..."callousness and narcissism were redefined as caring and compassion."

Victor Davis Hanson writes in part in American Greatness,

...One of the strangest sights in California is the horde of trailers, ratty cars, and dilapidated Winnebagos parked throughout moralistic Menlo Park, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale, juxtaposed with gleaming high-tech corporate campuses. The most empathetic and caring people in the world, as they remind us hourly, turn out to be pretty callous about the “losers” in their midst who live in mobile and makeshift quarters on the street to keep Silicon Valley humming.

...To walk in areas of downtown San Francisco, Los Angeles, Fresno, or Sacramento is to venture into the pages of Boccaccio or Dickens, as thousands defecate, inject, eat, drink, and urinate on the sidewalks. Should the coronavirus ever incubate there among California’s hundreds of thousands on the street, the result would make the current nationwide caseload look like the common cold. Indeed, an epidemic among the tents and grocery carts of the state’s main cities would become hideous and terrifying—and right out of the accounts of Thucydides or Procopius.

...In California’s upside-down morality, what is ethical is allowing thousands to live in fetid filth and to endanger their own health and that of an entire city, or waving in millions of foreign nationals without health audits, background checks, or legal permission. The Silicon Valley moralist at coffee seethes that Trump “put people in cages,” while in private is relieved that there are not caravans of tens of thousands headed his way from Central America—in the age of the coronavirus.

What is now considered unethical would be either to provide planned suburban or rural homeless campuses with sanitation, clean food, and dormitory shelters, or to ask illegal immigrants in their home countries first to apply for U.S. residence through legal channels, to undergo legal, health, and job audits, and in the interval to learn English and the customs and laws of their desired new home.

Instead, opening the southern border to millions of destitute Central Americans and southern Mexican nationals is proof of one’s morality among the wealthy of La Jolla, Santa Barbara, Pacific Heights, and Sausalito—again at least in the abstract. Few of them venture to a Merced, Sanger, Madera, or Firebaugh school to see the impact of tens of thousands of immigrant youths, without English, money, or skills suddenly overwhelming local school districts.

Fewer experience the effects on driving and law enforcement when millions of foreign immigrants navigate without prior experience of U.S. traffic laws, and without licenses, insurance, and registration.

No moralist seems to worry that tens of thousands of Americans, among them Mexican-American citizens in particular, depend on access to state and federal dialysis centers and hospital emergency rooms, many of which are now overwhelmed with non-citizen new patients.

...Those legislators and executives who dreamed up decriminalizing thefts under $950 never worried about how the lost inventory of a family-owned store destroys middle-class aspirations. They certainly are careful about where not to shop, especially not where hordes of teens swarm and walk out each with mysteriously less than $950 in loot.

California has become a cruel and unusual state because callousness and narcissism were redefined as caring and compassion.

Read more here.

Priorities

No, thanks!

Tucker Carlson's show has been in California recently because he thinks the 2020 Democrats want our government policies to look like California's. Read more here.

Traffic fines in California

Don Surber reports,

The Sacramento Bee reported, "Turning right on a red light without fully stopping will cost you $500 in California. Parking blocking a wheelchair access curb could get you a $1,100 ticket. Is your license plate paint peeling? Some car owners have been hit with a $1,000 ticket for that.

"State officials who set those fees are now acknowledging that the high amounts are threatening the financial stability of lower-income drivers who can’t afford to pay those amounts.

"In his state budget proposal, Gov. Gavin Newsom is calling on judicial authorities to create a statewide program that will allow some of California’s poorer drivers to have their traffic citation amounts cut by 50 percent or more.

"If approved by the legislature, Newsom’s proposal would expand an existing traffic fine reduction program called myCitation which exists in four counties: San Francisco, Shasta, Tulare and Ventura."

If the fines are too high, why not reduce them for everyone?

The story said the state collected $1.4 billion in traffic fines last year, which answered my question.

"California residents are tiring of one-party straitjacket rule."

In PJ Media, Victor Davis Hanson writes in part,

...After three decades of radical progressivism, California residents are tiring of one-party straitjacket rule. The hard-liberal order normalized massive power blackouts, the nation's highest array of taxes, the forest mismanagement that fuels deadly fires, an epidemic of homelessness in major cities, eroding schools, ossified infrastructure and soaring energy costs.

The final irony?

Those most hurt -- and growing the most angry -- are the immigrants who once fled to a different California that now no longer exists.

Read more here.

California's sad state

Victor Davis Hanson's latest is in National Review. He writes there about the current state of California.

A progressive utopia

From the satirical Babylon Bee:

SACRAMENTO, CA—California is being heralded as a progressive utopia after eliminating electricity entirely.

Working by candelight at his desk, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a new law that bans electricity, propelling the state into a progressive futuristic paradise. Newsom said he got the idea while experiencing the latest round of rolling blackouts in the state. He decided to make the blackouts the law of the land.

"Other, backward states still use carbon-heavy electricity, gas for heating and cooking, and wasteful air conditioning," he said proudly as people applauded around him. "But not on my watch. California has progressed beyond these archaic concepts."

The law also bans vehicles, forcing pedestrians to use innovative new horse-driven carriages.

Next on the legislative docket? The elimination of water-wasting toilets, to be replaced by just going on the sidewalk. A pilot program in San Francisco has been very successful, according to the homeless population there.

No thanks, Nancy!

They don't all hate us!

I don't read much favorable about California anymore. So let me tell you about a 2 on 2 basketball game my son Jon and I had with a father and son from Berkeley yesterday in Santa Fe. The Californians were as nice as they could be. They were on a vacation trip of the west. You could tell they were enjoying themselves immensely because they had such good attitudes. No one kept score, but it was a very closely fought game. I made one feeble attempt to engage them about life in California, telling them I have heard that large numbers of people are leaving California. The man responded, "You wouldn't know it from the freeway traffic!"

New Governor wants Californians to stop eating paper receipts

Oh, and he also wants to tax drinking water.

Make 'em eat seaweed!

I assume by now you know that California has passed legislation to regulate cow farts! Kevin Boyd reports in Rare,

Depending on how the regulations are crafted, they could result in price increases on milk and other dairy products for consumers all over the country. California dairy farmers say they’re already struggling with high labor costs, a drought, and low milk prices. The new regulations, combined with the mandatory increased overtime pay that was enacted by the California legislature this year, could force many dairies out of business.

California regulators plan to combat the methane that is produced by the digestive systems of cows. Cows release the methane when they pass gas, belch, or produce manure.

One of the ways they plan to reduce methane emissions is by requiring farmers to change the diets of their cows. For example, Australian scientists have discovered that adding a sprinkle of dried seaweed to a cow’s diet reduces the amount of methane it produces by 99 percent. The same scientists who made that discovery are now trying to scale up seaweed production to meet global demand. There is no estimate on how much this seaweed will cost.

Read more here.

California politicians' biggest critic

Victor Davis Hanson answers a tweet from a California woman who prefers Silicon Valley to the nation's "hinterlands." She is Melinda Byerley, Founder, TimeshareCMO. Victor writes,

Thousands of Silicon Valley tech workers, in addition to tens of thousands of low-wage and often minority laborers, live in their automobiles and vans which dot streets where they work—especially in the environs of the signature companies of Silicon Valley.

Multiple families cram into single Redwood City homes. Why, when the market capitalization of companies like Apple, Facebook and Google reaches nearly three trillion dollars, and there are vast expanses of open land between the Pacific Ocean and freeway 280, are not there not affordable housing projects, especially in a state that virtue-signals its egalitarianism?

You may think the hinterland is, in your words, a “sh**hole”, but your own state is home to the most impoverished residents in the nation, where outbreaks of hepatitis and typhus are now not uncommon. California’s poverty rate ranges at about 20 percent of the resident population; one-third of the nation’s residents on some form of public assistance now live in California. Wealth disparity is among the most acute in the nation. Crime now makes many California cities quite unsafe.

In fact, hundreds of California businesses are relocating to red-state America, often in areas without the natural beauty and climate of California, given that they find the infrastructure, government regulations, schools, safety, and power and fuel costs far superior to those in California. New changes in the tax codes and continued depressing news about rising California crime, homelessness, failing schools and public agencies may accelerate the trend.

The people of rural America outside California in fact have a lot going for them. They are hardly “stupid”, and they feel no need to flee the public-school system. As far as bars go, I think there may well be more bars per capita in cities of California, Silicon Valley included, than what I have seen in places like Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio.

Again, I bear no animus toward you. I wrote not “pot-shots,” but simply quoted your own words—as did hundreds of other writers and journalists who found them emblematic, as I did, of a cultural and political denseness that helps to explain the Trump victory. Your current scurrilous tweet alleging that I am a Nazi sympathizer only confirms your original unhinged posting. So not only do you write recklessly and inaccurately, but you display a certain crudity perhaps unbecoming of a CEO of a corporation. That you couch your views with an aura of self-assumed cultural superiority is really quite sad.

Read more here.

Protecting criminals

Bookworm writes about a crime epidemic in San Francisco and Oakland. There is an epidemic of car break-ins. Also,

The Bay Area had the nation’s highest rate of car theft last year — and the problem is getting worse in San Francisco, statistics show.

...Have you all heard the expression that “the fish rots from the head”? I’m guessing that some of you young’uns haven’t. It means that in an organization, if the head of that organization is corrupt, that corruption will inevitably trickle down, eventually permeating the entire organization.

Since 1989, San Francisco has been a “sanctuary city.” What this means is that it aggressively encourages lawlessness within its borders. Illegal aliens who find themselves in San Francisco are pretty much immune to any serious consequences, not just for being in the country illegally, but for any other crimes they might have committed along the way. Putting an illegal alien in the criminal justice cross hairs runs the risk that federal immigration authorities might nab that criminal and return him to his country of origin.

This is a rotten system, one that creates a protected class of criminals. Just read about Katie Steinle — her murder and the criminal “justice” travesty that followed — to understand how corrupt this system is.

The same rot is in Oakland, a city directly across the Bay from San Francisco, and a city (as one of the above articles noted) that place a close second to San Francisco when it comes to car-related crimes. It was in Oakland, just a couple of weeks ago, that the mayor broadcast an imminent ICE raid, allowing hundreds of dangerous felons to avoid being removed from Oakland’s streets.

...The entire state of California has declared itself a sanctuary state, willing to do whatever it can to prevent federal law enforcement from rounding up dangerous criminals who are in this country unlawfully. The state of California is also making best efforts to circumvent the new tax law. As written, the law no longer allows high tax states to subsidize themselves as the expense of low tax states. That’s been morally rotten for years, and California wants to violate federal law to keep the rot alive.

Read more here.

"In California, civilization is speeding in reverse"

Victor Davis Hanson describes what life is like in the agricultural valley around Fresno, California.

The California solution is always the same: the law-abiding must adjust to the non-law-abiding.

...In California, civilization is speeding in reverse—well aside from the decrepit infrastructure, dismal public schools, and sky-high home prices. Or rather, the state travels halfway in reverse: anything involving the private sector (smartphones, Internet, new cars, TV, or getting solar panels installed) is 21st-century. Anything involving the overwhelmed government or public utilities (enforcing dumping laws, licensing dogs, hooking up solar panel meters to the grid, observing common traffic courtesies) is early 20th-century.

Law enforcement in California hinges on ignoring felonies to focus on misdemeanors and infractions. Or rather, if a Californian is deemed to be law-abiding, a legal resident, and with some means, the regulatory state will audit, inspect, and likely fine his property and behavior in hopes of raising revenue. That is a safe means of compensating for the reality that millions, some potentially dangerous, are not following the law, and can only be forced to comply at great cost and in a fashion that will seem politically incorrect.

The practical result of a schizophrenic postmodern regulatory and premodern frontier state? Throw out onto the road three sacks of garbage with your incriminating power bill in them, or dump the cooking oil of your easily identifiable mobile canteen on the side of the road, and there are no green consequences. Install a leach line that ends up one foot too close to a water well, and expect thousands of dollars of fines or compliance costs.

Elite progressive virtue-signaling is in direct proportion to elite apartheid: the more one champions green statutes, the plight of illegal aliens, the need for sanctuary cities, or the evils of charter schools, so all the more the megaphone is relieved that housing prices are high and thus exclusionary to “them.”

...California is no longer really a single state. Few in the Bay Area have ever been to the southern Sierra Nevada foothill communities, or the west side of the Central Valley, or the upper quarter of the state. Coastal California is simply far more left-wing than other blue states; interior California is far more right-wing than most red states; increasingly, the former dictate to and rule the latter.

The sharp divide between Massachusetts and Mississippi requires 1,500 miles; in California, the similar cultural distance is about 130 miles from Menlo Park to Mendota. Add California’s neo-Confederate ideas into the equation—such as nullification and sanctuary cities—and we seem on the verge of some sort of secession. (Would the Central Valley follow the path of West Virginia, split off, and remain in the Union?)

...A cynical neighbor once summed up the counter-intuitive rules to me: if you are in a car collision, hope that you are hit by, rather than hit an illegal alien. If someone breaks into your home and you are forced to use a firearm, hope that you are wounded nonlethally in the exchange, at least more severely than is the intruder. And if you are cited by an agency, hope it is for growing an acre of marijuana rather than having a two-foot puddle on your farm classified as an inland waterway.

I could add a fourth: it is always legally safer to allow your dog to be devoured by a stray pit-bull than to shoot the pit-bull to save your dog.

...In a state where millions cannot be held accountable, those who can will be—both to justify a regulatory octopus, and as social justice for their innate unwarranted privilege.

What Leftism has done to California

At the Never Yet Melted blog, Fifth Generation Californian Steve Baldwin says good-bye to the Golden State, refuting in the process all the liberal boasting about California’s prosperity under Leftism.

[L]iberals like to claim California socialism is working by pointing to the much-heralded statistic that “California’s economy is the 6th largest in the world” as calculated by the state’s Department of Finance. Indeed, California’s $2.62 trillion economy is larger than that of France, Canada, Brazil, Russia, and Italy. However, that GDP stat does not factor in California’s cost of living, which is 36.2% higher than the national cost of living. As Carson Bruno writes in Real Clear Markets, “using the cost of living adjusted data from the International Monetary Fund and adjusting California’s GDP data provides a better snapshot of California’s economic standing in the world. Doing so shows that California is actually the 12th largest economy — a drop of 6 spots — and actually puts the state below Mexico.”

Moreover, as Bruno points out, Silicon Valley “accounted for 50% of California’s private industry real GDP growth.” In other words, without a few dozen mega profitable high-tech Silicon Valley firms such as Apple, Google, and Facebook, California’s GDP would be significantly smaller.

However, as economic blogger Richard Rider points out, the aggregate GDP statistic is really not a good indicator of a state’s economic health, especially since one industry appears to be propping up the “6th largest economy” myth. California has over 39 million people, more than any other state, so a far more accurate assessment of its economy, Rider writes, would be per capita GDP as compared to the rest of the country. After adjusting the GDP figures to account for the cost of living (COL), the Golden State ends up with a paltry 37th place ranking within the U.S.A., with a $45,696 per capital GDP. Even rustbelt states, such as Michigan and Ohio, have a higher adjusted per capita GDP. Despite Silicon Valley’s high-tech giants, California barely squeezes past impoverished New Mexico. Rider also reports that when one looks at per capita GDP stats for the rest of the world, California ranks 19th, but those stats don’t factor in the COL data; if they did, California would be even further down the rankings internationally.

One should not also assume that high-tech companies are a permanent feature of California’s economy. Already, the extremely high cost of living in Silicon Valley has, since 2016, caused more Silicon Valley employees to leave the state than it has attracted. With a few high-tech companies having left California for other states such as Virginia, Texas and North Carolina, it’s only a matter of time before this turns into a flood.

But it’s not just Silicon Valley employees fleeing California; it’s productive — and job-creating — citizens from all over the state. As Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox wrote in the Mercury News last April, “the largest group of outmigrants tends to be middle-aged people making between $100,000 and $200,000 annually.”

Indeed, California has done everything possible to make it difficult for businesses and employers to produce goods and services. California now has the highest state income tax rate and the highest state sales tax rate in the country. Our gas tax rate is fourth-highest, but if you add in the 10-12 cent “cap and trade” cost per gallon, we have the highest gas tax in the country. Based on 2014 numbers, California’s single-family residence property tax is the eighth highest in the country with the median homeowner property tax bill 93% higher than the average property tax bill for the other 49 states. As for the state’s corporate income tax rate, it is also eighth in the country. And let’s not forget our small business tax, a minimum of $800, even if no profit is earned.

Overall, the Tax Foundation ranks California as fifth worse in overall tax burden, but the state is especially hostile to its high earners who start businesses and create most of the jobs. Indeed, the top 1% pays 50% of all state income taxes. Moreover, the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council ranked California as having the worst anti-business climate in the country; the American Tort Reform Foundation ranks the state as the “worst state judicial hellhole” in the U.S. and the national Chamber of Commerce rates California as having the fourth-worst business climate.

If California is such a prosperous state as liberals claim, why does it have the highest poverty rate in the nation? According to the Census Bureau, the poverty rate is 23.4%, which is 17% higher than second place Nevada. Indeed, while California has 12% of the nation’s population, it is home to 33% of the nation’s TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) welfare recipients, more than the next seven states combined.

What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million. The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs. Liberals claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true. It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6 billion, or at least $1,800 per household.

Carrying offending pronoun users away

The Babylonian Bee reports,

California governor Jerry Brown signed an executive order Tuesday re-opening the internment camps utilized to illegally detain Japanese citizens during World War II in order to forcibly imprison anyone who misgenders another individual by using the wrong pronoun for him, her, or them.

The camps will be open for offenders by January 2018.

“Use the darn pronouns or shut up,” Brown said in a press conference. “Tolerance is so important to us in this great state that we can no longer tolerate those who disagree.”

“Every American has the right to free speech, so long as it agrees with the spirit of the age,” he added.

The governor has also reportedly okayed the expenditure of up to $7.5 billion on a state-of-the-art alarm system that will allow citizens to press a button on a nearby kiosk or using their smartphone, summoning a team of state “thought police” to carry the offending pronoun user away, “no questions asked.”

The measure will be funded by a 3,000% increase on the state’s modest gasoline taxes, sources confirmed.

California's woes

At Investors.com, Victor Davis Hanson analyzes California's woes, and wonders if it will ever thrive again. Read it here.

"A wee bit hypocritical?"

Bookworm writes about the abuse of gays in the seven countries from which President Trump sought a temporary travel ban. California opposed the president's actions. Now California has instituted a travel ban on state-funded and state-sponsored travel to states in America that do not have laws to California's liking on LGBTQ issues.

In June 2017, California announced that it was banning all travel to states that it identifies as having policies discriminating in any way against LGBTQer conduct. This list currently includes Texas, Alabama, Kentucky, South Dakota, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Each of those named states has passed one or more laws holding that First Amendment religious liberty and freedom of association means that people whose faith disapproves of homosexual conduct cannot be forced to provide personal services for LGBTQ weddings, provide adoption services to LGBTQ couples, and share bathrooms with individuals who claim to be transgendered.

It is important to note that in none of those states are there official or unofficial policies calling for the physical abuse, imprisonment, or execution of people on the LGBTQ etc. spectrum. None of these states have laws preventing people in the LGBTQers from marrying or adopting children. Nevertheless, even as California extends an unlimited, un-vetted welcome to people coming from countries in which the law and the culture actively attack, imprison, and murder LGBTQers, it cannot bear to be in the same country as states that honor everyone’s First Amendment freedoms.

Is it just me or is California being a wee bit hypocritical here? Even worse than hypocrisy, it’s practicing a dangerous form of “soft” secession that would justify firing shots, just as Lincoln did against the South:

As we noted when California inaugurated this policy, American federalism is based on the agreement that different states can pursue different policies (within Constitutional bounds) while retaining equal status within the union. California’s decision to escalate the culture war with “sanctions” against states with different political orientations represents a direct challenge to America’s federal structure.

This new order could have a major symbolic impact—for example, by making it difficult or impossible for University of California sports teams to compete against the University of Texas. And could lead to retaliatory measures by the targeted red states: They could, for example, up the ante not only by enacting reciprocal travel bans but also by refusing to cooperate with California’s government in criminal investigations, declining to share tax data, or prohibiting companies from selling products to California’s state government. How long before a coalition of liberal states begins to collectively and systematically impose sanctions on conservative ones, or vice versa?

To say that Democrats don’t play well with others is an understatement. What’s worrisome is when this immature playground behavior extends to matters of core constitutionalism.

Read more here.

What's wrong with California?

hat tip Ed Driscoll, who links to an article by Michael Snyder entitled 16 Reasons not to live in California

California Democrats legalize child prostitution!

Travis Allen writes at the Washington Examiner,

Beginning on Jan. 1, prostitution by minors will be legal in California. Yes, you read that right.

SB 1322 bars law enforcement from arresting sex workers who are under the age of 18 for soliciting or engaging in prostitution, or loitering with the intent to do so. So teenage girls (and boys) in California will soon be free to have sex in exchange for money without fear of arrest or prosecution.

This terribly destructive legislation was written and passed by the progressive Democrats who control California's state government with a two-thirds "supermajority." To their credit, they are sincere in their belief that decriminalizing underage prostitution is good public policy that will help victims of sex trafficking. Unfortunately, the reality is that the legalization of underage prostitution suffers from the fatal defect endemic to progressive-left policymaking: it ignores experience, common sense and most of all human nature — especially its darker side.

The unintended but predictable consequence of how the real villains — pimps and other traffickers in human misery — will respond to this new law isn't difficult to foresee. Pimping and pandering will still be against the law whether it involves running adult women or young girls. But legalizing child prostitution will only incentivize the increased exploitation of underage girls. Immunity from arrest means law enforcement can't interfere with minors engaging in prostitution — which translates into bigger and better cash flow for the pimps. Simply put, more time on the street and less time in jail means more money for pimps, and more victims for them to exploit.

As Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O'Malley, a national leader on human trafficking issues, told the media, "It just opens up the door for traffickers to use these kids to commit crimes and exploit them even worse." Another prosecutor insightfully observed that if traffickers wrote legislation to protect themselves, it would read like SB 1322.

Minors involved in prostitution are clearly victims, and allowing our law enforcement officers to pick these minors up and get them away from their pimps and into custody is a dramatically better solution than making it legal for them to sell themselves for sex. That only deepens their victimization and renders law enforcement powerless to stop the cycle of abuse. SB 1322 is not simply misguided — its consequences are immoral.

Unfortunately for Californians, SB 1322 isn't an outlier — it's only the tip of the liberal iceberg. 2017 will see the Golden State subjected to wave after wave of laws taking effect that are well-intentioned but disastrous embodiments of progressive utopianism.

One such new Democratic-authored law throws open the door to even greater government dependency on the part of the poor by rolling back proven reforms. In 1996, welfare reform was one of the greatest social legislation achievements of the last century, ending the lifetime welfare system and putting millions of Americans on the road to self-reliance and self-respect. In its wake, California lawmakers passed a law barring increased payments to women who have more children while still on welfare, in order to encourage women to achieve independence before having more children.

It's a tough provision that works — which was apparently irrelevant to Gov. Jerry Brown, who just signed a bill repealing that prohibition. Henceforth, no matter how many children someone has while on welfare, the state government will ratchet up payments with each child, with no limit. Incredibly, the Democratic author of this bill claims she wants to discourage women from having more children while on welfare — but instead passed legislation replacing that effective reform with a law that restarts the cycle of welfare dependency.