I give a biased but, I hope, interesting report of what happened this past week in the OSE hearing on opposition to the transfer of water rights for use at Copper Flat Mine. PAWA and the Ladder Ranch presented their cases.
The State Engineer’s Hearing of the protests against the mine’s application to move leased water rights to their wells for use at Copper Flat Mine has now finished its first week. It has yielded some surprises as well as some really excellent research.
The State Engineer's hearing of the protests against the application to transfer water rights to be used for reopening Copper Flat Mine will begin tomorrow. Here is an explanation of how that process will work.
A gleam in George Lotspeich's eye created the idea of Copper Flat Mine in the 1950s, and over the years, he was able to make millions with that idea, but not from mining copper. For over 70 years, it's been just that, an idea and not a mine.
I return to the idea of entropy, this time as a measure of the increasing randomness in the universe, and I relate this increase to our gradual loss of social cohesion under the influence of individualism, to the breakdown of language in our culture, and to our carelessness about Covid.
I continue my look at the sources of our present cultural impasse by examining in detail the incompatibility between an egalitarian democracy and individualism by examining the notions of rights and choice and how non-democratic hierarchies promote individualism.
New Mexico in coordination with the US Geological Society look for "critical minerals" at Copper Flat Mine in an effort to expand mining.
The exposition of recent changes in reading and writing leads to this excursion on a breakdown of what we used to think was the social function of language. That postulate is discussed by analyzing the comments to this series of articles as symptomatic of that breakdown.
I've weighed the way three institutions have historically unshaped our idea of democracy as a model of human relations. I now turn to look at how these cultural tendencies impact public discourse and our apparent inability to settle any public issue.
The validation of a personal, individualistic point of view in American culture to the exclusion of an objective, shared, and collective perspective constantly puts us at odds with one another because individuals normally disagree in judgement, interpretations, and opinions.
Continuing my discussion of our turn towards individual points of view to the exclusion of larger concerns, I propose that in the last half century, American education has focused on student subjectivity pushing the culture towards individuation rather than cohesion.
Continuing the series "Assaying Entropy," I continue to develop a description of how the original idea of democracy in America was altered due to the influence of undemocratic structures. The last essay dealt with corporate hierarchy. In the present piece, I discuss the military influence, militarism, and the frontier mentality.