California is the blueprint for the rest of the country. Fuck everything up at the most basic levels, but continue funding as if it were all working perfectly.
And, in fact, the system IS working perfectly for the "leaders", they get to siphon BILLIONS AND BILLIONS from the taxpayers and direct it to their cronies scattered about the state. The homelessness issue is a perfect microcosm -- cities spend out the ass to 'fix' the problem, but instead only make it worse.......ensuring they get even more money next year. (See also: Portland, Seattle)
Have you seen the news about the legislature's solution to the public transit "fiscal cliff," which fixes the collapse of our public transportation agencies by giving them more free money? "Fuck everything up at the most basic levels, but continue funding as if it were all working perfectly." That's it exactly.
Jun 13, 2023·edited Jun 13, 2023Liked by Chris Bray
I saw something similar about NYC. Not enough people are riding, so they want to make it 'free' and have drivers pay for it instead.
Edit, from the article:
“The Legislature’s budget agreement is a very positive first step toward securing the future of public transportation in California. Though significant work remains to avoid our transit systems’ fiscal cliff — which was created by the end of federal pandemic emergency aid before transit ridership fully recovered,” Sen. Scott Weiner said.
-----------
It's the fault of those mean federal jerks who pulled the emergency funding!!!
When I lived in NYC, the subway was crowded as hell. Now, though, people go to work in Manhattan maybe two or three days a week--what do they expect? You can only break things so much before you have to deal with the consequences.
Jun 13, 2023·edited Jun 13, 2023Liked by Chris Bray
And the answer? Get more money from the feds by spending money ruining your own system!
-------------
“Transit capital projects are critically important for our economy and climate goals,” Sen. Weiner stated. “For every dollar California invests in transit infrastructure, it will receive up to $10 in federal matching funds.”
“It would be short-sighted to cannibalize significant transit capital funds and forfeit billions in federal matching funds.”
The most likely result of the failed railway system is the siphoning of the money from the project to individual coffers. I bet there is a mere token of spending audits, just like Baltimore.
It’s not just California, as you say. The Small Business Administration doled out around 1.2 Trillion dollars between the PPP program and EIDL (emergency disaster loans) during the COVID scandemic. While exact numbers are not yet in, Estimates of the number of fraudulently obtained loans run into the hundreds of thousands with losses over 100 billion dollars and possibly above 300 billion or more. The SBA basically loans money as it’s full time mission. That’s what it does all day long for decades . So they have finely honed , effective policies and procedures in place to make sure they are lending money to who they think they are lending money to, underwriting criteria, background checks, etc. right? Wrong. How do I know this? I started getting demand letters for an overdue loan from SBA that I never took out.
Identity theft. The letters threatened me with IRS agents, prison etc.. Contacting the agency was a Kafkaesque joke. The office the demand letter was from in Portland, said contact Dallas, who referred me to Fort Worth, who told me to go online and contact the Inspector General, whose website tells you there is no progress report to be obtained on open fraud cases after you report it. The letters continued. The people I called again were no help. Finally I found some information online and began to bombard the agency with letters and an FTC identity theft report, which ultimately resolved the issue. The agency is an incompetent nightmare. Imagine lending (let’s be nice) only $100,000,000,000 to fraudsters and lending is your only job....Who is that fucking bad at their job in the private sector and still employed?
Nothing will be done to the SBA. They will wring their hands and obfuscate and pseudo apologize and institute “new and improved” processes and hope for the best. Most of the stolen money cannot be recovered per the SBA, particularly for those thieves using fake identities and fake businesses. Some of these gangs got many millions of dollars. Fraudulent indicators were noted on over 3 million applications. And maybe 300 billion dollars are up in smoke.
This is every day in the federal and state and on down the line government in America in 2023- halfwits and petty tyrant bureaucrats screwing everything up and nobody but the citizens and taxpayers foot the bill. This is in great part why we are a mess.
Sending thoughts and prayers to you from the great “Live Free or Die” state of New Hampshire, where we fled to from Malibu last year. I’m one of the 700,000 CA refugees. Life has never been better. I love it here.
I hear you. I lived that way, wanting to leave but trapped, for 5 years before we finally escaped. Hoping you free yourself before the ship sinks. California is doomed.
If only there were such a thing as good faith in populist republicanism.
It's btw that your new home has an interesting history. It includes being the 9th State to ratify the imperial constitution of 1787. That was in June of 1788, as I recall. The legislators of the day were steamrolled by advocates for change. It was not so everywhere in New England, however.
Legislators of Rhode Island had disregarded the sophistry of Article VII, which pretends to state the law on an important topic before its own "Establishment". They submitted the Constitution to the electorate for a public referendum in March of 1788. Less than 10% voted FOR the C. It was an outcome which ought have convinced every honest person that the C would have been rejected in several other states, too, if referenda had been held.
RI submitted to the convention ruse a few yrs later, after all of the other 12 had been subverted. With hindsight, we can see that the outcome is unsurprising. The DoI which led to the interegnum under the Articles of Conferration was itself a masterpiece of sanctimony and sophistry. Behold the moxie of people who declared during the midst of their brutal civil war that all of their enemies have "unalienable Rights". We are forced by their own words to conclude that every death they caused was a murder.
We live in Volusia County, and one of the few seniors who are friends with my kid took his boyfriend to the prom. No fanfare; it was just what happened, and nobody blinked. I hear from friends in the North about the violent, extremist bigotry of FL, and I don't know where they're talking about. I have literally never lived anywhere as non-judgmental as FL, and I spent nearly a decade living in Manhattan.
Repeat that prom story on any number of topics and one can begin to understand the live and let live attitude here in FL. In my 45 years living here, I’ve found it to be an easy going state for the most part. Those who have problems here are often problem makers, themselves, and who, I’m beginning to believe, have actually made themselves mentally ill due to their intolerance and rigidity (the things they claim to hate.) Oh well, love wins and hate has no home here - or else! - or something...
Newsom will be a formidable candidate in 2024 or 2028: he will have the entire MSM as his campaign team, maybe a billion $ from his friends in the Bay (if people like Zuckerberg and Omidyar ponied up around $500 million for Sleepy Joe, Gavin will get at least twice that), plus he has the greatest talent required for political success: he has no soul and no shame and will say or do anything to get ahead.
They are very similar: handsome boys of privilege always with an army of servants and lackeys trailing behind to clean up their messes, money only a call away without needing to mess their hair, not particularly bright or interesting but very ambitious and willing to say or do whatever it takes to get what they want...maybe Fidel is Gavin's dad too! ;)
I don't like to use the word "hate" but I hate Los Angeles and most of the people here. I came to CA in 1997 and really enjoyed life here until about 2012. Then the politics started getting all weird. We are the playground for awful communist ideas and the speed of deterioration is picking up steam. The part I hate most is that there are a lot of people here who are just willfully blind to what is going on. So I like to say almost everyone here is either a Monster or Sheep.
Gavin is loathsome. If you look up “sociopath” in the dictionary, his picture is right there.
Yes, all the clown talk is to distract from failures. Yet Gavin doesn’t seem troubled. Why should he be? There are no consequences for most Democrats who are colossal failures by any normal metrics. Do a terrible job, keep the job or get a promotion is how it works. Gavin is political royalty. The money keeps getting spent. Nobody stops them. I’m guessing your elections in Cali are rigged too. I mean why not? It’s not like the election fraud model they’ve worked out won’t work everywhere. In Cali most of the Uber wealthy will stay, at least for now. As the taxes get even more onerous, more will leave. They like having the biggest homeless population. They like having cities that don’t function. It’s a feature for the political elite, not a bug. If they wanted to fix shit, they’d fix it. They clearly don’t care. So...the question is only why most Californians don’t seem to care either. This is clearly a game of chicken. How badly can we treat you before you leave or revolt? They don’t care about retaining the middle class. The middle class is the only class questioning their activities. We work hard and expect performance. The poor get handouts, and so do the wealthiest tech lords and industrialists. So as long as the govt. money tap is open, they are drinking like a frat house on a Saturday night. Only the middle class is disturbed by things not working like street lights and schools. There is no politically powerful middle class in totalitarian societies. That’s why they are driving you out. You are in the way. Fiscal and infrastructure Collapse, debt, crime, depravity. They don’t care at the French Laundry. Join the cult or leave.
Societal collapse. The only question is, will it be just a steady deterioration like Rome's, or some black swan event, even a minor one, that pushes your state over the cliff? So sad, such a beautiful place, blessed with so much. But all the politicians that have done this were voted in by the proletariat. Remember De Maistre's observation of the the French Revolution: "People in democracies get the governments they deserve".
We'd love to have you in Texas. In my part, we're much muggier and hotter than along your coastal areas and mountains. But we have only two seasons: green, and less green.
Victor Davis Hanson has often written (and I paraphrase because I can't find the exact quote) that the more a state or local politician is incompetent to handle the state or local problems under his or purview, the more he will talk about and spend money on airy global issues that he has no ability to affect one way or the other.
It took me a while, but I eventually worked out why people get so upset about seeing stuff like "tens of billions of dollars for high-speed rail, and not a single mile of track after a decade".
Turns out that people think that this sort of thing reflects a FAILURE OF POLICY
(__FUCK SUBSTACK FOR THEIR RETARDED COMMENT SYSTEM__ btw)
It's nothing of the sort. The correct amount of money went into the correct pockets.
Robert Higgs wrote an extremely insightful piece in NINETEEN NINETY FIVE (1995). It's been freely available on Mises.org for at least a decade (it's been a bookmark of mine since 1:34pm on December 5th 2016, but I first read it almost a decade earlier).
It's not rocket surgery: simply start from the premise that politicians are parasitoid (parasitoid is different from parasitic, in that parasitoids invariably KILL THE HOST), and that everything they ever say or write is a lie - or at the very least is so rife with 'embedded asterisks' that it may as well be vapour.
NO EXCEPTIONS.
(__FUCK SUBSTACK FOR THEIR RETARDED COMMENT SYSTEM__ btw)
It would be awesome if it was just incompetence, but there's no evidence that really stacks up.
If it was incompetence, there would be random GOOD results.
Even if everyone working (LOL) on some big societal problem was a total fuckup, there would be the rare occasion where some 'big ticket' thing was a home-run for society - where some big policy
(1) happened faster than forecast; AND
(2) cost less than forecast; AND
(3) delivered better results than forecast.
Instead, we get policy after policy after policy that have the exact same characteristics:
🔹 they are MUCH more expensive than the electorate is told to expect;
🔹 they deliver MUCH worse outcomes - even as measured by the bureaucracy; and
🔹 the benefits - if any - take MUCH longer (and so on an NPV basis, the policy is a dud because of temporal discounting).
The "Ship of Fools" also permits the goal-posts to be moved:
🔹 "two weeks to stop the spread" -> "home gulag";
🔹 "get jabbed or get sacked" -> "we never forced anyone";
🔹 "the jab stops the virus 100%" -> "we never said that".
And some stupid middle-aged white woman (the real enemy) will then write an essay calling for "Amnesty" - before the corpses are even cold.
Let the call go across the land... every heterosexual man has the freedom to give 24/7 standing ovations to any pig-ugly obese beta-male who puts on lipstick.
And with freedom comes responsibility: if said heterosexual man
🏳️⚧️ fails to exercise that freedom or worse;
🏳️⚧️ claims that he has no desire to bang the man in lipstick...
then said heterosexual man is #LiterallyHitler (and not in a good way).
Amazing that Californians continue to vote for their own destruction. A secular humanist mindset is leading them down a path that is hopeless. Newsom claims he “owns” the homelessness problem. Yet he doesn’t understand the cause. He blames things like a “lack of affordable housing” as if that was the real culprit. The reason people are living on the street is so much deeper.
Gavin's boring old day job is Governor of California, but his real higher calling is his holy position as Pope of Social Justice, as Cali of course is the Vatican City of the Church of Social Justice.
And the first job of Pope as Defender of the Faith is to protect the flock of faithful and hunt down all heresies, which are the work of Satan aka Hate or (in this case) "heteronormativity".
The Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church has detected 556 (!) bans of sacred dogma, as every child has the god-given right to explore their sexuality, no matter how pre-pubescent they may be, and depriving one child anywhere of a BJ manual is an attack on all children everywhere. Haven't we all read in our Critical Bibles that removing graphic descriptions of sex from public schools is the literal equivalent of Nazi book burnings? Only heretics disagree!
"Grand Wizard" DeSantis, the Antichrist on Earth—anathema sint!—has declared war on the Church and all its works but Pope Gavin is preparing a new crusade where his righteous armies will rescue Florida from its "state of emergency" and deliver the benefits of sacred Social Justice to all its people. All for the glory of the New God. Praise be unto them/their name.
Whenever a politician says they’re going to do something in X number of years you know it’s bullshit. Promises promises.
And look at Gavin. Isn’t he cute? Such a little sparkle in his eyes. Why wouldn’t you believe everything that he says? I’ll bet he gets every single middle-class woman’s vote. Just like Bill Clinton did.
I'm interested to see what happens to California after the democrat mono-party is done sucking all the value out of it. The Chinese and Mexican people are serious about continuing their culture here. There are already millions of Chinese and millions of Mexicans. I know of a private school where all the kids are Chinese and they speak only Chinese in class. These schools are probably everywhere. There are so many advantages to non-citizenship here, that the Mexican people are thriving, and many other central and south American people are along for the ride. I recently bought pesos so I can trade with them when the dollar crashes, and I'm learning a little Spanish. I think the peso will have more buying power here than in Mexico, because they will be more scarce here, and I expect the dollar to come uncoupled from the peso, and the peso to float against the dollar. I believe Mexico will be the sixth BRICS nation because of their massive silver production.
The wealth is the land. Steinbeck was right about that even though he was a drunk lefty communist. If I learned one thing from reading Michener, it's that the wealth is the land.
You can blame Newsome and the Woke Democrats (AKA globalist feudalists) but the reality is this can only happen because the people want it to, and/or let it happen, whether wilfully or because they are submersed in propaganda and lack personal discipline to think for themselves. The Woke are useful idiots for the globalist elites like Newsome, who is part of an Oil family if I’m not mistaken, which is why he is anti nuclear and pro renewables - the former works the latter doesn’t so the former is a threat to oil and the latter isn’t, not hard to figure out when you stop listening to the propaganda noise...
So point out Newsome and the elites by all means but that will not wake people up. Rather focus on what impacts them directly, like you have been re infrastructure and crime and vagrancy etc but make it personal to the people with stories they can’t ignore. Only that has a chance to wake them up to all that is false: Covid policy, mRNA jabs and big Pharma and the health complex generally, propaganda and censorship; climate alarmism lies and the big lie of the Woke ideology.
California is the blueprint for the rest of the country. Fuck everything up at the most basic levels, but continue funding as if it were all working perfectly.
And, in fact, the system IS working perfectly for the "leaders", they get to siphon BILLIONS AND BILLIONS from the taxpayers and direct it to their cronies scattered about the state. The homelessness issue is a perfect microcosm -- cities spend out the ass to 'fix' the problem, but instead only make it worse.......ensuring they get even more money next year. (See also: Portland, Seattle)
Have you seen the news about the legislature's solution to the public transit "fiscal cliff," which fixes the collapse of our public transportation agencies by giving them more free money? "Fuck everything up at the most basic levels, but continue funding as if it were all working perfectly." That's it exactly.
https://newspress.com/averting-fiscal-cliff-california-legislators-come-to-late-night-agreement/
I saw something similar about NYC. Not enough people are riding, so they want to make it 'free' and have drivers pay for it instead.
Edit, from the article:
“The Legislature’s budget agreement is a very positive first step toward securing the future of public transportation in California. Though significant work remains to avoid our transit systems’ fiscal cliff — which was created by the end of federal pandemic emergency aid before transit ridership fully recovered,” Sen. Scott Weiner said.
-----------
It's the fault of those mean federal jerks who pulled the emergency funding!!!
When I lived in NYC, the subway was crowded as hell. Now, though, people go to work in Manhattan maybe two or three days a week--what do they expect? You can only break things so much before you have to deal with the consequences.
They keep kicking that can down the road -- see state bailouts of horribly mismanaged states under the guise of pandemic relief.
And the answer? Get more money from the feds by spending money ruining your own system!
-------------
“Transit capital projects are critically important for our economy and climate goals,” Sen. Weiner stated. “For every dollar California invests in transit infrastructure, it will receive up to $10 in federal matching funds.”
“It would be short-sighted to cannibalize significant transit capital funds and forfeit billions in federal matching funds.”
I’m surprised Scott Weiner could be bothered to take the time from his groomer activities to bother commenting on transportation.
Lord knows Mayor Pete isn't doing it.
His second favorite thing to do is take creepy selfies on public transit
The most likely result of the failed railway system is the siphoning of the money from the project to individual coffers. I bet there is a mere token of spending audits, just like Baltimore.
Everything government does is a money laundering operation
This is wisdom.
I think I read it in the Book of Proverbs!
I hear that's a good one. Do they have that at Barnes & Noble?
Fact check: true
And any country in Africa.
Fuck up’s are continuing and increasing income, success means the $ ends.
It’s not just California, as you say. The Small Business Administration doled out around 1.2 Trillion dollars between the PPP program and EIDL (emergency disaster loans) during the COVID scandemic. While exact numbers are not yet in, Estimates of the number of fraudulently obtained loans run into the hundreds of thousands with losses over 100 billion dollars and possibly above 300 billion or more. The SBA basically loans money as it’s full time mission. That’s what it does all day long for decades . So they have finely honed , effective policies and procedures in place to make sure they are lending money to who they think they are lending money to, underwriting criteria, background checks, etc. right? Wrong. How do I know this? I started getting demand letters for an overdue loan from SBA that I never took out.
Identity theft. The letters threatened me with IRS agents, prison etc.. Contacting the agency was a Kafkaesque joke. The office the demand letter was from in Portland, said contact Dallas, who referred me to Fort Worth, who told me to go online and contact the Inspector General, whose website tells you there is no progress report to be obtained on open fraud cases after you report it. The letters continued. The people I called again were no help. Finally I found some information online and began to bombard the agency with letters and an FTC identity theft report, which ultimately resolved the issue. The agency is an incompetent nightmare. Imagine lending (let’s be nice) only $100,000,000,000 to fraudsters and lending is your only job....Who is that fucking bad at their job in the private sector and still employed?
Nothing will be done to the SBA. They will wring their hands and obfuscate and pseudo apologize and institute “new and improved” processes and hope for the best. Most of the stolen money cannot be recovered per the SBA, particularly for those thieves using fake identities and fake businesses. Some of these gangs got many millions of dollars. Fraudulent indicators were noted on over 3 million applications. And maybe 300 billion dollars are up in smoke.
This is every day in the federal and state and on down the line government in America in 2023- halfwits and petty tyrant bureaucrats screwing everything up and nobody but the citizens and taxpayers foot the bill. This is in great part why we are a mess.
Uh
Er
You realize there’s often overlap between government oversight and “oversight$” ?
Right?
This is our government, all of it this way
https://www.al-monitor.com/lobbying
You, sir, are a gift in my email inbox.
Dare I say, a national treasure.
Sending thoughts and prayers to you from the great “Live Free or Die” state of New Hampshire, where we fled to from Malibu last year. I’m one of the 700,000 CA refugees. Life has never been better. I love it here.
Join me?
Would love to. Am currently stuck here. It sucks.
I hear you. I lived that way, wanting to leave but trapped, for 5 years before we finally escaped. Hoping you free yourself before the ship sinks. California is doomed.
You ought to hope that very few of your fellow 700k refugees have set down roots in NH. When it comes to Californians, the more, the unmerrier.
O Lord, hear our prayer…😂
Yes, I hope they don’t follow—except the ones who value freedom, good faith rational debate, common sense—all things no longer on offer in CA.
If only there were such a thing as good faith in populist republicanism.
It's btw that your new home has an interesting history. It includes being the 9th State to ratify the imperial constitution of 1787. That was in June of 1788, as I recall. The legislators of the day were steamrolled by advocates for change. It was not so everywhere in New England, however.
Legislators of Rhode Island had disregarded the sophistry of Article VII, which pretends to state the law on an important topic before its own "Establishment". They submitted the Constitution to the electorate for a public referendum in March of 1788. Less than 10% voted FOR the C. It was an outcome which ought have convinced every honest person that the C would have been rejected in several other states, too, if referenda had been held.
RI submitted to the convention ruse a few yrs later, after all of the other 12 had been subverted. With hindsight, we can see that the outcome is unsurprising. The DoI which led to the interegnum under the Articles of Conferration was itself a masterpiece of sanctimony and sophistry. Behold the moxie of people who declared during the midst of their brutal civil war that all of their enemies have "unalienable Rights". We are forced by their own words to conclude that every death they caused was a murder.
Walk away Chris
We live in Volusia County, and one of the few seniors who are friends with my kid took his boyfriend to the prom. No fanfare; it was just what happened, and nobody blinked. I hear from friends in the North about the violent, extremist bigotry of FL, and I don't know where they're talking about. I have literally never lived anywhere as non-judgmental as FL, and I spent nearly a decade living in Manhattan.
Repeat that prom story on any number of topics and one can begin to understand the live and let live attitude here in FL. In my 45 years living here, I’ve found it to be an easy going state for the most part. Those who have problems here are often problem makers, themselves, and who, I’m beginning to believe, have actually made themselves mentally ill due to their intolerance and rigidity (the things they claim to hate.) Oh well, love wins and hate has no home here - or else! - or something...
Same. Nobody gives a shit about other people's personal life's in my neighborhood in FL
Martina lives there.
Gavin Newsom is the Jim Jones of our time. Unfortunately the body count will far outnumber the ones discovered in Jonestown Guyana in 1978.
Jim Jones was MUCH more manipulative and smarter than NEWSCUM.
Well ... smarter for sure.
He’s chomping at the bit to run for Prez. Would probably slip Dementia Joe a drano daiquiri if he had the chance
Pretty confident the Democratic Party is going to discover that it's shocked by Biden's bribery scandal just in time for the big handoff.
Newsom will be a formidable candidate in 2024 or 2028: he will have the entire MSM as his campaign team, maybe a billion $ from his friends in the Bay (if people like Zuckerberg and Omidyar ponied up around $500 million for Sleepy Joe, Gavin will get at least twice that), plus he has the greatest talent required for political success: he has no soul and no shame and will say or do anything to get ahead.
He reminds me of Trudeau.
They are very similar: handsome boys of privilege always with an army of servants and lackeys trailing behind to clean up their messes, money only a call away without needing to mess their hair, not particularly bright or interesting but very ambitious and willing to say or do whatever it takes to get what they want...maybe Fidel is Gavin's dad too! ;)
Born on third base and sure they hit a home run.
Attractive enough to make the Chardonnay-swilling AWFL’s turn out en masse for whatever passes for voting at our late stage.
As if the election results were in question CP?
And he’s so cute
Not sure feeding Joe drano would result in any notable change in his status quo
Unless the reason for his inability to speak coherently is a hairball which, the photo evidence might suggest, is a possibility.
I don't like to use the word "hate" but I hate Los Angeles and most of the people here. I came to CA in 1997 and really enjoyed life here until about 2012. Then the politics started getting all weird. We are the playground for awful communist ideas and the speed of deterioration is picking up steam. The part I hate most is that there are a lot of people here who are just willfully blind to what is going on. So I like to say almost everyone here is either a Monster or Sheep.
That’s humanity
90%+ NPC
Always was
Gavin is loathsome. If you look up “sociopath” in the dictionary, his picture is right there.
Yes, all the clown talk is to distract from failures. Yet Gavin doesn’t seem troubled. Why should he be? There are no consequences for most Democrats who are colossal failures by any normal metrics. Do a terrible job, keep the job or get a promotion is how it works. Gavin is political royalty. The money keeps getting spent. Nobody stops them. I’m guessing your elections in Cali are rigged too. I mean why not? It’s not like the election fraud model they’ve worked out won’t work everywhere. In Cali most of the Uber wealthy will stay, at least for now. As the taxes get even more onerous, more will leave. They like having the biggest homeless population. They like having cities that don’t function. It’s a feature for the political elite, not a bug. If they wanted to fix shit, they’d fix it. They clearly don’t care. So...the question is only why most Californians don’t seem to care either. This is clearly a game of chicken. How badly can we treat you before you leave or revolt? They don’t care about retaining the middle class. The middle class is the only class questioning their activities. We work hard and expect performance. The poor get handouts, and so do the wealthiest tech lords and industrialists. So as long as the govt. money tap is open, they are drinking like a frat house on a Saturday night. Only the middle class is disturbed by things not working like street lights and schools. There is no politically powerful middle class in totalitarian societies. That’s why they are driving you out. You are in the way. Fiscal and infrastructure Collapse, debt, crime, depravity. They don’t care at the French Laundry. Join the cult or leave.
Societal collapse. The only question is, will it be just a steady deterioration like Rome's, or some black swan event, even a minor one, that pushes your state over the cliff? So sad, such a beautiful place, blessed with so much. But all the politicians that have done this were voted in by the proletariat. Remember De Maistre's observation of the the French Revolution: "People in democracies get the governments they deserve".
We'd love to have you in Texas. In my part, we're much muggier and hotter than along your coastal areas and mountains. But we have only two seasons: green, and less green.
Danny Huckabee
Victor Davis Hanson has often written (and I paraphrase because I can't find the exact quote) that the more a state or local politician is incompetent to handle the state or local problems under his or purview, the more he will talk about and spend money on airy global issues that he has no ability to affect one way or the other.
It took me a while, but I eventually worked out why people get so upset about seeing stuff like "tens of billions of dollars for high-speed rail, and not a single mile of track after a decade".
Turns out that people think that this sort of thing reflects a FAILURE OF POLICY
(__FUCK SUBSTACK FOR THEIR RETARDED COMMENT SYSTEM__ btw)
It's nothing of the sort. The correct amount of money went into the correct pockets.
Robert Higgs wrote an extremely insightful piece in NINETEEN NINETY FIVE (1995). It's been freely available on Mises.org for at least a decade (it's been a bookmark of mine since 1:34pm on December 5th 2016, but I first read it almost a decade earlier).
It's called "The Myth of 'Failed' Policies".
https://mises.org/library/myth-failed-policies
It's not rocket surgery: simply start from the premise that politicians are parasitoid (parasitoid is different from parasitic, in that parasitoids invariably KILL THE HOST), and that everything they ever say or write is a lie - or at the very least is so rife with 'embedded asterisks' that it may as well be vapour.
NO EXCEPTIONS.
(__FUCK SUBSTACK FOR THEIR RETARDED COMMENT SYSTEM__ btw)
You mean they're doing it on purpose just for the money? I thought it was just dolts botching shit?
It would be awesome if it was just incompetence, but there's no evidence that really stacks up.
If it was incompetence, there would be random GOOD results.
Even if everyone working (LOL) on some big societal problem was a total fuckup, there would be the rare occasion where some 'big ticket' thing was a home-run for society - where some big policy
(1) happened faster than forecast; AND
(2) cost less than forecast; AND
(3) delivered better results than forecast.
Instead, we get policy after policy after policy that have the exact same characteristics:
🔹 they are MUCH more expensive than the electorate is told to expect;
🔹 they deliver MUCH worse outcomes - even as measured by the bureaucracy; and
🔹 the benefits - if any - take MUCH longer (and so on an NPV basis, the policy is a dud because of temporal discounting).
The "Ship of Fools" also permits the goal-posts to be moved:
🔹 "two weeks to stop the spread" -> "home gulag";
🔹 "get jabbed or get sacked" -> "we never forced anyone";
🔹 "the jab stops the virus 100%" -> "we never said that".
And some stupid middle-aged white woman (the real enemy) will then write an essay calling for "Amnesty" - before the corpses are even cold.
PRIDE_PRIDE_PRIDE_PRIDE_PRIDEPRIDEPRIDEPRIDEPRIDEPRIDEPRIDEPRIDEPRIDEPRIDEPRIDEPRIDEPRIDE:
Let the call go across the land... every heterosexual man has the freedom to give 24/7 standing ovations to any pig-ugly obese beta-male who puts on lipstick.
And with freedom comes responsibility: if said heterosexual man
🏳️⚧️ fails to exercise that freedom or worse;
🏳️⚧️ claims that he has no desire to bang the man in lipstick...
then said heterosexual man is #LiterallyHitler (and not in a good way).
The American Citizen sold their vote for money from the government and deserves exactly what is happening.
As long as the money trickles down the government is immune from elections, even honest ones.
Amazing that Californians continue to vote for their own destruction. A secular humanist mindset is leading them down a path that is hopeless. Newsom claims he “owns” the homelessness problem. Yet he doesn’t understand the cause. He blames things like a “lack of affordable housing” as if that was the real culprit. The reason people are living on the street is so much deeper.
Gavin's boring old day job is Governor of California, but his real higher calling is his holy position as Pope of Social Justice, as Cali of course is the Vatican City of the Church of Social Justice.
And the first job of Pope as Defender of the Faith is to protect the flock of faithful and hunt down all heresies, which are the work of Satan aka Hate or (in this case) "heteronormativity".
The Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church has detected 556 (!) bans of sacred dogma, as every child has the god-given right to explore their sexuality, no matter how pre-pubescent they may be, and depriving one child anywhere of a BJ manual is an attack on all children everywhere. Haven't we all read in our Critical Bibles that removing graphic descriptions of sex from public schools is the literal equivalent of Nazi book burnings? Only heretics disagree!
"Grand Wizard" DeSantis, the Antichrist on Earth—anathema sint!—has declared war on the Church and all its works but Pope Gavin is preparing a new crusade where his righteous armies will rescue Florida from its "state of emergency" and deliver the benefits of sacred Social Justice to all its people. All for the glory of the New God. Praise be unto them/their name.
I’m glad someone else noticed CP the Protestants have at last found the Universal Church again; it’s called Woke Social Justice.
OTOH they ain’t got no Constantine, so there’s that...
The quality of the Enemy is our greatest asset at present.
Whenever a politician says they’re going to do something in X number of years you know it’s bullshit. Promises promises.
And look at Gavin. Isn’t he cute? Such a little sparkle in his eyes. Why wouldn’t you believe everything that he says? I’ll bet he gets every single middle-class woman’s vote. Just like Bill Clinton did.
That’s exactly it
I'm interested to see what happens to California after the democrat mono-party is done sucking all the value out of it. The Chinese and Mexican people are serious about continuing their culture here. There are already millions of Chinese and millions of Mexicans. I know of a private school where all the kids are Chinese and they speak only Chinese in class. These schools are probably everywhere. There are so many advantages to non-citizenship here, that the Mexican people are thriving, and many other central and south American people are along for the ride. I recently bought pesos so I can trade with them when the dollar crashes, and I'm learning a little Spanish. I think the peso will have more buying power here than in Mexico, because they will be more scarce here, and I expect the dollar to come uncoupled from the peso, and the peso to float against the dollar. I believe Mexico will be the sixth BRICS nation because of their massive silver production.
The wealth is the land. Steinbeck was right about that even though he was a drunk lefty communist. If I learned one thing from reading Michener, it's that the wealth is the land.
Wow. Such clinical detachment. I like it.
Schools like the madrassas in Saudi Arabia.
Well
And the coast
You can blame Newsome and the Woke Democrats (AKA globalist feudalists) but the reality is this can only happen because the people want it to, and/or let it happen, whether wilfully or because they are submersed in propaganda and lack personal discipline to think for themselves. The Woke are useful idiots for the globalist elites like Newsome, who is part of an Oil family if I’m not mistaken, which is why he is anti nuclear and pro renewables - the former works the latter doesn’t so the former is a threat to oil and the latter isn’t, not hard to figure out when you stop listening to the propaganda noise...
So point out Newsome and the elites by all means but that will not wake people up. Rather focus on what impacts them directly, like you have been re infrastructure and crime and vagrancy etc but make it personal to the people with stories they can’t ignore. Only that has a chance to wake them up to all that is false: Covid policy, mRNA jabs and big Pharma and the health complex generally, propaganda and censorship; climate alarmism lies and the big lie of the Woke ideology.
The solution to California's problems is simple and obvious: Send more weapons to Ukraine.
Extra points for cluster munitions.
Makes sense. Only a Nazi would disagree. Oh, wait…..