• • • google suggested • • •
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
In Montana, Remote Fire Lookouts Keep a Century-Old Tradition Alive
As wildfires rage across the West, an old job feels more critical than ever.
Webb Mountain Lookout in the Kootenai National Forest in far northwest Montana. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
LOW-HANGING CLOUDS OCCLUDE THE mountains of nearby Glacier National Park as Leif Haugen drives his pickup truck down a rugged forest road in the predawn darkness. About 20 or so miles north of Polebridge, Montana, Haugen pulls over, lets his dog Ollie out, swings a pack on to his back, and starts hiking down an old logging road. A mile or so down, he spots a small pile of stones and turns into a thick forest for a 3.5-mile hike up to Thoma Lookout.
This is Haugen’s commute.
Thoma is two miles south of the Canadian border and one of a dozen mountaintop fire lookout towers still staffed in the Flathead National Forest and Glacier National Park in the northwest part of the state. A century ago, more than 5,000 of these small buildings were built and staffed across the United States to spot wildfires. Today, only about 300 are still in use, mostly scattered around the West. But just because their numbers have shrunk doesn’t mean they are no longer needed. In places like this, people like Haugen are keeping a critical, century-old tradition alive.
Leif Haugen has been a lookout since 1994, and has worked at the Thoma Lookout since 2010.
On this cool September day, Haugen is coming off his four-day weekend. From July until late September, he and other lookouts work five- or 10-day stretches searching for new wildfires, which in these parts can burn through tens of thousands of acres in a matter of hours. The week before, Haugen left his post a few days early because he couldn’t see anything in the thick smoke from wildfires in nearby Washington, Oregon, and California that had blanketed the region. While Montana’s fire season has been much calmer this year, the weather’s still been dry; in the previous six weeks, Haugen recorded less than a quarter-inch of rain at the lookout, and this morning his rain gauge is dry again. This means the danger for wildfire remains high. But with the morning dew still hanging on the grass and low clouds everywhere, Haugen knows the day will be slow. …
What Did You Expect?
Trump should never have been allowed anywhere near any public office.
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There is a great deal you have every right to expect at this moment of crisis, and no reason at all to believe that Donald Trump or his White House will provide it.
You cannot expect this White House to tell the truth about Trump’s health. His doctors have lied about the president’s weight and height. They have never offered an adequate explanation of his sudden, unscheduled visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center a year ago. Even the fact that a close aide to the president had tested positive for the coronavirus was kept from the public until Bloomberg broke the news.
You cannot expect the White House to produce any orderly plan for the execution of Trump’s public duties, even to the very limited extent that Trump executed public duties in the first place. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was diagnosed with COVID-19 on April 6 of this year. Johnson formally deputed Foreign Minister Dominic Raab to preside over the government during his own incapacity. But the pattern in the Trump administration has been that the president will not and cannot do the job himself, and that he vengefully strikes down anyone who tries to do the job for him.
Trump fired his most successful chief of staff, John Kelly, for trying to force him to work. Kelly’s successor, Mick Mulvaney, survived by enabling Trump “to act as he chooses—a recognition that trying to control Trump is a futile approach,” as Politico’s Nancy Cook put it. Likewise, Vice President Mike Pence had better be awfully circumspect about filling the role that the Constitution and its Twenty-Fifth Amendment assign him. Trump will be watching. So long as Trump is conscious, he will not allow it; should he lose consciousness, he will retaliate when and if he recovers. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: By sticking to an aggressive travel schedule with in-person gatherings while eschewing even minimal safeguards, Trump has carried the risk of disease across the country.
How one man spent 34 years in prison after setting fire to a pair of curtains
David Blagdon’s long-term detention has been described as ‘barbaric’. Whatever his disastrous personal choices, the system failed him repeatedly.
Main image: The cell block at the now-closed HMP Kingston in Portsmouth.
There’s never a good time to get a phone call from an escaped prisoner. I was at a talent show in Essex in August 2001, watching a succession of soul singers, when three missed calls from an unknown number appeared on my mobile, starting at 10.07pm. Stepping out of the club, I listened to the first message: “It’s David. I’m at King’s Cross station. This is urgent.”
David Blagdon was a longtime prisoner who had become a friend after I interviewed him for a story in 1999. He’d left the number of a phone box for me to call him back, and when we spoke, he said he was on temporary home leave from prison and needed somewhere to stay. I called my neighbours in London, who agreed to let him in. It was after midnight when I returned to find David chatting to my neighbours, eating a sausage and drinking a beer.
“You won’t believe what’s happened to me today. It’s been terrible,” he said, beginning a convoluted story about how he was on short-term release when someone stole his bag and then he got lost. But he soon gave up on it and admitted he was on the run: “I’ve had enough. The Home Office keeps knocking me back. I’m 50, and they’re never going to let me out.”
At that point, David had been in prison for 23 years for starting a fire in a church. Absconding from day release was his latest rebellion against a system that would end up keeping him in prison for twice as long as the average time served for murder.
On the face of it, his was not such a terrible crime: the church, in a village near Oxford, where he set a pair of curtains alight, was empty, the fire was quickly put out, no one was hurt and he wasn’t convicted of any subsequent crimes. And yet David spent half his life in jail. …
PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE; it’s The Long Read.
5 Fun Places in America With Screwed-Up Racist Histories
Do you enjoy being told that things are racist? Presumably. Why else would you be here? And so, in our quest to dole out painful truth to balance out any bit of fun that may still exist, we have to inform you that …
5. Central Park Was Made By Razing A Minority Community
Imagine a hypothetical traveler coming to visit New York City with no prior knowledge of the place. They see towering skyscrapers, exclusive retail establishments, and residences that their proud guide says take up some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Then they reach a massive expanse of grass and ponds occupying more than a square mile. “Wow,” they say. “Amazing that the city cut off developing space to preserve nature!”
Their guide then informs our imaginary yokel that, really, city parks are rarely areas of preserved nature; they’re planned spaces. Before New York built Central Park, something was in its place. As for what that was … well, the guide may be a little cagey on that. Why? Because there used to be a series of villages there until the city took the residents’ land by force.
Before Central Park, meaning pre-1855, the area was home to small settlements such as the attractively named Pigtown and larger communities such as Seneca Village. The residents were mostly Black, and right before the land was seized, there was also a growing Irish population and some Germans. All were groups that had trouble making it elsewhere in the city (New York abolished slavery in 1827, but things didn’t immediately turn awesome). Some people were just hanging out on unclaimed land, and the city kicked them out, telling them it was time to stop squatting rent-free. But in places like Seneca Village, the people were legit landowners until the government seized it and sent them scattering. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
What the hell happened this week? Trump paid $750 in taxes, nominated a replacement for RBG, told white supremacists to “stand by” in the wildest debate ever.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Like the rest of America, Stephen Colbert and the staff of A Late Show spent Friday, October 2nd waiting for news of President Trump’s health after learning he had tested positive for Covid-19 and was taken to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for treatment.
THANKS to CBS and A Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
偉大なるうどん職人まる。Maru is a great udon craftsman.
What is it like to be a smartphone?
“The fact that we cannot expect ever to accommodate in our language a detailed description of Martian or bat phenomenology should not lead us to dismiss as meaningless the claim that bats and Martians have experiences fully comparable in richness of detail to our own.” –Thomas Nagel
WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A SMARTPHONE? In all the chatter about the future of artificial intelligence, the question has been glossed over or, worse, treated as settled. The longstanding assumption, a reflection of the anthropomorphic romanticism of computer scientists, science fiction writers, and internet entrepreneurs, has been that a self-aware computer would have a mind, and hence a consciousness, similar to our own. We, supreme programmers, would create machine consciousness in our own image.
The assumption is absurd, and not just because the sources and workings of our own consciousness remain unknown to us and hence unavailable as models for coders and engineers. Consciousness is entwined with being, and being with body, and a computer’s body and (speculatively) being have nothing in common with our own. A far more reasonable assumption is that the consciousness of a computer, should it arise, would be completely different from the consciousness of a human being. It would be so different that we probably wouldn’t even recognize it as a consciousness.
As the philosopher Thomas Nagel observed in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” his classic 1974 article, we humans are unable to inhabit the consciousness of any other animal. We can’t know the “subjective character” of other animals’ experience any more than they can understand ours. We are, however, able to see that, excepting perhaps the simplest of life forms, an animal has a consciousness — or at least a beingness. The animal, we understand, is a living thing with a mind, a sensorium, a nature. We know it feels like something to be that animal, even though we can’t know what that something is.
We understand this about other animals because we share with them a genetic heritage. Because they are products of the same evolutionary process that gave rise to ourselves and because their bodies and brains have the same essential biology, the same material substrate, as our own, they resemble us in both their physical characteristics and their behavior. It would be impossible, given this obvious likeness, to see them as anything other than living beings. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
