text:
22 S.Ct. 891
46 L.Ed. 1121
CHIN BAK KAN, Appt.,
No. 525.
Argued March 13, 14, 1902.
Decided june 2, 1902.
22 S.Ct. 891
46 L.Ed. 1121
CHIN BAK KAN, Appt.,
No. 525.
Argued March 13, 14, 1902.
Decided june 2, 1902.
Complaint under oath was duly made before a commissioner of the United States for the northern district of New York, charging 'that Chin Bak Kan did, on or about the 13th day of March, 1901, at Burke in said district, knowingly and wrongfully come from Canada, in the province of Quebec, into the northern district of New York, to wit: into Burke in the county of Franklin and state of New York, in the United States, he, the said Chin Bak Kan being then and there a Chinese person and laborer, and a person prohibited by the laws of the United States of America from being and remaining in the United States, and he, the said Chin Bak Kan, then and there being such Chinese person as aforesaid, was then and there found unlawfully in the United States at Burke aforesaid, in violation of the acts of the Congress in such case made and provided.'
A warrant for the apprehension of Chin Bak Kan was issued March 13, 1901, and he was arrested and brought before the commissioner. He was informed of the charge against him, advised that he would be permitted to make a statement without or with oath, or to refuse to make any statement or to answer any question put to him, and was entitled to reasonable time to send for counsel and procure the attendance of witnesses. He pleaded not guilty to the charge, 'but admitted that he had just come into the United States.' He was thereafter represented by counsel. Subsequently a hearing and trial was commenced before the commissioner who issued the warrant. That officer having been taken sick, the hearing was continued and concluded before another commissioner, who found and adjudged upon the evidence as follows: 'I now hereby find and adjudge that the said Chin Bak Kan is a Chinese person and laborer, that he is not a diplomatic or other officer of the Chinese or any other government, and unlawfully entered the United States, as charged in said complaint. And I further adjudge him, said Chin Bak Kan, guilty of not being lawfully entitled to be or remain in the United States. I further find and adjudge that he, said Chin Bak Kan, came from the Empire of China, but he has not made it appear to me that he was a subject or citizen of some other country than China. And I hereby order and adjudge said Chin Bak Kan to be immediately removed from the United States to the Empire of China. A certified copy of this judgment shall be the process upon which said removal of said Chin Bak Kan shall be made from the United States to the Empire of China. And said process shall be executed by the Hon. C. D. MacDougall, United States marshal for said district.'
An appeal was prosecuted to the district court of the United States for the northern district of New York, but the appeal was dismissed, and the judgment for the deportation of the defendant was affirmed.
From the final order of the district court an appeal was then
Messrs. Max J. Kohler and B. Lewinson for appellant.
Assistant Attorney General Hoyt and Solicitor General Richards for appellee.
Mr. Chief Justice Fuller delivered the opinion of the court:
By § 1 of the act of May 6, 1882 (22 Stat. at L. 58, chap. 126), it was provided that from and after the expiration of ninety days, and until the expiration of ten years, the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States should be suspended, and during such suspension it was made unlawful for any Chinese laborer to come, or, having come after the expiration of said ninety days, to remain within the United States.
By § 4 provision was made for certificates to be granted to such Chinese as were entitled, under the treaty of November 17, 1880, to go from, or come to, the United States, of their free will and accord, in order to identify them.
The 12th section of the act was as follows: 'That no Chinese person shall be permitted to enter the United States by land without producing to the proper officer of customs the certificate in this act required of Chinese persons seeking to land from a vessel. And any Chinese person found unlawfully within the United States shall be caused to be removed therefrom to the country from whence he came, by direction of the President of the United States, and at the cost of the United States, after being brought before some justice, judge, or commissioner of a court of the United States, and found to be one not lawfully entitled to be or remain in the United States.'
This section was amended by the act of July 5, 1884 (23 Stat. at L. 115, chap. 220), so as to read as follows: 'That no Chinese person shall be permitted to enter the United States by land without producing to the proper officer of customs the certificate in this act required of Chinese persons seeking to land from a vessel. And any Chinese person found unlawfully within the United States shall be caused to be removed therefrom to the country from whence he came, and at the cost of the United States, after being brought before some justice, judge, or commissioner of a court of the United States and found to be one not lawfully entitled to be or to remain in the United States; and in all such cases the person who brought or aided in bringing such person to the United States shall be liable to the government of the United States for all necessary expenses incurred in such investigation and removal; and all peace officers of the several states and territories of the United States are hereby invested with the same authority as a marshal or United States marshal in reference to carrying out the provisions of this act or the act of which this is amendatory, as a marshal or deputy marshal of the United States, and shall be entitled to like compensation, to be audited and paid by the same officers. And the United States shall pay all costs and charges for the maintenance and return of any Chinese person having the certificate prescribed by law as entitling such Chinese person to come into the United States, who may not have been permitted to land from any vessel by reason of any of the provisions of this act.'
By § 1 of the act of May 5, 1892 (27 Stat. at L. 25, chap. 60), it was provided: 'That all laws now in force prohibiting and regulating the coming into this country of Chinese persons and persons of Chinese descent are hereby continued in force for the period of ten years from the passage of this act.'
Sections 2, 3, and 6 were as follows:
'Sec. 2. That any Chinese person or person of Chinese descent, when convicted and adjudged under any of said laws to be not lawfully entitled to be or remain in the United States, shall be removed from the United States to China, unless he or they shall make it appear to the justice, judge, or commissioner before whom he or they are tried that he or they are subjects or citizens of some other country, in which case he or they shall be removed from the United States to such country: Provided, That in any case where such other country of which such Chinese person shall claim to be a citizen or subject shall demand any tax as a condition of the removal of such person to that country, he or she shall be removed to China.
'Sec. 3. That any Chinese person or person of Chinese descent arrested under the provisions of this act or the acts hereby extended shall be adjudged to be unlawfully within the United States unless such person shall establish, by affirmative proof, to the satisfaction of such justice, judge, or commissioner, his lawful right to remain in the United States.'
'Sec. 6. And it shall be the duty of all Chinese laborers within the limits of the United States, at the time of the passage of this act, and who are entitled to remain in the United States, to apply to the collector of internal revenue of their respective districts, within one year after the passage of this act, for a certificate of residence, and any Chinese laborer, within the limits of the United States, who shall neglect, fail, or refuse to comply with the provisions of this act, or who, after one year from the passage hereof, shall be found within the jurisdiction of the United States without such certificate of residence, shall be deemed and adjudged to be unlawfully within the United State, and may be arrested, by any United States customas official, collector of internal revenue or his deputies, United States marshal or his deputies, and taken before a United State judge, whose duty it shall be to order that he be deported from the United States as hereinbefore provided, unless he shall establish clearly to the satisfaction of said judge that, by reason of accident, sickness, or other unavoidable cause, he has been unable to procure his certificate, and to the satisfaction of the court, and by at least one credible white witness, that he was a resident of the United States at the time of the passage of this act; and if upon the hearing, it shall appear that he is so entitled to a certificate, it shall be granted upon his paying the cost.
'Should it appear that said Chinaman had procured a certificate which has been lost or destroyed, he shall be detained and judgment suspended a reasonable time to enable him to procure a duplicate from the officer granting it, and in such cases, the cost of said arrest and trial shall be in the discretion of the court.
'And any Chinese person other than a Chinese laborer, having a right to be and remain in the United States, desiring such certificate as evidence of such right may apply for and receive the same without charge.'
Section 6 was amended by the act of November 3, 1893 (28 Stat. at L. 7, chap. 14).
Article 1 of the treaty with China, proclaimed November 8, 1894 (28 Stat. at L. 1210), was: 'The high contracting parties agreen that for a period of ten years, beginning with the date of the exchange of the ratifications of this convention, the coming, except under the conditions hereinafter specified, of Chinese laborers to the United States shall be absolutely prohibited.'
Article 2 provided: 'The preceding article shall not apply to the return to the United States of any registered Chinese laborer who has a lawful wife, child, or parent in the United States, or property therein of the value of $1,000, or debts of like amount due him and pending settlement. . . . And no such Chinese laborer shall be permitted to enter the United States by land or sea without producing to the proper officer of the customs the return certificate herein required.'
Article 5: 'The government of the United States, having by an act of the Congress, approved May 5, 1892, as amended by an act approved November 3, 1893, required all Chinese laborers lawfully within the limits of the United States before the passage of the first-named act to be registered as in said acts provided, with a view of affording them better protection, the Chinese government will not object to the enforcement of such acts, and reciprocally the government of the United States recognizes the right of the government of China to enact and enforce similar laws or regulations for the registration, free of charge, of all laborers, skilled or unskilled (not merchants as defined by said acts of Congress), citizens of the United States in China, whether residing within or without the treaty ports.'
In United States v. Lee Yen Tai, just decided, 185 U. S. ——, ante, 629, 22 Sup. Ct. Rep. 629, the question was propounded to us by the circuit court of appeals for the second circuit on certificate: 'Is § 12 of 'An Act to Execute Certain Treaty Stipulations Relating to the Chinese, Approved May 6, 1882,' as amended by § 3 of the amendatory act of July 5, 1884, repealed by the treaty or convention with China of December 8, 1894?' and that question we answered in the negative.
The act of March 3, 1901 (31 Stat. at L. 1093, chap. 845), provides:
'That it shall be lawful for the district attorney of the district in which any Chinese person may be arrested for being found unlawfully within the United States, or having unlawfully entered the United States, to designate the United States commissioner within such district before whom such Chinese person shall be taken for hearing.
'Sec. 2. That a United States commissioner shall be entitled to receive a fee of five dollars for hearing and deciding a case arising under the Chinese exclusion laws.
'Sec. 3. That no warrant of arrest for violations of the Chinese exclusion laws shall be issued by the United States commissioners excepting upon the sworn complaint of a United State district attorney, assistant United States district attorney, collector, deputy collector, or inspector of customs, immigration inspector, United States marshal, or deputy United States marshal, or Chinese inspector, unless the issuing of such warrant of arrest shall first be approved or requested in writing by the United States district attorney of the district in which issued.'
The errors assigned may be grouped into those which presented the question of the effect of the treaty of 1894 by way of repeal, and these have been disposed of by our decision in United States v. Lee Yen Tai, 185 U. S. —, ante, 629, 22 Sup. Ct. Rep. 629; those in respect of the assertion of citizenship and the action taken thereon; and certain objections of want of jurisdiction because of insufficiency of the complaint. The latter relate to lack of positive averment of the facts, and as to the official character of the person who made the complaint. The complaint was made by one Ketchum, and, although it was not therein stated, it appears from the official register of the government that he was a Chinese inspector, and as such authorized under the statute.
The charge was made on information and belief, but no objection was raised to the complaint on that ground, and we think the ruling in Fong Yue Ting v. United States, 149 U. S. 729, 37 L. ed. 918, 13 Sup. Ct. Rep. 1016, applies that defects in complaint or pleadings do not affect the authority of the commissioner or judge or the validity of the statute.
Something is said in respect of want of jurisdiction in the commissioner because § 6 of the act of 1892 provides that Chinese laborers without certificates may be 'taken before a United States judge;' but we concur in the views of the circuit court of appeals for the ninth circuit in Fong Mey Yuk v. United States, 113 Red. 898, that the act is satisfied by proceeding before 'a justice, judge, or commissioner.' These are the words used in § 12 of the act of 1882; § 12 of the act of 1884; § 13 of the act of 1888 and § 3 of the act of 1892; while the 1st section of the act of March 3, 1901, explicitly authorizes the district attorney to designate the commissioner before whom the Chinese person may be brought. The words 'United States judge,' 'judge' and 'court,' in § 6, seem to us to refer to the tribunal authorized to deal with the subject, whether composed of a justice, a judge, or a commissioner. A United States commissioner is a quasi judicial officer, and in these hearings he acts judicially. Moreover, this case was taken by appeal from the commissioner to the judge of the district court, and his decision was affirmed, so that there was an adjudication by a United States judge in the constitutional sense, as well as by the commissioner acting as a judge in the sense of the statute.
But it is argued that the commissioner had no jurisdiction to act because the claim of citizenship was made. The ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U. S. 649, 42 L. ed. 890, 18 Sup. Ct. Rep. 456, was to this effect: 'A child born in the United States, of parents of Chinese descent, who, at the time of his birth, are subjects of the Emperor of China, but have a permanent domicil and residence in the United States, and are there carrying on business, and are not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China, becomes at the time of his birth a citizen of the United States.' It is impossible for us to hold that it is not competent for Congress to empower a United States commissioner to determine the various facts on which citizenship depends under that decision.
By the law the Chinese person must be adjudged unlawfully within the United States unless he 'shall establish by affirmative proof, to the satisfaction of such justice, judge, or commissioner, his lawful right to remain in the United States.' As applied to aliens there is no question of the validity of that provision, and the treaty, the legislation, and the circumstances considered, compliance with its requirements cannot be avoided by the mere assertion of citizenship. The facts on which such a claim is rested must be made to appear. And the inestimable heritage of citizenship is not to be conceded to those who seek to avail themselves of it under pressure of a particular exigency, without being able to show that it was ever possessed.
Section 13 of the act of September 13, 1888, provides that any Chinese person or person of Chinese descent, found unlawfully in the United States, may be arrested on a warrant issued upon a complaint under oath, 'by any justice, judge, or commissioner of any United States court,' and when convicted, on a hearing, and found and adjudged to be one not lawfully entitled to be or remain in the United States, shall be removed to the country whence he came.
'But any such Chinese person convicted before a commissioner of a United States court may, within ten days from such conviction, appeal to the Judge of the district court for the district.' [25 Stat. at L. 476, chap. 1015.]
It seems to have been assumed, during the years following the date of the act, and is conceded by the United States, that although most of its provisions were dependent upon the ratification of the treaty of March 12, 1888, and failed with the failure of ratification, that this section is in and of itself independant legislation and in force as such. Accordingly in this case an appeal was taken from the judgment of deportation rendered by the commissioner to the judge of the district court of the United States for the northern district of New York, and, upon hearing, the district court affirmed that judgment. From the judgment of the district court, this appeal was taken under § 5 of the act of March 3, 1891, on the ground that the construction of the treaty of 1894 was drawn in question. Except in cases under that section where the question of jurisdiction alone is certified, we have power to dispose of the entire case, but as the jurisdiction of the commissioner is sustained, we are of opinion that we cannot properly re-examine the facts already determined by two judgments below. That is the general rule, and there is nothing to take this case out of its operation, and, on the contrary, the conclusion is, a fortiori, justified. The same reasoning in respect to the authority to exclude applies to the authority to expel, and the policy of the legislation in respect to exclusion and expulsion is opposed to unmerous appeals. And we are not disposed to hold that where a Chinese laborer has evaded the executive jurisdiction at the frontier and got into the country, he is therefore entitled to demand repeated rehearings on the facts.
Judgment affirmed.


text:
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
Bolivia, a South American republic which lies between longitudes west of Greenwich 57° 30′ and 74°, and latitudes 8° and 22° 50′ south. These figures are, however, still subject to treaty changes.
AREA, POPULATION, ETC.—The republic covers an area of 702,767 sq. miles (I,822,334 sq. kilometers) and ranks as third in size among the South American countries. In 1905 its population was estimated at 1,816,271, or a little more than five persons to every two square miles. Of these, 231,088 are reported as whites; 484,611 as mestizos, and 792,850 as Indians. Besides these, there were about 4,000 negroes, and the residue are of unascertained origin. The proportion of Catholics to non-Catholics is approximately as seventy-two to one. All these figures are to be taken with reserve, since the efforts at serious statistics are but very recent.
Since the close of the war with Chile in 1881, Bolivia has had no sea-coast. It is bounded on the west, northwest, arid north by Peru; on the northeast and east by Brazil; on the southeast by Paraguay; on the south by the Argentine Republic, and on the southwest by Chile. Its communications with the outer world were still defective in 1905. A line of steamers on Lake Titicaca then plied between the Peruvian port of Puno and the Bolivian of Huaqui, and stage lines, between La Paz and the Chilian frontier. On the east side of the Andes, in the Basin of the Amazon, rivers, which are often interrupted in their upper course by rapids (cachuelas), afford the only means of transit. Bolivia had two short railroad lines of its own, besides the Chilian line to Oruro, of which the terminus is upon Bolivian soil. The two Bolivian railroads were trunk-lines, with an aggregate length of sixty-five miles. Work was, however, progressing on several other newly begun lines.
Bolivia is divided into nine departments and a "National Territory of Colonies", the area of which covers somewhat less than one-third of the whole surface of the republic, while its population is only one-sixtieth of the whole. Of the nine departments, La Paz is the most populous. Since 1899 the national capital has been La Paz de Ayacucho, with a population of 59,014 souls, situated in this department. Next to La Paz in importance is Cochabamba with 21,886 inhabitants. Sucre and Potosi are reported with 20,900 each, and Santa Cruz de la Sierra with 18,000, while the important mining center of Oruro has a little over 15,000 inhabitants.
NATURAL FEATURES AND RESOURCES.—The southwestern third of the country lies at a great altitude above the Pacific Ocean. The Puna, or tableland comprised within the Departments of La Paz, Oruro, and Potosi, has an average elevation of nearly 13,000 feet. Two lofty mountain ranges form natural breastworks to Bolivia: in the West, the Coast Cordillera (Chilian frontier) and, in the East, the Bolivian chain, consisting of the Andes of Carabaya and Apolobamba towards the North, and the Royal Cordillera or central Bolivian range, with its southern ramifications and prolongations to the Argentine lines. The mountainous section of Bolivia has no important rivers. Its drainage is in the North to Lake Titicaca, which itself empties to the South into the Lago (Lake) Poopb, which has no visible outlet. Towards the East mountain streams descend abruptly into the Basin of the Amazon. But the mountainous section has the two largest, and also most elevated lakes of South America: Titicaca, 12,500 feet above sea-level, 138 miles long from northwest to southeast, and of varying width, and Pobpo, farther south. The eastern two-thirds of Bolivia, that section lying towards the Atlantic, is traversed by mighty streams (e.g. the Beni and Mamore) and their affluents, all of which rise in the central Bolivian chain. Bolivia has properly but two seasons: winter, corresponding in time to summer and part of fall and spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and summer embracing the rest of the year.
The mineral resources of this republic are known to be very important, but as yet they have been only superficially prospected. Difficulty of access to the country, unsettled political conditions in former times, and cumbersome, primitive transportation have been the main cause of this backwardness. The upper regions of the Amazonian Basin are known to contain coal, but there attention has been given chiefly to the vegetable resources, the India rubber tree having rendered possible the establishment of a highly important and growing industry. The same section, also, produces both coffee and sugar, and today the coca shrub is a staple, while calisaya bark is returning into favor. The highlands in the departments of La Paz, Oruro, Potosi, parts of Cochabamba and Tarija abound in a variety of valuable ores. Gold is not generally distributed, and is extracted mainly by "placer" mining, as for instance at Chuquiaguillo, near La Paz. In the first half of the nineteenth century the Tipuani district, so difficult of access, was productive of gold of great fineness, and in quantities very considerable for that time, and the Tipuani mines are even now far from exhausted. Quartz gold is worked at Araca. Silver is very plentiful, and is extensively extracted in places. Native copper is mined at Corocoro, where it crops out in veins of unusual richness and width, but other copper ores are found in abundance also. Of late it has been established that Bolivia is probably one of the countries in the world, where tin (cassiterite) is most abundant, and the same may be said of bismuth. While on the eastern slope of the Andes the existence of gold and other mineral wealth has been proved, the attention of prospectors and miners has been turned chiefly towards the mountains themselves. The processes of mining and treatment of the ores are still, in many places, rudimentary and primitive, but with the influx of foreign capital and the introduction of machinery, conditions are rapidly improving. On the shores of Lake Titicaca bituminous coal is found both east and west of that lake. Besides mining, the chief industry of the mountain region is agriculture. As this branch is almost entirely in the hands of the Indians, it will be treated in connection with the ethnography of Bolivia.
The Amazon Basin and its forests, as well as open spaces with high grass, are full of animal life. The large rivers, as everywhere in tropical South America, teem with fish, crocodiles, snakes, and other amphibia, and the manatee also occurs. Aquatic birds, parrots, etc., are abundant. The fauna of the mountain districts is more in evidence, but much poorer in species and individuals, than in the adjacent countries. The llama and its congeners, the alpaca, vicuna, and guanaco, belong to the Bolivian fauna. The llama and alpaca are domesticated by the Indian. Beasts of prey are not numerous and are found only within the limits of arboreal vegetation. Lower down the great ant-eater is occasionally seen, the puma and the bear (Ursus ornatus). In southern Bolivia, as well as in the eastern sections, the American ostrich occurs, and a tiny armadillo has its home in the cold, arid Puna, south of Lake Titicaca. Over the highest peaks soars the condor.
GOVERNMENT, THE CHURCH, AND EDUCATION.—Bolivia, then the Spanish colony of Alto Peru, or Upper Peru, declared its intention to achieve political independence July 16, 1809, and actually became an autonomous republic August 6, 1825, taking its name in honor of Simon Bolivar, its founder. The Constitution under which the republic is now governed dates from October 28, 1880, and aims at a "unitarian republican" polity. Under this Constitution the legislative power is vested in a Congress which comprises a Chamber of Deputies and a Senate, the former body consisting of 72 members elected by direct popular vote for terms of four years, the latter of 16 members also elected by direct popular vote, but for terms of six years. The executive power is vested in a president, elected by direct popular vote for a term of four years. The president, however, can exercise his authority only through his Cabinet, which consists of five Ministros de Estado, jointly responsible with him for all his official acts. Under this chief executive the civil government of the country is carried on by prefects of Departments, appointed by it and directly responsible to it, and they in turn have under their jurisdiction sub-prefects and Corregidores for the subdivisions of Departments. The revenue of the republic for 1905 was stated at 7,928,730 bolivianos (I boliviano = $0.422 in United States currency).
By Article 2 of the Constitution of Bolivia, "The State recognizes and supports the Roman Apostolic Catholic religion, the public exercise of any other worship being prohibited, except in the colonies, where it is tolerated". For the support of Catholic worship in general the State pays the sum of 182,027 bolivianos ($76,815 U.S. currency), besides 14,000 bolivianos ($5,908) for missions to the aboriginal tribes. There is one archbishopric, Sucre, or Charcas, formerly La Plata, with 146 parishes, three colleges of the Propagation of the Faith, and five monasteries. The suffragan bishoprics are: La Paz, with 102 parishes, and 5 monasteries; Cochabamba, with 69 parishes and 4 convents, and Santa Cruz, divided into 73 parishes. Both La Paz and Santa Cruz were erected into bishoprics in 1605, the Archbishopric of Charcas was founded 1609, and the Diocese of Cochabamba in 1847. Efforts are kept up to gather the unsettled tribes of the Amazon Basin into permanent settlements (reductions), a very slow and difficult task.
The legal status of marriage is thus summed up in Art. 99 of the Civil Code of Bolivia: "Matrimony being in the Republic elevated to the dignity of a sacrament, the formalities necessary for its celebration will be the same as those which the Council of Trent and the Church have designated." Bolivian law recognizes no divorce permitting remarriage, and all questions arising between husband and wife can be decided only by the ecclesiastical tribunals.
ETHNOGRAPHY.—The comparatively small proportion of whites among the Bolivian population makes of the Indian the numerically preponderant stock. The mestizos, while not disclaiming their partly white origin, sometimes stand, in the country and among the lower classes in towns and cities, but slightly higher than the aborigines, being distinguished from the latter mostly by the fact that they wear European costume. Of the Indians several linguistic stocks inhabit the country. The roaming tribes of the Amazon lowlands are neither numerous nor important enough to deserve mention here. But in the mountains two powerful stocks, sedentary, agricultural, and pastoral ever since they have been known to the whites, form the working lower class of the people of Bolivia. These stocks are the Quichua and the Aymara. These two large tribes may, perhaps be about equally numerous. The Quichua occupy southern Bolivia and the Andean districts adjacent to Lake Titicaca on the East; the Aymara hold the upper valleys of the Andes, the West, and the center. Physiologically, no great difference in type exists. They are, first of all, husbandmen, in fact they control agriculture. Nearly all agricultural lands being held by whites or mestizos, who do not themselves cultivate, but prefer to live in settlements following some trade or commerce, the Indians, who are settled everywhere, take care of the fields. This they do, either in a kind of serfdom, living on the property and performing, also, some personal services for the proprietors, or, as Indian communities settled near the land, they have a tacit lease of it. The Indians organized in communities according to their primitive customs control the land, through their labor, virtually more than the owners, and thus remain a power in the republic, since they are the feeders of the people. Their serfdom is much more apparent than real, for the masters depend upon them for subsistence. Some alimentary plants in the high regions are potatoes, quinua, oca, etc., as well as maize in districts suitable for its growth, with coarse beans (habas) and barley, the last two being of European origin. The Indians raise cattle for themselves and sometimes for the landowners. All their farming is done in a primitive and very slovenly way. Next to agriculture, transportation and personal service in housework are also in the hands of the Indians. In fact their silent influence pervades the whole of public and private life; their industrial methods are obsolete, and they resist improvement with the greatest tenacity.
As the Indian has maintained his primitive organization with few changes, he might form a State within the State, and thus become a grave danger to the whites. But as he never had any conception of a State, being, moreover, divided into autonomous or independent tribes, that danger is much diminished. Neither the Aymara nor the Quichua could coalesce to form a homogeneous body. This they have shown ever since the Spanish occupation, and during the most alarming of their attempted uprisings, such as that of 1781. They would like to, return to their primitive condition of barbarism, but feel that, despite their vast superiority of numbers, they are virtually powerless. In addition to these two principal Indian groups, the mountain districts still shelter the Uros, feeble remnants of a tribe dwelling among rushes and reeds, and comparatively little known. Of the white population of Bolivia little need be said that is not applicable generally to the whites in other South American countries. They differ of course from the inhabitants of less mountainous countries in that they have the general characteristics common to all mountaineers.
(For special information on the individual dioceses, aboriginal tribes, languages, etc., of Bolivia, see articles under separate headings.)


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Trees of deep time are a portal to the past – and the future | Aeon Essays
From the library of Alexandria to the imagined canals of mars to the spots on the sun, this is a beautifully written examination of the chronology contained within the bristlecone pine.
The oldest of the living bristlecones were just saplings when the pyramids were raised. The most ancient, called Methuselah, is estimated to be more than 4,800 years old; with luck, it will soon enter its sixth millennium as a living, reproducing organism. Because we conceive of time in terms of experience, a life spanning millennia can seem alien or even eternal to the human mind. It is hard to grasp what it would be like to see hundreds of generations flow out from under you in the stream of time, hard to imagine how rich and varied the mind might become if seasoned by five thousand years of experience and culture.
There is only the briefest passing mention of the sad story of Don Currey.


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Debian Security Advisory
DSA-2519-2 isc-dhcp -- several vulnerabilities
- Date Reported:
- 04 Aug 2012
- Affected Packages:
- isc-dhcp
- Vulnerable:
- Yes
- Security database references:
- In Mitre's CVE dictionary: CVE-2011-4539, CVE-2012-3571, CVE-2012-3954.
- More information:
Several security vulnerabilities affecting ISC dhcpd, a server for automatic IP address assignment, have been discovered. Additionally, the latest security update for isc-dhcp, DSA-2516-1, did not properly apply the patches for CVE-2012-3571 and CVE-2012-3954. This has been addressed in this additional update.
BlueCat Networks discovered that it is possible to crash DHCP servers configured to evaluate requests with regular expressions via crafted DHCP request packets.
Markus Hietava of the Codenomicon CROSS project discovered that it is possible to force the server to enter an infinite loop via messages with malformed client identifiers.
Glen Eustace discovered that DHCP servers running in DHCPv6 mode and possibly DHCPv4 mode suffer of memory leaks while processing messages. An attacker can use this flaw to exhaust resources and perform denial of service attacks.
For the stable distribution (squeeze), this problem has been fixed in version 4.1.1-P1-15+squeeze6.
For the testing (wheezy) and unstable (sid) distributions, this problem will be fixed soon.
We recommend that you upgrade your isc-dhcp packages.


text:
There are two different kinds of risks and we will address each. The first risk is what we might call incidental use. The second risk is when a person drives his/her own car every day as part of their job, like a sales person. This person's job description actually includes using their own car as part of the day to day job functions.
Situation One-Incidental Use
Generally in these situations you would be covered under your personal auto policy. If you find you are driving more than 30-40% of the time on company business, it would be best to contact our office for a review of your coverage. Examples of incidental use would be:
Going to a company event
Taking the mail to the post office
Picking up supplies at the store
Going to see a client - occasionally
Situation Two- Drive as Part of the Job
Many personal auto policies have drive-for-business exclusions, requiring individuals to inform their agents that they drive for work and to acquire an endorsement. Without the endorsement, insurers may refuse to cover a claim. Here are some examples of work related situations where you might need to make adjustments to your insurance:
Outside sales professionals
Real-estate agents
Driving more than 50% of the time for the company
You receive an auto allowance
You take a tax deduction for work related driving
If you use your vehicle for delivery or landscaping you might need to consider a commercial policy, especially if the vehicle is used 100% for business use.
We are ready to help you with all your auto, home, RV, and motorcycle needs. Call us today. We can combine your insurance under one program and save you hundreds of dollars.


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Barney's Birthday Photo Contest Winner Announced
Congratulations to Melissa Herman and her son Brody! After being put to a public vote, this photo of Brody earned the Herman family 4 VIP Passes to meet and see Barney live in concert at the Casper Events Center on August 4th. If you don't have your tickets yet, you can still save $5 with our secret promotion code.
Way to go, Brody - next time, save some cake for us!


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It's funny how often I make posts of this nature, but no worries boys and girls I'm still around :-)Haven't been doing too much painting lately, or gaming for that matter. I'm working (slowly) on my classic Dwarf army, trying to get them all build and primed so I don't feel like quite as much of a hobo when I play small games with them. The current list involves about 2x10 Quarrellers, 20 Ironbreakers, and a smattering of war machines and small support units.I'm currently still trying to get my
Hey everyone, just thought I'd let you know that I posted some updated shots of some models from last year. I got to re-shoot a few photos to submit them for the CMON Annual 2008, and figured this was a good opportunity to get some updated shots uploaded.The Warrior Priest and Master of the Fleet had some extra work done to them last year before I entered them in GD Canada. I never got around to posting pics of the updated models until now. I also included some bigger and better shots of Nazgrub,
Slight exaggeration, but the influence on the color scheme is undeniable :-) I made him with the Empire Wizards kit, and he's painted in generic colors to match Shiekh Yadosh and so that I can justify him knowing different spell lores from one game to another. My favorite thing about the model? The fact that I painted him in under 3 hours! 2:53 to be precise, I got bored and timed myself with my iPhone stopwatch.
It's been too long since I updated the blog (again). I did a bunch of work on the Chaos army, getting a good chunk of the units finished prior to the tournament in February. I'll be posting pics later on, if you guys saw my project log on Warseer then there's not much new just yet.Anyway a good chunk of our gaming club is from Prince George, and we're driving down there for a tourney this coming weekend. I'm revamping my Dogs of War for the event, and adding some old/new characters and Duelists.
A quick shot of the WIP Chosen unit, I think the color scheme will definitely pan out nicely. I'll start working on the rest of the unit plus the Knights, and hopefully I'll have the big fat batch of models all finished in assembly-line fashion within a week. Gotta start ramping up the speed extremely quickly here or I won't finish on time.These last 2 pics aren't 100% up to date, but they show the color scheme pretty well. The leather boots will be the dark brown/purple color, and the metal on
Nothing fancy, but they're done I think. I might go back and blend the skin a bit if I have time at the end of the project, but the priority is getting the next 54 models finished :-)
Lots of pics, more construction than painting though. More recent shots are at the bottom, but I'll say right now that I have built a bunch of movement trays, primed most of the regiments, and painted the Warhounds since I've last taken photos. I'm mainly showing off the conversions so far :-)The Sorceror Lord, complete with all his magnetized optional equipment.The Knights, after being liberated from many of the unnecessary spikes and horns covering the models.The Chosen were definitely a ton of
It's nice to go from that, to this in a single sitting.In a strange turn of events, I used white primer for the first time in ages, and then proceeded to paint a very dark and gritty model using the new Citadel Washes. The recipe for the model was simple. Basecoat. Apply a few washes. Reapply basecoat. Apply some final washes. Varnish and photograph.I'm really excited about how the army will look, and it should be pretty realistic to expect to have it all done in 6 weeks. My current schedule is
Cue the ominous tones, I've finally been converted to the dark side. I'm actually doing an "evil" army for once. Warriors of Tzeentch to be precise. Some Slaaneshi Marauders will play a supporting role, but I want a loaded magic phase, a few heavy hitters, and very little in the way of defense. Should be fun!I'm currently working on some of the first conversions for the army. Pretty soon I'll get impatient and build the rank and file plastic models from the army. I plan on taking them
Just finished and submitted the essay I was working on, hooray! I really should be studying (have an exam at 9am and I haven't begun to study yet) but I want to post a super-quick progress report before I bury my face in another textbook.I didn't get any work done on the Venators today... but I did start painting an Ogre Maneater for the same army. I have the attention span of a gnat.
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One Party Classroom Introduction
An Academic Tragedy*
To appreciate the radical changes that have taken place in America's universities over the past few decades, one could do worse than start with the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Academic courses at Santa Cruz and other California campuses are ostensibly governed by the "Standing Orders" of the university Regents. These state that each school must "remain aloof from politics and never function as an instrument for the advance of partisan interests," and that professors must never allow the classroom "to be used for political indoctrination." In the words of the Regents, such indoctrination "constitutes misuse of the University as an institution."1
Unfortunately, this rule and rules like it at academic institutions across the country are increasingly ignored by university professors, and almost never enforced by university administrations. The UC Santa Cruz catalog is itself littered with course descriptions that promise indoctrination, almost invariably in radical politics. The clear goal of such courses is not to educate students in the methods of critical thinking but to instill ideologies that are hostile to American society and its values. Contrary to the Standing Orders of the university Regents, these courses teach students what to think, not how to think.
The Santa Cruz catalog, for example, describes a seminar offered by its "Community Studies Department" as follows: "The goal of this seminar is to learn how to organize a revolution. We will learn what communities past and present have done and are doing to resist, challenge, and overcome systems of power including (but not limited to) global capitalism, state oppression, and racism."2
This is the outline of a political agenda, not the description of a scholarly inquiry. Moreover, the sectarian character of this course reflects far more than the misguided pedagogy of an aberrant instructor. University faculty are credentialed, hired, and promoted by committees composed of faculty peers.
To create an academic course requires the approval of the tenured leaders of an academic department who have been hired and then promoted by other senior faculty. For a department to survive and flourish, its curriculum must be recognized and approved by professional associations that are national in scope. Consequently, the fact that a course in how to organize a revolution is offered at one of the nation's distinguished academic institutions speaks volumes about the contemporary university and what it has come to regard as an appropriate academic course of study.
The Community Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz is by no means alone in its departures from scholarly principle. The school also boasts a "Department of the History of Consciousness," which was created in the 1960s as a platform for political radicals. Communist Party stalwart Angela Davis—a onetime federal fugitive featured on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list—has been a faculty icon for decades.3 Black Panther felon Huey Newton received a Ph.D. from the department by submitting a dissertation that was little more than a political tract justifying his organization's criminal activities. Another prominent radical credentialed in the program and then hired to its faculty is Bettina Aptheker, creator of UCSC's Department of Feminist Studies.
The daughter of a famous leader of the Communist Party, Professor Aptheker was herself on the party's central committee for many years. Aptheker finally left the party in 1981 after her superiors rejected a political tract she had submitted for publication to the party publishing house. Her manuscript was considered unacceptable because it argued that women were oppressed due to their gender and not merely their class position.4 In a recent memoir, Aptheker explained that she agreed to pursue an academic career only after another professor and long-time Communist Party member told her, "It's your revolutionary duty."5
In pursuit of her revolutionary goals, Aptheker devoted herself to revamping the curriculum of the newly created "Introduction to Women's Studies" course, "making it more overtly political" and turning it into a training program in radical feminism and an adjunct of the women's movement.6 "Teaching became a form of political activism for me, replacing the years of dogged meetings and intrepid organizing with the immediacy of a liberatory practice."7
Aptheker was appointed the first professor of Women's Studies at Santa Cruz and went on to build an entire academic department based on her political agendas, shaping its course offerings for a quarter of a century. At her instigation, the department was eventually renamed the Department of Feminist Studies, which finally captured her achievement: the embedding of a political program in an academic curriculum, despite the explicit warning by the UC Regents that this "constitutes a misuse of the university."
Bettina Aptheker's academic career is a metaphor for the political trends that have reshaped America's liberal arts classrooms over the past generation. A lifelong political activist, Aptheker regarded the university first and foremost as a fulcrum for revolutionary change. In furthering her political goals, she received extensive support from crucial elements of the university system. This support included, first of all, the academic department that awarded her a Ph.D. for non-scholarly work. Like Newton's, her doctoral thesis was not a scholarly dissertation but the political tract she had previously submitted to the Communist Party publishing house. Once credentialed by the History of Consciousness program as a "scholar," she was hired to the faculty and then promoted by committees dominated by other faculty radicals. These committees then approved the creation of a politically designed Women's Studies program through which she could spread her doctrines. The central university administration then agreed to the expansion of the program into a full-fledged academic department and to its transformation into the Department of Feminist Studies.
Throughout the entire process, Aptheker's ideological curriculum received the imprimatur of the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA), which sets standards of discourse, research, and hiring in the field. Its support was entirely predictable, since the NWSA is itself a political organization whose formal constitution lays out its agendas in blunt fashion:
Women's Studies owes its existence to the movement for the liberation of women; the feminist movement exists because women are oppressed. Women's Studies, diverse as its components are, has at its best a shared a vision of a world free not only from sexism but also from racism, class-bias, ageism, heterosexual bias—from all the ideologies and institutions that have consciously or unconsciously oppressed and exploited some for the advantage of others. . . . Women's Studies, then, is equipping women not only to enter the society as whole, as productive human beings, but to transform the world to one that will be free of all oppression.8
In sum, Professor Aptheker's academic career and her politicized Department of Feminist Studies are made possible by a national movement of academics who share her broad ideological agendas. Over the course of several decades, this movement has instituted massive changes in the structure of higher education, creating new courses, new departments, and new fields that violate the professional standards of the modern research university and undermine its foundations.
These disturbing developments are the subject matter of One-Party Classroom. Recent decades have witnessed widespread complaints about the political abuse of university classrooms. But never before has anyone undertaken a comprehensive investigation of what America's college instructors actually say they are teaching their students.
One-Party Classroom fills in those blanks. It documents the results of an in-depth, multiyear study of twelve representative schools— public and private, and ranging from large state universities to elite Ivy League institutions. Our investigation has systematically scrutinized course catalogs, syllabi, reading lists, professors' biographies, scholarly records, and testimonies.
The outcome of our research leaves no doubt that the failure to enforce academic standards is a problem that is endemic to institutions of higher learning. An alarming number of university courses violate existing academic regulations that have been designed to ensure that students receive professional instruction. Curricula are designed not to educate students in critical thinking[1] but to instill doctrines that are "politically correct." This is not a claim that professors are "biased." Bias is another term for "point of view," which every professor naturally possesses and has a right to express. For the purposes of this study, professors whose courses follow traditional academic standards do not pose a problem regardless of their individual point of view. What concerns us is whether their courses adhere to the academic standards of the modern research university and the principles of a professional education.9 And the fact is that a growing number of activist instructors routinely present their students with only one side of controversial issues in an effort to convert them to a sectarian perspective.
Once the widespread nature of the abuses is appreciated, it becomes impossible to argue that the problem is limited to a few aberrant instructors, or to offhand professorial comments, or to an occasional assignment of materials designed to sway students' judgments on controversial matters.
The more than 150 college courses documented in these pages do not exhaust the political offerings at the twelve institutions studied; they are merely the most obvious cases at these schools. The ideologies presented in these courses often reflect prominent and even dominant schools of thought in their respective academic fields. More importantly, these ideological doctrines often shape the core curriculum most undergraduates are required to take to earn their degrees in liberal arts.
If we were to extrapolate from the materials examined here, taking into account the total number of institutions offering advanced degrees, the result would be as many as 10,000 college classes nationwide whose primary purpose is not to educate students but to train them in left-wing ideologies and political agendas. The students who pass through these courses annually are numbered in the millions. In other words, One-Party Classroom demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that the attempt to indoctrinate American college students is more pervasive and extreme than even the harshest critics of academia have previously suggested.
"No Tipping of the Scales"
Although the courses examined in this text reflect, without exception, a left-wing view of the world, the problems exposed would be just as serious if instructors were instilling conservative or right-wing doctrines. The reason for the absence of such courses in this study was our inability to locate them at the schools examined. This is not surprising. As recent surveys have shown, conservatives are an extraordinarily rare presence in contemporary liberal arts faculties. At several of the schools examined, we could not locate a single conservative professor on the social science faculty. A 2007 investigation by two liberal academics, Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, reported that liberal professors generally outnumber conservatives in the social sciences and humanities by a factor of 9 to 1.10 In fields such as anthropology and sociology, the ratio approaches 30 to 1, Consequently, in the mainstream university system, which is the focus of our inquiry, conservative professors lack the institutional means to create ideological departments or to design courses for the purpose of training students in right-wing doctrines.11
The roots of the present situation lie in the political history of the 1960s and its aftermath. The cultural upheavals of that era saw the accession to academic tenure of a generation of activists who regarded the university as a platform from which to advance their political mission. Drawing on the works of European Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse, and the educational theorist Paulo Freire, the radicals viewed universities as "means of cultural production" analogous to the "means of production" in Marx's revolutionary schema. To these professorial activists, the academic classroom offered a potential fulcrum for revolutionary change. Because the university trained journalists and editors, lawyers and judges, future political candidates and operatives, it provided a path to cultural "hegemony" and an opportunity to promote a radical transformation of the society at large.
The efforts of this radical generation soon led to a dramatic shift in educational attitudes. When the modern research university was created a century ago, it signaled an end to the dominance of religious institutions in the field of higher education. Under the new dispensation, teachers were expected to refrain from imposing their religious or ideological prejudices on students in their charge, to teach according to the precepts of scientific method and not according to what the philosopher Charles Peirce referred to as the "method of authority."
The most important and influential statement associated with this emergence of the modern research university was the "Declaration on the Principles of Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure," a document issued by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The Declaration stipulated that a university instructor should "set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators . . . and he should, above all, remember that his business is not to provide his srudents with ready-made conclusions, but to train them to think for themselves, and to provide them access to those materials which they need if they are to think intelligently."12 This statement, issued in 1915, has provided the template for the academic freedom policies of most American universities ever since.
Equally explicit on these matters was a 1934 statement by Robert Gordon Sproul, the president of the University of California and the architect of its rise to academic prominence as an exemplar of the values to which a research university should aspire. In the 1934 statement, Sproul defined the mission of the university as incompatible with the agendas of sectarian political movements: "The function of the university is to seek and to transmit knowledge and to train students in the processes whereby truth is to be made known. To convert, or to make converts, is alien and hostile to this dispassionate duty. Where it becomes necessary in performing this function of a university, to consider political, social, or sectarian movements, they are dissected and examined, not taught, and the conclusion left, with no tipping of the scales, to the logic of the facts."13
The Sproul statement was integral to the academic freedom policies of the University of California until 2003, when academic radicals succeeded in suppressing it. In that year, the academic senate voted to remove the Sproul statement from its academic freedom template by a majority of 43—3- This removal was engineered by Professor Robert Post, who is currently the principal authority on academic freedom for the AAUP.14
The activist mentality behind these moves was aggressively promoted in an article titled "Impassioned Teaching," which was featured in the Summer 2007 issue of the AAUP's official journal, Academe. It was timed to coincide with a new statement on academic freedom and was written by Pamela Caughie, a regional president of the AAUP and also a professor of English at Loyola University, Chicago, and its director of Women's Studies.
"Don't be afraid of classroom advocacy; it's not the same as indoctrination," Caughie advised other academics. But her text demonstrated that this was a distinction without a difference: "Feminism is a mode of analysis, a set of values, and a political movement. In teaching students its history, its forms, and its impact, I am teaching them to think and write as feminists. I want to convince my students of the value of feminist analysis and the importance of feminist praxis." In other words, Caughie understands her educational mission as one of persuading students to adopt her point of view, not teaching them how to conduct an intellectual examination of feminism and think for themselves. Caughie is even ready to concede the point in a backhanded way: "In twenty years of teaching I have never gone into the classroom hoping to make converts that day. Still, I feel I am doing my job well when students become practitioners of feminist analysis and committed to feminist politics."15
Caughie's defense of the "praxis" of indoctrination in the official journal of the AAUP underscores the predicament in which American liberal arts programs find themselves. The radical cohort to which Caughie and Aptheker belong is now a large and influential presence and in some cases an imposing majority on liberal arts faculties and the governing bodies of national academic organizations. As a result, it has been able to transform significant parts of the academy into agencies of political and social change.
These include traditional professional groups such as the American Historical Association (AHA), which now routinely pass formal resolutions on public controversies that have nothing to do with scholarship, and which take positions on issues that only a handful of their thousands of members would be professionally qualified to judge. In 2007, for example, a tiny but determined minority of AHA members passed a resolution condemning the Iraq war. In doing so they exploited the scholarly prestige of AHA members gained in historical fields far removed from the Middle East in order to promulgate a fashionable left-wing position on current events.
The political subordination of scholarship to political agendas is most evident in fields such as Women's Studies. Almost universally, Women's Studies programs base their courses of study on the ideological (and unproven) claim that gender is "socially constructed"— that behavioral differences between men and women are socially, rather than biologically, determined. According to these Women's Studies programs, gender differences between men and women are artificially created by an entrenched patriarchy for the express purpose of oppressing women. This perspective is presented by Women's Studies faculties as a settled doctrine even though it is a controversial opinion. Recent advances in modern neuroscience, for example, have identified significant differences in the biological makeup of men and women that affect their relative abilities and behaviors.16 Yet for Women's Studies faculties the issue is settled in favor of social determinants.
Ideological developments in the university have also led to the prevalent phenomenon of professors academically trained in one discipline teaching courses and posing as experts in others. Since radical ideologies require their adherents to make global pronouncements, it is not uncommon to find instructors with degrees in English or Comparative Literature teaching courses that focus on the historical development of economic empires or the complexities of gender and race. This is analogous to a situation where botanists and microbiologists would teach big bang physics or macroeconomics. It is a serious problem for academic professions, which are defined by their specialized knowledge. Entry into these professions is barred to individuals not credentialed as experts in their disciplines, while students pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of being taught by specialists in their fields. Why go through the arduous and expensive process of credentialing experts if anyone is qualified to teach anything?
What we are witnessing in the liberal arts programs of American universities is the collapse of standards on an alarming scale. To describe this problem as one of "liberal bias" or a "lack of balance" is to misrepresent and trivialize it. All faculty, whatever their point of view, have intellectual biases and a right to express them. But the same right comes with an important and long recognized caveat: Professors have an obligation to be professional in their instruction. They are expected to refrain from imposing their personal views on students through the authority they exercise in the classroom, or through the design of the course, or through their power over student grades; they should not represent mere opinion as scientific fact.
The problem posed by the incorporation of ideological agendas into the academic curriculum is not the opinions of a particular instructor or a particular idea introduced in the course of instruction. The problem arises when the course of instruction is not guided by scientific method; when it is not constructed as a scholarly inquiry within a scholarly discipline; when the instructor fails to present students with divergent views on controversial matters or with access to materials that will enable them to think intelligently and for themselves. The problem facing the university today is that many academic courses are designed to train students in sectarian ideologies and recruit them to sectarian causes.
Even as the abuses of university classrooms documented in this study have reached epidemic proportions, faculty unions and professional associations have become increasingly averse to any accountability for the design of academic instruction. Roger Bowen, who until recently served as general secretary of the AAUP, has said in so many words that academics should not have to answer to anyone but themselves: "It should be evident that the sufficient condition for securing the academic freedom of our profession is the profession itself."17
But the pages that follow show that left to their own devices, faculty and administrators have consistently failed to defend academic freedom or maintain reasonable academic standards. Routine abuses of the university are also made possible by the passivity of other actors— instructors in the hard sciences who observe traditional professional standards in their own work but choose to remain silent when these standards are traduced by others, non-ideological scholars in the liberal arts who do likewise, education-oriented trustees and alumni, and students abused by the practices described. These academic bystanders constitute a majority of any university community and a majority of faculty as well. But their refusal to speak up has allowed their less scrupulous colleagues to engineer a decline of professional standards, and a consequent debasement of the academic product.
If this passivity continues and the university community does not respond to the assault on academic standards, the credibility and authority of the university will continue to decline and the future of liberal arts education in America will then become bleak indeed.


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Galyna Andrushko
Galyna Andrushko is a best-selling stock photographer with over 20,000 travel and nature images in her portfolio.
Her images are on sale all around the world. Many printed and web publications used them for advertising and editorial purposes. You can see them anywhere from billboards and web designs to book covers and printed publications, including Britannica.
Galyna and her team are keen on traveling. Her images are unique in terms of quality and subject combination. She is one of the few photographers in the world who are able to make high quality images in extreme conditions of mountain or desert trails.


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With Windows 8, Microsoft has replaced the lackluster Windows Virtual PC solution with the powerful Hyper-V capabilities from Windows Server 2012. This is an amazing change, but it somewhat limits how virtualization works in Windows 8. That is, instead of focusing on application compatibility, Hyper-V in Windows 8 is aimed at software development test environments and IT pros who are managing environments based on Microsoft's enterprise virtualization solutions.
Aside from lacking Windows Virtual PC's XP Mode and its attendant application virtualization niceties, Client Hyper-V, as Microsoft calls it, is more capable and powerful than its predecessor. It offers much better performance and lets you run multiple virtual machines simultaneously. It works with both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems, and not just 32-bit like Virtual PC. And it comes with an amazing management interface, just like the version from Windows Server. (In fact, they're identical.) This means that your experience using Client Hyper-V in Windows 8 will be directly applicable to Windows Server 2012 as well.
Hyper-V is so powerful, in fact, that it comes with very specific system requirements.
64-bit PCs only. Like the Server software on which it is based, Client Hyper-V only runs on 64-bit PCs that are running the 64-bit version of Windows 8 Pro (or Enterprise).
Chipset requirements. Client Hyper-V requires modern Intel and AMD microprocessors that include Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) technologies. Fortunately, this is a feature of all current generation ("Sandy Bridge" on Intel) microprocessors. But it means that your older Core 2 Duo-based PCs may not work.
Memory. Your PC must be configured with at least 4 GB of RAM. Of course, more is always better with virtualization, so if your needs are high-end, you'll want more RAM than that.
To install Client Hyper-V, you use the well-hidden Windows Feature control panel. (Thanks to the wonders of Start Search in Windows 8, however, it's easily found if you know what you're looking for: Search for windows features, filter to Settings, and select Turn Windows features on or off.)
Expand the Hyper-V entry and you'll see two sub-entries, Hyper-V Managements Tools and Hyper-V Platform. If the second is grayed out, you can't install Hyper-V. (That said, you may need to turn on virtualization features in your PC's BIOS or UEFI firmware first. So check that before despairing.)
Select the features you want to install, click OK, and Client Hyper-V will be installed. After a reboot you're good to go.
There are two primary interfaces for interacting with Client Hyper-V: Hyper-V Manager and Hyper-V Virtual Machine Connection (VMC).
Hyper-V Manager is the Hyper-V management console and the exact same utility that is provided with Windows Server 2012. It's a modern and full-featured tool, and all you need to create, manage, and run virtual environments on your PC.
Documenting every single feature of this amazing application would be lengthy and time consuming, but some of the key features include:
Connect Hyper-V on your PC or on other PCs or servers. While you can of course work solely on your PC, you can also connect to other Hyper-V installs on other PCs or servers in your environment. I use this feature fairly regularly, as I also have a Hyper-V install on my Windows Server 2012 Beta machine.
Create a virtual machine. The primary function of Client Hyper-V, of course, concerns the creation and configuration of virtual machines, or VMs. These are created via a simple wizard with a name, (dynamic) RAM allotment, a network, one or more virtual hard disks (VHDs), and an attached installation media (which can be a physical disc, an ISO, or other source). (You can make further configuration changes later.)
Create and manage a virtual hard disk. You can also create and edit virtual hard disks, or VHDs, that can be used by virtual machines or the host, physical PC. Note that Client Hyper-V now supports the newer VHDX format, which provides support for virtual disks up to 64 TB big but is not supported in OSes earlier than Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. Also, VHDs can be configured to be dynamically sized. That way, a 2 TB virtual disk—which appears as a single file to the host system--won't take up much too much disk space unless you later fill it up with content. To edit a virtual disk, select Edit Disk from the Actions pane. (Note that you can also create VHDs and VHDXs from Disk Management in Windows 8.)
Manage and configure virtual machines. Once you've created a virtual machine, you can access its settings and configure many features, including the device boot order, the memory (RAM), the number of virtual processor cores, the attached hard disks (which can be virtual or physical), and much, much more. You can also use VM snapshots to capture and return to "point in time" versions of the VM.
Install and run an operating system in virtual machines. At some point, you are of course going to need to install an operating system in that virtual machine, configure it to your liking and then possibly install applications within it. You do so as you do when installing Windows or other OSes on a physical PC, but of course in this case it's running virtually and is typically accessible in a window.
Import and export virtual machines. If you've created a virtual machine in another instance of Hyper-V, you can use the Import functionality to import it to whatever machine you're connected to (the host PC or a remote PC). Likewise, you can export virtual machines so they can be used elsewhere.
And so on.
Hyper-V Virtual Machine Connection can be used when you want to just work with a single virtual machine that's already created and configured. It looks and works almost exactly like the related Remote Desktop Connection utility. (You can also connect to virtual machines using RDC, of course, though that has different requirements of its own, both in the virtual guest and on the connecting PC.)
Overall, Client Hyper-V is an amazing addition to Windows 8 and one that will prove to be very useful to developers of all kinds and of course IT Pros. If Microsoft could just figure out an XP Mode addition of some kind, replicating the amazing application-only accessibility from Windows Virtual PC, it would be perfect.


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December 9, 2013
School of Leadership Studies selects new student ambassadors
The School of Leadership Studies has selected 19 new student ambassadors. As School of Leadership Studies Ambassadors, the students will promote the school to current and prospective students at events such as K-State Celebrates, Junior and Senior Days, and the Academic Majors and Minors Fair.
New K-State School of Leadership Studies Ambassadors include:
Gabrielle Armstrong, freshman in open option, Olathe; Nicole Baccarella, freshman in nutrition and health, Littleton, Colo.; Celine Beggs, freshman in agricultural communication and journalism, Bedford, Iowa; Katie Gehrt, freshman in political science, De Soto; Allyson Hall, junior in biology, Lenexa; Taylor Harms, sophomore in family studies and human services, Lincolnville; Patrick Kennedy, freshman in business administration, Paola; Alexis Lundy, junior in family and consumer sciences education, Leawood; Emma Miller, freshman in elementary education, Dodge City; Princess Moran, freshman in business administration, Wichita; Daphne Park, freshman in family studies and human services, El Dorado; Kaylee Smith, sophomore in mass communications, Louisburg; Jordan Strickler, freshman in chemical engineering, Iola; Anastasia Vandermark, freshman in business administration, Frisco, Texas; Sydney Webb, sophomore in pre-psychology, Topeka; and Matthew Zemanick, freshman in business administration, Wichita.


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The Facts About Thumb Sucking
One topic we are often asked about is finger or thumb sucking and/or pacifier use — a challenge that most parents or caregivers will likely face with at least one of their children. The first and perhaps most important thing to remember is that it is totally normal for babies and young children to suck their fingers, thumb or a pacifier. It only becomes a problem when it continues as the child ages or if you unnecessarily make it a problem.
For most children, the sucking instinct starts in the womb before birth. This fact is evident, as many expectant mothers are shown their child sucking fingers or a thumb during a mid or late-term sonogram. Once the child is born, the habit may continue because it provides the child with a sense of security. Other research indicates that some babies start sucking habits as a way to make contact with, test and learn about their new world outside the womb. It is interesting to note that most children typically tend to stop finger or thumb sucking habits on their own and without much intervention between the ages of two and four. However, for others it can continue much longer. And that is the scenario that parents and caregivers need to be aware of so that they can monitor sucking habits.
Children who suck their thumbs or a pacifier after the age of two have a higher risk of developing some long term negative effects from the habit. This includes but is not limited to upper jaw development issues and "buck" teeth (upper front teeth that protrude forward out of a natural position towards the lips). For this reason, some researchers feel that children should cease thumb or finger sucking and/or pacifier use by 18 months of age. However, the Academy of Pediatric Dentistry recommends that parents and caregivers encourage children to cease this habit by age three.
If you feel your child is at risk due to his/her age and habits, please call our office at (248) 589-2021 to schedule an appointment for your child. After a thorough exam, we can work with you to create a strategy for helping your child overcome finger, thumb or pacifier habits.
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on Aug 10th, 2011
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text:
I attended the Parks and Community Services Commission meeting tonight. I have not attended many City meetings in the last few years. I don't like to go out at night or drive after dark even to the City Hall on Camino Ramon, but I wanted to write my blog on Rene Matsumoto and her recent appointment to the Parks Commission.
You may recall that Rene Matsumoto ran for San Ramon City Council last year. I had a hard time deciding whom to endorse between Councilman Dave Hudson and Rene. Some of you may recall that I was Still on the Fence for several weeks before I finally endorsed Harry Sachs and Dave Hudson. Harry, as I predicted, lead in the voting. Rene lost to Dave Hudson by only 240 votes.
In my blog, Off the Fence, I advised Rene, ". . . to apply for one of the City's advisory committees and work her way up." Rene was considering applying for the slot on the Planning Commission vacated by Harry Sachs, but I recommended the Parks and Community Services Commission instead.
On January 4, 2014 Rene sent me the following email:
"Hi Roz,
Happy New Year!
Thank you for your interest in writing a follow up blog.
At this time, I did not apply for a seat on the Planning Commission. My hope is to apply for a seat on the Parks & Community Services Commission.
In the meantime, I will do my best to stay involved and/or learn more about the city in one aspect or another. Next week I will begin the Citizen's Police Academy. And, my plan is to turn in an application for the Government 101 session.
With regard to running for City Council again, this will depend on my family dynamics.
I was very impressed that Rene kept her word and continued to learn more about how the city is run. She applied for the Parks and Community Services Commission, and last month she was appointed to the Commission. Her name was on tonight's meeting Agenda to be sworn in with two returning Commissioners.
So I went to tonight's meeting to take a photo of Rene being sworn in and ? she wasn't there! She is on vacation and will be sworn in at the next Parks Commission meeting in August. So I took a photo of the two returning Commissioners, Dominique Yancey and Heidi Kenniston-Lee being sworn in:
and another one of the new Student Commissioner, Caroline Lee.
I stayed for the Commissioners to approve recommendations for appointments to the Arts Advisory Committee, Senior Advisory Committee, and Poet Laureate. Two years ago I was on the Arts Advisory Committee and interviewed applicants for Poet Laureate with Commissioners Heidi Kenniston-Lee and Carol Lopez.
We recommended Kathy Moore who was appointed. Moore served 22 months as Poet Laureate and reapplied this year. When Moore's appointment was approved by the City Council in August 2012, I spoke in Public Comment and recommended that past Poet Laureates be designated Poet Laureate Emeritus but not reappointed. This would keep the position more diversified.
However Moore's was the only application submitted by the deadline this year; so the Commissioners voted to recommend her through 2016. This recommendation will go to the City Council to approve.
Kathy Moore has been an excellent Poet Laureate. She should be reappointed to continue as our Poet Laureate. Here's the poem she wrote for the 4th of July celebration.
To be Free by Kathy Moore
City of San Ramon Poet Laureate
This morning I awoke to birdsong
A gentle breeze, cloudless bluesky day
Stretched out before me like an ocean
Vacation day,
All mine, to do as I please
I drop into a lounge chair
Pick up my book
War, imprisonment, starvation, cruelty
Greed, suffering, all the light we cannot see
People trapped in lives they did not choose
Fiction told in these pages I hold
The newspaper's filled with the same
Story after true story after true story
All around the world
But not here
Not where I live and work and love and breathe freely
Not where I wave my flag listening to patriotic cries of horn and drum
Not here
This day is a gift
This freedom that I have, you have, we have
To be cherished and revered and kept sacred
To give thanks for on the 4th of July, yes
And to remember tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next
To be free is the greatest gift of all


text:
Giving Everest the Bird
The arrival of high-altitude helicopters on Mount Everest and other Nepalese peaks has transformed search-and-rescue and saved lives. But the choppers have also added to the chaos at the top of the world—and introduced a deadly new brand of danger.
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EARLY ON NOVEMBER 7, 2010, Sabin Basnyat, 34, one of Nepal's most skilled helicopter pilots, lifted off in a Eurocopter AS350 B3 from the small airport in Lukla. Two climbers were stranded high on the north ridge of Ama Dablam, a 22,494-foot peak about 12 miles southeast of Mount Everest, and Basnyat had been dispatched to rescue them.
Surviving EverestTake a look at where things go wrong on Everest and the support systems in place when they do.
Technical Everest rescueA technical rescue on Everest in 2006
Khumbu IcefallCrossing a crevasse in the Khumbu Icefall
Everest helicopter rescueTransporting injured climbers from Everest Base Camp
Khumbu Icefall at nightAscending the Khumbu Icefall by headlamp
Denali rescueA rescue on Alaska's Denali, where ground teams are backed up by a helicopter
It was a good morning to fly—light winds, clear skies—and Basnyat and his mountain paramedic, Purna Awale, both employees of Kathmandu-based Fishtail Air, one of Nepal's largest private helicopter companies, rose toward the sawtooth skyline. The professional climbers, a German named David Gottler and his Japanese teammate, Kazuya Hiraide, had been attempting a new route on the mountain's steep north face, intending to cross the summit and make a quick descent of the more traditional, and easier, southwest ridge. But upon reaching the north ridge, at 19,000 feet, they discovered that it was studded with giant mushroom-shaped formations of snow and ice, blocking their progress. The climbers had brought minimal gear, and retreating back down the north face was impossible. Recently, Gottler had heard of Himalayan climbers being rescued by helicopters at extraordinary heights, and because cell phones now worked quite well throughout the Khumbu, the region surrounding Everest, he was able to call his expedition outfitter and arrange an airlift for the next morning.
By 9 A.M., Basnyat was guiding the B3 steadily toward the two men in their frozen bird's nest. Because the air at 19,000 feet is so thin, requiring deft piloting skills to maneuver a helicopter, Basnyat inched in slowly, the landing runners nearly touching the snow. At this altitude, he and Awale could carry only one passenger; the climbers had done schnick-schnack-schnuck, or rock-paper-scissors, and Gottler had won. Once Awale helped him aboard, the B3 swooped down to the nearby village of Chukhung, deposited the German, and then took off again to retrieve his partner.
Gottler could see the ridge from where he'd been dropped, and he filmed as the helicopter returned to fetch Hiraide. Basnyat approached as he had before, from the east, arcing slowly up toward the ridge until he was only a few feet from where Hiraide waited. The B3 was just above the climber's head when Hiraide heard a loud report and was suddenly showered with snow and ice.
Basnyat had clipped the ridge with the chopper's main rotor. In a flash, the blade disintegrated. Miraculously, Hiraide was unscathed, but he watched in horror as the machine shuddered and rocked to one side before plunging down the mountain. The chassis ricocheted off the massive rock wall several times, then came to rest nearly 5,000 feet below. By the time a second rescue team reached the scene later that day, they found Basnyat and Awale dead. Hiraide spent another night on the ridge, and Fishtail rescued him the next morning with another B3.
THE TRAGEDY STUNNED the Himalayan climbing community. Ever since the infamous 1996 Everest disaster, which left eight climbers dead in a single day, mountaineering accidents had prompted tough questions about risk and responsibility on the world's highest peaks. This time, however, the reaction was intensified by the fact that the deaths were caused by the very machine that is supposed to be saving lives. By most accounts, efforts to improve safety in the Himalayas, and on Everest in particular, have improved measurably over the past 15 years. On Everest, where several hundred climbers go for the summit each year, fixed lines are stitched nearly the length of the route; a seasonal emergency clinic has been established at Base Camp; training and equipment for Sherpas, Nepal's indigenous mountain workforce, have improved dramatically; and commercial operators, climbers, and guides now communicate—and cooperate—better than ever.
With the growing use of B3 helicopters—light, powerful aircraft designed to operate at up to 23,000 feet—both search-and-rescue and commercialization in the region are taking another large, if lurching, step forward. B3s have been a fixture for decades in other mountain destinations, especially the Alps, where they have saved hundreds of lives. But in Nepal, B3s had until recently seen limited use, including a 2005 stunt flight in which a French pilot landed a stripped-down model on Everest's summit. Over the past several years, Fishtail Air, in partnership with venerable Swiss helicopter company Air Zermatt, has deployed a small fleet of the machines to complete hundreds of successful evacuations in the country, including the 2010 rescue of a three-person Spanish team from 23,000 feet on Annapurna, the highest heli rescue in history, and the plucking of injured American climber Cleo Weidlich from 20,997 feet on Kanchenjunga last May.
But as the incident on Ama Dablam illustrates, the helicopters have also introduced a frightening new dimension of risk. Extreme altitude plus the unpredictable and sometimes violent weather of the Himalayas exacerbates even the smallest pilot errors. Nepal has a grim civil-aviation history: at least five helicopters have wrecked in the mountains since 1997 (none were B3s), and a 2009 report details 43 fixed-wing and helicopter accidents since 1990, resulting in 338 deaths. One recent analysis, by a group called Initiative for Aviation Safety, in Nepal, places a good deal of blame on the country's airline companies, which have displayed "rampant disregard for rules and regulations."
At Everest Base Camp, two helipads sit within a few hundred feet of expedition campsites, and the frequent landings can make climbers uneasy. "The danger isn't so much the propeller downwash," says veteran Everest guide Dave Hahn. "It's that, if there's a crash, we're all living in fabric structures inside the kill zone."
Others worry that the presence of the B3s alters expedition decision making and encourages climbers to push beyond their limits. Though Gottler is adamant that the ability to call in a helicopter didn't affect his and Hiraide's decisions on Ama Dablam, the expanding safety net is inherently changing mountaineering in the Himalayas. "The old-school thing was, you were self-sufficient," says alpinist Conrad Anker, 49, who has summited Everest twice. "If an accident did happen, you would have the wherewithal to extract yourself and your teammates."
There's evidence that helicopters in Nepal are increasingly being deployed in questionable circumstances. Because the aircraft are so expensive—a B3 runs $2 million, not including pilot training and maintenance—Fishtail and the three other helicopter companies in the country have to contract as many flights as possible to make a profit. This carries some distinct benefits for the region, such as government-subsidized sorties to ferry building materials for schools and hospitals and airlifting sick Nepalis from remote villages. Meanwhile, to attract private business, the helicopter companies offer kickbacks to outfitters that call in flights—as much as 10 percent on services that can run $2,500 an hour. The result is that climbing and trekking agencies are highly motivated to encourage any client with a headache or a hangnail to catch a lift out of the mountains, provided they're sufficiently insured or flush enough to pay out of pocket. One Everest veteran complained to me about the 2011 evacuation of a climber above the Khumbu Icefall even though he could still walk.
At the peak of the spring season, there are now often three or four daily flights from Everest Base Camp. (At 17,600 feet, it's within reach of many chopper models.) Flightseeing is also a growing business in the region. Reports have even surfaced of climbers completing their acclimatization outings, then helicoptering to Kathmandu to recuperate in comfortable hotels before flying back to Base Camp to begin their summit attempt.
"These kinds of things are definitely happening," concedes Eric Simonson, co-owner of International Mountain Guides, a longtime Everest outfitter. "But they're rare. And if helicopters on Everest mean I don't have to put 10 or 12 people in the icefall to carry someone down, that's a huge benefit."
Russell Brice, owner of Himalayan Experience, one of the largest outfitters on the mountain, echoes that sentiment. The B3s "can get in and out quickly, and they are proving to be reliable," says Brice, whose Sherpas and guides have participated in a number of rescue efforts in recent years. "They're going to be more and more prevalent."
With helicopters becoming a fixture in the Himalayas, the question becomes: What will this mean for climbing and trekking among the greatest mountains on earth?
"It's good that helicopters are here," says Luanne Freer, a physician from Bozeman, Montana, who founded and runs Everest ER, an independent medical clinic at Base Camp. "But right now it's a free-for-all."
MOUNTAIN RESCUES in the Himalayas have always been ad hoc affairs. Despite improvements in technology and communication, there is still no 911 in Nepal, no professional search-and-rescue team, no government agency standing by to help. Climbers and trekkers rely on outfitters, teammates, and the kindness of strangers when trouble strikes. Until recently, helicopters were a last resort, used most famously in the 1996 evacuation of Beck Weathers and Makalu Gau from a then record 19,800 feet on Everest.
It was a climber in similarly desperate circumstances who would change things. In 2005, the storied Slovenian alpinist Tomaz Humar found himself pinned down by an avalanche at 19,680 feet on the Rupal Face, a daunting slab of rock and ice on Pakistan's 26,660-foot Nanga Parbat. By then, Humar was a national hero, and his predicament became an international incident, eventually prompting the Slovenian embassy to contact Air Zermatt, which had been conducting rescue and transport missions in the Alps since 1968. The company was running a heli-skiing operation in the Himalayas and dispatched its best high-altitude pilot, Gerold Biner, to Nanga Parbat. But by the time he arrived, the Pakistani military had already plucked Humar off the wall, using a French chopper called a Lama. The mission nearly killed everyone involved: Humar was still anchored to the rock when the Lama attempted to fly away.
Four years later, in November 2009, Humar was climbing solo on 23,711-foot Langtang Lirung, in Nepal, when he fell and broke his leg. Again the embassy contacted Air Zermatt, but before the Swiss could respond, Humar died. The incident spurred Air Zermatt to invite the owners and pilots from Fishtail Air, whose three B3s were then the only ones owned by a Nepalese company, to Switzerland to teach them short-haul (sometimes called long-line) rescues—an operation that involves delivering a rescuer to a site via a cable attached to the bottom of the aircraft. The following summer, in 2010, Biner and several Air Zermatt pilots traveled to Nepal to conduct training missions in the Himalayas. The first few months of the project, paid for by Zermatt, went well; the Nepalis were quick learners, though they had yet to conduct a short-haul rescue at altitude on their own. Then came the disaster on Ama Dablam.
"This mission came at the wrong moment," says Biner. "Sabin and Purna had lined out the short haul, but we asked them not to use it because they didn't have the proper communication equipment yet. So they tried to carry out the rescue the conventional way, by doing a partial hover very close to the cliff."
The accident nearly brought an abrupt halt to high-altitude heli training in Nepal. Fishtail had lost its top pilot, a skilled paramedic, and a very expensive aircraft. "We thought it was the end of the project," says Biner. Instead, Fishtail stuck with the program soon after welcoming back the services of a volunteer who'd left in the wake of the tragedy: Simone Moro, a celebrated Italian alpinist and certified mountain pilot who'd recently made the first winter ascent of Pakistan's 26,360-foot Gasherbrum II. "The Nepali pilots are good, but I have more experience in the mountains," says Moro, who has flown 1,000 hours in the past two and a half years. "I'm not scared by the vertical perspective."
Air Zermatt also returned to Nepal last spring, this time to initiate a training program, open to any qualified Nepali pilots, that—if the company can find sponsors—will last until 2016.
EVEN A STUD ITALIAN piloting the best helicopter can't save everyone—especially in the Himalayas. When conditions don't allow for airlifts, you need ground forces. Thus, for the past few years, Luanne Freer, from Everest ER, and David Weber, a U.S. National Park Service climbing ranger on Denali, have been collaborating to create a team of trained Sherpa rangers on Everest.
"Helis are great, but they aren't a silver bullet," says Weber. "You need people on the ground to stabilize patients and get them to a landing zone when conditions aren't ideal."
Weber believes a model like the one used on Denali—a stand-by helicopter supported by rangers rotating between high camps—is more realistic on Everest than, say, the European system, in which extremely skilled pilots regularly pluck injured climbers, skiers, and hikers from Alpine peaks. Since 2009, Weber has been bringing Sherpas to Alaska in the summer to teach them the Denali approach. This year he has four Sherpas with technical rescue skills ready to go on Everest. That's a big caveat where Everest is concerned. Most outfitters are reluctant to pay for backup, given that guides and Sherpas have pulled off plenty of heroic rescues over the years. "It's a good idea," says Brice about the Everest rangers. "But it's pie in the sky. We've done a pretty good job managing rescues on our own."
Still, as Weber points out, the current we've-got-each-other's-backs approach places paying clients at risk. It can also add large costs to expedition teams in the form of bottled oxygen and manpower (Sherpas who help often expect to be paid), and some scenarios demand expertise that many guides don't have. Freer says she's still haunted by a few unsuccessful rescue attempts, particularly one from 2005, when a Sherpa named Karma came down with appendicitis while at Camp IV. By the time he'd descended to Camp II, he couldn't walk.
Volunteers "improvised a stretcher and started down," she wrote in an e-mail. "It took days to get him through the icefall. It was agonizing how slowly they went. They were within sight of Base Camp when we got the final call on the radio: no pulse, no respiration. A 23-year-old Sherpa with his life in front of him—dead from appendicitis because they couldn't get him down to us in time." Of the 19 deaths on Everest's south side since the clinic opened, Freer believes that at least a quarter of them could have been prevented, especially if a ground team had been available when a helicopter evacuation wasn't feasible.
"We need trained professionals here, and we need a system that supports them," says Freer, who faced considerable skepticism when she started Everest ER in 2003. Today, Western climbers are asked to contribute a $75 fee to support the clinic, which has become a hub of activity on the mountain. "I've always seen it as a collaborative effort, with involvement from the outfitters, the climbers, and the Nepalese government."
WHILE THAT KIND of cohesion may be years off, the aerial invasion is well under way. With 25 helicopters now operating in Nepal, the thwapping of rotors is becoming one of the landscape's most familiar characteristics. As the three companies that vie with Fishtail for lucrative rescue flights procure their own B3s, the stage will be set for a high-stakes competition to dominate the market, increasing the chances of another deadly accident.
Fortunately, several smart proposals to control the skies are up for discussion, including shifting all nonemergency helicopter flights downvalley from Everest Base Camp, to a dedicated heliport in Gorek Shep or Lobuche. Another notion gathering support is to require flightseeing pilots to maintain minimum altitudes, as they do in U.S. national parks, to control noise.
Meanwhile, the modernization of mountain rescue in the country is marching forward. Weber says he has private funding in place to debut the Sherpa rangers this season, though it's unclear how they'll coordinate with helicopter evacuations. Gerold Biner has been urging Nepal's Ministry of Aviation to establish clear protocols for high-altitude rescue missions, including a checklist that would assess risk factors and, ideally, prevent tragedies like the one on Ama Dablam.
When I asked David Gottler, the German climber who was rescued in 2010, how he felt in light of the accident, he said that he still believes helicopters are a good thing for the region. Still, it comes at a cost, including more accidents until a better management system can be sorted out. The Everest region is flying into the future, but as veterans of the diverse international community who arrive there each spring will tell you, it's still a frontier where self-regulation governs the land. Turbulence should be expected.