Who killed the Golden State?

Ten million Californians have fled in the last generation. When my family lived there in 1944-45, the Oakies and Arkies were flooding the place--it was the land of opportunity and new beginnings. Now their grandchildren are leaving.

If you believe charging higher taxes is the answer to poverty, educational system failure, violence, bankrupt pension funds, then California should be a lesson for you. Who killed the golden goose and golden state?

The hallmark of all liberal thought--self righteousness.

". . .one of the landmarks of the new California mentality is denial and self-righteousness that assume it is illiberal to notice that a quarter of the nation’s homeless population sleeps on California streets, or that violent crime is 20 percent higher in California than the national median, or that San Francisco ranks No. 1 in per capita property crime rates of all the nation’s largest cities."

Coastal California is a lot like feudal Europe--only richer.

"So there is a separate state of Coastal California, a manor of prosperity. And it is probably the richest urban area in the world, or rather in the history of civilization — drawing on its geostrategic location, long coastline, weather, climate, blue-chip universities, and high-tech industries. Residents have the disposable income and leisure to live the life of aristocrats — and do so if gauged by their lifestyle choices, travel, hired servants, and appurtenances."

Victor Davis Hanson assesses the sad state. https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/california-coastal-elites-poor-immigrants-fleeing-middle-class/

Seth ponders what makes the elites

At Seth's Blog I read:

“In more and more societies, though (including my country and probably yours [and I'm including virtually the entire planet here, except perhaps North Korea] ), I'd argue that there's a different dividing line. This is the line between people who are actively engaged in new ideas, actively seeking out change, actively engaging--and people who accept what's given and slog along. It starts in school, of course, and then the difference accelerates as we get older. Some people make the effort to encounter new challenges or to grapple with things they disagree with. They seek out new people and new opportunities and relish the discomfort that comes from being challenged to grow (and challenging others to do the same).” Seth Godin (marketing guru).

In this country, in my opinion, the libertarians and conservatives are the ones doing the challenging and growing. The leftists, socialists, progressives, Marxists, etc. are lemmings, doing the same old same old that led to the enslavement and often murder of millions in the 20th century. By discouraging investment in new ideas, whether energy, education or money, they hope to retain power and squash individualism. Do they want to help the poor? Sure--until he gets to that 4th or 5th quintile and votes Republican. Then they demonize him. They haven’t had a new idea in over 100 years--it’s always, let the government do that. They don’t know how to harness the thousands of new ideas out there because it is so threatening to their political views.

Is WaPo reporter complicit in blaming U.S.?

So it was the fault of President Carter and all those nasty capitalists of the 1970s that these coddled, wealthy, ungrateful people were spies for Communist Cuba?

"What Walter Kendall Myers kept hidden, according to documents unsealed in court Friday, was a deep and long-standing anger toward his country, an anger that allegedly made him willing to spy for Cuba for three decades.

"I have become so bitter these past few months. Watching the evening news is a radicalizing experience," he wrote in his diary in 1978, referring to what he described as greedy U.S. oil companies, inadequate health care and "the utter complacency of the oppressed" in America. On a trip to Cuba, federal law enforcement officials said in legal filings, Myers found a new inspiration: the communist revolution.

Myers, 72, and his wife, Gwendolyn, 71, pleaded not guilty Friday to charges of conspiracy, being agents of a foreign government and wire fraud. Their arrest left friends and former colleagues slack-jawed, unable to square the man depicted in the indictment with the witty intellectual with a prep-school background they knew. Washington Post in a much too sympathetic story for my tastes by Mary Beth Sheridan

Don't you wonder about wealthy people, children of privilege and elitist educations (like our first couple) deciding that everyone should be poor like the Cubans? What kind of guilt does that?

The author of this piece apparently was really stunned 4 years ago when through her "embedded" experience with the military she discovered such shocking things about our soldiers--they were decent, patriotic, and non brainwashed. Imagine.

"First of all, she said she was "overwhelmed by the military," but she did learn by being embedded that members of our armed forces were not "blood-thirsty maniacs." Yes, she really did say that.

In fact, she said, they were "really decent people." And even "sweet." Of course, after being shot at they were eager to shoot back — a military attitude that seemed to surprise her.

She also reported that when she asked soldiers why were they in Iraq, every single one told her, "to help the Iraqi people." Again she was surprised that the military could create such a unity of purpose even though, she said, she didn't see any "brainwashing" going on. She also noted that many soldiers had no opinion about the war. They had gone where they were ordered to go, like all good soldiers. Such an attitude seemed to dazzle her as well.

She didn't have anything much to say about "reporters as citizens," but clearly she appeared to be one citizen who had very little familiarity with, or understanding of, or even quite possibly respect for the military before her tour of duty. In a way, it is kind of sad that only after some first-hand experience did she learn what most American citizens believe: that American soldiers are "decent people." And that it is those soldiers, not our journalists, after all, who protect our freedom of the press." Reporters as citizens

Does Obama include himself in the draft proposal?

"But it’s also important that a president speaks to military service as an obligation not just of some, but of many. You know, I traveled, obviously, a lot over the last 19 months. And if you go to small towns, throughout the Midwest or the Southwest or the South, every town has tons of young people who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s not always the case in other parts of the country, in more urban centers. And I think it’s important for the president to say, this is an important obligation. If we are going into war, then all of us go, not just some."
Link

It's bad enough that the military has been forced to be a laboratory test tube for gender equality. Apparently he forgets that these young people have chosen to enlist, since we have an all volunteer, outstanding military. Young people in metropolitan areas have the same opportunity. And has he ever really looked at the data? Is he aware that rural schools have higher graduation rates than the city schools of Detroit or Cleveland or Columbus, and our military requires people of higher achievement? There are probably 25 year olds in the military who have more "leadership/executive" experience than he does. Does he know that the young people in the military are better educated and wealthier than a comparable group of young people in the civilian population? Or is he just again showing his elitist, liberal, smug opinion of people who choose to serve in the military, combined with his "clinging to guns and religion" bias toward fly-over country Americans.

. . . each year shows advancement, not decline, in measurable qualities of new enlistees. For example, it is commonly claimed that the military relies on recruits from poorer neighborhoods because the wealthy will not risk death in war. Our review of Pen­tagon enlistee data shows that the only group that is lowering its participation in the military is the poor. The percentage of recruits from the poorest American neighborhoods (with one-fifth of the U.S. population) declined from 18 percent in 1999 to 14.6 percent in 2003, 14.1 percent in 2004, and 13.7 percent in 2005.

. . . in the most recent edition of Population Representation in the Military Services, the Department of Defense reported that the mean reading level of 2004 recruits is a full grade level higher than that of the comparable youth population.[8] Fewer than 2 percent of wartime recruits have no high school creden­tials. Table 2 shows the breakdown for the educational attainment of the war­time recruit cohorts. The national high school graduation rate taken from the Census 2004 ACS is 79.8 percent." Link "Who are the recruits?"