Notices by Chuck Darwin (cdarwin@c.im), page 5

Hi, it's #Eugene #Vindman.

I am about to take the stage to debate my MAGA opponent.
But before I do, I need to know I have this grassroots team behind me, ready to defeat him.

Can you please rush $10 to my campaign before the debate begins?
https://vindman4va.com/

A new tropical depression has formed in the eastern tropical Atlantic -- and may strengthen into a significant hurricane later this week.

For updates, visit the National Hurricane Center.

https://mapstodon.space/@zoom_earth/113222275766519050

Scientists just discovered why Earth’s atmosphere is leaking

Since the late 1960s, satellites over the poles detected an extremely fast flow of particles escaping into space
— that were being leaked by our atmosphere.

Now, scientists have discovered a global electric field that explains how particles from our atmosphere are catapulted into space.

Scientists suspected that gravity and the magnetic field alone could not fully explain the stream.

There had to be another source creating this leaky faucet.

It turns out the mysterious force is a previously undiscovered global electric field, a recent study found.

The field is only about the strength of a watch battery
— but it’s enough to thrust lighter ions from our atmosphere into space.

It’s also generated unlike other electric fields on Earth.

This newly discovered aspect of our planet provides clues about the evolution of our atmosphere, perhaps explaining why Earth is habitable.

The electric field is “an agent of chaos,” said Glyn Collinson, a NASA rocket scientist and lead author of the study.

“It undoes gravity. ... Without it, Earth would be very different.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/29/earth-electric-field-discovery/

Trump on #Project2025:

Heritage will lay the groundwork and detailed plans for what our movement will do and your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America

And that's coming
That's coming

Balanced lessons on missions and the gold rush in California

🔸There is a flip side to the narrative about the cultural richness that Spanish #colonists brought to California.

🔸The discovery of #gold at Sutters Mill in 1848 did more than just spark the largest settler migration in the country’s history.

🔥In both cases, the damage to the lives and cultures of the state’s Indigenous populations was profound.

At the time, there were far more #Indigenous #people than the Spanish or European-descended Americans.

In its effort to provide Native-led historical instruction, the "National Museum of the American Indian" has developed curricula that provides perspective about the people who were there long before anyone else.

Join Native America Calling to learn about NMAI’s educational goal and how it’s being used

https://indianz.com/News/2024/09/23/native-america-calling-balanced-lessons-on-missions-and-the-gold-rush-in-california/

The majority of Americans want to ditch the #Electoral #College and 💥"would instead prefer to see the winner of the presidential election be the person who wins the most votes nationally."

Pew Research Center surveyed 9,720 adults across the United States in late August and early September, and found that
✅ 63% want to abolish the process outlined in the U.S. Constitution
and replace it with a #popular #vote approach,
compared with just 35% who favor keeping the current system.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/electoral-college-map-2024

Sheldon Whitehouse here.

President Biden and Vice President Harris endorsed sweeping reforms to the Supreme Court,
including 18-year term limits for justices and an enforceable code of ethics.

I've been leading the way on reforming the Supreme Court for many years.
This has been a long, and at times lonely, fight.
But we've got momentum now.

My SCERT Act, which would create real ethical guardrails at the Supreme Court, is through committee and ready for a floor vote.

AND I have the Supreme Court Biennial Appointments and Term Limits Act to establish eighteen-year term limits for justices.

Will you chip in before our end-of-quarter fundraising deadline on September 30th to support my re-election campaign
so I can keep building on our momentum to clean up the mess at the
Court That Dark Money Built?

https://go.whitehouseforsenate.com/9261

Federal judge blocks employee abortion, IVF protections
at thousands of Catholic employers nationwide

The group that brought the challenge to a new federal policy argues it cannot be forced to accommodate
"immoral infertility 'treatments.'"

A federal judge in North Dakota issued an #injunction on Monday ❌blocking the🔸 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission🔸 from protecting
any employees of any members of a nationwide Catholic association
who are seeking time off or other accommodations under the #Pregnant #Workers #Fairness #Act
for an ♦️abortion or
♦️in vitro fertilization ( #IVF ) treatment.

U.S. District Judge #Daniel #Traynor, a Trump appointee to the federal court in North Dakota, issued the🔸 religion-infused preliminary injunction🔸 to partially
🆘 block enforcement of an EEOC rule implementing the 2022 law,
👉along with related implementation of Title VII of the #Civil #Rights #Act of 1964,

as to the Catholic Benefits Association and its members
— current or future
— #nationwide.

The order covers ⚠️more than 8,000 employers
— including thousands of churches
— across the country.

The #PWFA was passed in December 2022 and is supposed to protect covered workers from discrimination on the basis of “pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions”
by, in part, requiring employers to provide employees with reasonable accommodations.

The EEOC proposed its implementing rule for the PWFA in August 2023,
stating in part that abortion and fertility treatment, including IVF,
are covered by the law’s protections.

That rule, which does not relate to insurance coverage, went into effect in June.

Judge Traynor concluded that the CBA is likely to succeed in its challenge to the rule and related Title VII enforcement guidance under the "Religious Freedom Restoration Act".

Any appeal would go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit,
which only has one Democratic appointee among its 11 judges.

https://www.lawdork.com/p/federal-judge-injunction-cba-pwfa-abortion-ivf

Murder and other violent crime dropped across the U.S. last year, FBI data shows

Crime, including serious violent incidents like murder and rape, dropped nationally from 2022 to 2023, according to new data released by the FBI on Monday.
Violent crime was down about 3% from 2022 to 2023 and property crime took a similar drop of 2.4%, the FBI reported in its annual "Summary of Crime in the Nation."
The most serious crimes went down significantly: Murder and non-negligent manslaughter were down an estimated 11.6%
— the largest single year decline in two decades
— while rape decreased by an estimated 9.4%.
#proharris #gobiden
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/violent-crime-dropped-america-last-year-new-fbi-data-shows-rcna172217

Fertilizing the ocean with iron
is a form of #geoengineering,
a set of technologies that are compelling for their potential to meaningfully alter Earth’s systems,
-- and controversial for the same reason.

These days, some geoengineering techniques,
such as spraying chemicals into the sky to encourage clouds to produce more rain and ease drought,
are already in use.

Scientists have begun real-world demonstrations of
“cloud brightening,”
misting the skies with sea salt to dial up how much sunlight clouds reflect.

And even the more controversial approaches
—such as injecting the stratosphere with shiny sulfur compounds to block the sun’s rays
—are becoming part of mainstream climate discussions.

All of these methods are of undetermined efficacy, involve unknown risk, and may entail unintended consequences.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/09/geoengineering-microbe-bacteria-climate/679961/

When the eccentric entrepreneur Russ George dumped iron filings in the ocean, the world was outraged,

critics issued condemnations,

and experts talked soberly about the potential for disaster.

But we failed
— as we have on climate change in general
— to build any kind of international consensus about a solution.

In the meantime, we live in a world where
anyone can dump iron into the oceans,
and where local, commercial, and national actors might move ahead with larger-scale geoengineering interventions as climate change worsens.

Recent papers have outlined new ways that individuals could try to DIY-engineer our planet out of the climate crisis — with uncertain consequences.

Are we more prepared
for that than we were in 2012❓

Not really.

Russ George, for his part, considers himself vindicated,
and told me he’s continuing to work.

In his last email to me, he signed off:
“The greatest threat to the environment is waiting for someone else to save it.”

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/24/18273198/climate-change-russ-george-unilateral-geoengineering

🙏🏻 @Nazani

#geoengineering

Hey!
It’s Get Your Sh*t Together Day

- We’ve got a wannabe dictator campaigning for president,
- a religious weirdo as Speaker of the House,
- countless extremists running down-ballot,
- and a corrupt Supreme Court with a fetish for stripping away basic rights.

Do your part and check your voter registration status.

Then, guilt/inspire three friends to do the same.

https://www.votesaveamerica.com/

One of the most telling parts of Trump’s insane rant du jour was this:

YOU WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION, BECAUSE IT IS NOW WHERE IT ALWAYS HAD TO BE, WITH THE STATES,

This is something that not only Trump believes,
or that members of the anti-abortion lobby believed
— it was a way for centrist pundits to demonstrate their Savvy.

The idea that "Roe was the reason there was political conflict over abortion" was amazingly widespread.
And, of course, couldn’t possibly be more #wrong:

⚠️The number of women in Texas who #died while pregnant, during labor or soon after childbirth
#skyrocketed following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion care
— far outpacing a slower rise in maternal mortality across the nation, a new investigation of federal public health data finds.
🆘 From 2019 to 2022, the rate of #maternal #mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%,
compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period, according to an analysis by the Gender Equity Policy Institute.

❌Supporters of abortion rights and women’s rights are #never going to accept this status quo.
🔥And it’s hard to imagine a time when the well-connected anti-abortion minority stops trying to pass draconian bans in every state legislature they control -- and nationally,
whether legislatively or by judicial fiat.
The idea that overruling Roe would mean you no longer have to think about abortion made no sense if you thought about it for more than 5 seconds,
but ⭐️this is the case of Trump believing something he heard all the time on cable news.

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/09/more-pregnant-women-getting-killed-by-trump-abortion-bans

Harris dares Trump to debate again with acceptance of CNN offering

Vice President Kamala Harris agreed to a presidential #debate on #CNN set for #Oct. #23, even though Donald Trump has signaled that he won’t debate again.

The Harris campaign is hoping Trump accepts this invitation -- given the format and setup will be similar to his face-off with President Joe Biden in June.

The debate would take place at CNN’s studio in Atlanta, Georgia.
Harris campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said, “Donald Trump should have no problem agreeing to this debate,” given the similar format.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/presidential/3162280/harris-dares-trump-debate-again-acceptance-cnn/

Trump and his campaign enter turbulent phase in final weeks

With just 45 days left until the election,
the past three weeks reveal whatever control and self-restraint helped launch Trump’s third presidential campaign has largely disappeared in the crucial final stretch.


On the Monday before Trump’s first debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, his running mate shared on social media, without evidence, the claim that Haitian immigrants were abducting and 🔸eating their neighbors’ pets
— one Trump repeated the following night on the debate stage, in a moment that instantly went viral.

Trump’s #chaotic and widely criticized #debate #performance coincided with an already tumultuous period for the former president.

He had recently welcomed back into his orbit Corey #Lewandowski
— his former 2016 campaign manager who was exiled after allegations of #sexual #assault by a donor
— and had begun traveling around the country with Laura #Loomer, a far-right ally who has spread #conspiracy #theories.

Two failed apparent #assassination attempts,
as well as additional #threats against him,
have also left the freewheeling presidential candidate constrained by a mushrooming #security presence and has made staging campaign events more challenging.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/21/trump-turbulence-campaign-election/

Newsweek just made a MAJOR surprise prediction!

"𝙺𝚊𝚖𝚊𝚕𝚊 𝙷𝚊𝚛𝚛𝚒𝚜 𝚑𝚊𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚎 𝚝𝚘 𝚙𝚞𝚕𝚕 𝚘𝚏𝚏 𝚊 "𝚜𝚞𝚛𝚙𝚛𝚒𝚜𝚎 𝚟𝚒𝚌𝚝𝚘𝚛𝚢" 𝚒𝚗 𝙵𝚕𝚘𝚛𝚒𝚍𝚊" - 𝙽𝚎𝚠𝚜𝚠𝚎𝚎𝚔

Kamala Harris could pull off a STUNNING upset in Donald Trump's home state of Florida!

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Thank you so much,

-Congressional Black Caucus PAC

He was driving my rental car through the West Virginia coal fields when he said this.

His father had taken care with his dress and appearance.

Robert Mark liked suits and bow ties and his white beard as tightly and neatly groomed as an Augusta green.

Chris wore a wrinkled uniform of flannel and jeans and a careless stubble that was closer to the Augusta rough.

After 40 years in the coal fields, he looks and sounds less like a Princeton kid than a West Virginia coal miner.

When he laughs, he reveals a hole where a molar should be.

Nothing about him is decorative;
everything serves some structural purpose.

He lives in a modest house in the Pittsburgh suburbs
and drives a 10-year-old Subaru Forester with a standard transmission.

In the presence of luxury, he was visibly uneasy
— the sort of person who, when offered filet mignon,
squirms a bit before saying he’d rather have a cheeseburger.

“We always told our kids there are two ways to be rich,” he said.

“One is to make a lot of money.

The other is to not want much.”

It was the kind of thing a father would say only if he’d figured out how not to want much.

From the moment we left the interstate,
we were on narrow back roads winding through towns half-populated by people with a talent for throwing leery glances at strangers.

One side of the road was usually bordered by a canal or a single railroad track
and the other by exposed layers of sedimentary rock containing a thin seam of coal.

The West Virginia coal fields were famous for their abundance of coal seams.

Seldom more than six feet thick, they were still everywhere and encouraged generations of small mine operators to dig into the closest mountain they could find.

Every couple of miles, we’d pass a mine that had been abandoned,
its infrastructure left in place.

Old cranes rose from beds of weeds.

Chutes that once carried coal still ran half a mile from the mouths of exhausted mines to rusting and empty shipping containers.

“Does anyone ever intend to remove any of this?” I asked,
as we passed what looked like a vast abandoned construction site.

“It’s hard to imagine,” he said. “There’s no money in it.”

When Chris arrived in coal country in 1976, there were roughly 250,000 coal miners in the United States.

There are now fewer than 70,000.

During this time, West Virginia has turned from the bluest state in the country to the reddest.

“My idea about how society changes has changed,” he said.

Public interest in preventing miners from being killed on the job has always tended to peak after a mining disaster
and then fade until the next catastrophe.

The U.S. Bureau of Mines was created by an act of Congress in 1910,
three years after 362 coal miners were killed in an explosion in a West Virginia mine.

The bureau was mainly a research facility, however, and lacked the authority to police the mining industry.

In 1941, a year after mine explosions killed hundreds of miners in West Virginia and Pennsylvania,
Congress gave the bureau the authority to enter mines and look around
— but not much else.

In 1952, a year after 111 coal miners died inside an Illinois mine, Congress required the industry to acknowledge every roof fall fatality and investigate the cause of failure.

In 1969, a year after 78 miners died in another explosion inside a West Virginia mine, Congress passed a new law that gave the bureau the power to punish safety violations with fines and even criminal charges.

In 1972, after 125 people were killed by a burst dam in a West Virginia coal mine, Congress,
suspecting that the Bureau of Mines had been largely captured by the industry it was meant to regulate,
encouraged the Interior Department to separate mine inspection and regulation,
and created a new agency called the Mining Enforcement and Safety Administration.

Five years later, after 15 miners died inside a coal mine in Kentucky, Congress changed the new agency’s name to the Mine Safety and Health Administration
and gave it even more powers.

It mandated quarterly inspections of every underground coal mine, for instance, to ensure it was following the safety rules.

The powers obviously were only as helpful as the safety rules.

And the safety rules had some problems.

In the late 1960s, roughly 200 American coal miners were dying on the job every year.

Half of those were killed by collapsing roofs,
and roughly half of those were killed while following the existing safety rules.

No one ever told Chris to invent better rules.

But before he even began to figure out better designs for coal mine pillars, he knew that was what he wanted to do:

He wanted to keep miners safe.

As he worked toward his PhD, he figured out that the only place to do it was inside the federal government.

The coal mining companies had largely dodged their responsibility.

Industry executives who visited Penn State made it clear to Chris that they viewed safety as a subject for wimps and losers.

And no one coal mining company was likely to fund the research that would benefit all coal companies.

Working on his thesis, right through the mid-1980s, Chris had offers to teach,
but he knew no university could guarantee him access to the mines he wanted to study.

“Plus, academia puts on a facade of being impartial but is in fact much more closely connected to industry than anything else,” he said.

“In some ways it is an arm of industry.”

He needed to find a job inside the federal government,
with either the Mine Safety and Health Administration or the Bureau of Mines.

The mine safety agency had been hit by the Reagan administration with a hiring freeze.

But the Bureau of Mines, still largely owned by the industry, had some money and knew about his research.

“I just kind of had an open door there,” said Chris.

“I’m not actually sure who even hired me.

I know I had one interview because I forgot a tie and had to stop off at Wal-Mart on the way to buy one.”

It was now 1987.

He was 31 years old, married and the father of a 1-year-old son.

He joined the bureau at its research facility outside of Pittsburgh.

Upon arrival, he sensed a certain wariness from his new colleagues.

No one else had a PhD.

No one else had studied with the great Bieniawski.

“They put me in a basement office that was way out of the way with a guy who was mentally unstable,” said Chris.

“Whenever I’d get a phone call, he’d start making these funny sounds.”

They also assigned him to the jobs no one else wanted
— week-long trips to gather data from coal mines in Kentucky.

None of it mattered;

he was the least likely human being on the planet to put on airs,
and what was pain to others was pleasure to him.

He didn’t even much care that his phone calls triggered at the desk beside him the honks of a braying donkey.

“I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” said Chris.

“The idea of being able to spend weeks studying these longwall mines was fantastic.

And as soon as I got to the Bureau of Mines, I had no one to tell me what to do.

I even made up my own title:
Principal Roof Control Specialist.”

He began with the problem he’d been attacking in his still-unfinished PhD thesis:

roof collapse inside longwall coal mines.

Evaluating the safety of a coal mine roof was less like evaluating the safety of a suspension bridge than it was predicting the performance of baseball players.

No matter what you did, you were going to be wrong some of the time:

The best you could do was improve the odds of success.

And the way to do this was to collect lots of data from roof failures
and search for patterns.

Much later, he’d explain his approach in a paper:

“The very words ‘statistical analysis’ seem foreign to many in rock engineering.

Engineers are trained to see the world in terms of load and deformation,
where failure is simply a matter of stress exceeding strength.

Statistics are generally given short shrift in engineering curriculums,
and so the entire language of statistics is unfamiliar.

Yet statistics are the tools that science has developed to deal with uncertainty and probability,
which are both at the heart of mining ground control.”

His new job came with a badge that granted him access to any mine he wished to study.

The Bureau of Mines also kept records of deadly roof failures along with important details:

the mine’s depth, the size and shape of its pillars, the nature of the rock in the roof, and so on.

Oddly, no one was really searching for meaning in the numbers.

“They had all this data but weren’t doing much with it,” said Chris.

The phenomenon had also occurred in baseball and, I’d bet, in other fields, too.

The impulse to collect data preceded the ability to make sense of it.

People facing a complicated problem measure whatever they can easily measure.

But the measurements by themselves don’t lead to understanding.

He finished his thesis while settling into his new job at the Bureau of Mines.

But even before it was finished, coal mine engineers embraced his stability factor.

At conferences, they’d come up to him after he’d explained his work and say,
what you are doing is the future.

They hadn’t felt compelled to do the work themselves, but they were delighted that he spared them these roof falls that cost them $200 a minute to clean up.

There was a limit to its practical usefulness, though, as the stability of a coal mine roof depended on its specific geology.

And the geology varied from coal field to coal field.

“In some places, like Pittsburgh, you needed a higher stability factor,
and in other places, like Alabama, you could use a smaller one,” said Chris.

The same stress that caused a mine roof outside Pittsburgh to crumble and collapse would have no effect on a mine roof in Alabama.

It wasn’t enough to know the load on the pillars.

You needed also to know more about the rock mass over them.

In some coal fields, the sedimentary layers were as thick and cohesive as a chocolate fudge cake,

in others as thin and flaky as a mille-feuille.

Some mines had more moisture in them than others,
and some rocks, in the presence of moisture, would return to mud.

Layers of laminated shale tended to be weakly bonded and vulnerable to horizontal stress.

All else equal, a layer of sandstone was a good sign.

Yes, it had once been a beach, but grains of sand tended to bond more strongly than other particles.

Between a rock and a rock mass was the difference between a person and a society.

Hard as it was to understand a rock,
it was far harder to understand masses made of lots of different rocks.

And so Chris spent much of the late 1980s and early 1990s figuring out which qualities in rock masses caused their strength to vary.

“What I realized very quickly was that none of the existing classification systems for rocks were going to work for coal mine roofs.

You are evaluating not a rock but a structure.

There’s enormous variety.

That’s the key, to look past that variety and come up with a measure.”

Again, he found work done by others and repurposed it for his uses.

Back in the 1940s, geologists working for the Agriculture Department in national forests created a crude method for work crews to determine if some rock would work as a road:

whacking it with a ball-peen hammer.

Oddly, it didn’t matter how hard you whacked it.

There were just a handful of ways the rock might react,
and its specific reaction revealed its strength.

Chris started whacking mine roofs with ball-peen hammers.

“It’s not precise,” he said, “but it does get you in the ballpark.”

The why of it all often remained out of view.

He couldn’t explain why certain traits in a rock mass made it less prone to collapse.

He could just show that they did.

But as Chris set out to classify rock masses, he noticed an odd force that was often observed inside underground coal mines:

the massive horizontal stress on the rock.

“There’s a textbook explanation for stress in the ground,” he said.

“You have the vertical stress of the rock above.

And any time you apply stress from above, the rock below tries to expand laterally.

But at depth it can’t expand laterally in either direction because it is confined by other rock.

So you get horizontal stress.”

In the textbooks, the rule of thumb was that the horizontal stress was about one-third of the vertical stress.

In fact, as mine engineers had known from the stress gauges they drilled into rock,
the forces on the rock running parallel to the Earth’s surface were often two to three times greater than the vertical pressure from the rock pressing down directly from above.

Often miners could even see this horizontal stress
— say, in a buckled mine floor.

But its source was a mystery.

“No one could explain it,” said Chris.

“Nobody had any theory of it.”

It finally occurred to him that what coal miners were seeing near the surface of the Earth
was simply an expression of forces deeper in the Earth’s crust:
plate tectonics.

He made a study and sure enough, the direction of the horizontal stress in coal mines lined up exactly with the definitive plate tectonics stress map that had been created in the 1970s.

The plates pushing against each other directly below West Virginia create a stress running from east to west.

West Virginia mines that ran north to south had always experienced more roof collapses than those that ran east to west,
but no one knew why.

Now they did:

It was as if they were trying to saw against a wood’s grain instead of with it.

“Once you figured that out, it was like magic,” said Chris.

“You would see people’s eyes light up.”

At the start, much of what Chris did in his new job felt like bricolage.

He took data gathered by others and work done by others and repurposed it to his narrow problem.

His immediate goal was to create for the pillars inside the tunnels of longwall mines the equivalent of what engineers call a safety rating.

A safety rating is the load-bearing capacity of whatever is holding the load,
divided by the load.

(If it’s less than one, don’t look up.)

Bieniawski had created a formula for calculating the load-bearing capacity of coal pillars,
but to use it you needed to know the load that needed bearing.

Calculating this was tricky.

It changed as coal was removed from the mine in ways that were not obvious,
and that varied from mine to mine.

The rock that collapsed harmlessly behind the mining machine did not have the same ability to support the mountain above it as the previously intact seam of coal.

Crumbled cake offered less support to whatever was above it than intact cake.

The weight of the mountain needed to travel someplace.

One place it went was onto the remaining coal pillars.

The more coal you removed, the greater the so-called abutment load
— not the load that was vertically over the pillar, but the load that moved, horizontally, onto it.

Chris spent several years measuring the way the load on the pillars changed as coal was mined.

His aim was to reduce his findings to a set of equations that could be used by mine designers.

Given the length of the mining wall, the depth of the mine and the height of the roof, etc.,
the load should be roughly X.

X was the numerator of his safety factor, which,
to avoid the impression that the entire mine was rendered safe by it,
he renamed the “stability factor.”

He then back-tested the number against case histories to see whether coal mine roofs had indeed collapsed when the stability factor was less than his model thought it needed to be.

He was turning pillar stability into a science.

“All I’m doing is taking trial and error and looking at the data more scientifically,” he said.

By academic statistician standards, his work was more than a bit loose.

“I’ll never have a database that is large enough
— or collected in the random way that you’d need to do precise statistical analysis,” he said.

“I’ll never be able to say ‘there’s a 95 percent chance the roof will hold up.’

You’ll never know the exact probabilities.

I’m using statistics to make better engineering judgments.”