Arthur has an essay over at his site about the myths and realities on the Left (and Right) about these two large areas of our country. Very insightful.
Tag: California
ArthurinCali Has a Post on California Illegals
Arthur discusses the dysfunctional California policy toward illegals and its consequences.
“Platitudes about the “Rule of Law” regarding due process and expedited deportations sound comical from a state like California that has the most sanctuary cities and routinely flout federal immigration law. A state that spent over $9 billion in 2024 on healthcare coverage for illegals and is on track to spend nearly $11 billion this year. Adding in additional costs from illegals in the areas of education, housing, and law enforcement pushes this figure even higher. One does not need a degree in economics to know this is unsustainable for the long-term, and will continue to add tension around the immigration issue.”
And he includes some nice photos of some of California’s natural wonders.
Viva California
Everybody is agog at the LA fires. It’s hard to believe that that level of incompetence and plain irresponsibility can exist in a metropolis the size of Los Angeles. But that’s what we have to realize. There is no back-up plan for this ongoing catastrophe. The two largest fires are still only 10 to 15% contained and have already burned 13,000 buildings. That means that there are already property losses in the tens of billions of dollars, and considering the high cost of houses in these areas, possibly much more.
But when the mayor or the governor are asked what is being done to save the properties surrounding the burned-out areas, they make it sound like this is an act of God that they have no responsibility for or power to fight. In all those videos of large forest fires we see planes filled with water dropping it on the fire. Well, what’s stopping California from requesting Washington to send aircraft of this kind? If the answer is that California doesn’t have any large bodies of water nearby then I’d remind them of that big blue thing called the Pacific Ocean somewhere West of LA. Sure, salt water is bad for the plants and everything else but I’m guessing that 2,000 °C fire is more than slightly worse.
But that is the reality. Mayor Bass and Governor Newsom are just going to try and hand wave their way through this and somehow try to blame Donald Trump and tell the victims that he has to foot the bill and make it all right. Well, I feel very badly for the victims of these fires. But they voted for these people because they agreed with the things the Democrats said they want to do. What happened is the end result of all those policies. What happened is the result of electing people who are incompetent. None of this is a surprise for the normally intelligent people who have been warning California about the direction they have been going for decades.
Well, there are thousands and thousands of angry, scared victims. And some of those people are Hollywood icons. And they are about to be dragged through the horror of trying to get a bureaucracy to treat them like suffering human beings. They are in for a world of pain. And all the people whose houses are spared this latest fire season aren’t going to forget how close they were to losing everything. Who knows? Maybe they’ll recall Bass and Newsom. That at least would be a start. Would it solve the problem. Nope. To do anything permanent the whole voting population of California would have to recall all of their state representatives and elect Republicans. And there are too many school teachers and prison guards who owe allegiance to the Democrat party for their lucrative positions.
So, nothing much will happen. But one of these days, the big one is going to hit Los Angeles. Something like a 7.5 on the Richter Scale. And the Angelenos are going to discover what having fake police, fire and emergency departments mean when there are thousands of people dead and injured. And something tells me that will be the one that wakes up even the most woke of the woke. When your family is buried under tons of debris and Assistant Fire Chief Kristine Larson tells you that they are out of luck because her lesbian POC firefighters can’t move heavy stones, well, that’s probably going to be the point when violence becomes the solution. But then again maybe I’m wrong. It’s been said many times that you can fix stupid. Viva California.
Guest Contributor – TomD – 11JAN2025 – California Wildfires
I live on the Florida panhandle, the population isn’t nearly as dense as central and south Florida. There are extensive farmlands and 10’s of thousands of acres covered in trees, mostly pines.
Except hot and dry spells, you will commonly see large smoke plumes here and there on the horizon. That is called “controlled burning”. That is to burn off the underbrush and dead branches, dry pine straw, etc., but not kill the trees. That reduces the kindling and fast fuel that a major fire needs to get started. It works. This method is common across the US in forested areas.
It is illegal in California.
In the meantime, the LA fire dept has spent the last 4 years hiring mostly lesbians as firefighters with no qualifications other than being lesbians.
In the meantime, California has created no new reservoirs since 1979 despite a near doubling of population since.
In the meantime, California passed a $7.5 billion bill to ensure adequate water supply but not a cent has been spent to that purpose. Some of it was used to destroy 4 then existing dams and reservoirs.
A number of years ago, someone ventured that California was rich enough to be stupid. I’m not sure that is the case any more.
Another interesting point: LA, and California in general, has long been famous for the difficulty and time required to get a building permit. We’re talking years for a house. How do you think the 10’s of thousands of people affected by the burning show up to get permits to rebuild their homes and businesses only to be told that they first need an environmental study and permission from 17 different agencies? Do you think there will be hangings? Hopefully.
Guest Contributor – War Pig – 10JAN2025 – California, Then and Now
I lived in Calfornia in the early to mid sixties. Nice climate. Cheap gas, but it was still horribly expensive real estate compared to other states at the time. There were enough reservoirs so that we never had a “do not water lawns” restrictions. No brownouts, no blackouts. There were fires but the shrubbery that causes major fires was controlled and sensible and sustainable forestry practices were the norm. I was young and paid zero attention to politics.
We lived not terribly far from Watts during the race rIots. I had no trouble as I knew the kids from school and their parents thought I was polite. Being biracial was also a boon. I had a foot in both camps and my parents had raised me to not separate people by exterior appearances. I also got along with the Hispanic kids as many of them had at least partial Native American ancestry, although most of it was South and Central American tribes such as Aztec. And since I never shunned Black or Hispanic or the growing (back then) Asian population, I was accepted in pretty much all camps. But since then the left has gone to extremes to create racial hatred. It began in universities then trickled down to elementary schools to the idiocy you see today. Any school administration thatallowed drag reviews in primary education back then would have been ran out of town on a rail.
The left follows the Marxist/Leninist doctrine of first infiltrating schools. California is their glowing success. Massive school systems, immense school budgets. Ripe for conquest. Then fund and incite civil unrest.
In the early sixties California was doing almost everything right. Now they are doing almost everything wrong.
Good Luck Then!
Rolling blackouts, whole towns burned off the face of the Earth, multimillion-dollar shacks, endemic rampant crime, homeless encampments everywhere, endless drug addicts, legislated anti-white hate, LGBTQ lunacy, hopeless energy policies and an unaffordable cost of living. I could go on but why bother? California has become emblematic of absurd progressive policies and the disastrous effects they’ve caused.
And now when the wealthier parts of Los Angeles are literally going up in smoke some people are wondering if this is the moment when the Californians will turn away from the Democrats and bring in the Republicans to fix the mess. Well, they might. But if the Republicans are smart, they won’t sign up for the job. Specifically, no Republican in his right mind should run for or even accept if appointed to the governorship of California. Well, let me qualify that. If the citizens of California also elected a majority of Republicans to the legislature too, then it might have some value. If all of the insane laws that have been passed in the last thirty years could be cancelled and the state could be put back onto a rational basis then it might work. But short of that it’s a death trap. Look what happened to poor hapless Arnold Schwarzeneggar. The voters elected him to clean up the mess from their previous feckless Democrat governor but basically all he could do was preside over the freak show that the Democrat super-majorities in the legislature ordained. Of course, he really didn’t put up any fight at all. So, nobody remembers him fondly. And the state continued its slide into ruin right on schedule during his term.
Just as when we talk about New York trying to save a sinking ship, the reality of who the voters are in California has to be faced. The state has an enormous illegal alien population and an equally enormous population of people living off the government in one way or another. None of these people will ever vote for a Republican or anyone else who promises to balance the books. No, the system will have to crash so hard that the welfare checks stop getting delivered before the bread and circus crowd will pay attention to how bad things are going.
So where does that leave things? Well, it looks like any frame houses in Los Angeles are just waiting for the wind and the arsonists to find them. If I lived in LA, I think I’d get together with my neighbors and cut down all the trees and shrubs in the neighborhood and haul them away. Then I’d invest in fire-proofing materials to protect my house. But most importantly, I’d sell my house at whatever price I can get and move out of the Golden State as fast as I possibly could. Because every time some new atrocity appears on the ground everyone declares that it can’t possibly get any worse and in fact this will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and things will get better. Well, I don’t think that is even remotely the case. I think it will get phenomenally worse as more people leave. The tipping point is already here and we’re just waiting for something like this fire season to find out things like there’s no water in the fire hydrants and the firefighters are now overweight lesbians who won’t be able to carry anyone out of burning buildings and the city has cut the budget for the fire department to pay for DEI training.
And that’s just for something minor like wildfires. What happens when there’s a major earthquake? Good luck then.
Guest Contributor – War Pig – 10SEP2024 – California
Dad was s big name at North American Aviation, then Rockwell/Rocketdyne. He actually touched things that went in orbit in the space program. I have a ring the factory made for important people at Rocketdyne. It was made from a crazy, missile nose cone titanium alloy. Like tungsten carbide, it took diamonds to cut it. It had been tempered in the hellfire of reentry and was light yet incredibly string. We lived in places like Simi Valley, Canoga Park and then up in the Thousand Oaks area. Mom shopped at the then amazing Topanga Plaza. We went ice skating indoors. We’d go up Mt Baldy in the morning to play in the snow, then in the late afternoon, we swam and surfed at the public beaches. It was the days of Wolfman Jack, Dragnet and Adam-12. It was also the days of the Watts riots, but as my heritage is divided between Caucasian and Native American, neither side had an issue with me. Mexican, Black and White kids got on amazingly well in school. Drugs were just beginning to be a problem. Living was large and life was good. We were solidly ahead of the Russkies in the space race. American technocracy led the world. We were winning battles in Vietnam (only to be betrayed by politicians later). Overall, it was a magical time.
Will California Crack?
California has been the jewel in the crown of the United States for over a hundred years. Throughout the Great Depression Dust Bowl Okies travelled across country looking for salvation in the Golden State. And afterwards throughout the second half of the twentieth century California was the capitol of modernity, innovation, affluence and optimism. It grew at an astonishing pace both in wealth and in population for what seemed like forever. And it reaped the rewards of this growth when Silicon Valley become the engine that powered not only California’s economy but the whole country through stock ownership in companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft.
But in the last decade that has all changed. California’s policies on almost every aspect of life in the Golden State have conspired to put an end to that growth. The cost of everything from groceries to gasoline have skyrocketed and the cost of owning a home is preposterously out of the reach of everyone but the truly wealthy. For that reason alone, the exodus of Californians to red states like Tennessee and Texas has been large. So much so that for the first time ever the state has lost representation in Congress.
But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Even the enclaves of the absurdly rich around Los Angeles and San Francisco are beginning to suffer from violent crime to an extent they’ve never experienced before. And the lower income areas are becoming no-go zones for vulnerable older people and women. The effect of all this is to begin unravelling the fabric of normal life in the state. Shoplifting of less than a thousand dollars of merchandise has essentially been decriminalized and so drug stores and other retail businesses are moving out of the urban areas. District attorneys and prosecutors refuse to prosecute property crime and even some violent offenders. And so, the police have essentially stopped arresting them.
Encampments of homeless drug addicts and illegal aliens have mushroomed across the cities and with them has come crime, violence, filth and disease. Taken along with all of the other dysfunctional policies of the state like the elimination of gasoline powered cars and the dependence on “renewable sources” of energy and the resulting brown-outs and black-outs this causes, it seems to me that California is ripe to be the first bright-blue state to wake from their woke fever dream and admit defeat. Now maybe I’m off base and the trillions of dollars of revenue that Silicon Valley currently pumps into the California state coffers is enough to fend off reality for Sacramento law makers forever.
But even if insolvency isn’t on the immediate horizon, how about the common people. You know, even if I were a Mexican-American working as a teacher or some other stalwart dues-paying client of the Democrat party I think I might be tired of having to put my kids in the bathtub to protect them from gangland gunfire in the crime riddled hellscape that their neighborhoods have become. And that goes for having to pay five bucks a gallon for gas and $1,000 a month for an apartment that’s ten square feet!
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this can go on forever. Of course, if the profits in Silicon Valley ever dip it might really cause a problem. Or suppose more of these companies decide to head to a low tax state like Florida or Nevada? Well, that could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The question I have is what happens then? Can even Washington’s infinite currency printing machines make California work without Google and Apple? They might be finding out sooner than they think.
Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 03JAN2024 – Christmas SoCal Desert Trip
Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 15JUN2023 – Energy Haves and Have-NotsXYZ
A side story on California’s stupidity on renewable energy:
Last fall the state energy commissioner, or whatever the “very important state official” who is in position to announce proclamations from on high to us peasants had dire news. The problem? Energy consumption between the hours of 4pm-10pm needed to be drastically reduced due to the whole sun going down effect. No sunlight, no solar charging-easy concept. The call was put out with advice on appropriate temperature settings for A/C, and the avoidance of activities that might strain the electric grid across the state.
Imagine the surprise that night to see So-Fi Stadium in Los Angeles fully lit up in anticipation for the NFL game being played. The irony was not missed on what the state considered their priorities to be during this alleged crisis. And yes, it was put out with an attitude that this could result in blackouts (brownouts?) across the state.
Those unfamiliar with Los Angeles weather should know that it is quite mild for most of the year. If this was such a desperate situation surely a football game should not have been that important to warrant the amount of wasted energy to light up a small village. The game could have been rescheduled to be during the daylight hours. But no. Priorities you see.