Imagine NO oil drilling in California.  Imagine NO refineries in California.  Imagine NO gas stations in California.  Imagine NO cars that use gas allowed in California.  Think this will end climate change?  Or will it bring about a Depression that no amount of tax dollars can stop?  Is this how we kill employment, tax revenues and hope in California?  Is this how the Democrats get the middle class to leave California?

“In “The Killing of Kern County,” Joel Kotkin, presidential fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute, usefully explains for the many in Sacramento who are missing the point that oil (and agriculture) are the foundations holding up the county’s economy. Despite what’s at stake, Kotkin believes Newsom is more “interested in flattening the area’s aspirations” than unlocking its potential, which the governor once pledged to do.

Regulators, for instance, turned down 21 fracking applications in Kern County in a single month over the summer. With one of every seven workers in the county either employed by or reliant on the oil industry, the denial of so many jobs is not an insignificant blow to the economy.

The energy producers of the WSPA are also at risk. Court rulings in Newsom’s favor make the next step – the complete shutdown of oil production across the state – much easier to take.”

While Newsom is killing off the oil industry, using a limitation of water, refusing to build water storage facilities and ending the use of needed pesticides, the Democrats are killing the agriculture industry.  Finally, the other big industry, tourism, is being killed by the abusive COVID regulations and the defunding/demeaning of police.

What Can We Expect in a Frackless California? Economic Devastation, More Energy Imports.

Kerry Jackson, Pacific Research Institute, 11/17/21   

Care to guess the last time the governor’s office issued a new fracking permit? It was February.

Now that’s a meaningless fact without context, so let’s put it perspective: Even though “Newsom endorsed an end to fracking” while running for governor in 2018, says California political legend Dan Walters, his administration early on increased the flow of fracking permits.

But then Newsom later “came under heavy pressure to match his words with action,” Walters continues.

By November 2019, Newsom had set ​a moratorium on fracking projects. Before permits would be issued, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers would review plans to ensure they met regulatory requirements. Yet it wasn’t terribly long before “the state issued 48 new permits for hydraulic fracturing,” according to the Associated Press.

Then the recall collar got tight in April. The governor’s response was to ban new fracking anywhere in the state by 2024. Even though he previously said he didn’t think he had the authority to prohibit the process and asked the Legislature to do it for him. And even though a legislative attempt never made it out of committee.

So can we expect in a frackless California?

Energy analyst and author Michael Shellenberger says Newsom’s fracking prohibition is simply “​​bonkers.” Assemblyman Rudy Salas, a Bakersfield Democrat, called it “an abuse of power” that will “put the lives, economy and well-being of thousands of California families in jeopardy.” Western States Petroleum Association President and CEO Catherine Reheis-Boyd says it’s an “arbitrary” action that will impose “big impacts on Californians.”

Both the Western States Petroleum Association and the board of supervisors in oil-rich Kern County, which produces roughly two-thirds of the crude that California doesn’t import – making the county the seventh highest oil-producing region in the U.S. – have sued the governor over his order. It’s an existential matter for each party.

In “The Killing of Kern County,” Joel Kotkin, presidential fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute, usefully explains for the many in Sacramento who are missing the point that oil (and agriculture) are the foundations holding up the county’s economy. Despite what’s at stake, Kotkin believes Newsom is more “interested in flattening the area’s aspirations” than unlocking its potential, which the governor once pledged to do.

Regulators, for instance, turned down 21 fracking applications in Kern County in a single month over the summer. With one of every seven workers in the county either employed by or reliant on the oil industry, the denial of so many jobs is not an insignificant blow to the economy.

The energy producers of the WSPA are also at risk. Court rulings in Newsom’s favor make the next step – the complete shutdown of oil production across the state – much easier to take.

Maybe the oddest part of any California energy story is the fact that officials and activists seem to have no reservations about importing what they consider “dirty” energy from other states. That reliance is only going to grow as long as Sacramento is at war with fossil fuels.

How corrupt is the funding system for California Community Colleges?  In 2020 they lost 15% of their enrollment.  Yet in 2021 they will receive the same amount as they got in 2019.  Worse, as they continue to lose enrollment, they will continue to receive the same amount of money till 2026!  Then they will start receiving a reduced amount—even with a third of the students.

“While student enrollment plunged during the pandemic, districts that lost students won’t get hurt financially. The state’s funding formula distributes money based partly on enrollment, but colleges that have lost students in recent years are funded based on higher and older numbers.

Those protections will be in place until at least 2025. For part-time faculty, however, the consequences will be more immediate, as they work semester-by-semester based on the availability of classes.

This will allow the colleges to raise salaries and benefits, since they will no have students to finance.  Then in 2026 they will have bloated salaries and taxpayers will be forced to finance the corruption.  Thought you should know.

Dramatic enrollment drop won’t cost California community colleges state aid but could impact adjunct faculty

The system’s board of governors will be briefed Monday on enrollment declines 

Michael Burke And Thomas Peele, edSource,  11/12/21 

The California community college system’s dramatic enrollment drop won’t have immediate financial consequences for the 116-college system — but it could be detrimental for part-time adjunct faculty.

While student enrollment plunged during the pandemic, districts that lost students won’t get hurt financially. The state’s funding formula distributes money based partly on enrollment, but colleges that have lost students in recent years are funded based on higher and older numbers.

Those protections will be in place until at least 2025. For part-time faculty, however, the consequences will be more immediate, as they work semester-by-semester based on the availability of classes.

“We’re watching to see how it impacts part-time faculty assignments because the districts are going to give full-timers their assignments first,” said Stephanie Goldman, acting executive director of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges. The group advocates for issues of interest to the 42,000 adjunct faculty in the system, but it does not bargain for them. Local unions negotiate with each of the 73 locally elected districts that run the colleges.

The community college chancellor’s office last week reported to the Assembly’s Higher Education Committee that the system is facing a nearly 15% enrollment drop due to the pandemic, a loss of 318,800 students from the prior year. That put its student enrollment at 1,833,843, down from 2,152,643 students in 2019-20. That figure was given as a “best estimate” available at the time.

Assemblyman Kevin McCarty (D-Sacramento), chairman of the state Assembly’s budget subcommittee on education finance, said that even if lawmakers had exact enrollment numbers, it likely wouldn’t affect policy decisions.

The “bigger-picture issue,” McCarty said, is that the enrollment drop across the system is significant regardless of the exact figure. The current year’s budget deal between lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom included spending to help the colleges address the declines. The budget allocated $120 million to the colleges to increase efforts to retain current students and re-engage ones who have dropped out.

 “It’s certainly an issue we’re concerned about in the big picture,” he said of the declines.

McCarty also pointed out that California faces a college degree and certification shortage, and said reversing the enrollment trends will be necessary to change that. “It’s an important issue for the economic well-being of California.”

The enrollment declines have plagued the community colleges throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. The statewide board of governors will be briefed on the issue at its meeting on Monday.

Part of the conversation during the board meeting will likely deal with challenges the statewide chancellor’s office is having with determining exactly how many students opted not to enroll or return to classes during the 2020-21 academic year. For months, the chancellor’s office has been unable to say how many students enrolled in fall 2020 and spring 2021. A memo prepared for the system’s board of governors puts the loss at 15% but also offers an additional possible loss estimate of 9.6%.

The memo to the board says the inability to produce an accurate figure for enrollment loss stems from its challenges in counting students in certain noncredit classes.

Lawmakers and Newsom administration officials acknowledge the need for accurate data. Officials said they remain concerned about the consequences of enrollment declines, not only for the colleges but for the long-term economic health of the state because it is an important player in the training and educating of the state’s workforce.

The college system, however, won’t face any fiscal or policy ramifications for not having an exact enrollment count. For one, the state does not rely on student headcount — the total number of students enrolled — for determining how much funding each college gets. Instead, the shares are based on the number of full-time equivalent students, or FTES, which is calculated by taking the sum of course credits carried by all students enrolled at a district and dividing that by the number of credits in a full-time course load.

Under the funding formula, districts that gain in FTES are eligible to get more funding. For districts that have suffered FTES losses during the pandemic, a so-called “hold harmless” provision ensures that they will be funded at least at their 2017-18 levels, plus a cost of living adjustment. The 2021-22 budget deal extended those hold harmless provisions through 2024-25. Additionally, state regulations allow colleges to use old years of enrollment data in emergency situations, which the Covid-19 pandemic is considered to be.

“We’re aware of some of the system’s data challenges, and we’re certainly concerned about issues with data quality – which is necessary for policymakers to make informed decisions,” H.D. Palmer, a spokesman for the state’s Department of Finance, said in an email. “That said, the underlying construct of the Student Centered Funding Formula significantly reduces the likelihood that the state’s CCC budget, or local district budgets, would vary dramatically from one fiscal year to the next.”

Part-time faculty could suffer

With fewer students enrolling in classes, some faculty members will inevitably be let go, said Goldman, acting executive director of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges.

“The part-timers who maybe have worked at a certain district for decades are going to start to lose out,” she added. “They got fewer people enrolling in classes and the first ones to go are going to be the part-time faculty.”

The association has “had a really hard time tracking the (enrollment) data,” Goldman said. Part of the problem is the state’s 73 local community college districts are on quarter systems and others have varying start times for semesters, she said. “They all report at different times.”

Board to be briefed

A memo prepared for the community college system’s board of governors ahead of Monday’s meeting provides the latest explanation of the problems the chancellor’s office is having collecting solid enrollment data.

“Examining students solely enrolled in noncredit courses,” the system observed a decline of about 153,000 students in 2020-21 compared to 2019-20, John Hetts, an executive overseeing data for the chancellor’s office, wrote in the memo.

The system’s data technology did not allow the colleges to report attendance by all students in noncredit courses, Hetts said. The result was “artificially inflating” the loss of those students. Paul Feist, a spokesman for the chancellor’s office, said in an email that solving the noncredit problem “continues to remain a priority, and efforts are underway to support districts being able to report to the Chancellor’s Office the headcount of noncredit students.”

Pamela Haynes, the president of the state board of governors blamed the system’s “outdated reporting definitions and data systems” for its inability to accurately count groups of students.  She also said the chancellor’s office needs funding to add to its 160-member staff.

What type of crazy do you have to be to believe that an oak, acorn, birch or other tree is really a tree that has a race?  This type is ignorance is what you would expect from someone that used her sex to get into politics—she was the mistress of Willie Brown.

“Vice President Kamala Harris asked NASA if it could use its satellites to track trees “by race” in various neighborhoods as part of “environmental justice” during a recent display on climate change, leading many to ridicule the vice president online and even giving rise to a “Black Trees Matter” hashtag.

Harris, who serves as chair of the National Space Council, visited Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, on Friday “to see vital climate science work.”

I she truly believe trees have a race, the Cabinet needs to use the 25^th Amendment to get her out of office—then she needs institutionalized therapy.  Some crazies see ghosts, she sees Hispanic trees.

‘Black Trees Matter’ — VP Kamala Harris Asks NASA if It Can Track Trees by Race for ‘Environmental Justice’

Joshua Klein, Breitbart,  11/7/21

Vice President Kamala Harris asked NASA if it could use its satellites to track trees “by race” in various neighborhoods as part of “environmental justice” during a recent display on climate change, leading many to ridicule the vice president online and even giving rise to a “Black Trees Matter” hashtag.

Harris, who serves as chair of the National Space Council, visited Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, on Friday “to see vital climate science work.”

As she met with scientists and engineers and received a firsthand look at how the climate is studied by the space program as well as how it provides data concerning planetary changes and their impacts, the vice president declared, “I truly believe space activity is climate action.”

In a clip originally shared by Deputy Director of Rapid Response at Republican National Committee (RNC) Jake Schneider, Harris is seen interrupting a presentation in order to share her “woke” inquiry.

“Can you measure trees — part of that data that you are referring to, [and it’s an issue of] EJ, environmental justice — that you can also track by race their averages in terms of the number of trees in the neighborhoods where people live?”

In response to the now viral clip, which has over one million views as of Sunday afternoon, many took to Twitter to mock Harris.

“This woman is a complete hack – and if this is not an act, she is also a moron…,” wrote retired senior intelligence operations officer Tony Shaffer. 

“I can’t get over the fact that ‘environmental justice’ and ‘tree equity’ are real phrases Democrats use,” wrote GOP strategist Matt Whitlock. “Reads like parody.”

“I thought this was a Babylon Bee headline, turns out it’s our totally serious Vice President,” wrote Republican congressional candidate Leon Benjamin. 

“Glad she has her priorities straight,” he added.

“This clip illustrates perfectly the worth of diversity,” wrote Darren Beattie, a former Trump speechwriter.

This clip illustrates perfectly the worth of diversity

What, after all, would we do without valuable insights and perspectives reflecting lived experience

This is why diversity is our greatest strength, and why the Globalist American Empire deserves to defeat those evil Chicoms https://t.co/lVxP8mXPWP

— Darren J. Beattie ἱ (@DarrenJBeattie) November 7, 2021

“For the confused, the CRT argument here is that urban centers have less trees and are warmer than less urban areas, which the left translates into privilege,” wrote conservative writer and commentator Chad Greene.

“White people have the ‘privilege’ of more trees, cooler temps and cleaner air,” he added. “Wala. Environmental Justice.”

“Too many White (Supremacist) Pines, not enough gender neutral Black Walnuts!” wrote a Twitter user, adding the creative hashtag: “#BlackTreesMatter.”

“Are we now headed towards #BlackTreesMatter?” asked another Twitter user.

“Officer Harris is just trying to figure out whether trees are racist or not,” wrote yet another.

“Yes, the world’s most inauthentic, unnatural politician Kamala Harris made news yesterday by pressing NASA on its ability to sort trees by race as part of an ‘environmental justice’ push,” another wrote. 

“So the [vice] president Kamala Harris with NASA yesterday, able to ask any question about our universe, she asks if they are able to ‘track trees’ by race as part of ‘environmental justice,’” wrote one Twitter user.

“She’s going to keep dividing, nothing will stop them from creating a new, segregated society,” yet another wrote.

This is all you need to know:

“So what’s the reason young men are falling behind? The rest of the story offers several possibilities including impact from the pandemic and a sense that men really aren’t sure what their career path should be. But part of the problem may also be that the idea of helping men, particularly white men, is off limits at most colleges and universities which are geared toward helping minority students. Men, especially white men, are seen as privileged and therefore the least in need of help, even if the numbers above suggest that’s not the case.

Current education is geared toward everyone, but straight, white, males—so why waste the time and money to learn you are scum, do not deserve a job and should pay reparations for living?  So, watch as white males become the innovators, entrepreneurs and successes—by NOT attending college.  Those that do attend will learn hate, bigotry, bullying and rioting—enough to get them a job filling taco shells.  Racism is alive and well in American colleges, sad.

WSJ: Men appear to be giving up on college

John Sexton, HotAir,   9/6/21    

There’s an interesting story in the Wall Street Journal today about the declining enrollment of men in 2 and 4-year colleges. This gender enrollment disparity is a trend that has been happening for a while now, but at this point the divergence between men and women is becoming pretty dramatic.

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline, the Journal analysis found.

This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues, said Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse.

The situation has become bad enough that some colleges are already offering more slots for boys in an attempt to bring the enrollment back into parity. The WSJ says this is “higher education’s dirty little secret,” i.e. schools are now practicing a kind of affirmative action for men.

There’s a chart included in the story which breaks down the admittance of men and women by both race and income. What the chart shows is that white men come in near the bottom at every income level.

It takes a while to really make sense of this chart. Each horizontal line represents a different income level. Each color represents a race. Colored dots are men and circles with white centers are women. So, again, the solid red dots are near the bottom in every case. Also, you’ll notice that Asian men and women outperform everyone else by a lot at every income level (the medium blue dots to the far right). In fact, the low income Asian men are doing about as well as men of other races in the top income category. Also, there is nearly no gap between Asian men and women. Both groups do extremely well getting into college. This chart is going to be bad news for people pushing the “model minority myth” nonsense. Clearly, Asians are doing something that other groups, especially whites, are not doing as well.

So what’s the reason young men are falling behind? The rest of the story offers several possibilities including impact from the pandemic and a sense that men really aren’t sure what their career path should be. But part of the problem may also be that the idea of helping men, particularly white men, is off limits at most colleges and universities which are geared toward helping minority students. Men, especially white men, are seen as privileged and therefore the least in need of help, even if the numbers above suggest that’s not the case.

All of this makes me worry about the future. Having CRT enter public classrooms and emphasize the idea of white supremacy and male privilege at a point where white males are already struggling with education seems like a perfect storm of bad ideas. Based on the data above, we don’t need to be telling boys that they need to check their privilege from the time they can first read and write, we need to be helping them do as well as girls. I wonder how many years it will take for teacher’s unions to figure this out.

Some California college dorms are segregated.  Some study halls, classes and tutorial programs are segregated in California.  None of this is done by Republicans—all the segregation is being done by Democrats.  Now a Georgia school is being segregated—by a black racist principal.

“Posey explained that Black students were put in two classes with two different teachers, while White students were put in six classes with six different teachers. 

She found out about the segregation when she asked Briscoe to place her child with a teacher who she thought would be a good fit, she recalled to the news outlet. 

“She said that’s not one of the Black classes, and I immediately said, ‘What does that mean?’ I was confused. I asked for more clarification. I was like, ‘We have those in the school?’ And she proceeded to say, ‘Yes. I have decided that I’m going to place all of the Black students in two classes,’” Posey recounted of her conversation with Briscoe. 

The principal reportedly told the mother that her child would be isolated if they were put in a White class. 

Now the Democrat Party is no longer hiding its historic role as the Racist American Political Party.

Dr. Martin Luther King died to oppose segregation—and th Democrats have brought it back.  Based on the facts, the State of Georgia needs to take over this racist school—and school district.  Racism has no place in America—even if the Democrats want it.

Black mother files complaint against Atlanta elementary school for racial segregation: disbelief’

Atlanta mother says a school principal implemented a plan to segregate students based on race

By Emma Colton | Fox News, 8/11/21   

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what’s clicking on Foxnews.com.

A mother in Atlanta filed a federal discrimination complaint against an elementary school, alleging the school segregated students based on race. 

“We’ve lost sleep like trying to figure out why would a person do this,” mother Kila Posey, who is Black, told WSB-TV. “First, it was just disbelief that I was having this conversation in 2020 with a person that looks just like me — a Black woman. It’s segregating classrooms. You cannot segregate classrooms. You can’t do it.”

“My community, had they known about this, would probably be extremely upset. Not just the Black parents but also White parents,” Posey added. 

Posey said that the practice was put in place last year at Mary Lin Elementary School by principal Sharyn Briscoe, who is also Black. 

Posey explained that Black students were put in two classes with two different teachers, while White students were put in six classes with six different teachers. 

She found out about the segregation when she asked Briscoe to place her child with a teacher who she thought would be a good fit, she recalled to the news outlet. 

“She said that’s not one of the Black classes, and I immediately said, ‘What does that mean?’ I was confused. I asked for more clarification. I was like, ‘We have those in the school?’ And she proceeded to say, ‘Yes. I have decided that I’m going to place all of the Black students in two classes,’” Posey recounted of her conversation with Briscoe. 

The principal reportedly told the mother that her child would be isolated if they were put in a White class. 

“I explained to her she shouldn’t be isolated or punished because I’m unwilling to go along with your illegal and unethical practice,” Posey said.

Posey also recorded a conversation with an assistant principal, who confirmed it was Briscoe’s decision to implement the segregated classes. 

“I just wish we had more Black kids, and then some of them are in a class because of the services that they need,” the administrator said on the recording.

The school now faces a discrimination complaint, which was filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. And Posey added that she wants the principal and her administration removed from their positions for the segregation. 

“Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 says that you cannot treat one group of people differently based upon race, and that is what is going on at Mary Lin,” Posey’s lawyer, Sharese Shields said.

The Atlanta Public Schools said it conducted and wrapped up an investigation into the concerns of segregation, adding that “appropriate actions” were taken in the matter. 

“Atlanta public schools does not condone the assigning of students to classrooms based on race. The district conducted a review of the allegations. Appropriate actions were taken to address the issue and the matter was closed.”

Atlanta Public Schools did not immediately respond to Fox News’s request for comment on what specific actions were taken. 

Briscoe also didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the matter.

It has a quality-of-life enforcement crisis.

Last weekend, the New York Times Magazine ran an article on homelessness in Los Angeles. The article framed the problem of street vagrancy as almost entirely a result of insufficient housing. “The state needs to create 1.2 million more homes for low-income residents and those experiencing homelessness—which would cost roughly $17.9 billion annually,” the author, Jaime Lowe, reports. California needs to be smarter about building houses and apartments, but the facts Lowe uncovers don’t point to new housing as a solution to street homelessness.

The article zeroes in on Venice Beach, part of the Venice area of Los Angeles. Venice Beach is a once-gritty area that’s now “gentrified.” Except: it wasn’t that gritty. Twenty-five years ago, Lowe reports, the going rate for a house was $300,000. In 1996, the median home price in the U.S. was $112,000. If Venice Beach was ever the itinerant artist’s paradise that nostalgists depict it as, that was a long time ago. Today, the same house in Venice Beach goes for $2 million—a sign that its residents ought to consider some well-planned construction so that theirs doesn’t become a stagnant community.

In any case, though, such new housing won’t fix the homeless crisis. Nowhere in her 6,000-word article does Lowe find an example of the archetypal homeless person of casual understanding: a down-on-his luck, working-class man or woman who had a house in Venice Beach—whether rented or owned—and lost it after getting fired, having a spouse die, or suffering a disability or illness. That’s not to say that such cases don’t exist, but they’re certainly not the norm for the hundreds of people who have pitched tents and cardboard boxes or built plywood shanties along the beach, boardwalk, and sidewalks.

The homeless individuals featured in the article are all long-term transients afflicted with substance addiction, mental illness, or both. One young man tells Lowe that he came to Venice Beach from Washington State last year, “hoping for a new life apart from his estranged wife and children.” He appears to have no disability preventing him from working; he paints artwork to sell. He’s less a romantic artist than (likely) a child-support deadbeat who left someone else with the burden of making a living for his offspring. An older man, 64, says he’s been homeless for three decades, after “his family banished him because of his alcoholism.” The star of the story is a 19-year-old woman who goes by the name of “Angel.” She was recently arrested for weapons possession and recently refused government shelter inland, preferring the beach.

The story characterizes efforts to build housing for such individuals as facing a “fierce NIMBY pushback,” but it’s no mystery why Venice residents would oppose such measures as a 140-unit shelter building along the area’s main boulevard. It would be one thing if local officials could promise that after the area accepted the building, no one would ever sleep, defecate, or urinate on public property again. But nowhere does the article acknowledge that 140 new units—or 500, 1,000, or 10,000—in a resort town of 40,000 housed residents would not solve the problem. A beachfront community is by definition isolated from large employers in diverse industries. There’s little mass transit. This is a place where people buy property to relax or retire, not to invest in factories, warehouses, white-collar office buildings, or large-scale retail stores. Venice Beach is thus not the best place for a person with a short or nonexistent employment history and limited education to find an entry-level job and start to move up.

Venice Beach, then, faces not a displaced-persons problem but a transient problem. Owing to its nice weather, well-meaning volunteers who give out food and clothing, and Los Angeles’s lax approach to encampments, addicts and other lost souls are drawn there from around the country.

What kind of market housing could Venice Beach build that would be affordable to a 19-year-old woman with no job? The Times article is striking in its lack of curiosity about Angel’s background. A 19-year-old was a minor child not long ago. Where did she come from? If she could not live with her parents or guardians because of severe abuse, didn’t that town, city, or state have social services that would have put her into foster care or young-adult supportive housing and subsidize her college education or vocational training? Does her hometown have the same supposed severe housing shortage as Venice Beach does?

It’s dishonest to blame NIMBYs for this crisis or to paint local residents who don’t want to be harassed by vagrant men as somehow privileged. If Los Angeles does build subsidized, below-market housing around Venice Beach, why should that housing not go to people who already have stable jobs in the area, or who are interested in finding one—with a small fraction reserved for people who, at the very least, agree to start weaning themselves from alcohol and drugs, to learn skills needed for employment, and to pass each part of a mandated multistep program?

Rather than attempt to spend tens of billions of dollars a year to house the nation’s transients, California would be better off using limited resources to attempt to connect and re-integrate people like Angel into their home communities until they have the resources to start a new life by themselves. But to embark on such a strategy, Los Angeles would need a stick to go with the carrot. That could go something like this: the city will put you into temporary shelter if you have no other place to go, and it will get you inpatient mental-health and addiction treatment if warranted, but it will not offer transients with no long-term ties to the community any long-term housing—and no, you can’t live in a tent on a beach.

Nicole Gelinas is a City Journal contributing editor, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street—and Washington.

This article was originally published by City Journal Online.

As a legislator, Rob Bonta co-sponsored a proposed ballot measure that would have given Californians another chance to discard the death penalty, a repeal they narrowly rejected in 2012 and 2016.

As California’s attorney general, Bonta still opposes capital punishment, and he believes the state is moving in the same direction.

“I think the death penalty is inhumane. It does not deter. Studies show it’s long had a disparate impact on defendants of color, especially when the victim is white,” Bonta said in an interview. Three weeks earlier, his former legislative colleagues had confirmed the Alameda Democrat’s nomination by Gov. Gavin Newsom to succeed Attorney General Xavier Becerra, now U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services.

Bonta said the death penalty is also both irreversible and “fallible,” citing the exoneration and release of numerous Death Row inmates nationwide — 185 since 1973, including five in California, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The nonprofit organization says it has also found “strong evidence” that at least 20 prisoners who have been executed since 1989, all in Southern states, were actually innocent. …

Click here to read the full article from the San Francisco Chronicle.