8 December 2017 — 1309 mdt

Friday briefs

The week of the earliest sunsets started yesterday. At the Stillwater solar array three miles north of Kalispell, the sun sinks below the southwestern (235°) horizon at approximately 1643 (actually, a few minutes earlier because the horizon isn’t flat). The sun rises tomorrow in the southeast (125°) at approximately 0816. The sun starts setting later beginning 14 December, but the sun continues rising earlier through early January. At meridian transit, the sun is 19° above the horizon, just one degree higher than its lowest transit of the year. You can calculate the times of sunrise, sunset, meridian transit, and the beginning and ends of civil, nautical, and astronomical twilight, for your location at the U.S. Naval Observatory's website.

Kalispell City Council makes two mistakes

One is adopting the nostalgia fueled plan to make old downtown Kalispell a paradise for foot traffic by narrowing main street and slowing down traffic to the point of enraging drivers. The other is leasing the city airport to a private group instead of shutting it down and selling the land for commercial development and perhaps a new hoosegow for Flathead County. The city airport is a convenience for those wealthy enough to own airplanes and anti-government enough to loath flying out of Glacier International Airport where the runway is three times as long and the red tape longer still.

Ousting Hauck as UMT’s football coach won’t solve UMT’s football problem

Dozens of University of Montana faculty members signed a letter asking that the university reconsider hiring Bobby Hauck as football coach, citing the problems of sexual assault and harassment that coincided with his first stint as UMT’s football coach. Predictably, a spokesperson for UMT’s president rejected reconsideration while promising that his time Hauck’s players would not bring dishonor on the school.

The concern that Hauck’s second time around will be as bad as his first is legitimate, but it misses the larger issue: playing football carries an extremely high risk of incurring severe brain damage. That’s not an argument. It’s a fact. Universities exist to develop minds, not ruin them. Football, soccer, rugby, and boxing, cannot be made safe and have no place in a university’s athletic program. Football, as I observed six years ago (post 1, post 2, post 3), venerates the doctrine that might makes right, and thus has an adverse effect on character building. It might be possible to mitigate some of the ways football contributes to bullying and creates a sense entitlement and moral superiority, but there’s no way to mitigate the impact of the game’s violence on the brains of the players. It’s time to abolish football, and for people in the stadiums to stop cheering hits that rattle and ruin brains.

DOI Secretary Ryan Zinke’s flying too high

There are times when a member of the cabinet needs to travel by air to save time and reduce risk, but traveling to ride horses with Vice President Mike Pence is not one of them. Nevertheless, that’s what Sec. Zinke did, reports Politico. I suspect Zinke’s military career left him accustomed to, and fond of, traveling by air, but as SecDOI he’s riding and flying way too high. He can help pay for the Trump-Ryan-McConnell tax cuts by doing a better job of scheduling so that he can travel by automobile or shanks mare and save the taxpayers money when he wants to horse around.

High school golfer seeks Democratic nomination for HD-20

Keaton Sunchild, a high school senior in Great Falls, filed a C-1 form with Montana’s Commissioner of Political Practices earlier this week (postmarked 6 December, received 8 December). House District 20 currently is represented by legislative freshman Republican Fred Anderson, a white haired gentleman, who defeated Amy Rapp 3,985 to 1,625 in 2016. Sunchild’s Twitter account links to a story, Montana is the only state in the U.S. where parents cannot watch their children play golf. Parents aren’t allowed at high school golf competitions in Alaska, either, but that’s because golf isn’t a high school sport in Alaska. Who’s behind this rule? Coaches and athletic directors, who want to keep parents out of their hair. If by some miracle Sunchild wins the election, he can whack that asinine rule with a legislative nine-iron — and his parents can watch him do it.