WE don't generally wander far from local, but the PJTV Trifecta (below) caught our collective eye.  Living next to Canada makes Border Patrol a part of daily life, 24/7.  WE like having a secure border, and national security is a truly enumerated federal duty.  Knock on wood we're probably safer than people on the southern border.

But there's a another program here that few citizens are aware of - regular and totally "un-warranted" photo surveillance that Whatcom County (and a slew of partner agencies) engage in on a regular basis.  This aerial surveillance now being done using Pictometry.  What once was merely "mapping" is something very invasive.

Pictometry is not garden variety aerial photography for mapping and measuring for public work.  Using airplanes, look-down and oblique photos are taken regularly and then compared to prior images using a specialized computer program to watch for changes, to see what people are doing.  Boy, if that doesn't fit the definition of "surveillance" WE don't know what does.

Who's watching?  All kinds of agencies are (see list after this paragraph), including the Lummi tribe. The whole purpose is to actively snoop on citizen activity, peering at everyone's home, yard, or farm by taking oblique photos periodically without having to establish "probable cause" or get a warrant.  If the Pictometry computer program flags some perceived activity or change to your property (from a long list of options)  you're subject to further investigation, or maybe even a knock on the door.  Who's privy to what extent of the photo bank isn't clear.  Do they all share everything?  Is there any protection from abuse?  Most importantly, is this much un-warranted surveillance justified?  What would a court say if a citizen objected?

Those involved:  Whatcom County (numerous departments), City of Bellingham, the Housing Authority, Blaine, Everson, Lynden, Sumas, PUD #1, the Conservation District, the "Council of Governments", the WTA, Lummi Nation, Ferndale, Lk Whatcom WAter & Sewer (and who knows how many more - the feds too?)

There were no public hearings about the adoption or expansion and continuation of this program.  There's never been a chance for the citizenry to weigh in over a number of years (4 or 5).  Pictometry is being renewed for 2015 (and perhaps longer), it was in the county budget.  For a taste of the terms, look at this agreement and a truckload more here.

And are these pictures public records?  Will "the people" be permitted to "see" the pictures and reports - Pictometry "product" - that our public servants see?  Not a chance. WE have good reason to expect access to be denied (records withheld) "to protect citizens privacy" (!) if you could believe the hypocrisy of such an oxymoronic excuse. These photos and reports ("product") is being held in the hands of a very tight circle of "interests."  Carefully read this stock clause in all of the Pictometry agreements:

How does all that cozy vendor-agency protection square with the Public Records Act, which says:

From time to time WE shares interesting little tales from the mainstream meed-yah.  Nags and nanny statists, take note that (drum roll)

Breakfast Downgraded From 'Most Important Meal of the Day' to 'Meal'

MSN News, Aug 22, 2014

"You didn't eat breakfast? Don't you know it's the most important meal of the day?"

In the bitterly divided world of breakfast habits, otherwise reasonable people become evangelists. Why is it acceptable to make people feel guilty about not eating breakfast, but it is not acceptable to slap those people?

This week health columnist Gretchen Reynolds at The New York Times did the slapping with science, reporting on two new nutrition studies. She concluded, "If you like breakfast, fine; but if not, don’t sweat it."

That's reasonable, sure, if apathetic. Nutrition science as a field has in recent years been bisected over the importance of breakfast. The research speaks with more nuance than the lay breakfast pusher. But the new studies land a weight of evidence thoroughly outside the realm of "most important meal."

In one study, 300 people ate or skipped breakfast and showed no subsequent difference in their weight gained or lost. Researcher Emily Dhurandhar said the findings suggest that breakfast "may be just another meal" and admitted to a history Breakfast-Police allegiance, conceding "I guess I won’t nag my husband to eat breakfast anymore."

Another small new study from the University of Bath found that resting metabolic rates, cholesterol levels, and blood-sugar profiles were the same after six weeks of eating or skipping breakfast. Breakfast-skippers ate less over the course of the day than did breakfast-eaters, though they also burned fewer calories.

“I almost never have breakfast,” James Betts, a senior lecturer at University of Bath, told Reynolds. “That was part of my motivation for conducting this research, as everybody was always telling me off and saying I should know better.”

One thing I've learned as a health writer is that a wealth of academic research is the product of personal vendettas, some healthier than others. The crux of the breakfast divide is a phenomenon known among nutrition scientists as "proposed effect of breakfast on obesity," or the PEBO. It's the idea people who don't eat breakfast actually end up eating more and/or worse things over the course of the day because their nightly fast was not properly broken.

Some studies have supported that idea, but a strong meta-analysis of all existing research last year by obesity researchers found that "the belief in the PEBO exceeds the strength of scientific evidence," citing poor research and bias in reporting.

Another study published last year researchers at Cornell had people go without breakfast for science, and those who skipped ended up eating less by the end of the day.

In a third study published last year, also in July—breakfast scientists might simply refer to as "the month"—a large study in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation found that eating breakfast was associated with significantly lower risk of heart disease. That remains the most persuasive pro-breakfast case to date.

"I refute the dogma that inevitably creeps into discussions of breakfast. Skipping breakfast can mean many different things," wrote David Katz, director of Yale University's Griffin Prevention Research Center, at the time. Katz introduced additional philosophical dilemmas: "Research about breakfast tends to divide the world into those who skip, and those who don't. But deferring and skipping are not the same. Skipping despite hunger, and deferring for want of it, are not the same. And clearly all breakfasts are not created equal."

For example, as Reynolds proposed, "Preparing a good breakfast can be as quick and easy as splashing some milk over cereal." You're definitely better off with no breakfast than with most cereals, which are primarily sugar, but another study from Harvard Medical School found that people who ate breakfasts of whole-grain cereals had lower rates of diabetes and heart disease compared to skippers.

If you ever visit the Internet's most-read site for health information, you'll see an articlepresumptuously titled "Why Breakfast Is the Most Important Meal of the Day," which mainly focuses on kids and the lore that they do better academically if they have eaten breakfast, but that's overblown and really not a clear conclusion. As Katz put it, "We have little information about adolescents, little information about the benefits of breakfast in well-nourished kids, and little information about how variation in the composition of breakfast figures into the mix."

But shades of grey do not satisfy my bitter-divide hypothesis. Let's still say there are two kinds of people in the world: Those who eat breakfast, and those who don't. If you're a breakfast deferrer who feels cowed by breakfast evangelists, a good way to stand up to them might be to echo Betts:

"More randomized experiments are needed before we can fully understand the impact of breakfast."

Or as a joke, "If you like breakfast so much, why don't you marry it?"

Or, with a very serious face, "Don't tell me how to live my life."

WE were alerted to a new article at Freedom Foundation about Puget Sound Partnership's latest "environmental" project. It seems they just haven't been able to accomplish anything approaching the mission they were created to do, and so they decided re-branding would help. It reminds us of when the United States Postal Service was hemorrhaging money to UPS, FedEx and that newfangled e-mail thang. What did the post office do? Why, instead of solving their systemic problems, and maybe addressing the realities of a changing world, they redesigned their eagle logo, to make it faster looking. And raised the price of stamps.

So in the fine tradition of government agencies, Puget Sound Partnership is getting a new look, for $60,000.00, give or take. Now, WE realize that's less than one modest house in the Seattle area, but still. If the Puget Sound is really so all-fired threatened, it seems like a real, functional agency would want to spend every dime fixing that. Oh, yes, image does affect contributions, but this is taxpayer money we're sending down the rat hole, and contributions to PSP have never been great. 

WE only mention this because PSP has a nasty habit of poking its funnel into local Whatcom County government affairs all too frequently, politically molesting citizens who are happy the way things are, and just want to be left alone. 

So, what is this agency, and how effective are they? Well...

If you have the belly for it, you can find out how that re-branding is going to shape up. Continue reading...

The Town Hall blog featured an article entitled I'm A Conservative And They Lied When They Said I Hate You. The article highlights the tendency for the opposition to engage in ad hominem attacks, instead of debating the issues. In fact, marginalizing the opposition really is the objective in all too many cases. 

The article begins,

Yeah, sure. As if WE have time for that. If you are a liberal or a conservative who is concerned that things are drifting away from your ideals, are you really going to burn processor cycles hating people? Where exactly does that get you? WE thought so. There are too many truly important things going on, to get all bigoted on someone's hiney. As if WE wanted to. Which WE don't. 

Sliming the opposition is an effective strategy to win over the low-information voter. If you can paint the opposition as an evil person, the weak-minded will automatically dismiss any argument, candidacy or policy proposal the opposition may present. WE think this is a horrible state of affairs, and sadly, it seems to have permeated the dialog in good ol' Whatcom County. 

WE could go on, but the article pretty much says it all. Continue reading...

Glen Morgan at the Freedom Foundation posted an update on the home detention policies of Washington State. This has local relevance because it was a Whatcom County resident who noticed that it was trivial for criminals to remove location tracking hardware in order to move about freely when in fact they were under home detention for failing to exercise their rights responsibly (i.e., they broke the law, and infringed on others' rights). And the authorities were either clueless or careless. 

King 5 reports,

Next week is candidate "filing week," that important window of time that kicks off election season. Left and right, once again a crop of wannabees will vie to win all sorts of offices - some powerful, most less-so.  But every contest will matter.

As we're subjected to months of low blows, breast beating and virtuous claims (again -from left and right) citizens must do their damndest to figure out who is most like the people, willing to represent and respect the wisdom of "the folks" ... and which characters are more or less hankering to rule.  Yes, rule.  WE don't care for elitism, particularly the kind of arrogant "we know better than you" elitism that relies on the command and control of a few to impose their brilliance on others. What's so pathetic is, elites that crave that much power are not quite smart enough to recognize that if it takes force to impose an idea, it may not be such a good idea.

Will another river of cash be pumped into Whatcom County to divide the community and poison our local election process?  That's a distinct possibility.  All successful cons repeat their tricks on the unattentative and trusting; a dime for every quarter that's the grifters code.

This new Parody found at the Weekly Standard is not particularly funny, given the politics of the power-happy progressives that have seized the reins here in Whatcom County, aided and abetted by a fawning local press.  Substitute Carl Weimer or Jack Louws for "the President," WWU for Brandeis, and The Herald for the press references, and ... well there you go.  [On the state level, substitute  Gov Inslee, the Puget Sound Partnership and the Growth Management Hearings Board.]  A very few persons, federal state and local, have presumed inordinate powers to "rule" nowadays.  Kiss your rights goodbye.

Comrades of Bellingrad, those of you who missed "Earth Hour" from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. "local" Saturday night, March 29th -  it's not too late to sit in the dark for an hour of your choosing to contemplate your sins - that is, the environmental impacts of your merely being.   WE missed this!  It came and went under our radar.  Our bad and boo-hoo (bah humbug!).   [Get out the nets.]

Night Falls on Civilization
Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog
March 29, 2014

     The World's Fair to Earth Hour marks the journey of a civilization across the sky from light into darkness. In our new post-civilizational time, we no longer celebrate human accomplishment by seeing a vision of the future, instead we turn off the bright lights of civilization and sit in the dark for an hour to atone for our electrical sins.

Earth Hour stigmatizes human accomplishment as the root of all evils and treats the lack of accomplishment as an accomplishment. For all the pretense of activism, environmentalism celebrates inaction.

Don't build, don't create and don't do-- are its mandates. Turn off the lights and feel good about how much you aren't doing right now.

Humanity is what is wrong with the world. It began with fire, then the wheelbarrow, the lever and the ax, the mason, the carpenter, the scientist, the visionary. It can end with you.

Just turn out the lights. 

Environmentalism has degenerated from valuing how much the skies and the oceans, the butterfly and the beaver, the still lake and the blade of grass, enrich our humanity into a conviction that all human activity is destructive because the species of man is the greatest threat to the planet. Each death, each act of undoing and unmaking, each darkness that is brought about by the cessation of humanity becomes a profoundly environmentalist activity.

Kill yourself and save the planet. Put out the lights, tear down the city and let the earth revert to some imaginary primeval paradise free of all pollution; whether it is the carbon breath of men, dogs and cows or the light pollution of their cities.

Embrace the darkness.

While we take electric light for granted, being able to read and write after dark is a technological achievement that transformed our civilization. Animals are governed by day and night cycles. Artificial light made it possible for us to work independently of the day and night cycle. And that made our literature and our sciences, our civilization, possible. 

Like all environmental gimmicks, Earth Hour is self-defeating as anything other than an assertion of identity and faith. Far more energy is consumed promoting it, than is saved by practicing it.

Websites switch to black, even though displaying black on television sets or monitors consumes more energy. Turning off electricity to entire buildings after working hours and then turning it on costs more than letting it run. And getting 90 million people across the country to turn their power on and off at a scheduled time is an energy savings disaster. And since power companies draw down on their more expensive 'green' generators first, Earth Hour actually shuts down 'green' power.

But its sponsors don't claim that Earth Hour saves energy or prevents us from polluting the globe. Like every environmentalist stunt from flying rock stars around the world on jet planes to carving thousands of statues made of ice and then leaving them to melt in a public square, Earth Hour is described as spreading "awareness".

Spreading awareness is the sole purpose of most environmental activism. Awareness spreading doesn't improve anything, but spreads the ideology that humanity is evil to make people feel guilty, outraged, hopeful or some combination of the appropriate political sentiments in the face of an imminent armageddon that can only be fought by convincing everyone to be deeply concerned by it and disdainful of everyone who stands outside their Chicken Little consensus.

It is a religious ritual for a secular religion that has no god, but whose devil is the gear and the microchip, the milk cow and the imported banana, the skyscraper and the lathe. 

The WWF, Earth Hour's godmother, has learned that shrill attention seeking is a reliable fundraising method. One of the WWF's more memorable fundraising methods was an ad showing hundreds of planes headed toward the World Trade Center, to highlight just how much more important their work is than fighting terrorism. Franny Armstrong of Age of Stupid, which was promoted by the WWF, ran a 10:10 campaign in the UK, whose ads featured environmentalists murdering dissenters, including a group of schoolchildren. The ads are just ads, but London's leftist former mayor, Ken Livingstone had said of Age of Stupid, "Every single person in the country should be forcibly sat down on a chair and made to watch this film."

That is the dark side of environmentalism. The most active non-Muslim domestic terrorist group is environmental. The undercurrent of violence finds easy purchase in environmentalism's creed that the only real problem with the world is people.

No amount of turning off the lights is enough. Eventually you come around to having to turn off the people.

The Nazis were among the most enthusiastic environmentalists of their day, even the term 'Ecology' was coined by Ernst Haeckel, whose racial views served as precursors to Nazi eugenics. But while Nazi environmentalist believed that we were all animals, they insisted that some animals were better than others. Modern environmentalists believe that we are all worse than animals. In their view we are both natural and unnatural. Natural because we come from the ape and unnatural because we are intelligent. We live on the planet, but our intelligence excludes us from ever belonging to it.

Tools are our crime against nature. We make things. And we make things better. Earth Hour is our reminder to drop our tools and stop. Stop thinking. Stop doing. Just stop. 

The incompatibility of productive man with the natural world is a fundamental tenet of the environmental movement. Everything we do is destructive because of what we are. We are tool builders, inventors and producers. And the environmentalist movement is aimed at convincing us to stop being these things. To turn off the lights, make do with less and march back to the caves with a few clever ad campaigns and a catchy tune.

Not only mankind must go, but all the animals that man has domesticated and bred-- cows, dogs and cats. That is why PETA kills thousands of dogs and cats a year, promotes the euthanasia of wild cats and pet spaying and its staffers have even been known to kidnap animals and then kill them. It is why the Global Warming crowd has made cow emissions into their whipping bovine.

It's not enough to kill man, tear down his cities and put out his lights. His cats and dogs and his cows and sheep must die along with him. 

Environmentalism is not motivated by a love for all creatures, but by the fanatical belief in the purification of the earth from all traces of human civilization. The political leftist romanticizes the noble savage over the civilized man and its environmentalist arm romanticizes the jungle over the thousand acre farm. It prefers the the swamp to the garden, the wolf to the dog, and the tiger to the house cat.

This preference is not scientific, it is emotional, rooted in an antipathy to industrialization and human development. It wraps itself in the cloak of science, but it is a reactionary longing for a romanticized nomadic past that never existed. A way back to the lost eden of noble savages free from morality and guilt.

In the environmental bible-- man is the source of all evil. The transition from the nomadic to the domestic, the village to the city, and the craftsman to the factory, is its version of original sin.

The environmentalist began with a distaste for human civilization and the fetishization of the rural farm life of the peasant. The champions of this "naturalism" were invariably urban artists and writers from the upper classes who were enthusiastic about being in touch with nature. After them came the "Nature Fakers" crafting myths about the high moral standards of wild animals. Domestic animals in such stories were always wicked and dumb, while wild animals lived deep and spiritual lives out in the woods. And so the animal kingdom was subdivided into the noble savage and the uncle tom.  

The world was divided into two polar opposites, the green and the gray, in an apocalyptic struggle. Either man would drown the world in industry, or he would return to a natural way of life through a lethal virus (Mary Shelley, The Last Man, 1826), a devastating war (H.G. Wells), oppressive social policies (Edward Bellamy) or eco-terrorism (The Monkey Wrench Gang). The more civilization grew, the more apocalyptic the scenarios became culminating in the two great environmental myths; nuclear winter and global warming. These apocalyptic myths have served the same purpose for environmentalists as apocalypses do for all religions. They predict a time when the sinful order is overturned and the earth is renewed to make way for the faithful. 

Man is the environmentalist's devil. He must be beaten, broken and subjugated. Even the animals he has bred, who are the spark of his genius, must be taken out and killed. Take away his food and his power. Blame him for the natural cycles of the planet and the inevitable extinction of species that goes on whether he is there or not. Take away his technology and his inventions. Tell him that the humblest bacteria is better than him for it is dumb and follows its natural instincts while he insists on using his mind. Take away his primacy and his learning. And then leave him in the dark.

The environmental movement is tenacious, fanatical and deceptive. Its creed is the undoing of all human progress.

There is money to be made from that, as there is in all revolutions, but beneath the inconveniences of living under an environmental regime, from dirty clothes to high taxes, while being forced to listen to the hypocrisies and false pieties of the Gorean clergy of environmentalist activists heating their mansions while the poor freeze in energy poverty, is the darker reality that environmentalism is an anti-human movement with a vicious hostility toward man and the civilization he has built.

Whatever he has built, it must destroy.

FOOTNOTE:   Alternatives for penance are, however, available.  For the pittance of a couple of hundred thousand dollars a share, environmental sinners can belly up to a local mitigation bank and buy an indulgence.  Or, perhaps trade-off "development rights" for eternity - imposing conditions on the use of the land - through a TDR (transfer of development rights). Better still, pick up some quick cash through a PDR (purchase of development rights) program, or from the publicly subsidized land trust at the expense of your neighbors.  Ka-ching!  The priests and priestesses of planning have their money-changing tables out, ready to do business at the temple, bless the local politicians...

   The Excavators' focus is devoted to local issues, and sometimes it takes a mighty strong grip on the steering to keep stories close to home. WE're diverging only an itsy-bit by sharing this brief but brilliantly written history lesson. Think about about how incestuously nanny local and state programs have become. The truth of this article is self-evident. If you've followed local politics an iota (left or right) you may recognize how history repeats (or politics work), with the new control-happy majority at county council in post-election payback mode, joined at the hip to the ideological moonbats who have run Bellingham threadbare.
  This article is about far more than the Affordable Care Act. It's about the wages of growing the public addiction to "subsidized" programs* that weaken the foundation of society itself, and calling it progress.
______
   *On March 25, Whatcom County Council approved expanded definitions for the use of "economic development investment" (EDI sales tax) funds for the construction of private single and multi-family homes under the figleaf of "affordable housing." Freddie and Fannie What, here we come.

Dependence Day:  The corrupting effects of Obamacare
Jay Cost - February 24, 2014, Vol. 19, No. 23

On February 4 the Congressional Budget Office dropped a bombshell. Analysts there found that Obamacare’s structure will create an enormous implicit tax on work, such that people on the lower end of the economic scale will have an incentive to quit their jobs or scale back to part time to maximize their premium subsidies. In an earlier study, CBO had estimated that this disincentive to work would destroy the equivalent of less than a million full-time jobs. Now, it projects that an equivalent of more than 2 million jobs will be lost as people voluntarily leave the workforce.

Many liberals celebrated this development. They trumpeted the new possibilities: Parents will have more time to spend with their children, young people more time to go back to school, and so on. As liberal pundit Matthew Yglesias wrote, “If Obamacare really does cause millions of people to voluntarily leave full-time employment, that shows us how much avoidable suffering the earlier system was causing.”

But conservative critics have the better argument. Perhaps the best rejoinder came from Keith Hennessey, former director of the National Economic Council and now a lecturer at Stanford University. At his blog, he finds that the law can trap people just as easily as it can liberate them. A family of four making $35,000 a year would face a steep implicit tax by adding income from a part-time job; in that scenario, the family isn’t working less for the sake of the kids, but “because the government raised [their] marginal effective tax rate and made work less financially rewarding.” This is an excellent point, and speaks to the potential damage that this implicit tax will wreak.

The economic arguments against this disincentive to work, while significant, are not the entirety of the case to be made against it. Indeed, they may not even be the strongest. There are important civic ideals at stake that, while often overlooked, get to the very heart of the nation’s experiment in republican self-government.

What does it mean to be a citizen of a republic? For centuries, philosophers have generally concluded that citizenship has two essential qualities—freedom and equality. In other words, nobody in a republic is your master or lord, and nobody enjoys a higher civic status than you. The state, insofar as it compels you, does so on behalf of everybody. Governmental coercion is legitimate only if it is on behalf of the public good.

In practice, this ideal has been exceedingly difficult to realize. History has shown time and again that republics are often, if not inevitably, corrupted by factional forces who capture the government and twist it toward their own, selfish ends.

The Constitution, with its labyrinthine system of checks and balances, is an effort to mitigate this danger. Importantly, the anti-Federalist insistence on a Bill of Rights was seen as an extra safeguard against corrupting influences. By their reckoning, even if government fell into the “wrong hands,” it would be limited in what it could do to you, and by extension to the republic itself.

Nowadays, we are wont to correlate liberty with dynamism. A free society is one where risk takers can innovate, create new solutions to problems, and make everybody better off. There is no doubt that all of this is true. Even so, it would be anachronistic to see the Founding generation as making the same arguments. Liberty was essential primarily because of its civic benefits, above all as a bulwark for true republicanism against the despotic pretensions of the likes of King George III.

We cannot reconcile these republican notions with Obamacare’s disincentives to work. If we take the Framers’ hard-earned lessons seriously, the sort of clientelistic relationship that exists under Obamacare is incompatible with authentic citizenship. The problem arises from two different directions.

First, a government captured by factions will simply have more power than it previously did. Once people come to depend on those benefits, they will have little choice but to abide by whatever strings the government chooses to attach.

Second, the government will now have less to fear from its opponents. Dependency degrades the capacity of the citizenry to operate as a check on the antirepublican tendencies of the government. As Madison and Jefferson argued toward the end of the 1790s, this was the last, best hope for true republicanism. In their telling, a junto of financial elites from the Northeast had seized control of the government, perverting public policy towards their own, selfish ends. The only recourse was the ballot box, where they hoped to mobilize the people at large to stand up for the public interest. If the government has turned citizens into clients, how will the citizens then stand up to the government should it misbehave?

All of this might sound far-fetched, but these very dangers arose in the 1880s and 1890s, as the government began dispensing pensions to Civil War veterans. The Republican party essentially captured the votes of the pensioners and forced them into an alliance with the manufacturing and financial sectors of the economy, against the agricultural interests with which many pensioners might otherwise have been affiliated. It was, in a word, a massive logroll. The pensioners voted for ever more generous benefits, but they also voted for protective tariffs and the gold standard. These economic policies socked it to the poor farmers in the South and West, and the gold standard probably would never have survived had it not been coupled to the pensions and the tariff. The sum total was an electorally unbeatable coalition that was nevertheless of questionable public utility; yes, the economy developed during this period, but its development was highly uneven, with poor farmers left on the outside looking in. The South in particular would not see any real benefits from economic modernization until after World War II.

There is a similar dynamic today, though it is less pernicious. The entitlement state is unsustainable in the long run. Eventually, it will wreck the public finances of the nation, yet it remains unreformed because a vast array of groups are dependent on the status quo. It is difficult to expect citizens to rebuke the government when supported by it. This makes it harder, not easier, to realize the public good.

This is not to say that we should hold these republican values above all others. In practice, we have rightly made trade-offs; senior citizens who can no longer care for themselves, or vets too sick to work, are tended to. There is a broad consensus that people who cannot depend on themselves for food, shelter, and medical care should depend on the government, concerns about republican citizenship notwithstanding.

But note: This is not what Obamacare does. Its disincentives to work are not geared toward the sick, the elderly, the disabled, but toward working-age, able-bodied adults. These are people who can work, but who will choose to substitute governmental dependence for self-reliance. This runs contrary to the broad consensus about the appropriate boundaries of the welfare state.

Who is to say that some coalition will not gain control of the government to leverage the Obamacare clients for their own political gain, just as the Gilded Age Republicans did with the Civil War vets? And, should that happen, how can these people be expected to do their duty as citizens to stand up for the public good? It is worth noting that the Republican regime of pension benefits, protective tariffs, and the gold standard did not fall apart until after most of the vets had passed away.

On any given policy question, it is easy nowadays to overlook the civic implications. We take our civil society for granted; we can hardly imagine our government turning against its own people, so we just assume that this republic we inherited will be here for generations to come. 

But the Founders understood better, and history shows us differently. Republican government is easier to philosophize about than to maintain. It requires, above all, an active, engaged, and independent citizenry that can be called upon to vindicate the public good when it is threatened by factional designs. While we admit of important exceptions to this principle, Obamacare nevertheless violates it by encouraging dependency among citizens. This is a dangerous development for a republic such as ours.

Jay Cost is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.

     The headline at the Bellingham Herald reads, "Under new leadership in Whatcom, Futurewise to try cooperation". That might just work, following the last election, what with the county council now stacked with sympathetic syncophants. (No, not all, but WE think WE know who you are.)  Given the massive amount of outside money spent on the ugly tactics of last fall's election, nobody should make the mistake of assuming the results were a genuine mandate from the electorate. The perspective of this council has become very narrow, in most ways deaf and blind to the self reliance of "county" people who don't share their Bellingham addresses. There's little knowledge, fondness, or respect for the rich diversity of county life outside Bellingham's city limits (in the small cities, small towns, for farmers and their rural residential neighbors).

Futurewise wants to be a "resource" for government, promoting their brand of environmentalism, "to prevent urban sprawl before legal action is needed". If that isn't a veiled threat, WE don't know what is. Very cooperative.  Given that Futurewise has a constant and imposing presence at our county's department of Planning and Development, the word "co-opt" would be more accurate.

Sensible planning is one thing, but WE reject the premise that Futurewise, or any other person or group, should claim authority to direct and dictate where people live and whats best for the county. Not everyone wants to live in cities. Those who want to live in urban villages or pack & stack cubicles, fine; enjoy that lifestyle if it’s your desire.

But WE find vigilante public-private policymaking neither appropriate nor healthy for community planning. Why should the Growth Management Act – a state law - need this self-appointed enforcement arm?  On what authority? Is the GMAFB not adequate? (oops, that should read GMHB) (Google it!)

WE have to ask, who runs this county? Bellingrad? A bunch of legal eagles from who-knows-where? Or is local government accountable to citizens from all across Whatcom County?

Under new leadership, instead of being an environmental watchdog, Futurewise says it wants to have "broader appeal". Really? The best way WE see that happening is to butt out, and allow the local community to develop with the control and consent of its people as it sees fit, without special interests and self-anointed authority figures trying to influence the lives and settlements of the citizens in a supposedly free country.

According to the report, Futurewise has now decided to focus its efforts on helping to "solve" the water rights dispute. The "dispute"?  That's rich. Futurewise has been a central protagonist in the dust-up. And they claim to represent whom, exactly? By what process did the public request this "help"? WE will lay dollars to doughnuts that the rights of individual citizens won't be defended or championed in their efforts -- just a SWAG. 

Meanwhile, Futurewise previous local chapter director has moved on to RE Sources for Sustainable Communities -- which could be another fine organization, if they'll just live and let live. WE don't think it's in their nature to do that, unfortunately.