2014 Caucus and County Assembly
Caucus is coming up on March 4th. Since the precincts were renumbered many Republicans will have to figure out their new caucus meeting locations. Caucus locations used to also be voting locations, but mail-in ballots have evidently made polling places obsolete, at least for the time being.
So, caucus meetings are the last remaining face-to-face official political event for the small minority of average voters who don’t operate the machineries of the political parties, but who like to get out one evening every two years and do something political.
After the last Colorado governor’s race and the guy who Republicans now dare-not-speak-his-name, the near loss of Republican majority party status in the state, the experience of being had by the Democrat “Blueprint,” and the effect of new-media sunshine in that at any instant a broadcast publication on social media could launch from any room, there’s definitely a caution in the air. Speakers are more careful about creating an inconvenient sound bite. Some seem less spontaneous and more scripted.
With the exposure of the Left’s Blueprint for Colorado and the revelation that large sums of money wait in the wings to exploit any spinnable factoid for political advantage, a certain amount of caution is warranted. A couple candidates are taking it to the point of closing off debate forums entirely, under the theory that the reality of their meaning will be spun by adverse political and media forces no matter what they say, so they’re just not going to say anything.
This represents an imposed caucus disempowerment. Caucuses can’t function without discussable content.
I’m sure that once the candidates get into true two-party debates and the playing field is levelled, political disclosures will come fast and furious from all sides.
Also, consider that the historical manipulability of candidate selections by caucus party insiders may have run its course to some extent. Technological evolution forces adaptations. If the cloaks and cloak rooms of the past no longer shelter participants from scrutiny, then those folks must adapt to operate in a new reality.
The right questions directed toward leadership can bring out some good analysis if the leaders are honest with themselves and with their audiences. Candor is always appreciated and I’m seeing much more of it. Those speakers uncomfortable with candor may stand out more. Must not make eye contact, must not. . . Too much! But it’s all good fun, at least until the polls close and you find out what harmful edicts the opposition will be shoving down your throat for the next two years. Hopefully the tide will turn this year and we won’t experience those revelations once again.
Elbert County Republicans have never advanced caucus resolutions to the state party for further action. Either they just never got around to it, or perhaps the resolutions were never sufficiently cleaned up to make them worth advancing. This year could be different.
Caucuses have a right to pass resolutions for consideration at the County Assembly on March 29th. In the past those resolutions have not been rationalized at the assembly. Conflicting resolutions were allowed to stand, and the whole resolutions business came at the end of the assembly day when everyone was tired and disinterested. The necessary assembly discussions did not occur.
This year, resolutions are scheduled for assembly discussion and approval, in detail, from 10:00 – 12:00 a.m., prior to commencement of the remaining assembly business. This opportunity should give Elbert County Republicans a chance to pass a set of harmonized, non-contradictory resolutions that can be sent up the party chain of command.
More importantly, out of this process, resolutions concerning local matters should carry more persuasive weight with county leadership.
If you don’t like how much of our local media constantly push an opposition agenda designed to shift debate to the left, the Republican caucus resolution process presents a great opportunity to voice some leadership direction to Elbert County in an authoritative manner. Republican caucus attendees, who show up to act in the capacity of representing the big majority of Elbert County voters, should bring that language to their caucuses. Don’t waste the opportunity! Make those resolutions persuasively, get them passed, debate them at the county assembly on the 29th, and give some real direction to this county.
Republicans can stop reacting to the leftist juggernaut and get out in front of it. We have the tools and we have the numbers, if we’d just use them.
Fracing legal and regulatory challenges in 2014
This is a refreshing analysis in its objectivity.
Fracing faces legal and regulatory challenges in 2014
02/01/2014
Wayne D’Angelo
Andrew McNamee
Kelley Drye & Warren
Washington, DCLast year was an eventful one for hydraulic fracturing. Use of the completion technology helped to dramatically boost US oil and gas production—tight oil production from the Bakken and Eagle Ford formations alone increased by 700,000 b/d during the year, and gas production from the Marcellus shale jumped to 13.5 bcfd.
Alongside this historic production growth came employment growth, a resurgence of domestic energy-dependent and energy-intensive industries, and historic energy-driven declines in the US trade deficit. While domestic development and industrial activity increased dramatically in 2013, the increased use of natural gas helped lower the carbon footprint of the US below standards set by the Kyoto accords that were previously considered unattainable by many.
Notwithstanding these economic and environmental benefits, 2013 was also an eventful year for hydraulic fracturing legislation, regulation, and litigation. The federal government continued to pursue regulation on federal lands and for air emissions, while various environmental groups continued to petition for even more regulation.
Numerous states, like Wyoming, North Dakota, and Alaska, continued to update their hydraulic fracturing regulations while other states, like Illinois, passed sweeping new regulations. State ballot measures restricting the use of the completion technique were passed in several Colorado municipalities (Boulder, Broomfield, Fort Collins, and LaFayette) but were rejected in a pair of Ohio municipalities (Bowling Green and Youngstown). Other municipal preemption actions were litigated in New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and elsewhere. New infrastructure was proposed to bring the rising oil and gas produced from unconventional reservoirs to market, and many of these proposals met challenges from environmental groups. The first applications for LNG export were approved by the Department of Energy, and a discussion of the potential for crude oil exports was started for the first time in decades. Legislation of all kinds was proposed in Congress and in state houses across the country—particularly in California.
Given 2013’s widespread and transformative changes, it is difficult to predict precisely what 2014 will bring. It is, however, possible to identify some of the key regulatory and legal issues facing the hydraulic fracturing industry—and the states where those issues principally will play out in 2014.
Municipal preemption
The ability of localities to regulate (and ban) oil and gas development is a hotly debated issue. State regulators generally favor implementation of comprehensive statewide regulations. Industry similarly prefers compliance with a single regulatory structure versus a patchwork of local regulations. Some municipal and environmental groups, however, believe that oil and gas development is inherently dirty and dangerous—particularly when hydraulic fracturing is utilized. As such, these groups are increasingly challenging portions of state oil and gas law that preempt local regulations banning hydrocarbon development. In the final days of 2013, Pennsylvania’s highest court sided with a handful of municipalities and struck down portions of the Commonwealth’s oil and gas law, Act 13, which preempted municipal regulations from constraining oil and gas development. This decision set the stage in 2014 for a continuing fight in Pennsylvania, and similar preemption debates in other states such as Colorado, Ohio, and New York.
In 2014, we expect the Pennsylvania decision to be cited extensively, though perhaps not always effectively, by preemption litigants in other states. State court decisions may be persuasive but are not legally binding on other states. Further, the Pennsylvania decision was based on particular language in Act 13, the Commonwealth’s Constitution, and a nuanced application of the seldom cited “public trust doctrine.” Courts looking at the preemption issue in other states will need to examine, and base their decisions on, their own state laws—perhaps with very different results. At the same time, lawmakers in other states that are interested in preserving uniform state oil and gas laws will use the Pennsylvania decision to ensure their preemption language is as strong as possible to avoid a successful municipal challenge.
Chief among the preemption actions to watch in 2014 is the fight between the city of Munroe Falls and the state of Ohio over whether Munroe Falls can ban drilling on private property in city limits. Ohio’s oil and gas law has some of the strongest preemption language in the country and has already been upheld by an Ohio appellate court. Munroe Falls’ appeal will be heard by the Ohio Supreme Court this spring.
Methane regulation
In November 2013, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper’s (D) administration proposed the nation’s first state regulation of methane emissions from oil and gas operations. Methane, a greenhouse gas, is already controlled federally under the Clean Air Act, and Colorado’s proposal to add state regulation of methane emissions is unique.
While some in industry have welcomed the proposed regulations, others have expressed concern about the costs of the detection and control systems, the futility of regulating global climate change on a single-state level, and the need to inflexibly force specific controls on companies that already have financial incentives to capture methane. It remains to be seen whether Colorado will create a regulatory precedent that can be adopted in other states or will overstep the bounds of state regulation. The rulemaking process for this proposal will be among the most closely watched in 2014.
New York ban
New York state’s ban on high volume hydraulic fracturing will enter its sixth year in 2014. The New York ban is the most closely watched in the country because of its duration and because, unlike other states with bans, New York is sitting on a great deal of shale gas.
While the long-awaited decision by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) to either extend or lift the state’s de facto moratorium on hydraulic fracturing is supposed to be made in 2014, the same was said in 2013—and 2012. The fate of hydraulic fracturing continues to be postponed until the state health commissioner completes a seemingly boundless review of the potential health implications of hydraulic fracturing.
In November 2013, Gov. Cuomo affirmed that he expected the health study to be completed before his November 2014 gubernatorial election. However, in December 2013, he hedged that he would continue to defer to the health commissioner’s deadline. Predicting the fate of hydraulic fracturing in New York is always difficult. In an election year, it is impossible. At best, we can predict that, in 2014, New York will remain a key focal point of the highly visible and increasingly passionate debate over America’s domestic energy future.
The authors
Wayne D’Angelo is special counsel in the Energy Practice at Kelley Drye & Warren and Andrew McNamee is a government relations professional at the agency. Kelley Drye’s regulatory team helps companies navigate environmental and regulatory pressures faced by the energy industry. The agency’s government relations team has experience representing conventional and alternative energy producers, as well as retailers and energy consumers in a variety of industries. The agency has presented a broad range of energy policy matters before Congress and the executive branch for a variety of clients, including large oil and gas companies, a coalition of start-up renewable energy producers, and energy-intensive manufacturers.
Bruce S. Thornton
The Costs of the Environmentalism Cult
The central mistake of the romantic environmentalist is to gloss over the profound differences between human beings and the natural world. We are not “natural” creatures. What makes us human is everything that exists nowhere else in the natural world: the mind, language, consciousness, memory, higher emotions, and culture. None of these exist even in the highest primates. Apes do not craft tools, marry, name their offspring, bury their dead, live by laws or customs, or respect inalienable rights. This radical uniqueness of human identity means that we do not have a “harmonious” relationship with nature, but an adversarial and conflicted one. The natural world is the alien, inhuman realm of blind force, indifferent to suffering, death, and beauty. It is meaningless, for only humans bestow meaning on the world. And that meaning reflects our knowledge that each of us is unique, a creature that appears only once, and that each of us must die.
Most important, unlike everything else in the natural world ruled by necessity, humans are free. As French critic Luc Ferry writes, “Man is free enough to die of freedom.” And from that freedom comes morality, all the things we are obligated to do or not do, particularly in regard to our fellow humans. The nexus of consciousness of our individual uniqueness and necessary death, our freedom to choose to act against nature’s determinism, and our moral obligations to one another is what makes us unnatural––and human. Nature is our home only by dint of our alteration of it to make it suitable for such creatures, and that process is one of conflict and struggle against the brutal forces of extinction and destruction that have characterized the natural world for the 3.6 billion years life has existed.
The unnatural uniqueness of humans makes talk of “harmony” with nature the Disneyesque fantasy of rich people protected from nature’s cruelty by a high-tech civilization. Thus the proper view of nature should be how do we interact with our world and use its resources in order to benefit the greatest number of humans today, and to ensure that those who come after us have the resources to live well. Every environmental policy should start with that assumption. And we should determine the goods we want from nature––from economic development to the preservation of natural beauty––through the democratic process, not by the diktats of self-selected elites who mask their preferences as science rather than taste, and enlist the coercive power of the federal government to impose those subjective preferences at the expense of the well-being of everybody else.
As it is today, the biggest beneficiaries of our civilization indulge a sentimentalized nature love the cost of which is borne by others. They attack the technology and the free-market economic system that have created the unprecedented wealth, comfort, and leisure that they take for granted, but that their policies deny to others less privileged. The irrationalism and hypocrisy of modern environmentalism is a “black-market religion,” as Chantal Delsol puts it, a feel-good cult that makes its adherents feel superior to the grubby masses and the corporate barbarians who create the wealth and products that make their existence possible. Meanwhile jobs are not created, economic growth is burdened by costly regulations, and our national interests are compromised by the failure to exploit our country’s resources. That’s too high a price to pay just so some people can enjoy a pleasing fantasy.
deja vu
As U.S. Weakness Leads To Global Rearmament, Can War Be Far Behind?
The Law Of The Land
In Inventing Freedom, Daniel Hannon writes, “English-speaking peoples still commonly, and exceptionally, talk of “the law of the land.” Not the King’s law, not God’s law, but the law of the land–a set of rights and obligations immanent in the country, growing incrementally, passed down as part of the patrimony of each new generation.”
As President Obama continues to demonstrate, the Left do not hold the law of the land in the high regard traditionally upheld by “English-speaking peoples.” Conservative writers and speakers chronicle this feature of our new age on a daily basis, and mentioning it here has earned this writer a variety of libels–short of using the blood of Leftist babies to make matzah balls, though the day is still young.
Anyway, with due respect to the objectives of the Left with regard to Elbert County oil & gas development, I find their chosen tactic – to cause local zoning operational conflicts with COGCC – legally insufficient. It is my 1st Am. right to make the finding and to publish it.
Over the years I’ve documented in these pages evidence of a Leftist policy to push Elbert County into expensive litigation over oil & gas regulation, and county vs. states rights. I maintain that the county cannot afford that expensive litigation, and I applaud the BOCC for avoiding it thus far.
Rather than address the substance of my analysis, the Left comes back with libel on the front end, and politicking out the back door. The Left continue to push for operationally conflicting local regulation and they just don’t care about the legalities.
The Sierra Club recently entered the Elbert County oil & gas political arena by sponsoring a letter containing the following language:
Elbert County needs strong oil and gas regulations to protect our air, water, land, public health, safety, and quality of life. We are asking you to protect Elbert County residents by adopting regulations which would prohibit open pits for toxic produced water and prohibit spraying of toxic produced water to mitigate dust on county roads.
We also urge you to support citizen-drafted MOUs which would protect Elbert County citizens by increasing drilling set-backs to 1320 feet from homes, require green completion systems to reduce air emissions, require operators to notify residents within a mile of production activities, and increase baseline water sampling.
Please do everything in your power to ensure that Elbert County residents and their property are protected from the toxic spills, groundwater contamination, ozone-inducing emissions and other impacts that the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission has documented. The industry averages more that a spill per day across Colorado and has been found to be responsible for more than half of the ozone pollution causing federal air quality violations in nine Front Range counties. A recent Colorado School of Public Heath study found an increase in the incidence of congenital heart defects within 10 miles of drilling operations.
You have a duty to protect Elbert County from these impacts and risks and we are relying on you to do so.
Thank you for your consideration.
Well, the President may be able to walk all over Congress and get away with blatant constitutional violations, but Elbert County need not follow his “leadership.” The duty of the BOCC runs first to the law of the land, and I am relying on the BOCC to not break that trust. Under our system, the ends don’t justify the means.
If the Left cannot abide that framework, there are plenty of totalitarians in the world who would be glad to have them as subjects.
BOCC should turn down proposed regs
As currently written and approved by the Elbert County Planning Commission, the proposed zoning amendment for Part II, Section 27, Administrative Review and MOU Process for Minor Oil and Gas Operations and Related Facilities to Elbert County Zoning regulations will expose Elbert County to multiple lawsuits.
The proposed regs define the nature of a minor oil & gas operation in terms of equipment, operational characteristics, etc. In addition to specifying the physical characteristics of a minor oil & gas operation, the regulations require that a “voluntary” Memorandum of Understanding be inked between Elbert County and a prospective operator. Without a “voluntary” MOU, an operator’s physical equipment cannot constitute a minor operation.
Moreover, this fiction was invented to shelter the incorporation of local zoning operational conflicts with COGCC regulations into local law through the MOU. Operational conflicts are more restrictive regulations that conflict with state regulations, unless an operator voluntarily agrees to them. They cannot be required by local regulations.
Elbert County Planners are attempting to hide operational conflicts in plain sight by placing them inside a voluntary contract of an MOU.
Except the MOU isn’t voluntary. It’s a document required by zoning before equipment – with certain characteristics that don’t change whether or not the MOU exists – can meet the terms of a minor oil & gas facility in the proposed zoning section.
In this context, the MOU fits the definition of a contract of adhesion between parties of substantially unequal bargaining power. A “voluntary” MOU in the context of a required regulatory framework will not survive a court challenge as an enforceable contract.
Elbert County Planners have every right to follow a policy to seek truly voluntary MOU agreements with oil & gas operators. And an operator has every right to agree to more restrictive operational terms in an MOU with Elbert County.
But the construct currently proposed is not voluntary, it is regulatory. As such, it fails as a contractual construct, and it fails as a local regulatory operational conflict with COGCC state regulations.
The BOCC would be wise to turn this proposed language down. Passage will lead to litigation which can only delay the onset of oil & gas operations in Elbert County.
The Elbert County Planning Commission raised more rebuttable presumptions in their 1-2-14 recommendation to the BOCC, however, the above major problems should be sufficient to cause a re-tool of this zoning debacle.
The Meta Left
“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.” Albert Einstein
A lot of great explanations on the Left’s mental state made it to print in the last few weeks. Much of it advanced themes that have probably been known for some time, but there’s a real concentration of this sort of analysis going on right now by Conservative writers. They are rallying to explain the Left, each in their own way, and in doing so are exposing Leftist Man like never before. If the Left could shift their attention away from crafting political narratives to sway public opinion for a few moments and take a breather to look around, they might get a feel for how the reasoning world sees them.
In an essay today entitled Hate is the Force that Gives the Left Meaning, Daniel Greenfield asks the question, “The Left finally has its Un-American tyranny. So why is it [still] so angry?” Greenfield then answers the question in his typical definitive, dispositive, fashion. He explains that since the Left cannot rely upon their solutions to ground their political offense, all that remains available to them are the negatives they can frame about their opposition. Those negatives get drawn any number of ways. The only necessary element is that they’re negative. How, why, based on what, none of that really matters. It’s the negative conclusion that keeps them going and gives them something to build on to advance their cause.
In The Poison of Postmodern Lying, Victor David Hanson explained how good intentions are the only truth that matters – how democratic laws and objective truth must give way to the more powerful truth of social justice [which the Left will define for us.]
In Progressives Without Progress, Daniel Greenfield discusses how the Left see scarce resources as an unsolvable problem. [Forget that markets do this without any controls.] He shows how the Left’s rationing makes things more scarce and more technologically backward, and how their planning causes a conformity of unimaginative redistribution that solves nothing. He shows how the Left’s utopian police-state economics deny progress and kill off the human creative spirit.
In The Kindergarden Of Eden, Evan Sayet illustrated how the Left demonizes and makes enemies out of the those individuals in society who don’t follow the Left’s utopian plan, notwithstanding how those same people create real solutions to real problems.
In The Closing Of The American Mind, Allan Bloom shows how the Left removed all of the traditional cultural standards that used to moderate and frame the appetites of free Americans, and replaced them with a sterile orthodoxy obsessed over the avoidance of politically incorrect taboo outcomes. In other words, Bloom asks, and answers, the question of whether a Left life is a life worth living.
Recently Thomas Sowell put his spotlight on the Left’s narcissistic personality disorder in a column entitled Visceral Hatred Has Always Set Left From Right. The thinking goes that the Left’s good intentions, by themselves and without outcome evidence, give them all the self-esteem they need. To mention how the Left’s solutions don’t actually get to the outcomes they intend is not merely a scientific judgment, it’s a vile attack on their self-worth. The Left has always had trouble separating the person from the idea, which perhaps explains why they so readily resort to ad hominem attack. Sowell points out, in other words, how the Left’s penchant for ad hominem attack hoists them on their own petard. Criticize their good intentions and you criticize them. There’s a certain consistency of error here, but still wrong whether applied to themselves or against those they disagree with.
With all of this good, free, substantive analysis a mouse click away, you’d think some on the Left might risk noticing, or might even offer a substantive rebuttal. But not only do the Left seem disinterested in understanding themselves, they don’t seem too interested in understanding Conservatives either. We know all the flavors of hate, all the special names the Left reserve for Conservatives, but we have very little evidence that the Left have any deeper understanding of us.
Mau Mauing the MOU
If the Elbert County BOCC bows to the Left’s Mau-Mauing of Oil & Gas, we’ll end up with more expensive energy, and no local development.
(click on following excerpts for analysis from today’s IBD)
“The self-appointed environmental stewards. . .”
Elbert County voting precincts
Why you must propagandize
A day without propaganda from the Left is like a day without sunshine.
Bailey assumes too much
In his Oil & Gas regulus opus, Christopher Bailey assumes too much.
In a first-pass careful reading, the assumptions I noticed are:
- Operators intend to pollute to the extent regulations permit.
- Drinking groundwater may be contaminated at the surface.
- Drilling of water sampling wells is a cost-free option.
- Regulations can compensate for imperfect knowledge.
- Because something is permitted to happen, means that it will happen.
- Things that might happen, will happen, without any historical evidence.
- Any information an Operator produces is contaminated by its personal interest.
- Water loaded to pits is not sampled and tested.
- Well casing integrity is not tested and is assumed to leak.
- Regulatory exceptions are cited without any historical evidence of usage.
- Regulatory exceptions are cited without any citations.
- If regulations aren’t duplicated within each regulatory body, they go away at some point.
- The logical outcome of any argument against a COGCC rule construct is assumed to exist in fact, without any evidence.
- Possible harms are treated as proven.
- Temporal harms are treated as permanent.
- Suppositions are treated as findings.
Local enviros will love his analysis because it affirms all of their prejudices. They seem to be an earnest bunch but their standards for proof, logic, and evidence, need considerable work. It’s too bad the New Plains’ attempt to sell Bailey’s essay did not address any of the substantive weaknesses of his analysis.
Oh, and Bailey’s regulatory MOU suggestions are in operational conflict with COGCC regs.
the warp and woof the Left weaves
“Postmodernist relativists claimed that things like “truth” were mere fictions to preserve elite privilege.”
“[G]ood intentions . . . are the only truth that matters.”
“If ignoring bothersome laws . . . serves a greater social justice, then such dereliction also becomes “truth.”
“Without notions of objective truth, there can never be lies, just competing narratives and discourses.”
“But outside of math and science, whose natural truth man so far cannot impugn, almost everything else in America has become “it depends.”
Under these ground rules, there’s nothing the Left won’t say.
Super Bowl Sunday
The Sultan’s Laws
“The domestic left destroys everything it does not control as part of a cultural war[.]”
“Once the left achieves its dream of absolute power in a nation, that nation becomes socially backward, technologically backward and culturally backward.”
“[U]nplanned change is locked out of the equation because reactionary progressive utopias have to be relentlessly planned.”
“Time slows down and utopia sinks into its own progressive muck.”
“[T]he flower children became professional activists and politicians and ran a system of stale conformity[.]”
“The left only believes in change when it moves in their direction. But once change has been achieved, then their ideal is a static changeless society.”
“The progressive movement . . . depends on the egocentric tantrums of individuals for its philosophy, its art and its activism[.]”
“Fuel, water and even the atmosphere are all on the verge of running out. Everything must be safeguarded, counted and put in a locked box where qualified personnel will only distribute it at need.”
“Progressives equate progress to redistribution.”
“[U]topia becomes an economic police state.”
“The utopian is really a cynic, certain that individualism will unleash everyone’s worst impulses, and offering instead the iron order of his vision.”
“[T]he utter undoing of humanity is only a land use resolution or unrecycled plastic bottle away.”
“Utopians fear the unregulated and unplanned and they replace the true expansive progress of the human spirit with the false progress of social controls.”
“Under their rule, progress in this country, once its secular faith, has slowed to a crawl outside of a few select industries that are able to move faster than the speed of progressive regulations.”
one rule for thee
The problem with viewing the world through the lawyerly lens is the prerequisite of conflict. The whole business exists to force someone to behave according to a law as interpreted by some judicial or quasi-judicial third party.
Conflict means a disagreement exists between at least two parties. The progression of law, therefore, is built on conflicts by people who, for whatever reason, cannot otherwise agree to get along. Where there is a-priori agreement, no law enforcement is necessary.
As an aside, so the Left can avoid inserting the canard of criminality in their expected rebuttal, obviously I’m not talking about criminal matters.
Now, the Elbert County Left love this legal business. Whether it’s a zoning matter enabling them to push the government to make some code to control land use behavior the way they want, or whether it’s an electoral claim to harass the Republican leadership of the county, the law is a game in which they can at least score points, and maybe even win.
One hopes that the Colorado legislatures who create the enabling statutes for governing the playing fields of county zoning and election law, do so with the intention that what subsequently occurs in those domains will inure to the benefit of Colorado citizens living with the consequences.
One hopes that the statutes aren’t created for the purpose of enabling a gaming environment where the law can be turned, within the rules outlined by the legislature, to the advantage of one group of citizens over another, based on how well the game is played.
If legislation allows, however, for sharp dealing, or heavily loading the boat on one side by filling public meetings with a noisy minority, or filling courtroom proceedings with a noisy minority, then unscrupulous people will seize those gaming opportunities to serve their own advantage.
Some humans seem to have a gaming instinct, an ability to set aside ethics for personal advantage. And fiat legal structures seem to attract people who look for an unjust enrichment or a power play in their own interest. Where no conflict exists to start the playing field conditions that might sustain a game plan, such people will simply invent the necessary conflict. Fish can’t “go blub” without water in the tank.
Ultimately our legal systems cannot prevail over deficient ethical sensibilities. Our systems cannot withstand continued gaming attacks from a dedicated minority of baby boomer Leftists, many of them sustained by publicly funded pensions, who despite repeated failed attempts to get themselves elected as Elbert County officials, think they should be governing Elbert County’s highest offices, and who do everything they can to impede the officials elected to those offices.
Evan Sayet summed up the syndrome in one passage as follows;
Everyone in the Democratic Party, then is convinced that he or she is a victim, and every one of them agrees on who their victimizers are: the men and women of God and science who do things and make things. Their victimizers are the people who, because they live in the real world, have to engage in discriminating thought and choose the best (but by definition not utopian) answer.
When a Shick, a Thomasson, a Duvall, a Blotter, or a Brown, take umbrage over a bit of zoning code or some judicial matter, they project an alleged offense personal to themselves. Cosmically, it’s them in the cross hairs, their whole world in the chain of causation directly targeted by the alleged harm. For the practicing Leftist, it’s always their water, their money, their property, their minerals, their rights, their speech. Leftist standing is assumed, but never demonstrated.
And since utopia is their measure, and no human being can possibly measure up because human beings operate with imperfect information and imperfect capabilities, and since Leftist standing is a given, the ingredients for an endless umbrage that can never be remedied are also a given.
But don’t fail to notice that the only times less-than-utopian outcomes matter to the Left, the only times they feel targeted, are when they’re not in control. That’s the false alternative the Left presents to the world. Either put them in control, or they’ll selectively engage their grievance machinery and make a living hell out of things as perpetual victims.
The dilemma they present does not materially differ from the one presented by the Taliban – whose world view provides sufficient motivation for them to make war on the West, notwithstanding anything the West actually does to avoid or provoke them. They have an offensive metaphysical foundation in Islam which they can choose to ignore or follow. Reasoning and reality feedback from the world external to their domain are largely irrelevant except to the extent they get in their way.
Those of us outside the cults are constantly placed on the defensive from endless experiments and harmful inventions presented as progress toward their utopias.
The adversarial system that the Left invest so heavily in can be manipulated. Despite systemic mechanisms that push in the direction of objective justice, those principles can be overcome by unscrupulous tactics. But the Left won’t publicly own the ethics they practice to reach the ends they consider justified by any means.
Their post-hoc explanations, which get utterly fantastic when they’re challenged, know no bounds. But their super-sensitivity to anti-utopian harm is no more than a tactic, a practiced art they’ll turn off the moment they get power.
Under the Left it’s one rule for me and another for thee. Under the Right it’s one rule for all and one chain of causation for all. That’s the difference.
Left is infallible
Looks like the Elbert County News has gone off the reservation where most of the Elbert County press lives. Good for them.
As you can see from the comments to the Rowland/Gessler story of 1/24 (copy saved here if the above link expires), the Elbert County Left posse came out to reinforce this new skirmish line in their political war on Elbert County.
Most of their rhetoric consists of the usual damnation/salvation dichotomy where they represent everything good and their opposition is all bad. But they’re not as smart as they think they are.
Mr. Thomasson let slip a comment that undermines all of their moral authority;
. . .but I believe the facts of the case will suffice to keep the court from overturning the verdict. If it goes the other way, it will be because the ALJ made a mistake, not because of some wild claim that the Leftists are after the good Republicans of Elbert County.
If the judge does not agree with the Left, then the judge will have made a mistake. The Left can not be wrong. Ever.
You need to look at the cases the Left make in and around Elbert County from this perspective – especially the Planning and Zoning cases. Truth is not on the table. Efficiency doesn’t enter into it. Economics, legalities, justice, sound science, none of those dispositive disciplines matter to the Left. Those who don’t agree with the Left have made a mistake. Those who don’t agree with the Left in the future will have made a mistake!
I only know of one guy in history who successfully pulled off a claim of infallibility, and he got crucified for it.
the cathedral of anything
For all those who missed church yesterday, the Grammy Awards held a nuptial mass near the end of the program last night.
In a time when states are considering imposing a regulatory requirement for couples to get certified as marriage eligible by attending state approved classes before the state will issue a marriage license, perhaps the Grammy people wanted to get a bunch of couples grandfathered into the institution by conducting a mass marriage ceremony last night.
It was pretty interesting. Individuals of all sizes, shapes, colors and sexual preferences appeared suddenly in the audience, rings in hand, dressed for marriage. Meanwhile, the stage turned into a gothic cathedral complete with stained glass window projections. The songs turned to the theme of universal love, rings were exchanged, there was a processional, or is it recessional, as the newlyweds marched out of the hall to their various wedding receptions and honeymoons.
The show had all the sincerity of a tent revival, or maybe an episode of Rex Humbard, broadcast live from the Cathedral of Tomorrow. Really, the marriage of rock music, rock concert stagecraft, ersatz religion, and liberated sex in an over-the-air television broadcast, taking up the time slot normally held by the nightly news, was something.
Along with Katy Perry’s ritual witch burning, too many Goth tunes, and country music celebrating reefer and lesbians, the music arts business desperately seeks to capture some relevancy in a world of adrift souls who will consume anything that titillates on any level.
I expect we’ll see more of this sort of thing with other political memes plugged into the liberated sex slot. We’ll come to miss the good old days when religion was merely replaced by belief in extra-terrestrials.
Country, religion, family, ideas of civilization, all the sentimental and historical forces that stood between cosmic infinity and the individual, providing some notion of a place within the whole, have been rationalized and have lost their compelling force. America is experienced not as a common project but as a framework within which people are only individuals, where they are left alone. To the extent that there is a project, it is to put those who are said to be disadvantaged in a position to live as they please too. The advanced Left talks about self-fulfillment; the Right, in its most popular form, is Libertarian, i.e., the right-wing form of the Left, in favor of everybody’s living as he pleases. The only forms of intrusion on the private-life characteristic of liberal democracies–taxes and military service–are not now present in student life. If there is an inherent political impulse in man, it is certainly being frustrated. But this impulse has already been so attenuated by modernity that it is hardly experienced.
Allan Bloom
The union of melody, harmony, rhythm and lyrics, combined to connect to a real emotional response, will survive this mass market insanity. But at least for a time, you’ll have to look harder to find it.
Visceral Hatred Has Always Set Left From Right
Thomas Sowell wrote today in the Investors Business Daily, “The vision of the left is not just a vision of the world. It is also a very flattering vision of itself.”
The entire column is linked here. (If this link fails, click on the paragraph below for a saved copy.)
Whew! – A lotta’ hatin’ goin’ on Facebook at the New-Plains and Meadowlark pages.
. . .must be good for their communities.
Kiowa evening
the “high” Left
The Left own the domain of the Elbert County Planning Commission. It’s their sandbox.
If looks could kill, yours truly would be cold in the ground from the sneers, snarls, scowls, disgust and disapproval they’ve thrown at me on the few evenings I’ve ventured on to that hallowed forum for regulatory orogeny. [Read more…]
Evan Sayet, Understanding How Modern Liberals Think
MOU continued
My side of a continuing MOU discussion –
I don’t think one can sufficiently torture the English language so as to disguise the fact that this MOU, written into this county zoning process, is a regulatory document that must exist, must be agreed to, is contemplated to contain certain elements, and will be integral to further regulatory enforcements in both county and state jurisdictions.
The Elbert County MOU is framed as a voluntary agreement – a contract. This interpretation is a precedent condition necessary to make the argument that the MOU is non-regulatory – and an MOU with terms in operational conflict with COGCC regulations must be non-regulatory, else the county will be non-compliant with COGCC rules on regulatory operational conflicts, and will get sued by the Colorado Attorney General.
At the very least this MOU is a non-voluntary contract of adhesion within a mandatory regulatory framework enforced by a superior power. As currently conceived and extensively written into proposed ECZR, looking at the totality of the circumstances, I don’t see how this MOU + ECZR can survive judicial review as a contract.
The Left is hung up on the MOU in Elbert County because they need a device to enforce more stringent operational requirements and end run operational conflicts with the COGCC. They’re attempting a “cake and eat it to” construct. It’s inappropriate to stand by while they corrupt language and common sense in order to accommodate a partisan purpose.
As currently conceived, this MOU is obviously a regulatory device. To make it non-regulatory, it needs to completely come out of the proposed zoning regulations. The Left is free to follow their objectives, however, they are not free to re-engineer our common language, or set up disingenuous zoning artifices.
And to further the point, I see no problem with the county having a policy to seek MOU agreements and to use them to augment regulatory processes when they are voluntarily obtained. The key is that those regulatory procedures need to function equally well in the absence of an MOU agreement. Only then will you be able to say that the MOU is non regulatory.
References to the MOU should come out of the Part II Section 27 proposed zoning regulations. If not, the BOCC should not approve those regs.
The Eternal Darkness of the Progressive Mind
The Eternal Darkness of the Progressive Mind
Posted By Bruce Thornton On January 20, 2014 @ 12:24 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage
The attacks on Lone Survivor, the movie about 4 Navy Seals caught in an operation gone lethally wrong in Afghanistan, illustrate once again the fossilized orthodoxy of the left. The L.A. Weekly’s Amy Nicholson called the movie a “jingoistic snuff film” that “bleeds blood red, bone-fracture white, and bruise blue” and assumes “brown people bad, American people good.” Similarly, Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir called it a “jingoistic, pornographic work of war propaganda.” Such rhetoric reveals the anti-military, anti-American biases typical of progressives, a form of bigotry as stale as disco king Tony Manero’s white leisure suit. continue
Oil & Gas MOU is a bad idea
P.S. On the claim that the MOU “is not regulation and cannot be regulation”
There are over 30 references to the MOU in the proposed Part II Section 27 zoning regulations, in a variety of usages. ECZR even specifies that the MOU must be submitted to COGCC, a requirement which would seem to present an operational conflict with COGCC.
The writers of the new section of ECZR [that the BOCC will consider on 2-12-2014] seem to take the position that because the county offers alternative zoning approval through SUR, that the MOU is optional and non regulatory.
I don’t find that argument persuasive.
If the BOCC enacts Part II Section 27, the MOU will become regulatory for that section of the ECZR. The fact that alternative ECZR exists would not make the new Part II S 27, MOU inclusions any less regulatory.
——————-
It’s a bad idea for Elbert County Oil & Gas zoning regulations to base any zoning decision points, in the application of county zoning laws, on the existence or substance of an MOU contract between Elbert County and an Operator, or between Elbert County and a mineral rights owner. [Read more…]
bursting bubbles
Eamonn Butler on Daniel Hannan
Rush covered this from Dr. Butler today. I had the good fortune to have a class with Dr. Butler at Hillsdale, a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.
Written by Dr. Eamonn Butler [2] | Monday 20 January 2014
New-Plains Hypocrites
Digital Attack Map
Hit the “Play” button.
gender, class, environment, pacifism, rogue markets
So many “foundational theories” – like those in the title of this post – lay strewn about like scattered tinker toys. The Left use them to frame all of their views, whether in Elbert County or the Universities. They’re not really theories in the scientific sense, because a theory is an idea capable of being disproved. These “foundational theories” of the Left are outcomes the Left intends to manifest. They are “foundational” in the sense they create movement toward whole sub-menus of corollary Leftist activities. Leftists hold these truths to be self-evident, above question, and they will protect them from refutation at any cost.
paring knives
I’m reading a Richard Dawkins book from the last decade, and now and then he leaves a gold nugget on the trail – a little truth he’s boiled down to an essence.
For example –
- An inability to prove the existence of something does not make its existence a 50-50 proposition. In fact, the inability to prove the existence of something has no bearing on the probability of its existence.
- The fact that a question can be phrased in a grammatically correct English sentence doesn’t make it meaningful, or entitle it to our serious attention.
Truths like these – variations on the idea of Occam’s razor I suppose – are like paring knives for whittling away the spoiled meat from the fruit salad of unfounded theories and hack philosophies so prevalent today.
story of Elbortopia
As if to defy the ruling logic of Elbortopian Leftist Dinosaurs, the sun rose again today. Mother Gaia continued to spin the earth underneath the sacred alluvium that supports beloved Elbortopia, and brought our little patch of heaven into the light once again.
Elder Dinos predicted we would not see this future day. They told us that only the sacred statutory zoning scrolls of Elbortopia would satisfy [Read more…]