Sunday, July 29, 2018

ANTS

poor georgie’s almanack: 


After writing about bees, Teddy the Cal Tech maven asked about ants.  

OK. 

People who study bugs estimate the total weight of ants creeping around Earth at this very moment is about the same as the weight of all living humans.  


The estimated number of living ants has so many zeros it creeps me out. 

Saturday, July 28, 2018

Bees

poor georgie’s almanack:   


Bees are interesting.  A few random facts:

1.  Bee hives make decisions the same way human brains make them.  

2.  The once common Rusty Patch Bumblebee, now is endangered, going extinct.  Other bees are threatened.

4.  Bees both pollinate and predict.  For instance, Honeybees are European immigrants to America.  They arrived with early colonists along the Atlantic Coast and spread west ahead of settlers seeking to live off the land of milk and honey between the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains.  There, Native American medicine-men warned tribal leaders that the first sighting of a Honeybee meant white men would be appear over the horizon within three years. 


5.  To those of us who thought we might make the world a better place for our kids, today's kill-off of bees is just another sad reminder of the many ways we have failed.      

Sunday, July 22, 2018

WHAT IF IT IS A JOKE?

poor georgie’s almanack:

BUT WHAT IF IT’S A JOKE?  Yesterday, The Washington Post ran a story about the time, around 1840, when US President Martin van Buren was given two live lions, some horses, a Persian rug, and jewels by Mideast rulers.  The gifts set off one of the first really big emoluments-clause dilemmas.  To guard against conflicts of interest and potential bribes, people working for the government are pretty much forbidden to receive gifts and make profit from foreigners.  

Sometimes, it is not simple.  

For instance, The Post story reminded me of when daughter Amy and I were having lunch in Montevideo with the president of Uruguay, his wife, and daughter Pilar.  We, and a hand-full of others, were on the patio behind their government-supplied house.  Two llamas were roaming nearby.  


Amy’s college graduation present was to be my translator on a trip south of the Equator to present highly publicized awards to the first lady of Uruguay and the president of Argentina.  I was the volunteer president of the Pan American Development Foundation’s board of directors and had concocted a fund-raising and PR scheme to give awards to heads of state for working with the foundation on programs that helped their constituents lives.

Uruguay’s charming and very smart Mrs. Lacalle, though not the head of state, was a recipient for a nonprofit organization she led.  Some said it was Mrs. Lacalle who was responsible for her husband’s popularity.

Amy or I asked about the llamas.  The first lady said that, while in Paraguay for a summit meeting, the Lacalles heard a knock on their hotel room door.  It was opened and there in the doorway was Paraguay’s president with a rope in his hand.

He told them he knew there was a male llama in their back yard who must be lonely.  So his nation was giving them a female llama … which, of course, was on the other end of the rope, hopefully not soiling the rug.

I don’t think the emoluments clause of the US Constitution is a joke, nor are the potential legal problems of Mr. Trump’s family making money off of their foreign properties a triviality.  

But, how do legislators make laws that differentiate criminal activity from a couple of wise guys who like to pull practical jokes on each other? 



Tuesday, July 3, 2018

FDR'S WHEELCHAIR ... ESSAY #1

FDR’S WHEELCHAIR … ESSAY #1

A SUMMIT, A DETOUR ON THE WAY HOME, OIL, A FLYING SWIVEL SEAT, AND AN IMPULSIVE, HISTORIC ACT OF KINDNESS YOU PROBABLY NEVER KNEW.

It was Valentines Day, Wednesday, February 14, 1945.  The USS Quincy was anchored next to the USS Murphy in the Suez Canal's Great Bitter Lake.

Increasingly frail, exhausted and sick, the president of the United States of America was returning home after a long meeting in Crimea.  At Yalta,  Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), Russia’s Joseph Stalin, and England’s Winston Churchill had made plans for the end of World War Two and decided which parts of Hitler’s Europe would be their own “spheres of influence.”

On his way home FDR’s ship had detoured into the Suez Canal for a round of summitry with Arab leaders. 

Two months later, Roosevelt would be dead.

But, on that Wednesday, during a five hour one-on-one, the gaunt but gritty FDR made a gesture of kindness and empathy to Saudi King Ibn Saud that changed history.   (Photo: Quincy meeting.)


I know about this because my client in the 1990s was Alan Reich.  Like FDR, he was confined to a wheelchair.  At age 32, Alan's neck was broken in a swimming accident.  His disability was more serious than FDR’s, whose legs were paralyzed at age 39 by Polio.  Reich was president of the National Organization on Disability (NOD).  Roosevelt and Reich clearly proved that people with disabilities surely have important abilities.

Alan wanted to create an annual award for heads-of-state celebrating their country’s efforts to improve the lives of people with disabilities.  The award would be in FDR’s name.  Reich, the UN Secretary General, and a major donor would jointly make the presentation.  The NOD’s founder and president already had hooked Boutros Boutros-Ghali the sitting Secretary General (SG), but he needed to reel in a bundle of money to support the award.

Reich asked me to be his sole traveling companion for a one-day trip to New York.  By then I was fairly adept at handling the intricacies of accompanying a virtual quadriplegic, getting in and out of wheelchairs, cars and planes.  The two of us visited the Saudi’s acting UN ambassador and then had a short session with the Boutros-Ghali.  

I had hastily located a photo of the historic 1945 meeting between FDR and Saudi King Ibn Saud.  The intent was for me to take a picture of Alan in his own wheelchair next to the ambassador holding the summit photo.  We then could tell our story in a short caption. 

The ambassador’s visit was part of Alan’s campaign to raise $5 million from the desert nation for the award.  Alas, the Saudis had no interest.  The FDR award eventually was delivered to a few heads of state in a rather subdued manner with meager funding from elsewhere.  But, that’s background noise for this essay.

Later, when I had time to research the FDR/Saud session, what a story that photo revealed! 


The Arabian Peninsula floats on a sea of oil.  Several nations wanted to get their hands all the way into it.  But, Ibn Saud, the wily desert fighter who created the nation he led, could be as slippery as the oil.  

Sometimes he was a ruthless throwback to all-powerful god-fearing feudal and nomad kings.  Even as a head of state Ibn Saud often lived in tents, had relatively few modern conveniences, but was quite attracted to the US Dollar or any hard currency to fuel his dreams.  At that time Saudi Arabia was a desperately poor nation making more money from pilgrims visiting Mecca than any other source.   

Separately, moving FDR through Nazi submarine-infested waters was a major mission.  An armada of Navy ships and dozens of warplanes were involved in the trip to Yalta and back, including the Suez detour.   

One vessel was the USS Murphy.  For five days, it was home to  the King and his 48-person entourage of servants, cooks, an astrologer, food taster and barefoot body guards, plus a small herd of goats to be skinned and cooked following Islamic dietary traditions.  A group of the King’s wives and harem, originally scheduled for the trip, remained in Saudi Arabia.  Navy brass nixed having all those women onboard for the Jeddah - Suez round trip.  (Map: Jeddah, bottom right, Suez upper left.  It's a two night trip on a warship.)



During this first foray on a motorized ship, Ibn Saud slept in a large tent erected on the Murphy’s forward outside deck.  Sailors, of course, nicknamed the destroyer “Big Top.”   

Angelo Marinelli, a seaman on the mission, said, “They built campfires on the deck of the destroyer.  Every sailor aboard was carrying a fire extinguisher in case the fires in the tents got out of hand.”

Ibn Saud suffered severe pain while walking.  Ship decks were carpeted to alleviate some of the King's discomfort.  He and FDR famously bonded, in large part because of their disabilities, during what for the increasingly infirm FDR was a marathon ordeal. The King, whose cane is visible in the photo, had never seen such a chair and was fascinated.  

In what historians report was an impulsive act, FDR gave Ibn Saud his backup chair.  This was a bigger deal than the planned gift of a  fully-manned DC-3 passenger plane with a swivel seat.  Thus, while in the air, the King could painlessly turn to Mecca to pray.



After discovering that the thin wheels of FDR’s chair didn’t work in sand the monarch had several constructed with wide wheels.  

Like in affairs of the heart, kindness and empathy can be a warm glue that tempers cold hearted pragmatism.

###

Personal aside:  My enthusiasm for Reich’s idea was quite real.  At that time I also was the volunteer president of the Pan American Development Foundation’s board of directors.  Earlier I had a similar idea dealing with heads of state in the Americas, although disability programs were not on the Foundation’s agenda. 

The PADF awards had worked well … sometimes embarrassingly well.  The Brazilian Secretary General of the Organization of American States (the hemisphere’s UN) was a usually jovial Brazilian named Baena Soares.  He and I once were in Mexico City to present an award to the country’s president.  To my embarrassment, a major newspaper published a front page photo above the fold of the ceremony mis-identifying me as the SG.  We sort of looked similar … glasses, bald, short, wide of girth.  Fortunately, he thought it was humorous.

More about FDR’s wheelchair to come later in Essay #2 … “WHO OWNS HISTORY?”