Tag Archives: #California

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Californie ain’t the place you wanna be! "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." -- Albert Einstein

After Jed Clampett struck oil when he missed a shot at some game he wanted for the dinner table, and became an instant millionaire, his kinfolk said that he needed to get away from the hillbilly life, and that “Californie is the place you wanna be, so they loaded up the truck and they moved to Beverly.”

Hills, that is. Swimming pools, movie stars.

Well, these days, perhaps Californie ain’t the place you wanna be. Ballot Proposition 47, which passed 4,238,156 (59.61%) to 2,871,943 (40.39%) on November 4, 2014, reduced several (purportedly) non-violent offenses from felonies to misdemeanors:

  • Shoplifting, where the value of property stolen does not exceed $950
  • Grand theft, where the value of the stolen property does not exceed $950
  • Receiving stolen property, where the value of the property does not exceed $950
  • Forgery, where the value of forged check, bond or bill does not exceed $950
  • Fraud, where the value of the fraudulent check, draft or order does not exceed $950
  • Writing a bad check, where the value of the check does not exceed $950
  • Personal use of most illegal drugs (Below a certain threshold of weight)

Robert Stacy McCain has been calling California a kleptocracy for some time now, but, of course, he’s just another evil Right Wing Extremist, so his views don’t matter.

It has been said that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, something certainly not entirely true, as I have not been mugged; whether Mr McCain has been, I do not know. But what happens when reporters for the liberal Cable News Network get robbed?

CNN reporter burglarized a third time while covering rampant crime in the Bay Area

Kyung Lah warns tourists visiting San Francisco and Oakland, ‘do not leave a single thing in your car’

By Joseph A. Wulfsohn, Fox News | Wednesday, August 2, 2023 | 9:00 PM EDT

A CNN crew has been burglarized a third time while covering the rampant crime in the Bay Area of California.

CNN correspondent Kyung Lah took to Twitter on Wednesday and shared video of her crew’s car with a completely-shattered window.

“I’m #Oakland, shooting a story about crime. Got broken into again— but this time our car was completely empty. We were across the street— this happened in seconds,” Lah wrote. “Even tho the car is empty, the thieves break in and lower the seat so they can steal anything in the trunk. Our trunk was empty. If you come to San Francisco or Oakland, do not leave a single thing in your car. Ours was thankfully empty.”

The CNN reporter continued:

If you’re here keeping track, this is the 3rd time my CNN rented car has been broken into in the Bay Area in the last year. But I’ve finally learned to not leave even a candy bar in the car anymore (still doesn’t stop the car break in but at least we don’t lose anything)

“(A)t least we don’t lose anything,” she wrote, but, then again, it wasn’t really her car, was it?

At the rental car return lot, the employee tells us of the 250 cars returned yesterday, 27 had been broken into, just more than 10% of cars returned

Just how long will the rental car agency be able to stay in business if 10.8% of the vehicles it rents out come back damaged like that? The agency’s insurance rates will have to increase, along with the repair costs within the deductible, and that means the price to rent a car will get jacked up. At what point do businessmen simply say, “This [insert slang term for feces here] just isn’t worth it”?

Fox News had a story on Miss Lah’s previous encounter with crime.

We previously wrote, At some point, you’d think that even the most liberal of the liberals would realize that without some semblance of law and order, you no longer have civilization! Yes, after fifteen good years in the Keystone State before I retired, I tend to concentrate on crime, mostly violent crime, in Philadelphia.

Carjackers beat a man to death in Northern Liberties, police say

The incident occurred late Thursday night, according to police, when two men pulled a 60-year-old from his vehicle and beat him before fleeing the scene in his car.

by Beatrice Forman | Friday, August 18, 2023

A pair of carjackers assaulted a man before fleeing the scene and taking his vehicle, leaving him for dead in Northern Liberties Thursday night, Philadelphia police say.

The incident occurred just before 10 p.m. on Third and Cambridge Streets, when two masked men pulled up on what a witness told police was a dirt bike. Then, the pair pulled a 60-year-old man from the driver’s seat of a parked 2023 Toyota Highlander, according to the witness account that police relayed to reporters.

That would be a “small, frail, thin, lightweight” 60-year-old Asian man, according to the Philadelphia Police. They sure proved how manly they are!

An altercation ensued before one of the masked men took off in the Highlander and the other took off in the on the dirt bike, according to police.

When officers arrived on the scene, they found the 60-year-old laying in the street as witnesses attempted to render aid.

“He was bleeding from the head. He was semi-conscious,” Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small told reporters. “He was unable to stand up.”

The victim was transported to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, but was pronounced dead less than an hour later.

Officers tracked the location of the Highlander to Camden, where it was recovered unoccupied by Camden police. The dirt bike was last seen traveling north on Third toward Girard Avenue Thursday night.

So, whatever the thugs had planned — and remember: they didn’t know that the victim they beat had died — they simply dumped the car they stole on the far side of the Ben Franklin Bridge, and at least one of them was back in Philly, and while Northern Liberties isn’t that bad an area, heading north on Third takes you to some not so great parts of town. But the innocent man they beat lost his life over what turned out to be a joyride for the thugs, and the odds are pretty good that the carjackers, the killers, were teenagers, and juveniles.

Beatrice Forman, the Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, cannot always choose the stories she is assigned; news comes in, and has to be written up. She is, after all, a “general assignments reporter.” But when I read her bio at the bottom of her article, where it said that she “enjoys covering Philly-specific tomfoolery,” I had to wonder how she felt about this specific bit of tomfoolery, because, the way it ended, at least on the part of the killers, was little more than tomfoolery as far as they were concerned.

We have previously noted Oakland/Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, yet another one of the ‘progressive’ civil rights defense lawyers funded by George Soros, like Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, who are softer-than-Charmin on crime. These idiots good people believe that they are somehow doing something good and noble by keeping oh-so-misunderstood young men out of jail, but what they have created, and what the Pyrite State’s Proposition 47 has enabled, a situation in which crime has few consequences, a situation in which crime has been enabled, and the ‘tomfoolery’ of a joyride into Camden has left an innocent man stone-cold graveyard dead.

Civilization requires civility, and civilization requires law and order, to keep the people living in it safe. Perhaps CNN correspondent Kyung Lah didn’t really feel the full effects of the car break-ins while she was reporting on crime in the Bay Area, because, after all, it wasn’t her car. But other people are feeling it, the rental car agency which has to repair the vehicle her producer and she rented, and the extra costs which that imposes on the agency, and eventually, its next customers. The people of Ward 8 in the District of Columbia are feeling the effects of crime, as the only grocery supermarket there is at least looking at closing its doors due to rampant shoplifting, and the store’s employees might feel the effects of crime as they could lose their jobs if the store closes. Michael Salerno’s family are feeling the effects, as he was murdered during a carjacking attempt, allegedly by a 15-year-old. “The latest serial carjacker had all of his cases dismissed in juvenile court and slaughtered a 19yo while on ankle monitor GPS.”

I would like to believe that Miss Price and Mr Krasner and the rest of the ‘progressive’ prosecutors are genuinely good people, who actually believe that what they are doing will reduce crime and create a better society, rather than just evil, because good people can eventually learn from their mistakes, from the consequences of their actions and policies. I would like to believe that ‘progressives’ in general are seeing the consequences of the policies they support, and at least considering whether conservatives have been right all along, and that crime needs to be punished, and punished harshly. I would like to believe that good people could see that excusing lesser crimes, crimes which could put the malefactors in jail for five years, does the bad guys no favors, when, instead of being able to look forward to being released in a few years, they have been enabled to commit crimes which could get them locked up for the rest of their miserable lives.

Sadly, if that is going to happen, it hasn’t happened yet, as the good, white liberals who live in Society Hill and University City voted for the Larry Krasner-supporting Helen Gym Flaherty, because crime hasn’t come to their doorsteps yet. Perhaps, just perhaps, Miss Lah and her staff have learned the hard lesson the easy way, and might at least consider voting for conservatives, rather than the same old, same old who have enabled America’s large cities to turn into crime-ridden [insert slang term for feces here]holes. California is run almost completely by liberal Democrats, and Philly hasn’t had a Republican mayor since Harry Truman was President.

Albert Einstein, usually considered a fairly smart fellow, once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” I keep hoping that our ‘progressives,’ who consider themselves to be very smart people indeed, eventually see that, despite their very good and noble intentions, that what they have been doing, how they have cast their votes, has led to only bad results.

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The mindlessness of the leftist elites Their ideas enable more crime

Seth Rogen is a Canadian comedian, actor, screenwriter, film producer, and voice actor who, according to the site Celebrity Net Worth, has a net worth of $80 million. I suppose that when you can put together 80 million bucks, getting your car broken into and your stuff therein taken, it isn’t really that big a deal to you. Maybe that makes it easier for you to accept the unacceptable, to tolerate the intolerable.

Business Insider noted:

California remains the state with the highest poverty level in the US, according to a September 2021 report from the US Census Bureau.

In the report, three-year poverty level averages were calculated for each state and the District of Columbia using the supplemental poverty measure, which found that 15.4% of California residents lived in poverty from 2018 to 2020. Only the District of Columbia had a higher rate of poverty — 16.5%.

The supplemental poverty measure expands on the official poverty measure, which was developed by Social Security economist Mollie Orshansky in the 1960s, by accounting for cost of living, work and medical expenses, tax credits, and government programs designed to assist low-income families and individuals.

By comparison, California’s three-year poverty level average has considerably decreased from 17.2 % in 2019, and 18.1% in 2018.

It’s worse than just the numbers: the poverty rate in the Pyrite State would be much higher without welfare and the COVID-19 stimulus payments, the latter of which should eventually disappear.

Social Security transfers and stimulus payments prevented a combined 38.2 million individuals across the US from falling into poverty, while medical expenses caused the largest increase of the number of individuals in poverty, according to the Census Bureau report.

Californians benefited the most from government programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit, CalFresh, and Child Tax Credit, each of which lowered poverty rates in California by more than 1% in 2019, research from the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) found.

So, if the esteemed Mr Rogen thinks that getting robbed is just “called living in a big city,” maybe he ought to think of those Los Angelenos who don’t have $80 million bucks.

His Wikipedia biography described his politics as very left wing, a description he has used for himself. Yeah, and that might describe his brains as well.

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) guesstimated that the city had at least 63,706 homeless persons, blaming “in part, poverty, lack of affordable housing, employment discrimination, substance abuse or mental health challenges, LGBTQ kids who are rejected by family, domestic violence, lack of familial ties, and kids who age out of foster care.” That’s ‘only’ 0.612% of the population of Los Angeles County, but that’s still over 60,000 people having to pee and poop out in the streets, having no safe place to stay, and perhaps living in their cars . . . if they have cars.

Mr Rogen isn’t homeless. He lives on a 10-acre estate in the West Hollywood Hills, having sold, for $2.16 million, another West Hollywood home behind high hedges and a tall, metal fence. ‘Twould seem that, despite his seemingly cavalier attitude toward petty robbery, he does care about security for his property and himself.

And so it is with the City of Brotherly Love. District Attorney Larry Krasner. a George Soros-financed #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading prosecutor who is opposed to “mass incarceration” and who has helped preside over a record 500 homicides in Philadelphia, was recently re-elected by a wide margin, and his votes did not all come from the poor and downtrodden; the well-to-do white liberals in Chestnut Hill voted for him, too.

Why? Like Mr Rogen, despite Philadelphia’s crime rate, the better off Philadelphians are largely insulated from city crime. Those 500 homicides? The vast majority are black, and, as we have noted so many times before, black lives don’t matter to the well-off whites in the city, or at least they don’t if we are to judge by the coverage of The Philadelphia Inquirer. It’s easy for well-to-do white liberals to cling to the oh-so-sympathetic policies, policies which reduce penalties for crime, policies which enable crime, because they are not personally affected by them. They might not have ten acres in the West Hollywood Hills like Mr Rogan, but they have their gated subdivisions, their security systems, and their neighborhoods, let’s be honest here, have few black residents. Philadelphia is highly ‘diverse’ as far as overall population figures are concerned, but far more internally segregated on a by-neighborhood basis.

Seth Rogen is simply a visible symbol, because he posted an incredibly stupid tweet.[2]Because someone a little bit smarter than Mr Rogan might persuade him to delete the tweet, what you see above is a screen capture of it, but if you click on the image, it will take you to the … Continue reading But there are millions more American liberals like him, perhaps not as well-to-do, but mired in the sympathy which enables higher crime rates.

Then they are shocked, shocked! when that crime occurs.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑2 Because someone a little bit smarter than Mr Rogan might persuade him to delete the tweet, what you see above is a screen capture of it, but if you click on the image, it will take you to the original on Twitter.
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There are times that I wonder if today’s Democrats see George Orwell’s 1984 not as a warning but a model of good government.

As we have previously noted, Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) imposed a three week, possibly renewable, ban on indoor dining at restaurants. Los Angeles, Chicago and foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia have all banned indoor dining, and Philly imposed new restrictions on outside dining as well.

Well, LA has gone a step further. From the Los Angeles Times:

L.A. County suspends outdoor dining at restaurants as coronavirus surges

By Alex Wigglesworth, Matt Hamilton and Jenn Harris | November 22, 2020 | 3:29 PM PST | Updated: 9:19 PM PST

In a devastating blow to Los Angeles’ struggling restaurant and hospitality industry, L.A. County public health officials on Sunday announced they will suspend outdoor dining at restaurants amid a surge of new coronavirus cases.

Few segments of Southern California’s economy have been hit harder by the pandemic than the once-booming dining world, with many landmark establishments closing in recent months and many more on the brink. After they were forced to shut indoor dining rooms in the spring, many eateries got a lifeline when officials allowed them to serve outdoors, often in patio areas and makeshift dining halls set up in parking lots, sidewalks and streets.

The new rule takes effect at 10 p.m. Wednesday and restricts restaurants — along with breweries, wineries and bars — to takeout and delivery only for the first time since May. It will remain in place for at least three weeks, officials said. Wineries and breweries can continue retail operations.

Warm weather Los Angeles is a great place for outside dining, if you don’t mind the automobile fumes too much, anyway, much better than in the impending winter weather in most of the country. But, not to worry, now LA is going to suffer just as much as Philadelphia. Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia) won’t have to completely shut down outdoor dining in the City of Brotherly Love; evening temperatures in the thirties and forties will do that for him.

Diner: Waiter, could I have another glass of water.

Waiter: Is your glass empty, sir?

Diner: No, it’s frozen.

But, if the ban on outdoor dining doesn’t run the Los Angeles restaurants out of business, the county is preparing to do more to them:

Officials have urged residents to stay home as much as possible for the next two to three weeks to curb the rising tide of infections and avoid overwhelming the healthcare system.

L.A. County could face even stricter rules to stem the spread of the virus if the average number of new daily coronavirus cases over a five-day period continues to rise and tops 4,500, or if hospitalizations grow to more than 2,000, officials said.

In that event, officials plan to impose a three-week stay-at-home order that would permit only essential workers and those procuring essential services to leave their homes.

“Essential workers,” huh? That means who work at jobs that other people find essential. The apparently quaint notion that working to put food on the table and a roof over their heads is essential to everybody who works doesn’t appear to penetrate the consciousness of the rulemakers.

Doug Rankin, chef at Bar Restaurant in Silver Lake, said that outdoor dining had helped the restaurant break even over the last few months, generating enough to carry it through the year and ensure staffers kept their jobs.

Rankin planned to pivot entirely to takeout. He said that the entire service staff had already been laid off and that kitchen staff would be scaled down immediately.

Mayor Eric Garcetti (D-Los Angeles), with a salary of $248,000 per year and a net worth of $3,000,000, doesn’t have to worry about the ever-increasing restrictions will put him out on the street, doesn’t have to be concerned with being able to put food on the table, so it’s just so easy for him to have put the “entire service staff” of the Bar Restaurant out of work. It’s for their own good, don’t you know, as though eventual homelessness won’t be any big thing.

Many in the hospitality industry shared the sense that their businesses were being scapegoated, and they worried that the closure of outdoor dining would push L.A. County residents to gather at homes, where adherence to safety measures would be inconsistent or absent.

Governors Kate Brown (D-OR) and Tim Walz (D-MN) have already asked neighbors to spy on neighbors are report any violations of COVID-19 regulations. If Mayor Garcetti or Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA), net worth $10 million, most recently famous for his attendance at a maskless dinner at the hoitiest and toitiest of restaurants, get too concerned about the people misbehaving at home, count on them wanting to send the Geheime Staatspolizei to people’s homes to stamp out that, too.

There are times that I wonder if today’s Democrats don’t see George Orwell’s 1984 not as a warning but a model of good government.

Perhaps if I point out that many of the restaurant staff who will lose their jobs are illegal immigrants, Mr Garcetti will yield and let them go back to work, rather than force them to return south of the border . . . .
______________________________
Cross-posted on RedState.

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The nanny state prepares to strike again

As William Teach pointed out, it’s rather humorous that the Pyrite State is so worried about sugary drinks, yet legalized marijuana usage. From the Los Angeles Times:

Is gulping soda as bad as smoking? California seems to think so

By The Times Editorial Board | March 4, 2019 | 3:10 AM PST

In California, soda is the new tobacco — at least from a public policy point of view.

Adopting some of the same methods that have been employed to reduce smoking, California legislators have put together an ambitious package of bills aimed at curbing consumption of sodas, energy drinks and other beverages that have added sugar.

The proposals, which are sponsored by the California Medical Assn. and California Dental Assn., include levying a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, mandating warning labels on their bottles and restricting how they are promoted and displayed in stores, as well as limiting the serving size of fountain drinks. The proceeds from the tax (the amount is yet to be determined) would fund programs to prevent obesity, diabetes and other health problems associated with the overconsumption of sugar.

It’s an intriguing approach that has already sparked a backlash from the soda industry and a public discussion about what role the government should play in grocery store purchases. Now the onus is on public health officials to make a clear and compelling case about the dangers — and to explain why sugary drinks deserve as harsh a regulatory response as cigarettes.

There’s much more at the original.

Full disclosure: I love Mountain Dew, and I had been consuming mass quantities of it since I was a teenager in the 1960s. It was nothing for me to drink four bottles or cans of Dew in a day, and on a particularly hot summer day, the count could go higher. When we lived in Pennsylvania, I even had my own, separate Dew refrigerator in the basement, because Mrs Pico continually complained that I had the regular ‘fridge set too cold, and was freezing the produce and eggs.

On July 1, 2017, when we moved back to the Bluegrass State, I gave up soda, cold turkey. I really haven’t missed it.

But, I digress. There is little question that soda isn’t particularly good for you; the Times’ editorial board was simply making the case that it hadn’t been proven bad enough for you for California to attempt to regulate and tax into disuse. I find it interesting that a state which has legalized the recreational use and sale of pot, has passed an assisted suicide law, tried to (but shelved) ban homosexual conversion therapy, and makes millions off of advertisements and product placements for the consumption of alcohol, is so very worried that you might drink a Pepsi.

But one of the proposed measures that could show results is definitely worth exploring: taxes on drinks with added sugar. Last week, a three-year study of the tax on sugar-sweetened beverages imposed by Berkeley in 2014 — the first in the nation — found that people in low-income neighborhoods bought fewer sugary drinks after the tax was imposed, while consumption trends remained the same in neighboring cities that didn’t have such a tax. The study also found that the people who drank fewer sugary beverages consumed more water during the same period.

This finding mitigates the argument that such a regressive levy would hit low-income people the hardest. Poorer people, many of them black and Latino, would still suffer, economically and physically, if they continued to drink copious amounts of sugar-sweetened drinks. But black and Latino Californians have higher rates of obesity than other populations, so if the higher cost encouraged them to switch to healthier (and untaxed) water, it would be a double benefit to them.

Translation: yes, it would have a disparate impact on minorities, but it’s for their own good, so that doesn’t matter!

The obvious question has to be asked: why is it any of the government’s business to “encourage” people to change their choices and habits? The city of Philadelphia imposed a special tax on sugary drinks, and part of the effect was to cut revenue to retailers near the city limits when their customers could, and did, easily drive to stores in neighboring Bucks and Montgomery counties to buy Mountain Dew without paying the ridiculous tax. It seems that customers were willing to spend a little more in gasoline to buy what they chose.

Of course, alcohol consumption is worse, far worse, than that of sugary drinks, and nobody in the Pyrite State is (seriously) trying to ban or reduce that. The editors of the Los Angeles Times even advocated changing state law to allow businesses which serve alcohol to continue serving until 4:00 AM rather than the 2:00 last call specified by state law:

California is still hewing to a 1935 law dictating that alcohol sales stop from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m., and that blanket prohibition no longer makes sense for cities with thriving music and nightlife scenes that compete for investment and tourism with the likes of New York City, Las Vegas and other late-night cities.

Heaven forfend! We wouldn’t want the “thriving music and nightlife scenes” to be stifled by not having people drinking during the very wee hours of the morning, would we? At best, I found some California sites which want to help people who drink too much alcohol to moderate their intake, but it seems that nobody wants to curtail it back to zero. The National Institute for Health said:

An estimated 88,0008 people (approximately 62,000 men and 26,000 women) die from alcohol-related causes annually, making alcohol the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States. The first is tobacco, and the second is poor diet and physical inactivity.

Yet California’s legislature doesn’t seem to care much about that!

The truth is that sugary drinks aren’t good for you, tobacco isn’t good for you, alcohol isn’t good for you, and, let’s be honest here, casual sex isn’t good for you, but you sure won’t find the home state of Hollywood trying to discourage the hook up culture!

Governments should just stay out of people’s personal decisions about what to put in their mouths. Yeah, a lot of things people do put in their mouths aren’t good for them, but those are decisions, intelligent or otherwise, which ought to belong to individuals, not politicians.