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Old School Blog
Author: TriSec    Date: 05/23/2009 11:57:02

Good Morning!

I don't really have anything coherent this morning, but in skimming the news I've found a handful of disconnected stories that I find interesting. Reminds me of the early days....3 headlines, something pithy at the end, and presto! A blog full of empty calories!

Bah. Everyone needs a Twinkie every now and again, don't you think?



How many folks here have easy access to a rail trail? Over the past two decades or so, there's been a move on to convert old railroad lines, many in urban areas, into bicycle paths. Especially where the routes parallel dense urban roadways and head straight into the heart of downtown, it makes a lot of sense. But did you know there's a huge number of people out there that hate them? Here in Massachusetts, we had an opportunity to build a massive trail that would have connected the Minuteman Bikeway in Cambridge, MA all the way out west to the Berkshires, well over 150 miles.



Trouble is, the path would have to traverse Weston, MA. You could look it up; Weston is the richest, most exclusive community in all of Massachusetts. CEOs, Athletes, and "old money" types call this town home. They blocked the project and the whole rail trail fell apart.

Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson recently travelled to his ancestral homeland of Wisconsin, and penned a column about the bike trails out there...


AS I JOGGED across the downtown bridge over a section of the Fox River, I was blinded by scores of massive, shimmering American white pelicans perched on rocks and zooming above with wingspans of up to 9 feet. Some packs paddled around the froth of cascading dam water, creating perfect circles around schools of fish to gobble them up.

At the end of the bridge, I continued down to the bank, onto the Fox River Trail, a paved bike and pedestrian trail that stretches north to Green Bay. The swirling congregations of pelicans gave way to the solo soaring of bald eagles. As beautiful as that was, I noted the substantial homes abutting the trail and a couple of people waving graciously from them. It made me think of the anti-trail, not-in-my-backyard arguments in some suburbs in Massachusetts, as if the dregs of Guantanamo Bay were to be unleashed upon them.

"I have mixed emotions," Tom Erdman, 60, curator of the Richter Museum of Natural History at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, later said over the telephone. "There used to be nice cattail marshes, before any developments, condos, or yacht clubs at all. But I'm big on the bike trail because people see things they might not otherwise see. They can see peregrine falcons and other things that make them say, 'That's cool,' and it gets around what we have here."

It would also be cool if the Patrick administration and Massachusetts towns found more efficient ways to build bike trails. The Globe reported last month that the Commonwealth is last in the nation for accessing available federal funds for transportation enhancements such as rail trails and bike lanes. Massachusetts uses only about a third of funds, while my home state Wisconsin and the rest of New England use nearly all of theirs. Though Massachusetts has several great trails, such as the Minuteman Bikeway from Cambridge to Bedford and the Cape Cod Rail Trail, the state has left about $84 million on the table because of NIMBY squabbling and a process that makes it so expensive and time-consuming for towns to plan and get approval for trails that they give up altogether.



Heading overseas, there's an unusual story that comes to us from South Korea. You may or may not remember president Roh Moo-Hyun (I sure didn't). In any case, he pitched himself as an "honest" politician and swept into office as a reformer in 2003. Unfortunately, like many before him, he fell prey to the temptations of office, and after he left the presidency in 2008, he's been investigated for bribery, his hand-picked succesor was defeated, and his political party has collapsed. Yesterday, Roh Moo-Hyun jumped off a cliff.


SEOUL, South Korea – Embattled former President Roh Moo-hyun — a reformist shamed by a corruption scandal that tarnished his image as a "clean" politician — jumped to his death while hiking in the mountains behind his rural home in South Korea, his lawyer said. He was 62.

Roh was hiking in Bongha village when he threw himself off a steep cliff around 6:40 a.m. Saturday, lawyer Moon Jae-in told reporters in the southern city of Busan. He said Roh left a suicide note.

"Too many people are suffering because of me," he wrote, according to South Korean media.

Roh was declared dead from a head injury, officials at Busan National University Hospital said.

Roh, a self-taught lawyer who lifted himself out of poverty to reach the nation's highest office, prided himself on his clean record in a country with a long history of corruption. He served as president from 2003 to 2008.

But he and his family have been ensnared in recent weeks in a burgeoning bribery scandal.

The suicide — the first by a South Korean leader — stunned the nation. South Koreans huddled around TV screens at Seoul's main train station and elsewhere watching news broadcasts.

"I was utterly shocked," said Chun Soon-im, 63, of Seoul. "They say 'hate the sin but not the sinner,' and that's how I feel. The investigation must continue and we must get to the truth, but I cannot help feeling sorry for the man and those left behind."

Last month, state prosecutors questioned Roh for some 13 hours about allegations that he accepted more than $6 million in bribes from a South Korean businessman while in office — accusations that deeply shamed him.

"I have no face to show to the people. I am sorry for disappointing you," an emotional Roh said April 30 before speaking to prosecutors.

He denied the allegations against him during questioning, prosecution spokesman Cho Eun-sok said.



Lastly this morning....when was the last time anyone tried to buy Sudafed? I used to eat it like M&Ms in allergy season....but that all came to a crashing halt a few years ago. It seems that a miniscule part of the population used the pseudoephedrine in it to make crystal meth. Naturally, the knee-jerk reaction of the nanny state was to brand us all criminals and make us show an ID at the pharmacy to buy it. God forbid I want to breathe easier.

In any case....have you heard about ketamine? It's a horse tranquilizer; completely unregulated by either the FDA or the DEA. In some places in the world, you can legally buy it over the counter. But folks aren't using it to tranquilize horses these days. On the street, it's called "Special K", and it's nasty stuff indeed.


LONDON — In September 2006, Peggy Sau-Kwan Chu, a urologist at Tuen Mun Hospital in Hong Kong, saw a patient in his 30s complaining of severe bladder problems. His symptoms included painful urination, incontinence and urinating every 15 minutes. He mentioned to her in passing that he had been using ketamine for the last 10 years.

Two months later a married couple — he 25, she 22 — came with similar symptoms. Chu, suspecting environmental factors, asked if they had grown up near each other, but the couple had not. Nor were they cousins, which ruled out any genetic link. They had, however, both been using ketamine for a protracted amount of time.

Chu, on the hunch that ketamine (a drug whose nicknames include K, Special K and raver’s smack) was causing these severe problems, talked to other Hong Kong urologists and found they were seeing similar cystitis-like symptoms in young patients. Working through a rehab clinic, Chu sent a survey to 97 former ketamine users asking if they had suffered the same issues — 30 percent admitted they did.

“That was when I realized that there was something seriously wrong,” said Chu, who last month presented a paper on the subject to the American Urological Association meeting in Chicago.

What Chu discovered was that heavy and frequent ketamine use inflames the bladder, shrivels the organ and eats away at its muscle, so that the bladder has trouble contracting. Almost as soon as Chu and her colleagues published their findings they said, urologists across the globe contacted them to say they were witnessing the same symptoms.

The use of ketamine — and the health problems it causes — is on the rise around the globe. In 2001 only two countries reported seizures of ketamine — which can be snorted, injected or digested — while that number had jumped to 20 by 2006, in countries from Argentina to Australia to Canada. Use in Asia is particularly widespread and there have been multi-ton seizures in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

“K is really taking off in some parts of the world and potentially in others but we just don’t know,” said Jeremy Douglas from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). “We need to pay attention to it and we really have to start tracking better information on the drug.”

Ketamine is fairly easily trafficked because in countries like India it can be purchased over the counter — it is used as a horse tranquilizer and in some developing countries it is used in surgery because it is comparatively cheaper than other anesthetics. It can be transported across borders in liquid form with little trouble, because it is odorless and colorless. There have been cases where traffickers have shipped liquid ketamine into a country claiming it was rosewater or massage oils.

continued...



So.....I hope everyone gets a chance to get out and enjoy the long weekend.....looks like it's going to be a good few days here in New England. Of course, your mileage may vary.

I'm starting a new job at the store today.....so I'll be heading out in about an hour. I'll see everyane much later this evening, I've got 9 hours on the clock today.




 

9 comments (Latest Comment: 05/23/2009 23:50:24 by velveeta jones)
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