Month: July 2017

My uncle F. S. Pettyjohn Jr. was born in 1915 in a sod house on the White River of South Dakota, just north of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.  When his mother, Mary MacNamara Pettyjohn died after giving birth to her ninth child, he quarreled with his father, and left home at the age of twelve.

In 1941 he was an Army Sergeant stationed in Cut and Shoot, Texas.  When a new paratroop division was formed in 1942, the 82nd Airborne, he was an original member.  By the end of the war, 90% of these soldiers were casualties.  He fought from North Africa to Berlin, jumping at Anzio, Normandy, and Holland.

The Holland jump was part of Operation Market Garden, and the 82nd was surrounded by SS units of the Wehrmacht for eleven days.  They were saved when the Canadians broke through to rescue them.

When he came to Alaska after the war he was known simply as Pettyjohn, as he was in the army.  After re-upping for the Korean War, he came back to Alaska.  He prospected, and in 1952 succeeded in locating the McLaren River copper deposit, which was subsequently thoroughly explored.  Low copper prices prevented it from being developed.

In the early 1950’s he was part of Tennessee Miller’s road construction crew which built an ice and snow road from Fairbanks to the North Slope.  This road was for supplies needed for the construction of the Distant Early Warning Line of radar sites.  Prior to the pipeline, the DEW line was the biggest construction project in Alaska, and was completed in 1959.

While on the North Slope he met and worked with the local Inupiat, and got to know them well, and to admire them.  He liked their toughness, and their sense of humor.  He never forgot their primitive living conditions, and their ingenuity and resourcefulness.

He’d been wounded out a couple times during the war, and his body bore the scars of combat.  But the worse scars were in his mind, and he drank excessively, and was a violent man.  He was 5′ 10″, 245 pounds, with a 53 inch chest, and the main reason he wasn’t behind bars was because of the respect that law enforcement had for his war record.

In the mid 1950’s he returned to South Dakota and married his first cousin, Helen Mary Mitchell, who was one quarter Oglala Sioux.  For her, he quit drinking, and they ran a roadhouse midway on the Richardson Highway.  He became the host of an Anchorage morning television show, “Breakfast in Bedlam”.

Later he wrote and published “Alaskana”, a complimentary newspaper supported by ads.  It was given to passengers flying to Alaska, and distributed to schools.  It was the story of Alaska, and its Natives, from the earliest days.  He wrote most of the stories himself, and was a talented writer.

He continued prospecting, and made a living selling his claims to people wanting to have the right to build a cabin in the Alaska bush.  Any amount of gold was a legal discovery, and he could find gold anywhere.

His passion was the Natives of America, and his intention was that they be treated fairly and respectfully.  His wife, Helen Mary, had a steady income as a secretary for the Federal Aviation Administration, and when they bought a nice home in south Anchorage he paid for a portrait artist to show him in a full Oglala Sioux costume.

Pettyjohn claimed to be part Native American, but it wasn’t true.  His mother was the daughter of Irish immigrants, and his father could trace his ancestors back to Virginia in 1635.  He had no Indian blood, but the portrait of him as a Sioux Indian hung above his fireplace.

Like Pettyjohn, I am named for his father, and I came to Alaska to meet him in 1969.  After going to law school I returned with my wife Babbie in 1974, with an intention of becoming a United States Senator.  I figured I’d have a hard time ever raising any money, so I decided to get into the state legislature and make a name for myself as the most conservative politician in the state.

I worked on the Reagan campaign in 1976, and came to the attention of Bill McConkey, who was running Gov. Jay Hammond’s reelection campaign.  He asked me to come to work on the campaign, which I was glad to do.

Right before the August primary against Hickel and Fink, Bill asked me to form an imaginary volunteer group, Hands for Hammond.  He then asked me to issue a press release, in which I accused Wally Hickel of running for governor as a stepping stone to the White House.  My uncle had told me that Hickel looked down on the Natives, so I was happy to do it.

The Anchorage Daily News was in on the plot, and ran a big story about my charge.  Hickel reacted as expected, over the top, confirming what everyone already knew about him.  He lost to Hammond by 98 votes.

Ideologically, I was a Tom Fink Republican, and some people just thought I was an opportunist to work for Jay Hammond.  But they didn’t know my uncle, Pettyjohn.

 

 

In early America the Europeans who settled the land, by occupying and farming it, had a very hard life.  A man worked from sunrise to sunset, at tedious and sometimes strenuous physical labor.  It was common for a man to work himself to death in his 30’s.

The American Natives had a different lifestyle, that of largely nomadic hunter gatherers, with a very little agriculture.  A man’s job was to hunt, fish, and fight.  The rest of the work was for women.  The men had a lot of time off.

Some young white boys on the frontier thought being an Indian looked pretty good, and ran off to become one.  If they passed the tests of manhood the Natives put them through, they were adopted, and came into the tribe.  A few were prominent in the wars with the Indians, fighting against their own people on behalf of their adopted one.

Some of the old mountain men took the side of the Natives, and fought the United States Army on behalf of them.  One such, Captain Bob North, led a war party of Sioux and Arapahoe in battle against the Cavalry near Fort Kearny, Wyoming in 1866.  He was shot from his horse, and carried off by the Sioux.

Jack Clybar was a member of the Seventh Calvary who was left for dead by his companions, and rescued by the Sioux.  He recovered, was adopted into the tribe, and given the name Comanche, which was a compliment.  He fought at Little Big Horn under Crazy Horse.

A lot of Native American men would like to live like their ancestors, as subsistence hunters and fishermen.  Very few are actually able to do this without governmental financial assistance.  But they hang on nonetheless, living a reservation lifestyle.

Eskimo men had no leisure time.  They outworked any white man, and showed as much ingenuity and resourcefulness as any people on earth.  Physician and anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson, of Iceland, spent fifteen years with the Eskimos.  He found no sign of cancer.  His discovery is documented in Cancer:  Disease of Civilization?  They were the healthiest people on earth.

The life of an Eskimo was a daily struggle for survival.  These people had an incredible will to live, to survive.  If survival requires flexibility, they can be flexible.  They adapt, in order to survive.  They are natural capitalists.

 

Why are Indians so poor?  This link to an old Forbes article tells the tale.  American Indians had a communal lifestyle, and don’t take easily to capitalism.  Indian reservations are models of socialism.  They’re a disgrace.  But the Indian elders don’t want to change.  They’d rather be dirt poor together, than prosperous apart.

The Indians of interior Alaska are Athabaskans, and many of them share the attitude of their Apache cousins in the lower 48.  Everyone I ever knew in Alaska wanted all of Alaska’s Natives to avoid the fate of the tribes down south.  But many interior Alaska villages are no better today than those awful reservations.

The Athabascans came to Alaska first, followed around three thousand years ago by the Yupik Eskimo and their cousins, the Aleut.  Then, around 1,000 years ago, came the Inupiat Eskimo, a Thule people related to the far north Arctic Eskimo of Canada and Greenland.

The Yupik, especially, came into conflict with the Athabascans as they settled western and southwestern Alaska, and warfare on the boundary of the two peoples was common.  They are two different cultures, and they very much want to stay that way.

The Inupiat, the Thule people who settled the North Slope, didn’t need to fight the Athabascans for the land, because there were no Athabascans there.  It was too tough to make a living, so they stayed south of the Brooks Range except for an occasional summer hunt.

It turns out the Yupiks and Inupiats are more culturally flexible than the Athbascans.  Eskimos seem to have a knack for capitalism.  They are not content to live like reservation Indians.

They certainly have a knack for politics.  They run the Bush Caucus in the Alaska Legislature, and will either put the Republicans or the Democrats in power, depending on circumstances.  They’re flexible.

The idea of North Slope oil going to Japan is not a new one.  When the choice of an all-Alaska pipeline route was made, rather than the more economical and logical route through Canada, it only made sense if the oil went west, to Japan.  Shipping it east and south from Valdez to the lower 48 was expensive and unnecessary.  But there was an Arab oil embargo going on at the time, and people were waiting hours to buy gas.  Politically, shipping Alaska oil to Japan was impossible.

In 1987 the Alaska Legislature did a study on the impact of this export embargo, and found that it had already cost the state $15 billion.  There was a glut of crude on the west coast, and supertankers from Valdez were offloading onto smaller tankers in Panama, which would go through the Canal and on to Houston.  Some of it went all the way to the east coast.  It made absolutely no sense.

As these tankers headed east through the Panama Canal, they met tankers full of  Venezuelan oil heading west, to Japan.  Ah, politics.

Somehow I’ve got to convince the Inupiat to tell their story to the rest of America.  Very few people are aware of it.  Unlike so many lower 48 Indians, they are making a successful adjustment to western civilization and the American way.  They’re an inspiring people, with a colorful, Alaska story.

They need to tell the story of the real people of Alaska.

 

 

 

As reported at American Thinker, three college Republicans in Orange County managed to collect 85,000 signatures on a recall petition against freshman California State Senator Josh Newman.  In less than three months, these young Republicans have forced Newman into a recall election.  Newman was the pivotal vote needed to pass a $52 billion gas tax increase.  He’s in trouble.

The gas tax hike takes effect in November, and Thomas Lifson hopes for “recall petitions all over California.”  But there’s a better way —  recall them all by dissolving the entire legislature.

In eight states it is realistic politically to amend the state Constitution by initiative.  California is one of them.  A constitutional initiative requires signatures from 8% of the votes cast in the most recent Governor’s election.  Around 7.3 million votes were cast in the 2014 election, so a shade less than 600,000 signatures would be needed.

In one state senate district three college kids collected one seventh of the number required to propose a constitutional amendment.  If the college Republicans of California were organized, 600,000 is in reach.

The amendment would declare that the legislators elected in 2018 would hold office for no more than 90 days, during which time new legislative elections would take place.  No sitting member of the legislature would be eligible to run, in this election or any other legislative election in the future.

I doubt the Lieutenant Governor would approve of such an initiative, so suit would have to be filed to force the issue.  That will require money, which such a noble venture surely would attract.

The time to act is now, getting the legal challenges out of the way before the gasoline tax takes effect on November 1st.  That will be the time to collect signatures.

California has a long and distinguished history of legislation by constitutional initiative.  One of the few protections California taxpayers have is Prop 13, the Jarvis-Gann Amendment of 1978.  This law, enacted as a constitutional initiative, had saved Californians from paying $528 billion in property taxes, as of 2009.  Today the total savings are probably 3/4 of a trillion dollars.

There is no member of the California legislature currently serving who is worth keeping.  California legislators make $104,000 a year, and when they leave the legislature they arrange to be appointed to boards and commissions where they keep the gravy flowing.  The entire political system of California is corrupt, a natural result of extended one party rule.

California Democrats have no more use for our state legislators than Republicans do.  They’re a worthless bunch.  Let’s throw the bums out.

 

Trump’s Warsaw speech was magnificent, and his meetings in Hamburg with Putin and all the rest are extremely important.  But the most interesting thing he’s done in Europe is embrace the Three Seas Initiative, a Polish-Croation idea.

Croatia was near the heart of one of the great powers of old Europe, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Three Seas is nothing less than its resurrection, and its alliance with Poland and the Baltic states.  At the outset of its existence it’s concerned principally with energy imports and the improvement of north-south transportation corridors in the region.

If it succeeds in improving transportation, economic ties will follow, allowing these countries to have an alternative to the established east-west routes to Germany.  They want economic independence from Germany, and increased trade within this new bloc is a good start.

They also want to end their energy dependence on Russia, and here’s where the USA comes into the picture.  We have more natgas than we know what to do with.  In a lot of oil fields it’s just burned off.  There’s probably more than 250 trillion cubic feet of gas on the North Slope of Alaska that nobody knows what to do with.  It’s so cheap that it doesn’t make sense to build a gas line 800 miles across Alaska to export it.

Much of the world is hungry for secure natgas supplies, so we have our pick of buyers.  Selling all we can to the nations of the Three Seas Initiative makes perfect sense for all concerned.

It’s also the eastern faction of the European Union, a faction opposed in many ways to the Franco-German core.  Poland and Hungary are leading the resistance within the EU to the German embrace of refugees from the middle east.

The Three Seas countries do not want to break up the EU.  But they want to retain their individual identity, and will be against further centralization of power in Brussels.

None of this makes the Germans happy.  They dominate the Three Seas countries economically, and they want to keep it that way.  And they are as reliant on Russian energy as the Three Seas countries are, but apparently they don’t want us to save them from this reliance.

To some extent, you’re allied with your energy source, since without it you can’t function as a modern country.  This means Germany and Russia are tied to each other economically.  Politics follows.

Germany and Russia were allies before World War One, but Germany gave up its alliance with Russia in order to defend Austro-Hungary.  It was the dumbest thing the Germans have ever done.  It looks like they’ve finally learned their lesson.

A de facto German-Russian condominium may be taking shape before our eyes.  This isn’t necessarily against American interests, as long as it’s not directed against us.  We want cordial relations with all the powers of the world , Germany and Russia included.

If the Germans and Russians can reach a modus vivendi it’s good for the whole world.  We don’t want anybody fighting anybody.   We’d much rather have the Russians in bed with the Germans than the Chinese.

And China, with its little pet, the Norks, is our number one problem right now.