Sedona cops trample First, Fourth Amendments

The classics ain’t fringe; Cultural Park gets pro bono lawyers; censorship at Crystal Vortex; Dowell was unprofessional; P&Z celebrates National Beer Day; and Cottonwood runs over OHV whiners

Shlomo Who?

Over at Tone Prose this week, Maestro Will has shared some highly pertinent comments by British talent agent William Norris on the comprehension gap between those active in the art world and those who, in modern society, choose to be passive consumers of rather than participants in the arts. Norris pointed out that the lack of public awareness of well-known artists and their work makes publicity campaigns that centrally feature such artists ineffective at filling a house; in particular, he cited one study in which members of a dance company estimated a choreographer’s named recognition among member of the general public as being approximately 40 percent when in fact it was less than 1 percent. One was painfully reminded, in reading, of how the Red Rocks Music Festival brought Shlomo Mintz, one of our era’s preeminent violin soloists, a genuinely world-class performer, to SPAC a few years ago and Sedona insulted him when only about eight or ten people turned up for some of the finest playing this town has ever heard.

However, Maestro Will then added, “I think my bigger takeaway from this article is that it’s refreshing to hear someone tell the collected population of internet-based classical music lovers just how weird and fringe they are.” It may be true that classical music lovers who actually know a bit about the subject have come to be considered “weird” and “fringe” in today’s society, but if that’s the case, it’s also the biggest problem of all and cannot be lightly passed over and accepted as “just the way things are.” Why should classical music be considered fringe—how can it be? The entire field of music is a continuum that ranges from folk to high classical; abortive branches such as commercialized pop songs or modernist orchestral experiments are musically meaningless and uninteresting precisely because they attempt to escape that continuum. They are not within the musical mainstream as defined by history and internal cohesion; the folk-classical continuum is the musical mainstream, employing the same principles and often the same tools for tens of thousands of years. A tradition of music-making as old as humanity is not “fringe,” and a society whose members are prepared to consider it “weird” has some serious self-evaluation to do if its population wishes to avoid a painful collapse. To be deprived of electricity would be one of the greatest benefits and possibly the greatest benefit this species could receive, as it would force humans to return to entertaining themselves by their own efforts, with consequent benefits to their cognition.

For the benefit of your cognition, Chamber Music Sedona will close out its season on Sunday, with artistic director Nick Canellakis doing musical comedy. (Have you seen his short film about that time his girlfriend got jealous of his new cello?) Tomorrow, Saturday, Verde Valley School will host its Spring Revel at 5:30 PM with music by cellists Hillary Smith and Christopher Ahn and pianist Nikos Syropoulos. Gutenberg! The Musical is playing at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre through Monday, and the Sedona Symphony’s pops concert will follow on the following Saturday, with the Red Rocks Music Festival at the JCSVV on April 19. The Fine Art Museum of Sedona will conclude its fundraising raffle for Christine Barr Carey’s Storyteller on April 20. Then take a breather until Piano on the Rocks opens May 1 at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre this year; if you’re on the Cottonwood side that weekend, the Verde Valley Voices will sing at Immaculate Conception on May 3.

See You in Court, Sedona

The Save Sedona Committee announced today that the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest has agreed to represent the committee pro bono in its legal fight to keep Proposition 403, the Cultural Park Preservation Act, on this July’s ballot. A hearing on the city of Sedona’s attempt to block the initiative will take place on Monday in Yavapai County Superior Court.

Committee organizers have cited the example of last year’s Proposition 484 process in Prescott, during which 84 percent of residents voted to designate land for open space preservation and which was not challenged by the city government as an unlawful rezoning, as an alternative to Sedona’s determination to keep its citizens from having a voice.

“On one hand, a nonprofit public interest law firm has stepped in to defend the constitutional rights of voters at no cost. On the other, the city is spending taxpayer dollars to prevent those same taxpayers from having a voice at the ballot box,” Bill Noonan of the Save Sedona Committee said. “At its core, this is about whether residents have the right to vote on an issue of clear public interest. It is difficult to ignore the irony that public funds are being used in an effort to stop a public vote on the future of public land.”

“This Center has long defended Arizonans’ constitutional rights to use the initiative and referenda processes against government attempts to curtail direct democracy. Here, that is exactly what the city of Sedona is trying to do: limit the people’s ability to have a meaningful voice in the future of the Sedona Cultural Park,” Nick Ansel of ACLPI stated.

Schizophrenics on the Force

Sedona’s finest are in even more hot water after an embarrassing incident in Uptown this week. After an operations manager for Sedona Crystal Vortex named Marsha began harassing a vlogger named Jason Gutterman, who was filming on the sidewalk in front of the chain’s Canyon Portal location, and Gutterman asked her to move away from him, she phoned the police. “I didn’t give you permission to take pictures of my store,” the Marsha character can be heard saying on Gutterman’s video. As even the ACLU notes, “Taking photographs and video of things that are plainly visible in public spaces is a constitutional right…If you’re not under arrest, a law enforcement officer needs a warrant to confiscate your device or to view its contents without your consent. If you are arrested, an officer may take your phone but still needs a warrant to search its contents.”

Jesse Alexander of Sinagua Plaza and Canyon Portal then claimed “this is private property and there is a preference we do not film here” and asked Gutterman and his son to leave or stop filming. Gutterman agreed to leave the store’s property and said he would move to the sidewalk; Alexander protested that the sidewalk was also his private property.

“You think you own the sidewalk?” Gutterman asked.

“I know we do,” Alexander said.

When a Comrade Klafin of the Sedona paramilitary showed up, Gutterman repeated Alexander’s claim that he “leases the sidewalk” and the Klafin character demanded identification.

“Am I being detained?” Gutterman asked.

“You are not being detained, but we are conducting an investigation at this point,” Klafin responded.

“Well, if you do decide to detain me, and I have a lawful obligation to give you ID, I will,” Gutterman responded.

Klafin then demanded Gutterman spell his name.

“Am I free to go?” Gutterman asked.

“At this point, you are not free to go,” Klafin said.

“So at this point, I’m being detained?” Gutterman demanded.

“You are being detained,” Klafin said.

“You sure you want to do that? Detaining me for taking pictures on a sidewalk?” Gutterman continued.

“We’re not detaining you,” Klafin said. “You’re being detained while we’re conducting an investigation.”

Comrade Willadsen then jumped in to repeat what he had been told by Alexander and refused to allow Gutterman to explain his side of the story until he handed over an ID. Gutterman handed it over; Willadsen then proceeded to claim that “this property you’re currently on is leased by them,” referring to the sidewalk outside Canyon Portal and Sinagua Plaza. “They don’t want you arrested, so you’re trespassed.”

“Trespassed from the public sidewalk?” Gutterman clarified.

Willadsen told Gutterman that Alexander would “explain to you where his property is that you’re currently on.”

“And you’re going to take his word for that?” Gutterman wanted to know.

“Yeah,” Willadsen said.

“You’re going to allow him to convince you that the public sidewalk is his property?” Gutterman pursued. Willadsen insisted that Comrade Dickey had told him that “this is a privately-owned sidewalk.”

“There’s no such thing as a privately-owned sidewalk,” Gutterman retorted. The cops informed him he was still being detained while Willadsen was on the phone with Comrade Foley.

Alexander continued to insist that the sidewalk from Don Diego onwards was private property; the cops complied with his demands by telling Gutterman to leave the sidewalk and that he would not be allowed so much as to walk down it to return to his truck.

“Let’s go off the public sidewalk,” Willadsen stated while trying to get rid of Gutterman, and Willadsen and Klafin then hustled him out of the area.

A glance at the Coconino County GIS map shows that the entirety of the sidewalk along the east side of SR 89A, from Don Diego—which is owned by Atherton Ventures, not Canyon Portal or Sinagua Plaza—north to the Sedona Arts Center, lies within the city’s public right-of-way. One small portion of the sidewalk in front of Don Diego is privately owned. The remainder, including the sidewalk outside Sinagua Plaza, is public land. The city’s ownership of this right-of-way is why city staff were able to install the Amara turn lane three years ago without a land acquisition process.

Gutterman posted the video on his Youtube channel on Thursday morning; as of Thursday night, it had received more than 200,000 views, and by publication time on Friday, it had received more than 270,000 views. One wonders what Sedona’s minister for propaganda Comrade Maffitt plans to do to counter that kind of reach.

Gutterman’s channel, by the way, is incredibly annoying with its degree of monetization, and his behavior was deliberately abrasive—but that doesn’t matter. Sedona’s stormtroopers are paid enormous salaries to put up with abrasive behavior, among other things, and in theory to understand the difference between abrasive behavior and violations of statute.

So now some Uptown business owners apparently think the Sedona police are their private security team they can call to arrest people for legally filming and photographing in public places? Are we New York City now, where NYPD closed off large segments of public thoroughfares to turn them into private patios for private restaurants? I’ve never heard of this Gutterman guy before; he comes off like some kind of fringe nut; but if this is really what some of these business owners are trying to pull, I’m going to start walking around and filming them just for the hell of it. People come into the store where I work and take pictures and video all the time. It’s their right. It’s this little thing called freedom of speech and information that normal Americans and normal humans respect.

Of course, the subtext here is that this guy was filming in front of Sedona Crystal Vortex—and the crystal shops really don’t want exposes of their fraud going up on Youtube. The incident can also be read as further expenditure of city funds on protecting and perpetuating pseudoscience.

The city of Sedona’s response so far has been to post on its Facebook page that a public meeting on the consultant’s report intended to whitewash SPD’s abuses and Comrade Foley’s incompetence will take place on the evening of Thursday, April 16. The top comment as of yesterday evening was from Greg Anderson: “How do we get to this public meeting? I’m worried I’ll be arrested for walking on the sidewalk.” Mike Jones replied, “You have to walk in the street. All public sidewalks are leased.”

Former deputy police chief Ryan Kwitkin, who is currently suing the city and Foley for violating his own First Amendment rights, pointed out that even on a private sidewalk within a public space, an individual has no expectation of privacy, that the only thing Gutterman could have been doing was trespassing, and that when he was asked to leave the private property, he promptly departed for an adjoining public property. As he was on public property when Sedona police confronted him and they observed him committing no crime, Kwitkin stated, they violated his constitutional rights by at first attempting to prevent him from leaving and taking his identification: “They had no lawful reason to detain that man.”

Kwitkin identified First and Fourth Amendment violations in the SPD officers’ behavior as well as poor police tactics, lack of knowledge of the law, and purposeful endangerment in their reactions towards Gutterman. He also confirmed that the stretch of sidewalk in question in Uptown is city property regardless of the city’s informal agreement with businesses to allow them to place furniture up to the edge of the sidewalk.

The Willadsen character involved, incidentally, is the same one who’s allegedly on the Brady list, was disciplined for turning off his body camera while on duty, is on video pulling over, handcuffing, and screaming at a motorist without even having his motorcycle lights on, and once wrote an 82-year-old resident four tickets for an improper lane change.

Square Dowell, Round Hole

In yet another illustration of how transparent and forthcoming Sedona city staff are, no announcement has yet been made by city staff regarding the outcome of their recently-concluded investigation of former deputy police chief Comrade Dowell for professional misconduct. After last fall’s disclosures of internal city documents showed Dowell supporting his predecessor Ryan Kwitkin’s complaints about Comrade Foley’s misconduct, and mention of Dowell’s comments appeared in the Verde Independent on November 28, Kwitkin forwarded the story to a number of city officials and staff, including Dowell, on November 29. Dowell responded to Kwitkin within the hour, “Cease and desist with any further comments about me immediately or find yourself on the other side of a civil lawsuit for slander and defamation. This is the only warning you will be receiving from me.”

Kwitkin in turn responded by filing a November 29 personnel complaint against Dowell. “Threats of litigation from a public official are a violation of Sedona Police Department policy…The words I sent were not mine and actually many of the words he is referring to are directly from his own mouth. I can provide the audio/tape of Commander Dowell if necessary. This does not constitute slander or defamation.”

During his disciplinary interview, Dowell attempted to justify his response by claiming Kwitkin’s email “contained something in it I believe is untrue about myself. I believe at this point it has become harassing, defaming. I’m just tired of being bombarded with…nonfactual comments about myself, I just don’t want to be part of it…I don’t want to be part of the drama.” Good to know that Dowell’s detachment from objective reality has now reached the point at which he thinks his own official on-the-record statements are both untrue and nonfactual. What is perhaps more alarming in someone supposedly tasked with administering the law is that Dowell appears to believe that the truthfulness of a statement is not automatically a defense against a charge of slander—whereas the law is extremely clear that the truth of a statement is such a defense.

Kwitkin had accused Dowell of having violated SPD policy 26.2.1.D.4—“City electronic communication systems shall not be used in any way that is offensive, harmful, or insulting to any person”—and the city’s employee manual, section 1401.C: “E-mail shall not be used for unethical, illegal, unprofessional, or disruptive activities.” Comrade Penner, now Dowell’s replacement, who conducted the investigation, determined that while Dowell’s response “was not harmful or insulting,” it was “unprofessional given his leadership position within the city and the fact that he was aware of the current litigation between Kwitkin and the city of Sedona” and sustained Kwitkin’s allegation on the second ground. However, while the allegation was sustained, city documents indicate that no disciplinary action was taken against Dowell for his unprofessional conduct.

Although the investigation was conducted last December, city staff did not notify Kwitkin of the findings until April 1, more than three weeks after the filing of a public records request to obtain the results of this and other investigations into Dowell’s conduct at the city. “I hope the investigation into Commander Dowell’s racist airline pilot comment he made to Erin Loeffler is made available when completed,” Kwitkin had written in his original email to city officials; no documents relating to such an investigation were released by city staff.

And, as if city bureaucracy could get any dumber, city staff are redacting my own email address in copies of emails I’ve already received from others when those emails are released to me as public records. This use of time and resources is what we pay $103 million a year in public funds to underwrite.

One wonders whether a previous accusation of unprofessional conduct at a previous job is a prerequisite for employment by the city of Sedona.

Come to think of it, it’s been what, six months now, that the Verde Independent has been looking for an editor? You’d think someone would jump at the chance to do all the things the Red Rock News isn’t doing.

The Silence of the Lambs

Apparently Comrade Segner is now branding the legal democratic process provided to us by state law the “tyranny of a minority.” I’d love to see how many signatures he and his cronies could come up with on a counter-petition supporting construction of market-rate housing for sale to non-Sedonans at the Cultural Park. There’s been no petition for that going around—and somehow I suspect there never will be. It would be a very bad look for some.

No Opinions, Please

There is still no budget survey up on the city website, and it looks as if city staff have no intention of putting one up ere the draft budget comes before that gang calling themselves the city council next week. Public comments will be crammed into the first thirty minutes of next Wednesday’s special meeting and, in another sign of council disdain for the public, will be limited to two minutes apiece, allowing members of the public no time to make any kind of a comprehensive argument against the budget. They play so fair.

Bringing Life to the Neighborhood

The Planning and Zoning Commission celebrated National Beer Day on Tuesday with the unanimous approval of a perfectly-timed application from commissioner Kali Gajewski of Basecamp for a conditional use permit that would allow for regular outdoor events. Gajewski described the permit as necessary to an effort “to do more regular events, more creative events, and add another place for locals and visitors to have music and movies and just fun things that I can’t currently do outside…a space where we can do really fun things that aren’t happening elsewhere.” She discussed planned collaborations with the Sedona International Film Festival, which held outdoor screenings at Basecamp last year, and plans to expand community trivia nights during the summer, as well as Basecamp’s previous events with the library.

“I just don’t know what I’m going to be asked for,” Gajewski said in regard to potential future events, explaining that she wanted to have flexibility “so when those local nonprofits come to me and ask for something…I can say yes.”

“This is a no-brainer,” Patrick Schweiss of SIFF told the commission. “We were able to reach an entirely new demographic…her supporters became our supporters and vice versa…I hope this is indefinite beyond the three years,” adding that Gajewski offered an “incredible business model.”

“We would love to have it. It would bring a little life to the neighborhood. The music that we’ve heard so far has been great,” neighbor Nick Nancy said. “We don’t mind the noise and it’s not much noise at all. We would love to have another place to walk.”

“I do have some ambivalence,” a person who identified herself as Andrea Mattie, the owner of a vacant property somewhere in the area, said before mentioning “concerns about the commercial being squeezed into our neighborhood. There’s a big homeless problem going on in the wash,” without connecting her remarks to Basecamp’s application. She later complained that allowing movies to run until 10 PM “seems a little late.”

In their enthusiasm for the project, the commission bumped city staff’s proposed three-year limit on the CUP to five years prior to approving the permit.

The commission’s subsequent discussion of land development code updates and city staff’s new draft housing study indicated a degree of awareness on the commission’s part of the unnecessary obstacles that city code places in the way of having fun in Sedona.

“Many people move here, but they always move away,” commissioner Harmony Walker commented, arguing that Sedona’s demographic problem is not about building houses but rather about getting people to stay for the long-term. “There are people and young families that can afford to live here, but why would they?”

“We do a really good job of regulating fun here, and we need to stop that…if I’m a teenager, that’s all I really care about,” Tony Allender of community undevelopment pointed out before referring to the Basecamp permit: “The fact that we had to have a conditional use permit to have entertainment is to me a boneheaded thing.”

“Two thousand dollars,” Gajewski remarked.

“You could get a good band out here for that,” Allender commented.

“We seem to be on the dull side,” Jo Martin agreed. “There’s no way for entrepreneurs to think outside of retail here.”

“Let’s go after code that makes it not fun. I want fun written into code,” Gajewski suggested. If that’s the case, repeal the noise ordinance, which is the number-one piece of code used to kill fun in this town.

What is really staggering to the observer is to watch all these people talk perfectly sanely and rationally about the lack of participatory activities and entertainment that are undermining Sedona’s community cohesion and trying to reconcile it with their willingness to destroy the Cultural Park for millionaires’ housing and non-arts and culture uses—as if restoration of the Cultural Park was not the most significant thing this city could possibly do to attract families and revitalize community engagement and cohesion. Draw your own conclusions about how sincere they’re being.

The discussion also saw two of the commissioners questioning why the city should be involved in attempting to manage the housing supply at all.

“I don’t know if it’s really the city’s place to help me live better, and I don’t know that it’s the city’s place to take my house and put it back into the supply chain,” Martin stated. “It’s not really the government’s job. How does the government of Sedona help a cost-burdened senior citizen living in a house they can’t afford? They don’t.”

“We recognize that we don’t control the market, and we’re not trying to control the market,” Allender admitted, in another apparent reversal of city staff and council’s attitude for the last few years on trying to impose deed restrictions and buy up commercial land and so forth in an effort to control the housing market.

“I don’t know how you achieve some of these things without the city becoming a landlord, and I think cities shouldn’t be landlords…I don’t know if any of this is achievable,” Rob Smith commented. He added that a city effort to reduce the retired proportion of Sedona’s population “seems futile to me.”

“How does anybody write words to get results in the built form? That’s very difficult,” Smith additionally challenged. “The bigger question for me is, do we want to do that?…Zooming way out, should we be legislating the look of Sedona when we don’t know what the look is?”

“People have said, we love our homes, we really don’t want to leave,” Allender agreed.

“People aren’t downsizing, so those starter homes, those growing homes, aren’t becoming available…which is complicated in town where our average home size is big,” Gajewski pointed out.

“This feels like an affordability issue more than a housing supply issue,” Gajewski continued, putting her finger on one way of phrasing the problem. “We have an increase in housing supply but not in the hypothetical people to live in them.”

She urged the commission and city to drop the idea of large blocks of housing. “I don’t want the solution to be large developers, thirty-year timeline, and scrape…Portland did the backyard houses, and they’ve had a reduction in rental costs…that’s kind of the things I’m thinking about…How many people’s kids or grandkids would move into a one- or two-bedroom backyard cottage?”

Commission chairman Sarah Wiehl was the very first person to ask the obvious question about the study, which the entire city council and school board missed, of “how did we get from 1,800 to 600?”

“Really it’s a difference in philosophy,” Allender said, explaining that the previous studies attempted to estimate the number of cost-burdened households in the area, while the new draft primarily considered the question of how many units were theoretically needed to prop up the population levels for the state indoctrination system to keep it from losing any more funding. In other words, it was the result of a design assumption decision.

Smith questioned the draft study’s optimism by including 221 apartments and condos currently under construction due to their high cost. “This basically says for half the units being built, only nurses and doctors can afford to live there,” Smith pointed out.

“We can achieve all of this almost exclusively within two stories,” Allender suggested of the approximately-500-unit assessment.

“I think we need to change the narrative on density. I think it needs to not be a scary word,” Wiehl suggested, which is actually quite an important point. Maintaining small-town character is not a function of either population or density but rather of how those attributes are managed—with freedom and without overregulation. I grew up about thirty minutes from Kalispell, Montana, then the seventh-largest city in the state, with around 15,000 people, and that was more of a small town back then than Sedona is today, with bars that still had sawdust on the floor, a newspaper stand on main street, and fields running right up to the houses. Forget Sedona’s namby-pamby allocation of funds to buy a bulletproof bench for its municipal courtroom; there was no court security in Montana back in my day and judges carried on the bench because they didn’t know who in the courtroom might also be packing.

It was entirely predictable when Allender mentioned that when residents talk about how they want Sedona to look in the future, “what they talk about is what sedona looked like in 2000.” If that’s the case—and it is—then for the love of God in heaven, just put things back the way they were. It’s not that hard to do.

Martin commented during the session that the concept of building housing at the Dells was “gaining a lot of momentum in the community” and should be formally discussed by the city at some point.

Other remarks during the meeting were less sensible.

“There is not a chance for that individual to live here,” Allender commented with regard to a hypothetical scenario in which a teacher earning around $54,000 would thereby be able to afford a $173,000 house. Yes, there is a perfectly good chance, if you ditch the sets of bureaucrat-serving, profiteer-serving assumptions that make homes cost far more to buy than they actually cost to build. That teacher could build himself a home for $50,000 to $75,000 in land costs and around $20,000 in materials costs if allowed to do so by city code—mostly by the removal of the planning requirements in the DREAM and the lot split prohibition in the LDC. Assuming, of course, that the teacher in question was intelligent enough to know and be able to practice one of humanity’s most basic skill sets.

Will Hirst made the remark that “the pay is pathetic” for teachers—what universe is he in? What does he think is fair pay, and would he extend that to paying a laundry attendant whatever he thinks is fair pay for a teacher? Differential pay rates for the same number of hours of labor is simple bigotry; an hour of human time is an hour of human time, period. No form of labor is more or less special than another or deserves pay at higher or lesser rates than any other on a temporal basis. To presume otherwise would be to assume a fundamentally illogical inequality among human beings.

Allender also announced that the beginning of the code critique process will be delayed from the middle of this month until the end of the month or the beginning of next month. A consultant, yet to be selected at a cost of $300,000, will be selected in September or October and will require a full year to produce a new code at that rate. “That’s not an unreasonable number to ask,” Allender claimed, falling back on the old argument that staff don’t have time to rewrite their own rules because of all the other projects they’re doing. That’s easy to solve; we’ll vote home rule down and get rid of all the other projects they’re doing.

Martin repeatedly made the Leninist-inflected remark that “folks don’t understand” why hiring unnecessary consultants saves the city money and said the community needed to be lobbied to understand why its affairs should be handed over to outside “experts.” No, the community understands very well—we just disagree completely. Tony Allender has experience writing codes; that’s literally his job. He should do it. That’s what he’s paid for.

Unto Dust Thou Shalt Return

Over in Cottonhood, anti-Western bigotry is rearing its head again after the Planning and Zoning Commission approved a noncontroversial conditional use permit for an OHV rental lot in a commercial area on January 26. Resident Chris Archer filed an appeal of the decision on February 9, making the usual claims about unbearable noise, intense dust, and diminished property values that we in Sedona have to put up with from that 7 percent or 8 percent of the population who hate others having fun. However, as Sedona’s own latest OHV study revealed, the average noise volume generated by OHVs is well below levels at which hearing damage can occur, being comparable to that of a lawnmower, or less than 1 percent of the level at which risk of injury occurs. Dust concentrations related to OHV traffic were also found to be well below federal health guidelines.

That gang calling themselves the Cottonwood city council heard the appeal on March 17 and concluded by a vote of five to two, after a fringe group of residents wasted more than two hours of the rest of the community’s time, that P&Z had decided correctly in granting the permit.

“They actually had more letters of support than we had public comments this evening,” mayor Ann Shaw pointed out to the audience with regard to the application. “I don’t have a reason to overturn their CUP.” Felicia Coates said the noise levels were consistent with the noise from traffic already traveling on city streets.

Bob Marks noted that no one had presented data refuting the applicant’s statements about his expected volume, instead contenting themselves with expressing baseless disbelief in the application. “You have to make a decision here: who are you gonna believe?” Marks demanded of attendees. “Who here has presented data showing he’s renting more than three ATVs a day?” No one in the audience could answer the question to his satisfaction.

“I have worked in Sedona for the last year and a half,” Sedona’s former deputy police chief Comrade Dowell, who is double-dipping on Cottonwood council, said, before adding that his experience in Sedona had trained him to buckle under to minority groups of noisy whiners rather than respecting the law.

If nothing else, this incident demonstrates yet again that most of the noise in our neighborhoods is generated not by OHVs but by fragile snowflakes whining about OHVs. Salt for the unlamented Comrade Jablow’s wounds, please. Guess none of the other mayors and councils in the area were really so concerned about the whole nonexistent OHV disaster when they didn’t have a retired investment banker’s lobbyist riding them about it all the time.

Artemisia Vulgaris

This week in demonstrations of unutterable pettiness and tininess, the American imperium and its castrated leaders are rejoicing because their psychopaths-in-charge have managed, at the cost of billions in public funds spent to maintain bad hardware decades out of date, to send four canned primates on a loop around the moon. And it’s apparently the farthest humans have ever traveled from earth. What a completely pathetic “achievement” to celebrate. Sixty-five years since the first human orbited the planet, and the farthest we’ve been able to get yet is 252,756 miles. Disgraceful. That’s an average of 3,886 miles a year since the first man in orbit in 1961. You could walk farther in a year. It was taken for granted in the 1950s that landing on the other planets of our system was only a few years away and landings on planets orbiting other stars only a few decades beyond that. Here we are, in 2026, still stuck on this one damn rock. What happened? Now even that high-functioning psychopath Elon Musk has reeled back his Mars ambitions and is talking about the moon as the end goal. How the hell is any of this mucking about with rockets in the local neighborhood going to get us to other habitable planets—or get us to developing the jump drives needed to get to other habitable planets?

Isaac Asimov, for all his preferences for urbanism and totalitarianism, was nevertheless clever enough to realize, as he explored in The End of Eternity, that if humans spend indefinite amounts of time dawdling over their comforts and their phobias and thereby delay going to space, all of the other spacefaring species in the galaxy are liable to get to the available planets first—and what will that leave mankind with as a future? A self-inflicted xenocide from boredom, drowning in its own juices on one little planet in “the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy.”

This Civilization is Toast

This week in performative distractions and the myth of infinite technological progress, we have some nut at the Guardian rejoicing that unspecified “scientists” have now “developed gene-edited wheat that can be used to make bread that is less carcinogenic when toasted.” The story, of course, completely omitted any reference to any putative evidence that toasted bread has been empirically linked to cancer, or that exposure to the levels of acrylamide—this week’s minor chemical de scandale—found in wheat or bread were associated with an increased risk of cancer, or even that acrylamide itself has been definitely shown to be a carcinogen. The mere presence of a toxin in a consumed substance does not imply toxic effects to the consumer. You know what else contains toxic compounds? Chocolate. About 80 percent of the complex flavor compounds that occur in chocolate are not approved for use in foods by the FDA, including at least one cyanide-based compound. And yet here we are—because chemistry isn’t magic and dosage determines effects.

But sure, let’s waste time and resources on quantifying the incredibly tiny potential cancer risk from toasted bread and then reworking an entire industry to eliminate it via the unnecessary complexity of gene-editing technology—while blithely ignoring the fact that the nitrate fertilizers used to grow that wheat are probably the single most dangerous collection of chemicals ever employed by humans. Nitrate fertilizers, whether chemical or organic—and prior to 1913, almost all high-nitrogen fertilizers were organic—destroy farmland, poison water supplies, kill off fisheries, cause neurological problems in humans, encourage weed and pest growth, drive levels of overproduction conducive to tyranny, render small farms dependent on a mechanized global economy, and are in all probability one of the key causes of the rapid rise in sterility that some individuals see as a personal and existential threat. Yet the continued use of nitrates and high-input farming is taken for granted by the performative freaks who are prepared to dance in the streets because the tiny risk posed by a naturally-occurring chemical can be reduced.

Ultimately, such an attitude reflects how the city-dwellers genuinely fear nature and the natural regardless of how much lip service they pay to the wonders and the beauties of nature—because they are prepared to accept the dangers of their own stupidity without concern simply because they manufactured those dangers themselves and are comfortable with them as a consequence. It also reflects this urban-industrial society’s carefully-studied unwillingness to acknowledge its systemic problems. Cancer risk? Let’s look for a trivial trace compound in nature rather than acknowledging every human industrial activity is more toxic than anything in nature short of an exploding volcano. New pandemic? Blame it on a lab leak or the unwillingness of the population to blindly follow government orders; never mind that epidemic diseases didn’t exist before humans jammed themselves and domestic animals into a bunch of cities. Global warming? Pretend that getting an electric car and putting weather stripping on your house will magically eliminate the consumer industry’s ceaseless appetite for carbon-emitting products. Environmental toxins? So much easier to believe that a government composed of incredibly stupid people is engaged in a vast conspiracy to poison its own human resources rather than blaming the industrial plant down the road. The participants in modern urban-industrial societies, and Americans in particular, work very hard to deny that their societies are the problem and to pretend that small tweaks to the system would solve all of its problems; such an evasion is absolutely false and irrational. Every political, economic, and social problem of the present stems from the existence of coercive urban-industrial societies and cannot be eliminated without eliminating such societies. Traditional cultures, here we come.