What the Flock?

The uniting qualities of Flock and data centers. Green River, Wyoming, is a small town named for a river that flows into the Colorado River. I come from a small town on the Hams Fork River, which flows into the Green River. So really all I've done in my adult life is move downstream ha ha. The little town I came from (Kemmerer, for the record) is 74 miles from Green River. I know because I'd see the highway sign while repeatedly driving a pickup with a cattle rack full of garbage to the dump every Saturday morning (long story; perhaps another time). And I also know that  50 years ago Sweetwater County, which includes Green River and its bigger neighbor Rock Springs (the real Sin City, some used to say) was a union-Democratic stronghold, but those days are long, long gone. No state is more Trumpy than Wyoming. I understand you'll find smatterings of Democrats in Jackson Hole (no relation), Laramie (the university town) and Cheyenne (the state capital), but really only smatterings.

So a month or so ago when I saw that Green River was one of the many local jurisdictions around the country that had banned Flock cameras, it solidified in my noggin that yeah, Flock, like data centers, is reaching across the red-blue divide to finally bring Americans together. Kumbaya! Which brings us to...

IN NEVADA CURRENT

Flock off. Using the soothing word "guardrails," a legislative interim committee last week ordered up a bill to monitor and regulate the use of those automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that are at pretty much every intersection with a stoplight, and that are watching you and keeping receipts in case the deep state deems you a threat or whatever. Guardrails ain't gonna cut it, say critics who want to do what dozens of other jurisdictions around the country have done already: ban the infernal things. "Wagging our fingers and saying, ‘Government and tech oligarchs can spy on us, but only a little!’ is not going to fix the underlying issues or put our constituents at ease,” observes Democratic Assemblymember Selena La Rue Hatch.

Democratic AG and gubernatorial nominee Aaron Ford, like an overwhelming majority of U.S. politicians right now, is scrambling to catch up with public opinion on ALPRs; he's def pro-guardrail, and could maybe be convinced to be pro-ban. By contrast, erstwhile upright Western lawman and current Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo (whose infamous red light adventure was probably at least partially captured by an ALPR, come to think of it) thinks ALPRs are peachy keen and super useful, because he would, wouldn't he? But Lombardo also likes the word "guardrails" which, to reiterate, sounds soothing. Michael Lyle reports: Calls for a ban on Flock grow in Nevada as critics say new guardrails won’t be enough

Your U.S. Department of Interior has an attachment called the Interior Board of Land Appeals. Some Nevada groups as well as the City of Boulder City appealed to the board, asking it to reverse the Bureau of Land Management's patently bankrupt attempt to let a data center be built on BLM land under an environmental review that had been approved not for a data center, but for solar power. Seriously BLM WTF? the appeals board ruled, more or less. Jeniffer Solis reports: Judge halts data center construction on public land

Note: An important facet of the fight over the BLM's sloppy shenans is that the agency was performing them in the aid of the first data center that would be built on BLM land. Rep. Dina Titus, in whose district the BLM's shenans were being perpetrated, and who's always had some pretty good public lands chops, used the project to raise some serious issues about just what BLM thinks it's going to do with/for data centers, and what role states and local communities should have in the BLM's decision-making process. Titus tried to get Lombardo to get his head in the game, but he effectively demurred (he can be so dainty sometimes).

Meanwhile, if/when this is brought to Trump's attention, in his capacity as the world's biggest data center cheerleader, maybe he'll decree the abolition of the Interior Board of Land Appeals. Or maybe not. In any case, the Boulder City project is on ice, but data centers on BLM lands is still a thing that's going to be a thing.

Officially heralding the start of the Current's general election voter guide production process, here's a story from Nevada's incomparable chronicler of judicial races, Dana Gentry: Prosecutor challenging incumbent in Clark County District Court Dept. 8

Messy, messy people. In last weekend's newsletter I noted the Trump regime is super sloppy, as evidenced by the economy and war and so much more, so it's possible Trump's war on mail ballots might also blow up in his own face, because of, you know, the incompetence. Well! Here's the DC bureau's story on the Postal Service whistleblower complaint which warns of  a "catastrophic disruption to our coming nationwide elections based on the reckless pursuit of readying a new, insufficiently tested, poorly planned mail-in ballot screening system.” USPS whistleblower predicts ‘catastrophic’ effect on elections under Trump vote-by-mail order

Good Luck