Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[misko27]

Not sure I'd put much weight behind history based attempts at identifying modern political patterns.

I'm not sure this sentence iss phrased the way you intended it to be.

If everything Trump does ended up not doing anything, I think we'll be able to count this Administration as pretty damn good. Government that governs least and all that.

The problem is that a government which allows over-exploitation of natural resources, by "governing least", leads back to primitive times.  Feudalism at best, with the anarchs scraping by in the wilderness.

Sounds like a neat video game premise.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

John Boehner is certainly having a load of damn fun now isn't he. He called it exactly a month ago.

This is not all that hard to figure out, except this: In the 25 years that I served in the United States Congress, Republicans never, ever one time agreed on what a healthcare proposal should look like. Not once.
...
All this happy talk that went on in November and December and January about repeal, repeal, repeal -- yeah we'll do replace, replace -- I started laughing because if you pass repeal without replace, first, anything that happens is your fault. You broke it.

He went on to predict that the replacement version would basically be Obamacare with a conservative box around it, and that attempting repeal without having a bill in waiting was a recipe for failure because members "will never ever agree what the bill should be." Meanwhile, Rep. Tom McClintock, R-California disagreed.

"Unlike John Boehner, I can't read minds and I can't tell fortunes. But I can tell you there is a very strong consensus in the House that Obamacare is collapsing on the American people," he said, adding that deliberations on fixing health care issues are "moving very rapidly."

Hindsight is a bitch.

[Frumple]

If it wasn't, it's late enough and I'm tired enough I can't particularly identify what's wrong with it. Closest I notice would be being pedantic/ignoring context regarding the usage of history there, but that's all I can see, and I'm entirely too out of it to care about adjusting the sentence for someone deciding they feel like being obtuse.

... though do recognize how staggeringly passive aggressive that response sounds. That, at least, wasn't intentional. Too tired to try to fix anything about that.

[palsch]

This is just weird.

Rep. Devin Nunes was traveling with a senior committee staffer in an Uber on Tuesday evening when he received a communication on his phone, three committee officials and a former national security official with ties to the committee told The Daily Beast. After the message, Nunes left the car abruptly, leaving his own staffer in the dark about his whereabouts.

By the next morning, Nunes hastily announced a press conference. His own aides, up to the most senior level, did not know what their boss planned to say next. Nunes’ choice to keep senior staff out of the loop was highly unusual.

Being the CEO means getting to write "clusterfuck" in your op-eds describing the President.

It is not just that Donald Trump is an egomaniac. Most presidents have a pathological need for approval and attention. It’s why they suffer the slings and arrows that come with seeking the country’s top office. Egomania is for Hollywood actors and [url=https://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/conservatives-seize-nunes-incidental-collection-proof-trump-right-about-obama]House committee chairmen[/url] who think the rule of law doesn’t apply to them. Trump is a Transcendental Solipsist. It is not just that he has a strong sense of self. His view of the universe does not extend a single inch beyond the boundaries of his own interests. That is why normative concepts like truth or commonly held values or the national interest are completely alien to him. There is Trump world, and then there is oblivion.

Of course, the fact that our president is so psychologically broken would not automatically mean that the rest of us would become infected with a new, Trumpian me-me-me-ism. No, perhaps the sole notable achievement of his record-breakingly bad first couple of months in office has been his ability to make his pathology our pathology, by invoking the multiplicative principle of narcissism. If you take a nation of narcissists and place the ur-narcissist at their center of attention and he behaves in a way that makes it impossible for them to look away then all of a sudden we become like him, the world falls away, the universe evaporates, and we enter whatever is the opposite of the Buddhist ideal of enlightenment. Unlightenment? This is Transcendental Solipsism. It’s all about us being all about him being all about himself.
[...]
In short, Trump is very likely a short-timer whose moment on our national stage — even if it lasts four years — will not have warranted the degree to which it has shifted our attention from the important long-term issues that do not go away simply because we stop paying attention to them or, as in the case of climate change or Russian wrongdoing, our president continues to pretend they don’t exist. Just as the greatest cost of the Iraq War and much of the war on terrorism has been their opportunity cost, the damage done by Trump sucking all the oxygen out of the room is likely to be the areas where the resulting oxygen deprivation is causing us to black out and not attend to the issues posing long-term threats to American leadership and security … or those presenting long-term opportunities.

Trump will not inadvertently or otherwise damage the fundamentals of what makes America great. Indeed, recent events have restored hope that perhaps his story may one day be seen as proof that the American system works and that bad actors are ultimately brought down. But we need to tear our eyes away from the spectacle of this clusterfuck of a presidency and its daily dramas and periodically look up and out to our horizons, recognizing that the narcissism aside, there remains real greatness in America that needs tending, planning, and nurturing in the context of the real world — even if, at the moment, there is very little evidence of that greatness at the center of our government.

A follow up to an earlier post on why none of the allegations so far qualify as treason. The core thing to remember is that treason must be aiding a (poorly defined) "Enemy" of the USA, and that case law is restrictive of this term. Even Russia during the Cold War didn't qualify, which is why convictions were for espionage instead.


Bannon handling sensitive negotiations;

When the balky hardliners of the House Freedom Caucus visited the White House earlier this week, this was Steve Bannon's opening line, according to people in the conference room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building:
    Guys, look. This is not a discussion. This is not a debate. You have no choice but to vote for this bill.
...
One of the members replied: "You know, the last time someone ordered me to something, I was 18 years old. And it was my daddy. And I didn't listen to him, either."

Some other good summaries further down that page that are good for catching up on anything that may have been missed in the flood of stories.

[Frumple]

Yeah, re the whole treason thing (both for trump and, to a currently larger degree, manafort), from what I've noticed it's fairly unlikely from a legal standpoint. However, something like sedition or your mentioned espionage , well... to paraphrase something I noticed someone say elsewhere, we Americans have made something of a national pastime of finding ways to circumvent legal protections for our citizens :V

[Folly]

I'm hearing a lot of pro-coal talk out of the White House lately. Are there any informed parties who would care to weigh in on the matter?
I was under the impression that coal is destroying our environment and killing the miners who labor to produce it. But maybe modern techniques make coal relatively harmless to obtain and use? What are the facts here?

[Hanslanda]

I'm hearing a lot of pro-coal talk out of the White House lately. Are there any informed parties who would care to weigh in on the matter?
I was under the impression that coal is destroying our environment and killing the miners who labor to produce it. But maybe modern techniques make coal relatively harmless to obtain and use? What are the facts here?

Official stance is that everything you just said is fake news and alternative fact.

[Baffler]

It's cleaner and safer to extract than it's ever been, but it's still fairly dangerous and still pretty dirty. Much of the country is dependent on coal economically though, so talk of banning coal or phasing it out is concerning since there will almost certainly be little to no effort to support those areas who've had the rug pulled out from under them other than 'lel git gud, better get a degree and move somewhere else.'

[MrRoboto75]

I'm hearing a lot of pro-coal talk out of the White House lately. Are there any informed parties who would care to weigh in on the matter?
I was under the impression that coal is destroying our environment and killing the miners who labor to produce it. But maybe modern techniques make coal relatively harmless to obtain and use? What are the facts here?

Yeah, coal is dirty as fuck and people die of black lung all the time.  I'm sure the whole BL thing is better than say the 20's, but any tunnel work can screw you up.  Just ask my late grandfather.  Lived to 75+ but the last few years had him breathing pure oxygen via a tube.

The actual impact of coal burning can actually depend on where it came from, or rather what kind of coal.  Some coals are "better" or "cleaner" than others.  But really if you wanna save the earth... don't burn coal.  One of the powerplants a relative of mine works at swapped from coal burning to natural gas, which is a better improvement than swapping coal types.

Either way, coal country like West Virginia don't want to die, Trump thinks global warming is Chinese Propaganda, and the man who runs the EPA a year ago hated the EPA's guts.

[Frumple]

It's cleaner and safer to extract than it's ever been, but it's still fairly dangerous and still pretty dirty. Much of the country is dependent on coal economically though, so talk of banning coal or phasing it out is concerning since there will almost certainly be little to no effort to support those areas who've had the rug pulled out from under them other than 'lel git gud, better get a degree and move somewhere else.'

Hey, there was talk of moving new energy stuff in. Manufacturing related to renewables, R&D stuff, etc. Would still probably mean a fair amount of moving, since basically no one (with investment capability, anyway) wants to be out in the boonies when there ain't nothing out there to dig up, but at least the states wouldn't largely collapse on the economic side of things. Collapse more, at least. Dems at least gave it lip service, and ramping up investment for those sorts of things has been a goal for a while now. Also had upping/improving education in the areas in question (and everywhere else) so getting a degree or tech training and either getting out or bringing something new in was more of an actual possibility.

'Course, the GOP is so far in the opposite direction we could produce a solar panel that fueled entire cities on its own and had pure gold as a waste product and they still wouldn't put any support behind it, and their general stance on education basically reads "sell it", with nothing else on the board besides that. Most politicians that are pro-coal without reservation are more or less sending those areas up the river, heh.

That said, haven't paid all that much attention, but last I paid any what I recall is that coal extraction is kinda' starting to trail off, on top of all the usual stuff that means more production but less workers. Still a lot of it out there, but the junk's finite and the population ain't. The coal counties that haven't already been screwed by companies having ran out of stuff to dig up and leaving are on a time table, and any future relying on those industries isn't a future at all. Places needed to start transitioning like two or three decades ago, but they didn't. Options going forward are going to rapidly winnow down to get welfare, get out, or get fucked, and no amount of pro-coal sentiment or support is going to change that. Which is kinda' unfortunate, to rather massively understate things for the poor bastards.

[Lord Shonus]

The thing is, coal is pretty much dying regardless of what government regulations are in effect, as natural gas is so much cheaper to obtain and use that coal can't really compete economically as a power source. Ideally, the solution to Coal Country would be to use government assistance to phase out the industry in some way, but that is contrary to GOP philosophy.

[Max™]

I'm hearing a lot of pro-coal talk out of the White House lately. Are there any informed parties who would care to weigh in on the matter?
I was under the impression that coal is destroying our environment and killing the miners who labor to produce it. But maybe modern techniques make coal relatively harmless to obtain and use? What are the facts here?

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis: a lung diseased caused by inhaling fine silica dust.

I'd rather snort silica than coal dust, I spent a week working on a section of a coal plant they were overhauling, there are these big metal plates that they run a charge through to get the dust to stick to it, and then they whack the top of it with mechanized hammers so the dust falls and lands in hoppers below to be pumped elsewhere.

When they were redoing the system they needed to remove the plates which were not designed to be removed, so this meant cutting the 4x6 inch metal extensions off the top and bottom of each plate before they could lift it out with a crane.

There was a huge room full of these plates and hoppers so rather than cutting them off and moving them somewhere they just torched them off and dropped the 18~20 inch long chunks of metal down into the hoppers.

I was getting paid 1050 a week after taxes to climb down in there, grab the metal chunks and toss them out into a dumpster, as a 19 year old that is FUCKING RIDICULOUS money.

After a week I started getting a cough, halfway through the second week we had to snake dust out of the shower at home because so much of it came off when I sloughed it all off at the end of the day, the cough started getting worse and I quit shortly afterwards. Sometimes I still get colds which trigger wheezing and coughing for weeks, and this is over a decade and a half later. It isn't persistent but it sucks (and makes me all the madder at antivaccination morons putting babies through whooping cough... can we get a bill passed to install loudspeakers playing coughing babies around McCarthy's house at all hours?) and that was a couple of weeks in a coal plant which wasn't running. The hundreds of thousands of dead coal miners per year should be common knowledge, I think 2016 was the first time it was under 100k actually.

Nuclear plant accidents make the news, people see "nuclear" and think "bombs" instead of "boiling water with hot rocks" like they should. They see "coal" and think "barbecue!" instead of "piles and piles of miners dead before their time" like they should.

Coal kills something like 100 people per terawatt/hour, nuclear kills 0.04.

[PTTG??]

Coal costs more than natural gas. Natural gas costs more than solar. Solar costs more than nuclear.

That said, solar doesn't make large areas of land uninhabitable for centuries when it goes wrong. Mainly it makes roofing contractors swear.

Oh, and nuclear costs more than hydroelectric.

I think wind is somewhere between coal and natural gas.

Huh, found the latest stats:

https://www.lazard.com/media/438038/levelized-cost-of-energy-v100.pdf

Wind is cheapest. Solar's more expensive, then you get to natural gas and stuff.

[Amperzand]

Also, fun fact for you, coal is actually more of a radioactive contamination hazard then nuclear power. (Assuming the reactors don't blow up, obviously)

You see, coal contains small amounts of thorium, among other things, so burning it and letting the ash go where it will basically sprays low level radioactive material everywhere. Living near a functional coal power plant inflicts several times more radiation damage a year than living near a functional nuke.

[hector13]

Well there are also unpleasant chemicals used in the manufacture of solar panels. Also a risk of pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovlcanoconiosis apparently

The risks with those can be minimized though, and the carbon footprint of manufacture transport, use, and decommissioning solar panels is still fucking infinitesimal compared to coal and gas.

[misko27]

The issue with coal, as I best understand it, is that for all the improvements (and there have been improvements), it's still pretty terrible. China, with their rapidly improving but still incredibly terrible pollution issue, is one example of what an unrestricted coal industry can do. Thus, environmentalists and others would very much like to gut the whole industry like a mutant fish, and since it is much less economically important (and just as polluting, if not moreso) than oil and natural gas, it's also an achievable and desirable target. So what? Well there are regions which depend on coal economically, and those regions (some already poor, like West Virginia) would be devastated (incidentally, if we tried the same thing with Oil, the exact same thing would happen to much more prosperous places like Texas). As such, there's a small but influential demographic of poor and blue-collar workers (and other people in those regions) highly opposed to coal restrictions and reductions, and this demographic is a thorn in the side of the Democratic party. Trump, of course, has denounced coal restrictions as job-killing and this fits with his blue-collar appeal.

It really comes back to arguments about how to revitalize regions with economic problems, except here those regions are not yet gutted, and thus have more political influence with which to defend themselves (while regions that are already suffering economically, like Detroit or parts of upstate NY for example, usually have little political power). So environmentalists and the coal industry butt heads and leave room for individuals like Trump.