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“And it shall come to pass, that every thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live: and there shall be a very great multitude of fish, because these waters shall come thither: for they shall be healed; and every thing shall live whither the river cometh.” Ezekiel 47:9
From the dawn of recorded history, humans built cities along rivers. Over 6,000 years ago, Sumerian city-states grew along the fertile banks of the Tigris-Euphrates rivers system, relying on these rivers for irrigation and transportation, water to drink and fish to eat. And in the millennia to follow, from the Yangtze to the Mississippi, across the continents, rivers have been the enabling arteries of civilization.
With the arrival of the industrial revolution came rapid population growth and an explosion of new technology. In 1800 the earth and its rivers sustained 990 million people; today, that number approaches 8 billion. As cities expanded along their rivers, to prevent winter floods, dams and levees at an unprecedented scale were constructed to contain them. And at the same time as many urban rivers were transformed into gigantic drainage culverts, their waters were fouled by contaminated runoff, poorly treated sewage, and outfall from industry.
The turning point in the desecration of urban rivers was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the modern environmental movement began in reaction to polluted air and water. A defining event of this era came in 1969 when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland […] Read More
When it comes to cost-effective ways to increase the supply of water to California’s cities and farms, every idea should be considered. The residential, commercial and industrial water requirements of California’s 40 million people add up to about 8 million acre feet of water per year. The nine million acres of irrigated farmland that produces the food they eat, requires another 30 million acre feet of water per year.
With droughts and increasing priority given to letting water stay in the rivers to maintain ecosystem health, this water supply is threatened. Water scarcity and water rationing, along with fallowing millions of acres of farmland, is the only answer California’s legislature seems to support. Efforts to increase the water supply have been incremental at best.
From a cost perspective, most supply solutions are financially viable, but nonetheless quite expensive. For example, only about one-third of California’s urban wastewater is recycled. Construction costs to upgrade every water treatment plant in the state that isn’t already turning sewage back into recycled water for landscaping or even for potable reuse would cost about $20 billion, and give back up to 2 million acre feet per year.
Desalination is another option, but is roughly twice as expensive as wastewater recycling. For an estimated construction cost of $20 billion, about one million acre feet of ocean water per year could be desalinated. While it is the most expensive option, desalination has the virtue of being a perennial supply of new water, impervious to drought. What other […] Read More
In the Federalist Papers, James Madison famously warned against the “tyranny of the majority,” but it is unlikely he could have envisioned what we face today. 21st century America is dissolving before our eyes, as our heritage and sovereignty is stolen by a tyrannical coalition of minorities. Not ethnic minorities – their American bequest is being stolen right alongside that of America’s shrinking white majority. Nobody is exempt, and everyone should unite to resist.
Minorities in this context refer to the elite vanguard of what Californian political writer Joel Kotkin has called the “Upstairs-Downstairs Coalition, a voting bloc that brings together the most destitute with the most privileged parts of our society.”
At the top of the top are a few thousand of the super rich. At the bottom are a few thousand hardened fanatics, many of them professionals. These two super-minorities, working in tandem, currently control the destiny of America. Expertly manipulating the voters in the upstairs-downstairs coalition, they’re actively destroying everything we love and everything we need.
The minority occupying the top position in the Upstairs-Downstairs coalition are the plutocrats who run America. A 2017 analysis identified the top 0.01 percent (one in ten-thousand Americans) have an average income of over $30 million per year. A 2019 Stanford study of the top 0.1 percent (one in one thousand Americans) control a total net worth equal to the entire cumulative net worth of the bottom 90 percent of Americans. At the pinnacle, however, are Read More
California’s Homeless Industrial Complex was delivered a minor jolt last month, when Governor Newsom “issued a blanket rejection of local California governments’ plans to curb homelessness, putting on hold hundreds of millions of dollars in aid.”
The panic was short-lived, however, when in a November 18 conference in Sacramento the governor relented and released yet another billion dollars to California’s cities and counties after their representatives all pledged that “in the next round, they commit to more aggressive plans to reduce street homelessness.”
Oh please. “We’re going to plan to make more ‘aggressive’ plans. Ok? Now give us the money.”
This is theatre, but it doesn’t have to be. Newsom is one of the few individuals in California with the power to completely upend the corrupt, phony compassion-spewing army of opportunistic bureaucrats, nonprofits, and politically connected developers who have squandered billions in order to make California’s homeless crisis worse than ever.
Newsom was right to reject funding requests that, on balance, claimed they would only reduce homelessness in California by two percent. But he is wrong to expect that “more aggressive policies” will ever be effective unless the fundamental model to combat homelessness is completely scrapped and replaced.
Homeless policy in California rests on premises that guarantee ongoing failure. The so-called “Housing First” doctrine, which requires the homeless to be given free housing without any behavioral conditions before they can be treated for mental illness or substance addiction, much less trained to develop marketable skills, is […] Read More
“And it shall come to pass, that every thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live: and there shall be a very great multitude of fish, because these waters shall come thither: for they shall be healed; and every thing shall live whither the river cometh.” Ezekiel 47:9
Water is Life. For as long as there has been civilization, access to water has been an unyielding prerequisite. California is no exception. As its population grew, the state built one of the most remarkable systems of interbasin water transfers in the world. Every year, nearly 40 million acre feet of water is diverted from remote rivers and transported to magnificent coastal cities or used to irrigate rich farmland. But the whole system needs to be upgraded for the 21st century.
Here are some water projects that ought to be moving forward in California:
(1) Desalination at scale: There is only one major desalination plant in California, located just north of San Diego. At a total project cost of just over $1.0 billion, the Carlsbad Desalination Project went into operation in 2015 and desalinates 55 thousand acre feet of water per year. Desalination has the unique virtue of being an inexhaustible supply of fresh water. Every other water source, ultimately, depends on how much rain we get. In combination with wastewater recycling, building several more large desalination plants could enable California’s coastal cities to become nearly independent of imported water. Potential sites for their construction are already […] Read More
AUDIO: The avoidable hardships that the climate mitigation agenda have imposed on the Western nations is nothing compared to the catastrophe they’re wreaking on emerging African nations. Edward Ring with Kara McKinney on OANN’s Tipping Point.
Climate Change Skeptics Have Ready Allies in Africa
Less than six months ago, California’s state legislature approved a record breaking $300 billion state budget. Within that total, and to finance most of the state’s ongoing operations, was a general fund allocation of $235 billion for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2023.
Record breaking budgets are nothing new. Only ten years ago, California’s general fund was $93 billion, which adjusted for inflation would be $118 billion in today’s dollars. Meanwhile, California’s population over the past ten years has only grown from 38 million to 39 million. This means that inflation adjusted per capita general fund spending in California has increased from $3,124 back in 2013, to $6,023 today. California’s state government is spending twice as much money today per resident as it did just ten years ago.
This explosion in spending has yielded dubious benefits. By nearly every measure, things are worse off today in California. Obvious examples include expensive and unreliable energy and water, failing schools, rising crime, unaffordable housing and college tuition, and an exploding homeless population, but that’s hardly the entirety of the worsening challenges facing Californians. The decade-long run of record tax revenue spawned an avalanche of new regulations, driving up prices, discouraging expansion of big business and driving small businesses under. Through its spending priorities California attracts the dependent and repels anyone striving for independence. It’s grotesquely inequitable.
This is the context in which to view the latest revenue projections coming from the nonpartisan Office of Legislative Analyst. The concern […] Read More
So when you say stop to your fossil fuel, what’s the alternative? – Fortune Charumbira, president of the Pan-African Parliament, November, 2022
his is a question without an answer. But for nearly three weeks in November, over 35,000 people including heads of state and the global corps d’elite, pretended they were solving what they claim is the most urgent crisis in the world—the climate emergency—while ignoring the only relevant question. What is a practical alternative to fossil fuel?
Also ignored at the latest U.N. Climate Change Conference, an event sponsored by some of the world’s biggest corporations and covered, uncritically, by the biggest media conglomerates on earth, was the primary reason for environmental challenges in the 21st century. It’s not fossil fuel. It’s population trends.
How patterns of population growth and population decline among the nations of the world intersect with the necessary trends in per capita energy use to eliminate global poverty is by far the most relevant variable affecting the future of humanity and the planet. But nothing in the program of COP27 explicitly focused on either of these genuinely existential challenges.
The imbalance in population demographics between wealthy nations, in which the native populations are failing to reproduce, and poor nations, which continue to explode in population, is easily apparent. The decline in birthrates in wealthy nations is well documented, even if it is rarely discussed. But what is almost never discussed, because it invites accusations of racism, is the unchecked population growth in nations […] Read More
If Republicans hope to unify their party and realign American politics in their favor, they’ll have to do more than pour billions of dollars into television ads that highlight rampaging looters and the despairing jobless. They have to offer hope, tied to an achievable vision. Americans are ready for an alternative to Democratic fearmongering and stagnation. Give it to them.
Standing in the way of Republicans developing a comprehensive agenda they can agree on is the deepening rift within the party. On one side is the legacy party, represented by McConnell and Romney and other so-called moderate Republicans. Opposing them is the MAGA movement led by Donald Trump and backed up, among other things, by the Freedom Caucus which now constitutes a majority of the House Republicans.
The opportunity to heal this rift lies with the American voters themselves, whose sentiments on a few fundamental policy issues are coalescing into a consensus bigger than the political parties that supposedly speak for them. Embracing these unifying issues and emphasizing them will hand Republicans a populist bloc of voters that will include almost all grassroots Republicans, along with Independents and Democrats. It will attract voters irrespective of their income or group identity and it will cross ideological lines.
These core premises that might enable Republicans to realign American are on the issues of education, immigration, affirmative action, and climate change. In every case, powerful special interests among Democrats and Republicans will consider these policies, which have the potential to unify grassroots voters, […] Read More
Karen Bass’s victory over billionaire Rick Caruso epitomizes what Californians are up against if they are to have any hope of rescuing their state. Bass, with her political origins as a communist activist and community organizer, and more recently as a Democratic Congresswoman, is now the incoming mayor of the City of Los Angeles. God help us all.
Rick Caruso, long-time Democrat who recently became a Republican, has proven yet again how money and consultant curated, moderate rhetoric do not win elections. In terms of spending per voter, Caruso’s $105 million campaign, financed with over $80 million of his own money, easily exceeds Meg Whitman’s $170 million outlay, squandered in her failed 2010 bid to become California’s next governor.
Like Whitman, Caruso tried to position himself as a centrist, hoping that moderate voters would join the small fraction of conservative voters to get him to a majority. But nothing Caruso had to say was explicit enough to excite conservatives, or differentiate him from Bass in the eyes of moderates.
Nonetheless, with Karen Bass. Angelenos are just going to get more of the same, whereas Caruso would have shaken things up at least a little bit. To illustrate how bad things have gotten, consider the “permanent supportive housing” proposal that relentlessly approaches groundbreaking in LA’s Venice Beach neighborhood. Everything about this project screams authoritarian corruption masquerading as compassion.
Dubbed by outraged Venice residents as “the monster on the median,” the proposed structure will […] Read More
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