Here's some important news that will get zero mention at the Herald.  The Department of Interior is reviewing federal indian policy - hooray! - and the public can submit comments (there's a link below, in the article).

The two indian groups in this county have asserted drum-beating, race-based "sovereignty" and yet "dependence" for decades.  Even though their 'business councils' are social organizations, they're riding the dependent money train, some years receiving as much as a hundred million dollars at taxpayer expense that most folks don't know about.  Neither the Lummi or Nooksack want any facts about their actual legal status brought out in the open.  That's why they keep demanding privately "negotiated settlements" of their claims.  Is it time for a review?   Does the situation need to be straightened out?  WE think so.   Read on - and by all means, don't let this opportunity to comment slip by.

Federal Indian Policy: "Mom Always Liked YOU best!"
by Elaine Willman, July 31 2017
published at The New American
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​It’s 83 years late in coming, but at long last the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (IRA) is finally getting its first-ever review, and hopefully serious reform. IRA (48 stat. 984) forms the backbone of federal Indian policy across the country and has been extended, expanded, and abused far beyond the original intent of Congress.

In order to understand IRA and its major impacts on America, let me share an analogy. Imagine an American household with a single mom and a couple of sons, Johnny and Jimmy. One day Mom calls the family together to make an announcement. “Johnny, you were here first; Jimmy you were here second. Therefore, Johnny, you are more valuable and important than your brother. And Jimmy, you have intruded upon Johnny’s room, his life and his world, so a big chunk of everything you earn from now on and forever will be given to me, Mom, and I will redirect your earnings to Johnny. You really don’t belong here, Jimmy, because you were here second.”

This is exactly what has been happening in our country for 83 years. Since the Tribes (Johnny) tell the government (Mom) that they were here first, the non-tribal inhabitants (Jimmy) have become second-class citizens.

The mantra foisted upon Americans for decades is, “We were here first; you stole our land.” Neither is true. But even if it were true, the response as of 1789 should have been, “So what?” That was the way of the world in the 1600s under the Doctrine of Discovery. Life changed on this continent in September 1789.

One could hardly call the poor souls arriving on the Mayflower and other ships to establish a new life on this continent, conquerors. They had fled religious oppression under a tyrannical king, and were seeking liberty, religious and individual freedom. These were the seeds that became the Great American Experiment. But for that “transgression,” apparently, Americans are to be forever damned.

In my analogy, Mom is our Mother Country. Imagine that Mom’s folks come to visit their grandsons and discover the new household rules. Mom’s folks, representing our Founders, would be astonished. The seeds planted in the early 1600s by arrivals from Europe gave birth to the Framers of our Constitution and our republican form of government. Regardless of historical decisions, some right, some wrong, the reality is that the United States of America, as of September 1789, is our government, inclusive of the now 50 separate and sovereign states. Revisionist history has been common practice for far too long, but the actual reversal of history occurring today is the slumbering thunder creeping across this country.

There is no tribal sovereignty recognized in the U.S. Constitution, but such sovereignty (just like Jimmy paying perpetual debt to Johnny) has acquired a power beyond the Constitution’s declared sovereign authority of individual citizens and states. States such as Washington, Montana, Idaho, and some Midwestern states have continually relinquished their state authority in deference to all tribal whims. Many states have created de facto “trust” relationships with tribes where none existed; only the federal government has a court ordered (but not constitutional) “trust” relationship with their “dependent wards — Indian tribes.”

Johnny’s governments (tribes) may directly finance political parties, incumbents, or candidate election officials. Jimmy’s government may not. Johnny’s businesses are all tax-exempt and growing enormously. Jimmy’s businesses are taxed to the max. Johnny’s government members can hold elected office anywhere across the country, passing land use and taxation laws upon Jimmy that do not apply to Johnny. Johnny has priority over most of the river and water systems throughout the Western states because Johnny was here first, and Jimmy’s needs don’t matter — he shouldn’t exist.

There is a wondrous Statue of Liberty in New York harbor that welcomes all to come, as the early Jamestown settlers, legally to the United States. We are a country forged and thriving by “intruders” from all over the world. Our republican form of government does not classify those who were here first as superior, nor does it distinguish a priority between the person naturalized yesterday as a full American citizen and the child born here five minutes ago. But federal Indian policy requires perpetual debt and shame for all who came second.

And now we take a deeper look at the Indian Reorganization Act and its impact on the lives of American citizens. In 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Carcieri v Salazar that IRA was intended to reorganize only those tribes on existing reservations and “now under federal jurisdiction” in June 1934. There were only some 65-70 actual Indian reservations in the United States in 1934. Therefore, the IRA was to reorganize only those 65-70 tribes, and no more. The Carcieri ruling was a political earthquake.

The Department of Interior and Bureau of Indian Affairs have not just reorganized reservations in existence in 1934; they have federally recognized a current total of 567 tribal governments, each acquiring and expanding their reservations, each receiving tax exemptions, and each receiving money from Jimmy (“second-class” citizens).

The response to Carcieri under the Obama administration was to utterly ignore it, along with other Supreme Court rulings where the High Court rolled back tribal governing authority, replacing state sovereign authority.

The good news is that on June 22, 2017, the Department of Interior published a “Notice of Regulatory Reform” with an open public comment period on the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) and four other major federal statutes. The Notice reads: “This document also provides an overview of Interior’s approach for implementing the regulatory reform initiative to alleviate unnecessary burdens placed on the American people.”

No doubt Johnny’s 567 tribal governments and the entire Indian industry will be weighing in with their comments to legitimize and further expand decades of IRA unauthorized overreach.

This is our very first opportunity to truly confront the erroneous and detrimental policies that one ethnicity that was here “first” is superior to all others in this country because all other ethnicities are intruders on this continent, and that communalism, socialism, and tribalism is preferable to individual liberty.

It is imperative that states, counties, towns, and Jimmy — who lives within an Indian reservation — describe their “burden” at this time. If Jimmy stays silent, Jimmy’s wallet will continue to be annually poached for the expansion of tribalism as a governing system, replacing our constitutional republic form of government.

Please get your comments on the record to the Department of Interior in one of two ways:

1) Submit comments to the federal “eRulemaking Portal,” www.regulations.gov. In the Search box, enter the appropriate document number (DOI-2017-0003-0002). Or,

2) Mail a hard-copy of your comments to: Office of the Executive Secretariat, ATTN: Reg. Reform; U.S. Department of Interior; 1859 C Street NW. MailStop 7328; Washington, DC 20240.

All other Americans are up against 567 tribal governments with 400 more waiting in the wings for their recognition (not “reorganization”). How long must Jimmy owe his older brother who was here “first” and who seldom says “thank you,” and never says “enough”?

I am not a secondary American citizen. Are you?

Related videos and articles:
Warpath: Obama’s Indian Policy Threatens All Americans, Both Tribal and Non-tribal Citizens 
Oops! SPLC Exposes “Anti-Indian Movement” — Led by Indian
VIDEO: U.S. Indian Policy Used to Assault Freedom, Expert Says
VIDEO: Full Interview with Author Elaine Willman
Exploiting Indians 
American Natives Ask UN to End U.S. “Occupation” 
Exploiting Indians to Seize Land 

Truly worthwhile, and timely.
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Why The Greens Lost, And Trump Won
by Joel Kotkin
NewGeography - July 23, 2017

When President Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accords, embraced coal, and stacked his administration from people from fossil-fuel producing states, the environmental movement reacted with near-apocalyptic fear and fury. They would have been better off beginning to understand precisely why the country has become so indifferent to their cause, as evidenced by the victory not only of Trump but of unsympathetic Republicans at every level of government.

Yet there’s been little soul-searching among green activists and donors, or in the generally pliant media since November about how decades of exaggerated concerns—about peak oil, the “population bomb,” and even, a few decades back, global cooling—and demands for economic, social, and political sacrifices from the masses have damaged their movement.

The New Religion and the Next Autocracy

Not long ago, many greens still embraced pragmatic solutions—for example substituting abundant natural gas for coal—that have generated large reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Rather than celebrate those demonstrable successes, many environmentalists began pushing for a total ban on the development of fossil fuels, including natural gas, irrespective of the costs or the impact on ordinary people.

James Lovelock, who coined the term “Gaia,” notes that the green movement has morphed into “a religion” sometimes marginally tethered to reality. Rather than engage in vigorous debate, they insist that the “science is settled” meaning not only what the challenges are but also the only acceptable solutions to them. There’s about as much openness about goals and methods within the green lobby today as there was questioning the existence of God in Medieval Europe. With the Judeo-Christian and Asian belief systems in decline, particularly among the young, environmentalism offers “science” as the basis of a new theology.

The believers at times seem more concerned in demonstrating their faith than in passing laws, winning elections or demonstrating results. So with Republicans controlling the federal government, greens are cheering Democratic state attorney generals’ long-shot legal cases against oil companies. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman has talked about dismissing the disorder of democracy as not suited to meeting the environmental challenges we face, and replacing it with rulers like the “reasonably enlightened group of people” who run the Chinese dictatorship.

After Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord, China was praised, bizarrely, as the great green hope. The Middle Kingdom, though, is the world’s biggest and fastest grower emitter, generating coal energy at record levels. It won’t, under Paris, need to cut its emissions till 2030. Largely ignored is the fact that America, due largely to natural gas replacing coal, has been leading the world in GHG reductions.

Among many greens, and their supports, performance seems to mean less than proper genuflecting; the Paris accords, so beloved by the green establishment, will make little impact on the actual climate, as both rational skeptics like Bjorn Lomborg and true believers like NASA’s James Hanson agree. In this context, support for Paris represents the ultimate in “virtue signaling.” Ave Maria, Gaia.

The California Model

The cutting edge for green soft authoritarianism, and likely model after the inevitable collapse of the Trump regime, lies in California. On his recent trip with China, Brown fervently kowtowed to President Xi Jinping. Brown’s environmental obsessions also seems to have let loose his own inner authoritarian, as when he recently touted “the coercive power of the state.”

Coercion has its consequences. California has imposed, largely in the name of climate change, severe land use controls that have helped make the state among the most unaffordable in the nation, driving homeownership rates to the lowest levels since the 1940s, and leaving the Golden State with the nation’s highest poverty rate.

The biggest losers from Brown’s policies have been traditional blue collar, energy-intensive industries such as home building, manufacturing, and energy. Brown’s climate policies have boosted energy prices and made gas in oil-rich California about the most expensive in the nation. That doesn’t mean much to the affluent Tesla-driving living in the state’s more temperate coast, but it’s forced many poor and middle-class people in the state’s less temperate interior into “energy poverty,” according to one recent study.

That, too, fits the climatista’s agenda, which revolves around social engineering designed to shift people from predominately suburban environments to dense, urban and transit dependent ones. The state’s crowded freeway are not be expanded due to a mandated “road diet,” while local officials repeatedly seek to reduce lanes and “calm traffic” on what are already agonizing congested streets. In this shift, market forces and consumer preferences are rarely considered, one reason these policies have stimulated much local opposition—and not only from the state’s few remaining conservatives.

California’s greens ambitions even extend to eating habits. Brown has already assaulted the beef producers for their cattle’s flatulence. Regulators in the Bay Area and local environmental activists are proposing people shift to meatless meals. Green lobbyists have already convinced some Oakland school districts to take meat off the menu. OK with me, if I get the hamburger or taco-truck franchise next to school when the kids get out.

Sadly, many of these often socially harmful policies may do very little to address the problem associated with climate change. California’s draconian policies fail to actually do anything for the actual climate, given the state’s already low carbon footprint and the impact of people and firms moving to places where generally they expand their carbon footprint. Much of this has taken on the character of a passion play that shows how California is leading us to the green millennium.

Goodbye to the Family

An even bigger ambition of the green movement—reflecting concerns from its earliest days—has been to reduce the number of children, particularly in developed countries. Grist’s Lisa Hymas has suggested that it’s better to have babies in Bangladesh than America because they don’t end up creating as many emissions as their more fortunate counterparts. Hymas’ ideal is to have people become GINKs—green inclinations, no kids.
Many green activists argue that birth rates need to be driven down so warming will not “fry” the planet. Genial Bill Nye, science guy, has raised the idea of enforced limits on producing children in high-income countries. This seems odd since the U.S. already is experiencing record-low fertility rates, a phenomenon in almost all advanced economies, with some falling to as little as half the “replacement rate” needed to maintain the current population. In these countries, aging populations and shrinking workforces may mean government defaults over the coming decades.

The demographic shift, hailed and promoted by greens, is also creating a kind of post-familial politics. Like Jerry Brown himself, many European leaders—in France, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands—are themselves childless. Their attitude, enshrined in a EU document as “no kids, no problem” represents a breathtaking shift in human affairs; it’s one thing to talk a good game about protecting the “next generation” in the collective abstract, another to experience being personally responsible for the future of another, initially helpless, human being.

Do As We Say, Not How We Live

The pressing need to change people’s lives seems intrinsic now to green theology. Without penance and penalties, after all, there is no redemption from original sin. In the process, it seems to matter little if we undermine the great achievements of our bourgeois economy—expanded homeownership, greater personal mobility, the ability to rise to a higher class—if it signals our commitment to achieve a more earth-friendly existence.

The left-wing theorist Jedidiah Purdy has noted that “mainstream environmentalism overemphasizes elite advocacy” at the expense of issues of economic equity, a weakness that both Trump and the GOP have exploited successfully, particularly in the Midwest, the South, and Intermountain West. Some greens object even to the idea of GDP growth at a time when most Americans are seeing their standard of living drop. No surprise then that the green agenda has yet to emerge from the basement of public priorities, which remain focused on such mundanities as better jobs, public safety, and decent housing.

To further alienate voters, many green scolds live far more lavishly than the people they are urging to cut back. Greens have won over a good portion of the corporate elite, many of whom see profit in the transformation as they reap subsidies for “green” energy, expensive and often ineffective transit and exorbitant high-density housing. Most notable are the tech oligarchs, clustered in ultra-green Seattle and the Bay Area, who depend on massive amounts of electricity to run their devices, but have reaped huge subsidies for green energy.

The tech oligarchs have little interest in family friendly suburbs, preferring the model of prolonged adolescence in largely childless places like college campuses and San Francisco. Oligarchs such as Mark Zuckerberg live in spacious and numerous houses, even while pressing policies that would push everyone without such a fortune to downsize. Richard Branson, another prominent green supporter, may not like working people’s SUVs, but he’s more than willing to sponsor climate change events on a remote Caribbean island reachable only by private plane. One does not even need to plumb the hypocrisy of Al Gore’s jet-setting luxurious lifestyle.

In the manner of Medieval indulgences these mega emissions-generators claim to pay for their carbon sins by activism, buying rain forests and other noble gestures. Hollywood, as usual, is particularly absurd, with people like Leonardo di Caprio flying in his private jet across country on a weekly basis. Living in Malibu, Avatar director James Cameron sees skeptics as “boneheads” who will have “to be answerable” for their dissidence, suggesting perhaps a shootout at high noon.

In the end, the greens and their wealthy bankrollers may find it difficult to prevail as long as their agenda makes people poorer, more subservient, and more miserable; this disconnect is, in part, why the awful Donald Trump is now in the White House. Making progress on climate change, and other environmental concerns, remains a critical priority, but it needs to explore ways humans, through ingenuity and innovation, can meet these challenges without undermining what’s left of our middle class and faded democratic virtue.

This piece originally appeared on the Daily Beast.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    On this 4th of July when factoids and soundbites pass for information, and computer-generated "data" pass for knowledge, WE recommend that curious readers take a humble look back upon the culture of revolutionary times, when satisfying one's appetite for learning and discovery took substantial effort and wit.
     WE respect the depth of intellectual rigor of the founding.  In candle-lit times, the prerequisite education to enter colonial colleges (Harvard (1636) and William and Mary (1693)) was daunting by today's standards.  And while it's true that George Washington didn't have the luxury of such a formal education, his talents, curiosity and practical interests were tremendous.  Understand not only the making of this man but the bold intellectual nature of the American Revolution, itself.  Read on.

Curious George
A bibliographical view of the Father of Our Country.
By Douglas Bradburn, July 3, 2017
​The Weekly Standard

  John Adams, in his bitter old age, complained that George Washington was too much worshiped by the American people. Washington’s talents were at best superficial, Adams growled, and that the great man was “illiterate, unlearned, unread” was a fact Adams considered as “past dispute.” Historians have given too much credence to the musings of John Adams generally, and in these characterizations we find an old man—American’s first one-term president—indulging in his worst petty jealousies. Adams could have worked wonders with a Twitter account.

Thomas Jefferson also opined on the scholastic achievements of George Washington and noted that Washington read “little.” He did assert that Washington possessed a powerful mind, but it was not quite first rate. George Washington, Jefferson concluded, “was not so acute as” Sir Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, or John Locke—a pretty lofty standard. So where does Washington fit? Somewhere between illiterate and Sir Isaac Newton.
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Historians have typically been rather cool on Washington’s reading and learning, echoing Adams and Jefferson. Some have even argued that his best letters were written by someone else—Broadway’s Alexander Hamilton comes to mind—and compared with the constellation of geniuses present at the founding, Washington is sometimes seen as but a dim star, even though he looked great on horseback. The great historian James Flexner argued that the “indispensable” George Washington was the ultimate man of action, but “only a sporadic reader.”
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In this new work, Kevin J Hayes shatters the myth of an ignorant, unread Washington and does something even more difficult: Hayes not only has tracked down new discoveries in one of the most studied American lives, but he reveals a much more human portrait of the great man than most biographies have been able to reveal. Hayes makes George Washington even more real, and more significant. Instead of a dull boy, we find Washington to be a curious, intense, and practical reader, a brilliant writer of letters, a visionary advocate for a broad liberal and useful education, a great patron of arts, literature, and history, and one of the smartest men who ever held the presidency. George the Magnificent.
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It is true that Washington did not have a formal education of the type expected of a gentleman of his era. Adams and Jefferson both went to college, Harvard and William and Mary respectively. (Washington would later receive an honorary doctorate from Harvard and serve as chancellor of William and Mary.) To gain admittance to either school in the 18th century, one needed to be able to read Latin. Once there, the young scholars embarked upon a rigorous study of classical literature in the original Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, they learned rhetoric, logic, divinity, physics, and metaphysics, as well as algebra and astronomy. To become lawyers, both Jefferson and Adams then read law extensively under the guidance of a master attorney until they were ready to pass the bar.

Washington, for his part, didn’t have these opportunities. His two elder half-brothers had been educated in England, but after the death of his father in 1743 when young George was 11 years old, such an expensive elite education was out of the question. He would have tutors of various competency, but for the most part, he would be on his own. George Washington, like Benjamin Franklin, was self-taught.

At age 17, he was a professional surveyor; at 22, an age when Jefferson and Adams were reading law, Washington was the colonel of a Virginia regiment, fighting in the French and Indian War. As Hayes emphasizes, at that age George Washington had already written a book—a short journal describing his harrowing mission to the Ohio Country in the middle of the winter of 1753-54, when he was sent by the governor of Virginia in Williamsburg to explain politely to the French Army near Lake Erie that they were trespassing on Virginia’s land. Filled with Indians, bear-hunting, diplomatic intrigue, a flight across a frozen river, intrepid pioneers, and an impossible and unforgiving wilderness—think The Revenantwith a happy ending—the small book was widely read in England and serialized across the American colonies. The adventures of Major Washington helped precipitate a diplomatic crisis and made George famous on both sides of the Atlantic. He was an 18th-century reality star.

As a reader, Washington consumed all he could—in English. He bought and borrowed books of all kinds: travel and adventure stories (not unlike the one he wrote), geographies and atlases, his father’s copy of Shakespeare’s plays, encyclopedias and dictionaries, picturesque novels, treatises on military science, histories both ancient and modern, politics, agriculture, and law. And he would regularly devour the most recent available newspapers. As a young man on the make, he would spend hours in the fine library of his patron and neighbor, Col. William Fairfax, and discover to his surprise (long after the old man had died) that he had forgotten to return William Leybourn’s Complete Surveyor.

Washington was particularly fond of the new magazines that became available in the Anglo-American world in the 1730s and ’40s. These works, like the Gentleman’s Magazine, collected news and literature, scientific reports, histories, metaphysics and philosophy, political satire, clever anecdotes, short stories and poetry, and were a sort of compendium of miscellaneous information—the broad sweep of human learning. As a young man Washington showed a particular interest in poetry, even trying his hand at love poetry in a stumbling attempt to unlock the mysteries of an unknown young woman’s heart.

But nothing eclipsed his early interest in mathematics. Here Washington showed exceptional talent; in fact, one gets the sense that he had an easy gift combined with the profound appreciation of the logical beauty of a good proof. In his copy of Archibald Patoun’s Complete Treatise ofPractical Navigation Washington corrected a mistaken example of how to calculate the declination of the sun—crucial to discovering one’s location on the globe. In his spare time while president of the United States, he designed a unique 16-sided threshing barn and calculated the exact number of bricks needed in construction. Mathematics had a practical purpose for Washington: It was useful for his surveying profession and essential for his agricultural and military pursuits; but he pursued the study for his own pleasure. At 18, he purchased Guillaume François Antoine de L’Hôspital’s Analytick Treatise of Conick Sections, a work of advanced geometry, something which had little practical purpose other than to satisfy his eager, hungry, and curious mind.

John Adams, for his part, was terrible at math.
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George Washington read his books gently. Rarely would he mark up the margins, but he would correct typos wherever he saw them, or thought he saw them, as he did incorrectly in his copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. For agricultural books with immediate practical purpose for his plantation, sometimes Washington kept copious notes in little books that he could carry with him into the field. And in almanacs he often kept his daily diary, a record of people he dined with and detailed observations of the weather. He was a systematic farmer through and through.

When he realized that he had not read certain books that his peers considered essential, like the novels Gil Blas and Don Quixote, he purchased them and quickly began referencing them in his own correspondence. In one delicious case, in James Monroe’s published defense of his behavior as American minister to France, Washington made extensive, sarcastic, and biting notes, ridiculing Monroe’s pretensions to authority, clarity, honesty, and competence. His running critique of Monroe would have played well at a White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

During the Revolutionary War he had a special bookcase designed, complete with green baize lining to protect a large collection of military books that accompanied him throughout the war—from Valley Forge, to West Point, to Yorktown. As mentor of the inexperienced officer corps of the Continental Army, he recommended reading specific titles to the unsure and unsteady. He had long practiced what he preached: During the French and Indian War, when he was in charge of the frontier defenses, he traveled with Caesar’s Commentaries and Quintus Curtius’s History of the Wars of Alexander the Great. Washington’s example made an impression: One Hessian officer was astonished during the war that “every wretched knapsack” of a captured American officer was “filled up with military books.”

At the end of the war Washington’s fame and consequence would put him in a position of patronage. The first histories of the American Revolution, as Hayes shows, depended upon Washington’s papers and his support. It was myth-making from the start, and with Washington’s support for painters, sculptors, poets, historians, and authors, the United States began to make its own mark on the republic of arts and letters.

One advantage of Washington’s self-directed education and lifelong curiosity was reflected in his willingness to change his mind or reject received opinion for new ideas. Hayes reveals this aspect of Washington’s mind by exploring the ultimately profound shift in his ideas about slavery. Born into a slave society and an owner of people his entire life, Washington collected anti-slavery pamphlets and tracts, and gradually came to shift his own perspective. By the time he became president he was privately asserting his desire to end his commitment to enslaved labor, a problem he never solved until his death. He would use his last will and testament to provide a pathway for freedom for the slaves he owned outright, providing for the education of the young and pensions for the elderly. And he wrote his will without the aid of lawyers.

Kevin J. Hayes’s study will reward the reader with a newfound respect for our first president and imparts a renewed sense of the sustained curiosity of truly great leaders. It is a book even John Adams might have enjoyed.
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Douglas Bradburn is founding director of the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon.
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