BBC Radio 4 this month is airing a new, sixth series of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, 40 years after the broadcast of the first series in 1978. Fans in the United States might have an easier time downloading the podcast from a client based here rather than trying to listen directly from BBC Radio 4. The Stitcher podcast client, for instance, offers several BBC Radio 4 programs, among them Comedy of the Week. Enthusiastic fans of the series will find a way to listen.
The complete first series from BBC Radio 4 is available for listening, and it truly does the best job with the material of all the different formats, radio or television or print or motion picture. Douglas Adams wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for the 1978 radio presentation, and the other formats followed. The BBC made it into a very good television program in 1981. The 2005 motion picture was not popular. In this country, public radio rebroadcast the BBC Radio 4 series, and public television did the same for the BBC television adaptation.
A representation of the personal electronic device used by Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Computer graphic by Nicosmos.
From the 1981 BBC television adaptation of The Hitchihker’s Guide to the Galaxy, protagonist Arthur Dent meets the planet designer, Slartibartfast.
Rebroadcast in this country of original BBC radio programming is nothing new now, but in the 1970s and 80s it was fairly novel because at that time there was still some original programming being produced for radio by American public broadcasters and private outfits. There was Earplay on NPR, which were dramas based on original material and adaptations, and there was the CBS Radio Mystery Theater, a program of thrillers. Those American radio programs shut down in the 1980s, and since then very little original programming has come out of America. Britain, on the other hand, has a comparatively lively radio program production lineup, and as proof there is the sixth series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (with a cameo by renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking no less), airing in March 2018, forty years on from the first series. Fans of the show on this side of the Atlantic are glad the BBC radio crews are still at it, and if the latest series is anywhere near as enjoyable a listen as the first series, then their efforts will have been well worthwhile.
— Techly
The evangelical Christianity we are familiar with today in the United States does not resemble what it was prior to the Civil War, when evangelical Protestants promoted social justice issues such as the end of slavery. Slavery was the primary issue that divided some Protestant denominations, the Baptists more than any others because of the strong presence of Baptists in the South. Rancor over the issue within the Baptist denomination eventually led to its division before the Civil War into Northern and Southern sects, a division which has continued to this day.
Le bon pasteur (The Good Shepherd), a painting from between 1886 and 1894 by the French artist James Tissot (1836-1902).
When people think of evangelical Christiansactive in modern political life, largely in conservative Republican circles, they are primarily thinking of Southern Baptists, because that is the denomination which has dominated politics and culture in the South since the Civil War, and it is from the South in the 1970s that arose the major political and cultural movement known first as the Moral Majority, and since then mostly known as the Christian Right. For over a hundred years, the dominance of Southern Baptists over life in the South was as close to a state sanctioned religion as we have gotten in this country, or at least in one part of it. Other Protestant denominations in the South, such as the Pentecostals, have been a part of modern evangelical Christianity, but the Southern Baptists have always been the major players.
As the de facto state religion of the South in the Jim Crow era and beyond, Southern Baptists were more interested in preserving white privilege and power than in promoting the kind of social justice Jesus advocated in His teachings. The Southern Baptists chose to ignore many of those ideas from the New Testament, lest they give black folks unsavory and rebellious ideas, and instead focused on the rewards waiting for the saved in the afterlife, where it wouldn’t cost the earthly white leaders anything in money or power. As the South remained rather isolated and more conservative than the rest of the country throughout the first two thirds of the twentieth century, there were further fractures within Protestant denominations, with the more liberal Northern sects increasingly considered the mainline portions of each denomination, and the Southern sects more and more lumped together as evangelical Christians, but with the twist that these evangelicals were largely white conservatives more vested in the status quo than in change for social justice.
President Jimmy Carter addresses the Southern Baptist Convention in Atlanta, GA, in June 1978. Evangelical Christians were lukewarm at best regarding Mr. Carter, and in the 1980 election they turned him out in favor of the more conservative Ronald Reagan. Since then, Mr. Carter has devoted himself to humanitarian causes around the world, including Habitat for Humanity, all of which earned him the honor of a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
President George W. Bush meets with the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention in the Oval Office in October 2006. Pictured with the President are Dr. Morris Chapman, left, Dr. Frank Page, and his wife Dayle Page. Mr. Bush the Younger was more to the liking of evangelical Christians than any president of the past 40 years other than Ronald Reagan. White House photo by Paul Morse.
When the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in the 1970s went after Bob Jones University, a private evangelical school in Greenville, South Carolina, to revoke its tax exempt status on account of not adhering to Civil Rights era desegregation laws, Southern Baptists, which by that time had become indistinguishable from evangelicals, were catalyzed into action, forming the Moral Majority in order to take an activist role in national politics. They added abortion later as a rallying cause and it also served to mask the initial, primary impetus for organizing politically, which was the affront by federal interference into their pocketbooks and their white supremacist fiefdom. From the 1970s until today evangelical Christians, the Christian Right, have been a force in national politics, and never has their participation been more perverse at first glance than their unwavering support for the current president with all his defiantly un-Christian character flaws, but with an understanding of their history it begins to make sense, though it doesn’t make it right.
— Vita
Growing ginger (Zingiber officinale) is not all that difficult in most parts of the United States as long as the grower understands that except in the warmest zones of the country, ginger is unlikely to produce mature rhizomes. Ginger has a nearly year long growing season, and in three fourths of the country that means it will only produce baby ginger rhizomes even with assistance from the grower to keep the plant warm at the beginning and the end of the growing season. Baby ginger is catching on in culinary circles, however, where it can be used to lighter effect than the full grown type.
Ginger plants (Zingiber officinale). Photo by Ramjchandran.
The portion of a ginger plant generally used in cooking and medicine is the rhizome, which is technically an underground stem, but to most people it appears to be a tuber or root, and for practical purposes it makes little difference to them what that part of the plant is called. Like a potato, the ginger rhizome has eyes which are starting points for new growth and indicate to gardeners where to divide the rhizome when propagating the plant. Cut up the rhizome with one eye to each section and then plant the sections. In cases where a gardener is concerned with growing only enough ginger for home consumption, the simplest method of planting is one section of rhizome each to wide, shallow pots, which the gardener can move easily from indoors to outdoors and then back again over the course of the 8 or 9 month growing season.
Why go to even that much trouble for a non-native, tropical plant? There is after all a distant relative that is native to North America, known as wild ginger (Asarum canadense), which Native Americans had used in the past as a spice and a medicine, much like its Asian relative. The difference is that scientists have determined American wild ginger can be poisonous, while Asian ginger is safe to consume. In addition to its salutary effect in food and drink recipes, many people believe Asian ginger has anti-inflammatory, anti-arthritic, and anti-nausea properties. Scientists have not necessarily agreed with all those assessments, though they recognize that in the amounts typically consumed by most people there is no harm to eating ginger spiced foods or imbibing ginger infused drinks.
Wild ginger plants (Asarum canadense). Photo by Michael Wolf.
A ginger (Zingiber officinale) rhizome on a Delft blue European porcelain plate. Photo by Lucyin.
Of all the South Asian and East Indies spices that are well known to Europeans from earliest trading days, only ginger rewards the gardener who attempts growing it outside its native region or outside tropical climate zones without resort to expensive greenhouses. Start it indoors in late winter on a sunny windowsill and keep it there until mid-spring, when it should be safe to move it outdoors, but always with an eye toward nighttime temperature dips. In the fall, bring the potted plants back indoors and start harvesting baby ginger to last the winter while enjoying the beauty of an unusual houseplant with a tropical feel and a warm, spicy scent.
— Izzy
Investigative journalist Robert Parry, founder and editor of the website ConsortiumNews, died on January 27 after a series of strokes precipitated by pancreatic cancer. He was 68.
Adding “investigative” to Mr. Parry’s job description of journalist gives an insight into the principles he applied to his work. Aren’t all journalists investigators in some way or other? No. Some are content rewriting press releases. Robert Parry was not one of those, and for that he paid a price in getting pushed out of working for mainstream media outlets. He would never be one of those television talking heads claiming journalist credentials while making millions of dollars for asking trivial questions of celebrities about their plastic surgeries. He came by his credentials through hard work looking into things that matter.
President Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office on November 25, 1986, with Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of State George Shultz, Attorney General Ed Meese, and Chief of Staff Don Regan, discussing remarks he intended to make at a press briefing on the Iran-Contra affair.
Robert Parry was best known for breaking the story in the second term of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s that eventually became known as the Iran-Contra affair. The Contras were Nicaraguan rebels or terrorists, depending on point of view, who sought to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Earlier in the decade, the United States Congress had passed legislation making it more difficult for the Reagan administration to meddle in Nicaraguan politics by supporting the Contras. The administration circumvented the law by selling arms to Iran, a purported enemy, and funneling the profits to the Contras.
Mr. Parry also wrote about how the CIA appeared to be enabling drug trafficking by the Contras in order to give them more material support, though it was another investigative journalist, Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News who explored the story in greater detail in 1996. In the early 1990s, Mr. Parry wrote about another aspect of the Reagan years that remained in shadows, which was the possibility of a deal between Reagan’s campaign team and the Iranian government to delay releasing the 52 American hostages Iran had held from November 4, 1979, until after the U.S. presidential election in 1980. Iran released the hostages on January 20, 1981, when Reagan was sworn in as president. Jimmy Carter lost his bid for re-election in large part due to the poor economy, and at least in small part due to the continuation of the hostage crisis.
Because of Mr. Parry’s habit of pursuing stories like that, he wore out his welcome with the corporate media outlets he had been working for, such as Newsweek and the Associated Press, and in 1995 he started Consortium News, possibly the first independent online news site written and edited by a reputable, professionally trained journalist. Since then online news sites have proliferated, which has been both good and bad for readers. It has been good for the obvious reason that more choice means a discerning reader is likely to find a trustworthy site delivering quality journalism, and bad because more choice means the non-discerning reader is likely to find a site masquerading as news that serves up opinions which reinforce existing prejudices. Add to that the algorithm of a social media platform like Facebook which ensures readers see more of what they want to see, and it’s an uphill battle for the truth.
Cover of the Kerry Committee December 1988 final report of an investigation by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations into the possible role of the Nicaraguan Contras in drug trafficking.
Robert Parry surely understood the maxim that we are all entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts. He also understood that some facts, known collectively as the truth, were unpleasant for all kinds of reasons, chief among them that they afflicted the comfortable, another maxim. And to underscore how old school was his journalistic integrity, never mind his early appearance on the digital frontier, Mr. Parry knew his first job was to tell the truth, and if that meant he wasn’t invited on the Washington, D.C. cocktail club circuit, then so be it. People like him don’t end up making millions of dollars, and don’t realistically expect to, but to the readers who valued his services he was one in a million.
— Ed.
It’s not easy leaving one home for another one far off, as anyone who has ever done it can attest. If moving thousands of miles away from family and friends is difficult now, when electronic communication allows people to keep in touch, it was even more difficult in past centuries, when leaving behind familiars often meant permanent dislocation without any further contact. The emigrants, particularly if they were poor, had to be brave to make the momentous decision to leave, and then again to establish a new home.
Economics and politics are the biggest drivers of emigration, even for those leaving the United States. American government agencies don’t keep exact numbers on the amount of people leaving the country, but estimates over the past twenty years are that the number of Americans living abroad either on a temporary or permanent basis have more than doubled, from four million to nine million. People who live abroad temporarily, but longer term than tourists, are considered expatriates. The status of expatriates is usually fluid, with some eventually becoming citizens in their adopted country, and some returning to the United States.
The Emigrants’ Last Sight of Home, an 1858 painting by Richard Redgrave (1804-1888).
As hard as it is to pin down statistics on American expatriates, it seems a reasonable inference from the increasing number of articles published online and elsewhere touting overseas retirement destinations that more Americans than ever are deciding to live abroad when they have a fixed, mostly predictable income. For some of these people, the political situation in the United States may play a role in their decision, as this country more and more resembles the banana republics derided in the past, with obscene income inequality, police state tactics employed by the governing class, and the mass of people working in a condition of debt peonage. Many of the countries listed as desirable retirement destinations are in Latin America, and the reasoning among retirees may be that since the United States has come to resemble those countries politically, at least the change for them won’t be that great on that account, and their money will go further.
It’s more complicated than that, of course, because for centuries the United States interfered in the politics and economics of Latin America, which it regarded patronizingly as its back yard. Latin American countries have lately been working to disengage themselves from the most sordid aspects of American interference, with the most extreme example being Venezuela. At any rate, Latin America is popular amongst expatriate American retirees looking to get the most out of their pension dollars. Europe is generally more expensive, with the more dysfunctional economies of southern Europe offering better deals. Southern Europe also offers warmer weather and high quality health care that is on a par with the rest of Europe. American retirees are more likely, therefore, to emigrate to the sunny beaches of Spain than the frigid fjords of Norway.
Director John Huston, an American expatriate for much of his life, in a cameo appearance early in his 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, with Humphrey Bogart. The film was about a trio of down on their luck American expatriates in Mexico. Poverty is a miserable existence anywhere, but it causes even more anxiety among those who are adrift from the support of friends, family, and familiar surroundings. The magazine articles for retirees typically mention a few destinations in southeast Asia, and hardly any spots in Africa or the rest of Asia. Presumably the heavy slant toward Latin America and Europe is because those places offer less of a culture shock to most Americans along with the aforementioned economic advantages and similar political climate. That slant also assumes the major part of the readers are of Caucasian European descent, which is not unreasonable considering American demographics, particularly of the middle class that can afford a comfortable retirement, or at least expects to do so if they can stretch their dollars overseas. Their numbers are increasing.
The propaganda in this country has long been that everyone in the world wanted to come here, and that we could pick and choose who got in. With some quibbles, that was mostly true for a long time. Now that may no longer be the case; now not as many people elsewhere may be attracted to these shores, while more people here may be looking elsewhere. For now, it is the people with dependable income, retirees among them, who are leaving. They are the brave ones, and as the political and economic situation in America swirls down a dark hole, and despite the ever more shrill propaganda about how everything is great, just great, more will surely follow to make their home elsewhere.
― Ed.
Lee-Jackson Day is not a holiday that is generally recognized throughout the United States, and even in Virginia, where the holiday originated, most people are unaware of it. Yet it persists, tied to the Friday before the third Monday in January, which happens to be Martin Luther King Jr. Day. For nearly 20 years at the end of the twentieth century, the two holidays were bundled together in Virginia on the same day, making it an even more peculiar observance. Since the separation of Lee-Jackson day to the Friday preceding Martin Luther King Jr. Day, some of the minority of people who regularly note its passing are the state workers who get Friday off, and therefore a very long weekend on account of the national holiday the following Monday.
Giving some state workers an extra day off is a poor excuse for continuing a holiday that most people have little enthusiasm for observing. There are small groups of Southern history enthusiasts who gather in Lexington, Virginia, every year on the long weekend (long, but not very long, because it includes Friday, but generally not Monday), where both Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson are buried. Washington and Lee University, a private institution in Lexington, and the place where General Lee was president from shortly after the Civil War until his death in 1870, only recently started distancing itself from the Confederate memorializing controversy by refusing to lend its facilities to these Southern history groups and by canceling classes on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
The Southern history enshrined by observances like Lee-Jackson Day and by monuments to the Confederacy is a peculiarly blinkered history, however, and for enthusiasts of that narrow vision to act perplexed when some other folks object is either daftly naive or disingenuous, more likely the latter. In the Jim Crow days of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when many of the Confederate memorializing was first officially sanctioned as a means of reminding everyone who was still really in charge in the South, fans of the Confederacy could be quite open about their views and not be concerned over anyone’s objections. It was easier then to point out such people for what they were, even if it was harder to do anything about it.
Arlington House, former home of Robert E. Lee and his wife, Mary Anna Randolph Custis, with Section 32 of Arlington National Cemetery in the foreground. Photo by Protoant.
Martin Luther King Jr. was the civil rights leader most instrumental in changing all that in the middle of the twentieth century, and for his accomplishments he has been nationally recognized with a holiday on the third Monday in January. Discrimination against black people was certainly nor restricted to the South, but since it was there where it was most culturally and institutionally ingrained, that was where Dr. King held his rallies, boycotts, and marches.
The regional holiday of Lee-Jackson Day is a holdover from the Jim Crow era, and for the people of that time, who could be open about their white supremacist views, the holiday certainly represented something less innocuous than the claims today’s Southern history enthusiasts make for it. Some of those Confederacy fans understand that, but they also understand that these days it behooves them to be less open about their views, in great part due to the legacy of Dr. King. Nowadays they are often as not passive-aggressive in defiance of others’ objections to their glorification of white supremacy, saying “Oh, does this [Confederate statue, battle flag, etc.] bother you? I’m so sorry to bruise your delicate feelings, Snowflake.”
Such people may be ignorant of the view of their hero, General Lee, who did not approve of memorializing the Confederacy because it would prevent wounds opened by the war from healing. It could be, however, that since they are not the ones who suffered any wounds, they lack the imagination or the empathy to understand Lee’s sentiment. Then there those who recognize the wounds in others and seek to keep them open, even salting them occasionally, because it gives them power or satisfies their spitefulness. Those are the ones who held rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, in July and August of last year. Everyone should consider honestly then whose interests are served by propping up outdated and outmoded Confederate memorializing, whatever form it takes, and by relating a history of stars and bars while glossing over shackles and whips.
― Vita
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”
― from The Federalist Papers, No. 51, by James Madison.
United States Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a fan of civil asset forfeiture, and last year he reinstated the federal partnership with state and local authorities that had been ended by the previous Attorney General, Eric Holder. That partnership allows state and local police to share seized assets with federal authorities if they claim even the flimsiest trespass on federal law by the forfeited assets (in a pretzel-like twist of legal reasoning, it is the assets themselves that are accused, not the person or persons who own them). Engaging the federal government in this way allows state and local police to bypass their civil asset forfeiture laws because they are superseded by federal laws, which are often more favorable to the police. The feds then give the state and local cops a kickback of all or part of the proceeds. This is called “equitable sharing” or, more cutely, “federal adoption”.
Getting pulled over for a minor traffic violation while carrying a large amount of cash can lead to a nightmare civil asset forfeiture scenario for the driver, regardless of the legitimacy of his or her claim to the cash. Only the rich can afford to fight city hall in court. Photo by photoo.uk.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
― The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, with the due process clause.
It’s hard to imagine how the law can be more clear than this: ” . . . nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law . . . ” To be doubly sure, there is another due process clause in the 14th Amendment. Yet here we are, with police abusing the citizenry by stealing from them, sometimes without even a formal charge filed, but only on mere suspicion of a crime having been committed with the asset or assets, and keeping the proceeds in order to augment their budget. There are slight differences in the law from state to state, but in many states the police are allowed to keep seized assets, which also clearly violates the last clause of the Fifth Amendment, the takings clause. It’s impossible to imagine a more blatant case of conflict of interest, adding insult to the injury of the initial seizure.
In a civil asset forfeiture case, the burden of proof is often on the citizen whose assets were seized, not the authorities who took them. In order to retrieve seized assets, a citizen must prove they were not used in the commission of a crime or are a result of criminal activity, and this proof must be forthcoming even when the police have not filed a charge in court. Apparently the only thing to prevent the police from more flagrantly abusing the civil asset forfeiture laws more than they do is the basic decency and good character of the majority of them. But men are not angels, as James Madison wisely observed, and to allow these laws to remain on the books is to invite corruption of the police and further erosion of public trust in government.
Cash found in a freezer at the Washington, D.C. home of Congressman William J. Jefferson of Louisiana. This photo was entered as evidence in July 2009 showing what was seized in August 2005 from the freezer of the home of then Rep. William Jefferson, D-New Orleans. Jurors in the trial of Jefferson, who lost his re-election bid in 2008 while under indictment for bribery, saw photos of the infamous frozen cash. It was wrapped in $10,000 increments and concealed in boxes of Pillsbury pie crust and Boca burgers. Photo by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
A flagrant case of abuse occurred last year in Jeff Sessions’s home state of Alabama, in the small town of Castleberry in the south central part of the state. To generate revenue for his little town, the mayor hatched a plan for taking advantage of Alabama’s very favorable civil asset forfeiture laws by confiscating cash and property from citizens and visitors alike, but especially out of state visitors, often using entirely invented suspicions. The police chief made no bones about it on public forums, where he joked about how the bogus money grabbing had been a windfall for the town of Castleberry and its nascent police department, now flush with fancy new equipment and patrol cars. Eventually bad publicity caught up with the mayor and police chief of Castleberry, and they were hit with a lawsuit. On a national scale, what happened in Castleberry doesn’t amount to much other than a clear distillation of everything wrong with civil asset forfeiture.
Attorney General Sessions, waving the bloody shirt of the War on Drugs, nevertheless wants to continue civil asset forfeiture and expand it, if he can get away with it. His motivations are unimportant other than how they forecast all the draconian policies he’s likely to see through while he is in charge of the Department of Justice. The important thing is that he has opened up one of the very few issues that attracts a bipartisan consensus in Congress, and that has been for less civil asset forfeiture, not more.
Highway robbery in Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film Barry Lyndon, with Ryan O’Neal as Redmond Barry. Under America’s civil asset forfeiture laws, the gold guineas in Barry’s purse, and the horse he rode in on, could be forfeited to the robbers, or police. The strange history of this policy of official stealing from the innocent and the guilty alike also matters little, except perhaps to those appellate court judges who fall back on referring to obscure precedents of legal reasoning as convoluted and ultimately irrelevant as the debates of clerics who wondered how many angels might dance on the head of a pin. Congress can take this matter away from both Sessions and the judges by enacting legislation rolling it back. Really it should be swept away entirely, along with the War on Drugs it purportedly assists, as failed policies which have corrupted the police and eroded public trust every bit as much and in the same way as Prohibition did in the early decades of the twentieth century, when civil asset forfeiture first became a major police tactic. It seems we never learn lessons once and for all, but have to forever relearn them.
― Ed.
There’s a movie out recently starring Hugh Jackman as the 19th century impresario P.T. Barnum, and it’s called The Greatest Showman. The script appears to play fast and loose with history, for one thing imposing a modern sensibility about sideshow freaks on people like Barnum perhaps, and on many in Barnum’s audiences certainly, who would have found modern ideas about respect for diversity bizarre and laughable. We, of course, have come around to feeling the sensibilities of people in the past regarding respect for diversity and individual rights were bizarre and cruel. It’s not clear from a review alone if the movie takes the same anachronistic approach to respect for animal rights.
In the last year, after many years of criticism of it’s inclusion of animal entertainment acts in its circus, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus folded its tents for good and went out of business. The criticism led to steadily declining ticket sales as well as loss of revenue from being shut out entirely from some localities where legislation had been enacted to ban the kind of animal entertainment acts that had long been part of circuses, even before P.T. Barnum came along with his great showmanship.
Jacko and Bess, two mandrill monkeys with the Olympia Circus in December 1931. Some people find this sort of thing entertaining. Note the leashes.
An African elephant at the Milwaukee County Zoo. Photo by Ronincmc.
Zoos may start closing in large numbers soon, after several of them around the world closed in the past decade, citing the hypocrisy of pretending zoos provided means for animal conservation and public education, when really they represent a more staid form of the entertainment seen in circus animal acts. Zoos have always dressed themselves up in a veneer of respectable science, often with little evidence to back it up. Zoos have played Dr. Jekyll to the Mr. Hyde played by the rest of humankind in its voracious appetite for resources and habitats, displacing and killing wildlife at will. It’s past time to go beyond trying to conserve wildlife from the rapaciousness of Mr. Hyde and to stand up to him and then relegate him to irrelevancy. Meanwhile, no one asked the animals what they wanted, but it’s clear from the more expressive of them that they are miserable in their zoo enclosures, however well disguised those are from steel cages.
These are steps in the right direction, and naturally it will take some time to redress the other wrongs against animals that people have perpetrated through malevolence, neglect, and a misguided sense of divinely bestowed dominion. At the same time that many people treat their pets, mostly dogs or cats, very well indeed, there is a whole revolting system of inhumane factory farming of animals for meat and other animal products that goes on largely ignored by the general public. Out of sight, out of mind. People will sometimes wonder how the Germans and the Poles could have turned blind eyes to the shipment by trains through their villages of millions of Jews bound for the gas chambers during the Holocaust. Surely they had to have noticed, and the claims by some of them that didn’t are self-serving lies. Maybe so; but then look what goes on across the United States and, increasingly, other parts of the world every day in order to feed the rising demand for meat with every meal. Or don’t look.
A lion at the Milwaukee County Zoo in June 2010. Photo by Antigrandiose.
Companionship with a pet is a fine thing, beneficial to human and animal alike when the animal is welcomed as part of the family. From that point on there is a sliding scale measuring the relationship of animals to humans, continuing past domesticated animal likes cows and pigs to partnerships like that with honey bees, and on to the last type of relationship, that with wildlife, which in its ideal state would be one of mutual respect and staying out of each others’ way. There used to be a television program sponsored by an insurance company called Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, in which the host and his trusty assistant were forever tranquilizing wild animals and then affixing a radio collar to them before letting them go. The people troubling the animals in this manner meant well, and they were doing it all in the interests of science and of the animals themselves, but another concept seems to have never come up, namely leaving the animals be. There have been many other nature shows since, and thankfully some of them have grasped that concept: How about if we just back off, let these animals have the space any of us have a right to, and leave them the hell alone?
― Izzy
With Christmas past by several days now, many children will be enraptured by a new toy or toys if they were lucky enough to receive them. The trend now is for giving more technologically sophisticated toys even to small children, but a simple toy such as a rubber duck can give a small child many hours of joy through encouraging the use of imagination, while some complicated toys do everything for the child, who quickly becomes bored through passivity.
For such a simple toy, the rubber duck has become enormously popular since its introduction in the form we recognize today in the mid-twentieth century. Some rubber ducks squeak when squeezed and others don’t, but all are hollow with a weight in the bottom, so that they always float upright. Of all toys in America, perhaps only the teddy bear is more popular than the rubber duck. A teddy bear does even less on its own than a rubber duck, however, since some won’t float, and it certainly doesn’t know which end is up when it does float.
The world’s largest floating rubber duck, designed by the Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman, is towed in Los Angeles harbor in August 2014 as part of the Tall Ships Festival. Photo by Eric Garcetti.
The technology employed in making rubber ducks is some of the simplest in manufacturing, involving rotational molds, heat, and some hand painting. The toys are not made of rubber anymore, since that has gotten too expensive. Manufacturers instead use a non-toxic vinyl which will be safe for toddlers, who inevitably will chew on the toy. The paints also are designed for child safety. Like many manufacturing plants in the past half century, the ones for making these simple toys had moved overseas, primarily to China, until one company returned part of its manufacturing to the United States. That company struggled at first to find a factory and skilled workers, evidence of how quickly disused facilities and worker skills melt away without investment.
For all the stories in the news about how Silicon Valley technological companies like Apple and Google are leading the way for the American economy, and how the less educated workers who don’t fill that mold will just have to make do with minimum wage jobs in the service economy, flipping burgers at McDonald’s or driving Ubers, there are millions of workers who are not cut out to be software engineers but who nonetheless could use better paying jobs to help their families not merely stay afloat, but get ahead in the world.
In this clip from an early episode ofSesame Street,Ernie the Muppet sings “Rubber Duckie”, the 1970 song that set off a resurgence in popularity for the toy. These are people who may never invent the next big thing in computers or smartphones or driverless cars, but whose children possibly could if given a fair chance at a good education without sinking the family into poverty. In the last fifty years, while the rich in their opulent yachts have gotten ever richer, the working class has been cut adrift from the mainstream economy by the loss of good paying manufacturing jobs, and the middle class has been kept busy furiously kicking to keep from drowning. Not everything has to be complicated or technologically sophisticated to work well in the world. Sometimes all it takes to make people happy is a simple toy that knows enough to bob upright in the water and keep afloat with a plucky smile.
― Techly
With each successive year, the United States Postal Service shows more cracks in its structure, and at no time of year is that more evident than around the year end holidays as letter and package volume increases. It’s difficult to find empirical evidence of the Postal Service’s failings as a delivery service, though anecdotal evidence is plentiful. Just about everyone has tales to tell of late delivery, non-delivery, delivery to the wrong address, or failure to pick up mail. If it seems these failings are increasing, that’s more than likely an accurate assessment because the United States Postal Service is beset both from within and without.
The Postal Service as originally designated in Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the Constitution, says nothing about profitability of the Service, only that it is a necessary manifestation of interstate commerce and communication. The Founders recognized it as a public utility, in other words, not a business for private profit making as much as a service for the benefit of the public, with all the implications for public subsidy that can entail.
Along the way from 1775, when the Continental Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin the first Postmaster General of the fledgling United States of America, some right wing factions got the idea that the Postal Service should behave as a quasi-private business still under government control. They got their way first in 1971 when the Postal Service was transformed into an independent agency under the Executive Branch, and then even more importantly in 2006 after Congress passed legislation requiring the Postal Service to fully pre-fund employee retirement health benefits, a requirement which has hamstrung the Service financially ever since.
U.S. postage stamp issued in 1976 honoring the 50th Anniversary of U.S. Commercial Aviation (1926-1976). Illustrated are the first two airplanes used to carry Air Mail under contract: Ford-Stout AT-2 (upper) and Laird Swallow (lower). Federal Air Mail contracts provided important sources of revenue to early aviation companies, including Eastern Air Lines.
Hamstringing the Postal Service was not an unfortunate unintended consequence of fiscal responsibility measures, but a deliberate step by Republican legislators to ensure the eventual failure of the Postal Service so that its carcass could be picked over by private businesses, with the choicest bits going to the highest bidder. Less choice bits, like mail delivery to remote outposts around the nation, would most likely be ignored, with a consequent loss of mail service to those places. Sorry, not profitable. Travel half a day to the nearest small town to pick up your mail at a privately maintained postal outlet. Sending a letter to that remote outpost? Sorry, flat rate postage no longer applies for first class delivery. That will be ten dollars, please.
Besides being attacked from the outside by vultures, the Postal Service has been hampered lately from within by a toxic work environment fostered by bad, unaccountable management which has led to chronic staff shortages around the country even when the troubled economy would dictate that people would flock to Postal Service jobs that are relatively high paying, with better benefits than most other employers offer. Word gets around, however, and eventually people become reluctant to apply for those jobs regardless of the monetary rewards. Meanwhile, attrition combined with the depressing, hostile work atmosphere saw to it that valued senior employees took early retirement or simply quit to get away from the place. If Congress ever gets around to convening an investigative commission, Postal Service managers will have a lot of explaining to do.
In the 1947 film version of Miracle on 34th Street, starring John Payne as attorney Fred Gailey and Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle, the Post Office (as it was known then) was a respected institution.
In the meantime, try to be kind to your local mail carrier, who is only trying to make the best of a bad situation and, if possible, get home at a reasonable hour. Post Offices are short of staff, and mail sorting centers have been closed in the past ten years in a short-sighted attempt to save money, resulting in long hours for many mail carriers. Working after dark in the evenings has presented a whole new set of dangers to these people, from urban carriers walking a route being mistaken for prowlers to rural carriers in outmoded vehicles with only two weak hazard lights blinking to warn other drivers on dark country roads that they are sitting ducks as they move from box to box at low speed delivering the mail.
These are unnecessarily dangerous conditions for the carriers on their appointed rounds, and then to be confronted with bullying managers back at the Post Office when they’re finally done with their shift is too much. Something has to change at the Postal Service, starting with the top, but the first shove has to come from what corporate and political America considers the bottom, which are the customers who expect good service from their mail carriers, if only managers and legislators would either do better jobs supporting them or get out of the way and stop actively obstructing them.
― Ed.
