Photos from a hazy morning, 5-12-11

[E1 camera and 55-200mm Sigma lens]

 

   

Gunfire & the threat of rain

[E1 camera & 18-125mm Sigma lens]

We weren’t able to get in our usual two hours of hiking.  Part way in we heard gunfire fairly close to us.  I thought at first it was someone from the nursery on the other side of the levee, but it was closer than that.  I knew Sage was frightened by loud noises.  I looked around for her and she had already fled.

so Ginger and I turned around and started back. We found Sage by Nicole, the Field Biologist who had been trying to verify the presence of a bird on the endangered species list.  She said she saw Sage running toward her looking panicky and wondered if the gunfire hadn’t perchance taken me out.  Sage had run back and forth, she said, but wouldn’t go up to her. 

As we walked back toward the Jeep the gunfire seemed to follow us; which was probably good for Nicole and her endangered birds.

 

 

Photos from a foggy morning, 5-7-11, II

[E1 Camera & 55-200 Sigma lens]

Photos from a foggy morning, 5-7-11, I

[E-1 camera and 55-200 Sigma lens]

Andre Glucksmann and the "end of fatalism"

http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_2_snd-end-of-fatalism.html

The above is an article by the French philosopher Andre Glucksmann on the “revolutions” that seem to be sweeping the Middle East. It was translated by Alexis Cornel. I’ll quote a bit from it and comment below.

“. . . Consider two old prejudices, both dating to the end of the Cold War: the idea that the polarity between East and West had been replaced by a conflict among “civilizations”; and the conviction that the Cold War would be followed by the peace of economic rationalism. . . The Arab implosions—which expose the incoherence of such categories as “Arab world” and “Islamic civilization”—make clear the inadequacies of these prejudices. How many times have we heard that freedom and democracy mean nothing to the “Arab street” as long as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains unresolved? To refuse to defer the question [has] until now been enough, in universities and right-thinking circles, to brand a person as indecently Eurocentric, simplistically hung up on human rights, or even . . . Zionist. This fatalism no longer applies to the Maghreb or to the Middle East.

“Whatever may come, let us greet the Arab upheaval with “sympathetic aspiration that comes close to enthusiasm,” as Kant spoke of the French Revolution, though he disapproved of its many excesses. There is no reason to bemoan the fall of a tyrant. I enjoyed seeing the end of Communist satraps in Europe and in the East, as well as the falls of Salazar and Franco and Saddam Hussein; why would I mourn the departures of Ben Ali and Mubarak?

“But what happens next is anybody’s guess. Freedom contains the power of opposites; it embraces, as Friedrich Schelling observed, “the deepest abyss and the highest heaven.” Europe’s historical itinerary shows us that revolution can lead anywhere: to a republic’s common good or to terror, conquest, and war. At the same moment that Mubarak was stepping down in Cairo, Tehran celebrated the 32nd anniversary of its Islamic Revolution with a festival featuring hangings and savagely tortured bodies. Egypt is not—God forbid—Khomenei’s Iran, nor is it Lenin’s Russia, nor Germany under National Socialism. It will become whatever it is made to be—by its youth eager to breathe free, by its Muslim Brotherhood, by its hesitant and disassembled army, and by its rich and poor, still separated by light-years.

“Forty percent of Egyptians live in poverty, and over 30 percent are illiterate. According to Pew polls from 2010, 82 percent of Muslim Egyptians desire the enforcement of sharia and the stoning of adulterers, 77 percent have no problem with cutting off thieves’ hands, and 84 percent favor the death penalty for apostates. That’s enough to temper any rosy forecasts.

. . .

“Revolution” and “freedom” don’t always mean democracy, respect for minorities, sexual equality, and good relations with neighbors. Such goods are gained as part of an ongoing struggle. Let us welcome the Arab revolutions, for they shatter the fatalists’ illusions. But let us not flatter them or delude ourselves: great risks and even worse dangers lie ahead. We know from our own history that the future holds no guarantees.”

COMMENT: For the most part Glucksmann’s article makes sensible observations about the implications of the current “Arab upheavals,” but his warnings that we should not assume that they will result in Liberal-Democracies or at least not Liberal Democracies any time soon, goesagainst one of his main theses that the ‘conflict among ‘civilizations’ thesis of Samuel P. Huntington (at least that is what I assume him to be saying) has been disproved.

I agree with him that Arab aspirations for ‘freedom and democracy’ can be separated from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but I do not believe that “Arab upheavals” disprove Huntington’s thesis about the Clash of Civilizations. Note that Huntington didn’t argue that these clashes would go on forever, merely that they would go on for the foreseeable future; so will these upheavals end Arab conflicts with other civilizations as Glucksmann implies? I hope that they will, but I don’t believe they have disproved Huntington.

Russia has moved a long way toward Liberal Democracy, much further than any presently-convulsing Arab state can be said to have moved, and yet I doubt that the portion of Western Civilization bordering the Orthodox Civilization believes that “clashes” or “conflicts” as Glucksmann seems to prefer, have been ended. It is a modern “prejudice” that Liberal Democracies will not war against each other and I go along with that prejudice when it is applied to Western nations and a few others such as Japan, and while I hope that it also applies to the resulting Arab Liberal-Democracies, should they come to exist, I am not willing to go as far as Glucksmann in assuming that Huntington’s “fatalism,” if we can describe his thesis with this word, has been disproved.

The remaining Glucksmann thesis is that something has disproved the “prejudice” that “the Cold War would be followed by economic rationalism.” He is referring to Fukuyama’s The End of History thesis, is assuming that this “fatalistic” thesis has been disproved as well. I do not see how the Arab upheavals help disprove Fukuyama. In fact if they result in the Liberal Democracies Glucksmann seems to anticipate, sort of, they will tend to prove rather than disprove Fukuyama.

Donald of Arabia

http://www.arabist.net/blog/2011/5/3/donald-of-arabia.html

I subscribed to a few Arab-Egyptian blogs recently. Here is Issandr El Amrani’s view of Donald Trump:

“I just came back from a few days in New York. As always when in the US, I watch Fox News in the hotel room (not because I think it's representative, but because it's so jaw-droppingly fascinating). On Fox and other channels, Donald Trump is very much the flavor of the moment, as well as an unlikely early leader for the Republican presidential primary. It's a good indication of how weird the Republicans have become, and how the Tea Party crowd has turned it upside down.

“In the video above, the Donald makes some quite insane comments about the Arab world. Some are refreshingly honest, like when he says he would only go to Libya "if we get the oil", and then some very ignorant ones, like how without the US, the Arab countries "wouldn't exist". (My favorite piece of Moroccan-American trivia: the Sultanate of Morocco was the first country to officially recognize the United States in 1777). I tend to think that Trump's bizarre candidacy is a good thing, hoping that it will weaken the Republicans, but then again who knows if the alternative is that much better...”

COMMENT: I frankly haven’t been following domestic politics very much but my mostly-uninformed impression of Trump isn’t unlike Issandr’s. Unlike Issandr I hope the Republican Party can field someone I can have more respect for, but at the present time the Republicans do not seem in very good shape. They impress me as not knowing how to progress; so it may seem to some a good time to bring out the clowns.

I watched most of President Obama’s speech about the killing of Osama bin Laden and thought that if the national election were held the next day, Obama would win. Obama, whatever Liberal errors I might think he embraces, is not a clown. No president, whether Liberal or Conservative could have been more presidential. On the other-hand, I recalled the exultation that followed the First President Bush’s situation after Gulf War number 1. He was so popular it was as though he felt he could phone in his reelection. But Clinton, believing it was “the economy, dummy” was elected instead. Our present economic difficulties are likely to be with us at the time of the next election, and it doesn’t seem likely that Obama’s admiration of the European-style Welfare State is going to find favor with a majority of the voters.

But on the other, other-hand, if Obama is running against a real dummy then his presidential stature may compensate for any economic difficulties, especially if the economy has shown a marked improvement.

River Wood, late afternoon on 4-30-11

[E-520 & 35mm Zuiko]

Someone asked about the relationship of the trees and brush to the river.  Some is on the banks and on the other side of the banks, but a very lush growth is in the river itself.  Trees don’t grow from bank to bank in these lush areas, but they’ve managed to survive on somewhat higher ground.  The river when it does flow moves around or through these areas.  In the twelve years I’ve been hiking this area, it has looked just as it does here – taking into account the season, light, time of day, etc.