Miscellaneous

When the Soviet Union dissolved, eliminating our only superpower rival, we should have reexamined all of our obligations around the world.  What made sense in the era of the Cold War didn’t necessarily make any sense at all when it was over.  But instead of reducing our commitments, we increased them.  We expanded NATO, for no damn good reason.

We got involved in the Middle East because of oil.  The fracking revolution has eliminated our dependence on this region, and it is no longer required for our national security.  As long as we needed that oil we had to stay involved in this hellish part of the world.  Now we don’t need the oil, and we don’t need the trouble.   Sunnis and shias have been butchering each other for centuries.  If they want to get back at it, that’s their business.

I’ve started Peter Zeihan’s The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America.  Ir follows his excellent 2o14 book, The Accidental Superpower, in which he described the foreign policy view that Trump campaigned on.  You have to give this guy credit.  He was calling for a Trump to emerge, and to say exactly what Trump did say, on foreign policy.

With no superpower rival, and with no need of foreign oil, Zeihan predicts a Great American Retrenchment.  The way he sees it, we’re in the catbird seat.  We’ve got everything we need, and are due for an industrial renaissance.  We will have peace and prosperity.

Not so, for the rest of the world, according to Zeihan.  It will all go completely to hell.  I haven’t read that part yet, but you can see where he’s headed.  Without the United States as the world’s policeman, there will be no police, no “law” enforcement.  Everybody is on their own, and the strong will survive, and the weak will perish.

In other words, thank God you’re an American.  Zeihan can get a little apocalyptic, but he’s basically right.  I have more confidence than he does about the ability of other countries to figure a way to a better future.  But one thing seems clear, to me.  American citizenship is more valuable than ever, and will only increase in value.  There’s a high demand for it, and for good reason.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s in the best interest of the people of this country that any immigration, from  here on, be restricted to people that bring something to the table, wherever  they’re from.  If someone wants to bring a million dollars into this country, to invest, and spend, and put people to work, then that person is bringing something to the table.

Or we could use an auction.   But letting law breakers have it is crazy.

 

 

 

If you travel across California you’ll cross the mighty California Aqueduct, the legacy of the great Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, governor of California from 1959 until 1967, when he was defeated by Ronald Reagan.  It gathers the waters of the northern Sierra and transports them 400 miles south, where it serves the people of Los Angeles.  It’s one of many which were built by the California State Water Project.  California has, since then, done virtually nothing to ensure itself an adequate supply of water.  The Aqueduct stands as a monument Pat Brown, still serving his people 50 years after it was built.

Pat’s son, Jerry  — or, as he’s semi-affectionately referred to, Governor Moonbeam  — will have a different monument, or legacy. It will be a stretch of railroad track, from nowhere to nowhere in the Central Valley.  The California High Speed Train, or the Moonbeam Express, may wind up laying a few miles of track.  That’s all that will ever be built, and these rusting railroad tracks in the middle of nowhere will be the Moonbeam Monument.  It might be kind of a tourist attraction in the future, where people can come and marvel at the stupidity and arrogance of politicians back in the day.

The snakes in Sacramento foisted this project on the people of California, duping them into believing that the $10 billion bond they voted for would be all that they’d have to pay for this thing.  The federal government and private investors would come up with the rest of the money.  Wishful thinking.  California will get no federal money, if Trump can prevent it, least of all for high speed rail.  And no private investor in his right mind would put a penny into this boondoggle.

They need $68 billion to complete a scaled back first stage.  No one’s going to give them a dime.  California High Speed Rail will soon be dead.  It will be finished off, for good, by an initiative on the 2018 ballot.  It’s being promoted by CA Water 4 All, and it will take whatever’s left of that $10 billion high speed rail bond, and dedicate it to water storage and conversation projects.  These are long overdue, and desperately needed. You may have heard that the mighty Oroville Dam is full to bursting.  That should never happen.  There should be dams upstream of the Oroville to relieve the strain, and to conserve the water.

California has been in a severe, five year drought.  Everybody’s cutting back on water usage.  Babbie and I have disconnected our irrigation system.  When the people —  who have been taking great precautions to save water  — see all that beautiful clear mountain water come blasting out of the emergency spillway at Oroville Dam, wreaking destruction in its path, they should ask themselves, Why are we wasting all that beautiful California water?  To hell with high speed rail, let’s build some dams.

This flooding in Northern California, caused in large part because of a failure to build a water infrastructure, will be what Ca Water 4 All needs to win that initiative election.  Governor Moonbeam may hang on to his railroad dream, but no other Democrat will embrace it.  When he leaves office, two years from now, his dream goes with him.  He can always go down to that lonely stretch of track in the Valley, and see how far he got.  He’s been an arrogant son of a bitch his whole life.  I don’t mind rubbing his nose in it.

We passed the Arizona House, 33-25.  With Master Lobbyist Konstantin Querard at the controls, we should get it through the Senate before too long.  Idaho is looking very strong, and we should have Wyoming in two weeks.  The coast is clear.

 

If you’ve read the federal law that Trump is relying on for his immigration order, you may be excused for wondering what the litigation over the order is all about.  The language of the statute is written in plain English.  You don’t need to be a lawyer to read and understand it.  Trump’s smarter than the average bear, he’s read the law in question, and he can’t understand the problem.   But then, he’s not a lawyer.

The 14th Amendment, and its due process clause,  were ratified in 1865, 108 years before the Roe v. Wade decision.  For over a century legal scholars had studied, written about, and litigated the due process clause.   Then came a truly  brilliant lawyer, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who saw something no one had ever seen before  — a penumbra, surrounding the due process clause, containing within it the right to privacy, and a woman’s right to an abortion.  Justice Douglas did not say that the right to privacy was the only right that was within the penumbra.  Ever since that decision, people have been trying to find one, but no luck so far, and Douglas, with his super vision, is long dead.  Even to this day, there are people like me who look at the due process clause, and we don’t see any penumbras.  Is that because he was smarter than we are, or does it mean he came up with the idea when he was stoned?

These judges on the Ninth Circuit ought to be impeached.  They’ve all sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution, but by their decisions you know that their legal philosophy does not require them to stick to the Constitution, which, to them,  is a living document.  And here’s where it gets tricky.  To understand the evolution of the Constitution, from its original form into what it is today, you have to be a lawyer, preferably from Harvard.  This is heavy intellectual lifting.  Only brilliant legal scholars can see all the penumbras out there.

They don’t defend the Constitution, they gut it.  Other than parts of the Bill of Rights, they’ve made a hash of the entire federalist system designed by the Framers.  Who knows if it can ever be put back together.

We’ll start with Article V, and the Nashville Balanced Budget Amendment Convention (NBBAC) on 11-7-17.  The Tennessee Senate, through the leadership of Sen. Brian Kelsey, has passed the formal Call for the Convention today.  The House, with Rep. Dennis Powers leading, will pass it soon, and a formal invitation, and a signed and sealed copy of the Call for the Convention, will be sent by the Speaker of the House Beth Harwell, and Lieutenant Governor Randy McNally to all of their counterparts in the other 49 States.  We’re confident we’ll get a quorum of 26, and from there the sky’s the limit.  We may wind up getting 45 States.  The ones that don’t come are going to look foolish.

It’s going to be a good Call.

Every Don needs his consigliere, and Trump has his own, personal Rasputin in the person of Steve Bannon, who’s a piece of work.  The more I read about him, the more alike he and I seem.  Among other things, Bannon is a half-assed intellectual, just like me.  His favorite book is Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.  And one of the main lessons it teaches is that, “All warfare is based on deception.”

Bannon and his boss are in a war, and they know it.  They’re up against not just the elite media, but the whole liberal establishment that constitutes our ruling class of elites.  This includes a whole lot of people, concentrated densely in the liberal metropolitan enclaves on the coasts.  They have a lot of weapons at their disposal, and they’ll throw everything they’ve got against Trump.  So forget bipartisanship, and working things out together.

My theory is that all these impulsive tweets, and this dumb statement about Shwarzenegger, and all the crazy stuff Trump is doing are part of the act.  He wants the disdain of the elites.  It validates him to his base.  And it helps deceive his enemies, by distracting them from more important matters.  And, he’s trolling them.

Bannon is also a history buff, and is a believer in The 4th Turning, which says all of history can be explained in four generational cycles.  This is batshit crazy, and makes me worry about this guy.  But at least he thinks, and is a unapologetic champion of our Judeo-Christian culture.

It’s interesting that these liberal enclaves all want to be sanctuaries.  Maybe we can work out a deal with them, like the one India used to have with the Portuguese enclave of Goa.  Give them a separate status, as a dependent enclave.  Be creative, maybe try something no one’s ever done before.  They want to leave, we want them to leave, so why can’t we cut a deal?

Sex and the city, maybe that’s part of it.  People go to the city for sexual liberation, and go back to the country to raise their families.  Some people get so liberated they never leave the city, and a lot of them don’t have families.  This is the land of confused sexual identity and the metrosexual.  It’s a different world.

Fixing Obamacare is going to take a while.  Simply repealing it won’t work, because, in the larger sense, Obama has won.  He succeeded in making it unacceptable that so many people lack health insurance.  He expanded the scope of governmental dependency.   For a man like Obama, that’s a pretty good legacy.

I realized all this when I read about a statement my Tea Party Congressman, Tom McClintock, made about Obamacare.  We can’t just repeal it, he said.  There are too many people relying on it, and we can’t take away what they’ve been given.  Case closed.

This was the dying breath of the progressive project, and it’s as far as they’re going to get.  But we’re a rich country, and we should make the health and welfare of our people our priority.

This far, and no further.

 

The Gold Country of California is an economic backwater.  Young people leave to look for work.  The population is steady, but only because it’s a relatively inexpensive place to retire.  Commercially, there’s really nothing happening.

Except in Calaveras County, where marijuana farmers are injecting new life.  There may be as many as a thousand of them, half legal, half illegal.  The legal ones welcome taxation and regulation.  The illegals are, of course, uninterested.

A couple years ago three thieves were on an illegal grow, and they were shot and killed.  The first degree murder trial is underway, and it’s, let us say, bad PR for the whole industry.  The timing of County Measure M, which would put the legal growers out of business, couldn’t be worse.

The legal farmers already pay substantial taxes, and they’re going to pay more, $12 million a year more, and they don’t mind.  The Sheriff’s office has expanded, with new equipment.  But they publicly acknowledge they don’t have the resources to take out the illegal growers.  There are just too many of them.  Taking out the legal growers won’t solve the problem.  It will reduce revenue to the County, which will have to cut back on enforcement.

Public opinion is against the growers, as shown in the recent election.  The new Board of Supervisors was elected on a wave of anti-grower sentiment. Thus, Measure M.

It just so happens that the Gold Country has an ideal marijuana growing climate.  If you’ve got a southern exposure on your land, that’s all you need.  Special soils are imported for the growing pots, and the plants need to be watered daily.  Farming marijuana is similar to farming tobacco, just like the first English-Americans did in Virginia.  It is very labor intensive, but the rewards are huge.   If you’re willing to put in the work, for a fairly small investment you can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A lot of this money is circulated in the local economy, since most of the growers live and are raising their families there.  Little towns like Mountain Ranch are bustling, and you see a lot of new pickups.  This is the first real money a lot of these people have ever seen.

I’m with the growers, since some of them are my friends.  And, of course, I’m a libertarian.  I found out about Measure M over the weekend, and I got the impression that the growers weren’t organized for the fight of their lives.  I got a call from someone heavily involved, and it turns out I was wrong.  They are organized, they have professionals working for them, and they seem to know what they’re doing.  I’ll stay involved from the sidelines, since I naturally have a lot of amazing ideas, but lack the ability and means to implement them.

Working on campaigns is the one thing I’ve done in my life that I was best at.