Legalectric

The U.S. is the laughingstock of the world, and rightly so.

From Meryl Streep, via New York Times:

Please sit down. Thank you. I love you all. You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve lost my voice in screaming and lamentation this weekend. And I have lost my mind sometime earlier this year, so I have to read.

Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press. Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie said: You and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners and the press.

But who are we, and what is Hollywood anyway? It’s just a bunch of people from other places. I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey. Viola was born in a sharecropper’s cabin in South Carolina, came up in Central Falls, Rhode Island; Sarah Paulson was born in Florida, raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids in Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Vicenza, Italy. And Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates? And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in London — no, in Ireland I do believe, and she’s here nominated for playing a girl in small-town Virginia.

Ryan Gosling, like all of the nicest people, is Canadian, and Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, and is here playing an Indian raised in Tasmania. So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick them all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.

They gave me three seconds to say this, so: An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that. Breathtaking, compassionate work.

But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good; there was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh, and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose. O.K., go on with it.

O.K., this brings me to the press. We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage. That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in the Constitution. So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists, because we’re gonna need them going forward, and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.

One more thing: Once, when I was standing around on the set one day, whining about something — you know we were gonna work through supper or the long hours or whatever, Tommy Lee Jones said to me, “Isn’t it such a privilege, Meryl, just to be an actor?” Yeah, it is, and we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy. We should all be proud of the work Hollywood honors here tonight.

As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once, take your broken heart, make it into art.

RESIST!  There are many ways, each of us can do something, take action, speak up.  JUST DO IT!

I’d requested information on the Lab USA project from MPCA and City of Red Wing, and got some info last week:

Hey Red Wing — MPCA’s Lab USA documents here!

And they granted an extension for Comments due to the delay in providing primary documentation for review (DOH!) — Comments are now due January 19, 2017:

Lab USA’s Ash Processing Facility – Red Wing – EAW – Comment period extension (p-ear2-119c)

Hiding in the MPCA’s EAW, Appendix B, is this map, above.  The map shows the Water Tanks Burial Mounds, and the western end of the area is about 1/2 of the Red Wing Laydown Yard and Crusher site.  Oh my!  I’d noticed that factoid and included in my comments for the Tyler Hills Neighbors (p. 14):

Comments -_Tyler Hills Neighbors & Exhibits

Note the Red Wing Laydown Yard and Crusher site, on the right hand side of that clearing:

They also want to run a drainage ditch through and put ponds in that area — note they did NOT include the ponds in this depiction of drainage plans!

Here’s one with the “ponds” (no real plan yet, City of Red Wing is supposed to file that before they build it!) and note that the scenic easement as depicted here is further south than it is in another map, where the scenic easement overlaps the southern edge of the clearing (all of these maps are from the EAW, fyi):

Turns out I’m not the only one that noticed that encroachment of the Red Wing project (click for document or larger view):

Comment Letter – Dept of Administration

Look at that, “direct consultation with the Office of the State Archaeologist and the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council…”  Do ya think Prairie Island Indian Community might be interested, have an interest?!?!

Here’s the Comment from the Indian Affairs Council (click for document or larger view):

Comment Letter – Indian Affairs Council

A quick reminder:

Here’s the EAW — Comments are due by January 4, 2017:

EAW – Lab USA SW-670-001 – p-ear2-119a

Send Comments to (click for larger image):

These are the documents I’ve received from the MPCA thus far.  There’s a lot and I’ll be uploading today:

Lab USA Permit Application

June 16 Permit Application-Part 1 Checklists

June 16 Permit Application Part 2 Design-Rep

June 16 Permit Application Part 3 OM

June 16 Permit Application Part 4 Plans

Lab USA Documents

Public Notice – Checklist – LabUSA

Technical Support  Document – LabUSA

SW 670

2025947-212729-Lab USA Stmt of Authority

2062890-212729-Corresp Lab USA – Permit App Amendments

1906244-212729-Corresp 7/20/2016 – MPCA – Technical Comments

2025941-212729-public-sw-670-Corresp SEH Permitting Responses

It’s old news, be it “mad cow” or “sheep scrapie” or “pissy deer” a/k/a Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), and it’s here in Minnesota, this time the DNR reports another round of CWD revealed in deer:

Third infected deer discovered in Minnesota’s CWD outbreak

Here’s the DNR’s page on chronically wasted deer:

Chronic Wasting Disease Management

Notice the DNR is talking about “management” and not prevention and eradication.

As a former meat hauler, and as a for-the-most-part veggie, I noticed years ago when a local man died of Jakob-Creutzfeld (don’t know if it was “variant” or not, that was not reported one way or the other), and have been waiting for the other shoe to drop.  It did later, when three Wisconsin men died of Jakob-Creutzfeld — the Center for Disease Control is paying attention (but not nearly enough):

Fatal Degenerative Neurologic Illnesses in Men Who Participated in Wild Game Feasts

Not just Minnesota and Wisconsin –here’s the US map (linked) — what concerns me is that it looks like only the Fillmore County and that the Pine Island CWD cases aren’t shown, where deer and elk were found, an entire elk herd shot::

Here’s bad news from Arkansas, lots of bad news:

Yearly Archives: 2016