Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach — crossposted from my blog, Skating Under The Ice
Let me start by saying that I’m a huge fan and frequent user of our National Park System. I’m also a dedicated and lifelong conservationist, concerned with our natural environment that is the basis of all life. So please don’t take the following as being opposed to true environmentalism. I’m not. I’m opposed to political activism under the name and imprimatur of the National Park Service.
After the Trump Administration told the Department of the Interior to shut down all their Twitter accounts because they were being used for partisan political purposes by Democratic government employees, some National Park Service employees got in a huff about how their rights were being violated. So they put together a new Twitter account called AltUSNatParkService. Here’s the header on their page, in case they change it:
I cracked up when I saw that, I thought “Man, they just hung themselves out to dry, they just blew it bad!”.
Setting that question aside for the moment, under the aegis of this new account they are all about the climate and other virtue-signalling subjects, viz:
They’re organizing meetings and the like because of these fears. Gotta say … I’m getting tired of people trotting out their fears and using these fears to justify all kinds of actions. I get it that folks are afraid. And I know that the fear they feel is real. But that is not sufficient reason for me to automatically take their fears seriously and buy into their fright, particularly if nothing untoward has happened to date. It’s just baseless fears.
In any case, they’ve shot themselves in the foot. They are putting themselves out as if they represent or are part of the real National Park Service, both by their name and even to the extent of using the official arrowhead emblem of the Park Service on their Twitter site, as seen above. Clearly amateur hour. Here’s more about the arrowhead, it’s not some random symbol.
What is the origin of the National Park Service arrowhead?
The arrowhead was authorized as the official National Park Service emblem by the Secretary of the Interior on July 20, 1951. The components of the arrowhead may have been inspired by key attributes of the National Park System, with the sequoia tree and bison representing vegetation and wildlife, the mountains and water representing scenic and recreational values, and the arrowhead itself representing historical and archeological values. Read more about the history of the arrowhead and other elements of NPS visual design.
Why is their using the arrowhead a huge mistake? Because using it is not just a bad idea. It is a crime to use the official NPS “arrowhead” emblem without specific permission from the NPS:
Use of the NPS arrowhead symbol and badge is governed by 36 CFR Part 11. Unauthorized use is a criminal offense, punishable in accordance with 18 USC 641 and 701.
And because that defines it a Federal crime (USC for “US Code”), that lets the Administration call in the FBI to identify the anonymous folks behind this account. And being NFS employees they can hardly claim ignorance of the law. When they sign on, in their New Employee Handbook they are given links to the following:
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Documents Containing Selected Topic
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As a result, it should be very easy to find and fire these government employees for cause, because they are falsely representing themselves by using the official NPS arrowhead, and they know or should know that’s both illegal and wrong. However … civil service laws may get in the way.
And if the civil service laws do get in the way, I sincerely hope Trump adds those laws to his list.
The best part to me about these kinds of spontaneous outbursts of righteous indignation is their generally Darwinian nature … and after eight years of government employees being allowed to run wild as long as it was the approved liberal and Democratic style of wild, I suspect we’ll see more of these outbursts before we run out of candidates for the Bureaucratic Darwin Award.
The tragedy in this is that it detracts from majesty and mystery of the parks that these folks are supposed to protect, and makes them into a political football. That we don’t need.
w.
PS-If you are commenting please QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS YOU ARE DISCUSSING. That way we can all understand just what your subject is.
UPDATE: 1/27/17 9:45AM
It seems they had to abandon use of the official park service logo shortly after this post by Willis was published:
And this is what their Twitter page looks like now:
Alt-Idiots. They probably aren’t aware of the Acceptable Use Policy for the government run Internet accessible network. That will be their next challenge.
-Anthony
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The threat to Joshua trees isn’t “climate change”, it’s S CA residents going out, digging them up illegally & trying to transplant them (almost always unsuccessfully) onto their expensive CA properties.
Willis Eschenbach,
Long comment stream here, and I haven’t looked.
Are you aware that this is a fake Twitter account?
Its location is: London
ticketstopper January 26, 2017 at 7:59 am
Mr. Eschenbach,
As far as I know they are all democracies.
Communist.
Is there some dispute about this that I’m unaware of?
w.
Eshcenbach is ignorant of China. “Communist” is not a form of government. China is technically a constitutional republic with the Communist party in control.
..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_China
..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China
In practice, China has a reformed and modernized version of the same Imperial Bureaucracy that has run things for about 2300 years now.
When you set about draining a swamp, you will expose all kinds of slimy critters in the muck.
So the swamps are particularly well protected by the EPA. They want to use of these critters against a high-ranking official of the US…
I note that the cowards at @AltNatParkService have realized their stupidity and now use a bogus copy of the “arrowhead” instead of the real thing. However, their imitation looks extremely similar to the real one, so they’ve just made it worse—it’s still a ripoff of the official NPS, but now it’s clear that they know using it is wrong.
Gotta love watching fools at work …
w.
Willis,
Yes, in the case of trademarks, if the logo is so similar that the average person would not know it was not the official one, I think that the courts would find against the faux logo.
Willis, I measure the efficacy of a WUWT post by the number of shrieking, tooth-gnashing, spittle-spewing Warmist concern trolls who show up and try to hijack the thread with their lamentations, “not in anger but in sorrow,” lamenting the alleged depths to which WUWT has fallen in their squinty little eyes. You know you’re over the target when you catch flak The ALT weenies are vulnerable and they don’t want people calling attention to the gross mistake they made.
If I, as a boss, had employees that don’t want to work for me, actively working against me, sabotaging me? That’s a break of trust. Much worse than the misuse of some corporate logo.
I don’t remember which of the famous bosses said something like ‘What have you done for me today?’
Off with their heads 😉
Referred to General Counsel
Such articles are getting results: See:
What The ‘Rogue’ EPA, NPS and NASA Twitter Accounts Teach Us About The Future Of Social
They are worried about the climate and the gases in the air. Maybe they should be worried about the air between their ears first.
jorgekafkazar January 26, 2017 at 11:07 am
Danny Thomas January 26, 2017 at 11:32 am
I agree totally. Nobody can order or bully or browbeat anyone on the web. No matter what I say, Danny is free to post what he wants.
Climate alarmists on the government payroll are illegally using Government logos in a desperate attempt to convince the rubes of the coming Themageddon™. This is not important in your world?
If you care to ‘feed the troll further’ please share what the beneficial result will be at the end of this thread. Greater edification? Expanded knowledge? Bouncing a ball?
My main intention in writing this was two-fold. I wanted to bring attention to the fact that a group of activists are posing as legitimate US Government Departments, and I wanted to point out that they are illegally using the emblems of the agencies. I wanted the people in charge of the government to be aware of that little wrinkle, the fact that it’s a Federal crime.
I note that yesterday the AltEtc Twitter site said that oops, they had to consider some legal issues … and today they have a new bogus logo that is a direct ripoff of the actual NPS logo. I’d say they’re getting bad legal advice …
So it appears that the post may already be having an effect. And you might note that I expected that effect, which is why in the head post I said “Here’s the header on their page, in case they change it:” …
Do the posts here reach the top government officials? I have no clue, but I’ve always been amazed at how far my posts here have reached in the past.
Next, I wanted to point out that the Government has a legitimate interest in keeping the stock clerks from speaking to the press or twittering to the public. Every large business and organization has those rules, and the EPA is no exception.
Finally, as in most things I write about, I wanted to spark dialogue and ideas about the situation. And in this, as in the other “beneficial results” that I intended, I’d say the post has been a success.
w.
+100, Willis you are a treasure, don’t let anybody slow you down
Amen!
I used to look forward to WUWT when it was focussed on climate science, not so much now. Can’t really be bothered with all this recent political ego polishing.
How can the science of climate move forward, when the politics of climate scientists forbid it ?
Policy, hence p-o-l-i-t-i-c-s, defines what is acknowledged as … “science”. When the politics becomes better, then the science will become better, and THEN the discussion can become more pure again.
Avoiding this reality is just hiding from the way it is now. You want science, then stand up for it. That’s politics.
Yes, but not everyone who reads WUWT cares about American politics, not my circus, not my clown.
I think that communist is too general a term to describe the Chinese government.
I have not been there since 1999, but at that time, elderly Chinese described
social security as having a son to take care of them in old age. Free amniocentesis
and free abortion allowed for selection against girls, so about 75% of the children
I saw in the cities were male. Party members were severely penalized for violating
the one child policy.
In the rural areas, the farmers were a class of entrepreneurs. After the “great leap
forward in the late ’50s, when farms were collectivized, a great famine resulted.
20-50 million people starved. Mao backtracked and put farmers on plots of land
in which the farmers had a profit motive. After they paid their rent, which I believe
was 20% of their crop, they could sell or eat the remainder.
The famine went away and there is an underclass of capitalists.
I call China a dictatorship with a strong military.
The farmers have the girl children and capitalism works.
Russia found much the same thing. They could not feed their population,
so small private plots were allowed people who wanted them. Very small
plots produced more than 25% of Soviets food.
When I visited Russia in ’93 the plots outside Moscow were still being used.
Profit motive TRUMPS socialism.
CINO, i.e. Chinese and/or communist in name only.
The religion of communism is there but not the practice, it is just a simple dictatorship by a small group of elites.
Oh, that’s hilarious. A commenter above points out the following:
Somebody’s paying attention …
w.
That there exists an
just proves that EPA is very bloated
Kind of TradeMark too:
https://www.google.at/search?q=AltUSNatParkService+stickers&oq=AltUSNatParkService+stickers&aqs=chrome
I do love that they think that the new logo is “different enough to not get sued” … I suspect they may be surprised in that regard …
w.
I was too busy working yesterday to notice this post but I have thoroughly enjoyed it. With regard to how much Park service employees know about use of the logo, my business partner worked for the Park service several summers ago as a seasonal employee cutting grass and generally doing manual labor for about two times the wage required. Part of the job included an uniform allowance and he still uses many of the heavy pants. I asked him why he never uses any of those heavy duty shirts and he told me that it was not allowed to wear anything with the Park service logo or name on it if you were off duty.
Every one of those employees knew they were violating their terms of employment and they just are so indoctrinated that they believe that they know better than the duly elected president. The very definition of noble cause corruption.
Wow! I am thinking that Willis needs to spend more time on public lands and less on the internet. Talk about nicking picking and looking insignificant problems to be angry about it.
One of the great pleasures in retiring is enjoying our public lands. For seniors, entry into federal fee areas is free. Organized camp sites are half price. If you like solitude, there are many beautiful places to boondock for free.
What I do not recall is being irritated by CAGW bs with all the good stuff to learn about at visitor information centers. I have noticed and many it has always been that way, NPS employs are more likely to have a law enforcement background than one of the natural sciences.
Sad to say it is a necessary skill.
“What I do not recall is being irritated by CAGW bs with all the good stuff to learn about at visitor information centers…”
Either you haven’t been to one in a while or you blocked it out. Nat Parks are on a full court press to propagandize CAGW. Every Federal institution under Obama is involved in proselytizing CAGW.
It has been two weeks and there was no CAGW BS at the dump station. Just the usual entertainment. Duct tape repairs in progress for the guy who drove away with jacks down.
Just checked nrc.gov, airnow.gov, and weather.gov. Just information that I expected to see and nothing about climate change.
A few years ago when in China, I went to Obama’s Whitehouse web site looking for all that new science to justify coal wars. Same old BS.
“The tragedy in this is that it detracts from majesty and mystery of the parks that these folks are supposed to protect, and makes them into a political football.”
I highly disagree. The first action that made the parks a “political football” is the proposed bill H.R. 621 allowing the Secretary of the Interior to sell federal land in 10 states. The political football was punted at American citizens with such a threat that if there was no uproar or retaliation from the American people, I would have been ashamed to be called a conservationist. This political football was NOT kicked off by the National Park Service or the Alt NPS.
Thanks, Bailey. You misunderstand my meaning, likely my fault.
First, the National Park Service is totally separate and distinct from the vexatious question of what we do with federal land in the American west. Claiming that the federal land debate is the reason for the NPS employees to go rogue is special pleading. If you want to discuss that question, fine. However, you cannot pretend that it has anything to do with AltNatParkService.
My point was this. What the Obama Administration did was they politicized THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE EMPLOYEES. For the last eight years they’ve required their employees to spout the climate change BS on company time.
During Obama’s Administration, rather than people just going in to the Park and expecting to be told about the glories of nature, we had to worry that we get some fire-breathing left-wing climate alarmist who will lecture us on our moral failings and our sins of emission … been their, listened to that garbage more than once. Now they think they are entitled to do that no matter what the new boss says … grow up.
Now, we get the same pimply-face boys and girls starting up their own cowardly anonymous anti-Park Service site and PRETENDING TO BE THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE … and you claim that Trump is at fault? They don’t have the balls to sign their own names to the nonsense they put forwards, and you support that kind of cowardly action? I’d fire them for violating the law and bringing the organization into disrepute.
Lead, follow, or get out of the way. The debate is over. Their side lost. Those folks will not last long if they keep it up. Me, I’d fire the lot of them, or better yet, put them to work clearing trails.
w.