15 thoughts on “Brown Versus Green”

  2. The GOP really needs to pick a deep red state and figure out an urban strategy for it. Not just a “Oh, we didn’t lose so bad” strategy, but one that actually wins inside the city core.

    Charter schools, as one piece.

    I think a second piece could really be urban safety. Someone (preferably not the GOP -or- the NRA) offer certification like the Red Cross Lifeguard/First Aid/CPR certification – for firearms knowledge, safety, and accuracy. Push very hard in some basically amenable places (How about Houston) but targeted at the core. Hold contests with food. And prizes. The goal is to figure out what works before transplanting it to somewhere less red.

    A third piece is shedding the “Flunky for Big Business” image. The core principles revolve around promoting small business. And things that help small business (roads, courts, sane regulations) almost all necessarily help big business as well. But… the OWS(*) insanity does have exactly one cogent point: Monopolies, cartels, oligopolies, all help the big get bigger – and hurt the little guy. Make a Corporate Death Penalty. And call it that. It’s basically the AT&T breakup – sliced into parts and set back into motion as independent entities. The workers are fine, the executives get stiffed, and suddenly there’s a whole lot more interest in not doing crazy crap by the people steering the ship. It’s basically what should happen in mega-bankruptcies anyway.

    (*) One part about OWS that is particularly irksome is “Corporations are not People!” Other than the land-of-duh aspects, and the court-didn-t-say-that aspects, there’s the flat acceptance of the statement that corporations do not enjoy the protections of the Bill of Rights. They don’t have freedom of speech is the explicit claim. But… do they have the right to assemble? Be the press? Hire armed security? Do they deserve … due process? Trials? Protections against searches and seizures? Eminent domain? The whole farking house of cards comes down practically overnight if you accept the premise that accumulations of people are not protected by the Bill of Rights. “Yeah, You can have your weird ass religion – so long as there’s only -one- of you.”

    1. Al,
      why NOT the NRA? Because the Dems don’t like them? The GOP isn’t set up to teach anything about firearms, so they’re out for sure.

      The NRA has a 142 year history of training people in gun safety AND usage. They’ve literally trained tens of thousands of people how to handle guns safely and how top shoot them accurately. Maybe if they did train some people from Blue States / Inner Cities they’d lose their ‘white guys wearing trucker hats and camo’ image.

      1. Yes, -I- know that. Just thinking the NRA has too much baggage to overcome. And they do seem quite lethargic and “It’s new! Run!” sometimes.

        The Red Cross certification is something that is actually required for many jobs. I’d really like exactly this same situation – where even police are going through outside training and certification.

        I’m not looking for “tens of thousands”, I want millions. High school curricula, rifle clubs, whatever.

  4. The best approach to extracting the oil is to drill in horizontally from Nevada, perhaps starting very deep and then fracturing the rocks over the entire route so California’s oil will slowly and naturally drain into a state where it can be recovered. The greens could be sold on it as a way to drain dangerous toxic substances from their environment..

    Another option is DIY horizontal fracking rigs that could be set up in the woods by crews of Mexican pot growers.

    1. The best approach is sell “Environmental Cleanup Permits” that allow basically free rein to anyone that has a plan for removing highly toxic, carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic materials and converting them to plant food and water.

    2. 😀

      That would work. What’s ironic is that there are oil wells hidden inside LA buildings, even in malls, pumping away.

      If present trends continue, one day a visionary like Elon Musk will map out the technology required to land a rover in California and have it deploy some sort of small scale industrial processor that can synthesize building materials from local soil – or from the rusting refuse of a long extinct technological civilization. Perhaps Spanish missionaries would show up and teach the natives how to farm again.

      On another note, I ran across a nice story about 3-D printing with lunar materials (slow link).

      It mentioned that a volcano in central Italy has a basalt that is a 99.8% match for lunar soil, which made for a vastly cheaper source of test soil.

    3. There’s precedent: most of LA’s water is piped in from from out-of-state and there are actual legal decisions stating that the residents of those states have no choice but to watch it happen.

  5. “Does California’s Democratic Party come down on the side of low income Californians, who desperately need the jobs…”.

    That may be, THE dumbest thing I’ve ever seen written about creating jobs. Does the writer truly think that working in an oil field is the same as working at Burger King or Wal-Mart? Not that I have an axe to grind with either of those places, but having worked in the oil fields, it’s NOT a low income job hunter ‘friendly’ place. Most of the jobs are skilled labor,. And even though the ‘Black Gold ‘ show would make you believe that just anybody can walk up and get a starter job, it ain’t so.

    1. When you create high-paying oil field jobs, you also create a lot of lower paying, less skilled jobs to support them. Those oil field workers have to eat, have to buy gas for their vehicles, have to have a place to sleep and would like a place to blow off some steam. For every high paying job, you’re likely to create several low paying jobs. Take a look at North Dakota. They’re paying big bucks to people to do jobs that are normally considered low skilled because of the labor shortage.

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