Planning
Planners don’t have enough information. They never do. It’s the nature of their problem. Looking into the future when all things are known, from the vantage point of the present, has its limitations. Planners don’t have enough information because they can’t have enough information. They can’t have enough information because that information doesn’t exist yet.
This fact of space and the direction of time does not deter them. They envision a harmonious future world with all people and things relating to one another in the most optimally sweet balance of sources and uses, comings and goings, beings and doings, with socially just outcomes, no big losers, and no big winners.
In their future, earned equity is the only value – but only insofar as the equity has no past, no family, and no inheritance. Those things involve capital and capital comes from profit. Profit means that something more was gained by one party in a transaction than was fairly deserved based on cost. Profit can never be earned because it’s essentially unfair. The Marxist theory that labor determines value doesn’t allow for earned value to exceed the cost of sustaining the labor.
So planners posit their sustainable future without profit. Their models have people only needing and receiving enough to sustain them in the lifestyles they’re accustomed to. After all, why should they need more? They’re just going to die in a few years like everyone else. Shouldn’t someone else have a fair chance? It’s only fair.
In their optimally sweet sustainable future, people live in the class they were born into. They don’t profit, they don’t accumulate wealth, they don’t move up in society, because there are no winners and losers when we all balance each other from each according to our abilities, to each according to our needs.
Well that’s all nice enough on paper. It just falls completely apart when you try to shoehorn human nature into the picture. Without motivation, people don’t work. A system that provides a subsistence level of motivation yields a subsistence level of human energy where everyone just subsists…in an optimally sweet harmonious and fair balance…at the level of the least common denominator.
I’m not saying planners are short sighted, at least not more than the nature of their avocation demands. One can see from reading their plans, zones and various diktats that they’re quite thorough. They’re no doubt doing the best they can in trying to solve a problem that, by its nature, can’t be solved.
What confounds, however, is what on earth they must see in their harmonized sustainable least common future to motivate them to try to bring it about? Imagine a sailor who dreams of a flat lake without a breath of air to move his boat. It just makes no sense.
B_Imperial
taxation without representation
Notably absent from the Oil & Gas task force meeting last Tuesday were many property owners with Oil & Gas mineral interests. Everyone at the meeting, planner and audience member alike, seemed quite at ease with the proposal in the MOU to impose very expensive water quality testing protocols on all future Oil & Gas development.
Arguably, the proposed testing protocol could make energy development here so expensive as to preclude it ever happening at all. Judging from some of the body language by at least one of the planners (red hat), one might conclude that preemption of drilling was the real purpose behind the proposed zoning law.
Who would pay for these protocols? Payment would come in the form of reduced revenues to mineral property owners. Those imposing the law are not those who would pay for the law. Isn’t that an awfully familiar theme these days? The casual air with which these folks discuss making law to spend large amounts of other people’s money is quite astonishing.
In days of old we used to call that taxation without representation. A more modern description might be politically motivated bad science.
Those who have an interest in protecting their property might want to attend future meetings of this group and stand up for their interests. There is just no balance in the room right now.
Should laws be built around expensive experiments? Should those with no stake in bearing the expense of the experiment be the ones making those laws?
B_Imperial
Proposed water test protocol. Click to enlarge.
O & G Regulation Task Force mtg
OGR MOU Items for discussion with COGCC 8/28/2012
Note, the above document is discussed in the accompanying video. Video of Oil & Gas Zoning working group meeting 8/28/2012: http://bambuser.com/v/2941056
About the meeting:
Later in the second hour I asked the task force the question, “Is there any evidence from anywhere in the world where aquifers have been contaminated from the down-hole horizontal fracturing region of a well?”
As you can see from the above pdf, the proposed water testing protocols over the horizontal tangent portions of the wells — the fracturing zones — are extensive, and presumably expensive. In Elbert County geology, this fracturing zone is 10,000 feet deeper (roughly) than our deepest aquifer. Is it reasonable, or perhaps even remotely possible, that a fracture could penetrate 10,000 feet of rock to compromise an aquifer?
Team members admitted that there was no evidence that such a contamination had ever occurred anywhere. They also admitted that these regulations were constructed as an experiment to gather data to prove or disprove the issue. They said that, absent data, they had to take the most conservative approach possible.
Those are the bare facts behind this proposed law. This law is an experiment, plain and simple. Should zoning law be the proper forum to conduct geological experiments? Should property holders be forced to fund such experiments through zoning law?
Like anthropogenic global warming, this is probably another example of what you get when you mix politics with science — something really expensive without scientific support.
The other question this MOU begs, for me, is a procedural issue.
This water testing protocol has been copied from the working draft of the OGRs. As zoning law, those proposed laws must go through public hearings before they can become law. It was noted in the meeting that for any elements of the draft OGR that get pulled into the MOU agreement with the COGCC, those elements will be removed from the OGR.
The question is whether the MOU, as an intergovernmental agreement [IGA], is subject to the same public hearing and approval protocols as a proposed zoning law? If it is not, that is, if the MOU can be inked between Elbert County and the COGCC without a public hearing, then Elbert County CDS would be significantly impacting our property rights without broad public scrutiny.
I hope this is not the case.
B_Imperial
ElCo usurping property rights
A right is only as valuable as your ability to protect it. I recently wrote about water rights, and I had no plans to revisit the subject so soon.
At the last BOCC meeting, the Director of Community and Development Services [CDS] announced a meeting to be held this evening at 6:30 p.m. in the commissioners chambers to discuss the draft Oil & Gas Regulations [OGR]. The Director indicated the proposed zoning was nearing completion. I stopped at CDS today to pick up a copy of the current draft prior to tonight’s meeting, which they provided for $.25 a page. 56 pages.
I was also informed that the purpose of tonight’s meeting is to discuss a Memorandum Of Understanding [MOU] to be submitted by CDS to the COGCC. I presume that MOU hinges on having the OGR largely resolved. See Followup here.
I found some major problems with the Draft OGR.
I.
The first one is in Section 26.2 A, a. Suitability. This section forms the corpus of planning review criteria to be used to evaluate all OGR development. It says, “factors will be evaluated in accordance with applicable State, County, and Federal standards.” What standards? It doesn’t say. The applicable ones I guess. Which ones are applicable? Who knows.
Next, Section 26.2, A, c. Site Characteristics. “Factors for consideration include: topography, natural hazards (landslides, flooding, wildfire, etc.), cultural and historical uses of the proposed site, and current resource values (open space corridor and wildlife habitat).” Again, what defines these factors? It doesn’t say.
These two sections are meant to guide CDS, the Planning Commission and the BOCC throughout the implementation of these proposed zoning laws. They are a blank check, without an anchor in any specified written law, in the hands of the government.
Zoning that is not founded on published statutes or objective sources of law is a license for government to do as it pleases. There is no property right protection under such a scheme.
II.
Turning to Section 26.2 B, 1. Minor Oil & Gas Facility Defined. “Land use applications for a proposed Minor Oil & Gas Facility shall be processed administratively by [CDS] without a public hearing before the Elbert County Planning Commission or the Board of County Commissioners.”
However Section 26.2 B, 2. Review Process for Minor Oil & Gas Facilities, specifies adjacent property notice procedures and refers to “appearing at the hearing or by submitting a written waiver to the Director prior to the hearing.”
Now, there’s either a public hearing process for Minor O&G facilities, or there’s not, but the Draft OGR is internally inconsistent on the question.
III.
The largest objection I have to these regulations is in Sections 26.3 G. 5 – 9. Water Supply Plan and Surface Water / Aquifer Protection.
Section 5, “Prior to commencement of any drilling operations, the Operator will contact, by certified mail, all surrounding property owners with active domestic, irrigation or livestock wells … and ask permission to conduct water sampling and analysis pre-drilling, post drilling, post completion, and post production every (3) years for a period of fifteen (15) years.”
“The Director of Community and Development Services may require further water well sampling at any time in response to complaints from water well owners.”
“Additional testing, for cause as determined by CDS, will be done at any interval for any resident within the test area. A request for further testing must be submitted in writing and must include reason for request.”
The section continues and even specifies allowable methane levels in your water before CDS will require an Operator to investigate the source of the gas.
So, to summarize, this zoning law gives away your rights to protect your water quality to Elbert County bureaucrats, who may require an Operator to determine the source of gas in your water, if they agree with your written request, and if the test results meet their standard for water pollution.
Perhaps what most offends my sensibility is that this surrendering of your ability to enforce your own water quality comes in the form of asking permission by a non-governmental entity. A prospective operator asks you permission to test your water. If you give it, Elbert County steps in and becomes the arbiter and enforcer of your water quality. The county owns your water quality thereafter, and with that, they might as well own your water.
What if you don’t like the quality of water that the county finds acceptable for you? What if you think .9 mg/L of methane tastes funny in your water and you want a remedy, but the county doesn’t think your water pollution rises to the level it is willing to defend?
Don’t do it Elbert County citizens. Don’t give up your ability to protect your property interest in your water quality to government planners. Their interest in your property is just not as personal as yours.
These Draft OGR zoning laws undermine your property interest in owned mineral wealth by subjecting that process to an arbitrary set of laws. And they undermine your property interest in protecting your water quality directly.
Fail.
B_Imperial
Bob is a racist
not so smart
Mitt’s backstory
Joel Gilbert, “I accuse the press”
When Democrats Talk Like Socialists
By SVETLANA KUNIN
Posted 08/22/2012 06:47 PM ET
‘What exactly is the point of this article?” asked a reader of my last (July 25) column titled “President’s Attack On Success Shows U.S. Falling, Not Rising.” “That the U.S. has a robust private sector and a host of freedoms? That people with good ideas can succeed in America? Who is arguing these points?”
Too many people think that freedom, opportunity and a variety of choices are ever-present features of life in the U.S. — that fundamental transformation of America will not affect accustomed standards. [Read more…]
“The Unvetted”
America divided
- African Americans
- Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders
- Catholics
- Educators
- Environmentalists
- Jewish Americans
- Latinos
- LGBT Americans
- Native Americans
- Nurses
- Parents
- People of Faith
- People With Disabilities
- Rural Americans
- Seniors
- Small Business Owners
- Veterans & Military Families
- Women
- Young Americans
These are groups Obama has targeted to re-elect him. Maybe this is just the list his campaign thinks can be reached on-line. There are other groups in play that don’t present so well on the internet such as government employee unions and government contractors.
Obama’s job is really pretty simple: Identify groups and pay them off. Authorize an entitlement, a benefit, a public expenditure for a group, expend the debt-financed federal money, move on to the next group.
Republicans have to sell an ideology, a basket of ideals that capture the imagination of their constituents – a much tougher proposition because it involves education, persuasion, historical context, ethics, morality … good grief, the list is endless.
To contrast, Democrats just write checks out of the treasury to their voters. Democrat constituents must possess the skill to cash a check, and then get to a polling place from time to time to pull a democrat voting lever — a pretty short resume’.
It doesn’t look good for taxpayers. They’re not on Obama’s list.
B_Imperial
Occupy ElCo Govt
Occupy Admits Its Real Goal: Communism
The Left: An Occupy organizer admitted over the weekend that the goal of his protest group was to “overthrow the capitalist system and build communism.” So the cat’s out of the bag again on this bunch. Where is the outrage?
The true agenda of the Occupy movement has been revealed — it’s a totalitarian one. Billing itself as a spontaneous people’s revolution and embraced by the media and Democrat political establishment, Occupy is really a destructive band of thugs whose goal is the violent demise of democracy. [Read more…]
ELCO’s CP
Not Communist Party, Cloward and Piven, though some might say that’s a distinction without a difference.
The ersatz Republicans at New-Plains continue their manipulation of ELCO Republican voters, causing confusion, corruption and chaos in their Cloward and Piven strategy to replace our system with theirs.
The Summer of the Schlegel Recall
www.new-plains.com
Only a moron or dedicated liar could twist it into anything approaching “partisan.”
The Cloward and Piven strategy: overwhelm the system, force it to collapse, replace it with a socialist alternative.
Cloward and Piven applied to Elbert County: overwhelm commissioners with open records requests, constant misrepresentations of their policies, challenges to every decision they make, spurious litigious actions. Cause the commission to expend money and resources defending against phantom issues, then blame them for doing so while at the same time ignoring any culpability or responsibility for generating the phantom crisis. Install socialist commissioners with plans to use zoning to take control of private natural resource properties.
B_Imperial
Dishonorable Disclosures
Paul Ryan rally at Lakewood HS
I met former Boulder County Republican Party Chairwoman Marty Neilson, now head of CUT, and her colleague/chauffeuse LeMoine, at the Paul Ryan rally yesterday. They really know how to work a rope line!
————————————————————————————-
“Our” water
In Elbert County groundwater aquifers, there is no such thing as “our” water. “Our” water is a political myth built on a fantasy. Obviously, this absence-of-foundation gives no pause to politicians who use “our” water to justify all sorts of self aggrandizement to gain office, and all sorts of regulation once in office. Let’s explore the fantasy.
Groundwater rights in Colorado are gifts to landholders from the government that come with restrictions. They are government grants that can take the form of well permits, water court decisions, and various decrees from the Colorado State Engineer.
With them, the State of Colorado conveys limited rights to parties to (a) use defined amounts of water each year for 100 years, from (b) in the case of groundwater, defined depths in the ground known as aquifers, that are (c) in the case of groundwater, underneath specific areas of land, for (d) specific types of uses, on (e) specific surfaces of land. Those elements combine to make a water right, a grant given by the state to a grantee, usually a landowner.
A water right gives the holder a license to put some of Colorado’s water to a beneficial use. Moreover, unless that water is actually put to that beneficial use, the right cannot be defended or protected.
A grant from a state regulatory authority is not a permanent or absolute form of property. For example to contrast, after an owner of a house pays off the mortgage, they own a perfected title to that house. No one can take it away or dispossess the owner of it, unless it’s done through a court action in satisfaction of some other debt or obligation.
Water rights, however may be revoked or modified if the conditions of their usage are violated. Title to them is never “perfected.” It’s always contingent and subject to change. Considering their source — a political authority — this should come as no surprise. But not only are water rights contingent, there’s no guarantee that the water permitted to be extracted will even exist for the life of the water right. This makes them contingent and speculative.
Water rights are given through transactions between surface landholders in Colorado and the State of Colorado. Whether the grant comes directly from the Colorado State Engineer, or through a water court consulting the Colorado State Engineer on how much water to adjudicate, they all come from the same place.
There are no other governing parties such as local and county governments who define a water right, however, Elbert County uses zoning authority to modify and reduce state-granted water rights for property owners through their county subdivision regulations. Subdivision owners have their water rights reduced to a third of the state grant.
The Colorado Legislature has determined that the Colorado State Engineer will use a 100-year aquifer life when it delegates water rights. Elbert County divides those water rights by 3 to translate them into 300 year conveyances, though a recent court decision found that zoning time-frames beyond 50 years were subject to strict scrutiny. I suppose this was the courts way of admitting our inability to see the future.
It is common knowledge to most people in Elbert County that the water produced here comes out of non-renewable aquifers. Once it comes out of the ground, it doesn’t go back in. We consume it, and unless we recycle it in some way, that consumption is a one-way trip to evaporation.
Sidebar: Dr. Ken Carlson discussed water recycling in the context of hydraulic fracturing in a recent talk at an Elbert County Conservative Breakfast.
Scarcity is the soul of economics. Scarcity causes value to exist. The threat of scarcity causes value to go up. So, we have this scarce resource, becoming more scarce because it has a finite supply because most people foresee humans to be around, needing water, much longer than the supply is projected to last. Add a dash of politically motivated emotion, and you have a guaranteed vote-getter made to order for any political race, however tangential to water.
Vote for me, I’ll save “our” water, otherwise you’ll die of thirst. It’s a powerful message and it’s used to some degree every day in Elbert County.
So what’s wrong with this notion of “our” water? Back to the Colorado State Engineer, grantor of all water rights, either directly or through connected water courts, in Colorado.
Denver Basin groundwater aquifer rights are not allocated from a pool of aquifer water. They are allocated based on overlaying surface land.
I’ll say it a different way. When a 100-year water right is calculated by the Colorado State Engineer, the calculation is done according to the amount of overlaying land. It does not take into account how much water might be available in the vicinity as a product of historical nearby withdrawals.
Our individual water rights are not calculated from a model of the aquifer pool. They’re just not. Legally, they don’t connect to each other. The rights are derived as stand-alone, quantity of land, calculations.
So when someone comes along after the fact, mostly for a political purpose, and purports to address “our” water, that person is treating a disconnected set of things as if they were a uniform thing. Yes, those rights all concern water, but that’s where the similarity ends. Legally, in public policies, in private dealings, in what can be enforced in a court, there is simply no pool of “our” water in Elbert County.
A zoning law with a purpose of extending Elbert County’s aquifer lives to 300 years, has no more chance of accomplishing its purpose than the initial grant did based on an overlaying land calculation driving a 100 year aquifer life assumption.
I was very surprised to learn that in this computerized age with our massive computational capacities, that the State Engineer does not model the Denver Basin aquifers in a pool, or use previously granted rights in order to arrive at a water right determination — a pooled calculation that might try to account for adjacent depletions.
Everyone talks about depletion, local politicians build their political lives on the assumption, hundreds of people will come out to occupy a county commissioners meeting and demonstrate about the potential threat of it, but our water rights, and the laws surrounding them, simply don’t anticipate it.
Perhaps it is time for our zoning law and our politics to adapt to this reality — time we use science to address this issue, and leave the parade of shamans screaming about “our” water alone.
B_Imperial
Fascism
Wed 8/8 5:00 p.m. @ Lions Hall
This film documents the socialist conquest of America. Whether Obama is the son of Frank Marshall Davis or not, the history of the totalitarian movement they both dedicated their lives to is an on-going American tragedy that must be seen, must become known, by all Americans.
WND EXCLUSIVE
Filmmaker reveals ‘deeply disturbing’ Obama background
‘Gap between his public narrative … and reality’
Ever wonder why presidents before Barack Obama didn’t feel the need to publicly berate the U.S. Supreme Court during a State of the Union address, even when they disagreed with a decision, as Obama did over the campaign finance ruling?
Did you think why earlier presidents did not demand ranks of unaccountable “czars” in the White House, to address everything from water use to executive pay?
And did you notice the reams of orders emanating from the Obama White House regarding immigration policy, social welfare programs and terrorism policy, issues that logically should be addressed by Congress?
There’s one man who’s noticed it all: Filmmaker Joel Gilbert, who has directed the new “Dreams from My Real Father: A Story of Reds and Deception,” about Obama and his past.
Gilbert purports in his production that Obama’s biological father was not the “Kenyan goat herder” Barack Obama Sr., who visited the United States as a student and later returned to Kenya.
Instead, his evidence suggests that Obama’s biological father was Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party USA propagandist, and who has prevailing influence over White House actions even today.
Gilbert told WND that his background in Middle East and Islamic studies had him working in 2010 on “Atomic Jihad: Ahmadinejad’s Coming War and Obama’s Politics of Defeat.”
He reviewed hundreds of Obama speeches during that research and noted an “odd” pattern of behavior in Obama.
“When speaking of issues relating to the rich and the poor, Obama became very excited, speaking rapidly and louder, always in a higher pitch. On other subjects, he was quite calm. Why would Obama have an inner passion for class struggle? From my knowledge of his background, exclusive prep school, Ivy Leagues, Harvard Law – it didn’t seem to fit,” he said.
But for Gilbert, a film director, writer, and musician who creates documentaries through his Highway 61 Entertainment, the light clicked on when he read Obama’s book, “Dreams from My Father.”
There were multiple references to Obama seeking out Marxist individuals, pursuing socialist events, and advocating for a “community” lifestyle.
His investigation then turned to Davis, whose name repeatedly was mentioned in Obama’s writing.
“His close physical resemblance to Obama was shocking, while Obama little resembled the Kenyan Obama. How could this be?” he wondered on his website about the new “Dreams” production.
“I unearthed two film archives of Frank Marshall Davis, one from 1973, the other from 1987, as well as Davis’ photo collection. I then acquired 500 copies of the Honolulu Record, the communist run newspaper where Davis wrote a weekly political column for eight years. I also obtained seven indecent photos of Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, taken at Frank Marshall Davis’ house, suggesting an intimate connection between Dunham and Davis.
“I concluded that to understand Obama’s plans for America, the question was ‘Who is the real father?’”
Gilbert, who previously challenged Hollywood’s comfort zone with “Farewell Israel: Bush, Iran and the Revolt of Islam,” said the bottom line is that Obama’s “story” of an inspiring childhood is just not real.
Gilbert told WND, “I felt I could build a case that Obama in fact had a very deeply disturbing family background.”
And Obama is, in fact, pursuing the “dreams” from his “father” – his real father, a “likely Soviet agent,” Gilbert said.
There is an ever-present set of themes about which Obama revolves, he said, including a “top 1 percent taking advantage” and “a proletariat being taken advantage of.”
There are “evil straw men preventing the working class from upward mobility,” he said. “This is classic Marxist ideology.”
Even Obama’s recent claims to small business owners that “You didn’t build that,” align with the ideology of Karl Marx.
“This is all the justification for taking over, redistributing wealth. It’s preliminary talk for telling people they are being oppressed by evil straw men,” he continued.
Gilbert felt he had to tell the story – especially as the primary major media outlets in the nation are isolating and ignoring the issues at hand regarding Obama – and he turned to film.
“My ‘Dreams’ provides the first cohesive understanding of Obama’s deep rooted life journey in socialism. It includes Obama’s indoctrination in Marxism by Frank Marshall Davis, his college years, his job as ‘organizer,’ his involvement with Project Vote and the subprime mortgage crisis, the Ayers family, Alinsky and Reverend Wright, all the way to his campaigns and presidency,” he said.
He said it is “shocking” how the long-independent media in the United States has decided to “support this false narrative” of Obama’s Kenyan father and typical childhood.
He said as part of his effort to get the message out, he’s working on delivery of copies of his DVD to members of the public.
Gilbert told WND his goal is based on the fact that Americans are a great people, and they “deserve to elect … a president on a truthful and honest depiction of both his political foundations, his background and his plans and what he will do.”
“We deserve and must have honesty from candidates as to what they intend to do,” he said. “Barack Obama has violated that trust to their votes.”
Gilbert said Obama needs to speak honestly about those issues.
“Obama must come clean and admit his real background, who is his real father,” he said, so that voters can vote based on who he really is and what he wants to do.
“Obama’s election was not a sudden political phenomenon. It was the culmination of an American socialist movement that Frank Marshall Davis nurtured in Chicago and Hawaii, and has been quietly infiltrating the U.S. economy, universities, and media for decades,” Gilbert warned.
“‘Problem solving’ and ‘fair play’ are the new code words that socialists employ in a determined strategy to move the Democratic party to the far left, and embrace socialism as their natural ideology. Obama’s anti-democratic behavior, including consolidation of power through Czars, going around Congress, intimidating the Supreme Court, and class polarization tactics can be better understood after viewing ‘Dreams from My Real Father.’”
Prairie Slimes
Prairie Times Editorial Policy:
“Be respectful: stick to issues, not personalities. Name calling is not allowed. We want considerate, respectful dialog. You can disagree without being disagreeable.”
Except Jerry and Susan Bishop, two of our not-so-faithful Republican Committee people, will print anything our local leftists have to say — and whether or not they used their real names to say it.
The Editors of New-Plains.com writing in the 8-1-2012 Prairie Slimes:
- “…or their verbose blogging bloviator, Brooks Imperial.”
- “Blind faith and ignorance may loom larger than it should among the voting public. If the uninformed citizen….”
- “…Party officials….a bunch of two-year olds…”
- “…GOP….jaded old crocks….”
- “…and kudos to the judge for not bitch-slapping Schlegel for stupidity.”
- “…a bloviating blogger…”
If you happen to miss a defamatory article on the New-Plains on-line website, don’t worry, Jerry reprints most of their work in his advertiser-funded fishwrap he mails out to all property and business owners in the area. Now that Jerry’s established his paper as the print version for the New-Plains left, I wonder how long it will take for his advertisers to get hip to the yellow journalism readers may now associate with their products and services.
Take a good look Elbert County. These are the people you elected to run things around here for the next 4 years. They’re going to give me way too much to write about.
B_Imperial