Random Politics & Religion #26

Lol, Trump has done nothing on NK. Nothing. Unless you count letting them do whatever they want as something. Still waiting on either 1. Action or 2. A plan.

There is a long line of Chinese banks that have been financing NK for years, pull the trigger on sanctioning a couple of those big banks and that will actually get their attention fast. Cut them off from access to the US and China might actually give in on NK.

Corporate profits at California-based transnational corporations such as Apple, Facebook and Google are hitting record highs.

California housing prices from La Jolla to Berkeley along the Pacific Coast can top $1,000 a square foot.

It seems as if all of China is willing to pay premium prices to get their children degreed at Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA or USC.

Yet California -- after raising its top income tax rate to 13.3 percent and receiving record revenues -- is still facing a budget deficit of more than $1 billion. There is a much more foreboding state crisis of unfunded liabilities and pension obligations of nearly $1 trillion.

Soon, new gas tax hikes, on top of green mandates, might make California gas the most expensive in the nation, despite the state's huge reserves of untapped oil.

Where does the money go, given that the state's schools and infrastructure rank among America's worst in national surveys?

Illegal immigration over the last 30 years, the exodus of millions of middle-class Californians, and huge wealth concentrated in the L.A. basin and Silicon Valley have turned the state into a medieval manor of knights and peasants, with ever fewer in between.

The strapped middle class continues to flee bad schools, high taxes, rampant crime and poor state services. About one-third of the nation's welfare recipients reside in California. Approximately one-fifth of the state lives below the poverty line. More than a quarter of Californians were not born in the United States.

Many of the state's wealthiest residents support high taxes, no-growth green policies and subsidies for the poor. They do so because they reside in apartheid neighborhoods and have the material and political wherewithal to become exempt from the consequences of their own utopian bromides.

Blue California has no two-party politics anymore. Its campuses, from Berkeley to Claremont, have proven among the most hostile to free speech in the nation.

A few things keep California going. Its natural bounty, beauty and weather draw in people eager to play California roulette. The state is naturally rich in minerals, oil and natural gas, timber and farmland. The world pays dearly for whatever techies based in California's universities can dream up.

That said, the status quo is failing.

The skeletons of half-built bridges and overpasses for a $100 billion high-speed-rail dinosaur remind residents of the ongoing boondoggle. Meantime, outdated roads and highways -- mostly unchanged from the 1960s -- make driving for 40 million both slow and dangerous. Each mile of track for high-speed rail represents millions of dollars that were not spent on repairing and expanding stretches of the state's decrepit freeways -- and hundreds of lives needlessly lost each year.

The future of state transportation is not updated versions of 19th-century ideas of railways and locomotives, but instead will include electric-powered and automatically piloted cars -- all impossible without good roads.

Less than 40 percent of California residents identify themselves as conservative. But red-county California represents some 75 percent of California's geographical area. It's as if large, rural Mississippi and tiny urban Massachusetts were one combined state -- all ruled by liberal Boston.

Now, a third of the state thinks it can pull off a "Calexit" and leave the United States. Calexit's unhinged proponents have no idea that they are mimicking the right-wing arguments of the Confederate states that prompted the Civil War. Like South Carolina residents in 1861, Calexit advocates seem to assume that federal law should apply everywhere else except in California. Many of these California residents also believe that the federal Environmental Protection Agency should always override local ordinances, but not so with another federal bureau, Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

South Carolina started the Civil War by shelling and capturing federal property at Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay. Calexit wannabe secessionists similarly assume that thousands of square miles of federal property -- from California federal courtrooms and post offices to national parks such as Yosemite to huge military bases such as Camp Pendleton -- belong to the state and could simply be confiscated from the federal government.

Calexit proponents assume California can leave the union without an authorizing amendment to the Constitution, ratified by three-fourths of all the states. And they fail to see that should California ever secede, it would immediately split in two. The coastal strip would go the way of secessionist Virginia. The other three-quarters of the state's geography would remain loyal to the union and become a new version of loyalist West Virginia.

Buying a home on the California coast is nearly impossible. The state budget can only be balanced through constant tax hikes. Finding a good, safe public school is difficult. Building a single new dam during the California drought to capture record runoff water in subsequent wet years proved politically impossible.

No matter. Many Californians consider those existential problems to be a premodern drag, while they dream of postmodern trains, the legalization of pot-growing -- and seceding from the United States of America.

Do you honestly think that's going to work?

Sure, censure the banks, and you will get a response from China. Then again, China would still send money to NK, and you will be left with practically nothing but another ally pissed off at you.

I mean, it's not that hard to send money to NK from a Chinese bank. Hell, you don't even know which bank to censure, so you will end up censuring them all (just to be safe).



Like I said before, sanctions won't work in this case. Mainly because of reasons I am making up.

Oh yeah, Vic, where's those options you were talking about?

Frustrated that China has not done more to rein in North Korea, the Trump administration could impose new sanctions on small Chinese banks and other firms doing business with Pyongyang within weeks, two senior U.S. officials said.

The U.S. measures would initially hit Chinese entities considered "low-hanging fruit," including smaller financial institutions and "shell" companies linked to North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, said one of the officials, while declining to name the targets.

It would leave larger Chinese banks untouched for now, the official said.

Because we all need more laughter at the expense of California:

The real blame for North Korea goes back to the time the U.S was involved in the Korean war. Nothing was decisively done back then. But yeah, Nausi will keep trying to blame Obama, like the idiot he is, instead of opening a damned history book.

Yeah ***is *** up beyond belief out there, good reason why I turned down some job offers. They have astronomical taxes with insane cost of living, creates a huge class divide between executives and workers.

others will offer wages high enough that their personnel can afford to live within commuting distance.

No. Really. There wouldn't have been a Korean war if we hadn't been implicit and concomitant in the establishment of North Korea.

It goes back to our splitting countries with Russia in the dawn of the cold war.

Its how we got north and south Viet-Nam, just a bit earlier. As it was explained in the far distant past, we felt that both countries would fall under communist rule if left alone. So we arranged for two countries were one had been. We get one, the commies get one, the balance is maintained.

Didn't work out well in either case.

Didn't work out well in either case.

If you've got a leader that's cuckoo for cocoa puffs, what do you do in the event that he strikes first? Do you patriotically carry out orders knowing that you and your glorious leader stand a good chance of being vaporized, or do you back down and run for the hills?

Some good points there. Now the question is this: Will the military stop fighting if Kim Jong Un gets kersploded?

By the looks of it, while the numbers are staggering, the soldiers aren't physically capable of waging war.

Reports of starvation among soldiers

More starvation and ancient military technology

Ideological propaganda, plus overall bad training for conscripted soldiers

That's after a 8 second google search.