“The wind blows there like a coal plant.” The solar resource? They call it high desert.

The hard part will be making the development deal with the locals. To do so, Element Power, which wants to build a first-of-its-kind combination wind and solar project, opened an Antelope Valley office. Parker, previously with the Sierra Club, has been working the region for the last year.

"At first it seemed like [NAT teams] were focusing on trucks, then truck containers, then cars, then boats, then RVs, then trailers" parked on their owners' land, Guild says. But once the county Nuisance Abatement Teams got access to these parcels far off the beaten track, the crackdown widened to building codes — in a region where almost every home has code violations....

Of big rigs parked on private property, Grover says, "You know, you're parking semi trucks in the backyard of a residential neighborhood. It's not necessarily approved to do that."

But Rajkovacz suggests that Antonovich's code enforcement pressure on independent truckers in the desert reveals that Los Angeles County leaders, including Antonovich, are ignorant about the trucking industry. "He probably thinks there are six or seven big companies," Rajkovacz says, but in fact small-business truckers who own 20 trucks or fewer make up 96 percent of the industry. People with one truck make up half of all registered "motor carriers" in the U.S.

"A person owning one truck is not going to own a terminal — they're going to choose to live in a rural area" where they can park a semi truck, he says. "It just boggles the mind, when you look at L.A. metro — a complete lack of respect for these small businesses."

With truckers integral to L.A.'s status as a leading goods-transportation hub, Rajkovacz says the attitude of " 'Now we are going to show up with guns' — it's insanity. Treating taxpaying citizens like criminals. ... And Antonovich says he wants a transport hub in Antelope Valley."

On Antonovich's website, he does tout "an 'inland port' for the Antelope Valley to encourage the movement of long-distance freight to and from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach by rail." Truckers would pick up the containers in Antelope Valley. But county officials say they can't park on much of the land they own.

Government officials have "no idea — they think you can just park your truck in a big dirt lot," Rajkovacz says. "But if you don't park in a secure area, you get vandalized." A new truck runs $130,000 or more. When Scott Sterner, the trucker who chopped his two containers into pieces to meet county code, left his rig overnight at a construction site to which he was hauling material — an effort to comply with county orders not to store his rig on his own land — his truck was stripped.

"They're not talking about setting up whorehouses," Rajkovacz says. "They live in the high desert, a lot in Antelope Valley. There's a reason they live in rural, downtrodden areas — because that's all they can afford."

Tony Bell, Antonovich's spokesman, says, "To say the whole community is filled with truckers and construction workers — I don't think so." But AVTO cites California DMV statistics showing that Littlerock's ZIP code, 93543, has 266 Class A drivers. Multiply that by four, to represent the average family, and 1,064 people may be directly supported by truckers, out of a population of about 11,000 living in 3,600 households.

Cars didn’t shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We’re way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy’s lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren’t forced to surrender, we were able to retreat. - P.J.O'Rourke

The Delphi Technique

It was originally intended for use as a psychological weapon during the cold war.

However, it was soon recognized that the steps of Delphi could be very valuable in manipulating ANY meeting toward a predetermined end.

How does the process take place? The techniques are well developed and well defined.

First, the person who will be leading the meeting, the facilitator or Change Agent must be a likable person with whom those participating in the meeting can agree or sympathize.

It is, therefore, the job of the facilitator to find a way to cause a split in the audience, to establish one or a few of the people as “bad guys” while the facilitator is perceived as the “good guy.”

Facilitators are trained to recognize potential opponents and how to make such people appear aggressive, foolish, extremist, etc. Once this is done, the facilitator establishes himself or herself as the “friend” of the rest of the audience.

The stage is now set for the rest of the agenda to take place.

At this point, the audience is generally broken up into “discussion—or ‘breakout’—groups” of seven or eight people each. Each of these groups is to be led by a subordinate facilitator.

Within each group, discussion takes place of issues, already decided upon by the leadership of the meeting. Here, too, the facilitator manipulates the discussion in the desired direction, isolating and demeaning opposing viewpoints.

Generally, participants are asked to write down their ideas and disagreements with the papers to be turned in and “compiled” for general discussion after the general meeting is reconvened.

Philipp Rode, executive director of the Cities Programme research unit at the London School of Economics says: "A new holistic approach is central to the sustainability agenda. There should be collective decision making from both the public and private sector, free of managerial constraints.'' - Guardian

* Jacques-Yves Cousteau, environmentalist and documentary maker: “It’s terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized, and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn’t even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable.”

* John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal: “I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”

* Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University population biologist: “We’re at 6 billion people on the Earth, and that’s roughly three times what the planet should have. About 2 billion is optimal.”

* David Foreman, founder of Earth First!: “Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.”

* David M. Graber, research biologist for the National Park Service: “It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil-energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”

* Alexander King, founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome: “My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guyana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.”

* Merton Lambert, former spokesman for the Rockefeller Foundation: “The world has a cancer, and that cancer is man.”

* Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh, leader of the World Wildlife Fund: “If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”

* Maurice Strong, U.N. environmental leader: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

* Ted Turner, CNN founder, UN supporter, and environmentalist: “A total population of 250—300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”

* Paul Watson, a founder of Greenpeace: “I got the impression that instead of going out to shoot birds, I should go out and shoot the kids who shoot birds.”