Fractured California Fairy Tales
by Andy Caldwell
Ronald Reagan hadn’t seen anything yet when he said, “It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so.”
Where do we begin?
The Washington Post did a story on the efforts to restart the oil pipeline that burst in 2015 near Refugio beach. Nearly 10 years later, the pipeline is still not back in operation albeit the new operator, Sable, is doing everything it can to resume oil production off our coast. The usual suspects, including the CA Coastal Commission, the Environmental Defense Center, and local politicos like County Supervisor Joan Hartmann, are doing their best to stop the restart to lead the way to a renewable energy nirvana by eliminating oil production and consumption in our state.
The reality of the situation?
While California (and the Biden administration) is doing its best to shut down production by eliminating drilling and curtailing consumption by basically outlawing vehicles and appliances that run on fossil fuels, they find themselves having to rely on totalitarian controls because the vast majority of people in CA are not buying what they are trying to sell. For all the mandates, subsidies, and prohibitions against the use of fossil fuels, all we did was kill local jobs while driving up the price of fuel. California still uses upwards of one billion gallons of fossil fuels per month. Hence, the only thing the regulators have accomplished is to increase foreign oil imports to make up for our lack of oil production here in CA and Alaska, the latter thanks to Obama and Biden. See this chart from energy.ca.gov
What’s worse is the phony claim that California is leading the way in going all-electric. As I have outlined in a previous column, California is producing too much solar during the day, which creates the ridiculous situation involving our having to pay other states to take it off our hands because otherwise the grid will overload. Conversely then, during the rest of the day we are importing more electricity from other states than any other state in the nation. Our virtue signaling about being a world leader is thereby just a mirage in what is becoming an energy desert.
Next up, the multi-billion-dollar effort to end homelessness. Governor Newsom can’t account for over $20 billion spent on the homeless because nobody bothered to track the abysmal results that have actually resulted in more homelessness. The truth is the policy that California embraced, known as “housing first,” is a major reason our efforts are failing. Whereas a housing-first policy can work for some people who happened to simply run into some bad luck in their lives, it doesn’t work for those people who are homeless because they are alcoholics, drug addicts and/or mentally ill. That is, throwing a house at people in the throes of severe dysfunction won’t serve to address the underlying problems that are keeping them down and out. There is only one jurisdiction in America that has a stellar record in ending homelessness and that is San Antonio, Texas, which has up to an 80% success rate in successfully reintegrating the homeless back into society and that has to do with the fact that they focus their efforts 100% on treatment and recovery.
More Righteous Indignation
My final umbrage of the week has to do with all the insanely infuriating things the Biden administration is doing in the last days of his failed presidency. Two of these acts, which speak for themselves, are a literal insult to injury to the families of the victims of the 37 people who had their death sentence commuted despite having perpetrated heinous crimes, and the associated granting of clemency for 1500 criminals, the most ever by a president in U.S. history.
The third action was his awarding Hillary Clinton and George Soros the Medal of Freedom Award which (according to Wikipedia) was created to recognize people who have made "an especially meritorious contribution to (1) the security or national interests of the United States, or (2) world peace, or (3) cultural or other significant public or private endeavors, was also a moral outrage. Hillary certainly did not promote our security or national interests when she brokered a deal to sell uranium to Russia, let alone for abandoning our people in Benghazi. Soros is, according to The Economic Times, “the 94-year-old billionaire hedge fund tycoon and philanthropist disliked by many critics for impoverishing countries by attacking their currencies and attempting regime changes in various parts of the world to install governments of his liking.” Here in the United States, Soros is infamous for having helped elect District Attorneys throughout the nation that refused to prosecute violent crimes.
The last thing these two people deserved was to be honored by our country.
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Well said! Soros should be declared an enemy of the state. This guy is a psychopath.
Yes Andy, you have stated that Biden equates to blatantly visible EVIL of the first degree. I cannot recall in my lifetime an instance that comes close to the EVIL actions performed by a President of the United States ... this is definitely a first, and there's no doubt about it.