Rebane's Ruminations

Ruminations - 30sep14

'My Uncle Frank in Chicago was a staunch Conservative, and voted straight Republican until the day he died.  Since then he has voted Democrat.'  (H/T to reader)

George Rebane

Measure S proponents have an ex parte court hearing tomorrow to change the wording on the ballot that has been known to all since last April.  These progressives have taken a page from their eco-nut brethren who know how to time lawsuits on projects they oppose so as to drain the cash out of the enterprise no matter the merit of the suits or how they are settled.  Now it seems that the pro-S crowd is after the county’s coffers, which, of course, duns us all.

Moonbeam will allow police drones to search your property without a warrant.  So don’t get all excited when you see a quadcopter with a sheriff’s star on it hovering outside your window.  That will inject a new dynamic into the dialogue with (fancy wording for ‘frost the balls of’) our marijuana growers.  How many ways does Big Brother need to watch us?

Giving new meaning to Teflon President, Obama just threw Team Clapper under the bus, claiming that our intelligence community didn’t have a clue about the rise of the ISIS ragheads.  The public truth is quite the opposite.  The Great Golfer was warned all last year in confidential briefings and publicly (by LTG Flynn, DIA) last February in a taped congressional hearing.  Flynn nailed it, Obama ignored it (no doubt on advice of ValerieJ).

Our progressive readers may feel their undies getting into a knot since for years they have accused Bush2 of a perfidious 2003 invasion of Iraq.  The only difference is that Bush2, along with leaders worldwide, did listen to his intelligence services and acted accordingly, while Obama did not, and instead acted to bring on the Third Gulf War (here Gulf3) in a quarter century.  Let’s hope that he knows how to fight and button up Gulf3 better than Bush2 performed in Gulf2.  (Sure would like to see some high ranking brass resign when the CinC ignores the advice and alarums that they are paid to deliver.  That would start some interesting national dialogue.)

AG Eric Holder has been another worthy on Team Obama who has wreaked his share of havoc in the public forums.  Over the years we have noted and commented on his long list of sins which have in many ways made him an historical standout in that post.  His last contribution to Obama’s fundamental transformation of America will be to deprive our constabularies and national security services of the legal use of Bayesian decision tools (more commonly known as ‘profiling’) in their pursuit of bad guys and bad things about to happen.  Yep, ol’ Eric will end his ravaging forays across this land with a swift kick in the pants of the Rev Bayes.  To cover this significant shortfall we will pray for God’s expanded mercy on us all.

For a more proper and consistent view of the intruder who illegally climbed the fence at 1600 Pennsylvania and made it into the depths of the executive mansion before being collared by the Secret Service, the politically correct appellation for the man should be ‘undocumented White House visitor’ as suggested by Sen Ted Cruz.  This would put a different pall over the whole case, and be consistent with the pernicious wordplay that characterizes liberal blather.  Don’t hold your breath ;-)

A new Stanford report (here) claims to definitively connect California’s recent drought to climate change – with the strong implication being AGW.  But you knew that.  NPR this morning was making sure that everyone knew without really saying anything – even a couple of words – on how that causal chain was forged by the investigators.  Well, dear reader, your faithful commentator has plumbed the depths of their work, it is all based on the application of “advanced statistical techniques to a large suite of climate model simulations.”  There, aren’t you glad you asked.  The fact that there does not yet exist a reliable general circulation model (GCM) of earth’s atmosphere should make no never mind, since we all know ‘the debate is over’.  All we now need to do is pile on a bunch of such studies using GCMs, and before you know it, national carbon taxes will drive energy prices through the roof.  Isn’t science wonderful? 

Everyone catch Prime Minister Netanyahu’s UN speech (here)?  It was a noteworthy presentation to a world audience.  He clearly linked the motivations and purpose of the Nazis’ horrific implementation of ‘racial purity’ in their sought after Lebensraum with Islam’s scriptural, now existential, goal of global religious purity using even more horrific methods (in which light we see the beheading in Oklahoma).  To that we may add the collectivists’ (Marxists, socialists, communists) fevered goal of attaining global ideological purity best characterized by the collection of social goals under the rubric of the UN’s Agenda 21.

At this point one is prompted to conclude with ‘... other than that, how did you like the play?’

Sandbox - 27sep14

[A refreshingly new sandbox is filled and ready for your divers thoughts, ideas, and repartees.  I would be interested in a thread that discusses the 'Ring of Fire' rumblings going on.  What really concerns me is that not much is being said about the really big one under Yellowstone.  When that one goes we will all be wishing we had more emergency food and ... ]

Thoughts on Marijuana and Measure S

George Rebane

Measure S to replace Nevada County’s current Ordinance 2349 specifying how medicinal marijuana (MMJ) has become our community’s latest cause celebre and also the casus belli between the pro and anti Measure S factions.  Measure S is a public initiative on the November ballot to replace the current 2349.  Both S and 2349 deal only with growing MMJ in the county.  Growing recreational marijuana (RMJ) for fun and profit is illegal everywhere in California.  Access to 2349, Measure S, and a side-by-side comparison of the S and 2349 provisions is available here.

Before S arrived on the scene, I never thought I would become so interested in the MMJ issue.  My thoughts on MJ and the legalization of drugs in general was declared some time ago (here) and should be no mystery to RR readers.  (Full disclosure: neither Jo Ann nor I have been or are marijuana users.)  My interest has grown in MJ use since moving to one of the world’s prime MJ growing areas, and becoming involved in the county’s politics primarily as a conservetarian blogger, commentator, and speaker.  So let me meander a bit on this latest dust devil on our main street that is trying to grow up into a cyclone.  I’ll try to be structured so readers can easily reference their comments to the various parts of this piece.

1. Last Tuesday (23sep14) there were two ‘information sessions’ on S and 2349 – one sponsored by the pro-S (at Nevada Theater) and the other by anti-S (at Rood Center).  I attended and reported on the anti-S affair.  Now the League of Women Voters will sponsor a debate on the matter on the eve of 16 October at the Rood Center.  (Apparently the same kind of debate as recently proposed by The Union and KVMR for the Rood Center was not as acceptable as the upcoming one by the LWV.  Oh well.)

Ruminations - 23sep14

George Rebane

The ISIS fatwa urging all Muslims in the world to ‘kill ‘em wherever you find ‘em’ is finally starting to cause some serious concerns among western leaders.  The news services are reporting frustrating communiques being issued by presidents, prime ministers, intelligence service heads, and national police forces.  The problem comes with the radicalized Muslims returning from the Mideast, and also our indigenous Muslims motivated by the call to kill in response to the new coalition air strikes in both Iraq and now Syria.  And what puts a bow on the whole thing is Islam’s carte blanche to use ‘taqiyya’ in the preparation for their murderous attacks.  Taqiyya has been the scripturally bloody staple in ‘green on blue’ attacks American troops have suffered from their Muslim comrades in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Now our authorities are telling us (correctly) that they have no means of stopping such attacks on civilians in the west by seemingly moderate Muslims – Major Hassan’s rampage at Ft Hood may serve as Exhibit A, along with the street killings of British and French GIs.

It turns out that repetition and exercises are needed to learn mathematical concepts.  The government schools have been telling us for some years that doing ‘rote exercises’ was of little use after a student claimed to have understood the concept underlying a newly introduced mathematical idea.  Engineering professor Barbara Oakley reports in the 23sep14 WSJ on some recent research that again confirmed that it is repeated applications of the concept is what really locks it into your brainbone.  Her point, “Achieving 'conceptual' understanding doesn't mean true mastery. For that, you need practice.”

Those of us who have based our careers on the understanding and practice of some fairly hairy mathematics (I have a minor in math, and my graduate engineering work has been basically all math) have known this since day one – I even had to learn it the hard way in an early math course.  Common Core standards continue with this breezy misunderstanding of how math is learned.  But it will be up to the school districts and classroom teachers to come up with curricula that re-introduce the ‘practice makes perfect’ approach to teaching math.  Don’t hold your breath.

Today the medical marijuana Measure S circus comes to town.  The two sides on this new ‘medical’ marijuana cultivation issue have had a rocky road putting together a debate on the matter under a single roof, and wound up blowing a tire (Bob Crabb’s cartoon filched from the 22sep14 Union again nails it).  The story of who agreed to what and when and then changed their mind(s) is too complex to repeat in these pithy remarks.  But, as reported in this morning’s (23sep14) Union, each side has added a “rally” to celebrate their respective convincing arguments.  The ‘No on S’ faction is headed by Sheriff Keith Royal who will be interviewed at 5pm by Union publisher Jim Hemig at the Rood Center; don’t know about any subsequent Q&A.  Then Mr Hemig will skedaddle across town to the Nevada Theater where at 6pm he will be asking the same questions of the ‘Yes on S’ folks.  But we can expect shouting and happy dancing to follow the sober phase of both presentations at their respective venues.  Perhaps the distance separating these two seriously enthusiastic groups was not such a bad idea after all ;-)

Walking Back Climate ‘Science’ & Policy (updated 22sep14)

Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.  Luke 23:34

George Rebane

On the front of the 20sep14 edition of WSJ is a top-of-the-page herald that reads ‘Climate Science is NOT Settled’ (emphasis theirs; source of filched photo).  I have waited at least ten years for the world’s preeminent newspaper to publish a major essay, so titled and no less by a scientist acknowledged by both true believers and skeptics.  The piece is written by Dr Steven E Koonin, now director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University, and formerly undersecretary for science in the Energy Department during Obama’s first term.  Other positions included professor of theoretical physics and provost at Caltech.  Let me be up front, this is an ‘I told you so all along’ posting in which I will engage in some well-deserved braggadocio here and again.

Koonin’s piece is somewhat awkward in its attempt to walk back the bamboozle from the 'science' and baseless public policies we have been subjected to for the last 20+ years.  However, it is rich in corroborating the exact laundry list of criticisms that we science-savvy climate skeptics have been alerting our readers to for at least a decade.  While the Sierra Economics and Science Foundation and RR have a long string of published critiques of what has passed for climate science from government grant-sucking academics and in the lamestream media, the heavy lifting in informing the public has been done by people like Anthony Watts, Steve McIntyre, and even our own Russ Steele.

Awkward or not, Dr Koonin has the courage to finally break the silence with which Teams Obama, Gore, Schwarzenegger, and now Moonbeam have greeted every substantive counter to the arguments claimed to have been made in the various reports released over the years by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  Before going into some detail, let me give the overview that Koonin’s arguments follow exactly the (Venn) diagrammatic structure of the same arguments I gave in my 2008 paper ‘Climate Change – A Format for Reasoned Dialogue’ available here.

The tagline to Koonin’s piece is “Climate change is real and affected by human activity, writes a former top science official of the Obama administration.  But we are very far from having the knowledge needed to make good policy.” (emphasis mine)  Koonin opens up with –

The idea that "Climate science is settled" runs through today's popular and policy discussions. Unfortunately, that claim is misguided. It has not only distorted our public and policy debates on issues related to energy, greenhouse-gas emissions and the environment. But it also has inhibited the scientific and policy discussions that we need to have about our climate future.

A Nation in Denial

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 19 September 2014.]

Are we in information overload?  It’s hard to think back to a time when Americans have been in such deep denial about so many things going on in the world – both here and abroad.  When I begin to think about the laundry list of current happenings, it seems never ending.  Let’s just illustrate a few of the major items to which we seem to pay no mind.

The campaign for ever more legislation to stop manmade global warming has always ignored the science involved, and in the last years has ignored and misrepresented hard data about actual things we can see and measure – things like global temperature which has been flat or falling during the last 15 plus years, the extent of polar ice caps which have never been bigger, new low temperature records and early snows, fewer extreme weather events like hurricanes and tornadoes, no catastrophic sea level rises, and the list goes on.  But our government controllers deny all this and are going forward at state and federal levels as if we had a proven climate emergency that needs more draconian legislation and regulation, right now.  We keep hearing ‘the debate is over’; that just is not so.

All over the world the United States has become a paper tiger in the eyes of radical Islam which is now comprised of multiple militia groups spread over vast regions of the Middle East and Africa, and stronger than ever.  One group has even beaten standing armies in two countries, and now rules over 8M people.  They execute our innocents with impunity and vow to raise their flag over our capitals.  And in this war between civilizations we are still playing around with semantics trying to figure out whether to call a war a war.  But it really doesn’t matter.  Because after our leader told us we didn’t have a strategy to deal with the situation, he decided come up with a strategy and make a big deal announcing it, which only confirmed that we really don’t have a strategy, but are instead engaged in a desperate pitch to cobble a coalition of reluctant ‘allies’ who really don’t care how the borders in the Middle East are redrawn.

And all the while we are told that our southern border has never been more secure, while data from Homeland Security and the Border Patrol tell us exactly the opposite, as they report illegal aliens now entering our homeland from over a hundred countries, including many from terrorist groups here to begin a new wave of attacks.  As many of our border regions have now become no-man’s land where even the Border Patrol dare not go, we are told that everything is secure down Mexico way.

Sandbox – 15sep14

[I salt this sandbox with a reminder to RR readers that Obama (with the enthusiastic aid of acolyte Schumer) is planning his next step to take the US down another notch – we are already 32 out of 34 developed countries.  Today in the 15sep14 WSJ lead editorial we read –

Any day now the White House and Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) will attempt to raise taxes on business, while making the U.S. tax code even more complex. The Obama and Schumer plans to punish businesses for moving their legal domicile overseas will arrive even as a new international ranking shows that the U.S. tax burden on business is close to the worst in the industrialized world. Way to go, Washington. … On Monday the Tax Foundation, which manages the widely followed State Business Tax Climate Index, will launch a new global benchmark, the International Tax Competitiveness Index. According to the foundation, the new index measures "the extent to which a country's tax system adheres to two important principles of tax policy: competitiveness and neutrality."  (chart filched from the article) - gjr]

Cultural Solidarity (updated 16sep14)

George Rebane

As we await this week’s vote for Scotland’s independence, my thoughts again turn to culture and its role in shaping a people and structuring a society.  Reviewing some of these notions with you at this time might even pique some discussion.  The basic idea here is that what a society can/will or cannot/will not do is constrained and guided by its culture.  Today Scotland is not alone in the desire for its culturally cohesive population to have a country where Scots can work and live according to their own laws and traditions, and according to their own values and mores, speaking their own language.  This is an ancient desire shared by all people around the world who have grown up in strong culture-defined communities.  Such life has given rise to powerful sentiments expressed in art and literature, and sentiments that have also led to revolutions, wars, and migrations.

Today, perhaps more than ever before, we see such movements of people wanting to relearn their heritage and band together with those like-minded to see if they too could improve their lot by mutually embracing their roots and working together in closer harmony.  The Scots are not alone.  Since the Treaty of Versailles (end of WW1), and again since the Cold War ended, we have seen dozens of culturally cohesive peoples gather together to work toward their ultimate mono-cultural independence.  Here the Scots are joined by the Catalans, Basques, Flemish, Kurds, Shias, Sunnis, …, and cohorts of USSR transplanted Russian speakers living in Russia’s ‘near abroad’.

From the opposite perspective, one of the lures of collectivism (especially in its Marxist-Leninist form) was the gathering of all peoples into one peaceful and productive global society to create an undifferentiated amalgam of humanity.  This would be achieved by the shedding of multitudes of discriminating and chafing cultures, and in their place adopting one common social contract that would be dictated by the over-arching state and imposed equally on all.  But again it has turned out that this is not how the realworld works.

It is obvious to all but the ideologically blindered that the form and function of multi-culturalism as promoted by progressives is grossly in error, and a stifling of all societies that have attempted to implement it.  Penning in different cultures on the same land mass, and then keeping them ‘peacefully’ in line by the government gun has satisfied no one.  Instead such autocratic cum tyrannical governance has exacerbated the cultural and ethnic divisions in these forcefully amalgamated populations.  As Chancellor Angela Merkel said, after years of Germany’s heroic attempts to assimilate its recently imported ethnicities from Eastern Europe, the Mideast, and Africa, “Multi-kulti does not work.”

Marijuana Ordinance Utility/Criteria

George Rebane

In the comment stream to 'Medical Marijuana Cultivation Initiative' I suggested that a better marijuana ordinance for Nevada County should be developed through a more systematic process starting with laying out what are the criteria that the provisions of such an ordinance should satisfy.  A collection of such criteria are also known as a ‘utility function’ against which candidate ordinances or their several provisions can be evaluated.  To be clear, in a reasonable development process such a utility function or set of criteria are agreed upon by the parties that will draft the ordinance BEFORE they start writing the individual provisions.

In the figure below I illustrate an example of such criteria for a marijuana ordinance (as I promised to do in the referenced comment stream).  Readers may now comment on the adequacy of what I have offered and/or suggest modifications to it.  I will do my best to incorporate all such reasonable changes, and then we can see what kind of consensus can be had at this level of developing a better ordinance.  All should understand that if we can’t agree on what a good ordinance looks like, then we have no hope of agreeing on ANY fully fleshed out ordinance, and it’s back to politics as usual.  Going through this procedure should be illuminating (even in its rejection).

Sandbox - 9sep14

[The belatedly refreshed sandbox is again open for business.  We start this new load of sand with an excellent graphic commentary (filched from the 9sep14 issue of The Union) from our brother Bob that goes a long way to explaining how these beautiful foothills got that smelly purple tinge. gjr]

While Waiting for a Backbone (updated 12sep14)

George Rebane

We anxiously await President Obama’s foreign policy speech tomorrow in which he will again make “perfectly clear” a strategy with which no one, and I do mean NO ONE, in the world has seen as anything but meak, muddled, or missing.  RR is on record as one of the earliest to recognize that this president is a naïf on foreign affairs (including geography), and demonstrably not suited for his high position – most recently expanded on 10aug14 in the ‘The Foreign Policy of a Community Organizer’ and the 7sep14 ‘Shamed into Strategy?’.

The main problem with Barack Obama has turned out that he has no backbone nor much sitting on top of it for understanding America’s required and, yes, self-sacrificing role in the maintenance of a liberal world order.  He arrived at our helm at the terminus of a lavishly ladled and lapped up line of bullshit that defined the sum of his ‘achievements’, and then thought he could also make those assets work in prime time on the international stage.  It turned out that the only ones he would bamboozle in that effort was the Nobel committee – but that’s another story.

Shamed into a strategy? (updated 17sep14)

George Rebane

The pen is mightier than the sword only to the extent that it can invoke the sword.

Every stream of lame confusion put out by this administration is claimed to be “perfectly clear” by Josh Earnest, the shamelessly earnest shill who currently mans the WH press room.  That nothing this president says or promises contains any semblance of clarity is finally perfectly clear to his constituents and America’s allies.

Ms Lisa Navarrette of La Raza went on TV last week, pissed to the gills because Obama will not fulfill his promise to Hispanics that he would grant amnesty to 6M illegal aliens before the end of this summer.  To the rest of us he assured that his new ‘immigration policy’ will not include amnesty for anyone.  But to La Raza he is now revising his (wink-wink) promise that he’ll do them right soon after the November election.  You see, he doesn’t want to lose any of those tenuous Demo voters in a close election, so he does what comes naturally – he lies, and his devoted thought-free sheeple will also do what comes naturally in the voting booth.  Clear?  Capice?

That our feckless chief community organizer is worse than a 2x4 with a painted face was made clear in two major essays published this weekend in the 7sep14 WSJ.  I bring them to your attention under cover of false modesty since RR has been way ahead of this curve for years.

Historian Dr Robert Kagan at the liberal Brookings Institution writes a major analysis of the progress of western geo-strategic thought over the last century that has now developed into a pretty hopeless quagmire (‘America’s Dangerous Aversion to Conflict’).  He argues that “the U.S. increasingly yearns to escape the harsh realities of war, but as recent events make clear, raw force remains a key element in international politics.”

Decades of progressive pabulum drilled into our heads that ‘wars never solve anything’ – when in fact war or its imminent prospect have prompted the only solutions in international affairs – is now so dominant in what passes for thought in the west, that the world’s bad guys are doing exactly what they have done for millennia when such nonsense rises to the top.  Kagan reviews the strategies of Germany and Japan during the inter-bellum years of the last century.  Our president has understood none of this, but you can bet that his handlers read such pieces, know exactly who is the intended target, and are sensitive to how such prominent messages will affect the Dems chances in the voting booths this November.

Nationally syndicated columnist Peggy Noonan takes a distinctly Socratic approach as she leads her administration readers through a series of questions that, correctly answered, point to a family of strategy options that have lain fallow in this White House.  In ‘The World Needs a Clarion’ she concludes that “Obama can't lead a coalition if nobody can follow his thinking.”

Noonan opens with, “It is a muddle, a murk and a desperate-looking thing, the president on the subject of the Islamic State.”  This was also the message from America’s allies at last week’s NATO summit in Wales.  Their leaders told our messiah that he needs to sit on something besides his thumb and re-assume America’s historical leadership position in world affairs, especially when bad guys from all quarters recognize that we have a junior varsity player at the helm.  But apparently that message did get through to others at State, Defense, and 1600 Pennsylvania.

Today we were told that things have recently been so perfectly clear about our foreign policy that this Wednesday President Obama will go on national TV to remind us and the world how inattentive we have been as he will try to spell it all out again.  See, hubris hides shame every time.

Lucky Strike Extra!  Henry Kissinger, that perennial sage of realpolitik, has written World Order, a timely book that instructs us how world order has been maintained and also forfeited over the centuries – please fasten your seatbelts.  Book review here.

[17sep14 update]  I concur with the points on the House floor made by Rep Tom McClintock (here)regarding our response to ISIS.

Ruminations – 5sep14 (updated 6sep14)

George Rebane

Google is diving into the anti-aging drug markets by teaming with R&D firm AbbVie and deals with big pharma in the offing.  This is one of the inevitable tacks that the big search firm is taking with Dr Ray Kurzweil at its technology helm.  Kurzweil (q.v.), a proselytizer of the Singularity, is a longtime advocate of human longevity, and has been going through some serious pill taking to assure that he survives until he can merge with the smart machines.  (more here)

The Wales NATO summit may have eked out something productive, but just barely.  To stop Putin from applying Hitler’s Sudetenland paradigm to Russia’s neighbors, NATO has promised to set up a brigade sized rapid deployment force in central Europe.  This brigade could then be quickly moved to anywhere from the Baltics to Poland’s eastern boundary to counter the Russian bear’s new program of expansion.  (But the Baltics and Poland have a long memory of British/French guarantees from 1939 as they were overrun by Stalin and Hitler.  When they called London and Paris for help, the response was, ‘We were just kidding.’)

What was highlighted again at the meeting is the EU’s timidity and the sorry state of its militaries.  Participation in NATO calls for its members to spend at least 2% of GDP on defense.  Only four members qualify – US, GB, Estonia, and Greece.  If Germany, France, Italy, or Spain had to send troops to an eastern front, they would have to hitchhike.

And no one really wanted any part of our president’s new coalition of the willing to stop ISIS in the middle east.  That for the simple reason that our NATO allies no longer trust US leadership without which no projection of force is possible.  In the meanwhile Russia and radical Islam continue their ‘outreach’.

Medical Marijuana Cultivation Initiative - Nevada County Ballot Measure S (updated 6sep14)

[This November Nevada County voters will decide whether to adopt a new and revised marijuana ordinance or keep the existing one.  The marijuana cultivation issue continues to generate more heat than light.  Here is one comparative analysis that was published in the September edition of The Nugget, the monthly newsletter of Nevada County Republican Women Federated.  Its author Jo Ann Rebane is 2nd VP and Legislative Chair of the NCRWF.  (She also happens to be my wife.)

The piece includes a downloadable pdf of a spreadsheet that compares by attribute the current ordinance with the ballot’s Measure S.  I have also included that spreadsheet below the text.  Readers may wish to consider and share a third column that contains their druthers for a new ordinance. gjr]

Jo Ann Rebane

For a moment, set aside these facts: that Marijuana is listed by the Federal Controlled Substances Act as a Schedule 1 Drug which has a high potential for abuse; that, according to Dr. Mitchell S. Rosenthal founder of Phoenix House, substance abuse treatment and prevention center, “…pot damages the heart and lungs, increases the incidence of anxiety, depression and schizophrenia…”; that marijuana does lasting damage to the brains of adolescents and it impairs learning, memory and judgment according to Dr. Nora Volkow’s  research at  Northwestern University; that Colorado and Washington states have legalized recreational use of marijuana; that California voters in 1996 approved Prop 215 allowing marijuana cultivation for medical purposes only; and that cities and counties may adopt and enforce ordinances consistent with the state’s health and safety code. 

What we do need to focus on right here in Nevada County is Measure S on the November ballot.  According to Nevada County Supervisor Richard Anderson, proponents of Measure S want voters to replace a liberal ordinance with a more liberal ordinance.  The current medical marijuana cultivation ordinance, adopted in May 2012 specifies where, how, and how much medical marijuana may be cultivated in unincorporated residential and agricultural areas of the county. The current ordinance has enforcement, appeal and abatement provisions, and provides the community a means to alleviate nuisance marijuana “grows” and encourages those who legitimately grow it for their personal medical use to be good neighbors.