The Evidence Is Clear: Masks Don’t Do Anything… – neither did the jab or social distancing. It was just controlling the population. The Germans did shit like that in the 30’s and everyone obeyed like sheep. They could have just taken vitamin D3 and ivermectin and be protected for a few cents.
Federal data now shows California fast food employment is down 16,000 jobs since the passage of the state’s $20-per-hour fast food minimum wage last year.
A fast food study from the Berkeley Research Group found California fast food prices increased 14.5% from September 2023 to October 2024, or double the national average.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ quarterly employment survey covers 95% of American jobs, and is considered the gold standard for jobs and wage data. Now its latest report shows California fast food jobs declined from 570,909 in September 2023 to 554,748 in September 2024.
“Some advocates for the fast food minimum wage have already branded the 25% increase a success,” wrote BRG, whose research team included the former head of the state-funded Legislative Analyst’s Office. “According to them, not only have fast food workers received higher pay because of the increase, but the number of jobs available to these workers has increased as well. However, these claims are not supported by reliable data.”
The BRG report notes jobs declined in December 2023, which in this century only occurred during the Great Recession in 2009 and during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and that employers have cut hours and benefits to offset wage increases.
According to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, that’s not happening, citing a UC Berkeley study.
Again, this is a shout out to Denny at Grouchy Old Cripple who no longer is with us, but was a fellow blogger and IBM’er with me. We never knew each other at IBM, but agreed that we’d worked with the same assholes at the same time.
Here we go.
A lot went on this week and there were certainly a lot of members of the press that deserved this. The inauguration boycotters certainly qualified.
The girl bishop who pontificated at Trump about illegals certainly deserved at least a consolation prize
There were too many coincidences and screw-ups in California, so the asshole of the week is:
Los Angeles was forced to slash funding for the fire department after Mayor Karen Bass awarded gilded contracts to city workers, a review of public records shows.
The trouble began early last year after Bass settled contract negotiations with public sector unions. In dozens of agreements, the city’s civilian employees pocketed 20 to 25 percent wage hikes over five years and other goodies that cost the city $4.5 billion over the life of the contracts, according to an analysis by the city’s administrative officer, the City Journal reported.
A series of unintended payouts stemming from judgments against the city in personal injury lawsuits brought Los Angeles to the brink.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom received a briefing about the area damaged by the Palisades wildfire, with others present in a parking lot.
This is the fish that California justified ruining the water supply for farmers and firefighters years ago.
The tiny Delta Smelt fish have not been seen in the wild in California in over a decade.
And yet, California Democrats flushed annual water flow into the ocean to save this little fish that they can’t even find in its natural habitat. Now several cities are burnt to the ground.
They sacrificed entire communities for a fish that doesn’t exist.
A 2021 report by Dan Bacher in the Sacramento News revealed that there have been NO DELTA SMELT seen in the wild since 2012. They’re extinct.
For the seventh September in a row, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife has caught zero Delta smelt during its Fall Midwater Trawl Survey of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
The last time Delta smelt – an indicator species for the broader ecological health estuary – were found in CDFW’s September survey was in 2015. Only 5 were caught by state biologists at the time.
After that, the only year that Delta smelt were caught during the entire four-month survey was in 2016, when a total of 8 smelt were reported.
The final results of Fish and Wildlife’s four-month survey of pelagic (open water) fish species, conducted from September through mid-December, won’t be available until around the start of next year. The current September 2022 data is available here on the annual state surveys webpage.
After years of fire and smoke in rural Northern California—evacuations, death and destruction, broken communities, lost homes—watching Los Angeles burn feels surreal but inevitable. This could have been avoided, but we knew it was coming.
For years, we have sounded the alarm to anyone who would listen. San Francisco and Los Angeles ignored us.
Now Los Angeles—one of the great cities on earth, a unique American gem—is in ashes.
For anyone who wants to understand how we got here, this is what happened.
California has not built a new major water reservoir since 1979.
The state’s last major reservoir project was completed in 1979, when the population was some 23 million. It’s been 50 years, there are now 39 million residents, and progress on the storied California Water Project has stopped.
In 2014, Californians voted overwhelmingly for Prop 1, funding a $7.5 billion bond to construct new water reservoirs and dams, with a deadline of January 1, 2022.
It’s now 2025, and no reservoirs have been built. Proposed projects remain mired in the bureaucratic morass of California politics.
There is no reason for California to experience water shortage. The natural climate is cyclical: years of low rainfall punctuated by years of extreme rain. Eleven months ago, at the start of 2024, we were enjoying several extra feet of snowpack in the Sierras and the most rain we’d had in 25 years. The reservoirs were overflowing.
Year after year, massive, swollen rivers in Northern California send water out to the Pacific Ocean, while government agencies scold citizens for watering their lawns.
The state is spending millions to REMOVE existing water infrastructure.
If failure to build new water projects for a growing state population weren’t bad enough, Gavin Newsom and his feckless administration is spending millions of taxpayer dollars to destroy existing water infrastructure in fire-prone Northern California.
The Klamath Dam was removed in 2023.
Scott Dam is next: a century-old dam system upon which some 600,000 people rely in agricultural communities stretching from Potter Valley to Bodega Bay.
The government wants to remove this dam, impoverishing the farm communities and rural residents who rely on it, to “improve salmon habitat.”
Photo credit USFS. Lake Pillsbury is a scenic reservoir created by Scott Dam, critical water infrastructure serving rural and ag communities and 600,000 users from Potter Valley to Bodega Bay. Gavin Newsom’s administration is set to remove this dam, which will run Lake Pillsbury dry.
Several lethal fires have hit this region in the past few years, including the Redwood Complex and Sonoma Complex fires in 2017, and the Mendocino Complex Fire in 2018. Removing their water is a cruel blow for a community still reeling from those disasters, leaving them defenseless when the next fire comes.
Water cuts to farmers and citizens over a 3-inch fish led to empty reservoirs.
Farms were run dry and pumps shut off to preserve the three-inch “Delta Smelt”
California is the leading agricultural state in the nation. But for years, politicians slashed water allotments and shut off ag pumps to farmers in an effort to save a finger-length, minnow-like fish called the Delta Smelt.
When President Trump took office, he said California should consider updating its water infrastructure so farmers could grow crops and cities didn’t have to burn to the ground over a minnow.
This enraged Democrat activists. Their righteous indignation fueled many think pieces about the Delta Smelt.
For all that spilled ink, the restoration efforts didn’t work. Outside hatcheries, the Delta Smelt are all but gone.
So are scores of farmers, their land run dry by politicians in Sacramento.
This approach is typical of the consistent preference displayed by California politicians for the perceived prosperity of any animal, species, or ecosystem over the welfare and survival of its citizens.
After years of anti-human water and land policy, neglecting critical infrastructure, when the fires started last night in Los Angeles, there was no water in the fire hydrants.
Removing grazing, control burns, and management left California an unnatural tinder box.
According to U.C. Berkeley rangeland science professor Lynn Huntsinger, cattle remove some 12 billion pounds of dry biomass from California’s grasslands and woodlands every year.
“Cattle are the largest fire prevention tool we have in the state,” she told me, “But people are largely unaware of it.”
Lynn Huntsinger, professor of rangeland ecology and management at UC Berkeley, calls cattle grazing California’s most valuable and important fire prevention tool.
Environmentalists blame cows for climate change. Beef cattle are responsible for less than 2% of all U.S. carbon emissions. Wildfire is responsible for between 15% and 30% of U.S. emissions—and that number appears to be getting worse.
Prescribed fires and forest management have also gone out of fashion. For centuries, Native tribes practiced control burning to manage the natural fire risk inherent to California’s ecosystem.
As relentless fires burn in Los Angeles, thousands of residents who fled their homes are just learning how poorly public officials prepared for such an event. Emergency response leaders following bad public policy have been too focused on sending firefighting equipment to Ukraine, keeping the homeless safe, protecting fish, and adopting green policies to focus on things like making sure there is enough water to feed fire hydrants and guaranteeing that the strongest, best-trained, most-skilled firefighters are leading operations.
Officials seem to believe that when fire forces you to flee your home, there is just one thing on your mind: the skin color and cultural experience of the firefighters who will bring you to safety. Will they be diverse enough to rescue you? Never mind if they are the best for the job, are they anything but straight white men?
That has been a major priority of the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD), which, in 2022, launched its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Bureau (DEI), purportedly “focused on ensuring a safe, diverse and inclusive workplace for all.”
In January 2022, then-Mayor Eric Garcetti checked multiple DEI boxes by appointing Kristin Crowley as fire chief, the first female, LGBT chief in Los Angeles. That year, according to LAFD data, “of the more than 6,500 applicants to LAFD, 70% were people of color and nearly 8% … were female,” which was “double the … percentage of female firefighters within the Department” at the time.
The LAFD Girls Camp is one avenue for recruitment for female firefighters, hosting girls between 14 and 18 to explore career opportunities in the department.
America’s dirtiest beach revealed: Beautiful coast is making dozens sick due to river pumping in raw sewage in what’s been branded a ‘portable toilet’
California is home to three of the most polluted beaches in the country, according to a new report.
The Surfrider Foundation tested thousands of water samples across the nation, with Imperial Beach in San Diego coming out as the worst.
As part of the group’s survey, they also found that 64 percent of the 567 sites tested had at least one sample with unsafe bacteria levels.
A quarter of the samples came from sites in California, with three beaches in The Golden State among the ten most polluted.
Every sample recovered from Imperial Beach turned up bacteria counts that exceeded the state’s health standard for recreational waters.
More than 100 billion gallons of untreated wastewater have flowed through Mexico ‘s Tijuana River and into the Pacific Ocean, eventually reaching the coastal town
When delta smelt were listed as a threatened species, the biggest cause of their population decline was identified as reduced freshwater flow into the estuary. This makes the water saltier, which leads to dehydration. This is similar to the reason humans shouldn’t drink saltwater when they’re thirsty. Because of this, a recovery plan was made that mandated increased freshwater flow for the smelt, which meant less water for agriculture.
They were willing to cause environmental damage to agriculture for a relatively unremarkable fish, all for political reasons.
Record Rain
The net is a water shortage. It was blamed on global warming, but that just shows the level of lowness they will go to in California for political gain.
Now, with the flooding that happened yesterday, there is an abundance of water, but since it’s regulated against the farmers, it will be diverted away and crops will likely suffer later in the year.
An intense, long-lasting atmospheric river is moving across California — bringing widespread power outages and the potential for mudslides and life-threatening flooding as it dumps heavy rain and snow. Follow our live coverage here. This is what’s happening:
• Rare high flood risk persists: A firehose of rain has parked over Southern California, including Los Angeles, worsening the high risk of flooding throughout Monday. Torrential rainfall and “locally catastrophic” flooding is possible in Orange County through Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service office in San Diego.
In the end, climate change will be blamed for what was government mismanagement and stupidity.
It’s just another step in the climate staircase that is built on government regulations. In fact, if they’d stop laundering money through yet another scare tactic to distract the population, there would be no water shortage since nature took care of it already.
Unfortunately, California is the canary in the coal mines of the US. This craziness needs to be stomped out and put to death before it fully infects the rest of the country.
California regulators on Tuesday cleared the way for widespread use of advanced filtration and treatment facilities designed to convert sewage waste into pure drinking water that can be pumped directly into systems feeding millions of household taps.
Proven technologies capable of recycling wastewater for human consumption, a concept once derided by critics as “toilet to tap,” have gained greater credence in recent years as water-conscious California faces worsening drought cycles from climate change.
More than a decade in the making, the regulations adopted by the State Water Resources Control Board represent a landmark in the quest to reclaim some of the hundreds of millions of gallons of waste discharge that flows out to sea unused each year, supporters say.
“Today heralds a new era of water reuse,” Patricia Sinicropi, executive director of the recycling trade group WateReuse California, said in a statement.
As I read about California trying to buy votes with reparations, it occurs to me that California can’t afford it nor were they in the slavery issue to begin with. It’s about being woke. No one mentions that the first slave owner in America was black, or that South America was by far a worse offender of slavery than the United States by millions of people. They let it go on longer and didn’t fight a civil war on behalf of stopping it.
It’s never mentioned that slavery still exists in North Africa today or that the people who sold the slaves were blacks to begin with.
A generation of Americans are being raised on half-truths and lies about the history of slavery in America.
They are given the impression that America was uniquely bad and that American slavery was uniquely bad. They learn nothing about slavery elsewhere. Among the many lies they are told are that “black slaves built America” and that America is systemically racist.
Since the only mortal enemy of the Left is truth, here are some truths about slavery.
America’s Slavery Compared to Slavery Elsewhere
If you are interested in morality and committed to truth, you do not ask, “Who had slaves?” You ask, “Who ended slavery?”
Who had slaves?
Every civilization throughout history had slaves: Asian societies, Africans, Native Americans, and other Indigenous peoples around the world, and the Muslim/Arab world, which may have had the most slaves of all.
Who ended slavery?
There was only one thing unique about slavery in the West: It raised the issue of the morality of slavery, ferociously debated it, and finally abolished it there, before it was abolished in any other civilization.
If you care about moral truth rather than, for example, promoting America-hatred, you must recognize—and you must teach—that America was one of the first slave-holding societies to abolish slavery. This even includes Africa.
Cornell professor Sandra Greene, a black scholar of African history, notes, “Slavery in the United States ended in 1865, but in West Africa it was not legally ended until 1875, and then it stretched on unofficially until almost World War I.”
The numbers of slaves.
According to the authoritative SlaveVoyages.org, the total number of black slaves imported from Africa into America was 305,326. The number of black slaves other countries imported from Africa into the rest of the New World—i.e., into the Caribbean and South America—was 12,521,337.
In other words, other countries imported 41 times the number of black slaves into the Western Hemisphere than the United States did, including the years before American independence).
Yet, the American Left never mentions this important moral point—because the Left-controlled education system suppresses facts it finds inconvenient, and the Left is not interested in morality or truth, but in vilifying America.
And then there is Arab/Muslim enslavement of blacks. Professor Paul Lovejoy, in his “Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa” (Cambridge University Press, 2012), reveals that from the beginning of Islam in the seventh century through the year 1600, the estimated number of Africans enslaved by Muslims was about 7 million. After 1600, it was about a million per year.
Do American students ever learn about the Arab/Muslim slave trade? How many know, for example, that a great percentage of the African male slaves were castrated so that they could not have families?
‘Black Slaves Built America’
This is another lie of the Left.
Those who make this argument point to the lucrative cotton manufacturing and trade in the 19th century—the industry in which black slaves were primarily used in the American South.
But University of Illinois professor of economics Deirdre McCloskey answered this:
Growing cotton, unlike sugar or rice, never required slavery. By 1870, freedmen and whites produced as much cotton as the South produced in the slave time of 1860. Cotton was not a slave crop in India or in southwest China, where it was grown in bulk … That slaves produced cotton does not imply that they were essential or causal in the production …
The United States and the United Kingdom and the rest would have become just as rich without the 250 years of unrequited toil. They have remained rich, observe, even after the peculiar institution was abolished, because their riches did not depend on its sinfulness.
But one need not know anything about cotton to understand how false “Black slaves built America” is. All you need is common sense.
First, even if slavery accounted for much of the wealth of the South, the Civil War that brought slavery to an end in the United States wiped out nearly all of that wealth and cost the Union billions (in today’s dollars).
Second, if slavery built the American economy, the most robust economy in world history, why didn’t Brazil become an economic superpower? Brazil imported 4 million black slaves, about 12 times as many as America. Why did the slave-owning American South lag so far behind the North economically?
Why did England, which, though it played a major role in the transatlantic slave trade until the beginning of the 19th century, had almost no slaves, become the most advanced economy of the 19th century?
“Black slaves built America” is left-wing propaganda to vilify America and to discredit capitalism.
“America is systemically racist.”
This is the Great Left Lie.
Four million black people have emigrated to the United States since the 1960s—and tens of millions more would if they could. Are they all fools? Why would anyone move to a country that is systemically bigoted against them? Did any Jews emigrate to Germany in the 1930s?
Blacks have emigrated to the United States because they know what Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the black woman who fled her homeland of Somalia and who now writes and lectures in America, knows:
What the media do not tell you is that America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans, or what have you.
Blacks emigrating to America know what Algerian writer Kamel Daoud, writing in Le Monde and Le Point, knows:
It is forbidden to say that the West is also the place to which we flee when we want to escape the injustice of our country of origin, dictatorship, war, hunger, or simply boredom. It is fashionable to say that the West is guilty of everything.
As regards American slavery and everything else, always remember this: Truth is a liberal value, and truth is a conservative value. It is not a left-wing value.
California has loved to stifle any form of capitalism with overbearing environmental laws has just done this:
A “catastrophic failure” killed 21,000 fish at a UC Davis research facility, the university announced Thursday.
We’ve had to listen to decades of them protecting water against farmers using it so a worthless fish (compared to what they killed) could stand in the way of irrigation.
There is enough water for the state if they would quit mismanaging it.
I could go on about them killing raptors (especially eagles) in favor of turbines, that don’t help their rolling blackouts either.
They don’t really care about the environment as stated. They want to restrict resources to control the population. They have the most private jets flying around the world (to global warming conferences) so don’t give us the argument that this is for the climate. They only care to control money, the goal of climate change anyway.
This is after they protect pet fish also:
The center has made headlines in recent years for assisting with pet fish injured in California wildfires. In 2017, 16 koi fish were rushed to CABA for care after being impacted by the Wine Country wildfires; they recovered and were returned to their grateful owner.
Now I could tie this to the 20 plus food plants that have burned creating a food shortage, something the Soviets did to starve their population, but then that would be conspiratorial. People hate it when I am right on this so I won’t say anything.
There is a pattern here by the left. Using climate issues for control. It’s there for you to see.
One of the areas hit hard by the drought is the state’s farms. This is especially troubling as we enter an era of food scarcity concerns. Commenting on the poor state handling of the drought and its impact on California agriculture, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., blasted for mishandling the problem during his time in office.
“I think Gavin Newsom has failed when it comes to water,” McCarthy, who represents a district in California’s Central Valley, said.
…[F]armers’ yields and, consequently, their businesses, are suffering, said Sam Parnagian, a third generation California Central Valley farmer. Over one-third of the country’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts are grown in California, according to the state Department of Food and Agriculture.
“You’ll go see tens of thousands of acres that used to have nuts, almonds, pistachios, and they’re just bare,” “It’s just all dust.”
This is a grave matter, especially for those who love pasta and french fries. The poor planning and negligence in accommodating agricultural needs mean a looming tomato shortage.
California leads the world in production of processing tomatoes — the variety that gets canned and used in commercial kitchens to make some of the most popular foods. The problem is the worst drought in 1,200 years is forcing farmers to grapple with a water crisis that’s undermining the crop, threatening to further push up prices from salsa to spaghetti sauce.
Here is a little Friday humor, inspired by all the recent going’s on in the news about housing prices, immigration, pot, high taxes, overburdensome government regulation and the usual stuff you read about.
1. Your coworker has 8 body piercings and none are visible.
2. You make over $300,000 and still can’t afford a house.
3. You take a bus and are shocked at two people carrying on a conversation in English.
4. Your child’s 3rd-grade teacher has purple hair, a nose ring, and is named Flower.
5. You can’t remember . . . is pot illegal?
6. You’ve been to a baby shower that has two mothers and a sperm donor.
7. You have a very strong opinion about where your coffee beans are grown, and you can taste the difference between Sumatran and Ethiopian.
8. You can’t remember . . . . is pot illegal?
9. A really great parking space can totally move you to tears.
10. Gas costs $1.00 per gallon more than anywhere else in the U.S.
11. Unlike back home, the guy at 8:30 am at Starbucks wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses who looks like George Clooney really IS George Clooney.
12. Your car insurance costs as much as your house payment.
13. You can’t remember . . . .is pot illegal?
14. It’s barely sprinkling rain and there’s a report on every news station: “STORM WATCH.”
15. You pass an elementary school playground and the children are all busy with their cell phones.
16. Or it’s barely sprinkling rain outside, so you leave for work an hour early to avoid all the weather-related accidents.
17. HEY!!!! Is pot illegal????
18. Both you AND your dog have therapists, psychics, personal trainers and cosmetic surgeons.
19 The Terminator was your governor.
20. If you drive illegally, they take your driver’s license. If you’re here illegally, they want to give you one.
Delusions of Adequacy 