The Army Corps of Engineers is accepting public comments on their plan to grant the easement required to complete the Dakota Access Pipeline. The Notice of Intent indicates that the public comment period runs through February 20, 2017. Comments can be sent to Mr. Gib Owen.

I used a few minutes of this snowy, lazy morning to send the following feedback:

Mr. Owen,

I’m writing to request that Dakota Access, LLC, NOT be granted an easement to cross Lake Oahe.

Because the proposed easement is only one half-mile upstream from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s reservation, any spill would have a substantial impact on their land. As we have seen already in 2017, these pipelines have a substantial likelihood of leaking, and tremendous capacity for damage when a leak occurs. The following articles support this claim:

Report: Kinder Morgan’s pipeline spill in South Carolina bigger than estimated http://savannahnow.com/news/2017-02-03/report-kinder-morgans-pipeline-spill-south-carolina-bigger-estimated This article details a gasoline pipeline spill of more than 500,000 galloons, still seeping into creeks in South Carolina.

Iowa oil spill underscores pipeline risks day after Trump revives major projects https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jan/25/oil-spill-iowa-trump-keystone-dakota-access-pipeline An oil pipeline has leaked 138,600 gallons in Iowa in January.

Oil Pipeline Spills 53,000 Gallons on First Nations Land http://www.ecowatch.com/oil-pipeline-spill-first-nations-2211497739.html Also in January, a Canadian pipeline leaked 200,000L of oil onto Native American lands.

These articles highlight the inability to guarantee the integrity of these pipelines. I urge the Army Corps of Engineers to seek an alternative location for the Dakota Access pipeline.

Thank you,

Jeff Vautin

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Please consider submitting a comment!

Following advice from Manton, I’m configuring a new microblog feed on this site. I’d like to own my content, so I want my micro posts to originate here and then mirror over to Twitter.

Per Manton’s recommendations, I’m configuring these micro posts as a Status format, without titles, and in their own category — Micro.

I modified the site’s .htaccess file so that the current RSS feed excludes posts from the Micro category, and to create a Micro feed with only posts from this category. To do this, I changed /var/www/jeffvautin.com/.htaccess from:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

To:

# BEGIN micro
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^rss\.xml$ "/feed?cat=-104"[L,R]
RewriteRule ^micro\.xml$ "/feed?cat=104"[L,R]
RewriteCond %{Query_STRING} ^$
RewriteRule ^feed/?$ "/rss.xml" [L,R]
</IfModule>
# END micro

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Where 104 is the category ID for the Micro category. I copied most of this from the discussion on the gist Manton provided, with one modification: I added /? (optional trailing slash) to the following line, so that either https://jeffvautin.com/feed or https://jeffvautin.com/feed/ would find the micro-less feed:

RewriteRule ^feed/?$ "/rss.xml" [L,R]

I found good resources regarding the .htaccess file from Digital Ocean:

• How To Set Up Mod_Rewrite
• How To Use the .htaccess File

Next, I created an IFTTT rule to watch for posts in the Micro feed and to put the post content in a tweet.

I still want to setup a simple posting method from my iPhone, likely using Workflow. I also want to clean up the site’s appearance — I Status posts have a bit of extra cruft displayed that I could clean up, and the Recent Posts widget displays title-less posts by their post ID, which is unsightly.

As of this morning, Amazon is still choosing to advertise on Breitbart.com. This is disheartening, and I’m planning to boycott Amazon until this policy changes¹:

Hey @Amazon & @Shopify - time to take your ads & business#OffBreitbart

Our wallets are as loud as our voices. Don't awake @slpng_giants https://t.co/1b1aKWgoet

— Beau Willimon (@BeauWillimon) February 4, 2017

Telling Amazon how you feel is really easy. You can go to their feedback form to leave a comment. This is what I wrote:

As a longtime, frequent, customer, I’m very disheartened by Amazon’s decision to continue advertising on Breitbart.com, a white- supremacist propaganda website. Please reconsider, and remove your ads from Breitbart.com. Until then, I’ll be reducing the amount of business I do with you.

My call to action (cribbed from Beau Willimon) is exploding this morning, with ~50 retweets in the first 20 minutes:

This is really easy - send feedback via: https://t.co/Jw7q7fPcls https://t.co/P6j6Cz7QSs pic.twitter.com/aq7Ua5aSpO

— Jeff Vautin 📎 (@jeffvautin) February 4, 2017