Locoism

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Most ranchers raising cattle in the South West are familiar with Locoism, a term that goes back to the 1870’s cattle drives. Pioneer trail drivers began to notice cattle straggling from their herds and gathering around some plants that made them a little "loco". This term, used by the Spanish speaking cowboys among them, referred to crazy behavior. Sounds like our first pot party participants were bovines rather than hippies.

The New Mexico Agricultural Extension Service reported last year over 1,000 calls, from ranchers within the state, of loco weed problems. Loco weed until recently was thought to be on the wain but it’s once again raising it’s ugly head. Well, I’ve got news folks, that same crazy behavior is also beginning to manifest itself in epidemic proportions within the Washington Beltway. Let me explain:

Last month I reported in this column, my disappointment with the Obama
Administration for torpedoing the Keystone Pipeline. Many in the mainstream media and the president’s advisory brain-trust, and I use that term loosely, completely missed the point of that project’s importance. It wasn’t the temporary employment that would have resulted during the construction phase, although compared to his stimulus projects it would have been a better bang for the buck. Nor was it to be a panacea to quench our insatiable appetite for imported oil, although it would have contributed more available energy than solar, windmills, and biofuel combined. The importance of the Keystone
Pipeline, like the Big Inch lines constructed during WWII, was it’s national security value.

We are so vulnerable in the Strait of Hormuz that any sustained blockage of that bottleneck would be catastrophic to our daily economy and our national security.

So what’s the president’s counter proposal? Borrowing from the Strategic Oil Reserve to temporarily alleviate gas pump prices in an election year. Wait it gets better: The Administration’s State Department is in the process of giving away seven strategic, resource laden Alaskan islands to the Russians. A commentary written by Joe Miller,an Alaskan resident, appeared in the February 17th issue of The Washington Times(notice how the big brother of the Times,the Post, is once again A.W.O.L. in reporting this administration embarrassment). Miller revealed the agreement was negotiated in total secrecy. The state of Alaska was not allowed to participate in the negotiations, nor was the pubic given any opportunity to comment. The Alaska Legislature had passed
resolutions of opposition but were completely ignored by the Washington crowd.

So much for states rights.

The seven islands in the Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea include one bigger than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Putin’s Kremlin,with a horrible environmental track record, will also get the tens of thousands of square miles of oil rich sea beds surrounding the islands. According to our Department of Interior estimates, these beds contain billions of barrels of oil. Hey, Greenpeace and Sierra Club Club members: how does that "hope and change" grab ya? Ironically one of the seven, Wrangel Island, became American in 1881 with a landing party that included famed naturalist John Muir.

Wrangel island is 3,000 square miles. Hear that late night sobbing at the Muir grave site? Just for the record, the negotiations by the bureaucrats in the State Department had been going on before President Obama took office but now that this debacle has been revealed, leadership should kick in on behalf of the American people.

Could a few seeds from the loco weed epidemic have blown into the new White House vegetable garden? What ever the reason for the President’s lack of leadership, it reminds me of the closing scene from the classic 1957 British movie, the Bridge on the River Kwai. In the movie a British POW medical officer refused to participate in the opening ceremony of the bridge because he considered the British POW cooperation, inappropriate. As an observer he had just watched the destruction of the bridge with casualties on both sides. The faint strains of the Colonel Bogey March begin to play in the background as the movie fades out and he exclaims: "Madness! It’s all Madness!"

How do I feel about our current national Energy Policy and it’s leadership, or lack there of? It’s pure Locoism!

Stratton Schaeffer
Retired Consulting Engineer and Farmer
April, 2012