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California: A Dreamscape that Ignores the Reality of Incentives and Disincentives

 

A homeless encampment in SF.

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

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Cross-Fertilization of Two Investigations and the Bane of Progressivism

I have long sought to keep separate the FBI’s Trump/Russia probe and their “MYI” [Mid-year Investigation] into Hillary’s server. The IG report of this past week shattered that assumption. The two are linked by the same personnel, a coterminous but muddled boundary in time, and an obvious unity in partisan bias. All of this is nestled in unbridled DOJ and FBI higher-ups in DC and its satellites. We’ve got a real mess on our hands.

The legacy media oracles responded as if they are on a mission to contradict conservatives and simple common sense. A bias in its own right. They serve to mystify and cloud what is increasingly becoming apparent: powerful organs of our government engaged in crass partisan favoritism in both official queries.

If this doesn’t dispel the progressive dream of the benign, above-the-fray rule of a clerisy of “experts”, nothing will. Progressivism has its roots in upending the understanding of our nature dating back to Genesis. It used to be accepted as axiomatic that humans are corrupted by an imperious selfishness. We were counseled by our traditions to restrain it. The late 19th-century progressives jettisoned this human nature and replaced it with a person cleansed by an expertise born of formal education (the “expert”). In other words, people like themselves.

This has profound societal consequences. The design of our Constitution is predicated on the overriding inclination of people to pursue self-interest, and thus it is true to our traditions. The founders’ structure sought to fight selfish faction with selfish faction by distributing power with separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism.

No need for that kind of thing under the progressives’ scheme of rule by a degreed priesthood of technicians. According to Churchill, though, “The French have a saying, ‘Drive Nature away, and she will return at the gallop'”. The episodes in 2016 and 2017 reveal those technicians to be riven by the same weaknesses as our sandaled and later-wigged ancestors. All that we’ve done is insulate the powerful from accountability in a massive bureaucratic pyramid.

The officials with the guns now have a political eco-system to facilitate great damage. Free of popular sovereignty, their base instincts are free to flower.

Recourse to official ombudsmen – like the IG – as a corrective is fruitless. They are too often infected by the same natural defensiveness as the rest of us. Thus we have the IG report’s equivocations, contradictions, and voluminous mind-numbing prose stretching beyond 500 pages. A glaring example from the report: on the one hand there exists coarse bias; on the other, we can’t attach the bias to any actions. What? How does that work?

There’s the rush to exonerate the favorite (Hillary) while they jump at the slightest unproven provocation to bedevil the targeted villain (Trump). It’s laid out in the report’s timeline and public record. But we’re expected to believe that what’s in the head of Strzok, Page, McCabe, and untold others is somehow unrelated to the clearly observable actions adjoining the thoughts. It’s simply Orwellian.

Trump/Russia and Hillary’s server are two investigations that share the same DNA. Questions about Mueller’s probe are similarly warranted. Like the others, Mueller is taking on a flavor akin to the previous machinations. The same or similar people are scouring for Trump people to ensnare.

Has it been happening for years? You know, the underhanded tactics to flip people, empire-building of imaginary cases, the incestuous relationships – some sexual – between big journalism and big law enforcement, the hounding of people into incriminations, and all of it unchecked. A look under the rug at the Carl Icahn-Phil Mickelsen-Chlorox-Tom Davis imbroglio, shepherded by FBI honcho David Chaves and the DA of SDNY, might be instructive.

Yes, we’ve got a mess. The sooner we discard the demigod status of government apparatchiks, the sooner we’ll make sense of it all. Only then will we be empowered to restrain our own government. Accountability need not be something necessitating a 500 page report.

RogerG

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2016 Hayseed Racists? NO!

I’ve been reading Salena Zito and Brad Todd’s The Great Revolt, an exegesis of the 2016 election. Villification of one’s opponents after the shocking loss has reached new heights, enough to obscure the reality. Tune into the halfwit but snarky late-night comedians and you’ll get a flavor of it.

The authors Brad Todd (c) and Salena Zito (r) on C-SPAN Book TV.

No, the voters opposing Hillary cannot be reduced to rural bigots left behind by “progress”. Many other things were at root to explain Trump’s winning coalition: condescension, social and political bias, and too many deaf ears in too many places of cultural authority. Those places correspond to urban and academic dots, socio-political monasteries walled off into insular echo chambers. The roiling in the backcountry therefore came as a shock to those comfortably nestled behind the walls – which means most everybody in the dots, or mentally influenced by the dots.

The book dispels these real urban myths with a grand survey of Trump voters and a series of vignettes in locales that flipped 15-30 points from solidly Democrat to Trump in the rust belt. In a nutshell, they were so fed up with the long-running disparagement that not even Trump’s boorishness would slacken their momentum to the polls.

Main Street, USA, the epicenter of the Great Revolt.

Main Street rebelled against the Acela corridor, the left coast, intense urban clusters, and the disconnected college campus. Zito and Todd make abundantly clear it was a revolt and not a Klan march. Many Obama voters became Trump voters and the rest is history.

RogerG

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A Chance Meeting and Not Connecting the Dots, 5/26/2018

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

RogerG

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The Free State of … San Bernadino

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/

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Happy Mother’s Day, 2018

If we can’t celebrate our moms on a special day for her, how can we, in good conscience, show deep and personal gratitude to anyone? A she – with the momentary assistance of a he – brought us into the world. In an age when women are pressured to stretch themselves thin by being a master of the universe, motherhood still makes all those other competing roles fade to insignificance. Literally, my very existence came from her. I thank God every day for having had my mom.

It’s time to resurrect motherhood in this era of declining birth rates and turmoil over marriage and genders. Mom, dad, and home need some burnishing, now more than ever. We can start by resurrecting the writings of Phyllis McGinley.

“Women are the fulfilled sex. Through our children we are able to produce our own immortality, so we lack that divine restlessness which sends men charging off in pursuit of fortune or fame or an imagined Utopia . . . the wholesome oyster wears no pearl, the healthy whale no ambergris, and as long as we can keep on adding to the race, we harbor a sort of health within ourselves.”

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms.

RogerG

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#REDFORED = #RESIST

Teachers rally outside the state Capitol for the second day of a teacher walkout to demand higher pay and more funding for education in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, April 3, 2018. Reuters

The recent teacher strikes – mostly in “red” (i.e., Conservative) states – are intriguing. What started out as a cause to boost the pay of truly underpaid teachers in West Virginia has metastasized into Occupy Wall Street, something under the rubric #redfored. In truth, I think that the lefty hive is being ginned up as the Supreme Court deliberates its decision in Janus vs. AFSCME. If Janus wins, the cushy power relationships of public employee unions will be deflated. But here’s the big scoop from the ruckus: government unions are lefty enterprises.

PHOENIX, AZ – APRIL 26: Arizona teachers chant in support of the #REDforED movement as they walk through downtown Phoenix on their way to the State Capitol on April 26, 2018 in Phoenix, Arizona.  (Photo by Ralph Freso/Getty Images)

It’s a familiar script. Trump gets elected and hyperventilation replaces deliberation – mostly on the left but also in some extreme precincts on the right. The swarming extends everywhere the left has a stranglehold. The only surprise to me is the length of time it took for the education blob to catch on.

What has the adoption of California-style taxes to do with teacher pocketbook issues? Clearly, for the firebrands, simply raising pay is too vanilla. The slogan is bloated to include lefty planks like the adoption of the progressive tax nightmare and dolloping layers of bureaucracy on the schools. Poor pay was simply the vehicle to swarm the hive and cloak the wolf in a pleasant disguise.

Well, it took some time but the genus Ovis aries (sheep) costume was outed. Now the “#redfored” is no different from “#resist”, “Bernie Sanders for president”, or Occupy … [fill in the blank].

RogerG

* Check out “Teacher strikes morph from pocketbook clash to partisan street theater”, Frederick M. Hess, Education Next, AEI, 5/8/2018,  http://www.aei.org/publication/teacher-strikes-morph-from-pocketbook-clash-to-partisan-street-theater/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT0RjM1pERXhabUZsWVRBNSIsInQiOiJzeFpQdkVWblBGaExlMGhtQnFwTFB4dEd4VmlDbFBxYWdZSVF5QXJoQVVzNDdYK3J3bDNEb0xycDBHT2dJOWUzVGI5Rjh1QTdIOU9mMWhDYllmWWFodVpneWxPNXhWSUo5T0VtWGZsK3BGSGtIV2ordDBHM0ZqcVhiVUxvSnhyYiJ9

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Drunken Sailors

Today’s rambling was inspired by George Will’s column, “Are We Trapped in a Debt Spiral?”* I’ll try to keep this short.

I can’t get away from the old cliché about the spending habits of intoxicated sailors. For us to protect ourselves as we maintain a wide-open spigot for the nanny state, DC is spending us into oblivion. The federal debt monster, according to the babblers in the CBO, will explode from 39% of GDP in 2008 to 96% by 2028. Most likely, it’s worse. In other words, we’re reaching the point of not paying it back. Do the words “Argentina” and “default” have a special meaning?

The National debt is shown behind Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, left, as he makes the semiannual monetary policy report to the House Financial Services Committee, Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2018, in Washington.

How did we get so inebriated? Now there’s a Gordian knot to unravel. My stab at it begins with the practice of labeling defense outlays “discretionary” and that for federal check recipients “mandatory”. It’s a formula for a descent into the deeper circles of Dante’s fiscal inferno.

Who’s to blame? Don’t look any further than the mirror. We chose our representatives and reward them for furthering the insanity. We are comfortable in our fictions. Many of us seem to like a democracy of unelected administrators. Or, how about “fiscal discipline” defined as increasing dependency on the dole while “national security” is construed as Red Chinese-controlled sea lanes? “Contradictio in terminis” (contradiction in terms) anyone?

And come November, we might be getting ready to hand power to a party of people who’ve added dope to the booze. Go figure.

RogerG

* Thanks to “George F. Will: Are we now trapped in a debt spiral?”, George Will, Salt Lake City Tribune/Washington Post, 5/6/2018,  https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2018/05/06/george-f-will-are-we-now-trapped-in-a-debt-spiral/

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Equality Run Amok

International Women’s Day protest march in Sydney, March 2017.

I can’t help noticing it. One of the crazes of our times is the attempt to force equality in almost all its guises, a hell-bent exercise in the ludicrous and insane. While flitting about online this morning, even as I was booting up, the Windows 10 startup pic was graffitied with reminders of female underrepresentation in technology and inventions. And, of course, they announce what Microsoft is doing to even the score … as if “underrepresentation” was enough to embark on a major campaign to redirect the company’s resources. The tendentiousness of it is astounding.

And this coming on the heels of reading Heather McDonald’s speech at Hillsdale College in “Imprimis”.* Her thesis is the danger of “#MeToo” morphing into a jihad (my words). She recounts the orchestrated shaming that would make the Khmer Rouge proud. In America’s boardrooms, professional associations, and cultural centers, the suits are running to the hills with proclamations of their own efforts to even the score.

Heather McDonald of the Manhattan Institute.

Click on the link on the wallpaper and you’re sent to Microsoft’s “#MakeWhatsNext Patent Program” site. Hiding beneath the surface of these “programs” is a false premise: We are all the same and chromosomes are completely irrelevant. For these commissars, chromosomes should be put on a par with melanin. They assert that what is true for skin tone must be true for chromosomal development from blastocyte on. Really!

And to think that none of this matters to those caught up in the craze. Put your mind to imagining the consequences when a country tries to live a lie. No good will come of it.

Stress, anxiety, and chronic dissatisfaction may await as some women torture themselves to live a lie.

RogerG

* Please read “The Negative Impact of the #MeToo Movement”, Heather McDonald, Imprimis, April 2018, https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-negative-impact-of-the-metoo-movement/?appeal_code=MK418EM15&utm_campaign=imprimis&utm_source=housefile&utm_medium=email&utm_content=april_2018_metoo&_hsenc=p2ANqtz–nx1IRYEsOfVpXhXSv_00N_BJDcN0RdDFM962GZJdXztH6TfJuTDMLRifXm7zued-LhNvNqUTlHHNRgIb5FxjnDohB4Q&_hsmi=62504373

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Our Failing Schools and the Second Amendment

The wake of the Parkland school shooting brought to mind a little-known incident from my teaching days (retired in 2015). As the Social Science Department chair in my high school, and with the responsibility for making requests for new and updated textbooks, I noticed a subtle change in one commonly available supplemental and historical document: the English Bill of Rights. An older version of the piece included the following clause: “That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence [sic] suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law”. The newer form of the document had it removed. Why? I was suspicious then and still am.

The English Bill of Rights of 1689.

I have always understood the opposition to the Second Amendment to be part ideological and part cultural – maybe mostly cultural. I suspected that a bias due to the ascendancy of the values and beliefs of a narrow subset of our population was at work, for the most part.

An eatery in NYC’s Greenwich Village neighborhood.

Putting the best face on the item’s exclusion, the abridging of the document caused the publishers (Holt McDougal) to weed out those things considered less important. Still, though, that’s just a roundabout way to knowingly or unknowingly display the same prejudice.

Children will go through life not understanding the full connection of the English experience and our Constitutional legacy, particularly the parts that are embarrassing to our self-anointed cultural potentates. The result is profound ignorance about our most cherished natural rights, and the susceptibility to end up like David Hogg (made famous by the Parkland shooting) and other young and eager enthusiasts for gun control.

David Hogg at the March for Our Lives this past March 2018.

Let’s set the record the straight: (1) the “militia” was all able-bodied men with the expectation that they be privately armed, and correspondingly not an organ of the government but part of civil society; (2) the English Civil War was as much a religious as political affair; (3) Charles I, in an attempt to squash religious and political dissent, called out the militia with their best private weapons and then quickly disarmed them; (4) privately-owned weapons were long held to be an inherent right of Englishmen for defense from threats to personal safety and tyranny; and (5) a great majority of the people who originally settled here carried this legacy with them to the new world. The right to bear arms is clearly an individual right – indeed, a “natural right” – as based on the words’ clear meaning to the amendment’s authors and the history leading up to its inclusion in our Constitution.

Modern reenactor of a 17th century English militiaman.
Pre-revolution Virginian militiaman.

It’s a lesson increasingly lost on successive generations brought up on the progressives’ love-state fetish. The deficiency is built into the curriculum and nearly everything the teachers were taught. Ignorance begets ignorance … and poorly informed 17-year-old agitators.

RogerG

** Thanks to The Avalon Project of Yale Law School for preserving our cultural inheritance: “English Bill of Rights 1689”,
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/england.asp .