'I cut off my arm to survive'

A lobster fisherman from Maine in the US has told a BBC documentary on human instincts of the extraordinary lengths he went to in order to preserve his own life:   Doug Goodale cut off his own arm at the elbow in order to survive an accident at sea.
    He had become caught in a winch hauling lobster pots up from the sea floor, and could not free himself.
    The power of the winch left him hanging over the side of the boat, unable to either free himself or clamber back aboard.
    'I did it for my children'
    As the boat was rocked by stormy weather, he believes it was only a last, desperate instinct for self-preservation that kicked in to save him.
    He said: "Nobody near you, no help, no radio, nobody to turn the radio off - that's it - you're going to die.
    Somehow he managed to haul himself back onto the deck, dislocating his shoulder in the process.
    His motivation was the image of his daughters appearing to him.
    "I don't know how to explain it to people, but I swear, climbing onto the boat were my two girls."
    However, he was still trapped in the winch, bleeding heavily, and with no way of getting free, his only option was to pick up a knife and cut through his right arm.
    He then managed to pilot his boat back into harbour to get medical help.
    He said: "When my six-year-old tells me: 'It doesn't matter that you've only got one arm - you're here'.
    "Now if you heard that from your kids, wouldn't you take a knife and do the same?"
    Survival instincts are the theme of the first in a series of BBC documentaries starring Professor Robert Winston.
    These are abilities and reactions which are imprinted in us by millions of years of evolution.
    Even babies have the instinctive ability to spit out bitter-tasting food - which may save them from eating poisonous food.
    And modern phobias, say scientists, are simply left-overs from times when spiders and snakes represented a genuine threat to life.
    From the first years of life, humans develop a finely-tuned sense of "disgust" which can protect them from items which might spread disease.
    And the classic "fight or flight" response still works, with the first indication of a threat launching swift brain activity to flood the body with adrenaline, readying it for action.
    Human instincts have been honed over 4.5 million years, and account for the natural human preference for sweet or fatty foods.
    This harks back, say experts, to millennia in which such food was scarce - humans who craved it tended to thrive better than those who did not.
    It is only in the past 100 years that food has become plentiful in any part of the world.
    Human Instinct will be broadcast on BBC One at 2100BST on Wednesday 23 October.

DEVENDRA BANHART
Biography of Devendra Banhart written by himself:

Born on May 30 1981, oh what a time I had coming in. I was born in Texas. Stupid fucking boots. But I like those boots, I wanna get a pair. Then , after a few years, i moved to Caracas Venezuela, and I lived there, with my family, (we moved there because my father was arrested and sent to jail) In Caracas, everything’s fucked, but I love my grandmother, whom fed whisky to me from her pinky, paid me to touch my earlobes, and let me pull her elbow flab. As I first became a teen-ager, my mother remarried and we moved to California, into a canyon, Encinal Canyon. I began to play music. Then I moved to San Francisco to go to an art school, There I lived with Jerry Elvis and Bob The Crippled Comic. My first show was their wedding , I played my own adaptation of How Great Though Art and Love me Tender. My next show was at Wazeima, an ethiopean restaurant. I wonder why I want to tell you how about all the shows ive played, I will not, the first two are the most significant, I played many bad places, some good, some people I have played with are: Black Hearts Procession,Microphones,Smog,Little Wings,Karl Blau,Vetiver,Flux Information Sciences, The Lowdown,Young People, Old Time Relijun, Jerry Lee Lewis 60th picnic party, and M.Gira, amongst many other faceless talents , gay pirates.

I cant do this (too well)

I Devendra Banhart then moved from san Francisco, to Los angeles, then to paris, then to San Francisco, then to Los Angeles, then to New york, though, while In Los Angeles he formed the Black Babies, so he can be Devendra Banhart or The Black Babies, in New York, he is poor as shit , no, don’t put that in , today , shit man , its all coming apart , ive got no phone, news of getting kicked out the squat , im trying to not let it get to me,blah blah blah)

Flutter away little flute.

In New york, he lives in an old Salsa Club, it is a squat, a shot hole with a dead charm , as in many people I know for a fact died there, today I found journals of the boy who died there, he wanted to be an actor, I found his headshots too. There is a room called the Helter Skelter room and its scary as shit. I live there, there are no windows, there is no air, but its free.

For Devendra, he feels, that Mississippi John Hurt, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Karen Dalton, Vashti Bunyan, and Fred Neil are the most important musicians there ever was, thank god for them.

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:
October 19, 2002

Challenging the Growth Gurus
By MICHAEL MASSING

As the chief economist of the World Bank in the late 1990's, Joseph E. Stiglitz got a firsthand look at how policy was made at its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund, and he was dismayed. Decisions, he said, were made on the basis of ideology rather than sound economic reasoning.
    The fund was made up of "third-rank students from first-rate universities," as he once put it. Frank discussion was discouraged, and developing countries were expected to accept fund prescriptions without question. And those prescriptions too often failed, leaving many nations sunk in poverty.
    The experience convinced Mr. Stiglitz of the need to reassess the ingredients of growth. As he wrote this year in "Globalization and Its Discontents," "If the developed countries were serious about paying more attention to the voices of the developing countries, they could help fund a think tank — independent from the international economic organizations — that would help them formulate strategies and positions."
    Now Mr. Stiglitz himself has set up such an institute. The Initiative for Policy Dialogue is at Columbia University's School for International and Public Affairs, where Mr. Stiglitz is a professor. It is bringing together economists, political scientists and policy analysts from around the world to re-examine the prevailing wisdom about development and to come up with alternative strategies. "There's not a Brookings or an American Enterprise Institute for the developing world," said Mr. Stiglitz, co-winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science.
    It's an ambitious and controversial undertaking. Mr. Stiglitz is the I.M.F.'s most visible critic, and the fund has made little secret of its disdain for him. In a biting open letter posted on its Web site (www.imf.org), Kenneth Rogoff, the fund's director of research, calls Mr. Stiglitz's ideas about development "at best highly controversial, at worst snake oil." His "alternative medicines, involving ever more government intervention, are highly dubious in many real world settings."
    Undeterred, Mr. Stiglitz is taking aim at the so-called Washington consensus, a package of free-market, free-trade policies that, critics charge, the I.M.F. and World Bank have imposed on third world nations. "We disagree with the World Bank-I.M.F. idea that there's one approach that's right for all countries," Mr. Stiglitz said. Rather, he said, there is a range of policies that must be selected based on conditions in each country.
    Mr. Stiglitz's effort to rewrite the textbook on development is being conducted through 14 panels that are re-evaluating such critical issues as bankruptcy, poverty, privatization and trade. For each a dozen or so specialists from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres are meeting to compare the experiences of different countries and ponder what policies have worked where. The objective of each group is to produce a series of papers that will provide a fresh look at the components of growth.
    But Mr. Stiglitz hopes his institute will be more than a paper exercise. He has accused the I.M.F. of acting like a "colonial ruler" and stifling discussion in developing countries, so in addition to the study groups, he is organizing forums in some countries. The goal is to expand the policy debate beyond the usual elite of government officials and business executives to include civic leaders, activists, academics and journalists. So far, forums have been held in Ethiopia, Moldova, Nigeria, the Philippines, Serbia and Vietnam. At the Nigeria session a key theme was the need to raise living standards in the countryside, where most Nigerians live. Soon after, Mr. Stiglitz recalled, Nigeria's agricultural minister obtained more money for agriculture.
    Mr. Stiglitz spends about a third of his time advising foreign governments, providing alternatives to the ideas of the I.M.F. He has been to Argentina four times in the last four years and recently visited Bulgaria at the invitation of that country's president.
    "What's amazing," Mr. Stiglitz said, "is how little information is available that is disinterested and balanced. In many cases the discussion has been very general. For instance, it's said that countries need good corporate governance. But what does that mean?"
    Finding the answers to such questions is the goal of his institute's study panels. The panel on privatization, for example, is looking at the experiences governments have had in selling state-owned enterprises. Gerard Roland, a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley and co-chairman of the panel, said that the fund had pushed governments to give away the assets of such companies "as quickly as possible." If those assets don't immediately end up in the right hands, the reasoning goes, marketplace incentives will ensure that they eventually do, with less skilled owners selling to more able ones. But in Russia and other countries that tried this, Mr. Roland said, the new owners quickly became oligarchs who blocked future reforms. The outcome was rampant corruption and a sharp decline in output.
    Poland initially planned to have a similar program, Mr. Roland continued, but it was blocked by the Polish parliament. So privatization there proceeded more gradually. As a result Polish enterprises ended up with more seasoned owners, and its economy grew more briskly. By comparing such experiences, Mr. Roland's group is trying to determine which approaches work best in which circumstances.
    "When the I.M.F. says that these are the particular policies you should follow," Mr. Roland said, "those policies often aren't thought through and don't have a scientific basis. Policies have to be adjusted to each country's environment."
    Similarly, the panel on trade is examining the effect of efforts to lower trade barriers. "The I.M.F. and World Bank are pushing across-the-board trade liberalization," said Dani Rodrik, a professor of economics at Harvard University and co-chairman of the committee. In reality, he added, "Trade reform is something that has to be tailored to each country's circumstances, taking into account its geographic advantage, its institutional needs, its relations with its main trading partners." He added: "What are the best policies to encourage foreign investment? Is this good for all countries, or are some countries throwing away resources through tax subsidies? And how can trade policy be targeted to reduce poverty? We're not trying to present a particular take but to summarize and describe what we know about these issues."
    Such an approach troubles Jagdish Bhagwati, a colleague of Mr. Stiglitz's at Columbia and a strong advocate of free trade. "Joe assumes that there's a monolithic view at the fund and the bank, but that's not the case," he said. The whole idea that there's a Washington consensus that promotes a one-size-fits-all policy is absurd, he said, adding, "In practice shoe sizes are bound to vary and do. The real choice is between wearing shoes and going barefoot. Socialism didn't work. In countries like India, Egypt, Brazil and China, the market was absent. The debate is moving away from knee-jerk interventionism and excessive controls."
    Mr. Stiglitz's institute, Mr. Bhagwati went on, is not including people "who really have alternative points of view." Its trade group, he said, "has none of the big trade people," including himself. "The Initiative for Policy Dialogue is in danger of turning into the Initiative for Policy Monologue."
    Mr. Rodrik disputed this. Of the five economists from developed nations invited to join his panel, he said, two — Gene Grossman of Princeton and Rob Feenstra of the University of California at Davis — are former students of Mr. Bhagwati. (Mr. Feenstra declined to join because of time constraints; Mr. Grossman has yet to decide.) The three other economists "are also utterly mainstream," Mr. Rodrik said. Mr. Bhagwati himself may be asked to join the group. "We have no intention of keeping certain views off the table," Mr. Rodrik added. "That would defeat the purpose."
    The institute's architects deny any inclination to turn the clock back to an era of state farms and five-year plans. Thomas Heller, a professor of international law at Stanford University and co-chairman of the committee studying the rule of law, said that while it has become clear that the wholesale withdrawal of government from the economy is ill-considered, no one would deny the value of the market. The institute, he said, "is attempting to make a series of adjustments without getting countries to go back to the state-heavy systems of the past. We don't want to throw out the baby with the bath water."
    Is the institute likely to have any impact? That depends on how confrontational it becomes, said Robert Solow, an emeritus professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A recipient of the Nobel in economic science who has long argued that governments must be prepared to intervene in the market, Mr. Solow said the idea that a Washington consensus forces cookie-cutter-type policies on every country is overdrawn. "If you look at the way the World Bank and I.M.F. operate," he said, "you will see that they have regional and country specialists who know their way around. When they deal with a country, they study it very knowledgeably, and their prescriptions do pay attention to local conditions."
    On the other hand, he said, I.M.F. programs "do tend to have an awful lot in common, whether they're aimed at Turkey or Thailand." So the institute's effort to look at how different policies work in different environments could prove useful, Mr. Solow said. If, however, it "starts with the notion that it's going to turn everything upside down, that it's going to be the dark destroyer of the I.M.F. and the World Bank, then it won't succeed.`
    Rather, he said, the institute should try "to bring around the international financial institutions, to present a reasonable case and induce them to move a little bit."

FROM THE L.A. TIMES:
 

Swallowed by Urban Sprawl
Relocating to Inland Empire puts people in the midst of what they fled,
researchers find.

By Scott Gold and Massie Ritsch, Times Staff Writers

RIVERSIDE -- The Inland Empire, overwhelmed by unchecked growth and plagued by
helter-skelter development, is by far the nation's worst example of urban
sprawl, a team of researchers said Thursday.
    For 20 years, the price of homes closer to the coast has skyrocketed, forcing
hundreds of thousands of families to search inland for affordable housing. Many
landed — in Riverside or San Bernardino, Corona or Ontario — with the hope that
they had left behind the ills of urban life.
      Instead, the study says, they have found themselves in a far-flung dystopia, a
region whose schools and roads cannot keep up with the number of new residents,
a sea of strip malls and chain restaurants, all surrounded by just as much
traffic, pollution and congestion as they confronted in the city.
    The three-year study was conducted by researchers from Rutgers and Cornell
universities and released by a Washington coalition of organizations interested
in growth, known as Smart Growth America.
    The report faulted the Inland Empire for everything from its lack of economic
and social cores — two-thirds of the massive region lives at least 10 miles from
a central business district — to a haphazard, poorly connected road system that
makes walking and bicycling perilous.
    Even the region's high number of traffic fatalities — 49 of every 100,000 people
die each year in car crashes — is due to endless hours spent negotiating
highways and packed, high-speed arterials, the study concluded.
    Barbara McCann, a spokeswoman for Smart Growth America, said the Inland Empire
fits the dreaded metropolitan tag: "There is no 'there' there."
    Home building and economic development organizations, which have defeated
several recent attempts to limit growth in the Inland Empire, disputed the
study's results.
    "I would call it a blatant joke," said Borre Winckel, executive director of the
Building Industry Assn.'s Riverside County chapter. "I am not impressed by it."
    On Thursday afternoon in Chino Hills, on the western rim of San Bernardino
County, scores of people were having lunch at tables assembled in front of what
passes for a central gathering place — a giant strip mall called Crossroads
Marketplace. It features a Costco, a Sport Chalet, a mattress store and an
enormous Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse emblazoned with a slogan: "More of
Everything."
    At one of the tables, Clysta Keller, 57, sat reading a book. Keller said she and
her family moved from Orange County to nearby Mira Loma 20 years ago after her
husband retired from the military, largely because they could afford a nice home
there on a third of an acre. Back then, it was a quaint country home. Now it is
in the midst of perpetual construction and giant warehouse operations.
    The Inland Empire, weary of being a dormitory for the rest of Southern
California, has tried to create more local jobs, and Keller has one of them, in
Lowe's administration office. It still takes her at least 35 minutes to drive 17
miles to work.
    Like many others, she said she found it difficult to reconcile how there can be
so much stuff in the Inland Empire, yet so little to do. Even a highly
anticipated soccer academy that was built near her home failed because of a lack
of attendance, she said.
    "I feel most sorry for the children growing up here," she said, recalling the
difficulty she had finding things for her children to do when they were younger.
    "The politicians like the idea of more people moving here. But they aren't
taking care of the schools, or the traffic — or even thinking of things for the
children to do."

Using a 'Sprawlometer'
The Oxnard-Ventura region ranks ninth in urban sprawl, according to the study.
    The Los Angeles-Long Beach, San Diego and Sacramento metropolitan regions all
registered slightly better than 100, or average, on the "sprawlometer."
    Such growth is difficult to measure, the researchers pointed out. It is akin,
they said, to former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous view on
pornography — it's hard to define, but we know it when we see it. Previous
studies have typically used limited and subjective data to analyze it, often
relying almost entirely on density as their primary yardstick.
    In the new study, researchers spent three years developing a four-category
measure of sprawl.
    In 83 metropolitan regions representing half of the nation's population, the
researchers used 22 demographic databases to calibrate density of development;
the blend of homes, jobs and services; the accessibility of streets; and the
strength of downtown areas and other "activity centers."
    To the cynic, it might seem that each category was devised atop a bluff in
Temecula, where the population doubled between 1990 and 2000, or along
California 71, home to rows and rows of Spanish-tile-roofed homes built with
stunning efficiency.
    The Riverside-San Bernardino region scored poorly in every category except
density of development, in which the region was below average — a vestige of
older developments that featured larger lots.
    The result: Riverside-San Bernardino scored 14.2 on the sprawlometer. A score of
100 is average, researchers said, and the lower the score, the worse the
attendant problems are.
    The Inland Empire was the only metropolitan area that scored lower than 45. It
far outpaced the second- and third-place finishers, both in North Carolina.
    "It's a pretty bad commentary," said Philip Lohman, executive director of the
Los Angeles-based Endangered Habitats League, an environmental organization that
helped with the study. Lohman spent his teenage years in Redlands, in San
Bernardino County, then earned three degrees at UC Riverside before moving to
Lakewood. "We can't undo the damage that's been done. All we can do is protect
what remains," he said.

Looking for Solutions
Riverside County Supervisor Tom Mullen said such an effort is well underway. For
three years, Mullen and other Inland Empire leaders have pieced together what
they say is the nation's most ambitious metropolitan development plan. It
includes, Mullen said, a $13-billion plan for four new highways, including a new
connector to Orange County, and a proposal to set aside 550,000 acres of open
space and animal habitat in western Riverside County.
    "The important thing is that we recognized that there was a serious problem and
that we needed to find an innovative way to deal with it," Mullen said. "We know
it is out there. And we are trying to fix it."
    Colleen Smethers, a retired nurse practitioner in Mira Loma, doesn't buy it. She
said the Inland Empire is being built backward — houses first, then stores, then
infrastructure such as roads and schools.
    "They call it the blueprint for the future," Smethers said. "They think we are
so stupid that we believe it. That's the part that's so hard to swallow. We live
here in this little country place, supposedly out of the city. And we have big
rig traffic on my street.... We are choking out here."
    In Oxnard, a primary section of the metropolitan area that ranked ninth in the
study, several residents defended their lifestyle Thursday — and the "small
town" atmosphere they say exists in their community.
    Standing in front of the home that he and his wife bought last year in Oxnard's
Aldea del Mar tract, Jeff Starr, a critical-care nurse, cited the positive side
of growth: People have some elbow room, some distance between themselves and
other people, droning freeways and belching buses.
    "You work in a high-stress job and you come home and you don't want to be
bothered by noise and commotion outside," Starr said.
    Starr's mother lives in Riverside County, and "every time we drive somewhere, we
see stuff that wasn't there the time before," he said.
    But, he asked, "What are you going to do? People gotta live somewhere."

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