Volcanoes are harmless.

I live around 50 miles from Mt. St. Helens. Mt. St. Helens is an active volcano. You may remember it erupting May 18, 1980.

The pictures above are of Mt. St. Helens before and after the 1980 eruption.

That's the funny thing about volcanoes - they erupt. We can figure when they'll erupt by using science. Science costs money. Sometimes private industry invests in science, because science can make money. Sometimes government has to invest in science, because the science doesn't make money. Studying volcanoes doesn't make a lot of money, so government has to invest in it, because no one else will. Which is funny because natural disasters like volcanoes cost private industry a lot of money - like logging companies, for example. Insurance companies could invest in such things I guess, but that's just so they know how much to charge people for insurance. I assume they'd rather not because studying volcanoes just to determine the risk of eruption for insurance purposes seems rather expensive. So it seems like this sort of responsibility lies with government. Investing in valuable science that private industry won't because it's not profitable seems like just the thing we'd want our government to invest in. To protect us. To protect our towns, our livelihoods, our health.

Instead of monitoring volcanoes, maybe we should be monitoring is the eruption of stupidity in the Republican Party.