Hey, Gunowners, do you realize...

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Hey gun owners, do you realize that statistically 6,750 of you reading this will be dead by self-inflicted gunshots by New Year's Eve? Furthermore, 27,000 of you will have bit the Big One by this date a year from now. Sadly, you actually know who you are. This is not the first time you have thought about it. Now it the time to ditch your guns. Don't make it so easy. Tell your friends and family that you are ditching them. Then do it.

Unlike the M*A*S*H movie theme, suicide is NOT painless. It leaves dozens of friends and family who will feel the pain that you think will not exist. Ditch the gun and proclaim your freedom.

Spiderweb in the Night

This spider made a magnificent web this evening. Her filaments glistened in the rays of the post-supermoon of September 2015. Her choice of location is unfortunate though. The web spanned the space between the aerial of my car and the windshield. The morning sun will being the new day when I must drive to the train station to commute into DC for the day. The wind will blow her away to some distant tree or crux of highway standard that leads motorists to their destinations.

Hers is a Vulnerable Geometry that no matter how good the intention is doomed to failure.

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Author's Note: The book cover images in the side margins of this blog are my own publications of eBooks available at both Amazon and B&N. Please take a moment and go to the sites and read about them. Then if you like it, buy one or two.

A Little Quid Pro Quo

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There comes a time when a little quid pro quo is in order. Thousands of Twitter folks and Blogger readers have enjoyed the silliness, irreverence and sometimes prescient postings on my blogs that include Silly Bugger Shit, You Can't Argue With a Twit and A Vulnerable Geometry, all for free. While they will always be free to read, I have published to date three #eBooks that are available at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble that are available for a small price. That Boy in the 8mm Film, Rachel and Nikki Step Out, Ruminations of a Bird Brain Vol 1 & 2 and BIRD BRAIN RISING are sure to make you smile, laugh and even think. Please consider buying one or two to help support the writing of more posts and observations like the ones you have become accustomed to finding at my sites. Thank you.

Tweeting this post and following me @ItsallTuna on twitter is sure to help too.

                                                      

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Author's Note: The book cover images in the side margins of this blog are my own publications of eBooks available at both Amazon and B&N. Please take a moment and go to the sites and read about them. Then if you like it, buy one or two.

Deporting 11 Million Undocumented Immigrants Would be Tantamount to a Crime Against Humanity

Deporting 11 Million Undocumented Immigrants Would be Tantamount to a Crime Against Humanity

Author's Note: The book cover images in the side margins of this blog are my own publications of eBooks available at both Amazon and B&N. Please take a moment and go to the sites and read about them. Then if you like it, buy one or two.

There are many people in the US with ill-conceived notions to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants from American soil. Assuming for discussion that they are all Mexicans and can be deported to Mexico, there would arise a string of refugee camps in every border town in Mexico that would become home to those 11 million people. This number is larger than any refugee event in recorded history. As a burgeoning "humanitarian crises" develops on our border, would we provide food, water, doctors and medicine, tents and blankets, latrines and other infrastructure to alleviate that crises? If we did not, would not WE be guilty of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and other crimes against humanity?

At least while these undocumented people are resident inside our border, they are geographically dispersed, able to work at some job to support themselves, and not be forcibly concentrated into camps in a hostile climate. Right now they do jobs that we want done. They work for far less money than an equivalent documented citizen would. The only beneficiary of that are businesses that want cheap labor.

In the concentration camps there would be nothing for the adults and teenagers to do. Without the ability to earn money from the outside they would have to rely on what each new arrival brings. These camps would be ripe pickings for drug suppliers, child predators and traffickers who promise a nocturnal border crossing back to the states, for a price.

Saying you'd deport the illegals is a high and mighty rhetoric, but is only half of the statement. The other half is that you would create the greatest humanitarian crises that this hemisphere, and possibly the world, has ever witnessed.

We as a species of animal that shares this planet with all the others and all the peoples of the world must come to terms with the potential for massive migrations that will disrupt every aspect of civilization we have to date created.

The Dynamics of Massive Migration

In the middle of the 20th century a demographer asserted that if you lined up the Chinese people, five abreast and marched them into the ocean, the line would never end. Before anyone becomes indignant about repeating that statement here, this author denies any malice against the Chinese people and mentions this scenario only to make the point that very large populations have a huge impact on the earth. Today that number exceeds 25 abreast and the column never ends. This mathematical example applies to the people of India too.

Now the purpose of bringing up this bizarre concept is: what if you exchange the ocean for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran in a mass migration intent on survival in new land rather than death by drowning? There would be two columns of migrating people, one Chinese and the other Indian. Two columns collectively 50 people wide pouring over the borders and into what certainly would be hostile territory would be an unstoppable tide. To obtain the maximum affect they could walk in a far wider path and not intend to make the line never-ending.

People walking at about 4 ft/sec moves 50 ppl/sec over any border line. In a day, 4,320,000 people would cross that border and in just over 115 days, they would have emigrated 500 million people. There would still be 1.6 billion relatives back home who could follow if sufficiently motivated.

Of course these three initial countries are only the beginning.  Iraq, Syria and Turkey are next on the itinerary to Europe. Bulgaria is only a small land bridge away with Greece nor much further along. East European countries lay beyond with land that would be squatted and homesteaded by these migrants as they overwhelm the locals. These are agrarian people, people who make their own furniture, tools and clothes. These are people who can weave a house out of sticks and hides. They are not dependent on the electric grid or natural gas pipes. They need no gasoline for the cars they do not have. They will be amply able to make due with whatever surface resources are available.

This is not to say that they would nor denude the forests for firewood and pollute rivers with their human wastes, but they will be able to survive in the far more moderate Euro-zone.

Now all of this conjectured migratory activity supposes that there is a need to do so. People do not pack up and leave their ancestral homes unless forced by some vector to do it. Drought and famine come to mind.

I'd like to point out that a walk along the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea through Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco is not much of a greater distance into Europe than going the counter-clockwise route. Spain and Italy are only a ferry ride away.

Russian was so concerned about China flooding across their mutual border that they build their railroads at a different wheel gage so Chinese trains could not use their track to invade. Even today the Trans Siberian Express stops at the border each week to change the wheel trucks under all the cars. That process takes 4 hours. A slow invasion it would be.

Why People Would Undertake Massive Migration

Here again China and India stand as proxies for the growing crises of human migration from Asia and Northern Africa into Europe. In the case of Africa, the migration can also be characterized as a refugee event where hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing war, genocide, the extremist Muslim armies that execute large quantities of people on their march to their State goals.

Fleeing war and ideological mayhem is only part of the driving forces that motivate people to walk a thousand miles, float across 250 miles of open sea in crowded boats only to walk another thousand miles to try to get a job in France or England.

Northern Africa is enduring progressive desertification and drought even as they are experiencing the hottest temperatures since records were first made. War and religious genocide has made food into a weapon. Burn the fields and kill the animal herds and the people will die or move away. When the move away there only is Europe to see as sanctuary. Going south is only walking into deeper trouble.

Right now, in August 2015, there are only thousands of Middle Eastern refugees trying to cross into England from France via the channel tunnel on the last leg of their search for a better life.  They try to hop trains to get a ride through. This activity although risky, is nowhere near as dangerous as the trek they make from their homes in countries such as Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, and others.

As change occurs to the global climate there will be those people who see more rain (resulting in flooding and landslides) less rain (resulting in drought, famine, wildfires and long term desertification) sea levels rise even as the withdrawal of ground water makes the land sink and allows seawater intrusion. There will be people whose million dollar homes are lapped at by the high tides while others will see their entire terrestrial existence covered by the sea. Even as wildlife activists try to stop arctic oil drilling to save polar bears and seals, we need to understand that those species are the "canaries in the mine shaft" and whose fate foreshadows our own.

But back to migration of humans. We are capable of looking out to sea and seeing the water rising. We can connect the dots that show us that our accustomed home is no longer habitable. We can decide to move elsewhere while the polar bears and migratory birds will die before they can realize what is happening. It is supposed that humans are the only species that can anticipate dire consequences of their environment. It could be that others see the carnage to come, but lack the facilities to stop it (us.)

The levels of economic migration that we see today may pale in comparison to that which may arise as millions of sea-level populations are displaced. When the rivers cease to flow because their headwater sources are depleted there will be migration. When the soldiers come and decimate civilian settlements, the rest will flee to places where war is not proximal but they may be as unwelcome in that sanctuary. Then the noon hour temperature exceeds 100 °F for weeks on end, populations will get up and move. Many will die on the way, but there will be no going back nor any way to stay behind.

Whether it is social strife, religious sectarian violence, drought, flooding, famine, heat, disease or for economic opportunities there will be huge shifts in human populations in the coming decades. We have only seen the beginning of the trend, the part that is driven by sectarian violence and people taking refuge from war.

While the Middle Eastern refugees are from sectarian war, the refuges from Central America are fleeing the violence perpetrated by drug gang rivalries. Think about what it takes to motivate parents to send their children on a journey of 1000s of miles north to the American border unaccompanied in the belief that making that journey was far better than staying at home and coping with the violent culture there.

Internally in America families trekked west during the Dust Bowl conditions of the 1930s. Workers in large numbers left the South for northern industrial jobs. People always follow the work opportunities when they can. Today, people in Mexico and further south see the land of opportunity and arrive here to get a piece of it. They arrive with a work ethic that makes them willing to labor in the sun for starvation wages and sun up to sundown hours. They are willing to stand in building supply parking lots with the expectation that they will get the opportunity to hop on the back of a pickup truck or into a van to go to a day job and earn a few dollars for their efforts.

While some of the people who seek a better life in a new country are educated and can land a salaried job, they are not the ones who must cross deserts of foot and seas in open boats. Those people are the ones who have only the skills that are commensurate with the offering of minimum wage or less. Americans must not forget that this country is not the only one that is receiving large numbers of agrarian laborers who want to eat, sleep and be comfortable in their family units.

Now for the other side of migration. If there are 10 lifeboats floating at the scene of a sinking ship that each hold 25 people and there are 1,000 people in the water, there is a high probability that every boat will be capsized the 750 people trying to get in too. If someone doesn't arrive soon with an alternative all are likely to perish. Even when the people already in the boats risk their survival by taking on just a few more people from the water, they will not be rewarded for their generosity. There are just too many exhausted people treading water in the sea for there to be any decorum.

It is the same on land with overland migration and crowding at the borders. Countries that border war torn nations have either to accept or turn away the people who seek refuge. Even when those countries accept the refugees eventually the conditions will deteriorate into anarchy and chaos will prevail. Masses of refugees are not particularly adept at self-organizing into sustainable towns with a chart of rules for where to erect a shelter, where to defecate and urinate, how to make use of limited resources (especially when there are none to manage.)

Then there is the long-term scenario to address. The masses of displaced people cannot live in the makeshift camps forever. They must survive the winters, the summers, the lack of food and water, the communicable diseases that always erupts in such places. The hopes of the host countries is that they will eventually go home. While many would love to go home, for many there is no home to go back to.

Host Countries Must Come to Grips With Migration

As long as there is a place from which people need to flee and there is a better place to go, there will be migration. Trying to hold them back is like the story of the Dutch Boy with his finger in the dike. Eventually he will run out of fingers and arm length to save the town. The migrants come for many varied reasons and they are indeed a tide. As long as there is a shore on which to break, there will be a swell and a breaking wave that washes over the coast line. Each host country needs to devise a plan for how to accommodate that tide.

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DC Commuting

I should have known. Or at least suspected it. I hit the off-button of the alarm clock instead of the Snooze and woke up 20 minutes later than planned. I had to hurry up and get ready for the commute.

I dashed to the car and to the train station only to find that the train was going to be about 30 minutes late. It was. At least I got the extra sleep. The platform was already hot with the morning humidity and there were dozens of extra people there because the next train is usually only 20 minutes later than the one I take. So we had two trains worth of commuters to stand in the aisles and block up the path.

By the time we arrived at Union Station, I was half-way between two local bus arrivals and waited along with a dozen people who would be wanting to board the bus also. It arrived and we all piled in.

By the time we reached 9th Street, the Police had the block over to 10th cordoned off for some unspecified reason. The bus deviated with a left turn in what was supposed to be a "uni-block detour" that turned out to be much more. By the time we moved one block south we were met by another police vehicle making us turn left again. While two wrongs don't make a right, three lefts do.

We were headed back toward Union Station until we made the third left and were headed North. By then there were a series of No Left Turns including the useless left on at E Street from where we originally diverted. K Street provided the first opportunity for a left turn, the fourth one that put us back on a Westward path.

It was about then that I thought about the possibility of the driver's name being Moses. He did an admirable job of navigating the city streets during morning DC rush hour, but we did seem lost in the desert there for a time.

Employing 20-20 hindsight this day would have been a good one to telework. Then the realization hit me. When you get to work, your commute is only half over. The day was only cranking up to its maximum temperature at that early hour. AMTRAK and MARC still had to contend with warped rails, switch and signal malfunctions, and overheated locomotives. Sometime over the past 21 years of commuting into DC the commute has become an adventure. THAT was never supposed to be.

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Red Line Today

During my MARC ride into Union Station, I received an email from a colleague that said the Red Line was in Major Delay Mode. It was several months ago that I gave up on the Red Line due the many elevator and escalator outages at Union Station and Metro Center. Not withstanding the actual train delays, the the ancillary vertical and diagonal "rail" services had become quite a problem.

For a person who relies on those vertical transports (aka elevators) the amount of extra time in the system exceeded the rail benefits over the surface bus service.

I arrived a minute too late at the bus stop and could see the extra multitude of "breakdown" riders already waiting to board that bus. I was nowhere near the stop to even try to get aboard using a wheelchair. While waiting for the next bus, I was able to compare rider notes with a few women who likewise are MARC commuters and who normally ride the Red Line trains. Their comments paralleled mine.

While riding along E Street, one could tell that there was something afoot with the Metro due to the abundance of middle aged white men wearing blue and white stripped shirts seeking to board the bus along the way and needing to ask what the fare would be. I was glad that I chose a shirt other than my blue and white stripped one.

The ride was a bit slower than normal but it did manage to be far faster than the rails. Another colleague passed me in the office and said that he decided to take my advice and try the bus this morning. He said it was a good alternative but... but he got on going the wrong direction. By the time he was well into NE rather than NW, he figured that he better ask. He was still here before me. Therefore even with starting out in the wrong direction and getting turned around, the bus was still better today.

We keep hearing that "they are working on it" and that services will be getting better. Apparently they had a long way to go just to get to "square one." I still suspect that services will get worse before it gets better at the rate maintenance and repairs are going.

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Drug Addiction is Great for the Economy

In Baltimore, MD, alone there are an estimated 60,000 heroin and cocaine addicts either using the white powdered type or the rock version called Crack. Minorities and urban dwellers are more likely to be addicted to the Crack version while the Caucasian and suburban dwellers are more likely to be addicted to the powder. Penalties for possessing or selling the Crack version holds prison terms that are two to ten times longer than for the powdered stuff.

A typical daily consumption costs $70- $150 per addict. That becomes $6,000,000 per day in total consumption if we use $100 per day. Let us assign half of that cost to the people who can still hold gainful employment and pay for their habits with legally obtained funds. The other $3,000,000 per day has to be raised through crime. At 10 cents on the dollar for fencing stolen goods and pawn shop loans, the amount of stolen property is $30,000,000 per day. Annualizing that number it becomes $10.95 Billion to support the habits of Baltimore's cocaine addicts. Now apply that number to the 50 largest cities in America and that's $547.5 Billion annually.

If I were a retailer selling electronic devices and other portable things like watches, rings and gold chains, I would love the trade that drug addicts create for my business. If I were a manufacturer of such things, I would likewise appreciate the market that the drugs create for me. In neither case would I have to have any connection to the production, transport, import, sale or buying of controlled substances in order to realize this benefit.

Everyone who has property stolen will replace it with and maybe without an insurance settlement. Not including any of the criminal justice cost-benefits to the economy, just the "stimulus" that drug addiction provides is highly beneficial to the economy while being wholly detrimental to the addicts.

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The Gun, The Religion and The Driver

I see the world as a set of vector arrows pointing at each other and at common places.  These are cause and effect couplets and isolated events that don't seem to have anything pointing at it to make it happen.  Some of the vectors we see and others we don't.

There are a lot of parallel arrows that point to different objects and by that parallel geometry creates a relationship between seemingly independent objects.  Such is the conditions among the firearms debate, radical religious factions and automobile accident fatalities.  Wow, what a wild and spurious connection?

Here is what I mean.  There are hundreds of millions of automobiles registered in this country, well almost two, at 196 million people.  Automobile fatalities is presently down from the 1972 high of 54, 589 deaths to the 2011 level of 32,367 deaths.  Between 1900 and 2012 there have been a recorded 3.5 million deaths from automobile accidents.  While many deaths occurred in the same collision perpetrated by the same driver that lowers the one to one ratio, for simplicity sake we will use the 1:1 ratio for further discussion.  And, yes, the 3.5 million deaths were over a period of 112 year.  Even so my point will be valid.  Somewhere less than 0.5% of drivers will cause the death of someone in their entire lifetime.  This means that 99.5% of drivers are innocent of anyone's death.  However, all states require training, testing and retesting, licensing and renewals.  And most states require sufficient automobile liability insurance on all drivers even though most will never be the cause of an accident or a claim.  Gun rights advocates just said, "I knew you were going there."

There are upwards of 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. They want to live a comfortable life, work, eat, stay warm and dry, raise a family and pray to their god.  There are some Muslims who are not satisfied with the way they are treated in this world and adopt radical ideas of how to make that change.  Some of the more radical ones adopt violence as their tool of choice.  Even if there were 1 million such violent persons who actually will ever do a massive violent act, this number is 0.0625% of the world population.  Muslims in general should not be held responsible for the actions of such a small part of their population. Someone just called me a "Muslin Apologist."  Most others are seeing my point.

In the USA the estimates of gun ownership widely vary from between 190m to 300m individual guns.  The better and more conservative estimate is that about 52 million households have about 260 million guns in them.  Even if you don't agree on those numbers the point that is being made here remains valid.

Gun deaths run around 40,000 per year.  Using a one perpetrator per dead person as the largest percentage of crimes or measures of self-defense we are talking about 40,000 perpetrators per year.  It is unlikely that perpetrators of gun deaths in the home, where most gun deaths occur, will be a repeat offender.  Yes, there will be a few but not many in the grand scheme of things.  Over ten years there will be 400,000 deaths and 400,000 perpetrators.  Running the ratios, that means that slightly more than ¾ of a percent of the gun owners will ever kill someone.

In all three of my examples it becomes acutely obvious that a very small number of people perpetrate all of the violent death and dismemberment in each example.  And that the vast majority of people on each category are innocent and guilty only by association, the associations that others assume.

Most people are not capable of distinguishing which driver of which vehicle is going to collide with them or anyone, now or ever.  But we force insurance and other regulations on them just in case.

Many Americans want to exclude Muslims from residency or entry in the US on the grounds that they cannot be trusted, even though the percentage of dangerous ones is the smallest of the three examples.  They want to hold all people in that group responsible.

The gun rights advocates want to segregate themselves into the law abiding and the lawless components in order to equate themselves with the virtuous and deny the dark side of their ideology.  To be fair, automobile drivers who do not drive intoxicated, distracted or fatigued, want to divorce themselves from the aggressive ones and those who are not fit to be behind the wheel for any reason.  And religious people of all faiths want to not be lumped together in to one group and labeled with the characteristics of the minority.

Gun rights advocates are indeed responsible for the actions of the lawless when they stand in the way of proposed solutions and do not champion solutions of their own to curtail the death and injury that their population inflicts on themselves and everyone else.

BOOTSTRAPS

I do not know of too many people who decide for themselves what their annual income will be. There is the legendary scenario where a person is in such demand by the headhunting company executive that he gets to name his salary.  This may actually be a fact for a very few people but typically the wage or salary paid is determined by the company that is doing the hiring or is set via a collective bargaining agreement.  Whatever the method is it is not usually up to the employee to make the determination.

In order to earn a progressively better income over a period of years, the employed person must 1) have appreciating skills that permits promotions, 2) employment with a company that has a step-wise pay scale or a collective bargaining agreement, 3) be employed at a place where there are employment positions available to be promoted to, or 4) the ability to shop their availability and skills to other employers.

An example of a situation that is exemplar of #3 that is not a good situation is a public transit bus service.  The company may hire 1,000 drivers to operate buses but only maintain 10 to 15 supervisors.  Supervisor would be the second step in promotions but the opportunities are highly limited when there are potentially 1,000 in-house candidates with which to compete.  While not all drivers are or will ever be suitable to be a Supervisor, promotion prospect are very scarce.

Most public transportation providers do not undergo rapid growth of operations where in influx Fail new talent would suddenly be required.  Therefore, the ability of an individual employee to affect his/her income growth is minimal, even when they have excellent credentials and skills.  The only need to the company is the ability to safely drive the bus and prepare all the periodic reports.  Doing everything correctly is the only measure of excellence and one can only go down from there.

Giant retailers such as Walmart, in particular, employs upwards of 220,000 people.  People work there "at the pleasure of the owner," that is there are no guarantees or protections.  A person accepts whatever pay is offered, is subject to the work hours rules, and has zero control over promotions practices.  People who go to work in such places may never be promoted or receive a pay rate increase even after many years.  This is just the model that the employer created and strives to maintain.  A person seeking more income must go elsewhere to get it.

In communities where a very large employer sets up shop there are usually few alternatives to working at that location. A person seeking better pay and conditions, advancement opportunities will have to consider relocating to obtain it. At the lower end of the income level continuum, relocation is not compensated and the feasibility is low for the employee.  In households where two people hold jobs,sometimes even with the same employer, one person choosing to relocate for better opportunities is just not an option.

These obstacles to advancement do not occur to the upper middleclass workers because they are not subject to the limiting factors as being a two income household, working in a sea of personnel who all have the same job description,or live in places with only one significant employer.

While Conservatives cry for poor people to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps," first they must have boots and then they must be allowed to do the pulling.  Such self-help activities are stacked against the low income workers who really do want to do better than they are allowed to do. Lower income workers might make disproportionately longer trips-to-work and spend significantly more of their time getting from one place to another.

Consider this morning ritual.  Mom gets the three children ready in the morning before going to her 8-hour per day job.  The youngest must be dropped off at daycare.  The middle child must be dropped at Pre-school and the oldest at her Elementary school.  Then Mom goes to her job.  Now consider doing all this while riding the bus.  To top it off, the bus stops on the highway adjacent to her employer and she must walk ¼ mile to the employees'entrance.  If driving a car, she could park in the lot next to the building.

When she gets that $5,000 per year pay increase she will be able to afford to buy, insure, maintain and fuel a car.

Where Was The Warning?

Hebrews believe that god gave Israel and Palestine to them and Christians believe that god gave them the rest of the world and the entire universe. The truth is we are only renters here on this planet and act like if we foul the place we can just move elsewhere in the night. When the authors of the books of the Bible set out to write down their beliefs about the origins and destiny of their species, they knew nothing of global-wide pollution, depletion of fish in the Mediterranean Sea, or the impacts of over-population on their world. The author of Genesis only declared that god gave man dominion over all living things and the land. He did not know that there were other civilizations on the move in their direction and that one day they would collide and try to out compete each other for limited resources.

About the worst thing man could do to damage the land was to order it to be sown with salt to poison it and use the lack of food as a weapon against and enemy or conquered people. There were no massive petro-chemical corporations that would make a beneficial concoction while dumping toxic waste products into the rivers and onto the land. There were no plumes of heavy particulate smoke to blanket the landscape in the wee hours of dawn and choke the people to death or damage their future generations with mutations. I don't want to get into a discourse about how much god didn't appear to tell man when he was dictating his word to the scribes. A lot of that essential information would be useful just about now as Conservative Christian factions in the US and the world declare the Bible to be literal, absolute and unalterable while also declaring that god creates all bad environmental events as collective punishment for acts that men and women are squeamish about.

Some omniscient cautions would have been helpful to guide man in the "ways of righteousness" such that he could actually be an effective steward of Creation and not its ultimate destructor. Corporate mentality is only a microcosm of the mentality of a people steeped in the notion that everything belongs to them and that they have an inexhaustible amount of resources to exploit in an inexhaustible amount of time. The trouble is that even if the scriptures are only several men's notion of the divine, they did get it right that Time itself is a resource that is not infinite. Whether it is Time itself that runs out or there is a god who says that Time is up, either way man is never promised tomorrow.

There is a crack in our hourglass and sand is leaking out as we argue over who or what is responsible for the loss of sand. The biblical notion that man will not know the hour or the date of the end is actually quite prophetic even if you are an atheist, or believer in another dogma. Geologic, environmental, solar, galactic and cosmological events have a way of sneaking up on us even as we divert attentions to the trivial pastimes of professional sports, TV reality shows, political campaigns, culture clashes and war. Whole cities such as Pompeii can disappear from the surface of the earth for 17 centuries while emperors and kings play chess with the lives of other cities and towns in their domains. We neglect the doom that is spelled by fossil fuel burning even as the Russian Bear grabs a natural gas transit nation in a revanchist move to reunify its former territory.

Much of the nature of current events, faith conflicts, and socioeconomic discord masks the truly "end-times" scenarios that we have set in motion with carbon loading of the air and sea, poisoning of our food crops, and our relentless pursuits of personal longevity and family propagation. No deity has warned us against those things.

2 Degrees Of Separation

Pete Postlethwaite speaks as the lone narrator at the end of Man in 2055. Man has loaded the atmosphere with the correct amount of CO2 to cause the temperature tipping point tat climatologists have been warning us about for decades. This semi-documentary film using news footage and Pete as the lone controller at the console of a great database of video footage.
"The Age of Stupid" asks the burning question Why did we not do anything about our imminent extinction? The film presents the factors surrounding oil use and the warmer atmosphere that contribute to intensified flooding, melting of glaciers, desertification, stronger storms, and wide-ranging poverty in the land of oil riches.

The NIMBY mind-set shows the conflicted attitudes that people ave about alternate energy systems such as wind turbines. While everyone claims that they care about climate change, they continue to resist the wind when it will be harnessed close to their homes.

The film was made in 2008 so we are already 7 years behind schedule to stop the 2 degree Celsius temperature rise that will tip the scales toward our demise. 2015 is the seminal year for reaching Carbon Neutrality. I guess we have failed.

This film is well worth the watching. It is available as a Netflix DVD. BTW, guess how a passing space explorer would know that planet earth was once inhabited.

The Upside of Utility Deregulation

There is a positive outcome from the deregulation of utilities that as fostered during the Reagan Administration. That deregulation made it possible for competing gas suppliers and traditional electricity suppliers to compete and allegedly lower the cost to consumers. There was a secondary and some say an unintended consequence to that deregulation.

At the time of the changes to laws and regulations no one had ever heard of a commercial-grade solar or wind sourced supplier being able to generate electricity and move it to market.

What the deregulation process created was the ability for a legacy utility company to continue to deliver the commodities and charge a delivery fee separate from the actual commodity. The original idea was that small and competing providers could sell their commodity to the utility and they would blend it in with their own material. Then the idea of selling directly to the consumer took over.

Today, many Americans are able to choose the electricity supplier they want to buy from. Such providers may source some or all of their electricity from the wind or solar sources. Best of all the legacy utility company will deliver for the same fee as they do their own electricity.

A quick search of the Internet using ones zipcode can determine if there is the opportunity to buy electricity from an alternative source. Billing is transparent and seamless so there is no need to get two bills from two different companies. There is no investment to pay for. There are only yearly contracts to adhere to. While the price today may be a bit higher than coal, nuclear or hydro-electric power, the far smaller carbon footprint will make any ecologically sensitive consumer satisfied.

When I chose wind power I agreed to pay 0.5 cents more per kilowatt-hour.  That was a small price to pay for knowing that I was doing something good for the environment. Now I don't fret about leaving the light on.

Every time a consumer chooses to buy electricity from a wind or solar sourced utility provider they make it possible for that company to build more capacity. New alt sources are faster and easier to bring online. Similarly, as the technologies are improved, there is no need to stay stuck with the old tech.

Every time an investor with a conscious thinks about the choice between a legacy power source and a modern alternative source, he, she, they make it possible  to have energy AND a sustainable environment.

"That which brought us through the past century will not sustain us through the next one."

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Author's Note: The book cover images in the side margins of this blog are my own publications of eBooks available at both Amazon and B&N. Please take a moment and go to the sites and read about them. Then if you like it, buy one or two.

WMATA 7000 Series Rail Cars

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) that operated the Metro Rail system in DC always has great intentions in the improvements they plan and implement. However, at the saying goes ""no good deed goes unpunished." Such is the case of the acquisition of the new 7000 series rail cars that will be put into full service on the Blue line on April 14 this year. While the quality of safety and serviceability are not part of the purview of this blog post, there are customer comfort issues that remain open for complaint and possible reconsideration of the basis of the decision to design the interiors in the manner they have.

 "Elements of the car that were influenced by customer feedback include: Interior layout, including placement of hand holds, privacy screens and seat positions." this statement (taken from the WMATA website) neglects the fact that such decision adversely impact certain passengers who are by no means unique on the train cars.

The decision to forego stanchions in the areas of the doors may improve pedestrian flow into and out of the cars, but it does create hazards by their absence. There are two Series of cars that are involved in this decision making. The new 7000 Series cars are lacking in sufficient hand holds and the remodeled 6000 Series cars have the same issues.

As a wheelchair using Metro Rail rider for the past 21 years, I have seen the issues I describe first-hand. The absence of a stanchion somewhere between 12 and 18 inches inside the doorway to pull against to enter the car is a serious hazard. The fact that in practice most MetroRail car floors do not match the platform elevation withing ADA required parameters makes the placement of auxiliary leverage points, i.e. stanchions necessary. Without them boarding is many time foiled and a second "running start" necessary to complete the boarding.

The other aspect of the lack of stanchions inside the doorways is that when the train cars reach Standing Room Only (SRO) and there is a crowd of people standing around my wheelchair they reflexively reach for my hardware to keep from falling either on me or on the floor. I may look like something to grab a hold of, but I am as loose a cannon as are they when the train lurches to a stop or pulls out fast.

A colleague of mine who is not as stable on her feet as she used to be was horrified when she entered a remodeled 6000 series car only to find herself in the midst of a wide open expanse with nothing to hold on to until she could wend her way through a few standees to request a seat as close to yet far from the door.

WMATA has a history of doing what it believes is a good thing for many riders while simultaneously impeding others. Case in point is the placement of these sign stanchions at the bottom of platform escalators. By placing those stanchions precisely as they did, they were about two inches too close to the sidewall for a wheelchair to pass to the right of the escalator and avoid the narrow platform on the left side where people like to congregate in order to board the front cars of the train. All of the focus groups and presentations cannot replace good design thinking in the first place.

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Author's Note: The book cover images in the side margins of this blog are my own publications of eBooks available at both Amazon and B&N. Please take a moment and go to the sites and read about them. Then if you like it, buy one or two.

That Third Cup of Coffee

That Third Cup of Coffee

Coffee drinkers all know the drill. They finish their second cup of coffee and everything is going well. The good feeling prompts you to have another. That is the fatal error. All too soon you have to get up and head to the "facilities." There is an urgency to the mission that just cannot be resisted. For most of us the need to remedy the coffee conundrum doesn't involve flying a plane with a co-pilot that as it turns out is suicidal.

The pilot of the Germanwings Airbus stepped out of the cockpit probably to use the head and was summarily locked out by his co-pilot. No amount of pleading moved him to change his mind after he decided that his suicide needed 149 other deaths to make it worthwhile and memorable.

The anti-hijack protocols enacted internationally require that the cockpit door be closed and locked against intruders during the flight. Once the pilot stepped out and the door was locked, he, the crew and passenger were at the mercy of the only person who could stop the impending disaster. There a method for locked out pilots to regain the cockpit but that system can and must be able to be disabled from inside the cockpit.

On US Domestic flights there is a requirement for a third crew member to occupy the cockpit in the event that one of the pilots needs to step out. This guards against unfortunate disabling of the second pilot but does not guard against malicious intent. If there is foul play that replacement crew member just might be the first to go.

It is tragic that such an event as the Germanwings flight crash ever happens but that metaphorical "Third Cup of Coffee" would not have meant the end of 150 lives in this incident if the pilot did not have to leave the control to the man who had misplaced trust in him. I suspect that the foreign air carriers will now alter their cockpit protocols to avoid the conditions that allowed such a horrible crash to happen.

Water Shortage in the Cinema

The conflict over water is not a new one. The battle has raged on for decades. Now in our current times, that struggle only grows larger and more fractious. America has grown multi-billion industries around the plentiful flow of water for their processes. At the same time america has grown its population and therein it need for water for life itself.

Water is so essential that at one point in time oil tankers that millions of barrels of oil TO the United States were beginning to refill their holds with fresh water from the Hudson River and taking it back to the Middle East. This water was on a fast track to the open sea anyway but the Ports Authority of NY/NJ counted it as theft of US resources and wanted paid for the amount of river water thusly conveyed.

Other Middle East fresh water projects included the idea of harnessing massive icebergs in the Antarctic and towing them to a mooring location where they could be harvested for their fresh water.

Las Vegan has proposed spending over $3 billion to construct a 260 mile pipeline to bring water to their city. Even though the city is rapidly depleting its only water source, Lake Mead, the pipeline project has been held up for years in environmental reviews and permitting,

Film producers have not been quiet on the topic of water shortages and water rights issues for a long time. There are some films that are directly involved with water struggles and other merely peripherally. These films are not just examples of US strife but the entire globe.

The Milagro Beanfield War (1988) centered on one man's obsession to plant a beanfield and use water that flowed by it in an open channel. The trouble was there was a wealthy land speculator who wanted all the water for his residential and golf course project in the valley. Therein lay the conflict. The water was all allocated by powerful people who did not care about the indigenous peoples who had been on the land for generations.

Even the Rain (2010) was set in Bolivia where the water and all distribution rights were sold to a private corporation so that the capital city could continue to use water the way it wanted to do. The indigenous peoples were forcibly restrained from gathering and holding "even the rain."

Even the Hollywood movie, Chinatown (1974) was about the intrigues of the Mulholland era water management projects to make living the desert of Los Angeles possible.

As far back as the building of the hydro-electric dams by the Tennessee Valley Authority there has been contentious actions on both side of the issue. The only real argument over water rights can take place where there is water in the first place.

One might wonder what the cinema will say about the droughts that plague the people of the planet Earth 10, 20, 50 years from now. We saw the forced migration of farming families due to the 1930 Dust Bowl and its treatment in literature and film with John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" (1940). There are other books and films that address the trials and tribulations of the shortage of water, but these four are a sampler. We may yet see our future in the recent past.

Water Filter Straws and More

Author's Note: The book cover images in the side margins of this blog are my own publications of eBooks available at both Amazon and B&N. Please take a moment and go to the sites and read about them. Then if you like it, buy one or two.

While researching material for Vulnerable Geometry blog posts, I came across the WATERisLIFE.com website. Their solutions for clean drinking water are so simple. Although simple, they are not free to implement and maintain. They need a sustainable flow of funds that will allow people to avoid the pathogens in their water that Americans take for granted. Even when our tap water is not up to regulation standards, it is still far cleaner and safer than water is in most of the world.

WATERisLIFE.com is leading the way with solutions that we may need in our future if we cannot find the political will to maintain our infrastructure.

The first stage in remediation is to provide filter straws like the one show here for particularly children to use to avoid Typhus, e.Coli, Cholera, and a myriad of parasites and amoebas.Visit their site to read more about how this device works and the follow up projects for establishing safe clean water supplies. Most of all considering donating to the cause. Every dollar helps. The fate of a billion people is heavily influenced by their quality of the water they must use.

Once again read the material at WATERisLIFE.com. They also have a Twitter account at @WaterisLife. Spread their word.

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Coal Ash: Then and Now

In the summer of 1979, a group of friends of mine and I forded a back channel of the upper Allegheny River in Warren, Pennsylvania to camp on an island situated adjacent to a coal fired electric generation plant. To get there we had to hike past the ash pit that had accumulated over years of generating electricity.

The pits were being services and the orange-brown effluent was obvious in the low-lying areas. Though the site was ugly, the island was small and uninhabited except for a few birds and snakes that frequented the forested spit of land. The water in the main channel are as cold as the bottom of a reservoir but the back channel was extremely warm "fresh" from cooling the machinery. The Kinzua Dams is only a few miles upstream from this site.

These ash pits were located only a few feet above "normal pool elevation" and would periodically get flooded when the river flow was high.

since that day in 1979 the coal burning plant was closed and the ash pits remediated. Sometime around 1990 the ash was dug up and relocated at a higher elevation. It was still on-site, but it was sealed in an area with an impervious bottom lining and top cover. With the rain kept at bey the amount of run-off has been minimalized. The water that does leak out does so via a drain into a catch basin where it can be removed and treated.

This third image is the aerial view of the site now. Ash storage is in the upper left quadrant. The square catch basin is clearly in the center and the location of the former pits along the river are now grassy fields. There is no coal pile ready to be burned and no smoke and CO2 to foul the air.

Such sites can be rehabilitated, but should only be done so at the expense of the utilities that were for so long allowed to neglect the "externalities" of their business model, i.e. land, air and water pollution.

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If I Had a Billion Dollars

If you had 1 billion dollars, your could explore for gas or oil or even open a coal mining operation with your investment. In doing so you would be investing in an 18th century energy source that certainly has a deleterious impact on the environment. Your meager contribution to the warming of the planet may in and of itself be minimal, but with all the other investors doing the same, the effect is cumulative. The Laws of Thermodynamics are absolute. You cannot break them. They will break you. Or brake you.

with your 1 billion dollars you could also invest in a massive wind turbine farm or a PV solar array that generates electricity without adding carbon dioxide to the air or massive amounts of previously stored heat. You would earn your profits with a non-polluting 21st century technology. The decision would be yours to make as the owner of the capital.

Whether or not the activities of 307 million Americans are altering the planet is not as big a deal as the activities of 3 billon people who reside on the India subcontinent and in China. Everyone is adding his small contribution to the alteration of the planet.

"The biggest peril that humans face is not war. It is not hurricanes. It's not a pandemic disease. It's not even sea level rise due to Arctic ice melt. What it is is the change in weather patterns that impact the availability of fresh water and the growing of food crops. The summer of 2012 brought with it a US Heartland drought that decimated the crop yields. The East Coast received more than its share of precipitation as the weather patterns had shifted a thousand miles eastward. So far the world has only been inconvenienced by Supply and Demand price increases. Two or three years of this shifted weather pattern could make the total amount of food produced be too little to feed everyone." Source

Sao Paulo, Brazil has not gotten nearly enough rainfall to maintain reservoir levels in light of the 20 million people who live there and rely on that rain. The Summer of 2015 will be critical for the lives of those people as the water faucets slow to a drip. In a similar vein, Los Angeles and the California farm land are facing the same drought conditions with a Summer 2016 doom-date.

"Let's put Global climate Change in its proper perspective. What ever the causes, whatever the magnitude, we humans need to figure out how we will live in the New Equilibrium." Source

We human beings have the ingenuity and intelligence to solve our environment problems and distribute fresh water to every city and population center on the planet. We have the capacity to design other ways to do what we do without consuming massive amounts of water. We only need the will to do it.

Maybe you groused at my suggestion that "if you had $1 billion to invest." While you and I don't have that level of wealth, there are many people who do. It is they who need to be influenced and convinced to make their profits in way that do not hurt the rest of us (and themselves.)

The Joys of Gas Fracking

The Joys of Gas Fracking

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Here are a few benefits and detriments to having hydraulic fracturing operations in your neighborhood.



* Leaking methane into the air and into the ground water

Once the shale layers are broken by the application of intense water pressure and held open by sand there is additional opportunity for the methane to flow to the desired conduit but it cannot be contained from also leaking into the groundwater and be expressed to the air by other previously drilled and poorly sealed wells in the area. The gas will seek the "path of least resistance" to the surface. If that is a residential or agricultural water well the gas will be dissolved in the water and come out like a carbonated beverage when the bottle is opened.

* Micro seismic activity

All that deep internal pressure in the rock layers will give rise to undesired cracking and that by definition is seismic activity, i.e. an earthquake. Small ones may be a nuisance but cumulative pressurizing of the strata may cause a damaging quake as it has in some heavily fracked regions.

* Toxic chemicals going into the ground and coming back out leak into GW

Fracturing used a cocktail of elements and compounds in the drilling and rock fracturing stages that are highly toxic and dangerous to humans, plant and wildlife. The cutting head of the drill turns the rock into fine particle that emerge as mud. This mud has all the chemicals that were put into the well and all the materials that were previously buried deep in the earth. These elements and compounds contain heavy metals (lead, arsenic, mercury, uranium, et al) and radioactivity. These items also leak into the groundwater causing it to be useless for human use.

* Drill cuttings must be disposed of somewhere

The drill cuttings must be disposed of somewhere. Typically it is stored on-site until the well is completed then it is either abandoned in place or transported off to be "processed". Some unscrupulous operators just truck it away and dump it where ever they want to.

* Drill cuttings have heavy metals and elevated levels of radioactivity

Drill cuttings are highly toxic as discussed above.

* Drill water that comes back out is toxic and must be contained and treated

Drill water and fracking water do not stay in the ground. It comes back out and must be treated else it contaminates the well site and everywhere around it. Treating it is not as simple as treating residential sewage which is primarily a biological process to degrade and remove organic compounds.

* 24/7 diesel generator noise and exhaust

Due to the locations of drill pads they must generate their own electricity to power the drilling equipment, light the place at night, pump water at high pressure. These generators are noisy and smell of diesel exhaust.

* Noise and vibration from high-pressure water pumps

There is a lot of vibration from the high-pressure pumps and the drilling equipment. Time is money when the operation costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per day. 24/7 operations are essential to the operation due to the costs. This nuisance must be borne by the human neighbors of every drill pad.



* Wells use multiple millions of gallons of water that must be trucked in

Most drill pads need to have water trucked in. Even if they last part of the delivery is by pipe, the entry point for the water usually is trucks. One million gallons of water requires in excess of 100 tank trucks. Typical water use is 5mg or 500 truckloads per site.

* Production wells need long pipe lines to move gas to collection points

Natural gas must be piped away from the wells. The gas be transported to a collection/transfer point.

* Gas collection/transfer points need to compress gas for transmission pipes

Before the gas can be introduced into a transmission line, it must be compressed to the high-pressure level of the transmission line. This requires yet another noisy diesel facility running 24/7.

* Well casings get old and crack over time

Even a new well can have problems with casing leaks but older one will eventually leak due to cracking and aging of the casing materials. Once a well is drilled it may sit, capped and awaiting actual production.

* There never is only one well. They are created in clusters of 5 to 10.

A drill pad is never alone as a single unit. Wells are drilled in clusters to make benefit of the closeness for supply delivery and production piping.

* Hundreds of truckloads of water, diesel fuel and chemicals create traffic

One million gallons of any liquid requires 100 truckloads (when using 10,000 gallon tanks.

* Truck accidents, pavement damage, shoulder damage and tight turns at intersections

10,000 gallons of water and the truck that carries it weight over 80,000 lbs (40 Tons). Road pavement wear is accelerated at those weights. Local bridges and culverts may not be rated for that range of weight. Smaller tanks are lighter but require more deliveries. More tank trucks mean more noise, congestion, opportunities for motor vehicle and pedestrian collisions. Most of the rural roads were not designed for heavy truck use therefore shoulder stability and intersection turning radii may not be adequate.

* Elevated crime levels are collateral with drilling operations.

Many new people in the community coming from all over the country are not "community minded." They are there for the paycheck and work. High levels of excess money from paychecks encourages illicit used for things like drugs and prostitution. While this may be good for drug dealers and prostitutes, it is contrary to the character of the existing community.

* Noise is a nuisance

Industrial land uses are not compatible with residential, tourist and agricultural land uses. The protracted periods of noise generation will be detrimental to the community

* Property values are negatively impacted by proximity to wells and drilling

When there is perceived or actual degradation of the landscape existing land and real estate values fall when located at or near a drilling operation. A study indicates a 5 to 10% in values within 0.9 miles of a drill site.
* Production intervals are usually short leading to shutdowns and abandonment

In takes a year or so to drill a well and prepare it for production. Most wells playout in a few years and may require additional fracturing to boost the output later in its lifecycle. Many times the well is merely shut down and/or abandoned. Bankruptcies are rife in this boom and Bust industry. Every bankruptcy filing seeks to limit the liability of the debtor in order to get out from under its obligations. This includes damage mitigation and remediation/reclamation of the well sites.

* Many out of town workers who are highly experienced in drilling.

Most drill site employees are experienced workers who travel to the well sites and work there until the drilling/fracturing operation is completed. Local talent is usually not employed at these sites.

* Only ancillary jobs for locals.

Restaurants, motels, grocery stores and pharmacies are the main beneficiaries of the drilling industry moving into town. But don't be fooled into expanding existing businesses because the industry packs up and leaves just as fast as it arrives.

The benefits of drilling for gas in your neighborhood.

* A few owners of larger parcels of land will be the ones who can sign a lease

The lot a house sits on is not sufficient in most cases for a drill pad construction. Apartments and condominiums are even less able to host a drill operation. The few large land owners are the ones who can sign a lease and be paid a royalty. They will be profiting at the expense of their neighbors who get little say in what takes place across their mutual property lines.

* County gets a short term boost in property tax revenues

While the county may derive a short term increase in property tax revenues, that doesn't last. Damage to roads and culvert, increases in policing, and other emergency services will easily overwhelm the increases in local revenues.

* People who are the "closers" that get permits approved and leases signed earn commissions

There is no guarantee that the people who "close" the deals will be the people who do the drilling and the production. Many signed leases and drilling permits are resold to make the profit without the company having to do anything.

* Financial incentives to local government can be lucrative.

Financial incentives to local government can be too great to pass up. Some "incentives" are outright bribes while others are promises of the betterment of the community for the sake of the residents.

* Local suppliers who can ramp up to provide goods and services can get new business

Things to remember.

* Keep in mind that there are two sides of the Equal Sign.

This equals That. Where there is a remuneration being paid, there are cost to cover. One must make sure that all he costs are covered or the deal is not a good one.

* The fracking boom is always short lived.

Drilling booms always go bust. They are all short-lived. They are no different that the S&L bust of the 1980s, the Tech-stock bust of the 2000s, the mortgage/housing boom/bust of 2007-9. Many localities are already Gone Bust and are sitting on an industrial wasteland.

* The damage done to the land, and water is an "externality" as far as the corporations are concerned.

That is, they drill for resources. They don't clean up after themselves. That is some other businesses' business.

* Drillers are speculators. They use other peoples' money to fund their drilling operations.

No driller ever cares anything about the land, communities or people who are in their way and constitute an expense and reduction of their profits.

* Producing gas is an "externality" as far as the driller is concerned.

Drillers don't care about production. They have already made their money drilling the hole.

* Many companies that get the permits issued and the leases signed only do so to sell those permits and leases at a profit to someone who will actually drill.

* Someone has to lay pipe lines between the production wells and the collection/transfer points.

* There are already tens-of-thousands of capped non-producing and unfinished well in the country.

* Many drilling/finishing enterprises file for bankruptcy and walk away from the sites when they get in over their heads.

* Profit is privatized. Loses are socialized. Expect to file lengthy lawsuits to get the drill sites remediated when they fail.

In the end, this nation needs natural gas to heat homes, run industries, generate electricity, drive some converted motor vehicles. Not all of that gas needs to come from every possible parcel of land in the country. There is a need for most things sometime, but not everything all of the time. Planned developments work far better than a haphazard development of anything anywhere. This is why we created land use zoning in the first place.

How Rider Behaviors Impact MetroRail Experience

Anyone who is a daily commuter on the Nation's Metro Rail system knows, it doesn't take much to bog down the timely trip to work and home. One person standing on the left on any escalator will evoke the ire of the people behind him/her. One lane of people could be getting in or out of the station a minute faster if EVERYONE adhered to that commuter etiquette. And a minute is a long time when you are "in a hurry." Just keep in mind that it took the Personal Computer to make 3 seconds into an unbearably long time.

Another behavior that slows down the flow is when a person, with a wheelie bag or not, stands about halfway between the platform edge and the back wall to wait for the next train. That position creates maximum impedance to the flow of people both in front of and behind that person. Rushing the open door before everyone who wants to get out has gotten out is yet another rider behavior that cascades failures all the way back up the line for several stations. That behavior leads to the biggest disruption of all.

One of the most common disruptions to the daily commute is the Door Jammer. He or she feels that one more person actually can get on that train and not wait for the next one. Granted is that Metro Rail Car Door mechanism have aged and are easy to knock out of alignment. Granted is that they can fail to close even when nobody has his elbow or her bag in the doorway. But most of the causes of disabled train are due to door jams and subsequent complete failures. Too many people trying to push in to the car and feeling completely justified in doing so because they have been waiting for two or three trains to get on. They have been late before and "Darn it, not today again."

No amount of maintenance and repair or even complete car replacement will correct for the anxious passenger who just has to get on this train, Now. The Red Line in particular is a very heavily used rail line. It will continue to experience breakdown blamed on numerous factors, not the least of which is rider behavior.

Ruminations on Ants And Beer

I had just returned from a week long interval on the road doing the job I have come really enjoy providing some of my years of experience to small transit providers in some of the most out of the way places left in America. This is not to say that they are insignificant or lacking in importance. What it is to say is that the smallest transit companies are extra lean on management and that makes them cost efficient but lacking in the opportunities to address the big picture because they are addressing the immediate picture. The managers of such operations can imagine the larger horizon but do not have the luxury of spare time to pursue activities that do not yield immediate satisfaction.

My morning consisted of sleeping in to compensate for the long days on the road and the lack of contiguous hours of uninterrupted sleep that so often accompanies business travel to places in strange time zones where the sun is not where it is supposed to be when you are starting out the day or finishing one up. The mundane chores of dumping a week’s load of dirty laundry in the machine and catching up on the groceries filled the remainder of the morning.

Most of the afternoon was consumed furthering the progress on my house project to replace the soffits. Waiting for the afternoon sun to cast the work area in shadow is the most intelligent approach to getting this summer-long project completed without reaching the point of exhaustion before the job is done. Of course the interruptions by work travel makes this project longer than if the task was worked on a little bit each day.

Fortunately the heat of the day had moderated and the humidity was not so oppressive that one did not wish to venture out of doors. I put in my Saturday hours demolishing the old soffits on the east end of the house and decided that the presence of wasps entering and leaving the corner of the house signaled my time to break for the day.

After blowing all the dust and debris off my clothing and skin with the compressed air chuck I settled into evening recovery mode. I keyed up a CD of ethereal Native American music called “Burning Sky” and leaned back with a bottle of Newcastle beer. The bottle cap flipped through the air on its way to the glass table top before bouncing and landing on the weathered wooden deck a few feet from mine.

The sky above was mostly blue with a few clumps of cloud chasing each other along on an easterly bearing. My backyard sky is just a small piece of the whole and is constrained by the close horizon that makes my world there very small and comforting. In South Dakota, from where I just returned, the sky way very big. The anvil of land made the horizon quite far indeed. The world is much larger out there but being so close to the surface makes people see so much less of it. One must be able to get above the topography to see farther.

Near my feet a few tiny ants scurried about in their ant-pursuits. These were not the typical brown ants that usually populate your kitchen floor. They were only about one-fourth that size. Midgets in a world of dwarfs, with all due respect to people of small stature.

I realized that they were so small that even if they could ponder their existence and the why and wherefores, they would be blind to my presence towering over them. One philosopher-ant might dare to postulate the existence of a superior being or a loving god who watches over each and every one of them only to be scorned by the nay-sayers who refuse to accept such existences without irrefutable evidence. A human being is so different from them that they might not even recognize me as a living thing at all. I might merely be another terrestrial surface upon which they tread seeking access to food and hospitable habitat.

Just as they are miniscule as compare to me, so might I be to such a being that I too cannot fathom. I know that even in their sub-millimeter stature, that there are dust mites that live under the scales of their insect exo-skeletons.

As I look to the celestial regions, my planet may only be an electron to a galactic nucleus and all galaxies may be atoms in the molecules of a far greater DNA than anyone has ever dared imagine.

The ants were not fussing about at random. There was purpose in their movements. They were converging on the upturned beer bottle cap that landed in their world a few minutes earlier. Manna from Heaven perchance. I wondered if their anxious masses had prayed for deliverance from a famine and draught. Each of these little bodies were smaller than the hairs on my forearms. Each of those hairs had more mass that any one of those ants. Yet the ant-mass had mobility, intent and proclivities that are lacking in the hairs of my arm. It was then that I felt compelled to retrieve my tablet and pen. I always write better when first putting pen to paper than hacking away at a keyboard.

Within the circular world of the bottle cap with its corrugated boundary was a gram or two of the beer that adhered to the cap surface as my cap lifter pried it loose and sent it tumbling through space and landing on the wide plane of the backyard deck. They found it quite rapidly.

Soon there was a colony of ants sipping at the Nectar of the Gods. I wondered if the alcohol made them drunk. Did they sing their way home after neglecting their assigned duties too long? Do any of them become morose and sardonic when partaking of the brew? Does anyone become belligerent and boorish with too much of a good thing? Will they be chastised for being less than virtuous? Will any of them say, “shut up, Bitch, I’m not that drunk. And if I am, it’s none of your business?” Will they even know what hit them?

I only know that 24 oz. of the stuff compared to my body size is quite ample to wax me philosophic. The beer and the music and the absolutely perfect evening have converged to make me not care if I am part of something bigger or not, although they are not enough to make me stop thinking that I am. A light breeze blows from the east across the expanse of the deck and makes the trees gently sway allowing the rays of the sun through the leaves to occasionally find my face.