Mary Soderstrom's Blog, page 99

[image error] The New York Times has an opinion piece today arguing that rebuilding along the New York and New Jersey shoreline in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy is not a good idea.   "Retreat from the Beach" it's called, and it points out that people know what locations are chancey, and have a for a long time.

"Respecting the power of these storms is not new," writes Orrin H. Pilkey. "American Indians who occupied barrier islands during the warm months moved to the mainland during the winter storm season. In the early days of European settlement in North America, some communities restricted building to the bay sides of barrier islands to minimize damage. In Colombia and Nigeria, where some people choose to live next to beaches to reduce exposure to malarial mosquitoes, houses are routinely built to be easily moved. "

My mother, who loved the beach and delighted in living not far from one in San Diego, also was careful to buy a house on high ground.  "You can build on a swamp, but that doesn't make it any less a swamp," she said many times.  It was good advice decades and decades ago,  and it becomes more pertinent as sea levels rise with climate change.

BTW, the picture is of Sunset Cliffs, where she loved to sit and watch the surf, but where she would never have bought.  [image error]

Chrystia Freeland says that the top .01 per cent control about 8 per cent of the world's wealth.  So crazy that's is probably true!  Check out her interview on CBC's The Current  or her book. The Plutocrats.

So why should anybody be surprised that, finally, protests against austerity for everybody else are coming together in Southern Europe? 

Maybe the next revolutionary slogan should be: ordinary folk of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but you bosses.[image error]

Elin and her friends are heading for Victoria today, to round out their Western tour.  They got a lovely feature in Vancouver's Georgia Straight , and sounds like their audiences have been most appreciative.

Jeanne and Emmanuel have done quite nicely in Elin's absence, but he's doing school workshops this week, so Jeanne has come to spend some quality and quantity time with Grandma and Grandpa (or Mana and Bada as she calls us: go figure.)  That means that my posts will be sporadic this week while we have a good time together....[image error]

Don't know the name of this shrub, but it has been spectacular over the last week or so.  The leaves are falling now, but for a while they blazed.

Gorgeous, and perhaps a harbinger, which we didn't see, of the end of the long slog toward a slightly left  of centre election in the US.


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The results of Tuesday's election seem to show that the appeal and influence of the Christian right wing, both Catholic and Protestant, is waning.  Maybe not a lot, but enough so thata Obama won as did measures to legalize same-sex marriage and decriminalize marijuana possession.  The New York Times today has an interesting analysis of this trend.

But if the US is becoming more secular, will that have any effect on the striking scientific nay-saying that shows up in attitudes toward evolution?  A poll released last summer showed that 46 per cent of Americans believe in Creationism,  32 percent believed in theistic evolution and 15 percent believed in evolution without any divine intervention.

There's a lot of talk about making Ameicans cutting edge when it comes to science and technology, but when one of the foundation blocks of scientific thinking is so roundly denied, one can't have much hope.

BTW,  61 percent of Canadians and 69 per cent of Britons think human beings evolved from simpler life forms.[image error]

[image error] One of the things that fascinated me in my research for Making Waves: The Continuing Portuguese Adventure was the evidence of contact on a nearly-equal basis between some Europeans and Africans  following the great European wave of exploration. 

For example, after the Portuguese reached Kongo at the end of the 15th century, Dom Affonso, the Kongolese king, sent his son and other members of his family to study in Portugal, and he himself wrote quite acceptable Portuguese.  

And  the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin was the grandson of a man from an African royal family (sometimes recorded as being from Chad, sometimes Abyssinia), who was captured, sent to the Turkish capital of Constantinople in the mid-eighteenth century, and then sold to the Russian Tsar.  His elite status was recognized from the beginning; he was sent to France for military training and ended up marrying into a wealthy land-owning family.

 These contacts left traces in a number of works of art, many of which are on display at recently opened exhibit ‘Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe,’ at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.  The portrait of the  thoughtful woman above dates from 1580: she was a slave but her steady, intelligent gaze says much about her character and about what the painter (probably Anibale Caracci) thought about her.  [image error]

First question of the day: how will Obama convince the Republican majority House to sign on to his plans?
 Probably the only way that  will happen is if the Republicans themselves change.

Second question of the day: Will they?Maybe, with two "ifs." If they decide to change in order to appeal to a broader base, and if they realize that big money can't buy elections. Place your bets, Mesdames, Messieurs.
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How does Google know when my birthday is?  I have very deliberately avoided listing it on Facebook (although apparently you can find it: a friend did yesterday) and in replying to those who ask to include me on their birthday calendars.

Nevertheless, this morning when I opened Google I was greeted with "Google" spelled out in cakes and candles.  I presume they got that information from my registry info but I certainly never gave permission for them to use it in any way.

Bah humbug![image error]

Seems that Paul Krugman was in Singapore yesterday (must have voted in an advance poll or by mail.)   He had some most interesting things to say, as quoted in the Bloomberg newsletter:

“If it’s possible, we could use some modest additional stimulus, mostly in the form of aid to state and local governments.

“A lot of what’s required right now is just plain not doing anything stupid that derails the recovery. We can count on President Obama not to do anything stupid.

“We have a still very extreme Republican party so legislation is going to be very difficult to pass and there are going to be sharp limits on what Obama can do. To the extent that he is going to have big achievements in his second term, it’s mostly because he’s already passed the legislation.” [image error]

Mitt Romney helped Obama a bit with his stupid comment about Big Bird, but what really won the election was slogging in the trenches, that is work on the ground.

You have to connect with the voters, have to be on the game all the time if you want to get them out to the polls.

Occasionally there are crazy sweeps, like the Orange Wave in Canada in 2011, or times when public enthusiasm runs ahead of the ground game.  That happened in 2008 with the Obama victory, but this time around it was just plain, hard work.

There's a lesson here for all of us political junkies.  Now let us hope that the Obama team turns it attention to wresting the country away from the Republicans in Congress, and listening to people like Paul Krugman who really have the interests of the country and the world at heart.  [image error]