That was one funny motherfucker… hilarious guys like Sam die off and we’re stuck with jackasses like Mike Meyers – probably one of the most UNFUNNY Jews I have ever seen.
Billy
May 4, 2015 3:00 pm
Yeah.. that last one was me.
Peaceout
May 4, 2015 3:17 pm
That was priceless!
Tommy
May 4, 2015 3:20 pm
The best of Sam.
card802
May 4, 2015 3:25 pm
Now we wait for the cries of “Climate Change” and below “Normal” water levels from the ignorant left.
When John Powell finished his trip down the Green and the Colorado he knew that homesteaders heading west would demand water, the government would provide and the future would be fucked.
Powell predicted that water, or the lack of it, would be a major problem in America’s expansion west.
From a NPR article:
“He spent his final years advocating that communities organize around existing water and watersheds, which would force water users to conserve the scarce resource, because overuse or pollution would hurt everyone in the watershed.
Powell believed this arrangement would also make communities better prepared to deal with attempts to usurp their water. Any city — Los Angeles, for example — would have had to deal with these local watershed groups and meet their terms,” Worster says. For Powell, the water would not be taken out of the watershed or out of the basin and transferred across mountains … hundreds of miles away to allow urban growth to take place. So L.A., if it existed at all, would have been a much, much smaller entity. Salt Lake City would be smaller. Phoenix would probably not even exist.
Powell’s utopian vision also focused on self-reliance. Farmers would spend their own money, not government funds, on the dams and canals needed to get water to them, and their use of water would be tied to their land. They wouldn’t be able to sell their water separately to cities or syndicates.
Three months before Powell died in 1902, Congress launched a century of massive dam and canal construction costing billions of dollars, all subsidized by the federal government. That fueled homesteading and corporate mega-farms. Cities snapped up water rights and imported water across hundreds of miles. Small farmers were overwhelmed by urban and corporate interests. And more water was promised than was sometimes available, triggering water wars.”
From USANews:
“Climate change is linked to California’s drought by two mechanisms: rising temperatures and changing atmospheric patterns conducive to diminishing rains. The first link is firmly established, and there is a considerable and growing body of evidence supporting the second.”
Move out of the FUCKING desert, assholes.
Montefrío
May 4, 2015 3:32 pm
A worthwhile if perhaps dated read on this issue is the 1986 book “Cadillac Desert” by Marc Reisner.
Billy
May 4, 2015 3:34 pm
Move out of the FUCKING desert, assholes.
NO!!
Fuckin’ STAY THERE!
If they leave, they might come HERE! We’re happy without all the fuckin’ beanbags, thugs, weirdos, psychos, tree-huggers, fags, granolas, etc…
Stay the fuck AWAY! Let them live in their land of fucked-upedness… if they move here, they’ll fuck it up beyond all hope.
card802
May 4, 2015 3:48 pm
“Stay the fuck AWAY! Let them live in their land of fucked-upedness… if they move here, they’ll fuck it up beyond all hope.”
Excellent point.
Iska Waran
May 4, 2015 4:13 pm
I don’t know much about California water rights, but I understand that some CA farm families were granted “their” water rights as much as 100 years ago. The way I look at it is, if one guy, through subterfuge or bribery or just the sheer idiocy of the then-existing California government had been able to secure to himself and his progeny all of the water rights in that state, people would look at that status quo and say ‘that’s fucked up and bullshit’. The fact that it’s not one lone guy who did that but hundreds (or thousands ?) of farmers who secured those water rights ages ago doesn’t change the fact that those water “rights” should be subject to re-assessment. Note that I’m not talking about the farmers’ land itself, but the water that is under or adjacent to it – to which others have some claim. One would hope that market pricing of water could solve the shortage as people would give up on lawns and farmers would only grow crops that make sense given the high price of water, but farmers don’t have to pay real market prices, since they have “rights” to cheap or free water. Seems to me that the California Assembly should strip farmers of their water rights, pay them some compensation (much less than they’d want, I’m sure) come up with some market pricing mechanism and let farmers – as well as consumers – buy what they choose to afford. When there’s a water shortage, raise the price so that ALL water users (consumers AND farmers) have to adjust their usage.
Iska Waran
May 4, 2015 4:16 pm
I understand that almost all almonds & walnuts come from CA. Can’t those crops grow anywhere else in this country? Mississippi or someplace? Some farmers in other states are going to do real well by starting to grow the crops that CA farmers have to stop growing due to lac of water.
Stucky
May 4, 2015 4:18 pm
Sam was once a Pentecostal preacher. Really. Married twice. After his second divorce, he quit preaching and went into comedy. A lot of his jokes come from those experiences. I love SK!! RIP.
“Phoenix would probably not even exist.”
—-card802 quoting and NPR article
Oh, yes, it would. It probably might not be as big as today without the Central Arizona Project, but it exploded in the early 20th Century due to the amazing Salt River Project. Google it. And the aquifers under and west of Tucson are the second largest in the U.S.
Arizona is quite possibly the most water conscious state in the nation and has been for a long, long time. The “Pima Cotton” farms are rapidly disappearing, along with the thirsty citrus groves. Next up are the pecan and pistachio groves, which are ironically fighting new mining operations because of the competition for water. Guess who is the biggest fighter to stop new copper mining in southern Arizona? A uber liberal family who owns a massive pecan farm that uses 3X the water that the mine is expected to use.
Let me see. Copper or pecans? I’ll take copper.
EL Coyote
May 4, 2015 11:29 pm
SK’s humor was juvenile and sophomoric, while it was fresh back in the 80’s, so was Eddie Murphy’s million ways to interject the word fuck in a monologue. That he died an early death is not lamentable, it is divine justice. But then you don’t believe in a power greater than man.
Bob
May 5, 2015 10:17 am
Coyote, Sam was honest, rational, humane, flawed, troubled and incredibly insightful, as the clips above make abundantly clear. His material is as funny, fresh and relevant now as when he first delivered it. I still miss him, and always will.
BTW, divine justice is not meted out in this world — it is reserved for the next. There is nothing divine about this world except its very existence.
Chicago999444
May 5, 2015 10:41 am
Montefrio, CADILLAC DESERT is not dated at all, and is in fact more relevant than ever as the true costs of our water policies and projects in the west become manifest.
Face it, the place is a DESERT, and absolutely cannot and never could support anything like the numbers of people who live there now. The success of the thousands of water projects built there over the past century, and their ability to provide sufficient water to the 50M or so people living in the Sand States, is predicated on flow rates and precipitation that are anomalous for the region.. in other words, they are built with the idea that water would be as plentiful out there as it was in the 20th century… … which we now know was a period that was anomalously wet. For most of the past 1000 years, the region has been much more arid that recently.
Another thing the success of those projects is predicated on, is the forbearance of the U.S. taxpaying body. WE have all of us in other regions subsidized the dirt-cheap water that the Bureau of Reclamation (which, IMO, should never have existed) has made available to CA agriculture, giving it a grossly unfair advantage over agriculture in areas better endowed with water to begin with.
Time to admit that it’s over and let the desert be desert. If you want water, go where the water is- don’t make the taxpayers at large bring it to you at a cost ruinous to the rest of the country. Time for these places to depopulate and for people to live where the resources they need are available for what they can afford to pay.
Chicago999444
May 5, 2015 10:58 am
Iska, the REAL culprit in granting water-rights welfare to CA growers is the federal government and its Bureau of Reclamation, which promulgated one of the first, the largest, and most expensive welfare programs ever visited on this country.
Water welfare for the west has destroyed California, causing it to become grossly overpopulated while guaranteeing there will never, ever be enough water for the swollen population, because the more cheap water you give away at a fraction the cost to store and convey it, the more people waste it.
It has destroyed agriculture in the midwest and south, as farmers in these places have to compete with large CA growers who get their water almost free relative to its cost.
And it’s destroyed the people the Reclamation programs were supposed to benefit- small farmers in CA and other parts of the arid west, who never could make it on the 320 acres officially allowed by the Bureau, while large growers like Tejon Ranch (320,000 acres held by the Chandler family), or Union Pacific, were able to game the system to get, and waste, water at giveaway rates that they had no legal entitlement to, while ever more small-fry were lured from eastern and midwestern cities to see if they could make it on the 320 acres per couple, and then fail and bankrupt out.
Like all welfare programs, the Reclamation program led only to waste, corruption, and the impoverishment of the taxpayers for the good of the connected and wealthy.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-04/leaking-las-vegas-forced-rationing-looms-lake-mead-faces-federal-water-emergency
I miss Sam…
That was one funny motherfucker… hilarious guys like Sam die off and we’re stuck with jackasses like Mike Meyers – probably one of the most UNFUNNY Jews I have ever seen.
Yeah.. that last one was me.
That was priceless!
The best of Sam.
Now we wait for the cries of “Climate Change” and below “Normal” water levels from the ignorant left.
When John Powell finished his trip down the Green and the Colorado he knew that homesteaders heading west would demand water, the government would provide and the future would be fucked.
Powell predicted that water, or the lack of it, would be a major problem in America’s expansion west.
From a NPR article:
“He spent his final years advocating that communities organize around existing water and watersheds, which would force water users to conserve the scarce resource, because overuse or pollution would hurt everyone in the watershed.
Powell believed this arrangement would also make communities better prepared to deal with attempts to usurp their water. Any city — Los Angeles, for example — would have had to deal with these local watershed groups and meet their terms,” Worster says. For Powell, the water would not be taken out of the watershed or out of the basin and transferred across mountains … hundreds of miles away to allow urban growth to take place. So L.A., if it existed at all, would have been a much, much smaller entity. Salt Lake City would be smaller. Phoenix would probably not even exist.
Powell’s utopian vision also focused on self-reliance. Farmers would spend their own money, not government funds, on the dams and canals needed to get water to them, and their use of water would be tied to their land. They wouldn’t be able to sell their water separately to cities or syndicates.
Three months before Powell died in 1902, Congress launched a century of massive dam and canal construction costing billions of dollars, all subsidized by the federal government. That fueled homesteading and corporate mega-farms. Cities snapped up water rights and imported water across hundreds of miles. Small farmers were overwhelmed by urban and corporate interests. And more water was promised than was sometimes available, triggering water wars.”
From USANews:
“Climate change is linked to California’s drought by two mechanisms: rising temperatures and changing atmospheric patterns conducive to diminishing rains. The first link is firmly established, and there is a considerable and growing body of evidence supporting the second.”
Move out of the FUCKING desert, assholes.
A worthwhile if perhaps dated read on this issue is the 1986 book “Cadillac Desert” by Marc Reisner.
Move out of the FUCKING desert, assholes.
NO!!
Fuckin’ STAY THERE!
If they leave, they might come HERE! We’re happy without all the fuckin’ beanbags, thugs, weirdos, psychos, tree-huggers, fags, granolas, etc…
Stay the fuck AWAY! Let them live in their land of fucked-upedness… if they move here, they’ll fuck it up beyond all hope.
“Stay the fuck AWAY! Let them live in their land of fucked-upedness… if they move here, they’ll fuck it up beyond all hope.”
Excellent point.
I don’t know much about California water rights, but I understand that some CA farm families were granted “their” water rights as much as 100 years ago. The way I look at it is, if one guy, through subterfuge or bribery or just the sheer idiocy of the then-existing California government had been able to secure to himself and his progeny all of the water rights in that state, people would look at that status quo and say ‘that’s fucked up and bullshit’. The fact that it’s not one lone guy who did that but hundreds (or thousands ?) of farmers who secured those water rights ages ago doesn’t change the fact that those water “rights” should be subject to re-assessment. Note that I’m not talking about the farmers’ land itself, but the water that is under or adjacent to it – to which others have some claim. One would hope that market pricing of water could solve the shortage as people would give up on lawns and farmers would only grow crops that make sense given the high price of water, but farmers don’t have to pay real market prices, since they have “rights” to cheap or free water. Seems to me that the California Assembly should strip farmers of their water rights, pay them some compensation (much less than they’d want, I’m sure) come up with some market pricing mechanism and let farmers – as well as consumers – buy what they choose to afford. When there’s a water shortage, raise the price so that ALL water users (consumers AND farmers) have to adjust their usage.
I understand that almost all almonds & walnuts come from CA. Can’t those crops grow anywhere else in this country? Mississippi or someplace? Some farmers in other states are going to do real well by starting to grow the crops that CA farmers have to stop growing due to lac of water.
Sam was once a Pentecostal preacher. Really. Married twice. After his second divorce, he quit preaching and went into comedy. A lot of his jokes come from those experiences. I love SK!! RIP.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSwG9Tojg9I&feature=player_detailpage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o70wMlJO3ck&feature=player_detailpage
“Phoenix would probably not even exist.”
—-card802 quoting and NPR article
Oh, yes, it would. It probably might not be as big as today without the Central Arizona Project, but it exploded in the early 20th Century due to the amazing Salt River Project. Google it. And the aquifers under and west of Tucson are the second largest in the U.S.
Arizona is quite possibly the most water conscious state in the nation and has been for a long, long time. The “Pima Cotton” farms are rapidly disappearing, along with the thirsty citrus groves. Next up are the pecan and pistachio groves, which are ironically fighting new mining operations because of the competition for water. Guess who is the biggest fighter to stop new copper mining in southern Arizona? A uber liberal family who owns a massive pecan farm that uses 3X the water that the mine is expected to use.
Let me see. Copper or pecans? I’ll take copper.
SK’s humor was juvenile and sophomoric, while it was fresh back in the 80’s, so was Eddie Murphy’s million ways to interject the word fuck in a monologue. That he died an early death is not lamentable, it is divine justice. But then you don’t believe in a power greater than man.
Coyote, Sam was honest, rational, humane, flawed, troubled and incredibly insightful, as the clips above make abundantly clear. His material is as funny, fresh and relevant now as when he first delivered it. I still miss him, and always will.
BTW, divine justice is not meted out in this world — it is reserved for the next. There is nothing divine about this world except its very existence.
Montefrio, CADILLAC DESERT is not dated at all, and is in fact more relevant than ever as the true costs of our water policies and projects in the west become manifest.
Face it, the place is a DESERT, and absolutely cannot and never could support anything like the numbers of people who live there now. The success of the thousands of water projects built there over the past century, and their ability to provide sufficient water to the 50M or so people living in the Sand States, is predicated on flow rates and precipitation that are anomalous for the region.. in other words, they are built with the idea that water would be as plentiful out there as it was in the 20th century… … which we now know was a period that was anomalously wet. For most of the past 1000 years, the region has been much more arid that recently.
Another thing the success of those projects is predicated on, is the forbearance of the U.S. taxpaying body. WE have all of us in other regions subsidized the dirt-cheap water that the Bureau of Reclamation (which, IMO, should never have existed) has made available to CA agriculture, giving it a grossly unfair advantage over agriculture in areas better endowed with water to begin with.
Time to admit that it’s over and let the desert be desert. If you want water, go where the water is- don’t make the taxpayers at large bring it to you at a cost ruinous to the rest of the country. Time for these places to depopulate and for people to live where the resources they need are available for what they can afford to pay.
Iska, the REAL culprit in granting water-rights welfare to CA growers is the federal government and its Bureau of Reclamation, which promulgated one of the first, the largest, and most expensive welfare programs ever visited on this country.
Water welfare for the west has destroyed California, causing it to become grossly overpopulated while guaranteeing there will never, ever be enough water for the swollen population, because the more cheap water you give away at a fraction the cost to store and convey it, the more people waste it.
It has destroyed agriculture in the midwest and south, as farmers in these places have to compete with large CA growers who get their water almost free relative to its cost.
And it’s destroyed the people the Reclamation programs were supposed to benefit- small farmers in CA and other parts of the arid west, who never could make it on the 320 acres officially allowed by the Bureau, while large growers like Tejon Ranch (320,000 acres held by the Chandler family), or Union Pacific, were able to game the system to get, and waste, water at giveaway rates that they had no legal entitlement to, while ever more small-fry were lured from eastern and midwestern cities to see if they could make it on the 320 acres per couple, and then fail and bankrupt out.
Like all welfare programs, the Reclamation program led only to waste, corruption, and the impoverishment of the taxpayers for the good of the connected and wealthy.
Spot on commentary +100