Ailantha - Blog

Images Of The Apocalypse

9/17/2019

...Continued from yesterday:
    My daughter Claire, a disaster response nurse, returned last Friday from a week of volunteering with the International Medical Corps in Grand Bahama where she was part of a 4-nurse strike team sent to the island to assess the medical needs of the people there and determine how health care might best be delivered amidst the destruction left by Hurricane Dorian (see previous post, "Messages From The Bahamas").
     As Claire went back to work at Northwestern Hospital the day after she returned to Chicago from the Bahamas, it wasn't until yesterday that we were finally able to have a phone conversation.
   "It looked like the Apocalypse," Claire said when I asked her how it was on the island. There were areas, she said, where "there was nothing. No houses, no buildings."
     And yet, strangely, she said, they would often know where a house had stood because they would come across a toilet standing. No sink, no bathtub, no refrigerator, no stove. Just the toilet.

     "It was as if the whole house and everything in it had been lifted and carried away, with just the toilet left behind."
      I asked Claire how they got around the island. She said that when their plane arrived at the Freeport airport there was no electricity on the island and the airport was badly damaged and there was no transportation available to take them to the hospital in town, which was, thankfully, still standing and running on a generator. "But," she said, "the logistical folks at the airport got to work and pretty soon a truck drove up to take us to the hospital."
       Claire said some nurses from the Freeport hospital joined their team, which was wonderfully helpful, because in a place where nothing was recognizable to indicate a town, the Bahamian nurses knew where the towns were, and also the residents recognized and appreciated seeing the local nurses.
      It was hard getting around by truck, Claire said, because there was so much debris on the roads; and so they'd drive where they could, but they mostly walked.

      "You must have done a lot of walking," I said.
      "Well, I got my steps in," she said.
       Sometimes they'd come across a house that was still standing.

"Then I'd knock on the door, but usually the door just swung open. If there was just a facade standing I'd poke my head inside and call 'Hello?'"
Sometimes they'd find people inside the houses in need of medical care.

"We'd sometimes find people who had hurt themselves trying to repair their houses. You know, they'd have a cut on their hand, or they stepped on a nail."
Many buildings were little more than piles of rubble.

"We didn't have the heavy equipment you'd need to dig through the rubble," Claire said, "but somebody's going to have to. Because, Mom, sometimes when we walked by a pile of rubble you could tell by the smell that there was something underneath that had died."
In one town called Pelican Point they came across a medical clinic that was still standing. They went inside and found the clinic nurses there trying to set the place back up as best they could.

Once as the teams walked along they came across a cemetery where the caskets had been washed up from beneath the ground and had been thrown up against the fence. "It looked as if the caskets were trying to escape," Claire said. I asked her if the caskets were opened or closed and she said some were opened and some were closed. I asked her if the remains were still in the open caskets. "I didn't go close enough to look," she said.
Once they saw a field of palm trees that looked as if a giant blade had flown by and cut off all the trees' heads.

"And there were so many cars in the water," she said, "just everywhere in the water. You'd see this beautiful blue sea then when you looked closer, you'd see all these cars. It's terrible."

I asked Claire what the strike team did for food. "Getting food and water was so much work," she said, "and sometimes at the end of the day I was so tired that I just skipped eating and went to bed." She said the team mostly subsisted on protein bars and MRE's (Meals Ready to Eat) that they'd brought with them. She said that for water there was a working spigot about half a mile down the road from the Airbnb where they were staying at in Freeport. However after a few days a supply of water arrived for them, which made life somewhat easier.
One of the team's assignments was to offer assistance to the medical clinic in the town of High Rock. But when they arrived they discovered that the clinic was gone.

However the local administrator gave the team permission to set up another clinic anywhere in High Rock where they could find a cleared space.
They found a spot outside of a government building that was still standing, and so here they set up a little clinic under a canopy tent. "Now we had a place that we could tell the residents to come to for medical care if they needed it."

And then one day towards the end of the week FedEx arrived with supplies.

"And now," said Claire, "there's a nice big tent to use for the clinic."

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Messages From The Bahamas

9/13/2019

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...Continued from 9/9/2019:
I just received a brief phone call from my daughter Claire, a disaster response nurse who spent the past week in the Bahamas with the International Medical Corps with the mission of providing medical care for the victims of Hurricane Dorian (see post from 9/9/2019, "Strike Nurse").

   Claire has arrived back at the Miami, Florida airport and will soon be en route home to Chicago.
       We had only a few minutes to talk before she boarded her plane and so she couldn't much fill me in other than to let me know that she was safe and well and back in the States.
     While she was on Grand Bahama, where she spent most of the week, Claire had found only one spot where internet and/or phone service was occasionally up. Therefore her communications from the island - mostly via Facebook messaging - were few and brief.
      But I'll share here her messages such as they were and pictures she posted over the week:

      Sunday, September 8
      Landed in Grand Bahamas safely! More to come as assessment continues!

Monday, September 9
Hi all, I am home from being out in the east end of Grand Bahamas today. This is by far the worst cane I have ever seen.

What’s left of a house

We were sent to assist this clinic but there is nothing left.

Oil spill, it’s everywhere.

Tuesday, September 11
Hi all, just a quick update...yesterday and today we went door to door in the High Rock area checking up on people, providing medical care as needed and doing an assessment of the damage to the area. It has been unbelievable, the destruction.

Me going house to house.

      Tomorrow we have procured a 4 wheel drive vehicle to make it out further east. In the other truck we had we couldn’t get past the oil spill. We hope to get to the community of McLean, which is on the Far East of the island. Overall I am tired but well, had a bucket shower and then the electricity came on, hooray!
      We have about 12 volunteers here now, doctors and nurses, plus 6 logisticals. So a big crew. (We are using swimming pool water to flush the toilets because there are 16 of us in the same house with no running water. So we are taking turns hauling water, too.) I’m hoping with the return of the electricity in the neighborhood the water will follow. (Not out east though, those power lines will be down for months I’m sure.)

      On Wednesday evening, September 11, I received a text from Claire that her team had spent the day in McLean's Town, a town on the far eastern end of the island that had been badly hit by Dorian.
     I had seen pictures of McLean's Town on the news.
     Apparently it is - was - a beach resort town.
    Here's how McLean's Town looked before the hurricane:

Here's what it looks like now:

   Last night Claire sent word that she had left Grand Bahama and had arrived at Nassau.
       Today she left Nassau and flew to Miami, from where she'll catch her plane to Chicago.
       Tomorrow she will back at work on the Intensive Care Unit at Northwestern Hospital.

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A Letter To My Senators On 9/11

9/11/2019

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      Dear Senators Brown and Portman,
      I'm addressing this letter to both of you because I've sent a copy to each of you.
      My name is Patti Liszkay and I am a piano teacher from Gahanna, Ohio. This morning I heard on the local news that out of respect for those who died in the 9/11 attacks on our country eighteen years ago our Governor Mike Dewine had 3,000 American flags planted on the Ohio Statehouse lawn.
     The newscaster's use of the word "planted" gave me an idea.
     What if every year on 9/11, along with the thousands of flags planted across the United States on that day, our country planted 3,000 trees in honor of those who died on that day, sixty trees in each state? The Federal government could allocate the funds to each state for the planting of the trees, though it could be left to each state to choose the kind and location of the trees planted each year so that each state could have trees compatible with the climate and geography: Maybe palm trees for Hawaii, palms and redwoods for California, hardy evergreens for Alaska, deciduous trees for the Midwest, etc. Maybe Southwestern states such as Arizona and Texas could opt for planting saguaros, or some other majestic plant that thrives better than trees in their climate.
    Perhaps funding could even be allocated for a volunteer corps dedicated gathering, planting, and caring for the 9/11 Trees.
       What better tribute could we offer our fellow Americans who died on that day than a 9/11 Tree honoring each of them, trees that would live on and multiply, year after year, offering solace to their loved ones and keeping them alive in our collective memory?
         In these troubled, divisive times would not a bill calling for the yearly planting of 9/11 Trees be legislation on which everyone on the both sides of the aisle could come together?
       I am therefore requesting, Senators Brown and Portman, that together you introduce bipartisan legislation calling for the planting of 3,000 9/11 Trees, sixty in each state, on every September 11. Perhaps you could even propose that 9/11 be declared a national holiday on which Americans could also spend the day planting a tree somewhere in their community or on their property in remembrance of those who died on that day?
          What better way to bring Americans together on this day to honor the 9/11 fallen?
          Thank you, Senators Brown and Portman,
           Patti Liszkay

The above is the letter I sent today to my state senators. If you like the idea please feel free to suggest the same idea to your senators or representatives.

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Strike Nurse

9/9/2019

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As I write this my daughter Claire is somewhere on the Island of Grand Bahama,

...likely on a U.S. Coast Guard cutter with three other nurses and a small cadre of security guards, searching the flooded island for survivors and assessing what their medical care treatment needs might be and where it might be possible to set up a make-shift hospital.
Claire is part of a 4-person nurse strike team from among a group of nurses and doctors with the International Medical Corps.

    The nurse strike team was sent out from the group's home base established a few days on the nearby island of Nassau. The team is gathering information on the needs and conditions in Grand Bahama, which information they will then relay to the rest of the medical team waiting in their make-shift staging area set up in a Nassau resort.
     Claire left last Monday, September 2, on a day's notice - a disaster response nurse who has worked with a number of national and international medical organizations, Claire keeps a "to-go" bag always packed and ready to grab - for Daytona Beach, Florida, where her assignment was to care for the residents of nearby nursing homes who had been evacuated to a middle school gym in anticipation of Hurricane Dorian hitting the area.
       Below is a picture someone took of Claire comforting one of the evacuees while she was working the night shift.

    However, as the hurricane bypassed Florida, the evacuees were sent home and the shelter closed, and on Friday Claire deployed by plane with the rest of the International Medical Corps team to the Bahamas.
     The World Health Organization had tasked the IMC with assessing the east side of Grand Bahama, where some of the worst devastation had occurred. The group put together a 4-person "nurse strike team" of which Claire was to be a member.
       The IMC group landed in Nassau, which had been spared the destruction, and where they were given accommodations in quite a lovely resort hotel, as Claire describes it.
       As of Friday the airspace between Nassau and Grand Bahama was still closed for safety and there were no available planes anyway. The only transport at hand would have been a 14-hour boat ride. Therefore the group spent that day and the next at the hotel staging and organizing medical supplies,

...and logistical supplies such as fuel, of which there is none on Grand Bahama,

...and giving belly rubs to the search and rescue dogs, named Angus and Peter Pan.

As of 10:45 PM Saturday night, at which time Claire messaged the family, there was still no transportation from Nassau to Grand Bahama and Claire and her fellow strike team members feared it would probably be the following week before they would be able to head out.
However half an hour later Claire called me to let us know that a plane and a dry landing site on Grand Bahama had been procured and that she and her three other strike team members would be flying the following morning, Sunday morning, to the west side of Grand Bahama, which was dry, and landing in Freeport, where they'd stay at an Airbnb.

It was during that phone call late Saturday night that Claire told me about being on the nurse strike team, and how as soon as they landed in Freeport they'd begin traversing the island by Coast Guard cutter accompanied by four guards, not American, but on assignment from an international company. She warned me that, as the electrical grid was down, there might not be any internet or phone service.
However the family received a quick message on Sunday afternoon that the strike team had landed safely in Grand Bahama,

...and last night those who showed up for weekly open Sunday dinner,

...posed for a group "hello" to Claire, which I sent her via text.

Late last night she sent out a brief text that she was back at the Airbnb on the west side of the island.
And that's all we've heard for now.

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Our Last Hope

9/8/2019

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...Continued from yesterday:
Dear Future Cyberarchivist,
On this day, September 8, 2019, Hurricane Dorian, after destroying several islands in the Bahamas,

... continues to slam into the eastern seaboard of North America,

...and the fires that were set by humans in the Amazon rain forest in Brazil are now raging out of control.

There has been a global outcry over the deliberate burning of the Amazon (see yesterday's post), and a union of the seven wealthiest countries in the world known as G7 has offered to help Brazil extinguish the Amazon fires.

But the President of Brazil, a man of great ego but questionable judgment and competence named Jair Bolsonaro,

...has refused help, likely out of a mix of resentment, vanity and the desire for his country to reap the temporary profit to be gleaned from the permanent destruction of the rain forest.
Most of the countries of the world have banded together in an accord known as the Paris Agreement to work together to reduce carbon emissions and stop rising global temperatures.
However my country, the United States of America, the wealthiest and most powerful country on the planet and the second greatest producer of the carbon emissions that are causing greenhouse gases and global warming, is not participating in the Paris Agreement.

Our President, Donald Trump (see posts from 9/4/2019 and 9/6/2019), has pulled the United States out of the climate agreement and refuses to participate in the world-wide effort to reduce carbon emissions.

Rather, Donald Trump's response to the global warming crisis has been to deny that the crisis exists and to deliberately take counter productive actions against the health of the environment, such as:

- promoting the carbon-producing fossil fuel industries;

- scrapping initiatives set in place by his predecessors to replace fossil fuels with clean energy;
- repealing laws protecting our water and air quality;
- cutting back regulations on the emission of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas;
- rescinding a law banning old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs and requiring Americans to use only high energy-efficient light bulbs.

According to scientists the small act of eliminating outmoded, inefficient light bulbs,

...would save the electricity output equivalent of at least 25 large power plants, enough energy to power all the homes in the states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and would significantly cut back on greenhouse gases that are making the world too hot and causing our climate to go haywire.
     Some people say that Donald Trump is mad. And yet others worship him like a god.
      You, historian of the future, may ponder how a democratic nation such as the United States of America is - or maybe, as it may turn out, once was - elected such a man as its leader. Living at this moment, I can only tell you that these are strange times.
       And so, though we human beings may lose - or, as you read this, did lose- this moment to save the health of our planet and subsequently our own health and well-being, at this moment there is still hope on the horizon.
      There is a cadre of new young progressive leaders in our government who oppose Donald Trump and his careless, poisonous policies and have taken up the cause of global warming.
        One of these leaders,

...a strong, outspoken Representative named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortetz

... and a seasoned Senator named Edward Markey,

...have put forth legislation called the Green New Deal that would require the United States to begin transitioning from using carbon-producing energy sources to using only 100% renewable, zero- carbon emission energy sources.

However the Green New Deal was killed on the floor of the Senate, one of our governing bodies, by a power-hungry old man named Mitch McConnell, a sycophant who sucks his power from his support of Donald Trump and who wields tight-fisted control over all the Senators of his party .

      Sadly, the Green New Deal has been mocked not only by the disciples of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, but by moderate Americans who gasp that the Green New Deal is too radical a move.
       Meanwhile the planet drowns and burns.
       But next year, in 2020, there will be another election in this country, and we of the United States of America will have the opportunity to vote out Donald Trump and our current legislators and vote in a new President and leaders who who would take up the Green New Deal and join the rest of the world in the fight to stop global warming. And in this outcome - remote as it might be - lies our last hope.
     And though you, Future Archivist, know whether at this moment in time we humans chose to save our world for ourselves, our children, and for future generations, or whether we passed on to all of you a ruined, less sustainable, less productive, less pleasant and livable planet, this is the moment.
      This is the moment.

References
https://globalnews.ca/news/5818696/brazil-amazon-france-macron-fires-help/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/paris-climate-agreement-what-you-need-to-know/

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-America-stacks-up-greenhouse-gas-emissions-180963560/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/climate/trump-light-bulb-rollback.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/climate/trump-auto-pollution-california.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fclimate&action=click&contentCollection=climate&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=sectionfront

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_New_Deal

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Apocalypse Now: Fires

9/6/2019

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Fires detected over the past year, 2018-2019:

...Continued from yesterday:
    Dear Future Cyberchivist:
     By the year 2019 the world has become too hot.
     Human's excessive burning of fossil fuels - oil, coal, natural gas - over the last few decades to inexpensively feed our existence such as it is has caused the formation of a layer of carbon gases called greenhouse gases that traps too much heat of the sun in our lower atmosphere.
    This has subsequently raised the temperature of the earth to a dangerous level.

Hence our too-warm oceans now spawn behemoth hurricanes,

...that leave in their wake horrifying devastation and death.

And while coastal areas and islands in the sea are being ravaged by hurricanes and floods, fires of historic proportions are burning around the world.
Over the past few weeks, monster wild fires have been raging across Europe,

...in France,

...Spain,

...Greece,

...Turkey,

...and Russia.

Fires are flaming in the jungles of Indonesia and across the African Savanna.
Wildfires are raging in cold places where fires rarely burn: Greenland, Alaska, Siberia,

...the Arctic Circle.

     Meanwhile the layer of ice at the top of the world known as the Polar Ice Cap is melting. The sea-ice of the Arctic Ocean is melting. The glaciers, moving frozen rivers of ice in polar regions, are melting. All the ice in the world is melting.
      And here in the United States of America, my country, while Hurricane Dorian besieges our East Coast (see yesterday's post), our West Coast burst into flames yesterday from a new wild fire in the city of Murrieta, south of Los Angeles in the state of California.
        1,000 acres have already been destroyed by that fire.

      Scientists see this plague of fire as being driven by the earth's rising temperature; but the fires are in turn exacerbating the heating of the earth by releasing more heat-trapping greenhouse gases and killing the trees that help remove those climate-warming gases from the air.
       And so its a vicious circle: the global warming causes the fires which cause more global warming.
     But the most tragic and destructive fire currently ravaging the planet is, ironically, not one that has been cause by global warming, but one that has been set by humans.

The Amazon, the world's largest tropical rain forest,

...covers much of South America and has been called "The Lungs of the Earth" because its two-million square-miles of cooling trees and plant life release oxygen into the atmosphere,

...and remove carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping greenhouse gas that is a major cause of global warming. The thousands of rivers that flow through the Amazon bring cooling humidity to the planet and rain to the surrounding areas.
However in recent years cattle and soybean farmers in the country of Brazil, where most of the Amazon rain forest is located, have been deforesting the Amazon, cutting down the vegetation then burning the area to turn it from jungle to cattle grazing and farmland,

...to feed the world's voracious appetite for beef and soy.
Brazil is the world's largest exporter of beef cattle. The United States used to be the world's largest exporter of soy beans, which thrive on the fertile plains of the American West and Midwest.
However the current President of the United States of America,

...a foolish, greedy, power-hungry rich old man named Donald Trump (see yesterday's post),

...has plunged our country into a reckless trade war with China, to the end that China, the former consumer of a quarter of all soybeans produced in the United States, no longer buys soybeans from our farmers, but has turned to Brazil for its soy bean imports.
Subsequently American soy bean farmers are going bankrupt while their fertile fields lie fallow and Brazilian farmers are burning down more of the Amazon rain forest to produce more soy beans to send to China.

The fires set in the Amazon are up by 80% this year over previous years and the Amazon is being destroyed at a record-breaking rate..

Scientist warn that if the loss of the Amazon passes a certain threshold it may never recover and will no longer be a rain forest,

... but could become a savanna, a grassy area with few trees.

       In that case, we're told that the death of the Amazon rain forest would release billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere that had previously been absorbed by the rain forest vegetation, making the planet even hotter and dryer.
       And so, dear Future Archivist, that is where we stand today, September 6, 2019.
       Scientists tell us that if we are to preserve the planet as the green, verdant, life-filled, productive, beautiful gift given to us by our Creator we must act now to clean our atmosphere of fossil fuel emissions, clean our waters of the pollution, plastic and chemicals we've dumped into our rivers and oceans - well, that's another global problem besides the warming - and change our life styles to become better stewards of the Earth.
       Scientists say this is the moment. Some say it's already too late.
       Of course, only you of the future know.
       And yet at this moment in the history of humankind there is still hope on the horizon..
       To be continued...

References
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/climate/fire-amazon-africa-siberia-worldwide.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/world/americas/amazon-fire-brazil-bolsonaro.html

https://www.vox.com/2019/8/22/20828219/amazon-rainforest-wildfire-photos-fire-greenland

https://www.newsweek.com/nasa-images-show-africa-has-five-times-more-wildfires-burning-amazonheres-why-theyre-1456382

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/26/unprecedented-more-than-100-wildfires-burning-in-the-arctic-in-worst-ever-season

https://www.mintpressnews.com/MyMPN/goodbye-flying-rivers-amazon-rainforest-drying/

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-rainforest-experiencing-record-breaking-deforestation-2019-7

https://www.edf.org/climate/will-wildfires-keep-spreading-climate-change

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Apocalypse Now: Hurricanes And Floods

9/4/2019

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     Dear Future Cyberarchivist who, while sifting through ancient internet postings from bygone centuries in search of the history of humankind, has come across this blog chronicling the events and observations of life in the first quarter of the 21st Century AD:
      Two years ago I entered in this web log a post about a monstrous hurricane that hit Texas, a coastal state along the Southwestern seaboard of the country where I live, known today as the United States of America. (You may, if you wish and are able to, look up that post, entitled "Hurricane Harvey, 21st Century Behemoth" and dated 9/5/2017).
       At that time Hurricane Harvey was among the worst natural disasters to the hit our country, and surely the worst, most destructive hurricane, destroying much of the Texas city of Houston.
    This hurricane was a new weather phenomenon in its size and in that, unlike previous hurricanes, it moved very slowly so that it stayed for days hovering over the city of Houston,

...where it dumped over 50 inches of rain.

At the time Hurricane Harvey was considered to be the worst hurricane in history - it had been preceded in 2005 by previous record-setting Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the city of New Orleans, and in 2012 by Superstorm Sandy that hit the eastern coastal state of New Jersey - and forecasters pronounced Hurricane Harvey to be a once-in-500-years weather event.
But that very same year, 2017, two more equally monstrous hurricanes, Irma and Maria, defied the forecasters and wreaked havoc on the southeastern coastal state of Florida and some nearby islands in the Caribbean Sea,

... and laid waste to the island of Puerto Rico, killing over 3,000 people.

Two years later the island of Puerto Rico has still not recovered.

Almost exactly one year later, in early September of 2018, another monster hurricane called Hurricane Florence churned up in the too-warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean and slammed into the south eastern coastal states of North Carolina and South Carolina,

...then swirled in place, barely moving for days, causing in that area destruction and floods of historic proportion.

A month later the Florida coast, not yet recovered from the destruction wreaked by the unprecedented storms Irma and Maria from the previous year, was again hit, this time by a a hurricane even more savage than Hurricanes Irma and Maria,

....a monster from the sea called Hurricane Michael,

...which reached record wind speeds of 185 miles an hour,

...and set a new record for size, strength, and destruction.

And one year later, today, September 4, 2019, Hurricane Dorian, a behemoth hurricane every bit as destructive as Hurricane Michael was last year, is churning off the beleaguered south eastern coast of the United States, with predictions that it will make landfall soon.

But since its nascence in the Atlantic Ocean several days ago Hurricane Dorian has already laid siege to the Caribbean Island group to the southeast of the United States known as the Bahamas with 185-mile-an-hour winds and rains that have caused terrible devastation and loss of life.

   "Apocalyptic," "Unprecedented," "Truly catastrophic," "A historic tragedy," are the words that are being used by those who have seen the destruction of Hurricane Dorian to the Bahamas.
And yet for the past three years at the end of summer monster storms have been rising up out of the Atlantic Ocean, each one worse than the previous, each one breaking unprecedented records of size, strength, and destruction.
        And note this, Historian of the Future: we, the people of the planet Earth, know perfectly well the cause of these apocalyptic weather events.
      For years every reputable scientist on the planet has been reporting that climate change caused by global warming caused by humans' overuse of fossil fuels is the cause of, and will continue to be the cause of, these monster storms. According to scientists bigger, slower, wetter - and consequently stronger, more intense and more destructive - hurricanes are the product of the rising temperatures of the ocean in which they are born.
        And we know, we absolutely know on this day, September 4, 2019, how to stop this terrible climate trend that we have caused. We even have the the technology to to replace fossil fuels with clean energy sources.
       But our country, The United States of America, the most powerful country by far on the planet, is currently ruled by foolish old men devoured by greed and personal power, which they put far above the welfare of our nation and our world.

    These foolish old men refuse to stand up to the obscene wealth and power of the fossil fuel industry because they themselves are in the pockets of the rich men who rule that industry.
   And so, the worried scientists tell us, year after year the hurricanes will come and they will get worse as the planet warms. And we could stop this. But as of today we are doing nothing.
And while this part of the world is being destroyed by wind and water, other parts of the world are being destroyed by fire...
         To be continued...

References:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/02/world/americas/hurricane-dorian-bahamas.html

"A Warmer World Makes Hurricanes Wetter and More Intense,"
https://www.apnews.com/47d8e0bf05354260931de08ad9976a37

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"Ready Or Not"

9/2/2019

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Last Saturday night I saw the comedy horror flick "Ready or Not."

I recommend that you see it too, and soon - before everyone else has seen it and starts dishing out the spoilers - because I predict that this is a movie that is going to start picking up steam pretty quick.

The plot line follows the chain of events that unwinds when a girl raised in foster homes with no real family marries the man of her dreams,

...who happens to be an heir to the wealth of a
close-knit,
crazy -rich ― and mayhaps a bit
crazy ― family,

...whose fortune was built on the board- and card- game industry.
The new bride being eager to embrace her husband’s family as her own and for them to embrace her as their own, she gamely goes along with a family tradition that’s sprung on her on her wedding night: Any new person who enters the family must agree to play a game with the family on their first night.
However, things being seldom what they seem - in the movies as much as in real life – the young bride,

…brilliantly played by Australian actress Samara Weaving,

...who has mastered the art of bug-eyed disbelief and/or fear,

...soon learns that in this game the devil is in the details and that she’s acquired the in-laws from Hell – or at least closely affiliated with the place.
From there ensues a scary, splattery, game of cat-and-mouse ― or rather, a dozen cats and one mouse ― that is nonetheless mostly played for laughs.
And yet at one point in the movie there is a moment that transcends the horror and comedy when the beleaguered heroine asks her husband how in the world his relatives could do such awful things and he explains that it goes back to their childhoods:

"You'll do anything your family says is all right."

That line hit me as being so insightful and true that from that point on I started seeing this movie as more than just an escapist romp, but as offering a number of metaphors for real life, among them:
- How children can be shaped - even psychologically trapped - to believe and accept just about anything, no matter how awful or absurd.
- How hard - sometimes impossible - it is to escape those ties that bind us all, for better or worse, to our families.

- How some in-laws really put their children's or siblings' spouses through hell.

I also found themes of:

The sins of the father being visited not only on the sons, but down through generations,

...the weak confounding the mighty,

...and a family selling its collective soul.
Well, that could happen, right?

(Maybe Tiffany is the lucky one.)

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It Happened With And Without Pics

8/29/2019

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…Continued from yesterday:
      The day before yesterday after I lost my camera in the Los Angeles airport my heart did indeed feel a little broken. Of course it wasn’t over the camera, which can always be replaced, but over the pictures I’d taken during the past few weeks, which can’t.*
       My my daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren had been visiting Columbus the week before last and when they returned to Los Angeles on August 19 I followed them and stayed in LA for another week. So in losing my camera I lost all the pictures I'd snapped along the way during that time.
        Or so I thought.
        After I crawled up out of the dumps I remembered that I'd taken a few pictures on my phone and that there were a few more on the tail end of a memory card that I replaced in my camera with a new memory card a few days after my kids arrived.
       So from over the past few weeks I do in fact have a few pics of:
      1. A Visit to the Franklin Park Conservatory.
       On Thursday, August 15, Tom and I took the girls to visit one of the gems of Columbus, the Franklin Park Conservatory, a vast house of glass,

...filled with plants of every imaginable kind,

...among which are displayed the beautiful, whimsical works of Seattle glass artist Dale Chihuly.

Here are my grand daughters standing very still in hopes that one of the hundreds of butterflies flying around the butterfly forest might land on them.

But in spite of all the fascinating plants, art, environments, displays, and fun and educational activities for children at the Franklin Park Conservatory, including a "wetlands" area where the children could actually get wet, what my grand daughters most enjoyed was a patio at the far end of the park where there was located a few simple toys and some other children to play with.

2. A Visit to the Doctor's Office for a Flu Shot.

Before the flu shot,

...and after.

3. The First Day of First Grade.
My grand daughter walking down the path from her first-grade classroom, which is perched high on a hill, at the end of the first day of school.

4. Celebrating the first day of school.

We celebrated the first day of school by going out to dinner at Islands, a Manhattan Beach restaurant,

...where somebody ordered an Impossible Burger.

5. A Sunset Picture of Palm Trees.

6. The Denver Airport.
On my way home from Los Angeles after I'd lost my camera I snapped a couple of shots during my layover at the Denver airport, which looked to me like a shopping mall,

...and where I had some good shrimp fried rice at the City Wok.

    And I have no pics to show of:
    1. Our Visit to Amish Country.
     On Friday, August 16, Tom, myself, our daughter, son-in-law, grand daughters, our son and his girlfriend spent a night at the Berlin Resort in Amish Country,

...here's a picture of the Berlin Resort I took a couple of years ago,

...where the highlights for the children were playing in a miniature village on the hotel grounds and visiting an Amish petting farm and where the highlight for the adults was having not much of anything to do, which we all found rather nice.
     2. Shopping for School Supplies the Day Before School Began.
     3. My Other Grand Daughter's First Day of School.
     4. A Wonderful Bar Mitzvah - my first ever - that we attended on Saturday.
     5. Palm Trees.
      I took dozens of pictures of palm trees, intending to do a blog on the palms of Los Angeles, which are not in the least indigenous to this area but were schlepped over in the early 20th century from the Middle East and Mexico by land developers just to make the place look attractive to potential buyers.

Which they did.

Otherwise the palm trees of Los Angeles serve no purpose - they don't provide wood or shade or food or protection to the land from erosion - than to look pretty.

...which they do.

But, not having any of the pictures I took, I guess that's all I have to say about the palm trees. And about everything else I don't have pictures of.

*My son-in-law told me I should save all the photographs on my memory cards to The Cloud, which I’d subsequently been thinking about doing some day. I expect now would be a good time to stop thinking about doing it.

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Loss And Kindness At LAX

8/27/2019

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Today I lost my camera.
This actually isn’t the first time I’ve lost my camera,

...(see post from 4/8/2016, “The Little Mitzvah”),

      But it’s the first time I’ve ever lost it for good.
     I lost it today while hanging around the Los Angeles airport waiting for the first flight of my trip home to Columbus, Ohio. I’m pretty sure I lost it while sitting at gate 72A of the United terminal, chatting on the phone with my daughter for 11 minutes. After I hung up I left gate 72 A, where there were free seats, and headed to my gate, 73A, where there weren’t, and made another phone call standing up, this one about 17 minutes long. Then I went to the rest room.
       It was upon exiting the rest room that I realized I didn’t have my camera on me. It wasn’t back in the rest room. I returned to where I’d been sitting at gate 72A, which seat was now occupied by a nice older guy who replied, sadly, that he hadn’t seen my camera.
      But I was sure I lost my camera between the 11-minute call at that seat at gate 72A and the 17-minute call at gate 73A.
        I asked the gate attendants at both 72A and 73A if anyone had turned in a camera at either gate, but no one had. However the gate attendants were so kind and concerned, they even left their posts to collaborate and they looked around, made calls, and one called the airport police, who speedily sent over an officer. The officer, a middle-aged African American man, had me walk back with him to the lost and found so he could check. By then my flight was boarding and I was nervous about leaving my gate, but he told me not to worry, that it would only take a minute to look, that I’d be back in time.
        He didn’t find my camera in the lost and found, but he tried to encourage me, telling me that it still might turn up, maybe later, and he took down my address and phone number and assured me that if my camera was turned in it would be sent to me. He told me that if it turned up in the next few minutes before the flight left he’d board the plane and bring it to me.
       I wish I would have gotten his name and the names of the gate attendants who also dropped what they were doing to help me, but I was too upset and focusing too hard on trying not to show how upset I was. Still, in the eye abides the heart, and judging from the solicitous concern shown by those around me, I think my eye must have been giving away my heart, which felt a little broken.
       But I’m going to write a letter to the Los Airport - however one manages that - and ask if the people who tried to help me find my camera today can be located and thanked for me.
      If anyone ever says that Los Angeles International airport, one of the biggest, busiest, most crowded airports on the planet is an impersonal, uncaring place I will surely beg to differ.
To be continued…

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