Environment II by mark andrew york

Patriot Up

2012-01-31T06:02:00.000-08:00

Patriot is live on Amazon.

Fracked

2011-11-23T07:09:00.001-08:00

EPA Finds Compound Used in Fracking in Wyoming Aquifer

by Abrahm Lustgarten ProPublica, Nov. 10, 2011, 1:10 p.m.

As the country awaits results from a nationwide safety study on the natural gas drilling process of fracking, a separate government investigation into contamination in a place where residents have long complained [1] that drilling fouled their water has turned up alarming levels of underground pollution.

A pair of environmental monitoring wells drilled deep into an aquifer in Pavillion, Wyo., contain high levels of cancer-causing compounds and at least one chemical commonly used in hydraulic fracturing, according to new water test results [2] released yesterday by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The findings are consistent with water samples the EPA has collected from at least 42 homes in the area since 2008, when ProPublica began reporting [3] on foul water and health concerns in Pavillion and the agency started investigating reports of contamination there.

Last year -- after warning residents not to drink [4] or cook with the water and to ventilate their homes when they showered -- the EPA drilled the monitoring wells to get a more precise picture of the extent of the contamination.

The Pavillion area has been drilled extensively for natural gas over the last two decades and is home to hundreds of gas wells. Residents have alleged for nearly a decade [1] that the drilling -- and hydraulic fracturing in particular -- has caused their water to turn black and smell like gasoline. Some residents say they suffer neurological impairment [5], loss of smell, and nerve pain they associate with exposure to pollutants.

The gas industry -- led by the Canadian company EnCana, which owns the wells in Pavillion -- has denied that its activities are responsible for the contamination. EnCana has, however, supplied drinking water to residents.

The information released yesterday by the EPA was limited to raw sampling data: The agency did not interpret the findings or make any attempt to identify the source of the pollution. From the start of its investigation, the EPA has been careful to consider all possible causes of the contamination and to distance its inquiry from the controversy around hydraulic fracturing.

Still, the chemical compounds the EPA detected are consistent with those produced from drilling processes, including one -- a solvent called 2-Butoxyethanol (2-BE) -- widely used in the process of hydraulic fracturing. The agency said it had not found contaminants such as nitrates and fertilizers that would have signaled that agricultural activities were to blame.

The wells also contained benzene at 50 times the level that is considered safe for people, as well as phenols -- another dangerous human carcinogen -- acetone, toluene, naphthalene and traces of diesel fuel.

The EPA said the water samples were saturated with methane gas that matched the deep layers of natural gas being drilled for energy. The gas did not match the shallower methane that the gas industry says is naturally occurring in water, a signal that the contamination was related to drilling and was less likely to have come from drilling waste spilled above ground.

EnCana has recently agreed to sell its wells in the Pavillion area to Texas-based oil and gas company Legacy Reserves for a reported $45 million, but has pledged to continue to cooperate with the EPA's investigation. EnCana bought many of the wells in 2004, after the first problems with groundwater contamination had been reported.

The EPA's research in Wyoming is separate from the agency's ongoing national study of hydraulic fracturing's effect on water supplies, and is being funded through the Superfund cleanup program.

The EPA says it will release a lengthy draft of the Pavillion findings, including a detailed interpretation of them, later this month.

Colburn Project Accepted

2011-08-11T10:07:00.000-07:00

After more than ten years of trying, Patriot on the Kennebec: Major Reuben Colburn, Benedict Arnold and the March to Quebec 1775 will be published in spring 2012 by The History Press. It will part of their War and Military Series.

Gone from LA

2011-08-11T09:29:00.000-07:00

I sold my place in LA and hauled the remaining possessions 865 miles across the Nevada basin and range to the contrasting edenic world of the Wood River Valley. Long may its waters flow over my feet.

1977 Silver Streak Supreme Saturn

2011-07-16T08:31:00.000-07:00

My trailer is for sale in Sunland, CA. It's a classic and has served me well as it will anyone who buys it.

San Fernando Valley Recycler

Out of LA

2011-07-16T08:17:00.000-07:00

I've finally made a permanent move from LA to the Ketchum, Idaho area, which is a great improvement over the hostile concrete jungle of La La. I'm a part time reporter for the Idaho Mountain Express when not fly fishing Silver Creek. Life is good in all areas including housing and at long last, romance. Here's to that!

Eh Tu Brute?

2011-04-06T19:17:00.000-07:00

The Truth deniers can't handle.

Shame on the Obama Justice Department

2011-03-04T09:28:00.000-08:00

For prosecuting Tim DeCristopher.

Gasland

2011-02-27T14:06:00.000-08:00

I'm rooting for Gasland tonight, a chilling documentary by Josh Fox about hydrofracking for natural gas.

It didn't win. I guess money trumps Benzene in drinking water but they are both related.

Living in the Singular Dream World

2011-01-12T09:19:00.000-08:00

Livingston, Montana novelist Walter Kirn has been active all week on Twitter, working through his thoughts on the Arizona tragedy. I credited some of this nervous Twittering to his recent attempt to quit smoking, but it's much more than that. He knows this character firsthand from his novel, The Unbinding serialized on Slate a few years ago. We've become a nation of individual isolationists walking around in a dreamworld of our own making, desperately trying to shut out all reality. We're a mosaic, cordoned apart by walls. The more wealthy we become, the bigger the walls we build. We don't know our neighbors and more to the point we don't want to. After all, they could be trouble. Some, tragically, are.

Global Warming Mapped

2010-12-22T09:46:00.000-08:00

NASA Observatory Red means fever.

Driving On the Rim in Livingston, Montana

2010-12-01T10:21:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of The New York Times

Berl Pickett, the self-deprecating memoirist in Tom McGuane’s Driving on the Rim, may well be the average, small town physician in Montana, but I doubt it. McGuane presents Berl’s recollections the way a cowboy on horseback chases calves in a cutting horse competition, which happens to be the McLeod author’s avocation. He goes for the critter at hand and then returns for another, in no particular order. We never learn what Berl looks like, and true to literary form, we have no disparate image sprung on us later, leaving us content with our own. Despite Pickett’s awkwardness, he manages to punctuate life in his hometown of Livingston, Montana with three rocky romances. That is, if you don’t count his initiation to love by his own aunt in Idaho, much to his parents’ dismay.

Berl witnesses his patients’ relationships going bad, intervening as best he can, while trying to build one of his own. When his first girlfriend, Tessa, an opportunist who formerly shacked up with an art collector decades her senior, presents with a fatal, self-inflicted knife wound, Pickett does his professional best to save her. But he knows he never had a chance in either regard. For reasons unknown, other than small town vindictiveness, he is accused of negligence and blamed for Tessa’s death, which results in losing his license to practice.

While on a fishing trip to the remote Dean River in British Columbia, the events of 9-11 take place without Berl’s knowledge. When his plane doesn’t arrive, he waits for two days and then walks to the nearest town. When he learns what happened in New York, it fuels his feeling of disconnectedness. He drives back to Livingston in an Oldsmobile 98 that he finds on a lot in Vancouver and then uses the car to wander around for the rest of the story. He paints houses, all the while trying to assess how the bizarre events of his life, including the malpractice charge and the strange relationships with virtually everyone could have happened.

Along the way, Berl recounts his life story. He tells of caring for his parents, members of the World War II generation, his dad a veteran of the Huertgen Forest. His mother was a religious fanatic who ultimately had to be committed in her twilight years. His father didn’t wait for the rapture as his mother did but hoped, at least, to get out of the wind. Anyone who has been to Livingston knows this feeling.

The book has funny and poetic moments and even a macabre twist at the end that concerns Berl Pickett’s great, but doomed-from-the-start love, Jocelyn, and her villain sidekick. In the end, Pickett triumphs by attrition, and he learns as Dorothy in OZ did that the secret to life was with him all along, and that some things will remain unknowable until further notice.

The Media Has Failed in Covering the Climate Crisis

2010-11-18T11:54:00.001-08:00

Cool It is the same collection of non sequiturs Lomborg has always used. He acknowledges the problem but dodges the solution and that is the price of carbon. It's the perfect way to do nothing, and assure disaster will smack us where we live. The problem with global warming is that everyone is implicated. There's the fear.
About Climate Bill
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Income rates grow more under Democratic presidencies than Republican ones.

2010-10-30T18:05:00.000-07:00

Income disparity: Growth rates 1948-2005 The trick is how they get poor and middle income people to vote Republican. Will they do it again with all of these dirt poor tea baggers? We'll see.

Dispatches From the Culture Wars

"From 1962-2001, the average growth in total federal spending under Republican presidents has been 7.57%; under Democrats, 6.96%. Bush certainly did not help those averages any after 2001. During that same period, the average yearly deficit under Democrats was $36 billion; the average under Republicans was $190 billion. So under Republicans, spending grows more but revenues grow less because they always insist on tax cuts."

Salter Reynolds On Driving on the Rim

2010-10-29T20:45:00.000-07:00

Susan Salter Reynolds has a unique take on Tom McGuane's Driving on the Rim in the LA Times. All of the reviews are stellar and the opening chapters are amazing. I can't wait to get my copy. I'll be at the LA event on Nov. 4. I finally met Tom two years ago in Missoula after doing a story for The Livingston Enterprise on he and his longtime friend and fellow author and screenwriter William "Gatz" Hjortsberg of Livingston, Montana. On stage, Tom reminds me of Mark Twain. He's that good.

The Difficulty of a Global Warming Script

2010-10-29T17:54:00.000-07:00

The Difficulty of a Global Warming Script

No matter the complexity of the plot, there is no story people want to see. In the harsh reality of what is to come, they really don't want to look. They should.

Arctic Shift

2010-10-22T22:01:00.000-07:00

Conditions have been warmer this year in Greenland's capital, Nuuk, than at any other time since record-keeping began there in 1873.

Arctic Sea Ice extent is third lowest

2010-10-06T08:16:00.000-07:00

2010 Arctic sea ice extent

2C is disaster for Planet Earth

2010-10-03T19:52:00.000-07:00

Recent research suggests current target for limiting global warming is actually unsafe

Mr. McKibben goes to Washington

2010-09-17T19:33:00.000-07:00

The Middlebury College professor and activist went with three students from Unity College, which is located out in the "sticks" near my hometown in Maine. The little school, housed on a former commercial chicken farm, is known for its natural resource focus, as opposed to the business and liberal arts colleges that populate the area. Idealism is hard to juxtapose on the reality of dealing with the human animal. The mission was symbolic: to have the Obama administration reinstall a solar panel that once graced the roof of The White House under the Carter administration. Reagan remo ved them upon taking office, another symbolic gesture. Here we are, faced with pending peril at the hands of our own ineptitude to deal with scientific reality. And now fear of Fox News. But remember, Mr. President. There's a wind generator at the Bush Manse on Walker's Point in Maine. Of course that's a facade, but they know how to play the game. Our side clearly does not.

"We've run out of spare decades to deal with climate change — the summer's events in the Arctic, in Russia, in Pakistan proved that with great clarity. We know what we need to do, and we must do it. Enthusiastically."

Extreme Weather Events Linked to Global Warming

2010-08-15T11:59:00.000-07:00

As Dr. Schmidt says, here, the odds go up with higher global mean temperature. It's a no brainer, really.

Himalayas, going, going ...

2010-08-03T20:08:00.000-07:00

Himalayan Glaciers Last Century Yeah, what was that IPCC typo controversy? Facts are stubborn things and a picture is worth a thousand words, especially if the words are conservative BS. Get on board the reality train, man.

I Write Like

2010-07-16T21:55:00.000-07:00

Well, apparently my latest work of fiction shows signs of greatness. According to the text analyzer I Write Like, in the first chapters of my work in progress I start out writing like David Foster Wallace, then move into Dan Brown mode and finish strong with Vladimir Nabokov. If that doesn't show signs of improvement I don't know what could.

Record Heat

2010-07-16T21:46:00.000-07:00

warmest first half of year on record 2010 tops 1998 temps; question now is whether 12 months will break 2005 record for warmest year

So I guess global warming didn't end in 1998. Whoops there goes another zombie lie.

In the House of Light My Fire

2010-06-27T17:57:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer. The future is uncertain and the end is always near. Jim Morrison.

By Mark A. York

And he did that and other things while living in this Laurel Canyon house, now on the market. When I heard the story on the 95.5 KLOS Los Angeles Mark and Brian Show last week, I knew where I'd be on Saturday afternoon. I flowed with a steady stream of cars down Laurel Canyon that moved at a frantic clip, and it seemed as if they all were late for an important date. Alas, I was in the mood for poking around, but poking space was in short supply in Laurel Canyon. Nevertheless, I went with the procession toward Hollywood, and after a death-defying ordeal of a left turn at Canyon Country Store and Kirkwood, there it was, dead ahead: 8021 Rothdell Trail, known in The Doors lyrics as Love Street : Jim Morrison's house.

She lives on Love Street
Lingers long on Love Street
She has a house and garden
I would like to see what happens

It's the only house in view with a bell tower complete with bell. Nice touch. I worried about parking, but the whole street behind the store was available. That in itself is amazing on a Saturday afternoon in LA. I parked, took out my iPhone and popped a shot of the street. For all practical purposes, this is downtown Laurel Canyon Village. I had the sense that in his day Morrison was the unofficial mayor.

The gated door of the narrow courtyard was open, so I walked in. From there, I had to climb a set of perimeter tile stairs and then ascended to the lair. No just walking in the front door around here. Voices and rustling came from above. The entrance at the top of the stairs had the feel of a mountain cabin. Inside, I passed a small bedroom off the hall, which opened into an open living room with exposed timbers and a wall made of round, light grey stones. The realtors, Chris and Sandy Carlson, had bottles of water and a tray of oatmeal cookies arranged on a wooden gothic table, not present during Morrison's tenure in the late '60s at the height of his Doors fame. The interior wall featured a gothic arch.

I took in the feel of the house, as I always do when I enter a place of historical significance. Mr. Carlson, with longish gray hair and a goatee reminiscent of General Custer or one of the Three Musketeers, turned around to find me standing there.

"You snuck up on us," he said.

"I couldn't pass up an opportunity like this," I said, and smiled. This was a Rock and Roll realtor.

"We're glad you came," he said.

"Do you know about the house?" Mrs. Carlson asked, busy with arrangements at the table.

"I did some research."

"Well, have a cookie and some water and we'll take the tour." I declined the cookie and grabbed a bottle of water.

"I'll have one too," he said.

Mr. Carlson led me back the way I came in to show the rooms; laundry, bathroom, bedroom and modernized kitchen nook that contained no cooking smells. Back in the main room in the far right corner hung an art deco print of Morrison. Thus far I hadn't seen anything signed by him, but the current owner made the house into a rock museum in its own right, with vintage Beatles posters, too. Despite the recent remodeling, it was still very true to the period.

He led me to a balcony overlooking the Canyon Country Store and busy boulevard. "Listen. It's quiet here. This is as noisy as it gets."

Strange but true. The traffic noise dissipated to a barely audible white noise. A fresh breeze brought cool air into the house.

"You know the feature everyone wants to see," I said.

"Oh yes, and we'll get to it." Excellent. The hidden shower.

Downstairs to the right, past the bathroom, a small bedroom opened on the hall side. "There used to be a totem pole carved with rock and roll figures including Morrison and ending with, I believe, John Lennon," Carlson said. "So it must have been after 1980, which was the year of Lennon's death. They donated it to the rock and roll hall of fame and framed in the open column with the additional bedroom.”

In the master bedroom, two framed documents hung on the wall. "They came with the place," he said.

I went straight to them. The papers were both handwritten and typed receipts for songs from the album, "Waiting For the Sun," including “Love Street,” listing what they cost to produce into a salable product. Nice. Written presumably by Morrison, but still no signature.

"That's excellent," I said. Very nice provenance. From there it was back to the bathroom, now with a large enclosed and tiled shower and glass door. In the back of the bathroom, a sink vanity lined the wall. Over the counter to the left was a medicine cabinet in the wall.

"Here it is," he said, pulling the cabinet out of the wall and setting it on the counter. "Morrison's shower perfectly preserved."

I peered into the tiny green tiled enclosure. "That's some small shower."

Chris Carlson nodded. "You have to really bend over to get wet."

The nozzle was chest high on me at five-feet-eight. This thing was a Houdini box.

"Can I take pictures?"

"Sure."

With my iPhone I snapped a shot of the three walls of the enclosure that contained writing from a black magic marker. From my vantage point, leaning over the vanity, only two were legible. On the left side in large block letters were the words “Doors Live,” the first above the other. Tiles were missing from most of that wall.

"What happened to most of the tiles?" I asked.

"The former owner gave them to the surviving members of The Doors as gifts." It would be nice to know what those tiles said.

An elderly lady joined us on the tour, so I stepped aside with my evidence captured on the phone. Score one for Rock journalism. The lady knew Mr. Carlson.

She looked into the cubby hole. "Do people usually write on shower walls?" she asked, seeming both amused and puzzled by one of the few cases where the walls actually could talk.

"Well, they get an idea in the shower and just scribble something down," he said.

I nodded. Creativity happens when and where it happens, and singing in the shower is legendary, so why not poetry? We adjourned to the living room upstairs, then I went outside to inspect the garden patio area. I could almost feel the presence of the rock legends who must have gathered here for boozy get togethers, pot smoke wafting into the cool soft breeze blowing over the Hollywood Hills. The air on this late June afternoon smelled fresh and clean, not typical of LA.

The garden terrace led to a small set of steps up to another tiled terrace with an outdoor shower, and due to the location of large trees, it was blocked from the neighbors’ view, yet it was out in the open. Hard to beat that. In Morrison's time a rock wall blocked off a recent addition of land acquired from an adjacent house on Rothdell Trail. I went back inside and chatted for a bit, thanking my gracious hosts. Mr. Carlson said that there may be a possible lease arrangement from The Doors, since next year is the fortieth anniversary of Morrison's death. They would use the house as a promotional tool.

"I think that's a great idea," I said. By rights it should have some form of historic site status, which could happen regardless of ownership. Possibly a shower tile reunion too. I'm all for preserving as much cultural history as we can. As with pristine natural areas, once it's gone, it's gone for good.
He said KLOS's Jim Ladd had an interview scheduled. KLOS Photo

In the end, Morrison left the band, the house and the country. He died in a Paris flat in 1971, in the bathtub, with a smile on his face that has puzzled many over the years. The best reports were that he had a bad night of drinking but dipped into his long time love Pamela Courson's heroin stash. He preferred to snort the drug because he feared needles, but that wasn't enough care, given the nature of the drug. That may account for his death, but the real reason for his smile was written on the shower wall in Courson’s hand at the house on Love Street.

On the back wall are the words:

I Love You

Jim

Me

Bring in the Clowns

2010-06-25T17:23:00.000-07:00

So with the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding states drizzled with oil, what does the right-wing press have to say about it? We have Good Ole climate denier in Chief Joe Barton licking BP's befouled boots, and now Al Gore has stepped into a pit of quicksand at the hands of the fine journalists in Lantana, Florida. Let's see, if we pay a million bucks to a washed up masseuse to report on Al's room service etiquette in 2006, maybe that will take heat off the gulf?

Even columnist Howie Carr, the author of this screed, is befuddled by the length of time that has passed, never mind the truth served up in The Enquirer. But that doesn’t keep him from his appointed rounds per decree from the Hive.“The odd thing is, this alleged incident happened in 2006, before the global-warming scam imploded in the wake of plummeting temperatures and the hide-the-decline e-mails among Gore’s flim-flamming co-conspirators. Back then, it was practically a crime to be a non-believer - “denier” was the word the moonbats used. Usually these religious hucksters like Pope Albert get caught touching the third rail on the downhill slide, after they predict that the coming of the Rapture or the mothership or whatever and the date arrives . . . and nothing happens.”

Right. Did someone predict the world actually would end? Carr has confused Al and by association, the climate scientists, with the Millerites I guess. Never mind what NASA says about the subject. Nope, Al Gore has been caught, allegedly with his pants down, thus global warming science is defacto disproven as it clearly has been in Carr’s head. This reminds me of the bad syllogisms used in Logic class.

So The Portland paper held the story, possibly, because facts were involved? Damn that liberal press! The nerve. Iced. It’s the “limousine liberal” way, as Carr puts it. Not enough name-calling for you? Throw in “green Bernie Madoff” for good measure. Green entrepreneurship must be bad because we know oil is good and it isn’t green. Got it.

We don’t know what Al Gore has done behind closed doors but I’ll withhold judgment until he hikes the Appalachian Trail to Argentina to have a weekend with the babysitter, his true soulmate. Then, as is the case now, it will be irrelevant.

Publishing, Reports of Thy Demise Are Premature, Still

2010-05-30T19:37:00.000-07:00

Garrison Keillor laments in a syndicated op-ed, no small old fashioned feat in its own right sans a major name made with the written word, and with it reveals his epic ignorance of just how bad the so-called new paradigm of publishing really is. What the master of homespun wisdom doesn't realize is that nearly all of it is crap, its authors incompetent boobs without a clue about anything Keillor learned before he would write for The New Yorker. Nor will they. Instant in. Instant out. Online publication is the road to nowhere and 14 readers who all had to pay you to get a copy of your overpriced print on demand book that shouldn't have been printed in the first place. We agree on that. Nothing has changed. Nor will it.

Hide the Incline

2010-05-22T09:49:00.000-07:00

Easterbrook's projection. It's fitting that this band of Heartland Institute frauds blatantly do what they accuse real climate scientists of doing: Faking graphs and editing data to bolster their case. They don't have a case and thus need fraud to make it. Busted.

Night of the Jack-booted Thugs

2010-05-13T19:26:00.000-07:00

University of Virginia should fight the Va. attorney general's inquiry (Against Dr. Michael Mann)

Maybe Massachusetts should launch a similar investigation against Richard Lindzen? He's the one taking grants to do junk climate science while taking oil industry money to deny the science of global warming, which is a fact. Talk about double dipping. Mann's work stands. No number of Jack-booted right winger cops can change that Inconvenient Truth.

LA Times Festival of Books

2010-04-25T19:35:00.000-07:00

Another good day of author panels at UCLA topped off by a new story written and performed by T.C. Boyle, one of the best entertainers in literature. I was pleased and honored to finally meet Bill McKibben. I'm a 350.org member and feature the number, which represents the safest level in parts per million of CO2 we can have in the atmosphere, in both of my novels. We stand at 391 and climbing. Without a price on carbon it will only get worse. We see the effects now and they are not good.

Earth Day 2010

2010-04-18T11:51:00.000-07:00

I attended an mini eco festival out in Ventura yesterday. More of a street fair than a clearing house for solutions of environmental problems, but it's the idea of Earth restoration and preservation that's important. Once the concept is in the collective consciousness the entrepreneurial solutions come forth. Use less, spend less, live more.

Individual and collective action will drown the noise of the denialists and all they'll have is the penalty for overuse.

"Everyone pays to play." Mark Knopfler

Jones cleared of scientific fraud

2010-04-02T09:14:00.000-07:00

Phil Jones Exonerated by British House of Commons.

We knew that would happen.

Climate scientist Dr. Phil Jones to Parliament

2010-03-02T11:54:00.000-08:00

Jones said he expected to be cleared of accusations that he tried to pervert the scientific process.

Sceptics Nigel Lawson and Benny Peiser embarrassed themselves today with their sceptic foolishness, while UK scientists neutered the hostile interrogators with facts.

Under questions from the committee, prominent climate sceptics Nigel Lawson and Benny Peiser, who represented the Global Warming Policy Foundation, conceded that the use of the word "trick" was innocuous. Lawson said the issue was that the scientists had not disclosed the way they blended several separate data sets into single graph, which he called a "fudge". Jones said this was not true, and the technique was widely discussed in scientific papers.

Lawson and Peiser said they did not think the release of the emails questioned the underlying science of climate change. "This is nothing to do with the basic science, that's not the issue," Lawson said. Peiser said the emails had "tarnished the image of British science around the world"

Yeah and falsely so as the testimony shows.

Sea Level Rise

2010-02-22T09:20:00.000-08:00

Is happening now* of course and many solid papers and direct measurements by satellite confirm it. In the wingnutosphere, though, finding out that one set of scientists found flaws in another group's paper is a sign of all AGW climate change theory is a hoax. This is laughable. Nothing rides or falls on one paper.

As usual, it's old news too, but on the contrary, this is an example of how science is self-correcting. This is a concept that wingnut sceptics and their madcap followers running on venom and blind faith will never get.

*Global sea level rose about 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) in the last century. The rate in the last decade, however, is nearly double that of the last century.

Climate Clown Media Circus

2010-02-16T08:55:00.000-08:00

Blub blub blub

The complacency of major news outlets in print and television in repeating disproven lies about climate scientists and the science is unprecedented. It goes to show that when conservative activists lose a battle, they gather and storm the gates with lies and misinformation covered non stop by the easily duped press. As the cartoon above shows, that does nothing to change the facts.

UCS Factcheck:
The overwhelming consensus of more than 1,250 authors and 2,000 scientific expert reviewers from the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as well as 18 American scientific associations, is that global warming is observably happening and a growing threat to our world.

key Indicators

Of course if you happen to think that Limbaugh, Beck and Palin know more than NASA and NOAA, then you have more serious cognitive issues to contend with.

Update: This is a nice takedown of the misuse by sceptics on the answers of Dr. Phil Jones.

Kudos to Andy Revkin for providing the link on Dot Earth.

J.D. Salinger RIP

2010-02-01T10:19:00.000-08:00

As the The Gawker confirms, this is Salinger's Cornish, NH house. It's further away from the river and farther north than I'd thought, which is why visitors could be so easily misled trying to pay homage to the literary sage of our time. He's fascinating in many ways, one being despite strange and yet, curmudgeonly ways, he managed to always get a 19-year-old wife no matter what decade he advanced to. That's easier to grasp than the last of his fiction, although all of it has an affected air. Big culture bearing books often do. They last though. I for one hope there's more of them left in his safe as many papers have speculated, although the Boston Globe Editorial board claimed to know. That's interesting. We'll wait and see.

Hansen's Warning

2010-01-26T19:10:00.000-08:00

Every rock of coal and every ton of carbon we use makes it more likely we will cross the tipping point. Every ton we get instead from low-carbon sources makes it less likely.This is only one of a dozen effects of global warming that are just as terrifying. If we burn all the world's remaining fossil fuels, there is only one precedent in the climate record for the warming that will occur. It happened at the end of the Permian period 251 million years ago, when the world warmed by 6 degrees. The result? Almost everything on Earth died. A solitary pig-sized creature, the Lystrosaurus, had the land to itself for another 30 million years. Hansen's is the only nonfiction book to ever give me nightmares.

Jim Hansen is a great American hero and as such faces an unthankful populace. People rarely ever want to hear the truth. Hansen's book is a must read.

Hansen knows what all those attuned to nature know--that pumping fossil fuel carbon into the earth's atmosphere is like feeding a dump bear: Sooner or later it will come back and trash the place.

Ode to Jim Harrison

2010-01-16T19:56:00.000-08:00

Bednarik: Your first novel, Wolf, was subtitled “A False Memoir” and it was initiated as a challenge from Thomas McGuane, if I remember correctly. So, there you were a poet with three books under your belt and then faced with writing a novel.

Harrison: I was injured. I fell off a cliff above a river while bird hunting. OK, and you know where the clay looks like it’s dry but it’s not dry and you step on it and there you go. I had ripped muscles away from my spine. Tom—we talked all the time, I think he was out at Stanford at the time—so he said “Why don’t you write a novel?” I outlined the novel musically, first.

Bednarik: What do you mean by that?

Harrison: I outlined the structure of the novel, and I outlined the highs and lows like Yeats used to do with poems. He hears the rhythm of the piece first. And then I poured myself into this drawing of the structure. So it was basically a poet’s novel. That first paragraph runs two pages or so. And I was lucky they even published it. It had even been lost. The only manuscript had been lost in the mail for almost a month. There was a mail strike at the same time and I had sent it to my brother, because I couldn’t afford to have it copied. Sent it to my brother who was a librarian at Yale and he was going to copy it for me. But he’s a bully and he went down to the post office after about a month and he explained the situation and they let him dig through the packages. And he found the novel package.

This would be a tough go today. Harrison knows it, but that's what makes this word game so intriguing and worthwhile. Salud!

Wrong Way Weathermen

2010-01-07T19:12:00.000-08:00

"But in fact, the basic question of whether rising greenhouse gas emissions will lead to climate change hinges on mostly simple, and predictable, matters of physics. The short-term variations that throw the weathercasters’ forecasts out of whack barely register at all."

That's about it, and why the local weathercasters, who mostly lack the graduate education required in climatology, can't grasp the long term effects of a well-tested theory, in place since the mid-19th Century and tested in a lab. They skipped that class.

The March of the Loons

2009-12-26T20:17:00.000-08:00

As I wrote at the Washington Post-- The ratio of denier loons to those trying to inform them [on the comment thread] seems to be growing. That's a good sign. So is the Copenhagen Accord. The other treaties didn't work because we didn't join in, nor did China. Imagine if we compete to see who will contribute the least CO2 and to lose is to lose face? This is the future. It will happen so we can all have one.

Barbarians at the Climate Gate

2009-12-13T18:53:00.000-08:00

Review: E-mails show pettiness, not fraud
Climate experts, AP reporters go through 1,000 exchanges.

E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data — but the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press.

As was clear from the start. The break in and resulting smear attack worked as planned. I say subpoena Christopher Horner and make him sit in a corner wearing a dunce cap, eating his turds and ways. Follow the money to CEI.

Amazon Breakthrough Contest Adds YA Category, Reduces Advances

2009-12-09T09:23:00.000-08:00

For the third year, Penguin Group is joining Amazon in their Breakthrough Novel Award contest--which will now add a second prize for young adult fiction. The contest, which starts January 25, will also now be open to novels that have been previously self-published (to not penalize all those existing CreateSpace customers). Alas in a less heralded change the promised advance to the winners has gotten smaller: originally promising a $25,000 advance, this new contest's two winners are assured $15,000 advances each. (Sales of the three contest-related books published so far by Penguin imprints--Bill Loehfelm's FRESH KILLS; BAD THINGS HAPPEN by Harry Dolan; and THE WET NURSE'S TALE by Erica Eisdorfer; have been quite modest to date.

They will accept up to 5,000 entries each in the fiction and young adult categories. The "professional" judges evaluating the three finalists (selected by Penguin editors) are author Tana French, agent Julie Barer, and editor Molly Stern for general fiction, and authors Sarah Dessen and Nancy Werlin, agent Amy Berkower, and publisher Ben Schrank for young adult.

And the cheapening of publishing continues. Quite modest results indeed. Look for less this round.

The "Decline" is in the journalistic Inquiry, Stupid

2009-12-06T10:41:00.000-08:00

Boy as a science journalist myself I find this piece very disheartening, not only for the climate, but for journalism, which just about the only thing in decline on the issue.

"some scientists say the Earth hasn't warmed as predicted over the past 10 years --"

Who? Whoever they are they get more credit than NASA. Great work as propaganda. Reporting, not so much. "Cry me a river Pielke Sr," who is not a physical science professor to start with, simply wants a special pleading for conclusions that don't pass muster. That may work in journalism and for the partisan fuzzy social scientists, such as skeptic Bjorn Lomborg, but it doesn't in a hard science field like climatology. Sorry charlie. Life is tough.

This is a non scandal but has worked according to the plan's instigator, most likely a denial group such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute or the George Marshall outfit. It's a good bet the hacker got a paycheck. Go talk to Bob Woodward and follow the money. You'll find the real culprit. There's nothing that can wipeout the measurements and facts about global warming. And nothing has.

NASA's JPL Climate Symposium

2009-11-24T13:02:00.000-08:00

This is the whole presentation of the 350.0rg event at JPL I attended.ClimateSymposium

The eHarlequin Thomas Nelson Affair

2009-11-20T19:14:00.000-08:00

No, Steve McQueen isn't involved.

To a question posed by Michael Hyatt President of Thomas Nelson Publishers, rendered in typical vanity press rhetoric on his blog:

Sidebar: Take the imprint challenge. Go to a bookstore and ask one hundred shoppers—people who love books enough to make a special trip to a bookstore—to identify the publishers of the top ten New York Times Bestsellers. Report back with your results.

I offered:

"How about this for a test? Walk into any bookstore anywhere and pick up a book. What are the chances this volume was produced by a vanity press, under the wing of a traditional house or not? Congratulations. You've just proven why vanity presses aren't publishers or booksellers. Westbow sure isn't and you know it. So does Harlequin."

What they do know is the book has to be on a shelf somewhere to pick up or happens to be out of stock. End. of. story.

So Long Lou Dobbs

2009-11-11T20:23:00.000-08:00

The long awaited move to FOX is underway. Dobbs has always been a one-note samba on immigration, but after viewing his tact in interviews on multiple subjects, I see the same mocking confrontation found on FOX that is much more conservative opinion than journalistic inquiry. CNN is lucky to be done with him. If he does actually believe climate change is real, as it is, then I'll look for his commentary accordingly and judge it then. Bon voyage.

America's Next Great Pundit Contest

2009-10-30T20:36:00.000-07:00

At the Washington Post, didn't care for my poke George Will in the eye punditry it seems. Alas, this was no contest at all, but a diversity of mediocrity festival that resembles applying for any job if you happen to to over 50 and not already a Stanford perfessor like one of the winners.

Thank you for entering the first season of the America’s Next Great Pundit contest. You didn’t make the judging easy for us. Not only did we get nearly 5,000 entries, but a great many of those entries were really quite excellent -- smart, interesting, funny, well written and well argued. So while we’re sorry to say that we can’t include you as one of our ten finalists this time around, we hope this isn’t the last time we hear from you.

Oh it won't be. like most contests, these ten finalists are the most limp selection imaginable and the reason newspapers are doomed. The truth won't ever be sexy with this level of punditry. Glenn Beck, rest easy. Ca Ching!

The line up? Wow. Diverse and successful and alas, not writers. All of the columns suck. Insert any ethnic joke conservatives love. George Will's bullshit is sooo safe.

350 Awareness Day

2009-10-24T19:44:00.000-07:00

I attended a great presentation ay NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory this afternoon promoted by 350.org. Sea level rise was the most disturbing discovery. The displacement of water from the melting of ice sheets in both hemispheres congregate around the US coastline. Sea level rise is not uniform. Talk about your chickens coming home to roost.

Yet whack job deniers still persist. Like the Superfreakowingnuts and their hose to heaven pie-in-the-sky "solution" from the people who brought you the incompetent Windows OS, and commenters on major newspapers who claim this sort of wisdom.

"To respond to the carbon dioxide claim, true scientific data show that we had higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in 1820 and 1940 than we do now."

Why does this sort of ignorant garbage litter a major newspaper's web site? I mean really, many of us know we are riding on a ship with fools but are a long way from being a ship comprised of fools. One won't get that impression reading a comment thread at an environmental article on The Washington Post. What sad times for media.

CO2 is now at 388 ppm and climbing. 350 is the safest level of carbon dioxide we can have without drastic climate repercussions.

Political forecast:Increasing cloudiness for many among us.

The Lost Message of the Masons

2009-10-13T18:05:00.000-07:00

After having listened to The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown's latest opus, I admit that,like Matt below I wanted to like it, but in the end I just couldn't. Brown violates all of the rules of writing good fiction en masse from an over use of modifiers, repeating phrases as if they were a mantra we can't recall from the previous page. The key to thrillers though is a fast pace, murders, or one murder and a maiming in this case, although as others have pointed out, the murder victim was long forgotten once the deed was done. The italicized internal dialogue with he thought attribution is a beginners style mistake but having to fully master POV is not on Dan's radar when he can sell his tomes without learning anything save laundry lists of obscure facts presented as infodumps. As long as the whole thing is a chase scene it works. Sex? Let's just hope Dan's home life is more exciting than his characters.' I mean really.

Hilarious reviews here:

MATT TAIBBI
"The most irritating Harvard-educated, mullet-wearing, sexless pedant of all time."
09/25/09 at 16:30

The let down new agey anti-climactic ending felt like a rip off of the movie, The Jewel of the Nile. The jewels have been right before you all along. But where is the damn treasure! Yeah. I felt the way I did touring the Montana headquarters of the CUT church: standing in a gift shop awash in religious symbol trinkets ( like a Catholic field day sidewalk sale) from every belief in the history of the world humans have ever held, all gathered beneath a portrait of the owners of the church, The Prophets. Us. We are the Gods we've always dreamed of. Sure. It's all about us.

At the end of the day those of us involved in the pursuit of the publishing grail of are all just mystified by the Brownian product line and what he gets away with. I strive for the opposite, but the biggest fantasy of all may be that good craftsmanship should command this kind of money. I think that's the real lost message of the freemasons. And if you look in just the right place in the right light I bet it's chiseled into a corner stone somewhere,

Greenhouse Reduction Incentives

2009-10-01T19:32:00.000-07:00

Since no major industry is likely to reduce emissions out of their own volition and concern for the world, the first incentive is a swift kick in the ass. Kudos to the Obama administration for implementing my plan. Rebates and tax reductions for doing so to follow. Time for the coal power plants of the rust belt states, the south, and any other holdouts, to be pulled kicking and screaming into the 21st Century and face the consequences for the rapidly warming world. "O.H.I.O. Ohio," as Joan Armatrading sang. Selling scrubbers is good not only for the environment, but for those businesses. This is a win win. I should point out that most western states use natural gas, a much cleaner fuel, to generate electricity.

The Towering Inferno in the Warming World

2009-08-31T19:10:00.000-07:00

"Fire officials worried the eastern flank could approach the upper edge of Sierra Madre by today and that a finger of flames on the west could hit Sunland. But officials said they were "fairly confident" they could keep the fire out of Acton."

Great. I'm glad for Acton, which is the size of a postage stamp. I live in Sunland. Happily I'm not there. I'm fishing in the Eastern Sierra's. It's no coincidence. Good luck and goodnight. Little fire scarecrow?

Online Celebrity

2009-07-30T20:28:00.000-07:00

"On the Internet, however, it’s not one single subjectivity but a popular hive-mind that decides. The “big break” arrives when, with lightning speed and often to one’s own surprise, the inscrutable pack decides to start forwarding one’s content around."

I particularly like the "hive-mind" tag. In a role I played on the NBC show, Dark Skies I led Jerri Lee Ryan and Eric Close back to the hive; an alien pod. That's what so-called online success is based on: getting groups of friends to declare you the winner of whatever the online contest is. Real success though is even more scarce here than the traditional merit-based route, be it publishing fiction, talking about it, or journalism. On the contrary, it almost never happens at all, save in the minds of the entrants. Shoot for the real thing. It's still real after all these years.

Qivitters Are losers

2009-07-25T20:30:00.001-07:00

While Alaska melts and the oil dries up, the governor qivits. Hensley was profiled in John McPhee's, Coming Into the Country.

The Funeral

2009-07-07T17:22:00.000-07:00

Just happened to be on my vector control beat here in Burbank. I took it in to start the day. Fans gathered at the park across the LA River, which affords a ringside seat to Forest Lawn. Forest Lawn Drive was closed.

Flim Flam WSJ

2009-06-06T14:39:00.000-07:00

They keep at it over at The Wingerville Journal.

My response on the forum page.

"poster child for how to lie with statistics"

Doesn't this title belong to Bjorn Lomborg? It still does. The logical fallacies in play here are evident and not on the side of the so-called true believers of Anthropogenic global climate change. As long as true deniers don't connect random weather events, and their disastrous results, to a long term trend of a warmer climate that is undeniably attributable to emissions then it will all be moot for you. I suspect your heads will be in the sand long after the waters dry up inland and inundate coastal areas worldwide. It may be caused something else? Your job as a critic is to find it. What is your theory?

Salinger Sues Fanficcer!

2009-06-02T19:15:00.000-07:00

Salinger calls the new book "a rip-off pure and simple." Gee, ya think?

"The sequel's author, 'J.D. California,' explains that 'Just like the first novel, he leaves, but this time he's not at a prep school, he's at a retirement home in upstate New York. ... It's pretty much like the first book in that he roams around the city, inside himself and his past.'"

The old man still has it in him. Keep out signs posted and shot gun at the ready. Bravo.

Amazon's Bonfire of the Vanities Finale

2009-05-28T10:01:00.000-07:00

James King won the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award yesterday. It was certainly the best novel of the bunch even if I found some of his skill-craft lacking, such as passive constructions and the like, for a man with a recent MFA. But well-deserved nonetheless.

I found the selection process to be corrupted by so-called Vine Voice reviewers who had a vital screening role in a contest in which some members were also contestants. Houston we have a problem. This has an appearance of a conflict of interest. Naturally, Viners don't think so. I'm shocked. My count was four in the semi-final 100, but in the end the fold folded. No amount of gang reviewing of friends excerpts mattered, as a Viner tossed out an an early stage lamented. That can happen when an Amazon editor decides to as can a bad manuscript moved on. Mr. King had only five reader reviews. In the end, Penguin decided who they wanted and why. He's lucky he slipped by. Well done.

Global Warming's First Victims

2009-05-23T19:48:00.000-07:00

Are the animals of course. Here, grizzly expert Doug Peacock makes the case for the Yellowstone grizzlies, whose food source, the whitebark pine has succumbed to beetle kill in a vast way, due to warm winters for just seven years. It's a typical house of cards, with one piece falling and others in a textbook domino event.

I had lunch with Doug and his wife Andrea last October in Livingston, a month before I was run out of town by the Evil Editor. Peacock was a good friend of Ed Abbey and the prototype for Abbey's protagonist, George Washington Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang. For me it was meeting a legend, an introduction arranged thanks to ousted Park County Commissioner and chair, Dr. Larry Lahren, the man who also introduced me to Tom McGuane in Missoula at the Montana Book Festival, as "The man who ruined my political career,'Bless him!'" It's a tribute to my journalistic skills and Lahren's great character, that he didn't consider me an enemy. I'll always remember what he did for me.

The bears need to be protected again under the ESA. There aren't that many of them left and the curious matter of most native Montanans being afraid of the bears and wolves and bison be damned. The sad fact is outside of the liberal enclave of Hollywood insiders clustered at Deep Creek in the spectacular Paradise Valley south of Livingston, where the Peacocks live, most regular rancher folks hate wildlife, especially if they can't kill it, eat it, or sell it to tourists. It's a real problem in rural America. Saving wildlife isn't a priority with heartland types.

LA Times Festival of Books

2009-04-26T21:22:00.000-07:00

Another excellent time today at four fiction panels.The first described here. Dark humor abounded with novelist and screenwriter Jerry Stahl playing everyone and everything as his straight man on two panels. Good stuff.

McGuane on Hunting

2009-04-15T21:22:00.000-07:00

Wall Street Journal Sports

An excellent essay as only Tom McGuane could live and write. I know how honored I was when he invited me to the ranch in McLeod, Montana. I pulled in one Sunday afternoon in the fall on my way to fish the West Boulder River, upstream of Michael Keaton, Tom M., Tom Brokaw and Walter Kirn. I drove through his open gate down into the ranch. His pack of dogs greeted me en masse. I parked and went up to the old log ranch house escorted by the dogs and knocked on the door.

The window to my right framed the bald head of a familiar music figure, and quite a good novelist in his own right. Tom came to the door and we exchanged pleasantries. His brother in law blew in from Alabama, he said. I glanced at the SUV with Bama plates in the driveway. We talked about our visit in Missoula two weeks prior at the book festival where he spoke and we met formally after I interviewed him for a story in the local paper where I worked.

What are you up to today?" he said.

Oh, fishing the river."

He looked wistful. "Bad timing today for that."

"It's okay," I said. "We'll get to it anytime."

I handed him 50 pages of my novel he'd asked about and let him get back to lunch and visiting with family. Jimmy Buffett.

Jungle Bob Durr RIP

2009-04-08T19:20:00.000-07:00

Well I just got ripped for a book review I did in 2005 of my short time neighbor in Chase, Alaska in 1976, ex-professor Bob Durr of Syracuse NY. They weren't very friendly when I tried living "up the tracks" north of Talkeetna. People are animals who guard their territory. This is what the Durr's did.

I can't help but laugh at the fact that you're blogging about this. A whopping thirty years later and that one incident still bothers you. Goodness. While the fact that you've labeled the Durrs as “snobs” and the lake as a "strange place" irritates me to this bad point where if I ever saw you I might poke you in the eye, I am happy to fill you in on some details. Jon and Steve do small time music money making. Playing gigs (which by the way is not "panhandling", Talkeetna summers bring in a lot of tourists a gig at the Fairview pays at least $200 depending on who owns the place), selling CD's to tourists, that kind of stuff. Jon also hunts and sells a lot of skins. Bob has done well as an artist, and his paintings sell for good money across Alaska. And, as you know, he's written novels that have been published and that brought in a fair amount of revenue as well.
As for the past, Bob wasn't exactly the most responsible and Carol most likely handled what little money they had. So it doesn’t surprise me that he didn’t know where the money came from. Also, with hunting and gathering a lot of their food, and no electric bills, rent, or car payments the living expenses were not much. Yes they did have some money in the first cabin when it burnt down, you surely don’t think that they had ALL of their money in a book in the cabin? They had just enough to pack up their stuff and go to NY because his father was dying, I can’t really remember but I’m pretty sure it was his father. There, Carol got a job at a hospital, and their rent was free since Bob’s father owned an apartment that he let them stay in.
One of my favorite things that you wrote about Bob was your question about his life. “Does he intend to just hang out on a biologically dead lake until the end?” It makes me smile because that was in fact what he intended to do and did. Back Lake was everything to Bob, he lived and breathed it, and it meant more to him than just about anything or anyone. Although my grandpa did a lot of horrible things in his life, but the one thing he did right was Back Lake. So it doesn’t surprise me that he shooed you away from his paradise. And when I inherit the lake, I’m sure I’ll do the same.

PS, the outhouse holes are REALLY deep.

As I told this young lady, who is Durr's granddaughter, I call them as I see 'em. It's my recollection of my time there at Chase and a critique of Bob's memoir The Coldman Cometh. Durr passed away onFebruary 25. He did it his way, no question.

Critical Birds of a Feather: Kookaburras

2009-03-31T19:57:00.000-07:00

Reached by telephone, Hansen [Dr. James Hansen, NASA Climatologist] sounds annoyed as he says, “There are bigger fish to fry than Freeman Dyson,” who “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” In an e-mail message, he adds that his own concern about global warming is not based only on models, and that while he respects the “open-mindedness” of Dyson, “if he is going to wander into something with major consequences for humanity and other life on the planet, then he should first do his homework — which he obviously has not done on global warming.”

Global warming is a Rorschach test on the foibles of human reason and of projection. The handful of kooks aren't right. The consensus is. This the outsider is right business is the stuff of novels but rarely is in real life. Dyson and the whackjobs on FOX play the victim when the truth is they're just flat wrong. See Occam's Razor. ex parsimoniae. End of story.

The Bonfire is a Pyre

2009-03-18T17:38:00.000-07:00

Not only were many of the 500 quarter-finalists in the ABNA contest hopelessly flawed by bad grammar, wordiness, editing problems and cliched scenarios such as "a writer finds his muse while reeling from rejection letters;" a plethora of prologues, which violated the rules, and now some of the poor rejected masses got a corrected email saying their pitch eliminated their entries after the first one declared they made it into the 2000 and would get reviews soon. Oh Brother, where art thou?

Amazon sent them a $5 gift card for the mistake. Talk about a sad comedy of errors. Pathetic.

Amazon's Bonfire of the Vanities

2009-03-17T09:48:00.000-07:00

For the second year in a row Amazon.com sifted through some 10,000 entries for their Breakthough Novel "Award" contest. Amazon is a vanity press in addition to online only bookseller and hopeful these reams of losers will buy their vanity press product at Createspace that entrants were required to join in order to participate.

What slush contests like this do is illustrate that the goal of any novelist is a commercial contract. That's the carrot: $25K and a contract with Penguin. That's a bargain for Penguin. How they get there is another matter. Entrants write a 300-word pitch and an excerpt of 5000 words. Nebulous Amazon editors, whoever the hell they are, determine if the pitch works or not. If it does, those writers go into a group of 2000. Then Vine reviewers, a special group of amateur reader reviewers, randomly chosen, some who are also in the contest, are shipped 40 excerpts to read, also random. Yeah, that's bright. Talk about a crap shoot. So last night they announced the 500 winners and posted the excerpts on the Web site, including the two random reviews that helped determine the book's future in the contest. Final decisions came from the same unnamed group of Amazon employees. Later on an expert judging panel comes into play, but they have no hand in this phase. This is all about amateurs picking amateurs, many of which are perennial contestants with the same books.

As if by magic, many of the losers in last years' affair randomly made it through. Uh huh. Yeah, as if there was no memory of the same books. Consider this gent who made it all the way to the final three last year and then Penguin decided his bizarre entry wasn't fit to publish. It wasn't and still isn't, yet here it is.

Review
I'm confused after reading this excerpt, but since the writing is so clear I have faith that the author will pull this plot together and help it make sense later in the book. I just don't "get" how it all works - how a family gets to try a potential child out, and how the child gets to decide if they live or not. Regardless, it is a highly original concept and I'd be interested to read more.

Yeah. I was confused too when I read the same excerpt, which the author flogged for the last two months on the forums. Just think of all the possible decent manuscripts rejected while "glowing" reviews like this moved the author on? The number of other examples of this flawed decision process are the majority of the 500 winners from what I could tell surfing through. That and Vine reviewers also being dubbed by Vine reviewers. Ahem. Little conflict of interest scarecrow? I said this during the first Gather.com contest. In vanity world, crap floats.

Andy Revkin Drinks the Kool-Aid

2009-03-09T18:59:00.000-07:00

NYT science reporter Revkin on a so-called exaggeration of Al Gore."While climate scientists foresee more intense droughts and storms, there is still uncertainty, and significant disagreement, over whether recent patterns can be attributed to global warming."

Right. It's either that or the Tooth Fairy. That's a tough one. There's been a huge flap over this and with the wingnut Glenn Beck vilifying climate modeler and T. Texas professor Dr. Michael Tobis, in a breathtaking case of creative defamation that headlined on Beck's show on FOX. It's bad news personified. And totally false at its core. I'll not repeat it here, but as I told Tobis, this is the skeptic media modus operandi. I'm sorry to see Revkin co-opted in this way in another example false equivalency comparing Al Gore's so-called exaggerations to the falsehoods of George Will.

The Ole Vanity/POD Shuffle

2009-03-06T12:10:00.000-08:00

There's a statistical claim going around the net about the dismal performance, 70 percent, of new novels published every year by so-called traditional publishers not selling more than 500 copies. It's blatantly false.

First, there aren't 195,000 novels published every year as the statement claims.

According to Bowker.com for 2007, There were 50,071 new fiction titles introduced in the U.S. last year, up 17% from 2006, and the number of new titles in the category in 2007 was almost twice what it was as recently as 2002.

What is alarming is this: "While traditional book publishing was basically flat last year, there was a staggering rise in the reported number of “On Demand” and short-run books to 134,773, pushing the grand total for projected 2007 U.S. book output to 411,422 books. To maintain the continuity of statistics, Bowker is excluding this output from its traditional reporting and has begun tracking the On Demand industry segment separately."

Yeah Boy, Howdy. The claim made on these Web sites is bogus and seems to originate from a post by an author, sans source at this New Zealand Web siteHow many books do first-time authors sell? Over 195,000 new novels are published by traditional publishers in the U.S. every year. Of those, 70% sell fewer than 500 copies. Yikes..

Yikes indeed. Only 84 titles from iUniverse, now a part of Authorhouse sell 500 copies. This is a marriage of that pitiful and predictable fact and total books sold in 2005. Lies. Damned lies. And statistics.

Willful Disgrace

2009-02-23T09:22:00.000-08:00

George Will has lied through the years as it has suited his personal biases, as Media Matters points out.

"Washington Post can hide behind multi-layer processes all it wants, but as long as it publishes Will, it will continue to misinform its readers. The Post doesn't need to give Will a better fact-checker; it -- along with the rest of the media elite -- should instead give him a good, thorough shunning."

Will has no expertise on science or banking or anything except political history. One thing is certain: lies sell papers. And wars.

Send him over to The Washington Times where he belongs.

Willfull Ignorance Part ....?

2009-02-18T09:00:00.000-08:00

There's been so many it's hard to know, but George Will continues to spout lies about global warming. Are conservatives just blind on this or inherently stupid? It has to be deliberate. Then again opinion is opinion and some are worth less. His is one of the latter.

On Darwin

2009-02-14T19:10:00.000-08:00

"But what is astonishing," Olivia Judson writes, "is how much Darwin did know, and how far he saw. His imagination told him, for example, that many female animals have a sense of beauty — that they like to mate with the most beautiful males. For this he was ridiculed. But we know that he was right. Still more impressive: he was not afraid to apply his ideas to humans. He thought that natural selection had operated on us, just as it had on fruit flies and centipedes."

Elementary Watson, as Holmes would say. And the greatest idea of all time.

Here We Go Again

2009-01-26T18:57:00.000-08:00

The latest vanity press mega transition is making the news like some sort of new archeological discovery, since that's how rare these anomalies are.

By 2008 people were reading Still Alice. Not a lot of people, but a few, and those few were liking it. Genova wound up getting an agent after all--and an offer from Simon & Schuster of just over half a million dollars. Borders and Target chose it for their book clubs. Barnes & Noble made it a Discover pick. On Jan. 25, Still Alice will make its debut on the New York Times best-seller list at No. 5.

Yeah well, the real story is missing from this piece and lies between those few liking it...and wound up getting an agent and the half mil. I mean, really.

The best thing about about TIME is their archive is open and online. Come fish with Papa.

Two Writers Talk through the ages

2008-12-30T16:42:00.000-08:00

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legend.
Jim Harrison

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
H. L. Mencken

The real Legend of the Fall

2008-12-24T14:33:00.000-08:00

Like most legends this one is purely fictional. The core character,General William Ludlow, never settled in Montana on a ranch near Choteau, had three Bonanzaesque sons who fought in WWI , a wife in Boston and a globetrotting wayward son Tristan played by a younger Brad Pitt so ably. Jim Harrison sure fooled me. I never thought to look until finishing the 1979 novella last night.

Like the great novelist he is, he made it up.

The Future of American Literature

2008-12-20T17:12:00.000-08:00

Above all, I want you to expand your horizons and set sail for something bigger and better than either of the current branches of fiction. I want you to write novels that are larger than anything being written today. I want you to write stories that embrace the best of both worlds. I want you to write stories that are accessible by everyone. Do you want to do something for American fiction? Then write novels that weld the broken pieces back together.
The sage advice of novelist extraordinaire and my friend Richard S. Wheeler. Let the work begin.

Left Livingston part deux

2008-12-16T07:28:00.000-08:00

Since I've received attacks from some folks on the left and right about my recent separation from The Enterprise , allow me to clarify. First,an agent is reading my novel. Second, I have started working on a group biography of the Montana Bloomsbury group, and a full-time reporter job had become increasingly difficult to manage time-wise. I have bigger things going than worrying daily about virtually nonexistent local news in the wake of the election. And as I mentioned before, the economics and advancement opportunities just weren't there, nor would they ever be by my boss's own admission, so like the last four reporters I took it as long as I could and moved on. End of story.

Left Livingston

2008-12-13T10:36:00.000-08:00

It's my duty to announce that I've left The Livingston Enterprise. I won't go into the details, but let's just say there was a management style issue, excessive work expectations, and no raise in salary forthcoming. I couldn't support two houses on the money they paid, so a Solomonesque decision had to be made. I'm grateful for the opportunity. I made some great friends and powerful allies, made real change in the town and county in the way of bridges and roads being repaired as a result of my stories, have great clips to my credits file now, that are linked to the right on this blog, so I'm satisfied. I'll be back summers to fish.

Losing Winter

2008-12-13T10:31:00.000-08:00

Winter easing its grip on Northeast
Temperatures rising 0.8 degrees a decade

The comments from idiots at the end of the article resort to the same failed logic as always. It's a shame reasoned people don't comment more, but the right wing nutcases run roughshod at newspapers Web sites, which they claim to hate.

McGuane in Butte

2008-12-12T20:15:00.000-08:00

This is a nice little clip of Tom McGuane speaking to journalists in Butte, Montana in May. This is the man I came to know this same year. Gracious, funny and as entertaining as they come. He's true Americana. I'm honored to know him.

Erin Prophet publishes memoir of life with 'Guru Ma'

2008-11-29T07:04:00.000-08:00

By Mark A. York
Enterprise Staff Writer

Erin Prophet's long-awaited memoir of her years at CUT in Paradise Valley, "Prophet's Daughter: My Life with Elizabeth Clare Prophet Inside the Church Universal and Triumphant," hit book store shelves recently.
Calling the book an "extraordinary memoir," Publishers Weekly says, "Prophet pulls the curtain back on the highest levels of life inside a cult, documenting her life inside as the daughter of cult leader Elizabeth Clare Prophet, of the Church Universal and Triumphant, from her birth through 1990, when the Church's long-awaited apocalypse failed to materialize."
Prophet writes with empathy and respect for her mother and for the followers of the faith her parents founded, but also with equal alarm at what it had become.
According to Prophet's brother Sean, who was with Erin and his other sisters Moira and Tatiana through much of the years in CUT with their mother, the memoir was 10 years in the making.
"It is to Erin's credit that she did a decade of research, and consulted a wide range of sources both within our family and outside of it," Sean Prophet writes in a reader review at Amazon.com. "Her book is factually unimpeachable when it comes to its representation of the lives of our parents and the church they founded. The story is told against a backdrop of constant crisis, 'divine revelation,' fame and the idolatry of followers."
The book opens in the night of March 14, 1990, when the 18-year old Erin Prophet, now 42, and her young son Mark are entering through a four-foot tunnel into the CUT's 756-person fallout shelter built the year before.
The underground shelter complex, built in a meadow high in the Gallatin Mountain Range alongside Mol Heron Creek, was known as "The Heart."
The CUT had built a multi-million-dollar bunker system designed to protect followers from a nuclear holocaust they believed was imminent on that night in March.
There, in her sleeping quarters, she waited along with the others for impending doom.
Erin Prophet writes of a friendship with a journalist in Livingston she had imaginary conversations with that night in the shelter while she lay in her bunk. He is Scott McMillion, formerly of The Bozeman Chronicle, whom she met a year before while he was writing about the CUT and whom she describes as a "benevolent, disinterested voice of reason, a defender of the right to be human."
The CUT organization had prepared for the worst at the hands of Soviet nuclear warheads and an anarchic aftermath.
"Underneath the floor of the Deep Cor shelter, a gargantuan underground storage warehouse, named for the thick folds of corrugated steel that formed its shell, was a secret twenty-five-foot-long tank filled with fifty AR-15 rifles, the semiautomatic civilian version of the Vietnam era M-16, along with tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition," Prophet writes.
"Stored in the the same tank as the weapons was a horde of coins - more than $5 million in gold and silver, and $25,000 in pennies specially ordered from the Federal Reserve Bank. The coinage was meant to establish a currency 'apres la guerre.' (After the war)
"This tank, whose existence had been concealed even from me, was hidden beneath a special panel topped with a car-carrying trailer filled with Isuzu pickup trucks."
There was enough food stored underground to sustain them for seven months in the shelters, and seven more years when they emerged, Prophet writes.
"Most followers weren't aware of the seven-year scenario," Prophet said in a telephone interview Friday. "They were used to authoritarian power, so most people didn't question those types of directives."
The seven-year provision requirement caused logistical problems for the CUT engineers and incurred great expense, but there was no going back. She had seen the way through the voice of El Morya, one of the ascended masters, Prophet said.
Ascended masters are spirits that guide CUT followers on earth.
CUT sold holdings all over the country and even its warehouses in Livingston, Prophet writes.
But the nuclear holocaust that Elizabeth Prophet, known to followers as Guru Ma, predicted, never came to pass and members emerged from the shelter the next day disillusioned and for many, financially broken.
"We followers participated in and even reinforced my mother's prophecies," Erin Prophet attests in the book's preface. "Our faith in her bolstered her faith in herself - and her need to give ever-more precise answers."
"I began to have serious doubts in 1990," she said. "But I hoped we could reform because I thought there was a lot of good in it."
In the wake of the shelter phase, Prophet said, "I think reform efforts were made by my mother, but (CUT) returned to authoritarian rule. The reforms didn't go as far as I thought they should.
"I did begin to consciously moderate her decisions and was successful in some areas, such as the code of conduct was relaxed and some matters of behavior were left to individual conscience."
Of faith, she said, "I came to believe that faith should not be a factor in whether someone can participate in a religious experience.
"The way a group is structured is a very important factor in the behavior of its members."
She added, "I'm more tolerant toward religious beliefs and experiences than my brother. We both like to see more education on religious history of how religion evolved over time. Sean and I would agree on that.
"I wanted to write a book that told the truth of what we were really like. There was a lot of stereotyping. I couldn't make people understand what we were like back then. At the same time, we were doing things that were strange."
Erin said she visits her mother, who is suffering from Alzheimer's disease, in Bozeman from time to time.
"Her illness is continuing its progression," she said. "It's difficult to watch."
Erin Prophet works as a project manager for a hospital in Boston, the city where her mother first met her father, Mark Prophet, decades earlier.
"Sometimes, I imagine her racing down Commonwealth Avenue for that fateful meeting with the messenger Mark Prophet. I pull her aside and beg her to stop," she writes, warning her mother of the dangers of infallibility that lie ahead and leading her down another path.
"In reality," she writes, "she would have brushed me aside and continued toward her destiny, believing in the power of her intentions."
Erin Prophet will be in in Montana Dec. 14 signing books at Fact & Fiction in Missoula. She said she will be in Bozeman or Livingston near that time but did not have a firm date or place yet.
"Prophet's Daughter: My life with Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Inside The Church Universal and Triumphant" (The Lyons Press, $24.95)accomplishes with precision and clarity what its author intended.

Montana Festival of the Book

2008-10-27T18:42:00.000-07:00

The literary event of the year was a roaring success this past weekend. Readings by Bill Kittredge, Tom McGuane, Rick Bass and Idaho's Kim Barnes headlined the festival.

I was happy to finally meet Tom McGuane after interviewing him a month ago for a story. On stage he's a mixture of Mark Twain and Will Rogers, a master at making his characters come to life and eliciting raucous laughter from the audience be it from his personal ancedotes of drunken excursions in his early days in Montana with friend and fellow author Jim Harrison, or with the quips of fictional cohorts drawn so vividly we know them by the time the story ends. McGuane is a first rate entertainer in every way, an American literary legend. I'm honored to walk the same paths he trode and still does.

Montana is one special place.

Tony Hillerman R.I.P.

2008-10-27T18:33:00.000-07:00

Acclaimed novelist Tony Hillerman died today. I saw Hillerman at the LA Times Festival of the Book three years ago.

Local Writing Phenom Breaks Book Sales Record

2008-10-03T18:52:00.000-07:00

By Mark A. York
Enterprise Staff Writer

Local author, 24-year-old Christopher Paolini, made publishing history this week, selling 550,000 copies of "Brisingr," book three of his inheritance cycle series, the greatest one-day sale ever recorded by a Random House's Children's Books division title, in hardcover or paperback.

"I think the series appeals to younger readers because it's a coming of age story," Paolini said, Friday on the telephone from Miami, where he is on a book tour. "It reminds them of things they are going through in their own lives.

"I didn't write it for young readers only. Adult readers enjoy reading hero stories, and that's what this is."

Paolini has come a long way.

He began writing his first novel at age 15. Paolini and family self-published "Eragon," using a print-on-demand printing company for the printing. They heavily promoted the book in Montana.

According to his official Web site and a New York Times story, in 2002 author and Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen was visitingParadise Valley south of Livingston on a fishing trip where thePaolinis live. Hiaasen, a well-known fly-fisherman, whose stepson
read a copy of the self-published book while on vacation in Montana, brought "Eragon" to the attention of his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf Books For Young Readers, an imprint of Random House Children's Books. Michelle Frey, executive editor at Knopf, contacted Christopher
and his family to ask if they might be interested in having Knopf publish Eragon.

The answer was yes, and after another round of editing, Knopf published Eragon in August 2003. A second novel, "Eldest" continued the story of a boy and dragon in 2005. A movie version of "Eragon" followed in 2006.

In book number three, "Brisingr," the protagonist, Eragon, a simple farm boy, and his dragon Saphira, attempt to rid the kingdom of Alagesia, which has geographic features akin to the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains in Paolini's back yard, of tyranny from
the evil king.

Paolini draws on the works of fantasy and science fiction writers such as Bruce Colville, Frank Herbert, Anne McCaffrey, Jane Yolen and Ursula K. Le Guin as inspiration for his work.

"The whole series deals with the importance of family, "Paolini said, "making it in difficult circumstances over all, trying the best to survive in the world and be happy."
Paolini said he draws daily inspiration from the Beartooth Mountains of Paradise Valley.

"If I don't have a deadline, I work a bit in the morning, then take a walk, and work again in the afternoon," he said. "With an imminent deadline I'll work all the way until dinner. I'm not the fastest writer, so I have to be diligent, and write faster than I'd like. It's the only way I can produce a book of this length. I concentrate on telling the story and don't ponder each individual word.

"It's kind of funny ... some readers have told me they like those passages the best."

Paolini is scheduled to be at the Livingston-Park County Public Library,
for a book signing on Sunday Oct. 26.

"They've been good to me," he said. "It's an important part of the community."

Paolini will also appear in Bozeman Thursday, October 23, 2008, 7:00 p.m. A ticketed event, and at Borders, 2855 North 19th Avenue, and Saturday, November 22, 2008, 1:00 p.m. at Costco 2505 Catron StreetE. Valley Center Road @ 19th Street.

A Message From Al

2008-09-19T19:57:00.001-07:00

The solution to our climate crisis seems simple.
Repower America with wind and solar.
End our dependence on foreign oil. A stronger economy.
So why are we still stuck with dirty and expensive energy?
Because big oil spends hundreds of millions of dollars to block clean energy.
Lobbyists, ads, even scandals.
All to increase their profits, while America suffers.
Breaking big oil's lock on our government ...
Now that's change.
We're the American people and we approve this message.

Hear hear!

Author details Livingston’s literary legacy

2008-09-13T10:16:00.000-07:00

By Mark A. York, Enterprise Staff Writer

Enterprise photo by Angela Schneider

Author William “Gatz” Hjortsberg, of Livingston, speaks to members of the Park County Historical Society about Livingston writers in the 1960s and ’70s at the Park County Senior Center, Wednesday, Sept. 10. Hjortsberg, a biographer of author Richard Brautigan, is also a novelist.

“This area of Montana became known as the ‘Bloomsbury of the Rockies’ in those days,” local author and longtime Livingston resident William “Gatz” Hjortsberg said, Wednesday at a presentation before the Park County Historical Society. “We were making history, but of course we weren’t aware of it at the time.

“We were just guys without jobs.”

Hjortsberg, a novelist and biographer, was invited by the Historical Society to speak on the history of Livingston writers. The event was held at the Senior Citizens Center of Park County.

The term “Bloomsbury,” Hjortsberg said, referred to a section of London where famous writers Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, David Garnett, Vita Sackville West and E.M. Forster lived during the period between the world wars.

Hjortsberg recalled how Paradise Valley and Livingston became an enclave of writers in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The group included Hjortsberg, Tom McGuane, Jim Harrison, Dan Gerber, Russell Chatham and Richard Brautigan, about whom Hjortsberg just completed a 1,600-page biography that took him 20 years to complete.

“The story centers around Tom McGuane,” he said. “We met in 1962 at a Yale Drama School play writing seminar. We both loved fly-fishing and wanted to write fiction.”

Gatz, as he is known, said he left a master’s program in screenwriting to travel and pursue writing novels, while McGuane remained to complete an master of fine arts. They later met up at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., where they both held Stegner Fellowships.

“We couldn’t afford the housing on a small stipend, so Tom began to look up north for cheaper arrangements,” he said. “We wound up in Bolinas in Marin County. Since the seminar was only one night a week, commuting was no problem.”

It was during this time McGuane sold his first novel, “The Sporting Club,” while Gatz struggled. He couldn’t sell his novel.

“I was sick with envy. I was doomed. Stephen Crane was dead by this age,” he said to audience laughter. “So at 28, I gave up being a published writer and took a job as a stock boy at the Bolinas grocery store.”

Hjortsberg still dabbled at writing fiction for fun.

“Some people discover being a writer is who they are,” he said.

McGuane asked to see his project, which was in a rough draft editing stage, around 40 pages, Gatz said, and his only copy.

McGuane submitted the pages to his editor at Simon & Schuster. They offered Gatz a contract, and his first novel, “Alp,” based on a dead climber hanging from a rope on the Swiss mountain the Eiger — an idea they’d traded back and forth — sold.

“I didn’t even have an ending, or know where it was going,” Gatz said.

He delivered the finished manuscript, and the job as a stock boy was history.

It was the last real job he had.

Coming to ‘a new place’

“Tom picked Livingston off a map in 1968, as a good place for a headquarters,” Gatz said. “He and his wife, Becky, drove out and rented a house at Lewis and H Street. Friends followed from Michigan — Jim Harrison and Dan Gerber, heir to the baby food company, who drove race cars.”

Hjortsberg and his wife followed from Colorado, where they’d been living in a Volkswagen micro bus after McGuane, Harrison and Gerber had moved to a ranch in Pray the following summer.

“We all worked in the barn that summer in 1969,” Gatz said. “We wanted to make literature. Each line had to justify itself. We were just trying to get it right.”

When the owner, rancher Duane Neal, returned in the fall, the group had to find a different place to live. Gatz wound up in Chico Hot Springs. There, he worked on a novel that became “Gray Matters.” He and his wife wintered in Mexico that year.

“It was serialized in Playboy,” Gatz said.

The novel did well and allowed him to buy a house in Pine Creek.

“Tom McGuane had a knack for real estate,” Gatz continued, “and bought a small ranch house and 15 acres in Deep Creek area of the valley, with proceeds from the movie rights to ‘The Sporting Club,’ and wintered in Key West.”

“‘Ninety-two in the Shade’ is Tom McGuane’s best known novel,” he said. “They even allowed him to direct the movie.”

Subsequent projects, such as the 1975 McGuane-penned film “Rancho Deluxe,” drew other writers, directors and actors to the area, including Peter Fonda, who starred in the movie “92 in the Shade.”

The artist Russell Chatham arrived in 1972, Gatz said.

“Russell knew of us from the Bolinas days,” he said. “He’s quite a good writer in his own right, too.”

The Murray Hotel played host to all sorts of artistic types, Gatz said, including director Sam Peckinpaw and Warren Oates.

“The rooms were $11 a night,” Gatz said. “And you could fall into the bed from the shower, which was handy some nights.

“The ‘70s were a golden age.”

Tom McGuane

“It was a real happy time,” McGuane said Thursday in a phone interview from his McLeod ranch. “Montana was a gentle, open society. It was an Edenic kind of world. There was a wonderful freedom to sit and think and make things up.

“Nobody really wanted to get ahead financially, and we were comfortable living like bums. I never intended to stay, but the people were so nice, I wound up staying 40 years.

“The discovery of this place was electrifying, and showed up in our writing, landing in a place that was new.”

He said Hollywood was more open in 1975, too.

“I wrote ‘Rancho’ in 15 days, made the deal in my son’s bedroom at the house in Deep Creek, and the project was a go.”

He added, “Gatz was great. We all helped each other in those days. Harrison helped me get started.

“Gatz is a fabulist in everything he does,” a writer like Italo Calvino, McGuane said.

At the Senior Center Wednesday, original copies of the group’s books were arranged on the table. After his presentation, Gatz pondered the collection for a moment and said, “It’s hard to say if anyone of these authors will be known 100 years from now. Maybe one.

“Livingston is still a highly literary town.”

Mrs. Whippee, Fire up the Way Back Machine

2008-09-09T19:10:00.000-07:00

Gov. Palin is pro-life but anti-nature, which as a biologist I find puzzling, but in the course of human events one credo rules: follow the money. Left to their own devices people in power will take the money, and the future be damned. Palin even prays for it at revivals. Once higher powers tell leaders what to wish for, there’s trouble afoot. In this case a national problem. As Sherman in the cartoon once said, Mrs. Whippee, fire up the way back machine.

Hail to the Vice-Chief

2008-09-03T18:59:00.000-07:00

Palin Biography Well it's not a vanity press, but close. An MFA credentialed writer penned the Palin book about her former mayor and neighbor in Wasilla, Alaska. A place almost nonexistent in 1975 when I first went to Alaska. Regardless of experience, once someone is a governor of any state in the union all bets are off as to the next leap. Sometimes getting there is the ball game. Palin's views are decidedly flat-earth. She typifies the wrong-headed selfishness of the GOP. Me, me, me, take, take, take; the selfishness of large out of control families akin to those found in third world countries. Of course that's what Alaska is, and most residents live like it too. A handful don't and they are hooked to Ted Steven's beleagered wagon. This governor is just the latest. Follow the money.

Unlike Democrats, who get saddled with charges that aren't even true, crimes that are don't stick to the GOP. At least not since Watergate.

If I were Obama/Biden, I'd worry. I'd worry a lot. Clinton should have been the nominee, and at least the VP.

A Governor Scorned

2008-09-01T20:52:00.000-07:00

As Josh Marshall reports, not the sort of temperment desired in a quasi-chief executive.

So let's put this all together. We rely on elected officials not to use the power of their office to pursue personal agendas or vendettas. It's called an abuse of power. There is ample evidence that Palin used her power as governor to get her ex-brother-in-law fired. When his boss refused to fire him, she fired his boss. She first denied Monegan's claims of pressure to fire Wooten and then had to amend her story when evidence proved otherwise. The available evidence now suggests that she 1) tried to have an ex-relative fired from his job for personal reasons, something that was clearly inappropriate, and perhaps illegal, though possibly understandable in human terms, 2) fired a state official for not himself acting inappropriately by firing the relative, 3) lied to the public about what happened and 4) continues to lie about what happened.

These are, to put it mildly, not the traits or temperament you want in someone who could hold the executive power of the federal government.

The Witching Hour

2008-08-31T07:18:00.000-07:00

7 Years to Climate Midnight. It's no joke except to the ignorant. They will be happy with Sarah Palin, the latest flat Earth rendition of the Republican party, who would take us back to the stone age where a half of all Alaskans still live anyway. Somehow they think not controling the numbers of offspring or resources used is a good thing. It's the kind of thinking straight from Utah and Idaho where Palin hails from. No surprise there. Neither is her op-ed against listing the polar bear.

Going, Going...

2008-08-28T05:40:00.000-07:00

The Arctic ice pack is set to surpass the lowest extent recorded in modern history. Drip,drip...

New England: The New Tennessee?

2008-07-27T07:24:00.000-07:00

With global warming this is what occurs.Tornado in New Hampshire

CUT at 50: Hoping to move into the mainstream

2008-07-22T18:31:00.001-07:00

My story hit the AP wire today.

CORWIN SPRINGS –The Church Universal and Triumphant has
completed a $2.2 million chapel and an 18,000 square-foot office
complex on its Corwin Springs property north of Gardiner, in time for
its 50th anniversary celebration held early in July.
After years of controversy and preparation for a nuclear
apocalypse that never materialized, weapons charges and environmental
lawsuits, the New Age organization has been out of the news in recent
years.

Former leader Elizabeth Clare Prophet has been in a Bozeman assisted care arrangement with Alzheimer's disease since 2000, but her message
lives on.

"We've had some sensationalist press coverage over the
years," said church Co-President Rev. Lois Drake. "We want to be
treated fairly."

Mark L. Prophet founded the organization as The Summit
Lighthouse in 1958. His wife, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, a New Jersey
native and Boston University graduate in political science,
established The Church Universal and Triumphant in 1974. She
permanently moved its headquarters from Southern California to
Paradise Valley in 1987 to a property purchased in 1981 from the late
Malcom Forbes. Today, the property is known as the Royal Teton Ranch.
"We have local chapters in over 250 communities worldwide," Drake said.

The New Age organization is seeking to change its image from
a bunker-dwelling doomsday cult to a mainstream religious
organization, CUT observers have said.

The new chapel is serving as inspiration for that
worldwide membership, Drake said.

King Arthur's Court

According to CUT's Web site, the new complex, called "King
Arthur's Court," will "beautify this place prepared by the Ascended
Masters for millions of seekers - the place where the messenger
Elizabeth Clare Prophet stood and delivered the Word for the Aquarian
Age."

"We completed the main office building in 2006," said Drake,
a pleasant, tall, Southern California native during a visit last
week. It houses the offices of the presidents, Summit University and
The Summit University Press, which produces and distributes materials
worldwide.

The reception foyer is in the center of the room, accoutered
with fine furniture. On one wall, a portrait of Mark Prophet faces
another of his wife across the room.

"This is the great room," Drake said of the two-story wall of
windows that open to a grassy courtyard facing the new chapel topped
with a golden-peaked lighthouse tower.

"It's important to have a beautiful environment and to blend
with Montana," Drake said, "and for visitors to have a nice place to
gather when they come here from all over the world."

The whole property was lined with large tent structures
currently being torn down by crews of teens.

"The young people like to help set up and take down the tents
for the conference," she said of the event held July 1-8. "We had
2,000 people here at the anniversary conference."

Inside the chapel foyer, another portrait of Elizabeth Clare
Prophet, smiling, watches over the entrance.

"We haven't got the door handles installed yet," Drake said
of the brown, double-arched doors. Inside, was an arched, tiled
ceiling and rows of seats leading to an altar framed with a portrait
of Christ on one side and Ascended Master St. Germain.

The new chapel, formerly a barn, cost 2.2 million dollars, Drake said.
"It's paid for, but we're collecting funds through donations
to recover that amount," she said. "Construction began in May 2007."
The chapel project includes: Lighthouse Tower; two rooms for
classrooms and fellowship; a small chapel for weddings, non-English
services and other events; and a room for families with viewing
window. In the family room, Drake pointed to a purple glass light
fixture.

"This chandelier was in our Malibu, California headquarters,
so there's history here as well as the new," she said.
The bookstore in the complex sells numerous copies of the
organization's publications, which are translated into several
foreign languages. There were many Buddha's and Shiva statues for
sale, reflecting the church's embrace of Far Eastern religions.

"We sold out of many items during the conference," Drake said.
There were bins of buttons with likenesses on them, including
that of Mark and Elizabeth Prophet, for sale.

Faith and taxes

According to the doctrine of the church, Ascended Masters
"are enlightened spiritual beings who once lived on the Earth, and
over the course of many lifetimes of devotion and striving, they
fulfilled their mission for being - their divine plan - and ascended
back to their divine source, reuniting with Spirit."

Followers believe these beings are the spiritual guides and
the teachers of mankind, who instruct spiritual evolution of all
those who desire to unite with divine consciousness, or God,
according to the church's website.

"The essence is unity with God," Drake said.

The church recently retained a partial tax-exempt status from
the Montana Department of Revenue for its main bomb shelter, built to
house hundreds, because it is used it for religious purposes as
storage facilities for religious material, according to state records.

"The underground structure is being assessed at 50 percent of
the value," said Mark J. Olson, area manager for Park, Meagher,
Broadwater and Madison counties for the Montana Department of
Revenue, in a recent e-mail. "All remaining structures are being
assessed at 100 percent of their value. However the Chapel, Old
Montessori School, and three log cabins are exempt."

Drake commented on the controversial shelter phase of CUT's
history of 1989-1990, when Prophet predicted a nuclear holocaust
commanded members into the underground shelter in March 1990.
"It was a long time ago," she said. "We're moving forward
based on universal and time-tested tenants, helping our congregants
achieve their spiritual path."

Sean Prophet comments

Mark and Elizabeth Prophet's son Sean, 36, sees the CUT and
its new chapel in a different light.

Sean Prophet, 36, now a film editor in Los Angeles who left
the church in 1993, was present and helped build the 756-person
underground structure during the shelter phase.

He writes on his Web site, www.blacksunjournal.com, "Church
Universal and Triumphant is a cult that has now survived past its
founding generation. Though the organization faltered for a few
years, it now seems to have stabilized and shows no signs of
disintegrating. As long as there are people who need the particular
brand of Ascended Masters teachings my parents offered, their
successors will continue to propagate their messianic zeal."
In a telephone interview last week, Prophet said the church
is putting the best face it can on a failed prophecy.

"It's bad fruit from a bad tree," he said. "The (new chapel)
is a meeting house for the community to give them a place to go. They
raised $2 million for that, but that doesn't hide the fact they spent
$20 million on shelters for nothing. They ruined a lot of peoples'
dreams."

The time after the shelter event was a turning point for Sean
Prophet, who began to question the teachings he'd grown up with. He
walked away from a powerful position as a minister of the church
and denounced its beliefs.

"They made it all up," he said. "These religious ideas have
been handed down from one person to another throughout the centuries,
drawing from earlier fictional accounts, such as the books of Guy and
Edna Ballard, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and others, and my parents
just picked ideas they agreed with.

"In the end," he said, "It's all about the money, buildings
and who gains the most."

Prophet said he knew the new chapel building well.
"There's an underground shelter under there, too," he said.
"There are steel trap doors in the floor near the altar. They may
have covered it up."

The main bomb shelter Sean Prophet helped build, which he and
members entered to escape a feared holocaust, is located in a high
meadow at the end of Mol Heron Creek Road, five miles above the main
compound behind a big log gate on which is a sign, "RTR," for Royal
Teton Ranch.

A no-trespassing sign is posted on the gate.

"That's where they hold their retreats," Prophet said.

"It's our Heart," Drake said. "The spiritual center of the
ranch. We take the young people on wildlife hikes up there. The bears
and mountain lions are doing very well, so we keep everyone together."
Near the end of Mol Heron Creek Road sits a collection of
more white tent structures atop an embankment with railroad tie
steps. A short way beyond, the county road ends at the closed gate to the big meadow.

"The bones of a failed prophecy," Prophet said, "are buried
up in Mol Heron Canyon."

Mark A. York
Livingston Enterprise
Staff Writer
myork@livent.net
(406)222-2000

Brother Can You Spare an Iceberg

2008-07-17T18:04:00.000-07:00

Global warming forces Russian scientists to abandon the ice

Beer...Non essential? No way!

2008-07-11T19:42:00.000-07:00

I sometimes agree with George Will and this is one of those times. Survival of the Sudsiest. If only he could apply this approach to climate change, the erudite Will would rise above clueless in D.C. status in the scientific community. Cheers! Writing opinion is the best gig in America. Ask any real reporter.

My Reporting Gig

2008-07-03T21:34:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm a full time reporter for the Livingston Enterprise, in Livingston, Montana, a long time dream of mine. I interviewed a U.S. Senator and the governor in the first week. What a country!

Happy Birthday to Me

2008-06-15T07:11:00.000-07:00

I'm 55 today, and yet still taking a college kid's summer job for the US Government. I took it, but didn't keep it. I was forced to resign because I couldn't carry a Honda gasoline generator on my back over the tops of the mountains of Central Idaho. "Good luck with that," I said.

And a happy father's day for my late dad. Two years ago he passed coming this July 22nd. He taught me you can be a regular guy and still be a big player in history as he was in WWII, and know famous people like Ernest Hemingway on equal footing. And like the prematurely late Tim Russert's dad Big Russ, my Big Russ, as he referred to himself in jest, did a crap job all his life until a heart attack got him out of it, luckily not permanantly at the time. I always said I'd rather lose the job than my health. I learned that from him. It still is a necessary policy too it seems.

I shared my story with Russert, but he didn't include it in his last book. I got a reply thanking me for reading his first book, even though I hadn't. That was nice of him at least. Dad has a room at Ft. Carson, Colorado and an award in his name for the fourth Engineers, and a spot at the Vet's History Project. Not bad recognition for a bakery worker from Waterville, Maine. We do what we can.

Tim Russert R.I.P

2008-06-13T20:48:00.000-07:00

It's as if the Sun eclipsed at high noon

Jesse Jackson on Russert's sudden passing of a heart attack at 58.

Polar Bears Gain Threatened Listing

2008-05-14T21:56:00.000-07:00

As much as it pained Secretary Kempthorne to say it, he did. Sure there were some pathetic caveats, but the basis is there legally, now. I applaud it.

Sea Ice decline

No More Salmon

2008-05-10T20:08:00.000-07:00

Some folks declare the environment is getting better, but then they aren't fish biologists. I am. Chinook Salmon Vanish Without a Trace. In a time of dwindling fresh water in a warming world, this is a symptom. Hatchery salmon don't have the survival skills of wild runs. Like cattle, they can wander off and die easily. One thing is certain: they need water to get back to their source.

The "Authors" Keep Coming

2008-04-25T19:07:00.000-07:00

The readers run for the hills, and with good reason if the product is vanity published by any vendor. The result is always the same. 0-200 sales. A book like this stands no chance in the market. Craft and persistence still can reap a credible reward even if it's in name only. A real book, chosen by agents and publishers offers that status. In America, and beyond, this is everything.

Earth Day!

2008-04-22T19:27:00.000-07:00

Go Hillary! There's work to do since those nearby planets are either too hot or too cold with no atmosphere at all. Only this one is just right.

Presidential Science

2008-04-11T20:16:00.000-07:00

So the candidates have turned down an invitation to debate science on Charlie Rose. This is the reason Americans are so dismal and unprepared in science in general, even as we have some of the best in the business on our team. Alas, not enough.

The Society of Environmental Journalists held a conference today and each candidate had an advisor show up in their stead. I think it's time the candidates did. The voters need to hear the facts of science as understood by the three citizens who will inplement, or in the case of the current occupant in chief, hinder American progress.