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Opinion
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- Written by: James BlueWolf
Having been a landscape contractor myself, I know how difficult it is to design systems that are always “perfect” when it comes to the controllability of the ratio of how much water is needed to how much is applied. New technologies make these problems less difficult to solve.
I want to take this opportunity to encourage the county to consider what types of voluntary and mandatory water conservation steps can be taken to insure that the quality and availability of our water resources is maintained.
A panel of landscape contractors could make suggestions for technologies that could be required as code to insure that sensors, timers and other automatic monitoring technology be utilized on new projects – with the possibility of additional credits to homeowners and businesses for the retrofitting of existing systems considered.
Any increased costs to implement these types of systems would not substantially affect competition if everyone was required to use them. Anyone that’s driven by a water system functioning in a driving rainstorm can testify to the waste unmonitored systems can produce.
Even our groundwater is precious. Well systems should have some sort of guidelines and safeguards to insure that people with these types of systems are not lulled into thinking they have unlimited access to these resources simply because they’re not paying to city water companies.
Once again, I know this infringes on the time-honored feeling that individual ownership entitles one to unlimited use of natural resources – but this is an obsolete philosophy given the realities of limited resources.
A second concern is that despite the county’s progress with recycling – a significant amount of usable resources are still being sent to the landfill. Construction materials that might be recycled at the landfill gates free of cost might give our commercial contractors a way of getting rid of their waste and allow subcontracted handling companies to re-market these materials at reduced costs to citizens unable to purchase new materials.
Additionally, it seems that many of our resorts and communities are not required to recycle at all but still dump all their garbage – plastic bottles, cardboard and all – together with nonrecyclable trash. These gaps in our system need to be addressed by making tenants and/or resort owners responsible for the same efforts at recycling the rest of the populace is now required to participate in.
Finally, we need to make more of an effort to provide additional locations for people to get rid of common hazardous waste materials – i.e., batteries, light bulbs, electronics equipment, etc. – so they aren’t tempted to “hide” these items in their regular landfill wastes. My wife and I very much appreciate the plastic bag recycling cans out in front of a number of our more progressive food markets. The recycling of plastic bags and bottles must be at the forefront of our efforts.
In the same way that public and commercial trash receptacles are located outside businesses and public areas for trash – we need to begin to allow the concept of having more public receptacles for specialized and separated wastes creep into our social consciousness – even if it requires more and more cans.
The results of these efforts will be felt for generations and the need for them surpasses any reticence we have about the visual impact these extra facilities might have in our immediate surroundings. Personally, I’d rather see an abundance of garbage containers wherever I go than imagine that these materials are being deposited onto and into our lands and water systems.
Budgeting and planning for the appropriate amount of workers and resources needed to keep our communities clean and safe and our disposal and recycling systems effective are part of the greening and sustainability movement we are embracing.
Yet we should not expect that county government will do all these things for us – as citizens we have the ability, without much of the red tape – to take the lead in these efforts. But that’s an issue for another commentary.
James BlueWolf lives is an artist and writer. He lives in Nice.
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- Written by: Sophie Annan Jensen
Would somebody please give me a map?
As a retired senior with some physical disability and a chronic illness, I'd really love to know where the facilities are.
I know there are golf courses, but I'm not interested in golf and wouldn't be able to play it anyway, for both physical and financial reasons.
I know there's a public swimming pool somewhere, but I gather it's only open in the summertime. Is there bus service that would get me there from the Northshore?
I know there are libraries and I am, thankfully, still able to drive to one. But where is the bookmobile for those who are not so fortunate?
There is a nice little art gallery in Lakeport and some pretty decent amateur theater from time to time. Are there any traveling shows or any simple entertainment in other areas, like Readers' Theater?
The city of Clearlake has a pretty snazzy community center, but I didn't notice any recreational facilities there for seniors or anyone else. The county's other senior centers don't look so snazzy. I believe the one in Clearlake Oaks is open only for lunches. I know the one in Lucerne, near me, is usually open only until mid-afternoon, and never on Sundays.
Is there any air-conditioned place in the county that's open in the very hot late summer afternoons for a cooling off respite? The city of Chicago established some of those centers after 700 people died in a heat wave a few years ago. Would it be so hard to take some preventive action here?
Am I on totally the wrong track here? Is the goal to attract only those affluent seniors who can afford air-conditioning and their own boats? Whose main interests are golf and gambling? Who will never become disabled or unable to drive?
If that's the case, just tell me and I'll go away.
Besides, why are we so anxious to attract seniors? Why aren't we focused on attracting businesses that will employ productive young people at a decent wage? Silicon Valley is the richest area in California. I bet some of those folks would love to cash out and come here, if there were jobs here.
Sophie Annan Jensen lives in Lucerne.
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When we are made to question our allegiance to a political party, to wonder why it seems to make little difference at times whether the House or the Senate is controlled by Democrats or Republicans, we fall back on the old illusion that our disappointment has everything to do with the personal qualities or shortcomings of individual politicians, and like fools keep hoping, at every election, that the right people will appear, to rescue this nation. It is true enough that a handful of politicians are actually sincere, and believe in and attempt to uphold the Constitution.
The truth appears to be, however, that the principal forces at play in government are not at all ideological, but a matter of class and economics. Having initially modeled this system of government on the Roman Republic, the so-called founding fathers set up two legislative bodies: the House of Representatives, which was to represent the people as did the Roman Assembly of Citizens, and the Senate, which exactly as in Rome was designed as a chamber elected by and for the elite.
The elite, of course and as in Rome, was to have the final say on matters of the state, while the will of the people was to be symbolically represented by Congress, presumably to appease the populace on matters of little importance. This is why America was called a republic, as in Rome, and not a democracy, as in Greece.
The system appeared to change in 1913, when the American people were given the right to vote for their Senators, and both the House and Senate were to represent ordinary citizens. It is also in 1913, prior to the change in the election process of the senate, that a powerful group of finance capitalists (better known as bankers), J.P. Morgan, Paul Warburg and John D. Rockefeller among others, created, without the proper Constitutional amendment and with the help of their ally the Senate, the Federal Reserve, a private monopoly that allowed them and allows their successors to control the US government.
"Give me control of a nation's money supply, and I care not who makes its laws" accurately boasted Mayer Rothschild, another finance capitalist.
After having thus taken ownership and control of the nation and no longer needing absolute power over the Senate, this small elite of bankers allowed the people to vote for their Senators, throwing them a few symbolic crumbs that were to make them believe they had acquired more representation and greater power, just as their power had been taken away by the Federal Reserve and they were too elated and distracted to see what had been done to them.
Are we, incidentally, to naively believe that some of the founding fathers did not plan this from the very beginning, having given this elite of finance capitalists total control over the Senate, until they no longer needed it because they had finally achieved their goal, which was to take control of the monetary system?
Kennedy, who unlike other Presidents refused to be a puppet in the hands of this elite, was assassinated before he got a chance to do what he wanted: to restore the gold standard for our monetary system, thus threatening the profits and control of the private bankers who own and run the Federal Reserve and the artificial creation of an actually worthless paper money, a currency that is only as good as the paper it is printed on.
Our political system, like the governments of all nations throughout history, is therefore seemingly torn between serving the elite that controls the world's wealth, and appeasing and controlling the populace that could become a threat if it was better informed. There is not much chance of this happening, as the elite needs an under class to exploit and to frighten the middle class, and a vastly ignorant and easily conditioned middle class to consume its entertainment and its junk, its bread and circus, and to unknowingly support its agenda, lead by deception and disinformation.
Bankers, or finance capitalists, are the hidden elements who control history, who finance wars and revolutions, decide who wins and who looses through the management of supplies and demands, the control of currency values, and even create or manipulate social movements and civil unrest when it is to their advantage.
They have no ideological loyalties, and neither do the key politicians they own: political ideologies are primarily meant to control the naïve and emotional populations by dividing them along mostly fictitious or irrelevant ideas, for the only practical ideas that matter to the highly pragmatic, opportunistic and level-headed elite are profit and power.
If you think this sounds like another absurd conspiracy theory, ask yourself why Hitler never attacked and invaded Switzerland, the banking center of the world and a very easy, very close and very tempting target ... was he the type to respect international treaties and national boundaries and sovereignty?
Could it be that he was financed by international banks just enough to be fooled and used by them, as the predictable psychopath he was, to redraw the map of the world and alter the power play, not to mention facilitate the brutal crushing of a rapidly burgeoning international movement of worker
solidarity, as was also achieved by the first world war? Fifty million lives was apparently an acceptable loss for an elite whose fortunes also soared beyond all expectations as a result of that war.
Our government, like all governments, is putting on a show of political theater for us, the easily fooled, easily distracted and now apparently heavily medicated populace, while the actual conflict is, once again, between public interest, the welfare of the nation and its people, and private interest, the power and extreme wealth of a very small elite.
Need I say who wins the battle every time? This will go on as long as we accept being trained to worship dominant power and to admire wealth, as our forefathers did under the monarchy, and to fear and demonize the poor and all who question might and greed. It will also go on as long as we ignore
the real dynamics of power, and believe in ideologies, in the right and left "good cop-bad cop" routine, that has been allowed to insult our intelligence far too long and is becoming insufferable to some.
Today it is often said that corporations seek to rule the world ... they have been given the same rights as a person, while being shielded from a person's responsibilities, for this very reason. But corporations, like politicians, only do the finance capitalists' bidding and are pawns in their power games. Corporations are today's "villains", decoys that are useful to implement the banking elite's agenda of the new world order, of globalization, but whose power will be taken away as soon as they have served their purpose in this agenda, and under the pretence of freeing the populace from their apparent corruption of government and abuse of such power.
Finance capitalists, who came up with the idea of a banking monopoly, of central banking, to control the state, perhaps as early as two thousand years ago or more, an idea later espoused by Marxists and Capitalists alike, ultimately do not want a free market but a highly regulated economy that could be called capitalist in the sense that it does not threaten their private capital, but prevents, to a large extent, the creation of too many new and independent (free from loans) fortunes outside of their circle of power, of a new elite that would ignore the rules of the ancestral game and would be apt to want to reform and change the world. This is why the on going globalization agenda appears to be communist to some and fascist to others, because it is neither.
These people do not want our solutions to the world's problems. They need to keep the problems in place to maintain the world's conflicts in ideological and divisive terms, and to offer, when strategically appropriate, their own solutions, that will profit them exclusively in terms of ever more profit and power. Consequently, do not expect any real and holistic solutions to global warming, to global pollution, to human suffering in the third world, or to the exhaustion of resources, to be implemented when they should, today.
If a third world war is deemed to be more profitable by this small circle of finance capitalists and apt to fulfill their long term goals, the world will be, once again, thrown into the pits of hell ... and many will be convinced to hate and fear the newly created enemy, as countless generations have done. But if, at some future date, global warming or some other issue is thought to be helpful in implementing a timely policy of new regulations, it is what will happen, seemingly for the benefit of the people of the world and of the environment.
There is no other solution to this condition of the control and enslavement of the world by a small and extremely discreet, well educated and very clever banking elite but an emergence of the truth, which can be obtained and expanded through research ... The important point is not in finding out names, but in understanding the strategy ... the names are ultimately completely irrelevant.
One only has to look at what has been done by banking monopolies to acquire control over governments and policies, and connect the historical and contemporary dots, so as to no longer fall in the trap of believing the many historical, social, ideological and cultural fairy tales that the media and the educational systems feed us, and perhaps no longer be as a pawn in this elite's games, particularly in times of war, when the consequences of being fooled are truly tragic.
Raphael Montoliu lives in Lakeport.
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- Written by: Mike Humble
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. This is a common metaphor used to describe how things can be linked together and dependent on one another in order to function properly.
Often times when I am at the scene of an accident, I use this metaphor to explain why the accident occurred. Most of the time traffic flows smoothly throughout Lake County. However, collisions do occur and when they do it can have a devastating affect on those involved.
When a driver becomes a weak link in the metaphoric chain of traffic, the chain can snap and a collision is the result. Drinking and driving causes an obvious weakening of the chain, but what other causes are there?
The speed of a vehicle can create a weak link in the chain of traffic. The difference in stopping distance for a vehicle traveling at 55 miles per hour compared to 60 miles per hour is approximately 38 feet. Following too closely has a similar affect on the chain as speeding does. It effectively reduces the three second rule, but that rule is designed to create a safety cushion under optimum driving conditions.
Straight and level roadways with a good sight distance are more the exception than the rule in our beautiful mountainous county. If you create a buffer between you and the car ahead longer than three seconds, you actually help to strengthen the chain against the weak link that may be ahead of you or behind you.
Driver complacency is a hidden cause of link weakening. When a driver has never had a collision, he or she begins to believe that they never will, and they begin to disregard the rules of the road.
Another weak link is created when a driver continues to drive while sleepy or fatigued when they should pull over and rest.
Next time you drive your car, take a few moments to critique your driving. Look around at the other vehicles on the road and see if you can tell who is the weak link on the road. If you’re the weak link in the chain, it’s time to improve your driving.
If we all try to strengthen our own individual links, it will have an overall positive effect on the traffic safety in our community.
If you have any questions about this article or ideas on future articles, contact myself or Officer Adam Garcia, Clear Lake Area CHP. Remember, buckle up and drive safe!
Officer Humble has been a California Highway Patrol Officer for 17 years, and has been assigned to the Clear Lake CHP office for the past 11 years.
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