Congratulation Egypt!

"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

From a speech by Robert F. Kennedy, on June 6, 1966, in his Day of Affirmation Address at Cape Town University

To all my friends in Egypt, the Egyptian people, and all those that imagine another world, achieved through peace - stand up for an ideal, or act to improve the lot of others, or strike out against injustice - keep dreaming.

There are other forces at work in this world,

Frodo: I wish none of this had happened.

Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to

decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.

There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides the will of evil.

.... And that is an encouraging thought.

Weather... or not

I always dreamed of a place with a view of the sea.

"And next up, your Tropical Storm Watch."

"And now more on Hurricane..."

Over the past few weeks I have begun to wonder if the Weather Channel was invented by a bunch of TV weather folks from Louisiana who simply had too much boudin and crackl'n.

Like all weather reports every one on the street, or water, thinks these are hit and miss at best. "These people are never right." But everyone keeps listening.

The marine radio is endlessly broadcasting a stream of concerns, mariners take note, coastal residence pay focused attention, for god sakes their lives could be on the line. That got me thinking, what if we had a global radio or TV network that could do the same, ya know, broadcast climate concern. Like the CCBN - Climate Change Broadcast Network? But would it be profitable? Who would listen? Would there really be an audience?

In 2010 I think we the CCBN would have done well - demographically. Let's see who might have tuned in...

• In January through April we could have counted on over 20 million Pakistanis to kick off the year.
• In April we could have highlighted an oily distraction that would have lasted well into hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico - keeping a couple billion of the planet captivated.
• In June and July the CCBN would have been flooded with broadcast opportunities as three-quarters of China's provinces were hit by flooding and 25 rivers saw record high water levels, causing the worst death toll in a decade, Liu Ning, general secretary of the government's flood prevention agency, told a news conference. Aside from the dead and missing, 645,000 houses were toppled and overall damage totalled 142.2bn yuan (£13.7bn). All the figures, Liu said, were the highest China had seen since 2000.
• In the summer, one weather system caused oppressive heat in Russia, while farther south it caused flooding in Pakistan that inundated 62,000 square miles, about the size of Wisconsin. That single heat-and-storm system killed almost 17,000 people, more people than all the worldwide airplane crashes in the past 15 years combined. We could have counted on over 20 million Pakistanis tuning in.
• September it started showering in SE Australia and by December was flooding most of the entire east coast of the continent - Australia had its wettest September-to-November spring on record, according to the Bureau of Meteorology. - a good portion of the population, say 20 million - they are still watching.
• In early November I could have reported live from Costa Rica as flooding from the snapped off tail of Hurricane Thomas killed and destroyed - but good ratings, all 4.5 million Ticos tuned in.
• December washed out the old year in Brazil by killing several hundred and drawing over 2 million local viewers

In other news we could have broadcast reruns the global Climate Conference in Copenhagen, where the world's nations gathered to get down to the serious business of addressing the potential possible impact of change in the climate if it actually happens... and is caused by human actions.

Of course, it will be a rerun, the show was previous cancelled due to lack of action. Nations, especially the USA, China and India were looking for a program with more monetary mystery and intrigue. They complained that they need programming that really bites into their economies before it's worth tuning in.

Well its a New Year, 2011, this year we may have something for them. A fresh new show from DownUnder called 'Flood the Market' The show follows the current ruin of a nation due to catastrophic flooding. Lots of action, chaos, death and destruction, AND the economic Apocalypse that should get their rapped attention. Here are a few of the episode recaps:

• The rain may cut the quality of more than 40 percent of the country’s wheat crop, according to estimates by National Australia Bank Ltd. Rio Tinto Group, the world’s third-largest mining company, said today coal mines in central Queensland state had partially resumed operation after rains.
• Macarthur Coal Ltd., Aquila Resources Ltd. and Vale SA said last week they had declared force majeure, while Xstrata Plc shut part of its rail system and said it would use stockpiles to supply customers. Force majeure is a legal clause invoked by companies when they can’t meet obligations because of circumstances beyond their control.
• Commonwealth Bank of Australia cut its estimate of wheat exports to 14 million tons in 2010-2011, from an earlier 16 million tons. “Many in the industry suggest the disruptions to the harvest this year and the implications for grain quality are the worst in a lifetime,” Luke Mathews, a commodity strategist at the bank, said in a report yesterday.
• Queensland Sugar Ltd., which ships more than 90 percent of the country’s sugar, also today cut its export forecast to 2.2 million tons because of weather, compared with an outlook earlier in the year of as much as 3 million tons.

As 2011 flows forward so do the storms and floods, for investors in the new network it looks like the CCBN would financially stay afloat.

• TODAY From Brazil - The region has already seen the largest rainfall since 1967, according to the government’s Inmet meteorology agency. Teresopolis, the largest and hardest-hit city, where at least 228 people died, absorbed 259 millimeters (10.2 inches) of rain in the past 10 days, while the average rainfall for the month of January is 290 millimeters, according to Inmet.
• The floods in Rio are the world’s fourth-worst disaster involving floods and landslides over the past 12 months by the number of deaths, according to the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, or CRED, a Brussels-based independent research institute that collaborates with the World Health Organization.
• TODAY - More than a million people in Sri Lanka are suffering from massive flooding described by the government as the worst natural disaster since the 2004 tsunami.

Preliminary data show that 18 countries broke their records for the hottest day ever. The killer Russian heat wave — setting a national record of 111 degrees — would happen once every 100,000 years without global climate change. Super Typhoon Megi with winds of more than 200 mph devastated the Philippines and parts of China. Through Nov. 30, nearly 260,000 people died in natural disasters in 2010, according to W.H.O. A list of day-by-day disasters in 2010 compiled by the AP (news service) runs 64 printed pages long!

Weather or not climate change is real it would be nice to have some real scientific evidence to back up this climatic hyperbole.

Bit more cherie climate summary here.

Iceberg Cam - Cool - Polar Cool

And the Envelope Please....

WHAT! You've got to be kidding me!

TIME announces it has selected facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg for Person of the Year - move over Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., yes, even you Stalin, Hitler and Ayatollah Khomeini.

"But then again, perhaps Time's selection is a perfect fit for a nation of passive consumers in love with themselves and bored and addicted to mind-numbing entertainment. In a rich post-military and on-the-verge-of-collapsing-empire, who can blame most Americans for wanting to seek an impersonal, isolated and virtual outlet to get away from the realities and perplexities of their leaders domestic and foreign policies? After all, self-censorship and egotism is at a all time high, as are doses of self-love and madness that are lived through technological co-dependency which keeps one sane, or so it seems. Anything that will distract consumers and make them even more inattentive is good for business and a technocratic state. Technological diversion is the adhesive for a ruinous empire." wrote Dalles Darling.

Do I use facebook? No, I talk with people.

When I heard Zuckerberg had been named Time's Person of the Year I was stunned with numbness and the dumbness. I started to write, then read Dalles Darling's piece - it said it more eloquently.

TIME says in justifying their choice, "This year, Facebook — now minus the the — added its 550 millionth member. One out of every dozen people on the planet has a Facebook account. They speak 75 languages and collectively lavish more than 700 billion minutes on Facebook every month. Last month the site accounted for 1 out of 4 American page views. Its membership is currently growing at a rate of about 700,000 people a day."

700 billion minutes - that's almost 500 million DAYS! Imagine if those wasters volunteered to do something real on this planet?

POOF! Gone is hunger

POOF! Gone is homelessness

POOF! Gone is illiteracy

POOF! Gone is... hell just fill in the blank, the point is things would get done

Even being the lead sheep doesn't make you the sheep herder. I would like to nominate instead my mother who taught me, "if every one jumps off a bridge that doesn't mean you have to."

Inalienable Obligation

Certain phrases have followed me around my life like a shadow - there beside me, stretching out from me, inseparably connected, married to me, even before they were there, as they were becoming know, as they are occasionally forgotten.

"Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one"

- Eleanor Roosevelt

An "obligation" to be an individual.

Wow. Could there be more powerful a concept.

We don't generally think of the obligation embedded within our right. Taking for granted the first too often seems to obliterate not obligate responsibility.

As I work on the Gulf Coast and each trip leads me on a journey continually further in pursuit of a truth that so much money, time and energy has been spent to conceal, I think a lot about my obligation. To myself as well as others.

I keep searching for a balance. A balance? Yes, in my own life and in my global life, I think. And then I remembered the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, "Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one."

Not just a right, but an inalienable obligation. As such maybe there is no balance - balance suggests two or more objects held in some level of equilibrium. If right and obligation meet at individual then all are one and the same. My own life and my global life are simply Life, as I live it.

Obligation of individual to me means putting self on hold.

Today I hear that at the global summit in Cancun, Mexico the parties have accepted that there can be no global agreement on global climate change, reduction of greenhouse emissions targets.

"The rising ocean raises questions, too: What happens if the 61,000 Marshallese must abandon their low-lying atolls? Would they still be a nation? With a U.N. seat? With control of their old fisheries and their undersea minerals? Where would they live, and how would they make a living? Who, precisely, would they and their children become?" - more on the disappearing Marshalls

At what point is that Life what I focus on first? At what risk of discomfort, inconvenience, nuisance, reduced fortune, maybe even frustration? When do the decisions I need to make I actually become the decisions I make? When do I realize I am that individual with an inalienable obligation?

More: UN chief warns climate talks are too slow

Pub, Pints and Petroleum Politics

I don't know if I always had a journalist gene, or it's just something that intertwines itself within the double-helix for curiosity, but stories that don't walk a straight line fascinate me. Especially stories that don't just dip their toes, but wade waist deep into the confluence of environment, politics, conservation, money. Any one of those, combined with the erraticism of human nature, would be enough, but find that wedding of the waters and you better start looking at the local levies - something eventually will give. Maybe what intrigues me even more are the convolutions that the various channels take, and the moments of serendipity. Those moments I'm finding are often over a pint in a pub.

You can just call it drinking, but it's more. It's journalistic in perhaps the oldest sense of the craft. A filtering process refined in the great newspapers and radio days, and polished in the early years of television. Sorting on the fly what is and isn't helpful verses pure raconteur BS - which of course can always lend a bit of color. Out side the DC beltway, and unless you are overseas, there seems to be less hard stuff being drunk these days, but a couple craft beers, local brews, do just fine.

Some watering holes work better than others. Each locale has its flavor and approach. I'm not skilled at them all - yet. For example I'm not good with bad beer. In other words, fishing dock lounges are my Achilles heal. The kinda places where the lingering combination of grease and cigarette smoke veneer even the clean flatware, and the smell haunts you in your motel room even the next morning as you stare in disbelief at the paisley-plaid curtains (yes, somebody really did think combining those two was a good design idea.) Places where nothing on tap, or more often bottled, is darker going in that it is coming out. Beers often referred to by the person behind the bar as "beer product" and generally bear the label "lite". And all of the establishments start and end with someone's first name - women's names are the worst for me, they hold the promise of cleanliness going in, then dash your hope and smother your senses.

Yesterday afternoon I visited one of my favorite pubs here on New Orleans' Magazine Street - finally yielding to that little voice. The same little voice that over the years tells me, "talk to that guy or gal sitting next to you" and I finally relent to discover a valuable lead or relationship that far exceeds the cost of the local draft microbrew.

There were just two of us sitting outside at 4PM and serendipity killed the power on the outlet he was using. So laptop in one hand, pint in the other, here he came. Sharing an outlet bonds you in this digital age, the way a bad cab ride or train trip did a couple decades ago, or a five-day monsoonal rainstorm in the third-world still can.

An hour later, and half a pint (second round) remaining, we shut laptops and commented on the weather - snow up north in home towns. My home town, Portland, was his envy. After this was over he would like to head there. This, turned out to be the BP mess. Serendipity. Much of the next several minutes was peppered with him saying, "off the record", but, in their turn comments, facts and anecdotal debris floated down several of the above mentioned channels, pushing me closer to the confluence of this oil mess. Information like, there are places people just aren't looking, "there's $5 billion in charter fishing in the Gulf", why isn't anyone talking to these guys. Yes, follow the money.

I'm headed for Grand Isle this weekend based on that last half pint. My Nawlins "Deep Throat" connected me to other activities, separate, out of Grand Isle. A coastal confluence. All channels seem to be flowing south to Grand Isle - now if the island just had a good pub!

PS - I debated on where to post this, here or over on my general blog Perambulations - in the end both - it's as much a Louisiana/Gulf story as general journalists journey.