Category: Uncategorized

Should Al Franken resign? It’s Complicated.

At this very moment, 6:15 pm EST on November 17, Al Franken has neither resigned his seat in the Senate, nor declared positively that he’s not going to.

Of course, understandably, there have been calls for Franken’s political head.  The complainant has the goods. Even Roy Moore–a sexual predator far worse than Al Franken–  doesn’t have an  actual photo of him taking advantage of a woman.

I’ve been a fan of Al Franken from well before he was elected to the U.S. Senate.  As Senator, he has been a strong and effective voice for liberal politics.. I admire the man and like him, and am thankful for his service.

BUT:  there’s more at stake in the Al Franken scandal than an offense to a woman at a some comic moment that he must have thought at the time (being a man) was a harmless bit of fun. What’s at stake is the moral stature of the Democratic Party. Which is why I think Franken should resign. 

Continue reading “Franken: Should He or Shouldn’t He? The Bigger Issue”

At last someone at the top of a corporate hierarchy gets his comeuppance. The Supreme Court declined to take the case when top mining worm Don Blankenship appealed his mine safety conviction.

The Trump DOJ actually recommended to the Court not to take the case. It was a continuance of measures under the Obama administration.  We can surmise that the prosecutors on the case have for now flown under the gut-the-government radar. There are just so much staff you can axe without breaking down.  So, who knows what the Trump DOJ will do in similar circumstances going forward?

Blankenship turned down by Supreme Court

Yes!  Some good environmental health news for a change.  And evidently driven, on the demand side, by millenials. See:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-du-pont-results-health-idUSKBN1AC2ZP

Sure, you have to view the apparent changes in Big Chem cited in the Reuters article as grudging concessions supplemented by greenwashing. Nevertheless, minimally incremental progress toward the good is better than no progress toward the good.  And I am happy to see that those socially mediated young people are moving the consumer goalposts on at least one critical issue.

(Also check out the piece on Walmart and consumer preferences that follows the Big Chem piece. When it comes to buying American, the price is not always right—despite consumer professions of patriotic buying practices, when the actual purchase is made, patriotism takes a back seat.)

Crossing this line is worse than uncivil, and is no joke

In the face of more and more ominous signs that the President of the United States is inciting violence against journalists, what voice among Republicans has been lifted against him?  In any substantive way: none.

Now that Donald Trump has crossed a line by tweeting a cartoon of himself physically bashing a CNN journalist, it is time for some high-ranking Republican to denounce this behavior as WRONG—not merely inappropriate or tasteless or even “loathsome,” as they are euphemistically calling it, but flat-out wrong, and not just morally but in the sense of a threat to the free press and therefore Western democracy (such as it is).

Administration spokespersons are asking why Trump detractors “can’t take a joke.”  Well, it was a joke when posted on Reddit—probably as satire—but not a joke when appropriated by the President himself. Anyone who minimizes it has put himself or herself on the wrong side of an increasingly dangerous line.

Continue reading “The Creep toward Autocracy – Real or Imagined?”

Washington Post Sounds the Alarm on Bicycle Accident Medical Costs—Loudly

When I bicycled in DC and suburban Maryland more than a decade ago, I got used to the Washington Post’s editorials, op-eds, and letters to the editor being, on average,  biased against bicycles.  Now the Post has knocked cycling again by publishing a story headlined: “As bike commuting soars, so do injuries. Annual medical costs are now in the billions.”

(The byline was Ariana Eunjung Cha, and I’d put money on a bet she doesn’t commute by bicycle. But I wouldn’t put money on the likelihood of her having written the headline; that was the work of some editor in the vein of “cycling is a pain in the ass” Washington Post editorial culture.)

Continue reading “Knocking Bicycles – Again!”

[Dear Reader: please note that The Guardian has no paywall (yet), so if you read the article linked to below, you should really think of making a donation.  All the more so since journalists are under serious attack.]

The uproar over the somewhat-misnamed “Petya” ransomware attack has largely drowned out the near-certainty that the “ransom” part wasn’t the half of it.  Experts point to many clues that imply the malware was most probably a destructive virus disguised as ransomware—and its primary target was the government of Ukraine. See this article in The Guardian, and scroll down to the part titled “Who is behind the attack”:

More on “Petya” from The Guardian

There’s a deeper deception probably going on. One of the early targets was the Russian oil company Rosneft, but Rosneft reported its drilling operations were unaffected due to switching to a backup server system. Russian banks were also hit, but so far no disasters have been reported; the Russian central bank referred to “isolated cases” of infection.

Continue reading “Ransomware as Camouflage, and More Diversions”

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.