PARADISE, CA – NOVEMBER 09: Sacramento Metropolitan firefighters battle the Camp Fire in Magalia, Calif., Friday, November 9, 2018. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)A business that was destroyed by the Camp Fire continues to smolder on November 9, 2018 in Paradise, California.
If you’ve got time (about an hour and 20 minutes), please listen to this conversation between 2 radio hosts and Prof. Peter Kolb of the U. of Montana’s Dept. of Forest Management about the recent and deadly fires in California (below at the bottom). Prof. Kolb was a native Californian with family still living in the state. The “burning” question for most everyone concerns the extent California state policies have contributed to the danger of destructive wildland fires in the state. The quick and short answer shouldn’t be a quick and short answer. Yet, the prevailing climate of governing opinion in the state can’t be ignored, a view that leans in the direction of environmental preservation at nearly all costs. It is a factor bunched together with California’s unique conditions.
Here are some often-mentioned points to ponder:
(1) Climate change: Yes, we’re in a warming trend, but long term climate changes can’t be adjusted like your wall thermostat. Besides, unless you’re able to convince 2 billion Chinese and Indians to stop they’re economic growth, global mitigations are highly unlikely. Greenie energy like wind and solar aren’t a substitute for fossil fuels in propelling a poor country into prosperity. Period.
Indian coal-fired power plant. (Image by Smeet Chowdhury)
(2) Drought: It’s a fact of life regardless of warming trends, and it’s only exacerbated by the state’s hot dry-summer climate. This raises the concerns about the state’s measures, if any, to alleviate the annually recurring dry spells. Do they intensify or lessen the fire danger? There’s reason to doubt the efficacy of many of the policies that might exist.
(3) Foliage: California has biomes uniquely suited to its annual and extensive dry periods such as chaparral on the coasts and foothills . These are plants that can survive the dry periods alongside the dry grasses and dead forest litter. If the under-story of “fine fuels” ignites, a fire will race through with mounting intensity.
California chaparral biome.California chaparral biome.
(4) El Diablo, the Santa Anas: These eastern hot and dry winds are a natural feature of California’s climate. They exist regardless of climate change. Since they are as persistent as the coastal surf, what has the state done to deal with their inevitable consequences? My guess: nothing much.
The Santa Ana winds as seen from space.
(5) Development practices in WUI (Wild-Urban-Interface): This refers to the aesthetic preference of many residents in the state for trees and brush against building walls in that uneven zone between wildlands and structures. It’s a disaster-in-waiting in times of hot, dry, and windy conditions in California’s dry-summer biomes.
Residence in Paradise, Ca. Pay close to the landscaping with its foliage adjacent to the structure.Another example in Paradise, Ca.
(6) California’s policies: It’s a state in the grip of environmentalism. The “ism” is a single-minded preference for a form of nature preservation without humans. Wildland management policies reflect this bias. Fuel builds up in the hinterlands due to restrictions on measures to reduce the fuel load. Such as, the state requires a “forest management plan” to remove dead trees and brush on a person’s property. Of course, the rule and regulations about it are enforced by an elaborate bureaucracy. Be prepared to spend $5,000-$10,000.
Tree mortality at Bass Lake, Sierra National Forest.Dead trees in Sierra National Forest.
(7) California’s decaying infrastructure: The state’s water storage and delivery systems are now approaching 5 decades or older and were built for a population half the size. In like manner, decades of greenie mandates and regulations are corrupting the state’s grid. Rising electricity demands on an aging grid can contribute to mishaps like the one just outside of Paradise, Ca. California’s answer is to raise taxes on an already over-taxed population, all the while undermining the physical grid by forcing the utilities to subsidize greenie visions of utopia at the expense of maintenance. And of course, the governing classes will answer with a call to raise rates.
Power lines and electrical equipment are a leading cause of California wildfires. Increased loads on the lines cause them to sag. (photo:Los Angeles Times)Solar and wind farm, Palm Springs, Ca. With so much emphasis on “sustainable” sources, the traditional grid has the potential to suffer from reduced upkeep. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)
In the end, California has the worst roads, a dilapidated water system, an energy grid that is environmentally snazzy but aging into incontinence, and the all-too-familiar recurrence of fires capable of reproducing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Just saying.
How is it possible that California gave the country Ronald Reagan, especially seen from this point in time? In 2016, Hillary’s victory margin over Trump in California was 4.3 million votes. Her nationwide popular vote bested him by 2.9 million. That means she lost by 1.4 million everywhere else. California is to the Democrats what Saudi Arabia is to the oil market. California’s blue is darkening to black – and “black” as in black hole of intergalactic fame, not race. And that means an intoxication with taxes. All that government with its programs and fashionable crusades is expensive.
The blueness has tailed off into self-flagellation. California voters this year had the opportunity to free itself of its 12 cents/gal gas tax increase but Prop. 6 failed spectacularly (51-45 early in the count) . People in the state like their high taxes. Oh, I suppose at least partly, they see it as absolutely essential in saving the planet, even though the scheme was billed as a way to pay for roads and bridges that couldn’t be paid by the state’s other astronomically high taxes.
But I don’t see how California’s 36 million population will have much sway in lowering the planet’s temps when compared to 2 billion Chinese and Indians (the subcontinent variety). The denizens of the rest of the world now know that living in the dirt isn’t the only option. Their elevation out of the hut isn’t going to happen by forsaking carbon and living according to the precepts of Marin County “sustainability” … and Zambians know it. Don’t expect such inescapable logic to penetrate the state’s semi-literate hipsters and coastal fashionistas in their wine soirées.
Evidence of tax inebriation didn’t have to wait for the 2018 midterms and Prop 6. No sooner had the Republican House and Senate blasted their tax cuts to the president’s desk for his signature in 2018 than the suzerains of the state’s ruling party went into hyper-drive to undermine them even before Trump’s ink was dry.
Bills began popping up in the state’s legislature to stick it to “corporations”, the nomenclature of virtue-signaling for today’s hip lefties. The Dems’ Kevin McCarty boasted, “It’s time for middle class tax justice”. What does “middle class tax justice” look like? Well, it means to shaft California businesses with a jump in the corporate tax rate from 21 to 35 percent. The “middle class” shtick is more virtue-signaling to the state’s real overburdened and shrinking middle class – overburdened by the likes of McCarty and his colleagues.
Getting beyond the boilerplate rhetoric, though, it’s just plain ol’ vengeance for losing in 2016.
Now, what to do about the tax-cut bill’s undeniable justice in refusing to continue to force low-tax states to bail out high-tax states with a complete federal write-off of exorbitant state and local taxes, the “state and local tax deduction” (SALT)? The puppy love of tax-happy states for nearly everything government is the well-spring for ingenious ways to hide some of their grossest taxes in other deductible categories. That other tax-drunk jurisdiction – NY – wants to disguise them in the payroll tax. Gov. Brown and his fellow lefty bootleggers in Sacramento – I’m not kidding you – want to turn their taxes into charitable giving. Yeah, it’s called the California Excellence Fund. But there’s a problem with the ploy: the IRS code declares that the giver can’t benefit for it to be genuine charity. Oh well, back to the drawing boards.
As of April 9, 2018, $269 billion in new taxes were wafting through the California state legislature. And to top it off, the midterms ushered into power more tax-happy Dems. I’m beginning to wonder if many of the state’s voters should be tested for alcohol poisoning before entering the voting booth. This goes way beyond the .06 limit. What’s holding them up as they punch the ballot?
RogerG
Bibliography:
“It’s Official: Clinton’s Popular Vote Win Came Entirely From California”, John Merline, Investor’s Business Daily, 12/16/2016, https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/its-official-clintons-popular-vote-win-came-entirely-from-california/
“Election results 2018: Proposition 6 gas tax repeal crashes, burns [Updated]”, Adam Brinklow, Curbed: San Francisco, 11/7/2018, https://sf.curbed.com/2018/11/7/18071282/election-night-2018-california-prop-6-gas-tax-repeal-rejected
“High-Tax States Reach For Gimmicks”, Milton Ezrati, Forbes, 2/16/2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/miltonezrati/2018/02/16/high-tax-states-reach-for-gimmicks/#6fddec4185c5
“$269 billion in new state taxes and fees proposed”, Dawn Hodson, Mountain Democrat, 4/9/2018, https://www.mtdemocrat.com/news/269-billion-in-new-state-taxes-and-fees-proposed/
“‘Time for middle class tax justice’: California corporate tax bill offsets Trump cuts”, Alexei Koseff, The Sacramento Bee, 1/18/2018, https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article195434569.html
“California Bills Acknowledge Federal Tax Changes, Don’t Conform”, Laura Mahoney, Bloomberg News, 5/4/2018, https://www.bna.com/california-bills-acknowledge-n57982092512/
Today’s environmental activist owes much to Stalin. Oh, this is not the Stalin of the secret police, gulags, and purges. No greenie would stand for that … I hope. Rather, it’s the Stalin of muscular and hypothetically rational central planning. The commissars, operating as “experts”, establish the goals that are deemed critical to national and world survival and then hector society to achieve it. In our country, the browbeating occurs without the mass arrests. Rather, the hectoring encompasses the carrots of bribes (subsidies) and the sticks of regulations and taxes to engineer the “proper” individual behaviors to reach the target. Though, the whip-hand of the state always lurks in the background. The zealots don’t give either the goal or the rationale behind it a second thought. It’s full steam ahead … until reality hits.
Not surprisingly, an unintended and unpleasant reality for the enthusiasts and the rest of us will eventually hit. In the meantime, play up an impending doom to stampede people into accepting the grand design. For today, the holy grail is “clean” and “sustainable” energy in order to avoid Earth becoming Venus.
An artist’s conception of the surface of Venus.
So the goal of 100% “clean” and “sustainable” energy by X date is popping up in deep blue states. How’s that any different from Stalin’s Gosplan (Soviet economic central planning agency) announcing X amount of steel and wheat for each of year of the 5-Year Plan?
1948 USSR propaganda poster. It reads, “Let’s carry out the five-year plan in four years”.
Corporate America, increasingly simpatico with Earth First, is all-in for the crusade, especially the tekkie companies. Watch Verizon’s latest ad now running on tv screens nationwide (https://youtu.be/Sv1OVlyUyNY).
To reach Hawaii’s centrally planned goal, the beautiful Hawaii countryside will be scarred with vast solar and wind farms. Enviros bemoan the loss of the rainforest, except when it comes to solar panels and wind turbines. Apparently, food production takes a back seat to energy utopia.
Not to be outdone by lowly Hawaii, Governor Brown and the rest of the California politburo have jumped in with SB100. It proclaims the state to be 100% carbon-free by 2045, like Hawaii – a twisting of the old and venerable 5-year plan into a 27-year one. Anyway, a central plan is a central plan.
How’s that to be actualized? Geothermal and nuclear might be accepted into the “clean”family, but they will be the red-headed stepchildren. Pride of place for today’s greenie central planners goes to wind and solar. To make it all happen, let’s not forget the plentiful taxpayer subsidies, rate increases, burgeoning regulations, higher taxes, and, oh, a little rationing thrown in for good measure.
Be prepared on your next Hawaii hike or excursion to Mammoth to run into the likes of the following:
Wind turbines dot the landscape in Mojave, Calif.The 200-acre Waianae Solar Project in West Oahu, Hawaii.
Reaching the green goal will require an expansion of the forests of 300-foot towers with 100-foot blades – and their unceasing hum – and the Levittowns of black panels. Leaving aside the technical and cost burdens of the whole scheme, the landscape will be as different as Stalin’s Russia after the construction of his collective farms and contrived industrial projects … with similar results. More likely, prior to public and private bankruptcy, these efforts will begin to look like the abandoned towns and collective farms of Soviet Russia.
The abandoned Soviet city of Chukotka, eastern Siberia.Abandoned Soviet-era collective farm.
Markets Do It Better But Don’t Tell the Central Planners
That appears to be a more than a rare outcome in these best-laid plans of mice and men (to borrow from the poet, Robert Burns). Part of the problem is the nature of the people who are commandeering society: utopia-mongering fanatics and politicized “experts”. In both cases, we have people who claim to know more than they really do. Couple this with the fact that no one person or small group can know all the details and circumstances to manage the thousands and millions (if not billions) of individuals interacting in a society. Millions end up doing without as they live among the sun-bleached bones of decaying grandiose projects.
Hayek addresses a class at the London School of Economics in 1948.
F.A. Hayek called it the “knowledge problem”. He wrote,
“The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never [my emphasis] exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed [my emphasis] bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” (9)
Boy, that’s a huge slice of humble pie for our budding central planners in Sacramento, Hawaii, and Verizon corporate headquarters. Honestly, the Verizon folks are in it for a piece of the action, thereby affixing “crony” to “capitalism”.
What? They don’t know it all? Of course not, but that won’t stop them form forging ahead because they know the important stuff, or so they believe. If there are hiccups along the way and a few people get ruined, well, be like Stalin’s head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yeszhov, when he said, “When you chop wood, chips fly”. Eh, que será, será … and stay out of the way.
Stalin and Yezhov, 1937.
The chips?
The Holodomor, the Stalin-engineered famine in the Ukraine of 1932-33, as captured in an American newspaper from the time. Massive starvation was the result of a Soviet takeover of agriculture as per the 5-Year Plan, and the use of starvation as a weapon to quell opposition.
Hey, I Can’t Afford My Electricy Bill!
And there will be hiccups. Like the Ukrainian peasants in the Holodomor (see above), those wood chips will strike the most vulnerable: those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. The rich can always afford to go green. Boutique food stores and boutique energy, with a Tesla in the garage, easily fall within the financials of the well-heeled. But a person living paycheck-to-paycheck, or residing in a South-Central LA rental, must skip some things in order to pay the state-contrived electricity bill. By all means, get air conditioning but don’t use it. Sweat.
As for that utility bill in the mail, a visit to Southern California Edison website will give new meaning to the folly of the bake-a-cake-by-committee logic. There’s no simple answer to the question, how much do you pay per kWhr? The price is a “structure” with a morass of “tiers”, “time-of-use”, “baselines”, “incentives”, “high usage charges”, etc. The thing makes King Minos’s Labyrinth appear as straightforward as a Kansas highway. (1) Go to the footnote and see if you can make sense of it.
Example of a High Usage Charge on a Southern California Edison bill from their website.
The bloody thing, though, points in one direction: Californians pay 50-60% (depending on the calculations given the word salad of California regulations) more than the national average for seeking cool air, warmth, fresh food, and clean clothes. (2) You can avoid the whipping to your pocketbook by succumbing to solar panels on your roof. What you do at the end of their 10-15 year lifespan is hard to say. Still, you’ll get a ratepayer/taxpayer provided subsidy and the utility will be hogtied into accepting your feeble production into its grid. All of which means that somebody has to foot the bill. And that somebody is, as always, you, the ratepayer and taxpayer. Going green doesn’t mean going cheap, particularly if you want to avoid Lancaster’s 110° heat.
The Peasants Are Coming And They Look Angry.
The flinging wood chips don’t end with the heart-stopping utility bills. You’ve heard of racial disparities, right? Well, now we have greenie-inspired economic disparities which have a racial tinge. The poor, and really anybody below the per capita income of Malibu, will pay more as a portion of income to keep the lights on. And you know what? The peasants are looking for their pitchforks. The scene of a torchlight mob marching on Frankenstein’s castle may have some metaphorical relevance.
Not surprisingly, somebody has come forward to sue the California commissariat for its flirtation into greenie-energy wonderland. A consortium of civic-minded community leaders – The Two Hundred – has the gumption to sue the state for its bilge of laws and regulations that push the Sierra Club’s vision at the expense of anyone who won’t reduce nature to a Disney cartoon. (3) Expect the smear campaign from the usual suspects of powerful lefty hotheads in the state legislature, the well-funded collection of politically powerful environmentalist klans, not to mention the governor, to brand those who dare to rebel as greedy, self-serving Big Real Estate, Big Oil, Big Developers, Big Polluters, Big ….
Throwing out pejorative labels is a favorite tactic, that way they don’t have to be burdened with addressing the litigants’ arguments. Brand them and wait for the sympathetic legacy media to repeatedly broadcast the slander. It’s a well-worn script.
It’s interesting to ponder the rationale behind the lawsuit. The plaintiffs point to CARB’s recent greenhouse-gas mandates on new housing as having “a disparate negative impact on minority communities and are discriminatory against minority communities and their members”. One member of The Two Hundred, John Gamboa, put it more bluntly, “They [the state’s powerful green politicos and regulators] care more about spotted owls than brown babies”.
The logic is unassailable. Piling on the regulations and mandates will have a negative effect on the cost of everything from air conditioning to a bungalow to a pound of cabbage. The costs ripple through the supply chain of everything in the consumer market. No Mensa membership is required to foresee the pernicious impacts on anyone without an inherited portfolio. Already the state with the highest poverty rate (21%) – and ballooning to 8 million when housing costs are factored – California’s enviro extremism is slamming the already-exposed to even more exposure.
Germany’s natives were exposed to the ploy at the same time as it became fashionable in West Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Manhattan, Humanities Departments, and Fortune 500 corporate soirées. The Deutsche planners declared an 80% cut in demon CO2 by 2050, began closing down nuclear power plants, and went hell-bent into the dreamland of “renewables”. A hausfrau saw her electricity bill jump 50% in 10 years and realized that she was saddled with highest-priced juice in the EU ($0.37 per kilowatt-hour). (5) The road to ecotopia is paved with unpaid electricity bills.
Ecotopia?
Ontario, Canada, and Australia jumped on the same train to the asylum with ditto results.
So, seeking to end the slide to social and economic melancholia, The Two Hundred is suing the collective pants and REI-purchased hiking shoes off California’s eco-panderers in the state nomenklatura. It seems that the plaintiffs have available a whole bunch of laws to ban “disparate impacts”of a racial cast, and the laws are at the ready to weaponize legal briefs. The state’s Fair Employment and Housing Act and US Federal Housing Act stand poised to be used. If an employer can be dragged before the EEOC for too few hires in a “protected” category, why not haul into court for the same reason the gaggle of Sierra Club diehards in CARB (Calif. Air Resources Board)? Should eco-lefties with political power be immune to the identical sanctions faced by anyone else trying to make a living?
California Air Resources Board chairwoman, Mary D. Nichols.Nichols’s inspiration? Nikolai K. Baibakov, head of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) 1955-57 and 1965-85.
Success in court isn’t likely. The courts have a long track record of protecting government desk-jockeys from the consequences of their actions. Maybe that’s how it should be. If popular sovereignty means anything, we could simply vote the bastards out, except for the bulk of civil service and union-protected lifers in the bureaucracy’s bowels – and maybe that’s how it shouldn’t be. The growth of the administrative state has made the franchise nearly mute.
The empowered eco-central planners in the Dem one-party states only muck up the works. They claim to know what needs to be done and what is best for all 300+ million Americans as well as all other earthlings. Stalin would be proud of his progeny.
RogerG
Footnotes and Bibliography:
“Time-Of-Use (TOU) Rate Plans”, Southern California Edison, https://www.sce.com/wps/portal/home/residential/rates/Time-Of-Use-Residential-Rate-Plans/!ut/p/b1/pVJNc4IwEP0tHjhiNgQl7S1tLcL4UcVW4eIEjEgHA0Ja2_76RseL06p1mtPuztuXt7sPRWiGIsnfs5SrrJA83-VRe-57Dwy7tuUNg4EDDAedvjvqkQ6zNSDUADjxGOz7MXVZ1wvAc59aNni-MwHHCTB9dNAURShKpCrVCoV1IuZJIZWQai6kAYfYgErU2UJHGc91wpWoj2pmmXO5IyqTbIHCFudtGtOlyTERpk1jbHJHpxQvktgWLRILfBB-RtmFwf1Lk-kPrKp_30-1LK5WZiaXBZr9UL1fwBHT2LE000unN7zDFlDrALhxodP1hxowGRHwyAgGAWMEoH0AnDmCFpvmRbw_aMhkTKhWVYmlqETVfKt0eaVUWd8aYMB2u22mRZHmopkUawN-a1kVtUKzYyQK9Uad0ysjKLjyROcJR3A1of8HN2evm03EtCd33vvQU_7PlOX6eU3JpxnF7XH3qyemJo8pkFaeNhrfvJkzbg!!/dl4/d5/L2dBISEvZ0FBIS9nQSEh/
“Californians are paying billions for power they don’t need”, LA Times, Feb. 5, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-capacity/
A description of “The Two Hundred” can be found from their website: http://www.ccbuilders.org/project/the-two-hundred-project/
“California Climate Policies Facing Revolt from Civil-Rights Groups”, Robert Bryce, National Review Online, Sept. 15, 2018, https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/california-climate-change-policy-hits-poor-residents-hardest/
“Germany Could Be a Model for How We’ll Get Power in the Future”, Robert Kunzig, National Geographic Magazine, November 2015, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2015/11/germany-renewable-energy-revolution/
“Why California Has the Nation’s Worst Poverty Rate”, Ryan McMaken, Mises Institute, 1/17/2018, https://mises.org/wire/why-california-has-nations-worst-poverty-rate-1
“On the relevance of Hayek: centralized economic planning is dead”, Alex Cartwright, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 6/10/2013, https://home.isi.org/relevance-hayek-centralized-economic-planning-dead
“Beyond Hayek: A Critique of Central Planning”, Tibor R. Machan, 6/1/1988, https://fee.org/articles/beyond-hayek-a-critique-of-central-planning/
“Hayek: The Knowledge Problem”, Jeffrey A. Tucker, Foundation for Economic Education, 10/28/2014, https://fee.org/articles/hayek-the-knowledge-problem/
Watch this scene of traumatized Googlers trying to make sense of the fact that a good chunk of the country doesn’t have their “values”, and it showed by putting Trump in the White House. By all means, Googlers, don’t question the universality of your peculiar beliefs; question the motives of those who disagree with you. Heck, Googlers can’t even recognize their views as “peculiar” since they aren’t likely to rub elbows with those who think different. They get their prejudices reinforced, and reinforced ….
The leftist stream of consciousness on the Google campus stage on that November day of 2016 was littered with politicized code words. Take the word “values”, as in “our values” by Sergey Brin. The word is freighted with other words like “diversity”, and it ain’t the diversity of the opinion kind. For this monocultural groupthink, all diversity is limited to race, genitalia, and sexual appetites. Mix enough hijab-wearing lesbians into the workplace and, voilà, the only meaningful kind of “diversity” is created for this diversity-is-our-strength gang. Conservatives are tolerated … so long as they lie low. The other kind of diversity – as in diversity of thought – will be a casualty. In fact, it might be excised as “hate speech”.
James Damore, ex-Google senior engineer, after his 2017 firing for publishing on the company’s “free speech” forum an essay, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”.
It’s as if Googlers found themselves rejected by the election results, and rejection is a powerful source of anxiety for those ensconced in their self-reinforced and pampered cocoons. How to make sense of it since the mind must still grapple with the reality? Well, brand your opposition as morally and intellectually deficient. The other side is said to suffer from “tribalism” and “fear”. It’s not that adversaries simply disagree, but their disagreement is a product of an unrestrained id, a libido run amok. People like our Googlers have such a high self-regard that no concession can be made to the validity of an opposing point of view. Therapy on the Google campus was reduced to fortifying the attendees’ sense of superiority and convincing them that Darwin’s missing link resides in red America.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin at the post-election confab.
There was an early light-hearted moment. A rousing cheer came from the crestfallen when Brin announced the success of pot legalization. Now that says something. Either intoxication is a preferred state of mind for Googlers, or many of them have all the seriousness of Animal House’s Bluto at a frat party. Or it could simply be a Brin joke. Anyway, it probably isn’t Joe Sixpack material.
The expected response came out of the Google inner sanctum after the video went viral. The declaration went along the lines of “we’re biased but trust us”. Here’s a good portion of it: “Nothing was said at that meeting, or any other meeting, to suggest that any political bias [we’re biased] ever influences the way we build or operate our products [trust us]. To the contrary, our products are built for everyone, and we design them with extraordinary care to be a trustworthy source of information for everyone, without regard to political viewpoint [trust us]”.
Maybe the word “monoculture” is inadequate. The Borg of Star Trek fame is gaining relevance as the more appropriate metaphor.
The Borg or Silicon Valley/blue America?Borg drones or the Google workforce?
California is a real-life version of a Salvador Dali painting. The state is governed as if certain realities can be twisted by fantastical imagination – even ignored entirely – in the service of an all-embracing dream. Case in point: the “putrid city by the bay” *. San Francisco is the poster child of unintentionally engineered urban decay. This happenstance wasn’t produced by magic. Policies of longstanding have unexpected consequences of longstanding.
First, the situation. It is best described by local media reports:
– “Trash bags full of approximately 20 pounds of human poop were left on the sidewalk over the weekend in downtown San Francisco. It’s the latest — and perhaps most alarming — sign of the increased filthiness of one of the most popular cities in the United States”. Fresno Bee, July 4, 2018. **
The 20 pounds of SF human poop reported by the Fresno Bee.
– An investigation by NBC Bay Area “reveals a dangerous concoction of drug needles, garbage, and feces lining the streets of downtown San Francisco. The Investigative Unit surveyed more than 150 blocks, including some of the city’s top tourist destinations, and discovered conditions that are now being compared to some of the worst slums in the world.” NBC Bay Area, Feb. 18, 2018. ***
Needles, garbage, and dried feces on the streets of SF.
– The president of the SF’s travel association reported the cancellation of a convention by a medical assication due to the city’s filthy and mean streets. He said, “They just said that the conditions of the streets, in their mind, had gotten to the point where their delegates don’t feel safe coming to San Francisco. They see harassment on the street, and it’s not a pleasant environment, so they have reconsidered all future years in San Francisco.” NBC Bay Area, July 3, 2018. ****
– The problem encompasses more than SF. Similar conditions can be found up and down the state’s urban coastal corridor and capital. In Sacramento, the Sacramento Bee reported that “safety inspectors have issued nine citations and fined the Department of General Services for failing to adequately prepare groundskeepers asked to clean up needles and fecal matter in Capitol Park.” *****
Typical homeless camp in the American River Parkway, Sacramento.A homeless encampment arrayed along the Santa Ana River, southern California.
Why is this so? For one, the state is smothered in regulations. Many of them meander back to lefty utopia-building. Take rent control. SF plans to address its homeless crisis with – you guessed it – rent control, the same mantra that helped create the problem. Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck put it best: “Next to bombing, rent control seems in many cases to be the most efficient technique so far known for destroying cities.” If SF’s elected officials were doctors, they’d be practicing phrenology.
The state is infatuated with regulating its way to the better world. Greenie obsessions are at the top of the list. Obsessions have consequences. Today, temps in Bakersfield will top over 100 degrees … but don’t turn on your air conditioner unless you want to file bankruptcy. Of course, you could surrender to the state’s shotgun wedding between you and solar panels.
And we have the tangle of intestines of the state’s multi-faceted, multi-layered system of land use controls. It’s something that would make Daedalus, the engineer of King Minos’s Labyrinth, green with envy. So, forget about addressing the state’s housing woes with an increase in supply.
RVs are seen parked on South 7th Street in San Jose on Dec. 5, 2017. Government officials and homeless advocates have seen an increase in the number of working poor residents living in RVs on public streets. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)RV resident Robert Ramirez, 54, has been living in his RV for about six months. Ramirez supports himself by collecting recyclable materials and also gets government assistance. He wishes he could park his trailer in a RV park for more stability in his life but he can’t afford it. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
Run to the hills if you have a six-figure income and wish to avoid the minefield of feces and needles, because you will pay, and pay, and pay in so many ways.
The state is a psychiatric patient in a condition of perpetual denial. It has unleashed a host of incentives and disincentives pointing in one direction: decay. While Dali had clocks melting over the edge of a table, the creators of California’s mess have constructed a canvass of a more all-encompassing meltdown. Let’s see if the state’s voters can find a new bank of artists before it’s too late.
RogerG
Footnotes:
* “Increasingly Putrid City by the Bay”, Steven Greenhut, California Policy Center, July 5, 2018, https://spectator.org/increasingly-putrid-city-by-the-bay/…
** “Approximately 20 pounds of human poop was found on a sidewalk of San Francisco”, Bryant-Jon Anteola, Fresno Bee, July 4, 2018, https://www.fresnobee.com/news/state/article214320174.html
*** “Diseased Streets”, NBC Bay Area, Feb.18, 2018, https://www.nbcbayarea.com/…/Diseased-Streets-472430013.html
**** “San Francisco’s ‘Dirty Streets’ Scare Off Long-time Convention with 15,000 attendees”, NBC Bay Area, July 3, 2018, https://www.nbcbayarea.com/…/Dirty-Streets-Threaten-San-Fra…
***** “Feces, blood, syringes at California Capitol: Workers unprepared for clean up, OSHA says”, Sacramento Bee, July 3, 2018, https://www.sacbee.com/…/the-state-wo…/article214208014.html
An accidental meeting on a forest road with a semi-Californian/Montanan – he spends his winters in California (understandable) – showcases much that has gone astray in the America of today. Our biggest threat doesn’t arise from material circumstances but from what rolls around in our heads. Occupying the synapses are an excess of unexamined assumptions and the crazes that they feed.
Let me explain. While riding our ATV’s through the forests near our property, my wife and I came upon a man on a motor-bike. Pleasantries and friendly conversation arose. It turns out that the man haled from Redding, Ca. He had few nice things to say about the winters and complained of the shrinking longevity of restaurants in the area. I mentioned that we had lost our appetite for our native state after one of many recent visits. Prohibitions, high prices, and petty annoyances – the plastic bag carousels are empty at the stores for instance – have soured us.
He complained about the plastic litter in a feeble defense of the ban. I don’t think that he, and many others, connected the dots between the propensity for prohibition and the new feudalism that is taking shape in the so-called golden state. Many off-the-cuff reactions to a hypothetical evil produce unexpected effects. Too much plastic bag litter? Ban them. Too many poor people? Tax the rich. Don’t like carbon? Command people to put solar panels on their roofs or punish them with high utility bills – or both. Don’t like suburbia? Strangle it in a maze of land-use controls. The only problem is: growth suffocates; the middle-class flees; and the cost of living inflates. The result is a new feudalism of the hyper-rich in their manorial enclaves surrounded by a growing low-wage servant class.
As for the limited restaurants in our area, our friend showed no acknowledgement of rudimentary cause-and-effect. Enterprise has been suffering in industrial and rural America for quite some time. Take away the primary industries – mining and lumbering in our case – in those places dependent on them and poverty, meth use, and social chaos erupts. Tourism is a very poor substitute.
Many of these ruminations were kept to myself. He did say that he didn’t like mining for its scarring of the land. I responded with the obvious: without it, he and I wouldn’t be on our vehicles. He dismissed the claim with a cursory, “I’ll buy it from China”.
There you have it. Don’t think of employing our own people; export our wish-fulfillment to foreign lands; and don’t give a second thought about the repercussions. As long as the consequences are invisible to us, and we remain ensconced in our comfortable illusions, all is right with the world. Right?
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” Luke 23:34
US President Donald Trump makes remarks at a roundtable meeting on sanctuary cities May 16, 2018, in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington, DC. Orange County Supervisor Michelle Steel is 3rd from left.(Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)
From 1864 to 1865, Jones County, Mississippi, and its immediate environs were in open revolt against the Confederate state of Mississippi and its governor, Charles Clark – a Democrat by the way. The so-called “Free State of Jones”. Numerous state officials were assaulted and harassed, some probably killed. Clearly, this was a pro-union constituency. Project forward to May 16, 2018 and a meeting of disgruntled California local leaders with President Trump. A parallel anyone?
Some firebrands of the left – who rule the roost in California – are as incensed about federal immigration law as the South was about abolitionism and tariffs. They have made cooperation with ICE the equivalent of assisting child porn traffickers. What’s next, an act of secession?
Well, some in the state are having none of it. They have approached the president, as surely as some in 1864 Jones County would relish a confab with Lincoln.
History seldom repeats, but it does rhyme. (Reputedly stated by Mark Twain)
RogerG
* See “Orange County, Inland Empire leaders talk immigration with Trump in White House”, Roxana Kopetman, Orange County Register, 5/17/2018, https://www.pe.com/2018/05/16/trump-meeting-today-with-leaders-from-orange-county-inland-empire/
“The Year of Living Dangerously” (1982) with Mel Gibson and Linda Hunt.
Ever since the Trump ascendancy, the left has been on a tirade. The marches, the gnashing of teeth about fictional prophecies of doom, and the willingness to tramp over broken glass to defeat anyone with an “R” (Republican) after their name are loose in the land. They are ginned up as if on amphetamines. The political season erupted after inauguration and hasn’t let up. It’s the season of living dangerously.
2,500 unhinged protesters hit Boston Common to protest the election of Donald Trump, Nov. 2016.Anti-Trump rally, NYC.Man disrupted and had to be removed from Sen. Bill Cassidy’s (R, La.) townhall in Feb. 2017.
Case in point: lefty bankrollers like Tom Steyer and their misnomered “League of Conservation Voters” (LCV) are airing adds hyper-ventilating about the rape of nature by the R’s. The bilge of extremist rhetoric abounds. Here in Montana, the targets are Greg Gianforte and Brian Zinke. I’m sure that the field of fire is national.
So-called “dark money” abounds at the LCV. That’s the money hidden behind a non-profit label, taking full advantage of FEC regs. Peeling back the facade, though, one finds envirotopia’s big-time cleanup hitters.
The “League” ain’t a quaint collection of middle-class hikers. It’s heart is the well-heeled lefty do-gooder, anxious to order our lives according to their semi-literate conscience. The hall of shame includes Facebook co-founder Dustin Muskowitz and wife who cut loose with $5 mill for the “League” in 2016. 2014 saw AFSCME and George Soros ladle a combined $1 mill into the coffers. Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate Action poured $775,000 into the collection plate. That’s just a sample of the deep pockets.
Lefty billionaire activist Tom Steyer turns to people standing behind him before taking questions during a news conference in Washington, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster).
This campaign has nothing to do with the grassroots. The average Joe and Jane want good jobs and healthy social conditions to raise their families. All the lefties can offer up is DMV-style government, debilitating dependency, and micro-management of our lives, aka California. The whole thing adds up to a social and economic cesspool.
Billie Jo leans back at her homeless encampment near unincorporated Cameron Park in El Dorado County, Ca.A encampment is shown along the Santa Ana River trail on the border of Fountain Valley, Ca.
If they succeed, watch out! It certainly is the season of living dangerously.
RogerG
** Thanks to “League of Conservation Voters: Environmental Group or Democratic Campaign Heavyweight?”, Hayden Ludwig and Kevin Boyd, Capital Research Center, 7/6/2017, https://capitalresearch.org/…/league-of-conservation-voter…/
Student fights at West High School, Bakersfield, Ca., 3/15/2017.
Today, there seems to be a concerted effort to make-believe everyone is the same, not just equal: among the sexes, genders (?), racial and ethnic groups, social classes, everyone. Of course, this is a flagrant contradiction to multiculturalism’s worship of differences. But, pushing the incoherence aside is the pogrom against any real or imagined bigotries. It takes the form of a jihad to eradicate “disparate impact” – or the presence of unequal outcomes. If we are more than equal, but the same, too many of one group in an unsavory category is said to be proof of amorphous and shadowy forces of bigotry. The only problem: It’s all nonsense and, when implemented, a hot mess.
Recently, the Kern High School District in California was sued by the Dolores Huerte Foundation for a negative “disparate impact” in its discipline policies. Too many minorities were said to be kicked out of school. Now, in caving in to a judicial shakedown, the District implemented PBIS. Don’t fret over its meaning. It can be translated to mean more mothering for hellions. Too bad if you’re a good student or well-meaning teacher.
Bakersfield High School teachers expressing their fear and dismay:
Here’s a clip of fights at neighboring West High School from last year:
You see, hellions aren’t evenly distributed in a population any more than the social conditions that give to their rise.
Read the article: “‘Out of Control’: Teachers describe KHSD schools after anti-discrimination settlement”, Jeff Platt, Eyewitness News staff, BakersfieldNow.com, http://bakersfieldnow.com/…/out-of-control-teachers-describ….
The following is a comment to “‘We will prosecute’ employers who help immigration sweeps, California AG says”, Angela Hart, The Sacramento Bee, 1/19/2018, http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article195434409.html .
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State officials are not required to enforce federal immigration law. But California actions to not hold suspects of federal detainer requests, refuse to share information, and help facilitate violations of federal immigration law veer awfully close to nullification. Now, upping the ante further, the state’s attorney general threatens prosecution of any employer who adheres to the requests and instructions of federal authorities. Not participating has morphed into obstruction.
Employers in a state, first and foremost, are citizens of the U.S., but merely residents of a state. Patriotism applies to loyalty to the nation, not a state. Mr. Becerra is forcing patriotic employers of the state into obstructing federal authorities in the fulfillment of clear and unambiguous Constitutional powers – Article I, Section 8, clause 3. The state is forcing U.S. citizens within its borders into not cooperating with federal authorities.
Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun disagreed over South Carolina’s nullification of the tariff law. Asked if he had any regrets during his presidency, Jackson said, “[That] I didn’t shoot Henry Clay and I didn’t hang John C. Calhoun.”Andrew Jackson threatened to march into South Carolina and hang the state’s government in 1833 over its nullification of the tariff law. U.S. AG Jeff Sessions needs to indict and submit Mr. Becerra to a perp walk. If the rest of the brood in Sacramento continues to interfere, a criminal conspiracy is at work. Apply RICO.
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” Luke 23:34
