Enter the bomb cyclone(s)
November 24, 2024
Yearling mule deer buck, in the rain-soaked gloaming Friday evening…
The gyre of storms is not just in the atmosphere
Where I live, in the inland Northwest, the transition from mid-October to mid-November is swift and dramatic. I still have tan lines on my legs from blue-skied, October swims in the river. But, now, instead of a bathing suit under my shorts, I’m wearing blue jeans and, above the pants, a raincoat over a down vest to try to stay warm and dry. Instead of photographing trout, I’m on the trail of mule deer and the hyperactive, over-wintering birds that glean for bugs and seeds.
I look down a lot. Not because I’m depressed (though there is some of that going on, after November 5th) but because I have two bad knees. I’m usually walking on the talus of fractured basalt where one mis-step can send me sprawling, or doing further damage to my knees and/or ankles. In that mode, I can’t help but notice the explosion of life beneath my boots, the rapid emergence of lichens, mosses, and new sprouts of green grass taking off after the steady rains and wet snow of the past couple weeks, including over an inch of rain, just in the past 24 hours.
“Have you seen the satellite images?” my son asked me a few days ago, referring to the tightly spinning “bomb cyclone” off the northern Pacific coast, launching one deluge after another. I had of course, as I check the satellite images frequently to try to time my bike rides and hikes. The meteorological bomb cyclone—though it has caused flooding and power outages on the west side of the Cascades—is actually far less destructive than the human vortex churned out by the rogue’s gallery of our politics, what with a new fist-bumping administration of Trump-bros closing in with its promises of mass firings and “retribution” in store.
That said, I’d be remiss to ignore the local and the positive that—admid the national maelstrom—may not get the media attention they deserve. Last week I wrote about a Monday evening presentation in Airway Heights by Alissa Cordner, a professor at Whitman College. She is also one of the leaders of a national project to help raise public awareness of the PFAS contamination problem and empowering communities—like that on the West Plains of Spokane County—to respond to the threats the toxic, long-lived chemicals pose to water and food. The event she spoke at didn’t just happen out of thin air. It was the result of what is now a two-year-old wave of community action—largely through the nascent West Plains Water Coalition—to organize, educate themselves, and press federal, state, and local officials to take remedial and enforcement actions.
Under the circumstances, that part of it has been a remarkable success, especially since the Washington Department of Ecology became engaged (i.e. filing an enforcement action against the recalcitrant Spokane International Airport after a citizen public records request revealed substantial PFAS in SIA groundwater). Ecology has also provided a public participation grant to the coalition, funds for which enabled the video of Ms. Cordner’s presentation last Monday (below.) The agency is working in partnership both with the community and sister state agencies (most notably the Department of Health) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s regional office of emergency response.
Stories worth following—
(A) The former librarian who has Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s number
If the arc of the moral universe still bends, however crookedly, toward justice it will be because of people like Brandy Zadrozny. Zadrozny is a former librarian and mother of three whose data driven journalism (she know works for NBC News, covering “politics, tech, and extremism”) led her increasingly into investigations of conspiracy theorists. Her investigations include, as it turns out, a man with a very prominent name, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.. Kennedy declared his candidacy for President in April of 2023, only to withdraw his name and throw his support to Donald Trump in August of this year. On November 15th, President-elect Trump announced he would appoint Kennedy to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny
Zadrozny is known for her scrupulous data gathering and fact-checking. In 2015 she was working at The Daily Beast when the publication’s editor asked her to fact-check an essay Kennedy submitted for publication. This was at a time when Kennedy (apparently with a new interest in holding political office) was trying to curb his growing reputation as a staunch opponent of vaccination—an anti-vaxxer. Zadrozny picked up the story with Pod Save America’s Tommy Vieter that aired five days ago. (It is 58 minutes into the podcast).
“It was given to me to fact check,” she told Vieter, “And so I fact checked it. He had tons of footnotes in the bottom. I called the people who had written the studies that provided the footnotes and they were like, this person's crazy. ‘No, that's not what my research says. And furthermore, don't put my name in this 'cause I'm afraid that his minions on the internet are gonna reach out and harass me.’ That was 2015. So he's been wanting to say that he's not an anti-vaxxer for a long time. He can say it forever and it's just not true.”
Zadrozny subsequently had several interviews with Kennedy and she shares that experience in the conversation with Vieter.
As part of a three-part series published here, at the Rhubarb, last January, Audrey covered a piece of it in recounting how her father (cough, that would be me) introduced her to RFK, Jr., when he visited Spokane in 2011. She felt unsettled by his demeanor and wrote about her unease at the time. Audrey was prescient, and in her piece last January, she cited RFK Jr.’s lethal visit to Samoa (midway between Australia and Hawaii) in 2019. Months before Kennedy’s visit to the south Pacific islands, two children died when nurses inadvertently mixed a muscle relaxant with their vaccine doses. As the Associated Press reported in a 2023 exposé on the damage done by Kennedy’s anti-vax activism, RFK Jr. leveraged that tragedy to discourage measles vaccination among Samoans. A few months later, 83 Samoans (most infants and children) died in a measles outbreak.
Kennedy is a charlatan.
Several close members of the Kennedy family have denounced him, as have several of the nation’s most prominent environmental organizations, with whom Kennedy used to be allied.
He is also a cad.
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