Monthly Archives: August 2012

News, Politics

Israeli Judge Rules Rachel Corrie’s Death a Mostly No-Fault Accident

The civil suit that Rachel Corrie’s parents filed in 2010 against the Israeli military reached its first conclusion this week, as Judge Oded Gershon decided Israel bore no fault for the “unreasonable” Corrie’s death.

The Los Angeles Times headline, “Israel judge rules Rachel Corrie responsible for her own death,” seems almost to caricature the finding, summoning up a mental image of Corrie coaxing a D9 Caterpillar driver into crushing her, in particular.

Corrie, an Evergreen State College student, was killed in mid-March 2003, she and other International Solidarity Movement members entered a military zone to protect the homes of Palestinians there. Nothing about that preceding description is uncontested except for Corrie’s name, the college she attended, and the date. Too much has occurred in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in the context of which Corrie’s fate is a small footnote, for dispassionate appraisals.

That said, Judge Gershon’s ruling, calling as it does on protesters to be “reasonable” people who prudently keep out of harm’s way, displays a peculiar obtuseness on the subject of non-violent resistance. And it remains unclear why the Israeli military, aware of the protesters’ presence, didn’t simply scoop them up before sending in the Caterpillars with their limited visibility. They would have been the people wearing bright orange vests and carrying megaphones. When tear gas didn’t move the protesters, the bulldozers moved ahead anyway.

The Nasrallah family’s home that Corrie was trying to protect from demolition was subsequently damaged, then razed. In 2008, Seattle documentarian Jen Marlowe was interviewed about her visit there:

My first trip to Rafah is imprinted on my brain. It’s among the most depressing places I’ve been to in the world, and this includes Afghanistan, and Darfur. I’d been to Jenin refugee camp just a few weeks after it was flattened in 2002. In Rafah, I remember standing not far from where Rachel was killed. The Nasrallah house was still standing then, but everything else around it was destroyed. Bulldozers were at work, pushing away the rubble of destroyed houses. There was something about the continuous, slow, grinding, steady destruction that was so depressing.

The fate of the Nasrallah family seems to fall into that of “collateral damage.” No particular association with tunneling terrorists has been laid at the feet of pharmacist Samir Nasrallah.

The ISM, naturally, has a few words for Judge Gershon: “By disregarding international law and granting Israeli war criminals impunity Judge Gershon’s verdict exemplifies the fact that Israel’s legal system cannot be trusted to administer justice according to international standards.”

Corrie’s parents plan to appeal the ruling.

News, Transportation

Allstate: You Really Suck at Driving, Seattle

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RV catastrophe–not in Seattle proper but remarkable, isn’t it? (Photo: MvB)

Apparently, the message is that you had better be in good hands if you’re driving in Seattle, because you’re more likely to get into an accident. Out of a field of 200 U.S. cities, Seattle comes in 154th. Where the national average for car accidents is one every ten years, in Seattle, the average driver will collide–or be collided with–every 7.9 years. (Whereas an average Sioux Falls driver, in the top spot, will go almost 14 years between smashups.)

The Eighth Annual “Allstate America’s Best Drivers Report” is not supposed to be a shaming document. “We don’t want drivers in Seattle to be discouraged by their ranking. Instead, we want the report to challenge drivers in Seattle to make positive changes to their driving habits that will in turn make the city a safer place to live, work and raise families,” is the diplomatic framing of Shauna McBride, Allstate’s Regional Spokesperson.

But let’s go ahead and note right here that Tacoma is worse–in 156th place. Those people drive like maniacs. Around the Northwest, Spokane comes in 43rd, slightly bettering the national average, at 10.6 years between bent fenders. But Boise, Idaho, is the real star, coming in second, just a hair behind Sioux Falls. Boise! We throw up our hands.

As Allstate’s tips on safer driving boil down to “drive more safely,” they may be of limited use. One might reasonably assume that people who drive in a rush, distractedly, without a clear idea of where they’re headed, tailgating, unaware of the rules of the road, speeding, and without looking for pedestrians have been told, repeatedly, to be more careful already, without it sinking in. And actually, all of those sound like Seattle driving behaviors, except for the not watching for pedestrians part. (Not that people aren’t run down and killed even so.)

All that is needed now is an overlay of smart phone penetration in U.S. cities, so we can see the relationship between distracted driving and collisions. (Or, to triage the problem, distracted driving and fatalities.) “Sending or receiving a text takes a driver’s eyes from the road for an average of 4.6 seconds, the equivalent-at 55 mph-of driving the length of an entire football field, blind,” says the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute.

For you statistical wonks, here is some background on the Allstate report’s reliability:

A weighted average of the two-year numbers determined the annual percentages. The report defines an auto crash as any collision resulting in a property damage claim. Allstate’s auto policies represent about 10 percent of all U.S. auto policies, making this report a realistic snapshot of what’s happening on America’s roadways.

 

Environment, News, Science

What Lies Beneath Mount St. Helens? Scientists Plan a Volcanic CAT Scan

Mount St. Helens, seen from I-5 (Photo: MvB)

“Imaging Magma Under St. Helens” is the name of a new research project (aka iMUSH) that’s just gotten National Science Foundation funding. Beginning in 2014, scientists with the University of Washington; the Rice, Columbia, and Oregon State universities; and the USGS will embark on a four-year study of Mount St. Helens, the most seismically active volcano in the Cascades mountain range.

St. Helens has been percolating off and on for between 300,000 and 500,000 years, but what’s really going on down there remains mysterious. Magma somehow makes it from the subduction zone where the oceanic Juan de Fuca plate grudgingly curves under the continental North American plate, perhaps 66 miles down. But although the mountain might add to its height with a lava dome, the 1980 eruption of St. Helens was marked by gas and ash–a plinian eruption–rather than torrents of “liquid hot magma.”

What gives? Researchers will throw eight of their best X-Ray Specs techniques at the problem, upping the amount of seismography on and around the mountain substantially. (St. Helens has been under a seismographic microscope for a while, even before the 1980 eruption, and you can follow along with its mini-quakes online–it averages about 22 per month.)

One way of getting a better “look” is with the anodyne-sounding “active seismography“–which means they’ll be drilling 80-foot-deep shafts and setting off explosions in them. For science. They’ll also use receiver function analyses, ambient noise tomography (that’s when you listen to the Earth hum), and magnetotelluric surveys.

Because the Earth transmits telluric currents, depending on fluctuations in its magnetic field, you can listen in to how well they’re being conducted, and learn something about the make-up of the ground beneath your feet. Magnetotelluric surveys can manage incredibly deep soundings, up to 6,000 miles.

Researchers will also be looking for the cause of deep, long-period quakes (DLP earthquakes, of which there have been “9 events since 1980, generally located 5-10 km southeast of Mount St Helens at 25-30 km depth”)–is it magma shifting into new reservoirs? Another fluid? Petrology, another tool in the utility belt, will focus on samples of igneous rock and try to trace the circumstances of their formation.

All in all, the scientists will have more precise, higher-resolution data to pore over, seeing more deeply and thoroughly into the Mount St. Helens region than ever before. “The National Science Foundation will spend about $3 million on the project,” says The Columbian, in its story–the grants will be parceled out to lead investigators at the collaborating institutions over the next few years.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Pinter Sketches (Part 2)

Frank Corrado in No Man’s Land (Photo (c) Chris Bennion)

A Discomfiting Presence

In Corner Conversations & Matters of State, ACT’s second set of Pinter shorts festival (which closed Friday), curators Jane Kaplan and Frank Corrado delivered a sophomore survey of Pinter’s body of work that provided a satisfying capstone to the celebrations. This survey included essays, bits of lecture, context, and commentary.

In his opening remarks Corrado contextualized the shorts in the world of the British comedy stage review, specifically “Beyond the Fringe“, and the influence of sketch writer and performer Peter Cook. With no more further ado than a harmonica solo by Charles Leggett the nimble cast launched into a series of bits featuring mostly older and somewhat mentally unstable Brits.

The Black and White, Umbrella, and Last to Go took advantage of Pinter’s skill in dialogue that discussed almost nothing in phrases that turned back on themselves with multiple variations. Suzy Hunt was a standout in the first of these with the clever detail of her business. She repeatedly sucked at dentures, cleaned a fresh restaurant spoon with her hem and eyed the world with active, suspicious glances. Meanwhile Julie Briskman wisely underplayed on her side of the milk bar table.

Interview shifted things from the absurd to the disturbingly silly as David Pichette’s porn shop proprietor slowly revealed his unhinged ulterior intentions. There was pleasure for audiences familiar with Pichette’s work to watch this hissing maniac uncoil from the actor’s usual dignity.

Hunt returned as a dotty and manipulative derelict in Bus Stop, the production’s weakest offering. This preceded the evening’s hidden track (kept off the program the audience was asked to say nothing about this piece, which was less funny than illustrative in its subtle contrast with the rest of the evening’s sketches.

Leggett’s harmonica interlude, which was such a delightful surprise at the end of the first set of sketches became a bit monotonous and wearying in its regular use as set change cover in this round. As director, Kaplan justified this choice in the second half the evening, which lost the harmonica as the pieces took a more serious bent.

The fulcrum sketch was Night. Contextualized by notes on Pinter’s marital struggles, we saw a very human snippet in which a couple (Briskman and Leggett) reminisce about their first meeting. This being Pinter the past is not a singular thing or a point of consensus here but a stage for playing out the couple’s current tensions, conflicts of personality, and abiding grievances through disagreement.

With an acknowledgement of Pinter’s political life and a quotation from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech the cast launched into a pair of shorts that cut to the bone on the inhumanity in government. Precisely, from 1983, slipped from ambiguity into discomfiting clarity as men in suits discussed figures. Ben Harris and Peter Crook carried a waft of casual malevolence from their appearance in No Man’s Land. Harris, who was all but inaccessible as Foster (and appropriately so), made a case to send him some meatier roles.

In Press Conference Corrado played a government minister answering questions on policy with horrifying answers that were nearly masked by his official language. Corrado took on the minister’s role sounding more like an actor than a politician (an admittedly slight distinction). One wonders whether greater verisimilitude would have masked the enormity completely or lent it more power.

Horrors of more typically Pinterian absurdity define Tess, a rambling almost-logical monologue that spirals away from sanity. Briskman’s ingenuous approach gave full power to the shock ending.

The ending of this second set of sketches was less shocking than jarring; it wasn’t even theatre. The final word was given to Pinter himself in a video clip of his live televised performance of Apart From That. The script, a Pinter-précis of the utmost simplicity, was a near-perfect coda to the evening and the festival itself. That the performance featured a cancer-ridden Pinter was key to its success, but it also fascinated as performance.

Pinter is in the company of Checkov and Beckett in the degree to which his plays depend on presence—the experience of people remaining in one another’s company. Presence creates an opportunity for violence but in his world the only thing worse than being together would be to be parted. Yet, here in this final piece the performance itself questioned the nature of presence and thus the nature of community, citizenship, and our relationship to every other living person.

Written as a phone conversation and staged with Rupert Graves playing the other role via a live feed from a distant studio, the video of this sketch could hardly be more separated in time and space from ACT’s audience. As you read this article, however far removed you may be from ACT’s Pinter Festival, these questions could not be more pertinent. What is it that separates you from me and everyone else? What is it that connects us—writer and reader, the callous government minister and the woman scrimping in the milk bar? How do we live together and how do we feel about the horror and the menace of everyday? As the festival wraps up this weekend these questions remain implicit.