Had the Greeks lost at Salamis, Western civilization might easily have been strangled in its adolescence. Had Hitler not invaded the Soviet Union, the European democracies would have probably remained overwhelmed. And had the Japanese just sidestepped the Philippines and Pearl Harbor, as they gobbled up the orphaned Pacific colonies of a defunct Western Europe, the Pacific World as we know it now might be a far different, far darker place.
I am not engaging in pop counterfactual history, as much as reminding us of how thin the thread of civilization sometimes hangs, both in its beginning and full maturity. Something analogous is happening currently in the 21st-century West. But the old alarmist scenarios — a nuclear exchange, global warming and the melting of the polar ice caps, a new lethal AIDS-like virus — should not be our worry.
Rather our way of life is changing not with a bang, but with a whimper, insidiously and self-inflicted, rather than abruptly and from foreign stimuli. Most of the problem is cultural. Unfortunately it was predicted by a host of pessimistic anti-democratic philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and Spengler. I’ve always hoped that these gloom-and-doomers were wrong about the Western paradigm, but some days it becomes harder.
Over 90 million Americans who could work are not working (the “non-institutionalized” over 16). What we take for granted — our electrical power, fuel, building materials, food, health care, and communications — all hinge on just 144 million getting up in the morning to produce what about 160-170 million others (the sick, the young, and the retired who need assistance along with the 90 million idle) consume.
Every three working Americans provide sustenance for two who are not ill, enfeebled, or too young. The former help the disabled, the latter take resources from them. The gang-banger has only disdain for the geek at the mall — until one Saturday night his liver is shredded by gang gunfire and suddenly he whimpers (who is now the real wimp?) that he needs such a Stanford-trained nerd to do sophisticated surgery to get him back in one piece to the carjackings, muggings, assaults, and knockout games — or lawsuits follow!
Given that the number of non-working is growing (an additional 10 million were idled in the Obama “recovery” alone), it is likely to keep growing. At some point, we will hit a 50/50 ratio of idle versus active. Then things will get interesting. The percentage of workers’ pay deducted to pay for the non-working will soar even higher. So will the present redistributive schemes and the borrowing from the unborn.
We forget that the obligations of the working to care for the 70-80 million who genuinely cannot work become more difficult, when the 90 million who can work for all sorts of reasons won’t. Note the theme of this essay: the more in humane fashion we provide unemployment insurance, food stamps, subsidized housing, legal advice, health care and disability insurance, the more the recipients find it all inadequate, inherent proof of unfairness and inequality, and always not enough.
Much of the Modern University Output Coarsens American Life
We will hear even more shrillness about “fairness” and “equality.” The more government support, all the more will grow the sense of being shorted. When someone idle receives a free iPhone, he doesn’t thank government for its magnanimity. More likely, he damns it for allowing someone else the ability to purchase an updated, superior model. I have talked to several students about their iPhones; so far not one has said, “Wow, I have more computer and communications power in my palm than a multi-millionaire had just 15 years ago.” Mostly they wished they had an updated version like someone better off.
An indebted and crippled U.S. has so far survived the second decade of the 21st century largely due to some ingenious engineers and audacious workers who revolutionized the gas and oil industry, at a time when wind and solar merely amused us, when our enemies considered us ripe for perpetual petro-blackmail, and when our wherewithal to pay for more imported energy was increasingly questionable.
A very few people are saving very many. But how thin the strand of civilization hangs — given that the forces of our modern Lotus Eaters (every bit as dangerous in their postmodern imaginations as the Cyclopes are in their premodern savagery) have stopped the Keystone Pipeline, stopped most federal leasing of new gas and oil finds, and are trying to regulate fracking and horizontal drilling out of existence where it might be most vital to the U.S. — as in the Monterey Shale formation in California.
How ironic is the Sierra Club Bay Area grandee who finds light when he flips on his office switch, and would find no light were his utopian ideas about wind, solar, and biomass to come to full fruition. Only what he despises — radioactive uranium, messy drilling rigs, and unnatural dams — for now continue to bring him what he must have. Again, the theme: the more the green activists empty reservoirs to save a bait fish, or stop fracking, or prevent salvage logging, the angrier they sigh that it is not enough and the more they must count on someone ignoring them to provide them with what they must have.
The universities were the great backbone of the West, from the Academy and Lyceum to medieval Pisa and Oxbridge to the great 18th- and 19th-century founding of American campuses. Not necessarily any longer. Too many are bankrupt morally, economically, politically, and culturally.
The symptoms are terrifying: one trillion dollars in student debt (many of these loans accruing at higher than average interest rates and even before students have graduated); a small Eloi class of rarefied elites who teach little and write in runes that no one can decipher; a large Morlock class of part-timers and oppressed lecturers who subsidize the fat and waste of the tenured and administrative classes; graduates who are arrogant but ignorant, nursed on –studies ideology without the liberal arts foundations to back up their zeal; and a BA/BS brand that no longer ensures better-paying jobs, if any jobs at all.
In sum, apart from the sciences and medicine, most of the university coarsens rather than enlightens American life.
The current campus is unsustainable and we are beginning to see its decline, as online courses and for-profit tech schools usurp its students. The liberal arts are not nurtured and protected for another generation in the university. Instead, their umbilical cords have become cut with the cleaver of race/class/gender no-nothingism. Again the theme: the more bloated, exploitive, and costly the university, the more it lashes out it that it is short-changed, the victim of philistine budget cuts, and the last bastion of civilized life.
Civilization Seems to Be Losing
Popular culture is likewise anti-civilizational. Does anyone believe that Kanye West, Miley Cyrus, and Lady Gaga are updates to Glenn Miller, jazz, Bob Dylan and the Beatles? Even in the bimbo mode, Marilyn Monroe had an aura that Ms. Kardashian and Ms. Hilton lack. Teens wearing bobby socks and jeans have transmogrified to strange creatures in our midst with head-to -oe tattoos and piercings as if we copied Papua New Guinea rather than it us. Why the superficial skin-deep desire to revert to the premodern? When I walk in some American malls and soak in the fashion, I am reminded of National Geographic tribal photos of the 1950s.
Again the theme: the more we borrow to provide iPads to our supposedly deprived youth, the more in theory they can access in a nano-second the treasures of their culture and heritage, and in fact the more likely it is that they have no clue what Gettysburg was, who Thomas Jefferson was, or who fought whom over what in World War II. Our managers in education, terrified of confronting the causes of ignorance, believed that the faster youths could transmit nothingness, the more likely they might stumble onto somethingness.
The fourth-century Greeks at the end pasted silver over their worthless bronze coins — “reds” being the protruding noses and hair of the portraiture that first appeared bronze-like, as the silver patina rubbed off. The bastardization of the currency fostered many books on Roman decline. More worthless money for more people was a sign of “crisis” — analogous to our own quantitative easing and $17 trillion in debt.
Once more the theme here is not just that we are insolvent, but that we are so insolvent that it is now a thought-crime to talk of dissolution, bankruptness, and irresponsible spending — all damned as symptoms of “callousness” to the poor, proof of “social injustice”, and “obsessions” with deficits. The medicine of austerity always becomes worse than the disease of profligacy.
What do I mean about the “thinning strand of civilization”?
A shrinking percentage of our population feeds us, finds our energy, protects us, and builds things we count on. They get up each morning to do these things, in part in quest for the good life, in part out of a sense of social obligation and basic humanity, in part because they know they will die if idle and thrive only when busy, and in part simply because “they like it.”
We can stack the deck against them with ever higher taxes, ever more regulations, ever more obligations to others, and they may well continue. But not if we also damn them as the “1%” and call them the agents of inequality and the fat cats who did not build what they built or who profited when they should not have.
You cannot expect the military to protect us, and then continually order it to reflect every aspect of postmodern American sensitivity in a risky premodern world. Filing a lawsuit to divert a river’s water to the sea during a drought is a lot easier and cleaner than welding together well-casings at sea. Last week, an off-duty armed correctional officer in Fresno intervened in a wild carjacking, shooting and killing the gang-member killer and thus limiting his carnage to one death and two woundings rather than five or six killings — at the very moment Harvey Weinstein — of guns-blazing Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction fame and profits — promised to destroy the NRA. These contrasts say everything about the premodern, the postmodern and the innocent who pay the tab in-between.
Each day when I drive to work I try to look at the surrounding communities, and count how many are working and how many of the able-bodied are not. I listen to the car radio and tally up how many stories, both in their subject matter and method of presentation, seem to preserve civilization, or how many seem to tear it down. I try to assess how many drivers stay between the lines, how many weave while texting or zoom in and out of traffic at 90mph or honk and flip off drivers.
Today, as the reader can note from the tone of this apocalyptic essay, civilization seemed to be losing.
Insightful and true, but misses a point on jobs. The most available work is part time. The full time work is unattainable for one without a degree AND years in a related field. Just a degree will not always garner a job. Of the available work to masses, it is service industry. Service industry itself depends on those who have money to spend it. When the pool of those who have money declines, so does revenue to service companies, which causes declines in even these part time jobs.
That's true Phil. A big driver behind that is most certainly Obamacare.
One other thing I would add to that is that a lot of government jobs should not be considered because they don't really contribute or produce anything.
January 31, 2014
Boehner Courts a GOP Civil War
By J. Robert Smith
See also: The GOP Mulls Seppuku
If you can't win, flee. Heck, if you won't even try to win, retreat. You can't make this stuff up. A day after President Obama's rousing State of the Union address to an enthralled nation, House Republicans skedaddled to Maryland's Eastern Shore. They went to crack crabs, swill cold microbrews, talk issues, yuck it up with lobbyists, and concoct more legislative "strategy." Heck, there's got to be more than one way to capitulate on measures the size of the Farm Bill?
Come to think of it, there is. In the vernacular, it's called "immigration reform," which when all the layers of rhetorical garbage are peeled off, is nothing more than a route to legalizing the illegal. But Speaker Johnny Boehner and gaggles of business interests hanker to legalize our illegal amigos, so Boehner, the dutiful, if plodding, golf buddy wants to see if he can cajole and arm-twist his fellow retreaters to go his way.
But the speaker's way on immigration reform is simply another surrender, which fits neatly with his strategy, but it can't be gulped down with even gallons of microbrews -- certainly not by grassroots conservatives and Tea Party patriots.
There aren't pejoratives adequate enough to describe and deride Boehner's resolve to tackle immigration surrender this election year. Either the speaker has one of the greatest tin ears in the history of American politics or he's got his sights set on a cushy post-speakership job and a corner office somewhere in DC. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce will gladly provide references for the speaker. Those big business interests have got Johnny's back, all right.
Perhaps the speaker is pimping immigration reform from spite, having disparaged his party's grassroots for calling him out, often and loudly, on his jellyfishness. Don't discount spite's role in history. The speaker may also want to prove -- as he did with the gargantuan, wasteful farm bill that just passed -- that he can cobble together a majority coalition of House Republicans and Democrats, as he earlier threatened to do if dissenting Republicans failed to get with his program.
The only way the farm bill passed the House was with Democrat votes. Sixty-odd Republicans voted "no," meaning that there wasn't majority support in the GOP caucus for the measure. Don't put it past Boehner to pull that stunt again on immigration reform. If Boehner goes ahead with an immigration reform gambit based on an unholy alliance of petting zoo Republicans and Democrats, he invites an ugly civil war in the party. In an critical election year, no less.
Don't underestimate the rancor and division that will result if Boehner stays focused on immigration reform this year. More importantly, don't be surprised when a Boehner immigration reform drive drives away the GOP grassroots. Staying home on Election Day is a time-honored means of protest by disaffected voters. This happened in the 2012 presidential contest, when the lackluster Mitt Romney lost because about four million voters decided there wasn't much reason to turn out, Mitt not showing much gumption.
House districts are drawn in such precise ways that drop offs in GOP grassroots voting may not cost Republicans the lower chamber -- that's a very qualified "may" -- but the Senate hangs in the balance.
U.S. senators are elected statewide, of course. Most Senate seats up for grabs in November will be highly competitive and narrowly decided. If the GOP grassroots opts out of these contests, the Democrats will surely retain the Senate. Note that politically shrewd Democrats are insisting their party shift focus and resources away from House contests to retain the Senate.
Democrats understand that losing Congress effectively shuts down Mr. Obama's presidency in many critical aspects. Yes, the president has threatened to rule by executive order, but there are practical limits to what he can do and legislative remedies -- provided a Republican Congress had the moxy to intervene.
As the acerbic Ann Coulter wrote about the politics of immigration reform:
How are Republicans going to square that circle? It's not their position on amnesty that immigrants don't like; it's Republicans' support for small government, gun rights, patriotism, the Constitution and capitalism.
Coulter was referring to a report released by longtime conservative stalwart Phyllis Schlafly. Schlafly supports her analysis with hard data. The conclusion is simple: illegals are pro-big government. Legalized and voting, they swell Democrats' ranks. As Coulter opined, "At the current accelerated rate of immigration -- 1.1 million new immigrants every year -- Republicans will be a fringe party in about a decade."
Game over, folks. If Boehner and the GOP hands Democrats an unwarranted victory on immigration reform, then less than ten years from now, Mark Levin's astute Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic will be quaint. Levin's Liberty Declaration... of Independence will be the hot seller.
Boehner's courting -- and must know he's courting -- a crackup of the Republican Party. House Republicans -- like all Republicans and conservatives -- should focus like laser beams on 1) exploiting ObamaCare's crass failures and growing unpopularity with voters; 2) aggressively pursuing the Obama scandals; 3) offering a "liberty" agenda, which goes heavy on reviving the nation's anemic economy and downsizing and reforming the federal government. That's a recipe for electoral success in 2014.
If its civil war the speaker wants, its civil war he'll get. Establishment Republicans may have the dough, but the grassroots outnumbers them roughly three to one. The commitment and passion are with the grassroots. At war's end, it's the speaker and his ilk who'll be trundling off on yet another retreat -- and, this time, for good.
Libertatem Prius!
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By: Erick Erickson (Diary) | January 31st, 2014 at 04:30 AM
Less than twelve hours into the Republican retreat and the leaks and attacks came fast and furious. John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, and Paul Ryan intend to push immigration through the United States House of Representatives.
The bulk of the House Republicans thus far seem opposed, but Boehner and his lieutenants intend to find a path forward. They will start bid and grandiose and whittle their way down into something, anything, to show they intend to move the ball forward.
Conservatives inside and outside the retreat began preemptively crying foul. The bill is going to suck. We all know it will suck. But we only have a few digestible nuggets.
John Boehner is reaping what he sowed. During the last great fight — the Ryan-Murray plan — Boehner attacked conservatives who, relying on press leaks from his office to reporters, opposed the deal. “They had not yet seen the deal,” Boehner claimed and, consequently, were opposing something they had not seen with no basis for opposition.
Once he made the case and had people rally to his cause, he rushed through the Ryan-Murray bill in less than seventy-two hours. Boehner expected that many of those who joined him in ridiculing conservatives for their opposition to Ryan-Murray (again: based on leaks from Boehner’s own crew, but before the entirety of the package was released) would stand with him.
Instead, it looks like they know the game that is about to be played. John Boehner and his friends will craft a package behind closed doors. They will leak it to the press. They will attack conservatives for daring to oppose that which they have not seen. Then he will rush through a package as quickly as possible, relying on Democrat votes to get it done.
The Chamber of Commerce will be happy, the base will not be, and Boehner can retire to a cushy K-Street job with Chambliss, Latham, and his other BFF’s who are retiring this year.
Unfortunately for the Speaker, the alliance he built for Ryan-Murray was an alliance for that legislation only. Many of those with him then are not only opposed now, but see how he played that game. So they’re rallying as early as they can.
Libertatem Prius!
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Had the Greeks lost at Salamis, Western civilization might easily have been strangled in its adolescence. Had Hitler not invaded the Soviet Union, the European democracies would have probably remained overwhelmed. And had the Japanese just sidestepped the Philippines and Pearl Harbor, as they gobbled up the orphaned Pacific colonies of a defunct Western Europe, the Pacific World as we know it now might be a far different, far darker place.
I am not engaging in pop counterfactual history, as much as reminding us of how thin the thread of civilization sometimes hangs, both in its beginning and full maturity. Something analogous is happening currently in the 21st-century West. But the old alarmist scenarios — a nuclear exchange, global warming and the melting of the polar ice caps, a new lethal AIDS-like virus — should not be our worry.
Rather our way of life is changing not with a bang, but with a whimper, insidiously and self-inflicted, rather than abruptly and from foreign stimuli. Most of the problem is cultural. Unfortunately it was predicted by a host of pessimistic anti-democratic philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and Spengler. I’ve always hoped that these gloom-and-doomers were wrong about the Western paradigm, but some days it becomes harder.
Over 90 million Americans who could work are not working (the “non-institutionalized” over 16). What we take for granted — our electrical power, fuel, building materials, food, health care, and communications — all hinge on just 144 million getting up in the morning to produce what about 160-170 million others (the sick, the young, and the retired who need assistance along with the 90 million idle) consume.
Every three working Americans provide sustenance for two who are not ill, enfeebled, or too young. The former help the disabled, the latter take resources from them. The gang-banger has only disdain for the geek at the mall — until one Saturday night his liver is shredded by gang gunfire and suddenly he whimpers (who is now the real wimp?) that he needs such a Stanford-trained nerd to do sophisticated surgery to get him back in one piece to the carjackings, muggings, assaults, and knockout games — or lawsuits follow!
Given that the number of non-working is growing (an additional 10 million were idled in the Obama “recovery” alone), it is likely to keep growing. At some point, we will hit a 50/50 ratio of idle versus active. Then things will get interesting. The percentage of workers’ pay deducted to pay for the non-working will soar even higher. So will the present redistributive schemes and the borrowing from the unborn.
We forget that the obligations of the working to care for the 70-80 million who genuinely cannot work become more difficult, when the 90 million who can work for all sorts of reasons won’t. Note the theme of this essay: the more in humane fashion we provide unemployment insurance, food stamps, subsidized housing, legal advice, health care and disability insurance, the more the recipients find it all inadequate, inherent proof of unfairness and inequality, and always not enough.
Much of the Modern University Output Coarsens American Life
We will hear even more shrillness about “fairness” and “equality.” The more government support, all the more will grow the sense of being shorted. When someone idle receives a free iPhone, he doesn’t thank government for its magnanimity. More likely, he damns it for allowing someone else the ability to purchase an updated, superior model. I have talked to several students about their iPhones; so far not one has said, “Wow, I have more computer and communications power in my palm than a multi-millionaire had just 15 years ago.” Mostly they wished they had an updated version like someone better off.
An indebted and crippled U.S. has so far survived the second decade of the 21st century largely due to some ingenious engineers and audacious workers who revolutionized the gas and oil industry, at a time when wind and solar merely amused us, when our enemies considered us ripe for perpetual petro-blackmail, and when our wherewithal to pay for more imported energy was increasingly questionable.
A very few people are saving very many. But how thin the strand of civilization hangs — given that the forces of our modern Lotus Eaters (every bit as dangerous in their postmodern imaginations as the Cyclopes are in their premodern savagery) have stopped the Keystone Pipeline, stopped most federal leasing of new gas and oil finds, and are trying to regulate fracking and horizontal drilling out of existence where it might be most vital to the U.S. — as in the Monterey Shale formation in California.
How ironic is the Sierra Club Bay Area grandee who finds light when he flips on his office switch, and would find no light were his utopian ideas about wind, solar, and biomass to come to full fruition. Only what he despises — radioactive uranium, messy drilling rigs, and unnatural dams — for now continue to bring him what he must have. Again, the theme: the more the green activists empty reservoirs to save a bait fish, or stop fracking, or prevent salvage logging, the angrier they sigh that it is not enough and the more they must count on someone ignoring them to provide them with what they must have.
The universities were the great backbone of the West, from the Academy and Lyceum to medieval Pisa and Oxbridge to the great 18th- and 19th-century founding of American campuses. Not necessarily any longer. Too many are bankrupt morally, economically, politically, and culturally.
The symptoms are terrifying: one trillion dollars in student debt (many of these loans accruing at higher than average interest rates and even before students have graduated); a small Eloi class of rarefied elites who teach little and write in runes that no one can decipher; a large Morlock class of part-timers and oppressed lecturers who subsidize the fat and waste of the tenured and administrative classes; graduates who are arrogant but ignorant, nursed on –studies ideology without the liberal arts foundations to back up their zeal; and a BA/BS brand that no longer ensures better-paying jobs, if any jobs at all.
In sum, apart from the sciences and medicine, most of the university coarsens rather than enlightens American life.
The current campus is unsustainable and we are beginning to see its decline, as online courses and for-profit tech schools usurp its students. The liberal arts are not nurtured and protected for another generation in the university. Instead, their umbilical cords have become cut with the cleaver of race/class/gender no-nothingism. Again the theme: the more bloated, exploitive, and costly the university, the more it lashes out it that it is short-changed, the victim of philistine budget cuts, and the last bastion of civilized life.
Civilization Seems to Be Losing
Popular culture is likewise anti-civilizational. Does anyone believe that Kanye West, Miley Cyrus, and Lady Gaga are updates to Glenn Miller, jazz, Bob Dylan and the Beatles? Even in the bimbo mode, Marilyn Monroe had an aura that Ms. Kardashian and Ms. Hilton lack. Teens wearing bobby socks and jeans have transmogrified to strange creatures in our midst with head-to -oe tattoos and piercings as if we copied Papua New Guinea rather than it us. Why the superficial skin-deep desire to revert to the premodern? When I walk in some American malls and soak in the fashion, I am reminded of National Geographic tribal photos of the 1950s.
Again the theme: the more we borrow to provide iPads to our supposedly deprived youth, the more in theory they can access in a nano-second the treasures of their culture and heritage, and in fact the more likely it is that they have no clue what Gettysburg was, who Thomas Jefferson was, or who fought whom over what in World War II. Our managers in education, terrified of confronting the causes of ignorance, believed that the faster youths could transmit nothingness, the more likely they might stumble onto somethingness.
The fourth-century Greeks at the end pasted silver over their worthless bronze coins — “reds” being the protruding noses and hair of the portraiture that first appeared bronze-like, as the silver patina rubbed off. The bastardization of the currency fostered many books on Roman decline. More worthless money for more people was a sign of “crisis” — analogous to our own quantitative easing and $17 trillion in debt.
Once more the theme here is not just that we are insolvent, but that we are so insolvent that it is now a thought-crime to talk of dissolution, bankruptness, and irresponsible spending — all damned as symptoms of “callousness” to the poor, proof of “social injustice”, and “obsessions” with deficits. The medicine of austerity always becomes worse than the disease of profligacy.
What do I mean about the “thinning strand of civilization”?
A shrinking percentage of our population feeds us, finds our energy, protects us, and builds things we count on. They get up each morning to do these things, in part in quest for the good life, in part out of a sense of social obligation and basic humanity, in part because they know they will die if idle and thrive only when busy, and in part simply because “they like it.”
We can stack the deck against them with ever higher taxes, ever more regulations, ever more obligations to others, and they may well continue. But not if we also damn them as the “1%” and call them the agents of inequality and the fat cats who did not build what they built or who profited when they should not have.
You cannot expect the military to protect us, and then continually order it to reflect every aspect of postmodern American sensitivity in a risky premodern world. Filing a lawsuit to divert a river’s water to the sea during a drought is a lot easier and cleaner than welding together well-casings at sea. Last week, an off-duty armed correctional officer in Fresno intervened in a wild carjacking, shooting and killing the gang-member killer and thus limiting his carnage to one death and two woundings rather than five or six killings — at the very moment Harvey Weinstein — of guns-blazing Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction fame and profits — promised to destroy the NRA. These contrasts say everything about the premodern, the postmodern and the innocent who pay the tab in-between.
Each day when I drive to work I try to look at the surrounding communities, and count how many are working and how many of the able-bodied are not. I listen to the car radio and tally up how many stories, both in their subject matter and method of presentation, seem to preserve civilization, or how many seem to tear it down. I try to assess how many drivers stay between the lines, how many weave while texting or zoom in and out of traffic at 90mph or honk and flip off drivers.
Today, as the reader can note from the tone of this apocalyptic essay, civilization seemed to be losing.
all hinge on just 144 million getting up in the morning to produce what about 160-170 million others (the sick, the young, and the retired who need assistance along with the 90 million idle) cons
That right there, folks, is what it's all about.
And it's about to be two less soon.
Libertatem Prius!
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A seemingly long-shot proposal to split California into six smaller U.S. states cleared a major hurdle this week, with the golden state’s secretary of state’s office saying that proponents “may begin collecting petition signatures.”
The initiative is sponsored by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper, according to the AFP, and contends that ”political representation of California’s diverse population and economies has rendered the state nearly ungovernable.”
A proposal to split California into six smaller states just cleared a major hurdle. (Image source: Shutterstock)
The proposal aims to divide California into ”six smaller state governments, while preserving the historical boundaries of the various counties, cities and towns,” the AFP reported.
“…six smaller state governments, while preserving the historical boundaries…”
States would reportedly include Silicon Valley, South California, West California, Central California, North California and Jefferson, if the proposal is ultimately approved.
The Tuesday move by the secretary of state’s office allows the movement to begin collecting the needed 807,615 signatures necessary for the initiative to arrive on the ballot.
To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
Nikita Khrushchev:"We will bury you"
"Your grandchildren will live under communism."
“You Americans are so gullible.
No, you won’t accept To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism.
To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. ."
We’ll so weaken your To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. until you’ll To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. like overripe fruit into our hands."
And it will be not unlike the first American civil war - but this time it will be conservative vs. liberal. Actually it will be heavily armed and dangerous morons against the sane people of this country. It just seems that the heavily armed dangerous morons tend to vote republican. Most sane, or educated, or well traveled people tend to vote for a saner party. The tea-party(R) destroyed the Republican party and I will forever be in their debt.
If they want to fight, they should be reminded that we currently control the nukes.
They will use any means to keep control of the country to continue moving it down the path of Socialism/Marxism/Communism.
They would allow foreign forces who share their goals to help fight against organized resistance.
Willing even to allow nukes to be involved on US soil to subdue stronger conservative parts of the country who refuse to assimilate.
To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
Nikita Khrushchev:"We will bury you"
"Your grandchildren will live under communism."
“You Americans are so gullible.
No, you won’t accept To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism.
To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. ."
We’ll so weaken your To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. until you’ll To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. like overripe fruit into our hands."
A seemingly long-shot proposal to split California into six smaller U.S. states cleared a major hurdle this week, with the golden state’s secretary of state’s office saying that proponents “may begin collecting petition signatures.”
The initiative is sponsored by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper, according to the AFP, and contends that ”political representation of California’s diverse population and economies has rendered the state nearly ungovernable.”
A proposal to split California into six smaller states just cleared a major hurdle. (Image source: Shutterstock)
The proposal aims to divide California into ”six smaller state governments, while preserving the historical boundaries of the various counties, cities and towns,” the AFP reported.
“…six smaller state governments, while preserving the historical boundaries…”
States would reportedly include Silicon Valley, South California, West California, Central California, North California and Jefferson, if the proposal is ultimately approved.
The Tuesday move by the secretary of state’s office allows the movement to begin collecting the needed 807,615 signatures necessary for the initiative to arrive on the ballot.
This proposal has the merit also of getting rid of the serious hurdle any conservative has of winning the electoral college if they cannot win California; and the Urban more leftist areas of California make a leftist winning California almost a foregone conclusion. Also, it has the merit of seperating the people who actually work and pay most of the taxes in California from the rich and poor deadbeats who live off of them.
"God's an old hand at miracles, he brings us from nonexistence to life. And surely he will resurrect all human flesh on the last day in the twinkling of an eye. But who can comprehend this? For God is this: he creates the new and renews the old. Glory be to him in all things!" Archpriest Avvakum
Ryan, I don't think they would get possession of most of the nukes either.
And indeed, I too await the Moment, the Moment when the would-be Bolsheviks get what's coming to them.
"God's an old hand at miracles, he brings us from nonexistence to life. And surely he will resurrect all human flesh on the last day in the twinkling of an eye. But who can comprehend this? For God is this: he creates the new and renews the old. Glory be to him in all things!" Archpriest Avvakum
President Obama joked during a New York fundraiser that he needed the attendees to move west to increase his support.
During his speech, Obama told a story about a woman who asked how she could help him, and he joked that she should move to North Dakota.
“If I could just get about a million excess votes in Brooklyn out to Nebraska, Wyoming, we’d be doing okay,” Obama said as the crowd laughed. “I don't need 80 percent of the vote here.”
Obama complained about “structural disadvantages” with the political system, pointing out that although Republican ideas did not have support from the majority of Americans, the political system kept Democratic majorities out of reach.
“We have a congenital disease, which is: during midterms our voters don't show up. That's what it comes down to,” he said. “That and population distribution and gerrymandering.”
Obama said he had been stymied in trying to enact his agenda because "Washington doesn't work."
Obama said:
The challenge we've got is very simple: Washington doesn’t work. It's not as if we've got no good ideas on policy. We've got tons of them. I've got a drawer full of things that we know would create jobs, help our middle class, boost incomes, make us more competitive. But we have a party on the other side that has been captured by an ideology that says no to everything because they cling to a rigid theory that the only way to grow the economy is for government to be dismantled and let the market sort things out, and folks at the top doing very well will somehow automatically trickle down to everybody else.
Obama made his remarks during a fundraiser with investment banker Blair Effron and his wife Cheryl on behalf of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
Florida man pointed laser at sheriff's helicopter, deputies say
19-year-old arrested, taken to Seminole County Jail
Author: Daniel Dahm, Managing Editor of ClickOrlando.com, ddahm@clickorlando.com
Published On: Jun 09 2014 09:39:52 AM EDT Updated On: Jun 09 2014 06:53:39 PM EDT
Trevor Ragno, of Longwood, was arrested Saturday on felony charges of pointing a laser light at a pilot and culpable negligence.
According to the Seminole County Sheriff's Office, shortly before midnight, the sheriff's helicopter, Alert 2, was on patrol over Interstate 4 and E.E. Williamson Road at 800 feet, when the flight crew reported a green laser light flashed through the cockpit.
The helicopter used infrared to direct deputies to a home on Deer View Place, where Ragno was located outside, officials said. Ragno was arrested and taken to jail.
"Shining a light into an aircraft creates a glare on the windscreen and generates a temporary flash of blindness, similar to a camera flash," the Seminole County Sheriff's Office said. "It is highly dangerous for pilots and flight crew who can experience blurred vision or become disoriented. At the time of Saturday night’s laser strikes, Alert 2 was flying at approximately 800 feet."
The FBI and FAA were notified of the incident. The FAA is investigating and can impose civil penalties of up to $10,000. The FBI could file federal charges for pointing a laser into the cockpit of an aircraft.
Ragno posted a $1,100 bond Sunday morning and was released.
Officials said in Seminole County alone there have been five incidents of lasers being pointed at pilots, all leading to arrests.
"If the laser beam goes directly into the night vision and amplifies the eye it can create permanent damage and ruin the night vision goggles that are very expensive," said Pilot Steve Farris.
Libertatem Prius!
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Longwood man arrested, accused of shining laser at sheriff's helicopter
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Trevor Ragno. (Seminole County Jail)
Published: 6/09 1:50 pm
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Updated: 6/09 1:54 pm
LONGWOOD, Fla. (WFTV) -- A 19-year-old man from Longwood was arrested Saturday night after deputies said he pointed a laser at a Seminole County Sheriff's helicopter as it flew near his house.
Deputies arrested Trevor Ragno at his home.
Deputies said the pilot of the helicopter reported that the crew was being struck repeatedly by a laser around 11:45 p.m. while they were on patrol.
The helicopter crew was able to pinpoint the location of the laser to a home on Deerview Place. Through the helicopter's night-vision camera system they saw a man in swimming trunks and no shirt standing in the home's pool enclosure shining a laser at the helicopter, according to the arrest report.
Deputies arrived at the house as three people were getting into a vehicle. The three told deputies that Ragno was the one pointing the laser at the helicopter, according to the report.
Deputies said Ragno told them where the laser pointer was and said he didn't know that pointing a laser at an aircraft was a crime.
Ragno was booked into the Seminole County Jail and charged with misuse of a laser lighting device and two counts of culpable negligence.
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Re: Will America Break Up?
A proposal to split California into six smaller states just cleared a major hurdle. (Image source: Shutterstock)
I don't think it works like that.
Originally Posted by vector7
Proposal to Split California Into Six States Clears Major Hurdle — Here Are the Proposed New States
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