The bad news first:  “Alpha announces 1,100 layoffs at several mines“:

Eight operating affiliates of Alpha Natural Resources, Inc., including two in Boone County, have notified their employees that the coal mines and other facilities where they work are subject to being idled due to sustained weak market conditions and government regulations that have challenged the entire Central Appalachian mining industry.
In accordance with requirements of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, notice has been given today to approximately 1,100 employees at 11 Alpha affiliated surface mines in West Virginia, as well as preparation plants and other support operations, advising them of the expected idling of those facilities based on Alpha’s current assessment of market conditions.

Now the good news:  these 1100 serial, terrestrial rapists have been effectively castrated so that Mother Nature no longer has to endure their unwanted penetrations into her resource-rich inner regions.  This may prove disastrous for humans — after all, our energy grids are still reliant on coal, and brown outs and black outs, in addition to over a thousand newly-unemployed, may soon flood the markets — but then, humans are just carbon dioxide belching walking plagues, anyway.

No worries, though. Ebola will probably take care of a good chunk of them.  So we can get back to the paradise we were all promised — where cougars once again run wild, and we sleep quietly and contemplatively in our thatch huts.  Right up until the time we’re either wiped out by a flu or eaten by emboldened, pissed-off bears.

Utopia is nigh!