Clearly we have learned a few things.
1. When invading, whether militarily or on rescue missions, we need Port capacity. Assume in all operations that a Port will be needed. Assume that it has been destroyed, and assume that there are no other ports that will suffice to your needs of the mission. We need landing craft that can offload supplies and heavy equipment. We need heavy equipment that can be offloaded into a destroyed port and rebuild a working port, and we need to be able to deliver this to the site within ten (10) days from starting orders. Assume, for planning purposes, that there is no warning and no ramp-i[ to mission time. Something happens... and you need a port rebuilt suitable to handle three (3) freighters a day off loading... and further assume that the freighters were never designed to deal with a broken or inoperable Port.
2. Catastrophe Personnel Management: Survivors and decedents all need a few things: A name, a photograph of each hand and each foot, suitable for comparison with archival records. As an aside, imagine distribution of a spray to enable any standard web-cam or cellphone camera to gather enhanced-resolution images suitable for archive.
Also, a central collection authority for various automated and paper systems creating documentation of individual record-of-identity. This central collection authority needs to be on an Open Standard. All various systems need to be able to intercommunicate.
3. Extremely rapid implementation and DEPLOYMENT of distribution systems capable of reaching millions of persons is a primary concern. Water must be deployed at levels to maintain basic sustenance hydration within no more than three (3) days. Protein, carbohydrates, and vitamins must be deployed no later than seven (7) days. Carbohydrates should be distributed within five (5) days, protein within seven (7) days, vitamins in mid-term daily supplement packs at the ten (10) day term.
4. Medical personnel are of limited use unless supplied with modern medical technology. In Haiti 2010, the lead to follow is that of the Israelis. Within 60 hours they had deployed a hospital including modern imaging-systems, and 200 staff including a variety of surgeons, technicians, nurses, and logistical staff. This should become a world standard.
5. Short-to-mid-term housing for thousands or millions of displace or invading personnel are essential. Unexpected disasters or military maneuvers on an impromptu basis can occur at any time. In Haiti, excellent luck meant that a disaster of unparalleled proportions occurred during the dry season of an island notoriously susceptible to hurricanes. Impromptu shelters suitable to a subtropical winter (dry season) are easily assembled even from scrap cloth and salvage timber or light piping. Yet such shelter will be completely inadequate to a tropical summer (rainy season) or tropical fall (hurricane season).
6. Sanitation is a major concern even among healthy populations. Remember: in a dry environment, for each liter of water consumed by a human, approximately 4 liters are needed for personal hygeine and approximately 10 liters are needed to flush away excretory wastes. Deliberate concentration of human wastes can reduce requirements of water for sanitation, but only if the deliberate concentration of human wastes is intentional and well-designed.
More to come as more lessons are learned.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Turkey Branch Clean Up Day
As previously, mentioned, I spent Martin Luther King Jr Day helping clean trash out of Turkey Branch, a tributary of Rock Creek. It's part of the stream which joins the Watery Branch and then runs through Matthew Henson State Park to cross under Veirs Mill Road and then it joins Rock Creek.
And now, you can see photographic evidence!
You can read more about this at the blog of the Friends of Rock Creek's Environment.
And now, you can see photographic evidence!
You can read more about this at the blog of the Friends of Rock Creek's Environment.
Monday, January 18, 2010
More on Haiti 100118
First, a brief break from the doom, gloom, and misery in Haiti.
A late-arriving notice gave me just enough time to make it down to the Martin Luther King Day "stream walk" and join with about 10 adults and about twice as many kids to clean up trash and haul off junk.
We were working on the Turkey Branch of Rock Creek from the point where it emerges from underground across from the McDonalds in the Aspen Hill Shopping Center, down to where the stream comes close to the intersection of Grenoble Drive and Turkey Branch Parkway and where the Parkway is joined by the Matthew Henson State Park. Altogether, we were able to fully load my pickup a bit more than twice with refuse ranging from paper trash through bottles and cans and even including a TV tube and a defunct lawnmower.
Whether or not a good time was had by all, some years' worth of trash were removed. The event was organized by the Friends of Rock Creek's Environment. They have a very informative blog that makes good reading.
First off, I need to point out that although famed televangelist Pat Robertson's claim that ultimately the cause of Haiti's terribly tragic history is that "they made a pact with the devil" isn't rigorously true.
However, leaving out all questions of religion and theology, some of the initial rebellions were organized by a man who is very famous in Haitian lore, and as well known in the annals of the history of Haiti as known by any reputable historian.
Revolutions are never "pretty" and neither are slave rebellions. Haiti's was particularly nasty as it was not merely class warfare but race warfare and the cruelty and malice seen from all factions was epic is both scale and scope.
Yet it was as nothing compared to the scale and scope of the tragedy that continues to unfold on the island of Hispaniola.
The western part of Hispaniola lies directly atop a major fault bounding the Caribbean tectonic plate to surrounding plates.
Over the last 10 days -- both before and after the Haitian primary event (7.0 magnitude) -- there have been an increased frequency of quakes of magnitude 5.0 or above.
Rather worrisomely, many of these magnitude 5.0 and higher quakes are along very major plate boundaries that are not well known for such activity. For example, today's quake 5.0, Southern East Pacific Rise is somewhat unusual, as was yesterday's 6.3, Drake Passage quake.
The Drake Passage is the straits between the closest points of Antarctica and South America, and quite near to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet , which is believed to have reached a tipping point due to global warming and may be about ready to break up and slide off into the ocean. Perhaps this won't happen all at once, but in recent years, chunks as large as the State of Rhode Island have detached and drifted out to sea. So much ice has immense weight, and the sudden release of that much weight from along a major plate boundary could have effects all along related faults.
With this recent escalation of earthquake activity all around the so-called "ring of fire", and even earthquakes in the more stable North American tectonic plate central core -- in places such as today's 4.1 Central New Mexico quake and a January 15 4.0 magnitude quake in Jones, Oklahoma and a very unusual 2.7 magnitude quake between Toronto and Quebec -- we must regard events in Haiti with an eye to viewing a cautionary tale...
Because what is happening there may someday be what happens here.
Should history repeat itself, should the New Madrid Seismic Zone kick loose in a way it hasn't done in 200 years, we are all screwed.
More to come.
A late-arriving notice gave me just enough time to make it down to the Martin Luther King Day "stream walk" and join with about 10 adults and about twice as many kids to clean up trash and haul off junk.
We were working on the Turkey Branch of Rock Creek from the point where it emerges from underground across from the McDonalds in the Aspen Hill Shopping Center, down to where the stream comes close to the intersection of Grenoble Drive and Turkey Branch Parkway and where the Parkway is joined by the Matthew Henson State Park. Altogether, we were able to fully load my pickup a bit more than twice with refuse ranging from paper trash through bottles and cans and even including a TV tube and a defunct lawnmower.
Whether or not a good time was had by all, some years' worth of trash were removed. The event was organized by the Friends of Rock Creek's Environment. They have a very informative blog that makes good reading.
First off, I need to point out that although famed televangelist Pat Robertson's claim that ultimately the cause of Haiti's terribly tragic history is that "they made a pact with the devil" isn't rigorously true.
However, leaving out all questions of religion and theology, some of the initial rebellions were organized by a man who is very famous in Haitian lore, and as well known in the annals of the history of Haiti as known by any reputable historian.
Half a century later the much smarter and stealthier runaway Francois Makandal bought island-wide terror to the plantocracy.[20] Originally Mandingue, when Makandal lost an arm to the sugar mill, he claimed to have had a vision of the great cities of Guinea, magnificent in comparison to Haiti’s diminuitive capital Port-au-Prince, described by one European as “a Tartar camp”, its streets running with filth and its Christian churches with corruption. Immediately after his maiming, Makandal affected the role of prophet and built a considerable following in northern Limbe. By 1740, Makandal had fled to the Maroons and used their secret networks to build a force of thousands across Haiti, infiltrating every home and plantation and bringing poison to each, adapted from west African lore to local circumstances. Dependent on their servants, the plantocracy was helpless as one day their livestock died, the next their domestic animals, finally themselves and their families. 6,000 were killed before Makandal was through. The Whites’ powerlessness only increased their brutality. Laws were passed prohibiting slave preparation of any medicene except snakebite treatments, and all suspected poisoners were mercilessly tortured and burned. When — despite the strictest security, including the poisoning of any thought traitors — Makandal was finally betrayed and caught in 1757,[21] the attempt to burn him in the streets of Haiti’s second city, Cap-Francois, went awry. Though only one-armed, he fought free of his shackles and leapt from the flames. Rich Whites that had come to gloat fled in terror. Though soldiers said they recaptured the prophet and had thrown him back into the flames bound to a plank, the Blacks could not give up their symbol of liberation and so claimed Makandal had magically transformed himself into a fly and so escaped even that. Tropical Haiti abounds with flies, each a reminder of Makandal and ironically, they — or at least their cousins, the mosquitoes, as carriers of yellow fever — did have as big role to play in subsequent struggle for freedom. In his honour, even to this day, talismans, poisions and even an entire voodoo society bear Makandal’s name.
Makandal’s revolt may have laid an island-wise network of secret communication between the Maroon communities and into the towns and plantations, but it was as nothing compared to what the voodooists were to achieve from the Bois-Caiman ceremony of 14th August 1791.
[ ... ]
Thousands of plantocrats were strangled or battered to death that first night. Each atrocity was repayed in kind. Grenada-born Henri Christophe had a carpenter sawed to death between his own boards. With the war cry of “Vengeance! Vengeance!”, Jean Jacques Dessalines carried a White child impaled on a pike before him as a battle standard. As clear-sighted as the Luddites a generation later, the insurgent slaves had no interest in preserving any part of the system that was enslaving them and so destroyed without restraint.
Revolutions are never "pretty" and neither are slave rebellions. Haiti's was particularly nasty as it was not merely class warfare but race warfare and the cruelty and malice seen from all factions was epic is both scale and scope.
Yet it was as nothing compared to the scale and scope of the tragedy that continues to unfold on the island of Hispaniola.
The western part of Hispaniola lies directly atop a major fault bounding the Caribbean tectonic plate to surrounding plates.
Over the last 10 days -- both before and after the Haitian primary event (7.0 magnitude) -- there have been an increased frequency of quakes of magnitude 5.0 or above.
Rather worrisomely, many of these magnitude 5.0 and higher quakes are along very major plate boundaries that are not well known for such activity. For example, today's quake 5.0, Southern East Pacific Rise is somewhat unusual, as was yesterday's 6.3, Drake Passage quake.
The Drake Passage is the straits between the closest points of Antarctica and South America, and quite near to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet , which is believed to have reached a tipping point due to global warming and may be about ready to break up and slide off into the ocean. Perhaps this won't happen all at once, but in recent years, chunks as large as the State of Rhode Island have detached and drifted out to sea. So much ice has immense weight, and the sudden release of that much weight from along a major plate boundary could have effects all along related faults.
With this recent escalation of earthquake activity all around the so-called "ring of fire", and even earthquakes in the more stable North American tectonic plate central core -- in places such as today's 4.1 Central New Mexico quake and a January 15 4.0 magnitude quake in Jones, Oklahoma and a very unusual 2.7 magnitude quake between Toronto and Quebec -- we must regard events in Haiti with an eye to viewing a cautionary tale...
Because what is happening there may someday be what happens here.
Should history repeat itself, should the New Madrid Seismic Zone kick loose in a way it hasn't done in 200 years, we are all screwed.
More to come.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
More on Haiti 100114
1300 hours: CNN reports that ships loaded with relief supplied are standing in the port at Port-au-Prince, and the port facility is INOPERABLE.
Heavy lift crane: bent, buckled, partially submerged.
Wharf unloading area: pilings collapsed, pavements buckled, service roads buckled and impassible.
We will need cargo choppers and or heavy-lift choppers to help unload ships. We also need, probably, some sort of pumping and piping system to move fluid/liquid cargoes such as fuel or potable water from ships in harbor to shore. Probably storage need tanks airlifted in to store such pumped liquids.
We need bridging units and bulldozers to help clear roads from both the harbor and airport.
Relief supplies are starting to arrive in large quantities but questions remain about distribution systems, and such systems seem to be mostly theoretical in the absence of passable streets.
A reasonable idea would be to lift in a few bulldozers and their fuel and set them to work clearing straighter avenues so that medium heavy trucks can roll out aid distribution to the peripheries away from the airport.
As always we advise people to check with the Ushahidi Haiti Information Aggregation and Reporting Site.
We need more and better minds thinking ahead on this, the professionals are either now arriving in the field, more likely in some stage of being in transit, or in staging areas waiting to launch towards Haiti. The Federal Aviation Administration has put a temporary hold on travel to Hispaniola (the island of which Haiti is the western half). It seems that about a dozen heavy aircraft are circling above waiting for opportunity to offload and land.
Part of the need to rapidly adapt at the Port and Harbor is the need for massive amounts of aircraft fuel needed at the Port-au-Prince airport and also at nearby Dominican Republic airports. It seems that the only way to deliver such amounts of fuel for non-military aircraft (military aircraft can refuel in flight in some cases) will be by tanker ship and if they can't unload we could wind up with dozens of heavy aircraft idled on the ground.
Seriously, more heavy-lift choppers, bulldozers etc. Fuel for everything. And sanitation even if that mostly consists of shovels to dig latrine pits, tarps to line the pits, and chlorine bleach in large volumes to disinfect what winds up in the latrine pits.
Water. Lots of water, and engineers to slap an emergency pumping system into place. Some parts of town seem to have some water at the moment but that may be gravity fed from local storage towers.
Heavy lift crane: bent, buckled, partially submerged.
Wharf unloading area: pilings collapsed, pavements buckled, service roads buckled and impassible.
We will need cargo choppers and or heavy-lift choppers to help unload ships. We also need, probably, some sort of pumping and piping system to move fluid/liquid cargoes such as fuel or potable water from ships in harbor to shore. Probably storage need tanks airlifted in to store such pumped liquids.
We need bridging units and bulldozers to help clear roads from both the harbor and airport.
Relief supplies are starting to arrive in large quantities but questions remain about distribution systems, and such systems seem to be mostly theoretical in the absence of passable streets.
A reasonable idea would be to lift in a few bulldozers and their fuel and set them to work clearing straighter avenues so that medium heavy trucks can roll out aid distribution to the peripheries away from the airport.
As always we advise people to check with the Ushahidi Haiti Information Aggregation and Reporting Site.
We need more and better minds thinking ahead on this, the professionals are either now arriving in the field, more likely in some stage of being in transit, or in staging areas waiting to launch towards Haiti. The Federal Aviation Administration has put a temporary hold on travel to Hispaniola (the island of which Haiti is the western half). It seems that about a dozen heavy aircraft are circling above waiting for opportunity to offload and land.
Part of the need to rapidly adapt at the Port and Harbor is the need for massive amounts of aircraft fuel needed at the Port-au-Prince airport and also at nearby Dominican Republic airports. It seems that the only way to deliver such amounts of fuel for non-military aircraft (military aircraft can refuel in flight in some cases) will be by tanker ship and if they can't unload we could wind up with dozens of heavy aircraft idled on the ground.
Seriously, more heavy-lift choppers, bulldozers etc. Fuel for everything. And sanitation even if that mostly consists of shovels to dig latrine pits, tarps to line the pits, and chlorine bleach in large volumes to disinfect what winds up in the latrine pits.
Water. Lots of water, and engineers to slap an emergency pumping system into place. Some parts of town seem to have some water at the moment but that may be gravity fed from local storage towers.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Cities in Dust
Airlift heavy equipment now.
Of course, this is a commentary on the classic disaster of the eruption of Pompeii buried by Mt Vesuvius.
Lyrics to that song of lament may be found here.
Don't think I am unconcerned.
Send heavy equipment and sanitation facilities right now. Porta-potties may be the salvation of the Haitian people. Cholera risk is high.
Also send fuel to burn the dead, and/or to operate heavy equipment to bury the dead.
More to come. For months.
Of course, this is a commentary on the classic disaster of the eruption of Pompeii buried by Mt Vesuvius.
Lyrics to that song of lament may be found here.
Don't think I am unconcerned.
Send heavy equipment and sanitation facilities right now. Porta-potties may be the salvation of the Haitian people. Cholera risk is high.
Also send fuel to burn the dead, and/or to operate heavy equipment to bury the dead.
More to come. For months.
Haitian Catastrophe
Ushahidi is a crisis response mapping and messaging system.
It's getting a workout right now (http://haiti.ushahidi.com/).
As a public service, bloggers in the area may wish to duplicate this posting.
How to Report
1. By sending a message to 447624802524
2. By sending an email to haiti@ushahidi.com
3. By sending a tweet with the hashtag/s #haiti or #haitiquake
4. By filling a form at the website
For now this might not be all that helpful. But within the next 24 hours or so, relief efforts should have restored some cellular/txting and internet capability to rescue and relief centers in the affected areas.
It's getting a workout right now (http://haiti.ushahidi.com/).
As a public service, bloggers in the area may wish to duplicate this posting.
How to Report
1. By sending a message to 447624802524
2. By sending an email to haiti@ushahidi.com
3. By sending a tweet with the hashtag/s #haiti or #haitiquake
4. By filling a form at the website
For now this might not be all that helpful. But within the next 24 hours or so, relief efforts should have restored some cellular/txting and internet capability to rescue and relief centers in the affected areas.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Public Safety Issues -- Cops, Robbers, and Stalker Gangs
Almost exactly a year ago, we launched into a series on the topic of illegal discrimination in Aspen Hill -- and beyond -- against persons believed to be homeless, near homeless, mentally-ill, unemployed, or possibly even just funny-looking.
We covered opposition, in-general, to group homes in Aspen Hill, Maryland; later, we opposition to "scattered site housing" for persons with psychiatric disabilities.
We covered, minimally, an abortive effort to close down one such group home. We covered some background on psychiatric disability and "moral incapacity", and we covered the mysterious phenomenon of people with no known official background pretending to be officials and giving newcomers the "welcome wagon walking-tour of weirdos and wackos" in Aspen Hill. We cover PROFIT as a motive for clandestinely organizing neighbors to the cause of evicting these group homes and their residents.
We also covered the basic elements of where to recruit henchmen and minions, and we covered the strategic and tactical niceties of destroying these group homes and their residents so as to acquire the properties on the cheap to turn them into worker-barracks and flophouses for illegal alien workers, and explored the causes and effects of the housing bubble and consequent crash of the economy.
We laid out a start-to-finish trajectory that starts with a search for higher property values, and then goes outside the bounds of decency -- not to mention outside of a huge variety of law -- sparing no amount of wicked cleverness and despicable sneaking-about in the pursuit of raw greed. The story ends in a place we all know: Aspen Hill, Maryland, with one of the highest foreclosure rates in the State of Maryland.
Well it's a year later, and the economy certainly hasn't gotten any better, however much Bonus Money the Wall Street Fat Cats have decided to pay each other. Nationally, unemployment is up around 10 percent, although if you add in the long-term unemployed and the undremployed, it comes closer to 20 percent. While this isn't quite as bad as the over-30-percent unemployment of the Great Depression, the Great Recession comes within spitting distance, so to speak.
So, the pressure's on, and whatever level of antipathy for the disadvantaged might previously have been demonstrated by any shopkeepers in the Aspen Hill area, now that antipathy is doubled, it would seem.
Today I had an experience that I would consider totally worthy of calling in to the police, if I didn't think that they were a very large part of it.
Now, I do not for one minute wish anyone to get the idea that I think it's official police policy to encourage shopkeepers to assault their patrons, whether or not the patrons are everything a shopkeeper could want in their clientele.
I will go on record to say that I am absolutely convinced that at least some officers are extremely inclined to look the other way when crimes of violence -- subtle violence, but violence nonetheless -- are perpetrated against people who shopkeepers decide they don't like.
I would further go on record to say that I am absolutely convinced that the so-called "community policing program as originally conceived has been perverted out of all semblance to "law enforcement" here in Montgomery County.
Here's how it is supposed to work: LE elements ("law-enforcement officers and non-sworn staff") identify stakeholders such as property-managers (commercial or residential facility), school administrators, security firm representatives, and community activists and have recurrent meetings in which police provide statistics and some information into ongoing crime trends, resolution of previous crimes, etc.
It is not supposed to be the case that officers take money off-the-record and outside of public and agency review to provide "security advice" and/or strongarm tactics outside of legal bounds. Yet that's what happens... either that, or there are large "security" operations going on her in Montgomery that rival the scale and scope of the Montgomery County Department of Police, of which the police department is either completely unaware, or entirely and illegally tolerant.
You could call it a militia, and frankly I don't have a problem with that, so long as its not conducting illegal operations such as rousting disabled, disadvantaged, or unpopular persons "just because we can".
You could also call it cause stalking.
Whatever you want to call it, locally it seems that there are people who make it their business to organize group harassment campaigns of an individual or of individuals. It is vital to the public safety that the police identify the persons responsible and give them a taste of their own medicine.
Some of this might be actually well-intended and a reasoned response to an actual threat, but erroneously misdirected initially as a case of mistaken identity.
For example: in a nearby neighborhood, there is an individual who scams people with a story about having run out of gas and needing to get to the hospital, etc. Usually he's working the gas stations in the vicinity of Glenmont, Maryland, but he isn't above going into the neighborhoods and knocking on doors. He's potentially a danger should he decide to actually enter the houses. Police are well aware of this individual, as are many of the local shopkeepers and the civic association's membership.
Yet if you were to get together a bunch of people to go put an ass-whupping on this individual, based purely on the description, there is an excellent chance that you would get into exceptionally foul trouble for assaulting a police officer named Bruce Beardsley.
Ofc Beardsley is a fine officer, and a patriot who has served his country with military service overseas in a hot warzone. He was, for some time, a liason officer to our little 'mid-county neighborhood initiative' community-policing group in Aspen Hill and Layhill. I can recognize him almost instantly on sight... yet when I was approached by the scammer, it took me more than a few seconds to realize that the person approaching me was not Ofc Beardsley, but a person I knew not at all who had a more than superficial resemblance to that estimable police officer.
To make matters worse, the man was dressed like a plainclothes officer on street detail. From the shoes to the windbreaker and the in-style-2-years-ago collar on the shirt, this man looked like someone they'd call "sergeant" in the non-public area of the police station... but in fact he's a well-known scammer in the Glenmont community. He's not the upstanding public servant to whom he cultivates a resemblance, right down to the same clothing choices and facial expressions.
The moral of this story is "don't go beat someone's ass because their description matches that of a criminal, or a lot of cops may come and knock your goddamn teeth down your goddamn throat".
This section, above, is absolutely true in all detail.
Here's a little story that will demonstrate another approach to getting someone else to kick someone's ass for you.
A guy is ducking his ex-wife's lawyer and anyone looking to serve papers on him. He likes to drink, so he goes to a bar in a really sketchy part of town. Now, this guy is not racist, so it doesn't bother him that he's about the only non-black patron in the bar. He's far from the only white patron, but he's definitely in the minority. What the heck, the drinks are inexpensive.
So, he's sitting there drinking sort of heavily, watching the game, cheering on his team. Finally, the game's over and people go back to drinking and talking.
Another guy comes into the bar, sits down and has a drink, and then turns to the other guy, and says, "let me buy you a drink". The one guy says, "sure, why not". He's drinking when the newcomer says "I want to buy a round for the folks in this room". He pays the bartender, and when everyone has a drink in front of them, he gets up to make a toast, and says "I want you all to drink to the health of this man! Now bottoms up! Bartender, set up another round."
The first guy can't figure this out, but he's not complaining, neither is anyone else. The newcomer stands up and says, "this man here is the best man on earth, he's a man who would do anything for anybody, he's a fine man, a decent man, this man is my best friend! Drink up, and bartender, send another round!"
The man is handing fifty dollar bills to the bartender and the bartender is passing out booze, and the newcomer keeps up his spiel about what a great friend the one guy is. Since the newcomer is passing out drink after drink to the house, they all gather around to listen close.
And the one guy finally get too curious about what was going on here. He asks the guy to tell him why he's got such a high opinion of him.
Everyone else wants to hear it, too. So the newcomer says: "I was down on my luck, I was feeling so down, lost my wife, my son knocked up the town tramp, my boss cut our wages and hours, but this man kept up my spirits, he talked me through it, he's the best friend I ever had..." and everyone's nodding along "... and just when I thought my life was gone to crap, he gave me a dog, a wonderful dog, and now that dog is my other best friend, and if this friend here hadn't given me that dog I don't know what would have happened, but he's my best friend and he gave me a dog, a BLACK dog, and I took that BLACK DOG and named it N****R," and then the man stops talking and runs out the door.
The first guy is just sitting there with his mouth wide open when someone in the crowd -- which you will remember has just been drinking fast and heavy -- says: "so you're his best friend, hmm?"
Right about the time his broken bones healed and had almost stopped hurting, the first guy finds out that the other guy was a private detective hired by his ex-wife's attorney.
The difference between the matter of a police officer and a notorious scammer both frequenting the same neighborhood, and a man pulling a rather severe practical joke on a man he was hired to target, is that in the first case the confusion is the fault of the witness who has heard a description or seen an "artists composite drawing" which very much resembles both a cop and a criminal. In the second case, it's an intentional misrepresentation of actions to a known identity.
What would happen if you intentionally combined both stories? For example, someone could get into the same circles that the scammer frequents when he's spending his ill-gotten gains. They could tell people in that circle that the scammer exactly fits the description of an undercover officer who brought down some friends, "call 'em up and ask 'em for a description if you don't believe me".
So, what happens to me if I walk into a store next to one where there was a recent incident involving someone answers my description no less than their own?
If the shopkeeper in the one store has gotten a description from the store next door, and the description fits me as well as it fits the actual perpetrator, I could get in big trouble for something someone else did...
And as often as something fairly close to this happens to me, I'm fairly sure that someone around here who looks a lot like me -- and may even be cultivating the resemblance by dressing much the same as I do -- has been outraging a lot of folks in the local shopkeeping community.
It's definitely going to be a problem if they mistake me for their perpetrator, and take my own actual photograph and pass it around, attached to the legend of the perpetrator's bad actions.
It's time to get to the bottom of this.
Ideally before they start passing around a picture of a police officer, with the scamming and annoyance of a lookalike misattributed to that picture.
Because that's what "cause stalkers" do: they take the law into their own hands like they thought they were cops.
Perhaps they should be disabused of that notion.
More to come?
We covered opposition, in-general, to group homes in Aspen Hill, Maryland; later, we opposition to "scattered site housing" for persons with psychiatric disabilities.
We covered, minimally, an abortive effort to close down one such group home. We covered some background on psychiatric disability and "moral incapacity", and we covered the mysterious phenomenon of people with no known official background pretending to be officials and giving newcomers the "welcome wagon walking-tour of weirdos and wackos" in Aspen Hill. We cover PROFIT as a motive for clandestinely organizing neighbors to the cause of evicting these group homes and their residents.
We also covered the basic elements of where to recruit henchmen and minions, and we covered the strategic and tactical niceties of destroying these group homes and their residents so as to acquire the properties on the cheap to turn them into worker-barracks and flophouses for illegal alien workers, and explored the causes and effects of the housing bubble and consequent crash of the economy.
We laid out a start-to-finish trajectory that starts with a search for higher property values, and then goes outside the bounds of decency -- not to mention outside of a huge variety of law -- sparing no amount of wicked cleverness and despicable sneaking-about in the pursuit of raw greed. The story ends in a place we all know: Aspen Hill, Maryland, with one of the highest foreclosure rates in the State of Maryland.
Well it's a year later, and the economy certainly hasn't gotten any better, however much Bonus Money the Wall Street Fat Cats have decided to pay each other. Nationally, unemployment is up around 10 percent, although if you add in the long-term unemployed and the undremployed, it comes closer to 20 percent. While this isn't quite as bad as the over-30-percent unemployment of the Great Depression, the Great Recession comes within spitting distance, so to speak.
So, the pressure's on, and whatever level of antipathy for the disadvantaged might previously have been demonstrated by any shopkeepers in the Aspen Hill area, now that antipathy is doubled, it would seem.
Today I had an experience that I would consider totally worthy of calling in to the police, if I didn't think that they were a very large part of it.
Now, I do not for one minute wish anyone to get the idea that I think it's official police policy to encourage shopkeepers to assault their patrons, whether or not the patrons are everything a shopkeeper could want in their clientele.
I will go on record to say that I am absolutely convinced that at least some officers are extremely inclined to look the other way when crimes of violence -- subtle violence, but violence nonetheless -- are perpetrated against people who shopkeepers decide they don't like.
I would further go on record to say that I am absolutely convinced that the so-called "community policing program as originally conceived has been perverted out of all semblance to "law enforcement" here in Montgomery County.
Here's how it is supposed to work: LE elements ("law-enforcement officers and non-sworn staff") identify stakeholders such as property-managers (commercial or residential facility), school administrators, security firm representatives, and community activists and have recurrent meetings in which police provide statistics and some information into ongoing crime trends, resolution of previous crimes, etc.
It is not supposed to be the case that officers take money off-the-record and outside of public and agency review to provide "security advice" and/or strongarm tactics outside of legal bounds. Yet that's what happens... either that, or there are large "security" operations going on her in Montgomery that rival the scale and scope of the Montgomery County Department of Police, of which the police department is either completely unaware, or entirely and illegally tolerant.
You could call it a militia, and frankly I don't have a problem with that, so long as its not conducting illegal operations such as rousting disabled, disadvantaged, or unpopular persons "just because we can".
You could also call it cause stalking.
I also spoke with police officers from across the country. They confirmed the existence of stalking groups across the country. In general, they said that 'cause stalking' is primarily a civil problem where the plaintiff has to prove financial loss. They also said that there are free speech and grass roots issues involved. In fact, the police themselves are targets of these groups. In small towns, the number of members in these groups can easily exceed the number of police officers. In general, the police will NOT talk about stalking groups. One officer did say there is a storm brewing as groups become larger and more numerous.
[ ... ]
One day, several years ago, I was sitting in my house, and checking out the activity on my scanner. I heard a woman say that she was following a certain vehicle. She gave the location, the make and model of the car and the license plate number. A few days later, I heard the same woman on the same frequency say that she needed a bit of help at a certain location and a few days after that I again heard her broadcasting the position and details about another vehicle she was following. I listened to other people talking on that frequency and they didn't give any indication that they were with any government agency but they were talking about ARRESTING PEOPLE.
[ ... ]
"On another occasion, on the same business band frequency, I heard someone complain that an African American man was crossing the street. "All we could get him for is jaywalking" responded the leader.
[ ... ]
People in the group would discuss where they would go for supper, after their shift was over, so I [the author] went too. I listened to a group of people openly discussing various activities as if they were the police.
"Real police officers were also sitting in the restaurant, listening to them. I later learned that their presence was not a coincidence.
"One man who had supper with the group drove a van marked with the call letters of a local AM radio station. I started listening to it. Most of the guests were people who said they had new revelations about Waco or Ruby Ridge, or had some inside story about government corruption. I also heard advertisements for the meetings of a local political group and I attended some.
"At the first meeting I attended, one young man flashed a phony police badge at me. No one paid any attention. Some of those in attendance were the people I had seen in the local restaurant. This was my introduction to the creepy world of extremists.
[ ... ] (Terrorist (Organized) Stalking in America, Lawson, David, ISBN: 0-9703092-0-1, (2001))
Whatever you want to call it, locally it seems that there are people who make it their business to organize group harassment campaigns of an individual or of individuals. It is vital to the public safety that the police identify the persons responsible and give them a taste of their own medicine.
Some of this might be actually well-intended and a reasoned response to an actual threat, but erroneously misdirected initially as a case of mistaken identity.
For example: in a nearby neighborhood, there is an individual who scams people with a story about having run out of gas and needing to get to the hospital, etc. Usually he's working the gas stations in the vicinity of Glenmont, Maryland, but he isn't above going into the neighborhoods and knocking on doors. He's potentially a danger should he decide to actually enter the houses. Police are well aware of this individual, as are many of the local shopkeepers and the civic association's membership.
Yet if you were to get together a bunch of people to go put an ass-whupping on this individual, based purely on the description, there is an excellent chance that you would get into exceptionally foul trouble for assaulting a police officer named Bruce Beardsley.
Ofc Beardsley is a fine officer, and a patriot who has served his country with military service overseas in a hot warzone. He was, for some time, a liason officer to our little 'mid-county neighborhood initiative' community-policing group in Aspen Hill and Layhill. I can recognize him almost instantly on sight... yet when I was approached by the scammer, it took me more than a few seconds to realize that the person approaching me was not Ofc Beardsley, but a person I knew not at all who had a more than superficial resemblance to that estimable police officer.
To make matters worse, the man was dressed like a plainclothes officer on street detail. From the shoes to the windbreaker and the in-style-2-years-ago collar on the shirt, this man looked like someone they'd call "sergeant" in the non-public area of the police station... but in fact he's a well-known scammer in the Glenmont community. He's not the upstanding public servant to whom he cultivates a resemblance, right down to the same clothing choices and facial expressions.
The moral of this story is "don't go beat someone's ass because their description matches that of a criminal, or a lot of cops may come and knock your goddamn teeth down your goddamn throat".
This section, above, is absolutely true in all detail.
Here's a little story that will demonstrate another approach to getting someone else to kick someone's ass for you.
A guy is ducking his ex-wife's lawyer and anyone looking to serve papers on him. He likes to drink, so he goes to a bar in a really sketchy part of town. Now, this guy is not racist, so it doesn't bother him that he's about the only non-black patron in the bar. He's far from the only white patron, but he's definitely in the minority. What the heck, the drinks are inexpensive.
So, he's sitting there drinking sort of heavily, watching the game, cheering on his team. Finally, the game's over and people go back to drinking and talking.
Another guy comes into the bar, sits down and has a drink, and then turns to the other guy, and says, "let me buy you a drink". The one guy says, "sure, why not". He's drinking when the newcomer says "I want to buy a round for the folks in this room". He pays the bartender, and when everyone has a drink in front of them, he gets up to make a toast, and says "I want you all to drink to the health of this man! Now bottoms up! Bartender, set up another round."
The first guy can't figure this out, but he's not complaining, neither is anyone else. The newcomer stands up and says, "this man here is the best man on earth, he's a man who would do anything for anybody, he's a fine man, a decent man, this man is my best friend! Drink up, and bartender, send another round!"
The man is handing fifty dollar bills to the bartender and the bartender is passing out booze, and the newcomer keeps up his spiel about what a great friend the one guy is. Since the newcomer is passing out drink after drink to the house, they all gather around to listen close.
And the one guy finally get too curious about what was going on here. He asks the guy to tell him why he's got such a high opinion of him.
Everyone else wants to hear it, too. So the newcomer says: "I was down on my luck, I was feeling so down, lost my wife, my son knocked up the town tramp, my boss cut our wages and hours, but this man kept up my spirits, he talked me through it, he's the best friend I ever had..." and everyone's nodding along "... and just when I thought my life was gone to crap, he gave me a dog, a wonderful dog, and now that dog is my other best friend, and if this friend here hadn't given me that dog I don't know what would have happened, but he's my best friend and he gave me a dog, a BLACK dog, and I took that BLACK DOG and named it N****R," and then the man stops talking and runs out the door.
The first guy is just sitting there with his mouth wide open when someone in the crowd -- which you will remember has just been drinking fast and heavy -- says: "so you're his best friend, hmm?"
Right about the time his broken bones healed and had almost stopped hurting, the first guy finds out that the other guy was a private detective hired by his ex-wife's attorney.
The difference between the matter of a police officer and a notorious scammer both frequenting the same neighborhood, and a man pulling a rather severe practical joke on a man he was hired to target, is that in the first case the confusion is the fault of the witness who has heard a description or seen an "artists composite drawing" which very much resembles both a cop and a criminal. In the second case, it's an intentional misrepresentation of actions to a known identity.
What would happen if you intentionally combined both stories? For example, someone could get into the same circles that the scammer frequents when he's spending his ill-gotten gains. They could tell people in that circle that the scammer exactly fits the description of an undercover officer who brought down some friends, "call 'em up and ask 'em for a description if you don't believe me".
So, what happens to me if I walk into a store next to one where there was a recent incident involving someone answers my description no less than their own?
If the shopkeeper in the one store has gotten a description from the store next door, and the description fits me as well as it fits the actual perpetrator, I could get in big trouble for something someone else did...
And as often as something fairly close to this happens to me, I'm fairly sure that someone around here who looks a lot like me -- and may even be cultivating the resemblance by dressing much the same as I do -- has been outraging a lot of folks in the local shopkeeping community.
It's definitely going to be a problem if they mistake me for their perpetrator, and take my own actual photograph and pass it around, attached to the legend of the perpetrator's bad actions.
It's time to get to the bottom of this.
Ideally before they start passing around a picture of a police officer, with the scamming and annoyance of a lookalike misattributed to that picture.
Because that's what "cause stalkers" do: they take the law into their own hands like they thought they were cops.
Perhaps they should be disabused of that notion.
More to come?
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Noted in Passing
I have to recommend to everyone that they should all watch the ABC network sitcom "Better Off Ted".
Whether or not this show deserves critical acclaim, it should give the Astute Reader of this blog a good idea of why I don't want to work in a corporate office.
"Better Off Ted" is actually pretty sane and normal compared to some of the places I've worked...
Whether or not this show deserves critical acclaim, it should give the Astute Reader of this blog a good idea of why I don't want to work in a corporate office.
"Better Off Ted" is actually pretty sane and normal compared to some of the places I've worked...
Sunday, January 3, 2010
China's Colorado River Also Sometimes Doesn't Reach the Sea
Once again we are covering reasonably predictable "knock on effects" of climate change.
Prior to the building of such grand projects as the Hoover Dam, the Colorado River was a truly typical major river in very many ways.
It was characterized by seasonal flooding, especially in spring. Yet for much of its journey from the snowpacks in the Rocky Mountains to the Sea of Cortez, the Colorado River cannot flood, as floods in the past have carved deep canyons which more than sufficed to contain the flood flows.
The amount of water that is delivered by the Colorado is absolutely staggering to the imagination, especially at flood, and early settlers often remarked at the contrast between the awesome aridity of the desert lands surrounding the top of the Grand Canyon and the roiling flood thousands of feet below. Any of them must have thought "if only there were some way to get that water up here, the desert could be made to bloom".
Eventually, people did manage to bring the water up to the top, not with pumps, but with megascale engineering projects. A surprisingly large number of extremely large dams impound the flow of the Colorado, and the Colorado River Compact of 1922 regulates the allocation of diversions from the flow. The total flow allocated for the upper basin in 1928 was some 7.5 million acre·ft/year, with an equal amount reserved for uses in the lower basin. California alone is allocated some 4.40 million acre·ft/year. A 1944 agreement allocates a final 1.5 million acre ft/year to Mexico.
For some decades now, it's a very unusual year when any of the Colorado River water actually makes it to the Sea of Cortez.
Cycles of variations in precipitation are certainly not unknown in the Southwestern USA; it's widely believed that a native civilization known as the Ancient Puebloans or Anasazi migrated into the area during a cycle of consistent snowfalls which raised the water table of the plateaus they settled. As long as the water table remained high enough, their fortified and inaccessible Cliff Dwellings kept them relatively safe from invaders and allowed them to engage in gainful commerce with neighboring populations. The Cliff Dwellings all shared the feature of being built into cliffside caves that had "permanent" springs fed by the water tables of the mesas they farmed and hunted.
Yet eventually the precipitation patterns changed, and the Anasazi were forced to abandon their safe cliffside fastnesses when the water table no longer fed the springs in the caves.
And once the Anasazi were forced, by thirst, out of their impregnable fortresses in the cliffs, cannibalistic invaders from Mexico ate them, or, arguably, as their civilization collapsed along with other nearby civilizations (Hohokum Civano phase collapse), they were driven to eating each other.
In either case, as a culture, they no longer exist.
The Yangtze River of China, another of the greatest rivers of the world, is reported to have occasionally run dry. This was reported in the coastal Jiangsu province in 1342, and also in 1954.
As with the American Colorado river, the Yangtze is beset with flooding, though the flood patterns are somewhat different, with floods originating at times in the upper reaches, which are mountainous and fed by Glacier melt as well as direct precipitation, and at times the floods originate in the lower reaches, and at times it seems that the entire river floods from source to gulf.
The completion of the immense Three Gorges Dam will certainly do a great deal to regulate the downstream damage of floods originating in the upper reaches, and in the mere two years since the installation of the final hydroelectric generating turbine, the dam has repaid a full one-third of the total project cost simply through electrical power generation, an amazing 348.4 terawatt-hours by September 2009.
Yet it's worth pointing out that this immense investment can't always pay off at this rate, simply because the Himalayan Glaciers are melting, and that's where the upper reaches of the Yangtze gets most of its water.
It must be noted in passing that the IPCC's declaration may be a bit premature, and at least is criticized by many as being "not supportable by the state of existing science", but then again, it's always best to be prepared for the worst and then be pleasantly surprise when the worst does not occur.
Otherwise, like most of the USA, you could be blithely drifting into the future with a defense posture and strategic position best compared to being a beauty-queen on fertility pills sleeping drunk in public with no clothes on.
Some scientific thought does indeed support the notion that Himalayan glacial melt is accelerating, due to soot particulates increasing solar absorption of glacier faces.
Other interpretations of science declare that in any case, rivers such as the Ganges get only about 5-percent of their annual flow from glacial melt, and that the rest comes from the periodic inundations by the Monsoon storms. This last may be true... but it may also be more the case that around half of the dry season flows are contributed by glaciers. In any case, the Monsoon typically brings massive flooding to these rivers, so perhaps declaring the glacial contribution to the annual flow may be technically accurate, but very misleading. Regardless of that, with sufficient reservoir capacity to moderate the differences between drought and flood seasons, a continuous release might be made to support agriculture, as is done in the US Colorado basin.
Of course, the problem with such managed systems is that you have to have something to manage. See above where we detail critique about whether or not the allocations of Colorado River water were calculated in years of unusually high precipitation.
In the worst imaginable case in the US -- not really likely but actually possible -- no precipitation falls in the Rocky Mountains, all extant snow melts, and eventually all of the water in the reservoirs is pumped to the destination. Every city along the path of the Colorado River either brings water in by truck, or the cities are abandoned to thirst. Even Los Angeles will have to be evacuated.
This would be putting nearly 50 millions on the move, looking for someplace where the water supply is reliable.
In the worst imaginable case in Asia, the glaciers melt and the monsoons fail and the reservoirs are exhausted, and about 1.5 billions on "the China side of Asia" would be uprooted, along with about 1.5 billions on the India/Pakistan side.
That's 3-billion people. That's half the world's population.
Even if you used every last known drop of oil to fuel every ship ever built, it's not possible to evacuate all of them to someplace with a reliable water supply, such as the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States.
That doesn't mean that nobody's going to try.
Prior to the building of such grand projects as the Hoover Dam, the Colorado River was a truly typical major river in very many ways.
It was characterized by seasonal flooding, especially in spring. Yet for much of its journey from the snowpacks in the Rocky Mountains to the Sea of Cortez, the Colorado River cannot flood, as floods in the past have carved deep canyons which more than sufficed to contain the flood flows.
The amount of water that is delivered by the Colorado is absolutely staggering to the imagination, especially at flood, and early settlers often remarked at the contrast between the awesome aridity of the desert lands surrounding the top of the Grand Canyon and the roiling flood thousands of feet below. Any of them must have thought "if only there were some way to get that water up here, the desert could be made to bloom".
Eventually, people did manage to bring the water up to the top, not with pumps, but with megascale engineering projects. A surprisingly large number of extremely large dams impound the flow of the Colorado, and the Colorado River Compact of 1922 regulates the allocation of diversions from the flow. The total flow allocated for the upper basin in 1928 was some 7.5 million acre·ft/year, with an equal amount reserved for uses in the lower basin. California alone is allocated some 4.40 million acre·ft/year. A 1944 agreement allocates a final 1.5 million acre ft/year to Mexico.
For some decades now, it's a very unusual year when any of the Colorado River water actually makes it to the Sea of Cortez.
[ ... ]
In recent years, the compact has become the focus of even sharper criticism, in the wake of a protracted decrease in rainfall in the region. Specifically, the amount of water allocated was based on an expectation that the river's average flow was 16.4 million acre feet per year (641 m³/s). Subsequent tree ring studies, however, have concluded that the long-term average water flow of the Colorado is significantly less. Estimates have included 13.2 million acre feet per year (516 m³/s)[3], 13.5 million acre feet per year (528 m3/s)[4], and 14.3 million acre feet per year (559 m3/s)[5]. Many analysts have concluded that the compact was negotiated in a period of abnormally high rainfall, and that the recent drought in the region is in fact a return to historically typical patterns. The decrease in rainfall has led to widespread dropping of reservoir levels in the region, in particular at Lake Powell, created by the Glen Canyon Dam in 1963 [...] ("Colorado River Compact", Wikipedia, downloaded 2010 January 3)
Refs:
3. H. G. Hidalgo, T. C. Piechota, and J. A. Dracup, 2000: Alternative principal components regression procedures for dentrohydrological reconstructions, Water Resources Research v. 36, p. 3241-3249
4. C. W. Stockton and G. C. Jacoby, 1976: Long-term surface-water supply and streamflow trends in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Lake Powell Res. Proj. Bulletin no 18, National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA
5. C. A. Woodhouse, S. T. Gray, and D. M. Meko, 2005: Updated streamflow reconstructions for the Upper Colorado River Basin, Water Resources Research v. 42, W05415, doi:10.1029/2005/WR004455, 2006
Cycles of variations in precipitation are certainly not unknown in the Southwestern USA; it's widely believed that a native civilization known as the Ancient Puebloans or Anasazi migrated into the area during a cycle of consistent snowfalls which raised the water table of the plateaus they settled. As long as the water table remained high enough, their fortified and inaccessible Cliff Dwellings kept them relatively safe from invaders and allowed them to engage in gainful commerce with neighboring populations. The Cliff Dwellings all shared the feature of being built into cliffside caves that had "permanent" springs fed by the water tables of the mesas they farmed and hunted.
Yet eventually the precipitation patterns changed, and the Anasazi were forced to abandon their safe cliffside fastnesses when the water table no longer fed the springs in the caves.
And once the Anasazi were forced, by thirst, out of their impregnable fortresses in the cliffs, cannibalistic invaders from Mexico ate them, or, arguably, as their civilization collapsed along with other nearby civilizations (Hohokum Civano phase collapse), they were driven to eating each other.
In either case, as a culture, they no longer exist.
The Yangtze River of China, another of the greatest rivers of the world, is reported to have occasionally run dry. This was reported in the coastal Jiangsu province in 1342, and also in 1954.
As with the American Colorado river, the Yangtze is beset with flooding, though the flood patterns are somewhat different, with floods originating at times in the upper reaches, which are mountainous and fed by Glacier melt as well as direct precipitation, and at times the floods originate in the lower reaches, and at times it seems that the entire river floods from source to gulf.
The completion of the immense Three Gorges Dam will certainly do a great deal to regulate the downstream damage of floods originating in the upper reaches, and in the mere two years since the installation of the final hydroelectric generating turbine, the dam has repaid a full one-third of the total project cost simply through electrical power generation, an amazing 348.4 terawatt-hours by September 2009.
Yet it's worth pointing out that this immense investment can't always pay off at this rate, simply because the Himalayan Glaciers are melting, and that's where the upper reaches of the Yangtze gets most of its water.
The "Water Tower of Asia", composed of over 15,000 Himalayan glaciers, has been melting into the nine rivers forever. However, the rate at which they are melting today indicates that they will dry up.
The United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declares that "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world" and that "If the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate".
It must be noted in passing that the IPCC's declaration may be a bit premature, and at least is criticized by many as being "not supportable by the state of existing science", but then again, it's always best to be prepared for the worst and then be pleasantly surprise when the worst does not occur.
Otherwise, like most of the USA, you could be blithely drifting into the future with a defense posture and strategic position best compared to being a beauty-queen on fertility pills sleeping drunk in public with no clothes on.
Some scientific thought does indeed support the notion that Himalayan glacial melt is accelerating, due to soot particulates increasing solar absorption of glacier faces.
Other interpretations of science declare that in any case, rivers such as the Ganges get only about 5-percent of their annual flow from glacial melt, and that the rest comes from the periodic inundations by the Monsoon storms. This last may be true... but it may also be more the case that around half of the dry season flows are contributed by glaciers. In any case, the Monsoon typically brings massive flooding to these rivers, so perhaps declaring the glacial contribution to the annual flow may be technically accurate, but very misleading. Regardless of that, with sufficient reservoir capacity to moderate the differences between drought and flood seasons, a continuous release might be made to support agriculture, as is done in the US Colorado basin.
Of course, the problem with such managed systems is that you have to have something to manage. See above where we detail critique about whether or not the allocations of Colorado River water were calculated in years of unusually high precipitation.
In the worst imaginable case in the US -- not really likely but actually possible -- no precipitation falls in the Rocky Mountains, all extant snow melts, and eventually all of the water in the reservoirs is pumped to the destination. Every city along the path of the Colorado River either brings water in by truck, or the cities are abandoned to thirst. Even Los Angeles will have to be evacuated.
This would be putting nearly 50 millions on the move, looking for someplace where the water supply is reliable.
In the worst imaginable case in Asia, the glaciers melt and the monsoons fail and the reservoirs are exhausted, and about 1.5 billions on "the China side of Asia" would be uprooted, along with about 1.5 billions on the India/Pakistan side.
That's 3-billion people. That's half the world's population.
Even if you used every last known drop of oil to fuel every ship ever built, it's not possible to evacuate all of them to someplace with a reliable water supply, such as the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States.
That doesn't mean that nobody's going to try.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
In China, the Marching Sands Portend Doom
In recent postings, we have focused on the impending climate catastrophes -- and consequent massive population migrations -- resulting from Andean Glacier Melt-Off.
It's not just Latin America, of course, and it's not even just the US Southwestern desert cities which depend on Rocky Mountain snowpacks and glacier melts to bring water thousands of miles to them via the Colorado River.
In China, the fearsome Gobi Desert is expanding, and expanding rapidly.
Now, the Chinese -- as a people -- are not known for their failure to think ahead.
They are also notably good at figures and at business. When we examine the fact that only 7-percent of China feeds about 25-percent of the world's population, we may reasonably wonder what will happen if the arable lands in China are reduced to only 6-percent. At the present rate of yield, that one-percent reduction in arable lands would reduce by almost 4 percent the number of people fed by that land. Considering that the 25-percent of the world's population is 1.5-Billions of people, that's about 20-million less people that China's arable lands can feed.
So, what will happen? Will all of China reduce their consumption of food by 4-percent so that those undersupplied can eat? Chinese people are not known for being overweight; many are already near the lower limit of caloric intake to allow them to live and work. Starvation may become endemic again, and perhaps even epidemic. Even as China's vaunted "two parents, one child" program begins to make inroads into the immense overpopulation problems in the People's Republic of China, now the food supply dwindles as if to enforce the mandate of the Party.
More to come... and we're stuck doing Indochina and China for the forseeable future.
As for the forseeable future... what may one reasonably expect? And one must ask, what would you do if you were in their position? And what decisions would you make? And if you are not in their position, but in a position where you must expect that their position requires them to take your position from you, what defenses will you raise? Or can the situation reasonably be expected to be made controllable, so that by working together all may find a useful solution?
This calls for a great degree of speculation, of course, and one must always ask if what one hears from another party is what one observes from another party. For after all, "actions speak more loudly than words", and everyone knows that when the criminal comes to rob you, though he shows his teeth, you should not mistake this for a friendly smile.
So, we may ask, what are your intentions? -yet while we may choose to trust, assuredly we shall verify. In the meanwhile, it's good advice to guard the guardians when they are not at their posts. If the guardians cannot stand their watches, then only a fool sleeps when there are no eyes upon the frontiers, or even merely upon the streets. Yet all must sleep, sooner or later, and the enemy is wakeful at all times, or at least they know enough to sleep while we are awake, and to waken when they see us sleep. Yet though we may sleep in shifts, so that there is always a cadre to survey the frontiers and watch over our streets, what good will this do, if the enemy can make certain that only the blind are left to man the watchtower?
As the Roman Tacitus observed about the art of camouflage, practiced by the nation of the Lygians who fought only by night:
"In all battles the eyes are vanquished first."
And as Sun Tzu said, "deception is at the heart of all warfare".
It's not just Latin America, of course, and it's not even just the US Southwestern desert cities which depend on Rocky Mountain snowpacks and glacier melts to bring water thousands of miles to them via the Colorado River.
In China, the fearsome Gobi Desert is expanding, and expanding rapidly.
[ ... ]
Few people think of China as a desert nation, yet it is among the world's largest. More than 27%, or 2.5 million square kilometers, of the country comprises useless sand (just 7% of Chinese land feeds about a quarter of the world's population). A Ministry of Science and Technology task force says desertification costs China about $2-3 billion annually, while 800 km of railway and thousands of kilometers of roads are blocked by sedimentation. An estimated 110 million people suffer firsthand from the impacts of desertification and, by official reports, another 2,500 sq km turns to desert each year.
This is nothing new, of course. In the 4th century B.C. Chinese philosopher Mencius (Mengzi) wrote about desertification and its human causes, including tree-cutting and overgrazing. Experts argue over the reasons and consequences, but all agree that Chinese deserts are on the move. Sand from the distant Gobi threatens even Beijing, which some scientists say could be silted over within a few years. Dunes forming just 70 km from the capital may be drifting south at 20-25 km a year. Conservative estimates say 3 km a year. And despite massive spending on land reclamation and replanting, China is falling behind.
In the northwest, where the biggest problems lie, desertification has escalated from 1,560 sq km annually in the 1970s to 2,100-2,400 sq km in the 1990s. [ ... ] ("Beijing's Desert Storm", Gluckman, Ron, "gluckman.com", July 14, 2008, downloaded 2010 January 2)
Now, the Chinese -- as a people -- are not known for their failure to think ahead.
They are also notably good at figures and at business. When we examine the fact that only 7-percent of China feeds about 25-percent of the world's population, we may reasonably wonder what will happen if the arable lands in China are reduced to only 6-percent. At the present rate of yield, that one-percent reduction in arable lands would reduce by almost 4 percent the number of people fed by that land. Considering that the 25-percent of the world's population is 1.5-Billions of people, that's about 20-million less people that China's arable lands can feed.
So, what will happen? Will all of China reduce their consumption of food by 4-percent so that those undersupplied can eat? Chinese people are not known for being overweight; many are already near the lower limit of caloric intake to allow them to live and work. Starvation may become endemic again, and perhaps even epidemic. Even as China's vaunted "two parents, one child" program begins to make inroads into the immense overpopulation problems in the People's Republic of China, now the food supply dwindles as if to enforce the mandate of the Party.
More to come... and we're stuck doing Indochina and China for the forseeable future.
As for the forseeable future... what may one reasonably expect? And one must ask, what would you do if you were in their position? And what decisions would you make? And if you are not in their position, but in a position where you must expect that their position requires them to take your position from you, what defenses will you raise? Or can the situation reasonably be expected to be made controllable, so that by working together all may find a useful solution?
This calls for a great degree of speculation, of course, and one must always ask if what one hears from another party is what one observes from another party. For after all, "actions speak more loudly than words", and everyone knows that when the criminal comes to rob you, though he shows his teeth, you should not mistake this for a friendly smile.
So, we may ask, what are your intentions? -yet while we may choose to trust, assuredly we shall verify. In the meanwhile, it's good advice to guard the guardians when they are not at their posts. If the guardians cannot stand their watches, then only a fool sleeps when there are no eyes upon the frontiers, or even merely upon the streets. Yet all must sleep, sooner or later, and the enemy is wakeful at all times, or at least they know enough to sleep while we are awake, and to waken when they see us sleep. Yet though we may sleep in shifts, so that there is always a cadre to survey the frontiers and watch over our streets, what good will this do, if the enemy can make certain that only the blind are left to man the watchtower?
As the Roman Tacitus observed about the art of camouflage, practiced by the nation of the Lygians who fought only by night:
Ceterum Harii super vires, quibus enumeratos paulo ante populos antecedunt, truces insitae feritati arte ac tempore lenocinantur: nigra scuta, tincta corpora; atras ad proelia noctes legunt ipsaque formidine atque umbra feralis exercitus terrorem inferunt, nullo hostium sustinente novum ac velut infernum adspectum;
nam primi in omnibus proeliis oculi vincuntur.
"In all battles the eyes are vanquished first."
And as Sun Tzu said, "deception is at the heart of all warfare".
Friday, January 1, 2010
In Peru, Some People Migrate the Wrong Direction
Peru is home to the second-largest desert city in the world, ranked behind only Cairo. Lima, Peru, has some 9-millions in population, and is the 5th-largest city in South America. Yet like the majority of Peruvian cities, it is west of the majestic Andes mountain range, and situated in the coastal desert.
Astonishingly, in the coastal desert of Peru, there is a booming new industry, that of production of agriculture for export. Almost all of this is dependent on irrigation, though mostly that irrigation is of the traditional type, with little use of the modern drip irrigation of the type pioneered in Israel where it has "made the Negev bloom".
It's possible that the coastal-desert agricultural producers, increasingly plagued by water shortages, will quickly adapt and adopt these extremely efficient modern drip-irrigation methods. But what of the poor indigenous Quechua farmers of the high altitudes?
Some 2/3rds of Peru's 29-millions of people live on the western slopes of the Andes.
In the same way that eastward winds blow over mountains in the northern hemisphere, to drop most of their moisture on the western slopes or deposit it as snowpack near the peaks of the highest mountains, in the southern hemisphere the process is reversed. Westward winds crossing the immense height and length of the Andes mountain range -- the spine of all of South America -- rain out or build snowpack on the eastern side of the mountains.
Only 2 percent of the precipitation reaching Peru runs off to the west. On the eastern side of the mountains, as much as 80 inches per year may fall as rain. The greatest number of people live where there is the least water.
There a certain amount of speculation about ways to get some of that water east of the mountains to the west of the mountains:
The award-winning film, Sin Nombre (Without Name) is a gripping depiction of some of the realities of Central America.
Despite no ongoing worries in Central America about the melting of tropical glaciers disrupting the water supply, there are still many reasons that people want to leave such places as Honduras and El Salvador.
This film does an excellent job of depicting the journey north, even as it explores young love between a teenage girl traveling to New Jersey with her father and uncle to meet and live with her step-family, and a young MS-13 gangster on the run from conflicts with his home "clique".
Yet really, the star of the show, in my opinion, is nothing but the journey, and the circumstances in which it takes place.
The train rolls north, packed to the roof and beyond with migrants. They face many perils, ranging from bribe-seeking border-patrols at the southern edge of Mexico, to gangs of thugs who board the train to rob the migrants. Aside from this, sanitation, food, water, all are in short supply.
Yet we see that an entire -- if generally disorganized and unregulated -- culture has sprung up along the tracks to do business with the migrants, whether or not the business is at the moment feeling charitable or predatory. One cannot help but be struck with the whole scale of the enterprise, from the numbers of people camped out at switching yards waiting for their train to come so that they can stow away aboard the northbound freight cars, to the numbers of the people supplementing their incomes by providing the necessities to the weary travelers (or preying upon them).
There's one thing I know about business and culture. There is generally an ability to scale up or scale down as the circumstances and the market demand for services may change.
In Central America, there's only one reasonable place to choose as a destination, it seems. That would be the US, or perhaps even Canada and points beyond, but the US is far more inviting and accommodating in so many ways.
For those in much of South America, however, there are the obvious local destinations. Even in Mexico, there is Mexico DF, with 20-millions of persons and growing all of the time.
In Peru, cities such as Lima are growing rapidly. Indeed, such extremely rapid and generally unplanned growth is a major characteristic of the large cities of Peru:
I can't help but contrast and compare this with the eruption of spontaneous organizations along the migration routes into the USA, which in the last decade have successfully brought roughly one million people per year illegally into the US.
Will we see comparable settlement patterns when the millions of squatters comprising half of Lima's 9-million person population discover that they should have migrated some place that has plenty of water, instead of into a city in the desert that depends on rivers that depend on vanishing Andean glaciers?
More to come?
Astonishingly, in the coastal desert of Peru, there is a booming new industry, that of production of agriculture for export. Almost all of this is dependent on irrigation, though mostly that irrigation is of the traditional type, with little use of the modern drip irrigation of the type pioneered in Israel where it has "made the Negev bloom".
It's possible that the coastal-desert agricultural producers, increasingly plagued by water shortages, will quickly adapt and adopt these extremely efficient modern drip-irrigation methods. But what of the poor indigenous Quechua farmers of the high altitudes?
[ ... ]
"If the snow disappears, the people will disappear, too," Sánchez-Guardamino says. "If the snow disappears, we will be left without water. The pastures and the animals will disappear. Everything is interconnected. The problem of the melting of the glaciers is that the source of life is drying up."
Andean farmers struggle to understand the changes. Some say the mountains are turning black because they are angry or sad. Some blame pollution. Carmina Sicusta has another explanation.
"The earth itself is sick," she says.
Sicusta, 48, lives in Amaru, a village of small adobe houses on a mountainside above Pisaq, a picturesque town near Cusco that is best known for Inca ruins and a Sunday market that draw tourists from around the world.
In the past decade or so, Amaru's farmers have watched the pattern of hillside fields change. On the frigid hilltops, the tundra-like pasture suitable only for llamas is receding. Fields of grain blanket high hillsides that were once too cold for anything but animals. Families that used to own dozens of llamas now have only a handful.
"The earth is warming. The waters are warming. The springs are drying up," Sicusta says in Quechua, looking up from her weaving. "There is going to be a shortage of food. Our children will have less to eat."
[ ... ] ("Altered climate forces cultural shift high in Andes"), Fraser, Barbara, the Daily Climate, October 5, 2009, downloaded 2010 January 1
Some 2/3rds of Peru's 29-millions of people live on the western slopes of the Andes.
In the same way that eastward winds blow over mountains in the northern hemisphere, to drop most of their moisture on the western slopes or deposit it as snowpack near the peaks of the highest mountains, in the southern hemisphere the process is reversed. Westward winds crossing the immense height and length of the Andes mountain range -- the spine of all of South America -- rain out or build snowpack on the eastern side of the mountains.
Only 2 percent of the precipitation reaching Peru runs off to the west. On the eastern side of the mountains, as much as 80 inches per year may fall as rain. The greatest number of people live where there is the least water.
There a certain amount of speculation about ways to get some of that water east of the mountains to the west of the mountains:
[ ... ]
But plans to redistribute water by rerouting rivers or drilling through the Andes raise questions for which neither politicians nor scientists have easy answers. How much water can be piped from reservoirs in the Andean highlands or Amazonian cloud forest without damaging those ecosystems? Who has priority — thirsty cities or food producers? Subsistence farmers or export agribusinesses? Poor rural communities or revenue-generating mines? Agriculture or hydroelectricity?
[ ... ]
[T]he tension continues between export agribusinesses on Peru's southern coast and the small farmers upstream. Large-scale farmers on the coast have more efficient irrigation systems, but the profusion of wells is pumping water out of the aquifer nearly twice as fast as it can recharge, according to Javier Chiong of the Ministry of Agriculture in Ica.
Large farmers downstream are calling for a major infrastructure project to channel water from the highlands, dispersing some of it through canals in the desert to recharge the aquifer. Small farmers and llama herders upstream say the scheme could dry the Andean bogs, an ecosystem about which little hydrological data exist.
"There's a lack of planning," said Gotuzzo of the Farmers Association of Ica. "And it's the poor people who will suffer the most. The rich will be able to solve their problems."
[ ... ] ("Glaciers go, leaving drought, conflict and tension in Andes", Fraser, Barbara, the Daily Climate, May 19, 2009, downloaded 2010 January 1)
The award-winning film, Sin Nombre (Without Name) is a gripping depiction of some of the realities of Central America.
Despite no ongoing worries in Central America about the melting of tropical glaciers disrupting the water supply, there are still many reasons that people want to leave such places as Honduras and El Salvador.
This film does an excellent job of depicting the journey north, even as it explores young love between a teenage girl traveling to New Jersey with her father and uncle to meet and live with her step-family, and a young MS-13 gangster on the run from conflicts with his home "clique".
Yet really, the star of the show, in my opinion, is nothing but the journey, and the circumstances in which it takes place.
The train rolls north, packed to the roof and beyond with migrants. They face many perils, ranging from bribe-seeking border-patrols at the southern edge of Mexico, to gangs of thugs who board the train to rob the migrants. Aside from this, sanitation, food, water, all are in short supply.
Yet we see that an entire -- if generally disorganized and unregulated -- culture has sprung up along the tracks to do business with the migrants, whether or not the business is at the moment feeling charitable or predatory. One cannot help but be struck with the whole scale of the enterprise, from the numbers of people camped out at switching yards waiting for their train to come so that they can stow away aboard the northbound freight cars, to the numbers of the people supplementing their incomes by providing the necessities to the weary travelers (or preying upon them).
There's one thing I know about business and culture. There is generally an ability to scale up or scale down as the circumstances and the market demand for services may change.
In Central America, there's only one reasonable place to choose as a destination, it seems. That would be the US, or perhaps even Canada and points beyond, but the US is far more inviting and accommodating in so many ways.
For those in much of South America, however, there are the obvious local destinations. Even in Mexico, there is Mexico DF, with 20-millions of persons and growing all of the time.
In Peru, cities such as Lima are growing rapidly. Indeed, such extremely rapid and generally unplanned growth is a major characteristic of the large cities of Peru:
[...] [Italics mine -th] A third migratory pattern was that people invariably followed in the footsteps of relatives and fellow paisanos. Once a village had a few paisanos established in the city, they were soon followed by others. During the course of Peruvian migration, relatively few persons simply struck out on the migratory adventure alone. Thus, the society of migrants was not a collection of alienated "lost souls," but rather consisted of groups of people with contacts, social roles, and strong cultural and family ties.
This fact produced the fourth dimension of the Peruvian migratory process: the propensity of migrants to organize themselves into effective voluntary associations. The scale and pattern of these associations distinguished the process in Peru from that in most other countries. The organizations have taken several forms, but the two most outstanding examples are found in the squatter settlements and regional clubs that have proliferated in all the largest cities, particularly Lima. The process of urban growth in Lima has produced an urban configuration that conforms to no central plan. Without access to adequate housing of any type, and without funds or available loans, migrants set about developing their own solutions by establishing organizations of their own, occasionally under the sponsorship of APRA. They planned a takeover of unoccupied land at the fringes of the city and, with the suddenness and effectiveness of a military attack, invaded the property, usually on a Saturday night.
Once on the land, the migrants laid out plots with precision and raised temporary housing in a matter of hours. Called by the somewhat deprecatory term barriada, the shantytowns quickly developed both an infrastructural and a sociopolitical permanence, despite initial official disapproval and police harassment. At first, the land invasions and barriada formation provoked enormous unease among traditional limeЯos and especially in the halls of government. The barriadas were wildly characterized as dangerous slums by the Lima middle- and upper classes, which felt threatened by the squatters. Research by anthropologist JosИ Matos Mar Santos and others demonstrated beyond doubt, however, that these "spontaneous settlements" were, in fact, solutions to grave urban problems. Subsequent research by anthropologist Susan Lobo established that such settlements were civilly organized and rapidly assumed positive urban attributes under the squatters' own initiatives.
In 1990 there were over 400 of these large settlements surrounding Lima and Callao, containing at least half of Lima's population. Over time, many of them--such as San MartМn de Porres, Comas, and Pamplona Alta--had become new political districts within the province of Lima, with their own elected officials and political power. [... ]
("Peru: A Country Study", Hudson, Rex A ed., GPO for the Library of Congress, 1992, downloaded 2010 January 1)
I can't help but contrast and compare this with the eruption of spontaneous organizations along the migration routes into the USA, which in the last decade have successfully brought roughly one million people per year illegally into the US.
Will we see comparable settlement patterns when the millions of squatters comprising half of Lima's 9-million person population discover that they should have migrated some place that has plenty of water, instead of into a city in the desert that depends on rivers that depend on vanishing Andean glaciers?
More to come?
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