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By Neil,

Kate and I are once again changing our blog theme. We hope it will allow for easy navigation.

Well I’m off to a fish hatchery to see some New York native frogs.

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8:00 PM – Update!

I went to a fish hatchery about an hour from our place and saw many native New Yorker frogs, turtles and fish. Here are two shots: a two headed six legged turtle and another larger one headed four legged turtle.

p.s. my new lens is wonderful!

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By Neil, 27 June 2009

I was so excited for my day off this Friday. I have been working non-stop since we arrived in New York City and I badly needed a break. Also, I got a great deal on a new camera lens and I wanted to use my Friday off to test it. Knowing the best light for outdoor photography is right around sunrise, I decided to leave the house at 6:30 am for the famous Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. The old crypts, dusty mausoleums ($250,000-300,000 plus fees, according to www.green-wood.com) and weathered grave stones were going to be so magnificent in the soft orange morning lights. This was my intention when Kate and I climbed into bed at midnight.

The alarm snooze went off twice before Kate poked me in the side, “Neil, it’s 6:30.” In uncharacteristic fashion, I jumped out of bed, ran through the shower, grabbed my camera and was out the door. I made my way to the Union Turnpike station to catch the F Train to Roosevelt Ave for the 7 Train to 52nd Street. The light was perfect. I was even inspired to snap a shot of a random tree basking in the light. When I stopped to photograph the random tree, it was about this time I noticed my body was a little achy and my head kind of hurt. “It’s because I woke up so early,” I thought, “it’ll go away after I eat some breakfast.” I hopped on the F Train and opened my copy of, “The Sun Also Rises,” and turned to page 14, were I’d last left off. I love taking the subway. I love having some time each day when there is nothing to do but read. I’m going to read a lot of classics this summer and all thanks will have to go to the New York Subway. So anyway, I was reading my book, made my transfer and arrived at 52nd Street.

I stumbled down the exit stairway to 52nd Street. The 7 Train runs above ground. I’d lost a lot of energy and felt drained to my core. My head ached really bad. While I was on the subway the sky had darkened and the sun had disappeared behind heavy rain clouds. My glorious golden light was now mucky dull gray. And I didn’t have any cash for food. A Rite Aid next to my stop opened in 45 minutes and I planned to return for some cash. I crossed 52nd and worked my way to the grave yard entrance. The Green-Wood Cemetery is really cool. At one point it was attracting more visitors than Niagara Falls. Except today it seemed dull and a hassle. I strolled around a much as I could bare, snapped a few shots and tried to avoid a drizzle. I only lasted 45 minutes before heading back straight to the Rite Aid. I got some cash and bought a bagel with cream cheese and orange juice. My one stroke of luck for the day came as I bought my breakfast and it started to pour. I eat inside the small convenience store and when the rain died down I ran up the stairs to once again catch the 7 Train. This time for Manhattan.

By the time I got to Manhattan I basically felt like death. I had a lunch appointment with Kate and 1 pm, but since it was only 9 I didn’t really know what to do.  In New York City, unless you spend money, there is nowhere to sit when it rains. I decided I would try to catch a movie to burn some time before meeting Kate and trekked to the Regal Union Square Stadium 14 Theater. I didn’t really care what I was going to watch, “Up,” “Transformers 2,” or “Angels and Demons” would have been fine, just as long as it finished before 1 pm. “14 bucks for a matinee! You’ve got to be kidding me!,” I said to the electronic ticketing machine. “Do you have a student price?,” I asked. The ticket machine said nothing. Hollywood movies are crap anyway, so decided to find something else to do.

Something else turned out to be walking to the Grace Church on Broadway, finding an empty pew in the back row and sleeping for an hour. It wasn’t the best sleep I’ve ever had, but I was glad for it.

I had lunch with Kate at an okay vegan diner, met up with my brother Jesse who had just finished his shift at work, and then realizing I had the flu I headed home. By the time I climbed into bed my muscles were so sore and my body so hot that I thought for sure I would never get to sleep. I did. I slept for 4 hours before Kate came home, where she found me in toasty feverish delirium. She gave me some meds and I fell back asleep.

The day ended well enough. Kate and I walked to a little pizza place close to our subway stop and split a slice of salad pizza, spinach pizza and roasted vegetable pizza (none were my favorite). We came back home, watched a movie that had John Travolta as a lawyer (A Civil Action) and went to sleep.

I guess that I am trying to say through this story is don’t let your spouse poke you out of bed…especially on your Friday off.

**Spouse note: DON’T SET YOUR ALARM FOR 6AM & IGNORE THE SNOOZE 2 TIMES!!

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By Kate, 21 June 2009

A fellow intern at CCR made this video while in Palestine. It’s about the wall constructed by the Israelis. It’s beautiful.

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By Kate, 16 June 2009

This is an excellent article in the L.A. Times about us. My favorite line is:

” ‘Secret,’ ” author Mark Danner has observed in the New York Review of Books, “has become an oddly complex word.” It refers not to things we don’t know but to things we won’t admit to seeing.

All I read about every day at my job is torture, and it is painful & disturbing. But, is torture really the biggest problem? The article is short. Please read it below.

Torture, the painful truth

It may be a blow to our self-image, but torture has been part of the American way for decades.

By Ben Ehrenreich
June 15, 2009

Perhaps we protest too much. Torture, after all, is a venerable American tradition. If not quite as homespun as apple pie or lynching, it is at least as old as our imperial aspirations. We were waterboarding captives in one of our earliest wars of occupation, the Philippine-American War, which cost as many as 1 million civilian lives. In 1902, Teddy Roosevelt himself wrote with laconic praise of “the old Filipino method.”

Other techniques, crude or sophisticated, have filled the war bag since. CIA interrogation manuals from the 1960s, which lay out the basic stress-position and sleep- and sensory-deprivation techniques later applied at Bagram and Guantanamo, have been public since 1997. Despite our protestations, we have little to be surprised about. The Bush administration’s great act of hubris was not to allow torture — that was nothing new — but to attempt to shelter it within the law. Now, when President Obama vows that “the United States does not torture” and spars with the former vice president over details, he crosses his fingers behind his back and saves himself a loophole. Via “extraordinary rendition” — a Clinton administration innovation — our government is still free to outsource torture and claim it doesn’t know. The Obama administration has been relying increasingly on foreign intelligence services to detain and interrogate our suspects for us. Our hands, in a way, are clean

Yet as more classified documents dribble into the headlines, we hold tight to our outrage. The scandal has been slowly breaking for five full years (I wrote about the abuse of detainees in these pages in April 2004), but still we claim not to recognize ourselves. Despite hundreds of front-page stories, we pretend we didn’t know, that it was all somehow kept secret from us. ” ‘Secret,’ ” author Mark Danner has observed in the New York Review of Books, “has become an oddly complex word.” It refers not to things we don’t know but to things we won’t admit to seeing. This blindness serves a function. By declaring torture anomalous, by pushing it once again to the margins of legality, we can preserve a vision of U.S. military power — and of American empire — that is essentially benevolent.

That vision — of our nation’s messianic role, its unique destiny to shower the world with freedom and democracy — has for more than a century been at the root of our self-image. Even when we know better, we are loath to let it go, even when we understand that those showers often take the form of 500-pound bombs and that self-determination is not something that can be bestowed at gunpoint. Maintaining military and economic hegemony over the planet remains an inherently bloody affair. Seen from the other side, empire is a synonym for subjugation, and hence for violence on a massive scale.

You don’t have to be Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to find our self-regard wanting. All that’s required is minimal attention to the fates suffered by the citizens of the nations to which we are currently delivering democracy. Take the residents of the Bala Baluk district of Afghanistan’s western Farah province, where, on the evening of May 6, U.S. airstrikes killed either 147 or 20 to 30 civilians, depending whether you prefer to believe, respectively, the people bombed or the ones who bombed them. Survivors described extended families wiped out, a nightmare landscape littered with human limbs. Being waterboarded 183 times suddenly doesn’t sound so bad.

That bombing was hardly extraordinary. You may remember the 37 civilians killed outside Kandahar last Nov. 4, the 90 killed near Herat on Aug. 22, the 47 killed in Nangarhar province on July 6 or the 15 killed in Nuristan two days earlier. If not, don’t blame yourself. Unless the body count approaches 100, these kinds of deaths barely merit a word on CNN’s crawl.

And as our war spreads into Pakistan, such incidents are on the rise. Missiles launched from unmanned drones have killed 700 civilians in Pakistan since 2006 and, we are assured, 14 Al Qaeda leaders. (Obama has been drastically increasing the number of drone strikes, which Leon Panetta, his CIA director, has called “the only game in town.”) Meanwhile, back in Iraq, one of the more moderate estimates of the civilian death toll hovers near 100,000. Doesn’t it seem odd that it’s only torture that appalls us?

As the deaths mount, we will continue to beat our breasts about the treatment of detainees. The outcry is not unjustified. My point is not to relativize torture: We should not torture anyone. But we do, and have done so, both directly and with the help of client states, for many years. Just as in war after war, the alleged costs of our well-being have been borne by people we will never see, most of them noncombatants.

This is the price of global sovereignty, of being, in Colin Powell’s words, “the biggest bully on the block.” President Bush and Dick Cheney knew this, and they were unapologetic. Obama knows it too, but he has worked hard to let us believe otherwise, to patch up the tattered fantasy that we are the country we imagine ourselves to be.

Our outrage over torture, like the president’s rhetoric, lets us maintain the belief that we had innocence to lose. It allows us to deny the everyday violence of empire and to forget the many thousands of lives that we continue to sacrifice for something that we persist in calling freedom. I don’t mean that we should be less outraged, but more, and more broadly. The rest of the world cannot afford our good conscience.

Ben Ehrenreich is the author of the novel “The Suitors” and a fellow of the Horizon Institute.

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By Kate, 12 June 2009

Door to Door as Missionaries, Then as Salesmen

Brandon Rogers, a former missionary, is a rookie salesman.

OAK BROOK, Ill. — Six days a week, in fair weather and foul, two-dozen door-to-door salesmen, all of whom live clustered together in an apartment complex in this suburb west of Chicago, pile into S.U.V.’s and cars and head into the big city, bent on sales of home security systems.

And on Sunday, their one day off, they drive together to the nearest house of worship of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The salesmen are mostly former Mormon missionaries from Utah who cut their teeth — and learned their people-skill chops — cold-calling for their faith. In Chicago and in its suburbs where their employer, Pinnacle Security of Orem, Utah, has shipped them for the summer sales season, they are doing much the same thing, but as a job.

“It’s missionary work turned into a business,” said Cameron Treu, 30, who served his mission in Chile and was recruited into D2D (that is door-to-door in sales lingo) by another former missionary.

Managers at Pinnacle Security, founded in 2001 by a student at Brigham Young University, the Mormon Church-owned school, say missionaries simply have the right stuff. Many speak foreign languages learned in the mission field. All have thick skins from dealing with the negative responses that a missionary armed with a Book of Mormon and a smile can receive.

Mormon men are expected to serve a two-year mission in their early 20s, and about two-thirds of Pinnacle Security’s 1,800 sales representatives this summer have been through the experience. Former missionaries work for other direct-sales companies, too, though Pinnacle seems to be in a class by itself: It has deployed them in 75 cities nationwide.

“They’re used to knocking on doors, and they’re used to rejection,” said Scott Warner, Pinnacle’s manager of the Chicago sales team.

Mr. Warner said interest in the security products was up this year — a recession indicator, he said — as people reacted to fear (if not always a statistical reality) of rising crime. But the number of potential customers who cannot pass credit checks is up, too, with more homeowners unable to afford the $40 or so a month that Pinnacle charges to monitor a system. The company also charges a $99 installation fee, but nothing for the alarm equipment itself in a standard package.

As millions of traditional jobs dried up last year, at least 100,000 Americans joined the ranks of what is called, in the trade, direct sales. With items like cosmetics and skin care (Mary Kay, Avon) and housewares (Cutco knives, Fuller Brush), more than 15.1 million people are now selling something, or trying to, somewhere far beyond the mall.

And retention is up in a profession with a notoriously high burn-out rate, industry experts say. (Fifty to 100 door-knocks a day, with one or two completed sales, is an average grind.) At Pinnacle Security’s Oak Brook office, for example, only about 15 percent of the reps had given up and gone home, or not worked out to expectations, after the first month of the sales season, which began in early May — about half the normal attrition rate.

“Consumer companies and retailers are trying to break through the clutter, and it’s a lot easier for companies to recruit talent in this job market,” said Thomas Lutz, a senior partner in the Boston Consulting Group, which advises companies on growth and marketing.

Business is only part of the chemistry though. In a free-market economy, every sale or purchase is on some level an act of conversion, a matter of overcoming objections or hesitancy and getting to “yes.” Decision making and trust are never entirely matters of pure logic.

Matt Romero, a 24-year-old college student from Draper, Utah, south of Salt Lake City, admitted freely that in his heart he was still partly a missionary.

Mr. Romero is fluent in Spanish from his mission to Peru, eloquent and invariably polite in English in trolling the mostly black neighborhoods of Chicago’s South Side. He made $13,000 last summer selling 60 security systems for Pinnacle and is aspiring this year to sell 150 systems, which would trigger big incentive bonuses that could increase his pay to $75,000 or more.

But he said he was also ready to render unto God the things that are God’s.

His thinking on that question changed one afternoon in early May. A woman opened the door and wanted to talk about religion.

“She asked me if I believed in Christ and if I knew who my savior was and I said, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and we had a discussion and she told me, ‘No one comes in my house without hearing the word,’ and I said, ‘That’s a good policy, ma’am,’ ” Mr. Romero said on a recent afternoon of knocking on doors.

“Since then, I’ve been carrying around these little cards,” he said, lifting up his stack of Pinnacle brochures to reveal a smaller stack of what are called “pass-along cards,” with facts and frequently asked questions about the Mormon Church. Marketing experts say that cold-calling in general has become more sophisticated since the era of Willy Loman, with training, mentoring and recruiting efforts sharpened at many companies. But Pinnacle’s salesmen are also applying skills learned in the mission field, like “mimic and mirror,” a technique of adapting one’s posture and bearing to the person being spoken to as a way of inducing trust — if his arms are crossed, you cross yours; if she tilts her head in asking a question, you do the same.

“Before my mission, I knocked on doors and I had some success,” said Matt Biesinger, 23, who worked a summer for Pinnacle before going to Paraguay as a missionary. “On the mission, I learned how to talk to people.”

Role-playing exercises conducted on many mornings reinforce those lessons. Look into a potential customer’s eye, trainers say, but do not stare, which can appear confrontational. When the door opens, always stand at a slight angle to diffuse any body language that might convey threat. And never diminish yourself by using the word, “just,” as in, “I’m just here in the neighborhood.”

Sometimes, though, it rains, and when it does, Pinnacle’s sink-or-swim mentality for sales reps, especially new, unproven ones like Brandon Rogers, is tough love at its toughest.

Newbies, for fear they may retreat to their cars, are dropped off and left on foot without shelter or access to a bathroom unless they can gain admittance into a house to make their sales pitch. Mr. Rogers, who is 21, had three energy bars and no umbrella to last him through a long, wet day.

He had made one sale by dark, when they picked up him.

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By Kate, 6 June 2009

I never learn. I never learn. Once again, instead of going to a normal place to get a haircut that may cost $10 more… I was drawn to the NY equivalent of SuperCuts & yet again to a “stylist” who speaks no English. So, THE OPPOSITE OF A BOY HAIRCUT turns out as pictured above. sigh.

In other news…

Neil has started wearing my laptop case on his head in lieu of a baseball cap. Good looks & good times.

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By Kate, 3 June 2009

Well, it’s been a great first couple days at CCR.

I have been assigned my issue areas. They are three fantastic topics that I’m doing research on:

• Universal Jurisdiction cases in Spain
• Research on detention of immigrants in the US
• And research on holding health care professionals accountable for participation in torture

So far, I have no idea what I am doing, but I am surrounded by brilliant, passionate people and am loving it (although I could really use a Herman Miller).

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By Kate, 30 May 2009

We’ve arrived in NY! Below is the route we took. (If anyone every tries to convince you that driving across the country is “not that bad”… DO NOT LISTEN!) It was quite the haul.
View Larger Map

We had two friends with us to help with the driving and to add to the good times. Aside from the absolutely no sleep, good times were had by all.

Neil’s favorite state, Wisconsin.

We rented bikes in Minnesota’s Lake Itasca where the headwaters of the Mississippi are.

Neil tried out the 3-wheeler.

Best part of the trip was visiting with Neil’s parents. Having great food & fun times. Neil even went on a shopping spree with his Pops. Nothing like shopping in Fargo!

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By Neil, 15 May 2009

My previous post was a poor attempt to demonstrate my disdain for packing up the house and moving. After finding this photo I’ve decided to change my tune…. Packing is great because you get to discover forgotten treasures!