Employment Resources on the
Internet by Marcus P. Zillman November 4, 2012
a comprehensive listing of employment resources available on the Internet. http://www.llrx.com/features/employmentresources.htm
Mary J. Bligh performed at the
Hurricance Sandy Relief Telethon on November 2, and sang The Living Proof with
these words: I know where I'm going
'Cause I know where I've been . . .
See complete lyrics at: http://en.musicplayon.com/lyrics?v=603376 Some of the other performers were Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Christina Aguilera, Billy Joel, Sting, and Aerosmith. $23 million was raised for disaster relief.
See complete lyrics at: http://en.musicplayon.com/lyrics?v=603376 Some of the other performers were Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Christina Aguilera, Billy Joel, Sting, and Aerosmith. $23 million was raised for disaster relief.
This year, Princeton, N.J. has hired sharpshooters to cull 250 deer from the town's herd of 550 over
the winter. The cost: $58,700. Columbia,
S.C., is spending $1 million to rid its drainage systems of beavers and their
dams. The 2009 "miracle on the
Hudson," when US AirwaysLCC -0.16%
flight 1549 had to make an emergency landing after its engines ingested Canada
geese, saved 155 passengers and crew, but the $60 million A320 Airbus was a
complete loss. In the U.S., the total
cost of wildlife damage to crops, landscaping and infrastructure now exceeds
$28 billion a year ($1.5 billion from deer-vehicle crashes alone), according to
Michael Conover of Utah State University, who monitors conflicts between people and
wildlife. Today, the eastern third of
the country has the largest forest in the contiguous U.S., as well as
two-thirds of its people. Since the 19th
century, forests have grown back to cover 60% of the land within this area. In New England, an astonishing 86.7% of the
land that was forested in 1630 had been reforested by 2007, according to the
U.S. Forest Service. Not since the
collapse of Mayan civilization 1,200 years ago has reforestation on this scale
happened in the Americas, says David Foster, director of the Harvard Forest, an
ecology research unit of Harvard University. In 2007, forests covered 63.2% of
Massachusetts and 58% of Connecticut, the third and fourth most densely
populated states in the country, not counting forested suburban and exurban
sprawl (though a lot of sprawl has enough trees to be called a real forest if
people and their infrastructure weren't there).
The "fur trade"
is a feeble euphemism for the massacre of beavers, America's first commodity
animal. By the late 19th century, a
population once estimated at as many as 400 million was down to perhaps
100,000, mostly in the Canadian outback. By 1894, the largest forest left in the
eastern U.S., the Adirondacks, was down to a single family of five beavers. Beyond beavers,
by 1890, a pre-Columbian whitetail deer population of perhaps 30 million had
been reduced to an estimated 350,000. Ten
million wild turkeys had been reduced to no more than 30,000 by 1920. Geese and ducks were migrating remnants. Bears, wolves and other "vermin"
were all but gone. The passenger pigeon
would soon be extinct. The feathered
skins of hummingbirds, used to make women's bonnets, sold for two cents apiece. Restocking wildlife was a mixed bag. In 1907, 50 Michigan white-tailed deer were
shipped to Pennsylvania. Eleven years later, foresters and truck farmers there
were complaining about "too many deer"—a phrase uttered to this day. Between 1901 and 1907, 34 beavers from Canada
were released in the Adirondacks. With
no predators and no trapping, they grew to 15,000 by 1915. Today they are almost everywhere that water
flows and trees grow. Beavers are
wonderful eco-engineers, a so-called keystone species building dams that create
wetlands that benefit countless other species, filter pollutants, reduce
erosion and control seasonal flooding. The trouble is, they share our taste in
waterfront real estate but not in landscaping. We put in a driveway, they flood it. We plant expensive trees, they chew them down.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture
estimates that the cost of beaver damage may exceed that of any other wild
species. Bringing
back ducks and geese was slow going. Commercial
and sport hunters long kept live birds (in addition to wooden facsimiles) as
decoys to lure migrating waterfowl. The
use of these live flocks wasn't outlawed until 1935. They hadn't migrated in generations. The outlaw birds were used to stock newly
created refuges in the hope that they would join migrating flocks and help them
to grow. But they stayed put. Their descendants include the four million or
so resident Canada geese that now occupy golf courses, parks, athletic fields,
corporate lawns and airline flight paths.
The founders of the conservation movement would have been astonished to
learn that by the 2000 Census, a majority of Americans lived not in cities or
on working farms but in that vast doughnut of sprawl in between. They envisioned neither sprawl nor today's
conflicts between people and wildlife. The assertion by animal protectionists
that these conflicts are our fault because we encroached on wildlife habitat is
only half the story. As our population multiplies and spreads, many wild
creatures encroach right back—even species thought to be people-shy, such as
wild turkeys and coyotes. (In Chicago
alone, there are an estimated 2,000 coyotes.)
Why? Our habitat is better than
theirs. We offer plenty of food, water, shelter and protection. We plant grass, trees, shrubs and gardens, put
out birdseed, mulch and garbage. Sprawl supports a lot more critters than a people-free
forest does. People against
killing usually advocate wildlife birth control. Practical and affordable contraception for deer
was said to be just around the corner 30 years ago. It still is. You can dart female deer living in a confined
area (behind a fence, on an island) with PZP (porcine zona pellucid) for $25
per dose plus hundreds of dollars per animal per year to set up and run the
program. For free-ranging deer, forget
it. You can feed OvoControl to Canada
geese to stop their eggs from hatching for $12 per goose per season. Do the math. Jim Sterba
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204846304578090753716856728.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_6
Louise Erdrich has won America's
National Book Award for fiction for The Round House.
Erdrich, 58, has been a highly regarded author for nearly 30 years and The
Round House (the second in a planned trilogy) is about a teenage boy’s
effort to investigate a racial attack on his mother on a North Dakota
reservation. Erdrich, who is part Ojibwe,
accepted the award in English and in her Native American language. She said she wanted to acknowledge “the grace
and endurance of native women,” adding, "this is a book about a huge case
of injustice ongoing on reservations. Thank
you for giving it a wider audience.” Katherine
Boo's Behind
the Beautiful Forevers won the nonfiction award for her account of people
living in a slum in the shadow of luxury hotels in India. “If this prize means anything,” Boo said in
her acceptance speech, “it is that small stories in so-called hidden places
matter because they implicate and complicate what we consider to be the larger
story, which is the story of people who do have political and economic powers.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookprizes/9680107/Louise-Erdrich-wins-National-Book-award-for-fiction.html
The Los
Angeles Times reported Nov. 14
that petitions for secession have been filed on the White House site from all
50 states. http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-white-house-secession-50-states-20121114,0,4408092.story
But is secession legal? Didn’t the Civil War determine that the union
was insoluble? One argument is that the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment
protects the right to secede. The
amendment says, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the
Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states
respectively, or to the people.” Since
the Constitution does not prohibit secession, it is a reserved right of the
states in this view. There is no federal
law against secession. In 1868, the
Supreme Court addressed the legality of secession in Texas
v. White. In that case, the Court
ruled, “The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as
perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration or
revocation, except through revolution or through consent of the States.” In the Court’s view, since a state cannot join
the union unilaterally, it also cannot secede unilaterally except by
revolution. Writing on Findlaw.com in 2004,
Michael Dorf speculated on what might constitute “consent of the States” since
the issue is not addressed in the Constitution or the Supreme Court decision. Dorf notes that approving secession is not
listed among the enumerated powers of Congress; therefore it would likely
require a constitutional amendment for a state to secede. The Constitution could be amended to allow
states to secede unilaterally as well as with federal approval.
Elizabeth Dias
of Time Magazine says the secession petitions really amount to
nothing more than "comic relief," and she reminds us that many
liberals upset with the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004 threatened to
move to Canada. (Reportedly
there are some conservatives now pondering
this move. However, very,
very few people from the left or right follow through.)
But Dias says it's not all fun and
games, though: There is a seamy aspect to
the surge in petitions as well. Little
concrete information is known about most of the signatories. Their names have not been verified, and anyone
can sign as many petitions as they like. Southern nationalists have rallied around the
idea, and many may consider it a last-ditch effort to preserve the notion of
white supremacy in the U.S. rather than a post-election joke. "The election results were really great
for our cause," says Michael Cushman, 36, an advocate of secession and
founder of the Southern Nationalist Network. "I think it was better that Obama won
because it has revived a lot interest in secession in the South because he is
very unpopular here." http://www.cleveland.com/nation/index.ssf/2012/11/secession_petitions_serious_mo.html
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