Quote: “With our economy the way it is, with California going to hell in a basket, I should be excited?! Doesn’t make sense to me.”Me neither, lady.
Fact: This Whittier woman, the 87-year-old next door neighbor of the “miracle” octuplets mother would have been about eight years old when the Great Depression hit about eight decades ago. Many of us remember being eight years old fairly vividly. I sure do.
See the short segment on the BBC World News YouTube channel (duration = 1:58) for an example of how this story is being covered abroad.
Yes, this controversy has been festering for a while now, but this lady’s reaction is my favorite aspect of the story so far; she’s such a breath of fresh California air compared to, say, all the back-peddling fertility specialist experts.
Here is some not-so-fresh air. The image at right depicts carbon monoxide (not CO2) emissions over South America in September 2004 as recorded from NASA’s National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Terra Satellite. See NASA’s excellent Visible Earth portal for more stunning images.
A question: Do crisis refugees have higher fertility rates, on average? Consider the case of the Indian Ocean rim baby boom/boomlet soon after the December 2004 earthquake/tsunami.
This paper might offer some insights: “Mortality and Fertility Interactions” [PDF]. This was published by the Population Research Center, National Opinion Research Center (NORC), & The University of Chicago around 2003.
Now, as far as the octuplets lifestyle saga goes, I wonder if the bread-winning Iraqi grandfather who brags about his wealth plans to support his family with U.S. contract money for Iraq, courtesy of Bush and his neocon crony club of amateur nation builders. (Sorry for that dig, Dubya apologist holdouts. We know your disgraced figurehead has left for the warm climes of Crawford, but his legacy is to be found everywhere nowadays in These United States.)
5 comments:
All of those carbon monoxide traces in the satellite image are from all of the chainsaws cutting down the rainforests, lungs of the earth.
Just crazy, isn't it?
It sure is.
I hear lots of chainsaws here in slumburbia during the warmer months. People around here seem to be afraid of large mature healthy trees for some reason.
It is a combination of anti-arboreal PEPCO/Asplundh propaganda and the fact that we have so many refugees from slash-and-burn subtropical deforestation zones that have never lived next to a tree more than 30 years old.
It appears that the BBC downgraded the view privileges on that news video to private. Apparently too low-brow or something.
Although I think this story is very relevant, if only for its symbolic potential.
Back before the County started promoting preservation of our Urban Forest, we used to be able to tell who were the "immigrant" families
First thing they would do when they moved in was to cut down every last tree in the yard, and generally most of the bushes as well.
Then they'd pave the yard.
Then they'd illegally park their work fleet on the paved yard...
But it's not just the "immigrants", there are folks from elsewhere in the country who just seem to hate the native trees, never seen an oak they didn't hate, etc etc.
“But it's not just the ‘immigrants,’ there are folks from elsewhere in the country who just seem to hate the native trees, never seen an oak they didn't hate, etc etc.”
Indeed. A lot of the long-term residents have moved out of this neck of the deforested woods, so I forget about all the other demographics of tree-haters.
Why, the nouveau riche tree-killers of Potomac, for instance.
Here’s an item on a Potomac tree butcher from the 1980s.
And here’s a much more prominent Potomac tree butcher from the 2000s: Dan “Chainsaw me a river view” Snyder.
Luckily there are enough local tree loving elites with noblesse oblige when it comes to Mother Nature.
But in a housing boom-to-bust free-for-all like that of the 1990s-2000s in MoCo, you see high-consumption, slash-and-burn lifestyles on ostentatious display all across the socioeconomic spectrum. And the people who adopt these unsustainable consumption habits think that status-symbol materialism will always compensate for whatever other inadequacies they may display. That’s why it’s such a joy to have these vacuous, aggressive, and arrogant people as neighbors, co-workers, and fellow road-ragers.
We need to start to learn from places like Jersey. There the residents in overcrowded suburbs don’t even pretend to get along. If so many of us hate each others guts, why even start out with the veneer of liberal let’s-make-nice? It sure didn’t work for me. Speaking in high-school Spanish and liberal-speak while trying to be neighborly with an abundance of do-gooder tolerance just made my neighbors distrust me even more and take advantage of my courtesy/patience to boot.
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