We’re In Hot Water

The Daily Escape:

Harbor Seals hauling out on a buoy in Petersburg, AK. Wrongo and Ms. Right were passing by in a zodiac – July 2023 photo via the cruise line

It seems like it’s going to stay hot for a long while, and nobody wants to do anything about it. Temperatures are rising both on land and at sea, with climate experts ringing alarm bells about unprecedented sea surface temperatures:

“The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in late June warned that half of the world’s oceans may experience marine heat wave conditions by September.”

And it’s hitting close to home:

“Not only is Florida sizzling in record-crushing heat, but the ocean waters that surround it are scorching, as well. The unprecedented ocean warmth around the state — connected to historically warm oceans worldwide — is further intensifying its heat wave and stressing coral reefs, with conditions that could end up strengthening hurricanes.”

The NYT reported that the water temperature around Florida hit 90° yesterday.

And while it’s possible to score cheap political points on their governor DeSantis who would rather fight with Mickey Mouse and whatever “Woke” means this week while ignoring climate change, Wrongo won’t stoop to that. He’s sure that Floridians love their governor’s priorities. Just last week, as insurance companies were pulling out of Florida, DeSantis was saying not to worry, the insurers will return to Florida after the hurricane season.

As Pogo said many years ago: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Primarily, the enemy is the Republican politician who continues to vote against efforts to bring the world’s CO2 levels under some semblance of control. The fixes to climate change that will have the most impact involve changes in public policy that will never happen as long as Republicans hold enough votes to block them.

But the big idea is that we’re not going back to where we were heat-wise, no matter what we do to cut further CO2 emissions. As NYT journalist Jeff Goodell said on NPR: (brackets by Wrongo)

“We are moving into a different world, and we need to grasp that idea….the planet is heating up…because we’re putting CO2 into the atmosphere…..It is essentially permanent when we put it [CO2] up there….And the warming will not stop until we stop emitting CO2 and burning fossil fuels….And even if we stop [adding more] CO2, we are stuck with that warming planet for a very long time.”

So, even if at this moment we made huge changes, we would always be on this part of the temperature scale, unless we figure out how to take quite a bit of that CO2 out of the atmosphere.

A few red state legislatures are considering following South Carolina’s lead and simply banning all mention of global warming or climate change in official documents or state-funded research. They think the only real way to deal with the climate problem is to ignore it.

Worse, nobody has a good model for what happens when all that warm water sits and gets warmer. Some meteorologists have pointed out that if the Caribbean got hot enough, it could spawn a continuous series of Category 5 hurricanes, say, once a week from May to October.

Which would resolve the problem of insuring Florida’s oceanfront properties pretty quickly.

It’s becoming evident that we live in a world designed for a climate that no longer exists. What’s really sobering is that the climate that now exists won’t resemble the one that will exist a generation from now.

How our societies and political systems deal with this is the central question of the 21st century.

Wrongo and Ms. Right moved back to New England from California partly because of climate. We were concerned about how scarce water would become in Los Angeles, and we knew that Connecticut would have more water for longer. This week, several of our roads and bridges closed because we had too much rain, causing the Housatonic River to overflow its banks.

This shows that there are no longer any places that can be marked safe from climate change. It has become impossible to predict the future climate/weather anywhere based on the past. And we’re still not coming to terms with just how hot and dangerous things are becoming. Or how fast it’s happening.

Let’s close the week with a wake up tune. Here’s “The Effects of Climate Change on Densely Populated Areas” by People Under The Stairs, a hip hop group from LA formed in 1997:

Sample Lyric:

Hundred degrees at midnight for the third day in a row
Nobody sleepin’ well and I can feel the tension growin’
LA wth rollin’ brownouts, rollin’ papers and rollin’ sixties
Heat exhaustion increasing caution across the city
Some people hit the mall, they’re tryin’ to stay cool
Some people call the cops; “there’s black children in the pool”
Everybody’s lookin’ sideways, we’re ragin’ on the highways
I hate it, I’m tryin’ to stay hydrated and faded but my way Is blocked
By road construction like a scene from “Falling Down”
Cops, they tryin’ to function but it seems they takin’ down us
Brown people at will People get hot and then killed
As the sun begins to set it’s hotter, no-one can chill
Everybody’s windows open there’s not a moment of silence
Alcohol heatin’ frustration that’s increasing domestic violence
9-1-1 is overwhelmed, homie, guess you on your own

The hills are still on fire, I recommend you stay at home

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Saturday Soother – January 28, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Outside Mayfield, Utah – January 2023 photo by Robert Stevens

Wrongo read a review of two books on US agriculture in the New York Review of Books. The books are “Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It” by Tom Philpott, and “The Farmer’s Lawyer: The North Dakota Nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm” by Sarah Vogel.

The review is written by Ian Frazier. This gives you an idea of his writing:

“We are eating a big hole in the middle of the Midwest and sucking up California’s ancient aquifers until the land collapses like an empty juice box. The awe that new arrivals from other countries feel when they see the bounty in a US supermarket is an illusion—more like what one might experience when stepping from a cold night into a nice, warm house where they’re burning the furniture. In short, we are plundering the natural sources of our food production and can’t go on this way.”

All of this is Big Agriculture’s doing. Corporate farming controls most of our agriculture, but it’s facing the challenge that American consumers can eat only about 1,500 pounds of food per person per year and the US population is only growing at about a half percent/year. But the investors behind Big Ag want more profit than supplying food to a slowly growing US population. So their strategy is to get Americans to eat more, and to find new foreign markets.

Philpott concentrates on just two of the US’s top food-producing regions: California’s Central Valley and the Iowa-centered Corn Belt.

The CA Central Valley constitutes about half of California’s cropland. Smaller farms concentrate on fruits while the large corporate farms mostly concentrate on nuts. Nuts are a highly profitable crop with low labor costs, but they need enormous amounts of water: To grow a single almond requires about a gallon of water.

Frazier says that almond groves cover about a fifth of the San Joaquin Valley and consume four times as much water as the city of Los Angeles:

“…I eat plenty of nuts myself, including almonds. Looking in the pantry, I see I possess the almond-growing equivalent of a few dozen bathtubfuls of California water.”

Philpott points out that TIAA, a leading provider of financial services owns a 40% stake in Treehouse California Almonds. The Farmland Index, which tracks the performance of agricultural investments, has outperformed the Standard & Poor’s index 11.8% to 9.6% in recent decades.

One problem with California’s Ag dominance is that it takes an increasing share of an increasingly scarce water supply. When irrigation water from snow and rain is scarce, as it has been for decades, farmers pump more of California’s groundwater. Nobody can say when the groundwater will run out because nobody knows how much CA has.

Turning to the Midwest, Frazier points out that the Corn Belt is one and a half times the size of California’s farming acreage. The Corn Belt uses so much fertilizer that it delivers a huge amount of polluted agricultural runoff via the Mississippi down to the Gulf of Mexico. Off of Louisiana, there’s a marine dead zone the size of New Jersey.

Huge companies dominate Midwest farming, from fertilizer and seed manufacturers to large and expensive farm machinery equipment. There is concentration in the companies that buy, process and ship the grain: Three companies: Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), and Ingredion control 87% of the US corn market. Four companies: ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Ag Processing handle 85% of the soybeans.

It is cheaper to raise pork in the US than it is in China because our feed is cheaper. Smithfield is the world’s largest pork producer and is Chinese-owned. AND, the 23 million hogs in Iowa along with Iowa’s other livestock produce as much excrement every year as do 168 million humans.

This data are called “fecal equivalent”. Iowa produces the same amount as the world’s eleven largest cities. Shouldn’t that be on Iowa’s license plate?

But the headline is that mid-sized and small farms are dying. Frazier says that midsize farms are too small to compete with the corporate farms in volume and price. OTOH, they are too big to be supported by the farmers’ outside income. In her book, Sara Vogel says the midsize farm is in danger of going extinct:

“In today’s economy [they] wouldn’t have a prayer.”

Frazier closes by wondering who in agriculture will work to save our environment. He concludes that Big Ag won’t try. A disturbing, but important article.

Time to take a break from politics and economics. It’s also time to ignore that inflation is down and an asteroid narrowly missed the earth. Instead, let’s relax with our Saturday Soother. Readers who are into football will spend their Sunday watching the NFL’s division championship games. That will probably include Wrongo. To kick off our weekend, listen to Alexandra Whittingham and Stephanie Jones perform “Helping Hands” by Sergio Assad. Assad is a Brazilian guitarist. We have featured Whittingham here before, but Jones is new to us:

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Monday Wake Up Call – September 19, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Willard Beach, South Portland, ME – September 2022 photo by Eric Storm Photo

Last week, Wrongo wrote about how if you know a little about politics, your issues are guns, abortion, and taxes. We need to think about adding immigration to that list. Blog reader Craig G. asked, “when is enough, enough?” in response to Wrongo’s column on DeSantis sending immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard.

It’s a great question. We tend to think of immigration as an American/Mexican border problem, but it is much, much worse than that. The UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees reported in May 2022, that the world, for the first time in history, had 100 million forcibly displaced people either in camps or on the move.

Of those who were on the move, “conflict and violence” accounted for 14.4 million, and “weather-related events” accounted for 23.7 million. The distinction between these numbers is often hard to understand. The civil war in Syria for example, produced large numbers of refugees. In 2021, more than 6.8 million refugees were from Syria, more than any other country in the world. At the same time, another 6.9 million people were displaced within Syria. The Syrian civil war followed the most profound drought ever recorded in what used to be the Fertile Crescent.

About 100 million migrants is huge, more than the population of Germany, Turkey or, Vietnam. But it could get worse as the impacts of climate change broaden throughout the 3rd world. The International Organization for Migration has predicted that we could see 1.5 billion people forced from their homes by 2050.

These numbers are staggering. Now couple them with America’s declining birth rate. Econofact reports that the US birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007. They say the decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes. So, what if it continues while the number of people knocking on America’s doors continues to grow?

As Craig G. implies, there could come a time when all Americans will agree to limit immigration. Otherwise, a smaller, aging America will be asking what some on the Right are asking today: Who are the “real” Americans? What do we owe recent immigrants?

The Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1 says:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

How will we adjust when the majority of our population are from different cultures, different races and speak different languages? The children of first-generation immigrants generally are well-adapted to the broad American culture; for the most part, they sound and act like Americans. If they were born here they ARE Americans. But the first generation migrant has an understandably difficult time.

This has caused the Right and specifically, the Christian nationalists on the right to be stingy about who they say is a true American, despite when many kids of immigrants are born here in America.The 14th Amendment doesn’t require any ideological, racial or language prerequisite.

Our low birth rates mean we can’t replace our population, so our economic growth will slow. If we replace our population with immigrants, we’ll have economic growth, but our culture will inexorably change.

Our history gives us some pointers. Immigration to the US peaked in the 19th century in the decade 1880-89 when it reached 5,248,568. The first decade of the 20th century saw another record with 8,202,388 people entering the country. In 1910, 75% of the population of New York, Chicago, Detroit and Boston consisted of first and second generation immigrants.

Remember that the US population was 62,979,766 in 1890, an increase of 25.5% percent since the prior census in 1880.  Contrast that with today. Stastia says that 710,000 legal immigrants arrived here in 2021, and that we had 11.39 million illegal immigrants living in the US at year end 2018. We’re five times larger today.

Think about it: In 1890, our foreign-born population was 9.2 million. The total US population was 62.9 million. 5.2/62.9 = 14.6% of our population were immigrants. In 2018, out foreign-born population is 44.8 million. 44.8/320 million in US = 14.0%. Is our problem worse today?

Time to wake up America! A tsunami of immigrants will try to move from the 3rd world to the developed world. The numbers will be staggering, beyond anything experienced so far by Europe or the US. Our ability to cope with so many people in motion in some even modestly humane fashion will determine the character of our country over the next century.

To help you wake up, listen to John Moreland perform “Ugly Faces” from his 2022 album “Birds in the Ceiling”.

Sample Lyric:

You’re seeing ugly faces in your dreams
Let me know what it means
We told ourselves we’d tell it true
But I learned how to lie, watching you
This dirty place don’t want you here
Looks like you’re stuck another year
You close your eyes, a scene rolls by
A strip mall under sunburst sky
My back was to a corner, lonely in a crowd
I couldn’t hear you calling, the bullshit was so loud

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We Won’t Manage Our Water Resources

The Daily Escape:

Louvre, Paris – 2017 photo by Brotherside

Let’s leave North Korea and the G-7 for others to worry about. Wrongo suggests that you read “Crisis on the High Plains: The Loss of America’s Largest Aquifer- the Ogallala” from the University of Denver’s Water Law Review. Here’s the key section:

The Ogallala Aquifer supports an astounding one-sixth of the world’s grain produce, and it has long been an essential component of American agriculture.

This isn’t new news. There were plenty of environmental writers in the 1980’s and 1990’s highlighting the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer as the biggest single threat to world food supplies.

The Ogallala is an interconnected series of water bodies, not one single geological water body. That implies that the last drop extracted from a New Mexico well will not cause immediate drought in Nebraska. But it is still possible that catastrophic depletion could occur over a tight enough timescale to cause a major disruption of US food supplies, especially in light of climate change. Here is a map of the Ogallala that shows the depletion of water from about 1950 to 2015:

Source: USGS SIR 2017-5040

Sadly, the prospect of the US managing our water resources seems well beyond our will and ability. We also see this in California, where the aquifers in the Central Valley are being depleted by farming.

Most of the time, the primary cause of water depletion is the decision of farmers to grow crops which are unsuitable for the local climate, invariably for financial reasons. The only true solution is a long term retreat from high water demand crops grown in semi-arid areas, in favor of growing them in more suitable areas.

And who are these farmers?  We know about the corporate farms in the Midwest, but some farmers are actually foreign countries. This from NPR: (emphasis by Wrongo)

Outside of Phoenix, in the scorching Arizona desert, sits a farm that Saudi Arabia’s largest dairy uses to grow hay for cows back home. That dairy company, named Almarai, bought the farm last year and has planted thousands of acres of groundwater-guzzling alfalfa to make that hay. Saudi Arabia can’t grow its own hay anymore because those crops drained its own ancient aquifer.

More:

They got about 15 water wells when they purchased the property. Now, each one of those wells can pump about 1.5 billion gallons of water. It’s an incredible amount of water they’re going to be drawing up from that aquifer underground…

The remarkable thing about this Saudi Arabian company is that it did the same thing in Saudi until the water ran out. The aquifers they used to grow hay and alfalfa at home simply went dry, and the Saudi government told its dairy companies to start importing hay from elsewhere.

It turns out that hay yields in the desert are the best in the US. You can literally get three or four times as much hay growing in the desert because you have a very long growing season: It’s hot, so the hay dries really quickly once it’s cut. It turned out this was such a good idea, the UAE decided to buy a farm in Arizona too.

America has already given away our manufacturing capability, and thereby created the rust belt. Now, we’ve decided to “export” our water.

Saudi Arabia’s amber waves of grain. Because, “free trade.”

The Ogallala article mentions that, if everyone immediately reduced their usage by 20%, the aquifer should last another 100 years. That’s the generation of Wrongo’s great-great-grandchildren (as yet unborn).

Not much time if you think that the Ogallala has been with us for 10,000+ years.

If we believed that the water resource should belong to those who must pay to replenish and renew it, rather than to those who can monetize it most profitably, our property rights laws would have to be different.

But we don’t, and they aren’t.

Our culture is predatory.

When the spoils are eaten, there is no more. Who will we turn on then?

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Rural Towns Have Polluted Water. Will Trump’s Plan Fix It?

The Daily Escape:

Valley of Desolation, Eastern Cape, South Africa – 2018 photo by Ottho Heldring

The Trump infrastructure plan asks states and cities to partner with private equity to build their roads, bridges and water treatment plants. As the WSJ explains, private equity says they are not interested. Apparently, they don’t want to build things; they prefer to purchase existing assets: (emphasis by Wrongo)

Fund managers say they are mainly looking for assets that are already privately owned—such as renewable energy, railroads, utilities and pipelines—and not the deteriorating government-owned infrastructure like roads and bridges that helped attract the capital in the first place. To the extent they are interested in public assets, the focus is more likely to be on privatizing existing infrastructure than on new development—the heart of Mr. Trump’s push.

One area where private equity may think they have a role to play is with America’s threatened water systems, which are existing assets. When people think of water crises, they think of places like Flint, Michigan, because a failed urban water system affects huge numbers of people. If you’re worried about the quality of your drinking water, take a look at https://waterfilterway.com/.

But most health-based violations of drinking-water standards occur in small towns. Of the 5,000 US drinking-water systems that racked up health-based violations in 2015, more than 50% were systems that served 500 people or fewer.

But when we add up the total number of people affected, rural America’s drinking-water situation is an order of magnitude greater than Flint’s. Millions of rural Americans are subject to unhealthy levels of contaminants in their drinking water, largely from agriculture and coal mining.

And as the rural/urban economic gap grows, this basic inequality won’t get fixed unless something radical is done to improve water quality in rural America.

Agriculture is the culprit in many rural towns, and unhealthy levels of nitrates is the primary cause. Nitrogen-based fertilizer runs off of farmlands and into the nation’s fresh water. The health impact of ingesting nitrates is serious:

  • Two-thirds of communities with nitrate levels at or above 5 ppm are in 10 states where agriculture is big business.
  • Almost three-fourths of communities whose drinking water is at or above the legal limit are found in just five states – Arizona, California, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

Remediation costs vary, but a 2012 report from the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis gives a yardstick. They say that a community of just under 5,000 people could incur annual costs ranging from $195,000 to $1.1 million to build and operate an ion exchange system, while a reverse osmosis system would cost from $1.1 million to $4 million a year. A $4 million system would cost $800 per citizen.

These costs may be far beyond the ability of small towns to finance. What is really going on here is another case of “socializing losses”. Farms are polluting the water, and the town is left to pay for remediation. And the big agriculture lobbies are making sure that their members avoid any liability for poisoning their towns.

We know that we haven’t been able to fund Flint’s water remediation with public funds. How will we deal with the rest of America’s polluted drinking water? It isn’t likely that towns and cities can do much more. Some cities have debt capacity, the capital markets may be willing to lend to them. However, hostility to new taxes on the local level means that issuing new debt is difficult politically for mayors and town councils.

Trump’s infrastructure plan opens up the Clean Water State Revolving Fund (CWSRF). This federal financial assistance program for water infrastructure projects would allow private firms to both manage and repair water infrastructure at taxpayer’s expense. Previously, only states and municipalities could access the fund.

Funneling CWSRF funds to private water system providers means our most vulnerable towns will have to turn over basic infrastructure to for-profit companies. And those companies will charge for the privilege. On average, private for-profit water utilities charge households 59% more than local governments charge for drinking water, an extra $185 a year.

When your water is poisoning you, should you agree to raise water rates to fix it, or do you expect to get pure water for the money you are already paying?

What if you are unable to move to a place where the water is safe?

If your water system will cost $ millions for a town of 500, how can it possibly be paid for, except by public funding?

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – April 23, 2017

Sorry for the lack of columns; Wrongo has an acute case of Trump Fatigue. It is difficult to: a) think of anyone or anything else, and b) when writing a column, everything seems linked to every other thing, and none of you want to read a thousand-word rant. On to the rich harvest of cartoons.

Le Pen’s ballots in today’s election in France may be enough to force the big box to open:

The March for Science, unsurprisingly, has opposition:

 

It isn’t enough to just think about the planet on Earth Day:

Fox replaces O’Reilly with another loser:

Why do we still call it the Presidency when the differences are so stark?

Why would millions of people willingly watch a real-time murder?

 

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Monday Wake Up Call – June 6, 2016

We know that D-Day was June 6, 1944, but what does the “D” in D-Day, stand for?

Apparently, this is a frequently asked question by visitors to The National WWII Museum. But the answer isn’t simple. Disagreements between military historians and etymologists about the meaning of D-Day abound. Here are two explanations:

In Stephen Ambrose’s D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, Ambrose writes:

Time Magazine reported on June 12 1944 that ‘as far as the U.S. Army can determine, the first use of D for Day, H for Hour was in Field Order No. 8, of the First Army, A.E.F., issued on Sept. 20, 1918, which read, ‘The First Army will attack at H-Hour on D-Day with the object of forcing the evacuation of the St. Mihiel salient.’ (p. 491)

In other words, Ambrose reports the D in D-Day stands for “Day.” But In Paul Dickson’s War Slang, he quotes General Eisenhower:

When someone wrote to General Eisenhower in 1964 asking for an explanation, his executive assistant Brigadier General Robert Schultz answered: ‘General Eisenhower asked me to respond to your letter. Be advised that any amphibious operation has a ‘departed date’; therefore the shortened term ‘D-Day’ is used.’ (p.146)

It’s an enigma wrapped inside of a mystery. A continuing enigma is the lack of accountability by both our elected officials and our state and national bureaucrats. Today’s travesty was reported in the UK’s Guardian:

Despite warnings of regulators and experts, water departments in at least 33 cities used testing methods over the past decade that could underestimate lead found in drinking water.

These tests are taken annually and sent to the EPA in Washington. The 33 offending cities were in 17 different states. Of the cities, 21 used the same failed water testing methods that were used in Flint MI. Additional findings:

  • Michigan and New Hampshire advised water departments to give themselves extra time to complete tests so that if lead contamination exceeded federal limits, officials could re-sample and remove results with high lead levels.
  • Some cities denied knowledge of the locations of lead pipes, failed to sample the required number of homes with lead plumbing or refused to release lead pipe maps, claiming that would be a security risk.

Since the Flint water crisis erupted last year, school districts from coast to coast have stepped up testing of fountains and sinks. From Newark to Boston to Detroit, city after city has reported elevated levels of lead in the water of some educational buildings. The Portland OR schools have the problem and the school district has been aware of it for years. But the federal government doesn’t actually require most schools to test, so few do.

Apparently, the federal EPA has known since 2001 that its testing guidelines were weak. They are working on “long-term revisions” to its lead and copper rule, which are expected in 2017. Or sometime.

From Ian Welsh:

No regulator worth its salt, who is doing their job, could have missed entire States and large cities cheating, because any regulator worth its salt does its own audits and testing.

Republicans do not see this as a problem. Yes, there have been apologies, but no federal funding to remediate the problem. In fact, Fitch Rating Service estimates that capital costs to replace the nation’s lead water service lines could exceed $275 billion.

Republicans expect Mr. Market to take care of issues like this, once we privatize our water supply.

After all, aren’t invisible hands already cleaning the lead from the brains of America’s children?

It’s the miracle of market self-regulation.

Time for a wake-up call for all who think that business as usual is acceptable for our aging infrastructure, and in the case of our water supply, our poisonous infrastructure. Let’s look back to a time when America could do great things, even if it cost real dough. In 1977, we sent the Voyager I and II interstellar satellites off into space with a record of the things we thought made Earth unique. The music we sent was picked by Carl Sagan. This link lists all of the music we sent into the cosmos. One of his picks was by Blind Willie Johnson, “Dark Was the Night”, which has no lyrics, but creates a mood of loneliness. Here is “Dark Was the Night”:

This song will likely last longer than the human race. It’s doubtful that Blind Willie ever thought THAT was gonna happen.

What isn’t gonna happen is that our politicians decide on their own to be accountable to the rest of us.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – May 29, 2016

Californians will be pleased to know that when Donald Trump becomes president, he can stop their drought overnight. California just went through the driest four-year period on record.

But Trump isn’t sold. He told supporters in Fresno, CA that the dry spell is bogus. Trump said the state was denying water to Central Valley farmers to prioritize the Delta smelt, a native California fish nearing extinction — or as Trump called it: “a certain kind of three-inch fish.” He told the crowd:

We’re going to solve your water problem. You have a water problem that is so insane. It is so ridiculous where they’re taking the water and shoving it out to sea…

At least we know where Trump stands on the issue:

If I win, believe me, we’re going to start opening up the water so that you can have your farmers survive.

Never mind that this is a state, not a federal issue, because Trump will win on the environment too.

In other news, Hill’s email problem gives her a few hurdles:

COW Hillarys Hurdles

So far, we’ve heard what we already knew, she broke a rule that others had broken before her. Of course, to Republicans, breaking an agency rule is proof she’s broken the law. Maybe, but rules ain’t the same as the law. She needs to put this behind her, or face death by a thousand cuts.

We got our first look at Hill’s emails:

COW Hills Emoticon

Bill & Hill feel the Bern in CA:

COW kids in car

Trump and Bernie wanted to debate. You know who the target was:

COW Trump Bernie

Apparently, we have no antibiotic for the Superbug:

COW Superbug

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The GOP plans to make the transgender toilet rule a centerpiece in the campaign:

COW Toilet

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Can You Trust Your Local Government?

Citizens are supposed to be able to trust their elected governments, local, state and national. But, surveys show that Americans have very little trust in government. In fact, an October 2015 Pew Study shows that only 19% trust the federal government “all or most” of the time.

This brings us to Flint Michigan. Flint’s citizens have been drinking, cooking and bathing in poisonous water.

The decision to expose Flint residents to known risks of lead poisoning were made by an unaccountable “emergency manager” who was installed by the governor, Republican Rick Snyder, in order to solve the fiscal problems created by the city’s declining tax base.

In April 2014, Flint’s emergency manager, in order to save money, directed the water company to begin drawing water from the Flint River rather than from Detroit’s water system, which was deemed too costly ($1.5 million/month). But the river’s water was high in salt, which helped corrode Flint’s aging lead water pipes, leaching lead into the water supply.

Problems were apparent almost immediately: The water started to smell like rotten eggs. Engineers responded to that problem by increasing the chlorine level. GM discovered that city water was corroding engines at their Flint factory and switched sources.

Then children and others started getting rashes and falling sick. Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech environmental-engineering professor, found that the water had nearly 900 times the recommend EPA limit for lead particles. Yet as late as February 2015, even after tests showed dangerous lead levels, officials were telling residents there was no threat.

But in September 2015, two independent studies found that the lead levels in Flint’s water were absurdly high, and in October, 2015, Flint once again began buying water from Detroit.

On January 5th, 2016, Governor Rick Snyder declared a state of emergency due to lead in the water supply. The same day, the US Department of Justice announced that it is investigating what went wrong in the city. Several top officials have resigned, and Snyder apologized. But that’s cold comfort for Flint residents, particularly children, who are being poisoned by lead, which can cause irreversible brain damage and affect physical health.

And it could cost $1.5 billion to fix the problem, a staggering sum for a city struggling financially like Flint. Worse, six months ago, Rick Snyder’s Chief of Staff knew about it and expressed concern:

These folks are scared and worried about the health impacts and they are basically getting blown off by us (as a state we’re just not sympathizing with their plight).

So, the Flint story is hands down one of the worst abuses of government power in a long time. Money took precedence over people’s health. An unaccountable emergency manager who in a possibly well-intended effort to save the city $1.5 million a month in water fees, changes the source to the Flint River. In December 2014, a city employee tested the water of a woman whose son had gotten a rash after swimming in a pool.

He found that the lead level in her water was 104 parts per billion, about seven times greater than the lead level the EPA deems “actionable.”

BTW, Michigan voters repealed the Emergency Manager Law in 2012, but the Republican-controlled state legislature then passed a more far-reaching, emergency-manager law, one that could not be repealed.

So, what conclusions can we draw? Could the failure in Flint be used by conservatives to say?

See? You can’t even trust government to provide you with clean water anymore. We need to privatize the water company right now!

Or, the really damning take away is the emergency manager tried to save some money in a way that actually requires more money be spent, but did it anyway, apparently after being told about the problem, which poisoned people!.

OTOH, the fine citizens of Michigan re-elected Mr. Snyder, who took away the democratically elected team in Flint, and granted power to his appointed Publican. But the voters are not to blame. It is one thing to accept some right-wing economic BS, or to be too lazy to vote.

The penalty for either of those shouldn’t be that your government poisons you and your children.

St. Ronnie told us government was the problem, not the solution. And Rick Snyder’s cost-cutting steps seem to prove Ronnie was right (at least if government is run by the GOP).

It is hard to care about “Islamic terrorism” when your government knowingly poisons your city’s water supply in order to save money (in the short term).

And what is the criminal penalty for 10,000 cases of child endangerment?

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Are the Bundys America’s Y’all Qaeda?

Off Topic: Here is your last Santa photo of the season. Santa dodges tear gas in Bethlehem, 2015:

Santa in Bethlehem

 

 

Source: The Economist

Everyone is following the story of the standoff in Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, waiting for the next ugly shoe to drop: Will the authorities shut down the Ammon Bundy crew? Will bullets fly? Will they wait them out? As Josh Marshall said: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

…we just confirmed from Oregon State police the Ammon Bundy and his crew, who appear to be running low on supplies (Fritos, beef jerky, pizza, etc.) are actually free to come and go as they please. So if they need more food they can just leave the standoff, drive off to the nearest grocery store on a food run and come back and keep up the historic siege.

More from Marshall:

We look at the ridiculously inconsistent way law enforcement handles white right-wing freaks as opposed to other people who break the law or threaten violence…the import should not be that federal law enforcement should just rush in and kill everyone. Using force should be a last resort. And, within reason, if you can just wait people out and then charge them with whatever crimes they committed, great.

Seems like some liberals are willing to work really hard not to create an incident with the Bundy crew, or as Tengrain calls them, Y’all Qaeda. Here’s Booman, commenting on Marshall:

The double standard in how these white men are treated and how, say, Tamir Rice was treated couldn’t be more glaring. However, delivering Ruby Ridge Part Deux just to be consistent is maybe the dumbest idea ever written down by a liberal. The easiest way to end a siege is simply to refuse to besiege them.

Wrongo gets that the Feds and the local authorities don’t want another Waco or Ruby Ridge, but if we had nipped the Bundy problem in the bud when it arose in Nevada, this subsequent event might not have happened.

The Malheur was poorly managed before and after the government took over. Nancy Langston, professor of environmental history at Michigan Technological University wrote about Malheur in the NYT:

By the 1930s, after four decades of overgrazing, irrigation withdrawals, grain agriculture, dredging and channelization, followed by several years of drought, Malheur had become a dust bowl.

The Bundys and fellow travelers refuse to accept that We, the People, already own and run the land. That we determine how to use it. The protesters might not like this, but even if it went back into private hands, it would be a matter of little time before overgrazing brings back dust bowl conditions to the area, and these free marketers ask for federal disaster assistance.

The common thread is the continuing story of corporate welfare in the American West: under-market grazing fees, under-market water rights, under-priced mineral rights, crop subsidies, ad nauseam. And the cry is always the same: “the government is ruining our way of life” (by interrupting the flow of subsidies). The question is whether this “way of life” is sustainable if it’s not supported by the American taxpayer.

Back to the occupation of the Wildlife Refuge:

‱ We can ignore them until they get bored and go home, but what if they don’t go home?
‱ OTOH, we can say it’s an armed standoff with the federal government. The very opposite of legitimate protest.

We need to remember that this has its genesis with Cliven Bundy in Utah. There, the Feds backed down to avoid an armed incident, and Cliven Bundy still has not paid his grazing fees. It’s as if threatened violence caused the US government back down. We acted moderately, and now 21 months later, another Bundy is edging up to another armed standoff about other federal land in Oregon.

When we are moderate in the Middle East, the neo-cons say we are emboldening the bad guys. If we move on these guys with guns, the neo-cons will say we are stopping a legitimate protest.

Let’s ask the Y’all Qaeda to leave, letting them know the legal penalties for staying.

Finally, if all else fails, send in unarmed officers to arrest them. The feds should ask for volunteer officers to go in 100% unarmed to arrest these people.

They should tell the media exactly what’s happening. Let every cable and network television channel go live as the federal officers go in, armed only with handcuffs.

Don’t shoot our way in, making them martyrs or giving them a defense of armed self-protection.

If the situation gets adversarial, then of course arrest them, by any means necessary.

See you on Sunday.

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