Andrew Sullivan, writing in New York Magazine, writes that Donald Trump is a con man, that the con is his presidency, and that the con is beginning to unravel, as all con jobs do eventually. An unraveling con job requires increasingly desperate actions by the con man to keep the marks from tipping to the con.…
WC will be off the intertubes for a few days. Posts will resume when WC is back or when the temperatures in Boise drop a little bit, whichever occurs first.
There are at least five active wildfires in Valley County, Idaho alone. One of those fires, the Mile Marker 73 Fire, sent WC and Mrs. WC on a gnarly detour along a ridge above the North Fork of the Payette River and Highway 55, our intended route. The detour was along a logging road with…
WC isn’t talking about the movie or the song. WC is talking about the newly fledged birds. The next generation. The reason for migration, for courtship, for bird song. Richard Dawkins would call them the reason for birds. Either way, they are out of the nest. Newly fledged birds, for a birder, are delightful and…
The Skua is the bad boy of the Southern Ocean. Egg stealer, penguin chick grabber, bully, carrion eater, kleptoparasite; by human standards, this is a bad bird. They work in pairs to steal Gentoo Penguin eggs, with one distracting the penguin and the other stealing the egg. They are smart, skilled predators. But in the…
Geologists tend to have a strange time sense. Mostly, they live in the present, year-to-year, decade to decade, like the rest of us. But their profession also requires them to live in geologic time, in epochs spanning millions of years. A geologist would look at Payette Lake in both ways: a beautiful, blue and blessedly…
At a speech on Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the chief law enforcement officer for the United States, giggled and joined in when his audience chanted “Lock her up.” Never mind that a room full of college students was metaphorically lynching someone. Never mind that Hillary Clinton has been absolved of any crimes by the…
The Snake is the Snake River, once one of the world’s preeminent salmon streams, famed for its chinook,sockeye and steelhead runs. Now those fish are an endangered species and at the heart of a complex struggle involving fish, water rights, hydroelectricity and, most of all, dam-foolishness. One way to measure the health of an anadromous…
Alaska has very good reason to dislike and distrust Exxon Mobil. As it turns out, Idaho has its own bad experience with the world’s largest oil company, too: The Megaloads. In 2010, Exxon Mobil quietly arranged for Korean-manufactured refinery equipment to be barged to Lewiston, Idaho and then trucked along U.S. Highway 12 to the…
Sixty years ago this month, on the quiet evening of July 9, 1958, the Fairweather Fault in Southeastern Alaska shifted 21 feet laterally and three feet vertically, a ML 7.8 earthquake. The violent shaking caused a massive landslide at the head of the Lituya Bay, on the northeasterly wall of Gilbert Inlet. From as high…
If you know the word “prion” at all you probably think of a mis-folded protein that causes neurodegenerative diseases. But it’s also a small family of seven petrel-like species, the largest of which is the Antarctic Prion. The white belly, white eyebrow, black tail tip and distinctive dark “M” shape on the back make it…
Nothing hammers readership here at Wickersham’s Conscience like writing about economics. The dismal science is just not a popular topic. But it is important, and we are finding out how important as we live with the fallout from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017. Harvard has published an interesting study of the effect…
WC authored the Hypocrisy Hypothesis, the principle that a noisier a Republican politician is about Christian values, family values and domestic bliss, the more likely it is he is pervert or a horny dog. Think Newt Gingrich, serial adulterer, or Dennis Hastert, convicted child molester. If you needed more evidence that the Hypocrisy Hypothesis is…
Our President uses language in strange and unusual ways. Notably, he often uses the same words or phrases in numerous different Twitter messages. In an ongoing service to readers, WC offers the following updated Trump Lexicon, offering definitions of those word and phrases as an aid to understanding what the President is really saying. …
Vice President Mike Pence likes to brag about living the American Dream, growing up working for his Dad’s gas station empire. Kiel Brothers Oil Co. operated a chain of some 200 gas stations in Indiana, Kentucky and Illinois. The kids took over when Pop Pence died in 1988. Mike Pence’s older brother, Greg Pence, was…
The thing is that there aren’t going to be any documents captioned “Collusion Agreement.” There aren’t likely to be any secret recordings, not even of Russian prostitutes, where Donald Trump talks about colluding with Putin. Nor is there a crime called “collusion.” If Mueller brings criminal charges against the Trump Administration and its political campaign…
Stop WC is you’ve heard this story before. The first time it was Dorothy Oremus Lindauer who wanted to buy Alaska’s governorship for her husband, John. She spent $1.7 million on the effort. Of course, John claimed it was his money, which was a lie, which earned him a criminal conviction, a one-year suspended sentence, two…
There are whole families of smaller birds, ranging from crow-sized to sparrow-sized, that spend their whole lives on the ocean, coming ashore only to breed. Petrels, Prions, Storm-petrels, Diving-petrels; they are all adapted to live on the ocean, with no need for fresh water. One of those smaller marine birds is the Cape Petrel, in…
The MQ-9 Reaper, according to the U.S. Air Force, “is an armed, multi-mission, medium-altitude, long-endurance remotely piloted aircraft that is employed primarily against dynamic execution targets and secondarily as an intelligence collection asset. Given its significant loiter time, wide-range sensors, multi-mode communications suite, and precision weapons — it provides a unique capability to perform strike,…
Galileo Galilei famously faced the Inquisition for steadfastly asserting the Earth revolved around the Sun, rather than the Sun around the Earth. But before that, he is credited with the equally famous experiment at Pisa, where he dropped two heavy metal balls, of different sizes, from Pisa’s Leaning Tower. Aristotle had written the heavier metal…
A society that does not protect its children, by definition, is doomed. Yet the Trump Administration, across the board, has shown it is perfectly willing to sacrifice the health and well-being of children to allow its corporate underwriters to make an even bigger profit. WC offers four specific examples. The World Health Organization (WHO) proposed a…
WC will make another stab at his efforts at diligence, if not journalism, and follow-up on some earlier blog posts. Remember when Golden Valley Electric’s Healy 2 power plant was called the “Clean Coal Project”? In an ongoing affront to the Sunk Cost Fallacy, GVEA has now poured $175 million in rate payer dollars in…
The Salmon River, the largest tributary of the Snake River, dominates central Idaho. It drains the eastern, western and northern slopes of the Idaho Batholith, the vast granite pluton in the heart of the state. It’s also the largest un-dammed river in the Lower 48. Exploring all of the Salmon River and its tributaries would…
Therese Patricia Okoumou was the woman who climbed up on the skirts of the Statue of Liberty to protest President Trump’s immigration policies. WC think there is a lot to protest and that Ms. Okoumou’s protest was a pretty mild response. She didn’t harm anything or anyone; just sat there peacefully. According to the New York…
In the Falkland Islands, the ecological role of ravens, crows and vultures is occupied by a falcon, the Striated Caracara. This is one of the larger members of the falcon family, with a wingspan of about four feet. And you can see those talons aren’t anything you’d want to mess with. In the Falkland Islands,…
This is a Silver Maple tree, across the street from WC’s house. It’s likely more than 100-110 years old and more than 100 feet tall. It has homed Eastern Fox Squirrels, a family of Western Screech Owls, countless Eurasian Starlings and American Robins. It received a death warrant on Tuesday. Its crimes are (1) being…
President Trump and the Republicans that control Congress promised the giant, budget-busting tax bill passed last year would have a trickle-down effect as big corporate employers passed tax breaks down to their employees in the form of bonuses and raises. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R, Quitting) back in January in response to Apple’s decision to reward…
You fly your colors; WC will fly his.
WC can report a new and entertaining way to waste time assiduously study on the internet. Sometime in 2016, the United States Geological Survey created an on-line, interactive geological map of Alaska. If you are a geologist, professional or amateur, it’s about as cool a toy as the Series of Tubes™ has to offer. WC…
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