“The times that try men’s souls”

Sen. Robert Byrd is the eloquent elder statesman whose speeches in the run-up to the present war offered potent warnings as to the dangers and unpredictability of war.
Now, the Senator is once again at the forefront of the fight for the American conscience– or, if you like, the American soul. Yesterday, he had this to say about the recent revelations that the President has for several year’s now specifically allowed US security agencies to spy on the US public without even complying with legislation that requires them to get a warrant to do this from an existing, specially constituted court.
Byrd’s remarks were under the potent title, No President is above the Law. They included the following:

    We know that Vice President Dick Cheney has asked for exemptions for the CIA from the language contained in the McCain torture amendment banning cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment. Thank God his pleas have been rejected by this Congress.
    Now comes the stomach-churning revelation through an executive order, that President Bush has circumvented both the Congress and the courts. He has usurped the Third Branch of government – the branch charged with protecting the civil liberties of our people – by directing the National Security Agency to intercept and eavesdrop on the phone conversations and e-mails of American citizens without a warrant, which is a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment. He has stiff-armed the People’s Branch of government. He has rationalized the use of domestic, civilian surveillance with a flimsy claim that he has such authority because we are at war. The executive order, which has been acknowledged by the President, is an end-run around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which makes it unlawful for any official to monitor the communications of an individual on American soil without the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
    What is the President thinking?

Continue reading ““The times that try men’s souls””

This day in history (Rumsfeld-Saddam)

Susan (NC)– who also posts on Today in Iraq as ‘Dancewater’– put a great post up there last night reminding us that December 20, 2005 is the 22nd anniversary of the famous Rumsfeld-Saddam handshake in Baghdad that sealed the rapid improvement in US-Iraq relations of those months.
Susan also linked to this recent article by Norman Solomon, in which Solomon noted the following:

    Christmas came 11 days early for Donald Rumsfeld two years ago when the news broke that American forces had pulled Saddam Hussein from a spidery hole. During interviews about the capture, on CBS and ABC, the Pentagon’s top man was upbeat. And he didn’t have to deal with a question that Lesley Stahl or Peter Jennings could have logically chosen to ask: “Secretary Rumsfeld, you met with Saddam almost exactly 20 years ago and shook his hand. What kind of guy was he?”
    Now, Saddam Hussein has gone on trial, but such questions remain unasked by mainstream U.S. journalists.…
    As it happens, the initial trial of Saddam and co-defendants is focusing on grisly crimes that occurred the year before Rumsfeld gripped his hand. “The first witness, Ahmad Hassan Muhammad, 38, riveted the courtroom with the scenes of torture he witnessed after his arrest in 1982, including a meat grinder with human hair and blood under it,” the New York Times reported Tuesday. And: “At one point, Mr. Muhammad briefly broke down in tears as he recalled how his brother was tortured with electrical shocks in front of their 77-year-old father.”

Continue reading “This day in history (Rumsfeld-Saddam)”

Post-election prospects, Iraq

Can the Dec. 15 election in Iraq help lead to some form of intra-Iraqi accommodation, and thus to significant progress toward US troop withdrawal and national independence?
Most (but not all) indications so far seem discouraging on this score. The conduct of the election has been hotly contested by, among others, the mainly-Sunni “Iraqi Accordance Front” (IAF) and also the more secular list headed by longtime US ally Iyad Allawi. Of these two contestations, that from the IAF is the one with the greatest potential to prevent the reaching of a national accommodation.
We probably don’t know the true dimensions of the complaint from the IAF yet. AP’s Jason Straziuso reports from Baghdad that the IAF officials have so far “concentrated their protests on results from Baghdad province, the biggest electoral district.” Early returns indicated that the “result” in Baghdad province was that the big Shiite list, the UIA, had won about 59% of the vote, the IAF around 19%, and Allawi’s list around 14%.
But we haven’t even heard any estimates yet of the “result” in the other provinces where Sunnis are present in large numbers and where the IAF might also rightly expect to win a lot of votes. And so far, as Straziuso reports, the IAF hasn’t started to focus on their complaints from those provinces.
Given the total lockdown the country experienced for the days around the election itself, and the very substantial lockdown that the US and their allied forces maintain, in general, in and around most of the country’s heavily Sunni cities, it must be extremely difficult for the IAF’s national leadership even to communicate with its representatives in those areas, let alone to gather any systematic details about the nature of complaints from the many voting precincts in those cities.
According to Straziuso, the IAF warned of, “grave repercussions on security and political stability” if the mistakes claimed (in Baghdad) so far were not corrected. He quoted Adnan al-Dulaimi, head of the front, as saying, “we will demand that the elections be held again in Baghdad. … If this demand is not met, then we will resort to other measures.”
However, Moqtada Sadr, the activist, generally anti-US Shiite cleric who is both on the UIA list and an advocate of strong links with the Sunnis, has reportedly lauded the results of the elections as released so far. This Dec. 19 edition of IWPR’s “Iraqi Press Monitor” summarizes a report from Al-Sabah that said this:

    The young Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr said the participation of Sunni Arabs in the elections enhanced the political process. He added that the wide participation of Iraqis in the recent election reflected the vitality of the Iraqi people. Sadr said the people will decide the government’s future. He emphasized that he supports any list that will better serve the people and any government that works for Iraq’s independence. The electoral victory is a victory for Iraq, Sadr added.

The way I read this, it seems likely that Sadr feels that his people did well in the elections– perhaps especially in and around Baghdad, where he has a strong base of support. A particularly strong result for the UIA list in Baghdad would presumably give Sadr a lot more bargaining power in the crucial post-election bargaining for power that is going on right now inside the UIA coalition. (It’s a strange feature of the electoral system that has been cobbled together in Iraq over the past 18 months that people vote for a list without the order of the actual candidates who are part of that list having been agreed and advertised in advance.)
I’ve been trying to read today’s Al-Hayat in Arabic to figure out what might be happening inside the UIA right now. But I don’t really have time to do a good job… (Help, Salah, Shirin, anyone?) Anyway, toward the end of this article there , it says,

    … sources close to the UIA confirmed that disagreements had broken out between its principal parties over the position of prime minister. And the sources, which preferred not to be named, told al-Hayat that, “The sharp disagreements over the premiership between the Daawa Party led by Ibrahim Jaafari and SCIRI, led by Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, have not yet been resolved.”
    And they added that SCIRI rejected this [unclear what], referring to “its bigger mass following and its larger number of seats and that if it hadn’t been for SCIRI the UIA would only gotten half as many votes”. And they noted that, “the other disagreements center on the terms offered by the representatives of Moqtada al-Sadr in the list and which are represented by the need not to deny positions [i.e. jobs] of soveriegnty and ministerial [responsibility] and the participation of all the winning lists regardless of their ministerial weight, in the formation of a government of national salvation.”
    And the sources confirmed that, according to the contacts that the American administration in Iraq, as represented by its ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, the [contest over the] premiership is reserved between Adel Abdul-Mahdi [of SCIRI] and Iyad Allawi and that Zad [i.e. Khalilzad] doesn’t support the candidacy of Ibrahim Jaafari, and he prefers to save the security-related ministries for parties that don’t have militias…

We could also note that Jaafari’s (out-going) administration has really been hobbled in recent days by the (US-imposed) decision it took the day after lat week’s election, to increase fuel prices by around 2,000%…
Anyway, there is clearly a lot of politics going on inside the UIA there… SCIRI head Hakim has been quoted in Hayat and elsewhere as saying some pretty triumphalist things about how the UIA has now definitievly won the election so they can go ahead and intensify their “de-Baathification” campaign. That would seem to be a big obstacle to Moqtada Sadr’s aim of finding a good entente with the Sunnis…
Any further contributions that commenters can make to providing good sources, links, and translations about the current politics inside the UIA (or even just improving my rapid little piece of translation there) would be really great. Thanks, friends!

Who’s running the Iraqi elections?

From AP’s Jason Straziuso in Baghdad, this morning, writing about the official complaints that have been filed about the conduct of last Thursday’s election:

    U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said there had been 20 “red” — or serious — complaints as of Monday that could affect the outcome.
    “Final results will not be announced until those red complaints are looked at,” he said.

But I thought we were being told that responsibility for running the elections was in the hands of the all-Iraqi “Independent Election Commission”?
This is, of course, the same picture that prevails across the entire gamut of governance responsibilities inside US-and-UK-occupied Iraq. In the conduct of the elections. In the conduct of the Saddam trial. In the conduct of “security” and military policy. In the allocation of budgets… The occupying power is in fact— and indeed, still also under international law– in charge. But this occupying power (the US) likes to make it appear that it’s the Iraqi collaborators who are calling the shots…
Just until things get tough, and then Big Brother Khalilzad steps in immediately to call the shots.

Iraq as Bush’s ‘strongest card’ (?)

So here’s how bad the political situation at home has become for the Bush administration at this point, less than a year into his second term: He even has to peddle the situation in Iraq as being the strongest achievement of his presidency to date…
Yes, the guy truly is in dire political straits.
Tonight, he went on national t.v. to give a major public address about Iraq for the fifth time since November 30. And Dick Cheney even left his bunker for long enough to go and visit the Baghdad Green Zone. The intensity of these guys’ present public focus on events in Iraq is completely unprecedented.
Remember, we don’t even know yet what kind of a government will emerge from Thursday’s elections.
(If the votes were gathered in a generally fair way, and fairly counted, then the new government is most likely to be very hostile to any lengthy presence of US troops in their country. What will the Bushies do then? Maybe we can get a hint of an answer from Palestine, where the US and now the EU have already said that they won’t support any elected body in which anti-imperialist, anti-US parties dominate.)
So the timing of the current Bush/Cheney attempt at a “victory lap” may well be dictated by the need to for them to strut their stuff before the potentially challenging results of the recent election come in. But it is also, I’m sure, dictated by their need to claim some kind of victory– any kind of a victory!– somewhere in the world, given the sudden new plummet in their political sway at home. They couldn’t get the Patriot Act renewed. They couldn’t (despite Cheney’s best urgings) get a strong pro-torture provision preserved in the legislation. They couldn’t stave off the prosecutors and judges– and in texas, too!– from going after Tom De Lay. They couldn’t ram Samuel Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court through the Senate before Christmas, as they wanted. They haven’t been able to stop Patrick Fiztgerald’s investigation from getting very close indeed to Karl Rove ….
Failure, threat, and weakness, wherever they look.
Except– in Iraq! Where they have all those great pictures of Iraqis walking along showing off their ink-stained fingers!
(The Bushies ignore, of course, that the violence also escalated badly again there today.)
Well, if the January elections are anything to go by, then this time once again it’ll take the Iraqi Election Commission a long time to count the votes; then it’ll take even longer to get the elected parliament seated; then there’ll be many weeks of haggling over who gets to be President; and ditto, for Prime Minister… So we may not see any kind of government emerging from this election for another 2-3 months. Plenty of time for Amb. Khalialzad and Gen. Casey to continue all kinds of anti-democratic machinations, back up by the military, the Special Forces, and other means of violence… So it may be quite a time yet before we see any clearly presented, anti-US political movement emerging from the elections– even if there are many signs that this movement is waiting in the wings.
And in the meantime, the Prez will continue to try to strut his stuff as the hero of “democracy” and “liberation” in Iraq.
But in in the rarefied hot-house of intra-elite politics in Washington, it’s not even really about Iraq any more. (And it most likely never was.) It’s about power in Washington: who’s got it, and who’s losing it. George W. Bush has been losing it big time. In other circumstances, that would be the kind of circumstance that could prompt a president to launch some kind of a “wag the dog” military adventure. But not today. Been there, done that…

Christmas in our Quaker meeting

Quakers generally hold that every day is as holy as any other, every place is as sacred as any other, and every person equally as much a child of God as any other. So we don’t have a “liturgical year” with Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, etc. But we US Quakers do live here in our surrounding culture, with the kids and all of us subjected strongly to the winds of the surrounding culture. And since it’s good to build our community with special gatherings when we can, our Quaker Meeting (church) here in Charlottesville usually has one just before “the time known as Christmas” when our kids tell us some about the things they’ve been learning and lead us in some singing.
This year’s children’s performance was today.
We have the most amazing kids in our children’s program. Ever since 9/11, new families with young children have been coming to our Quaker meeting– looking, I think, for a congregation dedicated to peace, understanding, and nonviolence in which they can raise their kids. And we also have many families who’ve been Quakers for a long time, who have kids of various ages.
Today, at 10 a.m., the under-12s all came into the middle of the square room in which we hold our twice-weekly worship sessions. They were wearing a variety of costumes and had an excited air. Julian Waters, aged about 5, started out by reading some of the account of the Christmas story from one of the Gospels. He was very serious about it. When he got to a place talking about the birth of the “Prince of Peace”, he looked up and– still following his stage directions– asked loudly, “Why are we celebrating Christmas if we’re at war?”
One of the adult friends (Quakers) then led the kids in singing John McCutcheon’s “Christmas in the Trenches”, which is a lovely song about the “Christmas truce” in the World War 1 trenches, in 1915. (John, who’s a great folk musician, is also a member of our Quaker Meeting, but he wasn’t there today.)
The kids have been studying ‘comparative religions’ in their Sunday school. So most of the half-hour program that followed consisted of various quotations about peace and brotherly love taken from a wide variety of different religions. These were interspersed with other songs, including “This is my song“, which is sung to the haunting “Finlandia” melody, by Sibelius.
Oh and I forgot to mention: at the beginning, a bunch of the adults welcomed the kids in by singing a Sufi chanted version of “La illahi- illallah”, which is very meditative.
In our Meeting we have some really great parents and Sunday school teachers, and we all work hard to raise caring and self-confident kids who have a strong commitment to nonviolence. Lots of us adults were sniffling as we watched our kids this morning– and thinking, too, of the violence of the culture in which we’re trying to raise them.
Talking of our responsibilities as parents… that reminded me about the great job my daughter Lorna Quandt (then 17) and her friends did back in March 2003, when they organized a walkout from Charlottesville High School to protest the launching of the war. You can still read about it, here. I was so proud of her and her friends that day. Later, the Principal gave all those who had participated a couple of extra detentions. (Or was it an “in-school suspension”? I forget.) Anyway, a non-trivial punishment. But that was okay. They knew they would get some punishment– but thought it was important to make their feelings known, all the same.
250 kids walked out of the high school that day. That was around 25% of the entire student body.
Now, we really need to start planning a good public action for March 18, 2006…

George Bush and “victory”

I’ve been thinking a lot about George W. Bush today. Can’t help it. Here’s what I’ve been thinking…
He and his administration have been making a big deal about the record so far regarding yesterday’s election in Iraq. Claiming it as their own “victory”. (See, for example, the exultant– if somewhat patronizing– text of the remarks he made to some visiting Iraqi-exile “just plain voters” who visited the White House yesterday.) And I can’t really decide how I feel about this claimed “victory”. Here are the two main points on which I’m anguishing:

    (1) I am very happy that the Iraqi people get the chance to vote for their government. I hope that this vote proves to be a meaningful one– though I fear that two big factors may strip it of its value: (a) the centrifugal nature of the draft constitution, and the clear intention of most Kurds to indeed, flee from the Iraqi political center, which together may mean that the “national government” is a meaningless body; and (b) we know that a strong majority of Iraqis want to see the US occupation end: but will the body elected yesterday actually be able to pursue that goal on behalf of the electors?
    (2) I believe the central goal for the “peace and human equality” movement here in the US and elsewhere around the world now has to be the speedy and total withdrawal of the US forces from Iraq. But is this likelier to happen if we can allow George W. Bush to claim one or more political “victories” in Iraq? Is it indeed possible that him claiming this “victory” right now is a way for him to politically cover his rear end as he prepares to– in effect– “cut and run” from a situation that, as his political handlers now believe, has become increasingly politically costly for him and for his party.

There is actually a third big concern I have about yesterday’s election which causes me no anguish to think through, at all. That is: were the Iraqi voters indeed able to express their preferences freely, and to have it fairly represented in the final outcome of the election– or did the US and its allies, or other parties, end up beng able to “rig” the election and thus steal it from the Iraqi voters? If that latter thing happened, then of course the election was not a “victory” for anything valuable, at all.
But the other two issues are tough ones to think through. I don’t want to punish George W. Bush if his clear intention is to do what I consider to be the “right thing”– i.e., to withdraw from Iraq. But I really don’t want him, at the end of the day, to be able to say that his whole invasion and subsequent lengthy occupation of Iraq has been “successful”.
That risks having two consequences I consider very worrying: (a) his cohorts in the right wing of the Republican Party might be able to use the claims about that victory to stanch the erosion of support they have been suffering among US public opinion, and to lay the basis for further political victories here in 2006 and 2008; and (b) Bush himself, or the other US president (of either party) who follows him, might be tempted to try to do a “regime-change invasion” some place else, over the years ahead…
Then again, I really do want the much-battered and much-abused Iraqi people to find a way of achieving stable self-governance. If having “successful” elections there right now helps to bring this about– both by paving the way for a total US withdrawal, as noted above, and by providing the basis for a working national governance structure– then I reckon I would have to be totally for the success of those elections, regardless of whether this strengthens George Bush here in the US or not…

Afghanistan, Iraq, etc on Transitional Justice Forum

Transitional Justice Forum, the group blog that I’ve been trying to crank up with help from Jonathan Edelstein and some other friends and colleagues, has gotten off to a slow but generally satisfactory start.
Yesterday, I put a new post up there about Afghanistan where earlier this week the government adopted a new transitional-justice “Action Plan”. It’s an interesting situation. Several of the parliamentarians elected to the country’s two-house “Loya Jirga” (parliament) back in September are people accused of involvement in earlier rounds of atrocitiy. As a result, many human-rights activists there are worried that the parliament– which will have its inaugural session next Monday– might attempt to immediately pass legislation for a blanket amnesty. I guess that President Hamid Karzai pushed for government approval of his new TJ “Action Plan” in attempt to forestall that.
Personally, I’m not as opposed to the adoption of amnesties– even blanket amnesties– at the end of long, punishing civil wars as most of my colleagues in the human-rights movement are. I believe fairly strongly, based on quite a broad amount of evidence, that if what we are concerned about is improving adherence to the rule of law, going forward, and if there has been a clear and universally recognized transition out of the preceding, highly atrocity-laden era, then the granting of amnesties can play a role in both marking and easing that transition.
But anyway, in the TJF post, I just mainly describe what I understand of the situation in Afghanistan.
If you’re interested in this issue, why don’t you go over to TJF and submit a comment?
Other posts there over the past couple of months include:

    — Jonathan writing about the still tragically strife-torn situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the attempt of President Joseph Kabila to enact a blanket amnesty there… Another really interesting and humanly challenging situation there…
    — me, writing about the recent discovery of huge archives of old police files in Guatemala, and what that might mean for truth-seeking efforts there…
    — this short post by Brandon Hamber linking to a story about the recent discovery of mass graves in Namibia…
    — Christopher Le Mon, writing about the Saddam trial (also here)…
    — me, writing about Uganda and the ICC…
    — Jonathan, on Liberia and Aceh…
    — me, on the Saddam trial (also here)…
    — Joanna Quinn, on Uganda…

… and more.
So as you can see, we have quite a lot of interesting and very thought-provoking “cases” being discussed there, and we’re also probing many of the (sometimes contesting) principles that underlie transitional-justice efforts, as well.
I urge you all to head on over to TJF, read a few of the posts that interest you– and if you can, to leave some comments over there. Even if your comments are only questions, or requests for more information, or for clarification, or whatever. That way, I hope we can make the blog be a bit more lively for everyone.
Ya know, here’s something I find really interesting. The big human-rights organizations have become stunningly successful at ginning up international concern for the ongoing atrocities that they choose to highlightduring any particular period of time… Right now “genocide in Darfur” is on the lips of many, many well-meaning people in the west who this time a year ago probably couldn’t even have found Darfur on a map. A few years ago it was “East Timor” (ditto.)
But once the current round of atrocities dies down some, then the human-rights groups shift everyone’s attention to the next place, and sadly few people– humanitarian aid workers, mainly– are left behind to worry about what actually happens in, say, East Timor, once the place is no longer on the front page of the New York Times…
But if the “landmines of the heart” (as Betty Williams so accurately describes the kind of simmering resentments and desire for revenge that may lie unattended for many years in the aftermath of an atrocity) are not attended to effectively, then they can become ignited once again, very easily, even many years later. And that is the job of Transitional Justice. Transitional Justice mechanisms– whether war-crimes courts, truth commissions, general amnesties, social-reintegration efforts, vetting procedures, or whatever– are those mechanisms used in a post-conflict situation with the goal of ensuring that the inter-group conflict in question and all its attendant atrocities do not recur. They seek to defuse the landmines of the heart. As such, they lie at the heart of any attempt to build a lasting peace where previously there was only conflict, fear, resentment, and war.
That’s why I think that understanding Transitional Justice, and trying to identify which TJ mechanisms can work, and which do not– or, which ones work in which of the many different kinds of post-conflict situation around the world– are really important tasks. That’s why I’ve been working so hard (okay, probably not quite hard enough, but still pretty darn’ hard) with my co-authors there to get this new TJ blog off the ground.
If any of you want to come and help us– whether by posting comments there, or by volunteering to write a main post for us there, or by publicizing the TJF blog in your work and with your colleagues, or whatever– then that would be really great.

Australian riots, the short version

Here is a really interesting blog post about this week’s riots near Sydney, Australia. Its title is Riots in Cronulla: What’s going on?, and it’s by a blogger called Amir Butler. Amir describes himself thus: “an engineer and writer based in Melbourne, Australia. He holds a Masters of Engineering, and is currently completing a PhD in Computer Science…” Hat-tip to Yusuf Smith for that link.
Amir writes:

    There is no doubt that there is a problem with gangs and criminality amongst a small section of Lebanese youth in Sydney. However, it is wrong-headed to believe that any of this owes anything to the religion of their parents.
    Secondly, the riots are not really about race. There is certainly a racist hue to them and the rioters made race the focus of their rage, but there are reasons to doubt this is the root cause. The fact is that riots are nothing new on Australian beaches. We have a long and illustrious history of beachside battles: surfers versus Westies; surfers versus surfers; and so on. In most all previous conflicts, the battle lines were drawn between two distinct groups of white Australians. They were essentially battles between competing subcultures or tribes. And the battles were being fought over ‘turf’.
    The same thing is happening today. The difference is that the ‘Lebs’, a competing subculture vying with the local surfies for control over the beach, are a different race to the mostly Australian surfers. Therefore, they have made this difference the focus of their rage and the focus of their venom — even though, as history shows, they have been equally hostile to other Australians from other parts of Sydney who tried to ‘control’ what they see as their beach. By control, of course, one does not mean that they are fighting for the right to impose parking fees or the responsibility to clean up litter from the shore. It is more a question of which subculture — the ‘lebs’ or ’surfies’ — would be the dominant subculture on that stretch of beach….

He also has what look to me like a very sober analysis of the situation there and some good suggestions on how to address it.
Here is an article in today’s NYT titled, Australia Asks if Racism Was Behind Riots on a Beach.
Thinking about Australia made me think of two other related texts. One is the excellent discussion that Jonathan Edelstein, Shirin, Salah, some other JWN commenters, and I had about the nature of different settler societies, back in the summer. You’ll find that if you read the comments board here. Jonathan even developed a potentially very powerful typology of settler states there… I think that Australia would definitely qualify as a “Type A” settler society in that typology.
(Jonathan, did you ever flesh that work out and publish it someplace? Including on your own blog?)
And the other text I thought about– which I really do need to link to someplace here in JWN, so why not here?– is this one. It’s the PDF version of a June 2004 article by Benjamin Madley of the Yale Univ. History Department, titled “Patterns of Frontier Genocide, 1803-1910: the Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia (Journal of Genocide Research 6:2).

Weather in the real world

Yesterday, my friends Chris, Heather, and I were the only ones braving the winter weather to do the regular Thursday afternoon peace demonstration. That’s okay. We got LOTS of honks and I don’t think any of us caught pneumonia…
The weather was what forecasters describe as “a wintry mix.” There had been snow in the late morning, and by the afternoon it had turned to freezing rain. An ice storm was forecast for the evening…
In case you’re not familiar with “freezing rain”, here’s how it works. The air temp is always just at around freezing, having risen a tad from a long spell at sub-freezing. Rain falls. As it hits any objects– pine needles, utility wires, roofs, sidewalks, whatever– that is still at sub-freezing, it immediately freezes, causing a hard casing on tree boughs, pine needles (there’s a reason I mention them again), railings, sidewalks, etc. As the rain continues this casing gets thicker and thicker, or dangles down in the most amazing icicles, either way adding weight to said objects. If they are utility lines or pine boughs, they can rapidly become heavy, and break off and fall. A falling bough can of course also bring down some of the utility lines that loop along high above most of our streets here in C’ville.
As we stood there, of course it rained on us. There were very few pedestrians and relatively few drivers going past. The cars drove slowly along a nasty slushy roadway. One big city-run snow-plough came past and the driver gave us a great honk!
But of course as utility lines all over the city started snapping, there were fires and power outages in many places. Near where we stand is a fire station. The fire-trucks were called out no fewer than six times while we were there. And I have to confess we actually packed in our vigil quite a bit short of the normal 60 mins. duration.
Anyway, I drove Heather home through several dark, powerless neighborhoods. (She, Chris, and our friend Chip are three people who regularly come to the peace vigil by bike; but yesterday both she and Chris sensibly chose to get there by other means.) She and I did both have power in our homes, however. I had a nice warm dinner with Bill and my son Tar and settled down to plan for a nice evening’s blogging when–
You guessed. We lost power.
We lit the candles that we already had at hand. Bill and I played a few rounds of our favorite word games. Tar was in his room, I think working (by flashlight.) We all went to bed early. The power didn’t come back till around six hours later.
This morning, I ran a bunch of errands… sat down and researched and wrote a really long and informative JWN post about Australia… just about finished it… and then, I swear to God (or would, if I weren’t a Quaker) that I had even thought “Oh, I ought to save this” when I turned around and–
You guessed, the darned power went out again.
All that work lost.
Anyway, now I’m writing this on my laptop. He-he-he. It won’t get lost in a power-out his way, will it?
But here, for any of you who has had similar experiences, is the haiku I have taped up beside my desktop computer:

    A crash reduces
    Your expensive computer
    To a simple stone.

Of course, I read that again this morning and said a long “Ommmm.” I guess writing “power-out” instead of “crash” would mean we’d lose the scanning there? But you lose the work you’ve done and failed to save just the same, in both events.
But at least a power-out has two huge advantages over a computer-linked “crash”:

    (1) The power will come back on. You know that. You just need to wait.
    (2) The power-out is nearly always not your fault. So you needn’t sit around feeling mad at yourself about it.

Well, apart from feeling mad at yourself for not having backed up your work, that is.
Okay, today the weather’s a lot warmer, and everything outside is dripping like mad. Yesterday I got a good upper-body workout shoveling snow (before the peace vigil.) Today, I guess I’ll go for a run.
So that’s the weather news from wintry old Charlottesville.