July 7, 2025

Jul 07, 2025

In this edition: Local elected officials hold community meeting on proposed Oncor transmission line; Amendment to House bill funds Dyess gate security; and an editorial on bombing Iran

Brown and Comanche County Commissioners Take the Lead Facing Oncor

On the evening of June 24, in a modest conference room at Dudley Bros. Ranch on the western outskirts of Comanche, about 100 local residents, mostly farmers and ranchers, singles and couples of all ages, crammed in, seated on plastic folding chairs and standing against the walls, at a meeting called by Brown County Commissioner Joel Kelton, and Comanche County Commissioner Russell Gillette. Brown County Commissioner David Reid also attended.

Surrounded by framed portraits and statuettes of champion Hereford steers, the attentive crowd got a crash course in community organizing, as they learned how to influence the decisions of Oncor Electric Delivery Co. and the Texas Public Utility Commission (PUC), who are planning the route of Texas’ first ever 765-kilovolt (kV) high voltage transmission line, more than twice the voltage of existing 345-kV lines.

Power industry lobbyist Advanced Energy United claims the project will result in “significantly boosting the efficiency and flexibility of Texas’ electric grid.”

https://blog.advancedenergyunited.org/articles/texas-approves-first-ever-high-voltage-transmission-lines-to-power-growing-demand

At the center of the room on the conference table, 7 small color satellite images had been taped together to show the locally affected areas of Oncor’s proposed Dinosaur-Longshore 765 kV Transmission Line. A map of potential routes shows two preliminary route links passing through the northern half of Brown County, on a 200+ miles-long route from the vicinity of Glen Rose at the eastern end, to the vicinity of Forsan at the western end, just south of Big Spring.

https://www.oncor.com/content/oncorwww/us/en/home/about-us/transmission-systems/current-transmission-line-projects.html

The main speaker was Brown County rancher Jule Richmond, who detailed the priority concerns that will be considered by Oncor and the PUC as they plan and adjust the route. These include historical documentation of Indian sites, like the old Comanche trail that ran along the Brown/Comanche County line; historical documentation of the Texas Family Land Heritage Program, which honors 100 years or more of continuous agricultural use; sensitive wildlife habitat areas; homes directly or indirectly impacted; and land fragmentation, which devalues farm and ranch lands bisected by transmission lines.

Richmond is a past Chairman and current long-serving Board member of the Pecan Bayou (Brown Co.) Soil and Water Conservation District, and was acknowledged, as he spoke, as a natural, if reluctant, leader of this current organizing effort. His response: “I’m not wanting to be in this position, but this is going to destroy communities. We’ve got to focus on the things that are going to do us some good.”

Richmond asked affected landowners to email him their specific concerns, so he can collect them and submit them all together to Oncor, state legislators, and the PUC: julerichmond4@gmail.com

Affected landowners further to the east, between Stephenville and Gustine, can email Joanna Friebele: Joanna@SofineArabians.com

Also in attendance was Comanche County Judge Stephanie Davis, who asked for a few concerned citizens to join her the next day for a Zoom call/meeting with state legislators regarding the Oncor project.

Congressman Arrington Gets $4 Million for Dyess Gates Upgrades

In a June 25 press release, District 19 Rep. Jodey Arrington called for passage of his amendment for $4.1 million to fund security upgrades to the Tye and Arnold gates at Abilene’s Dyess Air Force Base. The funding amendment was approved, to H.R.3944 -the Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2026, which has passed in the House, and is currently referred to the Senate Appropriations Committee.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3944

https://arrington.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=3845

Why do I include this item?

This newsletter is dedicated to covering local policy, funding, and public meetings that affect environmental issues, including pollution, biodiversity loss, and climate change. It is a truism that full funding to address all these environmental issues (and many others) could be provided with a small fraction of the defense budget.

Rep. Arrington’s new spending request for the Dyess gates is in addition to over $30 million in House-passed appropriations for Dyess last year in H.R. 8580, all of it in preparation for the anticipated beddown, still years away, of the next-generation B-21 bomber:

https://arrington.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=1341

While the Pentagon has long been notorious for waste, fraud, and abuses of funds on a massive scale, it escaped the DOGE chainsaw of federal staffing and spending cuts earlier this year, suffering a DOGE cut of just .o7%!

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/doge-pentagon-2671396652/

This was, of course, before the military spending increases passed last week in the 2025 Budget Bill, H.R. 1.

Trump’s First War Satisfies an Irresistible Urge

The president who claimed he could end the war in Ukraine on his first day in office, and would turn Gaza into a resort paradise, has done neither. There is no end in sight to either war. The president who said he could keep our country out of Middle East quagmires has already entered his first war, and claimed an early victory in Iran. The temptation to use his great power proved too great to resist. The so-called 12-Day War on Iran (June 13-24), started by Israel and then joined by the U.S., appears to be over, but is it really?

“When the fight was over, nothing was solved, but nothing mattered. Afterwards, we all felt saved.”

“Jack” (Edward Norton) in the movie Fight Club (1999)

War is a Racket, Revisited

I was bemused by the earnest experts’ discussions after the US bombings of Iranian nuclear sites. The president immediately boasted that the sites had been obliterated and the Iranian nuclear program utterly destroyed, but intelligence agency analysts were less certain.

Who to trust? The felon convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records, or the experts in assessing bomb damage?

The war hawks were ecstatic. Direct hits, on target, flawlessly executed by our pilots.

But the real star, or rather stars, of the show were the MOPs—the 14 Massive Ordnance Penetrator GBU-57 series bunker-buster bombs, after years in research, development, and testing, making their proud and perfect combat debut. And you know those bad boys don’t come cheap.

I was reminded once again of US Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, who said it best in 1935—War is a Racket—A few profit, and the many pay. Butler wrote:

“A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to be to the majority of people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.”

Read the original edition of his pamphlet here:

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.32000014248506&seq=1

Following Butler’s logic, I submit that the US bombing of Fordo and Natanz, was nothing more or less than a “real world” operational weapons test of the MOPs, a test paid for not just in hundreds of millions of dollars to Boeing, who makes the bombs, and Northrup-Grumman, who makes the B-2 bombers that are the only plane that can deliver them, but in geopolitical instability for untold years to come.

As Butler said, “this is not what it seems to be to the majority of people.” Many, if not a majority of people, seem to accept the argument that the bombings somehow made us all safer.

Yet the Islamic Republic remains intact, and the Israeli-American attacks have led to a new wave of terror and oppression by the theocratic regime against the Iranian people, not a popular uprising against that regime that Trump vaguely hinted might be a beneficial consequence.

https://www.pbs.org/video/iran-aftermath-1751485651/

Would it have cost less, both in dollars and Mideast strife, to maintain the Iran Nuclear Agreement (officially known as the JCPOA)? Scholars will debate the point, while American, Israeli, and Iranian civilians are deprived of the vast resources that went to the war instead.

After the US bombing, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Air Force Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine revealed that “in the beginning of its development, we had so many PhDs working on the MOP program, doing modeling and simulation, that we were quietly, and in a secret way, the biggest users of supercomputer hours within the United States of America.”

https://www.twz.com/air/gbu-57-massive-ordnance-penetrator-strikes-on-iran-everything-we-just-learned

Meanwhile, the current administration is giving up American leadership in nearly every field of science, with its unprecedented funding and staffing cuts at NOAA, NASA, the NSF, the CDC, the EPA, USDA, the Dept. of Energy, and more.

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/american-science-brain-drain/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

For more in-depth analysis of the Iran bombing raid, you will want to read Seymour Hersh’s July 4 Substack post, “Was It Obliteration?”

You may also want to check out his 1991 book, The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy

For the intriguing story of an earlier Israeli-American attempt to stop Iran’s nuclear program that went awry, you must watch this fascinating 2016 documentary about the Stuxnet computer virus, “Zero Days”:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5446858/

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