The Natural Environment and the Foothill Conservancy

At the Amador Water Agency public discussion of the Amador Canal’s small diameter pipe, Cecily Smith read the Foothill Conservancy’s position on the project. Given its convoluted bureaucratic rhetoric, I was confused at times, but they seemed nominally in favor of the project. Upon reading the material on their website, it became clarified. The opposing points of view discussed there had uncovered a primary flaw in the dominant environmental dogma. The now 150+ years of the canal had spawned a new, desirable and natural environment. What, then, is the natural environment?

Many large forest preserves dot the northern suburbs of Chicago. For one reason or another, I have observed them for almost 40 years now. On my last visit, I witnessed rotting logs, dead limbs and half fallen trees. It seemed like an unsafe place to hike. A local told me of a change in policy to keep these woods in their natural state. That seemed like a strange assumption to me, since Native Americans would have been cleaning the forest for firewood, construction, tool making, etc. As I noted in one of my prior posts, the absurdity of New England environmentalists, proclaiming "Save This Natural River" when ground penetrating radar and similar techniques, reveal that the course of the river was determined by stone fishing weirs built thousands of years ago.

In the BLM land south of Chaw’se lies a blackberry patch. One year when I went to pick, the berries were sparse because a tree had fallen and blocked the creek’s flow. If a tribal group had been dependent upon that patch the tree would have been removed immediately. As I realized that likelihood, it also seemed likely that the bend in the creek which created that berry bog was also a human endeavor. Practices like this are called intentional agriculture. Hunter/gatherers didn’t wake up one morning and say: "This is getting boring, let’s become farmers." They observed how and where certain plants or animals flourished and customized the land and rivers for their convenience and survival. This has occurred for probably 500,000 years and possibly a million years. The aborigines in Australia had absolutely no concept of a park or preserve. But here in Amador County we have a so-called wild and scenic river created by dam release water flows on a river that has been artificially controlled for over a 150 years. Its natural summer condition is bone dry.

The Amazon basin is filled with “natural” groves of fruit and nut trees. To justify the current mythology of the Amazon, some scientists have published articles of twisted and convoluted logic to prove these groves natural, despite the first (and probably disease carrying) Spanish explorers describing a vast and thriving culture. Their arguments read as disgusting racism trying to prove that these “primitive” people were not capable of transforming their landscape to their advantage. It was a sophisticated and acceptable liberal academic version of KKK literature. Not only are these groves probably a vestige of a once elaborate human society, but some have hypothesized that much of the Amazon Basin was once a savannah forested by humans. While I have no idea if that is true, I feel certain that research money to investigate is unlikely to be available. But there is lobbying, deemed important enough for two and half pages in our local Ledger-Dispatch, to save the now naturally wild horses and burros descended from escaped or abandoned animals.

The Native Americans burned the forests to eliminate underbrush, etc and create a grassy environment to promulgate the desirable deer population. This practice amazed the first British settlers and gave birth to our current controlled burns. Many of our current forest preserves were farmed for over a 100 years before being turned into forests during the New Deal. And locally we have a 150 year old mining district being called pristine by the anti-Newman Ridge enthusiasts. The so-called natural environment developed in symbiosis with human habitation. The Bible giving us dominion over the land and other life forms was simply a codification of ancestral belief. Much of the official academic literature seems present centric and ethno-centric. The Ancients had technologies for remaking the earth often hard to grasp today, given our prejudicial blinders. They were as intelligent as we are, despite not walking around staring at iPhones. When I hear this prideful present attitude, I ask: How long did it take us to go from electricity to electronics?

The difference between then and now is simply a oneness with the land; people did not see themselves as separate from the wholeness of creation. Today’s common environmental belief is one of separation, that people are an unnatural, alien intrusion. This is an invented ideology that serves other purposes. I find it a bone chilling religion of self rejection, not unlike white guilt and other propagandized distortions prevalent today. It isn’t very holistic is it?

When you start with the wrong assumptions, you end up with the wrong conclusions. In 1962, Decca Records decided that guitar-based groups were passé (remember those great tenor sax choruses with The Coasters and other groups), and therefore refused to sign the Beatles. In 1948, the Pentagon added up planes, tanks, guns and bullets and told President Truman nascent Israel couldn’t defend itself. What army would you bet on: probable conscripts of feudal monarchies, or concentration camp survivors fighting for their own soil? When you conceive the situation incorrectly, the answers don’t work. We can’t get there that way, despite all of us caring about the earth.

PS: A similar situation seems to also exist with historic preservation. In the 1970’s the 20 th Century-Fox Ranch became Malibu Creek State Park. Great lengths were taken, which I wholeheartedly endorse, to preserve the remnants of Native American settlement. But the ruins of a Chinese village and other old movie sets were destroyed. Aren’t they both our history?

Copyright 2016, Mark L. Bennett

The General Plan that Isn’t

I spoke at Tuesday’s hearing to approve our General Plan EIR, and said this:

“Before I begin, I want to remind everyone here that I have a Masters in planning and have worked much of my life in that field. So while some may regard me as a nuisance to their goals, I am an expert nuisance. My sympathies to all you commissioners. Tonight has been one of the most masochist experiences of my life. I wish it were possible to debate almost every one of tonight’s speakers. I turned in numerous pages of plan and plan DEIR criticism. If anyone wants to read them they are all still available on Amador Community News under my blog, Outside the Ivory Tower. The draft EIR reviewers considered my comments to be primarily personal opinion because they did not discuss the adequacy of the General Plan. While technically correct for this EIR review, it was a set up because it’s impossible to discuss a General Plan that isn’t general. A General Plan is supposed to set aside sufficient land for various uses to provide choices for people in the future. Yet the Foothill Conservancy has criticized this plan as vague. They want an even more proscriptive plan than even this proposal.

By what Godlike omnipotence does anyone know what the world will be in the future? No one does know, but after reading the entire General Plan and the Draft EIR it’s rather apparent that this is not a plan in the tradition of freedom but a very specific program to create a very specific future. A future where people are removed from the land into service worker strategic hamlets called town centers. It is social engineering that should include, according to the Foothill Conservancy, even what type of stores people have the freedom to open here. It is an Agenda 21/globalist agenda cookie cutter plan so we can all goosestep to the new world order. A certain political faction with time and financing was able to pack the early committees that selected this consultant. That was a mistake I hope is never repeated.

I am well aware that much of this plan is required by the Sacramento overloads. Included in this is the total fraud of human induced global warming and the degradation of science that has accomplished. The Foothill Conservancy statement on this plan adds to that fear mongering with a laundry list of frightening outcomes they envision if this plan is not even more specific. Personally, if I had a few extra million, I’d give it to the County to start fresh with new plan. In that case, this plan could be put to good use by being recycled into bathroom tissue.

While I may appear to be speaking as an isolated individual, I would not be here today unless I was completely confident that I am representing a large number and possibly a majority of Amadorians. We don’t like losing our freedoms. People have just voted for freedom in the UK and we have the Trump candidacy here. Most likely the plan’s prescriptive future will take hold in a manner similar to that of the abusive EPA. Relatively powerless property and homeowner’s will be picked off one by one when a change in their circumstances trigger a new procedure. Some will sue and others may not be so polite. While I hope and pray nothing truly horrible happens, this plan and its draft EIR are asking for trouble.”

PS: We, the American people, are mostly descended from the n-word people of Europe. Because of this we built a country based on freedom and opportunity. When I listened to people tonight it seemed like they see themselves as little aristocrats. Perhaps Sartre’s statement that "America is Super Europe" was prophetic.

Reality Intruded

This follows in the same vein as my last posting. They started with the suggestion of a writer friend who loved my stories and suggested doing an oral history. So here is another episode of my political evolution from starting adult life as a liberal and learning through reality intrusions. I don’t want this to be interpreted as sour grapes; I’ve had my successes, along with the evitable mistakes.

In the early 1980s, I bought a vacant lot in LA along with a business partner. It was to be politically-correct infill housing, and we hired the absolute best to design and engineer. The building department plan checker was in awe. I can’t imagine the most strident environmentalist objecting to anything. We were then ready for a construction loan, but interest rates soared (the lesson I learned was to never be late in an economic cycle). My partner said to wait, and I couldn’t risk it alone without putting up my home. While we were sitting it out, I received a citation for having an unweeded empty lot. So my partner and I, along with his teenage daughter, worked a long day and manicured the lot, leaving some isolated and healthy green plants. But we then got cited for an incomplete lot cleanup, and therefore were forced to kill those remaining plants (they were edible plants we could have harvested. But this was our private property in theory only). Now in full compliance, but without any vegetation, the winter rains pushed much of this downslope lot into the property below. We then got cited for this problem that was created by our compliance with the previous citation (the lesson I learned here was that while regulation and reality seem like separate worlds, they are not. Regulation is government profiteering). So I put a crew together, and we moved all the dirt back to the vacant lot and built a retaining wall.

(An added irony to this was that, in my much earlier appearance before some environmental board, I had to promise to replace imaginary former trees. I told them I had approved plans without trees and that there were never any trees on the property beforehand. A board member then quietly told me that I was being naive, and that I should understand that this is necessary for approval despite everyone knowing that it’s total bull. Agree and forget it.) While we watched the interest rate climb, I had to renew my approvals. But the building and planning departments kept giving me different answers since each was controlled by a differing attitude and probably involved in an inter-agency power struggle. I also went before a property tax reduction board. I might as well have been a priest being entertained at an ISIS camp. By this time, a new tenant had moved into the building next door and decided my lot needed fertilization. So they threw their child’s diapers there. So now they really had me. Raw sewage. The citations became so frequent I forgot how many there were because I quickly discarded them (but not by tossing them into a vacant lot).

So why did these situations occur? It probably wasn’t because they were mean and nasty; most people aren’t, and I have no reason to assign those motives. But it’s possible that they saw me as a capitalist pig that was OK to abuse. And while there is truth to that possibility, the likelihood wasn’t as overwhelming then as it may be today (I was certainly a bootstrap capitalist; my capital was saved up living in a studio apartment and later working two jobs). But the real reason was obvious. They got promoted on the number of supposedly valid violations and citations they wrote up. Those inspectors are probably now retired with fat pensions. That is how the system is set up. It benefits its enforcers and designers at the expense of everyone else.

In the name of the poor or the unprotected, the Progressives steal from the middle class and share the take between themselves, the expert and enforcer class, and the governing elites. I see this consciousness all around me. Some people believe that taxing poor people five cents a bag at store checkout will cleanup ocean pollution. Others think that a sales tax increase for roads that subsidizes Cal Trans corruption is the way to go. And some feel that our one railroad is so unimportant to our economic well being that they are willing to sacrifice it for an imagined Utopian future. 

So I started out being considered a liberal, and now I’m considered a conservative. But in many ways, I don’t see where I’ve changed. My sentiment is the same. I’ve always been for the everyday person, the average citizen, “the little guy”. When I planned the bus system in Modesto, I increased service in black and Hispanic areas. I asked my assistant if I did this because I’m a bleeding heart liberal and I believe that these people deserved it, or did I do this because I’m a hard-nosed conservative who believes that bus service should go where more people put money in the fare box. “Good question,” she answered.

Finally my partner said that he not only wanted out of the development project, but that he’d totally had it with the liberal tyranny and was leaving the United States. At his time many of my other friends were leaving LA and scattering across the map. This added to my growing decision to leave. No one would buy the project until finally an immigrant from Iran purchased the land and plans. We took a huge loss. He must have bought it under the illusion that America was the place presented on Voice of America broadcasts. I picked up the pieces of my finances and bought a cheap house in Amador County. And I never returned to that site to see what happened.

PS: Where and when I grew up was in arguably the most organized crime controlled community in the US.  At first California startled me with how clean everything was. But it didn’t take me long to see that what the Mob skimmed off in Buffalo is the government take in California. And while I can hardly condone organized crime, I do appreciate their honesty about themselves compared to the sanctimonious attitude of the experts and bureaucrats here.

Copyright 2016, Mark L. Bennett

Bathrooms and Changing Perceptions

The recent controversy over the “right” of transvestites to use women’s restrooms has understandably made me recall the changing perceptions regarding my own masculinity. I grew up in the 1950’s. The most admired children on our block had fathers who owned Lugers and Mausers from German officers they had killed and ID’d. If I had a time machine I would have joined 14 year old Johnny Tremaine and the Sons of Liberty dumping British tea into Boston harbor. Davy Crockett was another of my heroes. My father was a strong male figure who had kept his own while having to deal with organized crime to make a living since he was 14. I was quite secure in my maleness. But at the same time I was raised by three feminists, my mother and both grandmothers.

My mother’s mother was a suffragette and had traveled around the country before the First World War as the secretary to a leading suffragette. Her picture may even be in some history books. She raised my mother to be a trailblazing female journalist. In college my mother was in freshman Introduction to Journalism with Mike Wallace who she said grilled the instructor in the same style he used years later on 60 Minutes. But my mother was not allowed to continue. The scene with her advisor sounded just like the scene in the Autobiography of Malcolm X when his 8^th grade guidance counselor asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. Malcolm said a lawyer and his guidance counselor answered by asking if he had ever considered a carpentry apprenticeship.

I went out into the world during the women’s movement in the 1960’s. Many women I met assumed that I had a sister and were shocked when I answered no. Later when I had my first professional job all the female assistants were assigned to me because most of the other men there had treated the women as if their wife had burnt the morning toast. It was disgusting. But much of the women’s movement for equality and freedom degenerated into a man hating radical feminism. In today’s news we see a parallel with Black Lives Matter and the New Black Panther Party. When I listen to them I remember the desegregation sit ins and hearing the arrested sing: “Black and white together, we shall not be moved.”

A type of woman has emerged that Rush Limbaugh as aptly called feminazi. They always sense a 1950’s maleness in me, and hate me immediately. This even happened in my own congregation in LA. Once some chit chat while waiting in line at a chain store turned into a glare so hateful that I swear she would have killed me given the opportunity. When my bank account got transferred to another branch the female manager’s instant dislike was so intense I had to threaten violence in a subtle way to conclude a transaction. That was the only time in my life I ever had to act like that in a commercial transaction and the memory still unsettles me.

But I still believed in the American Way. I was hired as a part time instructor at ITT Tech in Lathrop. I worked hard, won every award they gave, and got promoted to full time instructor followed by a promotion to chair of two academic departments.  Then the accrediting association visited and I was interrogated by a feminazi with a definite political agenda. She asked me to lie and I refused. As a result I lost my position. Aside from the financial loss and the ending of career advancement, others suffered. I was counseling a student working three jobs to pay her tuition along with a crippling math anxiety. We got her finances straightened out and weekly meeting began to conquer her math anxiety. But that ended when I lost my academic chair position. She responded by dropping out.  Obviously this feminazi didn’t care about what she did to people, her political agenda was far too important. This seems standard today. Once upon a time liberal meant liberal minded. Then it became Liberal which transformed itself into Progressive. That means it’s acceptable and perhaps even noble to sacrifice the individual to the collective.

Recently a women interested in me told me that she liked my shirt. I answered by saying I always wear green because it lights up my eyes.  Her countenance changed with a certain realization of who I was. I have never hidden my “feminine side” or my 1950’s maleness. I’ve not changed, but the attitudes of the world around me have been in maelstrom mode.

Copyright 2016, Mark L. Bennett

Gone, or Rebirth Possible?

Every day when I taught economics I would first write on the whiteboard: Market Rules! While markets are subject to distortion and manipulation, in the end they always tell the truth. Gold is soaring around the world. Analysts I trust are saying that it’s a response to the Clinton Crime Family exoneration. While we all know this a watershed event, the whole world is seeing it that way, too. Here is what one foreign news media now says about us: http://www.xyz.net.au/clinton-cleared-end-of-rule-of-law-in-america/

If we become weaker internationally, we must depend upon our internal strength more. The economy, while seemingly slow but steady from most government numbers, has endured deteriorating internals. Politically, we are in a pre-civil war like polarization.

In a recent Facebook discussion, Katherine Evatt built a case to preserve certain former PG&E land along the Mokelumne River, prompted by my statements about the Mother Lode Land Trust. But do we want this land to be governed by an unelected body? And do we need another organization to manage public or semi public land? We now have a service economy based upon borrowing money from often hostile foreign powers. We produce less and less of what we consume. We don’t use our own resources. How many Saudi oil presidents have we had? I see in the Mother Lode Land Trust existence both the internal economic decline and the political attitudes that defend self destruction.

PS: Does anyone know of a county with lots of unmined gold?

Copyright 2016, Mark L. Bennett

Land Grab becomes Word Grab

Yesterday I posted here and linked to Facebook a commentary entitled “Today’s Wild West Land Grab” about the expansion of the Mother Lode Land Trust. This engendered an endless discussion about the PG&E land deal and its constrained and complex circumstances. While I don’t question the legality of the decision, I question the system that preordained that outcome. Since my Facebook introduction referenced the Homestead Act, is not surprising that one response noted that most land in the USA was a transfer from government to people or businesses. While this is generally true, there is more to the story.

Many of the Colonial period people who settled the Appalachian Mountains weren’t proper enough people to enter through Charlestown or other ports. They landed in the more tolerant Philadelphia, traveled inland and then south into the hills of the Carolinas, etc. The far west was settled extensively by escaped slaves. In the 1850’s some feared that Colorado was to become the first black state. What these two groups have in common is that they were both squatters and both loved freedom. What title did the Oregon Trail pioneers have to the land they settled considering that Oregon wasn’t US territory then? Not all land rights come from the government. Although despised by the globalist and globalist environmental elite, there is a long American tradition based on freedom and private property. As I’ve noted before, this country was originally settled by people who had lost their grazing rights under the Enclosure Acts and understood this relationship.

When the British said no more settlement beyond the Appalachians we fought a war for the right to move west. These were not Eric Winslow’s hobgoblins, but people who dreamed of a homestead instead of a city factory job. A century later immigrants would give up education to work and save money to buy land. This country has always followed the policy of maximum land and home ownership. From FDR setting up national mortgage pools to Richard Nixon authorizing additional cutting in National Forests to reduce the price of lumber and therefore housing, this has always been our national policy. But in recent years the globalists and environmentalists have found common ground in schemes to tie up land ownership and use. The rich get richer and many environmentalists glorify saving the earth from its inhabitants.

Copyright 2016, Mark L. Bennett

Today’s Wild West Land Grab

The Mother Lode Land Trust is now hiring a full time director and a half time assistant to that director. According to their website the impetus for this is: “MLLT is posed to assume a total of eight additional conservation easements (8,000 acres) from the Stewardship Council as part of the PG&E bankruptcy settlement.” Whose land and, therefore, whose money does this really belong to? The stockholders? The bond holders? The ratepayers? The taxpayers? Isn’t this environmental theft of our private property rights a far greater scandal that the worst case scenario of the Human & Health Services Building vividly and biasedly portrayed by Eric Winslow in his latest editorial disguised as a Ledger Dispatch news article?

The land tenure system of the United States is increasingly regressing to the Middle Ages. The super rich are sheltering their wealth through a system of conservation easements, land banks, tax credits and carbon capture forests. These environmental aristocrats will increasingly determine our future. I can’t help but recall Bob Dylan’s song about the outlaw Pretty Boy Floyd: “…through this world I’ve rambled, I’ve seen lots of funny men, Some will rob you with a six-gun, And some with a fountain pen.”

Do we have the will to fight powerful outside forces with seemingly endless funds? Do we want to remain free in Amador County?

Copyright 2016, Mark L. Bennett