My tweets

[ksmith]

• Mon, 20:09: http://t.co/9xSShFD9: Diamond Pet Food Recall http://t.co/EBabKkUn via @Po_st
• Mon, 21:30: Oil Not Guaranteed: The XL Pipeline's Accidental Activist http://t.co/tw84R5mi via @EsquireMag
• Mon, 23:21: Big Idea: Physicists Carve a Niche in Time http://t.co/LlPIcsl4

Comments

[threeoutside.livejournal.com]

OK, the piece about the XL pipeline hit a nerve. I worked in Nebraska environmental regulation for the State for 20 years. To be clear, I oppose the pipeline personally, too, mostly because I think it's an environmental disaster waiting to happen regardless where they put it, and on general principles: it's another death throe of the dinosaur oil industry. Let's move on from that dead horse, shall we?

But in Nebraska, which is the only place I know anything about, the ranchers and farmers have had the legislature in their pockets from the inception of statehood. Around 95% of the state's economy depends on agriculture, so of course that's important to the state. However, those same farmers and ranchers who are so concerned about the ground water NOW were the same ones who successfully kept the Legislature from legally recognizing the connection between ground and surface water SINCE THE BEGINNING OF NEBRASKA. Only about twenty years ago did the legislature at long last acknowledge legally that what you do to the surface water, you do to the ground water, and vice-versa. You should have heard the screams.

A little more than 20 years ago, there was a study done in the Nebraska Sandhills to determine how much nitrate fertilizer they could put on corn crops before it would sink down through the sand and contaminate the aquifer. The scientific conclusion: zero. Virtually any fertilizer put on those sand soils goes straight down into the ground water. (That was pretty obvious to anybody with a brain; one of the big reasons they fought that legal recognition from my previous paragraph.) But the scientific conclusion was fuzzed up with all kinds of political backpedaling, and that form of the results never got published.

What I am saying is that these people have no business screaming and crying about how "the government" is selling them out. Particularly in environmental regulation, the agencies charged with developing regulatory programs around Unicameral-passed (and watery at birth) laws have had their hands tied from the get-go BY THE SAME PEOPLE WHO ARE NOW WAILING about it.

In my daydreams I get to walk up to these idiots and scream in their faces "Be careful what you ask for asshole!"

Yes, nefarious things are taking place. No, I don't want the damned thing, either. But the stench of Hypocrisy chokes me.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this background. It's the sort of information that a reporter would need to dig deep for, and it doesn't fit the narrative of "conservative farmer working with actvist environmentalists to stop the pipeline."

[threeoutside.livejournal.com]

Yes, and that's why I lost all faith in "journalists" a long time ago. They have no idea what they're doing, what questions to ask, what people to ask them of. When they do get to someone with something real to say, they either ignore them entirely or distort and "sound bite" the truth out of any coherence. None of them know how to dig for a story any more. The Fourth Estate has totally let this country down.