The Jewish Community of Sedona and the Verde Valley hosted violinist Jake Shulman-Ment and accordionist (for the evening) Jordan Wax for an evening of klezmer music last Saturday. Shulman-Ment and Wax opened with “Maacht,” or “Power,” one of Wax’s original compositions, dealing with the ways in which property, land, empires, and cultures interact. “Who do the mountains belong to?” the lyrics demanded, unconsciously echoing the words of the Talbot Mundy character Tsiang Samdup, a Tibetan lama: “Is the air mine? Are the stars mine?” “Who takes away our power?” The music began with blinding smoky runs on the violin in an improvised, prolonged introduction that nevertheless referenced Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade. A despairing, languishing first section gave way to a second, upbeat, folksy theme, with the in-the-know members of the audience clapping in time, and then a third racing display section following the verses, building in raucousness and enthusiasm. Such a threefold levelling-up, with increased tempos and a mood change at each juncture, was a common organizational pattern within the duo’s songs, which generally featured very philosophical themes and a certain feverishness in the conclusions.

A similar division was likewise apparent in and within the elements of the suites of klezmer melodies the duo played. One such suite, composed of nigunim, or contemplative themes meant to accompany prayer, began with one of Shulman-Ment’s composition that gave off an air of dogged determination through its broad and buzzing chords, rather like seafaring music. The chanty segued into a melody borrowed from his neighbor in New York City, which felt more like music of the Plains or Appalachia, becoming almost Celtic before it yielded in turn to a traditional variation from Soviet musicologist Moisei Beregovsky, which started simple, sad, and rhythmic only to lead into a speedy dance. Another suite was themed around music from the Black Sea, which, Wax commented, collectively expressed that “there is no realness in ethnic purity.” The initial melody, collected from a Tatar violinist, was almost classical in its structure and warm and knowingly reassuring at points, as well as sounding deceptively casual given the action it required from the violinist. The second theme, supplied by Joseph Moskowitz, consisted of short, brisk phrases that were highly danceable, while the third theme, a famous traditional klezmer melody utilized by multiple composers, was even faster than the second theme and incorporated considerably more character along with quite recognizable motifs. It was additionally more of a party song, with a sound suitable for a chase scene in a classic slapstick film, and gave Shulman-Ment the opportunity to show off with an eye-popping cascade of slides. A suite of wedding music began solemnly, with Wax singing to an absent groom like a prayer with violin obbligato; evolved into a serious duet with building emphasis; and then dropped its sobriety and transformed into an all-dancing, all-drinking extravaganza again, with the accordionist becoming extremely vivacious.

Other items on the evening’s program included Wax’s composition “Singing As You Go,” which dealt with the challenges of being a traditional musician in today’s society. The main melody, borrowed from Romanian folk music, was rousing and classic, but the English lyrics seemed a bit too ample for the tune. However, when Wax switched to Yiddish, the combination clicked and the lyrics became far more effective and suitable, producing a real old-fashioned feel. The two of them ended it with a racing instrumental run that would have been excellent for dancers, if there had been dancers, to use to dance themselves to exhaustion in its absolute merriness. “The World Is A Wheel,” a traditional Yiddish song from Shulman-Ment’s first album, had voice and violin earnestly alternating like joint soloists for a throbbing, intense effect, the violin keening at times and almost funereal. Another traditional lullaby, “In the Faraway Mountains,” came off as both tender and wistful. In distinct contrast was Shulman-Ment’s demonstration of an alternate Turkish tuning on Wax’s violin, a method he commented was referred to as “two strings,” that produced a higher and more metallic sound of the type often associated with the Levant; the piece they played in that tuning slowly accelerated until it was racing away like an elaborate contredanse. A folksy and fascinating evening.

Singer Jeannie Carroll, trumpeter Dave Len Scott, and the Red RockAppella Quartet will perform at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre tomorrow afternoon. Chamber Music Sedona will close its season on April 12 with comedy and cello from director Nick Cannelakis, followed by the Sedona Symphony’s pops concert on April 18 and the Red Rocks Music Festival at the JCSVV on April 19. Last call for plein air painters for Paint Arizona Day on April 4, tomorrow, at the Sedona Artist Market Gallery. Also, Gutenberg! The Musical opens at SIFF on April 10 for three performances.

Roundabout Our Town

Drivers along SR 89A on Wednesday morning were able to have the experience of watching the Sedona paramilitary parade a woman stark naked down the sidewalk. SPD certainly seems to have a thing for stripping women naked in public—and in this case, holding up traffic in the process. In all probability the SPD thugs did it on purpose as an attempt at public humiliation. One does hope that they had something better on her than public nudity; as an enthusiastic nudist, I would like to remind Comrade Foley that Arizona statute sets a “reasonable person” standard with respect to indecent exposure, which, in a desert climate, effectively legalizes nudity in most situations.

We might reflect that it has been very ingenious of city staff to close a bunch of Uptown parking—and drive visitors away from potential parking by underpaying private lessees—in its effort to kill Uptown businesses, because the effect has been to concentrate the declining demand for parking in a smaller number of locations and thereby to make it look like there is an increasing demand for parking. City staff have thus created the illusion of a nonexistent parking problem to which they will react not by reopening the parking that they arbitrarily closed, but by imposing further restrictions on parking, which will create more parking problems, which will justify further restrictions…until city staff attempt to illegally bar nonresidents from parking in Uptown altogether.

If these brain-dead councilors and staff had a clue, they would realize that retail is shifting away from Uptown and over to West Sedona anyway, which in the long run will result in the reconversion of much of Uptown from retail to residential and also thereby eliminate most of Sedona’s traffic problems—without the government having to lift a finger to accomplish that.

Democracy Dies in Sedona

That gang calling themselves the Sedona city council and their supine, manipulative, gerrymandering staff have filed a lawsuit challenging the Save Sedona committee’s Cultural Park Preservation Act, scheduled to be placed on this July’s ballot as Proposition 403, in Yavapai County Superior Court. The council has been having executive sessions for months on whether to file suit against the initiative, and now that it has become apparent to them that the Save Sedona committee has collected enough valid signatures to allow the initiative to advance to the ballot, they have decided to go ahead with their effort to suppress democracy. The suit, incidentally, names the Coconino and Yavapai county recorders and boards of supervisors as defendants, with the expectation that they will be what it refers to as nominal parties.

The suit contains no new arguments on the city’s part, merely repeating Comrade Christianson’s sauceless canard that “the initiative is an attempt to rezone land via the initiative process separate from the LDC—something Arizona courts have long categorically prohibited.” Yes, Arizona courts have long prohibited that—which is why Bill Noonan drew up the initiative very specifically to avoid effecting a zoning change. The complaint also complains that “the initiative also conflicts with the city-specific community plan for the area, the Western Gateway Community Focus Area.” Well, yeah—when the city holds a faked public process to come up with a faked plan, the way the public has to fight that kind of chicanery is through an initiative that conflicts with the plan.

The suit does, however, contain a number of factual lies that are intended not to support city staff’s legal case but their argument for the park’s destruction by having these lies read into the public record, just as staff attempted to establish false information regarding short-term rentals as part of the historical record by inserting it into an agenda bill officially approved by council. The Court of Appeals has already had to smack Sedona around for this kind of behavior when it struck down Sedona’s original prohibition on short-term rentals.

In the present case, the lies include city staff’s claim that “the majority of the property is not generally open to the public or even publicly accessible,” which, as anyone of the hundreds of us in the public who regularly access it know, is factually untrue. Comrade Fultz even spoke from the dais on how he and Noonan discussed the park’s future while standing on the stage. The suit then continues on to claim, “The initiative would markedly change these restrictions. Specifically, it proposes to require the City to ‘maintain the Sedona Cultural Park as a city parks and recreational facility.’” I hate to break the news to Sedona’s utterly clueless, completely deceptive and mendacious city staff, but the Cultural Park has been an official city park and recreational facility since December 2023, when city staff officially posted it as the “Cultural Park Recreational Facility” with open hours of 5 AM to 10 PM and Comrade Harris stated it was considered a park.

Apart from any genuine legal threat the lawsuit poses to the initiative, it is also—and perhaps primarily—a propaganda threat. The mere existence of a suit against the initiative will be used by those at the city and those who are opposed to arts and creativity as a putative reason to return a negative result in the ongoing Cultural Park survey by implying falsely that the amphitheater restoration rests on a legally invalid basis and to vote against the initiative should it proceed to the ballot. Old-timers have recounted that Sedona city staff have repeatedly used the same tactic in an attempt to discredit community initiatives, most notably in the case of an attempt to pass a permanent base adjustment as an alternative to home rule in 2018.

However, the suit additionally represents an instance of a Leninist vanguard party acting in outright defiance of the public will in a manner that is also historically familiar in Sedona, as Serge Wright recounted in a letter to the Red Rock News a couple of years ago:

The city commissioned a survey and even though the questions were skewed—in my opinion—to favor city ownership of State Route 89A, over 65 percent of those surveyed wanted the road to stay the state’s responsibility. Our council still went ahead and approved city ownership and taking the $10.6 million from ADOT against the wishes of the residents. A group of citizens called Let the People Vote on 89A, led by former Vice Mayor Sheri Graham and represented by Jon Paladini, filed a referendum and initiative to block the city council’s decision. Signatures were gathered and a decisive 70 percent of voters cast their ballots against the transfer of ownership…As an interesting aside, several councilors petitioned the state to get the vote of the people declared null and void after passage of the referendum on the lights—so much for the democratic process and our constitutional rights…Several of our councilors who led the fight against the lights along State Route 89A actually tried to stop the International Dark Sky Association from awarding Sedona this [dark sky] designation, as they felt Sedona was undeserving.

In another gesture of the contempt city staff show for their ideological opponents, the Save Sedona committee had not even been served with the lawsuit or given any notice of the pending suit prior to the city’s announcement of the suit in a press release, which was sent out at 6:19 PM on a Tuesday evening. One resident’s immediate suggestion was that the Save Sedona committee’s principals stymie the city’s efforts by simply leaving town and rendering themselves unable to be served. Sometimes the old-fashioned aspects of the legal system come to our aid.

I should like to take a moment to call out that steaming pile of ordure, Sedona’s mayor, Comrade Ploog, who two years ago stated at the time of the referendum on the concentration camp, “Seventeen percent of our community has told us within thirty days that they do not want to see this more forward. I could not support under any circumstances moving forward when 17 percent of the people in our community have said no.” At least 1,400 and probably more than 1,600 people in Sedona have told Ploog that they do not want housing on the Cultural Park and that they want a vote on it—and she has disdainfully flushed their opinions down the toilet where she belongs by presiding over this lawsuit. Who wants to picket outside her house at 139 Bristlecone Pines with signs reading, “Here lives an enemy of the people?”

If Ploog wants to get off the hook for this one, she can release executive session records proving she opposed the lawsuit and was overruled by a majority of her colleagues. Otherwise, she has no possible excuse and it’s time to recall her. The next election at which a recall of a sitting councilor can be placed on the ballot is the general election on November 3; signatures are due by July 6. She’s had three days to make a statement dissociating herself from this blatantly totalitarian and anti-democratic move. She’s been silent; therefore, she gave consent.

Ploog’s action is literally a duplication of one of Comrade Lenin’s most infamous hypocrisies. Immediately before the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin wrote a book called The State and Revolution in which he declared that the state and a Marxist society were irreconcilable opposites and that the task of the revolution would be to smash the state. A few months later, with the revolution accomplished, Lenin promptly reversed himself and learned to justify the existence of the state—because he needed it to get his way. Ploog is as great a hypocrite and in exactly the same way as her master himself.

Sedona is already rife with reports of the city’s purposeful abuse of its rigged survey regarding the future of the Cultural Park amphitheater. A number of registered voters have not received surveys. Others have scanned the provided QR codes only to find that the codes don’t work. Still others have been able to navigate to the survey website only to find that they are unable to submit their answers. Totally expected. The city never wanted us to have an honest survey. As always, the question is—incompetence or malice?

The Segner Files

Should you see the name “Sedona Democracy Alliance” on any mailings or ads this election season, don’t be fooled: it’s another DORR-Chamber front group set up by city apologist Comrade Segner and his allies. Updates to follow on whether this group was the organization formally responsible for Segner’s deceptive Cultural Park mailing a couple of weeks ago, but it was most likely the pass-through that he used, as the description of its legal purpose begins with the phrase, “Developing and disseminating educational materials on civic engagement and policy issues.” The group’s articles of incorporation specify, less ambiguously, that the group was organized for “the purpose of supporting and promoting Democratic and Democratic-aligned candidates and causes in local and regional elections through lawful advocacy, education and communication efforts.”

Segner was joined in forming this group last November by Lea Lagas, Andrea Christelle Houchard, Al Comello, and “Coleen Jeffries.” These individuals are, of course, not democrats but Leninists engaged in pushing Segner’s fringe philosophy of democratic centralism and destroying a small town based on their religious reverence for the myth of perpetual technological progress.

Jeffries does not even live in Sedona but is a Scottsdale resident, while Segner lives in unincorporated Coconino County, as does Lagas, who may be merely the group’s registered agent rather than a co-conspirator. She is also registered agent for Chamber Music Sedona, which may suggest the latter alternative. Christelle is a sort of fringe tour guide who happens to be a member of the Chamber; the RRN once referred to her as an “environmental ethics expert,” which can safely be taken to mean that she’s a pseudoscience promoter. She also appears to have done some work for Segner. Oddly enough, she joined the staff at the University of Kentucky the same month that Segner launched the group, which means that unless they’re letting her run an entire program remotely, she’s not even in town anymore. And she may not have been for a while; Yavapai County records show that she sold her house in Foothills South, which she continues to use as her Sedona address, to her philosophy partner Matthew Goodwin in June 2018 after purchasing it in March 2014. Additionally, she or Segner omitted her surname from the filing paperwork; it’s unclear if that invalidates her status as a director of the nonprofit corporation. Maybe she got ticked off after she failed to get selected for that empty council seat that Comrade Hosseini now holds and decided to help screw the city up for the heck of it.

As for Jeffries, there appears to be no “Coleen Jeffries” living in Scottsdale, although there is a “Colleen Jeffrey” living at the address Segner included in his incorporation paperwork. Jeffrey is a relocatee from Bellingham, Washington, and the People’s Republic of California, another similarity she shares with Segner.

Incidentally, while it has often been repeated that Segner lives in the Village of Oak Creek, county records give his address as a custom 3,200-square-foot home in unincorporated Coconino County, on a three-acre parcel up Oak Creek Canyon at 2975 Thompson Road. Segner carries a $1,403,000 mortgage on the property; its estimated value is $1.8 million. He also owns, via his Inn Sedona LLC, 95 Portal Lane, his petite hotel, which Coconino County values at a minimum of $2.9 million and is doubtless worth much more in today’s market; 87 Hart Road, valued at $783,000; and 70 Brewer Road, valued at $1.4 million. Rumor overstated the extent of his real estate operations—somewhat. Meanwhile, he thinks that you and I, dear reader, should consider ourselves privileged to be permitted to live in our cars on the outskirts of a town he doesn’t even deign to live in—yet which he thinks he has the right to manipulate. Talk about a real friend to the working class.

For what it’s worth, Segner also keeps several additional active LLCs circulating should you see the names of Bear Wallow Partners LLC, Sun Country Adventures LLC, or Sedona Fixtures LLC pop up in correspondence. He never thought to form his LLCs in Wyoming, apparently.

Segner is Sedona’s foremost proponent of the pro-growth agenda, which proposes to cover the land in concrete and asphalt for the benefit of entitled, arrogant Leninists like himself. Bernard Prusak in Commonweal called attention to the distinction between the Christian morality of the “degrowth” philosophy as opposed to the lack of morality of the dominant neoliberal consensus to which Segner belongs:

The degrowther movement has adherents among left-leaning Catholics and finds support in at least some passages of Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical on the environment, Laudato si’. Francis criticizes “those who doggedly uphold the myth of progress and tell us that ecological problems will solve themselves simply with the application of new technology” (60), rejects “the idea of infinite or unlimited growth” (106), and submits that “the time has come to accept decreased growth in some parts of the world, in order to provide resources for other places to experience healthy growth” (193). By contrast, Klein and Thompson seem to envision a secular paradise “beyond scarcity” (the title of the book’s introduction). The thought that poverty, voluntarily assumed—loosening our attachment to our own power and pride and increasing our dependence on God and neighbor—might be good is as foreign to their universe as are MAGA’s techno-feudal fever dreams.

Seriously, though, what can you really expect from the kind of schizophrenic who launches a group called a “democracy alliance” when he’s on film in front of that gang calling themselves the city council denouncing democracy for undermining the democratic process—and openly declaring that Sedona “is not a democracy”?

If it’s not, then we have a problem.

‘In a Day We’ll Have it All Figured Out’

While city of Sedona propaganda staff are busily trying to plant their lies about the benefits of high taxes and crippling bureaucracy in the public discourse by repeating the lies as often as they can at public meetings, local groups are also meeting to discuss the city’s organized deceptions, and the outlook among residents is not favorable to home rule, as one such group discussion this week showed.

“They spent $300,000 on how to get people out of Sedona,” one resident said, alluding to the city’s proposed evacuation plan as an instance of both a staff project that turned into a boondoggle and an excuse for staff to do projects. “We got three roads and two canyons. I’ll take any two people in this room and me and we’ll go sit down with the fire chief and police chief and we’ll get it done. In a day we’ll have it all figured out. We’ll identify every person that’s got a physical disability. We’ll have the road plans worked out. How hard can it be?” He then noted that the late and unlamented Comrade Jablow had claimed that the over-budget construction of Forest Road was justified by its inclusion as an escape route in the city’s evacuation plan—when the study for the evacuation plan had not even been done at the time of the road’s approval.

“I believe the city’s run by a machine that’s been around for quite a while, that’s in the background doing whatever it is that they do,” another member of the group commented. “Jablow already knew in advance what was going on. You can’t tell me this group of seven that’s doing all of this is that smart. Cause they’re not.”

“I think you start with the name Steve Segner,” someone suggested, to a burst of laughter. Laughter likewise greeted repetition of the staff remark that grant money isn’t “real money.”

“There will be a PAC” on Segner’s part, another resident declared, unaware yet that Segner had launched the PAC last November.

“There’s a lot of people that generate projects to keep their job,” a speaker noted. “That’s government in general. We run under a city manager type of government here where your council is supposed to give direction, but I’ve always thought that the council never really followed through with a lot of of questioning what they’re doing…The city manager will overpower the council with tons of BS, tons of paperwork and stuff. The council’ll take a look at that, they may read a couple of pages and say ‘They must know what they’re talking about to give us all this paperwork’…and then you realize, or you don’t realize, that you’re not running anything, the staff is running it. That’s not just Sedona, that’s pretty common.”

“You ask a question, you will get a more complex answer than a yes-no to the question, because they don’t want you to lift up the rock and see what’s underneath the rock,” another remarked on staff’s treatment of inquiries before addressing their habit of deliberately confusing issues as a policymaking tactic.

“The city manager made it apparent that she wanted to pass certain things not really because in her opinion they were a good idea but because the council wanted them. She pretty much doesn’t want to be in trouble with the council,” a member of the group commented.

“They want to build another parking garage next to the high school on the corner there for about another $30 million. What the hell?” one attendee demanded.

“Always easier to spend somebody else’s money, right?” someone asked.

“In talking with people, and this is likely an outcome of the city’s scaremongering, the common response is saying, ‘Well, we’re collecting all that money, if we don’t have home rule, what happens to it, we’re gonna lose it,’” another person remarked.

“The money’s not going anywhere. It’s not like we lose it,” came the answer. “In fact, if we get enough of the money, maybe we can have a vote on the council to knock the sales tax down a percent and make it two percent here instead of three.”

One speaker argued that lowering taxes or fees is “not hard to do if you look at these crazy projects and everything” in which city staff indulge. He described the city spending $840,000 to install a culvert on Back o’ Beyond to avoid vehicles driving through an occasional foot or so of water during torrential rains but refusing to fix an area of the road where the water could become deep enough to wash a vehicle away, alluding to their attitude as “‘we gotta spend the money to fix something up here that doesn’t need fixing.’ Why? What’s between 179 and the place where the trailhead is? They gotta have their little electric buses going back and forth, and that kind of thing, make sure we can get down to the trailhead, take care of the tourists and so on. Never, ever has there been a problem to drive that road. I’ve got a couple other examples in here too. They just paved the sidewalk from the 179 parking area just outside the city limits…and there was a gravel path that went to the sidewalk in front of the United Methodist Church over there, which people would walk on, and they’d walk down Back o’ Beyond Road…These are hikers. They’re parking their car to go hiking. Why do you need a brand-new concrete walkway to go from the parking lot to the front of the Methodist church so you can cross the road? It’s not like you’ve got joggers and bikers. These are hikers. And you’ve seen what they’re doing to Dry Creek.”

“Has anyone followed the money to see if these projects end up in a relative’s bank account?” was a question raised at some point.

One guest reported that a former councilor—a member of the Democratic Party—had claimed that being a city councilor in a small rural town is properly a 20-hour to 30-hour-per-week job, while the citizen budget committee, given the limitations on what it can actually make recommendations on—its scope does not include capital projects or operations budgets—was described as “looking at the world through a soda straw.”

Another resident advised the future council to adopt the attitude that if home rule does pass, “very little is going to change in this community except that we are going to come to you, Mr. Voter, and discuss and ask for permission to keep things going as they’re the same…we will fix it no matter what you guys decide, because basically it is a decision of the voter.”

The meeting indicated the emergence of a strong sentiment within the group for an initial “no” vote on home rule to break city staff of their overspending habits, followed by a permanent base adjustment that would lower the budget to a much more rational level, albeit not to the level of the state expenditure limit.

Sedona residents who are politically conscious are well aware that city staff, terrified of losing the home rule vote, are attempting to initiate as many projects as they can prior to their budget deadline in an effort to ensure those projects can be carried forward even if their future budgetary greed is limited.

‘Your Hands Are Full of Blood’

In yet another illustration of how little that which passes for mainstream media knows or cares about Christianity or morals, CNN has taken it upon themselves to wonder pompously why Pope Leo just visited Monaco: “The pontiff’s visit to the principality has raised questions about why he chose a place known for its wealth and reputation as a playground for the super-rich for his first foreign trip of 2026.” It’s rather funny that Jesus himself was busy rebuking CNN a couple of millennia ago:

And after these things he went forth, and saw a publican, named Levi, sitting at the receipt of custom: and he said unto him, Follow me.

And he left all, rose up, and followed him.

And Levi made him a great feast in his own house: and there was a great company of publicans and of others that sat down with them.

But their scribes and Pharisees murmured against his disciples, saying, Why do ye eat and drink with publicans and sinners?

And Jesus answering said unto them, They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick.

I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

And Leo delivered on that tasking, telling the bloated Monegasques that they were expected “to put your prosperity at the service of law and justice, especially when the display of power and the logic of oppression are harming the world and jeopardizing peace…every good placed in our hands has a universal destination; it bears an intrinsic need not to be held back, but to be shared, so that everyone’s life may be better.” He then assured them that God would disrupt “those structures of sin that create chasms between the poor and the rich, between the privileged and the discarded.”

Leo also distinguished himself this week in ticking off the world’s sanguinetti, opening his homily in Monaco with an uncompromising reminder that the state and the demands of realpolitik stand in stark relief to Christ: “The verdict of Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin stemmed from a political calculation based on fear,” Leo reminded his listeners. “As teachers of the Law, their vision was so distorted that they violated the precepts of the Law themselves. Forgetting God’s promise to his people, they sought to kill the innocent, and behind their fear lay a desire to keep hold of power…The wars that stain [our present] with blood are the fruit of the idolatry of power and money,”

The pope returned to the theme back at the Vatican on the following day: “Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.’” Apart from their general context, his remarks have clearly also been aimed at that aged Ken-doll in fatigues masquerading as America’s minister for war. And yet Leo’s invocation of universal absolutes isn’t getting front-page coverage. Actually trying to live Christ’s example rarely does.

They should probably hook up a set of transformer leads to St. Patrick’s in New York at this point, given how fast Cardinal Spellman must be spinning in his crypt by now at seeing an American pope flush his heresy down the Tiber.

Nauseating

That inglorious bag of tricks called artificial unintelligence has received its latest blow in the form of a near-unanimous rejection by the English-language Wikipedia’s editorial board, which voted 40 to 2 on March 20 to ban all “AI”-generated content with very limited exceptions, which require all machine-edited content to be checked by human editors first, effectively rendering their use a pointless waste of time—and implicitly acknowledging that machine-generated content is error-ridden enough that using any of it is a waste of time. Hilariously, the Wikimedia Foundation is now starting to collect revenue streams from all the “AI” companies that wanted to train their machines on the encyclopedia’s “AI”-free content. Using pointless consumer capitalism to fund the operation of a nonprofit working on real issues in direct opposition to consumerism—now that’s human intelligence at work.

I was going to leave the idiot machines alone with that comment for this week, but after double-checking the Talbot Mundy quote used earlier in this week’s edition by means of Google, the sheer incapacity of “AI” demands, nay, invites, further pulping. As one can see in this screenshot, when the quote was entered into Google’s search engine, the engine immediately returned the correct source: a link to the Project Gutenberg edition of Om: The Secret of Ahbor Valley. However, Google’s attempt at an “artificial intelligence” search engine, the results from which are placed above the results from the functional algorithm, blithely stated, “This specific phrase does not appear in the provided text of Talbot Mundy’s 1924 novel Om: The Secret of Ahbor Valley, which you can read in full on Project Gutenberg and Project Gutenberg Australia. The novel focuses on a journey of spiritual discovery, and a thematic search of the text did not locate this exact quote.” This in spite of the fact that the copy of the novel at Project Gutenberg does include that exact quote. The feckless “intelligence” can’t even scan an HTML page!

There’s a lot of good lines in that book, by the way, along with a boatload of outdated and now pseudoscientific metaphysical speculation. “The smell of over-civilized, unnaturally clothed humans was nauseating.”

The Sedona Dance Project has announced that this year’s Sedona Dance Festival, which would have been the fourth iteration, has been canceled due to funding constraints. The nonprofit is working to raise $40,000 during the remainder of the year to support next year’s festival and will be returning to Tlaquepaque for a performance on May 9 and 10.

Just think—a fraction of Comrade Spickard’s salary, if it were still out circulating in the community instead of being diverted through taxation, could have paid for something everyone could have enjoyed. Instead it’s ending up in a withered, selfish person’s bank account where it will do no good to anyone.

Violinist Jake Shulman-Ment and multi-instrumentalist Jordan Wax will offer a klezmer concert at the JCSVV tomorrow evening at 7 PM, while Chamber Music Sedona plans a comedy routine for its final show of the season on April 12. The Sedona Symphony will play its pops concert on the evening of Saturday, April 18, featuring Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite, and the Red Rocks Music Festival has a Holocaust remembrance concert scheduled for the following Sunday. Make advance plans as well for Piano on the Rocks for the first weekend in May. Painters, sharpen your finest sable tips for Paint Arizona Day at the Sedona Artist Market Gallery next Saturday. And look forward to a purrfectly splendid time at SIFF with the annual Cat Film Festival starting Sunday.

What Shall It Profit A Man?

Some in town will have noticed that well-known city apologist and Village of Oak Creek resident Comrade Segner sent out a flier this past week urging that residents support the proposed bulldozing of the Sedona Cultural Park. One wonders who is likely to come for Segner first: someone from the Save Sedona committee or the secretary of state’s office for sending out an election mailing in possible violation of ARS §16-925, or the Red Rock News for potentially using an old RRN photo on the mailer without permission. Segner’s hysterical and deceptive flier featured his signature “AI”-generated art showing families walking in a playground in a park—which is what the Cultural Park is now, whereas Segner and his comrades at the Chamber want to have it destroyed and covered in housing for more millionaire retirees who won’t want families anywhere near them.

Segner, of course, has reportedly long been engaged in cutting families out of Sedona by buying up housing units and turning them into STRs. He’s allegedly got four of them now. That’s, what, an estimated sixteen people under age 55 not living in Sedona and eight empty seats in schools he claims he wants to support? So public-spirited of him. Just like how the late and unlamented Comrade Jablow would never deed-restrict his own home to ensure it wouldn’t become an STR—because of course he’s shortly going to sell it for the biggest price he can get to benefit his selfish self, and it will then become an STR. By their real estate deals shall ye know them.

The desire to make a profit is simply immoral, not only because Jesus of Nazareth said so but also because the historical record tells us that the usual motivation for profit-seeking is a quest for control over others—which resulted in the original creation of coercive states based on taxation and the loss of human freedom.

Redeployment

That gang calling themselves the Sedona city council heard a preview of city staff’s new housing strategy on Wednesday, during the course of which Comrade Allender dropped the alleged number of new units needed in Sedona from 1,871 as of last July’s internal scaremongering to fewer than five hundred—with caveats. Allender proposed, without showing his math, that the city pursue construction of 775 new “housing units” over the next ten years, which he predicted would result in a population increase of 440 to 470 kids and 744 to 756 working adults in order to satisfy his primary goal of increasing enrollment in the state indoctrination system by 50 percent. He then pointed out that 221 of the needed units were “already in the works,” including all the barracks projects in planning or under construction, and suggested that the city “redeploy” up to eighty-eight homes occupied by seniors by convincing them to move elsewhere or into specialized jails in order to put their homes back on the market, which would drop the number of needed units to fewer than five hundred.

Allender did not address the question of how much of a housing supply increase would be needed to reduce the average working person’s mortgage payment—not rent—to 25 percent or less of income or propose another alternative that would lead to the same outcome. He also commented absurdly, “That’s okay” with regard to individuals who work in Sedona but claim they do not want to live in town. No, that’s not okay. They have the unquestioned right to live wherever they want, but if they choose not to live in this community, they are declaring they have no attachment to it and desire no role in its affairs, and such an attitude does not foster maintenance of a strong, well-integrated community resistant to state incursions. By taking jobs in town, they are misappropriating resources that could otherwise be used by people who do actually care about Sedona in Sedona for the benefit of Sedona.

Remarkably, the presentation saw Allender, as a newcomer, begin to walk back city staff’s tradition of short-term rental hysteria to a very limited degree. For the first time, a city document admitted that second homeowners might be part of the problem, with the presentation stating with regard to vacant homes, “It is extremely likely that the very large majority of those units are comprised of second homes and short-term rentals.” “We are by no means demonizing short-term rentals,” Allender told the council, and when Comrade Payne of SOCSD, in attendance, asked about how new homeowners might be deprived of their property rights in order to meet council’s ideological goals, Allender told her that effectively the only way the city could guarantee such an outcome would be for it to own the properties in question outright. “If we’re left entirely to the private sector, I can’t guarantee you anything.”

At the same time, Allender couldn’t resist claiming that STRs accounted for only 10 percent of Sedona’s housing, or about 680 units, as of 2020, compared to something like 18 percent of the city’s housing today. In reality, as opposed to city staff’s manufactured narrative, there were already 1,138 STRs in Sedona at the end of 2018, accounting for about 16.7 percent of the city’s housing. No one at the city will ever admit it, but the pre-2017 STR ban was pointless and unenforceable and Sedona has in fact seen negligible STR growth since the supposed horror of SB1350.

One of the effects of this new assessment will be to cut the legs out from under the argument that it is necessary to demolish the Cultural Park to provide workforce or family housing. With a presumed need of fewer than five hundred units and more than a thousand vacant lots available in Sedona, including large city and other properties that could be turned into the wage slave barracks after which the council’s Leninists slaver, council and staff will be hard-pressed to craft a new argument for building on one of the most unbuildable properties in town.

The new needs assessment draft additionally contained the intriguing data point that 34.1 percent of Sedona’s housing was constructed prior to 1980—in other words, prior to the existence of any building code or system of government inspections—and yet it’s still standing and constituting a disproportionate number of the homes in Sedona. It’s information like that that tends to give the lie to people like the late and unlamented Comrade Jablow who claim that building codes keep fires from happening in homes. That fact is also why community undevelopment staff across the state—except for Apache and Greenlee counties—are so set on permitting zero development freedom. When the evidence that they’re lying is readily available, people are more likely to challenge their lies.

SOCSD is Burning

The Wednesday session, which was a joint one with that gang calling themselves the Sedona-Oak Creek School District, given council’s desire to procure more victims for the state indoctrination system, proved highly informative about parents’ increasing lack of faith in the district. Allender cited a decline in SOCSD enrollment from 1,365 students in 2001 to 695 students currently, while SOCSD chief child abuse officer and VOC resident Comrade Swaninger cast it as a decline from 1,514 students in 2006 to 694 currently. Allender then cited a current total of 917 students enrolled in all Sedona schools—meaning that at least 24 percent of Sedona’s families are choosing private schools, as compared to 9 percent nationally and 5.6 percent in Arizona. That number also doesn’t include those parents who are homeschooling, who account for about 5 percent of Arizona families. In an illustration of targeted hatred towards homeschoolers, Comrade Hosseini described them to Swaninger as “an opportunity for you to bring in.” One is tempted to send a report on this nonsense to HSLDA. My parents were longtime members.

Swaninger and his board employers attempted to spin the district’s supposed excellence and recent improvements on standardized testing as reasons why parents would want to send their kids to be abused at SOCSD. “That’s just bogus,” an alumnus of Red Rock High School called out from the audience, and the numbers bear him out. Only 22 percent of the district’s victims are rated as being proficient in reading and only 19 percent are rated proficient in math. I will simply comment that when the city appointed a junior poet laureate last year, the selection went to a student from the private Verde Valley School, not one from the local indoctrination system.

In order to cover his bases, at another point during the meeting, Swaninger shot his own “excellence” argument down by counter-claiming that proximity, rather than any other factor, determined school choice and therefore that the quality of the indoctrination centers, however that might be measured, was irrelevant.

Swaninger went on to make a spectacle of himself by repeatedly and demonstrably lying to the public about the district’s finances and other factual points. He claimed that SOCSD only receives $5,113 from the state for each of its child victims; in FY25, the district’s budget was $10,768,317, which, assuming that his claim that they have 694 victims is correct, would work out to $15,516 per head. That is in fact above the state average of $14,853 in 2024. The mendacity would be astonishing if it weren’t so expected. He offered the argument that eliminating theatre “doesn’t directly affect the academics,” speaking to his total ignorance of neurochemistry and the well-documented physical linkages between participation in performing arts and heightened cognition. In a truly Humphrey Appleby moment, the child abuser Swaninger declared that the district would require counselors and groundskeepers even if it had no students—“you talk as though the [hospital] staff had nothing to do simply because there are no patients!”

Some former doctor named Jean Barton popped up during the public comment period to complain about how hard it was for professionals like her who earn six-figure salaries to educate their kids without public schools and all sorts of optional extras like after-school programs. The district is the ninth-largest business in Sedona, with 103 employees, only 31 percent of whom can be bothered to live in the city, although, Swaninger confessed, teachers’ starting pay begins at $52,000 to $62,000, almost double the average individual income in this town. “Who can afford to live here?” Swaninger lamented. The answer to that is lots of people who are paid way less than what the luxurious young urban-trained yuppies the indoctrination system hires demand to support their wasteful excess and consumerism.

To tease Swaninger’s numbers deceit apart even farther, if SOCSD has, as its website claims, one teacher for every 16.5 students, then it should have forty-two teachers, who, if they are getting paid $62,000 apiece, would account for only $2.73 million of the district’s budget—meaning the other $7 million is not even being spent on the kids’ indoctrination, but on buildings and equipment—administrators’ vanity projects—and the administrators themselves, who make up the majority of the district’s personnel. The actual amount per kid that SOCSD is spending on whatever it is doing to them would then be $3,934.

Let us not forget that by any rational standard, what SOCSD is in fact doing to kids—indoctrinating them in submission and dependency and civil religion, trapping them away from sunshine and nature, stunting the growth of their minds, cutting them off from the arts—is child abuse. Are the defenders of the state indoctrination system prepared to defend the position that abuse of a child’s mind is less of a sin or a crime than abuse of a child’s body? A sin is a sin. A crime is a crime. Abuse is abuse. Evil is evil, and all evil is equally evil; there are no gradations. Indeed, if we were to split hairs on whether it was possible to distinguish among varieties of evil, we would, in accordance with the Western tradition that values principle over outcomes, unhesitatingly declare that a crime against the mind was a greater evil than a crime against the body. There is no getting around the fact that Tom Swaninger is, from a rational ethical perspective, Sedona’s version of Jeffrey Epstein.

As parents continue to flee this mess of a psychopathic organization and its captive victim population continues to fall, SOCSD and council will doubtless engage in a rhetorical shift to redefine supporting the school district as what Comrade Kinsella would call an “equity issue”—something they have to do to show they care about the poor kids of the Hispanic families who serve them who make up an increasingly large proportion of the district’s victims. Hey, if they don’t throw public dollars at the system, those parents might have to move and they’d lose their housekeepers and wait staff!

Mayoral candidate Henry Silbiger called out Allender’s numbers, noting that if, as Allender at one point claimed, new housing construction was outpacing population change, there was no need to discuss city-orchestrated housing efforts at all. Council candidate Lita Boyd, who helped to found the Verde Valley Regional Economic Organization, brought some historical perspective to the discussion. “We were having that conversation twenty-three years ago, almost the whole valley,” Boyd commented with regard to the idea of a housing shortage, instead linking the difficulty of finding housing in Sedona to the lack of economic diversification. If the town had more jobs and business that were not tourism-related, she argued, “all of these other pieces will fall into place, and you will start to see a shift…it’s not about just building houses.”

Sean Smith was being especially schizophrenic this evening, first making the excellent point, in reference to the old days in Sedona, that “the way it was involved families. That is never talked about,” before making the outrageous statement “Let’s be the Silicon Desert at an appropriate scale,” which was not only a complete contradiction of any pretend pro-family attitude he might gin up but also an atrocious suggestion from the perspective of those of us who value minimalism, efficiency, and sustainability.

Regardless of the inanity of the meeting and the way it made them accomplices with child abusers, the councilors adored it. Comrade Fultz said the performative exercise “checked all the boxes I was hoping for” and Comrade Furman loved the idea of having more meetings at more frequent intervals with the school board, as well as child abuser Comrade Hawley’s proposal for a joint committee of councilors and board members; Fultz and Hosseini immediately threw themselves under the school bus to volunteer for that one. “It was so worthwhile to do,” Comrade Ploog cooed.

And the best part? After spending years relying on huge housing shortage numbers to justify their anti-STR panic and attempts at remaking Sedona’s infrastructure, council meekly folded up and accepted the new results as being every bit as valid as the old ones without question, indicating the strength of their deference to unelected staff. No one even bothered to ask where the other thousand units of the shortage went—not that said units of shortage had ever existed, but council had pretended to believe that they did, so for consistency’s sake they might have at least made a show of following up.

Jobs for the Boys

On Tuesday, the comrades on council engaged in still more corporate welfare by giving a corporation called Wecom the franchise rights to install fiber-optic cables throughout the city for nothing. Not only that, the councilors were so desperate to get broadband into town to attract their desired yuppie workforce that they agreed to take a more than $2 million loss on the project. The project will install five miles of underground conduit capable of accepting additional lines and facilitating future urbanization of Sedona.

In exchange for giving the corporate poverettos a twenty-year non-exclusive license to construct an unneeded fiber-optic network, Wecom will build the city its own private fiber network intended to link every municipal facility in town, from the Y to the sewer plant. The purported value of the network and thus of the city’s gift to a private corporation is currently estimated to be $3.249 million, which city staff estimate will save the city about $30,000 a year in ISP fees, for a total of $1,184,000 over a forty-year period. Nothing like spending $3 million to save $1 million. In addition to the city’s $2.1 million gift, Comrade Fultz also clarified that Wecom will be making its money by acting as an ISP rather than by simply building the infrastructure—which will inevitably drive utility prices up in order to pay for the infrastructure, which is not actually needed except as a demonstration of conspicuous consumption.

“It takes hours to back everything up…we cannot do smaller increments,” Comrade Hardy of IT whined at council before drooling over the possibility of fifteen-minute or five-minute backups if council would only buy him a hundred-gigabit connection with public money. “We just can’t afford the ISP connection,” he added with regard to storing video files remotely, ignoring the fact that his department has a seven-figure budget; presumably he wants to keep more of that for himself. He proposed building yet another tech center at the Brewer Road building—which the city is planning to buy from SOCSD as a form of welfare program at a cost greater than the cost of the Cultural Park—once the new connections were in place, just because they could, before claiming that the added complexity was necessary to eliminate latency issues and packet errors. One was under the impression that, as IT manager, eliminating errors through troubleshooting would be his job.

In a truly Sedona moment, Hardy then whipped out his crystal ball and predicted that if council just approved the new network, they wouldn’t have to upgrade again for more than forty years. He addressed only purported benefits of the purchase during his presentation and did not suggest that there could be any negative aspects.

Paul Fleming of Wecom predicted that if council approved the contract, his firm could apply for permits within forty-five days and begin construction within ninety days, with each project area being finished within an additional twenty to forty-five days. “We would be looking at the first customers online in approximately three months,” Fleming said, and estimated that the total project would take between one and two years to complete. Construction would begin near Yavapai Community College.

Comrade Hosseini’s concerns about the contract being awarded through a noncompetitive process were dismissed by Comrade Coady on the grounds that “we’ve had no other interest,” Comrade Christianson on the grounds that Wecom previously received a different award from the state to install a fiber network through a competitive process, and Fleming on the grounds that “it’s not a sole-sourcing item as much as it’s an in-kind trade.”

A couple of Sedona’s prominent nonworkers turned out to support the proposal during the public forum. Comrade Key of the anti-business Chamber of Commerce confessed that Wecom had joined the chamber in advance of its proposal in order to demonstrate a performative commitment to the community. He made the astounding claim that faster internet would speed up the building permit process and then stated, “Broadband is gonna empower our workforce,” implying that Sedona’s existing workforce would somehow be “empowered” by being replaced by nonproductive, nonworking, untalented urban yuppies relocating.

“This can absolutely be a game-changer for our community,” Richard Keppel predicted. Yes, it will very much change the game in Sedona when no one actually does or makes anything in town anymore and it’s occupied only by six-figure urbanites who fly out for meetings. “They would have come here with hundreds of professional jobs,” he added with regard to unnamed companies if luxuriously fast internet had been available years before. Why would we who value a small town ever want “professional” jobs in this community? We want hands-on, blue-collar, self-sufficient workers, not useless middlemen parasites. Making nothing is not work. Being a middleman is not work. “Virtual work” is not work.

Comrades Fultz and Dunn chose to indulge themselves in comments related to the myth that human history since the emergence of coercive states five thousand years ago has been nothing but progress and improvements in the quality of living enabled by the period’s combination of industrialization and organized violence. Dunn made an idiotic remark that businesses need to do business outside the community—no, that’s called both globalization and vulnerability and it’s how you destroy local economies. “That’s how artists are going to sell their works,” Dunn said in her total ignorance of the art market and the role of in-person experience. She then expressed a conviction that Sedona should join the rest of the world in rushing towards an even more wasteful, unsustainable future simply because “this is where we’re headed.”

“This feels like an awful lot of good news,” Comrade Fultz opined before claiming ahistorically that unrestrained technical progress had furthered human creativity rather than stifling it. “Building roads created progress.” He clearly never heard about how Robert Moses destroyed local communities by building roads, or how the auto manufacturers destroyed local rail after World War II by building roads, or how the Eisenhower administration destroyed local economic sustainability by building roads.

Numerous comments have been offered in recent years on the absurdity of the myth of progress, starting with Henry George in 1879:

There are in the heart of our civilization large classes with whom the veriest savage could not afford to exchange. If, standing on the threshold of being, one were given the choice of entering life as a Tierra del Fuegan, a black fellow of Australia, an Esquimau in the Arctic Circle, or among the lowest classes in such a highly civilized country as Great Britain, he would make infinitely the better choice in selecting the lot of the savage. For those classes who in the midst of wealth are condemned to want, suffer all the privations of the savage, without his sense of personal freedom; they are condemned to more than his narrowness and littleness, without opportunity for the growth of his rude virtues; if their horizon is wider, it is but to reveal blessings that they cannot enjoy…I challenge the production from any authentic accounts of savage life of such descriptions of degradation as are to be found in official documents of highly civilized countries.

The anthropologist James C. Scott offered a similar perspective in Against the Grain, taking the question back to the time of the earliest states that portrayed themselves as progressive and technically advanced by comparison with their “barbarian” contemporaries:

The fragility of the state…would not have allowed us to discern anything like state hegemony until, say, 1600 CE at the earliest. Until then a large share of the world’s population had never seen a (routine) tax collector or, if they had seen one, still had the option of making themselves fiscally invisible…Their subsistence was still spread across several food webs; being dispersed, they would have been less vulnerable to the failure of a single food source. They were more likely to be healthier and live longer—especially if they were female. More advantageous trade made for more leisure, thus further widening the leisure-drudgery ratio between foragers and farmers. Finally, and by no means trivial, barbarians were not subordinated or domesticated to the hierarchical social order of sedentary agriculture and the state. They were in almost every respect freer than the celebrated yeoman farmer.

Trading freedom, efficiency, and health for toys like cellphones was an insanely bad deal. True progress within the Western tradition consists of neither an increase of complexity in the design of objects or an increase of complexity in the design of state hierarchical structures, but in the accumulation of additional information by the species and in the increase, if possible, of individual freedom.

Other councilors were less lofty. “My internet connection is spotty these days,” Comrade Furman complained, reminding us that the personal angle is always central with him.

Eliminating Commercial

Comrade Key made a further spectacle of himself during the council’s unanimous rubber-stamping of staff’s federal funding application for the Brewer-Ranger roundabout fiasco that staff have, in all probability, purposefully and intentionally designed to infringe on one of Sedona’s most historic structures, the Hart House, in order to show their contempt for good building and entrepreneurship alike. “I am not going to stand here and oppose every project that affects a small business,” Key loyally—loyally to city staff, that is—declared loftily. One wonders how many small businesses feel very supported by his attitude and his deference to the people who are driving them out of business. He then explained that residents who object to city infrastructure proposals simply didn’t know enough about the city’s plans—he must have been spending time with Comrade Fultz recently—and stated that he would favor further federal control of Sedona because “infrastructure funding is infrastructure funding.” “Appreciate you all,” the smarmy little bitch finished.

Elsewhere in council’s hostility to the business community and entrepreneurship, they agreed to enter their opposition to HB2118 at the legislature. The bill in question is a strong pro-freedom proposal that would prohibit municipalities from requiring local licensing for mobile food vendors. Comrade Kinsella did her usual local control tarantella in justification; Comrade Senseman explained the bill as “a way to get around a lot of local regulation” and noted the fact that it was being presented by a legislator who is “notorious for only running bills that his constituents bring to him.” All excellent reasons for this anti-democratic council to oppose it. Comrade Browne initially claimed that the city does not currently regulate food trucks before admitting that they do need a city business license—how is requiring any kind of license an absence of regulation? She admitted to serious concern that the bill’s passage and removal of the licensing requirement would impair staff’s ability to track and surveil these businesses.

When they weren’t trying to drive small businesses out of business, the good councilors occupied themselves by unanimously agreeing to beg for a $200,000 grant to fund additional removal of two types of trees that staff had decided to term “invasive” species, overlooking their own status as the planet’s most successful invasive species and the hypocrisy attendant upon the decision. The ecofascist plan is intended to demonstrate the form of purity culture beloved of this particular group of rich white people by purifying the land of dirty foreign invaders while simultaneously employing ignorant environmentalist rhetoric in a bid to advance state power.

Comrade Hosseini had a brief moment of sanity and asked staff how they intended to keep the targeted species from regrowing, since staff would only be able to remove them from municipal property. She was told that the solution would be a combination of removal and replanting native species, which neither answered the question nor addressed the simple fact that native species often fail to out-compete newly-arrived species, which is why biodiversity and ecosystem challenges arise in the first place. Strangely, Keep Sedona Beautiful, Sedona’s leading ecofascist organization, was not present to advocate approval of the grant application.

There is still no budget survey up on the city’s website. The website still states that “As part of each year’s budget process, the city conducts an online survey seeking input from the community on potential future projects,” but there’s no actual survey.

On the Road Again

Everyone seems to have gotten all excited over the revocation of the EPA’s endangerment finding earlier in the month, but from the point of view of those of us who happen to be in the market for a small pickup, the real action happened last July, when the feds quietly abolished the fines for violating CAFE fuel economy standards. That doesn’t guarantee any carmakers will start bringing back real trucks, but at least the door is open now. The CAFE standards are an excellent instance of both creeping bureaucracy—the progressive addition or modification of small regulations over time to expand the scope of the agency’s regulatory authority—and an Anslinger-inspired indirect ban. Federal bureaucrats wrote the standards not to prioritize fuel efficiency but to create an incentive for manufacturers to replace smaller vehicles with larger ones, basing the standards on a vehicle’s wheelbase rather than its mass or engine efficiency and setting the required efficiencies for small vehicles impossibly high. Apart from being more wasteful of fuel by having to move more mass, large trucks with lower-emission engines also incorporate the additional inefficiencies of increased air resistance, far more complex production lines required to manufacture the engines, and diminished reliability and increased maintenance. The CAFE standards were nothing but a corporate welfare program, including their role as a form of hidden tariff, and an incentive to consumerism and wasteful spending. Call it yet another successful government program to increase emissions and waste.

With gas prices soaring at the moment, it’s the perfect time to revisit a classic do-it-yourself sustainability technology: the wood gas generator, a fiendishly simple mechanism that uses the heat generated from partial combustion of wood or biomass to cook the remainder of the fuel stock into a hydrocarbon-rich exhaust gas that can then be used to power a vehicle’s engine in place of a liquid hydrocarbon fuel. These were all the rage during World War II, when the global tyranny was busy rationing gasoline in the name of all sorts of causes. Oddly enough, the 1970s fuel crisis likewise led to a resurgence of interest in wood gas, which ended with FEMA, working at its usual slow pace, eventually publishing a manual on how to build your own generator to run your car off trees in an emergency in 1989, although the FEMA design was in some respects inferior to that of the earlier Imbert gasifier. A more recent design developed at Auburn University and tested in a Dodge Dakota proved to be 37 percent more efficient than burning gasoline. Since it can run on any form of biomass, the generator itself is about as close to being carbon-neutral as anything made out of metal can ever be.

Consideration of the gasifier also leads us to reflect on how internal combustion motors have certain advantages over electric motors with regard to fuel sources, while electric motors have advantages in terms of motor construction and reliability. Internal combustion motors can run on an almost ridiculous variety of organic fuel stocks—did you know it’s possible to run a jet engine on coal dust?—that are easy to obtain from a wide range of sources, but constructing an engine to burn those fuels efficiently is a considerable challenge requiring multiple forms of complexity such as tight tolerances, appropriate materials for seals, and auxiliary systems for cooling, ignition, and so forth. On the other hand, electric motors are extremely simple to construct, with high durability and long lifespans, but cannot be used in mobile applications without being paired with hard-to-construct and inefficient battery technology. It’s actually quite a fascinating conundrum. This is the kind of thing you’d never learn in an SOCSD classroom.

Innocents Abroad

The Maricopa County Superior Court has smacked Adrian Fontes’s knuckles with a ruler after he attempted to change the name of the No Labels Party to the Arizona Independent Party without having statutory authority to do so. Fontes argued that “in the absence of statutory authority, the general rule is to presume that conduct not prohibited is permitted.” Yes, if you’re a private individual; no, if you’re a government employee. This is the sort of thing that Kurt Christianson is also confused about, claiming that things not specifically permitted by the city to individuals are automatically prohibited. Fortunately, the judge in the case had a better understanding of the Western legal tradition.

As the Labour Party pursues its continued demonization of anyone who can use received pronunciation, Baroness Smith of Llanfaes, the House of Lords’ youngest member, has offered a comment on the future of her own institution that ought to be framed above every Sedona city employee’s desk: “I’m working to get rid of my job. I don’t believe my position should exist. So I’m reforming the institution from the inside.”

The most amusing thing anyone has said this week was a remark noting how convenient it is for any number of persons that there is now a war on to distract everyone’s attention from the Epstein files.

More promisingly, in Denmark, voters are increasingly rejecting photovoltaic solar projects that destroy farms to power industry. Mads Fuglede of the Denmark Democrats has expressed the problem perfectly in terms equally applicable to Sedona: “Solar panels have become a symbol of the political elite that wants a green transition and doesn’t care about what happens to the countryside. Because that’s not where they live or where their voters live.” Danes seem to be keen on the idea of clean, cheap energy—who wouldn’t be?—but also seem to be recognizing that photovoltaics don’t fit that description.

The Sedona Symphony played their final regular season concert on Sunday, a concert unified by the idea of what Maestro Will called “the invention of Johann Sebastian Bach” as the great progenitor of the entire field of classical music. The first half of the show was actually the post-Bachs, starting with the “Dance of the Furies” from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, a sample of the Rococo style that historically served as a sort of sandwich filling between the high Baroque and the high classical. It was more silvery and metallic than colorful—slippery, sliding, slithering music. Maestro Will let the strings ride at first and led with his hips as much as his hands, getting an excellent sound balance from the players. They did a highly competent job with the music; it’s just that a piece like this fully demonstrates why Gluck is mostly forgotten, although the end of the dance hinted at an idea that would later resurface in operas by both Mozart and Salieri.

The concerto for the program was Felix Mendelssohn’s for violin, on this occasion performed by guest soloist Jacqueline Rodenbeck of Tucson. Maestro Will explained the choice as being related to the Bach theme in that the Mendelssohns had a long family history of enthusiasm for the works of Johann Sebastian that had culminated in Felix staging revivals of Bach’s compositions and bringing him into the mainstream of European music. There was more to the linkage, though, which hinted at some interesting thinking on the maestro’s part. Rodenbeck has a compact, sweet voice that strikes the listener as being closer to the Baroque than the Romantic, with the lightness of her playing creating a unity between the concerto and the chronologically earlier works on the program. Her refined, gentle approach, almost cautious in the opening bars, involved none of the various forms of emotionality that many soloists bring to the work. Instead, she was cool and precise throughout, never overexerting, her cadences dancing rather than striking or singing. She has much deeper to dive into the potential passion of the concerto in the decades to come if she chooses. The delicacy of her rendition also created a notable contrast between the soloist’s and ensemble’s respective roles, as Maestro Will was evoking the same rich, smooth, gorgeous sound from the orchestra that they had achieved in last month’s Mendelssohn symphony. He had devised a classic Romantic feminine-masculine dichotomy in which the softness of the former, in the person of the soloist, was set in relief against the boldness and vigor of the latter, in the persona of the orchestra.

In the second movement, Rodenbeck opened with greater conviction, with the orchestra retreating into a more subdued role to support her heartfelt, compelling sound. Her assertiveness continued through the mood changes in the central portion of the andante, and into its resolution, exactly in balance with the orchestral forces. She again took a position on more equal terms with the ensemble in the third movement after abandoning the initial minor-key lament for fast and merry fingering. Her style was very summery in the passages where she was paired with the horns, appropriate to the March weather Sedona has been having, and the clear power coming from the Symphony was truly beautiful to feel as Rodenbeck delivered a little extra force for a strong finish.

The second half of the afternoon was devoted to the prolific and fecund—in every sense of the word—Bachs. Maestro Will pointed out, very appropriately, that there is no point in lamenting the loss of a hundred Bach church cantatas if one doesn’t have a nodding acquaintance with at least a fair number of the remaining two hundred. He also got to go batonless for the occasion. The proceedings began with Carl Philip Emannuel’s Symphony in D Major, with its layered first movement in which much of the melody seemed to lurk in the background, implied rather than fully stated. There was a great deal going on in the best sense of the phrase; the strings played with great smoothness, accented by the use of the flute often favored by the younger Bach and an occasional emphasis on the bassoon. It was good-natured, sparkling music. The flute also featured prominently in the opening bars of the second movement, which came off somewhat like a flute concerto at first, expressing refinement in the cool of a neoclassical portico. For the third movement, CPE did a complete flip into runaway, playful giddiness that nevertheless saw excellent unity in the strings and especially the first violins.

Johann Sebastian’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 sounded only sporadically like Johann Sebastian—because, as Maestro Will explained, he had originally written only the string parts and CPE had added oboes, trumpets, and timpani. The younger generation clearly knew what it was doing. The trumpet flourishes on entry put a totally different complexion on the expected phrasing, with JSB’s typical style still showing through in the strings. Wherever the additional instruments prevailed, though, the music got so much better. The first and fifth movements also managed to suggest a Handelian flavor, perhaps a result of CPE’s studies of Handel, although the way in which the younger Bach used the trumpets also suggested a comparison to Lully. The rousing, jump-out-of-your-seat spirit of the first movement became majestic and glorious by the finish, while the lamenting character of the second movement was relieved somewhat by the number of string players and abolished by three additional gleaming, dashing sections, short but upstanding. Concertmaster Sara Schreffler and guest harpsichordist Ruta Bloomfield put in some very nice work, with Schreffler digging into the spirit of the piece as if it had been chamber music. Outstanding choices both in reviving a minor and underrated Bach and picking an unaccustomed major Bach.

The Symphony will round out its season with this year’s pops concert on April 15, and next year’s lineup is expected to be announced in May. Join Chamber Music Sedona and the Brentano Quartet in the Village of Oak Creek next Sunday after the Pecan and Wine Festival in Camp Verde, and the JCSVV for klezmer music on March 28. Paint Arizona Day will be taking place across the state on Saturday, April 4, hosted in northern Arizona by the Sedona Artist Market beginning at 8 AM.

Out on the least coast, the musical establishment is having a meltdown over the Boston Symphony Orchestra board’s unceremonious termination of music director Andris Nelsons, who apparently was insufficiently progressive for the board. Over at the Guardian, Tom Service has suggested Karina Cannelakis, sister of Chamber Music Sedona’s Nick Cannelakis, as a potential contender for the post. Personalities aside, the idea that a musical establishment can revive declining attendance by programming more unpopular modern works has already been disproven and is ludicrous on the face of it. These people have apparently learned nothing from the Met’s crisis—or is it more that Bostonians refuse to learn from New Yorkers in general?

“When I started at the BSO in 2013, I joined a workplace where stewardship of the organization, both on and off stage, was a shared value so essential I took it to be part of the DNA of the BSO,” bassist Tom Van Dyck wrote in a pointed letter to the orchestra’s board of trustees. “In the past five years, this tradition has been replaced with what appears to be both personal and professional ambition.” I don’t know if he’s ever been to Sedona, but he’s put his finger on what has been slowly happening not only in this community but also throughout the Verde Valley. Locals with decades-long connections to organizations are being replaced on the boards and in the management structures with newcomers whose concerns are the implementation of their own programs, not the continuance of what the community has been doing in the way the community likes it. The brochures get glossier, the words in the press releases get bigger, and the level of community service declines.

Service’s piece also devoted a few lines to the idiotic but entirely predictable remarks of that talentless twig Timothee Chalamet, whose by-now well-publicized disdain for the performing arts has still not earned him a fraction of the beatings he richly deserves:

There’s no point excoriating him over his perceived slights of live art-forms, as others have done so energetically and defensively. What is worth saying is that AI is coming for you, Timothee, as it is for every digitally manipulable movie star. It’s the live arts and live experiences—yes, human-made and human-performed opera, ballet, theatre and classical concert-hall culture—that will last. Just you watch.

The resurgence of live performance as the digital garbage that passes for entertainment in American culture, one of the new opiates of the masses, becomes ever blander and ever more mechanical is going to be beautiful to watch, and it’s going to happen first here, in the rural communities, where people are the least deluded about reality and most alienated from the Establishment values of Hollywood. Besides, when the computers all fall silent at last, from resource exhaustion or disaster or rejection as the case may be, humanity will have nothing left to fall back upon for entertainment but its own performance abilities. Use them now or lose them later and lose the species in the process. So we can afford to laugh at the pretentiousness and superficiality of those who think that electrons are immortality, as at those who once thought that celluloid is immortality. How many of them have already gone up in smoke forever?

Cultural Park Initiative Submitted

The week in Sedona has been a quiet one for once, in part because KAZM’s 780 AM and 106.5 FM stations have indeed gone off the air. The online feed also went offline on March 14. No word has been received from station owner Charles Helstein as to what exactly is up—or down—with his operation. Helstein purchased the station in December 2023 for $390,000 and has periodically been engaged in disputes with city staff over the uses allowed on the station’s property. Word on the street is that KAZM’s lease on the parcel of state trust land it has been occupying has expired, although clarification has not yet arrived from the state.

More importantly, on Thursday, the Save Sedona political action committee submitted its signatures to get the Cultural Park Preservation Act on the ballot this November. The final number of submitted signatures is in excess of 1,400, more than the 475 signatures the committee was initially informed that they needed by city staff, and more than the 1,089 signatures actually required by state law.

Volunteers who have been out collecting signatures have reported that approximately 90 percent of those with whom they have spoken have expressed opposition to housing at the Cultural Park. Now, not all of those individuals were in favor of reopening the amphitheater, and collecting signatures out in public doesn’t take into account the views of the large number of middle managers who have retired to Sedona, never leave their air-conditioned homes, and are not in any way involved with the community but who will vote for anything that makes the government bigger and their compadres’ salaries higher. Still, it seems fairly certain that the numbers are not in the city’s favor.

City clerk JoAnne Cook will now have the task of verifying the signatures to ensure all signatories reside within city limits within the next twenty days before sending the petitions on to the county for random signature verification. In Sedona’s case, the process is complicated by the town’s straddling two counties, meaning that the organizers of any referendum or initiative effort must take care to record the signatures of eligible voters on the correct petition for their county of residence. About 20 percent of signatures are generally disqualified during the verification process, although due to the care taken by organizers, 2024’s Proposition 483, which blocked staff’s proposed concentration camp at the Cultural Park, saw fewer than 15 percent of signatures disqualified. At least one observer from the Save Sedona committee will observe the signature verification process.

The city of Sedona is soliciting ballot pamphlet arguments on the home rule election scheduled for the July 21 ballot. Arguments must be less than 200 words and submitted to the city clerk’s office by close of business on April 15.

In a surprise to absolutely no one in Sedona, and as a reminder—again—of the degree to which staff and council are completely disinterested in our opinions, there is still no budget survey up on the city website.

With the return of Sedona’s glorious weather this week has come also the reemergence of the masochists who engage in the use of air conditioning. The facts are simple: Humans evolved in and were optimized for operation in a hot savannah climate. Human cognition—the defining factor of the species, which distinguishes it from the machines called animals—begins to decline at ambient temperatures below 77 degrees, while in the opposite direction, cognitive impairment does not begin to occur until the air temperature surpasses 102 degrees. The resulting conclusion is quite straightforward: any person who attempts to maintain an air temperature below 77 degrees is not only impairing their own cognitive processes but committing a physical assault on every other person affected by their actions.

Air conditioning is one of the most dangerous and worthless inventions this species has ever stumbled across, up there with nitrate fertilizers, polychlorinated biphenyls, and microplastics. Anyone who claims that they eat organic and source their products locally and avoid doctors and support sustainability and care for the environment—but uses air conditioning—is an inconsistent hypocrite. Besides, running an air conditioning system basically feeding money into a campfire, so anyone who turns on the air conditioning and then complains about their electric bill—which may go up 40 percent as a consequence—needs to be taken out back for a talk and perhaps something more. And all because Americans have been inculturated to think that dangerously low temperatures are somehow desirable—but then of course, that acculturation is also tied in with Americans’ gross obesity and their superstitions around clothing, which is itself another wasteful and typically unnecessary scam.

The Bogs Down in the Valley-O

Elsewhere in the Verde Valley, that gang calling themselves the Cottonwood city council again held off from attempting to sabotage the airport on March 3, when they voted unanimously to appoint Bill Wade, a 37-year area resident and former NACOG executive director—and private pilot and Cottonwood Airport hangar lessee—to the non-resident tenant seat on the city’s airport commission. Staff informed council that Wade was the highest-scoring applicant for the post but declined to name runners-up; Wade was appointed in preference to Mike Looney (private pilot and EAA member), Connor McTurk (commercial pilot and Sedona Airport employee), and Jeff Rose (private pilot). The only applicant for the open resident non-tenant seat was Bill Wagnon, who was also the only applicant with zero aviation experience. Wagnon is a longtime opponent of the airport and has made a habit of demanding the coercive curtailment of the freedom of others for his emotional convenience. It would appear the councilors thought better of permitting someone with the deadly combination of an agenda and no background to serve on a public body. The resident non-tenant and resident tenant seats on the commission remain open.

Following his non-selection, Wagnon complained that the council “did not want me to represent the resident’s [sic] concerns” on the commission. How very Sedona of him. He appears to be laboring under the misapprehension that the concerns of a small group of irrational freedom-haters somehow represent “residents,” just as how, in Sedona, Comrade Furman et al seem to believe that talking to their fellow millionaire retirees on their street gives them an accurate sense of public opinion in the town.

A February 10 presentation to the Cottonwood council by their staff turned up the details that revenue from Thunder Valley Rally over the last five years was $118,657 for 2021-22, $168,992 for 2022-23, $142,473 for 2023-24, $112,507 for 2024-25, and $114,944 for 2025-26. However, net income dropped from $15,582 in FY22 and $12,504 in FY23 to losses of $15,596, $52,782, and $44,302. The expense breakdown for last year’s event, which cost $159,246, suggests part of the reason for the constant increase. $18,254.92 for generators? The parks department doesn’t have generators it can loan for the event, or very long extension cords? $8,279 for security? They can’t have the cops they’re already paying drive by more often than usual—and who’s going to try anything around a bunch of bikers, anyway? $6,686.53 for fencing and restrooms? It can’t possibly cost that much to rent a few portables for a few days, and again, public works already has the fencing. And $57,500 for production equipment? I thought this was supposed to be a rough and rugged event. People in the rural West really need to start thinking lean again.

In shit that goes on in Camp Verde, that gang calling themselves the town council down there approved a $63,100 contract with Mulcaire and Son on February 4 to clean up contaminated soil in former sewage lagoons that the town is in the process of abandoning. ADEQ handed the town a notice of violation last year and town staff have until July to get the problem fixed, which will require removing ten thousand tons of clean soil and three thousand tons of nitrate-contaminated soil. On March 11, town staff acknowledged they had under-budgeted and council obligingly gave them another $175,000 for the asking. On February 18, the council also supinely approved the new I-codes, further destroying the town’s rural, ad-hoc, do-it-yourself heritage.

More positively, council voted down a staff proposal at the February 18 meeting to amend town policy to allow paramilitary troopers to take their armored cars home, which staff justified as “an incentive for retention and recruitment.” For incentive, read transference of public tax dollars to already overpaid parasites, not to mention the added intimidation effect. Vice mayor Wendy Escoffier asked what the benefit to the public would be by having Camp Verde’s equipment in Payson or Heber-Overgard, where some of the town’s employees live. Paramilitary staff replied that it would help them get to their jobs faster—and then added that it would put more heavily armed troops “constantly on the roads.” Escoffier then pointed out that city officials were “speaking out of both sides of our mouths” by proposing to build affordable housing and then proposing an incentive program to pay cops even more to choose to live in the area.

Public comment on the proposal was entirely negative.

“Issues include the community and understanding of community challenges by those who live outside our community, the perception that the town is actually unfairly rewarding officers who choose not to live in our town,” Cherie Wischmeyer told the council. “The citizens don’t want this and it should not be allowed…Has anybody looked at exactly how many miles the officers are driving outside of the town when in fact, they probably don’t even drive a hundred miles a day per officer, and I would say it’s probably half that.”

“In the old days, people were glad and happy that we had the town of Camp Verde and a place to go to work and a job here so they didn’t have to drive down,” Jackie Baker pointed out. “Perhaps it never was discussed with council before, any difficulty hiring officers for the marshal’s office, that they didn’t want to come here. As far as I know, people have been happy to come to Camp Verde and go to work.”

“I remember, and probably many people sitting here are old enough to remember, when Evan Meacham was elected governor of the state of Arizona,” Baker continued. “He was in charge of the prison system, and one of the first things that he did was look at the expense of providing vehicles for the staff at the prisons, and he immediately stopped that.”

“If you do allow them to live outside of the camp, let them drive their own vehicles to and from the office and they pick up their car at the marshal’s office,” Charolotte Salsman agreed. “But I do also believe that any department heads, whether it’s the town manager, marshal, they should live in the town of Camp Verde. If they don’t want to live in the town of Camp Verde, then don’t apply for a job here. I’m sorry to be so harsh that way, but somebody has to say it the way it should be.”

After throwing the Camp Verde Arena Association out of the Camp Verde Equestrian Center by choosing to void a valid lease, the anti-freedom, anti-community, anti-Western bureaucrats of the former small town of Camp Verde elected on February 20 to reject all three bids for future use of the arena. Arizona Rally LLC, Bryson Ranch LLC—a local contender—and The Sports Facilities Companies all presented proposals to council for future use of the facility. After an hour-long, closed-door executive session, council instructed town staff to discard all three proposals, thereby killing the arena and local roda. The CVAA began moving off the property on Wednesday. Camp Verde has now followed Sedona’s lead in throwing away its rodeo tradition and preparing to transition to a bedroom community for parasitic middlemen. Why is no one picketing outside Comrade Fisher’s house?

Meanwhile, Sedona is handing out so many free cars to its spoiled cops that it just had to order nine new ones, and many of its department heads make a point of living far away from Sedona: Comrade Whitehorn in Clarkdale, Comrade Harris in Flagstaff, and Comrade Dickey in Camp Verde itself.

However, after voting down the free cars for cops, council then approved a staff proposal to remove the requirement for the town marshal to reside within town limits, instead allowing him to reside anywhere within thirty minutes’ drive of his office and further weakening imported bureaucrats’ connection to the community they supposedly “serve.” Two weeks earlier, town manager Comrade Fisher had attempted to secure passage of an alternate amendment to town code that would have permitted her as well as the town marshal to take a hike outside the city limits; council shot that part of the plan down. Public feedback was again negative.

February 25 saw the council vote to censure Planning and Zoning Commission vice chairman Renee Hall and remove her from the vice chairmanship following complaints regarding “her public communications outside of official meetings…after review, the council has determined that certain statements directed to our members of the public were inconsistent with the standards of professionalism, integrity, fairness, and respect expected of appointed officials serving this community.” Although no longer vice chairman, Hall may continue to serve as a member of the commission. In an amusing note on the calibre of talent government employment is capable of attracting, the official record of the vote of censure used the incorrect homonym “censor” in place of “censure” in every applicable instance.

Hall’s offense, it appears, was using strong language on social media. After the town received two anonymous complaints that called her wording “concerning” in one instance and said that it “reflects poorly” on the town in another, council unanimously approved the censure. Hall pointed out that her choice of language stemmed from irritation over receiving death threats related to her anti-ICE activism. The council’s action could potentially be pointless, as the commission would technically have the power to reappoint Hall as vice chairman, but such an outcome appears highly unlikely given community sentiment.

“This action is not based on disagreement with any viewpoint,” mayor Marie Moore claimed, somehow overlooking that the action itself was a disagreement with the viewpoint that the free exchange of ideas is beyond censure and that any censure of such exchange is itself a morally deplorable activity.

Small Dustup

Arizona Department of Environment Quality staff admitted during Thursday’s public meeting in Cottonwood on the purported health risks associated with the Cottonwood slag pile that their initial studies had overstated the actual levels of residual metals present in the area and attempted to exaggerate the significance of existing levels of residual metals. Daniel Czecholinski confessed that the lab they had hired had calculated the first analysis for airborne lead incorrectly and had massively overstated the figure, which should have eliminated any grounds for the study. ADEQ continued it anyway. The three-month average concentration for airborne lead in the followup study was found to be 0.018 micrograms per cubic meter, well below the national air quality standard of 0.15 µg/m³. Only two of the samples taken at the site of the Cottonwood VFW post exceeded 0.05 µg/m³ at all during the study period from December to June.

Both scheduled and surprise inspections of the Minerals Research facility located at the slag pile found the company was operating well below its permit limits of 1.741 tons of ANFO for blasting per day, with amounts from 0.92 to 0.95 tons being more commonly used, and of 6,412 square feet of surface area to be blasted on any given day, with areas from 2,400 square feet to 3,840 square feet being cited as routine by ADEQ. As for visual emissions, “the inspectors when they were on site observed that the plume did not leave the property as a result of that blasting activity,” Czecholinski said.

“This is a mining town. This town was built for the copper mines” Dan Sola said, stating the obvious and adding that background arsenic concentrations at or above 200 parts per million were to be expected in the region based on geology. “If there was an arsenic business, we could have some great mines.” He noted that their followup study including a greater number of reference areas had found the average arsenic background level around Cottonwood to be 29.5 ppm, lower than the 35 ppm reference established during the first phase.

His counterpart Hazel Cox likewise admitted to two “holes” in the data in the original study that had required additional research. The first phase of soil sampling had involved 704 samples using x-ray fluorescence spectrometry and and seventy-four soil samples; the second phase included 883 and 267 of each type, respectively. Cadmium, manganese, and lead exceeded background reference levels in only one location, near the former smelter stack, which was also where the highest levels of residual copper were found. The stack site was similarly the location for the highest reported level of arsenic, at 1,680 ppm, while peak arsenic levels decreased to 835 ppm in the adjoining downwind sample area and 345 ppm in the adjoining upwind sample area. Soil samples upwind of the slag pile returned maxima of 108 ppm and 169 ppm. South and east of the pile, levels of 44.9 ppm and 83.2 ppm were reported. No samples at the Cottonwood Kids’ Park returned arsenic levels at or above background and only one sample taken in 2024 had even reached the background level.

To put these levels in perspective, assuming a lethal dose of one milligram per kilogram and no dilution effects, the average person would have to consume about seventy-eight and a half pounds of dirt from the Cottonwood smelter site to die from arsenic poisoning, or close to a thousand pounds of dirt from the area of the slag pile. It would be easier to drink yourself to death on water. Long-term effects are a separate story—but then so are the long-term effects of all residual wastes from an industrial society.

Nevertheless, in spite of finding nothing of any substantial degree of concern, the bureaucrats somehow managed to come up with a whole boatload of recommendations to fix what they described as nonexistent problems, including such totalitarian schemes as wholesale soil removal, more municipal spending on fake “stormwater” projects, fencing off public rights of way “just to prevent people being exposed to something they don’t know is there,” residential “hot spot removal,” and, in an instance of the freakish paranoia of the bureaucrats who want to trap us all indoors to impair our cognition, “limiting your outdoor activity when it’s windy.” As for the Cottonwood Kids’ Park, where there was no exposure risk and thus no need for remediation, which the bureaucrats admitted, they suggested “turf remediation” anyway, just like a doctor recommending a Z-pack for a viral infection: useless and performative.

Some area residents have stated that they have conducted their own laboratory tests and obtained results disproving ADEQ’s assertions and showing different concentrations. I look forward to seeing those results. The very nice thing about claims of this nature, whether they emanate from a state agency or a member of the public, is that they are easily falsifiable. Anyone with a few thousand dollars to spend on an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer and a few lab tests—and a knowledge of lab procedures—can easily confirm or falsify ADEQ’s or anyone else’s results. What that says about ADEQ’s potential readiness to lie is a separate story. Many things Sedona officials say are easily falsifiable—and yet they say them anyway. It was amusing that one could hear the increased tension in Cox’s voice when she had to announce elevated numbers that could be misinterpreted by the paranoid or low numbers that contradicted the popular assumption. Nor did it help their public image that ADEQ staff took up more than 90 percent of the time with their presentations and recitation of credentials rather than talking to the public, leaving just seven minutes out of two hours for questions.

ADEQ is clueless in thinking that sending a number of bureaucrats no one could even keep track of to a rural town to attempt to convince them by the mass of their authority will have any effect that could be deemed positive. Rural Americans look at a setup like that and immediately know they’re being scammed, regardless of the quality of the data. It was particularly annoying when the bureaucrats patronizingly wasted time to explain, in nauseating detail, what an XRF was and how it worked, how soil sampling worked, and what isotope analysis was. Do they really think none of us ever had high school chemistry? Then they started explaining smelting to the residents of a historical mining town, which was absolutely precious. Somehow the clown Sola managed to avoid the word “oxidize” entirely. Mya Davis’s presentation on other points that any sane and logical person already knows was unspeakably paternalistic, condescending, and insulting. “Too much of anything can harm us.” Did she think she was teaching flipping kindergarten? Everything after 6:30 PM was pure manure. And “surveillance program manager” and presumed affirmative action hire Hsini Lin was beyond belief, spouting useless generalization after useless generalization in an indistinguishable accent. Davis and Lin were nothing but a distraction routine to take up time and prevent the public from assailing the sacred bureaucrats with their questions. It was a spin job with no apparent reason for a spin job. The very fact that ADEQ rigged the meeting now calls its staff’s veracity into question. Personally, I don’t think there’s a problem with the slag pile—but now that ADEQ has insulted the people of the Verde Valley to this extent, it may be time to take a hand in the game.

“That was wonderful,” host bureaucrat Daren Sweet enthused afterward, indicating how these emotional parasites feast on public frustration.

Meet the Meat

Arizona Game & Fish has released the state’s 2025 hunt results, and the totals shed a highly disturbing light on the state of both education and primary production in Arizona. Note that AZGF maintains its statistics on a calendar year basis, including results from both the January period of one season and the autumn period of the subsequent season, rather than calculating numbers on a seasonal basis.

For 2025, the Arizona deer harvest was a mere 10,623 animals, 5,407 of which were mule deer and 5,087 of which were white-tailed deer (yes, the state’s numbers don’t quite add up, they never do), taken by 30,134 hunters. All but sixty-six animals were reportedly bucks. Units 7 and 9, between Flagstaff and Tusayan, 33, northeast of Tucson, and 34A, south of Tucson were the most productive, accounting for 13 percent of total take. Only 368 pronghorn were taken by 487 hunters, with the highest numbers reported in Units 10, northwest of Williams, and 1, on the New Mexico border. A total of 8,233 elk were taken by 19,798 hunters, 3,053 of which were bulls. Units 1, 2B, and 2C, near the New Mexico border, and 6A and 6B, between Camp Verde and Flagstaff, accounted for 10 percent of the total take.

Spring turkey harvest was a mere 1,285 birds taken by 3,976 hunters. Units 1 and 27, along the New Mexico border, were the most productive areas, accounting for more than 40 percent of total take. Only 7,350 Sedona pancakes—javelina—got slapped on somebody’s griddle, and it took 17,049 hunters to get them. Fully a third were harvested using archery tags, while Units 37A and 37B, between Tucson and Superior, were the best place to nail a javelina. Hunters also harvested 143 bighorn sheep, 330 mountain lions, 431 black bears, and 48 bison.

For purposes of comparison, maintaining Arizona’s current population of 7.5 million on a diet composed of two-thirds deer protein, consistent with dietary standards for the average hunter-gatherer, would require the harvest of about one deer per person per month, or 90 million deer per year—about nine thousand times the actual harvest rate. The number of deer and elk actually harvested would be enough to feed about 3,600 people per year on the same basis. Assuming no duplication, less than one percent of Arizona’s population even attempted to participate in harvesting their own protein last year, whether or not they were successful.

If we needed a reminder, the economic existence of the polity of Arizona is not sustainable in its current configuration—and forget about Phoenix altogether.

The Flock-to-School Pipeline?

Remember when city staff and Flock (un)Safety officials lied to us about how our license plate data would be strictly controlled, not shared, and only used in the investigation of crimes? In another illustration of how specious that lie was, officials of a suburban school district outside Chicago are refusing to allow a mother resident in the district to enroll her daughter on the grounds that she does not in fact live in the district. Their evidence? License plate tracking data on the mother’s car—which had been lent to a relative in Chicago at the time. The school officials, it turns out, are now spending public money on student surveillance. What’s more, officials explicitly rejected the mother’s appeal to her status as the legal owner of a property in the district by claiming that their tracking data, which was quite possibly obtained illegally, outweighs property records.

This whole surveillance scheme isn’t about data verification, or crime, or privacy, and it never was. It’s about making sure you stay exactly in the lane where your superiors want you to be and do exactly what they expect you to do as a good little pleb, and about ways they can find to coerce and harass you into obedience.

The Sedona Arts Center’s annual Juried Friends show is in full bloom this week, featuring work by SAC staff and volunteers. Highlights include Linda Sherman’s amusing “Only in Alaska,” colorful abstracts by Julie Bernstein Engelmann, and an impressive ceramic triptych in a Maya-inspired style, “Beso,” by Valentina Castilla.

The Fine Art Museum of Sedona has also unveiled its new exhibit, “Resonance: Frequency and Legacy,” which pairs the work of well-known Sedona painter Jan Sitts with retro-feeling drawings by contemporary Sedona artist Lynnda Pollio. Pollio’s approach is particularly successful in her smaller compositions, in which she is able to achieve greater compression of detail and intensity, with “Edge of Understanding” and “Electric Martini” coming off strongest. Sitts’s share of the show primarily showcases her well-known acrylics, but there are new discoveries to explore among those, such as the “Winds Adrift” set that evokes a remarkably vivid image of a Hawaiian coastline from great paucity of detail. Most striking is Sitts’s “Art Deco Lady,” which greets visitors as they enter the museum with an elegant, stylized realism that is both a complete departure from the artist’s signature technique and a simultaneous nod to both Gustav Klimt and traditional Japanese portraiture.

The Notre Dame Glee Club filled St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church with selections ranging from Thomas Tallis to Harry Belafonte on Sunday. “Here Come the Irish” turned out to be surprisingly modest for a bunch of nominal Irishmen, subdued but assured, paced like the earth breathing, capturing the evocation of spirits of which they sang. “Tonight” had a classic barbershop sound with strong harmonization and “Give Us Music” showed off the group’s strong lower register, as did “Thou Didst Delight My Eyes” and “The Long Day Closes,” which were presented as a pair and ran too long for their musical interest. The opposite was true of Sydney Guillame’s contemporary “Gagot,” which recalled old-style sonata form with its clear structural divisions: an urgent, thrumming first section of rhythms becoming broken as the music intensified, a subdued middle section with little in the way of memorable thematic material, and a resolving final section that was first uplifting and then quietly determined.

The Sedona Symphony will play Mendelssohn and two Bachs on Sunday, followed by Chamber Music Sedona presenting Schubert and Beethoven by the Brentano Quartet on March 22, with the week rounded out by klezmer music at the JCSVV on March 28.

Financial Fiascos

That gang calling themselves the Sedona city council unanimously approved putting home rule on the July 21 ballot this year on Tuesday, with Comrade Dunn absent—again, presumably in India cultivating her lack of inner self—and Comrade Kinsella phoning it in. Comrade Whitehorn repeated her inaccurate presentation on the supposed minimum financial expenditure to keep the city meeting its statutory requirements, and, in a remarkable moment of candor, she admitted that Yuma, with a population of 95,000, is the largest city in Arizona to set its budget at the state expenditure limit—meaning they’ve figured out how to run their city on a fraction of the amount per person that Sedona’s staff require. She also bragged about all the awards the city has received for its budget documents while remaining oblivious to the harm staff’s greed causes to real people. When Comrade Fultz asked about their options in the event of home rule being defeated at the ballot, Whitehorn immediately shifted to discussing the possibility of a one-time override or a subsequent PBA—without a word about simply obeying the public will and accepting the reduced budget limit should it be approved.

Comrade Key of the Chamber rallied round—after the vote on the measure had already been taken—to announce that the Chamber will officially be supporting home rule. The question is how exactly he manipulated Chamber members into agreeing to such a position. Key’s motivation, of course, is obvious enough to deduce; he was a failed musician and a nobody before he somehow lucked into the Chamber job, which will be his springboard to moving on to another similar executive position elsewhere where his salary and his power will continue to go up as he mouths platitudes, so he can’t buck his fellow elitists now that he’s part of the club. The Chamber members’ motivation is less clear, as a yes on home rule means higher taxes in due course instead of a potential tax break; continued action by the city council and staff to reduce tourism and suppress the construction of housing; continued city attempts by city staff to control the movements of individuals without regard to the interests of businesses; and continued persecution over signage. Are they simply terrified of their overlords’ displeasure? Perhaps we’ll see how many businesses quit the Chamber over this decision. Early indications are that member businesses were not even consulted before Key made his bootlicking declaration.

“Disenfranchised people look to create opposition to the status quo,” Key opined in a remarkable display of arrogance and condescension, thereby attributing opposition to big government and authoritarianism solely to those who have no stake in the community. As a resident of just over one year, his own stake in the community that he will shortly be leaving is doubtless considerable.

Subsequent discussion of the city’s annual financial audit was farcical, with Comrade Fultz wanting to know if staff could use “AI” as a tool to handle grant reporting management in the future.

“We always have to read what AI reads. Trust but verify,” auditor Jean Marie Dietrich said, thereby acknowledging, in one nugget buried in a mass of fluff, the reality that this AI thing isn’t a tool at all.

“I think we’ve done a good job at increasing our grants,” Comrade Ploog commented, thereby applauding successful begging on the city’s part even though she formerly supported efforts to suppress begging on the part of private individuals.

Incidentally, Mark TenBroek noted during public comment that by his estimates, short-term rentals produce 45 percent of Sedona’s lodging revenue, above both city staff’s and the Sedona-Verde Valley Association of Realtors’ calculations, and further that residents pay 34 percent, not 20 percent or 23 percent, of Sedona’s taxes. He also pointed out that the city’s spending on consultants worked out to be the equivalent of approximately thirty additional full-time staff positions.

The New Urbanism

Council and staff are looking to launch yet another urbanization program in Sedona at an estimated cost of $3.37 million for the option currently under consideration, and a potential total cost of $10 million, in current numbers, by rebuilding and expanding old roads taken over from Yavapai County when Sedona was incorporated. The legal terms under which most of the roads were acquired barred first the county and then the city from maintaining those roads unless they were upgraded to modern design standards at the expense of the residents living along those streets.

“Well of course they’re going to say no,” Comrade Ploog commented on city staff’s one hundred percent failure rate on trying to encourage residents to pony up millions to rebuild perfectly functional roads. Comrade Ebers of public works stated that the city universally received the same response from the owners of private roads interested in potentially deeding them to the public.

The roads under discussion are:

• Goodrow Lane, Finke Drive, and Schimberg Drive, taken over by the county in 1971. Right-of-way 12 to 50 feet wide; road 12 to 20 feet wide.

• Cline Road, taken over by the county in 1972. About 14 feet wide.

• Grasshopper Lane, a public roadway easement established in 1958. Easement 20 feet wide; road 20 feet wide with shoulders. The city is permitted to maintain this road.

• Little Elf Way, taken over by the county in 1956. Easement 20 to 50 feet wide; road 15 feet wide with shoulders.

• Aspen Road. Right-of-way 20 feet wide; the city does not currently know to whom this right-of-way belongs, as the plat documents and other materials are missing.

• Serenade Drive, taken over by the county in 1969. Right-of-way 50 feet wide; road 12 feet wide.

• An unnamed road off Solider Pass road with an unclear right-of-way status that appears to be two adjacent driveways.

These roads account for slightly over a mile of Sedona’s streets. Ebers proposed that the city either extend all the roads to a full 50-foot-wide right-of-way with 12-foot-wide lanes in each direction at a cost of up to $3.5 million for Cline, $4 million for Goodrow, Finke, and Schimberg, and $2.5 million for Grasshopper and Little Elf; or that the city partially rebuild the roads to the maximum extent possible within the existing right-of-way, at estimated costs of up to $120,000 for Aspen, $1.5 million for Cline, $1.5 million for Goodrow et al, and $250,000 for Grasshopper. Council achieved consensus on pursuing planning for the latter urbanization scheme.

Comrade Harris announced that staff would be chopping back vegetation for two feet on each side of the “improved” roads to a height of fourteen feet as part of the process. “A lot of people are gonna lose trees and vegetation…it’s gonna be controversial,” Harris said. “Once I start talking vegetation, they never call back.”

“I think the time has come in my opinion to own them, at some level,” Comrade Hosseini, who initiated the whole discussion, said of roads that the city already owns. “I really would like to see us have a plan for them.”

“We bought it when we incorporated and I think we should take some ownership of those streets,” Comrade Furman agreed trippingly.

“What we own we need to maintain,” Comrade Kinsella asserted. Comrade Fultz wanted to know if the city would be increasing residents’ property values by increasing the degree of urbanization and if that could be used as a justification to make them bear part of the costs. Harris proposed a “quid pro quo” in which the city would offer to do “improvements” in return for the private property owners’ giving away part of their land to the city.

“We can find the money if we have the will,” Hosseini declared, and Comrade Spickard readily agreed that they could begin fitting funding for the projects into next year’s budget before staff would even bother to develop a plan to carry out the work.

And this, children, is how a request for information by a nosy councilor gets turned into a multimillion-dollar make-work project for civil servants overnight. Any excuse will serve a bureaucrat.

Red Light Cameras

In legislative updates, Comrade Browne tried to get council to consider taking a position on HCR2004, which would send a question to the ballot this fall to then give voters in individual cities a subsequent one-time chance to permit photo and radar enforcement for red light and speeding violations.

“Do we even think our residents would pass this vote?” Browne reluctantly acknowledged, but then added, “If we forego the opportunity now, we won’t get the opportunity in the future.” Let us not forget she is likely always looking ahead to the day when she hopes to become city manager.

Council, for once, shot her down in flames, with the exception of Furman, who suggested, “This could be different than what we’ve talked about before.”

“I see no reason to go down this path,” Comrade Pfaff countered. “It’s not that different. I for one am not a masochist. I see no reason to go through that again…It’s giving up control to do something that we don’t want to do, that our residents don’t want us to do.” Now why doesn’t he apply that same logic to so many other issues?

“The community and council spoke very loudly on this topic. I don’t see where this is a good use of your time to spend another nanosecond on this,” Fultz agreed. Kinsella wanted nothing to do with it.

In their perverse capriciousness, council then twisted around and agreed to express support for HB4064, a pro-taxation bill that makes it easier for municipalities to skirt noticing and procedural requirements in creating new special taxing districts.

The Unluck of the Irish

The March 7 “know your rights” event at St. Andrew’s produced additional accounts of instances of opportunistic Leninism by Sedona’s disgraced police department, including this story from a local worker:

I was pulled over for my third brake light not working and my license plate light not working but they were both working. First he was like, “Oh, yeah, I’m just gonna write you a fix-it ticket,” so I’m like okay, and I give him my license, and he goes back to his vehicle, and then he comes back saying, “I’m looking for drugs.” I’m like, “What? I’m sorry, I can’t help you with that. You’re looking in the wrong place.” I told him I don’t have any drugs, and then he’s like, “So you’ll consent to me searching your vehicle.” I was like, “Whatever, do what you gotta do, I got somewhere I gotta be.” I don’t have any kind of criminal history. No drug charges, no nothing. I am not a felon; there is absolutely no reason for that at all. So I let him search my car, and then he tells me, “I’m still gonna run my dog around your car real quick and if everything’s cool I’ll write you a ticket and you’re free to continue, you can leave.” Fine, whatever, just hurry up. He runs his dog around my car three times, and finally, by the driver’s side, the dog sat down, and he put me in handcuffs, and he put me in the back of his vehicle, and he said he was going to search my vehicle…For a whole hour him and his buddy tore my car apart. They destroyed it. They broke every clip in my door panels. They tore every little plastic thing that could be taken off, and didn’t find anything because I didn’t have any drugs. There was no reason for that whatsoever. And then he finally gets me out of the back of the car, and he’s like—oh, he ran his dog through and around my car again. They popped my hood, they were messing around down by my license plate light. They were doing all kinds of things. I was like, this is so wrong. Then he gets me out, he’s like, “I don’t know why my dog hit on your car.” Two days later, I’m driving my friend to work, and I get pulled over again for the same thing. Different cop, though, but the first cop ended up showing up there. And they searched my car again. I feel like I’m being targeted for something here…he pulled me over for a stupid light not working. Why did it have to go to the whole drug thing?

Another attendee reported that one of his friends was ticketed for driving 55 mph—on a conventional bike. I didn’t realize we had someone in town who was capable of setting a new world speed record for an unpaced cyclist.

Mayoral candidate Henry Silbiger argued, based on historical data, that SPD has been deliberately increasing stops in an attempt to use fines as a revenue generator, and Comrade Fultz did in fact inquire of staff during the last budget process whether the city had the “ability to fine higher” in order to extract more of the magistrate court’s costs from its victims. Per the city’s comprehensive annual financial report submitted to council on Tuesday, the number of traffic stops conducted by the Sedona paramilitary was consistently between 3,600 and 3,900 from 2020 to 2023, while it was 4,269 in 2019 and 5,173 in 2018. For 2024, they reported 4,465 stops, and for 2025, 4,502. Stops are in fact up about 20 percent from the recent average.

These numbers, however, must also be viewed against another set of figures in the report: the number of arrests. Sedona’s decade-and-a-half-long history of steady declines in the arrest rate ended in fiscal year 2022, when there were only 268 arrests. For both of the next two years, 2023 and 2024, the paramilitary reported 381 arrests, while in FY 25, arrests rose still further to 398. In other words, the ratio of stops to arrests went from 12.66:1 in 2021 and 12.47:1 in 2022 to 11.3 in 2025, representing an increase of 11 percent in the likelihood of arrest on top of the increased likelihood of being stopped. Not only are more traffic stops and arrests being made, stops are, as the event’s attendees stated, becoming more likely to be escalated into criminal cases carrying much higher fines. In a town with a stagnant and aging population and declining crime. The math is not mathing.

Former deputy police chief Ryan Kwitkin’s lawsuit against Comrade Foley for retaliation will be proceeding in federal district court, although Kwitkin’s similar claim against the city as a body has been dismissed. District judge Diane Humetewa ruled last Friday, March 6, that “Kwitkin has failed to plausibly allege an unlawful practice or policy by the city. His First Amendment retaliation claim against Chief Foley, however, survives.”

The court agrees with defendants that Kwitkin has not sufficiently identified a governmental policy, custom, or practice that can conform to the standards of municipal liability under Monell. Monell established that a municipality cannot be held liable under Section 1983 under a respondent superior theory. Rather, to state a claim against a municipality under Section 1983, a plaintiff must allege the following: “(1) the plaintiff possessed a constitutional right of which he was deprived; (2) that the municipality had a policy, custom, or practice that amounted to deliberate indifference to the plaintiff’s constitutional right; and, (3) that the policy, custom, or practice was the moving force behind the constitutional violation”…

Kwitkin alleges that his probation was extended and he was ultimately fired in violation of his First Amendment rights because he spoke out on matter of public concern. Defendants do not dispute that the constitutional right at issue is the First Amendment. But defendants argue that because Kwitkin spoke out on matters of public concern in his capacity as a public employee, he had no clearly established First Amendment right at time of the alleged retaliation.

Under the Pickering balancing test, whether a person has a clearly established First Amendment right at the time of the violation requires a court to assess the following:

(1) whether the plaintiff spoke on a matter of public concern;

(2) whether the plaintiff spoke as a private citizen or public employee;

(3) whether the plaintiff’s protected speech was a substantial or motivating factor in the adverse employment action;

(4) whether the state had an adequate justification for treating the employee differently from other members of the general public; and

(5) whether the state would have taken the adverse employment action even absent the protected speech.

In his response, Kwitkin points out that an assessment of whether he had a clearly established First Amendment right when his probation was extended and later when he was terminated requires the court to consider allegations that are still in need of factual development. The court agrees…The court therefore declines to conclude on a motion to dismiss that Chief Foley is entitled to qualified immunity; Kwitkin has sufficiently alleged that his First Amendment rights were violated. Therefore, the court will not grant defendants’ motion to dismiss against Chief Foley.

In addition, Humetewa dismissed Kwitkin’s claim against the city without prejudice, potentially allowing him to re-file the claim with its defects remedied.

Based on the progress of Kwitkin’s suit, Mark Spencer of Judicial Watch requested on March 10 that the Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board investigate and potentially revoke Comrade Foley’s certification as a police officer:

Foley punished Kwitkin for exercising free speech (e.g., speaking out, criticizing organization policies and managers). It should be noted that the city of Sedona offered to settle with Kwitkin regarding this retaliation on or around March 9, 2026.

Under AAC Rl3-4-109(A) (Denial, Revocation, Suspension, or Cancellation of Peace Officer Certified Status), “The Board may deny certified status or suspend or revoke the certified status of a peace officer for: 8.) Committing malfeasance, misfeasance, or nonfeasance in office or 12.) Engaging in any conduct or pattern of conduct that tends to disrupt, diminish, or otherwise jeopardize public trust in the law enforcement profession.

Also under R13-4-l09 it states in paragraph D: “Upon receipt of information that cause exists to deny certification, or to cancel, suspend, or revoke the certified status of a peace officer, the Board shall determine whether to initiate action regarding the retention of certified status. The Board may conduct additional inquiries or investigations to obtain sufficient information to make a fair determination.”

Based upon an offer to settle from Sedona, the aforementioned AAC rules, as well as the ruling from the federal court regarding Kwitkin’s allegation of retaliation by Foley (abuse of authority) in light of the First Amendment of the Constitution, I am requesting that AZPOST conduct an investigation into the alleged misconduct of Sedona Police Chief Stephanie Foley for violating Arizona Administrative Code (AAC) Rules 13-4-109(A).

Meanwhile, at Tuesday’s council meeting, Comrade Ploog was observed to approach Comrade Dowell in the staff box and say to him, “Sorry to see you go”; Dowell had submitted his resignation letter earlier the same day, as expected for the last several months. Now the question becomes—how much time does Comrade Penner have left on the clock before Foley gets paranoid about her? One to two years?

Irritable Traffic Syndrome

Residents reported this Wednesday the installation of new cameras, suspected to be a new range of spycams, on traffic lights around town. Comrade Harris of public works stated that the cameras are an ADOT pilot project, apparently the first in the state, with a company called Miovision Technologies to modify traffic signal timing on the fly in response to changes in traffic flow. ADOT refers to it as an “intelligent traffic system.” Since when was having automobiles at all intelligent? Anyway, Harris said that “we are expecting much better travel times by the end of April along the SR 89A corridor.” We shall see.

Harris was very careful to specify that “this is ITS to improve traffic management, not surveillance.” On the one hand, we all know the timing of some of these lights is a mess; the left out of Rodeo onto 89A is a special nightmare. On the other hand, the simple fact is that software technology now allows just about any camera to be turned into a surveillance camera by tweaking the code and adding some post-processing. History, including our own local, recent history, has shown us that government officials cannot be trusted to use dual-use technologies for purely benign purposes; therefore, as a working philosophy, they must be denied any such technologies.

Are You Being Served?

Last week, Comrade Segner, the well-known apologist for big government, attempted to fire back at my recent description of city’s staff’s institutionalized corruption in the form of salary greed in an opinion piece on Sedona.biz. I say that he attempted to do so, since his bland and uninspired effort had all the force capable of being generated by a little boy who’s spent the last half hour of a roadtrip whining that he needs a bathroom break and then fails to produce enough to wet a daisy. Anyway, Segner decided that he would simply repeat the old set of chestnuts, beloved of Comrades Spickard, Whitehorn, et al, that the city provides some kind of “services” that we the residents should be only too delighted to pay for and which justify any amount of non-market spending on disproportionate city salaries. Let’s examine this idea of “services” more closely. How exactly are we being served here?

Which city departments does Segner think provide a service? Of course he started with the paramilitary, repeating the claim that “police officers protect the public.” Protect the public from what? I read SPD’s daily briefing reports for years. There’s about fifty or sixty assaults a year committed in this town, compared to around 400 (if you count arrests objectively) or 4,500 (if you count traffic stops by threat of force objectively) assaults committed by cops against members of the public. Is assaulting us a public service? They’re not protecting us from violence, they’re committing most of it—which is, of course, consistent with the historical fact that governing organizations are constructed by violent psychopaths in the first place. They’re not deterring private violence, that theory has long since been put to bed, nor are they protecting us from some nonexistent bogeyman. Do you realize what’s actually in the Sedona police reports beyond them shaking down drivers for cash and responding to reports of octogenarians found dead in their bathrooms? I’m still undecided as to whether my favorite one was the call to respond to an incident where a “cat got out and was frolicking with squirrels” or the incident in which someone was burning incense in his van and set it on fire. Is sending someone to look at those incidents a public service that warrants, depending on which part of the budget you look at, anywhere from $8 million to $11 million a year in public funds? Ah, but then I forget that this is Sedona and the fact that the working population of this town sees the cops as a threat, not a service, is probably viewed as a service by the bloodsucking millionaires who fear the proles.

Or is it the communications and tourism department that serves us so well by conducting biased and rigged surveys, disseminating misinformation about STRs, and attempting to censor publicly-available information with the avowed goal of manipulating resident behavior in accordance with their whims? Do they serve us by spending tax dollars to hire highly-paid nonresident consultants to sell us on the success stories they want us to believe and filling the newspaper with propaganda? This department also has economic initiatives underneath it—who thinks that city staff are serving our local economy well by attempting to kill tourism, squeeze businesses, route tourists away from shopping, and drive events out of town? Is that a service?

Maybe Comrade Segner would like us to believe that the community development department serves us by preventing the average person from building housing and thereby providing the primary factor that has driven housing prices in Sedona sky-high. Does anyone else in this town actually believe it’s a service to us to have unelected city staff who do not even live in this community and have no connection to it preventing residents from building on their properties for up to a decade at a time? Or is it the housing department that Segner fantasizes is a service? As one of the Pakistani officers asks sarcastically in Charlie Wilson’s War, “Is that meant to be a joke? Is that meant to be a funny joke?” Instead of actually doing things that could help the housing situation for those in need, city staff’s achievements so far have been throwing public money at apartments that cost $800,000 apiece to build and proposing to spend still more money on a concentration camp. We know now just how well-served 64 percent of Sedona voters feel by that department.

Parks? That’s another one we could do better for ourselves. As Comrade Frewin once grudgingly informed Comrade Ploog, to her urbanist astonishment, the entire set of fields and facilities that is Posse Grounds was originally built and maintained by volunteers from the Sedona community, back when the land was owned by the county, and was only belatedly taken over and ruined by the city. The people of this town have always been capable of making parks for themselves without needing their hands held by the government.

Moreover, it is absolutely ludicrous that anyone should try to defend the existence of parks staff on the grounds that they bring great events to the community when they are and have been, even prior to the pandemic panic, attempting to destroy the use of public parks for events and discourage events from being held. Frewin has admitted it. When we the people called the shots at Posse Grounds, we had fireworks and rodeos and festivals and carnivals and fairs. Now there are no more fireworks and no more rodeos and no more festivals, and that limp-wristed pansy Frewin won’t even allow carnival rides out of his cowardly, sniveling fear that someone might possibly one day sue the city. Is Steve Segner really trying to tell us that getting rid of this guy and his fellow pathetic obstructionists—and thereby being able to have festivals and parties and attract families and young people to this town—is somehow a bad thing? Does he think that being told we’re not allowed to have fun is a service?

Sustainability? One of the clearest majorities in town thinks that the whole department is providing so little in the way of service to the community that it should be scrapped. For those who don’t care about that sort of thing, it’s irrelevant; for those who do care, the creation of the city’s so-called sustainability programming has coincided with actual emissions continuing to climb merrily while city staff pretend they don’t exist because they bought credits with the public’s dollars. In fact, if you really do care about genuine sustainability, you should be mad as hell that city staff are greenwashing the destruction of the environment with their performative programs and in fact facilitating ongoing environmental destruction by pretending everything’s okay. Is that a public service?

Public works? What exactly are they working on? As council reluctantly admitted during their discussions this week, the streets in this community, like the parks, were originally constructed by members of the community, not the government. So were all the retaining walls and drainage improvements—which city staff in their arrogance are now tearing down because they, not the people who have been here for decades, apparently know best. Do you feel served by their condescension in doing things you could do for yourself? Especially when their efforts, again, are intended to change your behavior?

Transit? Is it a service to us in the community to have shuttles that go from parking lots near nothing out into the middle of the forest? Is it a service to us to have an unreliable city taxi program overwhelmingly used by tourists rather than residents at enormous public cost in place of a scheduled bus service that could actually serve workers and retirees, or an environmentally-friendly bike-share or ride-share program? One would think not.

What about wastewater? Ah, yes, the $10 million a year (on average) boondoggle that only serves about half the homes in Sedona anyway, in spite of the lying claims about the soil’s supposed lack of capacity for septic that were used to justify its forcible imposition. I seem to have heard the phrase “raped by a sewer pipe” having been used by residents to convey their feelings about this particular “service” provided by big government. Besides, who thinks it is in any way sane—or defensible in sustainability terms—to pump more than a million gallons of waste a day ten miles out of town instead of treating it at the source? Wasting energy and effort unnecessarily is a service to the community—and to the environment?

As for the city manager’s office, city attorney’s office, and human resources, finance, general services, and IT departments, these and their staff have no pretense of providing any kind of a public service, but exist merely to serve city staff. Are you feeling very served by their spending millions of your money on software and distinguished budget presentation awards?

The most common view I have heard expressed in the community with regard to city staffing levels is more or less summed up in this quote from the 2025 budget survey: “Cops protect the community, Parks and Rec hosts good events. I don’t know what the other 150 to 200 of you do except waste money.” This, of course, is the sort of response that explains why there is still no 2026 budget survey posted on the city website. From my own perspective, the only useful function within the city is performed by the clerk’s office; even in a non-literate, non-coercive society, someone has to keep the records. I’m quite tired of hearing the platitudes that government is either good or useful repeated with absolutely no evidence to support them—and in the face of the history of the lasts several thousand years, which tells quite a different story.

Comrade Segner at one point made the ridiculous statement that city staff deserve respect. No, they don’t; that’s as ludicrous as Christopher Fox Graham’s embrace of the old sawhorse, “We may not respect the man, but we must respect the office.” That’s not how it works. Respect is earned based on actions that serve the truth and serve others, not given automatically based on position. City staff are liars who serve their own interests at the expense of the public and do not deserve respect. Individuals who choose to be stupid, cowardly, deceitful, greedy, selfish, violent, or materialistic do not deserve respect.

As for Segner’s irrelevant digression that the city’s economy depends upon tourism, yes, it does—which is another part of our community city staff are steadily working to undermine. As for his ridiculous claim that city staff are “working people,” no, they’re not. City staff are greedy, bloated parasites who believe that they are somehow superior to the rest of us and produce nothing in exchange for their kleptocracy. That is the story of the last five thousand years.

I understand that John O’Brien’s feelings were apparently hurt by the reference to city staff being parasites. I repeat what I have said before: he was the only city official about whom I have never heard a complaint in this town. However, it was also literally true that he was, in his own intended-to-be-sarcastic words, a “community development parasite.” Consulting Webster’s Dictionary, I find “parasite” defined as “an organism living in, on, or with another organism in order to obtain nutrients, grow, or multiply, often in a state that directly or indirectly harms the host.” That is a very precise description of how city staff behave and what they are. Also, I’ve been calling city staff parasites since my very first appearance at council as a member of the public. Why is anyone surprised now? They are also, of course, psychopaths, because they seek dominance over others through aggression, manipulation, and lack of empathy. Rhetoric and definition are two different things.

This entire situation can be summed up in two points:

• 1. Most of the so-called services provided by Sedona’s municipal government are not services to but detriments to the community.

• 2. The few useful functions currently performed by any of Sedona’s city staff could be more efficiently and democratically performed by volunteer members of the community, as historically was the case.

Comrade Segner may have no problem with having his masochistic streak on full display. Like Max Klinger, I applaud his courage if not his intelligence. But masochism is not a trait that I or most of the others in this community with whom I have interacted seem to share. We have no intention of continuing to allow ourselves to get the crap beat out of us at our own expense.

Values First

Remember how, at last month’s film festival opening, John Rubinstein as Dwight Eisenhower in This Piece of Ground denounced political parties that sought electability over a consistent ethical program as nothing but a conspiracy to seize power? A new NBC poll suggests most Americans would agree with him—Republicans more so than Democrats. Seventy percent of Republicans and 56 percent of Democrats, it turns out, will vote for a candidate who represents their values closely over a candidate considered more likely to win an election. The result suggests that there is some lingering awareness of how morality works among Americans. If we truly believe a certain action is absolutely wrong, of course we will not choose to take it, regardless of the material reward offered. The two things cannot even be compared within a common frame of reference. On the other hand, if we choose to trade away a supposed principle, we make it clear that it was no principle at all, merely a performative bargaining position, and we further make it clear that we are unfamiliar with and incapable of implementing the concept of a moral principle. Morality defines social reality; it is not defined by social reality.

Meanwhile, only 37 percent of voters have a positive view of the Republican party, while an even lower 30 percent have a positive view on the Democratic party, with the level dissatisfaction suggesting that neither is particularly strong on values and that the Democrats are—no surprise—even worse at it.

The final days of the Sedona International film festival have come and gone, with Switch & Bait taking the audience choice award for feature-length comedy and The Secret Floor winning for feature-length drama. The Marching Band was voted best narrative and Andre Is an Idiot best documentary, with The Fallow Few winning best international film and Mr. Nobody Against Putin best international documentary.

One of the bigger disappointments of this year’s run was Creede U.S.A., which nevertheless received a director’s choice nod. Perhaps it was a question of an expectations mismatch. The synopsis appeared to describe a documentary about a tiny mountain town, Creede, Colorado, that had been a 10,000-strong mining community at its height before the population fell to 145 in the 1960s and the town’s residents pitched in to set up a summer repertory theatre that helped to revive the community and give it a distinct character. What a remarkable and relevant story—except that that wasn’t the story the film actually told. At no point did the director pay significant attention to exploring the role of art and performance art as a unifying force in the community, or discuss how widespread local participation in theatre productions was, or consider the role of the theatre in local tourism and the local economy. The theatre, it turned out, was instead merely a staging ground for a culture war piece on the perceived problems with conservative views in a small town. The director chose to waste the majority of the film’s running time on what she considered to be problematic issues within the local school district, specifically arguments over whether teachers should be armed and the process of selecting a sex education curriculum.

Even her discussion of these topics was incredibly tired and unoriginal. When covering the armed teachers, she managed to omit any reference to the risk of intimidating young minds into subservience by having armed troops glowering down at them, or to the incident as an instance of how paranoia over nonexistent threats is used to justify creeping government expansion, one position at a time. When she dealt with the sex education curriculum, she never addressed how the whole debate was a staged farce intended to obscure the board’s unanimity with regard to depriving kids of information not about sexual identity but about sex. She was given a perfect lead to discredit the fallacies of the abstinence-only superstition along the way when one of the participants in the film called attention to that aspect of the curriculum, and she failed to take that lead. The amount of effort expended on keeping the scientific fact that sex is healthy for humans—including and especially for kids—out of schools is perhaps exceeded only by the amount of effort expended on keeping reference to the ongoing absence of that fact out of the media.

The east coasters interviewed during the film came off, in spite of their protests, very much as busybodies trying to change the town. Likewise, the filmmakers were oblivious to the fact that their acts create the very impression of pushing an agenda that they deny, which then feeds back into the attitudes they deplore. It was a shame, really, because for someone who grew up in part on the western slope in Colorado, the film was also a reminder that good places still exist, and that factor simultaneously made it into a cautionary tale. Once upon a time, Sedona was a small town where the whole community pitched in to make things happen in the arts without asking a by-your-leave of anyone. That attitude has been destroyed here. Will the same thing happen in Creede one day?

What was possibly the brightest moment in the film occurred near the end, when it revealed that a Jerseyite member of the school board was packing up and leaving Creede because she found that she didn’t have the “emotional capacity” to deal with the level of social interaction required in a small town or with various attitudes she found objectionable. If only that, too, could happen in Sedona.

The best line of the night wasn’t even in the film, but was delivered by the main subject’s father during an audience Q&A as he addressed the subject of community function: “We don’t have a jail or a hospital for a long way, so we gotta talk this out.” And that’s exactly what humans did before jails and hospitals were invented. We can do it again any time we choose to do so—if we make a committed ethical choice to do so.

Several of last weekend’s shorts proved particularly outstanding, especially Divers, perhaps the most artistic film presented this year. Recall how in days gone by, cinematographers would actually compose each shot as if it were a painting or a photograph? That’s exactly what director Geordie Wood did for this behind-the-scenes short filmed at a diving training camp. Wood frequently used thoughtful two-tone compositions, pairing blue and white, or blue and gold, or white and gold. The result was highly dramatic without a word being said except in the background, and when the divers were silhouetted against a sky filled with fluffy clouds, the visual framing spoke to athleticism as art and as an alternative approach to the sublime or the divine. Intimate, intense, and even erotic.

Also among this year’s best were Di Sarno, a delicious little snack of a film interviewing Manhattan restaurateur Emilio Vitolo about his establishment, which was founded in the 1950s, and his cooking philosophy. A colorful, high-energy, earthy selection, the short drove home an important point when Emilio’s son complained about the recent influx of younger, hip customers because “they don’t understand the food” and were only coming for the Instagram experience. La Orquesta went inside an all-Latino school orchestra program in Atlanta to look at the fierceness with which the orchestra’s director, a Cuban refugee, fought for her students, juxtaposed with the threat from the state that the students and their families faced while trying both to better themselves and to keep Western civilization alive. The film closed with a reflection by one of the students that music can connect you with, or give you, a sense of inherent power inside you—which explained in a nutshell the reasons behind the administrative state’s systematic destruction of school music programs in our recent history.

The single worst thing at this year’s festival was “Rovina’s Choice,” which was not a film but an advertisement for the welfare state bureaucracy. Produced by The New Yorker, the ad was about on the level of what we in the Verde are used to seeing from MATForce—you know, the organization that tries to create reactive fear through anecdote while lying about the facts. That’s all this ad was. The sadists who made it used the device of milking the story of the death of a child in a refugee camp in Kenya to make an argument for why USAID and other welfare bureaucrats should immediately be given back their billions in funding and their six-figure salaries—because peasants in Africa will die if the American government doesn’t try to control their future. The ad further came off as an instance of the absurdity of arguing that it is better to feed refugees that result from wars than to stop wars; if government meddling is supposed to be a good idea, why not meddle so as to fix the systemic problem instead of its symptoms? Bureaucrats are incapable of doing so, however, due both to their own psychopathy and to the contradiction that fixing the systemic problem introduces. All famine throughout history has resulted from the violent intervention of psychopaths into naturally-evolved resource management systems, but the psychopaths who make up the American administrative state want to pretend that their intervention is somehow benevolent, that they and they alone have the recipe to preventing starvation and must be allowed to steal and torture to impose it—when, if they were removed, there would be no more famine. Psychopaths cannot logically eliminate that on which they rely for their existence without eliminating themselves, which, unlike normal humans, they are unwilling to do in the interest of others. The ad was nevertheless red meat for those audience members who would never think to give away their own millions, but are indignant if the coercive totalitarian state doesn’t provide “charity” at the point of a gun as a trade for compliance.

Between these extremes came Just Jools, about a disabled girl finding greater freedom in greater control of her body through studying dance; My Memory Walls, an interview with a French artist who covered the walls of her suburban bungalow with thirty-five murals depicting the events of her life, which was rather jarringly interspersed with animation; and Petal Pushers, one more story of the destruction of a small business, in this case a flower shop in Penn Station that closed down some years ago when the station’s managers kicked them out after a forty-five year run.

Saturday night at the festival featured a live appearance by Broadway and West End star Ramin Karimloo and his Broadgrass Band, which turned out to be a simple affair of two acoustic guitars and one piano—Chamber Music Sedona’s Steinway has been getting quite a workout this week. That was all he needed to pair with his remarkable voice remarkably controlled, with almost no vibrato in it. Karimloo put a classic country spin on a number of Broadway tunes, including “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” and “It All Fades Away,” as well as his original “Letting the Last One Go” and the cover “Watch Over Us.” “Hushaby Mountain,” on the other hand, he managed to make more like classic rock, with almost a hint of “Hotel California.” “Edelweiss” he gave a modest, compact rendition without the soaring vocals it could have supported, and his interpretation of the nineteenth-century folk song “I Wish That the Wars Were All Over” was absolutely captivating, if inconsistent with his earlier sentiments of rejoicing over the dead ayatollah (more on that later). Karimloo also treated the audience to a new number called “Oh, My Family” from an in-development show titled Rome, a paen to freedom and family with quick, catchy rhythms. The casual, riveting power of his voice was perhaps most apparent in “Bring Him Home,” but he also delivered an abridged version of “The Music of the Night” in which he briefly unleashed the magnificence of the Phantom’s brazen organ-pipe tones before closing appropriately with “You’ll Be Back.”

Calendars, Please

The Cottonwood Community Band’s upcoming concert has been rescheduled to Tuesday, March 10, in Camp Verde, and the Notre Dame Glee Club will sing at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church on Sunday, March 8; tomorrow, the church will also be hosting an ACLU “know your rights” camp. The Sedona Symphony returns on March 15, followed by Chamber Music Sedona on March 22.

Rumor has it that KAZM will cease broadcasting on March 10. Station owner Charles Helstein has not yet responded to a request to clarify the situation. Stay tuned.

Anette Spickard and Her Forty-Four Thieves

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled reminder of what comfortable lives the parasites who make up the city of Sedona’s staff are living on your tax dollars. This year’s rundown of city staff’s salaries indicates that they have reached new heights of legalized corruption, with a total of forty-five regular city staff—twenty-two percent of the total—having ascended to the $100,000-plus salary circle, up from 28 last year. The fortunate extortioners, who can afford to buy homes in Sedona paid for by the rest of us—that is, if they condescended to live here—are:

• City Manager Anette Spickard, $209,475. 10.3 percent raise from 2025.

• Deputy City Manager Andy Dickey, $199,251. 10.5 percent raise from 2025.

• Deputy City Manager Barbara Whitehorn, $197,017. 9.5 percent raise from 2025.

• City Attorney Kurt Christianson, $181,416. 5 percent raise from 2025.

• Police Chief Stephanie Foley, $171,531. 10.2 percent raise from 2025.

• Director of Community Development Tony Allender, $165,006. New hire. Steve Mertes was previously paid $141,255 in the role.

• Assistant Director of Community Development Steve Mertes, $154,690. 9.5 percent raise from 2025.

• Magistrate Judge, currently vacant, $155,000. The magistrate judges pro tempore are paid at a rate equivalent to an annual salary of $135,200. Former judge Paul Schlegel was paid $140,438 in 2025, so the new rate represents a 10.4 percent increase.

• Human Resources Manager Russ Martin, $146,604. 16.5 percent raise from 2025.

• Criminal Prosecutor William Kunisch, $146,408. 11.3 percent raise from 2025.

• Assistant City Attorney Monique Coady, $146,341. 12.6 percent raise from 2025.

• Public Works Director Kurt Harris, $144,530. 3.3 percent raise from 2025.

• Deputy City Manager Lauren Browne, $142,480. 21.7 percent raise from 2025.

• Director of Wastewater Roxanne Holland, $141,541. 4.7 percent raise from 2025.

• Information Technology Director Chuck Hardy, $140,342. 4.4 percent raise from 2025.

• Assistant Director of Public Works Sandra Phillips, $139,184. 8.5 percent raise from 2025.

• Planning Manager Cari Meyer, $133,780. 19.8 percent raise from 2025.

• Transit Administrator Amber Wagner, $128,400. 7 percent raise from 2025.

• Police Commander Christopher Dowell, $124,633. Not a regular staff member in 2025.

• Parks & Recreation Director Josh Frewin, $123,925. 24.1 percent raise from 2025.

• Tourism Manager Andrew Grossman $121,885. 12.8 percent raise from 2025.

• City Clerk JoAnne Cook, $119,563. 23.3 percent raise from 2025.

• Accounting Manager Renee Stanley, $118,472. New entry.

• Wastewater Regulatory Compliance Specialist Kelly Hanzel, $118,144. 12.2 percent raise from 2025.

• Police Commander Heather Penner, $117,000. New entry.

• Police Support Services Manager Erin Loeffler, $116,298. 5 percent raise from 2025.

• Network engineer, unlisted employee, $115,833. 2.9 percent raise from 2025.

• System administrator, unlisted employee, $115,833. 2.9 percent raise from 2025.

• Engineering Supervisor Jon Ebers, $115,003. New hire; former supervisor John Hall was paid $108,665 in 2025.

• Court Administrator Brenda Schorr, $113,805. 35.4 percent raise from 2025.

• Sustainability Manager Bryce Beck, $113,474. 17.2 percent raise from 2025.

• Communications Manager Tyler Maffitt, $113,001. New entry.

• Purchasing Manager Ian Coubrough, $111,981. 15 percent raise from 2025.

• GIS Manager Aaron Seifert, $111,951. New entry.

• Associate Engineer Bob Welch, $107,019. 10.5 percent raise from 2025.

• City Surveyor Aaron Reay, $104,000. New entry.

• Maintenance Manager Ryan Hayes, $102,970. 11 percent raise from 2025.

• Wastewater Chief Plant Operator Mike Atwater, $101,982

• Associate Engineer Johnathan Hoffman, $100,006. 8.8 percent raise from 2025.

• Parking Administrator David Velasco, $100,000. New hire; his predecessor Lance Lunsway was paid $112,000 in 2025.

In addition, five of the Sedona paramilitary’s sergeants are now paid $108,243, $105,768, $102,939, $100,069, and $100,422, while the sixth is paid $99,986, for the privilege of beating up others without punishment. Last year, only three of the sergeants were in the $100,000-plus club. The members of the $100,000-plus club collectively earn $4,906,726, accounting for 29 percent percent of the city’s total before-benefits salary budget, up from 25 percent last year.

Twenty-six city employees, or twelve and a half percent of the total, receive salaries between $80,000 and $100,000, including:

• Wastewater Project Manager Dan Thurston, $99,986. New entry.

• Senior Accountant Jessica Bryson, $98,001. Upgraded from Comrade Foley’s lapdog in 2025.

• Marketing Manager Rob MacMullen, $97,036. 12 percent raise from 2025.

• Arts & Culture Specialist Nancy Lattanzi, $96,564. 4.4 percent raise from 2025.

• Budget & Investment Manager Sterling West, $94,856. New entry.

• Chief Engineering Inspector Sal Valenzuela, $93,246. 9.5 percent raise from 2025.

• Emergency Management Coordinator Chance Wnuck, $90,002. New entry.

• Senior Planner Christian Santa Gonzalez, $90,002. New entry.

• Associate Engineer Robert Willett, $88,985. New entry.

• Assistant Engineer Michael Righi, $87,464. New entry.

• Public Relations Analyst Kegn Hall, $86,819. New entry.

• Assistant Engineer Hanako Ueda, $86,819. New entry.

• Senior Engineering Services Inspector Travis Zellner, $86,736. New entry.

• Right of Way Specialist Victor Estrada, $85,883. New entry.

• Network Engineer, unlisted staff, $83,691. New entry.

• Wastewater Chief Collections Officer, unlisted staff, $82,264. New entry.

• Plans Examiner Rebecca Oium, $80,288. New entry.

Eight paramilitary troopers also fell into the above category, with salaries ranging from $80,330 to $94,557, plus the not-quite-there sergeant. Average city staff budgeted compensation, according to the FY26 budget, was $83,500 before benefits or $117,879 after benefits, representing 32 percent and 29 percent increases, respectively, since 2021. The number of authorized positions for full-time employees to collect these salaries increased by fifty during that same five-year period, with the city’s compensation budget swelling from $13.9 million to $23.8 million as a consequence.

For comparison, the median individual income in the Verde Valley, from the US Census Bureau as of 2023, is $35,400, while minimum wage income in Arizona is $31,512 and per capita income statewide from 2024 data is $42,503. The governor of Arizona is paid $95,000, or less than half of what the city manager of Sedona gets to run a city of 10,000. Proportionally, the Sedona city manager is paid about 1,680 times as much as the governor of an entire state; presumably her job is 1,680 times harder? As Alan B’stard once remarked, one can almost feel the gravy dribbling down one’s chin.

Meanwhile, there are those in Sedona who have lived here and contributed to the community all their lives who are being forced to move away so city staff can giggle in their offices and feel powerful after having said “no” to the deregulatory measures that could make this a workable community again. It should also be noted that senior bureaucrats’ 10, 12, 16, and 24 percent raises occurred at the same time that the managers of less-prestigious departments were directed to recommend only 3 percent raises for their rank-and-file staff.

It’s highly important that we in the community be able to put names and faces to the thieves who are extorting our livelihoods from us at gunpoint. It helps us to understand their greed and thus their psychopathy and unfitness to participate in normal human society, and it tells us whom we should call out for their total lack of any ethical principles. After all, what individual with any degree of concern for others would accept such an unequal and elitist offer of employment?

There is a simple question of philosophical logic here that no one on city staff or council or among their sycophantic public supporters ever seems interested in addressing. City staff are variously defined as public servants or public employees. Servants do not earn more than their masters; employees do not earn more than their employers. The public are the employers of all public employees; therefore, it is inappropriate for any public employee to earn more than the average for a member of the public. If public employees were to be paid more than their employers, it would imply that they were not employees at all, but the directors of a business enterprise set up to benefit them, rather than the people—and that is obviously untrue. If it’s not, then it’s time to break out the Declaration of Independence again. All city salaries and compensation, assuming the city engages the services of any non-volunteer personnel, should be capped at the individual median income for the area.

The growth in city staffing as a result of bureaucratic empire-building has reached the point that a number of city functions have now been moved out of that sprawling complex known as city hall. The parks and finance departments have been kicked all the way through Sedona traffic to the Brewer Road site, while the old Chevron station at the Y is housing the so-called inspectors who play a key role in helping to prevent housing construction in our town.

It’s a nice little graft they’ve got going here. Would be a shame—from their perspective—if the voters took it away from them.

‘You Tossers! You Had One Job to Do!’

City of Sedona staff handled a mere 330 public records requests during 2025, fewer than one per day, and only about 200 out of the city’s approximately 10,000 residents were able to be bothered to file one of those public records requests. Of the 330 requests, 117 were made by just twenty-five people. Yours truly led the standings with thirteen requests, followed by Donna Joy Varney with ten requests, tied with someone named “Keegan,” and then Lisa Bravo with seven and Mark TenBroek and Steven Schwartz with six apiece. They in turn were trailed by Christopher Fox Graham and John Patton with five apiece; Jacque Weems, Mark Spencer, Simon DeGruchy, and the Giddens creature planted at the newspaper with four apiece; and Adela Buster, Anthony San Felice, Colleen TeBrake, Diane Uzee Larson, Jamie Pulver, “Jared,” Joan Shannon, Lina Rueda, Mark Worthington, Olivia Maillet, Sarah Schiele, Tom Huthwaite, and Sue Wehrmann with three apiece. Of these, Spencer is with the nonprofit Judicial Watch and is investigating the Sedona paramilitary, while Maillet is a reporter for the Verde Independent. One request was anonymous; several included only a first name.

The really astonishing thing was what residents were requesting, which was predominantly land use information, not information on internal city operations or policymaking. Inquiries about permits, plans, zoning or boundary changes, plat maps, certificates of occupancy, inspection reports, variances, code complaints, background information on properties including ownership, and related topics accounted for 153 of the requests.

No fewer than seventeen requests were made for a list of short-term rentals, although such a list is already up on the city website as part of council’s efforts to incite a scare campaign. The most extraordinary of these requests was that from Craig Swanson of the ecofascist KSB, who explained his need for the list in these terms: “Keep Sedona Beautiful is interested in piloting an initiative to make STRs aware of the work KSB does as an organization to keep Sedona beautiful for not only Sedona residents and business owners but also for our efforts to inspire visitors to experience the Sedona area responsibly.”

There were also sixteen requests that stemmed from the various police department meltdowns involving comrades Foley and Jablow, fourteen requests for police reports or legal documents not related to the Kwitkin-Foley-Jablow affairs, twelve requests for officials’ emails, six requests related to the city’s various spy camera programs, five requests related to parking, and sixty-one requests for city documents including attendance records, budget inquiries, ordinances, policies, and business license information.

A few of the requests stood out for their novelty value. John Hayes wrote, “I am trying to locate a psychic reader with the first name of Hanna who claims to have a psychic reading shop in Sedona. This is all the information I have on her. She is running a scam, which I was taken for.” Maricela Alvarez of the League of United Latin American Citizens wanted “a current breakdown of sworn law enforcement officers by rank and by race/ethnicity, including the number or percentage of Hispanic/Latino officers at each rank.” Jennifer Leising put in a question about the budget line item for the police dog, noting that the dog’s handler is trained to beg for money from the public to pay for feeding it.

Someone giving the name of “David McGill” was nosing around into the 2017 death of Brent Wilkins at Midgley Bridge, although he didn’t know how to spell “Midgley.” The funny thing there is that Sedona’s paramilitary chief from 2016 to 2018 was a Californian named David McGill (who incidentally bragged about helping to bring more big government to Sedona), who presumably wouldn’t need to be requesting records for an incident that occurred during his time on the job. Meanwhile, EWU Media of Sparks, Nevada, was getting curious about the 1998 disappearance of David Barclay Miller in the wilderness.

I’m quite frankly appalled. This level of interest in public records is nowhere near sufficient to put any kind of pressure to behave decently under scrutiny on staff or council. We as a community are failing to exercise any due diligence in demanding accountability of public officials. We’re certainly not scaring the living daylights out of them like we should be. The situation represents a complete failure to use one of the few tools we have available to induce responsible administration in those who are largely immune to being punished for their repeated failures.

The outlook for 2026 appears slightly better so far, but only slightly, with ninety-three requests submitted through the end of February, which would extrapolate to 558 for the year. That’s not enough pressure.

The Bloomin’ Onion Had Layers

Digging through the correspondence of departed housing mismanager Comrade Blum—who was paid $90,272 last year, by the way—has revealed more about how city staff think and act behind the scenes, as well as some decisions regarding housing that have been taken outside a public forum. Although no statement to this effect appears on the city’s website for the project, or has been made publicly, it appears that the Sunset Lofts project was half-canceled on July 29 last year, when the RFP process to build the complex was terminated without an award because, in the words of Comrade Coubrough, “none of the proposals fully align with our current financial strategy and the scope of services required.” In other words, no developer wanted to take on the financial burden the city was trying to stick them with while working under the city’s excessive rules and putting up with its games-playing. The existing development review on the project will expire on September 21 of this year, which will require the entire thing to be restarted from scratch, abandoned at long last, or rethought entirely.

A message from Comrade Stewart to Blum in September 2025 indicated there were forty people on the unofficial waiting list for the Villas at Shelby; if the examples Stewart provided were any indication, roughly half of them were seniors, not families. By the end of the month, that list included forty-eight names, at least nine of whom were seniors, not the young people or families the council pretends to want to attract. Even more interesting was the explicit inclusion of seven individuals who did not live in Sedona but were hoping to relocate to Sedona to live in subsidized $800,000 units. Contrary to the internal tizzy among comrades Blum, Browne, and others that followed my previous story on the per-unit cost of the project, these units do not cost $500,000 apiece to build; that $9 million in construction funding isn’t just magic and invisible. The cost is $800,000 per unit. It’s the same kind of excuse-making that followed Comrade White’s hysteria over reference to the purchase cost of the Cultural Park as being $23.5 million, including interest, because, as finance mismanager, she was apparently under the impression that interest payments didn’t exist.

City records gave away the attitudes of certain residents towards the Shelby project as well. “Impressive!” Al Comello enthused in a November message to Blum, forwarding her photos of the three-story fiberboard box on Shelby that passes for the city bureaucracy’s greatest achievement in housing to date. Margaret McFarland had described the project in July as “like an ant farm.” “I’m laughing at the name,” McFarland added.

I’ll make this quite clear again, and I’ll continue making it clear until it sinks in: By a ten-to-one ratio, we the people do not want to live in rented apartments. We want to live on land of our own where we call the shots, not a landlord or bureaucrat, and we can get that quite easily by getting the city and its godforsaken rules out of the way.

A classic example of Comrade Meyer’s total unwillingness to consider any kind of flexibility in planning or alternatives to millionaires’ McMansions in Sedona can be found in an exchange between Blum and Meyer last July, initiated by the former:

Quick question for you—John Bradshaw is hoping to temporarily place one of his tiny home models (10’ x 40’, on a chassis with wheels) on his commercial property at 2900 W. State Route 89A. The property currently has a CUP for his trolleys and other vehicles, so he’s wondering if this would be allowed under the existing permit or if he’d need a temporary CUP for 30–60 days.

He wants to use it purely as a demo unit—so Sedona businesses and employers can come see it as a potential workforce housing option. He’s not proposing to develop these in Sedona; he just wants to make it easier for local employers to view the model here rather than traveling out to his active project site in Camp Verde.

Some details: The unit is on wheels (no foundation); he’d add temporary stairs for access; possibly some temporary power for lighting when the unit is being shown, but no other utilities and nothing permanent.

Would this fit under his current CUP, or would he need a temporary one just to be safe?

Meyer responded almost instantly in bureaucratic terms, eighteen minutes later, to squash the suggestion:

There’s not a way to permit this. He doesn’t have a CUP—he has an occupancy permit for a jeep tour business; this does not fit within that occupancy permit. The closest thing this could be would be a model home, but model homes aren’t permitted in commercial zones and model homes are defined as “A dwelling or dwelling unit representative of other dwellings or units offered for sale or lease or to be built in an area of residential development within the City.” Since we don’t allow tiny homes on wheels, this would not fit that definition. The next closest thing would be temporary housing, but, again, this isn’t permitted in a Commercial zone and is only permitted when someone is building a new house on a lot (has an active building permit for a new house). So, it doesn’t fit here either. Temporary Use Permits are valid for up to 5 days at a time and you have to go a minimum of 10 days between each permit, so even if it fit into one of the temporary use categories (which it doesn’t), we wouldn’t be able to issue one for 30-60 days.

So much for trying to think outside the box. One is vividly reminded of the complaint of Bob Ritter, the CIA’s deputy director for operations in Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan series: “Damn it, Arthur, you tell our people to think outside of the box, and what do they do? They build a better box!”

When not thinking well inside the box, Blum’s emails betray a fascination with that plastic suburb of Salt Lake City known as Park City—ironically and informatively including this gem of a headline from The Park Record: “Buyer of Town Lift base holdings worries ‘Park City is building L.A.’”

City staff’s correspondence and internal documents also provide some indications of the way in which the new “housing needs assessment” about to be debuted by the city’s bureaucrats could be going. An internal memo discussing the study proposal submitted by consulting firm Logan Simpson stated that staff’s goal was to “realign” the proposal with “the Mesa balanced housing plan model” and employed the language “mirror Mesa” five times. They are explicitly trying to turn us into a big-city dump. A guesstimate prepared by Comrade de Luz last July suggested that building another seven hundred “housing units” would be necessary to eliminate 1,175 commuters. He had trouble deciding whether the total number of commuters was 1,884, 3,301, or 4,205; the latter two numbers, which would put the total workforce at 5,077 or 5,981, sound absolutely ridiculous. The draft assessment presented by Elliott Pollack at the end of July 2025 increased the previous study’s estimate of 1,620 units needed to 1,871 units needed, dutifully reflecting staff’s wild speculation earlier in the year about the effect of the nonexistent increase in the number of STRs. The draft added that the construction of 328 additional “apartment units with subsidized rent” to target those making less than 60 percent of median income would “satisfy current needs.” The study’s suggestions that the city “encourage small lot and attached ownership development,” “continue to allow secondary dwelling units”—like it does to any real extent now?—and “allow manufactured homes” are unlikely to be taken up by council. On the other hand, its proposals to build more subsidized housing and destroy the Sedona Cultural Park in the interests of urbanization will doubtless be embraced by council. We shall see if the the final number goes up to over 2,000 as some would doubtless like it to do, or whether staff produce something more realistic for a town that has not grown in twenty-five years.

Staff’s efforts to induce Sedona property owners to give the city a partial interest in their properties have stepped up a notch with a modification to the highly unsuccessful anti-STR deed restriction program. Marks—sorry, participants—can now receive, in exchange for a potential reduction of their property values by 10 to 15 percent, the option to continue to rent their properties as STRs—provided that the property is also their primary residence. You know, with the amount of time Sedona’s staff spend wishing they were in Aspen, maybe they should pay attention to why Aspen’s deed restriction program has worked: because Aspen is willing to pay a market price for its restrictions.

It turns out that one of the few home sales conducted through the city’s down payment assistance program fell apart last September, when Comrade Brashier of parks decided to pack up and move to Lake Tahoe for a better job and sold the home—in Camp Verde—that she had purchased with the aid of city of Sedona tax dollars. I believe this program was one of the things Blum pretended to be excited about at some point.

Just before her departure, in November, Blum was in communication with Coconino County attorney Ammon Barker and Yavapai County supervisor Nikki Check’s office about the possibility of creating a specialty “drug court” in Sedona, an idea previously floated by Comrade Fultz in another illustration of the extension of the therapeutic state.

It appears Blum will be unlikely to run for council, as she stated in a November 12 email to a fellow bureaucrat, “I’ll be leaving the city…working for greater impact from the ‘outside.’” Nothing she did in the community became her like the leaving of it, eh?

It’s also worth noting that city IT staff are so efficient at doing housekeeping on their system that the late and unlamented Comrade Boone’s email address is still active almost two years after she got the sack.

For those who have never been through the Citizens’ Academy indoctrination program, be warned: according to the program materials, “excessive negativity will not be tolerated.” So it’s a yoga retreat now? One would wonder who wrote that idiotic line, but it was clearly Comrade Hall in the aftermath of Comrade Osburn’s threat to exclude residents from participation in city programs for asking questions.

Pulling a Willie

The Supreme Court is appearing highly skeptical of the suggestion that the use of marijuana automatically renders a person too dangerous to possess a gun—as they should be, since all the evidence is that those who don’t use marijuana are more likely to do something violent with a gun. In a case that has taken four years to reach the high court, FBI bureaucrats are attempting to prosecute Ali Hemani of Texas for having both a gun and weed on the grounds that the government has decided that weed use is inherently dangerous. The justices have spotted holes in that reasoning. “Is it the government’s position that if I unlawfully use Ambien or I unlawfully use Xanax, then I become dangerous?” Amy Coney Barrett demanded, highlighting the discrepancy between biochemical reality and the state’s subjective definition of lawful use. Neil Gorsuch went originalist, quoting references to how much alcohol the Founding Fathers drank; apparently Thomas Jefferson was a lightweight at only three or four glasses a night. The case holds out hope that a favorable verdict will lead to the removal of the marijuana question on Form 4473, which the ATF is currently using to prevent the majority of the American population, who use or have used cannabis, from legally purchasing a gun from a dealer.

Elsewhere, the American wars for oil and Israel seem to have kicked it up another notch with the latest Iranian debacle. The really extraordinary thing here seems to be the sheer number of Americans who are willing to delude themselves that this is an excellent thing for Iran, that all the all-powerful US Navy has to do is launch a few missiles and presto! peace and prosperity, as if most of them had not lived through the Iraqi and Afghan debacles—or, just a few months ago, the Venezuelan mess. The pretend naivete is all the more unbelievable in light of the historical record, of which Americans are blithely ignorant, which perhaps informs the fantasyland of political understanding in which many of them seem to prefer to live. Lest we forget, Iran’s condition of brutal dictatorship for the last seventy years resulted from a CIA coup in 1953 that overthrew Iran’s democratically-elected prime minister (who had nationalized the Royal Navy’s oil supply in the interests of his own people) and replaced him with an authoritarian government, after which Mohammed Reza Pahlavi spent the next twenty-five years taking his revenge for his overthrow, blowing the public funds, building up the secret police, and destroying representative institutions. He and his American allies created the preconditions for an eventual, inevitable revolution—but the shah had done his destructive work so well that by the time his government collapsed, the only viable rival was a group led by a fringe Shia cleric whose successors quickly came to be as hated as the shah.

The United States’ government’s fawning support for the corrupt and brutal Pahlavi dynasty, its opposition to democracy, and its facilitation of radical Islam are the reasons that Iranians—quite justifiably—hate the United States government. They suffered first under the shah and then under the Islamists for decades as a result of American meddling. And now some of these quite extraordinary monarchist-fascists in disguise are seriously proposing Reza Pahlavi for the new leader of Iran? A man with no skills, whose history with the country is that his father was the hated tyrant who brutalized its people? That certainly promises well as an alternative. Any of these damn Yankees who think more meddling on their part is a good idea, either for their own interests or for the interests of the Iranians, haven’t bothered to read the form book.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the whole situation is that the United States in no way benefits from wasting munitions on murder in Mesopotamia. Iran’s North Korean-style pomposity poses even less of a genuine threat to the US than Saddam Hussein did. No, this incident was staged solely for the benefit of Israel. Future historians will express both admiration and derision of the manner in which one tiny state turned the world’s biggest empire into its catspaw to pulls its chestnuts out of the fire.

Nor is the intimacy of this alliance of long standing; it emerged only in the 1980s following an increase in the numbers of politically active evangelicals in the United States, who turned unquestioning support for Israel as the embodiment of God’s chosen people into a political dogma. The irony of their position is that, in order to maintain it, the evangelicals must either believe that they will be swept up to heaven on the coattails of the Jews, who are still the chosen people, in which case they disbelieve in Christ’s redemption, or that the end of the world, LaHaye-Jenkins fashion, will be brought about by the full restoration of the state of Israel, a process in which they expect all Jews who do not become Christians to be exterminated. The latter theory strikes one as a rather cynical form of exploitation. Nevertheless, there are a significant number of individuals involved in American politics who do manage to maintain this position via one or the other of these lines of rationalization. American policy towards Israel has nothing to do with realpolitik and everything to do with the millenniarist fantasies of an extremely obstinate fringe group that has been beavering away behind the scenes for years. These are the same people who are trying to find Noah’s ark and carbon-date the planet to a few thousand years back. In order that this group’s fantasies may advance, Iranians and Americans, Israelis and Palestinians, and whoever else gets in the way or is available for use as a tool must die. They’re fine with that. The best thing I’ve seen this week was a meme pairing a recent quote from Trump in which he is cheerfully casual about sending men to their deaths with a quote from Lord Farquaad in Shrek: “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.” Applause.

On top of everything else, the repetition of warmongering presidents who lie about their intentions with regard to foreign adventurism in order to get elected is becoming wearisome. I remember one of my history professors in college telling us a story about how, when she was a kid, she had tried to get her grandfather to register to vote as part of a school project. He adamantly refused. When she asked him why, what was his response? “I voted for Wilson in 1916 to keep us out of war. I ended up in France.” Now Trump has gone and pulled a Wilson. Twice. It was a refreshing change to see opposition to war showing up again on campaign posters last season, but clearly that did not take.

In any case, an attack that is made in response to a fear of a future threat is an act of pure paranoia and cowardice. It is nothing but animal behavior. Even admitting a form of distorted moral code that allows a role for violence, sneaking up and sneaking around are beyond the pale.

The first week of the Sedona International Film Festival kicked off on Friday night with This Piece of Ground, a one-man play starring Tony winner John Rubinstein, who delivered a thoroughly confident and natural performance in the role, albeit one that came off at various moments as being more George C. Scott as Patton than Dwight Eisenhower. The play opens with Eisenhower in retirement swearing at the newspaper as he reads about how a group of historians, Harvard types led by Arthur Schlesinger, have ranked him twenty-second out of the United States’s thirty-one presidents. He faces a crisis prompted by legacy insecurity, in short. Talking first to his editor on the telephone and then to his tape machine, Eisenhower tries to evaluate what he has actually accomplished. At first he highlights his championing of highways, but then realizes how trivial that was. Instead, his thoughts turn to the importance of leaving the land better than you found it for those who will come after you, a form of greatness that he contrasts with the Schlesinger crowd’s association of greatness with ambition, which, he notes, is inconsistent with an idea of greatness that defines it in terms of moral courage and integrity. “We have to keep choosing the harder right instead of the easier wrong,” Eisenhower declares. “It is not our cities that need to be conquered, it’s our souls, and that takes moral courage.” The first act was full of sarcasm and laughs, including digs at Harvard and a thorough review of the golf jokes, but slowed down as Eisenhower got further into relating his family history to the audience; the more revealing parts of the show were the philosophical rather than the historical and it lagged where it became biographical.

As for the play’s philosophical side, it raised more questions of ethics than it was able to answer. Eisenhower was unable to deal, even to his own satisfaction, with the moral status of his career in organized murder. At first, he expressed resentment of the historians for ranking James K. Polk higher for starting an unprovoked war than they ranked him for stopping the Korean War, which was followed by a reference to the cost of the military undermining the security of the country, which segued into a disquisition on the futility of hatred because it is self-harming and then a stereotyped modulation on the point of war being peace and how his sending men to their deaths was somehow justified. The first act ended on that note; by the end of the second act, however, Eisenhower showed that he was more ready to admit the indefensibility of this utilitarian argument.

He made less progress in realizing the evils of civil religion, echoing the words of Abraham Lincoln and Joseph Goebbels alike in declaring that the law must override conscience and that individuals must give their allegiance to the law imposed at gunpoint by the state rather than to any personal moral code. The problem with Eisenhower’s argument, as pointed out by Thomas Aquinas in spite of all his own faults, is that if one assumes the existence of a divine or natural law separate from human law, human law will either be consistent or inconsistent with that natural law. If the human law is consistent with the natural law, it is redundant and can be discarded, Aquinas observed, while if it is inconsistent with the natural law, it is obviously unethical and must be discarded. The unacknowledged problem with asking individuals to act on their consciences is never the act of moral behavior itself, but the question of whether they share the same set of moral values, which is necessary in order to obtain consistent outcomes. However, while This Piece of Ground did not satisfactorily resolve or address these moral issues, at least it raised them for once.

Many of the play’s quips might have been tailored to the context of Sedona’s elderly audience. The lines “The President of the United States ought to at least have some dignity” and “Suppression of truth is the weapon of dictators” brought the house down with ovations, as did the bits about not forcing debts onto grandchildren, preserving the Social Security system, and political parties without principles being merely conspiracies to seize power.

Marilyn Monroe impersonator Samantha Stevens’s performance could best be described, in the words of Dorothy Sayers, as bright, brief, and brotherly—it certainly ran nowhere near the two hours specified in the program. Stevens and her band successfully captured the rhythm of Monroe’s era throughout the program, although there were moments when the band tended to drown out her diction. Selections included “I Enjoy Being a Girl” from Flower Drum Song and “A Little Brains, A Little Talent” from Damn Yankees, as well as Marilyn’s own “I Want to Be Loved By You,” “After You Get What You Want,” and “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend,” as well as three or four quick-changes. Stevens even threw in a period-appropriate rendition of Britney Spears’s “Whoops, I Did It Again,” which was actually quite amusing because it was so easily the sort of thing that Marilyn herself would have done.

The best thing at the festival so far has been Mr. Nobody Against Putin, the story of how a schoolteacher in the Urals named Pavel Talankin documented the visual transformation of an ordinary indoctrination center into what was effectively a type of military academy during the two years following the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Talankin tells the story with a simple humor and gentle wryness that he does not overplay, reflecting on his own culpability and complicity in the erection of a bigger propaganda operation than the one to which he was previously accustomed and how he decided to resist its growth. Against his conscience is set, painfully, the resignation of his mother, whose words reflect the views of many Russians and repeat the old, old lie that tyrants use to gain control: “People love war… It’s always been like that.” He shows the students and teachers at his school fully recognizing the absurdity and illegitimacy of the process—but acquiescing in it all the same.

Both visually and intellectually, the film’s most striking moments are those in which Talankin captures the revival of Soviet imagery as part of the process of strengthening Russian nationalism. Kids attempting to goosestep to the Preobrazhensky March as if they were the Kremlin drill team in a Soviet patriotic reel. The return of the Young Pioneers in red berets and scarves. The “history teacher” who opines that he would very much enjoy meeting Beria and Sudoplatov while standing next to a red banner adorned with a portrait of Lenin. These are accompanied by references to defection plans that sound like something out of a Tom Clancy novel and a clip from a contemporary Russian rock music video prominently quoting the phrase “red banner.” As I was leaving the theatre, I spoke with another viewer I knew who had gotten out of Soviet Russia many years ago. Her comment on the film boiled down to two words: “Nothing’s changed.”

“Loving your country means saying, ‘We have a problem,’” Talankin told the audience. It was entertaining, listening to those lines, to contemplate how many of those viewing the film were members of Democrats of the Red Rocks, who would be incapable of ever saying “We have a problem” with regard to their own country’s system of government, their objections being entirely to the people running the system rather than to the system itself. I’m sure some of them were shocked, shocked at the sight of kids being taught to march up and down hallways—the occasion for Talankin’s scathing comment, “Is Severus Snape our new headmaster?”—and would never dream of connecting such events with the Boy Scouts, the Civil Air Patrol, the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, or any of the paramilitary organizations set up in the United States to train child soldiers. I’m sure they pretended to be horrified at the sight of the Beria fan preaching love of the motherland in the classroom—yet one of my most vivid memories of DORR members is how keen they are on getting more of what they refer to as “civics”—state-worshiping propaganda—into schools.

Paint Me a Road Out of Here developed in effect as a disorganized instructional film on hypocrisy. In 1971, well-known modern artist Faith Ringgold was hired to execute an inspirational mural depicting jobs then closed to women at the women’s gaol on Rikers Island to inspire them, she said, with the idea of freedom and “a road out of here.” At no point did Ringgold, interviewed for the documentary shortly before her death, or any of the other artists interviewed comment on the act in terms of what it was: a collaboration with a fundamentally evil and systemically racist prison system.

The cognitive dissonance of attempting to admit the evil of the prison system while also attempting to soften the appearance of that evil by dressing it up with art—nothing but putting lipstick on a pig—was the film’s main theme, and the mural’s story ended in what was really a tragedy. Prison staff painted over the mural in 1996; after it was restored, it was reinstalled in a gymnasium where it was inaccessible, then loaned to the Brooklyn Museum for display in 2017. After being returned to the gaol, it was hidden away in a little-used corridor until a tour group of depressed civil servants spotted it in 2021 and “rescued” it for the museum with the connivance of the bureaucrat in charge. “The gaol didn’t do it justice,” a former prison guard says with satisfaction upon viewing it at the museum where it had been saved for the good people. This was a story about how something created with just the faintest hope that it might empower the oppressed was seized and repurposed for the uses of the oppressors. One of the art experts interviewed for the film commented on how both prisons and museums evolved as “institutions that teach the public what to value and what to devalue.” Throughout the film, those supposedly on the side of prison and judicial reform displayed this attitude themselves to the same extent that the agents of the state did, as in one risible scene where an artist demanded that her audience accept her work uncritically and described her work as teaching her audience. The production might be eye-opening for those who had no idea of the evil of the prison system, but its internal contradictions do not make its subjects look very good.

The Renaissance Prince was really more of a prat. The film was the outcome of a five-year project trailing precocious Norwegian painter William Heimdal, and in his future years Heimdal, if he ever develops a sense of self-awareness, will be very uncomfortable with the results. “I was born 2,000 years too late,” he laments pretentiously in the picture’s opening moments before going on to display a rather astonishing lack of historical and contextual knowledge for an individual intensely talented in an area in which the production of good work requires both. He presents himself as a champion of the Western tradition, yet fails to realize that the Western tradition is rooted in logic rather than emotional aestheticism. He presents himself as a devotee of the old masters, yet fails to realize that the goal of humanistic training in the Renaissance was to produce generalists, not specialists, and is therefore able to claim simultaneously that he wants to do nothing but paint. The degree to which his educational makeup is unbalanced is underlined in a scene that shows him teaching himself to play the piano in order to absorb something of genuine culture rather than merely posing.

Heimdal’s complete lack of modesty in the film extends to his desire to paint himself—and his erection over and over again in various guises, which presumably reflects his lack of any sex life, not to mention the narcissistic desire of a moderately epicene youth to conceive of himself as David or St. Sebastian. A related problem is his constant recycling of classical tropes in his work. His facial expressions a renot just guarded but openly resentful and scornful, screaming at those around him without a sound, and he gradually becomes more and more deliberately obtuse or offensive in his efforts to provoke others into lashing out at him so that he will have even more material with which to feed his sense of alienation. His narcissism turns more farcical still with the melodrama of burning his unsatisfactory works in a darkened room—but with the documentarian’s camera watching him. Only at the end of the film, when the lofty artist-poseur gets to know a girl and gets laid, is he humbled sufficiently to begin showing a very slowly dawning sense of personal and historical perspective. It wasn’t the subject alone who was the problem with this film, either. One came away with the sense that the director was trying to find a story that did not exist.

Mozart’s Sister turned out to be a superbly-shot, beautifully-lit, thoroughly enjoyable documentary that was visually and sonically successful but historically less so. There seems to be a tradition of making inaccurate but beautiful films about the Mozarts. “Maria-Anna Mozart’s story has been hidden,” the film declared, which was simply untrue. Anyone who knows anything about classical music history knows about the Mozart children, Wolfgang and Nannerl both, performing all over Europe. Certainly Nannerl had a less productive musical career than her brother, and certainly discrimination against women in the eighteenth century played some role in that, but the discrimination was far from being the main reason why Nannerl’s career was derailed. The real reason was Leopold Mozart, the original heavy father, whose role was minimized in the film, which explained why the writers had to turn to an inaccurate and generalized argument about female suppression. The simple fact of the matter is that Leopold considered himself God, or at the very least God’s appointed agent, with regard to every other member of his family. He decreed that Wolfgang should obtain a certain job for the good of the family; he decreed that Nannerl should marry for the good of the family. Wolfgang disobeyed and his rocky relationship with his father has become the stuff of legend; Nannerl obeyed and kept a good relationship with her father—and lost her prime performing years as a consequence. Personality, not ideology, controlled, but the filmmakers missed that.

Interestingly, the film itself contained plenty of indications and evidence rejecting the Nannerl-was-hidden theory for viewers who were paying attention. The writers admitted the existence of other female composers and performers at the time, including the extensive compositional tradition at the nunnery of Nonnberg Abbey and the work of Maria Theresia von Paradis, for whom Wolfgang composed the Piano Concerto No. 18, while trying to downplay their visibility. They quoted a letter from Wolfgang assuring his sister she could make an excellent living as a performer and teacher in Vienna and urging her to break free from Leopold’s control—a recurring theme in their correspondence. They acknowledged the role of a father’s pressure when referring to the quite intentional suppression of Fanny Mendelssohn’s works without acknowledging that the same personal pressure might have been operative in Nannerl Mozart’s case. And they admitted that after both her father and her husband were out of the way and she was a financially independent widow, she made an easy and celebrated return, if a belated one, to a public concert career.

Mozart’s Sister also went to too-great lengths to try to emphasize that Nannerl composed—well, of course she composed, that’s well documented in the primary sources; the absence of the scores is par for the course for a composer of this period. Muzio Clementi, for instance, an equally famous contemporary of Wolfgang’s, composed at least twenty symphonies; today, we have four of them left, and at least two had to be pieced back together. The “lost composer” problem goes hand in hand with the “minor composer” problem: in the former case, the works are missing; in the latter case, the composer did not write enough works or enough very famous works to be considered noteworthy at a later date. Sometimes practical considerations contributed as well. In another famous case, the music of the Chevalier de Saint-George was not suppressed on purpose because of his mixed-race origins, but simply fell out of popularity due to changes in the French musical scene, his lack of major “hits,” and his preference for composing for smaller orchestras than were rapidly becoming the new standard. Saint-George’s violin teacher, Gossec, one of the major French composers of the day, is now equally forgotten. The two composers of his own era whom Beethoven regarded most highly were Clementi and Luigi Cherubini, who were European stars at the time. Today, it is exceptional for either to receive even one performance in a year. Nannerl Mozart was in some very good company in being forgotten, and the forgetfulness was not personally or sexually directed at her.

More intriguing was the information that forensic analysis has shown that a number of the inscriptions on the Mozart violin concertos match Nannerl’s handwriting rather than Wolfgang’s, which certainly opens up room for speculation. Nannerl didn’t play the violin; Wolfgang did but disliked the instrument and abandoned it early; so was she doing additional cleanup on his manuscripts? The film further noted that the siblings spent years trading compositions, that in duets written for the two of them, Wolfgang designed the more complicated passages for his sister, and that Nannerl in fact orchestrated Wolfgang’s First Symphony. It benefited considerably from the appearance of composer Alma Deutscher as the narrator, who offered insights into compositional methodology and how inspiration develops from and is processed through practicing improvisation.

‘Put the Whole Thing on the Diagram and We’ll Try to Trace the Short’

This year’s shorts have been a mixed bag so far. Benchless (in French, Sans Banc Fixe, which would be more appropriately and humorously translated as “without a fixed bench”) featured three homeless guys sitting on a park bench in Paris arguing about who should call the shots on their bench with a surprising degree of wit and pathos. When one of them comes across a lost phone belonging to a politician, they start calling officials whose numbers are in the contact list to tell their stories and plead for a little understanding—until one decides to call his estranged family and then destroys the phone in a fit of rage at being rejected again, driving his companions away. In a final, supremely Gallic thrust of irony, a security guard shows up at the scene, only to find the broken phone and report back, “M. le President, the bench is empty.”

Disco Beats offered the slow but sweet tale of an 85-year-old who wanted to learn to dance disco to please his wife in order to surprise her for their sixtieth anniversary, and appeared unremarkable until it turned out that his wife had died more than a year before and he himself was dying of cancer, which he did before making it to his second lesson. The short closed with a scene of the couple dancing together at last. Rather poignant, that idea of learning to dance for his beloved for forever. It provoked a considerable number of sniffles from the Sedona audience. WildKind was not really a film but a family art project featuring a poem narrated over a series of animated ink drawings and could be given points only for visual style at best, as it had no content. Massage Therapy, unfortunately, turned out to be an awkward mess about an emotionally needy freak of a massage therapist that had nowhere near enough of a twist in its role reversal at the end to make it anything but unpleasant. Waiting for Aphrodite, on the other hand, nailed the comic timing. The audience spent the whole very brief short thinking the paranoid father was waiting up for his daughter, who was past her curfew—until the very last seconds revealed the catch: it was actually his elderly mother, who had moved back in with her children but still had a very active romantic life. Not overplayed, not overstated, and hilarious.

More disturbing was the documentary short Nice Girls Don’t Ask, which the director assembled entirely, except for one clip, from seventy-two “social guidance” films distributed in American schools during the 1940s and 1950s. Apparently these films were intended to selectively suppress curiosity among girls and to teach them to value ignorance as the price of getting sex and financial support, with the resulting female ignorance then being used to justify a supposed need to explain everything to girls to a greater extent than to boys. Bound up with this concept, although not made explicit in the clips selected, was the idea that curiosity, questions, or dissent were somehow negatives rather than positives, a position that could only be described as anti-human. Some of the scenes included were so outrageous in their casual, discouraging cynicism that it was difficult to believe that they could have been shown even in the 1950s without sparking despairing rebellion. Of course, when one thinks about it, perhaps they did; how much did exposure to this sort of existential drag when they were kids inspire the teenagers of the 1960s to attempt to create a different kind of society?

The Demon Core, a narrative account of the 1946 Los Alamos criticality accident in which physicist Louis Slotin killed himself while playing cowboy with the guts of an atom bomb, turned out to be the biggest disappointment of the festival so far. It was badly written and structured, with the back-and-forth cuts between three separate timelines preventing the high-stakes suspense of the accident from being developed properly; the accident itself was shoved into the background. Instead, the film focused on completely unhistorical speculation about the relationship between Slotin and a fictitious fiancee—to the point of claiming, without any grounds whatsoever, that thinking of her was the distraction that caused Slotin to cause the accident—and the gory aftermath of the accident leading to Slotin’s death. The indulgence in Marvel-style pornoviolence and grotesquerie for its own sake was extremely offputting, especially because the screenwriter revealed during the subsequent Q&A that the historical Slotin had actually been dictating details of his symptoms to his medical team on his deathbed. Why couldn’t the filmmakers have chosen to show the heroic scientist putting knowledge above personal pain? Instead, that aspect was totally omitted from the end product in pursuit of cheap, tawdry clawing for shock value. Disgraceful. The Demon Core also deserves condemnation as one of those ridiculously pretentious pictures that cast an “intimacy coordinator” just in order to show two people in bed. The film’s one redeeming feature was a stellar performance from lead actor Connor Paolo, who radiated youthful intensity to great effect, practically vibrating with tension while presenting a striking image of mid-century youthful boldness.

Calendars, Please

Musicians from the Flagstaff Symphony Orchestra will play a free chamber music concert featuring the works of Dohnanyi and Schumann at Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church in Flagstaff at 3 PM tomorrow. The next installment of Celebrate Sedona is scheduled for March 6, while the Notre Dame Glee Club will appear at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church on Sunday, March 8; for those at the other end of the valley, the Cottonwood Community Band will be playing at the Phillip England Center for the Performing Arts in Camp Verde. Cellist Ian Maksin will debut selections from his new album at the Ultimate Light Mission on March 15.

The Yavapai-Apache Nation’s Exodus Day commemoration will take place tomorrow at 10 AM, and Cititzens for Justice has rescheduled their “know your rights” event for 1 PM at St. Andrew’s on Saturday, March 7.

Rule of the Unfittest

In far less entertaining experiences, that gang calling themselves the Sedona city council also held their first perfunctory hearing of sorts on placing home rule on the ballot once again this July. The session started off on a hilarious yet savage note when minister for propaganda Comrade Maffit of Utah, who moved to Sedona in December, started off his presentation with what he called an “educational slideshow,” adding with a patronizing air, “I felt it would be really useful if we started off on some background for the audience.” Apparently he’s already given a propaganda presentation to the Lodging Council and plans to give ten or eleven more to various community groups and homeowners’ organizations prior to the election—but none except one are expected to occur prior to the last public hearing on home rule before it goes to the ballot.

“This is an educational thing from our point of view, not a do this or do that,” Comrade Whitehorn of finance announced before presenting a set of misleading and deceptive slides in which she described the city’s legally-required functions under state law as carrying an annual cost of $22.5 million, with functions that she considered “desirable” and “essential” running another $61.5 million. “There would be significant service level reductions,” Whitehorn predicted, incidentally breaking election law again by describing the city’s activities as “services,” a non-neutral positive pejorative, before clarifying that, in her estimate, only “about 40 percent” of the city’s required functions could be funded.

The trouble with Whitehorn’s argument was that state law requires far less than Sedona’s bureaucrats actually perform. Her proposed $25.5 million in required functions included $8.1 million for the paramilitary, $9.7 million for streets and facilities, $4.1 million for sewage operations, and $2.2 million for permitting. To take the paramilitary budget as an example, state law requires simply that the city have a town marshal. If the council gave Comrade Foley a stipend of $100 a week and an official cowboy hat instead of an official Glock, the statutory requirement would be met. Meeting it does not require having a department accounting for a quarter of all city personnel. Even if Sedonans do somehow feel reassured by having a gang of official bravi on staff to assault them from time to time, the numbers of those sanguinetti could be reduced by half to parity with levels in other small Western towns and their salaries cut by half to parity with their US Army counterparts. That would cut the budget of that “essential” function by $6 million while still preserving the so-called “service level” of official violence at the same level it was decades ago—when, by all accounts, this town was a much better place to live. Apply the same logic to streets and facilities and that budget could quite easily be taken down from $9.7 million to $1.7 million, and there you have another $8 million in savings, bringing the total budget for “essential” functions down to $11.5 million without even touching the boondoggles that are permitting or sewage—and leaving another $3.9 million for the things people actually want, like the library and community center and parks.

Actually, the bureaucrats confessed, besides getting them more money, the reason they prefer home rule is that they find it to be less work to sell that option to the public, with Whitehorn claiming home rule was “easier to understand” and Comrade Hosseini, a career bureaucrat, stating that “home rule was easier to explain.” Inertia was also a factor. “This has been the way the community has done it,” Whitehorn declared, and Comrade Furman agreed that the precedent made it “the easier thing to do.” Browne jumped in to add that council’s hand-picked work group on the topic in 2018 had recommended home rule rather than a permanent base adjustment. Hosseini offered speculation that a PBA increase could be “even more alarming” than the current budget—in other words, it’s easier for them to propagandize home rule to the public—and dismissively added that “it would just be too difficult to explain a permanent base adjustment…the average person is gonna get confused.” Comrade Kinsella joined the vanguard chorus to explain that home rule would make it easier for staff to budget the public’s funds.

“I can’t see giving a tool such as home rule to the current city council,” Robert Koster told the current city council during public comment, specifically linking his opposition to the council’s composition and to projects such as Forest Road and the Uptown garage that have seen their costs increase wildly. “It’s just not being spent appropriately.”

Council candidate Rich Gay called for the city to give more consideration to the possibility of a permanent base adjustment in place of home rule: “It might be a pretty viable option to avoid this disaster scenario that you’ve painted,” Gay said. “This sure sounds like an extortion plot: ‘That’s a nice city you have, would be a shame to lose it.’” He was, of course, spot-on; it’s well-known that the city has been using home rule as an extortion plot for many years.

The membership of council’s official work group on greed has been announced, with Comrade Furman in the gilded chair, to be joined by Brock Delinksi, CJ Gershon, Sean Smith, Kali Gajewski, Diane Phelps, and Laura Rumann. Smith, of course, is the well-known unconvincing public advocate of some of council’s least popular ideas, and Furman is likely now the poorest or second-poorest member of that millionaire body, so we have some indications to go on.

The comrades then undertook some more anti-transparency actions by voting to reverse their previous decision to oppose HB2793 in the current legislative session; the bill would speed up the annexation process for city-owned properties by reducing public notice requirements. It seems the League of Cities and Towns, that well-known Leninist organization, had begged Sedona’s comrades to join them, in the spirit of comradely good fellowship and democratic centralism, by expressing at least a neutral position on the bill since all the other cities in Arizona were supporting it. City lobbyist Comrade Senseman told council that the League had been going out of its way to lobby state newspapers and media to stay neutral on the bill.

“It’s about the public being able to know that this is going to happen,” Comrade Kinsella stated in what was probably her best moment on council. “The original reasons that we took our position of opposition hasn’t changed…why would we compromise a value that we have?”

“Cities support each other,” Comrade Ploog said, doubling down on the “Soviet-style democracy.” “We need to be a team player.” She added that the Red Rock News had lobbied the city to remain neutral on the bill and had been pleased by the council’s initial position of opposition.

“For the greater good…I’m happy to be neutral on it or even in support,” Hosseini chorused. The councilors voted four to one—comrades Fultz and Dunn had absented themselves—to change their position on the bill to neutral, with Kinsella continuing to demand greater transparency.

Comrade Senseman distinguished herself during the session by her opposition to HB4030, a pro-democracy, pro-small government measure that would impose a five-year moratorium on a city’s ability to raise taxes, fees, or other charges without a public vote—and the increase would have to pass with at least 60 percent support. Senseman described it as “such a horrible bill” and council rapidly agreed to oppose it. She also expressed hostility to HB4064, which would require a majority of property owners by number and value to support the creation of municipal improvement districts, a form of special taxing district. Senseman called such districts “one of the few economic development tools cities have,” overlooking the fact that the government plays no role in economic development in a free society and that increased taxes would not be viewed as a development positive by those affected by them.

Construction on another of those sidewalks the size of airport runways along Brewer Road, this time via a deal with ADOT, is expected to start in the fall, with construction time currently estimated at four months. “Retaining walls, it’s going to be a little difficult to see what we run into,” assistant engineer Comrade Phillips said euphemistically to the council, thereby glossing over the fact that last time staff tried to build a sidewalk with a retaining wall in winter, the whole thing was improperly done and had to be rebuilt. She also mentioned that the city’s oh-so-sustainable decomposed granite paths are actually “glued together.”

Revive or Restore?

The council then approved two neutral questions and one misleading question for a survey on the future uses of the Sedona Cultural Park, the first of which will ask whether Sedona voters support or oppose the Dig Studio proposal for the park’s redevelopment, with residents to be given the options “definitely support, “probably support,” “probably oppose,” “definitely oppose,” and “don’t know.” Ploog admitted that in spite of city staff’s propagandizing efforts, she doubted that 75 percent to 80 percent of the community had any idea what was included in the Dig Studio plan. “I don’t believe the majority of the people in the community will know what you’re talking about.”

Comrade Pfaff proposed they “scratch the whole question” on the grounds that respondents’ lack of information about the plan might keep them from completing the rest of the survey “if we bore them with a URL and something they’ve got to go do some homework on.” “All the other stuff is irrelevant until we know what the public wants to do about the amphitheater,” he added.

Pollster Paul Bentz of HighGround promised to present an updated draft for the question that would also eliminate the term “mixed-use” at Kinsella’s request and moved on to the second proposed question, which would ask respondents to rank proposed uses for the park from one to five. The proposed uses listed in the question were housing; apartments and townhomes; restaurants; retail; commercial space; community gathering space; event lawn; and amphitheater. The organization of the items made it obvious that city staff plan to compress the redundancies of housing and apartments, retail and commercial, and gathering space and event lawn in the final results to produce higher rankings for those items than for the amphitheater. A recreation center was added to the list after a request from Ploog that provoked laughter in the audience.

The third proposed question had initially asked whether voters would prefer a green space for 1,500 people or a “commercial outdoor live entertainment amphitheater,” or something else entirely.

“What if we could have both?” Ploog asked to a dead silence in the room for several seconds at the audacity of a suggestion that would maximize public use. “We don’t know that this space of 41 acres can’t include both an amphitheater and a green space…We’re giving the impression its an either-or, and we haven’t decided whether it’s an either-or.” Pfaff suggested adding “both” and “neither” options; Bentz made the excuse that too many respondents would answer “both” as the easiest answer.

In a remarkable about-face, Hosseini took issue with the word “commercial” in the question, and Kinsella, who had insisted on its inclusion in the first place, then recommended its removal; council agreed. Furman and Pfaff next proposed narrowing the scope of the question to the amphitheater itself without a green space being considered as an alternative.

During the public forum, former vice mayor and Sedona Cultural Park 2.0 president John Bradshaw suggested the survey include questions on whether respondents ever attended an event at the park and whether they knew if the amphitheater already existed, pointing out that that someone who thought it had to be built from scratch would respond differently than someone who knew it was still sitting there. “This is a renovation, not a reconstruction,” Herb Tiffany agreed, suggesting the wording “renovating an existing amphitheater.” Tim Jessup proposed including reference to economic development in the survey questions and argued it should be opened beyond Sedona voters to include former residents who had been displaced. Ben Miller suggested an independent feasibility study on the venue’s viability prior to conducting an opinion poll.

“You’re throwing good money after bad…how many times do you want to run back to your father or mother to try to get an answer you like?” Robert Koster, who is now leading the Cultural Park Preservation Act ballot initiative, asked the council. “We don’t serve you, you serve us, and the best interests are served by getting it on the ballot.” He later observed that the council’s ignoring the wishes of the more than one thousand residents who had already signed petitions to put the initiative on the ballot would continue to undermine confidence in the institution.

Joetta Winter pointed out that the items included in the second question were unequally matched and included duplicates, as well as the absence of reference to collection of demographic data in the survey, while Sean Smith commented that the options did not reflect the preferred uses of those who wanted the park to remain a park or the land to remain unused.

“You’re disingenuous. If you want to poll the people, hire a polling group. The public is beginning to believe that you’re trying to push them to certain answers,” Kathy Howe added.

“A lot of people are not aware there is an existing amphitheater,” Ploog agreed with the SCP 2.0 supporters, and Pfaff noted that calling it a “former” amphitheater when it still existed was imprecise. Ploog then proposed the wording, “I support reviving the outdoor amphitheater,” which rapidly found council and public support before Bentz interjected that he considered “revive” to be biased. Pfaff suggested “restore and reopen,” only to be cut off at the pass once again by the consultant, who considered “reopen” to imply that the amphitheater’s organizational model would be similar to whatever it was in the past. Kinsella put forward, “I support restoring the outdoor entertainment amphitheater…” and the draft question that Bentz eventually presented was phrased, “The proposal may include restoring an outdoor live entertainment amphitheater with a capacity of approximately 5,500 people…knowing what you know right now, do you support the amphitheater?” He suggested this question also include options for “definitely” and “probably” supporting or opposing the proposal.

Under the circumstances, council elected to defer consideration on whether to issue SCP 2.0 a letter of intent to explore management options for the park until after the survey results are returned. Comrade Spickard said she expected to present them to council on April 28, putting any meeting on an LOI back to May 12 at the earliest.

Council held a worship session for their climate change religion on Wednesday, during which unsustainability mismanager Comrade Beck explained that staff had decided that 64 percent of the community wanted them to continue wasting money on their religious cult based on an eighty-person sample including an unknown number of actual residents. Beck also claimed that buying electric vehicles would save the city $1.5 million a year in fuel costs without bothering to suggest how much the city might have to spend on getting those electric vehicles in the first place, and admitted that the city’s actual emissions are up 6 percent in one year, as opposed to their imaginary emissions, which he likes to think are down by 53 percent. Actual emissions, staff claimed, have been reduced by a mere 153 tons through their home retrofit program, which has, in four years, seen one hundred homeowners out of roughly 6,800 sign up.

Beck also claimed, falsely, that 36 percent of municipal-origin emissions were from commuting, with another 29 percent coming from the paramilitary’s cruisers; in reality, more than 80 percent of the city’s emissions originate from the city’s sewage plant. To avoid the wastewater issue, Beck separated sewage emissions into their own category. The unbelievability of his numbers was reinforced by the manner in which he alternately cited cars as being responsible for either 58 percent or 30 percent of community-wide emissions. Furman had the nerve to propose that the city spend public money on lobbying the legislature to change state law to allow the city to spend more public money on subsiding solar projects. Staff plan to try to get city employees, few of whom live in town, to carpool in order to reduce emissions.

This year’s council candidates are out collecting signatures and chatting up voters. Rich Gay and Jean Buillet have been hitting the campaign trail this week, with appearances from Lita Boyd and Henry Silbiger expected next week. Comrade Hauserman of the state indoctrination system filed for the office on Tuesday; doubtless there is a certain, thankfully small, segment of the population that would like to replace the outgoing career bureaucrat with a child torturer. No word yet on whether William Grosz, Allen Elfman, Allan Affeldt, or the late and unlamented Comrade Blum have filed for seats or will file. The deadline for submission of nomination petitions to the city clerk is March 23.

Sedona Water Works unexpectedly closed last Saturday afternoon and it has since been reported that the owner subsequently fired the managers and all employees and has replaced them with new staff. More details to follow.

From California to Virginia, members of the public are destroying the Flock surveillance cameras being used to track their movements. In one case, the smasher told Flock to “get wrecked, ya surveilling fucks.” Let us not forget that when the state breaks the social contract, the contract is voided and the public is no longer bound by its terms. Let us also not forget that in a truly free market, ecotage and sabotage are legitimate business tactics.

A quarter of a century’s worth of experimentation on American children by agents of the state indoctrination system pursuing their preferred, bureaucracy-enhancing policies has been declared to have produced the first generation in modern history “less cognitively capable than their parents.” Eighty percent of “teachers” now report using computers for at least one hour a day, while 25 percent use them for more than five hours per day. The result has been impaired focus, poor memory formation, and increased error. The new findings, however, merely highlight an exacerbation of a trend that has been ongoing since the Neolithic revolution. Sedentism and urbanization have caused the human species to lose brain capacity at forty times the rate we previously evolved it. Forcing kids into fluorescent-lit prisons for eight hours a day sped up the process, and now fluorescent tubes in front of their faces has pushed it along still further. Study after study has found that allowing children extensive use of computers impairs their development of linguistic, social, and motor skills, and, most strikingly, that typing is a less effective method to stimulate cognition and memory than handwriting.

Meanwhile, analysis of Palaeolithic figurines created by Aurignacian hunter-gatherers has revealed that the Aurignacians had invented a simple means of encoding meaning with symbols by 43,000 years before the present that almost exactly prefigured the sequencing and information density of proto-cuneiform, which would not be invented until more than thirty thousand years after the Aurignacian system had died out. So-called “barbarians” could invent writing out of nothing, never even knowing it existed, but American so-called “schools” today can’t even teach it properly. That’s not a bright outlook for the species.

Chamber Music Sedona hosted the Junction Trio this Sunday, and they proved to be a stylish and energetic bunch, well-matched and capable of some very passionate playing in both Beethoven’s Op. 70 No. 1 piano trio and Schubert’s D.898 trio. The Beethoven trio featured musical roles evenly balanced among the three instruments and an interesting choice of tonal color, with buzzing chords that sounded both antique and modern over a background of throbbing piano bass. Violinist Stefan Jackiw and cellist Jay Campbell exhibited extremely clean, angular bowing, while pianist Conrad Tao distinguished himself with a certain shoulder action requiring certain sartorial modifications—specifically a jacket without armpits over a tank top. Must be a New York thing. As for Beethoven’s music, it was almost entirely a light, bright romp of gaiety, with a quality in the cello part that invited comparisons to Schubert and exquisite moments of tenderness before the climax. The second movement brought an entire change of attitude and an emptying of color. Its broody ominousness even had the musicians imitating the sinister sizzle of organ pipes as the organizational structure shifted between the edge of madness and beautiful, rich songs of consolation, the left-hand part dominant again on the piano. That structure, however, dissolved and the music became urgent before a tentative close leading into a presto that launched itself with glittering runs on the keyboard. The strings played up to the piano’s riotousness with a sweet sophistication, Jackiw inspiring his colleagues with a very lively action as ideas from the first movement returned to lead up to a fiery, captivating finish with much elegance along the way.

In what was a very poor programming choice, the trio chose to insert a short work by John Zorn titled “Ghosts” between the second and third movements of the Beethoven trio. Campbell attempted to justify the decision as an instance of ekphrasis. The reality was that the piece was nothing but a lot of high-pitched madhouse squealing that was a trite cheapening of the Beethoven and had absolutely zero in common with it. Zorn was merely trying to be tricky with a bunch of scraping glissandos, plus pigeon, rat, theremin, and squeaky door effects, forsooth. It said nothing. It was a backing track, not music. It was drivel without phrasing or an idea. And of course it required Tao to reach inside the instrument, which of course one has to do to show one is au courant with musical modernism. There was both an audible and a visible expression of relief from the audience when it ended.

The Schubert trio began swimmingly and proved to be a perfect stylistic match for the Beethoven work, albeit even more playful. Again the Junction Trio showed off plenty of energy, and more than that, they had the ability to make make watching them at work visually as well as sonically fascinating, with their vigor spreading to parts of their audience and sending a current of motion through it. The first movement featured some teasing violin-cello interactions, with Tao getting quite a kick out of his part. For his second movement, Schubert selected a placid contrast rather than a negative contrast. A pensive piano-cello opening led into a development that had an air of being a musical version of the Twenty-third Psalm, gentle and melodious, speaking to the heart in a compact, charming fashion. It was quite simply spellbinding. A thing of beauty is a joy forever. The scherzo was back to being frisky and humorous, like adolescent kittens frolicking, with some moments for adorable naps. Jackiw, Campbell, and Tao showed off a striking similarity in their body language here in particular, and the structure and phrasing of Schubert’s thought process was pleasingly present throughout. The rondo was an opportunity for more and more of Schubert’s exuberance to show through within the music as it evolved. Tao was busy being immensely smooth while Campbell delivered some very intense throbbing on the cello, all leading up to a merry, proud motif that preceded the climax.

The Sedona Symphony is back on March 15 with the Mendelssohn violin concerto, followed by the return of the Brentano Quartet on March 22. In the meantime, the Sedona International Film Festival opens this evening; make your selections ASAP. I have Mr. Nobody Against Putin, Paint Me A Road Out of Here, The Renaissance Prince, The Demon Core, Divers, La Orquesta, and Creede USA on the list at the moment, along with This Piece of Ground this evening and Ramin Karimloo next weekend. There may be room to squeeze in a few more. Mozart’s Sister, Remaining Native, and Trade Secret are all appealing, but scheduling may be an issue. As Falafel, the maitre d’dungeon, aptly remarked, “We’re so busy!”

Mendacious Martin

In further refutation of Comrade Martin’s previous and now-withdrawn false claim that he did not conduct city employee exit interviews in person, a new review of city public records indicates that Martin conducted or scheduled such in-person interviews with James Crowley, Katie Dutro, and Chris Stevens in May 2025, Bernadette Krchnavy in June, Johnna Johnson in July, and Laura Olson (nee Leon) and Jeff Rich in September. Rich, incidentally, submitted his resignation letter in Comic Sans, which can be taken as a subtle reflection on how the city’s operations might appear from the inside.

Martin continues to deny that he recorded these exit interviews in spite of testimony from former employees that contradicts his story. Residents must decide for themselves, especially those residents with experience working in large government and corporate organizations, how plausible it would be for a human resources manager to refrain from recording exit interviews that might disclose information that would potentially later be required in litigation.

My December 9 demand to council for the records Martin had lied about resulted in a flurry of internal emails among staff, all of which were redacted before staff released them, obscuring their efforts to structure their response. However, a subsequent December 15 email from city clerk JoAnne Cooke to Martin mentioned, “When you and I discussed this matter early Wednesday morning you told me multiple times you would not throw David [Jakim] under the bus in your response. You did just that.” Martin sure has a knack for winning friends, doesn’t he?

In September and October 2025, Martin engaged in the farcical exercise, which he described as a training event and which was conducted using paid staff time, of administering a pseudoscientific “Real Colors” personality test to city employees. His gullible volunteers included comrades Frewin, Wagner, Foti, Reid, Nash, Thurston, Seifert, Turner, and Perez. Whitehorn also expressed interest. “I promise you will leave with something that will shed light on your perspective for the rest of your life!” Martin enthused on the public’s dime. Apparently he had performed this same ritual as part of the police department’s testing to fill a commander’s position in July. Sadly, he was not alone in his fondness for this form of pseudoscience, or his interest in forcing it into the public operations of government; Comrade Quick of accounting had commented in May 2025 regarding the discredited “Enneagram” test, “I would love to be able to have people I supervise take the test and even share mine to have a deeper understanding of each other and what motivated us.” How many of these idiots running our city believe that crystals do something and vortexes and fairies exist? What next, phrenology? Is Martin going to start running around asking to feel everyone’s bumps? When he’s not taking two-hour naps in his car or shopping on the clock, that is, as a former city staffer has reported.

In related matters, it appears from October and November 2025 emails that the city is now conducting “sovereign citizen training” for department heads. We know that paranoia over that particular set of eccentrics is a specialty of Comrade Fultz; presumably he’s succeeded in spreading it to others by this point. Moreover, staff is actively feeding council’s paranoia as well by giving them “active shooter training.” Comrade Ploog immediately rushed to try out her city hall badge on the police garage door as a possible escape route and was miffed when it didn’t work.

Perhaps the most screamingly funny and yet tragic thing was this email to Martin from “ceo@sedonaaz.gov”:

Russ,

Are you available?

I need gift cards for a select group of clients and have to send them out in less than an hour. I would provide you with the type of gift cards and amount of each.

Since it would be improbable to assume that someone managed to hack the city’s presumably elaborate multi-factor authentication system, we are left with the more likely scenario that the city’s bureaucrats are conducting incredibly implausible phishing attacks on their own personnel, which is both an indefensible waste of public time and money and a disgraceful, sneaky, immoral entrapment effort that puts them on the same level as Judas Iscariot. I’m sure knowing that city staff are actively trying to entrap one another makes everyone feel more comfortable about what staff are doing with all the surveillance data they collect on the rest of us. Incidentally, a November 25, 2025 email from Comrade Hardy in IT on staff’s proposed data handling policy for the new Uptown spy cameras showed him advising his comrades to reword part of the policy dealing with data retrieval because of instances in which “some data in other systems gets purged, but there may be places where it still exists. This is something we often run into.”

A set of June emails between Martin and Comrade Hayes of maintenance revealed a striking instance of staff’s internal elitism, as they documented Hayes’s anger at being told to recommend a smaller raise for his department than those recommended for other departments: “I have lost sleep over this and hope this will be the end of it. I hope this doesn’t come off wrong. I will follow my supervisor’s instructions and recommend a 3 percent raise. I don’t agree with this in any way. As I stated before, my staff is not average, and a 3 percent increase says that. We give 100 percent effort every day and make/do some cool things for this city. I was told that everyone can’t be a rockstar, but we all can be average. Just a suggestion for next year. If the 5 percent increase isn’t obtainable, please don’t offer it.”

Another email exchange from May documented a candidate for a tourism coordinator job turning it down because the city offered her $65,000 instead of $72,000 a year, illustrating how the continuous greed of bureaucrats gradually forces public salaries upward. Comrade Krchnavy apparently quit the city after being refused a raise last June.

A January 2025 email from Comrade Terraza of finance to Comrade Browne indicated increasing ambivalence and dissatisfaction among staff with their supervisors’ communications, with the percentage of staff who would strongly agree with the statement “I am satisfied with internal city communications falling from 21 percent to 13 percent between FY24 and FY25. Those who agreed declined from 45 percent to 44 percent, with neutral responses ticking up from 26 percent to 27 percent, disagreeing responses from 7 percent to 14 percent, and strongly disagreeing responses from 1 percent to 2 percent. Terraza reported to Martin in March 2025 that an employee named Tiffany was “not sure she can give even a two weeks’ notice because of how toxic things have become in her department.”

Forger in the Court

Elsewhere in city staff dysfunction, records reveal that the magistrate court’s security officer, Phil Clements, was terminated by the city on March 24, 2025, because, Martin stated, “he forged Brenda Schorr’s signature on a state training per diem report.” That certainly raises a few questions. If the city had to fire a semi-cop for forgery, why is it so implausible to suspect that SPD are indulging in a little light forgery, too? Especially when their targets are those with few resources or knowledge of the law?

Sedona Brady officer Comrade Dorfman was, as of March 2025, a person of interest in a case being handled by the law firm of Barrett Matura in Scottsdale, as a result of which the city provided Dorfman’s employment records to the firm in April.

City HR records show that the FY24 turnover rate for sworn officers in the Sedona police was 16 percent, climbing to 10 percent for the first half of FY25, for an annualized rate of 20 percent. The ongoing investigation of SPD by the Center for Public Safety Management is, according to the CPSM proposal, expected to cost $37,500 and to conclude by March 30.

It emerges that one of the details omitted from the city’s investigation reports of the Jablow-Foley debacle was that, among Jablow’s public records requests, was one for “the total public record requests that you have received from the Larson Newspapers (Red Rock News) for the past three years. This request should also include any requests directly from: Kyle Larson, Christopher Fox Graham, Joseph Giddens, Tim Perry, Daulton Venglar or any other reporters. I am interested to know the average amount of time that is expanded [sic] to respond to each of those requests.” Jablow simultaneously made a similar request to the Cottonwood clerk’s office, then forwarded Cottonwood’s responses to Sedona’s staff.

Grudge Match

In the ongoing debacle that is the Uptown garage, city staff issued a notice of noncompliance to Fann Contracting on October 30, 2025, on the grounds that the electrical conduits leading to the garage were incorrectly located with regard to the approved plan, “and further, the work and installation was conducted across private property unsupported by any easements or other right of access to the property.” Brian Fuller of Fann replied on November 5 that “this was the first notice we received regarding any concerns with the conduit” and went on to point out that the approved plans themselves did not depict the conduits, which were included in a later APS design revision outside the scope of Fann’s contract.

“As is standard with APS installations, these conduits were field-laid, observed, and inspected prior to backfill by both APS and city inspection staff, and subsequently approved before completion of the APS conduit installations and later the city’s substantial completion dated May 12, 2025,” Fuller pointed out. “Given that this work was completed and inspected during the March 2025 installation, Fann remained unaware of the specific issue and details until the clarifying information was provided in your recent November 3rd letter.” He proposed that the city and APS either secure an easement from the property owner whose land the conduits crossed—the parcel in question is 470 Forest Road—or construct a new set of conduits, which would require APS to waive its separation requirement for conduits. More to follow.

Frewin Mathematically Challenged

Comrade Frewin has coughed up some more records allegedly dealing with the public’s interest in renting the Sedona Cultural Park as event space. These miraculously turned up, after weeks of inaction, the very morning after I raised the issue in front of council. Don’t try telling us staff couldn’t get us all the records we wanted within five business days if they were legally required to do so. Of course they could. However, I use the word “allegedly” because, on reading through them, almost none had anything to do with the Cultural Park. Frewin turned over exactly two new inquiries about use of or access to the park: one from Steve Aderholt of Aravaipa Running, who inquired in February 2024 about locating the starting line for a 56-mile race at the park, a project that was abandoned after his group was unable to coordinate organization of the event with the Forest Service, and one from photographer Memphis Larson in January 2025 about photographing the amphitheater as part of an art project, which Frewin denied.

To recap: Frewin stated in front of council and the public that he had enough inquiries about use of the park to have an event there every week. There are fifty-two weeks in a year. He’s turned over inquiries relating to two different events. Two from fifty-two is fifty. Where are the other fifty inquiries? Frewin specifically stated that he had received inquiries from Sedona Yoga Festival and Vortifest, among others; no such records were included in what he released. At what point is this guy ever going to be held accountable not just for his lies, but for being a terribly careless liar as well?

Frewin also provided additional emails from his correspondence with Ben Miller of Jazz on the Rocks, in which Frewin admitted again that staff are “limiting large-scale events in general at the park” and trying to confine any event that does want to use the park to the Antonsen Memorial Pavilion, which Frewin claimed has a capacity of 680. “Over the last couple of years, a large portion of the community has made it known that they’d like the park to remain available as open park space, with less noise and traffic from Posse Grounds, improved athletic fields, and more open weekends without large events,” Frewin claimed, forgetting both what Sedona is all about and that the few whining millionaires of Casa Contenta are not “the community.”

City staff have revised the number of signatures required to put the Cultural Park Preservation Act on November’s ballot upwards from 475 to 1,089. While ARS §19-143 provides that the number of signatures needed to qualify an initiative for the ballot is 15 percent of the number of votes cast in the jurisdiction during the previous election—3,164 in Sedona’s case, according to the city clerk’s office—it also permits jurisdictions to set an alternative method of calculation. At some point, that gang calling themselves the Sedona city council chose to make it more difficult for the public to put initiatives on the ballot by setting an alternative signature requirement of 15 percent of the number of registered voters in the city. Staff initially provided the members of the Save Sedona political action committee with the number derived from the state calculation and recently confirmed the number derived from the alternative calculation to be the correct number.

Staff Feel ‘Diminished’ by Democracy

City records have revealed that former housing manager Comrade Blum, when preparing to resign in November of last year, sent a “confidential” memo to Comrade Allender headed “Context and reflections on my decision to resign” in which she blamed the process of representative government for the city’s failure to build any housing. She charged the councilors with “leadership misalignment”—basically implying that she expected council to get on board with whatever she and the other “subject matter experts” wanted—as well as charging her coworkers with perpetuating a “culture of risk aversion.” Blum blamed unspecified “city leadership” for a reluctance to push housing projects on council and council for “shifting or contradictory direction,” which she alleged had led to missed opportunities to issue RFPs for potential projects. Her complaints further hinted at the Byzantine-style infighting, backstabbing, and competition for control of petty personnel domains that characterizes the city of Sedona bureaucracy.

“At several points, public comments by city council members diminished the work of the housing division or misrepresented its intentions,” Blum pouted. “On one occasion, a private citizen who had created workforce housing with no city funding was publicly mocked. On another, I was characterized as ‘lobbying’ while carrying out my assigned responsibilities as housing manager. Additionally, a statement was made publicly by a council member that they ‘never thought [Jeanne Blum] was the right person for the job.’ This comment, delivered in a public setting, prompted negative community reactions and further strained trust between staff and the public.”

Blum claimed in her memo that she was resigning to “continue advancing housing and community development solutions” in a more respectful setting. “Continue advancing”? She advanced nothing. She stood in the path of housing reform while trying to put an Umbridge-style facade on doing so. Hallucinatory. The danger is that she’s still here trying to do more damage. The rumor mill has it that she’s mulling a run for city council.

Elsewhere in housing issues, there is apparently a group who are calling city staff on a daily basis to demand the names of the hotels participating in the city’s non-functional homeless voucher program so that they can organize a boycott of those hotels in protest. The foes of Christ are everywhere.

Remember Red Hedges?

This week I’ve been reading Mary Lou Keller’s Echoes of Sedona Past, which reminds us that Sedona’s attitude to the homeless in decades past was a far cry from criminalization:

Red Hedges was one of Sedona’s colorful characters and was much loved and cared for by the locals. He slept in the wash on an old mattress under the bridge on Brewer Road. One night during the monsoon season, a violent storm hit in the mountains above us, but no rain fell in Sedona. We had no knowledge of the storm until the middle of the night, when we were awakened by a gigantic roar. A huge flash flood, seemingly out of nowhere, was rushing down the wash that led into Oak Creek. Actually, the water overflowed the road and came right up to our own front door.

The flood of angry water poured under the bridge and carried Red and his old mattress along with it. Fortunately, Red was able to abandon his mattress in time to avoid being dumped into the raging creek.

When the town’s business people heard what had happened, they were terribly concerned and set about finding a safer and drier “bedroom” for Red. Someone located an old shack where he could sleep without danger of flash floods, and someone else donated a dry mattress. Red was not at all happy about his new sleeping arrangement, insisting he’d much prefer to sleep under his bridge. His benefactors managed to persuade him to sleep in the little shack until the monsoons and possible flash floods were over. On Thanksgiving and Christmas I used to go to Red’s shack with complete holiday dinners, and several other ladies also made a point of seeing that he always had food and other necessities.

Red was extremely proud of his army years in the service of his country, but unfortunately his addiction to wine had made his mind childlike and muddled. Sedona residents were aware of this, but accepted him as their lovable town drunk. A group of businessmen took it upon themselves to sort of look after him, providing him with shoes, shirts, socks, trousers and other articles of clothing when he seemed to be in need of them.

They also invented a job for him. He was to keep the sidewalk in front of the old Sedona Grocery Store and Pub clean and neat, and they gave him a big pushbroom to work with. Red was tremendously pleased with his job and felt very important. He was always out on the sidewalk, sweeping and tidying up after everyone. He would bow and tip his hat to the ladies like a proper gentleman and was regarded with real affection by Sedona’s residents.

Even though the book has a few of these historical tidbits scattered among the early pages, however, don’t waste your time seeking it out, as Keller’s memoir is actually more of a case study in gullibility and ignorance. In many instances the details of her supernatural experience are lifted straight out of the fakery of the turn-of-the-century spiritualist movement: “healers” pretending to be inhabited by “doctors” and faking a change in accent to prove their bona fides (see Conan Doyle); ranting about “etheric surgeons,” as if the Michelson-Morley experiment had never taken place; mediums who claimed to see countless supernatural beings around them that, conveniently, no one else could see; the dispension of vague banalities as revealed wisdom; and claims of individuals being haunted by the spirits of the dead seeking spiritual growth in some kind of generic afterlife. I was expecting someone to start regurgitating fake ectoplasm made from cotton-wool at any moment. Of course there were the usual references to eastern wisdom and the conflation of “energy fields” with oxytocin release by people who never bothered to realize the oxytocin molecule existed. It’s also full of examples of Keller working very hard to convince herself of things that never happened, such as witnessing levitation, and to rationalize being scammed over and over by wannabe gurus as a normal part of her spiritual development. She is even puzzled as to how her strict vegetarian friends who were so careful about what they put in their bodies could possibly die of cancer. I suppose it’s a minor miracle that she deigned to acknowledge the existence of cancer.

The book represents an astounding lack of critical thinking and thereby goes some way towards demonstrating just how the level of pseudoscience in Sedona today has become so excessive. Keller makes this most obvious when, after relating the large number of new age “treatments” that failed to have an effect on her ailments, she dismisses any idea that her experiments might have disproved their fatuousness with the line, “What works for one may not work for another.” And with that comment, all of science, rationality, and causality go out the window, because the entire point of the scientific method as applied to medicine is that what works for one does indeed work for another. With them go the entire Western intellectual tradition based in rationality and replication—thereby revealing the new age movement as a genuine attack on the Western tradition, humanity’s most significant achievement that most thoroughly embodies the potential and purpose of the species, as it denies the existence of the possibility of knowing at all. Instead, it substitutes superstition and a reverence for emotion-manipulating “leaders” for reason and responsible ethics rooted in reason.

Put Not Your Trust in Princes—As Always

Now that he’s safely out of office and doesn’t have to pander to his party’s bosses for his next appointment, Barack Obama is defying the Democratic Party orthodoxy by promoting the heretical idea that their lack of young, relatable candidates might be one reason they keep losing elections. As far as Sedona goes, that’s certainly why there are no young people on council, since young people in the West don’t join the party of big government and DORR currently has an organizational lock on voter organization in this town. Neither level of party organization, national or local, however, has any genuine intention of doing anything to diversify their candidate pool, which makes their continued employment of pro-youth, pro-worker, pro-family rhetoric absurd.

On that note, if the Sedona council wants a suggestion on its “needs of families” thing, which is none of government’s business, here’s one: The council and Sedona’s noncontributing population need to face up to the simple demographic fact that in order to make room for families, they themselves are going to have to leave. Furman said it once. He admitted it: those who retired here, including him and his colleagues, took up space that could otherwise have been taken up by families, which would have resulted in a more balanced population, a more vibrant and lively community—and maybe fewer STRs, too, for those who are obsessed with that. Either this group who pretends to be so concerned about the lack of families needs to sell up at an affordable price and take a hit for the greater good—which they have called on the public to do before—or they need to drop this rhetoric about how they want more families here. Put up or shut up.

Apparently Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t quite ready to stay dead after being knocked off. Consequently, we’re getting a fresh series of reminders of not simply the evil but the detachment of some of the world’s leading psychopaths. Royalty seem to be leading in their degree of alienation from normal humanity at the moment. The Crown Princess of Norway was at the head of the pack with her smirking over Epstein’s first conviction, but now the internet is agog over the “torture video” that Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem apparently provided to Epstein. Well, really, what did you think these obscenely wealthy Gulf potentates were doing with their free time if not making rape videos? To a psychopath, sexual actions are not about the pursuit of pleasure, but the pursuit of power. Power has no sexuality but power. And the long, long trainwreck that is Peter Mandelson has finally come to a screeching halt. That it took so long is merely more evidence of the cronyism of the Establishment.

I will remind everybody that none of the latest revelations involving the prince formerly known as York are anything new, no matter which set of “latest revelations” we are considering. Everybody knew forty years ago that Andrew was an unprincipled lecher; it simply wasn’t talked about. And when it was talked about, it was suppressed, such as the knowing reference in Sean Brady’s hilarious song “The Taioseach’s Hooley,” which was banned by Irish radio for its too-candid treatment of the royals:

Now Randy Andy’s lookin’ awful dandy:

Sure he’s out on the floor with Mr. Reagan’s Nancy!

But no one was ever going to do anything about “Randy Andy” while Mummy was alive to protect her dashing warrior princeling. Charles III’s approach of basically throwing his errant brother into the Tower, or the equivalent of immurement in the countryside, is positively medieval by comparison.

More importantly, let us not forget, in the horror-titillation of all these revelations of sexual details, just what was actually going on here. Epstein wasn’t simply a pervert, he was running a girls-and-cash-for-information scheme in both directions on an intercontinental scale. That is why these disclosures are rocking the bureaucracy and the corporatocracy: not the simple embarrassment, but the malfeasance. As with Manning and Snowden and the Panama Papers, once again the curtain has been pulled back on the barter-and-swap exchanges by which the big affairs of this world are managed and the sordid conscienceless behavior of the psychopaths who manage those exchanges. Such people truly do think the rest of us are meaningless animals.

There is no dark conspiracy by elites to take over the world, as some in Sedona are so ready to believe. That takeover already happened beginning five thousand years ago with the invention of coercive government, and it happened in plain sight and broad daylight. Our ancestors fought it—again and again they beat the men who would be kings—but thousands of years of grinding and technology changes wore them down. Now we have a functional global hegemony of psychopaths more totalitarian than anything that previously existed in human history. The question now is how much longer humans are prepared to tolerate it. Bring on the next global scandal that undermines the believability of autocracy.

In recognition of growing public disdain for and distrust in government, that element of the Establishment known as Gallup has announced that they are responding to consistent long-term declines in the approval ratings of politicians by simply ceasing to poll the public on the subject. Why, after all, would they allow the continued existence of an easy barometer for the rejection of tyranny? It’s actually quite similar to how the city of Sedona still has no budget survey up on its website even though the budget process is well underway.

Following the Haydn, Liang ran through three selections from Fanny Mendelssohn’s Das Jahr, offering her listeners musical tours of September and December as well as the work’s concluding postlude. The September section was low, brooding, and lavish, with the pianist being called upon to produce two very different sensations with each hand, the right tinkling lightly while the left struck in a slower, more powerful melody interlaced with the first theme. At one point both hands were even required to swap their respective roles, the technicalities offering Liang an opportunity again to display her flickering gossamer touch. The December movement, in contrast, was high and hurtling, a winter wind at play but not a bleak one. It was an embrace of winter, one that appeared to conclude with a warm, happy, simple false finish that exploded into a massive, rambunctious climax with satisfying chords. The postlude represented yet another change of pace, giving a reflective, austere conclusion.

Also on the program for the afternoon was Rautavaara’s Piano Sonata No. 2, “The File Sermon,” which indeed sounded every bit like a sermon in a very Calvinist church with its rolling, discombobulated, jarring bass, its deliberately exaggerated semitones amidst wild scampering, and the sort of crashing dissonances that I would play as a kid when angry or depressed. The result was a very effective picture of a sinner wrestling with God, all right, with Liang delivering an incredibly vivid performance and stunning speed that left her audience visibly staring.

The next installment in the St. Andrew’s “Shout for Joy” concert series will be an appearance by a fifty-strong contingent from the Notre Dame Glee Club on March 8, followed by the reappearance of former music director Dave Len Scott and his jazz trio for Mother’s Day. And, of course, we have Chamber Music Sedona bringing us the Junction Trio as well this Sunday, followed by Barrymore’s Ghost over at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre.

The Oscar Penas Trio played the Mary D. Fisher on Monday night with a mellow, timeless set that would have fit smoothly into a relaxing evening at any point from the 1950s to the present. “Spaghetti Western” was broody and bass before gradually picking up the pace like the sun pushing up over the horizon, with a haunting familiarity in some of the lines that was a common element in several of the band’s numbers. “Seismic Waves,” which Penas noted had been inspired by an earthquake in New York City and the subsequent panic of New Yorkers, was quite successful, urgent yet still pretty chill, scampering over itself. It would make a strong choice for choreography, with an abruptness to the rhythm that would pair well with visual movement. The standout of the evening was the trio’s rendition of Bill Frisell’s “Mandeville,” which could almost have been “Brazzaville” from its sound, steely and upbeat. There should have been dancing in the aisles—but then, this is Sedona.

That gang calling themselves the Sedona city council approved a zone change and development agreement for Basil and Mimi Maher’s 51-unit Goodrow Commons project adjacent to The Wilde during their Tuesday meeting. Comrade Meyer of community undevelopment informed the council that sufficient pressure on the project’s architects had succeeded in flattening the buildings’ rooflines, reducing the amount of height exemption that the project would require, as well as bringing the townhome portion of the project into compliance with massing rules. Building heights will exceed the land development code’s limits by amounts varying from eighteen inches to sixteen feet. “The permitted height went up and the proposed height went down,” Meyer said, referring to a separate rule change that had created increased height allowances for the buildings.

Maher clarified that contrary to a previous miscommunication, the affordability and short-term rental restrictions on the property would not run for the life of the project but would be limited to ten years, although he intended to disallow short-term rentals permanently on an unofficial basis and adjust rents as needed to keep them affordable as a matter of ethics rather than legality.

Architect Bruce Taylor claimed that he intended to design “a place for people, not a space for people,” but failed to address that by the very nature of an apartment complex, residents will not be able to make that space into a place for themselves, as they cannot modify it at will. His associate Pete Gilwalt carefully demonstrated that the proposed buildings would be almost entirely hidden by the Alkemista Meadery once built. Meyer added that the one-bedroom units would be 592 square feet, the two-bedroom-one-bath units 884 square feet, the two-bedroom-two-bath units 960 square feet, the two-bedroom townhouses 2,000 square feet, and the three-bedroom townhouses 2,200 square feet. Comrade Ploog in particular referred to the townhouses as “very luxurious and spacious.” Taylor proposed a possible start on construction this summer, with completion inside two years. City staff predicted an additional twenty to thirty cars per hour on Goodrow at peak times as a result of the project.

Council distinguished themselves with some particularly absurd statements during the discussion. Comrade Hosseini handed Meyer a lead to make the argument that the Villas on Shelby project had already been approved with a height of forty feet—so why not approve this project with just six inches more? It’s moments like this that the slippery slope argument doesn’t feel like a fallacy. Comrade Furman went off on a tangent about how in something he conceived of as modern design, bedrooms for kids didn’t necessarily all have to be large or the same size—where was he for the last several thousand years when buildings were built as a matter of course with oddly-shaped rooms and garrets and far more common sense? Comrade Dunn, who occupies a mere 5,100 square feet of her own, made the assumption that if two un-partnered individuals were to share a two-bedroom apartment, they would still need two parking spaces for two cars.

“While we can’t say that people won’t have cars, it’s a very logical possibility that they could live there and not need a car,” Taylor pointed out, referring to the site’s central location in West Sedona. Dunn found that argument—the city’s own, in effect—unconvincing and declared that residents would still own cars anyway and simply leave them parked all the time. She then blamed her fears on the city’s lack of a transit system. In what was possibly the most sane statement she has ever made in a public meeting, Meyer pointed out that the Pinon Lofts complex has averaged less than one car per unit registered with management.

Eight residents supported the project and two opposed it, with Comrade Swaninger of the state indoctrination system emphasizing his need for more industrial fodder and Comrade Key of the Chamber selfishly relating the project to his own personal needs as a “young professional.” Professional what? Ever seen him attempt to play the guitar? Neighbors Leonard Willis and Natasha Cain complained about the presumed effects of noise and light from the new buildings on themselves.

Councilors also accepted the proposed ten-year limitation on short-term rentals with some trepidation based on Maher’s assurances, with comrades Ploog and Furman threatening to haunt him should he reverse his position.

After showing a little respect for property rights—during which Comrade Pfaff made additional sub-fusc efforts to badmouth the Cultural Park revival effort without actually mentioning it—the council demonstrated once again how little respect they have for the residents who put them in those seats by deciding that “needs of families and seniors” would be the topic for the first of the planned “community conversations” at the library, which is scheduled for April 29. Comrade Spickard’s initial suggestion was “potential for wildfire,” but after some indecisiveness from Comrade Kinsella and Hosseini’s absurd attempt to shoehorn the ridiculously wasteful, luxurious, and effete recreation center proposal back into play, they settled on the families and seniors thing. The other suggested topics that Spickard offered were the Cultural Park, neighborhood connections, “building partnerships across organizations,” “climate resilience,” organizing the public to protest APS rate increases, transportation, and economic diversification.

After sitting through this discussion, one’s instinctive response was to ask if these people were insane, but of course they’re very sane, and their actions were very calculated, both as an insult and a matter of policy. Council clearly has no intention of listening to the community’s opinion on things that the community is actually pissed off about, like the size of the budget and staff, the existence of the sustainability department, the city’s absurd building and land codes, police brutality, the lack of city transparency, and council and staff’s attitudes of entitlement. These so-called listening sessions are going to be nothing but a series of time-wasting farces in which the council throws the public another sop of pretending to be interested so the public can feel engaged while the Leninists go about executing their own agenda with zero concern for the public will. It is impossible to witness these people’s hypocrisy and dishonesty in action without feeling periodic surges of rage at their revolting mendacity. They are so coldly, thoroughly evil in their animalistic quest for dominance, something that is far more alien to the human race than a human being who was actually from another planet ever could be.

Besides, the proposed conjoined topic is absurd. The only way to integrate the needs of families and seniors is through the abandonment of the modernist nuclear family and a return to the traditional, extended, multigenerational family in which the needs of seniors are part of the needs of the family, and council has no role to play in that process. In the current American paradigm, the needs of families are completely different from and opposed to those of seniors. The thing Sedona needs most with regard to seniors is for the seniors to make a free choice to move away and thereby make room for families and young people. Pete Furman said it: the members of the city council are all seniors who moved here and took up space in which families and workers would otherwise be living. This detached group of millionaires has absolutely no idea of the seething hatred which Sedona’s workers feel for them and their entitlement.

When they weren’t busy being a bunch of disdainful shitheads, council approved the pending zone change for Arts n’ One to allow the existing building to be converted to up to four apartments; gave staff permission to beg the federal government for another $2,455,876 in funding for the trailhead shuttles to keep barring locals from second homeowners’ neighborhoods; and agendized a discussion for February 24 to consider whether to delay further discussion with Sedona Cultural Park 2.0 until after the amphitheater survey results have been completed. Comrade Wagner claimed a 10 percent to 20 percent improvement for the microtransit service over the same month last year, which, given that 9 percent of riders at best are residents, means they managed to attract, at most, the patronage of sixteen new residents.

In legislative updates, Comrade Browne admitted that none of council’s dreams of STR restrictions are likely to be coming true this year. She then suggested that she was trying to get AirBNB officials to visit Sedona to show them how the community has allegedly been destroyed by it. Furman offered his own street, on which he always claims more than half the homes are STRs, as a location. If Browne does get these people up here, locals who benefit from STRs will have to make sure they get a chance to make the case for the other side. Fultz suggested that she challenge them to explain why, if most STRs are owned by second homeowners, Sedona’s population has gone down substantially. That one’s easy: It hasn’t. 10,162 in the 2000 census, 9,684 in the 2020 census, approximately 10,000 in community undevelopment’s latest estimates. A drop of 1 percent to 5 percent is not substantial and may not have even happened at all.

“There’s $5 million in PAC funding from AirBNB in an election year. What do you expect,” Ploog groused, and then had the audacity to imply that other cities like Page and Williams also view STRs as a devastating problem but can’t afford lobbyists, leaving Sedona to carry the torch for them. She expressed an interest in calling both mayors to find out.

“Include me in those conversations,” Browne directed her employer. The council never calls Browne on her continuous disrespect to them and Ploog even took the time during the meeting to praise her greed for power as being “passionate” about her job. The discussion also revealed that Browne, who rakes in about three times median income out of the pockets of the workers who wait on her, is able to own a house in Sedona.

Led by Comrade Kinsella, council performed a song-and-dance routine to agree to oppose HB2793, which would allow annexation notices to be posted electronically, as well as SB1027 and SB1167, which would allow government bodies to restrict their general posting of notices to their own websites. Comrade Christianson jumped in to protest that all the other members of the League of Cities and Towns were supporting these bills.

“More notice is better,” Comrade Pfaff said. “A lot of the people in our community aren’t computer savvy…I think they rely on print media, and I don’t want to cut those people out of the conversation.” He also tried to make an argument that the loss of notices would cause financial difficulties for small media outlets, not realizing how trivial the amounts that governments pay for notices in tiny print are compared to the cost of the entire operation.

“It’s never too late to go on record with the right thing,” Kinsella pontificated. This is the Ron Paul approach: they’ll oppose, it will likely pass, and then they’ll go ahead and pull the notices anyway while protesting that they protested. Additionally, council expressed eager support for SB1163, which would allow the city to increase its budget in the middle of a fiscal year, and opposition to SB1431, which would prevent municipalities from imposing aesthetic design standards on homes.

Tuesday’s meeting was further enlivened by a Moment of Art that consisted of Comrade Lattanzi and Mark Rounds reading a presentation on the history of art in Sedona to the council, with Lattanzi having apparently failed to find a local artist willing to participate. It was nothing short of an American tragedy to hear them meticulously reading off each artist’s highest-ever auction price in order to justify those artists’ inclusion and importance within materialistic American culture.

Rachael Collins appeared before the council again to point out the small hypocrisy with the city offering a hotel voucher program for the homeless—so far taken up by exactly one individual—administered by the police department while also working to criminalize the homeless, which makes it unlikely that any Sedona cop would have a positive encounter with a homeless individual that could lead to a voucher being handed out. “Back then in 2007 there was more tolerance in this community for anyone who was here whether they were housed or unhoused,” Collins lamented. “People are being labeled and determined to be unworthy.”

The Center for Public Safety Management LLC has been engaged by the city of Sedona to conduct a survey of the culture and working conditions within the Sedona police department. Make it an investigation, but don’t call it an investigation. All these investigations of Sedona’s incompetent and ill-behaved staffers are quite costly to the public treasury. The law firm of Gabriel & Ashworth, which conducted the Foley-Jablow investigation, billed the city on September 8 for $36,187.50, while Revolutionary HR Consulting billed the city $33,345 for the previous August’s Foley-Kwitkin investigation. In other words, the city is tossing sums equivalent to a working person’s income for a year at consultants to perform coverups and whitewashing rather than saving money by simply firing the bad actors. As Ken Dropek memorably remarked, “Oh, to be a consultant for the city of Sedona!”

On Wednesday, the councilors, who have yet to deign to conduct a citizen budget survey this year, heard a presentation from staff on how staff want a whopping $32,783,189 in capital improvement projects for fiscal year 2027, none of which are either needed or desired. Staff attempted to sell the package to council by touting it as a 25 percent reduction from last year. So, a 25 percent reduction in things that are completely unnecessary and could be eliminated entirely is something to rejoice over? The agenda bill for the occasion contained a particularly interesting and deceptive euphemism in which staff claimed that project schedules were being reduced “to avoid construction fatigue with the community,” meaning to avoid having to confront angry residents who don’t want project after project imposed on them. $10.3 million is slated for public works projects including more sidewalks the size of airport runways and staff’s Leninist attempts to reconstruct infrastructure to control resident behavior, $8.8 million to the unneeded and hypocritical sewage plant, and $1.7 million for the paramilitary—the better to abuse us, my dears. Comrade West confessed that staff were only able to burn through 71 percent of their FY25 budget.

The comrades on the Politburo naturally smiled on the proposals and spent the hour-and-a-half session discussing how they would possibly be able to figure out what they themselves were thinking. Comrade Dunn declared that the police should never get a low-priority ranking when it comes to choosing which staff at which to throw public money, claiming that “there’s risk to the people in the community.” Had she ever studied sociology, she would be well aware that most of the violence and therefore most of the risk to safety in American society is the work of the police, and she would also be aware that the police routinely fake evidence of so-called risk so as to provide justification for their increased budgets. Of course, she would also have been aware of the latter point had she managed to stay awake through the fakery of last year’s budget process.

The closest thing to sanity during the session came when Comrade Fultz pointed out the uselessness of the decision matrices staff had prepared and their lack of supporting data. “I just don’t find what we’re doing right now helpful at all because you don’t want to give us the detail of what’s in there,” Fultz pointed out. “So, I mean, unless just the overall total numbers just looked like something insanely outrageous in which we, you know, barfed all over it, I don’t know why we’re doing this. You’re not getting any feedback from us and we don’t know what it is that’s in there.” Staff promised to do better next year; of course they won’t.

Staff plans to review the proposed budget for next year with council on April 15.

Given the sheer number of snowflake food options we have in this town, perhaps what we really need for parity is a combination bistro and butcher shop that sells mostly meat. Just slabs or piles of tastily-seasoned meat with a scoop of potatoes or a hunk of bread. Lean meat, not fat. Simple, hearty peasant fare to feed the body and the brain, a science-based rejection of the organic scam and the vegetarian scam and the vegan scam and all the other fad diets that ignore the fact that human brain evolution occurred in tandem with and was powered by a high-meat or all-meat diet for efficiency. To reject a high-protein, high-meat diet is to reject the reality of human history and human uniqueness.

I understand there was a large game played with a pig’s bladder this past weekend. Contemplating football of any variety always leads me to think of the words uttered by Prince Mayo, the Japanese envoy, in a passage in the turn-of-the-century E. Phillips Oppenheim novel The Illustrious Prince in which he contrasts the differences between a culture of games and a culture of larger objectives:

I have been to every one of your great cities in the North. I have been there on a Saturday afternoon, the national holiday…How do I find the youth of your country engaged? I have discovered. It is for that purpose that I have toured through England. They go to see a game played called football. They sit on seats and smoke and shout. They watch a score of performers—one score, mind—and the numbers who watch them are millions. From town to town I went, and it was always the same. I see their white faces in a huge amphitheatre, fifteen thousand here, twenty thousand there, thirty thousand at another place. They watch and they shout while these men in the arena play with great skill this wonderful game. When the match is over, they stream into public houses. Their afternoon has been spent. They talk it over. Again they smoke and drink. So it is in one town and another,—so it is everywhere,—the strangest sight of all that I have seen in Europe. These are your young men, the material out of which the coming generation must be fashioned?…What do they know or care for anything outside their little lives and what they call their love of sport,—they who spend five days in your grim factories toiling before machines,—their one afternoon, content to sit and watch the prowess of others!…You are commercialized out of all the greatness of life. Forgive me, all of you, that I say it so plainly, but you are a race who are on the downward grade, and Japan seeks for no alliance save with those whose faces are lifted to the skies.

How many Americans sat on their fat pale arses on Sunday and watched? A hundred and twenty-five million. They did not compose a poem or a song, or craft some object of beauty, or conduct an experiment to add to the balance of knowledge of the species, or reach out a hand to aid another. They sat and watched, dead-in-life, coffined within their own bodies, rather than doing. The majority of the human species, at least in the developed world, has become the entertained rather than the entertainers, passive rather than active, supinely dependent rather than uncompromisingly independent—and that is an incredibly dangerous thing for the future.

This distinction between passive and active, entertained and entertainer, is in some degree reflected in and related to the historical decline in the modern world, and particularly in American culture, of sports and their replacement by games. A sport involves a practical skill being performed for recreational purposes; a game has no link to practical skill and is an invented form of pure recreation. As productive work has become progressively less a part of either daily life or economic activity, sports have declined, while games have flourished. Most of the activities that Americans consider to be sports—football, basketball, baseball—are games rather than sports, while most of the activities that are sports—riding, shooting, hunting, fishing, fencing, wrestling, boxing—are practiced by comparatively few Americans at all. Games tend to be played by teams, while in sports, individuals compete against one another. Games, and particularly team games, often involve balls, which, as objects with limited practical utility, play a small role in sports. Sports additionally tend to act as a means of preserving older skills, such as foraging techniques once the common heritage of humanity.

Of course, let’s not forget that American football is also a subtle version of a military training camp for boys, a post-Thayer artificial environment in which the physical layout and rules of the game allow the players to perform an idealized version of warfare as Sylvanus Thayer and Dennis Hart Mahan envisioned it: geographically limited and consisting of a limited set of prearranged maneuvers conducted without individual choice or initiative in obedience to central direction for the single purpose of increasing the amount of territory under one’s control.

Meanwhile, in academic research as opposed to Establishment scare tactics, a University of Colorado Anschutz study of 26,362 adults between the ages of 40 and 77 has found that lifetime cannabis use is associated with larger brain volumes and improved cognition. The researchers are nevertheless cautiously presenting their findings as showing the benefits of cannabis use for cognitive function in older adults and soft-pedaling the fact that the study’s participants were lifelong cannabis users and that the results therefore measured lifetime effects, including effects on cognitive development during youth. Indeed, the study’s published abstract, if not the university’s PR, makes this crystal clear:

Lifetime cannabis use was positively associated with regional brain volume in CB1-rich regions, including the caudate, putamen, hippocampus, and amygdala. Greater lifetime use was also linked to better performance in learning, processing speed, and short-term memory. Individuals reporting use limited to adolescence also showed larger regional volumes and better cognitive performance than non-users.

This passage is immediately followed by a concession to the standard narrative claiming cannabis use may pose risks “earlier in development” even though the authors just admitted they found no evidence of such risks. Nor has anyone else who avoided conflating cannabis use with real developmental problems in adolescence. This is where a basic understanding of science is always useful, so that one is clear that juvenile and adult bodies function the same way chemically, biochemically, and neurologically, and that there is not some kind of magical reversal at age 18 or any other age whereby substances that were formerly harmful become safe. A substance or action that produces chemical effects in one body will produce the same effects in another; if those effects are labeled either beneficial or harmful in one case, they must be labeled identically in another case. Period. Such is causality.

Before the concert, Maestro Will had encouragingly referred to Robert Schumann as an entirely incompetent orchestrator who had had to make his music “thick” to compensate for his own technical deficiencies. He added that under the circumstances, it was weird that the orchestration of the cello concerto had turned out to be perfectly balanced. The composer might have succeeded in this case with the orchestration, but less so with the thematic content, which showed a distinct lack of ideas. The cello and strings began the first movement together in a rich, ominous darkness into which soloist Gabriel Martins dropped interspersed outrage and despair. Schumann had left the cello exposed much of the time in a manner reminiscent of the eighteenth-century classical classical approach, but without the orchestral interactions with the ensemble that were key to sustaining interest in those earlier works. The more interesting parts of the concerto were certainly the 18th century-style eruptions.

Marked “langsam,” the second movement included more approachable moments for the cello, in which it had the opportunity to wax warm and loving while the rest of the ensemble kept butting in. The third movement represented an attempt at boldness and excitement but did not quite achieve it. Every so often, the composer attempted to develop a motif before dropping it, and towards the end, he made an effort to lighten the mood, briefly lifting thematic ideas from earlier works or giving the impression of doing so. The climax was the best part of the performance, the technical weaknesses of which were due to the composer’s writing rather than the Symphony’s playing, which was thoroughly satisfying.

“If you’re from Seattle where I’m from, you know the gray, you know the drizzle,” Maestro Will warned the crowd in regard to the thematic content of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3, the “Scottish Symphony” inspired by Mendelssohn’s visit to the Highlands, but there was almost none of either gray or drizzle in the Symphony’s performance, only occasional cloudbursts sweeping across an epic landscape. They opened with a beautiful balance of sound in the entry and some enchanting string playing into which the woodwinds intruded so subtly as to almost startle the listener, followed by a striding surge of power at the introduction of the second theme and its associated infectious, simple melodies. The orchestra handled the changes in dynamic levels neatly and even improved in the reprise, showing strong fusion and appearing to be at their most comfortable and responsive. Maestro Will even brought a bit of drama for the audience with his freedom and fluidity—and impressed by going scoreless as well. Here was the lushness promised for but absent from the first half of the concert, and it was fiery and intoxicating.

The ecstatic impression left by the first movement carried over into the sparkling joy of the second movement, which also served as a distinct contrast to the Beethoven-esque dark confidence of the first, full of verdant, springlike moments and the promise of tomorrow. Maestro Will was practically dancing the orchestra through the Highland fling with his energy and enthusiasm, delivering an absolutely terrific ride. The third movement was when the mists rolled in across the landscape, as if Mendelssohn had decided to swap the usual emotional structure of second and third acts. The moodiness set the stage for the emergence of a gentle warmth as a hedge against the grayness outside the bothy before the music grew march-like, led by the brass and winds, with a noble dignity emerging from some moments of travail. Amid the return of the ensemble in a surge, it was still possible to make out the fine details of the playing in the violin section.

Maestro Will brooked no delay in launching the final movement, almost taking the Symphony by surprise, but they kept up and delivered solid, substantial playing while also keeping the music fast and crisp. There was that unmistakable feel of country fiddles scraping away at a dance; there was also great power under great control, a conjunction that especially made itself felt as the orchestra lingered down the long diminuendo leading into the symphony’s immense, glorious climax like crepuscular rays punching through thunderheads over the Grampians. The transcendence of those final moments was almost literally breathtaking, as if the music had drawn the listeners out of themselves and into itself—reminding them, however briefly, of the smallness of humanity in the face of the ideal and the greatness of humanity when it reaches for the ideal. Sometimes fire does come down from heaven.

Walking into SPAC for one of Maestro Will’s pre-concert talks and seeing the stage set up for the orchestra is itself a a purifying experience, like walking into an old college library or lecture hall. Here the nonsense is stripped away and the ideal, the purpose of humanity, is placed at the center. Here the reality of truth and fact dissolve the trash of materialistic distraction. As Dorothy Sayers wrote of Oxford and the Oxford ideal,

Here, then, at home, by no more storms distrest,

Folding laborious hands we sit, wings furled;

Here in close perfume lies the rose-leaf curled,

Here the sun stands and knows not east nor west,

Here no tide runs; we have come, last and best,

From the wide zone through dizzying circles hurled,

To that still centre where the spinning world

Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.

Lay on thy whips, O Love, that we upright,

Poised on the perilous point, in no lax bed

May sleep, as tension at the verberant core

Of music sleeps; for, if thou spare to smite,

Staggering, we stoop, stooping, fall dumb and dead,

And, dying so, sleep our sweet sleep no more.

Coming up, mark your calendars for Chamber Music Sedona and the Junction Trio on February 15, preceded by the Oscar Penas Trio at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre on February 9. In SIFF’s efforts to revive live theatre in our community, Barrymore’s Ghost will run at the Mary D. Fisher from February 13 through 15, while at this year’s edition of the Sedona Arts Center’s Vision & Sound exhibition, attention is suggested to Elizabeth Denneau’s biting “They Will Never Pick You.”

The relationship of truth and beauty on the one hand and materialism on the other was in question again at the Planning and Zoning Commission on Tuesday as the commission approved a new three-year conditional use permit for the Cloth & Flame event venue up at the Sedona Airport. In spite of sixty-one neighbors submitting objections to approval of the venue’s original CUP on the grounds that the noise, which would be below legal levels, was unbearably offensive to them, in the year and a half since the permit was granted, the city has received no noise complaints attributable to Cloth & Flame.

“They’ve done an exceptional job in doing what they already promised to do, and not everybody does that,” Will Hirst noted.

Glen Baker of Panorama Boulevard claimed that the audible noise in the area from the venue—cited by one of his neighbors as being less than 43 decibels, or equivalent to birdsong—was “jeopardizing the lifestyle that I chose and invested here,” placing his own interests above those of the thousands of others who might want to enjoy the venue. “I believe in embracing the arts”—but not in his own backyard, he didn’t add. Comments included in the commission’s packet for the occasion also expressed continued opposition to the venue from other property owners in the area combined with an awareness that they have no legal grounds for complaint and outrage at the fact that they have no legal grounds for complaint.

As anyone who’s talked to people who have lived in Sedona for the long-term can attest, these sort of neighborhood cabals bent on selfishly destroying venues are why we don’t have much in the way of live performances in this town anymore. Harassment from one crazy old bat in Vista Montana killed Martini Bar. Selfish whining neighbors helped the city to kill Studio Live. This isn’t new, but it’s also destructive and completely antithetical to Sedona’s values.

Let’s be very clear: Sedona is a city animated by the arts. Most of us moved here because we appreciate, participate in, and support the arts. We do not appreciate these individuals who do not support Sedona’s values and who are in fact out to destroy those values. Why would someone who hates music and art move to an arts town in the first place except out of a sadistic desire to ruin the lives of others? The great value of having these permits come up for renewal—although permits should never be required either to do business or have fun—is that the process identifies those who do not share Sedona’s ethos, the Philistines among us, the barbarians within the gates. In a small city filled with arts uses, pretty much everyone will be abutting a venue of some kind, or should be, and should not only get used to it but embrace it.

There are two general principles involved here. The first is that self-interest can never outweigh the voluntary consideration of the welfare of others; to propose that it can is a fundamentally immoral suggestion. The second is that musical participation is biochemically and neurologically inseparable in humans from cognition, empathy, sociality, creativity, cooperation, freedom, and every other quality that is commonly associated with ethical behavior, and any attempt to suppress musical participation must therefore be viewed as an attack on the defining qualities of the human species and thus on humanity itself.

Neighboring residents’ comments submitted to P&Z also harped on the idea that the venue would exclusively serve tourists rather than residents, an unsupported fallacy, and emphasized that for that reason it should not be permitted, thereby implying that tourists’ needs are inferior to residents’ needs and that tourists are therefore inferior to residents, making some animals more equal than others.

The commission then moved on to considering early suggestions for reform of the city’s land development code during a discussion that revealed promising ideas for revision on the part of the commissioners, an ongoing and problematic willingness to coerce to achieve aesthetic results, and at least some small degree of awareness of the cognitive dissonance between ethical behavior and achieving one’s desired outcome.

Community development director Comrade Allender explained that the LDC is planned to go through a two-month “code critique” process in the near future, although the process is unlikely to begin until April. “We want to get as many opinions as possible,” Allender said, expressing an eagerness to cut out everything in the code not justifiable and inviting residents to send him lists of problems they have encountered with it. In the long run, he added, he planned to send the public comments out to a consultant to revise the entire LDC, which could take an additional twelve months.

“My hope is we find a way to simplify,” Kali Gajewski said. “Our code is incredibly limiting and complicated. It’s expensive. It causes divisions in our community…our code’s scary. I’ve been through our code through two major projects. Still scary…there’s a lot of data to support simplification.”

“In the 1900s, development happened organically,” Rob Smith said. “Factories were down by the river. Where the beautiful places were was expensive homes…you have a bakery of one story next to a four-story apartment building. It’s what we like. As time went on, municipalities, government if you will, decided we’re going to try to control and dictate what happens.”

“You can’t legislate beauty,” Smith emphasized. “How much do we think the city should control design and try to control the Sedona look? I think this code came out by trying to control and get all the buildings to look the same.”

He then went after one of the worst and most common undesign features in modern building in general, Sedona included: “Some of the most beautifully-laid out homes have a carport…now we legislate we have to have garage doors and, by golly, maybe three garage doors, and when you put three garage doors facing the street it takes up maybe half the property…Are the residential areas nicer with three garage doors and a sidewalk that goes around to the side?”

“We’re trying to draw more youth, and today’s youth doesn’t want something that all looks the same,” Jo Martin pointed out.

“Do you think that Sedona needs to dictate design standards?” Smith asked Allender.

“Yes and no,” Allender temporized, making the argument that city staff would have to use the rules as a “guardrail” to cut out architects whom they felt didn’t have “that same respect for sense of place.” “We have to create a minimum framework because we have to anticipate not everybody is going to think like you.” The trouble here is that the city is not an appropriate arbiter for making such decisions.

“Owners should be able to do what they want to do…with guardrails,” Wiehl agreed.

In the most promising suggestion yet about getting back to a small-town environment, Martin raised the topic of removing asphalt pavement altogether and going to decomposed granite, pointing out the hypocrisy involved in the city’s pretense of sustainability while paving over Sedona.

Last Wednesday, that gang calling itself the Sedona city council made four new appointments to the city sewing circle known as the Tourism Advisory Board: Julie Richard, Brett Labit, Lars Romig, and Gregory Stein. Three of the one and one of the other, in effect. Richard and Labit were selected for four-year terms and Romig and Stein for two-year terms. The board also interviewed Tracy Randall, who was not selected. Of the candidates, four expressed a vision of Sedona limited to its physical geography.

“I’m very biased. I think people predominantly come here for the red rocks and the trails,” Randall said. “The assets are the beautiful natural landscapes,” Labit said, and also suggested promoting the words “serenity,” “rejuvenation,” and “inspiration.” Romeg, a prominent opponent of public access to public lands, described Sedona’s assets as “the recreation…you can really access all of the rocks trails from pretty much every neighborhood so you don’t have to get in the car that much,” thereby portraying Sedona as the ideal destination for the lazy. “Mainly the visitors here are looking for hiking and biking...they’re just looking for the scenery,” Stein agreed.

Randall proposed “amenities at the trailhead,” by which she meant allowing or encouraging businesses to set up shop and sell things to “folks who are coming off the trail.” She also claimed that “the trails need a lot of work,” a Leninist hallucination that professional expertise is required to maintain them. Trails are created by people walking on them; if people choose not to walk on them, they don’t need work.

Labit advocated trying to attract high-spending shoppers from Scottsdale. “I’m sure the city could use the budget,” he said regarding tax collections, as if Sedona’s budget, the highest or second-highest for any city of its size in Arizona, could possibly need to get any bigger. He dropped in the buzzwords “a lower impact on the environment and more sustainability,” and in discussing the arts, his approach was all business: “We certainly could compete with an Aspen or a Vail or Santa Fe or a Scottsdale. Scottsdale’s art district is troubled.” He then confirmed that young people generally choose not to buy expensive art and that the high-end art buyer demographic is simply disappearing.

Romig took the opportunity to repeat the lie that Sedona receives “3.3 million visitors” when in fact it receives only about 1.39 individual visitors annually, a significant portion of whom are Yavapai and Coconino county residents and therefore not tourists. He described the ideal visitor as “people that want to get intimate with the landscape”—on a previous occasion he equated all tourists with terrorists—and said his reason for applying was that “I want to keep it pristine for myself, but I also enjoy sharing.” Labit had similarly said, “I want to do my part selfishly. I have businesses here that I think will benefit from my involvement.”

Stein, who is a Sedona Ranger, suggested that “the city needs to put more effort into debunking some of the misinformation on the web,” such as telling people that they cannot drive under Devil’s Bridge, and suggested that his “being a non-resident would improve the image of the board.”

Richard was the only candidate who had a clear message for the council and the only one who emphasized the importance of arts in Sedona’s tourism. “All it was was pictures of photos of red rocks. And there’s a lot more to Sedona than than pictures of red rocks,” Richard said of the city’s tourism website. “I think the nonprofit arts community, of course, is the very best asset…cultural tourists are the right kind of tourists. They’re the kind of tourists who stay longer and spend more money. It’s been documented over and over again. Sedona can draw those kinds of people. We at the art center are very much a tourism organization.”

“Funding begets events and festivals. I would love to see more um more dedicated festivals. I really would,” Richard added before committing sacrilege by calling out the absence of arts in the city’s holy sustainable tourism plan prepared by the flawless staff.

“You want me to be honest or political?” she asked the council when invited to comment on the plan.

“Honest is preferred,” Comrade Furman said.

“Both. And don’t tell us which is which. Let us figure that out,” Comrade Kinsella urged.

“I’d say it’s very measured,” Richard said. “It doesn’t really talk about what we want to do here. I think that there’s a lot of room for vision.”

“What you said was that the plan doesn’t address what we want to do here. What do we want to do here?” Kinsella asked.

“Well, I think we want to focus on cultural tourism,” Richard explained. “We really want to shine a spotlight on the arts that exist here. And by doing that, that is going to not only help the nonprofit arts and culture community here, but also the galleries and the shops and the retail and the hotels and everything else. That all comes with it. That also elevates the community so it becomes a more desirable place for people to visit.”

“Do you think that there is an aspect of Sedona that should be marketed other than the arts? A particular aspect. Other than the arts,” Kinsella pursued.

“The scenery and hiking, excuse me, and the outdoor aspects of what we have here are kind of interwoven into what we’re already doing,” Richard pointed out.

The dishonesty of the city council with regard to the Sedona Cultural Park is continuing with ongoing efforts by one or more members of council to discredit the revival project on social media. On Monday, the board of SCP 2.0 sent the members of the city council a document containing their comments and suggestions regarding the upcoming public survey on the amphitheater’s reopening. Within a few hours, that document appeared on NextDoor, posted by well-known concentration camp advocate Sean Smith, who also made a number of comments attacking the SCP 2.0 suggestions.

The question at first was which of the comrades on council decided to feed Smith the document. We know the unlamented Jablow used to pass information to Smith for astroturfing purposes, and the rumor mill has it that Comrade Pfaff is still willing to be Jablow’s tool for some reason. Smith, incidentally, later apologized for spreading misinformation in his comments. Meanwhile, Pfaff, who had been absent from NextDoor along with the remainder of council since the Jablow fiasco in September and council’s reappraisal of its rules of ethical conduct, abruptly rejoined NextDoor in order to confirm that he had forwarded the document to Smith and to deny there was any impropriety in his doing so.

To the average person, this looks like yet another smarmy attempt to influence a ballot initiative. It was, of course, completely coincidental that the “number of others with whom I regularly discuss Sedona-related matters” to whom Pfaff forwarded the email included an individual known to have consistently been used as a shill by council and staff, one who immediately reacted to the document by publicly attacking its proposals. One wonders what the likelihood would have been of Pfaff sending the document to a group including individuals likely to support the amphitheater revival.

What the members of the city council seem to fail to understand is that by running for and being elected to office, they have agreed to place the views of the public, their constituents, who put the council in office to enact public policy, above their own. Once they take their seats, for the next four years, they have no views other than those of the public as expressed through the democratic process. It is completely inappropriate for the council or its members to express any opinion whatsoever either for or against the amphitheater until they have been informed by the public as to what the public’s majority opinion is.

The Sedona Peace Force group has announced that they have rescheduled their ACLU training and speaker session for March 7 at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, with the event to run from 10 AM to 5 PM. More details to follow.

The all-American city council of Cottonwood, led by its city manager from the People’s Republic of California, voted on January 20 to purchase a new tank, specifically a Lenco Bearcat, on the grounds that their old one, a 2012 model, was too old. In context, I will point out that their Leninist counterparts in Cuba quite successfully employed the T-34 tank from 1960 until at least 2018 to keep their own population in submission. Cottonwood could use a lesson in fiscal responsibility from the Cubans, it seems. The new tank will be paid for with a $100,000 handout from the state of Arizona, and will not actually be a new tank, but a lightly used tank to be transferred from another Arizona paramilitary agency. Presumably its braking system will continue to function, which Cottonwood’s staffers claim is the problem with the current tank.

It’s always nice when the Leninists are candid about their totalitarianism. The agenda bill for the purchase described the old tank openly as “a decommissioned military armored vehicle” and “a 2012 decommissioned military platform.” It makes it so much better to know that our public employees and servants are being honest about their plans to use military force on us—oh, wait, how did Bakunin put it? “When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called ‘the people’s stick’.” The open militarism also dovetails with Joe Butner’s description of the Camp Verde marshals as paramilitary and Ed Mezulis’s fantasies about the Sedona fire department being a paramilitary organization—not according to the Third Geneva Convention, darling. Against their militaristic candor we might recall the words of the early constitutions of Pennsylvania and North Carolina: “As standing armies in time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up.”

A just-resigned state official named Virginia Rountree has demonstrated once again the heights of inanity to which bureaucrats can routinely rise during her testimony, so-called, before the legislature on health insurance fraud: “As a result of the fraud, you know, all kinds of actions had to be taken in order to stop it and that’s important and we have to continue to take actions and use our tools and our processes to ensure that we are mitigating as much as possible fraud, waste, and abuse in the system.” Riveting, Virginia. I am floored by your grasp of detail. “All kinds of actions”? What were they? “That’s important”? Thank you, Captain Obvious, for noting that one of the few modern crimes humans have actually considered to be a crime for thousands of years is a bad thing. “We have to continue to take actions”—such as? “Our tools and our processes”—which ones? “As much as possible”—how much? What’s your numbers goal? There’s nothing there. She wasn’t saying anything. Her words are completely devoid of content. And this is a woman who was getting paid at least $176,000 a year out of our tax dollars to condescend to those in need and waste the legislature’s time.

It’s worth noting that the same behavior was displayed by the character of Lord Dorwin in Asimov’s Foundation, where it was hilariously demonstrated via mathematical analysis:

I had thought his Lordship a most consummate donkey when I first met him—but it turned out he was actually an accomplished diplomatist and a most clever man. I took the liberty of recording all his statements…When Holk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications—in short, all the goo and dribble—he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out.

Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion, didn’t say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed.

Anyone who’s ever spent a few minutes listening to Chamber figurehead David Key rattle on knows that he does exactly the same thing: empty buzzword followed by contentless platitude followed by filler euphemism. Where’s the Golgafrincham B Ark when you need it?

In what should be a humiliating commentary on how spoiled and effete Americans have become, The Times has now pointed out that almost 40 percent of Stanford undergraduates are claiming to be disabled to get housing perks or, more troublingly, exemptions from classwork. With laziness comes cynicism, triviality, and materialism, as the article’s author admits:

At Stanford, almost no one talks about the system with shame. Rather, we openly discuss, strategise and even joke about it. At a university of savvy optimisers, the feeling is that if you aren’t getting accommodations, you haven’t tried hard enough…Some “disabilities” are just downright silly. Students claim “night terrors”; others say they “get easily distracted” or they “can’t live with others”. I know a guy who was granted a single room because he needs to wear contacts at night. I’ve heard of a girl who got a single because she was gluten intolerant.

The gaming even extends to our meals. Stanford requires most undergraduates living on campus to purchase a meal plan, which costs $7,944 for the 2025-26 academic year. But students can get exempted if they claim a religious dietary restriction that the college kitchens cannot accommodate.

And so, some students I know claim to be devout members of the Jain faith, which rejects any food that may cause harm to all living creatures—including small insects and root vegetables. The students I know who claim to be Jain (but aren’t) spend their meal money at Whole Foods instead and enjoy freshly made salads and other yummy dishes, while the rest of us are stuck with college meals, like burgers made partly from “mushroom mix”.

And this being Stanford, of course, these are the future elites being groomed to become the Randian techbros of tomorrow, optimizing the planet for themselves at the expense of humanity and sanity.

Historian Ken Burns is apparently out demonstrating how little he knows about American history by declaring that “we have sanitized the American Revolution”—true enough—but attributing the sanitation process to “an understandable fear that if somehow we reveal how dark and bloody it is, that it will somehow diminish those big ideas.” In other words, because the realism of war offends the snug sensibilities of modern Americans. By making a statement like that, Burns reveals to what degree he is part of the problem of the received narrative. The Revolution hasn’t been sanitized because it was unaesthetic, it’s been sanitized because the idea of the people overthrowing their government is very, very frightening to those in government, who have tried to write that idea out of history. As early as the second half of the nineteenth century, the new public school districts, the imposition of which was fiercely resisted by many Americans, were publishing textbooks in which they declared that the age-old right to revolution no longer existed—that it had come to an end with the establishment of the United States and citizens no longer had any right to resist the government. It was such maneuvers to erase the right to revolution that led the early authors of dystopian fiction to speculate on whether the Declaration of Independence would one day be banned in schools: “When, in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another…”

Much of the concert was a celebration of the irrepressible John Williams, beginning with a smooth rendition of the main theme from Star Wars, with plenty of power from the brass and strong leadership from Latshaw. A Navajo cousin of R2D2 made a cameo appearance. The “Imperial March” was delivered with a vigor that shook the auditorium, possibly at the expense of how much energy the horns had to allot to “Princess Leia’s Theme,” although the violins delivered a nice vibrato in the latter. Things improved for the brass during the theme from Jurassic Park, where the horns came through more strongly, and which the orchestra gave a gritty, gripping finish. “Adventures on Earth” from ET was somewhat less subtly handled than some of the other pieces on the menu, but the Symphony tackled the tricky beginning very capably, while their rendition of “Across the Stars” from one of George Lucas’s money-making enterprises recalled the elegant string passages of Philip Glass.

Naturally, the program included Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” used in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the other Strauss’s “Blue Danube.” The orchestra played a bit of the score from Somewhere in Time, which Latshaw quite properly declared to be “literally unwatchable,” as the film, set in 1912, features Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” which was not composed until 1934. Star Trek selections included the themes from Galaxy Quest, short but full of promise and inspiration, and Michael Giacchino’s Star Trek: Into Darkness score, vastly more invigorating and uplifting when heard live. The encore, to everyone’s delight, was “Ghostbusters.”

The show even included two pieces with Sedona connections. John Williams originally composed the horn solo in “Princess Leia’s Theme” for a horn player named David Cripps, who subsequently relocated to northern Arizona to become a professor at NAU—and, for five years, the conductor of the Verde Valley Sinfonietta, now our Sedona Symphony. The second half of the concert also included the profoundly majestic, noble main theme from Apollo 13, composed by James Horner, who studied at Verde Valley School, where his music teacher was founding VVS director Russell Fox. This is the kind of music we need to bring back to the Cultural Park for a summer concert beneath the stars.

The Sedona Symphony opens its spring programming this weekend with Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony, guest cellist Gabriel Martins, and a solo role for concertmaster Sara Schreffler. Celebrate Sedona is scheduled for next Friday, February 6, pianist Tiantian Ling will offer a recital at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church on the afternoon of February 8, and Chamber Music Sedona will be back on February 15, when the Junction Trio will play Beethoven and Schubert piano trios.

And now for something completely different, the Sedona International Film Festival has announced this year’s festival lineup, which will kick off with a live performance of Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground at SPAC on February 20. Other interesting items on the menu include The Renaissance Prince, a documentary on a modern Baroque artist; a guest appearance by Broadway lyricist Marc Shaiman; an appearance by Marilyn Monroe impersonator Samantha Stevens; a screening of Georges Melies films accompanied by a live ensemble; and a timely collection of prison documentaries. Special attention is suggested to Creede U.S.A., a documentary about a 300-person mining town with its own repertory theatre, on February 25 and 27, and The Cowboy on February 27 and 28.

If you ever thought that gang calling themselves the Sedona city council and their hired bravos were a pack of deceitful, sleazy, manipulative liars, you were right. They gave fresh proof of that this Tuesday when staff cautiously unveiled, under the guise of reviewing parking management plans, a new proposal to install license plate readers to track residents’ vehicles on Smith, Wilson, Van Deren, and Price between Schnebley Road and Forest Road in Uptown. The cameras were ostensibly presented as part of staff’s plan to discriminate against visitors by instituting resident-only parking permits for those streets.

Comrade Wagner claimed the data collected “is slated to be used solely for our parking operations” and “cannot be used for non-parking use or shared with or connected to any other databases,” but discussed no examples of real controls on the data that would be a matter of physical infrastructure rather than policy and mentioned no opportunities for citizen oversight of the system.

Comrade Ploog introduced the topic of the council getting the pants beat off them by the community over the Flock spycams. “The company was here and told us they didn’t share the data with anybody, and then we found out that was not correct…How can you assure us that the companies who would respond to our RFP would hold our data exclusively for our use?”

“It would be part of the contract,” Wagner assured her.

“Didn’t seem to work with the other company,” Ploog observed.

Comrade Dunn pointed to language in staff’s proposed policy that referred to “any data sharing with outside agencies,” contradicting staff’s previous assertions the data would not be shared, and Comrade Christianson admitted that the data could also be subpoenaed, although he dismissed the chance as “slim.”

“This is not an attempt to repeat the Flock camera fiasco,” Ploog claimed. In a demonstration of how careful the city was being about whitewashing its latest attempt at day-to-day surveillance, she touted Flock spycam opponent Mik Jordahl’s presence on the parking work group, pretending that it would ensure that “concerns about the cameras are going to be addressed.” Wagner claimed that Jordahl has already made his peace with the city’s Leninists and expressed support for the proposal. He and his associates are apparently so ready to connive at spycams from a different corporation that they’re planning to throw a party tomorrow evening to celebrate.

“License plate readers are okay with me. This is a different situation than having license plate readers out on streets,” Comrade Furman opined. Nevertheless, he added, “What is the problem we’re trying to solve?…We have other residents that say there’s no problems here.”

“I’m okay with the plate readers,” Pfaff said.

“We should make sure we’re not arbitrarily getting license plates” from street parking, Dunn quibbled.

Staff further tried to nudge council toward charging fees for the replacement of parking permit placards as a means of penalizing short-term rentals, although Comrade Dickey admitted in his confusion that they have not decided if the program would utilize a placard or a “virtual permit” yet. Wagner also claimed that a quarter to a third of parking demand in Uptown resulted from employees and that stopping businesses’ employees from parking in Uptown would be the best way to reduce crowding.

Resident comments included in the council’s packet for the meeting told a much more skeptical story about the purported need for parking management in Uptown than the one Wagner tried to present:

• “I don’t think parking permits for the street in front of your own property are necessary and the town is definitely overthinking this. Many of your silly rules to try to curb STRs actually make it harder for actual residents to live here.”

• “We’ve wasted enough money on a parking garage, so please don’t waste more money on this.”

• “Having lived here for 22 years, I see a noticeable pressure for more government, more regulations, more laws…and of course more hiring in an expanding city hall. It is lamentable to me, and unnecessary.”

• “Years ago when John O’Brien was head of community development and treated residents with kindness and openness he held a neighborhood meeting at the Uptown Wayside Chapel regarding Van Deren. The businesses on 89A wanted it for employee parking. John said if we the residents would support it, the city would promise not to infringe into our neighborhoods. Seems the city does not hold to its promises.”

• “I have never had trouble finding parking when I want to go into Uptown if I drive. There’s always been adequate parking. I was strongly opposed to this Uptown garage. I can’t imagine the difficulty it’s gonna cause going in and out of my neighborhood.”

• “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. There’s no problem parking on Smith. Guests, relatives, friends, parties, all these are concerns when we start regulating life. There’s enough regulations and restrictions happening in this country. Why are we trying to restrict life? I am not in favor of any permits.”

• “We do not have problems with vacation rentals…They are no problem for anyone, so why are you interfering and deliberately wanting to cause a problem that does not exist?…Sedona is like Congress: make up a problem so they can spend money and hire another employee to solve it. Is it any wonder we do not attend public meetings, as there is no trust between the city and many residents anymore, let alone faith to do the right thing.”

• “Stop limiting and controlling the residents. You are working against us and killing the quality of life for residents.”

• “I feel this creates more drama and implementing something like this creates more harm than good. We rely on tourism in Sedona. Don’t make it more difficult for people to visit.”

• “I believe we have adequate parking garages and spaces in Uptown. I’m not sure why this even went through.”

• “Provide more information on long-term benefits for local residents and business, rather than rush a vote for financial gain.”

• “This is so very unfair of the city to do this to residents.”

• “While you are at it, get rid of the parking meters on 89A Uptown and on Jordan. All it does is piss people off, residents and visitors.”

• “This completely unnecessary program should not affect our property because it is not located on one of the streets in question.”

• “With the loss of parking lot 1 and the distance [to] the garage, the businesses on Jordan Road only have street parking. People won’t walk up the hill from the big lot on Schnebly, so if we also lose street parking it means many businesses may not make it. This would be a major hit to the non-main street business or those [not] within use range of the parking garage.”

• “No one is going to walk from the new parking garage, it’s too far away; therefore they’ll either take customers’ parking spaces or find a different job.”

• “These are public streets in an area surrounded primarily by commercial properties, rather than a residential neighborhood. At this time, we’re not aware of any traffic or parking issues in these streets...The individuals parking along these streets are not causing disruptions or contributing to traffic concerns, as far as we can tell.”

Interestingly enough, given all the obvious community hatred of the garage, Ploog admitted at one point during the evening that the residents had in fact been opposed to the garage at the time of the council’s approval of the project and that the vanguardists overrode the public will in the interest of what they thought was the good of the community.

A new survey on the Sedona Cultural Park will be going ahead sometime in March after council directed staff to engage the services of an outside polling firm to answer the question of whether the community does indeed want the amphitheater reopened or not. The survey will be conducted by HighGround, Inc., will be conducted by direct mail to each registered voter in Sedona, and will take approximately thirty days to complete at a cost of $10,750. The city’s new minister for propaganda, Comrade Maffitt, told council that staff recommended HighGround not for their expertise or reputation for impartiality but rather for “their willingness to listen better” to and “work within the direction” of city staff.

“It was an exciting, wonderful thing that brought money to the city. I don’t understand what the city is interested in spending money on a survey,” Anna Bridenbaugh said of the Cultural Park. “The people don’t want parking there. And now you want to build on it, which just boggles my mind. Why would you build residential housing on such a beautiful property that could be profitable to the city?…We have already said we want this park back.”

“Let the initiative stand, get a vote from the city to make a determination, and then it’s out of your hands and you can support whatever the outcome is,” said Robert Koster, who is now leading the anti-housing initiative to block residential development of the park. He added that it was quite easy to make the results of any survey say whatever the person commissioning the survey wanted them to say.

“I am convinced that council in total is not fully informed on what the proposal is for bringing the amphitheater back…they’re very clear about it being a nonprofit entity that would be operating there under a lease to the city,” Fultz commented. He had previously proposed that the city give SCP 2.0 a letter of intent to explore concrete proposals on which council could then decide. “This is a very premature item to be considering…I would actually prefer to just see us defer this question indefinitely until such time as we have a better picture.”

“We don’t know enough. The very basic question has to be asked,” Pfaff said.

Comrade Furman made a spectacle of himself by revealing that he had never read either the results of the city’s January 2025 rigged survey on Cultural Park uses, the subsequent Red Rock News story about the survey, or the related Red Rock News editorial about the survey being rigged. But never fear—with this “new” information in front of him, he was immediately able to zero in on the conclusion that survey respondents had not seen a need for a “larger amphitheater” than the Antonsen Pavilion at Posse Grounds. What amphitheater? The Antonsen Pavilion is a field. It is not an amphitheater. Thanks, Pete, for brilliantly catching yet another of the misrepresentations in year-old data that invalidate that data. He then declared that the reason the city should do the survey would be to head off the initiative by showing an absence of support for it, and that if the initiative did appear on the ballot, the city would be certain to lose. Comrade Hosseini agreed that if council were to fail to have a plan to present as an alternative to the initiative, “then we’re sunk.”

“If we do nothing between now and then, it’s gonna be a fear campaign,” Furman predicted. “That is the easiest thing to win in a political environment…everyone resonates with fear ideas.” Strange how he never seems to think about that in relation to spycams.

Comrade Dunn, in her most elitist fashion, claimed that it would be impossible to conduct an accurate survey “because we don’t have the information citizens need to make an informed decision”—of course, we must be guided by what she thinks is the relevant information, not our own judgment. She next launched into reading a ten-minute-long prepared rant in which she recycled almost every lie that has so far been told about the Cultural Park restoration effort, including that it will somehow increase tourism, that “this is not the highest and best use of the land”—how are the arts not a highest and best use of resources for humans?—and that “there were a lot of noise complaints”—false; I’m still waiting for anyone on any side of this issue to produce one single record of a noise complaint.

However, Dunn’s most extraordinary remarks came when she stated, “As residents, there are not enough of us to fill 5,500 seats at any event…most of these attendees will not live here.” Comrade Allender just told the council that Sedona’s population is around 10,000. Is she actually claiming that in a city of 10,000 people, a “city animated by the arts,” the population so dead and indifferent to the arts that they couldn’t fill that bowl? If that’s true, we have a far bigger problem than what to do with a hole in the ground. Also, news flash: the people of Sedona did fill that bowl a quarter of a century ago when Norah Jones played the Park. Decades before, three thousand people piled into Poco Diablo to watch Henry Mancini conduct. And, to crown her ridiculousness, this millionaire nutjob who rattles around in an air-conditioned 5,000-square-foot house full of dust monitors to pander to her paranoia, who for some reason chose to move to a rural town in the Arizona desert, claimed once again that the park would be too hot in summer, even at night, and too cold in winter for concerts.

“There do have to be background questions that frame it,” Comrade Kinsella said of the survey, and at one point tried to work visitor numbers into the proposed question language as a deterrent to reopening the amphitheater.

“I’d prefer an outcome, but if it turns out that this community wants to restore the amphitheater, then that’s what we should do,” Furman conceded.

“If the public wants a 5,000-seat amphitheater, then we figure out a way to give them a 5,000-seat amphitheater,” Pfaff agreed. Ploog attempted to quash the Dig Studio misinformation that an amphitheater would take up the entirety of the site, pointing out that the alternative SCP 2.0 plan had successfully combined a number of uses with the amphitheater.

Council is currently anticipated to review the proposed survey questions on February 10 and approve a contract to conduct the survey at that time.

Staff additionally secured council rubber-stamping to apply for a $3.6 million federal grant, which would have to be matched with $1.7 million of city funds, to build a roundabout at the Brewer/Ranger/Portal intersection to replace the existing stop sign. Comrade Harris invoked the standard references to “safety,” “extensive outreach,” “cost savings,” and so forth that are always embedded within city project justifications like incantations. “The whole point is getting people complying,” Harris said, stressing that the city’s efforts were about behavior modification rather than traffic flow. They could just take the damn stop sign out if they were concerned about traffic; long-term residents have complained to me before about that sign being there at all. The city’s totalitarianism always goes in the opposite direction of what the public wants. The good news is that if they fail to get these grants, nothing is likely to happen on these projects until after the election, which means if home rule goes down, the whole thing thankfully stops. Harris further announced continued collaboration with ADOT in an effort to convince the latter to operate the city’s traffic signals so as to discriminate against private vehicles in favor of city transit vehicles.

“I think I’ve been battling the roundabout here since 2017,” Lorraine Pomeroy told the council, describing the 1926 Hart Store adjoining the proposed roundabout as “the original heart of Sedona.” “I think you’re missing the sense of the beauty, the community, the originality of Sedona there. You would negatively impact the Hart Store….they’d probably go out of business during construction…there are other things besides complying with the plan we had ten years ago.”

“There is no utility other than this was their grand plan,” Pomeroy commented after the session.

“When we bought this property, the roundabout was away from us. A year later, we found out the roundabout was right in front of our door…this is going to negatively impact our business,” Hart Store owner PJ Malani stated. He added that contrary to what Harris had promised, he stood to lose parking under the proposal.

“It is going to put me out of business. Local people are already concerned about how are we gonna get here,” Sandy Patel of Mi Amore, who leases the Hart Store, said. “It’s heartbreaking knowing that this is all going to start and people aren’t going to come to us because they can’t find a parking spot, they can’t get through that roundabout…You want people to walk to us? That’s also not going to happen. People want to come to us in their leisure cars…They don’t have an hour to spend walking ten minutes down.”

If the roundabout construction does go ahead, and if it does affect business in the neighborhood, it seems pretty safe to say that Malani and Patel will be able to sue the city of Sedona under the Property Rights Protection Act.

“This is a disaster in the making,” Robert Cornuke testified. “This roundabout is appealing, it looks good….it’s gonna put these people out of business and it’s gonna put tow truck operators in business…it’s disastrous for their business and it’s going to cause accidents.”

“I’m not interested in putting these folks out of business,” Pfaff said, and Dunn agreed in almost the same words. “I’m sympathetic to your situation,” Ploog likewise claimed. All seven of them then voted unanimously to go ahead with the grant with the expectation that the roundabout would be built as planned, since Harris said that staff had already finished designing it.

Harris promised they would accommodate Patel during the yearlong construction process by putting up extra signs directing customers to her business; knowing the city, the signs will be about the size of an index card and hidden behind a tree. Here we have yet another instance of city staff trying to rearrange the physical infrastructure of the town in such a way as to kill small businesses and tourism.

Council and staff managed to prolong the agenda item, scheduled for 15 minutes, for 69 minutes.

In legislative updates, it came as no surprise that the council wanted to support every anti-STR, anti-property rights bill on the docket. More oddly, Comrade Kinsella first tried to get her colleagues to support opposing SB1054, a very useful bill that would give anyone standing to challenge city legislation that included an emergency cause—we’ve had some issues with that here over the garage bonds and other things—and then, in a pro-transparency move, to express opposition for SB1167, the anti-public notice bill. “I don’t want to be off the hook for having to post outside our website,” Kinsella declared. Comrade Browne immediately jumped into the breach to try to get council to support rather than oppose the bill by tempting them with the option that they could still publish notices voluntarily, backed by Christianson, who read off a list of all the other cities in Arizona that were supporting the bill. (“But mom, all the cool kids are doing it!”)

There was a dramatic moment at council when one resident, on learning that council was not able to respond to residents, stood up and shouted at them, “That is so fucking funny. You’re so full of shit, motherfuckers!” and stormed out of the room. What was really fucking funny was that Andy Dickey stood up and moved towards the guy like he was going to do something about it. The idea of namby-pamby sissyboy Dickey who’s scared of the world’s existence trying to be butch is a scream.

Comrade Ploog also took a moment to pontificate about how the city had just put out a press release distinguishing between ICE and SPD that included such unbelievably ludicrous statements as “The city of Sedona and the Sedona Police Department are committed to serving our community with dignity,” “Our responsibility is…to protect public safety for everyone in Sedona,” and “Sedona Police officers are part of this community.” So these stormtroopers who grind the public’s faces into the dirt, literally, who snatch grandmothers off the streets and throw them in jail, who connive at putting the homeless in solitary confinement for months at a time in order to torture them into more economically productive behavior, are, according to our hallucinatory mayor, “serving” the community by abusing its members. Torturing someone keeps them safe, obviously, and is extremely dignified; how could we be confused about that? Do these morally bankrupt excuses for city officials actually pretend to think that someone getting beat up by a cop cares about whether the letters on the beater’s uniform are ICE or SPD? Such a statement could only be made by someone so detached from the everyday life of the American population in their elitism that they are incapable of understanding that they too might become the victim of these cops. Also, let’s not forget that hardly any of the city’s cops, including the chief and deputy chief, actually live in town. They are not part of the community.

In Sedona’s ongoing disclosures of police brutality, reports indicate that the lovely and untalented Comrade Beers and five of her colleagues, including Comrade Santos, whose name seems to keep recurring in these affairs, jumped a homeless man outside Dahl & DiLuca last Friday night. “There were six officers on one old man shoving his face into the white gravel right in front of the iconic dolphin fountain,” one of the witnesses stated. I’m sure Lisa Dahl and her customers appreciated the show—oh, wait: if Sedona’s very own ICE agents behave like thugs in front of a bunch of tourists, that’s going to scare the tourists away and undermine the viability of local businesses. So the police brutality is also in service of the anti-tourism agenda. Got it. Presumably Beers reserves decent treatment for her dog, who receives official treatment as a semi-person from the city staffers who treat human beings like animals.

With regard to the claim made at council two weeks ago that the city was using drones to hunt the homeless, a Sedona police detective named Justin White had emailed a USFS official named Christian Roper on January 24, 2023, confirming that city staff have been using drones to hunt for homeless individuals for at least an hour every week since late 2022.

Under the circumstances, St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church will be hosting a “Know Your Rights” workshop at at 4:30 PM on February 14, with speakers from the ACLU to discuss what the law actually says about how much violence the cops can use against you. It is a healthy thing that Sedonans are now being forced to confront the layers of cognitive dissonance involved in existing within a coercive society.

There is still no sign of a 2026 budget survey on the city of Sedona website, while portions of the tentative 2027 budget that is supposed to be taking input from that survey into account will be presented to council beginning February 11. This kind of contempt is why, historically, citizens made up songs about tarring and feathering public officials. Comrade Whitehorn did not condescend to respond to an inquiry about whether the city is still planning to do budget surveys at all.

As of January 19, three residents have filed statements of interest with the city clerk’s office to run for mayor. In addition to Comrade Fultz, Henry Silbiger and William Grosz have both put their names forward. Lita Loesch Boyd and Jean Buillet have also filed statements of interest to run for council, as has Comrade Dunn.

The comrades in Cottonwood are still refusing to turn over the Cottonwood police department’s list of Brady officers whose testimony is considered unreliable in court. After delaying for a full week, Comrade Skerrett of the clerk’s office responded to the request with a counter-request for clarification on the grounds that a request for three names already in the possession of Comrade Braxton-Johnson was “overly broad.” Comrade Mayes subsequently kicked the request across to the city’s contract attorney, then claimed earlier today that Cottonwood does not maintain any such records—in spite of Braxton-Johnston’s earlier testimony.

Meanwhile, in adventures in neofeudalism elsewhere, the Land Report has released its updated 2026 list of the 100 biggest landowners in the US. They omitted, however, to total up the amount of land held by the top crony capitalists, which comes to 43,281,000 acres, 16,083,000 acres of which are owned by ten people alone. Four of these big businessmen each hold more than two million acres, with Stan Kroenke, a real estate developer with no background in farming or ranching, topping the list with 2.7 million acres. The average for each landowner was 432,810 acres. Collectively, these 100 individuals and families own 3.3 percent of all privately-held land in the country. Per the American Geographical Society, 77 million people own 1.3 billion acres of private land in the United States, or an average of 16.9 acres apiece. Almost 260 million Americans own no land at all.

Arizona land barons represented on the list include the Babbitts of Flagstaff, with 275,000 acres; the Riggses of the Chiricahua, with 241,803 acres; the Brophys of Phoenix, with 228,000 acres; and the Irwins of Prescott, with 170,000 acres, for a total of 914,803 acres out of the approximately 9,542,000 acres in Arizona in private hands—or 9.6 percent of all private land in Arizona. Only 13 percent of Arizona’s land is privately held, by the way, and out of roughly 2.3 billion acres in the United States, about 640 million are claimed by the federal government.

For those who would try to argue that this concentration is a harmless sign of a healthy free market, bear in mind that when the majority of land is held by a small number of individuals, who themselves constitute part or all of the government-in-practice—what the British call the Establishment—what you have is, for all intents and purposes, state ownership of the land. Which is also exactly what the British themselves had, in effect, during the centuries when Britain was an aristocratic republic, and that backfired badly by inspiring the Labour Party to try to get land ownership abolished entirely. It’s moments like this that one recalls the old Liberal Party posters touting a balanced alliance between capital and labor instead of the bad old way of Toryism and the bad new way of socialism.

Also, everyone seems to forget that in a truly free market, there would be no state to guarantee the property rights of exceptionally greedy individuals and thus no way for owners to maintain control over large tracts of land if their neighbors refused to respect their greed, leading to the natural breakup of large tracts—and the political power derived from access to those resources. Foragers and farmers tend to be quite clear on this set of relationships; it’s the urban Americans who have forgotten.

Trump administration officials appear to have gone full California by declaring that protestors can’t bring loaded weapons to protests, as if the First and Second Amendments and the relevant case law no longer existed. It seems it was only a couple of weeks ago that a federal appeals court was rebuking California for basing its entire rationale for gun bans on first trying to stop the Black Panthers from protesting with loaded guns. Remember the old saw about “absolute power corrupts absolutely”? A more contemporary variation might be to say that all it takes to turn a MAGA Republican into a California Democrat is appointment to federal office.

Less euphoniously, we are now three weeks into the 2026 legislative session and this year’s set of proposals to grow state and local government, crack down on individual freedom, disseminate misinformation, and address nonexistent problems. Just over nine hundred bills have been filed in the House so far, compared to roughly 230 in the Senate. Additional bills may still be introduced until February 2 in the upper house and February 9 in the lower house.

Sedona and the Verde Valley are in line for several potential appropriations at the moment. HB2201, sponsored by Selina Bliss, would allocate $8,025,060 to Sedona for the Forest and Ranger road projects, while HB2609 would allocate $5,016,000 to Sedona for the Brewer roundabout. Given the state’s financial situation, city lobbyist Comrade Senseman said that these appropriations were not likely to pass. That should bring a welcome slowdown to city staff’s destruction of the town. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, HB2761 would give $300,000 to ADOT for a study of Cornville Road, and HB2242 would allot $175 million to widen Highway 260 to four lanes in places where it isn’t and add additional luxuries. Perhaps the most eyebrow-raising local handout is contained in HB2432, which would provide a grant of $10 million to the scandal-plagued Yavapai Community College for its health program. Note that both Comrades Bliss and Nguyen, who introduced the bill, are “medical professionals.”

Amazingly, a few bills managed to rise above the general inanity, and a few isolated legislators have actually proposed changes to state law that either reflect common sense or might turn out to be useful:

• HB2037: Introduces automatic voter registration at the time of getting a driver’s license. Something so obvious it should have been done decades ago, except that bureaucrats like to generate more paperwork.

• HB2059: Starts the process of rolling back speed limits on freeways. Yeehaw!

• HB2073: Establishes an open meetings law enforcement team to check up on local government. Is Arizona still having problems with this? Not that having roving auditors checking up on people who are full of themselves are a bad thing.

• HB2158: Adds bears, cougars, mountain lions, and wolves to the state definition of “predatory animals.” Duh. How is this even a question? But referring to “cougars” and “mountain lions” separately is very poor phrasing.

• HB2210: Bans the use of ADS-B systems to collect fees from aircraft owners and pilots. I seem to recall Cottonwood was looking into a system that sounded quite similar in the hope that they could bleed college kids to punish them for daring to have fun at the expense of retirees having to hear an occasional sound.

• HB2359: Requires private jails to keep complete and accurate records of their operations and makes them subject to state public records law.

• HB2534: A useful provision that would allow the proposers of ballot initiatives to submit their proposed language to the attorney general’s office for legal compliance review, with the office required to respond within ten days, replacing a review by the legislative council with a thirty-day response period.

• SB1069: Would repeal the state’s ban on firearm suppressors, an irrational legacy from the national paranoia of the 1930s regarding mob hits.

HB2088 offers a historically and theoretically interesting proposal, but one with little apparent application at the moment, to reintroduce specie as legal tender. A handful of other bills represent something of a mixed bag in terms of how they awkwardly attempt to combine public benefit with a neglect of true pro-freedom principles, leading to contradictions in which the rights of some are to be sacrificed to the rights of others:

• HB2086: Prohibits both government and private mask and vaccination mandates. Similar to HB2336, which prohibits health insurers from including a vaccine mandate as a condition of coverage. Banning government mandates creates no ethical problem, since it merely prevents the creation of rules by the government, but imposing a mandate on private enterprises sacrifices one individual’s freedom of action to another’s, which is unacceptable.

• HB2147: Requires the DNR to issue landowner permits for the taking of deer on private lands up to 10 percent of total statewide tags issued. The cap should be eliminated.

• HB2222: Allows individuals to change the sex on their birth certificate without confirmation from a physician. Fine, but why is the state issuing birth certificates in the first place? The state does not decide the reality of an individual’s existence or the details of an individual’s identity.

• HB2475: Prohibits the wearing of masks by the paramilitary, but with far too many exceptions. Only a coward hides his face and sneaks around committing violence, and to plead that one is a utilitarian in search of survival is hardly a moral defense. HB2882 is very similar in content.

• HB2497: Possibly the most important bill in the legislature this session. Although it purports to reserve the right to regulate hunting and fishing to the legislature, the bill also provides that the state may not adopt any policy that “unreasonably restricts hunting, fishing, or harvesting wildlife or the use of traditional means and methods. It is the policy of this state that public hunting and fishing are the preferred means of managing and controlling wildlife.” If passed, the reasonableness provision will open the door to further gradual expansion of the provision over time to ensure full re-legalization of foraging, since it will be easy to argue that any restriction that impedes one’s ability to feed oneself is unreasonable.

• HB2632: A one-sentence bill stating, “A landlord may not terminate a tenant’s rental agreement because the tenant uses marijuana.” Applaud the sentiment, but it’s an interference with the landlord’s freedom of contract. If a landlord wishes to be unbusinesslike enough to limit his tenant pool that way, that’s his own fault.

• SB1012: Legalizes concealed carry on the premises of establishments that serve alcohol for those holding a concealed carry permit. A step in the direction of less paranoia, but not far enough, and again at the expense of the retailer’s right to run his establishment as he chooses.

Of course, the number of bad bills floating around the legislature far exceeds the number of those that might have some utility:

• HB2139: Creates additional reporting requirements for the public officers responsible for public records, but doesn’t create a hard-and-fast must-respond-by deadline, which is what HB2808 in 2023 would have done before the League of Cities and Towns and other bureaucrats freaked out and moved to block it over uniform public support. That bill would have required they hand over the records within five business days, period, and fined them if they didn’t.

• HB2251: Creates a state bureaucracy to interfere with midwives, including a state midwifery board to regulate them. This bill is another one introduced by Comrade Bliss, part of the government-associated medical establishment who, you will remember, were so very successful at mismanaging a simple new respiratory virus a few years ago.

• HB2354: Bans bump-fire devices. If Congress would just repeal the National Firearms Act and the prohibition on machine guns altogether, we could get rid of this nonsense. Those who would wring their hands in horror at the idea are also generally the sort of individuals who have never fired a machine gun and thus fail to realize that they are unlikely to be owned by anyone who doesn’t literally have money to burn. They’re tremendous fun, but you can chew through the cost of a brand-new gun in ammo in a few minutes while not hitting anything.

• HB2362: One of the bills that the whining of Scott Jablow and the other spoiled anti-freedom retirees of Sedona over the years have managed to prompt Bliss to drop. It would amend state tax law to tax short-term rentals as businesses—thereby refuting the claim of that gang calling themselves the Sedona city council and city attorney Comrade Christianson that they’re already businesses; if they were already businesses, the law wouldn’t have to be changed—if the landlord does not live on the property or the property is rented for more than 180 days out of the year. How carefully the language is drawn to accommodate the stereotype of the retiree renting a room to supplement their income—I have no idea how frequent that actually is—and the need of the second homeowners who will become Sedona’s future ruling class to be able to afford their mortgages while compromising on the total amount of time they can rent their property. Even if this somehow got through, it would barely affect the vast majority of people who own STRs in Sedona and it would do zero for housing affordability or availability. But—it would allow the good Democrats to perform the role of standing up for housing before election season hits.

• HB2409: Establishes a permanent “artificial intelligence” education program at the state level. Considering that there is no guarantee this “AI” nonsense will be of much account ten years from now, let alone a hundred years from now, it’s a complete waste of time. And it’s even accompanied by a companion bill, HB2410, which consists of a single line stating, “A person’s communication with an artificial intelligence is privileged if the person would have been entitled to privileged communication had the person sought the advice from a human professional.” Incredible how this gang of presumably urban legislators has drunk the sci-fi kool-aid. “Communication with an artificial intelligence”? Excuse me? A computer is a machine, not an “intelligence,” not a person or a being, and you do not communicate with machines, you feed instructions into them.

• HB2415: This one is to the eternal discredit of Sedona and the Verde Valley’s idiot and anti-freedom representative Comrade Nguyen for trying to add kratom, a mild and typically harmless soporific, to the state’s list of prohibited narcotic drugs. The pseudoscience is strong with this member of the medical establishment. Ah, but let us not forget—who has better incentive than a doctor to ban traditional remedies outside the control of the medical-industrial complex? The history of the last century is the history of doctors colluding with the government to get plants banned so individuals wouldn’t have access to pain relief and other useful functions in their own backyards in order to build dependency on drugs dispensed for profit. Perhaps it’s time to start calling him “Quack” Nguyen since he’s just another ignorant doctor. From the perspective of someone who has used this with no ill effects, he’s a dangerous idiot.

• HB2417: Another ingeniously totalitarian measure from Comrade Nguyen that would attempt to blackmail individuals into having speed limiting devices installed in their cars as part of plea bargains.

• HB2419, HB2420, HB241, and HB2422: The annual return of the package of terrible anti-gun bills from Comrade Marquez of the People’s Republic of North Phoenix. HB2419 would create unnecessary bureaucracy around concealed carry permits and background checks. HB2420 would ban private party firearms sales completely. HB2421 is the “assault weapons” ban and gun surrender component of the package, except that Marquez has drawn his language even more broadly than most of his comrades do: his definition of assault weapon includes any semiautomatic rifle with a detachable magazine; any semiautomatic pistol with the “capacity” to accept a magazine of more than ten rounds; or any shotgun with a pistol grip, thumbhole stock, or magazine capacity of more than five rounds! Oh, but .22s and tubular magazines are exempt—as are government employees. HB2422 would ban the concealed carrying of all weapons, except pocket knives, without permits, and amend the current law to deny permits to those who took a firearms safety course out of state. HB2570 would create an elaborate state bureaucracy to regulate gun dealers and HB2571 would ban machine guns. Who keeps electing this single-issue nut?

• HB2423: Requires schools to enroll high-performing students in advanced math courses. Apart from the totalitarianism and the antipathy to parental choice, it’s also clearly intended as a pipeline to tech jobs, which is not what a true education system is for.

• HB2429: Another Bliss attack on STRs, which in this case would let cities cap the number of STR permits, set minimum distances between STRs, and even regulate the number of people allowed to be inside an STR. Again, it does nothing for the supposed housing shortage. She paired it with HB2430, an attempt to let cities penalize websites for listing STRs that don’t have city permits. Comrade Finchem is running a similar bill in the Senate, SB1076.

• HB2548: A big government bill that would ban the sale or installation of any plumbing fixture not approved by the EPA in Washington from 2028 onward.

• HB2580: An effort to help regulate small private schools out of existence by imposing fingerprinting requirements on employees.

• HB2589: A single-issue bill sponsored by one nut that would create an unprecedented felony called “unlawful exposure to a drag show.” Apart from being blatantly anti-freedom and repeating the logical fallacy of equating drag with eroticism—most drag I’ve seen was decidedly non-erotic in any way—it perpetuates the very dangerous lie that sex is bad for kids. A brief review of the biological facts: Watching or having sex pumps the body full of monoamine neurotransmitters; monoamines increase cognition; therefore, watching or having sex improves human intelligence. For the same reason, the single-sponsor HB2900, a ludicrous and unconstitutional attempt to ban pornography in Arizona, counts as a similar attempt to undermine the human cognition that underpins our commitment to personal freedom and our ability to organize against the coercive state.

• HB2715: A very interesting short bill that would repeal existing provisions in state law preventing cities from imposing conditions on building projects that would lead to the preferential sale of those projects to individuals at a particular income level or belonging to “any particular class or group of residents.” One hears Sedona’s Democrats trying to gerrymander in the background.

• HB2718: A bill to cap annual rental increases at the rate of increase of the consumer price index.

• SB1071: From Sedona’s very own Comrade Finchem, here is an attempt to reduce the role of community members in maintaining community organization and cohesion by abolishing the Arizona Rangers. It’s actually a rather subtle move by Finchem, whose big government tendencies are well known. He wants a more totalitarian and militarized state, and one pathway to getting there is eliminating auxiliaries to help centralize power in Phoenix.

• SB1111: A big government bill that purports to restrict the use of license plate cameras to locating missing persons but provides no real safeguards for their use, while also attempting to exempt surveillance camera data from public records requests. It’s in competition with Finchem’s SB1138, which would let the paramilitary surveill us for any purpose.

• SB1167: The return of an anti-transparency bill supported by Sedona two years ago that would allow cities to post public notices only on their websites rather than in newspapers, likely shrinking the circulation of public notices by an order of magnitude.

This being the wild, wild west, the legislature is considering a number of bills that will likely get Arizona sued should they be crazy enough to pass the legislation:

• HB2039: Requires priests to violate the confessional if child abuse is confessed to them. Apart from being a blatant violation of the First Amendment, Washington passed a similar law last year, and has already had to back down after being sued by the Catholic Church and losing in federal court.

• HB2110: Attempts to encourage government-sponsored prayer at public events. No.

• HB2212: Prohibits lobbying by condo associations. Not likely to stand up to legal challenge in the aftermath of Citizens United.

• HB2226: Attempts to give military veterans privileged treatment in court when arrested.

• HB2705: Restricts ownership of single-family homes by corporate bodies by imposing additional paperwork requirements on them, in what is clearly a blatant attempt to force disclosure of the out-of-state corporations supposed to be turning houses into STRs.

• HB2862: Another one from the anti-freedom “Quack” Nguyen, who would like to make wearing a mask in public a crime for ordinary people—but government authorities are specifically exempted. So let me get this straight—he fled Vietnamese communism, where the government wanted to tell people what they could and couldn’t wear, in order to bring their communist model to America?

Some items on the legislative agenda are mere posturing and preening for election season—“red meat for the party faithful,” as Tom Clancy described a Ronald Reagan speech as seen through the eyes of a KGB officer:

• HCM 2002: Requests that Congress designate the Council on American-Islamic Relations as a terrorist organization.

• HCM 2005: Requests that Congress limit the property rights of foreign governments operating under undefined “communist or authoritarian” systems. To someone who grew up in Montana, the United States federal government is a “communist or authoritarian” system. Implications?

• HB2135: Allows individuals injured by federal or state DEI policies that exist in violation of laws preventing such policies to sue for relief in state court.

• HB2171: Banning property ownership in Arizona by an entity controlled by the government of China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia. What, no ban on Saudi Arabia, which is actually draining Arizona’s groundwater because the king and the eleven hundred and seventeen crown princes (“God is truly abundant and merciful,” the emir remarked) like their racing camels?

• HB2295: Raises the minimum wage to $18 beginning in 2027. Not the government’s job. When are we going to get a bill capping government employees’ compensation at median wage?

• HB2522: The Arizona Right to Contraception Act. Yawn. Humans have the right to put into their own bodies anything that exists and any attempt to interfere with that is an illogical and immoral waste of time.

• HB2523: Requires same-gender strip searches in jails. As if one really cared about the sex or gender identity of the abusive tyrant stripping and searching them. Under the circumstances, that would be a pretty irrelevant consideration.

• HB2562: Banning the serving of water to customers in restaurants—in a desert state—except on request.

• HB2741: Would create a “day of racial healing” as a state holiday. Somehow I doubt there will be much interest at the legislature.

• SB1019: This one is straight out of Dr. Strangelove: a bill to prohibit fluoride in public water supplies. While the delivery of supplemental fluoride in water as opposed to toothpaste is enormously wasteful, this bill is clearly intended as an electoral technique rather than a genuine attempt to eliminate inefficiency.

• SB1025: A single-sponsor bill to require that schools teach intelligent design alongside evolution. Barring the fact that public schools shouldn’t exist, I’m all for teaching alternatives to the mathematically implausible Big Bang theory—except that this bill and the intentions of the sponsor have nothing to do with teaching intelligent design. It’s a backdoor attempt to teach Genesis—and the thing about these backdoor attempts to teach Genesis is that their real intent is to implant the beleaguered, grasping, aggressive mentality of ancient nationalistic pastoralists in modern kids. If SB1025 by some freak of nature were to pass, what would you like to bet that next year the sponsor, Comrade Farnsworth, would be introducing another bill to ban any mention of panspermia?

• SB1070: Simultaneously perhaps the stupidest and most dangerous bill in the legislature so far this season, it would have the state health department conduct research into a fictitious mental condition described as “Trump derangement syndrome.” And here we are back at a perfect illustration of, as Thomas Szasz described, how the state and the medical establishment collude to weaponize invented disorders against the public and attempt to define sanity or the lack thereof based on political allegiance. Pure Soviet policy.

Other bills that are coming up on the legislative calendar are simply bizarre, and one wonders if some of these legislators have been spending too much time in Sedona lately:

• HB2042: Prohibits the “release” of any material “for solar radiation management,” which appears to be some sort of pseudoscientific anti-“chemtrail” bill introduced by a comrade masquerading under the appropriate name of Fink. A companion bill in the senate, SB1098, is more comprehensive.

• HB2123: Requires the state to create a bullion depository. “Lay not up for yourself treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.”

• HB2312: Encourages pro-government propaganda in public schools.

• HB2337: Prohibits county approval of zone changes or variances for wind or solar energy projects unless all members of the commission are present and vote unanimously in support of the proposal.

• HB2388: This beauty would appropriate an undecided amount for a study on the benefits of “small modular reactors and data centers” in Arizona. Has the author lost his conkers? There are no benefits to nuclear reactors and data centers in a free, decentralized society. The related HB2452 would similarly require counties to incorporate planning for data centers and “small modular reactors” in their comprehensive plans, and to ensure—as if the writer were listening in on the discussion the Sedona city council was having the other day—that such plans would not effectively prohibit the construction of data centers. Along with that goes HB2456, prohibiting the prohibition of small nuclear reactors. And HB2467, which has a lot more cosponsors, would attempt to keep the real job-destroying data centers while putting a nice green Democratic label on them to absolve them of their social problems by requiring that they only be allowed to use “renewable energy.” HB2493, meanwhile, would bar the regulation of production facilities to build nuclear reactors. Well, we now know which members of the legislature are in the Big Data camp.

• HB2763: A very carefully drawn bill requiring joint legislative approval of the closure of any state-owned shooting range, which, from its text, appears to be aimed at preventing the closure of a specific facility in either Phoenix or Tucson, since those are the only two cities to which the bill will apply.

• HB2787: An effort to nullify the federal Mexican wolf reintroduction program. Obviously someone never heard of a little dustup called the Civil War.

• SB1024: Establishes state registration criteria for nonexistent “roadable aircraft.”

• SB1128: If your civilization has reached the point where scrap metal theft has become an issue of high public policy, it’s in collapse.

Tell me, is it necessary in Arizona to have reached a certain level of insanity before one becomes eligible for election to the state senate? The density of completely loopy ideas seems so much higher there. Incidentally, that reminds me of an old joke:

One night during the administration of Grover Cleveland, Mrs. Cleveland was awakened by strange noises from downstairs. Alarmed, she seized her husband’s shoulder and began shaking him. “Wake up! wake up!” she hissed at the chief executive. “There are burglars in the house!” “No, no, my dear,” murmured the half-awake Cleveland. “In the Senate, maybe, but not in the House.”

Given the amount of scrutiny Sedona’s paramilitary force is undergoing at the moment, and the apparent systemic tendency of SPD to engage in illegal brutality and the manufacturing of false charges, it’s worthwhile to note that two Sedona cops are on the Brady lists maintained by prosecuting attorneys in Arizona. These lists began to be created in 1963 following the US Supreme Court decision in Brady v. Maryland, in which the court ruled that the prosecution’s suppression of evidence violated the defendant’s due process rights and that the defense must be provided with all information necessary to challenge the credibility of government witnesses, including information relating to the trustworthiness of government agents. Under the Arizona rules of civil procedure, such proceedings are referred to as Rule 15.1 disclosures, and to facilitate these disclosures, the legal officers of each jurisdiction typically maintain lists of police officers whose testimony is not considered credible in court, commonly referred to as Brady lists.

Per the city attorney’s office, the two currently-implicated Sedona officers are Nathan Dorfman and Michael Lewis:

On May 25, 2012, Cottonwood Police Department terminated Officer Dorfman after finding Dorfman had been untruthful in connection with an internal investigation of improper verbal threats by Officer Dorfman. Officer Dorfman also failed a polygraph regarding whether he had made the threats that witnesses accused him of making. On 4/25/13, Officer Dorfman passed a subsequent polygraph regarding whether he had made the threats that witnesses accused him of making.

On 10/29/24, Michael J. Lewis was terminated from the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department after an investigation determined Michael J. Lewis made false statements in connection with employment forms and an employment interview with another agency.

Dorfman and Lewis were subsequently rewarded for their conduct by the city of Sedona with a sergeant’s rank and a school resource officer position as well as six-figure compensation. Nor do they represent isolated incidents; a 2022 investigation by ABC15 turned up an additional five Sedona officers who were then or previously on the Yavapai and Coconino county attorneys’ Brady lists: Shane Bryant, Mike Edgerton, Marlayne Hatler, Wilfredo Lopez, and Dan Norton.

“To my knowledge the Camp Verde Marshal’s Office does not have any current employees on the Brady list,” acting Camp Verde marshal Comrade Jacobs claimed on January 20. ABC’s 2022 investigation found that CVMO cops Thomas Baizel, Cecil Bruno, Russell Grover, Aaron Hopkins, and Shawn Martinko were all on the Yavapai County Brady list; all continue to appear in the Arizona Prosecuting Attorneys’ Advisory Council’s Rule 15.1 disclosure database, although APAAC notes that the database may not be up to date. When asked for clarification, Jacobs stated that none of those officers are currently employed by CVMO.

While Sedona and Camp Verde both get points for disclosing their Brady officer situations within twenty-four hours of the request, Cottonwood is currently stalling. Comrade Braxton-Johnson admitted to there being three Brady officers working for Cottonwood but refused to provide those officers’ names or the reasons why their testimony was considered to be unreliable without a public records request. Cottonwood city staff have still not provided the three names and supporting details five days after the initial request for information was made. The ABC15 investigation found that Cottonwood’s Brady officers at that time included Scott Dever, Cody Delafuente, Matt Earls, Todd Moore, Kohl Nixon, and David Ross.

It is worth noting that the 2022 investigation turned up only four Brady officers in CCSO and four in YCSO, which are much larger bodies than the Sedona, Cottonwood, and Camp Verde police departments. Do paramilitary troopers with a chequered personal history gravitate towards small-town governments where there is likely to be little organized oversight? Amusingly, it also appears that since the 2022 investigation, Yavapai County has attempted to suppress the practice of maintaining Rule 15.1 disclosures in a readily available form, as Comrade Matheson-Parks of the county attorney’s office claimed that “this office does not maintain an internal 15.1 list.”

Sedona parks manager Comrade Frewin has repeatedly told the city council during recent meetings that the community could be hosting an event at the Sedona Cultural Park every week, given the demand for it, and has named a number of local organizations wanting to use it, although he has also made it clear that he is opposed to such uses by his lack of action and his advocacy. Basic math would suggest that his statement implies that the parks department receives about fifty inquiries a year regarding use of the facility. In response to a December 19 public records request to produce copies of those inquiries, however, Frewin has so far turned over, on January 13, only three emails with one single individual concerning one possible event. Either he told council an absolute whopper of a lie about demand when he didn’t even need to, considering most of them want to destroy the park anyway, or the city is deliberately trying to violate the provision of public records law that requires records be provided “promptly.” At the current rate, I could expect to receive the remainder of the estimated number of emails by roughly April 2029. As the Court of Appeals wrote in Phoenix New Times v. Arpaio, “Such inattention by the employee of a public body does not meet that body’s burden of establishing that it promptly provided documents that were clearly requested and readily available. We cannot find that a document furnished forty-nine days (thirty-four working days) after it was requested was furnished ‘promptly’ when the only reason for the delay was lack of diligence on the agency’s part.”

What’s up with the Little Free Library at Sunset Park? It used to have books in it all the time. Now it’s constantly empty. That strikes some of us around here as highly suspicious.

Has anyone else noticed the systemic national press campaign against homeschooling lately? Pravda West, the New York Post, the Atlantic, the Guardian—outlets that should know better, all publishing pieces about the risks of escaping the state indoctrination system, all prompted by the whiny memoir of a no-name novelist that appears to have far more to do with the Jewish mother stereotype than homeschooling itself. The whole thing, like Anslinger’s campaign to demonize cannabis in the face of thousands of years’ worth of evidence, is part of a larger effort based on a few cherry-picked anecdotal accounts, horror stories intended to foster paranoia about the tiny hypothetical risk of what could go wrong. Such accounts take little notice of the evidence, which makes it clear that homeschooled kids typically score higher on the ACT, are more likely to become entrepreneurs, are more likely to vote, and are more likely to volunteer or participate in a religious group.

In Arizona’s case, of course, we have an ongoing local variant on the same theme given the need of state bureaucrats to attack the ESA voucher program for financially undercutting them, which results in all these articles and op-eds complaining how vouchers are hurting public schools. Yes, that’s exactly the point. The public school system does three things: it teaches kids to worship the government, it teaches kids to be obedient to authority figures, and, so far as it attends to anything relating to knowledge, it teaches kids disjointed bits of information intended only to fit them for a lifetime of urban-industrial employment. These “schools” need to be hurt. They need to be starved of funding until they close and are replaced with a highly varied mix of private schools and homeschooling. The continued existence of the public school system is, quite simply, child abuse.

The child abuse factor was always something of which I was very aware when I was young, as a kid who was homeschooled. Every time we drove by one of the public schools, I would look at it and wonder why a school had to be surrounded with chain-link fence and bars and barbed wire, and I would wonder what horrible things the adults inside were doing to those poor kids, and I pitied them. I pitied them more because, when I met them, I could tell they weren’t learning or bothering to think for themselves. Those experiences were also the beginnings of understanding something that I would fully come to learn as an adult reading anthropology and history: coercive rulers do not build walls to protect their populations, but to capture their populations.

Arizona’s teachers play the role of being absolutely scandalized about how unfair it is that parents who choose not to use a state-provided service, if we may call it that, should get a tax break for the corresponding cost the state has not incurred as a result. How is that unfair? Unfair was when my parents got a cut taken out of their paychecks every year to pay for the state child abuse system and still had to pay for the books and materials they needed to homeschool their kids outside the abusive system. The tax system is deliberately rigged to discourage home or private education—especially for poor and working families with whom the Democrats pretend to be so concerned. That’s unfair. Also, the ESA voucher program provides families with between $6,000 and $9,000 a year toward the cost of a child’s schooling. Public school enrollment was around 882,000 in 2024, while funding was $13.1 billion—or $14,853 per student. That doesn’t sound very fair, either. What it does sound like is welfare for bureaucrats. Public school teachers want to attack the program as a handout for the wealthy first and foremost because it takes away from the handouts for teachers.

The vigorous sextet had the bassoon lead off like an elephant trumpeting before racing away into dramatic references to Grieg and Dukas—a curious coincidence, since well-known works by those two composers are often paired on late twentieth-century combinations of popular classical music—and other potpourri well stirred. Somewhere in the full flight of all six instruments, Poulenc decided to take a sudden tempo and mood change to pure tragedy, something like one of Schubert’s swans dying, but less poetically. It also carried a faint flavor of stalking in the shadows of one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mayan Revival houses in LA. This went on until the composer decided to flip back to a reprise of the hurtling initial themes. He had described the second movement of this work as a “divertissiment,” but it was more of a lament by the winds with minimal piano. They played with a motif that hauntingly recalled “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” and refused to resolve it before the horn led another dramatic shift to confident joy, shading into relaxation. The final movement, stepped up to prestissimo, had the entire ensemble romping over each other like puppies as they pursed a complex, interlayered exchange of emotions that shaded in and out of one another with little warning.

The Winds broke up the Poulenc pieces with a rendition of group founder Valerie Coleman’s “Portraits of Langston,” a set of five short pieces for flute, piano, and clarinet reflecting the composer’s impressions of a number of Hughes’s poems, with the poems narrated by bassoonist Monica Ellis. The theme inspired by Helen Keller had the flute and clarinet playing in simple unison at first before slowly diverging as the music grew increasingly complex, an effective evocation of intellectual enlightenment. “Dance Africaine” simply didn’t reflect the text of the poem after which it had been named, which spoke of beating drums stirring the blood. Instead, it was a slow, sultry meditation to which one had to listen for quite some time before a strong beat began to emerge, and once that beat came along, the composer kept interrupting it before folding it back into slowness. The second movement was the occasion for a brilliant showing by Mark Dover on clarinet, however. Likewise, “The Big Sea” was all dramatic story about a little danseuse named Anette [“Oh, yes, he was doing it. Something quite obscene. With Anette. In the lounge.” Wait, isn’t the city manager…never mind…], and the story must have gone over great at Chamber Music’s outreach concert for local students the following day, but the short, sprightly wind conversation that followed captured none of the story. “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cafe” was more on target as a nimble, sparkly threesome with extra piccolo, as was the placid “Summer Night,” although it was impossible to imagine a literal depiction of Hughes’s Harlem in the sylvan music, which had a very low clarinet supporting the flute. Beautifully executed, the Coleman work nevertheless lacked both distinctive melodies and ideas and a clear thematic linkage internally. An interesting twist was that the flute led the trio most of the time; Coleman herself, it turns out, was a flutist.

The Imani Winds further varied the Poulenc with an unannounced performance of Lalo Schifrin’s wind quintet, a highly cinematic work as promised that likewise displayed the group’s exquisite sense of timing. It called for a wispy, wavering flute and some fun runs from the horn before developing a very New Orleans feel, mellow and bluesy except for the oboe throwing some sauce.

They had apparently saved the best for first this concert, with the best piece of the show being Paquito D’Rivera’s “A Little Cuban Waltz” with which they opened the afternoon. Far less like a waltz than a visually vivid modern dance, it featured a sassy bassoon in conversation with the flute, with an insinuating clarinet attempting to make a third at times. Good-humored, vivacious, and scampering, it could only be called a romp, a spring bacchanal that erupted into a shimmering solo display from Dover before the bassoon and horn put the clarinet firmly back into its place, Ellis tucking into her part with verve. Most impressively, the D’Rivera piece was a highly individual and original work that had almost nothing in common with the ideas of other composers or genres, and yet came off as fully mature and self-confident in its own style. Fun, brain-teasing, and well-constructed.

For those who didn’t catch the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concert earlier in the month, this year’s performance had the orchestra accompanied by conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin, an opera director notoriously weak in orchestral fare and better known, like his collaborator Yuja Wang, for his sartorial than his directorial skills. He had selected for the evening a piece of neckwear that came off as a cross between a bat, a rodeo buckle, and a reject from the Faberge workshop’s latest project for the Romanovs, and appeared to have left his beat somewhere under a marble-topped cafe table in the Herrengasse. Fortunately for YNS, the traditional Viennese new year’s program has always been dance-heavy, so his dancing on the podium was able to substitute for baton skills to some extent. Watching, one was reminded of the orchestral musicians’ saying, “When you see the concertmaster making extra-big movements…” This year’s Philharmonic was a younger, leaner machine, with fewer musicians on stage and those less often gray-haired than in former times. Quite a change for those of us who were first introduced to them in decades past.

The players had changed; the sound had not—until it did. The particular and delightful tone of the Vienna horns was particularly noticeable in the overture from Franz von Suppe’s Die schöne Galathée, where there was a glorious operetta-cafe showing from the brass. After having performed no music by a female composer during the New Year’s Concert until 2025, the Philharmonic pulled out all the stops in 2026 to hurry up and make up for lost time with Josephine Wienlich’s polka “Siren Songs,” a tone-painting of an Edwardian hothouse environment with a surprise guest appearance by the harp, followed by Florence Price’s “Rainbow Waltz,” which was less flowing and more interrupted than standard Austrian bonbon fare with a touch of Broadway roof garden. And yet these pieces weren’t really new music, either; each one has now become a time capsule of nostalgia for the perceived days of order and elegance before the Great War. The Viennese look back, not forward.

The standard Johann Strauss selections for the evening were supplemented on this occasion by Josef Strauss’s waltz “Woman’s Dignity,” a choice that was both bold and graceful and in which the composer made extensive intentional use of low brass reinforcements. The leader of the second violins appeared to take a particular fancy to it. The “Palms of Peace” waltz was overly long without making much of an impression, while the “Egyptian March” had the Philharmonic chanting along in time with the tambourine as they played. Although the younger members seemed to get a kick out of it, the older ones had expressions on their faces that said, “What the hell am I still doing here?” On the other hand, everyone seemed to enjoy Hans Christian Lumbye’s very tasteful but highly successful “Copenhagen Steam Railway Galop,” a truly galloping piece that started slowly, creating a peaceful landscape in anticipation of a train interrupting it, which the train eventually did with delicious thrust, the orchestra members whistling along as needed and the use of Rossini-like alternation of crescendi and decrescendi lending anticipation to the scene. On the final fortissimo, YNS flashed a railway conductor’s stop paddle at the orchestra, to the crowd’s delight. In the last of the three traditional encores, the “Radetsky March,” the maestro expanded upon the traditional conducting of the audience’s clapping begun by Herbert von Karajan by going walkabout, taking to the aisle to commune with his public in a fashion that would have thrilled Leonard Bernstein while leaving the orchestra to quite successfully fend for itself.

The livestream was absolutely appalling, repeatedly cutting away from the orchestra so the cameras could linger on the plaster Muses dotting the pediments and being interrupted with unnecessary digressions into organizational self-promotion. “Roses from the South,” the “Blue Danube,” and the “Diplomats’ Polka” were accompanied by cuts to dance sketches by Vienna State Opera principal dancers, the most successful and amusing of which was the latter, in which they reenacted the arrival of an ambassador at the Hofburg only to be stymied by the bureaucracy.

Tuesday night’s meeting of that gang calling themselves the Sedona city council produced a full-frontal attack on the brutality of the Sedona Police Department, with community members standing up for the first time to denounce the systemic violence that we are now finding out goes on in this town. The situation has apparently gotten so bad that we now have a grassroots group called Peace Force campaigning for paramilitary reform in Sedona, and several members of the group told the council in no uncertain terms that having heavily-armed thugs wandering around the community laughing at people while roughing them up is unacceptable.

Timothy Bush was the first to speak:

When SPD shows up, they escalate the situation with aggressiveness, then violence by attacking you. They commit aggravated assault, then they charge you with the exact crime that they have committed on you. I’ve witnessed this. I will never forget the day I was called by Sergeant Leon to come to my fiancee’s home. They were hauling her away. When I got there, Sergeant Leon was bopping her chest in the driveway. I pulled up, she says, “She thought she could take me! She thought she could pin me! I taught her something different!” I was there for this whole thing. Her and Shayla Jones were out there laughing, pumping their chests. After brutally attacking her, stripping her half naked, and then dragging her in the police car with a male driver. Now she’s a convicted felon. She’s a teacher. She was born in this community. These officers here—this is the Sedona brutality force…They don’t pull people over peacefully. When they stop you, they’re looking for any reason to rip you out of your car. They do it all the time…SPD is assaulting its citizens legally.

He was followed by Gaia Lamb, an 83-year-old resident who has lived in Sedona since before it was a city:

I feel threatened. Other people [are] threatened by the police here in Sedona. A year and a half ago I was arrested and spent the night in jail…I never had anything like this happen to me before. It was a great experience with regard to experiences in life, but it really took a toll, and I don’t want this happening to other people. I had a slight accident, ran my car into the ditch. My son came to help me, and when it was all over and everything was fine, my son was thrown to the ground, and I reacted, and because of my reaction I was grabbed and hurt and then arrested for resisting arrest—of course I resisted!—and then I got to spend the night in jail. There are quite a lot of us, we’ve found each other, that have been unduly hurt by police in this town.

The experience, Lamb said, cost her over $15,000. She was succeeded by Shandra Ryan, Bush’s fiancee:

There was a noise complaint to my home, and when I tried to stop the officers from opening the door and letting my dogs come out, they forced their way in. Two officers grabbed me and held me while another officer elbowed me in the head, kneed me in the gut, and then threw me to the ground. They shoved my head into the ground and they said, “Stop resisting! Stop resisting!” And I said, “What are you doing?” And they said, “All right, that’s it, we’re putting you under arrest,” and they put my hands behind my back and kept shoving my head into the ground, where they had already put a major trauma, and hauled me off to jail…It didn’t make sense to try to fight the police department in this small town. It was right around Christmastime, and my kids were being told they couldn’t see me until we resolved this case, and so I went ahead and took the plea…Come to find out it’s happened to many other people by the same set of officers. We’re going to be reaching out to the community about this.

Michael James Long was up next:

The local law enforcement officers here have specifically targeted the most vulnerable members of the Sedona community, such as the unhoused, those with medical needs, and people seeking spiritual, not material, goals. The hunting and vendetta against such people is not only illegal, but also a misappropriation of public money and police time that could be better spent keeping secure the rights and the property of the community. I have personally experienced being hunted by drones and followed up by officers on foot for many years, since about 2020.

Hunted by drones? Remember when the city was so ready to deny that they were going to plant surveillance cameras all over town to track where individuals were going so they could send cops to harass them? Of course, Comrade Finchem had already given the game away at that point. One wonders if Comrade General Foley will deny the use of drones. Anyone care to apply Occam’s razor or supply confirmatory or nugatory evidence?

I have been slandered with the term “transient” and I’ve been here longer than many office-holders and police officers…I’ve been arrested several times for not having a house and sleeping outside when there is no affordable housing in this city. This is the criminalization of the poor.

Given that some people in Sedona fully support the criminalization of anyone who is unwilling to contribute to the neoliberal-libertarian productivity cult, as they literally worship money and interpret its rejection as fundamentally wrong, it is almost to be expected that SPD would put those attitudes into action. Rachel Collins rounded out the evening’s narratives:

In the last ten years, the police department has gotten horrible. Absolutely brutal…I was seeing multiple attorneys in Phoenix right before Christmas, and they acknowledge, they know, what the city of Sedona, and other law enforcement agencies in collusion together, have been doing in Yavapai County because they see the victims who are trying to get representation for criminal defense when there is no actual crime that has been committed. They have been falsely charged, they have been jammed through a prosecutorial process that is completely illegal. And they’re behind us. The attorneys said they want us to stand up. They want to help us, because this is absolutely diabolical. Unfortunately, my situation came from somewhat opposite of some of these good people, which is that the police of Sedona refused to take a crime report that I was the victim of, something so severe, a racketeering situation that’s happening in Yavapai County, by people who are well-known, influential, and have money. And therefore the Sedona police wanted to cover up for them, because of their relationship with these people. I lost my home, I lost all my possessions, and I lost my businesses.

The group’s allegations are hardly surprising; they merely confirm and localize what we could already predict quite easily, knowing how police forces in general behave. Remember what the federal InJustice Department concluded about the Baltimore police department? “Officers seemed to view themselves as controlling the city rather than as a part of the city.” More than anything, though, these charges remind us why cops and bureaucrats and government employees do what they do: They enjoy it. They love that feeling of power over others. That is their motivation that compensates them for everything else they have to put up with. They are the psychopaths, the tiny fraction of the population that nevertheless manage to dominate the rest through their shameless indulgence in violence. Most humans may be willing to commit an act of violence in a situation where their lives or the lives of others are at immediate risk, but it takes a very rare type of human being, a type of human being that retained and re-evolved the animal dominance behaviors that most of the species lost long ago, to be willing to scheme to commit violence in cold blood for the pleasure of it.

The syllogisms are straightforward:

All police are violent. All violence is evil. Therefore, all police are evil.

All police take away freedom. Taking away freedom is evil. Therefore, all police are evil.

All police tell lies. Telling lies is evil. Therefore, all police are evil.

We need no more logic than that. The straightforward way to solve all of these problems is to send the people who cause them packing. The existence of a police force is a moral abomination, a crime against God, a crime against humanity, and a blatant act of disregard for the historical record and for basic logic. There is no possible justification for violence or for attempting to control another human being. Ever.

And let’s be clear: the people who showed up at council on Tuesday are not the only ones in this community preparing to take action against SPD for fabricating charges. The grapevine has it that there are other officers and other incidents involved. Personally, between Scott Jablow’s and Stephanie Foley’s animosity, I’ve been expecting a bag of cocaine to turn up in my car for the last six months.

What the Peace Force speakers described can happen to anyone. It’s not something that happens to other people. Every single one of us in this town is a potential victim of violence at the hands of the Sedona police department. That is a simple fact. It occurs hundreds of times a year if you count every arrest; thousands if you count every traffic stop. And it’s paid for out of our taxes on the false premise that it deters crime when in fact it does not. Imagine what might happen if, instead of spending ten million a year on violence, our community spent it on learning about ethics?

When they weren’t being told what a bunch of utter rotters their stormtroopers were, the council heard a repeat of Mary Chicoine’s presentation to the Planning and Zoning Commission last week on the VVCDO’s land trust project. Chicoine once again emphasized that “the homeowner’s first of all not allowed to do any major changes to a land trust home” and described the nonprofit board’s control over tenants as “the beauty of the land trust.” She added that eligibility to “purchase” one of the homes would be restricted based not only on income but also on other factors relating to lifestyle and employment. For those curious about the location, the property on which VVCDO plans to construct its first project is just across from the marijuana grow facility in Camp Verde.

Council additionally tossed another $1,288,000 in public money at asphalt contractors to continue pouring tar onto Sedona’s red dirt and agreed to the continued existence of the Historical Preservation Commission, as well as rewarding the Sedona paramilitary for their brutality by giving them another $755,510 for more encrypted radios and more additional transceiver sites. Interestingly, the map of the department’s planned radio coverage that Comrade Loeffler presented to council indicated that coverage will be effectively zero out at the buildable portion of the city’s Dells property—but excellent throughout the northern areas of Sedona’s recent annexation, where council has a strong interest in being able to pursue campers and OHV drivers.

“How do you quantify cost efficiencies for these additions?” Comrade Hosseini wanted to know. Comrade General Foley’s response was the exceedingly precise “Doing it now.”

Comrade Browne reassured council that “we are working with a PR firm to help with the stories of how short-term rentals are impacting communities around the state.” Why is every STR owner in town not at council to protest the city’s propaganda program?

The council also on Tuesday declined to appoint a replacement to the Planning and Zoning Commission in preference to seeking additional applicants. The sole candidate this round was a real estate broker from New Mexico and five-year resident named Keith Meyer who echoed the council’s own views on the appropriateness of totalitarianism. During his interview, Meyer expressed his comfort with violating individuals’ private property rights “for the greater good” provided that they received appropriate compensation. He complained that Sedona’s “signage is inadequate,” in spite of the city being littered with far too many obnoxious signs, and disparagingly called Sedona’s organic growth a “patchwork,” instead suggesting that the city needed a unifying theme imposed from on high. Meyer also kept using the phrase “peer group cities” and the idea that development concepts should be imported into rural Sedona from urban areas. “Hopefully driverless cars take over,” Meyer said, before adding the even more naive and authoritarian fantasy that parking and car ownership alike could be eliminated by driverless cars.

When Comrade Fultz asked him, given his familiarity with Santa Fe, if there was anything that Santa Fe was doing that Sedona should imitate, Meyer came back with “they’ve maintained the core historical area” and criticized their previous restriction of apartment development. He completely missed the opportunity to mention the world-famous Santa Fe Opera and its successful outdoor venue, thereby indicating that his awareness of and interest in the arts is sufficiently tiny to make him unqualified for any public position in a city animated by the arts.

As an instance of a project he was involved with that he thought had gone well, Meyer named building a solar plant in Belen, NM, because “it took quite a bit of education to communicate to Belen why this is a good thing for them.” However, he displayed a complete lack of familiarity with ongoing development projects in Sedona, the community plan, or the land development code. When asked how he would weigh public input against staff recommendation, he came back with, “It’s not important for me to be popular…Is their stated objection a legitimate objection?”

Meyer couldn’t answer the question on whether the community plan actually represents the community’s vision and values, so I’ll do that for him: It sure as hell does not.

On Wednesday, council and staff held a fantasy session to discuss their wild ideas for future capital improvement projects—translation: the big-city horrors they want to keep inflicting on a small rural town. Comrade Fultz raised the topic of installing signals at crosswalks to discriminate against and inconvenience pedestrians for the benefit of drivers—yet another way this gang of millionaire NEPmen wants to privilege wealth and waste—and Comrade Harris reassured him that staff have “a long-term plan to signalize those.” Fultz called it “intelligent control.” Harris added, “We’d love to finish that skybridge, that pedestrian crossing, at Wayside Chapel,” although he knows perfectly well that a strong majority of residents do not want any kind of skybridge. Good idea from an engineering standpoint? Certainly. But residents don’t want it, so the idea should have been dead as soon as the survey came back. The idea that Fultz and the city will reeducate residents to change what they want is not only a complete misunderstanding of the democratic process, it’s a complete rejection and reversal of the democratic process. Meanwhile, Comrade Kinsella wanted still more signs to try to steer people around town by tempting them with a display of available parking spaces.

Comrade Dickey made a highly interesting remark regarding council and staff’s plans to install a form of totalitarianism to which they euphemistically refer as a “parking management” system in Uptown: “Some of the delays on this has to do with the video camera system critique we’ve had over the past year,” adding by implication that staff were trying to present the invasiveness of the system to the public as being less than it actually is. He next tossed out the option of building a “flex lane” in Uptown. Fultz proposed taking over part of SR 179 from ADOT, so the city could do whatever it wanted with the road without regard for the public’s freedom of movement, and Dickey agreed, “That would definitely be an option to consider.”

“If we bring the community in, if they hear the plans, there may be less resistance,” Comrade Ploog suggested at one point. Of course we in the public are going to resist; this nonsense is all completely unnecessary. Instead of all this unneeded building and complexity, what we in the community should be asking is, how do we make our community simpler? How do we use less and older technology and thereby become more resilient—in particular, how do we eliminate dependence upon electronics? How do we become more old-fashioned? Millions of dollars are being wasted on unneeded technology and infrastructure in the hope that it will save a few spoiled people a few seconds of their time because they can’t manage their emotions or their expectations successfully. What a farce.

Also, city staff seem to think the city is a business or a developer that has to keep building projects in order to stay relevant. It doesn’t.

Again in response to a suggestion from Fultz, Dickey agreed that it would make sense for the city to start looking at fees for the trailhead shuttle. That may be the best idea I’ve ever heard from him, as it will kill the program. City staff have been able to force people to use the shuttles so far now that they’re free, but if a whole family has to pay each way, that’s going to flip the cost-benefit calculation for a lot of people and crater ridership—and then staff will no longer be able to justify the program’s existence as per-rider costs soar and it will fold in a few more years. Maybe the end of this long, bumpy road is finally in sight.

As part of their efforts to institutionalize discrimination, Comrade Pfaff proposed targeted increases in parking fines in neighborhoods where popular trailheads are located, and instead of pointing out the lawsuits that would be likely to ensue, Comrade Christianson embraced the idea eagerly. Comrade Frewin revealed that the city’s surveillance ambitions have extended to tracking disc golf players, and that their data has shown that of some 3,000 registered players, only about 600 are Sedona residents, while more than 1,000 traveled from more than 100 miles away to play. So let me get this straight: a piece of publicly-owned land that could be put into a land trust and parceled out to residents to build their own affordable homes on is instead being used as an amenity for tourists.

Comrade Beck apparently plans to present his carbon inventories in February and reiterated his claim that the city’s own emissions are down 50 percent. Fultz, strangely, called him on it. “Carbon offsets, in my view, is not a plan,” Fultz said, and the city has done almost nothing to actually reduce physical emissions apart from buying offsets. He then questioned whether Beck’s proposal to spend $10 million on “decarbonizing” city buildings would be the best use of public money and said he would be inclined to put the funds into some sort of community-building program instead.

And let’s not forget that the arrogance of these people wasting the public’s time to this extent while they talk about their personal preferences would be unbelievable if we weren’t here to witness it.

This past week in superstition and stupidity in Sedona, I was confronted with the ludicrous spectacle of an individual who claimed to be an aspiring “breatharian.” Having once witnessed someone starve themselves to death as the ultimate “fuck you” to the medical establishment that had abused them, I’m unsympathetic to the idiocy of claims that ignore basic facts about the mechanics of the human body and are therefore so easily disprovable. Perhaps if more people still died in their homes, in their own beds, surrounded by witnesses, instead of remotely in hospitals under the supervision of “experts,” obvious stupidity would be less easily believed. Cultural ignorance is a killer. And that problem really has to be laid at the feet of the state indoctrination system, which quite intentionally no longer teaches a working knowledge of things like logic, physics, and chemistry. Kids who graduate from what passes for the typical school system these days are not equipped with either the tools of reason with which to critically attack the assertions of others, or with background knowledge about how the universe functions that could inform their critiques of new claims.

Of course, such a state of affairs is very convenient for the coercive state, as a population that cannot critically weigh conspiracy theories is more likely to believe them, which both distracts the public from organizing effective political resistance to the state—and undermines their will to resist tyranny by propagating false impressions about the strength and competence of the government. If, for example, the public believes that the government is in possession of the sort of supernatural powers, acquired either through the development of advanced technology or alliances with otherworldly visitors, that would allow it to construct physical impossibilities or high-order improbabilities such as phased energy weapons or intercontinental tunnels, then that public will be unlikely to consider their chances of success when fighting the state to be very high. In Sedona, to an extent not found elsewhere, it is not religion but UFOs, crystals, and vortexes that are the opiate of the people.

Among the many debts of thanks we owe to Edward Snowden is one for bringing out the confirmation that nothing actually exists behind the government facade of secrecy except a morbid manipulative interference and the additional information that the public’s belief in the supernatural alliances of the US federal government is a cynical running joke for those who operate the administrative state.

A group describing itself as the National Parents Union is complaining that the federal heath department’s new dietary guidelines recommending no sugar for children under the age of eleven are “completely unrealistic.” Naturally, the federal government has no business making dietary recommendations in the first place—indeed, the 2,000-calories-a-day suggestion that appears on every label for prepackaged food has likely been a key contributor to the obesity epidemic—but no sugar for kids is one that should be fairly uncontroversial. It’s quite possible to make the argument that refined sugar is the most dangerous substance humanity has ever invented, given its ability to hijack the evolutionary history of our biology to our detriment. Chalk up one small step towards fixing the systemic lifestyle problems that cause most health problems.

As for such a goal being “unrealistic,” I can only say that my mom raised my brother and I along similar lines during the early years of our lives quite successfully. No refined sugar except on rare occasions, no processed foods, lots of meat, homemade bread and pasta. Being a budding chocoholic myself, this sometimes led to incidents like the time I was hiding an unsweetened bar of baking chocolate in my bedroom to nibble on, but she generally kept us eating well. And that’s how we ate for the most part until I was about ten or eleven years old, and I’m confident that that early foundation in good nutrition explains in part why we continue to stay healthy with very little effort. We don’t see doctors or carry health insurance because we have no need for it, and we therefore are not exploited by the medical industry scam; our bodies function according to the design specification—which is what happens when you put in proper maintenance on any complex machine.

At the moment, Susannah Crockford’s Ripples of the Universe, an academic study of some of the more common superstitions in Sedona, is sitting on my desk for reference, and I recall that Crockford commented forcibly on the problems of the standard American diet:

The food system in capitalism simultaneously overfeeds and undernourishes, resulting in the “mirror symptoms” of obesity and emaciation. Both of these symptoms are wrought on the bodies of the poor, as food producers in the global South remain malnourished while the working poor in the United States suffer the highest rates of obesity. The built environment and employment conditions in America exacerbate this; fast food and vending machines make food of poor nutritional quality easily available, during a working day too long and exhausting to leave time to cook at home or get much in the way of exercise, and driving is often made mandatory by distances, lack of public transportation, and dearth of sidewalks. government further encourages poor health in low-income neighborhoods through zoning laws mandating space for fast food franchises and rewarding schools’ partnerships with soda companies. American workers’ true four food groups are sugar, fat, salt, and caffeine, according to Berlant, because this is what is available to them and what enables them to get through the day. This imperils public health at the same time as responsibility for personal health is rhetorically situated almost exclusively on an individual level. When obesity is cast as the result of lack of will and poor food choices, then the structural conditions of the capitalist food system are obscured. Survival becomes a matter of “slow death,” where people live but not very well.

Entertainingly, she also commented on how obvious rejection of the standard American diet is a common way to perform superficial spirituality in Sedona:

The spiritual food rules of Findal and Buttercup constitute a hierarchical social order, where the highest level is not eating at all, surviving on air, light, and elixirs that purify the body, maintaining the boundaries of the corporeal body and the social body. This creates a body that is the inversion of the caricature of the “fat American” supposed to result from the “standard American diet.” It was not incidental that Findal and Buttercup were both very thin. They were also tall, white, and as small business owners, economically middle class. In broader American culture, eating sparingly and excluding foods is a demarcation of upper-middle-class behavior; the higher-class body is a thin body.34 Findal and Buttercup’s diet was “high class” in the social hierarchy of spirituality; they could see themselves as more spiritual than others because of their diet. were also higher class socio-economically. Their artisanal company was successful, unlike many others in Sedona. This meant that Findal and Buttercup did have more resources than others, and they had easier access to a wider range of foods through which to construct their high-class diet. They acted superior but they were also superior in terms of economic capital. They had a successful business, social capital, and a cohesive social group around them.

This assumption of superiority did not pass without comment in Sedona. Others I spoke to expressed opinions that Findal and Buttercup were absurd, cultlike, and self-aggrandizing. Theresa, who lived in Sedona to recover from a brain tumor, regularly remarked on what she called the “right-wing spirituality” of the “spiritual drag queens” in Sedona. People who thought they were right about everything and everyone who disagreed with them was wrong. They wore sundresses and no makeup, they used their appearance to put on a performance of being spiritual. This kind of spirituality was like religion in her opinion. She found their actions contrived. Theresa would often comment in our conversations on the “spiritual drag queens,” whom I subconsciously associated with Findal and Buttercup, when after about a year of knowing each other she explicitly identified the type of person she meant as Findal. Another acquaintance I asked directly if she knew Buttercup and she made a negative noise, indicating she knew her and did not like her. She called Buttercup a “blisstard.” Previously she had been involved in a community space called the Greenhouse that was run by Buttercup and the ChocolaTree owner. There was a long list of banned things at the entrance: “no meat, no smoking, no drinking, no drugs…” The negativity turned a lot of people off, I was told; it was not a democracy, but a dictatorship of Buttercup. The Greenhouse ceased to be a community space soon before I arrived, when it was turned into a grow space for sprouts run by a couple of guys who worked at the ChocolaTree. The “ChocolaTree crowd” was a social group explicitly identified by others with Findal and Buttercup, a raw food diet, and a sense of superiority and exclusiveness.

And wouldn’t you know it, the wannabe “breatharian” also turned out to be a member of the “ChocolaTree crowd” and in fact blamed his inability to resist his cravings for their food for his failure to maintain the “breatharian” lifestyle. This was the same “breatharian” who showed up later in the week with food poisoning, only to claim he didn’t believe in germ theory.

When these people fell out of the stupid tree, they hit every branch on the way down.

The beat is back this Sunday as Chamber Music Sedona hosts Michelle Cann and the Imani Winds, and Moshe Bukshpan and Vitaly Serebriakov will perform at the JCSVV synagogue on January 25. Don’t forget the Flagstaff Symphony on January 24, either. And Community Library Sedona will be hosting its inaugural book fair for local authors on Saturday. There’s still time this evening to catch the Baker’s Dozen of Yale singing a cappella at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre, which will be followed on Saturday morning by Bellini’s I Puritani live from the Metropolitan Opera. Also, the Arizona Stop Flock Initiative will be throwing a party to celebrate the removal of Sedona’s Flock spy cameras on January 31 at 4 PM at Sedona Hot Yoga.

At their Tuesday meeting, the members of the Planning and Zoning Commission reelected a California proponent of pseudoscience as the commission’s chairman and a former city employee’s wife as vice chairman, thereby demonstrating once again how little involvement of ordinary working Sedonans there is in how Sedona is run. The Californian proposed making the chairmanship a rotating position to “promote more diversity,” which the commission will discuss at a future date. The commission then moved on to impeding the arts in Sedona by unanimously recommending the city council approve a zone change and minor community plan amendment for the Arts ‘n’ One art studio facility behind Chocolatree, allowing part of it to be converted into four apartments.

Per city staff, the property, owned by Paul Kaiser and Susan Herman, last underwent a zone change in 2004. Kaiser said that the parcel was formerly the location of a bronze casting foundry that they converted to art studio space at that time under a special use zoning designation, and that allowing a partial apartment conversion of the property was necessary due to “gentrification.” Comrades Meyer and Wiehl clarified that the arts uses of the property will not be allowed to continue at all unless the owners apply for a conditional use permit within six months, which Kaiser confirmed they intend to do.

“We have never had a complaint from our neighbors for the last 30 years of our being in the building,” Kaiser told the commission, which unanimously approved recommending the zone change to council.

While the commission nominally acted properly in respecting property rights and recommending the requested zone change, it acted with complete impropriety when the members failed to protest the disgusting spectacle of the Californian cajoling and soft-coercing the property owner into a perpetual short-term rental deed restriction as a condition of allowing him the right to do what he wanted with his own property. Comrade Wiehl also took time to gloat over the fact that some of the other conditions city staff imposed included “no outdoor activity, no audible noise after 9 [PM],” the sort of nitpicking rules that have already proved incredibly destructive to the arts scene in Sedona. How poor in spirit, how devoid of humanity, does someone have to be to think that the suppression of fun and creative activity is a good thing? Nor does the principled propriety of the decision diminish the fact that more apartments will help to create a population of permanently-dependent employees and will be a far more negative thing for Sedona than the preservation of space for the arts, especially when artists in the community lament constantly that they can’t find studio or rehearsal space. This is not a decision that benefits the Sedona community as a whole. This is the sort of highly uncomfortable situation in which we find ourselves when individuals do not voluntarily temper their freedoms with ethical self-discipline.

The commission then recommended council approval of a conditional use permit for a new St. Vincent de Paul food pantry adjacent to the St. John Vianney Catholic church following a presentation in which the supposedly “Christian” members of the congregation mainly emphasized that their operation wouldn’t even visually inconvenience the more worthy and virtuous millionaire property owners of the adjoining Casa Contenta subdivision. The proposal would replace the food bank’s 480-square-foot building from 1987 with a new 1,500-square-foot facility. The utilitarian Scotsman Andrew Brearley, speaking as president of the food pantry, reassured listeners that “the homeless are not our primary clients. Over 90 percent of the people that we serve are underprivileged working Sedona families, not the homeless. Secondly, people say, well, these people might be dangerous. I’m glad to say we’ve never had any incident of violence.” Brearley added that they would have anyone who tried to camp on the property trespassed by the Sedona police. Presumably he would do the same to Jesus and the disciples, who were among the itinerant homeless living on handouts.

Father Ignatius Mazanowski assured the millionaires that “we’ve done a tremendous amount of pruning on our property. Once you prune your property, it’s harder to camp on your property.”

Comrade Wiehl wanted to know why a building for serving those in need was being prioritized over preserving old-growth trees. Parishoner David Mascone similarly complained that serving the homeless in the proposed manner would be “in conflict with the need for open space” and, in a stunning demonstration of the intellectual and moral distance between the rich retiree and the average working person, asserted that the building’s waiting room alone would need to be 1,500 square feet to accommodate a mere 45 regular clients.

Mazanowski further revealed during the meeting that in response to the outrage of the millionaires next door, “we have withdrawn our application for rezoning. We have no plans for affordable housing. That’s not something we’re doing at this time.”

While it’s shameful that the church was so theologically deficient in the first place as to propose building profit-earning barracks for wage slaves, it’s also shameful that those infamous Sedona neighbors have once again proved themselves to be inconsistent implementers of the social contract that guarantees property rights and elitist bigots more concerned with keeping “the poors” out of their millionaires’ neighborhood than anything else. Let’s not forget that Comrade Dunn lives in that neighborhood, in a 5,000-square-foot house in which she and her equally nonproducing husband rattle around with their dust monitors, and can’t stand to have the homeless any closer to them than in a concentration camp on the very fringes of town at most. What would you like to bet they were active behind the scenes in rallying opposition to the church’s project? And what would you like to bet that Dunn won’t recuse herself when the CUP comes to council? She has to defend the good people somehow.

The real point of the meeting was Mary Chicoine’s presentation announcing that the Verde Valley Community Development Organization has launched its own land trust and acquired a 14-acre piece of property in Camp Verde on which they propose to build 45 homes. Chicoine laid out a proposal drastically different from any of the housing options city of Sedona staff have been exploring, one that would offer a number of real advantages to local workers, but one that would also continue the pattern of self-defined local elitists—the Verde Valley version of the Leninist vanguard party—attempting to increase their control over the lives of those individual workers. It was, in essence, a scheme to tempt workers with luxuries without actually giving them home ownership.

On the positive side, Chicoine emphasized that VVCDO is not pursuing government-funded low-income apartment projects for working residents, but instead an effort to “get them in actual houses.” She then, surprisingly, went after high construction costs created by building regulations: “Every time we add ten thousand dollars, like a door, or, I hate to say this, we add another smoke alarm—I have an 1,800-square-foot house with, I think it’s six or eight smoke alarms in it—water sprinklers, all those different kinds of things, or we change something within the process, it adds a cost. And the cost of our building houses here in the region is pretty exorbitant.”

However, instead of proposing the simple abolition of the obstructive rules, Chicoine segued into discussion of how her group’s land trust proposal would work, describing it as a “ground lease and shared equity program.” “The homeowner is only buying the vertical structure,” thereby reducing their mortgage costs, Chicoine said. Land lease rates would be capped at 1 percent of the value of the land only. “Owners” would be required to cover property taxes and would be required to “sell” their properties at an affordable rate, but would receive 25 percent of the equity from the property if “sold.” Leases would be perpetual rather than for a term of years; “they even have the right to pass it down to a family member if they meet the affordable restrictions,” Chicoine said. She added that she currently has donors lined up for two additional pieces of land.

More negatively, Chicoine reiterated that the program was not about helping to create strong, standalone families, but rather about simply providing a consistent workforce for employers: “Employees stay longer when they’re invested in the community.” She also emphasized that tenants will have no actual freedom to make decisions regarding their homes. The nonprofit, not the residents, will control rulemaking and management for the community in a paternalistic patronage arrangement allowing them to impose their lifestyle choices on residents. Tenants will have to sign an 82-page contract, will not be allowed to remodel without permission of VVCDO, and will have to accept that VVCDO bureaucrats can waltz through their homes and inspect them annually. Chicoine said smugly that the properties wouldn’t just be people’s homes but would represent an ideological “commitment to affordable housing.” Her group assumes that rural workers will know nothing about home ownership and will have to be trained by office staff who have never hammered two two-by-fours together in their lives. She teased city staff and council with the prospect of giving city employees first right of refusal on housing trust properties if the city were to donate a piece of land for such a project. She also made it clear that the project will likely impose unnecessary costs on tenants through luxuries such as wastefully large houses in the neighborhood of 1,500 or 2,000 square feet, as well as requiring garages.

The Danish Leninist Ida Auken wrote a decade ago, expressing the ambition of the managerial elite, “Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.” Or, as the phrase has evolved over time, “you will own nothing, you will rent everything, and you will be happy.”

Like hell we will. Ownership is a logically, philosophically, historically, and ethically problematic question. But in the United States of today, ownership is also the only way we in the general public have to claw back some modicum of freedom from the totalitarian state. Therefore, workers must own homes to protect their freedom, and a land trust can only be a genuinely beneficial option when the residents of the project can control its operation without elite oversight—if they can have the control that comes with ownership without having the ownership.

We are told over and over again that the reason to consider the creation of new homes in Sedona is to attract families with kids so the state indoctrination system can stay financially afloat and continue abusing those kids to turn them into the next generation of wage slaves. It will be very interesting to see, when and if any of these school-filling projects get built, if families are denied admission should they refuse to enroll their kids in public schools.

A land trust proposal oriented toward the needs and desires of regular people, and towards producing genuine equity, by the way, would incorporate the following elements:

• Democratic rulemaking and management of the community by residents only, not an outside board of paternalists.

• Fixed costs for land leases, so that the lease payments would eventually expire when the cost of the land was paid off, similarly to a mortgage payment, thereby allowing residents to either accumulate equity or reduce their working hours thereafter.

• Voluntary limitations on the sale of the property to another local resident or worker and capping of possible sale prices.

• In the absence of repeal of current building regulations, a development-specific building code for each project tailored to encouraging owner-builder construction and permitting self-certification of the resulting structures.

• Voluntary limitations on the size of structures, including a flat cap on square footage and a 10 percent limitation on the amount of lot a structure can cover.

All of these elements, with the exception of the sale price cap, were nowhere to be found in Chicoine’s proposal.

In typical bureaucratic fashion, Chicoine interrupted her presentation to accuse the public of spreading misinformation when giving their directions to their elected council and commissioners. “I just think the community is uninformed,” Chicoine said arrogantly. She then made the extraordinary claim that single-family homes consume more water than high-density housing and stated her organization would be bringing in an “expert” to “educate” the community on that claim. It must be remembered that these supposed community benefit nonprofits are generally composed of retired bureaucrats or current bureaucrats merely diversifying their careers.

The commission’s only comments on the proposal dealt with whether making homes more affordable would interfere with the city’s pursuit of green ideology.

At the end of the meeting, the commissioners agreed to set up a subcommittee to recommend possible revisions to the city’s land development code, which everyone in town with a brain realizes is half the cause of the housing problem. One is not optimistic that any serious improvements will result, especially since there’s talk of bringing in yet another consulting bureaucrat to advise.

City of Sedona staff have still not released the city’s annual budget survey, which should tell us just how seriously the council and unelected bureaucrats are planning to take our opinions on their overspending.

Who here in town drives a Toyota Sequoia SUV equipped with both a whopping 5.7-liter, 381-horsepower engine that gets roughly 11 to 14 miles to the gallon—and a custom conservation specialty license plate reading “TREEHUG”? Are they on drugs? Have they been pickling their brains in alcohol for the last twenty years? That combination is going to have to go on the list of most performative things seen in Sedona. Even by Sedona standards, it’s eye-popping. Perhaps we should give out an annual award for biggest virtue signaler in town, the way Rand Paul puts out the Festivus Report on government waste annually.

Someone in Cottonwood apparently panicked and called the inhumane society over half a dozen peahens clustering on the corner. We had a pair of those living in the backyard when I was a kid. They roosted in the ponderosas at night and had a call that would scare the crap out of you until you got used to it. They’d eat a cracker from your hand if they knew you or fly off to somewhere unreachable if they didn’t fancy having you around. Those birds are more than capable of taking care of themselves. People who move to Arizona really need to stop thinking the wildlife needs to be protected from existing in the environment where it’s perfectly at home.

In further indication that Cottonwood’s new city manager Comrade Cifuentez is still doing his best to make Cottonwood into California, he attempted to con the city council into passing a new ordinance on December 16 that would have reduced the number of members of the airport commission required to have a knowledge of aviation matters from four to three, as well as “updating the commission’s enumerated duties to specifically include language addressing airport noise complaints.” The move was clearly intended as part of a process to shift the public body away from addressing issues of law, which, as those involved in the aviation field know, unambiguously prohibit the city from attempting to restrict use of the airport, and towards addressing issues of emotion and feelings. It’s quite obvious that Cifuentez is deliberately trying to reduce the influence of aviators on the operation of the airport and to transform the board into a whining forum so the commissioners can be harassed by freedom-hating residents. He apparently hopes to bully them by proxy into yielding to the selfish retirees’ illegal demands. However, council only gave him half of what he wanted. They approved updating the language of the commission’s duties to encourage greater public harassment, but denied Cifuentez the additional non-aviation commissioner. Aviators will remain a four-fifths majority on the airport board—for now.

Of late in the People’s Republic of California, the Ninth Circuit has tossed the state’s prohibition on the open carry of firearms in counties with more than 200,000 people as a result of its decision in Baird v. Bonta. Counties with fewer people can still issue open carry permits, but everywhere else, where more than 95 percent of the population lives, it’s back to the good old days of the Wild West for a short while until the Politburo in Sacramento can come up with a new licensing regime it can manage to get by the appeals court. The decision follows the Ninth Circuit kicking the case back to the district court two years ago, which granted summary judgment in favor of the state on the grounds that a near-total ban on carrying firearms was somehow “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Californians are truly delusional, living in their world of manufactured history.

It might be timely to recall the real reason why California has such extreme gun laws in the first place: the Black Panthers. When the Black Panther Party started showing up at California government facilities to protest while carrying weapons, which was completely legal at the time, good white California politicians panicked and decided to take away the right completely so it wouldn’t be exercised by people they despised. The NRA, given its historical advocacy of gun control, had naturally expressed support for the ban. Let us not forget that a key ingredient of supposedly progressive California’s sixty-year passion for gun control is and always has been simple racism—which the court explicitly called out in its decision:

From 1850, when California first became a state, until the Mulford Act of 1967, public carry of firearms in California (open or concealed) was entirely unregulated. And when California first deviated (or considered deviating) from this practice, its reasons for doing so were less than morally exemplary. The first restriction on public carry that California contemplated was a concealed-carry ban in 1856—which was intended to apply only to “Mexicans,” who were considered dangerous…Eventually, in 1967 California first criminalized the peaceful open carrying of a loaded handgun in the Mulford Act—legislation that was also tainted with racial animus. Passed during a period of significant racial unrest, the Mulford Act was a legislative response to the Black Panther Party’s activities, which included openly carrying firearms to protest police behavior in African-American communities. The catalyzing event occurred when “30 members of the Black Panthers protested on the steps of the California statehouse armed with .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns and .45-caliber pistols and announced, ‘The time has come for black people to arm themselves.’” The California legislature disagreed and responded by passing the Mulford Act. Yet even then, it remained legal in California to openly carry a handgun, so long as it was unloaded. That was the case for nearly half a century after the Mulford Act—Californians remained free to carry unloaded handguns openly and holstered for self-defense without penalty. That changed only when California enacted its urban open-carry ban barely over a decade ago in 2012. In doing so, California joined a tiny minority of states to have adopted such severe restrictions on open carry. In fact, California is the only state in the Ninth Circuit that has entirely banned open carry for the overwhelming majority of its citizens.

“California has apparently resorted to subterfuge to deny its citizens their Second Amendment rights,” Judge Kenneth Lee added pointedly in concurrence. “California insists that citizens in counties with populations of fewer than 200,000 people can apply for an open-carry license. Yet California admits that it has no record of even one open-carry license being issued, and one potential reason is that California has misled its citizens about how to apply for an open-carry license.” My, but doesn’t that sound like the city of Sedona’s community development department?

The small potential problem with appealing to the “nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation” is that until well into the twentieth century, the American tradition of firearm regulation was organized around the concept that firearms, and specifically rifles, had to be widely available to the general public in order to equip the militia force that formed the basis for the country’s defense. American military doctrine throughout the nineteenth century held that any invasion would be repelled not by the professional army, which was considered to be merely a technical corps of advisors and a nucleus for organization, but by citizen-soldiers who would bleed the invader into a retreat after the fashion of General Nathanael Greene in the southern campaign of the Revolutionary War. Vesting this task in the citizenry was explicitly intended to remove the need for the existence of an army—James Madison wrote that arming the public destroyed “every pretext for a military establishment. If the military and paramilitary forces of the United States were to be reduced to a level proportional to that at which Congress fixed the size of the military in 1790, their numbers would fall from several millions to about 100,000. If their numbers were to be reduced proportionally to Congress’s 1784 authorization level, the total number of soldiers of all kinds in this country would fall to roughly 7,000. That is what a genuine awareness of and enthusiasm for upholding the nation’s “historical tradition of firearm legislation” would look like: the abolition of standing armies dangerous to liberty.

Only in 1898, when the United States began to acquire its overseas empire with the conquest of the Philippines and Cuba, did the concept of relying on a militia for national defense begin to prove inconvenient. Militia forces, which voted on their period of service, could not be sent overseas, so the federal government turned part of the militia into the National Guard via the infamous Dick Act (which also served industrial purposes) and started to build up a standing army. Two world wars and a lot of defense contracts later and guns in the hands of the average American started looking like job insecurity to the generals, who were professionals by that time. Ironically, even as government bodies started cracking down on gun ownership, the US Army kept getting the shit kicked out of it in guerrilla battles in the jungles of Vietnam, the cities of Iraq, and the mountains of Afghanistan, demonstrating the ongoing ability of guerrillas armed with limited technology to send an invader packing. The United States has been getting a painful lesson for decades past in how well militias can defend a country even as it has been dismantling its own. But then, that would assume that the US Army and its associates have any interest in defending the United States.

The read of the week is, of course, Marine Corps commandant Smedley Butler’s War is a Racket, his account of his career as a gangster for big business, during which he was involved with a number of Central American annexations. What with the Americans trying to conquer Venezuela for the profit of their oligarchs and the beneficial effect on fuel prices before the next election cycle and the Israelis and Russians going on the warpath to try to reestablish their ancient empires, we might as well be back in the 1930s, the days of the Anschluss and the annexation of the Sudetenland. Any pretense to anything called international law or civilized discourse is out the window at this point, and the ruling elites of these states are operating on a basis of pure self-interested expediency. It’s the Huns swooping down from the steppe. Raiding barbarism and the devil take the generations to come. Olga Romanoff raving in the ruins of the world. Then the whole thing turned to farce when the excuse masquerading as the United States secretary of state was very careful to specify “there’s not a war” against Venezuela. But of course, because why else would you bomb and invade a sovereign nation and kidnap its president than not being at war with it? Whatever became of the days when secretary of state Henry Stimson shut down the entire nascent US surveillance program because, as he said, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail”? And to now presume to try a foreign leader for actions committed in his own nation under the legal authority of his own constitution and government—we really should rejoice at this sort of nonsense, because it undermines any credibility the American federal government or legal system might have left. One is reminded of the statement of the Combat Organization of Anarcho-Communists at the time of the Wagner Group rebellion: “In this fight between two cannibals, anarchists should stay away—let them bleed each other as much as possible. That way, they won’t be able to disturb people in the future.”

It is tempting sometimes to consider the 2020s thus far as an analogue of the 1920s, when Marxism-Leninism and fascism began to divide the political scene between them. On the former occasion, as Richard Coudenhove-Kalgeri pointed out in The Totalitarian State Against Man,

Gradually there ripened in the bourgeois camp the idea that a bourgeois dictatorship should confront the communist dictatorship and use violent means to protect private property and the existing foundations of Western culture against the onslaught of bolshevism and atheism…The bourgeois counter-revolution against the world revolution began in Hungary and Bavaria after the overthrow of the communist governments in Budapest and Munich. Their first decisive victory, however, was gained in Italy, where the role of leader had been undertaken by a foeman worthy of Lenin’s steel in the person of Mussolini…When the Third International threatened Italy with the dictatorship of the proletariat and the parliamentary system proved itself too weak to destroy this creeping revolution, Mussolini created for himself an armed party army in order to put an anti-Marxist dictatorship in the place of Italian democracy.

In this century, however, it appears that fascism is taking the lead in the authoritarianism sweepstakes, which raises the question of whether a Marxist-Leninist resurgence is to be expected in reaction. Quo, quo scelesti, ruitis?

The top ten are:

• The Myth of Mental Illness, by Thomas Szasz. A classic, but new to me. Szasz’s eloquent argument can be condensed into a single critical sentence: “Mental illness,” so-called, does not meet the basic criteria of modern medicine to be considered a disease or illness, as it causes no physical lesion, and its false portrayal as an illness susceptible to “treatment” has in fact been a scam used to stigmatize and suppress behaviors considered a threat to the coercive state. A must-read for anyone who finds the constant invention of new alphabet-soup “disorders” by the medical industry to be highly suspect.

• The Polymath, Waqas Ahmed. Explores the benefits of generalists to human societies and, conversely and perversely, the tendency of societies to evolve in ways that drive specialization instead. Ahmed particularly relates this trend, within the context of recent human history, to the need of governments and corporations for controllable labor in an industrialized economy and the consequences of an education system designed to meet the needs of those groupings.

• The Use and Abuse of History, by Marc Ferro. A delightful romp through the lies that governments around the world tell children about the false glories of their pasts, revealing the common thread of shared narrative within them all: a struggle for liberation from outside tyranny or outside influence, during the relation of which low points are erased and embarrassing incidents conveniently forgotten. Should be a pleasurably uncomfortable read for anyone indulging in any kind of fantasy of the American state indoctrination system being either truthful or an improvement on the others of its kind.

• Patterns of Sexual Behavior, Clellan Ford and Frank Beach. One of those books that does a great job of showing off how thorough, properly-conducted research leads to the correct answer anyway even in a climate hostile to the facts. Instead of doing what most of their peers did, namely indulging in psychobabble about their pet theories and personal obsessions, Ford and Beach took the Kinsey approach of collecting and analyzing hard data on sexuality and applied it worldwide. They took a high-level look at studies of almost 200 different societies and arrived at three general conclusions regarding human sexuality. First, they concluded that opposite-sex coitus is the default pattern of sexual behavior in all human societies. Second, they found that same-sex attraction and the capacity for same-sex sexual activity also existed in all humans whether or not it was recognized or indulged. Third, they concluded that the aspect of personality that is now called “sexual orientation” is neither ingrained nor permanent, but is variable throughout life based on the individual’s experiences, choices, environment, and physiology: “Both extremes represent movement away from the original, intermediate condition which includes the capacity for both forms of sexual expression.” These conclusions, although amply supported by plenty of additional research since, are nevertheless statements that remain highly controversial even today because of their potential to disturb vested interests built up around alternate and less realistic theories. Imagine to what degree they were a departure from the norm in 1951. A riveting display of good scholarship.

• The Myth of Sex Addiction, by David Ley. The title says it all. Following in the footsteps of both Szasz and Carl Sagan, Ley disassembles the lie that sex addiction exists at all, pointing out that it is a non-falsifiable claim turned into a media circus in the 1980s for the purpose of profitability. He then goes on to a biting takedown of a variety of other lies about sex current in our society, highlighting how abnormal the accepted values of urbanized, industrialized cultures are in comparison to traditional human behavior. “There is a wealth of evidence that sex is good for you,” Ley writes baldly. “In many cases, more sex is even better for you, both psychologically and physically.”

• Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera, by Philip Gossett. From a fun little narrative about how the author accidentally stumbled into the world of nineteenth-century Italian opera grow a series of anecdotal explorations of the difficulties of performing some of these operas and understanding exactly what the composer’s intentions were—as well as the problems of deciding when to abide by the composer’s original intentions and when to utilize a revision. Some of the stories deal with the author’s musical detective work to reconstruct the mutilated scores of the great Italian masters and the remarkable finds that are still waiting to be made in the archives.

• The Sindbad Voyage, by Tim Severin. A curious British explorer decides to try building a replica of a traditional Omani ship and sail it from Oman to China. He does. Highly recommended for Patrick O’Brien fans.

• A Brief History of Drugs, by Antonio Escohotado. If you want to read one comprehensive book on drugs, this is it. The author took his ten-volume series on the history of intoxicants and summarized it all in less than 200 pages. With the timescale sped up, the book makes it easy to see the association between the growth of the coercive state following the second industrial revolution and the social demonization of drugs via xenophobia, racism, religion, and economics—and hand in hand with suppression, the soaring abuse of drugs driven by their prohibition.

• A Bullet in the Ballet, by Caryl Brahms. A charming, half-forgotten tale of a murder in the Ballets Stroganoff in the London of the thirties. The British detectives must come to terms with the Franco-Russian custom of everybody apparently sleeping with everybody else with everybody else’s consent, removing sexual jealousy as a motive for murder—and with the deeply-ingrained attitude that the show must go on, including the director’s incomprehension as to why the corpse should not have been moved or the blood not wiped up.

• Everything Must Go: Stories We Tell About the End of the World, by Dorian Lynskey. A nice systemic look at all the ways Anglo-American culture has become paranoid in the last century or so. Lynskey dredges up classics of science fiction from the 1950s and 1960s that most of today’s readers are unlikely to encounter elsewhere, teasing out shared themes across seven broad categories of narrative. He takes a wry, high-level approach appropriate to the subject, starting with a nice breakdown of the whole John of Patmos fantasia.

And now for the bottom three:

• The Anatomy of Courage, by Lord Moran. A utilitarian and purely mechanical take on courage by an elitist authoritarian that mixes up obsolete and discredited medical and pseudoscientific theories to evolve a portrayal of courage as a physical substance of which individuals have a limited quantity and that consistently equates humans with animals, claiming that they are subordinate to instinct. The author, who was physician to Churchill, condemns creativity and imagination and praises individuals stupid enough to walk into danger without thought while indulging in contradiction after contradiction. I had hoped this would shed some light on the behavior of some of those in Sedona who appear to have no rational response to threats. It did not.

• The Archaeology of Mind, by Jaak Panskepp and Lucy Bivens. This is an overpriced five-hundred-page argument that animals should be considered human or human-equivalent, based on the erroneous argument that affective feelings—mere mechanical responses—are “a fundamental form of consciousness.” The authors admit that animals entirely lack cognition, which is unique to humanity, but seem to believe that distinction, which in fact constitutes the difference between animals and humanity, is trivial in relation to the electrochemical actions of the nervous system. A literally enormous waste of time and cognition in multiple respects.

• Being There, by Jerry Kosinski. Kosinski’s much-beloved main character is a truly repulsive creation, a gardener of extremely low intelligence interested in nothing but the television set who, by a string of coincidences, is mistaken for an economic genius and nominated for the presidency. His ignorant remarks are taken throughout as pearls of wisdom by the vapid society in which he moves, which wrongly perceives him as a refreshing rural philosopher. So he would be, and so his remarks would be, if there was any intent or substance behind either. Instead, he is barely above the level of an animal, uncomprehending and not caring, and while the story is a bitingly cruel and true commentary on American culture, it is also not the least bit funny and the protagonist not the least bit sympathetic.

Anyway, moving from books to music, Chamber Music Sedona is back on January 11 with the Imani Winds and Michelle Cann, who will perform selections from Paquito d’Rivera and Francis Poulenc. Moshe Bukshpan of the Red Rocks Music Festival and Vitaly Serebriakov will perform a violin-piano program at the JCSVV synagogue on January 25, including Mozart, Brahms, and Paganini. I’m also thinking about heading up to Flagstaff on January 24 for the Flagstaff Symphony’s “Symphonic Sci-Fi” program at 7:30 PM. Could be worth the drive to sample those scores live in anticipation of hearing them under the stars in our own amphitheater one day.

Starting off the new year with a review of pending legal actions against our local municipalities, it turns out—surprise, surprise—that yet another lawsuit has been filed against the city of Sedona, this time for refusal to pay a contractor for costs resulting from city-caused delays. City staff hired engineer and contractor Rodney Schlesener of Safford, who does business as HT4 Construction, to perform part of the realignment of Dry Creek Road on July 29, 2024. However, Schlesener states in his suit for breach of contract and unjust enrichment,

Nothing in the instructions to bidders or in the other contract documents forewarned HT4 of the need to build downtime into its schedule for the relocation of a utility vault (the “vault”). Nothing in the instructions to bidders or in the other contract documents obligated HT4 to provide traffic control for other city contractors or for utility companies. The contract did not require that HT4 order the vault. The contract stated that the vault would be placed by others. HT4 did not have the authority to order the vault. HT4 did not have the authority to purchase the vault. The city purchased the vault from Arizona Public Service company. Section 38 of the contract acknowledges that a utility company is not a contractor within the meaning of the contract documents. The city arranged with APS for the delivery of the vault. The city planned that the vault would be installed adjacent to the roadway that HT4 was, under the terms of the contract, to realign (the “roadway”).

During the course of HT4’s work, HT4 was forced to halt construction while APS installed the vault adjacent to the roadway. Upon information and belief, the city did not order the vault until on or about July 16, 2024. HT4 could not complete its work until the vault was relocated...

On October 5, 2024, HT4 submitted Change Order No. 3 in which it itemized all of its expenses relating to the vault relocation delay and requested $30,957.39 to compensate for the resulting costs that HT4 incurred. On November 29, 2024, HT4 submitted Payment Application No. 5, requesting payment for all but $2,000 of the contract price. The payment application included a change order summary that showed Change Order No. 3 as “not negotiated yet.” Per the terms of the contract, HT4’s work was to be completed by November 25, 2024. Even with twelve calendar days of downtime resulting from the vault relocation and two days of rain delays, HT4’s work was completed by November 26, 2024. The city failed and refused to pay HT4 for the extra work described in Change Order No. 3.

On or about April 23, 2025 and pursuant to ARS §12-821, HT4 duly and timely served the city with a notice of claim...The city denied the notice of claim. The city’s failure to pay the full amount due HT4 for the work and material provided to the city is a breach of the city’s obligations under the contract. As a result of the city’s breach of the contract, HT4 has been damaged in an amount not less than $30,957.39...As a result of the city’s refusal to compensate HT4 for the full value of the labor, equipment, materials and supplies provided by HT$, the City has been unjustly enriched at HT4’s expense. HT4 is entitled to restitution in an amount not less than $30,957.39.

The suit was filed in Yavapai County Superior Court on December 16. What a New York real estate tycoon move by city staff, screwing a contractor out of money he lost because of their delays. And a small business, no less. Staff can’t seem to stop throwing multi-million-dollar contracts at Kimley-Horn, McCarthy, and other large corporations, but apparently they see the small businessman as merely an appropriate target for chiseling. That’s a great way to build community feeling and trust in the city. It’s also more evidence of how bureaucrats offer preferential treatment to other sprawling hierarchies.

In other Sedona-related cases on the docket, Ryan Kwitkin’s lawsuit against the city and the current and former city managers and other staff for employment discrimination has been removed to Arizona district court as of January 2025. In Duane and Terry Gregory’s suit against the city for demolishing their floodwall to build a millionaires’ sidewalk “the size of an airport runway,” as one area resident put it, the Gregorys filed a motion on November 14 to have the city’s counterclaims regarding alleged LDC violations dismissed pursuant to the rules of civil procedure. Judge Linda Wallace dismissed their motion to dismiss the city’s counterclaims on December 16. The case will now proceed to trial, with discovery scheduled to conclude by August 31 and a three-day jury trial anticipated to begin on December 15.

On December 22, Daniel Herrick filed his second amended complaint in his attempt to sue the city, the Amitabha Stupa, Dave Swartout and Safari Jeep Tours, and various other individuals for, in essence, being too noisy. His suit alleges, among other claims, intentional infliction of emotional distress, civil conspiracy, defamation, and negligent infliction of emotional distress resulting from the “persistent noise disturbances” caused by those using drums, bells, chants, and musical instruments during religious activities protected by the First Amendment. One of the more entertaining elements of Herrick’s suit is his inclusion of Sedona police reports documenting his own trespassing from the stupa as a result of his harassing other visitors. These appear to be intended to support his claims that some of the individuals he is suing conspired to have him trespassed for being a nuisance. This case doesn’t seem likely to go anywhere, and in any event, if you live in Sedona and have a problem with live music, you shouldn’t be living in Sedona. This is an arts town. The music is sending that message.

Over in Cottonwood, disgraced former councilor Comrade Palosaari’s lawsuit against former mayor Comrade Elinski was dismissed on October 26 and his lawsuit against former city attorney Comrade Winkler was dismissed with prejudice on November 17, with the court indicating at that time that Palosaari had agreed to voluntarily dismiss all remaining defendants in the suit, thereby folding his tents and silently stealing away. The town of Camp Verde attempted to respond to Jake and Nadiya Peters’s suit over unfairly-applied development requirements by alleging on November 20 that the claim was barred by the statute of limitations and that the plaintiffs had not exhausted administrative remedies and moving for dismissal. The Peterses replied on December 12 that the time limit for the statute of limitations would not begin to run, according to law, until they had suffered actual damages from the town’s actions and that there was no appropriate administrative remedy available.

As a result of the ongoing internal dramatics Sedona’s police department is enjoying, the department has apparently now being seen as a ripe target for unionization. One Joe Clure of the Arizona Police Association—the statewide union that, according to his pitch, works to get more handouts for government employees and reduce due process—has begun reaching out to Sedona’s paramilitary employees to invite them to form what he terms “an independent association affiliated with the APA.” The APA, it seems, is quite eager to have the public remain unaware that it is a union, instead calling itself an “association of associations,” given how poorly unions tend to be received in Arizona and the West. Clure can go stuff it in his holster. It’s an umbrella name for a bunch of representatives doing collective bargaining on behalf of employees. It’s a union. And hell no to unions. This is the sort of extra layers of additional bureaucratic crap that all these big-city activists getting jobs in Sedona are dragging along with them. Let we forget, unions helped to destroy the labor movement in the United States. A hundred and fifty years ago, the homegrown American socialist movement was quite simply about workers taking over their factories and sharing the proceeds among themselves, rather than having the fruits of their labor go to a single capitalist. No central government, no central planning, none of the Marxist-Leninist elements that the progressives and the Europeans later imported. Very straightforward, potentially appealing to a number of ideological viewpoints, compatible with the existing system of government, and consequently terrifying to big business interests. Hence the support of big business, after some initial conflict, for the growth of unions, which represented a deal: nominal recognition of workers’ rights and large handouts to the union officials who kept the workers they tricked in line. Unions became just another type of corporation with vested interests in maintaining the unequal plutocratic system, and that, my children, is how Sam Gompers became a millionaire and reviled by the workers he betrayed. Unions screwed the working man. Unions themselves were a key part of the early growth of American bureaucracy. No unions. City employees have, of course, the right to form one, but what a rotten idea, and how damaging to their identification with Sedona. If the city has enough employees that they can form a union, that alone should be sufficient evidence that the city has far too many employees. And what, pray tell, would a union for city employees do? Bargain with their employers, the sovereign people? That would make no sense. Bargain with their managers, who are merely another type of themselves? Also illogical. If the city of Sedona could clean up its act, we wouldn’t be faced with the prospect of something so entirely pointless.

In ongoing speculations as to how to fix housing, local developer Ben Miller revived the land trust idea, once ever-so-briefly mentioned by the disgraced former housing manager Comrade Boone, during a discussion of a proposed future development outside Cottonwood with the Sedona Lodging Council on November 11. Miller pointed out that creating a land trust, which would continue to own the land underneath any houses constructed on it, would allow the developers to set occupancy rules that would be more enforceable than a deed restriction attached to a fee simple sale. Most significantly, he called attention to the fact that a land trust could be used to keep housing costs low for workers by reducing the effects of inflation and profit motives on home rents and sale prices. “You can essentially price-control the occupants,” Miller said. “Let’s say its three percent per year...and the sales are also capped.” The effect would be to keep housing prices affordable for multiple generations; Miller floated the possibility of an entry-level price around $100,000 with a 99-year land lease or similar terms. Unlike our dear leaders on the local Politburo, he also stressed that in his own survey of local employees, “the majority would like to live in a home, own a home,” and three quarters of those surveyed were looking for a home with three bedrooms and two baths.

Comrade Segner immediately and enthusiastically responded to the proposal by suggesting that retirees relocating to Sedona might well snap up twenty or thirty percent of the units immediately, a suggestion that did not appear to fill Miller with joy.

The key issue with Miller’s plan seemed to be the proposal for an outside nonprofit or property management company to oversee day-to-day operation of the development, rather than the occupants themselves or a small board elected and directed by the occupants. One of the many potential benefits of land trusts is the opportunities they open up for smaller areas of residents to manage increasing amounts of their affairs themselves, re-implementing self-responsibility and village-style direct democracy. Having an outside firm dictating to the occupants would be no improvement at all.

Why do workers want to own homes? To get out from under the very things landlords are determined to impose on them. Basil Maher said quite frankly when he recently appeared before P&Z that he wanted to maintain control of the Goodrow property on which he plans to build apartments; he has no intention of turning over control or decision-making to the people who live there. Similarly, when council approved the Saddlerock development last year, they imposed a number of absurd and nitpicking conditions on hypothetical future residents, including dictating extraordinarily broad quiet hours and regulating (probably unconstitutionally) what residents might or might not be allowed to have on their balconies one day. The landlords and the city want to have control over what the workers do down to dictating what the workers can and can’t do in their own homes, and that’s precisely why all of the city’s housing proposals for worker barracks are so deeply unattractive. We, the working people, have no desire to be controlled by these raving elitists. Home ownership is attractive because it relieves the individual of at least a part of the constant meddling, interference, and threats that are the daily fare of our coercive totalitarian society—and that is precisely why the Leninists hate it.

Let’s examine how this lust for control works in practice in a very simple case. Most of us who grew up in the rural West like to have a fire in our backyards from time to time. The city staff and council and the landlords are generally paranoiacs who also hate ordinary people having fun and want to prevent things like casual backyard fires. Individuals who live in landlord-controlled or city-controlled housing can be forcibly prevented from having fires; individuals who own their own property cannot. Ditto hundreds of other similar situations that arise when the values of working rural people come up against the performative excuses for values of imported bureaucrats and millionaires.

Again this week I heard yet another local complaining that the Tlaquepaque crosswalk should be closed because she believed that it slowed her down on her drive into town. Let’s be very clear: to close the crosswalk and to obstruct crossing the highway at other points between the two halves of Tlaquepaque interferes with and reduces individuals’ freedom of action. It therefore harms them. Any of us who argue that the crosswalk should be closed are arguing that others should have their freedom taken away and should thereby by harmed. And why? If for our own convenience, that’s an appallingly selfish and utterly immoral argument. If for the sake of improved traffic flow, that’s an argument that attempts to privilege one section of the population—drivers—over another—pedestrians—and as an elitist and discriminatory argument, it is equally immoral. It is, in fact, immoral to suggest harm to others or the reduction of others’ freedom for any reason, which is probably why we should avoid arguing for actions that will result in either harm or loss of freedom, like the crosswalk closure, altogether. When talk of closing the crosswalk is accompanied by talk of “forcing” pedestrians to take Stab Alley, as it often is among both residents and city staff alike, the naked tyranny and immorality of the proposal becomes even more obvious. Nevertheless, when I tell people that the city has no legal power to close the crosswalk, which is regulated by ADOT, they are typically outraged that city council and staff dumped five and a half million dollars of public money into the creek to build Stab Alley. “Then why did they build the underpass?” they ask indignantly. First, because bureaucrats like to build stuff; it lets them flex their egos by feeling they’re modifying the real world and interfering in the lives of others, and it looks good on their resumes. Second—and from the council’s perspective this is the real kicker—they hoped they could use the existence of the underpass to persuade ADOT to let them close the crosswalk. That seems very unlikely at this point, as Comrade Dickey let slip during one council meeting that it was the city that first pushed ADOT to open that crosswalk years ago and that the city might want it retained for occasional use anyway. Under the circumstances, I think we can all imagine what ADOT is going to tell Sedona to do to itself.

In any event, the city’s preliminary traffic studies have showed that closing the crosswalk actually slows traffic further. No one on council or in the public so far actually believes that, any more than they believe the results of any of the other studies that they emotionally disagreed with, but facts is facts. Besides, anyone who ever paid attention to either conditions on the ground or to Google Maps could have told the city that it’s not the crosswalk that’s the traffic chokepoint in the area, but the completely unnecessary roundabout at Schnebly.

Rumors are flying in the Verde Valley lately that one of these Johnny-come-lately tech firms is looking at putting a data center somewhere in the area. First the word was Intel was looking at Beaverhead Flats; now it emerges that some company called “BluSky,” since techbros can’t spell, has put out a vague letter of intent to build something at an unspecified location in Camp Verde. Nothing is actually certain. In any event, a data center would be an appallingly awful idea for reasons that have nothing to do with water and power but rather with sustainability and individual freedom; see the discussion on agriculture at the end of this week’s newsletter. Actually, there does appear to be something unrelated to the building of a data center but curious going on out at Beaverhead Flats; more on that to follow.

In a move that strikes a Montana boy as merely cute, state representative Nick Kupper is offering up a bill this season, HB2059, which would effectively allow ADOT to repeal daytime speed limits on less-trafficked sections of state roads. He’s calling it the RAPID Act. As auto news site Hagerty reports,

Kupper’s idea isn’t unprecedented. For decades, the daytime speed limit on some Montana highways was simply “reasonable and prudent.” The state enforced a 65-mph limit at night until lawmakers agreed on a 75 mph speed limit in 1999 (it was increased to 80 mph in 2015). Kupper noted that a study performed in Montana while the state had no daytime speed limit shows accidents and deaths went down even as the average speed increased, and that seatbelt use and driver behavior are more important than speed.

That no speed limits meant safer roads was well-known in Montana when I was a kid. State officials rammed it through by lying to the legislature “that if they didn’t pass a speed limit law they would lose federal highway funding, whereas the only federal funding they were in fact losing were enforcement grants; highway funding was never at risk.” Kupper’s proposal is a timid tiptoe in the direction of the simpler, safer way life used to be, but perhaps when it’s been seen to work for a few years, ADOT can be pushed to start getting rid of more of the speed limits.

Where does one find a friendly representative to introduce bills these days? I heard a rumor that only about two thousand are expected to be introduced this session; as I recall, that’s down considerably from twenty-seven hundred or so a few years back. It would be nice to have a legislator bring forward a new method similar to the recall procedure by which members of the public could get municipal or government employees fired by obtaining a certain number of signatures. There could be one threshold for an official inquiry, and if the employee indicted by public distaste refused to resign and the city manager or other relevant official refused to fire that employee, then a second higher threshold that, if reached, would require the employee to be fired automatically, no further discussion. I have vivid memories of Comrade Fultz asking what the consequences of an unpopular policy might be and Comrade Meyer smirking at him that “you might not get reelected in four years,” secure in her own invulnerability. That’s the kind of smugness that begs to be punctured. Even more delightful would be the creation of a new super-inspector general position, the holder of which would have the ability to show up without notice, pry into the records of any agency or government body, any records, and publish those records in an official format if they deemed it necessary in the public interest. Perhaps it’s time to revive the ancient office of censor, prominent in ancient Rome and China, those feared incorruptibles charged with investigating the malfeasance of officials. It is an interesting meta-reflection on the nature of the Roman and the Chinese republics that it was assumed as a matter of course in those societies that officials would be corrupt and would have to be supervised by deontological philosophers who held them in contempt.

The latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer has a strong article by Andrea Love pointing out that organic agriculture is simply a scam by big agribusiness to sell some food as being of superior quality at a 22 to 35 percent premium in spite of organic farming being as harmful or more harmful to the environment than conventional industrial agriculture:

The organic industry has convinced people for more than thirty-five years that organic means no pesticides. This is objectively false. Organic farming uses a lot of pesticides. A non-exhaustive list includes copper sulfate, sulfur, pyrethrins, 20 percent acetic acid, spinosad, copper hydroxide, copper oxide, peracetic acid, eugenol, hydrogen peroxide, boric acid, potassium silicate, and Beauveria bassiana. The difference? They’re “naturally derived,” which in science means absolutely nothing about their effectiveness or safety. Many organic approved pesticides are more toxic and less selective because they are prohibited from chemical action to improve safety or specificity.

Copper sulfate, one of the most widely used fungicides in organic farming, is toxic at 300 milligrams per kilogram body weight. It accumulates in the soil and groundwater and can be toxic to fish, aquatic life, and even humans at high enough doses. On the flip size, mancozeb, a synthetic fungicide used in conventional farming, is twenty-six times less toxic with an LD50 of 8,000 mg/kg, and it rapidly degrades in the environment. Yet mancozeb is demonized solely because it’s synthetic, even though it is objectively safer and more effective.

Organic pesticides are typically less potent and less targeted, which means farmers much apply more per acre and more frequently than conventional pesticides to protect crops. Eugenol, a clove-oil herbicide used in organic farming, is more than twice as toxic as glyphosate and requires ten times the amount per acre to control weeds. Farmer apply it up to six times per season, compared to one or two glyphosate treatments. The result is opposite to what organic marketing promises: more chemical load, more ecological disruption, more risk to farmworkers…

Even well-intentioned people repeat the falsehood that organic produce has “fewer residues,” so much so that even the American Academy of Pediatrics has adopted this as an official position. The problem? Mot people don’t realized that organic pesticide residues aren’t monitored! People cite the USDA Pesticide Data Program, but the PDP monitors synthetic pesticides to ensure compliance with EPA tolerance limits. Because organic-approved pesticides are exempted from tolerance limits, the PDP does not test for them. When people claim organic food has “fewer residues,” they have identified a data gap. You can’t detect things you aren’t testing for!…

Trace pesticides aren’t hurting people; scaring them from eating produce is. Ninety percent of Americans don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables, and unfounded fear of pesticides exacerbates that, especially for low-income households. Telling people they are poisoning their families if they eat conventionally grown produce objectively worsens health. This tactic from the organic industry is the nutritional equivalent of anti-vaccine propaganda: create fear of a fake threat to drive people toward a real risk…

The anti-science principles of organic farming don’t improve health or sustainability; they just give wealthy consumers a sense of moral superiority...Organic is not the “healthy” choice; it’s the agricultural arm of the wellness-industrial complex that undermines trust in science and profits from fear.

Love’s down-to-earth and data-rich piece does have one serious flaw. Noting that yields from organic industrial farming run 10 to 30 percent below yields for conventional industrial farming, she then proposes that reduced yields would necessarily mean more work, injuries, inequality, and emissions. Here is where it also becomes necessary to tease out the difference between organic industrial agriculture and old-fashioned traditional methods of farming, the sort that Masanobu Fukuoka described can allow an individual to feed himself on one hour of work a day using complementary plantings, and which may be categorized under the “organic” heading. Normal, old-style farmers already work without pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides, eliminating damage to the land through poisoning, and also drastically reducing work, injuries, inequality, and emissions. They achieve all the social goals with which Love seems concerned and all the environmental goals with which the organic farming movement seems concerned. The small-farm approach lacks all the disadvantages of the organic big-farm approach except for one: reduced yields, which is, for Love, the real issue. She gives the impression that she has internalized the Anglo-American libertarian religious attitude that maximum productivity and profit must be pursued at all times for its own sake regardless of the consequences. As such, she is effectively siding with the interests of big business. When she talks about “crop losses,” she’s not talking about small farmers and their inability to feed themselves, she’s talking about the hit that big agribusinesses would have to take to their profits and productivity. When she talks about a possible rise in food prices as a result, she ignores that food prices are already kept deliberately high as one of the market state’s solutions to helping keep poor people poor. At no point does she ever speak of a possible return to old-style farming methods as a “third way” capable of improving both individual quality of life and protection of the environment, because such a third way would include no place for industrial agriculture of any kind, conventional or organic. Love similarly takes a hit at “less regulation,” presumably since regulation can easily be navigated by a large corporation even though it destroys small farmers in real life. Less regulation is always superior from a social and political perspective because it is less regulation, period. To suppose that more regulation, and thus less freedom, could possibly be a superior alternative, would require an individual to reject the fact that the quest for freedom and resistance to control is so central to who and what humans are that it’s the closet thing we have to an instinct.

The natural-is-superior-to-synthetic argument does have one possible point going for it. If a “natural” or plant-derived pesticide and a synthetic pesticide, for instance, have similar toxicity, specificity, and bioaccumulative properties, neither is chemically preferable to the other—but the plant-derived version may be economically and socially preferable if it requires fewer steps and less equipment to manufacture. Synthetic organic chemistry involves complex processes requiring elaborate equipment and numerous precursors, which often must be carried out under the hierarchical supervision of specialists. All factors of complexity in manufacture, by requiring the previous construction of an increasingly complex industrial economy, tend to reduce individual freedom and increase inefficiency as well as productivity. Crop yields might indeed fall as a result of a switch to plant-based pesticides, but if toxicity remained constant and economic complexity—and therefore the control of some individuals over the actions of others—was reduced as a consequence, that could be considered a very acceptable tradeoff in a scenario where subsistence and self-reliance were to be prioritized above profit margin. The argument is analogous to making the case that automobiles should be replaced by horses because autos require human effort to construct but horses manufacture themselves, thereby allowing the entire auto industry and its supporting industries to be abolished and the total labor effort of the species to be considerably reduced by an amount more than compensating for the slower speeds of travel. It is, as always, necessary to remember that normal humans have no drive for maximum productivity unless they are coerced to it by psychopaths.

Little boxes on the hillside,

Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,

Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes all the same…

Such is the result of the Cari Meyer approach to design and Sedona’s abandonment of old-fashioned sustainability in favor of integration into the corporate construction economy. Have you seen the ticky-tacky that’s going into that new box up Cook’s Hill on the way into West Sedona? And what of the people who live in the boxes?

And the people in the houses

All went to the university

And they all got put in boxes

And they all came out the same

And there’s doctors and lawyers

And business executives

And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky

And they all look just the same.

Sounds like our city council, the membership of KSB, the people who come out of the woodwork to complain about their neighbors’ freedom, and all the rest of that crowd in town who think they’re smarter than everyone else and have a right to lord it over the place. It might be a good idea to distribute a few dozen cases’ worth of copies of Seamus Khan’s Privilege, which examines how expensive, elitist schools inculcate attitudes of entitlement to authority in those whose parents can afford to send them to such places without providing them with any kind of intellectual competence that could be used to justify a claim to authority. By extension, the entire university system has become detached from its purpose of scholarship and instead converted to a method of producing vanity credentials for those who like to invoke their roles as “sociologists” or “management professionals” as reasons for their hatred of equality and their willingness to destroy small towns. But Sedona is not and will not be a suburb for the performative.

Given the city’s antics lately and its refusal to cough up the records it is legally obligated to produce, “The Room Where it Happens” from the brilliant and problematic Hamilton has also been seeming peculiarly applicable:

No one really knows how the game is played

The art of the trade

How the sausage gets made

We just assume that it happens

But no one else is in the room where it happens.

And really, that’s Sedonan’s own fault as well. For three days the elitist members of the Sedona City Council and staff sat in a room and discussed how they planned to remake the community in their desired image without a thought that the community’s consent might be required, and the only other people in the room when it happened were two prospective future officials who had been taught to say acceptable things, a former federal employee who was incapable of understanding and could be relied on to misrepresent what happened, and yours truly. The meeting might as well have been held in secret for all the attention Sedona residents paid to what was happening. Apathy in this town is in effect creating state secrecy and enabling the quiet growth of bureaucracy. Would the council have dared to make the claim that they should get to decide who moves to Sedona in the future if an entire roomful of people had been watching them, ready to eviscerate them in person and on social media? Doubtful. City staff have much to answer for, but residents are also complicit in creating the-room-where-it-happens effect. The song’s lyrics are dangerously relevant to Sedona elsewhere as well:

Politician A: Wouldn’t you like to work a little closer to home?

Politician B: Actually, I would.

Recalls the whole argument that Comrades Martin and Fultz made that the city’s employees, not the lowly others who serve them, need and deserve to live in Sedona, doesn’t it? Of course, then there are always the more subtle implications of the mood of Rossini’s “La calunnia” for the upcoming election to contemplate. The complacency and information lag of the ruling elite often means they are shocked, shocked when the peasants revolt or the voters flip an election. Our dear city council seems oblivious to the gentle sighs of discontent, rage, resentment, and insult whispering along the rock shelves that will build to shake the forest and the caverns until at last—come un colpo di cannone! E produce un’esplosione!

Councilors, you have hurt the people of this town, and some of them are planning to make you pay for it at the polls next year. La commedia e finite. Plaudite.

Do you hear the people sing, lost in the valley of the night?

It is the music of a people who are climbing to the light:

For the wretched of the earth there is a flame that never dies,

Even the darkest nights will end and the sun will rise!

We will live again in freedom in the garden of the Lord…

If we can get home rule taken away from the bureaucrats next year, we’ll be singing yet another different tune as we joyfully contemplate the mass firings of city staff that will have to ensue: “As someday it may happen that a victim must be found, I’ve got a little list! I’ve got a little list! Of Sedona city planners who might well be underground, and who never would be missed! Who never would be missed!” There’s always room for more Gilbert and Sullivan in our day-to-day, and it’s so temptingly easy to make up new lyrics: “There’s the cops who charge us twenty thousand dollars for a stop—and the city arborists! I’ve got them on the list!” Excuse me while I go whistle the Carmagnole.

Elsewhere in the world of music, TwoSet Violin have dropped a new video ranking the commonly-played violin concertos in search of the most overrated. I’d agree with their call to place the Mozart concertos effectively on an ascending pentatonic scale of quality from one to five. And no question about Beethoven and Tchaikovsky being in the very top rank with the Mozart 5. Sibelius and Brahms, maybe, although that’s a matter of taste. But Shostakovich 1? With Prokofiev 1 as a close second? No. Absolutely no. The Korngold, which they placed in the same second-rank category, is far superior to either, as is the Mendelssohn, which was in the same position as the Korngold. The latter and very likely the former both belong in the top rank. They also made the call to rank both Paganini 1 and 2 in second place, even though the first is better than the second and neither is even as good as the Korngold. No mention was made of the forgotten twenty-two concertos of Louis Spohr, and justly so. The two really notable omissions, however, were the Bruch 3 and the Saint-George Op. 5 No. 2. The Bruch 3 is the strongest of the composer’s works both melodically and technically and does in fact deserve recognition as one of the truly great works for the instrument. The third movement is not only highly approachable but even catchy. As for the Saint-George Op. 5 No. 2, it has suffered from the double handicap, from a programming perspective, of being written by a minor composer—if you write fewer than five or six hundred works, you’re just not considered to have drawing power—and written for accompaniment by a string orchestra rather than a full orchestra. Still, the Bach and Vivaldi concertos were also written for small ensembles and are still played, so why not the Saint-George? Brilliant in technique, sparkling in its displays, and remarkably advanced in its thematic range, it is better than the Mozart 5 and again one of the masterpieces for violin, and fortunately one that is now coming back into the repertoire, the charge being led by Anne-Sophie Mutter. Oh, and no love for the Philip Glass concerto, either?

Ultimately, Brett and Eddy never picked a most overrated concerto, but that one should be pretty obvious: the Bruch 1, which they at least demoted to a C grade. It is by far the least interesting of the composer’s three concertos for the instrument and its inexplicable popularity with soloists and audiences caused considerable annoyance to Bruch in his own lifetime.

Following their December 10 work session on how to distribute more misleading survey questions on the Sedona Cultural Park, that gang calling themselves the Sedona city council decided to direct city staff to plan for the abandonment of effluent irrigation at the Dells—a mere year or so after the council invoked the planned use of the Dells for effluent disposal for the foreseeable future as a reason why housing could not be built at the Dells and the Cultural Park would have to be destroyed. The decision followed a hallucinatory presentation that was an attack on both Sedona’s agricultural heritage and the very concept of sustainability, as well as a demonstration, again, of the sheer detachment of council from reality, in which Comrade Furman’s self-importance was prominent.

Comrade Holland of wastewater offered the council three options for the future disposal of the city’s treated effluent: keeping the existing irrigation system and adding two new injection wells for anticipated increases; abandoning the irrigation and adding a total of four wells over time; keeping the irrigation system and using the additional water for parks by building a new distribution system; abandoning irrigation and disposing of the additional water through a combination of wells and parks diversion; and abandoning irrigation and setting up additional equipment to further treat the water to potable standard, which would require arsenic removal due to Arizona’s background levels. She priced those options at $11 million, $22 million, $28.6 million, $39.6 million, and $161 million, respectively. Naturally, city staff recommended the $22 million option to replace irrigation with wells, as irrigating the land was apparently inconvenient for their purposes. The least expensive and invasive proposal, Holland stated, staff liked the least and had “thrown out.” Holland confessed that no towns in Arizona actually run potable water purification programs yet, although she claimed several are in the permitting process. She suggested the city could impose a new sales tax to fund such a costly program, which Comrade Christianson confirmed could be imposed by the council without a public vote, although he added that there was a rumor that the legislature would be changing the law this year to require tax increases to go to the voters. John Snickers of Arizona Water Company refused to say how much his company might be prepared to kick into the cost of a purification system, instead taking refuge in vague generalities. The question turned out to be irrelevant, as council obediently followed staff and obeyed their direction to authorize replacing the irrigation with more injection wells. As a result, the council will have made it significantly more difficult to develop the Dells for agricultural use and shot themselves in the foot with regard to that economic diversification that they appear to pretend is one of their top priorities.

Terri Sue Rossi of AWC, after bragging to council about how her for-profit firm really just wants to create a “sustainable water supply,” mentioned that the Sedona area uses around 2.7 million gallons of water per day, or around 3,000 acre-feet per year. That averages about 270 gallons per person per day. That is an astronomical number. Humans require about one gallon of drinking water per day to survive. The average shower consumes about 17 gallons of water. When I lived aboard a sailboat, my daily water usage, to avoid excessive time-wasting in watering, had to be kept to five gallons or less for everything. The amount of water needed to produce the crops necessary to support a 2,000-calorie daily diet is about 840 gallons even with inefficient present-day industrial methods, but Sedona has no agriculture. Two hundred and seventy gallons per person for pure residential usage represents a level of luxury unthinkable to Sedona’s pioneers. As a result of such carefree usage, Rossi continued, by the year 2125, water usage was expected to increase to 4,360 acre-feet per year. She teased the council that reusing a third of the effluent and reducing usage by 20 percent could reduce Sedona’s need to 2,049 acre-feet per year, but admitted that based on the wells they tested, their best-case scenarios still forecast a decrease in the water table varying from 95 to 111 feet, with a drop of 200 feet predicted in the VOC area. This information was subsequently supplemented during a presentation by NAU students stating that Oak Creek’s annual flow has dropped by five billion gallons since 1981, accompanied by a 40 percent decline in regional snowpack.

“We’re still well within providing an adequate water supply,” Rossi assured the council without disclosing what substance she might have been on at the time. “The actual change is not significant.”

“Our withdrawal from the aquifer isn’t changing, really,” Comrade Furman pontificated in agreement before delivering a mini-lecture about how “our basin is pretty good...we’re not too worried about future growth.” Why am I having these memories of how, after the council voted to purchase the Cultural Park three years ago and to pay for half of it with bonds, adding something like $3.5 million to the purchase price, Comrade Thompson opined, “It’s really as if we were doing it all in cash.” You pay three million in interest and you think it’s a cash deal? Your water table drops a hundred feet and you think your withdrawal isn’t changing? What the hell are you people thinking? Are you thinking at all? As Professor Higgins would say, why is logic never even tried?

Performative rhetoric aside, if you want a genuinely sustainable local environment and economy, the aquifer cannot go down. Period. You cannot draw it down by even a fraction of a foot a year. You must work entirely off precipitation and surface flow.

Furman then went on to threaten the public with violence should they fail to conform to his and the city’s desired ideological position.

“We’re trying to work with our residents and the people that are up here to understand that water is life and valuable...you start off with carrots, and later on you go sticks,” Furman said, echoing the disgraced Comrade Jablow’s language about using the law to “hammer” the OHV owners whom the council despises. He next indulged in a fantasy about using the excess water to flood a dry wash and create a new riparian zone draining into Oak Creek.

With regard to the development potential of the Dells, Holland informed the council that soil samples for thirty-seven different contaminants, including fecal coliform bacteria, heavy metals, and pesticides, had revealed “little to no environmental impact exceeding standards” and that fifteen test borings had shown the soil to be suitable for building construction. Detected levels of metals ranged from 4 to 12 mg/kg for antimony, 5.5 to 15 mg/kg for arsenic with an outlier at 36 mg/kg, 1 to 3 mg/kg for beryllium, cadmium, and silver, 18 to 83 mg/kg for chromium, less than 1 mg/kg for cyanide, 10 to 45 mg/kg for copper, 2.4 to 11 mg/kg for lead, less than 0.1 mg/kg for mercury, 14 to 120 mg/kg for nickel, 9.6 to 29 mg/kg for selenium, 4 to 12 mg/kg of thallium, and 18 to 68 mg/kg of zinc. For health comparisons, median lethal doses for some of these metals are from 8 to 916 mg/kg for arsenic, depending on compounding; about 1.5 mg/kg for cyanide; 6 to 200 mg/kg for mercury; and 8 to 12 mg/kg for thallium. If a 132-pound person were drinking water contaminated with arsenic at 36 mg/kg, the highest level reported at the Dells, for example, it would be necessary for that person to drink anywhere from four to four hundred gallons of contaminated water, or to consume at least twenty-nine pounds of contaminated soil, in order to achieve a fifty-fifty risk of death. The sampling site that consistently demonstrated the highest concentrations of heavy metals was, incidentally, located at the far southeast corner of the property at the greatest distance from the city’s sewage plant. In another example of the competence of city staff and their consultants, the final report, for which the city paid public money, states that the location of all the sampling sites was “Nevada.”

Organochloride pesticides showed up in the analysis at rates below 0.04 mg/kg, with toxaphene and chlordane being detected at the highest levels. Median lethal doses range from 50 to 250 mg/kg for the former and from 100 to 600 mg/kg for the latter.

The waterworks were followed by the NAU sustainability presentation, which demonstrated that the students had clearly grasped the elemental principles of how to be good bureaucrats-in-training and delivered exactly the sort of thing the council wanted, a “vulnerability assessment,” in Comrade Beck’s words. They obligingly found Sedona to have “medium” energy and health vulnerabilities and “high” wildfire and water vulnerabilities, which they admitted there was no way to rank objectively, thereby paving the way for further action to expand an intrusive government. Based on a tiny sample of forty-six residents—about 0.46 percent of the current population—taken at one event, they concluded that Sedona’s residents are very concerned about the effects of climate change, and based on that sample, they proposed that the city engage in more home retrofit programs, revising its code to require reflective roofing, buying air purifiers for households, encourage rainwater harvesting, and conduct surveillance on insects. Personally, I am a strong supporter of reflective roofing, which I seem to recall is currently prohibited by city code in the interests of “the views.” However, I absolutely oppose this totalitarian proposal—as all proposals for new building regulations are totalitarian proposals—to mandate it. That it’s a smart idea is not sufficient justification to warrant its promotion by violence. To require it is as evil as to prohibit it. Ditto everything else on any sustainability or other list that might be a good idea.

Comrade Pfaff drew the line at the insect scaremongering and demanded to know what dangerous insects Sedona had at all beyond mosquitoes; Beck tried to raise a hypothetical fear of tick bites.

“Have we had any cases?” Pfaff insisted.

“Not as far as I know,” Beck said.

Beck, it turns out, had also declared a theoretical victory in the city’s campaign to reduce its emissions by 50 percent: lurking on page 605 of the 613-page council packet was the statement that “since the 2018 baseline year, the city has reduced its annual emissions by approximately 50 percent with its most notable reduction taking place in 2023 with the signing of the Green Power Purchase Agreement through APS. This agreement has allowed the city to claim renewable energy credits to cover all emissions associated with electricity consumption at all city-owned buildings, streetlights, and traffic signals. Prior to the GPPA, electricity consumption was responsible for approximately 50% of the total inventory emissions in 2021.” In other words, city staff haven’t reduced municipal emissions at all; they’ve simply arrived at an external agreement with a third party to validate their efforts at pretending to reduce emissions. Pretending is more effective when everybody agrees to pretend the same thing regardless of reality. And since they’re all successfully pretending, it doesn’t matter that Sedona’s municipal emissions are actually increasing. In the next sentence following his imaginary declaration of victory in the carbon-cutting battle, Beck went on to admit that actual municipal emissions rose by 86 tons in 2024, and he has previously also admitted that the much-vaunted emissions-cutting trailhead shuttle program pour encourager les millionaires adds more than a hundred tons of emissions per year; my own calculation, if I recall aright, was 110 tons. If Beck’s claim that city emissions were about 3,000 tons in the baseline year of 2018, far from cutting anything, city staff have increased emissions by about seven percent in the last seven years.

Anyhow, with regard to Comrade Fultz’s desire for more events in Sedona—which is in fact what we normal people would like—I was browsing through some of city staff’s correspondence and came across two interesting communications, one of which, from Comrade Frewin to Comrade Dickey in November 2024, amplifies some of Frewin’s subsequent remarks during the recent council retreat about a lack of event space in Sedona:

We have a growing issue with space and festivals, that you and I have talked about a bit—but one that’s come up again a few times in the past couple weeks. After discussing it with everyone yesterday and a few festival organizers—wanted to reach out to you and get your thoughts and see if this is potentially something that I should take to council to ultimately have them make decisions on or what you think?

Essentially, we’re needing and trying to push events (including our own) off of the athletic fields, so we can have decent quality athletic fields. Sedona Winefest is one of the larger events in Sedona, they use the athletic fields every year—and this year with their set-up and event time weren’t able to water the fields for six days, then had the incidents with glass and zip ties all over the field after they left that the soccer players/parents complained about to us and ultimately to you as well. We held their deposit as a result of the glass and trash on the field, which Winefest agreed to. Winefest has had lots of frustration with parking in the park, not being able to stake on the athletic fields, etc., and “threatening” to not come back to Sedona again and consolidating their two events (one in Sedona, one in Cottonwood) to just one large one in Cottonwood since they have the event space.

Mountain Bike Festival has lots of parking issues and outgrowing the Posse Grounds Park area as you know well. This year they have even more parking issues because of the pickleball courts as we knew would be the case, so of course Mike is saying Sedona makes it difficult for them to be able to justify continuing in Sedona as well as they’ve outgrown the parking and consistently things are made more difficult. We did have a good meeting today that was productive, but he is going to reach out to you with a couple of concerns.

Sedona Jazz on the Rocks has been going on for over 40 years, but hasn’t taken place over the last several, and they’re looking to get started up again. They put together a proposal to do a Friday evening show at the Pavilion and then rent the soccer field for the weekend for their festival in October, and they anticipate about 1,500 attendees. As we work to get events off of the field—I can’t justify okaying another event on the field with another several-day span of no watering and kicking the youth soccer teams off of the athletic fields for another weekend. At the same time, that’s turning another event away from Sedona that I’m sure council will hear about. My proposal to them is to just use the Pavilion venue, such as we had Vortifest do, but they will struggle with the capacity limit of 700 in that area and ultimately likely not host the event...

There are several other examples of this with Yoga Fest, Vortifest, and other groups that have wanted to do things that we’ve turned away.

Essentially, I’m wondering if it’s either time for council to take a look at it and consider either do we want events and accommodate these things to take place, or do we want to continue to move towards having decent athletic fields and downsizing events to those that can fit in the park footprint. Of course, I love the events and want these things to be able to happen, but the way it’s heading we’re close to losing a few of these large events and want council to either be okay with them going away—or weigh that against athletic field use. The other issue on the event side is the Pavilion operating plan that doesn’t allow events, lights, music at the pavilion after dark. Having the one area that is built to contain sound and our designated “event space” not be able to operate after dark makes that even trickier on the event side, so would love to see that taken a look at as well as a potential change to permit certain events to operate after dark in the Pavilion...Or alternatively—is it okay for some of these types of things to use Western Gateway [sic] and having an “event space” there for the time being (even without/ignoring the amphitheater) and just being able to park and put up tents, rentable stage/generators, etc., in that location and some of the Jazz on the Rocks, Mountain Bike Festival, Winefest, etc., are able to look at that as a potential location for an event space for the time being?

Of course, Frewin failed during the council retreat to connect the need for level event space with the possibility of creating such a space where it was originally intended on the Cultural Park festival grounds, but he also stated that the lack of space was preventing things like larger events with carnival rides. Oh, really? The city previously stated that they no longer allowed carnival rides at events due to their fear of liability. Moreover, it turns out in related reading that Comrade Dunn, who in December savagely attacked the concept of having a restaurant at the Cultural Park, had expressed her support for a restaurant in March. If only they could pick a story and stick to it...

Anyway, the other communication from Ben Miller of Jazz on the Rocks to Comrade Vargo in February 2025 again showed the ongoing community interest in a venue larger than the Antonsen Pavilion:

I look forward to continuing the discussion about the possibility of the city working with the Sedona Jazz on the Rocks as a public/private partnership for our events, hopefully starting in October of this year and for years to come. Again, our primary mission is the music education and support of the Sedona area youth from K-12th grade. As I mentioned, we have had several discussions with the strings program at the charter school to be a strategic partner as well as supporting the West Sedona School and Red Rock High School.

As discussed, Sedona Jazz on the Rocks would be very interested to someday call the Cultural Park our home with an event in the late spring and another in October of each year...

Another gentleman in town and I have an idea to create a museum space for a significantly relevant organization that started in Sedona. Along with their presence could be another element of the museum that is a focus of Native American art and jewelry and then possibly a third part of the museum that would be dedicated to the local/Sedona gallery community which may have vignettes, etc., to show/sell a sample of their product with the idea that they also advertise their primary gallery in town. There could be a real possibility for entities that would be interested in funding the construction of the museum, i.e. the Native American community as well as private donors for naming rights, etc...

If the performing arts/amphitheater venue is at 2,000-seat capacity, the parking and other logistics become much more manageable than a 5,000-plus venue and we can certainly make a 2,000-seat venue work for our organization, and my sense is it could work for other types of events and would create a sense of urgency with a more limited amount of seats available as you and I discussed.

Contrariwise, city staff’s own approach to creative proposals for the property might best be gauged from this March proposal from Comrade Jones of the paramilitary to Comrade Major General Dowell: “I wanted to see about potentially using the abandoned buildings by the amphitheater at Cultural Park for SWAT training, as we are always looking for new places to train at. I figured since it is city-owned, the insides of the buildings are already demolished, and it is away from town that it might be a good place to try.”

Sedona is indeed a city animated by the arts—the arts of violence, it would seem.

In a cheering move for the holidays, the Ninth Circuit has upheld a University of Washington professor’s First Amendment right to mock the university’s policy of coercing its employees into making land acknowledgment statements. After being pressured to include such a statement in his syllabi, Stuart Reges fired back with, “I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.” Most amusing, but why drag the quasi-magical labor theory of property into it? How about a simple “I acknowledge that the concept of any individual having a special and unique right to anything is contrary to both the basic logic that holds the universe together and Christian ethics”? At any rate, the court observed that “debate and disagreement are hallmarks of higher education. [Of any kind of education, if done properly, but go on.] Student discomfort with a professor’s views can prompt discussion and disapproval. But this discomfort is not grounds for the university retaliating against the professor...The First Amendment’s protections for academic freedom in public universities will necessarily lead to disagreements on campus. Student unrest is an inevitable byproduct of our core First Amendment safeguards in the higher education context. This unrest therefore cannot be the type of disruption that permits restricting or punishing a professor’s academic speech.”

The ruling remains constrained by the Supreme Court’s 1968 decision in Pickering v. Board of Education, in which the high court decided out of thin air that academics’ First Amendment rights could be limited to a certain degree in order to achieve the government’s idea of an equitable “balance between the interests of the teacher, as a citizen, in commenting upon matters of public concern and the interest of the State, as an employer, in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees.” The Pickering decision, like Reynolds v. United States, is one of those blatantly unconstitutional rulings that ignore the literal text of the Constitution in the interests of pragmatism and need to be gotten rid of as soon as possible. The terms “balance,” “public concern,” and “interest of the state,” all highly subjective concepts, appear nowhere in the First Amendment. Instead, the language states baldly that Congress—and by later extension, any other level of government—“shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” There is no ambiguity in that phrasing. Speech and publication, along with religious practice and peaceable assembly, are completely exempted from government regulation or limitation. Yes, that is very inconvenient for the totalitarian state. It does indeed, as the wee shrinking timorous cowering justices wrote in Reynolds, “make the professed doctrines of religious belief [or of conscience in general] superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself. Government could exist only in name under such circumstances.” Exactly. That is the type of government which the designers of the American government had, less than a century before, explicitly created. A minimal government subordinate to the rational conscience of the citizen. And yet, a mere ninety years after the ratification of the Constitution, the physical and intellectual bloat of the American state had already grown so large that a return to the leanness of the law as written was dismissed and rejected as inexpedient. Why am I reminded of Comrade Pfaff crying out that even a partial return to the lean, minimalist organization of Sedona forty years ago would be “anarchy”? In order to reach their tortured conclusion, by the way, the justices had to create an imaginary distinction between an ethical belief and the act of acting upon that belief so that they could claim the First Amendment permitted the former but not the latter. In point of fact, the actual text of the document refers not to belief but to “the free exercise” of religion. The authors already considered the implications of such a pointless distinction and rejected it, as their language shows. It is high time that Americans got over this bad habit of trying to ignore the First Amendment while paying lip service to how wonderful it is. Either repeal it or start acting on it. This shilly-shallying gets us nowhere.

As I’m finishing up Dorian Lynskey’s extremely well-written Everything Must Go, I’ve noted that Lynskey shows an awareness that any genuine risk computers or machines might pose to humanity arises not from some supposed intellectual superiority (impossible) or deeply-laid malice against their creators (also impossible), but rather from the fact that, as consistent logical engines, such machines are capable of executing whatever instruction a human feeds into them, whether by accident or malice, without conscious consideration to the point that the actions of a large enough device might risk the future of the species. The machines are dangerous not because they are cunning, but because they are stupid. Their threat lies in their extremely simple, single-minded literalism. I am reminded of the alternate history universe of Randal Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories, in which magic exists and can be used for such purposes as enchanting a pyschopath to prevent him from committing an act of violence without permission. Such an instance occurs in “A Case of Identity,” an account of counter-espionage against Polish agents within the Anglo-French Empire. The agent under restraint, Lord Seiger, is at one point instructed by his handler to kill two Polish agents threatening them with the directive, “They are traitors to the King...Destroy them.” Later that evening, when an official refers to a third member of the conspiracy as a traitor, Seiger kills him without further direction before being himself killed:

Sir James, still staring at the fallen Lord Seiger, said: “But...how could he? I didn’t tell him to.”

“Yes, you did,” Lord Darcy said wearily. “On the ship. You told him to destroy the traitors. When you called Sir Gwiliam a traitor, he acted. He had his sword halfway out before Sir Gwiliam drew that pistol. He would have killed Sir Gwiliam in cold blood if the seneschal had never moved at all. He was like a gas lamp, Sir James. You turned him on—and forgot to shut him off.”

Richard, Duke of Normandy, looked down at the fallen man. Lord Seiger’s face was oddly unchanged. It had rarely had any expression in life. It had none now.

“How is he, Reverend Father?” asked the Duke.

“He is dead, Your Highness.”

“May the Lord have mercy on his soul,” said Duke Richard.

Eight men and a woman made the Sign of the Cross in silence.

In addition, Erdely-Sayo was named a Steinway Artist this past August, numbering her among the two thousand or so pianists considered fine enough that Steinway will provide them with complimentary instruments for their performances. Piano on the Rocks will be moving to the Mary D. Fisher Theatre this spring for the three-day festival, and Steinway will be supplying two seven-foot Model Bs for the occasion. The full concert grands will have to await the new recital hall at the Cultural Park. One does wonder if there will be room in that auditorium for one or both of the iconic organs that the Sedona Conservatory project rescued. In the meantime, the Sedona Dance Academy’s annual Nutcracker will take place at SPAC tomorrow afternoon.

That gang calling themselves the Sedona city council held their annual priority retreat over three days this week to determine what in the community they want to focus on spoiling over the coming year. “Can we quit calling it a retreat?” Comrade Pfaff had asked last week. “Cause it’s really more of a slog.” In the parlance of the Party, it might be more accurately termed a “struggle session.” What we should be asking is how democratic it is of them to have a retreat to decide on policy priorities at all, when policy is supposed to be generated by the public through the public process and staff merely informed of those decisions rather than being involved in making those decisions. Instead, policy is apparently generated with no reference to the public by playing musical chairs with the assistance of a consultant. This year’s guest star was Jonathan King. In an instance of how the cart drives the horse in bureaucracies, he admitted that staff didn’t provide council with all the information that would be required during the retreat exercises so they wouldn’t come up with their own solutions ahead of the retreat and in order to induce “a sense of humility” in them. Forget about the pipe cleaners three years ago; King was literally holding up a toy car in front of the council and asking them freshman-level questions about “models” to emphasize the concept, as if none of those professional bureaucrats had ever heard of a model before—on the contrary, council and staff were discussing some of their preferred models before the discussion ever began. King admitted that the easiest way to figure out what one’s priorities are is to be confronted by a crisis, but then suggested that council just keep that in mind, rather than moving on to a simulation of how they might respond when and if confronted by the example crisis—in their minds—of home rule being defeated. Instead, he ran them through a series of exercises intended to reduce last year’s eighteen priorities, dictated by staff, to three concrete priorities that they wanted to accomplish in the next year.

During the process, as a part of which senior staff were intermingled with council for discussion, Comrade Allender, recently arrived from the People’s Republic of Houston, was heard to utter the phrase “maintain and enhance community character,” which meant nothing, while Comrade West felt it would be appropriate to introduce an “iterative feedback loop.” “We need one visionary leader. We need a point person,” Comrade Kinsella urged. Didn’t Comrade Krushchev previously give a speech about the cult of personality and its consequences? Comrade Spickard floated an idea to annually reward individuals and businesses who work with staff and council to demonstrate compliance with the city’s vision statement and “come forward and talk about the value of the city.” How did Comrade Col. Dr. Spalko put it? “Three times Order of Lenin. Also Hero of Socialist Labor.” Spickard also wanted developers starting to build senior housing on top of the Cultural Park within a year from now. Maybe she really is planning to retire soon. Comrade Foley revived the myth that “enough parking” was a major need, while Comrade Christianson was still playing with the idea of a recreation center for the Cultural Park. Assistant city engineer Sandra Phillips was seen publicly making fun of both the Cultural Park revival effort and the Frontiere Pavilion’s structural soundness, which was endorsed by her own consultant’s report earlier this year. Comrade Ploog admitted that the outreach program for the Cultural Park “pissed off so many people” and continued to entertain the idea that the park’s future should be put to a vote. She also, oddly, suggested reducing the number of city consultants, admitting in the privacy of small group discussion that there is a wide public perception of booming bureaucracy and that “conservative reductions” might help quell the perception that government is out of control.

The highest priority to emerge from six hours of King’s model-building exercises was a renewed and aggressive commitment by the council to pursue increased propaganda efforts to convince the community that they’re doing a great job. More than that, they intend to use their platforms to attempt to change the minds of members of the community on topics on which those community members oppose the wishes of council and staff. Allender called for “constant communications celebrating our accomplishments...to make sure people know the great things we’re doing.” Comrade Dickey wanted to try to eliminate opposition to projects before staff even begin the project, as well as suggesting fewer public meetings, while Kinsella talked about how she wanted to push a narrative of the microtransit system being convenient in order to induce usage. All of this communication, as council and staff discussed, was to be aimed at communicating to the residents of Sedona the council’s ideas about what they and the rest of Sedona should be like. “We need to decide first who we’re going to be in the future in Sedona,” Comrade Dunn said, as if that was any of her business. “We have to decide who it is we want in our community that may not already be here.” Comrades Harris and Mertes likewise referred to “who this community wants to be in the future” and “what we want our community to be.”

We, as residents, can and certainly should have conversations about what we would like our community to look like in the future and whom we would like to see move here. But that is not a discussion for government, because the purpose of government is to coerce, and we will not tolerate coercion of demographic patterns, which recalls the forced resettlement of the ancient and modern despots alike to meet their economic and military needs. It never seemed to cross any of the minds of council or staff that they were elected and hired to maintain the streets and run the sewage pumps and clean up the parks, not to reshape the beliefs and values of their employers or to selectively discriminate against Sedona’s future occupants. Nor did it seem to occur to them that they could just stop screwing up and defying the public instead of trying to build a false front to convince the public how great they are. Instead of stealing people’s land to build a sidewalk for millionaires and then wondering why people are pissed off and trying to soothe the discontent, they could avoid such moves in the first place and the problem would never arise. If the community doesn’t want something, you don’t do it. Period. You do not try to convince them that it’s a good thing, or that they should want what you want.

In order to measure whether they would be able to change people’s minds successfully over the coming year, Ploog repeatedly proposed using the passage of home rule as a metric. Apart from the fact that by doing so she was skating very, very close to the line separating her from election advocacy, her statement must be taken as a reminder that council are not at all as certain about the community’s commitment to overspending as they pretend. Fultz suggested trying to increase the percentage of respondents satisfied with city performance in the budget and community surveys, as well as trying to get more of their trained “Citizens Academy” graduates planted on council, commissions, and work groups so they would get fewer dissentient answers. Phillips proposed using the number of invasive trees being removed to measure approval; Dickey volunteered a reduction in the number of emails complaining about a project. Furman had the bright idea of creating a performative, high-visibility joint project with businesses or individuals that could be used by the city as a public relations rallying cry, a “short-term win,” in King’s words. Four such projects was eventually set as the goal for the year.

Fultz had already included in the council packet for the retreat a request to discuss a proposal for “a weekly 30-60 minute video podcast to cover city topics and have the podcast accessible from the city homepage.” In other words, he want the city to have its own miniature television channel to give the official view on how events should be interpreted. If we pick up the Merriam-Webster dictionary and turn to the entry for “propaganda,” we find it defined as “ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause; also a public action having such an effect.” Fultz and colleagues want to further their causes by disseminating slanted misinformation; therefore, they literally want propaganda. Fortunately, council seemed to have little interest in the propaganda podcast at the moment.

The clueless and essentially insincere repetition by councilors that they want better communications with the public will never bear fruit because the issue is not about how, it’s about what. It’s not about how the message is packaged, it’s about the message itself. The psychopaths who make up city staff and council—and I use this word, as always, in its literal sense—do not understand two key things about the rural Western population. First, it is a matter of common assumption among rural Westerners that government and all of its programs are always a bad thing. Second, it is equally a matter of common assumption that any expenditure of money by government is a bad thing. It doesn’t matter how bureaucratic psychopaths try to “sell” this to the public or what techniques they use; if a proposal involves either government involvement or government spending, it will be resisted and rejected by many Westerners automatically. This is especially the young person’s viewpoint, the working person’s viewpoint, and the alternative lifestyle enthusiast’s viewpoint.

A couple of weeks ago, I did a little outreach on home rule to a resident of a decade’s standing who had never heard of it before. All I told him was that years ago, the state set a limit on city spending, but the city can hold a vote to get an exemption from the limit, which means it can spend $100-plus million a year instead of $15 million a year. With no other explanation, do you know what his immediate response was? “Those fuckin’ criminals!”

Council and staff’s discussions of how they can school the public on how wonderful they are also entirely missed the point that it is completely inappropriate for any kind of democratic government to be telling the public about what is good for them as individuals or what is good for society. The public will decide on the answers to those questions and tell their elected officials, who will carry out the orders without quibbling. Suggesting that officials could suggest to or persuade the public, their employers, of anything involves a fundamental misunderstanding about how representative democracy is supposed to work. Selling a staff or council proposal to the public would involve the council directing the public, which is a reversal of the council’s own process. If council were to direct public, it would be a sign that the democratic component of Sedona’s government was completely gone and it would be time for them to stop pretending by holding elections and public meetings and so forth. The only forms of appropriate communication from council or staff to the public are an acknowledgment of orders and a report that those orders have been carried out.

Council’s second-highest priority to emerge from the exercise was housing, but it turned out they had no idea how to identify any actual housing projects they could complete or make measurable progress on in so short a time, so they contented themselves with tasking staff with running up more reports on how much housing is needed and finalizing a new master plan for the Cultural Park as their contributions to that priority category. No one proposed setting concrete and easily achievable goals like having at least six sets of pre-approved plans for home construction by year’s end, an increase in the number of permits granted for single-family homes, an increase in the number of ADUs being built, or a reduction in the number of rules in the LDC and building code. “Do we have any impediments that we’re putting in front of potential developers?” Comrade Pfaff wanted to know, indicating that his interest was in developers, not regular people. “What are the barriers and how do we overcome them?” Ploog asked more generally. As she acknowledged, I previously outlined many of the regulatory obstacles to new home construction in Sedona in a Red Rock News article three years ago, including garage requirements, sprinkler requirements, soil classification requirements, drawing requirements, labor requirements, and the omission of affordable and sustainable construction methods from code. Dunn implicitly admitted that families were more likely to want houses and would be less likely to settle for apartments than single individuals would be; therefore, if the council wanted to attract families to Sedona, they would have to consider that desire. “What does the school system need in terms of additional students?” Fultz asked in a purely utilitarian inquiry for the future health of an urban-industrial economy based on idiot workers. Let’s not forget that the council’s pretended concern for the school district is also, besides being a manifestation of their industrial business outlook, a major form of virtue signaling. Most of the kids in Sedona schools are Hispanic and the children of the working poor, and therefore supporting the school system is an easy way for a council of performative neocon Democrats to show their concern for the poor minorities.

As part of the background to the discussion, Allender noted that the median age in Sedona is now 64.1 years, average household occupancy is 1.9 people, only 6.7 percent of Sedona’s houses have more than two people in them, and the typical mortgage in town eats up 64.5 percent of household income. “The population is not anticipated to increase much at all,” Allender said with regard to future planning, in one sentence undermining the case of Comrade Blum et al that some 1,600 new homes for 3,000-plus new residents are required. Approximately 5,400 residents, if not more, are nonworking either in Sedona or elsewhere.

The councilors were unable to decide whether “mobility/transit/circulation” or “economic diversity” should be their third priority in the six hours allotted to them for the purpose. “What is it you think we’re going to do to improve the current economy?” Fultz demanded of Ploog, Pfaff, and Dunn, who had all favored economic interference of some kind, as opposed to himself, Kinsella, and Furman. He suggested economic improvement would be a byproduct of continued traffic infrastructure improvements. The economics advocacy group had no suggestions for what they could do to change the town’s economy, but Dunn declared boldly that if they didn’t do something, Sedona would end up turning into a retirement community. Furman said he still wanted broadband for yuppies even though no federal funds will be forthcoming to pay for it. As far as measuring what a successful transit policy would look like, Dunn wanted reduced car usage, Kinsella increased shuttle ridership, and Fultz a firm decision on the bus barn, a review of the transit plan, and a decision on the Tlaquepaque crosswalk.

As one illustration of how clueless staff and council are about how ordinary working people think as they attempt to form these “priorities,” Comrade Furman claimed that the paranoid Firewise program is “top of mind for almost everybody in the community.” In three years, I cannot recall a single conversation in which the so-called fire risk to Sedona was taken seriously or in which the Firewise program was taken seriously, and few conversations in which the subject of fire was touched on at all other than as an expected incident of life in the rural West. “I didn’t think the restroom at the park and ride would be controversial but of course it was,” Dickey murmured, showing off his own lack of understanding of the community. During a break towards the end of the meeting, Comrade Phillips asked me if my priorities for Sedona matched up with theirs. My reply? “Not even close.” In lieu of the nonsense council came up with, I’d like to suggest three more realistic and helpful priorities:

1. Reopening the Cultural Park amphitheater to help revive the arts in Sedona, provide community events, and diversify the economy.

2. Massive cuts to staff and budget, preferably by reverting to the state expenditure limit.

3. Abolition of the land and building codes to “solve housing.”

Day two of the retreat saw council still attempting to thrash out whether economic diversification or transit should be their third priority. After saying that “we all know the trend is away from people buying stuff and wanting experiences” and having heard from Comrade Grossman about the decline of retail in Sedona over the last five years, Fultz suggested that the city encourage large, elitist, high-profile chain stores like Cotopaxi, Patagonia, or Lululemon to move into Uptown to “revive” the area’s economy.

“We need to be really cautious about letting the national brands in the door. Once you let the barbarians in the gate, there’s no turning back…They kill competition,” Pfaff fired back. “There are any number of businesses I would not want setting foot in Sedona because I’ve seen what they do…Don’t invite them. If they come, they come, but let’s not encourage them.”

“I don’t think this is a healthy road to go down,” Kinsella said. “Are we really talking about changing the face of retail in Sedona with public money as a budget priority?”

Pfaff pointed out that most residents would likely prefer a more diverse economy over a more intense tourist economy, and Ploog agreed: “It has always been a crisis that we are totally reliant on one industry.” Grossman bragged about how Sedona is well-positioned in his mind to profit from new age tourism, talking for instance about the ready availability of vortex tours, but not mentioning that any money spent by the city to facilitate the spread of information about vortexes, crystals, UFOs, or related tourist attractions is an investment of public money in pseudoscience. Furman continued to insist that faster internet would be a tool leading to entrepreneurship. Dunn heatedly declared that diversification was “critical for the future of Sedona” in order to make it possible for families to live here and reverse the trend leading to their accounting for just 6.7 percent of the population. “To me, that’s a crisis,” Dunn stated. If that’s a crisis, why aren’t you helping to fix it by selling your $3 million home for $250,000 to a local family a third of your age and leaving town?

What could the city of Sedona legitimately do to contribute to diversification away from tourism? How about supporting the arts? “I think it’s important, but how realistic is it?” Pfaff asked about economic diversity. Well, when you also don’t want an amphitheater that could help start the process of economic diversification, or attracting young people with new ideas and innovations, it’s a lot less realistic a goal than it might otherwise be. Reopening the Cultural Park, with the amphitheater, film festival, and other arts locations co-located at the site, would not merely diversify tourism in the short term. Over the long term, the park’s presence would create the impetus to develop a local support infrastructure for it, leading to true diversification away from tourism, and possibly to the development of a local arts college in Sedona, diversifying the town’s economy further into education. Meanwhile, the city could also promote economic sustainability and diversification at once by rolling back regulations on agricultural enterprises and finding non-coercive, non-funded ways to encourage the development of pocket agriculture and the cottage food industry. Perhaps the city could lease parcels of city-owned land for vineyards or orchards, particularly the Dells; perhaps the future use for the Dells should not be housing, since it appears the so-called housing crisis is less and less of a reality, but rather as leased public land to facilitate local market gardening. It has become commonplace in housing discussions to talk about workers living at the Dells and commuting into Sedona to work. What about workers living in Sedona but commuting to the Dells to grow things? More generally, there needs to be a shift away from services to production and creation—from generating nothing to generating something. Contrary to Dunn’s and Pfaff’s vigorous defenses of online business and telecommuting, online businesses are not the future, firstly because they are nonproductive; secondly, because there is no guarantee that the internet itself, or the physical infrastructure to support it, will still exist fifty or a hundred years from now; and thirdly, because online business comes with certain losses of freedom due to the role of the internet as a tool for extending state power. Arts and agriculture fit with the historical, small-town character of Sedona; chain stores and telecommuting do not.

In the end, council elected to have four priorities after all and added both economic development and transit to their list for the coming year.

In budgetary updates, Comrade Whitehorn announced that the city will be moving to zero-based budgeting for fiscal year 2027 on the grounds that it was demanded by both the council and the public. Council unanimously directed staff to keep revenue assumptions flat or reduce them for the coming year, in spite of West having declared that assuming a 1 to 2 percent revenue increase in the face of a potential recession would be “prudent.” Ploog suggested the city stop overbudgeting so much for capital projects, and Whitehorn admitted that the city’s combined execution rate on budgeted projects for 2006 through 2024 was only 74 percent. Forgive my obvious math, Barbara, celarent, darii, ferioque prioris, but if Sedona budgets $100 million a year, only spends an average of $74 million a year, and $40 million of its spending is capital projects and $20 million is bureaucrats’ salaries and benefits, slashing those looks like another very feasible scenario leading to successful operation of the city at the expenditure limit. Kinsella declared that “adding any additional staff at this point would be contrary to that message” of prudence and Fultz suggested they limit themselves to a “mixing of the deck chairs” as far as staff positions were concerned, but both Furman and Pfaff expressed willingness to consider new staff requests in the upcoming budget. West claimed that the city staff turnover rate in FY25 was only 16.8 percent, down from 20 percent in FY24 and higher rates in previous years, a very disappointing development.

“We have had a prudent budget,” Fultz protested, again showing off his lack of awareness of how the public views the city of Sedona budget in spite of numerous budget surveys highlighting popular discontent with its size.

West further informed council that sales tax was down in August and level in September, while bed tax was down both months. Tourism mismanager Comrade Grossman claimed Canadian travel to Arizona has been down almost 20 percent this year and that hotel demand in Sedona is down 6.2 percent for the year, which would have been higher had not Poco Diablo been closed for renovations. However, Grossman cheerily explained, he wasn’t the least bit concerned because the hotels have all raised their rates, meaning that the city’s revenues continue to flow from fewer visitors, which of course has been staff and council’s goal all along. More importantly, Grossman finally admitted that the city can legally provide a breakdown of the share of bed tax paid by short-term rentals as opposed to hotels, and according to him, that number for the calendar year so far is an average of 40 percent, varying from 31 percent in July to 56 percent in January. That’s even more significant than the Sedona-Verde Valley Association of Realtors’ conclusion that STRs accounted for 26.3 percent of Sedona’s taxes. An interesting historical twist has been that over the last five years, amusements and restaurant tax receipts have remained level, while the proportion of sales tax revenue drawn from hotels has been increasing and retail is in decline. Grossman added that in the city’s extensive survey of seventeen businesses, two more than participated in their last survey three months ago, 43 percent of retailers said that business had gotten much worse and 63 percent said foot traffic was down. It won’t affect him or his job prospects; in February, he’ll be going to Paris and Brussels on the public’s dime.

The councilors later touched upon a few of their own proposals for new programs. Comrade Dunn wanted to give service provider contracts to the food bank and Hope House, and Kinsella showed off the hook embedded in all such deals with the city when she called for audits of every organization getting a contract. Furman responded with an unexpected but eloquent critique of the concept of government nonprofit funding in general. “You start to naturalize government contributions to a nonprofit organization, and it does tend to decrease their entrepreneurial effort toward fundraising,” he pointed out, adding that if nonprofits become conditioned to receiving government funding, and that funding is the first expense to be cut in a time of financial crisis, the result is chaos in the community. Dunn offered a rebuttal that implied the council’s recent arts grants were not going to people in the community who needed help. Her colleagues agreed to look at a contract expansion. Comrade Hosseini, who will be gone in eleven months anyway and couldn’t be bothered to show up for the session, had asked for a review of former county streets and the addition of sustainability metrics to the service provider contracts without specifying either what kind of metrics she wanted or whether she meant environmental or economic sustainability. Council set those to one side. Furman had an absurd proposal to pay council members a regular wage for doing the job, ignoring that it’s a form of public service. He attempted to justify the proposal by suggesting it would make it more affordable for young people to run for office, although the actual effect it would have would be to attract cold-minded, ambitious professional careerist types rather than community volunteers. The suggestion was popular, but Pfaff raised an unexpected objection. “I don’t want to complicate home rule by, ‘Oh, they’re giving themselves a raise,’” Pfaff said. “Home rule is sort of a do-or-die thing as far I’m concerned.” Is he over the legal line yet?

Furman also revived his old proposal for an outside auditor to audit city staff, this time joined by Dunn and Fultz. Fultz proposed that the auditor would be a third party or “even possibly folks from the community with specific skill sets and interests,” which is the single best proposal anyone on council has made since I’ve been here. “It would be unusual for a city of our size but we’re also not a city of our size considering the budget spend that we have,” Furman said. “An independent auditor would report to council and council deploys them.” The council agreed to a subcommittee to explore the concept further, although Comrade Spickard expressed conditional support based on the auditor not targeting staff or causing them to feel uneasy. What did she think the auditor was supposed to do?

Fultz served up additional suggestions for what he termed community engagement, which, unlike his propaganda podcast plan, were actually excellent ideas. He proposed that instead of holding an additional work session each month, council agendize that time slot for a public forum at the library to actually hold conversations with residents on both scheduled and new topics. “We often hear that the public forum, three minutes, is inadequate in a number of ways,” Fultz said. He then proposed that the city return to its former practice of creating resident working groups to advise on issues on a regular basis, and as an example, suggested one such group might give input on how to draw events back to Sedona, which, Fultz said, are the most consistent thing that the community actually wants. He expressed that he was “pretty married” to both of those ideas, although flexible on the propaganda podcast. Council were generally favorable, but Dunn made the Jablow-type comment that public opinion “could force us into a position of doing something we don’t want to do.” The problem with the work groups idea is that their membership will be handpicked to get the desired answers and will exclude dissenting voices. The good thing about that will be that it will quickly reveal council’s biggest sycophants and the loudest voices for bigger government in Sedona.

In a sign of things to come, even though the agenda for the meeting stated that no public comment would be taken, council took comment from a couple of Citizens’ Academy graduates in attendance, Ed Kettler and Jolene Pearson. It should be remembered that the Citizens’ Academy indoctrinees have now been officially anointed as the preferred successors and appointees to council and commissioners as part of council’s efforts to build a pipeline to power that will eliminate nonconforming views and bypass or neuter the electoral process. The most interesting comment either made was a whining remark Pearson was heard to utter at the start of the meeting: “I never wanted the stupid amphitheater anyway.” Ah, so the amphitheater is stupid. Performance art is stupid. Music and theatre are stupid. Beethoven and Tony Bennett and Shakespeare are equally stupid. Thank you, Jolene, for clarifying the definition of stupidity for us.

On the third and final day of the retreat—yes, staff managed to stretch it to three days this year—the town bureaucrats presented their implementation proposals for the council’s new priorities, and wouldn’t you know it, Firewise, home rule, the Ranger Station restroom, Walk Sedona, a wastewater rate study, and household hazardous waste collection all turned out to be things Dickey and Mertes tried to convince the council they could get the community excited about to satisfy the “community” priority! They completely hijacked the process and ignored council’s intent in order to wedge their preferred projects back into the agenda and took none of what council really wanted, which was more propaganda efforts, into consideration! Thank God for the ineptitude of government, which so often saves us from what could be so much worse. “I look at all of these as helping to build a sense of community,” Furman cooed, buying right into the staff manipulation. An exchange between Dunn and Comrade Frewin of parks indicated that staff and council are agreed that the only feasible way to fix the sticky floor of the Posse Grounds restroom is to build an entirely new restroom. Bureaucrats’ solutions have so little connection with reality. When Fultz called for projects for “building enthusiasm. And events. Music, athletics, food, culture,” staff suggested bringing the community together with a drone show and handing off events to outside contractors rather than organizing homegrown community enthusiasm. Credit to the vice mayor: he got the message that we in the community want events first and foremost, but that message is not getting across to staff, who are disinterested, unimaginative, and don’t want to break out of their grooves.

“I’ve got a little gnawing concern here about how much we think we can control this. It’s organic. Communities evolve,” Kinsella said with regard to the housing priority. Fultz said the “most direct way we can influence where we go” would be to prioritize two- and three-bedroom units for families in development plans for city property, while Dunn, her elitism running over, demanded that they “create that opportunity by getting the right people here.” “We’re also trying to change the definition of workforce in Sedona,” she added, from hospitality and service workers to remote workers, who tend to be cleaner and not going out and about where they might be seen by the good retirees. The best staff could come up with for definite transit priorities for the next year was another millionaires’ sidewalk and the unlamented Comrade Jablow’s dumb proposal to add traffic lights to the crosswalk at the Y, which was one of the stupidest ideas he ever had, yet the city is proceeding with it. Staff apparently understood the exercise as having been an effort to find little things that they, with their misunderstanding of the public mind, thought they could use to generate enthusiasm.

Comrade Mertes presented a six-step model for how staff thought they could put council’s priorities into action in such a way as to generate community interest. Step one, Mertes said, would patronizingly involve studying the community and “how we’re gonna educate them...the sensitivities we’re gonna run up against.” Step two would involve recruiting fake activists in the community to push the city’s official line on these programs and coordinate with council and staff. Step three would “create the why,” “create the story” to justify the city’s actions by scaring people with fictitious alternative scenarios. Step four would be more formal engagement to push the propaganda down people’s throats, followed by their submission to being run over by the city in step five and “celebration” in step six. “Celebration” seems to be a new term introduced by Comrade Allender; did he work at Disney as well as the Politburo before coming here? How ludicrous. As if Sedonans are going to celebrate a bunch of out-of-town bureaucrats getting their way.

Since Mertes was using his beloved Firewise program as his example in his scenario, he kept digressing to talk about the rise in insurance rates and finding out why that happens. Everyone knows why insurance rates have gone up: because the Sedona Fire District has vastly expanded its irrational, anti-science rules and its so-called “wildland urban interface zone” in order to cater to its bureaucrats’ egos by giving them more power, which has given insurance companies the justification needed to raise rates. Revoke all those SFD policies, or better yet, abolish the fire district and go back to a volunteer fire department the way it was in the good old days, and the insurance problem would go away. All of these proposed fire management programs are in any case such revolting cowardice and weakness to witness. Could anyone really be so degraded as to take this nonsense seriously? In discussion of who would champion what, Ploog blithely referred to the “home rule team,” another indication of how council apparently plans to defy state statute to advocate for their desired election outcome.

Council lobbyist Kathy Senseman had little of use to share with her employers apart from a new set of city legislative priorities drafted by herself and Comrade Browne—although we know who really did most of the drafting. These priorities include opposing a ballot referral that would repeal sales tax on food, resisting any loss of city authority or zoning control, demanding short-term rental caps and limits, demanding the repeal of SB1487—“I know you guys have had a few SB1487 complaints,” Senseman noted, but put the chance of repeal at “close to zero”—trying to get the expenditure limit changed or repealed, opposing any reduction in shared revenues or taxes, and trying to get more flexibility to spend money through bond issues and fee increases. Dunn took the opportunity to ask about OHVs and revive the false canard of “OHV damage” to forest land, letting her personal bigotry flag fly. “They go out in force at night and go off the trails and destroy the trails,” she alleged without proof, repeating a scenario she likely saw in an environmentalist film once upon a time. Kinsella did her duty of promoting the Democratic Party line and wanted to add an entire additional section about resisting changes to election law. “I would throw in something about gerrymanding,” Dunn oozed. “We’re opposed to any such change.” What did she think her plan to bulldoze the Cultural Park for high-income housing for relocating Democrats is realistically called?

As for the Sedona Cultural Park, council approved including the Sedona International Film Festival in the planning process for the park in half an hour. A visibly unhappy Comrade Meyer—she doesn’t like to move fast or say yes to things—explained to council that they would have to change the lot lines of the current parcels to create a new one for the festival, which would then have to be rezoned for an indoor recreation center. The lot line adjustment could take several weeks, followed by about six months for the zone change process and four months for permitting, allowing the project to “potentially start in about a year.” An enthusiastic Patrick Schweiss declared that timeline would be six months ahead of their original estimate: “That’s the greatest Christmas present we could ever get!” It’s amazing what happens when council simply orders staff, “Make this happen.”

The Cultural Park discussion then shifted to the amphitheater, and the exchange—the first honest public exchange council has ever had of their own views on the subject without being led by the nose by staff—turned into Ploog and Fultz trying to hold the line on fairness and process against three of their council colleagues. Repeating that the first so-called outreach process had not been a success, Ploog returned to the concept of holding a community-wide survey on whether the amphitheater is wanted or not. Christianson confirmed such a survey could be held, although the results would be nonbinding.

“I don’t know what the community thinks. I’ve heard everything from people. But I don’t think that was necessarily a fair representation,” Ploog said.

“We don’t know just the basic question: do people want the amphitheater to reopen?” Pfaff agreed.

“I like the idea of getting public opinion, doing a survey…my impression is that most people oppose it but I don’t know that...we’d have to be careful in the wording of the question,” Kinsella said, foreshadowing what she was about to do next.

“I think we should get public input at the right time. Now is not the right time,” Fultz said. “I believe there was consensus that we were going to give the 2.0 group official sanction to go and prepare a business plan that includes them being able to contact concert promotion companies to be able to have legitimate conversations that lead to building out that business plan. So I think that we should follow through with the consensus that seemed very obvious last Wednesday on that, and give direction to Kurt to draft the letter, and then again, when we’ve gotten more for the community to truly react to, then I think we should get that input from them.”

Dunn attempted to insinuate that the SCP 2.0 nonprofit would be attempting to repurpose significant portions of the park as commercial space for leasing. Ironically, this is the same route a member of council went down to kill the amphitheater back in 2003, when Vice Mayor Tutnick accused Georgia Frontiere of wanting to make a profit out of it after she’d poured millions into making it viable, causing her to withdraw from saving the park in disgust. Kinsella likewise kept falsely representing the proposal to reopen the amphitheater as a commercial one, although SCP 2.0 is a 501(c)3 nonprofit and would not be able to engage in commercial activities to any greater extent than, say, the film festival would.

“Where’s the master planning portion we aspired to?” Kinsella asked. Dan Jensvold and Steve Thompson handed that to you on a silver platter if you had the sense to accept it.

City staff called in parks manager Comrade Frewin to testify that he wanted a minimum of two acres of flat space for commercial event rentals and would not sacrifice that priority to the amphitheater. Meyer made the false claim that there was no separate level area for events included in the SCP 2.0 plan for the site, although the park’s master plan always included space for festival grounds in the northwest corner, and Fultz had to point out that SCP 2.0 had retained that use for alternate event space. However, Frewin’s testimony earlier in the day also undermined city staff’s case against the amphitheater, as he admitted that many groups regularly inquire about renting the park and that “we could have a major event in the park every week” but claimed it wouldn’t be good for the community. That, again, in the face of the vice mayor having just informed staff that what the community wants is events.

Furman kept obstinately insisting that the existing Dig Studio plan derived from the rigged surveys accurately represents community needs, called the SCP 2.0 supporters making use of the democratic process “disruptive,” said that disrupting the bureaucratic process “feels wrong to me,” and so concluded that he would support a survey in the hope of shutting the community up. In a rather impressively surreal move, he explained that the city’s best hope of fighting the no-housing initiative would be to go ahead and approve the Dig Studio plan, which, he said, was developed by a flawless process, with a total of something like 350 units. Somehow, he was able to say all this and then claim that if a survey showed the public wanted the amphitheater, he would rethink his opposition.

“We were presented with a single option as a result of the master planning process, and we’re going to have a referendum. That’s your answer,” Ploog retorted bluntly.

“Does it have to be 5,500 seats?” Dunn whined. How else will we get every voter in the community in one place to engage in a true public process one day? That’s every bit as important and more important than booking concert acts. She then claimed “that land has to be walled off” in an urbanist’s total misunderstanding of how rural societies work. When the amphitheater isn’t in use for events, it will act as a public park, obviously; it will not be walled off from the rest of the park. And if she hadn’t made herself look ridiculous enough, Dunn then attacked a proposed “expensive restaurant” of the kind in which she would eat that she thought she saw somewhere on the SCP 2.0 plan.

“I hear a lot of fear up here,” Fultz said of his colleagues, supporting the argument that a certain minimum number of seats would be required for financial break-even and pointing out that the proposed 1,100 parking spaces were likely overkill that could be distributed elsewhere. “We owe it to look at what the possibility could be of that amphitheater reopening...it could be a good thing for the community.”

Like Dunn, Pfaff tried to misstate SCP 2.0’s purpose as being commercial, but he then had the intelligence to introduce a worthwhile counter-proposal that had not yet been seriously considered.

“Does it have to be commercial? Have we looked at the viability of the city making this part of the parks and rec department?” Pfaff asked. “What would it cost to just do the bare minimum to this thing...the Antonsen Pavilion on steroids?” If it was not a commercial enterprise, he continued, “the amphitheater would sit there and be a public amenity...Just because the SCP people are the ones that brought the plan forward doesn’t mean it has to be their plan.” He went further and suggested the city could potentially fund such an alternate proposal privately, “asking people to put their money where their mouth is.”

Instead of being tempted by the prospect, Kinsella returned to her new desire to propose a public survey question that would prove the public didn’t want the amphitheater, and suggested language along the lines of “Do you support a 5,500-seat commercial live entertainment amphitheater at the Western Gateway site?”

Fultz wanted to add language to the survey question specifying that the amphitheater had to be “completely self-supporting,” an indirect reference to a previous city staff survey on the park that had slanted the questions regarding the amphitheater to make it appear more expensive than alternative site uses. Kinsella refused “because it’s an unknown,” falsely claiming that SCP 2.0 will be asking for city funding, although the organization has stated since its foundation that it intends to restore the amphitheater using private funds.

“If it’s fully self-funding, hell, maybe I could get on board. But I just don’t believe that,” Pfaff said.

Dunn made the remarkable statement that she wanted the wording of the question to include “live,” “commercial,” and the size of the venue—and then said that she didn’t want to be accused of leading the public.

“I want to limit the parameter of how they’re putting the question together,” Kinsella said.

“We’re biasing the answer. We want to get to an answer, and we’re structuring it so we get to an answer,” Ploog said in exasperation.

“We can’t just ask a simple question, we have to show people what it is they want,” Dunn said in one of the most Leninist statements ever to come out of the mouth of a Sedona city council member.

Ploog and Fultz failed to convince their colleagues to adopt a fairer form of language and Spickard announced that she would bring back draft language on a survey question at one of the council’s January meetings, which would subsequently be submitted to the city’s registered voters. At the last minute, councilors also decided to add a second question asking if respondents “support some housing” at the Cultural Park.

It’s like we’re back at the last paragraph in E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, in chapter thirty-two, which loops around to insert itself into chapter one in a potentially infinite repeating sequence. Haven’t we been through this all before? Biased survey questions to get a desired answer, growing public outrage, legal resistance, council members belatedly seeing the light, another attempt to do the right thing—and that attempt immediately degenerates into another effort by a bad actor to manipulate the process. Kathy Kinsella’s behavior was shameful. She has proposed a question based on lies that will be useless for either determining public opinion or persuading anyone of anything. Should the city put out that question, and get a negative reply back, it will be irrelevant, since SCP 2.0 is a nonprofit seeking to operate a nonprofit venue, not a commercial venue, and the question does not apply to it. A neutral and accurate survey question might read, “Do you support allowing a nonprofit organization to reopen the existing Cultural Park amphitheater at its own cost?” Since there continues to be some interest among council in potential alternate sizes of amphitheater, another variant could be, “Do you support allowing a nonprofit organization to reopen the Cultural Park amphitheater at its own cost at a size to be determined?” Such a question would then have to be followed by either additional questions or an instant-runoff survey on the different sizing options to arrive at a genuine sense of what the community wants. The Kinsella question will not give us that answer and will change nothing.

As for the proposed housing question, that is also unanswerable, since for many in the community, the deciding factor in whether they will accept some amount of housing on the site is whether the city will first agree to reopen the amphitheater. The stubbornness and absolute refusal to play fair of several of these councilors is exactly why the no-housing initiative of which they are terrified remains such an attractive alternative. If the council takes away our amphitheater, we will take away their prestige housing project.

Personally, I’m also open to Pfaff’s conceptual suggestion that the amphitheater could simply be kept as a park, minimally restored, and used for community events without having to rebuild it to a degree necessary to attract large concerts on a regular basis, albeit with the caveat that its operation would still have to be contracted to some kind of nonprofit. The city of Sedona cannot be allowed or trusted to make decisions regarding aesthetics or artistic merit. There are additionally a number of other intermediate options possible for the amphitheater, such as limiting its large-scale use to a single short period each year for the purpose of a single festival, or, more intriguingly, keeping the whole venue stripped-down and minimal on purpose. No lighting, no sound, no installed facilities for performers, and no amplification allowed. If artists think they have what it takes to play the Cultural Park without electronics, au naturel, they’d be welcomed; if not, no go. That kind of simplistic approach could quite easily be turned into a marketing gimmick itself by a clever manager. There are many possibilities that exist to keep the amphitheater and use it for community benefit in various ways that are not captured either in city staff’s plan or SCP 2.0’s plan, and that cannot be properly assessed outside of the kind of conversation that council had yesterday for the very first time, three years too late.

An unexpected piece of news emerging from the retreat: the Sedona Community Food Bank has declined the opportunity to become a contract service provider for the city and should be heartily applauded for resisting the lure of easy government money, especially given the pressures it faces. Let’s send them something extra to show our appreciation.

Once again, the public pressure has been too much for a government body: the Flagstaff city council voted unanimously on Tuesday night to cancel Flagstaff’s contract with Flock un(Safety) before its proposed citizen work group even reported back. Following Sedona’s lead, Flagstaff has become the second Arizona city to tell the aspiring evil megacorporation that surveillance is for the birds after Flagstaff’s paramilitary troopers were unable to convince the public that being spied on constantly would somehow benefit them. Cottonwood, you’re up next.

In the coming year’s legislative session, Rep. Matt Gress wants to introduce mandatory nonpartisan training and term limits for school board members, along with tying superintendent pay to student performance. Gress said he wants board members to start running their districts instead of merely cheering for and rubber-stamping the decisions of unelected administrators. State education Tom Horne also recently commented on the reasons for increasing numbers of school closures: “There are conservative communities with left-wing school boards. And then the parents become unhappy and they have choices now. So they go to a charter school or ESAs and so you get an acceleration for declining enrollment.” Horne simultaneously called for districts to cut their administrative costs and staff and focus on teaching. Not bad advice. I seem to recall that the Sedona indoctrination district’s per-classroom cost is something in the region of $176,000 per year, which would put the “teacher’s” salary at around a third of that expense with the rest going to administration. But then, the kind of teaching that these indoctrination centers are doing is also one of the key reasons why parents are pulling their kids out. One in three eighth-graders can’t read well enough to grasp the central idea in a passage, ACT scores are at their lowest in three and a half decades, and the lowest-performing students have fewer reading and math skills than their counterparts of fifty years ago. And this is the kind of environment that Comrades Fultz and Pfaff want to force kids into by bringing families to Sedona for the explicit reason that they’ll be expected to place their children in this system. I’d counter-argue that if we want families moving to Sedona, killing the state indoctrination system and developing a wide range of small alternative schools will be a far more attractive move. After all, this area was once an education destination back when Verde Valley School was first founded.

Meanwhile, showing that absolutely nothing has changed in two thousand-plus years, the state’s murderers are in tears over a Massachusetts priest who has had the audacity to point out the status of the Holy Family as persecuted refugees by replacing their figures in his church’s Nativity scene with a spray-painted sign observing, “ICE was here.” It’s always remarkable what fear and terror the nonviolent can provoke in the violent, and behind their fears ring out the bells of Longfellow’s carol forever:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;

The Wrong shall fail,

The Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men.”

And guess what: on Thursday, the current totalitarian in the White House gave us a real Christmas present this year: the rescheduling of cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III, marking, after fifty-five years of lies, the federal admission that it has little potential for dependence or harm. How amusingly ironic that Democratic candidate after Democratic candidate has run on this issue, yet it was a personally anti-drug Republican who has finally started to act on it. Democrats have trouble rolling back rules. Now, if we could get opium legalized again, that might just finish off the whole fentanyl problem. There’s this little trend in human history that appears when governments don’t interfere: safe drugs drive out dangerous drugs.

Last week over at Tone Prose, Maestro Will challenged readers to think about an appropriate menu pairing for the Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 2, which is actually a less tricky exercise than it might first appear. The concerto represents a complete departure from Shostakovich’s usual Stahlstadt style, as it is bright, optimistic, gleeful, and exuberant with sweeping cinematic gestures, as well as strongly reliant upon themes. It carries a hint of sea-breeze in summer. The musical language suggests it would complement Korngold’s suite from The Sea Hawk, or possibly The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, which were incidentally contemporary works to the concerto. The standard suite from the former, however, clocks in around seventeen minutes, while the six-part long-form suite from Elizabeth and Essex runs sixty-five. A different selection from the parts would be needed to keep the concert to somewhere between sixty-five and eighty minutes with the concerto. Borodin’s Symphony No. 2 could be an approachable alternative, and, at thirty minutes, an easier piece to schedule. Plus there’s always the punning factor to consider: an orchestra could promote the Shostakovich-Borodin pairing as its “Minor Seconds” concert. As for an opening piece, if sticking with the nautical flavor, why not Ethel Smyth’s “On the Cliffs of Cornwall”? The Smyth piece would have the logistical advantage that the rather hefty orchestration, including harp, trombones, and extra winds, could be reused in the Korngold suite after intermission. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio espagnol exhibits a similar breadth of color and effects, making it another possibility. On the other hand, Michael Nyman’s “Water Dances” could make for a successful opening pairing with the Shostakovich, in which case the Borodin in the second half would be right out in preference for something lighter.

If you’re free in the afternoon on Sunday, December 21, Dave Len Scott will be bringing his jazz trio back to St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church for their free Charlie Brown-themed holiday concert.

City of Sedona staff have been repeatedly refusing to produce extant public records by lying about the existence of those records. On October 23, I filed a records request for all exit interviews with outgoing city staff from the last three years. The records were apparently provided on November 4; after reviewing them, I notified the city clerk’s office on November 19 that I had been given only the anonymized responses from the city’s online staff survey rather than the transcripts of the one-on-one interviews conducted by human resources director Comrade Martin with outgoing staff. The clerk’s office responded on November 23 that Martin had told them there were no in-person exit interviews. I subsequently was able to obtain statements from former city staffers that such in-person interviews were indeed conducted and in some cases recorded by Martin, along with supplementary details including the dates, times, and locations of the in-person interviews. I informed that gang calling themselves the Sedona city council that Martin had lied about the existence of the in-person interviews on Tuesday, and on Wednesday I received an extraordinary email from Martin that included additional documents at first omitted from the request due to his confusion but that also doubled down on the lie: “I do not record or create transcripts of these one-on-one interviews.” Considering that other testimony exists to contradict that statement, it’s quite brazen that he would continue to repeat it.

Furthermore, let’s loop back to Martin’s word choice for a moment: “I do not record or create transcripts of these one-on-one interviews.” How interesting. On November 24, the clerk’s office had stated, on direction from Martin, that “it’s not even a verbal interview; they just complete the form on paper or online, and they’re anonymous.” So Martin has now confirmed that he does in fact conduct in-person interviews, although three weeks ago he denied it. He lied about the one; presumably he lied about the other. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. Of course, this just makes us in the public all the more curious. Whatever is in those interviews must be something that council and staff really, really don’t want us to see. And what kind of human resources manager would not record all employee interviews as a matter of course, to cover his own ass if nothing else? At any rate, the city now appears to have violated not only those provisions of state statute requiring them to release the interviews but also those provisions requiring that the records be released “promptly,” which, the Court of Appeals determined in Phoenix New Times v. Arpaio, was less than thirty-four working days for a simple request.

The additional documents that Martin did turn over, by the way, shed little additional light on the dysfunction of city staff apart from suggesting that dissatisfaction was not so high among them in 2023 as in 2025.

On Wednesday, the council, after having been battered into some degree of receptiveness to their constituents by two years of emphatic public rejection of their schemes to demolish the Sedona Cultural Park and replace it with high-density housing for the relocating bourgeoisie, condescended to hold a work session on a few of the public’s ideas for the park’s future. Presenters from the public included Patrick Schweiss of the Sedona International Film Festival; Allan Affeldt, resident and former mayor of Winslow; and Sedona Cultural Park 2.0, the nonprofit working to reopen the amphitheater.

Schweiss fleshed out the film festival’s plans for its four new theatres on a portion of the park, which would include the expansion of the Alice-Gill Sheldon Theatre to either 75 or 100 seats, along with the addition of a stage; the relocation of the Mary D. Fisher Theatre at its current size; the construction of a new 350-seat film viewing and performance hall based on the auditorium of the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix for its superior acoustics; and an additional 150-seat space with removable seats that could double as a fourth theatre for festival season, eliminating SIFF’s need to rent Harkins, and as a meeting or flexible performance space. “We would literally have the entire film festival happening within a two-block radius on the end of town,” thereby moving the traffic out there, Schweiss tempted the council. The new festival building, designed by John Sather, would include a commercial kitchen to provide catering services to groups renting space for events and 192 parking spaces. Bob Lewis of the festival board described it as an effort to create a “crown jewel” for Sedona, and Schweiss noted that the other two presenters had reserved SIFF’s preferred location for the festival in their proposals.

“We’re hoping for early development of our parcels,” Schweiss added, suggesting that the city should allow the festival to break ground within two years at the most so SIFF can have the project up and running in four years.

“The school district needs every dime they can get from renting that property out,” Comrade Fultz groused about the potential loss of revenue to SPAC if Symphony, Chamber Music, and Sedona Ballet events were to move across the road to the more appropriately-sized SIFF theatre, but the council eventually agreed to include the festival’s proposals in its future planning process.

It must be noted that although the relocation of the film festival to the Cultural Park is an excellent idea to be applauded, the proposal was originally initiated by disgraced former mayor Comrade Jablow in an effort to supply the city with an excuse it could use to claim it was supporting the arts while demolishing the amphitheater.

Affeldt’s presentation was a nonspecific disappointment. “Housing and the arts are both possible and desirable for this property,” Affeldt opened. Both possible, yes; both desirable, no. He then continued to misstate, as the council subsequently did during their discussion, that the city had purchased the property with the intention of constructing housing on it. I was in the room when the Sedona city council voted to purchase the Sedona Cultural Park, and far from declaring they were buying it for housing, they went out of their way to make it very clear to the public that no decision had been taken as to what it would be used for and that they were not firmly committed to housing. “We do not have a specific master plan for this site at this time,” Comrade Osburn stated, adding that the planning process would need to involve “dialogue with community about what the future land use plan should be.” “We can’t plan it until we own it,” Comrade Kinsella said, while Comrade Williamson declared that “you buy a piece of property, then you plan it.” Two months after the purchase, former councilor Comrade Thompson, who had voted in favor of the acquisition, told the community during an OLLI session, “No one decided to buy the property so we could fill it up with low-income housing…this was an opportunity that presented itself…we didn’t have to think any further than that.” The idea that the park would be bulldozed for housing was primarily advocated by disgraced former mayor Comrade Jablow, who conversely declared before any democratic process had been conducted that “We’re going to do workforce housing. Everything else is optional.” The official city narrative at the time of the park’s purchase was that the land had been purchased as a good opportunity without any definite plans. City staff and council have attempted to rework that narrative over time to conform to their genuine goals of destroying the park to replace it with voter housing, but the facts are on the record, and the city and those who wish to toe the official line must conform to them.

Affeldt went on to place stress on “diverse housing,” which is a bureaucratic euphemism for diluting a pool of existing diverse, individualistic housing with sterile, homogeneou,s centrally-planned barracks. He suggested around 240 units on three parcels within the park, in addition to the amphitheater and film festival, to occupy about 25 acres of the site. “Clearly the primary need in Sedona is workforce housing,” Affeldt said, which must be why he included 40 units of workforce housing in his conceptual proposal, as opposed to 80 units for millionaire seniors. He compared the Cultural Park to the world-famous Sante Fe Opera, but declared that “the amphitheater property is vastly more beautiful” and represents an “opportunity to do something more holistic, grander, a bigger vision” with regard to the arts in Sedona. Affeldt mentioned that the Fine Art Museum of Sedona, which has long sought a permanent location at the Cultural Park, is currently in discussion with Yavapai Community College about repurposing part of the Sedona Center as a new museum facility. However, Affeldt then dropped back into bureaucrat-speak, suggesting that the city needed a master plan committee with a mandate of “mostly housing” to update the master plan through a daylong charette process. He even suggested, in the long run, the possibility that the city “could have a city office there that could help coordinate arts programs” at YCC. Absolutely not. The city government must be cut firmly out of any possible involvement in the arts in this town.

“There was a lot of support for having an amphitheater,” Affeldt said, countering the false claims of Comrade Dunn that the amphitheater did not rank high in the rigged public outreach process. “It’s always a tragedy to tear down an asset, and I think this is an enormous asset for the city,” adding that it would be absurd to think past failure predicted future failure.

“It’s already there. You don’t have to build a new amphitheater,” Affeldt reminded council as well, stating the obvious, which is necessary with these people, who at times give the impression that they imagine a hole in the ground several hundred feet in diameter has ceased to exist.

SCP 2.0’s team was led by Jenn May of Ambiente, who made the case to council that housing and a performance venue could not only coexist on the site but also produce tax revenues that could be recycled into building additional housing. May pointed out that the national market for amphitheaters is “booming,” with a 7 percent annual growth rate, and that the possibility would exist for the reopened amphitheater to receive federal grant funding under a $1 billion 2025 Congressional program. She stressed that an operating amphitheater would be a much-needed boost to the local economy and employment during the slow summer season. Architect Dan Jensvold, one of the park’s designers thirty years ago, presented SCP 2.0’s revised master plan, which included both SIFF and the restored amphitheater, around 1,100 parking spaces, and a total of 200 apartments, divided between 150 in the northeast corner of the site and 50 integrated into the park’s arts village. SCP 2.0’s proposed apartment buildings look nothing like those proposed by Dig Studio and every other developer in town; instead, Jensvold and Steve Thompson’s concepts incorporate ziggurat-style terracing and ample light with visible wood and no more than three stories staggered against a hillside. It was also striking how much more human and interesting the Jensvold-Thompson sketches of the arts village, with their broken rooflines and interrupted massing, appeared compared to the bland smoothness of Dig Studio’s “products.”

Sedona contractor Herb Tiffany, another SCP 2.0 board member, explained that the nonprofit’s plan to reopen the amphitheater could be executed in three stages, with the first phase reopening 1,845 seats within eight months for $2 million, the second phase reopening the whole bowl at 5,063 seats for $7.5 million in the same timeframe, and the third phase expanding the space slightly to 5,530 seats over twelve months at a higher cost as a result of hiding the restrooms underneath the hill. SCP 2.0 proposes to complete the first two phases simultaneously if funding can be raised, which will encourage further donors.

None of the proposals were fully satisfactory. Coasting on their reputation, SIFF failed to present an elevation of what a potential 60-foot-tall stage house next to SR 89A might look like. Neither SIFF nor SCP 2.0 disclosed the donors or amount of donations on which both organizations propose to rely to fund these projects; rumor is that the film festival has secured pledges in the low eight figures. SIFF omitted to supply a proposed budget for its construction program, while SCP 2.0 included construction estimates but failed to submit a sample budget for ongoing operations, including potential revenues to the city. None of the plans addressed the fact that the US Forest Service, which granted the park an easement for a portion of the loop road that traverses the former compactor site, has stated that the loop road will have to be closed if any housing is built on the site, which will substantially alter all of the proposed configurations apart from SIFF’s plans. The noticeable thing, though, was that SIFF was repeatedly given a pass on omissions that the council purposefully chose to make issues for SCP 2.0. Pfaff justified this favoritism by calling the festival a “known quantity,” and Comrade Hosseini said that “SIFF has proven itself.” Comrade Ploog pushed back against the discrimination to a certain extent, pointing out that SCP 2.0 was not so mature an organization as SIFF and it would not be reasonable to expect the same level of planning from them.

Council and staff complaints about the public’s ideas included Comrade Furman’s gripe that 240 units of housing were insufficient and Comrade Meyer’s revelation that city staff don’t want any events at all that could have more than between 1,000 and 2,000 attendees. Meyer continued to claim, falsely, that the amphitheater, which occupies less than 10 percent of the current site, would magically expand to consume “most” of the site were it to be reopened. In a vivid illustration of how officials attempt to misinterpret public records to their own ends, Comrade Pfaff claimed that he read the city’s engineering report on the Georgia Frontiere Performing Arts Pavilion, produced earlier this year, as saying “this thing could fall down,” even though the report’s conclusions found the pavilion to be in structurally sound condition and agreed with the assessment Jensvold and Thompson had sent the city two years earlier. Comrade Dunn demanded to know why the amphitheater enthusiasts hadn’t bought the land back when it was on the market; SCP 2.0 president John Bradshaw explained that the city buying the property and taking on the debt service was what had made the amphitheater a viable prospect again, as the original Cultural Park had been running in the black apart from its poorly-managed debt. Bradshaw added that the distinction would now make the Cultural Park into a revenue generator rather than a revenue drain. That still wasn’t good enough. “The revenue sharing plan in their mind is sales tax...cities aren’t in the business of making profits, we’re in the business of servicing our community,” Dunn complained, showing off her ignorance of the concept that arts and culture could possibly be a service to the community. Furman openly confessed that he does not attend live music or films and started pulling hypothetical financial scenarios in which the amphitheater would fail out of his arse in an attempt to disparage it. He next attempted to discredit May’s financial comparison to St. Augustine, Florida’s amphitheater as misleading by making the eyebrow-raising claim that having a metropolitan area of 900,000 people only 40 miles away from that amphitheater helps keep it viable, while having a metropolitan area of five million people 100 miles away from the Sedona Cultural Park would not contribute at all to the park’s success. As Schweiss pointed out earlier in the meeting, Sedona’s distance from Phoenix is actually an advantage to attracting performers, as it can be covered in two hours, yet is just outside the 100-mile non-compete clause that is standard in touring agreements.

Comrade Ploog demanded that members of the public limit their comments to a minute and a half apiece due to council’s desire to get home early and claimed that she already knew what everyone in the audience would say. Nevertheless, Chris Ford and Scott Ross testified that a 5,000-seat venue would be necessary in order to attract the highest calibre of national touring acts. Tim Jessup made the forward-thinking argument that the park, as “the best possible solution we have ever had to resolve our seasonal economic downturns,” would in the long term eliminate any need for the city to provide workforce housing by improving local employment conditions. Sean Smith complained about the omission of a recreation center with tax-subsidized fees in a town surrounded by 1.8 million acres of recreation center; Ben Miller held out hope of bringing back Jazz on the Rocks. Comrade Key of the Chamber of Commerce distinguished himself by limiting his remarks to a couple of carefully-chosen sentences in which he attempted to disparage the entire Cultural Park revival effort by latching onto the suggestion that LiveNation could be a potential future contractor for the venue and pointing out that the corporation is currently the subject of a legal investigation. As a producer of my acquaintance said when I repeated the comment to him, “Every failed musician blames LiveNation,” and after hearing Key’s guitar playing and vocals, I’m not disagreeing with his assessment. Also, as I seem to recall, the news that Catholic Charities was under indictment in multiple jurisdictions had little effect on the council’s willingness to throw close to a million dollars at them last year to finance their ongoing abuse of the homeless. Key made the additional claim that workforce housing is the main concern of local workers, but did not explain if their employers had threatened to fire them for responding otherwise before his survey was taken.

I am credibly informed that Comrade Blum, city housing manager, has been misrepresenting herself to residents as no longer being employed by the city. Blum inserted herself into the audience for the occasion and was inappropriately allowed twice the amount of time allotted to ordinary, second-class citizens to speak, during which she made the claim that she was an artist herself who understood the value of arts and culture and wanted to see Sedona as a vibrant arts community—and somehow still argued for the destruction of the amphitheater in favor of worker barracks. This is one of those easy cases of “by their fruits shall you know them.” If Blum was actually an artist, she would understand that the arts are essential to the existence of human cognition, human societies, and the human species, while housing in general and modern luxury housing in particular is not, and she would be arguing for the preservation of the amphitheater, as did the actual local artist who spoke on the topic the previous day, Tyler Carson. Since she didn’t make that argument, she is, logically, not an artist but a liar.

Personally, I pointed out that the entire false narrative that the public doesn’t want the amphitheater is based on rigged surveys done to support staff’s desire to build huge amounts of Soviet-style housing projects that will be beneficial to their resumes and egos that started when Comrade Browne, prior to the amphitheater’s purchase, declared on her own nonexistent authority that it would not be reopened. Comrade Fultz attempted to contradict my statement by declaring his certainty that Browne wouldn’t make any statement the council hadn’t approved. Unfortunately for him—and he wasn’t even on council at the time, so he can’t possibly be speaking from firsthand knowledge—council had not so much as decided to purchase the park at that time, much less decided what would be done with it, so they couldn’t possibly have given Browne direction to make a statement that the amphitheater wouldn’t be reopened, unless we want to suspect that they were having a bunch of meetings in secret that we somehow never noticed. Consequently, Browne’s statement did not originate as legal council direction but as an inappropriate, usurping, and undemocratic staff imposition. I should add that in the early days of this project, staff had not yet gotten council trained up to their preferred narrative; Comrade Kinsella, for example, actually forwarded an inquiry to the city manager about renting the amphitheater for Vortifest instead of blowing off the request. Oddly enough, Comrade Ploog, who is showing random flashes of sanity, admitted that the so-called outreach process was “very prescriptive...as opposed to true brainstorming” and that “when we went out to the public, there was a large positive response of having a music venue, or venues for events...there was a large vote to have something.” However, she also stated incorrectly that a 5,000-seat amphitheater received the fewest votes; in fact, residents preferred either a 1,000-seat or 5,000 seat option and had little interest in the piddly middle size. Go big or go home.

“There is enough land on this property that we can meet many, many needs,” Fultz said, and added that the city should be thinking about the amphitheater and housing coexisting. However, he then went down a very sinister train of thought when he declared that “we think it’s important to have families with kids that put butts in seats in our schools.” Ah, so it’s really all about training the wage slaves of the future to be subordinate to government officials.

“It’s going to sound like I’m very down on the amphitheater. I am,” Pfaff said, claiming he questioned the public support and would want to see an alternative plan in case of the amphitheater’s failure. Furman, echoing George W. Bush, murmured that “I just don’t feel it the same way I do the SIFF thing.” How reassuring it is to know that our council are basing their conclusions on their gut feelings instead of the hundreds of pages of data in front of them. Hosseini introduced her false recollections into the conversation—“it was always in my mind a discussion of a housing component”—and tried to temporize by suggesting a smaller amphitheater. Ploog commented that when the city bought the property, “in my mind it wasn’t defined...I saw it as a village.”

Almost entirely absent from the discussion was the concept that the primary reason for the park’s reopening should not be to generate revenue for the city and local businesses, but rather to provide the community with nonstop opportunities for immersion and participation in the arts. Only Jensvold recognized the centrality of local use, declaring, “This is a community facility. This is for the citizens of Sedona.” Local use of the amphitheater must take priority over any touring use, and any serious discussion of the amphitheater’s and the park’s future must include serious planning as to how Sedona is to build up the necessary musical and theatre skills among members of the community to be able to put on community shows all year long. There must also be a conversation about differential ticket pricing and how ticket prices can be adjusted to maintain break-even while ensuring the majority or maximum amount of the Cultural Park audience consists of Sedona and Verde Valley residents. An order of magnitude price differential should be considered at the very least; if someone from Phoenix is paying $500 for a ticket, locals should be paying $50. Visitors will be subsidizing residents, which is a concept that should gladden every anti-tourism Sedonan’s heart. Incidentally, total ticket sales in such a scenario to 2,000 visitors and 3,000 residents would come to $1.15 million per concert, which would yield about $40,000 in tax revenues for the city. On the basis of thirty concerts a year, the city would stand to gain $1.2 million annually.

Comrade Segner is apparently running around with some sort of segregationist plan to construct a new amphitheater at the Dells at ten times the cost of refurbishing the existing structure in the quest to keep those nasty things called tourists on the outskirts of Sedona. Even that represents progress, as it amounts to an acknowledgment on Segner’s part that the Sedona community does indeed want the amphitheater back.

At the end of the meeting, Comrade Fultz called for a spirit of compromise in determining the future of the Cultural Park. In fairness, he and Comrade Ploog have shown a willingness to entertain serious compromise; the rest of the council has not. SCP 2.0 has been extraordinarily flexible. They have already compromised over and over, reworking the entire master plan to accommodate the film festival’s preference for a roadside location and the council’s demand for a ridiculous number of apartments. In developing the plan from no housing to 200 units, they have literally met the city halfway along the path to its original proposal for a little over 400 units. It is now time for the council, if they are indeed serious about compromise, to meet SCP 2.0 halfway by dropping the demand for still more housing—indeed, Pfaff wants nothing over three stories anyway, meaning a maximum of about 330 units, and Kinsella wants no more than 200 units, so compromise on the number is closer than it appears—and give up their staff-induced commitment to demolition of the amphitheater.

That the majority of the council has no desire for genuine compromise on the Cultural Park issue and that the true objective of the city is, as it always has been, the destruction of the venue was made clear at the end of the meeting, when Comrade Dunn launched into an aggressive, vicious rant. Repeating the falsehood that the council bought the park for housing like a mantra—perhaps she believes if she says it enough times, it will come true—she then threatened the public with the possibility that if the Cultural Park Preservation Act were to pass and prevent the council from bulldozing the park for their fake housing goals, the council would then vote to sell the property instead of developing it for any other proposed use. Rather than acknowledge the right of the public to determine the uses of public property, she declared, the appropriate response to democracy by that gang of elitists would be to hamstring public choice and the arts alike out of pure spite by taking the park away from the public. “I know that sound really harsh, but if we cannot come to a compromise where we all can live with the fact that there will be housing up there, I’m not personally sure why we have this property,” Dunn said. Here we have the selfishness of the monkey in Aesop’s fable with his hand stuck in the jar. He may not be able to make use of all those nuts himself, but he’ll be damned if he lets anyone else get to them. Dunn next decided to up the stakes even further by threatening to deny the public access to their park—a formally-designated city park—by fencing off everything except the trailhead access point if the council doesn’t get what they want.

Dunn specifically directed her ire at the Save Sedona political action committee, which is a different organization than SCP 2.0 and was not presenting during the meeting. “I don’t like the feeling of a sword of Damocles, of a threat, hanging over my head,” Dunn whined angrily. As one resident pointed out to me after the meeting, feeling that a sword is hanging over one’s head is a very healthy attitude for a public official. If the city fails to come to a reasonable compromise that recognizes the apparent public will that the amphitheater be reopened, and bigotedly pushes ahead with its proposals to gerrymander the park for the electoral benefit of Democrats of the Red Rocks, the anti-housing initiative will likely pass. The no-housing ballot measure is the backup in case council doesn’t do the right thing, in case they hadn’t figured that part out yet. Maybe if they come up with a sane plan, they can win over some of the anti-housing supporters. If they don’t, there will be no housing, period. Dunn and her council colleagues could avert this latter eventuality quite easily by simply dropping their opposition to the amphitheater. As for the economic nonsense that the city should consider selling the park if it can’t build housing on top of the amphitheater, once the city has forced the public to block its overdevelopment plans by preventing any residential development of the site altogether, it will likely be unable to sell the property at anything other than a huge loss due to the new encumbrances. Conversely, reactivating the amphitheater would continue to hold out the possibility of tax revenue generation, making its reopening a still more appealing alternative at that point. The more council pushes to do whatever they want with the Cultural Park, the less likely it becomes that the public will allow them to do any of it. And a $23 million Cultural Park that can’t be used for hotels or housing is much more likely to be snapped up by an arts nonprofit that could raise the $10 million or $5 million needed to buy it—which could then reopen the amphitheater while the city council sits there with steam coming out their ears, no housing, and no control. This is a no-win situation for the city.

In related news, rumor around town is that Dunn and her husband have replaced their brand-new Tesla, which Dunn was bragging about during the council priority retreat three years ago, with a brand-new Porsche. Let us not forget that this paranoid, anti-science, selfish, malicious elitist is standing for reelection next year. One wonders what bizarrerie will emerge during next week’s retreat…

Previously on Tuesday, the council unanimously denied a zone change request for the Madole-Rigby House west of Safeway during one of those meetings in which the selfish totalitarians in the community suss out. Luke Sefton, representing the property owners, argued that the proposed change from single family to high-density multi-family—possibly up to around 260 units in place of one current house—would comply with both the land development code and the city’s design manual as well as the community plan requirements and include more restrictions than required by city code. “We are meeting all of the things the city can be concerned about, and of course we’re meeting a need for housing as well,” Sefton said. Darius Mahmoudi, attorney for the applicants, pointed out that the zone change would encumber the property’s marketability and that his clients were pursuing it in what they perceived as the best interests of the community. “They began this rezoning process after the city approached them,” Mahmoudi added, referring to the fact that Comrades Meyer and Raber were harassing the property owners about changing the zoning back as far as 2017, and had done so “in the interests of furthering the community plan,” which included a staff-imposed Soviet-style “future land use map” declaring the site of the Madole-Rigby property to be future high-density apartments. Thirty percent of the units on the property would be deed-restricted as workforce housing with income limitations. Opposing the request, Comrade Meyer asserted that projects, rather than fulfilling a property owner’s wishes, are expected to “move the city closer to realizing the vision the city has set for itself and not detract from that vision.”

The needs of the city, going by the results of this meeting, are apparently selfishness, inconsistency, and existential contradiction, at least as defined by the surrounding residents, who turned out in force to accuse their neighbors of trying to ruin their lives, shuddering with little tremors in their voices as they speculated about the possible horrors of a few extra cars on the road and did math at the microphone. Judith Jagla imagined an extra 392 cars, David Quinn an additional 500, and Jonas Acri 720; the latter also complained of cars backing up for four cycles of the light at the Andante/SR 89A intersection but failed to mention that the poor timing of the light, which causes the problem, is ADOT’s problem. Financial concerns, rather than traffic concerns, were nevertheless the primary form of self-interest on show. Kevin Zollinger claimed the development “would likely retard the surrounding neighbors’ potential valuation” and Quinn demanded the city do what was right for the other property owners in the neighborhood. “We’ve made major investments and we’d kind of just like to keep them where they’re at,” Jagla said, showing no concern for her fellow landowners’ investment. Harry Christianson employed the “cloud of smoke” cliché; Carol Bell chose “dangling carrot”; Wade Bell picked “a pig in a poke”; and George Hall employed “blank check” after calling for the erection of signs closing Madole Road to public access. For Karen Butterfield, the prospect of additional barking dogs was an existential terror. One especially peculiar individual asserted that studies needed to be done on the electromagnetic frequencies used by each household and the “preservation of our natural crust,” recalling Gen. Jack D. Ripper’s concern for “the purity and essence of our natural fluids.”

On the other side, Jessica Williamson emerged from hibernating in some burrow to encourage the city to approve the zone change, which she considered the “right thing,” while Anthony Owens expressed disappointment in the roadblocks being suggested. Developer Shane Qualls, one of the few remaining residents to have gone to grade school in Sedona, argued that granting the zone change would simplify later development and that the walkable location of the site would obviate traffic problems. “Your vote against this zoning change will give us more multi-million-dollar homes, and that’s not what we need...your vote tonight will tell us what your priorities are,” Olin Robie reminded the council. Comrade Blum turned up in the audience yet again, and yet again it was completely inappropriate double-dipping. On this occasion she falsely claimed that “housing takes years to come to fruition.” In refutation of Blum’s urban ignorance, I would like to direct readers to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, particularly chapters 5 and 6, which describe the construction of a house in the absence of government over the course of a few days.

“I have few concerns regarding staff making good decisions,” Dunn said, reading a statement against the zone change request that was obviously prepared before the meeting and included griping about native landscaping and “sustainable development.” “I don’t see any reason to override staff,” Pfaff agreed, and then added, “I don’t see any reason to forfeit the leverage the city has” over future developers. Hosseini agreed; so did Kinsella. “Without an opportunity to approve a zone change, we can’t leverage,” Kinsella panted. Hosseini argued that the applicants were “not binding [developers] in ways that we may find entirely objectionable.” “We need more of everything,” Furman said to be on the safe side, forgetting that Sedona’s population has been falling for over twenty years and the town actually needs less, not more, housing at the moment than it has in the past. The display was perhaps the most explicit confirmation I have seen in three years that this council’s intentions have nothing to do with the good of the community and can indeed be summed up in one simple phrase longtime residents have been telling me since I got here: “They just want control.”

“I want to say yes to the right deal. This just isn’t it. We should have multi-family on that property,” Fultz said, demonstrating his Leninist ability to determine what is best for others, while Ploog took the opportunity to do some retroactive whinging about the Oak Creek Heritage Lodge: “We gave up the zoning without a plan. And we sat here on this dais and said we are never going to do that again.”

The only intelligent and telling critiques of the proposal were made by Comrades Dunn and Hosseini. Hosseini pointed out that it was “disingenuous” to present the proposal as a workforce housing project when only 30 percent of the units would be deed-restricted as such housing. Dunn noted that the lowest rents for units within the development could still be up to $1,200 per month, while the larger units, even with deed restrictions, would still rent for between $3,200 and $3,300 per month, “which honestly is close to market rate right now in Sedona.”

This council wouldn’t know a principle if one did a striptease in front of them. By failing to recognize the right of the property owners to use their land as they please, the council has stated that no person’s property is guaranteed to be protected against the discriminatory complaints of his neighbors and that the very nature of ownership itself is uncertain. But anyone who’s ever read the totalitarian requirements of city code knows that already.

Addressing the fantasy that what Mahmoudi called a “byproduct of public policy,” the supposed housing crisis, results from the actions of the city itself, if these people want to talk about housing in the real world, here are a couple of real-life stories for them. The two-bedroom 1972 house across the street from my apartment just sold for the second time this year—for $735,000—after selling for $687,000 last August. Someone made some fast money and future renters are going to be paying for those profits. Another story: there used to be a realtor in Sedona who was a practicing Buddhist. He died and left his house to the local ashram. Now, Buddhists are all about getting rid of the burden of possessions and doing good to others, so naturally you would expect they gave it away to a family in need, right? No? Well, then, it would be reasonable to expect that they took the Middle Way and sold it at a moderate, affordable price to a working family, wouldn’t they? Reasonable, maybe, but that’s not what they did. That house is now on the market for $1.05 million and will likely sell to a Phoenix-based or California-based investor who will STR it before retiring here in five to ten years—and when that happens, the very people who sold it to that investor at that price will be outraged and complain that it’s become an STR.

Half of the housing problem in Sedona is caused by the disproportionate growth of Leninist bureaucracy and the creation of rules by that bureaucracy to prevent individuals from building themselves homes. The other half of Sedona’s housing problem is caused by the unethical greed of individuals who choose to sell their homes not to existing members of the community at reasonable prices but to outsiders for the highest figure they can possibly get. Individual greed, a voluntary choice, is the real problem—the very same problem caused by all these council members and rich retired elitists doing the whining about how horrible STRs are. The standard narrative on how STRs are supposedly “destroying” Sedona never addresses the problem of the greedy individuals who sold their homes to STR investors in the first place, who are every bit as much responsible for STR conversions as the people to whom they sell their properties. Of course they have the right to make such a decision, but it’s a shit-poor ethical choice that is completely indefensible on the grounds of caring about the community. Any discussion of housing in Sedona needs to involve loud, vigorous public condemnation of those individuals who are more interested in the health of their own pocketbooks than the health of the community. Their values do not align with those of a small, rural Western town.

Does this mean the wealthy are expected to sell a $2 million home to a local working family for $250,000 and accept the financial loss as the cost of benefiting their community? Absolutely.

As for the housing shortage itself, rather than the reasons for it, the more I back away from the rhetoric, I realize there is no housing shortage at all in Sedona. The city has not actually grown in twenty-plus years; instead, the population has fallen by something like five percent. Sedona could be demolishing housing every year and still break even. Let’s check that conclusion. City staff tell us there are about 6,800 houses and apartments in Sedona. Subtract 1,100 STRs and you come up with 5,700 units, which at an average of two people per unit, equals Sedona’s population of 11,400 people—oh, wait, no, it doesn’t. Sedona’s population is 9,700 people. When we take the time to look at the numbers, we find Sedona actually has 850 more houses and apartments than its population needs, statistically speaking. Perhaps that’s why city staff, in order to create a housing bureaucracy from scratch, had to pull a housing study out of their collective arses that they use to justify fantastically implausible claims about Sedona needing 1,200 to 1,600 new houses or more. Of course, they know that there’s no way that kind of population could actually move to Sedona, because there isn’t enough housing for them—which now explains the urgency they feel to build three- and four-story apartments that can be occupied by the people who will be moving to Sedona and “needing” more roads, more “services,” more bureaucrats. It’s a process that feeds on itself for the aggrandizement of the staff and those developers who flatter their egos sufficiently.

There’s also one very important point that needs to be made about the community plan, since that keeps coming up in discussions. The community plan is not a representation of the will of the community; the community plan is a representation of the desires of staff masquerading as the will of the community. It’s a fake.

Anyway, Tuesday’s meeting further involved the council rubber-stamping more allocations for staff funding: half a million for fancy ditches; $200,000 for chiseling concrete, since they apparently have no one on their 200-strong staff with basic construction skills; another $500,000 for trash pickup; and $249,759.50 for yet another consulting firm, this one to tell the city how best to “decarbonize” its own buildings. As concrete and wood both contain carbon, it is unclear how this process is intended to occur without the collapse of city hall. One is reminded of that Greenpeace nut long ago: “There are no uses of chlorine which we regard as safe.” Let’s see how safe he would feel if every atom of chlorine were to be removed from his own body. Comrades Browne and Beck let slip during the discussion that to implement the entire city “decarbonization” plan, which really deals with carbon oxide emissions, would cost around $13 million and would be able to reduce a portion of the city’s own 2024 emissions by the 50 percent figure to which staff aspire. City staff claimed that the city’s total emissions in 2022 amounted to 167,386 tons of CO2, of which 3,253 was the city’s share as of 2018; however, Beck estimated the city’s share would be about 1,320 tons in 2024. Using the latter number, and generously assuming that the portion of emissions that would be affected by the “decarbonization” plan would be 70 percent of the total, the plan would be able to cut about 462 tons of city emissions. Extrapolating that figure, “decarbonizing” the entire city at that rate would cost about $4.7 billion. A mere eight decades’ worth of revenue for Sedona. Meanwhile, as of spring 2024, measurable progress on the 2020 Climate Action Plan emissions goals was at less than 1.9 percent. Council also gave Comrade General Foley $1,246,000 for thirteen shiny new cars to pursue the crime that gets less and less every year. She falsely believes in deterrence theory. And they decided to order another propaganda loudspeaker, ostensibly for emergencies, to complement the two that FEMA is giving them for an additional $120,000. The consultant told them he would give them a $50,000 discount and Comrade Kinsella couldn’t resist. One will get stuck on top of the parking garage, another on top of the administration building at 221 Brewer, and a third on top of the Thompson Trail Water tank. Foley cooed that city staff had given the manufacturer “color swatches that meet our code.” How precious! In response to a question from Ed Kettler, she promised there would be “guardrails” on what uses of the system would be allowed and who could activate it and that it would not be used for marketing or deterrent behavioral messaging; we shall see. I can already hear Comrade Grossman’s smarmy voice drifting over Uptown trying to get people to care for the dirt.

Kinsella provided some end-of-the-six-hour-meeting diversion when the consultants described the battery backup for the loudspeakers as being similar to a car-type battery.

“And their average cost would be?” Kinsella demanded.

“Very similar to a car battery,” the consultant said patiently. Has she never done a normal person thing like putting a new battery in her car before? Under future meeting ideas, Comrade Dunn proposed another review of the LDC to make it even more discriminatory against normal homes and create extra pressure for developers to build barracks.

During their executive session prior to Tuesday’s meeting, council additionally directed staff to settle outstanding Prop 207 claims against the city and to appeal the Mobilodge STR decision to the state Supreme Court. They’re such gluttons for punishment.

I recently heard one of the best suggestions yet made in this town, for roundabout art that would double as a form of traffic signal to improve driver attentiveness. Sedona could install rusty pirate cages, complete with skeletons, suspended from gibbets in each of the roundabouts, along with signs informing passersby that the former occupants had stopped at an empty roundabout, or attempted to change lanes within a roundabout, or committed one of the other heinous crimes in this community. It might, one fancies, get the point across. One is reminded of how the Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s court faced an inconvenient public demand for more miracles:

By my authority as executive I threw Merlin into prison—the same cell I had occupied myself. Then I gave public notice by herald and trumpet that I should be busy with affairs of state for a fortnight, but about the end of that time I would take a moment’s leisure and blow up Merlin’s stone tower by fires from heaven; in the meantime, whoso listened to evil reports about me, let him beware. Furthermore, I would perform but this one miracle at this time, and no more; if it failed to satisfy and any murmured, I would turn the murmurers into horses, and make them useful. Quiet ensued.

Comrade Cifuentez over at Cottonwood has finally confirmed that Cottonwood has installed its 11 Flock spy cameras to surveil Verde Valley residents. Pursuant to the recent court decision in Washington, the images captured by those cameras are public records. Let’s start requesting.

The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality has announced that it has apparently lost its copies of the paper that ADEQ issued on April 18, 1988, requiring that the Sedona Sanitary District comply with NACOG’s 208 Water Quality Management Plan and threatening to withhold approval for future septic systems in Sedona if the district did not comply with the plan. The paper provided the legal rationale for compelling the newly-formed city of Sedona to construct a sewer plant—and the prospect of the threat was one of the factors that had pushed Sedona voters to agree to incorporation in the first place—which allowed the newly-formed city to, in the words of locals at the time, rape its residents with a sewer pipe. If the documents no longer exist, does that mean that ADEQ’s requirement that Sedona construct a sewer plant is no longer legally demonstrable and Sedona can therefore close the plant without any further legal complications? Investigations are underway.

Harrison Kass over at The National Interest recently made the heretical—in terms of American civil religion—argument that the best way to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the US Marine Corps would be to abolish it as redundant and wastefully expensive, and he’s got an excellent point. Even assuming an ethical viewpoint that holds murder for cause to be morally justifiable, it can still be reasonably asked whether the murders in question are being carried out at optimal efficiency. If all one is interested in is whether one’s enemy ends up dead, it would be irrational to subordinate that objective to costly emotional considerations of tradition, esprit de corps, and prettier uniforms. And now that we’ve started down this train of thought, why not apply it to the entire Air Force, the biggest and most redundant bureaucracy in the entire federal government? USAF bureaucrats are fond of pointing out that only three percent of them are pilots. Great. Send the pilots and the ground crews and the planes back to the Army Air Corps, where they’ll be better integrated with ground support operations anyway, and cut the rest of the duplicative bloat.

Pushing Kass’s logic further still, why not apply that same reasoning to the aircraft as well? The Pentagon’s supposed new fighter designs—which are also being developed in criminal secrecy, unlike in the past—appear to be more enormous, unwieldy, insanely expensive bomb-carriers incapable of outmaneuvering a more agile aircraft in visual-range combat. Their design additionally reflects the federal government’s need to maintain the propaganda myth of “stealth” aircraft, a fantasy that further impedes performance. Take a glance through the early parts of Robert Coram’s biography of John Boyd for some background on how today’s Chair Force is recapitulating all the same mistakes it made in the 1960s with the Century-series fighters and the attempt to replace guns with missiles—and why today’s efforts will fail in combat in the same way they failed six decades ago. It’s not difficult at all to design a good dogfighter. Put the pilot in a plexiglass bubble. Give the pilot a gun sufficiently powerful to murder the other guy. Stick an engine behind them big enough to push them into the high subsonic efficiently. Wrap the whole package in a wing just big enough to keep the wing loading low, probably a delta. And there you have it. There is absolutely no reason aircraft factories in the US and elsewhere could not be churning out thousands of small, maneuverable, flexible dogfighters at the cost of a few million dollars apiece were it not for the emotional attachment of the psychopaths-in-chief to physically large, expensive, complex weapons. Time to break out that old Cold War study on the phallic appeal of ICBMs.

It’s not just that killing is bad. It’s also that these guys are really bad at killing. It’s the same set of problems as with the Sedona police department: it’s not only evil, it’s also immensely wasteful.

Jurors in the Washington, DC sandwich-throwing case have gone on the record as having concluded that no reasonable person would regard a sandwich as a weapon, particularly when the sandwich-thrower’s target was wearing armor plate, and described the federal government’s effort to prosecute the case as “ridiculous.” Lest we forget that throwing food, particularly rotten food, is a time-honored and effective means of social shaming that is generally physically harmless, we have Walt Disney and the inimitable Glynis Johns to remind us:

Mrs. Banks: Lovely, lovely morning, Ellen.

Ellen: Indeed it is, ma’am.

Mrs. Banks: Have you put the spoiled eggs in my carryall?

Ellen: Yes, ma’am.

Mrs. Banks: After our meeting at the Albert Hall, we’re all going to Downing Street to throw things at the prime minister.

Bertie Wooster once waxed poetic as to the degree of finesse required to select the appropriate fruit or vegetable to give effective expression to one’s political views:

“I didn’t like the look of those rustic faces. They seemed to have an ugly, menacing look. I didn’t want to be pelted with anything. I mused for a while, running over the various things one can be pelted with at a village concert. Tomatoes I ruled out. They splash too much. New-laid eggs, excellent for pelting purposes, are hard to come by in these days of austerity. There are always cabbages, of course, but a cabbage is an unwieldy thing to throw. You are almost certain to hit the wrong person. Potatoes? Too heavy. They might kill. The thing, I decided, was the over-ripe pear. Small, travels well, and delivers a nasty, squashy sting.”

And yet, in three years in Sedona, I’ve yet to see a single police report about an STR being egged or an STR owner pelted with rancid tomatoes. O, tempora! O, mores!

The Planning and Zoning Commission approved a zone change and development review for Basil and Mimi Maher’s proposed 51-unit three-story apartment and townhome complex, to be called, ironically, Goodrow Commons, during its Tuesday meeting. City council will have to approve additional variances for the project, which exceeds the height limitations for the site by amounts ranging from seven to twenty feet, before development can proceed. Comrade Meyer in community undevelopment refused to recommend approval of the project on the grounds that a mere ten-year restriction on the use of units as short-term rentals was insufficient and that the applicant had not taken enough advantage of existing code provisions to reduce the need for variances. She added that staff had succeeded in pressuring the Mahers into changing the proposed paint color that very afternoon.

The project’s designers turned out to be from Park City, Utah, which apparently has its own recognizable style of bad architecture, as commissioners Sarah Weill and Harmony Walker—new to P&Z—compared the proposed buildings’ style to the architecture of Park City. The design was not merely bad but old; it came across as the sort of residential project built in Honolulu in the eighties, or perhaps, from a more forgiving drawing, as having the elevations of a Seattle cannery. It was appallingly out of character with Sedona and the Sedona scale and the Sedona style, the sort of thing one could find in any aspiring inner city. Again one hears Robert Koster demanding of the council whether Sedona is supposed to start looking like Anthem. These buildings, architect Bruce Taylor assured the commission, wouldn’t exceed a modest 38 feet in height. He described the footprint of the seven large buildings, which would cover 48 percent of the 2.83-acre site, as “working with the terrain” and claimed that the proposed townhomes were positioned at the highest point of the property for “minimizing visual impact”—although that location would also conveniently give them the best views. The sheer inherent classism of some of these design assumptions. Each of the 16 townhomes will include a garage—which, if the desire to solve the “housing crisis” were really that strong, could easily have been designed as another 16 studio apartments. The level of luxurious wastefulness in the design appears to be on par with that of Villas on Shelby; if the 51-unit complex costs $30 million to build, that’s not far south of the $803,000 per unit Shelby price tag. You could buy the materials to build thirty small homes for the cost of one of these units, in other words.

Commissioners, as expected, seized the opportunity to make surreal and propagandistic remarks about how wonderful the project was. Wiehl, now serving as interim chair until January owing to the apparent departure of Kathy Levin, claimed that tall buildings made of non-native industrial materials would be “more reflective of environmental stewardship.” At one point she went off on a tangent about how the mosquitoes breeding in the detention pond at an apartment she had previously rented had driven her “to the point that I was afraid to open my windows for fear of contracting a vector-born illness.” Is she serious? Is this actually what Californians waste time thinking about and fearing? Kali Gajewski described herself as being “impressed” by the preservation of 52 percent of the site as open space; an intelligent, humane, sustainable design could have put sixty units on the same land while preserving 80 percent of the site as open space and not exceeding 18 feet in height. “These developers already house a huge amount of our workforce...they know what people in the community want because they’re already housing them,” Gajewski argued, a hallucinatory theory when one thinks about it. If people genuinely wanted to live in rented apartments rather than homes they owned, if pouring one’s money down an endless drain with no equity to show for it and no control over one’s own surroundings were indeed the preferred option, home ownership would not be an iconic cultural goal for Americans. But it is—because people want to feel secure in their surroundings, not at the mercy of a landlord. Gajewski next declared that “the one thing we must protect the community from is this becoming a short-term rental complex.” Why is there this ongoing delusion that tourists want to come to Sedona and stay in somebody’s apartment? That’s the very reason driving the move away from hotels to STRs: people don’t want to be jammed up against one another in a massive building! Wiehl and Gajewski then both doubled down on the wastefulness of the proposal by asking about possible plans for a dog park, not bothering to consider why those struggling to find housing would be wasting money on a dog or would need a dog park. Jo Martin was absent or the audience would probably have gotten a load of the same bull from her.

David O’Donnell gave a particularly effective rebuke of the designers’ distance from everyday reality during the public comment period:

We were told at the city council meeting that this was intended for young families and bringing children back to our schools...What I see are high-end rentals with many frills. The reason for breaking height limits is for the garages. I do remember being young with a wife and two kids. I was also looking for a place to put a roof over my head for my family’s sake. Our air conditioning was a window unit and it was supplied by me. There were no garages, driveways, assigned parking—but I digress. I am a bit shocked. I don’t see the affordable part at all.

“I’ve heard more comments about dogs today than the 25 people who live on Goodrow Lane,” former commissioner George Braam complained.

The proposed layout for the buildings was designed to allow for a future connection of Contractors Road to Bennett Way through the property; the route is currently blocked by a city-owned building.

“Perhaps we can encourage the city to paint a mural on the side of the building so it looks like they’re going someplace,” Taylor suggested.

“Like a Wile E. Coyote?” Gajewski suggested. The room erupted in laughter.

The Goodrow Commons proposal as presented, refined to Meyer’s unctuous specifications, represents a disappointing departure from the Mahers’ initial approach, which was to shake the housing situation in Sedona up by actually providing families with housing of their own by selling it to them at affordable prices. Presumably they’ve since been beaten into submission by city bureaucrats, which is a shame, since they’re among the few people in town who could force the city to do whatever they wanted if they really felt like it. On the other hand, Basil Maher also made a revealing remark near the end of the meeting. “Our intention is to maintain control of the building. You sell a unit, you’ve lost control,” Maher said when discussing future rental rates. “We want to control the rentals.” His comment should also be considered in light of the statement of Brad Andrews, a board member of the Mahers’ Sedona-Oak Creek Educational Foundation, that “this project is designed to invite families with children that will ultimately participate in the school district here,” a comment backed up by David Key of the Chamber and Comrade Swaninger of the state indoctrination system. Such a comment might explain why the Mahers have shifted their emphasis from providing real homes to providing imitation homes: perhaps they consider that independent-living families not having to keep a landlord happy or with more physical space available might well homeschool or send their kids to private schools, rather than subjecting them to abuse at the hands of the Sedona-Oak Creek School District. Besides, apartments are inherently part of the trap designed to separate workers from their income and keep them in poverty. Basil Maher and his father made quite a bit of money as employers of labor. Encouraging the efficient processing of kids through a system designed to turn them into uncomplaining workers and the construction of barracks in which to house those workers sound like a rational, system-supporting decision for a productivity-oriented capitalist. Sounds harsh when you strip out the euphemisms and express it in practical terms, but there it is.

It’s hard to tell so far if the Mahers are good guys or bad guys. Do they truly want positive change in Sedona for the working population—which means a rejection of city bureaucracy and a return to a simpler, more uncontrolled way of life? Or are they simply aiming at reinforcing existing structures of discrimination, inequality, and psychopathy? Their actions will answer that question.

Also, let us not forget—Goodrow Commons is a badly-designed project, and apartments are a terrible idea and a sign of the decline of a rural town, but the Mahers have the right to build the project. The commission, Will Hirst’s traffic fantasies aside, acted appropriately in approving the development and inappropriately in recommending to the city council that it impose more coercive requirements on the Mahers.

In any event, the simple fact of the matter is that, using the city’s own figures on housing need, Sedona actually appears to be overburdened with new apartment construction. City staff routinely cite old studies and guesstimates to produce a housing need number of around 1,600 units, whatever the exact figure happens to be at the time of the most recent council meeting. Research by the National Association of Realtors indicates that 80 percent of Americans want to live in a single-family home; conversely, only 8 percent of Americans would prefer to live in an apartment or condo. Eight percent of 1,600 is 128 units. Let’s see—Villas on Shelby, 30 units; Navajo Lofts, 60 units; Goodrow Commons, 51 units—that adds up to 141 units, or 10 percent more than the actual need for apartments. There are those who might try to squirm around that by claiming that, well, some of those are townhomes. From the perspective of the resident, occupying part of a shared building where you have no control over the building or land is the same thing regardless of what it’s euphemistically called by “development professionals.” There are also those elitists, I am sure, who will be quite ready to argue that newcomers to Sedona should consider themselves lucky to be allowed to live anywhere here at all. They think it quite proper, being the Leninist classists that they are, that those who serve them, in the words of Kathy Kinsella and Linda Martinez, should occupy less than comfortable or desirable accommodations in order to remind them of their inferior position in the scheme of things. Apartments in Sedona, apart from being a capitalists’ scam and a blot on the rural landscape, are the modern equivalent of the servants’ quarters detached from the main building both physically and socially.

A reader recently shared a survey of newly-released architecture books that included an example looking back to Lloyd Kahn’s 1973 classic Shelter, a book that “might even be described best as an anti-architecture book—or at least an anti-architect book—since it aims to inspire people to design and build their own homes...the book continues the countercultural spirit of the 1960s through an enthusiastic embrace of low-cost, low-tech methods of building.” That is, of course, more of the spirit we need in Sedona. It’s very simple. The biggest set of roadblocks to getting housing built in this city is the barriers to entry city staff have set up that prevent the people who need houses from building their own houses: drawings, surveys, studies, custom designs, inspections, “and so on, and so on, and so ad infinitum.”

I took a moment to go look back at the photos of the Victorian house I helped design when I was twelve years old and helped build over the next few years—the one that was so convincingly done that passersby thought it had been there for a century. There are multiple buildings standing in Montana that I worked on as a teenager. I’m not by any means alone in having had this experience. Back when Mary Ann Gove Cheatham used to have a column in the Red Rock News, she occasionally included reminders that when her husband Walter was “age 13, he helped his father and an uncle build the house we live in, four bedrooms, three bathrooms, and five other rooms.” There are plenty of people in Sedona who grew up in the rural West putting a roof over their own heads and are fully capable of housing themselves and their neighbors, no developers needed. That, of course, is inimical to city staff’s centralization efforts and their greed for increased control over private property. Leninism at work in the future Sedona Soviet Republic.

Ongoing perusal of the transcripts of interviews with city staff turned up by Ryan Kwitkin’s lawsuit against the city and the Sedona paramilitary over his dismissal last year has uncovered some revelatory tidbits about how city staff and councilors deliberately work to try to keep the public from getting information. Former SPD sergeant Comrade Olson testified that Comrade General Foley has “given us directives for a very long time in person about certain topics that we are to either talk to her in person or call her on the phone, but not write emails because she doesn’t want them being public record.” Comrade Ploog made a very similar comment about her notes on the council’s executive sessions during which Comrade Jablow was censured: “I tried not to be very specific in the notes because it was private and I didn’t want them to be discoverable by the newspaper when the censure was intended to be a private censure. And that’s what I was instructed, put as little of it in writing as I can.” Sure, we’ll be certain to believe you next time you start talking about how much you love transparency, Holli. Reminds me of that occasion a couple of years ago when Comrade Osburn emailed Mark Antin to tell him that she wouldn’t tell him something about the Red Rock News in an email lest it become a public record. Oh, wait, this is the same Mark Antin who just turned up at council to get a certificate for going through the city indoctrination program for those who Comrade Moorcroft said “will” be given priority consideration for membership in city bodies in the future.

The interview transcripts and related notes include many other informative little details about what goes on behind the scenes at city hall. Olson reported Comrade Dorfman going on blood pressure medication and Comrade Stevens having panic attacks in response to Foley’s management style; Comrade Bergstrad, she added, was “visually burning out with trying to balance being overtasked because Foley knows he wants to be chief someday and won’t say no to anything if it kills him. He knows there would be retaliation if he did that or stood up to her so he just smiles and says everything is peachy.” She recorded an odd interaction of her own with Foley as well:

There was an occasion when she was flirtatious in her office early on in my tenure with the PD when she asked me if I thought she was the woman or the man in her relationship. Not being a lesbian or knowledgeable in those relationships, I answered, “The woman?” and she replied, “No, I’m the man.” How she brought up this topic is beyond me. I was surprised and very uncomfortable.

Camp Verde resident Comrade Dickey provided just one sample, although he assured the interviewer he had more such stories, of an incident involving the unlamented Jablow:

It was a couple of years ago when ADOT was doing pavement work on State Route 179, and he didn’t like the interruption that was being caused to traffic. The timing, they should have been doing this work at night, is what I recall him saying. Again, screaming and yelling over the phone, and to the point I was hearing background noise and I said, “Scott, what is that background noise? Are you honking your horn?” And he said, “Yes, I am.” And I said, “You may want to settle down.” I said, “If DPS is there, they’re probably not going to like that very much and you might get in trouble.” And it seemed like that just made him even more mad. And he said, “Here’s DPS, now I got to get off the phone.” I heard later through the grapevine that the DPS officer said that he was ready to handcuff him. He was so upset with the mayor at the disruption that he was causing.

Dickey further revealed that during the development of the millionaires’ sidewalks plan in 2020, “one of the projects identified would go through [Jablow’s] neighborhood and he demanded that that trail be taken off the plan because it would’ve went by his—actually right beside his house, and he didn’t want that...As I recall, I believe it was modified, yes. I believe it was taken off and rerouted to go around the neighborhood.” Typical New York move. Remember the time Robert Moses moved an entire highway route so it would go through and destroy a bunch of small farms rather than bisecting the estates of the wealthy? The most surreal quote, however, was from Comrade Spickard, describing her first one-on-one interaction with Jablow:

He was upset that in my negotiations I had asked for an upfront bank of vacation hours, which is a normal compensation package kind of thing for an executive. And he said it reminded him of his son who still lives at home and refuses to take a job unless it has fat benefits. And that upset him that I would dare to ask for that. And I got very insulted by that and explained to him, “Hey, I am not some 20-something-year-old living in my parents’ basement.”

She was insulted? Her six-figure salary, her benefits package, and her 10 percent raise, which add up to about twice the governor of Arizona’s compensation, if I recall aright, are all colossal insults to the working people of Sedona. Anette Spickard has contributed zero to this town that is good or useful. She is a far less important or worthwhile person in the everyday scheme of life than the guy who rings up coffee at the gas station. And she had the nerve to get indignant because someone queried her desire to screw the public out of even more money? Our city manager comes off as a spoiled brat who appears to have no knowledge whatsoever of real life and certainly no sympathy with the public who are her employers. If Sedona is really “the most difficult and challenging organization” she’s ever worked for, perhaps she shouldn’t be here—and perhaps that comment should remind us that it’s not just the people, it’s the massively excessive bureaucratic organization that’s the problem, too.

Meanwhile, other information that Kwitkin provided to the nonprofit legal group Judicial Watch regarding the Sedona paramilitary’s revisions to its warning shot policy now has the nonprofit looking into whether city of Sedona staff are fully disclosing all relevant records in responds to public records requests. “Four emails (see attachments #2 through #5) appearing to match the requested documents in the aforementioned PRR were obtained by Judicial Watch from outside sources,” Judicial Watch southwest projects coordinator Mark Spencer wrote to Comrade Spickard on November 5. “Out of courtesy to you, a public officer, and to the City, and prior to the consideration of litigative resolution to this via A.R.S. §39-101.C (a class 2 misdemeanor), I would like to make an informal inquiry as to if these four documents (and possibly others) were inadvertently missed, sent but not received, or deliberately withheld.” Spencer further commented upon the omission of Comrade Dowell’s testimony regarding Foley’s behavior from the city’s final investigation report: “An administrative investigation which was provided to JW via a PRR and which was funded by taxpayers seems to exclude pertinent information regarding allegations of misconduct—namely retaliation. This omission further complicates the appearance of difficulty in adhering to Arizona public request statutes and document retention mandates.”

Entertainingly, Kwitkin has since been threatened with a lawsuit, in writing, by Dowell for distributing Dowell’s own on-the-record statements. I’ll get the popcorn.

The Red Rock Ranger District has refuted the rumor that Devil’s Bridge only has between five and ten years’ lifespan remaining. While gossip around Sedona reports that the Forest Service has had the arch surveyed and arrived at the conclusion that it is due for collapse in the near term, district ranger Alex Schleuter stated that he was “not familiar with any study done on the structural integrity of Devil’s Bridge by the Forest Service or another party. I am also unaware of any plans to perform such a study or of any estimate of the remaining life of the structure.”

Cottonwood has continued to refuse to confirm the date of installation of its Flock surveillance and tracking cameras, with Comrade Cifuentez of California setting new standards of obstruction and indifference to public inquiries. Meanwhile, Greg Reese over at The Reese Report has drawn our attention to Flock’s new deal with Amazon to access the feeds from Amazon’s Ring door cameras. Feeling a bit foolish yet about all those devices you let Amazon con you into paying to have installed in your home? A scam for the centuries, getting people to pay for their own surveillance and suppression. Reese also quoted Flock CEO Garrett Langley referring to the website deflock.me, which maps his company’s unconstitutional and undesirable cameras, as “terrorists,” which reminds us that the state’s definition of terrorist is not “someone who causes fear or terror among others,” but rather, “someone who challenges the coercive state’s legitimacy or monopoly on violence.” I suppose butterface Langley keeps a wanted poster of Jesus Christ on the wall of his office.

The Camp Verde town council voted unanimously on Wednesday to deliver another slap in the face to the town’s rural and Western heritage that they falsely claim to be upholding when they unanimously approved termination of the town’s valid lease with the Camp Verde Arena Association to operate the Camp Verde Equestrian Center. After blackmailing CVAA into agreeing to revise the existing valid lease by using a threat of termination, town staff then attempted to impose new lease terms on CVAA that would have given them the right to examine any of the nonprofit’s records relating to the arena’s operation anytime they felt like it, as well as requiring annual reports, annual presentations, and CVAA lease agreements with every exhibitor, and subordinating preplanned rodeo use of the arena to any uses town staff might decide to introduce. CVAA voted to reject the town’s proposed new lease on November 13.

“We were prepared to work collaboratively on any amended lease agreement that reflected the scope of our investment and dedication,” CVAA president Mary Phelps stated to the council. “Unfortunately, our request for assistance and joint support were met with denials citing insufficient money or staff hindering the collaborative relationship we had hoped to secure.”

“It’s sad that we’re here at this point,” CVAA founding member Bob Weir told the council. “We’ve done a lot for this community and this arena was built by the community, not by the town...It’s on land, but you gave some money, but I didn’t see any sweat, tears from anybody in the town council or the town grounds. This was built. We proved we could build it. We proved we could run it. It is a money-maker managed right, but by volunteers at the time when this people are volunteers; we don’t have the youth that are volunteering and stuff. It’s getting hard to manage. The sad part is we’ve allowed lawyers and people that don’t know the whole situation to determine this and you have not been involved. You didn’t open up to have discussions, you didn’t go around and ask people.”

“I’m worried about what’s going to happen to the arena,” Weir added. “A lot of that equipment’s going to be gone. It’s going to be bare bones, I’ll just tell you that right now. And someone’s going to put money into it to make it a usable facility. And I’m sad that probably a private entity is going to come in here, take that over, offer you a little percentage, and you guys are going to be excited because you’re going to make money and you’re going to allow that to happen and it’s going to get tore up.”

Heather Weiker spoke out against the decision on behalf of local food vendors. “Without the arena, we as vendors would lose much of our income, most of mine actually, and exposure to the community,” Weiker said. “They offer those opportunities without heavy fees, without complications, and with full support from their staff. I’ve personally seen James Seeley go out at 2 and 3 in the morning to ensure the vendors’ properties are safe and to ensure that our generators had enough gas. That is something I don’t see as a priority from a city worker...if the town were to take over the arena, the atmosphere and accessibility would change dramatically. The personal touches would be lost, fees would go up, the flexibility that allows for last-minute charity events, low-cost community gatherings, would disappear. The arena would no longer feel like it belongs to the community. It would feel like another government facility.”

Town manager Comrade Fisher justified her decision to squeeze CVAA out of operating the arena through bureaucratic quibbling as having been motivated by “just a desire to really clean that up as we’re doing with any of our contracts.” Neat paperwork is more important than the richness of human lives, don’t forget. Comrade Murdock gave a vehement, deceitful speech about how much she had supported the arena before voting to kill it on the grounds that the council and community needed to defer to civil servants who knew better than them. Comrade Foreman claimed falsely, based on the same incorrect staff advice, that allowing the current legally-binding lease to stand would somehow violate state law. Town staff are so impatient to get a more profitable, more bureaucratic operator into the arena if they can that they’ve already issued an RFQ for a new operator, responses due by January 5.

It is highly unlikely that there will be another local organization that will be interested in coming forward to run this facility, which the community built out of the goodness of their hearts; town staff, who are not from the area, have no connection to the rural lifestyle, and are unskilled at managing business operations, will not be able to manage the arena successfully; and the result will be that there will be no more events at all. By her insistence on being a bureaucratic pedant, Miranda Fisher has just done more than any other person to kill rodeo in the Verde Valley. Again we are face to face with this phenomenon that, over the past ten to fifteen years, has done so much to ruin local communities: out-of-town, big-city, so-called “professional” or “expert” administrators moving to the Verde, getting hired by local government and nonprofits, and attempting to introduce sterile, one-size-fits-all, unresponsive bureaucracy in place of community connections. It doesn’t matter if we have a method here that works; if it doesn’t correspond to the thirty-point plan they pulled out of some journal, away the practical solution goes and in come the bland buzzwords and indifference to real needs. Their checklists matter more to them than people’s lives or happiness.

A helpful touch of reality lately is being supplied by the reports of a mountain lion killing livestock along the Verde River. Such is rural life. Messy accidents sometimes intervene.

Some nut in the Arizona legislature apparently wants to make ivermectin available “over the counter” in pharmacies. Those who want to try taking an anti-parasitic medication for kicks can go to a feed store, where it’s already available over the counter and always has been. I know; I remember buying a lot of it in my teenage years. That was less unpleasant than giving the horses their shots.

In the further progression of the ongoing evolution of the United Kingdom into the Soviet Union, the British government has announced that it plans to abolish one of the oldest elements of British government: jury trials. From the new year onwards, anyone up on trial for their liberty for a term of less than five years will no longer have to have their guilt proved to twelve individuals who have no vested interest in their guilt or innocence; instead, the whole thing will be in the hands of one judge in league with the prosecutor. Conviction and clearing rates, will soar, and that’s the point. Her Majesty’s Government is not even making an effort to address concerns over ancient rights or corruption, instead blandly asserting that revoking one of the population’s most fundamental civil rights will enable bureaucrats to deal with their backload of work more effectively. And there you have the pinstriped Briton and the kilted Mesopotamian speaking in perfect unison across five thousand years in the relentless quest of all psychopaths to enforce, in the face of biology, history, and morality, the attitude that the individual is the chattel of the state and has no rights save those temporarily granted by the state. It’s the same attitude that comes across clear as crystal in Sedona’s land codes, too.

Dawson showed herself to be most at home in the high classics, attacking the bitter opening chords of Mozart’s Violin Sonata No. 21 with verve. The first movement was turbulent and somewhat Romany-sounding at first before a strained jollity emerged, while the disjointed, sorrowing second movement ended in a delicate resignation and one desperate final flourish. Here Dawson joined technical proficiency to a feel for the emotional outlook and energy of the piece, the keen clarity of her tone the equivalent of looking through still water; Anderson’s own enthusiasm caused the piano almost to overwhelm the violin at times. Her approach to Beethoven’s Romance No. 2 demonstrated a still greater level of assurance and skill with precise fingerwork, A slight initial hesitation was gone by the time of her crystalline second entry and her subsequent elegant playing, employing substantial dynamic contrasts with greater proportional force on her fortes and less on her pianissimos. Dawson also gave an impressive display of strength at her third entry, where the music becomes vigorous, and she and Anderson even incorporated some of the flavor of Beethoven’s upbeat, cheeky popular songs into the end of the piece.

Two years ago Georgie was playing holiday songs with her dad and it was cute. Now she’s playing at a professional level with professionals and it’s impressive. Brava!

The Sedona Symphony gave its second home concert of the season on the Sunday after Georgie Dawson’s performance, following last month’s first concert on the road in Prescott, which set an attendance record for the Yavapai Symphony Association. A special shoutout to Sedona resident Mik Jordahl substituting at principal bass for the occasion. Maestro Will warmed up the afternoon’s audience with a talk on the Symphony’s revised seating plan and the reasons behind it. For the first concert this year, he moved to antiphonal violins; now the Symphony has antiphonal brass as well. It does make a remarkable difference. “The French horns lead a double life,” White commented, explaining their uncomfortable status as both brass and woodwind instruments, in contrast to the trumpets, which were historically linked with timpani as military signaling devices. On reflection, any instrument in an orchestra is a signaling device, to some extent, as the musicians are all taking feedback from one another, and the conductor is entirely a signaling device. Contemplating and observing the amount of information flying back and forth within an orchestra during a performance is one of the most fascinating aspects of orchestral music. Guest marimbaist Abby Fisher, who teaches at NAU, was on hand to demonstrate her instrument and the required technique before the show. It turns out that she does travel with it—by road; it breaks down into half a dozen cases.

“I’m sure in some ways your parents wish you had chosen the piccolo,” White commented slyly.

After the informational symposium, the Symphony opened the concert with Nancy Galbraith’s “Midnight Stirring.” Beginning with an ambiguous oscillation between strings and winds, the silvery strings gradually waxed rustic and nostalgic, the horns speaking prominently, a constant throb in the background, creating a thoroughly bucolic effect with moments of flowing intensity amidst the easy relaxation. White had been accurate in comparing the feel of the piece to a song by Coldplay or Bjork; following the initial tempo change, there was a definite suggestion of “Viva La Vida.”

Then it was time to marimba with Kevin Puts’s concerto for the instrument, which featured an elegant, almost classical-chamber opening that merged immediately into the broad strokes of the modern American style. The writing for the first movement showed little in the way of thematic linkage; it gave the sense that the composer had not fully decided what he wanted to do with the movement. The strings and horns sang a melody while the flutes offered an ebullient contrast and the marimba provided a mellow flavor that slid in and out of the sonic picture, with a rural openness shading into a more urban ambiguity as the movement progressed. At a number of points, the solo instrument sounded almost submerged beneath the power of the orchestra, with the xylophone—no timpani needed—making itself heard more than the marimba, which was most prominent in the movement’s cadenza. There was no tossing back and forth of a theme between soloist and orchestra here as in most concertos.

Puts had more success with the second and third movements of the concerto, which were much more strongly structured and in which the marimba received greater prominence. The lullaby-like introduction of the second movement built to a warm depth in which the marimba was both front and center and integrated with the simplicity of the musical structure, adding intrigue and inquisitiveness against soothing, superbly controlled playing from the Symphony. It was, unexpectedly, another of those rare successful solutions to the second movement problem. The marimba maintained its leading role in the third movement, in balance with the orchestra, whereas in the first movement it had been either too exposed or insufficiently exposed. The third movement also had an agitated jungle feel to it, accented by long horn notes and short, sharp interjections from the flutes and xylophone. Again the open range impression it conveyed contrasted with the marimba’s voice, leading to a surprisingly effective climax.

Breaking the usual overture-concerto-symphony programming structure, White introduced the overture from Nicola Porpora’s opera Carlo il Calvo following intermission. “You haven’t heard of him,” White warned the audience. “The musicians hadn’t heard of him.” He seemed to want to make sure the audience remembered Porpora, though, putting his own twist on the opening bars and emphasizing the dynamic changes. The Symphony enthusiastically gave it the bouncy approach needed to do justice to the piece, and delivered a nice clean B section without too much slowing down or overloading the air of emotional discomfort common to these middle passages. White deliberately elided the transition between the B section and the reprise of the initial theme, conducting much more freely by comparison with the first half of the concert as he brought back the buoyancy of the earlier part of the overture.

After that, the Symphony tackled Mozart’s Symphony No. 36, which began in the typically bleak, enervated way characteristic of late Mozart. White incorporated a hint of bombast and firm fortes into his interpretation of the allegro section of the first movement, which was well-suited to the outbursts that recurred repeatedly in this portion of the symphony; underemphasis would make it boring. The Symphony played richly enough to keep the piece from sounding thin, always a challenge in this case. The movement is filled with stereotypical Mozart tricks and tropes, but White kept the orchestra moving at an energetic pace, changing his body language from the earlier part of the concert and at the same time abandoning reliance on a strict beat as he adopted a more idiomatic approach. In the second movement, the orchestra continued to display smooth confidence, and particular strength in its unisons, White guiding them rather than holding them together and managing to make the andante sound more pastoral than intellectually despairing. The third-movement minuet came off as heavy and stately before merging into the simpler, leisured sophistication of the trio, and the orchestra exhibited cleaner playing in the da capo of the minuet than in its initial presentation. It was a pleasure to watch them tackle the delicate string parts at the beginning of the final movement that would not have been a success several years ago. Mozart packed this bit with more of the same angsty tricks as the first movement, but the Symphony made it as gracious as they could, articulating the phrases well and avoiding disintegration into a mass of shrilling. White was a pleasure to watch, keeping them animated, and the strongly-integrated climax was some of the most enjoyable playing I’ve heard from this orchestra.

Start planning your holiday musical events. Verde Valley Voices will perform at Immaculate Conception on December 7 at 3 PM, followed by the Cottonwood Community Band at the Phillip England Center for the Performing Arts on December 14 at 3 PM, and Sedona Dance Academy’s performance of The Nutcracker will take place at SPAC on December 20 at 2 PM. Piano on the Rocks will present its Christmas concert at the Verde Valley School at 3 PM on December 14, featuring works by Bach and Schubert as well as Christmas and Chanukah songs. The students of Mingus Union High School’s A Troupe of Ridiculous Thespians also have a holiday dance production on the calendar, “The Pumpkin King Steals Christmas,” which will run December 6-7 and December 12-14.

In the continued mess of division, favoritism, and retaliation that is Sedona city staff behind closed doors, the Sedona paramilitary’s token black officer, Sergeant (formerly Lieutenant) Raquel Oliver, has quit, allegedly due to harassment and racist remarks by Comrades Foley and Dowell, respectively. Anonymous emails from an individual allegedly working for the Sedona paramilitary to Comrade Ploog on November 19 and 20 commented on Oliver’s departure, referred to “racial comments by a commander,” and stated that “Sgt. Oliver left without anyone asking her about the racist comment.”

Meanwhile, discovery in former deputy police chief Ryan Kwitkin’s ongoing lawsuit against the city of Sedona and the current and former city managers has revealed a number of statements that Dowell made to outside investigators during the recent Foley-Jablow investigation that both supported Kwitkin’s previous claims of a hostile workplace and spoke to the current state of morale within city staff, but that were omitted from the city’s final report:

I just feel like I’m being gaslit most of the time. In fact, I started looking for jobs. Well, I’ve looked on and off for jobs over the last year because of this situation with her. And in the last three weeks to a month [as of September 5], I’ve applied at eight other places because I don’t see this going well.

When I first saw the complaint that Kwitkin put against the chief, I was like, there’s no way any of this occurred. This is ridiculous. But now, after working for the chief for a year, there are things in there that I’m like, oh, yep, I should not have disregarded his complaints entirely. The microaggressions, the micromanagement on the chief’s behalf, the dressing people down, the making decisions in silos, not being transparent. She spends about three quarters of her day in her office with her door shut. She allows subordinates to come in and go around the chain of command, and then she’ll question us on it: “Why did you do this?” She has people—she will call people in to question them about what has occurred on certain incidents, and then she’ll confront you with it about, “Hey, so-and-so told me that this was going on.” And I’m like, well, first of all, not the truth. And then secondly, why don’t you just ask me?…She doesn’t do it to me as much as she does it to other employees. She always says, “Hey, I’m trying to protect everybody here. I’m protecting this person. I feel like they’re being mistreated.” I’m like, well, how are they being mistreated? “Well, just in general, women are mistreated in law enforcement. So I bring the women closer,” and I’m like, okay, whatever. So there’s times where she’ll say, “I’m only doing this to protect that person.” Yet I feel like now she brings them in closer so that she can be the one who controls their thoughts, which is, that might sound stupid, but Erin Loeffler, she mistreats Erin on a daily basis to the point where at least once a day, I’m like, oh my goodness. Did you need to do that?

Dowell’s statements appear on the recording of the investigator’s interview and in the transcript of the interview, but not in the final report issued by the city. In fact, the city’s consultant cut Dowell off when he began addressing Foley’s management style and interactions with her subordinates. The interview transcript also includes an extraordinary exchange between Dowell and the consultant:

Dowell: When the city manager leaves, she has put the chief of police as the acting city manager.

Stacy Gabriel: Okay. Let me just pause you because I understood and speaking with the deputy city manager, one of them, that it’s been the practice that the deputy city manager is the interim city manager when Anette is out of town. And that’s been the practice.

Dowell: No, I can, I know of at least twice where the chief was the interim with the deputy chief or with the deputy city manager being there. Again, I’m not privy to the conversations, but I know that the chief has told me I’m the interim city manager.

Dowell, who also serves on Cottonwood city council, either has an incredibly skewed understanding of how city power structures work and his own instructions, or the city of Sedona’s most senior personnel are casually playing dice with the question of who’s steering the ship of state. The transcript further includes Dowell’s confirmation of the rumored affair between Foley and Kegn Moorcroft that led to the latter’s divorce and Dowell’s disapproval of how city staff handled the affair:

HR told me that they were not the morality police and they were not going to do an investigation. I expressed my concern with that, and my concern with it is twofold. First of all, I don’t see it as a morality thing as much as I see it as a code of conduct thing. So I don’t believe we’re the morality police. I believe it’s a code of conduct issue with the police department. And then secondly, I believe the city has an obligation to confirm or deny the allegations that are out there. I mean, the chief has the same right, as far as I’m concerned, to be exonerated if this is untrue. And she represents the police department. And this kind of conduct when you’re married, I don’t believe is in conjunction with what we promised to uphold with the code of conduct. I mean, I have disciplined plenty of officers for the same type of behavior…

It’s a disappointment because of the standards that—she is very strict. She has standards. She’s like, “Hey, we uphold the highest standards in the police department,” and her standards are higher than mine, which I appreciate. There’s times where I’m like, okay, I get it. I wouldn’t have the same high standard. She does uniforms and vehicles, and I get it, and I have upheld every one of her standards because that’s her standard and she’s the chief. I have had no problem doing that up until this incident because now I feel like here’s a double standard. Now I feel like, how do I hold one of our subordinates accountable for something when they can look and say, well, what about that?

It emerges that it was Dowell who formally reported the Foley-Moorcroft entanglement to Comrade Martin in human resources after two other city employees had reported it to him, and that Foley, in his telling, appeared to try to retaliate against him for putting it on the record:

The chief and I got into it in a command staff meeting because the chief accused me of spreading rumors…I said I’m not spreading rumors. I said it was brought to my attention by two employees and I gave it to HR. And she said, “Well, what I do in my private time is what I do, and it’s none of your business or anybody else’s business.” And I said, “Well, I strongly disagree.” And she again called me a rumor-starter, blah, blah, blah. And I said that was a lie. I said, “Whoever you’re getting the information from is incorrect.” And then it was the week after that heated exchange to where I was called into HR. And what is concerning to me about getting called into HR is that I was called into HR essentially due to an employee who is very, very—Jessica Bryson. She is the chief’s executive, and she is very good friends with the chief. They used to be partners. Jessica was a police officer. They were partners on the street together. She hired Jessica without any input from any rest of us. And in fact, they hang out on a weekend basis. I see Facebook posts constantly. I asked the chief, when the chief said we were going to HR, I said, well, why wouldn’t we just handle this? She doesn’t believe that I’m nice to her…Jessica sent an email out, basically, in my opinion, it was kind of a degrading email, and I fired back at her to email just saying, hey, I didn’t need to be counseled by her. And so that was her complaint against me was that I was rude in an email…The chief has told me that she’s going to review all five pages [of Bryson’s complaint] with me so that I can understand how to change.

Jessica Bryson, it should be noted, who was the subject of allegations of physical violence during the Verde Valley Sanctuary scandal last year—she was a VVS employee at the time—no longer works for the city of Sedona. Dowell went on to describe himself as being “appalled” by Foley’s inclusion of her accusations against Laura Olson in her complaint against Jablow and described them as “retaliatory,” adding that Foley “threw her under the bus” when she was trying to retire.

According to Dowell, Foley suffers from “this paranoia” about her job:

She does have this, I feel, this complex that every person she hires as command staff wants her job. And I have relayed to her, I don’t know how many times, “I don’t want your job. I’ve sat in that job. That was not fun to me. I just want to be a patrol commander,” and she’ll make comments, “Yeah, that’s what they all say. You’re just saying that because you don’t want me to believe you want my job.” I told her, I said, “I don’t want your job.” She doesn’t believe that. I think she believes that I’m trying to undermine her. And I’ve asked her, I said, “Well, how am I trying to undermine you?” And she thinks that every conversation that I have with somebody else is that I’m trying to do that.

And, to crown the entire situation, the rumor coming out of the Sedona police department is that council and staff are now “hoping or planning” that Foley is going to retire in January in order to avert the ongoing spiral of investigation, lawsuits, and complaints resulting from the internal mess of accusations and counter-accusations.

As Lady Bracknell might have said, to be accused of creating a hostile work environment by one deputy chief might have been a misfortune; to be accused by two deputy chiefs looks like the beginning of a pattern of behavior. Do I hear number three waiting in the wings for next year if nothing gives?

City staff have refused to release further public records pertaining to former staff’s exit interviews, claiming that the interview is “not even a verbal interview; they just complete the form on paper or online, and they’re anonymous,” and that Comrade Martin does not personally interview those leaving. While that might be true, Martin has previously indicated differently during his testimony to council. For instance, Martin has emphasized to council that one of staff’s main reasons for leaving was a failure to find the kind of housing they want. This information is not found in the written comments for the provided exit interviews, which make housing appear to be a very minor concern, nor is it deducible from the numerical results; therefore, Martin must have obtained it elsewhere, most likely in one-on-one discussions that would have been transcribed and summarized for the city’s records. Add it to the list of easy reasons to sue Sedona one day. Alternatively, if staff have indeed released all the applicable records, then Martin is obviously lying to council to try to get pay raises for his fellow bureaucrats and himself.

If there are to be any city staff at all, there must be an auditor—a real auditor, someone completely outside the staff and council chain of command and empowered to investigate and publish everything. That is the only possible way to put the fear of God into these mendacious bureaucrats. Who remembers Gogol’s The Inspector General—or more importantly, Danny Kaye’s marvelous performance in the title role of the 1948 film of the same name? The corrupt small-town officials are so terrified of what the putative inspector general might discover that they are bending over backwards to give him everything he wants while he’s in town while at the same time trying to poison him. The postmaster is a particular problem; he keeps popping up at inopportune moments saying, “I would like to take this opportunity to tender my resignation,” and at one point writes out a full confession of everyone’s misdeeds, which he plans to use as his suicide note. The mayor has to forcibly prevent him from carrying out his scheme of repentance. Such is the beneficial and ultimately self-destructive panic into which the threat of exposure will drive bureaucrats.

During the executive session prior to Tuesday’s meeting of that gang calling themselves the Sedona city council, the council was scheduled to consider Sen. Mark Finchem’s request for an SB1487 investigation of the city of Sedona. In a November 5 letter to the attorney general, Finchem charged that the city had violated state law by adopting zoning inconsistent with its community plan when it reverted the zoning for the Stevenson family’s Uptown property, which is planned to become the future location of Ambiente: Creekside. Finchem stated that Sedona refused to come into compliance with state law “and instead offered unconvincing excuses.” He had previously argued in a July 10 letter to the city council that either the zoning would have to be changed to something compatible with the community plan or that the plan itself would have to be changed.

City attorney Comrade Christianson had replied on July 22 that the city’s action had been a zoning reversion rather than a rezoning, which was both required by state statute under the circumstances and explicitly exempted by state statute from community plan conformity. He in fact countered that an amendment to state statute would be the only way to remedy “the limited statutory choices faced by the city.” Christianson reiterated these points in a November 21 letter to the attorney general’s office.

My only question is, which Bear Wallow resident sent a letter to Finchem’s office begging him to intervene out of some fear that the eventual second Ambiente location could encourage the development of the hypothetical creekwalk of which they are so afraid?

The council additionally approved a new fee schedule this week, along with new rules of procedure. The updated rules, triggered by the late and unlamented Comrade Jablow’s bad behavior, now require councilors to “put the interests of the city of Sedona over all personal considerations” and to “conduct myself so as to maintain public confidence in the city government to act in the best interests of the community.” As if any of them would know what those were. Councilors are also required to discuss any public records request involving city personnel with senior staff before filing it and are prohibited from disrupting staff; however, another alteration removed the requirement that councilors forward copies of complaints they receive to the city manager. The updates included an extensive new section establishing a status of “good standing” for councilors, of which they can be deprived, including access to city resources, if their colleagues vote to revoke their good standing for ethical reasons. After discussion, council agreed a two-thirds vote would be required to both revoke and restore standing. The start time for special meetings has been adjusted from 3 PM to 4:30 PM, a change marginally more beneficial to the city’s working population, and the rules now state that during a meeting, “The mayor may grant up to two additional minutes per speaker card to speakers representing two or more persons present at the meeting and who have filled out speaker cards,” with “up to two” and “minutes per speaker card” being additions to the former language.

Another of the changes to the rules of procedure was the adoption of ranked-choice voting for the internal election of the mayor and vice mayor as required, which prompted some extraordinarily ignorant statements by councilors and staff. Christianson declared that ranked-choice voting was “untried and untested in the real world,” while Comrade Ploog agreed that “it’s unproven and untested for sure.” I have only to turn to Wikipedia to discover that “it is used to elect members of the Australian House of Representatives and the National Parliament of Papua New Guinea, and to elect the head of state in India, Ireland, and Sri Lanka.” Untested and unproven indeed. Did any of these people ever read a book on government before applying for public office?

Comrade Kinsella then wasted more of the public’s time unnecessarily by demanding the insertion of parenthetical clarifying statements in the rules of procedure along with other quibbles. Granted, I have to go over this document a couple more times, but is there any provision in the new rules of procedure that at the nth mention of a parenthetical, Kathy Kinsella gets put in a corner so the meeting can proceed? Her performance was ridiculous, insulting, and totally unnecessary. She then proceeded obliquely down a rabbit hole to inquire about the possibility of creating a rule of procedure that would allow the council to designate an unnamed bird—presumably the hummingbird—as Sedona’s official bird.

“We should stay out of the business of making official whatevers,” Comrade Pfaff retorted. “If we open the door to the official Kleenex box of the city of Sedona, we’re going to have people coming out of the woodwork.”

“That’s just not a conversation that needs to happen on this dais,” Comrade Furman agreed. Comrade Dunn wearily suggested that such a decision would only have to be reconsidered “at some point when the quail society moves into town.” Nevertheless, after an exhaustive amount of discussion, it appears that staff will be bringing forward a new proposal later on how the council can recognize individuals or groups by other means than a proclamation.

Tuesday’s meeting was enlivened by a public comment from Sandy Magid, who complained of subjective speeding concerns on Inspirational Drive and asked the city to take the anti-freedom action of installing speed bumps. Such an incident is yet another excellent reason why the city should not be allowed to install speed bumps at all: put them on a few streets, and certain unmentionable individuals will begin begging that such freedom-limiting, dangerous devices be installed elsewhere. The legislature needs to pass a law making municipalities financially liable for any damage to a vehicle that occurs when a vehicle drives over a speed bump those municipalities have installed. Nevertheless, Magid gets extra points for bringing her cat to the meeting in a stroller and rolling him up to the podium with her when her turn came. If I had a loyal feline companion, I would totally bring the cat to these meetings and let him sit on the chair next to me staring at the council in disdain. It might soften them up a bit.

According to city emails, the Sedona 30 nonprofit group is continuing to explore a potential arrangement for the Sedona International Film Festival to “take over the running of SPAC.”

The Goldwater Institute’s lawsuit against the city of Sedona on behalf of the Oak Creak Mobilodge has been revived by the Arizona Court of Appeals, which has overturned the Yavapai County Superior Court’s previous dismissal of the case at the city’s request and remanded the case back to superior court for the court to issue an order declaring that the city is preempted from prohibiting the use of mobile homes as STRs and enjoining the city from attempting to prevent such use of the Mobilodge property. The city refused to grant the Mobilodge a short-term rental permit last year, with Comrade Christianson arguing psychically that “the legislature clearly did not intend to permit mobile home parks, which frequently house some of the most vulnerable persons in the state, to evict its residents to allow the construction of STR parks” and insulting his employer, a Sedona property owner, by referring to his arguments as absurd and a waste of public resources. The Court of Appeals found Christianson’s arrogance unconvincing, concluding instead that “the city’s policy that would cause it not to grant Oak Creek a short-term rental license is preempted by the short-term rental statute.”

“The short-term rental statute is unambiguous in its expressed intent to preclude local control,” the three-judge panel wrote in a unanimous ruling. “The statute defines a ‘vacation rental’ or ‘short-term rental’ to include ‘any individually or collectively owned single-family or one-to-four family house or dwelling unit.’ The city argues this language refers to one form of land use—the unified use of an entire parcel of real property for single- or one-to-four-family residential purposes. Because the Oak Creek Mobilodge’s land use is a 59-space mobile home park, the city asserts the Mobilodge cannot be a single-family or one-to-four-family house or dwelling unit. Oak Creek counters that the statute protects short-term rentals of all mobile homes in a mobile home park. It assigns a regular meaning to ‘house or dwelling unit’ to include individual residential structures, stressing that the statute does not reference parcels, land use, or zoning.” Upon review of applicable state statutes, the court concluded “that the phrase ‘house or dwelling unit’ in the short-term rental statute’s definition of ‘short-term rental’ includes individual mobile home units and does not refer to the entire mobile home park...the city may not prohibit mobile homes from being used as short-term rentals.”

After being more than usually annoyed by individuals professing belief in pseudoscientific superstitions this week, I turned for an antidote to the pages of Skeptical Inquirer and typed in “Sedona” to see what happened—and lo and behold, we rated several mentions, including in a 2013 piece by anthropologist Kenneth L. Feder in which he reported an exchange with a credulous fellow visitor to Palatki:

“Wow! How wonderful running into you here. I just saw you on a show about that scientist who believes in ancient astronauts. What’s his name?”

“Do you mean Erich von Däniken?” I asked.

“Yeah, that’s the guy. Von Däniken.”

“Von Däniken isn’t a scientist. He’s a fantasy writer as far as I’m concerned.”

“Well, you really should reconsider your skepticism. After all, there’s some very good evidence for those ancient astronauts visiting earth. First of all, how do you explain the fact that the Maya had a base-12 number system? Doesn’t that prove that the Maya were an alien race with six fingers on each hand?”

“Actually that’s not the case,” I pointed out, “the Maya didn’t have a base-12 system. Theirs was a base-20 system.”

Ironically, Feder is the author of the Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology. Von Daniken, forsooth—and there are still people in Sedona, I have found, who believe in Mary Baker Eddy and Madame Blavatsky as if it were the 1920s instead of the 2020s, and then there are those who make Whitley Streiber their particular tin god. Somehow, almost every new-age type who starts in on trying to convince me of whatever their particular superstition is always, within the first five minutes, invokes at least one of their gurus, inevitably some fringe medical doctor or media personality no one in the wider world has ever heard of. You’d think if they were going to routinely employ the fallacy of the argument from authority, they’d at least pick someone who would have a chance of being regarded as a genuine authority figure, maybe one of history’s great philosophers or scientists. But no, it’s always a modern American or European who supposedly has the answer. Trivial cultism used as an escape from hard thinking. Even more ridiculous is the embrace of certain medical quacks by individuals who profess a lack of confidence in the medical community—but who are very willing to cite their preferred quacks’ MD credentials in efforts to validate those quacks’ unproven treatments. How much longer is it going to take for people to realize that the mainstream medical community and the fringe/alternative medical community are both shameless frauds?

Anyway, moving beyond the prevalence of willing suspension of disbelief in the wider public consciousness, I found that SI also has a nice piece from five years ago directly addressing another of those new age-related difficulties of life in Sedona: the role of cognitive biases in the belief in the ubiquity of alien visitors. Author Matthew Sharps reported the result of an experiment that involved presenting subjects with a set of images of Hovenweep National Monument in which each image was distorted by two blurred dust specks in the sky:

The good news is that 35.4 percent of our respondents thought that our UFOs, the two fuzzy dots in the pictures, were “camera issues.” That’s what they were. The bad news is that 14.1 percent believed, explicitly, that the dots were spacecraft or UFOs. An additional 18.2 percent didn’t use the term UFO, but they believed that these dust specks were inanimate or animate objects flying above the earth—pretty much the definition of UFOs. We wind up with a grand total of 32.3 percent of modern adults who believed that these two dots were UFOs in the sense of alien aircraft…

In the control group, respondents were told that these images were “over desert mountains” (Figure 1), above “an…Anasazi ruin” (Figure 2), or there was “a common raven” in the same picture (Figure 3). In the experimental group, respondents were given the same information but were also informed that these images were recorded in a desert area “in which a great many UFOs and alien encounters have been reported.” (This is true. A lot of people in pursuit of personal revelations from the Eagle Gods take some time off to seek out their flying-saucer allies in the same places.)…

Those receiving the UFO-intensive “experimental group” information were significantly more likely to endorse the following ideas:

1. That the two dust specks on the camera lens were real objects;

2. That at least one dust speck was an intelligently controlled vehicle;

3. That the vehicles in question may have been piloted or remotely controlled from some other “ship or station”; or

4. That “at least one of these objects is an extraterrestrial spacecraft of similar vehicle, and neither is an explicable, natural phenomenon of the Earth”…

The primary result of this experiment is very clear. Human beings, if provided with a prior cognitive framework, will respond according to that understanding. Human responses will be rooted in that prior framework, even if the framework in question is full of UFOs. Therefore, between the prior cognitive framework created by the influence of alien-nonsense media and an ill-informed view of ancient Southwestern peoples as vaguely magical, alien-ridden beings, many people are easily persuaded to believe in relevant mystical/UFO nonsense in the ancient Southwest. And this is what we found. In the present experiment, all we had to do was present two dust specks as possible alien starships, and presumably rational people were perfectly willing to accept these specks as emissary vessels of the space aliens to their Southwestern spiritual children.

Sharps denounced the Sedona combination of new age spirituality with UFOlogy as essentially cultural appropriation: “the imaginary transformation of the tough, practical people of the Southwest’s past into ethereal visions of cardboard mystics, dancing in obeisance to unknown gods from outer space and spiritually acceptable to the alien-seekers of the Southwest’s present…Were that thinker to engage in the more detail-oriented, more productive feature-intensive cognitive abilities of which we are all capable, the ultimate beliefs might be less alien-intensive and more appreciative of the extraordinary technological achievements of the tribal peoples who inhabited the House of Rain, the harsh environment of the Southwest desert. It might be considered somewhat insulting to the memory of the brilliant Anasazi, Hohokam, Mogollon, Salado, Sinagua, and other unnamed Southwestern technologists—who for a period triumphed over a terrifyingly unforgiving landscape—to believe otherwise.” Insulting indeed.

Sharps also placed the necessary emphasis on the importance of a “prior cognitive framework” in which stereotypical beliefs in aliens can be propagated. UFO believers and new agers in general are blithely unaware of how the cultural background to their beliefs was built up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in popular newspapers and magazines, how weird fiction and science fiction and thrillers, the diet of the average reader, was saturated with the themes that they now treat as spiritual beliefs. Electricity and spiritualism came in together at the turn of the twentieth century; with the development of psychology and anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s, those elements were added to the developing mix to increase its exoticism; and after World War II the whole mess got caught up with television and the millenniarist panics attendant upon the atom bomb. Fictional tropes have been repeated so often, and the level of education and skepticism in this society has become so low, that the comic-strip material of a century ago now passes for sober fact and divine revelation. The cultural role in superstition in modern societies was a topic that Carl Sagan likewise addressed at great length in The Demon-Haunted World; if I were one of these Sedona millionaires, I would send a copy to every address in town.

Sedona-level paranoia has reached Yavapai County with the county’s adoption of a new anti-freedom ordinance on November 19 that a few of the great minds on the Board of Supervisors feel might prevent someone from feeding wildlife. Board attorney Comrade Brennan was careful to explain to the board that the basis for the ordinance is purely anecdotal: “We’ve all heard of incidents involving interactions with humans and animals that have not gone well.” That’s called part of living in a rural environment. Brennan was, of course, unable to cite a specific number of purported incidents that he was willing to defend as having risen to a level necessitating coercive prohibition. He then made the extraordinary leap to anti-human advocacy by claiming that feeding animals might expose them to inappropriate food, as if the welfare of animals was of any concern to humans, let alone government officials. The county’s adoption of the anti-freedom ordinance follows Sedona’s own passage of an equally paranoid and anti-Western ordinance from last year, which Comrade Browne, a former web developer with zero experience in game management, declared to have been a success on the basis of a non-statistically significant change in frequency from three javelina bites in three years to one bite in two years.

The meeting at which the board of supervisors adopted their latest anti-human ordinance was also the scene of an absolutely bootlicking performance by the newest, weakest supervisor, Comrade Check, who represents those parts of the county adjacent to Sedona and is therefore our and our neighbors’ problem. Check doubled down on her record of bad decisions on the board, which included voting against the good college—Embry-Riddle—and in favor of the bad college—Yavapai College—by expressing enthusiastic support for the ordinance. According to Check, her constituents who are exercising their normal rights as human beings to feed an animal if the fancy so takes them are creating “a dangerous situation,” and she is “really happy” that she’s able to threaten them with violence and try to take their freedoms away in this manner. Check was naturally the first to vote in support of the totalitarian proposal.

I am unable to wrap my my around the extent to which all of these people who supposedly live in the rural West are unable to comprehend the simple fact that living in the countryside means living up against wildlife and dealing with it. And if you choose to feed the wildlife, for whatever reason, you deal with the consequences of that, too. When I was a kid in Montana, we used to feed the deer in our backyard from time to time. The deer feed had a lot of corn and a lot of molasses in it, it actually smelled pretty good even by human standards, and we kept it in a container in the back shed. The result was that one night, a grizzly bear ripped part of the siding off the shed to get to the container—which was empty at the time—and pulled it out through the studs, all while half of the neighborhood was descending on our yard with pots and pans and shotguns to try to scare him off. That’s called life in the rural West. Get used to it. Which of these soft-headed, soft-handed councilors and supervisors and staffers, I wonder, can remember being taught by their parents how to use bear spray at the age of six?

NPR has run a hilarious piece about how Democrats are “announcing a new investment to win over voters in rural areas” that is risible not only because it had to be written in the first place, but because the content of the story makes it very clear that Democrats still don’t have the faintest clue why they get their asses roundly kicked by rural voters. The Democratic strategists and sources quoted think they can flip rural voters with an economic message. Make more money, let the government give you more stuff. That kind of attitude merely shows how thoroughly they’ve missed the point. Rural folks can take a lot more economic pain than city slickers can. That’s not what matters out here. What matters in rural America is that the Democratic Party is predominantly seen as the party of big government: more rules, more spending, more taxes, more bureaucracy, more interference with the individual’s life and choices. More than that, it’s seen—accurately—as packaging all of those policy stances with the arrogant condescension of ignorant, soft, spoiled urbanites who think they should be telling everyone else what to do. These two attitudes—the beneficence of government and the right of a ruling elite to manipulate others for the greater good—are not simply interwoven with the Democrats’ ideology; they are the Democrats’ ideology. Their party is built not around the policies they propose, but rather the attitude that whatever the best policies might be, those policies will be determined and administered with no humanity, flexibility, public control, or potential for alteration by an elite group of professional experts. That idea is revolting to normal humans and it will be why the Democrats continue to lose rural elections until and unless they abandon these vanguardist attitudes sufficiently to no longer be Democrats.

Elsewhere in the world, lack of knowledge of or concern with rural lifestyles has mired the Italian government in outrage after the government of Abruzzo has kidnapped the three children of a British expatriate couple living off-grid based on a city slicker judge’s decision that their home was not habitable. The country’s deputy prime minister has declared it to be “shameful that the state is concerned with private education and the personal life choices of two parents who found Italy a hospitable country, yet it steals their children.” One of the judge’s complaints was that the family’s use of a composting toilet was insufficiently sanitary. Hatred of alternative plumbing arrangements that don’t require bureaucrats, wasted energy, and huge expenditure certainly seems to be a point of similarity between Sedona and Italy.

Next up was Bartok’s Violin Sonata No. 2, dating from 1922. Beilman warned the audience that there was something “so wrong” about Bartok’s vocal language, and that much was obvious from Chien’s opening blow on the piano, which set up a series of tragic melodies by the violin into which the piano kept hammering at intervals. The violin even had to reach up to the limits of audibility in a late tribute to Halloween on a few occasions. Again there was a sense of a score for a black-and-white film, albeit with a very different edge from the abstract forms of the Ysaye piece written a year later; here there was instead melodrama leading to murder and more. The pace of the action picked up towards the end of the movement, presumably corresponding to the arrest scene, before looping back to a reprise of the opening themes. It was into this Hollywood-style schmaltz that Bartok then chose to insert an abrupt, marching, swinging entry for the second movement that suggested the scene and plot had been transferred entirely to a cabaret of very advanced character: rigid movements, hyperactivity, a general air of dissoluteness. Chien played with flowing, romantic arms that were an enormous contrast to the sounds she was producing. Pizzicato from the violin and rolling bass notes from the piano signaled a switch to a chase through the back rooms and into the streets, with the piano taking over much of the action. Bartok somehow managed to orchestrate a change from this mis-en-scene back to the main themes of the first movement before handing the whole thing over to the violin to wrap it up on the high side.

The most successful compositional achievement of the first half was Szymanowski’s “Nocturne and Tarantella,” which featured a haunting Moorish entry by the piano over which the violin mounted, playing madly to the roses in the perfumed garden of the night, before both instruments kicked up their heels and danced away. Zorro made love to the alcalde’s daughter in the dark because Beilman sang for them. Nothing whatsoever like the Ysaye or Bartok selections, the Symanowski contribution had all the flavor of the love ballads of the early twentieth century while also reaching back to the elegance of Tchaikovsky. That difference persisted into the tarantella, which, while absolutely frantic, did not abandon normal conventions in pursuit of what Lord Peter sarcastically referred to as the modernists’ pursuit of “a scale of thirty-two notes to the octave.” The movement’s cohesion was repeatedly moderated and threatened by the intrusion of elements from the nocturne before its original themes reestablished themselves without overall disintegration; the center held and anarchy was not loosed upon the world. The climax pushed the violin to the limits of its upper register again, but marvelously without shrillness, the instrument caroling joyously instead of shrieking, which is a rare achievement indeed.

Intermission saw a number of patrons who were unprepared to be reminded of the chaos of the 1920s leaving in a state of shock.

“Literally everything I was feeling that morning came out onto the stage,” one audience member remarked.

“Dear God, why didn’t you stop him?” another commented to a friend.

One is reminded of the time Zubin Mehta put the brakes on the New York Philharmonic in the middle of a concert after the audience began heckling the program and demanded sarcastically if it would be possible for them to allow the orchestra to play the next thirty seconds without interruption. As one listener memorably argued in a subsequent letter to Pravda West, Mehta could alternatively be viewed as having brought it upon himself for having programmed the work of Anton Webern: “Since many concertgoers regard performances of Webern as the musical equivalent of a visit to the dentist, audience unrest should not have been a surprise.” Nevertheless, in instance after instance throughout the first half, the sheer beauty of tone of the Guarnerius almost redeemed Ysaye’s and Bartok’s less than stellar sense of melody.

Ironically—or naturally, in obedience to the dead hand of Murphy—the entire tone of the concert changed during the second half, with Beilman redeeming himself in the eyes of some in the audience with a commission from living composer Chris Rogerson, the “Arietta” for violin and piano, written as processional music for Beilman’s wedding. A graceful, measured duet was succeeded by a solo for violin that segued back into a two-voiced cry of yearning and passion to the point of building into a wind-whipped sea beneath scudding clouds. The bride-to-be might have been invoking the blessing of her father Poseidon before the procession resolved itself placidly.

The Rogerson piece was intended as an aperitif preceding and introducing Beilman’s main item on the program, Franck’s Sonata in A Major, a sample of pure late Romanticism written for Ysaye to play on this very same violin—and handed to him on his wedding day, with the composer having intended the piece to represent the tumultuous stages of a successful courtship. Imploring at first, it evolved quickly into something more comfortable and relaxed, with the writing dominated by the violin until interrupted by an efflorescence from the piano. The violin then regained the lead and held it, bringing the piano along with its increasing passion, yet it was the piano that had the most richly-textured and noble passages. The second movement, marked allegro, maintained this trend but picked up the pace, the violin swaying madly above the scampering piano, a gale beneath a golden sunset pressing down the autumn grass bending before it, the pheasants skimming low beneath the driving force ere the fall of dusk and stillness. Franck marked the third movement as “Recitativo—Fantasia,” and built up the intensity further in this section while incorporating a bewildering variety of themes and moods for both instruments, some of them folksy, some exploratory, some dramatic, prior to a false climax in which the Guarnerius absolutely sparkled. He then changed the tenor of the movement entirely, however, introducing an ominous attitude for the piano and despair for the violin, and progressing to a true largamente, subdued, sad, and wistful, full of an atmosphere of negation in which attempts at reigniting the burned-out embers of enthusiasm kept dying in diminuendos. The final movement, an allegretto with movement, was more manic than fully confident in the degree of resolution it achieved for the courtship, with the violin coming off a trifle crazed and the piano a bit more strident than it really needed to be up until the final moments. Great instrumental acting from Beilman and Chien, though.

Chamber Music Sedona’s next concert of the season is scheduled for January 11, featuring the Imani Winds and Michelle Cann. Be sure to catch Georgie Dawson tomorrow at the library at 2 PM and the Sedona Symphony at SPAC on Sunday with guest marimbaist Abigail Fischer. A violinist friend of mine is curious as to whether she travels with her own marimba. We shall enquire. And the Met Live Opera series continues at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre tomorrow and Wednesday with a revival of Richard Strauss’s Arabella.

As we wait to find out what the city staff turnover rate has been for the year—last year they claimed it had dropped to a mere 18 percent from much more encouraging levels in the mid-20 percent range—it is useful to consider why middle managers leave city employment where they are paid three or more times what the average Sedonan earns. An examination of city staff exit interviews from January 2023 through October 2025 indicates that compensation is precisely the issue and that departing staffers see their compensation very differently than do their employers, the public. According to the anonymized sets of survey results the city clerk’s office provided for those outgoing staff who completed exit interviews, fewer than 10 percent ranked the city’s pay rates as excellent, while 43 percent ranked them as good; the remaining 48 percent of city staff described their pay as either fair or poor. Average compensation before benefits for a city of Sedona employee in 2025 is $74,219 before benefits, or $134,035 after benefits, with twenty-eight staff earning more than $100,000 before benefits and an additional 23 staff earning between $80,000 and $100,000 before benefits. And half of city staff consider this to be less than a decent salary—although 81 percent thought their retirement packages were good or excellent and 90 percent said the same about their four-day work weeks. One really has to pause and admire the level of arrogance, greed, entitlement, and luxury conveyed in those responses. Once again, it reminds those of us in the everyday world how very different the bureaucratic perspective is.

Staff’s fixation on taking advantage and making money out of the public is further evident in those responses to the question that asked why they accepted a position with the city. Twenty-four percent ranked better pay as their most significant factor in the decision, although 33 percent also ranked better pay as their least significant factor. Benefits were the most significant factor for 33 percent of hires, the city’s retirement package for 38 percent, and better hours for 29 percent. Relocating to Sedona was the least significant factor for 57 percent of respondents and the most significant factor for 19 percent. Being closer to home was also least significant to 57 percent of staff in making their decision and working with a friend least significant for 76 percent. Additional write-in reasons mentioned in the surveys included “available position,” “full-time opportunity,” “maintain career-level work,” and “dog to work policy.” City employees most liked the “remote days off campus,” “Sedona location,” and “security of government work.”

When it came to reasons for leaving the city, however, few former staff called out the low (in their eyes) pay rates as a reason for their departure once they had already accepted those pay rates. Forty-eight percent cited working conditions, 43 percent the quality of supervision, and 33 percent coworkers as being among their reasons for departure. Family commitment or circumstances were other frequently-given reasons; only 19 percent of staff mentioned the cost of housing. They wouldn’t; they can afford a $3,000 per month rent or mortgage payment. Multiple staff mentioned their supervisors or managers in written comments on their reasoning for leaving, while one called out the “lack of ability to actually take the leave granted.” Nevertheless, in a reminder of how good staff know they have it, only one single respondent indicated they would not recommend that a friend work for the city.

This impression of dissatisfaction with management was reinforced by the responses to the questions asking staff to rate their supervisors and departments. There was a clear split in employees’ confidence in their managers’ ability to avoid favoritism: 38 percent said their supervisors always avoided it and 43 percent replied their supervisors seldom avoided it. Fifty-two percent thought supervisors communicated honestly, while 29 percent said honest communication was rare. A third of staffers viewed their managers as sometimes or frequently engaging in criticism of other managers and refusing them fair or equal treatment and rated their feelings of being supported by their supervisors as fair or poor. Seventy-one percent of staff thought they had good cooperation among their coworkers, and 76 percent that they were respected by their coworkers. Nevertheless, 43 percent found the division of labor within their departments to be unfair, and there was a split in employees’ impressions on whether their opinions mattered, with roughly equal numbers rating the situation in their departments as being either excellent or only fair. Staff complained of “hushed tones” and “gossip,” “lip service,” “inconsistent statements,” and feeling isolated from other city departments. One stated that “strong ownership [of projects] limits collaboration,” while another celebrated the city’s “willingness to allow you to expand role,” two pertinent comments on bureaucratic behavior.

The list of what these ex-civil servants liked the least about working for the city included “supervision, professionalism,” “trust,” “micromanagement,” “office dynamics,” “management (hierarchy as primary focus),” “politics in and out of office,” “lack of staffing, support,” “resistance to change,” “one item focus at a time,” “zero creative,” cliques, the lack of “internal leadership opportunities” to enhance one’s resume, and, in a truly Sedona moment, “spring break tourist” [sic]. “I felt like it was very ridged [sic] without a lot of flexibility,” read another of the comments. Someone even critiqued the “budget process for complication.” A few staffers exhibited considerable arrogance towards their employers, describing the citizens of Sedona as a “challenge” of the job and complaining of a “level of citizen engagement required that was redundant.” “Some citizens were frankly nasty to staff,” one whined; well, yes, staff are wrecking what used to be a nice place and some resentment is quite understandable. In a hint of what is going on behind closed doors in the secrecy of the Sedona Magistrate Court, one staffer wrote, “Toxic work environment cultivated by management and no other superiors to step in and correct her behavior despite witness/experiencing first hand. No support. No training (which other courts have, offer, and foster). No room for advancement or growth. Not given the benefit of the doubt, or given a 1:1 meeting without the supervisor. Not being believed.” To be continued. Alternatively, departing staffers’ new jobs, they told the city, would offer them perks like a “brand-new facility to work in,” “flexibility to spend more time with family,” a “higher wage,” “less stress,” “variety,” and a “more narrow focus of the part of job I like.” “I feel like I have more freedom,” one actually wrote.

City staff have not yet released the full set of public records constituting former staff’s exit interviews, including the transcripts of individual one-on-one interviews with human resources director Comrade Martin.

It has become necessary to remind ourselves that the city of Sedona does not receive 3 million visitors a year. The city of Sedona’s own 2024 tourism study, which city staff keep pretending doesn’t exist, found that the city received an average of 3.28 million visits—not individual visitors—per year. The average number of individual visitors per year over a three-year period, the study found, was 1.39 million. Those 1.39 million individual visitors further include everyone who works in Sedona and commutes into town and every resident of Coconino and Yavapai counties, who are not “tourists” or “visitors” in a city within their own county, but rather locals. The city’s study concluded that 38 percent of the 1.39 million visitors were locals, which would put the number of actual tourists at roughly 862,000; however, that number is also implausible, as the combined population of the two counties is only 400,000, less than the difference of 528,000 between the two numbers. Given that the majority of county residents do likely visit Sedona during the year, it seems reasonable to conclude that the actual number of tourists in Sedona each year is closer to 1.1 million. That conclusion should be clear to anyone who’s ever bothered to look around Sedona. Three million tourists a year would be close to 10,000 a day, and for anyone who actually leaves their retirement home to walk around the city, it’s blindingly obvious that there are not 10,000 extra people on the streets and sidewalks every day. On a strong weekend, perhaps, but not on a weekday, not even in season. Go up to a vantage point in Uptown and count all the people you can see at one time. There won’t be anywhere close to a few percentage points of the purported total. It really shouldn’t be necessary to bring this up at all, but considering that city staff continue to lie about the number of tourists Sedona receives, as in Comrade General Dowell’s error-ridden August 13 presentation to council on the Flock spycams and on the police department website, both of which falsely stated and state the number of visitors—not the number of visits—to be 3 million, it has become necessary. I realize that staff have a vested interest in inflating the numbers both for the benefit of their own careers and for the purpose of panicking the public about the hated tourists so they can expand the mental rape program that they call a tourism management plan, but a lie is a lie. And Comrades Browne, Grossman, and the rest of that lot have lied about the number and are continuing to do so, to the confusion and misinformation of the community.

Elsewhere in Arizona towns misinforming the community, the Fountain Hills town council has attempted to eliminate the call to the public from council meetings as an effort to suppress speech regarding religion during the public forum. The council voted 5-2 to eliminate the call to the public on the grounds that it would make it easier for them to have orderly meetings if they simply didn’t have public input on potentially controversial topics. Resident Bethany Culp had also threatened the council with a lawsuit for allowing speech regarding religion during the public forum, which is protected by the First Amendment. Stay tuned; it will be interested to see which civil liberties organization now sues Fountain Hills and forces them to back down.

Meanwhile, in our regular Flock spycams update and related matters, the in-service date for Cottonwood’s Flock surveillance network is not yet known, while the Associated Press has recently disclosed that the Border Patrol has built a nationwide network of hidden traffic spycams of its own. Unlike local jurisdictions’ Flock cameras, the Border Patrol has gone to great pains to hide its cameras both inside seemingly innocuous objects like roadside drums and during legal proceedings, to the extent of dropping criminal charges in attempts to avoid having the program mentioned in court. More than that, the Border Patrol is already engaging in the behavior prediction efforts to which Flock aspires through both computerized profiling and simple gossip. “Chat logs show Border Patrol agents and Texas sheriffs’ deputies trading tips about vehicles’ travel patterns—based on suspicions about little more than someone taking a quick trip to the border region and back. The chats show how thoroughly Texas highways are surveilled by this federal-local partnership and how much detailed information is informally shared,” the AP reported. Of course, until recently—and it’s probably continuing in the background anyway—the Border Patrol had access to Flock’s cameras as well, including the cameras in Sedona, Flagstaff, Cottonwood, and Yavapai County. And the program’s results? The AP quoted admissions from paramilitary troopers that nine out of ten of these attempts to shake down members of the public based on guesswork lead to no arrests or charges. Welcome to the Arizona SSR, where having a “suspicious” travel pattern is enough to get a gun pointed at your head by a shock jock immune from legal repercussions for his violence. Where, pray tell, are Cottonwood’s passionate so-called fake conservatives who thought a drag show would trigger the Apocalypse but are seemingly indifferent to city officials colluding with the feds to impose Soviet-style travel controls?

It must be said: If the only way we can have a non-totalitarian society is to get rid of computers, then the computers must go.

I took a brief trip to San Francisco this weekend that involved a Lyft driver who kept rolling the windows down, in disregard for his instructions, in 50-degree weather. I am always struck by the manner in which Americans have made a fetish out of embracing cold weather regardless of the economic and cognitive costs of doing so. Sedona city council chambers are routinely refrigerated to 74 degrees or less, even in winter. At my very first council priority retreat in January 2023, Comrade Fultz complained that 77 degrees was too warm and had the air conditioning switched on. Last year, at the priority session for 2025, Comrade Whitehorn delivered much of the presentation while wrapped in a blanket. Residents whine that their power bills are going up and that APS keeps raising its rates, but it never seems to occur to them to stop refrigerating their homes to 70 degrees or colder. Apart from the sheer wastefulness and sissiness of acquiescing in low temperatures where they exist and creating them where they do not, there is the additional problem that cold weather diminishes human cognitive processing capacity. Cognitive function declines steadily at temperatures below 77 degrees, but does not begin to decline due to heat until the ambient temperature exceeds 102 degrees. Exposure to cold, like obesity, is damaging to both self and others, and any of us who choose to create a low-temperature environment for others or to impose one on others, although having the unquestioned right to do so, are thereby acting maliciously towards others. Turning on the air conditioning is quite simply an act of aggression against other humans and the pursuit of intellectual inhibition through environmental meddling.

Furthermore, the American love of cold appears to be more genuinely alarming when it is considered within the long-term historical context. Ever since human body temperatures could be reliably recorded and measured, early in the second industrial revolution, average body temperature has been steadily declining, and it is simple enough to predict that cognition has been declining in tandem as a consequence. The link between ambient temperature and cognition is significant enough to warrant speculation as to whether humans should bother establishing settlements at all north or south of 30 degrees latitude, and whether the incidence of violence throughout human history, particularly state violence, increased in parallel with the expansion of humans into cold northern climates in Eurasia and North America. Arizonans and Sedonans are fortunate enough to live in a southerly climate with abundant insolation; installing air conditioning systems that didn’t exist a few generations ago and pretending they can’t live without them is likely the least intelligent thing any of them have ever done.

I was also amused by the sheer number of vague advertisements for old and new “AI” systems scattered everywhere throughout Fog City, many of which did not provide even the merest clue as to what the product they were promoting was intended to do or who their target audience was. Apparently the city by the bay and its unwashed hordes of tech workers have not yet had time to assimilate into their collective the August MIT report on the state of the “AI” business. Some highlights: with $40 billion in total in investments in “AI” companies so far, 95 percent of firms received zero return on their investments. A mere five percent of business “AI” programs have reached production. Ninety percent of “AI” users still regard human abilities as superior to “AI”, particularly for projects requiring continuity or for complex projects. Thirty percent of managers wouldn’t even trust an “AI” system to produce a first draft of an email. “Most AI tools don’t learn and don’t integrate well into workflows.” More generic tools are more effective than specialized tools—do I hear Professor Challenger coughing loudly in the back of the room? Businesses are also reluctant to invest in new software that doesn’t play nicely with their existing systems. “For anything complex or long-term, humans dominate by 9-to-1 margins,” the MIT report found. “The dividing line isn’t intelligence, it’s memory, adaptability, and learning capability.” And creativity, which no machine has ever yet demonstrated.

The AI hype, in addition to being merely the latest South Sea Bubble, a market fraud based entirely on overpromotion of nonexistent productivity, is also the latest iteration of the core Marxist religious doctrine that ongoing technical improvements in productive efficiency will at last provide a surplus of material goods that will enable an end to the artificial scarcity of capitalism. Naturally, this makes it especially appropriate for San Francisco. News flash for Marxists: The human species had access to easily procurable surpluses for fifty thousand years. Not until capitalists chose to create artificial scarcity by using some of those surpluses to forcibly deprive others of access to resources did that situation change, and it will not change again until either the available surplus dries up, the psychopathic drive of certain individuals to dominate others is evolved out of the species, or the psychopaths within the species make a widespread moral choice to refrain from indulging their lusts for power. Historically, when capitalists develop tools that increase productive capacity or efficiency, they simultaneously alter the other terms of the economic situation to ensure that increased capacity is taken up in unnecessary make-work tasks in order to forestall potential economic or political disruption. Those who work less can think more. It’s a scream to read through the series of introductions to Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, in which the Marxist philosopher became increasingly depressed throughout the 1950s and 1960s at the success of capitalists in distracting the proletariat from overthrowing the system with the expansion of service jobs, the proliferation of entertainment outlets, and the fostering of consumer culture. Of course, one could also, in that context, adduce the much earlier and more cynical reflection on government of the same kind provided by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels, in which the high-ranking Laputans are constantly struck with bladders by their servants to prevent them from becoming caught up in reflection and force them to attend to daily affairs.

Multiple states across the country are attempting to magically fix falling levels of educational proficiency by fixing the numbers rather than fixing the state indoctrination system. Illinois has discovered that the state has been “misidentifying students as being ‘not proficient,’” while Wisconsin has found students “appearing to be doing worse than they really were.” The solution? Lower the proficiency standards and watch your numbers jump. Bonuses and awards for career bureaucrats all around and the continued sabotage of American intelligence. This is farcical. It really is another Sir Humphrey moment: “Minister, you said you wanted us to reduce the figures, so we reduced the figures.” It’s also reminiscent of how Sedona city staff rigged the numbers on the garage: after realizing they could never show 100 percent Uptown parking utilization, they lowered their standard for congestion to 80 percent utilization in order to create the illusion of a parking shortage they needed to solve. Bureaucrats are the same everywhere.

A Michigan legislator is championing two bills that would end the federal government’s assertion of warrantless access to private land for conservation purposes, a policy known as the “open fields” doctrine, which is being challenged in court in at least four other states. State bureaucrats have complained that requiring them to have a warrant for such access in compliance with the Fourth Amendment would impede their efforts to protect the land from its owners.

The new government of Bangladesh has sentenced the head of the old government of Bangladesh to death. This is, of course, the traditional procedure. A surplus of heads of state presents practical problems in headship for any government. In that light, the appropriate book of the moment must be Geoffrey Robertson’s The Tyrannicide Brief, a lawyer’s account of the life and career of John Cooke, the lawyer who prosecuted Charles I for the abuse of power: “Cooke’s case against the king was the first modern legal argument against tyranny...[based] on a universal legal right to punish a tyrant who denies democracy and civil and religious liberty to his people.”