"The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol. In a community lacking pure-water supplies, the closest thing to "pure" fluid was alcohol. Whatever health risks were posed by beer (and later wine) in the early days of agrarian settlements were more than offset by alcohol's antibacterial properties. Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties. Many genetically minded historians believe that the confluence of urban living and the discovery of alcohol created a massive selection pressure on the genes of all humans who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Alcohol, after all, is a deadly poison and notoriously addictive. To digest large quantities of it, you need to be able to boost production of enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases, a trait regulated by a set of genes on chromosome four in human DNA. Many early agrarians lacked that trait, and thus were genetically incapable of "holding their liquor." Consequently, many of them died childless at an early age, either from alcohol abuse or from waterborne diseases. Over generations, the gene pool of the first farmers became increasingly dominated by individuals who could drink beer on a regular basis. Most of the world population today is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol. (The same is true of lactose tolerance, which went from a rare genetic trait to the mainstream among descendants of the herders, thanks to domestication of livestock.) The descendants of hunter gatherers--like many Native Americans or Australian Aborigines--were never forced through this genetic bottleneck, and so today they show disproportionate rates of alcoholism. The chronic drinking problem in Native American populations has been blamed on everything from the weak "Indian constitution" to the humiliating abuses of the U.S. reservation system. But their alcohol intolerance most likely has another explanation: their ancestors didn't live in towns."
--Steven Johnson, in The Ghost Map, pages 103-4.

$10,830/year is poverty line for one person
2 people: $14,570
3: $18,310
4: $22,050
6: $29,550
8: $37,010
(these stats from presentation by OI staff)
Seems like one person living on 10.8K would be much better off than 8 living on 37K.
But I suppose rent is the big issue there.

And from a PDX newspaper in mid Oct:
Brookings Institute statistics
national poverty rate increasing at 26.5%
suburban poverty on the increase
currently approx 1/3 of poor live in burbs
since 2000 suburban poverty is up 37.4% to 13.7 million
that's 2x the urban poverty growth rate
urban poverty rate 19.5%
suburban rate 10.4%
more people live in the suburbs so 1.6 million more poor in suburbs than urban
of 100 largest metro areas, 57 had major poverty increases in last year
most impacted: sunbelt areas that boomed with housing boom

I just got back from a yoga class, to which I drove my truck. Driving anywhere is still strange to me. For the last year my truck was not registered. For several years before that it was registered, but I barely managed to start it up once a week. I ride my bike. I use public transportation. I walk. I have an aversion to the automobile. I think it is part of our demise. And yet, I drive. I just drove all the way to AZ and back. And it was a blessing.
( ruminationCollapse )

It was a 5/4 decision on "the Chicago Case" in which the Court said that city residents can have handguns for their own use, even in their home. The decision voids a 1982 Chicago ordinance outlawing home handguns, and furthermore overrides any city or state laws banning handguns. The folks who think the 2nd Amendment means that anybody can have any kind of gun they want for personal use are celebrating. Justice John Paul Stevens, the leading liberal on the court, takes the bench for the last time today.

Dennis Henigan of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence said the decision will be used by the gun lobby to challenge a myriad of state and local gun laws. "With few exceptions, these challenges will fail," he said.

By one estimate there are 200 million guns in the private ownership of about 90 million people (in the US). This is an average of 2.2 guns per owner. I wonder how many people have just one gun, and how many people have a hundred. According to government stats we have about 80 gun deaths a day, 34 of which are homicides.

( sources, exact wording of the 2nd amendment, and opinionCollapse )

interesting new 2-wheeled motorized urban personal transport
it folds up tiny and goes 25km/hour
looks like it rides as instinctively as a bike--after a while
http://www.yikebike.com/site/gallery/video/yikebike-discovery-channel
my concern is the sort of posture that it traps you in, upright but slumped
like we need any more reasons to slouch and be sedentary

Whoa, Nelly.

Such a sad song... Suz, can you play this one?

They make it look so easy...and where is the law?