The First Day of School...

is always hardest on kids and parents...

The Country's In The Very Best Of Hands...

                                                     (hat tip to Instapundit for the title)

This is a photo blog and I don't like to digress onto politics and current events here, but I sometimes feel required to do so. Today is one of those days.

Today we digress a wee bit to acknowledge 'Fast and Furious' cover up by the Obama administration of the botched, illegal, and fatal Fast and Furious operation. Attorney General Eric Holder was found in contempt of Congress and as a last minute attempt to avert this, it was announced that the documents sought by the Congressional committee investigating this matter were protected by 'Executive Privilege.' The utter hypocrisy and sheer cynicism displayed by this administration is breath taking and makes Nixon at his worst look good by comparison.



We're talking about the Fast and Furious operation where automatic weapons were deliberately funneled to violent Mexican drug gangs by the A.T.F.. Unlike the tired old Watergate scandal in which the democrats and their MSM bitches have incessantly flogged for the last 40 years, this illegal operation is where agents of a U.S. Federal agency knowingly provided weaponry to criminal gangs across our borders. This resulted in hundreds of Mexican deaths and the death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

You would think that this would be major news, in all media venues and if this were a republican administration, it would be, but it's not. ABC news leads with the weather. Brian Williams calls it more of our broken politics.


I am linking to a few posts for anyone who hasn't been paying attention to this unfolding tragedy.

Another View of Whittier Small Boat Harbor

Above is another view of the small boat harbor in Whittier. Though just a short drive from Anchorage, it is on the other side of the Chugach Mountains and borders on Prince William Sound.

A map of Prince William Sound, one of the premier boating, fishing and recreational areas anywhere, period. Prince William Sound was named by George Vancouver in 1778 to honour George III's son William IV of the United Kingdom.

A majority of the land surrounding Prince William Sound is part of the Chugach National Forest, the second largest national forest in the U.S. Prince William Sound is ringed by the steep and glaciated Chugach Mountains. The coastline is convoluted, with many islands and fjords, several of which contain tidewater glaciers. The principal barrier islands forming the sound are Montague Island, Hinchinbrook Island, and Hawkins Island.

Jacob's Ladder

A Jacob's Ladder is a basic spark-gap device. As described in Wikipedia...

"A spark gap consists of an arrangement of two conducting electrodes separated by a gap usually filled with a gas such as air, designed to allow an electric spark to pass between the conductors. When the voltage difference between the conductors exceeds the gap's breakdown voltage, a spark forms, ionizing the gas and drastically reducing its electrical resistance. An electric current then flows until the path of ionized gas is broken or the current reduces below a minimum value called the 'holding current'. This usually happens when the voltage drops, but in some cases occurs when the heated gas rises, stretching out and then breaking the filament of ionized gas. Usually the action of ionizing the gas is violent and disruptive, often leading to sound (ranging from a snap for a spark plug to thunder for a lightning discharge), light and heat.

Spark gaps were used historically in early electrical equipment, such as spark gap radio transmitters, electrostatic machines, and x-ray machines. Their most widespread use today is in spark plugs to ignite the fuel in internal combustion engines, but they are also used in lightning arrestors and other devices to protect electrical equipment from high voltage transients."

You can easily make one for that "Dr. Frankenstein's Lab" look. They're great for trick or treat. To make the one in this photo, I took a boiler transformer, the old magnetic type, not the newer electronic ones. I removed the electrodes and replaced them with #12AWG solid copper wire. The wire was shaped so that at the closest point, they were separated by approximately 1/4". As the wires rose up, the separation became greater. Plug it in and you're off!

A note of caution, I did this in my garage so as to not accidentally catch anything on fire. Also so curious pets or kids don't stick their noses into the arc. (Think taser.)

Portage Lake in Spring

Handmade Portraits: The Bone Carver from Etsy on Vimeo.

Scammon Bay Approach

This is a tonemapping of a scanned Kodachrome slide taken back in 85 or 86. I was in the co-pilot seat of a Cessna Caravan that was landing at Scammon Bay. This was taken with my Minolta XG-1. I posted this before, some time ago, but I like the effect the toneapping gives it (Photomatix 4.1).

LIGHT from Matt Kleiner on Vimeo.

The Goalie's Eyes Say It All

From my daughter's hockey team this past season.

Country Livin...

This past week, a brown bear was shot and killed about a mile from our house in a residential neighborhood, near a park I used to take my daughter to when she was small. The article link is here. Some of the comments are pretty stupid.
Here's a link to a map showing the tracking of some brown bears in the Anchorage area. Not the usual problem a city of this size would have in most places.

You Can't Always Get What You Want

Canon EOS7D, Tamron 18-270mm lens, ISO:200, Focal length: 18mm, Ap: f8.0, Exp: 1/794 Circular polarizing filter used, hand-held.

A photo looking WNW, towards the mouth of Turnagain Arm. This is at extreme low-tide. Turnagain Arm is one of the two locations in North America where you can observe a bore tide. We were expecting a pretty good bore tide today. Unfortunately, the local media had publicized this fact, so it was a real zoo along the highway. I wanted to get out to a good vantage point to take some photos of the incoming tidal bore, away from any crowds,kids,tourists, etc.. I asked my daughter if she wanted to go along and she said yes, so we drove down to Bird Point and trudged out (through marsh) to an isolated point where you would have a great view. That's where I took the above photo.

As we awaited the bore tide, my daughter announces that she has to get back for a soccer game. Some discussion ensued, but we packed up before the incoming tide arrived and went back to our car. I wasn't real pleased. Then on our drive home, she gets a nose bleed, a real gusher of a nose bleed. I have a box of kleenex, which she's going through like nobody's business. She's a mess, the inside of my car looks like Ted Bundy had borrowed it for the weekend, I didn't get the photos I went there for and we are going to be late for her game. Some days are like that.

But the bore tides are cyclical. I like to view them and I've seen many of them. I'll see more, and hopefully get some good shots of them to post. But your kids only grow up once. That's something well worth remembering even on 'those days.'


Canon EOS7D, Tamron 18-270mm lens, ISO:800, Focal length: 270mm, Ap: f6.4, Exp: 1/395 Circular polarizing filter used, hand-held.
Finally, here's an interesting item, via 'Small Dead Animals';

Venus in Transit

I took this yesterday, (obviously).
Using a Tamron 18-270mm f3.5-4.5 lens.
fl: 270mm
iso: 100
Ap: f36
Exp: (1/500), 0.002sec.
Exp. Bias: -5EV
I also used an adjustable neutral density filter dialed almost to opaque. The only post production enhancement is the color saturation. The original image was almost in black & white.

Grandeur

From "The People's Cube"...

* Condecession: set-asides or subsidies to groups one feels sorry for.

* Defaulty setting: Something incorrect that's widely believed because it was the first explanation proposed rather than because there was any actual evidence or proof.

* Dimprovement: A bad, dimwitted improvement that isn't better, often worse. (Can you say New Coke, Vista operating system or nationalized health care?)

* Feelosophy: positions and policies adopted because they make you feel good or virtuous rather than on any reasoned basis or because they could possibly work.

* Iconoklatch: group of nonconformists who uniformly conform to an "alternative" set of standards.

* Infopinion: The intermingling of news and opinion so that it's hard to tell which is what. Often called analysis.

* Literateur: Someone who talks about and refers to books they've never actually read. Think Wealth of Nations or Das Kapital.

* Malapropitization: Needlessly adding prefixes and suffixes to words to make yourself sound erudite, more scholarlisticalful.

* Nincomproof: A line of thinking both logical yet so unreasonable only an idiot or an intellectual would buy it.

* Oprahtunity: The chance to cash in on fame in one area in another area you really have no qualification for. (Al Gore for instance.)

* Psychophant: A lunatic follower of a lunatic leader. (See Marxist-Leninist)

* Sophistreatment: A "fake but accurate" film treatment. Such as any "documentary" film by Michael Moore, or docudrama by Oliver Stone.

* Shamnesia: a condition where one cannot remember personal details or incidents on the advice of their attorney.

* Spoofemism: Play on words making fun of a euphemism. Like calling a bald guy "tonsorially challenged."

* Xenotopia: Something you find unbearable but, strangely, other people desire.

* Preachable Momement: pompous blather masquerading as wisdom

* Quackification: phony, over-hyped or bogus credentials

* Propagandate: an official proclamation which is total baloney

* Compretention: simulated competition, as in two family members running for the same senate seat (also see "public option")

* Negatiate: a negotiation in which one party gives everything away in the very beginning (see "Polish-Czech missile defense")

* Factate: to feed false or irrelevant factoids to gullible supporters for wider dissemination

* Hopeable: susceptible to false or unfounded hopes; idealistically gullible

* Bidentify: to locate and recognize a gaffe-prone official idiot

* Intaxicate: to become drunk with political power, especially with regard to fiscal authority

* Anthropogentrification: the process by which one comes to believe baseless, fraudulent or convaluted theories due to frequent association with self-styled elitists and pseudo-intellectuals

* Clodify: to make idiocy into law

* Wrightisms: The act of damning the nation you live in, and blaming unpopular religious groups for your problems.

* Correctify: to collaborate on fixing something in such a way that only the already-solved problems get "treatment", whereas anything that actually needs attention is dismissed or left alone (See Health Care Bill).

* Legistrate: to conflate the legislature's duties with those of the judiciary. Also known as "legislating from the bench" (see Judicial Activism).

* Extra-Sensory-Deception(ESD) - the ability to communicate absolute garbage through a teleprompter directly beamed across tv into gullible minds full of mush

* Self-Bidentity- seeing yourself as far more competent than you actually are

* Pressoteric- Insight belonging only to members of the Fourth Estate

* Historectomy- removing evidence of past events to promote an agenda

* Stimulation- giving the illusion of fixing the Economy while actually lining your own pockets

* Fundle- to touch a taxpayer's money for your own pleasure

* Acornicopia- a bountiful display of illegitimite votes

* Genufliction- bowing to a dictator to purposefully offend your own people

* Procrasstorial- apearing to be carefully weighing an opinion as a cover for screwing around and not doing your job

* Obesequezy (n.): the feeling of nausea that one experiences upon watching a lemming perform an act of political ingratiation.

* Sacroshanked (adj.): Having been attacked, sometimes mortally, by a religious fanatic.*

Memorial Day 2012

"It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God that such men lived." -- Gen. George S. Patton

05/27/12

After Dinner...

I saw this over at Instapundit's site and thought it was very much worth passing on.
150 year old photos from the American West.  These were taken by Timothy O'Sullivan in the 1860's & 70's and are from the Library of Congress. Take a few minutes and have a look. It's well worth your time.

Roller Blading on the Coastal Trail

Infra-red in Black & White

I took this yesterday evening. It's an HDR composite of three IR images. The images were shot in black & white using a Neewer IR720 filter.

Checked out Roller Derby Friday night

Pretty entertaining all in all. My wife, daughter and I had a good time. Unfortunately, I didn't take the 'fast' Canon 70-200mm, f2.8 lens I use to shoot action in low light, I took my slower 18-270 Tamron f3.5 lens.
I should have (and do) know better. I'll definitely know better next time.

Below is a short piece I read over at Jaded Haven, via Improved Clinch. It's not very long and is below in its entirety...

A Sweet Lesson On Patience

A NYC Taxi driver wrote:

I arrived at the address and honked the horn. After waiting a few minutes I honked again. Since this was going to be my last ride of my shift I thought about just driving away, but instead I put the car in park and walked up to the door and knocked.. 'Just a minute', answered a frail, elderly voice. I could hear something being dragged across the floor.

After a long pause, the door opened. A small woman in her 90's stood before me. She was wearing a print dress and a pillbox hat with a veil pinned on it, like somebody out of a 1940's movie.

By her side was a small nylon suitcase. The apartment looked as if no one had lived in it for years. All the furniture was covered with sheets.

There were no clocks on the walls, no knickknacks or utensils on the counters. In the corner was a cardboard
box filled with photos and glassware.

'Would you carry my bag out to the car?' she said. I took the suitcase to the cab, then returned to assist the woman.

She took my arm and we walked slowly toward the curb.

She kept thanking me for my kindness. 'It's nothing', I told her.. 'I just try to treat my passengers the way I would want my mother to be treated.'

'Oh, you're such a good boy, she said. When we got in the cab, she gave me an address and then asked, 'Could you drive
through downtown?'

'It's not the shortest way,' I answered quickly..

'Oh, I don't mind,' she said. 'I'm in no hurry. I'm on my way to a hospice.

I looked in the rear-view mirror. Her eyes were glistening. 'I don't have any family left,' she continued in a soft voice..'The doctor says I don't have very long.' I quietly reached over and shut off the meter.

'What route would you like me to take?' I asked.

For the next two hours, we drove through the city. She showed me the building where she had once worked as an elevator operator.

We drove through the neighborhood where she and her husband had lived when they were newlyweds She had me pull up in front of a furniture warehouse that had once been a ballroom where she had gone dancing as a girl.

Sometimes she'd ask me to slow in front of a particular building or corner and would sit staring into the darkness, saying nothing.

As the first hint of sun was creasing the horizon, she suddenly said, 'I'm tired.Let's go now'.
We drove in silence to the address she had given me. It was a low building, like a small convalescent home, with a driveway that passed under a portico.

Two orderlies came out to the cab as soon as we pulled up. They were solicitous and intent, watching her every move.
They must have been expecting her.

I opened the trunk and took the small suitcase to the door. The woman was already seated in a wheelchair.

'How much do I owe you?' She asked, reaching into her purse.

'Nothing,' I said

'You have to make a living,' she answered.

'There are other passengers,' I responded.

Almost without thinking, I bent and gave her a hug.She held onto me tightly.

'You gave an old woman a little moment of joy,' she said. 'Thank you.'

I squeezed her hand, and then walked into the dim morning light.. Behind me, a door shut.It was the sound of the closing of a life..

I didn't pick up any more passengers that shift. I drove aimlessly lost in thought. For the rest of that day,I could hardly talk.What if that woman had gotten an angry driver,or one who was impatient to end his shift? What if I had refused to take the run, or had honked once, then driven away?

On a quick review, I don't think that I have done anything more important in my life.

We're conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great moments.

But great moments often catch us unaware-beautifully wrapped in what others may consider a small one.

Downward

This is a tone-mapping of a scanned kodachrome slide. Taken with my Minolta XG-1 sometime in the mid-80's. We were flying into Scammon Bay in western Alaska in a Cessna Caravan. This was shot from the co-pilot's seat.

Bearfoot in the Park

Taken at Katmai National Park, near Brooks River Falls.

Maximus Snackimus

Happy Easter

Taken today (4/08), Easter Sunday near Portage. Watch in full screen mode;

The Space We Live In from Matthias Müller on Vimeo.

When my daughter was very small, the car wash scared her. When she got a little older, she loved going through the car wash. Now days, she's neither scared or thrilled about it. I however, still manage to entertain myself. ISO:1600, focal length: 12mm, Exposure: 1/200

Fleeting...

Another Clip From Vimeo...

Arctic Motion from Tor Even Mathisen on Vimeo.

Downtown Anchorage

Chinese Scenes from BASE-Book - Matt Gerdes on Vimeo.

Experience Freedom from Betty Wants In on Vimeo.

Glowing Man HD from Jacob Sutton on Vimeo.

Score!

Anchorage - Evening Light

Here are some pretty amazing color photos from the turn of the here. These were from Albert Khan.

"In 1909, the millionaire French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn embarked on a project to create a color photographic record of the world and its people...
Using his huge fortune, Mr Kahn sent a group of photographers to more than fifty countries around the world.
The intrepid photographers took the earliest known color photographs in countries such as the United States, Brazil, Vietnam, Mongolia, Norway and Benin.
With the First World War and the beginnings of twentieth century globalization, it was a time of great change with old cultures on the brink of being changed forever."

Something for your consideration. Remember this the next time some leftist twit talks about civility in politics.

Happy 2012!

Here's hoping that 2012 is a better year for everyone than this past year.

Approaching Cantwell

Merry Christmas

For your Cristmas consideration. I found this article over at Instapundit. It's not very Christmasy, but something to think about none the less. Here's the link. As he said in his intro to this article, you wonder how those who railed about the evil of places like Guantanamo and Abu Graib can remain silent about this? But after eight years of rabid Bush derangement syndrome, increasingly corrupted elections, three years of the most cynical and corrupt administration in this country's history, and that's going a stretch, I don't wonder anymore. I am posting the entire article here for you to read. Merry Christmas.  

The Xinjiang Procedure Beijing’s ‘New Frontier’ is ground zero for the organ harvesting of political prisoners.
Ethan Gutmann
December 5, 2011, Vol. 17, No. 12

To figure out what is taking place today in a closed society such as northwest China, sometimes you have to go back a decade, sometimes more. One clue might be found on a hilltop near southern Guangzhou, on a partly cloudy autumn day in 1991. A small medical team and a young doctor starting a practice in internal medicine had driven up from Sun Yat-sen Medical University in a van modified for surgery. Pulling in on bulldozed earth, they found a small fleet of similar vehicles—clean, white, with smoked glass windows and prominent red crosses on the side. The police had ordered the medical team to stay inside for their safety. Indeed, the view from the side window of lines of ditches—some filled in, others freshly dug—suggested that the hilltop had served as a killing ground for years. Thirty-six scheduled executions would translate into 72 kidneys and corneas divided among the regional hospitals. Every van contained surgeons who could work fast: 15-30 minutes to extract. Drive back to the hospital. Transplant within six hours. Nothing fancy or experimental; execution would probably ruin the heart. With the acceleration of Chinese medical expertise over the last decade, organs once considered scraps no longer went to waste. It wasn’t public knowledge exactly, but Chinese medical schools taught that many otherwise wicked criminals volunteered their organs as a final penance. Right after the first shots the van door was thrust open and two men with white surgical coats thrown over their uniforms carried a body in, the head and feet still twitching slightly. The young doctor noted that the wound was on the right side of the chest as he had expected. When body #3 was laid down, he went to work. Male, 40-ish, Han Chinese. While the other retail organs in the van were slated for the profitable foreigner market, the doctor had seen the paperwork indicating this kidney was tissue-matched for transplant into a 50-year-old Chinese man. Without the transplant, that man would die. With it, the same man would rise miraculously from his hospital bed and go on to have a normal life for 25 years or so. By 2016, given all the anti-tissue-rejection drug advances in China, they could theoretically replace the liver, lungs, or heart—maybe buy that man another 10 to 15 years. Body #3 had no special characteristics save an angry purple line on the neck. The doctor recognized the forensics. Sometimes the police would twist a wire around a prisoner’s throat to prevent him from speaking up in court. The doctor thought it through methodically. Maybe the police didn’t want this prisoner to talk because he had been a deranged killer, a thug, or mentally unstable. After all, the Chinese penal system was a daily sausage grinder, executing hardcore criminals on a massive scale. Yes, the young doctor knew the harvesting was wrong. Whatever crime had been committed, it would be nice if the prisoner’s body were allowed to rest forever. Yet was his surgical task that different from an obstetrician’s? Harvesting was rebirth, harvesting was life, as revolutionary an advance as antibiotics or steroids. Or maybe, he thought, they didn’t want this man to talk because he was a political prisoner. Nineteen years later, in a secure European location, the doctor laid out the puzzle. He asked that I keep his identity a secret. Chinese medical authorities admit that the lion’s share of transplant organs originate with executions, but no mainland Chinese doctors, even in exile, will normally speak of performing such surgery. To do so would remind international medical authorities of an issue they would rather avoid—not China’s soaring execution rate or the exploitation of criminal organs, but rather the systematic elimination of China’s religious and political prisoners. Yet even if this doctor feared consequences to his family and his career, he did not fear embarrassing China, for he was born into an indigenous minority group, the Uighurs. Every Uighur witness I approached over the course of two years—police, medical, and security personnel scattered across two continents—related compartmentalized fragments of information to me, often through halting translation. They acknowledged the risk to their careers, their families, and, in several cases, their lives. Their testimony reveals not just a procedure evolving to meet the lucrative medical demand for living organs, but the genesis of a wider atrocity. Behind closed doors, the Uighurs call their vast region in China’s northwest corner (bordering on India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia) East Turkestan. The Uighurs are ethnically Turkic, not East Asian. They are Muslims with a smattering of Christians, and their language is more readily understood in Tashkent than in Beijing. By contrast, Beijing’s name for the so-called Autonomous Region, Xinjiang, literally translates as “new frontier.” When Mao invaded in 1949, Han Chinese constituted only 7 percent of the regional population. Following the flood of Communist party administrators, soldiers, shopkeepers, and construction corps, Han Chinese now constitute the majority. The party calculates that Xinjiang will be its top oil and natural gas production center by the end of this century. To protect this investment, Beijing traditionally depicted all Uighur nationalists—violent rebels and non-violent activists alike—as CIA proxies. Shortly after 9/11, that conspiracy theory was tossed down the memory hole. Suddenly China was, and always has been, at war with al Qaeda-led Uighur terrorists. No matter how transparently opportunistic the switch, the American intelligence community saw an opening for Chinese cooperation in the war on terror, and signaled their acquiescence by allowing Chinese state security personnel into Guantánamo to interrogate Uighur detainees. While it is difficult to know the strength of the claims of the detainees’ actual connections to al Qaeda, the basic facts are these: During the 1990s, when the Chinese drove the Uighur rebel training camps from neighboring countries such as Kazakhstan and Pakistan, some Uighurs fled to Afghanistan where a portion became Taliban soldiers. And yet, if the Chinese government claims that the Uighurs constitute their own Islamic fundamentalist problem, the fact is that I’ve never met a Uighur woman who won’t shake hands or a man who won’t have a drink with me. Nor does my Jewish-sounding name appear to make anyone flinch. In one of those vino veritas sessions, I asked a local Uighur leader if he was able to get any sort of assistance from groups such as the Islamic Human Rights Commission (where, as I found during a brief visit to their London offices, veiled women flinch from an extended male hand, drinks are forbidden, and my Jewish surname is a very big deal indeed). “Useless!” he snorted, returning to the vodka bottle. So if Washington’s goal is to promote a reformed China, then taking Beijing’s word for who is a terrorist is to play into the party’s hands. Xinjiang has long served as the party’s illicit laboratory: from the atmospheric nuclear testing in Lop Nur in the mid-sixties (resulting in a significant rise in cancers in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital) to the more recent creation in the Tarim Desert of what could well be the world’s largest labor camp, estimated to hold 50,000 Uighurs, hardcore criminals, and practitioners of Falun Gong. And when it comes to the first organ harvesting of political prisoners, Xinjiang was ground zero. In 1989, not long after Nijat Abdureyimu turned 20, he graduated from Xinjiang Police School and was assigned to a special police force, Regiment No. 1 of the Urumqi Public Security Bureau. As one of the first Uighurs in a Chinese unit that specialized in “social security”—essentially squelching threats to the party—Nijat was employed as the good cop in Uighur interrogations, particularly the high-profile cases. I first met Nijat—thin, depressed, and watchful—in a crowded refugee camp on the outskirts of Rome. Nijat explained to me that he was well aware that his Chinese colleagues kept him under constant surveillance. But Nijat presented the image they liked: the little brother with the guileless smile. By 1994 he had penetrated all of the government’s secret bastions: the detention center, its interrogation rooms, and the killing grounds. Along the way, he had witnessed his fair share of torture, executions, even a rape. So his curiosity was in the nature of professional interest when he questioned one of the Chinese cops who came back from an execution shaking his head. According to his colleague, it had been a normal procedure—the unwanted bodies kicked into a trench, the useful corpses hoisted into the harvesting vans, but then he heard something coming from a van, like a man screaming. “Like someone was still alive?” Nijat remembers asking. “What kind of screams?” “Like from hell.” Nijat shrugged. The regiment had more than enough sloppiness to go around. A few months later, three death row prisoners were being transported from detention to execution. Nijat had become friendly with one in particular, a very young man. As Nijat walked alongside, the young man turned to Nijat with eyes like saucers: “Why did you inject me?” Nijat hadn’t injected him; the medical director had. But the director and some legal officials were watching the exchange, so Nijat lied smoothly: “It’s so you won’t feel much pain when they shoot you.” The young man smiled faintly, and Nijat, sensing that he would never quite forget that look, waited until the execution was over to ask the medical director: “Why did you inject him?” “Nijat, if you can transfer to some other section, then go as soon as possible.” “What do you mean? Doctor, exactly what kind of medicine did you inject him with?” “Nijat, do you have any beliefs?” “Yes. Do you?” “It was an anticoagulant, Nijat. And maybe we are all going to hell.” I first met Enver Tohti—a soft-spoken, husky, Buddha of a man—through the informal Uighur network of London. I confess that my first impression was that he was just another emigré living in public housing. But Enver had a secret. His story began on a Tuesday in June 1995, when he was a general surgeon in an Urumqi hospital. Enver recalled an unusual conversation with his immediate superior, the chief surgeon: “Enver, we are going to do something exciting. Have you ever done an operation in the field?” “Not really. What do you want me to do?” “Get a mobile team together and request an ambulance. Have everyone out front at nine tomorrow.” On a cloudless Wednesday morning, Enver led two assistants and an anaesthesiologist into an ambulance and followed the chief surgeon’s car out of Urumqi going west. The ambulance had a picnic atmosphere until they realized they were entering the Western Mountain police district, which specialized in executing political dissidents. On a dirt road by a steep hill the chief surgeon pulled off, and came back to talk to Enver: “When you hear a gunshot, drive around the hill.” “Can you tell us why we are here?” “Enver, if you don’t want to know, don’t ask.” “I want to know.” “No. You don’t want to know.” The chief surgeon gave him a quick, hard look as he returned to the car. Enver saw that beyond the hill there appeared to be some sort of armed police facility. People were milling about—civilians. Enver half-satirically suggested to the team that perhaps they were family members waiting to collect the body and pay for the bullet, and the team responded with increasingly sick jokes to break the tension. Then they heard a gunshot, possibly a volley, and drove around to the execution field. Focusing on not making any sudden moves as he followed the chief surgeon’s car, Enver never really did get a good look. He briefly registered that there were 10, maybe 20 bodies lying at the base of the hill, but the armed police saw the ambulance and waved him over. “This one. It’s this one.” Sprawled on the blood-soaked ground was a man, around 30, dressed in navy blue overalls. All convicts were shaved, but this one had long hair. “That’s him. We’ll operate on him.” “Why are we operating?” Enver protested, feeling for the artery in the man’s neck. “Come on. This man is dead.” Enver stiffened and corrected himself. “No. He’s not dead.” “Operate then. Remove the liver and the kidneys. Now! Quick! Be quick!” Following the chief surgeon’s directive, the team loaded the body into the ambulance. Enver felt himself going numb: Just cut the clothes off. Just strap the limbs to the table. Just open the body. He kept making attempts to follow normal procedure—sterilize, minimal exposure, sketch the cut. Enver glanced questioningly at the chief surgeon. “No anaesthesia,” said the chief surgeon. “No life support.” The anaesthesiologist just stood there, arms folded—like some sort of ignorant peasant, Enver thought. Enver barked at him. “Why don’t you do something?” “What exactly should I do, Enver? He’s already unconscious. If you cut, he’s not going to respond.” But there was a response. As Enver’s scalpel went in, the man’s chest heaved spasmodically and then curled back again. Enver, a little frantic now, turned to the chief surgeon. “How far in should I cut?” “You cut as wide and deep as possible. We are working against time.” Enver worked fast, not bothering with clamps, cutting with his right hand, moving muscle and soft tissue aside with his left, slowing down only to make sure he excised the kidneys and liver cleanly. Even as Enver stitched the man back up—not internally, there was no point to that anymore, just so the body might look presentable—he sensed the man was still alive. I am a killer, Enver screamed inwardly. He did not dare to look at the face again, just as he imagined a killer would avoid looking at his victim. The team drove back to Urumqi in silence. On Thursday, the chief surgeon confronted Enver: “So. Yesterday. Did anything happen? Yesterday was a usual, normal day. Yes?” Enver said yes, and it took years for him to understand that live organs had lower rejection rates in the new host, or that the bullet to the chest had—other than that first sickening lurch—acted like some sort of magical anaesthesia. He had done what he could; he had stitched the body back neatly for the family. And 15 years would elapse before Enver revealed what had happened that Wednesday. As for Nijat, it wasn’t until 1996 that he put it together. It happened just about midnight, well after the cell block lights were turned off. Nijat found himself hanging out in the detention compound’s administrative office with the medical director. Following a pause in the conversation, the director, in an odd voice, asked Nijat if he thought the place was haunted. “Maybe it feels a little weird at night,” Nijat answered. “Why do you think that?” “Because too many people have been killed here. And for all the wrong reasons.” Nijat finally understood. The anticoagulant. The expensive “execution meals” for the regiment following a trip to the killing ground. The plainclothes agents in the cells who persuaded the prisoners to sign statements donating their organs to the state. And now the medical director was confirming it all: Those statements were real. They just didn’t take account of the fact that the prisoners would still be alive when they were cut up. “Nijat, we really are going to hell.” Nijat nodded, pulled on his beer, and didn’t bother to smile. On February 2, 1997, Bahtiyar Shemshidin began wondering whether he was a policeman in name only. Two years before, the Chinese Public Security Bureau of the Western city of Ghulja recruited Bahtiyar for the drug enforcement division. It was a natural fit because Bahtiyar was tall, good-looking, and exuded effortless Uighur authority. Bahtiyar would ultimately make his way to Canada and freedom, but he had no trouble recalling his initial idealism; back then, Bahtiyar did not see himself as a Chinese collaborator but as an emergency responder. For several years, heroin addiction had been creeping through the neighborhoods of Ghulja, striking down young Uighurs like a medieval plague. Yet inside the force, Bahtiyar quickly grasped that the Chinese heroin cartel was quietly protected, if not encouraged, by the authorities. Even his recruitment was a bait-and-switch. Instead of sending him after drug dealers, his Chinese superiors ordered him to investigate the Meshrep—a traditional Muslim get-together promoting clean living, sports, and Uighur music and dance. If the Meshrep had flowered like a traditional herbal remedy against the opiate invader, the Chinese authorities read it as a disguised attack on the Chinese state. In early January 1997, on the eve of Ramadan, the entire Ghulja police force—Uighurs and Chinese alike—were suddenly ordered to surrender their guns “for inspection.” Now, almost a month later, the weapons were being released. But Bahtiyar’s gun was held back. Bahtiyar went to the Chinese bureaucrat who controlled supplies and asked after it. “Your gun has a problem,” Bahtiyar was told. “When will you fix the problem?” The bureaucrat shrugged, glanced at his list, and looked up at Bahtiyar with an unblinking stare that said: It is time for you to go. By the end of the day, Bahtiyar got it: Every Chinese officer had a gun. Every Uighur officer’s gun had a problem. Three days later, Bahtiyar understood why. On February 5, approximately 1,000 Uighurs gathered in the center of Ghulja. The day before, the Chinese authorities arrested (and, it was claimed, severely abused) six women, all Muslim teachers, all participants in the Meshrep. The young men came without their winter coats to show they were unarmed, but, planned or unplanned, the Chinese police fired on the demonstrators. Casualty counts of what is known as the Ghulja incident remain shaky. Bahtiyar recalls internal police estimates of 400 dead, but he didn’t see it; all Uighur policemen had been sent to the local jail “to interrogate prisoners” and were locked in the compound throughout the crisis. However, Bahtiyar did see Uighurs herded into the compound and thrown naked onto the snow—some bleeding, others with internal injuries. Ghulja’s main Uighur clinic was effectively shut down when a squad of Chinese special police arrested 10 of the doctors and destroyed the clinic’s ambulance. As the arrests mounted by late April, the jail became hopelessly overcrowded, and Uighur political prisoners were selected for daily executions. On April 24, Bahtiyar’s colleagues witnessed the killing of eight political prisoners; what struck them was the presence of doctors in “special vans for harvesting organs.” In Europe I spoke with a nurse who worked in a major Ghulja hospital following the incident. Nervously requesting that I provide no personal details, she told me that the hospitals were forbidden to treat Uighur protesters. A doctor who bandaged an arm received a 15-year sentence, while another got 20 years, and hospital staff were told, “If you treat someone, you will get the same result.” The separation between the Uighur and Chinese medical personnel deepened: Chinese doctors would stockpile prescriptions rather than allow Uighur medical staff a key to the pharmacy, while Uighur patients were receiving 50 percent of their usual doses. If a Uighur couple had a second child, even if the birth was legally sanctioned, Chinese maternity doctors, she observed, administered an injection (described as an antibiotic) to the infant. The nurse could not recall a single instance of the same injection given to a Chinese baby. Within three days the infant would turn blue and die. Chinese staffers offered a rote explanation to Uighur mothers: Your baby was too weak, your baby could not handle the drug. Shortly after the Ghulja incident, a young Uighur protester’s body returned home from a military hospital. Perhaps the fact that the abdomen was stitched up was just evidence of an autopsy, but it sparked another round of riots. After that, the corpses were wrapped, buried at gunpoint, and Chinese soldiers patrolled the cemeteries (one is not far from the current Urumqi airport). By June, the nurse was pulled into a new case: A young Uighur protester had been arrested and beaten severely. His family paid for his release, only to discover that their son had kidney damage. The family was told to visit a Chinese military hospital in Urumqi where the hospital staff laid it out: One kidney, 30,000 RMB (roughly $4,700). The kidney will be healthy, they were assured, because the transplant was to come from a 21-year-old Uighur male—the same profile as their son. The nurse learned that the “donor” was, in fact, a protester. In the early autumn of 1997, fresh out of a blood-work tour in rural Xinjiang, a young Uighur doctor—let’s call him Murat—was pursuing a promising medical career in a large Urumqi hospital. Two years later he was planning his escape to Europe, where I met him some years after. One day Murat’s instructor quietly informed him that five Chinese government officials—big guys, party members—had checked into the hospital with organ problems. Now he had a job for Murat: “Go to the Urumqi prison. The political wing, not the criminal side. Take blood samples. Small ones. Just to map out the different blood types. That’s all you have to do.” “What about tissue matching?” “Don’t worry about any of that, Murat. We’ll handle that later. Just map out the blood types.” Clutching the authorization, and accompanied by an assistant from the hospital, Murat, slight and bookish, found himself facing approximately 15 prisoners, mostly tough-guy Uighurs in their late twenties. As the first prisoner sat down and saw the needle, the pleading began. “You are a Uighur like me. Why are you going to hurt me?” “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just taking blood.” At the word “blood,” everything collapsed. The men howled and stampeded, the guards screaming and shoving them back into line. The prisoner shrieked that he was innocent. The Chinese guards grabbed his neck and squeezed it hard. “It’s just for your health,” Murat said evenly, suddenly aware the hospital functionary was probably watching to make sure that Murat wasn’t too sympathetic. “It’s just for your health,” Murat said again and again as he drew blood. When Murat returned to the hospital, he asked the instructor, “Were all those prisoners sentenced to death?” “That’s right, Murat, that’s right. Yes. Just don’t ask any more questions. They are bad people—enemies of the country.” But Murat kept asking questions, and over time, he learned the drill. Once they found a matching blood type, they would move to tissue matching. Then the political prisoner would get a bullet to the right side of the chest. Murat’s instructor would visit the execution site to match up blood samples. The officials would get their organs, rise from their beds, and check out. Six months later, around the first anniversary of Ghulja, five new officials checked in. The instructor told Murat to go back to the political wing for fresh blood. This time, Murat was told that harvesting political prisoners was normal. A growing export. High volume. The military hospitals are leading the way. By early 1999, Murat stopped hearing about harvesting political prisoners. Perhaps it was over, he thought. Yet the Xinjiang procedure spread. By the end of 1999, the Uighur crackdown would be eclipsed by Chinese security’s largest-scale action since Mao: the elimination of Falun Gong. By my estimate up to three million Falun Gong practitioners would pass through the Chinese corrections system. Approximately 65,000 would be harvested, hearts still beating, before the 2008 Olympics. An unspecified, significantly smaller, number of House Christians and Tibetans likely met the same fate. By Holocaust standards these are piddling numbers, so let’s be clear: China is not the land of the final solution. But it is the land of the expedient solution. Some will point to recent statements from the Chinese medical establishment admitting the obvious—China’s medical environment is not fully ethical—and see progress. Foreign investors suspect that eventually the Chinese might someday—or perhaps have already—abandon organ harvesting in favor of the much more lucrative pharmaceutical and clinical testing industries. The problem with these soothing narratives is that reports, some as recent as one year ago, suggest that the Chinese have not abandoned the Xinjiang procedure. In July 2009, Urumqi exploded in bloody street riots between Uighurs and Han Chinese. The authorities massed troops in the regional capital, kicked out the Western journalists, shut down the Internet, and, over the next six months, quietly, mostly at night, rounded up Uighur males by the thousands. According to information leaked by Uighurs held in captivity, some prisoners were given physical examinations aimed solely at assessing the health of their retail organs. The signals may be faint, but they are consistent, and the conclusion is inescapable: China, a state rapidly approaching superpower status, has not just committed human rights abuses—that’s old news—but has, for over a decade, perverted the most trusted area of human expertise into performing what is, in the legal parlance of human rights, targeted elimination of a specific group. Yet Nijat sits in refugee limbo in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, waiting for a country to offer him asylum. He confessed to me. He confessed to others. But in a world eager not to offend China, no state wants his confession. Enver made his way to an obscure seminar hosted by the House of Commons on Chinese human rights. When the MPs opened the floor to questions, Enver found himself standing up and speaking, for the first time, of killing a man. I took notes, but no British MP or their staffers could be bothered to take Enver’s number. The implications are clear enough. Nothing but self-determination for the Uighurs can suffice. The Uighurs, numbering 13 million, are few, but they are also desperate. They may fight. War may come. On that day, as diplomats across the globe call for dialogue with Beijing, may every nation look to its origins and its conscience. For my part, if my Jewish-sounding name tells me anything, it is this: The dead may never be fully avenged, but no people can accept being fatally exploited forever. Ethan Gutmann, an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wishes to thank Jaya Gibson for research assistance and the Peder Wallenberg family for research support.

Fridaynight, Fall Colors, and Football

I saw this over at SDA and had to put it up here.