Tuesday, January 22, 2008 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
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The first bench, Dog Canyon Trail, Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo, New Mexico, January 20, 2008
My primary card that was compromised the other day and I'm happy to say I was able to use an older credit card I haven't used for a while and it is still acceptable. There was no real reason to think it wouldn't be but you never know; these big banks make me uneasy. As reward I treated myself to a nice lunch at Nature's Pantry Nutrition Center, a cafe and natural foods store on New York Avenue.
Night camp
Site 8 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - very good signal and access speed ( I have to qualify this - during my January 2008 visit the signal and access speed was excellent - in January 2009 it was practically non-existent during the day and slow at night with unpredictable short periods of excellent access)
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park website
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park on my Nightcamps map
- Check the weather here
Disaster and the Failure of Authority
Disasters are almost by definition about the failure of authority, in part because the powers that be are supposed to protect us from them, in part also because the thousand dispersed needs of a disaster overwhelm even the best governments, and because the government version of governing often arrives at the point of a gun. But the authorities don't usually fail so spectacularly. Failure at this level requires sustained effort. The deepening of the divide between the haves and have nots, the stripping away of social services, the defunding of the infrastructure, mean that this disaster—not of weather but of policy—has been more or less what was intended to happen, if not so starkly in plain sight.
The Uses of Disaster Rebecca Solnit, Harpers.org, September 9, 2005