It Has to Get a Lot Worse Before It Gets Better- The Sunday Collage

 As a young man researching the murder of Frank Little in Butte, Montana, I knew I was going to have my work cut out for me. It would be a diet of microfiche readers at the library and old documents at the Butte Archives which is a wonderful repository for all things associated with the history of Butte.

But the real problem I was going to have was the source or reference material. In 1917, the only source of information was print media. Newspapers. In Butte, every newspaper was owned by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company or the ACM. The ACM had acquired every mining property on the hill and employed tens of thousands of miners. They didn't just run Butte and own a sympathetic and crooked police force, they ran the state of Montana. That is well documented. In town, everyone just called them the "company."

I discovered a couple of things. That history really is- told by the winners. The company filtered out any death or story that cast them in a bad light. Since Frank Little was a union organizer and fiery orator, they especially hated him. They slandered him and his organization. His murder not only went unsolved- it went un-investigated.

So that was it. Radio would not be around for another 15 years. Newspapers, hopelessly biased, were going to be my only source of information. 

My father had been a news anchor on a small TV station in Williston, North Dakota in the late 1960's. Every night I would watch him report the local news and then I would watch the national news on one of two TV networks. Walter Cronkite was the anchor I remember most. I was about 8 years old. I have been a news junkie for over 55 years.

Cronkite was objective. There was no political bias or jaded subterfuge like today.

When networks reported the news in the 60's, 70's, and 80's- it appeared to be impartial and mostly truthful. There wasn't this heavily biased, editorialized opinions that we see today. Everything is suspect. Election rigging with no investigation. Fraudulent polls. Suspicious debates and moderators. Jaded celebrities offering platforms, endorsements, and liberal opinions. Unrelenting media hatred for one candidate and universal media love for the democratic party and whatever horrible candidate they conjure up. 

So what changed? Who murdered decency and objective reporting?

It was called the "Fairness Doctrine" and it was officially destroyed in 1987 and buried by Barack Obama in 2011.   

The demise of the Fairness Doctrine has been cited as the main reason for party polarization in the United States. So here it was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine

Every contest has rules. Boxers, caged fighting, football, golf. Without rules and a fair playing field, there is simply cheating and chaos. So cheating and chaos now reign supreme on our political landscape. All sorts of illegal activities like importing votes via illegal aliens and blocking any effort to prove citizenship before casting ballots. Demonizing anyone who questions the breakdown of our system. Subjecting people to ridicule for simply questioning an outcome or refusing a shot. We even have the democrats trying to unseat justices on the Supreme Court for simply returning the abortion issue to individual states. No issue is more divisive than the abortion issue.

As a country, we are in pretty bad shape. We desperately need an intervention and a complete change in policy. Yet, I don't see anyone with that level of political courage. Trump has his hands full.

So maybe things just have to go the way they are going. And with luck, it will get so bad that good people will finally get off their asses and help.  I don't think we can stop what's coming. 

But we can sure as hell slow it down.

Could America Survive Without California?

 For years I have been listening to various asshats tell me that California produces more tax revenue than it receives. I have also read where California believes they are the 4th or 5th biggest economy in the world. So as Gavin Newsome aka the clown prince of Sacramento, trades barbs with President Trump- you have to wonder...could we live without California?

California has the tech industry and Silicon Valley. It has the film industry and Hollywood. But most importantly, California has a fantastic agricultural economy. They grow everything from soup to nuts in one of the most fertile, temperate climates in the world. California has fantastic weather, miles and miles of beautiful beaches, and the Pacific Ocean. It has nice people as well. We conservatives tend to throw out the baby with the bathwater when discussing the oppressive liberal politics that strangle the state. We think everyone is a liberal in California and that simply isn't true. I know many conservative people, more conservative than myself, who have fled California.

Let's agree to one other thing. It is California's great weather, beaches, and the ocean that people love. That is why so many corporations and people have moved there. It is quality of life. 

Nobody moved to California for the great governance. In fact, California boasts a list of idiot politicians like no other state. Waters, Pelosi, Schiff, Harris, Newsome. You have to look awfully hard to find a cadre of dipshits worse than that list. I can't imagine anyone saying, "Man I love those California politicians- let's move there!"

For the record, I briefly lived in Santa Ynez. It was a wonderful place, with wonderful people (many conservatives) but the cost of living was atrocious. Santa Ynez has no water. Water bills approaching 1000 per month are not unheard of and the residential rate in Santa Barbara for water, sewer, and trash is 254.00 per month.

So California has three giant industries, which are more or less, there because of the beauty and the weather. Two of them, tech and the movie industry, could easily be relocated. The agricultural industry, the one that feeds many of us, cannot be readily moved or relocated. It is mostly dependent on the weather, soil, and water California naturally has.

So just how much tax revenue does California send into the federal government compared to what they get back? While it is true that California provides a little excess revenue, it is not that much. I chose a couple of normal, or non covid years to make comparisons. In 2019, what California sent in was maybe 4% more than they received. You can play with this map and see all of the liberal states which love to tax and redistribute their citizens income. Balance of Payments Portal | Rockefeller Institute of Government

Can we live without Hollywood? Yes. Can we live without technology from Silicon Valley? Probably not. Can we live without the food California grows? No.

I used to love California. That was back in the Reagan days- maybe Schwarzenegger days. Now it has become a taxing, regulatory, expensive nightmare. Traffic is horrible, the roads are horrible, crime and homelessness are mired in the cities. The cost of everything is terrible. Insurance rates, utility rates, medical procedures, just the cost of doing business with all the government red tape and skim. In short, California has become noncompetitive. The only thing they produce better than anyone else is red tape and tax skim. They are very good at that.

I don't know how you turn around a Frankenstein government like California's. The six richest families, folks like the Gettys, understand that to keep the hoi polloi from stringing them up- you must keep the free shit army well fed, medicated, and pretend to care about them. This is accomplished by marching a few political stooges out there to administer your survival politics and make someone else pay for it. This is the role of folks like Pelosi and Newsome.

Could America live without California? I wouldn't want to. But we could sure live without all of those assholes who are currently running things.