I used to live in California. During the last several years I lived there, I went to Sacramento (a five hour round trip) more times than I can remember to protest/lobby against bad bills in the Legislature. So here you go -- Lessons from California:
1. Election campaigns for legislative seats should be 2 months long and fully publicly funded. No prolonged campaigning, and no donations to campaigns. (Would prevent Big Pharma from buying/owning legislators.)
2. Do not have a "full time" legislature. The legislative season each year should be short. (Reduces the amount of time for legislators to make mischief.)
3. The state should not pay legislators enough to live on. Legislators should have to make their livings by doing "honest work" in the districts they represent.
4. Sharply restrict the number of bills a legislator may introduce per legislative session.
5. Require every legislator to read the full text of every bill that comes before his/her chamber for a vote.
6. Restrict the total number of bills allowed to be introduced per legislative session to a number that is reasonable for a legislator to read, research, discuss with constituents, and debate with colleagues.
7. Educate voters so that they recognize that a legislator's most important job is to protect them from bad bills. (Currently a legislator's "worth" is measured by the number of bills s/he authors.)
8. Regarding legislative committee hearings on bills: Simultaneous hearings by different legislative committees should not be allowed, and every committee member should be required to attend each hearing for the full duration of the hearing. During hearings, require committees to allow each member of the public who wants to speak in favor of, or opposing, a bill to speak for up to 2 minutes. No more limiting citizens to Name, City, and "Oppose" or "Support." If hundreds of citizens line up to speak about a bill, legislators should have to listen to every one.
9. A state's governor should be able to exercise emergency powers for a maximum of four days in response to any particular emergency; this should be enough time for legislators to travel to the capital so that the legislature can convene and fulfill its duty to make public policy, weighing all the relevant factors (social, economic, environmental, etc.) and performing careful cost/benefit analyses.
10. The legislature should be prohibited by the state constitution from ceding its duty to make public policy to the governor or to "public health authorities" at any level within the state.
Wow! Ten simple rules. Seems to me there was another set of ten rules, a while back, that, if we followed them, would help us live together peacefully and productively. Look 'em up. [Ex 20]
Your ten "lessons from California", if we implemented them, would also do much to help us live together peacefully and productively. (And probably enjoy a much higher standard of living).
I would change #3 a bit. Pay them a small base pay with bonuses for the number of in person public town halls they hold. Make some mandatory throughout the year but have a set schedule for optional town halls filling up reasonable days in the calendar year.
Please feel free to pass this on to friends, re-post it elsewhere, etc. and make that change in #3 if you want. Seems like getting people thinking about all this would be good.
These are great suggestions. As one who still lives in California, I would love to see every one of these ideas implemented. I am torn between wanting to leave for my sanity and wanting to stay to help this state return to its better days. Thanks for sharing your vision.
CA already has term limits. Richard Pan, the leading author of vaccine mandate bills, termed out of the Assembly and "graduated" to the Senate, where he will term out this year. A Big Pharma puppet like Richard Pan can do tremendous damage regardless of term limits. And there's a disadvantage of term limits -- the loss of "institutional memory" when there are no "old timers" around to say "We tried that before. It didn't work. Let's not make the same mistake again."
Well thought out and valuable. But, how to get them implemented - really in more states than just California. That is the struggle. Unfortunately the "progress" has been to more and more politicization and "professionalization" of pols. It will be hard or impossible to reverse.
Waiting in line (with hundreds of other people) for hours in the halls of the CA Capitol, for 10 to 12 seconds to speak against stupid and dangerous bills in committee hearings...gives you lots of time to think about stuff like this.
I agree, it will be hard to make changes like these, maybe impossible. But if you think it would be useful, or even just interesting, to pass these "Lessons from California" on to friends, or re-post them elsewhere, please feel free.
Ideas that are so antithetical to truth they destroy the mind's ability to recognize depravity. We ought to be looking for the good in ourselves and in the world. Ideas, like Marx's, that you can overthrow the evil superstructure of the economic order, that you can rebel against against the natural order of our bodies; these are really bad, untrue, ideas.
Nietzsche's madman is not mad at all. "We have killed God" He appeared before his time. He was believed to be mad. We are killing ourselves with strong delusions - Ideas that drive us deeper and deeper into madness.
Here is an update from the California prisons housing male sex offenders--who claim to be women (but don't take hormones or do surgeries)--and now one has raped a woman. They transferred the male to a lower-security women's prison.
It would, and I remain torn by the obvious fact that people like Jerrold Nadler and Scott Wiener are dumber than a sack of hair. But I'm coming around.
I have blind spots. We all do. I rely on you to help me see.
I am not sure that they are not "dumb", any more than public health authorities are "dumb". (Okay, some of them probably are straight up dumb. I'm arguing with myself and you here!)
They are responding to incentive structures. They are more "craven" than dumb, but surely there is overlap.
So this then becomes a detective story of motives and attributes.
They are Zombies. But they may be Ingenious Zombies.
Like AI Robots that are executing the mission even if the mission is idiotic.
He'd have to sprint around doing the state capitols and a few thousand school boards and city councils and county boards of supervisors for any of it to matter.
Not necessarily. Presidents get to dispense presidential pardons, as many as they want, for whatever they want. A sufficiently ruthless imperator could leverage this ability to ... encourage things, shall we say.
What happened to Julius Caesar? It's not as though his heroism and bravado were successful in the long run. He was murdered in the Senate by his fellow Senators, and thus ended the glorious Roman Republic.
Did anyone watch Rep Massie? Did you HEAR SOME LIBERAL ASSHOLE trying to jam his microphone and interfere with what he was trying to say? Is there any further proof you need that there is no negotiating with these toddlers? Freaking unbelievable.
I agree that the patchwork inconsistency of the current system is absurd.
In Japan it's 20, for everything. Interestingly, each year all the kids whose 20th birthday is that year 'turn 20' on the same day, and collectively celebrate their ascent to adulthood.
Of course, Asians are more neotenous, so 20 makes sense for them. For Africans, 16 is probably about the age they more or less mature. Whites, I'd argue 18 should be the natural age of maturity. Pushing it to 21 is infuriating because there's no real way to look at someone and guess if they're 21 or 29, which means constantly getting carded for everything. Which, for the control freaks on the left, is a feature, not a bug.
Oh, there's an ideology all right. The whole point is to reduce human beings to helpless, dopamine-driven animals. This has been understood since Greek times. Xerxes (or maybe Cyrus) had a troublesome Ionian city disarmed, banning the youth from learning the use of weapons. Instead, they were told to give themselves over to music, poetry, and drunkenness. The result was that a rebellious city of fractious, warlike Greeks was quickly reduced to passive acceptance of slavery under Persian masters, lacking not just the ability but even the will to revolt.
Contrast the modern opening of sex and drugs (not legally but come on) to tweens, while violence is prohibited them, with the precisely opposite situation just a few generations ago. Which system was more effective at producing men capable of guarding their freedom? Nadler and his ilk know precisely what they're doing.
Great historical analogy. And as for the legality of drugs - have you seen the billboards in NY and SF about using? “Don’t feel ashamed that you use, feel empowered that you use safely”. WTH?? Also, I believe the Canadian dictator is beginning to legalize fentynol. So yeah, drugs are legal.
I've seen the same ad campaign locally, and I'm nowhere near California or NY. So, it's national in scope, apparently. Interesting.
Legalization and popularization of weed, and various THC products, is of a piece with the decriminalization of opioids. Interesting that this is accompanied by the demonization of tobacco, too; along with restrictions on alcohol e.g. shutting down bars during the scamdemic.
It's almost like they want to encourage drugs that make people stupid and passive, whilst discouraging drugs that make people more social and more intelligent (alcohol does the former, and is partly discouraged; tobacco does both, and is intensely discouraged).
It's not widely known, for obvious reasons, but the clinical evidence is pretty unambiguous that it has salutary effects on both learning and memory. As to the social component - there's a reason the natives called it the peace pipe. No one has ever seen people fighting while smoking together.
As I read the many great comments; especially those about maximizing the damage done to the social structure; it occurred to me that there is indeed an underlying principle. It goes something like this:
Children are rightfully the property of the state. (Remember Hillary's "It takes a village?")
To implement that principle, they must first destroy, by whatever means necessary, each of the cultural artifacts created while we still labored under the antiquated notion that families are sovereign entities who joined together and created the state to serve their interests.
This notion that the creator can become the servant may seem odd at first but it seems to be the natural order of things. The 13 original states, for example, created the United States of America to serve their common but sovereign interests. Four score and seven years later, those states would be in the midst of a bloody civil war that would ultimately decide that they were instead "one nation, indivisible." The creators of the federation had become its servants.
I half expect puberty blockers to be added to the childhood "vaccine" regimen to counteract the scourge that is nature. There is a Methodist church school in my highly liberal city neighborhood, where the 5-6 year olds walk in line on the sidewalks and play in their playground, always masked. Child abuse is being normalized, among wealthy liberals and progressives. I have long known we are an empire in decline, and things would get crazy on that down slope, but I could not have imagined the kids would be sacrificed first.
All I can assume is that “progressive” politician’s brains are not fully developed. They are perpetually stuck in I-wanna-promote-something-outrageous-and-be-exalted-by-the-mainstream-media mode.
Sexuality in kids is a progressive fixation imbedded in the progressive pseudo-science psychology. Freud had plenty of it in his very well written but very unscientific writing. It lingers in psychology and its offspring like pedagogy. It was very cool with the french 60 - 70s philosophers perhaps due to their pedofhilic tendencies.
In Denmark in the 70s it was considered progressive to bring your kids with you to the bedroom to see how fornication worked. It was encouraged in the science pedagogy.
When society builds parts of its foundation on fictions like psychology, it paves the way for our current pedophile predicament.
I used to live in California. During the last several years I lived there, I went to Sacramento (a five hour round trip) more times than I can remember to protest/lobby against bad bills in the Legislature. So here you go -- Lessons from California:
1. Election campaigns for legislative seats should be 2 months long and fully publicly funded. No prolonged campaigning, and no donations to campaigns. (Would prevent Big Pharma from buying/owning legislators.)
2. Do not have a "full time" legislature. The legislative season each year should be short. (Reduces the amount of time for legislators to make mischief.)
3. The state should not pay legislators enough to live on. Legislators should have to make their livings by doing "honest work" in the districts they represent.
4. Sharply restrict the number of bills a legislator may introduce per legislative session.
5. Require every legislator to read the full text of every bill that comes before his/her chamber for a vote.
6. Restrict the total number of bills allowed to be introduced per legislative session to a number that is reasonable for a legislator to read, research, discuss with constituents, and debate with colleagues.
7. Educate voters so that they recognize that a legislator's most important job is to protect them from bad bills. (Currently a legislator's "worth" is measured by the number of bills s/he authors.)
8. Regarding legislative committee hearings on bills: Simultaneous hearings by different legislative committees should not be allowed, and every committee member should be required to attend each hearing for the full duration of the hearing. During hearings, require committees to allow each member of the public who wants to speak in favor of, or opposing, a bill to speak for up to 2 minutes. No more limiting citizens to Name, City, and "Oppose" or "Support." If hundreds of citizens line up to speak about a bill, legislators should have to listen to every one.
9. A state's governor should be able to exercise emergency powers for a maximum of four days in response to any particular emergency; this should be enough time for legislators to travel to the capital so that the legislature can convene and fulfill its duty to make public policy, weighing all the relevant factors (social, economic, environmental, etc.) and performing careful cost/benefit analyses.
10. The legislature should be prohibited by the state constitution from ceding its duty to make public policy to the governor or to "public health authorities" at any level within the state.
Wow! Ten simple rules. Seems to me there was another set of ten rules, a while back, that, if we followed them, would help us live together peacefully and productively. Look 'em up. [Ex 20]
Your ten "lessons from California", if we implemented them, would also do much to help us live together peacefully and productively. (And probably enjoy a much higher standard of living).
Feel free to pass this on to friends, re-post it elsewhere, etc., if you want.
I would change #3 a bit. Pay them a small base pay with bonuses for the number of in person public town halls they hold. Make some mandatory throughout the year but have a set schedule for optional town halls filling up reasonable days in the calendar year.
I like this idea...sounds good.
Please feel free to pass this on to friends, re-post it elsewhere, etc. and make that change in #3 if you want. Seems like getting people thinking about all this would be good.
These are great suggestions. As one who still lives in California, I would love to see every one of these ideas implemented. I am torn between wanting to leave for my sanity and wanting to stay to help this state return to its better days. Thanks for sharing your vision.
Feel free to pass these suggestions on to friends, re-post them elsewhere, etc., if you think it would be useful to do that...
Number 11 — term limits
CA already has term limits. Richard Pan, the leading author of vaccine mandate bills, termed out of the Assembly and "graduated" to the Senate, where he will term out this year. A Big Pharma puppet like Richard Pan can do tremendous damage regardless of term limits. And there's a disadvantage of term limits -- the loss of "institutional memory" when there are no "old timers" around to say "We tried that before. It didn't work. Let's not make the same mistake again."
Only two 'terms' including most government jobs with a possible one time exemption if you can show that you provably saved the public money!
I love this! I'm going to pass it on to friends if that's okay.
It's fine with me for you to pass it on to friends, re-post it elsewhere, etc.
Thanks. 😊
Well thought out and valuable. But, how to get them implemented - really in more states than just California. That is the struggle. Unfortunately the "progress" has been to more and more politicization and "professionalization" of pols. It will be hard or impossible to reverse.
Waiting in line (with hundreds of other people) for hours in the halls of the CA Capitol, for 10 to 12 seconds to speak against stupid and dangerous bills in committee hearings...gives you lots of time to think about stuff like this.
I agree, it will be hard to make changes like these, maybe impossible. But if you think it would be useful, or even just interesting, to pass these "Lessons from California" on to friends, or re-post them elsewhere, please feel free.
Rebellion against? Nature? Our bodies? Common sense? This is ideological madness.
The Crucible of Madness.
When you can never back up and reassess, the madness takes on a life of its own.
When you believe in science, the science is always settled.
I would suggest "when you believe in scientism, the "science" is always settled".
Hi William. I'm interested in the impact of ideology. What is ideological madness? I'm unfamiliar with the idea.
Ideas that are so antithetical to truth they destroy the mind's ability to recognize depravity. We ought to be looking for the good in ourselves and in the world. Ideas, like Marx's, that you can overthrow the evil superstructure of the economic order, that you can rebel against against the natural order of our bodies; these are really bad, untrue, ideas.
Nietzsche's madman is not mad at all. "We have killed God" He appeared before his time. He was believed to be mad. We are killing ourselves with strong delusions - Ideas that drive us deeper and deeper into madness.
Thank you. Makes sense, to not be able to make sense.
The insanity of it all.
https://www.womensliberationfront.org/news/case-update-crisis-conditions-in-california-womens-prisons?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=36267462-d0f2-4b34-b9d5-d63635544bd0
Here is an update from the California prisons housing male sex offenders--who claim to be women (but don't take hormones or do surgeries)--and now one has raped a woman. They transferred the male to a lower-security women's prison.
the only consistency is the purposeful maximization of damage.
That certainly seems to be the case.
Chris, does "purposeful maximization of damage" describe a coordinated intent?
Also, Hi! I'm Sage!
It would, and I remain torn by the obvious fact that people like Jerrold Nadler and Scott Wiener are dumber than a sack of hair. But I'm coming around.
You are a humble truth seeker, in my eyes. And a brilliant writer.
I enjoy parrying with you probably more than any other Substackian.
The same but different.
I enjoy hearing from you, and being pushed to consider an argument that I resist.
I have blind spots. We all do. I rely on you to help me see.
I am not sure that they are not "dumb", any more than public health authorities are "dumb". (Okay, some of them probably are straight up dumb. I'm arguing with myself and you here!)
They are responding to incentive structures. They are more "craven" than dumb, but surely there is overlap.
So this then becomes a detective story of motives and attributes.
They are Zombies. But they may be Ingenious Zombies.
Like AI Robots that are executing the mission even if the mission is idiotic.
“There is an alternative to corporate media BS, and we’re it!”
—Peter Nayland Kusk
Is anyone else hoping for an American Caesar to cross the Potomac and collapse the tent poles of our three-ring circus in DC?
He'd have to sprint around doing the state capitols and a few thousand school boards and city councils and county boards of supervisors for any of it to matter.
Not necessarily. Presidents get to dispense presidential pardons, as many as they want, for whatever they want. A sufficiently ruthless imperator could leverage this ability to ... encourage things, shall we say.
I would hope he's an industrious fellow.
There are no white hats
There are no Marines coming to rescue us
There’s only us, We The People!
What happened to Julius Caesar? It's not as though his heroism and bravado were successful in the long run. He was murdered in the Senate by his fellow Senators, and thus ended the glorious Roman Republic.
Did anyone watch Rep Massie? Did you HEAR SOME LIBERAL ASSHOLE trying to jam his microphone and interfere with what he was trying to say? Is there any further proof you need that there is no negotiating with these toddlers? Freaking unbelievable.
Dan Bongino, before he put on the 'Golden Handcuffs' used to say this everyday.
Even discussions with these people are not just pointless, but counter-productive!
Interesting. Seems like CA has conceded this brain development stuff.
https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/bph/youth-offender-hearings-overview/
Good catch.
Thanks. I kind of (fortunately?) work in the CA criminal justice system (post retirement). Very enlightening in many aspects coming from MN.
I made a similar comment, less eloquently, to Adam Kinziger earlier. https://twitter.com/jcomeau_ictx/status/1532532857066835969
That's plenty eloquent.
I agree that the patchwork inconsistency of the current system is absurd.
In Japan it's 20, for everything. Interestingly, each year all the kids whose 20th birthday is that year 'turn 20' on the same day, and collectively celebrate their ascent to adulthood.
Of course, Asians are more neotenous, so 20 makes sense for them. For Africans, 16 is probably about the age they more or less mature. Whites, I'd argue 18 should be the natural age of maturity. Pushing it to 21 is infuriating because there's no real way to look at someone and guess if they're 21 or 29, which means constantly getting carded for everything. Which, for the control freaks on the left, is a feature, not a bug.
Oh, there's an ideology all right. The whole point is to reduce human beings to helpless, dopamine-driven animals. This has been understood since Greek times. Xerxes (or maybe Cyrus) had a troublesome Ionian city disarmed, banning the youth from learning the use of weapons. Instead, they were told to give themselves over to music, poetry, and drunkenness. The result was that a rebellious city of fractious, warlike Greeks was quickly reduced to passive acceptance of slavery under Persian masters, lacking not just the ability but even the will to revolt.
Contrast the modern opening of sex and drugs (not legally but come on) to tweens, while violence is prohibited them, with the precisely opposite situation just a few generations ago. Which system was more effective at producing men capable of guarding their freedom? Nadler and his ilk know precisely what they're doing.
Great historical analogy. And as for the legality of drugs - have you seen the billboards in NY and SF about using? “Don’t feel ashamed that you use, feel empowered that you use safely”. WTH?? Also, I believe the Canadian dictator is beginning to legalize fentynol. So yeah, drugs are legal.
I've seen the same ad campaign locally, and I'm nowhere near California or NY. So, it's national in scope, apparently. Interesting.
Legalization and popularization of weed, and various THC products, is of a piece with the decriminalization of opioids. Interesting that this is accompanied by the demonization of tobacco, too; along with restrictions on alcohol e.g. shutting down bars during the scamdemic.
It's almost like they want to encourage drugs that make people stupid and passive, whilst discouraging drugs that make people more social and more intelligent (alcohol does the former, and is partly discouraged; tobacco does both, and is intensely discouraged).
Good observation. I didn’t know that about tobacco. Interesting.
It's not widely known, for obvious reasons, but the clinical evidence is pretty unambiguous that it has salutary effects on both learning and memory. As to the social component - there's a reason the natives called it the peace pipe. No one has ever seen people fighting while smoking together.
This is why I could never be a Liberal/Progressive. I'm not stupid enough.
If you’re not a liberal at 20 you don’t have a heart; if you’re not conservative by 40 you don’t have a brain.
I literally just said this exact line to my wife about 20 minutes ago. That's wild haha.
As I read the many great comments; especially those about maximizing the damage done to the social structure; it occurred to me that there is indeed an underlying principle. It goes something like this:
Children are rightfully the property of the state. (Remember Hillary's "It takes a village?")
To implement that principle, they must first destroy, by whatever means necessary, each of the cultural artifacts created while we still labored under the antiquated notion that families are sovereign entities who joined together and created the state to serve their interests.
This notion that the creator can become the servant may seem odd at first but it seems to be the natural order of things. The 13 original states, for example, created the United States of America to serve their common but sovereign interests. Four score and seven years later, those states would be in the midst of a bloody civil war that would ultimately decide that they were instead "one nation, indivisible." The creators of the federation had become its servants.
I half expect puberty blockers to be added to the childhood "vaccine" regimen to counteract the scourge that is nature. There is a Methodist church school in my highly liberal city neighborhood, where the 5-6 year olds walk in line on the sidewalks and play in their playground, always masked. Child abuse is being normalized, among wealthy liberals and progressives. I have long known we are an empire in decline, and things would get crazy on that down slope, but I could not have imagined the kids would be sacrificed first.
All I can assume is that “progressive” politician’s brains are not fully developed. They are perpetually stuck in I-wanna-promote-something-outrageous-and-be-exalted-by-the-mainstream-media mode.
Just get the civil war over and done with already.
Sexuality in kids is a progressive fixation imbedded in the progressive pseudo-science psychology. Freud had plenty of it in his very well written but very unscientific writing. It lingers in psychology and its offspring like pedagogy. It was very cool with the french 60 - 70s philosophers perhaps due to their pedofhilic tendencies.
In Denmark in the 70s it was considered progressive to bring your kids with you to the bedroom to see how fornication worked. It was encouraged in the science pedagogy.
When society builds parts of its foundation on fictions like psychology, it paves the way for our current pedophile predicament.