Ralph Nader very rarely misses a beat, but in the case of the issue of driverless cars, I think he missed an important aspect. He can be forgiven that, however, because I haven’t heard the issue raised as of yet: driverless cars, either owned or shared, could provide aging baby boomers with an alternative to fooling the Bureau of Motor Vehicles that they’re still safe to be driving their deathmobile on the roads.

More below, but first, in Driverless Cars: Hype, Hubris and Distractions, Nader writes:

The hype and unsubstantiated hope behind the self-driving car movement continues unabated, distracting from addressing necessities of old “mobilities” such as inadequate public transit and upgrading highway and rail infrastructure.

At a conference on Driverless Cars sponsored by the George Washington University Law School earlier this month, the legal landscape of unresolved problems and unasked questions were deliberated for a full day:

What are the legal requirements that should be applied to the testing phase, the deployment phase, liability and insurance, impacts on displaced workers, cyber-security, privacy, and antitrust? A takeaway from this gathering was the number of mind-numbing unresolved systems awaiting this new, untested technology.

First, a little background—car ownership and car sales are expected to flatten or decline due to ride-sharing and a new generation of consumers that is less Continue Reading »

A writer at KallanishEnergy would have young people believe that there is a bright future in becoming a fossil fuel worker. Well who wouldn’t want to work in a dying industry that is rushing to exploit as many natural resources for shareholder profit and personal wealth as possible before rising sea levels and heatwaves make the planet uninhabitable?

Here’s the case in Young people must be educated O&G can be a great career:

Not only must the oil and gas industry educate the general public on the science behind hydraulic fracturing, horizontal drilling, etc., just as important is teaching current/potential employees on what the industry offers. [The science of Climate Change/Global Warming? Not so much. JH]

A panel of experts discussed employee-related issues during Day Two of Hart Energy’s DUG East Conference & Exhibition in Pittsburgh on Thursday. Kallanish Energy attended the annual program.

The issues companies must face when hiring/retaining employees can be daunting and numerous, the experts believe. And, importantly, companies must be prepared to allow their employees to fail—to learn from their mistakes. [Like Exxon, British Petroleum and Energy Transfer Partners? JH]

“The Rover Pipeline, when approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, immediately put out the call for 30,000 workers, to find 15,000 people who could pass a drug test,” said Courtney McShane, director, Business Development, for Wilbros, a specialty infrastructure contractor serving the oil and gas and power industries. [So, your workers can be alcoholics but no druggies? JH]

Rover is an Energy Transfer Partners project 715 miles long, designed to flow 3.25 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas from the Marcellus and Utica Shale plays to markets in the Midwest, Northeast, East Coast, Great Lakes and Gulf Coast regions of the U.S. and Canada [and has had construction halted due to spills totaling more than 2 million gallons. JH]

Roger Rodiek, vice president of Strategic Development-Industrial & Energy Division for WSP USA (the former WSP/Parsons Brinckerhoff, a transportation and buildings engineering firm), said it takes a special type of person to work in the oil and gas field. [Considering whom they’re working for, nah, too easy of a target. JH]

“They want to build things,” Rodiek said. McShane, whose husband is in the armed forces, likened working in O&G to Army life: very structured, punctuated with long hours on the job, and away from family. [Then there’s the added benefit of enjoying despoiling vast tracks of farm land and poisoning water sources while slaughtering indigenous wildlife. JH]

[Snip…]

[Bill Debo, operations director, Drill Bits, North America, for Baker Hughes,] reiterated the importance of allowing younger employees to stretch, to try and, perhaps to fail [with catastrophic consequences. JH]

“People get bloody noses—and that’s okay,” he said.

OK, ruining the lives of millions of people is an OK outcome from a learning experience in Debo’s world. His hubris is frightening. Better these young people should think about getting one of the 13 million clean-energy—solar and wind—jobs in China.

In We must remain shocked over Philando Castile. Justice needs moral outrage, Chiraag Bainsa, a former prosecutor for the U.S. Justice Department, writes:

A jury recently acquitted Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez in the 2016 killing of Philando Castile, a beloved school cafeteria worker. On Tuesday, the prosecutor’s office released key evidence, including video from Yanez’s squad car and his interview with investigators.

Two things are evident from the new material: Castile’s every move was calculated to maintain safety and survive the encounter, and Yanez was responsible for turning the situation deadly.

Castile was cooperative. He pulled over immediately. He did not try to flee, resist or even complain. When the officer asked for his license and insurance, he handed over proof of insurance. He calmly and politely volunteered: “Sir, I have to tell you I do have a firearm on me.”
In fact, under state law, Castile didn’t have to tell the officer about the gun unless asked. He did so to be prudent – for his own safety, that of girlfriend Diamond Reynolds and her four-year-old daughter, and for the officer. Castile had been stopped before – 52 times since 2002 – and likely saw the wisdom in complying.

Yanez told Castile: “Don’t reach for it then.” Per the government’s evidence, Castile reached for his wallet. He even tried to explain this, telling the officer “I was reaching for –”, but was cut off by Yanez ordering: “Don’t pull it out,” referring to the gun. Continuing to communicate, Castile responded: “I’m not pulling it out.” Reynolds chimed in, saying “He’s not –”, but Yanez opened fire.

The result is that Castile was shot for doing what the officer asked: getting his license.

Maybe I’ll be able to write tomorrow.

This is one of what Trevor Noah calls his Between The Scenes segments where he talks to the audience during the commercial breaks. As good as Noah is in his scripted bits, I’m finding the honesty and transparency in these segments actually better.

As Noah points out, Philando Castile was a legal gun owner with all the proper permits for carrying a handgun, and the National Rifle Association hasn’t said jack shit since Castile’s murderer was found not guilty.

Michael A. Cohen, reporting in Why won’t the NRA speak out about Philando Castile? for The Boston Globe, writes:

Philando Castile was, from all accounts, a model citizen. He worked in a school cafeteria where he’d memorized the names and food allergies of 500 students. That should be enough reason for conservatives to be upset, but Castile was also a licensed and permitted gun owner. To avoid risk of being shot, he told the officer who pulled him over that he had a firearm on him, had a permit to carry it, and was reaching for his license, not his weapon. That hardly mattered, because within moments he’d been mortally wounded.

Quite simply, Philando Castile is dead today because he was exercising his constitutionally protected right to bear arms.

Yet, the National Rifle Association, an organization that is nominally devoted to protecting the constitutional right of Americans to arm themselves to the teeth has said nothing about the acquittal in the Castile case. Last July, when the shooting occurred, the NRA put out a statement that tepidly read “the reports from Minnesota are troubling and must be thoroughly investigated.” An organization that used the shooting of 20 kindergartners in Newtown, Conn., to call for armed guards to be stationed in the nation’s schools said it couldn’t comment on an ongoing investigation.

From now on I’m referring to the NRA as the National Racists’ Association.

You should too.

[Update @ 1822—Yes! Republicans say they will release draft of health bill amid pressure over secrecy:

Senate Republican leaders said they would release draft language of their healthcare bill on Thursday amid mounting frustration among lawmakers in both parties over the way the party is assembling their bill—behind closed doors and without a single public hearing scheduled. A vote is expected next week.

The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, confirmed that the draft bill would be made public on Thursday during a press conference with reporters on Tuesday.

He said a finalized version of the bill would be released after the Congressional Budget Office publishes its analysis, which is expected to occur sometime next week.

Again, YES…!!!]

The 13 White Republican Men—including my own Senator Rob Portman of Ohio—are crafting the secret Senate Republican plan to ram a massive tax cut for the very richest Americans down the throat of the rest of us by masking their largess under the guise of a faux healthcare plan is as perfect an example of Shock Doctrine as we’re seeing right now.

Tim Dickinson’s lede to WTF Is Going on With the Secret Senate Version of Trumpcare? for Rolling Stone illustrates the point.

We’ve been hit with an avalanche of news over the past week: Trump under investigation for obstruction of justice! House Whip was shot at baseball practice! Attorney General Sessions stonewalls Intel committee! Tower inferno in London! As a result, the Senate GOP’s campaign to advance Trumpcare is flying beneath the radar—exactly as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants it.

While everyone is watching the White House set it’s hair on fire, Congress is stripping $834 billion from Medicaid and throwing 23 million Americans under the Trumpcare II bus. Unless we help Senate Democrats yank back the curtain.

Here’s what they’re trying to do.

Lauren Gambino, reporting in Republican health bill: Democrats pledge Senate standstill over secrecy for The Guardian, writes:

Democrats have vowed to bring Senate business to a halt this week, in protest against secrecy around a Republican attempt to repeal Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act that will affect access to coverage for millions of Americans.

Beginning on Monday night, Democrats will begin an effort to delay a vote on the Senate health bill by forcing the House-passed healthcare bill into committee, a senior Democratic aide said. Tactics will include procedural maneuvers that will disrupt routine order and late-night floor speeches demanding greater transparency.

Senior party figures, who were reported to be planning to focus on Donald Trump’s reported description of the House bill as “mean”, also launched a campaign urging Americans to speak out against the healthcare plan and share their stories about how the ACA, known as Obamacare, has helped them. In a video, several female senators shared their constituents’ stories.

Obamacare: 11 months and “more than a dozen hearings” vs. Trumpcare: less than 11 WEEKS and NO hearings. Trevor Noah slammed the Republican Star Chamber last week in What’s in the GOP’s Mysterious Health Care Bill?

In the Senate alone compare Democrats in 2009 to Republicans in 2017:

Call your Republican senators and tell them healthcare is too important to fix in the dark. Call your Democratic senators and tell them to drag their Republican colleagues into the light.

[Update @ 0647—I’ve taken my own advice and called Sen. Portman’s offices in Washington (202.224.3353) and Cleveland (216.522.7095 to leave this message:

Good morning. My name is Jeff Hess and I live in North Royalton, Ohio.

I’m calling this morning to ask that Sen. Portman stop the Senate’s secret Trumpcare meetings that have the potential to put the lives of tens of thousands of Ohioans at dire risk. We deserve better from our Senate.

Thank you.

I also called Sen. Brown’s offices in Washington (202.224.2315) and Cleveland (216.522.7272) to leave this message:

Good morning. My name is Jeff Hess and I live in North Royalton, Ohio.

I’m calling this morning to thank Sen Brown for his work and to encourage him to take whatever steps he can to assist his peers in the senate in bringing the secret Trumpcare process into the light and protect the lives of all Ohioans and all Americans put at dire risk by Sen. Portman and the 12 other Republican senators now engaged in these secret meetings.

Thank you.

I also sent nearly identical—I’m writing instead of I’m calling—email messages to my senators. The whole process took less than 10 minutes. Please do the same.]

Earlier today I wrote about The Gang Who Can’t Talk Straight plotting in secret to slash $834 billion from Medicaid and throwing 23 million Americans under the Trumpcare II bus. This evening I’m reading Ralph Nader’s take on the Senate shenanigans.

Nader, in Closing Democracy’s Doors Until the People Open Them, writes:

In 2006 a book was published called Losing Our Democracy by civic leader, Mark Green. His 21st book, it was the usual Mark Green brand of meticulous research with memorable examples. One would have thought such an important subject would have received wide coverage and circulation. In fact, it was almost completely ignored by reviewers and the media interviewers. In 2017, the danger of having the door shut on the practice of democracy by its citizens is more important than at any other time in recent history.

Republicans prefer to use the words “liberty” and “freedom,” not “democracy.” Why? Because democracy includes these rights but adds “justice,” which holds those in power accountable and brings them down to earth where people live, work and raise their families.

Look at some ways democracy’s doors are closing. Thirteen Republican senators (all men) are now meeting secretly behind closed doors to further deny American families access to affordable, accessible healthcare. They arrogantly (or cynically) have refused to hold a single public hearing. In 2009-2010 the Senate held over Continue Reading »

What really happened, however…

[Be sure to listen to Roldo’s talk with Ralph Nader on The Ralph Nader Radio Hour. JH]

In August of 1983—some 34 years ago—I wrote this about the Plain Dealer:

“It’s like a giant whale, beached in shallow water.

Too embarrassing not to look at, too big to give it much help, and too obvious to ignore.

More than a year after the demise of the Cleveland Press, the morning paper, the very Plain Dealer, remains rather rudderless.

It has no spark, no drive, no mission.

‘There’s a lot of bad writing, a lot of bad editing, a lot of bad story selection and big gaps in coverage,’ said a close observer of the daily newspaper.

In one sentence he has summed up the discouraging state of journalism at the city’s only daily newspaper.

What can we say 34 years later? That the paper’s a Lake Erie perch dropped at the door four times a week?

The newspaper is shrinking as the city is shrinking. It may be published daily but it delivers to subscribers four days a week and the product remains shallow and even less relevant. There are minor exceptions from a few reporters as there were then.

Sports pages and sections dominate. Giant photos take up space. Cleveland.com has cute notes as how many beer joints are in the city or 27 things to do this weekend. It’s a mirror of Cleveland Magazine and what are the best suburbs. Why not, it gets clicks.

We look at the paper and notice, at least some do, reports from Continue Reading »

[Update @ 1413 on 22 June: Surprise, surprise, Murray is suing John Oliver and HBO.]

[Update at 1042—Jake Nevins offers his take in John Oliver on the coal industry: ‘Trump needs to stop lying to miners’ for The Guardian.]

So, at the time I posted John Oliver’s latest, the video had only been viewed 121,520 times, garnering 11,888 likes and 271 dislikes (a number, I’ll assume, representing all of Robert Edward Murray’s attorneys’, their staffs and various other Murray Energy lackeys. For comparison, last week’s show on Brexit has racked up 4,826,883 views, 100,601 likes and 3,697 dislikes (likely more people who even knew who Robert Edward Murray or Murray Energy were before last night).

Oliver’s mention of The Chagrin Valley Times and the Akron Beacon Journal definitely caught my attention. Murray sued the first paper in 2014 because:

On December 17, 2012, in front of the headquarters of Murray Energy in Pepper Pike, Ohio, Patriots for Change held an organized protest decrying the firing of 156 employees of various companies owned by Robert Murray the day after the presidential election. Protesters alleged that Murray fired these individuals as a political stunt. Sali A. McSherry, a reporter for the Chagrin Valley Times, interviewed protestors and sought comments from Murray and Murray Energy. She was able to contact Gary Broadbent, an employee of Murray Energy. He provided her with a statement from Murray Energy as well as statements from Robert Murray. An article appeared in the newspaper on December 20, 2012, reporting on the protest and the response from Murray and Murray Energy. On January 3, 2013, an editorial written by Editor Emeritus David Lange appeared in the Chagrin Valley Times. It was critical of Murray and other appellants. The commentary was published in conjunction with a cartoon unfavorably depicting Murray that was penned by Ron Hill.

He lost his suit in 2015 when the Ohio Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

The Akron Beacon Journal was the recipient of a suit from Murray some 14 years earlier after the paper published a front-page story headlined: Mine Owner Isn’t the Shy, Quiet Type. That suit was settled four years late.

Murray’s appeal narrowed its focus down to four specific statements in the newspaper article. His attorneys claimed the defendants had not provided sufficient evidence to back up the truth of the statements, and therefore didn’t deserve summary judgment.

The four statements about Murray, or attributed to Murray in the story were:

* ‘The only thing I want is a long line at my funeral. I’m sick. I bought my cemetery plot.’ (Murray supposedly said this.)

* ‘If the Boich brothers were the quite voice of coal in the 1990s, ‘Honest Bob’ Murray — as his competitors jokingly call him — was the loud one.’

* Even his (i.e. Murray’s) friends roll their eyes at his hyperbole.’

* ‘He (Murray) tends to exaggerate a good bit.’ (This was attributed to coal lobbyist Neal Tostenson.)

The appeals court found merit in the claim that the first statement was defamatory per se (in and of itself), because it suggested that Murray might be near death, and this perception could hurt his business prospects among people who view Ohio Valley Coal as a ‘one-man operation.’

Considering the next three statements as possible attacks on Murray’s personal integrity, the appeals court found that taking them together could give the impression that Murray is dishonest in his business dealings. Therefore, the court ruled, these three statements are also defamatory per se.

After the appeals court remanded the case back to trial court, the two sides reached a settlement, after what McKown called ‘a delicate and difficult negotiation.’

At the time of the original suit, Murray promised in a press release that:

[T]he first $39,960,000 of any award will be distributed to the 444 employees of his companies in Belmont County—which works out to $90,000 per employee. Any remaining monies, it states, will be put into a charitable foundation to benefit the charities and citizens of Belmont, Guernsey, Harrison, Jefferson, Monroe, and Noble counties.

In an online search this morning I was unable to find mention of any such distribution.

I’ll keep looking.

Now, you might ask, what does my congressman, James Bupkis* Renacci have to do with any of this? Back on 4 February I fisked an op-ed piece in my hometown newspaper, The Marietta Times, from Renacci in support of removing vital environmental restrictions from coal companies. In that op-ed, Renacci specifically mention Murray Energy:

In 2015, Murray Energy was forced to lay off thousands of workers.

In my February post I wondered why Renacci was interested in Coal in general and Murray Energy in particular. I wrote:

Why is Renacci suddenly so interested in coal jobs? Perhaps because the owners of Ohio (and other) mines are making contributions to Renacci’s war chest? Perhaps because he owes favors to representatives who—like fellow Republicans Brad Wenstrup (OH-2), Bob Gibbs (OH-7) and Steve Stivers(OH-15)—do have active coal mines and coal miners in their districts? Given the choice of The Marietta Times, however, my money is on Bill Johnson (OH-6).

All journalists love the rule: Follow The Money. This morning I see that over his political career, Renacci has received $43,417 from Murray Energy and that Renacci has been the recipient of $390,407 from the oil, gas and mining industries.

Then there is the matter, raised by The New Republic Senior Editor Alex MacGillis in Coal Miner’s Donor. In the lede to that 2012 story, MacGillis wrote:

It is both a pundit’s truism and a mathematical reality that Mitt Romney’s path to the White House runs through Ohio. And that path, in turn, runs through a firm called Murray Energy.

Over the years, CEO Robert Murray has brought in GOP pols from as far away as Alaska, California, and Massachusetts for fund-raisers. In 2010, the year John Boehner became House speaker, the firm’s 3,000 employees and their families were his second-biggest source of funds. (AT&T was in first place, but it has nearly 200,000 employees.) This year, Murray is one of the most important GOP players in one of the most important battleground states in the country. In May, he hosted a $1.7 million fund-raiser for Romney. Employees have given the nominee more than $120,000. In August, Romney used Murray’s Century Mine in the town of Beallsville for a speech attacking Barack Obama as anti-coal. This fall, scenes from that event—several dozen coal-smudged Murray miners standing behind the candidate in a tableau framed by a giant American flag and a COAL COUNTRY STANDS WITH MITT placard—have shown up in a Romney ad.

Days after MacGillis’ piece ran, he wrote a follow-up: A Coal Company Owner Responds. There his lede was:

In [Coal Miner’s Donor], I describe the pressure that Robert Murray, the owner of coal company Murray Energy, has for years exerted on his salaried employees to give to the company’s political action committee and to Republican candidates, including Mitt Romney. The article was based on the accounts of two Murray sources and on documents I obtained, including letters from Murray lambasting employees for not giving more and tables and a list of employee names showing who was giving and who was not.

MacGillis goes on to examine Murray’s response to his article:

[Murray Enegy]’s general counsel denied that Murray was pressuring employees to give or rewarding them in any way for their contributions, as the sources had described occurring. Now comes Murray himself with, as far as I can tell, his first public comments on the matter, in an interview with Erich Schwartzel of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “It’s timed to shut me up. It’s a dishonest, totally false and fabricated group of charges to embarrass Gov. Mitt Romney, my family, our company and me.”

Murray was reacting both to the piece and to two subsequent requests that federal authorities look into Murray’s fundraising—one from the Ohio Democratic Party, which sent a letter to the U.S. Attorney for Northern Ohio and the Cuyahoga County prosecutor requesting an investigation, and one from the good-government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which filed a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission.

I’m still looking, without success this morning, for the outcomes of those actions.

*After extensive searches, I have been unable to determine what Renacci’s middle initial stands for. Until I can find a reliable reference to Renacci full name, Bupkis will do.

Previously…

Previously…

The national threats engendered by the election of President Donald John Trump are not relative. Banning only some Muslims is not measurably better than banning all Muslims. Phasing out Medicare and Medicaid over any period of time is not better than phasing both programs out tomorrow. No one should feel any comfort in using any form of the phrase well, at least he’s not…. There are no reasonable, conventional people, from the President down, in the White House. Not one.

Naomi Klein, writing in The Worst of Donald Trump’s Toxic Agenda Is Lying in Wait—A Major U.S. Crisis Will Unleash It for The Intercept, explains:

During the presidential campaign, some imagined that the more overtly racist elements of Donald Trump’s platform were just talk designed to rile up the base, not anything he seriously intended to act on. But in his first week in office, when he imposed a travel ban on seven majority-Muslim countries, that comforting illusion disappeared fast. Fortunately, the response was immediate: the marches and rallies at airports, the impromptu taxi strikes, the lawyers and local politicians intervening, the judges ruling the bans illegal.

The whole episode showed the power of resistance, and of judicial courage, and there was much to celebrate. Some have even concluded that this early slap down chastened Trump, and that he is now committed to a more reasonable, conventional course.

That is a dangerous illusion.

Klein continues:

It is true that many of the more radical items on this administration’s wish list have yet to be realized. But make no mistake, the full agenda is still there, lying in wait. And there is one thing that could unleash it all: a large-scale crisis.

Large-scale shocks are frequently harnessed to ram through despised pro-corporate and anti-democratic policies that would never have been feasible in normal times. It’s a phenomenon I have previously called the Shock Doctrine, and we have seen it happen again and again over the decades, from Chile in the aftermath of Augusto Pinochet’s coup to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

As Sinclair Lewis showed us 82 years ago: It Can Happen Here.

There is much written in the past 250 or so days about the chaos in the White House. The supposition is that the chaos is the result of arrogance, ignorance and incompetence. What, however, if the chaos is a design feature and not a bug?

Since taking office… Donald Trump has never allowed the atmosphere of chaos and crisis to let up. Some of the chaos, like the Russia investigations, has been foisted upon him or is simply the result of incompetence, but much appears to be deliberately created. Either way, while we are distracted by (and addicted to) the Trump Show, clicking on and gasping at marital hand-slaps and mysterious orbs, the quiet, methodical work of redistributing wealth upward proceeds apace.

This is also aided by the sheer velocity of change. Witnessing the tsunami of executive orders during Trump’s first 100 days, it rapidly became clear his advisers were following Machiavelli’s advice in “The Prince”: “Injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less.” The logic is straightforward enough. People can develop responses to sequential or gradual change. But if dozens of changes come from all directions at once, the hope is that populations will rapidly become exhausted and overwhelmed, and will ultimately swallow their bitter medicine.

We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

All of this is shock doctrine lite; it’s the most that Trump can pull off under cover of the shocks he is generating himself. And as much as this needs to be exposed and resisted, we also need to focus on what this administration will do when they have a real external shock to exploit. Maybe it will be an economic crash like the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Maybe a natural disaster like Superstorm Sandy. Or maybe it will be a horrific terrorist attack like the Manchester bombing. Any one such crisis could trigger a very rapid shift in political conditions, making what currently seems unlikely suddenly appear inevitable.

Klein dives deep into the possibilities. Many will seem in the realm of Truthers, Area 59 advocates and those certain that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy is living out his waning years on a Greek island, but Klein is not conspiracy fanatic. She knows what she’s writing about and we dismiss her warnings at our own great peril.

The people in the White House are not stupid.

Word.

I sat in my car this morning listening to Robert Greenstein deliver his City Club of Cleveland presentation: The budget would turn back the clock even farther to before the 1960s.. You should listen as well. Seriously.

A couple of weeks ago I left this comment on Haley Zaremba story Despite High Profile Spills, Oil Pipelines Are Still Safer Than Other Options for OilPrice:

Good morning,

Pipelines are safer than all the other bad choices. Safer does not equal safe.

Safe would be to leave the fossil fuels in the ground and continue developing 21st century energy resources.

We ought not to allow the rest of the world to leave us sucking on the fossil fuel teat.

Jeff Hess
Have Coffee Will Write

Not surprisingly, the comment never posted. Oh well.

As I follow the story of the Rover pipe line here in Ohio, however, I see the safer (sometimes even touted as safe) meme) is becoming more and more common.

Here’s a clue, whenever a corporation, or their shills, started highlighting safety, run.

This morning I noted a letter-to-the-edition in the Intelligencer, Wheeling News-Register from Joe Eddy, president and chief executive officer of Eagle Manufacturing in Wellsburg, West Virginia. For a bit of context, please note that among Eagle Manufacturing’s products is the SpillNest line for: oil and gas sites and other large area applications. (I doubt that a SpillNest could have handled this mess, but my point is that Eddy has a dog in the hunt. He writes:

Most important, pipelines are the safest means to transport natural gas. Built under the scrutiny of all federal, state, and local regulatory authorities, the Rover Pipeline will meet or exceed all safety requirements — including rigorous standards set by the approved construction company. Today, technologically advanced techniques, such as x-ray inspections, high pressure water tests, automated valves that shut off the flow of gas in case of an emergency, and 24/7 monitoring, make safety the number one priority in pipeline construction.

No, no, NO, Bob. Pipe lines, Rover in particular may be the safest means to transport natural gas, but they are not, in any wild fancy of imagination, safe. This is the message we need to repeat as often as we can. Safer does not mean safe. Safe is keeping the fossil fuels in the ground.

There is a sense that writers compartmentalize. That we have a time and a place where we write and that after we have written our self-imposed daily allotment, we stop and go about the rest of our mundane day. I don’t buy that. Being a writer is a 24-hour-a-day reality and we never stop being writers. This can be distressing to the non-writer’s around us. We never seem to be off-the-clock, every second is grist for our writing mill. Long before people began taking selfies and live streaming their lives, writers were constantly taking notes, consciously and unconsciously, of every moment, every conversation, every view, every touch.

Most of what we record in a day is rubbish, but you never know what will spark a character or an entire novel.

In If I wake up at an early hour and write 500 words each day I will, in time, have a book, Hisham Matar writes:

The myth is you do the ordinary every day and the extraordinary will happen; if I wake up at an early hour and write 500 words each day I will, in time, have a book. Not all myths are untrue, of course, yet some of my best writing happens on the bus or while walking, and I must stand to one side, writing quickly, trying to catch the line of words that had just passed through my head like a butterfly. Some are phantoms; others are valuable sketches that can become the basis for entire paragraphs. I have learnt to take them seriously.

In recent years I have relied on the recording tool on my ancient flip phone—I actually have students who don’t recognize the device as a phone at all—to capture thoughts and moments for later transcription into my notebooks. Transcription is vital. I learned that as an undergraduate when I would transcribe all my class notes every evening before preparing for the next day.

Matar concludes:

I used to spend the evenings, depending on how the day went, either congratulating or beating myself up. It took me a long time to understand that both are just as narcissistic and just as useless, not only because the work is not responsible for my mood, but also because both conclusions steal the wind from my sails and leave me exhausted either from self-loathing or jubilation. Now I close the door and return to my life a little tired but also with that modest contentment and gratitude of those who enjoy their work. This must be boring to read, as there is really no drama. The deeper I am in this routine, the better things are.

Deep work indeed.

Given the young woman wearing a New York Yankee cap on the left and the size of the crowd, you might be forgiven for mistaking the event for a Bernie Sanders’s rally from last summer. The people gathered in the crowd are, in fact, there to hear Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Great Britain’s Labor party.

Gary Younge, writing in A shock to the system: how Corbyn changed the rules for The Guardian, explains why we should pay close attention.

When the clock struck 10 last Thursday night, there was a moment of collective disorientation. With each tolling of the bell, the solid political ground we had been standing on was shaken by tectonic shifts below. On television, the anchors sounded unconvinced by the news they were announcing: according to the exit poll, the Tories had lost their majority and Labour had gained seats. “Boy, oh boy, oh boy,” David Dimbleby said on the BBC, “are we going to be hung, drawn and quartered if this is all wrong!”

[Snip…]

Then came those bells, and the unravelling of all our assumptions in real time. There is a distinction between witnessing something one is told is unlikely to happen and something one is told cannot happen. The former is a surprise, a challenge to our understanding of how things work. But the latter is a shock, and it forces us to reckon with the question of whether things are working at all. As the results came in overnight, with huge swings to Labour in seats that the Conservatives had targeted, and gains in places where Labour was not supposed to be competitive, each new upset seemed to rewrite the rules by which we understood electoral politics operated. By dawn, the whole rulebook had been shredded. Throughout the night, panels of pundits who had told us with great confidence that this could never happen were telling us with equal certainty what would happen next.

Electorally, the night was confusing. As the votes were being counted, nobody had a clue how the night was going to pan out. Fifty-two seats were returned with majorities below 1,000 votes, including eleven with majorities of less than 100. On those narrow threads hung our future. And now the counting is done, we’re still not sure.

Politically, the result was much clearer. The party that came second had emerged resurgent, while the party that came first was humiliated. Theresa May’s days as party leader are numbered, while Jeremy Corbyn’s position has been unexpectedly secured.

That could have been us last November and, I think, presents a gleefully terrifying image for Republicans in November 2018. What happened in England and how do repeat the experience here? Consider what Younge witnessed in one race.

When I arrived at Harrow Leisure Centre at 2.30am on election night, local Labour activists were cheering at the television. What they thought would be a wake had ended up a shindig. It was clear by that stage that Thomas had netted a healthy victory. Almost an hour later, at 3.20am, he was declared the winner, with a 13,314 majority—doubling his previous highest margin of victory.

It was beyond unexpected: it was unfathomable. The local Labour party had done its sums and tallied its returns. It had canvassed, pursued and chased up all its known voters. It did not see these new voters coming. They were not on its radar. They had noticed some surprisingly long queues of young people at the polling station by Rayners Lane, but that didn’t explain it all. The party won Tory wards, and assumed that it picked up some Green switchers. Everyone was immensely grateful for them. But they had no idea who they were.

This was the story of the election, and it is the story of this political moment. When Big Ben called time on Thursday night, we saw clear evidence of a political realignment that the media and the political establishment had dismissed with hostility, and now regarded with confusion. We saw a polity that has lost touch with its people; a political culture unmoored from the electorate, and a mainstream media that drifted along with it. The election did not create that dislocation; it was merely the clearest and least deniable manifestation of it so far.

Stop, take a breath. Those same mystery voters are here in the United States.

We already know that President Donald John Trump’s disapproval rating is in historic territory for a president in office only 147 days.

Consider: in November 2016 231,556,622 Americans were eligible to vote. Of those, only 138,884,643 did so. A staggering 92,671,979 sat out the election. That means that the 62,979,636 people who voted for Donald Trump represented only a little more than 27 percent of the voter pool. In no one’s book is that a majority.

I have no doubt that Jeremy Corbyn has shown American Progressives the way and if the Democratic National Committee doesn’t pay heed, fuck them.

Younge offers a glimpse of how Trump voters might be expected to react if the Republicans actually offer Trumpcare II.

A fortnight before the election, I met Mohammed Ameripour, who lives with a severe cerebellar disorder that affects his speech and vision, at the law centre. He was declared fit for work, even though he has a full-time carer, and ruled to have no problem with mobility, even though he has to use a wheelchair. The benefits he was reliant on for 19 years were cut. “All the doors were shut to me,” he said. “Every door. I couldn’t get them to help me.” Thanks to the law centre, he won his case on appeal. “Some people are claiming benefits when they are healthy, and that’s not right,” he said.

“I think Jeremy Corbyn is weak. I prefer Theresa May. I think she is a leader. But I don’t like what she has done to benefits. I don’t like what she has done to me.” [Emphasis mine, JH] He was carrying his postal vote for Corbyn with him the day we spoke.

I expect that we’re going to here Ameripour’s last sentence as a refrain in the coming year

This parallel between Corbyn and Sanders is particularly on target.

For Corbyn, the accidental candidate, the leadership contest was a blur. “Everything sort of took off,” he recalled when I interviewed him a year later. “We didn’t have a campaign. We didn’t have an organisation. We didn’t have any money. All we had was my credit card. That lasted about a week. Then we started raising money … Time for reflection was very limited, because from the moment I was nominated I was on a train.”

But Corbyn began to pull in crowds, and his polling numbers started to rise. Lots of new people joined the party to support him. His campaign posed a direct challenge to the orthodoxy of the previous three decades, under which the Labour party was an electoral machine run from the top down, with the insistence that it could only win elections with ruthless discipline and tabloid-friendly appeals to the centre ground.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!

About that strategy.

After Labour’s defeat in the 2015 election, under the leadership of Ed Miliband, the Fabian Society published a document titled The Mountain to Climb, which argued that four out of every five voters Labour would need to win over in order to return to power would be former Tory supporters. When the website LabourList asked Corbyn how he would respond to this challenge, he proposed a very different strategy. “I think their approach to the research is from the wrong end of the telescope,” he said.

“[There are] young people who didn’t register, who didn’t vote,” he continued. “Those that did vote were overwhelmingly Labour, so I think there’s a whole area there, and this [leadership] campaign is demonstrating that. Secondly, [there were] reliable Labour voters who disappeared into the arms of Ukip, or not voting, because they didn’t feel the Labour party represented anything they wanted to hear. I think we can grow our support that way. Do we have to win back people who voted for other parties? Yeah, but we have to say to people, in a very clear way, what we’re offering.”

That was the proposition: to expand the electorate, broaden Labour’s coalition, and reach out to disaffected voters with a new and more radical offer. Many people thought this would not work, but a surprisingly large number insisted it wasn’t even possible.

Bernie’s take on Hillary Rodham Clintons deplorables assertion was spot on and in line with Corbyn’s views.

If you want to understand why they hate us, you need look no further than the case of blogger Raif Badawi. There are some stories that I choose to not let go off. Badawi’s is one such story.

Phoebe Braithwaite, reporting in Five years on, with no word on imprisoned dissident Raif Badawi, his family waits for The Independent, writes:

Today, 16th June, marks the five year anniversary of Saudi blogger Raif Badawi’s imprisonment. Arrested in 2012 for “insulting Islam through electronic channels,” in 2014, after appealing a seven year sentence, he was resentenced with a stiffer punishment: ten years in prison, 1000 lashes, and a fine of over £266,000 – making this the midway point in his incarceration.

Badawi is subject to two further penalties to be enforced upon his release: a ten-year travel ban, and a ten-year ban on engaging in electronic, visual and written media. This means he will spend another ten years apart from his family – his wife, Ensaf Haidar, and three children, who were granted political asylum in Canada in 2013.

“We are trying to live a sort of ordinary life as ordinary people. The children go to school, as they should. And I am like any other woman – a mum, doing things like ordering the house. But the peculiar thing about our life is that it’s all about waiting. We are waiting. And it’s been a long time, with these five years passing by slowly for us,” Haidar says. “Every day they say, ‘oh he has to come back—come back Raif.’”

When we back brutal reactionary monarchies like the House of Saud and their 18th century radical Islamic Wahhabi religious sect (remember, 15 of the 19 hijackers involved in the 11 September 2001 attack were Saudis) we have to expect that those in the Middle East who wish to live in the 21st century are going to do their best to get our attention by any and all means necessary.

When I was a student at Ohio University in the ’80s, I had the occasion to meet, talk and socialize with a number of Saudi students in classes taught by Dr.Gifford Doxsee. At the time Saudi Arabia had a somewhat benign policy of shipping students out of the country so that they might work off their youthful radicalism. The students I met loved the United States and wanted to stay here after graduation to enjoy our freedoms. They recognized the oppressive nature of their own government and didn’t want to go back to live under a monarchy.

They were observant Muslims who prayed five times a day—although some violated dietary laws and prohibitions concerning alcohol and caffeine—but they wanted a 20th century, not an 18th century practice of their faith.

No, those who attack us don’t hate us for our freedoms, they hate us because we support those who deny them the freedoms we enjoy.

So, back in June of 1992, I bought a Trek 800 Antelope like the one above. This month, three days shy of the bike’s 25th anniversary, the frame broke, snapping the frame/chainstay all the way through at dropout on drivetrain side.

At first I went online to see if the frame was repairable, but I was pleased to be reminded that Trek give a life-time warranty to the original owner. I pulled open my file cabinet and removed my bike file where I had kept all of the important information, including the original receipt. I call the Trek 800 number and spoke3 with Luke for about five minutes. Luke told me that yes, the bike was covered and that I should take the bike to the nearest Trek dealer which, in my case, was Bike Authority in Broadview Heights.

I took the bike there the next day along with a copy of the receipt. The technician gave me a repair ticket and told me that he would be in touch. Luke, at Trek, had told me that what usually happens in these situations is that a new frame is shipped and all the pieces-parts are transferred from the broken frame to the new frame.

That was what I expected, but that was not what happened.

I took a call from Bike Authority yesterday afternoon to come pickup my bike and today I brought home an entirely new—not new frame with old parts—Trek 820 Antelope. (Mouse over the above photo to see the bike.)

Clearly, as I’ve said to everyone involved, Trek rocks.

I’ve long been conflicted on laws governing when society considers a person to be an adult. We have a mishmash of thresholds such as driving at 16, entering the military at 17, voting (and becoming a stripper or porn star) at 18 and buying a beer at 21. We need to set one national age dividing adults from non-adults.

I really don’t care what that age is—16, 18, 21, 25—but the age need to be set and be universal; for every person, in every state, for every circumstance, so we can end this:

Charlotte Alter, writing in The U.S. Laws That Allow Underage Girls to Get Married for Time, has more:

Most Girls Scouts spend their time learning survival skills and selling cookies. But Cassandra Levesque, 18, spent her last year in Girl Scouts drafting and then campaigning for a bill that would raise New Hampshire’s minimum marriage age from 13 to 18.

Under New Hampshire law — as in most other U.S. states — minors can marry as long as they have parental consent and a judge signs off. “Every girl dreams about what their wedding is going to be like,” says Levesque, “but some girls are having a wedding that they never dreamed of. They’re being put into relationships that they’re not ready for.”

Last year Levesque contacted her state representative, Rep. Jacalyn Cilley, who in January 2017 introduced a bill to raise the minimum age of marriage to 16. The bill was later amended to prohibit all marriages for people under 18, before it was defeated by House Republicans in March.

Representative David Bates, who led the campaign against the bill, argued it was important to preserve the option for legal teen marriage in a few key scenarios, such as when a teen is pregnant and wants to marry the father of her child, or if a teenager is serving in the armed forces and wishes to marry before deployment. Bates said that since 17-year-olds can join the military, “there is no way our legislature is going to tell [them] they’re old enough to risk their lives for our country but they’re too young to get married.”

It can be easy to think of child marriage as something that happens somewhere else—in war-torn -countries, in nations notorious for the poor treatment of women. But in the U.S., nearly every state allows at least some people under the age of 18 to marry—and as the columnist Nicholas Kristof recently pointed out in the New York Times, the vast majority of those underage spouses are girls.

According to data compiled for the Times by a child-marriage abolition group called Unchained At Last, more than 167,000 people under the age of 17 married in 38 states between 2000 and 2010. And according to data collected by the Tahirih Justice Center, a nonprofit advocacy group for women and girls fleeing violence, 27 states set no true minimum age for marriage, and nine states set age limits below 16.

Here in Ohio:

The age of consent is sixteen. With parental consent, males and females under the age of 16 can marry and younger parties may receive a license by reason of pregnancy or the birth of a child. Common law marriage is not recognized.

What does the law say in your State?