Author: Mark J. Heinicke

It’s Sedimentary: Rethinking the Role of Mud

Sediment starvation is another slowly building crisis, but at least this one has more tractable solutions than Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) from Greenhouse Gases (GHG). Check out this piece in Yale Environment 360 that sketches out the problem and the solutions:
Sediment Loss and Restoration

As the article says, Southern Louisiana has lost 2,000 square miles of land and 20% of its wetlands since the 1930’s, when the Army Corps of Engineers set upon the Mississippi River with all the water-taming tools at its disposal. Throughout the world, 57,600 large dams and innumerable small ones are trapping sediment which would otherwise enrich downstream ecosystems.* Robin Grossinger of the San Francisco Estuary Institute likens it to “starving” the ecosystems of “nutrients, minerals, and vitamins [that] these systems need to grow and adapt.”*

Read the article in Yale Environment 360 linked above, for a look at ongoing and potential ways to redistribute trapped sediment, even without necessarily dismantling dams.

Continue reading “Rescuing Mud, Battling Carbon: Not Commensurate”

A Different Game for Trump, and He Doesn’t Get It

Should we take Donald Trump at his word (always a dangerous practice) that he would like to renegotiate the Paris Climate Agreement on terms more favorable to the U.S.—or is he just knowingly making an empty offer to cover his intransigence with a pretense of flexibility?

Sanity would plead the latter—no matter how transparent the pretense, he can say to his base in 2020, “Look, I offered to negotiate but the liberals are still whining. The failed deal is on their heads.”

But let’s just suppose that President Trump has some illusion that he can actually get a new “deal” from 197 other countries. What does that tell us about the world of carnival mirrors he inhabits?

Continue reading “The Art of the No Deal”

It seems that just about every irony you can invent dogs the Presidency of Donald Trump—the latest being that on the same day Trump was ranting about how the whole world was laughing at us, Vladimir Putin was admitting, in his characteristically oblique fashion, that Russia really was behind the hacking of the DNC and revelation of yet more Hillary Clinton emails.

This after months of Putin allowing Trump, flailing about with indignation, to speculate publicly about how many other possibilities for election tampering there were besides Russians—despite the agreement among several U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia was indeed behind the hacking.

(A Trump realization: Oops! So it was the Russians, after all? You mean, maybe they’re the ones who got me elected?)

So if any foreign country’s leaders are laughing at us, it would be the Russians.

You gotta admit, Vladimir Putin is a master of dissembling, on everything from the invasion of Ukraine to war crimes in Syria to alleging he has no designs on the Baltic states. I watched the video of him identifying the hackers as most likely non-governmental Russian “patriots”—and there was virtually no sign of emotion besides a momentary sly smile.  (That smile was for YOU, Donald, you sucker!)

You don’t need late-night comedians to make a fool of Donald Trump, all you need is another leader with a similarly thuggish mentality who is always a step or two ahead of him. Stay tuned for more of the same in months to come.

 

 

 

Last evening (Thursday) Mike Lee—one of the 22 Republican senators who sent a letter to President Trump recommending withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement—was interviewed on PBS.  As you might expect, he asserted with a great show of solemnity that Trump’s decision was “the right thing to do” at least twice during the interview.

But what I didn’t quite expect was that the first thing out of his mouth was not about the Paris accord itself, nor was it about climate or jobs or the economy—no, it was about the way Obama had drawn the U.S. into the agreement without the consent of the Senate (as he, or course, had every right to do).

And there it was. . . another surfacing of the anti-Obama toxin that has steadily dripped through the veins of the Republican Party ever since 2008. If the Paris Agreement had been entered into by a President McCain or President Romney, do you think it would have taken such a pounding from Mike Lee, or any other of the Republican senators who have defied common sense and the will of the rest of the world?

Continue reading “It’s Not about Climate Change, It’s about Obama”

Darkening Future for Protesters

Thanks to some  dogged sleuthing on the part of investigative journalists at The Intercept, we can hear the pitter-patter of little security-agent feet taking baby steps toward a police state in the good old land of the free and the home of the brave. See:

Police State Rising

As you read the article, you may find yourself wondering, who is better entitled to be paranoid—pipeline builders  and their private police forces or pipeline protestors? OK, that’s rhetorical question, but I say it to underscore the imbalance between the two forces. The language used by security agency “TigerSwan” would be comical if it were not so darkly ominous: protestors are likened to jihadists, and combating the “anti-DAPL [anti-Dakota Access Pipeline] diaspora” calls for “aggressive intelligence preparation of the battlefield.”

Continue reading “Mercenaries Track Pipeline Protesters”

It’s as Insane as It Looks

Most of us, after we have recovered from the initial shock and horror of a suicide bombing such as the recent atrocity in Manchester, ponder the mystery of the suicide bomber. What could be the motivation for something so horrific?  Here is a person who commits an act that he knows 99.9% of humanity will consider monstrous.  It is an act done for a cause which any rational person will conclude is doomed—if by “cause” we mean the creation of a worldwide caliphate ruled by psychopaths such as the leaders of the Islamic State.

It’s irrational, and a lot more irrational than the common wisdom supposes. We generally conceive of the suicide bomber as a self-identified martyr—s/he is not crazed any more than the first wave of soldiers to hit Omaha Beach on D-Day.

Are suicide bombers “sane?” Some say that self-destructive zealots are sane if their acts are based on a belief system made legitimate by authorities who purport to translate the Mind of God.

Continue reading “Suicide Bombers and Mental Illness”

Beyond Fake News: Hidden Persuaders Shifting the Ground beneath Our Feet

Fifty years ago, Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders drew attention to the methods by which advertisers manipulated the psyches of consumers to desire certain things—in part to gain advantage over competitors selling things people needed (food, medicine, soap), and in part to get people to desire what they did not desire until the advertiser influenced them to (Caribbean vacations, cars with enormous fins, hula-hoops).

The advertising game has not changed a lot since then, and many of the devices used to influence consumers have become so transparent you’d think most of us would simply laugh—making an association between a car and an ocean wave, a candy bar and a seduction.  But somebody’s not laughing, otherwise sponsors would not be dishing out humongous gobs of money to keep the games going. (For now we leave aside the question of sponsors themselves  being duped, forking zillions over to ad agencies  for advertisements that don’t get proportional results.)

Continue reading “Goodby, Autonomy – Not That You’d Notice”

Keep your eyes open for Mad Magazine June issue with First Daughter and First Son-in-Law on the cover.

Kushner/Albert Hybrid Hits Mad Cover

Susan Collins, of All People, Engages in Double Speak: A Manifestation of Fear?

Maine Senator Susan Collins’s defense of the firing of James Comey was a very peculiar move—Collins being someone who is known for her willingness to buck the party line, in particular supporting the funding of Planned Parenthood (successfully), and voted (successfully! joined by McCain and Graham) against repeal of Obama administration regulations restricting methane emissions. (Whether Pruitt will enforce the regulation is, unfortunately another matter.)

So. . . what calls for explanation:

What’s most troubling is that an independent-minded Republican would resort to specious public statements in defense of Trump.

Continue reading “Cross Me, and I’ll Cut You Off at the Knees”