|
|
With the November 8 election already one week ago, we already are conditioned to accept that some final results will not be known until December 16, five weeks later. Counting proceeds at a crawl in counties up and down the state, and those among us with housebroken political sentiments are expected to be impressed at the diligent performance of our election professionals.
In truth, however, no major nation on earth takes this long to count ballots, and no state in America takes as long as California to count ballots. As of November 14, there were still 15 races for a seat in the U.S. Congress that remained undecided. Eight of them, more than half, are here in California.
What has happened to the election process in California is a travesty. For over 30 years, political power has steadily drifted towards what is now a one party state. Democrats control all the higher state offices, from Governor to State Superintendent of Public Instruction, and none of that will change. In the state legislature, Democrats control what is referred to as a mega-majority in both the assembly and the senate. Unlike a super-majority, where two-thirds of the seats in a chamber are occupied by members of a single party, a mega-majority means that three-quarters of the seats are controlled by one party. That, too, will not change once final results are announced.
The reason for this dominance by one party can be misleading, however, because it isn’t a party so much as […] Read More
It’s been clear to millions of Americans for decades that the media was biased, that the Democratic Party and their government employee union allies controlled and corrupted big city elections, and that the “climate crises” and the threat of “white supremacy” were being oversold. These and other annoyances were perennial. But for many skeptics, the level of mistrust remained tolerable. The system itself was resilient. Nothing is perfect. The tide can turn. The good guys could still win. The 2015 arrival of Donald Trump on the national political scene changed the rules. The system not only revealed itself to be even more fraudulent than most people had previously believed, but it became malevolent.
For over six years, representatives of every established institution in the country have stereotyped Americans who voted for President Trump as bigots, idiots, ignoramuses, haters, psychopaths, and traitors. The virulence of this condemnation has escalated each year, culminating during the 2022 mid-term election cycle with a full-court press to tag anyone who supports the former president as a fascist and and potential “domestic terrorist.”
Those who openly proclaimed their support for Trump, even if they expressed themselves with tact and rational arguments, focusing on his policies, and even while acknowledging Trump’s often confrontational persona, lost lifelong friends and faced threats to their livelihood. By the millions, they were made to feel unwelcome in their own country.
Anger breeds anger. Contempt breeds contempt. With Newtonian certainty, the disgust has become mutual. But on one side, with rare exceptions, […] Read More
Exploring the roadways of California yields scenery evoking two distinct worlds. On the big freeways, surrounding every major interchange, the 21st century asserts itself in an agglomeration of concrete and glass boxes surrounded by lakes of asphalt, each festooned with a recognizable corporate logo. Food. Fuel. Lodging. The corporate power they represent is reflected in their generic interchangeability. “We have taken over the world. We are everywhere.” And they are. From California to the Carolinas, it’s the same fast food, the same gasoline, the same motel chains. You can’t tell them apart.
If you get off the main highways, a different world still exists, but it’s fading fast. Along Highway 50, which connects Sacramento to the South Shore of Lake Tahoe, there are several examples that take us back to the middle of the 20th century, before the only sources of roadside food, fuel and lodging were franchised cutouts backed by multinational corporations. On the eastbound ascent, just above the snow line, one of these relics sits, surrounded by chain link fence. Struggling for years against an economic deck stacked against it, COVID restrictions administered the coup de grâce. But there it stands, a spacious log cabin style lodge, with steep Swiss roofs and windowed gables. Moldering in the rain, freezing in the snow, it is worth more dead than alive.
Across the highway, a few miles downhill but still in the High Sierra, a roadhouse stands abandoned. Thick wood framing, a peaked roof, stone chimney and a decrepit neon […] Read More
In less than two weeks, voters in Los Angeles will have the opportunity to select a new mayor and nine of the 15 members of the city council. A positive outcome is unlikely. The cards are stacked.
It’s reasonable to acknowledge that big city politics are never squeaky clean. But if urban politics has historically been a swamp, Los Angeles politics in 2022 is a cesspool. To allege that The Machine controlling Los Angeles politics is fueled by the tons of feces that tens of thousands of “unhoused” addicts and predators drop onto the streets and into the gutters of the city each day is more than a metaphor, it’s reality.
This unregulated sewage is the foundation of political control in Los Angeles today. The Machine that runs Los Angeles derives money and power by creating and expanding a dependent, parasitic class of Angelenos, growing every time another free service is rolled out. A population that, by design, will never be “housed,” because “permanent supportive housing” costs taxpayers $500,000 per unit, and because most of them would never voluntarily vacate the streets even if there were enough units, since that would cramp their hunter gatherer lifestyle.
Nurturing this dysfunction therefore requires repeating a lie, endlessly, a lie that claims all you have to do is provide free housing and services, and on their own, people will decide to live in those homes, and magically shed their mental illness, their addictions, and their criminality.
This preposterous, lucrative lie persists because it […] Read More
The word infrastructure requires careful definition these days. Leftists have recently repositioned the word to describe not pipelines and power grids, and the like, but social services and public education. Where Leftists trod, moderate Democrats and RINOs have followed, muddying the meaning by imposing a broad concept onto what ought to be straightforward and tangible. This isn’t a trivial problem, because infrastructure, traditionally defined, demands painful clarity from ideologues committed to limited government.
For example, if you are going to build a pipeline to transport natural gas from wells to refineries, and thence to end users, you have to lay the pipe in a route that minimizes material waste. The same reality holds true for high voltage power lines, or freeways, or railroads. Without the ability of government to exercise eminent domain, it would be impossible to secure easements to build these necessary assets.
Even infrastructure that is built with private funding, such as toll roads, can’t be constructed without eminent domain. Without that legal authority, one private landowner, occupying a small parcel in the path of a project, could stop the project cold.
The moral worth of eminent domain falls along a continuum, and where the line is drawn between justified vs unjustified use is subjective. Necessary pipelines, aqueducts, and power lines are to one end, sports stadiums and urban renewal to the other. And even in those less justifiable categories, history is filled with examples of glorious rebuilt cities arising atop decaying slums, and only the arbitrary use […] Read More
Earlier this year the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) released a report entitled “Burned Out, Priced Out – Solutions to the Educator Shortage Crisis.” Given the universally acknowledged challenges facing public K-12 education in California, this report merits serious attention.
The UTLA represents teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which with over 500,000 enrolled K-12 students is the 2nd largest school district in the United States. How severe is their teacher shortage?
According to statements made by Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho in August, there are 900 teacher vacancies. To put this in perspective, according to LAUSD’s “Fast Facts” for the 2022-23 school year, there are 502,850 K-12 students enrolled in LAUSD, and 23,553 K-12 teachers. This means the student/teacher ratio without hiring 900 more teachers is 21.3 students per teacher, and once those hires are made, that ratio will shrink to 20.5 students.
Without knowing where these vacancies are concentrated – not enough STEM or AP teachers? – this does not appear to be a crisis. In fact, according to Cal School News, LAUSD enrollment is projected to drop by nearly 30 percent over the next decade. LAUSD needs to be planning to reduce teacher headcount, not increase it.
So is there really a teacher shortage in LAUSD? The UTLA may have inadvertently admitted their credibility is not unassailable when in the first introductory sentence of their report, they claim “a bipartisan political campaign has been waged against professionalism and greater spending […] Read More
It’s getting harder and harder to not abandon faith in the supposedly respectable institutions we once relied on, and to unequivocally reject what has become their core governing premises. So here goes: the entire “climate crisis” is an opportunistic hoax; the entire “equity” (along with diversity and inclusion) movement is a corrupt fraud. This fraud and this hoax have permeated and overwhelmed every “respectable” sector of American life, with disastrous consequences that are only beginning to be felt.
If you are someone who still has faith in the ultimate resilience of the institutions that once made America great, try to research positive new ideas. Try to identify and promote solutions to genuine challenges. Invariably as you peruse the promotional literature of today’s innovators, no matter what it is you’ve found, you’ll have to sift through endless drivel about carbon this and carbon that, along with diversity this and diversity that, before you might find any facts that matter.
This is a huge problem, because obsessive attention to climate and equity priorities, regardless of how important they may be, obscure the essence of pretty much anything, and deflect attention from whether or not it might have genuine value. We get it. Less carbon. More diversity. But does it work? Thanks to the obfuscating filters of climate and equity, separating useful ideas from monstrous scams is far more laborious than it ought to be, and all the while, the scams are getting bigger.
Climate and Equity Politics Will Destroy America
It’s becoming […] Read More
|
|
Comments