Here was the view from the mile 135 Denali Lookout point last Tuesday afternoon. The mountain was magnificent. The tallest mountain in North America. All 20,310 feet (6,190.5 m) were showing, just about. Aconcagua in Argentina is 22,831 feet (6,959 m). But Aconcagua is one of many peaks in the Andes range. The whole of Denali can be seen from 3000 feet and up. And Tuesday it was all out and clear.
After about four years in Alaska, I wanted to make a post card of clouds, labeled "Denali as most tourists see it." There was a couple from Toronto there taking in the sight and I wanted to let them know how lucky they were to see this great view. And we became friends for the next couple of days, enjoying the park together.
Below is that same view on Thursday afternoon on our return to Anchorage. My postcard view. You'd never know North America's highest mountain was hiding behind those clouds. You can also see that a lot of snow melted in those two days.
And below is a picture of Denali from the North (on the right), on the road in the National Park. Still clear.
Our Canadian friends got great views of the mountain. Below it resembles a full moon just rising.
But as lucky as they were with the Mountain, they were unlucky with animals. I don't remember a trip to Denali when we saw so few big animals. The few we saw were not particularly close. There were plenty of ptarmigan, gulls, and ground squirrels.
First we hiked along the Savage River trail. We've learned from past experience that this early in the season, the trail on the east side is still full of snow and ice in parts, so we hike to the bridge along the west side (right side in the photo) and returned the same way.
As you get closer to the bridge (about one mile each way) you start to see these Tolkien rocks.
And excuse me for putting all these photos up extra large. Denali National Park is extra large and even this effort doesn't do it justice.
We stopped at Sanctuary campground for lunch, where we saw this giant head in the rocky mountain across the way. Anyone else see it? Two of us did.
Just before Teklanika campground, there is a pair of small lakes, ponds really. One had buffleheads and pintails and a kingfisher. The other had northern shovelers.
We parked at the Teklanika overview - which is as far as you are allowed to drive - and walked down to the bridge below. You can drive in the first 30 miles only until May 20 when the tour busses start. (Well, they already had some tour busses for the benefit of cruise line passengers, but not too many.) Beginning May 20 you can only drive as far as Savage River (12 miles in.) The road is still closed at mile 40 due a a huge avalanche a few years back. So 20 miles further to Eilson, and then the next 30 to Wonder Lake aren't accessible. An Anchorage Daily News article say it won't be done until 2026.
It was only as we were headed back after a long day, that we saw the first large animal - a caribou. There were two moose after that. Denali - being far north with a short growing season and a long winter, is no Serengeti. There just isn't enough food for the large herds in Africa. But three large animal sightings is pitiful. It was a VERY windy day, and perhaps that kept the animals hunkered down.
Our new friends headed to their hotel outside the park and we got back to our campground. I'd brought a bunch of the broken tree limbs from the back yard post winter clean up and some nice dry pieces of firewood and we quickly had a dinner cooked in foil. First on the grill while the flames were high, and then on the coals a little longer.
Before the fire trucks, in fact yesterday, Sunday, we were at the Anchorage Botanical Garden Spring Conference downtown at the Dena'ina Center. I'd never been to one of these before. I was a bit underwhelmed, but I did get some ideas and tips and inspiration. In this session (on the right) we learned how to make a liquid to spray on plants to get them the calcium, and boron they need to flourish.
Most useful, I think, was meeting someone from the Anchorage Soil and Water Conservation District who will come to my house next fall and test the soil and make suggestions. We've got some areas where only the hardiest plants survive. I'm hoping that can be changed.
But today I woke up to see two fire trucks across the street. I was worried that a neighbor was having an health emergency, since there didn't seem to be a fire anywhere. When I went out, I saw there were actually four AFD vehicles.
Since I was out, I decided to walk around the neighborhood and get some blood moving in my veins. I kept wondering about why they needed so many vehicles for a paramedic call. When I got back, the firefighters/paramedics (there are far more paramedic calls than fire calls) were walking back to the vehicles. Not from the building across the street, but from around the corner.
I asked one of them what was happening and he told me they had been viewing the house around the corner that had burned. Which was when I realized that I'd read about a fire nearby while we were visiting out granddaughter Outside, but had forgotten about it. And I was reminded again that it's always good to ask rather than assume.
I also found out today that my very low carb diet, of the last four months, did indeed make a difference on my A1c blood test. That was gratifying. I'd thought that it hadn't made a difference based on another test result I got last week. But this test wasn't in among the results until today.
I also went to pick up a book on hold at the library. The door I normally go in was locked, so I went over to the main entrance where I saw the sign that said the library was closed for Seward's Day. I had gone to the library website to see how long they were going to hold the book, but there was nothing there that I saw to say the library was closed. Oh well.
This evening I walked over to see which house had burned. It was an apartment building. What is odd is that another house almost next door, burned down in March 2016. The red circle is the recently burned house. The purple circle is the new house built where the 2016 house burned.
Here's the building a little closer up. Another neighbor came out to see what I was doing near the
burnt house. He said he'd called the fire department that night and helped to get another family out. There was a man who went back in to get his wife. Both died. It was arson he said.
I noticed that both news articles were written by the same reporter. I'm guessing that he didn't visit the site this time because he should have noticed that it was practically next door to the previous fire.
Hope you had a good Seward's Day and thought about the man who negotiated the purchase of Alaska from the Russians - who actually only occupied a relatively small portion of the land.
My phone asked me to log in with my Apple ID today. On a whim, I tried Air Drop after and it worked. So, in what I hope is a long window, I'll put up some pictures.
Grow North is the farm in Mountain View where the Refugee Assistance and Immigration Service of Anchorage Catholic Social services grows food for the summer and operates a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) with once a week pick ups and sells fresh vegetables and some baked goods as well during the week. You can't get much fresher food in Anchorage unless it's from your own garden.
The garlic and the picture of the farm are from last week.
This week's box includes:
Classic cauliflower,
Crunchy kohlrabi
Unique malabar spinach,
Tasty bok choi,
And some lovely sage for the herb of the week!
From the email that CSA subscribers get:
"Malabar spinach seems like it would retain similarities to that of regular spinach. The plant uses the name spinach in it, yet the ironic part of that the two could not be more different. Malabar spinach grows on a vine, granting it the nickname of vine spinach, whereas regular spinach grows from the ground (like many leafy greens)."
This Goose Lake as I rode by The ducks hang out here because its's spot where people feed them.
On a completely different bike ride, out past Taku Lake, they've had the big blue sign up much of the summer, but the little one just popped up. If you can't read the small sign (which I'm guessing you can't) it says, "We are upgrading the skatepark!" It also says the construction budget is $1.2 million. I know we've had inflation over the years, but really? $1.2 million for curved concrete? Curious how much profit the contractor, also listed as "Street Maintenance and Grindline Skate Parks LLC" is making. I realize they may be doing more than just the skateboard park, but it would be nice if there was a watchdog group which gathered all the data on summer construction projects and evaluated how the money was spent.
In other construction news, the ACS fiber optic team was out on Crescent in Geneva Woods today. We're on the Lake Otis side, but all this area is getting wired. That bright orange wire is popping up all around the neighborhoods.
And it's mushroom season. Here are some making appearances in my yard.
Don't have time now to research these. The orange one is an amanita - hallucinogenic and al over Anchorage now. It can also make you really sick. Not planning on eating any, though I'm waiting for the King Boletes and the Shaggy Manes.
But I have started eating the olive bread I made last night. It came out well. The one in the back is a dill experiment. (We got lots of fresh dill from Grow North Farm last week.)
Meanwhile J got off the phone this evening with her long time friend (does 45 years count as long time?) who lives on the Haleakala foothills in Maui. Her house is far from Lahaina, but there is also a fire up in that neighborhood as well and she's been evacuated and is staying with friends. If I recall right, Maui has its share of eucalyptus trees, and their oil burns easily. May the fire be quickly extinguished and your house survive.
There was sun and blue sky mostly this morning and when we got to the first point on the park road with a view of Denali, there it was. There were a few clouds near the top, but on closer look they were behind the mountain.
But even before we got to that point, we saw a porcupine. I remember seeing one live porcupine in the wild in Alaska a long time ago, so this was a big deal.
And then that first glimpse of Denali. It's in the middle and looks like a cloud in the first picture.
But then, that's what the telephoto lens is for.
I've got about 15 or 20 pictures of Denali today. I'll limit myself to these three. It just dominates the view and may explain why we didn't see too many animals today. We also didn't drive in that far because we knew we also had to go home today. So we didn't go past the point where you could see the mountain.
At one view point, I just climbed up the tundra above the road and kept looking back down at the expanding landscape and the mountain.
Denali is still very much in early spring. There are few (I don't remember seeing any) new green leaves. And driving home, past the Denali viewpoint at mile 135, the trees seemed to go from just budding to full on new green. But on my tundra hike I did see a few of these. Don't know what they are.
We came upon this ptarmigan while we had some classical Indian music on. It seemed to pay close attention to the sitar and flute.
This is a white crowned sparrow we encountered as we did the Savage River trail again, this time with sun shining on us.
We saw a moose and a caribou outside the park on the way home. A man was taking a picture next to his car along the highway. I thought of the mountains to the east. When suddenly a caribou dashes into the road in front of me and doesn't a 180 when he sees my car rushing toward it. I guess that kind of quick change of direction is good wolf dodging genes. Was the man waiting to take a picture of a caribou being hit by a car?
This sad picture was near the road to Willow. Remnants of a fire now that many years ago.
The Riley Creek campgrounds now distinguishes between the under 30 foot and over 30 foot spaces. Our VW camper doesn't take up much room, but for the most part the bigger spaces have more privacy. So the space we normally have had we couldn't use. We'd reserved online as in the past, but this year there was no place to do it live. The Mercantile - the shop at Riley where you normally got your receipt - was closed. And they had cards on all the A sites (>30 feet> telling you not to park there.
Also, with the gas tax Anchorage added last year, gas is cheaper in Wasilla. And amazingly, the cheapest was at Trapper Creek - $3.04 for unleaded.
Here are three connected short discussions. 1. ISER Discussion on Red Dog Mine One Week From Tomorrow.
Long-Term Benefits to Communities of Extractive Industry Partnerships: Evaluating the Red Dog Mine
Matthew Berman, Bob Loeffler, and Jennifer Schmidt Mining and oil and gas companies developing resources on land historically occupied and used by Indigenous peoples have faced criticism for offering few benefits to local communities while inflicting environmental damage. The Red Dog Mine -- a joint venture between Teck Resources, Inc. and the NANA Regional Corporation -- has often been cited as a counter-example for developing extractive industries in a way that benefits Indigenous communities. Although the mine has unquestionably brought significant financial benefits to the area, questions persist about its long-term benefits to local communities. We report on a study that assessed the long-term benefits of the Red Dog mine based on findings from a unique 14-year panel dataset. The analysis addressed the following set of questions: what percentage of the mine workers live within the region, and what percentage of the total payroll do local workers receive? How long do most local residents hired to work at the mine keep these jobs, and how does landing a job at Red Dog affect workers' mobility and long-run earnings? The findings illustrate the strengths and limitations of industry partnerships in rural Alaska, and offer insights relevant to communities across the arctic and around the world.When: Friday, March 6, 12pm - 1pm Where: ISER Conference Room,
Third Floor, 1901 Bragaw Street, Suite 301 Note: This will not be streamed or recorded
"Library to end U.S. document duty
San Diego library says its depository role is unneeded when most docs are online."
I understand the librarian's concern for space. I'm concerned though, that if these documents are only available online from the Government Printing Office, then documents can disappear. Documents can be edited and even changed.
I first started thinking about this when I saw that the online Anchorage Daily News didn't match the print version. That edits were made after publication and the reader couldn't tell what was changed. (It would just say, "Updated dd/mm/yy")
3. Libraries As Depicted In Susan Orlean's A Library Book
The genesis for this book was the 1986 fire that destroyed hundreds of thousands of books in the Los Fahrenheit 451 (which is the temperature when paper ignites). She also discusses the wonderful memories she has of going to the library with her mother as a child, but that the internet cut her off from libraries until she rediscovered them with her son. It's an important book.
Angeles Central Library. But it is much, much more than that. It's an homage to libraries and their role in maintaining culture. It's a hands on look at what happens behind the scene at LA's central library. It's a look at the burning of books (she even forces herself to burn one to experience it herself.) There are details of the heat of the fire. But also the tradition of book burning and library fires around the world - some accidental, many intentional. She looks at how many and which libraries were burned by the Nazis in WW II and how many by Allied bombing. She talks about people for whom the LA library was important, like Ray Bradbury, who read books there voraciously in lieu of going to college, and eventually wrote
So, given all the fires, libraries alone can't protect the government archives, but especially now, we should be preserving government reports in hard copy all around the country so that online versions can be checked for omissions and changes.
All three posts are about information dissemination about important topics. Whether a University's research unit, a library's holdings of government documents, and the cultural and historical significance of libraries.
I was looking through old posts trying to find one where I suggested a statue and campaign support for the first 10 Republican Senators to pledge to fight Trump. I'm still looking for that one, but I also found this very relevant post from July 2016.
I hope you don't think I'm being lazy here. I know that very few people have the time to read even 50% of what I post and this seems particularly relevant today.
It's my thoughts on reading The Big Burn by Timothy Egan, with more relevance today than when I first posted it. (Well, it was relevant then and had enough people paid attention it might be less relevant today.) Let's see what's in it:
√ an account of huge forest fires in Montana in the early 1900's
√ a president attacking government employees' valiant attempts to preserve the environment
√ outrageous treatment of and discrimination against immigrants
Here's the old post:
From Timothy Egan's, The Big Burn:
"What passed for law and constitutional protections in Morenci, [company owned mining town in Arizona, 1910] were thugs hired by Phelps Dodge. They maintained a three tier wage system: one for trouble-free whites, one for Mexicans, one for Italians. Such attitudes are typical in a decade when nine million immigrants came to the United States, and one-third of the population was either foreign-born or a child of someone born abroad. The Italian surge in particular angered those who felt the nation was no longer recognizable, had lost its sense of identity. And they hated all these strange languages spoken in shops, schools, and churches. The Immigration Restriction League, founded by Boston blue bloods with family ties to the old Tories of England, campaigned to keep "undesirable classes" from entering the country. They meant Italians, Greeks, Jews, and people from eastern Europe.
"The scum of creation has been dumped on us," said the native politician Thomas Watson. "The most dangerous and corrupting hordes of the Old World have invaded us." It was not just pelicans [auto-correct changed my version of politicians to pelicans] who attacked Mediterranean immigrants as a threat to the American way of life. Francis A. Walker, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called Italian and Greek immigrants "beaten men from beaten towns, representing the worst failures in the struggles for existence." Another educated expert cautioned Americans against "absorbing the equitable blood from Southern Europe." (pp. 131-2)
"moved to the mining town of Monte Cristo, Washington in Snohomish County.[7] Monte Cristo was expected to produce a fortune of gold and silver because evidence of mineral deposits were discovered in 1889. This led to many prospectors moving to the area in hopes of becoming rich, with the financial investment of billionaire John D. Rockefeller in the entire Everett area creating an exaggerated expectation of the area's potential."
He returned to Germany in 1901, found a wife, and returned with her to the US in 1902. The Trumps, coming from northern Europe, while part of this huge surge of immigrants, came from a more privileged group of immigrants, they weren't Italians or Greeks or Jews. Though by 1917 the US was at war with their country of origin.
Actually, immigration is but a small part of the book. The main focus is the boom towns of Idaho and Montana as the railroads opened access to the forests just after Teddy Roosevelt, with the guidance of Gifford Pinchot, created millions of acres of national forests and parks in the West. But they had to fight Eastern corporations that were ravaging the new public land with their rapacious taking of minerals and timber. This included a huge scandal over Alaska coal. Roosevelt's second term was up and he chose not to run again. (He'd come in to office from the vice presidency when president McKinley was shot and had only served seven years.) While he was off on safari in Africa, Taft, who had promised Roosevelt to protect the forests and the new concept of conservation, had instead appointed pro-development Richard Ballinger as secretary of the interior.
"The interior secretary, whose duty was to oversee an empire of public land on behalf of the American people, had once backed a syndicate as it tried to take control of coal in a part of Alaska that was later added to the Chugach National Forest. . ."
"Beyond the Alaska coal deal, Ballinger was now showing his true colors - as a traitor to the progressives, Pinchot believed. "You chaps who are in favor of this conservation program are all wrong," Ballinger said in a speech. "You are hindering the development of the West. In my opinion, the proper course is to divide it up among the big corporations and let the people who know how to make money out of it get the benefits of the circulation of money." (pp. 94-5)
That's all backdrop to the story of a band of well-trained and highly motivated new rangers whose job was to oversee huge tracts of land newly designated as national forests and parks. ("Supervisor Koch . . . felt protective about his five million or so acres . . .") Land that was being exploited by mining and timber companies and hordes of folks taking the new railroad into the tiny boom towns hoping to get rich.
As the title of the book suggests, the book is about fires, as the rangers struggle on meagre salaries to protect the towns and even more, the newly created national forests from the ravages of fire in the bone dry summer of 1910. There was no rain, but lots of thunder and lightening, which started thousands of fires that summer.
I'm not through with the book yet, but I thought the sections on immigration give some historical perspective to today's political debates. And overall, the book shows that the fights between the corporations looking to exploit natural resources and the government fighting to preserve some of the natural space of the continent, wasn't much different then, though time allows us more facts about what was happening back then.
In a book Pinchot wrote at the time - The Fight for Conservation -
"He predicted that America might one day, within this century, be a nation of two or three hundred million people. And what would his generation leave them? Their duty was to the future. To ensure that people in 2010 would have a country of clean water, healthy forests, and open land would require battle with certain groups, namely 'the alliance between business and politics.' It was, he said, 'the snake that we must kill.'"(p. 158)
Given that today corporations once again have great influence over Congress - enough to prevent or pervert what they most oppose - and the importance of money in politics is major issue, I'd say his view of things was pretty prescient.
My birder friend Dianne agreed to take my daughter, nieta, and me birding today. We hit some Anchorage spots, then went onto the military base. Here are a few highlights - though I increasingly frustrated with my inability to take consistently clear pictures with my camera of distant birds.
A common loon with her big chick
This is an osprey that flew to the top of the tree with a good sized fish. It's dangling pointed toward 5 o'clock from the birds talons.
And salmon were spawning.
By mid day I realized how smoky it was. The paper this morning had said that we had a big fire (spread by yesterday's strong winds) to the South and another to the north. By midday it became really obvious.
Best I can tell, this is an F-22. One of four or five that flew over.
This is a white winged cross beak. The colors are hard to see silhouetted against the smoky sky.
And this is the smoke shrouded sun later in the day.
As I said the other day (actually it was just yesterday) news stories fly by so fast and superficially, that there's hardly time to put all the pieces together. We get random puzzle pieces, bits of news, then they either disappear or get thrown into a big messy pile. So no wonder people don't understand much. Any story that requires remembering sixteen other stories that whizzed past, won't have any more meaning than the headline or talking point used to frame it by whatever news outlet one attends to.
Antipathy toward time rooted in the very human combination of vanity and existential dread is perhaps the most forgivable type of chronophobia. But more dangerous forms of time denial pervade our society. Fiscal years and congressional terms enforce a blinkered view of the future. Short-term thinkers are rewarded with bonuses and reelection, while those who dare to take seriously our responsibility to future generations find themselves out of office. Even two years of forethought seem beyond the capacity of legislators these days, when stop-gap spending measures have become the norm. Institutions that do aspire to the long view — state and national parks, public libraries and universities — are increasingly seen as taxpayer burdens. . .
. . . We lack a sense of temporal proportion — the durations of the great chapters in Earth’s history, the rates of change during previous intervals of climate instability, the intrinsic time-scales of “natural capital” like groundwater systems.
We are, in effect, time illiterate, and this ignorance of planetary time undermines any claims we may make to modernity. We are navigating recklessly toward our future using conceptions of time as primitive as the pre-Copernican view of the universe. We think we’re the center of it all, unable to see either the past or future in proper perspective.
Another LA Times story, by Susanne Rust, tries to be timeful, after this year of horrific California fires, to look at the history of fires and other catastrophic events in California:
In 1860, a young botanist raised in New York and schooled in Connecticut found himself on the payroll of the newly formed California Division of Mines and Geology. His job: Roam the vast, new state, taking samples and observations of plants and animals.
Over four years journeying across California, William Brewer witnessed torrential rains that turned the Central Valley into a vast, white-capped lake; intolerable heat waves that made the “fats of our meats run away in spontaneous gravy;” violent earthquakes; and fires he described as “great sheets of flame, extending over acres.”
He, like explorers, journalists and settlers before him, wondered whether people could permanently settle in California, said David Igler, a professor of history at UC Irvine.
“People were flabbergasted by what was happening,” said Igler, referring to the droughts, floods and quakes of the mid-1800s. “They wondered whether this was a place where we could even really settle and where agriculture could be maintained.”
She writes about how the Indians who inhabited California lived in small groups that moved around and practiced controlled burns until the Spanish outlawed them. The Spanish. They were the landlords of California for a while before the US kicked them out through force and violence. But that's another historical amnesia when we talk about immigration.
And I began this morning working my way through another chapter of Seth Abramson's Proof of Collusion. That's a book that tries to put all the pieces together in the Trump-Russia collusion story. I've posted about that book already. It's an example of taking years of news stories and organizing them into sensible, in depth, cohesive organization of the facts. In the chapter today he writes about how Michael Cohen was a school boy friend of Felix Sater, who immigrated with his family from the Soviet Union when he was eight.
Abramson's book averages about five or six footnotes per page, so even Abramson is only telling us part of the story, but surely a lot more than most of us know despite the non-stop reports interspersed with click-bait and stories about the homeless, immigrants, murders, football players, weekly movie box-office earnings, and other relatively random bits of infotainment. So I checked footnote 78 from that chapter - a September 2017 article in the Nation on Felix Sater, by Bob Dreyfuss.
"Of all the characters caught up in Russiagate, none come close to Sater for having a decades-long record as a larger-than-life, outside-the-law, spy agency-linked wheeler-dealer from the pages of a John le Carré novel. His past record includes a conviction for lacerating a man’s face with a broken margarita glass in a bar brawl and his involvement in a multimillion-dollar stock fraud and money-laundering scheme. Despite that record, which came before he worked with Trump, Sater spent nearly a decade working with the Trump Organization in search of deals in Russia and other former Soviet republics. But on August 28, Sater made the front pages of the Times and The Washington Post, thanks to leaked copies of e-mails that he sent in late 2015 and early 2016 to Cohen, concerning Sater’s efforts to work with a group of Russian investors to set up a flagship Trump property in the Russian capital.
In language that Cohen himself described to the Times as “colorful,” Sater seemed nearly beside himself as he reported on his work in Moscow on behalf of Trump:
“'Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” wrote Sater. “I will get all of [Vladimir] Putins [sic] team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.… I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected.” Echoing a line that would later become Trump’s own description of why he and Putin might get along, Sater wrote that the Russian leader “only wants to deal with a pragmatic leader, and a successful business man is a good candidate for someone who knows how to deal.'”
Netflix and Prime and HBO should be doing these stories now, when they can make a difference. These characters and their misbehavior are as colorful and bizarre as anything they have up now. And learning about who all these people are now would help Congress members and voters understand how outrageous the Republic Congress' lack of integrity is.
All the President's Men - the Watergate tale - came out in June 1974 - not quite two months before Nixon resigned. The movie didn't come out until 1976.
Proof of Collusion came out November 13, 2018. But the Trump story is much less focused than the Watergate burglary. Trump's tentacles go out long into the past. His crimes and corruptions are myriad. His ties to Russia, Ukraine, and other nations - through his obsessions with putting up giant phallic buildings with with his name on them - require much more patience and attention from readers and viewers. And Bernstein and Woodward were better known as the two reporters who had been keeping the story alive.
Yes, long term, comprehensive knowledge packaged so that United States consumers of news can make sense of what is happening - in detail - is severely lacking. Instead of presenting the United States viewers with the picture of the completed puzzle (like on the box of jigsaw puzzles), or even sections of the puzzle as the pieces get pieced together, we get shown on piece at a time and little or none of how it fits into the larger picture.
The optimistic view of all this would be that technology has been changing so fast we haven't yet figured out how to slow down and get decent journalism for most people. Newspapers, trying to survive, are fighting for survival and clicks, and that eventually we'll figure this all out. More pessimistically, that hacking and trolling is taking us down the path to a version of Orwell's 1984. Just a few decades later than Orwell predicted.
You want more? An obvious part of the problem of getting the big picture is follow up of stories. So here's a video that was posted two days ago - a talk by Robert Tibbo, Edward Snowden's attorney in Hong Kong who is also the attorney for the refugees in Hong Kong who hid Snowden while he was there. It seems the Hong Kong bar association has created trumped up charges against Tibbo and are trying to disbar him. He tells us that they demand information from him, but the complaint against him is from an anonymous source and they refuse to give him any details.
I'd note that I lived in Hong Kong for a year when the British were still in charge. While it was nominally a democracy, people didn't have a whole lot of power compared to many democracies. Today it is part of China and the special protections Hong Kong people thought they'd gotten before they were handed back by the British, have little meaning. The fact that the bar association is doing what the government wants it to do is hardly surprising. China doesn't treat lawyers or anyone opposing them with much respect. Tibbo's arguments here are based on bar association standards in Western countries. I didn't hear him citing any Hong Kong rules or laws (though I may have missed it.) That's not to belittle his situation or his valiant efforts on behalf of his clients. But it suggests this video is aimed at the West, particularly Canada (his home) whose government is also dragging its feet in accepting this refugees.
Here's a Montreal article about Tibbo. It gives more background on Tibbo's life and legal career in Hong Kong. I can't figure out the date, but it seems to be much closer to when Snowden was in Hong Kong.
It got up to 50˚F (10˚C) in Anchorage yesterday and about 60% of our yard was snow free. Unusual for mid December in Anchorage.
Our red-eye to LA was pretty uneventful - which is a good thing - but as we flew over what was about where Santa Barbara should be, I could see the fires in the mountains. There was one big raging conflagration and then many little ones scattered all over. These pictures demonstrate why I need to get serious about learning how to take control of my camera. It works pretty well under normal circumstances, but not in unusual ones, like taking night pictures of forest fires from an airplane. The first shot was the biggest fire.
Mind you, that's way off in the distance, and we were 30 minutes out of LA, so maybe a pilot can figure out what our elevation probably was - well over 10,000 feet I would guess.
These next two pictures are more 'artistic.' The lens was open a long time so there's some jiggle and lots of reflection in the window. This is with a wider angle view. It gives a better sense of there being fire in a lot of different places, not just one ridge.
And this last one shows totally different hot spots.
As we got closer to LA we headed out over the ocean, so if there were any fires closer to LA I couldn't see them from the right side of the plane.
My computer tells me it was 48˚F at 7 am in LA.
UPDATE 4:30pm: We got the bus to my mom's house, slept until 2pm, then I biked to the beach and up along the coast. Felt great. The only sign of the fires was smoke along the mountains to the north.
You can see that as you get closer, things clear up a bit.
From Santa Monica pier looking north.
A couple miles closer and you can see where the mountains meet the ocean.
Another mile closer and you can distinguish three different points meeting the ocean.
We stopped at Sanctuary campground for lunch, where we saw this giant head in the rocky mountain across the way. Anyone else see it? Two of us did.
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