Family, kids, minivan—and drug dealing. How the recession has driven average Americans into the game.
By Tony D’Souza
For some time, I’d been hearing stories from my sources in the interstate marijuana racket about law-abiding “civilians” turning to the game because of the recession, and so, armed with introductions, I hit the road to meet some of these unlikely criminals face to face. That’s how, on a hot evening in June, I found myself in Dan’s Northern California kitchen.
Dan isn’t his real name. Nor are any of the names in this story, for obvious reasons. But his situation is a familiar, harsh reality for many Americans, as I learned while doing research for my recent novel on this subject. Dan is in his early 40s, a slim, soft-spoken former short-haul trucker who once owned all the toys: a used Mercedes, snowmobiles, Jet Skis. When they were both employed, he and his wife—a retail manager—easily cleared $100,000 a year. “We ate out breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” Dan, now a minimum-wage laborer, tells me with folded arms. “That’s the way life was for 17 years.”
Today, Dan’s toys are gone, sold to support an underwater mortgage. His wife, who kept her job, left him three years ago, driving away in the Mercedes. “She didn’t like the fact that I sat at home and she was going to work,” he tells me. “There were no jobs. I filled out a thing for the city, and 400 people were there for one opening—a garbage truck driver.”
Keeping the house has been Dan’s only real goal since 2008, when he was laid off. It’s a simple three-bedroom, two-bath in a prefab, working-class subdivision off the I-5 corridor. “I wanted my kid to grow up in a safe community,” he explains. “I have always made my house payment, and I’ve always made it on time.” But he fretted over things like gas prices. “My daughter would say, ‘Can I take your truck to the store?’ That’s 1.2 miles, which makes it 2.4 miles round-trip. If she went there once, I would not make it to work the next day. That’s how my money was. I’ve fought for it the past three years working two and three jobs. I’ve even changed my morals.”
From his window, I can see the jagged outline of the Klamath range far off to the northwest. Surrounding those mountains is the Emerald Triangle: Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity counties—the heart of large-scale pot cultivation in California. In 2010, state voters rejected a proposal to legalize marijuana for recreational use. Nevertheless, in the 15 years since they passed Proposition 215—the state’s vague and permissive medical-marijuana law—growing the drug has become more socially acceptable, local dispensaries have proliferated, and associated businesses have flourished like pilot fish on a shark. Mom-and-pop shops sell high-tech gardening gear and starter plants called clones. Pot “colleges” like Oakland’s Oaksterdam University offer “quality training for the cannabis industry.” An inexhaustible array of websites tout everything from fertilizer to legal advice and grow-room insurance.
Read HERE.
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WeatherSpark “WeatherSpark is a new type of weather website, with interactive weather graphs that allow you to pan and zoom through the entire history of any weather station on earth. Get multiple forecasts for the current location, overlaid on records and averages to put it all in context.”
The first shopping center in a suburb was in Kansas City, Missouri and the first tenant moved in in 1923. It had 150 stores and a 2000-seat auditorium. The first enclosed climate-controlled suburban shopping mall was Southdale, in Edina, Minnesota, opened in 1956. The first pedestrian shopping mall was constructed in 1959 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. – Provided by Reference.com
Cheetah, likely the last surviving chimpanzee star of the classic Johnny Weissmuller-era Tarzan movies, passed away last Saturdayas a result of kidney failure at Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Palm Harbor, Florida.
Remarkably, Cheetah — who played the same-named chimp during the early 1930s — lived to be approximately 80 years old. According to sanctuary outreach director Debbie Cobb, chimps, even in captivity, rarely live past 45.
“He was very compassionate,” Cobb said of the sanctuary’s celebrity chimp. “He could tell if I was having a good day or a bad day. He was always trying to get me to laugh if he thought I was having a bad day. He was very in tune to human feelings.”
Cheetah was purchased by Weissmuller’s estate in the last 1950’s, and brought to the sanctuary a few years later. He left no offspring behind.
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What is up with Chinese and acrobatics? Great to watch though!
Read about this teenaged girl who, knowing she had cancer, refused chemo to protect the baby: (lots more to include more videos at link)
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Poor Sleep Plagues Police
Sleep disorders like insomnia, sleep apnea, and shift work disorder are common among US and Canadian police officers, and excessive fatigue is impairing their ability to perform their duties safely and effectively. About 40 percent of respondents in a recent survey of US and Canadian cops screened positive for at least one sleep disorder. These officers were also more likely to commit serious administrative errors and safety violations and to fall asleep behind the wheel than their better-rested coworkers. More …
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The Bone-Eating Snot Flower
Osedax is a genus of polychaete—sea worm—that feeds on the bones of whale carcasses. Possessing neither stomachs nor mouths, members of the Osedax genus rely on symbiotic species of bacteria to digest whale fat and oils and to release nutrients that they can absorb through unusual root-like structures. One species is known as the “bone-eating snot flower” after its scientific name, Osedax mucofloris. When were these strange creatures first discovered? More…
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Why an Accidental Holocaust Expert Stopped Teaching About the Final Solution
It should have been a straightforward talk on the impossibility of talking about the Final Solution. But a funny thing happened on the way to the abyss that night—an event that led me to rethink the place of the Holocaust in modern history.
I was giving a guest lecture on the subject of Primo Levi at a synagogue in Houston, presenting Levi’s masterpiece, Survival in Auschwitz, to a crowd of 50 or so. I spoke about the nature of Levi’s experience at Auschwitz: his relationship with fellow prisoners, the camp’s makeshift economy and pecking order, the reasons he thought he survived while so many others died, and the narrative strategies he adopted to describe something that could not be described. In particular, I dwelt on Levi’s notion of the “gray zone”—the ways in which death camps blurred the frontiers between guilt and acquiescence, persecutor and victim. By way of conclusion, I revealed to the audience that the title of the book in its original Italian was If This Be A Man. With that abrupt flourish, I slowly closed my lecture binder and looked down at my hands.
I was superb.
An elderly and energetic man in the audience, however, did not agree. He raised his hand, gave his name—I’ll call him Siggie—and announced he was a survivor. A respectful hush fell over the audience, and all heads craned toward the small figure. Siggie declared that Levi didn’t know what he was talking about. “Gray zone, schmay zone,” he declared, more or less. As I stared at him, Siggie then launched into a long and polished account of his own experience at Auschwitz, one that drew fast and sharp lines between victim and victimizer. Moreover, Siggie suggested, anyone who tried to offer a literary or theoretical account of Auschwitz was little better than an interloper. This applied not only to Levi, but even more so to academics like me, who had never been in a concentration camp.
Read MORE.
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What happened in the basement of the psych building 40 years ago shocked the world. How do the guards, prisoners and researchers in the Stanford Prison Experiment feel about it now?
By Romesh ratnesar
Stanford Prison Experiment
It began with an ad in the classifieds.
Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. $15 per day for 1-2 weeks. More than 70 people volunteered to take part in the study, to be conducted in a fake prison housed inside Jordan Hall, on Stanford’s Main Quad. The leader of the study was 38-year-old psychology professor Philip Zimbardo. He and his fellow researchers selected 24 applicants and randomly assigned each to be a prisoner or a guard.
Zimbardo encouraged the guards to think of themselves as actual guards in a real prison. He made clear that prisoners could not be physically harmed, but said the guards should try to create an atmosphere in which the prisoners felt “powerless.”
The study began on Sunday, August 17, 1971. But no one knew what, exactly, they were getting into.
MORE.
Scientology Document Suggests Huffington Post Religion Blogger has been on the Church’s Payroll
Former Scientology executive Marty Rathbun made another leak of formerly secret, internal Scientology documents today, and this time he claims to have uncovered that a Huffington Post blogger who defends minority religions, and Scientology, has been on the church’s payroll.
That accusation has been made previously about Joseph K. Grieboski, who blogs at Huffington Post’s Religion section and runs something he calls the Institute on Religion and Foreign Policy. In 2009, former Scientologist Gerry Armstrong accused Grieboski of taking money from Scientology, claiming that he’d talked to a former Institute employee who told him of the connection.
And now Rathbun comes forward with a document from Scientology’s Office of Special Affairs — the church’s intelligence and covert operations wing — which suggests that Grieboski was employed to actively temper anti-Scientology sentiment in European countries. Previously, we’ve authenticated Rathbun’s leaks of OSA documents, including spying operations against Marc Headley, Mark Ebner, and South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
And besides, another former top Scientology official tells the Voice that he has personal information about Grieboski’s employment with the church.
Read MORE.
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Declinism’s Fifth Wave – Josef Joffe
That Used to Be Us is a co-production by a pundit and a professor, an unusual combination. Journalists write the first draft of history, say, on the Arab Spring. Taking a snapshot, they bet that the picture will reveal the pattern, and the particular the larger truth. Academics write the second and third drafts. They have the advantage of hindsight and a much wider dataset. So a reporter enthusing about Bastille Day in 1789 could not have known that the democratic revolution would throw up a Napoleon ten years later; a historian does. How, then, shall the twain ever meet? In Friedman and Mandelbaum’s venture, they do.
Journalist Thomas Friedman presumably took on the reportage and the rewrite in this book. It has the same fast-paced tempo and bubbly tone as did his Hot, Flat and Crowded. Michael Mandelbaum, a political scientist with a wide historical range, must have been in charge of the broader analytical perspective. This division of labor works quite nicely. On the one hand, there is the journalist’s instant insight, feeding on anecdote and atmosphere. So: “At the worst point of the subprime crisis, Tom asked his friend…” On the other, we get the academic’s “yes, but” that is steeped in “we’ve been there before.” (Truth in reviewing: I have known the authors for ages, ever since I met Mandelbaum at Harvard.)
The United States now faces its fifth wave of Declinism, that sinking feeling that the country’s best days are over. The first wave rolled across America with the “Sputnik Shock” of 1957, when Little Johnny was said to have fallen behind Little Ivan in the Three Rs. That wave crested in John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign against Richard Nixon. JFK rode all the way to the White House on a non-existent “missile gap” that supposedly presaged America’s demise at the hands of the Soviet Union.
READ.
Television Helmet from the 1960′s. Never saw one of these, so curious as to how it worked, how heavy it was and if it was sold to the public.
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In the bowels of U.S. Bank’s basement in downtown St. Paul, Kenton Spading follows guard Linda Traen into the carpeted vault lined with rows of safe deposit boxes. She reaches up to the second row from the top and unlocks a steel door. Spading delicately withdraws a large photo album containing 137 historic photos of the Mississippi River taken in the 1880s.
“They’re in pretty remarkable shape, considering they bounced around on a dredge for more than 50 years,” said Spading, a hydrologic engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Remarkable – and valuable.
A photography expert from Sotheby’s, the international auction house, flew in from New York recently and spent a day with the old photo album before appraising it at $4.5 million.
In the bowels of U.S. Bank’s basement in downtown St. Paul, Kenton Spading follows guard Linda Traen into the carpeted vault lined with rows of safe deposit boxes. She reaches up to the second row from the top and unlocks a steel door. Spading delicately withdraws a large photo album containing 137 historic photos of the Mississippi River taken in the 1880s.
“They’re in pretty remarkable shape, considering they bounced around on a dredge for more than 50 years,” said Spading, a hydrologic engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Remarkable – and valuable.
A photography expert from Sotheby’s, the international auction house, flew in from New York recently and spent a day with the old photo album before appraising it at $4.5 million.
Controversy Over a Memorial for a Korean Kamikaze Pilot
For those of you who don’t know, yes there were in fact Korean Kamikaze pilots during WWII. There were in fact 18 confirmed and probably more.
The actress Fukumi Kuroda is leading the charge (and footing most of the bill) to set-up a monument to Kamikaze pilot Tak Kyung-hyun in his hometown of Sacheon. It’s actually been built, it has been covered in tarp, and is waiting to be unveiled, but other residents have blocked it.
MORE.
This is not happening in our part of the world, with winter here.
Originally posted 2011-12-28 10:25:38. Republished by Blog Post Promoter