buffaloridgeblog

No sooner had the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party (DFL) won back both houses of the legislature, gotten moved in, and gaveled the bodies into session, the whining from the republicans began: “the DFL is overreaching!”

We’re in the easter recess, essentially half time in the legislative process, and a good time to see if any of this “overreach” by the legislators of our partisan parties has occurred. A bunch of “wish list” bills were dumped in the hopper by DFLers, mandating things like quotas of expensive solar energy that actually had me a bit concerned. Last couple weeks the deadlines for bills to make it through committees passed, and those bills seem to be dead for the session. The major target of the GOP legislators’ ire, the marriage equality amendment, made it past the committee deadlines but appears to be on the back burner… And the GOP have only themselves to blame for that issue resurfacing, being that when they were in command they dredged it up, forgot about most everything else, and threw it before the voters who shot their anti-marriage amendment down. And despite being in the minority, the GOP legislators have done their best to clog the hopper with a bunch of “cut ‘n’ paste” bills from the rabidly conservative Koch brothers ALEC. In the exception that proves the rule, I did find one GOP bill that actually answered a real need in non partisan fashion, and the DFL leadership rewarded it by passing it out of committee.  

Meanwhile, unlike the GOPers who march in lockstep, the DFLers are in the best tradition of the party debating amongst themselves- on the eve of easter recess the DFL governor dropped a new budget proposal with cuts in human services funding that isn’t receiving the warmest reception from a lot of DFLers. So on the Minnesota side of the Buffalo Ridge,  if there has been any overeach it’s been to pick up a heavy serving plate on the other end of the table to bring it closer and fill the plate of a child or elder with less strength and reach.

Overreach in Iowa’s been sorta difficult, being as the voters couldn’t decide who to let run the state and gave the presidency to Barack, evenly split their congressional seats, gave the governorship to the GOP, and gave each party a statehouse. The Dakotas are another matter, but first a plug for a couple blogs from the west end of the Buffalo Ridge that cover politics and a lot more much better than the often comatose local media- http://www.madvilletimes.com in SD and http://www.northdecoder.com in ND. Reading these two most excellent blogs we find that the GOP super majorities in the Dakota’s legislatures have been working hard to give their states to big business as quickly as they can pump the oil out of the ground and fill armored cars with tax dollars to “reward” businesses that were gonna come to their states anyway to take advantage of all the federally funded infrastructure there like I-29 and cheap hydropower. In the breaks between passing ALEC’s whole kit and kaboodle of big business giveaways, the Dakota’s GOP legislators have been competing to see who can pass the most regressive social legislation. It’s gotten to the point that a comedy hoax story that the NoDak GOPers were going to outlaw thongs got taken seriously. South Dakota’s GOPers matched that by being the one and only legislature in the country to take the NRA’s armed “School Sentinels” plan seriously and pass enabling legislation. Now the Dakotas already seem to be a sex offender sanctuary, and any school district in the state can now give any sex offender that doesn’t pop up on a sketchy records search carte blanche to walk about the schools, armed to the teeth. Heck, they can even buy ‘em the gun and pay ‘em if they want to!

So when it comes to the “legislative overreach” the Minnesota DFLers are like the small college team that cheerfully loses almost every game. The GOP legislatures of the Dakotas are clearly in a whole ‘nother league… Overreach? Heck, they’re workin’ overtime with the biggest backhoe made with the “extendahoe” option and an 80 feet extension of oil pipe welded onto that! 

This morning representative Karen Clark, who represents an inner city district in Minneapolis, presented her Marriage Equality bill to a committee of the Minnesota House. With reserved dignity she succinctly introduced her bill, then stepped aside to allow citizens to offer their testimony on the legislation. Karen’s an old pro at this, having been raised and schooled in Rock County on the Buffalo Ridge and served her district for going on four decades. 

Like her parents on the Buffalo Ridge, Karen’s a family farmer as well, founding an apple farm that became the Women’s Environmental Institute. She’s also served as a nurse before becoming a legislator, and in the little time her legislative duties don’t take she works as an educator. Again, she carries on the traditional values of the Buffalo Ridge, with farmers, nurses, and teachers being highly valued professions here for over a century. Another of our historic Buffalo Ridge values is commitment to family, and Karen has fufilled that requirement with extra credit with her four decade long committed relationship with partner family farmer and teacher Jacqueline Zeta. 

So why is a favorite daughter of the Buffalo Ridge living in the big city?

The ugly constitutional amendment that would have banned the recognition of Karen and Jacqueline’s relation by marriage was wisely shot down statewide, garnering but 47% of the vote. But in Rock County where Karen was raised it won 73% of the vote. Is it any wonder that gays are fleeing Rock County? Is it any wonder that despite becoming a virtual suburb of booming Sioux Falls, Rock County’s population isn’t growing?

Thank you Rock County for giving us Karen Clark… And if you don’t want to loose your gay kids and their numerous allies to the big city, get with the program and support marriage equality! 

It’s silly season (the legislative session) at the Minnesota state capital. The democrats AKA the adults in the room are (thankfully) in the majority, and the governor is a democrat too. That means if you’re one of the minority republicans and you want to accomplish anything, you compromise and work with the democrats and they listen to your ideas and incorporate some of them into the laws they pass. Sort of like keeping the standard mufflers on your motorcycle so you don’t tick off the neighbors and have them ban your loud motorcycle from the neighborhood.

Before the Minnesota house today is House File 5, a bill to set up a Minnesota Health insurance Marketplace. Basically it’s a federal compliance bill, required when the feds change their law and the states have to change theirs to avoid conflict with the new federal law. Such federal compliance bills used to be routine, uncontroversial, and passed quickly and unanimously.

But like the old guy on the Harley he can barely hold up, revving the engine to make sure we can all hear it thanks to it’s barely muffled exhaust, the republican representatives are loudly exhausting their bile just to remind everyone that they’re still around… I hear tell they’ll be offering a mere couple hundred amendments to the aforementioned federal compliance bill today and tonight. and after all the loud histrionics and theatrics from the republicans, they’ll all vote against the bill and it’ll pass anyway.

As a party, the republicans are tied to pretty much the same failed marketing strategy as Harley. Harley’s stock in trade is some tired old motorcycles badly in need of a 21st century redesign. Thus no surprise that Harleys are slow, unreliable, overheat, and none too durable. Case in point- while watching the republican’s noisy theatrics on Pioneer Public TV, I’m doing an overdue valve clearance check on a 2007 BMW F800S with 52,000 miles on the odometer. At that mileage a Harley is overdue for at least a valve job if not a full-on engine rebuild, but the BMW’s modern overhead cam engine’s valves are still within new specs and needed no adjustment. Heck, startin’ to wonder why I bother to check ‘em! I did replace the spark plugs, old ones were still within specs but I had the new ones handy so may as well put ‘em to work.  No wonder Harley is losing sales and laying off workers, while BMW and the other purveyors of 21st century motorcycles are recovering quite nicely from the depression.

The paranoia is similar too… While I fuel up on E30 at the blender pump, the Harley riders have ridden out of their way to find a station with ethanol free gas and paid a half buck a gallon extra for that 100% dead dinosaur swill. In similar display of paranoia, Representative Swedinski (R-Crazytown) introduced an amendment that would prohibit the Insurance Exchange from releasing information they’re not even collecting on gun ownership. Works just as well as the overpriced dead dinosaur swill, which still pings in the Harley’s ancient engine while the BMW with it’s 12 to 1 compression smoothly delivers 60 MPG on the cheaper 89 octane regular.

Harley and the republicans share a similar dying demographic too, with the average age of a Harley rider rising around 10 months every year. That means that neither Harley nor the republicans will joins the dinosaurs in extinction immediately, though their numbers will decrease and decibel level will probably increase. Probably was similar with the T-Rex, who the scientists who have researched their “straight pipe” vocal tracks assure us could be heard for miles. No doubt the dinosaurs protested loudly as climate change did them in, and barring some sudden evolution in Harley’s motorcycles or the republican’s platform, they have a similar date with extinction.

My sympathies to all the democratic legislators, staffers, and press who have to endure the republican’s political death throes, fortunately legislative TV coverage will end at 6 p.m. and save me from their noisy nonsense for the night.

The way the republican congresscritters from the Buffalo Ridge and beyond tell it, the federal government is a bloated jobs program and all the sequester shrunken legions of feds will have to do to keep up is to cut their lunch hours to two and reduce their recreational web surfing a bit. This from a congress that works a four day week at best, takes a week off for most every holiday, and knocks off for the whole month of august! The reality for most feds is a harried workday (or night) struggling to put out fires (sometimes literally) and trying to serve the public in understaffed agencies.

Interestingly, a lot of these republican critics come from states that are rather severely dependent on the federal government and federal workers. States and places here on the Buffalo Ridge like the Dakotas, Republican Steve King’s congressional district in western Iowa, and southwestern Minnesota which fortunately has the benefit of rural savvy democratic congressional representation. Unlike the metro’s, this is a rural region where the invisible departments like Agriculture and Interior affect our everyday lives in significant ways.

Out here, farming and food processing are the major industries, so let’s follow the food cycle from planting to supermarket to see how the sequester will cut deep. Today the fields are covered in a lovely blanket of white, but in a few weeks it’ll be time to plant. But what day is best? Farmers rely on the National Weather Service for accurate forecasts and gigabites of other info like soil temperature and moisture statistics to time their plantings. As sequester cuts deep, Weather Service offices in places like Aberdeen are likely to close and the vital stats buried in the Weather Services website may well disappear. Republicans will say farmers can just tune to the weather channel instead, but the weather channel and their ilk just repackage Weather Service data and add their sensationalistic dramatics… For a farmer, they’re useless. And what to plant? Farming today is intensely data driven, and the Agriculture department supplies most of that data, for now.

OK, we got the planting done, how about the livestock? Well, those reams and endless web pages of statistical guidance  may disappear at any time, but you can bet the big packinghouses will have their own stats to take advantage of you.  But the packinghouses will go intermittently silent as Agriculture Department inspectors are laid off, and with no inspector the packinghouse shuts down. As I write, no doubt everyone in the frozen food logistics chain is reserving more warehouse space to get them through the unpredictable production schedules trimmed by sequester. In a town like Marshall, Minnesota where Schwans, the turkey plant, and the university are the major employers, intermittent layoffs of a few inspectors cascade into massive layoffs of workers. Those layoffs cascade through the economy as workers quit going out for dinner and put off purchases, and pretty quick our food based rural economy isn’t recession proof anymore.

And with the frost out of the ground, the construction season starts… But maybe not in this season of sequester, as DOT cuts funding for badly needed transportation projects and Agriculture cuts home loans and infrastructure improvements they fund. And even if the funding comes in July or so, the projects won’t get finished and we’ll be driving on half finished dirt roads past foundations without houses all next winter.  And that’s just the beginning- Shipments of urgently needed tractor parts and foods headed to export will be delayed at understaffed border crossings and closed airports, national parks and forests will close during peak tourist season, social security applications will be delayed, federal education funding will be cut, and a thousand civilian Defense Department employees in South Dakota alone will be laid off. In a state with a workforce of only 300,000 or so the direct loss of a thousand employees is a lot, and given the usual follow-on loss of a couple thousand more jobs dependent on those thousand Defense jobs, the sequester will ratchet  South Dakota’s unemployment rate up by a full percent. In North Dakota the republican state administration there thinks the booming Bakken oil economy can overwhelm the sequester cuts, forgetting that Interior Department cutbacks will delay oil leases, exploration, and drilling. With the rig count in the Bakken having peaked and fallen, sequester will cut deep into the Bakken boom.

Add it all up, multiply by a few months, and the sequester’s deep cuts equal a recession… And we’re still not fully recovered from the last one!

On the tracks barely 100 yards from my home a steady parade of 100+ car unit trains of crude oil from the Bakken pass by each day and night. Yup, over a hundred 25,000 gallon or so tank car loads, amounting to a “mere” couple million gallons of oil in each unit train. Everyone has seen at one time or another horrific pictures of what a spilled 6,000 gallon tanker truck can do in the way of pollution and hopefully not conflagration. What’s passing barely a hundred yards from my house is 400 tankerloads in one train, and several of those trains a day.

Now the railroad, BNSF, does a damn good job of keepin’ up the tracks- they are literally out there every day and sometimes into the night maintaining the rails and the signals and such. Same with the engineers and conductors and dispatchers- they’re the best! They have to be- get caught speeding or running a red light on the railroad and it’s a 30 day suspension, do it again and you’re fired. And  from what I’ve heard, the railroad would really rather not be hauling Hazmat, but as a common carrier they have to.

And despite all those precautions, derailments and other accidents still happen. Over the last couple days BNSF’s main line across northern Montana was shut down by a derailment, and UP had a frac sand train derail east of St.Paul. Both accidents produced no injuries  with few cars derailing and the tracks were quickly cleared and repaired. But sometimes whole trains derail and cars get split open. That’s the worse case scenario with most of a couple million gallons of crude oil spilled along the tracks. Up here on the ridge the streams are small and steep and would quickly be flooded with oil. A couple million gallons of oil is more than our little volunteer fire departments can handle, and we’re hours away from the big cleanup specialists that would have any hope of containing a couple million gallons of crude, never mind clean up said crude. If the spill went into our landlocked Twin Lakes they’d be destroyed, if the spill entered the Redwood or Rock Rivers they’d be running black and dead within hours for miles downriver. Couple days and the Minnesota or Missouri would be polluted for months.

That’s if were lucky and all that crude oil don’t catch fire. Fortunately oil doesn’t get all gas and easily flamable like gasoline and other lighter oil refinery products, but it’ll burn if it finds enough heat and flame. And while the fire wouldn’t propagate at the speed a gas would, a couple million gallons will burn up a pretty good sized area and  create an inhalation hazard over an even bigger area. Now the rail line I’m on doesn’t pass through a whole lot of major metro areas, but it does pass through several medium sized cities of up to a hundred thousand or so population. Now imagine that derailment and couple million gallon spill and inferno happens in the middle of one of those bigger cities, at 3 in the morning?

That’s why oil belongs in pipelines, which have the best safety record of any method of transporting flammable liquids. But the big city environmentalist groups want to shut down oil production, and the arrogant oil and pipeline companies think they can drill “everywhere now” with impunity. Thus needed pipelines aren’t getting built and trainloads of flammable crude threaten our rural countryside. Meanwhile, we’re paying a premium for diesel fuel out here and supply is tight during harvest season due to insufficient pipeline capacity.

What we need is environmental groups and oil companies that will climb down from their uncompromising positions and make reasonable compromises… Like allowing new common carrier pipelines while restricting greenhouse gas emissions to keep the dirtiest tar sands oil in the ground ’til we develop cleaner ways to extract them

seou.

It’s not widely advertised, but about this time every winter a gathering of BMW “Airhead” motorcycles and their enthusiasts occurs in Naples, Florida. It’s technically a “Tech Day”, but it’s grown far beyond that into “Tech days” and maybe even “tech daze” as more than a few airhead bikes are treated to everything from mere valve adjustments to full on rebuilds. That’s just the tech side- A lot of us just show up to socialize and never lay hands on a wrench. And with good weather forecast and the fact that Airheads attack food with all the subtlety and reserve of a flock of locusts just breaking an involuntary fast, it was time to lay in some supplies…

This presented some logistical dilemmas… My first inclination was to bring in a New Panamax shipload of supplies, but it turns out that when the creator was handing out natural features Tampa and Miami got the harbors and Naples got the beach, and Miami’s just gettin’ started on dredging out their pond to New Panamax depths. Plan B was to bring in a unit train of supplies- a couple carloads of triscuits, couple more of brownies, a few boxcars of disposable plates/parts trays, etc.. And of course several tank cars full of adult beverages! But sadly, the tracks to Naples were pulled up long ago. So maybe we hook together triple 53 foot trailerloads of supplies and sneak them in on I-75, and if the troopers stop us we say that we we’re headed for the turnpike and got lost, and we didn’t know they only allowed three little trailers on the turnpike? But looking at the fancy remote sensing devices they’ve put on I-75 to sense something or other suspicious, that plan wasn’t gonna fly. That’s it- Fly the supplies in… But try as they might, Naples’ airport can only handle “puddlejumper” class aircraft that even a junior vice president of a bankrupt corporation would sneer at. Well heck, if the drug smugglers can land DC3s on the two lanes in Golden Gate Estates, why not?… Well, turns out that DC3s are now too rare and valuable for drug smugglers, and all the old drug smugglers have been released and are comfortably retired.

That left us one alternative- a Costco run. After being distracted by tool boxes and floor jacks we overfilled a supersized Costco cart with supplies. That was just the first load of cups, “cutlery”, and such… The shopping for vittles ain’t even started yet! First arrivals are expected tomorrow, a good thing given that there’s an R100GS build and something like three transmission surgeries scheduled!

Stay tuned… the mechanical mayhem of the Naples Airhead Tech Days is about to begin!

‘Twas time for my annual migration south, especially given that the Minnesota motorcycling season ended with a cold snap and snow around the middle of December. Plan was to leave xmas day, but delayed by a freak blizzard in the Mississippi delta. Kudos to the National Weather Service and their excellent forecasts and the various states RWIS systems- I waited out the storms and had clear roads all the way.

None the less, still got a late almost 9 a.m. start due to the lengthy task of draining my house’s plumbing. Stopped in Mason City and Waterloo, IA to get some pix of abandoned Hostess Brands trucks…

Place was blown closed by snow, obviously been shut down for weeks. I suspect the first two, being 1994 and 1997 models, have a date with the metal monger. The last one, a 2000 model, is somewhat in demand as they’re the last cabover tractors sold in the U.S. After all that time wasting and two laning I called it a night in Hannibal after barely 500 miles.

Up early and sunup caught up with me on the way into St.Louis Was hoping for more Hostess trucks at their huge St.Louis bakery, reputedly a former aircraft factory designed so planes could be towed down I-70 to the airport… But all I found was a hundred or so fenced in step vans and no tractors. After that bit of unproductive “fishing”, and noting that I was getting behind schedule, I decide to skip the Memphis, Birmingham, and Columbus, Georgia bakeries and beat a path to the everglades. Hopped on I-64 then I-24 then I-75 and called it a night on the north side of Atlanta. Heavy holiday traffic driving like crazy, so 650 miles was enough.

Now generally I try to get through Atlanta before calling it a night, for obvious reasons. So I head south right through downtown at 6 a.m. expecting the worst… And fly through at posted + 4 mph whilst being passed by the locals on all sides! Apparently most of Atlanta took new years eve off, and they must have been partyin’ hardy that night! Headed south on I-75 I expected third world style driving at near NASCAR speeds, and was not disappointed… First prize goes to the clown with the beat up trailer toter pulling what looked to be his prized pulling tractor on a trailer with but one axle and them little “donut tires” who took great offense at my holding him to a mere 75 MPH for a few seconds before I could move to the right lane and let him resume his 80+ MPH pace. second place goes to the aged yuppie in the BMW 7 series who suddenly lost interest in passing the truck in the right lane and decided to exit stage right, darn near becoming a bumper ornament on said truck in the process. Innumerable honorable mentions goes to the guys with a plephora of everything from 400 HP+ chipped diesel pickups to beat up three and more decade old pickups with even tinier tires cruising at 80+ while said tiny tires lasted. The supposed professionals with CDLs weren’t doing much better, like the coal hauler that blew by at 80+… Somebody needs to tell him that the railroads have already won the coal hauling business, and they’re makin’ money at it too!

Thanks to the early start got to my steel shack on wheels by the everglades just as the sun set, didn’t even need a flashlight to turn on the water. Had to finally replace the 6 year old battery on the Buell, but she fired right up and I made a test ride to the gas station and back. One fork seal is leakin’ a bit though, but seems to ride OK, so far. Dragged the troublesome trailer out of the weeds (damn near disappeared) in preparation for fixing it’s nonstandard Chinese axle.

As always, the TDI did a great job, fuel mileage slightly improved to 42 MPG. Never went into limp mode and adequate power, so looks like my workaround of keeping revs below 3000 worked. Heck, went right up the 6% percent grades at a speed limit limited 65 MPH in top gear! A little vibration at 75 MPH, at 117k miles maybe I should get around to replacing the  original struts.

Gettin’ back into the Florida routine… Tech day weekend after next, BMW Winter Rally, ride the human (under)powered bike, explore around with the Buell, shop for more bikes and parts…