Scuttlebutt

#1761

"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." - Henry Thomas Buckle

            Apparently, no one can be shocked anymore by anything. Our senses are bombarded everyday by things that the science fiction writer of my youth, could never have dreamed. From the talking head newscaster, politician, pastor, everyone talks "slivers" of solution... just chasing one thing until another comes up.

            This writer is always listening, everyone's talking... no secrets anymore. I am told that every living/breathing person, from the school child to the grandmother, either has a telephone in front of their face or they are looking down talking on their phone with their fingers (texting.) I have personally let several female employees go because they had their eyes and mind focused on a telephone rather than the dictation I was giving them for the computer. I went through eight years of university training, the most difficult courses of study in the world, working jobs at night so I could go to classes during the day. Never once during those eight years did I ever have a telephone call from home. I don't believe many students did at that time in our countries history. We knew the real joy of the mail man, "letters from home." During all my years of military service, there were very few telephone calls. The phone was for emergency-business, not visiting. One of my friends told me that his daughter, age 8, wanted a cell phone. I said, "You tell her that I was reared in a time where there was only one telephone for many miles." My cousin had a telephone at his country store. Everyone for miles used that telephone to call the doctor, the funeral home or to get an emergency message from somewhere.

            Scuttlebutt, where the happy hour at the pool haul, the golf links at the country club, women's mission circle at your church, was, is and will always be just scuttlebutt... talking-visiting. Human beings are the same, the world over, very social animals. This writer has traveled every continent, whether the desolate areas of India, crowded streets in Egypt, people talking-gesturing and body language. I was never one to waste my valuable time in idle conversation. I was always, perhaps, too brutally sharp on the phone. Professional people do not have time for the leisure of idle conversation. I can tell very quickly, the future of any professional man by his attitude on the telephone... friendly, fair, fast. I am told that every billionaire gets there because he is fast with a decision.

            There is two things that bother me the most about people engaged in idle conversation. If a person is sick enough to be in a hospital, the patient does not need visitors. People coming in, spreading their germs, talking and bothering a tired patient with unnecessary narrative.

            The other, a place of worship. The church house, the inter court is not a place for conversation. The worst, the Baptist. Their visiting-conversations should take place in the outer-court, the churchyard. I still like the denominations that have kneeling benches. You come into the sanctuary and get immediately and completely in the mode of worship. I often listen to the local Baptist church on the morning radio. Often, there is a interlude between the radio and the church house. The noise from the sanctuary is anything but worship. Talking, laughing, one is a place of worship... to honor god.  All attention to Christ, the cross. So many churches no longer have a cross and the Christian service is no different than that of a civic club, the same noise of a sports arena.

            I was on the staff of the Army hospital, fort McClellan, Alabama. A long desire of my life has been to worship at the Baptist tabernacle, peach tree St. Atlanta, Georgia. I drove the long distance one weekend to attend the service. The great tabernacle was everything I expected, the great choir singing without any hymn books. The great organ, grand piano, great preacher, the thing that ruined in all... before and after, the noise of the people come to worship. I do not know how or why this silly matter of running around shaking everyone's hands during the worship service. We are in the church to honor Christ, not to compliment one another.

           

            The history of the world started with conversation. From nothingness to something-ness, God spoke and the world was formed. God spoke and man was formed and the other animals, all life with its ability to participate.

            In other articles, I have described much of my world travel, many around the world trips... every continent... both the north and south pole. I want to bring two places to your attention, The Great Barrier Reef, near Australia. a 1300 mile coral reef made up of bodies of articulating animals. We are told that all around this great miracle of nature, marine animal life, can be heard to the educated ear. Like the great humpback whales, all marine life has a language and of course this is true with bird life near the great reef, rain island (known for its birds, their noises.) I was in the Indian ocean, bird island, another sanctuary. The place was alive with their communication skills. Life would be tragic indeed if not for the SHARING of tone sounds (music) whether in the great opera halls or in cheap radio. It is the universal language of mankind. The letters may be different on the type writer, in different countries, but the notes are always the same anywhere on a musical instrument.

            Talk radio has revolutionized the world of communication during the past 20 years. It is now an established fact that more people enjoy the different sounds-cadences of the human voice of people talking, than ever enjoyed music. The success of a talk show, radio-TV-platform, is completely dependent on a variety of speakers. Words mean something, words have a way of changing the mind, changing the world. 

Expiration Date

We live in a world of expiration dates. We know that everything around us, like we ourselves, are going to eventually expire. Every time we pass a cemetery, hospital or see rust on equipment, we know that time takes its toll, that there is deterioration, that a repair person, whether doctor or electrician, will have a job.

Give a small child a sucker, he loves to lick that sucker - we have all experienced it. You get that sucker from the child simply by offering a lolly pop instead. Most of us would rather have something new or different than illness or a fine. When your library book has expired, you will have a fine. When your milk, meat and prescription drugs have expired, you may have sickness. Things with which we should have no trouble - eggs, peanut butter, and spinach - do not necessarily have an expiration date. But common sense would dictate to producers and distributors that safety is more important than expensive recalls.

As I have written in many commentaries, I am a long time antiquarian book collector. In finding old books, in junk stores, public auctions et cetera, I am amazed to find long lost library books, many with the familiar check out card still intact and dates going back many decades. Someone did not pay attention to the expiration date.

We are slaves of the computer. Whether in the automobile or paying utility bills, the computer, though smarter than most human beings, is very impersonal. Since I must depend on telephones in order to run my various businesses, I have phones from several companies, just in case something happens. I have a land line with AT&T (cheapest service). You cannot make long distance calls on this phone, only local calls, and by law, emergency calls. The phone was disconnected because I refused to pay a large charge for long distant calls, a phone on which you CANNOT MAKE long distance calls. Of course, the agencies responsible for the oversight of these monopolistic companies, locally, statewide and nationally, are just paid to sleep. They give not the slightest oversight or response to a letter of complaint. Finally, after many letters, this dead phone, which had been dead for weeks, finally rang.

I realize the woman on the phone, when it finally rang, was a victim of a computer. I had stated in my letter regarding this problem that I would give one thousand dollars to the company if she could prove that anytime over the past sixty years of telephone service that I ever failed to pay a legitimate bill. These folks could care a less, they simply act on an expiration date. If the money is not there, they expire your service, like the electric utility who expired my service in an empty building where no service had been used simply because the meter had been misread, like the water utility who threatened to expire my service in all my rental units because I would not pay a twelve hundred dollar water bill for a building that had burned down twenty years before, before I owned the empty lot. The water meter had never been removed and a new employee read the meter from thirty years previous. All of these utilities wanted me to pay the erroneous bills and then get a refund later, after they were satisfied of the outcome. This is American life with monopolies, services on which you must depend.

If there is need for government at all, government regulations and government controls, there should be oversight with expiration dates. There are some things with which we have no control. Expiration dates which cannot be foreseen. Today we are observing the 9th anniversary of 9-11, an infamous date in America history, when thousands of Americans left home in the morning expecting to return in the evening, but becoming the victims of a dastardly attack. Today, in this city, a 21 year old marine is being buried, his expiration date coming much too soon, as he defended his country on foreign soil. He will be buried with military honors and long lines of military and police patrols will escort his casket to a family cemetery. But his life is over (and we all only have one life to live), and for his family, a large part of their lives has been erased.

The future holds expiration dates for us all. We do not know when or where. Before the foundation of the world, God designed us for a specific number of years, and he is Boss. Religion is not salvation. If you have not made arrangements, prepare for your certain redemption. In the meantime, prepare for an uncertain future. No one could have convinced me that I would spend most of my life as a totally blind person. The test of a man is not what he does when everything is going well, but what he does when things go wrong. Surveying conditions in the world, we are sure things can go very wrong in this country. Prepare for the unexpected. It might be a dirty bomb or it might be worsened economic conditions. By faith, you may learn how to hold on to your very existence, compromising your expiration date by the very finger nails.

Grounded

I was in Egypt about 40 years ago and just before making a picture of the great Aswan Dam, the guide said, “you are not allowed to make a picture of Egypt's great electrical system.” A Jewish friend said, “when you get to Israel, you can make all the pictures you want. They think that other nations do not have pictures of their power-plants of every type. Israel has pictures of every significant electrical facility in the world.” Electricity is something that most of us, like most things, take for granted. Every thing in life is controlled by a switch, except children.

No one has ever defined electricity precisely, when I was in freshman Physics, and so it is today, electricity is defined as electrons in rapid motion. We put a male plug into a female receptacle in the wall and expect power, and I understand that Physics professors and engineers refer to the entire process as “electrical power”.

Our ancestors knew something about electricity, enough to know that it can kill you, even static electricity. Over 400 workers are electrocuted in America each year. The old fashioned, fine homes of my youth had lightning rods on the roofs. Many progressive farmers even put lighting rods on the roofs of their barns, well grounded with conducting rods. These people knew the horrors of home or barn fires caused by static electricity (a lightning strike).

The entire world is one large globule of electrical activity. When you look at the structure of a molecule, it is mostly space with protons, electrons, neutrons in an exact configuration designed by God. Even the staunchest atheist cannot refute this, the absolutes of atomic weights, physical constants, the periodic table. If the Earth had a a crust of gold, men would lie, cheat and steal for a handful of dirt. The dirt of the Earth contains all the elements God put here, none have been created, divided, or destroyed. In my study of analytical chemistry we recognize unknown elements by their color, put a piece of wood in the fire place and you will see all the colors of the elements in the wood (their spectrum).

From the dirt, God created man, and in the flesh of man, we find all the elements of dirt. Man too is just a big electrical mass, on fire with electrical activity. All the cells in the body have the essentials for electricity. To be healthy, the body must be well-grounded. It is essential to walk around barefoot...to even walk on the ground or grass barefoot. Men were healthier when they wore leather soled shoes. It is since people started wearing rubber bottom shoes (rubber being the best known practical insulator), particularly athletic shoes, that our health has taken a downward slide.

Parents profess to loving their children. Most parents do not love their children, if they did, they would not buy these expensive, designer shoes made of rubber and substitutes. They would be careful about the food which goes into their child, garbage in, garbage out through the mouth, mind, everywhere. The obesity epidemic and the diabetic epidemic can largely be traced to an upset of the homeostasis going on in the human body. The body is 80% water, an electrical “firestorm”, water, and yet a perishing humanity.

China has two great problems with it's huge population, a problem with water supply and too many workers. Traveling the world, water is the great problem of the universe. In Africa and Asia, women walking long distance with jugs of water on their heads or in between them...so many germs because of low sanitation, not enough water for bathing and cleaning.

Added to this consternation, ¾ of the Earth's surface is covered with water, salt water which must be taken into the sky, it's molecules changed by the alchemy of God and then rained on the Earth as fresh water. In India, rainwater is being harvested. Across the World, with it's increased scarcity, water must be saved. The polluters of oceans, such as British Petroleum, should be defiled by the public.

God put a special significance on water, he made sure we understood the power of water baptism. The power of water is shown in so many ways: turning turbines, shipping, sanitation. Every time I take a shower, I think of the number of ancestors who never had a decent bath. Most of today's spoiled young people think the daily shower is a custom going back to the Garden of Eden...the first bathtub was put in the White House during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt only about 100 years ago...Abraham Lincoln's family used outhouses. I had two sissy, young college male graduates, and when I described the outhouse, the way most older Americans were raised...they both became ill.

Today's electrical facilities depend on the satellites, we believe some of the satellites have been hijacked and reprogrammed. Can we even imagine the terror involved in such...our military procedures, nuclear power plants, generators programmed at water treatment facilities. The Nazis taught us that the public can be dumbed down by the usage of chloride and fluoride in drinking water, we know these poisons are toxic enough to be used in rat poisons, pesticides and weed killer.

I live just a stones throw (my downtown home) from a polluted river...one of the south's largest, the Cape Fear. All the cities up the river put their treated garbage into the river (Raleigh, Fayetteville, etc. ). Here, at the mouth of the river, the polluted water is taken from the river, and put through a water-treatment plant where it is again treated with poison to make it potable for our children and animals to drink. Are we that insane? We put poisons into the sewage before the sewage is dumped into the river, and then put poisons into the water that is taken from the river. Those familiar with the complexity of the H20 molecule knows that we are slowly killing ourselves.

It is good to be well-grounded, not only with the electrical systems of our bodies, but well-grounded in our spiritual and political beliefs. It takes faith to live above the stupid practices of this world. Faith is a verb, action substantiated by belief, sustained by confidence. We do what we do because we believe what we believe. Take faith in grounding yourself in the spiritual consequence of your personal and political life. You only go this way once, it is not a dress rehearsal.

NY Times Article-Water

Saving U.S. Water and Sewer Systems Would Be Costly
A cold snap had ruptured a major pipe installed the same year the light bulb was invented. Homes near the fashionable Dupont Circle neighborhood were quickly going dry, and Mr. Hawkins, who had recently taken over the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority despite having no experience running a major utility, was responsible for fixing the problem.
As city employees searched for underground valves, a growing crowd started asking angry questions. Pipes were breaking across town, and fire hydrants weren’t working, they complained. Why couldn’t the city deliver water, one man yelled at Mr. Hawkins.
Such questions are becoming common across the nation as water and sewer systems break down. Today, a significant water line bursts on average every two minutes somewhere in the country, according to a New York Times analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data.
In Washington alone there is a pipe break every day, on average, and this weekend’s intense rains overwhelmed the city’s system, causing untreated sewage to flow into the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers.
State and federal studies indicate that thousands of water and sewer systems may be too old to function properly.
For decades, these systems — some built around the time of the Civil War — have been ignored by politicians and residents accustomed to paying almost nothing for water delivery and sewage removal. And so each year, hundreds of thousands of ruptures damage streets and homes and cause dangerous pollutants to seep into drinking water supplies.
Mr. Hawkins’s answer to such problems will not please a lot of citizens. Like many of his counterparts in cities like Detroit, Cincinnati, Atlanta and elsewhere, his job is partly to persuade the public to accept higher water rates, so that the utility can replace more antiquated pipes.
“People pay more for their cellphones and cable television than for water,” said Mr. Hawkins, who before taking over Washington’s water system ran environmental groups and attended Princeton and Harvard, where he never thought he would end up running a sewer system.
“You can go a day without a phone or TV,” he added. “You can’t go a day without water.”
But in many cities, residents have protested loudly when asked to pay more for water and sewer services. In Los Angeles, Indianapolis, Sacramento — and before Mr. Hawkins arrived, Washington — proposed rate increases have been scaled back or canceled after virulent ratepayer dissent.
So when Mr. Hawkins confronted the upset crowd near Dupont Circle, he sensed an opportunity to explain why things needed to change. It was a snowy day, and while water from the broken pipe mixed with slush, he began cheerily explaining that the rupture was a symptom of a nationwide disease, according to people present.
Mr. Hawkins — who at 49 has the bubbling energy of a toddler and the physique of an aging professor — told the crowd that the average age of the city’s water pipes was 76, nearly four times that of the oldest city bus. With a smile, he described how old pipes have spilled untreated sewage into rivers near homes.
“I don’t care why these pipes aren’t working!” one of the residents yelled. “I pay $60 a month for water! I just want my toilet to flush! Why do I need to know how it works?”
Mr. Hawkins smiled, quit the lecture, and retreated back to watching his crew.
On Capitol Hill, the plight of Mr. Hawkins and other utility managers has become a hot topic. In the last year, federal lawmakers have allocated more than $10 billion for water infrastructure programs, one of the largest such commitments in history.
But Mr. Hawkins and others say that even those outlays are almost insignificant compared with the problems they are supposed to fix. An E.P.A. study last year estimated that $335 billion would be needed simply to maintain the nation’s tap water systems in coming decades. In states like New York, officials estimate that $36 billion is needed in the next 20 years just for municipal wastewater systems.
As these discussions unfold, particular attention is being paid to Mr. Hawkins. Washington’s water and sewer system serves the White House, many members of Congress, and two million other residents, and so it surprised some when Mr. Hawkins was hired to head the agency last September, since he did not have an engineering background or the résumé of a utility chief.
In fact, after he had graduated from Harvard Law School in 1987, he spent a few years helping companies apply for permits to pollute rivers and lakes. (At night — without his firm’s knowledge — he had a second career as a professional break dancer. He met his wife, a nurse, when he fell off a platform at a dance club and landed on his head.)
But he quickly became disenchanted with corporate law. He moved to the E.P.A., where he fought polluters, and then the White House, and eventually relocated his family to a farm in New Jersey where they shoveled the manure of 35 sheep and kept watch over 175 chickens, and Mr. Hawkins began running a series of environmental groups.
The mayor of Washington, Adrian M. Fenty, asked Mr. Hawkins to move to the city in 2007 to lead the Department of the Environment. He quickly became a prominent figure, admired for his ability to communicate with residents and lawmakers. When the Water and Sewer Authority needed a new leader, board members wanted someone familiar with public relations campaigns. Mr. Hawkins’s mandate was to persuade residents to pay for updating the city’s antiquated pipes.
At a meeting with board members last month, Mr. Hawkins pitched his radical solution. Clad in an agency uniform — his name on the breast and creases indicating it had been recently unfolded for the first time — Mr. Hawkins suggested raising water rates for the average resident by almost 17 percent, to about $60 a month per household. Over the coming six years, that rate would rise above $100.
With that additional money, Mr. Hawkins argued, the city could replace all of its pipes in 100 years. The previous budget would have replaced them in three centuries.
The board questioned him for hours. Others have attacked him for playing on false fears.
“This rate hike is outrageous,” said Jim Graham, a member of the city council. “Subway systems need repairs, and so do roads, but you don’t see fares or tolls skyrocketing. Providing inexpensive, reliable water is a fundamental obligation of government. If they can’t do that, they need to reform themselves, instead of just charging more.”
Similar battles have occurred around the nation. In Philadelphia, officials are set to start collecting $1.6 billion for programs to prevent rain water from overwhelming the sewer system, amid loud complaints. Communities surrounding Cleveland threatened to sue when the regional utility proposed charging homeowners for the water pollution running off their property. In central Florida, a $1.8 billion proposal to build a network of drinking water pipes has drawn organized protests.
“We’re relying on water systems built by our great-grandparents, and no one wants to pay for the decades we’ve spent ignoring them,” said Jeffrey K. Griffiths, a professor at Tufts University and a member of the E.P.A.’s National Drinking Water Advisory Council.
“There’s a lot of evidence that people are getting sick,” he added. “But because everything is out of sight, no one really understands how bad things have become.”
To bring those lapses into the light, Mr. Hawkins has become a cheerleader for rate increases. He has begun a media assault highlighting the city’s water woes. He has created a blog and a Facebook page that explain why pipes break. He regularly appears on newscasts and radio shows, and has filled a personal Web site with video clips of his appearances.
It’s an all-consuming job. Mr. Hawkins tries to show up at every major pipe break, no matter the hour. He often works late into the night, and for three years he has not lived with his wife and two teenage children, who remained in New Jersey.
“The kids really miss their father,” said his wife, Tamara. “When we take him to the train station after a visit, my daughter in particular will sometimes cry. He’s missing out on his kids’ childhoods.”
And even if Mr. Hawkins succeeds, the public might not realize it, or particularly care. Last month, the utility’s board approved Mr. Hawkins’s budget and started the process for raising rates. But even if the bigger budget reduces the frequency of water pipe breaks by half — a major accomplishment — many residents probably won’t notice. People tend to pay attention to water and sewer systems only when things go wrong.
“But this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Mr. Hawkins said recently, in between a meeting with local environmentalists and rushing home to do paperwork in his small, spartan apartment, near a place where he was once mugged at gunpoint.
“This is the fight of our lifetimes,” he added. “Water is tied into everything we should care about. Someday, people are going to talk about our sewers with a real sense of pride.”
A version of this article appeared in print on March 15, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.

Addition by Dr. Morris
Every American should read the above, something happening in the Capitol of the Nation as well as their own city. Here in this historic port city, we have one sewage break after another, spilling millions of gallons of sewage into the sensitive estuary's surrounding the ocean. I have written so many letters about the situation here and other places that none of the supposed (power brokers) and “civil masters” and public health do nothing, individuals refused to even answer anymore.
Here, the problem has been turned over to a water and sewer authority. These authorities, airport, transportation, etc. are nothing but “cash cows” for appointed “good ol' boy” politicians to put money in their pockets. Nothing improves because unless you understand the disease you cannot understand the symptoms. As long as the tap is turned and water comes out, as long as you can flush the toilet, you will not think there is a problem.
I live ½ block from the Cape Fear River. Like most of the great rivers of the world, it was once a wonderful and clean source of water life and recreation. The stupidity of cities above us...Raleigh, Fayetteville etc. dumping their treated sewage into the river and then cities towards the ocean taking their water out of the river, supposedly treated and then used for public consumption is beyond belief. The chemist who understands the water molecule knows that like the water taken from the ocean, changed in the atmosphere, the molecule is complex. The water sanitized in water treatment facilities is mostly treated in plants by two poisons...fluoride and chlorine...I would not think of drinking water from a faucet in this city without it being boiled.
The immune system has been so compromised by the deadly bacteria seeping into the ancient pipes and from the sewage dumped into the water sources, that one can well understand why we have so many viruses and other illnesses. There was no news at all about the epidemic which swept eastern Europe this year...a hemorrhagic type flu which shredded the lungs of an estimated 3 million people. It is believed that much of the “mystery flu” came from sewer infections.
It was announced yesterday that it would take 11 billion dollars to restore Port-au Prince Haiti infrastructure. You know from where this money will come. The head of the Palestinians was in Washington wanting 4 billion to keep Palestine going after 61 years of US largess. Already, this authority here will increase our water bill by 14%. This is what happens when you put “unlearned” politicians on boards and authorities...people who just want to enlarge their resume. When this Army Medical Officer, Veteran, totally blind, 100% disabled service connected, returned to this city, he volunteered for membership on public health and library. The county manager came to his house and told him he would not be appointed to any thing because of his blindness. How much care are you getting from these sited politicians, federal, state, and local?