Dick

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column peaks and valleys

COSTLY DEADBEATS

BY DICK DORWORTH

“deadbeat” A person unable to pay his bills Someone of low financial standing An undesirable target for a sales pitch

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Above, top to bottom (photos taken Oct. 2): a female mallard duck paddles at Greenhorn pond. A Canada goose takes flight at the pond.

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Urban Dictionary

Photo by Theresa Orison

A squirrel goes nuts at Perkins Lake earlier this fall.

T h e W e e k ly S u n •

arlier this year, Idaho made deadbeat headlines around the world when the state legislature managed to cut off $16 million in federal funds to help Idaho track those who owe child-support payments and deduct those payments from their paychecks. But, according to Representatives Heather Scott of Blanchard and Sheryl Nuxoll of Cottonwood, among others, accepting such federal funds would possibly subject Idaho to ‘Sharia Law.’ So they feared.

So they thought. While it is probably impossible to untangle the knots of their fears and deadbeat thinking processes, the world press had a lot of fun reporting them.

The Daily Beast referred to Idaho as a “Haven for Deadbeat Dads” and headlined a story about Republicans bickering with Republicans over the issue “GOP to GOP: ‘Sharia Law’ Fearmongering Helping Deadbeat Dads.” Liberals Unite News Magazine headlined “Idaho Takes A Stand Against Sharia Law (And Child Support Payments).” If Scott, Nuxoll and the Idaho Legislature were sincerely interested in deadbeat accountability, a mirror would suffice. But they’re not, as evidenced by the fact that Idaho’s entire enviCourtesy photo ronment and economy is severely impacted by Dick Dorworth is a Blaine County four of the largest, most resident, author and former world expensive deadbeats in record holder for speed on skis. western America living Visit his website and blog at dicknext door in Washing- dorworth.com. ton. They are far more worthy of taking a stand against than the obsessed fantasy of Sharia Law governing Idaho.

The biggest of the four is 3,791 feet wide and 100 feet tall and goes by the name of Lower Monumental Dam. It is certainly monumental, a monumental deadbeat at the center (sic) of what Idaho Rivers United (IRU) terms “…one of the country’s biggest ongoing environmental boondoggles.” The other, slightly smaller deadbeat dams are known as Lower Granite, Little Goose and Ice Harbor. These and other deadbeat dams have turned the once vital, healthy Snake River into a putrid mix of canals and squalid reservoirs that cost taxpayers millions of dollars every year and, more significantly, have destroyed large swaths of Idaho’s environment and wildlife.

Two hundred years ago between 5 and 8 million wild adult salmon returned each year from the Pacific Ocean to the Snake River. An estimated 25,000 to 35,000 sockeye salmon made it 900 miles and 6,500 vertical feet to Redfish Lake each year, giving the lake its name. Today, because of those deadbeat dams, every species of Snake River salmon is either extinct or on the endangered species list. There are years when no salmon make it to the lake, which took its name from them. Most fish that do make it to Redfish are hatchery-bred as part of an expensive, complicated Idaho Fish and Game program designed to avoid holding deadbeat dams accountable. One report justified this ongoing environmental boondoggle with “…it’s too risky to rely solely on nature to recover sockeye.”

It’s a risk worth taking. Nature is reliable. Tear down the deadbeat dams and the sockeye and other salmon species will do just fine. They will return to Idaho and heal large parts of the environment, improve the economy and give the state legislature better things to grapple with than an irratiotws nal fear of Sharia Law.

october 14, 2015

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column peaks and valleys

SMOKE, SMOKE, SMOKE THAT CIGARETTE

BY DICK DORWORTH

“But nicotine slaves are all the same At a pettin’ party or a poker game Everything gotta stop while they have a cigarette Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette Puff, puff, puff and if you smoke yourself to death Tell St. Peter at the Golden Gate That you hate to make him wait But you just gotta have another cigarette” Courtesy photos

Above left: Series founder Jeannine Gregoire speaks about her love of the Film Noir genre during a screening of the Sun Valley Film Noir Series opener “Out Of The Past” (1947) on Thursday evening. Above right: Series curator Greg Olson discusses the history of Film Noir on-screen at the screening. The series continues with “Touch Of Evil” (1958) on Thursday, September 17 and “Body Heat” (1981) on September 24.

Photo by Brennan Rego

Photo by Jason Hanny

The Milky Way shines beautifully early in the morning on August 19. Photo taken from Couch Summit, north of Fairfield.

Scott Fagerland, guitarist for “Holiday Friends,” entertains the crowd on Thursday evening in Ketchum during a house show put on by donations.

Photo by F. Alfredo Rego

“Ketchum Sunset,” taken with an iPhone 6 from the corner of Main Street and River Street in Ketchum on August 21.

T h e W e e k ly S u n •

–Merle Travis and Tex Williams

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hat song was a household anthem of my post-World War II ’40s and ’50s childhood. My parents were heavy smokers. Mom often went through three packs a day.

She died the long, slow way of emphysema at the age of 50, spending most of her last 10 years hooked up to oxygen tanks.

It was not pretty. Dad quit when it became obvious that smoking had destroyed his wife. Though I could have avoided more of them, I am grateful and fortunate that I completely avoided the vice of smoking. Still, my lungs have always been compromised by growing up in a house of smoke.

I mention this personal history as context to my personal reaction to the recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Health Interview Survey, which found that in 2015, 15.2 percent of American adults smoke cigarettes.

That’s a troubling number of nicotine slaves to those who care about the health of fellow countrymen, but it’s a monumental decrease since 1962 when 42 percent of Americans were smokers, including Mom. Courtesy photo Stanford’s Dr. Robert Dick Dorworth is a Blaine County Proctor has written, “The resident, author and former world cigarette is the deadli- record holder for speed on skis. est artifact in the history Visit his website and blog at dickof human civilization… dorworth.com.

Cigarettes cause about 1.5 million deaths from lung cancer per year, a number that will rise to nearly 2 million per year by the 2020s or 2030s… Part of the ease of cigarette manufacturing stems from the ubiquity of high-speed cigarette making machines, which crank out 20 000 cigarettes per min. Cigarette makers make about a penny in profit for every cigarette sold, which means that the value of a life to a cigarette maker is about US $10 000.”

One human life = $10,000 corporate profit.

Despite the best coordinated efforts of the tobacco industry’s “denialist campaigns” to deny that cigarettes are “the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization,” along with denying their awareness of this danger and making such absurd claims as that the science wasn’t complete and more studies needed to be made, etc., etc., the awareness of reality filtered into the consciousness of the majority of Americans with the help of higher taxation on tobacco and outlawing smoking in most public places. (A pertinent local side note: Sun Valley Mayor Dewayne Briscoe was instrumental in the passage of the Washington clean indoor air act in 1985, the model for subsequent anti-smoking laws in Washington and many other states.)

That is, exposing the lack of credibility of the denialist campaigns of the tobacco industry worked. Not perfectly.

Not completely. But it’s better than it was in 1962 and a lot of people are alive who wouldn’t be otherwise.

That is, take heart, all you activists-against-climate-change deniers, the causes-of-gun-violence deniers and the worldwide-environmental-collapse deniers. tws Persevere.

september 16, 2015

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active art Sketchbook Hiking

column peaks and valleys

A TIME TO BE THANKFUL

MERCHANTS OF DOUBT

BY LESLIE REGO

Every day of my life I am thankful for the beauties of Nature – for the showy beauties and for the quiet beauties. I thought this would be a perfect week to reflect on some of the more gentle, less obvious enjoyments of this time of year.

I am thankful for the days of muted skies when the bare tree branches are etched in shades of taupe, the light softly reflecting off of the surfaces, creating a gentle contrast between sky and branch. I love that the world is showing more gray. Certainly gray can be a drab color, but with so many natural, different grays, the color becomes enticing, beguiling and charming – one gentle gray against another, one lighter gray against a darker one, until the outdoors becomes a value scale where the slightest nuance is given its spot.

I love the faded colors of the fall leaves – no longer a brilliant autumn gold, but rather an array of all the possible shades of browns.

There is a wealth to be learned from all of these browns and how each one brings a mystery and a depth to the natural world. They are not the showy colors of summer, but rather the slower-paced, restrained shades of the transition of autumn to winter. I find them infinitely rich, varied and precious.

I am thankful for a thin layering of snow on the sides of the mountains that provides a backdrop for all of the fallen burned trees, which become etched against the white, creating a multitude of linear patterns. These patterns are connectors between the living vertical trees and the

column movie review

A fracking review and more

BY DICK DORWORTH

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Leslie Rego, “Shades of Gray”, nib pen and wash, sumi ink, watercolor

dead toppled ones.

I delight in the tufts of grass that stick up through the clumps of snow, still tall and proud from the summer days and not yet beaten down from the winds of winter. I wonder at the mass of snow that sits on a small stone in the middle of the river, somehow not melting into the water flowing on either side.

I am thankful for the shift between the seasons where the

glitz of one season transitions to the quiet of another one, before the glamour begins again. These quiet times bring great reflection and repose before the charisma of winter.

Leslie Rego is an artist and Blaine County resident. To view more of Rego’s art, visit www. leslierego.com.

‘TRUTH’

Bush and the Guard

BY JONATHAN KANE

T

wo months before George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004, CBS news broadcast a story on 60 Minutes II that purported to show that the sitting President avoided service in Vietnam with a no-show position in the Texas Air National Guard that he obtained through his family’s leverage.

The story was soon to be debunked as false and in its wake the venerable career of CBS anchor Dan Rather would be over, as would the career of his pro-

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ducer, Mary Mapes.

Now we have the telling of this investigational journalism piece gone bad in the new film “Truth” with two great performances by Cate Blanchett as Mapes and Robert Redford as Rather. The movie is based on Mapes’ memoir, “Truth and Duty: The Press, the President and the Privilege of Power.”

Unfortunately, the casting of Redford cannot help but bring to mind the infinitely better “All The President’s Men” in a comparison that doesn’t do “Truth” any favors. This film is the work of first-time director James Vanderbilt from his own screenplay. He is also the author of the screenplay for “Zodiac” and it’s in the screenplay that the film has its troubles, especially in the first third, with a clunky style that hits you over the head.

Pressured to put the story together in five days, Mapes and her team based their report on documents that weren’t original and that could not be authenticated. Whether or not their premise was true, immediately after airing, the story blows up in their faces and the ship begins sinking at a rapid pace.

It’s here that the movie hits its stride as a character study of Mapes. Blanchett delivers one of her best performances to

Jon rated this movie

ast week I saw the fine documentary film “Merchants of Doubt,” a story about how scientific misinformation makes its way into the media and then the minds of the general public. In some ways it is an old story, best summarized in the inimitable words of Deep Throat (Mark Felt), “Follow the money.”

In other ways it is an entirely new story because the stakes and consequences of a public filled with scientific misinformation are unprecedented in all history.

I had planned on a different column topic this week until an opinion piece by the Denver Post editorial board caught my eye. It begins: “One of the stock charges used by those who campaign to ban hydraulic fracturing in oil and gas drilling is that it endangers groundwater supplies. And yet the pile of studies largely refuting this fear-mongering keeps growing by the year.”

One study mentioned refuting “this fear-mongering” was conducted by Colorado State University’s Warner College of Natural Resources. Yes, and, according to High Country News, Exxon Mobile in 2010 “…gave the university $5 million to study energy development impacts on western Colorado’s sage grouse, mule deer and other wildlife, spawning 20 new research contracts. Shell, BP and others have also recently poured millions of dollars into CSU’s research. Warner College is even named for alum Ed Warner, who donated $30 million in 2005 after making a fortune pioneering hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which has opened hard-to-reach oil and gas reserves worldwide.”

Last month a press release from Physicians for Social Responsibility read: “A partnership of prominent health organizations encompassing nationwide medical and public health experts and scientists released the third edition of their ‘Compendium of SciCourtesy photo entific, Medical, and Media Findings Demonstrating Risks Dick Dorworth is a Blaine County and Harms of Fracking’ on resident, author and former world Wednesday. The Compendium record holder for speed on skis. compiles and summarizes hun- Visit his website and blog at dickdreds of peer-reviewed studies dorworth.com. and other important findings on fracking, showing the significance and extent of the evidence demonstrating risks to public health, air and water quality, birth and infant health, the environment, and climate change.”

Who would you rather have as sources of scientific information about public health, Physicians for Social Responsibility or Exxon Mobil, Shell and BP? It seems obvious to me, but “Merchants of Doubt” is a stunning and disturbing documentary of the history and current practice of how public relations firms working for large businesses pervert truth and deceive the public for profit.

“Merchants of Doubt” director Robert Kenner says all of today’s “doubtmeisters” learned at the feet of the old masters from the Marlboro days.

“I spoke to Peter Sparber, who was masterful at working for tobacco,” says Kenner. “He helped slow down legislation on a slow-burning cigarette. He was able to convince people it was not cigarettes that cause house fires, it was couches. He was able to make a law that (requires) chemicals to be put in these couches. It turned out it didn’t prevent fires and it also caused cancer.” Sparber, who was interviewed for the film, told Kenner that if a person can successfully create doubt around tobacco products, they can do it with just about anything. He said, “You could take James Hansen, the leading climate scientist, and I could take a garbage man and I could get America to believe that the garbage man knows more about climate change than Hansen does.”

“Merchants of Doubt” will help the public differentiate between garbage and science. Don’t miss it. tws

Courtesy photo

Jonathan Kane is a graduate of the University of Michigan.

date, which is saying a lot, as her career crumbles around her.

“Truth” is compelling but lacks the stuff of greatness.

T h e W e e k ly S u n •

tws

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!

november 25, 2015