Friday, January 14, 2011
Emergency Comtesse Palate Cleanser
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Water:Australia by Sally E.
Salsta's Tomatoes
(Image © Sally E.)
As I write this blog post, I still have the scent of complete fertiliser on my hands from the gardening I was at a half an hour ago. Tonight it was just transplanting some capsicums/red bell peppers to a sunnier location to get them to grow a bit better than they have been so far.
I started the vegetable garden this year just with the idea that it might please my mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease, to see them grow. When I brought the first seedlings home, and again when I got some tomatoes going from seed (from particularly tasty tomatoes from the supermarket), I was rewarded with the sort of whole face grin normally seen in toddlers when they learn a new skill.
Now however, as well as providing fresh, tasty, seasonal produce fresh from the garden, it seems like these vegetables will give me a strong economic benefit as well. They’ll give many kilograms of food for the cost of a few seedlings, a handful of fertiliser, some sunshine and a little water.
With floods of up to 22 metres across an area of Queensland as big as France and Germany combined, I have no doubt that the price of vegetables in our oligopolistic Australian supermarkets will rise in a meteoric fashion. When there was a cyclone that wiped out the Queensland banana crop a few years ago, they put the price of all fruit up and bananas became a status symbol. There was no banana cake on the Australian menu for a couple of years and I suspect it’s about to go off the menu yet again. Fortunately I have a couple in the freezer. Although, earlier I read that that is one crop that may not go up significantly in cost this year.
Flooding in Australia
(Image Credit: Shairon Paterson for the Salvation Army IHQ courtesy of Pipeline)
Australia also has floods in NSW at present, with Victoria and Tasmania posting flood warnings as this post is published. We’ve had floods in food producing areas of Victoria twice in recent months. After 13 years of drought it’s somewhat of a relief, though the best crops in 15 years are now being badly damaged and for farmers who have no subsidies that’s a serious economic issue for them, as well as for the economy as a whole.
At this farm at Wycheproof, in northern Victoria, the drought seemed to break last year, but the wheat crop failed for want of follow-up rain
(Attribution unknown, found here)
It’s been so dry in Victoria (perhaps you remember last year’s bushfires) that even these floods are not drought breaking. After so much rain there’s still barely more than 50% of water in our dams and the population of Melbourne is growing rapidly, largely by political policy. After the 26% or capacity of a year or so ago, 53.8% sounds like a lot to us now but it’s still not a lot in storage in a state where the rainfall we used to be able to rely on has mainly shifted south into Bass Straight in line with climate change forecasting and the storages are relatively small as they were built with that reliability in mind. Melbournians currently use only 142 litres of water per person per day. To people in other developed nations that must seem miniscule but compared with undeveloped nations it’s luxurious. We still flush our toilets with potable water after all.
It’s all very reminiscent of a poem called My Country written by Dorothea Mackellar more than a century ago, which somehow moves me every time I read it:
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
Australia can seem a harsh land but it’s vibrant in people and land, one of Oprahs’ recent guests here reported to have said that visiting here is like stepping from black and white into colour. With all of what seems to be a packet of harsh weather being delivered at present, the people in Queensland are still exceptionally lucky when compared with the Pakistani flood victims of last year in the following ways.
· ❧ Convoys of food are being trucked in and flown by helicopter. There’s no chance that they’ll be stopped because they will be attacked on delivery.
· ❧ Many people are able to stay with relatives, who are wealthy enough to keep them safe until the floods recede and their homes are again safe.
· ❧ Those who cannot stay with relatives are being housed in solid communal shelters and the red cross is doing what they do in times of crisis, cooking for the masses as required, so there’s no chance of them going hungry.
· ❧ Though wet, the weather is comparatively mild. There is no harsh winter closing in.
· ❧ Though with sewerage plants flooded, there is a chance of water borne disease and the floodwaters will breed mosquitoes so Dengue Fever could break out, the population is well educated and most can swim, so public education is keeping most people as safe as can be barring acts is foolishness such as the teenagers who floated 15 km downstream on air-mattresses.
· Our military has been deployed to help and with only a few tens of thousands needing it, rather than 20 million, everyone who need help will get it.
· Australia is already making hardship payments available to people displaced by the floods.
To return to my original point, I will get very good value now for the water used in the garden this year. However it is a precious resource that must be respected, protected and appreciated for what it’s worth.
Water is eternal. The water on Earth was created long before the Earth itself. We cannot create more of it and when nature decides to play us with it there’s not a lot we can do but clean up afterwards. It’s been suggested that the next wars will be fought over water and given the difficulties managing it between the states in Australia, the US, the further difficulties when it’s an international matter, such as with the Mekong or Nile rivers and the level of importance of water in the volatile Middle East, it’s an easy thing to imagine.
I believe that we need to live within our most limiting means. In the case of Victoria that involves being still more water efficient than we are now and given the further pressures on water worldwide no doubt that’ll become a more widespread need, probably more quickly than people expect. Benjamin Franklin once said “When the well is dry, we learn the worth of water.”
Laanecorie Reservoir, Victoria Australia
Thank you Sally for sharing your thoughts...
Readers can contribute to the Queensland State Flood Fund at:
To help those across Australia, since more states are currently being affected, you can contribute to the Australian Red Cross at:
Flooding in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
(Image credit: Australia Red Cross)
Man rescuing a kangaroo, Ipswich, near Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
(Image credit: BBC News Service)
© Bright Nepenthe, 2011
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
The Revisionist's Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Mark Twain Controversy | ||||
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Tuesday, January 11, 2011
The Blame Game
Attribution Unknown
The Photoshop Miracle and Palate Cleanser #140
Morning Mist
which used to look like this, before PS5:
Monday, January 10, 2011
Snow White Loses Appeal to Retain Road to Independence Funds
Snow White by Liliane Grenier
Mental Illness of an Adult Child: Empathy for the Loughners
When my husband was recounting what he'd been listening to on the news, about how students and teachers in some of Loughner's classes at Pima CC were afraid of him, he mused for a moment about what on earth Loughner's parents, with whom Jared evidently still lived, could have been thinking letting him get this way, this horribly mentally ill. I turned to him and gave him a gaping stare.
"Really?" I asked.
The prospect of a 22 year old, adult child, in the midst of a mental health crisis or ongoing disorder is, let me tell you, daunting. Our laws and our healthcare practices in this country are stacked against successful treatment, true stabilization of such a child. Parents are left struggling to cope, often with little access to their adult child's healthcare professionals, little participation in their care, and even when that child has a complete and frightening psychotic break, little recourse. Every step of the way is a battle against HIPAA, against your insurance (if you are lucky enough to have it) and with doctors who are just tired of fighting between those extremes, and fighting combative patients, to boot.
From the difficulty of getting mental health crisis care for your adult child, to the wholly inadequate level of intervention offered in most hospitals, all I can say is, you're lucky if your child is obsessed with the Beatles instead of obsessed with guns and congresswomen.
My heart goes out the families of those killed and wounded by this young man. But it also goes out to the Loughners. I'm sure that the end of their long dark tunnel of mental illness has turned out to be a cavern so black and deep that no descriptor for their despair is quite poignant enough.
Reaping Venom Sowed, The Power of Hate Rhetoric
Today* I was walking with Jane at the Beaux Arts festival, discussing the horrific shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, among others, in that bastion of tolerance, Arizona. I had commented to both Jane, and to my husband, that I'd seen an opinion piece last night that said pages were disappearing from Sarah Palin's webpage of liberals in the crosshairs/gunsights or from the liberal Daily Kos, where a diarist recently said "Gabrielle Gifford is listed as 'dead to me' for having voted against former House Leader Nancy Pelosi in a vote". (You should note that Kos is pretty upset about how writer Matt Bai characterized this deletion.) My husband and Jane seem to think that what happened in Arizona is somehow uniquely American because of easy access to firearms. (Gail Collins is with them.) I really don't see it as such at all. Coming from a position of having long followed the politics of the Latin America, the Middle and Far East, I see assassinations of leaders, judges and others in position of authority as sadly commonplace in the world at large. I think that they just don't want to think that we're like every place else. I didn't want think that the US was quite as similar to India, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan or perhaps closer to home, Colombia and Mexico, as it's turning out to be, either. Judge John Roll had been the recipient of multiple threats for his ruling which allowed a multimillion dollar lawsuit, filed by a group of Mexicans workers against an Arizona rancher, to move forward. Roll received death threats, against himself and his wife, for that ruling and was protected for many months by US Marshalls. Evidently some are saying good riddance that this Bush appointee federal judge is gone. Gabe Zimmerman, a Giffords aide, was clearly working with a she-devil. But, I am still not quite sure what 9 year old Christina Green had done that was so objectionable. Likewise, retirees Phyllis Schneck, age 79, Dorwan Stoddard, age 76, and Dorothy Murray, age 76. Perhaps they were all guilty of having chosen the wrong supermarket that day.
We've gone through out periods of violent intolerance in our history here in the US. Those with short memories, and there appear to be quite a few people with just that, need only think back to the 1960's. Matt Bai asked in yesterday's NY Times if this was the end or the beginning of a era. I don't really think it's either, since we've seen increasingly hateful rhetoric in politics for some time now and based on the backlash against the backlash that's currently going on in the media, the end is not in sight. What I do think, is that maybe just maybe, some people will note that if you sow hatred, it may not just thrive but it may come back to make you look hateful, and, no matter what some people say or try to spin, culpable. Why else would Sarah Palin be so quick to alter her website? Sure, Jared Loughner pulled the trigger of that Glock. Sure, he is doubtless mentally ill. But politicians and media on both sides of the aisle have been loading their hate guns and I really don't see why anyone would be surprised if someone picks them up and uses them. And, lest my mostly liberal readership start finger pointing at conservatives, while the number of conservatives involved far out numbers the liberals, I can think of more than a few liberals who have said heinous things, as well. Remember Guy Cimbalo, who wrote in a 2009 Playboy Magazine online article (now, amazingly removed), a list of ten conservative women who should be raped (I think he used the charming term hate-fucked)?
Looking around though, I think it is astonishing that so many people think this is a uniquely American problem. Anyone that does needs to have intensive sessions with Fareed Zakaria or something, where they look at the realities not just of the post-American world, but of politics by elimination, a form of tried and true politics that is older than recorded history. Maybe we wanted to think that we were so splendidly different from the rest of the world, still, in spite of so much evidence to the contrary. But we aren't. People of unbalanced principles will kill Punjabi governors for thinking that executing Christians for blasphemy is stupid, ignorant and wrong. And they'll kill or try to kill a congresswoman for not satisfactorily answering cryptic questions or because said same congresswoman thought that the laws against illegal aliens in her state were wrong.
Actually, strike that. We could be different, as Krugman points out. But I guess that would take the effort of debating with political opponents on the basis of their ideas instead of by proffering threats and inciting hatred and divisiveness and continually deflecting and placing blame. And it would take leadership in both parties that, instead of looking at everything as an opportunity for backlash against the other party, makes a commitment to change their rhetoric to something both less potent and more meaningful than hate. The ability to express hatred for an idea, versus the person representing that idea, is getting lost in this country. We need to recover it unless we want to be no different from the violent political maelstroms that exist around the world. Do we really want to be like the crucible that is Pakistan? Do we want to live with a political system in which opposition leaders are targeted as they are in say, Colombia?
If we are indeed so special, so different, such leaders of the force of right, not just might, can we handle our politics differently than they do in Pakistan or Colombia? With our growing corruption of government and renewed violence against leaders, let's hope that George Clooney and a few others don't have to reserve a little air time for the USA. Let's hope we can control the climate of hate, so we don't slip farther and farther down the path of so much political history.
Because our house is on fire, people. Instead of finger-pointing about who was playing with the flamethrower and whether there was accelerant involved, maybe just maybe we ought to do the smart thing. Put it out and rebuild.
*In true form, whilst writing this article, my husband called me to tell me that he'd flipped off his bike, was injured and I rushed off to pick him up. Five hours, four x-rays and some plastic surgery on his lip later, I returned home too tired to finish writing and with the renewed realization that the hardest pain to endure is that suffered by your loved ones. Third time in only two months for that one...
Looking around though, I think it is astonishing that so many people think this is a uniquely American problem. Anyone that does needs to have intensive sessions with Fareed Zakaria or something, where they look at the realities not just of the post-American world, but of politics by elimination, a form of tried and true politics that is older than recorded history. Maybe we wanted to think that we were so splendidly different from the rest of the world, still, in spite of so much evidence to the contrary. But we aren't. People of unbalanced principles will kill Punjabi governors for thinking that executing Christians for blasphemy is stupid, ignorant and wrong. And they'll kill or try to kill a congresswoman for not satisfactorily answering cryptic questions or because said same congresswoman thought that the laws against illegal aliens in her state were wrong.
Actually, strike that. We could be different, as Krugman points out. But I guess that would take the effort of debating with political opponents on the basis of their ideas instead of by proffering threats and inciting hatred and divisiveness and continually deflecting and placing blame. And it would take leadership in both parties that, instead of looking at everything as an opportunity for backlash against the other party, makes a commitment to change their rhetoric to something both less potent and more meaningful than hate. The ability to express hatred for an idea, versus the person representing that idea, is getting lost in this country. We need to recover it unless we want to be no different from the violent political maelstroms that exist around the world. Do we really want to be like the crucible that is Pakistan? Do we want to live with a political system in which opposition leaders are targeted as they are in say, Colombia?
If we are indeed so special, so different, such leaders of the force of right, not just might, can we handle our politics differently than they do in Pakistan or Colombia? With our growing corruption of government and renewed violence against leaders, let's hope that George Clooney and a few others don't have to reserve a little air time for the USA. Let's hope we can control the climate of hate, so we don't slip farther and farther down the path of so much political history.
Because our house is on fire, people. Instead of finger-pointing about who was playing with the flamethrower and whether there was accelerant involved, maybe just maybe we ought to do the smart thing. Put it out and rebuild.
*In true form, whilst writing this article, my husband called me to tell me that he'd flipped off his bike, was injured and I rushed off to pick him up. Five hours, four x-rays and some plastic surgery on his lip later, I returned home too tired to finish writing and with the renewed realization that the hardest pain to endure is that suffered by your loved ones. Third time in only two months for that one...
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