A mandatory system upgrade at the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Juneau is expected to cause an extended outage of NOAA Weather Radio services from May 27-29. Officials have warned the outage could last longer than initially scheduled.
The planned maintenance will also affect the Alaska Weather Information Line, a popular phone service used by residents and mariners throughout Southeast Alaska. During this period, the NWS is urging users to turn to alternative sources for weather forecasts and updates.
In the event of severe or significant weather during the outage, the Juneau Forecast Office has arranged to relay critical weather alerts via the US Coast Guard on emergency marine Channel 16 and other maritime transmitters. Additionally, the Marine Exchange of Alaska will assist in disseminating information over the Automatic Identification System network.
NOAA Weather Radio is the resource for continuous weather information and emergency alerts across Alaska. This temporary disruption comes during a period when mariners and residents rely heavily on accurate forecasts during summer travel and fishing season.
The NWS has not provided a specific time for service restoration but will issue updates as work progresses.
It takes severe depravity, not to mention sheer stupidity, to believe that shooting an unarmed couple in the back as they stand at a crosswalk is somehow going to “Free Palestine,” which is what the cowardly killer yelled into the Washington night as he was led away by police.
If they didn’t realize it before, Americans have now learned precisely what kind of demons are being summoned up when pro-Hamas demonstrators on college campuses chant “Globalize the Intifada.” No one in Israel needed to be told. They’ve known for a long time.
The “Second Intifada” was burned into Jewish memory at the dawn of the 21st century by a series of gruesome attacks known in Israel by their place-names: the Dolphinarium discothèque in Tel Aviv, Sbarro Pizza and Café Moment in Jerusalem, Maxim Restaurant in Haifa, the Park Hotel in Netanya.
The Dolphinarium was blown up on June 2, 2001, by a suicide bomber who took the lives of 21 young people – most of them Jewish teenage girls from Russia and Ukraine.
Two months later, seven Palestinian terrorists with ties to Hamas carried out the bombing of the Sbarro pizza parlor. Sixteen people were killed, including three Americans and a pregnant woman. Half the victims were children. One of the Americans, a mother named Chana Nachenberg, spent 22 years in a coma before dying in 2023. Ahlam Tamimi, one of the masterminds of the crime, was released in a 2011 prisoner exchange. She lives freely in Jordan today and is unrepentant – saying in one television interview she’d do it again.
The deadliest single attack of the Intifada, known in Israel as the Passover Massacre, took place on March 27, 2002, at the Park Hotel along the Israeli coast. The killer disguised himself as a woman, and carrying a suitcase bomb entered the hotel dining room, where 250 civilians were celebrating Seder dinner. Thirty people, most of them elderly, were killed, and another five dozen wounded. Some of the victims were Holocaust survivors.
Hamas leaders boasted about the Passover attack, while Israeli government spokesman Gideon Meir spoke for most Israelis when he said, “There is no limit to Palestinian barbarism.” Apparently fearing what did, in fact, later ensue (a fierce IDF crackdown on the West Bank) even Palestinian Authority officials condemned the attack.
By the time the second Intifada waned, more than 1,000 Israelis were dead, most of them civilians.
Two of the terrorist attacks in particular foreshadowed the Wednesday evening murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim at the Capital Jewish Museum. The event featured humanitarian organizations that use interfaith dialogue in places like Gaza and Syria to alleviate civilian suffering.
Café Maxim had a similar ethos. Co-owned by Jews and Christian Arabs, the Haifa restaurant was a tangible symbol of peaceful co-existence when a female suicide bomber – a lawyer from Jenin – destroyed the place two days before Yom Kippur in 2003.
Jewish and Arab Israeli customers dined together in that place – and they bled and died there together, too. Twenty-one people perished, including three children and an infant. Among the dead were four Arab employees of the restaurant.
On May 2, 2004, a Jewish social worker named Tali Hatuel who was eight months pregnant, was driving with her four daughters when she was ambushed by two Palestinian gunmen. After it was disabled, the killers walked up to her car and shot the four girls and their mother at close range. Islamic Palestinian groups praised the deed as “heroic.”
That was 22 years ago. But it was only last week that Tzeela Gez, an Israeli mother of three being driven to the hospital to give birth, was shot and killed in the West Bank, a murder lauded by Hamas as a “heroic act.”
That’s what the word “Intifada” signifies. What happened seven days later in Washington is what’s meant by “globalizing the Intifada.”
Typically, segments of the legacy media struggled to find moral clarity, or even simple coherence, in Wednesday’s awful news. X.com was full of such examples, including one confusing passage from an NPR story that seemed to accept the Washington, D.C., killer’s logic. (“Many U.S. and Israeli officials identified the attacks as the latest in a marked rise of antisemitic incidents in recent years — and more notably, as Israel ramps up its offensive in Gaza, where the risk of famine looms for a population ground down by a months-long blockade.”)
Bari Weiss, as usual, cut to the heart of the matter. Writing in The Free Press about the double murder outside an iconic Jewish landmark in the capital city, Weiss unspooled “the culture of lies that created the climate for his murderous rampage.”
She details many of them; I’ll fill in others. The list of culprits is long.
It starts with college presidents who accepted money from sketchy Arab autocrats who buy peace in their own country by fomenting bigotry and intellectual dishonesty in ours.
Next are the faculty cadres who spread specious theories such as critical race theory aimed not just at the United States, but at Western culture in general. The apotheosis of this insanity is grafting the dubious “colonizer” label onto Israelis, who occupy a land inhabited by Jews 2,000 years before the advent of Islam.
Democratic Party politicians who’ve repeated these toxic lies, or at least not objected to them out of fear of alienating the kookiest elements of their progressive base. On Friday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes issued a forceful denunciation of antisemitism. Yet last year she was supportive of the pro-Hamas demonstrators at Columbia. “At Columbia University they call for Intifada constantly,” former Columbia student Jonathan Epstein explained on CNN. “They’re not doing it quietly. They’re loud … You can hear it. They make recordings of themselves.”
Liberals who repeat the spurious slander about “genocide” in Gaza – on behalf of a movement that openly calls for the destruction of Israel and murderous attacks on the Jewish diaspora around the world.
Islamicists working for the U.N. who aided and abetted the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas atrocities.
Useful idiots in the Western media who repeat Hamas propaganda uncritically, particularly the deliberately deceptive exaggerations about famine and wartime casualties.
Performative posers who glamorized political violence by swooning over accused assassin Luigi Mangione.
“Words matter,” we are constantly told. It’s true and it’s a lesson we learned anew this week.
On Tuesday British diplomat Tom Fletcher, U.N. Undersecretary General of Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief, told the BBC that if food trucks didn’t start rolling into Gaza, “14,000 babies would die in the next 48 hours.”
This was nonsense, as Fletcher knew. The report he cited actually claimed that 14,000 children under the age of six would be at risk for malnutrition in the coming 12 months if the situation remained static.
The BBC didn’t check Fletcher’s specious claims. Neither did the British prime minister, nor the hysteric members of the House of Commons who repeated them. His line was regurgitated ad nauseam by the U.S. news media and uncountable numbers of social media “influencers” around the globe.
By Wednesday, the BBC and the U.N. had backed off this assertion. Perhaps it’s unrelated, but by then a man with a pistol and evil intent had boarded a plane from Chicago to Washington and bought a ticket to a humanitarian event attended by Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics and executive editor of RealClearMedia Group.
ANCHORAGE CITY GOVERNMENT IS ALSO SPENDING TAXPAYER DOLLARS ON PRIDE PARADE
The Municipality of Anchorage is spending taxpayer dollars to organize a parade entry into the Pride parade, which is for support of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other sexual identities. The parade is an annual event in most communities, celebrating sexual variations. In San Francisco, it often features naked people walking down the parade route.
“Join Team MOA in the Anchorage Pride Parade,” says the flyer announcing the city’s sponsorship.
This year’s “Pride Month” is sure to be filled with a host of anti-Trump and anti-conservative activity, in Anchorage and around the state. It begins June 1.
But there are some pre-Pride month activities in Alaska, such as the one being sponsored by the Alaska Children’s Trust.
With the support of millions of dollars of State of Alaska funds, the Alaska Children’s Trust is sponsoring a Trans Youth event to kick off Pride Month. ACT is providing seed money for the new organization, Alaskans for Trans Youth.
That kick-off event is May 29 in Fairbanks, as shown on the flyer above (red arrow added by MRAK editor).
Take our survey: Should the Alaska Children’s Trust funding be vetoed?
In another blow to Harvard University, the Trump administration has moved to cancel federal contracts with the Ivy League school.
The General Services Administration announced that it is working with various federal agencies to “review” government contracts with the university in preparation to “terminate” or “transition” the contracts. The move by the independent federal government agency, funded only about 1% through congressional appropriation, comes at the behest of President Donald Trump.
In its explanation for terminating the contracts, the government agency says it is charged with the “safeguarding of taxpayer money” and that it has a duty to ensure that “procurement” money is distributed to “vendors and contractors who promote and champion principles of nondiscrimination and the national interest.”
The agency says Harvard has continued “to engage in race discrimination” in its admissions process, going opposite of a Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. The agency says the school “has shown no indication of reforming” its admissions process.
In addition, the agency “offering billions of dollars worth of products, services, and facilities that federal agencies need to serve the public,” per its website, accused the university of engaging in “discriminatory hiring practices.” That would be a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The agency also highlighted continual accusations from the Trump administration that the university isn’t doing enough to blunt the rise of antisemitism on its campus.
Trump suggested he could reallocate Harvard’s funding to trade schools.
In a social media post, the president said he was considering taking $3 billion in grant money “from a very antisemitic Harvard” and giving it to trade schools. He called it “a great investment that would be for the USA, and so badly needed!”
Supporters of the university say funding cuts would adversely impact critical medical research conducted by the university. Approximately 11% of Harvard’s operating revenues are federally sponsored.
The move to terminate federal contracts with Harvard and “its affiliates” follows a tumultuous week between the Trump administration and Harvard.
Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the Trump administration would be terminating Harvard’s foreign student visa “privileges,” citing antisemitism and close ties with the Chinese Communist Party.
Harvard swiftly moved to block the order by filing a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, saying the administration was violating the school’s First Amendment rights.
In April, the Trump administration announced it was freezing $2.2 billion in federal grants to the university. In addition, the president is threatening to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status.
Glenfarne Group, LLC, the majority owner and lead developer of the Alaska LNG project, has selected global engineering firm Worley to carry out additional engineering and deliver the final cost estimate for the proposed pipeline.
The selection marks a pivotal step forward for the long-anticipated $39 billion Alaska LNG project, a joint venture with the Alaska Gasline Development Corporation, the state’s independent energy infrastructure agency.
Worley, which has operated in Alaska’s North Slope region for over 60 years and has a longstanding presence in the state’s energy sector, will expand its role to become a key advisor to Glenfarne on all components of the project. In addition to refining the pipeline’s engineering scope and updating its cost estimate, Worley will also take on responsibilities related to the development of the Cook Inlet Gateway LNG import terminal.
The final cost estimate is a required step before Glenfarne makes a final investment decision (FID), which is expected later this year, the company confirmed in the announcement.
“The declining gas production from Cook Inlet risks Alaska’s energy security, as well as U.S. national security and military readiness,” said Brendan Duval, CEO and Founder of Glenfarne. “Prioritizing the development and final investment decision of the pipeline is essential to solving the natural gas shortages which are already impacting the state.”
Duval emphasized Glenfarne’s commitment to accelerating the project timeline and engaging potential strategic partners. He also highlighted Worley’s experience both globally and in Alaska: “We are particularly proud to be expanding our relationship with Worley to Alaska LNG from our existing partnership on the Texas LNG project,” he said. “Worley is one of the world’s largest and most experienced engineering and project delivery firms with a long history of success in Alaska.”
The Alaska LNG project, envisioned to transport North Slope natural gas through an 800-mile pipeline to a liquefaction terminal in Nikiski, has experienced numerous delays and shifts in strategy over the past decade. The project stalled under former Gov. Bill Walker, who sought communist Chinese state investment and control. It has since regained momentum under Gov. Mike Dunleavy, with a focus on American-led development and energy security.
Worley’s client history in Alaska includes work with NANA Regional Corporation, one of the state’s 13 regional Native corporations, signaling deep industry ties that may prove beneficial in navigating the regulatory and logistical hurdles ahead.
The updated engineering and cost work will build upon previously completed studies and designs, bringing the multibillion-dollar megaproject one step closer to groundbreaking.
A new online tool is shedding light on a subject that has long fueled political tension in Alaska: the reduction of the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD). The website, PFD Doomsday Clock, allows Alaskans to quickly calculate how much money they and their families have lost since the state government stopped paying out full statutory dividends in 2016.
Developed by concerned Alaskan Phil Izon, the tool uses publicly available data to estimate the gap between what residents would have received under the traditional PFD formula and what they actually received each year. Users simply input the number of eligible family members, and the site instantly displays a cumulative total of lost income.
For a family of four, the losses since 2016 can amount to more than $20,000, money that, under the original formula, would have been distributed directly from the earnings of the Alaska Permanent Fund. Instead, The Bill Walker Administration and legislatures have capped or restructured the payments, using portions of the fund’s earnings to cover perceived state budget shortfalls.
The site presents the information starkly, with a running counter and breakdowns by year. It’s a powerful visual reminder of how deeply the dividend issue cuts across Alaska’s political and economic landscape.
Since Gov. Walker’s Administration first reduced the PFD payout by half in 2016, critics have argued that the state has violated the intent and statute that governs the dividend program, which was created to ensure that all Alaskans benefit from the state’s resource wealth. Proponents of the reduced dividend argue it’s a necessary measure to maintain essential services amid fiscal challenges.
The release of the calculator arrives at a time when the current Legislature has reduced the dividend to just $1,000 in 2025. public pressure is once again mounting for lawmakers to return to the statutory formula. As debates continue.
With elections approaching in 2026 and budget debates ongoing, the PFD remains a potent symbol of what Alaska once was, and what it has become. Alaskans have a clear window into just how much it has cost them and their children.
What began as a routine REDDI report quickly unraveled into a high-octane crime spree Saturday night, leaving wreckage and injury in its wake along the scenic but infamous stretch of the Seward Highway on Memorial Day weekend.
At approximately 7:58 pm. on May 24, Alaska State Troopers received a report of a motorcycle exhibiting dangerous driving behavior near Mile 13, not far from the near the Grayling Lake trailhead. Before troopers could intercept the motorcycle, the situation escalated dramatically.
A good Samaritan, seeing the motorcycle toppled and its driver apparently injured, stopped to render aid. But instead of receiving help, the motorcyclist, later identified as 47-year-old Rondy Dupuy of Seward, sprang into action, commandeering the bystander’s Jeep and speeding north on the highway.
As Alaska State Troopers scrambled to respond, information flooded in. The motorcycle itself, they soon discovered, had been reported stolen just hours earlier. And Dupuy’s reckless flight didn’t end with the Jeep theft.
Before authorities could bring the chaos under control, the stolen Jeep slammed into a sedan, injuring both occupants and prompting the closure of the Seward Highway for nearly two hours. Emergency responders and law enforcement descended on the crash site, securing the area and tending to the injured.
Dupuy, who had an outstanding warrant for Misconduct Involving a Controlled Substance in the Second Degree, was taken into custody following medical treatment. In addition to his existing warrant, he now faces a litany of new charges: Two counts each of Assault in the Third Degree, Vehicle Theft in the First Degree, and Theft in the Second Degree, along with charges of Driving While License Revoked (DWLR), Driving Under the Influence (DUI), and Criminal Trespass in the Second Degree.
Dupuy was remanded to Wildwood Pre-Trial Facility following medical clearance.
Alaska State Troopers expressed their gratitude to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, whose swift assistance proved invaluable at both the crash site and during the ongoing investigation.
Over the past decade, Alaska has become a sobering case study in the systematic digression from freedom to entitlement, where government agencies, originally built to serve and protect, have transformed into sprawling bureaucracies of dependency, eroding both the independence and health of its people.
In a bitter irony, the very programs created with the intention of improving lives, Medicaid expansion, SNAP, subsidized housing, behavioral health grants, have instead produced managed decline, where poverty is institutionalized and personal agency is replaced by procedural compliance.
The irony lies not just in the results, but in the intentions. These programs were meant to expand access, reduce suffering, and create equity. Instead, they’ve created chronic dependency, where people are sustained in poor health rather than healed, where public nutrition programs coexist with soaring obesity and diabetes, and where addiction services multiply even as communities fall deeper into despair.
Alaska’s Medicaid program, expanded in 2015 with promises of increased care, now consumes billions while delivering long wait times, limited provider access, and little measurable improvement in public health.
Wellness is no longer the goal. Maintenance within a broken system is!
This decay has not been limited to health. SNAP benefits and housing subsidies, instead of providing stability, have fueled multi-generational reliance on the state, displacing family responsibility and weakening community resilience. In this environment, hope is rationed, and initiative is penalized. The government has become not a partner in progress, but the central authority managing a web of entitlements. This web quietly discourages self-reliance.
Meanwhile, to fund this expansive machinery, Alaska’s government has increasingly diverted money from the Permanent Fund dividend (PFD). Once a symbol of shared wealth and economic independence, the PFD is about to become a memory. In doing so, the state strips individuals of direct control over their portion of Alaska’s resource wealth and instead reallocates it through opaque bureaucratic pipelines, where the individual is always a passive recipient, never an empowered actor.
The cruelest irony of all is this: in attempting to protect the vulnerable, we have made more people vulnerable. In trying to reduce inequality, we have deepened the divide between state-managed existence and authentic opportunity. And in promising compassion, we have delivered control.
In this same vein, Alaska has witnessed the quiet emergence of a new class divide, not between rich and poor in the traditional sense, but between those who work for the government and those who live off it. This is the unintended but entirely predictable result of a system where government spending, not production, innovation, or private enterprise, has become the dominant economic engine in much of the state.
Classic Marxism.
On one side are the bureaucratic beneficiaries: agency employees, administrators, program managers, and consultants whose salaries, pensions, and job security are shielded from market forces and funded by taxes, royalties, and increasingly, by diverted Permanent Fund revenues. These individuals operate in a parallel economy where performance is often decoupled from results, and institutional growth, not public service, is rewarded. Their livelihoods depend on maintaining the size and scope of government itself.
On the other side are the dependent class: not by nature, but by circumstance, trapped in webs of Medicaid, SNAP, housing subsidies, and a host of welfare systems that offer temporary relief but long-term stagnation. These Alaskans are not empowered to build, compete, or rise; they are managed, surveyed, and processed. Any attempt to break free from these programs is met with bureaucratic resistance, benefit cliffs, or administrative delays that punish ambition and reward compliance.
Caught between these two classes is the shrinking private sector, where entrepreneurs, tradesmen, small business owners, and working families shoulder the costs of both systems while receiving few of the privileges. They do not draw checks from the state, nor are they supported by it, but they are constantly told they must pay more for the sake of “adequacy” and “equity” in a structure that seems neither adequate nor equitable.
This is not a healthy society. It is a soft caste system built not on merit, but on proximity to government power. It is a reversal of Alaska’s founding values, where rugged self-reliance and equal footing under the law were once the norm. And it is unsustainable.
Our state motto has become “North to entitlement.”
To restore balance, Alaska must rebuild a culture of earned independence, where dignity comes from contribution, not entitlement; where public servants serve rather than rule; and where assistance is a stepping stone, not a way of life. The state’s future depends not just on reducing bureaucracy, but on reviving the principle that government exists to enable freedom, not divide citizens into the managed and the privileged.
Change begins with awareness of the system’s drift, consciousness of its consequences, and conscience to act against it. We must awaken to how far we’ve strayed from Alaska’s original intent, freedom, opportunity, and accountability, and recognize that no policy, no program, and no bureaucracy can replace the responsibility and dignity of a free people. Only when citizens reclaim their role, not as passive recipients, but as active stewards, can we restore a system rooted in liberty, local control, and self-determination.
The solution is not to withdraw compassion, but to reclaim freedom. That begins by dismantling this entitlement apparatus, restoring local control, re-empowering families, and returning public resources to the people.
Alaska cannot recover its promise by continuing down a path paved with good intentions and buried under bureaucratic outcomes. It must rediscover the original values that built it: responsibility, liberty, and trust in the individual, not the institution.
Democratic donors are planning to spend $20 million to figure out how the Democrats can talk to dudes.
Democrats are viewing men as an exotic species they need to study in order to learn how to speak to them. The party is trying to decode American men and worm their way inside their brains with messaging.
In a long analysis in The New York Times titled “Democrats Are Still Searching For Path Out of the Wilderness,” the newspaper talks about the $20 million initiative with a straight face.
Faced with cratering support among key voter groups (including black Americans), the Democratic Party is investing millions to try to understand and reconnect with one demographic it has steadily lost: The American male.
The effort, code-named SAM, short for Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan, reflects growing alarm inside the party about its image, particularly among younger, working-class male voters. Once a reliable part of the Democrat coalition, this group shifted decisively to the right in 2024, helping deliver Donald Trump a second term — this time with a national popular vote win.
SAM’s mission, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times, is to study the “syntax, language, and content” that resonates with men online, including in male-dominated digital spaces such as gaming platforms and social media forums, and to reshape Democratic messaging to meet the dudes where they are.
The plan marks a significant departure from traditional outreach strategies. It urges the party to abandon what it calls a “moralizing tone” in favor of language that feels authentic and compelling to male voters who have become increasingly alienated from progressive cultural and political narratives, as well as the female-dominated Democratic Party.
One of SAM’s proposed tactics includes placing advertisements inside video games, since that is where young men spend a lot of time and it’s not a place that conventional political media reaches. The goal is not only to get their attention but to counter the influence of so-called “right-wing messaging” that the Democrats believe is happening.
The Democratic Party’s erosion among men is part of a broader trend as in 2024 men of all demographics swung hard to the right. This shift has rattled party strategists, who now see male disengagement as a serious structural liability heading into 2026 and beyond, according to the Times report.
The SAM project reflects a deeper reckoning within the party.
“We lost credibility by being seen as alien on cultural issues,” said Democratic pollster Zac McCrary, warning that even a strong showing in the next election could mask long-term damage.
For Democratic strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio, who has led hundreds of voter focus groups, the solution is simple: Stop navel-gazing and start acting. Voters, she says, “are hungry for people to actually stand up for them — or get caught trying.”
In focus groups conducted by Shenker-Osorio, swing voters often compare political parties to animals.
Republicans are typically described as “apex predators,” such as lions, tigers, or sharks. They are seen as powerful and aggressive. Democrats, by contrast, are likened to slow or passive creatures such as tortoises, sloths, or slugs.
One Georgia voter offered a more pointed comparison, calling Democrats “a deer in headlights,” frozen and helpless even when danger is clearly approaching.
These metaphors reflect how many voters, especially men, perceive Democrats as lacking strength or resolve, according to Shenker-Osorio.
With SAM, the party appears to be testing whether it can speak directly to a group it has spent decades alienating.
