California

The land of intolerance, hypocrisy and progressivism... but I repeat myself.

I'm a native Californian, but it makes me sad to say that. This state is the most constantly bad, and least tolerant of the states I've lived in or visited. It's kind of a "how not to" on how to govern, mind your own business, or help those less fortunate. Cali usually ranks dead last on Quality of Life metrics according to U.S. News and world report. I'm not sure about that -- if you're rich, it's pretty nice. But if you're struggling and have a family, it's harsh. Their progressivism has made it one of the hardest states to get ahead in.

Basics

Having lived all over the nation, the Bay Area is the least tolerant place I've lived.

Tolerance being how you treat people you disagree with -- so the way they treat cigarette smokers (but not marajuana), the military, fast food restaurants, those that disagree with them on any topic by calling everyone racist, sexist, homophobes, that's how much tolerance they have. The collectivist credo: demand conformity, bitch when you don't get it, henpeck anyone who disagrees, then blame the other side for not being tolerant enough of your ideas (if they complain), while being completely intolerance to theirs. Cuba, Venezuela, the Bay Area? The differences are just in the degree.

Examples of Intolerance

• Unlicensed Popcorn - If it wasn't for California Government, who would protect you from unsanctioned popcorn? Seriously, they harassed a local hardware store for offering free popcorn for 25 years. That's what California spends their tax dollars on.
• Hillary was a rape facilitator, who attacked victims of sexual assault, was the most corrupt Candidate in my lifetime, got caught colluding with the Russians, and the Media, to rig an election -- had her campaign paying people to assault the other candidates supporters, got off a major crime during an election (for gross incompetence: was too stupid to be held accountable for a crime that would have gotten any military person court-martialed), and was a divisive shrew, but they'll ignore the mirror, and continually jab the 30-40% that didn't vote for her, then laugh about it? That's what Bay Area tolerance looks like: hypocrisy and unprovoked attacks, then snowflakes melting when people protest. Even George Wallace supporters had enough class to know to shut about it a year after the election.

NOTE: I didn't vote for either candidate, and I don't think Trump was the perfect candidate either. But his supporters didn't post that poll, and then gloat about their bigoted hypocrisy. So the point is that if you're in glass houses, you should probably put down the rocks.

• Travel Bans - In protest of Trump's Travel Ban, California enacted their own. (They also did it for not baking a gay wedding cake, not being trans-bathroom friendly, or a dozen other similar things). Their travel bans are like Virtue-Signaling Tourette's. Look, I'm pro-Gay marriage, have no transphobia, but I'm also pro States-rights (even to do stupid things I don't agree with). So California banning Travel to states that don't allow friendly enough Trans Bathroom policies, after the ink is barely dry on their newly invented civil right, and while still allowing Travel to countries in the middle east that put gays to death, is just too dumb for morally consistent to fathom. What does a travel ban do that is constructive in any way? So should Texas ban travel to California because of their unconstitutional persecution of gun owners, their racist position on affirmative action in college admittance, or their violation of federal immigration laws? How does this help anything? Remember that in San Francisco, oral sex is still illegal, but North Carolina or Texas bathroom laws are where they draw the line? Progressives are so busy minding everyone else's business that they fail to mind their own.

Byran Adams: - to double-down in the dingleberry logic, Bryan Adams sided with California and said someone not baking a wedding cake for you is NOT denying your civil rights, “I cannot in good conscience perform in a state where certain people are being denied their civil rights due to their sexual orientation”.

• California Coastal Commission - The CCC is what happens when community organizers run development planning: they "To protect, conserve, restore, and enhance the environment of the California coastline" by obstructing development and improvement of one of our countries great resources, saving it from humanity and the usefulness it might have to individuals or our country. Good for the locals who don't want to share. Bad for everyone who isn't already there. It's what tolerance looks like in California.

• California Tax Priority - California doesn't have a highway shortfall -- from 1984-2012, the capital spending for roads and bridges rose nearly three times the inflation rate. What happens is that to little of the money spent is spent on the right thing or in the right way. About 20% of all monies from the highway trust fund were diverted to finance pet projects that have nothing to do with road maintenance (mass transit, bike paths, high speed rail, and so on), which are used by less than 5% of the population. So they raise gas taxes to make up for the fact that they can't manage their money well, and gullible voters buy in. Things like that are why California is such an expensive state to live in.

• Guns - A few coastal Californians are ignorant of guns, and thus hate them. They will use any technique to harass legal gun owners, and violate the second amendment, lose in court, then imagine up new (and impossible or expensive to comply with) laws to harass the gun owners. In the name of tolerance, and carrying the false flag of "reasonable" gun laws. That's called bigotry BTW. Some things they think are reasonable include:
  • They invented a "roster" of approved guns, to charge gun makers fees (to get on and stay on), and to submit three copies of each variant of every model, add special parts/modifications to be compliant, and waste time and overhead. To the absurd point that changing the color of the gun has to be a separate submission.
  • The results of the roster were many guns (newer, better and safer) couldn't be easily gotten, unless you were law enforcement, or the property was given to you by your parent/child, and some other exceptions. Which means Californians can get off-roster guns, from cops as gun runners and the like, but they cost a >40% premium.
  • Microstamping - since some guns were still compliant with the roster, California added a new impossible to follow requirement that you had to add tiny (easily defeat-able) serial numbers on the firing pins, to stamp every bullet casing. Even revolvers (which don't eject shells). The technology to do this doesn't exist. But the California Supreme Court ruled, "the inability to comply with the law is no excuse to repeal it". Seriously. That's California in a hypo-allergenic nutshell.
  • The result? No pistols has been added to the roster since 2013, and these kinds of legislative gymnastics are not considered to be hampering the rights of gun owners. (According to California Supreme Court). If you tried to put 1/10th those restrictions on illegal immigrants voting or getting taxpayer subsidies (welfare), and California would scream bloody murder.
  • They tried to outlaw lead ammo, to drive up costs.
  • They say you can't have gun shops, or own/carry a gun, within 1500' or within sight of a school.
  • They re-label everything as an assault weapon. My Baretta 92f pistol -- a standard, ordinary pistol used by the police and civilians the world over -- is labeled as an assault weapon in California, as is any gun that holds more than 9 rounds.
  • You can't transport a weapon legally, if your car has fold-down seats, since that means the gun is accessible from the drivers compartment.
  • If you have the magazine loaded in the glovebox, and the gun locked in the trunk, it's considered a loaded gun, because the magazine is a piece of the gun, and it has bullets in it.
  • California Gunpocolypse - In 2016, California passed many gun-grabbers dream laws: phased in tyranny over the next couple years. If you want to know why gun advocates have a problem with "reasonable" gun laws, you have to look no further than California, and their legislators versions of "reasonable". Not one of these new laws will help in shooting or mass shootings in any way, or gun safety, they only show raw, naked contempt for gun owners and the second amendment, in ways that will hurt the innocent, waste millions of dollars in legal fights, and eventually lose. But that doesn't slow them down from passing them. And that's why the NRA exists, and informed gun owners have contempt for what sounds reasonable to the uninformed.

• Straw Bans - rampant homeless, outrageous costs of everything, California focused on what matters: banning plastic straws that are responsible for virtually 0% of all oceanic pollution. Virtue signaling is more important than freedom or tolerance. Oh, and plastic cocktail sticks.
• Stem Cells - 2001 medical ethicists had looked at fetal stem cell research (from fetus's). They decided that using already harvested fetal strains (60 of them) was not furthering harm, but harvesting future embryos was more ethically questionable. They also predicted that this kind of research was going to run into limits, and there would be better ways to harvest or create stem cells in the near future, so having/mining new abortions for medical material would be unneeded. George Bush passed those guidelines on, and was the first President to allow the fed to fund fetal stem cell research, as long as they lived within the ethical constraints of the strains we already had. The left went nuts, ignored the science, made this into a wedge issue (as all things around abortion and early human lives). Since they saw no problem with harvesting humans for their cellular material, California passed prop 71, to force taxpayers to subsidize the killing and harvesting of babies for research, whether individuals agreed to or not. Despite making taxpayers pay billions, a few years later, we found better ways to get stem cells that not only didn't have the moral issues, but were cheaper and better, and most breakthru's in stem cell research have come from outside California's abortion harvesting efforts. If Californians had memories and ethics, they'd feel shame and learn from their mistakes.
• Sanctuary City - a sanctuary city is the idea that if you're an illegal alien and you commit many felonies (some violent), the state will not inform the Federal Government that you're in custody, and will release them into the public to avoid them getting rounded up by ICE. Then they passed an illegal law to force all the local officers in California to comply, which lead to Sanctuary State Backlash and a big lawsuit, that they'll eventually lose. But the taxpayers lose on both sides, for having to pay to fight at the city level, and pay to defend something indefensible at the state level.
• Seatbelt Laws - these are not about safety, these are about telling other people what to do. If you doubt it, then bike lanes or motorcycles get far more people killed than cars (with or without seatbelts). But math/logic are beyond virtue signaling pawns, if not the people controlling them.

Examples of Incompetence

Being incompetent is bad. Being incompetent and sanctimonious about it, is worse. So I don't mind some of their mistakes (some drive me nuts), but combine it with lecturing the world on how they are better, while they're actually worse? And that's a lot of bullshit for a single mouthful.

• Wildfires - California decided to stop logging in the name of environmentalism. At the time, they were warned that not culling forests, would lead to more and bigger wildfires. They told common sense to fuck off, and now that they have those exact consequences, instead of owning their mistake, they blame Global Warming. If warming is the new normal, then why do they spend 10x as much on electric car subsidies as clearing dead trees? Again, it's one thing to be stupid, it's another thing to do it with a megaphone.
• Sanctuary State Backlash - Californians (who supported this), lost their right to ever complain about state overreach again. California arrogantly tried to proclaim that federal immigration law, doesn't apply to them -- and anyone in the state that complies with the federal law, will be victimized by the government of the state.

• California Water Crisis - Understanding California's fake water drought. It had nothing to do with rain, and everything to do with the failure of government. California captures 1% of the water, then since 2007 flushes 46% of that into the ocean for "environmental purposes" (a baitfish the delta smelt), 43% goes to farming, 11% goes to urban areas. Whenever there's a problem they raise the cost of water and punish the 11%: because that's where the money is.

• California Notary - My wife spent like $500 (and a few days in class) getting her notary, only to be blocked by the County Recorder, for no good reason, because that's what Bureaucrats do in California.

• San Francisco: Parking Signs - In typical California (Bay Area) fashion, if there's a right way and wrong way to do something, they'll inevitably figure out a new and even more wrong way to do something. Take parking signs (next to the Train Station) for examples of how they want to kill people, and do things in the least intelligent way possible.

• GDPR - Europe hates tech companies and tolerance. So the EU passed a poorly written law that tries to protect consumer privacy in all the wrong ways, by draconian punishments on a hard deadline, called GDPR. Since it was implemented by Europe, big tech companies were all complying with it, in both the U.S. and abroad: single standard. So now that it was completely not-needed, California passed an equally poorly written variant for just California, to irritate everyone. This could have been implemented well, but that's not how they did it.
• Illegal to hunt whales from a moving car - So it is OK from a parked car? And I don't know about you, but I haven't seen many whales from a car -- whales live in the Ocean, cars drive on land! This is what the California tolerance looks like.
• It is a crime (punishable by $500 fine and 6 months in prison) to set off a Nuclear device within city limits. I feel much better knowing that.

Conclusion

Some people claim that California is "leading the nation". On some issues they try -- but sometimes I don't want to follow.

Others claim that California is more "Liberal". I find it ironic that the nation finds California "liberal", when about some things California the biggest bunch of politically-correct, intollerant, goose stepping brown shirts I've ever met. Liberal means tolerant towards those you disagree with, and no state is less tolerant of others views than California. Of course, not all laws in California are bad -- and niether is all of California. Californians are tollerant of a lot of things. But I think that when people think of California as the left-coast, or as Liberal, they might want to think about what that means, because I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean what they think it does.

More Links

• http://www.investors.com/politics/columnists/victor-davis-hanson-will-california-ever-thrive-again/
• http://riderrants.blogspot.com/2012/11/ca-vs-other-49-states-revised-11812.html
• Memes:California