Vin Suprynowicz

They say when you stand at the base of the great pyramid of Khufu and look up, you don’t see a pyramid, at all. The proportions are so vast that the third dimension drops away, and it appears you’re simply gazing at a flat new horizon, albeit tilted up at 51 degrees.

(This may be no accident. The western horizon was a very important place to the ancient Egyptians — the boundary between this world and the World-Beyond. And while it’s true the Egyptians were fixated on that land of the dead, it may not be true that all their best-celebrated texts were merely instructions to the traveler on how to conduct himself once he’d crossed that horizon for good. The promise of all mystery religions — Egypt’s surely among the oldest — was of a ritual and a sacrament that would allow the traveler to voyage to the World-Beyond … and return.)

But we were speaking of getting so close to things that it’s hard to see them with a proper perspective. I believe that happened to most of the newshounds commenting on the New Hampshire primary Tuesday night.

They’ve been following the inside baseball of the jockeying for position among the would-be Republican presidential nominees for so long that they seemed to miss the obvious: Many Americans have been studiously avoiding this sideshow. Tuesday evening was the first time many changed the channel and watched Mitt Romney and Ron Paul speak for a few minutes.

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The Obama administration is doing everything in its power to block the development and use of low-cost coal and oil reserves in this country — and even in Canada.

Bad enough that the administration continues to block the Keystone pipeline from Canada to Texas, a job-intensive private project which would reduce our dependence on Mideast oil and which has already passed every environmental review with flying colors. Beyond that, “Each step the government took … showcases its defiance,” as the administration continued its deepwater drilling moratorium after the policy was struck down as illegal, U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman of New Orleans found last year, holding the Obama administration in contempt of court.

Against this background, if we are to avoid crippling the U.S. economy entirely, it’s more urgent than ever that known high-grade uranium deposits be developed to facilitate new nuclear power plants, responsibly but quickly.

So the Obama administration announced Monday it’s going to … ban new mining claims on a million acres “near” the Grand Canyon, an area known to be rich in high-grade uranium ore reserves … for 20 years!

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Fed by streams tumbling from the Selkirk Mountains and bordered by parkland, the 19-mile stretch of clear water in the Idaho Panhandle known as Priest Lake has been called “the Lake Tahoe of the upper Northwest,” The Washington Post reports. Houses and resorts crowd the privately owned lakeshore; piers and a marina jut into its waters.

A local couple, Mike and Chantell Sackett run an excavation business in Priest Lake. Back in 2005, Chantell bought Mike a 0.63-acre lot in a subdivision about 500 feet from the lake, as a surprise.

There are several homes between the Sackett lot and the shore, the Post reports; Mike worked on the construction of one and says it required no special federal permit.

In 2007, the couple obtained local building permits and began to fill the lot in preparation for building their dream home. Three days later, officials from the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers ordered work to stop, claiming they thought the land might contain wetlands.

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Nation’s “Forests Are Severely Damaged By Marijuana Grow Sites,” reads the headline on the Dec. 7 press release from the U.S. Forest Service, datelined Washington, D&C.

Marijuana cultivation sites in 20 states on 67 national forests “have caused severe damage,” said Forest Service director of law enforcement David Ferrell. In California alone, the Forest Service has cleaned up and restored 335 sites, removing 130 tons of trash, 300 pounds of pesticides, five tons of fertilizer and nearly 260 miles of irrigation piping, the agriculture cop testified.

“Natural vegetation and wildlife are killed as growers use liberal doses of herbicides, rodenticides and pesticides, some of them banned in the U.S.,” Mr. Ferrell told whatever staff members were filtering in and out of the room. “These chemicals can cause extensive … damage to ecosystems. Human waste and trash in the grow sites are widespread. Winter rains create severe soil erosion and wash the poisons, this waste and trash into streams and rivers — including Congressionally-designated Wild and Scenic Rivers.”

No! Not the Wild and Scenic Rivers!

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And now the bustling streets and malls fall strangely quiet. In many a home the living room rests ankle-deep in an effluvia of ribbons and bows, while in the background someone has left the TV running — Alastair Sim throws open his window on a bright and shining world for the 56th time, and asks the lad in the street what day this is.

It’s Christmas morning, sir. And yes, he certainly does know the butcher shop on “the next street but one” with the big, fat turkey still hanging in the window — “the one as big as me.” (You thought it was a “goose”? Me too — but they actually say “turkey,” I checked.)

By day’s end, Sunday, much of the predictable hand-wringing over the commercialization of the holiday will have faded away, as in many homes the most expensive new Christmas toys will lie broken or abandoned in some forgotten corner, while toddlers play themselves to happy exhaustion in that yet-to-be-unseated, all-time-champion source of Christmas delight … the empty cardboard box in which the presents arrived.

A fancy high-tech toy has no option but to remain a fancy high-tech toy, you see, while a cardboard box can be a frontier fort, a hot rod with stick shift, a lonely aircraft dangerously icing up as it makes the perilous climb over the Andes …

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America’s great national holiday is July 4 — celebrating the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

But how long did that confederation of sovereign states, founded to fight the Revolution, really last?

Only the brightest of today’s young scholars are likely to recall that it passed away after only a dozen years, on June 21, 1788, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the new Constitution.

With Mr. Jefferson safely off in Paris, Alex Hamilton and the gang moved heaven and earth to convince a skeptical public that the stronger new central government they proposed would never grow powerful enough to take away any of their hard-won freedoms.

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Do you know who owns your mortgage? Wanna bet?

In 2004, the nice New York couple who rented me my house decided to retire to San Diego instead of Las Vegas. They asked me if I wanted to buy. It sounded easier than moving. I asked the folks at my bank, then called Bank West of Nevada, if they issued mortgage loans, thinking it would be nice not only to patronize a local business, and also to be able to go down the street and visit my mortgage holder in person if there was ever a problem. They told me they did.

That wasn’t quite true. When I sat down to sign the forms, it turned out my lender was an outfit called RBMG, which had been acquired in 2001 by NetBank, an Internet-only outfit which was to fail massively in 2007.

Within weeks, my “RBMG” mortgage was turned over to Countrywide, or so I thought. Then, when Countrywide tanked, I was told to start sending in payments to Bank of America.

By this October, my checks were heading to an outfit called “seterus” — yes, lower-case “s” — apparently in Pasadena, California, though I now learn that address is a glorified mail drop.

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Did you read the interesting five-part series in last week’s Review-Journal on fatal shootings by local Las Vegas valley police.

As ever, I’d urge folks to look not just at the 30 seconds leading up to gunfire, but to what goes on in the minutes or hours before.

Whether or not Officer Bryan Yant was wise to kick in the door of a bathroom where (now the late) Trevon Cole was flushing his minuscule pot stash down the toilet in June of 2010, when the officer had a non-functioning flashlight attached to his rifle in the night-dark apartment (remember, officers got to choose when to go in) — and according to the testimony of other officers at the scene to apparently discharge his weapon at the same moment he was kicking in the bathroom door — let’s go back a day or so earlier:

Why was a night-time SWAT raid set up to bust an unarmed, non-violent, small-time misdemeanor pot dealer? Did they really have this young man mixed up with another “Big” Cole? How did that happen, and what’s been done to stop such recklessness (or creativity) in future search-warrant affidavits? Isn’t putting false or unconfirmed information in such a sworn affidavit a crime? If so, why no prosecution? If not, why bother to require them?

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Steve Hill, a Las Vegas businessman and new executive director of the Governor’s Office of Economic Development, visited with us this month to discuss a new 178-page report from the Brookings Mountain West division, recommending new ways to diversify Nevada’s economy.

While Nevada still scores high (everything is relative, you understand) on its tax and regulatory climate, cost of living and transportation infrastructure, the report finds the state is held back by a low-skilled work force; an underperforming K-12 education system; relatively high energy costs, and a lack of startup capital.

Mr. Hill also mentioned the fact that development in many Nevada communities is stymied by the fact they’re essentially “land-locked” — surrounded by federally controlled land not available for taxable development.

All these problem areas are worth addressing — especially raising science, technology, engineering and math attainment in grades K-12. (Hint: Tax credits for caring parents who escape the unionized youth propaganda camps and send their kids to private schools.)

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The congressional deficit-reduction “supercommittee” said Nov. 21 it had failed to reach an agreement on slashing the U.S. deficit by at least $1.2 trillion. That failure will supposedly trigger mandatory cuts to military spending and some social programs, starting in 2013.

Or, perhaps, when pigs fly.

“After months of hard work and intense deliberations, we have come to the conclusion today that it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee’s deadline,” Sen. Patty Murray (D., Wash.) and Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R., Texas), co-chairs of the the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, said in a statement.

“The defeat is the latest sign of how hard it has been for Washington’s political class to come up with unpopular tax increases or spending cuts to rein in budget deficits that have totaled about $1.3 trillion or more over the last three fiscal years,” The Wall Street Journal reports.

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