Two incidents this week left two Alaska men dead, after they tried to take on Alaska State Troopers with guns.
On Monday, a man trying to break into a room at the Three Bears Motel ended up dead after brandishing an AK47-style weapon outside the building. An Alaska State Trooper shot him.
Timothy Thomas, a 21-year-old of Northway, was trying to break into the motel room and occupants, who knew him and were fearing for their lives, called 9-11. Troopers got the call at 2:30 a.m. and the man was recklessly brandishing the weapon when they arrived on scene. No other persons were injured during the incident.
On Wednesday, a male driver being pursued north of Healy by Troopers fired “multiple times” at the Troopers and others. Troopers fired back, striking the driver. The officers had used spike strips and other tactics to try to stop the man, later identified as Michael Grimes, 45, of Fairbanks. A female in the truck with Grimes, identified as Melody Perry, 42, of North Pole, was arrested for Misconduct Involving a Weapon III and taken to the Fairbanks Correctional Center.
That incident took place on the Parks Highway at about 1 pm, and the highway was closed to drivers for several hours, as the northbound chase and eventual shootout and cleanup took place.
Both of the deceased men have long court records indicating a history of illegal activity.
According to a market research poll conducted between December 2020 and May 2023, the people of Seattle are more heavily medicated than ever to treat depression and anxiety.
Nielsen said that 18% of the adult population in the Seattle metro area, or roughly 581,000 people, responded that they had purchased medication for depression or anxiety in the past 12 months, according to reporting from the Seattle Times. It is a jump from 2018-2020 surveys that showed 14.5% has purchased the meds.
Among young adults, ages 18 to 34, about 21% in Seattle said they used medication for depression or anxiety in the past 12 months, up from 14% from January 2018-May 2020, according to the newspaper.
Other age groups in the Seattle area showed an increasing use of anti-depressants, except for those ages 65 and older, in which the data showed no real change.
“Young adults are now the age group with the highest rate of using medications for depression or anxiety in the Seattle area,” the newspaper reported.
The Seattle metro area includes King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties, and has an adult population in excess of 3.2 million. Nielsen surveyed 6,330 people in the Seattle area for the new data release, the newspaper said.
Former President Donald Trump said he would end the funding for homeless immigrants in hotels if elected president.
“Under crooked Joe Biden, the U.S. government has spent nearly $1 billion to house illegal aliens and foreign migrants in expensive, luxury hotels courtesy of you, the American taxpayer, and they want to spend billions and billions more,” Trump said in a video message posted on his social media platform. “In many states, we are running out of hotel space because the rooms are all booked up with illegal aliens living in a very large way on the American taxpayers’ dime.”
Trump said there were 33,000 veterans who were homeless “living very poorly” and “nobody is doing a thing for them.”
“When I am re-elected, this national scandal will end,” Trump said in the video.
Trump is the leading Republican candidate for the presidency.
Biden announced in June that his administration was launching supportive services to help find housing for homeless veterans. Biden said that his administration was spending $3.1 billion across the country to find housing for homeless people, including veterans.
Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough said in May that the Veterans Affairs helped 40,000 homeless veterans find homes in 2022, according to a media release.
Communities across the country have used hotels to house homeless people. The homeless issue has been spurred, in part, by the increase in migrants into the U.S.
Chicago and New York have made the newsfor the billions they have had to spend to house the flood of migrants who have come to their states.
California, Colorado, Washington and Arizona are some of the states spending millions buying hotels and putting homeless people up in their own rooms.
In Los Angeles, a 2024 ballot initiative would require hotels to use vacant rooms to house homeless people who would stay in rooms besides paying customers.
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” -Genesis 12:1-3
World War III seems to be on the near horizon and the apocalypse can’t be too far behind, so it’s high time to recognize and call out evil for what it is.
It’s not just Taylor Swift’s endless Eras tour, or the capitulation of the National League to the designated hitter rule, or even people who drive slowly in the left lane during the Glenn Highway’s morning commute. Heinous as those are, there are even darker and more sinister movements on display.
On Oct. 7, hate-fueled terrorists attacked Israel, brutally killing, maiming, raping, and kidnapping any Jews they came across: soldiers, police officers, and civilians including women, children, and the elderly. The bodies of murdered young women were stripped and paraded through the streets. It was pure, unadulterated evil that deserves condemnation by all civilized people.
And yet, there are people who not only decline to condemn the attacks, but they also justify them. Demonstrators on the campuses of indoctrination centers that formerly served as colleges and universities are placing all the blame on Israel itself and condemning any response on the part of the Israelis, save capitulation. A Cornell professor publicly professed the exhilaration and excitement he felt at the massacre, and members of the United States Congress. Sure, he tried to walk back his words but the passion with which he spoke them fully demonstrated his full colors.
The modern state of Israel was formed in 1948, almost exactly three years after the surrender of Nazi Germany and the subsequent disclosures of what occurred during the Holocaust. The phrase “Never Again” was – and still is – a defiant cry to never allow the persecution of Jewish people to go unanswered. And yet, persecution continues and shouts proclaiming death to Israel/Zionists/Jews celebrate that persecution.
How does a human being not condemn the intentional murder, rape, and kidnapping of other people? Evil.
It’s the same thing that gives adults justification to not only allow, but encourage, men to dress like oversexualized women and gyrate in front of children, and then provide dollar bills to those children so they can reward the drag queens.
Evil is what justifies the mutilation of a child’s body by drugs and surgery so that child can further pretend they are a member of the opposite sex.
Evil provides the inspiration for a person to walk into a Maine bowling alley and indiscriminately shoot people (as was done a week ago) or into a Tennessee school and discriminately shoot people (as was done back in March). And it allows people to count that Tennessee shooter as one of the actual victims of the shooting because the shooter was “transgender” and was “misgendered” by reporters who referred to the shooter by her biological sex.
Evil empowers school officials to arrogantly withhold important mental health information about children from those children’s parents.
Evil provides justification for people to tear down posters of children who are missing or murdered at the hand of Hamas.
So, is it evil that encourages self-proclaimed LGBTQ+ members to throw their support behind Hamas and other Muslims who not only vow to eliminate Israel but also throw LGBTQ+ people off rooftops? No, that’s blatant ignorance. Or just plain stupidity.
Which is not to downplay the proliferation of ignorance and stupidity in American culture. They’re alive and well, those pathogens that proliferate the disease of evil; the gateway drugs that eventually lead a deadly path to the hard stuff. All one needs to do is check out some of the countless man-on-the-street videos that are out there. You’ll see American adults who don’t know how many states there are, or which countries border the United States. But ask the same people to name the Kardashian sisters and they answer immediately, correctly, and with pride. One series of such videos even reveals a gaggle of students from Harvard University, who are the alleged cream of the academic crop, who were routinely stumped by some pretty basic knowledge questions, including one sure to sadden MRAK readers: What is the largest U.S. state in area?
But let’s get back to evil. During its spree of terror, Hamas kidnapped over 200 people, taking them back to Gaza as hostages. If the hostages are killed as Israel fights to for their survival while ridding the world of the evil that is Hamas, the hostage takers will blame Israel and, most unfortunately, gain further sympathy from their Arab brethren . . . as well as those folks described in the preceding paragraph. Perhaps even worse (although rating levels of evil is as frustrating as it is absurd), Hamas will allow the Palestinians living in Gaza to be killed as well, all to further their claim that Israel is the one acting evil.
It’s typically been easy to point at the Nazis and call them evil, but now we are actually hearing the horrid refrains of the Third Reich to kill the Jews! The hard left, ironically including Antifa, loves to label people who disagree with them as fascists, but now it is becoming ever clearer who is acting like and aligning with the fascists.
It is time – past time, actually – to call evil for what it is.
Tim Barto is vice president at Alaska Family Counciland is a longtime writer at Must Read Alaska.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resolution to censure Democrat Rep. Rashida Tlaib for her anti-semitic comments and her encouraging pro-Hamas activists to storm the Cannon House building last month was voted on by the House on Wednesday.
Alaska Democrat Mary Peltola stuck with her fellow Democrats and voted against the censure of Tlaib, which was titled, “Censuring Representative Rashida Tlaib for antisemitic activity, sympathizing with terrorist organizations, and leading an insurrection at the United States Capitol Complex.”
Tlaib stood outside the Cannon Office Building on Oct. 18 and egged on pro-Hamas activists who stormed and took over the Cannon Building. Peltola votes with Tlaib nearly 80% of the time.
Rep. Greene had filed this resolution last week against Tlaib for inciting an unruly mob. The motion was ultimately tabled,
Ultimately, the resolution to censure Tlaib was killed when the motion was tabled, after another tit-for-tat resolution to censure Rep. Greene was withdrawn.
Peltola, in a partisan mood, also voted in favor of expelling Rep. George Santos, a Republican from New York who has been charged by the Justice Department but not yet convicted of with stealing people’s identities and making charges on his own donors’ credit cards without their authorization.
Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced has named Laura Daniel-Davis as acting deputy secretary, effective immediately. Daniel-Davis is a controversial pick, as she has an active ethics complaint against her by the watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust.
She replaces Tommy Beaudreau, who after serving more than two years as deputy secretary and a decade at Interior, announced he would leave at the end of October. Beaudreau, who lived in Alaska growing up, served his last day for Haaland on Tuesday.
With more than three decades of experience in the public and well-funded leftist environmentalist sectors, Daniel-Davis previously held the position of principal deputy assistant secretary for Land and Minerals Management at the Interior Department. That position is now unfilled.
In 2022, Protect the Public’s Trust filed an ethics complaint against her for improperly influencing policy decisions on behalf of the National Wildlife Federation, where Daniel-Davis had previously worked. The National Wildlife Federation had sued the Interior Department over oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and after joining the Interior Department, Daniel-Davis was involved in the cancellation of nine leases in the ANWR coastal plain.
However, Secretary Deb Haaland sees Daniel-Davis as an invaluable ally. “There are few people who have been by my side more over the past two and a half years than Laura, and I am so grateful that she has agreed to step into this role as we work together to implement President Biden’s ambitious and historic agenda,” said Haaland. “Laura has a depth of experience that will be invaluable in our work to build a clean energy future, honor our commitments to Indigenous communities, and leave our air, water, and public lands better for future generations.”
In response to her appointment, Laura Daniel-Davis stated, “The work of the Department of the Interior touches all Americans, and I am honored to have the opportunity to serve as Acting Deputy Secretary. We will continue to work in partnership with states, Tribes, industry, non-profit organizations, and academia to ensure that the best available science guides our decision-making as we deliver on our promises to the American people.”
Daniel-Davis has been paid for more than 14 years of service by the Department of the Interior across multiple administrations. She served as Chief of Staff to Interior Secretaries Sally Jewell and Ken Salazar during the Obama-Biden administration and worked at the department during the Clinton-Gore administration in various roles, including Associate Director of Congressional and Legislative Affairs.
During the Trump Administration, she switched over to the advocacy side. Daniel-Davis served as chief of policy and advocacy for the National Wildlife Federation, and had a key role in advocating for various anti-resource development initiatives.
The biggest problem confronting Israel in its war on Hamas is how to destroy the Gaza tunnel networks and the terrorist operations therein. Bombing works—mostly—but there’s a better way. Not only would it dramatically reduce Israeli military and Gazan civilian casualties, but it would effectively destroy the tunnel systems for the long term. That solution is to flood the tunnels with seawater from the adjacent Mediterranean.
I worked on the Gaza Strip back in the 1990s. The U.S. government was pouring tens of millions of tax dollars into development assistance there on engineering infrastructure, housing, and related projects. Part of reviewing that work on the ground involved tramping over much of the small territory on foot.
Gaza consists of a strip of beach, back beach, and coastal plain that’s flat to slightly rolling. The territory stretches for about 25 miles along the eastern Mediterranean. At its widest, in the south, it’s about seven and a half miles wide; most of it is far narrower, about half of that.
The Gaza tunnel system, mostly constructed over the last forty years, provides Hamas with offensive access to Israel. It also constitutes the terrorist organization’s most formidable defensive redoubt. The tunnels present by far the most difficult logistical problem for Israel in eliminating enemy targets. Open-source maps show at least 11 independent tunnel networks, some nearly adjacent to the sea. The number of independent networks, however, could far exceed that. Hamas claims that the total length of the tunnels is about three hundred miles.
The geography of Gaza argues strongly for the stratagem of flooding the tunnels. It would force the enemy above ground where they can more easily be destroyed, dramatically reduce the Israeli casualties required to accomplish that task and resolve the problem of dealing with parts of the tunnels that are too deep to destroy through bombing. Most importantly, flooding is a permanent or near-permanent solution to the Gaza tunnel problem. Once accomplished, pumping them out enough to be usable again would be both extremely costly and—especially in conjunction with bombing—exceptionally difficult. The timing of executing a flooding strategy is flexible; some could be flooded now, others later, and still others once they’re discovered.
The engineering is straightforward. Egypt flooded37 cross-border tunnels in southern Gaza back in 2015 in what stands as a practical proof of concept in this location. Seawater from the Mediterranean would be pumped directly into the tunnel openings through short pipelines. While there’s little hydrological head, there is also little topographical relief to deal with in laying the pipe. Large volumes of water are pumped long distances every day, and Israeli water technology is world class.
The shortest and most direct route to the tunnel entrances would be directly from the Mediterranean. This would require kinetic clearing of the construction sites and holding them for the duration of the operation to protect the temporary water transmission lines. The distance that would need to be cleared and held could be minimized on the northernmost and eastern tunnels by running a trunk line through adjacent Israeli territory and feeding water distribution lines to the tunnel entrances off that.
Flooding doesn’t have to be slow. A six-by-five-foot tunnel that runs 300 miles is a huge volume to fill, but how fast it fills depends on how fast the water is pumped. Rough calculations indicate that if a single pipe were used for each of 11 tunnels, with each pipe pumping at a very conservative 100 gallons per minute, it would take about seven and a half months for all 11 tunnel networks to fill. Pumping water at 10 times that rate, however, is routinely done today everywhere from wastewater treatment plants to oil field operations. Also, the tunnels wouldn’t have to be filled to capacity to generate the desired effect. The effect would begin as soon as water started to flow; by the time a tunnel has two or three feet of water it would be effectively unusable.
The collateral damage to infrastructure should be minimal. The distances are short, the diameter of the required pipe is small, and the pipelines would run very close to the surface. As with the Egyptian tunnel operations, the impact of flooding on groundwater salinization would no doubt be raised. The extent of saltwater leakage through the tunnels into local groundwater would depend on the depth and construction of the tunnels and the configuration of the local aquifer. Gaza’s shallow aquifer is already over-depleted, however, and 95% of its groundwater was considered unfit for public consumption as far back as 2017. The reason is that it’s extensively contaminated with chemicals and sewage, as well as saltwater intrusion from the Mediterranean due to a long history of over pumping. Because of that, Gaza relies heavily on desalinization for potable water.
In the short term, think of flooding Gaza’s tunnels as humanitarian assistance. By eliminating the need to keep bombing them, flooding would reduce civilian casualties and other collateral damage. In the long term, think of denying Hamas access to the tunnels as an A2AD stratagem. At the end of the war, there can be no complete destruction of Hamas, nor long-term peace out of Gaza, unless and until the Gaza tunnels are taken out.
Jeff Goodson is a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer. In 29 years with the U.S. Agency for International Development, he worked on the ground in 49 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, including the Gaza Strip. He served 31 months during three tours in Afghanistan. From 2006-2007 he was Chief of Staff and Head of Civil-Military Planning and Operations at USAID/Kabul, and from 2010-2012 he served as the DCOS/Stability Director of Development at ISAF Headquarters.
This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.
It doesn’t seem to matter that even the Centers for Disease Control has stated the new Covid vaccine isn’t effective except for 3% of the current strain, even at the time when the vaccine hit the streets.
There are newer Covid strains around today; so how good is this vaccine at stopping anything?
But never fear. The Alaska Department of Health wants you to know they have the vaccine and if you can’t afford it, they have grants to get this into your arm.
This mRNA technology has not yet been proven safe and has had very limited studies before approving it for human use. Some of the Covid boosters were only tested on nine mice.
There have been no Covid deaths in Alaska since April 15, 2023, per the State of Alaska web page:
Yet the Boys and Girls Club of Alaska has these vaccine clinics available for the most vulnerable among us—our children.
So how vulnerable to Covid are our children? One would think Covid deaths among children must be rampant to cause the government to push these vaccinations.
Here is a chart from the State of Alaska web page showing the number of deaths from Covid vs. age demographics:
Note that the very small death rate for the ages less than 20 years is less than one percent—barely visible on the left chart. And 27% of the Alaska population is less than 20 years old.
Additionally, there have been no deaths in children under the age of 18 for the entire Northwest Region 10, which includes Alaska for the entire year 2023.
This hardly seems like a vaccine we should be pushing on Alaska’s children.
Perhaps we should instead be educating Alaskans about the importance of taking vitamin D, especially as we watch winter set in, and the hours of sunlight continue to shrink.
Rather than push an ineffective vaccine, which can have many bad side-effects, why doesn’t the State push vitamin D?
Vitamin D is critical to a robust immune system. Studies show high levels of this vitamin in the body were found to prevent fatalities caused by the Covid-19 infection.
A study based on data from Israel’s first two waves of Covid showed people with a vitamin D deficiency were “14 times more likely to have a severe or critical case of Covid-19. Additionally, the mortality rate for those with insufficient vitamin D levels was 25.6%, compared with 2.3% among those with adequate levels.”
In 2013, former State Rep. Paul Seaton recommended a program to get more vitamin D to all Alaskans. People were appalled that this was even a topic of legislation.
Perhaps vitamin D should have been strongly recommended by the Alaska Department of Health and may have saved Alaskan lives. You can find vitamin D on their web page, but only if you scroll down many pages to find it.
Buried among the recommendations, it notes that the Alaska Vitamin D Work Group “recommends supplementing vitamin D above the national recommendations for Alaska infants and pregnant women.”
The State also acknowledges that “for people with low vitamin D levels, getting more vitamin D can help improve health outcomes.”
One would have thought the Alaska Department of Health would have seen this as a higher priority for the State as we head into further winter darkness.
Maybe the State should be buying vitamin D supplements for its population instead of pushing a vax that doesn’t work. It could even make the vitamin free.
More could be gained by that strategy, to include assisting with other infectious diseases and building one’s immunity.
The goal of Public Health, after all ,is to keep its citizens safe and protected. Yet that approach doesn’t fit the current narrative pushed by the Centers for Disease Control. A lot of money was spent to manufacture and buy these vaccines.
The State has a priority it seems: to deplete its vaccine stockpile. Thankfully, only 2% of the American population is even interested in getting it.
So, which is it? Vitamin D supplements or endless Covid vaccines? It’s your body, and your choice.
An Alaska woman who claimed to be emotionally distraught due to the thinning of bear and wolves earlier this year by Alaska Fish and Game officials, in order to help the Mulchatna caribou herd’s numbers, found no love from the Alaska Superior Court.
The Alaska Legislature passed a law in 1994 that allows Fish and Game to intensively manage moose, caribou, and deer to a level that makes these wildlife available for human consumption.
More than 100 bear and wolves were killed in the intensive management exercise in the summer, an action that was even supported by the Alaska Federation of Natives.
But Michelle Bittner sued, claiming emotional devastation. Judge Andrew Guidi dismissed her case on Tuesday.
As a “mere viewer of wildlife, [Bittner] does not allege any travel experience in the area that is the subject of her complaint,” Judge Guidi wrote. She is not a hunter. She is not a guide. Neither is she a wildlife photographer or subsistence user in the area where the state did predator control to enhance the ability of humans to harvest food.
“The court is unaware of any legal authority supporting the proposition that being emotionally triggered by government action constitutes a sufficient ‘injury’ to establish standing. If that were true, then anyone with a strong emotional reaction to the predator control program would have standing to bring suit against the state regardless of where they live or any actual connection to Alaska,” the judge wrote.
Guidi also wrote that if “emotional reaction alone was sufficient to create standing,” then those upset with the state’s alleged inaction on climate change would be able to establish that they had standing as a harmed plaintiff.
