says "nice girl" under special marks it says "prostitute". This nice girl was in for "Contempt" Jan 21, 1886.
The next entry is for Mrs. Sallie Ann Thompson, under County or state is just " " and also under remarks: " " so apparently she was also a nice girl and a prostitute!—though as in for contempt!

Sing Fiao, "Chinaman" in for assault, Feb 4, 1886.

O.T. Green, Feb 1, 1886, indicted for "interfering with dead body".

I also read a lot of newspapers from the 1880s-1905 or so. I love reading these old papers (one reason I wrote a book on an editor), and very often in the pursuit of a specific topic you stumble across some real wonders.

this 1886 "Mexican curiosities" ad and the coffin ad. There were many different ads for coffins in these years.
.


This kind of thing which shows that the Onion is never far off:



This headline during the Russian revolution of 1905 (the same time the zona libre was abolished, incidentally) is great.



The El Paso Weekly Tribune ran a page of local cattle brands on April 22, 1886. You sure wouldn't want to be a cow on the ranch with this brand:



But perhaps the best story I came across, from the Feb. 8, 1889 El Paso Daily Herald, which starts the story with this headline:


A SHOWMAN
Wants to Kill a Huge Elephant with Electricity at El Paso."



and with this great opener: "El Paso, the Paris of the southwest, appears to be the Mecca towards which sporting men and seekers for large pursues are turning their expectant eyes."

It seems that Col. J.H. Wood had a particularly ornery elephant that was responsible for the deaths of fourteen keepers "and to punish him for his past misdeeds and prevent any more in the future he has determined to kill him by electricity" in a public show.

The paper notes that "HERE IS A GREAT OPPORTUNITY" to see what they call, in quotes "the elephant".

I often suggest to people that they give money to the Heifer foundation, which supplies animals to people in the third world. I like this organization a lot, especially since they supply people with a hive of bees for a thirty dollar donation. Since that is less than half what a package of bees costs here (forgetting even about the cost of the equipment) this seemed like a hell of a deal.

So I was surprised to see that this charity spends its money in unwise ways. For example, the president Jo Luck earns $236,881. How is that a justifiable amount of money for a charity to pay someone, even one that raises a large amount of money? Especially one headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas? Even if a case could be made, I just keep thinking that that is 7,800 hives worth of annual compensation.

I checked some other charities I support. I got all of these figures from an useful website called Charity Navigator.

Appalachian Voices, an organization in Boone, NC that fights mountaintop removal among other issues: its Executive Director, Mary Anne Hitt, earns a very modest and respectable $42,500.

The Executive Director of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, David Startzell, earns a not surprising $100,577.

The Executive Director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts, Julia Olin, clocks in at $74,958.

Steven J. McCormick, the President and CEO of the Nature Conservancy earns $427,465.

Maybe I am thinking of this all wrong. Maybe I should run a charity.

I am headed to El Paso to do some research on a fascinating case of extraterritorial crime from 1886 called the Cutting Case. I'll blog in greater detail about it from down there when I have some more time. In the meantime you can read up: Case of the American, A.K. Cutting.

You have to love Google books.

I did want to take this opportunity before leaving to propose a new promotional picture for Virginia Wesleyan:



This was taken a few days ago, when it was quite cold. The past few days have been very warm (60s-70s), which is far more welcome. Nice when the semester ends and there are some warm days to get into the hives. The bees are definitely enjoying the weather.

There really is no winter here, just brief pockets of chill. I have no complaints (It is warmer here than in El Paso at the moment).

The plants know this--my daffodils are already starting to come up, and there are buds on (a few) plants around as well.

There are really only about six more weeks before it is going to be time to think about putting the honey supers on...

It's hard to tell if the Washington Post is being slyly critical or willfully simple in this article about the sudden realization that the Bush administration and Treasury department switched emphasis in a way that means Wall Street financiers get to sidestep the provisions outlined for executive compensation limits:

Executive Pay Limits May Prove Toothless
Loophole in Bailout Provision Leaves Enforcement in Doubt

"But at the last minute, the Bush administration insisted on a one-sentence change to the provision, congressional aides said. The change stipulated that the penalty would apply only to firms that received bailout funds by selling troubled assets to the government in an auction, which was the way the Treasury Department had said it planned to use the money.

Now, however, the small change looks more like a giant loophole, according to lawmakers and legal experts. In a reversal, the Bush administration has not used auctions for any of the $335 billion committed so far from the rescue package, nor does it plan to use them in the future. Lawmakers and legal experts say the change has effectively repealed the only enforcement mechanism in the law dealing with lavish pay for top executives.

"The flimsy executive-compensation restrictions in the original bill are now all but gone," said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), ranking Republican on of the Senate Finance Committee.
ad_icon

The modification reflects how the rapidly shifting nature of the crisis and the government's response to it have led to unexpected results that are just now beginning to be understood. The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, issued a critical report this month about the financial industry rescue package that said it was unclear how the Treasury would determine whether banks were following the executive-compensation rules.

"Rapidly shifting nature"? "Unexpected results"? Does it not defy belief that the Bush administration did not mean from the start to apply its giveaway of taxpayer money in a method guaranteed to protect the wealth of the wealthy without limits? That this one sentence change was just pure happenstance?

Paulson initially came to Congress with an authoritarian 3 page plan to bilk taxpayers to pay off Wall Street recklessness at public expense, accontability be damned. Though he got the money with a few strings attached, he has managed to sidestep or neutralize these tame restrictions. The result is precisely what the Bush administration wanted all along: the financial sector has been protected, risk transferred to a bankrupt state, and zero accountability has been established. Pretty neat, ain't it? One sentence can do a lot.

It is interesting that there was no similar difficulty in understanding the position of the Republican party in seeking to lower the wages of the autoworkers by holding a gun to the head of the whole auto industry. To them it is equally unacceptable to limit the stratospheric pay of a CEO who has produced losses of billions of dollars as it is for someone working in an assembly facility to earn a decent wage that is competing with the race-to-the-bottom wages current in the union-free states welcoming foreign auto corporations. To limit pay on the wealthy is socialistic, to be avoided with lazy disregard for the letter and spirit of the law. To limit the pay of working peoples is to be done with firmness and dispatch, a great defense of liberty.

Here is John Judis making an excellent point in this regard, and seeing what it portends:

"OK, let me get this straight. Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker, backed up by Alabama Senator Richard Shelby and South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, made it a condition of the auto companies receiving help that the United Auto Workers agree to a reduction of wages and benefits to the level of those paid by the Japanese companies that have plants in those senators’ states. Desperate for the deal, the UAW and the Democrats agreed to a phased-in reduction, but the Republicans insisted on an immediate cut. The deal broke down, and Republicans--aided by a few Red State Democrats (e.g. Baucus, Lincoln, Tester)--used a filibuster to kill the bill, which would have passed on a majority vote.

Here’s what bothers me. Japanese companies, which for years have benefited from one-way deal by which they could sell cars in the U.S. while U.S. companies were stymied in selling cars and trucks in Japan, set up non-union plants in low-wage, low-education, right-to-work states where they can pay less wages and benefits to their workers. Of course, in Japan, these same companies recognize and work with unions, but not here, where they have a chance to undercut American firms that work with unions. Corker and these other great patriots want to allow these Japanese companies to dictate the wages and benefits that American companies pay their workers. It’s despicable. Imagine, for a moment, American companies being allow to operate in this manner in Japan or South Korea. It would not happen.

Of course, this is not just about automobile companies. If you look at the history of the Great Depression, what tipped that event from a global recession to depression was precisely a series of dumb, craven--or in Keynes’ word, “feather-brained”--moves by politicians blinded by ideology or by narrow self-interest. An interest rate hike here, a balanced budget there, a spending reduction or two, and we went from ten to twenty percent unemployment. Don’t imagine for a moment that the failure to bailout the auto companies isn’t one of those feather-brained moves."

Here is a modest and sensible proposal:

When Franklin D. Roosevelt came into office, one of the first things he did was end Prohibition. He did this for several reasons centered fundamentally on the fact that Prohibition was both bad and failed policy. Outlawing alcohol did virtually nothing to stop alcohol use in the United States, but it did produce severe social costs in terms of increased criminality among smugglers, lower tax revenues, and greater and more corrupt policing. Importantly, it also normalized illegal behavior by otherwise law abiding citizens, as reasonable people chose simply to ignore the unreasonable law so they could enjoy an adult beverage responsibly.

One unintended consequence of prohibition was a great investment in alcohol production and smuggling activity in Mexico. Some of the best known Mexican beer producers got their start directly as a result of the misguided decision on the part of the United States to squelch its domestic producers. As Gabriela Recio (among others) has demonstrated, prohibition created and expanded the markets for Mexican smugglers of booze and drugs and set up the precedents for today's trade.

It is indisputable that today the U.S. "war on drugs" has been a failure in every direction--interdiction, treatment, prevention, education. American illegal drug consumption continues at historically high rates with the corresponding effect that drug producing states like Columbia, Mexico, and Afghanistan have their economies corroded by overwhelming incentives to supply this insatiable appetite.

In interesting ways, the effects of American drug addiction and use are directly analogous to the national addiction to oil--the core of a dysfunctional system that distorts every aspect of the national political economy it touches, destroys communities, wastes energy and money, and enriches and empowers bad guys abroad.

The Drug War has successfully consumed billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars, led to the incarceration of millions of Americans, underwritten wholesale invasions of the right to privacy in America, and helped to spread horrific violence, chaos, and American military interventionism in dozens of countries around the world. The continued and unchecked expansion of the War on Drugs has done absolutely nothing to stop the use and supply of drugs. That is to say, the War on Drugs has done nothing but to further fuel an endless War on Drugs. This "War" is getting along quite handily. But that is not its stated intent, no?

Mexico, to pick an undeniably important example, is well on its way to becoming a failed narco-state as a result of the U.S. drug war. The drug violence there (which is producing the equivalent of an Iraq War a year in Mexico in terms of 4000+ murders) is directly linked to powerful and rich drug gangs jockeying for position in the U.S. market and seeking to prevent the weak Mexican state from interfering with their efforts. The drug kingpins are responsible for their evil violence, period. But the root cause of this violence is the American drug user-- recreational drug users across the spectrum from suburban teenage pot smokers to crack heads. The desire for drugs spawns violence among drug gangs in the same way that the desire for cheap gasoline spawns irresponsible oil kingdoms like Saudi Arabia sponsoring Islamic fundamentalist terrorist organizations.

Barack Obama should take one more page out of the Roosevelt game book and end the destructive and self-defeating prohibition on drugs. In so doing, he would liberate billions of dollars of federal money for other, more productive uses and simultaneously open up a new field for very rich taxation of legally produced narcotics for a carefully regulated national market. Already the most valuable crops produced in many agricultural states is marijuana--and especially so in economically marginal states like those in Appalachia. Ending the prohibition on drugs would free these areas to produce and market valuable and highly taxable commodities to American consumers. This effort, and the ripple effect of business activity would follow in the wake of a new and highly lucrative market, can only have a powerful stimulus impact on the weak American economy. It would also directly and swiftly undercut the power and money of the Mexican drug gangs, ending violence and giving the Mexican state the room it needs to bring stability, order, and peace back. What is not to like?

The world's most dangerous drug, alcohol, is legal, regulated, taxed, and controlled. In Virginia, the state runs the sale of hard liquour and profits handily from it. The same can be done with narcotics, for the benefit of the nation as a whole.

A good place to start learning about the depth of the failures in the drug war is at Common Sense for Drug Policy and particularly in their report on the drug war, available free here.

The new Old Time Herald is out, with an annotated list of online digital traditional music archives that I put together. Most if not all of these links are listed on my music links webpage, but an enterprising OTH reader in New Mexico named Steve Langford has set up a page that has all of the list links on it. Nice effort on his part, much appreciated.

Agree with him or not, Charles Krauthammer often has some interesting things to say. This column nailed the moment Obama faces and the likely nature of his approach:

"A functioning financial system is a necessary condition for a successful Obama presidency. As in foreign policy, Obama wants experts and veterans to manage and pacify universes in which he has little experience and less personal commitment. Their job is to keep credit flowing and the world at bay so that Obama can address his real ambition: to effect a domestic transformation as grand and ambitious as Franklin Roosevelt's.
...
The deepening recession creates the opportunity for federal intervention and government experimentation on a scale unseen since the New Deal. A Republican administration has already done the ideological groundwork with its unprecedented intervention, culminating in the forced partial nationalization of nine of the largest banks, the kind of stuff that happens in Peronist Argentina with a gun on the table. Additionally, Henry Paulson's invention of the number $700 billion forever altered our perception of imaginable government expenditure. Twenty billion more for Citigroup? Lunch money.

Moreover, no one in Congress even pretends that spending should be pay as you go (i.e., new expenditures balanced by higher taxes or lower spending), as the Democrats disingenuously promised when they took over Congress last year. Even some conservative economists are urging stimulus (although structured far differently from Democratic proposals). And public opinion, demanding action, will buy any stimulus package of any size. The result: undreamed-of amounts of money at Obama's disposal.

To meet the opportunity, Obama has the political power that comes from a smashing electoral victory. It not only gave him a personal mandate. It increased Democratic majorities in both houses, thereby demonstrating coattails and giving him clout. And by running on nothing much more than change and (often contradictory) hopes, he has given himself enormous freedom of action.

Obama was quite serious when he said he was going to change the world. And now he has a national crisis, a personal mandate, a pliant Congress, a desperate public -- and, at his disposal, the greatest pot of money in galactic history. (I include here the extrasolar planets.) ...
...Ironically, when the economy tanked in mid-September, it was assumed that both presidential candidates could simply forget about their domestic agendas because with $700 billion drained by financial system rescues, not a penny would be left to spend on anything else.

On the contrary. With the country clamoring for action and with all psychological barriers to government intervention obliterated (by the conservative party, no less), the stage is set for a young, ambitious, supremely confident president -- who sees himself as a world-historical figure before even having been sworn in -- to begin a restructuring of the American economy and the forging of a new relationship between government and people.

Don't be fooled by Bob Gates staying on. Obama didn't get elected to manage Afghanistan. He intends to transform America. And he has the money, the mandate and the moxie to go for it. "

The Center for Public Integrity has put together this excellent if deeply depressing list of the many failures of the federal government. 128 of them, in fact. If you have had the sense that things just haven't been working right, here is some actual proof that you were right. (via Dan Froomkin)

It is worth noting that this is not a list of the usual bumbling government --this is flat-out malfeasance, some of it criminal, that has been enshrined by eight years of incompetence.

It isn't hard to come up with some glaring examples like a totally unnecessary and very costly war in Iraq or the wholesale decline of the American economy. But there are many, many others that bespeak a busted system. An example:

"The Bush Administration’s regulatory approach to toxic mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants was struck down by a federal court that concluded the government flouted health law in a manner reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. The National Academies’ National Research Council has found that some 60,000 newborns a year are at risk for neurological problems such as impaired motor function due to mercury—the largest source of which is coal-fired power plants. The Food and Drug Administration urges pregnant women to limit fish intake due to widespread contamination with mercury that made its way into the food chain. In its waning days, the Clinton administration listed mercury as a toxic substance subject to strict regulation as a health threat, but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under President Bush, proposed a rule to reclassify mercury from coal-fired plants under a different section of the Clean Air Act (CAA). The EPA’s rule would have set an overall limit on mercury, while giving coal plants flexibility to meet the goal or purchase “emissions rights” from other plants—known as a “cap-and-trade” program. The EPA said it would have cut the mercury being released in the air by 70 percent by 2018 — an improvement, but less strenuous than the 90 percent reduction by 2008 that was hoped for under the Clinton administration determination. In issuing the new rule and reclassifying coal plant mercury, the EPA used language lifted — in some cases verbatim — from utility industry law and lobby firm Latham & Watkins, as well as West Associates, a research and advocacy group. It was subsequently revealed that the EPA’s own air policy administrator was unaware of the private firms’ involvement, and that insertion of the language had actually been pushed by the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Energy. Critics, including the EPA’s own Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee, said the plan could help create “hot spots” around power plants that would disproportionately hurt communities living in the shadow of smokestacks, because mercury emissions do not disperse evenly. Allowing dirtier power plants to purchase additional pollution credits would add to that burden. EPA’s own inspector general found that the agency’s approach “was compromised.”"

I am asked pretty regularly these days if I think that the current financial crisis is going to become another Great Depression. Being a historian with a decent grasp of that time, I usually say the honest thing: I have no idea.

But the fundamentals surely don't look good, and a mismanaged country that has witlessly off-shored manufacturing jobs for close to two decades and failed to deliver increases in real incomes in a quarter century all the while witnessing the rise of an excessively rich overclass atop a financial sector that has collapsed shouldn't be overly optimistic about it being morning again in America in the morning.

Here is a historian, John Paul Rossi, who argues quite clearly that the makings of a depression are in place.

Here is an easy way to stop all conversations at your holiday parties this season: start opining about the looming global helium supply crisis. Be sure to start with the phrase, "I was just talking to an astrophysicist on a plane and he said..." It works, I've tried it.

(but helium is in short supply. According to the Globe and Mail, "half of the helium used in the U.S. comes from a WWII reserve stockpiled to fill blimps" and we may be out by 2017. Though about eight seconds of searching reveals that this was a news story two years ago. Theoretically that would mean there is a great supply crisis today, but just try to get people to be concerned, chicken little.

It is sad but true that there are always one or two knaves who plagiarize work at the end of any given semester. It is a terrible thing, a violation of the school honor code, a deeply stupid thing to do, and etc. But mostly it is a time consuming black hole for me, because as soon as it is clear that a student has plagiarized something it inevitably launches me on an intensive evidence gathering operation. This used to mean going to the library and paging through books, but technology changes everything. Google is the best tool for ferreting out the clowns. And, to be fair, most students are stunningly lazy in their style of plagiarism. It doesn't take much to find where they lifted information, it usually the first thing that comes up.

It occurs to me that a border collie might be better at plagiarizing.

Today I had an easy one--a student copied language directly from a webpage...and didn't even bother to strip the hyperlinks out of it.

But my personal favorite is still the freshman I had several years ago who copied a full speech from a State Department under-secretary or some such rank, including the verbatim phrase "As I mentioned in a speech in Berlin last month..."

One the students in my Virginia class was describing African American students in 19th century Virginia who had to wrap their feet in guano bags to keep warm in the winter. Nobody knew what these were, and it launched a discussion of the meaning of 'guano' in VA and the South more broadly. No, it isn't too hard to get me talking about guano...the short answer is that "guano" became the universal term for fertilizer long after it was actually real guano.

I never ended up bringing a guano bag into class before the semester ended, so as promised I am posting a picture of one. This is from Tennessee, a 100 pound guano sack. It looks small in the picture, but it is almost three feet long.