2011.06.28

This newsletter is pasted onto my blogsite:  http://naturenewssf.blogspot.com/ the same day it is sent via email. 

I was told that by pasting your email address in the upper right hand corner of the blogsite in box titled "Follow by email" that you would be informed of new postings.  However, two people have told me that doesn't work.  I will let this ride for awhile, as I have  limited time to unsnarl these problems.  JS

1.   Central Subway tunneling contracts being approved as this email is being written
2.   June is World Ocean Month.  Celebrate
3.   New story on Lyme Disease - squirrels and lizards are storage reservoirs
4.   How spiders survive Pakistan floods
5.   Feedback:  Magnitudes of energy as measuring stick
6.   Woodshop for Women in Occidental July 1-3
7.   Possible way to get back at banks?
8.   Should America flog criminals instead of jailing them?
9.   Roses, Late Summer by Mary Oliver
10. Byliner collects new and classic works by writers of the past and present
11.  Obituary:  Yelena Bonner, fighter for human rights


1.  RE:  CENTRAL SUBWAY CONTRACTS FOR TUNNELING
MTA Board is proposing to approve a $233 Million Contract to a Montana construction company (with Italian affiliations)---to buy 2 tunnel boring machines, to bore an 8,240 foot long tunnel and cross tunnels.

DATE:  MTA BOARD MEETING, TUESDAY, JUNE 28, 9AM  ITEM 12
AT:  CITY HALL ROOM 408 (Can watch TV, Comcast Channels 26 or 78 for Item 12).

ATTEND & testify OR WRITE  to  MTABoard@sfmta.com and Roberta.Boomer@sfmta.com .

OPPOSE the rush to award one of MTA’s largest construction contracts in history because:
Due diligence is required to analyze the Bids, for qualifications, bidding compliance etc.---especially with relatively low Local/ SBE participation and bid protests.

It is unwise to attempt to force Federal Transit Administration’s (FTA) and political approvals of Federal New Starts Funding (not due until December 2011) and State Funding in light of other priorities.

Evaluate the possibility of “low-ball” bids with risks for high change orders---particularly since the FTA has fixed Federal Funding (if approved) and requires that all cost overruns be paid by the City and County of San Francisco, placing the City at extreme financial risk.

The Central Subway is arguably a flawed project, which reduces existing and future transit levels of service, and the purchase of 2 tunnel boring machines is unwise---until and if federal funds are approved in December 2011.

Given Muni’s continued deferred infrastructure investments, the drain of local Prop K Funds would exacerbate Muni’s short-term decline.
Contracts should not be awarded until the Project Funding Plan is secure---and the status of Federal, State and Local funds is clearly explained to the MTA Board, Board of Supervisors, Mayor and citizenry.

Project cost estimates need to be reevaluated and explained---delineating cost overruns in design, project management, construction management contracts, specific station design costs, specific construction cost estimates, contingency amounts and plans for worse-case-scenarios.
All large infrastructure projects have exceeded budgets, often in the extreme, and the taxpayers must not be liable.
Project and financial risks need to fully disclosed.

CONTRACT INFO:
http://www.sfmta.com/cms/cmta/documents/6-28-11Item12CentralSubwayTunnelcontract.pdf
MTA BOARD AGENDA, SEE ITEM 12:
http://www.sfmta.com/cms/cmta/httpwww.sfmta.comcmscmtaSFMTABoardJune282011agenda.htm

Howard Wong, AIA for www.SaveMuni.com

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2.  June is World Oceans Month

SaveNature.org joins thousands of organizations and individuals around the world celebrating the World's Oceans. Our goal is to raise $5000 this month of June to protect 100 acres of biodiverse reef habitat in Komodo, Indonesia. Honorary deeds will be issues with your reef adoption. Adopt Komodo Reef now! World Oceans Day is coordinated by the Ocean Project and the World Ocean Network.

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3.  Berkeley Planet story on Lyme Disease - Lizards and squirrels as storehouses for the spirochete:   Ticks, Squirrels, Lizards, and Spirochetes 

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4. 


Splderwebs shroud trees in Pakistan's Sindh Province. After a 2010 flood inundated a fifth of the country, spiders sought refuge in the branches, where their webs snared malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

"Well, you can't talk," said Charlotte. "You have your meals brought to you in a pail. And furthermore ... do you realize that if I didn't catch bugs and eat'them, bugs would increase and multiply and get so numerous that they'd destroy the earth, wipe out everything?"

"Really?" said Wilbur. "I wouldn't want that to happen."

—from Charlotte's Web, by E. B. White

 Sierra- july/august 2011

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5.  Feedback

Sue Rosenthal:

Hi Jake, Hmmm... one of the items in your June 25 e-newsletter is making me write to you. I haven't read How Bad Are Bananas?, but I'm having a problem with reducing "badness" to just the carbon footprint of an item. Production and use of a plastic bag may release only a small amount of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, but that plastic bag will be around forever, most of the time as tiny non-biodegradable particles that will interfere with natural systems in the ocean, in the soil, and on up the food chain. I'll take Barcelona, thank you.

Sue:  Your comment is unassailable.  However, I think it may be beside the point that the writer is making, which is magnitudes of energy.  To me it is valid to use the plastic bag as a scalar--listing only magnitude, not comparative value.  It never occurred to me to interpret that as dismissing the downsides of plastic bags.

I'm expressing this awkwardly; I hope you get my point.

Hi Jake, I do understand. Since I'm so focused on the other problems created by plastic, it's hard for me to look at just a single aspect like greenhouse gas emissions separate from all else. It makes plastic seem so innocuous!

But as Gilda Radner in her Rosanne Rosannadana character used to say, "Never mind!"

Evolution



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6.  Occidental Arts & Ecology Center

Woodshop for Women
Friday-Sunday July 1-3, 2011
We are offering this intensive three-day course to enable women to conceptualize and carry out basic carpentry projects. Come together with other women participants to share in this practical and empowering workshop!

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7.  Learned from NPR's Says You:

dharna - In India, sitting on a debtor's doorstep until he repays his debt.  Creditor will sit there until he starves to death.

Goldman Sachs, Citibank, B of A, &c--why don't we all sit on their various doorsteps on a hunger strike until they repay what they owe us?  (We all need to lose weight anyway.)  They can't let us all starve because then they wouldn't have any customers to screw.

John Maynard Keynes:  "If I owe you a pound, I have a problem; but if I owe you a million, the problem is yours."

Or.....consider meting out punishment to fit the crime--see the next article.....

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8.  America's penal system

Sing Sing or the lash
Should America flog criminals instead of jailing them?

Jun 23rd 2011 | from The Economist print edition


This won’t hurt much

In Defense of Flogging. By Peter Moskos.

IMAGINE that you—or, if you prefer, a younger, more reckless version of you—committed a crime. A bar brawl, driving home drunk again, some tax fiddling, getting caught with a more-than-trivial but less-than-kingpin amount of illegal drugs: something, in any event, that got you sentenced to a few years in prison. And say you were offered a choice: you could either spend those years behind bars, or you could get ten lashes. Certainly painful, probably humiliating, but it would be done under close medical supervision by a licensed flogger, and it would be over in minutes. You would recover, except for the scarring, in a few weeks. And you could get on with your life. You may think flogging is barbaric, but is there any question which you would choose if you could? According to Peter Moskos, a sociologist whose previous book, “Cop in the Hood”, detailed his year spent as a Baltimore beat cop: “If flogging were really worse than prison, nobody would choose it.”

The modern American prison system evolved as an alternative to flogging: penitentiaries were designed to “cure” prisoners of their criminality—to render them penitent—rehabilitating them into productive members of society. On this score, as on most others, it has failed. Indeed, prisons seem to cause more crime than they prevent, hardly surprising when you throw a bunch of criminals together with nothing to do and lots of time. Today roughly 2.3m people live in America’s prisons, more than live in any American city other than New York, Los Angeles or Chicago. America’s incarceration rate of 750 per 100,000 is five times the world average; roughly one in every 31 Americans—and one in every 11 African-Americans—is under some form of correctional control, whether prison, probation or parole.

Some prison inmates are incorrigibly violent and must be kept apart from society, but most are not. They are there to be punished, hence the maxim, “We build prisons for people we’re afraid of and fill them with people we’re mad at.” Flogging, Mr Moskos argues, would at least let society punish people swiftly and efficiently. Brutal and archaic it may be, but Mr Moskos convincingly argues that America’s prison system is at least as inhumane. “If we really wanted to punish people,” Mr Moskos writes, “we could sentence drug offenders to join gangs and fear for their lives; we could punish child abusers to torture followed by death; we could force straight men to have semiconsensual prison-gay sex…All these things already happen, but we just sweep them under the rug and look the other way.”

The system is also broken: entities that profit from incarceration—prison-guard unions and private-prison builders—lobby for longer sentences, while politicians build prisons in poor rural areas. “The cynical among us,” Mr Moskos writes, “might even say we’re spending billions of dollars to pay poor rural unemployed whites to guard poor urban unemployed blacks.” And indeed prisons tend to be filled with poor minorities: more than half of all black men without a high-school diploma spend time in jail. Though in recent years a few states have started to roll back against the trend of ever longer, ever harsher sentencing, these efforts amount to little more than bailing out a sinking supertanker with a teacup.

Mr Moskos’s proposal begins as a provocation and ends bleakly plausible. But flogging is still flogging. There may exist little political will to legalise drugs or rethink how and why criminals are punished, but America is not about to start whipping people again anytime soon. Perhaps the most damning evidence of the broken American prison system is that it makes a proposal to reinstate flogging appear almost reasonable. Almost.

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results"    Albert Einstein

We are all wounded creatures.  Salman Rushdie

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9.
Roses, Late Summer

What happens
to the leaves after
they turn red and golden and fall
away? What happens

to the singing birds
when they can't sing
any longer? What happens
to their quick wings?

Do you think there is any
personal heaven
for any of us?
Do you think anyone,

the other side of that darkness,
will call to us, meaning us?
Beyond the trees
the foxes keep teaching their children

to live in the valley.
So they never seem to vanish, they are always there
in the blossom of the light
that stands up every morning

in the dark sky.
And over one more set of hills,
along the sea,
the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness

and are giving it back to the world.
If I had another life
I would want to spend it all on some
unstinting happiness.

I would be a fox, or a tree
full of waving branches.
I wouldn't mind being a rose
in a field full of roses.

Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question.

Mary Oliver online
http://guccipiggy.objectis.net/poetry/maryoliver/roseslatesummer

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10.  Here's the description of Byliner from The Observer's Very Short List:

Byliner collects new and classic works by writers of the past and present, commissions long-form “originals” by superstars like William Vollmann, and makes it incredibly easy to find, filter, and forward the best essays and articles on any given topic. This website—which launched on Tuesday—is the discriminating reader’s new BFF.

http://byliner.com/

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11.  Yelena Bonner, fighter for human rights, died on June 18th, aged 88

Jun 23rd 2011 | from The Economist print edition


AS A child, Yelena Bonner loved to be alone. As soon as she could walk she wandered away, preferably into warm spring rain. At the family’s summer dacha at Sestroretsk she strayed deep into the forest. When they moved to Moscow, she was out roaming the streets. Adult supervision infuriated her. Alone, she would secretly practise the things she was afraid of doing—climbing trees, going high on swings. She revelled in “a special state of separateness from everyone and everything”.

Strange, then, that her later life was given up totally to others. She became a wartime nurse on troop trains, dealing with crowds of refugees as well as soldiers, falling asleep exhausted in waiting rooms with the cries of new babies in her ears. In the post-war Soviet Union she sent food parcels to political prisoners and attended their trials, until her first marriage collapsed in the chaos of caring for them. In the 1970s she called the smoke-filled kitchen of her tiny flat in Moscow “the inn of merry beggars” after the dissident writers and intellectuals who crammed into it, seeking her help. She debated, typed, petitioned, monitored Soviet violations of the Helsinki accords on human rights, recorded those abuses for the Chronicle of Current Events, until her heart hurt, or her war-damaged eyes could scarcely see. Human rights were not a vague or general ideal as far as she was concerned. Promoting them meant defending each individual victim.

One man in particular she persuaded of this. In 1970 she fell intensely in love with an eminent physicist, Andrei Sakharov, creator of Russia’s hydrogen bomb. He too had dissident leanings; they met while picketing a trial. And he too was compulsively solitary: as well as genius, she recognised “extreme loneliness” in him. From that moment, though she fiercely insisted that she was her own person, theirs was a joint cause. They were a unit, he radiating quiet composure, she nervy, passionate, sucking on cigarettes while she talked; he abstracted, lost in his writing, while she made jam, stewed chicken, washed floors and organised dissent, a “doer” alway

He went on hunger strike for her, at last persuading the authorities to let her go abroad for medical treatment. While there, in 1975, she collected his Nobel peace prize and delivered his speech for him. When he was sentenced to internal exile in Gorky in 1980 she was his connection to the world, ferrying him books and news, sending his writings abroad. Single-handed, she reminded the West that he was working and alive. At one point she was exiled too for anti-Soviet agitation. They were “alone together” in Gorky then, and deeply happy in their aloneness, though “people” still moved their glasses and toothbrushes round in the flat, and slashed the tyres on their ancient car.

Andrei once persuaded her to ask the authorities for pardon. It was tactical, but stuck in her craw. When people attacked her for something, her instinct was to offend them more. At school, when her hair-bow was called “petit bourgeois” by a teacher, she wore a bigger one. Called a money-grubbing Jew for marrying Sakharov (a frequent slur), she longed for a yellow star to blazon on her coat.

The lightning ball

Her mother, whose name she took, was never an active Jew. Her foibles, like her insistence on eating sweets at bedtime, seemed to come from her Armenian father. But neither parent had much time for her. They were too busy building their communist revolution to care about their sickly, “useless”, “ugly” daughter, who therefore defiantly decided she was pretty all by herself. Then in 1937, when she was 14, Stalin’s purges took them away. Her father was shot, her mother sent to a labour camp. Yelena, who had always romantically believed that the world needed Russia’s revolution, refused to join the Communist Party until 1965, when her parents had been rehabilitated. Within seven years, appalled by the invasion of Czechoslovakia, she had left again.

Her work for others, slap in the face of Soviet bureaucracy and the KGB, piled up from that moment. She took on every plea for help that came to her, sending food or money, writing letters, finding rooms, whatever would make a difference. She was often ill, had several heart attacks, felt she was beating her head against the wall. But she would swallow her nitroglycerine pills, struggle up the stairs to argue with another official, stay ardently angry, in the hope of making her motherland acknowledge “the sovereignty of the individual”.

The Soviet regime toppled eventually, but never fast enough for her. She fell out with Yeltsin over the war in Chechnya, and in 2010 was the first to sign a petition that Vladimir Putin should go. She also helped set up Memorial, an influential human-rights outfit focusing on the Caucasus. When Andrei had died in 1989 he had been given a state funeral, but she still bitterly believed that his life had been shortened by persecution. So, probably, had hers.

On one of her solitary girlhood walks, she once found herself accompanied by a lightning ball. It bounced along beside her, glowing like the moon, and struck a tree. It fell apart then, exploding in sparks, but she remembered how elated she felt to touch the scorch-mark and smell the hot, tarry smell of the destroyed wood. Her life, she thought, would burn like that.