Tilichiki needs your prayers

Please pray for my colleague enviros who live in Tilichiki, Koryakia, which has this past few days been leveled by earthquakes.

There is no information but the video from news feeds show that nothing withstood the quakes and the 20+ aftershocks that were 5-6 in strength. Kindergartens, hospitals, power plants.

Here is the latest RIA Novosti article on the quake and evacuation.

Nobody is answering their phones there.

If you pray, pray.

A Beautiful Day for the Subjunctive

It's our first warm sunny day of spring, and the 100th anniversary of the great SF earthquake and fire today. That quake and fire is something that haunts everyone here all the time, but particularly today, when the subjunctive case-- "if this then that"-- is on everyone's lips.

So they decided to have a parade, which some think is weird, but on what other occasion do you get emergency services and trade unions all lined up to receive appreciation?

I got to clap for the SF police chief Heather Fong, and her mounted police escort. I got to clap for the firefighters, marching in dense formation ("formation"), replete with tiny children in arms, dykey types galore, and a very sweet but mangy looking black and white australian-shepherd-ish search dog. That will be the most beautiful dog on earth if I'm looking at him/her from under a pile of earthquake rubble, that's for sure.

I got to clap also for a sweet, earnest, out of tune junior high school band from Pacifica. The empathy that gushed out of me for those kids! I mean, the part of me that loves the Triplets of Belleville (the movie), the part that is so deeply touched by small acts of sheer absurdity, futility and earnestness, it just broke all open at their small, earnest out-of-tuneness. I even shed a tear at the beauty of it. As Eliot said "for us there is only the trying." Most perfectly embodied by a little tiny out of tune provincial marching band of prepubescents.

I got to clap for the long line of contingents of trade unions behind a single big banner "WE REBUILT THIS CITY." And the ILWU drill team, with their tap-adorned steel-toe boots and shiny chrome loading hooks.

As I walked away (the parade still going) I looked back to see the Red Cross marching by. As with the police and army and the firefighters who came before, when I'm standing holding my little tabby cat outside the burning wreck of my old 1920's apartment building after the next big disaster, I will be MOST grateful to see those uniforms.

At the tail of the Red Cross contingent was an old truck with the label "Red Cross Horse Ambulance." Right now, reading the Guns of August and getting a sense of the horse-dependency of the 1900-1920 era, I can imagine that truck was a welcome sight on many San Francisco street corners after the quake. But being an old horse person, some part of me saw that ambulance and felt that earthquake in an all-too-real way, imagining and quickly banishing the image of a burned animal.

So, both happy-gushy and provoked into disturbing thoughts by the sights of the parade, I returned to the office in time for a presentation by a visiting scholar showing us his horrible evidence of the vast recession of the glaciers since 1950. The ice core record showing exactly how human-made impacts are mounting (in terms of sulfates and other pollution evidenced in the core). Basically, after those firefighters, police, army and red cross workers do their best, and we still perish off the face of the earth, the other-worlders who come here to investigate what happened will have no doubt about what killed us.

A beautiful day with a very creepy aura.

[Note to the organizers: GET THE GAYS TO ORGANIZE THE PARADE IN 2106! If there's one community that knows how to organize a parade, it's them. And note to locals: did you notice the long hold ups and delays in this parade? This is how emergency services organizes a parade! Be afraid! Start those emergency kits NOW!]

Altaians in Ukiah

My three colleagues from Altai, Siberia, who I've been helping entertain, are here to learn about alternative energy projects in California. They went to Ukiah and got some front page coverage in the Ukiah Daily Journal this past Tuesday. In Hopland they didn't like the hoppy beer, but they sure liked the microhydro generators!

Hazards of Walking the Political Line with Russians

1. Overt racism. I work at an ethnically European-American organization that works with Ethnic Russians, Indigenous Peoples of Russia, and Asian-Russians. They have their bones to pick with eachother, but they are all pretty comfortable with European-Americans (hereafter "white people"). The white people they know are like the people I work with, often working in segregated circumstances, where the US NGO staff is primarily or exclusively white (due to traditional NGO elitism plus the nonprevalance of people of color with Russian skills). So not in ANY contact or circumstance do they have prior interaction with people of color from the US, and then they come to Oakland, San Francisco, Washington, DC, to visit. They are overtly amazed at the many different and often dark colors of peoples' skin, and will innocently ask for photographs with people who are exotic looking to them. Really! And really innocently. But to the grave discomfort of the well-trained well-intentioned white people that are trying to wrangle them.

Last night an Ethnic Russian visiting from absolute bumfuck nowhere Siberia was entranced with these two children the color of the darkest night sky sitting on a white bed in the bedroom display section of Ikea. He asked me to take his picture with them. I wouldn't, but I asked the Ikea employee who was talking to the kids, and who was African American, to stand for a photo with our guest. She was puzzled but not offended and hopefully I've averted a future disaster on this trip, since he now has his desired souvenir photo of himself with an African American. This definitely puts me in political grey area, as someone trying to live an anti-racist life, but I really felt like this urge of his to be photographed with exotic-to-him looking people could end VERY badly if it wasn't taken care of in safe circumstances. So, hopefully the young lady at Ikea thinks he spontaneously wanted a photo of someone who works at Ikea, and doesn't suspect the reality of the situation. Although, if I were her, I'd be suspicious. I apologized a little too much.


2. The reality that you might start fitting in with the Ethnic Russians. The questionable pedigree that Ethnic Russians have with regards to so many things-- treatment of minority ethnicities, minority religions, women, the environment, their neighboring countries-- leaves you with this question in your head when inevitably someone says "you're REALLY Russian now." Yes, working with a group of a certain language/ ethnic group you do try to fit in and not assert your own cultural expectations on the group. But do I REALLY want to thought to be REALLY Russian? This question comes up for me-- I try not to dwell.

Last night I briefly lost my car keys in the Ikea parking lot-- they fell from my hand into my trunk and got buried under some bags. So, I went from talking with my guests about my Swedish grandmother to being just at a loss-- here we are! Stuck in the parking lot! Oh well! As I unpacked things and eventually found the keys one of the Russians piped up-- "You're not Swedish-- you're Russian!" I know he didn't mean it in any way other than playful, and even complementary (see, you're just like us!), but it does leave me wondering if it isn't finally time to visit the land of my FarMor. Get in touch with some roots OTHER than my adopted Russian ones.

3. Of course the inevitable confusion with the Spy Names. And the Spy Rocks, getting clear transcriptions from our moles in Moscow.

KIDDING!

The Russian, the Eye of Shambala and the Dollar

Over dinner tonight with some visiting environmentalists from the Altai in Siberia, one of the guests brought up the rumor that the famous Russian artist Nikolai Roerich designed the back of the one dollar bill. We debated it a little and of course none of us knew anything about the dollar bill and its art. So, thank you Wikipedia, for clearing this up.

Roerich's influence on his devotee cabinet secretary Henry A. Wallace led to the inclusion of the Great Seal of the United States on the U.S. dollar bill known for the depiction of the Great Pyramid topped with an all-seeing eye — a religious, occult and Masonic symbol.

The FDR American Heritage Center backs this story up.


Nicholas Roerich, a Russian born artist, poet, writer and distinguished member of the Theosophical Society, led an expedition across the Gobi Desert to the Atlai mountain range from 1923 to 1928, a journey which covered 15,500 miles across 35 of the world's highest mountain passes. Roerich was a man of unimpeachable credentials: a famous collaborator in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, a colleague of the impresario Diaghilev and a highly talented and respected member of the League of Nations. Roerich was an esoteric Russian painter, and went to Central Asia to become a lama. His earliest paintings, filled with Himalayan light, are in the astonishing Oriental Museum, also known as the Museum of East and West, in the Russian capital of Moscow, and others at Roerich societies like the ones in New York City in the United States and St. Petersburg in Russia. Roerich was credited with introducing the West to Agharthi and Shambhala. Nicholas Roerich was also influential in FDR's administration, and was the pivotal force behind placing the Great Seal of the United States on the dollar bill.

I wish that page had some anchors so I could just link around the page, and I don't feel like quoting the page further, but there are some amazing things in there about this Henry A. Wallace character and his obsession with all things Russian and also weird-ass mystic sects. Boy, nowadays you could NOT get to the heights of government this guy got to and still be openly obsessed with the Illuminati.

So anyway, Roerich didn't design the US seal (with mystic pyramid and Eye of Shambala) that is on the dollar, but he was behind it being placed on the dollar.

What's especially cool for me is that, looking at the Wikipedia examples of Roerich's art, I recognize his work. I have visited his paintings in the Russian Museum (in St. Pete) for years. He is an AMAZING artist. And I am very sorry he did NOT design the dollar bill's art-- that would be a fanTAStic dollar.

Check THIS out. One of Roerich's paintings I've been admiring for years.

Temporary Reprieve in Misfortune for Albanian Lesbian Asylee, Mother

You have to celebrate when you can, and this is just a temporary stay of deportation on human rights grounds, but since the US basically doesn't even recognize human rights grounds to begin with, my hat is off to the UK Immigration Court of Appeals Lord Justice Sedley.

The Long Perspective

This week I started and finished, in time for spring break, the third of four sections of a self-paced Intermediate Algebra class. And I got an A on it. It was a chunk of learning that is designed to take at least three weeks, if not a semester. I am hoping to finish the next section by the end of the semester. I'm pushing myself to get through the whole course in a semester partly because I need to keep moving toward about my eventual re-application to UC Berkeley's policy school, the career move that will end, blessedly if only temporarily, my long ten-year drag under the glass ceiling of non-profit generic catch-all jobs where I inevitably feel the weight of the egos of my heirarchical superiors driving me towards a future where I hope to someday be their boss. The late nights, doing math until 2 or 3 am, feel like an indulgence in my dream of a better future. My current non-profit low-20's glass ceiling drag is feeling particularly futile right now-- battling the clock to get small $1,000 to $17,000 grants to small vulnerable environmental organizations in Russia. In one week the new Russian NGO law comes into force which will suspend my work on processing these small grants, perhaps indefinitely. I complain about what I'm paid, but looking at the payrolls in the project budgets for these little enviro projects... it gives some perspective. And if throwing these peanuts into the cage feels like an exercise in futility, what must it feel like to the recipients in that cage-that-is-Russia...

And some more perspective. Feeling like I'm in this embattled nonprofit organizing world at a dead run -- such that looking out the BART train window I tend to wonder whether I'm going home or going to work -- I've been grounding myself by reading Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. The story of the first month of World War One.

Wikipedia gives the summary.

By the end of August, the French Army had suffered 75,000 dead of which 27,000 were killed on 22 August alone. Total French casualties for the first month of the war were 260,000 of which 140,000 were sustained during the climactic final four days of the battle of the Frontiers.

Tuchman's book quotes some reports from the Battle of the Frontiers where the pile of dead was being compared to the image of a tidal wave falling at a 60 degree angle. Germany's conscripts were marching in dense formation and were mowed down in such a way that the French defenders were finding that the wall of dead created cover for the oncoming battalions. The world at that time was such that officers wore white gloves into battle. The cavalry with its swords was deployed against machine guns and heavy artillery. The old world and new world collapsed into a putrid wasteland of trenches and wire. And, most appalling of all, the presiding monarchs of the three prime players in this war were all cousins. One could say this bloody debacle was a family spat gone terribly terribly wrong.

So in my moments of feeling like I'm in a long uphill drag in a vast exercise in futility, I like a little perspective. The building I walk by every day to and from BART - the Kaiser Auditorium - has a gorgeous facade of Beaux Arts relief with the allegorical themes of a land at peace: the joy of effort, the consolation of the arts, the wealth of the earth. An agrarian, intelligent view of the world. The facade is dated 1914. I get chills looking at it, knowing that perhaps the very month that facade was installed the world changed forever, the ferocity of modern warfare erupted and-- to paraphrase T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets"-- "the dancers [went] under the hill."

Back in undergrad study, I imagined something like the hill home from a Tolkein hobbit village as the hill that the dancers were gone under. But the hills, the earth-- it was where you buried those villagers caught in the warfare that was waged in fields of wheat. I read "All Quiet on the Western Front" and the principal repeating image you are given is that the earth is solace. You want to crawl into it to get away from the death, stench, bombs. You have the taste of it in your mouth, and you want to become earth, wide and broad and low and dead. And safe. You want to be gone under the hill.

So, here I am. Still alive, still racing around, making my futile gestures at bettering the world, while bombs go off daily in a country my country destroyed in a gesture at fixing it, and yet there is not, and will not be, the kind of war of attrition that was World War One. The modern war is deadly but there are no battles where 27,000 die in one day. Tsunamis, yes, but not battles with that kind of human impact.

It is grim but it is still something for which I can be grateful. War has evolved, still a monster, but evolved.

"Eerily Effective Psychographic Matchmaking Software"

After coffee but before any other important events on this April Fool's Day I made sure to check out what Google has in store for those hapless folks who don't read calendars and trust Google to handle every aspect of their life. This year Google targets the lonely hearts.

Oooh ooh look - they have links in one nook of the soulmate search spoof to previous years' April Fool's jokes:
GoogleGulp
Lunar Job
Pigeonrank
Mentalplex