More than 2 million Californians were recently left without power after the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric — which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year — preemptively shut down transmission lines in fear that they might spark fires during periods of high autumn winds.
Consumers blame the state for not cleaning up dead trees and brush, along with the utility companies for not updating their ossified equipment. The power companies in turn fault the state for so over-regulating utilities that they had no resources to modernize their grids.
Californians know that having tens of thousands of homeless in their major cities is untenable. In some places, municipal sidewalks have become open sewers of garbage, used needles, rodents and infectious diseases. Yet no one dares question progressive orthodoxy by enforcing drug and vagrancy laws, moving the homeless out of cities to suburban or rural facilities, or increasing the number of mental hospitals.
Taxpayers in California, whose basket of sales, gasoline and income taxes is the highest in the nation, quietly seethe while immobile on antiquated freeways that are crowded, dangerous and under nonstop makeshift repair.
Gas prices of $4 to $5 a gallon — the result of high taxes, hyper-regulation and green mandates — add insult to the injury of stalled commuters. Gas tax increases ostensibly intended to fund freeway expansion and repair continue to be diverted to the state’s failing high-speed rail project.
Residents shrug that the state’s public schools are among weakest in the nation, often ranking in the bottom quadrant in standardized test scores. Elites publicly oppose charter schools but often put their own kids in private academies.
Californians know that to venture into a typical municipal emergency room is to descend into a modern Dante’s Inferno. Medical facilities are overcrowded. They can be as unpleasant as they are bankrupting to the vanishing middle class that must face exorbitant charges to bring in an injured or sick child.
No one would dare to connect the crumbling infrastructure, poor schools and failing public health care with the non-enforcement of immigration laws, which has led to a massive influx of undocumented immigrants from the poorest regions of the world, who often arrive without fluency in English or a high-school education.
Stores are occasionally hit by swarming looters. Such Wild West criminals know how to keep their thefts under $950, ensuring that such “misdemeanors” do not warrant police attention. California’s permissive laws have decriminalized thefts and break-ins. The result is that San Francisco now has the highest property crime rate per capita in the nation.
Has California become premodern?
Millions of fed-up middle-class taxpayers have fled the state. Their presence as a stabilizing influence is sorely missed. About one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients live in California. Millions of poor newcomers require enormously expensive state health, housing, education, legal and law-enforcement services.
California is now a one-party state. Democrats have supermajorities in both houses of the Legislature. Only seven of the state’s 53 congressional seats are held by Republicans. The result is that there is no credible check on a mostly coastal majority.
Huge global wealth in high-tech, finance, trade and academia poured into the coastal corridor, creating a new nobility with unprecedented riches. Unfortunately, the new aristocracy adopted mindsets antithetical to the general welfare of Californians living outside their coastal enclaves. The nobodies have struggled to buy high-priced gas, pay exorbitant power bills and deal with shoddy infrastructure — all of which resulted from the policies of the distant somebodies.
California’s three most powerful politicians — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Gov. Gavin Newsom — are all multimillionaires. Their lives, homes and privileges bear no resemblance to those of other Californians living with the consequences of their misguided policies and agendas.
Lay the blame on where it needs to be layed on this states issesponsible forest management and on too many idiotic enviromental regulations and on a idiot of a Govenor which prefers to listen to the idiot Tree Huggers instead of the experts
People who want CA to go solar and wind forget that those two also use transmission wires.
And those wires are why PG&E keeps turning off electricity to millions of their customers!
The turbines only make electricity when the wind blows but PG&E turns off the electricity when the wind blows!
Very bad outlook for CA’s future.
That would be a great place to test the 90% tax rate and a 2% “wealth tax”. There is probably plenty of wealth in California… it’s just in the wrong hands.
Here’s the deal; California is a trillion dollars in debt. The citizens are taxed to the max and those that can are leaving in droves. Yet the major problems they face are not even being touched. They’ve maxed out their budget and wasted it all. All Democrat, all the time.
Just observe and learn; this is exactly what Democrats will do to the entire nation. And they will trample any law to accomplish it.
and having the most stringent laws to protect the environment they ingnore trash and untreated sewage washing into the ocean washing up unto the beaches. They cant arrest or fine themselves now can they. Put that straw down and no body gets hurt.

What a bunch of pigs.
Enough to make a real Indian cry.
Actually, blame climate change. Western fire seasons are becoming longer, hotter, and drier, while there’s less snow accumulation at higher altitudes through the winter.
But like the man said, “Denial isn’t only a river in Egypt.”
Are democrats also somehow responsible for the increasing severity of storms during hurricane season?
@Greg: Sure, blame anything but the cause. That’ll make all the Democrats to blame feel better, but it won’t do a damn thing to help PEOPLE.
It’s not climate change because the climate hasn’t changed. All that’s changed is government competence in California.
@Deplorable Me: It would be nice for them to prove things with real data. Not fudged up shit data.
Be nice if they worried about real pollution and garbage. See #4
Shipping it to Asia is not a solution!
@Deplorable Me: Greg has no clue. One of the fires started because a branch fell on the power line. Did climate change cause the branch to fall or did the environmental activists who prevented good forest management cause the fire. Then, Clinton closed many of the roads in National Forests and grass lands. Now, there are no fire breaks and no access to stop the fires. Most every place gets dry during different seasons and in some years. That has always been the case. It is ignorant people like Greg who refuse to face reality!
Climate Change: How Do We Know?
If you look at the NASA site, they’ll tell you how they know. If you’re sufficiently open minded and reasonably intelligent, you’ll be able to process the information.
@Greg: Get off your soap box no one denies climate change. How will redistribution of wealth and other such nonsense help humans adapt to regular climate cycles?
Obviously cramming them all into cities isnt working. The policies of waste management ,really affordable housing, transportation, public safety are beyond the mental capabilities of Democrats.
Simply admitting that one of their policies suck and no more money should be placed into it is unthinkable.
They cant even run their own lives. I’ll be damned if they will run mine.
@kitt:
Cmon. That’s not how it works with the left that develops an agenda, they create the “science” to support the agenda and then accuse everyone that sees the fakery as “ignorant”. The only data that they acknowledge is the “data” that has been properly amended to fit the agenda.
@Greg: You people that pretend to believe in this farce in order to support the global socialist (and greed) agenda are the most closed minded on the planet. This is how we know it’s based on LIES.
Australia Bureau of Meteorology makes 50 years of hot days disappear
@Greg:
You only say what you’re told to say…believe what you’re told to believe…
Like a fundamentalist Christian from the 1980s…