This one's late because the electricity was off between about 3 a.m. and about 9 p.m.
Economy, The
When big corporations get hubristic and crash down, this is called a market correction. In a healthy, free-market economy it makes room for smaller, more efficient, more customer-appreciative companies to prosper. What concerns me is that the corporations going down are not the ones that most need and deserve bankruptcy--not Blackrock, not Microsoft, not Bank of America, not Bayers or Lilly or Merck or even Pfizer. Granted, they fell behind their competitors because their products or services or prices, or all of the above, were inferior. Still...
Big Lots
Brooks Brothers
Brookstone
Burger King
Butterick
Contadina
Del Monte
GNC
Hemper
Hooters
Hudsons Bay
JC Penney
J Crew
Joann's
Kohl's
Lake Shore
Lehman
Lord & Taylor
Macy's
McCall's
Modell's
Monster.com
Neiman Marcus
Party City
Pier 1 Imports
Publishers Clearing House
Red Lobster
Rite-Aid
Sears
Simplicity
Sunnova
...may have been yesterday's stores that will never be missed, but are their failures opening room for leaner, cleaner, better businesses, or are they feeding the bloated giants? Will Sears and JC Penney stores be replaced by stores with policies Mr Sears and Mr Penney would have respected, or merely by Amazon?
Electricity
Trump promised to cut the cost of electricity by encouraging more use of costly, unsustainable fuels--more use of coal, for instance, meaning more strip mining and/or deep mining, and more encouragement of merely stupid ideas like fracking and nuclear reactors. He needs to focus on what will actually cut the cost of electricity to private people--putting solar collectors on the outbuildings, covered walkways, bus stop shelters, etc., of customers beginning with the ones whose electricity has been disconnected or threatened with disconnection for non-payment. Those people need to be promoted from beleaguered, reluctant, discontented consumers into respected producers. People who have had to choose between electricity, medication, or meals should be the first to start getting monthly checks, instead of bills, from APCo or PEPCo or Dominion.
What do youall think? Is this a good enough song to be a theme for this issue? Has anyone Out There found a better one?
It's late in life for Trump to learn new negotiation skills...He did try to deliver what he promised, at a fast'n'furious pace, didn't he? He failed because the US government is set up to be different from the sort of private business with which he has experience: under the Constitution, our President has to recruit a critical proportion of our Congress (and their electorates) to support any big sweeping policy changes he wants to make. Trump needed to make haste a little more slowly by negotiating with Congress; he needs to keep hammering out those issues and not just go into a sulk and use the rest of his presidential term to indulge in personal vindictiveness. He is old, and he is male, and it will be hard for him to wrap his mind around this concept, but I believe he's capable of it if he's guided by people who are patient and mindful of his built-in challenges to new learning. We need to be those people, Gentle Readers.
(Am I saying that old men are more resistant to new learning than young women are? I am. Am I saying that this is necessarily always a reason to have young women making decisions? I am not. Young women absorb new information quickly--sometimes too quickly. Sometimes we follow along with ideas just because falling in and following feels comfortable to us, when we ought to be resisting and asking more questions. I think it's actually good to have decisions made by a mix of diverse people, which is why we have the US Congress.)
Federal Budget Cuts
Today's (Thursday's, the day when Wednesday's links go live) "main feature" post is about a topic raised in the Appalachian Voice, which most of our local lurkers also read. The Voice also discussed a list of federal programs Trump wants to defund or cut back "that have a disproportionate impact on the air, land, water, and local economies" in the Appalachian Mountains. (Note that the Voice only ever considers the Southern Appalachian Mountains--well, counting the Illegitimate State, which ought strictly speaking still to belong to Virginia and thus to count as Southern, but who wants it back?) Some of these are still being kicked around in Congress so this web site will weigh in on them:
Trump wants to eliminate something the Department of Energy calls the "Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations," which tests new energy technologies in rural areas or on mined-out land. Why do we have a federal Department of Energy at all? Do we want it testing, say, nuclear reactors on abandoned mines where the land is likely to sink?
Trump wants to halve the budget for the Economic Development Administration this year, closing it next year, paying it just enough to administer "already awarded grants" to local governments to "build the necessary public infrastructure that can lead to private investment." To what private investment has this increase in local government size and expense led? To what gain to the local communities?
Trump wants to halve the budget for the EPA's "Brownfields Program," which is supposed to clean up and redevelop polluted sites like abandoned factories or gas stations. Well? How many of those sites have been cleaned up and redeveloped, and by whom?
Trump wants to eliminate the EPA's "Wetlands Program" development grants, whose goal is to increase the amount of land grabbed by government, removed from private owners, under the pretext that it is "wetlands." What good can land grabs possibly do? Should government be allowed to own more land than a severely limited number of government offices sit on?
Trump wants to eliminate the "Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program," which pays part of the "energy" bills for welfare-dependent families. "This program helps prevent deaths...related to hot and cold temperatures," its advocates chant. If its funds were reserved for low-income working people, withheld from welfare dependents, would those people still want to keep it in the budget?
Trump wants to halve the National Park Service's budget. A suggestion: If the Park Service showed the ability to trim the fat and work with a smaller budget, We The People might be more willing to let the federal government continue to own the National Parks.
Trump wants to cut the budget for the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation & Enforcement...from $116 million to $101 million. Trust me, I've worked in federal offices; most of them could only benefit from that sort of tightening. And, if one round of budget cuts does not motivate them to trim the fat, fire the people with whom the most efficient workers "just don't fit in" rather than the more efficient workers e.g., cut'm again, deeper. Cry me a river, heirs of the federal employees who hated me so in my contractor phase. The nation needs you in jobs where your sluggish brains aren't doing anyone any harm or costing anyone any money. I don't know, maybe street cleaning.
Trump wants to cut funding for the USDA's Rural Utilities Service, whose original job was fairly well done in the 1970s, by letting them coast through next year on "carry-over funding" from previous years with no new funding. Should they complain? Is that better than no funding at all?
Trump wants to let the Fish & Wildlife Service's "State and Tribal Wildlife Grant Program" coast to a halt, similarly, on $59 million in fees and carry-over funding. Likewise the Forest Service's "State, Private, and Tribal Forestry Program," which supposedly helps "protect communities from wildfires"--hello? We're not the ones having the wildfires...yet...but California does not sound as if it's being protected.
Trump wants to cut the Forest Service staffing budget, and the US Geological Survey Water Resources Mission Area's budget, by about a third. I'd be surprised if any federal office couldn't survive having its budget cut back by only a third.
And, Trump wants to cut FEMA's "Building Resilient Infrastructure Communities Grant Program" waaay back, from $256 million to $50 million. Hello? This is the FEMA that deliberately failed to help citizens who supported the Trump administration. They're not falling on their knees with gratitude that they're still in the budget at all? I think Trump needs to be a good Christian and resist temptation to act out private vindictiveness, but objectively, speaking as a person who is not partial to Trump either, I think the FEMA's behavior in North Carolina was despicable and merits deep cuts. You don't get funding for humanitarian work if the humanitarian work you do shows partisan political bias. A valid request for funding for humanitarian work wouldn't show bias against people who were still supporting Lyndon LaRouche (who died in 2019, but who cares? Clueless people are human too).
I love this glorious nation,
And its government, I do,
Just as I love my own body;
I keep that the right size, too.
The good that some of these federal agencies are doing could be done by states or localities, or by charities. I'm in favor of these budget cuts. Please tell me, Gentle Readers, if any of you benefit from any of these agencies and if you believe they need to continue to be funded by tax dollars rather than by private funders.
Safety
What a sad, sickly, puffy, pasty, prematurely "old" face. 25 going on 95. This is the look I call UGLY because in my family it indicates illness. I don't think it's natural for her either, and I see it as UGLY. And it's likely to be a direct result of listening to, and believing, years of "We can't LET you go out and play, dear, because you might get HURT." I see that sad, ugly woman as a victim first and a perpetrator of abuse second...but she is both. Take a good look at her, Gentle Readers. This is what too many of us are doing to children, especially girls, in the name of "protecting" them. Stop doing that. Children, especially girls, need to be outside for as much of every day as they're willing to be, climbing as high and running as far as they want to, short of violating other people's rights. The function of adults is to stop holding them back and start letting people, even grubby little boys who want to pick fights, know that nobody is allowed to interfere with our children, especially the girls, even by speaking to them if not recognized by full eye contact. If it feels "unsafe" to let the children run and play outside all by themselves, get out there with them.
Because who wants to have to look at this around the table every morning...
(Photo from Twitter, presumably a CBC TV clip)
when the same genes could as easily produce this?
(Photo from Google, which credits Getty Images)
Writers, Hazards of Being
Should we pray that Anas al-Sharif "rest in peace"? Perhaps. In the sense of "may his soul be found unworthy of resurrection into destruction, and be dead and forgotten forever without having to burn in Hell." If our beliefs have room for that option. Because this is what he wrote:
"Better unborn than fool.
If born, spare Earth your breath.
Don't wait. Go straight to Hell"
(attributed to St Hildegard of Bingen)
...but, if one must be born a fool, one should try to avoid being a writer. It's too dangerous. For Sharif, and for any decent human beings who may happen to be writing for Al Jazeera. May they be guided to dissociate and protect themselves, and not share in the human or the divine punishment he has earned.
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