Life and all in Redding California
Everybody has one, this is my $.02
We could use the jobs. The infrastructure construction will boost the economy and leave behind a transportation system that will serve long after the oil runs out.
And one way or another, the oil will run out.
That’s the conclusion of this article about Facebook by John Dvorak, a columnist I often agree with. Coincidentally, local blogger Marc Beauchamp brings up the point about how businesses are using Facebook, perhaps to the detriment of the economy. Perhaps even more ominous, Henry Blodget does a good job of pointing out how the US Treasury is blowing up a Facebook valuation bubble via Goldman Sachs, using your money of course. We all know how government sponsored bubbles end.
I use Facebook, because it’s required in my line of work to be out there interacting with people, and if people are on Facebook, so be it. (Friend me!) It’s work related. But every time I log in, I confess to being baffled by the attraction. And I am very disturbed at how easily ordinary people give out so much personal information to a privately held corporation who has repeatedly shown their intent to profit by it. Of course, now if the planned profit doesn’t appear, a “too big to fail” firm will want a bailout from the government. We let this happen. Again.
No doubt they sparked some celebratory fattys last week at Redding’s many marijuana “collectives.” And at hydroponic shops. And perhaps among beverage distributors, who learned their special interest campaign money was well spent.
Druglords in Mexico laugh it up, too. All of the above groups formed a cynical alliance. The statewide failure of Prop 19 to end prohibition enables the underground and untaxed economy. The black market profiteers and the “herbal medical” community will continue to prosper, at least for a few more years.
Gettin’ all preachy on a Sunday. It’s Really Redding.
The image above captures it all for me; the lunacy, the hypocrisy. I know Proposition 19 is not the perfect answer, but what we are doing now is worse. It’s not about encouraging drug use. That happens whether we like it or not. It’s about enabling organized crime, and training young people to ignore our laws based on hypocrisy. Time to send a message about personal liberty, common sense, and some recognition of reality. This step won’t end the argument, but please join me tomorrow in voting to repeal Prohibition again.
The image above shows a business in the foreground named Stoneys that mostly sells pipes for smoking marijuana. They may also sell some Wholesale Vape Pens, but the point stands. An apparently legitimate business serving the needs of the illegal drug using population. The large building in the background is the Shasta County Jail, located right across the street, ready to incarcerate Stoney’s clientele who come looking for the best product to smoke their aaaa weed with. No doubt you and I can rationalize this evident contradiction of black and white laws in a gray world. But what message are we sending our young people, who are trying to make sense of the world and our culture? It would make more sense if the drug was legal and controlled, really. That way at least this confused message will not be sent out any longer. I’m convinced the unintended message is that drug laws are to be ignored, and by extension perhaps all societal laws are just a joke. The hypocrisy is poisonous.
I don’t think of ReallyRedding as a political blog. But in fact, every act of written expression is a political act in this world. The recent award of the Nobel Prize to Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo makes this painfully clear.
“The internet is God’s present to China
by Liu Xiaobo
Today there are more than 100 million internet users in China. The Chinese Government is ambivalent towards it. On the one hand, the internet is a tool to make money. On the other, the Communist dictatorship is afraid of freedom of expression.
The internet has brought about the awakening of ideas among the Chinese. This worries the Government, which has placed great importance on blocking the internet to exert ideological control.
In October 1999 I finished three years of jail and returned home. There was a computer there and it seemed that every visiting friend was telling me to use it. I tried a few times but felt that I could not write anything while facing a machine and insisted on writing with a fountain pen. Slowly, under the patient persuasion and guidance of my friends, I got familiar with it and cannot leave it now. As someone who writes for a living, and as someone who participated in the 1989 democracy movement, my gratitude towards the internet cannot be easily expressed.
I really enjoyed the exquisite weather this lovely Fall Redding weekend. I enjoyed the natural beauty, the freedom to travel freely about the Northstate.
I am enjoying the freedom now to write about this controversial subject. Liu Xiaobo is in jail for for 11 years for the crime of trying to enjoy the same basic freedoms we dare not take for granted. His wife is now under house arrest because of his new international recognition. Here are the words of the man who nominated him:
“The courageous men and women who are challenging tyranny in these countries are looking to the governments and leading non-governmental institutions in free countries for assurances that their fate, and the fate of their countries, depends on something more than the bottom line. To fail to challenge the Chinese government on Liu Xiaobo’s imprisonment is to concede this argument internationally, at enormous peril to peaceful advocates of progress and change not just in China but all around the world. “
You can sign a petition demand to free Liu Xiaobo at this link.
Or not.
Either way, you will be making a political statement.
Freedom of expression, the real prize. It’s ReallyRedding.
The RS ran this article about yesterday’s rally to save Kilarc. Below is a re-run of our thoughts on the Kilarc facility.
We stopped in over at Kilarc Reservoir in eastern Shasta County for a look and took a few shots. It’s nice to get up out of the valley heat. It has a lovely picnic area and lake, maintained by PG&E, who run the electrical generation facility there. PG&E wants to abandon the project, which is one of the oldest in the county. They would demolish the reservoir, power house, and the dam on Cow Creek that feeds it.
The plan strikes us as shortsighted, and a bit sad. This has to be one of the cleanest possible ways to make electricity. It’s been here for years, and seems to have had proportionally small impact. No hydropower comes without cost, but some projects seem to have reasonable cost/benefits, especially when already in place. Imagine the electrical power replaced with a coal fired plant, and it offers some stark perspective.
On the way home, we stopped at a high country ranch we know. The owner let us pick some fruit. These apples are from trees more than 100 years old. Still productive. The people who planted that orchard 100 years ago are the same people who thought electricity made from falling water would be a good idea.
With a little care, you can grow just about any crop you want in temperate Redding. Outside. Using no electricity. Yet our town boasts enough retail establishments selling hydroponic gardening gear to serve a colony on the moon. You can even see them advertising on billboards in town. Why is that?
Of course the question is rhetorical. The hydroponic shops cater to marijuana growers who prefer to grow their weeds indoors. Making sure you have the right temperature for your marijuana is adamant for many people who sell their weed on. Once these grows have finished, the flowers and many other byproducts of the grows will be used to stock up a dispensary in many legal states and countries. These dispensaries need to make sure that their weed is grown to the highest quality possible, in order to continue to grow their successful business. However, when growing marijuana, it’s important that the growers consider how they’re going to produce their marijuana. The most popular methods of growing marijuana are resin, live resin, and rosin (Read more about the differences here). It’s important for marijuana businesses to understand these as deciding which one to use can impact the success of the business. However, those businesses that aren’t performing as well as they could be might be interested in dispensary application consulting to improve the amount of business they have. When you’ve put all this work into finding the perfect temperature to grow your weed, you’ll want to be selling it on to make a profit! That being said, it is also interesting to note that although setting up a dispensary is one of the most popular marijuana business ideas out there at the moment, there are other ways to enter this exciting industry such as through social media marketing or even party planning. Ultimately, any industry that generates jobs and revenue can support the economy and therefore a lot of people think we should be doing more to support cannabis businesses.
I’m not here to pick on this particular establishment, about which I know nothing except that they have the wherewithal to advertise on a billboard in south Redding. I’m all for small and local business. But this growing industry is a lesson in unintended consequences that we ignore at our peril. At the roadside where I stopped to take a picture of the sign, I picked up this empty box.
The litter was a disposed box for earphones. The corporation that marketed and sold this product chose to play on words about an illegal drug for advertising purposes. Another company making money on marijuana. Can you identify the ethical contradiction involved when legal business organizations capitalize on illegality to thrive? Perhaps you cannot, or don’t care. But I submit that impressionable youth is being harmed by the hypocrisy. We are conditioning generations of young people to accept that laws are simply meant to be ‘winked’ at. It’s another unintended consequence of an ill-considered prohibition. We are complicit. We teach our young people that hypocrisy is acceptable, and laws are to be circumvented. In the long term, I expect it’s a cultural lesson we will come to regret having taught.
You won’t recognize the place after watching this short video. And this was recorded a few days before our Deepwater Chernobyl.
We keep trying to help the salmon that swim by our River City. But they have to go and grow up in the ocean. And we wonder why there are fewer every year. It’s all connected, it’s Really Redding.
The recent Deepwater Horizon/BP oil blowout is big. How big? Here’s a map of the spill, only spread over Shasta County.
Paul Rademacher is using GoogleEarth to give us all a better understanding of the size and scope of the problem. Although the news is using phrases like “the size of Delaware,” it can be hard to visualize. The link lets you place the oil over any geography on earth. You need to install the Google Earth plugin if you don’t have it already. It seems to be a harmless plugin.
The oil is not harmless.
Early on, some doomer bloggers were predicting this would be something we’d never seen before. That it would be unstoppable, and carried in the gulf stream, it would eventually destroy the entire ocean ecosystem of the planet. Maybe. Can you say it won’t? So far they have been unable to stop it, or even slow it down. And if you have been following the news daily, they seem to be downplaying it every day, until the news get worse. At first it was just a fire, then it sunk. Then just a few thousand gallons leaking, now millions. Then, they were going to put a cap on it, but it failed. A mile beneath the sea, and 30,000 feet below that, the oil has other ideas. It’s like a bad science fiction movie, only real.
Anyway check the link. We are an oil based civilization, and the fragile sea pays the price.
“I still recall my mother’s first words to me: ‘I haven’t killed anyone in years, but never think that I’ve forgotten how.'”
You should have a soft heart as a mom, but if you have a soft head too, your progeny are doomed.
Skip Murphy
Not exactly Hallmark card material, but Happy Mother’s Day, mom. Celebrating tough-minded, soft-hearted moms everywhere.
