montanamarshall - Network

Memories Only, Now

Montana bade farewell this last week to one of its most famous buildings, the M&M in uptown Butte, which burned down in a spectacular early-morning fire. The whole state is grieving.
     

     
“Uptown” in Butte means what “downtown” means everywhere else: the city grew up on the side of the hill where Butte’s spectacular copper deposits were being mined, and so the business/shopping/entertainment district was located above, not below, the bulk of the city. Uptown Butte contains the largest designated historic district in the whole United States, a time capsule preserved from before World War II and, in much of it, before the Great Depression, one that goes on and on for block after fascinating block.

     Butte was the richest copper strike in world history, the one that made possible the wiring of the world. And it was a party town. The hard-rock mining in the tunnels below was a miserable occupation, a lifetime of sun-deprived labor in places too low to stand straight without injury, heavy labor at temperatures and humidities at the upper limit of what any human body could endure, with the constant risk of death from cave-ins or wrongly-tamped explosives ever at your shoulder. Mining work paid well, though; for a time, the working class in the city was the richest anywhere in the U.S. The miners blew off steam with hard drink, parades, and crazy carryings-on. It’s not just coincidence that Evel Knievel came from there.
     

                                       — July 4, 1941; the M&M is on the right edge of the photo.
     
And the M&M was in the very heart of uptown. Built in the 1890s, it began as a pool hall and added a saloon. The miners flocked to it. During Prohibition it was converted to a cigar store front with a speakeasy in back, a bowling alley in the basement, and a gambling hall upstairs. Later the gambling was moved behind the bowling alley, where it couldn’t be heard from the street.
     

                                       — They placed their bets here —
     
The doors were always unlocked, and legend has it that the owner flushed the keys down the toilet.

     Jack Kerouac described his visit to the M&M in 1949 in the course of his great bus ride. He intended it to be published in his book On the Road, but that section was cut by his editors and only finally saw print in Esquire in March, 1970:
     

“It was Sunday night, I had hoped the saloons would stay open long enough for me to see them. They never even closed. In a great old-time saloon I had a giant beer. On the wall was a big electric signboard flashing gambling numbers …What characters in there: old prospectors, gamblers, whores, miners, Indians, cowboys, tobacco-chewing businessmen! Groups of sullen Indians drank rotgut in the john. Hundreds of men played cards in an atmosphere of smoke and spitoons. It was the end of my quest for an ideal bar….”

     
That, of course, was the Wild West of the second quarter of the twentieth century, a Wild West not celebrated by Hollywood, where activities long since banned in the increasingly Puritan remainder of the country still flourished in states like Colorado and Arizona — and Montana. Even decades after the mines closed, the M&M still served alcohol in the morning from 6 a.m. on, and old retired miners in bib overalls would come toddling in for breakfast with beer.
     

                                       — circa 1935
     
The parties became tamer after the 1950s, but they never stopped. And even as Butte became poorer and poorer, defined no longer by copper wealth but by now by an open tailings pit that was, and is, the most spectacular toxic waste site in the country, the bright lights never went out.

     I myself came to the West far too late to see the wild times — I was a bare few weeks old when Kerouac visited the M&M. But the glamor left behind by all that misapplied mining plunder and wastrel living still speaks to the history-lover in me. It remains a spectacle in places like uptown Butte (and Helena, Montana, and elsewhere). Farewell, O M&M.
     

                                       — the M&M, Christmas 2016; photo by Lindsey McLendon Gordon

Fossil Fuel Rapine

Old oil and gas wells across the U.S. are drying up, and when this happens they must be plugged, or they leak toxics into the landscape. Supposedly, the companies that drill the holes are required to provide the money for this. But a new article in the High Country News reports that Colorado has collected only 2% of the $8 billion that will be needed. Other states — Oklahoma, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, New Mexico, Wyoming, etc. — are in a similar fix. Both the land and the people of these oil-producing states have been raped, pillaged, and abandoned.

Conservation Funding Dries Up

Wildlife conservation in the U.S. depends heavily on oil and gas royalties; those sources of funding are drying up. Meanwhile, a Congress obsessed with diverting all Federal revenues to the pockets of the rich, special interests, and the war industry, have deprived related budget line items like national parks of the money they need simply to function. High Country News has highlighted the problem in a recent short article.

     This is not a high-profile issue for the Biden administration, and Congress has not discovered the full dimensions of ecological responsibility. (Nor does Congress want to.) So I am not expecting any real solution in the near-to-middle future.

Tribal Sovereignty and Institutionalized Racism: No One Without the Other

Knowing the past history of the “Five Civilized Tribes” as I do, I am frankly surprised this issue has taken so long to surface.

     Back when these tribes still lived on their ancestral lands in the southeast United States, and were struggling to retain them, one approach they took was to adopt the ways of the U.S. in an effort to gain U.S. respect. So, among other things, they established plantations on which they used negroes as slaves, just as U.S. whites did.

     In the interests of abolishing other people’s racism, members of the U.S. Congress are trying to force native American tribes to accept the descendants of the slaves their ancestors held as full tribal citizens. The Choctaw Nation says, nuh-uh, won’t do.

     Story in [i]High Country News[i] here.

Testing the Supreme Court’s Stripes

Quite a remarkable turn of events. The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing arguments over two related issues in Arizona — a state law banning ballot collection and a policy that rejects ballots cast in the wrong precinct. Both were measures designed to prevent minorities and the poor, who usually vote Democrat, from voting. The plaintiff in both cases: the Democratic National Committee (not a group I am usually fond of).
     

“What’s the interest of the Arizona RNC in keeping, say, the out-of-precinct ballot disqualification rules on the books?" Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked, referencing legal standing.
     “Because [not doing so] puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats,” said Michael Carvin, the lawyer defending the state's restrictions. “Politics is a zero-sum game. And every extra vote they get through unlawful interpretation of Section 2 hurts us, it’s the difference between winning an election 50-49 and losing an election 51 to 50.”
                                                                                                                                         — NBC news article

     
     Of course, such an argument will only play well in court if a majority of the justices view the purpose of the Constitution as being to keep Demonrats out of power. Evidently the lawyer assumes this is the case.

     It will be interesting to see if the ploy succeeds.

Evaluation, Mr. Spock

Probably Not What Killed the Neanderthals

RealClimate is a site whose integrity and commitment to honest science I have respected for many, many years. It has recently provided a tentative review of the article, recently published in Science. asserting that when the magnetic polarity of the Earth flipped 42,000 years ago (“the Laschamps Geomagnetic Excursion”), it created a global climatic crisis that wiped out the Neanderthals and various megafauna.

     I was skeptical already. I had reviewed the current state of scientific knowledge on the extinction of the megafauna just a few months ago. The currently available data indicates that the first of the big species to go (cave bears, Eurasian hippopotami, giant rhinoceri and others) were already in decline 50,000 years ago, which was long before the reversal of the poles, and were not fully extinct until tens of thousands of years after the reversal. Although the article in Science focuses on the megafauna in Australia, rather than those in Eurasia, the extinction dates there don’t fit the 42,000-year date any more than the extinctions in Eurasia do.

     As for the Neanderthals, the best current dating is that they disappeared from Eurasia between 41,000 and 39,000 years ago. This means that, whatever the Laschamps Geomagnetic Excurison may have done to them, they had a thousand years or more to recover. And there is some evidence to indicate that they were able to hold their own with our own species, Homo sapiens: it appears that they may have actually driven our species out of the Near East about 100,000 years ago and held it for themselves for 40,000 or 50,000 years. It is possible they were smarter than we are; they seem to have invented clothing, to have been able to splint broken bones and dress major wounds with bandages, and to have known the medicinal usage of some plants. So it is a pretty shaky argument to say that the magnetic reversal provided an initial lethal blow to the Neanderthals, after which our ancestors finished them off. Climate change (the Heinrich event 4) and/or disease (transmissible spongiform encephalopathy) seem more likely explanations of their disappearance, although frankly, it’s all guesswork right now.

     The authors of the article in Science appear to have falsified scientific data in order to support their claims. They “recalibrated” the extinction of the Neanderthals to make it fit their 42,000-years-ago event, but on close examination, this recalibration seems to be nothing more than hand-waving based on rock art. They ignored the actual last appearance dates for the Australian megafauna. And they wrote that the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, was rendered nearly extinct 42,000 years ago, and cited as their evidence a scientific article in the Journal of Biogeography that actually gives a date of 20,400 years ago.

     Data on global temperatures and trace gas concentrations from Greenland, Antarctica, and Hulu Cave in China, show no signs of the global climatic crisis 42,000 years ago that this new paper claims.

     One hates to say that a prestigious journal like Science was hoaxed, but that seems to be what happened.

Super Bad Karma, Going After Tibetans

A news release yesterday by Ravie Lakshmanan of The Hacker News:
     

Cybersecurity researchers today unwrapped a new campaign aimed at spying on vulnerable Tibetan communities globally by deploying a malicious Firefox extension on target systems.
     "Threat actors aligned with the Chinese Communist Party's state interests delivered a customized malicious Mozilla Firefox browser extension that facilitated access and control of users' Gmail accounts," Proofpoint said in an analysis.
     The Sunnyvale-based enterprise security company pinned the phishing operation on a Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) it tracks as TA413, which has been previously attributed to attacks against the Tibetan diaspora by leveraging COVID-themed lures to deliver the Sepulcher malware with the strategic goal of espionage and civil dissident surveillance. …
     The infection chain begins with a phishing email impersonating the "Tibetan Women's Association" using a TA413-linked Gmail account that's known to masquerade as the Bureau of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in India.
     The emails contain a malicious URL, supposedly a link to YouTube, when in fact, it takes users to a fake "Adobe Flash Player Update" landing page where they are prompted to install a Firefox extension that Proofpoint calls "FriarFox." [etc.]

     
See the release itself for further details —

About Those Insect Overlords

It’s not just Facebook breaking Australia and Myanmar. Naked Capitalism reported this morning on the Energy Charter Treaty, ratified in 1994, which allows fossil fuel companies to sue national governments for taking action on climate change. Vattenfall sued Germany in 2009 and won €1.4 billion plus interest because that country is phasing out nuclear. Right now, RWE is suing the Netherlands for proposing to phase out coal.

     There is a Europe-wide petition being circulated to get the countries there to withdraw from the treaty. We need a similar popular movement here in the U.S., but I have trouble imagining any politician, other than Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, supporting such a thing.

Don’t Tell Me This Is False Equivalence

                                          detention center in Carrizo Springs TX; photo by HANDOUT/Reuters
     
…Because I won’t believe you.
     

This week, the Biden administration did the unthinkable. They reopened a Trump-era detention site for migrant children. The detention center, a reconverted camp for oil field workers in Carrizo Springs, Texas, is expected to hold 700 children between the ages of 13 and 17, and dozens of kids have already arrived there.

                                                                  Moustafa Bayoumi in The Guardian, February 24, 2021
     
This is a demonstration of the realpolitik that Bill Clinton made the centerpiece of Democratic Party policy in 1992, the neoliberalism that was a betrayal of everything my generation, when it was young, had hoped for. Say you stand for human rights; then betray human rights and excuse it by saying the other party would have been worse. Even when true, that is not an excuse. Two wrongs, Joe Biden, do not make one right.