Roots
I remember ageism striking me right between the eyes, in Oaxaca, while I was climbing a pyramid at Monte Alban. Running, really. A silly sight from afar, trying to beat the veronica of the sun so I could get the “perfect” dusk shot with my Nikon.
Two elderly ladies on the side of the steps were selling beautiful weavings, something for which the Zapotec Indians of that region are known.
Over the past eighteen months two of the world’s largest automakers have been found responsible for deadly conspiracies. But, recent revelations can’t compete with the industry’s previous scandals.
Does the purpose of our lives change with age; does the life of a thirty-something have more point to it, than, say, a fifty-year-old, a sixty-year-old; indeed is there any real ‘point’ to either, and how would we discover what it is?
To many of us ‘The Cow’ is the best pub in London. On a quiet balmy Wednesday in June, I met a fellow middle-aged man for a beer, a bite, and, much to my surprise, what turned out to be some searching existential chatter. What, my friend asked – after a beer or two – is the point to me: the purpose of my life, and by extension of others like me?
Yes, it’s official. General Motors engaged in criminal wrongdoing for long knowing about the lethal defect in its ignition switch that took at least 174 lives and counting, plus serious injuries. At least 1.6 million GM cars – Chevrolet Cobalt and other models – hid this danger to trusting drivers, according to the Center for Auto Safety. Corporation executives who lie to or mislead the federal government violate Title 18 of the federal code, and risk criminal penalties.
Caught with their proverbial pants down, Fiat Chrysler executives have issued a voluntary recall of a good 1.4 million cars for the vulnerabilities of its installed internet system. Last Tuesday, Wired burst the bubble of confidence by showing how hackers could take control of a Jeep Cherokee via its internet-connected entertainment system. “Hackers remotely kill a Jeep on the highway – with me in it,” wrote correspondent Andy Greenberg.
When I co-founded the Public Citizen Health Research Group with Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe in 1971, he declared that this was his “last job.” The drug industry might have been advised to quiver. For through his Worst Pills, Best Pills books, newsletters and spectacular outreach via the Phil Donahue show, he has exposed by brand names hundreds of drugs with harmful side effects (worst pills) compared to drugs without such an unfavorable risk-benefit profile (best pills).
Are you one of the millions of people in the United States who drives a car every day? How do you react to the trucking industry, whose lobbyists with ample campaign cash swarm over Congress, pressing for a rider to a transportation appropriations bill to be passed to overturn laws in 39 states that currently ban unsafe double 33 foottractor-trailer combinations? What is your opinion of another provision in this bill to permanently increase truck driver working and driving hours up to 82 hours per week, abolishing the “weekend off” for two nights of restorative rest?
As a high school student, I came across an observation by Abraham Lincoln who said that “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.” Today “public sentiment” would be called “public opinion.”
Over the years, I have been astonished at how less than one percent of the citizenry, backed by the “public sentiment,” have changed our country for the better by enacting reforms to protect the people from abuses of power, discrimination and deep neglect.
Computers, unlike flesh-and-blood creatures, entirely lack the charms of spontaneity, playfulness, affection, sensuality, passionate attachment, and so forth. Yet recent films, to my continued bafflement, offer bizarre scenarios of “intimate relatedness” between humans and synthetic sentients (for instance, “Her,” “Ex Machina”–and even more sickeningly, the human clones of “Never Let Me Go.”) Two hundred years ago, the 19-year-old Mary Shelley showed more acute insight than today’s technophiles–by conjuring up a startlingly ironic contract between the coldly grandiose Dr.
As spring comes to the BC coast, young wild salmon are leaving the rivers where they were born and entering the ocean. Our pink and chum salmon take an exceptional gamble – they don’t spend a year in fresh water, they leave their rivers right away, tiny slips of silver weighing less that 1/2 a gram. These two species salmon are a gift to our rivers. Adult pink and chum salmon deposit tons of nutrients in the rivers when they spawn and die, but their babies don’t feed on the insect life that this abundance of nutrients produces, they leave this food for the coho, chinook, sockeye, steelhe
