Sunday, April 25, 2010
Trouble A'Brewin'
no. wait… you’d need water to brew it!!!
Saddam Hussein wanted to flush out certain ppl in his country so he drained swamps to cut off the water supply. What is reddest part of CA??
Martha Montelongo, a panelist via KamaainaInOC on Twitter
See.... The CA Central Valley grows 40% of the nation’s food, so this isn’t just a Krazy Kahleefohrneeiah matter.
The Extreme Greens—the watermelon variety—want to follow the Muir model and exclude humans from all the “natural” areas. They forget that Oakland was named for the giant oak trees that grew there 100 years ago and that San Francisco was a sandy bar home to a gazillion sand fleas, mites, midges and gnats before it was a thriving City by Teh BAy. The Bay itself was a ginormous water fowl fly zone surrounded by vast marshes which fed elk, moose, bear, and a quintillion mosquitos. But that’s not the “natural” area they want to excclude humans from: the National Forests, National Parks and, now, the best growing agricultural land in the world are where they want to keep the humans out.
[remember: all famines are political.]
So a couplafew years ago, the Watermelon Greenies became “conceeerned” about the Delta Smelt, some kind of dang guppie that was supposed to be native to the Delta region around Stockton CA. There is rather a controversy about the damthing even being a native, but that’s not important, now.
The “conceeern” was that the poooor smelt was dying out—just in the Stockton/Tracy region, mind you—because the Big Eviil Pumps that move the water through the California Aqueduct were sucking them in and making fertilizer out of ‘em. ‘Cept there’s a problem: the smelt are dying upstream from the pumps.
Thing is, although the pumps to the CA Central Valley were shut off in 2008 and 2009, there was NO improvement in the smelt’s numbers! Seems that there are other non-native fish who eat the smelt’s lunch and the smelt cannot compete. Darwin Award Fish, right? No one has ever laid out just exactly why the Smelt should be Saved; what good it does, what purpose it serves. No that would be too logical. Or, the hole in their argument is that the smelt is a useless little trash fish—an evolutionary experiment gone sideways and of not much use to anyone or any fish.
Or their sole purpose on Earth could be that they are the canary in the coal mine for the dumping of illegally untreated sewage, something that Stockton leads the nation in. Very good at the raw sewage dump, Stockton is. Hey - everyone has at least one talent.
But the Watermelon Greenies blame the pumps anyway—cuz they’re big and Industrial-looking, man-made and all complex and stuff, and likely make noise if you get past the razor wire and non-climb to get close enough to them. So the water to make the food was priced up and up and finally cut off. [one farmer reported his water bills: “2006-$300k; 2007-$600K; 2008-$1.3mil; 2009-$2mil."] And unemployment in many of these little farming towns is up to 40%. Yeah: 40% [forty percent].
And ver 50% of Central Valley acreage is being abandoned because, without water, dirt is useless. The farmers there have squeezed their water usage down to the last drop, practically dry-farming because of the water costs. Now, vast swaths of orchard - both fruit and nut - is lost, ready to be pushed over and burned. Vineyards are ripped out. Or it is left to rot. Mile upon mile of fields are barren, unplanted and slowly returning to worthless native plants—and non-native plants that thrive in the hot and dry.
[Y’all do realize that CA gets no rain from late April/early May to late October/early November, right?]
And people will pay more for food grown in Mexico with no health inspections and in Chile with no controls on pesticides. And, eventually, we’ll pay top dollar for a little pink baseball they’ll call a “tomato” grown in some night-soil fertilized field in China. Oh, Yum.
And CA will have no agricultural base, which will contribute no revenue to the General Fund. And the taxes will go up and up… But there will be no one to pay them. The already unoccupied houses in Stockton will rot and fall. And the rot will spread through the bedroom communities abandoned by those moving to Reno or some other place where jobs are plentiful because “business” is not a dirty word and “profit-making” is not a barely legal but socially disgusting undertaking. And the whole of the Golden State will come to resemble Detroit, with illegals as squatting in the neighborhoods and narco-terrorists replacing the rice farmers and potato growers and nut ranchers.
Meanwhile, the snow pack is 166% of normal in the Northern Sierra—where all this water comes from in the first place. Seems like it ought to be enough to create a whole lake for these smelt, doesn’t it? But no. The pumps remain silent. The farmers get out while they can—those who are able. The family farms fall to ruin. The California Dream is over.
And for what? Not the smelt. Really, it isn’t his fault; he’s just a 2 inch fish. It’s for the Big Government Power Brokers and the Hate The Human Greenies.
Swell.
Pat Riotic
Statistics
This page has been viewed 18348255 times
Total Entries: 5718
Total Comments: 4193
Total Trackbacks: 714
Most Recent Entry: 06/14/2011 06:44 am
Most Recent Comment on: 11/27/2011 05:18 pm
{/if}
