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Birth and Death in Grant Park 1968 and 2008

I wasn't in Grant Park the night Barack Obama won the election, which is a pity as it seemed like a joyous and life affirming event. But I've been in Grant Park with tens of thousands of others, the last time 40 years ago. There was tear gas everywhere, students and others being clubbed to the ground by berserker Chicago police and people running in terror and fury. Grant Park was full of anger and violence. So it was with wonder and a full heart that I looked on images of Grant Park Tuesday night: "Look at these people -- old, young, black and white -- I've never seen anything like it, "…

Save the submersibles!

Go sign this petition to maintain the tools for sea exploration at Florida Atlantic University. They're trying to get a thousand signatures…we can do that in no time at all. The Johnson-Sea-Link I & II submersibles are owned and operated by Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute (HBOI) at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Fort Pierce, Florida. They are launched from the HBOI research vessel R/V Seward Johnson, a 204-ft ,purpose built ,state of the art platform redesigned in 1994 which displaces 1282 tons and has a 6,000 nautical mile range. An experienced captain and crew constantly…

Quantum dots: thanks for the memories

The first computer I used was a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-9. It had 48K (that's 48KB, not 48MB or 48GB) of wound ferrite core memory that took up half a very large room. The we booted it with paper tape -- a strip of tape with holes punched in it that got read by a paper tape reader. First we had to set some register switches by hand. No time share. We signed up for use two hours at a time. There was someone in the lab 24/7 using the beast. My first desktop, an Apple II+, had the same amount of memory but it fit on a table top. That was 13 years later. Without a monitor it cost $2200…

Bird flu and the Fifth Estate

I clipped something from AP Pakistan last week but didn't use it because of interruptions. It turns out that Crof at H5N1 noted it at the time but I have a few observations to add, even at this late date. First, here's the gist: Federal Minister for Food, Agriculture and Livestock, Prince Esa Jan Baloch here on Wednesday asked the journalists to focus on factual, objective and positive reporting to check spread of misconceptions and misinformation regarding the outbreak of bird flu in the country. Addressing a press conference, following the coordination meeting between Ministry of Food…

Director of OIE tries to recover from comments about bird flu (doesn't make it)

When we complained the other day about World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) Director General Bernard Vallat's ill-considered remarks about how stable H5N1 was and that earlier fears were "overblown" we were not alone. Mike Osterholm at CIDRAP issued a similar remonstrance and the latter was publicized by the folks at Avian Flu Trackers on a press release that was picked up by a number of papers. Now DG Vallat is busy trying to extricate his foot from his mouth (or wherever he lodged it): At an informal meeting with the press on 10/1/08 , the Director General of the OIE, Dr Bernard…

Food labels: the font of all knowledge can be pretty small

There's a lot of stuff about tainted food in the news, whether it is toxins in imports or questionable additives in US products (e.g., bisphenol A in hard plastics). This stuff is not on any food label, of course, but there is a lot of detailed stuff that is on labels and increased concern about food seems to have made label reading more common. I've always wondered if the detail was encouraging or discouraging people from reading labels. How many people read labels really? Quite a few, it turns out, at least if you believe a new report, Label Reading from a Consumer Perspective, by the…

Smoking in the US

CDC has just released current smoking prevalence data showing that about 21% of Americans smoke daily or some days on a regular basis. This number has not changed in three years, so we seem to have plateaued. Since everyone knows what a deadly habit smoking is, this is disturbing. The operative word, of course, is "habit," although addiction would seem to be a better choice. We persist in using the word "voluntary" to describe smoking, but CDC data also show that almost half of all smokers quit for a day or more -- unsuccessfully. Since I'm a native English speaker I think I know what the…

Locating blame for adverse drug reactions

Adverse drug reactions often appear idiosyncratic. Some drugs have powerful effects and everyone experiences the side effects (e.g., cancer chemotherapeutic agents). Others, however, seem to disagree with only a few people, although that disagreement can be major. Obviously drug companies would rather not have to contend with the fallout that occurs when their customers become collateral damage. Much of the controversy over drugs like Vioxx is how much the companies knew about that damage and what they did with that knowledge. Big Pharma would rather the blame the drug failure on the victim…

Cancer in veterans: no problem

In the last five years the Veterans Administration has figured out a way to decrease cancer cases amongst veterans by a lot: 40,000 to 70,000 are the estimates. The breakthrough was initiated by the Bush administration, which has used the same technique to make an impact on other problems, from military casualties to the environment: they just don't bother to tell anyone about the cases. Presto: they disappear: Stonewalling by the Veterans Administration is putting U.S. cancer surveillance and research in jeopardy, according to many of the researchers involved in those fields. After decades…

I like my son's new science textbook

The school has started and I have not yet met my son's teachers, but he brought home his science textbook yesterday. Of course I had to take a look....and I really liked it! It is North Carolina Edition of McDougal Littell "Science" for 8th grade. While I am still stunned that all of science is bunched together this late in schooling (I had physics, chemistry, earth science and biology as separate subjects from 5th through 12th grade every year), but at least the way this is bunched looks good. It is divided into five units, each taking, I guess, about two months to cover. The first unit…

The Best Sneetches on the Beaches

From Thursday, February 16, 2006, another old post in the where did my son get his smarts vein: When I went to pick up Coturnix Junior from school today (he is in 7th grade), we bumped into his English teacher who informed me that he did not turn in his book review. He started coming up with excuses, that he lost the book, or it was stolen, etc. She said something like "Well, you better read something really fast, so you can turn in the review tomorrow. And it has to be something at middle-school level, not Dr.Seuss". I doubt Dr.Seuss ever crossed his mind up till that moment, but he was…

In Memoriam: Knut Schmidt-Nielsen (September 24, 1915-January 25, 2007)

How did I miss this!? Knut Schmidt-Nielsen, one of my personal scientific idols, died on January 25th, 2007at the age of 92. He has re-invented, or perhaps better to say invented, the field of comparative physiology (now often refered to as 'evolutionary physiology'). He wrote the standard textbook in the field - Animal Physiology: Adaptation and Environment, that he updated through several editions, from which generations of biologists (including myself) learned to think of physiological mechanisms as adaptations. He wrote a definitive book on Scaling, as well as a wonderful autobiography…

My picks from ScienceDaily

City Ants Take The Heat: While Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, has generated greater awareness of global warming, most people remain unaware of the more rapid warming that has occurred within major cities. In fact, large cities can be more than 10 degrees hotter than their surroundings. These metropolitan hot spots, which scientists refer to as urban heat islands, can stress the animals and plants that make their home alongside humans. Until recently, biologists had focused so much on the effects of global climate change, that they had overlooked the effects of urban warming. More…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Why Even Close Associates Sometimes Have Trouble Communicating: Particularly among close associates, sharing even a little new information can slow down communication. Some of people's biggest problems with communication come in sharing new information with people they know well, newly published research at the University of Chicago shows. More..... Older Adults May Be Unreliable Eyewitnesses, Study Shows: A University of Virginia study suggests that older adults are not only more inclined than younger adults to make errors in recollecting details that have been suggested to them, but are…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Discovery May Help Predict When Toxoplasma Can Be Deadly : Toxoplasma is arguably the most successful animal parasite on earth: It infects hundreds of species of warm-blooded animals, most notably half of humanity. Its unusual ability to overcome the numerous challenges of infecting and reproducing inside such a wide range of creatures has long intrigued scientists, and now researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have identified two of the proteins critical to its ability to thrive. One Gene 90 Percent Responsible For Making Common Parasite Dangerous: More than a decade of…

Fire in the hole: Wolfgang Wodarg and WHO

The Reveres have written many posts about the World Health Organization in five years. Some just reported on their activities, others, as seemed appropriate, were critical or praised them. WHO operates in a difficult landscape under rules of engagement not well suited to fighting an enemy that recognizes neither national borders nor national sovereignties and one might question this intergovernmental agency's relevance given those constraints. But we have always bridled at accusations WHO acted unethically or incompetently, neither of which is true. WHO does a difficult job with just a…

Crashworthiness and whiplash

When I recently got rid of my 15 year old car for one that is only 2 years old, I was amazed and impressed at the number of genuine safety features, many of them hidden or not obvious. Cars are simply much safer now than they were, even a decade ago, not to mention when I was a youth. Here's a dramatic example comparing the crashworthiness of a 1959 Chevy Bel Air and a 2009 Chevy Malibu: Injuries are the major cause of death up to age 44 and the most frequent cause is motor vehicle accidents. Car crashes also cause injury and disability, and one of the more common comes from the sudden…

No tsunami of regulations, proposals to improve safety for miners languish in White House review

(Update below (1/10/2014)) Obama’s “regulatory tsunami” is the term used by the US Chamber of Commerce to describe an expected flood of new regulations. Their message to the business community is that the floodgates will soon open and all of them will drown in red tape. The Chamber’s president Tom Donohue said it last month in a speech, and he’s been saying it for years. But him saying it, and us seeing it are two different things. In the worker health and safety world, there’s been no tsunami. For Obama’s first five years, it’s been more like a slow drip at the kitchen faucet. Remember, this…

Working in clouds of dust. If it's silica, it's not safe.

Occupational health hazards are often hidden, and may not even be appropriately disclosed to workers who are exposed.  They are usually shielded from public view, meaning they don't get the attention needed to ensure protections are put in place to address them.  But every once in a while, hazards to workers' health are right in front of you. Yesterday morning, I was driving on FM 1626 in Kyle, TX and passed this scene:  Two construction workers standing in a nasty cloud of dust.  The men were working at the new campus of Austin Community College in Hays County, TX and were cutting stone…

Cutting Your Phantom Loads

I've always liked Tom Murphy's "Do the Math" work, and I really like his latest piece on phantom loads and electricity cutting. That's one of the very first steps for most of us whe we seriously try and cut our electrical usage, but one that a lot of people don't know to do about. We've been able to radically reduce our electric usage by a lot of the same strategies, and they really work: One of the most important reductions one can make is reduction of baseload power: devices that consume energy 24/7. Every 1 W eliminated removes 9 kWh from the yearly tally and about $1 of yearly cost at…

So Can (some variations on) Left and (some variations on) Right Work Together?

There's a really good debate going on in the combox of my Khaki Markets Post on an issue that I've been meaning to write about for a while - to what extent is it possible for people who are seeking the same social ends to work together when they use different political means. In the comboxes the discussion is mostly over whether Progressives and Libertarians can work together on local food systems, but this strikes me as a larger - and deeply critical question. It isn't just the libertarians and the progressives who have common ground on food systems, after all. The socialists and the…

Is Japan Experiencing Peak Oil First?

There's a very good piece in the Guardian about the ways that Eastern Japan's energy crisis is a model for experiences we might have in the future: For large parts of eastern Japan that were not directly hit by the tsunami on 11 March 2011, including the nation's capital, the current state of affairs feels very much like a dry-run for peak oil. This is not to belittle the tragic loss of life and the dire situation facing many survivors left without homes and livelihoods. Rather, the aim here is to reflect upon the post-disaster events and compare them with those normally associated with the…

On the Death of Miep Gies

Until I saw Ilargi's lovely obit for Miep Gies, who helped hide Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis and who rescued Anne's diary, I hadn't realized that she had died at 100. I can only add that there is a life worth mourning, and Ilargi's piece is well worth reading: The Dutch language would be a hell of a lot poorer if not for the centuries of Jewish culture that enriched the country, and most of all Amsterdam. Rembrandt and Vermeer, and all of their 17th century peers, would not have created what they did without the Jews. The tulip bubble, well, perhaps, but the spice trade that made…

Orrin Hatch Kicks "Dreidel Song" Butt

I realize this has nothing to do with energy, food or environment, but it amuses me, so a brief hiatus from relevance will be taken. As y'all know (or don't) Chanukah starts this weekend, and the household is awash in preparations, many of them involving glue sticks and song. During the course of my life, I've had several candidates for the "Most nauseating holiday song award" - before my conversion to Judaism, I was an avid advocate of "The Little Drummer Boy" whose sicky sweet rumpapumpumming went on an awfully long time and seemed to be a favorite for covers by artists I already couldn't…

A Universe of Black Holes: II

and we are back from lunch J. Johnson (LANL) talking about supermassive stars as seeds for supermassive black holes - going to be getting more technical supermassive star has a gas mass ~ 105 solar masses (as oppesed to few hundredish solar masses for standard Pop III stars that could provide low mass seeds) form later than Pop III - maybe ~ 4-500 Myr after Big Bang something like that may be needed for observed high luminosity quasars at redshift > 6. radiative feedback, still not doing it right but are we they doing it well enough...? argues supermasive star formation common at z ~ 8-12…

Roadtrip observations of workers safety (sort of) during highway construction

I recently logged 1,300 miles in a rented white PT Cruiser traveling on I-94 from Chicago to Milwaukee and Madison, WI, down I-65 and I-74 to Cincinnati and up I-75 to Detroit. Along the way I saw dozens of road construction projects to expand traffic lanes, repair overpasses, and repave the road surface. Workers were dutifully wearing hard hats and reflective vests, but these protections seemed completely inadequate for the deadly hazards in their midst. Vehicles were zipping past within a few feet of the workers, with only a line of plastic barrels as a barrier. At one site near…

Two miners not yet located at Barrick gold mine in Nevada

Updated (8/15/10 2:00 pm EST) below Mine rescue teams continue their search to rescue or recover two workers struck by a "large surge of pressure" as they were being lowered into a mine shaft at Barrick's Meikle mine near Elko, Nevada. As the Associated Press reports, the incident occurred on Thursday, August 12 at 1:15 am local time. As of 2:00 pm (EST) on August 13, MSHA did not have information on its website about the incident. An inspection by three federal mine inspectors of Barrick's Meikle mine was ongoing at the time of the incident. (Like underground coal mines, other underground…

Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers

A Washington Post editorial entitled "Down and Out" (9/8/09) alerted me to a new report by the National Employment Law Project (NELP) on working conditions experienced by low-wage workers in the U.S.  The 72-page report "Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers:  Violations of Employment and Labor Laws in America's cities," describes the results of a survey conducted in 2008 of more than 4,300 workers employed in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City, and their experience with wage-and-hour violations, and retaliation for attempting to organize or pointing out safety problems. Among the …

Rhode Island Supreme Court reverses lead paint verdict

The State of Rhode Island's efforts, which began in 1999, to force lead-paint manufacturers to clean-up contaminated homes received a mortal blow when the State's Supreme Court reversed a lower court's 2006 decision.  (Full decision from 7/1/2008)  This early ruling was a result of the longest civil jury trial in Rhode Island history, with the decision going against the defendants Sherwin-Williams, NL Industries, and Millennium Holdings, holding them liable for creating a public nuisance by selling lead-based paint.  The R.I. Supreme Court said: "We do not mean to minimize the severity…

Taking Food Safety Seriously

Salmonella-tainted tomatoes have sickened at least 277, although the Seattle PIâs Andrew Schneider cites a CDC estimate of 8,600 people whoâve become ill during this outbreak. Congress has reacted to this and other food and drug safety problems by forcing additional funding on the FDA, which isnât allowed to ask for more money than the administration decides it needs. The additional $275 million is small change, though, compared to whatâs needed to shore up our overburdened food and drug safety systems. Contrast this lackluster action to what happened in South Korea when the government made a…

Four Deaths and FDA's Chinese Plant Mixup

Baxter International announced recently that it has temporarily halted production of heparin, a generic anti-clotting drug, because of four fatalities and hundreds of bad reactions potentially tied to the drug. Baxter and the FDA say they donât know the exact cause of the bad reactions, but attention has focused on the active ingredient supplied by a Chinese facility. This morning, Marc Kaufman reports in the Washington Post that this Chinese plant wasn't inspected by FDA because the agency confused its name with another one: Joseph Famulare, deputy director for compliance at the FDA's center…

Bush's Actions Louder than SOTU Words

In his last state of the union address, President Bush glossed over the seriousness of some of the most pressing problems facing our country, and suggested they could be solved with something thatâs been in short supply during his tenure. âGlobal climate changeâ got one brief mention, as something that the nation is committed to confronting with cleaner and more energy-efficient technology. Unacceptable rates of uninsurance and spiraling healthcare costs were obliquely referenced with a stated goal of âmaking health care more affordable and accessible for all Americans.â Bush invoked…

Public Health Calls for TSCA Reform

At last week's annual meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA), the organization adopted more than a dozen new policy resolutions which will guide its work into the future.  Included among them was a call for "Congress to fundamentally restructure the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 (TSCA)" so that more attention is paid to the toxic and ecotoxic properties of chemicals in commerce.  APHA's policy resolution on TSCA* describes the limitations of the existing law, echoing assessments made by other groups.  In 2005 and 2006, for example, the Government Accountability…

CPSC Chairman: Weakness is Strength

We've been following the crescendo of stories illustrating the severe limitations of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (here, here, and here): CPSC lacks the resources to test products adequately, it canât levy hefty enough fines to deter corporate wrongdoing, and it can announce a recall only through a news release that it negotiates with the company involved . Now, a bill is moving through the Senate that would boost CPSC funding, increase maximum penalties for violating product-safety laws to $100 million from $1.85 million, protect whistleblowers, and let the understaffed agency…

Mooney now agrees with us - Denialists deserve ridicule, not debate

He had to realize Nisbett's framing was worthless and write a whole book on defective Republican reasoning to realize it but it sounds like Chris Mooney has come around to the right way to confront denialism: The only solution, then, is to make organized climate denial simply beyond the pale. It has to be the case that taking such a stand is tantamount to asserting that smoking is completely safe, no big deal, go ahead and have two packs a day. Sounds a little bit like what I wrote in 2007 when I pointed out denialists should not even be debated: The goal instead must be to enforce standards…

Should doctors fire patients who won't vaccinate?

WSJ has an article about the increasing number of pediatricians who fire their patients who refuse to vaccinate: Pediatricians fed up with parents who refuse to vaccinate their children out of concern it can cause autism or other problems increasingly are "firing" such families from their practices, raising questions about a doctor's responsibility to these patients. Medical associations don't recommend such patient bans, but the practice appears to be growing, according to vaccine researchers. In a study of Connecticut pediatricians published last year, some 30% of 133 doctors said they had…

The Ayn Rand Deprogrammer: A More Twisted Crime and Punishment

Sciblings, I really appreciate all of the suggested texts submitted for the Ayn Rand Deprogrammer. If you visit the comment thread, you'll see that the inevitable happened: Objectivists tried to hijack the discussion. I say ignore them. Eyes on the prize: a solid Ayn Rand Deprogrammer. Any distraction will slow us down, and delay publication of forthcoming projects, the Hayek Deprogrammer and the Milton Friedman Deprogrammer. I am going to bundle up all the good suggestions made by commenters. But here is one that no one else has found. Written in 1957, it is clear eyed and prescient…

False equality

I'm off to the west coast (of Michigan) for a few days, and if I don't blog, I shall die...or something. So I have a few posts from my old blog to share with you. As my child approaches school age, I worry about school board battles a little bit more. I hate politics, but I can see myself forced to get involved at some point. And I find myself wondering, what is it about some Evangelical Christians? Why is their faith so weak? Is God testing them? I ask this because of their constant griping about "equal time" for Creationism in public schools. Given that science classes are supposed to teach…

Another anniversary

I fear for this anniversary. Like everyone else, my memories of 9/11 are vivid. It is a shared experience for Americans, but as time goes on, it is losing its shared meaning. Some of this meaning will, I'm sure, continue to be shunted into political ends, even more so with the election coming up. I have no interest in 9/11 "Troofers", the conspiracy theorists who have all kinds of outlandish ideas about the attacks. I don't need them---the real truth is more frightening. 9/11 wasn't Pearl Harbor. We didn't wake up on the 12th to find ourselves at war, despite what the president may…

Alternative medicne and the straight line to AIDS denialism

In order to bring you your daily dose of science, the Great Seed Overlords must pay the bills. Like any other medium, one of the ways this is done is by selling ad space. Internet ad engines generally have some sort of algorithm that choses ads based on the page content, thereby targeting readers' interests. If you doubt the sophistication of these methods, check your amazon.com suggestions, or your google search page. For a skeptical blogger, this can make for some interesting ads. One of mine is for a book called Water: For Health, For Healing, For Life, by F. Batmanghelidj, M.D. I've…

ADL makes an official statement

After all the pious nonsense from certain quarters blaming scientists for the Holocaust and other atrocities, it seems appropriate to take note of the Anti-Defamation League's response: The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community which rejects so-called intelligent design theory. Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler's genocidal madness. Using the Holocaust in order to…

MRSA, Meat, and Motown

It's been not even a month since the last paper looking at MRSA in meat, and up pops another one. So far here in the US, we've seen studies in Rhode Island (no MRSA found); Louisiana (MRSA found in beef and pork, but "human" types: USA100 and USA300); the recent Waters et al study sampling in California, Florida, Illinois, Washington DC, and Arizona, finding similar strains (ST8 and ST5, associated with USA300 and USA100, respectively). Now a new study has collected MRSA samples in Detroit, collecting 289 samples from 30 retail stores in the city. For this study, they collected only beef,…

The futile quest for the "perfect" breast

Over at Respectful Insolence, Orac discusses an article where a scientist has spent his days shut away, slaving endlessly over a data set--of pictures of topless models. Why? To produce the perfect boob job, of course--or as the article puts it, "to help Hollywood look even more perfect." Great. Just what we need. According to the researcher, the ideal breast "...is a 45 to 55 per cent proportion - that is the nipple sits not at the half-way mark down the breast, but at least 45 per cent from the top." Like it wasn't enough before to worry about them being too perky, or too saggy, or…

HIV denial update #1: shake-up in South Africa

There have been some interesting updates in the field of HIV politics and denial recently. First, after having several months of moving forward with a real plan to combat AIDS in South Africa, the deputy minister of health, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, has been fired. For those who follow this area, Madlala-Routledge stepped into the limelight when she took over for her boss, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, while she had surgery. Tshabalala-Msimang, you may recall, is the one who sided with President Thabo Mbeki regarding causes of AIDS (and cures for it), advocating treatments such as a recipe of…

Further reading on scientist-journalist communication

I've had a busy week (and an especially busy weekend--more on that in a later post), so today's activity will again be sparse, but I have a lot on tap (now just to get it all typed up!) I do, however, want to highlight a few other posts you should read if you were interested in my post on the collision of scientists and journalists: First, Mike's post on the topic. As he notes, part of his job is to "deal with journalists," so he has lots of good advice for those on both sides of the aisle. Astroprof left a comment here on the article, and also elaborated on the topic in a post of his…

While all the HIV "dissidents" are milling around....

...I'm sure they'll be happy to see that Gambia's president is curing AIDS: From the pockets of his billowing white robe, Gambia's president pulls out a plastic container, closes his eyes in prayer and rubs a green herbal paste onto the rib cage of the patient -- a concoction he claims is a cure for AIDS. He then orders the thin man to swallow a bitter yellow drink, followed by two bananas. "Whatever you do, there are bound to be skeptics, but I can tell you my method is foolproof," President Yahya Jammeh told an Associated Press reporter, surrounded by bodyguards in his presidential compound…

More anti-evolution rumblings in the UK

Via Dean and Science, Just Science comes this story about a new group trying to get ID into class in the UK: Parents are being encouraged to challenge their children's science teachers over what they are explaining as the origins of life. An organisation called Truth in Science has also sent resource packs to all UK secondary school science departments. It promotes the idea of intelligent design - that there was an intelligence behind the creation of the universe. On their website, Truth in Science notes that they've already sent " a mailing to all Secondary School and College Heads of…

Congress's FDA Bill Includes Reforms

The House and Senate have both passed legislation that renews the FDAâs user-fee system and enacts some important reforms. The process has been rushed because FDA is running dangerously low on funds; President Bush will need to sign the legislation today if the FDA is to avoid sending termination letters to one-fourth of its staff. First, some background: In 1992, Congress passed the first Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) and set up a system in which drug companies pay annual fees and fees for each prescription drug product they market, and these fees help fund the FDA's process of…

Where We Are on Labor Day

For those of us fortunate enough to have Labor Day off from work, itâs a good time to remember all the workers who canât take a day off because we rely so heavily on them: hospital staff, police officers, bus drivers, power-company workers, and many others. Then, there are the retail and restaurant workers who clock in on federal holidays because their employers know that many of us will observe Labor Day by going shopping or out to eat. We owe our current lifestyle not only to the workers who keep us supplied with food, electricity, transportation, healthcare, and other necessities, but to…

Bob Murray's "Woe is Me"

This time, it's not an Act of God, but instead it just that Big, Bad Mountain.  Owner/operator of the Crandall Canyon mine, Mr. Bob Murray said today: "Had I known that this evil mountain, this alive mountain, would do what it did, I would never have sent the miners in here.  I'll never go near that mountain again." We couldn't make this stuff up if we tried.  No wonder reporters were wondering where Mr. Murray has been over the last few days.   (I had two calls on Monday wondering if I knew where to find him. )  They were craving a few more choice quotes from the guy.  He …