I am a retired California teacher (since 2015) after 29+ years in California high schools. The state has become a zoo, and now so will the classrooms. AB 493 would require teacher training in LGBTQ ideology. SB 419 will make suspensions for, among other things, unruly behavior almost non-existent. For teachers, it’s like being wheeled into the operating room and seeing the medical staff armed with sledge hammers. There won’t be much improvement in your condition but there will be a big mess to clean up.
493 takes teachers out of the classroom to be indoctrinated in all things sex-related. The propaganda line is as follows: Forget the Bible and millennias of understanding and accept the idea that a person can will themselves into another sex. Transgenderism is an important part of the coursework. Of course, we can’t do the same thing with race or ethnicity. Remember cultural appropriation? We can’t do the same thing in regards to height or long fingers. But teachers will learn that genitalia and chromosomes don’t matter.
I know; I know. The ideologues have a chest full of rhetoric and vocabulary to make others well-versed in the pseudo-science. Just remember, this isn’t the first time “experts” were enthralled by intellectual mumbo jumbo. Remember phrenology? Remember eugenics? If you do a deeper dive, you’ll find more bunk.
If that isn’t enough, 419 moves the schools further down the road to a suspension-free utopia … or maybe dystopia is more accurate. A school is commanded by the ideologues in Sacramento to jump through more hoops before a kid can be suspended for unruly behavior. It’s not as if schools already don’t do this. They do, and a lot. In some cases, too much. Nikolas Cruz of Parkland fame benefited from this bend-yourself-into-pretzels disciplinary regime. Last year, California’s Kern High School District teachers rebelled against the imposition of the “restorative justice” flim-flam.
So, the not-so-golden state will have boys-now-girls in the girls’ bathroom, locker room, track team, soccer team, …. Chaos in sex and gender will be supplemented by classrooms that more resemble prison riots. Teachers might begin to act like the Lloyd Bridges air traffic control character in “Airplane”: “Looks like I took the wrong week to quit ….”
“Steve” (Lloyd Bridges) sniffing glue in “Airplane”.
The whole situation will drive teachers to more than the bottle. It’ll drive many out of the state … if they remain sober enough to operate a U-haul.
Today, Bernie Sanders unveiled his plan for the Green New Deal, a $16.3 trillion monster. You can read about it here in the New York Times. The number – 16.3 trillion – is so huge that we lose sight of its magnitude. To break it down, if the dollars were miles, it would be a little less than three-quarters of the distance to Alpha Centauri, an entirely separate planetary system “far far away”. The size of the number means that the bill can’t be paid by anyone. The projected payback will extend beyond generations “far far away”. It’s essentially an invitation to join the Stone Age for anyone and everyone in generations from now to those “far far away”.
That dingbat congresswoman from the Bronx would like to stampede us into the Stone Age with hysterical cries that we have only 10 years before the Götterdämmerung if we do nothing. For her, better the Stone Age than extinction. Apparently, Bernie also favors the choice of the Stone Age. For me, the difference is marginal. The Stone Age was best captured in Thomas Hobbes’s famous dictum: life is “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short”.
Making flints in the Stone Age.
But is the U.S. in the catbird seat to stave off disaster anyway? Remember, our government’s decisions to economically harm us only harms … us! China and the rest of the developing world have a keen interest in indoor plumbing and air conditioning. They’ll burn down their jungles and the fossil fuels in a long list of Saudi Arabias to get out from living in the dirt. So, unless Bernie appoints himself to be the Maoist General Secretary of the World and embarks on a Genghis Khan-style conquest of the planet to enforce the resultant poverty, he’ll just end up destroying us. The rest of the world will continue to pollute, albeit at a faster clip.
BEIJING, CHINA – DECEMBER 20: Citizens walk in smog on December 20, 2016 in Jinan, Shandong Province of China. Air quality index (AQI) readings exceeded 400 and some schools have suspended classes in Jinan. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)Burning coal in China to generate electricity.
A few numbers might help Bernie, his fellow ideological asylum inmates, and the Squad in understanding the extent of the craziness. The U.S. is about a quarter of the world’s economy. China comes in second at 15%. The numbers are nearly reversed in global CO2 emissions: China at 30%, the U.S. at 15%. So – I’ll go slow for the woke crowd – we produce 25% of the world’s product at only 15% of emissions, and China knocks out 15% of the world’s product at 30% of emissions. What’s that mean? I’ll go slow once again for all those with degrees but show no sign of better judgment: It means that China is dirtier, much dirtier at a rate twice ours. The lesson, therefore, is to smash the cleaner nation’s economy only to clear the way for the dirty one. Bernie must have skipped Math class in high school.
The hope is that China will be inspired by our example to voluntarily follow suit. What example? It’s the example of how to level a first world country into the third world. I suspect that they’d like to avoid the experience as if it was a leper colony.
California prides itself in being a ground breaker. They have adopted the greenie snake oil through a variety of measures over the past couple of decades. As of 2017/18, though, the state accounts for only 1.1% of global CO2 discharges. Even if they knock it down to zero – probably by running the rest of the economy out of the state – their slot will be more than replaced by India as it ramps up.
What’s the upshot of all the greenie caterwauling? Say goodbye to the future for your kids, their kids, and their kids’ kids. Maybe they might feel better if they know that they were making a sacrifice for the good of … no one. Not!
In 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill. 170 years tater, human waste is discovered on the streets and sidewalks of San Francisco. And just think, you don’t have to pan for it.
How bad is the problem? Poop maps have become indispensable for any tourist visiting Sodom-by-the-Sea. Here’s an instructional pic along with some maps showing the intensity of its occurrence.
If you’re wondering, here’s how it’s done:
From the streets of San Francisco.
This poop map appeared in Forbes, 2019:
This map appeared on Thrillist and is from 2017. If both maps are accurate, two years was enough time for public defecation to become the most popular San Francisco fad since bipedalism among humanoids.
Here, the dropping of one’s drawers in public can be seen as a miasmic cloud.
This map breaks down the number of incidences by district. Warning, stay clear of Golden Gate Park.
Here’s what it means for a municipal sanitation worker:
The Golden Gate was a reference to the entrance into the Bay and San Francisco in particular. The Brown Gate would be more accurate for today.
John Burton, outgoing chair of the California Democratic Party, leads a “F*** Trump” chant at their 2017 convention.
Some have often stated to the point of cliché that California presages the social and political future. The claim is abused but has some applicability to the benefit of opposing ends of the ideological spectrum.
In the 60’s to the 80’s it served the interests of conservatives. Reagan was governor, then president, and California became a willing partner in the Sagebrush Rebellion’s challenge to the collectivists in the DC administrative state. Prop 13 heralded a nationwide tax revolt. Today, it’s the left who benefits from the state’s 36 million person heft. They have a super-majority stranglehold on the state.
The place is a veritable political Disneyland for the furthest tip of the “progressive” left wing of the Democratic Party. Among other things, it’s a state with it’s own immigration policy – i.e., open borders. The Constitution be damned. Now with SB 1, California will declare that it’s the Obama presidency forever within the confines of the state’s borders. The Electoral College be damned.
SB 1 cyrogenically freezes in place the regulations of Obama’s people as of January 19, 2017, the day before Trump took the oath. The bill would in effect veto the Trump administration’s deregulation efforts on, and in, every inch of soil in the new PRC, the People’s Republic of California. This sounds to me like secession … till the next election that they win.
The effect on property owners and farmers would make worse an already bad situation. The bill specifically targets changes in endangered species regulation. Protections for a non-native fish – get that, non-native – the Delta Smelt, in the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta, will continue to be draconically enforced to the detriment of west-side Central Valley agriculturalists. The land out there is dry as a bone and fallow. The towns are drying up as water spills out through the Golden Gate. You can read about it here in an op-ed by John Harris, owner of Harris Ranch.
The Delta Smelt. (Illustration: Bob Bukin)
A puff piece from the sponsoring commissar can be found here.
Watch for other blue-dot havens to follow suit. Instead of a Sagebrush Rebellion, it’ll be secessionitis in the chic soirees of Brentwood/Malibu/Hollywood and Greenwich Viilage/Manhattan till a socialist or socialist-lite places his or her hand on the inaugural Bible and begins our slide into national incontinence. They won’t be happy till they get their chance to emasculate the country. And emasculate they will.
An el diablo is blowing out of Sacramento. The thing has long been associated with firestorms. To borrow with a twist the Las Vegas line, what happens in California rarely stays in California.
Substitute Gavin Newsom for Brown. Gavin’s got more hair, and its gelled, but the straitjacket fits just as snugly.
I’ve previously posted about the new federal tax law’s possible effects on California and the rest of the deep blue states. Ditto about California’s astronomical gas prices. More has come to light, so the need for “Part II”.
I. California and Blue State Taxes.
April 15 has come and gone. Many Californios – of which I used to be one, like millions of others scattered throughout the country – and others in deep blue states are cutting checks to the IRS instead of receiving refunds. Curtailing SALT (the federal tax subsidy to high-tax states, the Hillary electorate) and the home mortgage interest deduction (HMID), and a few other tax changes, have wreaked havoc with their expectations. Now, they really know what it means to live in a high-tax state.
Michael Ramirez / Weekly Standard
First, lower refunds across the country are expected since withholding was reduced in each one of your paychecks. Paychecks were bigger as the feds took less. We could go back to the old system of the feds lopping off more from each one of your paychecks and giving a pittance back at the end of the tax year. Let’s face it; withholding is a scam.
Second, the caterwauling from California about getting less from the feds than they send to DC has reached a fever pitch. The only problem: it probably isn’t true. George Skelton in the LA Times raised serious doubts, as does Ann Hollingshead with the Legislative Analyst’s Office and the Tax Foundation (see here).
The old wives’ tale was born of a flawed study with gimmicky assumptions. Among other things, not properly accounted was California’s peculiar demography. The state’s age pyramid is distorted with a mass of the young and proportionally fewer elderly. I suspect that’s probably due to massive foreign immigration over the past 5 decades and the hemorrhaging of retirees to other environs. As a result, the accounting contains less federal Social Security and Medicare payments. How much of this is due to the policies championed by the state’s ruling party? Hmmmm, I wonder.
Also, the military draw down since the end of the Cold War didn’t help. Still, in the end, the accounting gimmicks in the earlier study exaggerated the monies going to DC and undervalued the monies to the state. It’s just more proof of Disraeli’s old line: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
As for the clamps on the HMID, any adverse effects can be traced to California foot-shooting. Real estate is very pricey in the state, and getting pricier. It’s a good bet that much of the state’s middle class have mortgages that greatly exceed the limits in the tax law. Why is that? You need look no further than the Leviathan of taxes and regulations smothering housing in the state. Eco-craziness and taxaholism leaves a hangover. It comes in the form of homeless encampments – the usefulness of human poop maps (SF, but applicable elsewhere) as a result – skyrocketing rents, and a strangulation of supply.
Aiming a cocked-and-loaded gun at your foot is an appropriate metaphor.
II. California’s Gas Prices.
Self-serve gasoline prices at Chevron in Malibu exceed $4 a gallon mark on April 15. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
Once again, foot-shooting reigns supreme regarding the state’s astronomically high gas prices. But the mandarins of the ruling party are looking for scapegoats. A Berkeley prof of Business Administration, Severin Borenstein, gave the goons ammunition by apparently identifying a 24-cent “surcharge”, an amount that he couldn’t account for. The near-socialist ruling party didn’t need much of an excuse to go on a jihad against capitalism. Borenstein gave them one.
Prof. Severin Borenstein, UC Berkeley
Well, Severin, here’s one factor that you didn’t think of: the state has so mangled the market for fuel that supply and demand have nowhere to reach but up. Sorry, Newsom and the other chiefs of the ruling party, you can’t suspend the laws of supply of demand like you tried with immigration law. There’s no such thing as a sanctuary from supply and demand. The Soviets took that route to prosperity, and discovered poverty and social collapse.
The peculiar CARBOB blend, cap-and-trade, greenie taxes, and the constant finagling of CARB (Ca. Air Resources Board) have given the state the least consumer-friendly fuel market in the country. Such markets still have supply and demand. It’s just that they intersect at a place above almost any red state. Call it the lefty “surcharge”.
A beleaguered California resident?
This postscript to previous posts only makes the plight of blue states bleaker. The fact that this is democratically-chosen bleakness doesn’t alter the reality. If you want the clowns, accept what happens when you’re ruled by clowns.
And that includes sending more money to the state, any metroplex in the state, and DC. And add to it the high prices for almost anything, including gas. I guess that you get what you vote for.
Mark Zuckerberg in April of 2018 was quoted as saying before Congress that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place”. I would take it further. Any of the deep blue dots on the election map are, by definition, “extremely left-leaning place[s]”.
Today, almost any large institution or organization in our densely-packed urban nodes is likely to be an “extremely left-leaning place”. An example would be our tech giants like Google (or Alphabet, Inc). Daily, we are exposed to the socio-political biases of these “extremely left-leaning place[s]”. The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation (RMEF) in Montana was recently confronted with it. (see here)
Google employees at the Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.
The RMEF had been running ads on Google for years. In April, they were email notified by a Google employee that it would be no more. It seems that Google has a policy against hunting. Somebody apparently did a Google search on the RMEF. The RMEF quickly appealed to the Montana congressional delegation and the rejection was reversed.
Whether Google has a policy in opposition to hunting isn’t the pertinent question. Our gaze should be directed at the Google workroom. What’s happening in there? I suspect, with good reason, that they have an “extremely left-leaning” population at work. To them, nature is a Disney cartoon; hunting is cruelty; and we should all be vegan anyway. Hippie food stores and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation don’t go together.
Just another reminder that urbanity-as-in-citified is synonymous with eco-zealotry, gender fluidity, and Bernie bros/gals.
Lesson: Fashionable ideas frequently fall into the category of “too good to be true”.
Compare Amy Harder’s Axiospiece from yesterday, “The key to unlocking wind and solar: Making it last”, and Michael Shellenberger’s Forbesarticle from 2018, “We Don’t Need Solar And Wind To Save The Climate — And It’s A Good Thing, Too”. The former is a puff piece about another alleged “breakthrough” for solar and wind energy. The latter is a healthy splash of cold water on the whole ploy. In today’s media, almost anything chic among the beautiful people, popular with the rulers in deep blue states, championed in thousands of public service ads, and exalted in high school science fairs, should be taken with a ton of salt.
Here’s a few takeaways from the analysis:
* Solar and wind, especially solar, have always been on the cusp of the next will-o’-the-wisp big breakthrough since the 19th century. Shellenberger recounts the history; Harder unwittingly provides another example.
* Solar and wind are expensive. They sound like a great idea since the sun shines and the wind blows without our help. Check out the electricity rates of countries who have bought into solar and wind.
* The environmental damage of wind and solar is immense. They use up and mar vast tracts of the landscape, disrupt and threaten the natural flora and fauna, and the production of their devices begets toxic wastes and land scarring.
* Nuclear is an obvious alternative but gets no mention in the rush to the solar-and-wind utopia. It’s better, more efficient, more cost effective, produces no CO2, and recycles much of its waste. What’s there not to like … if we can look away from the scowls of the beautiful people?
The China Syndrome (1979), directed by James Bridges. Shown from left: James Hampton, Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas.
The real world can’t be boiled down to Sierra Club talking points. I wish that our media would stop repeating them and our kids weren’t taught the baloney.
A Berkeley economist has got the “woke” doofuses running the California madhouse – aka state capitol – in a tizzy over the state’s high gas prices. The number cruncher gave them an excuse for a pogrom [mass violence against a minority] against the oil industry in the state, shape-shifting blame from themselves to the buccaneers of capitalism. Now that’s quite a trick.
Gasoline prices have jumped nearly 60 cents in the past month in Southern California. The average price of $4.30 for a gallon of self-serve regular in Los Angeles County Thursday is the highest in California. The statewide average is $4.20 a gallon. (ED JOYCE/KPCC)
Below is a map of current gas prices by county. Notice the flaming red of California.
Let me count the ways that the screwballs – not Exxon/Mobil – have shafted the California motorist, starting with cap-and-trade. Back in 2015, people knew that the thing would hike fuel prices 11-13 cents per gallon by its lonesome. The dream was to dent global warming; the reality is to dent residents’ pocketbooks. (see here)
Let’s not forget that the state wacks each gallon of gas with a 41.7 cents/gal. levy – soon to rise to 43.7 cents. Couple that with the 18.4 cents federal tax and a commuter starts right out of the gate with each squeeze of the pump handle over 61 cents in the hole, second highest in the nation.
California seems to be always red on these matters. This map sets the combined gas tax burden in the state at almost 66 cents per gallon as of 2015:
It doesn’t stop there. California demands boutique fuels: unique fuel blends just for the not-so-golden state. In fuel-speak, it’s called CARBOB and according to experts, “CARBOB is even more expensive, and is the main reason why California gasoline prices are typically higher than anywhere else in the country.” (see here)
The result is a stunted and mangled market within the narrow confines of one state. Those kind of markets don’t work very well. You can’t impose some of the highest gas taxes, pursue the fantasy of counteracting China and India with California’s adherence to a cap-and-trade straitjacket, and play footsie with fuel blends and not get jacked at the pump. Get real.
It’s simple economics, or – better yet – it’s simple math. I guess it goes to the difference between knowing economics and math and actually believing in them. Apparently, some people think that they can suspend the rules with no ill-effects.
How about a mandatory blood test for those folks in the clown car called the California State Legislature?
Shriner clowns or the California State Legislature in a parade?
I’m loathe to admit this, but a small dose of maturity was administered by the Senator to politicized youngins, a few older than 18 and most appear to be around 12 (watch the video below). All mouthed lefty boilerplate in a visit to Feinstein’s office that couldn’t survive a serious high school debate.
It’s difficult to watch adults exploiting a group of tweens. They were members of the Sunrise Movement whose purpose is to stampede the country into enacting the Green New Deal and its Soviet-style central planning by hiding behind kids.
The title’s “kinda” part has to do with appearances, which can be deceiving. Today’s Democrats are in favor of more central planning. Yet, the presence of the Markey/Sanders/AOC Green New Deal makes the other Dems appear moderate. The fact is, the whole party has lurched left, and to the left means in the direction of the Socialist International. Some, like the Green New Deal sponsors, are just in a hurry to get there; others want to take a little longer and slower route to the same destination.
It’s much like the difference between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks of days of yore. They both wanted socialism. It’s just that the M’s were content with a more peaceful march to utopia while the B’s wanted it now, preferably with guns. The “M” and “B” thing is playing out in the office of Sen. Diane Feinstein and Democratic Party congressional caucus. Do you want your socialism straight (Bernie/AOC style) or diluted (Feinstein style)?
Mayor Eric Garcetti announces his intention that LA Department of Water and Power not replace three coastal gas-burning power plants but instead find a combination of renewable energy sources sufficient to take their place. (Sharon McNary/KPCC/LAist)
Today’s Democrats are like migratory birds. They are hardwired to travel in certain directions. For North American humming birds, it’s south; for Democrats, it’s left. In other words, even if blindfolded, Dems migrate ever closer to Havanna — as a model of societal organization, that is. Take for instance the rush to embrace the Green New Deal. Take for instance the LA mayor’s drive to hobble power generation for the city by closing down 3 natural gas power plants and replacing them with the fairy tale of … full-on “sustainables” – i.e., wind and solar. Get ready for more middle-class flight and rolling blackouts.
The pic shows LA’s powerful and influential lining up like Canadian geese. This certainly is a rush to the future … if your future has in store a lifetime lockup in a mental hospital. Knowingly taking poison isn’t a sign of mental stability.
Watch out USA. A Californian with presidential ambitions, Sen. Kamala Harris, wants to bring the California psychosis to a neighborhood near you. If you’re poorly informed, just remember that a Californian with a “D” after their name is shorthand for a candidate’s toxicity.
