elbertcounty.net

"Just the facts M'am, Just the facts." -- Sgt. Joe Friday

on a mission from God

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P.S.  After meeting update.

The Left played nice last night as they ratcheted regulations for minor oil & gas facilities into place.  Groundwork is laid for future battles on MOU contents and language designed to precipitate operational conflicts.  CDS’s Fenner, EC’s LGD, knows that an “official” MOU walks a zoning line that can be construed as regulatory, and by its expected content, will operationally conflict with state regs.  The Left would love nothing better than a good long lawsuit on the question.  And of course there is a commissioner on the ballot to be peppered with mudballs.  While the playground was orderly last night, I expect their diplomacy won’t last long. [Read more…]

January 1, 2014

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Let’s pretend I got in the car this morning, drove the hour to Denver, shopped at one of the dozens of green cross stores doing a brisk over-the-counter business this day, provided identification to prove I was at least 21 years old, bought a quantity of herbal medicine along with some mechanism to smoke it, drove the hour back home, lit up the newly-legal substance, and began to hallucinate about the new year.

It could happen.  Well, not likely.  But let’s say I could bend time, distance, the snowy weather, and a will to enter an altered mental state this morning with false drugs.  What unbounded world might I imagine under the influence of that smoky herb?

The first thing I’d dump out of my paradise would be [Read more…]

the taboo of freedom

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From the American Left, the Obama administration, and the Washington bureaucracy, one hears frequent lip service to freedom, but sees little substance about freedom in practice.  Too often, a discussion of freedom begins and ends with the Constitution, whence the discussion should only begin.  The Constitution establishes the essential foundation for free behavior, but it remains up to us to decide how to use that freedom. [Read more…]

Community and Development Services

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“The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey.  The resulting tyranny is even more impressive if it can be enforced by a privileged caste or party which is highly zealous in the detection of error.  Most of humanity, throughout its history, has dwelt under a form of this stupefying dictatorship, and a large portion of it still does.”

Hitchens

Why don’t Elbert County Republicans show up to fight encroaching totalitarianism from the expansion of impossible to obey zoning law?

All the Democrats show up.

B_Imperial

Merry Christmas

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Somehow the magic of Christmas can cut through all the noise in the world.  I know the noise will be back in a day or a week, and all the forces that tear at the world will be back doing their worst.  But at least for a few hours, how nice to set all that aside.

Aaron Brachfeld

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Aaron Brachfeld is no Andrew Breitbart.

Most writers write to find and flesh out their ideas of truth.  But for his political adversaries, Brachfeld writes to destroy their meaning, and cut off the potential that an inconvenient truth, for him, could be revealed. [Read more…]

Rick Brown on discretion

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discretion – A public official’s power or right to act in certain circumstances according to personal judgment and conscience. [Black’s Law Dictionary]

Mr. Brown – the Democrat Party official placed on to the Elbert County Planning Commission by BOCC member Larry Ross, a recent Democrat himself – does not trust the Republican majority on the BOCC to administer the law in the best interest of Elbert County.

Mr. Brown pushes regulations that, in the name of discretion, remove all discretion from the process.

First off, this is an impossible task.  Second, if Mr. Brown has his way Elbert County will be saddled with an impossibly tortuous body of regulatory law for oil and gas development that will put a stop to all oil and gas development.

Coincidentally, this has been Mr. Brown’s, and Larry Ross’s, objective all along.

Mr. Brown is on the Planning Commission to push the left’s agenda by any means possible.  If he can’t control the wording of the regulatory law, his fallback strategy is to delay the implementation of it.  Either one serves the purpose of preventing oil and gas development.  Brown is a determinist who intends to dictate the zoning law out of the mistaken belief that law can control human behavior.  While law can certainly influence human behavior, law will never control people to the extent the left believes.

It’s a mistake to put legal zealots in Planning Commission seats.  All they need is a foot in the door to insinuate anything they desire into the process.  That’s what lawyers do – they build cases out of thin air.

Take a step back from the particular points Mr. Brown and company ceaselessly argue.  Look at the one-way trend toward their objective of obstructing oil and gas development.  For almost 3 years now in Elbert County, their contributions to this nascent oil and gas industry have been about: control, delay, refusal, preemption, denial, suspension, constriction, prevention, etc., all performed in the name of good regulations.

Bullshit.

Are we not supposed to notice that nothing that they suggest actually facilitates this industry?

B_Imperial

A conflict of models

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Planners attempt to imitate reality through regulatory law.  You could call it modelling reality.

Private sector businesses make all sorts of models for controlling their businesses.  These models accept data, they associate data elements through defined relationships, they produce performance metrics for their businesses, and they attempt to predict, at least for the near term, future business requirements for the firms.

Public sector modelling in regulatory law aspires to reach the standards of modelling success seen in the private sector.  But regulators aren’t private sector operators.  They don’t run the businesses that their regulatory models attempt to control.  They don’t have a survival motivation to make a correct model. [Read more…]

Thomas Jefferson

"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."

Aristotle

"Only an armed people can be truly free. Only an unarmed people can ever be enslaved."

Karl Popper

“A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is nonscientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.”