The Culture War is 90% Chaff and Decoys

so take the occasional break so you have the energy to see through it

An example from California that isn’t just about California.

The City of Sacramento is about as healthy as every big city in California. Large and growing budget deficits are projected past this year and into the foreseeable future, becoming the kind of problem government officials call structural deficits.

The homeless population is growing, despite — “despite,” ahem — a long list of government interventions.

And the city is evolving little dead zones, patches of empty storefronts and physical symbols of the larger decline. Click here for video, but you can stand in front of a row of those empty storefronts and look right across the street at the Capitol:

And so the Sacramento City Council is addressing these crises by TRANS TRANS TRANS TRANS TRANS TRANS TRANS TRANS TRANS TRANS TRANS TRANS

Thank the stars, Sacramento is now formally a “sanctuary city” for the transgendered.

So stop rounding up transgendered people and shipping them to the concentration camps, or something. You can read the whole resolution here, and city officials definitely aren’t going to tell the pipe-smoking trans hunters if they’re hiding trans people in the basement.

For sure you can have that multi-tiered lazy Susan of detachable abstract art flowerdicks, and Sacramento police detectives totally aren’t going to take down your door with a battering ram. Sleep safe, little buttercup-girldicks, you’re in a sanctuary now.

What does this mean? Excuse me, stewardess, I happen to speak government: It means nothing. It quite literally exists to be a nothing structure, a large and highly visible non-thing, drawing the eye to keep it from landing elsewhere. The culture war is fought with Quaker guns. In 1999, NATO airplanes bombed the shit out of Serbian armor and artillery, then went in to assess the damage of the bombing campaign:

Because the Serbs built “tanks” out of plywood and painted canvas, which can look pretty tankish when you attack them from the sky. Eight bucks worth of scrap lumber, $20,000 JDAM.

So California government, at every level, is “structurally insolvent,” despite imposing a shockingly high tax burden…

…and the message that plays on repeat in the state is we’re out of money we’re out of money we’re out of money we’re out of money we’re out of money. Why is that? LET’S TALK ABOUT TRANS SANCTUARY. The news is currently doing the same thing at the national level all day every day, and every time I turn the dial to NPR — I mean, not the literal dial anymore, but whatever — it feels like 90% babbling about great orange show trials. It’s nonsense, in insistent and high-volume forms.

We’ve entered the phase of the decline in which distraction operations become critical to the culprits. The news is a shiny object, and politics is changing the subject. Trump said to inject bleach!

So.

I was struck by some of the responses to my recent posts about the giant buckets of money we’re building in California from diverted utility spending. Several commenters said the posts made them lose sleep, or stay up all night, or made them feel like they’d been kicked in the gut.

Please don’t. There’s a great deal of fraud and ruin the atmosphere, but you won’t fix it with psychological misery. If you’re feeling down, turn off the sewer box and go outside for a while. See that the “news” is mostly absolute shit, empty gibbering useless stupid noise, and just put it aside from time to time. How you do this is up to you, and subject to local conditions — my wife bizarrely says that no, we’re not just gonna jump in the car and drive to the San Luis Valley for the weekend, so I’m obviously being oppressed — but go look at some trees. The trans sanctuaries will be waiting for you when you come back.