In “Poltergeist II”, the little girl stares into the snow of the TV screen and announces, “They’re baaaaack!”. Who’s back? The ghosts, of course. For those chronicling the decline of California, the iconic declaration must be reworked. A person staring at their daily news feed comes away with stories of people leaving the state saying, “They’re leeeeeeeeeeaving!” This time, it’s Time magazine in “Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time” (see below).
The little girl from “Poltergeist II”
And I quote from the story: “Los Angeles was not at the top of the list [of places to move to], instead becoming the area residents were most likely to move away from.” According to a Redfin report, “That marks the first time on record [LA] has been the number one place homebuyers are leaving, and the first time in over two years the Bay Area has dropped out of the number one spot.”
A dubious distinction for the not-so-Golden State. LA occupies the top spot, but the rest of the list is a who’s who of American urban dystopia, all of them Democratic Party satraps. San Francisco, New York City, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit and Denver are kryptonite to businesses and the middle class. People are voting with their feet as they have for millennia. Hell on earth is not a magnet.
A common strip of homelessness in Los AngelesLitter from the chronic mobs of thieves along rail lines in Los Angeles
Welcome to urban America, and for the globe-trotting foreign traveler, reconsider that visit to the City by the Bay or Disneyland. Unless you’re a member of a major bowl game broadcast crew like the ESPN team reporting from the floor of the Rose Bowl, who’ll speed from the airport to hotel to the Rose Bowl in a limousine, you’ll risk face-to-face encounters with urban dysfunction.
For Californians, get out. For visitors, stay away.
RogerG
Source:
* “Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time”, Suzanne Blake, Time, 12/29/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/americans-are-fleeing-los-angeles-more-than-anywhere-else-for-first-time/ar-AA1md8sC?ocid=msedgntp&pc=LCTS&cvid=483db5997a504d34a10fb00840ed94db&ei=52
During the Cold War, the Soviets in their efforts to harness to their side the so-called Third World – mostly poorer, developing and nominally nonaligned countries (at least officially not tied to the western or communist bloc) – created a “university” to train the next generation of Marxist revolutionaries. Modeled on Soviet “education”, the schooling is premised, straitjacketed, on the absolute truth of Karl Marx’s revolutionary dialectic. Deeply implanted is the alleged Marxist reality of systemic oppression, the same kind of thing now commonplace in our schools of higher ed, and lower.
The Soviet tactic was to hide the indoctrination behind the name of a popular “hero” like Patrice Lumumba. Officially titled Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow implanted Marxist thought in the next generation of revolutionaries and activists from around the world. Notable alumni include a long list of murderous malcontents such as the terrorist Carlos the Jackal, Iran’s totalitarian mullah Ali Khamenei, the Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, and the one-man-one-vote-one-time ruler Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority.
Students at Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, 1985Carlos the Jackal
The politicized heirs could include much of the college graduating classes in the U.S. going back at least a decade or two. The Marxist-thought concept is infectious and is now established ideological orthodoxy throughout the college landscape across America. Scholarship is bastardized by Marxist jargon, politically weighted vocabulary for which no one is allowed question. Thought begins with the boilerplate, ends with the boilerplate. This passes for learning in America (and elsewhere).
In a previous post, I wrote of the troubles at Bakersfield College, the Kern Community College District, and the Community College System in California. Clearly, the intellectual rot doesn’t begin or end there. The results are found in the polling of the under-24s. The recent Harvard/Harris poll shows 51% of the 18-to-24 cohort supported the ending of the state of Israel and turning it over “to Hamas and the Palestinians”. Increasingly, these people aren’t just liberal; they’re Marxist, having applied the Marxist rhetoric of oppressor and colonizer to Israel. It is what is meant by “not being liberal enough”. Translation: being Marxist. Welcome to America’s future.
We’d be much more honest with ourselves if we renamed all American higher ed Patrice Lumumba Universities because that is what they are. Parents, beware, you might be subsidizing the future authors of the next holocaust.
The bodies of people, some of them elderly, lie on a street after they were killed during a mass-infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip, in Sderot, southern Israel, Oct. 7, 2023. (Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad)
RogerG
Sources:
* “Poll: Most young Americans think Israel should be ‘ended and given to Hamas’”, Toi Staff, The Times of Israel, 12/17/23, at https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-most-young-americans-back-ending-israel-many-find-jewish-genocide-calls-okay/
How did we get to this place? In one of the last remaining conservative bastions in a state gone neo-Marxist, the area’s community college district – Kern County CCD – is at the vanguard of the same poisonous revolution engulfing Sacramento and the Left-happy denizens on the populous coastal plain. I left the state, and a near 30-year academic career in the county, because there’s no escaping the toxic governing philosophy that holds sway over the entire state. County boundaries are no protection. The lines don’t shelter your schools from being engines of state-sanctioned revolutionary indoctrination.
I got out. You too may be left with no other option.
The happenings in the District and its main Bakersfield College campus are a scandal. A few names and words typify the sickening situation. Sonya Christian (no “Dr.” designation because it is reserved for those who passed their medical boards; PhDs in Education don’t qualify), English instructor Paula Parks (no “Dr.” designation; ditto), John Corkins (radicalized president of the Kern Community College Board of Trustees), radical jargon like DEI, and faculty counterrevolutionaries such as Daymon Johnson, Matthew Garrett, and Erin Miller of The Renegade Institute for Liberty at Bakersfield College (see Facebook page below)
Sonya Christian
Karl Marx wrote and spoke of a “false consciousness” among the people that prevents the revolutionary uprising. “False consciousness” is reserved for those who simply disagree, the counterrevolutionaries. It must be overcome and control of the schools is essential to that end. In a recent meeting of the Board of Trustees, its president, John Corkins, reminiscent of Lenin before his Council of People’s Commissars, called for the extermination of faculty who dare to oppose the revolution’s DEI ideology. Corkins said in reference to the faculty critics of the revolution’s doctrines – in essence, those guilty of “false consciousness” – of the need to “cull the herd”. He said, “We put a rope on some of ’em and take ’em to the slaughterhouse”.
John Corkins
In 1918, a Bolshevik organ, Krasnaya Gazeta, in the midst of their revolution put it in similar terms: “Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands; let them drown themselves in their own blood . . . . let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois – more blood, as much as possible.” Culling the herd, indeed.
More shocking were the reputed erudites seated to his right at the trustee table who were smiling, giggling, and nodding in approval. See for yourself in the video clip from the meeting. It was a monstrous display of revolutionary groupthink.
Corkins was caught in the fever of a revolutionary moment, like the editors of Krasnaya Gazeta, and subsequently apologized. Yet, it’s a window into the mind of a revolutionary. In that mind lies a modern manifestation of an old revolutionary dialectic in the form of DEI – “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion”, or more accurately, “Discrimination, Exclusion, Indoctrination” in the words of Wisconsin’s Robin Voss (R.), Speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly.
“Diversity” is code for a return to race-based hiring, promotions, and admissions. “Equity” is code for a spoils system for selected “protected classes” (synonymous with the Marxist “oppressed”). “Inclusion” is code for excising western civilization from instruction and replacing it with a litany of oppression by oppressors noted for their light pigmentation, male genitalia, and membership in wealthier societies. “Privilege” and “systemic” is more jargon to that end.
How any of this can pass the muster of the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC decisions (2023) is difficult to imagine. Chief Justice John Roberts put it succinctly in an earlier case (2007) when he wrote in the majority opinion, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” DEI is illegal if the rule of law has any meaning today.
Some didn’t get the Roberts memo, or more accurately ignored it in a brazen flaunting of the rule of law. The state’s Leninist Attorney General, Rob Bonta, rushed to the defense of Sonya Christian, chancellor of the state’s community college system and past president of both the Kern Community College District and Bakersfield College, and the target of lawsuits filed by faculty victims of the purge and loyalty oaths to the revolution. Bonta tried to recast the DEI mandates as advice, suggestions, or general guidelines, or “competencies” in Christian’s words. DEI “competencies” (or whatever) “advising” descriptions of the ways that the faculty will implement the revolution’s doctrines into classroom management, instruction, and grading is ipso facto forced endorsement of the revolution. Orwell’s Ministry of Truth would be proud.
Rob Bonta, state Attorney General
Others have also noticed the discrepancy between the law and California’s zeal for neo-Marxist revolution in the upper reaches of its community colleges. In a matter related to the lawsuit filed by the Institute for Free Speech on behalf of BC history professor Daymon Johnson against the district’s forced fealty to “anti-racist” ideology, a U.S. magistrate judge ruled that the district was wrong for stepping into a spat between faculty members Johnson and English prof Andrew Bond. At issue was an incendiary Facebook post by Bond:
“Maybe Trump’s comment about sh**hole countries was a statement of projection because honestly, the US is a f***ing piece of sh** nation. Go ahead and quote me, conservatives.”
Andrew Bond, left-wing activist and BC English profMatthew Garrett, BC History profDaymon Johnson, BC History prof
Johnson responded by suggesting that Bond “move to China”. And for that, Bond filed an administrative complaint of bullying against Johnson. Hyper-sensitive academics unable to engage in discourse have no business instructing anyone’s student body. The magistrate’s ruling is advisory while the lawsuit is pending before the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of California.
But it was the case regarding history prof Matthew Garrett that drew the ire of Corkins in his infamous remarks that “bad actors” like Garrett needed to be “culled” to the slaughterhouse. What was Garrett’s great and unforgiveable sin? He presented a different point of view to the reigning DEI orthodoxy on campus. He had the temerity of defending on free speech grounds “Smash Cultural Marxism”, etc., bumper stickers. And he was hauled before an administrative tribunal for criticizing the controversial University of Southern California Race and Equity Center poll on campus racism; trying to host a conservative speaker in violation of the school’s COVID restrictions at a time of approved progressive events, a jazz festival, football banquet, and a Day of the Dead celebration; and chiding “safe spaces” for black students as “segregation”. If Andrew Bond’s “the US is a f***ing piece of sh** nation” earns nary a glance of concern, what to make of the administrative hammer bearing down on Garrett for presenting a coherent alternative point of view?
Sonya Christian’s influence on campus during her tenure has been anything but salutary. She’s a lightning rod; her allegiance to neo-Marxist dogmas is provocative because the dogmas are provocative. They goad reaction because revolutions of this nature are totalitarian. They repudiate the central tenets of liberty which is a cornerstone of our society. The revolutionary ends now justify the revolutionary means.
Take a look, Kern County residents, at what your Board of Trustees is doing in your name. Please watch the clip. In the meantime, resist or leave the state. Your choices are simple at this juncture. Good luck.
RogerG
Sources:
* “California college trustee is forced to apologize after he was recorded saying anyone opposing woke anti-racism and ‘equity’ measures should be ‘roped’ and taken to the SLAUGHTERHOUSE”, Melissa Koenig, Daily Mail, 1/3/23, at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11596097/California-college-trustee-apologizes-saying-opposing-anti-racism-roped.html
* “California’s Troubled Community-College System Just Got Worse”, Will Swaim, National Review, 12/16/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/californias-troubled-community-college-system-just-got-worse/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth
* Daymon Johnson’s lawsuit case filing: “Johnson v. Watkin”, Institute for Free Speech, 6/5/23, at https://www.ifs.org/cases/johnson-v-watkin/
* The Renegade Institute for Liberty at Bakersfield College Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100048586580019
* “LENIN AND THE USE OF TERROR: SOME IMPORTANT QUOTATIONS”, World Future Fund, at https://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Quotes/leninkeyquotes.htm#:~:text=We%20will%20let%20loose%20the%20floodgates%20of%20that,bourgeois%20-%20more%20blood%2C%20as%20much%20as%20possible.%E2%80%9D
SF failure to sign: then-Los Angeles Angels designated hitter Shohei Ohtani reacts during the seventh inning at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, Calif., June 29, 2023. (Gary A. Vasquez/USA TODAY Sports via Reuters)
People are fleeing California and especially San Fransisco. San Fransisco is the tip of the spear in our current progressive-inspired wave of broad social decay. The fallout stretches from crime-ridden streets to ubiquitous disorder to business flight to join the residential variety — and in the difficulty in attracting promising young free agents, according to Buster Posey, recently retired player extraordinaire and part-owner and member of the team’s board of directors.
Buster Posey, Giants part-owner and member of the Board of Directors
Posey on the team’s difficulties: “Something I think is noteworthy, something that unfortunately keeps popping up from players and even the players’ wives is there’s a bit of an uneasiness with the city itself, as far as the state of the city, with crime, with drugs. . . . But as far as a free-agent pursuit goes, I have seen that it does affect things.”
Dan Lurie, throwing his hat into the ring for mayor, in an X post agrees with Posey. He posted,
“Players like Buster Posey have brought so much joy to San Franciscans, but now our city’s problems are affecting our ability to attract new generational stars. Our city should be a draw for players, not a reason to avoid our sports teams.
Current city leadership has let down the people who live and work in San Francisco every day. It’s time to call in the replacements and end the perception that lawlessness is an acceptable part of life in San Francisco. Then we will start our comeback.”
Dan Lurie, Levis heir and mayoral candidate
Yep, ideas have consequences, and probably the only real lasting consequences. The Lefty worldview is a disaster, and the calamity filters into everything, even my SF Giants.
San Fransisco poop map made famous by Gov. Ron DeSantis in his debate with Gov. Gavin Newsom
RogerG
* Dan Luries’s X post at https://twitter.com/DanielLurie/status/1735026315244528018?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1735026315244528018%7Ctwgr%5Ea4ecb030bd3537b9539ce9c7b19ade7f8ed3ca56%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nationalreview.com%2Fnews%2Fsnl-mocks-antisemitism-hearing-with-university-presidents-in-new-skit%2F
L-R) Harvard President Claudine Gay, former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, American University professor Pamela Nadell and MIT President Sally Kornbluth testify before the House Education and Workforce Committee on Dec 5. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
* “The Beast” is taken from Naomi Wolf’s latest book “Facing the Beast”.
You’ve all seen it or at least heard of it: the congressional testimony of the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT, particularly under the questioning of Elise Stefanik (R-NY). In monotone answers, as if coached by lawyers or PR experts, these people refused to declare that antisemitic speech calling for genocide of Jews by staff and students violates their schools’ official code of conduct (see video below). Their cagey responses say much about them and more so about the educational rot on their campuses and in their heads. It’s as if a malign beast has descended upon these places. Parents, beware.
What “beast”? The thing is more than a personification of evil. It’s the influence of ideas that can inspire people to do evil things. Some ideas are inherently evil. Some ideas are “beasts”, mostly because they contradict our nature. They bring out the worst in us and cause our demise. How do we know them? A biblical warning: “Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16).
Today’s “beast” is the Marxist oppressor/oppressed claptrap. It’s everywhere in the quasi-mystical jargon in DEI, ESG, CRT, the politics of identity, etc., and throughout K to grad school. There aren’t many institutions not infected by it. Your kids are getting a steady dose of it whenever they step into a classroom, watch TV, go to a movie, and cruise the internet on their cellphone.
The “beast” has a family tree. The 60’s counterculture was a hip version of an older belief system, the same one that is now bombarding your kids from age 5 to 26. German Marxist agitator Rudi Dutschke in 1967 preached a “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” strategy, the so-called Long March through the institutions. In other words, he proposed that the zealots conquer the system from within rather than tear it down – co-opt it through infiltration. He rejiggered one of his Marxist inspirations’ (Antonio Gramsci) revolutionary “war of position” language from a few decades before. And, boy, did he and they succeed as evidenced by the prevarications on display in last week’s congressional testimony. The college presidents can’t bring themselves to condemn the now common Dutschke/Gramsci/Marcuse grotesqueries replete in their lecture halls and on their grounds.
Parents, are you sure that you are not bankrolling the ruination of your child’s mind in a leftist finishing school? And all this so your kids can have the prestige in possessing something that is quickly losing its prestige? How does that compute?
The degree and campus experience are rapidly losing their value. The indoctrination and subsequent lack of rigor cannot be hidden for long. Dunces and extremists with degrees cannot interminably escape the withering eye of reality. Every employer will come to realize the truth in “Ye shall know them by their fruits”. Statue-topplers aren’t likely to keep the sewer system in operation.
Send your kids and money elsewhere. Please watch the short clip.
May 8, 2020, at a charging station in Dongguan, China, where an electric car caught fire when being plugged into a charger.
While perusing my news feed, I found a recent Fortune magazine article on the problems that electric vehicle owners are having with their cars, 80% more difficulties on average than conventional combustion vehicles (see below). The writer tried to deflect the problems into the category of “growing pains” for the new industry.
Yes, I agree with him, but he seems unaware of the much more fundamental issue. Problems or no, the EV is a politically driven product and, like any such good or service, has politically driven trade-offs. Growing pains? Growing pains or no, the whole EV industry probably would be immensely smaller but for politics. Politicians constructing their road to utopia understand that people must be bribed, and coerced, to mass adopt something that makes their lives worse off. The things still don’t make much economic sense compared to those efficient muscle engines.
Gasoline direct injection engine.An EV battery pack weighs on average 1,000 pounds. Your typical combustion engine and its transmission can vary from 300 (4-cylinder) to 1,000 pounds (V-8 powerhouse).
Lest we forget, politicians are camp followers, always with their fingers in the wind discerning the next fashionable thought or issue. Those leaning to the Left already have a laundry list of ready-made issues, just add water – i.e., donors’ money.
But there’s one huge complication: Politics is a poor driver of an economy. Utility (use and practicality) occupies first place in a normally functioning economy. Sellers invent and continue to produce the stuff that buyers find useful and enhances their lives. If it’s not as good as the alternatives, it’s essentially junk. It’s the economic definition of junk. When politics enters the fray, utility disappears from the equation. Practicality and usefulness take a back seat to powerful groups’ ideological demands. When the movement rises in prominence due to their momentary occupation of the commanding heights of the culture, they quickly gain the reins of political power to impose their preferences, and the artificially driven esteem for junk rises.
Trade-offs and opportunity costs are tossed to the wind. If pressed, the true believer can always interject their own wholly invented, unprovable costs into the equation. Prominent among the hypothetical eco-costs is the existential end of the planet. That’s always the gambit for the zealot: scare people into adopting the zealot’s choices. The Left’s ownership of the cultural commanding heights has made it easy for already Left-leaning politicos to engage in the hyperbole. Consequently, political power is married to an ideology’s agenda. In the end, your family sedan is forced into oblivion.
So, as politically inspired junk is imposed on the population, what is lost, or the opportunity cost? On the EV front, the auto producers’ resources are plowed into the less-useful and away from the more-useful. That’s a trade-off, and it’s unavoidable. The loss of the opportunity for producing the more useful things (opportunity costs) increases, and that’s equally unavoidable.
An EV depleted of chargeVandals cut and removed charging handles from this charging station on Vancouver Island, B.C.
What does all this mean for you? Your life changes, and for the worse. It always pencils-out that way when you are forced to choose the worst alternative. How bad is that alternative? The whole eco-agenda cascades onto you with its abundant unintended consequences. It goes beyond the problems with charging and the batteries (some of them catch fire) in the article. The additional resources to make the thing work as the numerous glitches of the impractical (“growing pains”) raise the costs of producing the impractical which will always translate into an increase in the cost of living. Higher standards of living do not ride the back of higher costs of production and living. The more that you try and do that, the worse it gets.
Save the planet by being worse off? But you aren’t saving the planet. Do you think for a moment that India and China and the rest of Donald Trump’s “shitholes” are going to give up cheap energy? Come on, get a grip. China is building new coal-fired plants at the same clip as they are warships. India, soon to be the planet’s most populous country, wants relief from the oppressive heat. Sorry, solar panels and windmills won’t cut it. Economies of scale in energy production, meaning a grid and power plants, is the only thing that’ll elevate people out of the sweat and filth. Everyone, if they were honest, knows it, except AOC, John Kerry, and our culture’s eco-barkers.
Wait a minute. That’s quite a crowd who’ve bought into the nonsense. And nonsense it is. The leap of faith from a period of warming temperatures to the apocalypse more resembles a religious doctrine than science. “Follow the science” is no such thing. It’s follow the eco-Pope.
That Genius of Lansing, Mi., Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, has decided to go California and follow the eco-Pope. She’s hellbent on bringing blackouts and skyrocketing utility bills to the wolverine state. She signed two bills establishing energy central planning (see below). The state must be 100% “clean energy” by 2040, 60% by 2035. That means a massive increase in solar and wind, 1.5 million acres more (Mackinac Center report, see below). The costs will be humungous, and it will be taken out of the hide of Michiganders. And out of the sovereign powers of localities. Their power to regulate these gargantuan scars on the land in their neighborhood will be proscribed. Expect each family in the state to shell out an additional $2,746 per year for energy (Mackinac Center report).
Declaring war on gas and petroleum and monopolizing all energy needs onto an electrical grid suffering from “intermittency” (solar and wind) is absolute folly. Do you want to live worse off? Do you want your children to be worse off? Don’t think for a moment that at least you’ve saved the planet, as they’ve made most people’s lives more challenging. By the way, it won’t be true for Jeff Bezos, nor Mark Zuckerberg, nor John Kerry, who married into the Heinz fortune.
Albert Gore and his mansions
The planet will be the same as before, and you’ll be less well off. All this brought to you by people who don’t know what they’re doing.
On second thought, they do. And it’s hooey.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Electric vehicle owners report 80% more problems than with conventional cars and trucks amid ‘growing pains’ for the industry, Consumer Reports says”, Tom Krisher of the AP, Fortune, 11/23/23, at https://fortune.com/2023/11/29/electric-vehicle-reliability-more-problems-gas-powered/
* “Michigan Gov Whitmer signs sweeping green energy bill forcing transition from fossil fuels”, Thomas Catenacci, Fox News, 11/30/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/michigan-gov-whitmer-signs-sweeping-green-energy-bill-forcing-transition-from-fossil-fuels/ar-AA1kJF4I
* “New Energy Bills Would Increase Costs and Blackouts”, Holly Wetzel, Mackinac Center, 10/27/2023, at https://www.mackinac.org/pressroom/2023/new-energy-bills-would-increase-costs-and-blackouts
You might be tired of my constant criticism of California, but there’s a reason for it. The state is in the vanguard of trends that are weakening the nation. Many of the ideas that prove to be harmful emanate from the state, while the state is without doubt in a doom loop. There’s no need to sugarcoat the reality.
Let’s start with population projections for the state. For at least a decade, people have been fleeing the state at a pace that might conceivably accelerate. The census that determines apportionment (the number of representatives in the House of Representatives for each state) has not been kind to California and is likely to get worse. After the 2020 numbers came in, California lost one seat (53 became 52). Now, as reported by Decision Desk HQ, California’s representation could very well shrink by an additional 5 by the time of the next census count in 2030 (see below).
Why the decline? Point of fact, the state is so poorly governed. Lefty ideation, which dominates the one-party state, is poison to the health of any community. Annually, bills are passed and signed that are making the state a living hell. Parents are losing control of their kids as soon as the kid steps onto the school grounds. State taxpayers will be on the hook for treatments and surgeries for any teen and tween from anywhere demanding to alter their birth sex. Call it an underground railroad for America’s version of teenage genital mutilation. Government workers in their unions control the state and many local governments driving them into insolvency. Filth, squalor, crime, drug abuse mar public and private spaces. And, let’s not forget, lefty environmental utopianism is destroying an entire way of life. With all that, why not get out?
One barometer of a community’s overall health is prices. High taxes on nearly everything jack up the cost of living, but it’s more than that. The state is a regulatory nightmare, mostly due to a labyrinth of laws and rules in pursuit of a “carbon-free future”. The state is busy administering a lethal injection to the fossil fuel industry and the plentiful natural gas fields in the state. The result? You guessed it; the people get hosed in exploding utility rates. And what should really be driving you bats is the fact that CO2 will still accumulate in the atmosphere since few people on the planet are as looney as the people elected to run the Golden State.
Watch the video below of a deep dive into one aspect of your California utility bill: your assessment for natural gas usage. It’s scheduled to jump. The sacred cows of windmills, solar panels, and EVs are a joke and making life a poor imitation of that lived generations before. Now, watch as your gas bill more than doubles . . . while prices fall nationally. It’s what happens when utopians taking on the role of central planner monkey around with the basic stuff of life.
My 8.23 cents/kilowatt-hour keeps looking better and better each time I read about the lunacy in my state of birth.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “California on Track to Lose Five House Seats in 2030 as Residents Leave”, Ben Wilson, The Washington Free Beacon, September 20, 2023, at https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/california-on-track-to-lose-five-house-seats-in-2030-as-residents-leave/
* See X, “California is now predicted to lose 5 congressional districts in the 2030 reapportionment cycle. What happened to its historically fast growing population?”, September 19, 2023, at https://twitter.com/DecisionDeskHQ/status/1704155907150733503
38-year-old Vivek Ramaswamy running for the Republican presidential nominationInside Pride Month 2023 at TargetDylan Mulvaney and Bud Light
Two things are on today’s docket: Vivek Ramaswamy’s star is rising and Bud Light and Target are still crashing. Regarding the former, Ramaswamy is pandering to the Trumpkins in the GOP. He’s trying to be a 38-year-old Trump but without the ugliness. He’s risen to second place in some state polls. Astonishingly, Bud Light and Target have jumped onto the gender-confusion/teenage-genital-mutilation bandwagon, as if their customers want to hear from them on the culture war. In both cases, what foolishness. Who in their right mind would think that any of this would pass the smell test?
Trump’s powerful presence in the GOP is making the party a reflection of his unlikeable persona for a functioning majority of the national electorate. By that, I mean disliked by those not siloed behind the increasingly constricted walls of MAGA world. As many Trumpers cling ever so tightly to him with each indictment, other and far more numerous GOP-leaning demographics fly the coop, no matter the imbecilities of the Biden clan on the other side of the political ledger. Democrats win by making the other guy more detested than them.
Vivek wants the nomination and will say anything to get it. For him, as an investment guru, everything, including politics, is transactional – i.e., you get something (the nomination) by paying something (pandering to the Trump crowd). What comes out is pure, unadulterated poppycock.
Have you heard Hugh Hewitt’s interview of Vivek from August 14, 2023 (transcript and audio below)? Vivek announced to the world a green light for Red Cina to invade Taiwan after 2028. You heard me right. Imitating his mentor (DJT) in the use of blunt and stark terms, no matter how asinine, he declared,
“I’m being very clear: Xi Jinping should not mess with Taiwan until we have achieved semiconductor independence, until the end of my first term when I will lead us there. And after that, our commitments to Taiwan, our commitments to be willing to go to military conflict, will change after that, because that’s rationally in our self-interest.”
There you have it in Ramaswamy’s words: Don’t mess with us until after my term ends and we have transplanted Taiwan Semiconductor and/or a good portion of the world’s semiconductor industry to our shores within reach of our IRS, EPA, and our ascendant neo-Marxists. After that, Taiwan, my friend, you’re on your own. Done.
MAGA is thrilled because no more “forever wars”. A President Ramaswamy looks tough in announcing a four-year delayed abandonment in “Trumpian” words. Well, for Taiwan, starting in 2029, enjoy the Taipei May Day parades of the People’s Liberation Army.
When pressed by Hewitt about the astounding repercussions, Vivek began repeated non-clarifications with “Let me make myself perfectly clear.” Making oneself “perfectly clear” is a poker-tell that you’re not going to be clear. He continued to insist on sending a huge naval force to the area but backed away from the will to use it. What’s the point? Thugs need to face real threats, not an armada that would blithely move out of the way for the PLA’s amphibious and aerial assault. The will to use it must be conveyed along with the deployment of the Pacific Fleet. Without the will, it’s an empty bluff.
Vivek, try to be something more than talking like Trump while acting like Jimmy Carter, Obama, or Joe Biden. It isn’t a good look for you, nor is it good for the country.
I would say, “Thank God, this guy isn’t president”, but then I have to glance over at the current occupant. Whew, what a mess, what a choice. Sadly, for this investment exec, transactional thinking doesn’t necessarily incorporate strategic calculus, such as the loss of Taiwan producing a gaping hole in the first island chain for the burgeoning PLA Navy to flood the Pacific. Vivek will do nothing but reinforce among our allies our habit of abandonment when things get messy. Remember Vietnam, Bill Clinton’s 1990s dithering with Al-Qaeda, Obama’s Iraq pullout and red line in Syria, and Biden’s Afghanistan bugout? And now Taiwan?
Our potential and current friends and allies will certainly remember. A lack of steadfastness and reliability won’t bode well for alliance-making. Who’d want to be our friend?
At that point, it will be America alone as the export part of our economy dries up in the face of a cordon of CCP satraps. If you think that Biden and company is making a hash of our way of life, wait for a President Ramaswamy and his 20-30% hit (value of our exports) to US GDP after his forced retreat to fortress America. We would be in Great Depression territory. Speaking of transactional thinking, Vivek’s pandering to the no-more-forever-wars constituency will have real world costs. We’ll quickly learn the value of alliances as we get crushed under a depression-ignited, debt-fueled, and bulging safety net.
Vivek’s foolishness can be chalked up to youthful rashness. What’s the excuse for the seasoned big wheels at Anheuser-Busch and Target? Or, are they “seasoned”, by whom, where? Who thought that a man (Dylan Mulvaney) trying to compete and look like a bulk of their customers’ wives and girlfriends would be a nice way to expand the Bud Light brand? Who thought that the family-friendly Target, with many a mother with children in tow, would be an excellent venue to advocate gender confusion and same-sex amory? It’s unfathomable.
At this time, Bud Light’s sales continue to plummet. They can’t give away the stuff. Whereas, at the beginning of the year, it ranked #1.
Alissa Heinerscheid, the Bud Light advertising exec behind the Dylan Mulvaney endorsement
The person most responsible for the debacle was Bug Light’s 39-year-old advertising exec Alissa Heinerscheid. Her classroom pedigree is impressive: Groton, Harvard, Wharton. But is such a distinguished pedigree a marker for success for the company and its products? We’re at a stage in our history when people need to question the idea that business acumen is a product of overhyped degrees from institutions who have been diminishing in excellence for years.
It probably never occurred to Alissa that expanding the brand in one direction could lead to lead to a dramatic contraction in another. This is a person who was marinated in a cocoon far removed from the lives of the people who buy the goods. She may know of the average Americans’ way of life, but it’s a kind of knowing absent the intimacy of actually having lived it. For her, “beer” meant European or craft. In her rarified social atmosphere, sex rebels are a cute social appurtenance; they’re kind of cool.
However, for the bulk of Bug Light’s consumers, it’s a movement to revolutionize their lives and expose their kids to emotional harm in their crucial developmental years. They want a beer to drink at the bar-be-cue not one that is curated to advance a disturbing cause. Who would have thought that in a week someone like Heinerscheid could turn a popular product into an icon of a left-wing cultural revolution? Bud Light’s sales have dropped for 17 straight weeks. “Expanding the brand” turned into subtracting the core, and out goes Alissa, and down goes Bud Light.
It’s a similar pattern with Target. Pride Month 2023 in June heralded a drop in sales which continues into the third quarter after the geniuses in the c-suite thought that it was a good idea to plaster the kids’ department in pride flags, introduce a line of “tuck friendly” girls’ swimsuits, and carry children’s products from Abprallen, famous for their Satanist line. What accounts for what can only be described as bizarre decisions? Like Bud Light and its determination to link with a TikTok “influencer” for transgenderism, these decisions arise out of people who were acculturated in a peculiar environment at odds to the life lived by most people who’ll never experience the Groton-to-Wharton social pipeline. The c-suite is simply out of touch, and grossly so. It’s as if they came from a different planet, and don’t realize it.
A Pride Month display at a Target store in Dickson City, Pa. (photo: Ted Shaffrey/AP)Idealized Target board meeting from its website. They’ve certainly got the look of the ignorant and naive.
Both cases are abject lessons in how to clog the bankruptcy courts by making yourself detested. The quality and affordability of the good or service is made irrelevant. Simply seen walking from the parking lot into the store, or being seen with the blue can in your fridge, now could brand you as an endorser of extremist causes.
It’s more complicated than “go woke, go broke”. The turn-off won’t come from the Groton-to-Wharton crowd. Anyway, their Maserati won’t be seen in the parking lot or with a 12-pack in the passenger seat. More accurately, it’s “go woke and half the country will be suspicious of what you’re selling”.
Meanwhile, from the right comes the youngish business savant, anxious to be president, who is completely out of his league regarding foreign relations and national security, adding greater urgency to the possible uses of the phrase “idiot savant”. Along with much of the c-suite, their self-confidence is so grand that they will court disaster for all of us.
Michael Ramirez is great for a comical portrayal of our current condition. Could fear of being “cancelled” drive the corporate brain trust to endorse left-wing cultural causes?
RogerG
Read more here:
* Transcript and audio of High Hewitt’s complete 8/14/23 interview of Vivek Ramaswamy: “Vivek Ramaswamy On All Things National Security” at https://hughhewitt.com/vivek-ramaswamy-on-all-things-national-security?highlight=vivek%20ramaswamy
* “Who Will Heed the Lessons of Target and Bud Light?”, Jim Geraghty, National Review Online, 8/17/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/who-will-heed-the-lessons-of-target-and-bud-light/
“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…” Winston Churchill in the House of Commons, 1947
But, dear Winston, what happens when the people vote for lunacy, or vote into power an autocracy of the self-important who happen to be the missionaries of the lunacy? It stays and never seems to go away until the place becomes a ghost town. Such is the bane of our times.
To borrow another line from the demagogic James Carville in 1992, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Rework it a bit and you would uncover another truism: It’s the people, stupid. The civilizational rot in our deepest blue places did not originate in a foreign lab. It was homegrown by our citizenry voting for lunacy and lunatics. No coup put into power in Sacramento, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, Albany, practically the entire Bos-Wash corridor, such a homogeneous grouping of the daft. They were freely chosen by the residents who decided to show up at the polls in those jurisdictions-turned-asylums.
We know it to be lunacy because . . . just look around. It’s littered all over the ground in these places, in the abandoned store fronts, empty commercial buildings, the gauntlet of the homeless/needles/feces, business flight, the lawlessness, the eviscerated economy from the eco-fanaticism. Of recent note, here’s a few examples of the dégringolade (civilizational decline).
The people of California, in the grip of the decarceration schtick of the Obama years, passed Prop 47 in 2014. It tweaked the state’s criminal code to reduce many felonies to misdemeanors, under the moniker “nonviolent”, especially property crimes with damages under $950. Probably, the only benefit from the change is that it improved the math skills of some of the state’s worst students. Understandably, rushing down the aisles of Nordstrom grabbing everything hither and yon and being able to produce a running – literally running – total of under $950 will sharpen anyone’s math intellect.
“Smash and grabs” have become the latest thing for many urban youths in the Golden State. Watch the ransacking below of a Nordstrom in Topanga, Ca., Saturday, August 14. Brazenness has become commonplace in the post-Prop 47 world of California. It (Prop 47) was billed as a sensible response to overzealous prosecutors. Instead, it produced A Clockwork Orange. All of it democratically chosen.
Don’t think that’s the end of it. Up and down the state, the mania is sweeping high-end shopping centers. That venerable mouthpiece of “decarceration”, NPR, in a rare sign of awareness of reality, stated, “Saturday’s robbery was the third Nordstrom heist in California in less than two years.” Days before, an Yves Saint Laurent store in Glendale was hit. San Francisco is famous for it.
Walgreens, San Francisco, chains their freezer boxes. Convenience shopping at a Walgreens or CVS is harder to come by since many have closed. One shoplifter at a SF Walgreens when asked by a reporter why he didn’t pay, as he nonchalantly walked out of the store, responded casually, “It’s San Francisco, Bro.” Watch the ABC 7 report here:
Seattle turned itself into a basket case. Remember CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone – ergo, no cops allowed) from that 2020 summer of riotous “fun”? In a recent Household Pulse Survey, Seattle residents’ disapproval of their own city ranks it ahead in the misery index of such metropolitan disaster zones as Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York City. 600,000 residents were queried and half cited “rent increases” while a quarter of them pointed to “unsafe neighborhoods”. Not a good look if you’re trying to keep or attract people. And the policymakers that made it all happen were duly elected, and may get elected again.
Oregon, in the grip of the inmates of the Willamette Valley urban asylums, passed with a 60% majority Measure 110, drug decriminalization and stepped-up treatment programs. Drug decriminalization occurred, but the measure’s treatment programs grotesquely floundered, so much so that the program’s director, Angela Carter, resigned one year later. The state is a druggies’ haven with overdose deaths and crime skyrocketing and the public square filthy and littered in homeless encampments.
A self-described “left of center” Portland resident and restaurant owner, Lisa Schroeder, expressed her regrets, “If I could turn back time and repeal Measure 110 tomorrow, I would do it.” Some are trying. Clackamas County Board of Supervisors, which encompasses some of Portland’s suburbs, approved a resolution requesting the state to do just that. Don’t expect that to happen any time soon. Other popularly elected representatives stand in the way.
At root is the prevalence of a mindset – left, right, and center – that an individual’s problems are somebody else’s fault, or the costs of their misbehavior will be borne by an abstracted “other”, not by them. They are not their own fault . . . when, in fact, they are!
This mentality is growing on the right. The anti-racists’ “privileged” (whites) are not so privileged – look at the opioid and meth deaths among poor whites – and these destitute whites are acquiring the outlook that they too are victims of faceless, nameless “others”. The lack of agency is as profound as the ingrained excuse-making among the youths rampaging a Nordstrom in California and their left-wing abettors in positions of power. The it-can’t-be-my-fault is resplendent in Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” tune. It’s gone viral. Some lyrics:
I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day
Overtime hours for bullshit pay
So I can sit out here and waste my life away
Drag back home and drown my troubles away
Sorry, but here’s a guy who needs to get off his ass. Bull**** pay? You know, he may have to walk around the homeless encampments, but he could go to school and pick up a skilled trade rather than fret about “bull****” pay while he “drown[s] [his] troubles away”. Watch the full ditty:
That’s the problem: too many people have bought into system-mongering. The “system” is said to be working against them, whether the panderers are talking about blue-collars in depressed areas or the deepest blue precincts who see a racist under every rug. You see, it’s the “people” who believe in things that aren’t true. In a democracy, a deranged people create a deranged government. It’s time that we put the blame where it belongs – on the people – and stop the pandering.
RogerG
Read more here:
* For an excellent compendium of Churchill quotes: Churchill by Himself: The Definitive Collection of Quotations, Richard Langworth editor, 2008 edition
* Southern California thefts, including the Toganga one, here: “’Savage’ mob robbery at Topanga Nordstrom sparks outrage, beefed up LAPD patrols”, LA Times, August 12, 2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/savage-mob-robbery-at-topanga-nordstrom-sparks-outrage-beefed-up-lapd-patrols/ar-AA1fgJJO
* “SF Walgreens puts chains on freezers as shoplifters target store 20 times a day, employee says”, Luz Pena, ABNC 7 News, July 18, 2023, at https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-retail-theft-sf-walgreens-shoplifters-geary-boulevard-17th-avenue/13520154/
* “Seattle tops major metros for people feeling unsafe in their neighborhood”, Gene Balk, The Seattle Times, August 2, 2023, at https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-tops-major-metros-for-people-feeling-unsafe-in-their-neighborhood/
* “Oregonians Turning against Drug-Decriminalization ‘Mistake’ amid Record ODs, ‘Dystopian Nightmare’”, Ryan Mills, National Review Online, August 15, 2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/oregonians-turning-against-mistake-drug-decriminalization-amid-record-ods-dystopian-nightmare/
County of San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Mayor Londond Breed centerSan Francisco Mayor London Breed
Many of our debates are vastly off-kilter. It begins with hugely consequential things. Republicans seem intent on foisting Donald Trump on the country again. The Democrats are focused on making a shambles of our country. The former makes the latter more likely. The abhorrent DJT is simply too ugly a face for the GOP to succeed among a national electorate.
It doesn’t stop there. The so-called solutions have the maturity and depth of understanding of locker room humor. Trumpkins insinuate that the country needs a Tasmanian Devil (of Looney Tunes fame) to fight, fight anyone, anyone coming from any direction, making enemies of friends. The Dems and their fellow cultural revolutionaries (their inspiration: Mao), after creating swaths of wreckage from their cuckoo ideas, want the help of people, who they have habitually tarred, to clean up their mess.
For the revolutionaries in power, more cops to reverse the doom loop of places like San Franscisco is much less feasible of an option after years of decriminalizing criminality and the branding of cops as racists. What they just don’t get is the fact that once the slide is initiated, like an avalanche, it’s awfully hard to stop. This class of revolutionary ruler is emotionally and mentally ill-equipped to address the situation.
The carnage is glaringly obvious to all. Type “doom loop” and/or “San Francisco” in YouTube’s search field and you’ll see. The list of major retailers abandoning the city is too well-known to require mention here. The two largest downtown hoteliers prefer foreclosure to continuing operations among the filth and crime. The iconic Westfield Mall has discovered a similar affection for foreclosure. San Francisco is the donkey party’s policies taken to their logical conclusion.
Mayor London Breed quipped in support of additional funding for public safety, “San Francisco must be a safe and just city for all”, and her fellow-travelling potentates on the Board of Supervisors responded with an additional $60 million in funding for the Police Department and 220 more officers. I don’t know what 220 more cops will be able to accomplish for residents, under the guise of the same ravenous Red Guards who created the situation, except spend a whole lot more money for more uniforms, training, equipment, and compensation with little real power to do anything to clear the public spaces. What high-quality candidate for SFPD recruitment would be willing to step into that minefield?
My guess is, if the same clowns are running the show, that things might marginally improve, but “marginally improve” is a bit like “marginally mugged”. It’s still going to be horrible, and managers responsible for many employees will recommend Zooming (stay home) if at all possible, instead of running the gauntlet.
A view of the troubling walk to the entrance of the San Francisco’s Federal Building
And that includes federal employees at the downtown federal building. HHS Assistant Secretary for Administration Cheryl R. Campbell issued the following advisory to SF district managers earlier this month, “In light of the conditions at the (Federal Building) we recommend employees … maximize the use of telework for the foreseeable future.” Even with the added cops, any return to the office workstation won’t survive the next assault.
Nancy Pelosi’s well-publicized pleas won’t matter squat if the people in charge fundamentally still think like her. That’s the crux of the matter: the critical mass of politics in San Francisco is infatuated with the power of the state to create Shangri-la and the view of the world through the lens of systemic victimization. So long as that sticks between the ears, decline becomes more than an option. It’s a perpetual reality.
Ideas matter, and boy do they matter. The clowns in San Francisco City Hall just don’t get it.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “HOW SAN FRANCISCO BECAME A FAILED CITY”, Nellie Bowles, The Atlantic, June 8, 2022, at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-francisco-became-failed-city/661199/
* “Federal workers in San Francisco told to work remotely ‘for the foreseeable future’ because local crime is so bad”, Chris Morris, Fortune Magazine, August 14, 2023, at https://fortune.com/2023/08/14/remote-work-federal-workers-san-francisco-work-from-home-crime-drugs/
