Obsidian Wings

Hi, this is lj and I've been quite intrigued by Michael Cain's comments about the possible partition of the US and asked him to write a guest post. Any blame for the layout lies with me and my tenuous knowledge of CSS. Enjoy!

by Michael Cain
I was invited to write something for the front page about my view that the American West could become different enough from the rest of the country that an eventual partition is possible. Some preliminaries:

• Yes, I know that it sounds like a lunatic fringe thing. You don't need to harp on that.
  
• When I talk about the West, I mean the 11 contiguous states from the Rockies to the Pacific. Alaska and Hawaii really are special cases.
  
• I'm taking a long(ish) view: it could become a subject not treated as completely crazy in 20 years, and could happen in 30-45. If you are mapping to the Civil War, think 1830 not 1860.
  
• With tongue only partially in cheek, it's my retirement hobby. It's at least a book-sized project. This is a really incomplete, condensed version of the arguments.
  
• There are maps, lots of maps. All of them make a division between east and west that correspond roughly to the Great Plains

by JanieM

Last night John Cole at BJ quoted at length from this Bloomberg article:

Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing business, is its fastest-growing and most profitable division, but it comes with a lot of upfront infrastructure costs and ongoing expenses, the biggest of which is electricity. Over the past two years, Amazon has almost doubled the size of its physical footprint worldwide, to 254 million square feet, including dozens of new data centers with vast fields of servers running 24/7. In at least two states, it’s also negotiated with utilities and politicians to stick other people with the bills, piling untold millions of dollars on top of the estimated $1.2 billion in state and municipal tax incentives the company has received over the past decade.

Today in the dentist's waiting room I was reading the preface to GBS's The Apple Cart, from 1930, and came across this:

...the conflict is not really between royalty and democracy. It is between both and plutocracy, which, having destroyed the royal power by frank force under democratic pretexts, has bought and swallowed democracy. Money talks: money prints: money broadcasts: money reigns; and kings and labor leaders alike have to register its decrees, and even, by a staggering paradox, to finance its enterprises and guarantee its profits.

I hope the cure isn't as drastic this time as it was last time.

by JanieM

My first front-page post here at ObWi was about cemeteries. In it I mentioned my dilemma: do I want to be buried? (If so, how and where?) Cremated? I wasn’t sure then and I’m not sure now, but I will soon have an option that wasn’t available in February of 2017.

Today was the annual meeting and picnic of the land trust I belong to, at which it was formally announced that we’re planning to buy a piece of land to turn into a conservation burial ground. One of my friends and I are already looking ahead to the trouble we’re going to cause once we take up residence there, whether along the lines of Spoon River Anthology or Lincoln in the Bardo we’re not yet sure.

To quote from the brochure:

As defined by the Green Burial Council, conservation burial takes place in a natural, conserved area of ten acres or more and uses only natural, biodegradable burial materials. Green burial also uses only natural materials, but is not defined as taking place in a broader conservation area. In contrast, most modern burial methods use deforested landscapes, toxic embalming fluids, cement vaults, and treated non-native wood, all of which are detrimental to the local environment, water quality, and worker health.

The burial ground the land trust is planning will be, like our other properties, open to the public for hiking, bird-watching, and generally enjoying the outdoors. It will also be the first of our conserved lands to have ADA-accessible trails.

At the moment I don’t have any thoughts, profound or otherwise, to add to my last post on the subject, but here are a couple of relevant book recommendations:

Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande. Gawande, for those who may not have run across him, is a Boston surgeon who also writes books and New Yorker articles. He’s the son of surgeons – who were also immigrants, those pesky people who will insist on coming to this country and not sponging off the rest of us.

Being Mortal combines family stories with information about the intersection of end-of-life issues with the practice of modern medicine and with end-of-life care generally in the U.S. It’s wonderfully written and very thought-provoking.

Also, Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying, by Sallie Tisdale. It’s a very different kind of book from Gawande’s, written by a nurse (and writer) who has worked in palliative care settings and who is also a Buddhist, with her own particular perspective on death and dying.

by wj

Because we are way overdue for a new open thread. And this
https://deadspin.com/minor-league-baseball-team-wins-on-a-three-run-walk-off-1828308390
is just way too good not to share!

by liberal japonicus

Perhaps red-meat liberalism talking here, but I have to wonder if the whole Trump presidency is a way for Darwinian selection to operate. Case in point: Chris Collins.

here

They've got video of him making the call to his son.

whoops

Here's some background that I thought was interesting.

Another example (hopefully) of Darwinian selection:
Ted Cruz

Economic crimes, Trump endorsements, upper New York state, Texas, the implicit "what about Bob Menendez?", a lot of buttons here, all are encouraged to press the ones they like and go on about them.