There’s an excellent primer on California’s extensive and complicated water system by Chris Austin here. The bottom line is that there’s a colossal mismatch among California’s economy, its population center, and its water.

Southern California gets most of its water from three sources: the State Water Project that transports water from the Lake Oroville reservoir (where the dramatic videos of spillway collapse are coming from) all over the state including the Bay Area and Southern California, the Colorado River aqueduct that transports water from Lake Havasu to Lake Mathews near Riverside, and the Los Angeles Aqueduct that transports water from Mono Lake up by Yosemite to the Cascades facility in Sylmar. These aqueducts vary in age from about a century to 40 years. That maintenance is long overdue should come as no surprise.

I couldn’t help but laugh on reading this article at NRO by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry proposing alternatives to an increase in the minimum wage. I honestly don’t know why he bothered.

It doesn’t matter if a higher minimum wage is economically inefficient. It doesn’t matter whether it hurts more people than it helps. It doesn’t matter than union officials have decidedly mixed motives in supporting a high minimum wage, e.g. it provides them with opportunities for underbidding the minimum and it would automatically provide raises to union members with minimum wage multiple contracts.

It most especially doesn’t matter that there are much more efficient and effective alternatives. None of them pits state against state the way a higher minimum wage does, none of them has the secondary effects noted above which for some of the supporters of a higher minimum wage are primary objectives rather than secondary, and none of them has a catchy slogan.

The editors of Bloomberg have come out in support of the investigation I wrote about a few days ago:

One option, as Senator Lindsey Graham has proposed, would be a select committee made up of the top members of other congressional committees relevant to the investigation. Given the scope of the issues involved — including espionage, national security, cybersecurity, foreign relations, economic sanctions and more — that approach makes some sense.

Another option would be an independent commission. Although it would require legislation, such a panel would ensure a public and transparent probe, and it would be empowered to investigate failures and shortcomings across the government, including within Congress itself. The commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was an exemplar of open bipartisan inquiry and could serve as a model.

Note that the idea of an official formal investigation isn’t partisan or media scalp-hunting. It’s an idea that has been proposed by both Republicans and Democrats.

Would such an investigation convince anyone? Or are all evaluations being performed primarily on the basis of confirmation bias?

For my part I don’t care. If we are to be a society based on laws, we need to follow certain procedures and the most impartial, even-handed investigation possible is one of those procedures.

Congress doesn’t need permission; it should act in creating an independent commission immediately with or without the support of the president.

There are presently two diametrically-opposed explanations of what’s going on in Washington today. One explanation is that President Trump won the election through collusion with the Russians and is a traitorous, incompetent criminal. That explanation is epitomized by E. J. Dionne’s column in the Washington Post today:

NEW YORK — Let’s not mumble or whisper about the central issue facing our country: What is this democratic nation to do when the man serving as president of the United States plainly has no business being president of the United States?

The Michael Flynn fiasco was the entirely predictable product of the indiscipline, deceit, incompetence and moral indifference that characterize Donald Trump’s approach to leadership.

Even worse, Trump’s loyalties are now in doubt. Questions about his relationship with Vladimir Putin and Russia will not go away, even if congressional Republicans try to slow-walk a transparent investigation into what ties Trump has with Putin’s Russia — and who on his campaign did what, and when, with Russian intelligence officials and diplomats.

According to this view Trump’s chickens are coming home to roost and he should resign or be impeached sooner rather than later.

The opposing view is that Trump is being subjected to a relentless campaign of disinformation, opposition, and subversion by Democrats, journalists, and employees of federal agencies (including the intelligence agencies). That view is exemplified in this article by Richard Pollock at The Daily Caller:

The talk within the tight-knit community of retired intelligence officers was that Flynn’s sacking was a result of intelligence insiders at the CIA, NSA and National Security Council using a sophisticated “disinformation campaign” to create a crisis atmosphere. The former intel officers say the tactics hurled against Flynn over the last few months were the type of high profile hard-ball accusations previously reserved for top figures in enemy states, not for White House officials.

“This was a hit job,” charged retired Col. James Williamson, a 32-year Special Forces veteran who coordinated his operations with the intelligence community.

Noting the Obama administration first tried to silence Flynn in 2014 when the former president fired him as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Williamson called Monday’s resignation, “stage Two of ‘Kill Mike Flynn.”

Former intelligence officials who understand spy craft say Flynn’s resignation had everything to do with a “disinformation campaign” and little to do with the December phone conversation he had with the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

They charge officials from America’s top spy counsels leaked classified government intercepts of Flynn and President Trump’s conversations with world leaders and had “cutouts” — friendly civilians not associated with the agency — to distribute them to reporters in a coordinated fashion.

Can these views be reconciled? I don’t see how. What I believe we’re seeing is a low-level civil war—a cold war, played out domestically. Something that needs to be recognized is that ordinary Americans don’t see things quite the same as activists, news junkies, and politicians do. Based on the RealClearPolitics composite index of polls, President Trump’s approval rating is actually better than it was on election day. That may explain why he’s reaching out so supporters.

I recognize that my view is distinctly a minority view (possibly a minority of one) but I support the creation of a bipartisan commission to investigate the emerging allegations against President Trump with the charter of making as much public as it can as quickly as it can. That’s based on the rubric of more light and less heat.

My concern is that heat could turn a cold war into a hot one.

Speaking of corroborating evidence, this article at Bloomberg by Noah Smith supports something I’ve been saying for some time—monopolies might be a contributing factor to income inequality:

There’s now evidence that market concentration could also be hurting workers, by decreasing the share of national income that they receive. It’s probably making inequality worse. I also suspect that creeping monopoly will prove to be one of the main reasons for decreasing business dynamism. And it could even be a contributor to slow productivity growth. In other words, many of the diseases in our economy can probably be traced, at least in part, to the problem of market concentration. And it’s getting worse…

The more human-scale things are the more conducive they are to human well-being. That’s true of all organizations not just businesses. Economies of scale are mostly over-rated. I learned that a long time ago when I accidentally received an invoice sent to one of the biggest buyers in the world in the mail and learned that they were paying the same thing as I was.

I found this article at Science Direct very interesting:

We report from converted seismic waves, a pervasive seismically anomalous layer above the transition zone beneath the western US. The layer, characterized by an average shear wave speed reduction of 1.6%, spans over an area of ∼1.8×106 km2∼1.8×106 km2 with thicknesses varying between 25 and 70 km. The location of the layer correlates with the present location of a segment of the Farallon plate. This spatial correlation and the sharp seismic signal atop of the layer indicate that the layer is caused by compositional heterogeneity. Analysis of the seismic signature reveals that the compositional heterogeneity can be ascribed to a small volume of partial melt (0.5 ± 0.2 vol% on average). This article presents the first high resolution map of the melt present within the layer. Despite spatial variations in temperature, the calculated melt volume fraction correlates strongly with the amplitude of P–S conversion throughout the region. Comparing the values of temperature calculated from the seismic signal with available petrological constraints, we infer that melting in the layer is caused by release of volatiles from the subducted Farallon slab. This partially molten zone beneath the western US can sequester at least 1.2×1017 kg1.2×1017 kg of volatiles, and can act as a large regional reservoir of volatile species such as H or C.

Basically, what’s that saying is there’s a huge pool of something-or-other deep beneath the western United States. Could be hydrogen. Could be carbon. Could be methane or any number of other alternatives.

There are all sorts of possible reactions to that news. My immediate reaction was that it might present some great new opportunities for testing the abiogenic theory of the origins of petroleum. I know that deep deposits of this sort are one of the bits of evidence offered in support of the theory. I always thought it was a bit wacky but who knows?

Hat tip: the Daily Mail

George Soros’s op-ed at the Guardian argues that Russia will act to hasten the European Union’s inevitable demise. I think that’s about right.

However, I think he underestimates the Russian people’s tolerance for dysfunction. Russia has always had a dysfunctional economy.

I also am not convinced that the Europeans need Russia’s help to be distrustful of Muslims. There’s nothing like half a millennium of oppressive occupation by the Caliph or being attacked every few years over the period of a millennium for encouraging mistrust. Under the circumstances I’m not sure I’d call it “Islamophobia”. The astonishing thing is how well the Greeks have treated their guests from Syria, Iraq, etc. The Greeks have been saints.

It’s a bit difficult to summarize the relationship between Russia and Belarus but this op-ed by Andrew Wilson at the European Council of Foreign Relations does a pretty fair job. It’s sort of like the relationship between President Jimmy Carter and his younger brother Billy Carter except more dysfunctional. Everything bad you can say about Russia is about ten times worse in Belarus.

I can’t help but feel that Joel S. Wit and Richard Sokolsky’s article at Atlantic on how to make a deal with North Korea is arrant nonsense:

Reading North Korean intentions is, of course, always a tricky business. However, the White House, already consumed with putting out daily fires and faced with a bunch of bad options for constraining North Korea, has little to lose in exploring them. Moreover, the U.S. will be no worse off than it is now if testing the North proves that it is not serious about abandoning the escalatory path it has been on for the past eight years. In fact, it will arguably be in a stronger position to seek greater Chinese pressure on the North if it has, as Beijing has urged, pursued diplomacy.

Speed is of the essence to get past a potentially escalating crisis and that will require balancing a complicated set of initiatives. The Trump administration has already taken two important steps: moving forward with United Nations deliberations on Pyongyang’s ballistic-missile test, since it violates existing sanctions; and signaling to the North that Washington will defend its allies. But it also makes sense to test North Korea’s intentions by signaling a new openness to serious diplomacy without preconditions.

Such contacts would be facilitated by reactivating the only channel of communication between the two countries through Pyongyang’s Mission to the UN, which has been shut down since last July. And given the tightly controlled and centralized North Korean political system, it would also make sense to create a parallel and private high-level dialogue between Trump and Kim Jong Un, starting with direct communications between the two leaders. Suspending the exercises, as the North Koreans have demanded, is neither politically nor strategically prudent. But continuing to speak publicly about decapitating the North Korean leadership and making overt nuclear gestures, such as over-flights of long-range nuclear-capable bombers, would send precisely the wrong signal unless Pyongyang conducts another nuclear test.

We know with a confidence based on experience that North Korea cannot be trusted to honor any agreement. Full stop.

I do think there’s a strategy that would work short of war: embarrass the Chinese regime. I believe they’ll throw the North Korean baby off the back of the troika if the wolves get close enough. Start a relentless public opinion campaign characterizing the Chinese authorities as weak because they can’t control Kim Jong Un and rather claiming that any action that doesn’t accomplish that is a “wag the dog” strategy to distract from their weakness. And so on.

I don’t believe that the Trump Administration is subtle or skilled enough to pull that off and there are too many American businessmen making money off cheap Chinese labor to upset the China trade applecart.

Meanwhile, we’ll just wait until one of North Korea’s nuclear-armed ICBMs goes astray and strikes Kyoto. Or Honolulu.