California as a ridiculous oligarchy

California as Saudi Arabia

Happy Labor Day Weekend from a part of California that's not all that "woke". Sometimes we wonder how there can be so many differences between the "woke" and "unwoke" parts of the state. Back in 2018, a U.S. News study ranked California worst in quality of life, particularly in the categories of environment and social engagement. But there are a lot of people who can still pretend that things are going great in the state, and for some people, things still ARE going pretty well! Problems in the state are not distributed equitably.

California is blessed with a lot of natural advantages which the uniparty government is busy squandering. A lot of people wonder how the state has not collapsed yet.

Back in April, NorCal Sierra Foothills Lurker sent in a great summary piece by Stephen Green on just how ridiculously profligate Sacramento can be:

"I could have sworn I had another $73 billion around here somewhere," California Gov. Gavin Newsom, possibly.

$73 billion is the size of California's budget deficit this year, a deficit bigger than the annual budgets of 41 other states. It's at times like these — another is when you wake up in a location you don't recognize without your pants — that the people involved in creating the mess must ask themselves, "How the hell did that happen?"

The fact is that before finding themselves in a $73 billion hole, assemblycritters in Sacramento had so much money coming in that they barely knew how to spend it all. I'm kidding on that last point, of course. Just as quickly as California found itself with a $100 billion surplus in 2022, Newsom announced big plans on how to squander every cent of it.

And his Team was right there with him.

But what it comes down to is that Sacramento found itself with a tidy little sum and, instead of tucking it away for a rainy day, blew it all on pet projects and vote-buying. Here's that rainy day, as the song says, but the irony is that California was seeding the clouds.

Like every other state during this country's stupid, useless, and economically suicidal COVID lockdowns, California was given oodles in federal funny money to paper over the lockdown damage done. Much of that money came from Presidentish Joe Biden's inflationary American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) of 2021.

You'll totally believe what happened to the ARPA money, as detailed by Assemblyman Joe Patterson (R-Rocklin). . .

In essence, Sacramento did spend the same money twice — it's just that they put the first half on the credit card and the other half came from their rich uncle in Washington.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you go from a $100 billion surplus to a $73 billion deficit in little more than a year. California's $173 billion turnaround from red to black is unprecedented in the histories of all 50 states.

In other words, half went on the California credit card and half went on the National credit card! YOU are the rich uncle!

Can you think of another team that might be prone to over-spending? (Great piece. Thanks, J.J.)

A few days ago, Stephen Green quoted Peter Thiel from a post on Battleswarm Blog:

“It’s not the way you might want to design a system from scratch, but it’s pretty stable. People have been saying Saudi Arabia is ridiculous, it’s going to collapse any year now. They’ve been saying that for 40 or 50 years. But you know, if you have a giant oil field you can pay for a lot of ridiculousness… I think that’s the way you have to think of California. There’s things about it that are ridiculous, but there’s something about it. It doesn’t naturally self-destruct overnight.”

Even if Elon Musk and some others leave and there's poop on the sidewalks of San Francisco, there's still a lot of money coming into the government in California.

Here's the video excerpt of Thiel's conversation with Joe Rogan:

Still, it's not the same as when a roommate of mine, as a child, wore a dress and little white gloves like her mother when going to "The City" of San Francisco to shop.

What are your thoughts and experiences?

I'm not going to show any homeless squalor or tent cities.

I think Newsom's deadline for signing that bill to provide home loans to illegal immigrants is today. That should help the state's budget! And the country's banking system! Like in 2008!

Below is one representation of an ongoing problem out here in the hinterlands, especially since they actually started trying to build the short segment of High Speed Rail that no one will want to ride if it is ever finished:

And there are traffic/law enforcement problems in the big city, too:

California is completely dysfunctional pic.twitter.com/wnKKuZgtTT

— Declaration of Memes (@LibertyCappy) August 30, 2024

Why can't anything be done about shoplifters and looters?

Drug stores are closing in California.

Ace posted a piece yesterday about difficulties of retailers in the USA (especially in Blue states and cities). One was the discount store Dollar General.

There is a Dollar General not far from us. I visited once because I had paperwork for a shipping return that I needed to send from their store. I remember this visit because as I was driving into the parking lot, a press conference came on the radio concerning progress in finding suspects in a Mexican drug cartel's murder of a family further north in the Valley.

Kamala Harris was bragging the other day about taking these cartels seriously when she was attorney general (as evidence that she was tough on the border). But neither she nor Gavin Newsom seem to have set up systems to stop their depredations.

There are some financial problems now in oil producing areas in California, too. Oil was a big income-producer at one time in California. There's a reason there are tar pits at the La Brea Tar Pits.

This pump in Signal Hill, Long Beach looks an awful lot like one that was operating year ago when I lived near there. It was still going in 2022, but I can't say if the owners have kept it up with Newsom's insanely cumbersome anti-price-gouging regulations on producers supplying gas for California consumers. I thought of Kamala Harris and her anti-price gouging proposal for groceries. The paperwork alone will raise costs!

I wondered why I had heard on the radio that a Canadian firm had bought rights to an oil field in the Bakersfield area. They might face a lot less paperwork if they shipped the oil to Canada and then, say, to China (compared to a U.S. company supplying oil here). Though Newsom and Trudeau have some sort of virtue-signaling environmental pact between California and Canada, too.

But California is less like Saudi Arabia in oil production now. So the oligarchy must be feeling pretty good about themselves.

Sometime soon, we should discuss who is in the oligarchy.

NorCal Sierra Foothills Lurker also sent in a piece about a longer-term disaster caused by another oligarcy which took a little longer to form, and which involved parts of all of the West Coast states. Remember the Spotted Owl? She said about the small to medium-sized firms generally affected by this economic disaster:

Many in my family who worked in the logging industry were directly affected by this. Ironically the flood of imported workers from Mexico who eventually spilled into what little remained of the industry, almost entirely killed off those few jobs too. And every other industry if I’m honest. The laws changed and that’s why even today in businesses across this country, most workers are imported and the only American’s are the owners. Add to that the outsourcing of most manufacturing and it ends with the slow death of a nation. And yes I will forever be angry about it all.

Daniel Greenfield:

Thirty-five years after “save a logger, eat an owl” could be seen across the Pacific Northwest, the government environmentalists at US Fish and Wildlife want to kill half a million owls…to save the owls.

In a world of transgender surgeries, terrorist cryptocurrencies, and senile presidents, the Owl Wars that entered the 1990 presidential election seem implausible. But they cost tens of thousands of jobs, wiped out sizable amounts of the logging industry in the Pacific Northwest, and helped solidify Oregon and Washington as hipster strongholds no Republican could win.

It all started with listing the spotted owls as an endangered species. The northern spotted owls (which to non-owl fanciers look like most other owls except smaller) were listed as endangered by that noted scientist, Judge William L. Dwyer, who apart from destroying logging also helped create the Seattle Mariners which placed two crimes against humanity on his checkered soul.

But Dwyer was doing the bidding of the anti-industrial Sierra Club and decided to block timber sales in national forests to save the owls.

I immediately think, This increased fire hazards and endangered a lot of wildlife, didn't it? I also remember an anecdote about spotted owls building nests on billboards.

President George H.W. Bush in his usual squishy manner tried to split the difference. “All across the country, we have a spotted owl problem. And yes, we want to see that little furry, feathery guy protected and all of that. But I don’t want to see 40,000 loggers thrown out of work.”

Bill Clinton, who did want to see 40,000 loggers thrown out of work, won and held an owl summit in Portland on April Fool’s Day featuring Al Gore and a protest rally led by Neil Young. The result of the summit was that the millionaire hipsters and environmentalists who had funded the Clintons won and the loggers who were just trying to feed their families came out the losers.

Clinton cut 80% of logging. Timber prices rose 70% in the first years of the Clinton administration. Housing construction costs rose with it further hurting the middle class. Seattle and Portland became safe spaces for fans of Neil Young and bad music. Republicans, conservatives, and the working class were squeezed out to make way for the owls.

But a funny thing happened on the way to owl nirvana, the owls kept dying.

Environmentalists railed that the Trump administration’s expansion of forest areas where loggers could work was “heartbreaking”, “callous” and “offensive” to an “endangered species”.

But the real threat to the spotted owls wasn’t the loggers, but other owls. Environmentalists had known and lied about the fact that barred owls were expanding their territory and driving out the spotted owls. But the spotted owls provided a convenient excuse for a government power grab.

And now if the spotted owls disappear so does the excuse for government abuses of power.

That’s why US Fish and Wildlife has discussed killing the owls to save the owls. The proposal would use “trained shooters” to kill 470,000 barred owls. (And if enough of the barred owls are killed by the government, maybe they can be listed as an endangered species and protected.)

Maybe instead of hiring more government workers, we should think, on this Labor Day Weekend, about how the government can become more sustainable. "Sustainable" is a nice woke word.

Weekend

You may want to avoid rapscallionism this weekend. But have some fun!

Marines, here’s your Labor Day safety brief!

There will be none of the following:
pic.twitter.com/EyntlYPHLq

— 𝕃𝕚𝕖𝕦𝕥𝕖𝕟𝕒𝕟𝕥 ℂ𝕠𝕝𝕠𝕟𝕖𝕝 ℙ 🪖 (@TheLtColUSMC) August 30, 2024

Music

The Vogues "Five O'Clock World"

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, August 24, Who is protecting the environment during the presidential campaigns?

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.

The main topics as Friday wound down were the Democratic convention, RFK addressing the nation and the attack on an oil tanker by the Houthis.

Further developments:

The Sounion, which the Houthis said was en route to Israel, apparently did not request protection as it passed through the critical shipping lanes there, confirmed Operation Aspides, the European Union’s maritime security operation aimed at preventing Houthi threats.

One of its ships responded to the scene to help rescue the crew.

Representative Mike Waltz (R-Florida) shared video of the ship explosion on X — and called it a failure of US foreign policy.

“This is what Biden/Harris policy of appeasement towards Iran gets you… Houthi terrorists blowing 150,000 tons of crude oil into the Red sea,” Waltz said.

Blackwater founder Erik Prince called the latest attack “a clear sign of the collapse of American credibility and deterrence.”

The Sounion, which the Houthis said was en route to Israel, apparently did not request protection as it passed through the critical shipping lanes there, confirmed Operation Aspides, the European Union’s maritime security operation aimed at preventing Houthi threats.

“Letting the Iranian proxy Houthis shut off a major maritime seaway is an epic fail. America can and must do better! ” he wrote on X.

A United States defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity told the AP that American officials were aware of the fires and continued to monitor the situation.

The US Central Command (CENTCOM) said early Saturday its forces had destroyed one Houthi missile system in a Houthi-controlled area of Yemen in the past 24 hours.

“It was determined this system presented a clear and imminent threat to U.S. and coalition forces, and merchant vessels in the region,” CENTCOM said on X.

“This action was taken to protect freedom of navigation and make international waters “safer and more secure” for US, coalition, and merchant vessels,” it added.

CENTCOM said on X????

By Jim Geraghty
August 26, 2024 9:17 AM
On the menu today: I can’t begrudge everyone for paying a lot of attention to the U.S. presidential race, but there’s a lot going in the world beyond Trump’s pouting and threatening to withdraw from the remaining debate. The Houthis are reenacting the Exxon Valdez spill in the Red Sea, to the yawns of environmentalists in the West; NASA can’t get its astronauts down from the International Space Station; and the U.S. Navy is quietly putting together plans to remove the crews from 17 Navy support ships “due to a lack of qualified mariners to operate the vessels.” If you want to get a good sense of how the Democratic nominee would perform in the Oval Office, take a good look at the performance of the administration in which she’s currently vice president.

It’s an Islamist Oil Spill; That Kind of Spill Is Completely Different

Do America’s environmentalists oppose the Houthis’ blowing up oil tankers because it results in massive spills and a “severe ecological disaster,” or quietly support them because they represent attacks on the fossil-fuel industry?

It’s easy to wonder about the latter, as life stateside is full of people who will give you grief about your Big Mac, your SUV, your gas stove, and now your air conditioning. Meanwhile, these kidnapping, humanitarian-aid-obstructing, cholera-exacerbating Islamists who carried out a “partial and limited reintroduction of slavery” are reenacting the Exxon Valdez spill, and you barely hear a peep from the green crowd. It’s easy to conclude their movement is primarily focused upon hassling you, not about protecting the Earth.

Oh, and hey, look who else is benefitting from the Houthis' turning the Red Sea shipping lanes into the site of the U.S. Navy's "most intense combat since World War II":

"Freight companies operating between China and Europe are increasingly turning to rail lines that run through Russia as Houthi rebel attacks on ships travelling through the Suez Canal trigger delays and higher costs."