Eating the Golden Goose

15 October 2025

There are times when I look at the state of the State of California, and I alternate between laughing and not laughing.  I don’t cry because the Golden State is not worth my tears.  This vast domain has always been a loony legislative playground for Marxists Under the Dome.  The rest of us, the hard-working citizens who live outside of the urban zones, and way beyond the coast, we do our best to ignore the parasites, survive them, triumph over them.

The latest chaos here revolves around the refiners who have padlocked their refineries and are leaving California, by or before 2026.  They’ll be back, one day, but the State of California will have to pay them for their return.

The Official Party Line, “You wouldn’t dare . . .”, has been granted a most appropriate and just reply:

“Watch me.”

During the past decade, the parting shots from the Fed-Up Capitalists have gotten more and more expensive for the Cali-Commies, who keep circling their collectivist wagons.  The Save-Our-State rallying cries of 2010, when Geezer Moonbeam ascended for another eight years of regulations-and legislation-in-lunacy-orbit, have morphed into, “Wake me when it’s over.”

The level of competence among “elected” politicians and appointed officials has plummeted here, as elsewhere, in the USA, and in the world.  They’re a seedy, sorry sight for very sore eyes, during a digital era where even photoshopping can do just so much.  There aren’t many golden geese left in the Golden State to gobble up, but I’m an optimist about wild wings returning home to roost to form cash-flow catalysts of the future.

If nothing else, we’ve still got those magnificent beauties of nature.  The sublime works of the Master Gardener remain intact, much in the same way that France stayed intact, physically speaking, in May 1940, after the Nazis rolled their tanks into Paris to declare the conquest of France.  Only about 1/2 of France was occupied, but, the serious betting money was on the other 1/2 getting Gestapo-ed ASAP.

ASAP came after Operation Torch in November 1942 gave a decisive victory to the Allies in French North Africa.

This passage from the middle of Chapter 51 of THE DAWN echoes my thoughts and sentiments about living in a once-prosperous and phenomenally beautiful world, one that’s been plundered into a pitiful state by the Occupying Nazis.

The year 1942 would be momentous for France on many levels and for many reasons.  This year marked the beginning of a full-scale war economy in France, as devised by the occupying Germans.  Having extorted from the French people as much money, plunder, profits, commodities, contracts, food, wine, and hope as were gettable until this time, the Germans then set out to implement an exhaustive war economy which would, indeed, exhaust France and her people.  It became apparent to the French that conquest had not been sufficient for Hitler.  Collapse of the French nation through consumption and debilitation of her people were next in line.

All French industries which had not already been directed to support the Nazi war machine were ordered into compliance with directives, dictates, and production quotas by the overseeing Germans.  France was a ripe goose that not only had laid several golden eggs; she, the goose, was about to be devoured.  The conquering Germans, having sharpened their knives, intended to use them to feast upon the hands which fed them.  While other portions of the European population, mainly Jews, Russians, and Slavs, were being liquidated, the French were in for the slow kill: debilitation.  How Hitler and the Nazis presumed that the French people would simply accept such a fate is another question for historians, or a shrink.

By the start of 1942, the Germans had already extracted from the sacred French soil nearly half of its bauxite; over half of its aluminum; nearly all of the cement; half of the sheared wool, manufactured shoes, and leather products.  Of course, well over half of the champagne in the country had been imbibed by these German supermen.  Their response to the polite but pointed questions from Vichy bureaucrats about the rabid consumption and confiscation of French goods, materials, foodstuffs, and resources was simply that the English would have taken far more from you Frenchmen.  Be thankful for uncivilized gluttons.  (This persistent, perverse attempt to divide the French from the British people and thus achieve even further conquest was as hopeless as it was pointless, but, as such, it continued to be persistently employed by the Germans.)

The punitive seizures of French bounties by the Germans resulted in wide-scale pilfering that equated to fiscal and material rape.  There was also the expectation from the Germans that Vichy would fully pay the costs of the Occupation.  This expectation was a delusion, but the occupying enemy partook in this type of thinking almost as often as did the Vichy regime.  The sound thinking was accomplished by the people of France and, outside of France, by the Allies.  This obsession of the Germans with payment of the Occupation by Vichy, moreover, ranks up there with the rankest hypocrisy, a key component of Nazi ideology.  In light of the refusal of the nation of Germany to pay the debts incurred by the Great War, this petulant expectation offers a rather base definition of sore loser.

The Germans would not tolerate the French welching on this financial obligation, as agreed to in the ignoble Second Armistice at Compiègne.  France had to pay her debts, even though Germany had weaseled out of paying reparations for the Great War.  After Hitler came to power in 1932, all payments permanently ceased for reparations that were accepted by German officials in the Versailles Treaty.  The money was used instead to build the world’s most humongous war machine.  This construction of lethal methods, means, and machines required a lot of Reichsmarks.  It also required the tacit consent of the rest of the world.  The building of a Wehrmacht was in flagrant violation of the Treaty of Versailles.  In truth, the Treaty of Versailles was ceasefire for Germany.

By 1938, just five years after Hitler ceased payments of the German war debt, the monies spent on re-arming Germany for world conquest greatly exceeded the costs of reparation, as they’d been set in the Versailles Treaty.  Within the space of five years, the nation of Germany could have paid these reparations in full, but then the German people and their lunatic leaders would have been deprived of a colossal chip on their national shoulder.  The mania for world conquest would not have been fed by the bloodthirsty Nazis.  The concept of conscience was too hard to bear for the leaders of the German people.  Revenge, retribution, retaliation, all in the name of world conquest, were far more appealing than obeying the terms of a peace treaty that had been begged for by the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, the German emperor who wished to stop the blood-letting of the German soldiers of Imperial Germany.

The Berlin Wall later gave the German nation a reprieve from having to pay its Great War debts.  Losing half of their country to the Soviet Union might have been punishment enough for the German people; but half a nation could not pay penance for what the entire nation had brought upon Europe and the world.  The evils of the Berlin Wall were offset by the long-term effect of dismembering Germany for nearly thirty years: it was one surefire way to prevent this nation from killing again.