WC hopes to make this part of an irregular series of blog posts discussing the impacts of climate change on the United States, with a focus on some of the unexpected impacts. Because climate change is as real and as serious as a heart attack, no matter what some may say. The National Flood Insurance…
WC will undertake to explain the nation’s longest, stupidest government shutdown in words that possibly even Donald Trump can understand. There is no emergency at the border. It’s clear that illegal immigration is down and has been down for a while now. If there was truly an emergency, Congress would have addressed it when the…
Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibi wrote of Goldman Sachs in 2010: The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state…
It’s time for WC’s very-nearly-regular follow-up on stuff WC has written about earlier. As always, the Magpie Principle applies. WC wrote back in 2016 about Exxon’s effort to conceal its knowledge about the role of greenhouse gas emissions in climate change. Exxon has fought furiously to avoid being compelled to disclose records sought by the…
Sometimes all a frustrated citizen blogger can do is resort to doggerel. Of all the villains in the Trump’s government shutdown – and there are a lot of them – the one who could fix the shutdown most easily has vanished from the scene. All Mitch McConnell1 would have to do is let the Trump…
If you live in Alaska, especially rural Alaska, you fly a lot. Mostly, it’s safe. But sometimes it isn’t. There are plane crashes and sometimes fatalities. No aircraft crash in WC’s lifetime impacted Alaskans more than the crash of N1812H on October 16, 1972. There were four people on board that Cessna 310C charter flight:…
A shutdown of the federal government is a failure of our form of government. It happens when one party or another attempts political blackmail, and the other side calls its bluff. It is a relatively new thing in American politics. And it is being used increasingly often. Here’s a brief history of federal government shutdowns:…
