Check out my latest over at Glibertarians; this is the first in a series on the history of bolt guns. Also, our thanks as always to The Other McCain for the Rule Five links!
Moving right along, ever-more-loony Californey has produced the world’s most expensive fish, at (minimum) $178 million per fish. Excerpt:
Threatened Central Valley Chinook adult salmon have returned and spawned to the San Joaquin River!
For some, it’s proof they have been able to avoid predators and multi-billion dollar infrastructure that keeps millions of humans alive.
It has been nearly 65 years since the species has spawned in the San Joaquin. And the news this week follows major political and environmental action.
After being released in 2017, the salmon made it hundreds of miles to the Pacific Ocean, and have found their way back to the San Joaquin River.
The total yield from the Bureau of Reclamation: five so far. One died, but for the sake of argument, I’ll call it five.
There are more to critical issues than a feel-good attitude just because it’s nice to see threatened salmon in the San Joaquin River.
It can’t be overstated the cost and effort it took to make this happen.
Here’s a recap of that effort:
Taking the conservative cost estimate, each of the five fish caught cost taxpayers and water users $178,000,000.
And each of those fish needed 50,000 acre-feet of water per year.
I won’t even stress the cost of pumping, aquifer consequences, fallowed land, and – lest we forget – lost jobs. Many politicians aren’t either.
H.L. Mencken famously said that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” While the United States is not a democracy but rather a Constitutional Republic, California increasingly practices direct democracy with their initiative program; but the cause of this kind of lunacy is something else, specifically, the California Democratic Party’s re-jiggering of the election system to ensure one-party rule for eternity.
This is just one example of what happens when you have one-party rule. In a state where there is an effective political opposition, these types of shenanigans would at least be more difficult to pull off; at the very least, the opposition party would be able to run on a platform of defunding lunacy and have a chance of winning.
Not so under California’s jungle primary system, which frequently results in a general election where both candidates are Democrats. From the shit-stained streets of San Francisco to the nine-figure fish of the San Joaquin River, the once and former Golden State’s voters are reaping what they sow. Mencken has been proved right.
