Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Home of the ... racist, intolerant and unhinged?
Thats the view I get this morning, considering the Giffords assassination attempt, the bomb found in Spokane on the route of a MLK Jr. Day parade route, and the new governor of Alabama turning his inaugural bully pulpit into just that - a pulpit for bullying and threatening non-Christians. I think that it should be clear to most Americans, regardless of their political beliefs, that the current atmosphere will see sectarianism only grow. The right in particular feels emboldened, and the Tuscon shootings, far from making them rethink their strategies, will only help those who feel threatened by plurality, non-whites and non-regressive thinkers to use violent means. And the timing couldn't be worse: right at a moment in world history when other countries (China and India the leaders, but many others also) are readjusting to take advantage of a new era in global economics and power, the most conservative and repressive elements of American society are attempting to dominate with individual acts of cruelty and idiocy - ecce homo, ergo Palin.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Recipe for Disaster
Here's something that could end up very badly - lots of novices, tourists and the curious heading to the South Pole to commemorate the centenary of Admunsen's ski trip to the pole. Of course Scott and party perished after reaching the same spot just weeks later. Apparently people are ponying up to pay tens of thousands of dollars to live the experience, some skiing (or attempting to) all, or part, of the way, like this one Briton in the NYTimes article who has never x-country skied before and doesn't like cold weather! Are you serious? This is like Everest - one bad stretch of weather, and at the South Pole this is the norm, like on Everest - and there will be dead and/or missing peoplel all over, I'm afraid. The Times does specialize in the adventures of the effete and underinformed, so we will have to see how it turns out .... Read at your own peril.

Tourists Mimic Polar Pioneers, Except With Planes and Blogs

Extreme World Races
Participants in a previous race sponsored by Extreme World Races.

By JENNIFER A. KINGSON
Published: January 15, 2011
Recommend
Twitter

E-Mail

Send To Phone
Print


Reprints

Share
CloseLinkedinDiggMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalink When the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott arrived at the South Pole only to find that he had been beaten there by Roald Amundsen and his team of Norwegians, he was despondent. “Great God! This is an awful place,” he lamented in his diary.

Enlarge This Image

Associated Press
Robert F. Scott, standing center, with his 1912 polar expedition. A Norwegian team arrived first, and Scott’s group perished.
Enlarge This Image

Amundsen Omega 3
The flags of the signers of the Antarctic Treaty are planted near the geographic pole.

Awful as it may be, it is about to get a lot of foot traffic. Hundreds of people — tourists, adventurers and history buffs — are lining up to visit the South Pole in honor of the 100th anniversaries of Amundsen’s arrival (on Dec. 14, 1911) and Scott’s (Jan. 17, 1912). The preparations are already speeding along.

Some people intend to ski the exact routes of Amundsen and Scott, reading the explorers’ diaries daily and blogging about the experience. Others will drive to the pole by truck. For those seeking less exertion, there will be catered flights to the pole, including several that will let passengers off a few miles away so they can ski the remaining stretch and feel the thrill of victory.

One of the many tour operators trying to cash in on the fervor is Polar Explorers, a company in suburban Chicago that is charging $40,500 for a flight to the pole on either anniversary (weather permitting). People who want to be dropped off a degree or two away so they can ski in will pay up to $57,500.

“We’re going to have lots of Champagne toasts and take a lot of pictures, and you can call home to your loved ones from the pole,” said Annie Aggens of Polar Explorers. “It’s super exciting just to walk in the footsteps of these early explorers.”

Needless to say, people will not want to replicate Scott’s entire expedition. He and his men died in a blizzard during the 800-mile trek back from the pole, huddled in a tent that was, famously, just 11 miles from a vital cache of supplies.

Instead, many people plan to ski to the pole, then fly back. One of them is Matt Elliott, a 28-year-old Briton, who will compete in a 440-mile ski race, pulling 200 pounds of gear the whole way. A resident of Windsor, he works for his family’s paper wholesaling business and calls himself “a complete polar novice.”

He has never tried cross-country skiing, and he is not a big fan of cold weather, but he has been practicing by dragging two car tires on a rope for several hours at a time.

“I want to know how far, physically, I can go,” said Mr. Elliott, who is paying about $95,000 to enter the competition, sponsored by a London-based company called Extreme World Races. “It would be great to get there first and run the Union Jack at the South Pole before the Norwegians get there,” he said.

Davis Nelsen, who is 52 and runs a steel manufacturing company in Chicago, will have a less stressful trip. He plans to be on one of the Amundsen flights run by Polar Explorers, in honor of his Norwegian heritage. This will be his second polar adventure: in 2009, he flew to the North Pole to mark the centenary of Robert Peary’s expedition.

In polar travel, “you have to be prepared to be uncomfortable,” said Mr. Nelsen, who plans to ski the last 30 or so miles.

The crowds going to the South Pole are not expected to amount to more than a blip in overall tourism numbers to Antarctica, which peaked at 46,000 in the 2007-8 season and have dropped off because of the global recession. But because most people who visit Antarctica go by cruise ship and do not venture beyond the coast, a spike in tourism to the pole itself is expected.

The National Science Foundation, which runs the Amundsen-Scott research station at the South Pole, is not amused. It has a message for all these potential visitors: do not expect a warm welcome.

“Those people who do arrive, we don’t really have a process for them other than letting them know that they are at the pole, that this is a U.S. station, and we’re not able to provide them with any amenities,” said Peter West of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs.

Yes, there is a small gift shop — make that, “commissary” — where people can buy T-shirts and the like, and visitors can drop off letters that will get a South Pole postmark. But the research station is “really not set up for tourism,” said Evan Bloom of the State Department. “We want other governments to get the word out that people should not simply show up at the South Pole.”

Most of the time, visitors will be spread across Antarctica. The biggest ski race, the one set up by Extreme World Races, will take place far away from the routes taken by Scott and Amundsen, approaching from the opposite side of the continent. Fifty-one competitors, in teams of three, will ski to the pole, said Tony Martin, founder of the company. Training for the race, which includes jumping into ice holes and learning to negotiate crevasses, will take place at a camp in Norway; space is still available.

“We don’t give cash prizes or cars,” said Mr. Martin, in an interview by satellite phone from Antarctica, where he was in a truck setting a course for the race. He described his clients as “just ordinary people” who wanted to “push themselves psychologically and physically.” Each will wear a GPS device, and airplanes will be on call in case someone needs to be evacuated.

Among other adventure travelers, Henry Worsley, a lieutenant colonel in the British Army, may have the best historical pedigree. He is distantly related to Frank Worsley, the captain of Ernest Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance. He is staging his own race to the pole in two teams of three men.

“The intention is to rerun the Scott-Amundsen race from the two start points,” he said. “I’m leading the Norwegian route up the Axel Heiberg glacier from the Bay of Whales, and a friend of mine is going to do the Scott route, which I did a few years ago.”

Some people are trying to play down the competitive angle and play up the historical one. Jan-Gunnar Winther, director of the Norwegian Polar Institute, plans to be at the pole the day Amundsen reached it, part of a four-man team that will re-enact Amundsen’s journey then fly home in time for Christmas. On the British side, Ben Saunders, a 33-year-old London resident, who is a long-distance skier and motivational speaker, plans to follow in the footsteps of Scott — and to complete the return trip that Scott could not finish.

David Wilson, a great-nephew of Edward Wilson, the naturalist and sketch artist who marched to the pole with Scott and died beside him, will join other descendants of Scott’s polar party in Antarctica next Jan. 17 in the vicinity of the tent, where they will hold a memorial service.

He echoes the Scott party line: that the British expedition went to Antarctica to do science, not to race to the pole. The people planning competitions are “completely misunderstanding what happened 100 years ago,” Dr. Wilson said.

Despite the potential circus atmosphere, some veterans insist that Antarctica is not for novices.

“It’s a place that wants you dead,” said Robert Swan, an environmentalist who walked Scott’s route to the South Pole in 1985. “Scott found that out 100 years ago.”

A version of this article appeared in print on January 16, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Tibet after the Dalai Lama

Interesting read about the Dalai Lama in The Economist, and speculation - well a little - on what lies in store for the Tibetan cause with the 14th Dalai Lama now 76. The Karmapa Lama may come into play as the next Dalai Lama will be young, and there will be a regency for 15 - 20 years once he is located. Here's the link:

http://www.economist.com/node/17851411

Also posting a publication by Human Rights watch on the wide scale repression and abuse in Tibet since the 2008 Lhasa uprising. As usual it makes for grim, but necessary reading. The real extent of Chinese atrocities may never be known.

http://www.hrw.org/node/91850

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Can You Balance the Budget!?!

Try this interactive feature from the NYTimes on balancing the US budget by setting priorities and choosing what to cut from the budget, and which taxes to raise. I did it without a problem, by adhering to the following dicta: 1) screw the rich; 2) screw the big corporations; and 3) screw the industrial/military complex. And I'm for that 95% of the US population below the wealthy class; reverting tax rates to Clinton-era levels (Kennedy era would be better); keeping Social Security and Medicare afloat; and keeping tax cuts and breaks for the middle class and those below. As one of my favorite bumperstickers says:

EAT THE RICH

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html?hp

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Nepal Feels the Heat from Expansionist China

Short but informative article on how pressure from China on Tibet has contorted Nepal's internal politics. The Chinese, ever so sensitive about their own internal politics, have been bullying Nepal for years now on the status of Tibetan refugees in Nepal, who have been there since China first invaded independent Tibet 60 years ago. China would like to see them returned, not allowed to enter, and if Tibetan refugees are in Nepal, the Chinese would like to see that the Tibetans' lives in Nepal are as uncomfortable as possible. And the Nepalese Communist and Maoist parties, run by ideologues and manned by illiterate thugs, gladly oblige, as they try to create their own Cultural Revolution.





Asian politics

Banyan's notebookChina, Nepal and TibetA thwarted election

Oct 4th 2010, 13:44 by Banyan

DISTURBING pictures of Nepali police in riot gear carting off ballot boxes illustrate both China’s clout in Nepal and its fears about the activities of Tibetan exiles. This was a primary election held among some 80,000 exiles to pick candidates for polls for a new parliament-in-exile and prime minister next year. The Nepali government has made sure that votes in the primary in Nepal at least will not count.

Most of the 120,000 or so exiled Tibetans are in India—either in the north, where the government-in-exile, and Tibet’s spiritual leader, have their seat in the Himalayan foothills at Dharamsala, or in the southern state of Karnataka. Every year more join them, mostly by fleeing the Tibet Autonomous Region of China through Nepal.

Some 20,000 live in Nepal, about half of them eligible to vote. In recent years, Nepal, at China’s behest, has curbed their political activities, such as protests. In 2005, floundering and looking to China to prop up his regime, the former king, Gyanendra, closed the Dalai Lama's representative office in Kathmandu. China has obvious objections to an election for a government-in-exile it does not recognise, and which supports the Dalai Lama, whom it regards as the source of many of its troubles in Tibet.

There are two other reasons why China objects to the voting. It does not want the world—or China—to be reminded that the Dalai Lama has insisted his exiled compatriots embrace democracy. Rather, it prefers to depict him as the representative of a cruel feudal elite which forced the miserable masses into monasteries or serfdom.

Also, the Dalai Lama’s advanced age—he is now 75—give elections increased importance, as the government elected may have to cope with the difficult transition to a new incarnation.

Nepal, sandwiched between two huge and overbearing neighbours, India and China, has no desire to antagonise either. India is by far the bigger influence in Nepal. To keep it in check, Nepal seeks good relations with China. One sure way of ruining those would be to show any sympathy to the Dalai Lama and his followers.

Former CCP Officials Call for End to Censorship, Criticize Current Regime

Maybe there is hope for real change in China, and therefore hope for the many peoples who have suffered under the Hu's government. From today's NYTimes.


Former Chinese Officials Demand Media Freedom

By MICHAEL WINES


BEIJING — A group of retired Communist Party officials and intellectuals issued an unusually blunt demand on Tuesday for total media freedom in China, stating that the current regime of censorship and government control of the press violates China’s constitution and debases the government’s claim to represent its citizens.

The document’s 20 signers, including academics and many former executives of China’s government-controlled press, have no public influence on the nation’s ruling coalition of Communist leaders. Some of them have issued other public demands for reform in past years, to no effect.

Still, the bluntness of their message — and its timing, coming days after the jailed intellectual Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — signaled that not all in the ruling establishment are content with the steadily tightening control over expression in the final years of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao’s leadership.

The letter’s language was notable for including an undisguised attack on the legality of censorship by the party’s Central Propaganda Department, which ultimately controls much of what is published, broadcast or posted on the Internet here.

“This is an invisible black hand,” the signers wrote of the department. “For their own reasons, they violate our Constitution, often ordering by telephone that the works of such and such a person cannot be published, or that such and such an event cannot be reported in the media. The officials who make the call do not leave their names, and the secrecy of the agents is protected, but you must heed their phone instructions.”

The “core demand,” the writers stated, was that China’s rubber-stamp legislature, the National People’s Congress, dismantle censorship procedures “in favor of a system of legal responsibility” for items that are freely published.

Some experts said that the demands, which were quickly squelched by censors after being posted on the Internet, were unlikely to have a serious impact on government policies.

“To the extent that people will learn about this letter, it resonates, because it shows there are different sensibilities within the party,” Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher for the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, said in an interview. “But it does not, on the political level, alter the balance.”

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Some more photos - they were uploading slowly so I opted for medium, rather than large format.

Vijayanagar, Hampi


Bom de St. Francis, Goa





Ajanta Caves


Dhaulagir from Poon Hill



Juhu Beach, Mumbai


Vijayanagar, Hampi




Boudinath