I've been helping to fight the city council's plan to convert 1400+ acres of restorable wetlands in Redwood City. As a fly fisher and supporter of the environment, I am appalled at the level of greed and short-sightedness being demonstrated by my city. We don't need more condos, we don't need more development, and we certainly don't need any of it here, on the banks of the bay. What we need HERE are wetlands, protection from floods, habitat for wildlife and a healthier ecosystem for our damaged watershed.
Even if we didn't need all of those things, which we do, we simply cannot afford the water and electricity needs of such a massive project. Remember the electrical shortages that resulted in brown-outs? Would you welcome water rationing? You might not think about it now that it's fall and the rainy season, but come summer, we will all remember what that pain feels like.
The city is chasing money, pure and simple. Cargill and the developers won't be around later to reap the ecological rewards of such a misguided plan, and even if they are they'll be too busy counting their money to care.
For a while, it seemed the misinformation campaign they were running was winning, they won at the ballot box by confusing the voters. But now people are discovering how truly awful this plan is and they are starting to do something about it.
I am, and you can too:
Spread the word.
Dear karen,
We are glad to report that there is a growing rebellion against Cargill's plan to build a city in San Francisco Bay. We wanted to update you on these developments and ask for your continued support in protecting the 1433 acres of restorable wetlands in Redwood City.
In an important opinion piece in the Palo Alto Weekly, Palo Alto City Council member Yoriko Kishimoto calls out Cargill's plan as a grave threat to the Peninsula's future: "A proposed development in Redwood City so breathtaking in its size and misguided in its scope that nothing of its kind has been seen in half a century." She points out that "this is not an infill site and this is not the place for housing."
And the Redwood City Daily News recently reported that the Menlo Park City Council is moving to declare the project an environmental hazard to the region. Menlo Park Council Members Kelly Fergusson and Andrew Cohen agree that "the current Cargill/DMB development proposal seeks to reverse long-standing regional and local policies to protect the Bay and its wetlands."
Meanwhile, in an opinion piece published in the Redwood City Daily News Redwood City resident Marsha Cohen expressed concern that the city "is stonewalling requests for public records." She points out that the mayor works for business lobbyist SAMCEDA, a strong public supporter of the Cargill development. Ms. Cohen wants to know what advice was given to the mayor about the conflict of interest.
You can join these Peninsula leaders in the battle to save the Redwood City salt ponds. Please write letters to the editor in response to these pieces, expressing your own opinion:
letters@dailynewsgroup.com
Palo Alto Weekly letters can be sent to:
letters@paweekly.comCurrently, the Redwood City Council is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to determine whether Cargill's application should move forward. Clearly, many leaders on the Peninsula have found a much cheaper answer: It should be dead on arrival.
Go to www.savesfbay.org/redwoodcity for more information and to sign our petition, and stay tuned for more interesting updates.
Sincerely,
Stephen Knight
Save The Bay Political Director
510.452.9261
I'll tell you a not-so-little story that I can hardly believe myself - even though I am living it.
As some of you know, I was struggling back in July to come to terms with some unresolved issues related to a past relationship. At one point toward the end of that month, I realized that there was no way to resolve them and so I just had to finally let go. There was a definite shift in that moment when my internal state changed and I became ready to really move on.
That same afternoon a former coworker of mine was driving home from work. (We'll call him "D".) He has been in the process of dismantling a 25-year marriage since January. We have known each other for 13 years and worked together very intensely for the first 7 of those years. Somewhere around the beginning of July, he had started to think more about his future and what he wanted for the next phase of his life. At almost precisely the same moment I was making my decision to move on, he made his decision that this was the night he should call me.
When the phone rang and my dear, long-time friend and colleague asked me if I would "consider going out on a date" with him, I had a few moments of stunned silence - partially because I never imagined that he would think of me in this way and partially because my mind was rewinding the events of the previous month and thinking that the universe was having a good laugh at me.
After I recovered my voice, the first words out of my mouth were, "How would H feel about this?" You see, after all these years I know his ex-wife too. He said that she was the first to actually suggest it back in May. (She even called me later that week to give her approval.)
I honestly didn't know whether our great work partnership would translate into something more intimate, but I was very curious to find out and I thought it was so brave of him to call someone he would have to face for years to come even if I turned him down - I couldn't possibly say no. We had our first date on August 1st, just 2 months shy of 13 years from the day we met. It was very strange those first few weeks, but we found out that we have good romantic chemistry as well as being great "partners".
The last weekend in August, we decided to make a quick visit out to my parents. It felt a little early, but with my dad's health declining and our next opportunity not for another month we decided to push things forward a bit in case my dad wasn't feeling well when our next chance came. On a whim, D grabbed his camera because he had been wanting to get a photo of the two of us and was hoping my folks could take one.
D and my parents hit it off very well. (He is a deeply good man who actually reminds me a lot of my dad.) Dad took some photos of us and D took some photos of me with Mom and Dad. At one point when I was out of the room, D made a point of telling my dad that he would be there for me and that I would be taken care of. After we left, my dad told Mom how much he liked D and what a good guy he seemed to be. That was the last day my dad was himself.
The next day when I went to visit, Dad had lost his sense of humor. A few days later he lost all ability to communicate with us. A week later he was gone. D met my dad on the last day he was himself and took the last photo that was ever taken of him. I have yet to tell this story to anyone who believes this is coincidence.
Maybe it was destiny. Maybe it is just that my dad let go when he knew I would be okay. I don't know. What I do know is that I have never experienced respect, compassion, and appreciation on this scale. I have always known in my head that respect is key to a relationship but until I really experienced it, I never realized the extent to which it permeates and changes everything.
What an incredible gift at an amazing time. D has been gradually changing my perceptions of what I am worth and my expectations about what a relationship can and should be. My life will never be the same.
It has been just over a month since Daddy passed away. A month of meeting with funeral directors, trying to make sense of mountains of financial papers, finding hidden treasures in Dad's closet, and shuttling Mom back and forth to Kaiser.
Mom started having serious pain in her hip the day Dad died. She got up that morning thinking she didn't know how she was going to take care of him that day and went in to find him gone. She still feels a little bit guilty - as if somehow it was her fault.
Trying to work through her health issues with Kaiser has been a complicated, frustrating experience. I don't really understand why it is taking them so long to address her pain. I think they have too many members for the number of doctors. Not that they haven't done anything - I understand that it can take time to find the right solution. But the time between attempts is too long. The pain has spread to her back and she is starting to retain water in her feet - which means that her symptoms are following my Dad's right down the line. My best guess, based on our experience with Dad, is that she has another 4 or 5 months.
This time I am the only caregiver and she is not only physically hampered but also mentally disoriented, which Dad never was until his last week. I think this is largely because of the pain medication but probably also a side-effect of grief. I am now spending about 4 days a week there to help keep an eye on her especially since she is getting confused about when to take medications.
I have done some grieving for my Dad, especially while preparing the slide show and eulogy for the memorial. But I have been so consumed with taking care of Mom and her finances that my experience of grief has been disrupted. I suspect that I will have a pretty big collapse when mom goes that will be part grief/part relief.
It sounds odd, maybe even terrible, but I have a strange sense of belonging in these events. I have been dreading this time for the last year and a half. The beginning of grief is also the end of anticipating it. A substantial part of the dread is the fear of the unknown. Fear of making the wrong decisions, of not knowing the right things to do for them. That part gets a little easier with every milestone along this journey.
It is not all gloom and doom here. Good things - even amazing things - happen when you least expect them. But that is a story for Part 2....
From Vanity Fair....
Here is an amazing fact: nearly a year after perhaps the most sensational corporate collapse in the history of finance, a collapse that, without the intervention of the government, would have led to the bankruptcy of every major American financial institution, plus a lot of foreign ones, too, A.I.G.’s losses and the trades that led to them still haven’t been properly explained. How did they happen? Unlike, say, Bernie Madoff’s pyramid scheme, they don’t seem to have been raw theft. They may have been an outrageous departure from financial norms, but, if so, why hasn’t anyone in the place been charged with a crime? How did an insurance company become so entangled in the sophisticated end of Wall Street and wind up the fool at the poker table? How could the U.S. government simply hand over $54 billion in taxpayer dollars to Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch and all the rest to make good on the subprime insurance A.I.G. F.P. had sold to them—especially after Goldman Sachs was coming out and saying that it had hedged itself by betting against A.I.G.? Since I had him on the phone I asked Jake DeSantis for what Congressman Grayson had asked Edward Liddy: names. He obligingly introduced me to his colleagues in London and Connecticut, and they walked me through what had happened—all of them speaking to someone from the outside for the first time. All, for obvious reasons, were terrified of seeing their names in print, and asked not to be mentioned by name. That was fine by me, as their names are not what’s interesting. What’s interesting is their point of view on the event closest to the center of the financial crisis. For while they disagreed on this and that, they all were fairly certain that if it hadn’t been for A.I.G. F.P. the subprime-mortgage machine might never have been built, and the financial crisis might never have happened. More
via Andrew Sullivan.
America is exceptional not because it banished evil, not because Americans are somehow more moral than anyone else, not because its founding somehow changed human nature—but because it recognized the indelibility of human nature and our permanent capacity for evil. It set up a rule of law to guard against such evil. It pitted branches of government against each other and enshrined a free press so that evil could be flushed out and countered even when perpetrated by good men. The belief that when America tortures, the act is somehow not torture, or that when Americans torture, they are somehow immune from its moral and spiritual cancer, is not an American belief. It is as great a distortion of American exceptionalism as jihadism is of Islam. To believe that because the American government is better than Saddam and the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Americans are somehow immune to the same temptations of power that all flesh is heir to, is itself a deep and dangerous temptation. The power to torture is a case in point. Because torture can coerce truth, break a human being’s dignity, treat him as an expendable means rather than as a fragile end, it has a terrible power to corrupt. Torture is the ultimate expression of the absolute power of one individual over another; it destroys the souls of those who torture just as surely as it eviscerates the dignity of those who are its victims. And because torture is so awful, it also often requires a defensive embrace of it, a pride in it, an exaggeration of its successes.
real; genuine; authentic; sincere; not deceitful;
firm in allegiance; loyal; faithful; steadfast;
being or reflecting the essential or genuine character of something;
exact; precise; accurate; correct;
reliable; unfailing; sure;
honest; honorable; upright.
My dear dad passed away this morning. I can think of no better word to describe him than "true". He was a deeply good man who did everything he could for those around him. He lost his ability to communicate with us last Wednesday, but I know he chose his time. He refused water and even his pain medicine starting yesterday morning and managed to say to Mom, "Don't force me." He died in his sleep sometime around 4am and looked very peaceful for the first time in several days. I am grateful that he is no longer suffering.
Bye-bye Daddy.
We saved our vacation until the very last possible minute, less than two weeks before the girls had to go back to school. by waiting so long we also shortened it, but we still managed to 1) see places we'd never seen before and 2) spend quality time with my wonderful sister.
We decided to take Gringo with us this time, which added a little complexity, but not nearly as much as we'd feared. He's great in the car and in the hotel room too. He was just happy to be with us.
The full Flickr set is here. The pictures of the kids are protected but if you're my friend, request to see them and I'll let you!
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