Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
- Climate
- Wildfires
- Race
- VA Gov
- Lottery
- NFL
- E&E
- Climate. As Alaska Governor Bill Walker approaches his reelection campaign next year, he is pulling out all the stops to pander to the usual suspects on the left. Last week he announced reformation of Sarah Palin’s Climate Change operation in the Governor’s office in Juneau. Walker signed a administrative order creating the Climate Action for Alaska Leadership Team. These guys are charged with established Alaska Climate Change Strategy to support the goals of the 2015 Paris agreement and UN Sustainable Development Goal 13, Climate Action. Being unable to find someone here in Alaska who is sufficiently wacked out about manmade global warming due to CO2 emissions, they hired someone from Seattle who commutes to and from Juneau. Walker put our “esteemed” LtGov Byron Mallott, who is so enamored with his racial identity as a Tlingit elder that he has a difficult time talking about anything else, to head up the newly formed group. The team will address mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions to decrease the state’s CO2 emissions footprint, evaluate risks and adopt measures to reduce vulnerability of Alaska citizens to climate change impacts, research ways to sell climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies, plans and train for timely and robust responses to protect and address near term threats to communities and regions from climate change. Somehow, I don’t think they will keep villages from building more stuff on barrier islands on the Arctic Ocean. They will work with all the usual suspects on the left (NGOs, University of Alaska system, and politicized government agencies) to prepare a plan of action due Sept. 1, 2018. The order repeals and replaces Palin’s Climate Change subcabinet. Expect the team to attempt to shift Alaska from a petroleum economy to a renewable energy economy. If the experience of this foolishness in Oz over the last decade is any indication, energy is going to get very, very expensive up here in the very near future. So, a state with more coal than any other state in the union, centuries of natural gas, and as much oil in ANWR, NPR-A and offshore in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas individually as we have found at Prudhoe over the years is going to ignore all of those and use wind. Gonna need a lot of wind to stay warm when it is -50 F and still outside. This sort of virtue signaling is jaw-droppingly foolish and more than a little bit dangerous to those on fixed incomes and the less well off. But it is what the democrats want to do, which gives us yet another issue to discuss next year. https://gov.alaska.gov/admin-orders/289.html
- Wildfires. The massive forest fires in California wine country last week are the natural outgrowth of changes in forest management over the last century, exacerbated by federal laws that have all but ensured forests are no longer properly managed to control either wildfires of the fuel they need to burn. The US Forest Service manages nearly 200 million acres of forest here in the US. It has a yearly budget of over $7 billion and 28,000 employees. Legislation signed by Teddy Roosevelt in 1905 moved 40 million acres of forest reserves under control of the feds. Three years later, that total had grown to over 150 million acres. Additional legislation in 1911 expanded the power of the Forest Service and allowed them to purchase private lands for the creation of national forests. An early head of the USFS was a friend of Roosevelt who believed that the government could manage forests better than private owners. His goal was to give the USFS control over all forests nationwide. That goal was the policy of the agency for the next 40 years. In the early days, the leadership believed that there would be a shortage of wood products, something they called a timber famine. For various reasons, that famine never materialized. Congressional mandates over the years led to some bizarre outcomes. By the early 1950s, selective cutting was used for logging. Over the next 20 years, that shifted to clear cutting because USFS managers got to keep more proceeds out of timber sales that they didn’t get to via selective cutting. The move to massive clear cutting created an environmental backlash that in turn led to the Clinton era shutdown of forest sales and logging, which dropped by 85% in the 1990s. The next big cash cow is now money to fight forest fires, which may be significantly overfunded as USFS spends almost six times per acre burned than Interior does. The other thing that has stood in the way of responsible forest management has been legislation like the Endangered Species Act which ties every single decision on forest management up in decades of required paperwork and court fights. We are at the point today that the forests can no longer be managed. And they aren’t. When that happens, we have deadly, expensive disasters like California wine country last month. https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/forest-service
- Race. When you head up a political party that places race at the pinnacle of all things important to it, it is not a surprise that they use race in hiring and firing decisions (which I thought was illegal). Latest example of this is an e-mail from the DNC recruiting for eight open positions in their tech department. Data Service Manager Madeleine Leader wrote an e-mail that the desire for diversity in the DNC no longer includes “cisgender straight white males.” DNC leadership promptly crawfished nicely away from the patently racist e-mail saying it was not sanctioned or authorized by the DNC. Perhaps the Alawi Brothers have some other relatives who aren’t under investigation yet that might want to apply. As always, diversity is their strength. Just ask Hillary. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/11/01/dnc-white-men-shouldnt-apply-for-tech-jobs.html
- VA Gov. The Virginia gubernatorial election comes up Tuesday. In it are a cookie-cutter democrat, though happily not a committed Clintonoid like The Punk Terry McAuliffe, who cannot run for reelection, and a former governor Ed Gillespie. For most of the campaign, Gillespie was simply running as a square filler, flying the flag so that the democrats don’t have an unobstructed run to victory. But the greed and ugliness of democrats and their supporters is difficult to keep out of the campaign as an outfit called the Latino Victory Fund put together and ran an incredibly nasty ad in support of the democrat which showed a black pick-up-up replete with Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, Don’t Tread on Me license plate, and Gillespie bumper stickers trying to run down Muslim and Latino children. For democrats, race baiting am us. When you go all race all the time, you fire up people who weren’t going to turn out in the first place. Such is the case in VA, with Trumpians who were ready, willing and able to sit this one out because Gillespie was a friend of the Beltway Swamp, not suitably incensed and willing to crawl thru broken glass to cast their votes for Gillespie. Will this work? At this point, I don’t know, though the race has tightened up nicely. We will see what happens. The other interesting thing in this race is that the democrat candidate has not run parallel ads or even acknowledged that his running mate for LtGov is a black guy. The party of Race Uber Alles is having a really hard time with people who do not fit their worldview on their ballot. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/gillespie-ad-attacks-latino-victory-fund-commercial-northam-ad-ties-him-to-trump/2017/11/02/8fe2c78a-bfe2-11e7-8444-a0d4f04b89eb_story.html
- Lottery. Yet another Muzzie, one Sayfullo Saipov, 29, a Diversity Lottery Visa Winner from Uzbekistan, went on a road trip in NYC last week, taking a detour on a on a bike path on the other side of the Holland Tunnel where he ran down and killed 8 people and injured another 12 all in the name of ISIS. He was stopped by a school bus driver who put his bus in his path, forced a collision, and forced him out of his Home Depot truck where he was shot and captured. It turns out that this particular little vermin was invited into the US via a thing called the Diversity Immigrant Visa, something created in 1987 as a way to pump up the numbers of Irish, Canadians and British. It quickly morphed into a way to inject mass quantities of people who hate America like Egyptians, Pakistanis and Bangladesh into the country. Today the program mainly allows Islamists to enter the US. It was amended in 1990, mainly at the insistence of democrats like Chuck Schumer to select people from countries with low levels of immigration as Winners. Over the years, it has allowed between 50 – 100,00 people / year who don’t want to go thru the formal immigration process to apply for visas and be approved for them, or perhaps 2 – 3 million people over the last 3 decades. President Trump instantly went after supporters and defenders of the visa program in his comments on the attack. And those targets included Senate Majority Leader Chuckie Schumer. This is what is known as fighting back and it is long past time that someone on our side started returning fire. I think the Lottery is going to be repealed by congress in the not so distant future. And it is about time, as there are real costs in virtue signaling. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-diversity-lottery-immigration/544850/
- NFL. Lots of news out of the continuing self-immolation of the NFL and its business model. The guy who started it all, one Colin Kaepernick filed a class action lawsuit against the league trying to prove collusion in his failure to land a QB job following his protests. As part of his discovery process, he has demanded e-mails from NFL Commissioner Goodell and a number of owners including Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. The WSJ ran an article suggesting that NFL Commissioner Goodell was intentionally pandering to the political left as demonstrated by his hiring of Clinton mouthpiece Joe Lockhart as a press spokesman. This wouldn’t surprise me a lot given his response which at the time I thought was simple cowardice to the Limbaugh attempt to purchase a part of the Rams. Looks like it was not cowardice at all. Vendors are having a hard time with the protests with Nike and Under Armor losing sales with their support of the continuing protests rather than the interests of their customers. Finally, Papa John’s Pizza, which is a major sponsor of the NFL, publicly complained that they were losing sales based on the protests and noted they were going to have to reconsider their approach to advertisements, as they based their ads on connection to Payton Manning and NFL football. Of course the media which has been cheerleading the seppuku of the NFL downplayed these concerns. It is always instructive to watch the marketplace in action. http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/11/02/papa-john-s-blames-nfl-anthem-protests-for-taking-multimillion-dollar-slice-out-its-pizza-earnings.html
- E&E. The legal pushback against the Blue State Attorney General conspiracy to use their power and authority to push the Exxon Knew investigation and state-sponsored lawsuits took place last week when E&E Legal (Energy & Environment Legal Institute) filed suit against the California Attorney General for withholding e-mails and other communications demonstrating their work with partisan and environmental activists to use state law enforcement to go after opponents of their climate political agenda. This collusion started under former California Attorney General and now US Senator Kamala Harris. It was part of the now collapsed cabal organized by NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. The new Attorney General, Becerra has suggested that he was working with activists. As usual, the elected officials are doing their level best to bury their work with activists using the power of the State of California to further partisan environmental goals. Even in California, this is still illegal, at least for a little while. I expect discovery will be fascinating. https://eelegal.org/press-release-ee-legal-forced-sue-california-attorney-general-failure-release-public-records-already-shared-green-activists-involving-inappropriate-lobbying-practices/
More later –
– AG