voter registration

It seems to be happening again. The most active "scrubbing" of voter registration rolls is going on in states where Barack Obama has made significant inroads into traditionally Republican territory. And what do you know? A majority of those being "scrubbed" are registered Democrats.

These kinds of shenanigans shake my faith in democracy and humanity. For a reminder of the voter registration roll "scrubbing" that went on in Florida in 2000 - and likely cost Al Gore the Presidency - click here. For a really interesting interactive feature from the New York Times about the Florida recount in general click here. (The Florida recount was not related to the "scrubbing" issue, but is dispiriting in and of itself. The main takeaway: if a statewide recount had been conducted, according to the existing rules, Gore would've won.)

This image is also from the New York Times, in an article detailing the most recent shady scrubbing activities:

meet my new friend

I did something decisive recently. Really! It's true! I'm taking Chemistry I at the University of Maryland on Monday and Wednesday nights. This constitutes an official toe-in-the-waters of a possible future vet school application. And so far, it's been really fun and energizing to be back in school.

heaven

KK and I went hiking on the Appalachian Trail in Massachusetts this week. Just four days in the middle of a week we're spending up here visiting her crazy family. It was a great hike. The first night it rained incessantly, though we stayed nice and dry inside our trusty tent. Even inside the tent, though, everthing gets moist, and it was a good 24 hours before we really dried out. The weather didn't clear up til about noon the following day, so we had a soggy seven mile hike to the next campsite. But the rain made everything feel lush and verdant under the tree canopy, as though if I just reached out with my senses, I'd be able to feel the forest growing around me.



In Massachusetts, you can only camp in designated areas, so we had the company of other hikers most nights. Our second night, we met some extremely entertaining thru-hikers. They were doing 20-plus mile days, and smelled like they hadn't showered in a month (which they hadn't). One was a 60-something year-old guy who was 100 miles from being done. He walked from Georgia to New York, and then took a bus up to Maine and was walking South back to where he left off in New York. He was skinny with a long white beard, and he walked around camp like he felt every one of those two-thousand plus miles in his bones, bent crab-like over his battered feet, wincing. He was travelling with a tall seventeen-year old kid who went by the trail-name of Stretch. Stretch had just graduated from high school, and when he talked to you he peered out from under a thick greasy curtain of curly blond hair. The two had met on a bus on the way to Maine, and they had now walked 600 miles together. They cooked and ate 10 hot dogs for dinner, complete with buns and a ziploc baggie of ketchup that they had bought in the last town they walked through.

On our third day we walked ten miles to a campsite that we had all to ourselves. We passed through Cheshire, a little New England town surrounded by small farms where we got lunch at a sandwich shop. On our way out of town, the trail passed through a cornfield, where we stole three ears of corn to cook for dinner that night. When we arrived at camp, Kati made up a fire while I went and fetched water from the stream nearby. We cooked our stolen corn in the coals, and watched the light fade through the trees.



I love backpacking because it reduces my needs and wants to their most elemental levels. If I don't need something, I don't bring it, because everything has to be carried on your back. In fact, a good chunk of our conversation as we walk is usually about what we brought that we could leave behind next time (you'd be amazed at what starts to look expendable by mile ten under a heavy pack). And I think some of the most satisfying meals I've ever had have been ones that I carried out of civilization to eat. My friend JJ posted recently about the concept of "enoughness". Backpacking feels like an active exercise in enoughness to me. Being out in nature is one of the simplest pleasures I can think of, and also one of the most satisfying. And it feels like a relief to shuck the burden of things I hadn't realized I didn't need. At a stream-crossing on our last day, we passed this on a collapsed stone bridge - it's a nice reminder:

Ocean Therapy

KK and I spent a fantastic weekend in Emerald Isle, NC with nine other crazies, mostly friends of mine from college, and a few new additions. There were several birthdays nearby, so we made and ate desserts like you wouldn't believe. They were delicious. Though the house was nearly overflowing with food, we had so much of it. Here are some of the cast of characters:







The weather was fantastic - and it's always so great to get out in the waves. Since I don't spend a lot of time at the shore, I often forget how powerful the ocean feels. I like the sense of smallness it gives me: it reduces my worries and preoccupations to their correct proportion -- which is infinitesimal. Thanks, Ocean.

Smartbike Sighting!

I ran into these little beauties on my way to work today:



DC's bike sharing program is underway! You pay $40 a year for a Smartbike card, which will unlock one of these sweet rides. You can ride it around for 3 hours, and return it to any of the ten Smartbike stations around the city.

I'm not sure how much use I'll have for this program in its current form - usually I have my own bike, and even if I didn't, the three hour window is limiting. I couldn't fit in dinner and a movie in three hours. But I'm still incredibly excited to see these. It feels like a sign of an increasing enthusiasm -- in DC and elsewhere -- for changing the way we get around. I posted previously about the effect that high oil prices are having in the auto industry, where suddenly gas mileage and alternative fuels are all the rage, even in Detroit. Bike sharing programs, and bike-friendly city life in general, have become more popular recently for partly the same reasons. But apart from their earth-saving qualities, there is something about bicycles that make a city seem like a nicer place to live. I'm so glad that I'll be seeing these cheerful little critters around town.

"No End In Sight"

In the opening scene of Charles Ferguson's documentary No End In Sight Donald Rumsfeld stands behind a podium and opines that only history will be the judge of the war in Iraq. This movie is one of a bevy of recent documentaries that constitute the first draft of that history, and the early word is about as bad as you can imagine. Fueled by his own outrage, political scientist and first-time director Chris Ferguson winds fact-wise through the invasion and the early days of the occupation. He treats us to a side-by-side comparison of two startlingly different versions of events: the official line, as dispensed from press-briefing podiums by the president and Donald Rumsfeld; and the damning testimony given by the people who were actually in Iraq. Just about every frame adds a new and ever more sick-making revelation of the arrogance and incompetence with which we have conducted this war. Worse, it didn't have to be this way.

Of course all hindsight is 20-20, and Ferguson's movie has been justifiably accused of tendentiousness. Even so, it's hard not to be swayed. Ferguson traces the administration's narrative using archival news footage; in and of itself, the cocksure-ness on display is startling. He then contrasts this version of events with dozens of interviews he conducted with current and former civil servants, journalists, soldiers, and Iraqis, including Richard Armitage, Barbara Bodine, Jay Garner, Paul Hughes, Walter Slocombe, and George Packer. Most heartbreaking are the stories told by Garner, Hughes, and Bodine, who were all but helpless witnesses to the destructive decisions handed down from Washington. During these early days, the Iraqi people were willing to wait and see: they had not yet turned against our presence there. It's difficult to remember from this far distance, but No End in Sight reminds us that regardless of whether we should have gone to Iraq in the first place, there just might have been a right way to conduct this war once we started it.

The entire movie is posted on Google Video. I embedded it above, though if you don't see it, your browser might not have the latest version of Flash Player. Click on the lower right of the video to watch it in full screen, or click here to go to Google Video. If you're having trouble, try switching to another browser, too. Enjoy.

Green Car Insurgency!

High oil prices are tough on consumers who might already be struggling, but I for one am just brimming with excitement over the effects $4 per gallon gasoline is having on the automobile industry. Last week, GM announced that it's closing 4 SUV manufacturing plants, and said in its press release that it believes cheap gasoline to be a thing of the past. GM, Ford, and Chrysler are fundamentally changing their businesses as a result. Apart from the potential demise of the Hummer brand (which I would find very satisfying), Ford is retooling F-150 producing plants to switch to small car manufacturing, and Chrysler is getting into the hybrid market. Their ridiculously large hybrid SUVs are not the answer to the climate problem (and in fact big, expensive hybrids with infinitesimal fuel efficiency gains are selling abysmally), but these signs of change are really, really exciting. A couple years ago the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car" portrayed GM as a wicked corporate giant quashing the plucky little EV-1, in spite of its possible commercial feasibility (or maybe more accurately, in spite of the possible value of heading in that strategic direction - imagine if GM had beat Toyota's Prius to the gas-mileage punch?). Now, the giant is staggering under rapid changes in consumer behavior that it evidently thought impossible, and it's falling all over itself trying to beat Toyota to the market with a plug-in hybrid in 2010.

Just as exciting to me is the proliferation of impatient entrepreneurs trying to concoct plug-in electric MPG improvements (which may or may not result in a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, depending on the upstream energy source of your wall outlet). Hybrids-Plus, an outfit in Boulder, CO, is one of a handful of companies offering plug-in conversions on the Toyota Prius and Ford Escape hybrids. They are prohibitively expensive - upwards of $30,000 not including the car - but the mere fact that these companies exist is evidence of a market not being supplied by the major auto manufacturers. On a smaller scale, a guy named David Taylor in Lee County, NC seems to have converted his 2005 Dodge Ram pickup into a plug-in hybrid in his shop. From his video, it seems like he's ready to start converting cars for us, too. And there are other entrepreneurs who are innovating their way towards higher MPG's: Aptera is a California-based car company set to start selling their first vehicle in 2009, and it gets 300 MILES PER GALLON:



Cars are not the biggest producers of greenhouse gases in the world - according to Environmental Defense, they account for about 10% of global emissions - but as developing countries like China and India become wealthier, their new middle classes are buying cars, which will exacerbate the problem of tailpipe emissions. Plug-ins are far from 'clean', but moving the pollution from millions of tailpipes to a handful of power plants seems like a step in the right direction.

I can't wait to see what happens next.