The U.S. Coast Guard on Friday recovered the downed MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter that crashed on Read Island on Nov. 13 during a rescue mission, in which the crew was responding to a boat taking on water in stormy seas.
The four aircrew members involved in the crash were medevaced to Seattle during the initial rescue effort, and have since been released from Harborview Medical Center.
Efforts to retrieve the aircraft included the Coast Guard, the U.S. Army’s Downed Aircraft Recovery Team, Forest Service, National Weather Service, Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, Petersburg Fire & Rescue, and independent contractors.
“We are grateful our four crewmembers were released from Harborview Medical Center and are on the road to recovery,” said Coast Guard Capt. Brian McLaughlin, head of the Crisis Action Team, who led recovery efforts. “We are also incredibly thankful to the many people and organizations who helped us recover the aircraft. Getting the helicopter to where our investigators can better examine the wreckage is the next step in the ongoing investigation.”
The Coast Guard also disestablished the security zone around the crash site, which has been in effect since the incident occurred. The investigation into the crash is still ongoing.
One of the more difficult topics to capture the public’s interest in is how certain political taboos originated. I’m writing about nonpartisan municipal elections in the United States, and how and why they developed.
This topic is like the debate in the Sean Connery movie, “The Name of The Rose.” Set in the early 14th Century, Franciscan William of Baskerville, played by Connery, and his Benedictine novice travel to a monastery in northern Italy to participate in a major ecclesiastical debate at the time: Did Jesus and the Disciples own their own clothes?
A 21st Century reply might be, “Who cares?”
But here’s today’s question: Has our current nonpartisan municipal elections become a conduit for creating a country with a national debt headed to $50 trillion, the worse outcomes in public education, and the most corrupt redistribution of our tax dollars in the history of the world?
How did this all begin?
It started toward the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th Century. The reason for nonpartisanship in municipal elections was to promote focus on community-specific issues, rather than national party politics. The thought was, if you were an “R” or a “D,” you were more likely to be concerned with national party politics than wanting to fix potholes or fight local crime.
In the turn of the 20th Century, nonpartisan elections were marketed as a way to develop strong local governance without the domination of city politics promoted by the urban-centric party machines. This was a progressive model for utopian political equity.
As a result, nonpartisan municipal elections were brought firmly about by the Progressives’ insistence that most of the late 19th and early 20th Century cities faced issues of corruption by the very political machines that controlled local government, through favoritism and crooked patronage.
This brought us the current era of the industrialization of municipal entities: Large urban centers controlled by small groups of people managing the redistribution of local tax dollars, which subsequently control the states in which these cities reside. Today, examples abound with New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
In the early 1900s, there was a mix of trust and skepticism in local government, just like there is now. The Progressive Era (late 19th to early 20th century) saw efforts to address issues such as corruption, inequality, and the influence of powerful interests by offering remedies such as nonpartisan local elections. More government regulations were marketed to the public to fix this, and the voters bought it.
The remedy brought with it several changes to how local government was managed in America. It helped to create the advent of professional municipal management. Unfortunately, there is little evidence that professional municipal management has done anything favorable to municipal efficiencies and effectiveness. Such management has evolved with the focus on employment security for municipal employees, rather than municipal services to the public.
In part, this presented a foothold for local identity to be managed by small groups of councils or assemblies in huge populations rather than small more efficient local governance models managed by active public involvement.
Nonpartisan elections left voters with the inability to discover candidate political ideologies at a glance of a letter after each candidate’s name. That opened the door to large, non-party organizations promoting candidates loyal to their organizations. It reduced civic engagement as respective political parties did not have the seat at the table of the discussion of local challenges and ideas. This further fostered voter disillusionment, resulting in inhibited competition, choice, and apathy.
It is critical at this point of our discussion to note that local government, then and now, controls the most useful tool for political change: public education. What have non-partisan municipal elections done for American education?
The advent of nonpartisan municipal elections brought promises of improved efficiencies and professionalism to local government. These promises promoted the American values of localism, which addressed the unique needs of the respective communities. The result of these promises underdelivered meaningful features and benefits to local communities and instead created an hegemony in power and control.
The Municipality of Anchorage is one example that showcases hegemony.
Have nonpartisan municipal elections improved our American model? Many would still argue against the changing the status quo, but with over 125 years of experience, perhaps we might now want to consider the alternative: Partisan municipal elections.
Michael Tavoliero is a senior contributor at Must Read Alaska.
Leonard “Pete” Hicks, police chief of Bethel, joined the force on Sept. 12, 2022. Dec. 31, 2023 will be his last day.
Hicks submitted his resignation to the Bethel Human Resources department on Wednesday. In it, he said that he felt there was not much more he could do: “Both internal and external interference and challenges have hindered my ability to enforce and maintain discipline within the department.”
From Trussville, Ala. last year to Bethel, Alaska, Hicks has a 20+-year law enforcement background and is a military veteran. He has a bachelor’s degree in homeland security, law enforcement, firefighting, and related protective services. He is a graduate of the FBI National Academy.
Hicks had served as lieutenant and chief investigator in the Criminal Investigations Division for the Moody Police Department in Moody, Ala. When he accepted the offer to lead the Bethel Police Department, the position had been vacant for several months year after the resignation of Police Chief Richard Simmons, a 25-year law enforcement officer who had moved from Fort Worth, Texas but lasted less than two years in Bethel.
Hicks was offered $130,786 and a $10,000 relocation budget when he accepted the job. His predecessor, Chief Simmons, was offered a $140,000 starting salary.
The job has not been posted at the City of Bethel’s website as of Saturday, Dec. 9. Lt. Jesse Poole served as interim chief between Simmons and Hicks, and will serve in that role again until a new chief is hired, which may take several months.
“I’ve enjoyed the community,” Hicks told a KYUK reporter. “I like the community. But I feel like I’ve reached a point where there’s just not much more I can do, and it will just probably be in everybody’s best interest at this point just to move on and let somebody else try.”
Bethel, located on the Kuskokwim River about 40 miles from the Bering Sea and 400 air miles from Anchorage, is a commercial hub and port for the entire Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta area of Alaska, and serves as a tribal hub. Bethel, with a population of about 6,300, is comprised of 83.3% Alaska Native (mainly Yupik).
During the Covid-19 panic of 2020 and 2021, city officials mandated that all municipal employees get Covid vaccines. About half of the police force refused. Chief Simmons, who left shortly after that forced vaccine dispute, has described Bethel as “one of the most violent communities in the nation.
His claim is backed up by a report from 247Wall Street, which said in 2020 that violent crime rate in Bethel ranks as the highest of the 12 cities in Alaska that are home to at least 5,000 people for which the FBI has data.
“Thinking past the sale” is a powerful persuasion technique that moves your attention from whether or not something ought to be done to all the wonderfulness that will happen once you do it.
The most common and infamous example comes from the used car sales field, where the sales critter pushes hard the wonderful new world of sex, booze (or drugs) and rock and roll that will open to you once you sign on the dotted line.
The important point here is to ensure that you spend very little time considering whether to make the purchase and almost all time and effort on how Life Will Be Good after you bring your new play toy home.
The project kicked off May 2022 and is scheduled to be completed June 2024. It is being funded by the Office of Naval Research and State of Alaska FY23 Economic Development Capital Funding.
The goal is to identify several pathways to a completely decarbonized Alaska energy system and to see if it is in anyway affordable. Happily, the scenarios include Big Hydro (Watana) and nuclear (Gen IV nukes). Wind, solar, tidal, biomass, and in-stream generation are all part of the work. I expect them to conclude that it is possible to get from here to there. But at what cost?
“Thinking past the sale,” is what the Alaska Center for Energy and Power is doing, telling us how Alaska can construct a pathway from where we are today to a carbon-free future in 27 years (2050). This is their job, and someone needs to be doing that sort of analysis.
But the most critical question is not how to do it, but why should Alaska decarbonize its energy use? And if we choose to travel that pathway, what will it cost and how will our lives and the lives of our children and future generations change?
As I have previously written, energy use here in Alaska is divided roughly into three equal buckets, electricity (90% natural gas in the Railbelt), heating (natural gas and propane), and vehicular fuel (gasoline, diesel, AvGas).
Think of this mix as three legs on a stool. If one leg goes away, you can still remain relatively upright with the other two intact. If the electricity goes away, which it does from time to time, you can keep from freezing in the dark with heating and still retain mobility with your vehicle.
The decarbonization crowd would take us ultimately to a single legged pogo stick relying on electricity for everything. For me, something less than a positive lifestyle choice.
At a more basic level, why should Alaska adopt decarbonization? What are we hoping to change? While the climatistas will spend a lot of energy arm waving and chair throwing about manmade global warming due to CO2 emissions, precisely what impact does a state with 732,000 people have on the global climate? Is it even measurable?
I would submit the answer is really close to zero / none. And if we are having no measurable impact, why are we even considering this future?
Choosing a decarbonization pathway before even agreeing that we have a problem is a fool’s errand, thinking past the sale.
This will be a difficult discussion, as we have a political party supported by half our population that already adopted decarbonization as a matter of faith. They are in the process of installing it in their party platform. As they control the Senate majority, expect some legislation to make this so to start percolating through the process in January.
Make no mistake, Democrats are interested in decarbonization, which means decarbonization is interested in you. It is their latest faith-based climate prescription, completely ignoring the unpleasant experience of Europe, California and Texas traveling that path over the last few decades. And if we’ve seen nothing else out of Democrats recently, they aren’t a bit bashful of cramming their shiny new solution down the uncooperative throats of a skeptical public the instant they have a one-vote majority in any legislative body.
This is coming. Be ready for it.
Alex Gimarc lives in Anchorage since retiring from the military in 1997. His interests include science and technology, environment, energy, economics, military affairs, fishing and disabilities policies. His weekly column “Interesting Items” is a summary of news stories with substantive Alaska-themed topics. He was a small business owner and Information Technology professional.
The United States on Friday vetoed a resolution by the United Nations Security Council that demanded Israel stop its defense against Hamas, and create what the council imagined would be a permanent cease-fire.
The resolution needed nine votes in favor and no vetoes from any of the five permanent members, which include the United States, Russia, China, France, and Great Britain.
Thirteen members of the council, including Japan and permanent member France, approved the resolution, offered by United Arab Emirates and which had 98 sponsor nations as signatories; Great Britain abstained.
The U.S. has agreed with Israel’s position that unless Hamas is dismantled, there will never be an end to the conflict, which started when Hamas terrorists made a surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 Israelis. The Israeli military response has been overwhelming and there is clearly a humanitarian crisis in Gaza among the civilian population, as food and fuel is running low and as much of Gaza has been razed.
The resolution not only demanded an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, and the immediate and unconditional release of hostages, it did not condemn the terror attacks perpetrated by Hamas.
It was the third time the U.S. has vetoed the security council’s call for an immediate cease fire. The vote came after United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres sent a letter to the Security Council warning that the Gaza war has the possibility of becoming a global threat and calling for a vote.
During the 2020 election, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) partnered with the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a consortium of groups led by the Stanford Internet Observatory, to track and counter what they considered mis- and dis-information.
EIP surveilled hundreds of millions of social media posts and collected from the cooperating government and non-governmental entities that it calls its “stakeholders” potential violations of social media platforms’ policies concerning election speech.
It coordinated its efforts primarily through a digital “ticketing” system. There, one of its as many as 120 analysts or an external partner could highlight a piece of offending social media content, or narrative consisting of many offending posts, by creating a “ticket,” and share it with other relevant participants by “tagging” them. Tagged participants could then communicate with each other, in something of a group chat, about the veracity of the flagged content, concerns about its spread, and what actions they might take to combat it.
For social media companies this meant removing the content outright, reducing its spread, or “informing” users about dubious posts by slapping corrective or contextualizing labels on them.
During the 2020 election cycle, EIP generated a total of 639 tickets, covering some 4,784 unique URLs – representing content shared millions of times – disproportionately related to the “delegitimization” of election results. Major platforms including Twitter, Google, and Facebook responded to tickets in which they were tagged at rates of 75% or higher. The platforms “labeled, removed, or soft blocked” 35% of the URLs shared via EIP.
RealClearInvestigations has obtained data associated with nearly 400 EIP tickets, data produced for the House Homeland Security Committee in connection with its oversight efforts. The tickets come in the form of a series of spreadsheets. Each row represents one ticket. The Stanford group provided no key for the spreadsheets. Much of the information is redacted.
Here are just a few examples of the tickets EIP produced:
Ticket EIP-482 (created October 27, 2020) was originated by the CISA’s Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center (EI-ISAC). It concerns a tweet from then-President Trump indicating “most” states permit one to change one’s original vote after engaging in early voting, which EIP categorized as potential “Procedural Interference.”
The analysts point to fact-checks from, among other sources, Buzzfeed and ABC News challenging the president’s claim. Following two redacted comments on the ticket, an unnamed commenter writes, “Twitter received and is reviewing.” A subsequent comment reads: “We heard back from Twitter through CISA with this response: Our team concluded that the Tweet was not in violation of our Civic Integrity Policy.”
CISA-produced documentation shows the sub-agency’s chief counter-MDM (mis-, dis-, and malinformation) officer, Brian Scully, had also reported the tweet to Twitter, which responded to him directly about it. Therefore, EIP and its stakeholder, an executive agency, both forwarded the chief executive’s speech to a social media platform for potential censorship.
Ticket EIP-257 (Sept. 29), originated by the EI-ISAC, concerns a social media post from an unnamed user, alleging an absentee ballot had been delivered by mail to his dead father. An EIP stakeholder “flagged the post to Facebook for removal and the link is no longer active which means it has either been taken down or made private to the individual’s Facebook.” A subsequent comment notes that “We also received confirmation from Facebook (by way of CISA) that Facebook took action on this case,” again showing EIP and CISA seemingly working as force multipliers in content moderation.
Ticket EIP-301 (Oct. 2), originated by the EI-ISAC, concerns a “tweet regarding voting machines.” An elected official reported that the since-deleted and unavailable tweet “is false. Voting machines work the vast majority of the time. Old machines do have issues, but to phrase it like [this] vastly overstates the scope of the problem.” CISA inquired as to whether Twitter took the tweet down. It did.
Ticket EIP-954 (Nov. 8), the origins of which are not discernible, concerns social media posts sharing an article from The Federalist, where I am a senior contributor, titled “America Won’t Trust Elections Until The Voter Fraud Is Investigated.” According to the ticket, the article “Misconstrues Disinformation as Evidence.” One tagged post comes from Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway. A stakeholder writes to Facebook and Twitter in connection with the ticket that “this seems to be the greatest hits from the past 3 days wrapped up in one article. The article links to several of the gateway pundit links which have received action since Tuesday.” Twitter indicates it was reviewing the tweet, though it appears not to have taken action on it. RCI asked Hemingway for comment on the flagging of her tweet and publication’s work. She replied:
“This unconscionable censorship of The Federalist and its reporters is sadly unsurprising. The censorship-industrial complex in this country clearly views free speech as its enemy and will do anything to shut it down, including spreading lies and using intimidation to coerce private companies to censor factual, legal speech on behalf of the regime.”
Hemingway concluded with a warning: “The censorship-industrial complex better buckle up, because the days of conservatives taking this lying down are over.”
As first reported by Suzanne Downing in Must Read Alaska, the Alaska Democratic Party is saying the quiet part out loud in their fight against traditional energy, and considering making their platform fossil fuel-free.
Changes to both Republican and Democratic state platforms are considered and ratified at biannual conventions of party activists, but proposed changes are tossed around throughout the time in-between.
Over the past few weeks, the Democrats’ Climate Caucus, a standing committee comprised of eco warriors on their State Central Committee, have been editing their party platform.
The changes are shocking.
The picture above is a screenshot of just some of those proposed changes, including a complete deletion of the plank dealing with oil and gas development. Tim Hinterberger, a professor at the University of Alaska, Anchorage and a well-known anti-development activist, sums up his thoughts in a comment, shown below: “At this advanced stage of climate disruption, no oil development is responsible.”
Will the rest of the Democrats support the radical changes to the platform? We’ll stay on top of things between now and their 2024 convention. This document, when completed, will be the litmus test they vet candidates for public office against. If they insist on looking to eliminate the industry that pays for nearly 25% of all private-sector employees and over 40% of state government, it will be interesting to see how their preferred candidates react.
Should teachers and administrators of Anchorage Public Schools let parents know if their children are using alternative names or alternative pronouns for themselves at school?
Anchorage School Board member Dave Donley thinks parents have a right to know, and that there should be a rule to prevent schools from grooming children without their parents’ knowledge. Other school board members, however, believe some secrets should be kept from parents.
Member Andy Holleman, speaking during a committee meeting on Thursday, said teachers need latitude and should not be required to notify parents. If parents want to know, they can simply ask, he said.
But even then, the school district’s administrative guidelines currently advise teachers and staff that notifying parents of secondary students is not required. School employees have latitude to decide if sharing such information would put the child in danger, and if they decide there is a risk, they can keep it between themselves and the student.
Donley could get no board second for his motion to protect parents and children, and keep guardians from being cut out of gender discussions taking place in the schoolhouse; without a second, the proposal is essentially dead on arrival.
During a committee meeting held on Pearl Harbor Day (Dec. 7), Anchorage School Board member Dave Donley moved to have the public schools play the National Anthem over the intercom on Pearl Harbor Day, Veterans Day, and on Sept. 11, if schools are in regular session on those dates.
Donley could not get any support for the motion from his fellow board members, however. The motion was tabled and referred to the school superintendent’s office to study until March.
