The following images are reported to have been caused by flip-flops sold by Wal-Mart – which, according to the same report, told the consumer to take the matter up with the Chinese manufacturer.
If Chinese-made items as innocuous as rubber sandals can cause injury – perhaps, until circumstances change, emergency caches should not contain any items made in China. Let’s hope this manufacturer hasn’t also been making respirators.
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Meet Mike Mercurio, a friend of mine in Long Beach Island, NJ. The image shows his PV Solar installation and small wind turbine. The turbine sits 34 feet above the ground. The 6-foot blades make the tip 40 feet above the ground.
Mercurio’s wind turbine and solar panels produce power without pollution – without greenhouse gases, mercury, and radioactive wastes. And with an annual bill of $114. Click Here for Treehugger
, or Here for the International Herald Tribune.
His neighbors prefer smog. They prefer the hacking cough of polution related “health effects” and other “externalities” to the gentle whirr of wind power. And electric bill of $2500 per year and $3500 per year, as opposed to his grid-connect charges of $114. What are they thinking? Are they thinking?
Mercurio is a real patriot who believes in intelligent action, not empty words. His wind turbine and photovoltaic solar panels show us how to achieve energy independence, and national security, with clean safe energy, with lower costs, with no pollution.
He should be applauded and emulated, not sued and shut down.
Our dear friend and pack-member (that’s right, we’re a lot like dogs, in good ways and
bad) Zuzu has started her own blog
We’re aware that most Popular Logistics readers excel in obscure languages – and spoken Irish, even taking into account recent efforts to revive it – falls ino the category “obscure.” (And the people who post responses in Aramaic – we have good reasons
for not publishing those comments. I’m not even going to discuss the Esperanto types). But in case your Irish isn’t too strong – this means “Kindly Kiss My —-.”
Never at a loss for words, Zuzu is like Shakespeare’s Beatrice – with a little Emma Goldman a tiny touch of Maureen Dowd mixed in.
So please check out Kindly Pog Mo Thoin.
I’ve been looking for a while for a high-visibility vest – ideally ANSI Class III (visible at – I think it’s 1,250 feet – in poor lighting conditions, like snow or rain, visible from all sides) – that also had pockets. And had great difficulty finding a garment that was serious about storage and visibility. Lots of great special ops-type vests – in any color you want as long as it’s black.
I’ve been looking every time I find a new EMS or SAR or similar supplied. I stumbled on these guys through a Google search (I think for “ANSI” +”vest” +”pocket”).
And, of course, it comes in any color you want, as long as it’s high-visibility yellow. Trimmed with Scotchlite at virtually every opportunity. The person I spoke with, Mark Robinett, told me that while they don’t make this in-house, it was designed by Dan White of AllMed. So I’ve ordered one – and I’ve got high expectations. (My nefarious scheme is to try to get them to add some Reflexite to each surface, some velcro or dual-lock on the back and/or front for names, assignments, etc).
New Yorkers involved in CERT stuff know that people are often selling “CERT” gear that doesn’t remotely approach the ANSI specs, and is very overpriced.
I’ll try to add photos of the AllMed vest – and the not-so-useful “CERT” vests to this post later.
I did some quick comparisons of AllMed’s gear and prices and my impression is that they’re very competitive about price – and, while they have a pretty wide range of merchandise – one gets the impression they’re fussy about the brands they stock.
Here’s a link to AllMed.
Note: not that we’re not thoroughly corrupt (we are, after all, New Yorkers, and have a reputation to live up to) – but because we’re going to review this item, we paid for it, as is our current policy.
An extraordinarily useful site – even for those of us who don’t understand satellites – Eric Johnston’s SatSig.net -which we’ve just added to our blogroll.
Those of you living on or around the Parade Grounds in Brooklyn have probably noticed a decline in police presence in our neighborhood this summer. That’s because after two years, the ‘impact zone’ defined by the 70th Precinct to address serious safety issues with a whole lotta beat cops, has moved on to shadier climes. Fair enough, but we still get a lot more visitors than most neighborhoods because of the athletic fields, on top of a thriving core of our very own home-grown
thugs.
Since the end of May, a group of area residents has been working closely with members of the 70th Precinct to try to reverse the spike in criminality that resulted when the impact zone moved on. We’ve been very pleased by the responsiveness of the police. Now we’d like to invite other concerned residents of the area immediately around the Parade Grounds to join us for a community meeting and briefing with the police on Tuesday, July 17th at 7:30 pm in the lobby of 25 Parade Place. The idea is to expand and organize the network of neighbors willing to use their eyes and ears and voices for the welfare of the community. Please help us to spread the word among those who care. Thank you!
This is a post-Katrina take on why the system didn’t work – so it’s not new – but no less relevant – from a blog, Marginal Revolution, which we’ve only recently discovered.
Pollution kills 750 thousand per year in China, according to a self-censored World Bank study described in the Independent and on Yahoo News. According to these reports, the Chinese government is suppressing knowledge of the issue, rather than addressing the problem, and the World Bank agreed to suppress the data.
While three quarters of a million people in a population of one point three billion is only six out of ten thousand and is a low percentage of the population, this corresponds to 173 thousand Americans. If 173 thousand Americans were dying each year from pollution, which is slightly more than the 150,000 Americans who die each year from stroke, we might be upset.
The worse things are:
As China continues to industrialize, as they put an additional 1000 cars on the road each day, things will only get worse.
And according to the World Watch Institute, 16 of the worlds 20 most polluted cities are in China.
From Irwin Redlener’s Americans at Risk:
Even if the nation’s intelligence capacity is substantially strengthened and homeland security better assured, these systems will never be perfect. An American city could conceivably experience the nightmare of a nuclear detonation. The essential point is that the quality and extent of survival and recovery, even from a nuclear bomb, are affected by the success of our preparedness and mitigation programs.
The current presidential administration is, of course, now well-known for its argument that it “didn’t want the smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud.” Implicit – by omission – was that the strategy of pre-empting the (hypothetical or fictional) threat of nuclear attack by Iraq would so likely to succeed that it wasn’t necessary to take steps to mitigate or prepare for the effects of a nuclear attack. Continue reading
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I’m shocked, Shocked, to find the Chinese using lead paints on toys for toddlers.
They put Etheylene Glyclol as a substitute for Glycerin in toothpaste and a few years ago in medications. Ethylene glycol works great as antifreeze, but it’s poisonous in small doses.
In The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future, available from Amazon, Elizabeth C. Economy describes “In late July 2001, the fertile Huai River Valley – China’s breadbasket – was the site of an environmental disaster. Heavy rains flooded the river’s tributaries, flushing more than 38 billion gallons of highly polluted water into the Huai. Downstream, in Anhui province, the river water was thick with garbage, yellow foam, and dead fish. … Only seven months earlier, the government had proclaimed its success in cleaning up the Huai. A six-year campaign to rid the region of polluting factories that dumped their wastewater into the river had ostensibly raised the quality of the water in the river and its more than one hundred tributaries to the point that people could once again fish, irrigate their crops, and even drink from the river.”
They lied and their people die.
In Deep Economy, also available on Amazon
, Bill McKibben describes “a trip to China, where I met a twelve-year-old girl named Zhao Lin Tao, who was the same age as my daughter and who lived in a poor rural village in Sichuan province – that is she’s about the most statistically average person on earth. Zhao was the one person in her village I could talk to without an interpreter: she was proudly speaking the pretty good English she’d learned in the overcrowded village school. When I asked her about her life though, she was soon in tears: her mother had gone to the city to work in a factory and never returned, abandoning her and her sister to her father, who beat them regularly because they were not boys. Because Zhao’s mother was away the authorities were taking care of her school fees until ninth grade, but after that there would be no money to pay. Her sister had already given up and dropped out.”
What’s one or two girls in a population of one billion three hundred million?
Unofficially HIV Aids follows trade and prostitution. January, 2006, the Chinese government, (www.avert.org/aidschina.htm) reported 650,000 people living with AIDS, down from the 2003 estimate of 840,000, and up from 1989, when AIDS was known as “aizibing,” the “Loving Capitalism Disease” and it was reported at 153 Chinese and 41 foreigners.
If they are correct in their characterization of HIV Aids as the disease of loving capitalism, boy are they in trouble.
We first learned about these from Haninah Levine’s piece in Defense Tech, which had reported that they were under consideration for field use in Iraq
.
From the firm’s press release:
This is a revolutionary, plug-and play, rapidly deployable, mobile, hybrid solar and wind power system. It can provide power in hours and run for years with very low maintenance and minimal operating costs. It is ideal for disaster relief, Homeland Security, commercial, military, and intelligence applications in any climate worldwide.
From the press release of the Royal College of Art :
A revolutionary new design for personal wind turbines wins top prize at the BSI Sustainability Design Awards 2007.
Christian Science Monitor, by Alexandra Marks, July 14, 2005:
As planning for terrorism becomes a part of daily life in the Western World, a growing number of disaster experts are calling for a dramatic reassessment in the way the nation plans for emergencies.
The problem, they argue, is that the current top-down approach views the public as a problem to be managed rather than an asset to be utilized. Officials don’t take into account people’s natural willingness to help or address their most basic needs — like concern about the safety of their spouses and kids.
This upstart group of sociologists, physicians, and terrorism experts contends that the use of ordinary citizens during a large-scale emergency could save hundreds if not thousands of lives. And they are determined to ensure the public is properly prepared before the next catastrophic event.
“It’s critical that we readjust our thinking. If you look at the 9/11 commission report they talked about first responders versus what they called ‘civilians,’ as if all of the civilians did was just stand at the sidelines,” says Kathleen Tierney, the director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “That is so radically at variance with what actually happened that day.”
— snip —
A major study done by the Center for the Advancement of Collaborative Strategies in Health at the New York Academy of Medicine found what many experts call an alarming disconnect between those official plans and the needs of the public. Researchers did an extensive review of the current plans to deal with a dirtybomb explosion and a smallpox attack at an airport. Then they did in-depth interviews with citizens at 14 different locations around the country, and a national telephone survey to find out how people would actually react.
In the case of a smallpox outbreak, they found the official plans expect everyone to go to a vaccination site. But the study found that only 40 percent of the public would actually go. The reasons are twofold: 40 percent of the people surveyed said they basically didn’t trust their government in such a case, and 60 percent were concerned about impact of the vaccine. That’s twice as many as were worried about catching the virus.
The official plans have another vulnerability. Currently, medical experts estimate that 50 million people are at risk of developing life-threatening complications if they get the smallpox vaccine. In the case of an outbreak, the official plans expect even those people to go to public vaccination sites which could unnecessarily put them at risk.
And in the case of a dirty bomb, the study found only 60 percent would “shelter in place” for as long as officials tell them to, primarily because they’d be worried about their families. On the upside, the study found that if people knew that their workplaces were organized and safe, and their children’s schools were safe and prepared, and that they could communicate with family members, they’d be much more likely to follow official instructions.
“Because we haven’t looked at these issues from the perspective of the public, we’re missing some very important information in developing strategies that would work best for them and also would be much more effective in terms of protecting people,” says Roz Lasker, the study’s principal researcher. “There’s been no planning that starts with asking, ‘What would make you feel safe?’”
That’s why researchers contend it’s crucial to involve whole communities in disaster planning from the start.
“If we really truly want to prepare for a disaster, we need to do it on a local level, where local means down to the level of the workplace and the level of schools,” says Lee Clarke, a disaster planning expert at Rutgers University In New Jersey. “Too many of the usual ways of looking at disaster planning looks at command and control, as if we’re all children and we need the generals to organize us otherwise the world will fall apart.”
Via Jonas Landgren
