Catastrophes

I wrote a post about the good stuff that happened in 2006. Everytime I sat down to write about the bad and the ugly of last year, I'd become paralyized by the massive amounts of badness and uglyness that permeated the year.

There was the triumvirate of firecrotch (Lindsay Lohan), skanky chocha (Paris Hilton), and white trash poontang (Britney Spears).

Ugh Britney.

Anorexia became the new black with Nicole Ritchie it's standard bearer. Yeah sure, anorectics have been banned from catwalks across the globe what with four dead models sacrificied to the disease but when we still have a coked-out yet incredibly rich Kate Moss prancing around ... well ... no wonder it's still considered hot in Hollywood.

There was also the crazy whacked out Tom Cruise with his scientology slave Katie Holmes and their tethan child. And Star Jones. And Donald Trump. And Kid Rock and Pam Anderson.

But those are just the entertainment.

What about Darfur?
Do you remember the devastation of Lebanon?
Then there's the never ending carnage in Iraq.
And the immigration raids.

Do you know where habeas corpus went?

How about Mark Foley?
Ted Haggard?
Samuel Alito?

The thing is ... all of this is too abstract, too far away when compared to the death of my niece Lydia.

Twenty two years after losing his parents and 5 siblings to Union Carbide's criminal negligance at Bhopal, India, activist Sunil Kumar Verma has committed suicide after fighting for years with paranoid schizophrenia an illness which affected many Bhopal survivors.

Meanwhile, Union Carbide and its successor, Dow Chemical, has largely gotten off scott free.

From the International Capaign for Justice in Bhopal:

On the night of Dec. 2nd and 3rd, 1984, a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, began leaking 27 tons of the deadly gas methyl isocyanate. None of the six safety systems designed to contain such a leak were operational, allowing the gas to spread throughout the city of Bhopal.[1] Half a million people were exposed to the gas and 20,000 have died to date as a result of their exposure. More than 120,000 people still suffer from ailments caused by the accident and the subsequent pollution at the plant site. These ailments include blindness, extreme difficulty in breathing, and gynecological disorders. The site has never been properly cleaned up and it continues to poison the residents of Bhopal. In 1999, local groundwater and wellwater testing near the site of the accident revealed mercury at levels between 20,000 and 6 million times those expected. Cancer and brain-damage- and birth-defect-causing chemicals were found in the water; trichloroethene, a chemical that has been shown to impair fetal development, was found at levels 50 times higher than EPA safety limits.[2]Testing published in a 2002 report revealed poisons such as 1,3,5 trichlorobenzene, dichloromethane, chloroform, lead and mercury in the breast milk of nursing women.[3] In 2001, Michigan-based chemical corporation Dow Chemical purchased Union Carbide, thereby acquiring its assets and liabilities. However Dow Chemical has steadfastly refused to clean up the site, provide safe drinking water, compensate the victims, or disclose the composition of the gas leak, information that doctors could use to properly treat the victims.

The heatwave is putting some serious stress on the New York City grid.

All of the East Village, Union Square and Gramercy Park, including Peter-Cooper and Stuyvesant Town, have been browned out. We just had someone from the administration knock on our doors to alert us that there may indeed be a blackout in our area.

I live two blocks away from the 14th Street ConEdison plant. I just saw a note posted next to our elevators that MetLife is shutting down one elevator in all their buildings and are denying people access to the laundry rooms in order to limit energy consumption within their properties.

I would not mind if this meant that we'd need to go up and down the stairs. Unfortunately, we live on a 12th floor.

If brownouts and blackouts only meant disruptions in electricity, I would not have a problem. I mean, I have a gas stove. The fridge, as long as it's closed, can ride out a few days of no wattage.

The problem we have in New York City is that brownouts and blackouts also mean potential water supply disruption. I learned this in 2002 during the blackout. I was out at a playground relatively close to Avenue D and from there we heard the boom and saw the plume of steam that signaled when the turbines screeched to a halt during during the blackout. We ran home and found almost a dozen elderly neighbors waiting to be helped up to their apartments. Since ours is the last floor, we helped them all. Once up, one of my next door neighbors and a native New Yorker commanded me to immediately fill up every pot and pan available as well as the tub. "In two more ours, the water will be off too." And what do you know, she was right.

So here are Liza's to-do's during a brown/blackout :

I got it right here, baby!

Photo courtesey of the National Weather Service

NOAA PREDICTS VERY ACTIVE 2006 NORTH ATLANTIC HURRICANE SEASON Residents in Hurricane Prone Areas Urged to Make Preparations
"For the 2006 north Atlantic hurricane season, NOAA is predicting 13 to 16 named storms, with eight to 10 becoming hurricanes, of which four to six could become 'major' hurricanes of Category 3 strength or higher," added retired Navy Vice Adm. Conrad C. Lautenbacher, Ph.D., undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator.

On average, the north Atlantic hurricane season produces 11 named storms, with six becoming hurricanes, including two major hurricanes. In 2005, the Atlantic hurricane season contained a record 28 storms, including 15 hurricanes. Seven of these hurricanes were considered "major," of which a record four hit the United States. "Although NOAA is not forecasting a repeat of last year's season, the potential for hurricanes striking the U.S. is high," added Lautenbacher.

It's one of those quiet Sundays; the oppressive heat has broken, we have friends in town, now despatched to SoHomo for a glamour fix. So I have some free time to bang my head against the wall at the catatonic stupidity that is our policy in Iraq. Words are beginning to fail me at the extent of this colossal military and moral disaster; what is it? A quagmire? A morass? Mere turmoil at the bloody borders of the empire? Or a fetid sewer into which the nation has cast, in a season of madness, our blood, our treasure, our power and our honor?

Case in point: the Washington Post has a long article today titled simply "In Iraq, Military forgot lessons of Vietnam", well worth a read. It details in exquisitie detail how exactly we tumbled over this abyss, once the war had been won and this country, under leadership at once staggeringly inept and profoundly criminal, proceeded to lose the peace.

On the morning of Aug. 14, 2003, Capt. William Ponce, an officer in the "Human Intelligence Effects Coordination Cell" at the top U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, sent a memo to subordinate commands asking what interrogation techniques they would like to use."The gloves are coming off regarding these detainees," he told them. His e-mail, and the responses it provoked from members of the Army intelligence community across Iraq, are illustrative of the mind-set of the U.S. military during this period.

From the Union of Concerned Scientists:

An external review of NOAA’s Hurricane Intensity Research and Development Enterprise has been released for public comment. The NOAA Science Advisory Board (SAB) announced the availability of the preliminary report of the SAB Hurricane Intensity Research Working Group’s (HIRWG) external review for public comment. The report can be found HERE

The Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere requested the SAB to conduct an external review of NOAA's hurricane intensity research and development enterprise. Details on the report’s draft recommendations are appended below. “The report recommends that NOAA strengthen its efforts to develop numerical models which incorporate essential physics and have sufficient resolution to resolve hurricane structure. The essential physics includes full representation of clouds and a much improved representation of the exchanges of heat, moisture, and momentum at the atmosphere-ocean surface. Development of these representations will require extensive analysis of data from carefully planned field studies using both traditional airborne and ground-based observing systems and novel observing platforms such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.”

Forget about the current immigration bill approved by the Senate but loathed by Congressional Republicans.

Forget about the political merry-go-round of Republicans defending corrupt Democrats because they think their arrest was unconstitutional.

Forget about the stupidity about English-only legislation while the United States still hasn't figured out what to do with their Spanish-speaking colony.

Forget about the Soul Patrol voter turn out or Duke's soulless women Lacrosse team.

Forget about chaos in East Timor or the Earthquake that shook Indonesia.

All I care about is Brangelina's new baby girl:

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have welcomed a baby girl, Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, a rep for the couple confirms exclusively to PEOPLE.

The child was born on May 27, at night, in the African country of Namibia.

Oh and that Britney may have kicked KFed to the curb.

Oh and that Gwen Stafani hollabacked a baby boy.

Life is too short to be depressed and ranting and raving all the time.

I was attacked once, in a televised crowd of almost 100,000 people in the streets -- assaulted and battered on the sidewalk after a huge hometown football game in Gainesville, Florida.

Please understand I was hometown fan but no fanatic, a sober, sanguine 40-year-old mom who'd just succeeded in becoming pregnant again though I didn't show, didn't yet even know. I'd been faithfully abstaining --from alcohol, obviously not from sex!-- with the hope in mind.

So why did the attack happen to me, what did it mean?

I was on foot with my husband, leaving the stadium across the grassy field where some brash, privileged young frat boy type (wearing the same team colors as I, does that mean he was "on my side?") had parked his sporty first-tier-access car. Maybe Daddy was a big booster? Or the kid could have been a Master of the Universe himself -- it WAS the '90s.

Our team had just lost a fair --and fairly humiliating-- fight to our major in-state rival. We were the team the TV commentators loved to hate, so no one wearing orange and blue was feeling great.

But it was objectively beautiful weather (my happy hormones might have been kicking in already?) and win or lose the game, I had every reason to be enjoying it among my fellows, or so it had seemed.

On This Day in 1911, 146 people died in the very building I work in. The result of their deaths was the rapid growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and the real beginning of the fight against sweatshops. It also was the beginning of fire regulations in American cities.

I work in what is now known as the Brown Building at NYU. But in 1911 it was the Asch building. The top three floors of the Asch building comprised the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. For the record, a shirtwaist is essentially a woman’s blouse. I work a couple of floors below where the factory was.

This factory employed some 500 workers, mostly young women immigrants. The working conditions were essentially sweatshop conditions with fourteen-hour workdays and a 60- to 72-hour workweek. It was also a death trap. Workers of course smoked and lighting was from gas lighting…and, of course, the clothing was flammable. But it was even worse due to management distrust of the workers. One of the two exit stairs was locked to keep workers from taking breaks. The fire escape was substandard. And working conditions were crowded.

Mushrooms grow in bullshit. Patriarchy grows in bad analysis posing as scholarly analysis in Foreign Policy. Really. Who writes this stuff?

In The Geopolitics of Sexual Frustration, Martin Walker offers information about the imbalances between male and female birthrates in Asian countries.

Mother Nature’s usual preference for about 105 males to 100 females has grown to around 120 male births for every 100 female births in China. The imbalance is even higher in some locales—136 males to 100 females on the island of Hainan, an increasingly prosperous tourist resort, and 135 males to 100 females in central China’s Hubei Province. Similar patterns can be found in Taiwan, with 119 boys to 100 girls; Singapore, 118 boys to 100 girls; South Korea, 112 boys to 100 girls; and parts of India, 120 boys to 100 girls.

(This is the kind of information, by the way, that puts the whole notion that women are equal on a par with the report of WMD in Iraq. We're so equal that prospective parents abort us at higher numbers because they don't want to bring up girls. Feel equal yet? )