City staff propose lawnmower ban

Last weekend’s Community Jubilee hosted by the Sedona Residents First candidates treated Sedona to the talents of Robin Miller, Patrick Ki, Tim Jessup, and Nina Weisbord, along with performances by the Sedona Dance Academy. Farther afield, the latest installments in the Haydn 2032 project from Giovanni Antonini and the Basel Chamber Orchestra are out, and they’re among those for which Haydn aficionados have been most eagerly waiting: Symphonies 96 and 97, both among the master’s masterpieces. Period instruments, of course, and the lighter touch of the musicians as a consequence was a visual treat as well. Either because of, or in spite of, Antonini’s extremely unorthodox directing style, the orchestra is also not coasting or ignoring the conductor, but watching very carefully, making for a highly intimate performance.

Symphony 96 opened with a nice clear oboe silhouetted in the slowness and great integration of the brass, no jarring. An extra force of four basses enhanced the heartinesss of the orchestra’s sound. The string cadences came off as almost impossibly furious, but the ensemble kept the phrasing unbroken and aglow with glorious color and high spirits, Antonini almost tearing a page out of his score in his near-manic enthusiasm and the horn cheekily peeking out from the back every now and then to set off another outburst. The second movement was presented as an epitome of elegance showing off the refinement and enthusiasm of the players before descending into the expected travail and recovering with embroidery from the leaders of the violin sections. In the menuetto, the first movement combination of brilliance in detail and fine pacing in the balance of phrases reappeared, along with the featured role for the crisp oboe. Again Haydn’s exuberance was brought out to its maximum and made piercing in its emphases—which made the orchestra’s performance of the final movement a considerable surprise, considering the excellence of their rendition so far. They were almost too restrained and formal at first in the closing movement, one of Haydn’s best. Instead of tripping and intoxicated, there were moments at which it came off almost ominous, stodgy, even heavy, but the Baslers managed to summon enough of the earlier spirit to bring the climax back into line with the work’s fundamental joy.

For Symphony 97, they established a sense of great profundity at first before delivering a tempo change fit to fling the listeners out of their seats with the urgency and fantastic snap of the trumpets and timpani, accompanied by Mozartean string phrasing. The orchestra delivered impeccable entries and accents, maintaining the rhythmic pulse on which large sections of the movement relied, aided by the fact that in Antonini’s orchestras the violins and violas stand, moving on their toes together, a choice even more noticeable in the mostly gentle second movement, with the strings practically dancing together as the players smiled. This is an ensemble that makes it very easy to feel the music. Every so often, the grace of Haydn’s writing was interrupted by moments of clangor which Antonini drove at a tempo that nearly turned them into chaos. At other time, the orchestra was getting an impressive amount of musical color out of comparatively little bowing. The third movement was cheered by the amusing irruptions of the woodwinds, with the clear entries of the strings there and at the start of the finale beautiful to witness. The latter involved almost a comic touch being given to the brass in places while the Baslers played to a golden finish with a fervor intended to carry their audience away.

Clarkdale’s coming Concert in the Park tomorrow will be performed by the Red Canyon Band of Phoenix, playing country and classic rock and showcasing songs from their new album. Up north, the Flagstaff Piano Festival is taking place at NAU all next week, running from June 20 through June 27, with masterclasses, young artist concerts, and performances by Sergei Babayan, Alexander Kobrin, the Cann Sisters, and more. Both the Cottonwood Community Band and Clarkdale have July 4 concert performances planned, and Koz Mraz will be offering his first classical surround-sound experience, “Classical Blast!” at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre on July 9, featuring Gustav Holst’s The Planets paired with Gregorian chant and Brahms’ German Requiem.

As part of the no on home rule presentation that Donna Joy Varney and I gave at the library this past weekend on behalf of Small-Town Sedona, we presented a sample budget demonstrating that, contrary to the outright lies being spread by incumbent members of the Sedona city council, not a penny would need to be cut from community services and all municipal functions that most of the community genuinely value could be preserved even under the “worst-case scenario” of a reversion to the state expenditure limit:

• Statutory officers: $665,940

• Sewage plant: $4,772,719

• Parks and recreation: $1,512,226

• Community pool: $578,038

• Special events: $459,491

• Recreation programs: $315,419

• Small grants program: $350,000

• Arts and culture grants: $200,000

• Community service contracts: $1,130,568

• Arts and culture programs: $159,205

• Elections: $53,393

• Pavement preservation: $1,451,000

• Street maintenance: $737,734

• Traffic control: $309,913

• Police: $2,000,000

• Total: $14,695,646

• Expenditure limit before exemptions: $15.4 million

The departments and functions to be cut under such a budget, apart from staff’s useless resume-padding capital projects, would be those considered to be of least importance by the community, such as sustainability, which most residents want abolished anyway; transit, since more than 90 percent of transit riders are tourists, not residents; tourism and communications, since it’s both grossly inappropriate and damaging to business to have the city meddling in marketing; and community development, which prevents us from building housing. One attendee at Saturday’s session expressed unease at the idea of reducing the last-named department to a single person, but felt that cutting its staffing to three people from its present level of fourteen would be a reasonable move.

We should be very clear on what Comrade Fultz mentioned last week when he threatened that services would go away and on what Comrade Dunn meant when she declared, “The pool will close.” No, those services will not go away automatically. If home rule is voted down, the city council will have to prepare a new budget within the city’s new financial constraints, and councilors will have to choose which services to include in that budget. What Fultz and Dunn are telling us is that if we take away home rule, but they are somehow reelected, they will choose to vote, out of spite, to take away the services that are most important to the community in order to preserve things that are important to them, like the third deputy city manager or an additional sustainability coordinator.

The full presentation can be viewed on YouTube or Facebook.

This evening at Republicans of the Red Rocks, we were also scheduled to present a potential permanent base adjustment budget, which, assuming a 1 percent decrease in both sales and bed tax revenue to benefit residents and small businesses, would reduce the city’s revenues—and therefore its PBA cap in a balanced budget scenario—to $57,768,662. A $57.8 million budget would allow for the city’s entire FY27 operating budget of $47,225,245, as calculated by comrades Whitehorn et al—and excluding their greed for contingencies and debt service, which would be exempt—to be preserved with zero cuts. A less-than-ideal outcome for those of us who seek efficiency, but also a significant improvement over where we are now. Such a PBA would even allow for $10.5 million a year in capital projects, perhaps things that people actually want and would be useful like restoring Schnebly Hill Road or fixing the single northbound lane in Uptown.

However, this presentation was not given, as we withdrew after Comrade Kelley of RORR, who is both a disguised Democrat and a city shill openly working for a yes vote on home rule, demanded that we refrain from presenting any alternative budget numbers, discussing problems with city administration and governance, or questioning whether the city should be doing certain services at all, and instead restrict ourselves to fifteen minutes of platitudes. Comrade Whitehorn, on the other hand, was given thirty minutes with a full battery of slides to present her falsified numbers. By their fruits shall we know them.

Kelley’s main priority, it turned out, was reassuring anyone in the audience who might have relatives working for the city that their relatives weren’t going to get fired. That’s the whole point of a no on home rule—firing all these worthless parasites! Besides, what member of our community would be so morally degraded as to think that their personal self-interest should be placed above the interests of others in their community and determine their vote? That is precisely one of the reasons why we shouldn’t have a secret ballot. And what the hell has happened to these Sedona Republicans, so-called, that they are no longer the least bit interested in debating whether government should be involved in certain activities at all and just want their piece of the welfare pie like the Democrats?

Fortunately, Kelley will not be able to do any more damage, as she’s packing up and moving back to Texas and RORR will be in the hopefully far more capable hands of Carol Gandolfo henceforth.

Ultimately the question of whether or not the city should have an infinite or $100 million budget comes down to the very question Admiral Sir George Parr struggled to answer a couple of decades back about aircraft carriers that couldn’t carry aircraft: what is any of this spending actually for?

“And how much will they cost?”

“Three-point-nine billion pounds.”

“And what are they for?”

(long silence)

“They each weigh 65,000 tons…”

Every so often, we hear a complaint from some disgruntled member of council or staff—most recently from Comrade Pfaff—about what a waste of staff’s time it is to process public records requests. It turns out that Sedona city staff do not actually maintain records of the number of staff hours spent on filling records requests. Since there is no evidence as to how much time it actually takes to fill those requests, any related claim made by council or senior staff about how arduous the process is can, from now on, be dismissed as baseless anecdote that merely betrays their hostility towards their employers. The amounts collected by the city for converting records between paper and electronic formats and providing commercial data pertaining to STR records totaled $25 in FY22, $330.85 in FY23, $348.75 in FY24, and $2,108.85 in FY25. It appears, contrary to the drama some members of the city council would like to generate, that records requests do not in fact impose much of a burden on staff time.

Should you have attempted to submit a letter to the editor on election-related topics to the Red Rock Snooze and been refused publication as part of the Larson family’s efforts to generate more ad revenue, feel free to send your letters to Tommy Acosta over at Sedona.biz; he’s happy to consider all submissions in the interests of free speech, balance, and facilitating the public process.

Last Wednesday’s extra-special council meeting was held for the purpose of seeing how many “sustainability code” recommendations staff could foist on council as part of their pursuit of green ideology via the process of implementing the 2024 international building codes. Council and Comrade Mertes had already reluctantly reviewed the decision to refrain from adopting the energy code component of the I-code at a previous meeting, but that didn’t stop Comrade Beck from throwing dozens of anti-freedom proposals at the council dartboard to see what would stick. These are based on conversations with a mere five developers so far, to the extent that staff take any public opinion into account at all.

“There’s no way around it. It increases upfront building costs…it’s an inherent problem within codes in general,” Beck admitted in a shocking moment of candor before attempting to underplay the problem by arguing that “adopting of the 2024 energy codes with some minor appendices was on average about a $9,700 increase in the upfront cost of that construction” in Flagstaff’s version of the codes. That can be contrasted with his mention of the cost of a Level 3 EV charging station: $150,000. He argued that the codes would only offer a potential 15 percent energy savings in new construction anyway—which would be more than canceled out by the expected 15 to 40 percent increase in utility costs by 2030.

“Can we have solar on every single building and new construction from the get-go? Can we get natural gas out of the buildings from the get-go?” Beck breathily proposed. His policy suggestions included offering incentives to Harkins and Safeway to cover their parking lots with photovoltaic canopies, and he specified that staff’s new code recommendations will “encourage” green roofs, which simply means allowing them for the first time without doing anything else. The new code will not, however, in spite of all staff’s performative heartburning over energy efficiency, permit reflective roofs for natural cooling. Beck confessed to council that their consultants told them right off to simply allow white roofs; he decided to dance around that by instead proposing “sandstone and putty…aged copper terracottas…metallic silvers” because of course aesthetics are more important than his actual job of sustainability. No white roofs. He described it as merely “sliding the scale” and next teased the idea of exploring what he called “cool roofing”—which is for all practical intents and purposes a solar water heater. Yawn.

Council then moved on to consider their ability to control the color of people’s driveways and whether they could force them to cover their asphalt without saying a word about the thousands of cubic yards of black asphalt the city lays down every year. They also plan to control your faucet size down to ensuring you can’t dispense more than 1.8 gallons per minute from any fixture in new construction. Apart from the basic totalitarianism, one wonders how well that will play out the first time that someone’s house burns down because they can’t get enough water to put it out in time. Council was curious about whether they could lower the compliance threshold for renovations from 50 percent of the property to a lower figure to be able to impose the requirement on more homes and Beck assured them that they could. Let us recall that this is the same council and staff who dump 1,160,000 gallons of water, on average, into the desert every day.

Beck also said it was “very sad” when the city forces people at gunpoint to repaint their homes to conform to staff’s whims.

A particularly inane move is staff’s plan to demand 20 percent tree coverage of residential properties; these nuts have clearly never talked to the Forest Service about how over-forested Sedona already is, but that’s what happens when you have a bureaucrat pulling an ideologically-driven one-size-fits-all solution out of a public administration model instead of consulting local conditions. Beck additionally revealed that “publicly-accessible restrooms have decreased over the last fifty to seventy-five years.”

In the most purely ideological and elitist move of the evening, Beck proposed bringing forward a ban on gas-powered lawnmowers, weedwhackers, and other tools in the joint interest of stigmatizing fossil fuels and forcing electrification and eliminating so-called noise pollution. Further along these lines, staff will be pushing individuals to replace reliable multi-fuel backup generators with giant battery packs.

Comrade Pfaff offered the most dissenting view among the green ideologues on council: “To the extent it’s permitted under the gift clause, I’m in favor of incentives. Beyond that, I’m not interested in forcing this on anybody. It’s expensive enough to build a house in Sedona…I just don’t feel like we should be dictating any of this. Some of this stuff’s easy, some of it’s, you know, low-flow toilet, paint colors, but again, I feel like that needs to be recommendations, not mandates.”

Comrade Hosseini dismissed real people’s concerns, arguing that not enough people were allowed to build affordable homes in Sedona to make it necessary to worry about cost-burdening them with council’s green ideology.

Comrade Allender announced that the code critique process has been delayed still further and is now not expected to start until the end of the month. What do you wager they drop it altogether?

Word on the street is that either the Chapel of the Holy Cross, or the city of Sedona, or both in collaboration, are planning to add another seventy parking spaces in the Chapel neighborhood, to the outrage of those who live there

“Nobody has heard anything about it,” one resident complained. “The city seems to do the opposite of what’s good for residents every single time.”

The Sedona Lodging Council’s meeting last Tuesday saw the council’s members, led by Comrade Segner, with Comrade Fultz seated beside him, snobbishly pecking at city council candidates Lita Boyd and Henry Silbiger, while the city’s tourism manager, Comrade Grossman, leaned over Al Comello to coach him. Much of the session was devoted to the clique’s continued attacks on the democratic process, including some truly remarkable statements that deserve a wider public circulation.

“How do you feel about citizens controlling when where and if we put workforce housing in our city?” Chamber figurehead Comrade Key asked Boyd, thereby implicitly disparaging democracy and indicating that he thinks of himself, an outside “professional” only temporarily resident here, as separate from the citizens.

“I think the citizens should have a voice in it,” Boyd returned. She later informed Segner, when he persisted in demanding that she take a position of telling the voters what was best for them, that “I’m not the queen of Sedona.”

“We’re a democracy in the sense that we’re hiring you to represent us,” Segner insisted—what a change for him, who is previously on record saying, “This is not a democracy.”

“I am for our democracy, to let it play out and to let the people decide,” Boyd calmly replied.

“Why do we need to do that?” Segner then insisted in blatant unconscious contradiction of his words few seconds before.

Lonnie Lillie claimed that he associated the Sedona Residents First candidates with the “No on home rule” signs being erected by the Small-Town Sedona PAC because their signs happened to be adjacent to signs put up by the Sedona Residents First slate, without claiming that he associated the signs of the Segner slate—Fultz, Dunn, and Hauserman—with the no on home rule signs, although those sets of signs were also adjacent to the Small-Town Sedona signs. Members of the lodging council then piled on to complain that most Sedonans don’t even know what home rule is and by implication would be unable to decide properly on the issue.

Lodging council president Cheryl Barron claimed that “decreasing the budget may look great for the residents” but would interfere with tourists, which, number one, is an irrelevant consideration, and number two, is for her a personal rather than a community-wide consideration. “We’re making progress with traffic,” Barron added.

“How do you feel we’re making progress with traffic?” Boyd queried, noting the three-to-four mile backup opposite her house on SR 179 and arguing the only thing really done in “eleven years” was Forest Road.

“That’s me,” Barron said, apparently justifying the expenditure of $17 million in public funds on the basis of her personal convenience.

“I don’t want you to feel like I’m attacking you,” Barron then hypocritically added while attacking Boyd, who was a member and founder of numerous local organization and business groups, for not being sufficiently involved in the community, although it soon became clear that Barron was misinterpreting “city government” as meaning “community.”

Boyd noted that she has so far spoken to over eight hundred residents during her campaign and that the general sentiment directed at the city government as it now exists is anger.

When Segner turned his vitriol on Silbiger’s support for democracy, Silbiger responded by asking why the lodging council had brought a “Yes on home rule” sign to a supposedly nonpartisan meeting.

“It takes more than four and half months to learn a business” Segner argued; apparently he thinks Fultz’s twelve months in Sedona before running for council were sufficient.

“How many of those city council members were only here for a year?” Silbiger promptly retorted.

“They took training!” Segner exploded, giving away his assumption that members of the public must be trained by “experts” in order to become officials.

Barron asked Silbiger if he envisioned Sedona moving to something closer to what she described as a putative Glacier National Park model and “forcing people to take public transportation,” not just admitting to the council-chamber agenda but also revealing her own sense of unreality. I grew up not far from Glacier National Park, and up there, anyone who suggested forcing us onto a government bus would have been taken out back and shot.

“I don’t see a 15-minute city…that’s not Sedona and that’s not the West. We drive our cars,” Silbiger responded. Barron followed this up with discussing how the city’s shuttles for tourists served her business without once mentioning residents or employees. Silbiger also expressed opposition to schemes to charge employees for parking in Uptown. All that discussion of traffic and no one bothered to mention just putting back the second outbound Uptown lane.

Fultz next gave a repetition of his canned remarks, making his case for using public funds to support increased child abuse in Sedona, citing false figures on the effectiveness of the city’s spending on tourism marking that are in fact simply invented by Comrade Browne out of thin air, and expressing support for giving staff more power and less council oversight. He claimed he wanted a diversity of ages in Sedona, although his actions for the last four years, with attempts to kill housing, the Cultural Park, and the arts scene say exactly the opposite. “It’s not urbanization, it’s reasonable,” Fultz claimed of his passion for apartment construction and dependent renters and claimed that the city would not be putting in “five hundred units” right after bragging about his support for 775 units. Another part of his platform was wishing there was a way to force all council candidates and commission applicants to take the city’s indoctrination programs in order to produce orthodoxy of thought.

He then launched one of his most memorable attacks on democracy while lambasting his rivals. “It is ridiculous for anybody to say they’ll accept the will of the voters,” Fultz fumed. “I’ve been listening to this nonsense for months.”

Wyndham representatives expressed anger at the city’s purchase of the 2411 SR 89A property without consulting them about the needed second exit. “I hope we do better,” Fultz soothed, making no comittment.

Otherwise, the assembled hoteliers got to hear Comrade Key complaining about Republican attempts at the legislature to cut off his welfare drip feed and assuring them that all the signs outside the Chamber advocating the election of state-level candidates are not a part of his attempt to find a higher-paying job elsewhere. “That is not our land. Those are not our signs,” Key promised. Excellent. Small-Town Sedona will be out there with fenceposts shortly. Barron claimed that the Chamber’s funding is derived from its members and the business improvement district, making no mention of the city contract funding that the Chamber still receives. Grossman excelled himself, admitting that the city’s web traffic was down, allegedly due to an increase in “AI”-assisted searches—maybe it’s just the intellectual poverty of your marketing efforts?—and that there continue to be ongoing drops in international travel. He then admitted, on the topic of potential budget cuts with a no vote on home rule, “My understanding is we’re not essential.”

Comrade Segner commented that there are currently a lot of people at the city “who are asking themselves right now, ‘Am I essential?’” And I say to myself, as Louie did, what a wonderful world. Segner then went on to speculate about a purported “underground” marketing effort to groups of women of which the lodging council was unaware and commented that it was probably good for STRs rather than hotels, “and maybe down the line we can encourage it a little bit more.”

Grossman added that hotel occupancy was down 7.2 percent in April compared to last year, while STR occupancy was down 2.6 percent per VRBO.

“We’re still up slightly in occupancy,” Grossman said with the numbers on the screen in front of his audience.

The longer this sort of thing goes on, the more the whole tourism program looks like a scam by a few hoteliers to grab public dollars for their private businesses.

Cottonwood’s League of Women Voters forum for city council candidates on Monday night at the Cottonwood Recreation Center was an utter trainwreck in contrast to the Sedona version. Attendance was tiny by comparison, with a couple of dozen people in the room, and even the candidates appeared bored. Whatever problems with democracy we have here, they have them worse in Cottonwood. In its way, the Cottonwood forum offered a more stark and less elaborate blend of sanity and insanity than Sedona does, with common sense more abruptly juxtaposed against idiocy and psychopathy, all set against the background of a faint whiff of chlorine—is this the future that certain elements in Sedona envision for us? Election debates held not in a performing arts center or an amphitheater but in a room annexed to a pool?

Five candidates are up for three seats: sitting councilors Debbie Wilden and Stephen DeWillis along with Sedona’s former deputy police chief, Comrade Dowell; Scott Ellis, the city’s former community development director who now does the same job for Clarkdale; and Heather White, a healthcare worker running as a write-in candidate who also ran two years ago. Wilden was absent but sent a statement talking up her experience with chambers of commerce and working for the governor of Texas, along with “many years of preparing cost-saving budgets”; in point of fact, though it’s no proof that she was responsible for it, Cottonwood’s budget has dropped from $154 million in FY24 to $151 million in FY27.

On challenges and opportunities for Cottonwood, Dowell declared that growth had to be managed so that people would still want to live in the town and added, “I really want to hear what you have to say, cause that’s where my decision goes.” Ellis argued that town staff weren’t spending money where he thought was appropriate on infrastructure projects. “Challenge? Bringing in big business. That’s always a challenge,” DeWillis said, before talking about housing in terms of housing employees. White kept repeating the phrase “putting residents first” without specifics or explanations before demanding, “Why on earth do we have three massive buildings worth millions of dollars we are not using?” She charged the sitting council with “lack of common sense” and added, “I can make sure that I don’t just say no to the residents when they ask me a question….many families are merely surviving while tourists are using this as a playground.”

Discussion of public communication saw DeWillis urging the audience, “We expect you to show up to these meetings...we need to hear your voice.” “I know firsthand that the city’s email does block a lot that should come through,” Ellis informed the audience. “We gotta quit speaking for the residents all the time,” White said, and suggested the council reconsider its meeting time since she considered 6 PM to be too early for working residents.

Oddly enough, Dowell, who has a background in coercion, was the only candidate to offer verbal support for democracy, telling listeners that the council shouldn’t try to change people’s minds from the dais: “That’s not really my job…my job is to listen to the citizens and vote the way I believe the citizens want me to.” Conversely, the other candidates rejected democracy, with Ellis saying that he would vote to “do what’s ultimately best for the city and the residents in a long-term impact mindset,” DeWillis that he would “make the best decision humanely possible for all people concerned,” and White presenting the inherent contradiction of “It’s very important that you explain why you vote the way that you vote.”

All four candidates complained about state involvement in local decision-making but offered no hard suggestions for preventing state intervention beyond rambling about how much they disliked the state trying to prevent local interference with private property rights. Dowell made the extraordinary comment that “nothing bothers me more than when the state says this is the rule and it’s good for everybody, because it doesn’t work,” thereby repeating in one casual sentence the modernist repudiation of Western civilization, in which any genuinely valid rule does apply to everyone. He then teased the audience with the false prospect of legislative STR reform when in fact the legislature has zero interest in looking at that law at all. As a typical bureaucrat, Ellis first lamented individuals’ freedom to build and then declared that all legislatures “all have their finger in real estate.” “Andy Biggs,” whispered someone in the audience at that juncture.

“We here have enough water for us. It’s not us who are eating the water up...how much does Phoenix need from our water system?” Dowell pointed out on the topic of water. DeWillis made the very pertinent point that individuals should talk to one another to encourage waste prevention rather than invoking a threat from the city and exercise self-control in their own use.

Both Ellis and Dowell raised the spectre of the city having to budget cautiously due to a coming downturn in tax collection as retail spending declines. White kept complaining that the paramilitary was underfunded and emphasized the importance of ensuring that bureaucrats were happy in their jobs.

“Housing is a huge problem and it will always be a problem, that’s just the way it’s gonna be. It boils down to a greed type of thing,” DeWillis commented, calling out the selfish individuals who sell their property for the highest possible prices. “What can we do?…I have absolutely no idea. The best I can come up with is we can try. We can get rates and prices lowered in some way.”

In ludicrous comment of the evening, Dowell declared that he was proud of the new city manager from California, whom he described as “perfect” in spite of admitting “we got a lot of guff for him being from California…he’s leading the city as I think it should happen.” DeWillis charged that the city’s tourism program overemphasizes Cottonwood’s wine industry.

One must point out that the injunction to the candidates at these LWV forums to “be respectful of one another” is in direct contradiction to the direction to “speak their minds freely.”

Also, this is the sort of situation that leads to a staff takeover—for different reasons than Sedona, but tending to the same end. These candidates don’t have a clue what they’re doing, and that creates an opening for bureaucrats.

ASU is trying to seize a 124-year-old historic home in Phoenix via eminent domain in order to build a five-story block on its site rather than pay the owner, who has lived there for more than fifty years, a sufficient sum to enable him to relocate the building. This is what they call progress. The case was scheduled for hearing today.

In better news, the legislature took care of one last quick piece of business last Friday evening, when they approved HCR 2048 by votes of 31-22 in the House and 16-13 in the Senate. The resolution places on this November’s ballot a constitutional amendment that would protect the state’s school voucher program from further attempts to defund it by the state’s welfare bureaucrats. The trouble will be selling the amendment to the voters as such due to the incredibly roundabout way it seeks to achieve its end. First the language sets up a prohibition on defunding scholarship accounts for the children of military families, and then it casually, as an afterthought, adds that any law or ballot initiative passed after November 1 that violates that prohibition, even in part, is void in full. It’s not a full block on attempted defunding measures, but it’s going to be very tricky for the teachers’ union to circumvent, and their current proposals to control parents’ choices and fingerprint parents are completely barred by HCR 2048’s language. As part of the process, Sedona’s Soviet-inspired senator, Comrade Finchem, demanded and succeeded in obtaining the removal of the public from the hearing room.

Meanwhile, the French and Germans have once again demonstrated the brilliant state of their respective industrial complexes by spending the last decade attempting to design a new fighter jet that has now been canceled without so much as a single prototype having been produced. The BBC says they fell out over the question of whether size mattered or not. The French said it didn’t; the Germans said it did. When you have an aircraft carrier complex, it changes the situation. The even more awkwardly-harnessed troika of the British, Italians, and Japanese still haven’t gotten their new plane airborne after eleven years, and the American version, which has already raise the per-plane cost by a factor of three over the one it’s supposed to be replacing, still hasn’t flown after six years and might not after eight. And let’s not even get started on the way the so-called F-47 project is being hidden from the people who are paying for it. The Russians have less hope of ever building one of these planes than they do of naturalizing the tropicbird in Siberia, and the Chinese versions, which are bombers rather than fighters, are simply intended to look like something out of a sci-fi flick regardless of the performance issues raised.

Ordering a new fighter jet these days is the most effective way in the world to convert ego and dollars into exactly nothing via the law of diminishing returns. By the time the engineers get done adding all the bells and whistles that all the different generals want for what they call their respective missions, and wrapping those in a “stealth” shape and coating, and upgrading the engines to carry the weight of the whole thing, and increasing the size of the whole thing, and so on, and so on, the problems multiplying exponentially at every change. All these people could stand to take the world’s best piece of engineering advice from Mikhail Kalashnikov: “Anything complex is not useful and anything useful is simple.”

But air force generals want to fly fancy airplanes. That’s what it boils down to. And that’s what hundreds of billions are being poured into these programs when all someone has to do to destroy one of these planes is fly a cheap drone into the intake.

An Oregon pastor is in the news this week after sending the second-biggest movie theatre chain in the country, Regal Cinemas, a neatly-worded cease and desist letter demanding they stop showing government propaganda before their screenings. “While at Portland’s Regal Lloyd Center last night to watch Disclosure Day, our family was surprised that before the movie, we were forced to watch an advertisement touting the leadership of Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and the so-called Department of War,” the Rev. Chuck Currie wrote. “It was like we were at a movie theatre in Russia or North Korea. Democracies do not do this. The audience loudly booed.”

It’s also worth noting, with the performative celebration of the United States’s 250th anniversary coming up in a few weeks, that similar propagandistic nonsense used to go on, up until a few decades ago, in the very nation against which the US revolted, Great Britain, where it was standard practice to play the national anthem and worship a tyrannical monarch at the beginning of every cinema film. As General Partridge sneered, on target for once, “Goddammit! We fought a revolution so we wouldn’t have to pay any attention to the fucking British!”

The other intellectual irony here, of course, is that set up by the image of a pastor going to see a film—yet another film—about the revelation of a government coverup of aliens. As any orthodox Christian theologian would point out, the whole superbeings-will-come-down-from-the-sky-to-save-us concept was in fact played out two thousand years ago, with the Incarnation, and its endless repetition in diluted sci-fi forms amounts merely to a set of tawdry attempts to recycle the story without the burden of dealing with its historical, ethical, or religious content. See Carl Sagan for further on this subject.