Part of the (absolutely justifiable) outrage about what has been going on in Ferguson is the use of surplus military equipment by local police forces. There is no clear reason why most local police forces would need armored grenade launchers, armored personnel carriers, and the like.
Well, I found a legitimate use today for at least one kind of surplus military equipment. And this use also explains how the right wingers are correct when they deny global warming. Details below the fold.
I have been in Alaska for a week. Most of the time I have been attending a professional conference, but today I was able to take the Alaska railroad from Anchorage to Seward and back. The trip is beautiful, but that isn't what this diary is about.
Along the railroad line you can find small tent-like structures enclosing 105mm howitzers. No, this isn't some crazy local militia, although with Alaska's non-existent gun laws that would likely be totally legal. (I saw hunting rifles for sale in a supermarket.) The local authorities use them for avalanche control. Specifically, they use them to create planned smaller avalanches after closing a highway or railroad by firing the howitzer at areas that look avalanche-prone. Then the snow removal equipment comes in, and things are back to normal in short order. It prevents the kind of dreaded avalanche that kills. I'm not sure where they got the howitzers but I can guess.
And as I was thinking of this I realized that this is the solution to a problem that the right wingers have. One of the strongest evidence for the hoax called global warming is that glaciers have been dramatically retreating. For example, there was a photograph of one glacier, Spencer glacier, in the Seward train depot that shows it reaching almost to the railroad almost a century ago; today it is many miles from the railroad. But my discovery of the howitzers explains how this can happen. The Evil Gooberment not only uses the howitzers to create controlled avalanches, it also fires them at glaciers to try to make them break up! They the Gooberment can convince people of the truth of their hoax, and convince law abiding citizens to give up their own rights to have 105mm howitzers, not to mention their rights to have open pit mining in national parks and free ranching on BLM land.
I hope that this will convince everyone, even the right wingers, of the need to stop distributing surplus military equipment to state local governments.