Bill Murray's Blog, page 52
September 11, 2018
China Moves Its Cities Abroad
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Beijing is not only buying Africa, now it’s building its own cities in other countries. Here, in Cambodia,
“Union Development Group (UDG), the Chinese developer behind Koh Kong province’s $3.8 billion tourism project called Dara Sakor, has unveiled plans for yet another project called “Tourism Vacation Town,”
an investment of an additional $1.2 billion dollars, while in Malaysia, a proposed new city of 700,000, the $100 billion Forest City project looks a lot like mainland China’s Shenzen, which is perched on the border with Hong Kong. Forest City would sit just across the Johor Strait from Singapore. It’s running into resistance from the Malaysian leadership, though. 93-year-old leader Mahathir Mohamad said this week
“that no foreigners would be allowed to live there even as crews rushed to complete some residential towers before buyers move in later this year.”
September 7, 2018
Weekend Reading
Don’t know about you but the anonymous column in the New York Times doesn’t make me feel better. An unknown group within the executive branch doing unknown things to undermine a presidency that’s doing it best to undermine itself. Not reassuring.
For years I bemoaned the over-long interregnum between the end of the Cold War and whatever came next. Everybody knew the institutions fashioned after the Second World War, the IMF, the UN, NATO, needed restructuring to factor in the rise of players outside North America and Europe and all the other new realities, but nothing seemed to budge.
Change is finally coming hard and fast. My ten-cent theory is that the catalyst was the 2008 sub-prime crisis and the endless austerity pursued after it, coupled with resentment that none of the responsible players in the financial industry was seen to pay. All facilitated by around forty years of dedicated Neoliberal economics.
The “Post-Cold War world” lingered until it didn’t. Now, with changes coming like lightning, most political thinkers trying to come to grips with the new, still unnamed era, gravitate toward the rise of the loosely defined idea of “populism.”
Too loosely defined, says Jason Frank in Populism isn’t the problem in the Boston Review. He writes,
For … prominent advocates of the populist thesis (there is a) common danger posed to democracy by such disparate leaders as Trump and Chavez, Orbán and Morales, Erdoğan and López Obrador, and such disparate political movements and parties as Podemos and the Tea Party, Syriza and Alternative for Germany, the Five Star Movement and the National Front.”
“As Roger Cohen argued in a recent New York Times op-ed, … the term … has “become sloppy to the point of meaninglessness, an overused epithet for multiple manifestations of political anger.”
– Balakris takes a look at one of Neoliberalism’s favorite ideas, privatization, in Italy’s bridge disaster: an inquest into privatisation at ft.com.
– Adam Tooze takes a look at The Forgotten History of the Financial Crisis in Foreign Affairs (You may have to sign up for this one).
– Scooted along by the Euro crisis, European politics took the lead in the phenomenon of vanishing center parties. The U.S. is catching up, writes Gracy Olmstead at The Week, in The vanishing political center.
– In spite of his article’s title, Timothy Shenk is optimistic in Is Democracy Really Dying? in The New Republic.
– And last on the general subject of the shrinking center, the Swedish general election is Sunday. Couple of articles:
– So Long, Swedish Welfare State? by Nima Sanandaji in Foreign Policy, and
– A Guide to What Could Be the Most Uncertain Swedish Election Yet by Nick Rigillo at Bloomberg
Lighter stuff: August is the hottest month in our part of the world, so two articles about the north:
– Vikings Razed the Forests. Can Iceland Regrow Them? by Henry Fountain at the New York Times, and two book reviews in
– The Big Melt by Tim Flannery at the NYRB.
– And finally, just for fun, a really well-written article I thoroughly enjoyed, a book excerpt, The Worst Ever First Day on the Job by Finn Murphy at Literary Hub.
Have a good weekend. See you next week.
September 5, 2018
Barentsburg: Russian Svalbard
Nice article at ArcticToday.com about a new push for tourism to replace coal mining in Barentsburg, the Russian city on Svalbard, at 78 degrees north latitude.
Here are two excerpts from Out in the Cold about visiting Svalbard for the March, 2015 total solar eclipse.
Photo from the Svalbard Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
August 31, 2018
Quotes: On Sea Ice
“Back in the early 1980s, the (Arctic) sea ice in September typically covered an area somewhat less than the size of the contiguous United States. Now it is much, much smaller – we have lost an area equivalent to all of the states east of the Mississippi, plus the Dakotas and Nebraska.”
– From an interview with Mark Serreze at FiveBookscom.
August 30, 2018
August 24, 2018
The Humanity!
You may remember that the early internet brought the cost of voice communication dramatically down, and fast. For some years American consumers grumbled that “customer service,” having been sent to cheaper offshore call centers, became incomprehensible and ineffectual.
A backlash brought a lot of that work back onshore, but I’m afraid call center calls with my fellow Americans, while now more comprehensible, remain ineffectual.
Employees MUST use the script they suit up with when they come in to work. MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST! No deviating into humanity. No exceptions.
I called the air conditioning repair people after business hours and a live voice answered. I told it, “Oh hi, I was just thinking what I would tell the machine.” This plunged the live voice into stunned silence.
Spontaneous remarks had not been addressed on her script.
Pause, and a time wobble.
“Your address?”
Weekend Reading
Just a couple of timely articles for you this weekend, one a pocket history of Irish Catholicism on the occasion of the pope’s visit, called It’s too late. Not even Pope Francis can resurrect Catholic Ireland by Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times, the other Peter Beinart’s explanation of Why Trump Supporters Believe He Is Not Corrupt in The Atlantic. Beinart:
In a forthcoming book titled How Fascism Works, the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley makes an intriguing claim. “Corruption, to the fascist politician,” he suggests, “is really about the corruption of purity rather than of the law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of the traditional order.”
Beinart’s thesis is that
for Trump and many of his supporters, corruption means less the violation of law than the violation of established hierarchies….
and he points to Fox News’s prominent coverage of the Mollie Tibbets story on the morning after the Cohen and Manfort court proceedings:
The Iowa murder … signifies the inversion—the corruption—of that “traditional order.” Throughout American history, few notions have been as sacrosanct as the belief that white women must be protected from nonwhite men.
and to Trump supporters’ revulsion at Hillary Clinton:
Clinton’s candidacy threatened traditional gender roles. For many Americans, female ambition—especially in service of a feminist agenda—in and of itself represents a form of corruption.
•••••
It promises to be a lovely pre-fall weekend in southern Appalachia, low humidity, nighttime lows below 60 (15C). Wherever you are I wish you well and I’ll leave you for the week with one more problem to chew on.
Damrak, Amsterdam.
Too much tourism:
Amsterdam edition.
Venice edition.
Prague edition.
Iceland edition. (I write about the scourge of “Puffin Shops” in Out in the Cold, too.)
And it’s not just Europe. There’s the
Thailand edition.
Philippines edition,
USA edition, even an
Adelaide edition.
See you next week.
August 21, 2018
Good Clean Fun in Turkmenistan
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Eurasianet reports that the government of Turkmenistan is inaugurating a new Amul-Khazar road race “that the government hopes will put the country on the international motor sports map.”
It quotess RFE/RL’s Turkmen service: “each of the country’s five regions, or viloyats, is being required to dispatch 7,000 spectators to convey the impression of a popular event.”
“‘According to the instructions, they should stand along the route of the rally and in their capacity as spectators, make a noise,” a correspondent on the ground told Radio Azatlyk.’
Sad!
“In May 2015, there were 69,460 jobs in coal mining itself — only 15,900 of which were extraction workers or helpers, mining machine operators or earth drillers. That’s 0.019 percent of the American workforce that month.”
[image error]– That’s from the Washington Post. The Bureau of Labor Statistics website says there are 2,800 more coal mining jobs than in the month President Trump was elected.
Count me as an opponent of the Trump administration, but doggone it, it’s hard not to feel bad for the president (Yep, I just wrote that) out rallying tonight in West Virginia, trolling the 0.019 percent for friends.
Because back in Washington today his 2016 campaign manager was convicted of corruption, while his personal lawyer pleaded guilty to eight crimes, naming the president as a co-conspirator in campaign finance violations.
The president is a Tweeter, not a poet. But if he were:
“Witch hunt witch hunt,
crooked Hillary, Pelosi too!
Remember we hire only the best,
that I can tell you.” Believe me.
On the Road: Rapa Nui
Here is the complete first column in the On the Road series at Three Quarks Daily, as it appeared there yesterday
Polynesia could swallow up the entire north Atlantic Ocean. It’s that big.
Only half of one per cent of Polynesia is land, and 92 per cent of that is New Zealand. Then there’s Tonga and Samoa, the Cook and Hawaiian islands, the French possessions, and back in its own lonely corner, Rapa Nui, the famous Easter Island. Four and a half hours flying time to South America and six hours to Tahiti, Rapa Nui is a mote, a tiny place that feels tiny, forlorn, a footnote.
How in the world did proto-Polynesians cast their civilization from Papua New Guinea all the way to Rapa Nui in canoes, with thousand year old tech, sailing against prevailing winds and all odds?
If you think about it at all, you might suppose Rapa Nui was an accidental discovery, storm-damaged canoes drifting off course, perhaps, or voyages of exile dashed upon obscure rocks. Who imagines resolute, purposeful voyages of discovery on stone-age ships no match for the vastness of the sea?
I do. I fancy single-minded voyages of exploration carried out by well-provisioned scouts sailing with, say, a month’s food, who set out in the more difficult direction, “close to the wind.” If no land were found in a fortnight, when half the food was gone, they could sail home downwind, faster.
By the time Europeans first explored open water, the farthest bits of Polynesia – more than seven times the size of the Roman Empire – had already been settled. Let us not sell the Polynesian navigator short.
I think this is how, from Papua New Guinea and the Bismarck and Solomon archipelagoes in Melanesia, the vastness of Polynesia was wound together, one island at a time, arteries from the heart.
When a voyage of discovery succeeded, the explorers would return to a heroes’ welcome and the king would set about settling the new land. How to provision the settlers? Ropes and reeds for the ships, patches for the sails, food for the journey, seeds and tubers for planting, domestic animals, pigs and chickens.
I imagine a royal council of elders gazing into a crackling fire, kava at hand, debating the necessary skills, selecting the best settlers. There must be canoe-builders, planters, stone masons. Wizened fishermen and promising apprentices. Daughters of child-bearing age. Tears would surely be shed.
A holy man privy to counsel from the gods, (a Tahitian tahu’a with special knowledge of navigation, perhaps), would be called to preside over ceremonies on both the home island and the new.
Today’s navigator consults his own oracles, the blinking, reckoning, chart-following machines on his bridge. And in Micronesia today, the art of navigation by the stars is still passed along orally, in the dark, on the sea, as it always has been.
•••••
In legend, Rapa Nui’s first colonizers arrived on two ships, one led by Hotu Matu’a, the other by Ava Reipua, Hotu Matu’a’s wife or sister, it’s unclear. Petroglyphs on a Rapa Nui cliff called Orango tell this tale. But how did they find this place?
In 1999, the Hawaiian historian Herb Kawainui Kāne and the Polynesian Voyaging Society set out to “discover” Rapa Nui using ancient methods and materials. Kāne and crew sailed from Hawaii via Mangareva to Rapa Nui in a canoe called Hōkūle‘a.
Polynesian canoes of exploration didn’t preserve well; scant evidence remains. Drawings from a 1773 British expedition that called at Rapa Nui show double-hulled canoes in the harbor. Excavated fragments of ancient canoes have turned up on New Zealand. A bog on Huahine near Tahiti yielded bits of a canoe. A petroglyph of a canoe at the Orongo cliffs suggests a possible ancient design.
Beyond these clues Kāne and the Voyaging Society found little hard evidence, so they guessed. They crafted a double-hulled canoe 62 feet four inches long, with a draft of two and a half feet and a sail area of 540 square feet.
Nainoa Thompson, the Hōkūle‘a’s navigator, devised a scheme for finding Rapa Nui at once straightforward and ambitious. Rather than hoping just to blunder onto a trifle of land, the Hōkūle‘a would approach from the west, targeting a box 300 miles by 240, two degrees on either side of 27 degrees south of the equator, the island’s latitude. It would sail the box top to bottom, zigzagging back and forth, hoping to pass within sight of Rapa Nui.
A crew member named Sam Low kept a dairy of the mission that glides through the stuff of a sailor’s days – sunrises, stacks of cumulus, sharks and sunsets. We thrill with the crew when just before dawn on October 8th, 1999, seventeen and a half days out of Mangareva, Max Yarawamai, the crewman standing lookout, spots a vague black line on the horizon and the crew celebrates with garlic eggs for breakfast.
II.
Rapa Nui’s suzerain, Chile, is its own enigma. The Atacama Desert in Chile’s north is the driest place in the world. Places there have recorded no measurable rainfall for decades. Because of its altitude and aridity, the Atacama hosts the world’s most advanced telescope.
Though a Pacific nation, at the Strait of Magellan, its storm-hammered southern tip, Chile opens to the Atlantic. A settler described Tierra del Fuego as “65 unpleasant days per year along with 300 days of rain and storms.”
Between desert and strait, Chile’s skeletal finger points the distance from Reykjavik to Ankara, 2,675 miles, but is only 40 miles wide at its narrowest, barely the width of Israel from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.
In the Andes to the east Mount Aconcagua towers over all the Americas, at 22,841 feet the western hemisphere’s highest peak. Off the western shore the Atacama trench plunges 26,460 feet beneath the Pacific ocean. From trench to peak: 49,301 feet. Mt. Everest: 29,029 feet.
The length of the country, conical peaks serve as picture-perfect tourist lures. They can also be agents of epic havoc.
•••••
The ire of the mountain gods rose with the sun on a Sunday morning in winter, 1960. A 7.5 Richter predawn earthquake chased coastal Conception’s faithful to church and that was good, providential even, as people fled houses fated to collapse.
Another 7.5 crumbled the walls of old Conception just past two o’clock, rolling and shaking for four minutes. Andean ridges skittered and slid. Survivors fled to high ground but the high ground plunged into lakes. Six old and three new volcanoes brewed up, and all this, incredibly, was just the opening act.
7:11 p.m: the strongest earthquake in the history of the earth shook the Pacific Ocean, at 9.5, beyond human experience. Waves rocked the Pacific basin for a week.
Coastal villages simply disappeared under a ghastly eighty-two foot tsunami. Docks and coastal roads, desert to strait, fell into the sea.
Waves bent parking meters in Hilo, Hawaii, 6,600 miles away. Water drew back from the harbor seven feet below normal then bored back in in a flattening scowl.
Ten thousand miles from Concepcion tsunami waves destroyed the entire town of Shizugawa, now called Minamisanriku, and more than a hundred died elsewhere on Honshu, Japan.
Between Japan and Chile lay little Rapa Nui.
Rapa Nui’s famous statues are called moai, and the base on which a moai stands is an ahu. Ahus are holy places, ancestral graves. Likely as not you’ll hear admonitory shouts if you try to touch a moai or walk across an ahu. They are Rapa Nui’s patrimony.
The gods went bowling that day in 1960, scattering the moais at Tongariki two thousand feet inland and dashing their ahu to bits. The Tongariki moais are giants, the island’s greatest achievement, but the heavens’ pique cast them like matchsticks onto the plain.
Thirty years on from the earthquake, Chile’s President Patricio Aylwin sent a replica moai to the destroyed Japanese village of Minamisanriku. The Japanese crane manufacturer Tadano returned the gesture, sending heavy cranes to restore Ahu Tongariki. Until a quarter century ago, the massive Tongariki statues, the island’s iconic, unexplained, unforgettable images, still lay scattered.
III.
We have saved Tongariki for the night of the full moonrise. Fabiola, in whose taxi we have come, is intent, no nonsense, a devoted smoker with one son at university in Santiago and her younger boy here on the island. Her university son will bring a telescopi from the mainland this year, her Christmas gift to her younger boy.
Fabiola demonstrates her expectations for the telescopi, cigarette between her fingers, arms apart and eyes wide, awed by what it will reveal. She must be right because you hardly need a telescopi. Just look to the heavens.
What a place to view the planets. Hardly a view-obscuring light for 2,300 miles. Just here, in a heartbeat, we follow where Fabi is pointing and find two fast-moving satellites.
•••••
Counterclockwise through the roundabout we catch the coast road. Children get dirty on the curb. Women on a veranda erupt into theatrical laughs. A slow rider clops by on horseback. We drive for half an hour at a leisurely pace because leisurely is the thing here.
The coast is close; the waves crash in. They’ve come a long way, got up a good head of steam.
Brine in the mist. Lick your lips and you taste it.
Horses graze on shore, unbound by fences. They’re not wild, exactly. They all belong to somebody, they’re branded. But since there’s nowhere for them to go, they go where they will. The surf pounding behind them frees you, too.
Horses and cows and a produce stand. This planted field and that on the inland side. We are running up the east road, sun casting shadows the length of the island, darkness creeping in from the sea.
Here, a moai has been toppled on the ahu where it once stood. Looks like they knocked it over in just such a way to add insult to injury, back broken at the neck in two pieces. Naked conflict, right here.
You read about violence in the late statue-building period and now you see it before you, its cruelty magnified by this smallest canvas. On Rapa Nui the most advanced instrument of war was the adze, a hand tool.
Stéphen-Charles Chauvet imagined it thus: “The attacking warriors set off before daybreak, followed by their women and children, who wailed or intoned ‘protective’ chants.” Women and children found seats along the neighboring slopes to watch the triumph or death of their fathers, husbands and brothers.
•••••
Arriving at Tongariki for the first time is hard to describe, an experience you can only have once. The Tongariki ahu aligns with a natural bay hundreds of yards wide, a moor gradually rising inland, a natural amphitheater.
The indifference of towering stones, far out in the Pacific, draws the three of us to quiet. The biggest moai of all is here. Eighty-six tons. Imagine.
The ancients got it and its siblings here somehow, rolled them on logs, rocked them side to side with ropes, somehow. It is just plausible because the quarry, on the slopes of the volcano Rano Raraku, is line of sight from here.
All the half-unearthed, nodding moais you’ve seen in pictures are up there, never finished, never extracted, never put into place, buried to the shoulders, never making their statement.
They say they built them bigger toward the end, perhaps growing more plaintive to the gods, perhaps making more desperate claims on immortality.
The moais’ obsidian pupils stare into the past. We assume a pilgrim’s pose at the base of the ahu. Isolated in the back corner of an obscure island, alone in the twilight, it’s a feeling unlike any other. It’s entirely unique.
A man taking pictures, one other man and a boy are leaving as we walk through one of the rusty turnstiles they’ve put up and long abandoned. Turnstiles?
Campers’ lanterns twinkle down along the shore and besides that there is no one. Only the full moon ascending through broken clouds, a crashing surf, the Rapa Nui moais and us.
