The Social Collapse of California

Michael Shellenberger describes the social collapse of California in his recent article at City Journal, "America’s Shadow Self: Ruinous policies have transformed California from a symbol of progress to a cautionary tale for the nation."

[California] has become America’s shadow self. True, it is more prosperous than ever, surpassing Germany last year to become the world’s fourth-largest economy. But Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, and smaller cities are today overrun by homeless encampments, which European researchers more accurately describe as “open drug scenes.” Crime has become so rampant that many have simply stopped reporting it, with nearly half of San Franciscans telling pollsters that they were a victim of theft in the last five years and a shocking one-quarter saying that they had been assaulted or threatened with assault.

These pathologies are just the most visible manifestations of a deeper rot. Less than half of California’s public school students are proficient in reading, and just one-third are proficient in math (with a stunning 9 percent of African-Americans and 12 percent of Latinos in L.A. public schools proficient in eighth-grade math). Education achievement declined precipitously in California in 2021, as the state kept children studying at home well after kids in other states had returned to the classroom. Californians pay the most income tax, gasoline tax, and sales tax in the United States, yet suffer from electricity blackouts and abysmal public services. Residential electricity prices grew three times faster in 2021 than they did in the rest of the United States. And the state government, dependent on income taxes, faces a projected $23 billion budget deficit that will only grow if the nation’s economy enters a recession. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given these trends, California’s population stopped expanding in 2014 and has slightly declined since, resulting in the loss of a congressional seat after the 2020 Census.

Homelessness and disorder loom as the biggest problems. Most of the assaults and threats that San Franciscans reported came from the city’s large number of homeless and mentally ill addicts, who are allowed to sleep, defecate, and use drugs in public. Los Angeles is in even worse shape, as the city is so much larger than San Francisco and the local government is, against stereotype, even more progressive. Skid Row can no longer contain its massive population of street homeless; the city’s government has all but legalized open-air drug dealing and use. Over the last decade, homelessness increased 43 percent in California, even as it fell 7 percent nationally.

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Crickets . . . The Sound We Will Hear from Corporate Media Instead of Apologies

The Washington Post reported a story today without mentioning that until today, the paper has been engaging in reckless journalism for many months prior. Here's today's headline:

"‘Havana syndrome’ not caused by energy weapon or foreign adversary, intelligence review finds: After a years-long assessment, five U.S. intelligence agencies conclude it is ‘very unlikely’ an enemy wielding a secret weapon was behind the mysterious ailment.

To be a modern corporate journalist, you don't need any evidence to publish a story. All you need is to know someone in the federal government who whispers something to you that furthers your employer's favorite narrative. Just look at these clowns go at it, convincing each other that the sounds made by crickets were caused by a Russian high tech weapon that was frying the brains of U.S personnel. WaPo published DOZENS of these xenophobic articles. How much of our Russia-hate these days is because of journalistic malpractice?

Glenn Greenwald adds (and I agree that this is an easy bet):

This is yet another hoax where any ethical and actual news organization would go on air and say: "for years we told you something that turned out to be false. Here's why we did it. We apologize and retract our stories."

That they don't tells you all you need to know about them.

I just checked (March 1, 2023 at 11pm CT): The corporate media refusing to mention that the story was a hoax include: NYT, Washington Post, NPR, MSNBC and CNN.

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Censorship Czar Anthony Fauci Bans Discussion of the Lab Leak Hypothesis

Glenn Greenwald connects all the dots regarding the lab leak hypothesis.

Fauci knew lab leak was possible, but he and his $-conflicted pals denied this and summoned the power of the federal government to bar others from discussing lab leak in the "news" media and social media for many months. In addition to this being public health corruption, this is a free-speech disaster. This is your country's leadership keeping you safe by protecting you from ideas they consider harmful, even from true ideas they consider harmful.

You can watch Glenn's show every week-night on Rumble, the free-speech alternative to YouTube.

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Sharyl Attkisson Discusses the Official COVID Narrative

Sharyl Attkisson is a five-time Emmy Award winner and recipient of the Edward R. Murrow award for Investigative Reporting. She's the author of two New York Times bestsellers including “The Smear How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What you Think and How you Vote.” For 30 years Attkisson was a correspondent and anchor at CBS News, PBS, CNN and local news and she is now the host of a weekly show, “Full measure,” which focuses on investigative and accountability reporting. Excerpt from her discussion with Steve Kirsch.

Steve Kirsh: How are people being misled and how can we tell when people are telling you the truth?

Sharyl Attkisson : I think some important trends started in the past 15 to 20 years and have become more visible as time has gone on. Now you have to dig deeper. When you hear a prevalent narrative on the news, if you understand how the news has been co opted--like virtually every source of information that we use--you have to almost think two layers beyond what they're trying to tell you.

Number one, you have to assume that when everybody's on the same narrative, typically, if they're using the same language, interviewing the same experts all on board saying everybody knows something, then that's your cue that there's probably a really important piece of the puzzle that's being hidden by some important interest that would suffer if we knew the truth. So as you hear these narratives, your first thought should be "Who wants me to believe this and why?" And I know that ordinary people, including me, when I'm just leading my normal life, we don't have time to deeply research, every question that arises. We are used to counting on the news to help us do that. But I'm telling you today, you kind of have to rely on yourself, because there are very few sources you can go to where you can trust the information as being unfettered and dual-sided, presenting all viewpoints.

A lot of it is just purely strategic for the past five or six years, dishonest, not just even out of context, but completely false. But you'll never know if you're trusting your traditional source that we used to look to for such things.

This has never been truer than when we look at the COVID pandemic and the vaccines. And I certainly didn't know at the front end of the pandemic, what the truth was any more than anybody else did about how effective the vaccines might be, how bad the pandemic would be. But as time went on, this began to take on hallmarks of every other scandal that I've covered, including many non-medical scandals, where there are important interests, trying very hard to shape and censor information, trying to control the landscape where we get all of our information online, on the news, any source that we have. And I think it resulted in a lot of harm, number one, but number two, maybe irreparable damage to the credibility of the institutions that we rely on political institutions, medical institutions, law enforcement, whatever you're looking at, Department of Justice, media. People, by and large as a good chunk of the population, don't believe--nor should they--take at face value, what comes out of their mouths in terms of advice, and their fact checks, and so on.

Steve Kirsch: So what is your trusted sources that you rely on today?

[More . . . ]

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