Click to see preamble.

   

 
AUGUST 4, 2019

WE THE PEOPLE RADIO

Hour 1 The Fountain Wind Project, How will it effect Northern California!? WE THE PEOPLE RADIO
  with Gary Cadd, Beth Messick, and Joe Osa  
Hour 2 Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution WE THE PEOPLE RADIO
  with Myron Magnet, City Journal editor-at-large  
   REPEAT FROM JUNE 30 2019  

"The Fountain Wind Project, How will it effect Northern California"?

Citizens in Opposition to the Fountain Wind Project (CIO FWP)    www.STOPFW.com

An unincorporated association
 

Speakers are Beth Messick and Joe Osa
 
Outline

´Download PDF    Download PowerPoint

Purpose of the CIO FWP
´Goal:   The goal of the CIO FWP is to stop the proposed Shasta County Fountain Wind Project and any future Industrial Wind Turbine projects in the heavily forested regions of Shasta County.
´Purpose: The purpose shall be to promote the safety, health, peace, morals, comfort, protection of Tribal Cultural Resources and history, and general welfare of persons residing or working in the neighborhoods of Shasta County. We believe that the continued development of Industrial Wind Turbine (IWT) projects, such as the Fountain Wind Project, would be detrimental or injurious to property or improvements in our neighborhoods or to the general welfare of Shasta County. We have requested Shasta County representatives, through a formal moratorium, make the necessary updates to the General Plan and Zoning codes to protect residents and communities. We believe these types of developments need to be addressed by all of the Shasta County residents, obtaining County wide public input including independent scientific studies, and exposing how the numerous environmental, financial, health, cultural, and general welfare negative impacts of the Fountain Wind Project will not benefit the residents or communities.

Overview of The Fountain Wind Project
´1) Shasta County Use Permit – (UP 16-007)
´2) Developer – Pacific Wind Development, LLC, subsidiary of Avangrid, subsidiary of Iberdrola of Spain
´3) Land Leased from Shasta Cascade Timberland, subsidiary of New Forest, of Australia
´4) Location: Eastern Shasta County located near Montgomery Creek, Round Mountain, Oak Run, Big Bend, Wengler, and Moose Camp. The Industrial Wind Turbine Development will cross Hwy 299 on the way to the Intermountain area.
´5) 100 turbines up to 591 feet tall over approximately 31,000 – 43,000 acres (associated transformers, associated infrastructure and ancillary facilities) generating capacity 347 MW
´a. Just a few feet shorter than the Shasta Dam
´6) Over 2,000 acres clear cut during construction phase with 1,000 acres permanently cleared
´7) 16 miles of new overhead transmission lines
´8) Over 50 miles of new buried transmission lines
´9) Up to 21 miles of new roads that are 40 feet wide
´10) More than 1,500 extra wide or super load equipment transport requirements on Hwy 299
´11) Concrete foundations measure approximately 80 feet in diameter. Spread footing buried underground to a depth of approximately 10 – 15 feet. Some foundations will need to be cabled into the bedrock, some up to 50 feet, to stabilize the foundations.

 

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Some of the Many Negative Impacts of the Fountain Wind Project
´1. Aesthetics: Visual pollution, obtrusive lighting (day and night) and industrialization of Forest Lands, able to be seen from neighboring counties. Only the beginning “Coming to a neighborhood near you”
´2. Wildfires: Increases risk, new transmission lines, turbines attract lightning, located in highest rated fire hazard zones by both Cal Fire and CPUC. Shallow soil and soil type makes lightning grounding systems more difficult and problematic.
´3. Economic & Social Impacts: Drastically reduces property values for all properties that enjoyed views of Shasta County’s eastern range. Local properties near turbines may be worthless, local community likely to wither as people move or abandon properties and fewer people move in. Any positive tax revenue from Turbines may be offset by reduced property taxes due to loss in assessed value.
´4. Tourism: No longer a place to enjoy Nature. Tourists will be driving through an Industrial Wind Farm to visit Intermountain Communities, beautiful Burney Falls, and Fall River areas.
´5. Tribal Cultural Resources: Destroys sacred cultural resources and history, Pit River Nation is opposed, other neighboring tribes opposed.
´6. Hydrology and water quality: Miles of new roads, blasting, Soil compaction, Hundreds of tons of concrete and other materials, transformer oils, herbicides usage. Likely to affect local springs and waterways.
´7. Biological Resources (wildlife): Threatens local Bald eagles, spotted owls, raptors, migratory birds (located in “Globally Significant Avian Area”). Likely to affect various mammals due to ability to hear and use infrasound and other noise affects shadow flicker, etc.
´8. Public Health: Shadow Flicker, Noise, Infrasound, Increased stress. Shadow flicker already observed across Hwy 299 from Hatchet Ridge Wind Turbines.
´9. Not as Green as Advertised: Only produces 20-25% of advertised capacity, clears 2250 acres of carbon sequestering forest, requires fossil fuel backup when winds not blowing, curtails existing green hydropower when winds blowing implies 0% green benefit.
´10. Energy: Round Mountain substation already has voltage stability issues, already producing more power than we need (CA ISO paid Arizona to take power in 2018), PG&E requested permission to Curtail Hatchet Ridge power during negative pricing events (i.e. too much power on grid). PG&E has enough Renewable Energy to meet requirements to 2030 according to PG&E 2018 letter to CPUC.
´The construction of industrial wind farms cannot be justified in the rural and wild places that developers usually target!

Actions Taken by The CIO FWP
´Started a petition to stop the Fountain Wind Project
´Sent a certified mailing to all Shasta County Board of Supervisors officially requesting they place a moratorium on all Industrial Wind Developments in the County so all County residents  have a voice regarding these types of developments.
´Provided Environmental Impact Report Scoping comments (See Shasta County Scoping Report)
´Requested both the Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors deny the Fountain Wind Project Special Use Permit and adopt the requested moratorium
´Contacted several Law Universities, Environmental organizations, and other law firms seeking an environmental or CEQA law attorney.
´Attempting to use all available  communications to spread the word about the Industrial Blight coming to Shasta County

Sources of Information
´Stop Fountain Wind  https://www.stopfw.com/home
´Wind Action http://www.windaction.org/
´Wind Watch www.wind-watch.org
´How to Stop These Things https://stopthesethings.com/
´California Independent Service Operator (CAISO) 2018-2019 Transmission Plan – Round Mountain Sub Station Upgrades http://www.caiso.com/planning/Pages/TransmissionPlanning/Default.aspx
´PG&E Corporation and Pacific Gas and Electricity Company Bankruptcy (Prime Clerk) https://restructuring.primeclerk.com/pge/
´CALFIRE 45 Day Report to Governor Gavin Newsom in response to Executive Order N-05-19 https://www.fire.ca.gov/about-us/45-day-report/
´GET INFORMED on how Industrial Wind Turbines (IWT) are an intrusive industrialization of rural and wild areas which require extensive expansion of transmission lines. The wind turbines add noise, light, visual pollution, destroy and fragment wildlife habitats and wetlands, destroy sacred cultural resources and history, cause health issues, increase wildfire risks, add instability and inefficiencies to the electrical grid, and increased energy rates.

How You Can Help
https://www.stopfw.com/get-involved-now 
´1) Sign-up to receive Email updates on the Stop Fountain Wind web page.
´2) Sign the petition at the community meeting or on-line at Stop FW web page.
´3) Read our Wind Turbine Moratorium Request at Stop Fountain Wind
´4) Send your District Supervisor (or all of them) a letter requesting they support the moratorium request. Letters are available on our Stop FW web page.
´5) Attend the Board of Supervisors Meeting and speak out during the Public Comment Period or attend and support the members who are providing comments regarding our efforts.
´6) Attend the Planning Commission meeting when the Fountain Wind Project is brought before them for a vote.
´7) Contribute financially if possible.
´8) Contact your neighbors and friends about the CIO FWP efforts and inform them on how they can get involved and support our efforts.
´9) When the Draft Environmental Impact Review (EIR) and final EIR are made available from Shasta County provide feedback as to why you oppose these types of projects.
´10) Write letters to the editors of the newspapers stating your opposition to these types of projects in Shasta County.
´11) Contact your local community business leaders and organizations asking for their support and help get them informed on how they can help.
´12) Attend the monthly community potluck meeting, held the 2nd Tuesday of each month beginning at 6:00 at the Hill County Community Clinic, Health & Wellness Center in Round Mountain, to learn the latest updates and schedule changes.
´13) Reach out to request CIO FWP members give a presentation to your local organization or community groups at notofountainwind@gmail.com 

Contact us:
´Mail –  Stop Fountain Wind, P.O. Box 116, Montgomery Creek, CA 96065

 

STOP FOUNTAIN WIND!

WWW.STOPFW.COM

 

 

 
Hour 2

Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution   WE THE PEOPLE RADIO 

 REPEAT FROM JUNE 30 2019

About Myron Magnet

Myron Magnet is a prizewinning author and journalist, editor-at-large of City Journal, and author of the new book, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution.  He previously served as editor of City Journal and a member of the board of editors of Fortune magazine.  He is one of America’s leading public intellectuals and a recipient of the National Humanities Medal in 2008.  Magnet is a frequent media guest who has appeared on major radio and television programs nationwide.  He has written extensively for some of our nation’s leading publications such as The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Commentary, The American Spectator, and The New York Times.  His work has covered a wide range of topics from American society and social policy to history, economics, literature, and the American founding.  He previously authored The Founders at HomeThe Dream and the Nightmare, and other titles.  Magnet holds bachelor’s degrees from Columbia University and the University of Cambridge.  He earned an M.A. from Cambridge and a Ph.D. from Columbia, where he taught for several years.  He lives in New York City.

 

"Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution"

By Myron Magnet

 

Washington, DC—When Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court in 1991, he found with dismay that it was interpreting a very different Constitution from the one the Framers had written—the one that had established a federal government manned by the people’s own elected representatives, charged with protecting citizens’ inborn rights while leaving them free to work out their individual happiness themselves, in their families, communities, and states.  How did we lose the republic of the Framers’ imagination and how can we restore their magnificent self-governing nation of liberty?

In CLARENCE THOMAS AND THE LOST CONSTITUTION (Encounter Books, May 7, 2019), renowned author and City Journal editor-at-large Myron Magnet contends that Clarence Thomas’s radical originalist jurisprudence presents a path forward for recovering our nation’s “Lost Constitution” and restoring America as a free, self-governing nation made up of independent-minded, self-reliant citizens.  And the book reveals how the mortal combat between the original Constitution of Liberty and the evolved “Living Constitution” lies at the heart of the animosity that divides Americans today.

Magnet recounts the gripping tale of how the Constitution got twisted beyond recognition from the 1787 document, the 1789 Bill of Rights that the Founders had framed, and the Reconstruction-Era Amendments ratified to fulfill Lincoln’s dream of a new birth of freedom.  Woodrow Wilson, who despised the Framers’ checks and balances as obsolete and inefficient, purposely began that distortion, aiming to replace the Founders’ government of separated, enumerated, and limited powers with government by unelected, “scientific” experts in executive-branch agencies, dispassionately making binding rules like a legislature, carrying them out like a president, and adjudicating and punishing infractions of them like a court.

Seeking to bypass cumbersome congressional lawmaking, Wilson saw the Supreme Court as a permanent constitutional convention, the soul of a “Living Constitution” that would evolve continually, in Darwinian fashion, with the Bench legislating to meet modernity’s ever-new needs.  What Wilson set going, Franklin Roosevelt supersized, creating in the alphabet soup of New Deal agencies what he acknowledged was a fourth branch of government with no constitutional basis.  Then, under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and 1960s, the Nine set about realizing Wilson’s dream of a Supreme Court sitting as a permanent constitutional convention, conjuring up laws out of smoke and mirrors and justifying them as expressions of the spirit of the age.

But Clarence Thomas—who joined the Court after eight years running one of the myriad administrative agencies that the Great Society had piled on top of FDR’s batch—had deep misgivings about the new governmental order.  He shared the Framers’ vision of free, self-governing citizens forging their own fate.  And from his own experience growing up in hyper-segregated Savannah under the vigilant eye of his ferociously self-reliant grandfather, flirting with and rejecting black radicalism at college, and running an agency that supposedly advanced equality, he doubted that unelected experts and justices really did understand the moral arc of the universe better than the people themselves, or that the rules and rulings they issued made lives better rather than worse.

More painful to Clarence Thomas, his predecessors on his own Court had helped kill Reconstruction in its cradle through grotesque 1870s decisions that neutered the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and ensured decades of Jim Crow black subservience in the South.  Even worse, the Court still cites those decisions as precedents for its rulings to this very day.  But such racist judgments surely don’t merit the status of Constitutional law, Clarence Thomas concluded.  In the Justice’s radical originalism, clearly explained in these pages in engaging, non-lawyerly prose, the only legitimate Constitutional law is the Constitution.

So in the hundreds of opinions he has written in more than a quarter century on the Court, Clarence Thomas has questioned the constitutional underpinnings of the new order and tried to restore the limited, self-governing original one, as more legitimate, more just, and more free than the one that grew up in its stead.  The Court now seems set to move down the trail he blazed.  So far, few of Clarence Thomas’s searching opinions have served as the Court’s majority ruling.  But he is laying down, within the Court’s official record, a blueprint for future Justices to restore the authentic U.S. Constitution, just as his own character embodies the old ideal of American citizenship, with liberty at its heart.

 

To arrange an interview with Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution author Myron Magnet, please contact Stephen Manfredi at 202.222.8028 or smanfredi@ManfrediStrategyGroup.com.

 

10 Interview Questions

for Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution Author Myron Magnet
To Learn More About Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution, 
visit 
www.EncounterBooks.com or www.MyronMagnet.com

 

1.       Why did you write CLARENCE THOMAS AND THE LOST CONSTITUTION?

2.       In CLARENCE THOMAS AND THE LOST CONSTITUTION, you contend that upon his ascension to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas was dismayed to discover that the Court was interpreting a very different Constitution from the one the Framers had written.  How was this Constitution fundamentally different?

3.       What is the “Lost Constitution”?  How did we lose the republic of the Framers’ imagination?

4.       What impact did Clarence Thomas’s own life experiences—growing up in segregated Savannah under the vigilant eye of his fiercely self-reliant grandfather, running an agency that supposedly advanced equality, and encountering race and sex politics at his confirmation hearings—have on his judicial philosophy and quarter century of service on the Supreme Court?

5.       How did Woodrow Wilson’s notion of a “Living Constitution” and dream of a permanent Constitutional convention develop from the Progressive Era and FDR’s New Deal to the Warren Court and beyond?

6.       Why has the new constitutional order based on a permanent Constitutional convention undermined American freedom and the Framers’ vision of free, self-governing citizens forging their own fate?  To what extent is this new constitutional order based on judicial policy-making directly responsible for the creation of our undemocratic “Administrative State” in which unelected bureaucrats rule?  To what extent does the battle between the original Constitution of Liberty and the “Living Constitution” lie at the heart of the animosity that divides Americans today?  Does our constitutional order face a crisis of legitimacy?

7.       How did the Supreme Court actually undercut Reconstruction efforts after the Civil War, weakening the Fourteen and Fifteenth Amendments to ensure decades of Jim Crow black subservience in the South?  Why does the Court continue to cite these decisions as precedent for its modern rulings?

8.       What is “originalism”?  You note that Clarence Thomas holds firmly that the only legitimate Constitutional law is the Constitution itself.  Does this mean that legal precedent is irrelevant?  Why is the Court so wedded to the doctrine of stare decisis?  Please explain Clarence Thomas’s originalist judicial philosophy.

9.       You contend that in the hundreds of opinions he has written in more than a quarter century on the Court, Clarence Thomas has questioned the constitutional underpinnings of the new order and tried to restore the limited, self-governing original one, as more legitimate, just, and free than the one that grew up in its stead.  What are a couple of the most important opinions Clarence Thomas has written?  How do Clarence Thomas’s legal rationales generally differ from his fellow justices, even those with whom he usually agrees?

  1.     CLARENCE THOMAS AND THE LOST CONSTITUTION argues that the Court now seems set to move down the trail Clarence Thomas has blazed—that he is laying down within the Court’s official record a blueprint for future justices to restore the authentic U.S. Constitution.  Do you think that Clarence Thomas’s “radical originalism” will ultimately prevail?  Are Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh in the same mold as Clarence Thomas?