Category Archives: Uncategorized

Today I heard on MPR that Ray Christensen, “the voice of the Minnesota Gophers,” has passed away at age 92. I grew up listening to him broadcasting many University of Minnesota Golden Gopher sports (Dad was an alumnus and liked to listen), and Ray is the only broadcaster who made any sort of impression on me. He had a drone of a voice that modulated to the words he wanted in a rather memorable way – a voice that really matched up to the imagined immensity of the football stadium, or the old Barn for basketball.

But more importantly, Ray was a good role model, and it’s very simple to sum it up: he rejected tribalism. For all that he was an inveterate Gophers fan, he was also a very fair person. More than once he expressed the sentiment, “Hey, I’m a Gophers fan, but, boy, Penn State is sure playing well today.” Sounds meaningless? Compare that to, say, modern GOP behavior, a take-no-prisoners, say nothing good about the enemy approach, which denies any kind of common bond which we should share across this nation. Reading the partisans of both sides, I cannot imagine them getting together over a beer to discuss the problem of today. But Ray? Just listening to how he conducted himself, you knew he didn’t hesitate to share a meal with his colleagues from Penn State, or Indiana, or the coaches of those teams.

And that’s vitally important. Our technology may be advancing at a breath-taking pace, but culturally speaking, we’re regressing. The entire GOP appears to have sunk back to the level of pre-World War I, where epithets were applied to all other countries, and the idea of dealing fairly with other countries was considered radical. And from my exposure to leftist “progressives”, they seem to be following the GOP down that same hellish rat hole. By contrast, Obama conducted himself in the old style of believing we all had something to contribute, continually offering to work with the GOP.

I have no idea what Ray’s politics might have been, but I suspect sitting down with Ray and talking about them would not have been a traumatic experience. And I don’t have that hope for the partisans of today. I can only hope they die off quickly enough so that we can return to the task of maturing – as a nation.

Oleograph:

a chromolithograph printed on cloth to imitate an oil painting [Merriam-Webster]

Seen on the Center For Inquiry blog (Joe Nickell):

A folk-art phenomenon of yesteryear was so-called “tramp art”— wood items handcrafted from discarded materials, ostensibly by hoboes, either to sell or to barter for food or drink. Pictured here (see photo) is a tramp-art frame with its religious oleograph (which I acquired for my collection in 2002).

 

A repeated background event appears in The Time Travelers (1964), the destruction of a habitable Earth by atomic war, which also motivates events in the just previously reviewed In the Year 2889, although this time the war happens in the future, not the past. A group of physicists are researching how to open a window on the future and they accomplish their goal – showing a blasted barren land where their campus currently resides. As they struggle to stabilize the window, they inadvertently convert the window into a door. One of their assistants, a goofy power engineer, stumbles through the doorway and into the future. When he disappears from view, the scientists set out in search of him.

I see into our future. It appears to be filled with coneheads!

Attacked by human-like creatures and having lost their doorway, they retreat (I openly admired how the young lady could out-sprint her male colleagues despite her high heels) into a maze of rocks, until they are trapped in a cave. Much to their relief, they are saved by the last true humans on Earth. They learn the plans for escaping this blasted place (it’s not a bad plan), but that they don’t fit in. What to do? That’s where the tension starts to build.

Unfortunately, the makers of this film introduced a scene or two that didn’t really belong: the seduction of the power engineer, a comedic scene involving android parts which move on their own, a scene in which the women discuss their romantic inclinations, all done to terribly dated, even excruciating music. These feel superfluous and detract from the pacing of the movie. On the other end of the spectrum, a creature described as midway between the enemy mutants and true human is introduced, saved from out-of-hand execution, and then never seen again. What?

We’re also subjected to a couple of battle scenes, which have some passing interest in how the androids’ destruction is handled, but are really rather amateurishly handled. However, as one of the battles takes place in the laboratory as the scientists feverishly work on their problem, it does show some ambition on the part of the movie-makers to ratchet up the tension.

The visuals are also a bit amateurish, and the sound is fuzzy at times; definitely not a tour de force for the movie making staff. This is not a movie made for the ages, nor do I recommend it; yet, for all that, I will say that their depiction of the final conundrum is innovative without being didactic, bringing home a basic problem the scientists face – and may never solve.

A cat dies, and within a month you expect little more effect on you.

But Phanny, our inherited calico who passed away last July, and left in her wake one destroyed computer monitor and multiple floor stains, not to mention wrecking my parents’ wooden living room floor more than once, has one more incident to her credit. Deb tried to use her fencing lamé for the first time in months – and it didn’t work. We knew Phanny had peed on it, and, yes, we had cleaned it – but it appears the incident was far more harmful to the lamé than anticipated.

Just one more thank you from a cantankerous calico.

I didn’t have to dig for this one, this is right up front and center on the ESA/Rosetta gallery, and it’s really quite glorious

Source: ESA/Rosetta/MPS

But I also like it because I can imagine finding this place on Earth. It has a certain element that’s almost human-like to it, an element that gives us a connection to what is actually the speeding comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Readers comment on the nomination:

Well, he accepted being the whirlwind. If he was REALLY principled, he would have said “Garland is the guy you need to vote on now.”

Gorsuch will forever be remembered as a lesser Supreme, of a diminished and corrupt Supreme Court, if he’s confirmed. He’ll aways be Gorsuch (R), the Republican hack who took Garland’s stolen seat.

Yeah, and that would be the end of his career. Still, it’s a great fantasy, him up at the podium and saying, “I told President Trump that I accepted the nomination, but, like him, I lied: we should be debating Judge Garland’s qualifications and nomination.” I wonder if it ever crossed his mind to make that move.

Another reader retorts:

Gorsuch was appointed by the President and has nothing to do with Obama’s cheap shot on appointing a candidate on his way out the door that he knew full well wouldn’t be approved by the congress, who BTW at the time was controlled by the Liberals,

If Justice Scalia had passed away in October 2016, I’d be in full agreement that this was a back door appointment and the United States would have been better served by having the next President make the nomination. That’s not what happened, though. Justice Scalia died the night of Feb 12 /13, 2016, nearly a full year before the end of President Obama’s second term. It was Obama’s responsibility to make a nomination, for the good of the Nation. Indeed, at the time Clinton was the odds-on favorite to win the election – can you imagine the uproar if President Obama had stated that he was going to abdicate the choice to the future President? Given the fear, even paranoia attaching to Hillary Clinton, among a GOP that is controlled by self-interest (and perhaps that’s why they fear Clinton and Obama, who do not appear to share their motivation of taking advantage of their positions to engorge themselves and their sponsors, mostly indirectly), I suspect the business for hearing-aids would have greatly expanded in the last months of President Obama’s term – the shrieks from the GOP would have been too much for my frail ears, I’m sure, and many others.

With regard to the reader’s other point, only the Senate approves Supreme Court Justices. For the last two years of Obama’s second term, the Senate makeup was 54 Republicans, 44 Democrats, and 2 Independents (Bernie Sanders, Angus King). As the two Independents caucused with the Democrats, it was effectively a 54 / 46 split in favor of the Republicans – not the Liberals, as asserted.

Gorsuch remains heir to the epithet I.J., Illegitimate Justice.

A reader requests more information regarding mercury and tuna:

I just had tuna last night. Tell us more about tuna-induced mercury poisoning, please!

Consumer Reports in 2015 gives a quick summary:

Tongue firmly in cheek, The Postillon reports on one approach to building the southern border wall:

The Scandinavian furniture maker has offered the USA a practical, ready-made solution with “Börder Wåll”. All they need to do is pick it up in a van from the nearest IKEA branch and put it up where they want it to go. Totalling US $9,999,999,999.99, “Börder Wåll” is significantly cheaper than a conventional wall. Estimates suggest that a conventional wall would cost between US $15 and $25 billion.

Of course, IKEA products have had a few problems over the years, especially if they’re improperly installed. I’m just having visions of the entire wall tipping over… and then all the immigrants trapped inside the United States escaping in one great mass while Immigration Agents hurriedly try to prop the thing back up again to keep them in…

This might save the phone even if the battery fails. Published on journal site Science Advances, an approach to the lithium-ion battery fires:

Although the energy densities of batteries continue to increase, safety problems (for example, fires and explosions) associated with the use of highly flammable liquid organic electrolytes remain a big issue, significantly hindering further practical applications of the next generation of high-energy batteries. We have fabricated a novel “smart” nonwoven electrospun separator with thermal-triggered flame-retardant properties for lithium-ion batteries. The encapsulation of a flame retardant inside a protective polymer shell has prevented direct dissolution of the retardant agent into the electrolyte, which would otherwise have negative effects on battery performance. During thermal runaway of the lithium-ion battery, the protective polymer shell would melt, triggered by the increased temperature, and the flame retardant would be released, thus effectively suppressing the combustion of the highly flammable electrolytes. [Science Advances  13 Jan 2017: Vol. 3, no. 1, e1601978, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1601978]

They need a better editor, but it’s an interesting approach. Hopefully, your local phone technician will be able to tell that your battery didn’t burst into flame. (See, I can write as poorly as these folks.) (But my ideas aren’t nearly as good.) Of course, better to solve the problem a priori; this is more of a clean up after the problem has occurred.

Samuel Bray on Lawfare frets about federal judges issuing orders with nation wide impact:

But those issues are secondary to the more fundamental problems—forum-shopping, decision-making, and the proper authority of the federal courts—discussed above.

To be sure, there is an important argument for the national injunction. Without a national injunction, there can be inconsistent decisions from different courts. One plaintiff might challenge her deportation and win; another plaintiff might sue in another court and lose. Admittedly, this kind of inconsistency is a failure of justice, a failure to give each person his or her due. But our legal system is constructed for fallible human actors. Our legal system makes the bet that tolerating some inconsistency between cases will create better decisions and more justice in the long run.

The executive order on immigration demonstrates acutely the real human cost to narrow orders, to injunctions that protect only the plaintiffs and not everyone else who might sue throughout the country. We cannot ignore, however, that the national injunction is counter to the way our system of federal courts operates. It is at odds with the Constitution’s grant of “the Judicial Power,” which is a power to decide cases for parties, not questions for everyone. And national injunctions are likely to lead to worse decisions, not better ones.

Democrats have good reason to cry foul. The district courts in Texas went far in binding the Obama administration with national injunctions, indeed much further than the district courts in California had gone in binding the Bush administration. But payback is no way to run a legal system. National injunctions are a bad idea no matter who is president.

Without further evidence, I doubt this is a payback; it’s a convenience – you use the tool best suited to your needs. If the federal courts permit national injunctions, you go for it.

But, as a non-lawyer, the whole forum-shopping issue makes me vastly uncomfortable, and has done so for years. Looking at the alternative – filing in all of the federal district courses – also makes me squirm. From Justice 101:

The federal court system has three main levels: district courts (the trial court), circuit courts which are the first level of appeal, and the Supreme Court of the United States, the final level of appeal in the federal system. There are 94 district courts, 13 circuit courts, and one Supreme Court throughout the country.

94 filings seems quite out of line. Even if there was some way to skip the district courts and go directly the circuit courts, 13 is still a bit hefty. But one can easily envision that creating a direct route to SCOTUS (the Supreme Court of the US) would lead to abuse of that route.

Perhaps if an identical filing in several of the courts (say, five), across several of the circuits, were all awarded an injunction, perhaps that would trip a nation-wide injunction. Something to think about. *Probably someone in the legal community has already suggested it.*

Immanent:

remaining within; indwelling; inherent. [Dictionary.com]

Seen in The Climate Fix, Roger Pielke, Jr., Chapter 8, The Politicization of Climate Science, p 204.

“The concern for the ‘good’ and ‘just’ case of avoiding further dangerous human interference with the climate system has created a peculiar self-censorship among many climate scientists. Judgments of solid scientific findings are often not made with respect to their immanent quality but on the basis of their alleged or real potential as a weapon by ‘skeptics’ in a struggle for dominance in public and policy discourse.”

[Typos mine.]

Whatever factors explain the trend, public trust in climate science appears to be a causality of the climate debate.

– Roger Pielke, Jr., The Climate Fix, p 200.

I admit I was captivated.

No! There’s not room for you here!
Uh, oh, here comes my daughter, she always contradicts me.

Watching In the Year 2889 (1967), we agreed that this movie must certainly be considered a candidate for Mystery Science Theater 3000: awful story, poor acting, uninspired makeup, ridiculous premise, obtuse title. And, for MST3K, a target rich environment.

General premise: the atomic bomb have come raining down on mankind.

Specific  premise: a man has built his home so he and his daughter can survive this. Wait, what? Why? Why would you want to survive?

Plot: As the survivors puzzle over a couple of survivors who should be dead, the squabbling begins and survivors (and one unsuspecting rabbit) start getting picked off.

Acting: not wooden, but restrained without that sudden release that restrained acting can enable. Even the would-be rapist only inspires some faint inclination to shun him, without the actual need to strangle him.

And, despite the title, they seem to be discussing World War II!

But perhaps best is the father, in his sixties, a retired Navy Captain, who keeps meeting refugees at his front door with a gun and a barked “Get out! There’s no room for you here!”, only to have his twenty-ish daughter reprimand him and take the refugees to yet another bedroom in their spacious abode, while the father walks grumbling off. Juxtaposing that with a yet later “I’m in charge” speech was priceless.

But, really, I would only recommend seeing this under the guidance of Joel Hodgson. Or with beer, and lots of it.

Here’s the header of the Raw Image Gallery of Cassini. Totally gorgeous color palette.

Source: NASA/JPL/California Institute of Technology/Space Science Institute

Since we’re in the raw image gallery, here’s a fairly striking, uncalibrated picture of the moon Mimas from just a few days ago:

Credit: NASA/JPL/California Institute of Technology/Space Science Institute

Makes me wish I had pressed on with my own image processing. I had to figure out some math and ran out of energy for it. Maybe the Cassini math isn’t as bad as the Viking math.

38 North invited former Secretary of Defense William Perry to their monthly breakfast, and he accepted, giving a short presentation and taking questions from the press. While he doesn’t claim to be an expert, he certainly has a lot of experience with the North Koreans, and I appreciated this insight into North Korean motivations:

Anybody that’s ever done any negotiations understands you cannot succeed unless you know where the other side of the table is coming from, what they’re trying to achieve. And I think a big failure of our negotiations in the so-called “Six Party Talks” is we have not done that and not understood where North Korea is coming from.

I presume to tell you what I think they are. My knowledge is based on two things. Partly on having had numerous discussions with North Korean senior officials on this subject. But, I think more importantly, by observing what they do. What they do makes clear what they are thinking. So, let’s get to that for a moment.

I believe – I believe without any, really, uncertainty – goal number one of North Korea is to sustain the Kim dynasty. You could describe that as survival of the regime. But I put it more specifically: sustaining the Kim dynasty.

The second goal is an important goal for them. It is achieving international recognition.

A third goal is improving their economy. But I want to emphasize that third goal is subservient to the first two goals, and they have demonstrated that over, and over, again. They’re willing to sacrifice their economy if it’s necessary, to achieve those first two goals.

So, sustaining the dynasty, achieving international recognition, and a poor third is improving their economy.

The idea of a unified Korea that they talk about I think that’s way behind the other goals. They don’t see that as something that’s going to be operational for many, many – a long, long time.

It’s true that sometimes leadership and legislative wisdom can clash with the popular will – after all, we don’t hire representatives to convey our express will into the legislature, we hire them to figure out what’s best and then do it. But it’s a ticklish high wire we cross when this comes up – when is it leadership, and when is it base corruption? Several factors need to be observed, including the reasonability of the claim – does it pass the sniff test?

So the activities of the South Dakota legislature need this examination, because they seem to contravening the will of the voters who approved a referendum, as Salon reports:

Republican lawmakers in South Dakota have refused to enact a ballot measure instituting campaign finance, lobbying reforms, public financing for campaigns and creating the first independent ethics commission in the state’s history. The bill passed with 52 percent the vote.

The South Dakota Government Accountability and Anti-Corruption Act makes it illegal for lawmakers to receive more than a total of $100 annually from lobbyists in the form of “any compensation, reward, employment, gift, honorarium, beverage, meal, food, or other thing of value made or given directly or indirectly.” Under the new law, an independent ethics commission would investigate ethics and campaign finance complaints lodged against legislative and executive branch officials.

The opposition was primarily the Koch brothers, and after the measure passed,

Republican Gov. Dennis Daugaard has argued that voters were “hoodwinked by scam artists who grossly misrepresented these proposed measures.” Republican House Majority Leader Lee Qualm said, “We need to get rid of this as quickly as possible.”

Surely you’d think they’d understand how bad this behavior looks to the average voter, at least those who paid attention and gave the bill serious thought. Now, perhaps they have a point, and if so, if they have average communications skills they’ll be OK. But without seeing those arguments, I have to fall back on general observations of the GOP for the current year, and it’s not looking good. The scandalous doings of the North Carolina legislature is getting to be emblematic, although the attempt at the Federal level to gut the ethics watchdog is certainly closer to what’s going on here.

It’ll be interesting to see what comes next, since, as Salon reports, the South Dakota legislature operated under a “state of emergency,” which nullifies any direct attempts to reverse the legislature’s action, as can otherwise happen. In some ways, it’s almost as if the GOP is asking to get booted in the teeth by the citizens; however, it’d have to be a big boot, as the GOP is in overwhelming control of the South Dakota legislature.

They’d be better advised to embrace these sorts of initiatives, to proclaim they’re so pure that there’s nothing to fear from such laws for their part; only their opponents need fear those laws. But right now, it looks like a bunch of cockroaches scurrying about, frantically trying to hide from God.

Or someone’s boot.

North Korea is working again on its financial sector and making banking facilities available. Andray Abrahamian on 38 North writes up a report on it, but one passage really caught my attention:

Interest in the financial sector has generally grown under Kim Jong Un, as more students and delegations have been sent abroad to explore issues related to banking, and relevant domestic education has increased.[11] Also in the last couple of years, North Korean media have made a rhetorical return to the mid-2000s by lamenting the wastefulness of “idle funds.” As The Kim Il Sung University Gazette noted in 2014:

Some of the funds that are being circulated in the market have strayed away from the normal production process and distribution passage and remain harbored in the hands of organizations, enterprises, and people … mobilization of idle funds shall meet the funding needs of the state and serve as a source of supplementary income to increase state revenue.[12]

The last sentence implies a key risk: if banks in the DPRK take deposits to fund loans, those loans have to perform. If banks are forced to make loans to economically non-viable state projects, depositors could lose out, quickly undermining the process of banking-sector development. Despite this potential pitfall, greater regulation and formalization of the system of deposits and lending would be a positive step. Informal financing currently dominates the commercial loan market with little guidance from the state and interest rates can surpass 15 percent. By offering formal loans that are cheaper, North Korea’s banks could help drive growth.

The bold is actually mine, not Andray’s. He sees a risk of one sort, but I see another: banks traditionally serve the needs of the customers and use their custodianship of their customers’ funds as an opportunity to make money through their own investments of those funds while in their custodianship. But the sentence that bothers Andray clearly indicates the purpose of the bank has shifted from serving the customer to serving the North Korean state, which almost certainly, in practical terms, will devolve to the Party as well. At a more basic level, and using my favorite lens, this change in purpose will also imply a change in the optimization of the methods of the bank – meaning that presence and supremacy of the needs of the State will almost certainly not benefit the customers.

If, at some point, the customers conclude that the costs outweigh the benefits, then the bank will be defunded by the customers, those late to the conclusion will lose everything, and the bank will implode.

This, of course, comes from someone with little knowledge of the North Korean situation on the ground. It just seems likely from general principles observed here in the West.

Concerning Tesla‘s batteries, a reader adds a technical note regarding my concerns:

The “blowing up” cell phones were caused by errors measured microns. I don’t think that will be a problem here.

Hope not. Hopefully they’re relatively stable in percussive environments such as an earthquake or tornado.

A new one on me. NewScientist (21 January 2017) reports on the possible detection of same on Venus:

A giant atmospheric phenomenon called a gravity wave has been spotted above Venus by the Japanese probe Akatsuki.

For those of us not keeping up, Wikipedia gives a definition:

A gravity wave results when fluid is displaced from a position of equilibrium. The restoration of the fluid to equilibrium will produce a movement of the fluid back and forth, called a wave orbit.^[1] Gravity waves on an air–sea interface of the ocean are called surface gravity waves or surface waves, while gravity waves that are within the body of the water (such as between parts of different densities) are called internal waves. Wind-generated waves on the water surface are examples of gravity waves, as are tsunamis and ocean tides.

The abstract of the technical paper from which the report is drawn:

The planet Venus is covered by thick clouds of sulfuric acid that move westwards because the entire upper atmosphere rotates much faster than the planet itself. At the cloud tops, about 65 km in altitude, small-scale features are predominantly carried by the background wind at speeds of approximately 100 m s⁻¹. In contrast, planetary-scale atmospheric features have been observed to move slightly faster or slower than the background wind, a phenomenon that has been interpreted to reflect the propagation of planetary-scale waves. Here we report the detection of an interhemispheric bow-shaped structure stretching 10,000 km across at the cloud-top level of Venus in middle infrared and ultraviolet images from the Japanese orbiter Akatsuki. Over several days of observation, the bow-shaped structure remained relatively fixed in position above the highland on the slowly rotating surface, despite the background atmospheric super rotation. We suggest that the bow-shaped structure is the result of an atmospheric gravity wave generated in the lower atmosphere by mountain topography that then propagated upwards.

Business Insider has a lovely pic in infrared light:

When I say “we saw Vincent Price’s Madhouse (1974)”, I mean this in a very special way. Vincent plays a retired horror movie star, known for his portrayals of Dr. Death, broken by the horrible fate of his fiancee. A decade later, he’s enticed out of retirement, but as he begins to work on a TV version of the movie series, people begin dying – all in the style of the deaths of the previous Dr. Death movies. All of this is supported by outtakes – a restrained number – from Price’s real movies.

And so this really is Vincent Price’s Madhouse.

It’s an interesting premise for a movie, but, as noted for other movies of the era, it suffers from the 1970s British movies malady – a certain brittleness, brought on in this case by characters who might have been sympathetic, but are not. Some are merely neutral, with no effort to humanize them, while others are faintly repugnant. Even Vincent’s character fades a little towards ineffectuality, even a note of pathetic failure. The plot jumps from scene to scene, some of which seem gratuitous – the blackmailing couple, for instance, are both unbelievable and disposed of with no consideration of consequence or sentiment. While the ending has a certain element of fun in its breaking of yet another wall, frankly, questions of fantasy and reality are not brought to mind, due to the mostly insipid characters and a basic failure to care for the fates of those induced to act in this, ummmm, madhouse.

And Peter Cushing is way shorter than Vincent Price. I’m just saying there’s a monstrous plot hole there.

Sami Grover on Treehugger.com reports more abandonment of coal:

Earlier today, I reported that Deutsche Bank is going to stop financing new coal mines and power stations, and reduce its exposure to existing coal-dependent assets too. Obviously, this move has benefits in terms of the bank’s corporate responsibility commitments, but there’s another important aspect to this tale: It just doesn’t make sense financially anymore.

No sooner do I write this than I get another confirmation of the way the wind is blowing: Danish energy giant DONG (yes, snickering is allowed) has committed to phasing out coal from its energy mix by 2023. This move probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. As the graphic above shows, DONG has already reduced its coal dependence by 73% since 2006. But the fact that they are announcing a complete phase out is still encouraging: coal’s decline isn’t likely to plateau out with a reduced market share. It’s going to go the way of whale oil and steam trains.

Among his many promises, President Trump claimed he would bring work back to the coal miners, and now they’re waiting for it to happen. Congress has followed his lead in the matter, as reported by The New York Times:

Republicans on Thursday took one of their first steps to officially dismantle Obama-era environmental regulations by easing restrictions on coal mining, bolstering an industry that President Trump has made a symbol of America’s neglected heartland.

Using an obscure law that allows Congress to review regulations before they take effect, the Senate voted to reverse the Stream Protection Rule, which seeks to protect the nation’s waterways from debris generated by a practice called surface mining. The Interior Department had said the rule would protect 6,000 miles of streams and 52,000 acres of forests by keeping coal mining debris away from nearby waters.

CNN/Money explains why they think this is just shouting:

Despite Trump’s best intentions and regulation-busting actions, experts don’t believe they will be enough to save coal.

That’s because coal has a fierce competitor in the form of natural gas. It’s cheap, it’s clean and there’s a ton of it in the U.S. Plus, Trump himself supports expanded drilling of U.S. shale, the chief source of the boom in natural gas.

“The coal jobs aren’t coming back,” said James Van Nostrand, director of the Center for Energy and Sustainable Development at West Virginia University College of Law.

He called it “nonsense” to think lighter regulation will change that. “The coal industry is being pounded by market forces. It’s not regulation,” he said.

Even Robert Murray, the CEO of the largest U.S. private coal miner, thinks Trump is going to have a hard time keeping his coal promises.

West Virginia power plant
Source: Steam Engine Revolution

In a very real sense, and honestly no offense to the President or the GOP portion of Congress, but this is a betrayal of the coal-miners. Most of the out of work miners will probably never see the inside of a coal mine again, except as tourists. Coal is a dirty fuel, even without regard to climate change; I have a friend who is currently suffering from mercury poisoning, no doubt brought on by the burning of coal and its absorption into the oceanic food chain – he’s a tuna addict. There are cleaner alternatives, both fossil and renewables, that are cheaper or nearly cheaper than coal. And in the export market, the United States is not a dominant force; that position is taken up by Indonesia.

This is a false hope. Rather than trying to return to a Golden Age that will never be there for them again, we should be looking at how best to take care of those who worked in the coal industry, identifying those who need retraining, and get to work on taking care of the business of taking care of Americans. It’s a technology which was very useful a century ago, when its use didn’t damage the environment in meaningful ways, but today we need better solutions – and better thinking from the President and Congress. So far, they have been very disappointing in their performance.

As Reuters is reporting, GOP ideology is not the same as conservatism – especially when said conservative benefits from a government program. Rep. Chaffetz (R-Utah) had recently proposed legislation to sell off public lands – land used by hunters. Then he got caught in a snowstorm of complaints:

Republican U.S. Congressman Jason Chaffetz said on Thursday he plans to withdraw a bill that would have sold off more than 3 million acres of federal land to private interests after it drew a barrage of negative comments from hunters and outdoor enthusiasts….

“I’m a proud gun owner, hunter and love our public lands,” the Utah representative said in a comment, beneath a photo he posted of himself outdoors wearing hunting gear and holding a dog. “I hear you and HR 621 dies tomorrow,” added Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

I think the ideologically driven may discover there’s a lot of folks who don’t much attention to politics – until their apple cart is upset. Then, much like the Democrats were surprised in the recent elections, so will the GOP be surprised.

It’s a problem I’ve noticed with politicians and politic-groupies. For them, the world of politics is central, exciting, fun, and gives them a purpose – and, like a lot of people, they think everyone is like them, outside of a few cranks.

They even have a point. Governance is an important part of our cultural landscape.

And because of endemic human urges, they think they’re right and that most folks agree with them.

But a majority of the citizenry doesn’t care for it. Not a whit. You go out and vote because it’s a civic duty if you’re one of the 50% of the country actually susceptible to that sort of argument; if you’re not, you don’t worry about it. Election Day has slightly different traffic patterns, some people are wearing red stickers on their shirts, that’s all.

And, you know, in a country where a lot of us work way more than 40 hours a week, we’re raising kids, taking care of the house, and pursuing quite a few hobbies that have little to do with government (I used to say “go bowling and drink beer,” but I think that’s lost relevance), it’s not surprising that interviews with voters seem like they’re done through a dirty window. The voter is ill-informed (especially if they’re watching Fox News), votes how the family has traditionally voted (never mind that both parties have changed quite a lot over the years), or only votes for the City Council member that happens to live on their block. As an Irish software engineer once told me on her visit to our country, “You’re so big! No wonder you don’t know anything about other countries!” And we often don’t think big.

But someone’s bull was about to be gored, the word got out in hobby-land, and now we’re seeing a little of how politics works in the common citizenry – “forest rangers”, to make a metaphor, keep an eye on government and sound the alarm when a resource valued by the hobby is threatened, and the sleepy citizens suddenly leap to their feet and assault the fetid legislator who thought he was doing good.

Similar reactions may occur as other extreme GOP ideological points approach implementation. Indeed, there’s been several stories about the expected repeal of the ACA triggering panicky reactions among voters who have come to depend on it.

Look for more.

Snow sculptures from the St Paul Winter Carnival.