[UPDATE Sept 25, 2018: This November there is
a new Prop 1 on the Alaska ballot. This one would restore the public's ability to have input on projects that would impact them and the environment. Input that was taken away, in part, when Republicans eliminated the Coastal Zone Management projections that every other coastal state still has. Naturally (not the best choice of words here) the mineral and oil extraction industry is strongly opposed to this Proposition. This post explains the historical patterns of non-Alaskans exploiting Alaska resources and taking most of the profits out of the state, so it's appropriate for understanding why we are having this battle yet again. Mining and oil (particularly) companies - most headquartered outside of Alaska - don't want to have to deal with pesky locals who don't want their water and air and fish messed with unless there are careful reviews and guarantees that the project will be done right.
Go ahead and read this. Once again the right response, from my perspective, is to vote yes. Construction companies along with the extraction industry are making doomsday predictions how this proposition will stop all development dead. Same arguments they made against environmentalist fighting the original oil pipeline. All the environmentalists did was make the pipeline safer, though even that hasn't stopped oil spills here and there, not to mention Exxon-Valdez. THIS POST"S DISCUSSION AT THE BOTTOM IS FOR THE 2014 PROPOSITION 1. BUT THE VAMPIRE HISTORY IS STILL RELEVANT TO THE 2018 PROPOSITION 1, ]
[UPDATE Feb 21, 2018: Note, this post is dated 2014 and this is a very different Prop 1 than we have an the ballot in April 2018. Definitely
Vote NO on this year's Prop. 1.]
Everyone knows vampires don't show up on photos.
"According to many tales a vampire will cast no reflection when in front of a mirror; in addition, a vampire's image can not be caught on film. So what then of digital cameras?
Before we tackle that question, we should first know why the myth exists in the first place. Mirrors were thought to show a person's soul. As a vampire has no soul (unless he is Angel) we must logically conclude that there will be no reflection. The same hold true for film and photographs - they too were thought to be creating an image of the soul. (Interestingly enough, some people were even afraid to have a picture taken of them, for fear of having their soul stolen!)
Based on these assumptions we must then conclude that a vampire would not show up in a picture taken by a digital camera for any mechanical device that reproduces an image of a being is actually only capturing their essence or soul. " (From Everything2)
But I frequently warn readers not to believe everything they read online. In fact, this post is made possible by recent advances in vampirology and in technology. It's been discovered that vampires actually have a negative soul. (Sorry, the link keeps crashing, and as you read on, you'll understand why.) That vampire knowledge along with new technology that can find the vampire traces left in old photos, allows historians to reprocess historical pictures (and even drawings) to reveal the vampires who were actually there all along. This process is not yet available to the public, but through a friend of a friend, I was able to give them five photos and one picture. That's all I can tell you.
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| Timber Vampires |
The most successful of the ones I submitted has to be this Timber Vampire picture. I used an historical photo I got from
AlaskaNativeStudies. Other images came back looking like shoddy photoshopped work. But the technology is in its infancy. Additional sources for this and the other images are at the bottom.
Of course, we all know that famous phrase, often
attributed to Churchill, "History is written by the victors." And so it is, that while vampires have been involved in much of world history, they have done a great job in scrubbing their malicious presence from the history books. Of course,
vampires do not die of natural causes, so they live a very long time. That gives them a great advantage over humans. They understand the rhythms of history. They understand the weaknesses of human beings. And they exploit them with deadly precision.
Currently
Alaska is under a massive vampire attack as they use every trick in their arsenal to get Alaska voters to vote no on Prop 1. This proposition would overturn SB 21 that gives oil companies a huge tax break and cuts the benefits Alaskans would get from their ownership of state oil. It's vastly complicated and in this post I just want to put this particular human/vampire encounter into the context of the vampire history of Alaska.
The basic pattern of vampire invasion of Alaska goes like this:
- The vampires sense an Alaskan resource is currently worth exploiting.
- They use any means necessary. Earliest attempts used great violence, but that was before Alaska was well connected to the world and before media covered what was happening.
Their schemes became more subtle as mass media and communication evolved. Typically,
- they use the legal process to lay claim to resources
- they disguise themselves inside corporations
- they infect a select and useful group of Alaskans such as legislators, business people, Republicans, and media to work for them
- they brain wash as many of the remaining Alaskans as possible to believe the vampire corporation(s) is
- creating jobs,
- bringing wealth to Alaska,
- retrieving natural resources critical to US security
- that anyone opposing them is a communist, liar, environmentalist, or a combination of all the evil terms their focus groups discover, and
- those evil opponents' agenda is to destroy Alaska and the civilized world
- they cause discord between urban and rural, Alaska Native and Non Native, public employees and private employees, etc.
- they deviously convince the poor and undereducated that the interests of the rich are their interests
- they destroy the land, the water, the flora, the fauna to get what they want as cheaply as possible
- they get their infected legislators to pass laws to restrict citizen participation, to hamper environmental protections, to build infrastructure needed to exploit the resource
- they sprinkle crumbs from their bloody profits on public buildings and on arts and charities leaving them indelibly marked with their corporate logos
- and they send the blood of Alaska back Outside to their vampire bosses
Some examples of vampire invasions in the last several centuries of Alaska history:
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| Seal Hunter Vampires |
Among the first vampires to come to Alaska were those from Russia who killed seals and otters and Aleuts to enrich themselves in the fur trade.
Vampire Miners
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| Gold Mining Vampires |
Minerals have been a favorite target of vampires in Alaska. Above are some gold mining vampires. Remember we can trace the pattern of blood sucking listed above in each of these waves of vampire.
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| Vampire Miners |
Copper mining is another example. In the case above, JP Morgan and the Guggenheim family vampires managed to mine $200 million (1930 dollars) of copper blood out of Alaska. I'd note that I discovered, doing this post, that
there's a whole special class of vampire miner that tend to look more like computer game icons:
Vampire Miners appear in cavern-level biomes and follow the Fighter AI. They wear (but do not drop) a Mining Helmet, which provides a small amount of light around them. This light can sometimes reveal sealed caves, much like blooming Blinkroot. Vampire miners can break down doors. Vampire Miners also have a brighter hue of red. Vampire Miners are immune to the Poisoned debuff.
Fishing Vampires
Then there are the fishing vampires who have sucked the fish blood out of Alaska and sent it all Outside. They infected some Alaskans, but many were - and still are - brought in from Outside.
Timber Vampires
Getting the government to build roads, they clear cut forests, destroyed salmon streams, and generally sent raw timber away to be processed elsewhere.
Oil Vampires
The largest current vampire invasion has been ongoing for over forty years. The most visible damage of this invasion happened in 1989 in Prince William Sound.
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| Exxon Valdez Oil Vampire Work |
Alaska's Current Vampire Threat Level
You can also see and hear the vampire handiwork today in newspapers, on television, on radio, on lawn signs as they
use their huge corporate profits to convince Alaskans that if they don't vote no on Prop 1
- Alaskans will lose their jobs,
- the oil companies will leave the state,
- oil production will collapse,
- income and sales taxes will be law
- everything that is good in Alaska will disappear.
By Tuesday they'll be telling people Prop 1 will cause guns and penises to stop firing.
Just vampire business as usual in Alaska, as well as in their corporate colonies around the world.
The TRUTH?
If Prop 1 passes, none of those things will happen. ACES will get revised in the next legislative session so that the tax rate at the high end will be adjusted. And there will be enough money in the state budget to support schools and even reformed vampire support groups. Sean, there's a way out. The
first step is
"admit to [your]self that something is
seriously wrong in [your] life."
And where does Sarah Palin fit in here now that she officially supports Prop 1? All I can say is there is a big difference between vampires and zombies.
Image sources:
Timber Vampire:
AlaskaNativeStudies
MLP Wikia
The Loneliest Vampire
Seal Hunter Vampire:
St. John's College, Cambridge
Gold Miner Vampires:
Media-Cache-AK
Copper Miner Vampire:
AlaskaDigitalArchives
Needcoolshoes
Zazzle
Fish Vampire:
Carmelfinley
Oil Vampire:
NOAA
AntiqueImages
