The year 1979 was a big year for the Whitefish Bulldogs football team. They won the first Montana state championship in the school's history, defeating Powell County 14-7. According to the Flathead Beacon, the Bulldogs had a secret weapon on defense.

But if there was one player opponents truly feared, Havens said, it was Zinke. At 6-4 and about 210 pounds, Zinke was an athletic and punishing safety. “He was an animal and he was huge,” Havens said. “Just a beast.”

The beast is now Ryan Zinke, America's only Secretary of the Interior, but keep the Bulldogs in mind because their championship roster becomes important later on.

Zinke has had an interesting couple of weeks as California has been burning down. He's been working overtime to assure the country that the Great Chinese Climate Hoax has nothing to do with California's burning down. From KCRA3 in Sacramento:

“Unfortunately, this trip is about fires,” said Zinke before heading to the fire zone. “I’ve heard the climate change argument back and forth. This has nothing to do with climate change. This has to do with active forest management.”

As the week went on, Zinke found other culprits to blame. From The Washington Post:

During a radio interview with Breitbart News, Zinke said that “environmental terrorist groups” are preventing the government from managing forests and are largely responsible for the severity of the fires. But fire scientists and forestry experts have said climate change is the main factor behind the problem. Zinke said during the interview that an overabundance of fuel load — things such as twigs and leaves that make it possible for fires to burn — make fires more intense. "There have been a number of instances where environmental groups have submitted petitions to the Bureau of Land Management, halting companies from removing dead and dying timber until the BLM can sort through each petition point,” Department of the Interior spokesman Faith C. Vander Voort said in an email. “These actions halt proper forest management and leave the West vulnerable to incredible devastation."

It didn't take long for even Zinke to realize that this was not the smartest take in the world, so he walked it partway back later on Thursday. (Admitting that the climate crisis is "part of the problem" is pretty much the same as saying that dirt was "part of the problem" with the Dust Bowl.) He remained firm in his contention that, if there weren't environmentalists, the environment would be better off.

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Meanwhile, as The Guardian tells us, some important decisions about how and on what the Interior Department's science funding will be spent is in the hands of a guy whose only apparent qualification is that he's a former Bulldog who helped Zinke turn back the Powell County Wardens back in 1979.

The US interior department administers over $5.5bn in funding to external organizations, mostly for research, conservation and land acquisition. At the beginning of 2018, interior secretary Ryan Zinke instated a new requirement that scientific funding above $50,000 must undergo an additional review to ensure expenditures “better align with the administration’s priorities”...Steve Howke, one of Zinke’s high-school football teammates, oversees this review. Howke’s highest degree is a bachelor’s in business administration. Until Zinke appointed him as an interior department senior adviser to the acting assistant secretary of policy, management and budget, Howke had spent his entire career working in credit unions.

In case you were wondering, the climate crisis is not one of those priorities.

The department, which manages a significant portion of the US landmass, has attributed the slower pace of funding approval to efforts to reduce “waste, fraud and abuse”. Yet the policy, which has been in place for six months, is already crippling some research. One of the largest programs affected is the Climate Adaptation Science Centers, a network of eight regionally focused research centers located at “host” universities across the country.“I think there is a real suspicion about what science is being done, and if you were going to design a way to bog things down so not much could happen, you might do it like this,” said a scientist affiliated with one of the centers who asked to remain anonymous owing to the perceived risks of speaking out. “We have voiced the challenges we have hiring staff, hiring students, with the science we can do, but I think that we’re not a priority audience.”

This is how you make government work if it is in your political and financial interest for government not to work at all. You hire a completely unqualified crony and give him carte blanche to monkey-wrench the whole system until it simply shuts down, and you do it to gain a temporary political advantage.

“Funneling every grant over $50,000 to a single political appointee from departments that range from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the [US Geological Survey] to the Bureau of Reclamation suggests a political micromanagement approach,” said David Hayes, an interior deputy secretary in the Obama and Clinton administrations who now directs the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center at the NYU School of Law. He described it as “political interference” that is “both unprecedented and pernicious”.

All the best people. Never not going to be funny.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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