Bombs Away

Editorial cartoon: Nick Anderson

      First off, this post has nothing to do with war, regardless of how you're feeling about the high price of gas and how we're dangerously low on advanced weapons, even pulling them from South Korea and stopping further shipments to Ukraine.  And makeup artist, Pete Hegseth, not only caused another top military commander to resign, but brought his wife in to help with the new Department of War...good choice of name because Hegseth has also ordered any soldier over the age of 30 to have a mandatory testosterone count check, but generously also offering free testosterone shots to those who may want them -- not women, of course, whom he is trying to diminish in numbers in the military (not "manly" enough).   And who's to blame when elderly Congress folk simply fail to show up, some even being discovered living in an assisted living facilty.  No worries since the Trumpster himself would simply pardon them, adding to the nearly 2000 pardons he's granted since January of this year.  All true, that.  But no matter since the looney bin in Washington is on invisibility status from the general public so we'll turn instead to weather (sounds a bit like the news at six)....

     While it seems easier and easier to joke about what's going on in Washington, D.C. (although all that is happening is anything but a laughing matter -- did you know that defendants in immigration court do not have the right to an attorney if they cannot pay for one?...me neither), our changing weather is really no laughing matter.  We're now hearing terms leaking their way into our everyday vocabulary: microbursts, rain bombs, flash flooding in cities, El Niño.  Wrote a piece in The New Yorker: In recent years, cities have been living through short storms that turn subway stations into lakes, streets into rivers, cars into boats.  Zhengzhou, China, got nearly eight inches of rain in an hour on July 20, 2021.  In the Libyan cities of Derma and Bayda, there were no monitors measuring hourly rates on September 10 and 11, 2023, but the totals suggest a storm of terrifying force: more than sixteen inches in twenty-four hours, followed by two dam collapses and more than eleven thousand deaths.  The Valencia region of Spain drew global attention on October 29, 2024, when almost seven inches fell in an hour...Flooding is less a matter of how much rain falls than of how fast it falls.  Two inches over a day is once thing.  Two inches in thirty minutes can overwhelm drainage systems and leave deep ponds in lower areas as water races downhill...When pipes fill during a big storm, pressure builds and the water comes back up through the plumbing, into homes and storefronts...There’s a formula behind the flooding.  The Clausius-Clapeyron equation, which was introduced almost two centuries ago, describes the relationship between air temperature and atmospheric pressure.  Warmer air holds more water, and the relationship is exponential, so small increases in temperature can yield huge jumps in rainfall intensity.  For years, climate scientists have said that warming would bring heavier downpours.  Now, it seems, that future has arrived.

    For most of us, such events seem real, but also seem to happen elsewhere, becoming little more than a distant news event as reporters brave hurricane-like winds and later, the devastating flooding and such that those storms may have caused.  But temperatures in the Pacific Ocean have already tripled from their norm.  Said the World Meteorological Organization: As of mid-August 2026, El Niño has become firmly established, marked by persistent and intensifying positive sea surface temperature anomalies across the central-eastern equatorial Pacific.  The latest seasonal forecasts from WMO Global Producing Centers indicate an exceptionally high likelihood (nearly 100% probability) that El Niño will persist through September–November 2026 and December 2026–February 2027. 

      On a brighter side, the drought in our state (Utah) was briefly helped as the annual monsoon rains arrived from the Baja area of Mexico, and the high atmospheric pressure finally moved eastward to allow those rains in.  And at first, everyone was overjoyed.  The first downpour arrived, then another, then all stopped for a week or so as the heat returned.  But lawns and trees had perked up, and the nearby foothills had turned surprisingly green.  All appeared to be falling into its normal annual pattern.  Then the winds began.  Now backing up, some four years ago our Salt Lake area encountered a rare wind event, one which knocked down massive 100-year old pine trees (14 in just my two-block area) as Arctic air moved in and swept over the Wasatch Range. Nothing that extraordinary in our history, reported the news.  And while trees fell throughout my neighborhood and the rest of the city-wide area (the devastation to the century-old trees lining our Capitol was extensive), all of our own trees survived.  But jump to now.  The winds bent and swirled those same trees in all directions egg-beater fashion, swaying them in all directions.  And for the first time --since many of those trees are now 60 feet or taller-- I worried that they might break and fall onto our house or that of our neighbor (they didn't).  Then the rain arrived like a mighty backup reinforcement, a torrent of force that sent sustained sheets of water horizontally across roofs.  It hit our west-facing windows and sent what seemed a growing cascade of water down our streets.  It didn't let up.  My wife and I looked at one another and said almost-simultaneously, that what was happening was scary.  We had never seen such winds; never had had a storm come from the west, and never had had rains that seemed to not touch the ground but to fly across roofs horizontally, over and over for about 15 minutes.  And then it was gone.  We called our friends a mile south of us, down the road.  Nothing other than a little rain.  We called another friend about 8 blocks north of us.  Nothing, other than a bit of rain.  Somehow, the "cell" had hit only a limited area with force and had left.

     Likely you've had at least one experience with a plane landing in a microburst, the windshear causing the plane's wings to rapidly dip side to side as the plane slows and accelerates as the runway nears.  One captain I spoke to after we had safely touched down told me that in his 35+ years of flying, that was his scariest landing (his words), the wind shear forcing the plane down (accelerate) then disappearing just as quickly (leaving the plane approaching too quickly), then the wind shifting its force to the side (accelerate again so the rudder can correct the angle), then shifting again.  Then to the side, pushing the wing near the ground (accelerate), then shifting to the other side.  I remember long ago in a small Montana airport, having a coffee and a bite when another pilot walked in, one I had seen walk out earlier to fly his small commuter jet full of passengers.  I looked at him, and he just shrugged.  "Too windy," he said, not realizing that I had watched as the winds had neatly spun his plane around at the end of the runway.  Unlike the jet I had landed on, his small commuter jet was no match for such winds, neither in weight or in power.  

     Something else is changing, something that may change even more come November, and that's the way our government operates.  As of this year, we had nearly 520,000 elected officials and 7 times that number of federal contractors (you may be reading about all those no-bid contracts Trump has awarded to high-end donors).  That's over 3,700,000 contractors, wrote Annie Lowrey in her book, The Time Tax: The average American forks over 21 percent of their income to cover the cost of public services, year in and year out...The situation is a failure, and a failure with many fathers.  The very structure of the American political system encourages disfunction.  The United States government is in fact a network of at least 91,476 governments (no official count exists, as far as I can tell): 1 federal, 6 territorial and district, 50 state, 574 tribal, 3,031 county, and 35,705 town and city, plus 12,546 school districts, 39,555 special-purpose entities, and more than 10,000 voting jurisdictions.  Each has it own rules, policies, procedures, and budget...the time tax is a bipartisan thing.  Republicans love assigning paperwork as a form of punishment, like teachers overseeing detention.  They believe that the onus should be on citizens to prove their mettle.  They obsess over fraud and use it as a justification for making programs impossible to use.  Democrats, for their part, love too-complicated-by-half means-tested measures, like tax credits for rural broadband users and grants for people struggling with the cost of air-conditioning.  They load straightforward initiatives up with so many conditions and chokepoints ha they fail to deliver, if they ever get off he ground.  And yet, she notes, parts of our government such as Social Security can mail checks out to millions of people each month without a hitch.  And the administrative cost to do so?  One-percent of its budget.  Contrast that with another department which, until last year, still processed all government employee retirements by hand: ...in a limestone cave filled with manila folders and filing cabinets, 230 feet beneath a forest in Pennsylvania....The Defense Department used eight-inch floppy disks to manage the nuclear arsenal until 2019. (the author noted that reginfo.gov gives a peek at this regulatory morass)

 

     France and now the Netherlands have been pulling a majority of their gold reserves out of the US, causing the NY Times to note: ...Western governments are "moving at surprising speed" to distance themselves from the U.S. government and corporations such as Google, Meta, and Amazon.  Trump's trade war with Canada cost our northern ally $21 billion in export revenue, but by making more than 100 trade deals with other nations, Canada increased its 2025 exports by nearly $5 billion.  Leaders of other democracies have concluded that the nation that once led and defended the free world is gone, and "real security can be found only by removing your country from American influence, on every front."  Editor Susan Caskle of The Week added that "We buy over 70% of Canada's exports, and they are the top purchaser of our exports."  Not any more, it would seem (did I mention that much of our toilet paper comes from Canada?).  So after all of that, it was refreshing to read a satirical piece by Bob Odenkirk of how the next presidential candidate might campaign: I will meet with my Cabinet.  Behind closed doors.  I'll listen to their suggestions, and nod, and give a thumbs-up, and say, "O.K., sounds like you're working on it."  I will not pick the best people, but I will pick the best people I can find who have been working in their fields for at least twenty-five years.  This is my "experience" rule.  You have to have had experience in what you are doing.  Sorry, that's my rule...I'll be honest with you -- most days I won't even make it onto the news. I won't do anything that might provide "footage."  I will not say anything remarkable.  You won't know I'm there, and if I'm there you will think,  "He's a pretty decent guy -- at least he's making an honest effort."  You might also think,  "Well, he loves his kids.  That's mostly all he talks about, when he talks."  Of course, that was satire; even my deep-red state finds billboards that say, "Politicians are like diapers...need changing often."

     Kidding aside, perhaps more importantly, there is an even more powerful entity this is changing...our bodies.  In a review of Beyond Inheritance, Dr. Jerome Groopman wrote in The New Yorker: People tend to assume that the genes we inherit from our parents are a blueprint for our growth and development, immutable throughout our lives, and that the DNA in each cell of our body is the same as in every other cell.  In fact, changes in our DNA, known as mutations, occur from the time we are in the womb until our death...Each time a cell divides, its DNA is copied, but mistakes inevitably creep in.  The adult body, after all, contains some thirty trillion cells, about four million of which are replaced in any given second, and the human genome is made up of six billion letters of DNA.  "By some estimates you acquire trillions of new mutations a day, " Khamsi [Roxanne Khamsi, author of the book] writes.  Environmental factors --such as radiation, sunburn, air pollution, and smoking-- can increase the rate at which errors in DNA copying happen, but genetic mutations are not rare aberrations; they are intrinsic to the system by which cells reproduce...Only a fraction of the human genome is involved in making antibodies, and yet the potential of this section to recombine in novel ways is almost limitless.  According to Khamsi, we are capable of producing up to a quintillion different antibodies, each with a unique shape.  Groopman goes on to note that such mutations can lead to autoimmune diseases, but also offer hope that the use of chemotherapy now used to fight cancer (which kills cells both good and bad) can possibly be substantially reduced to allow the body's natural mutation pattern to fight off tumors, something proposed by Dr. Robert Gatenby who has worked with such evolutionary models (the theory being that mutating cells will work on fighting the tumor vs. fighting the radiation).

Editorial cartoon: Nick Anderson

      And finally, as if to put fear in every abuser that frequented those underage women of Jeffrey Epstein, there's an excellent series, Furious, which appropriately describes how one such 15- year old at the time felt when she was passed around by the rich and influential.  She's now grown up and has decided to become a serial killer, but only of those who victimized her, all of whom are now even wealthier and in higher positions: judges, heads of law firms, billionaires.  How to reach them?  None of that is s problem for her, and one by one they begin to fall.  She's clever, smart, and manipulative, but so is the former-NYPD,  now-FBI detective --also female-- hot on her tail.  And unlike so many cardboard cutout CSI scenarios, this one will keep you watching... that is, unless you happen to have been one of those abusers (rumor is that this was offered to stream for free at 1600 Pensylvania Avenue).  A female serial killer who's not a professional (although the series Ride or Die is the "fun" version of this story and quite entertaining)... if we can't get justice in the real world,  at least this show offers it up to us in another realm. 

                      

    Aaugh!  The bureaucratic maze of figuring out politics and weather and regulations and buried emotions.  Sometimes I just like to step outside and watch the clouds change as those occasional storms come in.  To watch a cloudless day suddenly fill just as you look away, then darken and hold patiently, as if tempting you to place a bet on whether it will let loose.  Look back too soon and the storm may move off in another direction.  Don't pay attention for awhile and the storm may come swiftly then just as quickly give way to the sun, or the night.  Look at another direction and the storm may have become ultra-local, seemingly pouring in one area just ahead of you but never releasing a drop where you are standing.  Such weather seemed to wrap all of these times together: the unpredictability, the hidden strength or weakness, the noise and chatter without any follow-up.  But after that microburst my wife and I witnessed, I'm still placing all of my bets on the weather, that be-all and know-all that has seen all of our human foibles before.  Same pattern, same results, same predictability, as if the weather may be saying, "If only they could learn from me."  I might add just that beginning part: If only we could learn...