Today the courts ruled that since Congress never actually acted to end our change the boundaries of the Muscogee Reservation, the reservation remains interact and the State of Oklahoma does not have jurisdiction to try cases between tribal members for crimes committed on reservation lands.

The argument against focused on the number of cases this ruling could overturn, and the potential legal chaos involved. In the majority opinion, Justice Gorsich wrote, “The federal government promised the (Muscogee Creek Nation) a reservation in perpetuity,” adding that while Congress has “diminished” the sanctuary over time, lawmakers had “never withdrawn the promised reservation.”

The State cannot claim authority over the reservation unless Congress explicitly gives that authority to the State.

The scope is the ruling is limited to legal jurisdiction to prosecute crimes, but there is a broader message. Promises made in the past to Native Americans cannot now be ignored because it would be too difficult to rectify. In the words of Justice Gorsich, “many of the arguments before us today follow a sadly familiar pattern. Yes, promises were made, but the price of keeping them has become too great, so now we should just cast a blind eye. We reject that thinking.”

We’re taught the Declaration declares independence from England, but it does so much more than that. It declares independence from the concept of a governing monarchy chosen by God to rule. It states that we are all created equal, we create governments, and any just powers the government holds, it holds with our consent.

Consent is an interesting word here. We know the person who wrote the document was a slaveholder, whose economic power came from people with no agency to withhold consent. We know he regularly had sex with one of those slaves who had no agency to refuse. The Declaration, as forward-thinking as it was, still envisioned a world where only a part of the population was governed. The rest was ruled.

Mr. Jefferson’s flaws make his document all the more powerful. The thesis of the Declaration is that no man has the Divine wisdom to rule us all. Any just power and authority in government must come from all of us and change with us when we finally see the errors of our past. When we understand that government must include all who were once ruled, be they freed slaves, women, or those who the Declaration later called “merciless Indian savages.”

Words from the past are like bugs trapped in amber, unable to change with the world around it. Jefferson’s document, preserved in amber, has all the DNA of our current government, and the aspirations for a government we’ve not yet been able to build.

To paraphrase biographer Joseph Ellis, his Declaration was wrong for the time but right for the ages.

I’ve watched the horror of the Flint water supply since April, and it did not take long to realize the residents of Flint are living through a public policy case study.  This week’s anniversary reminds me of a specific public policy case study in the lead up to the loss of the space shuttle Challenger.

The Flint water situation and the Challenger disaster is essentially the same problem manifest in two separate ways.  In both cases, the people with the authority to proceed were doing the jobs they were tasked with doing, which was not the same as fulfilling the mission of their respective organizations.

It appears that in both cases, people died as a result.

The mechanical problem that brought down Challenger was an O ring that was brittle at low temperatures.  It was a known problem, and expensive to fix correctly.  The less expensive solution to not launch in cold weather.  Despite the known risk, the launch proceeded.

The cold weather made the O ring between two sections of the solid booster rocket brittle.  The ring failed, creating what amounted to a rocket powered blow torch aimed directly at a large fuel tank.  The tank then ruptured and ignited.  The ship and crew were lost.

The political problem that brought down Challenger was that people running NASA were tasked with a priority above the good management of the organization.

Space travel was becoming routine.  NASA needed to encourage a new generation of STEM students to bring the United States into the future.  NASA was going to launch a schoolteacher into space, and the President was going to tell the world about it that night in the State of the Union.  The job of NASA was to provide the timely launch of an inspiring figure into space.

The engineers who know the risks tried to halt the launch, but lacked the authority to do so.  Those with the authority had the job of putting a teacher in space before the State of the Union.  They could not do that while still heading the engineers concerns.  The launch proceeded resulting in the disaster.

The mechanical problem with flint water supply is that treated water from Lake Huron was replaced with corrosive water from the Flint River.  The corrosion ate away at the lead pipes, causing the lead to leach into the water supply, poising the residents of Flint.  Additionally, the corrosive environment lead to a drop in the disinfectant qualities of chlorine, winch may be a contributing factor the spike in legionnaires disease from which 10 people have died.

The political problem that poisoned Flint’s water supply  was that people who were running Flint were tasked with a priority above the good management of the organization.

The city of Flint was in serious financial trouble, to the point where the State took over.  During a period of just over 4 years, the State appointed a series of 5 emergency managers with extraordinary powers to govern.  By and large, these powers are unchecked, and there is little local oversight.  The managers had one job, and that is to get the city’s finances in order.  The functioning of the city was secondary to that goal.  An old back-up plan to use water from the Flint river from was dusted off and implemented as a cost saving measure, but without the full engineering knowledge or institutional memory of a functioning city government, it was not implemented completely.  The highly corrosive water from the Flint river was not treated with an anti-corrosive agent before being fed into the water supply.

There was a rising chorus of people and institutions raising the alarm about the condition of Flint’s water supply.  Residents were complaining about the water, independent tests were finding the water not safe to use, and Ford switched away from Flint water to protect its plant from damage.  However, the people who were raising the alarm lacked the authority to fix or mitigate the problem.

Those with the authority had the sole job of putting Flint’s financial house in order, and did not feel they could do that while heading the concerns about Flint’s water.  They stayed the course, resulting in the disaster.

We don’t know yet how extensive the lead poising truly is, but it could pose a major public health challenge for decades.  We don’t know that the deaths from Legionnaires’ disease are directly attributable to the lead reducing the effectiveness of chlorine, but there is certainly a correlation worth further study.  We don’t yet know the cost of repair to the water system but estimates exceed hundreds of millions, and possibly more than a billion, dollars.

Both in Flint and at NASA those who we were paying to manage the respective organizations were doing exactly what we were paying them to do.  The problem in both cases is that we were not paying the managers to do the right thing, we were paying them to do the politically expedient thing.  In both cases doing what they were paid to do resulted in disaster.

I will light the fire with a torch made up of campaign fliers for both Mark Begich and Dan Sullivan.  No matter who wins the Senate race (and I doubt we will know by Guy Fawkes night), the winner will go to Washington to take part in an elected body deriving its power not from God, or even from the allegedly divine right of a king, but from our Constitution, an imperfect document that can be changed to reflect the will of the people, all of whom it governs equally.

I will burn theocracy in effigy as I reflect on what the Fourteenth Amendment to that Constitution has meant to my friends this year, several of whom are now married.

As I watch theocracy burn, I will say a prayer of thanks to God that I was born into a country where I have never been compelled into professing a religion and therefore have never had cause to wonder whether my religion was, in fact, my own.

Theocracy will burn with paper extolling the virtues of both local and national candidates.   The fire will light up the night with joyous relief.  Relief that this $50 Million campaign is over, but also at a process where people of uncommon background can come together and send representatives to parliaments that are, no matter how imperfect, far better than the alternative.

We are being polled.  Oh my, but we are being polled.  We are called nightly to the point where I, a person who LOVES telling everyone what I think, I have respondent fatigue.  I, and just about everyone I have personally talked to, now regularly screen calls to avoid being polled.  I don’t know how a pollster would weight the results to reflect that and so I don’t suspect any poll in Alaska is worth the electrons it takes to post.

The crazy thing is that this is probably the least consequential Senate race of my lifetime.  There are many important local issues that make this a very important election for Alaska, but the Senate race is not one of them.  One of two things will happen.  Either the Democrats retain control of the Senate, the Republicans the House, and the current dysfunctional Congress continues to be the least productive Congress in recant history, or the Republicans gain control of the Senate, but not with enough seats to override a veto.

Look, it’s important, I know it is.  I also know that there are other important things going on in this election as well.  You can’t help but be surrounded by the visceral nature of the campaign and not absorb some of the hate.  They are spending $50 Million dollars to tell us that the candidate from the other party is already bought by evil people and can’t  be dealt with by us good folk.  They are spending $50 Million dollars to tell us that this election is important because if our side does not win THEY will fill Washington with those  bought and paid for candidates and we won’t be able to feed our families.  They are spending $50 Million dollars to teach us to hate the very principles that our Republic were founded on, that in the finest deliberative body we can build, opposing ideas have a chance to develop into workable compromises.  It’s all or nothing.  We must support OUR side (which is good) because there is no compromise to be had with THEIR side (which is evil).   In this election, this relatively inconsequential election, we are told we make a very un-Alaskan decision of who we can work with, and who we can not.

Once the money is gone, I hope we re-find our center.  I hope we can re-build Alaska’s tradition of working with people we don’t agree with.  And once the money is gone, I hope we don’t find ourselves in the position to potentially decide control of the Senate again.

Renewable energy has come a long way, but until recently, its been a side-show to carbon or nuclear, the fuels of choice for serious work. The idea of a carbon-tax has been (with the exception of the Northeast) somewhat anathema to US politics, and we seem unwilling to underwrite long-term tax incentives for carbon replacement. Too many jobs, too much of our economy is tied into carbon based fuels for a serious change in the value of carbon to take place. I think that is about to change.

Green Car Congress has an article that talks about the potential for a new wind farm in Wyoming to fuel Los Angeles. This proposed wind farm is massive. At 2,100 megawatts, it would be more than 3 times the size of the proposed Susitna-Watana dam. From there, the power would be sent to Utah, where a compressed air battery would stabilize the wind resource, and make it available for peak demand in California.

This is where I see the game start to change. The scope of the project directly affects jobs in 3 states. A fourth state, Texas, is the home to Dresser-Rand, manufactures the equipment for the compressed air batteries, and the turbines will be produced by GE, (Connecticut), meaning this project touches 10% of the Senate districts in the nation. While I am not going to argue that Senators from Texas or Wyoming will become hostile to oil, I do think that such large projects will insure that they become friendlier to the advantages of wind energy (although it must be said that Texas generates more power from wind than the next two states combined).

While fracking still provides a carbon-based fuel, natural gas releases less carbon per kWh than more traditional fuel sources. As more natural gas is used, the overall cost to industry of a carbon tax will decrease.

I predict that between this decrease in overall relative cost of the carbon tax, along with environmental advocates pushing for a carbon tax, will create an opportunity for a new group of people to change the rules to gain an advantage over their predecessors.

A carbon tax would lead the way for energy contractors and developers to profit off of rebuilding our generation infrastructure from the ground up. I suspect this will happen sooner rather than later.

 The Goat Rope points out that human civilizations are evolving towards less war, not more. Perhaps the next step, especially as war becomes more mechanized, is for us to use humanizing language in the lead up to war.

Solders. Humans. Whose people will be on the ground? Who, solider or civilian, will bear the consequences of our political discussion? I don’t really care about boots.

In 2005, surface ozone damaged enough of India’s crops to feed 94 million people. What makes this study interesting is that it provides an economic value to the damage done by pollution now ($1.29 Billion for India in in 2005), which is politically easier to deal with than looking to the future.  This study points to a political demographic that is directly harmed by climate change, and gives a specific number to that harm.

That number is only about 0.002% of the GDP of India,* so it’s unreasonable to expect wholesale change based on this report, but a specific price-tag does make policy easier to develop.  Simply put, can India develop regulations that will clean up the air for $1,29 Billion a year or less.?

I am optimistic that the answer is yes. I am also optimistic that the answer is not necessarily telling people what they can not have,  but by improving what they do have.

There is only so far we can go with increasing the fuel efficiency of cars and power plants.  Eventually, in a democracy, leaders will reach a point when they are too far ahead of the people we are leading.  Fortunately, we are developing architectural elements that can improve the air we breathe.

At the Milan Expo in 2015, a canopy over the food court is set to (hopefully) produce as much oxygen as 4 hectares of trees, presumably sequestering carbon in the process.  Meanwhile, microalge street lamps could, in theory, pull 100 tons of carbon a year out of the environment.  Again, not much individually, but it is something that can be done by government in the process of building and rebuilding civic structures, especially if we can set a price at not doing so (in India, say $1.25 Billion a year).

*In 2005, the GDP of India was $834.2 Billion, so around 0.002% of the total economy,

The New York Times has an excellent article that details how, in the name of lower taxes, we are giving private corporations license to monitor criminals on probation. Since these corporations don’t charge tax-payers, they do so by charging people out on parole. Constitutionally mandated services that used to be free, now come with a charge. The cost of monitoring parolees, once borne by the State, have been shifted by politicians to a group of people who, conveniently, cannot vote.

It’s not just the convicted who are falling victim to this system. In some jurisdictions, we are charging presumably innocent people for the right to a jury trial. In others, a chronically underfunded public defender system is leaving those who cannot afford private counsel without their constitutionally “guaranteed” right to council, all in the name of saving the country money.

Our national debt to asset ratio is around 7.5%. We are not in the sort of dire financial straits that can forgive forgoing our basic civil liberties.

A tip of the hat to The Goat Rope for the NYT article that got me thinking.

The average total debt to equity ratio for the S&P 500 is around 0.88. Our national debt to equity ratio is around 0.075.

By rational business standards, if we don’t take on a lot more debt (at 3% interest) to invest in the future, we are not providing a good return for our shareholders.

No good business would let it’s basic infrastructure crumble while worrying about a 0.075 debt to equity ratio. No informed shareholder would stand for it.