NY Times Reports That US Honeybee Decline Is Accelerating

Bee Goddess and priest/priestess dressed as bees
from ancient Sumeria

If you lost nearly half of anything, you would be concerned. When the item in question in the nation's honeybee population, the concern becomes elevated. Bees are essential to pollination. Their decline has caught the attention of the scientific and agricultural communities, which have now taken some steps to measure the number of bees buzzing around the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

According to a report in today's New York Times, a survey of American beekeepers showed a loss of 42 percent of their honeybees in the past twelve months. That loss is roughly eight percentage points higher than in the prior two years.

There are a number of suspected culprits impacting the dwindling bee population. Neonicotinoids, used in pesticides, are prime candidates. Western Europe has notably been vary wary about neonicotinoid use and has banned use of certain of them. A mite has also been cited as a factor in the vanishing bee caper. Of course, the loss of wildflowers in the environment is a disaster for bees, as well as other members of the animal kingdom.

We have bees that frequent our flowers during the warmer months. They're heartening to see and hear. I don't mind that their presence can occasionally be inconvenient. Bees are doing God's work, so to speak. Let the bees be.

Ray's Pizzeria and St. Mark's Bookstore, Two New York Icons, to Vanish

Ray's Pizzeria on Prince Street, New York

For native New Yorkers, and those who have lived in the City for double-digit years, witnessing the end of iconic enterprises is tough stuff. A pair of businesses about to wave good-bye, mostly due to insanely high commercial rents, bring this feeling home.

According to The New York Times, the Saint Mark's Bookstore can't swing the $20,000 monthly rent its landlord, Cooper Union, is requiring. The university's rather cool response to the notion that an important independent bookstore might bring more to the community than whatever might replace it is a telling one. Essentially, the school needs money; that consideration trumps intellectual nourishment.

Further downtown, the first of the various Ray's Pizzerias is calling it quits. Its story is a bit more complicated, including celebrity sightings, alleged organized crime links, and the demise of Little Italy. The New York Times covered the story, noting how the transformation of Manhattan South of 96th Street into a sort of Disneyland for zillionaires and tourists has "modified" the City's social and commercial fabric.

Photo by Amy Becker -- All Rights Reserved

In a recent post, I noted this phenomenon's extension into a uniquely New York neighborhood -- Coney Island. The so-called "improvement" of Coney Island is effectively diminishing the area's spicy personality, a process already witnessed during last decade's neutering of Times Square.

The photo shows a view of the Cyclone ride in Coney Island; the fearsome creature is no longer there. While the Cyclone has been kept on life support by New York's Parks Department, the squalid, vivid Casbah atmosphere that was its spiritual home has been homogenized into a much duller amusement park.

Enough said: read the linked stories.

Stories Overshadowed By Events in Japan

Obviously, the ongoing disaster in Japan has gripped the world's attention. However, it's worth noting some other events occurred today. Here are five of them:

1. Arab League calls for no-fly zone over Libya -- "social network" revolution needs help, as Mr. Gaddafi is turning out to be a very determined, ruthless adversary.

2. Democratic state senators return to Wisconsin capital -- public service unions between Obama and a hard place. Fox News keeps asking the question liberal media dodges: where is the Obama Administration on the Wisconsin protest?

3. Literary agent Owen Laster passed away -- an "old school" literary agent, who represented an amalgam of belles lettres figures and plainly commercial, big-money writers.

4. Maryland House torpedoes same-sex marriage bill -- passage was supposed to be a slam dunk in this politically liberal state. Bill had made it through state senate, and governor was ready to sign the legislation.

5. Miami recall election -- no one talking about this one. They should be. It involves the Miami-Dade mayor and the Miami-Dade county commissioner. Wisconsin watchers should take notes.

Pontiac R.I.P.

Today's New York Times reminds us that the General Motors Pontiac brand's Halloween will not be happy. In fact, the brand will be a zombie as of November 1st. It will be kaput.

I mentioned the story to my wife. She recalled how her family once owned a Pontiac. In her family's case, the car of choice was a white Bonneville. The car was equipped with a center console that, at the time, was an unusual feature.

While I haven't broached the subject with others, I feel safe in assuming many have had a Pontiac in their family histories. Pontiacs were an everyperson sort of car, and someone's dad drove one. I've never owned a Pontiac, but I did rent one. The ride was nice, but in the end I didn't care.

For the Pontiac brand, in the end, not enough people cared about it.

The photograph, from a different time, shows a 1958 Pontiac Star Chief.

Wells Fargo's Mortgage Market "Oops"

Wells Fargo announced it planned to "correct and resubmit" 55,000 documents that, if competently used, would get many homeowners The New York Times story expresses skepticim toward the Wells Fargo line.

The significance of the story is that Wells Fargo's stonewalling broke down. It had been the last major bank to try to dodge and weave through the housing crisis. The story seemed to have its own life, with Wells' heaping on the denials while other banks waved the white flag.

The photo shows a Wells Fargo strong box from a very different time.

NY Times Writer Jumps to Blog

The Huffington Post recently poached Peter Goodman, a former New York Times business writer. The writer, whose wife was already a Huffington Post contributor, apparently was well paid for his move. The Washington Post story on Goodman's choice is worth reading.

This talent raid feels like a trend in the making. Blogs, especially those bankrolled by independently wealthy individuals such as Ms. Huffington, have well defined audiences that advertisers love. Traditional mainstream publications are having a very difficult time surviving. The Washington Post, for instance, loses money annually. It's kept afloat because the Washington Post Company owns Kaplan, the cram-course kings. The LA Times is broke, the Chicago Tribune is bankrupt, Newsweek is kaput, and The New York Times is struggling. In contrast, and much to political liberals' chagrin, the Murdoch media empire manages to make money.

Still, building a media brand remains difficult, regardless of ideology. One wonders if hiring star writers will make any impact on the reading public. How many people really follow Peter Goodman? And how many of them will follow him from the Times to a non-print venue?

State Pension Underfunding

While the majority of state governments are effectively bankrupt, those who have are drawing state pensions or will qualify for one should pause and consider whether the money for their payments will continue to be available. Most municipal pension funds rely on accounting tricks to stay afloat, as a recent, well-written New York Times piece noted. The actuaries who put together these financial houses of cards are resorting to increasingly risky, unsupportable assumptions in order to justify current payouts. What's obvious is at these accounting schemes will collapse, as the American mortgage market did a couple of years ago.

What's also painfully evident is that most Americans are in denial over the extent of the nation's financial woes. The current dialogue unrealistically focuses on the "recovery" in our midst, while passing over strong evidence to the contrary, such as the implications of the inability or unwillingness of small businesses to create any new jobs to replace the millions lost since the fall of Bear Stearns. The proposed lifting of the "temporary" Bush tax cuts for the most prosperous two percent of American households has generated protests from those who firmly believe the massive transfer of wealth from the have-somethings and have-nots to the have-a-lots is sound public policy. No one, regardless of political ideology, has realistically proposed how this country will pay for its startlingly high fiscal deficits. A Chinese government official this summer characterized the United States as a financially bankrupt nation. Considering the People's Republic of China is arguably the largest single holder of US Treasury debt, shouldn't that statement have raised profound questions about the American economy's "recovery"?

I once suggested to a public employee that a day will come when municipal entities will approach pensioners a crisis-generated, take-it-or-leave-it deal: a cut of forty cents on the dollar on all current and subsequent pension payments. I understand pensions are legally sacrosanct, but that was also the status of holders of senior General Motors debt during the firm's federally-engineered bankruptcy. Nearly all states are broke; the largest state, California, has issued IOUs for vendor payments in the past year. If nations can effectively declare bankruptcy via debt restructuring, loan forgiveness, and other tactics, so can provincial entities such as American states.

Until Americans get past their unwillingness to acknowledge its descent from the financial heights, there can be little progress toward rebuilding our fragile economic system. The political crisis swirling around pension payments is merely a symptom of a larger ailment. Today's capitalist "heroes" are deal makers and financiers rather than manufacturing visionaries (with the notable exception of Silicon Valley) and resource discoverers. The principal problem with the Wall Street crowd is that they don't make anything. They simply deploy capital. While that's a necessary condition to sustain the vitality of our country's economy, it is a far from sufficient one. The notion that Asian economic powers will continue to financially support our nation's debt is the national equivalent of playing with fire. And the last thing we need is an American Nero playing music while all around him -- or her -- burns.

Classics Scholar Bernard Knox's Obituary

Today's New York Times includes an obituary of Bernard Knox. He was a Cambridge-trained classics scholar. That sounds pretty dull until one reads about his life. He fought on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War. He enlisted in the United States armed forces after the country's entry into World War II, eventually landing in the OSS. His missions included parachuting into France to aid the Resistance, and undertaking a dangerous mission into northern Italy.

Ironically, his passion for the classics was reignited during his Italian foray. According to the obituary, he found a bound copy of Virgil, whose bust, located at the poet's tomb near Naples, is shown above. Knox opened the book to "a section of the first Georgic that begins, 'Here right and wrong are reversed; so many wars in the world, so many faces of evil.'"

That lyric strikes a chord today, while reminding us that history continues to inform us, if we would only listen to it.