This week's notes. Optimist; notable dates in US history; a WW II veteran remember and questions; Native American treaty rights; children's health; the "right" war?; America's Taliban; a marvelous winter; a film first; Poland and pedophiles; the president in Japan; gerrymandering;
the improbable.

Optimist. Link here.
     College diversity. This year's valedictorian at the University of Southern California, Ivana Chiang, a child of Vietnamese immigrants, challenged her school's diversity. Mere ground breaking is not enough. "It isn’t enough to find new people to cycle through the same old system. We have to re-imagine a fundamental, cultural shift of these systems."
     However, a professor who worked with her on the speech noted, "[S]he had to struggle to be allowed to say these kinds of things. It’s hard to do that when you are 21 and the university administration is telling you not to say these things.” Ms. Chiang also talked about "...the unequal access given to women and minority communities for education and self-expression, “around the globe and right here on this campus.” Censorship very close to home!
     An autistic college graduate. Montel Medley, diagnosed with autism at 3, went on to be his high school valedictorian and just earned a dual degree in math and computer science from Towson University.
      Strange path to becoming an artist. I once spilled a cup of coffee -- and that was the end of that laptop. For Stefan Kuhnigk, an ad agency copywriter, his spill led to him becoming an artist.

Notable dates in US history.
     22 May 1968: The nuclear submarine, USS Scorpion, sank 400 miles southwest of the Azores, killing all 99 men aboard. Interestingly, three other nations also lost submarines in 1968: Israel (INS Dakar, diesel-electric, purchased from Great Britain), France (Minerve, diesel-electric), and the now-defunct USSR (K129, diesel-electric, part of which was covertly recovered by the US in a ultra-secret joint USN - Howard Hughes salvage operation. 2011: A mammoth  tornado hit Joplin, Mo., with winds up to 250 mph, killing at least 159 people and destroying about 8,000 homes and businesses.
     23 May 1934: Bonnie and Clyde died in a police ambush in Bienville Parish, LA. 1984: US Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, issued his now famous report on smoking and lung cancer.
    24 May 1844: The question, "What hath God wrought," was sent from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., as Samuel F.B. Morse inaugurated the telegraph.
    26 May 1868: President Andrew Johnson was acquitted at his impeachment trial. 1972: President Nixon and Soviet leader Brezhnev signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; the US withdrew from the treaty in 2002.
    27 May 1861: Chief Justice Roger Taney, sitting as a federal circuit court judge in Baltimore, ruled that President Abraham Lincoln lacked the authority to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. (Lincoln disregarded the ruling). (Taney is most often remembered for rendering the infamous Dred Scott decision.) 1942: Doris “Dorie“ Miller, a cook aboard the USS West Virginia, became the first African-American to receive the Navy Cross for displaying “extraordinary courage and disregard for his own personal safety” during Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. (After being sunk, the ship was raised from the harbor floor, repaired, and returned to duty.)
      28 May 1918: Troops of the American Expeditionary Force fought their first battle in WW I, capturing the  German-held French village of Cantigny, France.
   
A WW II vet remembers and wonders. In an Open Forum letter, 96 year-old veteran, John H. Rohner of Boulder, remembers how he and his brothers fought and died to defeat the Nazis menace, then wonders why "...today in America, the resurgence of white supremacy goes widely ignored and unchallenged." No easy answer there, Mr. Rohner.
     He might also have wondered how so many "good," average Germans failed to see what lay in store for their country and the world with Hitler's ascension to power. "Das tut mir leid (I'm sorry), but Mein Kampf was not just ill-imagined ruminations; it was a real, terrible program of actions.
 
Herrara v. Wyoming (2019) In a 5-4 decision, the USSC held that the advent of WY statehood did not trump the 1868 treaty between the Crow tribe and the US government. For the Native Americans, the decision means they can continue to conduct subsistence hunting without regard to WY's hunting licensing requirements.  One of President Trump's recent appointees, a westerner, Neil Gorsuch, sided with the Court's four more liberal justices.

Children's health and EPA. Will proposed funding cuts at the EPA cut/lessen the research into children's health issues? Several long running studies seem at risk. "The projects being targeted make up a more than $300 million, federally funded program that over the past two decades has exposed dangers to fetuses and children. Those findings have often led to increased pressure on the EPA for tighter regulations."

What war? Whose war? Evan Thomas asks, "Is America preparing for the wrong war?" Terrorists and rogue states? Or, a re-energized Russia and growing China? Thomas notes a Foreign Policy article with the imprint of the well-thought-of former secretary of defense, James Mattis. The article's subtitle was "The United States faces great-power enemies. It needs a military focused on fighting them." Why?

Because America "...risks losing a war to China or Russia—or backing down in a crisis because it fears it would—with devastating consequences for America’s interests....If China did so in the Western Pacific, it could dominate the world’s largest and most economically dynamic region. If Russia did so, it could fracture NATO and open Eastern Europe to Russian dominance.

     Re Russia, the USSR may be dead, but Russia's desire to dominate Eastern Europe has never faded. For its part, China would like nothing better than to be able to have the South China Sea largely as their exclusive province, much as cartoonist Thomas Nast portrayed President Theodore Roosevelt striding through the Caribbean with his "big stick." China's 21st century stick would, of course, have a nuclear component.
     However, "[t]he approach that worked so well against these so-called rogue state adversaries will fail against China or Russia." The question, of course, is can the Trump administration devise a suitable strategy?

America's Taliban. Our "first bird," John Walker Lindh, is coming home to roost, he was released from federal prison in Terra Haute, IN. Earlier he converted to Islam, became radicalized, went overseas and fought for the Taliban against American forces. He has a good prison record and served the usual 85% of his sentence. Now what "to do with him" become the government's major focus. "...[C]onditions imposed recently on Lindh’s release make clear that authorities remain concerned about the threat he could pose once free." Strange new territory.

Mueller Report. It just keeps on getting "curioser and curiouser." It was reported that the House Intelligence Committee and Justice Department have reached an agreement for the committee to receive the "unredacted" report.

The deal is a rare instance of detente between House Democrats and Justice Department leaders, who remain bitterly at odds over the administration’s resistance to congressional requests for documents and witnesses.

But President Donald Trump declared Wednesday that he would not work with congressional Democrats on any legislative ventures so long as investigations of his campaign, finances and foreign ties continue.

It is not clear if the president’s declaration jeopardizes the deal the House Intelligence Committee struck with the Justice Department; a spokesman for Schiff did not immediately return a request for comment on that matter.

CO snowpack: The state report this year is 202% better than last year and it continued to snow late last week. Breckenridge and Arapahoe Basin both extended their seasons. Now the new worry: a too-quick warm up that could produce flooding down-slope, especially into the South Platte which would only  heighten waters flowing into the Missouri/Mississippi basins.

A Korean first. Korean director, Bong Joon-ho’s social satire “Parasite,” won first place honors at this year's Cannes film festival.

Poland. Another attack on pedophile priests took place in Gdansk, Poland. This heavily Catholic nation is taking its revenge on the Church's slowness in addressing the problem. As always, bureaucracies are far too often slow to see, diagnose, and solve systemic problems.

A statue of a pedophile priest was toppled in Gdansk, put back by his supporters and finally dismantled for good. A feature film about clerical abuse was a box office hit....It’s also a crisis for the country’s conservative government, which is closely aligned with the Catholic Church, putting the ruling Law and Justice Party on the defensive before Sunday’s European Parliament vote in Poland.

 President Trump in Japan. It is usually only once a lifetime that a head of state has occasion to meet and talk with the new head of a dynasty dating back to nearly 660 BC. As all things Trump, the president's visit to meet newly crowned Emperor Naruhito could not be free of controversy. At every turn, the president seems to require controversy and took occasion to "needle" his hosts about America's trade imbalance. Then he had the temerity to tout "...the 'very special' U.S.-Japan alliance that he said 'has never been stronger, it’s never been more powerful, never been closer.'” One even wonders if the president (and his minions) can cope with the request that Americans begin to use Japanese names in their preferred order, as in Shinzō Abe, or Trump Donald.

Gerrymandering, Senator Michael Bennett (D, CO). Jennifer Rubin's column highlights the senator's worry that our electoral system now has it backwards: political gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their voters. The Founders, of course, planned it the other way round: voters should elect their officials.
    He is not afraid to make his case bluntly. “I believe that we have been tyrannized for the last ten years by the Freedom Caucus in this country. . . . They immobilized the Republican Party. They immobilized the Democratic Party. They immobilized this exercise in self-government.”

SAT, 2020. The new SAT scores include new data, "...an “Environmental Context Dashboard,” an extra batch of data that will be delivered to admissions officers alongside students’ raw, out-of-1600 scores on the SAT. The board has been field-testing the dashboard at 50 colleges and universities, with plans to roll out the tool to 150 more institutions this fall and then more widely in 2020." 

ND, more oil and wasted natural gas. As oil exploration continues in ND, so does the wasteful burning-off of natural gas at the well-heads.

The industry has spent billions of dollars on infrastructure but is at least two years from catching up, and regulators are projecting that the state’s increasing gas production will still outstrip that new capacity.

Environmentalists and even a key Republican say the problem will persist as long as the state doesn’t take a tougher approach with the industry, which has largely avoided financial penalties.

“We need to find an excess flared gas solution immediately,” said Republican Rep. Vicky Steiner, whose hometown of Dickinson is in the heart of the state’s oil patch. “It’s a shame. I’d like to see us find a use for this.”

The fact that even ND Republicans see the problem, but cannot seem to muster the votes to stop the problem, speaks volumes about the attitude in the board rooms of the industry.

Even more improbable math. President Trump: "We've kept more promises than we've ever made."

Thank you for reading. "He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery."  Harold Wilson (twice the British Labor party's Prime Minister)  "One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding."  Henrik Ibsen  "You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have."  Maya Angelou