Katrina Hits New Orleans: Bush has some responsibility for loss of life, in two ways

We are all horrified to see the loss of life, and extensive property damage, in Louisiana, Mississipi and nearby states from Hurricaine Katrina.

What escapes me is why the media is not pointing out that Global Climate Change models have been predicting that the build up of "greenhouse gases" in the atmosphere was certain to cause more frequent and more severe storms, and that President Bush has opposed any mandatory actions by US industry to reduce emissions.

At the same time, unfortunately, some people who could have been rescued will perish, because the National Guard has too many of their folks in Iraq. This point is documented in Norman Solomon's article The National Guard Belongs in New Orleans and Biloxi. Not Baghdad..

It is good that the American Red Cross, UJA-Federation and many others will be trying to get critical assistance to those people whose homes have been ruined or damaged. But rigid and foolish thinking in Washington DC means that there are far more such citizens than there might have been.

Katrina won't be the last severe storm. Will Washington, and the American people, wake up in time to prepare for, and maybe avert, future disasters?

Medical Researcher who survived the Holocaust makes huge donation to Medical Research

A press release - Remicade Co-Inventor And NYU Professor Of Microbiology Jan Vilcek, M.D., Ph.D. Pledges $105 Million To NYU School Of Medicine - announcing one the single largest gifts ever to academic medical research, is also insight into how fortunate we all are that some European Jews survived the Nazi Holocaust and had the courage to leave stagnant Communist economies and come to the West.

According to a profile
in the New York Times by Richard Perez-Pena published on August 12th:

His Jewish family survived the long German occupation of Czechoslovakia and the Holocaust. Though they were forced from their comfortable apartment in Bratislava, and into a succession of smaller ones, they were, at first, passed over when many of Czechoslovakia's Jews were deported to concentration camps. When the campaign to round up and exterminate Jews intensified, they fled the city for the countryside.

"I spent the last year of the war with my mother in hiding, and my father somehow made his way through the front lines to the Russian Army," he said. "I was 11 at the time, and it still seemed like an exciting game of some sort. I was aware of the seriousness of the situation, but not completely."

The people who hid him were strangers in a village. "They were among those exceptional people who took great risks for others," he said. It was an experience, he added, that left a powerful impression about the value of helping people.

Years later, when Czechoslovakia was under Communist rule, his parents - his mother was an ophthalmologist and his father worked for a coal mining company - wanted him to become a doctor.

"I resisted it at first," he said. "I would have preferred another profession, but in a Communist country, the law was out of the question and economics was out of the question, because they were both too politicized."

After becoming a doctor and a research scientist, in 1964, when he was 31, Dr. Vilcek and his wife decided to escape.

"In those days you could not really leave, legally, so my wife and I received permission to visit Vienna for a weekend," he said. "We were able to get out that way, and we did not go back." In 1965, they settled in Manhattan, where they have lived ever since, and he went to work at N.Y.U.

Thank you, Dr. Vilcek!

A Declaration of Progressive Principles adopted March 2005

A Declaration of Progressive Principles drafted by members of The Principles Project, is a concise one-page statement of values which, in my opinion, should be animating forces in United States' National Priorities.

SF MOMA's Taking Place Photography Exhibition

Taking Place: Photographs from the Prentice and Paul Sack Collection can be seen through September 6, 2005 at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art. These photographs were collected over many years by my cousin.

2 Studies Supporting Observed & Expected Climate Change

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=104326 reports on a study by Inez Fung of the University of California at Berkeley showing that Fossil Fuel combustion emissions would be expected (based on a computer simulation) to reduce how much carbon the earth can sequester. This would mean that increases in carbon gases in the atmosphere would probably accelerate over time.

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=104325 reports that Kerry Emanuel of MIT has determined that in the last 30 years, hurricaines have grown significantly more fierce, especially when they form over warmer waters.

You would like to think these kinds of studies will convince the US Executive Branch, as well as the laggards in Congress and in industry, that policies to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases are important to put into effect as soon as possible.

Resources for Jewish Experiential Education

I had the pleasure to study for 4 days with Hazzan Richard Kaplan, and if you have an interest in the use of song as a prayer form and get the chance to learn with Richard, don't miss it. See kaplanmusic.com.

If you want an experience of immersion in nature, community, learning and spirituality, you would do well to spend a weekend or week in Accord, New York at Elat Chayyim. See www.jewishretreatcenter.org.