Posts Tagged → California
Colorado shooting is another “Gun Free Zone”
Another crazy guy (and it’s almost always a guy, why is that) walks into a store and shoots innocent people just going about their business. So far ten people are dead, among them a local police officer doing his duty to protect and serve.
Colorado is a western state, with a strong history of cowboys, self-reliance, and private gun ownership. Especially carrying a sidearm for personal protection kind of gun ownership. Across most of Colorado a person can expect that a great many people around you are carrying a concealed firearm, for their own protection and for yours.
But in recent decades, beautiful western states like Colorado and Montana have seen an influx of Californians fleeing the disastrous policies of otherwise-beautiful California. But these refugees bring with them the same failed mindset and foolish policies they fled and had left behind in California. Slowly but surely, these transplants begin working to implement the same exact laws, policies and regulations that are even now destroying California. And where would these liberal transplants focus most? Why gun elimination, of course.
Boulder City in Colorado is the poster child for liberalism or woke-ism run amok, and every type of Marxist regulation and ordinance possible can now be found in Boulder, in an otherwise pretty free state of Colorado. One of the things that most of the Boulder residents really don’t like is guns, or gun ownership. And so, the store in which yesterday’s mass shooting occurred fell in line and had a “Gun Free Zone” warning on its front door.
When a store posts this kind of warning on its door, it usually means that anyone carrying a firearm on the premises could be subject to criminal charges. And so those people who do carry a concealed firearm almost always avoid these kinds of stores. I suppose they would rather be safe than sorry, and so they shop elsewhere.
So, who or what kind of person ignores the “Gun Free Zone” sticker or sign on the store front entry? Well, it just might be a crazy person, like yesterday’s shooter guy. People looking for soft targets can and often do target places where they reasonably expect to encounter little or no armed resistance.
What would have been the outcome of his attack, had there been several patrons in the store that day carrying firearms? Do we think the result might have been different, as the result has been different in other places where “a good guy with a gun” managed to stop the assault as it was beginning?
Gun Free Zones do not work. They are infantile make-believe wishful thinking that all bad things would just go away. Yes, Gun Free Zones are the equivalent of a #badthingsjustgoaway mindset, which is not a grown up, mature, contemplative way to approach reality. But apparently, so many Americans have experienced so little reality or real life challenge that they actually believe this kind of weak policy works. This childish mindset is at the core of the gun confiscation movement: “If we can just get rid of guns, then there will be no more bad things.”
Which is of course nonsense, because after all the known guns are eliminated, then the unknown guns held by bad people will come out. And American society will become a shooting gallery, because no one but a police officer here or there will be around to stop the carnage.
If you doubt this prediction, just look at this Colorado store. There is your Gun Free environment right there. A real effective policy, right? A real peaceful, safe place, right?!
UPDATE: Turns out the murderous lunatic is another peace-loving jihadi named Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, from Syria. Turns out America doesn’t need gun confiscation or regulation, we need immigration control.
Why California burns
Year after year, Americans are treated to images from California of flaming cars and zillion-dollar homes either burning down to the ground or sliding down canyon walls like toboggans on ski slopes.
No, these images are not from Hollywood movie sets designed to create fake images. These are the real thing, a hell on earth environment does in fact happen as badly on the ground each time we see it from afar.
Why these fires happen is right now subject to some debate, which does not make sense, because their explanation is very easy to understand.
No, President Trump did not cause these fires because his administration’s budget cut the fat off of some bloated California line item cost passed on to Americans everywhere. What a silly thing to say; it is just more “Trump did it!” goofball politics stuff.
No, “climate change” did not somehow cause these fires or the damage resulting from them. That would be impossible. Again, this is just silly politics stuff.
And no, sorry President Trump, these fires are not necessarily happening because California is mismanaging the forests there. That accusation would be correct for a lot of other Western areas, like Colorado, but I am sure that it does not apply to Malibu, California.
It is a fact that much of California’s landscape is a fire-based ecosystem, where wildfires are a constant, expected, and necessary part of the area’s natural cycles. Not only do the plants and trees there burn easily, some of them actually require fire in order for their seeds to germinate. For example, both redwoods and sequoias, two hugely famous trees that grow along California’s coast, have pine cones that will not open unless they are subject to fire. Without fire, these two tree species will not naturally regenerate. They evolved in a fire-based ecosystem.
Humans have built widely in this natural wildfire zone, by choice and with a lot of fore-warning about what they can expect while living there. So it is a mystery why the humans there then run about wringing their hands and trying to blame politicians whenever there is a wildfire that burns down their poorly placed buildings. Serious wildfire is one of the few things they can actually expect to experience at least once a year, every year.
Additionally, the soils along the California coast are the absolute worst types of soil for building on. These are crumbly, loose soils that move around easily, often following gravity downward and carrying whatever humans have built on them along for the ride.
Think about it this way: New York City is famously built on bedrock, a great feature for standing still on a solid base when humans have invested billions of dollars on skyscraper buildings above. Coastal California soils are the exact opposite of New York City’s bed rock.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, “[these] soils are on side slopes of hills and mountains. These soils formed in residuum and colluvium derived from inter-bedded shale and sandstone. Slopes are 4 to 75 percent.”
What this sciency lingo means is that these soils are loose and easily eroded. Moreover, fire temporarily reduces plants holding the soil together, and then water carries the especially but temporarily loose soil to the ocean. This is natural, it is how this area was created. Building on it is foolish.
A dear friend of mine owns a wonderful vacant lot in the heart of Malibu. Her large tract overlooks the Pacific Ocean and is surrounded by very expensive futuristic homes. Despite this lot’s beauty, she hasn’t built on it yet, because it has been washed away several times and burned at least once. One night we were looking for her corner survey stakes, and we found them down the street. About two feet of soil had washed away in that rain storm; it was mass wasting, really. A home there would have gone along down the street.
Which begs the question: Why would people build homes in a wildfire-dependent ecosystem and on soils that are as slippery as wet soap and as solid as sand?
Well, there is another question, too, which is why are all those expensive homes built on the San Andreas fault? But we can’t answer that until The Big One rocks California to the bone (and we get to see if Californians have an ounce of self-reliance left).
More important, something is going on with the people who live in California. This ‘something‘ is not good, because they are living in a self-imposed fantasy land that does not want them to live there; it is trying to burn them out and flush their buildings into the Pacific Ocean. The people there know what to expect, and yet they do the wrong thing anyhow, over and over.
Watching them now trying to blame President Trump for their own poor judgment would be funny, except the political consequences are serious.
California: Beautiful place, fascinating geology and ecology.
Californians: Bad character, poor judgment, American taxpayer welfare queens.
UPDATE: A friend commented and pointed out that New Orleans is built below sea level next to the seashore, and that Miami is built on a sand bar in the direct path of most hurricanes, and that Phoenix, Arizona, is built in an arid desert with no water anywhere around. These are all similar examples of humans tempting fate and defying Mother Nature. Good luck with that. And yes, I do feel badly for the people who have been directly affected by the most recent fire around Malibu, Paradise, and other California locations. How could I not feel bad for them? It is a sad situation. But the message of this post is that humans cannot successfully defy Mother Nature. It just never ends well for either party, but unlike the humans, Mother Nature can almost always fix herself. Humans need better development planning.
Normal People Must Stop Supporting the lawless Democrat Party
In the past two weeks, a new US president has begun taking control of the executive branch over which he presides, per the US Constitution, and the world has exploded in reaction.
No better proof exists that America has been hemmoraging wealth and accreting parasites than the universal response of the same parasites: We want our free lunch!
How on earth does an illegal alien deserve my Social Security money, which I will not qualify for until I am in my late 60s and which I have been paying for since age 14? How does an illegal alien begin their new life here in America by breaking the law? Damn, the old frontier mentality is alive and well here, and it is unsustainable. Schools, hospitals, police services, public utilities, the costs imposed on all US citizens by illegal aliens is in the hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
The now formal move to create safe spaces for illegal aliens (“sanctuary cities” and even sanctuary campuses) is simply one political party trying to artificially bolster its voter numbers so it can artificially take control of America and impose its radical un-American agenda on the unwilling inhabitants thereof.
Now that California and nearly all Democrats have declared their determination to brazenly disobey federal law, basically an admission of lawless and threatening behavior, the distinction is absolutely clear: The Democrat Party is officially the party of lawlessness.
Oddly, the 1960s protest mentality has now persuaded people that simply because they oppose something, they can break the law, even violently and destructively. This makes no sense to normal Americans, but it is what we are up against. We are facing pure lawlessness, supported by the meddlesome recently departed president. He remains a class-less street organizer til the last, desirous of an ungovernable country filled with citizens at each other’s throats. What a guy.
And what if the town of Sonora, California, (or some town in western Maryland, or Upstate New York) declared itself a sanctuary city for lawful gun owners, who simply want to own otherwise legal guns that the state of California has arbitrarily declared unacceptable? You just know the CA national guard and every California SWAT team would descend upon Sonora, kick the crap out of everyone, arrest the otherwise peaceful gun owners, prosecute them fully, make an example of them, and leave nothing but smoking ashes behind. Hypocrite Liberals tolerate no one breaking their laws.
Now that one political party has openly declared itself at war with the basic tenets of democracy and law, the choice is clear for every normal American out there. Stop supporting the Democrat Party until it returns to the Earth’s orbit.
I know a lot of Democrats. There’s a bunch I hunt with, and a lot of neighbors and friends. These are all normal people. None of these Democrats I know want violence and destruction, or street conflicts. They stand distinctly against that behavior. Nor do they want to win at the ballot box by cheating. So, their time to step up has arrived, and their choice is clear. They must stop supporting the Democrat Party. Only they can pressure the Democrat Party to return to acting like Americans, and stop acting like an attacking seditious force trying to use illegal alien invaders as mercenaries and human shields to help them wrest control of American government.
Time to revoke California’s full faith and credit standing
Full faith and credit is the idea that all of the states in the United States operate at more or less the same level of professionalism and responsibility. Full faith in the driver’s licenses of one states are assumed by all other states, and full credit is given by all states to the licensing process of all other states. It is at the core of the Union, it is the glue that binds the states to one another as equals.
California is up-ending this arrangement, however.
California has for a long time been dubbed “the Left coast,” the “land of fruits and nuts,” the “sunshine cancer state,” and all kinds of other funny, silly, and word-play sly riffs on its geography and light-headed lifestyle.
What is not so funny is how badly California has gone off the rails, threatening to take a bunch of other train cars with it.
Phenomenally wild and unscientific regulations, unsustainable minimal wage hikes, outlandish worker compensation and insurance requirements for employers, and other bizarre acts of officialdom there have damaged the state’s economy and the quality of life of its citizens. Businesses relocating from California to Nevada and Texas is now a daily report in regional newspapers.
However, if that isn’t bad enough, consider this, the dead canary in the polluted California coal mine: This week California government officials revealed that they had “inadvertently” released private information on about 3,500 state-licensed firearm instructors. The most personal medical and professional information about these individuals was disclosed to a news reporter, information that can really damage the instructors, and lead to their identity theft. The assumption is that the reporter would widely disseminate this information. After all, if he can damage these people personally, maybe they will stop being firearms instructors, goes that warped logic. It is at least consistent with California’s war against lawful gun ownership, a goal shared by the mainstream media. It was no accident.
This, in a state that goes into wild contortions to avoid identifying illegal aliens it has brought into its illegal “sanctuary cities,” including releasing illegal aliens convicted of violent crimes, who then go on to murder more Americans. Because they are illegal aliens, they are somehow “victims,” and not subject to the rule of law. The state of California puts tremendous taxpayer-funded resources into protecting illegal aliens, presumably because they will be good little partisan voters who continue to vote for more Santa Claus government handouts. It is total lawlessness, because the political goal of complete single-party power and control drives all official decisions.
California has gone so far as to issue driver’s licenses to at least a million illegal aliens, which easily paves the way for them to become illegal voters. This is America’s biggest vote fraud, and as we saw recently it threatens the core of our Republic. American taxpaying citizens deserve better than this. It really is a declaration of war complete with an invasion force. But Americans have been patient and understanding, too much so.
It is time to withdraw California’s full faith and credit standing amongst its peer states.
The resulting death and destruction emanating and radiating out from California reaches every corner of America, and this mayhem demands that other states take action to protect their citizens from California’s wanton disregard for basic law and order, a basic disregard for life and limb of American citizens who happen to be unluckily in the path of a vehicle incompetently driven by an illegal alien. Or on the street when an illegal alien blessed by the state of California pulls a gun and murders in cold blood.
Here are concrete steps the responsible adult states can take to get our United States back under control and serving the interests of the citizens and taxpayers who populate them:
1) Declare all California driver’s licenses unacceptable as legal documents or certifications, and subject to immediate confiscation by law enforcement officers;
2) Declare all California-licensed vehicles subject to immediate search, and illicit contents therein subject to seizure, and the vehicles to be impounded;
3) Declare all other California licenses and certifications null and void, and subject to review in each state.
This is good government. It is a government of good standards, of, by, and for The People.
Invasives & Sustainability
Invasives present a challenge to sustainability because they quickly fill gaps where natives take longer to grow and thrive. Natives evolved in their environment over long periods of time and they perform certain key services and functions that are necessary for the overall system to function properly.
As non-native invasives proliferate, they choke out the natives and reduce their ecosystem services. Almost always, the non-native invasives perform limited or no services, despite showy appearances. Their presence is totally unsustainable and is ruinous if left unchecked.
A day or so ago while walking on my favorite rail-trail, it was impossible to ignore the sickly sweet smell of Japanese honeysuckle, a huge invasive nearly everywhere in Pennsylvania. For whatever reason, Japanese honeysuckle has spread like wildlfire in the past few years. My only neighbor’s property is like Ground Zero, so whatever fight I am carrying on at my place is limited in effect by the invasive sanctuary across the boundary line. Like a shrub explosion.
Sure, the ruby throated hummingbirds benefit from honeysuckle, and who doesn’t like watching the gentle, delicate little birds flit around?
But this much honeysuckle is quickly crowding out native trees that benefit our native wildlife. Occasionally deer will browse the tender tips of a honeysuckle shrub, but after the first inch it’s just tough woody debris that deer won’t eat. So it grows pretty much unchallenged. And boy does it ever grow!
Along with Japanese honeysuckle comes barberry, multiflora rose, and autumn or Russian olive, often all popping up unannounced in large clumps. Interesting, isn’t it, that they all appear together? Once in a while a nasty ailanthus (“Tree of Heaven”) will push its way in among the other invaders.
After years of battling these non-native invasives, I have come to rely on pulling up the barberry by hand, usually with the aid of a length of re-bar, and spraying the smaller olives, honeysuckle, and multiflora rose with glyphosate. Sawing substantially into the larger honeysuckle shrubs and spraying the cut with glyphosate usually does the trick; it works much better than trying to spray the whole big shrub.
Intriguing, don’t you think, that the biggest advocates of fighting non-native invasives are the ones most aggressively pushing non-native invasives in the form of lawbreaking illegal border crashers?
Recently I was on the West Coast, in an area in the grip of a Biblical-size drought. Water scarcity is becoming a serious problem. Public demand for water far outstrips supply. A drive through the Central Valley revealed apocryphal “Dustbowl” conditions, with signs everywhere warning about the consequences of poor water management.
It is not a sustainable situation. Yet this area also holds the greatest number of illegal invaders in America, who put an unsustainable demand on other public services besides water. Public transportation, public schools, roads, highways, sewage treatment, public spaces like parks, police, fire and hospital services are all stretched way beyond capacity by the presence of the non-native, non-tax-paying invasives.
And yet the voting citizens of Los Angeles and California continue to aggressively vote for unsustainability.
Boggles the mind.
US Supreme Court decides straight forward case with weird outcomes
Fernandez v. California was decided yesterday by the US Supreme Court. Everything about it is just…weird.
In a holding that is enraging advocates of private property rights, limited government, and citizen privacy, the Court’s conservatives were joined by two liberals to allow the police to enter a private home without a warrant, even if one resident says they cannot enter, because another resident said they could enter.
In other words, if the police get a resident of a home to grant permission to enter that home for the purpose of searching for something illegal, which the police now do not have to specify in writing, the police may enter. What they are looking for could be unknown, or undocumented. Maybe they are on a fishing expedition, just looking for anything they could use against the person who said they did not want the police to enter. It seems like planting evidence would be a lot easier, now. In any event, your home is no longer your castle, if a pissed off teenager inside decides to take out their misplaced teenage aggression against their loving parents.
Seems like a recipe for disaster.
Justice Ginsburg wrote a dissent, noting the obvious erosion in Fourth Amendment rights against illegal searches and seizures that result from holdings like this. Ginsburg is the court’s most liberal member, an extremist who has spoken out against the US Constitution she is sworn to uphold, and an authoritarian statist who otherwise just loves, loves, loves state power over citizens.
And here’s the really weird stuff: The facts involve “illegal guns,” which in California is anything down to and including a Daisy BB gun, and documented domestic violence.
The person blocking the police from entering the home to search it was the Mr. Wife-Beating Fernandez, a scumbag who held his cringing wife prisoner under brutal circumstances. After he was momentarily out of the picture and not a direct threat, she allowed the police to search the house, where they found the illegal guns (let’s be clear – California is on the path to making all gun ownership illegal, except by the police, which is otherwise known as a police state, a separate topic).
Thus did Mr. Macho Wife Beater get into even more and more serious trouble with the legal system, and thus did he subsequently attempt to suppress the evidence the police found, which really put him away behind bars for a while.
Ginsburg and other liberals typically trumpet the rights of domestic abuse victims, but here they are clearly ranking them beneath the rights of the gun-owning wife beater. Weird.
Conservatives like Alito typically champion the rights of gun owners and are split 50/50 on privacy rights. But here they are so obviously opening up the flood gates of potential abuse by police. No warrant? No documentation for probable cause? Husbands and wives typically cannot testify against each other, but here they are now allowed to defy one another in the family ‘castle’ so the state apparatus may enter at will.
Seems like a pretty huge detonation of American citizens’ privacy rights. Weird.
California Pulls a High Tech ‘Yosemite Sam’ Move
Yosemite Sam is, or was, a colorful rootin’ tootin’ California cowboy created by Warner Brothers Cartoons. Based on the ’49er image of a rough ‘n ready gunslinger, Yosemite Sam occasionally shot himself in the foot while Bugs Bunny casually outwitted him. Testing brains versus brawn, these classic cartoons lampooned trigger happy meat heads and, as always, elevated the higher valued brain power of the waskilly rabbit (rascally rabbit, as pronounced by another trigger happy meat head, Elmer Fudd). Using that proven Hollywood method of powerful if subliminal suggestion, the cartoons’ message was clear to impressionable little kids and meat heads alike: Use your head, you’ll do better.
Fast forward 70 years to the home of Yosemite, the supposedly golden state of California. Yesterday, that Liberal-laden welfare state signed into law a new tax on Internet sales. Because interstate commerce is constitutionally protected above individual states’ financial interests, taxes on Internet sales aren’t really legal or legit. Most consumers take some risk when they purchase online, and the absence of state taxes (a huge 8.75% in California), is an overall small but relatively large reward for taking that risk. Returning items by mail costs buyers money, and not paying sales tax offsets those costs.
Well, here we are, many decades after California became one of America’s premier economies, and the elected officials of that once-great state have decided to return to the 1700s way of doing business rather than embrace technology, mobile consumers, and the blurring of boundaries everywhere (like they enjoy the blurred boundary between California and Mexico, a blur long sought and much enjoyed by Liberals everywhere). Rather than leveraging technology to work for California, in this instance, California Democrats choose to take the one-dimensional approach to gathering revenue. Taxing Internet sales was projected to gather about $200 million annually, but with amazon.com and other big Internet sellers immediately ending their high-tech advertising relationships there, the state is now projected to lose about $135 million in taxes paid by the owners of those advertising businesses. And because many of those owners have said that they will now relocate to a nearby state without Internet sales tax, California loses those tax payers as well as the creative brain power that those entrepreneurs brought to the state.
Like all mis-named “progressives,” Liberals are ultimately interested in just one thing, and that is power. Like Yosemite Sam of old, the California Democrats behind this foolish move understand power alone, and by golly, they will exercise power simply because they can. For the simple sake of having it and demonstrating to all around that they have it. But like Yosemite Sam, California has shot itself in the foot. The net result of their Internet tax appears to be just about a complete wash, with the added loss of yet more smart working people from the state.
Like their ideological counterparts in North Korea and China and Russia, California’s Democrats are most satisfied to exercise power for power’s sake, regardless of the collateral damage. Shooting themselves in the foot never felt so good, except for the entrepreneurs and remaining taxpayer left behind in the growing exodus of brain power leaving that Statist state.
Hopefully, my own home state of Pennsylvania, also long a haven for high taxes and unfavorable business conditions, will find a way to take advantage of the Yosemite Sams now running California government, and funnel their loss into Pennsylvania and make it our gain.