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#FamiliesBelongTogether

6/20/2018

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from the National Park Service website: https://www.nps.gov/stli/learn/historyculture/colossus.htm

(reprinted from the vizlearning blog) 

​Bullying takes a toll on everyone: those targeted for abuse, those who witness it and also those doing the bullying. It erodes our common sense of decency and fairness, makes us feel powerless and angry and all too often triggers a cycle of violence and hurt. Many times bullies themselves were damaged by bullying. 

We also know that children model behaviors. This is how they learn to navigate the world. They follow our lead. They play "teacher" and dress up like superheroes. They hop out to push their own strollers—so much more fun! They set up pretend stores, take care of their dolls and stuffed animals, and fly to the moon in imaginary spaceships. 

Parents, teachers and caregivers are constantly modeling good behaviors using theme and variation of the golden rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Day in, day out, they teach their children critical social and emotional skills such as sharing, cooperation and taking turns. Not only are these so-called "soft" skills important for success in school, but also in life. 

Unfortunately, bad behaviors can be modeled, too.  

The policy of separating immigrant children from their parents at the border harms all of us. The pain suffered by the parents is unfathomable. The damage done to the children may be irreversible.

From the Washington Post:  

"... The small shelter along the Texas border to Mexico held 60 beds and a little playground for children. Rooms were equipped with toys, books and crayons. To Colleen Kraft, this shelter looked, in many ways, like a friendly environment for children, a place where they could be happy.

But the first child who caught the prominent pediatrician’s attention during a recent visit was anything but happy. Inside a room dedicated to toddlers was a little girl no older than 2, screaming and pounding her fists on a mat. One woman tried to give her toys and books to calm her down, but even that shelter worker seemed frustrated, Kraft told The Washington Post, because as much as she wanted to console the little girl, she couldn’t touch, hold or pick her up to let her know everything would be all right. That was the rule, Kraft said she was told: They’re not allowed to touch the children.

'The really devastating thing was that we all knew what was going on with this child. We all knew what the problem was,' Kraft said. 'She didn’t have her mother, and none of us can fix that.'..."


Imagine that you are in a strange country and that you can't speak the language because you may be too young to speak any language all that well. Your mom is gone. And no one can scoop you up into their arms to comfort you as you cry in pain and confusion. It is hard enough to be a little kid, but to be turned into a negotiating tactic when your age is still measured in months is beyond unconscionable. 

Condemnation for this cruel practice has come from all quarters including the American Academy of Pediatrics and a broad cross-section of religious leaders. There have been protests all over the country. Dozens of organizations have mobilized to provide support to the asylum-seekers. 

One can only hope that the odious policy will be reversed soon and that families that have been torn apart will be reunited.  Yet already so much deep damage has been done, not only to the families but also to the rest of us—especially children—who have watched this horror unfold. Let us hope that rather than learning how to model cruelty, our children will learn how to stand up for those who are unable to stand up for themselves. 

RELATED: 

• Welcoming Refugee Children into Early Childhood Classrooms | NAEYC  
• AAP Statement on Protecting Immigrant Children | American Academy of Pediatrics
• Nazis separated me from my parents as a child. The trauma lasts a lifetime | Yoka Verdoner | The Guardian
• When Donald Trump was separated from his family | Michael D'Antonio | CNN
• Hundreds of children wait in Border Patrol facility in Texas | AP
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Coal, Nukes & National Insecurity...

6/10/2018

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Bioneers podcast:
"Security by Design" 
​David Orr | Amory Lovins
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"The United States has for decades been undermining the foundations of its own strength. It has gradually built up an energy system prone to sudden, massive failures with catastrophic consequences.
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The energy that runs America is brittle—easily shattered by accident or malice. That fragility frustrates the efforts of our Armed Forces to defend a nation that literally can be turned off ​by a handful of people. It poses, indeed, a grave and growing threat to national security, life, and liberty..."

There are many reasons why the Trump administration's recent move to force grid operators to buy coal and nuclear power is a catastrophically bad idea: It will distort  markets, cost rate-payers tens of billions of dollars, reduce consumer spending power, make US business less competitive and discourage investment in better, cleaner technologies and jobs. It will also make the US more vulnerable to attack. To justify such a move under the cover of "economic and national security" is Orwellian Newspeak at its finest. In "Great Again" America, danger is safety. 

There are two kinds of threats—one slow, one fast, both devastating. First there are the many consequences of man-mediated climate change. The accelerating rise in atmospheric carbon levels warming both air and water have quickened the melting of polar ice caps and glaciers, while also causing water itself to expand (warmer seas are bigger seas.) Dozens of US military bases around the world are already battling sea level rise and the expense of moving mission-critical assets to higher ground. Extreme weather events have also become more common, with cascading national security implications: 

"...In the Arctic, the region warming faster than anywhere else on Earth, the combination of melting sea ice, thawing permafrost and sea-level rise is eroding the Alaska shoreline enough to damage several Air Force radar early warning and communication installations. At one base, half a runway has given way to erosion, preventing large planes from using it. Damage to a seawall has allowed waves to wash onto the runway at another base. Thawing permafrost has also affected access to training areas.

In the West, drought has amplified the threat of wildfires and deluge has damaged roads, runways, and buildings at bases there. Wildfire in Alaska has interrupted training. Last year in California, fires threatened Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps’ major West Coast base, which lies 48 miles north of San Diego, as well as Vandenberg Air Force Base, 65 miles north of Santa Barbara. A year’s worth of rain fell in 80 minutes at Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert in California, causing $64 million in damage to 160 buildings, including barracks, roads, a bridge, and 11,000 feet of fencing..." 
— Who's Still Fighting Climate Change? The U.S. Military | National Geographic


The mandate that more coal be burned literally adds fuel to the climate change fire, dramatically increasing the risks and costs of socio-political destabilization due to droughts, floods and temperature extremes. We are just beginning to see the first waves of climate refugees.  

The second threat is structural. Large central power plants require a large and complex grid to deliver electricity. This is both wasteful (about 2/3's of power generated by coal, for example, is lost as heat in production and delivery) and also a strategic weakness. When something as commonplace as as a tree falling on power line or lightning damaging a transformer during a storm can knock out electricity in a neighborhood for hours (or, in the case of Puerto Rico, for months), it's clear there's a problem. Now imagine an enemy deliberately interrupting the nation's power supply via cyberattack. The grid is under constant siege. Yet at the same time that the administration has imposed sanctions on Russian hackers, whose attacks so far have included at least one nuclear plant, there has also been an exodus of cybersecurity experts from the executive branch. 

Malicious code is not the only threat. A strategically placed, low-tech explosive could do extensive damage, especially if nuclear power were the cross-hairs. In fact, grid vulnerability has been a top-level concern of the US military for the last several decades.

The antidote to "brittle power"— a term coined by Amory and Hunter Lovins, co-founders of Rocky Mountain Institute, and the title of a detailed report they prepared for the Pentagon in 1981—is to reimagine the big grid as a series of "islandable" microgrids, preferably powered by clean renewables and improved by efficiency. A modular design means that if one part of the system were damaged, it could be disconnected from the rest of the system during repairs. Each microgrid is self-sufficient so could continue to supply electricity to its users.  

In the wake of a disaster, it can be both faster and cheaper to get renewable power sources back online. After Superstorm Sandy decimated the Jersey Shore, for example, many residential solar panels were still physically functional, but due to regulatory requirements were unable to operate independent of the grid. Changing the rules would boost resilience dramatically. It was a teachable moment. 

More recently, in Australia a Tesla Powerwall battery storage system for a wind farm was able to keep the local grid up and running when a coal plant went offline. Typically, another coal plant would fire up to supply power in the interim, a process that can take a half hour or more. The Powerwall sensed the outage instantly, saving time and money, with a bonus of no planet-warming emissions. Businesses that depended on the power never skipped a beat, so they saved money, too.  

In short, we know how do better. We deserve better. And as it turns out, our national security depends on it. 

RELATED: 
•  Bob Murray drafted 6 orders on coal, climate for Trump | E & E News
•  Coal | Last Week Tonight | John Oliver | video
•  
All 5 federal energy regulators don’t believe there’s a national security emergency on coal | Think Progress
•  Interior had little basis for halting mountaintop removal study, probe finds | Wash Post
•  The Clean Power Plan...Still a Good Idea | better
•  Lost In Transmission | Inside Energy 
•  A Creative Brief: Rebranding Efficiency | J. A. Ginsburg
•  How Solar PV Can Support Disaster Resiliency | NREL
​
•  Paradise | John Prine & John Burns playing by the backstairs in Maywood, IL | video 
•  Call Up the Captain | The Steep Canyon Rangers (with Steve Martin) 
​
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Simply Marbleous

6/9/2018

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You can get lost in a sphere of glass. Its very existence is as unlikely as it is enchanting. How can something made mostly of sand—silicate—be so brilliantly clear? How can it be neither a solid nor a liquid, but an "amorphous solid" somewhere in between? As for those swirls and pirouettes of color—physics at its most beguiling. 

No wonder people were jostling for a look at Jackson Ocheltree's booth at Chicago's 57th Street Art Fair last week. Most glass spheres are small—they're marbles. By comparison, Ocheltree's were giants, the largest a few inches in diameter. In fact until he told the crowd we were looking at marbles, we didn't know. 

Each sphere is a technical tour de force forged in a single day-long sitting that requires a small crew. The larger the sphere, the more complex and physically-demanding the challenge. Not only is the glass heavy—a borosilicate similar to pyrex that's virtually unbreakable—but it must be kept at 2800° F for hours on end. (The video embedded above is from a BBC television segment on how small marbles are made. Ocheltree's marbles are significantly more challenging to create.) 

There aren't a lot of marble-makers in the world, much less giant marble-makers. Ocheltree was well on his way to a Ph.D. in organic chemistry when he began learning about glass a decade ago. Applied chemistry turned out to be way more fun. Five years in, he started making marbles.

"Glass is very circumstantial. What you're seeing is the result of years of practice and a lot of control," he says. For example, scallops of yellow and green are the condensed fumes of gold and silver. "The gas will travel in the flame of the torch and adhere to the surface of the glass," he explains.

Yet science doesn't quite account for the magic of time, space, movement and the metallic breath of color all captured within an impermeable, transparent sphere. In our world of constant change—not all of it welcome—it is extraordinary to find such a beautiful constant. In a marble, there is peace. 

RELATED: 
• Jackson Ocheltree's Contact Info | email 
​• Marble (toy) | Wikipedia
• Venice Glass Museum | website
• How to Play Marbles | Howcast | video
• Playing with Marbles | CBS Sunday Morning | video
• The Universe on Orion's Belt | Men In Black | video



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Of Four O'Clocks and Moon Flowers...

6/1/2018

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After a May that seemed more like March with a brief blaze of July, and a June that began as October, today we have that rarest of rare: a season in season. Birds are in full show-off serenade, the first crop of fledglings out and about. Perfect, pre-nibbled leaves effortlessly transform sunlight into green. Everywhere is lush and every day there's more. Winter has finally given way to the seductions of lilac and lily-of-the-valley. Moving on. 

I have been around long enough to know that this isn't forever and that each one of these days is precious. Until the solstice, just a weeks away, each day stretches a little longer and I am greedy for every minute. Up before dawn most days. At the Lake to watch the sunrise whenever I can. 

••••••••••

This year my mother wants four o'clocks for her small-but-jam-packed garden, so I went to Anton's, the neighborhood garden center that's actually in a neighborhood. Now in its second century (Anton took over the business 70 years ago), Anton's opened when this area was still "out in the country" and survives as a beloved zoning relic. Street parking only. If any place were to have an old-timey flower like a four o'clock, it would be Anton's. And they did, although only a few. I took two.  

As the name suggests, four o'clocks bloom in late afternoon providing pollinators—who have spent the long day visiting and revisiting all the other of flowers in the garden dozens of times hoping for one last tiny sip of overlooked nectar—with a bountiful tea time snack. Hummingbirds are said to be particularly fond of them. Each plant can have flowers of different colors. Each flower can be more than one color. They smell good, too. 

Mirabilis jalapa has become a global favorite. First the flowers spread from Peru throughout the Americas, then starting in the 1500s were imported into Europe and Asia. Beyond their sheer loveliness, four o'clocks are popular in folk medicine and have also shown potential for bioremediation, removoing pollutants from soil.

That last talent would have been unexpected side benefit of Project Carol Four O'Clock, a small-scale, guerilla gardening campaign to beautify the scruffy street corners of Chicago. Several years ago my friend, the eponymous Carol, would go out with a flat of plants stashed in the back her vintage VW Beetle and drive around looking for forlorn patches of weedy green in need of a little love. Since four o'clocks can be prodigious self-seeders, perhaps her long-ago acts of gardening goodness live on, a legacy of color and scent bursting into unexpected bloom at the end of a long, hot summer's day, the audacity of irrepressible color bounded by sidewalk and street. 

••••••••••

Moonflowers (Ipomoea alba) are also late-day bloomers, but only come into full gardenia-scented lusciousness once the sun gives way to the moon. Each enormous, creamy white flower lasts but a single evening. As tropical natives, they wait for the hot, humid nights of July and August to unfurl their magnificent blooms to the arias of amorous katydids and cicadas high up in the trees.

For the last couple of years I have planted moonflowers from seed. These are big garbanzo bean-size seeds that spend weeks developing roots before sprouting enormous cotyledons. For quite a while that's all there is to see. Then one day some heart-shaped leaves appear and it's off to the vine-growing races. Up the lamp post! Across the railing! Onto the trellis!

All that drama is still months away. We are just at the beginning. Isn't that wonderful? 

RELATED:


• "The Gentleness of Summer" | Asbury Street Sessions | Dave & Al (audio) 
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