Back in the USSA

We never feel more like criminals than when we reenter the US. I have the stupidest reaction when I see immigration. I actually get excited. I think to myself, "Hooray, won't my country be so happy to have me back." Of course that's never the case. Suddenly no one will help my pregnant wife get overweight luggage off the conveyor belt while I am in the bowels of the Seattle airport, seeing our cat through his inspection by TSA, and aren't I an idiot for not immediately understanding that TSA approval is the same as clearing him with Customs. Everyone who's been awake for 22 hours knows that sort of thing.

This flight across the pacific was by far the most interesting I ever hope to have. Since J is pregnant it meant I was pretty much in charge of everything: bags, cat, customs, and making sure she had eaten and was comfortable. But despite unforeseeable things like a shin jarring landing in Taipei and 23 hours spent in what seemed like jail in a Taoyuan City hotel ("those transfer passengers attempting to escape will be escorted back to the airport by the border police and placed on the list of undesirable persons"), and a missing bag (the one we paid an extra ฿ 3,900 for) we made it back, and have been here in south-east Texas for a whole week now. In another week we'll be up in Dallas.

Coming Next June

Circle of Life

(If you're squeamish you might want to stop this page before the photos load all the way.)

The circle of life in our house veers in strange ways. Tien, like all cats, love to catch things that are moving fast, like birds, cockroaches, or lizards. I liberate the birds if I can get to them in time, I praise him for the cockroaches, and the lizards, well that used to be problematic, because he never eats them, or at least not all the way. I don't know if I've mentioned our hedgehog Elinor on this blog yet (J has a post on Biciclette about when we took her to school), but she has helped close the loop where lizards are concerned. The other day Tien caught a finger sized skink, Elinor happened to be awake at the time since we'd just fished her out from under the fridge, and I thought, 'Good I'll feed it to her.' By the time I stepped out of the kitchen to help her find it, she was already munching away. I think she could smell the blood.

Sewer Mold

About once a month this crazy orange mold creeps out of our drain from the sewage ditch.I think it's kind of pretty. It grows fast, cover half of the sink's nether regions in about a day. You can sort of see the color below.

The Neighborhood

This is the neighborhood we've been living in since April. Our house is just right of center, one back from the street in a small group of six houses. Right next door is an Isan restaurant that does amazing grilled chicken.

The Short Update, or Rao Mai Chai Man

The notion that telecom companies can stay in business by refusing new customers is beginning to throw us into ever an ever deeper state of confusion and despair--confusion that said companies remain solvent, and despair because, well, it really sucks. I've been so desperate for news of the outside world that I spend an hour after work each day downloading podcasts on their ridiculously slow adsl connection, enough to fill the two flash memory drives I have, which ends up being about five hours of news. I am now aware of remarkable things like the collapse of the precariously overextended US housing market, and the introduction of chubby frog ipod nanos. That said, our local Apple nanostore (it's a glorified kiosk in the mall--doesn't even have doors) should have the new ipod touch by now, which we'll go look at once we leave our friend AZ's house.


So what's been happening here? Updates on this blog have been few and far between since April when we moved into our new house and the cable company began telling us they aren't taking new customers. Our move happened right in the middle of the week of Song-Kran, an enormous, country-wide water-fight that occurs at the tail end, and hottest part, of the dry season. It seemed we were always biking from the old house to the new house and back during the height of the celebration. Jami ended up more that soggy, since she'd a blondie, and a girl, and therefore quite an attractive target for 20ish Thai boys. Shortly after moving in we began to pis off our landlady by removing the nasty, filthy, polyester curtains and replacing them with light, clean, and airy, cotton ones; painting one of the bedrooms white (J's sewing room, it was so dark before that during the day you literally could not see certain corners of the room due to the combination of darkness and glare); owning a cat; and not shutting every single shutter every single time we walked down the street for ten minutes. The shutter bit lead to our first crisis, in which she threatened to kick us out if we weren't good, and accused us of tearing the house down (we were told that Thai houses were built to last, unlike American houses, which, presumably, disintegrate into a puff of saw dust and gypsum after six months of occupation, perhaps explaining our collapsed housing market). We've been good ever since.

Following our settling in period we left for a month to vacation with my folks on the East Coast, to bask in the beautiful blackness of J's father's new Rausch Mustang, and to assist with the ongoing, post-Rita, empty-nester remodel of the Vaughn home (they picked a swell local designer who has Brenda's tastes pegged quite nicely). Vacation included a a stay with auntunclecousins in Troy, NY, and trips into NYC from my Grandpa's Nyack apt. From there we headed to Maine for a few days in Acadia National Park, and then drove all the way to Orlando to visit my sister and her (and her husband's, yes we like you lots, Matt) new baby Magnus. We stopped in Lowell, MA and Jamestown, VA along the way, but basically it was the whole of the east coast in about 48 hours. On the way back to Dallas I got to set foot in Louisiana for the first time. It was at a Popeye's Chicken, and the parking lot smelled like garbage. Being a Texan, having never been to Louisiana is about as embarrassing as having never been to Mexico (though the embarrassment of having never been to Mexico is exacerbated by the fact that I speak Spanish--imagine how ashamed I'd be if I spoke Cajun? Perhaps we'll remedy the Mexico situation by simply moving there after Thailand manages to spit us out once and for all). Our time in Silsbee was spent keeping an eye on contractors, playing with the new (and ephemeral, she won't last much longer thanks to the red mange) boxer named Sophie. She's a pretty dog. I'd love to post photos, but I don't have any here with me.

Once back in Thailand we anxiously awaited the arrival of our friends Lucas and Merridy. They spent about ten days with us exploring Chiang Mai, and contributing to our second crisis with the landlady. I introduced her to Luke the day he arrived, and tried, in my worse-than-broken less-than-pidgin Thai, to explain how long he would be staying. The day after M arrived (several days after Luke) the landlady dragged me over to her house to explain to her nephew (while she shouted over his translations) who was staying and how long. She was of the opinion that there were more, way more, than two house guests, and that they had been there longer, way longer, than I had said (in her mind she had post-dated Luke's arrival by three or four days, even though they met within two hours of his disembarking from the plane). She claimed that the house wasn't strong enough for more than two people (its method of construction diverges in no significant way from the neighboring houses, one of which contains eight people). I stated the facts to the nephew and left, since we were leaving on a trek with uncle AZ in a less than an hour, and she was obviously lying, and nuts. The nephew is a good kid, she just never listens to him. The trek was great fun. We spent the night in a Karen village (the whole village was nominally Christian, so no long necks, but great buffaloes), played in two waterfalls, rafted on bamboo rafts, and rode elephants. Shortly after L&M left we rented a motorbike to do some home teaching, leading to phase 2 of landlady crisis #2. We'd rented the bike for 24 hours, which means it spent the night at the house, causing us to wake up to a note, posted to our front door, accusing us of still having house guests, and threatening to raise our rent by 40%. I went to bring her over to the house to demonstrate the lack of house guests (Puen yu thi nai khrap? Mai yu!), but she refused to come, so we just yelled at each other in tongues. I brought the motorbike over so that she could see that it pertained to no one but us, and wrote her a careful note, which her daughter read, and which seemed to calm her down. Temporarily.


Following shortly on the heals of crisis number two came crisis number three. Crisis number three has been escalating for some time, beginning with a large rat trap baited with fish placed prominently on our compound's spirit house. Actually, the great cat crisis may have begun with the catnapping of Pete, Tien's stray tabby buddy. The house behind us has been empty for some time, though the landlady is continually sweeping it out and showing it to potential renters. During one of those cleanings Pete ran into our house and hid under the bed, while she ran right up the stairs behind him. Anxious not to be accused of having two cats (she'd already expressed some concern over sweet T) I pulled him out from under the bed, only to see him unceremoniously stuffed into a bag of garbage. Assuming this was the end of old Pete, whose only offense would be his overabundance of good nature, I followed the landlady to her house to plead his case. Her nephew assured me he was going to a good home, Pi Lar's sister (that is the landlady's name by the way) needed a cat at her house to catch mice since hers had died recently. Shortly after this came the enormous rat trap baited with fish. Tien (and in all likelihood the neighborhood strays) had been stealing sticky rice from the spirit house. We tried to make amends by buying five sets of offering bowls, but the landlady refused to accept them, and took them to a shop owned by one of her renters to sell. This right before my very eyes. I have been assured by numerous Thai sources that this is unforgivably rude behavior here in Thailand. All this was before our trip to the States, and I assumed all was settled in the cat department until one the other renters in our compound adopted an obnoxious, sick, and starving ginger colored kitty, and an equally obnoxious, and pregnant, torty. The Ginger Kitty, as we came to call it, was always stealing Tien's food, creeping into the house at night, and dribbling diarrhea all over the furniture. Meanwhile, the torty was camped out in the neighbor's house having kittens. Now let me clarify that neither of these cats were strays. They both had collars, with bells, and they were both extremely social. Great cats really, they just wouldn't get out of our house. One morning the landlady came over to complain about the section of side yard all these cats were using as a litter box. While she was going on about meao khii the kittens made their debut appearance on the neighbor's porch. Lug meao! I exclaimed, hoping to pass the buck. She went to talk to the neighbors while I scooped poop. The neighbors, anxious as any good Thai to avoid conflict, blamed the vomiting mother torty on us (yes, she actually
threw up on the drive while they were discussing her): "We can't get rid of the things! It's those foreign devils that bring them 'round!" As the landlady left I offered to clean up any khii that our cat might be responsible for. As usual she dismissed my efforts to be helpful. The next day she showed up bright and early at our house again, and in front of our very eyes scaled to the heights of rudeness and absurdity. This is when we found out that the neighbors were blaming their cats on us. She accused Tien of seducing these poor cats and leaving then knocked up on the doorsteps of innocent Thai nationals. I called AZ's wife Dao to act as our advocate. She did such a good job that she had the old woman crying in less than five minutes. When I first put her on the landlady went off, complaining about us, until Dao said "Listen, listen, listen, listen. You always talk, you never listen. Now you have to listen. That cat is fixed, he can't be fathering kittens, or attracting female cats. I know, I went with them." Faced with Dao's startling use of facts (and a lie, though I'm sure she was with us in spirit the day Tien had his surgery) the landlady began crying and said that she didn't care for money, she just wanted us out of there. While all this was going on Jami was talking with the woman who'd been brought from one of the shops next door to act as a translator. We often have these translators arrive with the landlady, and she inevitably embarrasses them. She never listens to a word they say, and they always end up apologizing or trying to excuse her some how. Usually when the Thai are embarrassed they just smile, or laugh. Our translators always just looked scared and nervous. Here's why. While Pi Lar was on the phone with our beloved Pi Dao, she was using a very bad pronoun. Pronouns are weird in Thai. The male term for of "I" phom actually means hair (as in "the hair of my head is lower than the dust of your feet). The female terms for "I" are so unsatisfactory, that many women simply refer to themselves by name, in the third person. The pronoun for someone spoken of in the third person (male, female, or plural) is kao. The pronoun the landlady was using to refer to me to one of my best friends here was man. It is not a term you use for people. Literally it means "it." The other day I was trying to look up the word "hedgehog" in Thai, but the only word I could find was man. It means something along the line of "nonhuman creature." If I were Thai and actually had the basic human rights afforded to Thai citizens, I could have her arrested for profane speech and defamation of character. But I'm just a nonhuman creature, so oh well. I'll just go hang out with the hedgehog. After all this the translator managed to make clear that none of the other cats were ours, and since the neighbors were denying any responsibility I offered to take them away. This satisfied her, and she went away smiling. The mama and kittens had been carted of the other day for the price of 200 baht, so I caught the orange kitty and a stray tom that wasn't smart enough to run away, and took them to a Buddhist temple in the center of town. That night the we could hear the neighbor girl calling for her ginger kitty. We felt bad for her, but I figure it was karma. By lying and claiming that her cat was ours she created a condition in which our only hope of maintaining our residence (we are desperate not to have to move) was to take her cat away. I hope it's OK. On further karmic occurrences, that very morning the people in one of the shops in front of us, a building which our landlady owns, had an extra special Buddhist ceremony with about eight monks, which Pi Lar attended. Afterwards she took the head monk over to bless the house that she can't get to rent. Guess why it won't rent? Every time she is showing it to potential renters every tenth word out of her mouth is farang coupled with a dirty look shot in our direction. How can she expect to rent the place if every time she shows it off she advertises the fact that it come complete with the worst neighbors in the world? While I was transplanting cats, I stopped over at the elder's and asked then to translate the phrase, "Even though we are foreign, we are still human beings. We are not nonhuman creatures." It occupies a prominent place in our house, right below the picture of the king and queen.

In other news, we have a hedgehog. Her name is Eleanor. She is cute and thinks that toes are food. I've been spending all this time sans internet learning Sketchup and writing. I may have actually written a novel of sorts by the time we leave here. One of the stories in it is about anarcho-syndicalist farmers on the moon. Jami has been sewing like mad, and I have been making sculptures of goofy future plants out of paper mache. I'll upload some of my drawings soon, and maybe post one of the stories once I comb through it a couple more times.

NYCrappy Photos

After a couple of days enjoying folksy wonderfulness with cousins in Troy, we have been happily hiking through NYC with my Grandpa serving as our traditional guide. Today saw us at the Strand (my mother swears she had never been, which I still refuse to believe could actually be true) and the Met for Poiret, Nakashima, and Neo Rausch. Tomorrow off to Maine.

Still No

Still no internet. But travel plans for July are fixed. We'll be on the east coast the first half and Texas the second. We'll try to make a trip to Austin, and would love to see NYC buddies the first week of July.

Not Yet

No, we haven't abandoned this blog yet, we're just having trouble getting an internet connection to our house. So in the mean time enjoy this lovely picture about not over feeding welsh pigs.

Casa Nueva, Vida Nueva

Our house hunting is finally over. Here's our snug little new place. Today we cleaned top to bottom. Tomorrow we'll give the oppressively dark bedrooms and kitchen a coat of white paint and tear out some unwanted plywood which is preventing airflow in the kitchen. We have great plans for the place, including a solar water heater over the kitchen, a rocket stove, and maybe even a small wood burning oven if I can scrounge up the firebrick (wish me luck).

Rear. The kitchen is to the right. Living room 2nd floor left, bedroom right.

Front steps and door.

Looking out the front door, you can see the balcony and hallway.

Shot from the back of the living room.

Shot through the balcony door.

J mopping the second bedroom.

A kitchen of sorts.

Downstairs.

Etlaoephantcatagarwood

We made a visa run to Lao this week. Again. The process was much smoother this time since we actually had the paperwork we needed, and we knew how to get places. We also lucked out at the morning market in Vientiane and found a 14 inch piece of agarwood. It's not top quality, but it is streaked with resin throughout. The gal who sold it to us even lit it so we could see how it smelled before we bought it. Delicious. Just around the corner, however, my favorite little bronze elephant had gone up in price from 100 to 150 dollars. At least I got a picture.


On our way back, at about 4 am, somewhere in the mountains east of Chiang Mai our bus rear ended another bus. Jami saw it happening, but I was asleep, and bruised my kneecaps on the seat in front of me. As usual our bus driver was following too close. For some reason bus drivers seem to imagine that they only need four feet of clearance if the vehicle in front of them is another bus, as thought there were some psychic connection that would prevent one bus driver from actually hitting another. Our bus was fine, aside from the broken windshield, but the other one had metal and plastic pushed into the belts, so we had to hold their hands while they waited for another bus to pick up the passengers. We were worried about getting home in time to pick Tien up from the kennel at the small animal hospital.



He'd had surgery the previous Thursday to remove three dog-bite related abscesses. One went into his spine, and the surgeon told us how difficult it was to remove when we picked him up. It took him about twelve hours to get back on his feet. Literally. Every time he tried to stand up he would flip over, so instead of walking he would roll across the floor, howling, until he hit something and had to stop, or roll back the other way. I put him in a box and gave him water and half a raw egg with a syringe. The next morning his bandages had loosened enough that he could walk, and we found him out of the box, sitting on the bathroom rug when we woke up. This morning they took his stitches out, and he looks like a regular Frankenstein's Monster in his shaved, scarred, and iodine-speckled glory. Poor T.


Finally, we have a house to move into, and just in the nick of time since we have to be out of this place on Tuesday. It's south of downtown, a concrete and wooden combo, with a workspace underneath, and plenty of room for visitors if we ever get any. We're going over tomorrow to sign the contract and give it a top to bottom scrubbing. I'll post some pictures before we're sans internet.

Evolutionary Advantages of Subcutaneous Fat

Anyone who has grabbed a cat by the scruff of its neck knows how remarkably loose their skin is, a property conferred by the elasticity of their skin and the presence of subcutaneous fat. When little Tien was attacked by dogs last week one of the bites was on his left leg and abdomen. For a while we (vets included) thought that his abdomen had just been bruised, until Thursday night, when a previously closed wound opened up, revealing a large abscess, which Tien diligently licked clean. I took him into the vet to have it dressed properly (irrigated with peroxide and iodine, packed with antibiotic gel). All the puss that got squeezed out was basically liquefied adipose tissue, which made me realize that if it weren't for his loose skin, that bite would have punctured his upper colon. If he were in the wild, and able to escape, that would have done him in no matter what. But thanks to his wriggly, elastic nature, the damage done was localized, and not internal, something he might have been able to recover from. Maybe. As it stands now the vets want to cut into the abscess to clean it properly. Poor guy.

Birthday Blessing from Buddha

Every month the school where J and I work takes the kids to the wat next door for birthday blessings. I got to go along this month, and recieved this nifty cotton bracelet as compensation for another year on this planet.

Still Alive

I realized just now that it has been over a week since I've posted here. In fact, I haven't written since turning thirty, though that may or may not be the cause. Actually several factors have contributed, namely finding a new place to live, reading three books straight through, Tien being attacked by dogs, the worst pollution ever (the equivalent of smoking 5 packs a day), our first rain since mid October, and most recently a mysterious (but old) something-or-other (not mine) that will have to be looked at by a doctor.

In these pictures of our handsome Thai cat you can see three of the dog bites (accented in lovely iodine orange) he received from our neighborhood mongrels--one on his shoulders, and one on each flank. On Tuesday night he sneaked out while J was washing dishes. We didn't notice, then all of the sudden we heard dogs barking and a cat screaming. I ran around to the back of the house and chased the dogs off. We cleaned him up as best we could (he was covered in dog saliva and his own urine), and then let him sleep off the shock. The next day we took him to the vet and got him some antibiotics and painkillers. Today he ate some mackerel and took a leak (major progress), and this evening he actually emerged from beneath the couch on the balcony of his own volition. We're not worried about rabies (though we have yet to get him vaccinated), since our neighborhood strays are healthy enough, beyond the normal malnutrition caused by a diet of rice scraps. For the curious, they are typical "pariah dogs," and about half a step from being dingoes (yes, we do have them here in southeast Asia), their full compliment of hunting instincts being evidenced by their tidy lunge to poor Tien's flank.

Down the Street

These are pictures of a park with a pretty little waterfall down the street from our house, at the base of Doi Suthep. It's a nice place to walk to on Sunday afternoons. The latest batch of dogs, 29-32, always hang out at the entrance to the park.

Quotidian Efficacy

I started a new blog today--Quotidian Efficacy, named after two of our favorite davehickeyan mannerisms. It's really just an online recipe book for ourselves in blog format, but it might be of interest/use to other people, and the labeling should serve as a decent index. So far I've posted a yogurt recipe. Happy cooking.

Solar Dehydrator

We've been taking advantage of the hot/dry season, and making sun-dried tomatoes on the balcony. As an experiment we also made a passive-solar convection dehydrator out of a couple of old boxes. Unfortunately we don't have an ideal place to put it, and it only gets direct sun for about five hours a day. Our first trial batch of bananas is up on the top balcony, waiting for daylight. We'll let you know how it works.

Mormon Mentality and Global Warming

For a while now I've been planning some sort of post on latent environmental messages in the Book of Mormon. I realize that many of the readers of this blog are not LDS, so it would have been written for a more general audience. However, last night I came across this post at Mormon Mentality (a blog I had never visited before). In it the original writer, having just seen An Inconvenient Truth, asks why church leaders are so silent on the issue of global warming (and on environmental issues in general), why church members seem unconcerned, and what church members should be doing about it. The responses that followed covered a fairly broad spectrum of LDS thought, however most seemed to be arguing their points based on political ideology, showing how well, at least in my opinion, business and media have managed to politicize the issue. The following is the response I left to the post and ensuing discussion written (keep in mind) for an LDS audience, and from a largely scriptural perspective, since that is what seemed to be lacking from the essentially political discussion of the issue.

I’m even later in the discussion, but I read the whole dern thing, so I’ll at least say my bit:

In the Book of Mormon, a text in which I assume we all have some degree faith, or at least appreciation, the issue of human impact on the environment (of which global warming is an example, but not the only one) is treated, somewhat obliquely, through scriptures concerning the land of Desolation. In Helaman 3:5-7 and Alma 22:31 we learn that the land to the north had been severely deforested, to such an extent in fact that the animals inhabiting the area had all moved south in search of food. This “desolation” we will remember was the result of, and a significant factor in the collapse of the Jaredite civilization. The Jaredites were relatively isolated from the rest of the world. Even if we are so naive as to imagine that they occupied the whole of the North American continent (not very likely) their collapse had little if any effect on the world as a whole, other than open up land for occupation by the Nephites. They had no political, no economic ties with any countries on the other side of the globe. Their energy resources did not depend on the political stability of nations thousands of miles away. They had only the land the were given, the wisdom of their leaders, and the righteousness of their people.

We are told that the Book of Mormon is a message for our day. In it we read of the collapses of two civilizations. In both cases their prophets pleaded with them until the very end, but the people were too “wicked” to listen. As we learn from the example of the Jaredites, one symptom of a wicked people is over exploitation of resources and degradation of the local environment.

I write these words from Thailand (my wife quietly suffering in bed with a rash brought on by air pollution), a country no less cellphone, iPod and SUV obsessed than the USA, despite the current military junta’s desire to “simplify” and backtrack. The fact that they are poorer does not limit their aspirations, but instead makes them that much grander relatively speaking. We are quickly becoming one civilization (actually, I think we have been for some time), and the actions of one country can have repercussions around the world (the 1997 financial crisis originated right here). At this point in our civilization’s history there is no such thing as a strictly local environment. It’s all local. And just because your own back yard in the Whatever Valley, UT happens to be green and peaceful doesn’t mean that someone else’s desert isn’t blowing sand your way. Did you know that China’s soil (and our own) is being blown onto the Rockies as we speak, darkening the snow and making it melt faster? Do you people know where your water comes from?

I’m sure annegb has moved her defeatism and ignorance to greener digital pastures, but let me just say that I am ashamed to belong to the same church as her, and those that agreed with her in this discussion. If we are told to study the scriptures (BoM in particular) and follow the examples of the prophets, prophets who fought for their people, for their civilization, until the end, how in the world can anyone justify such a stance? I for one will follow the admonitions of our prophets and seek after “anything that is virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy,” regardless of whether it comes from that “putz” Al Gore. If there are virtues in the environmental movement (virtues like, frugality, conservation, self-sufficiency), and means to more fully magnify those virtues in myself and in my community, then we should embrace them without waiting for church leadership to tell us specifically to “go Green.”

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There is a baffling tendency among some members of the LDS church to treat the Republican party line as though it were gospel doctrine and political leaders as though they were church leaders. We are also, as a church, being left behind on environmental issues by evangelicals who are beginning to understand the role of stewardship in a more robust and productive way than we seem to. I would encourage any good Mormon members of the GOP to listen to this talk by Roger Kennedy to broaden their understanding of the US, the history of the land she now occupies, and the diversity of opinions that can be held by a Republican. Also this episode of Speaking of Faith discusses the environmental movement and growing evangelical engagement in a spiritual context.

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Here's more:

I’m sorry annegb, but if you think we agree on anything, I’m afraid you misunderstood me somewhere. I don’t think we should live merely decent lives, but rather exemplary ones, meaning radical change. If the rest of the world were to live up to our standards the results would be appalling. In the US we consume 20,030,000 barrels of oil per day. That’s more than China (6,391,000 bbl/day), Japan (5,578,000 bbl/day),Russia (2,800,000 bbl/day), Germany (2,677,000 bbl/day), and India (2,320,000 bbl/day) combined. Those countries are the top five oil consumers after the US, and have a combined population of 2,790,097,000. Nearly half the world’s population. Actually, about 300,000,000 shy of half, which happens to be the US population. As proud citizens of the USA we use, individually, .0667 barrels of oil per day. That doesn’t sound like much, but if our other buddies in the top six were to consume just as much their combined usage alone would top 186,285,476 barrels a day, or 67,994,198,877 bbl/year. And if the rest of the world were to live up to our standard, well, I don’t even want to do the math. The numbers for energy consumption, CO2 production, water consumption, waste accumulation, etc. are just as grim.

Much of the clean living, natural beauty, health, and happiness we enjoy in the US are the result of shipping our problems elsewhere. I happened to serve my mission in one of those places (the Dominican Republic) and I live in one now. On the flip side much of the clean living, natural beauty, health, and leisure we enjoy in the US are the results of work done by wacko environmentalists, labor organizers, and other lefty nutcases endorsing radical change.

That said, I wonder why the second-coming isn’t here yet? Maybe God is giving us a chance to repent and clean up Lake Baikal on our own. After all, the atonement is contingent upon our repentance.

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By the way, the people at co2science.org are totally evil, I don’t care what ward they belong to. They take a perfectly good, peer-reviewed study offering corroborating evidence for global warming, like the northward expansion of larch forests on to the tundra (due to the melting of the permafrost), and say that, in their opinion, it’s because CO2 is an excellent atmospheric fertilizer. When you do that to the scriptures it’s called “wresting.”

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Wouldn’t ignoring global warming count as “no management” as opposed to “intelligent management?” Or is this just part of a broader plan to get of rid NYC, Holland, Bangladesh, New Orleans, South Florida, and Tuvalu, all of them veritable blights on our globe, and true enemies of freedom. If only Iraq were below sea level.

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annegb- “I love to read and lay around and watch TV and eat junk food. I don’t have too many aspirations beyond getting the dishes done and serving dinner to my food-slut husband.”

Sorry if I got the wrong impression. Look, I don’t expect you to go out and become an environmental activist, nor do I think most members of the church should. There is plenty of good that can be done in the world, and I’m sure you’re anxiously engaged in your own area of concern. What I am asking is that those of us who do chose to focus on those particular issues not be antagonized by fellow members of the church. Especially when there is scriptural precedent for concern and action over environmental issues, and plenty of overlap in values between environmentalism (values I listed earlier, like frugality and self-sufficiency) and the church. I don’t think changing out your incandescent light bulbs for compact fluorescents is extremist. I don’t think recycling is extremist. I don’t think conserving water, electricity, or gasoline is extremist. Nor do I think they are based on feelings of fear or insecurity when they are in accordance with some of our core values as members of the church.

Each of us has been endowed with our own free agency (as you well know), and the world we create emerges from each of those individual actions. I don’t want to limit the good you do in the world, please don’t try to limit the good I do by saying there’s no point.

Thank you for your last comment, I feel I have a better idea where you’re coming from.

One more point, of general interest, on the rest of the world living up to our standards. As cleaner, lighter-weight substitutes for current technologies are deployed in developing nations, I actually think there is at least a (teensy-weensy) chance that they might do better than us. In the US our switching cost is greater since we are tied to our current infrastructure. It’s possible to envision a near future where currently struggling nations far outstrip us in quality of life while we struggle to catch up. Oh, the irony.

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Jonathan, am I correct if I summarize your argument thus:
the world is going to heat drastically, it’s the sun’s fault entirely, and there is nothing we can do but embrace the coming apocalypse?

I think scientists who actually work in field of climate change are concerned because in addition to the poorly understood mechanism of global warming caused by the sun (an estimated 0.6˚ in the past 100 years), human beings are generating enormous amounts of gasses (not just CO2) which have a well documented correspondence to higher temperatures here on earth (acounting for the other 0.4˚). In other words, we are making a bad situation worse, since many of these processes are feedback loops–increased CO2 leads to higher temperatures which lead to increased CO2 or CH4 (as previously sequestered sources of methane and CO2 are exposed by melting ice). By focusing on the anthropogenic side of the equation (greenhouse gas) I’d like to think we are merely being pragmatic. But then I’m just an art fag, not a rocket scientist (or does that mean you’re just an engineer and care little for hard science). Are you one of those who think we should launch giant sunshades into outer space?

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In Dallas, where I was raised, I used to mark the coming of spring by the blooming of the redbuds. It always happened the week of my birthday without fail. For the past five years they have been blooming earlier and earlier. In Austin (which is suposed to be only two weeks ahead of Dallas) I have seen them bloom in December and January. Also several plant species are are creeping north, ball moss (a bromeliad, related to pineapples), is well established in Dallas now. My parents have coma sprouting in their back yard (it was absent my entire childhood). And Jerusalem thorn (native to south Texas, like coma) is becoming a veritable weed in Austin.

This year’s freaky weather in the US (and probably here in Thailand, where we’ve had record cold) is due to El Niño. For signs of long term climate change I’d pay attention to the plants.

Relinquishment

About seven years ago Bill Joy wrote a piece for Wired Magazine , famously entitled "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" in response to a conversation he had with John Searle and Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil, for those of you who might not be familiar, uses what he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns to argue that three main technologies (GNR: genetic engineering, nanotech, and robotics) will shortly give rise (within forty years) to such a tremendous growth in technology that we will reach what has been referred to as a technological singularity, where the world around us will essentially begin to wake up, and we will have merged with our machines so much as to have become, effectively, a different species. I hope to write more about this soon, especially the similarities between narratives of a technological singularity, particularly as Kurzweil envisions it, and Christian narratives of the "end times" and the Millennium. In Kurzweil's book The Age of Spiritual Machines he includes a long quote from Industrial Society and Its Future, also known as The Unabomber Manifesto, in which several dystopian outcomes of technological advancement are outlined: our technological systems become so complex that we are no longer capable of running them, so they run themselves, making decisions in their own self interest; or powerful technology is only available to an elite group that either decides that the rest of humanity is superfluous, and therefore expendable, or that the rest of humanity doesn't know what's good for it, and needs to be adapted to the life that awaits it, through genetic manipulation, drugs, and other treatments. Joy, who himself could easily have been one of Kaczynski's victims, also quotes from the same text, reluctantly admitting that there is some merit to aspects of his argument. After citing his own not-a-Luddite credentials (my computer literally could not run without him) Joy lays out an argument for relinquishment of technologies that may lead to what he calls "knowledge-enabled destruction." He points out that though nuclear weapons are enormously destructive, the hardware costs associated with developing them are prohibitive for many nations, and the information necessary for successful implementation is well protected. Genetic engineering, nanotech, and robotics, however, are essentially information technologies, rather than industrial technologies, and therefore subject to the same deflationary trends as computers (DNA synthesis is currently around a dollar a base pair, and bound to drop further), with the same money buying twice as much computing power every eighteen months or so. With time, DNA synthesis will require a couple thousand dollars, and a device that either runs on its own, or talks to your laptop via USB, or wireless (or whatever comes next), and a bit of software. This setup (and this is my example, not Joy's) inevitably leads to the much prognosticated scenario of pimple-faced hackers in the back bedroom cobbling together biological rather than software viruses. Or if we survive that stage, there is always the specter of self-replicating magic pixie-dust (or so it will seem) that renders the world a desert, or a gob of gray-goo. In order to avoid these dangers, as well as others, Joy believes that it will be necessary for researchers to relinquish, to all together abandon, certain avenues of research. In Kurzweil's response to Bill Joy he says that the temptation will simply be too great, and the technology too cheap, to ensure that dangerous research isn't done. Any nation that agrees to abandon certain technologies will therefore be unable to defend itself against those that don't. In a way I can't quite put my finger on, this feels a bit like the US's argument against ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. Which brings me to the point I really wanted to make.

We're just no good at giving things up, even when the alternative is better than what we have now. Our current culture is one of entitlement. We feel entitled to our cars, our houses, our yards, our entertainment, our lifestyle in general. Instead of feeling grateful, we feel that we deserve those things, and probably a little more besides ("Where's my flying car, anyhow?" is our civilization's running gag). This culture of entitlement is an inexorable tidal force against which a tentative culture of relinquishment will have to fight in order to establish itself.

As a thought experiment, let's try a few of these out:
1) Would you relinquish your car for a bicycle, or public transportation?
2) Would you relinquish disposable diapers for washable?
3) Would you relinquish your clothes dryer or dishwasher for air and sunlight or a little elbow grease?
4) Would you relinquish your lawn for a vegetable garden, or something resembling the native landscape they tore up to build your house?
5) Would you relinquish your azaleas for blueberries, your crepe myrtles for fruit trees?
6) Would you relinquish your synthetic fabrics for natural?
7) Would you relinquish television or movies for a hobby or continuing education?
8) Would you relinquish your country's military budget for a more robust educational system, or universal health care?
9) Would you relinquish channelized water removal and treatment for wetlands?
10) Would you relinquish nations for small, geographically-determined, self-sustaining, semi-autonomous regions?
11) Would you relinquish power for referendum?

I'm sure some of these sound nice enough (if somewhat idealistic or naive), others impractical, and some downright impossible or dangerous. As a culture we are not geared toward giving things up. If we do, then we fear falling victim to the principle Kuzrweil points out in his rebuttal of Bill Joy--all the other guys will get ahead. If we are ever to develop a culture of relinquishment and restraint on a global scale, then how can we do it without cultivating one in our own metaphorical gardens? In many ways our (or maybe I'm just talking about myself here) perspective has become too broad (or too scattered) and at the same time too narrow, causing us to ignore the middle area, the intermediate terrain in our lives where our actions might be most effective. If we as individuals can learn to give a few things up, in favor of something better, then maybe the sum of all those individual changes can infect the culture as a whole.

What do you think we should give up, and what would you replace it with?

Things Music Makes Us Want to Do

Yesterday Jami walked up to the room from the studio, where she'd been sewing. I was hunched (I'm always hunched as the picture below will attest) over the computer, grumbling about the fact the Google wasn't loading (an earthquake, 7 point sommething, off the coast of Taiwan had ripped through a couple bundles of fiber on the ocean floor, closing markets all over Asia, as well strangling any web traffic from the western US), and I couldn't check sources for an essay I'm writing, and trying to annotate. "Some of this music I'm listening to makes me just want to live simply. You know, without much stuff." She'd been listening to Cavedweller, in all its Lo-Fi gloriousness. So I gave up, listened to our favorite troglodyte, mentally thanked JBB and the Quist girls for introducing us to Dirk and his music, and grilled pork and pineapple on our balcony, which we ate with sticky rice. I then spent the next four hours working on drawings for a project proposal in AutoCAD. Are we living without a lot of stuff if all we actually own here are a computer, a couple of hard drives, a couple of cameras, some clothes and a handful books?

Baskets of fire wood for our tiny Thai BBQ.

Quasimodo cooks.

Piña.

Living without a lot of stuff. On the floor.