Clips

Pelicans, Belted Kingfishers and Ospreys all love this tree

Some days the ideas don't come fast and furious so i surf the net looking for trends that affect humanity. On St. Croix the Hovensa closing is the main topic of conversation and will create unknown opportunities for years to come; we still have far to go before we feel the real effects. i'm avoiding writing about it because i've taken a position of wait and see. So on to other things that can also impact us and our environment.

There's a hint of a rainbow wayyyyy back in that cloud

Hawksbills and Greens...of the ten tagged in August at Buck Island National Park eight are still sending out signals whoo hoo. The map at seaturtle.org shows all of them remaining in the Caribbean between Puerto Rico and down as far as Antigua. They slowly meandered away from St. Croix with some going north and others heading south. It will be interesting to see if they come back and when.  i'm always checking the turtles at Cane Bay and so far none of ours have been tagged.

Hawksbill at Cane Bay

Hope the Whimbrel...that bird is freaking amazing and she is ours. Hope lives here from September to May at Great Pond on the south shore until she takes off to migrate north to her breeding grounds close to the eastern Alaskan border. She flies non-stop from here to Virginia where she fuels up and continues the trek north and west. She has had a monitor on her for three seasons and is one of the few Whimbrels still transmitting data to scientists. She has proven that Great Pond is an extremely sensitive wetland area and needs protecting.

Great Pond where Hope hangs out

New York Attorney General Eric Schnierderman will be co-chairing an investigation into risky mortgage packaging and the abusive lending that lead to the housing bubble that crashed our economy. This was a long time in coming and it is just a start but maybe some where down the road those that took advantage of inexperienced buyers will be brought to justice.

Customs House

Newt Gingrich is experiencing a revival of sorts. This summer his rising star bit the dust when his campaign staff bolted. i think most of us thought he was finished but he stayed in the game. Now he has won South Carolina and is trying to win Florida...apparently his schtick is redemption, he has seen the light and changed his ways. i think Gingrich is a professional con man and if conservatives can believe that he has repented of his ways and he becomes their nominee for President of the United States then they will prove to the world that they really can be led like a cow to slaughter.

Beliefs...it is easier to believe and not question than it is to question.

According to Michael Shermer “Men and women, indistinctly, have the same tendency to believe weird things. What changes is the type of weird thing. Women believe more in mediums, spiritualists, fortunetellers, witchcraft, amulets, alternative medicine and healers. Men prefer to believe in the paranormal, pseudoscience, creationism and UFOs.”

Saturday Market at La Reine

Jails are a business and we are number one in the world for incarceration. A New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik, "The Caging of America," shockingly notes:

"Over all, there are now more people under "correctional supervision" in America - more than six million - than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height."

The toll on minorities is devastating because a lot of poor black and white men were incarcerated for non-violent crimes:

For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today - perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system - in prison, on probation, or on parole - than were in slavery then.

Gopnik is appalled: "The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life."

And here's my two cents on that issue...when jails became a business the need for customers increased. Without customers there can be no profit so the fact that we are the number one jailers in the world does not surprise me.

Until next week, see ya.

ST Croix Oil Refinery closing

If you can't wade through the stuff see below for oil refinery comments.

Two individuals interacting through the use of vocalized reverberations that are recognized as containing a code of sounds that both understand. When you think about speech it is amazing that the grunts we emit induce reactions from those we want to impact in some way.

Green Turtle's never have goop on the rear of their shells

i don't know if any of the rest of you have ever done this but when i was young maybe seven or eight i would say a word to myself over and over. i'd repeat a word say...ant... for instance...ahhhnnnntttttt. i'd watch ants going about their business, trekking along in single file, bumping heads with ones going in the opposite direction and say to myself ahhhnnnttttt. i'd say it slowly over and over while i was leaning over watching them and think about the sounds and wonder how in the world ahhhnnnntttttt ever came to be the sound we use to indicate an ant. i'd repeat color sounds, sounds for objects, all sorts of things and never be able to understand why that particular sound became responsible for identifying something we take for granted. i still don't completely understand how we originally agreed that certain tonal articulations had any meaning at all.

Hawksbills always seem to have goop on the rear of their shells

Apparently i'm not alone. Linguists, anthropologists, philosophers, evolutionary biologists and psychologists have all wondered how human language developed. Those that follow the Bible believe that Adam was the first human to speak a designed language that was later scattered into separate languages at Babel by God. Chomsky a linguist at MIT thinks we may have a “language center” in our brains that enables the youngest child to acquire language innately. Others think the evolutionary tweaking of a few genomes way back when is the only thing separating us from the animals.

Moray body language

The Oxford English Dictionary has almost 176,000 words in common usage, 47,000 words in it are obsolete and 9,500 are derivative. No one really knows how many words the English language contains because it adds and subtracts them constantly based upon usage. It is thought that English has more words than other languages because of the addition of Latin and French after the Norman invasion in 1066.

Atlantic Ray trying to get away

The difference between us all lies not in our understanding but in our vocal projections. Since we attach different meanings to sounds we can't always speak to each other but we can understand every human on the planet through their body language. All humans recognize laughter, sadness, puzzlement, distress, arm signals, head nods, gestures and pictures that we draw. Travelers, even without knowledge of the language of the country they are visiting can get their needs met through sign and body language. We can communicate on an elementary level at all times no matter who we are with.

Can you read his body language?

Conversation can be verbal or non-verbal and both methods or a combination of the two clue us in to the intentions of those we interact with. Sounds may convey meaning but the way you look, listen, sit, move or react can give a much more in depth message. You may be trying to convince someone of one thing while your body language is sending a mixed message. If the two aren't working together the receiver of the information may have his or her doubts.

Today on the island we all got the horrible news that the oil refinery is closing. Everyone is talking about it and most of it is negative. Lots of people will be loosing their jobs and moving off island to find work. Everything will be affected, housing, gasoline, schools and all the business's that worked directly or indirectly with the refinery.

St. Croix has experienced ups and downs through out its entire human history and this will not be the worst thing that has ever happened on the island. Over time we have had earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunami's and declining economies brought on by the demise of the sugar industry, aluminum, rum and now oil. At one point in the 1600's all residents were ordered off. In the future it will be something else that will crash and burn...those committed to St. Croix will stay and those that can see no new future here will leave.

My advice is wait and see how things shake out. Some other company could make a bid for the refinery, Hess may decide to re-open if market conditions change and there could be better days ahead. One just never knows. When the refinery in Aruba closed they focused on tourism and the island is now one of the top destinations. Sometimes when things go bad it becomes an opportunity to create something new and better.

Conversation on the streets will be full of melee, take it with a grain of salt. Don't make decisions based upon other people and don't bolt just because everyone else thinks that is their only option. People will continue to live and work here for eons to come regardless of the Hovensa closing.

Think about it

Eleven days into the new year. How many times have you started to write the year down(2012) and gotten it wrong? Seems like it is a right of passage every year, learning the new numbers so you don't even have to think about it.

There are so many things we don't think about as we go about our days i thought i'd shake things up a bit.

How many of you know that flooding in Thailand is three times normal for January? Eleven days and its already three times worse than the average for the whole month. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2012/jan/10/weatherwatch-floods-thailand-temperatures-us

“2011 sets a new U.S. record for combined wet and dry extremes
If you weren't washing away in a flood during 2011, you were probably baking in a drought. The fraction of the contiguous U.S. covered by extremely wet conditions (top 10% historically) was 33% during 2011, ranking as the 2nd highest such coverage in the past 100 years. At the same time, extremely dry conditions (top 10% historically) covered 25% of the nation, ranking 6th highest in the past 100 years. The combined fraction of the country experiencing either severe drought or extremely wet conditions was 58%--the highest in a century of record keeping. Climate change science predicts that if the Earth continues to warm as expected, wet areas will tend to get wetter, and dry areas will tend to get drier--so 2011's side-by-side extremes of very wet and very dry conditions should grow increasingly common in the coming decades.” Jeff Masters http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/show.html

Or that 171 inmates still live at Guantanamo. 600 have been released and only 6 ever convicted. According to our own government reports 92% of the prisoners in Guantanamo never fought for Al Qaida. The close Guantanamo banner i used to have here mysteriously disappeared when the site went down, but it doesn't mean i've forgotten it or have changed my mind about its closure. It has been open ten years too many.

Or about all that killing going on in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Just yesterday 10 “Taliban” were killed by joint NATO and Afghan forces. In Pakistan 29 were killed and 40 injured in a bomb blast. And two of our drone missles killed 4 over the border in Pakistan. All deaths are always labeled as militants, taliban or al-quaida with no mention of civilians caught up in the conflict. i wonder when civilian deaths will be counted the way our soldiers are? Or if we will ever care.

Or that UN inspectors have had and still have access to Iran's Fordow nuclear enrichment site. According to Juan Cole at Informed Comment our sanctions are about regime change and not stopping nuclear proliferation. In fact he thinks our sanctions against Iran could be a war crime.

“I think blockading a civilian population for the purpose of instituting regime change in a state toward which no authorization of force has been issued by the UN Security Council may well be a war crime. Even advocating a war crime can under some circumstances be punishable, as happened at the Nuremberg trials.” Juan Cole

And its not just civilians getting slaughtered in our wars more than 100 species go extinct every day. The beautiful video up at National Geographic is large and powerful. Go visit.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/visions/field-test/sartore-biodiversity/assignment?source=hp_dl5_ngm_field20120107

Experiment with thinking about things you usually don't think about maybe it will open up new ways of viewing ourselves.

See ya next week.

St. Croix Christmas Parade 2012

So many beautiful people at the parade yesterday go check out the slide show. Too many to put up here.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7584904@N07/sets/72157628779291837/show/

Water has a memory

i spend a lot of time in the ocean and have always felt a communal, spiritual, reverence for it's ability to cocoon me in wonder and awe. Many times i think it is working with me to make my immersion in its substance more pleasurable. This morning a friend i swim with introduced me to the idea that water has a memory.

Researching on line brought me to two You Tube videos that touch on the topic of water and memory. Pretty exciting stuff. They are both about 3 or 4 minutes long and easy to watch.

We think of water as a necessary part of our survival, something we need to consume every day to stay alive but for most of us it is a mindless task drinking that which is vital. Our bodies weight is composed of 75% water and yet we focus on the other components like muscles, the skeleton, the vascular system and fat before we consider the major impact water has upon us.

Water is essential to good health and longevity; it flushes out toxins in your organs, carries nutrients to cells, and keeps the ear, nose and throat tissues moist. Fresh water is something every human being on earth needs and that we all use communally; it is not something that should ever be controlled by private enterprise.

We think of the earth as being surrounded by water but USGS created a photo that depicts water as a globe superimposed upon the earth. The reality of this photo is a wake up call to all of us. Water is precious, it appears to have a memory and there really isn't as much as we think. "That little sphere of water with a diameter of 860 miles sits over the mid-section of the US and includes all the water in the oceans, seas, ice caps, lakes and rivers as well as groundwater, atmospheric water, and the water in you, your dog, and your tomato plant."  USGS

Credit: Illustration by Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; USGS..
Data source: Igor Shiklomanov's chapter "World fresh water resources" in Peter H. Gleick (editor), 1993, Water in Crisis: A Guide to the World's Fresh Water Resources (Oxford University Press, New York).