Hawk Mountain

Lois and Ron are visiting from Long Island, and today I took them to Hawk Mountain in Schuylkill County.  It’s truly a wonderful place.  Great vistas, hiking trails, a visitor center with educational materials and fun items for kids.  

Lois noted that Hawk Mountain is not a state park, not a national park, but a private bird sanctuary, founded in 1934 by one woman, Rosalie Edge, who thought it was wrong to slaughter hawks for sport.  Hawk Mountain is a location where hawks congregate to take advantage of thermal updrafts to fly over the Blue Mountain on their journey south.  

Hawk Mountain is not only a sanctuary, but an international training center for scientists and volunteers from around the world.  It is a wonderful place, and for at least for a time today I didn’t think about Trump, nuclear war, or the administration’s attempt to gut our environmental protections.  If only I could live on Hawk Mountain.

Whitefish energy

I read mystery novels.  A cliche in those novels is that there are no coincidences.  If the suspect went to the same elementary school as the victim; if the bad guy and the murder victim were in the same unit in Vietnam–it matters. 

Now we get Whitefish Energy, a three-man company from Whitefish, Montana, awarded a $300 million contract to restore electricity to a large portion of Puerto Rico’s power grid.

Whitefish, Montana, is the hometown of the Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.  Coincidence?  I’m not buying that.  It matters.

On Sunday the Governor of Puerto Rico cancelled the contract.  

Question:  When will the swamp draining start?

Lead Lou Barletta not into temptation, and deliver us from evil

Lou Barletta is running against Sen. Bob Casey to represent Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate.  Lou made his reputation for his racist policies when he was the mayor of Hazleton.  Now he has promised to serve only two terms (12 years) as a U.S. Senator.

Justin Simmons, a snot-nose from the Allentown area, made a similar pledge when he ran for the PA House of Representatives four years ago.  He promised he would only serve two terms.  He is now running for his third term.  The temptation was too much.

Suppose Lou wins?  Suppose he wins again?  Might he not be tempted to run for a third term.  Let’s save Lou from the temptation.  Let’s work very hard to make sure he never has to face the temptation of running for even a second term.  

A letter to the Pennsylvania Grange

Dear Grange officials:

When I joined the Big Creek Grange in Carbon County some years ago, I assumed that it was an organization that would aid small farmers.  Today I read in the Lancaster Farming that the Grange is supporting legislation by the state House to “rein in” the Delaware River Basin Commission .  The Grange thinks Pennsylvania should decide what is best for the Commonwealth, according to the article, and the DRBC has no right to ban fracking.  

First of all, the DRBC is only banning fracking in the Delaware River Basin.  It’s a funny thing about river basins and watersheds.  What happens in New York can affect Pennsylvania.  What happens in Pennsylvania can affect New Jersey and Delaware.  I would think an organization of farmers would recognize that.

We own a small farm about to be bisected by the PennEast fracking gas pipeline.  We are in the blast zone.  The pipeline company has the rights of eminent domain, not for the benefit of the general public, but for stockholders and private profit.  

My hat is off to the DRBC, which evidently has my interests at heart far more than the Pennsylvania Grange.  In case you wonder why so few farmers are joining the Grange, and why so many members are in their sixties and seventies, I think I have found your answer.  If you purport to help farmers, you could start by opposing an industry that pollutes our water, fouls our air, and pays no severance tax while doing it.

Sincerely,

Roy Christman

O'Reilly coverage

Some pundits are making a big deal out of the fact that Fox News gave Harvey Weinstein 12 hours of coverage and O’Reilly 20 minutes.  

At a time when the U.S. Congress is about to pass a tax break for the richest Americans, when our closest allies the Kurds are being abandoned, when members of the Foreign Relations Committee didn’t even know we had troops in Niger, when the E.P.A. has been hijacked by the chemical industry, when Trump spouts off about opioids but provides no money, when over half of Puerto Ricans are still without power. I think 20 minutes devoted to that knuckle-head is about 19 too many.

I found my thrill

You have to be pretty darn old to know the next few words...”On Blueberry Hill.”  I was in 9th grade when Fats Domino’s version made the charts.  That was a new sound then, and it was exciting to teenagers everywhere.

Fats Domino (1928-2017) was one of the early rock and rollers.  He appeared in the movie “Shake, Rattle and Rock,” and he toured with Chuck Berry and Clyde McPhatter.  Fats also sang “”Ain’t It a Shame,” which Pat Boone later “covered” to the dismay of anyone who loves real music.  

A reporter once called Elvis Presley “the King.”  Elvis pointed to Fats Domino who was in the room.  According to the obit in today’s Times, Elvis said “There’s the real king of rock and roll.”

Enough of this.  I’m Walkin’

An Inconvenient Sequel

I saw Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Sequel” tonight at the Mahoning Valley Cinema.  Eleven years ago Gore’s first film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” achieved some popularity and a great deal of ridicule.

One of the most derided portions of that first movie was that as storms increased in size and strength and the oceans continued to rise, sea water could go inland in Manhattan as far as the site of the World Trade Center.  How silly.  Tonight’s film showed sea water pouring over that area during Hurricane Sandy.

The film also made clear the connection between warmer water and the increased intensity of storms.  It pointed out the Syrian crisis, including the refugee explosion, was connected to the worst drought in Syria’s history.  More crises of this sort will be coming.

A major part of the film revolved around the negotiations for the Paris Climate Accord.  The hopefulness, the sense that the world leaders were finally taking steps to solve a global problem, was a feel-good moment.

It didn’t last.  We had the 2016 election, with Perry, Pruitt, and Tillerson all pushing fossil fuels at the expense of renewables and the grand pooh bah himself so proud to pull out of the Paris accords, turning leadership on solar energy developments over to China.