Desert Dispatches

By Christian Probasco, 11-28-06

“You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.”
--Spencer Tracy as Henry Drummond, Inherit the Wind.

Bad news for Mitt Romney: a poll conducted by the LA Times and Bloomberg found that 35% of registered voters would not even consider voting for a Mormon for President, according to an article in Time. The Southern Baptist Convention categorizes the Latter-Day Saints as a “cult or sect.” That’s not very friendly, is it? Many people still associate the Mormon Church, which does not endorse political candidates, with polygamy and discrimination against women and blacks. The recent capture of polygamist prophet Warren Jeffs probably hasn’t improved the church’s image. One last time: Jeffs is not LDS, he is F (Fundamentalist) LDS. Gosh!

The Defense Department is going forward again with plans for the “Divine Strake” blast at the Nevada Test Site, known to locals as “the most nuked place on earth.” The detonation of 700 tons of ammonium nitrate-fuel oil (ANFO) is meant to simulate the explosion of a “bunker-busting” weapon, i.e. a conventional or even nuclear device which could take out a deeply buried facility such as you might find in Iran, say, or North Korea.

Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) Director James Tegnelia, in a briefing with congressmen from “several states” but NOT NEVADA, explained that radiation exposure from the blast would be “2000 times less than a single chest x-ray,” and that dust levels at the border of the Test Site and Nye and Lincoln counties would be “1000 times lower” than those allowed by the Clean Air Act, according to an article in the Las Vegas Sun.

Says Nevada Representative Shelley Berkley: “Those people must be breathing in the fumes from former nuclear bomb blasts at the Nevada Test Site if they think this is a done deal.”

Also opposing the blast: the Shoshone Tribe, which believes it exerts some ownership rights over the Test Site as part of its “ancestral lands,” and the Union of Concerned Scientists, whose position is that Divine Strake is a mockup for an atomic attack and therefore represents an expansion of the United States’ nuclear capabilities, and Citizen Alert, a local organization whose motto is “Nevada is not a wasteland.”

Says Peggy Maze Johnson, executive director of Citizen Alert, “How can we believe anything they are saying? That’s the bottom line. I hate to say it, but do I trust the government? No, I don’t. We really cannot trust them.”

To which I will respond: “Do you, Peggy Maze Johnson, really believe the government would lie to us about the possibility of radioactive fallout?”

The DTRA is expected to release a revised environmental analysis in December, at which point there will be a 30 day public comment period. Meanwhile, the results of the analysis and the objections of downwinders and others suing to stop the blast will be brought before Federal Judge Lloyd George. The Defense Department expects to have the legal aspect of things wrapped up sometime in mid-January. At some later, but not too later date, according to Tegnelia, Divine Strake will send a “mushroom cloud over Las Vegas.”

There is a magnitude 7 earthquake somewhere in Las Vegas’ future, says Launce Rake of the Las Vegas Sun. Such a tremor could kill “hundreds of people and do more than $10 billion in damage.” As University of Nevada, Las Vegas assistant professor of seismology Catherine Snelson puts it, “We live in the nice big valley, and we kind of look at it like a bowl of Jell-O.”

In terms of seismic activity, Nevada ranks third in the country, behind Alaska and California. In terms of “potential economic loss” from earthquakes, Nevada ranks fifth.

The good news? Ron Lynn, supervisor of Clark County building division and chairman of the Nevada Earthquake Safety Council says there are no unreinforced masonry buildings—the most vulnerable to earthquake damage--in Clark County and only about five dozen across Nevada.

The weird news: the Sierra Nevada mountains, and presumably all of California, is crawling northward at a half-inch per year relative to the rest of the country. At that rate, the entire population of Los Angeles will be relocated to Seattle 145 million years from now. Is anybody doing anything about this?

Oink. Lisa Mascaro of the Las Vegas Sun says that in the last six years, Nevada has gone from 17th place to 8th in terms of “pork procurement,” with $166 million of bacon, this due to our beloved Senator Harry Reid. With his imminent rise to the position of Senate majority leader, the sky is the limit. Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, publisher of the “Pig Book,” which ranks states by their porcine proclivities, expects to see relatively sparsely populated Nevada break into the top five, i.e. the top ten percent, in the near future. Jon Summers, spokesman for Reid says his boss “makes no apologies for delivering for Nevada.” Take that, taxpayers of America!

Roger Barnett, rancher and former sheriff’s deputy, who carries an assault rifle in his pickup and boasts of capturing over 12,000 illegal aliens on his ranch and surrounding property near Douglas, Arizona, was fined $98,750 for detaining Mexican-Americans hunting on state land that he was leasing, according to an article by New York Times reporter Randal C. Archibold. The hunters’ lawyer, Jesus Romo Vejar, says, “We have really, truly breached their defense and this opens up the Barnetts to other attorneys to come in and sue him whenever he does some wrong (sic) with people.”

But just what is “some wrong?” Barnett appears to have gone over the line (so to speak) this time, but did he do some wrong in all the other cases where he held at gunpoint immigrants who had crossed into his personal property, and into the country, illegally?

Chuy Rodriguez, spokesman for the Border Patrol’s Tucson office, asks concerned citizens not to try to enforce the law themselves. “If they see something,” he says, “we ask them to call us, like we would ask of any citizen.” In other words, the Border Patrol will take care of the trespassers. Like they’ve been taking care of them all along. But if you get a lot of illegal immigrants on your property, often, doesn’t that suggest that the Border Patrol won’t take care of them? Or that it has no intention of taking care of them? Why, then, would you call the Border Patrol?

Should the Border Patrol be taking care of illegal immigrants? Should somebody else be taking care of them? Should they be left to take care of themselves? If we take care of them, who will take care of us? The nation continues to watch and wonder.

National news with particular import for Westerners, who resent government intrusions in their lives: According to another article in the New York Times, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD), the Governors Highway Safety Association and the Bush Administration are seriously considering the possibility of mandating passive alcohol detection sensors “in all cars.” Says the association’s chairman, Christopher J. Murphy, “When 40 percent of all our crashes are alcohol-involved, I don’t think it’s going to be that difficult of a sell.”

Really? Well then God help us all.




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