Kakewalk of Shame?

local/regional, National, Uncategorized,

Who knew that the good people of  the Commonwealth of Virginia had so much blackface in their all too recent past? 

Before we northerners get to feeling all superior, maybe we ought to check our own closets.  I’ll bet more than a few contain yearbooks and programs from UVM that date back before 1969.

That’s the year in which the Green Mountain State’s most respected University ended its tradition of the “Kakewalk:” an annual event dating  from 1893, in which costumed students in blackface strutted and high-kicked their way through some semblance of a minstrel show.

Even though the offensive nature of the event was remarked upon in print as early as the 1950”s, it took that esteemed institution until the height of the Civil Rights movement (1969) to finally kill it dead.

I would guess that more than a few 70+ year old alumni who performed in the Kakewalk shows will feel an urgent need to burn rubbish this weekend.view

Condemn Ralph Northam for what he did, not for what he said.

National, , , ,

There is no question about it, Gov. Ralph Northam certainly has a lot to answer for in his insensitivity about blackface, but it is interesting how inartfully Donald Trump avoids condemning him for that and chooses instead to focus on remarks the pediatric neurosurgeon has made with regard to life-and death decisions concerning non-viable fetuses.

As I understand it, the remarks that Republicans have chosen to seize upon in embracing the call for Northam’s resignation are the following:

“[Third trimester abortions are] done in cases where there may be severe deformities. There may be a fetus that’s nonviable. So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen,” Northam, a pediatric neurosurgeon, told Washington radio station WTOP. “The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”

What Northam was saying essentially, is that, if a baby comes into the world either braindead or afflicted with a birth defect so severe that it could not survive and would potentially suffer if life were extended artificially, the parents and the doctors have to make a decision of conscience about whether or not to resuscitate.

This is true of end of life decisions for braindead patients and the last hours of the terminally ill.

I think you will find that the majority of Americans agree that these decisions appropriately belong to loved ones, informed by clergy and doctors of their choice.

In this instance, Dr. Northam was just stating the painful truth.  As a pediatric neurosurgeon he would probably be the first to argue for extreme surgical intervention if there was even a chance it could succeed.

This is a stupid issue on which to prosecute the governor’s fitness for office.  

In elevating this argument so that they can make a case to demand Democrat Northam’s resignation, the GOP faithful demonstrate their utter insensitivity to the real issues of racism at the center of the controversy.

Why am I not surprised?

Vermont Justice Fails Our Values; Over-and-Over Again

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Like many other folks, ’outrage fatigue’ has distracted me from the everyday injustices that are happening right here in Vermont.  That is one of the collateral costs of the Trump circus playing out like a bad soap opera in Washington.

It’s easy to assume that, in our tiny, generally progressive state, overtly threatening racist acts and sexual exploitation are both infrequent and met with swift justice.  Would that it were so.

I am learning that Vermont justice seems ill-equipped to address these threats, even in the twenty-first century.

Case in point is the sorry tale of Kiah Morris, formerly our lone black female legislator, who was successfully felled by a self-entitled white nationalist by the name of Max Misch, who got his fondest wish when, in order to protect her family, Rep. Morris abandoned her reelection bid.

Sounds like AG TJ Donovan, who recently ran a strong campaign for Attorney General, caved like a cheap suit when Ms. Morris appealed to him for relief from Misch’s harassment.

Who buys his argument that Misch’s threatening behavior is nothing more than ‘free speech’, protected under Article one of the Bill of Rights?  I don’t.  

There is real harm in Misch’s menacing words and presence, not just to Ms. Morris and her family, but to her constituents who, it could be argued, were unjustly deprived of Ms. Morris’ future representation by a single bigot and not the electorate as a whole.  That sounds like election tampering to me.

I don’t believe that Mr. Misch should be allowed to succeed by hiding behind a key provision of our Bill of Rights, which was, after all, intended to protect the individual from abuse; not to open them up to intimidation.

AG Donovan has a lot to answer for if he fails to make a better case than this.

And while we are at it, what about the shabby job done by the Franklin County States Attorney’s office in prosecuting accused serial sexual abuser and former state senator Norm McAllister?

No thunderous “Me too” challenge here!  Instead, having outlived one of his accusers and gotten the benefit of another accuser’s unjust shame, his attorneys only had to answer for accusations from the third woman, who was a crushingly poor victim of marital abuse, low on self-esteem and easily intimidated under questioning.  The attorney for the state only managed to get the least of the counts against McAllister to stick.

After pleading guilty to the one charge of procuring and receiving a laughably light sentence, considering the predatory nature of his still-alleged history; McAllister, all-lawyered up, has now managed to get a mistrial called on even that procurement charge and is scheduled for a new trial in March.  None of McAllister’s other history of accusations from other women will be allowed to be heard at the new trial.  The poor woman who must now repeat her grueling trial experience, was first encouraged by the state’s attorney to pursue her complaint against McAllister under the belief that she would not have to stand alone.  Having witnessed her humiliating testimony first hand, it is difficult for me to believe that she will be willing to go through that again.

My guess is that the whole thing will be dismissed, a quiet footnote in the evening paper.

In other words, McAllister will, like Misch, get off scott-free.

Vermont justice, it would seem, is not just blind, but sclerotic and decidedly white-male.

Vermont Yankee enjoying “hot” retirement

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Dismantling a nuclear plant  isn’t exactly retirement but what once seemed like a constant barrage of safety issues at Entergy’s Vermont Yankee has quieted since the plant stopped operating. That said, North Star Services (the new plant owners approved to do the decommissioning) don’t deserve to be completely out of the news.

Editorially the Keene Sentinel in nearby New Hamphire pondered the recent transfer: The sale is good news in that NorthStar plans to fast-track the decommissioning, while Entergy had indicated it might put the site into safe storage (“SAFSTOR”) for decades before starting to dismantle it. The reason, no doubt, is financial: NorthStar is betting it can do the job for less than the $500 million or so that’s in the decommissioning fund.

That raises an obvious issue: If doing the job cheaply is the company’s incentive, will it be done right?

Susan Smallheer of The Brattleboro Reformer reports a little bit of a problem was discovered in 2018 with the Holtec® storage casks used to bottle up and store 42 years worth of radioactive waste sitting along the banks of the Connecticut River at Vermont Yankee. The design of the casks manufactured by Holtec International had been modified in violation of NRC rules. “[…] last year [2018] Entergy Nuclear halted the transfer of fuel using the canisters to inspect the Holtec canisters it had. No problems were discovered in the canisters at Vermont Yankee, but the already loaded canisters could not be easily inspected.

Michael Layton, division director of spent fuel management for the NRC, who led the NRC inspection team, said it was possible the NRC would require additional canister inspections. Although Layton said he did not believe the Holtec design problems represented an “imminent safety threat” he added “[…] it may warrant additional inspections.”  That, to be sure, is a bit of classic, worn-thin NRC boiler-plate-speak.

It turns out that in 2016 the Holtec company changed the design and failed to alert the NRC — a violation of safety procedures. In the bureaucratic parlance of the NRC, the “pre-decisional enforcement conference” centered on whether Holtec should have alerted the federal agency before making changes to the design of aluminum shims that help center the highly radioactive nuclear fuel in a “fuel basket” inside the canisters.

The New Jersey-based company in 2016 redesigned the canisters by threading stainless steel pins about 4 inches long and a half-inch thick into the shims to improve circulation of helium inside the canister to keep the spent fuel cool.

Two years later The San Diego Union-Tribune reports Holtec became aware of a problem with lose holding pins found on spent fuel canisters being moved at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) in southern California. The transfer of loaded casks was halted, and inspections followed.vycasks The investigations, in turn, led the NRC to discover that Holtec had changed the designs of the casks. At San Onofre Holtec has stopped using canisters with the newer design. All subsequent canisters at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) will revert to the original design that does not use pins.

I should mention here that Holtec International is not only a manufacturer but also is in the business of buying and decommissioning old nukes-fast tracking to avoid placing the plants in 60 year SAFSTOR. Much larger and more diverse than VY’s new owner North Star Services, Holtec is not only decommissioning San Onofre but may soon do the same — they say at an accelerated pace — to Oyster Creek in New Jersey, the Pilgrim Nuclear plant in Massachusetts and the infamous Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania.

Soon Holtec will have the franchise on decommissioning several old nukes in southern New England, despite the casual attitude of Holtec’s founder, president and CEO over the NRC violation. On the 9th of January this year, during an official NRC public “pre-decisional enforcement conference” podcast, Holtec CEO Kris Singh took the stage and dramatically complained  “This inspection, if you were to quote Shakespeare, is much ado about nothing,” Singh said while delivering a 37-page PowerPoint presentation as part of a public NRC webcast. “At least that is our perspective.”

Well sure, Mr. Singh, you say, “much ado about nothing.” But, “what is past is prologue” is it not? And you know this  is about nuclear waste storage in casks for 12+ years. So your unauthorized, uninspected design changes should warrant inspections.

And then again, still quoting the Bard of Avon, “The Devil may quote Scripture for his own purpose.”

Baddies at the border: US

International, National,

If you aren’t overwhelmed by the wide range and daily barrage of lies, security leaks, and corruption out of the Trump administration and want a little dark humor, I’m thinking this video relates well to some recent news about U.S. border enforcement. It is from a years-old Mitchell and Webb BBC comedy skit in which one SS officer asks a fellow officer “Hans, are we the baddies?” It has been popular again online since Donald Trump took office.

Govexec.com reports  that the DHS not only separates immigrant children from their parents detained along the U.S. border but have been at it longer than they first admitted. And worse yet the original recording “systems” used to track children-needed to reunite them with parents or guardians is proving to have been … “inadequate.”

The Health and Human Services HHS Office of Inspector General published a report Thursday finding that the current tally—2,737 children—applies only to children in the department’s custody as of a June 2018 federal court order requiring the data’s release. But the statistic does not include thousands of children who were separated from their parents and detained beginning in the summer of 2017 and released before the ruling was issued.

And for officials currently trying to sort out the mess, tracking what became of these children is proving more than problematic. It seems, early on, headquarters-level record keeping at DHS was an “informal” Excel spreadsheet method later upgraded to include information gathered from the field.  This ad hoc tracking system inspectors now find is not conducive to “retrospective reporting.”

The Trump administration’s record keeping may not be up the standards of historical “baddies” but considering the suffering inflicted on all those detained we better take a close look in the mirror pretty damn quick.

Complaint Filed Against Vermont Guard

local/regional, National, , , , ,

What’s up with basing the military’s newest and most controversial fighter jet, the F-35  under operational control by a National Guard force that is, itself,  under scrutiny for corrupt behaviors?

Vermont Digger was recently taken to the woodshed for daring to investigate the Vermont National Guard with regard to systemic issues of sexual harassment, discrimination, corruption and substance abuse; but they are a prestigious regional news source and we are just a lowly blog site with no pretensions of influence; so we have have little to fear, and, arguably, an obligation to speak truth to power.

If anyone has paid attention to our postings, they will know that a number of GMD scribes have taken issue with the F-35 siting at Burlington airport.

Our questions were mainly about the safety of the densely populated urban area left at least statistically vulnerable to a disasterous crash by a minimally tested, nuclear-equipped war plane. More subtle issues of public safety, like health impacts from audio disturbance and unknown stress for aerial wildlife also concerned us. Then there was the extremely puzzling choice of Burlington over much more suitable (and willing) locations.

It appears that nothing will stop the fledgling war-dragons from descending on Burlington Airport now.  What the Guard wants, the Guard gets, and on this there simply is no political will for pushback.

With the recent scandal investigated in a series of articles by Digger’s Jasper Craven, there is even more reason to question the wisdom of the F-35 siting.  How is it prudent to hand over control of such a sensitive weapons system to a unit that has failed so recently and so conspicuously in the areas of discipline, honor and simple common sense?

Being a civilian, the conventional wisdom is that I am too ignorant even to raise questions; and I probably haven’t gotten the technical picture even half-right, from that point of view.  But if there is even a kernel of validity in the concerns that have been raised over the past few years about the siting and the process, we civilians have a right to be very worried by disciplinary failures in the Guard.

This is a rather long-winded way to segue into a complaint filed on January 4, 2019 by South Burlington attorney James Marc Leas with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).  I will allow excerpts from Mr. Leas’ press release to take it from here, and will add the full text of Mr. Leas’ press release, the full complaint and links to Jasper Craven’s articles in the comments section below.

“The heavy drinking culture and severe alcohol-impairment is inseparable from the intermingling of the military jets with a densely populated civilian neighborhood,” said Leas. “Pilots cannot be expected to blast children with thousands of F-16 afterburner takeoffs each year, impairing their learning and permanently damaging their hearing, as described by the US Air Force in its 2013 Environmental Impact Statement, without negative impact on themselves,” he said. “What was revealed by VTDigger are state agency commanders and pilots awash in alcohol and operating dangerous equipment amidst the densely populated Chamberlin School neighborhood of South Burlington. A recipe for imperiling health, safety, learning, hearing, and honor.”

…Far from putting a stop to the misuse of alcohol, VTDigger reports that under the redesign of facilities for the F-35, commanders are doubling the size of the “Afterburner Club” room for alcohol abuse. Commanders and pilots appear to understand that as they increase harm to civilians, more space for alcohol abuse is needed.

Nor is the corruption limited to Guard commanders and pilots. The abuse originated in political and military leaders who pushed for routine use of the F-16 afterburner in 2008, “just in time to vastly boost ‘baseline’ noise levels to facilitate selection of the Vermont Air Guard for the F-35 in the scoping process that began in 2009,” said Leas.

The complaint notes that the culture of falsifying records mentioned in the VTDigger series is intimately related to the F-35 basing. The fourth in the VTDigger series of articles disclosed a “longstanding policy” in which Guard commanders did “a very deliberate cooking of the books.” In the VPR interview, Jasper Craven explained to VPR’s Mitch Wertlieb, “Senior officers of the Vermont Guard are also alleged to have cooked the books around their personnel numbers ‘to project an operational readiness, a sort of strength to the National Bureau, in order show that the Guard deserves continued support and the F-35.’”

…said Leas, “None of the VTDigger articles suggested wrongdoing by the enlisted women and men of the Guard–the bad apples are all at the top of the tree: the commanders, the pilots, the congressional delegation, the Burlington mayor, and the governor himself. All the bad apples must be removed and composted. The enlisted women and men in our Vermont National Guard, and the public, deserve a leadership and a culture devoted strictly to serving the people of Vermont, free of alcohol abuse, where sexual abuse, retaliation, and falsifying records has no part, and where impairing learning of children and damaging hearing are not permitted.”

 

Will Vermont brake for THC saliva testing?

Business, local/regional, , ,

All indications are the Vermont legislature is on the road toward a vote on a bill that will legalize a retail, taxable, regulated marijuana market. Governor Scott qualifies his support for such a bill, stipulating there must be a reliable roadside test — such as a saliva THC blood level test — to determine driver impairment before considering signing one into law.

Governor Scott’s own marijuana commission in 2018 recommended saliva THC testing even while pointing out it wouldn’t be especially effective […] there is no formula that can be broadly applied to equate THC levels with individual intoxication. Heavy and light users will vary significantly in the detectable amounts of THC and the effects of similar amounts of THC will vary widely among individuals. [added emphasis.] They did not support establishing a per se limit of detectable THC.

And while state law enforcement officials may be, err… salivating at the prospect of getting the green light to collect DNA samples from drivers, the Vermont ACLU has expressed its concern that tests could be misused. Even when a warrant is required, widespread gathering and storage of DNA samples present serious constitutional privacy questions.

An article on NYTimes.com should burst the balloons of Scott and others who have been fulminating against legalized marijuana on unscientific grounds.  The tests we use for measuring the presence of THC, though, do not measure the level of impairment. They measure whether someone has used marijuana recently. If we legalize the drug, and more people use it, more people will register its recent use even when they are not impaired. So it should be expected that more people involved in car crashes will test positive even if no one is driving while high.

Using a synthetic control approach, Mr. Hansen and colleagues showed that marijuana-related fatality rates did not increase more after [two states passed] legalization than what you would expect from trends and other states.

In Vermont the THC saliva test may function best only to measure how hard Phil Scott is tapping the brakes on an issue he seems reluctant to support or thinks is moving too fast.

philsbadbrake

Poll: Vermonters still approve of Senators Sanders and Leahy and Phil Scott back in top ten Govs…again

local/regional, National, ,

Both of Vermont’s senators are at the top of a recent Morning Consult approval rankings list showing the top and bottom ten  approval rating for senators in the last quarter of 2018.

Bernie Sanders (I) tops the list for the 11th quarter in a row with 64 percent approval of Vermont voters and Senator Leahy (D) at close second with 62 percent.The top ten Senators includes four Democrats and two Independents that caucus with Senate Democrats.toptensens1

Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell moved up one place to the 49th least popular. Morning Consult notes: The fourth quarter marks McConnell’s best showing since the second quarter of 2017 as he prepares for an expected re-election campaign in 2020. McConnell lost his last-place least-popular senator “honor” to newly retired Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona.

Morning Consult has good news for second-term Vermont Governor too. Phil Scott (R), had experienced a significant drop in approval last quarter subsequent to signing into law a bill that restricts gun ownership. But his winning re-election has put him back in the top ten most popular governors  — in fact he’s back in the top five at 59 percent approval.

Donald Trump: The Moscow Candidate

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What a week it has been! While federal workers continued to struggle with the Trump Shutdown, made all that more real by their first zero-sum paycheck,  two venerable news sources, the New York Times and Washington Post revealed damning evidence that Donald Trump may indeed have a sinister relationship with Russia.

It may be shocking to hear out-loud speculation from the mainstream media that the American president could be a kind of “Manchurian Candidate” for Putin’s Russia, but it can no longer be dismissed as far-fetched.  In fact, with very little effort it is possible to reconstruct one’s very own forensic trail contributing to this alarming conclusion.

As a convenience to our GMD readers and with a quick Google search, I’ve compiled a few handy links for your interest.

Searching “Trump 1987,” yields, among other things, an account from Politico that appeared in 2017. It’s very interesting; reminding us that on his first visit to Moscow, he seems to have been  cosseted by the KGB.  This has probably been mentioned many times before but deserves special attention in light of this weekend’s revelations.

In the same search, I came across a curious piece from the Hollywood Reporter claiming that, in 1988, Trump was angling for Reagan to appoint him ambassador to the Soviet Union.  I offer the link here with no idea how valid the assertion may be.

The New York Times provides an exhaustive timeline of intersections between Trump-world and Russia.  Of course it ends in December 2018, well-before the new bombshells hit, but covering Donald Trump’s indiscretions seems to be a never-ending job.

Another good read comes from New York Magazine, “What if Donald Trump has been a Russian Asset since 1987?”  It even has a pictorial chart!

Exactly how might Trump have given service to Russian handlers over the years, even before reaching the White House suggests some additional data points.  Trump has been a public fountain of misinformation through much of his adult life.

Remember the Central Park Five? What prompted the stingy mogul to invest $85,000. in advertising to gin up hatred for these wrongly accused young African American men and advocate for their execution?  This, from a man who is notoriously un-philanthropic and won’t even pay his bills on time.   Why did he appear to care so uncharacteristically much? 

One can’t help musing that this would have been an ideal way to introduce a future candidate to the hate lobby.

This was followed by accusations that President Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. and the repeated suggestion that, if the accusation was true, his presidency was illegitimate.

He let that insulting calumny hover out there in the hate realm, without an apology, long after it had been effectively debunked.

Then, leading up to the 2016 election, he repeatedly attacked the integrity of the electoral process.  Most people just assumed he was making excuses for why he would most likely lose the election, but what if this was part of Putin’s plan to delegitimize the U.S. democratic process?

Anyway,  it’s quite a pattern; and Trump himself doesn’t display the cunning or even the simple attention necessary to sustain such a prolonged assault on our norms.  It is far more likely that he is simply the corrupt vessel through which Putin has delivered poison to the very roots of American democracy.

Vermont driverless cars: Can they get here from there?

local/regional, National, , , , ,

The Vermont Agency of Transportation is doing some early planning for  driverless cars. And the agency’s director of planning and research says he’d like to see how the experimental vehicles test on road conditions here.

Fifty-two companies, including Apple, Waymo, Tesla, Ford, Honda, BMW, Nissan, Intel and Uber, are currently working on them. To test them out companies in California are issued permits by the motor vehicle department for testing on tracks and on state roads. For the earliest road excursions, they were required to have a safety driver, but current permits for streets and highways with speed limits of up to 65 miles per hour at any time of day, as well as during inclement weather, are now issued that don’t require a human being in the driver’s seat.

However in several areas where driverless car testing is taking place people are not reacting well. In both California and Arizona people are hassling and even attacking automated test vehicles.

Out of the six self-driving car collisions last year in California, two happened when people-driven cars intentionally rammed them. And in San Francisco a pedestrian crossed a street to shout at and then body slammed a test car at a traffic stop.

Attacks on test cars in Arizona, where a driverless Uber vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian in March are notably more aggressive. In that state tires have been slashed, shots fired at vehicles and general harassment is occurring.

Some people have pelted Waymo [owned by Alphabet, the parent of Google] vans with rocks, according to police reports. Others have repeatedly tried to run the vehicles off the road. One woman screamed at one of the vans, telling it to get out of her suburban neighborhood. A man pulled up alongside a Waymo vehicle and threatened the employee riding inside with a piece of PVC pipe.

One man who was issued a warning by police for driving head-on at a test vehicle said: “They said they need real-world examples, but I don’t want to be their real-world mistake,” said Mr. O’Polka, who runs his own company providing information technology to small businesses. “They didn’t ask us if we wanted to be part of their beta test,” added his wife, who helps run the business.

Driverless cars may soon be coming to Vermont where the Agency of Transportation is doing some early planning for allowing testing of driverless cars here. Recently on VPR and in Vtdigger.com the agency’s director of planning and research, Joe Segale, said: “One of the reasons I’m interested in seeing these vehicles tested in Vermont is to see how they can handle driving on our back roads,”

He said he believes self-driving cars could have many benefits in a rural state like Vermont. For instance, Segale said, artificial intelligence technology could keep drivers safe in snowy or icy weather conditions, and create more efficient and affordable modes of transportation.

vtstrongdriverless

That last bit: “artificial intelligence technology could keep drivers safe in snowy or icy weather conditions” may be the toughest one as every Vermont driver knows. And notably the state transportation agency winter guidelines and radio PSAs for Vermont currently warns drivers to turnoff cruise control on snow and ice covered roads because of how rapidly conditions change.

For now the legislature, the AOT and the state police are working on issues such as registration, testing permits and of course, autonomous vehicle insurance liability. Who pays: manufacturer, owner, or operator? I’d be willing to bet this proves to be almost as problematic as getting self-driving technology to work safely on our back roads.