Common-Sense Solutions

Opinion
Written By Peter Daniel Miller

Peter Daniel Miller, March 15, 2022

Peter Daniel Miller is a former resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, Berkeley Sociology PhD, former energy and natural resources analyst at Stanford Research Institute, currently observing California and the world from Japan with an occasional blog post at https://kamprint.com/realities/.

Stories about what ordinary Californians encounter in their daily lives are carried by straight reporting news outlets like The Epoch Times. These topics include vast blighted areas of California life that public officials gloss over – homelessness, inflation, education,  immigration, crime, land use and natural resources, inflation, education, homelessness.  And government solutions to these problems don’t address the issues.

Most people seeing the ever-expanding homeless encampments in San Francisco and Los Angeles might think, while stepping around drug needles and excrement, that no one can do anything about them. Christopher Rufo, who has produced several documentaries on the subject, knows otherwise.[1] He finds it is a billion-dollar industry, subsidized by the very taxpayers preyed upon by the criminals it attracts.

Many of the San Francisco Supervisors are in it up to their ears, virtue-signaling their 'compassion' to disguise their corruption. As Rufo notes, when you give more money to a government-sponsored program, it grows -- as can readily be seen on the streets of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other big cities across the nation. Not that it benefits the homeless at all – the beneficiaries are the politicians, officials, bureaucrats, NGOs, real-estate developers, and others who cater to this ever-growing constituency.[2] 

LA Gas Prices March, 2022

Calling yet another press conference to give this bureaucracy even more taxpayer money – as if such largesse emanated from the kindness of officialdom – won't cut it. If Governor (and former SF Mayor) Newsom, Speaker Pelosi, and others took a break from their mask-free parties in Napa to spend a few days in a run-down Tenderloin hotel, they might experience first-hand the consequences of their own corruption. Others are voting with their feet. Incredibly, California, blessed by nature with one of the most splendid environments on the planet, has lost 2.7 million people in net domestic out-migration since 2000, due in large part to this blight.[3]

Oh, and inflation is only temporary, according to our elected leaders. Gasoline in California is now priced at $7.00/gallon, an inevitable consequence of $100/barrel oil. Food also is guaranteed to continue its non-inflationary spiral, with corn prices up more than 30% in the past year, and wheat futures having doubled in the past week. In effect, the dollar is being devalued, levying an enormous hidden tax on all Americans. Might this be related to out-of-control government expenditures that have ballooned the nation's debt to $30 trillion? If so, you won't hear that from anyone in office.

About the lunacy of Government forcing deadly drugs on an unsuspecting and naively trusting populace[4], in violation of the most fundamental human freedom, we also hear nothing but silence from politicians and public officials. The real leaders are those who say “no” to vax-mandates and other destructive government overreach, like truckers, nurses, airline pilots, and Frontline Doctors.[5] They've been canceled, threatened with loss of jobs and livelihoods, ostracized, and attacked for their courage and truth. At the very least, you'd expect a political party that cares about freedom to join them and vigorously defend them.

On education, parents concerned about the future of their children clearly have had enough LGBTQ/Trans tyranny/insanity, and are ready to clean that filth out of the schools (with due regard for the very few who are genuinely confused and have not been recruited into their confusion by manipulative teachers). Other States, like Virginia, South Dakota, Alabama, and Texas, are not afraid to affirm that girls are girls and boys are boys, and no they're not going to allow some disturbed six-foot biological male into the same bathroom or sports team as your ten-year-old daughter. That States have to pass laws to reaffirm basic biological facts tells you how far into the woke-hole schools all across America have gone.

While California's independent-school-choice initiative is a reasonable alternative to government-monopoly schools, it would still leave a lot of tax money going to those corrupt institutions of indoctrination and child abuse. They influence private education, as can be seen with purportedly 'independent' schools that adopt their noxious ideologies. Instead of de-funding police -– a crazy initiative popular with office-holders during the 2020 riots[6] -– de-funding the public schools would be more beneficial for all who seek real education for their children. Let parents take charge of education, without involving government at all. Employers will decide who's qualified, and train those who need it. A common-sense educational approach would combine vocational, survival, technical, humanistic, and artistic endeavors in one well-rounded preparation for civitas.

Paradise, CA wildfire.

'Open-borders' immigration brings people to America who start by flouting U.S. law, a prelude to criminality, homelessness, and tax subsidies. Even in its dubious objective of increasing the numbers of one party's voters, it isn't succeeding -– as is evident from the votes cast by Texas border-county Hispanics. Immigration, like homelessness, is another of those hidden industries which feed billions of dollars to NGOs, churches, and government agencies[7], leading to child-trafficking of the sort that the late Jeffrey Epstein epitomized.

Taking advantage of vulnerable children is nothing new to big political donors. One of Newsom's biggest donors, LGBTQ activist Ed Buck from West Hollywood, is a serial child-molester. His hobby is luring young black men to his home and over-dosing them to death, according to Federal indictments.[8] An essential prerequisite of intelligent immigration policies is shutting down the horrific abuses of children that occur routinely at the border, enroute to life in America, and in the schools (see above). Then perhaps we could think about premising immigration on rational principles like the skills that employers need, genuine family reunification, legitimate asylum, and other worthwhile objectives, consistent with respect for the law.

Malibu Fire, 2018

As U.S. leaders have suddenly discovered to their dismay, destroying energy independence was not a very smart thing to do. California and the nation will have to re-orient energy production to current actual requirements, not some fantasy of free energy. Even electric-car maven Elon Musk advocates more domestic-U.S. oil and gas production. He knows -- eco-propaganda to the contrary -- that you have to burn oil and gas to produce electricity to charge your electric car. He probably also knows there's little or no net energy savings from doing so. If people paying $7.00/gallon for gasoline don't understand how shutting down the Keystone Pipeline, banning offshore oil drilling, and over-regulating horizontal drilling raise the cost of gasoline, then real political leaders can help them 'connect the dots' and resume domestic energy independence instead of begging Saudi Arabia to pump more.

In many cases, intelligent policies involve nothing more than stopping stupid policies, like the incredibly negligent management of forests that has directly and repeatedly caused wildfires to rage out of control in California (and in other Western states).[9] The simple practice of controlled burning of brush and tinder, and selective harvesting of timber, was abandoned out of deference to the clueless environmental lobby. The result is an interlocking cascade of mismanagement.[10] Faulty energy policy led to over-loaded and over-heated PG&E power lines, which sagged, igniting brush and tinder. A court judged PG&E feloniously responsible for wildfires that killed many, but the company's $2M fine was waived in return for a $200K contribution to Newsom's re-election campaign.[11] An ABC reporter who asked Newsom in November 2020 whether he would return the $200K is still waiting for a response.[12]

The combination of incompetence and corruption literally takes your breath away, as it did those in the paths of these hellish wildfires. Managing forests as a renewable resource, with the help and expertise of the timber industry, requires clearly rejecting the absolutist eco-ethic of total preservation which has led to devastation year after year. And no, this devastation was not caused by 'climate change', as Newsom cynically asserted. It was caused by an ideology of senseless eco-madness, and it's about time real leaders said so out loud.

San Mateo County Greenbelt

Community land use is yet another field in which merely stopping the stupid government-overreach policies enacted under SB9 and SB10 would be enough to restore common-sense local control. Already towns all across California are being advised on how to 'comply' with State mandates promoting high-density housing -- with no provision and no funding for environmental, traffic, or public-services impact. Greenbelt-protected hills between San Francisco and San Jose disappear if these trends are allowed to continue. It's almost as if California State Government is trying to turn peaceful suburban and rural communities into simulacra of San Francisco and Los Angeles, creating more portals for illegals and homeless, who will have to be served with expansions of existing government programs to subsidize these industries.

It's about time for real leaders to speak up on behalf of current residents of these communities. Afraid of being called a 'racist', 'trans-phobe', or 'domestic terrorist', as the FBI characterized parents opposed to child abuse in Virginia schools? Then let's have some real leaders who refuse to be disarmed before they start. The plain sad fact is that Government officials have been lying to us habitually, repeatedly, and with malevolence toward the ordinary people whom they are supposed to serve. In California and throughout America, people long for the non-partisan truth to be proclaimed out loud and without fear, and for the common-sense policies and programs that flow naturally therefrom.

Peter Daniel Miller

Peter Daniel Miller is a former resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, Berkeley Sociology PhD, former energy and natural resources analyst at Stanford Research Institute, currently observing California and the world from Japan with an occasional blog post at https://kamprint.com/realities/.

https://kamprint.com/realities/
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