{"id":523,"date":"2019-12-30T11:16:52","date_gmt":"2019-12-30T20:16:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/interestingitems.org\/wp\/?p=523"},"modified":"2019-12-30T11:16:52","modified_gmt":"2019-12-30T20:16:52","slug":"interesting-items-12-30","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/interestingitems.org\/wp\/2019\/12\/30\/interesting-items-12-30\/","title":{"rendered":"Interesting Items 12\/30"},"content":{"rendered":"

Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information.\u00a0 Enjoy \u2013<\/p>\n

In this issue:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. AFN<\/li>\n
  2. Opioids<\/li>\n
  3. Energy<\/li>\n
  4. Upzoning<\/li>\n
  5. Greta<\/li>\n
  6. Men<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    <\/p>\n

      \n
    1. AFN.\u00a0 The Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN) is the preeminent organization among Alaska natives, combining both the business side of the regional corporations and the social side of the regional social organizations.\u00a0 It is crumbling, mostly due to divergent interests and goals of its members.\u00a0 Local writer Craig Medred wrote a great piece a couple days before Christmas describing the problems<\/a>.\u00a0 The AFN board was originally made up of representatives of what would become the 12 regional corporations under 1971\u2019s ANSCA.\u00a0 ANSCA was designed to help Alaska natives sidestep the reservation system that simply isolated them in enclaves.\u00a0 In exchange for dropping legal claims to all of Alaska, the feds agreed to grant title to 44 million acres, help set up 12 regional and hundreds of village corporations and seed those new businesses with $952 million.\u00a0 It took the villages a decade or two to figure out that the regional corporations weren\u2019t going to help them but had created a small group within the 12 corporations who were doing quite well.\u00a0 In order to tamp down resentment, the AFN Board brough in private, non-profit social service entities.\u00a0 A third expansion brought in 12 more members, representing villages in each region.\u00a0 The original 12-member corporate board now had a membership of 37, dominated by the social service and village votes.\u00a0 The 12 regional corporations still pay most of the bills for the AFN.\u00a0 Clinton\u2019s Interior Department under Ada Deer designated 229 Alaskan villages as individual tribes, bypassing the ANSCA agreement 22 after it was signed.\u00a0 This lit the fuse to the impending dissolution, as it gave the native sovereignty movement here in Alaska what it had started demanding.\u00a0 Congress approved the new list in a funding measure a few years later.\u00a0 What we have today, is a continuing push\u2013pull between the dueling power structures \u2013 the regional corporations dependent on success in the business world, and the social side dependent on government funding.\u00a0 These worlds to not coexist well.\u00a0 In recent years, the social side has increasingly hung their hats on climate change as a vehicle for increased federal funds to move villages off crumbling barrier islands and other maladies real and imagined.\u00a0 This hasn\u2019t sat very well with the regional corporations, heavily invested in resource development.\u00a0 And they have started leaving the AFN, taking their checkbooks with them.\u00a0 The irony in all this is that the social side of the AFN is hurtling just as quickly as humanly possible toward replicating in every awful detail the failed reservation system of the Lower 48 here in Alaska.\u00a0 Where the very solution to the endemic maladies in Bush Alaska (alcoholism, domestic violence, drug use, sexual assault, suicide, etc), jobs is the solution that you will never get from governments.\u00a0 Worse, the social side is actively involved in fighting tooth and nail, hammer and tong, any attempt to increase resource development (new oil and natural gas development on the North Slope, and mining at Pebble and Donlin Creek).\u00a0 In short, they are becoming that which they deign to hate the most.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

       <\/p>\n

        \n
      1. Opioids. Yet another example of the fraud the CDC has become over the years comes from an Oct 18 column in the Pain News Network entitled Study Finds Only 1.3% of Overdose Victims Had Opioid Prescription<\/a>.\u00a0 This comes on the heels of acknowledgement that the nationwide panic orchestrated by the prohibitionists at the CDC against vaping was entirely caused by ingestion of either THC or vitamin E oils in black market vaping products.\u00a0 In that one, the CDC used a few deaths as an excuse to attempt to shut down vaping completely.\u00a0 Similarly, the Pain News Network, reports that CDC guidance from 2016 stating<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        \u201cSales of opioid pain medication have increased in parallel with overdose deaths.\u00a0 Having a history of an opioid prescription is one of many factors that increase risk for overdose.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

        This claim is patently false, demonstrated by research out of MA that prescription opioids are usually not involved in overdoses.\u00a0 Even when they are, the overdose victim rarely has a prescription for them, meaning they were diverted, stolen or purchased on the street for use.\u00a0 The doctors involved in the study took a look at 3,000 opioid deaths 2013 \u2013 2015 when the problem was surging.\u00a0 They found that multiple drugs were involved in most of these, with heroin detected in 61% and fentanyl in 45% (China, anyone?) of them.\u00a0 Prescription opioids alone were detected in just over 16%, with those who had legal prescriptions for opioids only 1.3% of the total.\u00a0 And the CDC has access to this very same data, data they chose not to use in their pronouncements.\u00a0 How many pain sufferers have been dragged through the Hell of chronic pain due to the public pressure by anti-opioid zealots in the medical community, all based on fraudulent conclusions?\u00a0 And if these clowns can do it to opioids for pain control and vaping products, they can do it for literally anything else.<\/p>\n

         <\/p>\n

          \n
        1. Energy. A fun retrospective out of Axios last week entitled The decade that blew up energy predictions<\/a>.\u00a0 Despite the best efforts of the O\u2019Bama regime, the US blew away most of the energy predictions made in 2010.\u00a0 We ended up producing large quantities of clean natural gas and oil, to the point where the US just became a net energy exporter.\u00a0 Reason for both is the entrepreneurial combination of fracking and horizontal drilling applied to tight (mostly shale) oil-bearing formations.\u00a0 The US Energy Information Administration predicted that the US would by 2019 be producing 6.1 million bbl oil\/day.\u00a0 Per barrel price was predicted over $100\/bbl.\u00a0 Today, we are producing 12.5 bbl\/day with an average price around $60\/bbl.\u00a0 Oil imports were projected at 8.1 million bbl\/day\/\u00a0 Today we are exporting 0.1 million bbl\/day (as of Sept).\u00a0 Natural gas production was predicted at 19.8 trillion ft3 \/ year.\u00a0 Last actual production measured at the end of 2018 was 30.6.\u00a0 Actual coal use for electrical generation is half its projected level, natural gas nearly triple (and half again greater than coal), and renewables are 40% larger than projected.\u00a0 All this ties in with CO2 emissions, projected at 5.8 thousand million tons .\u00a0 Today that is down to 5.3, mostly due to switchover to natural gas fired electrical generation.\u00a0 This has been done privately, commercially, with little to no assistance form the feds, other than the O\u2019Bama regime doing their level best to speedbump the entire industry.\u00a0 It is what all the democrats promise to do to the industry should voters be foolish enough to elect them in 2020.\u00a0 Finally, imagine the sort of improvement we as a nation get in all of this if we get ourselves into the position of adopting Gen IV nuclear electrical generation that is completely emissions free, burns its own waste, and safe from meltdown.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

           <\/p>\n

            \n
          1. Upzoning. Not being content to start a shooting war with firearms owners statewide, newly elected Virginia democrats have also declared war on owners of single-family homes.\u00a0 Borrowing heavily from former O\u2019Bama HUD Secretary Julian Castro, the new democrat majority in the legislature introduced legislation that will centralize all local zoning laws at the state level<\/a>.\u00a0 The legislation will allow high-density housing to be built in suburban neighborhoods, the same sorts of neighborhoods that put this majority in office.\u00a0 Rationale by the supporters is that urban lifestyles are better for the environment and that the suburbs are bastions of racial segregation.\u00a0 So, their goal is to turn your neighborhood (and mine) into the streets of San Francisco.\u00a0 Great.\u00a0 With this legislation, urban democrats have declared war on suburban residents especially suburban women who were foolish enough to vote for them last month.\u00a0 I bet they didn\u2019t see that one coming.\u00a0 Northern VA is about to become HL Mencken Land, where they get the government they deserve and get it good and hard.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

             <\/p>\n

              \n
            1. Greta. This is a follow-on to my piece on Greta last week.\u00a0 With it, I will go down a bit of a laundry list of the things she (and her handlers) are wrong about.\u00a0 While everything is the correct response, it doesn\u2019t provide a lot of useful data for the persuasion wars.\u00a0 With that in mind, here are excerpts from an Oct 17 The Stream piece entitled Climate Change Fears of Teen Activist Are Empirically Baseless<\/a>:<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n