Three decades ago – maybe four – in the waning days of music on AM radio, the era of morning drive-time disc-jockey teams supposedly being light-hearted and humorous, a pair of funny guys on one Portland station had a running gag, blaming incompetent Washington drivers for any traffic problems. Now in 2019, a study by something called WalletHub ranks Washington motorists number 48, the worst in the continental United States. Numbers 49 and 50 are Alaska and Hawaii respectively.
Vancouver – not the British Columbia Vancouver – sits just across
the Columbia River from Portland – the Oregon Portland.
“Sea-Watch is a group of volunteers who heard that people were drowning off the coast of Libya, and instead of just sitting around twiddling their thumbs, they purchased a retrofitted research vessel, motored down off the coast of Africa, and started pulling people out of the sea.”
The 1944 movie “Lifeboat” received three Academy Award nominations: Best Director (Alfred Hitchcock), Best Story (John Steinbeck) and Best Cinematography (Glen MacWilliams).
Nicholas Kristof, graduate of Yamhill-Carlton (Oregon) High School, has for the past two decades been reporting for the New York Times from what a certain U.S. leader has referred to as “shithole countries.” Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn in 1991 earned a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on Tienanmen Square student protests. They became the first husband-wife team gain the honor. Kristof won the Pulitzer again in 2006 for his reporting from Darfur on the genocide there.
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Mr.
Kristof’s dispatches focus on subjects such as poverty, famine, human
trafficking and ethnic cleansing from outposts in Myanmar, Yemen, Bangladesh
and other sites of human misery. He has also made known his contrarian views on
the anti-sweatshop movement and the social structure of the U.S. military.
In contrast to his regular reporting and general public perception, Kristof in his year-end summing up makes the case that, overall, 2018 was the best year on record for general improvement of the human condition. Without disregarding all the bad news, he reports that fewer people live in poverty than ever before, that more people have access to clean drinking water and electricity, that literacy is at an all-time high and infant mortality is at its all-time low. (Unlike most other countries, life expectancy in the United States has gotten worse.)
In his book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Harvard professor Steven Pinker presents evidence in text and seventy-five graphs the betterment of the human condition over time.
We
may be past the tipping point on climate change and over-population proceeds
unchecked. Still Nicholas Kristof takes a break from his usual topics to give
us some perspective.
As the government shutdown drags on and visitors to unpatrolled national parks deface the landscape with off-road vehicles and leave their shit – literal and metaphoric – behind, and unpaid TSA workers call in sick to major airports, and senior White House appointees – Mike Pence included – are a bout to receive $10,000 pay increases, let’s give some attention to the animals about to be affected by the border wall Mexico is paying for.
Because of the purported urgency of the U.S.-Mexico barrier, environmental laws have been waived. The portion of the wall built so far has already had consequences, including some animal species separated from their food and water sources, others cut off from millennia-old migration routes, and habitats destroyed. One example is a herd of wild bison that regularly – without passports – crosses the border. On the U.S. side is a patch of native grass the animals feed on. On the Mexico side is the only year-round water source in the area.
Wild animals have not accepted that climate
change is a hoax promoted by liberals and scientists. Rising temperatures and
worsening drought exacerbate the difficulty of finding food and water.
Splitting up species, as the wall will do, lessens an animal’s chance of
finding a viable mate, meaning, obviously, fewer offspring. Inevitable inbreeding
leads to disease and less genetic diversity. Paul Ehrlich, president of the Center for Conservation
Biology at Stanford University, put it succinctly, “Building an impermeable
wall along the longest border in the Western hemisphere is a stupid idea — it’s
senseless. It’s truly a moronic move by a truly moronic administration.”
Assuming Trump’s Folly will be built, Wyoming gives us an example of how to mitigate the consequences for wildlife. For the past six thousand years, Yellowstone pronghorn antelope have annually migrated along a 170-mile corridor between the upper Green River basin and Grand Teton National Park. U.S. Highway 191 imposed a barrier to the pronghorn’s travels. To promote migration and reduce the carnage from animals trying to cross the highway, the Wyoming Department of Transportation built eight overpasses. It took a couple years, but the pronghorn have adapted and the animal-automobile collisions have been reduced over seventy percent. One would think such crossings should be simple to monitor for people migration.
“In guitar music, especially electric guitar, a power chord (also fifth chord) is a colloquial name for a chord that consists of the root note and the fifth. Power chords are commonly played on amplified guitars, especially on electric guitar with distortion.”
Dick Dale and the Del-Tones gained fame in southern California in the late fifties, working from their home base, the Rendezvous Ballroom near Newport Beach. The story goes that in 1962, on a bet that he couldn’t play a song using only a single guitar string, Dick Dale (née Monsour) reached back into his Lebanese roots and remembered his uncle playing a song on one string of a lute. Dale upped the tempo – and the volume – several magnitudes. The song was “Misirlou,” (or “Miserlou”) meaning “Arab Land.” The song had been recorded many times since the 1920s, but never like Dick Dale. “Misirlou” entered the rock canon and established Dale as “King of the Surf Guitar.”
