Is California becoming premodern?

Is California Becoming Premodern?

Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review

More than 2 million Californians were recently left without power after the state's largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric -- which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year -- preemptively shut down transmission lines in fear that they might spark fires during periods of high autumn winds.

Consumers blame the state for not cleaning up dead trees and brush, along with the utility companies for not updating their ossified equipment. The power companies in turn fault the state for so over-regulating utilities that they had no resources to modernize their grids.

Californians know that having tens of thousands of homeless in their major cities is untenable. In some places, municipal sidewalks have become open sewers of garbage, used needles, rodents, and infectious diseases. Yet no one dares question progressive orthodoxy by enforcing drug and vagrancy laws, moving the homeless out of cities to suburban or rural facilities, or increasing the number of mental hospitals.

Taxpayers in California, whose basket of sales, gasoline and income taxes is the highest in the nation, quietly seethe while immobile on antiquated freeways that are crowded, dangerous and under nonstop makeshift repair.

Gas prices of $4 to $5 a gallon -- the result of high taxes, hyper-regulation and green mandates -- add insult to the injury of stalled commuters. Gas tax increases ostensibly intended to fund freeway expansion and repair continue to be diverted to the state's failing high-speed rail project.

Residents shrug that the state's public schools are among weakest in the nation, often ranking in the bottom quadrant in standardized test scores. Elites publicly oppose charter schools but often put their own kids in private academies.

Californians know that to venture into a typical municipal emergency room is to descend into a modern Dante's Inferno. Medical facilities are overcrowded. They can be as unpleasant as they are bankrupting to the vanishing middle class that must face exorbitant charges to bring in an injured or sick child.

No one would dare to connect the crumbling infrastructure, poor schools and failing public health care with the non-enforcement of immigration laws, which has led to a massive influx of undocumented immigrants from the poorest regions of the world, who often arrive without fluency in English or a high-school education.

Stores are occasionally hit by swarming looters. Such Wild West criminals know how to keep their thefts under $950, ensuring that such "misdemeanors" do not warrant police attention. California's permissive laws have decriminalized thefts and break-ins. The result is that San Francisco now has the highest property crime rate per capita in the nation.

Has California become premodern?

Millions of fed-up middle-class taxpayers have fled the state. Their presence as a stabilizing influence is sorely missed. About one-third of the nation's welfare recipients live in California. Millions of poor newcomers require enormously expensive state health, housing, education, legal and law-enforcement services.

California is now a one-party state. Democrats have supermajorities in both houses of the legislature. Only seven of the state's 53 congressional seats are held by Republicans. The result is that there is no credible check on a mostly coastal majority.

Huge global wealth in high-tech, finance, trade and academia poured into the coastal corridor, creating a new nobility with unprecedented riches. Unfortunately, the new aristocracy adopted mindsets antithetical to the general welfare of Californians living outside their coastal enclaves. The nobodies have struggled to buy high-priced gas, pay exorbitant power bills and deal with shoddy infrastructure -- all of which resulted from the policies of the distant somebodies.

California's three most powerful politicians -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Gov. Gavin Newsom -- are all multimillionaires. Their lives, homes and privileges bear no resemblance to those of other Californians living with the consequences of their misguided policies and agendas.

The state's elite took revolving-door entries and exits for granted. They assumed that California was so naturally rich, beautiful and well-endowed that there would always be thousands of newcomers who would queue up for the weather, the shore, the mountains and the hip culture.

Yet California is nearing the logical limits of progressive adventurism in policy and politics.

Residents carefully plan long highway trips as if they were ancient explorers charting dangerous routes. Tourists warily enter downtown Los Angeles or San Francisco as if visiting a politically unstable nation.

Insatiable state tax collectors and agencies are viewed by the public as if they were corrupt officials of Third World countries seeking bribes. Californians flip their switches unsure of whether the lights will go on. Many are careful about what they say, terrified of progressive thought police who seem more worried about critics than criminals.

Our resolute ancestors took a century to turn a wilderness into California. Our irresolute generation in just a decade or two has been turning California into a wilderness.

Time For The Press To Do Its Job

Time For The Press To Do Its Job
Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel, co-founders: Daily Caller


The press hates Donald Trump. That’s not a newsflash. The bias the press shows toward most Republicans turns to outright hostility when it comes to Trump. Once you’ve convinced yourself your opponent is an evil racist, it’s not hard to justify doing anything you can to stop him. Many in the press corps have admitted this. Most haven’t, but it’s definitely the prevalent attitude in the dominant liberal media. How can we have a fair election in this environment? That question is coming to a head now with regard to Joe Biden and his son’s alleged corruption.

The Biden campaign has decided that their best strategy for handling allegations of corruption is to shame the press out of covering it. They have labeled any such allegations against Biden as Trump-inspired conspiracy theories and pushed newsrooms in an unprecedented way to ignore them. So far, it’s largely working.

But based on the agreed facts known to date, it’s clear there’s something worthy of investigation when it comes to Hunter Biden’s shady foreign business dealings. Here’s what we know: Hunter Biden received massive payments from shady foreign companies. Nobody denies this. He has had a turbulent and troubled professional career. From admitted substance abuse to an involuntary military discharge for drug use to failed companies, it hasn’t been a good run for him. The Bidens’ claims that Hunter was hired for corporate governance expertise don’t pass the laugh test. He has absolutely zero track record of any such expertise.

Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, paid both Hunter Biden and his business partner Devon Archer a total sum allegedly in the millions of dollars over a number of years. Chinese private equity firm BHR reportedly sold Hunter Biden’s company a 10% stake for $420,000. This seems like a remarkable discount for a firm managing over $2 billion in assets and therefore likely raking in tens of millions of dollars in fees every single year.

Barring some other explanation — not offered to date — it sure seems that the only reason these deals took place was to curry favor from or influence over Joe Biden or other top government officials around him. To be clear, the fact that foreign firms wanted to hire his son to influence Joe Biden does not mean that Joe Biden was himself corrupt at all. It could be that these firms went into these deals in hopes of influencing Joe and that Joe, in the end, never did anything wrong.

There’s only one thing to date that we’re pretty certain Joe did wrong, and even that is likely not illegal. Joe Biden flew his son Hunter to China in December 2013 on Air Force Two. On that trip, Joe met with the founder of BHR. Weeks later, BHR apparently closed on a deal for a $1.5 billion investment from Chinese state-backed investors. This all happened while Joe Biden was the Obama administration’s point man on China. Allowing Hunter to tag along with him to China on an official visit, where all this went down, at a minimum showed very bad judgement on Vice President Biden’s part. 

Was there anything more than bad judgment to these shady-looking Biden business dealings? Nothing more has been proven to date. The question at this stage isn’t whether corruption has been proven but whether it’s worth investigating. A functioning press corps would be all over this story. Maybe there’s nothing more to it. But until someone thoroughly investigates, we won’t know.

A massive number of Americans do not trust the media. The best way to counteract that is for the media to do its job.

But today, we have a very different situation. The entire establishment press corps, under direct pressure from the Biden campaign, has concluded that these clearly dubious business dealings are not worthy of investigation at all. Conclusory statements that there’s no “proof” of corruption have been copy-pasted into every Biden article in The New York Times and The Washington Post since this story first broke. That’s not enough. It’s time for the press to do its job and get to the bottom of why in the world these foreign companies paid Hunter Biden millions of dollars. Did they get anything back for their investment? It’d be nice to know.

Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel co-founded The Daily Caller, one of America’s fastest growing online news outlets, which regularly breaks news and distributes it to over 15 million monthly readers. COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

Elizabeth Warren (or “Elizanomics”) is absolutely CRAZY!

Elizabeth Warren (or “Elizanomics”) is absolutely CRAZY!

Col Mike Walker, USMC (retired)

Here is reality in four numbers:

            

(1) American household wealth: $100.8 trillion 2018 (that is a “T”!)

(2) Combined wealth of all 2,153 US billionaires in 2019: $8.7 trillion

(3) Projected Federal expenditures for 2019: $4.7 trillion

If we took everything from the billionaires and threw them out homeless on the streets of San Francisco then their total wealth would only run the US Government for about twenty-two (22) months.

(4) Add in the Green New Deal cost that includes Medicare-for-all, free college tuition, free jobs, etc, etc and you add a whopping $51 Trillion at the low end or $93 Trillion at the high end over ten years.

That cuts the 22 months down to 11 or 9 months – less than one (1) year!

After that, we would be right back in the same fiscal mess of unsustainable BIG GOVERNMENT overspending – or far worse with New Green Deal!

The bad news is that America would go broke and the world would fall into a Great Depression like the 1930s.

The good news is that future generations would avoid big government socialism like the plague.

For us it would be the worst disaster in American history.

Elizanomics is stone-cold CRAZY!

Giants in the Earth

Giants in the Earth

Members of previous generations now seem like giants

Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review 

Many of the stories about the gods and heroes of Greek mythology were compiled during Greek Dark Ages. Impoverished tribes passed down oral traditions that originated after the fall of the lost palatial civilizations of the Mycenaean Greeks.

Dark Age Greeks tried to make sense of the massive ruins of their forgotten forbearers' monumental palaces that were still standing around. As illiterates, they were curious about occasional clay tablets they plowed up in their fields with incomprehensible ancient Linear B inscriptions.

We of the 21st century are beginning to look back at our own lost epic times and wonder about these now-nameless giants who left behind monuments that we cannot replicate, but instead merely use or even mock.

Does anyone believe that contemporary Americans could build another transcontinental railroad in six years?

Californians tried to build a high-speed rail line. But after more than a decade of government incompetence, lawsuits, cost overruns and constant bureaucratic squabbling, they have all but given up. The result is a half-built overpass over the skyline of Fresno -- and not yet a foot of track laid.

Who were those giants of the 1960s responsible for building our interstate highway system?

California's roads now are mostly the same as we inherited them, although the state population has tripled. We have added little to our freeway network, either because we forgot how to build good roads or would prefer to spend the money on redistributive entitlements.

When California had to replace a quarter section of the earthquake-damaged San Francisco Bay Bridge, it turned into a near-disaster, with 11 years of acrimony, fighting, cost overruns -- and a commentary on our decline into Dark Ages primitivism. Yet 82 years ago, our ancestors built four times the length of our singe replacement span in less than four years. It took them just two years to design the entire Bay Bridge and award the contracts.

Our generation required five years just to plan to replace a single section. In inflation-adjusted dollars, we spent six times the money on one quarter of the length of the bridge and required 13 agencies to grant approval. In 1936, just one agency oversaw the entire bridge project.

California has not built a major dam in 40 years. Instead, officials squabble over the water stored and distributed by our ancestors, who designed the California State Water Project and Central Valley Project.

Contemporary Californians would have little food or water without these massive transfers, and yet they often ignore or damn the generation that built the very system that saves us.

America went to the moon in 1969 with supposedly primitive computers and backward engineering. Does anyone believe we could launch a similar moonshot today? No American has set foot on the moon in the last 47 years, and it may not happen in the next 50 years.
Hollywood once gave us blockbuster epics, brilliant Westerns, great film noirs, and classic comedies. Now it endlessly turns out comic-book superhero films or pathetic remakes of prior classics.

Our writers, directors and actors have lost the skills of their ancestors. But they are also cowardly, and in regimented fashion they simply parrot boring race, class and gender bromides that are neither interesting nor funny. Does anyone believe that the Oscar ceremonies are more engaging and dignified than in the past?

We have been fighting in Afghanistan without result for 18 years. Our forefathers helped to win World War II and defeat the Axis Powers in four years.

In terms of learning, does anyone believe that a college graduate in 2020 will know half the information of a 1950 graduate?

In the 1940s, young people read William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pearl Buck and John Steinbeck. Are our current novelists turning out anything comparable? Could today's high-school graduate even finish "The Good Earth" or "The Grapes of Wrath"?

True, social media is impressive. The internet gives us instant access to global knowledge. We are a more tolerant society, at least in theory. But Facebook is not the Hoover Dam, and Twitter is not the Panama Canal.

Our ancestors were builders and pioneers and mostly fearless. We are regulators, auditors, bureaucrats, adjudicators, censors, critics, plaintiffs, defendants, social media junkies and thin-skinned scolds. A distant generation created; we mostly delay, idle and gripe.

As we walk amid the refuse, needles and excrement of the sidewalks of our fetid cities; as we sit motionless on our jammed ancient freeways; and as we pout on Twitter and electronically whine in the porticos of our Ivy League campuses, will we ask: "Who were these people who left these strange monuments that we use but can neither emulate nor understand?"

In comparison to us, they now seem like gods.

We're all still trapped in Dems' Russia delusion

We're all still trapped in Dems' Russia delusion
Rich Lowry, Jewish World Review 

After three years, we're still on the Russia story. The locus has shifted 500 miles west from Moscow to Kiev, and now we are consumed with the Ukraine controversy rather than the Russia probe, though it's essentially the same thing — a battle over President Trump's legitimacy fought out with allegations of foreign interference.

Democrats are trying to widen the Ukraine controversy, which centers on Trump's mention of the Bidens on his call with his Ukrainian counterpart. They want to drag in his urging Ukraine, Australia and others to cooperate with William Barr's investigation of the origins of the Russia probe.

There's nothing wrong or unusual about a US president asking foreign leaders to provide information useful to his attorney general in an investigation. Why would there be? Except the president's detractors don't consider Barr's investigation above-board. In fact, they consider it another form of Trump's perfidy.

In its report on Trump's call with the Australian prime minister, The New York Times says — in a news report, mind you — that the call "shows the president using high-level diplomacy to advance his personal political interests." Trump is pleased with Barr's ¬≠investigation and would be even more pleased if it unearthed anything untoward. That doesn't make it merely a pet political project or mean that there isn't a genuine public interest in knowing in greater detail how and why the Russia story got started.

The Times of London reported of Trump's call to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson that he wanted "to gather evidence to undermine the investigation into his campaign's links to Russia." There's not really anything to undermine, though, since the investigation has been over for months.

Trump is basically being accused of the entirely new offense of obstruction after the fact. There were many novel theories of obstruction advanced during the special counsel probe, but this is the most creative.

The Russia investigation figures into the Ukraine story in another way. It's not clear that even Democrats would consider his Ukraine call impeachable if it weren't for their belief that Trump has gotten away with so much previously, as catalogued in the Mueller report.

There was already backing in the House for impeachment prior to the Ukraine whistleblower, and House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler already said he was conducting an impeachment inquiry.

Even the framework of the Ukraine matter reflects the Russia story. Trump's critics say he was asking for Ukrainian "interference" in our elections, when what was really going on was that he and Rudy Giuliani were interfering in Ukrainian politics. They were pushing the Ukrainians to undertake investigations, including, of course, into Joe Biden's actions in the country.
Trump publicly urges Ukraine, China to investigate Bidens If you accept the premise that any information developed in a foreign country and used in American politics is election interference, then Trump's opponents themselves were masters at leveraging Ukrainian interference during the 2016 election.

As Politico reported in 2017, Ukrainian government officials "helped Clinton's allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers."

Giuliani's Ukraine adventure was motivated, in large part, by the desire to get to the bottom of this activity in 2016 and turn the tables on Trump's critics. (Instead, he appears to have turned the tables on himself.)

There will be lots of comparisons with the 1990s as the House moves toward impeachment. Yet, the 1790s might be the more apt comparison. Back then, at the outset of the republic, each nascent political party was consumed with the idea that the other was a tool of a foreign power, either France or Britain, and believed that the other was a fundamental threat to American democracy. It made for particularly vitriolic politics.

Today, the Democrats still have not gotten beyond the idea that Trump is somehow a tool of Russia, while Republicans point to Democratic coordination with shadowy foreign forces to get the Russia investigation rolling. Books fly off the shelves about Trump being an alleged fascist, and Republicans are gripped by a Flight 93 mentality that fears if they lose a presidential election, they will never win another one again.

The Russian story contributed to and fed off this feverish atmosphere. For the longest time, it offered Democrats the hope of deliverance from a president whose election they never truly accepted. When Robert Mueller didn't have the goods, House Democrats were at sea for a while, until Trump's call and the whistleblower complaint brought impeachment deliciously back into play.

Ukraine is more an epilogue of the Russian investigation than the beginning of a new book.