Why Isn't China Helping the Burmese Victims?

Frank asks in a comment on my post on the difference between a hurricane and a cyclone,

do you know the earthquake in Wenchuan of China on May 12?

I'm pretty sure that Frank is one of my former students who lives in Beijing. It isn't always easy for people in China to gauge what the rest of the world is hearing about China.

So, yes Frank, the news here is dominated by stories about the earthquake and about how well the Chinese government is responding to the earthquake and how Chinese citizens are all volunteering to help in any way possible. For the most part the news is strongly positive, and I'm wondering a little bit about how the reporters are getting the stories. Who are the interpreters? How are they getting to the various sites? What is happening in areas where Western journalists are not getting access? I don't know, I'm just a little skeptical.

For the western readers of the blog who aren't sure where the earthquake and the cyclone happened, here are some maps.

You can see on the first map where China and Burma are in relationship to Alaska. (And for those of you wondering why Alaska is the benchmark, well, I live in Alaska. Since we have to see everything in the Main Stream Media from New York or LA's perspective, it does the NY and LA types some good to see that not everyone thinks that they are the center of the universe.)


And then this map shows where Sichuan Province (the location of the earthquake) is in relationship to where the cyclone did most damage in Burma. It's only about 1000 miles apart. The same approximate distance as:
Berlin-Istanbul Moscow-Prague Bangkok-Hong Kong Cleveland-Dallas
Pittsburgh-Miami Boston-St. Louis San Francisco-El Paso Los Angeles - Seattle

I'm thinking about the enormous difference in response between the Burmese cyclone and the Chinese earthquake. Sichuan is about 1000 miles away from the Irrawaddy Delta where the cyclone had its biggest effect.

China is the major supporter of the Burmese government. Without China's economic and political support, the Burmese regime would fall. Some news reports have said that China's openness to the world press in the earthquake disaster is aimed at showing that China is a world player that can handle emergencies. And the contrast between the way China is handling the earthquake and the way Burma is handling the cyclone is extreme.

But I can't help but wonder why, with Burma on its border, and with so much influence over the Burmese government, China hasn't helped to save tens of thousands of lives in Burma. They could have leaned on the military leaders quietly and even gotten publicly invited to assist. So they wouldn't have to worry about setting a precedent for interfering with the internal matters of another country. What they are doing in Sichuan proves they can do this work. So they certainly could have gone into Burma.

Perhaps Burmese lives aren't important, only Chinese lives. Helping the victims of the earthquake in China effectively will help China's world image. But not nearly as much as helping the victims in Burma would.



By the way, my post called "What's the difference between a cyclone, hurricane, typhoon, and tornado?" got listed as the first blog post in Google Trends "Difference between hurricane and cyclone" which was number 90 on May 6 and suddenly today is sending a lot of folks my way. I should have my highest single day hit count (I think I got to about 270 once during one of the trials). I was never aware of Google Trends and I'm not quite sure how it works. And very few have stopped to see more than that one page.

California's Same-Sex Marriage Ban Overturned

From CNN:

"There can be no doubt that extending the designation of marriage to same-sex couples, rather than denying it to all couples, is the equal protection remedy that is most consistent with our state's general legislative policy and preference," said the 120-page ruling.

It said that the state law's language "limiting the designation of marriage to a 'union between a man and a woman' is unconstitutional, and that the remaining statutory language must be understood as making the designation of marriage available to both opposite-sex and same-sex couples."

Those who have been working so hard, like Senator David Vitter

to protect traditional marriage as being between one man and one woman

have always puzzled me. Didn't they read the bible? Many of the biblical kings had more than one wife. And even Senator Vitter practiced the time-old custom have having only one wife, but women on the side.

Marriage has been an economic and political event throughout history. It was a way to establish (at least publicly) the parentage of children, a way to make truces between families, and to pass on property and wealth. The idea of love as the basis of marriage is rather recent. In India today arranged marriages are still common and love develops or not as the marriage progresses.

So if two people of the same sex fall in love and want to share a home, and to share medical insurance and all the other things that men and women share in marriage, I fail to see the harm in that.

It seems there is a distinction here between religiously sanctioned marriages and state sanctioned marriages. I strongly support the idea that various religions - which people join voluntarily - can make their own restrictions about who they want to marry. But the state should not discriminate against people who want to share their lives together simply because they are both men or both women.

Just as bans against interracial marriages seem outrageous today, the bans against same sex marriages will seem outrageous 30 years in the future.

Sandhill Cranes in Flight

I posted my digital video, but it took some time for my film from my old faithful Pentax to be developed. So, here are a couple of shots of the cranes flying.

Liberty Watch - No Man's Land Between Customs and the US

The New York Times has this new story about a European being detained by Customs when arriving in the US. This story brings to mind the Icelandic woman who was detained overnight in New York before being sent home because 12 years earlier she'd overstayed her visa by two weeks. It is also akin to the story of scholars who were denied entry into the US. A key problem is that

such “arriving aliens” are not considered to be in the United States at all, even if they are in custody, they have none of the legal rights that even illegal immigrants can claim.

But even American citizens are in a no-rights zone when they come back into the US. An issue that opens anyone with a laptop to privacy violations, Customs is searching some people's laptops when returning to the US.


Today's story is about an Italian attorney who has been visiting his American girlfriend:

But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum...

Mr. Salerno’s case may be extreme, but it underscores the real but little-known dangers that many travelers from Europe and other first-world nations face when they arrive in the United States — problems that can startle Americans as much as their foreign visitors.

“We have a lot of government people here and lobbyists and lawyers and very educated, very savvy Washingtonians,” said Jim Cooper, Ms. Cooper’s father, a businessman, describing the reaction in his neighborhood, the Wessynton subdivision of Alexandria. “They were pretty shocked that the government could do this sort of thing, because it doesn’t happen that often, except to people you never hear about, like Haitians and Guatemalans.”...

Though citizens of those nations [27 so-called visa waiver countries] do not need visas to enter the United States for as long as 90 days, their admission is up to the discretion of border agents. There are more than 60 grounds for finding someone inadmissible, including a hunch that the person plans to work or immigrate, or evidence of an overstay, however brief, on an earlier visit.

While those turned away are generally sent home on the next flight, “there are occasional circumstances which require further detention to review their cases,” Ms. De Cima said. And because such “arriving aliens” are not considered to be in the United States at all, even if they are in custody, they have none of the legal rights that even illegal immigrants can claim.

The whole story is here.

[Later: National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation has a show on right now about problems at the privately run detention centers for people detained by Customs.

'Careless Detention' Exposes Deadly Neglect

The Washington Post began a series of investigative reports on Sunday revealing mistakes in medical treatment that may have contributed to 30 deaths in immigrant detention facilities in the U.S. Reporters Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein talk about their series, "Careless Detention."]

Getting Out of Ruts

We rented out our house when we went on sabbatical for the school year 2003-2004. We stuck all the extra stuff (including what the kids left when they moved out) into a downstairs room that was not rented out. After we got back, the room stayed a storage room and at one point looked like this.



While I have seen most of the floor since then, the room has basically been a big closet. Things have flowed to various recycling options, but the room is still a mess. So I decided to look on the web for ideas of what to do with the room. I tried out "Designing a Japanese style workspace." So far I haven't found what I was looking for, but I realized that not only have we gotten into a rut in terms of our house decor, but I've gotten into a internet rut trying to keep up with the blogs I track. There's all this other incredible stuff out there. Here are just a few interesting things from a couple of sites I visited.

This comes from stashpocket





And this:



From Stashpocket I took a link turn to Flight405 And from there to his Vimeo page where I found this:



Tendrils continued from flight404 on Vimeo.

How did he do that? Well I had to go to Processing

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

Processing is free to download and available for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Please help to release the next version!

Keeping up with Alaskan politics is something I guess all Alaskans should do, but there are all sorts of people out there doing neat things and they are just a couple of google searches away. So, while I design a new place to work downstairs, I'm going to have to go exploring to the edges of the internet universe regularly too. Getting out of ruts is good to do.

What's the difference between a cyclone, hurricane, typhoon, and tornado?

With the stories of the cyclone that hit Burma, I decided I needed to confirm or change my understanding of what a cyclone is compared to hurricanes and typhoons. After reading a several websites, the Times of India had the most succinct explanation that seemed consistent with what I read elsewhere.

What is the difference between cyclone, hurricane, tornado and twister?

Technically, a cyclone is any kind of circular wind storm. But now, it is only used to describe a strong tropical storm found off of the coast of India. Hurricanes and Typhoons are the same thing, but in different places. On the coast of Florida it is called hurricane. In the Philipines, it is called typhoon. Hurricanes occur in the Atlantic and typhoons, in the Pacific. Basically, hurricanes and typhoons form over water and are huge, while tornados form over land and are much smaller in size. A tornado is a violent windstorm characterised by a twisting, funnel-shaped cloud. In the United States, twister is used as a a colloquial term for tornado.

— Pradeep Jain, Agra

For a glossary of hurricane related terms, check the National (US) Hurricane Center.

The Hurricane Research Center of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Lab has Hurrican FAQs in English, Spanish, French, and German.

Both are part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) so they have links to other weather related information as well. [I'm also testing blogspot's new "scheduling posts dated in the future" feature. Let's see if this is posted at 8:29am May 13.]

And I can't mention the cyclone in Burma without some comment on the evil of the ruling clique there. There isn't much we can do now, though complaining to elected officials and Chevron wouldn't hurt. But this is an example of the world letting this boil fester for years and years. Anyone who wants to know, has known that these leaders have badly used the people of Burma to enrich themseles and whatever twisted power needs they have. China is a major enabler of these activities - lots of Chinese goods pass across their border with Burma - as are corporations like Chevron that take advantage of the slave labor arranged by the Burmese military.

Elton John in Anchorage

I don't have any John albums, but we do have some tracks on an old CCNY tape someone gave us long ago. The friends that we asked weren't interested. But Elton John is Elton John. And he's coming to Anchorage. J got in line a week ago. The line minders assured people well behind her that they would all get tickets. But in the end, J was about six people behind the last tickets. But they did tell her and others in line that there might be a second concert and took her name and phone number. They called Friday to ask if we were still interested. Yes. Come back Monday between noon and four, we'll have tickets for you - dry or wet side?

Today, J got the tickets. I don't think we've ever paid so much for a ticket to anything. No, the LA Opera last summer was more. Slowly I'm thinking in dollars again and not figuring out how many Baht that is. It would be obscene in what Baht could buy. What's EJAF?[As soon as I hit publish I started figuring it out, and then I had to check.]

Love Songs - a movie

Monday night movie at the Bear Tooth, a favorite routine. Monday's when they have foreign films or other artsy films.

Boy, Girl, Girl
All singing in French
As they experiment in Paris
Girl dies, Boy sad
Breaks off with Girl 2
Boy, Boy on a ledge

If none of that makes any sense - and if it does you've seen the movie or live in a different world than do I - you can see a brief video here.

Happy Mother's Day

When I went to see the sandhill cranes a while back, I took my old Pentax that has been sitting idle. When I developed the film, I discovered I started the film last summer, when my mom was visiting. Here she is last summer at 85.

For Mothers Day, I'll try to keep this short by listing ten important things my mom passed on to me

1. When you help other people you get back far more than you give
2. Make peace before you go to bed, never go to bed angry at (your child, spouse, parent, etc.)
   
3. There isn't just one way to see things. My mother came to the US alone at age 17 from Nazi Germany in 1939. While she has always appreciated the country that took her in, she never took things for granted - either the good things or the bad.
4. How to take care of myself - cook, hang up the laundry, iron my own clothes, and many other things.
5. How to get a lot done with the time you have. My mom always worked, from the week she arrived in the US when she started as a baby nurse until last May when she 'retired' at 85 from the medical office she'd worked in since 1949. She couldn't waste time and had everything organized, like the different stops on her way home to get what we needed, or having lunches ready to go the night before.
6. That everyone was important and to be treated with respect. I was about five when I recited "eeny, meeny, miney, mo, catch a Nigger by the toe." She pulled the car over to the side of the road and asked me what I had said and we had a long discussion about what it meant and why I was never to use that word.
7. Don't leave the lights on, and turn off the water while you brush your teeth.
8. Worrying is important if it gets you to do what you need to do. Beyond that it is a waste of energy and life. My mom saw everything that could go wrong and worried about it. I guess that comes from being a Jewish girl when Hitler came to power. She emailed me today that she just listened to a CD of Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. It's a fantasy novel about how Nazis could have come to power in the US in the 1930s. It brought back memories, "Actually I was 11 yrs. when Hitler came to power in 1933. No wonder I wasn't afraid like the older people. What possibly could happen until I found out. They first thought he would be thru in 3 months and after that they became concerned, but then it was too late." I learned to be prepared and to think out all my options, but NOT to worry when there was nothing more I could do.
9. Let go. Even though she worried, she never said a thing to me when I took off to teach in Thailand with the Peace Corps long ago. She has accepted my living far away in Alaska with grace and has never used guilt on me. I've tried to give my own kids the same freedom to live their own lives.
   
10. To love the ocean.
    

This picture of my mother and daughter was also on that role of film.

My Buds

Mountain Ash Buds

Cottonwood Buds

Aspen Buds

Amur Maple Buds

Rspberry Buds

The garden is late, but it's starting to happen.