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Wednesday, November 23, 2016

A Thanksgiving Tale: Michigan Tech EMT Student Saves His Father's Life

Michigan Tech student EMS volunteers who helped during Mark Calabria's heart attack. From left: Theodore Kretzmann, Mike Sommers, Kyle Huyser, Ramandeep Rekhi, Ross Michaels, Jesse Olson, Mario Calabria, Jackson Burek. (Photo courtesy Michigan Tech University)

By Jennifer Donovan, Michigan Tech Director of News and Media Relations
Posted Nov. 21, 2016, on Michigan Tech News
Reprinted in part with permission


HOUGHTON -- At first, Mario Calabria thought it was a joke. The whole family was mountain biking on the Tech Trails, riding slowly on a flat part of the trail, when his father suddenly fell off his bike, hitting a tree as he slumped to the ground.

Mark Calabria was a fit 56 and an active outdoorsman. "I thought he was messing with us, pretending to be someone who didn’t know how to ride a bike," Mario recalls.

Then the fourth-year mechanical engineering student at Michigan Technological University noticed that his father’s eyes had rolled back into his head.

As his younger sisters screamed, Mario transformed into something he had spent 224 hours training to become: an emergency medical technician (EMT). Within 30 seconds, he had his brother’s girlfriend calling 911; he found a map posted on a tree and identified exactly where on the Trails they were; he called Travis Pierce, assistant director of the Michigan Tech Emergency Medical Services (as well as Mario’s mentor and friend). Within two minutes, he had checked his father’s pulse, found that he didn’t have one, flipped him over and started cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). ... CLICK HERE to read the rest of this article on the Michigan Tech News.

Sunday, November 20, 2016

Guest article: Après moi le déluge

By Louis V. Galdieri*
Posted Nov. 14, 2016, on Louis V. Galdieri's blog
Reprinted here with permission

There are many things at work in Trump’s reckless plan to withdraw from the Paris Agreement: it’s a sop thrown to big coal and voters in destitute coal-mining districts; it signals a retreat from twenty-first century global engagements and plays to the reactionary America First crowd; it’s a petulant thumbing of the nose at President Obama -- the list could go on. The point I would make is simply this: the threat to withdraw from Paris demonstrates that the man about to assume the presidency has no understanding of agreements.

When I talk about his lack of understanding I’m not simply saying that this man, who reads from the teleprompter like a struggling fifth grader, doesn’t intellectually grasp what agreements are or how they work. He might well not; but the real issue, I fear, is that he has no inclination to learn. Time and again, the president-elect has shown us and told us that he does not respect agreements or appreciate the power they have. He will break them at will, because cooperative agreements and -- perhaps more to the point -- cooperation don’t appear to have a place in his moral outlook, his idea of power, or his general view of the world.

He is a purely transactional man. He doesn’t build cooperative agreements; he strikes deals that work to his advantage. This is a point I’ve noted before, when Martin Wolf wrote about Trump’s "transactional approach to partnerships" in the FT (Financial Times) before the election. The foreign policy community is especially alert to (and rightly alarmed by) what this approach might mean in terms of existing alliances like NATO. As Ian Bremmer recently put it: "Trump views alliances transactionally, the way he views his businesses and marriages. Values don’t enter the equation."

The nihilism -- I think that might be the right word for what Bremmer is identifying -- of the transactional man counts as both a moral deficiency and a political handicap. In the moral sense, others have no standing: there are no second persons; there is no plurality, only a first person singular. He and I have nothing between us, because (I am again quoting Bremmer) "common values don’t matter" and there is no enduring "we." With no obligations to me, others or any who might come after, he is out to score. And should others refuse his terms, resist or demand recognition, he is likely to compensate for his lack of political prowess in the only way he can: by exerting hard power.

Après moi le déluge is pretty good shorthand for this attitude, especially as it relates to global climate risk.

Postscript: During a press conference this afternoon [Nov. 14], President Obama himself offered a more hopeful view. He noted a "tradition" of carrying international agreements "forward across administrations" and stressed what he called "the good news" about Paris: the agreement formalizes practices already embedded in our economy, and we have already demonstrated that it’s possible to grow the economy and meet its goals. Paul Bledsoe took a different tack this morning on the BBC Newshour, when asked if Trump could simply undo Paris: "investments in the United States and around the world are being made by businesses who know that carbon constraints are inevitable." Trump, he says, is "on the wrong side of history."

* Editor's Note: Guest author Louis V. Galdieri is a filmmaker based in New York City. He and fellow filmmaker Ken Ross visited Houghton, Mich., in October 2013 and screened their documentary 1913 Massacre, about the Italian Hall tragedy. Click here for his blog.
Inset photo: Louis V. Galdieri. (Photo courtesy Louis V. Galdieri)