The Geography Of The Assassination of General Soleimani

I was hoping to post pictures of flowers or something like that today.  Australia is burning because we can't give up our luxuries to fight climate change.  But we are in a huge crisis of our president's making. We are focused on possible war with Iran.  (No I don't think it will be anything like a conventional war.  It will be a 21st Century guerrilla war, with lots of cyber terrorism.)

So let's just look at something simple - geography.  

Distance from Tehran to Baghdad.

For those with vision issues, and whose computers can't read text in images, Tehran is 433 miles from Baghdad.

Here's a map from StatsAmerica of all of the US within 425 miles of Washington DC. to get a sense of how far 432 miles is.

Distance from Iranian border to Bagdad.

Baghdad is 209 Km = 129 miles from the Iranian border


Distance from Washington DC to Bagdad.

DC is 10,009* km (or 6,219 miles) from Baghdad.
*different sites show slightly different distances.

Imagine if an avowed enemy of our country had troops within 130 miles of our border.  How would the US react?  (I'd note that when Castro took over in Cuba  (90 miles from the US border) he came to the US and ultimately both had issues with each other. And the US imposed an embargo on Cuba.  But when the Soviets put missiles in Cuba, we risked a nuclear war confronting Soviet ships coming to Cuba.)

If we only consider geography, it is clear that Iran has a much larger vested interest in what happens in Iraq than the US does.  Imagine if any country assassinated a top US official in while he was in Toronto or Acapulco. I was told the other night by an Iranian/American who had just returned that a special position had been created for Soleimani that made him, in essence, second in command.  Reuters says he reported only to the Supreme Commander.  CNBC quotes defense policy expert Roman Schweizer, 

"This is the equivalent of Iran killing the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and then taking credit for it."

The US came to be when a relatively small, rag-tag army, used some conventional and some essentially guerrilla warfare to defeat the greatest power in the world at that time.  Eventually the US took over that position.  In Vietnam we discovered that guerrilla soldiers, fighting for their own land, could defeat the world's most powerful conventional military.  And that's the way General Soleimani advanced what he saw as Iranian interests.  He killed a lot of Americans as well as civilians that way.  But the president has taken an action now that demonstrates his belief that  killing enemies is not wrong.

We couldn't win in Vietnam.  We haven't been able to win (whatever that might mean) in Afghanistan.  We can't win in Iraq.  What would it even mean to 'win' against Iran, 6,000 miles away?  Against people defending their homeland? Ask Iraq War vets in the United States how it felt to battle in a foreign land where they didn't speak the language or know the terrain.

The geography is telling.

Paywalls And Sharing Good Articles - Immigration Activists, Tribal Contracting, War Is Hell, Flawed Humans,Why Trump Won't Win

Some thoughts raised by things I've recently read.  But first a note on paywalls.

I understand that newspapers want online readers to spend some money for the privilege of reading.  Newspapers are struggling to stay alive.  Many have not survived.

Early on - maybe ten years or more ago - there was a proposal for newspapers to have a collective fee, so that people didn't have to pay every time they visited an online newspaper.  You could buy a pass for a group of them and they could figure out how to divide the money based on hits from subscribers.  That doesn't seem to have happened.  I have an online subscription to the LA Times and the Anchorage Daily News.  I rarely read anything any more in the NY Times or the Washington Post.

This is problematic particularly for journalists and researchers who need to look at lots of things.  This was noted on Recall Elections Blog as a problem in tracking the various recalls around the country.

I say all this because a number of links here go to the LA Times and many of you may not be able to get direct access to the articles.  I'd note you can probably get there via your public library or find a reprint somewhere online.  Try different browsers, try private browsing, remove media cookies from your computer.


Immigration - LATimes article on Washington State activists making it harder for ICE - King County banned flights taking immigrants out of the state, so they have to go to Yakima, where protestors show up for flights.

What is happening on this front in Alaska?  Could Anchorage ban the use of our airport for these activities?


Tribal Membership And Minority Contracts - Giving federal contracts to businesses that claim Native American tribal status that is recognized by the state (Alabama in the article) but not by the feds.  Only 5% of federal contracts are set aside for minority/women owned businesses, but it's a lot of money.

Article says nearly $1billion has gone to Alabama companies with dubious claims to Native heritage.

Alaska Native corporations have done well with these contracts.  However, I would like to see more investigation on the structure of some of these.  Are they simply ways for larger white owned companies to buy Native participation so they can get the contracts?


When War is Hell In Movies

Lots of war movies are patriotic calls to support the current war.  But an LA Times article on the new film 1917 notes:

"WWII films tend to be stories of victory, BUT WWI movies SHOW the horrors OF A SEEMINGLY SENSELESS FIGHT."

Their list of notable realistic WWI movies turns out to include nearly all non-Hollywood films.  Would the misery of actual warfare on screen discourage potential enlistees?  Probably not those 17 and 18 year olds who are desperate to get out of the house and out of school and be heroes.

Or maybe all 17 year old boys should get school assignments to visit vets with various long term war related illnesses to find out what war does and what the Department of Veterans Affairs doesn't do to help.


Flawed Humans

Queen and Slim writer Lena Waithe, again in the LA Times, writes about how she got the idea and then wrote the film.  This sentence struck me:

"And, ultimately, my deep love and admiration for these two very flawed and extremely human characters never failed to pull me through. And I think it’s because for me Queen and Slim aren’t just characters in a movie, they’re two fictitious people that represent all of us."

One of the tropes that dominate how we see the world is the notion of right and wrong.  The American justice system is based on finding out whether someone is guilty or not guilty.  The Republican response to the impeachment of Trump has been to point out other people as guilty - most notably Hunter Biden, but many others as well.
But this quote adds nuance to the idea.  These two people have killed a cop in self defense.  But being black, the fear they won't be believed.  So now they actually break the law by fleeing.  And presumably, as the movie progressive, we learn more about their flaws.  We all have flaws.  We're all guilty of something.  Christianity has based a whole religion on that notion.  

This quote reminds us that even though they are flawed, they need to be judged by their actions, not their flaws.  It also reminds me that privilege (whether it's white privilege or any other privilege) means that you're more likely to be forgiven for your flaws.  We know, for instance, that young people of color are more likely to be sent to a detention center than white kids.  It's the difference between 'kids will be kids' so call their parents to pick them up, and assuming they're just no good.


Why Trump Won't Win Reelection

Here's a prediction based on voting patterns.

"Of course 2016 showed that we need to look beyond the national polls and focus on the swing states. But there too the news is encouraging. In Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, since Trump took office, his net approval ratings, which started out on the plus side, have fallen — disastrously.
In Pennsylvania they decreased by 17 points, in Wisconsin by 20 points, in Michigan by 22 points. In the midterm voting, those three swing states all elected Democrats in 2018. Wisconsin elected a Democratic governor to replace a Republican and reelected a Democratic senator; Pennsylvania reelected a Democratic governor, and Democrats there took three House seats away from Republican incumbents.
In Michigan, which the Democrats lost to Trump by 11,000 votes, the Democrats had a huge victory in 2018, sweeping the elections for governor and senator and flipping two House seats. Voters also banned gerrymandering and created automatic voter registration, which together will bear fruit in 2020. All this explains why I’m quite certain we’ll be free at last from Donald Trump on Jan. 20, 2021."

But the author acknowledges he also wrote about why Trump couldn't win in 2016.  I'm convinced in a free and fair vote, Trump will lose.  But with voter suppression, voter disinformation campaigns, and potential cyber attacks on voting machines  I'm less confident.

A Chilean Student's View Of Chile's Current Upheaval

This a follow up to yesterday's post on Chile's protests and government response.  It's based on a Skype chat with Sebastían, my college student friend in Santiago.  He was the catalyst for yesterday's post.  I'll use some images of the Skype chat to give a sense of this 'interview' but I've abbreviated it somewhat to cut out repetition and side conversations. I've made the images as big as I think I can fit them here.  You may have to work a bit to read them, but the visual of the chat seemed to capture our chat better than just the words.

I began by letting him know I'd posted about our previous chat (he'd said it was ok),  about the protests, whether he had any comments, (he did) and  by asking how he got to school today if the subway stations were damaged.

[Note:  OCDE - mentioned below- is Spanish initials for OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ]

Let's look at that picture of crowd for a subway train in Santiago at peak time a little larger.  

Also, some clarification - "minimum salary is 300,000 clp (Chilean pesos).  300,000 clp would be (today) $413. That's per month.  Here's a chart from wage indicator.org that shows 300,000 clp is below what a single person needs to live.  

Data for Chile Sept. 2019 - From wage indicator.org

Let's catch up a bit. First he sent me to an instagram that shows Chile's current president Pinera saying "Estamos en guerra" or "We are at war." Then it shows president Pinochet saying almost the exact same words 30 years ago. [I couldn't figure out how to get the GIF from Instagram to here (this is just a screenshot, but if you click on the image below, it will take you to the GIF.]




And an Instagram response:

(We are not at war)

Then he sent me to this video on Twitter, shot from a window above, of police or military, who could be snorting coke.  Or not.  You can judge for yourself.

PACOS JALANDO! pic.twitter.com/lByZsJcXo8

— gonzalosoyyo 👑 (@gonzalosoyyo) October 20, 2019

And this video Esto pasa en Chile - This is happening in Chile.  It begins with the president saying we are in war.  Then it has shots of the police attacking citizens.  Some particularly troubling ones include police cars intentionally running over people fleeing.

 

There is so much conflict around the world now:

• Hong Kong 
• Kurds in Syria
• The British are in knots over Brexit
• Venezuela 
• Yeman 
• Refugees in camps around the world
• US president facing impeachment

It's easy to not pay attention to what's happening in Chile.  But one of the Instagram sites Sebastían sent me to had this message:

"Friends of the world TV is not going to show this, help us to make visible. THE POLICE AND THE MILITARY ARE KILLING PEOPLE!"

Which included this:

"KNOW THAT IN CHILE TODAY, OCTOBER 2019 THE PEOPLE TIRED AND THE PIÑERA GOVERNMENT IS REPRESSING IT WITH DEATH, THE SAME AS IN THE PINOCHET DICTATORSHIP.."
[Translations from Google Translate.  Overall it's a messy translation so that's all I'll offer.]

Here's the Spanish from the Instagram, but I can't seem to get the link right on my Mac - it works on my phone.

que nosotrxs no lo vivimos, nosotrxs lo estamos viviendo. Amigxs del mundo la tv no va a mostrar esto, ayudenos a visibilizar. LA POLICÍA Y LOS MILITARES ESTÁN MATANDO GENTE! DESPUÉS DE UNA SEMANA DE MANIFESTACIONES DETONADAS POR EL ALZA EN EL TRANSPORTE PÚBLICO, QUE INVOLUCRARON LA EVASIÓN EN EL PAGO DEL MISMO, INFILTRADOS EN LAS MANIFESTACIONES COMIENZAN A REALIZAR MONTAJES TANTO DE INCENDIOS, BARRICADAS COMO DE SAQUEOS, PARA ASÍ EL INCOMPETENTE QUE TENEMOS POR PRESIDENTE, TENER EXCUSAS PARA DECLARAR UN TOQUE DE QUEDA Y SACAR A LOS MILITARES A LA CALLE VELANDO POR "EL ORDEN PÚBLICO" QUE SUS MISMOS PERKINES HAN DESTRUIDO EN BASE A MONTAJES. HOY ES EL 3ER DÍA Y YA HAY FALLECIDOS Y GENTE DESAPARECIDA. QUE SE SEPA QUE EN CHILE HOY, OCTUBRE DE 2019 EL PUEBLO SE CANSÓ Y EL GOBIERNO DE PIÑERA ESTÁ REPRIMIENDOLO CON MUERTE, IGUAL QUE EN LA DICTADURA DE PINOCHET. .HERMANX QUE ESTÁS AQUÍ SI TE TOMAN #DITUNOMBRE GRITALO! Y QUE APAREZCAN TODXS LXS QUE HOY NO ESTÁN! ..NO QUEREMOS MÁS MUERTES NI MÁS DESAPARECIDXS. NO QUEREMOS TU MIERDA DE DOCTRINA DE SHOCK!!! FOTO: CONCEPCIÓN @afpphoto

The US Department of Compassion Announced A Growing Shortage Of Thoughts And Prayers

That was my reaction to the Odessa shooting.  The rest of this is me thinking out loud while my nieta* is off with her mom for a bit.

But I've also been thinking about what we're going to need globally as climate change forces people out of their traditional homes through floods, droughts, disease bearing mosquitos and other critters expanding their range.  Normal crops in areas will fail as conditions change.  Refugees will be on the move for more hospital climates.  Well, for food and water and relief.

That's already happening in places.  Alaska native villages are being forced to move from their coastal locations because heavy waves are eroding the shoreline.  The waves are there because normally sea ice prevents the formation of waves most of the year.  No longer.

The Syrian civil war was caused in part by a years long drought that led farmers to move to the cities.  That led to many refugees trying to get to safe countries.  That's a taste of the future.

Even those who profess to not believe climate change is real talk about mitigation rather than prevention.  They think that we should take steps to adapt.  Yes, of course.  Where we can.  Are you listening South Pacific nations?  Are you listening  South Florida?  I guess people in Manhattan can make the third floor of buildings the new entrances and work with Venetians on gondolas.

Of course, there will need to be technical fixes.  People are creating floating cities in the South Pacific for nations that will be underwater soon.

But one thing I haven't heard people talk about is lessons in civilization and community.  There are organizations working with indigenous peoples around the world to help sustain their languages and cultures.  Others working with poor farmers and others.  But their stories don't generate clicks for new media they way violence and fear-mongering do.  But we do hear after many disasters that communities pull together and help each other.  After fires, floods, mass shootings, there are outpourings of volunteers and of money to help the victims.  But what happens when everyone is the victim?

Tapping Into People's Natural Goodness

We need to learn how to tap into that love we see in times of crisis. The love parents have for their children.  The camaraderie we're told soldiers feel during war.  What is that and how do we grow it? We need to study it and find out how it works, who does it, and how to nurture those kinds of reactions in the hearts and minds of everyone.  What is the difference between those who come after disasters to loot and those who come to help?

Disaster movies are a very popular genre, but how many teach people community survival behaviors?  (That's a sincere question, because those aren't my top choice of entertainment.)

We have a Department of Defense (which should more truthfully be called the Department of War as it once was.)  And we also need a Department of Compassion, or, if you prefer, a Department of Peace.  Humans are capable of both good and bad.  Under the right conditions - child rearing, schooling, national values, and role models - more people will be peaceful, caring, and happy.  Under the wrong conditions, more divided and violent.

This week research was announced that attempted to find a homosexual gene.  It's more complicated than that.  Genetic disposition for sexuality, they say, is all over the genome, and environment plays a role as well.  I suspect the same is true for sainthood as well as sociopathy.

The Netflix series Mindhunter, which added new episodes recently, follows two FBI agents, helped by a university professor, who decide that interviewing imprisoned serial killers to find out why they do what they do.  That start out doing this secretly and are chastised when they're found out.  But they already have enough insights for catching other serial killers that the Bureau lets them continue.  In a basement office.  The most persuasive argument is something like "who knows why serial killers do what they do better than serial killers?"

We should be doing the same thing with mass shooters (and I'm sure there are people who are already doing this.)(I looked.  Didn't find much, but here's a 2018 article about a project tthat was going to start interviewing mass shooters.)  (And here's Dr. Jillian Peterson, the head of that study doing a Ted Talk May 2019.)

And I suspect they will find out the same thing that the Mindhunters learned (this is based on a true story):  that they all had serious self image problems due to absent and/or abusive parents.

This trail leads to lots of different areas - rights of parents, education of parents, birth control, abortion, foster care issues . .  just as starters.  The Department of Compassion - as I write this I realize we need both the Departments of Compassion and Peace - one more on the individual scale and one on the national scale.  But they overlap, because ultimately, 'nations' don't make war, the individual people in control of the military make war.

That sentence took an abrupt turn and never got finished.  The Department of Compassion would work on all these micro and macro environmental factors that impact how kids learn to feel good about themselves and how they learn to work with and for others instead of against them.

That's enough for today.  Remember that every human you encounter is, surprise, a human, with a whole history trailing them.  And a mind, and feelings, and a sense of self.  Imagine what that person doesn't know about you, and there's just as much you don't know about them.  Try to connect to all those people in a way that makes them feel better for having interacted with you.  Just a genuine smile as you pass someone on the street.  And I guarantee you'll discover the people around you have rich and interesting lives that will make you feel better too.  99.9% of the people you pass are NOT people you need to fear.  (I just made up that number.  I don't know if it's true.  I suspect it's definitely not if you are a person of color or a woman.  But even the people who might do someone harm, probably won't do harm most of the time or to most of the people they encounter.)


Glossary
*nieta is Spanish for granddaughter

Luigi Toscano's Holocaust Portraits And Nathan Jurgenson's The Social Photo

The San Francisco Civic Center Plaza had about 80 of the giant portraits.  Each had a little sign (if you look closely, you can see it on the right in the middle.)

I'm afraid the title of the post promises a lot more than I can deliver.  But the title can at least point to what I'm thinking about as I write this post.   I've got too many backed up, unfinished posts.  These portraits made me think about the nature of portraits and how they're displayed (in addition to the content of the portraits.)  Jurgenson's book is also playing with my understanding of photos in general, and how digital photography and social media change human relationships with photographic images.  Here are the  two catalysts:

1.  Lest We Forget by Luigi Toscano - and installation we saw recently in San Francisco's Civic Center Plaza.

Click to enlarge and focus better

And 2.  The Social Photo:  On Photography And Social Media,  a very new book by Nathan Jurgenson that investigates the the meaning of photography in the digital age and how we need to rethink our mental frameworks of photography to understand what's happening.


The notion of portraits has changed over the years.  From the Tate Museum:

"Portraiture is a very old art form going back at least to ancient Egypt, where it flourished from about 5,000 years ago. Before the invention of photography, a painted, sculpted, or drawn portrait was the only way to record the appearance of someone. 

But portraits have always been more than just a record. They have been used to show the power, importance, virtue, beauty, wealth, taste, learning or other qualities of the sitter. Portraits have almost always been flattering, and painters who refused to flatter, such as William Hogarth, tended to find their work rejected. A notable exception was Francisco Goya in his apparently bluntly truthful portraits of the Spanish royal family."

Photography changed things dramatically.  And cameras on phones changes things even more.  From Nathan Jurgenson. The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (Kindle Locations 139-143). Verso.

"Photography is a technology of instability . It stages a play of the real and the simulated, the apparent and the contrived, the creative and the mechanical. And photography is itself always in flux, from plates to film, paper to pixels, to more people carrying more cameras more of the time. These changes affect who makes images, where, why, how often, and for whom. There has been a recent and massive shift in who sees any photograph, and the audience for images that social media promises alters what a photograph is and what it means."

Basically, Jurgenson is arguing that the age of digital photography along with social media presents us with a world of photos that the academic world of photography has essentially ignored because they still use the 'art model' of photography to consider photos.  Snapshots don't matter in their eye.

"This is a perspective rooted in art history, one that deals with galleries, museums, and professional work and is tangential to all but a tiny fraction of images made today. The vast majority of photos perform functions distinct from those of documentation or art. The quick selfie reaction, the instantly posted snapshot of nice sunlight on your block, the photo of a burger sent to a friend: these kinds of images are of central importance to photography as it occurs today, but they are not as well conceptualized or understood. These everyday images taken to be shared are examples of what I am calling social photography. Other names include “snapshot photography,” “personal photography,” “domestic photography,” “vernacular photography,” “networked images,” “banal imaging,” or, as Fred Ritchin differentiates in Bending the Frame, an “image” as opposed to a photograph.  All these terms are meant to distinguish social images— the overwhelming bulk of photographs being made today— from those weightier images made with that traditional understanding of photography as something more informational, formally artistic, and professional."   Nathan Jurgenson. The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (Kindle Locations 147-156). Verso. 

Her plaque identifies her as

Rachel Goldfarb

(Dokszyce/Poland 1930)

Nazi Armys occupied hometown/

moved to ghetto with the family

Jewish population numbered close to 3000/

Were not sent to concentration camps

but murdered by Nazis/

Less than a dozen survivors/

Only Rachel and her mother survived 

from extended family

1942 went into hiding with family

Brother discovered and killed

Survived with her mother with Russia underground

(partisans)

Liberated by Soviets/Experienced widespread and

overt antisemitism in Poland

Left for Italy

1947 migrated to United States

Lest We Forget - Washington 01-21-2018

OLEKSANDR SKLIANSKI

(KIEV/UKRAINE 1937)

"THANKS TO 

YEVGENIA BOBOVIK AND VIKTOR BOBOVIK

AS WELL AS THEIR DAUGHTER YELENA

MY BROTHER AND I WERE SAVED

FROM BEING SHOT DEAD IN BABI YAR.

THEY BECAME OUR COMPANIONS

ON THE ROAD TO PEACE."

LEST WE FORGET - KIEV/UKRAINE 26-02015

SUSAN CERNYAK SPATZ

(VIENNA/AUSTRIA 1922)

MAY 1942 ORDERED TO

THE GHETTO THERESIENSTADT

WITH THE MOTHER

JANUARY 1943 DEPORTATION TO

THE CONCENTRATION 

CAMP AUSCHWITZ-BERKENAU

JANUARY 1045

DEATH MARCH TO THE CONSTRATION 

CAMP RAVENSBRÜCK

SPRING 1945 LIBERATED

BY THE RED ARMY

LEST WE FORGET -  HEIDELBERG 18.09.2014

These descriptions are just the briefest references to a period of their lives lived in  horror and only the present locations and dates of the photos and the visual images themselves hint at the lives since the end of the war.  Though they never escaped the horrors that stayed with them the rest of their lives.

My stepmother could be one of these portraits.  She, like Susan Cernyak Spatz, was born in 1922 in the Austro-Hungarian empire (in Bratislava) and also was sent to Theresianstadt.  She eventually lived her life out in Southern California.  In 2014 she could have posed for one of these photos, but she passed away in 2018.  So maybe these portraits resonate with me more.  Here she is in 2015 on her 93rd birthday.  She didn't have a professional photographer (not sure how he got those little spots in everyone's eyeballs), nor was she allowed to put on some make-up and jewelry.  Not sure she would approve of this photo here.  But it's one more face for the record.    Who knows, she may have known Susan Cernyak Spatz at Theresienstadt.



Luigi Toscano's exhibit seems to recognize that people's relationship with photography is different now.  From LEST WE FORGET statement in San Francisco (the LEST WE FORGET photo above.)

"Instead of exhibiting them in a museum or a gallery, Luigi Toscano always presents the large-scale portraits in public places, such as parks, public squares or on facades, so they are accessible to everyone.  In this way, LEST WE FORGET reaches thousands of people regardless of age, origin, language or education.  Small information panels, a picture book, and a documentary movie complete the installation."

SF City Hall in background.

Nathan Jurgenson wouldn't count these as 'Social Photos":

"My interest here is with a type of photography made ubiquitous by networked, digital sharing, though many of its characteristics can be found in different degrees in pre-social media photography, especially amateur snapshots (Polaroid sharing in particular). For my purposes here, what fundamentally makes a photo a social photo is the degree to which its existence as a stand-alone media object is subordinate."  Nathan Jurgenson. The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (Kindle Locations 158-160). Verso. 

These aren't the instant photos taken on someone's phone and then immediately texted to someone as part of a conversation.  Clearly Luigi Toscano thought carefully about each portrait and how to package them and where to display them so that they would be seen and attended to by many people.  Looking at these giant face images in person, faces almost as large as the viewer, has a big impact.  The holocaust survivors are almost gone.  I suspect many, if not most in the installation, have pass away already.

 But there is no shortage of victims today, people being killed and maimed and terrorized by American made weapons as well as those made in Europe and Russia and Israel.  They are not that different from the Jews and other victims of Nazi Germany, just in the manner of their suffering.  But the Jews of Europe were easy to ignore while they were being slaughtered, just as the people of Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and the refugees from terror in Africa and Central America are easy to ignore today.

As I get to the end here, I realize that this mashup of Luigi Toscano's photos and Nathan Jurgenson's book may be a little forced.  And I may post more on Jurgenson's book later.  But here's a bit more:

"Photography theory’s long marginalization of amateur snapshots has left a shortfall of reference points for making sense of social photos today. The dichotomies of “amateur vs. professional” and “digital vs. analog” matter less for the social photo than the relations between power, identity, and reality. The fixation on professional and artistic photos comes with conceptual baggage rooted in other fields, much of which should slide to the margins when discussing social photography. The center of conceptual gravity for describing how people communicate with images today."  Nathan Jurgenson. The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (Kindle Locations 167-171). Verso. 

LEST WE FORGET website.
Jurgenson's book website.

About Pulling Out Of Syria

[I'm thinking out loud here, trying to bring disparate thoughts together.  Bear with me.]

It's not at all clear to me the costs and benefits of the US having troops in Syria.  I think finding ways to pull out of places like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and ending support of the Saudi war in Yemen are important goals.

Ro Khanna, a Democratic member of congress from California, in this Washington Post piece,  supports President Trump's instinct to pull out of Syria, though he argues we need to do it in a way better coordinated with our allies, and in a way that uses leverage over Turkey's Erdogan that keeps him from massacring Kurds in the area.

He also mentions,

"We have spent more money in Afghanistan than we did in the Marshall Plan and continue to spend more than $40 billion each year."

The Marshall Plan helped Western Europe rebuild after the destruction of WW II.  It help lift their economy so Western Europe could help us defend against the Soviet Union as the Cold War ramped up and so they could buy American products, which helped repay what we spent.

Imagine $40 billion a year.  What could the US have spent that money on?  Helping with education and economic development in Central America so that the people there could make a living and build safe lives, so they wouldn't feel the need to flee over the US border.

Think of the US veterans who wouldn't be suffering from PTSD and other serious ailments, not to mention missing body parts.  War is only good for people who make money selling guns, planes, tanks, technology, and all the support items needed for soldiers to live and fight and die.

Think about all the fossil fuel that would not have been used. And how global warming would have been a little bit slower.   The Union of Concerned Scientists write:

"The U.S. military is the largest institutional consumer of oil in the world. Every year, our armed forces consume more than 100 million barrels of oil to power ships, vehicles, aircraft, and ground operations—enough for over 4 million trips around the Earth, assuming 25 mpg."

According to Wired, $40 billion a year is only 2/3 of what's needed to rebuild our infrastructure.

" $1 trillion sounds great, but it ain't enough, not if the country wants to keeping fixing roads ten years down the line. According a US Department of Transportation report, just maintaining current highways and bridges through 2030 will cost a cool $65.3 billion—per year. That’s being conservative."

You get the point.  If the Soviet Union, which borders Afghanistan could take control, how can the US do it from half-way around the world away?

Unfortunately, few people, and I know this includes many members of congress, don't have a comprehensive understanding of the factors involved in wars like the ones we're involved in.  We originally went to Afghanistan to punish those who killed 2,955 people on 9/11, 2605 of whom were American citizens.

Brown University's Cost of War study offers this summary of what we've unleashed* in return:

SUMMARY

• Over 480,000 have died due to direct war violence, and several times as many indirectly

• Over 244,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the fighting

• 21 million — the number of war refugees and displaced persons

• The US federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $5.9 trillion dollars

• The US government is conducting counterterror activities in 76 countries

• The wars have been accompanied by violations of human rights and civil liberties, in the US and abroad

READ ALL FINDINGS

*I say 'unleashed' because the US forces didn't kill all these civilians, but the wars we've engaged in have.

Saddam Hussein was a ruthless leader.  Getting actual figures of the number of people his regime killed - civilians and and conscripted soldiers - is not easy.  As I look, numbers range in the hundreds of thousands - at least 300,000 and probably significantly more than that.  Some sources:

• State Department Summary
• The Scotsman
• Wikipedia

Surely, there are people alive who wouldn't be if we hadn't invaded Iraq.  But there are also people who are dead, who wouldn't be if we hadn't invaded Iraq.

I'd note this Brookings Institute (a liberal leaning think tank) prediction from 2002 about the costs of getting into a war with Iraq which I found while getting data for this post:

An invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein would likely cost the United States about $50 billion, though it could plausibly range from $25 billion to $75 billion or so, with likely annual U.S. costs of maintaining order in Iraq ranging from $5 billion to $20 billion for a number of years thereafter. The latter costs of winning the peace, and associated wear and tear on American military personnel, may actually turn out to be a greater concern than the one-time cost of winning the war.

If only it had been so 'cheap.'

My point is, again, that the number of people who actually have looked closely at all the costs and benefits - economic, human, political, opportunity costs - is relatively few.  I'm not in that group.

It's clear to me though, that the money spent "fighting terrorism" could have been better spent creating opportunities for human beings - education, health care, economic development.  These kinds of initiatives would have created positive changes in people's lives and put the United States and the world in a much better place than it is now.

It's time people went back and read some of the old stories we were supposed to learn simple truths from.  For instance the story of B'rer Rabbit and the Tar Baby might be an apt story for the United States' war on terrorism.





I'd note that many such old stories are seen today as sexist or racist.  I suspected people hadfound reason to question the Uncle Remus stories.  So  I checked and they have.  But it's hard not to be racist if you grow up in the United States even today.  Joel Chandler Harris was born just before the Civil War in the South, so surely he had lots of racist tendencies.  But all that considering, it seems he was pretty progressive for his times, and the Uncle Remus stories seem to be a tribute to an old black slave Harris looked up to.  See this Pittsburgh Gazette article on Harris' life.

In The Unbelievably Racist World of Classic Children's Lit,   Malcolm Jones writes:

"The case of Joel Chandler Harris is particularly relevant in this regard. A lifelong southerner and an Atlanta newspaper editor (and incidentally a friend of Twain’s), Harris was probably as enlightened as a white person could be in his time and place. If you read his Uncle Remus stories, you’ll see that to Harris, Uncle Remus was a hero. He’s certainly the smartest and kindest person, black or white, in the narrative that frames the folk tales collected by the author from former slaves.
More important, had Harris not collected those folktales, we almost surely would have missed much of a vast trove of oral storytelling (“our most precious piece of stolen goods,” Twain called them—so that’s what we were getting away with!), because before Harris, no one else had the sense to realize how wonderful those stories were, much less that they should be recorded for posterity. Whatever sins he may have been guilty of, Harris knew at least that much. James Weldon Johnson called the 185 stories published by Harris 'the greatest body of folklore America has produced.'”  

He's not as kind to Disney's Song of the South, from which this clip was taken.

None of this changes my belief that the sooner we get Trump out of the presidency the better for the world and the United States.  And the Republicans who have had control of both houses of Congress since Trump became president, share the blame, because they haven't done their job as a check on the criminal* who is in the White House.

*I think that anyone who looks at the Trump organization and Trump objectively has to acknowledge that he has abused our laws repeatedly.

October 1 - Day German Move On Danish Jews Thwarted By Georg Duckwitz German Ambassador To Denmark

LA Times has a bit of history for this date.  It's the story of the German ambassador to Denmark who helped get most Danish Jews to Sweden just before the Nazis were to send them to concentration camps.  From the article:

On Sept. 19, Duckwitz learned from Best that the operation was imminent. He wrote in his diary, “Now I know what I have to do.” When he was told by a fellow sympathetic official that he would risk Gestapo wrath if he were caught trying to countermand Hitler, Duckwitz responded he would do whatever it took to stop the deportation.
The next day, Duckwitz contacted two Swedish diplomats and traveled to Stockholm where he met with Prime Minister Albin Hansson, who agreed to propose to the Germans that his neutral nation would intern the Danish Jews. The Nazis didn’t even bother to respond.
On Sept. 28, Best received the go-ahead to launch the roundup, planned for Oct. 1, Rosh Hashana. Duckwitz immediately telephoned Danish political leaders. One of them later recalled that when they met, Duckwitz looked pale with shame and shock.
“Now the disaster is at hand,” Duckwitz said. Ships were waiting in the harbor to take the Jews to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. “Those of your poor Jewish countrymen who get caught by the Gestapo will [be] … transported to an unknown fate.”

Most were ferried across the channel between Denmark and Sweden by all sorts of vessels where Swedish officials took them in.  

Over the next few days, millions of Danes would shelter, protect and smuggle their Jewish neighbors to Sweden. They were delivered to the harbor in free taxis and hospital ambulances. Fishermen and ship captains made more than 700 trips across the Oresund. Duckwitz had tipped off his Swedish contacts, who were waiting to assist the refugees. And in a final critical action, he convinced German harbormasters he knew to ensure the coast guard sent out no patrols.

But this story, celebrating this Oct. 1, 1943 rescue mission is not just a history lesson.  The author wants to be sure readers get the more universal message.

Many ask themselves whether it is possible to stand up to pervasive evil. The Danes showed that when a nation — from the king to the taxi drivers and fishermen — decide they will not permit atrocities in their midst, even the Nazis could be hamstrung. And Georg Duckwitz, who put his career and even his life on the line, offers an object lesson on how one person can save thousands.

I'd note, as well, that we should look at each individual we've labeled "the enemy" carefully.  Some of them don't belong in that category.  Find them and let them help.

Meanwhile, life goes on.

Happy Birthday Mom

We've been working from early morning each day trying to get my mom's house ready for renting.  We got new beds, cleaned the yard just to fill the compost garbage for Monday night pickup, fussed with the alarm system, got the electrician, someone to steam clean the sofa and other upholstered furniture.  We visited my 96 year old step mom, who was briefly awake and engaged in a limited way.  I got ride in to the beach to simply to work off all the anxieties that were building up - it worked.  We had the electrician and the repair man.  Moving furniture back into the house from the garage now that the wood floor has been sanded and redone.  Maybe the car will fit in tomorrow.

picture from previous visit

Also squeezed in a trip to the cemetery today to wish her happy birthday.  I cut some flowering jade plant, a bird of paradise, and some epidendrum from my mom's yard, and we took out some of the dead flowers from last time and stuck in the new ones.  My wife's parents, my brother, and another close family friend are there too.   Last year I put some soil in the vases and stuck the jade plants in.  A caretaker at the cemetery waters them and the jade plants are growing and healthy.  So the flowers were just to add some color for a while.  She would have been 96 today.

And so as I was sorting out the books I opened Erich Maria Remarque's Shadows in Paradise to see why my mom  still had that book.  Here's the prologue:

"I lived in New York during the last phase of the Second World War.  Despite my deficient English the midtown section of New York became for me the closest thing to a home I had experienced in many years.
Behind me lay a long and perilous road, the Via Dolorosa of all those who had fled from the Hitler regime.  It led from Germany to Holand, Belgium, Northern France, and Paris.  From Paris some proceeded to Lyons and the Mediterranean, others to Bordeau, the Pyrenees, and across Spain and Portugal to Lisbon.
Even after leaving Germany we were not safe.  Only a very few of us had valid passports or visas.  When the police caught us we were thrown into jail and deported.  Without papers we could not work legally or stay in one place for long.  We were perpetually on the move.
In every town we stopped at the post office, hoping to find letters from friends and relatives.  On the road we scrutinized every wall for messages from those who had passed through before us addresses, warnings, words of advice,  The walls were our newspapers and bulletin boards.  This was our life in a period of universal indifference, soon to be followed by the inhuman war years, when the Milice, often seconded by the police, joined forces with the Gestapo against us."

My mom's Via Dolorosa was a little more straightforward.  At age 17 she finally got her visa and a ticket to sail from Hamburg to New York.  It was late August 1939 when she left home for Hamburg, leaving her parents behind.

Reading this and thinking of my mom and other family members whose trips were more arduous and followed Remarque's path more, the journeys of today's refugees seemed more real, and I seemed more connected.  Lacking visas, at the mercy of local police, finding word from relatives wherever you can (for those with cell phones today, this is probably easier), and getting advice from other travelers - some of it good, some of it not - wherever you can.

AIFF 2017: Shawn Convey Talks About His Film "Among Wolves"

I had a Skype conversation (audio only) Friday about the making of the film Among Wolves.  

This is a film about Bosnian war vets who have made one of their projects to protect a herd of wild horses.  I only saw the trailer and read the synopsis, but my main questions was how did an American film maker come to make a documentary in Bosnian  (Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian are all "mutually intelligible standard varieties" according to Wikipedia.)  He said he lived in Mostar for four years and I think he spent more time in Bosnia altogether. Long enough to get the trust of this group.  So those were the kinds of questions I asked.  Here's about five minutes of our conversation.  Basically it covers how he found this subject and made the film.

The film shows Monday, December 4 at the Bear Tooth at 8pm.  Shawn is scheduled to be at the Monday night showing.




Just to help out, here's a map of most of the former Yugoslavia.  This film takes place in Bosnia and Shawn lived in Mostar for 4 years.

AIFF 2017: Docs In Competition - Saving Brinton, Over The River, The Last Animals, The Cage Fighter, Among Wolves, Alphago

Here are the Anchorage International Film Festival in Competition.

Documentaries are non-fiction feature length films.  "In Competition" means, at AIFF,  these films have been selected by the programmers to be eligible for awards at the festival.  Another way of saying that is these are the films that the programmers collectively liked the best.   There are usually other films that appealed more to individual programmers, this list is there collective choices.

 I haven't seen any of these.  My goal here is simply to make it easy for people to know what's coming at the festival beginning December 1.

My experiences is that the documentary category tends to be very strong at the Anchorage International Film Festival.  They're in alphabetical order.

Docs in Competition	Director	Country	Length
AlphaGo	Greg Kohs	USA	1:30:28
Among Wolves	Shawn Convey	USA	1:27:00
The Last Animals	Kate Brooks	USA	1:31:50
Over the River	Vanina Lappa	Italy	1:14:00
Saving Brinton	Morgan White	USA	1:27:30

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AlphaGo
Greg Kohs
USA
1:30:28 
Showing:  Tuesday, Dec 5, Bear Tooth, 8pm
Sat. Dec 9, Alaska Exp Small 7pm


This appears to be a man against machine movie - can a computer beat the best human go players?


Here's the Director's Statement:  (Watch for the Alaska connection)

"Early in my career I worked at NFL Films. That experience, of being able to see the drama on the field while having access to the people and stories unfolding off the field, has always been a fascinating intersection for me. In my recent film, The Great Alone, I was able to explore the epic scale of the Iditarod through the comeback story of a single competitor. In AlphaGo, the competition between man and machine provided a similar backdrop, albeit with far larger consequences. 

The complexity of the game of Go, combined with the technical depth of an emerging technology like artificial intelligence seemed like it might create an insurmountable barrier for a film like this. The fact that I was so innocently unaware of Go and AlphaGo actually proved to be beneficial. It allowed me to approach the action and interviews with pure curiosity, the kind that helps make any subject matter emotionally accessible. 

Unlike the film’s human characters – who turn their curious quest for knowledge into an epic spectacle with great existential implications, who dare to risk their reputation and pride to contest that curiosity – AI might not yet possess the ability to empathize. ​But it can teach us profound things about our humanness – the way we play board games, the way we think and feel and grow.​ It’s a deep, vast premise, but my hope is, by sharing it, we can discover something within ourselves we never saw before."

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Image from Among Wolves Kickstarter page

Among Wolves
Shawn Convey
USA
1:27:00
Showing:  Monday, Dec 4, Bear Tooth 8:15pm 

From the beginning of the trailer, my thought was:  This is not the movie the title suggests to most Alaskans. 

This is a movie about veterans of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, specifically in Bosnia.  Here's elaboration on that from the Among Wolves  website:

"A paramilitary leader at the young age of 20, Lija helped defend the town while neighbors fell to the invading forces. Now he heads the Wolves, a motorcycle club that resembles the stereotype in rough image only. Under his leadership, this wild crew has become a positive force for good with a self-defined humanitarian focus. As their numbers grow, so do their successes, like holding charity events for the neediest in their community and securing badly needed supplies for hospitals in Livno an Srebrenica. 

One mission, though, rich in symbolism, captures their spirit more than any other. On what was once the front line, they now tend to and defend a herd of wild horses that society has similarly deemed expendable. A harsh environment, poachers, and urbanization continually threaten the herd. Stirred by their strength, the Wolves are determined to control their own fate and finally emerge from the shadow of war."

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From The Last Animals website

The Last Animals
Kate Brooks
USA
1:31:50
Showing:  Tuesday, Dec 5  Bear Tooth  5:30 pm

This is a movie about how rhinos and elephants are being slaughtered for their horns and tusks.  Hard to watch stuff.  As I wander the internet reading about this film, it's clear it's doing a good job of marketing itself.  The website is slick and full of gorgeous photos. There's even a piece about it in Glamor, not where you normally see stories about film festival documentaries.

"Kate Brooks may be missing the fear gene: At age 20 she was infiltrating state orphanages in Russia to document child abuse, work she published in The Boston Globe and *Newsweek*. By 25 she was capturing the American invasion of Iraq for Time. Ever since, she’s lived in war zones, sending back images of bombings in Pakistan, conflict in Syria, and amputees in Afghanistan.
In 2010 she finally took a much-needed vacation and headed to a national wildlife reserve in Kenya. “I was lounging by an infinity pool,” remembers Brooks, now 39, “and out on the horizon this herd of elephants walked by. It realigned everything inside of me. I left knowing I wanted to give the animals back some of the peace they gave me.” She returned to work, but the memory of those roaming giants stayed with her, and in 2012 she began looking into why such a staggering number—30,000—are killed every year for their tusks. When she learned the reason was related to terrorism, she set out to tell the world. The result is her eye-opening documentary, The Last Animals, which takes viewers on a journey into the violent epicenter of the ivory trade."

I doubt though that it will be screening at the White House any time soon, given that the Trump administration has reversed the ban on importing elephant ivory from Africa trophy hunts.

Here's a bit from Screen Daily:

"What distinguishes The Last Animals from other films on the subject (in particular last year’s Netflix doc The Ivory Game) is the raw urgency of Brooks’ direct conflict reportage: she is a war correspondent who lets us understand that what is happening here is nothing short of an all-out battle. This investigative mission, coupled with her painterly eye, elevates this doc – for the most part – into something filmic, often elegiac, and hopefully galvanising. After all, who are we, she asks, as guardians of this planet, if we allow the slaughter of these mystical, beautiful beasts to continue."

I couldn't find a trailer, but maybe this interview at the 2016 Women in the World Summit in New York City with the director Kate Brooks about the film is a better introduction.







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[UPDATE Nov 29, 2017:  I have a new post on this film with a video of my Skype conversation with film maker Vanina Lappa.]

Over the River 
Vanina Lappa
Italy
1:14:00
Showing: Sunday, Dec 3, Alaska Exp Small, 4pm
Sunday, Dec. 9 Alaska Exp Small 5pm

I've learned from the director via FB, that this film has been seen in Europe and Kathmandu, the showing in Anchorage will be its North American premiere.

As I looked this film up, I forgot we are in the documentary category.  It has the look of a feature.  But it's not.  Which will make it interesting.

From Film Italy:

"'We are too old, that's the problem. We look at the moon, look at too many things ...'. So it's been said to Angelo, a young waiter who lives in Caselle in Pittari, a small town that lies on a river basin Bussento in southern Cilento, at the foot of a sacred mountain, where there is the St. Michael's cave, inside which , the legend says, there's an ancient guarded secret."

Here's from an Italian review of the movie, you can get the whole review here:

"Angelo, giovane cameriere di Caselle in Pittari, nel Cilento meridionale, vive nel tempo sospeso e fuori dalla storia che sembra caratterizzare l’intero paese. La comunità, ancorata a rituali più o meno antichi, è insieme nutrice e gabbia per il giovane; e tale è anche per il suo omonimo Angelo, barista più anziano di lui, con uno sguardo sulla vita più radicale e disilluso. I due dovranno decidere tra la permanenza e la fuga: ovvero tra due, contrastanti, idee di esistenza. [sinossi]
C’è costantemente una doppia dimensione, la percorrenza di un doppio binario, a guidare lo svolgimento di un lavoro come Sopra il fiume. Il documentario di Vanina Lappa, regista e montatrice italo-francese, è infatti saldamente ancorato alla terra che racconta, ai suoi rituali, al carattere misterico e al potere aggregante delle sue simbologie, ma contemporaneamente punta a mettere in scena la tensione con l’esterno, la pressione della modernità, la voglia di fuggire di alcuni abitanti del paesino che è teatro del film (quello di Caselle in Pittari, nel Cilento meridionale). La regista approccia qui il genere del documentario etnografico mettendo sempre in primo piano questa dialettica: lo fa fin dalla sequenza iniziale, che racconta il territorio attraverso un’antica leggenda che viene narrata al protagonista quand’era bambino, a illustrare lo sguardo sul fiume e sugli incontaminati territori che sovrastano e cingono il paese; poi, l’obiettivo si sposta sulla vita quotidiana della cittadina, sulla concretezza delle sue i(n)terazioni, sempre uguali a se stesse, su un tessuto sociale che sembra demograficamente condannato, incapace di favorire il ricambio tra generazioni, e quindi la sua stessa sopravvivenza."

Here's how Bing.com/translator renders this in English:

"Angelo, a young waiter of boxes in Pitters, in southern Cilento, lives in the suspended time and out of history that seems to characterize the whole country. The community, anchored to more or less ancient rituals, is together nourishment and cage for the young; And such is also for his namesake angel, bartender older than him, with a look on the most radical and disillusioned life. The two will have to decide between permanence and escape: that is between two, contrasting, ideas of existence. Synopsis]
There is constantly a double size, the journey of a double track, to guide the conduct of a job as above the river. The documentary of Vania Lappa, Italian-French director and upright, is firmly anchored to the earth that tells, its rituals, the mystery character and the aggregating power of its symbology, but at the same time aims to stage the tension With the exterior, the pressure of modernity, the desire to flee some inhabitants of the village that is the theatre of the film (that of Caselle in Pitti, in southern Cilento). The director approaches here the genre of the ethnographic documentary always putting in the foreground this dialectic: it does so from the initial sequence, which tells the territory through an ancient legend that is narrated to the protagonist when he was a child, to To illustrate the gaze on the river and the uncontaminated territories that dominate and surround the country; Then, the goal moves on the everyday life of the town, on the concreteness of its I (n) teras, always equal to themselves, on a social fabric that seems demographically condemned, unable to favor the replacement between generations, and therefore its Same survival."

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From Box Office Mojo

Saving Brinton
Tommy Haines & Andrew Sherburne
USA
1:27:30
Showing:  Sunday, Dec 3  Bear Tooth, 7:30pm


This feels like a film makers' film - it's about the finding and restoring of turn of the (20th) century films in Iowa.  Last year we had an Indian film, The Cinema Travelers, about a business that traveled the festival circuit in India showing large reel-to-reel films as DVD's and online downloading were starting to challenge this old film showing tradition.  It won best documentary.

We can get a sense of things by looking at where the film comes from: Northland Films:

"Northland Films are non-fiction storytellers in the Upper Midwest devoted to producing challenging and engaging films on timely social issues. Working throughout North America, the filmmakers work boldly to uncover themes of nature, history & community and in unexpected places."

From an interview with the filmmakers at the American Film Institute (AFI) where the film premiered June 17, this year:

"AFI: What inspired you to tell the story of SAVING BRINTON?
TH & AS: The common threads through all of our feature documentaries are notions of community and place and the interplay of tradition and modernity. This story had all of those elements.
TH, JR & AS: On top of all that, we’re film nerds. So here are 130 films, many of them unseen for a century, and we get to be a part of bringing these back into the public consciousness. Of course, we were in from day one.
AFI: How did you find Michael Zahs?
TH & AS: Our last film, GOLD FEVER, was about gold mining in Guatemala, and we were looking for something closer to home. Our eyes lit up when we got a call about a man, in a small town just south of us, who had discovered a basement full of nitrate films from Thomas Edison and Georges Méliès. Our first reaction was the same as most everyone: “In Iowa? Really?” That was the beginning. But in that first visit to Mike’s house, we sensed that the man who had saved these things was the real story — you can see it in the opening scene of the film. I think we left that day and told Mike 'you’ll be seeing a lot more of us.'”

[TH is Tommy Haines, AS is Andrew Sherburne, and JR is John Richards - Director of Photography]









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UPDATE Nov. 18, 2017:  A film that was in this list before dropped out because of 'distribution.'