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Spent six months in California during 1970 at Ft. Ord before shipping out to Nam.  Really enjoyed the place,.  It was inexpensive, even for a PFC, I could afford trips to San Francisco, plus much of the entertainment -- saw the musical 1776, the movie Patton and the ballet Swan Lake  on a long weekend before I shipped out.  Even went to the Top of the Mark and had a couple of martinis like the WWII movies.  Even the hippies on Haight/Ashbury were entertaining, usually spaced out.Now, the place is extremely expensive with extreme divisions between groups.  The progressives killed the golden goose and got only goose shait. 

A good article on the present condition of the state and how it got that way.  I've made a couple of comments highlighted in red.

"The state is sinking, and its wealthy class is full of hypocrites. There was more of the same-old, same-old California news recently. Some 62 percent of state roads have been rated poor or mediocre. There were more predications of huge cost overruns and yearly losses on high-speed rail — before the first mile of track has been laid. One-third of Bay Area residents were polled as hoping to leave the area soon.  

Such pessimism is daily fare, and for good reason. The basket of California state taxes — sales, income, and gasoline — rates among the highest in the U.S. Yet California roads and K-12 education rank near the bottom. 

After years of drought, California has not built a single new reservoir. Instead, scarce fresh aqueduct water is still being diverted to sea. (Thank the enviro freaks for this.) Thousands of rural central-California homes, in Dust Bowl fashion, have been abandoned because of a sinking aquifer and dry wells. 

One in three American welfare recipients resides in California. Almost a quarter of the state population lives below or near the poverty line. Yet the state’s gas and electricity prices are among the nation’s highest.  

One in four state residents was not born in the U.S. Current state-funded pension programs are not sustainable. One in three American welfare recipients resides in California. Almost a quarter of the state population lives below or near the poverty line. California depends on a tiny elite class for about half of its income-tax revenue. Yet many of these wealthy taxpayers are fleeing the 40-million-person state, angry over paying 12 percent of their income for lousy public services.  

Public-health costs have soared as one-third of California residents admitted to state hospitals for any causes suffer from diabetes, a sometimes-lethal disease often predicated on poor diet, lack of exercise, and excessive weight. Nearly half of all traffic accidents in the Los Angeles area are classified as hit-and-run collisions. Grass-roots voter pushbacks are seen as pointless. Progressive state and federal courts have overturned a multitude of reform measures of the last 20 years that had passed with ample majorities.  

In impoverished central-California towns such as Mendota, where thousands of acres were idled due to water cutoffs, once-busy farmworkers live in shacks. But even in opulent San Francisco, the sidewalks full of homeless people do not look much different. 

What caused the California paradise to squander its rich natural inheritance? Excessive state regulations and expanding government, massive illegal immigration from impoverished nations, and the rise of unimaginable wealth in the tech industry and coastal retirement communities created two antithetical Californias.  

One is an elite, out-of-touch caste along the fashionable Pacific Ocean corridor that runs the state and has the money to escape the real-life consequences of its own unworkable agendas. The other is a huge underclass in central, rural, and foothill California that cannot flee to the coast and suffers the bulk of the fallout from Byzantine state regulations, poor schools, and the failure to assimilate recent immigrants from some of the poorest areas in the world. The result is Connecticut and Alabama(I object, Mississippi should be the comparison) combined in one state. A house in Menlo Park may sell for more than $1,000 a square foot. In Madera, three hours away, the cost is about one-tenth of that. In response, state government practices escapism, haggling over transgender-restroom and locker-room issues and the aquatic environment of a three-inch baitfish rather than dealing with a sinking state.

 

Blue-ribbon committees for years have offered bipartisan plans to simplify and reduce the state tax code, prune burdensome regulations, reform schools, encourage assimilation and unity of culture, and offer incentives to build reasonably priced housing. Instead, hypocrisy abounds in the two Californias. Elites need to go back and restudy the state’s can-do confidence of the 1950s and 1960s to rediscover good state government. If Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg wants to continue lecturing Californians about their xenophobia, he at least should stop turning his estates into sanctuaries with walls and security patrols. And if faculty economists at the University of California at Berkeley keep hectoring the state about fixing income inequality, they might first acknowledge that the state pays them more than $300,000 per year — putting them among the top 2 percent of the university’s salaried employees. Immigrants to a diverse state where there is no ethnic majority should welcome assimilation into a culture and a political matrix that is usually the direct opposite of what they fled from. More unity and integration would help. So why not encourage liberal Google to move some of its operations inland to needy Fresno, or lobby the wealthy Silicon Valley to encourage affordable housing in the near-wide-open spaces along the nearby I-280 corridor north to San Francisco? Finally, state bureaucrats should remember that even cool Californians cannot drink Facebook, eat Google, drive on Oracle, or live in Apple. The distant people who make and grow things still matter. Elites need to go back and restudy the state’s can-do confidence of the 1950s and 1960s to rediscover good state government — at least if everyday Californians are ever again to have affordable gas, electricity, and homes; safe roads; and competitive schools. "

http://www.nationalreview.com/...e-while-elites-watch

 

TRUTH -- THE NEW HATE SPEECH!

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One only has to look at policies under Democratic administrations and what comes out from them such as Democratic Healthcare (aka Obamacare) or look at any of the major American Cities that have been entrenched in Democratic control for any amount of time to see what our whole nation may look like soon.

The haves only can support the have not's for so long and as more and more of the population trend toward the have not side of things then an ever dwindling number of have's will either seek to leave or just give up and the bulk of the population will be utterly dependent upon a central Government which itself will soon be incapable of supporting the numbers of people that exist.  At that point a dictatorial form of central Government will seek to retain control and balance the equation by elimination and reduction of numbers of population that either no longer serve to benefit the central government or are opposed to it.  Freedom becomes only a memory and anarchy becomes the rule of the land.  It's not that government has to line up people and determine them for destruction that will be accomplished from within as the have not's will rebel and riot from within and be eliminated as a process of controlling the ever growing out of control situation.  It will be seen as an ugly necessity to maintain and keep control and keep the citizens safe.  

I know it sounds like Chicken little talk and I pray it's only wild careless concerns and worries about something that could never happen but I fear that our Nation is reaching a point whereby we are allowing an ever increasing number of illegal people to come into the nation and an increasing number of people who have no intent on assimilating into American society but rather have a desire to change and alter a formula that has kept our nation free and prosperous for more than 200 years.  I fear a rotting from within that will reach a point where anarchy becomes the rule of the day and an ever present violent reaction from the public that will  precede the enactment of strong federal control and a cessation of personal freedoms in order to maintain and establish control over an uncontrollable self inflicted situation.   Time will tell and I hope and pray I am so wrong and being as Chicken Little calling out the sky is falling.

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