[Vision2020] What I learned (aka thinking v. self-deceipt)

[Pat Kraut]

Wow Phil...this is a lot of info!
Thanks


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Phil Nisbet" <pcnisbet1 at hotmail.com>
To: <m1e2y3e4 at moscow.com>
Cc: <vision2020 at moscow.com>
Sent: Monday, January 30, 2006 10:51 AM
Subject: RE: [Vision2020] What I learned (aka thinking v. self-deceipt)


I need to reply to something that is obviously directed at me.  It interests
me that Jim does not seem aware that I have been working in the minerals
industry, including a not inconsiderable few years spent underground.

Jim tells us;

"Are you a thinking person? You know, the kind of person that is
introspective enough to test his/her own thoughts and prejudices when
confronted with a differing truth. Can you really THINK? "

So Phil replies;

Reading your response below I would have to question your ability to think
and not to act in a highly partisan fashion that makes little or no sense
when looking at facts objectively.  As per your Emory study, your reward
center must be lit up like a Christmass Tree when you ead a Molly Ivins
article.

Jim writes..

"What I learned recently is that two die-hard Republicans on V2020 believe
Molly Ivins is an idiot--as is anyone who would even consider her thoughts
is an idiot, as evidenced by both their initial comments--"Are you kidding?"
and then by their avoidance of addressing the questions Molly asks, and one
of them even  going so far as to put words in her mouth she didn't say and
then discounting them."

And I reply;

Molly is a partisan who does not care for inconvenient truths.  And I do
have a name Jim, you can use it.  And you would have nothing to write the
rest of the post with had I not address the issue of Molly not dealing with
the facts.  Now care to tell us all what words were placed in Molly Ivins
mouth?

Jim then presents things he thinks are facts;

"Well, here here are the facts about mine safety as I can discern them."

I reply;

Yes Jim, you have very little knowledge of mines or mine safety, which makes
your discernment of the subject pretty weak and based upon research that is
not very detailed.

Jim Fact #1

"--Under the Bush Administration, since 2001, fines have been routinely
dismissed or diminished--one example is $450,000 being reduced to $3000."

And the real fact

Mine safety violation fines were reduced under Clinton as well  Companies
have often pitched such fines to their Senators, the most powerful of whom
is Sen. Byrd of West Virginia.  Total fines and violations have not
decreased between the two administration  What has changed is that under
Clinton, the US Bureau of Mines was destroyed and the $100,000,000 a year in
funding for mine safety research was taken with it.  The USBM was the agency
which came up with new mine safety devices and also with new mine safety
regulations, MSHA was and is solely the enforcement group.  So since 1996,
there have been no new ideas in Mine Safety.  St Molly of Fort Worth was the
person who lead the charge to do in the US Bureau of Mines, something you
seem to have conveniently forgotten.

Jim Fact 2

"--Under the Bush Administration, the requirement to have two shafts, one
for the miners ventilation and one for the coal conveyor has been
unenforced."

The real facts

First, please provide any evidence for your statement there.  The
requirement for a separate man way is standard.  Care to provide any proof
that MSHA did not enforce that requirement?  If you are referencing the most
recent mine fire, the conveyor was in a separate drift and there were
numerous other manways.  Frankly I doubt you would know a shaft from an adit
from a decline from a drift or a crosscut or be able to tell stopes from
longwall cuts.  Further, ventilation is not something that shafts provide,
shafts are the means of enterence and exit from a mine working and
ventilation is provided most often by ducting in the various adits and
shafts of a mine.

Jim Facts 3, 4, 5 ect

"--That it is considerably cheaper to pay for a dead miner than pay for all
miner's safety. It costs $20 each for a personal pager sized device that can
locate a miner in the mine. It is made in Australia, by the way. It costs
about $800 for a text messaging device that can allow those outside the mine
to communicate with trapped miners. These items were not in use at the Sago
mine. The company owning the Sago Mine paid for the equivalent of pine box
funeral and made Cobra insurance payments for, I believe 1 & 1/2 years for
the family members of killed miners. The family members also receive
$150,000 or $300,000 in life insurance payments. That is it. If you do the
math, you can see that it is less costly to pay for killed miners than it is
to pay for their safety."

Line of sight devices do not work underground.  You can equip every single
miner with a pager and it will do absolutely nothing for locating them if
they are not within your line of sight.  Transmission of signals
communication through hundreds to thousands of feet of solid rock using a
tiny device is simply not going to happen.  The US Bureau of Mines was
working on devices that could do that kind of job, but the scrapping of the
complete Agency did tend to do in the potential to get devices designed and
tested.

As for the Australian device that you reference, it is brand new.  The PED
and Tracker system requires more than simply putting a pager on each miner.
Frankly it's a good idea, but it was not even approved for use in the US
until about a month prior to the Sago Mine disaster and it is not mandated
by MSHA or required by the UMW.  The Australians are just now installing all
the equipment as are the New Zealanders and the company involved in the
systems design is now looking at selling it into Japan.  Of course the
Aussies were just following through with the ideas and the preliminary work
that the US Bureau of Mines had going back in 1993-6 and all of the Sago
Miners would have had a US made device had the R & D on it not been wiped
out by the Clinton Administration, but who the heck is counting.  You can
send a nice thank you letter to Molly Ivins for being such a big supporter
of doing in the USBM's on that one.

As for the pay outs from the International Coal Group, you are totally all
wet.  First, they have a policy for $5,000 in funeral expenses, which is
considerably more than a pine box.  Next, in addition to the $300,000 in
life insurance, each family is getting over $300,000 from the company for
education of their minor children and support for their widows.  The company
is also paying the families the lost miner's wages for a two years
readjustment period and is honoring the pension clauses that the men had in
their contracts, so that the widows will get a retirement income.  You do
the math, because it's considerably more than the sum you suggest.

ICG lost 12 men with a lot of experience, had a mine hit by lightening that
blew up, lost infrastructure and a lot of production capacity.  They also
sprang a lot of money for the mine rescue operation.  All told, they are out
tens of millions of dollars.  Now please try to convince me that they were
not interested in seeing the mine operated such that it would not blow up
and that they would not lose money by the ream.  Having your mine blown to
kingdom come is something any company wants to avoid, yet you are suggesting
that somehow they would allow it to be liable to explode at the drop of a
hat.  Ideological blinders and your reward sensor hitting overload have to
be at play on that one.

Jim strange facts;

"--Although mine deaths have gone down over 30 years, it needs to be taken
into account that the numbers of underground miners has gone done
dramatically also, probably by more than 1/2."

And this is a bad thing?  If there had been a dramatic increase in Mine
related fatalities since the Bush Administration came into office you might
have something to talk about, but the fatality rate has been steady state
for close to a decade.  It might have fallen further had the US Bureau of
Mines not been wiped off the map.

Jim yet stranger factoid;

"--That since 2001, federal mine safety regulators emphasized getting along
with the company--not miner safety."

Are you totally unaware that this policy was put in place under Clinton?  As
a matter of fact, the numbers of mine health and safety violations and
citations has not decreased, so they are still inspecting as much as under
Clinton/Gore, they are simply resolving the issues, working for compliance
rather than working to increase the fines.  Is the objective in your eyes to
have miners get a safer work place?  Or is it to collect money?  Because
collecting lots of fines does not make for a safer work place, but demanding
compliance does.

And then Jim has this strange "fact";

"--That like Katrina, some questionable people, closely related to industry,
were in positions affecting mine safety, one of those being an OSHA head."

Name one person appointed by Bush who actually has anything to do with MINE
safety that you think is questionable.  You see OSHA has nothing to do with
underground mine safety and not one regulator at MSHA fits your supposed
bill of indictment.  It's extremely disingenuous to suggest that an
unrelated agency head with no authority for underground mine safety might be
conflicted in the Sago Mine disaster.


Then Jim Notes;

"In other words, Molly Ivins asked perfectly reasonable questions and these
were entirely dismissed by some of you on V2020. I guess your reward center
must be just glowing."

I can only reply;

No Jim, in other words your knee jerk support for the kinds of falsehoods
that Molly spreads has your little pleasure centers humming and lighting up
the boards.

And then Jim gives us advice;

"By the way, the CSPAN website has the Senate Appropriations Mine Safety
subcommittee hearings on it. Do what I did, listen to that and then do a
little research on your own. And then think (without the usual emotion)."

Good advice, you really should start to do research and not rely on
propaganda so much.  Try starting with basic references like what a mine is
and work your way up to reading what MSHA had to actually say about why the
accident occurred.  You might just find out a little something that does not
fit into your ideology driven agenda.  In the mean time try not to think you
can teach your grandma how to suck eggs.

Phil Nisbet



>From: Jim Meyer <m1e2y3e4 at moscow.com>
>To: vision2020 at moscow.com
>Subject: [Vision2020] What I learned (aka  thinking v. self-deceipt)
>Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 07:27:44 -0800
>
>Are you a thinking person? You know, the kind of person that is
>introspective enough to test his/her own thoughts and prejudices when
>confronted with a differing truth. Can you really THINK?
>
>"Emory University psychologist Drew Weston has found that our brains have a
>convenient way of processing facts that challenge our political
>convictions. Using MRI scanners, Weston found that when committed
>Republicans and Democrats were confronted with negative information about
>politicians they supported, the parts of the brain responsible for
>reasoning essentially shut down--and "emotion circuits" lit up. As the
>subjects dealt with their inner conflict by discounting the new
>information, the brains "reward centers" lit up--a response similar to what
>addicts experience when they get a fix. Biases can be overcome, Weston
>tells The New York Times, but only if people are willing to engage in
>"ruthless self-reflection"--a quality , he notes, that's "rarely talked
>about in politics." Nor is it likely to be. It's so much more rewarding to
>close our minds"  The Week, Feb 3rd 2006.
>
>What I learned recently is that two die-hard Republicans on V2020 believe
>Molly Ivins is an idiot--as is anyone who would even consider her thoughts
>is an idiot, as evidenced by both their initial comments--"Are you
>kidding?" and then by their avoidance of addressing the questions Molly
>asks, and one of them even  going so far as to put words in her mouth she
>didn't say and then discounting them.
>
>Well, here here are the facts about mine safety as I can discern them.
>--Under the Bush Administration, since 2001, fines have been routinely
>dismissed or diminished--one example is $450,000 being reduced to $3000.
>
>--Under the Bush Administration, the requirement to have two shafts, one
>for the miners ventilation and one for the coal conveyor has been
>unenforced.
>
>--That it is considerably cheaper to pay for a dead miner than pay for all
>miner's safety. It costs $20 each for a personal pager sized device that
>can locate a miner in the mine. It is made in Australia, by the way. It
>costs about $800 for a text messaging device that can allow those outside
>the mine to communicate with trapped miners. These items were not in use at
>the Sago mine. The company owning the Sago Mine paid for the equivalent of
>pine box funeral and made Cobra insurance payments for, I believe 1 & 1/2
>years for the family members of killed miners. The family members also
>receive $150,000 or $300,000 in life insurance payments. That is it. If you
>do the math, you can see that it is less costly to pay for killed miners
>than it is to pay for their safety.
>
>--Although mine deaths have gone down over 30 years, it needs to be taken
>into account that the numbers of underground miners has gone done
>dramatically also, probably by more than 1/2.
>
>--That since 2001, federal mine safety regulators emphasized getting along
>with the company--not miner safety.
>
>--That like Katrina, some questionable people, closely related to industry,
>were in positions affecting mine safety, one of those being an OSHA head..
>
>In other words, Molly Ivins asked perfectly reasonable questions and these
>were entirely dismissed by some of you on V2020. I guess your reward center
>must be just glowing.
>
>By the way, the CSPAN website has the Senate Appropriations Mine Safety
>subcommittee hearings on it. Do what I did, listen to that and then do a
>little research on your own. And then think (without the usual emotion).
>
>Jim Meyer
>
>
>
>
>
>
>_____________________________________________________
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>communities of the Palouse since 1994.                 http://www.fsr.net
>                              mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
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_____________________________________________________
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 serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
               http://www.fsr.net
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