And for important St. Louis county business, we get this: http://bit.ly/1hZRrfx. Of course, as the story says, many local city councils and now the county have passed resolutions against any Polymet review. What bearing this has on the final process is questionable, of course.

But there are other important questions:

1: Why are local government, county and state officials acting as publicly funded lobbyists for  private, multinational backed mining firms?
2: How many of these officials have stock, or potential personal and business benefits. How about their friends and acquaintances?
3: How much other important business  and how many other alternatives  for economic development are ignored?

The Range is not alone in these problems; in fact, they are global in nature, and resource extraction based communities all have similar problems. But, the Range's problems are also historically specific to both mining and logging. The artificial boom of the 60's and 70's was a Potemkin village; built and operated at cost-plus, with feather-bedded workforces and rampant theft, the building and expansion construction booms were due to end. Following Herbert Stein's famous quote: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop,". The seniority system gave most of the jobs remaining to first wave baby-boomers, thus an entire generation left starting in the 1980's and we now see the results.

Desperate for the days of easy money, local officials now push for their and their friend's personal profit at the expense of everyone else and the natural environment. Using their publicly funded positions, they now spend our tax dollars and time forcing this and other projects down the public throat, all while feasting at the public trough, whether in pay or subsidies.

Synergy

There are several words that,when heard,  I  prepare my mental defenses: management consultant,  synergy, paradigm and workshop. I believe management consultants descend from the robber baron's coteries, those who used to servilely bring them coffee, cigars and provide handjobs. Now bereft of duties , they serve the masters by telling them and their workers what the boss wishes to hear in exchange for consultant pay and the right to hang out at hotels and write off meals as business expenses. With most consultants, I immediately reach for my pistol loaded with silver bullets and mallet and wooden stakes kept under my desk. Many workers of the last 20 years will recognize the word "synergy". The real translation is workers doing more with less so investors get more profit for doing nothing. "Paradigm", far from its natural habitat in epistemology, translates to "you can't do things like you used to with four workers and get paid; now you must do it with two and we are cutting your pay so I can get a third house on the Key's. By the way, coffee pots are banned to reduce overhead. You are now required to buy coffee from our machine."  Middle management loves workshops. They have a reason to still be employed as when asked what they do, they can reply "I am organizing the semi-annual workshop" and stay in hotels with their partner,shop and expense meals. They also get to use the words "paradigm" and "synergy", despite having missed them on a test in the lib ed critical thinking requirement class those years ago, in the age before online education when  students were forced to read and physics wasn't explained by an animated rabbit. The new paradigm is  talking monkeys watching screens and laughing at cats, spewing right wing slogans  and posting about gun rights while raging at the guy who just fired them and used the phrase "Under the new paradigm and to increase synergy, upper middle management has decided that to quiet worker dissatisfaction, we will decrease their pay and hire consultants to hold workshops and tell them how they can be happy by changing their paradigm".

Soon the new "paradigm" will be virtual weather, as climate warming will have made the world so inhospitable people will have to stay inside and "virtually encounter" the real world. Until the lightning hits their house and destroys their new paradigm, that is.

Yarnell Fire: A man made tragedy.

The overall incident map is here: http://www.inciweb.org/incident/map/3461/4/

The Yarnell fire and the Fire crew's deaths were a truly man made problem. Viewing the Glen llah subdivision, surrounded by a dry, rocky landscape, the vegetation is immediately against the houses, the entire area easily seen as firetrap in any fast moving fire.  A better name would be community based manslaughter, as these pictures show: http://goo.gl/maps/cqC2S.

The late Roger Kennedy, is his book "Wildfire and Americans"clearly explained the problem than I could ever hope to. 

The focus, most likely, will be on "safety errors" and "failures to follow protocol", rather than the underlying, fundamental question of " why is this community here?" and "what were its zoning requirements?", if any. Last, and never asked, of course, is "why were these people out fighting that fire in the first place?", other than to defend the undependable and get paid the relatively small amount they do.

The headlines already announce the tired shibboleth of "Community Mourns (add victim name here), but this case is an obvious absurdity. The place is in a firetrap, and the subdivision is a firetrap's firetrap. That is the real tragedy. These people were killed for no reason other than stupidity and development greed.