Whatever you think of the Chief Justice's opinion in Trump v. Hawaii. there is one obvious problem with his analysis. There is no reference to Masterpiece Cakeshop. The dissents both discuss the case, which is clearly relevant to the Establishment Clause claim. The Chief Justice decided to pretend that the case was not decided a few weeks ago.
In a federal court of appeals, this sort of omission would amply support a petition for rehearing pointing out that the Court overlooked a pertinent authority in rendering its judgment. Once in a blue moon, the Supreme Court grants a petition for rehearing. This case will not come out any differently if they grant one in Trump, but the challengers deserve a fair assessment of the relevant case law.
Another major beermaker is looking at ways to enter the marijuana business.
Denver-based Molson Coors Brewing Co. is weighing whether to expand into the sector with Canada poised to legalize the drug for recreational use this October. The brewer is said to have held talks with several Canadian-based marijuana companies to invest and collaborate in cannabis-infused beverages in an attempt to halt declining beer sales, according to a Friday report from BNN Bloomberg, citing several unidentified people familiar with the matter.
The company has spent the past six months engaged with as many as four cannabis companies, including Aphria Inc. and Aurora Cannabis Inc., discussing its plans to enter the space, according to the report.
“We have assembled a team in Canada to actively explore the risks and opportunities of entering the cannabis space in that market, where it will be federally legal by this fall,” Chief Executive Officer Mark Hunter said at an investor presentation on June 6. Spokesman Colin Wheeler declined to say Friday whether it was in talks with specific cannabis companies.
“We’ve said specifically we’re interested in the infused beverage space and we do intend to enter that market,” Aurora Cannabis’ Chief Corporate Officer Cam Battley said Friday by phone. The company declined to comment further. Aphria could not be immediately reached for comment.
The speculation comes the same week as Canada gave the final approval for recreational sales to begin on Oct. 17. While edibles, including beverages, won’t be legal initially, companies are already jockeying for market share due to the potentially lucrative opportunity. There’s been an “explosion of interest” in edibles and six out of 10 consumers will probably choose to consume edible products, according to a June 5 report from Deloitte.
Last year, Corona beer seller Constellation Brands Inc. bought a minority stake in Canopy Growth Growth, the nation’s largest marijuana producer with a market value of $6.6 billion. Rivals such as The Green Organic Dutchman Holdings Ltd. plans to develop a product-testing and manufacturing center to explore using cannabis in everything from iced teas, juices and sports drinks.
Molson would have meaningful exposure to the North American cannabis market as the No. 2 beer seller in both Canada and the U.S., Cowen analyst Vivien Azer said Friday in a note. A deal would likely resemble the structure that Constellation laid out when it took a stake in Canopy last fall and a partner of scale will probably be the most attractive to Molson to ensure it has have adequate supply in the market, she said.
Today Illinois ratified the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Federal Constitution. This means that we are on the brink of a constitutional dilemma. If one more state ratifies the ERA, then there is a plausible argument that three-fourths of the states (38) have ratified. At that point, Congress will be asked to consider a joint resolution that would waive the ERA's ratification deadline (which expired in 1982) and declare the ERA part of the Constitution.
I am drafting an article about these issues that I hope will be ready by the end of June. I doubt that another state will ratify the ERA this year, so there is time for thoughtful consideration. The most likely candidate for the next vote is Virginia, which is the most liberal state that has not ratified. But an effort to do that there this year died in committee and will probably not be revived. Until next year.
Did I already tell the story of the Mines professor who has been working overtime to "debunk" the contamination concerns and specifically bought a house out near there to demonstrate his seriousness. I wonder if this will be an issue in the commissioner elections in the fall?
Jefferson County’s public health chief on Thursday declared that the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge should stay closed to the public for lack of a “truly independent” assessment of potentially lethal plutonium contamination both on and off the federal property.
Dr. Mark Johnson’s declaration — made in federal court to back a request by environment groups for a judicial order blocking the scheduled opening this summer — intensifies the recent flaring of mistrust around cleanup of the nation’s Cold War nuclear sites. It is rooted in decades of obfuscation and secrecy that have come back to haunt the government as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service labors to begin a new chapter.
Johnson also elaborated on his concerns in a Denver Post interview, saying he wouldn’t buy a house or raise children in developments adjacent to the 6,500-acre refuge, where a 1,300-acre fenced core contains buried waste that Department of Energy employees monitor daily.
During the Cold War, workers at Rocky Flats produced plutonium triggers for thousands of nuclear weapons that the United States wielded to deter the Soviet Union. They also produced horrific waste, with plutonium levels in some buildings deemed “infinity” because they were too high to measure. Plant operators apparently burned and dumped waste at the site.
“How well did we really characterize what has gone on out there?” Johnson said, emphasizing he has pored over research and data, and he feels “responsible for the health of the whole county.”
He worked as a medical expert for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and contractors dealing with the Rocky Flats mess.
“I began my job in 1990s, right when they were figuring out how they were going to clean this up. My sense was that much of the staff of the state health department were truly not experts on radiation and its health effects. And my sense was that the U.S. Department of Energy and the contractors were trying to cover up, as much as they could, what went on out there,” Johnson said. “So my level of trust has always been not the greatest. I know they hired people to go out and review everything, but it was all paid for by the Department of Energy, and I never felt like I could trust the Department of Energy.”
The Superfund cleanup done for the $7.7 billion that Congress provided, rather than the $37 billion contractors said proper cleanup would cost, “seems too convenient for me,” Johnson said.
“I would really like to have somebody totally independent — somebody that Congress has oversight of instead of the DOE — to look at all the data that has been collected,” he said.
Johnson said his predecessor in the county health agency followed soil sampling protocols “that always showed more plutonium than the federal investigations found.”
Housing developers repeatedly have assured residents that homes near Rocky Flats are safe. The latest of four federal site reviews concluded the cleanup restored the site to a condition fully protective of human and environmental health. Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator Doug Benevento, who worked for nearly a decade as the CDPHE’s chief during cleanup, recently pronounced that the refuge is “safe for everyone, … suitable for unlimited use and unrestricted exposure.”
Matthew Jonas, Daily Camera
The Denver skyline is seen from the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge in Jefferson County, Colorado on May 14, 2018.
But Johnson held his ground.
“I would not want my grandchildren to grow up near there,” he said. “I don’t think we know whether it is safe for kids to play there.
“If I were king of the world, I would have independent experts come in who really knew what they were doing and then tell us whether it is safe to have kids hiking on Rocky Flats and whether it is safe to put in new housing and shopping centers and schools.”
CDPHE chief Dr. Larry Wolk on Friday said public access and trails through the refuge have long been envisioned. “As a result of reassuring ongoing surveillance data, the Rocky Mountain Greenway trail through the refuge does not pose a threat to public health. Dr. Johnson’s statement appears to reflect his personal opinion and is neither based on fact nor science.”
This is happening as activist groups ramp up their campaign against allowing public recreation on at Rocky Flats, asking U.S. District Court Senior Judge Robert Blackburn on Thursday to issue an injunction stopping the opening of the refuge. Blackburn will consider a signed declaration by Johnson in making a decision.
Dogged opposition by the Boulder-based Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center and other groups is delaying the project that federal wildlife biologists have been working on for more than a decade, to convert one of the nation’s murkiest sites into an environmental asset. The work is similar to that done at Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, north of Denver and a site where the U.S. Army made chemical weapons and Shell produced pesticides.
Elk living on the refuge have multiplied to about 180, refuge manager Dave Lucas said.
“We have moose on there. There’s a bear out there now. A mountain lion. I saw a bobcat two weeks ago. Obviously coyotes and mule deer. All sorts of reptiles. Native pollinators. Migratory birds. And there are over 630 species of plants,” Lucas said. “This is vast biodiversity.
“The secondary value of these places is as a reminder of history, lessons learned and how we can turn a problem into something great for the future. That is something we need to teach — again and again as a society. Yeah, we made mistakes. But we fixed those. And the only way to do that is to come out here and witness it.”
The central off-limits core area at the refuge, behind a “wildlife-permeable” fence marked with warning signs, will remain the responsibility of the DOE under the under the Rocky Flats Legacy Management Agreement, Lucas said.
Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment officials recently reiterated their assessment that Rocky Flats, on wind-whipped grasslands 16 miles northwest of Denver, no longer contains plutonium at dangerous levels. The CDPHE and EPA oversaw cleanup after FBI raids in 1989 exposed mismanagement and violations of environmental laws.
But soil samples apparently haven’t been taken for more than 10 years, according to federal officials. Attorney Randall Weiner is pressing for stricter scrutiny.
“If granted, an injunction will keep the refuge closed until the court takes a close look at our allegations,” Weiner said. “The federal government has failed to look at the riskiest aspect of opening this refuge — putting public trails on top of unremediated plutonium. Human health and safety is at risk.”
David Claussen has been arrested and booked into the Jefferson County Detention Center in connection with the shooting of Alexander Hudspeth.
Hudspeth was found lying in the driveway of Claussen’s home in the 7700 block of Colorado 73 at 3:45 p.m. with a gunshot wound to the chest, Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Mark Techmeyer said in a news release.
Hudspeth had been living in Claussen’s home
“Claussen and Hudspeth got into a confrontation over Hudspeth continuing to live at the residence. Claussen had a handgun and during the confrontation shot Hudspeth,” the news release says.
Hudspeth was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead. The investigation into the shooting is ongoing, Techmeyer said.
BOULDER — Walking a visitor through the renovation of the long-shuttered Rocky Flats Lounge, Steve Glennon spoke from the heart about the importance of bringing back the legendary roadhouse that attracted standing-room-only crowds of Green Bay Packers fans for three decades before a fire closed the joint in 2015.
“This place is iconic,” said Glennon, a Wisconsin native who named his golden retriever Lambeau after the Packers’ hallowed home in Green Bay, Lambeau Field. “It’s got to survive — it’s a roadhouse, it’s a dive bar, it’s been the Packers bar. I grew up in central Wisconsin. I grew up eating fish fries. I’ve loved the Green Bay Packers almost as much as I love my dog.”
With that, Glennon confirmed the news that Front Range Cheeseheads have been longing to hear since the fire: Though it took more than two years to begin the rebuild because of insurance, permitting and contracting issues, one of Colorado’s best-known Packers bars should be back in operation in time for football season this fall.
“God, I hope so,” added Glennon, who was a Rocky Flats bartender before the fire and is involved in the rebuild. “I don’t see why not. The biggest things that needed to be done are done. Almost all of the electrical is done. HVAC is going in, then it’s drywall and flooring.”
Glennon is reluctant to predict when Rocky Flats will reopen, although it could be as early as this summer.
“When we started (rebuilding) last August, we thought maybe December,” Glennon said. “Now we’re looking at June, July.”
The last Green Bay game at Rocky Flats was an infamous Packers collapse in the NFC Championship game in 2015. Green Bay seemed destined for the Super Bowl, leading 19-7 with 5:13 left in the game, but a series of unfathomable mistakes, including a bungled onside kick, led to a 28-22 overtime loss.
“If the bar hadn’t burned, I’d probably still be in the back room sitting there sulking, not believing what happened,” said Rocky Flats regular Lance Rogers. “It was so depressing.”
Rocky Flats typically packed in as many as 300 fans for Green Bay games, most of them with Wisconsin connections — but not all.
Rogers grew up in Fort Morgan and moved to the Front Range in 1983. The Rocky Flats crowd turned his blood green and gold, and he loves the team so much now that he bought a share in the publicly held corporation that owns it. He goes to Wisconsin almost every summer for the team’s annual shareholders meeting at Lambeau.
“It’s just way too cool,” Rogers said. “It’s 20,000 people, they treat you like royalty. When I first got the share, I thought, ‘It’s kind of a waste,’ but I wanted to say, ‘I own a football team.’ “
The bar owns a share, too. Fortunately the certificate survived the blaze.
Located on Colorado 93 north of Arvada and a mile south of the Boulder County line in unincorporated Jefferson Country, Rocky Flats was a biker bar when it wasn’t filled for Packers games or Friday night fish fries. The good times ended, though, in the wee hours of July 15, 2015. Someone driving by the place shortly after 2 a.m. saw flames and called the Jeffco sheriff.
“The night of the fire, I was actually working at my other (bartending) job in Boulder,” Glennon recalled. “I got home, I was in bed and I got a call from the owner at 4 o’clock. He’s like, ‘Get out to the bar, it’s on fire.’ Other than the sheriffs, the fire department, the owner and his wife, I was the next one to come out here for it. I was out here when everything was (still) smoking. Somehow they saved the building.”
The specific cause of the fire was never determined, Glennon said, although it was obvious it began in the kitchen. Workers gutted the interior shortly after the fire, but then things stalled.
Someone at Packers headquarters heard about the fire and reached out to console Colorado Cheeseheads for their loss, sending a football autographed by the team, signed jerseys, posters and a flag. Another care package came a year later.
“The Green Bay Packers organization has really been helpful for us, and they don’t have to be,” said Glennon, who grew up in Stevens Point and moved to Colorado 12 years ago. “That’s why places like this have to continue to exist. You can go down to Denver and find modern bars. Everyone wants to be the same, everybody wants to be craft beer. We’re blue collar. We’re going to keep this as blue collar, as country and Wisconsin as possible.”
Glennon put on three fundraisers to help defray costs of the rebuild. One was a tailgate party at Sports Authority Field at Mile High on Nov. 1, 2015, a Sunday night game that Packers fans try hard to forget. The Packers and Broncos both were 6-0, coming off bye weeks, and many thought it might be a Super Bowl preview. The Broncos romped to victory, 29-10, and went on to win the Super Bowl, while the Packers began a three-game losing skid.
The new, improved Rocky Flats will have a sliding glass door opening onto a patio behind the building with views of open space which take in the Flatirons. The plan is to make it a thriving sports bar year-round, not just a place for Packers fans to congregate when their team is playing.
“It’s going to be fun,” Glennon said. “The place was great before, but I think we can make it even better. It’s going to be even more Wisconsin than before. I’m going to try to get as many blue-collar Wisconsin beers as I can. Fish fries, Badger games, Brewers games, Super Bowl parties, bowl parties, barbecues.”
Mark your calendars, Green Bay fans: The Packers open the 2018 season with a Sunday night NBC game against the rival Bears in Lambeau on Sept. 9.
“If we open up at 8 in the morning that day, it’s going to be an all-out, day (long) party,” Glennon said. “It’s going to be nuts.”
Helen Rosner writes in praise of monosodium glutamate, an umami-rich flavor additive that’s been vilified for all the wrong reasons.
Monosodium glutamate has been widespread in the American food supply since at least the nineteen-twenties, imported from China and Japan by major food-production companies like Heinz and Campbell’s, according to research done by Catherine Piccoli, a curator at New York’s Museum of Food and Drink. But a 1968 letter published in The New England Journal of Medicine raised the spectre of “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome,” an illness allegedly brought on by the consumption of MSG, which was commonly used in American Chinese restaurants. Ever since, the chemical compound has been vilified—despite dozens of rigorous studies concluding that the ingredient is innocuous and the “syndrome” nonexistent. Certain scientists and culinarians have long agitated for MSG’s rehabilitation. In a 1999 essay for Vogue titled “Why Doesn’t Everyone in China Have a Headache?,” the legendary food writer Jeffrey Steingarten gleefully ripped to shreds the standard litany of complaints and protests. But only in the past decade has MSG’s reputation truly turned a corner. The Times, Epicurious, and Bon Appetit have risen to its defense. The near-infallible food-science writer Harold McGee has regularly championed its use. At the 2012 MAD symposium, in Copenhagen, the chef David Chang gave a talk on the anti-Asian sentiment that underlies MSG aversion. “You know what causes Chinese Restaurant Syndrome?” Anthony Bourdain asked on a 2016 episode of “Parts Unknown.” Then he gave the answer: “Racism.”
MSG is a potent flavor enhancer; glutamate, the amino acid that does a lot of the heavy lifting, is found in foods as varied as parmesan cheese, fish sauce, and cooked tomato paste — all of them known for packing a punch. As Rosner writes, “it is to savory flavor what refined sugar is to sweet.”
An artist’s rendering shows what the proposed<br />public plaza near Calvary Church in Golden might look like.
A local church plans to fund and build a public plaza and parking garage in downtown Golden.
Congregants and staff members of Calvary Church propose transforming vacant land adjacent to the church between 13th and 14th streets along Arapahoe Street near Miners Alley into a community-centric space.
“The current street and sidewalk area will become a multi-purpose open space with terraced gardens, stairs and ADA compliant ramps, while the surface parking lots will be converted to a two level parking structure,” according to a site overview released by Calvary Church.
Senior pastor Tim Phenna said he hopes the plaza will provide Golden residents and visitors a place to connect. If approved, downtown Golden will gain about 20,000 square feet of outdoor space to be used for parking, markets, casual lunches, church services, weddings and, potentially, summer concerts. An initial proposal suggests more than 30 parking spaces will be included in the project.
“Calvary has always been closely connected to the wider city of Golden,” Phenna said. “For 150 years now, we’ve been a church right in the middle of town, and we just see this as a way to continue the community values for the whole of the community of Golden. We hope (the plaza) will enhance that.”
In an effort to instill that sense of community early in the process, Phenna has looked to nearby businesses and community members for feedback. So far, it’s been mostly positive, he said.
“We’re very excited about the project,” said Marv Kay, adviser for the nonprofit Golden Civic Foundation. “The foundation has been involved in much of the development downtown, including business and recreational development, and I think this is a project that will just add to the beauty of our community. I’m very enthused about it.”
Phenna has been working with a building team, architects and Golden’s planning department to solidify the blueprint. He initially believed construction would begin in April, but Golden planning manager Rick Muriby said the final design is not likely to be presented to the Planning Commission until May.
“Once they get approval from the Planning Commission, they’ll be free to pursue a building permit,” Muriby said. “They’re currently working on a new street design to make it wider and make it more of a streetscape. There would be sort of an S-curve street that goes through the site, if they can build it.”
Phenna speculates that, if the current proposal is approved, construction will begin in July.
this is a good discussion of some of the hard problems of human migration and borders
Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move by Reece Jones Verso, 208 pp, £16.99, October 2016, ISBN 978 1 78478 471 3 Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee…
On 23 May 2014, Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old college dropout, became the world’s most famous ‘incel’ – involuntary celibate. The term can, in theory, be applied…
this is basically just a propaganda piece, but this project took over my life for about 4 months at the end of last year and beginning of this year.
After years of planning, eight Jefferson County emergency response agencies have come together to adopt a new communications system designed to speed up help to residents and provide immediate backup for local agencies responding to a crisis.
Dispatchers from police departments and fire stations throughout the county will now be housed together in Lakewood as part of one singular entity known as Jeffcom 911.
Preparations for the consolidation began in 2013 after a group of Jefferson County law enforcement officials began brainstorming the possibility of a dispatching system that would save time and money.
By the end of this month, all 911 calls in Jefferson County will be directed to the same location. Officials believe this will foster stronger channels of communication, reduce the risk of dropped calls and potentially save more lives.
The mission of the merger is to streamline the response procedure when a 911 call is received.
Previously, if a Jefferson County resident dialed 911 to report a medical emergency, for example, they were connected to their city’s police department, which took down pertinent information and then transferred the call to the appropriate fire station for dispatch of emergency responders. The call-taker at the fire station also asked a series of questions before sending help.
Though an ambulance was on the way within minutes of the original call, valuable time was spent transferring calls and asking potentially repetitive questions.
Now, dispatchers can call on each other from across the room instead of across the county. Jeffcom will have a total of 136 call-takers representing the eight member agencies, with 25-30 on the floor at any given time.
The eight member agencies are Arvada Fire Protection, Arvada Police Department, Evergreen Fire Protection, Golden Police & Fire, Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, Lakewood Police Department, West Metro Fire Protection and Wheat Ridge Police Department.
“I think this is going to impact the community very positively, overall. It will help make Jefferson County safer,” said Sheriff Jeff Shrader, vice president of Jeffcom’s board of directors. “Jeffcom will save lives.”
Additionally, Jeffcom will allow member agencies to more easily combine resources during a crisis, such as a major traffic collision or a wildfire..
“There’s a time of the day when I have just one call-taker on duty, and I realized a number of years ago, when we have a significant call to the field … It can overwhelm one person,” said Wheat Ridge Police Chief Dan Brennan, also a Jeffcom board member. “From my perspective, we weren’t giving the level of service I felt we should be giving.”
Fourteen other, smaller county agencies will also be serviced through the new call center.
“When smaller cities need more resources for a serious call, by combining we sort of force multiply in terms of the personnel that might be available,” Brennan added.
The 14 smaller agencies are Edgewater, Lakeside, Morrison, Mountain View and Colorado School of Mines police departments, and Elk Creek, Fairmount, Genesee, Golden Gate, Indian Hills, Inter-Canyon, North Fork and Pleasant View fire districts. Highland Rescue Team Ambulance District also joined ranks with Jeffcom.
(The Westminster emergency response teams chose to remain as standalone entities because of the city’s municipalities in both Jefferson and Adams counties.)
“It was a lot heavier of a lift than we initially anticipated,” Brennan said of the process. “It’s a lot of unique technology. There were a lot of unique challenges in pooling together employees from eight different agencies, but we put together a pretty effective team.”
The center is prepared to serve more than 600,000 residents and field approximately 18,000 emergency calls and 50,000 non-emergency calls each month.
Jeffcom will boast a larger staff, new equipment, more training opportunities and an anticipated improvement in response time for callers.
“The bonus: It ends up being more cost-efficient, too,” Shrader said.
Jeffcom’s $15 million annual budget comes from all participating agencies. The Sheriff’s Office is fronting $2.4 million per year, for example, but expects to save more than $600,000 annually, Shrader said.
Similarly, Brennan said Wheat Ridge will spend $1 million annually and save about $250,000. The 11 dispatchers moving from the Wheat Ridge Police Department to Jeffcom will even see a significant pay increase, he added.
The agencies are moving into the new Jeffcom building in phases.
Golden Police & Fire District, West Metro Fire Protection and the Sheriff’s Office moved in and started fielding calls last week. Arvada and Wheat Ridge agencies began their transitions this week, and Lakewood and Evergreen will make the move next week.
Residents will still be served by their respective community’s police officers, firefighters and paramedics, and non-emergency numbers for police and fire stations will remain the same. The only real change for callers will be the greeting they hear when they dial 911 — and potentially improved response times.
“We want to be the best center in the nation,” Brennan said.
“We are bringing multiple policies together, so we will have the best of the best,” Shrader echoed. “The best talent will emerge, the best policies will emerge.”
MORE INFORMATION:
Jeffcom 911: 433 S. Allison Parkway, Lakewood; 303-989-3968; info@jeffcom911.org; jeffcom911.org
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to open the Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge to the public this summer despite attempts to block developing the refuge, which circles a shuttered nuclear weapons production facility.
Private tours have already started, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service refuge manager David Lucas said. No hard date exists yet for the full opening but it is expected to be this summer.
“The neat thing about Rocky Flats is it has been undisturbed for the past 70 years as opposed to lands on the other side that have been extensively grazed,” Lucas said.
Lucas said local governments are also working on trails that will connect the refuge trails to the surrounding area, including Boulder County Open Space.
A coalition of groups opposed to opening the refuge sued the Fish and Wildlife Service to block its development, citing fears it was unsafe because of plutonium contamination in the soil.
A plan by the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless to provide housing and a transitional shelter on 59 acres of federally owned land in Lakewood is in peril.
On Friday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services denied the coalition’s request to acquire the property, Lakewood Mayor Adam Paul said in an email Monday night.
The coalition had pitched a two-phase approach to housing up to 1,000 people on the Federal Center site, just south of West Sixth Avenue and east of Union Boulevard, to include the use of temporary structures — trailers, geodesic dome shelters or large insulated tent structures — for the first few years before permanent structures were to be built.
The coalition submitted a financing and operations plan for the $120 million project to Health and Human Services on March 9.
Lakewood residents opposed to the coalition’s plan had circulated a petition and have nearly 3,000 signatures, Lindsay Roser of Lakewood Residents Unite told Denver7.
“We acknowledge need out there, but we think having a 600-unit complex in the middle of a business district is not the place for it. We don’t have the services to support it in terms of police and fire resources,” Roser said.
The General Services Administration, which operates the Federal Center, plans to announce plans shortly about how the property in question will move forward, Paul said.
It’s pretty grim stuff: abandoned cars in Jamaica Bay, broken candy-glass unreturnable bottles everywhere, and one mill after another belching out smoke and dumping refuse in the rivers.
The Atlas Chemical Company, by Marc St. Gil
Oxford Paper Company, by Charles Steinhacker
Burning barge on the Ohio River, by William Strode
Mary Workman holds a jar of undrinkable water from her well, and has filed suit against the Hanna Coal Company - by Erik Calonius
"Edgewater, a city of 5,300 residents." for non-metro denverites, edgewater abuts denver and is smack in the middle of the metro area. it's a bullshit holdover town that basically just writes speeding tickets (and now has legalized retail pot) and keeps whining about needing to find a way to be a retail hub.
Ryan Dorris sat on a bench just outside a gymnastics studio at a high-end Aurora retail complex this week and watched as his daughter and other children tumbled and flipped their way through routines. Beside him were two of his other kids, one devouring an ice cream cone.
This family scene, in a mall-like shopping center, could be just about anywhere in Colorado — except for the cup of wheat beer Dorris held in his hand and a state law that makes it possible.
“It allows you to blend an adult experience with having children,” the father of three said of Stanley Marketplace’s “common consumption” rule. “My daughter can do gymnastics, my son can have an ice cream and I can have an adult beverage.”
Developers and local governments along the Front Range also see the appeal in a concept that allows adults to carry around to-go alcoholic drinks in an eclectic, food and drink-centered environment: a retail landscape that can’t be easily overtaken by the growing reach of Amazon and other online shopping sites.
“We designed Stanley to be a community hub and gathering place,” said Bryant Palmer, who carries the title of chief storyteller for the spacious market hall, which opened in the former Stanley Aviation manufacturing plant in late 2016. “There are lots of people trying to find a real experience — people care more about doing things that are unique.”
Daniel Brenner, Special to the Denver Post
Shoppers enter the building during Small Business Saturday on Nov. 25, 2017 at the Stanley Marketplace.
The idea of providing a unique retail experience in an age where buying something can be easily done with a click of a mouse or the tap of a phone screen is now resonating in Edgewater, a city of 5,300 residents on the edge of Sloan’s Lake.
Next week, the City Council is set to vote on whether to approve common consumption for a new urban gathering spot proposed for a 7-acre site at West 20th Avenue and Depew Street, where now sits a derelict and long-crumbling shopping center once anchored by a King Soopers.
“Edgewater has come of age to where this type of development would be well received,” City Manager HJ Stalf said. “I think it’s going to be a pretty cool community gathering spot.”
RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post
City council will be voting on rezoning a large lot at Depew Street and 20th Avenue that used to have a King Soopers, but has sat empty for years on March 1, 2018 in Denver. Edgewater hopes to open it up to a more boutique specialized kind of retail scene.
Glendale, too, wants an entertainment district where wandering around with adult drinks is a focus. Its Glendale 180 effort is a $175 million restaurant and bar complex slated for a 9½-acre site off of Colorado Boulevard.
Chuck Line, Glendale’s deputy city manager, said his city has “enough big boxes.” Glendale, he said, wanted to do something special with the city-owned land along the north side of Cherry Creek.
“If we had been planning a major retail mall there, we’d be retooling everything now,” Line said.
And ruling the online shopping world is Amazon, which captured 89 percent of all holiday web spending among dominant holiday retailers in the five-week period after Thanksgiving, according to an analysis of credit- and debit-card transaction data by Earnest Research.
Despite the turmoil in the nation’s brick-and-mortar sector, the metro area’s retail scene is holding up relatively well, according to a recent CBRE retail report. More than 1.6 million square feet of retail space was under construction in the final quarter of 2017 — the highest amount since mid-2009, the firm said.
A market report released last year by Marcus & Millichap said throughout metro Denver aging shopping centers “are being transformed into mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly developments.” The company cited Westminster Promenade and Ralston Creek in Arvada as examples of retail districts successfully making themselves over.
Still, Colorado communities feel compelled to offer an increasingly connected and internet-savvy population something more than just another place that sells underpants and umbrellas.
“We don’t want to slide down the slope of doing something that won’t have long-term success,” Edgewater’s Stalf said.
Edgewater’s redevelopment effort will probably feature breweries making craft beer and artisan eateries cooking up eclectic and original fare. The key will be tapping into the common consumption law that the state legislature passed in 2011.
But first the city must rescind a 1977 zoning designation that requires that the site at West 20th and Depew feature a “convenience-type shopping center only” — a reflection of the retail trend at the time that saw value in grouping multiple goods and services at one location. Edgewater now finds itself in a position similar to what city leaders 40 years ago faced: What do consumers want?
Jon Schallert, a retail analyst and president of The Schallert Group, said Edgewater is recognizing that “shopping centers need to be re-invented.” But it’s no easy thing to build that real-world alternative to the easy and convenient experience of online shopping, he said.
“(Edgewater) has to be really picky,” he said. “They can’t let anyone in there who isn’t going to contribute to customer traffic. They need synergy.”
Whether Edgewater can find that synergy isn’t yet known. Stalf said the proposed site is compromised by its location several blocks west of heavily traveled Sheridan Boulevard.
But Edgewater has been plucky when it comes to creating opportunities for itself. The city was a leader in embracing retail marijuana from the moment legal sales first went into effect more than four years ago — the square-mile city has half a dozen dispensaries — and it has used pot-tax revenues to cover the cost of road repairs and the construction of a new civic center.
And Edgewater’s demographics have dramatically changed over the past few years, as property values have doubled or tripled and young families have moved in. That favors the kind of development envisioned at West 20th and Depew, Stalf said.
“I think it makes it more social,” said Jason Wesoky, a Stapleton resident who was enjoying a beer from Cheluna Brewery in a hallway inside the 140,000-square-foot Stanley Marketplace this week. “It just makes it more fun.”
Wesoky stood with two mothers from the neighborhood, both of whom were drinking wine they had purchased from another business inside Stanley. Their kids were playing together at a nearby foosball table.
“The kids had ice cream,” said Melissa Howarth, finishing off her glass of wine. “And we had a grown-up dessert.”
Updated March 8, 2018 at 10:48 a.m. The following corrective information has been added to this article: An earlier version of this article cited an erroneous statistic in a Bloomberg story that the news service later corrected regarding Amazon’s performance during the 2017 holiday shopping season.
this is our state senator. not sure what to make of it.
A Democratic state legislator from Jefferson County has switched her party affiliation just days before the 2018 legislative session begins.
Sen. Cheri Jahn announced Friday on Facebook that she will be an independent because she is frustrated with the political system. State and national politics have become more polarized and partisan since she was first elected to the statehouse in 2000, she said.
“I have always brought an independent voice ,” Jahn wrote on Facebook. “I didn’t change, the system changed. This system is terribly broken. I have watched through the years and witnessed that there is more care about politics and those in power than serving people in the state.”
However, Democratic party leaders don’t believe the change will have much impact during the upcoming session. Jahn has requested to caucus with the Democrats during the 2018 session, which begins Jan. 10, said Sen. Lucia Guzman, Senate minority leader.
The Democratic caucus will vote at the start of the session whether to include Jahn. Guzman did not foresee any problems and said she expected her fellow senators to approve it.
Republicans hold a one-vote majority in the Colorado senate, 18-17.
“There’s really not that much change at all as far as our operation,” Guzman said. “Sen. Jahn has always been an independent voice even before she changed affiliation.”
In her Facebook post, Jahn said she had been bothered by the partisan process for years and gave considerable thought to the party change. Still, her constituents should expect the same representation, she said.
“I have prided myself on working with all of my colleagues regardless of party affiliation and I have a great respect for my friends in both parties. My decision to officially become an independent will not change the way I represent my constituents. The unaffiliated voters in my district and statewide deserve representation; they are a significant voting block and their voices are not heard or represented in the state senate.”
Jahn represents senate District 20, which includes parts of Lakewood, Wheat Ridge, Arvada and southern Jefferson County.
this is about 2 miles from our house. i hadn't realized that the original plan was blocked and there was a plan for low-income housing. i can imagine folks in my neighborhood, etc., pushing back pretty hard on this.
One of the metro area’s largest affordable housing projects — a proposed 500- to 600-unit, low-income complex slated for 59 acres of federally owned land in Lakewood — could take another step toward reality this month as federal officials mull a homeless advocacy group’s plan for the site.
But some in the city are asking whether such a high concentration of housing geared solely at individuals and families in unstable life situations is the best use of vacant ground abutting the W-Line light-rail stop near the Federal Center, even as home prices in the metro area continue to rise to new highs.
“I think there needs to be a lot more community input and engagement on what would be the highest and best use of that land,” said Lakewood Councilwoman Ramey Johnson, who represents the part of the city where the parcel sits. “People are sensitive to issues with the homeless, but they also have honest questions about transportation and congestion.”
Not to mention the security and safety of those living at the new site and of residents in adjoining neighborhoods, Johnson said.
Mayor Adam Paul said a community with more diverse housing, along with office and retail uses, would be a “bold first-of-its-kind development” that could mimic the success the city has seen with its overhaul efforts at Belmar in the past decade.
“I believe this property is better suited for a mix of incomes (homeless, affordable, market-rate and for-sale condos) and uses such as offices, primary jobs, stores and businesses with great community amenities, including parks, that would benefit all in the community,” Paul said.
But attempts to auction the 59-acre parcel, which sits at the corner of West Sixth Avenue and Simms Street, to private developers was challenged in court last year by the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless. The nonprofit argued that the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987 gives homeless agencies the right of first refusal when surplus federal properties are sold.
An earlier attempt by the federal government to transfer the land to Lakewood through a unique “lab-for-land” swap fizzled out in early 2016 when the city took too long to respond to the government’s offer. That plan envisioned a mixed-used development centered on the nearby W-Line’s Denver Federal Center Station.
The Colorado Coalition for the Homeless is in the midst of submitting a plan to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that, if approved, would allow it to move forward with its plan at the Federal Center site. A determination from the agency could come as soon as this month.
The coalition would then have several weeks to submit a full plan with financial details to federal officials.
Coalition spokeswoman Cathy Alderman said the need for more affordable units in metro Denver has never been higher. Sluggish home inventory growth and rapidly escalating prices have led to more people shelling out a larger share of income for a roof over their heads. According to a Harvard University study released last month, nearly one in four renters in the metro area spends half or more of their monthly paycheck on housing.
“It would be a slightly more intense housing situation that provides wraparound services for those who aren’t currently housed to stay stably housed,” she said of the Federal Center project. “We all recognize there is a great need for this kind of project.”
In addition to rising home prices, rents have also been on an upward march in and around Denver. Median rates for a one-bedroom apartment in Denver hit $1,070 this past summer while two-bedroom units climbed to $1,350. That’s a 3 percent increase over the median rates from August 2016, according to Apartment List.
“Too many people are un-housed and sleeping on the street,” Alderman said.
But she recognizes that neighbors around the Federal Center site have legitimate concerns about too high a concentration of low-income housing in one part of the city and the strain it could put on social services provided by Lakewood and Jefferson County. The coalition wants to see if it can include some diversity in its housing offerings without violating the McKinney-Vento Act.
“We’re having to explore about getting their approval of that as an appropriate use,” Alderman said. “We certainly know that there is a balance here we want to achieve.”
It’s a balance that the coalition has largely reached with the 19 other affordable housing projects it oversees in metro Denver, Alderman said, noting the group has had “pretty high success rates in keeping people stably housed.”
But the Lakewood project — at a projected $120 million to complete — would be appreciably larger than anything else the coalition, or anyone else for that matter, has undertaken to date. The coalition’s biggest community today is the 180-unit Renaissance 88 Apartments in Thornton.
Thornton’s neighborhood services manager, Nicole Jeffers, said the Renaissance has had some good and bad. Nearby shops and restaurants have been able to tap a plentiful pool of hourly workers who live in the complex, she said, but police have had to deal with more calls to the complex, especially those involving relatives and friends who don’t live there.
“We know there are homeless individuals living along the fence behind the Renaissance 88 on a vacant property,” Jeffers said.
On the other hand, she said, Thornton recognizes that it needs to be a part of the solution to a problem that is truly regional in nature.
“You’re either going to build housing for people or they’re going to be homeless,” Jeffers said. “These 180 families would be on the street or doubled up with friends and family if Renaissance 88 wasn’t there.”
Lakewood Councilman Charley Able said the question of “if not there, where?” is one he struggles with when it comes to housing the homeless in Colorado’s fifth-largest city. But he’s not sold on the location.
Not only is there the intensity concerns to placing so much low-income housing on a single site, Able also worries whether the ground has been adequately cleaned after years of environmental contamination. Once home to the Denver Ordnance Plant, the property contains a former landfill that contaminated 15 acres with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, metals, dioxin/furans, pesticides and asbestos, the coalition’s lawsuit states.
“I’m concerned about any habitation on the site,” Able said.
Alderman said the coalition plans to refrain from building any residences on the tainted acreage, instead dedicating that portion of the property to construction of a solar garden.
Troy Guard’s out-there menu (don’t miss the lamb neck and octopus tacos) and killer margaritas of Los Chingones will have a home at Colorado Mills mall.
“Los Chingones is all about having fun and eating good food,” Guard said. “So when the opportunity to open in a mall environment was presented, it just seemed to make sense. We feel that the neighborhood will appreciate how unique Los Chingones is and the fact that it’s not a chain restaurant.”
The Lakewood location, which was a former California Pizza Kitchen, will be the largest Chingones yet. The 5,500-square-foot restaurant will be accessible from both inside and outside the mall, in case you like your nachos with a side of retail therapy.
Look for the Colorado Mills Los Chingones to open in late spring 2018.
Los Chingones: 14500 W. Colfax Ave., Lakewood; loschingonesmexican.com; opening late spring 2018
The Los Angeles Lakers selected Lonzo Ball with the second overall selection of the 2017 NBA Draft, largely based on a one-and-done season at UCLA, where Ball averaged 14.6 points, 7.6 assists and 6.0 rebounds as a freshman while shooting 55.1 percent from the floor, earning him first-team all-American, first-team All-PAC-12 and PAC-12 Freshman of the Year honors. Yet his quirky shooting mechanics have limited his ability at the NBA level.
Ball’s set up starts at his right hip, with the ball brought up around his left ear where he then releases his shot. According to ESPN’s Sports Science, this puts his shot angle about 50 degrees away from the “ideal” shot position, resulting in some poor performances across the board.
His 30.9 percent field goal percentage, if it doesn’t improve, would be the fifth-worst performance by a rookie since 1979, the year the NBA adopted the three-point line. As a spot-up shooter he is below average, hitting 12 of 50 (24 percent) attempts; only Marcus Smart and T.J. Warren are worse on these possessions this season. In transition, Ball is producing 0.565 points per possession, placing him 65th out of 66 guards with at least 50 possessions in transition. And among the 35 players with at least 100 possessions as the ballhandler on the pick-and-roll, no one produces fewer points per possession than Ball does (0.577). To add insult to injury, no one has a higher turnover rate (23.1 percent), either.
Because of this, he is, according to NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley, “only half of a player right now.” And since Magic Johnson has stated that the Lakers will not tweak Ball’s shot mechanics during the season, it will be up to his passing to narrow the gap between worst in the league to something more respectable.
Luckily for Los Angeles, his court vision is good enough to mitigate some of his shortcomings as a shooter. For example, with him as the ballhandler in the pick and roll, the Lakers score 1.0 points per possession off his passes – almost double what Ball does on his own – with fewer turnovers.
Ball also generates 13.1 potential assists, assists a player would have if all shots off his passes resulted in a score. Only eight other players have more this season, and that includes last year’s MVP Russell Westbrook, the runner-up James Harden and perennial MVP candidate LeBron James, along with John Wall, Chris Paul and rookie-of-the-year favorite Ben Simmons.
But Ball doesn’t pass nearly enough to bridge the gap between his performance and what is produced by an average guard in the NBA.
His 0.108 points per touch is a league-low among players with at least 80 touches per game. The rest of the NBA’s guards score 0.242 per touch, with half of them above 0.229. Based on the Lakers’ roster, and his current shot volume, Ball would have to pass the ball 111.3 times per game to just make him an average guard producing .242 points per touch. He is currently making 63.7 passes per game. Since player tracking data is available, the highest mark was set by Kemba Walker in 2013-14 (77.9), making over a hundred passes per game considerably out of reach.
To be fair, the Lakers are an average shooting team (45.7 percent field goal percentage, 15th in the NBA), making Ball’s job more difficult than, say, if he was passing to members of the Golden State Warriors, the best shooting team in the NBA this season. But the difference in points per shot would still necessitate Ball passing almost 98 times per game. And again, that’s just to get him to average – to be one of the premier point guards in the league it must be much higher.
Ball does have some defensive value. His 2.1 deflections and 7.5 contested shots per game rank second and fifth, respectively, on the team this season. But other than that he is a non factor – the Lakers defensive rating remains flat with Ball on (101.6) or off the court (101.7).
Could Ball improve his shooting with better mechanics so he isn’t as much of a liability? Sure, but right now we are in uncharted waters. Since 1983-84, the earliest data is available, only two other guards in addition to Ball have shot 35 percent or less from the floor on 200 or more attempts during their first 20 games in the NBA, Emmanuel Mudiay and Mark Macon. Mudiay finished his rookie season shooting 36.4 percent from the field while Macon ended at 37.5 percent. They both improved slightly the following year, to 37.7 percent and 41.5 percent, respectively, which is still below average.
As for the Jason Kidd comparison’s for Ball coming out of college, they are appropriate, with the two starting their careers similarly through their first 20 games in the NBA, with the exception of free-throw percentage, which is heavily in Kidd’s favor. However, Kidd’s field goal percentage never got above 45 percent in any of his first five seasons in the league and he ended his career as a 40 percent shooter from the field, not exactly a ringing endorsement for a player struggling with his shot.
Apple’s trying out something entirely new starting Thursday: a medical study.
Apple Watch users are now able to enroll in a new study Apple is conducting with Stanford University School of Medicine, which uses the device’s heart-rate monitor to check for an irregular heart rate. While others have used Apple’s software and devices in medical studies, this is the first time that it’s actually sponsored one itself. The move underscores Apple’s focus on using its products for health care.
“Working alongside the medical community, not only can we inform people of certain health conditions, we also hope to advance discoveries in heart science,” said Apple chief operating officer Jeff Williams, in a statement.
Health and fitness have been a key focus for Apple, especially since launching the Apple Watch two years ago. Apple already employs a small staff of medical professionals to develop its health products, and it is reportedly working on a diabetes glucose-monitoring device that won’t pierce the skin. It’s also worked with hospitals to include more of its tech in patients’ rooms.
This study takes all of that a step further: Now Apple itself will be running a study and submitting data to the Food and Drug Administration. The heart-rate researcher will look specifically at atrial fibrillation – or afib – which refers to an irregular heart rate and is a leading cause of stroke and other heart conditions. The condition kills around 130,000 people per year, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
To join the study, Apple Watch owners must download the Apple Heart Study app. Participants must be over age 22. Once they have signed up, the Watch and Heart Study app will work to detect an irregular heartbeats. If it notices something amiss, it will notify that person on the Watch and iPhone. From there, he or she may opt to see a doctor online, for a free consult on their health. Apple and Stanford are partnering with Boston firm American Well to provide those consults.
Study researchers will also then send an electrocardiogram patch to participants experiencing irregular heartbeats, for a further reading.
Heart-rate monitoring features have been a core part of the Watch since it debuted as a heavily health and fitness focused product. More advanced software to take your pulse were a major addition to Apple’s latest Watch software upgrade, and users can already get alerts when you appear to have an elevated heart rate but aren’t active.
This move takes Apple a step further, into actually using all that data to conduct its own medical research. The company declined to say whether it would take on further research in the future.
Apple has previously noted how its products can make it easier for researchers to find study participants, thanks to their broad reach. Traditionally, researchers have had to seek out study participants directly – through medical facilities, by email or with fliers. Then, they often must visit them in person to collect data. By enrolling using devices, Apple has said, it makes it easier for scientists to both find and monitor study participants.
At least 33 million units of the Watch have been sold, according to Asymco analyst Horace Deidu – Apple itself does not officially release sales figures, nor information on who is buying the Watch. But Apple researchers said they believe the Watch will provide a representative sample of the population for their study.
Apple declined to say how long the study will run.
The wedding cake display at Masterpiece Cakeshop in Denver on June 6, 2013.
On December 5, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Masterpiece Cakeshop, the case in which a baker claims that free speech protects his right to refuse to make a cake for a same-sex wedding. Although it is impossible to know how the Court will rule, I can confidently predict that if the baker wins, the justices’ explanation will be incoherent.
There’s a lot of confusion, some of it intentional, over what this case is about. Here are the basic facts. Charlie Craig and David Mullins visited the Masterpiece bakery and looked through a photo album of custom-designed cakes. When the owner, Jack Phillips, greeted them, they told him (according to his own testimony) that they “wanted a wedding cake for ‘our wedding.’” Phillips told them that he did not create wedding cakes for same-sex weddings. They left immediately without discussing any details of their proposed wedding cake. The entire exchange lasted 20 seconds. Craig and Mullins then sued Phillips for violating Colorado’s antidiscrimination statute. Phillips claimed that he was protected by freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
To clarify the issues in Masterpiece Cakeshop, it helps to contrast it with a case now pending in the United Kingdom Supreme Court. Ashers Bakery in Belfast, Northern Ireland, refused on religious grounds to make a cake iced with the slogan “Support Gay Marriage in 2014.” It was sued for discrimination. The bakers testified, and the trial court accepted, that they would have supplied the cake if there had been no message and that they would have refused to produce the message even if the customer had been heterosexual. The court nonetheless found that refusing to write words supporting same-sex marriage was itself discrimination based on sexual orientation. The Northern Ireland Court of Appeals thinks you can commit antigay discrimination against a heterosexual customer, by refusing to produce a message supporting same-sex marriage.
This is a bizarre interpretation of antidiscrimination law. It also would clearly violate the First Amendment if it were adopted by any jurisdiction in the United States. One cannot be compelled to say what one does not believe. The Supreme Court so held in 1943, when it decided that children could not be required to say the Pledge of Allegiance: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” The Court has since explained that a person cannot be compelled to be “an instrument for fostering public adherence to an ideological point of view he finds unacceptable.” When the state does that, it “invades the sphere of intellect and spirit which it is the purpose of the First Amendment to our Constitution to reserve from all official control.”
But this is not the issue in Masterpiece Cakeshop. Unlike Northern Ireland, Colorado is not telling Phillips what words he must put on his cake. It is merely telling him that if he sells any products to heterosexual couples, he must sell the same products to same-sex couples. He is free to refuse to write “Support Gay Marriage” on any cakes that he sells, so long as he refuses that to both gay and heterosexual customers.
So this is an easy case. Phillips should lose.
Much of the argument on behalf of Phillips mischaracterizes the facts to make his case look more like Ashers Bakery. He cites evidence that Craig and Mullins wanted a “rainbow-layered” cake. “Given the rainbow’s status as the preeminent symbol of gay pride, Craig and Mullins’s wedding cake undeniably expressed support for same-sex marriage.”
But Phillips did not know that. He had no idea what they were going to ask for. He refused service before he found out anything about what Craig and Mullins wanted to buy. His arguments are a series of elaborate pirouettes around this inconvenient fact.
The brief for Phillips most directly addresses the problem this way: “When he heard [that the cake was for a same-sex wedding], Phillips immediately knew that any wedding cake he would design for them would express messages about their union that he could not in good conscience communicate.” The conduct of baking a cake has a conventional meaning. It expresses the celebration of a union. If he disagrees with that message, he claims, the law is forcing him to express a message with which he disagrees.
The strongest authority Phillips has, and the closest the Supreme Court has come to embracing this kind of logic, is Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, which declared in 2000 that forbidding the Boy Scouts to expel a gay scoutmaster “would, at the very least, force the organization to send a message, both to the youth members and the world, that the Boy Scouts accepts homosexual conduct as a legitimate form of behavior.”
The Court’s extension of the compelled-speech doctrine in this offhand sentence in the Boy Scouts case (which was primarily about freedom of association) has absurd implications. Federal regulations now require cars to have airbags. The federal government adopted these regulations despite the resistance of automobile manufacturers. When new cars conspicuously have airbags, this is reasonably understood as sending a message that airbags are necessary to make cars safe and that their inclusion is cost-justified. The car manufacturer may dissent from that message, but does the company have an argument that its First Amendment rights are being violated by requiring airbags? Although the Court could reinvigorate the principle it stated in the Boy Scouts case, the consequence would be anarchy. It would allow anyone to violate any law if obeying it would conventionally be taken to convey a message with which the objector disagrees.
There is a similar absurdity in Phillips’s claim that the state is discriminating on the basis of viewpoint because the antidiscrimination law, as applied, “favors cake artists who support same-sex marriage over those like Phillips who do not.” The law makes no reference at all to viewpoint. It just prohibits discrimination. It is true that the law favors those who oppose the conduct it prohibits over those who would like to engage in it. But that is true of every law. Again, there is no way to articulate the principle behind this claim that is not an invitation to chaos.
Other arguments on behalf of Phillips frame his case as only applying more narrowly. Phillips’s business is not just a bakery, but “an art gallery of cakes.” He “has been an artist using cake as his canvas with Masterpiece as his studio.” “The cake, which serves as the iconic centerpiece of the marriage celebration, announces through Phillips’s voice that a marriage has occurred and should be celebrated. The government can no more force Phillips to speak those messages with his lips than to express them through his art.”
The argument here is that custom cake decoration is inherently expressive. Phillips argues that the result should be different if Craig and Mullins had requested a premade cake.
Here again the facts intrude. Phillips has said: “Couples may select from one of our unique creations that are on display in the store, or they may request that I design and create something entirely different.” When he denied service to the couple, he had no idea which choice they would have made. Evidently, he deems “customized” the production to order of cakes that he has previously designed. When he had his very brief conversation with Craig and Mullins, they were looking at a book of such designs. Would the identical cake be “customized” if Phillips baked it in the afternoon, knowing what it would be used for, but not “customized” if had been made in the morning, before they walked into the store?
If “customization” means unique work made to order, many kinds of work are customized. Auto repair is unique work made to order. If the wedding limousine has engine trouble, would a mechanic have a First Amendment right to refuse service? How about a caterer? A hairdresser? This notion collapses the already porous distinction between Phillips’s artistic cake design and any other food that is made to order.
Phillips also claims that because Craig and Mullins easily found another baker, they must have been illicitly motivated by the desire to punish him for his ideas. But even if this were true (how could he know that?), the questionable motives of a plaintiff aren’t relevant to adjudication. If you negligently ding my car and I sue you, the court won’t care that I’m motivated by racism or other nasty motives. Even if the plaintiffs in some of these cases are trying to compel affirmation of what the Christian merchants do not believe, this has nothing to do with their legal claim.
Phillips also makes a religious freedom claim. Unlike the Hobby Lobby case, where the Religious Freedom Restoration Act told courts to consider exemptions from federal laws such as Obamacare, the Court has no authority to carve out religious exceptions to state laws. On the other hand, states must not discriminate against religion. Phillips claims that because bakers who support same-sex marriage have been permitted to refuse to make cakes quoting Biblical passages condemning homosexuality, the law “applies different rules to all expressive professionals depending on their views about same-sex marriage: supporters get a pass, but opponents get punished.” But this again confuses the facts of Masterpiece with those of Ashers Bakery. Phillips never found out what message (if any) he might be asked to convey.
So none of Phillips’s arguments work. Lately he has gotten some help. The help is clever but makes his case no better.
The surprising election of President Donald Trump was followed by the unsurprising decision of the Department of Justice (DOJ) to file its own brief supporting Phillips’s claim. The lawyers in the Solicitor General’s office are far more skillful than those of the Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents Phillips.
The DOJ brief ignores every argument that Phillips makes and starts all over with an entirely new theory of the case. The brief acknowledges, what is settled law, that the First Amendment is not violated by content-neutral laws that incidentally affect speech. For example, newspapers are not immune from antitrust laws. That means that bakers are not immune from antidiscrimination law either.
But then the brief proposes a new proviso: “an application of a public accommodations law that fundamentally alters expression and interferes with an expressive event triggers heightened scrutiny.” What’s an expressive event? “Public accommodations laws compel expression—whether speech or expressive conduct—when they mandate the creation of commissioned goods or the provision of commissioned services that are inherently communicative.” The theory follows Phillips’s brief in drawing the line at customized work, though its formulation is more deft and careful. Why the line is drawn there—and what counts as customized work—is still not explained.
The DOJ brief offers another, independent theory: “A public accommodations law exacts a greater First Amendment toll if it also compels participation in a ceremony or other expressive event.” The fact that it’s a wedding raises a special free-speech issue. The logic now seems to extend to premade cakes—and “participation” includes the sale of goods, hours before and miles away from the event. The Solicitor General tries to limit the scope of this point: “Whether governmental compulsion creates an association with an unwanted message depends on a reasonable observer’s perception of the relevant expression.”
But how is a reasonable observer to know whether a cake is custom-made? Or who made it? Wedding cakes aren’t normally accompanied by signs explaining the history of their preparation, such as whether they were based on customized designs. A wedding is not an art museum.
The claim that what matters is the “deeply expressive” character of a wedding has broad implications that DOJ does not notice. Lots of services that can be the basis of discrimination involve deeply expressive events: funerals, theaters, concerts, private schools, pregnancy, and childbirth. Anyone who participates in these events in any capacity, expressive or otherwise, would have a First Amendment right to refuse—even if they were motivated by pure, unapologetic bigotry. (If you think such bigotry has become marginal, talk to any American Muslim.) No one could know which businesses (or even which food preparation businesses) would be deemed inherently expressive. Any line courts draw will be arbitrary, since all intentional conduct expresses something. Chaos again.
Let’s not forget what this case is really about: the objection of some conservative Christians to facilitating same-sex marriage. Some of those objections can be shoehorned into a broad understanding of free speech. Others, equally strong, can’t. Are floral arrangements inherently expressive? What about renting a wedding hall, or married-student housing at religious colleges? The Court has previously held that universities were not compelled to endorse any message when they were required to provide space to military recruiters.
This is, at bottom, a problem of trying to work out a compromise between two groups, so that each of them is able to live out their ideals. It is a worthy goal. In its decision recognizing a right to same-sex marriage, the Court declared that “[m]any who deem same-sex marriage to be wrong reach that conclusion based on decent and honorable religious or philosophical premises.” (The deepest problem with the attempt to base accommodation on free speech is that it gives aid and comfort to those who are neither decent nor honorable.)
Some kind of legislative deal ought to be possible. Utah managed to do that, facilitated by the good offices of the Mormon Church. Any such accommodation will need to give clear notice of what is and is not permitted, with rules rather than vague standards, for instance exempting businesses of five or fewer employees.
This kind of bargain is beyond the institutional capacity of courts. They can’t learn through negotiation what each side’s most urgent interests are, and they can’t draw the kind of arbitrary lines that negotiations often produce.
The impulse to judicial intervention should have been resisted. The Supreme Court should dismiss its decision to hear the Masterpiece Cakeshop case as improvidently granted. The tools at its disposal are the wrong tools for this job.
Everyone’s eyes are on Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is generally thought to be the swing vote in this case. But I’m more interested in Neil Gorsuch. Gorsuch is a very good lawyer, and he is also a very partisan Republican. Those inclinations are at war with each other. If Gorsuch signs onto a nonsensical opinion that throws the law into chaos in order to reach a political result he likes, that will tell us a lot about what kind of judicial work we can expect from him in the future.
When our ancestors began to control fire, most likely somewhere in Africa around 400,000 years ago, the planet was set on a new course. We have little idea and even less evidence of how early humans made fire; perhaps they carried around smouldering bundles of leaves from forest fires, or captured the sparks thrown off when chipping stone or rubbing sticks together. However it happened, the human control of fire made an indelible mark on the earth’s ecosystems, and marked the beginning of the Anthropocene – the epoch in which humans have had a significant impact on the planet.
In Against the Grain James Scott describes these early stages as a ‘“thin” Anthropocene’, but ever since, the Anthropocene has been getting thicker. New layers of human impact were added by the adoption of farming about ten thousand years ago, the invention of the steam engine around 1780, and the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945. Today the Anthropocene is so dense that we have virtually lost sight of anything that could be called ‘the natural world’.
Fire changed humans as well as the world. Eating cooked food transformed our bodies; we developed a much shorter digestive tract, meaning that more metabolic energy was available to grow our brains. At the same time, Homo sapiens became domesticated by its dependence on fire for warmth, protection and fuel. If this was the start of human progress towards ‘civilisation’, then – according to the conventional narrative – the next step was the invention of agriculture around ten thousand years ago. Farming, it is said, saved us from a dreary nomadic Stone Age hunter-gatherer existence by allowing us to settle down, build towns and develop the city-states that were the centres of early civilisations. People flocked to them for the security, leisure and economic opportunities gained from living within thick city walls. The story continues with the collapse of the city-states and barbarian insurgency, plunging civilised worlds – ancient Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica – into their dark ages. Thus civilisations rise and fall. Or so we are told.
The perfectly formed city-state is the ideal, deeply ingrained in the Western psyche, on which our notion of the nation-state is founded, ultimately inspiring Donald Trump’s notion of a ‘city’ wall to keep out the barbarian Mexican horde, and Brexiters’ desire to ‘take back control’ from insurgent European bureaucrats. But what if the conventional narrative is entirely wrong? What if ancient ruins testify to an aberration in the normal state of human affairs rather than a glorious and ancient past to whose achievements we should once again aspire? What if the origin of farming wasn’t a moment of liberation but of entrapment? Scott offers an alternative to the conventional narrative that is altogether more fascinating, not least in the way it omits any self-congratulation about human achievement. His account of the deep past doesn’t purport to be definitive, but it is surely more accurate than the one we’re used to, and it implicitly exposes the flaws in contemporary political ideas that ultimately rest on a narrative of human progress and on the ideal of the city/nation-state.
Why did people start farming? At the ‘Man the Hunter’ symposium in Chicago in 1966, Marshall Sahlins drew on research from the likes of Richard B. Lee among the !Kung of the Kalahari to argue that hunter-gatherers enjoyed the ‘original affluent society’. Even in the most marginal environments, he said, hunter-gatherers weren’t engaged in a constant struggle for survival, but had a leisurely lifestyle. Sahlins and his sources may have pushed the argument a little too far, neglecting to consider, for instance, the time spent preparing food (lots of mongongo nuts to crack). But their case was strong enough to deal a severe blow to the idea that farming was salvation for hunter-gatherers: however you cut it, farming involves much higher workloads and incurs more physical ailments than relying on the wild. And the more we discover, as Scott points out, the better a hunter-gatherer diet, health and work-life balance look.
This is especially true of the hunter-gatherers who dwelled in the wetlands where the first farming communities developed, in the Fertile Crescent, the arc of South-West Asia now covered by Jordan, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, southern Turkey, Iran and Iraq. Scott’s book focuses on Mesopotamia – the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates where the first city-states also appeared – though it takes many diversions into ancient China, Mesoamerica, and the Roman and Greek ancient worlds. Until about ten thousand years ago, Mesopotamia had been a world of hunter-gatherers with access to a huge range of resources: reeds and sedges for building and food, a great variety of edible plants (clubrush, cat’s-tails, water lily, bulrush), tortoises, fish, molluscs, crustaceans, birds, waterfowl, small mammals and migrating gazelles, which were the chief source of protein. The wild larder was routinely replenished by the annual cycle of the ripening of fruits and wild vegetables, and the seasonal changes that brought the arrival of migratory species.
Wetland environments were available to hunter-gatherers elsewhere in the world too. In China’s Hangzhou Bay, phenomenally well-preserved waterlogged sites show that hunter-gatherers became sedentary amid a bounteous range of wild resources. I do my own fieldwork in Wadi Faynan, in southern Jordan, which is now an arid, largely treeless landscape, but 12,000 years ago a perennial river flowed there. Where it joined with the river of Wadi Dana, an oasis-like niche was created. That is where the early Neolithic site of WF16 is now located (we call it Neolithic even though there is no trace of domesticated crops and animals). A dense cluster of about thirty semi-subterranean dwellings was constructed there between 12,500 and 10,500 years ago by hunter-gatherers who were clearly enjoying a diverse and resilient set of local resources: hunting wild goats, trapping birds, collecting figs, wild grass, nuts and so forth. I suspect they were also practising some form of environmental management, setting fires to promote young shoots, building small dams to retain and divert water, and undertaking selective culls among wild herds to sustain animal populations.
The key to food security was diversity: if, by chance, a particular foodstuff gave out, there were always more to choose from. And so hunter-gatherers could become sedentary if they wished, without having to grow crops or rear livestock. The first cultivation of barley and wheat came from the slight modification of wild stands – weeding, removing pests, transplanting, sowing seeds into alluvial soils. This would have provided hunter-gatherers with a new source of food at the cost of little additional effort. The mystery is why cereal-farming came to be so dominant. Why hunter-gatherers passed up their affluent lifestyle in favour of far more onerous and risky existences growing a narrow range of crops and managing livestock is a fundamental question to which we have no good answer. Was it by choice, or was that first sowing of seed a trap, locking people into a seasonal cycle of planting and harvesting from which we have been unable to escape?
Scott considers whether the Younger Dryas, a period of markedly colder and drier conditions between 12,900 and 11,700 years ago, forced hunter-gatherers into farming. But while the change in climate may have inspired more experimentation with cultivation and herding, the Younger Dryas is too early: communities committed to cereals and livestock didn’t arise until about ten thousand years ago. Scott overlooks another possible factor: religious belief. The discovery of the Neolithic hill-top sanctuary of Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey in 1994 went against the grain of conventional archaeological understanding of the Neolithic. Here, around 11,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers had constructed a vast complex of massive decorated stone pillars in exactly the same place that domesticated strains of wheat had evolved.
The quantities of food needed to feed the workforce and those who gathered for rituals at Göbekli must have been huge: if the Neolithic gods could persuade people to invest so much effort in construction, and to suffer the physical injuries, ailments and deaths that came along with it, then perhaps expending those extra calories in the fields would have seemed quite trivial. Even then, Göbekli doesn’t help us explain why cereal farming and goat herding took such a hold elsewhere. Personally I find it difficult to resist the theory of unintended self-entrapment into the farming lifestyle, which was then legitimated by Neolithic ideology. We find evidence of burial rituals and skull cults throughout the Fertile Crescent.
I see the consequence in Wadi Faynan. A little less than 10,500 years ago the hunter-gatherer settlement of WF16 was abandoned and replaced by the Neolithic farming village of Ghuwayr 1. This had rectangular stone houses and storerooms. Piles of excavated grindstones testify to the back and knee-breaking work of grinding barley grain; meanwhile, domesticated goats had begun to eat up the local vegetation – the first step to today’s barren landscape.
It isn’t just the workload that makes the move to farming so surprising. Scott argues that these early Neolithic villages – his preferred term is ‘multi-species resettlement camps’ – were serious health hazards for all who stepped or slept in them. The villages were overrun by people and animals, and the waste they produced; mice, rats and crows took up residence, bringing micro-parasites of their own to join the burgeoning community of fleas, lice and mites. Until about 10,800 years ago domestic waste at WF16 was left on the floors of rooms or dumped between houses; after that date a centralised, communal waste dump appears to have been set up, but it would nevertheless have been a festering mess immediately adjacent to peoples’ homes. At the early Neolithic site of Boncuklu in Turkey, excavated by Douglas Baird of Liverpool University, a human toilet has been found in the middle of the village. Human susceptibility to illness would have been boosted by the increasing narrowness of the diet.
Outbreaks of disease, or chronic ill-health, may well provide a better explanation than ritual, ideology and conflict for the dense accumulations of human remains often found packed below floors or into special buildings in the Neolithic. The remains of around seventy individuals have been found in the Skull Building at Çayönü in Turkey. A mass of bodies, primarily infants, are currently being excavated by Roger and Wendy Matthews of the University of Reading from a single building at the early Neolithic site of Bestansur in northern Iraq. Signs of multiple burials have been found below house floors in late Neolithic sites throughout the region. Many Neolithic villages appear to have been abandoned quite suddenly: might that have been because of endemic disease?
It wasn’t just people: goats, sheep and cattle would also have suffered from overcrowding. A combination of selective culling and domestication reduced their sexual dimorphism, caused neotany (preservation of juvenile characteristics into adulthood) and changed their brains, both in size and function. The brains of domesticated sheep are 24 per cent smaller than those of their wild counterparts, and they are less timid, which probably relates to changes in the limbic systems relating to emotional response. The rodents in the settlements underwent similar changes, indicating that some of these were a consequence of village life rather than human selection. The implication is that we should assume the same process in people: how did the brains, personalities and patterns of thought of Neolithic farmers differ from those of their hunter-gatherer ancestors? Was this a critical step towards the complete domestication of Homo?
*
According to the conventional narrative, once the transition to farming had taken place, further progress would have been swift, culminating in the city-states with their glorious architecture, art and secure economies. This did happen eventually: by 3200 BCE Uruk in Mesopotamia was the largest city in the world, with between 25,000 and 50,000 inhabitants, soon joined by the city-states of Kish, Nippur, Isin, Lagash, Eridu and Ur. As well as monumental architecture, they all had thick city walls; a class of administrators and priests; centralised production of crafts such as ceramics and textiles; social hierarchies topped by a king; and – surely the key index of human ‘progress’ – tax collectors. But why did it take so long – about four thousand years – for the city-states to appear? The reason is probably the disease, pestilence and economic fragility of those Neolithic villages. How did they survive and grow at all? Well, although farming would have significantly increased mortality rates in both infants and adults, sedentism would have increased fertility. Mobile hunter-gatherers were effectively limited by the demands of travel to having one child every four years. An increase in fertility that just about outpaced the increase in mortality would account for the slow, steady increase in population in the villages. By 3500 BCE the economic and demographic conditions were in place for a power-grab by would-be leaders.
As Scott explains, the city-states were dependent on grain: wheat and barley in Mesopotamia, millet in China, maize in Mesoamerica. The reason is that cereals are easy to tax: they ripen at predictable times, the size of the harvest can easily be assessed, and the grain can be divided, transported and distributed in precisely measured rations by weight and volume. It is much more difficult to tax merchants who smuggle their goods, or to tax crops such as tubers that are hidden underground and can be dispersed throughout woodlands, or chickpeas and lentils, which have an extended ripening season. If the cereal farming takes place close to a river that can be used for bulk transportation, a potent power base can be established. That is what happened among the river and canal systems of Mesopotamia and Ancient China.
Record-keeping naturally follows. Writing was used for this purpose in Mesopotamia for five hundred years before it was used for storytelling and poetry. Huge numbers of lists on clay tablets recording crops, yields and taxes have been recovered. It remains unclear whether these tell us about projections and aspirations or are records of what was actually harvested. In China the earliest writing is found on oracle bones from 1600-1050 BCE, but record-keeping was adopted during the Warring States period, 476-221 BCE. The Qin verged on the obsessive, intent on imposing standardised methods of measurement throughout their empire, eliminating all local practices.
The third ingredient needed to form city-states, after grain and record-keeping, was people. Lots of people. The state with the most people was generally the richest in its region and prevailed militarily. Warfare between neighbouring states was endemic, not to gain territory but to seize captives. The aim wasn’t only to acquire slaves for unskilled labour but also people with technical expertise that could be used in boat-building, weaving and metalworking. In some cases whole communities were relocated closer to the centre of the state so that their crop production could be controlled. The key was to generate the agricultural surplus needed to feed the priests and administrators, the craftsmen, and the workers digging the canals and building the walls. But the peasants had to be compelled to do so, which incurred the risk of mass flight. The primary purpose of the walls around city-states may have been to keep people in, not to keep the barbarians out. (‘Barbarian’ and its variants are terms used by state centres to stigmatise those who live outside their control; the Huns, Amorites, Goths and other barbarian tribes were no more than loose confederations of disparate peoples brought together temporarily for military purposes and characterised as a ‘people’ only by the threatened state itself. Scott uses ‘barbarian’ simply as a shorthand for non-state people, whether they lived by hunting and gathering, farming or nomadic pastoralism.)
In describing the early city-states of Mesopotamia, Scott projects backwards from the historical records of the great slave societies of Greece and Rome. His account of the slaves and the way they were controlled seems strangely familiar. Much like migrant labourers and refugees in Europe today, they came from scattered locations and were separated from their families, demobilised and atomised and hence easier to control. Slaves, like today’s migrants, were used for tasks that were vital to the needs of the elites but were shunned by free men. And slaves, like refugee workers, were gradually integrated into the local population, which reduced the chance of insurrection and was necessary to keep a slave-taking society going. In some early states human domestication took a further step: written records from Uruk use the same age and sex categories to describe labourers and the state-controlled herds of animals. Female slaves were kept for breeding as much as for manual labour.
The city-states were fragile. The Old Kingdom of Egypt collapsed around 2100 BCE, Ur III around 2000 BCE and the Minoan Palaces around 1450 BCE – just three examples among many. Collapse could mean nothing more than the abandonment of the centre and the redistribution of the population into independent settlements, to be followed by the next cycle of annexation. The forces of destabilisation were such that it is remarkable any state was sustained at all. Many had short lives: the Qin lasted a mere 15 years and the third dynasty of Ur fewer than a hundred years.
Disease remained a signal problem. Virtually every infectious disease caused by micro-organisms and specifically adapted to Homo sapiens has arisen in the last ten thousand years, many of them in the last five thousand years as an effect of ‘civilisation’: cholera, smallpox, measles, influenza, chickenpox, and perhaps malaria. Germs travelled with trade and people, accompanying armies, slaves, or annexed peasants as they moved from state to state. Disease could destroy a harvest or a population of livestock, as could floods or drought. The frequency of flooding increased as a result of the deforestation caused by an insatiable demand for timber and fuel, and excessive grazing by goats. In the absence of trees, less rainwater penetrated the soil and reached the aquifers beneath, instead flowing destructively across the landscape. With deforestation came soil erosion, and with excessive irrigation came salinisation and a decrease in fertility. To this we should add continual warfare, which drew people away from farming and caused cities to be located with defensibility in mind rather than economic growth. There were also internal conflicts: battles for succession, civil wars and insurrections. And when an elite felt threatened it might become self-destructive, perhaps by taxing too heavily and leaving farmers to starve.
Scott writes about the normalising effects of state collapse. Often it was the best thing possible for a people now emancipated from disease, taxes and labour. In the subsequent ‘dark ages’ – a propaganda term used by the elite – democracy and culture could flourish. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey date from the dark age of Greece. This is in marked contrast to the consequences of state collapse today, now that there is no longer an external barbarian world to escape into. When Syria collapsed its refugees had no choice but cross the border to another state, whether Lebanon, Jordan or Turkey.
According to Scott, the period of early states was the Golden Age for the barbarians. They could prey on a state as if it were just another resource for hunting or harvesting; the Berbers of North Africa described raiding as their version of agriculture. Or they could take part in trade. Hunters, foragers and marine collectors supplied sought-after goods from mountains and forests such as ivory, rhino horn, spices, feathers, beeswax and furs; others controlled the trade routes, and along with them the traffic of slaves. When it was in their interest, the barbarians could become mercenaries for a state, or even conquer it and themselves become the new ruling class.
In Scott’s picture, the barbarians and the city-states were entirely dependent on each other for their existence. They rose and fell together: the Huns and the Romans; the ‘Sea People’ and the Egyptians. And for the vast part of recorded history the majority of people lived in the barbarian world. Scott’s view is that the barbarian Golden Age ended as recently as four hundred years ago, when the power of the state finally became overwhelming, partly due to the invention of durable gunpowder. Which is, of course, a means to make fire sparked by flint – a return to the ‘moment’ 400,000 years earlier which marked the beginning not of the steady rise of civilisation, but rather the muddled and messy affair that is the human past.
We could all use a heaping bowl of sweet, sweet nostalgia every now and then (or every day), and as of this week, a new restaurant in Arvada has answered our reality-dodging prayers. The Cereal Box, Inc. is now open and serving candy-colored, super-sugary cereals that will surely lower our life spans.
The concept started as a joke among Michael Emmerson and his advertising co-workers. After their business was shipped off to another state, they started talking about what else they could do.
“I love cereal and I collect toys, so I said I’d open a cereal store and just sell cereal,” Emmerson said. “I told my kids and they said that was cool. Then my wife got laid off from her job in March so we said, ‘We’ve gotta do something for us. Let’s do it.'”
The Cereal Box currently stocks 120 cereals from around the globe, so you’re bound to find something to quench your inner child’s (or actual child’s) whining. And The Cereal Box isn’t messing around with basic Frosted Flakes and Cheerios here (although it has those, too.) Oh no, it’s bringing in the big guns. We’re talking Marshmallow Fruity Pebbles, Quisp, Christmas Crunch and Unicorn Fruit Loops.
Emmerson said the rarest box is the just-released Oreo cereal from South Korea.
“It was really hard to track down, and shipping is just phenomenal. Like $20-30 a box,” he said.
Here’s how it works: You pick your bowl size, your cereal and your milk (banana and pumpkin spice milks are options, people). If your Cinnabon cereal isn’t sweet enough on its own, you can top it with candy, cookies or whipped cream. Because that’s how The Cereal Box rolls.
Can’t pick just one out of the multi-colored row o’ cereal boxes? Get one of the expertly-curated mixes, like the Zoo! Be Crazy, with Frosted Flakes, Corn Pops, Kinder Happy Hippo and chocolate milk, or The Nutty Professor, with Reese’s Puffs, Peanut Butter Cap ‘n Crunch, Cocoa Puffs, Reese’s Peanut Butter milk, whipped cream and peanut butter.
There are also cereal milkshakes that take those precious, bottom-of-the-bowl cereal milk slurps to a whole other level, as well as toys from Boulder’s Kid Robot, because what fun is cereal without the toy?
“People think it’s really cool,” Emmerson said of initial customer reaction. “We’re not breakfast, we’re not lunch; we’re more like a treat. We’re like an ice cream shop.”
and now the party gets to appoint a replacement who will get run as an incumbent in the fall. yay!
Jefferson County commissioner Don Rosier will step down from his position in January to take over as general manager of the Sterling Ranch Community Authority Board, where he will oversee operations at the 12,000-home master-planned community in Douglas County.
Rosier, a Republican who was elected commissioner in 2010 and re-elected in 2014, is term-limited next November. The vacancy committee of the Jefferson County Republican Party will choose a successor to fill out his term.
Don Rosier, seen in 2013 reading to children at the Lakewood Library, is stepping down from his position as a Jefferson County commissioner to oversee operations at Sterling Ranch.
Rosier, a fifth-generation Coloradan who grew up in Arvada, is a civil engineer by trade. He spent 25 years in the private sector doing civil engineering design, project management, acquisition, entitlement, land development, construction and management with a number of firms.
“Throughout my career I have accomplished a track record of success in managing complex design projects, acquisitions, entitlements, land development and construction projects,” Rosier said in a news release issued Wednesday. “Accepting (this) position… equates to a city manager position in a medium-size town.”
In the position of general manager, Rosier will work with contractors, homebuilders and home buyers as the community is built out in phases. Sterling Ranch will be made up of nine villages, including a town center, 2 million square feet of commercial space and 30 miles of trails.
fuck me. tancredo's last campaign manager lives in our neighborhood. one of only two trump signs we saw. lots of gadsden flags and gun stickers.
(Promoted by Colorado Pols)
Right-wing columnist Michelle Malkin has apparently endorsed Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo, according to a Facebook post of a well-known conservative activist.
On Wednesday, Conservative activist Kanda Calef posted an invitation to a Nov. 18 Tancredo fundraiser, with Michelle Malkin, with the comment:
Breaking News: Not only is Michelle Malkin endorsing Tom Tancredo, but is hosting a fundraiser for him!!!
Malkin’s Twitter feed has been boosting Tancredo of late, and Calef’s post cited Reardenstrategic, which is assisting Trancredo.
Malkin, who resides in Colorado Springs, is widely known to share Tancredo’s hardline views on immigration and guns, among other issues, often spreading misinformation along the way.
Malkin: And he’s got all the right enemies. What sets Tom apart is his lifelong independence and his proven record of bucking establishment politics. Nobody ever will accuse him of straddling the fence, sugarcoating his message or selling out. No wonder the powers that be in the bipartisan halls of power are scared.
In 2014, when Malkin endorsed Tancredo’s gubernatorial run, she called him “a principled, proven public leader committed to individual and economic liberty and our national sovereignty.”
Want to avoid paper tickets next time you ride the bus? Now there’s an app for that too.
The Regional Transportation District on Wednesday is launching a new mobile tickets application for train and bus day passes, letting riders skip ticket vending machine lines.
RTD customers just have to download the app on their Apple or Android smartphone, purchase a pass with their credit card and then activate the pass before getting on a bus or train.
The transportation authority hopes the new application will be especially useful for bus customers who pay for their tickets with cash, making it so they don’t have to ensure they have exact change for each fare.
“The addition of our new mobile ticketing app provides yet another option for our passengers to easily use RTD’s growing transit system,” RTD CEO and General Manager Dave Genova said in a written statement. “This app is convenient, gives our customers choices and adds another method of payment without using cash.”
Users, however, can only buy tickets for their day of travel, and thus can’t pre-purchase passes — though that feature is expected to be added in the future.
Purchased tickets will expire just before 3 a.m. the day after they are bought, even if they aren’t used.
Readers are sounding the alarm over ominous-looking signs appearing in the north Denver bedroom-community suburb of Northglenn, as the clock ticks down toward next month’s municipal elections:
The signs tell Northglenn residents to “CALL POLICE” in the event that, as happens at least a few times on average in any contested election, “someone knocks on your door asking about your vote/ballot.” In the lower right corner of the sign is a gold seal marked “CERTIFIED,” but there’s no indication of exactly what is being “certified,” or by whom. There’s also nothing on these signs to indicate who may have paid for them to be printed and distributed around the city of Northglenn.
Or at least there wouldn’t be any indication of who paid for them, if we hadn’t also received this photo:
Oops! Sorry about that, Northglenn mayoral candidate Carol Dodge, but whoever is putting out your campaign’s official yard signs needs to be more discreet about…you know, those other signs! It’s been suggested to us that this is Wayne Dodge’s truck, Carol’s spouse and owner of Northglenn’s Dodge Sign Company on East 112th Avenue. We have no way of confirming that detail, but it’s fairly obvious that her campaign is involved.
In any event, it should go without saying that these signs are almost comically unethical, plainly meant to disrupt the normal get-out-the-vote operations common to every municipal election. The fact that Dodge’s campaign is putting up signs like this indicates they aren’t running a field campaign of their own, since she’s telling people to call the cops on field campaigns. That means Dodge is simply not bothering with of the most important tools in a small election, and hoping this ridiculous attempt at intimidation will nullify the enormous handicap that creates for her campaign.
But in case you were in any way unclear–no, dear readers, it is not against the law for get-out-the-vote canvassers to knock on your door. If you call the police on canvassers who politely knock and leave when you ask them to, the canvassers will not be arrested. If anything, you might earn yourself a false reporting charge depending on what you accuse them of. More likely the police will explain all of this on the phone, and then move on to more important matters.
And this will go down as one of the cheaper tricks in Colorado political history.
A newly released report says that completing the embattled 10-mile Jefferson Parkway would give a $1.2 billion jolt to Jefferson County over a 20-year period, a nearly 17 percent premium over what the area would receive without the highway.
The report, conducted by Littleton-based Development Research Partners and shared with county officials last week, concludes that the proposed road would boost the amount of office and retail space in the parkway corridor from 2018 to 2037 to 7.6 million square feet from a projected 6.5 million square feet should the highway not be built.
Jefferson County government would also benefit from an additional $25.8 million injection in tax revenues over those two decades — a 23 percent improvement over a non-Jefferson Parkway scenario, according to the report.
“If we do nothing, it’s going to be horrific,” said Jefferson County Commissioner Don Rosier. “Development is continuing to occur and already traffic is getting worse and worse.”
He sees a new high-speed route across the northwest corner of the metro area as a matter of “health, safety and well-being” for those driving or living along roads that are overrun with regional traffic as rooftops continue to multiply in northern Jefferson County, including along Indiana Street, State Highway 93, McIntyre Street, State Highway 72 and Wadsworth Boulevard.
But those opposed to the parkway, which would connect Broomfield with Golden, say the real health risks to the public come from its completion. That’s because road construction, they say, could lead to the disturbance and spread of plutonium possibly buried in the soil, a grim legacy of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant that operated just north of Arvada starting in 1952.
“If you move dirt for this highway, you have an even bigger problem,” said Elizabeth Panzer, a member of the Rocky Flats Downwinders. “(The report is) not anticipating the negative impacts from the parkway.”
Panzer said construction of the Jefferson Parkway will likely generate additional class-action lawsuits from those living downwind of the former plant, which was cleaned up more than 10 years ago but is still believed by many to harbor health hazards from the spills and fires that occurred over its 40 years of operation.
The report, authored by economists Patricia Silverstein and David Hansen, focuses only on economic impacts in its analysis. It concludes that the parkway will not only bolster commercial and retail development along the corridor but appreciably speed it up.
“While it is expected that development will eventually occur with or without the completion of the Jefferson Parkway, the parkway will impact development patterns, especially related to the timing and types of uses along the corridor,” the report said.
The report assumes that the parkway will open in 2022. Project officials are still going through the environmental permitting process for the highway.
“The projected $1.2 billion impacts are significant, as they are only measuring the benefits to Jefferson County from three sites,” said Leigh Seeger, interim president of the Jefferson County Economic Development Corporation. “Completion of the beltway will have far-reaching economic benefits throughout the metropolitan region.”
The three areas along the parkway’s alignment that Silverstein and Hansen said would feel the greatest impacts are the Verve Innovation Park and Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport site to the east; Candelas in the middle; and a county-owned parcel southwest of State Highway 93 and 56th Avenue on the west.
Specifically, around the airport, the report found the Jefferson Parkway “will enable buildout of the siteʼs aviation, office, and industrial properties within a shorter 25-year timeframe” than would occur under a status quo scenario. Retail and hospitality uses at the site would also get a jump-start with the parkway.
At Candelas, the time to attract regional retail uses and an entertainment district would be halved by completion of the parkway — from 30 years buildout to 15 years, the report says.
Large swaths of land in the corridor — totaling 12,000 acres — will never be developed, according to the report, because they are either inside the 6,500-acre Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge or designated as open space.
That puts to rest one of the arguments that many parkway opponents over the years have cited for not building the road, Rosier said — that it will be nothing more than a magnet for suburban sprawl.
“When you take a look at the vacant land out there, most of it is already spoken for,” he said.
That doesn’t mollify Panzer, who lives in Arvada’s Five Parks neighborhood and whose son developed a rare heart-related cancer as a child. She is convinced that residual contamination from Rocky Flats is linked to her son’s health issues.
“Why are government officials so desperate to rewrite history for a cumulative gain over 20 years of $1.2 billion while dismissing whatever negative impacts their actions may cause?” she said.
A state health department study released at the beginning of the year found that some families living in the shadow of the former weapons plant have higher-than-expected incidence of certain cancers, but overall researchers uncovered no evidence to conclude that contamination from the plant has caused a cancer epidemic.
Rosier said if any hazards are detected during parkway construction, an order to halt work will be immediately given.
“We all agree that things will be stopped and corrected,” he said. “Nothing will be hidden; nothing will be covered up.”
Wheat Ridge takes on No. 4 Chatfield on Thursday at 6 p.m. at Jeffco Stadium in a Class 4A Week 3 non-conference matchup.
The Farmers (1-2) are coming off a 28-14 road loss to No. 3 Broomfield, while the Chargers (1-1) whipped Palmer 57-0 last week after dropping their season opener out of state.
FUUUUUUUck this guy. his daughter is in conrad's class and he's just such a smug asshole.
Last week, angry mobs shouted down Sen. Cory Gardner — and everyone trying to ask him questions — at town hall meetings. At these public events, ordinary people should be able to ask questions and demand answers from elected officials. But who will bother to show up when angry mobs shout down every comment, spend 90 minutes swearing at elected officials, and completely block any questions and answers?
If this is the future of town halls, we’re about to lose them.
To be sure, the ProgressNow wing of the Democratic Party has been spoiling for a fight with Gardner for a while. Like a school-yard bully, they accused him of “dodging” town halls. Set aside, of course, the hypocrisy; when Sen. Michael Bennet refused to hold a town hall meeting for nearly three years, no one accused him of “dodging.” Yet those clamoring for town halls now suddenly view them as sacred — but not for something old-fashioned, like respectful political discourse. They want YouTube moments. And selfies, of course.
And they certainly got their moment. It was a lesson on how to shut down political speech and shut out constituent input. The mob had prepared itself well — printed talking points, a ready-made plan for disruption, and self-absorbed fury. Clearly, someone had spent money to organize and mobilize. Mobsters repeatedly shouted Gardner down. They refused to allow him to answer questions. They swore at him (and pretty much everyone else). Gardner handled it with grace. But the event was a waste.
Last decade, Republican Sen. Wayne Allard held town halls in each of Colorado’s 64 counties. Today, that would be impossible. What normal person wants to go to a town hall and listen to a mob hoot and holler for 90 minutes? And what elected official wants to be subjected to that?
Alternatives exist, but they lose some authentic public input. Telephone town halls don’t fully substitute for face-to-face dialogue. Then we have town hall meetings run by Congresswoman Diana DeGette, which have all of the spontaneity and joy of a Soviet Union Politburo meeting, circa 1982 — a review of the party line, no live questions, and absolutely no surprises.
In Colorado, it has been the angry left shouting down Republicans. And frankly, only the responsible voices on the political left can stop this, by condemning and denouncing mob behavior. Far too many self-styled liberals and progressives will never listen to conservative voices, because they have fallen too deeply into the fever swamps of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Upset at angry, disrespectful discourse? Then don’t cheer on mob behavior just because it’s directed against your political opponents. And don’t claim that today’s mob is merely payback for town hall meetings in 2009 and 2010, just as the Tea Party movement got started. Back then, plenty of angry voters came to town halls for the first time, asked tough questions and actually wanted to hear answers. Elected officials could answer, often to their great embarrassment. And while breathless headlines pointed out each and every example of bad behavior, that behavior did not come close to last week’s 90-minute mass temper-tantrum.
Democrats regularly work overtime to hold every Republican responsible for every sin ever committed by every person who ever appeared to support President Trump. But that type of hatred doesn’t excuse shouting down a U.S. senator for 90 minutes — especially when he makes a sincere effort to listen to questions from ordinary people and to explain his positions in person.
Each time the mob succeeds, representative democracy shrinks. It is well past time for responsible voices on the left to speak out against mob behavior coming from their political allies. Just a few presidential elections ago, plenty of Democratic voices chanted repeatedly the mantra “we are the change we seek.”
Now is the time to actually do something.
Scott Gessler is the former Colorado Secretary of State and a Denver attorney.
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Right-wing columnist Michelle Malkin has apparently endorsed Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo, according to a Facebook post of a well-known conservative activist.
