Monthly Archives: April 2018

Cars

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Lately I waste time by watching car chases on YouTube.  They happen all over the country, but the televised ones tend to come from Houston, Detroit, Kansas City, and the champion, Los Angeles.  LA seems to have one almost every day, and the news copters are dedicated to following the runners.  There are fast cars involved, usually stolen Mercedes, BMW, and the Dodge hot rods, but anything that rolls with a motor qualifies.

I like to watch and marvel at the stupidity of the runners, but I am also struck by ubiquity of cars in any city.  The helicopters offer a view of cars chasing cars while surrounded by cars. Many chases end in parking lots where we leave our car while doing life.  The things are relatively recent, about 120 years, but they have transformed the planet.

Cop Chase End

We think nothing about pumping 15 gallons or more of a toxic, highly flammable substance into  our cars almost every week.  The industries supplying the car culture rule the planet.  There is lots of money to be made building cars, fixing them, crushing them and melting them down to get the metals to make more cars.

Lots of holes get poked into the ground to extract toxic, flammable, polluting stuff which is then piped to huge industrial facilities where the thick black toxic stuff is processed into lots of other toxic, flammable products.  They also make plastic, another planetary plague.  Governments spend a lot of their budgets building roads for the cars to travel around on.  They use a lot of very thick, black, gooey toxic stuff on the roads to make them smoother for the cars.

Oil Refinery in India

The old song from Cabaret says, “Money makes the world go around.”  Yes, and a huge percentage of the money is involved in making and using cars.  The greatest amount of pollution comes from cars.  71% of the petroleum produced goes to cars.

We are all digging a colossal asphalt lined hole and driving in.  The hole is getting so big it threatens to take over the planet.  Somehow it has to change.  There are cities in the world where the public transportation system is well developed enough to make going careless viable, but New York City remains clogged with cars.  There is a big push to build more light rail, but one of the light rail problems is providing enough parking at the stops.

I despair.  I don’t see any way out short of an economic collapse.  Have you seen Mad Max?  Not pretty.

Posted in Cars, Climate Change, Economics, Energy Policy, Health Issues, Oil and Gas Policy, Pollution, Stories

Tai Chi Chuan

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Tai Chi

I fall down.  I fall off ladders, I fall down stairs, I just plain fall down.  Now, I am somewhat weak in the coordination department, but I also hike, climbed mountains, backpacked, hunted in rough country, and survived it all.  As I age, the falls are more frequent.  I did two courses of physical therapy for my balance problem, but Medicare won’t pay for continuous physical therapy.

I am terrible at doing balance exercises on my own, so Tai Chi seemed like the best alternative.   It works.  I go for an hour four days a week, which forces me to plan my schedule.  Two days I go to the city recreation center, one day at the city senior center, and one day at a program for older adults at the University of Denver.

I haven’t fallen yet, but I do a lot of stumbling.  When I started a couple of months ago, I wasn’t sure Tai Chi would work for me, and I thought about of giving it up.  All the classes are for beginners with lots of different skill levels, but I have never liked being at the bottom.  I didn’t stay at the bottom very long, as there are a lot of old people with various motor problems.

I get to meet people, do something good for me, extrovert, and be a bit of the class clown.  My balance is also improving.  At first, I couldn’t do a kick without stumbling. Now I can kick with my left leg, but still stumble when trying my right leg.  Even that is improving.  I can also stand on my right leg and be fairly steady, but no luck when on my left leg.

Browning 50 Cal M2

I attribute to my lack of physical symmetry to the Army.  As you may be aware, armies make loud noises.  When I was in the Army during the early sixties, hearing protection was unheard of.  After I finally got a promotion, I was given a fifty caliber machine gun to care for and shoot.  Assembled on its tripod, it weighs around 150 pounds.  It needs that weight.  The cartridge is about 5 1/2 inches long and makes a hell of a noise when it goes off.  I now have a significant hearing loss with damage to the vestibular nerve in my right ear.  We use vision, sensation in our feet, and the inner ear for balance.  My right inner ear has trouble talking to my brain.   Thus, I fall down.

Inner Ear and Vestibular Nerve

The VA gives me hearing aids, but apparently is nothing to be done about the nerve damage.  My job is to keep the vision and propriocepter (foot sensation) balance stuff working and do as much as I can with the ear.  I especially have trouble turning right in the dark.  The Tai Chi keeps two out of three working and may be helping with the nerve damage.

Another benefit of Tai Chi is its meditative aspect.  I do Insight Meditation which advocates keeping mindfulness at all times, not just when meditating.  I am able to stay in the moment at times, but I’m not very good.  Tai Chi can be described as a martial art in slow motion.  The emphasis is on staying centered while doing the moves.  The motions are smooth and deliberate, coordinated with the breath, perfect for staying in the moment.

The more familiar I am with the Tai Chi forms, the better my meditative state.  It’s also a lot of fun.  I have three instructors, each with their own style.  One emphasizes correct body position and smooth, deliberate motion while maintaining good balance.  She goes over each move enough to enable doing it properly.  Another emphasizes learning the entire form, putting all the individual moves together.  The third does sort of a combination while including some Qui Gong, a method predating Tai Chi without the martial arts aspect.  Together the three instructors four day per week have allowed me to progress fairly rapidly.  My balance is better as I am having fun.

Posted in Stories

Tyranny

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Nuremberg 1938

The dominant form of government is not democracy, it’s tyranny, and always has been.  Tyrants used to be called kings or emperors.  Today their title is most often President or Chairman.  Tyrants are people who rule nations with little input from the citizens.   Putin, Mugabe, Gaddafi, Assad, Khamenei, Kim Jong Il, Castro.  This is a short list of the most notorious dictators.   Most nations are ruled by tyrants.  Fragile democracies are a distinct minority.

Often a central factor in the move toward tyranny is fear.  Europe is an example.  Terrorism breeds fear and the people opt for more central control to fight terrorism. Europeans are also afraid of the Muslim immigrants, equating them with terrorism.

The President of the United States is a would-be tyrant, held in check by a paralyzed congress and functioning judiciary.  In addition, the massive federal bureaucracy is resistant to rapid change, with most bureaucrats being career civil servants with fairly safe jobs.  The agency heads come and go, these days at a rapid pace, but cars are still being crash tested, roads are built, disease outbreaks are tracked, and the parks are open.

Federal judges block laws violating the constitution and the military continues to admit transsexuals.  Elections are tampered with, but democracy continues to prevail for the moment.  It appears the mid term elections will strengthen our republic.  Democracy is under fire in the U.S. and Europe but the democratic institutions seem to be prevailing.

Remember, however, the failure of democracy in Germany and Italy in the 1930’s with global consequences.  Here in our country we still possess the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.  We march.  We chant “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids you kill today?”  We march again.  We run for office.  We don’t give up.  We will prevail.  Our democracy will survive, probably.

Posted in Stories

My Politics

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DENVER, CO – January 21: Tens of thousands in Civic Center Park for the Women’s March on Denver January 21, 2017. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post)

With all the chaos in our government, I have taken part in some marches and visited Senator Cory Gardner’s office a few times (alas, to no avail).  I guess I would like to let you know about my political position and how a Western Colorado boy ended up marching in the streets.

Western Colorado is overwhelmingly conservative, and Fruita, at that time a farm town, even more so.  My father grew up a Union Democrat, railroading in the family.  However, during the depression he decided Franklin Roosevelt was bad for the country. I never understood why, but Dad called him Frankie with invective in his voice.  Maybe it was because he had a good job with the telephone company all through the bad times, so wasn’t directly affected by the catastrophe.

At any rate, I grew up conservative as well.  I didn’t realize there was an alternative view.  I have always been a thinker and questioner and when the local Republican Committee woman spoke in her government class, I was surprised when all she talked about was high taxes and how Republicans would lower them.  She was from a prominent farm family in the lower valley, and I had expected a broader perspective.

What began the reversal in my political views can be blamed on the Quakers.  Two of my classmates and I spent a week at a youth camp in Palmer Lake sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee.  The staff and attendees were all nice people, and we got an introduction to the Quaker form of worship, basically silent meditation, with people speaking as the Spirit led them.  Fascinating for a nominal Methodist sitting through mechanical services.

The real wake-up was encountering real, live liberals for the first time.  Well, that and the camp leader’s daughter.  What struck me most was one of the men refuting the idea about deficit spending being bad for the country.  After all, how was the war financed?  The country didn’t seem to go broke.

The influence didn’t take hold right away, I voted for Barry Goldwater for President while I was in the Army, another conservative organization.   While in the Army I subscribed to Time Magazine, the bastion of Eastern Establishment Republicanism.  I was a critical thinker even then (Boy, has that gotten me into trouble all my life.).  I gradually began to develop a more progressive view.

After the Army I went to Mesa College in Grand Junction to bring my grades up.  I took a liberal arts curriculum, and had Political Science and History teachers who broadened by liberal perspective.  Now this was in 1966 and 1967, and change was in the air and Vietnam on the ground.  I studied all the rhetoric coming from both sides and began to realize the Communist Bloc and the Free World shared the same basic viewpoints:  domination, control, and exploitation.

Third World people in countries under colonial or post colonial domination tended to choose Marxist ideologies, giving the Soviets and China a way in.  Thus, the fighting began.  The non-communist regimes tended to be weak, repressive, and corrupt.  With no alternative other than re-colonization, the western alliance led by the U.S., supported the corrupt regimes with military intervention, including the attendant suffering and division.

My Army Service was in Germany, where the Allies imposed democracy on an educated populace with great success.  The same approach doesn’t seem to work in a mostly peasant society ruled by an elite whose main goal was enriching itself.  The result was an impasse with increasing discord coming from people in the western world interested in human rights.

The protesters won and Vietnam went back to being a small nation with no expansionist ideas.  The U.S. and its allies didn’t seem to learn from the experience and now are bent on imposing foreign ideas on the people of the Middle East.   The strategy will fail, just as it did in Vietnam.  The western powers will leave and the locals will go back to fighting among themselves.  The reason the western powers will decide to leave is their lessening dependence on middle eastern oil and gas.

With all these developments I did not become a Marxist or Socialist, like a lot of my liberal contemporaries.  Planned economies just don’t seem to work any more than pure capitalist economies.  The reason in both cases is simple greed, an elite concentrating wealth and power for its own ends.  What seems to work best is a market economy with government regulation to dampen the greed.  It’s messy, but government has always been messy.  Let’s just stay away from foreign adventures also engaged in out of greed.  Why can’t we all just get along?

Posted in Stories

Draining the Colorado Plateau

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Grand Canyon

About 600 Million years old, the Colorado Plateau has been relatively stable throughout it’s history.  It has uplifts, interesting laccolithic mountains, lava flows, and In the last six million years or so, produced some of the most spectacular scenery on the earth.  Canyons.  Many canyons carved into many layers of rock, much of it red.  The canyons grew upstream from the Grand Canyon, the most spectacular of the canyons.

Some of the Colorado Plateau, Bryce Canyon

The Plateau is big, about 130,000 square miles.  It could swallow some of those little Eastern states with hardly a belch.  Utah east of the Wasatch mountains just east of Salt Lake.  Colorado west of the Rocky Mountains, south of the Uintah mountains and north of that rough country in northern New Mexico and Arizona.

For much of its history the Colorado Plateau was drained interiorly, no outlet to the oceans and surrounded by highlands.  The rivers then flowed north from now gone highlands in Arizona into a succession of mostly fresh water lakes.  The lakes left signatures such as the Green River Formation with its oil shale and landslides.  The Piceance and Uinta basins are examples. I grew up on a margin of the Piceance Basin.

Colorado River

Around six million years ago, the Colorado River flowed south, found its way onto the Basin and Range Province and eventually to the Gulf of California.  It is ironic such a powerful river responsible for carving all those canyons seldom reaches the sea, diverted onto land by recent despoilers, us.  The shift from internal drainage to the Colorado River with all the canyons carved by the river and tributaries is something of a mystery.

The answer is elevation change.  The Colorado Plateau ended up higher than the Basin and Range province to the west.  Was the Plateau uplifted or did the Basin and Range subside?  The change in elevation is relatively recent and gave the Colorado River the opportunity to begin draining the Plateau.

The Basin and Range With Stretch Marks

The Basin and Range is known as an extensional region.  As the Pacific Tectonic Plate slides northward along the North American Plate, it is stretching and pulling the Basin and Range to the west.  As it pulls apart, some big blocks stay at about the same altitude while adjacent blocks drop down to fill the void.  Thus we have basins and ranges.  There are theories that the entire province subsided as well.

This is probably not the case, as the crust under the region is thinner, a function of stretching, not uplift.  With uplift, we would expect the crust to be thicker.  The crust is thicker under the Colorado Plateau, suggesting uplift created by the remnant of the Farallon Plate subsiding and allowing lighter rock to rise and allow uplift.

I won’t go into detail about the various layers in the crust responsible for all this.  It is complex and all the stuff is way down there. Some are thicker, some thinner, as some rise their chemistry and density changes, and my eyes start glazing over.  Take it this way, that big thick and somewhat dense Plateau has stayed in one place and has had several periods of uplift.

The most recent uplift left the Plateau higher than the Basin and Range.  A stream on the western margin cut its way into the highland to the east and the Plateau started draining through the new canyon.  What a canyon it is, 6000 feet deep.  As the river cut its way down, all the tributary streams followed suit by making their own canyons.  The region is arid and has lots of cliff forming rocks, so deep, narrow canyons formed, some so narrow you can stand on the bottom and touch each wall.

I wanted the Basin and Range to sink, but is too thin and lightweight so it stretches.  The Colorado Plateau is also being pulled by that Pacific Plate, but instead of stretching, that big thick slab is rotating clockwise.  I am going to dig around and try to figure out why the Plateau stays in-one piece with all the activities going on all sides, but it is for later.  My working hypothesis is since the Colorado Plateau houses the center of the universe, it has stayed intact out of respect.

Posted in Basin and Range, Colorado Plateau, Colorado River, Grand Canyon, Plate Tectonics, Stories

The Enigma of the Colorado Plateau

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Although I have lived somewhere along Front Range Colorado most of my life, I still think of the Colorado Plateau as home.  I am dedicated to the region because of its Geology.  All that rock is just sitting there looking at you.  There aren’t too many plants to get in the way.  I grew up looking at the red rock of the Colorado National Monument just across the river from home.

Thing is, the red rock is mostly from the Mesozoic.  There is a lot of boring buff colored rock from the Cenozoic, notably the Green River Formation.  The Green River Isn’t much to look at, but it has a huge present day impact.  Look at my piece on the Formation in Categories.

I am currently interested in the time after the Green River Formation was deposited.  The literature on this time on the Plateau is relatively sparse, mostly because it was more a time of erosion, not deposition.  A large part of the deposition was in fresh water lakes with only remnants of the sediments today.  Those red rocks forming canyons and arches get all the press.

For most of its existence, the Colorado Plateau had no outlet to the sea.  Then, a bit less than six million years ago. The Colorado River decided to head for  Baja California.  There have been lots of explanations for this happening, but they boil down to elevation change.  The Plateau ended up higher than the Basin and Range province to the west.  That area was once a highland, but big tectonic forces changed everything. Then, a stream eroding east carved enough of a canyon to capture the Colorado Plateau drainage which became the Colorado River.

As you are aware, the Pacific Plate is colliding with the North American plate.  The collision is not at right angles, the Pacific Plate is headed northeast.  As it slides along, it pulls on the North American plate, somewhat pulling it apart.  The area east of the Sierras known as the Basin and Range is being stretched.  As it stretches, big blocks called grabens drop down, leaving mountain ranges between them.  The area ended up lower than the Colorado Plateau.

The Basin and Range Stretched

It’s not entirely clear if The Plateau was uplifted during this time by remnants of the same forces responsible for creating the Rocky Mountains.  It seems to me the uplift was earlier, but my reading on the issue is not conclusive. The fact is the Plateau ended up higher than the Basin and Range.  Erosion then began digging away in the area west of Grand Canyon, hooking up with the internal drainage of the Plateau.  Canyon cutting began.

All those spectacular canyons are younger than six million years.  An interesting sidelight is that the stretching of the Basin and Range continues, and the Colorado Plateau is slowly rotating clockwise.  The question for me is why is the Plateau still in one piece?  Compression, stretching, rising magma, new mountains, collapsing Nevada, huge volcanic fields, Arizona mountains wearing away, all this stuff going on all over the neighborhood, but this one slab mostly stays in one piece. Why?

My personal hypothesis is, as the Plateau houses the Center of  the Universe, it necessarily stays in one piece.  I haven’t found anything in the literature to support this, so we will look at some other explanations.  By the way, the Center of the Universe is within a 100 mile radius from the confluence of the Green and the Colorado.  Let me know if you find it.

In the meantime we will see what the geologists have to say.  Usually they reach some consensus, except here.

If you want to explore all this on your own: Carving Grand Canyon, by Wayne Ranney and Geological Evolution of the Colorado Plateau of Western Colorado and Eastern Utah… by Robert Fillmore.

Posted in Basin and Range, Canyonlands, Colorado Plateau, Colorado River, Geology, Grand Canyon, Green River Formation, Plate Tectonics, Stories