Crisis of Confidence - revisited

May 2011, we are just about 3 years from the very slow climb out of the Great Recession. Unemployment is still hovering around 9.8%, but in actuality, it is much higher - some say around 15% when certain age groups are isolated. Gasoline prices are hovering around $4.40/gal. We've hit our debt ceiling this week. Trade imbalance is out of kilter and favors China. The real estate house of cards has yet to peak, with prime loan properties now inching up the foreclosure rate. The banks are holding back a hugh inventory of foreclosed property.

Have we crossed this road before?

Read President Jimmy Carter's speech entitled: "Crisis of Confidence" - 32 years ago....

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/carter-crisis/

Oldest known U.S. free-flying bird hatches new chick on Midway

(Reuters) - The oldest known free-flying bird in the United States, a roughly 60-year-old albatross named Wisdom, hatched her latest chick weeks ago to become a mother again on Sand Island at Midway, wildlife officials reported on Tuesday.

The sea bird's advanced age may be double or triple the expected life span for a Laysan albatross, but biologists are still gathering information and learning about the species.

Wisdom holds the record as the oldest wild specimen documented during the 90-year history of the U.S. and Canadian bird-banding research program.

A U.S. Geological Survey scientists first tagged the bird with an aluminum identification band when she was about 5 years old in 1956 as she was incubating an egg.

Since then, the albatross has logged about 3 million flying miles, the equivalent of six round trips to the Moon.

"It's really exciting to see that these birds are long-living and still raising chicks at 60 years old or older," said John Klavitter, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, who spotted Wisdom with her chick in February.

Sand Island is the largest piece of land in the Midway Atoll, a tiny U.S. territory that lies about a third of the way between Honolulu and Tokyo in the North Pacific.

"It's a nice success story for wildlife and conservationists," Klavitter told Reuters in a telephone interview from Midway.

The chick, whose gender is unknown at present, is doing well. Wisdom and her mate are taking turns feeding it, and the young bird it will soon sport its own band, Klavitter said.

He said Wisdom has probably raised about 35 chicks during her lifetime. Her species generally mates with one partner for life and lays only one egg at a time. But scientists do not know whether Wisdom has had the same mate for all these years.

Laysan albatross breed on the Hawaiian islands of Oahu, at Kaena Point, and on Kauai, at Kilauea Point. Their feeding grounds are off the west coast of North America, including the Gulf of Alaska, and they spend their first three to five years constantly flying, never touching land. Scientists believe they even sleep while flying over the ocean.

Nineteen of 21 albatross species are listed as threatened with extinction from a variety of causes, including lead poisoning on Midway Atoll, injuries from longline fishing, climate change and ingestion of garbage floating on the ocean.

An estimated five tons of plastic are unknowingly fed to albatross chicks by their unsuspecting parents each year. Luckily, Wisdom's home at the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge is protected, Klavitter said.

(Editing by Steve Gorman and Jerry Norton)

Tuesday March 8, 2011

Giving an old bird a chance

Old, but Unready to Be Rung Out

Yana Paskova for The New York Times

A red-tailed hawk tagged in 1983, and currently living at the Raptor Trust in Millington, N.J., is believed to be the oldest found alive in the wild in North America.

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: December 19, 2010

Fame can be a capricious thing, for any kind of beast. So no disrespect to Pale Male, the über-hawk of Fifth Avenue, but he’s not the only raptor of renown in these parts.

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Times Topic: Peter Applebome

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Yana Paskova for The New York Times

A red-tailed hawk at the Raptor Trust in Millington, N.J., on Sunday. At 27, the hawk, a female, is the oldest found alive in the wild in North America.

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Yana Paskova for The New York Times

The tag was placed on the bird’s leg when it was 6 or 7 months old.

As Pale Male’s celebrity grows in books, song and the recent documentary “The Legend of Pale Male,” a rural cousin has demonstrated equally remarkable, if less publicized, avian persistence.

She doesn’t have a catchy name (or any name), a fashionable perch or Twitter twitter (“Pale Male’s Central Park is infested with humans but he’s tolerant”), but the red-tailed hawk first seen just before Thanksgiving sitting on a dead rabbit on the white line in the middle of Route 17M near Monroe, N.Y., has quite a story to tell.

When finally contained, after a somewhat erratic journey, she was clearly old and infirm. But it was not until people were able to study the aluminum band that had been placed on her left leg when she was 6 or 7 months old that they realized just how old she was: about 27 years and 9 months. Most red-tails that survive their first year — more than 60 percent do not — live about half that long.

Among red-tails whose ages could be documented, she was the oldest ever found alive in the wild in North America. She first came into contact with humans when Joe Morgan and Pete Rose were playing for the Phillies in the World Series and Ronald Reagan was president.

“Part of it’s luck, part of it’s genes, part of it’s being really proficient in what it does,” said Leonard J. Soucy Jr., founder of the Raptor Trust in Millington, N.J., where the bird is being kept at least through the winter. “It’s not that different from what makes you live a long time and stay healthy.”

Red-tailed hawks are large, adaptable birds of prey that breed from Canada to Panama. This one was almost certainly born north of New York City, and she was captured and banded on Oct. 15, 1983 — coincidentally, by personnel at Dr. Soucy’s center.

She has almost certainly traveled far since then, but her current acclaim began on Nov. 15 when a motorist, worried that the bird would be hit by a car, stopped to pick her up after seeing her feeding on a rabbit carcass in the road. When the bird didn’t fight him and wouldn’t let the rabbit go, he figured there was something wrong with her and put her in the back of his van, where she perched on a mop handle.

There were a few stops and missteps. She escaped when a worker at Sterling Forest State Park in New York tried to transport her in a banker’s box, but she was picked up the next day on the same highway and taken to the Bear Mountain Zoo, and then to Suzie Gilbert, a wild-bird rehabilitator in Garrison, N.Y.

Ms. Gilbert fed her for a few days, realized the hawk had a respiratory problem of some kind that needed extra care and took her to Dr. Soucy’s raptor center, where the red-tail has been given food, medicine and treatment for a hairline fracture of a wing. The bird will be fed and observed at least through the winter. If she is fully healed and able to fly, she will probably be released back into the wild.

Things have improved for red-tails since regulators began to curb the use of DDT and other harmful pesticides. And in some ways, the cleared landscape of highways and subdivisions has made it easier for them to find safe perches to hunt for mice, rats, squirrels and ferrets.

In other ways, our comfort zone is their nightmare, in which a bird like this one over the years has managed to escape plate-glass windows, electrified utility lines, speeding cars, hunters’ rifles, windmill blades and other perils. City hawks, like Pale Male, face particular dangers from rats feeding on rat poison, which can kill both predator and prey, though there is plenty of rat poison in the country as well.

As we are, a hawk is bred for survival and without concern for its victims in a world in which predator eventually becomes prey. So you romanticize it at your peril. Still, old age can be its own reward, burden or miracle. As we get older, this time of year feels as much about survival as about celebration, a time when, if we’re lucky, we find a secure perch for a few quiet weeks, to look back on obstacles overcome, mazes run, bullets dodged, refuges found. A holiday season shout-out to this tough old bird and to assorted tough birds, old and young, down here on the ground.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

Rage - Explained

The Rage Is Not About Health Care

By FRANK RICH

Published: March 27, 2010

THERE were times when last Sunday’s great G.O.P. health care implosion threatened to bring the thrill back to reality television. On ABC’s “This Week,” a frothing and filibustering Karl Rove all but lost it in a debate with the Obama strategist David Plouffe. A few hours later, the perennially copper-faced Republican leader John Boehner revved up his “Hell no, you can’t!” incantation in the House chamber — instant fodder for a new viral video remixing his rap with will.i.am’s “Yes, we can!” classic from the campaign. Boehner, having previously likened the health care bill to Armageddon, was now so apoplectic you had to wonder if he had just discovered one of its more obscure revenue-generating provisions, a tax on indoor tanning salons.»

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Frank Rich

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But the laughs evaporated soon enough. There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. And as the week dragged on, and reports of death threats and vandalism stretched from Arizona to Kansas to upstate New York, the F.B.I. and the local police had to get into the act to protect members of Congress and their families.

How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far.

No less curious is how disproportionate this red-hot anger is to its proximate cause. The historic Obama-Pelosi health care victory is a big deal, all right, so much so it doesn’t need Joe Biden’s adjective to hype it. But the bill does not erect a huge New Deal-Great Society-style government program. In lieu of a public option, it delivers 32 million newly insured Americans to private insurers. As no less a conservative authority thanThe Wall Street Journal editorial page observed last week, the bill’s prototype is the health care legislation Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts. It contains what used to be considered Republican ideas.

Yet it’s this bill that inspired G.O.P. congressmen on the House floor to egg on disruptive protesters even as they were being evicted from the gallery by the Capitol Police last Sunday. It’s this bill thatprompted a congressman to shout “baby killer” at Bart Stupak, a staunch anti-abortion Democrat. It’s this bill that drove a demonstrator to spit on Emanuel Cleaver, a black representative from Missouri. And it’s this “middle-of-the-road” bill, as Obama accurately calls it, that has incited an unglued firestorm of homicidal rhetoric, from “Kill the bill!” to Sarah Palin’s cry for her followers to “reload.” At least four of the House members hit with death threats or vandalism are among the 20 political targets Palin marks with rifle crosshairs on a map on her Facebook page.

When Social Security was passed by Congress in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, there was indeed heated opposition. As Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post, Alf Landon built his catastrophic 1936 presidential campaign on a call for repealing Social Security. (Democrats can only pray that the G.O.P. will “go for it” again in 2010, as Obama goaded them on Thursday, and keep demanding repeal of a bill that by September will shower benefits on the elderly and children alike.) When L.B.J. scored his Medicare coup, there were the inevitable cries of “socialism” along with ultimately empty rumblings of a boycott from the American Medical Association.

But there was nothing like this. To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance.

The apocalyptic predictions then, like those about health care now, were all framed in constitutional pieties, of course. Barry Goldwater, running for president in ’64, drew on the counsel of two young legal allies, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, to characterize the bill as a “threat to the very essence of our basic system” and a “usurpation” of states’ rights that “would force you to admit drunks, a known murderer or an insane person into your place of business.” Richard Russell, the segregationist Democratic senator from Georgia, said the bill “would destroy the free enterprise system.” David Lawrence, a widely syndicated conservative columnist, bemoaned the establishment of “a federal dictatorship.” Meanwhile, three civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.

That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical, given that what the right calls “Obamacare” is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare, an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care. But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964.

In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congresslast fall like an ominous shot.

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote,The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

If Congressional Republicans want to maintain a politburo-like homogeneity in opposition to the Democrats, that’s their right. If they want to replay the petulant Gingrich government shutdown of 1995 by boycotting hearings and,as John McCain has vowed, refusing to cooperate on any legislation, that’s their right too (and a political gift to the Democrats). But they can’t emulate the 1995 G.O.P. by remaining silent as mass hysteria, some of it encompassing armed militias, runs amok in their own precincts. We know the end of that story. And they can’t pretend that we’re talking about “isolated incidents” or a “fringe” utterly divorced from the G.O.P. A Quinnipiac poll last week foundthat 74 percent of Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while only 16 percent are aligned with Democrats.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. The arch-segregationist Russell of Georgia, concerned about what might happen in his own backyard, declared flatly that the law is “now on the books.” Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric.

Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.

Whatever it takes....

Homemade helicopter and now this...given the circumstances, how many could conjure up such a contraption under duress? Go to the link for the photo.

HeraldSun

Kept alive with a bike and washer

From: HeraldSun

November 30, 2009

A TEENAGE girl lived on a ventilator made from a washing machine and bicycle when her family couldn't pay for a hospital bed.

Ji Xiaoyan, 15, was taken off her ventilator and discharged from hospital in China as her family could no longer afford to pay her medical bills, The Associated Press reports.

Not to be deterred, however, her family made her a makeshift ventilator from bicycle and washing machine parts, driven by a noisy electric motor. The contraption pumped air into the teenager's lungs through a washer hose plugged into an incision in her throat for more than a month, until the family got donations for treatment.

"I knew my child didn't want to leave this world. We had to save her no matter what," Yang Yunhua, the girl's mother, a farmer in Henan province, told AP. "But we are only poor people."

They were finally able to raise the almost $24,000 needed to treat her for a rare neurological disorder that paralyzed her from the neck down, AP said.

Her father, a teacher, earns only $150 a month, so family and friends contributed most of the rest.

Ji has since recovered partial use of her limbs and no longer needs a ventilator to breathe.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/lifestyle/the-other-side/teenager-ji-xiaoyan-kept-alive-with-a-bicycle-and-washing-machine/story-e6frfhk6-1225805260710

Clearview Golf Club - More than a Historical Landmark

African-American Golf-Pioneer Bill Powell Dies at 93

(New York Times 1/2/2010)

Bill Powell, who was honored last summer as a racial pioneer in American golf more than 60 years after building a golf course while he was shunned by the sport he loved, died Thursday at a hospital in Canton, Ohio. He was 93.

The cause was complications from a stroke, the P.G.A. of America said.

In August 2009, when the P.G.A. of America held the 91st annual P.G.A. Championship in the Minneapolis area, it bestowed its highest honor, the Distinguished Service Award, on Mr. Powell.

According to the organization, Mr. Powell was the only African-American to build, own and operate a golf course in the United States.

When he returned to the Canton, Ohio, area from England in 1946 after serving in the Army Air Forces, Mr. Powell, a passionate golfer since caddying at age 9, was denied a chance to play on public courses. When he tried to get a bank loan to build his own course, he was rejected.

Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier in major league baseball was still a year away. The nation’s golf courses, like much of America, remained segregated. And the P.G.A. of America’s bylaws barred nonwhites from membership, a ban that remained in effect until 1961.

But Mr. Powell, a security guard for the Timken bearing and steel company in Canton, was undaunted.

“It’s distasteful when you get turned down,” he told The New York Times in 2009. “You have a little pride. You say the hell with them. You say I’m not going to badger. I’m not going to beg them. So I said I’ll just build a golf course.”

And so he did.

With financial help from two black physicians and a loan from a brother, Mr. Powell bought 78 acres on a dairy farm in East Canton.

Doing most of the labor by hand, helped by his wife, Marcella, Mr. Powell seeded pastures, tossed aside boulders and pulled up fence posts. In April 1948, what he called “this crazy dream” came true. He opened Clearview Golf Club with an initial nine holes and welcomed players of all races.

There were incidents of vandalism in the course’s early years — flag sticks were removed and ethnic slurs scrawled — but the course flourished, and Mr. Powell expanded it to 18 holes in 1978, having bought a total of 130 acres. The Department of the Interior designated Clearview as a national historic site in 2001.

“He was just obsessed,” Mr. Powell’s son, Larry, the Clearview course superintendent, told ABC’s “Good Morning America” in 2009. “He put all his efforts mentally, emotionally and physically into accomplishing his goal.”

When Mr. Powell, bent by age, was honored by the P.G.A. of America, he received congratulations from President Obama and former President George H. W. Bush. And he was accorded four standing ovations by the audience of more than 600 at the Pantages Theater in Minneapolis.

Seated in a large leather chair, he read an acceptance speech that his daughter, Renee, a pioneering figure in women’s pro golf, helped him craft. In it, he explained why he had built Clearview. “I did not want other people who wanted to play the game of golf to have to suffer the indignities that I had,” he said.

He closed with his credo: “Stand firm. Never give up. Never give in. Believe in yourself, even when others don’t.”

William James Powell was born in Greenville, Ala., then moved with his family to Minerva, Ohio, some 20 miles from Canton, as a youngster. He played golf and football in high school and attended Wilberforce University in Ohio, a historically black school, where he was a member of the golf squad.

With few decent job openings for blacks, Mr. Powell was hired at Timken as a janitor, but a few months later he became the company’s first black security guard. Returning to Timken after the war, he worked nights to support his family while building his golf course.

When Renee was 3 years old, Mr. Powell designed a miniature golf club and gave her lessons at Clearview. In 1967, Renee Powell became the second black woman, after Althea Gibson, to play on the Ladies Professional Golf Association Tour. She competed on the tour until 1980 and is now the head pro at Clearview.

In an e-mail message, Renee said of her father, “Early on we found that we had to share him with the world and what a gift he was!” In addition to his son and daughter, Mr. Powell, who lived in East Canton, is survived by twin sisters, Mary Alice Walker, of Akron, Ohio, and Rose Marie Mathews, of Minerva. His wife died in 1996.

The National Golf Foundation presented its Jack Nicklaus Golf Family of the Year Award to the Powells in 1992.

But Mr. Powell cherished a tribute beyond the spotlight as well. In 1997, as he told The Akron Beacon Journal, he was thrilled when two white women drove from Atlanta just to play his course.

“They shook my hand and thanked me,” he said. “They said I have a piece of history here, and they wanted to be a part of it. Can you imagine?”