v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

10 Fotos I Like

Last weekend we went over to good friends of ours to do a foto critique and review. I assembled ten (actually 14 fotos that I had taken over the years that I liked)-the act of going through your own fotos to select 10 that you can talk about is something all fotographers should do. The older the fotos perhaps the better as you tend to be more objective. Here they are with a short commentary below each-I'll include two per entry.:

Vallejo Nocturno 2019- Singapore Botanical Gardens- This was my second visit to this famed garden so I knew that I'd find lots to focus on. I took my infrared converted camera (Olympus 510) among the three cameras I carried. When I entered and purchased my ticket I walked towards the orchid display about 3/4 of a mile from where I entered. A man with top shelf camera equipment saw me and asked me about my gear (Leica, Sony, Olympus) and proceeded to tell me where I should go in the massive gardens. Happy to have received advice from what looked to be a veteran I walked about 15 yards from where he sat and saw this setting (above). I took several fotos of this scene adjusting the aperture and exposure and realized that my battery was out and I had failed to bring any others for this camera. This was the only infrared results for that day. For me this foto represents the mysteries that await in any forest full of plants, insects and birds.

Vallejo Nocturno 2017- Taken in 2017 in Chorrillos, a section of Lima, that overlooks the Pacific, this Christ was a gift from Brazil's Odebrecht to Peru. At the time of the gift the company was busy bribing politicians, CEOs, and managers to gain contracts in Peru. From the beginning people thought it a monstrosity and very bad taste but the mayor of Chorrillos accepted and put it where its stands today among a flock of antennas.

From Last Nights Concert at The Undercroft

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 - In descending order- Derrick Michaels' Born from Silence, Ledah Finck, and UHHM

White World Supremacy

From a review of The Guarded Gate by Daniel Okrent in the NYRB:

In May 1921 The Saturday Evening Post, America’s most popular magazine, warned its readers of the grave “immigration problem” threatening to bring about “racial degeneration” in the United States. Yet happily, scientific advances based on the discoveries of Gregor Mendel would ensure Americans need never “forfeit their high estate and join the lowly ranks of the mongrel races.” Poor Mendel, quietly cultivating his peas sixty years earlier, never said a word about racial degeneration, but that didn’t stop anti-immigration campaigners like the Post’s editor, George Horace Lorimer, from claiming that Mendel’s work on heredity corroborated a new science validating ancient bigotries—namely, eugenics. In offering a supposedly scientific foundation for nativism, eugenics kicked off a national epidemic of confirmation bias.

“Nordicism,” as American scientific racism was known, held that people of Northern European “stock” were biologically superior to everyone else. “The mental ability of the Southeastern European is below that of the Northern and Western European,” readers were instructed, in typical terms. “Northern and Western Europeans govern themselves better than Southern and Eastern Europeans govern themselves.” Every few weeks, Lorimer used his bully pulpit to hammer the same restrictionist message, railing against “our policy of putting the alien and his interests first,” in editorials such as “America Last.” The Post’s two million readers in 1922 would have recognized in that title a clear allusion to a familiar, belligerently nativist slogan—“America First.”

Lorimer also hired a mouthpiece named Kenneth L. Roberts and sent him to Europe to issue scaremongering diatribes from the immigration front lines, expounding upon “certain biological laws which govern the crossing of different breeds, whether the breeds be dogs or horses or men.” In “Plain Remarks on Immigration for Plain Americans,” Roberts claimed that stopping immigration was “a matter of life and death for America,” repeating the same ominous phrase four times in the essay’s first five paragraphs. He acknowledged that millions of Europeans were living in abject misery after World War I, only to rhetorically shrug his shoulders:

The economic distress of these wretched people, for one reason or another, has always been so close to the extreme limit, that they were dulled to distress’s finer points. If they lived on beans and beets in 1912 their distress didn’t increase if the beans were moldy and the beets decayed in 1920.

The people too dull to appreciate the finer points of their own misery were, Roberts explains, “Hebrews” from Poland and Russia.

Such arguments borrowed their authority primarily from two hugely influential books, Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916) and Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), both heralded as offering scientific proof, thanks to “recent advances in the study of heredity and other life sciences,” of white supremacy. In fact, Grant and Stoddard were simply repackaging old ideas in scientistic new containers. The word “nativism” had been coined to make the same argument in the mid-1840s, urging “native Americans” (i.e., descendants of earlier European settlers) to defend against the legions of Irish and German immigrants invading the nation.

The federal government, however, did not begin restricting immigration until the 1880s. There were local and state laws to control it, but they were rarely enforced. Immigrants who arrived before 1880 for the most part did so in the absence of any meaningful restrictions, or disregarded them and were permitted to stay. Claiming ancestry on the basis of “legal” immigration to the United States before the 1880s and 1890s is to all intents and purposes nonsense; the vast majority of immigrants just came.^*

More

The Birth of Single Malt

From LARB, a review of single malt guide book:

In his brief history of Scotch, Risen includes one overarching lesson: single malts are a happy accident of history. This is apt since the leading theorist of the unintended consequences of economic markets and public policy was himself a Scot: Adam Smith. But even though the author of The Wealth of Nationsdiscussed international wine markets to illustrate his theories, he did not have a single drop of single malt before his demise in 1790. For a simple reason: It did not exist. Yes, whisky could be had in Smith’s time, and for about three centuries beforehand, but it scarcely resembled single malt. To borrow a term from Appalachia (a region largely settled by Scots on the wrong side of history): it was “white lightning.” Unaged distillate of whatever grain, even fruit or vegetable, could be coaxed to produce alcohol. The querulous Highlanders were known for their consumption of uisge-beatha, meaning “water of life” in Gaelic, corresponding to eau de vie in French and similar terms in other languages that attest to the vital importance of distilled beverages. I first met with the term in reading Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, which I did while on a tour of the distilleries of Scotland. Scott’s novel was published in 1814 and is widely recognized as the first historical novel, with a story set during the Jacobite uprising of 1745 and featuring an English army officer seduced by the hospitable and tragically romantic Highland clans, whose exotic ways included drinking uisge-beatha. His novel does not relate the historical anecdote that the Scottish troops were administered the Eucharist with whisky and oat cakes on the eve of the climactic battle of the uprising. Perhaps the next day would have turned out differently if it had been a single malt.

Whisky was first introduced into Scotland during medieval times from Ireland. Tradition has it that none other than St. Patrick brought whisky to the emerald island during the fifth century. As Risen notes, the legend is exceedingly improbable given that the technology for distilling alcohol did not exist in the European West until centuries later, with the requisite alembic still introduced from the Arabic world (hence “al-embic” and “al-cohol”). Pesky facts. I say we double-down on the legend by adding that the patron saint of Ireland used whisky as fuel to fire his cleansing the island of snakes. The first written mention of whisky in Scotland does not occur until 1495, specifically in the royal finance rolls. Indeed, attempts to tax and regulate whisky production would turn out to be an important factor in the history of single malts, once again by way of unintended consequences. Onerous taxation chased distillers into the hills, just as would happen a couple of centuries later in Appalachia, with the same result: high-octane moonshine. Only after a set of laws dating from around the same time as the publication of Waverley and designed to encourage legal distillation did whisky slowly begin to become what we would recognize today.

Economic and political disasters turned out to be the crucible in which single malts were forged over the next few decades. Overproduction of whisky led to a sudden crash in the waning years of the 19th century, with countless distilleries boarded up and the supply reduced to a trickle. Not a single new distillery was built until 1949. Production in 1900 was 37.1 million proof gallons (a proof gallon being the equivalent of one gallon of spirits at 100 proof), but by 1932 it was 285,418 proof gallons. The dinosaurs fared better! The seven hobbling survivors simultaneously faced a series of laws intended to restrict production, in part the fruit of policies stemming from the temperance movement (though happily not resulting in an 18th Amendment to Albion’s unwritten constitution). Importantly for our story of unintended consequences, however, the laws regulating the ingredients, distillation, and aging of whiskies in order to reduce production and consumption of Satan’s favorite drink created the conditions for single malts’ eventual flourishing. A main villain of the story, turned hero by the unforeseen outcomes of his policies, was David Lloyd George. First in his role as chancellor of the Exchequer and then as prime minister during the Great War, the teetotaling Welsh politician followed up his regulation of the opening hours of pubs (still in partial effect today) by unleashing his animus against whisky, claiming that the unbridled consumption by workers in munitions factories and other wartime industries threatened national security. He probably wasn’t entirely wrong. The man credited with founding the modern welfare state in Britain thereby unwittingly elevated the status and quality of whisky, encouraging the production of a more mature, rounded, and complex spirit. The industry survived the Depression and a second World War to find an expanding world market, including in the United States. As noted earlier, single malts still accounted for a very small fraction of production and distribution, but at least they existed to be discovered and nurtured toward the end of the 20th century by Michael Jackson and Clay Risen, and me and you.

 

A Sick, Bad Guy

 

Of the many theories of why 45 acts as he does this one makes some sense from The Atlantic and Peter Wehner-an unwell person in the White House:

Donald Trump’s disordered personality—his unhealthy patterns of thinking, functioning, and behaving—has become the defining characteristic of his presidency. It manifests itself in multiple ways: his extreme narcissism; his addiction to lying about things large and small, including his finances and bullying and silencing those who could expose them; his detachment from reality, including denying things he said even when there is video evidence to the contrary; his affinity for conspiracy theories; his demand for total loyalty from others while showing none to others; and his self-aggrandizement and petty cheating.

It manifests itself in Trump’s impulsiveness and vindictiveness; his craving for adulation; his misogyny, predatory sexual behavior, and sexualization of his daughters; his open admiration for brutal dictators; his remorselessness; and his lack of empathy and sympathy, including attacking a family whose son died while fighting for this country, mocking a reporter with a disability, and ridiculing a former POW. (When asked about Trump’s feelings for his fellow human beings, Trump’s mentor, the notorious lawyer Roy Cohn, reportedly said, “He pisses ice water.”)

The most recent example is the president’s bizarre fixation on falsely insisting that he was correct to warn that Alabama faced a major risk from Hurricane Dorian, to the point that he doctored a hurricane map with a black Sharpie to include the state as being in the path of the storm.

“He’s deteriorating in plain sight,” one Republican strategist who is in frequent contact with the White House told Business Insider on Friday. Asked why the president was obsessed with Alabama instead of the states that would actually be affected by the storm, the strategist said, “You should ask a psychiatrist about that; I’m not sure I’m qualified to comment.”

We have repeatedly heard versions of that sentiment over the course of Trump’s presidency. It’s said that speculating on Trump’s mental health is inappropriate and unwise, especially for those who are not formally trained in the field of psychiatry or psychology.

That’s true, up to a point. Yes, it is best to leave it to experts to determine whether Trump satisfies the criteria for a clinical diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, some combination of both, or nothing at all.

But if a clinical diagnosis is beyond my own expertise, Trump’s psychological impairments are obvious to all who are not willfully blind. On a daily basis we see the president’s chaotic, unstable mind on display. Are we supposed to ignore that?

An analogy may be helpful here. If smoke is coming out from under the hood of your car, if you notice puddles of oil under it, if the engine is overheating and you smell burning oil, you don’t have to be a car mechanic to know that something is wrong with your car.