Category Archives: Governmental Incompetency

Peace…for our time

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In 1938, after Germany invaded and incorporated Czechoslovakia into the German Reich, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Germany to make an agreement with Adolf Hitler to end Germany’s expansion in Europe. On his return to London, Chamberlain gave his famous speech saying he had gained, “peace for a time.”

barack_chamberlainOver the weekend, Obama announced an agreement created by Sec’y of State John Kerry with Iran to “halt” their nuclear weapons program. Of course, the agreement has no teeth and leaves Israel swinging, alone, in the breeze. As a consequence, Saudia Arabia, fearing a nuclear Iran, is in the process of buying some nukes of their own from Pakistan. The Saudis have split with Washington over the justifiable fear that if attacked by Iran, the US would do nothing.

Yes, peace…for a time. A year after Neville Chamberlain made his famous speech, Britain was at war with Germany. The events of this last week leads me to wonder what the coming year will bring in the Middle East. Israel has never announced whether it has nuclear weapons, nor has Israel signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that would allow outside inspectors to see if Israel really had any. That aside, some sources estimate that Israel has approximately 90 nuclear weapons with enough material to manufacture 150-200 more on short notice.

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Obamacare is heading back to SCOTUS again. This time for possible violations of the First Amendment. Obamacare requires individuals and corporations to buy and provide birth control for themselves and their employees regardless of religious opposition. Hobby Lobby has filed suit and that suit is going to the Supreme Court.

Supreme Court to decide whether to review ObamaCare contraception mandate

Associated Press

WASHINGTON –  President Barack Obama’s health care law is headed for a new Supreme Court showdown over companies’ religious objections to the law’s birth-control mandate.

Amid the troubled rollout of the health law, and 17 months after the justices upheld it, the Obama administration is defending a provision that requires most employers that offer health insurance to their workers to provide a range of preventive health benefits, including contraception.

Roughly 40 for-profit companies have sued, arguing they should not be forced to cover some or all forms of birth control because doing so would violate their religious beliefs.

Both sides want the justices to settle an issue that has divided lower courts. The high court could announce its decision whether to take up the topic as early as Tuesday, following its closed-door meeting.

Arguments probably would take place in late March with a decision expected in late June.

The key issue is whether profit-making corporations can assert religious beliefs under the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Nearly four years ago, the justices expanded the concept of corporate “personhood,” saying in the Citizens United case that corporations have the right to participate in the political process the same way that individuals do.

The administration wants the court to hear its appeal of the Denver-based federal appeals court ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby, an Oklahoma City-based arts and crafts chain that calls itself a “biblically founded business” and is closed on Sundays. Founded in 1972, the company now operates more than 500 stores in 41 states and employs more than 13,000 full-time employees who are eligible for health insurance. The Green family, Hobby Lobby’s owners, also owns the Mardel Christian bookstore chain.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said corporations can be protected by the 1993 law in the same manner as individuals, and “that the contraceptive-coverage requirement substantially burdens Hobby Lobby and Mardel’s rights under” the law.

In its Supreme Court brief, the administration said the appeals court ruling was wrong and, if allowed to stand would make the law “a sword used to deny employees of for-profit commercial enterprises the benefits and protections of generally applicable laws.”

In two other cases, courts ruled for the administration. Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp., a Pennsylvania company that employs 950 people in making wood cabinets, is owned by a Mennonite family. Autocam Corp. is a Michigan-based maker of auto parts and medical devices that employs more than 650 people in the U.S.

The companies that have sued over the mandate have objections to different forms of birth control. Conestoga Wood objects to the coverage of Plan B and Ella, two emergency contraceptives that work mostly by preventing ovulation. The FDA says on its website that Plan B  “may also work by preventing fertilization of an egg … or by preventing attachment (implantation) to the womb (uterus),” while Ella also may work by changing of the lining of the uterus so as to prevent implantation.

Hobby Lobby objects to those two forms of contraception as well as two types of intrauterine devices (IUDs). Its owners say they believe life begins at conception, and they oppose only birth control methods that can prevent implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus, but not other forms of contraception.

Autocam doesn’t want to pay for any contraception for its employees because of its owners’ Roman Catholic beliefs.

The article continues at the website. You can read it here.

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Thanksgiving is just around the corner. I wish you all have a great Holiday.
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Rewrite!!

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Obamacare

healthcare.gov

One of the top headlines on Drudge this morning says, “5 million lines of software code needs to be rewritten...". Five million lines of code. You know what that means? A  rewrite of a significant portion of the software.

Before I retired, I was a project manager. I built things for my employer. I built customer service call centers across and outside the country. I built nearly 30 specialized call centers to allow the Deaf and Hard of Hearing use TTYs to communicate with the non-deaf. I created specifications for unique hardware and in the process of all this, was awarded seven telecommunications related patents.

Some of those projects were larger than the one proposed for Obamacare. The expected user base for our systems approached that expected for Obamacare.

My largest budget was under $15million over a three-year project. Obamacare spent over half a billion dollars—and it doesn’t work. In the private sector, everyone connected with that software development project would have been fired in three months—for gross incompetency and failure to meet milestones.

You see, in the private sector, there exists project gateways. Every few months, a gateway review is conducted—are you on schedule, does the design meet the original specifications, are you on budget (and woe to you if you are over or under budget for that particular segment of the project.)

Fail one of these criteria, and your project is on probation, fail two, you, the manager, are up for review and maybe fired, fail three and the project is killed before it can waste more money and usually, everyone on the project team is looking for a new job. Contractors are out on the street. In addition, at the end of each year of the project, it is reviewed for specification changes, whether the business climate, still needs the project. The project must pass this gateway, too, before any money is allocated and allowed to be budgeted to the project for the coming year.

I once had a three-year project killed after the second year. Why? I was on-time, on-budget, meeting all the project specifications and milestones…but the business climate changed and the project wouldn’t meet its expected ROI, Return-On-Investment. Too bad. Stamp! The project was killed. The company would not pour money into a project that couldn’t pay for itself within three years.

That is the real world, not the fantasyland that is now government. Apparently, the government failed to do any of these project reviews.

Obama is scheduled to have a press announcement later today to explain what he’s going to do to fix Obamacare. I know what he should do but knowing him and the dems, he’ll throw more money down the rathole to fix the unfixable.

He no longer takes questions. It is too dangerous. Someone may ask a hard question such as why a project needed 500 million lines of code or why was a Canadian company chosen on a No-Bid contract? Are there not plenty of US companies with that skill? I’ve managed projects with a comparable customer user base that was one-tenth that amount of code—and my project worked.

I suspect the real reason is that the data collected from people is shared across a multitude of government (and maybe outside companies, Obama favorites?) databases all across the government from the IRS to the FBI to who knows. One bottleneck in that update slows everything—if the transaction is completed at all. It is a rookie mistake by software engineers who don’t understand transaction processing, which, at the core, Obamacare enrollment must be.

Be that as it may, now Obama must “explain” why it failed. He’s already blamed Bush, I wonder who he will blame now? Probably Ted Cruz and the Tea Party.

Tech ‘surge’ to repair Obamacare websites

By JASON MILLMAN | 10/20/13 1:38 PM EDT Updated: 10/21/13 11:21 AM EDT

The Obama administration Sunday said it’s called on “the best and brightest” tech experts from both government and the private sector to help fix the troubled website at the root of the Obamacare enrollment problems.

The unusual Sunday 600-word blog post from the Department of Health and Human Services was the first update in more than a week on the many failings of an expensive website that HHS itself described as “frustrating for many Americans.” But it didn’t specify whom the administration had called in, or when the American people would see clear-cut results on HealthCare.gov.

“We’re kind of thinking of it as a tech ‘surge,’” an HHS official told POLITICO.

The Health and Human Services statement didn’t explain everything that’s wrong, or give technical details about the repairs under way. It outlined some steps being taken to fix the site, including updates with “new code that includes bug fixes.” The department also says it’s installing monitors to catch parts of the website that are proving the most troublesome for consumers. And it also said it had seen some improvements in wait times and consumer access to the website, the online portal to health insurance exchanges or marketplaces the federal government is running in 36 states.

Blah, blah, blah. Words from non-engineers who have no concept what they’re doing. I can tell you right now, they’re going to fail because they never knew what it was supposed to do in the first place. It reminds me of the old programmer’s joke.

IT Manager yells to his programming team, “You start coding and I’ll go see what they want!”

It was never so true as with Obamacare.

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The Return of the Vigilantes

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California has a history matched by few states. It has a history of dealing justice when the “official” law enforcement organs can’t or won’t meet their obligations. The Vigilantes of San Francisco first appeared in 1851 and a few years later in 1856.

The San Francisco Committee of Vigilance was a popular ad hoc organization formed in 1851 and revived in 1856 in response to rampant crime and corruption in the municipal government of San Francisco, California. It was one of the most successful organizations in the vigilante tradition of the American Old West.

These militias hanged eight people and forced several elected officials to resign. Each Committee of Vigilance formally relinquished power after three months. — Wiki

Now, move forward 157 years. The Vigilantes have returned for the same reasons, unconstrained criminality and the refusal of law enforcement to perform their function.

Oakland Neighbors Policing Their Own Streets As They Lose Faith In Cops

February 26, 2013 11:22 AM
This surveillance image shows three men preparing to break into an Arcadia Park neighborhood home in Oakland. (CBS)

This surveillance image shows three men preparing to break into an Arcadia Park neighborhood home in Oakland. (CBS)

OAKLAND (KPIX 5) – Oakland’s crime problems have gotten so bad that some people aren’t even bothering to call the cops anymore; instead, they’re trying to solve and prevent crimes themselves.

KPIX 5 cameras caught up with a half dozen neighbors in East Oakland’s Arcadia Park neighborhood Monday as they walked the streets on the lookout for crime. The vigilance has never seemed more necessary than now; 25 homes in the neighborhood have been burglarized over the last two months alone.

In a neighborhood that has started to feel like the wild west, people have even started posting “wanted” signs.

“You have to walk around in your house with a gun to feel safe here,” said Alaska Tarvins of the Arcadia Park Board of Directors.

Over the weekend, one home was burglarized twice in a 24 hour period, once while a resident’s nephew was inside.

“He was on with 911 when those men tried to kick into his room. That was very frightening,” said the woman, identified only as Inca.

Now, Arcadia park neighbors are taking the detective work into their own hands.

KPIX 5 found a woman who identified herself as L.E. patrolling her neighborhood by car. She said she recently chased down a couple of robbers herself.

“There was an armed robbery in progress and the owner yelled ‘help me’ and I ended up going after them,” L.E. recalled.

The people who live in the area are nothing if not gutsy, but they need help. A plan to gate their community has been stalled. With the police force stretched painfully thin, they may be forced to follow other Oakland neighborhoods and hire private guards.

“We don’t have a choice. Either die or we hire some security ourselves, because we can’t depend on the police department,” said Tarvins.

Remember the adage loved by 2nd Amendment supporters, “When seconds count, the cops are minutes away.” In Oakland, they just don’t come at all.

Some lefties like to boast that California leads the nation. I surely hope not. I don’t want anarchy to come to Missouri like it is, increasingly, in California. Decades of overspending, higher unsupported debt, massive influx of unrestrained illegal immigration and infiltration of gangs and the drug cartels, all the failed and frankly unworkable liberal policies are coming home.

The cities in California pay their elected officials multi-hundreds of dollars salary all while cutting the budgets of their police and fire departments. This is leading to some innovative solutions by Californians—by individuals, not the municipalities. The article below leads with events in New Jersey and continues with similar activities in California.

Alana Semuels,  February 21, 2013

Roles once held by police are now becoming commonplace for private detectives and security firms.

CAMDEN, N.J. — In an office in a sleepy town in southern New Jersey, Harry Glemser’s phone rang. With no buxom secretary to take a message, he answered it himself.

It was a dame, looking to hire a private eye.

But this was no scene from a noir novel. The woman was calling because someone in a car kept lurking in her driveway, the engine running, when her husband wasn’t home. She’d called the police, but they couldn’t help. She hoped Glemser could.

Detectives like Glemser across cash-strapped states have been getting more calls like these as cities and towns cut their police forces to contend with deep budget cuts. New Jersey alone lost 4,200 officers from 2008 to 2011, according to the Policemen’s Benevolent Assn., which tracks the state’s most recent data. As police focus more on responding to crime rather than preventing it, private detectives and security firms are often taking on the roles that police once did, investigating robberies, checking out alibis, looking into threats.

“The public is frustrated by the police,” said Glemser, a retired cop of 63 whose gold chains, white hair and bulky body might make a stranger worry he’s on the wrong side of the law. “The citizenry is quick to say that the police don’t do anything for them. They should be saying the police can’t do anything for them because of this budgetary issue, this manpower problem, this directive we have that came down from the chief.”

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In California, where many cash-strapped cities cut police budgets during the recession, residents are turning to detectives, security firms and even the Internet.

After police cuts in Oakland, resident Dabney Lawless encouraged 400 neighbors to sign up on a website so they could send alerts to one another when they noticed suspicious people around; she also pays extra to an alarm company to drive through the neighborhood. Ron Cancio, the manager of a Stockton security firm, said that since the city’s budget battles, residents often have called his firm for minor complaints, because they know he’ll respond more quickly than the police.

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Roger Arrella, the owner of TSInvestigations in Corona, said he’s getting a lot more calls from people who say police won’t help them in investigating burglaries, suspicious suicides or identity theft. But once they hear his rates, which are around $150 an hour, they usually balk.

“We get the phone calls — people are upset that someone broke into their house, or stole their car, and the police aren’t doing what they should be doing,” he said. “But then you tell them the price, and they say, well, maybe it’s not worth it to me.”

It’s another facet of how income inequality is playing out in America — as cities are forced to cut their budgets, even police protection is more accessible to those with cash.

“Wealthy neighborhoods are buying themselves more police protection than poor neighborhoods,” said Samuel Walker, emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the author of 13 books on policing.

Those who can afford it use private police—retired officers, detectives and security firms. Those who cannot afford that price are left with themselves to prevent crimes…and dispense justice. We call them Vigilantes.

We, here in Cass County, are fortunate to have a Sheriff who understands duty and commitment. It’s too bad, Californian elected officials aren’t like him.

Welcome to the Progressives’ world.

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Ingratitude!

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There is a story coming out of New Jersey this morning that really steams me. We know New Jersey is a haven for dems, liberals and bloodsucking unions.  That sentiment extends as well to some municipalities.  Late last night, reports began to appear that some cities in New Jersey were turning away out-of-state repair crews—because they weren’t in a union.

Nonunion Ala. crews turned away from Sandy recovery

Posted: Nov 01, 2012 10:05 PM CDT Updated: Nov 02, 2012 8:43 AM CDT
By WAFF.com Staff

(Source: Derrick Moore) SEASIDE HEIGHTS, NEW JERSEY (WAFF) –

The hurricane-ravaged east coast has been receiving north Alabama help, but crews learned they’ll be doing work in Long Island, New York instead of in New Jersey.

Crews from Decatur Utilities headed up there this week, but Derrick Moore, one of the Decatur workers, said they were told by crews in New Jersey that they can’t do any work there since they’re not union employees.

The crews that are in Roanoke, Virginia say they are just watching and waiting even though they originally received a call asking for help from Seaside Heights, New Jersey.

Understandably, Moore said they’re frustrated being told “thanks, but no thanks.”

Nothing like ingratitude in New Jersey. In New York City, it is worse. Mayor Bloomberg is diverting relief supplies intended for repairs and the residents to—the New York Marathon. It’s perfectly find for Bloomberg to let his constituency sit in the dark without food, water and utilities as long as the Marathon is not hindered.

Bloomberg Diverts Food, Generators from Devastated Staten Island to NYC Marathon

by Michael Patrick Leahy 1 Nov 2012

Fresh off his “climate disruption”-driven endorsement of President Obama, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has chosen to divert critical food supplies and power generators from desperate residents of Staten Island to Sunday’s New York City Marathon. Gothamist reports: 

[T]hose urging the city to halt the run believe that the thousands of Marathon volunteers could direct their efforts towards post-Sandy relief and cleanup, “and they also argue that the event will divert thousands of police from important hurricane-related duties.” But despite petitions circulating, work started up again yesterday on the Marathon route.

A tipster, who wishes to remain anonymous, told us there were lots of workers in and out of the park today, who had “started before the storm and then came back starting yesterday.” Trailers are lined up from around 71st to 66th Streets on Central Park West, a food truck was set up today, and “generators have been sitting there at least a week.” The tents that were taken down prior to the storm have also been set back up, and there is a stage set up near 73rd Street.

Considering all the volunteer help and NYPD attention that’s already being diverted to the Marathon, the added sight of generators and food being channeled to the event is probably going to strike some New Yorkers as a little misplaced—we’re thinking of the ones who are currently lined up waiting for the National Guard to ration out MREs and bottles of water.

Staten Island residents are frantically calling for help, ABC News reported on Thursday.

Democrats, read this and learn. Your party leadership doesn’t care about you. You are only a tool to be used to get your liberal leaders whatever they want. In this case, it’s the Mayor’s Marathon. When you’re used up, they’ll toss you aside. They did that with Obamacare.

Here you are. A life-long faithful democrat. You’ve voted the party line all that time. You belong to a union. You think your party and your union with take care of you. That’s the big lie.

When you retire, you find your Social Security payments aren’t enough for you to maintain your standard of living. Your union pension fund has been leveraged so much that when it’s your turn, you get less than expected. If you are a retired public employee, your pension may not exist if your state, like California, is about to go bankrupt. And Medicare? Now you discover it’s been destroyed by Obamacare and when you really need medical care…you’re too old and your care is too expensive. Just go off somewhere and die.

Remember the lessons of ingratitude from New York and New Jersey. Socialism doesn’t work. Unionism doesn’t work either. Unions are a scam to siphon your union dues into the union leadership’s pocket and to be used for their benefit, not yours.

Wake up! Vote Republican. Toss out the parasites; the liberal oligarchy at all government levels and seize your future with your own hands. You are the first step in national recovery. Do so by tossing the liberals out of office.

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Followup of Previous Posts

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Why does time fly faster with the intensity of events? Yesterday I wrote about the similarities of current events to those preceding World War I. I mentioned the increasing tensions between China (PRC), Japan, the Philippine Islands and the US. This morning I saw two new items that give more credence to another coming conflict in the Pacific.

 

Chinese General: Prepare for Combat

Top Chinese general in unusual move tells troops to ready for combat with Japan

BY:

China’s most powerful military leader, in an unusual public statement, last week ordered military forces to prepare for combat, as Chinese warships deployed to waters near disputed islands and anti-Japan protests throughout the country turned violent.

Protests against the Japanese government’s purchase of three privately held islands in the Senkakus chain led to mass street protests, the burning of Japanese flags, and attacks on Japanese businesses and cars in several cities. Some carried signs that read “Kill all Japanese,” and “Fight to the Death” over disputed islands. One sign urged China to threaten a nuclear strike against Japan.

Below is another news item that hints of Chinese violence being directed towards the US.

Beijing demonstrators damage US ambassador’s car

By DIDI TANG | Associated Press – 12 hrs ago

BEIJING (AP) — A car carrying the U.S. ambassador to China was mildly damaged after becoming the target of boisterous anti-Japan demonstrators who were expressing outrage over a territorial dispute and marking the 81st anniversary of Japan’s invasion of China.

The State Department said in a statement Wednesday that Ambassador Gary Locke was unhurt in Tuesday’s incident, and that diplomats have expressed concerns to the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

The statement said around 50 protesters surrounded Locke’s car as he tried to enter the embassy and were eventually removed by Chinese security personnel.

Over the years, I’ve worked with a number of Chinese. Most came here to the US to attend our universities. Most return to China. Some don’t. One of the things they taught me is nothing happens spontaneously in China without the government, I mean the Party’s approval—and active assistance. When you read a news item such as the one above, be aware it is not an expression of popular sentiment. It is a planned government act.

America’s weakness—and it is weak after four years of Obama’s administration and the crumbling of our military due to neglect, entices our enemies to take advantage of our weakness, real or not.

Add to all this is China’s deployment of nuclear-tipped, ballistic anti-ship missiles, missiles purposely designed to attacK our carrier fleets, it becomes apparent our military may no longer be a deterrent to war.

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This afternoon the Cass County Commission will hold a public meeting to discuss the outside auditor’s report on the County’s management for 2010. There is only one commissioner who is still in office from that period but he declined to run for re-election. The media will have a very strong presence, print and TV, at the meeting from what I’ve been told.

I’ll be there too with my little notebook and a voice recorder. The release of the outside report has been picked up by the local media and while the report was balanced, it was not kind to the Cass County Commission.

There has been more document drops since that auditor’s report. One is particularly interesting. The former Presiding Commission endorsed in writing a company that had existed less than a year, had no track record, no customer base and no product! The letter appeared to be given as a reference for the company to acquire public grants from the Mid-America Regional Council.

As more documents are released to the public, the county government is looking worse and worse. It makes one wonder what other activities will be exposed. Many of the ones now could lead to criminal charges.

 

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Why government should not compete with business

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The outside auditor’s management report for Cass County was released earlier this week. An earlier report by the County Auditor on the County Collector’s office had been blocked from being released on the county website. When the outside audit was delivered, the county Powers-That-Be relented and allowed both reports to be posted on the Auditor’s section of the county website.

There has been a firestorm about these reports since their release.  There has been accusations and counter-accusations on local Facebook groups and other internet forums. If you read the management report closely, you’ll see why a commissioner abruptly resigned last year and why another chose to not run for re-election.  The outside auditor is particularly damning on the actions and methods of the county commission and vindicates the county auditor.

But that is not the theme for today’s post. We should use these auditor reports to develop county Policies and Procedures to insure future occurrences do not occur.  In the business world, this is known as “Lessons Learned.” That is why we have auditors and auditor reports.

I would suggest that at the top of those lessons learned is this:

  1. Never compete with business. Especially, never compete with business when business has a proven track record, established customer base and existing infrastructure to support the product. In this case, the Broadband project should have been shown the door at its first appearance.  There is no way the county can compete with AT&T, Embarq, Sprint, CenTel, Comcast or Time-Warner in providing broadband internet access and provide a competing product at a competitive cost.  The rural customers that were to be served by the Broadband project don’t have the customer density to support Broadband at a reasonable cost.  That means municipal customers would subsidize the rural customers. The county’s competing product would have to do so at a price that is equivalent or lower than broadband service by AT&T, Sprint and others.  Any competent business manager or certified project manager would have seen these pitfalls and would not have approved the broadband project.  In business, this comes under Risk Identification, Mitigation and Avoidance—all part of a needed business plan that didn’t exist.
  2. Never subsidize new technologies or pilot plants without a proven vendor track record, customer base and established maintenance and support. In short, never be the first kid on the block with new technology until it has been proven.  In this case, the county subsidized the production of a pilot bio-fuels plant with the University of Central Missouri with no scope of work, project plan nor established schedule of deliverables, i.e., it was money thrown down a hole with no obligation of any return on investment.

The Commissioners violated other those and other common business rules and we now see the result. I don’t know the background of the two appointed democrat commissioners, Luke Scavuzzo and Terry Wilson. I would hope when they were selected to fill the vacant commissioner positions by Governor Jay Nixon, that he picked people with proven and successful business backgrounds for surely as God created little green apples, Cass County needs competent commissioners. We’ve not have any, as far as I can determine, for decades.

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Mad Max, Redux

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I’ve been debating whether to write about this subject for several days.  It’s a column written by Victor Davis Hanson over the weekend and appeared in PJ Media.  The column sounds like a science fiction tale. Unfortunately, it isn’t. It is factual and it is happening today.

During World War II the government produced a series of movies, what we’d call infomercials today, called, “Why we fight.” Hanson’s column can be considered to fall into that category because if we don’t heed it, it will come to us.

When you read this, picture the events not in California, but here in Missouri.  Kansas City is just next door to our county. We already have criminal elements moving into our towns.  A number of years ago, a man was shot and killed in his drive-way. If I recall correctly, it later turned our to be a drug deal gone bad. That shooting occurred only a few blocks from my home.

Complacency is our enemy. It is our enemy to understanding our personal vulnerability and it is our enemy to our political vulnerability.  When half the population pays no taxes, is dependent on governmental largess, what do you think will happen when the gravy train stops, when Obama’s stash is empty? They will be coming at us to take our stash.

Where’s Mel Gibson When You Need Him?

George Miller’s 1981 post-apocalyptic film The Road Warrior envisioned an impoverished world of the future. Tribal groups fought over what remained of a destroyed Western world of law, technology, and mass production. Survival went to the fittest — or at least those who could best scrounge together the artifacts of a long gone society somewhat resembling the present West.

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Our Version

Sometimes, and in some places, in California I think we have nearly descended into Miller’s dark vision — especially the juxtaposition of occasional high technology with premodern notions of law and security. The state deficit is at $16 billion. Stockton went bankrupt; Fresno is rumored to be next. Unemployment stays over 10% and in the Central Valley is more like 15%. Seven out of the last eleven new Californians went on Medicaid, which is about broke. A third of the nation’s welfare recipients are in California. In many areas, 40% of Central Valley high school students do not graduate — and do not work, if the latest crisis in finding $10 an hour agricultural workers is any indication. And so on.

Our culprit out here was not the Bomb (and remember, Hiroshima looks a lot better today than does Detroit, despite the inverse in 1945). The condition is instead brought on by a perfect storm of events that have shred the veneer of sophisticated civilization. Add up the causes. One was the destruction of the California rural middle class. Manufacturing jobs, small family farms, and new businesses disappeared due to globalization, high taxes, and new regulations. A pyramidal society followed of a few absentee land barons and corporate grandees, and a mass of those on entitlements or working for government or employed at low-skilled service jobs. The guy with a viable 60 acres of almonds ceased to exist.

Illegal immigration did its share. No society can successfully absorb some 6-7 million illegal aliens, in less than two decades, the vast majority without English, legality, or education from the poorer provinces of Mexico, the arrivals subsidized by state entitlements while sending billions in remittances back to Mexico — all in a politicized climate where dissent is demonized as racism. This state of affairs is especially true when the host has given up on assimilation, integration, the melting pot, and basic requirements of lawful citizenship.

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…here are some of the concerns recently in the Valley. There is now an epidemic of theft from tarped homes undergoing fumigation. Apparently as professionals tent over homes infested with termites, gangs move into the temporarily abandoned houses to burrow under the tarps and loot the premises— convinced that the dangers of lingering poisonous gas are outweighed by the chance of easy loot.  Who sues whom when the gangbanger prying into the closet is found gassed ? When I get termites, I spot treat myself with drill and canisters; even the professional services warn that they can kill off natural pests, but not keep out human ones.

No one in the Central Valley believes that they can stop the epidemic of looting copper wire. I know the local Masonic Hall is not the Parthenon, but you get the picture of our modern Turks prying off the lead seals of the building clamps of classical temples.

Protection is found only in self-help. To stop the Road Warriors from stripping the copper cable from your pump or the community’s street lights, civilization is encouraged to put in a video camera, more lighting, more encasement, a wire protective mesh — all based on the premise that the authorities cannot stop the thieves and your livelihood is predicated on the ingenuity of your own counter-terrorism protocols. But the thief is always the wiser: he calculates the cost of anti-theft measures, as well as the state’s bill in arresting, trying, and rehabilitating him, and so wagers that it is cheaper for all of us to let him be and just clean up his mess.

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In around 1960, rural California embraced modern civilization. By that I mean both in the trivial and fundamental sense. Rural dogs were usually vaccinated and licensed — and so monitored. Homes were subject to building codes and zoning laws; gone were the privies and lean-tos. Streets were not just paved, but well-paved. My own avenue was in far better shape in 1965 than it is now. Mosquito abatement districts regularly sprayed stagnant water ponds to ensure infectious disease remained a thing of our early-20th-century past. Now they merely warn us with West Nile Virus alerts. Ubiquitous “dumps” dotted the landscape, some of them private, ensuring, along with the general code of shame, that city-dwellers did not cast out their old mattresses or baby carriages along the side of the road. It seems the more environmental regulations, the scarcer the dumps and the more trash that litters roads and private property.

I walk each night around the farm. What is the weirdest find? A nearby alleyway has become a dumping place for the rotting corpses of fighting dogs. Each evening or so, a dead dog (pit bulls, Queensland terriers) with a rope and plenty of wounds is thrown up on the high bank. The coyotes make short work of the remains. Scattered about are several skeletons with ropes still around their necks. I suppose that at about 2 a.m. the organizers of dog fights drive in and cast out the evenings’ losers. I have never seen such a thing in 58 years (although finding plastic bags with dead kittens in the trash outside my vineyard was a close second). Where is PETA when you need them? Is not the epidemic of dog- and cock-fighting in central California a concern of theirs?

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The public schools were once the key to California’s ascendance. Universal education turned out well-prepared citizens who were responsible for California’s rosy future — one based on an excellent tripartite higher education system of junior colleges, state colleges, and universities; sophisticated dams and irrigation systems; and a network of modern freeways and roads.

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I think it is a fair assessment to say that all of the above is long past. Since about 1992, on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing, California ranks between 41 and 48 in math and science, depending on the year and the particular grade that is assessed. About half of the incoming freshmen at the California State University system — the largest public university in the world — are not qualified to take college courses, and must first complete “remediation” to attain a level of competence that was assumed forty years ago in the senior year of high school. The students I taught at CSU Fresno were far better prepared in 1984 than those in 2004 are; the more money, administrators, “learning centers,” and counselors, the worse became the class work.

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What makes The Road Warrior so chilling a metaphor is the combination of the premodern and postmodern. While utter chaos reigns in rural California, utter absurdity reigns inside the barricades, so to speak, on the coast. So, for example, San Franciscans will vote on whether to blow up the brilliantly engineered Hetch Hetchy water project (I bet they won’t vote yes), more or less the sole source of water for the San Francisco Bay Area. The National Park Service debates blowing up historic stone bridges over the Merced River in Yosemite Valley — as hyper-environmentalists assume that they have so much readily available power and water from prior generations at their fingertips that they have the luxury of dreaming of returning to a preindustrial California. Of course, they have no clue that their romance is already reified outside Madera, Fresno, or Bakersfield.

Hanson writes long articles. I’ve only quoted a small portion of his entire column. I urge you to follow the link and read all of it.  It could be prophetic, a cautionary tale coming to us if we are complacent. Now is the time to change our political climate. With that change in hand, we can attempt to reverse the social rot created by democrats and liberals. I know many who are taking Hanson’s warning to heart and, as individuals, are preparing as is Hanson.

Preparing as individuals does not change the future. We must work together, with a clear goal in mind, or as Franklin once said, “We will all hang together.”

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