Um. Maybe I'm just a callous asshole, but I don't exactly understand what the problem is here.

With growing evidence of an Alaska Native exodus from villages to the city, Mayor Mark Begich and Schools Superintendent Carol Comeau sent a letter to Gov. Sarah Palin on Monday asking her to organize an emergency task force to find ways to stem the migration. Anchorage and the state "cannot stand by and tolerate the deterioration of rural Alaska," the letter said.

What exactly is your solution, Marky-Mark? Throwing more subsidies at the problem to maintain the abysmal standard of life in communities that you'll just have to pay 70-100 million clams to rescue from environmental destruction within the next 5-10 years? It's clear from the article that this "emergency task force" isn't about preserving village life for its own, intrinsically valuable sake (which is a whole other conversation, in any case), but sparing the Anchorage School District overenrollment pressures. But instead of being up-front about that, you're exploiting narratives of rural exceptionalism that are not just insulting and misleading, but increasingly dangerous for these communities that must move if they're going to survive. Rural Alaska needs an emergency task force, no doubt. A few of them, actually. Just not this one. Not even close.  ¶ 5:16 AM

  October surprises Whooo boy. "It would shut down the race for a week!"  ¶ 10:10 AM

  Good sweet jebus, people. Me: Dude, I dunno. What would Gary King say about making your case selections through your goddamn DREAMS, man? I mean, that just can't be good.

Meg: I think he would say it is awesome. It is totally methodologically sound.

Me: But what if subconsciously I'm still selecting on the dependent variable?

Meg: Do you actually know one goddamn thing about Tanzania? Also, do you even know what your dependent variable is?

Me: Well. When you put it that way. No.

Meg: Okay then.

So. That's the prospectus news, dubious and troubling as it may be. In other news, teaching my first real section today was awesome. An ice-breaking round of Sarah Palin jokes and anecdotes helped a lot, but they really were a wonderful group and we had a very rousing discussion about Russia, democratization and the "transition" paradigm, and--confidential to Brad--the "Normal Country" fallacy. One especially on-the-ball student hit the nail on the head when she said (admittedly after I sooooort of kind of maybe primed the group to come to exactly this conclusion): "but Russia doesn't actually want to be a 'normal' democracy, does it?" An observation that I don't have to tell you led to some seriously great discussion. But I'm biased like that.

Next up: THREE MORE SECTIONS. One more for Russian politics tomorrow, and both for CP on Thursday. Jebus help me. Oh, and my prospectus is due to the workshop tomorrow. Tanzania is in, motherfuckers! If only because it will be a hell of a lot of fun to write into the abstract. The Arctic, the tropics, and the desert meet in a bar...  ¶ 4:13 PM

  Pretty goddamn good. It's a lovely, cool and breezy early fall evening in Boston, and I'm listening to nostalgic and awesome Seattle powerpop, drinking one of my all-time very favorite beers, and making curry from scratch. It's the closest I've felt to home in a good long while, even though I'm not even currently in my own house in this city, or, obviously, anywhere near home.

ETA: Um. My beloved Seattle-like band isn't from Seattle at all. But I feverishly love them still.  ¶ 3:03 PM

  Sound advice. So, I've been desperately needing to talk about my dissertation angst with people whose intellectual and personal judgment I trust--characteristics that can be rather scarce commodities around here--so I brought up the especially vexing question of case selection in an email conversation with one of my undergrad advisors the other day. I just got this in reply (along with a lot of other Very Wise Advice, most of which I will almost certainly take.):

"For starters, forget the fuckin' geographers and anthropologists."

God, I really miss the good old days sometimes.  ¶ 5:56 PM

  Distraction of the day... Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Sarah Palin baby-name generator.

I came up as "Moose Roadster Palin," which is so disturbingly appropriate that I cannot begin to comprehend it. My brother is "Buster Taint Palin," and my advisor is "Thump Hummer Palin." Go ahead. Give it your best all-American whirl.

Good times on the eve of the apocalypse, people. Gooooood times.  ¶ 1:58 PM

  Ike. I was attending a giant conference of political scientists when Katrina hit in 2005, and was amazed then and now by how little my fellow so-called experts had to say about how natural disasters shape politics. This weekend, as Ike bears down on Galveston, I find myself once again surrounded by social scientists who, for the most part, again have nothing meaningful to say on the subject, or have even thought about it. This is starting to get a little weird.

From where I sit tonight, Ike looks really, really bad. Especially since estimates are that forty fucking percent of Galveston's residents--about 23,000 people--ignored the evacuation order. Seventeen oil refineries, which together handle thirteen percent of the country's processing capacity, are shut down. Galveston looks almost certainly fucked; Houston may very well be pretty thoroughly fucked as well.

Forty percent. I just can't even comprehend that. They also didn't even try to evacuate the prison. I guess somebody had to make Alaska look good this week.  ¶ 6:57 PM

  Ack. I had a dream last night that I was explaining to a friend how I had changed my dissertation cases to the US (ie AK), India, and Tanzania. No. No no no noooooooo. Why does my brain DO this to me?

At least I've decided not to take that extra class this semester...  ¶ 6:10 AM

  Some nice, cheerful news This isn't a huge surprise, but, like so many things along this theme, it appears to be worse than expected:

Permafrost blanketing the northern hemisphere contains more than twice the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, making it a potentially mammoth contributor to global climate change depending on how quickly it thaws...

Full story here.  ¶ 7:12 AM

  I don't really have much to say, but good lord that last post is a bummer and it's time for it to go away now. I'm back home, semi-officially all moved in to the new place, and jumping into the semester in all of its insane glory. Among other things, I'm going to keep myself plenty busy for the next four months by teaching for two classes of two sections each, taking two classes, and writing this dang prospectus.

Speaking of my prospectus. It is sad and lonely and needs a hug. True, it's going to get a lot of attention in a workshop in MKE next week, but I'm not at all sure that's the kind of attention it needs right now. I really, really hate to go into this workshop with so little specificity around what I really am trying to do with this thing. I guess in some ways that's entirely the point, but the particular circumstances at work here put me at the mercy of a disciplinary perspective that mainstream political science doesn't even begin to take seriously. It's basically just bad fucking news to go in there with an open mind, but an open mind toward this project is exactly what I have and desperately want to explore right now.

This summer definitely debunked a few hunches, which is great, but I'm a bit short on new ones--mostly because I just can't get into the kind of good creative thinky space that generates them. I've been trying in earnest for the past few days, but my jetlag is unusually enduring, and my mind is just very much on other things. I know from experience that one cannot force the thinky-mojo, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating. So, yeah. My prospectus and I need hugs, and fewer distractions, and possibly therapy. Instead we're getting pomo-bootcamp with a bunch of geographers. And, again, if I were feeling a little more intellectually capable at the moment, that in itself would be a great opportunity to strengthen my arguments and loudly defend my commitments to my epistemological worldview. As it stands, there's a good chance I'm just going to be annoyed as fuck for several days, avoid the discussions in favor of holing up in my hotel room HST-style with a steady supply of complimentary Schlitz, and wind up with a draft at the end of the weekend that nobody is remotely happy with.

Still. Things could be worse. It's a little mind-boggling to realize that I'll have a draft--however shitty and contentious and methodologically incoherent and empirically confused--by the first day of the semester. In theory, anyway!  ¶ 4:46 AM