Climate Change Theory Affecting Local Policy

The Herald yesterday reported on a proposed $1.5 billion project to upgrade Miami-Dade's antiquated water and sewer system.  That system, according to the report, consists of 7,500 miles of sewer lines, "a good portion" of which "regularly rupture[s] and spill[s] millions of gallons of raw waste into local waterways and Biscayne Bay."  The federal government has sued the county for allowing the system to fall into such disrepair, threatening the assessment of millions of dollars of fines.

The system includes a "controversial" waste water treatment plant on Virginia Key, an island along the beautiful causeway that connects the mainland, just below the Brickell area of the City of Miami, with Key Biscayne.  The plan calls for renovating that plant at an estimated cost of $550 million. 

The Biscayne Bay Waterkeepers, clean-water activists who filed to join the federal action against the county, say spending hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild on Virginia Key is a waste, because the spit of land is likely to be under water within 50 years. 

The group points to a recent study by the journal Science that showed the polar ice caps in Greenland are melting at three times the rate originally believed. They also say a climate change compact Miami-Dade agreed to with three other counties — which accepted a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study that shows sea levels will rise 3 feet by 2060 — shows the Virginia Key plant could be in peril.
“Doubling down on Virginia Key the way they’re doing it is just stupid,” said environmental attorney Albert J. Slap, representing the Waterkeepers. “There’s not a dime in it for armoring the plant, or raising it. It’s on a barrier island.” 

Doug Yoder, deputy director of the county’s water and sewer department, didn’t dispute the Army Corps findings, and said the county could abandon the Virginia Key plant for a new plant on the western edge of the county if federal regulators make such a demand.

“We certainly don’t want to spend a lot of money fixing up a facility we’ll soon abandon,” he said. 

It makes no sense to me to have a water treatment plant on such a jewel as Virginia Key, but for reasons that have nothing to do with climate change.  My guess is that it is convenient to invoke that spectre as county officials seek to put themselves in a position to get federal funds to move the plant somewhere else.  The rising of the sea doesn't appear to be affecting another giant project near downtown.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/12/02/3124200/miami-dade-proposes-spending-15.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/12/02/3124200/miami-dade-proposes-spending-15.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

Crazy

American Heart Association reports that a healthy diet may help prevent recurrent heart attacks and strokes.

Sitting's Perils

From the NYT.  (h/t Drudge)

Childbirth in Rural (and Not So Rural) America 100 Years Ago

I live sixty-five miles from a Dr. and my other babies (two) were very large at birth - on 12 lbs., and the other 10 1/2 lbs.  I have been very badly torn each time through the rectum. . . . I am 37 years old and I am so worried and filled with perfect horror at the prospects ahead.  So many of my neighbors die at giving birth. . . . I have a baby 11 months old in my keeping now, whose mother died.  When I reached their cabin last Nov. it was 22 below zero, and I had to ride 7 miles horseback.  She was nearly dead when I got there, and died after giving birth to a 14 lb. boy - Will you please send me all the information for care of myself before and after and at the time of delivery.  I am far from a doctor, and we have no means.

-from a letter by Mrs. A-C-P of Burntfork, Wyoming, in 1916 to Julia Lathrop, a "maternalist reformer" and chief of the Children's Bureau within the Department of Labor.  Congress passed legislation creating The Children's Bureau in 1912.  This passage from the letter is quoted in Wertz and Wertz, Lying-In: a History of Childbirth in America (Expanded Edition) (Yale Univ. Press 1989), p. 205.

My dad's father, Walter Levi Stokes (June 6, 1877 - December 20,1949), was married before he married my dad's mother, Hettie Louise Johnson Stokes (October 24, 1884 - July 14, 1959).  His first wife died in childbirth, as did the baby.  My dad said that Grandfather Walter stopped working when my dad was 15 or 16. Dad had to go to work to support the family.  They moved from a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta to a house on the outskirts of that city.  I remember that old wooden house, with its privy out the back.  Neighbors, the Cooglers, helped feed the family.  My dad believes that his father stopped working because the trauma of Grandfather's first wife and baby dying caught up with him.  I think that means he suffered from depression.  You don't get over losing a baby at childbirth.  I can't imagine what happens to a young man who loses his wife and baby both.

Open Culture

More Online Learning.  Looks like a good website.  Look at this, for example.

Pell Grant Program Cut by One-Third?

The email, sent out by the Dallas County Community College District, informed students of the changes to the Pell Grant program. It revealed that the number of semesters a student could receive a Pell Grant had been cut from 18 semesters down to 12. It is a detail likely unknown to most students; in fact, the cut in grants has gone largely unreported by the media.

-from an article at Examiner.com entitled "College Students Learn of Obama's Secret Pell Grant Cuts."  (h/t Instapundit)

The slant of the article is that Obama is such a terrible person, because he "hid" this during his campaign.  (Obama is not an idiot.  Call him what you want, he is not an idiot.  Romney-Ryan were hardly forthcoming about what deductions they were going to eliminate in their proposed income tax program.)  But hasn't the right-wing been critical of the government for subsidizing higher education all along?  The problem with making the cuts in the Pell Grant program is that it is an outright grant program for financially needy students, not a loan program that weighs the down the young person with debt.  Cut back the loan program and higher education will have to cut back its high prices.  At least in that respect - forcing down prices - the Pell Grant program cuts might do some good.  I would start with the loan program, however, not with Pell Grants.

What this is really telling us, however, is that the slow motion bursting of the "higher-education" bubble continues, whoever we have in the White House.  The market, finally, will have its way.  And the market tells us that higher-education is terribly over-priced for what it is giving us back.  We will still get what is valuable from higher-education.  It is simply that it will be delivered differently and its substance will be transformed because subsidies of the entrenched educational establishment will be reduced.  At least that is my hope.  Thanks, Glenn Reynolds, for taking us to school on this issue.

Funny ATC Quotes

A DC-10 had come in a little hot and thus had an exceedingly long roll out after touching down. San Jose Tower noted: “American 751, make a hard right turn at the end of the runway, if you are able. If you are not able, take the Guadalupe exit off Highway 101, make a right at the lights and return to the airport.”

-More here at the AviationHumor.net website.

No Cost 10 Seminary-level Course Program Online

From Gordon-Conwell.

Whale Shark Off the Broward Shore

From today's Herald.

On-Line Teaching and Its Infinite Possibilities

In this month's MIT Technology Review.  The report has several articles worth reading.  Instapundit links to one of them, "The New Internet Teaching Stars."

Among the most time-consuming - and worst compensated - tasks in my estate planning practice is teaching the clients about the decisions they need to make and what they have to know to make them.  I have often thought that the internet - particularly on-line videos in the nature of You-Tube productions - provides an answer.  I would like to take 6 months off and work on that project.  Next year.  Provided I survive the "Fiscal Cliff looming!!" phenomenon this year.

As one thinks about it, isn't learning how we use the Internet most of the time?  As a tool for learning?  Yes, we use it for transactions too, increasingly so, and entertainment and as our post-office.  None of that diminishes the growing importance of the internet for education, for micro-education at its most informal ("Let's Google that") to formal, macro-education (free on-line courses at MIT), and every level in-between.

A tweener is my partner Juan's Florida Probate and Trust Litigation Blog. Trust and Estate lawyers from all over Florida increasingly rely on it to keep up to date.  Lay people read it all the time and call us.  I cannot go to a gathering of lawyers without someone bringing up "Juan's blog."  We will probably soon change the name of the firm to "Juan's Blog, P.A."  And that will be OK.

Esquire's The 75 Books Every Man Should Read

Here.

Gun Violence Down, Gun Sales Up

Go figure.

Oh, Great. South Florida now has Nile Crocodiles.

The four-foot one in the photo was caught in the Fruit and Spice Park in South Dade, for heaven's sake.  Read the Herald article in this morning's edition.  Here's the Wiki article on the Nile Crocodile.

How much nastier is this African cousin of our American croc?

The two species with the most well-known and documented reputation for preying on humans are the Nile crocodile and saltwater crocodile. Each year, hundreds of deadly attacks are attributed to the Nile crocodile in sub-Saharan Africa. On New Guinea, Borneo and the Solomon Islands attacks by saltwater crocodiles often occur. The mugger crocodile is also very dangerous to humans, killing many people in India every year. The American crocodile, while generally considered to be less aggressive, does occasionally kill humans and a handful of fatalities are reported and confirmed every year in Central America and southern Mexico. The black caiman is also responsible for several recorded human fatalities every year within the Amazon basin and the surrounding regions. The American alligator is responsible for human fatalities, with most occurring in Florida.

-from the Wiki article on Crocodile Attacks.

Miami and the Panama Canal Make-Over (Bumped Again: All 4 Parts)

Huge implications for South Florida.

The Herald published several articles over the last two weeks, the last one today.  For Part 1 of 4 parts, look here, part 2 here, part 3 here, and part 4 here.

Morsi's Mentor

Daniel Pipes on Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the prime minister of Turkey.

Attention, Austin Gawkers

 I want to go here next visit:

Grow Your Own Potatos

I have the bag.  If I only had the time!

Build Your Own PC?

Because it sounds like fun.

Grandparents, Carlos M. and Audrey J. Hemperley

Kenneth Whitehead, the Curator of the East Point [GA] Historical Society, very kindly sent me this photo of the parents of Juanita, my mother, apparently taken on June 30, 1919.  My grandfather, Carlos Mason Hemperley, born July 14, 1901, would have been just shy of 18 years of age, when he married Audrey Atrue Jordan, (March 13, 1902 - February 1, 1949).  I am not sure right now of their exact wedding date, but they married very young, as was the custom in that family.  (Audrey's mother, Nancy R. Della Lanford Jordan, my "Gramma Jordan," married at age 16.)  My mother was born November 17, 1920.  Her brother, Carlos M. Hemperley, Jr. was born in 1919.

Here is what Kenneth Whitehead wrote me in an email about this photo:

Lillie Ruth Hemperley Stewart, the sister of your grandfather Carlos Mason Hemperley Sr., [to whom my mother referred as "Aunt Lill"] donated over 600 photos to the East Point Historical Society a number of years ago. They apparently were taken from 1918 until the early 1920s. They were put away in a scrapbook and I recently found them and started scanning them. That way, we have permanent copies in our records and CD's, with these photos, will be available for family and friends. Attached is one of these photos.

I am not related to the Hemperley family but my wife is distantly related by marriage. Her cousin, Henry Lipes, married one of Asa Hemperley's granddaughters.

I'm retired and enjoy history and genealogy. I noticed your blog entry December 25, 2007, and figured you might be interested in this part of your family history.

Ken Whitehead

Mr. Whitehead also added this to his email:

You may find these web site locations of interest:

East Point Historical Society web site:
http://www.eastpoinths.org/

East Point Historical Society facebook site:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/72423884096/

I Grew Up in East Point facebook site:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/241425862108/

Thank you, Mr. Whitehead!

Pennsylvania College Slashes Employees Hours to Avoid ObamaCare

"The move will save an estimated $6 million."

Thanks, Instapundit.

This is going to happen a lot and it won't be limited to institutions of higher learning and to part-timers.  See Tate, ObamaCare Survival Guide, pp. 111-113.