Shut up. Quit your bitchin’. The title is a quote from Shakespeare, and a metaphor at that. No lawyers were harmed in the production of this podcast.
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Before we get to the main event, keep an eye on the upcoming episodes. I hope to have a surprise guest on in coming weeks. The next podcast will be Chapters 3 and 4 of Street Politics: It Ain’t Your Daddy’s GOP Anymore. We’ll define what a Conservative really is and is not. The media stereotype, mostly invented by the Left, has nothing to do with what an intelligent, free-market “conservative” is. And we might squeeze in a few issues that were of concern in 2016 and are now gnawing away at the social and economic fabric today.
I hope you enjoyed the last two episodes. Ron and James were excellent guests. I think we’ll see James again. I know Ron’s coming back for a special around the All-Star break, featuring another podcast called the Braves Dugout.
But it’s high time I quit screwing around and got back to what I do best, before they take my Right-Wing Reactionary decoder ring away.
Today, I want you to listen to this podcast or read/follow along in the text, then check out the video. Yes, this is another multi-media mash up that all comes together into one idea.
Background
I have been banging on about the Liquid Fluorine Thorium Reactor (LFTR) for years. I spoken a lot about the subject lately. And these contraptions are going to be a huge part of getting us through the coming multi-faceted collapse on our horizon.
Complete or at least significant de-globalization is now at our doorstep. As Peter Zeihan has explained brilliantly, the world’s best year ever was 2019. We will never have as much in the way of activity and plenty as we had that year; certainly not in any of our lifetimes.
The good news for you, if you live in North America, is that we will weather this period better than other geographies around the world. But that’s putting it nicely. I would say we will just be the healthiest horse in the glue factory for some time to come.
BUT…we can blow it. If we remain the weak, shallow, distracted, lazy country we are today…we WILL blow it. We will suffer far more than we need to as economies around the world contract or implode.
Sit tight. It gets real interesting. Because the Colorado River is near death.
Usually, by this point some of my listeners are upset and want to flee to kitten videos or sports pages. I understand. But I strongly recommend you stick around. I am going to touch on just one of a massive number of things we need to be thinking about. We will continue this discussion on a host of things like productivity, education, demographics and a return to the kind REAL normalcy that WE ALL know will enhanced cultural survival. We’ll eventually hit them all. But for now, just one.
The subject today is water. If you’ve been with me for a while this will be a slightly deeper dive into how we win the water wars bubbling up in the Southwest. I heard just the other day the water released from the Colorado River to other states is about to be cut on the order of 2 million acre feet per year. Put simply, that’s the usage of about 4 million homes. That’s huge. And it could have been avoided. Further ass pain CAN be mitigated, but the powers that be MUST be more visionary than they have been to date.
And further cuts are CERTAIN.
For the moment, I am speaking to the Southwest.
But hold on to yer ass, Fred. In a bit you’ll see how this effects everyone. Whether California takes this information onboard will dictate a great deal of the quality of life across the country.
One example of their lack of vision is this. If you have a population center so bereft of H2O that you need to pipe it in from a farm region hundreds of miles away, you need to STOP building there. LA and Las Vegas are examples of cities that have grown like malignant tumors as a result of their own stupidity.
So, the first and most obvious step is to stop wasting water. Think AstroTurf, seashells and rock gardens. Turn off all decorative fountains in the Southwest. That includes the Vegas water show. Sorry guys. Too much of that water evaporates into the dry air and ends up falling on places like Oklahoma.
The second and equally obvious step in managing the problem is to stop building in these places. And, as people leave (and they are leaving for other reasons), don’t permit new dwellings for their replacement. If you want to live in LA or Las Vegas, you buy an existing home there.
Oh, but MJ, we won’t be able to grow our economies! That would be the standard response to my admonition. I said VISION, damn it! You don’t need to grow your population to grow your economy. You need to grow your productivity per citizen. Besides, in coming years you’ll need to manage a shrinking economy. The answer to your new challenge will be to better educate your children, and to make better children to begin with. But part of the overall answer is to MAKE CHILDREN! You’ll hear more about that single point in future posts.
Get real good at water collection and encourage every resident to do the same. You don’t have to water AstroTurf. And if you can’t afford the artificial stuff, let your yard return to nature. Perhaps you can’t plant native, dry-soil plants. Something will grow. But disconnect your ego and vanity from the soil outside your house. And filter collected water for household applications.
Now, the next three steps California especially must take, in alphabetical order are: desalinate, desalinate and desalinate (desal). And tell Vegas to kick in a few billion bucks to the effort.
Now, along with the monumentally poor water planning the region has done, California in particular has not kept pace with power generation. So desalinization using electric power is OUT. In the near term, and just to get the infrastructure built and the water flowing, natural gas-powered desalinization plants (DP) can be built pretty quickly. We know how to move natural gas and we know the DP process. But regulators need to get out of the way. For once in modern history, greedy politicians and consultants need to bow out of the process. If California handles this the way they do everything else, even these basic gas-powered facilities will be 30 years too late to the game. And by that time you will have no trained technicians to do the work. Your work force will have aged out before bringing the next generation of skilled labor into the picture. See paragraph 4 in this segment above.
Consider the installation of these NG-powered stations - lot’s of them - an emergency measure. And get it done.
But as I said, the gas-powered facilities are a small, near-term fix. If you build them NOW you may slow the increase of the problem. The long term fix lies in LFTR technology. But before I talk about the use of these reactors in this application, I will address the common objections to them.
I bring out the old saw again.
One biggee is the material used in the reactor itself. We are talking about the containment of liquid salts after all. In the 1950’s, when we had a LFTR operating at Oak Ridge, one of the concerns raised was the durability of the metals that were in contact with the molten salts.
Well, it would seem that China has solved that problem to the point where they are ready to build a commercial reactor. With all the advancements we’ve made in the last 60 or 70 years in metallurgical and molecular research, you can feel pretty damn confident that an alloy exists that can do the job. If not, we can create one.
There was also a problem with stable power. My research says that engineers were experiencing high and low load spikes causing the system to shut down. It should be easily argued that the electronics available at the time could not react and compensate to these anomalies quickly enough to keep the reactor running. I suspect that there was little, real load available for the Oak Ridge test bed to shed the power and heat produced.
Again, China has been running their test bed for a few years and is building a commercial reactor. I suspect with the sophistication and speed of our present technology we can now monitor and anticipate weird activity in such a way as to maintain the reaction and keep the reactor going.
In an extreme case, the system would simply shutdown. In a catastrophic case where the system overheats, a plug in the bottom of the core melts and everything, the salt, the nuclear fuel and any waste in the mix simply drains into a chamber below the reactor and cools. Emergency over.
That’s just one advantage in favor of using these things on a large scale to desalinate water 24/7 in large amounts for California’s cities and farms. This is doubly important for the almond and avocado farms, which suck up water disproportionately to application. Their water usage is insane! THEY need to shoulder a significant part in this effort.
The urgency of the work that needs to be done is not immediate, as in today. It was immediate 20 years ago!
The particulars.
The immediate need is to mitigate the loss of multiple millions of acre feet of water these cities and farms have been sucking up from elsewhere for far too long. The emergency desal units would make a dent. Every gallon saved is precious. When the LFTR units are brought online, the emergency units can be decommissioned and sold or given to places in the world that can make use of them. Perhaps the whole thing could be a lease deal from the beginning. The lessor would have the proper motivation to install, maintain and remove the units as the cycle dictates.
In the meantime, smart Californians will be dotting the coastline with LFTRs. They don’t have to be huge as these things go. 100-200 MW will power multiple large DPs. So, three DPs the size of Carlsbad operating off of a 200MW LFTR would leave more than 100MW for the power grid. And no greenhouse gasses!
If you want to think REALLY long-term, divert a small percentage of daily flow to natural aquifers. It’s always good to have water stored in case the Vikings lay siege.
For every one of these complexes we build, we get water (lots of it) and power (lots of it). But for it all to work will require a hard-nosed commitment and monumental cooperation on the part of California, Nevada and Arizona. But most of the burden and benefit would be in California. And it has to start now! The NIMBYs and the people crying about exploiting the oceans MUST be ignored. And they can be when you consider the damage the same tribe is doing to the the eastern seaboard with their wind tinker toys.
Did I remember to mention it needs to happen now? Yeah, right fuckin’ now! And it has to be done by ballsy thinkers and doers, not bureaucrats. This cannot be a business-as-usual endeavor. Remember the multi-million dollar toilet facility in LA - a one holer. That kind of bureaucratic bullshit won’t work here.
Zeihan does a good job of laying out the problem we are fighting here. The text, and how it all effects YOU continues below the video.
double-click, then click once.
The knock-on effect.
Do you remember how I said you need to stick around a few minutes ago? Here’s why.
I diverge from Peter’s analysis of the climate in the Southern California only in degree. The default climate there is DRY. They don’t get mega droughts. They are primarily in a state of drought almost all the time, with occasional rain and rare deluge. So in the discussion of what must be done, we can do away with recriminations growing out of “climate change” or “global warming”. A dry LA is the condition in which we found it. It didn’t get that way because of cars or cow farts.
We get a great deal of our food and some hard goods from California. The whole state is in play here. Less from Arizona and Nevada, but some. But if these areas don’t get the vision thing, and right quick, the nutritional and economic shock waves will be felt across the country, and in some case around the world.
If you lose the water, you lose the food. Some parts of the country can vary what they grow a bit to make up some of the shortfall, but that would not help with the price of food. Generally, we’ll have less food overall so we will pay more to eat.
If you lose the water, AND you can’t feed your people, you lose the people. You lose them to migration, malnutrition and death. Ports close, factories close, productivity plummets. We’re talking near Mad Max shit here. Yes, we can make up some of this by relocating businesses, but we only have so many deep water ports. And states can’t just suddenly get good at something they never did before. The learning and infrastructure curve would be difficult and expensive.
If radical steps are not taken NOW, similar to the ones I laid out above, LA becomes a ghost town and the California farmland experiences a reverse dust bowl migration. I, for one, would like to see California solve their problems rather than to absorb their welfare-state mentality in my community. These people would have to go somewhere.
So this is where you come in. In anticipation of California’s almost certain failure (there is no adult leadership there) YOU must start building a community that will make it clear the inevitable migrants are not going to California YOUR Mississippi or YOUR Oklahoma, or MY Virginia, etc. ( I say that reservedly, since Northern Virginia is nut-to-butt government Lefties right now.)
A ray of hope, a very small - microscopic - ray of hope.
The situation playing out, outlined by Zeihan in the video, is a treaty between Southwestern states to share water from the Colorado River and other sources. It has been umpired by the federal government. I have ZERO faith the present Regime is competent enough to honcho a fix, or even assist in one. I am very confident that parts of the Regime will see this disaster as another Covid opportunity through which they can capture even more central power and to hell with the people who will suffer. Throw money at it. Take over the land and functions.
That tiny glimmer of hope is 2024 and people like Ron DeSantis or Vivek Ramaswamy. Where the glimmer dims is in the knowledge that most of you will be sucker enough to send the same jackasses back to the legislature that we have now. Hey, after all, YOUR guy’s the good one. It’s all those other ass hats that have to go, right? That’s what everybody thinks. That’s why we have a 95% incumbency rate in an institution as about as popular in this country as the Taliban.
Let’s get all macro here.
As I said at the beginning, we will hit on a bunch of topics, areas of life, which will be impacted by de-globalization. In all, as in this case, what you need to understand is that there will be little margin for error. If we squander opportunities in the next few years or if we let digital currency and ESG come into full bloom, THE CITIZENS of this country will not enjoy the benefits of being the “strong” country in the mix.
Davos, the government (many are Davos Cult members), Black Rock, Vanguard, using bug factories, green scams and ESG will guarantee THEIR OWN wealth and comfort while condemning you to a life of discomfort and drudgery. We’re talking a Great Depression that for YOU and YOUR KIDS, never goes away.
Make no mistake, if we don’t grow our way out of the coming economic contraction using the free market, if we let the ruling class centrally plan the way forward, WE WILL LOSE. People WILL die. I’ll spend some time with the Davos dirtbags by cross posting from my other site in a day or two.
But the bottom line is all the subjects we’ll cover in future posts will be do or die situations. Lose one and it won’t matter how we do with the rest. The system will crash as brutally here as it will in China or Russia or any landlocked country around the world.
And it all starts with re-establishing the concept of basic, objective truth. that’s not your truth or my truth. We NEED truth.
More to follow. Jordan, out.
If you would like to learn more about what LFTR technology can do for us click here.
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