Montebello E-News

 August 28, 2008

InBoston they ask, how much does he know? In New York, how much is he worth?  In Philadelphia, who were his parents?
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835 – 1910,
better known by the pen name "Mark Twain", was an American humorist, satirist, lecturer and writer. Twain is most noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which has since been called the "Great American Novel", and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He is also known for his quotations. During his lifetime, Twain became a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists and European royalty.

 [What a colorful, perhaps humorous, way to explain one kind of diversity in America.]

 1. Blindly Helping the Blind?

2. A Letter to the Editor   

3. Social-Impact Report, Part 10

4. Announcements

5. Fun Facts about Wyoming

6. The Flashback Quarterback:  Americans’ Fear of Dying

7. Be Aware and Share:  Government Must Do More?      

8. About Montebello E-News and “My Montebello"  

 Blindly Helping the Blind?  

Who would argue with the announcement below about changing the design of much of our American paper money so that the blind would know what they had in hand?  I would say, “Wait a minute.”  

A federal appeals court recently upheld a 2006 ruling which may require the Treasury Department to make modifications to currency.  In a 2-1 opinion, federal appeals court judges wrote that current bills deny people with vision disabilities "meaningful access" to U.S. money.  A judge on the case noted that a person could not determine the difference between a 100 dollar bill and a one dollar bill by touch.  Reportedly, the government has hired a research firm to explore ways to make sure currency is accessible to all.  The Council of the Blind, plaintiff, suggested a redesign that will result in bills that are different sizes or embossed with raised markings to help in differentiating one bill from another.  Mitch Pomerantz, president of the Council of the Blind said, "I don't think we should have to rely on people to tell us what our money is."  To read more about this Associated Press story, go to http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,356727,00.html. As found in HE-SL Digest for Thursday, May 22, 2008.  

Wait a minute until this question has been answered:  has anyone compared the cost of an electronic currency reader to the cost of changing much, if not most, of our paper bills?  

If you answer the multiple-choice questions below and e-mail to lessonanswers@mymontebello.com with “Lesson answers” in the subject field, you will be credited toward a “certificate of recognition in community affairs” to be awarded in 2008 by a local nonprofit organization.  

1. What did the federal appeals court rule?

(a) That the design of American paper money denied people with vision disabilities meaningful access to U.S. money.

(b) That a separate set of paper money should be created for those with vision disabilities.  

2. Why is the court’s ruling cause for concern?

(a) People with hearing disabilities have not been consulted.

(b) No one has done a comparison of cost with that of an electronic currency reader.  

3. It is argued that an electronic currency reader might be slow or might fail to read a bill correctly.

(a) In which case, engineers should design a better reader.

(b) In which case, we should immediately change our paper money.  

E-News does not carry letters to the editor, but one was written as an interesting history lesson in answer to the question in the previous E-News, “What moved people to found the Republican Party?”  [The first county convention of the fledgling Republican Party took place in Ripon, Wisconsin, in March, 1854.] Montebello resident Michael Popoff wrote:  

In response to your question, "What moved people to found the Republican party?", I can tell you. It was founded by Americans who believed in the principle of one man, one vote. The Democratic party was the party of slavery, and as they were also in the minority, they strove (with the help of the Supreme Court) to enforce the rule of slavery by legally forcing any citizen anywhere in the US to aid in the recapture of runaway slaves, under pain of arrest. The Democrats also acquiesced when southern states began to seize US Army equipment stored in their states to outfit their state militias in preparation of secession from the US.  The Republicans were incensed by the insistence of the slavery states that any new states admitted to the Union be equally pro and anti slavery, so that the actual number of slave states would always be 50% of the total, thus ensuring the US Constitutional support of slavery. One problem with this setup was that while the number of states was 50% of the total, the voting population of the anti slavery states was about twice as large as the slave states, thus meaning that the votes of anti slave voters only counted as half as much as pro slavery voters. The South justified this arrangement by saying that the votes of slave holders should count for more as they were voting, by proxy, for all of the non citizens (slaves), too.  [Orwellian logic almost a hundred years before Orwell.]  The North believed this situation to be unconstitutional, but as long as a pro slavery majority was in the Supreme Court, there was nothing that they could do. Thus, to redress these grievances, the Republican Party was forged in the crucible of the emancipation of the slaves and the rejection of the forcing of new states to be slave states.

 When most companies close the year, they assess their financial performance and thank their customers for sales. While we definitely succeeded on that dimension this year with over 1,000 retail locations across the United States and 300% sales growth, our far more important impact was increasing the quality of life for thousands of women and children across the globe – and we want to thank you for making that possible.  ...
Priya Haji, Co-founder and CEO
“World of Good” Social-Impact Report 2006, http://www.worldofgood.com/impact/index.shtml  

A “social-impact report”?  We have heard of “environmental-impact report”;  for example, one has to be filed with regard to the disposition of our Montebello Hills before a decision be made about the hills.  A social-impact report would talk about the probable and possible social consequences of a planned or existing activity.  

A Sob and a Sigh for Hip Hop High?  

The story below ties closely to the story in this issue’s "Beware and Share", namely, that we should depend less on government and more on ourselves.  Beyond that, consider this:  is the date for charter renewal more important than having a welcome learning environment for at-risk teenagers?  How do you think a social-impact report would have affected the decision not to renew the school’s charter?  What would you have done?  

...Officials in the Centinela Valley Union High School District, which operates the school, said Media Arts Academy, known as "Hip-Hop High," failed to renew its charter that expired July 1. Without a new contract, the school's 160 students cannot return in the fall.

"I have no idea why they failed to file for renewal of the charter," Superintendent Jose Fernandez said.

School director Jenn Murphy said the Hawthorne school has closed its doors over a technicality, adding that the school's five-year charter should not have expired until 2009.

Though the charter was first approved in June 2003, the school did not open until 2004. The contract was meant to extend for five years after that date, and not the 2003 one, Murphy said.

Unlike the district's traditional high schools, Hip-Hop High teaches English, math and science using technology and "culturally relevant" activities like rap and spoken word.

The problem,[School Director Jenn] Murphy said, lies with officials, who have been hostile to the school. She also said the district never warned that the charter was expiring.

"I don't think there's ever going to be a clear answer to why they've been so oppositional," Murphy said. "The truth is, they want to shut us down, when they've already failed these kids."

But school board President Gloria Ramos said she and the board had only recently learned of the problem, and that the financially strapped district was shouldering unfair blame.

"I was kind of shocked that we were so villainized at (Tuesday's) board meeting," Ramos said. "I'm so sorry that whoever didn't do what they needed to do, but I can say it wasn't our district. We're not even on our own two feet, so the timing could not be worse." ...

But Murphy said many of her brightest and most talented students would not thrive at another school. Some probably wouldn't attend at all.  "A fair percentage of those students would not go back to school," she said. "There is no other school that would take them."

by Sonja Sharp, July 10, 2008, http://www.dailybreeze.com/ci_9846579?source=email

FOR EVERYONE. Garage sales coming. Garage sales without the requirement of a fee or permit may be had on the following dates: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, September 5, 6, and 7; Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, December 5, 7, and 7. For more information, www.mymontebello.com/lists_tc_garagesales.htm.

FOR EVERYONE. More elephants in the room? Have you read The Crabgrass Frontier? …Gasoline costs $5 a gallon in the United States, [author and Columbia University history professor Kenneth] Jackson said, but the person paying at the pump puts in $1.50 while general taxes pick up the rest. A recent spike in U.S. gas prices led to complaints and has become an issue in the presidential campaign but Jackson said the reality is that gasoline is so cheap in the United States that drivers do not calculate it as part of the cost of travel. ... Jackson also documented in "Crabgrass Frontier" how General Motors helped spur the demise of the streetcar. The company formed a subsidiary corporation in 1926 that bought nearly bankrupt streetcar systems and replaced rail cars with rubber-tire vehicles for the next 30 years. GM was involved in replacing more than 100 streetcar systems -- including systems in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Baltimore -- with GM-manufactured buses. The company was eventually convicted of criminal conspiracy for its efforts but was fined only $5,000. ...
www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2000/democracy/
sprawl/stories/auto.history/index.html

FOR EVERYONE. What would you do with liars? A mailer came to the house, asking that we ask our state legislators to vote against a bill which would mandate a charge of twenty-five cents for a plastic bag. The mailer said that plastic bags were fully recyclable. What the mailer did not say was that most of us did not recycle plastic bags. We reuse ours, but they end up in the landfill. Are not plastic bags a petroleum product and does not continued use of such bags keep us dependent on oil?

FOR EVERYONE. Commission meeting. The Montebello City Planning Commission is holding its regularly-scheduled meeting on Tuesday, September 2, 2008, at 7 p.m. at city hall. The meeting is open to the public. For more information, 323.887.1200.

FOR EVERYONE. Commission meeting. The Montebello Traffic Safety Commission is holding its regularly-scheduled meeting on Wednesday, September 3, 2008, at 7 p.m. at city hall. The meeting is open to the public. For more information, 323.887.1200.  

Wyoming was the first state to give women the right to vote.  [This would be an interesting study for a sociology, history or anthropology student.  What in Wyoming ’s character do you suppose made it the first?]

Yellowstone is the first official national park, founded in 1872.

Established in 1096, Devils Tower was designated as the first national monument.

The largest coal mine in the USA is Black Thunder located near Wright. [I would have thought West Virginia had the largest coal mine.]

Wyoming has the lowest population of all fifty United States.

Cody, Wyoming, is named after William “Buffalo Bill” Cody.

The Wind River actually changes its name in the middle of the stream, becoming the Big Horn River at a site at the north end of the Wind River Canyon, where each year the Native Americans hold a ceremony depicting the “Wedding of the Waters.”

Would you attribute the following to our American fear of dying or to our captains of industry ever striving to make a profit?  

One of the more important reasons that the U.S. health care system is so much more expensive than those of other nations is our well documented excess use of expensive high-tech services and products. As much as 30 percent of spending is for services of little or no benefit, and often leads to adverse consequences as a direct result of the intervention or indirectly due to other interventions that this overuse may lead to.  

$100,000 drugs that have a 100 percent incidence of poisoning, but have only a negligible impact on the malignancy targeted, are not the breakthrough technology that those profiting from them imply. An expensive imaging procedure that has not been demonstrated to be of benefit, but has radiation doses known to cause cancer, is another breakthrough that favorably impacts profits to the detriment of patients.  

We can learn much from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), an independent organization that provides Britain's National Health Service with "national guidance on promoting good health and preventing and treating ill health."  Sadly, much of the publicity in the U.S. on NICE has come from the opponents of a government role in health care, claiming that NICE is depriving British citizens of life-saving cures. In fact, NICE is reducing the waste of taxpayer funds by providing better guidance on how those funds should be spent. … From “Quote of the Day”, Don McCanne, July 3, 2008.

We keep coming across very large mistakes, like the one below.  If we say, "Government must do more”, we have missed the point made in past issues of E-News, namely, that it is up to us, the public, to take care of ourselves.  

Congress Names Names in FEMA Trailer Probe
House Democrats say manufacturers knew of high formaldehyde levels
by Mike Brunker, MSNBC, July 9, 2008  

Congressional Democrats for the first time named names Wednesday in their investigation of formaldehyde-contaminated travel trailers provided by FEMA to victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, charging that manufacturers knew but did not disclose that the units were emitting high levels of the toxic gas that could sicken inhabitants.

At a contentious hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rep. Henry Waxman of California and other Democrats grilled officials of four companies — Gulf Stream Coach Inc.; Pilgrim International Inc.; Keystone RV Inc.; and Forest River Inc. — whose trailers were found to have the highest levels of formaldehyde in testing by the federal Centers for Disease Control.  

Waxman, the committee chairman, said all four companies should have known that their products contained potentially dangerous levels of formaldehyde, the airborne form of a chemical used in a wide variety of products, including composite wood and plywood panels. ... http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25607578/from/ET/

To learn about this newsletter, Montebello E-News, and the accompanying, growing Web site, “My Montebello”, visit www.mymontebello.com.  Also, you will find instructions and contact information for submitting announcements for publication in this newsletter, and for submitting stories to “Montebello Memories” at the Web site.