How do you know you are an Alaskan?

You know you are an Alaskan when you have a head bolt heater and never lock your truck. --- just in case!

Actually, I thought of this photograph when I heard one of the lady Democrats -- a senator, I think -- bragging to the press that drilling in ANWR was once again defeated. Her comment went something like this, "We can build bike paths and hiking trails -- and all enjoy the beauty of the wilderness." But then, there is the mosquito too. And the price of heating oil is so high in the villages, they have gone back to whale-oil (kidding), or moved to the city.

And, who did we steal ANWR from anyway? It's Kaktovik on the map. The people were first displaced by the radar station; their houses were bulldozed out of the way and then the great white hunter claimed the whole area as a refuge forbidding property rights, mineral rights, hunting and fishing rights -- to the ancestral owners from whom we stole it.

Unlike the treaties with Native American Indians down below, Alaskan indigenous enjoy complete equality with the rest of us -- by the charter that made Alaska a state 50 years ago, but the well meaning folks in DC don't get it.

Federal law mandates that our resources be exported on the global market, effectively denying local processing and utilization. Colonialism is out of style, but there you have it.

As an aside, how much more rational would it be for Alaska to process its energy resources and pipe the electricity south at a lower cost to everybody. If you have got to federalize, federalize the grid.