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.

A mask is as useless as Joe Biden.  The CDC has proven that belief.  In Kansas     , the State ended the mask mandate.  24 counties continued the mandate—81 counties did not.  The CDC used these counties to prove that wearing a mask was healthier.  Instead they found that wearing a mask or not wearing a mask made no difference in the virus.

“Many counties did opt-out, but the larger metropolitan areas did not. Overall, twenty-four counties implemented a mask mandate, and eighty-one opted out.

The CDC paper argues that the mandates were a success. In particular, the paper claims that “the increasing trend in COVID-19 incidence reversed” in the Kansas counties with mask mandates.

We noticed, however, that this conclusion is incorrect. As our paper shows, the trend did not reverse in those counties. Moreover, the growth in reported case incidence (and mortality) was, overall, virtually indistinguishable in counties with and without mask mandates.

It turns out that the CDC paper made an incorrect assertion because the authors used data that was later updated. As statistical studies go, this sort of mistake is surely forgivable.

However, the CDC’s refusal to publicly acknowledge this incorrect assertion—we corresponded with the main author, as well as several editors and an Associate Director for Policy at the CDC—is inexcusable. There simply is no room in legitimate scientific study for refusal to admit mistakes.”

Note that they misrepresented the facts and when caught—they refused to publically admit it—masks are as useful as Joe Biden.  Trust the CDC—not with my life depending on them—they lie and cheat.  And get caught doing both.

The CDC and Mask Mandates: Unmasking the Truth

Norbert J. Michel, Ph.D,, Doug Badger , 5/1/21  Heritage Foundation,

The growth in reported case incidence (and mortality) was, overall, virtually indistinguishable in counties with and without mask mandates.

While many facts were unknown when the disease first took hold in the United States, a great deal of the evidence was quite clear by May.

As the public health emergency abates, Congress, the media, and the American public should heavily scrutinize the agency’s procedures and practices.

Copied

How reliable are government declarations that mask mandates prevent the spread of the coronavirus?

Our recent experience with researchers from the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention has left us less than confident that the public should trust the CDC’s published research, much less any pronouncements based on that research.

Our problem involves a paper that the CDC published in November. The paper studies mask mandates in Kansas because, in July, Gov. Laura Kelly issued an optional mask mandate. Counties could decide whether to enforce the mandate or opt-out.

Many counties did opt-out, but the larger metropolitan areas did not. Overall, twenty-four counties implemented a mask mandate, and eighty-one opted out.

The CDC paper argues that the mandates were a success. In particular, the paper claims that “the increasing trend in COVID-19 incidence reversed” in the Kansas counties with mask mandates.

We noticed, however, that this conclusion is incorrect. As our paper shows, the trend did not reverse in those counties. Moreover, the growth in reported case incidence (and mortality) was, overall, virtually indistinguishable in counties with and without mask mandates.

It turns out that the CDC paper made an incorrect assertion because the authors used data that was later updated. As statistical studies go, this sort of mistake is surely forgivable.

However, the CDC’s refusal to publicly acknowledge this incorrect assertion—we corresponded with the main author, as well as several editors and an Associate Director for Policy at the CDC—is inexcusable. There simply is no room in legitimate scientific study for refusal to admit mistakes.

Our experience, sadly, is not unique. Even in those rare instances where government public health officials yield to scientific evidence and revise their recommendations, they seldom admit error.

On March 19, for example, the CDC abruptly changed its guidance for classrooms, saying that desks need only be separated by three feet, rather than six. The agency’s new “science brief” on the subject does not cite a single classroom-based study that found desks should be kept six feet apart, but lists numerous studies supporting the one-meter (3.3 feet) standard long favored by the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The agency brief did not cite a preprint study posted earlier in March that found, based on a review of numerous studies of classroom transmission, “no significant difference in student or staff case rates between schools with ≥3 versus ≥6 feet of distancing with a large sample size.”

The CDC changed its policy, but without acknowledging the damage its earlier recommendation inflicted on children, much less admitting error.

Unfortunately, throughout the pandemic, scientific facts have meant little. While many facts were unknown when the disease first took hold in the United States, a great deal of the evidence was quite clear by May.

Many facts are even clearer now.

For instance, most people who contract the coronavirus do recover, with the elderly and the sick, by far, the most vulnerable. Even ignoring the fact that many asymptomatic cases have gone unreported, the survival rate for anyone between ages 40 and 49— without regard to pre-existing health problems—is in the neighborhood of 99.7 percent. It’s even higher for younger people.

We also now know that lockdowns didn’t deliver on their promised health benefits. States that adhered to stringent lockdown strategies, like California and New York, report similar numbers of cases on a population-adjusted basis as those that imposed fewer restrictions, like Florida and Texas. Indeed, California’s overall rate of what epidemiologists call “excess mortality”—the total number of deaths in a given period of time compared to historic trend—is well above the national average and considerably higher than Florida’s, particularly among young adults.

The coronavirus retrospective must include a thorough evaluation of why, even after these facts were evident, so many government officials stuck to indiscriminate lockdown and mitigation policies. This kind of assessment will not be possible, though, without honest, legitimate scientific study.

A recent op-ed written by Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya does not bode well for such scientific rigor. It details how five prominent scientists “faced the modern-day inquisition” over their coronavirus-related work, and it is difficult to judge which of these cases is the most disheartening.

It is rather sad, for example, that the Journal of the American Medical Association published an opinion piece attacking Dr. Scott Atlas without engaging in his ideas.

Still, it’s difficult to judge if that case is worse than the one of epidemiologist Carl Heneghan, the head of the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine. UK officials attacked Heneghan after he publicized serious errors in official UK coronavirus statistics, and an article in the Guardian implied that Heneghan is part of “the anti-science lobby” after he pointed out that the only published randomized study on mask-wearing suggests that masks may not be effective in protecting against a coronavirus infection.

Government officials and the American people depend on legitimate scientific study, and they have shown extraordinary deference to the CDC throughout the past year. This deference rests on the presumption that the agency’s recommendations to shutter businesses, close schools, restrict public worship, and enforce mask mandates have a solid basis in science.

That confidence, in many instances, appears to have been misplaced. As the public health emergency abates, Congress, the media, and the American public should heavily scrutinize the agency’s procedures and practices.

This piece originally appeared in The National Interest https://nationalinterest.org/blog/coronavirus/cdc-and-mask-mandates-unmasking-truth-183755

On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to take on a case about how the city of Boise, Idaho, treats its homeless citizens, leaving in place a ruling that says it’s unconstitutional to punish people for sleeping outdoors if the city lacks alternatives.

The justices turned away Martin v. Boise, a case where a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled that Boise’s practice of citing homeless people for camping outdoors violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments since these people did not have alternative shelter options.

This doesn’t mean that people can just choose to sleep on sidewalks and in parks if they want to, but rather that a city cannot punish homeless people for camping in public space if the city has not provided enough shelter for them. It’s a ruling about shelters and housing, not an acknowledgment of some sort of right to live on public land.

The city of Boise has since changed its ordinances to state that they won’t be enforced against homeless people when shelters are full. But the Supreme Court’s refusal to take the case leaves big cities with large homeless populations along the West Coast (where the Ninth Circuit rules) with a clear message that they can’t use the law to try to run their homeless population out of town—the only way out is to build.

That’s a problem in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco, where overly meddlesome regulations and demands from the state and the cities make it very, very hard (if not impossible) for private developers to build any housing at all, let alone affordable housing for the poor. Expensive labor requirements drive up costs, and unions threaten environmental lawsuits against developers who don’t contract with them. There’s also the issue of homeowners who will lobby their local council members and city planners to block new housing or businesses (or turn to California’s overly broad environmental law to sue them, if lobbying fails).

It’s particularly telling that the Los Angeles Times describes this outcome as a “setback” for city officials in Los Angeles and elsewhere for getting rid of homeless encampments. Even though the city has committed more than $1 billion to build housing for its massive homeless population, resistance from within neighborhoods themselves have made it nearly impossible, and even where it is possible, regulatory and bureaucratic hurdles have made it absurdly expensive, approaching $700,000 a unit. …

Click here to read the full article from Reason.com

Real words no longer have the meanings we have been taught in school or are listed in a dictionary.  The “woke” crowd have changed the meaning of words, to make the words less threatening.  Or then making new definitions for the words—so that educated people do not know what is really being said.  For instance:

“Biodiversity. Biodiversity Excludes Humans. Biodiversity seeks a large, unchanging, and static number of biological species except for one species, human beings. Biodiversity seeks to minimize human presence, habitat, mobility, health and existence. Advocates of biodiversity ban killing mosquitoes, expand species populations, limit family sizes, and control human populations–abortion, infanticide, gendercide.

Manmade biodiversity, horticulture, animal breeding, hybrid plants, Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), e.g. productive agriculture feeding billions of human beings, is bad.”

You read that right—the killing of mosquito’s is bad based on biodiversity—but killing babies is OK.  Bet you never knew Democrats are protective of mosquito s and hateful toward babies.

Glossary: The Green Regime’s Eco-Speak.

By Dr. Roger B. Canfield, 12/17.19 

excerpt from Death by Ecology; Killing California, America Next  (https://www.amazon.com/author/rogercanfield 

)

The Green Regime has its own language, a politically correct distortion of language and reality to fit its ideological war on western civilization and capitalism. It is a language of ignorance and deceit, just like Orwellian Doublespeak and Newspeak. In Doublespeak, language is deliberately euphemistic, ambiguous, or obscure. Newspeak is doublespeak carrying political propaganda. In Orwell’s 1984, the Ministry of Truth promoted lies. Orwell’s ruling one party state declared War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. Dissenting ideas were thought crimes.

Similarly, the language of the Green Regime strays far from logic, facts and reality. Ordinary words take on new meanings. Criticisms of the ideology rise to the level of thought crimes, religious heresy, disaster denials, or even hate speech (Environmental justice).

Below an alphabetical sample of eco-speak.

***

Access. Freedom is Mobility Denied.Access to high-density, high-rise (Soviet style) housing and public transit is virtuous. Actual access to cars, parking, single-family homes, commuting and designated “public” areas is prohibited, restricted or limited. Environmentally correct access abhors excessive mobility, freedom, and automobiles. Promoters of “access” routinely deny humans access to the safe spaces and habitat of other species in public forests, parks, monuments, wildernesses and scenic areas.

Big. Big is Evil. In environmental usage Big is a euphemism for evil as in Big Business, particularly Big Oil, Big Chemical, Big Pharma, Big Pesticide, Big Lumber, Big Diaper, Big Beverage, etc. Big is synonymous with corporate, capitalist, e.g. corporate agriculture. Big is the code name for the most evil thing, capitalism.  

Biodiversity. Biodiversity Excludes Humans. Biodiversity seeks a large, unchanging, and static number of biological species except for one species, human beings. Biodiversity seeks to minimize human presence, habitat, mobility, health and existence. Advocates of biodiversity ban killing mosquitoes, expand species populations, limit family sizes, and control human populations–abortion, infanticide, gendercide.

Manmade biodiversity, horticulture, animal breeding, hybrid plants, Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), e.g. productive agriculture feeding billions of human beings, is bad.   

Capitalism. Freedom is Slavery. Capitalism is a stale and stagnant thing poisoning air, water, land and species for profit at the expense of the common good. Key elements of capitalism, individual freedom, private property and profits ought to be limited, confiscated, fined and taxed. 

Eco-speak turns upside down the wisdom of Frederick Douglass, to whom individual freedom was the answer to the real stagnant thing, slavery.  

CARB. All There is to Fear is Air Itself. California Air Resources Board is an Air Force, militantly exercising extreme prejudice against industrialization, manufacturing, irrigation, and small business. Carbon, methane, ozone, and just plain dust make virtually all air dirty and subject to CARB regulation.

Air is no longer free. It must be paid for in taxes, fees, property and regulations. 

CED. Tyranny is Democracy. Campaign for Economic Democracy is socialism by another name advanced by reducing capitalist plunder on the planet. Eco-tyranny will replace capitalist imperialism.

Clean. Green is Clean. Clean is no detectable level of any suspect mineral, chemical or substance in parts per trillion. Clean is cleaner than nature’s own river or spring water. Sewage water is cleaner than municipal drinking water. Summarily convicting corporations for poisoning clean air and clean water generates fear, hysteria and a straight path to political power of the accuser.

Climate. Weather is Bad. Manmade climate change causes undesirable dynamic changes in temperature, sunshine, wind, precipitation. See also the old school term extreme weather. 

Conservation. Less is More.Scarcity is Good. In California, conservation turned abundance resources into scarcity by prohibiting, reducing or rationing water, timber, minerals, e.g.  California’s 55 gallon a day ration of residential water use. Growing food wastes water. Conservation justifies stopping the building of roads, bridges, dams aqueducts, and suburban housing.

Diversion. Diversion is Theft. Diversion is the illegitimate excess human use of water that might otherwise rightfully passing through the gills of fish or the intestines of other wildlife. Humans divert water from suckerfish, salmon and Delta smelt.

It is considered an outrage that in some years, 90 percent of the Tuolumne River is diverted [to San Francisco], leaving only 10 percent for salmon and the Bay-Delta.

Equity. Some Are More Equal Than Others. Equity is dividing water equally, half to 40 million human beings, half to a few protected fish species. Trillions of gallons of “scarce” precious water equivalent to billions of dollars, are flushed past human uses to save handfuls of Delta Smelt. It would be far cheaper to construct fish hatcheries for all DNA varieties of salmon and smelt.

ESA. TheEndangered Species Act(s) of California and the USA are absolutist laws demanding the preservation of hundreds of species and their habitat from humans accused (with scant science) of threatening or endangering them. Environmental researchers typically down play the impacts of such forces of nature as weather and predators upon species and their habitats.  By law, the economic impact of the ESA upon human well-being or property rights may not be used in species preservation decisions.   

Facilitator. Censored Speech is Free Speech. A facilitator is a well-paid manipulator of stakeholder discussions toward a preconceived consensus.

Gas Tax. Grand Theft Auto. A highway user fee collected from those promised to benefit from spending the collected revenue on roads and bridges. Yet over some decades, California, has spent 80% of gas taxes, tolls, sales taxes on gasoline on “public” transit, bike paths, pedestrian crossings, curb cuts all benefiting very few at the expense of the many.  

Green House Gases (GHG). Deadly Vapors.Gases allegedly destroy the ozone layer subjecting human beings to sunburns or skin cancer (over a lifetime). The State of California has “determined” the guilty “greenhouse gases” are Carbon dioxide (CO2), Methane (CH4), Nitrous oxide (N2O), Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), Perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6).

Regulators have left no suspects, from manufacturers to farmers, bakers, and hair salons, free from conviction by accusation. 

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). Food is Unsafe. Man’s domestication of wheat, corn. rice, potatoes, fruits, vegetables and cattle, has modified them genetically. The war on GMOs is actually a war on Big Food and Big Chemical. To sow discord, the Russians have widely disseminated anti-GMO propaganda in the USA.

Green. Red is Green. Humpty Dumpty said, “When I use a word ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” What’s now called green was once openly authoritarian socialist, communist party red, and Nazi red and black. The Old Left red remains under green camouflage.

Irrespective of facts, the green regime arbitrarily defines what is green and what is not. Hence, the low emissions of natural gas compared to coal or oil and the actual zero emissions of nuclear power and of hydroelectric power are arbitrarily rejected as green or clean by the Green Regime. Facts do not matter. 

Habitat. Private Property is Theft. Air, land and sea is set aside for species to insure their protection from human beings. Designated species, given habitat, receive it from human housing, farming, lumbering, mining, and recreation. Habitat for humanity is condemned and limited

Housing. Do Not build It and They Will Go Away. Human housing is an unfortunate human desecration of soil, land and wildlife habitat. Suburban housing also violates the most enlightened aesthetic and enlightened sensibilities– e.g. ticky-tacky suburban housing tracts. Further, no growth, low growth and slow growth, and restrictive zoning have spectacularly succeeded in reducing housing supplies, making housing unaffordable for most Californians and stimulated mass evacuations.

Management. The Memo is Everything. The administration of processes and people contemplating problems, solutions and alternatives, but doing little about them, e.g. flood management displaces the actual building of flood control projects. No dams, levees, weirs, or flood plains, protecting human life and property, are built. Ideally, human habitat is prohibited or people are relocated from low ground where water flows. Human civilization has long been located close to water on flat ground and swamps were drained and filled in accommodate human habitation.

Forest management does little to manage the forest except to lecture and blame others for how little is done. 

Mitigation. Theft is Justice.Those presumed guilty of damaging theenvironment are required to mitigation, make amends, for their alleged violations of the environment. Mitigation is usually takes the form of taking cash or property in the form of extortions of high fines, fees and taxes and the taking of private property often without due process or compensation. 

Natural. Nature Good, Chemicals Bad. Environmentalists have a static, fixed view of nature whether it climate, species, foods and human bodies. Human modifications of climate, species and foods are dangerous.

“Natural” foods are free of chemicals and processing. Yet natural foods are not nutritionally different from other foods. Of course, all food preparation is some form of processing—washing, slicing, dicing, spicing, culturing, fermenting, cooking etc. Because foods are mostly safe and nutritious, the Food and Drug Administration sees no need for health standards for foods with tiny traces of chemicals.

Organic. Safe Food is Chemical Free. All things, animal, vegetable and mineral are chemical. There is no such thing as inorganic food. Lifeless dirt in inedible. All food is organic. Food designated organic is largely a consumer fraud detrimental not only to one’s pocketbook, but also to the health and nutrition of people terrified of safe food. Heavy regulations born, like Rosemary’s Baby, out of the anti-pesticide hysteria campaigns insured fresh fruits and vegetables became too expensive for poor people to buy.

Planning. The Plan is Final. Environmental planning is typicallyconsumed inthe writing of massive environmental reports, process memos, and the building of bureaucracies to achieve some ideal of things seldom possible or lethargically done, e.g. super fund cleanups, supposedly presenting great dangers to human health, take decades to cleanup, but provided long careers for a few bureaucrats.   

Progress. Progress is Moving Backwards.Progress demands halting industrialization, manufacturing, mining and farming and limiting growth, automobiles, suburban housing, water, and electricity. Going nowhere really slow is progress, a bullet train from Bakersfield to Merced.

Public Transportation. Neither Public Nor Transit. The public writ large avoids it and it transports close to no one.   

“Pure Water.” The Pure Water program recycles toilet water, both to replace water from Carmel River to save species and as an alternative to desalination polluting the salty Pacific Ocean. 

School Bond. Grand Theft Schooling. Money, collected and promised to build or repair student classrooms for schools with declining enrollments, is used instead to pay and office bureaucrats and to fund bankrupted teacher retirement systems. California has the best-paid teachers and administrators and the worst schools dedicated to environmental and progressive indoctrination.

Science. Science is Religious Orthodoxy. Science is whatever research governments, NGOs and foundations decide to fund. The 99% science occurs where the money goes. The Green regime deems, declares, denier and capitalist scientific research is just heresy. 

Smart. Stupid is Smart. Smart on crime means releasing all criminals or redefining down, decriminalizing, murder, rape, assaults and theft. Similarly, smart environmentalism opposes housing, the automobile, dams, aqueducts, roads, bridges. The smart environmentalist deplores all the advances of human civilization from agriculture to logging, trade, money, mining, industrialization and manufacturing.

Stakeholder. Crony Consensus. A stakeholder is a person or an organization selectively invited to participate in amicable rule making and in administrative law decisions. Those who might object, ordinary citizens or their elected representatives, are not informed of or not invited to help decide. Tight agendas and long meetings discourage and exhaust those who show up uninvited.

Sustainable. Sustainable is the Unattainable. To sustain a thing is to keep it static, the same. Neither Nature nor economics follow the doctrine of sustainability. Environmentalists dismiss dynamic natural forces such as the sun, earthquakes, and floods.  The dynamics of economic growth and technological innovations are often condemned.

The purest environmentalism is a utopian end state of no species extinctions and the absence of bad weather. The sustainability of species does not include the well-being of human species. The human species is only tolerated living and working at subsistence levels as low- income baristas, maids, chauffeurs, cooks. Such creatures are privileged to serve a leisure class usually given access to nature off limits to most others.

Sustainability was originally a compromise concept allowing “good development” of third world countries, while the rest of the world wound down growth, industrialization, and population.   

Takings. We Shall Steal is the first environmental commandment:. Environmentalists are very concerned with the taking of the lives and habitats of protected species. Such takings of species are ruthlessly prosecuted through the taking of private property with minimal due process under the 14^th Amendment and without just compensation under the Fifth Amendment. Radical losses of the value of private property are routine.

Transportation. Going Nowhere Slow with High Costs and Low Benefits. “Public” transit is moving proportionately small numbers of persons short distances by all manner of trains, buses and bicycles, but not automobiles.

The best transportation for the environment is the most primitive for humans–hiking, biking, walking, and busing. California Republican leader Ross Johnson once said he was willing to spend billions on roads and bridges, but not a nickel on “transportation.”

The principal exception is billions spent on a bullet train, if ever built, going very, very fast from nowhere to nowhere, Bakersfield to Modesto.

Visionary. Fantasies are Visionary. The description the California Coastal Commission gave to San Diego’s no parking plan was “visionary,” a delusional fantasy. San Diego is over budgets for bikeways.

Vehicles Miles Traveled. VTM. Have Car Cannot Travel. The ideal is zero vehicle miles traveled. Dense housing, public transit, bike paths and pedestrian walkways replace car miles traveled.

Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). Evil Vapors Are Everywhere, particularly in gas stations, body shops, hair salons and bakeries. VOCsare gases, smells, scents, often formaldehyde, emitted in paints, resins and coatings. Exposure is irritating to the senses and ought to be avoided.

Yet enviros have stimulated medieval fears of unseen things, vapors, as imaginary causes of multiple diseases usually by mere statistical association and over hum,an lifetimes during which other things can happen including nothing at all. 

Water Bond. Grand Theft Water. A promise to build new water storage, with only 12% of bond funds borrowed actually used to store water during wet years and to move water from the wet north to the dry south of California.   

Weather. Old school term used to describe changes in temperature, precipitation, wind speeds etc replaced by “climate” usually modified by cooling, warming or changing. Overlooking sun spot cycles, magnetic fields, volcanos, earthquakes and ocean currents, climate alarmists explain naturally occurring extremes in weather as entirely the result of manmade changes in climate.

Zero Emission Vehicles. ZEV. The Future of Mobility is Immobility. Many are led to believe electric cars are run by “clean” electricity produced by the sun and wind. In fact, electricity generated from natural gas, coal, oil, nuclear and hydroelectric power plants charge most car batteries. Generating electricity from burning fuels produces emissions. There is no such thing as a “zero” emission vehicle, until ancient sailing skills are returned.

Not doing a voter registration drive since March, 2013 is having its effect on the Republican Party and its candidates.  It can be starkly seen in the Orange County 37^th District.  In just three years, the District gained 1% Democrats and lost 4% Republican.  What could it have been if the GOP had been diligently working in that time?  Why 2020 is possibly the last time the GOP is relevant in California?  The conscious decision NOT to register voters.

Scott Lay, in the NOONER

“October 24, 2016: 30.95% Democratic, 39.42% Republican, 25.12% no party preference

October 1, 2019: 31.96% Democratic, 35.27% Republican, and 27.87% no party preference.”

While this article is about one district, last week I noted the same problem in several congressional, state senate and assembly districts due to the lack of voter registration.  We are paying the price of bad policy—and continue to do so, since we still are not doing a serious voter registration drive led by the CRP.

“BATTLE STATION” IN THE OC: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee yesterday opened a “battle station” in Irvine, reports Brooke Skaggs in the OC Register. While the DCCC is working to defend the four seats the party flipped in 2018, the additional organizing likely will be a boost to the party’s efforts to flip Senate District 37, where John M.W. Moorlach will be seeking re-election.

Registration in the district has shifted significantly since 2016.

• October 24, 2016: 30.95% Democratic, 39.42% Republican, 25.12% no party preference
• October 1, 2019: 31.96% Democratic, 35.27% Republican, and 27.87% no party preference.

Democrats challenging Moorlach are Costa Mesa mayor Katrina Foley and UC Irvine law professor Dave Min. Min placed in third in 2018 for CA45.

Gavin Newsom won in the district 50.2-49.8% and Katie Porter (D) defeated Mimi Walters in the largely overlapping CA45 by a 52.1-47.9% vote. SD37 has the beach cities in it, which also now have a Democrat in Congress and the State Assembly with Harley Rouda and Cottie Petrie-Norris, respectively.