This week's notes. Optimist; notable US dates; foreign policy by tweet; truth; Secretary of Defense; an unusual export; Supreme Court news; end of an era in Germany; head "mother;"

Optimist, 23 December. Link here. A most unusual -- and needed -- present: firewood. What to do with your soon-to-expire frequent flyer miles? Donate them to people who want to, but cannot afford to travel, to see loved ones. This year's best/most notable photos.   https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/amp-stories/stories-year-in-photos/?wpisrc=nl_optimist&wpmm=1

Notable dates in US history.
     19 December 1998: the Republican-controlled US House voted to impeach President Clinton. In 1972: Apollo 17 splashed down in the Pacific ending America's lunar landing program.
     20 December 1803: The Louisiana Purchase was completed, adding 827,000 square miles (530M acres), nearly doubling the nation's size.    
     21 December 1620: the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, MA.
     22 December 1944: In the "Battle of the Bulge," U.S. Brig. Gen. Anthony C. McAuliffe rejected a German demand for surrender, writing “Nuts!” in his official reply. The word instantly gained notoriety.
     25 December: two legendary singers died on Christmas Day; 1995, Dean Martin; 2006, James Brown

Colorado (CO) & the West.

• CO 7th fastest growing state: 1.4%, 1 July 2017 to 1 July 2018
• NV and ID topped list
• CO may be growing quickly, but a self-sufficiency study from the Colorado Center on Law and Policy found that a quarter of households in the state don’t earn enough income to cover basic living costs in the area where they live.  

The Wall: actual or idea? The shutdown. For the president there has to be a physical wall because everything has to be about him. The same for his "base?" Or is the base more realistic? Certainly many of those living near the Rio Grande know that a portion of the US's southern border "moves," that the border is wherever the river wanders.

Nuclear past. This High Country News (HCN) article examines one of the US's continuing problems from the nuclear past: the Hanford facility in Washington state, the site of our largest nuclear waste dump. "The scale of nuclear waste is like that: sprawling out into the metaphysical distance, too big for the human mind to hold."
     How toxic? "If you were to pull a shot glass full of liquid out of one of the tanks buried near us, it would kill everyone with[in] 100 yards instantly. And the danger would not disappear: Plutonium has a half-life of 24,100 years."
     Clean up? "The plant is supposed to start processing the most toxic waste in 2036. But construction has stalled out and most of the waste sits in underground tanks, some of which have begun to fail."
     “There’s a lot more work to do than there is money to get it accomplished,” Price [the tri-party agreement section manager for the Washington Department of Ecology, which regulates Hanford,] said. “We’ve really come to a fork in the road.” 
     That said, you probably should not buy any land "down stream" from Hanford!

DJT & foreign policy. The Donald does not need to consult anyone -- not Secretaries Pompeo (State) or Mattis (Defense), the Joint Chiefs, not the NSC -- his gut just tells him and he tweets for all the world to know. Our very own Caesar, if you will. For the latter it was the Senate and Forum, now for DJT it is the internet and a Tweet.   Lord, have mercy!
     Victoria Nuland in the Washington Post: "With his decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Syria, President Trump hands a huge New Year’s gift to President Bashar al-Assad, the Islamic State, the Kremlin and Tehran." Surely by now, there is not a leader in the world that does not know how to "play" the Donald. If only he knew he was being played.

     E.J. Dionne: "The week before Christmas may go down as the strangest and most revealing [until now ?] of Donald Trump’s presidency. Over just a few days, his sheer thuggishness, venality and corruption were laid bare. But it was also a time for Trumpian good deeds that allowed us a glimpse at how he might have governed if he had been shrewder — and had a genuine interest in the good that government can do."

     Declare victory and go home?  Home to what?

RIP: Weekly Standard. Possibly, the GOP, too? John A. Burtka IV is the executive director of the American Conservative magazine and he noted "...a conference [was held] at Washington’s Niskanen Center titled 'Starting Over: The Center-Right After Trump.' The underlying assumption of the conference: It’s time for moderate conservatives to regroup and reconsider their relationship to a Republican Party that has been overrun by populists, nationalists and demagogues. Could this be the new American triumvirate, in alphabetic order: Conservatives, Democrats, Trumpers? 

Truth? From a Toles' cartoon in the Washington Post. Judge: "Ignorance is no excuse!" Trump: "But, I didn't know that."

Colorado River. As this HCN article notes, the growing water demands in the West point to future conflicts between upper and lower basin states over the dwindling water in the Colorado.

Secretary of Defense. Secretary Mattis' letter of resignation was a well written, scathing statement of what he saw as needed accomplishments and a rebuke of his president's feelings and actions regarding allies and our mutual He was pleased to have served the nation and the men and women in uniform. Nowhere did the Secretary say he was pleased to have served his president.
     Columnist Max Boot wrote, "Trump does not appreciate the deep commitment that troops feel to the causes for which they fight. His only enduring loyalty is to his bank account....Mattis’ resignation was his final act of devotion to a nation he has served his whole adult life...[Mattis, one] of the last remaining adults has left the building. The president is home alone with his Twitter account — and our nuclear arsenal."

Science news you may not find out about. This article speculates about what science news the president does not want you to know. Democracies only truly work with necessary information, truths.
     "Over the past few decades, one federal agency after another has thrown up barriers limiting the media’s access to researchers....Earlier this year, a Food and Drug Administration public affairs officer declined to put me in contact with an expert who could explain how the agency evaluates the safety of genetically modified plants, instead emailing me boilerplate."

Education, an export? As improbable as it may seem, Catherine Rampell makes the important point that America had, at least in the past, an important -- very lucrative -- export. "In trade terms, this means we run a massive surplus in education — about $34 billion in 2017, according to Commerce Department data. Our educational exports are about as big as our total exports of soybeans, coal and natural gas combined....[However, a] recent report from the from the Institute of International Education and the State Department found that new international student enrollments fell by 6.6 percent in the 2017-2018 school year, the second consecutive year of declines."
     Nations are reducing their "subsidies" for their students and working to improve their own educational systems. However, foreign students... " '[feel] they’re no longer wanted in the United States,' said Lawrence Schovanec, president of Texas Tech University, whose foreign student enrollment declined by 2 percent this year. Sixty percent of schools with declining international enrollment, in fact, said that the U.S. social and political environment was a contributing factor, according to the IIE survey."
     Is the "goose and the golden egg" worth recalling?

The new divide. Fareed Zakaria writes that a new dividing line in societies may be rural folk who feel neglected by their urban elites who "run" their nation's governments. He points to the spectacle of France's urban populists, the "yellow vests," joining the nation's far right populists....Just as in France, the United States and Britain, the movement appears to be a rural backlash against urban elites." The US now has a president who recognizes how he can profit by exploiting this new divide.

Supreme Court. A divided (5-4) court let stand a lower court's ruling blocking President Trump's attempts ban illegal immigrants from seeking asylum. Chief Justice Roberts voted with the majority. Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a lobe (with cancerous nodules) of her left lung removed.

Germany's coal industry...  officially shut down as 7 miners brought a lump of coal to the surface.

Reindeer mother. In the vast reaches of Finland's heavily forested Lapland, reindeer herders are keeping tack of their herds by attaching GPS-enabled collars to each herd's female leader. Finnish scientists hope to eventually shrink the size of the battery (now the size of a card deck) to a small chip that can be embedded in an ear tag.

Thank you for reading. I hope your Christmas was joyous, filled with good fellowship.