Honestly, I don’t know how long women of childbearing age can stay in Texas. I am grateful my daughters are settled in states where their health and lives are respected. Tuesday’s decision by the Fifth Circuit reaffirms how broken Texas is. I am using my A language here, because Momma’s watching from the great beyond, but what I really want to use is my F language.

And then there’s this. Too many people are suffering and dying from bad air. Bad air along industrial zones on the Gulf Coast is not news. Just ask Juanita Jean. Yet, the powers that be in these states (and the Supreme Court) don’t want government interference or the EPA telling them what to do, until they want to blame Joe Biden. You can’t have it both ways, guys. Voters, you need to hold your leaders accountable up and down the ballot. All Politics is Local, right?

This will sound harsh, and certainly doesn’t apply to Salon patrons who are doing all they can to turn things around, but no one in a clean air/water state is going to feel too sorry for you if you don’t help yourselves. I do know that some of us will be sending a little cash to candidates in foreign states who give a hoot, joining GOTV letter campaigns, and supporting our own legislators who understand how important a clean environment is for all of us. Especially with the impacts of climate change. After all, we are pro life no caps, have friends and family we care about, and are good American patriots in the purest sense of the word. Some of us are even fans of the NE Patriots, even when they have losing seasons (like they did when I was growing up). See how I lightened up this rant??? Tomorrow, I go back to drinking half-caf in the morning, I can’t keep this up.

If there isn’t landslide mail in, early and on site Election Day voting in 2024, I will be more disappointed than I was on election night 2016. Okay, maybe AS disappointed. That was a hell night I will never recover from, and an order of magnitude worse than election night 2000.  I’d better stock up the bar just in case. At this rate I won’t come close to Damp January, never mind Dry January. Who knows where things will be at by November. Hang on, it is going to be a wild ride.

Impressive video from historic floods in Germany.

https://youtu.be/WBuqQuTfYPo

File under “The Irony Causes Whiplash”, former CEO of now bankrupt Murray Energy Company, has filed for federal black lung benefits.  You’ll remember Bob Murray, the guy who presided over the Crandall Mine disaster that killed 9 in 2007, and then denied responsibility for it.  He’s also the litigious Trumpist who threatens to sue anyone who tells the truth publicly about him.  He unsuccessfully sued John Oliver for slander after Oliver truthfully reported on Murray’s lies, earning Oliver’s spectacular “Eat Shit, Bob” response last year.  For those who haven’t seen it, here it is in all of its profanity laced glory.

Murray, who is a life long climate change and science denier, lied for years that unprotected coal mining didn’t cause black lung when it’s an irrefutable fact that it does.  So here we have Ol’ Eat Shit, Bob himself, filing for federal black lung benefits for a disease he claims doesn’t exist.

My neck hurts.

The White House has announced that Trump is setting up an ad hoc panel of “scientists” to argue against scientific consensus on climate change.  Of course, actual scientists know that science doesn’t work that way – first you study and test hypotheses before you come to a conclusion…not the other way around.  Apparently, the panel is deemed “ad hoc” in order to skirt transparency regulations about advisory panels.  It figures.

Michael Lewis of Moneyball and The Big Short fame has a new book called The Fifth Risk.  This book describes the corruption/incompetency in the US government since Trump ascended to office in early 2017.  The main character in Lewis’s book is a guy named John MacWilliams, who joined DOE under Obama as chief risk officer.  For Lewis, MacWilliams identified five big risks to the US that he observed.  The first four are pretty obvious:

• Broken Arrows (loose nukes)
• North Korea
• Iran (keeping them from building nukes)
• Protecting the electric grid from cyberterrorism

The fifth risk, though, is the scariest – Program Management.  That doesn’t sound scary, but it is.  Lewis puts it this way:

“The risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. … ‘Program management’ is the existential threat that you never really even imagine as a risk. … It is the innovation that never occurs and the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.”

In other words, the biggest risk to the US is likely something you’ve never even thought about thinking about.  Lewis outlines a number of issues that the US government assesses used to assess that could be cataclysmic if it occurred.  However, when Trump took over the government, he didn’t give a hoot about those threats, or, more tragic, was too stupid to even recognize those threats; since then he has stripped funding and slashed key staff positions that manage those risks.  One typical example of this negligence is the Office of Chief Scientist at the Department of Agriculture. This office manages $3 billion a year in research grants for important programs such as how to grow food in a changing climate, which seems sort of important.  The person holding that job was a distinguished research scientist in agriculture named Cathie Woteki.  Trump fired her and named a climate denying talk radio host, Sam Clovis, who had ZERO science background to be chief scientist.  Ol’ Sam, though, withdrew suddenly from the nomination when he became embroiled in the Mueller investigation.  Trump has since named a Dow Chemical pesticide executive as chief scientist.  Swell.

Another glaring example of Trump’s incompetence is naming our own Rootin’ Tootin’ Rick Perry to be Secretary of Energy.  Perry famously announced during the 2012 primary that he wanted to shut down Energy, Education, and, er… that other one (oops), so Trump thought he would be the perfect pick to protect our power grid, nuclear arsenal, and fossil fuel industries.  Perry clearly has no idea what he’s doing, so our energy security is in the hands of devoted public employees who are not morons like him.  He didn’t even take a briefing from staff, and has left day to day management to lieutenants, who are more interested in promoting the oil and coal industries and couldn’t care less about nuclear security or resilience of the power grid.

Even worse, budgets for data collection have been slashed.  That includes everything from weather data at NOAA to climate science and food safety and the USDA.  Essentially, the federal bureaucracy has been set adrift with slashed funding and no appointed leadership.  Career employees have been either ignored or fired, and so the US is essentially blind to threats against everything from our power grid to pharmaceuticals to nuclear weapons.

This bungling of management of the government is certainly incompetence on the part of Trump and his cronies; but that is not the only problem.  There is the profit motive.  If Trump succeeds in cutting off weather data from the public, then private providers of that data are then free to sell it for a profit.  And since that data is critical to state and local governments, farmers, ranchers, distribution companies, then the value of their monopoly of critical data is virtually limitless.

The Trump administration is nothing but a gigantic robber baron scheme.  The rich get richer, government services crumble and private companies receive soaring profits.  Lewis’s book should be a wakeup call, but I fear no one who can do anything is paying attention.  And that is when the threat you’ve never even thought about thinking about strikes with tragic consequences.

Don’t say I didn’t tell you so.

President Obama broke his silence yesterday after Trump’s idiotic spectacle in the Rose Garden; and it’s good:

“A year and a half ago, the world came together in Paris around the first-ever global agreement to set the world on a low-carbon course and protect the world we leave to our children.

“It was steady, principled American leadership on the world stage that made that achievement possible. It was bold American ambition that encouraged dozens of other nations to set their sights higher as well. And what made that leadership and ambition possible was America’s private innovation and public investment in growing industries like wind and solar – industries that created some of the fastest new streams of good-paying jobs in recent years, and contributed to the longest streak of job creation in our history.

“Simply put, the private sector already chose a low-carbon future. And for the nations that committed themselves to that future, the Paris Agreement opened the floodgates for businesses, scientists, and engineers to unleash high-tech, low-carbon investment and innovation on an unprecedented scale.

“The nations that remain in the Paris Agreement will be the nations that reap the benefits in jobs and industries created. I believe the United States of America should be at the front of the pack. But even in the absence of American leadership; even as this Administration joins a small handful of nations that reject the future; I’m confident that our states, cities, and businesses will step up and do even more to lead the way, and help protect for future generations the one planet we’ve got.”