The Problem of the Wilderness

The Problem of the Wilderness from Tom Welsh on Vimeo.

River Keeper

NCAA Football Championship Links

Even though the college football season was over for Notre Dame back in September, the last game of the season is tonight.  Thankfully, Ohio State fans are being quiet, so I'll post a few interesting stories from the last week or so:

How Tom Izzo's wish to play at the Palestra created a magical day for Penn State - Washington Post.  I'd like to go to a Big Five game there someday.

College Football: Beer Sales Are Bigger in Texas - Wall Street Journal.  They need the Ohio State numbers in there.

How Do This Year's Blue Jackets Hold Up Against the 1992-93 Penguins? - Vice Sports

Farmers Get Creative in Reaping Profits - Wall Street Journal

Too Much of Weed That Feeds Forcing Wheat Farmers to Other Crops - Bloomberg

Squamscot Soda: Helping You Wash It All Down Since 1863 - The Salt

2016 Was Second Warmest Year on Record in U.S. - New York Times.  Stuff it, deniers.

Liquid Assets - ProPublica

Blood and Sugar - Texas Monthly

Becoming Michael Lewis - Washington Post

The Growing Rural-Urban Divide Around The World - The Atlantic

Why Rural America Voted for Trump - New York Times.  I'd go with that they are bad with facts and numbers, but here is another view.

The End of the Rural Hospital - Pacific Standard.  A situation which was worsened by Republican governors refusing to expand Medicaid may be made worse by the repeal of Obamacare.  

This map explains the weather we had in 2016 - Washington Post.  Not exactly, because it doesn't indicate that we had a crippling drought in late June, July and early August, but it is interesting nonetheless.

NASA Photo of the Day

Well, a video, from the day of the solstice:



Traces of the Sun
Video Credit & Copyright: György Bajmóczy Explanation: This year the December Solstice is today, December 21, at 10:44 UT, the first day of winter in the north and summer in the south. To celebrate, watch this amazing timelapse video tracing the Sun's apparent movement over an entire year from Hungary. During the year, a fixed video camera captured an image every minute. In total, 116,000 exposures follow the Sun's position across the field of view, starting from the 2015 June 21 solstice through the 2016 June 20 solstice. The intervening 2015 December 22 solstice is at the bottom of the frame. The timelapse sequences constructed show the Sun's movement over one day to begin with, followed by traces of the Sun's position during the days of one year, solstice to solstice. Gaps in the daily curves are due to cloud cover. The video ends with stunning animation sequences of analemmas, those figure-8 curves you get by photographing the Sun at the same time each day throughout a year, stepping across planet Earth's sky.

Start of 2017 Links

Here are some stories to start the year out on:

Jack Johnson, still unforgivable? - The Undefeated

Big Battles Over Farm And Food Policies May Be Brewing As Trump Era Begins - The Salt

Where the Beers Are:A Regional Guide to U.S. Craft Beers - Wall Street Journal

Rogue One: an 'Engineering Ethics' Story - SciFi Policy and Architects and Engineers Shove a Light Saber Through the Death Star's Bad Design - Wired, along with a speculation on real-life ethics and scientific research, The Private Heisenberg and the Absent Bomb - New York Review of Books
A Bigger Problem Than ISIS? - The New Yorker. On the potentially imminent failure of the Mosul Dam.

The Space Shuttle Challenger Explosion and the O-Ring - Priceonomics

Meet Henry Orenstein, The Man Who Changed How The World Plays - Newsweek (h/t my former boss).  Unbelievable life story.

Fuck Work - Aeon. 

Holy Wars - Boston Review

The Ad That Moved People the Most: Bernie Sanders's 'America' - The Upshot

What History Has to Say About the Economy Trump Will Inherit - Bloomberg

America's electoral college and the popular vote - The Economist.

2016 In Review - Good Riddance

I figured I could list out the positives and negatives of 2016, and it just reminded me how I'm not going to miss this year.

Positives:
My employer was profitable
Best calf crop ever (14 calves out of 11 cows, 13 survived).
I bought a farm (I'm still not sure if this is all that positive).
A couple positive things on the personal side, sort of.
Survived this otherwise shitty year.

Negatives:
Drought pummeled corn and hay crops.
President-elect Donald Trump!?
World Champion Chicago Cubs.
Everything else.

Thank God this year is over.  Unfortunately, based on crop prices and the upcoming inauguration, 2017 is set to be even worse.  Maybe it will rain more between June 15 and August 15 next year.

Happy New Year and be safe.  I'll drink a few for you.

The War on Christmas Mapped

Fivethirtyeight:

In both years, white evangelicals strongly favored “merry Christmas,” while secular respondents prefer “happy holidays” or “season’s greetings.” But the “War on Christmas” does not divide people simply along religious lines — there are also regional differences. In both 2013 and 2016, the weakest support for “happy holidays” and “season’s greetings” was in the Midwest (42 percent in 2016), not the South (50 percent), as you might have guessed. Although both regions have large evangelical populations, the South is also home to a large percentage of the country’s African-American population, and that group strongly prefers “happy holidays” (72 percent in 2016) despite their high levels of Christian religiosity. Support for “happy holidays” decreased somewhat in both regions this year compared to 2013.

Looks like the Battle of the Corn Belt is the final struggle in the War on Christmas.

Festivus Links

Happy Festivus!  Before I enter into the airing of grievances, I'll share some news stories with you:

The Trials of a Boxing Romantic - New York Times

'Thanks for saving my life': Dennis Rodman's heartfelt tribute to Craig Sager - Washington Post

This Is Without  A Doubt The Best Obituary I've Ever Read.  It's Not Even Close. Outstanding, Outstanding Obituary - Barstool Sports.  Via the sister.

How an Idaho football player became a bank robber - USAToday.  Via the old boss.

For Cash-Strapped Monks, Selling Fruitcakes Is A Saving Grace - The Salt

Inside Quebec's Great Multi-Million-Dollar Maple Syrup Heist - Vanity Fair.  I can't get enough stories about the Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve, or the the heist from it.

The Inside Story of Apple's $14 Billion Tax Bill - Bloomberg

All-American Huckster: The Untold Story of Napoleon Hill, the Greatest Self-Help Scammer of All Time - Gizmodo

Columbus-Chicago passenger rail moves ahead, slowly - Columbus Dispatch

Teachers in Wealthy Districts Get Bulk of Indiana's Performance Payouts - Education Week.  Stupid Republican policy.

'It Makes You Human Again' - Politico.  Interesting piece on Albequerque's homeless program.

The U.S. is no stranger to interfering in the elections of other countries - Washington Post. What's good for the goose...

How Trump's White House Could Mess With Government Data - Fivethirtyeight

Trump's Pick for Interior Secretary Was Caught In "Pattern of Fraud" at SEAL Team 6 - The Intercept

Why the Nazis studied American race laws for inspiration - Aeon 

How the Obama Coalition Crumbled, Leaving an Opening for Trump - The Upshot

The Farmer

Some end-of-year farmer propaganda for you:

Waters of the U.S., Regulatory Overreach and Republican Propaganda

I was half asleep this morning when I heard an exchange on NPR that brought up the Waters of the U.S. rule:

Rand Paul:....So yes, I'll continue to advocate for Congress asserting its role, for not letting the president run amok through executive order. Domestically, most of that has been an overreach by President Obama, though, instituting regulations that could have never gotten through Congress. And I am confident that I think in the first hundred days we'll get dozens and dozens, hopefully, of onerous job-killing regulations removed.
GREENE: What's one regulation that would give people an idea of what you're talking about, a single regulation that you can really point to and you think limits jobs?
PAUL: There's a regulation called Waters of the U.S. There was a cattle rancher, Andy Johnson, out in Fort Bridger, Wyo. He was fined $37,000 a day for building a cattle pond that he had a local permit for. You should not have to get a federal permit to build a cattle pond. This is the kind of thing that has kind of run amok in our country is the federal government trying to regulate individual local issues like land use.

 I honestly thought Senator Paul said that the rancher spent $37,000 building a cattle pond, and that he ran afoul of regulators under the Waters of the U.S. rule.  Based on my limited experience applying for Section 404 (Army Corps of Engineers) and Section 401 (EPA) permits, I guessed that the rancher either dammed a stream to create the pond, or turned a wetland into a pond.  Both were seriously frowned upon under the Nationwide Permit format for Section 404 permits.  My first thought beyond that was that even if this was a massive ranch, I can't imagine very many jobs were killed based on not allowing said pond.  An also, that the Waters of the U.S. rule isn't born of Barack Obama, but has been an object of conflict for over 40 years.  The final rule that was issued in 2015 claimed the same jurisdiction for the WOTUS rule that I worked under over 10 years ago.

I figured I ought to do a google search on the case cited by Senator Paul, since I had the rancher's name and location.  I managed to turn up this New York Times story:

The sun was sinking and the brook trout were biting, so Andy Johnson and his daughter Aspen, 6, stepped onto their sun-bleached pier, hooked some mealworms and cast their lines into the most infamous pond in the West.

It is just a splotch of placid water amid endless ripples of grazing land here in western Wyoming. But in the two years since Mr. Johnson dammed a small creek running through his front yard to create the pond, it has become an emblem for conservative groups and local governments that are fighting what Senator Michael B. Enzi called a “regulatory war” with the Obama administration over environmental issues ranging from water quality to gas drilling, coal power plants to sage grouse....

 In a January 2014 violation notice, the agency said Mr. Johnson had violated the Clean Water Act by digging out Six Mile Creek and dumping in tons of river rocks without getting necessary federal permits. The agency ordered him to take steps to restore the creek under the supervision of environmental officials, or face accumulating fines of as much as $37,500 a day.

Mr. Johnson refused.

He argued that he had gotten full approvals from Wyoming officials, and said the federal government had no business using national water laws to make decisions about the creek that meanders through the family’s eight-acre property. Mr. Johnson and his wife, Katie, had spent $50,000 — most of their savings, they said — to create the pond to water their 10 head of cattle and four horses. Dismantling it now would be ruinously expensive and destroy what has become a tiny oasis for birds and wildlife, they said.

While I'm not going to try to justify the regulations on dredged and fill material in waters of the United States (because I never understood them enough to be able to make that case), I think it is a stretch to say that Mr. Johnson is a rancher who built this pond to water his cattle.  I'm pretty sure he built this pond for recreational use, but justified it by claiming it was a stock pond, either when he applied to the state, or after federal officials sent him the violation notice.  Nobody would spend $50,000 to build a pond to water 10 head of cattle and four horses.  For example, I keep 11 brood cows, a bull and a heifer, along with 13 calves at one farm.  To water these cattle, I have 3 100-gallon stock tanks that each cost about $100.  If I was smart, I'd plumb in one of the Ritchie cattle fountains that sit in the barn, instead of using the 3 tanks.  Plus, the guy owns 8 acres.  Building a pond on 10 percent of his land just so he can water his livestock doesn't make any sense whatsoever.  I would guess this is why the EPA went after the guy so hard.  They knew he was using an agricultural loophole to justify a pond that made no sense whatsoever as an agricultural use.  Just look at the pictures in the New York Times article.  Would you want cattle walking down those rocky shores all day every day to get water?  My experience is that EPA will generally work with you as best as they can, as long as you try to follow the law, and don't try to pull a fast one on them.  This especially applies when jobs are at stake.

This story is an example of what makes the Waters of the U.S. rule so controversial, but also of how Republicans generally overstate how damaging environmental regulations are.  I do struggle over the limits of how small of projects EPA and the Army Corps ought to regulate, but this example is probably the worst possible one that Republicans could use for "job-killing regulations."  Also, my experience ten years ago would have been that this project would not meet the qualifications for a Nationwide Permit, so the fact that Wyoming issued it a permit calls into question the ability of the state to manage the permit process.  It would seem that the EPA action was extreme, but Senator Paul claims the EPA fined Mr. Johnson $37,000 a day, while the New York Times article states that EPA didn't issue any fines.  The threat of fines is an important part of a carrot and stick approach EPA has to use to ensure compliance with regulations.  Taking that threat away makes it unlikely that EPA would be able to enforce regulations that are current law.  Likewise, various politicians and lobbyists are quoted in the Times article saying that the feds overstepped their bounds in this case.  But, like I mentioned earlier, building the pond violates regulations that have been on the books for 15 years or so.  The whole issue about the Waters of the U.S. rule is about trying to redefine an established rule that was thrown out by the Supreme Court because they thought it was unclear.  But it is a basic jurisdictional definition.  It has to be clarified to make the law work.  I'm all for Republicans making the case for changing the regulations, but if they are going to roll back the rule to only applying to navigable waters, they will allow tremendous damage to be done to the environment.

 In the end, I think Republicans need to make their case without exaggerating the facts in the examples they present.  Don't claim that a pond is constructed to water livestock, when it almost certainly isn't, or it is likely that stock pond exemption will go by the wayside.  This would hurt farmers and ranchers who actually are building stock ponds.  Don't justify scrapping a law as job-killing, when the example you give involves zero jobs.  I'm surprised that after thirty years of blaming regulations for a shrinking middle class, Republicans have so few concrete examples of "job-killing" regulations.  I'm also surprised by how effective their poorly-defined and poorly-reasoned arguments are.  This case is one which is one of their best examples of a regulation that can be considered over-reaching, but it is one of the worst examples of a regulation that is killing jobs.  Please, Republicans, do a better job of arguing your case.