City manager grabs more authority

Monday saw an appearance by guitarist Steve Estes at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre, hosted by Shondra Jepperson for her “In the Living Room” music series and accompanied by both six- and twelve-string guitars. His grandparents once played the speakeasy circuit in the vaudeville days and Estes himself started as a drummer, playing bars when he was still in high school. “If you notice, a lot of the way I play guitar, it’s pretty percussive,” Estes told the audience, adding that there was always a drum set playing in his brain. His “Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone” was eloquent, crisp, and delivered with feeling, while also being characterized by delicate, precise picking, with a fiery bridge in contrast to his mellow vocals. The sunshine was followed by a complete change of timbre to “Heard It Through the Grapevine,” which set the deeper instrumental passages against Estes’s very high tenor voice, bordering on falsetto. Estes then gave an absolutely sparkling rendition of “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard”—”You know what goes on in the schoolyard, don’t you?” he asked his listeners—that segued into and back and forth between an equally enthusiastic “Jump in the Line.”

His program also included several of his own compositions; Estes estimated he’s written between fifty and sixty songs so far. “What is This Feeling (That Stings Like This)?” featured strong melodic writing for the guitar, heartfelt with a suggestion of John Denver; “My Paradise Is You” offered a nice backbeat and touches of Jimmy Buffett. One of the best moments of the evening came when he played another original about the Verde River, which had a very classic Western feel and needs to be recorded if it hasn’t been already—perhaps by someone with a voice an octave lower than Estes’s own. The lyrics lamented the theft of the Verde’s water by the rich and the politicians; one hopes that Comrade Kinsella in the audience got the point, but that would be too much to expect.

“Did you ever sleep with your guitar?” a member of the audience inquired.

“I did once, but he complained,” Estes returned.

Towards the end of his performance, Estes commented that he would rather play for a larger crowd than a smaller crowd because it gives him a bigger charge to move more people.

“Everything I’ve ever wanted is right here,” Estes added, referring to the ease of finding receptive, diverse audiences in the Verde Valley.

From Hamburg, Maestro Will reports that Mendelssohn is being underplayed and Steven Kovacevich is no longer what he once was. He has also been forced to describe a Martha Argerich encore as “less bad.” Apparently the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin was much less disappointing, and it’s nice to know that Leipzig still has a sufficient sense of what’s important in life that you can find Kurt Masur comic books on sale in the town.

In yet another illustration of the extent to which both anti-arts and anti-Christian bigotry have penetrated Sedona, reports indicate that the Sedona Humane Society’s thrift store is now harassing the neighboring gallery over the gallery’s occasional provision of live music, complaining specifically about the performance of Christmas songs and traditional hymns. Secular music, by contrast, was not targeted. Meanwhile, customers at both stores routinely express how much they love the live music, with some even singing along.

Celtic Indian violinist Arvel Bird will be performing at Redwall tomorrow evening. “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change” is running at Theatrikos in Flagstaff through July 26, and Clarkdale’s next Concert in the Park is coming up on August 1.

The Flagstaff Symphony has announced their upcoming season, which includes Louise Farrenc and Beethoven’s Fifth on the September schedule; a melange of premieres by contemporary composers in October; film music in January; folk-inspired music in February; and, to close the season in April, a full performance of Mendelssohn’s Elijah with the Master Chorale of Flagstaff. Don’t miss it!

That gang calling themselves the Sedona city council held what was in effect a special interests festival on Tuesday, during the course of which the council and the various local groups that it has subverted mutually pandered to one another, demonstrating how the public process can be sidetracked by the manipulation of a small number of self-interested individuals. They started off by designating the Anna’s hummingbird as the city bird over a number of other, better, candidates. The designation has been pushed by Alice Madar of the International Hummingbird Society for the past year, who based part of her case for the hummingbird on the argument that having a city bird would tie in with the attempted neopagan revival masquerading as environmentalism and sustainability, calling for council to “honor and celebrate…the wildlife that lives here.” In a deft twist, Madar suggested that the decision would promote sustainable gardening by encouraging residents to plant native species suited to the hummingbird, in essence arguing that the city could push its official plant list by promoting those species as acceptable to the city bird. She then quoted some pagan who had referred to hummingbirds as “ministers of magic.”

The parts of the presentation that didn’t involve neopaganism focused on the possible utilitarian integration of hummingbirds with Sedona’s nonproductive tourism economy. “Birders are the best kind of tourists,” Madar said, shamelessly forgetting that Sedona is a city animated by the arts. She explicitly tried to tie the hummingbird festival and the official bird designation to city efforts to encourage the use of hotels rather than short-term rentals.

There were also the superficiality arguments. “There’s nothing more beautiful than a hummingbird, right?” Madar said. Ever seen a Reeves’s pheasant? A quetzal? She claimed inaccurately that hummingbirds were the fastest bird before quickly doubling back to clarify that they can only be considered the fastest if you measure their speed in body lengths per second. When the usual standard of measurement doesn’t allow your argument, just change the standard. A Sir Humphrey Appleby classic. “Minister, you said to reduce the figures; we reduced the figures.” She also tempted the council with the possibility of their being the first city in Arizona to declare a city bird. And then there were the convenience arguments; Madar actually suggested that the council should pick the hummingbird simply because a number of residents were under the impression that it was already the city bird and because there were images of hummingbirds to be found throughout Sedona.

In a clever move to give the council justification for their action, Madar staged the attendance of a number of her supporters and asked them to stand at the beginning of her presentation.

“They’re just beautiful…and they are not a source of conflict,” Ann Emerson told the council as her reason for why the hummingbird should represent Sedona—is that really an argument? She then tried to claim that hummingbirds are “courageous” when they are in fact the most timid things in the world in confrontation with anything other than another hummingbird. They’re the avian equivalent of Japanese waltzing mice, which sometimes die of shock on hearing a loud noise. Residents have already told me the hummingbird is too “sissy” to be Sedona’s city bird.

Comrade Furman redeemed himself temporarily for some of his recent nonsense by actually standing up for the public process and pointing out that there had been no public process to determine which of Sedona’s birds residents would support as a city symbol. “I would like our whole community to choose…I’ve already had people come up to me and ask,” Furman said, noting that he had received indications of support for the raven and quail rather than the hummingbird. He then questioned how the designation would be amended in future and how the city would cope with requests of the same nature without a procedure for dealing with those requests.

Comrade Pfaff dismissed the need to create a process and said the council should just rubber-stamp the designation “as a one-off.” “I don’t know how we could say no to this,” he babbled. It’s quite simple. The word is “no.” “I don’t think we need to bog things down,” Comrade Hosseini agreed. The councilors emphasized that the hummingbird group had created its own process outside the city process, a development that they seemed to view favorably. It’s so cynically amusing to watch how they pick and choose which community groups and initiatives they want to make sure go through a process and which ones they waive. We all remember how they didn’t play fair with Sedona Cultural Park 2.0.

“It does make me very uncomfortable to not have a process,” Comrade Kinsella countered, although she then argued that council caving in merely because they were asked for something twice was a good and sufficient reason to make the designation. “I do think this opens a door for gems and trees and goldfish and whatever else might come forward...I want assurance that next step is going to happen before I can support this.”

Comrade Spickard quickly resolved the impasse by alleging that staff considered they had already been given direction to create a process for designating official objects and were moving forward with developing said process. Kinsella quickly folded and Furman followed. Pfaff, who once had rejected the notion of designating city symbols at all, seconded the motion to approve the hummingbird, which passed, as usual, unanimously.

The puerile reasons given for choosing the hummingbird as a city symbol underline precisely how negatively this council views Sedona and Sedona’s future. Once again we are embarrassed by council and staff’s decisions about how we and our community should be represented. Instead of picking a hardy, useful bird like the quail—advocated by yours truly—or a traditionally-revered bird like the raven, the council has chosen a bird that is known for being pretty and for being tied to the utilitarian economics of a group of promoters. To pick something because it’s sparkly and weak, rather than because it’s useful and strong? Having the hummingbird as our city symbol will send a message to the world that Sedona is frivolous, trivial, and superficial, is concerned only with surface flash and not with building for the future, and intends to remain plastic and showy. Is the council really so eager to advertise this town’s fragility, weakness, and insipidity?

As those with a taste for American history will recall, we’ve been here before. Benjamin Franklin famously considered the bald eagle an unsuitable choice for a national symbol for reasons very similar to those that can be advanced against the hummingbird:

“For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen as the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perch’d on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him...Besides he is a rank Coward: The little King Bird not bigger than a Sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the District. He is therefore by no means a proper Emblem...For in Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America. Eagles have been found in all Countries, but the Turkey was peculiar to ours, the first of the Species seen in Europe being brought to France by the Jesuits from Canada, and serv’d up at the Wedding Table of Charles the ninth. He is besides, tho’ a little vain and silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.”

It is, however, apocryphal that Franklin actively promoted the turkey as an alternative national emblem to the fish-stealer. He should have, though. Up the quail!

The hummingbird debacle was followed by council’s electing to give city mismanager Comrade Spickard more authority to spend money without council authorization, as long as she calls it contingency spending for ads to drive people away from Sedona in times of poor business performance, that is. As predicted, the effort to subvert the public process was predicated on the city-supported panic surrounding the now-extinguished Pocket Fire. The session saw some of those folks who are supposed to be the city’s business leaders lining up to beg for government welfare in the form of useless, generalized marketing on the grounds of their own businesses’ terrible performance over the past month. One finds it impossible to forget that these were the same people cheering on the government a few weeks ago for closing down SR 89A—with predictable effects on their operations that they proceeded to lament after the fact.

Comrade Ploog actively recruited the remaining audience, composed primarily of council’s business figureheads looking for a handout, to provide council with sob stories to justify their already-determined action. Flagstaff resident Jesse Alexander obliged with a tale of how more tenants have been asking him for leeway on their rent this July than at any time in his experience. I seem to recall him saying something very similar a couple of years ago. He spoke of Uptown restaurants down by over $10,000 per day and one Uptown tenant reporting a $19 day, and others having to take out loans to cover their payroll. Cheryl Barron of the Lodging Council stated that she had lost 50 percent of her reservations for July and had none coming in for August, and spoke of a downturn in international business of around 40 percent statewide over the course of the year.

Nonresident Julie Richard, who mismanages the Sedona Arts Center, claimed that after having a “great June” that she attributed to the city’s mismarketing of Sedona to the immoral wealthy, their customers dropped to just sixty-one on July 4 and thirty-eight on July 5, and that during the week preceding the meeting, they had seen two days on which they did no sales at all. Let us not forget that the city gives SAC $100,000 a year, and Richard gets paid, according to SAC’s most recently available IRS filing, $138,834 a year—in order to provide this level of return on investment and wreck one of Sedona’s core cultural institutions? It’s also quite amazing how the city’s marketing was apparently such a success all throughout June, even after the fire started, and then suddenly, magically stopped working as soon as July started.

Tourism mismanager Comrade Grossman rallied round in support to claim that “we were down 10 percent in demand last week that I saw.” He elaborated that his perceived declines in hotel demand were 2 percent by June 27, 13 percent by July 1, and 8.3 percent as of July 4. Based on his extremely limited surveys of fewer than five percent of businesses in town, he argued that retail was down by 30 to 40 percent overall and that 90 percent of restaurants were seeing decreased foot traffic, with 75 percent seeing “significantly decreased” traffic. You can do wonders with extrapolation from a too-small sample size.

The problem with all of this information was that neither Grossman nor anyone else bothered to break out the difference between what’s going on in Uptown and what’s going on in West Sedona. Those are two different economic stories. West Sedona is not being hit nearly as hard by this very temporary downturn as Uptown is. The lack of discrimination between the two economic stories here reflects both staff’s lack of competence to describe economic reality in this town and council and staff’s combined unwillingness to accept the fact that retail is shifting away from Uptown. Instead of trying to bring in new box stores, per Comrade Fultz’s suggestion, or constructing mixed-use buildings to implement their social ideology and weaken the private market, council and staff must acknowledge the fact that market conditions are pushing businesses away from Uptown and that much of Uptown will have to be reconverted to housing. Which will be all to the good in the long run, as it will solve much of the so-called traffic problem when shoppers are no longer prowling Uptown’s streets.

Nevertheless, staff promptly leapt on the opportunity to use scare tactics again to make the case for government to do something, anything! After all, our dear mayor, Comrade Ploog, seems to think that it’s only necessary for people to believe there’s an improvement or something being done to satisfy them. That attitude explains why council and staff are so keen on propaganda work. Grossman obligingly called the Pocket Fire a “crisis,” revealing his mindset as a lifelong urbanist. He then trotted out the first half of staff’s proposal for contingency spending, which was to allow the city manager to spend up to $150,000 in contingency funds specially allotted to tourism mismarketing without oversight, which would be released based on what he called a “traffic light system.” That was the point when the whole plan started to get exceptionally unbelievable. After drowning the council in data tables to confuse them, Grossman first suggested that, in order to determine whether there was any decline in visitation that would trigger a need for city advertising, staff would not use 2025 as a baseline, but 2024, when visitation was higher—meaning that the additional spending would be more readily triggered.

“Year-over-year comparisons are less relevant when the previous year’s performance was poor,” Grossman commented in a stunning display of meaningless venality, offering no proof of his assertion. He eventually admitted, in response to a question from Comrade Hosseini, that if staff were to use the current year or last year as a threshold, the apparent decline would be so small that they wouldn’t get to spend any of the extra money. Comrade Browne then emphasized that staff had no intention of using a consistent base year or any other consistent standard but would simply pick whatever they considered to be a “normal benchmark”—in other words, whatever benchmark would justify their spending the largest amount of public funds.

At one point, Grossman made the comment that “when demand goes down, price goes up,” and Furman had to remind him that that’s not how economics works.

Eventually, Grossman and Brown explained that their proposed “traffic light” to prompt additional ad spending could be triggered by any one of five criteria being met: a decline in hotel demand of 3 percent or more over a period of four weeks; or a majority of negative responses on one of their slanted business surveys; or receiving negative responses during discussions with business owners; or a decline in traffic as shown by ADOT data; or a decline in the financial trend data received from Visa. They explained that their intention would be to simply run more of the same ads rather than different ads in response to an economic downturn. How much of the total pool of funding would be spent would, of course, be solely at the discretion of the city manager. After even Comrade Kinsella called them out for putting forward an imprecise and rigged scheme that would allow staff to spend based on meeting a single one of the five criteria, Browne first countered with a proposal that the situation would need to meet four of the five criteria before spending could begin, although this was later diluted to four out of a total of seven criteria.

When Ploog pointed out that the contingency spending plan offered limited “nimbleness,” Browne retorted, with an impatient edge in her voice, “It will make us four weeks more nimble,” reiterating the expediency argument she had made on previous occasions to justify the council’s abdicating their responsibility. Comrade Fultz called for something more “statistically rigorous” than an observed decline and Furman pointed out that the decline-in-demand criterion would be triggered every year going into summer before they approved the proposal.

In a moment of sanity, Bob Pifke pointed out to the council that if they were to keep using a bad prior year for comparison, rather than a significant base period, they might well end up with an overall 10 to 20 percent performance decline over the course of a decade without realizing it.

The second half of Grossman’s proposal involved using $50,000 of the new allocation for “crisis” spending on tourism marketing, specifically to try to persuade influencers and broadcasters to talk about why Sedona should be visited following the Pocket Fire. Grossman used the phrase “changing the perception of what happened to Sedona after the Pocket Fire”—once again, see the dictionary definition of propaganda. He distinguished the “contingency” spending from the “crisis” spending as being the difference between having a mere four weeks’ worth of data and making a wild-ass guess, and described the spending authorization as being more generally intended for use in cases of what he called an “immediate impact on visitation or reputational damage to Sedona.” Reassuringly, Grossman then added, “I won’t be able to show you that via data.” This is such a data-driven council. He next went on to lament the city’s lack of control over and ability to censor social media influencers and asked the council, “How do we combat that?” How do they combat free speech, in other words. To back him up, Browne talked about her gutless fear of using the word “safe” to describe Sedona.

If he had any sense of self-awareness, a quality that Comrade Pfaff seems to value highly, Grossman would have been thinking about the “reputational damage to Sedona” that resulted from his leading the second part of the presentation with an image of a woman pretending to do “sound healing,” thereby underlining the pseudoscientific slant of staff’s tourism thinking. There are moments when I really feel like buying the city a gift subscription to Skeptical Inquirer.

The sob stories, misrepresentation of economic trends, and staff’s awkward and unbelievable procedural planning culminated in a lovefest of Leninism as the supposed proponents of the free market made statement after statement expressing blind trust in unelected bureaucrats with many decades’ fewer experience either in Sedona or in business than themselves. Lonnie Lillie argued that bypassing council’s authority and the public process was necessary to give staff “the ability to do their job in a quicker fashion,” thereby defining their ability to do their job as creating a Marxist-Leninist command economy. “I understand the public fund issue, but we need to react quicker,” nonresident Jesse Alexander said. “We need the ability to have you react faster,” Cheryl Barron agreed. “I’m asking you to have faith in your city manager….to make decisions,” doubling down on the expediency and Leninism. “Why wouldn’t we spend as much as we can to attract as much business as we can?” Bob Pifke urged, seemingly unable to tell the difference between the public and the private sectors. That attitude might be a fantastic philosophy for a business under the right circumstances but has nothing to do with government. “For the council to have to be involved in a $150,000 decision…doesn’t make sense to me…Go with the professionals, let them do their job, trust in them,” Dave Swartout said, obliging the people he’s practically been ready to sue for years with his complaisance. “Please, please,” Lillie literally begged the council.

“I think our staff is more than capable,” Kinsella agreed. “We—you—are still gonna be bureaucratic. It’s still gonna take some time,” Furman commented before adding, “I trust the staff” and admitting, “We’re not nimble.” Council then unanimously voted to surrender more of their authority to spend the public’s money on corporate welfare to Anette Spickard, who had never even been to Sedona before coming here to interview for the job of running the place.

On the propaganda side of the discussion, Cheryl Barron made an unsupported claim that social media influencers were posting “AI”-generated videos of the Pocket Fire misrepresenting its size; she argued, on the basis of her expertise as a hotelier, that the videos couldn’t possibly be real. Alexander similarly complained of Youtubers “sensationalizing” current events—he should know!—and expressed that he thought the city should be interfering with the First Amendment and “combatting that message.” “I think it’s the responsibility of the city to put forward accurate information,” Kinsella proposed in what was perhaps one of her most mendacious statements on record, given the lies the city routinely perpetrates, and especially given that the city has just finished installing its new censorship kiosk at the Uptown visitor center.

Dunn claimed that one of the functions of city government is to provide an environment in which businesses can thrive. At no point did she explain how a city government does that by interfering with the normal operation of businesses through high taxes, crippling regulation, and idiotic, non-targeted marketing.

As if the tourism farce hadn’t been a big enough demonstration of corporate welfare and market manipulation, the council also used the evening to approve the latest bunch of handouts to Sedona’s nonprofits to keep them firmly tied to the city’s apron strings and to ensure the city can continue to expand its control over their policies. Comrade Kinsella referred to this institutionalized bribery and diversion of public funds to party political purposes as “one of the most pleasurable things we get to do up here.”

The entire meeting, and particularly the tourism discussion, boiled down to an illustration of the distinction between, and Sedona’s ignorance of, the deontological as opposed to the utilitarian, or the Platonist as opposed to the Aristotelian, mode of thought, a divide captured eloquently in an insightful and applicable passage by Harry Golden back at the middle of the last century:

The granddaddy of all Westerns is really the novel Don Quixote by Cervantes. Dostoevski, who was no mean novelist himself, called Don Quixote the most impassioned utterance of the human tongue…The truth of this novel is that Don Quixote makes the world a better place for having toured it. Everyone who meets him is benefited by the encounter. What Cervantes is really saying is that Don Quixote is right and the rest of the world is mad. Don Quixote is the Platonist and Sancho Panza the Aristotelian. This relationship is repeated in many Westerns. The Lone Ranger and Tonto. Hopalong Cassidy and his guitar-strumming, tobacco-spitting sidekick. One is the Platonist, the idealist; the other the Aristotelian, the materialist. Together they make the West a better place by ridding it of the bad guys.

The Platonist or deontological view forms the core of Western and human civilization: there are unchanging, objective truths and rules that we do not invent but which we can discover, and it is the function of our species to discover them and to act upon them, voluntarily, of our own free will. The Aristotelian or utilitarian view is modernism itself: expediency and the feedback of outcomes into premises as if the premises were capable of alteration, which is an impossibility within a moral framework. It is a moral impossibility to claim that a crisis can ever justify a change in principle. However, for this council and staff, and their corporate supporters, the use of objective and subjective principles to guide action absolutely is not at all understood. Instead, meetings consists of nothing but amoral and immoral discussion of how ends may be attained and conditions reacted to, mingled with open pleas for expediency, favoritism, and manipulation.

Furthermore, staff’s entire fantasy tourism scenario, with its fixation on 2, 3, and 4 percent changes, as if those were anything more than statistical static, is nothing but the myth of infinite growth with a vengeance. They are driving for growth for growth’s sake, for development for development’s sake, for “progress” for “progress’s” sake, for overdevelopment, perpetual tourism, and zero economic diversification—because they have no comprehension of any value system that doesn’t involve piling up more objects and measuring their own value by the number and size of those objects.

Comrade Spickard additionally used Tuesday’s meeting to announce the arrival of the new propaganda minister, Comrade Graham, another west-coast neoliberal from Washington. Her resume consists of fifteen years in the Washington state “healthcare” bureaucracy as well as—wait for it—time at the World Health Organization. So she’s not just your average Leninist, she’s doubly committed to the philosophy that only the government’s “experts” know best and are entitled to use violence to impose their will on our bodies. One wonders how long she’ll last. At any rate, her appointment reminds us once again how city staff are trying to replace Sedonans and their role and involvement in local governance with out-of-town globalists.

Comrade Christianson received a commemorative pen, Sedona-opoly, a puzzle, and playing cards as a parting gift for his final meeting. How classy. How reflective of the values of a “city animated by the arts.” Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Comrade Browne, after complaining once again about the city’s lack of ability to steal from residents, proposed that staff work on trying to create a statewide ballot measure in 2028 that would amend state law to allow the city to steal from residents more easily via short-term rental regulation. “We are different than any other city in Arizona,” Browne stated falsely, offering yet another repudiation of the Western tradition of accepting a universal rule of universal, objective law. Comrade Ploog pointed out that council is already working on this via their conspiracy with the uber-bureaucrats at the League of Cities and Towns and told staff to hold off.

It emerged that Browne was really being motivated by Parkinson’s Law in bringing up the proposal when she said it would be “my main project for a very long time.” In other words, it would give her something to appear to be doing now that there’s a new propaganda minister in town, and naturally the workload associated with the project would expand over time to justify the hiring of even more staffers. Officials multiply subordinates.

Skip Daum, that Leninist lobbyist from California, popped up gnomelike to suggest that, following this year’s elections, council fake what he called a “grassroots effort” to repeal SB 1350. Personally, he wants a cap on STRs. What that really means is that he resents having to dig into his seven- or eight-figure investment portfolio more than he has to in order to buy a house here. The problem with his California fantasy is that there is no real grassroots support either in Arizona or Sedona for repealing 1350, or the legislature would have acted on it by now. This is a property rights state. STR regulation intended to deprive individuals of the profitable use of their property is precisely the same thing the legislature already prohibited by passing SB 1487 and allowing property owners to sue municipalities that deprive them of the value of their property.

Campaign finance reports have now been published for the second quarter of the election cycle. On the Leninist side, Comrade Dunn reported receipts of $5,544.70 and disbursements of $3,092.90, with $3,544.70 of her receipts coming from personal contributions and the remainder from six donors, all of whom were DORR members and two of whom were her city council colleagues. She also took over $500 of Comrade Furman’s funds since he won’t be needing them anymore.

Comrade Fultz reported receipts of $4,800 and expenditures of $4,253.36 from the usual set of DORR donors, including public road closure advocates former mayor Comrade Adams and elitist banker Carl Jackson. He likewise received $1,000 of Furman’s leftover cash. He ordered his signs and flyers from Iowa and California and paid $2,162.80 to the Red Rock Snooze to take advantage of its declining circulation.

Comrade Hauserman reported receipts of $4,775 and disbursements of $5,080.01 this cycle. He listed twenty-two contributors, who again read like a who’s who of DORR administration. Comrades Ploog, Kinsella, Hosseini, and Furman all contributed, as did Hauserman’s paramour, Helen Jarnes, who provided a total of $700 to his campaign, making her his largest contributor. Hauserman’s expenditures went to out-of-area sign companies and included a convenient $2,750 to the Red Rock Snooze.

For the Sedona Residents First slate, Jean Buillet raised $8,950 from six contributors, with former councilors Sheri Graham and John Currivan showing support for his campaign, and spent $9,002.40. His expenditures included $1,661.20 to the Snooze and $1,070 to the city of Sedona to cover the community party the candidates hosted. Lita Boyd raised $10,242.72 from eleven donors and spent $7,681.47. Rich Gay raised $7,793.64 from six contributors and spent $4,974.33. Carol Scribner was the leading donor to each candidate, at $2,500 apiece.

On the PAC side, the Save Sedona Committee led with $19,500 raised during the quarter and disbursements of $20,487.68. Small-Town Sedona raised $6,387 and spent $4,900.01. The anti-democratic Sedona Democracy Alliance run by nonresident Comrade Segner raised $12,910 and spent $15,108.24, including $3,643.12 to the Snooze. I do hope Kyle Larson enjoys the fact that so much of the money he’s getting this campaign season is from the Democrats whom he despises and who despise him. Segner reported just seven in-state donors, two of whom were himself and his wife, who gave a total of $4,525. Segner received an additional $6,500 in business donations from Barrett Realty LLC, which, from ACC records, appears to be run by Al Spector and managed by Jesse Alexander.

Segner’s finance report included a $250 donation from former council applicant and Winslow mayor Allan Affeldt, who is otherwise engaged in trying to restore the Cultural Park and yet contrarily helped to pay for Segner’s “No on 403” signs arguing against his own position. Affeldt described the comingling of campaign funds as “unfortunate” and reiterated that he continued to be in favor of the amphitheater’s restoration, but added that he also supported a “yes” vote on home rule and had donated to Segner’s PAC for that purpose, arguing that without home rule there would be no city money for the arts. First, that’s factually incorrect; Small-Town Sedona has repeatedly presented a sample budget that both conforms to the state expenditure limit and preserves existing arts and nonprofit funding intact. Second, given that the entire history of interaction between government and arts has consisted of government officials trying to destroy the performing arts and subvert the visual arts, why would anyone propose that it’s a healthy or wise or good idea for government to be trying to give strings-attached money to the arts? Especially in Sedona, where our councilors are quite candid that they intend to determine nonprofits’ policies in exchange for funding those organizations?

Segner’s expenditures included a $2,900 late filing penalty to the city, which is par for the course for a guy whose legal records show he can’t even remember to renew his car insurance and registration.

My jaded palate gets a new experience next Tuesday: voting for the first time. I’ve never seen any point to it before, as there are almost never any candidates on the ballot anywhere who are standing for nonviolence, and voting for a candidate who openly supports violence makes the voter a moral accomplice in that violence. There are, however, no moral issues that arise from voting for any ballot proposition that deprives the state of the ability to do harm, which is in fact a virtuous act, such as voting no on home rule and yes on Prop 403.

A new story from the Daily Yonder about the effective theft of public lands by federal officials and their cronies reminds us afresh of the way the system is, and always has been, rigged against us. The Forest Service doesn’t do land swaps with the regular folks anymore, who might use the land for things like farming or housing, but up in Montana, an entity calling itself the “Yellowstone Club,” a private retreat where the Hollywood crowd and the DC crowd can plot against the rest of us, managed to close off public access to more than 15,000 acres of forest through deals the rest of us can’t do. In return for giving up access to land used for hiking and hunting for generations, the public, “represented” by the federal government, got some inaccessible mountain ridges. Conveniently, the club’s members include the current secretary of the interior, Doug Burgum, who gets to oversee land swaps. Who remembers the story of the Peralta grant and the Baron of Arizona, James Reavis, who tried to get his forged seizure of public lands through not just on the backs of forged documents but also on the basis of building close personal relationships with prominent members of the federal administration? There are many instructive lessons here—with immediate local application. Didn’t we see Comrade Spickard, upon arrival, immediately working to ingratiate herself on a personal basis with Comrade Foley and others of city staff?

California is having a wild time with its cognitive dissonance over mass surveillance and spycams. Astonishingly, the Los Angeles paramilitary is becoming the largest city to reject Flock Unsafety’s spycams, allowing its contract for 298 spycams scattered throughout the dystopian metropolis to expire—although there are still another 1,600 of the same kind of tracking spycams mounted in the paramilitary’s mini-tanks, which don’t seem to excite the public’s concern to the same extent even though they do exactly the same thing as the Flock cameras. It appears the LA stormtroopers have become somewhat cover-their-asses cautious after an internal review showed that about one in three stolen vehicle stops resulting from the cameras were false positives. Of course, such pretended concern simply means they’ll switch to other vendors and other types of cameras, with the predictable failures that will continue to result from the use of flawed technology by intellectual incompetents. Up in San Francisco, their paramilitary just leaked real-time drone footage of multiple police assaults on suspects to the entire internet for two days, along with piles of other footage showing officers randomly surveilling individuals not engaged in any crime. Expect more drones to be arriving as the cops work harder to hide the extent of their psychopathic spying from the general public and move away from obvious ground-mounted cameras.

Come to think of it, a shift of police surveillance to drones might not be a bad thing. Challenges create responses to challenges. The invention of military aircraft led to the invention of the anti-aircraft gun. The anti-aircraft gun led to the invention of jet aircraft in part to evade AA fire. The invention of jet aircraft led to the invention of portable surface-to-air missiles. The low cost and high effectiveness of missiles at shooting down aircraft led to the replacement of manned aircraft by smaller, more evasive drones, which are much more difficult to shoot down with missiles and cost much less than the missile. The advantage has swung to the offensive weapon at the moment, which can be expected to prompt a future track of technological development to devise a counter to drones. Guns and missiles are largely ineffective against such small targets, which suggests that the next move in defensive development will be a push to create a small, versatile EMP generator that can be used as a broad-area defense to target a drone’s electrical systems. Drones are peculiarly vulnerable to this sort of attack, since the shielding required to protect them against EMP attack would, through cost and weight, negate the drone’s minimalist advantages. And the invention and production of a simple, cheap, and effective EMP generator would have implications far beyond neutering the threat that drones pose to the general public: it would open up the possibility of a cascading spiral of the manufacture and use of EMP devices that could in time eliminate many uses of electricity altogether. Since the use of electricity has had terribly detrimental effects on human cognition for the most part, by enabling distractions and encouraging laziness and consumerism, that’s a very tantalizing prospect. Perhaps we can solve this technological-social problem ourselves without having to wait for the next Miyake event.

The best thing currently happening in global politics comes to us courtesy of Old Blighty, where there is a very real possibility of parody candidate Count Binface soaring to victory over Nigel Farage in the Clacton by-election. Farage’s reputation as a bought tool of some very fringe special interests has become so noxious that the rest of the Establishment is quite prepared to throw him to the Recyclons by refusing to even enter the lists against him. The prime minister-who-is-to-be has declared that the Count is “carrying the hopes of the nation,” while the leader of the opposition has cast Binface as the true people’s candidate. Variety reports that the House is already preparing to consider amendments to its traditional rules of procedure to ensure the Count, if returned, can take his seat in full costume. At the moment, the possibility seems more likely than not; the initial polling is giving the Count a comfortable three-to-two lead over Farage, with local voters expressing weariness over their posturing member’s lack of attention to local affairs. Voters also rate the Count as more likeable and more honest than Farage.

And the icing on the bun? Farage’s predecessor (Conservative) is, like the Count, a professional actor with an extensive resume in live theatre and television. He has described himself as “vaguely on standby” should yet another by-election become necessary. The whole scenario could have been scripted by nobody but Monty Python. Which comedian shall govern the country this season? On Wednesday, the scenario reached new heights with Metro UK picking the headline, “Man dressed as fox pulls out of Clacton election because it’s become a ‘circus’.”