"The Three Bears" updated -- now featuring Mama Bear, Baby Bear, and Other Baby Bear

YouTube description: "Tornado hunter Ricky Forbes was driving through Kootenay National Park when he spotted the black bear cub sitting dangerously close to the highway." (Newsflare link: http://www.newsflare.com/video/14601/weather-nature/mama-bear-rescues-baby-bear.)

by Ken

Kids! You tell them once, you tell them a thousand times, but do they listen?

Apparently Baby Bear just had to find out what was on the other side of that roadside concrete-divider thingy, not reckoning that getting to the traffic side of the divider is one thing but getting back over is another thing entirely. Luckily Mom was able to "handle" the situation. But what I like best -- knowing that the rescue is safely achieved -- is troublemaking Baby Bear's cub sibling perched atop the divider taking in the show.

Hat tip to HuffPost's Hilary Hanson.

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The rescue: the week after

A rescuer in the mine in Yuzhou, China, where -- with 30 miners already known dead -- hope was all but abandoned for the still-missing seven.

by Ken

When I wrote last week, bleary-eyed from my overnight glued-to-the-tube vigil, about the still-ongoing Chilean mine rescue, I noted in closing:

There will be plenty of time to talk about the cost of this whole operation, and where it fits into the grand scheme of the socioeconomic order. For now, I'm as dumbfounded as anybody.

Fortunately, The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik has covered a good deal of that still-to-be-covered territory in a "Talk of the Town Piece, "A Way Out" (under the heading "Story of the Week"), in the new issue (Oct. 25).

I'm pleased to see that Gopnik's basic take isn't much different from mine.

Chilean miner madness: it has been the condition of the past week in New York City, despite the fact that it is, in essence, a small story involving a country that no one has paid much attention to, and with no obvious ripples affecting us here in the United States. . . . [W]ho wouldn't be moved by hearing the Chilean national anthem, sung by proud Chileans as the miners rose to the surface. Chilean exceptionalism! it's a beautiful thing.

The truth is that this was an honest-to-God human-interest story, whose appeal is the eternal appeal of all child-down-a-well sstories; it is a story of something bad that turned out fine in the end. In the repetitive ribbon of stories that enwrap our existence, there are too few tales of this kind. . . . Only in a handful of stories, curiously set in places very high or very low -- astronauts lost in space, mountaineers marooned on summits, and these trapped miners -- is there hope of a true happy ending, in which losses are restored and sorrows cease.

Gopnik suggests some of the ways in which the rescue might be Hollywoodified, including "relocat[ion] to West Virginia, where the men can be blonder and speak English." He notes, however:

The real heroes are hard to dramatize -- the rescue workers who went down into the mine to show the miners how the rescue would work, and then stayed there till the end. True courage is mostly choices, not gestures -- difficult to make dramatic.

And then he gets into some of that stuff I left for some later time.

In the midst of it all, three significant facts got lost: what was being mined (copper and gold); how much a Chilean miner typically earns (sixteen hundred dollars a month); and how many Chilean miners have died in accidents in the past decade (about three hundred and forty).

At the end of the week, after every miner was up,. safe and sound, it was odd to see how eager the TV anchors were to insist that the worst lay ahead for them -- and not just for the miner whose mistress showed up in place of his wife. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a real thing, but let's not underestimate the power of post-traumatic stress delight: thierty-three men can now say, for the rest of their lives, "At least I'm not trapped down at the bottom of a mine." Certainly, veterans of war suffer, but how many also shine with the quiet feeling that, from now on, life can never get quiet enough. People are trapped by circumstances; other people help them. There is a way out. Since this is the fable that every life hopes to trace, maybe the madness isn't so mad at all.

In addition to the endless coverage, as Gopnik notes, of the prophesied gloom and doom for the rescued 33, already we're seeing stories about splits among them (cf. "Rescued Miners' Secrecy Pact Erodes in Spotlight"), including breeches of supposed "unity" pacts on post-rescue activities and cooperative profiteering. I don't care. I don't propose to pay any attention.

If there are guys who think they can make a killing on what they've been through, I don't begrudge them. If there are guys willing to sell themselves for a pittance, I feel bad for them. I will just note that nobody's going to make as much as a nickel off my interest.

I'm saddened to see reports that the death toll has reached 30 and hope was fading for the still-missing seven miners in Henan province, China ("Hopes Fade for China Miners After Deadly Leak"). Of course hopes for the 33 Chilean miners had also been all but written off. The Chinese outcome, however, is overwhelmingly the more usual one.

The CNN correspondent in Hong Kong who was monitoring online response to the rescue doings overnight noted a wave of bitterness from Chinese commenters who paid tribute to the Chilean government's resolve to rescue its miners, in contrast to their own government's record of relative insouciance. As Gopnik notes, one of the factors in the Chilean government's determination was its own poor record with the mine disasters that are apparently a regular occurrence in mining the subterranean riches of Chile's desolate northern Atacama desert.

Certainly I'm hoping some attention will rub off onto the dreadful U.S. record of mine safety, and safety with respect to resource extraction generally, in the Glorious Era of Deregulation, in which finally we succeeded in getting that damned gummint off our backs. The Bush regime's unapologetic contempt for the very idea of enforcing even the laws and regulations on the books could only be read as acceptance that the human toll -- in deaths, incapacitations, and just plain physical deterioration, without even getting into the vast realm of environmental spoilage -- is "the price we pay" for obtaining those resources, an attitude that appeared to have been carried over intact into the Obama administration version of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, helping lay the groundwork for the Gulf oil-spill disaster.

Without in any way diminishing the uplift of the worldwide outpouring of interest and concern evidenced during the Chilean rescue, which understandably was the primary concern until the trapped miners were safely above ground, we can see, I think, that longer-term what should concern us is the exceptional nature of that outcome.

Yesterday the Scranton Times-Tribune published this editorial:

Make more happy endings

People around the world watched joyfully last week as, one by one, 33 Chilean miners who had been trapped a half mile underground for six weeks emerged into the arms of their loved ones.

The event had special resonance for Northeast Pennsylvania, where most older residents easily can recall the shock, tension and, most often, despair rather than joy resulting from deep-mine accidents.

It's worth noting that the successful rescue was at least partly due to American engineering expertise, from the involvement of NASA engineers who designed the rescue capsule, to American drilling experts who responded to the scene from as far away as Afghanistan.

And it's a reminder as well that mine safety in the United States itself remains a work in progress - the most recent evidence of which was the explosion in April that killed 29 miners at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia.

The technology used to extricate the Chilean miners is marvelous. But the objective in the United States should be to ensure that safety regulation and enforcement preclude the need to use that technology.

"A work in progress" seems an awfully kindly characterization, especially with reference to the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, which was presided over by Massey Energy's career-criminal CEO Don Blankenship, whose business is essentially built on spitting at mining laws and regulations, and who by now should surely be serving a host of concurrent life sentences for the murders of his miners (presuming he's tried by a judge he hasn't bought) rather than proclaiming government efforts to regulate mine safety "as silly as global warming."

Every day a thug like Blankenship goes unindicted is another day of mockery of any pretense to concern for either the people he employs or the land he befouls.

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The rescue, as of 3pm ET (updated to 3:35pm)

Florencio Avalos greets his family after emerging from the Fenix 2 capsule in which each of the rescued miners has ascended the near half-mile from the mine in which they were trapped.

"We made a promise to never surrender, and we kept it."

-- Chilean President Sebastián Piñera

by Ken

I don't know about you, but apart from whatever occasional dozing may have occurred, I had about 45 minutes till my alarm clock would go off at the time I finally packed it in and stopped watching the Chilean mine rescue -- until, er, "morning." I don't know what exactly I was watching, or why, but I couldn't tear myself away.

I don't mean that I literally didn't know what I was watching. Of course I did. It was the long, methodically, and gruelingly planned start of the extraction of the miners after their 68-day captivity nearly half a mile below ground. What I mean, though, is what the hell was there to watch?

Maybe once every 50 minutes or so, the Fenix 2 capsule -- or cage, as the rescue people seemed always to refer to it -- emerged from the painstakingly excavated and steel-reinforced hole that leads to the mine nearly a half-mile below, and in due time, voilà!, another miner emerges from his 15 minute-or-so ascent in the 21-inch-wide container, barely enough to contain a man. (As we were reminded constantly, some of the men had had to slim down -- during the long preparation period made necessary by the time needed to dig the evacuation tunnel -- to be assured of fitting in the thing.) Among the orange-jumpsuited crewpeople was none other than President Sebastián Piñera, smiling and hugging everyone within hugging range for as long as he held out. I didn't notice when he finally gave out and disappeared, but he was there a long time.

President Piñera with budding superstar "Super Mario" Sepulveda

By the time each miner emerges, we know not only who it is but quite a lot about him and what kind of physical and mental shape he's in, thanks to the extensive contact between the trapped miners and the outside world while they were waiting for the rescue tunnel to be dug. In most cases, in fact, we've seen the newly emerged miner down in the mine clambering into the cage, because there's a camera down there providing a constant video feed, which has been one of the wonders of the whole thing: watching live, as it happens, a rescue operation for which no one seems able to think of an equal precedent.

The video feed has been provided entirely by the Chilean government, which has done an outstanding job, more focused and coherent than I would have expected from a network TV director. But still, it's not as if there's much to watch. Oh, CNN tried to tart it up with a steady stream of yammering -- some of it actually interesting, much of it embarrassing.

It's all worked out so well that it's easy to forget just how dangerous this escape plan, through a tunnel that's far from straight and has virtually no extra clearance for the escape "cage," seemed going in. No one could be sure it would even work! A key factor in determining the order of evacuation was uncertainty as to what the first few passengers would encounter on the corkscrew-style journey up. Even though, as we were told repeatedly, inside the capsule the passenger has his vitals monitored and is in constant contact with the topside, in order to ensure that the early travelers would be physically up to, well, whatever they might need to be up to, it was decided that Nos. 1-5 would be drawn from the fittest of the group, followed then by the group with the most serious health concerns. In the event, the operation has proceeded so smoothly that it soon came to seem routine! Amazing!

And I'm not the only one who was amazed by the condition of the men as they emerged from Fenix 2. (Among the many extreme precautions taken was the manufacture of not one but two capsules. Fenix 1 is on standby, and will remain so as long as Fenix 2, on which extensive maintenance is performed, continues to be operable. I assume the logic is that once they press the backup into service, they no longer have a backup.) The men look unbelievably fit and well. (The men requested shampoo and shaving equipment to prepare themselves for their return to the outside world.) Each is soon laid on a gurney to proceed to the lengthy process of medical observation planned for all the returnees.

I don't take anything for granted, and I don't want to jinx it. As I write, 19 of the 33 miners have been brought up, which still leaves a long way to go. But it's actually running ahead of schedule! The minister of mining estimated in a press conference earlier this afternoon that the operation may be completed today, well ahead of schedule. He explained that the crews manning the upper and lower ends of the shuttle have become steadily more proficient at their tasks -- though without sacrificing safety, which apparently has been a paramount concern. Built into the schedule, for example, was ample time for regular maintenance of the capsule. One of the fascinations of watching has been seeing how this incredibly complex plan, making use of technology and knowhow from all around the world, has come together. Col. Hannibal Smith would have approved.

Even though, as I say, 19 miners have been rescued as of the time of writing (shortly before 3pm ET), we're not even halfway through the operation, proceeding slowly and methodically. There would be no way to speed it up significantly anyhow, but you have to admire the time taken to the ticking cnn.com clock shows 14 "underground" and 19 "rescued," which is only technically correct, by virtue of the fact that the display is headed "Chilean Miner Rescue." Which is --

ONE THING THAT MAKES ME CRAZY . . .

Yes, there were 33 trapped miners to be brought up, but the total number of men to be extracted isn't 33 but, ultimately, 39, counting the rescue workers sent down to handle the bottom end of the shuttle operation. As of the minister of mining's press conference, c1:15pm ET, there were five, with a sixth scheduled to be sent down later, to provide the mine crew with more opportunity for rest. Hey, these guys have to be brought up too. The minister made clear that that last man down will be the last man up -- and it occurs to you that he's going to have to load himself into the capsule and get himself hooked up and make sure the thing is oriented correctly to ascend properly into the tunnel (not to mention turning off the lights, or doing whatever the protocol calls for the last man out to do), all without assistance.

All of the crew people have performed heroically, but perhaps none as much so as the ones who allowed themselves to be shuttled down into that cave where the 33 miners were imprisoned those 68 days. I don't know, maybe it's just me -- possibly a hypersensitivity hangover from the memory of 9/11 and all those NYC firefighters rushing into the World Trade Center towers. Some of the TV people are careful to remember that there are more than 33 men who have to be gotten out. (Now we know the total is going to be 39.) That's appreciated. What the hell is wrong with the other dopes?

There will be plenty of time to talk about the cost of this whole operation, and where it fits into the grand scheme of the socioeconomic order. For now, I'm as dumbfounded as anybody.


RESCUE UPDATE: UP TO 21 AS OF 3:35PM ET

With Johnny Barrios safely returned, it's on to No. 22, Samuel Avalos, who I believe is the brother of Florencio (pictured above). I know one of the already-rescued miners had a brother still down below.

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