My New Hero, George Galloway

I think I have a new personal hero, and his name is George Galloway.

In my mind, a hero is someone who speaks the truth to power, especially if he does it fearlessly, forcefully, and eloquently. In these tragic times, when the Republican Party is transforming into a fascist party, the Democratic Party is supine, and the newspapers are acting more and more like the PR offices of their corporate owners, the need for heroes, for people who speak the truth to power, has never been more desperate.

George Galloway is a British Member of Parliament. He was a fierce critic of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq when the Reagan administration and the first Bush administration were still his allies, and he has been an opponent of the invasion of Iraq since it’s inception.

Being a critic of the Iraq war has made him a target. With the reckless disregard for truth which has become characteristic of Republicans, a number of scurrilous accusations were made against him by Republican politicians and their spokesmen in the corporate media. A rising star of the neoconservatives, Norm Coleman, summoned Mr Galloway before his Senate subcommitee to answer these acusations. (In case you don’t know what a neoconservative is, I will explain it. “Neoconservative” is what Fascists like to call themselves these days.) Mr Galloway eagarly accepted this summons and, in front of the cameras of the news media, had Senator Coleman for lunch.

Below is an excerpt of Mr Galloway’s statement. Click anywhere on the excerpt to be linked to the complete statement. Is is worth repeated reading, as a case study in the tactics which Republicans use to smear their opponents, as an eloquent indictement of this idiotic war, and as a beautiful example of how the English language can be used for a good cause.

“I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.

“I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

“If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today.”

If only Kerry or Gore had had the backbone to say such things! It makes me wish British citizens could run for U.S. President.

Writing My Congressman

One of the last hurdles the Republicans have to get over in their efforts to destroy the priceless and irreplaceable Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is to work out an agreement on a budget bill. The Senate version has provisions to destroy the refuge and the House version does not. The handful of Republican congressmen who oppose destroying the refuge, including my own congressman, Mark Kirk, are under extreme pressure from the party leaders to change their position. To encourage Congressman Kirk to hold firm, I sent him this email.

Dear Congressman Kirk,

It is with great anxiety that I am writing concerning plans by many in your party to allow oil drilling on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Past and current behavior of the oil companies prove that this would surely lead to the destruction of the refuge and much of its wildlife.

I know that you have expressed support for protecting the Refuge in the past, but I have recently learned that you are under great pressure from your party to change your position and vote to allow the refuge to be destroyed.

Please hold firm on this issue. It would be a terrible tragedy for this irreplaceable treasure to be destroyed. There are so many way which our energy problems could be addressed through conservations. It is not necessary to sacrifice the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Note that I will be watching this issue, and I will pay close attention to how you vote.

Sincerely,
[My Name], PhD

On another issue, the time that all people of conscience in this country have been dreading has now come. Bush has a chance to select judges to the Supreme Court. As expected, his first nominee is a catastrophe. I sent the following email to my two Senators, Richard Durban and Barrack Obama, to ask them to do oppose this horrible nomination.

Dear Senator,

Please do everything within your power to block the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court. Judge Roberts's opinion in the Arroyo Toad case shows an inclination to favor business interests over the public interest, and his flippant characterization of the case shows that he does not take the problem of endangered species protection seriously. It is reasonable to extrapolate that he does not take other environmental issues seriously. This man is not fit to decide cases on environmental issues which may have irreversible consequences.

[My Name], PhD.

I hope some of you seeing this will also take the time to write and oppose the destruction of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and to oppose Bush's anti-environmental judicial nominee.

For more information on the struggle over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, see the National Audubon Society Website or the Sierra Club Website.

Birding on Monterey Bay

I made a reservation weeks ago to take a pelagic birding trip offered by Shearwater Journeys in Monterey, California. I left San Mateo early on Saturday afternoon, having spent the morning cleaning my apartment and running errands. I took the scenic route down to Monterrey down through the Santa Cruz Mountains along Highways 35, 9, and 1. I checked into the Lone Oak Inn in Monterey. Judging by the number of wetsuits I saw hanging outside the rooms, it is a hotel which caters to surfers and divers.

The next morning I got up earl and drove down to Fisherman’s Warf and met the boat, which was called the Checkmate. It turned out to be a pretty full boat, with about 20 to 25 people of various ages, genders, and nationalities. All of them were either birders or birders’ spouses, of course. Some names there I recognized from some of the birding newsgroups I subscribe to.

The idea of a pelagic birding trip is to see birds which live over the ocean a rarely come within sight of land. Monterey Bay is a particularly good place to see such birds because the water is unusually deep just off shore. Within minutes of leaving the harbor I got my first life-list bird of the day: a Sooty Shearwater. By the end of the day, I would be seeing Sooty Shearwaters until I didn’t care much about them anymore. Within the next couple hours, I got four more life-list birds: Pink-footed Shearwaters, Bullers Shearwaters, Black-footed Albatrosses, and Sabine’s Gulls.

Albatrosses, by the way, are incredible looking birds in the air. No still picture really shows how amazing those long, long wings look as they are flapping.

In addition to birds, there were marine mammals: Harbor Seals, California Sea lions, Humpback Whales, Pacific White-sided Dolphins, and Russo’s Dolphins.

I had a good time, and it was a successful day of birding. (There have been very few times when I have gotten five life list birds in one day.) Still, having tried it, I have decided that pelagic birding is my least favorite mode of birding. About 90% of the individual birds I saw were three or four species of gulls I could have seen on shore, and about 90% of the rest were Sooty Shearwaters, so basically you spend your time looking for the other one percent of the birds out there. Also, it can be frustrating if you aren’t use to it. It’s an awfully big ocean and some of the birds you are looking for are small and hard to see. I missed about half the birds which were seen from the boat which would have been life-list birds for me. Finally, out on the water when there aren’t any interesting birds or other animals around, there isn’t anything else to look at but waves. On land, if there aren’t any birds, there are always trees, wildflowers, and bugs to look at.

One more thing that weekend: while on the boat I heard about a sighting of a Crested Caracara in Santa Cruz County. This is a bird which usually isn’t found north of Mexico. On my way home from Monterey I stopped where it had been seen. I didn’t find it then, but I returned the next day (Labor Day) and found it.

A Week in Switzerland

The Family Vacation
The family and I have recently returned from a vacation in Switzerland. It was a bus tour through a company called Trafalgar, so our hotels were all arranged for us, as well as breakfast each day and dinner on most days. Mornings were usually spent on the bus. Lunch and the afternoons were generally on our own. The tour was competently run, but I am not sure that this is my way to see a country. It was far too much of see the sights from a bus window, especially when we were in the Alps. When I see mountains, I get an overwhelming desire to walk in them, especially when I see others doing the same. Its an automatic reflex for me. But there was almost no opportunity to do this on this trip.

This was a non-birding trip, since my non-birding wife and children were along, and the emphasis of the tour was sightseeing in cities and not getting outside, but I took my compact binocular with me and managed to see some good birds.

Pretty Girls, Ugly Noise, and a Bit of Tibet
We left Illinois on Friday afternoon, August 12 and arrived in Zurich the following morning, after a layover in Frankfurt. The tour manager picked us up at the airport and took us to the hotel. The first day was kind of slow-paced, which was fine with us since we had just had an overnight flight. There was suppose to be a tour of Zurich in the afternoon, but that was truncated by a big festival which they were having downtown closed down a lot of the streets and snarled traffic. I don’t know what the festival was called, but it involved a lot of the loud, oppressive thumping noises which some people regard as “music”, and young men and women in absurd, often skimpy costumes. The latter were funny, but the former was definitely not my idea of fun.

By the way, we had a celebrity staying at the same hotel in Zurich: the Dalai Lama. I think I saw him in the hallway when we were going to breakfast. There were some bodyguards with him as well as other monks. The hotel put up a Tibetan sand painting created by the monks in the front lobby. I love those Tibetan sand paintings, with their colorful, intricate designs, but I can’t even guess at all the symbolism which must be in them.

Into the Alps
Sunday morning was mostly on the bus. We left Zurich and rode to Vaduz in Liechtenstein where we made a short stop, and then went on to the resort town of St Moritz, up in the Alps. The scenery was awesome. In the afternoon we took a train ride through the Alps for more awesome scenery and a wine tasting near the Italian border. This was one of the only rainy days we had on the trip. Most of the days the weather was nice and clear. On the way back from the train ride, the bus stopped briefly at the top of an alpine pass and I got my first life-list bird of the trip: a Eurasian Kestrel. It was hovering, just like American Kestrels do, at the edge of a lake. I took a walk before dinner and got the second one, a Nutcracker.

Monday (8/15) got off to a nice start. I glanced out the hotel window and the bushes were full of Eurasian Blackbirds and Coal Tits, the latter my third life list bird of the trip. Then we had another morning of riding through the Alps. There was snow where we were riding for the first couple of hour, but it melted away after a couple of hours. This day was the Italian part of our trip. We crossed the Alps over into the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland and then into northern Italy in the afternoon. The climate and scenery were quite different here, still mountainous, but warmer and dryer. We stopped for the day in the town of Baveno on the shore of Lake Maggiore. The lake was beautiful. It reminded me a little of Lake Tahoe in California. On the lake and over it were Black-headed Gulls and Yellow-legged Gulls (life-list bird #4). Also on the lake, and on most of the lakes we saw that week, were Great Crested Grebes – large, very pretty water birds. We took a cruise on the lake and visited an island on the lake (Isola Bella Island) which contained the old palace of the Borrameo family, one of the three royal families which ruled northern Italy in past centuries and which still own just about everything in the area. The gardens of the palace were very impressive, and we took several pictures there.

A Fine Day at the Matterhorn
Tuesday (8/16) we rode back into Switzerland and went to the town on Zermatt. Zermatt is the town at the foot of the Matterhorn. This was my favorite day of the trip. Our hotel room was great. It was a suite with a huge balcony and a great view of the Matterhorn. Around mid-day we went for a ride on the ski-lifts high up into the mountain tops and in the afternoon we had plenty of free time to enjoy the area on our own. This was the one place on the trip where I had a couple of hours to do a little birding, which was great. I hiked up into the hills above the hotel and the woods, amid the twittering of Willow Tits (very similar to our Chickadees). I also found a Jay and a Hawfinch (#5 and #6, respectively).

Great Scenery and a Pair of Great Tits
Wednesday (8/17) morning we had some more time to enjoy Zermatt. I went for a short walk which my family was still asleep and found a Bullfinch (#7). Then the wife and I took a walk down into downtown Zermatt, before we got on the bus and rode to Geneva, with a couple of stops on the way. We briefly stopped to see Castle Chillon and later stopped in Montreux for lunch. Near the castle, my daughter found me a pair of Great Tits. (In case you don’t already know, these Great Tits are birds - see picture below.) From the bus window, I saw a Golden Eagle soaring amid the mountains, only the second one I’ve ever seen. As the bus took us into Geneva, we saw United Nations buildings and other international organizations, such as World Health Organization. We arrived in Geneva in the afternoon and walked along the Lake Front and downtown area for the remaining of the day. We saw the Brunswick Monument, Wall of the Reformation, Jet d’Eau, and St. Peter’s Cathedral.


Old Switzerland
Thursday (8/18) we had a stop at Berne and walked through the old section of the city. Albert Einstein used to live in this town and we saw where he used to live. There was an old clock tower which, if I understood the sign correctly (it was in German), dated back to 1192, and we watched the old clock chime at 11 AM. After seeing Berne, we rode to Interlaken where we stopped for lunch. Of all the awesome scenery we saw, I thing the Interlaken area was the most beautiful. The valleys we rode through reminded me of Yosemite, only not as dry. Also on this day we took a carriage ride in the country side which stopped for a little party at a barn which was built in the 1630’s. Finally, we ended up in the city of Luzern (also spelled Lucerne). Between Interlaken and Luzern, I saw a Marsh Harrier (#8) flying over a grassy field.

Prettiest City in Switzerland
Friday (8/19) we spend the day wandering the old city of Luzern. I think this was my wife’s favorite day of the trip. Of the large cities we visited, this one was probably the most interesting. We saw the famous ‘Dying Lion of Luzern’, a monument carved into a cliff, and then the Chapel Bridge, the old covered footbridge, which is shown in lots of travel brochures. At the middle of the old bridge is a large tower, and in this tower roosts a large colony of Alpine Swifts (#9). Alpine Swifts are about four times as big as the Chimney Swifts we have back home. About the time we reached the bridge, they left their roost all together with a big burst of noise. In the river which the bridge crosses were many Mute Swans, Mallards, Great Crested Grebes, and a pair Red Crested Pochards (#10). We also climbed the towers of the old city walls. We spent some time at the Jesuit Church, a grand Baroque-style church from the 17th Century with lots of pink marble and beautiful paintings. We also went to the Hof Church built in 1634.

Saturday (8/20) was the last day of our vacation. First thing in the morning the bus took us straight from our hotel in Luzern to the Zurich airport, where we boarded a flight to Copenhagen, and from there to Chicago.