Wither 2022?

Before wishing all a Happy a New Year, it seems to make sense to look back at what we all have to be grateful for from 2022.

Of course, first and foremost, there was…um…well…Wait! I got it! There was that thing that was up in the mountains with the bear cub, wasn’t there?  Wait, no, that happened in Utah.

There has to be something California can be thankful for… just has to be… well, we’ll come back to that.

As for the rough patches, there were a few.

In January, then-Mayor Eric Garcetti’s name was formally presented on the Senate floor for consideration of the post as Ambassador to India.  It was simultaneously the beginning of the beginning and the beginning of the end for that particular dream.

In February, we really started to get a good handle on about how much the current “supportive housing first” movement to end the homelessness crisis –  in a word, as Joe Biden would say, too much to be even remotely feasible.  From cost-per-500-square-foot-unit running above $800,000, to the astonishing amount of the value of the benefits that would be offered – the equivalent of making about $44,000 a year, the current dominant paradigm is unsustainable.

In March, the wheels of the Garcetti bandwagon – term used, at best, loosely, mockingly more accurately – started to fall off as people he (allegedly allegedly) lied to started pointing out that he lied…a whole bunch.

April brought a number of realizations, including the fact that everything is racist, at least according to the California Arts Council.  Californians, thankfully, can take solace in the fact they are not alone in their art community’s David Duke on a bad day level of racism.

In May we looked closely at primary candidates, found out Lisa Bloom is not as good a lawyer as her mom, kept watching with glee as Eric twisted in the wind of his making, and took a closer look at how maybe the “anti-racist” crowd may not actually be so anti-racist at all, considering it believes anyone who lives between Catalina and Karachi is the same.

The primaries came and went in June with no huge surprises but a sense of a November “red wave” did start to grow…sigh.

Independence Day month brought into sharper focus the state’s power elite dependence upon expensive unnecessary atrociously managed make-work riddled with graft public works projects to give them enough patronage to keep the yokels in line (more on this later.)

While it may not have happened in California, it very well could have (and would have if Gavin had his own FBI,) former President Trump’s estate was raided in August in a search for, um, documents? Underwear?  Nuclear secrets? A reason to bar him from ever running for office again – yup, that’s the one.  

The raid set off a discussion – severely truncated by the national media – of the power of the FBI and the now we really really really know it exists Deep State.  For background, here’s a piece that appeared just days before the raid, and here are two from just after HERE and HERE.

September got even woker and more worrisome, as food and kids – both pretty important, in my humble opinion, were further targeted by the pronoun mob.

The climate-based food attacks have gone global.  And if you can’t imagine anything like happening here, the Dutch have since ordered the destruction of one-third of their nation’s agricultural sector to meet meaningless climate targets.

The month did see, on a confusing note, President Biden announce the end of the pandemic (word has yet to get to Newsom on that).  Since then the Biden administration has said so many different things about COVID even a pretzel I know said “that’s way too twisted for me.”

September was also the 21^st anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. That meant that anyone born on Sept. 9, 2001 became able to legally drink. – how’s that for perspective?

Rolling into October, something interesting happened in the city hall of Los Angeles – a modicum of truth broke out with the revelations (anyone who pays attention would not call them revelations, merely confirmation of known facts) with the release of the now-infamous Nury tapes.

And Eric kept holding his breath, although what for is still to this day uncertain .

And then November happened. On the 6^th, there was a palpable feeling in the air, air that was let out of the balloon by the red trickle – not wave – that occurred on election day.  We learned that 57.7% of Californians are feckless lumps of carbon, that the state still can’t count, and that even running a well-funded, endorsed by the mainstream media campaign against an ethically challenged Democrat will net you only 4% more votes than any other Republican smudge on the ballot; sorry, Mr. Chen – you would have been exactly what the state needs.

Continuing on the sad side, the legislative supermajority is still in place, the Democratic Socialists of America now control 20 percent of the Los Angeles city council and machine-o-slug Karen Bass is the new mayor.

On a brighter note, Kevin Kiley was sent to DC by his voters and California did play a role in securing the GOP House majority. It should also be noted that Democrats had to spend more time and money and energy here than they normally do and still – and this is true nationwide – even where they won their margins were cut, sometimes drastically.

The end of the month also saw the issues of what is misinformation, and the beginning of the clear evidence of federal involvement in political speech suppression, and the beginning of the Twitter Files releases.

December – oh, that’s this month! – is a time for reflection and cheer and being driven absolutely bonkers by the lunacy of the state government. The EDD – yeah, that still exists – and it’s I-don’t-have-a-word-for-it level of incompetence (note – as of midnight, Dec. 28, it owed $18,571,199,846.34 in principal and $70,477,695.08 in interest.  In total, that’s $370 million more than it owed when the story was first published on Dec. 3, or about an additional $14 million PER DAY) is the gift that keeps on grifting.

Unlike the EDD, the high speed rail is a well-run, fiscally responsible, sorely need public works infra stru…oh wait, phone pinged, let me see, oh, the HSRA check didn’t clear…utter fiasco that now – hysterically –  wants to build its own solar utility – HERE and HERE.

And no year-in-review would be complete about a piece on the issue of gender.

So that was the year that was for what it was worth.

Oh, now I remember – the Rams won the Super Bowl, Chesa Boudin and a bunch of the San Francisco school board got recalled, and Eric ain’t going to India – so there’s that.

Happy new year – Can’t wait to see what 2023 brings!