SeniorJunior

    Looking like a bad exit wound         The heart of a frightening drought.               T he meteorologists call it "Exceptional,"                       Which is the tip top of the drought severity scale.                               I'd call it..... ...CRAZY DRY And it has been CRAZY WINDY with some DRY LIGHTNING .  And CARELESS HUMANS . All they can do is try to save houses and barns Last year we had the Dog Head Fire in our neighborhood.    We were all packed up and ready to evacuate. All irreplaceables were in storage.        Dogs were kenneled. Cat crates were ready. Friends were ready to put us up.              When I hear "2000 people evacuated," it has a visceral impact.                     Some of us live in flood plains, some in earthquake zones,                            There are tornado and hurricane alleys.                                 Very few of us would live anywhere else. BUT IT'S C

No More Droughts, No More Floods Here in the west,we are going into the fourth month of a  Fall/Winter Drought... It is scary. Every tree, bush and grass is stressed. Fire danger is high when we usually have a thick layer of snow. This may be the "new normal." ...And the other side of the country to the east is getting LOTS of precip. Why don't we leverage our obviously knowledge of pipelines (2.4 million miles of 'em in the U.S.), and move some of that water out here?          Why isn't this a big time infrastructure moment?   The Romans needed water moved, and they built the aqueducts Here is my plan . Again. (and it is the most viewed post on this blog for the last 15 years). It might make your environmentalist teeth hurt, but it could save America's neck. Mucho water heading west If the Romans could do it, WE could do it. Excerpt: So the Mississippi Flood of 2020 (and most other U.S. floods) became the End of Dr

May, 2003 Duff Cast His Sci-Fi Eye to the Distant Future May, 2020  * ( Honest. That was the day the piece was  first posted, and that was the predicted time. I promise I have not fudged the date. I reposted  it in 2011, adding some pictures.) It was about my fixation on inter-basin water movement to save the Western States. No More Floods, No More Droughts The Prediction That Ran Amuck May 2020     The Mississippi River is approaching flood stage in Illinois, Indiana and Missouri.  The Corps of Engineers monitors the levees and dikes with the giant web of depth gauges and flow meters.  The U.S. Weather Bureau is predicting major rainstorms in several of the watersheds.  Supercomputers are crunching trillions of numbers and putting options in clear graphical displays in front of Corps decision makers.   America The Beautiful ... The tale goes on about how America overcomes a looming environmental disaster. How Wrong I Was On.. . 1. We can still

Fixing capitalism for the richest country in the world When all this Coronacrap is over, and we have the vaccine and herd immunity has come about, and when we the herd can congregate any damn way we want to, there are still going to be millions of us out of work. Unemployed, busted, homeless, turning to crime or living with our relatives, not to put too fine a point on it. The muscle of capitalism is its workforce.  Ours is in terrible shape, even without the Virus. That really needs to be fixed. We need a healthy, stable, motivated, well trained work force. That's not what we've got right now. Confidence is rattled. Well deserved fear is about.  It's not everybody, but there many million of our fellow citizens who see they are in deep trouble. For capitalism to survive, this has to be fixed. In the days of Roosevelt, there was a functional majority of the nation that decided to support the New Deal. It was proof that government can respond - if imperfectly, per

Make Our Infrastructure Into A Super-Infrastructure In a fool's paradise, who is the fool? The big Midwestern floods just put an explanation point on the truth most of us know but seem powerless to do anything about: Our infrastructure is crumbling. “We” are powerless because we let the people who can do something, our elected federal officials, do nothing. Are we stoopid or unconscious or what? And we all just witnessed dikes breaking and homes, businesses and farms being ruined. Again. "We need profound changes," said engineer Kumares Sinha of Purdue University. "We can't live in a fool's paradise." (From the same Reuters article) Elected officials are afraid of the word “tax.” If something worthwhile needs doing and takes money to do it, our Congress and our Administration act like we are teenagers with credit cards. Actually pay for what we need? Horrors! Politicians who have the guts ask our citizens to sacrifice a bit to pa

[I've been on the road, visiting an extraordinarily large number of relatives. Perhaps I'll philosophize on that and them in the context of "we are all getting older." But west Texas and Oklahoma just scream drought , so this first.] --------_-- There is a great drought settling on the land. “We are looking at conditions that rival the dust bowl … earlier this year we were even drier than during the Dust Bowl.” That said by Jack Carson, spokesperson for the Oklahoma Agriculture, Food and Forestry Department. Oklahoma. Okies, get it? Leaving their lifeless farms for California during the greatest drought in recent U.S. history. Oklahomans should know a drought when they see one. This quote was from a front-page story on the front page of the June 15, 2006 “The Oklahoman.” Even with such important placement, something about the headline just didn’t have the feel the sort of “big” story we have grown used to. It was, “ Residents told to cut water use .” So is this really

I admit it. I entered a contest. So did another 20,000 or so folks, it turns out. Now Hillary Clinton has taken one of the entries and fashioned a bill based on it and put it to the Senate for consideration. What? Never mind. Just go to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) web site www.sinceslicedbread.com and check it out. It’s a big “wow!” believe me. Since I didn’t win the $100,000 grand prize or one of the $50,000 runner-up prizes, the least you can do is read my entry. The contest was for ideas that might pep up our economy and be good for us “common folk.” Here was my over-the-top idea. - - - - - - - - - - - The problem: our damaging cycle of droughts and floods. The issue: the opportunity this presents. Face it, it’s a government project. This idea is for a huge national endeavor – the size of the Interstate Highway System. Flood-prone rivers would be equipped with controllable water diversion structures. Before a river floods, these are opened and the exc