California Mindset

[dukkha]

ancy Pelosi gave a marathon speech on illegal immigration the other day. But how would she know much about the realities of open borders, given her palatial retreat in Northern California and multi-millionaire lifestyle that allows wealthy progressives like herself to be exempt from the consequences of her own hectoring? In the end, the House minority leader was reduced to some adolescent racialist patter about her grandson wishing to look more like his Mexican-American friend.

I was thinking of the San Francisco Democrat’s speech last week, during a brief drive into our local town, in a region that is ground zero of California’s illegal immigration experience.

Illegal immigrants are neither collective saints nor sinners, but simply individuals who arrive from one of the poorest regions in the Americas, without legality or much in the way of English, or high school education.

They encounter an American host that has lost confidence in its once formidable powers of assimilation and integration as well as its ability to mint Americans from diverse races, religions, and ethnicities. Instead, American culture has adopted an arrogant sense that it can ensure near instant parity as redemption for supposed past –isms and –ologies. That may explain the immigrant’s romance for Mexico to which he fights any return, and the ambiguity about America in which he fights to stay.

We dare not mention illegal immigration in California as a factor in the state’s implosion. But privately, residents assume it has something to do with the 20 percent of the state’s population that lives below the poverty level. Illegal immigration plays a role in the fact that one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients lives in California and that one of four state residents was not born in the United States—or that one-half of all immigrant households receives some sort of government assistance, and that one in four homeless people lives in California.

Note a final statistic. A record of nearly $30 billion a year is forecast to be sent this year as remittances home to Mexico. If the sum is assumed to be wired largely by the reported 11 million illegal aliens, then illegal immigrants are sending per capita around $2,700 home per year. Again, in per capita terms, a household of five would average about $1,100 sent home per month to Mexico—a generosity impossible without the subsidies of the American taxpayer. (Some might wonder whether the U.S. could tax that sum to build the wall or at least declare that proof of remittances disqualifies one for public support.)

Much Ruin in a State
On the way to town, I passed three neighbors’ parcels. All have something in common: several families are living on lots zoned for single-family residences in an array of illegal sheds, shacks, and stationary trailers. The premises are characterized by illegal dumping, zoning and building code violations, illegal electrical hook-ups, and petty misdemeanors of unlicensed dogs and strays. I remember similar such rural settlements from my early youth in the 1950s, over a decade after the final end of the Great Depression. Now, in our back-to-the-future state, we see some concrete reminders of what my parents used to relate about life in the 1930s.

In this strange “day in the life” melodrama, at the dry cleaner in town, a car collided with mine in the parking lot. We both got out to inspect the fender-bender damage (he had more damage—maybe in the range of $500-800—than I did—probably around $400). I showed him my license, registration, and insurance authentication and asked him to do the same to complete the exchange of information.

But he seemed either to have no license, registration or insurance authentication or was reluctant to show me what he had. I suggested then that we call the police to verify our likely insurance claims, and let them determine whether either one of us was at fault. He said no and suggested instead cash, as if perceived comparative damage outweighed assigning culpability. He spoke limited English. I gave him $50 in cash (all I had in my wallet) and he sped out. I figured that my damage would not have exceeded the insurance deductible and his was likely greater. I suppose he felt a possible insurance claim was not worth even theoretical exposure to deportation. Our negotiation was calm and respectful.

On the way home, I went a different route. The roadside of an adjoining farm parcel has become a veritable dump: I stopped and counted the following sorts of trash piled by the almond orchard: two infant car seats; one entertainment center, three bags of wet garbage, one mattress, one stroller, five tires, and a stack of broken cement, paint cans, and drywall.

Pulling into my driveway, I noticed that a pit bull mix had been dumped at my house during my brief absence (I have already five rescue dogs). We called the animal control officer and are waiting for a reply. I think the result will be predictable, as in the case of my recent misadventure in purchasing expensive solar panels: though they were installed over three months ago, I am still waiting for Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the local utility, to hook the idled system to the grid.

Some time ago I was bitten by two dogs while biking down a rural avenue nearby. The animals’ owners did not speak English, refused to tie up the unlicensed and unvaccinated biters, and in fact let their other dogs out, one of which also bit me. It took four calls to various legal authorities and a local congressional rep to have the dogs quarantined in an effort to avoid rabies shots. The owners were never cited.

The California solution is always the same: the law-abiding must adjust to the non-law-abiding. So I quit riding out here and they kept their unvaccinated, unlicensed, and untied dogs.

All that is a pretty typical day, in a way that would have been atypical some 40 years ago.

Traveling Halfway in Reverse
In California, civilization is speeding in reverse—well aside from the decrepit infrastructure, dismal public schools, and sky-high home prices. Or rather, the state travels halfway in reverse: anything involving the private sector (smartphones, Internet, new cars, TV, or getting solar panels installed) is 21st-century. Anything involving the overwhelmed government or public utilities (enforcing dumping laws, licensing dogs, hooking up solar panel meters to the grid, observing common traffic courtesies) is early 20th-century.

Why is this so, and how do Californians adjust?

They accept a few unspoken rules of state behavior and then use their resources to navigate around them.

1) Law enforcement in California hinges on ignoring felonies to focus on misdemeanors and infractions. Or rather, if a Californian is deemed to be law-abiding, a legal resident, and with some means, the regulatory state will audit, inspect, and likely fine his property and behavior in hopes of raising revenue. That is a safe means of compensating for the reality that millions, some potentially dangerous, are not following the law, and can only be forced to comply at great cost and in a fashion that will seem politically incorrect.

The practical result of a schizophrenic postmodern regulatory and premodern frontier state? Throw out onto the road three sacks of garbage with your incriminating power bill in them, or dump the cooking oil of your easily identifiable mobile canteen on the side of the road, and there are no green consequences. Install a leach line that ends up one foot too close to a water well, and expect thousands of dollars of fines or compliance costs.

2) Elite progressive virtue-signaling is in direct proportion to elite apartheid: the more one champions green statutes, the plight of illegal aliens, the need for sanctuary cities, or the evils of charter schools, so all the more the megaphone is relieved that housing prices are high and thus exclusionary to “them.”

The more likely one associates with the privileged, so too the more one avoids those who seem to be impoverished or residing illegally, and the more one is likely to put his children in expensive and prestigious private academies. One’s loud ideology serves as a psychosocial means of squaring the circle of living in direct antithesis to one’s professions. (I do not know how the new federal tax law will affect California’s liberal pieties, given the elite will see their now non-deductible state taxes effectively double.)

3) California is no longer really a single state. Few in the Bay Area have ever been to the southern Sierra Nevada foothill communities, or the west side of the Central Valley, or the upper quarter of the state. Coastal California is simply far more left-wing than other blue states; interior California is far more right-wing than most red states; increasingly, the former dictate to and rule the latter.

The sharp divide between Massachusetts and Mississippi requires 1,500 miles; in California, the similar cultural distance is about 130 miles from Menlo Park to Mendota. Add California’s neo-Confederate ideas into the equation—such as nullification and sanctuary cities—and we seem on the verge of some sort of secession. (Would the Central Valley follow the path of West Virginia, split off, and remain in the Union?)

4) The postmodern 21st-century state media in its various manifestations is committed to social justice, not necessarily to disinterested reporting. Few read about environmental lawsuits over the planned pathway of a disruptive high-speed rail project; not so in the case of planned state nullification of offshore drilling.

In many news accounts, the race and ethnicity of a violent criminal are deduced in the cynical (and often quite illiberal) reader comments that follow. Is the newspaper deliberately suppressing news information to incite readership, who, in turn, through their commentaries flesh out the news that is not reported and simultaneously spike online viewership by their lurid outrage?

Folk wisdom in California translates into something along the following lines: an unidentified “suspect” in a drunk driving accident that leaves two dead on the side of the road can for some time remains unidentified; a local accountant of the wrong profile who is indicted by the IRS has his name and picture blared.

Progressive Winners and Losers
There are progressive exceptions: universities—in email blast warnings to students and faculty about mere suspects seen on campus in connection with reported burglaries or sexual assaults—are not shy in providing physical characteristics, dress, and perceived racial identities. The media, in other words, feels by massaging its coverage of California realities, it can serve an invaluable role in guiding us to our fated progressive futures—with exceptions for income and class.

Californians, both the losers and beneficiaries of these unspoken rules, have lost confidence in the equal application of the law and indeed the idea of transparent and meritocratic government.

Cynicism is rampant. Law-abiding Californians do whatever is necessary not to come to the attention of any authorities, whose desperate need for both revenue and perceived social justice (150,000 households in a state of 40 million residents pay about 50 percent of California income tax revenue) is carnivorous.

A cynical neighbor once summed up the counter-intuitive rules to me: if you are in a car collision, hope that you are hit by, rather than hit an illegal alien. If someone breaks into your home and you are forced to use a firearm, hope that you are wounded nonlethally in the exchange, at least more severely than is the intruder. And if you are cited by an agency, hope it is for growing an acre of marijuana rather than having a two-foot puddle on your farm classified as an inland waterway.

I could add a fourth: it is always legally safer to allow your dog to be devoured by a stray pit-bull than to shoot the pit-bull to save your dog.

In the former case, neither the owner nor the state ever appears; in the latter both sometimes do.

In a state where millions cannot be held accountable, those who can will be—both to justify a regulatory octopus, and as social justice for their innate unwarranted privilege.
https://amgreatness.com/2018/02/19/u...lifornia-mind/

[Micawber]

Thats a pretty long OP for a guy who only gets paid 8 cents per post.

[dukkha]

Thats a pretty long OP for a guy who only gets paid 8 cents per post.

you could not have read it that fast. It is eye opening to say the least.
I would not want to live there- maybe up north ( if you recall 'cheapseats' -from DCJ -lives up there and I used to talk to her before she acquired TDS- seems pretty nice and all)-but the place has a lot of squalor/poverty and a whacked out government.. apparently Governor Moonbeam has lost touch with reality, as much as Pelosi has

[Frank Apisa]

The only proper response to this is OP is:

Oh yeah!

[dukkha]

How dirty is San Francisco?
An NBC Bay Area Investigation reveals a dangerous mix of drug needles, garbage, and feces throughout downtown San Francisco. The Investigative Unit surveyed 153 blocks of the city – the more than 20-mile stretch includes popular tourist spots like Union Square and major hotel chains. The area – bordered by Van Ness Avenue, Market Street, Post Street and Grant Avenue – is also home to City Hall, schools, playgrounds, and a police station.

As the Investigative Unit photographed nearly a dozen hypodermic needles scattered across one block, a group of preschool students happened to walk by on their way to an afternoon field trip to city hall.

“We see poop, we see pee, we see needles, and we see trash,” said teacher Adelita Orellana. “Sometimes they ask what is it, and that’s a conversation that’s a little difficult to have with a 2-year old, but we just let them know that those things are full of germs, that they are dangerous, and they should never be touched.”
Dried Feces can Lead to Airborne Viruses

“If you do get stuck with these disposed needles you can get HIV, Hepatitis C, Hepatitis B, and a variety of other viral diseases,” said Dr. Lee Riley, an infectious disease expert at University of California, Berkeley. He warned that once fecal matter dries, it can become airborne, releasing potentially dangerous viruses, such as the rotavirus. “If you happen to inhale that, it can also go into your intestine,” he said. The results can prove fatal, especially in children.
San Francisco Compared to Some of the Dirtiest Slums in the World

Based on the findings of the Investigative Unit survey, Riley believes parts of the city may be even dirtier than slums in some developing countries.

“The contamination is … much greater than communities in Brazil or Kenya or India,” he said. He notes that in those countries, slum dwellings are often long-term homes for families and so there is an attempt to make the surroundings more livable. Homeless communities in San Francisco, however, are often kicked out from one part of town and forced to relocate to another. The result is extreme contamination, according to Riley.

San Francisco Spends $30 Million Cleaning Feces, Drug Needles

Until the problem is fixed, Mohammed Nuru, the Director of the Public Works Department, is charged with the towering task of cleaning the streets, over and over again. “Yes, we can clean, he said, “and then go back a few hours later, and it looks as if it was never cleaned. So is that how you want to spend your money?”

The 2016-2017 budget for San Francisco Public Works includes $60.1 million for “Street Environmental Services.” The budget has nearly doubled over the past five years. Originally, that money, was intended to clean streets, not sidewalks. According to city ordinances, sidewalks are the responsibility of property owners. However, due to the severity of the contamination in San Francisco, Public Works has inherited the problem of washing sidewalks. Nuru estimates that half of his street cleaning budget – about $30 million – goes towards cleaning up feces and needles from homeless encampments and sidewalks.

'Human Tragedy' in San Francisco

A single pile of human waste, said Nuru, takes at least 30 minutes for one of his staffers to clean. “The steamer has to come. He has to park the steamer. He's got to come out with his steamer, disinfect, steam clean, roll up and go.”

Asked if he’d be willing to give up part of his budget and allocate it to more directly addressing the homeless problem – which would likely alleviate his cleaning problem – Nuru said, “The Board of Supervisors, the mayor – those are decisions that they need to make." He added, “I want to continue cleaning and I want to be able to continue to provide services. The Public Works Department provides services seven days a week, 24 hours a day.”

Ronen acknowledges that finding the money to provide 1,000 additional beds for the homeless may very well take years. The city is planning on opening three new Navigation Centers for homeless people by the summer, but two centers will also be closing.

“We're not going to make a huge dent in this problem unless we deal with some underlying major social problems and issues,” she said. “There's a human tragedy happening in San Francisco.”
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/loca...472430013.html

[Micawber]

you could not have read it that fast.as

You are correct, sir! I didnt even read past ^ on this one.

[dukkha]

You are correct, sir! I didnt even read past ^ on this one.

It's pretty sad.I was always a great fan of the movements that swept the nation from CA..The natural food
(health food stores) back in the 70's made my friend rich when he got on the ground floor for the east coast.

And lots of good things do still come from there -but the state looks to have accepted a high level of dysfunction as well

[katzgar]

Trying to pretend that the cost of living in California makes a bunch of people below the poverty level just makes your mind sick and not operating with any sort of effectiveness. I know you're desperate to paint California as socialist and failing but really neither is the case then this is something educated people to understand but you're too stupid to get. The cost of living problem in California is being solved by all California's poor people moving to Texas so no need to worry about it.

[Darth Omar]

you could not have read it that fast. It is eye opening to say the least.
I would not want to live there- maybe up north ( if you recall 'cheapseats' -from DCJ -lives up there and I used to talk to her before she acquired TDS- seems pretty nice and all)-but the place has a lot of squalor/poverty and a whacked out government.. apparently Governor Moonbeam has lost touch with reality, as much as Pelosi has

Pelosi is nearly a parody of the modern liberal.

‘Exempt from the effects of her own laws’ or however the writer put it. That someone like Pelosi is head of the party is a big reason democrats are out of power.

Yet they’re oblivious to it.

[dukkha]

Pelosi is nearly a parody of the modern liberal.

‘Exempt from the effects of her own laws’ or however the writer put it. That someone like Pelosi is head of the party is a big reason democrats are out of power.

Yet they’re oblivious to it.

isn't Pelosi from San Fran?
It looks like a beautiful place to visit-except for the poop and needles..

[Darth Omar]

isn't Pelosi from San Fran?
It looks like a beautiful place to visit-except for the poop and needles..

Yes and yes lol.

San Francisco democrats are so far to left of my democrat Senator from WV he can’t even see them with binoculars.

[dukkha]

Yes and yes lol.

San Francisco democrats are so far to left of my democrat Senator from WV he can’t even see them with binoculars.

something is terribly wrong with CA.. the OP shows the dangers of mass illegals.

Homelessness is more the problem with SF /but the entire state has gone full retard

[Darth Omar]

something is terribly wrong with CA.. the OP shows the dangers of mass illegals.

Homelessness is more the problem with SF /but the entire state has gone full retard

They will become Venezuela if the rich ever leave.

[Cancel 2018.1]

something is terribly wrong with CA.. the OP shows the dangers of mass illegals.

Homelessness is more the problem with SF /but the entire state has gone full retard

Pfffft. Let CA wallow in it, that's what they seem to want. As long as they keep it to themselves, fine by me. The only thing that appeals to me about that state is that I never skied at Tahoe or Mammoth . Once I've checked that off my list I'll probably never go there again.

[dukkha]

Pfffft. Let CA wallow in it, that's what they seem to want. As long as they keep it to themselves, fine by me. The only thing that appeals to me about that state is that I never skied at Tahoe or Mammoth . Once I've checked that off my list I'll probably never go there again.

it's leaking out to the Left coast as well