Nudes in the news

[jbeegoode]

Well, yup, this guy isn't who I would choose as poster child. But he certainly, or maybe just hopefully does teach people that naked others are pretty harmless.

I like the border music, like "Pancho and Lefty." Linda Ronstadt covered "Willin," She's a local. Her family is very musical. Lots of local border tunes around here. Here's a border tune done by some locals that I like:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ2VB6Sg-fg

Anybody with a box guitar in Baja Arizona has to play some Willie and Waylon.
Jbee

[Greenbare Woods]

I do think that that is interesting. Europe in ice age, Tucson in grasslands enough for mammoths, saguaros fleeing south (and naked Jbee, too), places under water. The Med still gets wet winters, doesn't it? There are lots of green places on the coasts.
Jbee

During the Roman Empire Carthage (Libya) was the grain growing center of the Roman Empire.  Now its a desert. Britannia was a well known wine region, now a beer and grain region.  Babylon and Israel was also a very fertile farming region, now a desert.  The global climate was some degrees higher then, even higher than "global warming" alarmists tell us to fear.   I'm not convinced that several degrees of warmer would be a problem.   

[jbeegoode]

I'm convinced that the current changes are problems caused by man. You know that. The overall average increases are only a gauge. The result is disruption. The global temps during the Roman Empire that you are quoting go against all research that I have seen. I think that it is mistaken. It may have been warmer, but not off the charts more than now. We are into averages beyond thousands of years.

As for that region's history, I'm surprised and curious. I was watching a series about the Roman Empire just last week and it was Egypt that was their bread basket. A traitor was hijacking the flow of grain to Rome to create havoc and starvation to undermine the emperor. The ground water use has increased in the Levant and caused problems. I suspect that it is climate change and over use and population both affecting those regions.

The poles are heating up much quicker. The evidence even has oil companies thinking of new trade routes. This creates a change in the layers of air flow up there, jet stream. This has weather swooping down oddly and creating extremes. This is coupled with other systems and effects interacting. Very complex, computer models are needed. So, it is a resultant climate change caused by temperature increases in certain parts and a gauge is the overall average. There is still a little debate why the overall temperatures are increasing causing these extremes, but whether it is man made is the what is questioned by a fringe.

Anyway to look at it, you and I are both on a train and can't get off, don't know where it will stop, or where it is going. That cord over the window in our car that put on the brakes is broken for us. All we can do is sit back and do our best to enjoy the ride.
Jbee

[BlueTrain]

Historically, there have been good years and there have been bad years. Much of our lives around the world depend, at least to some extent, on things not changing too much too quickly. When they do, people either move or they adapt. People live just about everywhere, after all, so it isn't like people require the climate of San Diego to survive and even thrive. Naturally, we make our judgements on our own experiences and the built-up knowledge of living where we do and whatever our so-called lifestyles seem to require. It hasn't been reliably demonstrated, but it could conceivably be possible to live without a cellphone, for instance, although they are in use in some unexpected places.

I have always thought it ironic that we imagine the plains covered with herds of buffalo and think it was good but we imagine a well-ordered landscape covered with farms and small towns and think it is bad. I am almost positive there are more deer around now than there were a hundred years ago, although I hesitate to suggest whether that's good or bad.

[jbeegoode]

There are more cell phones in India than functioning toilets.
Jbee

[ric]

There are more cell phones in India than functioning toilets.
Jbee

i guess that depends on your definition of a functioning toilet.    it doesnt have to be a white porcelain edifice that wastes 2 gallons of drinking water every time someone pees.

[jbeegoode]

Good point. I'll have to ask my friend about his stats.
Jbee

[BlueTrain]

It's quite possible. There may be a word for it but so-called developing countries (and others) sometimes skip technologies. In the case of telephones, it would be like getting a cell phone without ever having had a land line. Or perhaps having a motor vehicle without ever having had horse-drawn carriages, buggies or a surrey with the fringe on top. Where I lived for a time when I was in high school, there was a car but no functioning toilet. There was an outhouse. The car was a 1957 Chevrolet station wagon. So you can be up to the minute in one area and slightly behind in another. I don't have a cell phone myself. You could say I'm free of cell phones.

Technology, including such things as functioning toilets, advance only at the rate of other technologies and that is geographic specific. To have a functioning toilet as we think of such things, you have to have a water system. It doesn't need to be reliable but that is an essential requirement for a functioning system. There doesn't have to be a municipal sewage treatment system, either. All you need is some form of a water supply system, which Rome had 2,000 years ago, still in use in places.

Cell phones require those towers and not miles and miles of wires and hundreds of poles. Simple, huh?

[Peter S]

The sort of scrape-in-the-ground one can get away with on a camping trip won’t suffice for a full-time family toilet or village facility, but a better hole can do quite well. A new favourite at music festivals here is the “long drop”, a reasonably deep hole with a suitable seat over that can be back-filled at the end of the event. The depth makes it more salubrious than its shallower predecessor, or even the plastic cabin which needs frequent emptying of the sump. I imagine a long-drop facility could be built, filled, then rebuilt a few yards away, repeated, and work quite effectively for a small community (given the thousands using them at our music festivals!). Could add to the long-term fertility of the soil, too.

[BlueTrain]

People all around the world managed with simple toilet facilities for as long as, well, forever, more or less. It's even mentioned in the Bible when the children of Israel were wandering around in the desert. The use of human waste is not unknown for agricultural purposes but it has risks, while the use of animal manure seems to be completely acceptable, although probably becoming less common. Civil War era photos of Washington, D.C., show outhouses. An ordinary outhouse is good for decades of use by the average family, based on my own experiences with same (family of at least five).

The manure of elephants is supposedly available from the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., if anyone is interested. Although animal manure is probably superior to chemical fertilizer from an all-round standpoint, there probably isn't enough of it these days for use in large scale farming.

[Greenbare Woods]

There are more cell phones in India than functioning toilets.
Jbee

Many people in India know that a roadside or field is a functioning toilet location.   The government has spent years trying to teach them how to use indoor plumbing. 

A local field wont' replace cell phones though.   Antarctic ice keeps increasing.  None of the alarmist predictions over the past century have happened.  And yet they keep saying "We're all gonna die unless we send them our money."   Funny how that last part is always there.   

[BlueTrain]

Any field or roadside may be a convenient place to relieve one's self but it is hardly a functioning toilet, not more than the grass in front of your house. In other words, not in my front yard. But your idea of sanitation may be different. After all, humans and farm animals have sometimes shared the same dwelling.

Thoreau said, in so many words, that the poor are not so much hungry, naked or cold so much as they are dirty, ragged and gross. The poster child of naturism in this thread is just about all of those things, although it's not possible to determine if he's hungry. If it's San Francisco, however, he's unlikely to be hot.

I have seen actual homeless people, not referring to the panhandlers that presently occupy choice corner locations way out here in the suburbs, but those living in little cardboard, plywood and canvas shanties off in the woods not far from the highway--until they're shooed away into another jurisdiction. I have sometimes wondered if urban renewal and slum neighborhood destruction create at least some homelessness. If nothing else, they likely make a neighborhood too expensive for the poor to live in, which may or may not be an object, and also creates a sterile neighborhood with none of the street level businesses, such as they were, that existed before. Ultimately, it appears that the goal is merely to push the poor out of the way and out of sight and incidentally, further away from wherever they might have been employed.

[ric]

why the fuss about india

take a look at the uk

our house has 2 functioning toilets... many only have one.... family of 4 , weve 4 cell phones ,thats not unusual,   do tablets with sim cards count as phones? nobody is claiming that the uk is a toilet blackspot.

[BlueTrain]

I have been to the U.K. and found the toilets to be as satisfactory as the ones at home. But perhaps some people spend a lot of time in the bathroom, which means that more than one toilet might be required in a household to avoid problems. I did have a lot of difficulty with the language while I was in the U.K., however.

[Greenbare Woods]

Any field or roadside may be a convenient place to relieve one's self but it is hardly a functioning toilet, not more than the grass in front of your house. In other words, not in my front yard. But your idea of sanitation may be different. After all, humans and farm animals have sometimes shared the same dwelling.

In India its the opinion and custom of Indians that matters.  My opinion of sanitation matters not at all.  The nearby field has been a functional place to poo for a billion people forever.  It also recycles fertilizer.   The government has been attempting to convince Indian peasants to go inside and poo into western style plumbing, but has not succeeded in much of the nation. 

Closer to home, in my home we have 2 people and 2 toilets, plus 2 urinals.  We have 1 I-Phone, plus 1 older flip phone.  Neither of them actually work at our home so we can use them only when away from home. .