Dogs Playing Poker
Week of September 20, 2009 - September 26, 2009
The New Hard Times
The New York Times offers some worthwhile videos (mostly reader submitted) by folk that lived through the Great Depression.
92 yo Peter Holden tells how blacks and whites had to help each other or starve to death.
John Davis remembers working in the garden, picking cotton and his mother feeding the endless line of hobos.
93 yo Ben O'Brien remembers men in the boxcars hunting for work and working as a janitor under Roosevelt's NYA.
78 yo Robert Tobine advises you to save all you can. Don't use credit.
96 yo Prof Ernest Kurnow remembers students not talking about the bad economy until 1933, when they couldn't ignore it.
88 yo Dr Alvin Warnick came home to find his mother in tears over bank losses. They struggled for four years to pay taxes.
84 yo Dr Michael Homa remembers his Dad selling fruits and vegetables. He thinks this generation is dependent and will be angry.
95 yo Mary Boyce lost her father three years before the depression. They lived off the pension.
81 yo Viola Di Palo, her son and granddaughter put their efforts into the family business.
99 yo Francis Stroup realized there was a depression when his salary was cut from $75 to $30/month.
Gladys Shingobe Ray was raised in a traditional Ojibwe family and never felt deprived.
76 yo Patricia Addis remembers eating dandelions for supper. Her 25 yo granddaughter has applied to 283 jobs, but can't find work.
Descendants show sketches and read excerpts of letters between Jackson Pollock and his brothers.
82 yo June Reistroffer Hamer gets teary-eyed answering questions from her grandson. "Streetcar was 7 cents ... so you walked."
83 yo Norman and 85 yo Josephine Brown remember food lines, radio, oil lamps and coal stoves.
86 yo Patricia Cleere recalls her father supporting all his siblings during the depression, the Wizard of Oz and people living under bridges.
They are still accepting videos from readers.
My Dad has told us about his parents sending him to their friend Johnny's restaurant when they had no food.
I got a bit teary-eyed myself today. I was driving after a meeting, and there's always some beggar man on the corner of Northern Parkway and Falls Road. Today there was a thin, sad-eyed woman with a sign, "mom has 2 kids - no job - please help."
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Where Do Bikes Fit In?
The video above is standard fare for safe and legal cycling. Note the narrator's advice to maintain Lane Control by riding in the center of a marked lane. In 1978 I was riding my bike home from work in the right lane of University Boulevard. My route was mostly bike paths and small back roads like Forest Glen, but I had no choice but to take Colesville and University, major streets with center islands and two lanes in each direction, for a few blocks to get to my neighborhood.
An irate, business-clad fellow in a full-size pickup truck pulled next to me, scowling and sputtering. Finally he choked out, "Use The Sidewalk!" and sped off. Although there were some designated, paved bike paths in my area, I hadn't ridden sidewalks since I was a kid.
In my childhood neighborhood, we exited and entered the sidewalks at driveway cuts and mostly stayed on our own block. Many of us rode Sting Ray or Wheelie bikes with banana seats and 20" wheels. These bikes were popular because it was easy to pull wheelies. At that time few sidewalks had sloped curb cuts at the corners. To cross a road from the sidewalk, we launched our bikes off the curb at one end, then yanked the front wheel up by the handlebars to climb the next curb and jumped up off the pedals to lift the back wheels. We were cool.
That maneuver was more difficult on English Racers, and as I grew older, I learned that cyclists are supposed to ride to the far right of the road. Automobile traffic leaves a messy collection of gravel, broken glass and litter in the shoulder, so the best place to ride is just on or to the left of the rightmost painted line.
But riding the line has gotten more risky. I used to deal with the occasional thrown bottle or shout as a pair of jerks drove by, but now there are SUVs and drivers who talk and text on their cell phones to worry about.
Embedding is disabled but these videos show a more realistic situation for cyclists on the road:
and the Third one isn't disabled:
A big problem is the driver who forgets you exist once they've pulled their head ahead of your head. They immediately return to the center of the right lane, which forces the cyclist into the shoulder, guardrail, etc. or they make a right turn, which knocks the cyclist down. All of that has happened to me. It even happens when I run.
A bigger problem is the driver that doesn't notice you at all, or that doesn't want you on the road at all, like that good old boy on University, or this maniac. Every day I see more bike riders leaving the road to use the sidewalk. Curb cuts were intended for wheelchairs and older pedestrians, but make riding sidewalks much easier for cyclists. But there are sidewalks that are virtually deserted, and there are sidewalks that are choked with pedestrians. I eventually came to use some mostly deserted sidewalks in my commuting, but riding among walkers simply transfers the risk to the pedestrians.
As I've learned over the last few years, people walk just as inconsiderately as they drive or bike. A group of people will move apart to fill the entire width of a sidewalk. People will burst out of shop doors without looking either way. People will stop short to pay full attention to their cell phone. Mothers with strollers are completely unpredictable. You can't ride a bike around them.
So there's more of a push for dedicated bike lanes. Still there was a time when autos, cyclists and pedestrians managed to share the road.
Poisoning Our Extremities
An excerpt from Conquest of the Useless; Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog.
Camisea, 11 June, 1981: (Peru, at the headwaters of the Amazon rainforest)
"It was already dark when I was called to the medic's station in the big camp. Up on the plateau between the two rivers, woodsmen had been felling trees, barefoot as usual, and one of them had been bitten by a snake. Snakes had never been seen anywhere near chain saws, because the noise and the exhaust fumes drive the snakes deep into the jungle, but this man had suddenly been bitten twice in the foot. He had dropped his chain saw and just caught a glimpse of the snake before it disappeared into the underbrush; it was a chuchupe. Usually this snake's bite causes cardiac arrest and stops breathing in less than a minute, and cases in which a person has survived a bite longer than seven or eight minutes without treatment are almost unknown. Our camp with the doctor and the antivenom serum was twenty minutes away. The man, so I was told by someone who had been working next to him, had stood motionless for a few seconds, thinking hard. Then he had picked up the chain saw, which had stalled when it hit the ground, pulled the cord to start it, the way you pull an outboard motor, and had sawn off his foot above the ankle. I saw the man - his whole body was gray. He was alive, perfectly collected, and very calm. Before they took him to the doctor, the others had tied off his leg in three places with lianas: below his crotch, below his knee, and above the stump, and had twisted the lianas with sticks to make a tight tourniquet. They had stuck a kind of moss on the stump to stop the bleeding. I had a plane readied to fly him out to Lima the next day."
The blogger that posted this excerpt admired the courage of the woodcutter. I admire his decision-making prowess. Without his foot, his life would be harder. He wouldn't be able to walk, run or work as before. But he didn't spend time on anger, denial, etc. He just took the only action that might save his life.
I wish our society could deal with our problems that effectively, but we seem to be doing the opposite. We're stuck in anger and denial while we poison ourselves.
Some twenty-eight years later, I read that Hunt Oil - a Dallas-based company with close ties to the Bush administration, has been despoiling Camisea for natural gas:
Peru's Camisea Gas Project is arguably the most damaging project in the Amazon Basin at the time of writing. Located in the remote Lower Urubamba Basin in the south-eastern Peruvian Amazon, the $1.6 billion project includes two pipelines to the Peruvian coast, cutting through an Amazon biodiversity hotspot described by scientists as "the last place on earth" to drill for fossil fuels.
Nearly 75 percent of gas extraction operations for "Block 88", as the original Camisea concession is known, are located inside a state reserve for indigenous peoples living in isolation. In violation of both stated company policy and international laws such as ILO Convention 169 and the American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, employees of Veritas, a contractor working for consortia member Pluspetrol have made contact with these communities, pressuring them to abandon their ancestral lands. Pluspetrol also facilitated helicopter transport of missionaries to remote areas to contact isolated indigenous groups.
Additionally, another 22 indigenous communities living in intermittent contact with outsiders, as well as dozens of farming communities have suffered a range of direct and "indirect" impacts, from the loss of local fish and game populations on which they depend for their subsistence to landslides, infectious diseases and STD outbreaks. A May 2004 report, published by the Peruvian health ministry's General Office of Epidemiology confirmed that that incidences of infectious diseases had increased in the reserve among one isolated group, the Nanti, to such an alarming extent that only one in four now reaches adolescence. These serious environmental and social impacts now affecting the entire local population were predicted by environmental and human rights campaigners.
In the first 18 months after it became operational in August 2004, the Camisea pipeline, which runs from the Amazon, over the Andes, to the Pacific Coast, has ruptured four times, with at least three major spills. This appalling record is highly unusual for such a pipeline and comes despite repeated assurances from the downstream consortium and the Inter-American Development Bank that no such problems would occur. According to a February 2006 independent report by non-profit engineering consultancy E-Tech International, the pipeline was constructed by unqualified and untrained welders using corroded piping and rushing to avoid onerous late completion fees that would have totalled $90 million.
The project also has upset many in Peru given the gas processing facility on the Peruvian coast was built within the buffer zone of the Paracas Marine Reserve, an internationally important wetland area recognised by the RAMSAR convention and Peru's only marine reserve. Despite repeated appeals by Peruvian civil society, the consortium refused to choose an alternative site.
Pluspetrol and Techint have appalling environmental track records. In 2000, a Pluspetrol oil spill devastated one of Peru's largest protected areas, the Pacaya-Samiria Reserve, and seriously affected the health of the Cocamas-Cocamillas people who suffered severe diarrhea, skin diseases and malnutrition after their food and water supplies were decimated by toxic pollution. In the northern Peruvian Amazon, Pluspetrol continues to pump oil wastes into local rivers causing stomach ailments, cancer and respiratory diseases among Achuar and Quichua communities.
In early 2002, a huge explosion --the second in less than a year--- along an Argentinean gas pipeline operated by Techint, the contractor for the Camisea pipeline, again sent flames leaping through the Yungas forest, an area of critical conservation status, home to jaguars and other rare species. In Ecuador, Techint constructed the OCP pipeline and was embroiled in controversy, facing lawsuits, protests, and fines for the destruction of protected areas and the habitat of rare endangered species.
But that could never happen in the US, could it?
Two Green Blogs
I found two good blogs today - one through a Sharon Astyk link and then from that link to the other.
Stony Run Farm: Life on One Acre The unlimited accumulation of wealth
*Guest post by Plato (428-438 BCE approx., The Republic, Book II, Jowett tr.) *
[Socrates] .... let us then consider, first of all, what will be their way of life, now that we have thus established them. Will they not produce corn, and wine, and clothes, and shoes, and build houses for themselves? And when they are housed, they will work, in summer, commonly, stripped and barefoot, but in winter substantially clothed and shod. They will feed on barley-meal and flour of wheat, baking and kneading them, making noble cakes and loaves; these they will serve up on a mat of reeds or on clean leaves, themselves reclining the while upon beds strewn with yew or myrtle. And they and their children will feast, drinking of the wine which they have made, wearing garlands on their heads, and hymning the praises of the gods, in happy converse with one another. And they will take care that their families do not exceed their means ....
[Glaucon] Yes, Socrates, he said, and if you were providing for a city of pigs, how else would you feed the beasts?
But what would you have, Glaucon? I replied.
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