I just had to write my 5 cents on one of your correspondent's comments you posted in this article. (Complacency and Scalability Traps February 14, 2009)

Today's entry does, as usual, stand to reason. However, it also is, as usual, reductive and superficial. The best way to keep cops on the beat is to have a large support staff to do the time consuming paperwork following any arrest. An arrest at the beginning of a shift meant hours at the desk filling out forms; at the end of a shift it meant the same hours, but on overtime. In the military, for every combat troop in the field, there are 10 support troops-medical, culinary, clerical, supply, legal, transport, etc., etc., all essential. Get a job in the real world and see!

This is guy is clueless. His statement is right out of a text book (forgot the name) I read as an Officer Candidate. I am not sure what his "real world" job is but as a career Naval officer and a combat veteran, I can tell you the current model of our force is full of inefficiency. His statement about having 10 support personnel for every combat troop, sadly, is a true statement However that doesn't make it efficient nor necessary. I saw so much waste, abuse and inefficiency in Iraq I was sick to my stomach at times. Why do we even need 10 support personnel? We don't! These are left overs from WWII's based on Draft systems and outdated way of fighting the war.

If I was an ADM for a day, I would eliminate 50% of the the support staff. We would be leaner, faster and much more adoptive to ever changing environment. In a way, I am thankful for the current economic crisis because it may provide a catalyst to completely change our model of conducting a war. We will be leaner, smaller, faster and much more lethal at the end.

Sorry if I seem to be a bit emotional but this guys should first serve before speaking about the service!!!

John U. (reporting from the Sierra)

The snow level dropped to about 1,000 feet on Tuesday morning, and all traces of it were gone by noon.

One really important issue that must be addressed in the light of seemingly so much white stuff, is the drought just now emerging upon the public's view. I've had the opportunity to go on a few DWR snow surveys the past few years up in Mineral King below Farewell Gap @ close to 10,000 feet, and what a nice little adventure it is, and I feel fortunate to be involved.

The road up to Mineral King is 25 miles long and the last 10 or so is on snowmobile in the wintertime, just to get you to the ranger station. My friend on the journey is a telemark (telly) skier, and i'm a recovering resort skier used to good grooming conditions, and getting in 30 runs a day, but in lieu of a lift nowadays, I don Randonee skis (convertible xc-downhill skis) and skins, and we climb 1,500 feet, looking like Batman and Robin sans rope up a steep slope for 4 hours, no grappling hooks necessary. It's a 1 run day and the ride down takes 20 minutes, in comparison, pure bliss.

Disney was awarded the contract to develop Mineral King into a ski resort in 1965, and quite frankly it would have rivaled Mammoth or Aspen in terms of abundance of amazing terrain for skiers, and the Sierra Club is given the credit for stopping this from happening, but the real reason is twofold.

Walt Disney was one of the first investors in Badger Pass and Disney staged the 1960 Squaw Valley Olympics and he was quite the winter outdoorsman, but all the impetus to develop MK died along with him in 1966, as it seems cooler heads prevailed, and besides it's a lot easier to turn hot flat worthlessness into something: i.e. Disneyworld, vs. MK.

The 2nd reason is the road to MK. There are 698 significant curves from where it humbly begins on highway 198, and sometimes it seems like there's enough room for 1 2/3rds cars @ most. The State of California put the kabosh to this road being "improved" in the late 60's, and the Sierra Club merely inserted the legal dagger into a stillborn idea, and in 1978 MK became part of Sequoia National Park, and the only developments nowadays are on account of Mother Nature's whims.

The snow survey kit contains a series of tubes (Ted Stevens would be so proud...) that allow you to probe, perhaps there are 8 of them. We only needed 2 on our transit of about a dozen different spots. There was just a little over 4 feet on Superbowl Sunday, a foot more than the bleak 2007 readings. Since then, there's been a few more feet of accumulation, but we are still way down compared to average.

Perhaps the best way to think of the Sierra is "The 1st National Snowbank of the High Sierra". We've grown used to it slowly releasing it's bounty in accordance with crops growing in the Central Valley, but thanks to climate change, it's been melting off sooner. Farmers realized this last year and over 50,000 planted acres were left to wither on the vine, as they couldn't get enough H20 to get it to fruition. And last year all crops were worth much more than they will be this year.

If you were a farmer that had to plant his crops on the basis of the snow survey I did, along with all the work of bringing it to harvest only to break even, why would you bother putting a single seed into the ground?

This is the real immediate danger, one of a Malthusian nature...

Gene M.

On the Arizona story, (Complacency and Scalability Traps) reminds me of Marc Reisner's well-known book Cadillac Desert. I'm sure you know it, knowing you. An encyclopedia of human greed and folly when it comes to water.

The comment about committees reminded me of one of the best pieces of advice I ever got about businesses and organizations: never go to meetings. Always send someone else in your place.

Riley T.

I pretty much returned to my " fly on the wall " watch and wait position. Today's report from KD in Phoenix is exactly the reason. I have a well educated small circle of friends and each time I would bring up any thing the response would be the same as KD got.

I have accepted the idea that where the herd goes so do I. I can get out to the edge and hope the herd doesn't turn my way but if it goes over the cliff I go too.

When the Germans were loading the Jews on the trains to take them to the camps, recall that the Jews climbed on the trains by themselves. I have friends just like the people at the KD super bowl party and I have been telling them that they are in the same position as those Jews.

This " Bail Out Circus " that is going on here and around the world just reminds me of the Romans or the Roaring 20's.

RE: What's Obvious I: Legalize All Drugs But Meth (February 16, 2009)

Chad W.

I've said the same thing, legalize everything except meth. I used to think perhaps coke and heroin should be controlled, but you make a compelling argument to legalize them too.

Here is a very interesting data point I didn't see in your article:

During Obama's inaugural period, he had about 3-5 online "open question" sessions on his Change.gov site (two different technologies with a few runs each). Here's an example of the results:

https://change.gov/newsroom/entry/open_for_questions_response/

On all of these, one of the top (if not the top) concern was the legalization of Marijuana. It has *overwhelming* support, like right up there with health care reform and crucifying big bankers.

Here is an example question and response:

Q: "Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?" S. Man, Denton

A: President-elect Obama is not in favor of the legalization of marijuana.

Incredibly terse and non-explanatory for Obama, isn't it? Have you ever heard him give an answer on ANY other topic without a detailed soul-wrenching analysis of all sides of the issue?

I can't believe how entrenched the War on Drugs is...

Kevin K.

Like you I think that drugs should be legal, not that I like drugs (I have not used any drugs in 20 years), it's just that I feel that having more people getting high is better than the current situation where global drug gangs kill huge numbers of people and drugs users are forced in to crime to get money for expensive illegal drugs.

Readers checked in with some thoughtful comments on legalizing drugs. Let's start with a Prosecutor who warned of unintended consequences of legalizing all drugs:

I don't know where this guy is coming from, but it seems like the people that would see a big drop in "business" (cops, courts, jails, and drug treatment) if drugs were legal seem to be the ones that always come out the hardest against legalization or de-criminalization...

I've talked with real addicts.

I not only talked to real addicts, I used to try and collect rent from them... When I managed a portfolio of property is a tough part of San Diego and had many tenants who were addicts (one even had a meth lab in a rental that we found out about after the cops shut it down)...

I've attended seminars and talked with experts like a doctor who ran the Haight-Ashbury free clinic and worked with Jerry Garcia.

I've noticed that most seminar's are run by people who make money since drugs are illegal (see the people above), I've volunteered with he Haight-Ashbury free clinic at concerts (when I was dating a med student) and I dated another girl that saw Jerry Garcia passed out on the ground with a needle in his arm (in his dressing room at the Warfield when she worked for Bill Grahm Presents)...

I have a brother who is addicted to methamphetamine. And I myself went to college in California in the seventies (I'll leave it at that). I'm not an expert but I do have some education and practical experience.

My grandfather was an alcoholic (who literally drank himself to death after my grandmother died) and I started High School in Northern California in the 70's (and a lot of kids had older siblings that went to Cal who took us to "Day's on the Green"). I'm also not an expert but have a lot of practical experience.

The devil is always in the details, and your thesis is no exception. For example, you say "The way to 'take out' crack cocaine and crystal meth is to legalize plain old powder cocaine and make it cheap." But, any novice can easily "rock up" powder cocaine to make "crack." So if the alkaloid powder is cheap and accessible then the base rock derivative will be too. Some slopes really are slippery. Where is the logical or practical distinction to legalize one form of cocaine but not the other?

Any novice can also make "prison wine" out of rotting fruit, but I have never heard of anyone "outside the joint" making prison wine since you can buy real wine for such a low cost. If cocaine is legal no one will make crack, just like we don't have anyone (even homeless skid row bums) making prison wine out of rotting fruit...

I also don't follow your main exception for methamphetamine.

I do... meth is an evil drug that does scary things to people (believe it or not there is a huge problem with meth in rural Wyoming and I had a long talk with a Sheriff friend of a cousin about meth last year). I have eviceted Meth users and have seen them change from the normal people I rented to in to psychotic killers...

smoking meth and IV injection are comparable in every way to injecting or smoking cocaine (in the alkaloid or base rock forms, respectively).

If cocaine was cheap no one would smoke it or inject it since the high is better if you snort it, (other than Whitney Houston) you don't see rock stars smoking or injecting crack since they can afford nice pure coke...

Bottom line, I understand the appeal for legalization on a grand and idealistic level. It breaks down when you really start to analyze it, but I'm always open to discussion.

I have debated this for years and I have never had a "break down" after analysis...

One thing is certain, addiction in a large scale, poly-substance abusive society is not a simple problem susceptible to easy elegant answers. It is a hard, hard problem with dirty, ugly details.

I think that we will actually have less drug users with legal drugs. There are a lot of people that disagree with me, but I have never met one (1) person (or heard of a single person) that is just waiting until drugs are legal to start using (drugs are so easy to get that everyone that wants drugs today already uses them)...

Even the goal to eliminate enforcement, prosecution and incarceration through legalization is simplistic. Perhaps we can reduce expenditures but we will always have black market production, sales and abuse even if we legalize.

Do we have "black market production" of wine, beer, scotch (anything that is cheap and legal)?

I prefer to continue carefully with recent reforms emphasizing treatment (and limiting incarceration of addicts) as California started with Penal Code Section 11357b and Proposition 36.

This actually makes even more money for all the people that profit from the legal side of the drug trade (see the list above) and makes life worse for the rest of us by keeping the price of drugs high (so addicts need to steal to get the money for drugs) and keeping less addicts in jail (so they are out breaking in to our cars and homes)...

I don't think that I'll see legal drugs before I die since so many people make so much money from the "War on Drugs" that they will be able to tilt the debate so with the help of the (well meaning but wrong) people that just hate drugs will keep them illegal...

Bob S.

Mr. Smith: Have you read this article by Theodore Dalrymple? He is a physician and author with extensive experience with the disadvantaged English population.

I am Professor Emeritus of Ophthalmology and have admired your blog for some time.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/7_2_a1.html

Paula H.

Just wanted to send along a link related to today's post. This is more from Catherine Austin Fitts:

Narco-dollars for Beginners, a 13-part Series

https://solari.com/articles/scoop_narco_dummies.htm

(each part is short)

The biggest profits from the drug war don't come from government spending on prosecuting it. The REAL profits come from money laundering, $500 billion to $1 trillion annually. And none of it is subject to taxation, regulation, oversight, or popular opinion. Right now, drug money is about the only thing propping up global finance.

https://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/570/costa_UNODC_drug_trade_banks

It is not in the interest of the global financial system to decriminalize drugs. Prohibition keeps the price of narcotics and other illegal drugs artificially inflated, like the housing bubble, but with almost no risk of ever deflating. Decriminalizing drugs would send the global economy into a deflationary meltdown far worse than what's happening even now.

A California Yankee in Arthur's Pass National Park

About a decade ago, a National Park employee stumbled upon a sizable sophisticated growing area in Sequoia National Park, and since then both the cartel and the U.S. Government have been in doobie-us battle for the high ground...

Let's start off with who grows it:

The Michoacán cartel is responsible for most of the farming, and they employ campesinos from Michoacán to bring the crop to fruition. It takes around 5 months from seedling (grown in paper dixie cups in the Central Valley and re-planted somewhere typically below 4,000 feet) to finished product.

5 or 6 campesinos are all it takes to grow around 20,000 plants (street value @ $2k a plant = $40 Million) and the cartel has it down to a clockwork science...

How does it work?

The cartel dangles the offer of easy money to dirt-poor farmers down under, pays them a few thousand Dollars in advance, pays for each of the departed men's family's expenses in their absence, and then transports them across the border, to somewhere in the foothills, where they are supplied with the tools of the trade and are given enough food, defoliants tequila, fertilizer, and most importantly, enough hose to access creeks or rivers as far away as 5 miles. They need to be resupplied on a constant basis, and this happens sometimes in broad daylight, but more often in the wee hours when nobody's looking. My wife and I were driving down a dirt road from a trailhead last year, and coming up we saw a Visalia taxi with 2 Hispanic women in the backseat, and it's about a 50 mile 1-way trip from Visalia, and probably cost $100 to get em' to the front porch of the back of beyond, and we surmised they were either making conjugal visits to loved ones, or temporary loved ones? Comfort food for strangers in a strange land...

If the crop comes in, the campesinos can rake in the big money, an additional $25k per person...

So it might cost the cartel $200k for a return of $40 million, a tidy 200 to 1 margin. Wall Street would cream their pants for leverage like that. And when the occasional bust goes down, said campesinos take the fall, not the cartel. If you plant 20 gardens and lose 10 of em to the Feds, the return is still phenomenal.

The cartel is well aware of the different Federal jurisdictions, and here we have a mixture of private land, BLM land, Forest Service land and National Park land. The National Park Service has the most money available to go after the cartel, but the BLM & FS have meager funds in comparison, so the cartel spreads the crops around these jurisdictions, knowing some of them will be found, but playing upon the idea that there is little coordination between these agencies.

2 years ago, a 20,000 plant crop was as big as they got around these parts, but the cartel really went all out last summer, later-day hanging gardens of Babylon (keep in mind there is very little flat land in the foothills, virtually everything is grown on a slope) reaching 80,000 & 420,000 plants outside the park boundary that were busted this summer.

It's a tinderbox looking for a spark in a few ways...

Sooner or later the campesinos are going to be responsible for fires that break out in utterly remote off-trail locales, unintentional or not, and sooner or later gunfire will break out.

The way we've gone about dealing with this menace is to stop them after they've laid waste to pristine watersheds (those defoliants they use aren't the over-the-counter kind...), as opposed to before.

One way to stop them is to provide some needed "shovel-ready" jobs in the guise of 24/7 presence on mountain roads during planting season. No resupply and you starve out the campesinos.

Another way is to legalize it in totality and tax all the stoners next door, myself included.

parting shot:

I find it amusing that the maim stream media emphasized that Michael Phelps lost a lot of money in endorsements appearing as he was in real life, taking one toke over the line...

Dave M.

I was away from the internet for awhile and missed the Legalizing Drugs discussion. So, coming in late, here is my comment as to Legalizing versus other things. Everybody assumes that jailing drug users/dealers etc. somehow reduces the drug trade.

At least we assume that those we put in prison then are out of the drug loop. Not so. For about the last decade I have gone inside a Federal Penitentiary and worked as a volunteer; I estimate that I have met and become friends with about 800 guys. And sometimes they would talk about drugs, and all of them would say that there are more drugs available inside, than there is on the street. So, throwing people into prison does nothing to reduce drug availability, nothing.

RE: What's Obvious II: This Is Not the Bottom in Housing (February 18, 2009)

Ross M.

A few points on the issue of buying versus renting prospectively.

1.) Residential real estate and its prospects are, despite the ongoing national economic debacle, still very much a case by case/ regional affair. Some regions may follow your (and others) road map for where, in the aggregate, residential real estate will be priced when it hits bottom, but, in my view, it is not likely that there will be an across the board reduction in value equal to what we have seen in the worst hit R.E. markets across the U.S. This is not to say that a young couple interested in starting a family shouldn't wait a year or two to buy; they probably should with the caveat that...

2.) The quantity of quality rental property is, in many places, abysmal. This is especially the case where single family homes are concerned. Decent one and two bedroom condos in good neighborhoods in reasonably populated metropolitan areas tend are in abundant supply, but not a whole lot else.

3.) As a former renter, the ability to do what one wants to with one's property without having to negotiate with a landlord (who may be less than tractable) every time one wants to, paint the walls, replace a fixture or appliance, etc, etc. has a value that it is hard to put a price tag on. However, if one could, it would not be inconsequential.

RE: What's Obvious III: Some Transformations Will Be Positive (February 19, 2009)

Gene M.

Raises a lot of thoughts. I'll limit myself to two related ones. Mr brother, who worked for 30 years for the DIA, is an expert in living systems. His warning groups achieved 98% accuracy in its predictions of potential conflicts. He maintains that human beings are entirely predictable, at least 98% of the time.

Which leads me to the other concept. That human beings hate change in their lives. They want things to be predictable so they can go on with their affairs. (One reason why traditional religion is more accepted than Taoism, for example.) They will do almost anything to avoid changing. That's why revolutions are so infrequent. They have to be driven to the point almost of despair by the failure of government and institutions. We are far, far from that point, Hobbes' state of nature. In the Depression, you listen to Studs Terkel's accounts and you find that people were by and large blaming themselves for their plight. As bad as things were they never approached revolution.

Today we look to government much more than then. so when things get bad, it is likely that government will respond by demanding even more power to make them right (i,e., prevent social unrest). On the macro level, and for the short and intermediate term, I'm not expecting much good. Except the reduction of our country's extravagant life-style. That will be good, and much good will flow from it. Much weeping and gnashing of teeth as well.

But there will always be many, many people who willingly help others and give of their time and effort and money, and who do so many good things. Not to mention all the love and joy that immediate family members give.

The Tao makes sure there is a balance.

Thank you, readers, for such thoughtful contributions.





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